My first time going onstage to do stand-up was very last-minute. I was twenty-three years old and had been out of college for two years. A woman in an improv group I was in, a comic of about forty-five, had been doing stand-up for a long time. She was like a female Woody Allen without the marrying someone who was once his daughter. I went to see her perform one night, and like every other asshole who goes to comedy clubs, I thought, I could do this.

Not long after that fateful night, I discovered Gotham Comedy Club. It was on Twenty-Second Street at the time and seated about 150 people. I went in and found out that if I brought four people to be in the audience (people who would pay the door price and purchase some drinks), I could perform that night. I can’t remember who all four of these lucky souls were. One was definitely my mom, and another was my friend Eileen, a jazz drummer, but I don’t remember the others. I had a couple hours before I went onstage, during which I brainstormed the six-minute set I’d perform. The show was at five p.m. on a Tuesday. Still light outside. Great time for comedy. There were about twenty-five people in the audience. I unfortunately have a videotape of the whole thing. My hair is very curly and the only thing worse than my outfit was my jokes. I wore a Mormon-looking short-sleeved white button-down with jeans that would have fit the original version of Jared from Subway, and I ranted about sky-writing:

“It’s so annoying. It always fades, and you can never really read it. If a guy proposed to me that way, I would say NOooooooo.”

And then I added:

“So do me a favor this summer, keep it at eye level!”

That was my clever little sum-up. Keep it at eye level. Blech.

I could vomit thinking about how awful my act was. But I wasn’t nervous. I had been doing theater since I was five so I didn’t have stage fright. I was pretty confident for a newcomer with zero original thoughts and even less timing. People laughed enough. They laughed because I was young and hopeful and they could feel my energy and enthusiasm. They laughed to be nice. All that mattered was that they laughed. I was in. Some of the actual comedians there complimented me. They told me I should work at it and that I could get better. Maybe they were trying to sleep with me. Wait, just remembered my outfit. They weren’t.

From then on, I did a couple shows a month. Always “bringers,” which means you have to bring between eight and twelve people to sit in the audience and buy drinks in exchange for six minutes of stage time. It’s a bit of a racket, but everyone gets what they want. Everyone except the audience. I’d usually rely on my family and friends from Long Island and whomever I was waiting tables with at the time to fulfill my audience quota. It was brutal to need something from people all the time. Later on down the line, as soon as I stopped doing bringers, I deleted about a hundred numbers from my cell phone. I was thrilled I wouldn’t ever again have to text, “HEY! WANT TO COME TO MY SHOW?” As I have said before, I’m an introvert, and after shows I’d just want to go home and think about my set, but instead, I’d have to go to a bar with everyone who came to support me. Doing a show already takes a lot out of you, but then to have to kind of “work a room” was too much. It seemed easier to give a lap dance to an angry porcupine than to stand around with my restaurant coworkers hearing what they thought of my punch lines.

My first year of stand-up I’d pace in the parking lot outside Gotham before the show. I’d walk back and forth past the valet attendants and go over the set in my head the way an actor goes over a monologue: over and over again. Then, when I was a few minutes away from being called onstage, I’d get diarrhea. Every time. It was almost a ritual. I’d panic at the thought that they’d call my name while I was still in a cold bathroom wiping myself within an inch of my life, but it always timed out well. Somehow, I consistently managed to empty my bowels, wipe, and flush before my name was called. I even had a few extra seconds to stretch like a long-distance runner before I had to go on. Which I always did, until I saw someone shadowboxing before they went onstage and thought it was so lame that I quit my own ritual of stretching.

Now I can be fully asleep or in the middle of a conversation and walk onstage, but back then it was like sacrificing a lamb with all the creepy superstitions I had. The strangest one was watching myself. You could buy a VHS tape of your performance from a guy at Gotham for fifteen dollars. I didn’t have a VCR at home, so I’d bring the tape to a store that rhymes with West Buy and put it in one of their machines so I could watch my set and take notes. People shopping would walk by so confused as to why a girl had brought a video of herself to a store and was writing about it. Or once someone thought I was on a really low-budget TV show that I’d happened to catch the airing of. But I couldn’t afford a VCR with all the money I was spending on stage time and rent.

I didn’t graduate to open-mic shows for a while. Open mics are a bigger step because they aren’t bringers, and a lot of the time the audience consists only of other comedians. I decided a good place to get my feet wet would be up in Harlem on 106th Street at a place called the Underground. I went up with a lot of confidence. I’d been performing for months in front of real audiences with a couple hundred people in them, so I thought I could handle thirty comedians. (I’m singing these three words:) Noooo I cooooouldn’t! I bombed. Hard. Not one laugh.

There’s nothing quite like your first bomb. You can feel it in your bones. First you think there might be something wrong with the sound. But there isn’t. It’s you. You’re the problem. You and your terrible jokes that are not funny. You realize everyone has been lying to you. There are no friends in the audience laughing so as not to hurt your self-esteem. It’s a sea of unfriendly faces, people who do the same thing you do, so they don’t think you’re cute. They think you are boring and that you’re wasting their time. And all they are focused on is their own set and how they should be further along in comedy than they are. I was dizzy when I got offstage. I sat back down with a few other comics who smiled at me in a “sorry for your loss” way. I hung my head through the rest of the show and realized I had a lot of work to do. I didn’t cry but my confidence was in tiny little pieces shattered all over the dirty Harlem floor. Okay, fine, I cried. And I drank several warm beers.

From there, I began doing a couple of shows a week—an open mic here, a bringer there. I’d finish one set and go home to have dinner with my boyfriend, Rick, with whom I lived very happily in Brooklyn. We were both actors who met waiting tables, meaning we were both auditioning for shitty roles in shitty plays and not getting any parts. I remember thinking it was strange that a lot of other comics I knew would do more than one show a night. I could feel their insatiable hunger for stage time and I pitied them. What were they chasing? As if one more five-minute set at a hair salon (yes, they have shows everywhere) in front of ten other drunk open-mic performers would change anything.

And then it happened to me. I thought of my first good joke. The kind that made me feel I had to get onstage to tell it. It happened on the L train on my way home to Williamsburg around one a.m. I was sitting next to an elderly black woman and we were having a nice conversation. Just chitchat. She was Crypt Keeper old, like a California Raisin. That is not racist. If she had been white she would have looked like a yellow California Raisin. Anywhoozle, out of nowhere she asked me, “Have you heard the good news?” At that moment I saw she had one of those cartoony religious pamphlets and I realized she was trying to save my soul. I let her down easily, explaining that I was Jewish and would not be joining her in the kingdom of heaven. That was that. I thought she was just this sweet woman I was connecting with, but she was using me to get salvation points. Little did she know I was a godless, shifty Jew. I walked home from the subway thinking about the interaction and I wrote a joke. A good joke.

I called my sister early the next morning and woke her up. Kim hates being woken up. But she sleeps with her phone on and I know that, so ring ring ring. “Kim, listen, I have a new joke!” She answered me with a supportive, “Good-bye.” But I got her to stay on the phone and listen to my joke, which was:

This old woman on the subway asked me, “Have you heard the good news?” She was trying to save me.

I said, “Ma’am, I’m so sorry. My people are Jewish.”

She said, “That’s okay, your people just haven’t found Jesus yet.”

I said, “No, we found him. Maybe you haven’t heard the bad news.”

I listened into my phone for Kim’s response. Like I had so many times before. After about three Mississippis she said, “That’s funny. Good-bye.” And she hung up. But that was all I needed.

This piece is an excerpt from Amy Schumer's book The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, published by Simon & Schuster.