Play for Laughs

Short fiction for 831 Stories

This is new and fun! Last month, the publishing company 831 Stories asked me to write a short story inspired by their latest release, Comedic Timing by

Upasna Barath

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I love the story I wrote, so I wanted to share it here too. It’s more contemporary than what I’ve been writing elsewhere, so it was nice to jaunt in the world of romcoms. What I wanted to write is a story of friendship and growing pains in relationships that need work. I love love, and I love to love my friends.

You don’t need to have read the book to read this—the only context you should have is that the narrator, Jordan, is best friends with Naina, who just moved from their shared Chicago to start her new life in NYC.

There’s a voiceover above to enjoy this slightly extended version, or you can read it below. I hope you enjoy! 🩷

Play for Laughs

There’s a nipple in the bed staring up at me. It’s hair-ringed and pointing north, or whatever direction up is in—I’m not a scientist! Naina’s long hair is cascading over the nipple owner’s chest, making the top note of après sex in the room very potent.

David. Of course.

When I came into Naina’s room, I didn’t expect to find a man topless in her bed. Silly me. How could I forget David?

My planned weekend visit quickly turned into a meet and greet. A display of my best friend becoming a We Person: David and I thought your train was coming in later, I guess we misunderstood.
David and I were thinking we could go to this new restaurant we’ve been wanting to try.
David and I actually watched the new episode of Drag Race already… Sorry, I know I promised to wait, but he’s never seen it. Can you believe?
David and I have only been dating for like five minutes but I’m completely neglecting all of my other relationships because of him. Oh, except when I am in a he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not crisis, then I have time to call you back.

I barged in for our usual pre-coffee groggy debrief session, but it can wait. I start to squeeze out of the door frame to rejoin the living room couch I slept on. My ass leads my body backwards and so many things happen at once. The door can’t open all the way, it hits the bed with a soft thud. My left eye is still gunked shut from sleep and I underestimate the size of the doorknob as it jams into my side. I let out a yelp.

“Stupid ugly door in a stupid tiny New York apartment,” I mutter.

Naina’s door in Chicago had flair. It was a mess of layered paints from previous tenants with a big vertical crack down its sturdy wooden middle. On particularly cold days, she’d have to tape a towel over it so her space heater’s hot air wouldn’t seep from her cocoon. We used to joke that it was a window into her soul—colourful, one loud slam away from falling apart, but somehow completely right. Now it seems her soul is stark white, hollowed out, and adorned with an obnoxiously large gold handle.

Alchemy by Jackson Pollock

David and I lock eyes as he shakes his head awake. Sneaking out of the room now would be more strange than acknowledging my mistake, so I give him a polite nod. It’s something I learned from being one of two queer people working at a Foot Locker. The nod is a universal sign of respect in bro culture.

“Nice nipple,” I whisper as I shimmy backwards. My instinct to go for the joke is stronger than everything else, especially when it’s the wrong time.

Naina’s eyes fling open and I dodge the daggers they send in my direction. “Oh my god, Jordan, get out!” I don’t have the space to sidestep the pillow she launches at me. A ratty lump of gold brocade hits me squarely in the face and muffles my apology. I close the door behind me and tell the plasticky gold knob, “I fucked up, I forgot you weren’t alone.”

From the hallway, I can hear her explain me away to David. “I’m so sorry about him, he’s just… I know he can be too much...” Too. Much. Those two words feel like she just clipped my seatbelt into the driver’s seat of a car barrelling off a cliff while she watches me fall to my death from above. With David.

The rest of what she has to say I don’t want to hear. Nothing good comes after too much.

I’ve been told I walk like a New Yorker. Weaving through traffic, on a mission, and always miles ahead of anyone trying to keep up. I would argue I walk like the average gay person.

I love going on a walk. I’m constantly circling the streets of Wicker Park; that’s how I work out new material, find time to call my mother, or clear my head. I’ve been obsessed with the idea of using a long walk to process things since finding out Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston broke up on one of their famous strolls. My mother’s dental practice had a sweet Polish receptionist, Helena, who would read me People after school while I waited to go home—she was my initiation to the world of walking and celebrity gossip. We were both devastated when Brad started dating Angelina. “But the walks!” we exclaimed.

Here’s what I’ve worked out on my walk so far:

• New York’s garbage smell is still unbearable in the summer.

• “Maybe: Gill” texted me to remind me about our date tonight. It seems like a Gill is a person I should remember, but last night is a blur of vodka and moustaches in the backyard of Naina’s friend’s friend’s Greenpoint apartment. I’m going to have to find out if Gill is short for something. Gilbert? Gilliam? Gilhelm?

• The joke I was tweaking about hooking up with a 60-year-old father of three might need to be a darling I kill. There’s just no way for me to ignore him being a retired cop and I can’t make fucking a cop funny. It’s simply embarrassing.

• Naina thinks I’m too much. And I probably am too much, but it used to be just enough for her.

• I have to proceed with caution here. As much as I’d like to storm back into her apartment, admonish her for being a bad friend and prioritizing her new boyfriend on a weekend we’ve had planned for weeks, I don’t want this to be the beginning of the end. It’s a slippery slope from cold shouldering through the end of my stay into becoming a whatever-happened-to-that-person person.

• The pigeons in Brooklyn are far better than the ones in Manhattan.

I’ve seen at least four prototypical pigeons—perfect colouring, shape, mannerisms—while sitting in McCarren park. I take a photo, but I don’t post it to Instagram. If my New York comedy friends know that I’m in town, I’ll be guesting on more podcasts than I care to count.

JW Anderson gets it

On a warm July day, watching the pink sun dip behind trees and buildings, I get the appeal of this city: It’s electric! Anything could happen! I’m minutes away from popping on a Liza Minelli wig and tapping along to New York, New York.

I have the urge to text Naina this. I know she’d get a laugh out of picturing me in a silk tunic dancing between groups of picnickers, but I’m ignoring her messages right now. I’m a Capricorn in fight or flight. I can’t be held responsible for the havoc that my fingertips could wreak if I’m faced with her saying the wrong thing right now. Besides, silence from me is a loud enough statement.

“Hey Siri, remind me to tell Naina about pigeons and Liza when I’m no longer mad at her.” The British man's voice in my phone tells me it doesn’t understand my request. I don’t understand it either, I want to tell it.

Naina’s the person I want to call about birds and nearly dead icons of stage and screen. Feeling like an extra in your best friend’s life is a bad feeling. It’s a pit in the stomach, a papercut on the thin skin between fingers, a wet sock in a leather shoe. My chest does the tightening thing that we all just accept as normal, I massage it with my phone. Using it like a Gua Sha tool on my pec, I make it painful until it starts to feel good.

I know she’s not doing this on purpose, but I also don’t know how to tell her it’s hurting me. When I tried to broach the topic over the phone last week, she got defensive.

“Wait, when did I miss your call? I’ve just been so busy with everything,” she said. Before I could add anything, she continued, “And maybe you’re still mad I left Chicago? I mean I honestly feel like I’m the same.” Her tongue could make sweet nothings sound sharp when she wanted it to.

“Huh? Okay, I didn’t want to make this a thing,” I told her.

“Jordan, can we just talk about this when you get here? David is calling me.” We said a hurried goodbye and hung up.

After that call, texts were exchanged as if nothing had happened, though it felt like a crater had started to form. A few days later I was boarding a New York-bound train headed straight into a stretched out rift.

Ever since we became friends, we’ve been like family. She was one of the first people I met after feeling like I’d found myself.

I spent years hiding. Even when I started comedy there was a stench of internalized homophobia wafting from my jokes. Neo-pronouns are not actually a punchline. Pointing out the lack of difference between a lesbian and a variety of household items is really gross and misogynistic. I thought I couldn’t possibly hate myself if I was a gay comedian doing gay comedy, but the videos I have of that flannel-wearing twink punching down on other queer people fill me with so much shame. He grabbed any shield he could to make it through. But Naina never met him. She met the person I spent years healing to become.

The people I lost before now feel inconsequential because it wasn’t the real me who lost them. Those people fell out of touch with an idea, a loose approximation of a person held together with tape. The stakes are higher now. I spent too long being too little and I don’t want to go back. I can’t.

Gill and I agree to meet at a burger place nearby. In my haste to leave Naina’s, I put on jeans even though it’s too hot for jeans. The t-shirt I’m wearing is the one I slept in, and probably has a spot of blood on the back where I popped a pimple. I’m not exactly in the right fashion or head space for a date, but I reasoned that I just might need to find somewhere else to sleep tonight.

I spot him very quickly. He is sitting at the bar, hunched over his phone, sipping a cosmopolitan. He greets me grin-first with a kiss on the cheek.

“Hey! Thanks for coming,” he tells me. Warmth and a woodsy fragrance wrap around my waist. My ass finds a stool very quickly thanks to my knees almost giving out.

His face makes things from last night click into place. It’s full of duality: a sharp cheek, but a soft jaw. Sparse brows, but a thick moustache. A full bottom lip, but a thin top one.

His bald head catches the light and the glint brings me back to the present. “What do you want to drink?” he asks.

“Ummmm,” I glance at the menu without reading any of the words, just seeing shapes and colours.

His presence is like a low hum in my ear. It’s distracting. What’s also distracting is the fact that he’s wearing small running shorts, for which I send a silent thank you to Paul Mescal. His legs are thick and hairy, but smooth on the parts where his thighs rub together. I watch the pair of nail-shaped muscles slotted right above his knees move and I say, “I think I’ll just do a Diet Coke.” I want to remember him fully this time.

One of the hardest parts of being a comedian is that I’m always digging for something. A shiny acorn I can squirrel into my cheek and pull out on stage. Most dates I go on, I’m outside of my body watching it from across the room, trying to figure out the funny.

Maybe it’s the shorts or maybe he’s catching me in a moment of weakness, but Gill has me wrapped around his finger—the middle one that has a signet ring.

“What do you mean the pigeons are better?” His laugh is generous, and makes his shoulders shake vigorously.

“Okay, no, stop.” I tap his leg and my hand sizzles. “When you imagine a pigeon. The perfect one. It’s my belief that those kinds of pigeons only exist in Brooklyn. Maybe there’s more inbreeding in Manhattan? Those ones always look haggard.” The bartender’s eyebrows cock all the way up at me, and Gill laughs.

“I’m gonna have to pay more attention, I guess.” His legs shift and we knock knees. I pretend not to notice his smirk as my belly button turns to Jell-O.

It’s been over an hour and he has yet to ask me to tell him a joke. People always ask me to tell them a joke when I say I do comedy. It’s weird. I don’t go around asking a veterinarian to neuter a cat on a date.

Instead, Gill asks me what it feels like to tell a joke, a great one that lands perfectly. “There’s no good analogy for comedy because it’s so many things,” I tell him. When it’s not going well, it feels like being in a dimly-lit bar under a hot spotlight and there’s five to thirty people watching you while they eat onion rings. “Telling a good joke for the first time though, that sucks the air out of any room. No matter how stale it felt before. There’s a release, everything falls perfectly into place for even just a few seconds.” He’s thumbing the rim of his cosmo and it reminds me of the people who make water glasses sing that way. That would be a funny setup: Going on a date with a person who plays cup music during dinner. Before I can figure out the punchline, his hand reaches my forearm.

Our eyes meet, my cheeks feel like someone is holding a lighter up to them, but I manage to continue. “The joke becomes a shared thing with the audience and that’s my favorite part. It starts as a scribble on an important piece of mail I’ve left on my bedside table, but when it reaches the right people at the right time and they laugh… It’s ours. It’s theirs. It’s something else, and there’s no better feeling.”

Gill swivels his stool slowly so his legs frame me. His soft smile tells me he’s doing it innocently, and that makes it even better. “I’d love to watch you perform someday,” he says.

Suddenly, my awareness can’t be pulled away from the fact that I’m wearing jeans. It feels hot, way too warm. I worry that when I peel them off my skin will go too, melded to the denim.

“Tell me something weird,” I prompt him. A break from this building heat is the only way I’ll be able to take a full breath.

“Something weird?” Gill ponders aloud. He’s fiddling with a fry from the barely-touched bowl between us. “Oh, I have something!” There’s the smile again. So bright. I’ll need to find out what his tooth routine is. I suspect twice a day flossing. My mother would like him.

He continues, “Okay, it’s not funny, but I saw a video online this week about guinea pigs and how they sometimes hibernate if they get too cold.” He takes a big breath. “Well, I grew up in the midwest and the winters are no joke, even in the city. So I saw that and it made me realize that I might have buried my hibernating guinea pig as a kid.”

I’ve heard so many jokes that when something is genuinely funny, I don’t even laugh anymore. If you get a ‘that’s funny’ from me, it’s the equivalent of a guffaw from a non-clown. But for Gill, I burst out laughing.

Still Life with Guinea Pigs by Franz Werner von Tamm

Between the chest heaves, I tell him that’s the best thing I’ve heard in months. I try to get him to show me the video, he’s describing it as a millennial white woman with a bob sobbing to camera.

He can’t find it, so I pull out my phone to do some research. “Wait, guinea pigs don’t hibernate,” I read out loud to him. We discover, from a scientific and non-crying-millenial-bob source, that his four year old Fluffy likely died of natural causes. Relief washes over him and his head is thrown back in a sigh. Shit. His Adam’s apple bobs. I like the way his Adam’s apple moves the strips of muscle lining his neck.

My phone lights up, and alerts me to an incoming text from Naina just as Gill asks: “Okay, you tell me something weird. I can’t be the only one with a damning revelation from this week.”

“My emergency contact lives 800 miles away from me.” It just slips out. Seeing her name on my phone cut through this moment. Naina and I talked about finding new people to rely on, but I still haven’t done it. “It’s stupid, I know it is. I just can’t bring myself to change it.”

“I don’t think it’s stupid,” Gill says. “For years after my dad passed away, he was still mine.” The new information lingers between us, and he watches me take it in. “I guess I didn’t want to lose him again or something.”

I grab his hand. It’s not hot anymore, the closeness feels different. His ring catches under my palm, and I look at it.

“His,” he says.

“Thank you for sharing that with me.”

“It’s okay. I’m okay.” He leans over the bar, resting his chin into his free palm. “I just meant that I know what it’s like to want to hold onto someone, and if you still have the chance to do it, you should.”

Like a great joke hitting the right audience at the right time, it clicks suddenly. “I… I have to make a call,” I tell him.

“Huh?”

“Sorry, this is really bad timing. But I will be right back. I promise I’m not heartless or scared that you revealed this big thing to me.” His hand is lightly resting on my leg like he’s trying to anchor me down. “It’s just that things have been off with my best friend Naina, and I just have to call her. I need to tell her that I love her, and that I don’t care about any of it.”

“Oh, for sure.” Gill moves his legs and my beeline for the door is clear. “Naina’s really great by the way.”

“What? You know Naina?”

“Well, yeah.” He says it as if I am supposed to already know this, but I’m missing something. “David is my best friend,” he says as if reminding me, though it feels like new information. “He’s been so happy since he started dating her. I’ve never seen him like this.”

“Oh.” I’m standing to go, but not moving. “Wow. That’s really nice to hear.”

“Naina’s been talking you up to me for a while. She said I’d like you—I’m glad she was right.” There he goes smiling again, this time down to the bar.

My hands go up to his face before I know what I’m going to do next. I guide his lips to mine and kiss him. His moustache hairs tickle my upper lip, but it’s pleasant. The juxtaposition of a soft mouth and coarse hair is intoxicating.

We separate like magnets fighting the pull, and I leave him smiling on his stool. I look at my phone as I cross the restaurant. There’s an apology from Naina in several parts flashing up at me. I don’t even want to read it. I care about her more than I care about the weirdness. In the time it takes for me to reach the exit, everything melts away and I can no longer pinpoint why I was mad at her.

I step outside and click the call button.

She answers the phone on the first ring. “Hey,” she says. Her voice feels like dipping into a hot bath, I’m soothed immediately.

“I have to tell you about Gill,” I say.

She practically squeals.

Thank you for reading, it means so much!