Road Comedy on a Shoestring Budget Response to This Idiocy
- by Shayne Michael
Hello, LAugh Support reader. I thought it would be helpful to share with you some of the things I do survive in between road gigs when cash gets tight. Often in remote areas I have no place to stay, and purchasing an overpriced hotel room is out of the question. Paying for my own accommodations is simply too expensive and would eat up a significant chunk of my profits. And for those of you who feel this is an obvious attempt to play on a subject brought up in the Chucklemonkey April newsletter, duh; It is. That article went into detail about how to sleep in your car, turn minutes into hours at a coffee shop and how to use local libraries to write jokes while using local gyms to pass time. But why stop there?
The scope of the article was so limited. You would still be spending money to buy food, gas, drugs and writing equipment. When you consider how much more you can save, by making a few simple adjustments, you'll be truly amazed. When writing typically you need pens, pencils and paper. Pencils are expensive {running nearly a dollar for a dozen, except at Costco}. However, you can usually find discarded number twos along the ground, especially at freeway crash sites where patrol officers wrote up a trucker on a DUI and then discarded a half empty Papermate. I recommend you extend your thrift conscious budget to locating these pens and pencils along road side highways and using the back of receipts to write jokes. Usually in even the remotest parts of the country you can find something to write on and something to write with within a single hour. Then, by using the skill of multi-tasking you can write as you look for more toilet paper to spell out set lists and more half chewed pens to write them with.
The original article suggested writing in a coffee shop. Of course, why would you go to a coffee shop that charges $4 a glass? Even if you nurse that extra large Mocha Late for six hours that's still almost a dollar an hour. You're much better waiting until residents go to work and sipping water from a lose gardening hoses. The body can survive 40 days without food. But avoiding water can mean certain death so sipping from garden hoses or consuming water from drainage canals while sleeping in your car, can lead 40 days without paying a bill. A note to those playing Albuquerque and Oklahoma City, you might want to boil that water first.
The original article recommended sleeping in your car, unless you had three days off. After sleeping in a car for eight months {which led to a brilliant 2 minutes about back spasms and the wonders of Mexican penicillin} let me make some extra suggestions. When it comes to sleeping in a car remember the most comfortable cars to sleep in get the worst milage. True an SUV's back seat folds into a bed, but when gas is $2 a gallon who cares? Civics, Bugs and Saturns can stretch that $2 into 20 extra miles. Instead of buying an SUV, consider a smaller car and removing your back seat. Replace it with a card table and a sleeping bag. With a few pillows from the thrift store and a sleeping bag handed down to me from my grandfather, it's easy for me to lay there and mill over my routine while I count the ceiling tiles in my Oldsmobile bug and multiply it by the number of times my right leg falls asleep. You can get even better milage from a motorcycle. While, this makes it impossible to sleep in the car it is possible to carry a tent in the back and set it up on the outskirts of whatever town you're playing. True all land is owned, making this tactic a shaky legal move, but it won't matter as outlying lands are never patrolled by anyone except the rarely photographed Neanderthal race. And with a motor cycle instead of a car you can always get away if you're willing to leave the tent behind.
Some have recommended after three days of off time to bite the bullet and get a hotel. Still others have suggested getting a calling card, finding a pay phone and looking for another gig to fill in the dead space; but these unmotivated fools miss the point. I have a calendar, I post above my card-table/ bed. Every day, I cross out the date like I'm a cast member in Dawn of the Dead as I pass my time listening to Bozeman Montana's unique blend of Air Supply, Usher, and AC/DC.
Some people search out Continental breakfasts. But, once they find one, they quit. But why stop there? In bigger cities there are at least five major hotels. Sometimes, a city will have nine continental breakfasts going at once and a charity drive downtown. Often you can hit one continental breakfast at 7:00am, one at 7:45, one at 8:30, one at 9:15 and still eat a Bologna Sandwich while your contribute a quarter to fight for battered woman. If you purchase a cooler and load it up with ice from the hotel ice machines, you would have enough donuts and bagels to last you until noon the next day. Stock piling the orange juice is harder since hotels usually serve it in those small Dixie cups. You can only pour so many into a small water bottle before someone calls security and your forced to sell blood to make bail.
Now on occasion, you will need to use a restroom and most places that you stop will insist you buy something first. They will kick out the swinging door for being cheap and you can only dig so many holes down wind from your car. So I like to pretend I'm a potential investor. True, the appearance of a comic wearing thrift store overalls who is obviously sleeping in his car while doing Tribble runs doesn't scream the word "investor". But eventually, especially in the South, you come across the typical brother-sister, husband-wife team who are all but happy to show you around and consider the act of using their facilities and flushing a simple 3rd party inspection before escrow.
When you actually get to the show and deliver your set, make sure you get paid in cash. People should always be paid what they're worth in life. But personally, I don't trust banks because I've been told that between interest and maintenance fees any interest you might earn on that money erodes away in a wink, so I like to bury mine in old coffee cans and then dig them up when I return to town.
Comedy is a low paying industry. And the only way to cope is to cut out expenses entirely. Sure it was hard to find someone to insure my car for less than the price it would cost to raise an anorectic Somalian orphan, but after only one drive to Mexico, where I was able to pick up penicillin for the next two years, it was over. My car was insured, and I could safely go to the really cheap hookers and say, do your worst.
What could you possible get out of shelling out your hard earned cash for a hotel room? A bathroom, a phone, a bed and room service? Why would any self respecting comic need any those things {Rest before going up? Write until you need to rest? Or my favorite, to call and confirm your shows? Losers. You can do that by sleeping under an overpass, drinking rain water from a funnel and flagging down a cop with a cell phone.} Some day, when I'm writing that next classic bit about filling up my Harley at an abandoned gas station in Newark, I won't need to pinch pennies. Until then, things like health and comfort are extravagances that no comic needs. And if you have them, you aren't paying your dues. I don't need the peace and quiet of a hotel room to write. All I need to do is park off the side of the I-10 and hope that on Thanksgiving some trucker hyped up on speed and tryptophane doesn't turn my car into an accordion between his "I brake for a laugh" bumper sticker and my open mic'er friends squatting under the railings of a freeway underpass.
Remember in road comedy, the secret to survival is being cheap; not being smart. And anyone who tells you: "If you're comedy doesn't fund the life style you deserve you should create better comedy", just doesn't get it.