0109. Going in Circles

tldr: messing with form

There’s a post I want to leave in 2025 [ignore that it’s 2026], so here goes.

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Last spring I tried stand-up comedy for the first time. I couldn’t eat beforehand, so I performed in true grad student fashion: fueled by leftover pastries from the math department, a small black coffee, and 2 pieces of bacon “for protein.” Afterwards I got to do something I haven’t done in a long time: go out to eat with other performers, exhausted to all hell from a show day, to the only place nearby that was open past 11pm: Dairy Queen.

Between bites of a double cheeseburger, kindly paid for by Tom, the Emcee of the night, I was asked what I thought about the whole ordeal.

“I am trained as a storyteller. I know how to sit in perfectly awkward silence just slightly too long. Long enough to put someone on their heels, to keep them on their toes, and ease them into taking the next narrative step with me in confidence. And I know that it’s a skill you can work on, but comedy, to me, feels rushed.

You want to feed off the energy and momentum in the crowd to carry them from one moment to the next because you have places to get to. Punchlines to hit before a cane appears from out of frame to drag you off the stage on the off-chance your 10 minutes in the spotlight isn’t as tight as you thought it’d be.

… that said, there’s one thing I like about comedy that’s different from storytelling. The first piece of advice anyone will tell a novice storyteller is that a stories fundamentally need one thing: a beginning, middle, and end. That’s not inherently true in comedy. I mean, sure, you can see this structure in jokes: a setup, punchline, and (optional) callback. But in a stand-up routine, you can keep hitting the same story beat over and over again until the audience is left feeling like your narrative arc has gone full circle; regardless of whether or not it has, or if you’re really just back where you started.

In this way, a tight 10 can also force your audience to sit still in perfectly awkward silence— beginning, middle, and end be damned—and leave them feeling like they’ve changed.

And in a sense, they have. 10 minutes have passed.”

Sometimes, that’s all I want as a writer. To simply say something and let the audience sit with it until they feel the Earth shift, if albeit slightly. Half the tales I want to tell—half the problems I think about on a regular basis—don’t have a beginning, middle, or end. They simply are.

Who do you share those stories with?
Who is left to sit with them besides yourself?

I don’t know if I can sit in that silence alone. In isolation, narrative arcs or full circles or whatever you wanna call them can quickly turn into downward spirals. To the unobservant bystander, falling into a downward spiral can simply read as being “deep in thought.” To me, it feels like digging a hole ’til I’m past the point of being able to get back out.

That’s in some sense the fear isn’t it? Investigating something so deeply that you can no longer do justice to it’s intricacies and nuances. Introspection to the point of silence when all you wanted in the first place is to scream the blunt truth out and be heard. Stories gone unheard and lives lived alone.

I don’t say all this to Tom and the others. I write it all down that evening, long after the celebration. Words left unsaid because I couldn’t bear to sit with them. Words that even now I find myself avoiding writing, for fear of having to say anything more than what I simply wanted to say:

I wanted to thank him for buying dinner because I wouldn’t have been able to afford dinner that night.

But I knew that telling him that would’ve only led to a downward spiral. Stories with no satisfying endings, words that fall flat and just sit there.

How before the performance I only had 3 dollars left in my bank account, nearly all of I spent on 2 measly pieces of bacon from the sandwich shop next door. How that week the food bank on campus was closed, and I told myself I’d “fast” through the weekend. How I pictured my next paycheck taunting me with the ever-present question of if I’d be able to make it stretch until the next one.

And by the time I’d finish sharing all that—when my 10 minutes would come to close—I’d be right back where I’d started: with a story I have yet to figure out how to tell. A story in which this moment would either be the beginning, middle, or end.

I wasn’t certain which possibility I feared more.