So I was entered in a standup contest tonight. And no, I didn't win. As a matter of fact, the crowd hated me so much they pulled me off stage early, before I could even get to my best stuff. I used an abbreviated version of my "Wheelchair Pootang" set, which you can read here. It's amazing how one set can get such vastly different reactions from one time to the next. The first time I used that set I had people coming up to me afterward telling me how much they loved it and I even had the headliner telling me I had funny shit and had potential. Tonight, Jesus Christ. The crowd fucking hated me. Well, most of the crowd. There were probably about 80 people there, and 10 of them loved it, and 70 of them were ready to lynch me in the parking lot.
Ironically I had them at first. I told a couple relatively safe jokes first that got me off to a promising start. And then I started in with the handicapped jokes and things went abruptly south. When I said my joke about how I went to a very handicap-accessible school because at least there would be a lot of chicks who couldn't outrun me, I could feel the glares. And yes, the idea of making a joke about raping handicapped chicks sounds pretty bad. Okay it sounds fucking terrible and it takes a special kind of person to even come up with something that fucked up. But dammit, it's still funny. Well, the crowd already hated me, but I didn't have another set memorized because I'm still new at this gig, so I figured fuck it, I'll just keep on making more handicapped jokes. They already hate me, I already lost, what the fuck are they going to do? Well, as it turned out, what they did was flash the light indicating I was at my time when I was actually only at about two-thirds of my time. So I'll have to remember that when I'm to the point somewhere down the road where people are actually paying me to make wheelchair jokes so I can refuse to go to that place. Or maybe I'll go and tell nothing but wheelchair jokes just to piss them off.
Looking back though I can actually laugh about it because people hated me that much and I just kept going. I should've told the story about seeing the blind kid walk face-first into the door and fall over backwards. As it is I just told a few more cripple jokes. Then they flashed me off, so I finished with another handicapped rape joke. As I was leaving the stage my wife said the guy next to her said "That was awful."
Okay now here's the part I don't get. The guy before me had AIDS jokes, rape jokes, jokes about dropping babies, and jokes about bludgeoning cats with golf clubs, and the crowd ate it up. But then I go up and say I went to a school for the handicapped so there would be a lot of chicks who can't outrun me and suddenly these people no longer had a sense of humor. The same asshole who described me as awful was clapping at the joke about bludgeoning kittens. So I guess the moral of the story here is that AIDS, infanticide, and animal cruelty is funny, but handicapped people are not. That's worth knowing.