Stand Up Comedy Comics Club

[Marie Ota]

Everycomedian has a story about the first time things went awry for him or her onstage, or when he or she bombed badly and/or unexpectedly. It happens to all of us. And even though it feels horrible at the time, it's a good thing, because you need to learn from it so you can get better as a comedian and as a performer. Now John Mayer has one of those stories. Yes. John Mayer. Which makes it a little bit different. When you had an awkward onstage experience starting out in comedy, you likely were the only person to remember it the next day. When John Mayer does anything in public, everyone tends to notice. Here's one of the pics snapped of Mayer (by Rachel Sklar) when he performed comedy on Tuesday at The Slipper Room.

In the meantime, the Grammy-winning musician, celebrity and aspiring comedian went outside of his comfort zone on Tuesday night in New York City, and found himself in an uncomfortable and strange place. Trying to tell jokes without any of his metaphorical safety nets. And in one weird sequence, hopping back onstage to banter with a comedian he knew nothing about. It's my experience that when two comedians who do not know each other trade barbs, it's not always as fun as when friends roast each other at the Friars Club or on Comedy Central. Instead, things get weird. By all accounts, that's what happened at The Slipper Room.

If you've seen him tell jokes before, it has been as witty banter between songs in concerts, scripted bits for TV shows, riffs on the red carpet, or one-liners penned by him on his blog or his Twitter page. A few select crowds have seen him try stand-up as an unannounced guest at the Comedy Cellar in New York City's Greenwich Village, always introduced by one of his closest comedian friends.

Mayer wasn't even planning on performing on Tuesday. He said one of his comedian friends, Jordan Rubin, invited him along to check out Sweet, Seth Herzog's weekly comedy showcase at The Slipper Room in the Lower East Side. Rubin was supposed to have been that night's DJ sidekick but bailed. The show has a rather loyal following that includes creative types, hipsters, anti-hipsters, actors, actresses and fans of Herzog and his mother (who has a recurring bit on the show). It has a decidedly different feeling from the gruff and gritty vibe at the Cellar.

"Here's strike one as to why the night didn't work," Mayer told me. "I've never introduced a comic to the stage who didn't introduce me to the club. If it was uncomfortable, your friend is up there (afterward) and says, hey, 'It's John Mayer, that's tough to do.'"

This was the first time Mayer didn't know what he was getting himself into onstage.

"I'm blind and I'm an idiot. I go in and I smash things wth my big, dumb Hulk hands," he said. "I don't know how to do it yet. I don't know how to bomb. It was combative in the sense that the crowd didn't really accept the fact that the jock, the guy who gets the girls, was at a place where the guys go who talk about how they don't get the girls."

He said he didn't think he bombed when he took the stage for his surprise stand-up set (and others in the audience agreed that for a celebrity in an "alt" room, the set probably pleased as many as it displeased), but knew that things went wrong when comedian Kumail Nanjiani went up next instead of Rubin. Rubin didn't even end up going onstage that night. Instead, Nanjiani acknowledged the weirdness in the room and Mayer's performance. And the next thing anyone knew, Mayer was getting back onstage in the middle of Nanjiani's set.

"I'd never met Kumail," he said. "But I'm also in performance-mode, and in barrel-ahead mode, and with not enough information. I think it's just as uncomfortable for me to bring onstage someone who I don't know as it is for someone to follow me who doesn't know who I am."

"Performer to performer, I felt like, he's having trouble transitioning. They always think the other guy is the bigger guy. I'm just trying to tell them I'm John. Once I go out up there, I'm an amateur comic. In my state of vulnerability, I thought, it's not moving forward, and he said to me, 'Why am I doing stand-up?' The whole thing was so odd. It was off-kilter from the moment I'd gotten onstage. I'd seen so much collaboration onstage, between Seth and his mom, that I thought I could go back up. These are misfires on top of misfires. You're standing in front of the train and you're not going to be able to stop it. So I get onstage, and I didn't know he didn't want me onstage. I'm the exact opposite of a ham when I go to a comedy club. I'm just a dude trying to pick stuff up (learning from everyone else)."

Mayer has shared the stage at the Cellar with comedians such as Dave Attell, Jeffrey Ross, James Smith and Sherrod Small, but they've all gotten a chance to know and interact with him offstage. "There's always this level of trust," Mayer said.

With Nanjiani, Mayer didn't know what to do.

So was this a Kanye-style backfire interruption? Or worse yet, a Michael Richards-style backfire? Not exactly. "I don't think of this as Kanye and Taylor Swift. I think of this as some little Star Trek episode," Mayer said. "I said, 'This is like "8 Mile" where neither person can rap.'"

"I felt really bad. I felt like I ruined his set," he said, so he sought Nanjiani out afterward to apologize. Nanjiani, for his part, agreed that it was a weird, surreal experience and would just as soon move on.

Mayer said he leaned a tough lesson, and acknowledged: "It'll probably be a minute before I get up there again." Although he added: "Maybe we could have a potluck dinner at The Slipper Room next Tuesday night."

Watch any of Garry Shandling's specials (we recommend Alone in Vegas), and you'll see a charming neurotic burrowing into his looks and his failure with women in an attempt to let his audience breathe easy. On his Late Show debut, his typical self-deprecation came through while considering the end of a date: "This is where I start to wonder if there's going to be any sex, and if I'm going to be involved." His observational anecdotes could be so breezy that even a story about performing with President Bush (the first) could seem like a strangely everyday occurrence. Before he died in 2016, he had been working on a new act: What I want to happen is that I talk for an hour and the audience doesn't realize it is funny until they're driving home," he told GQ in 2010. That we never got to see that last Zen-like set is a tragedy.

Before she became the sitcom antidote to perky, middle-class moms like Carol Brady, Roseanne Barr broke that image of the chipper, wholesome matriarch over her knee via her blistering stand-up routines. "I hate that word, 'housewife,'" she'd whinge, "I prefer to be called domestic goddess." Her gripes about married life and child-rearing were delivered in that unmistakable nasal tenor; you knew her act wouldn't be a cup of warm milk and a lullaby. Watching her debut set on The Tonight Show, you can already see her mining the ground she'd end up colonizing and outright owning: speaking for a populace of average Americans unused to seeing themselves on TV. Every blue-collar comedian owes her a debt.

Years before he'd grab a camera and refine the personal comedy-drama into an art form, Woody Allen channeled his obsessions and neuroses into irresistible, intellectually wonky one-liners, delivered offhandedly in an endearing, Brooklyn accent ("I cheated on my metaphysics final in college, I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me"). He couched little jokes in the larger ones, as when he nonchalantly mentions attending a "surprise autopsy" or being a "history of hygiene" major on his way to bigger punchlines. After making his name in the downtown NYC nightclub scene of the Sixties and making a few albums, Allen started focusing on other pursuits. And though aspects of his personal life have forced moviegoers to reconsider their loyalties, his contributions to bridging the Borscht Belt and Greenwich Village are undeniable.

Whimsical but not frivolous, erudite but not snobbish, polished but never above a proper bit of silliness, Eddie Izzard makes intelligent comedy, U.K. division, entirely accessible. With a smirk always at the edge of his lips, Izzard lets his monologue spill downstream, swirling from eddy to eddy as he examines humankind's achievements, patterns and foibles. You might leave an Izzard show with a history lesson or a new vocabulary word; you also might also just find out Darth Vader's favorite cafeteria dish (penne alla arribiata, for the record) or how the Church of England roamed the countryside asking "cake or death?" And you almost definitely get some tips on how to turn glam-rock fashion tips into an "executive transvestitism" look that complements Izzard's one-of-a-kind turn of phrasings.

Don Rickles is a rare comic who found his voice by actually ignoring his material. In the late Forties, the man also known as "Mr. Warmth" and the "Merchant of Venom" discovered that his audiences connected more to the ad-libs he used to shut down hecklers than the jokes he'd written. Since then, the quick, sharp and unpredictable Rickles has plowed into his audiences, picking up on cues large and small and delivering little barbs ("It's over, I'm a friend") to his targets. Eventually, his wicked wit hit their most important target in Frank Sinatra, who championed the comedian to famous friends and got him started in Vegas. With that wide, jack-o-lantern mug and a torrent of rapid-fire gags, Rickles created a template that insult comics have referred to since the 1950s. This is how you do it right, hockey pucks.

Using just a single prop or bit of costuming, Jonathan Winters could use his imagination, voice and the elastic mask of his face to create solo vignettes with well-defined characters and exchanges with actual punchlines. Playing a pilot or bass fish, impersonating Bing Crosby or JFK, or revisiting crowd favorites such as saucy Maude Frickert or hayseed Elwood Suggins, he was full of playful mischief and capable of delighting all ages of viewers. He was also an incredibly prolific comic who produced more than 20 albums and was nominated for a Grammy 11 times; unlike other legends of improvisation like Vegas staple Shecky Greene, Winters left a trail of performances that can testify to the talent that so inspired comics like Robin Williams.

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