Photo by Derek Hills courtesy of Adam Ruben/Capital Fringe.

Stand-up comedy is an artistic discipline that few people attempt and even fewer people master. But over the past couple of years, it’s become something that seemingly everyone with a blog or op-ed column feels the need to write their own hot take on. Most of those pieces seem to be about where the line is regarding what should and should not be discussed at a comedy show. And I Feel Funny should be required viewing for anyone that thinks they have a thinkpiece on stand-up comedy’s moral offenses brewing in their arsenal of Important Opinions. This one man show not only reveals Adam Ruben’s own cringeworthy stories within the realm of being a professional stand-up comic, but it tackles the greater questions of what is funny and what really should not be said.

Ruben introduces himself to the crowd the way that he would to most other crowds on most other nights—with seven minutes of his stand-up material. That’s enough time to give the crowd an idea of his demeanor. He’s not providing anything groundbreaking, but he presents himself as a pleasant, clean, and professional comic from Delaware with enough surprising twists in his material to make the audience involuntarily giggle. He was extremely personable and comfortable with just the microphone and the bare bones stage.

Those seven minutes were also enough time to remind me that I had seen Ruben once before. He’s been performing in the D.C. and Baltimore area (as well as on the road) for fifteen years, and during that time he has made several appearances at the D.C. Improv and during Story League showcases. Ruben also taught a class on stand-up comedy to undergraduate students at Johns Hopkins University for ten years and one Wednesday per calendar year, he brought them down to D.C. so that they could get a feel for the “open mic experience.” During one such experience in early 2014, those three tables of unsuspecting 21 and 22-year-olds watched an aging drunk man saunter into the bar formerly known as Touchdown. Unaware of the concept of waiting his turn, this inebriated fellow demanded to be put up onstage immediately, heckling every comic until the host reluctantly gave in and let him have his three minutes. During those three minutes, some of the finest and most well-traveled comics in the D.C. area proceeded to knock over chairs, bang on tables, shout at this annoying man and sing this at him. Ruben’s students were terrified.

I tell that story only because that insane experience did not even crack his Terrible Top Ten.

Without giving too much away about the ten worst gigs he experienced, empty crowds are soul crushing, some heckles come completely out of left field, and bachelorette parties are the absolute worst. What’s more, these gigs all happened after his lowly beginning at a redneck bar’s open mic in Malaga, NJ—a beginning that he had thought was his rock bottom.

But before revealing his true comedic rock bottom, he revealed a lot more about himself. He talks about comedy’s wonderful healing powers and how his stand-up experience has prepared him for life as a father. He talked about his history of accidentally offending people with his humor and then feeling the need to apologize for that humor. He talked about the one person he met in college that taught him to stop back tracking on material that he was not ashamed to have written. The one joke that he admits to hating himself for having written (which by the way, is nothing horrific or dirty) made him far more visibly uncomfortable than either his horrible math puns from his first open mic or the lines from his Holocaust-themed musical number. But amidst the laughs, he teaches the crowd an important lesson that he learned along the way: the difference between “registering” humor and “advocating” humor. That nugget of wisdom, upon which Ruben elaborates beautifully, will teach the crowd more about the truth of being a stand-up comic than the most painful stories of bombing ever will.

I Feel Funny: True Misadventures in Stand-Up Comedy runs at the Tree House Lounge. Remaining performances are:

Thursday, July 23rd at 8:00 p.m.
Saturday, July 25th at 4:45 p.m.
Sunday, July 26th at 12:00 p.m.

See here for more of DCist’s Fringe 2015 reviews.