She’s been saying she’s nervous for the past hour, but now it’s starting to show.

It’s about 20 minutes before the start of the semester’s first Woo Hoo Comedy Hour show last Saturday, and Leah Jubara is on her hands and knees, digging for the Diet Pepsi cap that her jittery hand sent tumbling underneath one of the leather chairs in the Schine Student Center’s Panasci Lounge.

Jubara, a junior television, radio and film major, is the show’s host and the only female scheduled to perform stand-up tonight. It’s her first time hosting.

Upright after finding the soda cap, she makes small talk with a few people, occasionally digging her hand into the denim jacket that covers her brown and orange patterned dress.

She paces while staying in place, her left leg kicking up rhythmically with each third step, her body swaying in a knock-kneed waltz with anxiety.

‘My heart is shaking,’ she says when a friend asks how it’s going. She chases off her words with an uneasy laugh.

Things get easier once she’s on stage, but that still seems far away.

This is Jubara’s third year with Woo Hoo. She said she was never into stand-up before she performed in the second semester of her freshman year, but she gave it a shot just to impress Woo Hoo’s founder and original host, Josh Simpson, a 2006 graduate with a degree in television, radio and film.

With no tryout process necessary to get slotted in the show, Jubara just got on stage and started talking about awkward things in her life. Something clicked. She kept coming back, even if she still doesn’t watch much stand-up comedy.

Harry Shafer, a 2007 television, radio and film graduate, hosted last-year. Now it’s Jubara’s turn.

She’s the one responsible for scheduling shows (they try to have one every two weeks), crafting the show’s lineup, introducing the performers, helping set up the chairs in Panasci – not to mention writing material for her own act.

‘I’m more of a worrier, so I’m like, ‘Oh, I have to make this good. If it’s horrible, it’s my fault,” Jubara said. ‘So I feel a lot more pressure than when I was just actually performing as a performer, not the host.’

She was calmer earlier, sitting around with a few of the others performing tonight. Jubara laughs more than she jokes when she’s with the other comedians.

Most of the crowd had yet to arrive, so there was still some time for them to greet each other, talk shop, trade stories and worry. Mostly worry.

It’s like a psychiatrist’s office with no doctor available: the patients just talk among themselves in the waiting room.

Alex Adelson, a sophomore in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, sighs as he takes his seat.

‘Well, I feel rusty,’ he says.

He’s not alone.

‘I never give myself enough time to prepare,’ says Andrew Benedict, a junior English and Textual Studies major. ‘I don’t know why I don’t.’

Everyone has issues. Jubara can’t decide who will close the show. Adelson can’t remember the introduction to one of his jokes. Someone spilled a beer on Benedict’s arm right before he left for the show.

The biggest problem, of course, is a simple one. Stand-up comedy is hard.

‘If you have a crowd that’s not really into it, or gets offended early – which does happen – you feel like you’d rather be pulling teeth,’ Adelson says. ‘Silence is the worst thing ever. It cuts right through you. You’re like, ‘Hey, I used to be funny.”

That’s the dilemma facing Jubara as the show starts. She steps up onto the small platform that Woo Hoo uses as a stage, pulls the microphone out of its stand and welcomes the crowd.

‘So I guess we’ll just get started and I’ll do my bit and we’ll get on with it,’ she says. ‘I’m just going to talk about a lot of like, awkward events that either I’m planning or have already happened.’

Her first joke, about teaching her young cousins that dogs go ‘Caw-caw,’ doesn’t go over well. Earlier, she had stressed how important the first joke was. So this is a rough start.

Jubara presses on, the words coming.

‘But the best one that I can teach them is whenever I give them pop, I’m going to give it to them in a brown paper bag and tell them all the cool kids call it 40s.’

The crowd erupts at that one. The pressure’s off.

‘My sister is so conservative that she won’t know what this means, so she’ll just think it’s funny and laugh it off until we go to a restaurant and the kids go to order their drinks and they’re like ‘We want 40s!”

Now she’s rolling. Jokes about eyeball-lingus and her doctor’s ‘peda-smile’ go over well. Even her transitions – ‘One-night stands are really awkward,’ ‘I have a really creepy doctor’ – hit for laughs.

She’s breezing through her set now and slides into her final joke of the night:

‘I hated clowns my whole life, I hated them,’ she said. ‘And my best friend for her seventh birthday party had a clown, and the feet just screamed ‘Stomp on me, stomp on me.’

‘So I ran up and I stomped on them with both my feet, and I just looked up at him and I was like, ‘What’s with the make-up, not good enough the way God made you? Sinner!’ And that was the first party I had gotten thrown out of. Seven years old.’

And that’s Jubara’s act, four solid minutes of material to get the crowd going for the rest of the night.

She introduces the next comedian, and then bounds off the stage, accepting a hug or two from friends.

‘It’s easy,’ Jubara said, ‘when people are laughing.’

Published on September 10, 2007 at 12:00 pm