Therapy touches on my love/hate relationship with audiences. Audiences of all sorts. Doing standup, I come to hate audiences for many difference reasons. If I’m having an off night and bombing is the most obvious example, but there are times when I’m killing that I equally despise my audience. I’ve had somebody give me a “compliment” after a show where this person told me I was “just as funny as those Blue Collar Comedy guys.” I took great offense to that, but had to take a step back. I guess it was a compliment because I made them laugh, and that’s all that really matters in the end.

There are other times I hate my audience like when I’m getting heckled. The actual heckling I can deal with fairly well, it’s just aggravating that someone feels the need to interrupt my set. It’s equally frustrating when I come back at a heckler and get huge laughs. Sure it’s nice to get laughs putting a drunk asshole in their place, but it’s nicer to have the laughter at my prepared material and crafted jokes.

I have a joke that doing comedy is like therapy, but more financially viable. Instead of having to pay one person to listen to my gripes for an hour at a time, with comedy I can sometimes get a room full of people who have done the paying in order to hear my gripes for 5-10 minutes. It’s much more gratifying.