Autobiography-class presentation on comedy

The autobiography-class presentation on comedy was both a humiliating school performance and, in retrospect, an unlikely forecast of Lindy West’s career. She assembled the comedy that had taught her how to laugh, but the presentation failed in the room; years later, when she was earning a living by watching comedy and writing jokes, its subject no longer looked like a cop-out.

Making the Montage

West had collected comedy by recording anything she found funny and watching it repeatedly, hoping to absorb its power. For the presentation, she cut those treasured clips together on one tape. Among them was a scene from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, her favorite movie from 1989 onward: Bill tries to distract his stepmother while he and Keanu Reeves make kidnapped historical figures do his chores. Another selection came from Conan, where the Narcoleptic Craftsman falls asleep during a woodworking segment and cuts off all his fingers. Andy Richter’s deadpan explanation—that combining a craftsman and a narcoleptic produces this kind of disaster—was part of what made the bit work for her.

West framed the collection as an academic account of how her sense of humor had developed, while her accompanying writing described laughter as her favorite pastime. The grand framing sat uneasily beside what she later called hasty writing: she was trying to turn a personal store of funny moments into a school assignment, and to make that choice sound more scholarly than it felt.

A Failed Performance

As the tape played, West floundered through her speech. Ms. Harper, who considered her smart and a good writer, looked increasingly disappointed; West understood the presentation as an obvious evasion of the assignment. The tape was too long, and the bell rang before it finished. Classmates drifted out without watching to the end, bored.

The failure endured beyond the classroom. For years, remembering the presentation made West feel a little sick. The embarrassment attached not simply to a poor performance, but to the gap between her genuine fascination with comedy and her attempt to disguise that fascination as a more conventionally academic project.

The Assignment Reconsidered

Seven years later, West recognized that she had built a life around the very subject she had presented. She went to comedy shows at night, interviewed comedians, watched movies and television for work, and spent her days writing newspaper jokes. The realization that she was being paid to watch comedy and make people laugh changed the meaning of the old assignment: the interest she had once tried to justify had become her profession.

West compared her outcome with those of her classmates, whose presentations had proposed occupations such as professional scuba diver, itinerant bassoonist, or pupusa-stand operator, without, as far as she knew, predicting their later lives. She acknowledged that the assignment had not been intended as a forecast. That was precisely what made the coincidence feel so surprising to her: after years of struggling to define herself, she could look back on an embarrassing presentation and see, beneath its awkward performance, an early declaration of what she would do.