Bringing Live Stand-up Comedy to Ashland, Talent, Medford, Grants Pass, & Jacksonville, OR

The Bleeder

Is there a bit of slang in performance art called the “nosebleed?”   If not, there should be. I’m not sure what it would pertain to, but something to do with blasting through obstacles in a performance.  The urban dictionary has a few interesting definitions of nosebleed, and as is common with the urban dictionary, every word has to have at least two sexual definitions, whether they make sense or not.  One seemingly normal definition, however, was:

  1. Metaphorically used to describe incredible heights
  2. Metaphorically used to describe incredible speeds

I can get behind this definition as a starting point for deriving a whole new definition of the “nosebleed” in the context of performance art (such as Stand-up Comedy, for example).

nosebleed_2

Why the keen interest in the nosebleed? It comes from my latest travels during the holiday season.  While on the road, I spent some days in Portland, OR and there just happened to be a few Comedy Open Mics during the nights I was in town.  Well, hell yeah, I’ll sign up and do a few minutes of my shit for P-town. It was cool how many performers there actually were at the different clubs in town. Portland has a nice little comedy scene going, and it seems like the crowds are quite supportive.

Back to the point, though, on the first night I stopped into the Curious Comedy Club. This must be a newer venue to the city, because not everyone I talked to knew about it. While I told the MC that it was first time performing in town, she introduced me as a 1st time ever performer.  So, to play this up, I pretended like I didn’t know which way to get onto the stage.  I don’t think she got the joke, and it really just reaffirmed in her mind what an amateur I must have been.

So now my plan was to blow them away with how damn funny and pro this 1st time performer was.  As an opener, I started with some dating advice from my Dad.  Dad always told me, “Son, remember that women don’t always like clean things. … They like to clean things.”   (He never actually said that, I made it up.)  From there I segway into some good relationship bits – the “Love/Hate Relationship – I loved her, she hated me” (ala Rodney Dangerfield) into some fun domestically disputable “It’s not real love unless it requires police intervention.”

Unfortunately, I never even got as far as why an ex would reject flowers, when the nosebleed began.  I felt it start running in the middle of my icebreaker, right around “to clean things.”  And this thing was like the Columbia River, just going for it. Luckily, I had some tissues in my back pocket, and I kind of wiped at the blood a little, and then twisted and rammed that fucker up my nose like it was a Heavy-Flow Tampax. I could have actually used a heavy-flow tampon, though, because this tissue didn’t hold long enough for one whole joke.  I was trying to explain the confusion between masturbating and crying, but when you’re bleeding out in front of a crowd, it can get a little distracting.  With a quick bit about the “dry Portland air,” I excused myself, maybe a full minute into my stage-time.

The best of it is that no-one thought it was real. They didn’t get what a nosebleed had to do with relationship jokes, but for some reason, they all thought I was acting. After about 20 minutes in the bathroom getting it stopped up, the MC even asked if I’d want to get up after the last performer to finish my set.  So with a TP Torpedo still sticking out of my nose, I went up and finished off with another 2-3 minutes of my Medical Marijuana material.  I had to a least let this Portland scene know the “The Wrangler” wasn’t there to fuck around, he’s there to be the funniest mother-fucker in the room.

So… the next night supposedly held 3 different Comedy Open Mics. My goal was to hit at least 2 of the 3, but unfortunately I made the Boiler Room my first stop and got stuck dead last on the list.  The MC wasn’t even going to sign me up because contrary to their website’s info, sign-ups are now done via Facebook the day before, and you have to be friends with the MC first.  Huh. I never even met the guy before, so I wasn’t sure how I could’ve friended him in time to sign-up.  However, one of the audience members from the previous night’s showcase had signed up to perform and offered to let me have his time. “This guy’s great,” he told the MC, “He got a bloody nose last night, it was hilarious!!”  So now here I am, typecast as “that comic with the nosebleed.”  Well, at least if I’m not funny, I’ll still be memorable.  The MC even asked if I could get a nosebleed on command. I told him I used an old pro wrestling trick, and just before a good punchline, I slice into my septum with a razorblade conveniently hidden in my wrist tape. And then I told him, “No, I  don’t really like getting nosebleeds and try to avoid doing that in front of an audience. But I actually have jokes to tell, so don’t worry about that.”

Well, as the night drug on and the few actually funny comics did their time and skipped out to better venues, the MC started taking comics down from 5-minutes apiece to 3-minutes apiece.  Now the performers were becoming a mix between too self-aware of their bad acts and too drunk to remember their jokes.  And the MC took comics down to 2-minutes apiece.  And just as the comedy crowd had dwindled to one table, and the kareoke crowd was filling in and getting raucous, I was called up to finish off with a 1-minute time limit.  Great, uh… which is the funniest one joke that I have for these anit-hipsters. Oh I know – I’ll do 4 minutes about how people recycle too much, and foray into another minute or two of my Medical Marijuana bit that just kills.  Of course, my new best buddy the nosebleed decided to show up as soon as I grabbed the microphone.  It was to a lesser degree than the night before, so I was able to sniff & swallow most of it, and wipe at blood creeping into my mustache through most of my act.  “This is funny,” I said at one point, referring to what no-one could really tell was going on in the dim light, and most of them were wondering why this coke-head was trying so hard to pretend to be a stoner.  Oh, they must have thought, he’s letting us know that his jokes are funny.  No, I was letting you all know how much fun I’m having with my own secret little joke, which is, “how many pints of blood can I swallow before I throw it all up in front of this Portland crowd?”

Then I handed off the mic like there was AIDS on it, and honestly there could have been. I haven’t been tested in awhile, but I also didn’t die during the last flu season, so I’m hedging my bets.  In fact, I read that there are prostitutes in South Africa that are immune to AIDS because they’ve taken so much of it in, that their own bodies overpowered AIDS. I’m curious to know if they can just kill it instantly… or if I had AIDS and banged one of ’em, would it cure my AIDS… or even still, if I didn’t have AIDS and banged them, would I get the residual AIDS that was still “hanging out” in the area, or could I possibly get the cure for AIDS myself?  Hmm… I’ll get back to you all on that. And if you are reading this and have AIDS, maybe you should go bang a South African prostitute and see what happens. I mean what’s the worst? You’ve already got AIDS, and they can’t get AIDS, so …

Anyways… how about a little backstory on this nosebleed theme. My comedy night nosebleeds didn’t exactly come out of nowhere. I’d just spent 2 nights in Salt Lake City, UT and had gotten some ferocious bloody noses while I was out there.  So, when they struck me onstage back in Oregon, I was at least prepared for them, though not expecting them, and not expecting to get so thrown off track during my stage time.  Getting a nosebleed in the middle of my performance was like being heckled by a ghost – no one in the audience knows that this fucker is out there, stepping on your punchlines, laughing too loud at the wrong parts, and talking too damn much – but he’s there dammit, and there’s not a funny “put-him-in-his-place” comeback to a ghost heckler.

I did power through my short sets on both nights, nosebleed or not, and so I think again about the symbolism of these nosebleeds.  The only 2 nights I’ve performed in Portland, spur of the moment performances really, and both nights I still outshined 3/4 of the comics performing, while bleeding profusely. I imagine if I was more on my game (or actually had some jokes about nosebleeds).

This now takes me back to the metaphorical definitions of nosebleeds, about describing incredible heights and speeds. For now, a nosebleed will mean to me, “tackling a completely random obstacle while on display in a compromising position.” There’s also the definition of a nosebleed as “less embarrassing alternative to getting a boner.”  Generally I’m proud of my boners, and find them a little easier to hide than a nosebleed.

– by “The Wrangler” Levi Anderson