Going to Comedy Alone After Divorce

A woman came up to me after a show in Dallas and told me it was the first thing she had done alone since her divorce went through, eight months earlier. She had been sitting in her car in the parking lot for twenty minutes trying to decide whether to go in. She went in. She had a great night. She wrote me an email two weeks later to tell me she had been out with friends twice since then, and it was the first time in almost a year she felt like a person again.

I think about that woman a lot, because she is not unusual. She is one of many. If you are newly single, newly divorced, newly unmarried by death or by choice, and you are trying to figure out the first thing you do alone, I want to make a case for a comedy show as that thing. Not a bar. Not a movie. A comedy show, by yourself, in a seat you picked.

Why Comedy Beats the Bar for This

Everyone's first instinct for "getting back out there" after a long relationship ends is a bar. It is the cultural default. A bar as a newly single adult is one of the worst environments I can think of. It is loud, it is full of people already in groups, and the entire social structure of a bar assumes you are there to either be in a group or to start one. If you are sitting alone at a bar, you are either waiting for someone who is late, hitting on the bartender, or visibly sad. There are three roles and you do not want any of them.

A comedy show does not have this problem. At a comedy show, being alone is structurally normal. A lot of people go alone. Most people do not talk during the show. You are not required to perform confidence. You sit, you watch, you laugh, you leave. The room does the work. You just have to show up.

There is also a specific thing that happens at my shows because of how I do crowd work with couples. A solo attendee at one of my shows sometimes gets a different kind of attention, because the bits I build around singles tend to be warm, not mean. I am not the comic who punches down at the person who came alone. I do the opposite. I have matched solo attendees to other solo attendees in the room more times than I can count. Not always as a date. Sometimes as a friend. Sometimes as a "you two should talk after the show" nudge.

How to Handle the Seat Question

If you are going alone, people think you should sit in the back so no one sees you. I think the opposite. Sit in row 4 or row 5. Not front row, because a solo person in the front row sometimes reads as a specific energy the comic may not want to play with. But rows 4 through 6 are where you get the best view and the best sound, and the crowd around you is going to be couples and small groups who are not paying attention to you at all. You blend in better in a close row than in the cheap seats in the back, because in the back the camera of your own self-consciousness gets louder.

Buy one seat, not two. Do not do the thing where you buy two tickets so that "the seat next to you is empty." Empty seats next to a person read more lonely than one well-chosen seat. Also, comedy shows often oversell the room, and an empty seat next to you is going to get walked up on by staff asking if it is yours. Buy one. Sit down. You are fine.

What Solo Attendees Do Differently

Something I have noticed in twenty years of doing this: people who come alone laugh harder. I do not know if it is because they are not performing for a companion, or because they chose to be in the room on purpose and so they are pre-committed to the experience, or because the ambient permission to react genuinely is higher when you are not worried about what the person next to you thinks. Whatever the reason, the solo crowd is my favorite crowd. You are the best audience in the room because you are the most honest one.

If you are worried you will not laugh because you are sad, here is the thing. You will. Laughter does not require you to be happy. It requires you to be in the room. Your body knows how to laugh. It has not forgotten. You have just not let it do the thing in a while.

Healing Through Humor, Without the Phrase "Healing Through Humor"

I hate the phrase "healing through humor." It sounds like a greeting card. But the underlying thing is real. Not because laughing at jokes fixes anything, but because laughing in a room full of strangers reminds you that you are still capable of doing it. That the part of you that finds things funny did not get divorced. The part of you that laughs with your whole body is still there. You just had it turned down for a long time because you were surviving something.

The first time you laugh in a way that surprises you — that big laugh, the one where your shoulders shake and a stranger next to you turns and smiles because your laugh made them laugh — that is the thing. That laugh is a benchmark. You will remember it. Six months from now, when you are trying to decide whether you are doing better than you were, that laugh is one of the data points you check against.

The Post-Show Walk

Do not book anything after the show. No second venue. No "drinks with a friend who wanted to meet up." The two hours after a show are almost as important as the show itself, and you need them for yourself. Walk somewhere. Grab a slice of pizza alone. Sit on a bench. Let the laughter settle. Notice how your body feels. I have had more than one person tell me that the walk home from a show alone was the moment they actually knew they were going to be okay.

That is not hyperbole. That is a data point I have collected from a lot of emails.

If You Go to My Show Specifically

If you come to one of my shows alone, I want you to know I see you. Not in a way that is going to single you out from the stage. I am not going to out you. But in a broader way: the people who come alone are a group I think about when I am building the show, because the show has to work for them too. The bits about relationships have to hit for the person who does not have one right now. The crowd work has to be warm enough that a solo attendee is not scared to be called on. I know you are in the room. The show is for you too.

There is a piece I wrote about comedy date night that talks about why live comedy builds shared memory. The thing I did not get to in that piece is this: it also builds individual memory. You can build shared memory with yourself. You are allowed to have that.

Find a show near you, buy one seat in row 4, and go. If you see me after the show, say hi. You do not have to explain anything.