Schneible

Pages: 7

Estimated Comic
By Steven Schneible

Steven Schneible
srs6033@[Link]
(610) 217-9764
 Schneible 1

PART I: Showtime

SCENE: Rainy Friday night, between 7:00 and 8:00 in the PM; Penn State University; Interior

Carnegie Building

On-campus stand-up comedy shows at Penn State are grungy. Low production value.

Amateurish, rough-cut, and vulgar. And uproariously fun: everyone who is here in the crowd

wants to be here, be they student stand-up comics, friends of said comics, or any of the type of

student who sees the flyers or sign for the “FREE” comedy show and decides to sacrifice

valuable Friday night freetime to attend. I’m seated at the end of a row, sweating slightly from

the stuffiness and somewhat hoarse from the cackling I’ve been doing. “Please, give it up,” the

host is saying, or something to that general effect, “for Ryan Faris!”

The crowd claps with polite enthusiasm as Ryan hits the stage. Faris is a stolidly average-

looking guy. 5’10-11”ish; vaguely Middle Eastern complexion; brown, slightly bristly hair worn

short on his head but manifested magnificently on a tastefully-bushy-yet-conservatively-so

beard; strong chin; probably in the weight neighborhood of 170-180 lbs.; 21 years; handsome in

that withdrawn-and-vaguely-Middle-Eastern-guy kind of way; always wearing a combination of

flannel collared shirt over a t-shirt with jeans. The only conceivably un-average thing about Ryan

Faris is his eyes. They work fine and, eye-wise, look normal — there’s no hideous scarring or

color aberration with the iris or some sort of medical condition that alters their appearance — but

the eyes have a perpetually bugged-out quality to them, like that of shock, except they are always

transfixed on an item in the middle-distance, the classic space cadet stare. The placidly

ballooning eyes give Ryan the appearance of someone who is always surprised but

simultaneously calm about whatever it is that surprised him.

 Schneible 2

Comedians, as artists, have identifiable styles: Carlin’s aggressively verbal and

punchline-infused political rants; Marc Maron’s complex stream-of-consciousness, humorous

illogic; Seinfeld’s high-voiced and shtick-y observation. Faris eschews all this. Oh, he’s got a

style all right, and like all other comedians, he maintains a cherished notebook in which he writes

his material. But there’s no high-browedness to the Farisian act, no rants or personal insights or

Poptart deconstruction. Because Faris is, simply and boldly, a punster.

No audience addressing. No political commentary. Just puns. Delightfully painful. Ryan

is onstage, staring at no one, absolutely murdering, to use the colloquialism of comedians that

describes a particularly laugh-producing set. The room is loud, but the sound of the crowd is a

sound I have never heard before or since: 50% high-volume, cackle- and shriek-infused laughter;

and 50% loud, though not unkind, groaning (it’s the type of groan whereby just the pitch

indicates that there is indeed a smile on the groaner’s face). The room swims in an aural soup

that is itself a house somehow united in its division against itself; everyone digs the camp and

honesty of the puns and either chooses to give in and laugh or holds onto sensibility and gives a

knowing groan.

Faris is wrapping up his best-known and -loved joke, “The Shoemaker’s Daughter.” “So I

ask her, ‘what do your parents do?’ She says, ‘Well, my dad is a shoemaker, and I don’t have a

mother.’ ‘Don’t have a mother? Everybody has a mother.’ ‘Nope. Just me and my dad. You

could say he was my sole creator.’” Whoops. Cackles. Thunderous applause. And so much

groaning. Ryan smiles, staring down the shaft of the mic.

 Schneible 3

PART II: Watching The Wheels

SCENE: Softly rainy Saturday morning; 40°ish Fahrenheit; Exterior grimly utilitarian freshman

housing; Penn State University; Date: The secular drinking holiday “State Paddy’s Day”; All is

grey; And wet.

Ryan Faris pulls up to me in his Subaru. I open the door and am immediately hit with the

stale, acrid odor of menthol cigarette smoke, which odor has clearly baked into the car’s fabric

interior. He’s got a menthol going right now, blowing the fresh smoke out his window; the

pleasant smell of a burning cigarette forms a kind of olfactory wave interference pattern with the

stale smoke smell. We exchange pleasantries that my recorder fails to pick up; Ryan says we’re

going to the McDonald’s parking lot. “We’re gonna sit in the car. Drink coffee. Yeah, it’s rainy,

I don’t feel like dealing with these fucking people today.” The “fucking people” are, I am left to

assume, the State Paddy’s revelers. NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! is playing on the car radio,

a detail that seems somehow significant. “I’m excited, I haven’t done McDonald’s drive-thru in a

while,” I say. Ryan: “I do it too much. I didn’t eat any carbs this week, and then I relapsed

yesterday. Been doing, like, this diet thing.”

Faris has got a way of speaking in which his words seem to follow the middle-distance-

oriented trajectory of his tranquilly bulged eyes’ gaze. It’s like he’s receding into his own

forehead whenever he talks. He has also got, another minor detail that seems significant, a straw:

McDonald’s make, thoroughly chewed about ⅓ the way down the straw’s shaft, with the top ¼

of the straw forming a ~75° angle to the shaft. Faris spins this straw with his right hand because

he smokes with his left. When I ask him a couple of hours later about the straw, he says, “I
 Schneible 4

exclusively spin straws at 90° angles. When I was five, I would spin Mr. Potato hands… then I

found straws.” He has been a straw user ever since.

We are driving through the oppressively grey rain toward McD’s. Ryan blows menthol

smoke out the window. “I’m excited to do this. Why did you pick me? What struck you about

me?” “Essentially, I needed to find someone who was interesting and who would be willing to be

followed around for a day,” I say, obfuscating the real truth; I picked Ryan because of the eye

thing (which, in fairness to this reporter, was interesting). “I do this a lot [by which he means

going to the McDonald’s parking lot, ordering food, and then just sitting there]. You can count

on me hanging out. I mean, I can tell you things off the record. But, my thing is, I can’t wait to

say, ‘off the record.’ Like, I keep telling my roommates I’m gonna keep telling you, ‘Off the

record. Between you and me, off the record.’” Throughout the course of the day, Faris never uses

this phrase.

“So this is for a class? How long is it?” “1500-2000 words.” “1500 words about me…

I’m very excited. This could be the start of my Wikipedia page.” He’s smiling slightly. That’s as

much as he ever smiles: slightly. To give a full-facial smile would be to break his lucidly

trancelike countenance. “Like, did you ever hear S-Town?” “Yes!” I reply enthusiastically.

“What, you’re not gonna kill yourself, are you?” The profiled main character of S-Town had

committed suicide. “I dunno,” Faris says coquettishly, “it’s hard to peel back the onion layers.”

We chit chat. I mention my love for fresh cigarette smoke and hatred for the stale after-smell.

“You’re gonna get a lot of that. You’re gonna get both.”

McDonald’s. Ryan orders a prodigious amount of food — large Coke, large coffee, 2

McDoubles, medium fry, Caesar chicken snack wrap — and is kind enough to buy me a coffee

and McMuffin. We park. Still doggedly raining. Mount Nittany stands before us, brown and
 Schneible 5

foggy. All visible grass is dead. Ryan lights his third cigarette, smoking with his left hand. He

twirls his straw in his right when he is not holding his first McDouble. “We can get into the

straws, too. I don’t know if you know about this: I’ve got this obsessive compulsion with

McDonald’s straws specifically, and that might be ridiculous, we’ll get into details… It’s 100%

true. I’m very particular.”

Ryan and I share a love for radio, NPR especially. “I like Planet Money, This American

Life… I feel like this could be one of the things they play on This American Life.” We also both

like the album Terrapin Station, the mention of which lights a spark in the detached eyes of Ryan

Faris, and he expresses his love for the album and tries to recall the symbolism and Biblical

allusions in “Terrapin Station Medley.” I learn that Ryan Faris first started comedy in high

school by trying to make his friends laugh — “that’s where ‘Shoemaker’s Daughter’ started, 5

years ago” — but he never told jokes onstage ‘til this year. I learn Ryan started smoking when he

bummed a cigarette from his father at age 17. I learn that Ryan Faris delights in his car: “I can

escape. I feel like I can do whatever I want in my car. I can smoke cigarettes, I can eat food, I

can listen to whatever I want... There have been some times — see, sometimes I’ll go to Barnes

and Noble — and there have been times I’ve just sat in the parking lot, and I was just too happy,

like, I sat in the car. I was just enjoying myself too much, I never made it in.” And I learn that

Ryan loves McDonald’s. “It’s amazing to me that I’m not 400 pounds. I eat like shit, I don’t

exercise, I come here all the time… I once spent a good weekend at a McDonald’s in

Cleveland.”

En route to Ryan’s apartment, I make a gentle inquiry about Substance use. Faris obliges.

“Hmm… like Xanax... Adderall... I love amphetamines.” He reveals that he uses cannabis almost
 Schneible 6

daily. “It’s good to be high on something,” he tells me, eyes peacefully popping. “You’d like

stimulants, I think.”

We arrive at the apartment, just off-campus. Nearby State Paddy-ers shout drunkenly,

which visibly bothers Ryan. We walk up, and I am introduced to the roommates in a wood-

paneled living room, at the center of which is placed, phallic and imposing, a large, uncleaned

bong. The apartment, according to my notebook, is “romantically grungy.” I follow Ryan into his

room. He’s grabbed a beer from the fridge. I ask him about his guitar, and he begins to play,

strumming the chords to “Terrapin Station Medley” and singing, flubbing a few times and doing

the amateur musician thing of readjusting while saying, “wait.” Faris showers; I talk to the

roommates. “Faris is a weird dude,” one says while we’re out on the screen porch. Roommate is

smoking, tapping ash into a huge ashtray in which there must have been, like, fifty-plus butts.

“Faris drinks cold coffee, like, hours-cold, and likes old, cold fast food. Oh — Did he tell you

about the straw thing?”

Faris returns from the shower and packs a bowl. I am offered some. I decline. He fires up

an X-Box and begins blasting away at enemies. I point out that he’s playing for the Axis side.

“Oh. Yeah,” he says absentmindedly. This doesn’t seem to bother him. What does seem to

bother him is his, according to Faris, comparatively poor performance, for which he keeps

apologizing.

The afternoon ends with a trek to a party, hosted by a fellow comedian. At this point,

Ryan and I have largely stopped talking to each other, like a point in a road trip where both

people are fine with silence. We walk, in the rain along Frat Row, past hundreds of drunk and

green-bedecked students. I remark, baffled by questions of comfort w/r/t the rain and cold, on the

scantily-clad girls’ dress, which getup Ryan says he dislikes. I am freezing, wet, and tired. Ryan
 Schneible 7

chain-smokes along the way. We disagree about architectural preferences regarding the houses in

the neighborhood; apparently, Faris disapproves of most of the houses’ color schemes. Finally,

we arrive, and my phobic stuff about parties starts up. I force myself to stay. I am sober. Ryan

accepts a beer, and I watch him talk. I have to go soon. And as I gather my things, I see Ryan

Faris talking to two people, smiling slightly, as his words follow his bug-eyed gaze into the

serene middle-distance.

Word Count: 1998