Yom Kippur, 2024

It's Yom Kippur in a few days, marking 12 years to the day I decided to become a stand-up comedian.

This essay was originally posted on FB nearly 7 years ago - Yom Kippur, 2017. I’m sharing it with all of you as Yom Kippur, 2024 approaches. My relationship with stand-up comedy remains confusing, befuddled, sometimes contentious, yet awaiting clarification as fractals of complexity shoot out of my understanding regarding the spoken word, and more simplistically, “the paraprosdokian”. This harkens back to a time when things were bit a more pure. However, my motivation to maintain my integrity as a writer/ performer remains straonger than ever.

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Today (yesterday as I'm writing this) marks the 5 year anniversary of the moment I decided to become a stand-up comedian.

I didn't realize it until my friend Chris pointed out that today is Yom Kippur, and I remember that day because it's the reason I was the only student sitting alone in Dr. Osborne's office.

I had been there because I was part of a six-week work shadow program where each week, students could shadow a different Head and Neck surgeon at the Osborne Head and Neck Institute. Dr. Osborne was the founder of the practice, an intimidating man, who told you to stand up straight and button up your lab coat the second you shook his hand.

He was going to lecture us on head and neck cancer treatment, a touchy subject, his expertise. He was, after all, the founder of the practice, a man who built it up from scratch, a man the other surgeons feared but respected.

I was the only student being lectured that day, because the other students were Jewish and had the day off for Yom Kippur. Dr. Osborne and I had the whole hour session to ourselves.

He started off cordially, asking me where I was from.

"Oh, Culver City. I went to high school there."

"Culver High? Forreal?"

"Yeah I played basketball there."

"Wow, that's awesome."

He started talking about cancer surgery.

"Cancer treatment is a lot like Mexican food. See you got a few major ingredients, right? Like beans, rice, salsa, cheese. There are three major ways to treat cancer. There's radiation, surgery, chemo, there's more but those are the three major ways. We use those in different amounts to see what works."

He paused a second.

"You know what? We don't have to do the lecture, it's just you and me. Let me ask you, why are you here?"

"I wanna be an orthopedic surgeon. I used to get injured a lot and I got really into looking up what exactly was wrong, and I've always thought it would be cool to get into that."

"Well, if there's one thing I can tell you. If there's anything you can picture yourself doing besides this, do that. Anything at all. You can wanna be a circus clown, a trapeze artist. Go do that. Because this is one of the hardest things in the world to do, and you can't have any doubts. Not an ounce."

Immediately the word "stand-up" came to my mind. I had been writing jokes for 6 months at this point and obsessively watching stand-up. I even looked up on Google once, "How To Be A Comedian".

He said, "You can't have any doubts when it comes to something like this, you have to love it. See this? This is a surgery I've done 800 times. I've never made a mistake. You know why? Because it's easy for me. Because I love what I do. People come all over the world to have me operate on them. I'm great at what I do."

Suddenly this hour session had turned into a motivational speech. One where I listened and he spoke. I've learned so many lessons from that talk, things that have stuck with me and defined who I am to this day.

He asked me, "There's two runners. One gets a time of 10.000001 seconds and the other gets a time of 10.0001 seconds. What's the difference between these two runners?”

“One’s faster?”

“No, they’re the same person. They got the same time. One just wanted it more.”

“90% of the decisions you make are based on fear. You don’t run a red light, because you might get caught, or hit by another car. You can’t decide who you want to be based on fear.”

He told me about his journey to get to where he was.

“When I was 8 I would read anatomy textbooks. I knew I wanted to be a doctor. I was the top of my class and I played sports, had the resume. My counselors told me to apply to community college. I applied to Berkeley and got in. I did my residency and went from maybe wanting to be a family doctor to getting interested in surgery. I became a surgeon, and I started this practice, from scratch.”

His main emphasis was, “I am good at what I do, and I love what I do.”

“You have to love what you do, but you gotta be good. Find the things you love, and hopefully you’ll be good at it too. Most of the time, you will be. Or it’ll just take some time.”

I left the session in a haze. I had built my whole identity around becoming a doctor. I would tell people from the age of 12 that I wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon. I had done well in school, signed up for internships and programs, volunteered so I could beef up my resume to get into a good school, hell, I was at that shadow program purely to have something to put on my college applications.

So I thought, “You know what? I’m gonna do both. I’m gonna be a doctor and a stand-up comedian. F—k it. Ken Jeong did it.”

Next week I came back and another doctor was our teacher for the day, Dr. Hamilton. This time, the other students were there. We were learning about knot tying. To become a surgeon, you had to know how to tie knots, sutchering up wounds seamlessly, effortlessly, any mistake could be fatal. We had a knot tying kit in front of us, with rubber tubes parallel to each other. Dr. Hamilton told us their importance.

“See, this is the major part of the interview. I’ll ask the person some questions about themselves, get to know them, all while having them tie knots. I did this all through college. I had a study chair, it was covered in knots. The stick shift to my car, covered.”

“Some people would sweat, some people couldn’t handle the interview. I’ll ask them to tie a knot they can’t do, and they’ll crack. Other people keep the conversation going, and if they don’t know how to, they ask me. And they’ll figure it out.”

“Those are the people we hire. Those are the people I want to have coffee with. Because I know they did the work to get here. Everyone did the work to get here. They’re all the same person. But that person was more prepared, more ready to take on challenges. And most importantly, I want to have coffee with them. They’re interesting.”

He showed us the cover of the box.

“See this kit? You can get it free online. If you guys are really serious about this thing, you guys will get this kit, and start now.”

I left the session feeling flustered once again.

I talked to the other students on the way out. “Wasn’t that crazy? About what he said? Like people would sweat in interviews.”

One guy said, “I mean yeah. But like I’ve always known I wanted to be an anaesthesiologist.”

The other guy was pretty sure too. They both are still doing it. One of them ended up going to UCLA with me.

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“Still doing the pre-med thing?”

“Yeah man, of course.”

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I ended up ordering that knot-tying kit and I got it in the mail. I looked at the CD they had come with it, watched some videos and it wasn’t for me. That kit stayed by my bedside for 3 months. And that’s when I knew I didn’t want to be a surgeon.

Well, I guess it was just stand-up.

Kind of.

I had tried stand-up 2 weeks after that fateful meeting with Dr. Osborne. It went bad, of course it did. I mean at least I thought it did. I was so nervous beforehand that I wrote material about all the other performers before me and spent my first 3 minutes not even doing my own jokes, despite having 6 months of jokes stock-piled. I watched the clip back a month later. I had one joke that worked. “They say if it ain’t broken don’t fix it. So I broke all my dogs legs then got him neutered.”

I kept going. I met a guy at my church who had been doing it a while and he would take me to open mics.

I remember watching my first live show with him, “What’s Up Tiger Lilly?” I saw Nick Thune, one of my favorites at the time. We hit two mics before and one after. I was like, “Holy fuck, this is amazing.”

He was a regular at “The Meltdown” and took me in. Anthony Jeselnik was on stage and Hannibal Buress went up and Kristen Schaal did, who I had just seen on her hour special the night before.

I saw Rory Scovel do an hour at Holy Fuck. I remember coming home thinking, “Wow, I don’t even have to become a comedian, I get to see stuff like this cause I’m in LA. That’s amazing.”

I was still going to school for biomedical engineering.

I knew I didn’t want to do it. But a person had told me that if I was having doubts about becoming a doctor, I should do bioengineering because it gives you the option of not going to medical school.

I hated it though. After a few weeks I was screaming “Fuck” every few seconds while I tried to complete the online chemistry homework. I would cry in the showers in the Dykstra dorm like Moaning Myrtle in Harry Potter.

I told my parents I didn’t want to do engineering even though we had agreed on at least a year of it before I changed. They were understandably not on board. I had no reason to think I could do the comedy thing. I wasn’t very good and was only doing it twice a week.

Winter break of freshman year when I decided to switch from engineering, I remember I made a goal to do 7 sets a week on average. I reached that goal, doing 450 sets that year, surpassing my goal. I had switched finally from engineering to English, after many tears from my mom (bless her heart for putting me through college and supporting me even now).

I would take the bus at 3 PM right next to the Chik-Fil-A in Westwood and go to a 6 PM open mic, typically Rockpaper or Sal’s. Do some homework while I waited to go up. Go up first, take the bus to another open mic, read on the way there, do my set. Then go to hopefully a third. Sometimes I would get home at midnight, only to get to my dorm and converse with all the happy college kids, who had just played ultimate frisbee or went out to party.

“How was your night man?”

“It was fun, did some sets.”

“Dude that’s awesome. It’s so cool you do comedy.”

“Yeah, it is.”

Little did they know I had cried in the bathroom hours earlier, because I had bombed in a bar that I wasn’t allowed into, with people I didn’t know. Then the bus came late, dropped me off half a mile from campus, and I had to skateboard all the way up hill for 25 minutes.

It was brutal sometimes, but God knows it was worth it.

I had made some good friends from comedy, but for the most part I was on my own a lot. I had no real connection to college life. I would go to class, dream of dropping out, look up how to survive on minimum wage, then go alone on a bus to go try out some jokes.

People would ask, “How’s college?”

“It’s alright.”

Side note: anytime someone says “I’m alright,” it means they’re not.

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Towards the end of sophomore year, I had had it. I was gonna drop out. My friend Eagle told me, “Dude, you gotta be sure though. 100 percent. I just had it one day and I was like, ‘F—k it. I’m out.’”

I hadn’t had that moment yet.

One day I was playing basketball with my dad. I had just come off a 5-month injury, and was starting to feel it on the court. I went up for a jumpshot, and immediately retwisted the same ankle I had twisted before. That was it. The moment.

“I’ll never play basketball again. I get injured too much. God is taking away every hobby I have, to point me to stand-up. I keep getting injured and I’ll never be good at basketball. I never wanna feel mediocre at stand-up. I have to do this. I have to drop out.”

It was the same feeling I had when I decided to do English. I was angry and furious while playing basketball and I realized it wasn’t basketball, it was the feeling of being constrained, unable to move forward in life, all because I hadn’t made that leap to pursue what I wanted to do.

So I told my mom, “I can’t go back.”

She said, “What? You can take a day off, but you have finals this week.”

“No I mean ever.”

We didn’t talk about it for months.

I went to New York for a few days that summer and had been preparing to tell my parents, bring it up again. I bombed in front of them at a show in Harlem. Man was I sad. I walked all around Harlem Park that night like, “Wow, they know I suck. I’ll never convince them.”

The car ride the next day they said I did fine and that everyone else was way worse. That was enough.

I got back to LA and had a set at the Comedy Store. I was 20 at the time. I did well and Adam, the talent coordinator, told me to audition to become a doorguy. He wrote my name down. I thought that meant I had the job.

I told my parents, “I’m gonna work at the Comedy Store and drop out.”

I found out later I had to be 21, so I couldn’t work there. I still wanted to drop out.

I sat my parents down. I had a long conversation, with lots and lots of tears. We talked about how I felt like they didn’t trust me with my decisions, and my mom expressed why she thought college was valuable. She said something that was different than what I had heard from before. All I heard before was, "You need a fallback," which to me translated to, "You're not gonna make it."

She said, “College gave me a work ethic, character, I sold encyclopedias door to door and took every class I could so I could graduate and immediately give back to my family. You can’t do college and comedy, and we’re paying for it?”

I thought of all the nights I laid in my bed depressed, feeling helpless about not being able to juggle school and comedy, only to play FIFA later and not finish any homework or do any stand-up.

She was right, I could do both.

That year, I committed to staying in school. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. I would do 2-3 sets some nights, only to come home at 1 AM to stay up 4 hours writing an essay, then wake up to go to class and repeat.

Meanwhile, our club blew up. Our first show back was 300 people, and I got to perform 15 minutes. It was the first time I really did well. I got applause breaks. I thought, maybe I’m good at this. I had been doing it every night ever since I told my parents I wanted to drop out. I thought, “If I’m really serious about this, I have to take it seriously.”

I stayed in school. I did 8-10 sets a week. I ran our club, booked shows, booked headliners, ran a weekly, ran a monthly, did a podcast. I felt like I was really doing it. For the next two years I went to school and did comedy. But I felt like I was a student first, a comedian second. I wanted to be a comedian.

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The summer after my junior of college I went to New York to intern at Above Average. It was a huge opportunity, because I had always dreamed of moving to New York after college, and so I wanted to experience it before I went.

Man was it depressing. I was lonely, feeling like I sucked at stand-up. I started to get panic attacks. There were times when I called off work because I couldn’t sleep til 4 AM in the morning.

I went back to school, and it got worse. I was scared that I wasn’t ready to graduate, and that I hadn’t had anything going for me in comedy and that the time was ticking because college was almost up. I had put so much pressure on myself to feel like I had some professional groundwork in comedy before I graduated, because I wanted to be able to call myself a comedian, a student no more.

It was an identity crisis, something that ate into every relationship, even tearing down one. And I had to get help. I started going to therapy, dealing with some family issues, figuring out where this insane pressure had started.

I got on anti-depressants, they helped enormously. They gave me a clear mind, enough to make decisions that helped me plan for the future. School started to get a little more manageable, and I was able to see a light at the end of the tunnel. I was so close, yet so far. Those little inches before I finish the race. That .0000001 seconds that I needed to push myself to finish.

Around that time, I had been travelling a lot more. I had booked a two week tour in Portland, Seattle, and the bay with some friends. I had been trying to get footage. A comic saw me at a show in San Francisco, the set I ended up getting footage for, and he asked me to do his show in LA. I did that show, little did I know there was a manager in the audience.

We met and kept in touch and started to work together, and I couldn’t believe it. All that anxiety of having some sort of professional validation before I graduated started to go away. It was one of those vision board hippie moments because I had written it on a Google Docs labelled “GOALS”, that I wanted to have representation around the time I graduated.

I still had to finish those last few classes though. I walked the stage, graduated. Had a party. Technically I wasn’t finished. Me and my mom had a sentimental moment where I shared a speech similar to this where I explained how hard it was for me to finish college. It was a nice moment.

I went to Europe and finished my last few classes. Got to see some stand-up, got to do some. Got to go to the Edinburgh Festival, to this day one of the most transformative experiences I’ve had comedically. I came back and had one more final. It was hard, but I finished. And I felt great. I had finally finished. I honestly never thought that day would come.

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I went back to campus lately to do a show and I couldn’t help but realize, the only thing keeping me there was comedy. I felt like I was going back to a place I had conquered, and I didn’t want to relive some of the bad memories. The crying in my car, the panic attacks.

But I had finished. And I'm so glad I did, because if I did that, then the rest will be a piece of cake.

Things have started to get busy again just like school, but now my homework is doing writing packets for TV shows and preparing for auditions and writing jokes and trying to get footage together. It’s just as much work, but it’s exactly what I would be doing anyways.

When people would ask me before, “You do comedy?” I would say, “I mean, trying to.”

But this past week I was driving home and I thought to myself, "Holy s—t, I'm really a comedian."

This past week and a half I’ve done almost 20 sets, 9 of them booked shows, had two auditions, worked on two writing packets, got a commercial and voice-over agent, and got to see some amazing comics like Baron Vaughn do amazing things on stage. And I still got a full night’s sleep. And I haven’t had any panic attacks. I do miss those nights playing FIFA, but I’m doing what I love and I’m d—n good at it too.

So now I’m gonna start being more confident when people ask me that question.

"You're a comedian?"

Yes. I’m a comedian. Thank you, and goodnight.

- Nathan Mosher

Yom Kippur, 2017