Wit's Gall — Ken Witzgall

I moved to Chicago in October of 2007 following a failed attempt at a business venture in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. My apartment was far enough out into the wilderness that I wasn’t able to set up an internet connection, so I’d have to go to Timmy Lee’s Pub down the road and use his wifi to check my email and download pornography. I thought it would give me the kind of seclusion I needed to actually write a book, though it honestly just instilled in me a lifetime of unhealthy drinking habits.

Sitting at Timmy Lee’s one night, I found myself watching videos posted of my buddy KC’s band playing gigs at different clubs and bars around the city. We had met in college, back in Kalamazoo, but he was from the Chicago suburbs and had moved back into the city following his graduation, around the same time I was crossing the Mackinaw Bridge up into the UP. I was transfixed with him and his band, the Black Umbrella Brigade, and the fun they seemed to be having, living these wonderful, artsy lives.

KC (vocals, guitar) and the Black Umbrella Brigade, 2008

St. Ignace, the closest town to where I lived, was full of wonderful, interesting people, though after a while, one can still get tired of watching old fishermen get blind drunk and try to show you their revolver. A small town, it has only a handful of restaurants and inns snugged up along the bay, catching tourists headed to Mackinaw Island off in the distance. In the off-season, there isn’t much to do, and I found myself at the local video store quite often, perusing what felt at the time to be the last DVDs in existence. I rented The Number 23 several times, to give you an idea of how bored I was.

It was after renting Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedian for the third time that it hit me. I couldn’t stay here. I wanted to go work out punchlines with people like George Wallace and Colin Quinn. They were at the Comedy Cellar in New York. I didn’t know anyone in New York, but I knew KC in Chicago, and when you’re in St. Ignace, Chicago is basically New York. From St. Ignace, Omaha is New York. Toledo is New York.

Around that same time I met a road comic named Jer-Dog, watching him perform at the local casino’s semi-regular comedy night. I bought him a few rounds after the show to pick his brain, and he told me to move to Chicago and just start hitting up open mics. Don’t take a class, spend that money buying drinks for comics who will tell you all the shit you need to start writing jokes (and boy howdy, did that turn out to be the truth!). Get out of St. Ignace.

I mean no offense to St. Ignace, they have wonderful bartenders and planked whitefish, but they do not have comedy open mics.

So a few months later, I was living on KC’s dining room floor, on his air mattress. We agreed on a few weeks. That turned into six months. And despite the cockroaches and cat vomit and total lack of privacy, I was fucking thrilled. Everything felt electric. I was writing again and it didn’t feel like a slog. I was getting to be that clichéd “artist” that I had in the back of my head in creative writing classes, and though I wouldn’t write anything genuinely funny for another three or four years, I knew without a doubt I wanted to be a comedian, and I was finally living that life.

A few weeks after moving, before I had a steady paycheck, I would roadie for the KC’s Black Umbrella Brigade in exchange for (what usually turned into too many) free beers. One of these nights, standing in the beer garden after a show, I might two Israeli women who laughed when I told them my last name.

“Witzgall – that means clown in German.” I don’t know why they knew that dialect of German, and other Germans I’ve asked have denied this interpretation, but they seemed worldly, and the newness of the moment and my new life in Chicago added a sort of mysticism to the exchange.

The etymology of my surname had never dawned on me before that, but broken down, “witz” means joke or humor (literally wit), and “gall” means the same thing in English, gall, impudence (asshole). On top of that, my father, grandfather, and great-uncle were all actual clowns in an actual circus, as Shriners. I’ve even watched my father suit up when the Shrine Circus came to Detroit.

Me as a baby, with my Grandmother, Mother, Father, Grandfather (holding me), and my Great-Uncle George

So, I know that Wit’s Gall is a horrible name for a blog. Really ham-fisted, sounds like it’s trying to be too clever, and kind of harsh to the tongue in a clipped way as a title itself. But it makes sense, right? And as I set out to write a comedic correspondence, it only feels natural that the predestination of my last name should set the tone for the project.

Every week semi-occasionally, I’ll try to publish a new little article. It might be long and meandering, like the piece I’m putting up alongside this introductory rant, Prague, or more than likely it will be short and stupid.

Hopefully it will be funny, too, because otherwise, what’s the point?