The Possibility of Failure

On late-night comedy, elementary school obliviousness, and the judgment of Jaspers

Before 5th grade, I lived happily oblivious to the entire concept of failure. In school or sports or social interactions, I never worried about failing. It’s not that I constantly excelled—I remember running straight from first base to third, via the pitcher’s mound, during one of my early Little League games—it’s just that I didn’t judge myself in terms of success or failure, and I never considered the fact that anyone else might judge me by those terms, either. Maybe I have my parents to thank for that, or my own naive obliviousness. Or maybe it’s just that I was a kid, living in a pre-failure Eden. When kids are allowed to be kids, they tend to just live, focused only on enjoying themselves, unconcerned with results.

Anyway, here’s my story: In 5th grade, I was so unworried about the possibility of failure that I volunteered to put on a comedy show for my entire large, public elementary school. Volunteered isn’t even the right word, because it implies that my school asked for volunteers, which they didn’t. This wasn’t a school tradition; it was just something I came up with, out of nowhere, with my best buddy Tim.

When I asked Mrs. Reavis, our elderly and excellent 5th grade teacher, if we could put on a comedy show for the whole school, she reacted without any discernible doubt or surprise, nodding her head and saying she’d talk to the principal about it. Within days our big comedy show was on the schedule, planned for a Friday afternoon a few weeks later. All the other classes were invited.

Even now, several decades removed from elementary school, I still can't believe we did this. And I still can't believe they let us. 

On the days leading up to the show, Tim and I were allowed to leave class for an hour to go to the stage in front of the cafeteria to work on the show, with no adults around. What a privilege! Usually the cafeteria was empty by this point in the afternoon, but if it wasn't we closed the stage curtains so no one could watch us prepare. Mostly we just goofed off, tried to make each other laugh. Which felt productive, since we were working on a comedy show.

We talked about the late night shows we wanted to emulate, which we’d only occasionally watched, since they came on past our bedtime: Letterman and Arsenio and, most of all, the great Johnny Carson. I would be Carson and Tim would be Ed McMahon, my comedic sidekick. (If you’re young, you probably have no idea who these people are. Wikipedia them.)

At this point, my knowledge of late-night comedy mostly came from the only part of Carson’s show that I actually got to watch, on those rare occasions when I got to watch late-night TV at all: the opening monologue. Maybe Tim knew that Carson also did interviews, but I don’t think I did. Our own show would consist entirely of an opening monologue.

We knew how our show would begin: Tim would introduce me and then I would get stuck in the curtains as I tried to come out on stage. (Had we seen Carson do this? Maybe.) We thought the getting-stuck-in-the-curtain bit was hilarious, and we knew our fellow students/fans would feel the same way. Besides this, though, our planning sessions had yielded very little material that we were certain about.

Incredibly—and, in a way, beautifully—no adult authority figure ever asked us for a script or for any information about what we planned to do. Besides the curtain thing, we had a handful of random, nonsensical jokes that we’d come up with ourselves. I’d learned about the joys of randomness from Tim, and we’d both developed a fondness for absurd school-cafeteria comedy. (In post-Carson terms, we were more Letterman than Leno.) The random jokes we thought up made us laugh, even if they didn’t really make sense and maybe weren’t even jokes at all, so we figured they would make other people laugh, too.

But suddenly it was the day before the show. We still hadn't finished planning everything out. In fact, we’d barely started. This was it, go-time. And I panicked. All at once, I realized the magnitude of what we’d undertaken: Tim and I would be performing comedy for our entire school in less than 24 hours.

We went to the school library for one final planning session, and now that we faced the actual possibility of making our random jokes in front of the whole school, I lost confidence in our material. I didn't lose confidence in us, didn't consider canceling the show, still didn’t fully think in terms of success or failure—but I thought we needed better jokes. We needed more accessible material, crowd-pleasers. In fact, the only part of the show I had any confidence in was the beginning, getting stuck in the curtains.

So I told Tim we needed to scrap all our other material. If I'm remembering right, he disagreed at first, but I convinced him. I decided that we needed to get all the joke books off the library shelves and use material from those books instead of our own random jokes. And that's what we did. We grabbed a large stack of joke books and spread them out on one of the library tables. You know what kind of books I’m talking about: 101 School Jokes, 101 Pickle Jokes, 101 Silly Monster Jokes, 101 Super Sports Jokes, 101 Vacation Jokes. We plagiarized our final script from library books like these, which hadn’t actually amused us for several years at this point.

And then, again suddenly, it was Friday afternoon, seconds before showtime, and we were waiting backstage, behind the curtain. Every single class in the entire school, or maybe it was just the upper grades, had filed into the cafeteria and taken their seats facing the stage.

The way I remember it, Tim and I were wearing suits, or at least ties. We peeked out at the rows and rows of students and their accompanying teachers. All there to watch us—and no one else. I was nervous, but not the kind of nervous I would’ve been a year later in middle school or a decade later in college if I’d been in the same situation. In other words, I didn't feel like I was about to vomit, and my hands weren't shaking uncontrollably. I still wasn't fully acquainted with the concept or possibility of failure. But I was pretty nervous.

Tim walked onstage first, leaving me utterly alone. From the wings, I heard him announce me in his best Ed McMahon voice. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, here’s your host, BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURKE NIXON.”

I heard scattered applause and made my way to the curtain to get stuck in it. I did my bit, pretended to have a hard time getting out of the curtain. But no one laughed, or at least I didn't hear any laughter. So then I made an even more exaggerated show of being stuck in the curtain and the cafeteria was completely silent. That was the first time I realized that I was failing.

Tim and I stood at our microphones and did the jokes from the joke books. Our script is lost to time (unless you hunt down the books we plagiarized), but the routine went along these lines:

Me: Did you hear the joke about the peanut butter?

Tim: No. What joke about the peanut butter?

Me: I’m not telling you. You might spread it!

We received mild laughter at best. In my memory, the only people laughing were the teachers, out of politeness or pity. I’d never even known, until that moment, that pity laughter existed. But everyone knows that real laughter sounds different, and there was very little real laughter in the crowd. Maybe none at all. Which makes sense because the jokes were lame.

The whole thing lasted maybe fifteen minutes. When it ended, I was just happy to be done, feeling the relief and exhilaration that comes from finishing anything that you’ve been anxiously anticipating, especially something that requires you to perform in front of others. I knew that it hadn't gone well, but I didn't think all that much about it. We received no big compliments about the show, but we didn't receive any complaints, either. I basically forgot all about it by dinnertime, if not sooner. Not sure I even told my parents about it. Like the child that I still was, I moved on, living in the eternal present, unworried about the past. 

Some weeks later—maybe even months—I was hanging out at the Little League fields. By now, elementary school was almost over; we were basically middle schoolers. Tim and I were standing near the bleachers with a few other kids our age, when one of the moms watching the game, Mrs. Delarosa, turned around and smiled at us. “I heard you guys put on a comedy show for the whole school,” she said. “That’s so neat.”

I nodded and smiled, suddenly ashamed, not wanting to further acknowledge that this had happened.

Then Mrs. Delarosa turned to one of the boys standing next to me, Jasper, who went to our school. He had a low voice for his age, and his dad was a prison guard.

“You were there, Jasper,” she said, smiling kindly. “How was it?”

We all looked at Jasper now, waiting for his verdict. 

He looked Mrs. Delarosa in the eye, a faint smirk on his face.

“It was stupid,” he said.

Mrs. Delarosa didn’t seem to know how to respond to this. Neither did I. As Tim remembers it, Jasper caught himself and mumbled, “No, it was cool.” But I have no recollection of that. Maybe I was too busy thinking about what he’d already said.

Jasper was right, though: it was stupid. His words made me realize the full extent of our failure, my failure.

Around that time, I began to worry much more about what would make me look stupid, shaping my behavior precisely to avoid looking stupid in front of large groups of people. In other words, I began to avoid failure at any cost. Which, of course, meant that I became a much more boring person. The kid who volunteered to put on a comedy show in front of the whole school was gone. 

This happens to almost all of us, I think. Gradually or all at once, we become cautious, afraid to look bad, afraid to appear stupid in front of our peers, afraid to incur the judgment of the Jaspers. (Although I’m 100% sure Jasper feared looking stupid himself. We all do.) And, as a result, many of us stop doing the things we love: we stop making art or putting on plays, we stop writing stories or performing music, we stop doing the very things that make us feel most alive, because we know that if we put ourselves out there, someone might not think it’s good.

Eventually, I realized that my younger self learned the wrong lesson from that comedy experience. The takeaway wasn't that I should avoid failure, and never put myself out there. The takeaway was that I should fail my way. If no one was going to laugh, we should’ve at least told our jokes. To confidently, joyfully pursue your own idiosyncratic goals and interests, that can never be a real failure, no matter what the results might be. (I also should’ve learned another lesson: anything worth doing well is impossible to master on the first try. You learn from bombing, but only if you keep trying.)

The most interesting people, it turns out, are the ones who’re willing to risk failure. Looking back on that experience, I mostly feel awe and admiration for the kid who decided he wanted to put on a show for his school and just made it happen, without asking any of the questions I’d learn to ask myself too often: What will other people think? Am I good enough to do this? What if it doesn't go well? I’d like to find that part of myself again. I'd like to live my life as if failure and success were concepts that I wasn’t fully aware of. But I’m not sure I can.

I regret giving up on all the very random jokes that made me and Tim laugh. If Jasper thought our actual sense of humor was stupid, I could live with that. Anything interesting is bound to be considered stupid by someone—and possibly by lots of people. So what? That’s something I still need to learn: you can’t please everybody. And you can’t create cautiously. In elementary-school comedy or any other worthy pursuit, worrying too much about other people’s reactions just saps the joy away. In the end, the only real failure is abandoning the part of you that remains unapologetically yourself. 

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