Alex Robert Ross outside Comedy Bar on Toronto's Bloor Street, Aug. 7, 2025.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
It’s just past midnight on a Wednesday and the Cabaret Room in the back of the Comedy Bar on Bloor Street in Toronto is deathly silent. The half-dozen rows of seats near the front are empty, like pews in a forsaken and long-abandoned church, and a handful of impatient and half-drunk comedians lurk out there in the inky shadows, waiting for their turns on stage. Blinded by the spotlights, the only people I can actually see through these four laughless minutes are the hosts of tonight’s open-mic Bucket Show, Peter Saran and Jacob Balshin. They remain seated on stage, staring up at me unmoved as the last drops of confidence drain from my body.
I deliver my final joke of the night almost apologetically, and for the first time the silence is broken by something other than my wavering voice: a cough from near the back of the room. “They say you should leave on your biggest laugh of the night,” I say, turning to the hosts and fumbling for the mic stand before scurrying off stage. At last, I have something in common with my comedy heroes. I have bombed.
According to one influential study, roughly three in four people suffer from some form of speech anxiety, also known as glossophobia. “Speaking in front of a crowd is considered the number-one fear of the average person,” Jerry Seinfeld said in the first episode of Seinfeld. “Number two is death. This means to the average person, if you have to be at a funeral, you would rather be in the casket than do the eulogy.”
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Eulogies are comparably easy though. The audience at a funeral is supposed to remain silent, the emotional tone is set from the start and hecklers don’t tend to be an issue. Stand-up comedy, by contrast, is unpredictable and chaotic, glossophobia distilled into its purest form. It inspires true fear.
Bombing isn’t some far-off worst-case scenario either. As comedian Eric André said on his podcast series devoted to unearthing his peers’ horror stories, “Bombing makes you stronger. You can get through that, you can get through anything.”
“It’s ego death,” he said.
With this in mind, then, I devoted my summer last year to a form of ego-murder. I scrawled countless half-cooked jokes into notebooks that really ought to be burned, workshopped material at open-mic nights across the west end of Toronto and solicited advice from people much funnier than me on how to fake my way through a set.
This all led to my final test: returning to the Comedy Bar, but performing this time on the venue’s legendary main stage, sharing space on the line-up with professional comedians in a room that’s hosted by icons such as Maria Bamford, Marc Maron and Janeane Garofalo. Talentless and afraid, I committed to becoming good enough that a midweek comedy fan might confuse me for someone who could plausibly do this semi-professionally. I devoted myself to failure.
Ross dedicated a summer to open-mic nights before ending up back at Comedy Bar's main stage.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
Perhaps my first open mic had gone too well. It was hot and humid at Smalls Kitchen on Queen Street in July and, as the narrow room filled to capacity with notebook-wielding comics swigging from cans of cheap lager, my anxiety blossomed. The host, Joe Arsenal, a handsome and wiry comic in his mid-40s with an impressive mustache and a generous laugh, was noticeably thrilled when I told him it was my first attempt at stand-up.
“Try not to move your arms too much,” he said, adding that it had taken him a year to stand still on stage. This was sound advice, though it was disconcerting to someone who hadn’t even thought to worry about his limbs.
Arsenal called my name an hour into the show, and the walk through the corridor of bodies seemed to take forever. All that was on my mind was following my on-stage checklist: shake the host’s hand; pick the microphone up and move the stand to one side; take an audible breath.
An early laugh at one of my first jokes settled my nerves, and the spotlight was so bright that I mercifully couldn’t see the room. But two minutes in, my best line fell flat. “If you’re the type of person who wants to insult your dad, don’t waste money buying him a card that calls him a ‘dickhead.’ Just do what I did and disappoint him for 34 years …” I paused for laughs, but only one uncomfortable chuckle rumbled through the room before what was supposed to be my home-run shot: “I’m just kidding. He’s dead.”
Silence. My head snapped up and, squinting through the spotlight, I was forced to confront that terror of standing before a full and soundless room. My breath shortened and my heart began to race. This was agony. It was what I’d been searching for.
Unexpectedly, my studied deadpan expression turned into a grin. “I genuinely thought that would get a laugh,” I said. “I’ll be honest, the last two minutes was a build-up to the dead dad bit.” For the first time, I was off script, and the tension in the room dissipated into my best laugh of the night. I floated through the rest of the set.
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Two hours later, as the last comic stepped off stage, I was still levitating. One night in and I already knew why people kept coming back to do this: they were chasing a high.
And so I spent the next few weeks in stranger, murkier places, trying to get my fix. Soon I was in the back of an Italian restaurant in a residential part of the west end, driving away the last of the dining customers with a line about using cigars as a suppository. (Trust me, that joke isn’t any funnier with context). At a bar downtown called Dystopia, which felt a little on the nose, a set I’d agonized over for three days was enjoyed by one early-evening drinker and mostly ignored by half a dozen comedians.
Still, these were successful failures. My first night at Smalls Kitchen had given me a buzz, but it was too heady. “Success is like sugar,” Mel Brooks wrote in his memoir, more than 70 years after taking his first steps into comedy. “It’s too good. It’s too sweet. It’s too wonderful and it burns up very quickly. Failure is like corned beef hash. It takes a while to eat. It takes a while to digest. But it stays with you.”
These nights of passive-aggressive near-silence felt increasingly nutrient-rich. It had taken me three weeks, and a combined total of 15 minutes of stage-time, to reduce a vivid nightmare down to a routine weeknight.
For two decades, Toronto comedian Nick Reynoldson has performed at open mics in Toronto, small shows in Legion Halls in Alberta towns and eventually, major showcases like Just for Laughs.Comedy Records/Supplied
A few silent nights wasn’t going to turn me into a passable comic, though, so I went in search of professional advice. Nick Reynoldson is one of Toronto’s best-loved comedians, a staple of the local scene, and a co-host of the Talking Raptors podcast. He started out two decades ago at Humber College’s stand-up comedy program, though he said he learned “nothing” from the course itself.
“It just made me do it,” he said. “They don’t teach you how to write jokes, they don’t teach you how to find your voice, they don’t teach you anything other than: you have to do this shit, so brave it and go for it.”
For Reynoldson, that meant finding his voice through thousands of shows across 20 years: open mics in Toronto, small shows in Legion Halls in small Alberta towns, and eventually major showcases like Just for Laughs.
“My voice grew as I grew up,” he said, adding that there are no shortcuts. His advice to young comics is always the same: “Do it everywhere, all the time, as much as you can.” There will be sugary successes in there, he said, but this is really a search for the square meal of failure: “I’ve dodged my share of chicken wings that have been thrown at me in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, brother.”
Reynoldson had listened to audio recordings of my first few sets to get a feel for my embryonic style. “It’s very clear that you’re new,” he told me. “Your writing is good, and you’re right that the dead dad joke should’ve got a bigger laugh – but it sounded scripted.”
It was scripted. Fearing the worst at my first set, I’d written and rehearsed my lines endlessly, determined not to be left on stage unarmed. The comedians I’d loved growing up – Dylan Moran, Stewart Lee, Mitch Hedberg – had performed the same lines countless times before recording them. But on the DVDs and albums I’d memorized, they still sounded fresh and conversational, as if they were coming up with them on the spot. It’s what the early 20th-century actor William Gillette referred to as “The Illusion of the First Time.” Every audience, he wrote, “must feel – not think or reason about, but feel – that it is witnessing not one of a thousand weary repetitions, but a Life Episode that is being lived just across the magic barrier of the footlights.”
To succeed as a comedian, I’d need to loosen up. I’d need to fail harder.
Ross often prepares for his sets by writing a script and rehearsing his lines.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
Professor Willibald Ruch is one of the leading psychologists working in humour studies over the past half-century. He defined “humour” as something distinct from satire, cynicism or sarcasm, separate even from jokes. Humour is, by his definition, a disposition, a way of looking at the world, based on an “understanding of the incongruities of life, the imperfections of the world, the shortcomings of fellow humans, and our own mishaps and blunders.”
With only a few days until my set at the Comedy Bar’s main stage, I called Ruch at his home in Zurich to ask him directly what he would recommend me doing up there.
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“I don’t know whether you have any peculiarities that you could exploit,” he said, “but you can accentuate them and play with them. If others have it as well and they see that you are laughing about them, they are willing to join in because it connects you.”
Ruch’s advice prompted me to shift my focus. In the same notebook that contained all my previous failures, I scribbled down a decent opening line for a new set: “I’m a hypochondriac, which means I’m going to die soon, I just haven’t figured out how yet.” A neurotic rant about WebMD and health anxiety took shape. At least in theory, this one applied everything I’d learned so far.
Most crucially, it felt real.
Ruch may not have been able to see my peculiarities over our Zoom call, but by now Joe Arsenal had seen me perform three times, and on only one those occasions I’d fallen over while shaking his hand. He knows my comedy better than anyone, and so, over coffee, I asked him for a review of my work so far.
Arsenal got into comedy during a “classic midlife crisis,” he said. “What was missing from my life was some creative outlet, and there’s something thrilling about the adrenalin you get from going on stage when it’s unfamiliar. Now that I’ve been doing it for three years, I don’t get that fear any more. I kind of miss how scary it was.”
Early on, he’d tempered his anxiety just like me. He would write his set out “longhand, sentence and paragraph, and think of new jokes to add in. I knew that I wasn’t natural on stage, and I compensated by writing the hell out of my material.”
That is, he said, entirely normal. “You’re worrying a bit too much. Being natural in the moment and less rehearsed, those are worthy aims. But don’t even try to hit that level on your seventh performance. If you remember your lines, you’ll do great.”
Comedy Bar's Bloor location hosts The Pro Show is a weekly event for Toronto’s best comics to try out new work in front of a paying audience.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
After two months of working at it, when the day of my final performance arrives, the high of jumping on stage at an open mic has all but worn off, so the nerves that I feel are, though debilitating, rather thrilling. Perhaps there is just no way to truly fail in front of other comics any more.
Though it always seemed like a catastrophe from afar, in practice open-mic comedy comes with no horrid after-effects – no lingering sense of shame. It’s a laboratory for jokes and performance, the type of place where failure is expected. And, shockingly, comedians turn out to be almost universally generous and welcoming. As soon as they’ve seen a rookie get up and do five minutes, regardless of its quality, they invite them into the fold.
Professional comedy is different, though. The Pro Show is a weekly event at the Comedy Bar’s Bloor location, a two-hour slot for Toronto’s best comics to try out new work in front of a proper, paying audience, rather than to a room full of other comics. Bomb here and there are no fist-bumps from the sold-out crowd like there are at Smalls Kitchen on Queen Street.
The show is put together by Kyra Williams, one of the city’s best-known promoters, a co-founder of Williams Hirsch Talent Management and the executive producer of the Canadian Comedy Awards. At the bar before the show, I ask Williams for some last-minute help.
“Be funny,” she says. “I want something original, I want something that I haven’t heard a million times. But it’s also about confidence on stage, being charming on stage.” The show begins in 30 minutes. It’s time for me to become funny, original and charming.
In the cramped green room behind the ticket booth, panic sets in. I start writing my set out longhand – “So, anyone else think they’re going to die soon?” – and then write out all the bits I’m most likely to forget. The chalkboard by the stage has my name in the middle, and at this point I can’t run away.
The host, Jeff Paul, calls my name long before I finish writing down my set, and all I’m thinking of now is shaking his hand without falling over.
After my first joke, from the stage, the laughter sounds canned, like an episode of Cheers or Friends, and the spotlights blind me to everything but the first row and the microphone. It feels unreal, as though I’ve been dropped into a slick movie impression of stand-up comedy. I hit every cue, and keep my limbs mostly under control. It’s a passable set. Nobody heckles me. As far as I know, nobody rushes out to demand a refund.
But this is, in its own way, a failure. The headliner, Arthur Simeon, is one of Toronto’s best comics, and tonight he’s in incredible form. Simeon has been doing stand-up for about 20 years, getting up on stage thousands of times, refining his voice. His set is brilliant: conversational, riotous and organic-feeling. It is everything that my set wasn’t.
Back at the bar, as the adrenalin levels out to a warm glow, and, over a beer, Williams gives me her review. My set did feel “rehearsed,” the work of a writer rather than a comic, she says. There were a couple of solid laughs. Plenty to work on.
But for that there are no shortcuts. Most people can learn to write a joke; millions are quick-witted; and anyone brave or foolish enough can get up on stage at Smalls Kitchen on a Monday night. But being a stand-up comedian is irritatingly more complex than that. It’s a combination of stagecraft, charm and magnetism, finding the right tone of voice and the right persona, an ability to improvise or create the illusion of newness.
Williams says she can see in my eyes that I’m hooked on stand-up and, though I try to laugh it off, I soon catch myself talking about how I’ll rework my material next time around. What goes unspoken is that the only way to succeed as a comedian is to fail – not once or twice, but over and over again, in excruciating fashion, across years or even decades.
I’ll need to get used to the sound of silence.