–By Jan McInnis, Comedian and Keynote Speaker

Comedy clubs around 1998, were where you could find me! I loved the comedy clubs because they were so freeing and fun, but the grind of six nights a week, three or four weeks a month was taking its toll. I knew about comedy shows for the convention and corporate markets, and that they involved less travel with crowds that were more my style, but I had no idea how to break in. So, I kept plugging along in the clubs. I had an audition at a comedy club in South Carolina to get feature work (the order of the show is: emcee, feature, headliner). This comedy club was one in a chain of clubs, so I was hopeful to get several weeks of work.

What normally happens in an audition is that the emcee warms up the crowd for ten minutes, then brings me out for ten minutes of humor and then the scheduled feature and headliner go on as usual. But this night didn’t turn out to be normal. As the emcee took the stage, the feature and headliner proceeded to get into a huge fight in the green room over who stole whose jokes. It turned ugly fast, so I stood near the stage entrance to get out of the way of the fists. And it’s good I was near the door, because the emcee only did THREE jokes about his car breaking down, and then brought me out. While I was happy to get out of the green room brawl, I was not happy to go out to an unsettled crowd. The emcee was using me to warm up the crowd so he could have a great show. What should have been a fun comedy set turned into a struggle, and after the show, the manager said I would have to emcee in one of her other comedy clubs before she could feature me. Emcee money was pretty bad, and nowhere near the feature money, but I wanted to get into these clubs so I took it.

Fast-forward six months later and I’m headed to my emcee week. Unfortunately this was before cell phones, MapQuest, and Siri—I got lost. I arrived about 15 minutes after the show was supposed to start, so I raced to the stage without meeting the other comedians.

The next night, I got to the show early. I joined the feature act at the bar, and we started chatting. I mentioned I’d like to get into the corporate comedy market, and then mentioned I was stuck emceeing this week because the emcee from a few months back did “three stupid car jokes and brought me out.” As the words were coming out of my mouth, I had a revelation: I had heard those stupid car jokes THE NIGHT BEFORE. I blurted out “It was you! You were the emcee with the stupid car jokes, and now you’re featuring!” I was furious, and I let him know what a horrible thing he’d done and called him a few choice names.

To my surprise, he apologized. Not only that, he admitted what he’d done was lousy, and that the manager had given him some grief over it. And then he did something else surprising: he picked up the phone and made it right. He was good friends with the manager at the Punchline Comedy Club in Atlanta—a very hard club to get into. He got me an audition that week (my brother happened to be working in Atlanta that week, so I had a place to stay too!), and he also called his comedy agent about getting me into corporate work. And in addition to all of that, he introduced me to his comedian friend Frank King, since Frank was doing corporate work.

I passed the audition for the Punchline, Frank was key to getting me into corporate comedy, and I became friends with the agent. Life on the road started to change.

Years later, I ran into the comic in LA, and we had some laughs about it. He joked, “You know, I made you a lot of money by what I did to you that night! But could you stop telling people I have three stupid car jokes—I dropped them, okay?”

I learned some important lessons. First, if someone is sincere in their apology, accept it. I could have continued my curse-filled rant, but luckily I took a breath long enough to let him apologize. We both benefited. I also realized that if I had not taken the emcee work that was offered, and stayed angry and mad instead, none of this would have transpired. The moral of the story? Keep doing what you’re doing while looking for the opportunities amongst all the things that seem like failure. It’ll all work out.

About the author. . . keynote speaker and comedian Jan McInnis has shared her customized humor keynotes with thousands of associations and corporations. She is also the author of “Finding the Funny FAST; How To Create Quick Humor To Connect With Clients, Coworkers And Crowds,” and “Convention Comedian: Stories and Wisdom From Two Decades of Chicken Dinners and Comedy Clubs.”
Quote from a recent client: “Jan and her staff were great to work with before, during and after the conference. Jan’s session was entitled, “Finding the Funny in Change” which the attendees enjoyed. Jan offered ways to use humor with some of the daily challenges that we all face. This was a great session especially right after lunch. Thank you, Jan, for your part in adding to the success of our conference.”