How My Speed Date Got Stolen Onstage at a Live Comedy Dating Show

Summary

In Barcelona, there is a comedy speed dating show called “Lolyamorous”. It’s live and offline, not TV.The format is inspired by traditional speed dating. Random pairs of audience members go up on stage to have a two-minute date, followed by a few minutes of the hosts asking them questions, cracking jokes, and occasionally roasting them.On stage there is a table between participants with two buckets containing questions. The buckets are labeled “deep” and “dirty”. At any point, a participant can pull a question from one of the buckets.At the start of the show I swore to myself, if they called my name, I would not use those questions. You see, I am a writer, an artist, an independent thinker. I’m above using some random prompts written by god-knows-whom. My questions have to be artisanal and hand-crafted.They do draw my name out out of a name bucket. I end up on stage with a cute blonde woman, about 30 years old. The date starts:Hosts: “Why did you decide to come to a comedy speed dating show?”Me: “My whole life is a joke.”Her: “Is this your first time at a show like this?”Me: “Yeah, what about you?”Her: “It’s my third time.”Me: “Seems like these shows aren’t the best way to fix your love life.”Then I have no idea what to say — my mind just goes blank. She’s silent too. We sit in silence for 10 more seconds, and then she says, “So, should we grab a question from the bucket?”I look at the buckets, recall the promise I made to myself, look back at her and say, “I’d rather just sit here in awkward silence.” And so we do, for the remaining a minute and a half.I am a big proponent of cringe equanimity — going against the cringe field to reach inner alignment as cringe is a thief of internal freedom. There’s an expression: “Kill the part that cringes, not the part that’s cringe.” The part of me that would cringe in this situation has been dead for a long time (or, rather, absorbed). So being on stage didn’t feel particularly cringe. The questions from the hosts that followe...