For a number of years, I tried my hand at stand-up comedy. 
I appeared on stages in Lincoln, Columbus, Fremont, Neligh, Norfolk and Omaha, mostly as an unpaid amateur learning the ropes.
I loved doing stand-up, especially when I got to be the emcee or hostess for a show as well. It was both the most terrifying and the most exhilarating thing I'd ever done. I had plans to continue learning the business in the hopes of taking it on the road someday.
Then things changed. I changed. My life changed. And I haven't done a minute of stand-up since.
People who know I once did stand-up will sometimes ask me if I'm ever going to do it again. I may, but I doubt it. If I do, it will be firmly in the realm of amateur with no aspirations to rise above that. Perhaps someday I'll stumble across a local watering hole holding an open mic night, and I'll hop on stage for old time's sake, or maybe I'll get an opportunity to host some event and throw some humor into the mix. Who knows? For now, though, I'm not planning on doing any stand-up.
When those who have seen me do comedy before ask me why I haven't done it for a while, I usually just shrug and say something about how I lack the time for it or that I don't feel like driving hours just to go on stage for five minutes or other such excuses. Until recently I didn't really understand why I'd suddenly lost the drive to do comedy, and then one day it hit me like a load of bricks.
I'm not married anymore.
That's the real reason. Because I'm not married, I'm no longer angry and looking for outlets where I can express that anger in socially accepted and psychologically beneficial ways. I no longer need to tell others, in only slightly veiled and humorously twisted ways, about the misery of marriage. O.K., the misery of MY marriage.
At the time, though, you wouldn't have been able to convince me that anyone could be both happy and married. You wouldn't have been able to make me believe that love wasn't the gateway to eternal misery.
Instead, I spent numerous evenings with other bitter and angry people who used comedy also as an outlet to vent their frustrations about society, politics, sports, relationships, etc. upon often raucously drunken crowds of people who would laugh at about anything short of an actual punch in the face. While there are many happy-go-lucky people who do stand-up, most harbor some level of cynicism about something, and those are the things they choose to poke fun at.
I made fun of teaching because I am a teacher, so making jokes about it was a way to deal with my daily frustrations in that field. I made fun of parenting because I am a mother, but most of what I said concerning that topic dealt with amusing things my kids did -- no cynicism or anger involved there.
I made fun of marriage because I was married, and I hated it. Mostly, I hated the person I had married and the person I'd become as a result of our bad marriage.
I recall doing stand-up in a bar one night on my birthday and telling the crowd that it was my birthday and that my gift to myself was being there doing stand-up for them. A few people after the show approached me to ask me if it really was my birthday, and they couldn't believe that I'd rather be there with them, a bunch of strangers, than home with my own husband. In retrospect, it really was a horrible birthday gift to myself, but at the time, it was one of my best birthdays because I was away from the one who made me miserable.
Four years ago, though, I filed for divorce, and he moved out, and in a matter of seconds (I am not exaggerating in the least here), my life of complete and total cynicism melted away. Oh, I'm still a cynic about many things, but not to the level I had been. I was wallowing and drowning in cynicism, unable to see how life could ever be worth smiling about, so I'd put myself on a stage and get people to laugh with me and at me in a feeble attempt to put some humor in my life.
You could say that for a while stand-up was like a drug for me. It gave me a temporary high in a life full of low points. Don't be mistaken -- my kids brought me joy; without them, my life would have been completely hopeless. However, it was also because of them that I stayed with a man I hated for far too long in the misguided hope that somehow things would get better someday.
They did get better, but only when I removed him from my life. And it was an instantaneous improvement to my psyche and to every single aspect of my life.
I think initially I told myself that I was refraining from stand-up because it took too much work, and I was focused on the divorce, and then when that was finally over after more than a year, I told myself that I'd been away too long. I just kept finding excuses for not going back on stage until one day the truth of the matter hit me. I didn't need stand-up anymore.
I'd rather write, anyway. Things like my blogs, where I can interject humor amidst more serious subjects.
However, I have found myself thinking about stand-up again. Not because I want to bash love and marriage. No, I want to bash the sad state of our society and the jokes for candidates running for President and the violence that seems to be out of control everywhere. Those currently are the topics about which my inner cynic is most disgruntled, but I think there are enough stand-up comics tackling those very issues right now.
I'll wait a bit. The itch is there, but for now it's just an itch. Maybe I'll scratch it again someday, and maybe I won't. Whatever I do, though, I won't be making fun of divorce because it's the best damn decision I ever made, and these four years away from my shitty marriage have brought me nothing but joy.
