Towards the end of 2005, I was going to alot of live comedy shows. After watching and listening to Billy Gardell show one night, I talked to him about getting started in comedy and he pointed me to a local open mic night along with very simple instructions: Write five minutes of material and try it out at an open mic. You’ll know after your first time if it’s for you or not.

So from the beginning of December to the end of January, I just wrote stuff that was funny to me or just jotted down life stories that were humorous. I got up on stage for the first time on February 6th, 2006, and I had a great time. I remember being nervous as hell and opening with how I learned to ride a bike, a true story. It got a pretty good laugh and that helped some of the nervousness fade away. I got rollin’ and kept goin’. The middle of my set is a little fuzzy, but I remember closing with a bit about getting a Slim Jim confused for something no one should ever put in their mouth, which also hit pretty well.

From that point until about October, I’d go up and try new stuff as often as I could, but that wasn’t very often because I’d lived so far from the clubs and I couldn’t afford the gas. It was about once every two months. I entered in the Houston’s Funniest Contest for 2006 and didn’t get passed the first round. Not really unexpected considering I had only performed a few times in a few months.

Now, I mentioned I was doing that until October. That’s when I took a break. My girlfriend of two and a half years, who I was living with at the time, up and left me without any warning whatsoever. I truly loved her and it completely shattered me emotionally. I couldn’t eat for days and it took months for me to even be able to function normally again. I couldn’t do comedy at that time. I took a complete break for about six months. In March of 2007, I started writing again and planned to start going back to the clubs. In April or May, I did start going back, but I was only going every other week. For me, that just wasn’t enough. By June, I was going to the clubs every week and I found an open mic in my hometown at a pub that I went to every week. I also found a bar that was about half the distance that the club was that I would occasionally go to. There wasn’t much point in that place because the crowd was just there to get drunk and get wild. It was a great place to learn how to deal with obnoxious people A.K.A. hecklers, but not a great place to find out if I was actually funny or not.

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