I was doing five, six open-mics a night, grinding it out, and then I did a show one night and got noticed by one Amy Schumer. I bombed, but she goes ‘hey, I liked that one joke you had, do you want to open for me at the Atlanta Punchline?’ And I was like ‘Oh my God, I’ve never been on the road or opened for somebody.’ She asked if I had about 30 minutes of material, and I said ‘sure’—meanwhile I had about eight, and the eight wasn’t good. But I said yes to it, and then I started thinking about it and I was like ‘I don’t know this girl, do I have to hang out with her? I don’t have thirty minutes of comedy.’ I wussed out and called her and told her I couldn’t do it because my parents were com...[Read more]

My first open mic night in a comedy club was a cross between a tremendous disaster and an exhilarating success. When I hit the stage, I completely blanked out. I forgot every single thing that I was going to say, and I was just on stage like, ‘Wow, what am I going to do?’ And I just started ad-libbing about how stupid I was for not being able to remember my act and everybody laughed, and I just kept ad-libbing about how dumb I was and everybody laughed, and it killed. I killed for five minutes about how stupid I was. And I walked off stage and I was like in a fog. I didn’t know how to feel about it.

This is the thing. EVERYONE struggles early on. That legend of me being extremely horrible is heavily exaggerated, because I was doing ok and booking festivals, and making it to the finals of competitions 3 years into my career. So if we're talking about me being a bad comedian 2 years in, then that's insane because everyone is.