A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 25
This is the sixth year in a row I’ve run this series in April.
Today’s story: The woman who keeps comedians sane.
Ildiko Tabori has never stood on a stage trying to make strangers laugh, doesn’t write jokes, and admits that she’s not great at telling them. Trying to recount something clever she heard, she makes advance apologies: “I’m not going to do it justice.”
But if you make a living being funny, Tabori understands the particulars of your pain better than most: For the past 3 ½ years, she’s been an in-house psychologist at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood.
“Being a comedian is truly the hardest job in the entertainment industry,” Tabori says. “You have a lot of late nights. You have good sets; you have bad sets. It is kind of a lonely existence at times.”
She knows about the constant pressure of finding gigs. The uncertainty of whether the routine that worked yesterday will work tonight. The front-row drunk, ruining your set. The allure of drugs and alcohol. The hard-to-describe emptiness that attends interactions with fans, who mistakenly believe they know you because they related to a joke.
And the strain of watching fellow comics shoot to stratospheric success, sometimes as fresh arrivals on the scene. “I do hear that a lot,” Tabori says. “‘Why is this person successful, and why am I not?’”
— —
During the day, she sees patients at her West Los Angeles office. Two or three nights a week, she drives to the Sunset Strip club around the time comedians start taking the stage.
Clients follow her up a narrow staircase, past the bar and VIP lounge, to a third-floor office where they sit on an old-fashioned red couch that used to belong to Groucho Marx. Clowns gape from the walls. Through the floorboards rise the muffled sounds of jokes living and dying on the stage below.
“Initially people were skeptical of Dr. Tabori because, A. she’s a female; B. they didn’t think they needed any help; and C. how could this doctor who never did stand-up comedy understand them?” says veteran comic Sunda Croonquist, who has been seeing her for three years.
She says Tabori helped her get through “a horrible, dark time in my life” precipitated by a lawsuit by her in-laws, who were angry at her depiction of them in her act.
“She’s hardcore,” Croonquist says. “You’re not gonna get a fluffy pillow. It’s like, ‘Sunda, you have to deal with this.’”
Okay, all you rom-com fans. This is a movie waiting to happen. It’s Anna Kendrick and Whoever (she’s so awesome, you could pair her with a tree stump and she could pull it off). She’s a shrink to Hollywood comedians. Something she stumbled into. Has her regular practice. Then a couple of nights a week, it’s off to a comedy club to help a bunch of neurotic, anxiety-ridden, bipolar-like comics maintain their on-stage edge while somehow managing to circumnavigate the complexities of everyday life.
She’s been doing this for years and always managed to separate the professional aspect of being a shrink from the personal side of her life. Not that she hasn’t had male comics as well as females hit on her. That’s to be expected when you hold their hands, help them through crying jags, hold pillows for them to assault in order to express their rage, and keep them from careening off into the emotional stratosphere before some big gig on TV.
Then along comes Whoever. And there’s something about this guy that starts to erode her wall of separation. Why? What is it about him? What is it about her in her own stage of life?
Twist: What if she drops him as a client in order for them to be able to date. But once they start seeing each other, he loses his comedic edge.
It’s Punchline meets Good Will Hunting.
There you go: My twenty fifth story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!
What would you do with it?
Each day this month, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Gender bend, genre bend, what if. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.
See you in comments (hit Reply to join the conversation). And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.
Comment Archive