So to continue my story, I had just been dumped by my longtime boyfriend and had a show to do that evening…

That night I dragged my ass down to the Improv on West 44th Street to wait for my pickup to Long Island. A van with two comics pulled up, I got in and spit nails for the entire trip until I heard one of the guys say to the other, “Isn’t she ever going to shut up?” I heard the other one stage whisper that he heard I had just gotten dumped and suddenly they were both very sweet. Clearly they had been dumped before and knew how hard it was to have to get out of bed much less go do a show outside of Manhattan.

We got to the club and I went straight to the bar and ordered snake venom to soothe my aching throat. My agent walked in and asked how I was and I mentioned I’d been dumped and was deathly ill and he started to cry.

“I brought a booker to see you.” He said. I would have felt bad about that but I was too sick and depressed to care.

I got on stage and seven minutes into my set lost all will to live. Who cared about my stupid jokes? So I did what I always did when I got bored with my material, I started talking to the audience. A girl towards the front was very, very drunk. These are the best people to pick on since no matter what they say it’s always easy to top them. And the rest of the audience will egg you on because crowds love a bloodbath. And I was determined to give them one. If I was going down, I was taking hostages.

After a few minutes I asked her if I could go through her purse. She willingly brought it to me and went back to her seat. The first thing I found was an almost 18″ can of hairspray. So I made all the requisite dick jokes, big hair and vibrator jokes. Classy it wasn’t but she kept laughing and the audience was howling so I didn’t stop. From the stage I heard my agent apologize to the booker. And then faint.

After the show I was sitting at the bar having arsenic on the rocks when the drunken girl tapped me on the shoulder. Uh-oh, maybe I hadn’t been as funny as I thought.

“Thank you so much for making me laugh tonight,” she began, “I haven’t laughed in over 6 months.”
“Really? Why?”
“Six months ago I was driving home one night and saw an accident on the other side of the highway. When I got home my father told me it was my brother in the crash and that he had died.”

Oh God.

“And then two months ago my father passed away from a heart attack and I think it’s because he was so upset over my brother,” she continued, “and tonight’s the first time I’ve laughed since my brother died.

Suddenly getting dumped didn’t seem like such a big deal.

CYA next week.