Late Night with Maggie

I do stand-up comedy. Well, I did stand-up before the pandemic. Hopefully, I will do stand-up again someday. 

When I talk about comedy with people — other comics, friends or potential audience members — it’s common to discuss origin stories, but that usually means just two data points, “Which comics did you watch growing up?” and “When did you start doing open mics?” Eeeeevery once in awhile, a person completely outside of comedy will ask “Did you always want to do stand-up?” and I usually freeze up because I don’t have a short, neat answer. No, yes, sort of, it was a gradual thing? 

It wasn’t the first inkling I had about stand-up, but an unexpected turning point was the summer of 2007, the summer I watched “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson” every night.

I was in middle Tennessee for most of the break between freshmen and sophomore year of college. The plan was to get a job at an auto manufacturing plant before going back to school. Trouble was, I got all the way to Murfreesboro, but I didn’t get hired. I was anxious, unfamiliar with the area, lacking in both transportation and can-do spirit, so I just crashed on my mom’s couch for 10 weeks until it was time to go back to Louisiana. Looking back, especially from a never-ending quarantine, it is embarrassing I was so scared and unadventurous at 19 that I didn’t go out and do anything for a whole summer. I’ll never get that time back! 

Anyhow, Mom was working nights then, so I started staying up later and later to synchronize with her sleep schedule. My plan was to hang out when she was home and awake, and to be tired enough to sleep when she was asleep. At best, I got mixed results.

In my mission to become a night owl, I started watching “The Late Late Show,” and then I got really into it. I hadn’t kept up with late night TV for several years. I grew up with “Jaywalking” and “Stupid Human Tricks” and “Top 10” lists and it was all pretty stale, but Ferguson was doing something else entirely. 

While other hosts always seemed smug or maybe a little bored by their own shallow, repetitive jokes, Craig Ferguson was silly and self-deprecating and gleefully weird. Unlike everything I’d seen before, Ferguson seemed to be having fun on stage and he made it look easy. 

At some point in the summer, watching Ferguson flirt and wink and wiggle at the camera and the guests, I went from thinking “This is funny,” to “I bet I could do this,” to “They should GIVE me a show.” This gave way to a day-dream scenario in which I would launch a successful grassroots campaign using these new fangled social media sites, MySpace and Facebook, and I would win over the hearts and minds of strangers until one of the networks would basically have to give me a late night spot and I would become a nationally beloved success. I don’t think we had the phrase “going viral” yet, I was just vaguely aware people could get attention on the Internet and turn that into opportunities.

My teenage aspirations to take over late night are probably, hopefully, my most extreme experience with the Dunning-Kruger effect. I had no skills, experience or working knowledge of comedy, but I was convinced I’d be amazing at it. Where is that confidence now?! 

Truly, it’s for the best that I never launched that campaign, I was not terribly funny then and any attention I could have gotten would be mortifying to look back on. It’s bad enough Facebook reminds me daily of all the boring statuses and song lyrics I used to post. 

Once in homeschool, a standardized test administrator sent my test scores back with a note that said “Speed is not Maggie’s strength.” I know she didn’t mean that as a prophecy about my entire life, but I think of her when I get sad I haven’t accomplished more by now. 

In 2007, I was still two years away from seeing live comedy, five years away from actually writing jokes, and eight years away from getting on stage for the first time. If I had known how slow the process would be, I would have gotten really frustrated. 

What I didn’t know at 19, and what I wouldn’t have believed if someone had told me, was the slow work of getting better at comedy and joke writing is the fun part. Never before had I attempted something, been bad at it, and then could not wait to keep trying. 

This post is a jumbled messy way to say I miss doing comedy — and while I don’t still think I’m ready to take over a late night show, I do need a job.

PS: It is the year of our Lord 2020. I’m painfully aware how foolish it is to express admiration for any man in entertainment let alone to put it in writing. Still, Craig Ferguson’s work in 2007 late night TV is part of my strange internal road to comedy. I haven’t really kept up with him since. I don’t know what he’s doing now and I’m not going to scour his Wiki page for disappointments. So, based solely on my memories of my last summer as a teen — and the How to Train Your Dragon movies — I hope Craig Ferguson always gets work he likes and he never turns out to be gross and terrible and I don’t have to regret having such warm feelings about the work he did.