Last Saturday night, at 10pm, I climbed into an Uber with an orange-bearded, heavy set driver and drove to a stand up comedy open mic at Club de Vino in San Telmo, Buenos Aires. A month earlier I had turned down a trip to Bariloche (a town in Argentina’s Patagonia region) in order to be in Buenos Aires for a few open mics that week. I texted several of my friends trying to get them to come, but they were all busy, or else they were already planning to come to my show on Monday or they had come to the one on Friday. Either way, none of my friends would be there, and the wave of loneliness that hit me was intense but not surprising. Comedians end up in strange places at strange times: dingy bars at midnight, empty comedy clubs on the far side of town, high-end restaurants with indifferent diners. We turn down opportunities. We miss out. Instead of sitting in the crowd next to our friends, we’re on stage, in front of them — and, therefore, separate from them.

All of which is to say: an open mic can be a depressing way to spend a Saturday night. 

My host-mom had told me that San Telmo was “not the sort of place you want to wander around at night,” but the street on which my Uber dropped me was well-lit and quiet. I recognized one of the comedians sitting at the bar — a forty-something named Sebas with a provincial accent that I sometimes (often) struggle to understand. We take a stand up class together in Palermo. Despite both of our accents causing the occasional confusion, we were soon engrossed in a conversation about comedy. We had plenty of time to talk, because although the show was supposed to start at 10:30pm, it didn’t start until 11:30pm, after the host had stood on the corner for an hour flagging down drunk fans returning from the Boca soccer game. 

Sebas told me that when he first discovered stand up, it felt like the thing he had been looking for all his life. Growing up, he had admired the greats — Jim Carey and George Carlin — and wanted to be like them. But life had always gotten in the way and he had only started performing once his two kids had gotten older. I told Sebas about the first time I ever performed stand up — immediately after getting my Covid vaccine at a bar in Billerica, MA. After over a year of lockdown, I was desperate for any opportunity to perform, to be with people, and to push myself into uncharted territory, and stand up comedy was the scariest thing I could think to do. I told him how I used to deliberately take the stage unprepared in order to get used to the feeling of bombing. (I later learned it would take no extra effort on my part to bomb). Pretty soon, I caught myself hoping the show would never start — I preferred this conversation about comedy to the real thing. The loneliness wasn’t all the way gone, but it had faded into the background.

Comedians need each other. The craft is just too lonely without other performers who share your addiction. And comedians make for quick friends — because anybody who has ever spent a month working on their set and then bombed in front of their girlfriend, their parents and their coworkers is a friend. Anybody who has ever pulled out their phone at the dinner table to type down a premise is a friend. And anybody sitting at in an empty bar at 10:30pm on a Saturday night, waiting for their turn to spend five minutes telling jokes to strangers, unable to quite articulate why the hell this is how they’re choosing to spend their time, is a friend.

An hour after the show was set to start, the stage light turned on, illuminating an elevated black platform tucked into the corner of the room, on top of which was a chipped brown stool. I grinned, momentarily overwhelmed by giddiness. I looked around the bar and laughed. The setting was terrible. A group of Boca fans were chatting loudly in the back of the room. I assumed they would stop talking when the show started (they didn’t). One woman was actively groping her husband in the front row. I assumed she would stop when the show started (she didn’t). Everyone was drunk. Nobody in the room knew my last name. After an hour of waiting for the show to start, I was starting to fall asleep. But when the host called my name and I took the stage, I was terribly glad that I wasn’t in Bariloche.