You've been dabbling in stand-up at the Comedy Cellar in NYC. Describe the first set you bombed.
You mean "set" as in just one? I'm not done bombing. I'm still clearing out a life's worth of "is that funny?" to which the answer is usually "at least not the way you said it, it's not."
Caller: Other than doing improv at the Comedy Cellar, do you intend on furthering your stand-up career?
JM: I think probably not. Every time I do it I feel terrible. And there's two types of terrible. You're supposed to feel terrible cause you just suck when you start doing it. Nobody just gets up there and starts rocking it. You just have to start from zero and start it going. Which I'm fine with. I'm drawn to a learning curve that is incredibly steep.
The problem is this other type of beating myself up. That is more the artist, the fact that I've already made it. People know my name. I'm really not able to crash and burn. Which I love crashing and burning. And I'll know that a week from now I don't hear anything from my publicist that tonight was okay.
So it's kind of like duck and hope you don't get hit by something you said. Because when you're writing comedy you're just riffing, you can be someone else. You can say the craziest things that come out. So it's either I'll never do it again, or I'll just get home after this tour and just want to annoy the hell out of the world and then just do it every night. And just say deal with it world. I haven't figured out if I'm ready to do that yet. It's got to be all or nothing from this point on cause I can't do it every ninth Monday, I can't get good at it.
RT: Have you seen Seinfeld's little documentary?
JM: Yeah, yeah. It's great. I look at it and it may be the first experience in my life where wanting to do something doesn't line up with the talent to do it. And I just think that's interesting too. I'm not getting 20,000 people over to the Comedy Central. I sneak up on stage cause I just to creatively like to take a beating. I just like it. I'm masochistic. I want to get that burn in my chest like, you can't have everything Mayer, go home and work.
RT: And you can kind of hide, a little bit, behind your guitar. If you were to show up some place tomorrow with you and your guitar, you've spent so much time behind it, it's part of you, you're comfortable. But put you on the stage with just a microphone and people who need to buy two drinks to be happy.
JM: You need to do it to appreciate—it's almost like double black diamond skiing. You'd have to do it to know how hard it is to stay up on the skis.
SS: Standup comedy. When you started doing that. I mean you're very funny. I would say that that's the more ballsier thing than being a musician. Being in stand up is the hardest. It's the absolute hardest. It's the absolute hardest. So what aspect of comedy did you say, you know what, I'm going to try that?
JM: It's really just a faster, close quarter combat version of song writing. You know, as much as I worry about how I'm going to get the first verse of each section to set you up knowledge wise so you know the chorus is about is the exact same way I'm trying to write a joke. So that I can set it up in one sentence and you'll know what I'm talking about. You miss, so many times you go on stage to do comedy and you know what you're saying in your brain but you don't say it into the microphone and you get nothing. And someone else has to come up to you who's a comic or something and say, "I know what you were trying to go for but you missed that word and that word and that word and nobody knew what you were talking about." So I really can defend wanting to get up there as a writer. You have a seed of an idea, how do you get to a place where people can consume it and understand it. It's just like being a song writer.
PD: Will you get back to stand-up comedy any time soon?
JM: No, no. I’ll just make my funny friend laugh, that’s enough for me. Making my funny friends laugh is all I actually really wanted. I just didn’t realize it. You go, “This guy wrote Ghostbusters III and he’s laughing at what I said!”
[Question missing]
Comedy. It works exactly like music. Except with comedy, I can hear the notes but I can’t sing em like I want to. But the synaptic game is *exactly* the same.