“You have to be saved from the ego.”

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on January 16th, 2011

There’s a spirited debate going on in the comments. We goofed up and forgot to approve a comment by comedian John Roy… we just corrected our error and our follow up comment now makes sense. Thanks to all who chimed in. Keep it coming.

We’re borrowing from the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.  It will all make sense.

We were offered a second cruise.  It was a last-minute thing.  We phoned in to get feedback  on the first one (Dec. 12-16) and the question was posed, “What are you doing this weekend?” Did we have the time, really? We’re writing a book, we’ve got 80 to 90 per cent of our worldly belongings packed into boxes, we’re driving 2,523 miles across the country in the first week of February. Should we take it? Do another one? We’d have to massage the schedule, ratchet up the activity on the book and order the POD! Can we do this?

We’d be asked to fly to Houston, TX, limo to Galveston, TX, and board the MS Ecstasy, which would then sail across the Gulf of Mexico and visit the ports of Progreso and Cozumel. We’d be required to each do five shows– three R’s and two PG’s, plus a teaser set on the Welcome Aboard Show– and we’d be away (with limited– or expensive– phone service and internet connectivity) for six days.

We took it.

We figured that there’s a lot of downtime on a cruise. There’s that initial teaser on the first night, a flurry of shows on night number two, a flurry of shows on night number five… but in between is a lot of potential nothingness– a blank canvass– which we could occupy by working on the book, working out, visiting ports of call (should we be so inclined) and catching up on sleeping and drinking.

And it turns out: That’s just what we did.

We checked our email on day four at a chic coffee shop in Puerto Maya on Cozumel. (We were armed with our Acer netbooks and all we hadda do was spend $10 US. Easily done.)

One important email told us that the publisher liked chapter number one. (We bundled it up in a Word doc the Friday night before we left and sent it to London.) So we went back to ship confident that we were on the right track as far as the book was concerned.

On our first cruise, we were almost totally focused on the technical aspects of the shows, the sets, the jokes, the time, the order.

This cruise was different. While we weren’t cocky– we still allowed for the ten per cent chance that our success on Cruise Number One was a fluke– we were much more calm this time. Our serenity allowed us to dwell on other aspects of the cruise experience– more importantly, the cruise/performance experience. And we also pondered the ramifications of the cruise audience/cruise performer dynamic and the comedy community/cruise performer dynamic.

We concluded that the cruise comedy show (as it has been instituted by Carnival, at least) has certain unique quirks. For instance: There will be people observed walking out. This is to be expected and should be in no way interpreted as a judgment on one’s performance. There aren’t a ton, but there are significantly more than on land. You’ll be killing on the cruiseliner stage, but you’ll notice an occasional outward of patrons out of the room. This is easily explained. Firstly, your show is free. So, unlike on land, the cover is not a consideration. Secondly, there is much competition for the attention of the cruiser. As carefully as they might try to schedule the entertainment, there will almost always be competition for eyeballs and attention. (And if it isn’t a production show, it’s a disco or a karaoke night or a dinner seating.) Thirdly, you’re performing in a small, tight community, to a limited population. The relatively small number of people onboard (2,000 to 3,000) know that they just might have multiple opportunities to catch your shows… and they just might have already seen your show! So there is less urgency to schedule their attendance at a show and less urgency to stay put once they find themselves there. Lastly, there is a diverse population onboard, so they just might be offended… but we gotta figure that those folks are in a small minority. Whatever the reasons, walking a very small minority of the audience is nowhere near the crisis that it might be in a conventional comedy club. It may be somewhat disconcerting, but it’s not cause for a meltdown, or even cause for the mildest concern.

We were gratified that so many people on the Carnival boats were familiar with us by virtue of our 2010 appearance on Last Comic Standing. Before we had even set foot onstage, we were accosted by fans who recognized us from our American network television appearance. We have a tendency to think that people who cruise are of a certain age, or of a certain demographic that wouldn’t be aware of such pop culture benchmarks as LCS. We would, of course, be wrong. It turns out– if we are to judge by the number of folks who mentioned the show– that cruisers (at least Carnival cruisers) overlap heavily with those people who view such shows as LCS and who are regular consumers of Comedy Central. We might even go further and say that an unusually high number of Carnival customers are regular consumers of live comedy. If we consider that we filled (or came close to filling) a 200+-seat room for seven out of ten shows, then we might conclude that there are an unusually high number of comedy consumers onboard a typical Carnival cruise.

Were there difficult shows? To be sure. But, we point out that, in a typical week or weekend at a comedy show on land, there will be shows that are less than spectacular, where the audience response is less than rousing. So we were gratified that so many of our shows went so well. After all, we were told for so many years that audiences on cruise ships were terrible… and we were also told that the comics who worked on cruise ships were execrable. Why the dissonance?

Good question. It could well be that the so-called “boat acts” that dominated the high seas were chosen from among those who had “given up” or “cashed in.” It could be that, in the not too distant past, those who chose to make money on ships were folks who had given up all hope of starring in a sitcom or starring in movies. The cruise ships might have been the last resort of elder Catskillians or “variety” acts who hadn’t come up in the clubs. And that sort of act might have dominated or maybe weakly persisted into the 80s, or even the early 90s. But, somewhere along the way, the quality and nature of the talent changed (and the modus operandi of the cruise lines and the agents necessarily had to change) to the point where we’re seeing a glacial evolution take place.

And the attitude of the comics who succumb to the temptation of the high seas must (and, to an extent, has) changed.

We’re fully aware that this enlightened reassessment of the cruise/comedy thing might be viewed as self-serving. We might do a few more voyages and realize that the atmosphere is stultifying, that our reputation (and our performance) on dry land has been compromised by our experience on the closed and overwhelming culture that is performing on cruises. But rest assured that we’ll be monitoring for that nearly every step along the way.

Which is just what we did on this most recent trip. We were always assessing– during our flight to Houston, during our embarkation, during the body of the cruise, and during the disembarkation process and subsequent trip home– just what was it about the cruise experience that so many comics have felt compelled to complain about? Why was it that so many acts sought to distance themselves from the cruise comedy culture?

We were on high alert the entire week. Was it the waiting? The separation from the mainland? From agents? From managers? From loved ones? Was it the hours? Was it the people on the boat– the crew, the staff, the passengers? What made contemporary comics so determined to separate themselves from the comics who had no reservations about plunging into such a comedy subculture?

There are parallels, we suppose. We’ve heard similar, vague rumblings about comics who’ve switched gears and gone into corporate gigs or the Christian circuit and how they’ve somehow “sold out” or “given up.” The reasoning goes (as near as we can sort it out) is that such comics have forsaken the quest for the brass ring– the sitcom, the Hollywood life, the sick money– and in return, they’ve “settled” for giant gobs of money in venues and via channels that are insulated from– and invisible to– their compadres who toil in the clubs in New York or Los Angeles. It’s almost like they’ve walked away from the high-stakes table and instead chosen to work the slots. Or they’ve drifted away from the eye-popping lottery of Hollywood in favor of a day job.

Which, in a way, they have. But they haven’t done so in such a way that they deserve the enmity that they’ve been subjected to over the years. It is entirely possible to work the boats and keep a dog in the hunt in New York or Los Angeles or Melbourne or London. Being “stuck on a boat” for a week or two here or there isn’t a career death sentence. Nor should any taint accompany anyone who returns from such a gig. There is every possibility that one can do both the cruises and work the high-stakes venues of the entertainment capitals of the world– especially in this day and age of jet travel, cell phones and high-speed (if somewhat pricey) satellite internet access on the high seas.

Which makes the reaction to our impending move to Las Vegas rather puzzling. We’ve been toiling in the Philadelphia market for 17 years now. (We bellied up to the high-stakes table of Hollywood from 1988 to 1993, living in Burbank, CA, but moved back to Southern Jersey in September of 1993.) And while we’ve taken advantage of our proximity to New York City on a few occasions– and we’ve benefited from the very practical reality of the compactness of the Northeast Corridor, so non-flying gigs have been cost-effective and relatively pain-free– we have found ourselves in Los Angeles far more often than in Gotham over the past few years.) But more of that in another posting.

We leave you with the words of Shecky Shree Rajneesh:

The problem is not somewhere outside; the problem is your ego. You have to be saved from the ego. The problem is man himself; man has to be saved from man himself. The enemy is not outside, the enemy is within. In surrender you drop that enemy. In that very dropping the inner darkness disappears… When you surrender, in that very surrender something happens and your inner light starts burning, your inner light starts becoming clear. Clouds disappear.

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