Danny’s submission arrived formatted like a set list. Numbered items. Parenthetical asides. Two lines crossed out and rewritten in different ink. “I am professionally funny,” he wrote in the cover note. “I teach people how to be funny. I have made strangers cry laughing about my father’s prostate exam. But I have been sitting on something for two years that I cannot turn into a bit, and the fact that I can’t is the part that keeps me up.”
He teaches longform improv at a small theater in Wicker Park. He is thirty-three. He has been with Val for four years. The desire he describes has a growing clinical literature and a shrinking distance from mainstream conversation. But for Danny, the interesting question was never why he felt it. It was why the one tool he uses for everything went dead in its presence.
***
I teach improv. Not bits, not standup. Longform. The kind where you build a forty-minute show from a single audience suggestion and the whole thing either works or collapses and either way you bow at the end. I have been doing this for eleven years. I started at twenty-two because I was bad at sincerity and good at reading a room, and improv rewards both of those things equally.
Val is a graphic designer at a branding agency in the West Loop. She comes home smelling like dry-erase markers and stress. We have been together four years. Our Saturdays involve the farmers market on Division, a coffee place that spells things wrong on the menu deliberately, and approximately one argument about the litter box. We are not complicated. Or we were not, until I complicated us.
***
The thing arrived without an invitation. I do not know when it started because it did not start. It was already there when I noticed it, the way you notice a radiator makes a noise it has probably always made but you only hear it now because the apartment got quiet at the right moment.
Val was at a work dinner. She texted me a photo of her and her coworkers at some place in River North, the kind of restaurant where the entrées have first names. There was a guy sitting next to her. His hand was near hers on the table. Not touching. Near. And something inside me moved. Not a flinch. A lean.
I stared at that photo longer than a man stares at a photo of his girlfriend’s work dinner. Then I closed the phone and made a sandwich and told myself I was bored and tired and this was the kind of stray thought that happens at ten on a Tuesday when your girlfriend is out and you are eating deli turkey over the sink.
Two weeks later she mentioned a guy named Marcus at work. She said he was funny. I felt the lean again. This time I was standing in the kitchen holding a spatula and there was no excuse involving tiredness or sandwiches or the hour. She said “he’s funny” and something in me wanted to ask, “Funnier than me?” Not out of jealousy. Out of something I could not name, and I name things for a living.
***
Here is what I do with feelings I do not understand: I write them into bits. My father’s drinking? Bit. My mother’s phone calls? Bit. The time I got mugged outside a Walgreens and the guy apologized? Fifteen-minute set. Killed at the iO. Comedy is how I metabolize. It is not a coping mechanism. It is the mechanism. I do not have another one.
So I tried. I sat at my kitchen table at 2 a.m. one night in February and tried to write a bit about a guy who wants his girlfriend to sleep with someone else. I wrote the setup. I wrote three tags. I wrote a callback that referenced the prostate bit. And I read it back and it was not funny. Not unfunny in the way that means I had not found the angle yet. Unfunny in the way that means the subject was rejecting the format. Like trying to write a joke about a sunset. You can do it, technically, but the joke requires you to dismiss the beauty in order to land, and I did not want to dismiss this.
I tried again the next week. Different angle. Self-deprecating this time. “I am so insecure that my kink is outsourcing.” It worked on paper. It had structure. I could hear the rhythm. But when I imagined saying it on stage, my chest tightened. Not stage fright. I have not had stage fright since I was twenty-four. Something else. The joke required me to call this insecurity, and it was not insecurity, and my body knew that even while my brain was still negotiating terms.
I threw both drafts away. I have never thrown away a bit without replacing it with a better one. This time I replaced it with nothing. That silence should have told me something. It took another six months before I listened.
***
The internet was not helpful. I looked up what I was feeling. The word “cuckold” came back, and it came back wearing a costume I did not recognize. Forums with crude language. Categories that sounded like someone else’s fantasy filed under the wrong label. I read about compersion and sperm competition theory and understood them intellectually the way I understand quantum physics: the words tracked, the experience did not match.
What I was feeling was not a fetish the way the internet presents fetishes. It was not something I wanted to perform. It was a feeling that arrived when Val mentioned someone else, someone who noticed her, someone who found her funny or attractive or interesting, and instead of threat I felt a kind of expansion. Like my chest got wider. Like her being desired by someone else made her more vivid to me, not less mine.
I did not have a word for that. I still do not love the ones that exist. But I stopped needing the word to be perfect the night I realized the feeling was not going away just because I could not file it.
***
I told Val on a Sunday. Not planned. We were on the couch. She was reading something on her phone. I said, “Can I tell you something weird?”
She said, “Weirder than the prostate bit?”
I said, “Yeah.”
She put down the phone. That is how I knew she was listening. Val puts the phone face-down when something matters. Face-up means she is still half-elsewhere. Face-down means you have the room.
I told her. Not well. Not with setup and punchline and a clean callback. I said something like: “I think about you with someone else and it does not feel bad and I have been trying to make it feel bad for a year and it will not cooperate, and I cannot make it into a bit, and the fact that I cannot make it into a bit is how I know it is real.”
She did not say anything for a while. She ran her thumb along her lower lip, which is what she does when she is processing. Then she said, “How long?”
I said, “A year, maybe. Little longer.”
She said, “And you couldn’t workshop it.”
I nearly laughed. She said it like a diagnosis, which it was. She knows me well enough to know that if I cannot turn something into material, it lives below the floor where my humor operates. Below the comedy. In the part of me that is not performing.
She asked questions. Practical, Val-style questions. Not “why” questions. “What would this actually look like” questions. I did not have answers. I had spent a year trying to metabolize the feeling and zero minutes on logistics. She asked if I had looked anything up. I said yes. She asked if what I had found matched what I felt. I said, “About 30 percent.”
She said, “That is a failing grade.”
I said, “I know.”
We sat with it. She did not say yes. She did not say no. She said, “I need to sit with this the way you sat with it, and you do not get to rush me because you had a year’s head start.” That was fair. That was more than fair. That was Val being better at this than I was, which is not the first time and will not be the last.
***
We are still sitting with it. I do not know if that makes this an unsatisfying confession. We have not done anything. We have had five more conversations. Two were good. One was bad in a way that clarified something. Two were short because the litter box was overdue or dinner was burning or we both got tired at the same moment.
What I know is this: I teach people to improvise. The first rule of improv is “yes, and.” You accept what your scene partner gives you and you build on it. The thing I could not do for a year was “yes, and” my own brain. I kept saying “no, but.” No, but it is boredom. No, but it is the internet. No, but it is a midlife crisis happening eight years early. Every “no, but” killed the scene. And every scene I killed died the way scenes die on stage: not with a crash but with a fade, and then you are standing there holding nothing.
Val said to me last week, “You are the funniest person I know and this is the one thing about you that is completely serious.” She said it without judgment. She said it the way she reads a typeface: noting the weight, the spacing, the thing the letters are trying to do. I wanted to make a joke. I wanted to deflect with something like “give me six months, I will have a tight five.” But I did not. I said, “Yeah.” And that “yeah” was the most honest thing I have said in years, including everything I have ever said on stage.
***
Danny’s account maps a particular kind of impasse: the man whose primary instrument for processing experience cannot reach this one desire. The crisis is not the desire itself. It is the silence of the tool he trusts most. For men who keep trying to joke about what they feel, or rationalize it, or file it under something more manageable, Danny suggests that the joke dying is not a symptom. It is a signal of depth. The conversation that follows does not require a punchline. It requires a partner who can read the difference between a man performing and a man sitting still.