Submission 13

Comedian Bio

One part '80s nerd with an affinity for '90s rock and one part political satirist with a penchant for blasphemy, Larry Fulford enjoys reveling in his own geekdom almost as much as he enjoys holding a mirror up to society to show itself how ridiculous it is. Aside from booking his own tours and producing his own shows, including Life’s a Gift with Alex Luchun, Fulford appeared at the Altercation Comedy Festival (2017), Memphis Comedy Festival (2017), Orlando Indie Comedy Festival (2014, 2015), and Cape Fear Comedy Festival (2013), and has had the pleasure of opening for Brian Posehn, Nick Thune, Kyle Kinane, Creed Bratton (The Office), and Jay Chandrasekhar (Broken Lizard).

Story

“People always told me that bars are dark and lonely and talk is often cheap and filled with air. Sure, sometimes they thrill me, but nothin' could ever chill me like the way they make the time just disappear.” - My Morning Jacket, “Golden” Maybe you drive. Maybe you take a bus or a train. Maybe you Uber. Regardless of how you travel, there is travel. There is time devoted to simply getting from your residence to the place that lets you do the thing that’s caught you, like a fish snared in the lip by a rusty hook, fooled by a bright, lively, attractive, phony worm. And then you sit. Alone or maybe with acquaintances (other fish), but you sit, and wait. Half an hour, hour, who knows. Before anything even starts. And then it starts. And you sit. And wait. And wait some more. Minutes become dozens of minutes. Dozens of minutes become hours. The dark side of stand-up comedy isn’t bombing and wondering if it’s all even worth it. Everyone has the occasional rough day at work. It isn’t drowning your insecurities and stalled sense of self-worth in alcohol or numbing it with drugs. Plenty of people who aren’t aspiring comedians suffer from addiction. The dark side of stand-up comedy is the complete and utter loss of time. Entire days, weeks, months of your life spent simply waiting to do stand-up comedy. Comedians think nothing of commuting forty-five minutes (one way) for five minutes of stage time, sometimes multiple nights a week. Sometimes bouncing from open mic to open mic, hitting two or three in a single night. An endeavor that starts at 6 PM may see you getting home at 2 AM, and only twelve or fifteen minutes of that time was spent on stage. The rest of the time you’re in limbo. Waiting your turn, quietly. Making small talk with other comics around the sounds of bottles hitting bottles in trash cans and old men shouting at TVs. Moving through the night like a determined maniac with tunnel vision, on a single mission to retrieve some of that precious stage time. Which, at the end of the day, is air. Air for you to fill with even more air, talking to a room of mostly other comics. A room that could very well be damn near empty. Sure, maybe you record your sets, and every set makes you better, and blah blah blah, but, the fact of the matter is, we’re in search of a space where we can get four or five minutes of air so that we can spit hot air into it. And maybe, maybe someone laughs. I can’t think of another hobby or passion on the face of the earth like this, where you can’t effectively hone your craft at home. You need that air time. And you need it over and over again, vomiting up the same words, trying them in different arrangements, adding a word, subtracting a word, for weeks or months. And with so much time in between your actual practice spent driving or riding lonely trains and buses that smell like piss, sitting, waiting to get to the mic so you can sign up and wait some more. And you do all of this knowing the odds are stacked against you. Not the odds of getting a Netflix special or hitting the road with Chris Rock. The odds of simply still being interested in doing this three years from now at all. Maybe one year from now. You do it knowing most comedians in the same boat you’re in, and boats that came before you, eventually fall by the wayside, stop going out as much, then stop going out altogether. Yet you still do it. You abandon the comforts of home however many nights a week, avoiding loved ones, friends, family, a hard-earned evening alone with takeout and a movie, to trudge into the trenches, a voluntary captive of the slow, agonizing removal of Time itself. The arc of a comic’s life usually begins in their twenties, shaky hands holding a notebook, terrified of finally making themselves try it, finally making themselves get on stage. Then they wake up the next day and they’re thirty-five, forty-five, fifty, staring down at trembling hands, wondering where the time went. With stand-up, a great number of years simply vanish, taken out with the bar’s trash at the end of each night where they’re not even picked through by raccoons before being hauled off to a landfill of lost time. Most of us work at least part-time jobs, say twenty-five hours a week. Afterwards, we hit mics, showcases, whatever, wherever we can get our air. Maybe we only go out three nights a week, and maybe that only means nine hours a week. That’s still thirty-six hours a month. 432 hours a year. Think of what we could’ve done with that time. The trades we could’ve learned, volunteering for good causes we could’ve done, naps we could’ve taken to dream in peace. The reality is, comics who take the craft seriously are out almost every night, at least two hours a night, sinking the balance of their waking lives into attempting to master a thing that not only takes years to master, but, once mastered, is also as subjective as “Green is pretty.” Years ago, the first-person shooter game Perfect Dark came out, and my friends and I loved it. We’d have “Perfect Dark Night” and order pizza and kill each other for hours, laughing, bullshitting, shit-talking. I remember one day, somehow, I stumbled upon the part of the memory card where you could see how long you had played. And I had played for seven days. Seven. Days. Not consecutively, mind you, but, over the course of however many months, I had spent an entire week of my life inside this one video game. That’s stand-up comedy. Except there was no limit to how long we could sit and play Perfect Dark. It might take fifteen minutes to get to the house but we could play for five hours. With stand-up, the ratio is essentially the opposite: hours of time-spent-getting-to-and-waiting-to-get-on-stage versus minutes of time-spent-on-stage. And that’s the only way to get good. If that was how video games worked, no one would ever play video games. Imagine if someone told you that they felt an undeniable desire to drive to the DMV four times a week, hang out a couple hours, then, right before they leave, spend four minutes trying to make other people in the waiting room laugh. You’d think they were a crazy person. And you might not be wrong. The dark side of stand-up comedy is the black hole all of your free time slides into waiting to do stand-up comedy. The void normal people fill with dating, watching movies, reading, working out, sewing, playing video games, we fill traveling, often alone, and waiting. Like lonely, unnecessary snipers. On February 13th, 2018, I celebrated my seven year anniversary in stand-up. I celebrated by taking a thirty minute train ride to an Irish pub, signing up 18th, and waiting an hour or so to talk at several other comics for four and a half minutes, then taking a thirty minute train ride home. Imagine if I could add up all the travel and wait time of the past seven years, what that staggering number on that dusty memory card would look like. I shudder to think. And yet, the Twilight Zone twist is, even if I was able to see that number, it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t snap me out of anything, sober me up, or derail the journey. I’d write a joke about it, try it out in Irish pubs, ghost town coffee shops, and cavernous off-night comedy clubs in four-minute increments to the backs of barflies watching the game, chatty college students whose night I’m probably ruining, and blank stare comics lost in their own thoughts. For weeks. Months. Trudging through Time’s trenches towards year eight.