Before a residency in Edinburgh, the comedian will test out “Have Fun, Be Yourself” in Boston.
By Nick A. Zaino IIIUpdated July 16, 2024
Andrew Mayer knows the dramatic tension in his new show, “Have Fun, Be Yourself,” isn’t the standard one-person show fare. There is usually a monumental struggle, and that’s not what he’s presenting. “I’m tall, white, and straight,” he says in the introduction. “Things usually work out for me.”
“I feel like a lot of one-person shows [are] detailing a struggle that someone has had, and then they overcome it,” he says, talking about the show. “And in this case, I feel like mostly this struggle is me getting out of my own way.”
The story, which he is workshopping at The Mendoza Line every Saturday night in July for an August run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, is less a triumph and more a relief. Like a lot of kids, Mayer felt misunderstood and left out in high school, and a bit too eager to please. He likens himself to a dog who, when it sees someone reaching for a treat, immediately starts doing every trick it knows before anyone asks.
“So much of it was just intense social anxiety and truly, this desire to be liked,” he says. He wanted to excel at dating, which was the wrong way to look at it. “The concept of being good at dating, I guess, is to try to have every date go well, when, in reality, what you really want is to show people who you are as quickly as you can, so that you can both make a decision on whether that’s good or not.”
Mayer is still working on some of the details of the story, adding jokes and structure and getting it tightened up for the Fringe. But there is a happy resolution, which doesn’t involve his struggles magically disappearing. “I think at the end of it, the encouragement is for people to stop acting like they’re not nervous or shy or whatever,” he says. “This concept of pretending that you’re not feeling the feelings that you are, I think is overrated.” It’s better to be sincere.
Thus the title, “Have Fun, Be Yourself.”
Today, Mayer is married and knows who he is onstage. Comedy helped him become more of an open book, he says, and that has made things easier. “In stand-up, you’re required to really get to the point of who you are really quickly,” he says. “I know that I’m not the type of comedian who’s just going to have a presence that commands the attention of everyone, but if I go on and kind of just go, ‘All right, well, this is the speed that I go, and I don’t have a different speed, so I can’t change it, so you guys can come along if you’d like.’ It’s fun if you want to come along.”