Submission 2

Comedian Bio

Tyler Wood is a comedian and improvisor from North Carolina. Since 2013, he has been performing his crisply written stand-up all around his home state and the southeast. Tyler has been a part of the Cape Fear Comedy Festival, the Broken Record Comedy Show in Nashville, TN, and the North Carolina Comedy Festival.

Story

I started stand-up very early. I started attending weekly open mics religiously my second semester of college when I was only 18. I didn’t know a single thing about life at 18. Admittedly, I still don’t at 23. At the time, I’d never had a girlfriend (I was a very late bloomer). I was a very shy person until I came to college. Doing stand-up and improv really helped me come out of my shell and blossom into a sociable person. Stand-up gave me the confidence to ask out a girl I’d met at college. We dated; we broke up. I was sad, as one might expect, but I got over it. I kept doing stand-up and improv to take my mind off it. I lost myself in my work (as much as you can call it work if you’re never paid for it). About a year later after I graduated, I met another girl through a dating app. We were instantly infatuated with one another. She’d seen me perform at the local comedy club, Dead Crow. The other girl had liked me, but I didn’t feel the connection with her that I did with this new girl. She was very ambitious, unfalteringly confident, and just the slightest bit mysterious. We began dating. I was in love. She was the first partner I dated that saw my aspirations to be a professional performer as an interesting thing about me. To go from a loser in high school to someone who is viewed as “cool” in the almost real world is a great feeling. As the relationship grew, I let my guard down. I opened up about everything I felt. I loved her so much. She started show some signs that maybe she wasn’t as comfortable as I was. These were things I wrote off as “quirks.” Things I would later realize were gigantic red flags. She never wanted to call me her boyfriend. She would say that we were seeing each other, or that we were dating, but she would never say “boyfriend.” She hated PDA of any sort. No holding hands, no sitting on the same side of the booth or too close together. Anything that might make us look like a couple. I asked why these things bothered her. She couldn’t really give me an explanation, just that they did and she couldn’t help it. I loved her, so I tried to let it go. I’m a very affectionate person in relationships. I want to be around my partner as much as possible. Is this clingy? Absolutely. Did I know how to keep that in check? Absolutely not. The combination of her not wanting to acknowledge me as her boyfriend, her lack of public affection, and her close proximity to an ex-boyfriend in her social circle caused me to cling even more. I was terrified to lose her and that pushed her away even more. Fast forward to Thanksgiving break. By this time, I was demanding a lot of her time. I was unemployed, coasting on some savings. I was doing some creative stuff, but nowhere near what I should have been doing at the time. I was still doing stand-up and improv, but the majority of my time was waiting for her to see me again. She’d stopped texting me while she was visiting family. I was nervous. I knew something had to be done. I texted her asking if we could talk. She agreed that we needed to and she would come over first thing when she got back in to town so we could. She was bummed when she got there. So was I. We talked about how things weren’t working. She told me she was mentally exhausted. The time away gave her the clarity she needed and she knew we needed to break up. We cried. I told her I’d work on myself, and maybe we could try again one day. She agreed. We hugged. She left. My best friend, who I lived with at the time, was not back home from break yet. I had no one in the comedy scene I trusted enough to process this with, so I called my mom. I am a bit of a mama’s boy, admittedly. I told her what happened, we talked for a little bit, then she told me she had some bad news for me. My childhood dog had died. I lost it. I always take it hard when I lose a pet, but this was worse. I got dumped by a girl I was still very much in love with the same day. I felt like absolute shit. Living beings I had deep attachments to were leaving left and right. I didn’t know what to do. Then an idea. What if Jack was like a martyr? What if he had died so she would come back? She couldn’t stay broken up with me if my dog was dead right? Wrong. She could, and she did. Credit to her, she was a very strong woman. Very independent. That was something I liked about her. She did come back over after I explained what had happened. She stayed the night and helped me through it. We talked and opened up to each other more than ever before. The night we broke up was the night we became the closest to one another. The morning came. When we woke up, we weren’t cuddling. I was wrapped around her, hugging her. The perfect representation of our relationship. I still felt bad, but she had to go. Finals were coming up and she had to study. Besides, we were still broken up. I did what I did the last time, I threw myself into stand-up. I performed as often as I could and I tried to drown my memories of her and my feelings for her in various sexual encounters I now regret. With all of the writing, I tried to tackle the breakup. It was hard. It was the worst day of my life and I didn’t know how to verbalize it. This is what I came up with. “I went through a hard break-up. She dumped me the day that my dog died. Yeah, neither of those bitches are coming back.” The worst day of my life summed up into two lines and mediocre, easy punchline. The dog wasn’t even a girl. But it gets a laugh, so I keep doing it. Comedians are always told to write through the pain. Turn the hurt into something funny. Congratulations to those that can, because it is hard.