Indigo house

Sunday. LA is sleepy. The wholesome dozens flurry through empty streets and vacant markets without hangover or regrets from the night before. They bounce. They grin. They’re… gag… cheery.

The rest of us just want some fucking coffee.

I saw Eddie Peppitone last night at the Comedy Store with Mel. Eddie was on fire. A crowd trying really hard to give in to the premise while working to tune out the obnoxious noise of the outdoor patio through the window and separated from the room full of whispering drink orders by only a thin curtain hanging halfway to the floor. 

Newbie comics are easy to spot. Even the ones with promise. Their premise is amusing, but they haven’t figured out how to make each step funny. Their personality might help, or hurt… but they just haven’t pulled it all together yet. 

One comic mumbles his punchlines and his poor sense of timing leaves him fighting a chuckling audience for the next setup. Another dresses like she’s been sleeping in the greenroom on the weekends, and spends her first five minutes describing her look without an obvious point, or an audible laugh. 

Then Eddie walks out. Mostly bald with gray sprouts, black plastic glasses and a suit jacket that is implausibly too big for his overweight frame. Eddie seems frantic. Disjointed. Frenetic. He seems like he’s screaming. He seems loud. His bit takes him from the high of various drugs like Molly, Meth, and Crack, hyphenated by a bookish character who is serious, sober, and who seems like he is speaking much quieter. He seems loud. Then he seems quiet. But if you listen, you can hear every syllable he speaks, and the mic never sounds distorted. He’s never actually yelling, or mumbling. He’s playing dynamics with a tiny range of volume. Eddie seems all over the place, because Eddie wants it that way. Eddie knows how to get an audience on their toes, and ready to follow him. Eddie knows a trick that my dad taught me a long time ago. 

Dad ran summer camps for teenagers. Every summer, a few times between May and July, hundreds of teens from churches around the southeast would appear in busses, load into our cabins, and prepare themselves for a spiritual experience by the end of the week. My dad’s job was to keep them busy during the day, and make sure that as much physical energy as possible was exerted throughout the day so that the evening dinner, then the following late-night church service would drain the final sparks of emotional fire left in every hormonal lust bomb on the property, leaving the late night security detail much simpler after we’ve all been confronted with Heaven & Hell, life and death, and the consequences of every action. So… no sneaking around… you know?

When the church service starts, everyone’s on their second wind. After a long day of running around in the sun, then showers and a big meal, a few hundred teenagers and a few dozen volunteers would pile into our cafeteria and align themselves onto metal folding chairs on concrete floors where a full band was set up (myself included), and ready for the show.

My dad was a master with a room full of hyper yutes. He knew that the way to get a room to shut up and listen is to first get them all making noise at once, in unison. Build up the noise, then drop it. Then build it up more, then drop it lower. Stay longer in the silence each time you get there, and make the payoff of noise explosive and satisfying. 

Rhythm is key too. Surprise. That’s the point. He could hypnotize an audience of unwilling teenagers with the most skillful push and pull of emotional catch phrases and captivating stories until eventually, you could actually hear the crickets outside the window. 88 acres of Louisiana woods in the middle of the night would sparkle and hum in the background like a choir hanging on his every word. 

Inside, a crowd of introspective high school students were starting to break down. The wear and tear of being tossed around would leave them stunned. They were just laughing, but now half of the room is in tears. Seduced into self-reflection. Shocked into a moment of decision, with the promise of instant satisfaction, and longterm results. It was an offer impossible to refuse, and designed to be automatic. There’s a reason kids aren’t asked to give their heart to Jesus over breakfast. There’s been no priming then. The soil is still cold and hard, and there’s no receptivity. You have to start with Volleyball and Water Polo if you want to end with Repentance and Commitment.

Bruce Lee says to be like water. Water is fluid, and can take any form. But when force is needed, water can crash. Your opponent is simply a dance partner, pushing and pulling with you, and reflecting your energy back to you. This is performance. This is crowd control. This is manipulation in exactly the way the audience wants to be manipulated. 

Eddie understands this concept. The matching of body language and tone. The importance of clarity over control. If you want an audience to be flexible, you have to show them how. 

"Some comics say funny things. But the best comics say things funny."

Eddie is a pro. Eddie doesn’t tell jokes. He doesn’t do material. At least, he doesn’t seem like he’s doing material. He doesn’t seem like he’s telling jokes. He seems like he’s just… making you laugh.

He’s found a way to abstract from his material, his persona, his taste, and just use his skill to play. That’s the point of building the skill. Because the form is more effective when it’s done well, and because the euphoria of performance can only come from preparation. In other words, if you want to get lost and experience the magic and hypnosis of playing anything from Basketball to Shakespeare, you have to build the muscle memory enough to forget that you’re performing, and just play. 

Eddie walked onto stage in a flow state, and he swept the audience up in his trance. We were all so very grateful for that. 15 minutes of unison. A quarter of an hour spent with strangers in a shared imagination, a shared euphoria. We were on a rocket ship to nowhere together, and then we all landed safely, and went back home.

A mind reshaped by a new idea will never be the same again. Or something like that. 

Experience is powerful. But the more deeply the experience is associated to your identity, your sense of purpose and meaning, your emotional memory, the more transformative and lasting the experience can be. Tony Robbins curses in his meetings specifically because it isn’t supposed to be done. The point is micro-shock. Tiny psychological pinches to force the memory to form in it’s own little nook. Don’t think of this like any other conference meeting. Any other church service. Any other comedy routine. This one is different. This time you’re going to feel something real. Something lasting. Something surprising, and perfectly safe.

Let’s break the mold together, so it matters more to both of us. We’ll both feel like we’ve accomplished something when this over if we feel like we’ve ended somewhere other than where we started. The journey wasn’t wasted. We may have been willing to sit through just-another-version of whatever the thing is, but we would really rather not. We would really like to know where to go back and find those same old surprises. The comfortable joys. The secure laughs. 

But people like Eddie Peppitone know that real laughter isn’t safe. Tony Robbins knows that real change doesn’t come from the old format. Bruce Lee knows that effective combat doesn’t come from training the way your opponents train. 

You have to break the mold, and you have to do it so often, so repetitively, that your skill is transferrable. You can go from any point to your favorite imagination with a caravan of guests, and you can take the shortest route possible, without losing anyone. You have to practice your rocket ship routes over and over again. So that the most amazing thing that you do seems even more amazing because you make it seem simple. That’s magic. That’s what creates faith from thin air. That’s what inspires hope. 

You start with the premise that we all know the limitations, and then systematically cross each boundary like a tight-rope walker doing the funky chicken over the grand canyon. How is that possible? How can someone do that so easily? 

Because they did the thing that was extraordinarily difficult so often, so deliberately, and for so long, that they don’t know how to fail. 

“Don’t practice until you get it right. Practice until you can’t get it wrong."

A professional juggler has to make himself drop. After so much practice, the toss and catch is completely automatic. Like riding a bike. Or a unicycle. A great juggler will drop early in his show, so the audience remembers that it’s possible. Then, when the flaming chainsaws are flying through the air, you have a clear image of the danger. You remember that bowling pin that he dropped earlier, and you are mesmerized, waiting to see it happen. The suspense. The tension. Crickets.

Perfect bands are boring. Predictable stories are forgettable. A punchline that comes from the setup is not funny. Comfort isn’t exciting. Our audience swoons for scars. 

"Set yourself aflame, and invite the world to watch you burn."