WARNING: Family and Comedy Don’t Mix

Last night I did a stand-up show because my mom was in town from Georgia and had never seen my act. It was at a club that I had never performed at before, and will never perform at again because I inadvertently took my sweet, sheltered, albeit completely nuts, mom to see the dark side of comedy.

I know for a fact my mom has had limited exposure to stand-up because she quizzes me about my act and suggests jokes she gets via e-mail to use for my show. I think she thought I would use props and tell knock-knock jokes. Anyway, she's seen one of my shows now and…she’s definitely been exposed to stand-up.

One comedian (a giant man in a track suit) got on stage and pulled out a huge butcher knife and proceeded to act out how he'd kill people if they said this or that. Any laughter he got was distressed, and the entire nervous front row left after he got off the stage.

It was a show with some comedians cussing like sailors and talking about the usual gross beginner-comic stuff. It made me want to yell, "Hey asshole, Watch your f**king mouth, can't you see my f**king mother is here? Jackass!"

Which would have made me fit right in, since the audience was talking the entire time - the WHOLE time, full-on conversations during everyone's act. The host kept asking everyone to keep it down and be respectful of the comedians.

When I got on stage, they began to yell. Not the ‘You Go Girl’ yell, but the ‘We're So Drunk We Don't Know Where We Are’ yell that turned into the ‘Wet T-shirt Contest’ yell. It felt less like a comedy show and more like an indoor Puerto Rican day parade.

The only other girl comedian went up first, long before anyone was drunk enough to fully appreciate a female on stage. So when I got on stage, two tables in the back immediately started chanting, "WOOOOOHHHHH, take it off! Take it off!"

I should point out what I was wearing – brown dress pants, a button down, a wool sweater over it and my hair in a ponytail. It was like Martha Stewart showing up at a boobie bar.

So I looked at them like they were idiots, which they were, and gave a "What? My sweater? You want me to take off my sweater?" To which they went completely nuts. I tried to calm them down with "Come on, guys, show some respect, my mom is here." This mistake produced chanting for mom, my 62 year-old mother, to "take it off."

The night was topped off by getting trapped in traffic in a cab having to answer rapid-fire questions from my mom like, "Do you think that guy really went to the bathroom to do cocaine?" and "Was that supposed to be funny when that guy talked about sticking a cell phone up his butt hole? - That's just gross. Why would anyone talk about that?"

Just hours before this debacle, my mom thought it was unsafe to go to an ATM on the bustling intersection of 46th and 6th Ave at 6:00 pm because it was “after dark.” I could only imagine what safety concerns she had after being trapped in a small dark room with a knife-wielding comedian and drunk thug kids yelling for her daughter to strip.

This is also the same woman who, years ago when I lived in LA, was worried sick about me going to auditions because she had seen an episode on dateline where “young innocent girls went to auditions and were tricked into doing porn.” Of course, if a girl feels comfortable voluntarily having sex in a room full of strangers with cameras, chances are she’s not that innocent.

During this LA era, I got tired of telling her the details of my daily life as it was taxing to answer the same old question, “Did they ask you to take your clothes off?”

So, now my life has come full-circle, and her fears have been confirmed. I never imagined that I’d ever have a conversation trying to convince my mom that comedy is actually safer than it looks.

I know I'll make the prayer list at her church again. If the bouts of constipation in ’99 made the list, this will definitely trump that!