On Self Destructing

Why I have the impulses I do

Earlier this week I was sitting on the Downtown 1-Train finishing Moby Dick when a homeless man sat next to me, guitar in hand, and played “Ain’t No Sunshine” by Bill Withers. He fucking nailed it. I paid him $5 to play it again, and when he obliged, (with no less zeal), I gave him another $5. He smiled, thanked me, coughed in my face, and I spent the next three days at home, very sick with… something.

Now I’ve been thinking.

I’ve found that throughout my life, I’ve often developed intense passions that last between one and two years, before I inevitably crash out and abandon them forever. In grade school, I did this with competitive Pokemon, Duct Tape Wallets and online poker. In high school, it was basketball.

Now, it’s with people.

(I’ve been told this hyperfocus is a symptom of ADHD, but I’ve never been diagnosed.)

I’ve written about this before, but growing up, I never spent more than two years at the same school. Something—be it my mom losing her job at my private school, or a change in coaching staff that was negative for my basketball career, or the loss of my college basketball scholarship—always seemed to happen at this two-year mark, causing an urgent need for me to upend my life and restart elsewhere.

This, above all else, is what made me funny.

Comedy is, in its most traditional sense, tension followed by release. The greater the tension, the stronger the need for its release, and if done well, the more powerful the laugh. I remember once being on an airplane that lost fuel during its descent, causing the lights to turn off while we landed hard enough on the runway that I had a bruise on my left asscheek (the lower hanging one) the next day. Several people screamed, and I thought, for longer than a moment, that I might die. On our way to the baggage claim, my roommate and I stopped for a much-needed beer, and we spent the next half-hour laughing hyenically. We had withstood the tension of the fall, and were now in the release phase. Nothing funny had happened. But it was, in the purest sense, comedic.

Whenever I’d begin at a new school, I’d feel, for the first few weeks, a collective panoptical gaze from the student body, each of my classmates attempting to decipher what kind of kid I’d prove to be. No one ever knew what to make of me. I was huge—6’5”, and more than 200 pounds by the time I was 14—but far from a jock, always enrolling in honors classes and ghost-writing other people’s term papers for cash.

Every time I moved schools, I’d make an effort, in the first week, to get in trouble for something funny and unusual. A serious attempt, ill-advised but not futile, to define myself before the student body could do so for me.

Once, in the eighth grade, ten days after I’d transferred to Ladue Middle School, I correctly guessed my American History teacher’s computer password—it was, I kid you not, History1sC00L!—and added a question to our midterm, that asked which 19th-century president was famous for secretly having a third testicle. Though he never could prove it was me—I strategically scored a C- so I could say, If I had access to the midterm ahead of time, why wouldn’t I have done better?—word spread anyway, and everyone became eager to know me. The tension surrounding who I, the new kid, might be, followed by the release of my admittedly insane behavior, was the most comedic outcome I could have provided them. And they loved me for it. They always did.

However, I also think this aspect of my childhood has viciously hindered my ability to maintain relationships.

Though each opportunity at a new school brought excitement—what a genuine thrill it was to immediately win friends—it never came without pain. Whenever I’d announce to my friends of two years that I’d be going somewhere new, they’d promise to stay in touch (and earnestly so.) And although they might follow through for a few weeks, sometimes upwards of a month, our correspondence always fizzled out much more quickly than I’d hoped. I never blamed them—it’s hard at that age to keep in touch with people outside your immediate vicinity. Or at any age, I suppose.

Gradually, with each successive move, this pattern established itself as fact, and I became less trusting of the friendships I did make. People from class would ask me to hang out, and I’d say no, inventing vague excuses until they finally left me alone. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see them—in fact, I did, (desperately)—it was that the pain of being forgotten was much worse than that of staying unknown.

Unfortunately, this defensive impulse has remained firm in adulthood. I make an effort to fight it—after all, I am not friendless, thank God—but the impulse itself is very clearly there.

You are in any given moment two people: Your impulse, and the way you behave despite it.

The only hope of controlling the latter is to first identify the former.

“Avoidant” is the word my romantic partners have often used. How, when things start to go badly, rather than sit through the discomfort, or fight it, I retreat into solitude, where it’s safe. I used to dispute this—frankly, it seemed like agreeing with them would in some sense prove their point—but it has enough times been the case that to deny it would be disingenuous, bordering on insane. This oft-craved sense of safety not only stems from the catharsis of quietude, but also from the fact that, by behaving in such a way, I create the inevitability of our end, which, upon its arrival, I can then attribute to their own inability to handle my needs, rather than allowing even the slightest possibility that my character might not up to par.

To be hated is easier than being unloved.

“Self-destructive” is the term my friends use. How when things are going well, I begin to lash out, making insane proclamations, testing their will to tolerate me. It’s something I don’t do intentionally, (nor do I realize I’m doing so until well after the fact.) I put my foot in my mouth—often—because I think it’s funny. To disagree for the sake of disagreement, to run blindly in search of unfamiliar hills I can die upon, has led to some of my favorite conversations in the unlikeliest of times. It’s something Dave Chappelle once referred to as, “The joys of being wrong.” (Side note: I also think it’s the root of most great comedy. More tension equals greater payoff on its release, etc etc.) However, enough of my doing this—or my attempting to do so on days when my friends simply aren’t having it—can rub people the wrong way. There’s good reason my closest friends are also the ones in the healthiest relationships. I truly believe the ability to constantly tolerate my bullshit makes even the most toxic partner seem Bush-league.

But it’s that fucking impulse, man. That urge to self-destruct, to ruin everything the moment it starts to get bad, that just gets to me. Sensitivity is no boon for the confrontational. As combative, contrarian and opinionated as I am, I hate to piss people off. And unfortunately, I tend to do this… often.

And then the impulse arrives.

My heart pounds, my nails meet my teeth, and I begin to wonder if our friendship is over—and if it is, then what I must do about it. Do I try to fix it? Or do I disappear? The lie I repeat to myself is that abandoning them is good for them. They’ve probably had enough of me, I tell myself. It’ll be nice for them to reset. The truth is that it’s simply my own easy-way-out. If they have, in fact, signed off on our union—I should mention here that sometimes nothing has even happened in their minds, and I am concluding that my world is crumbling because of something minute like the fact that I ate more than half of the buffalo wings we agreed to share at the bar (it’s not my fault they gave us a prime number of them!); but still, more often than not, I have, at the very least, annoyed them to some extent—then I can leave my ego intact by rejecting them before they do it to me.

To choose your demise is easier than having your own demise chosen for you.

But this flightful impulse rests upon the supposition that something bad will always happen, and that simply isn’t the case; and therefore, such an avoidant reflex always causes more pain than it wards off.

To brace for a punch long enough leaves one’s stomach more worn than the blow they initially feared.

In my opinion, the two worst kinds of standup comics are those who seek to be likable and those who seek to be unlikable. The former group I just find uninteresting—good art has never been convergent, and yet, for some reason, so so so many people do comedy with the goal of befriending the crowd, rather than challenging it. They smile and only introduce ideas they know for certain most people already agree with. It’s like listening to an hour of someone complaining about the weather. It’s just bland, and a waste of everyone’s time.

But it’s the unlikeable comics who are the most self-destructive. The comics (everyone knows who they are) who take the stage purely with the intent to offend. It’s a defensive impulse no different than the one I’ve been describing. I’m a believer that in any art—not least of all standup comedy—no subject should be off-limits. But these comics are the ones who use rape, misogyny, pedophilia, etc as a way to say, Can you believe I have the balls to say this? rather than to begin a conversation, or slip them into a clever punchline. More often than not, they expect to bomb with this shit material. But by bombing this specific way, they can resign the room’s harsh judgement to an inability to handle their iron will, rather than accept the fact that there might be people on this planet who just… don’t like them.

The certitude of failing as someone else is easier than the potential, however unlikely, of doing so as yourself.

Artie Lange once said, “I used to be afraid of what happens when I’d take the stage. Now I’m afraid of what happens when I get off.”

I used to think this was coy nonsense. Now I believe it wholeheartedly to be true.

There are nights onstage when I feel like I have everything figured out. It’s a very ephemeral thing, and one I can’t quite articulate; but it stems from the fact that there are times when the union between comic and crowd is steel wire, and everything you say seems to connect with them on a deeply human level. It’s never at the beginning of the set; it usually takes a few minutes for them to let you in. But it’s the most powerful feeling, connecting with a room in such a way. You really lose track of time, and no matter how long you’ve been up there, no matter the awful or indefensible stances you’ve taken, even well after you’ve run out of funny things to say, you don’t want to leave them, and they don’t want to leave you. I’ve spent half a decade learning how to do this with a microphone. And for nearly three decades, I’ve failed to do it without one.

Sam Frank Jr. is a writer and standup comedian based in New York City. He has been published in The Panacea Review, The Bangalore Review, The Gramercy Review, and his standup comedy has been mentioned in the New York Times. He was named “Best Screenwriter” at the 2021 Austin Lift-Off Film Festival.

Sam is working on his debut novel about a traveling circus.

Sam can be reached at samfrankjunior@gmail.com