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Homelessness can take many forms. The stereotype of the unemployed, substance addicted hobo living under a bridge just doesn’t hold true most of the time. Many who are homeless have jobs and are out there working just as hard as anyone else. Some have to bounce around from place to place – an uncle’s spare bedroom, a cousin’s couch, a night camping at the state park. Quite a few are just so-called “regular” people whom you’d never tell apart from anyone else you ran into on the street.

The homeless are often displaced persons. They are lawyers, doctors, professors, artists – perhaps fleeing for their lives, perhaps living out of suitcases. They’ve fallen on hard times due to an accident or illness. Or maybe their homelessness is caused by seismic shifts in the ground beneath them, the once stable place they stood on has turned out to be sinking sand.

It is mean spirited to mock the homeless, it is judgmental to blame them for their circumstances. For we are all just a step or two away from our own displacement and most of us also experience having nowhere to call home at some point in our lives.

In comedy, moving to a new scene can feel a bit like artistic homelessness. You bounce from show to show, every request is a favor, and you have no place to lay your head.

The experience doesn’t have to be so dramatic. It’s not necessarily the artistic equivalent of living under an overpass, pushing all your worldly possessions around in a shopping cart. It’s more just a general sense of not belonging, that the space you inhabit is not your own.

It’s like if you had no home but someone invited you to theirs for dinner. You’re constantly asking “shoes on or off?” You’re always on your best behavior, spreading a napkin over your lap and being sure not eat too much even though you’re still hungry. You’re polite and measured, showing everybody your best five minutes on stage and sticking around afterwards to “network” (kiss ass).

Entering a new environment this is natural and to be expected.

It’s okay for a time, but hopefully a comic will eventually find a home, a place to be rude and risky. Comedy (or any art form) requires a place where one can let their hair down and leave messes. A place where, metaphorically speaking, you can walk around in your underwear.

Whether large or small, luxurious or spartan, people need a home. A comedy home is often a place, a literal space, and hopefully it is well constructed and sturdy.

As I wrote about previously comedy is one of the most fragile art forms, requiring a low noise/high frequency environment to really be done well. That’s why we remove all distractions: darken the walls, shut out the outside world, require people’s full focused attention.

When a space is poorly managed it resembles a house with a hole in the roof. The performers stand shivering and wet, exposed to the elements, performing to an audience of twenty bored comics and three confused patrons who are too polite to leave the bar. The comics have got things to say, big dreamy bits that they’re working on, but the bar staff refuse to turn off the Boston Celtics game. So, the audience have choices to make – do they watch standup comedy or watch NBA basketball? Do they continue to listen or go play pool in the back? There are so many distractions pulling their attention away: Three-dollar chicken wings, ten-dollar buckets of beer, Keno lottery, Celtics vs. Suns, chatty waitresses, and CSI: Miami.

This crumbling house is far from ideal, it is a difficult place to be creative and free. And yet even this environment, if it is familiar and full of friends, is better than no home at all.

Because home is not just a space, it is a people, a crew. Throughout my early comedy years in China with Kungfu Komedy we were constantly doing shows in an itinerant manner at all sorts of random venues. We performed in bars, bookshops and cafes, the lobby of a Howard Johnson and once inside an oversized racquetball court. There were many shows inside of “crumbling houses”, so those early years we found a home in each other, not the space.

Your crew, your family is just as important as a venue because you need people around who believe in your creative potential. These are the people who see beyond the polished finished product and witness all the crappy work it took to get there. They know it takes a mountain of coal to make a handful of diamonds. And when you produce heap after heap of coal, they encourage you to keep digging and find the gems underneath.

Author and writing coach Brenda Ueland attests to the importance of a creative family. She says in her book If You Want to Write:

For when you write, if it is to be any good at all, you must feel free, - free and not anxious. The only good teachers for you are those friends who love you, who think you interesting, or very important, or wonderfully funny; whose attitude is:

“Tell me more. Tell me all you can. I want to understand more about everything you feel and know and all the changes inside and out of you. Let more come out.”

And so, to be creative for the long haul, one needs not only a house, but a family to fill it.

**On stage at the Kungfu Komedy Club in Shanghai, 2016.**
At Kungfu Komedy we had many physical “homes” to perform in over the years. Our first venue Beedee’s featured bathrooms behind directly behind the stage, so when audience members got up to relieve themselves we could always tell if it were #1 or #2 by how long it took for them to emerge again in front of the whole audience. Other venues included Masse, The Camel (where you could hear the Rugby game going in the next room) The Drunken Clam (a degenerate bar where you might get stabbed with a screwdriver afterwards), and Into Ark. We did not find a permanent place in a professional comedy club environment for many years.

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As far as I can tell the main reason people quit doing comedy isn’t financial or emotional. Ultimately it isn’t because they got a new job, or had a baby, or even because they lack creative inspiration. The main reason seems to be homelessness.

They find themselves out all alone, far from any creative family. It’s a Lone Wolf existence, a ‘Me vs. Everybody’ battle. They have no space to call their own, no four walls and a roof under which to rest for a while. It’s exhausting and discouraging to live under a bridge, or in your car or to bounce from house to house.

After all, how long can you really sustain when it always feels like you’re in someone else’s home?

Homelessness in the Comedy Community