No. 149: DANISH AMHED a.k.a. THE GHOST / It was a story about stand-up. Two years after publication, it landed with an unwritten, tragic punchline. You'll laugh, you'll cry. I mean, you'll really cry.
I met Danish at a comedy class, did shows with him, got to know him, at least that's what I thought. After the mic drop his life came into focus: He was blind but I was the one who could not see.
What with the World Series being contested off in the Sun Belt and the NFL season rolling along so quickly that the online betting services’ algorithms can barely keep up, I figure readers of the How to Succeed in Sportswriting (without Really Trying) SubStack can use a break from sports.
Today I offer up a bit of all-too-human comedy, engineered to make your heart sink like mine.
Just this photo on the stage here is enough to cause amusement (yours) and evoke woe (mine, clearly visible on my shovel-dented grill). Who dressed me?
BACK in 2015 I decided to take a class in stand-up comedy at Second City in Toronto. I had tried to do it a couple of times and had even won an amateur contest back in college days—as far as the contest went, it didn’t hurt that I was working as a doorman in the bar.
I had no idea what might come of the comedy class and certainly had no intention of writing about it. For all I knew, a single class might have been harrowing enough to scare me back in the seats in the back of the room. It turned out to be a good time and pretty quickly stand-up became a passable excuse for getting out of the house a couple of times during the week. Nothing beats the exhilaration of a joke landing.
So it was that I wound up writing about it for Maclean’s in early 2016 and here’s the text in bold below. A deeper dive thereafter follows, including some heartbreaking stuff.
IT’S NO JOKE: One sports writer’s adventure in stand-up comedy
How does fifty-something sports writer Gare Joyce become a rookie in the stand-up biz? Well, it’s a funny story …
It’s no place for the maudlin or the claustrophobic. At open-mic Monday nights like this, the Corner Comedy club packs 60 cheeks into the 30 seats on the floor. A procession of comics will make their way to the stage one by one—51 on this night. They can’t all fit in the club, so they smoke in the alley and squint to read their set lists by streetlight. Vandad Kardar, the host, introduces each performer. The setting is simplicity itself: spotlight, stool and microphone. Nothing as superfluous as a mic stand.
For those in the seats, every shaking hand and every bead of flop sweat is painfully plain here at stand-up comedy’s entry level. The pros come out to test material in front of a focus group paying a $10 cover, but they’re outnumbered by aspiring amateurs. Not that it’s the card from the office going up to tell the latest joke he heard. The Corner is a venue for performers who’ve written their own material, who’ve practised it, who are seeking approval, desperately, cravenly, while trying to look like they don’t give a damn.
The comics skew young. A few go from gig to gig by skateboard. To the degree of geek they know chapter and verse of their heroes: Louis C.K., Dave Chapelle, Amy Schumer. I am skewed old. I snuck in to see Bob Hope at the CNE, sat in the crowd for Bob Newhart, parked in standing room for Jackie Mason. I was geek before they had geek.
The red light flashes. A gross-out comic finishes his scatological set and hands the mic to Kardar, who has shuffled the order, impromptu. “Next up: a friend from Second City,” Kardar says. “Gare Joyce.” How a fifty-something* sports writer got to be a rookie in the stand-up business is pretty straightforward. I saw no point in rushing into it.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A Bay Street stockbroker, a cosmetics salesgirl in a babushka, a bagpipe player, a hip-hop artist, Morticia Addams and an albino from Pakistan walk into a bar. Okay, there are a few other warm bodies, including me. And yeah, it’s actually a classroom above a bar on Toronto’s Blue Jays Way. We signed up for Second City’s stand-up comedy class, and passed our audition when we paid our $306.
The school of comedy that turned out the likes of John Candy and Mike Myers offers Stand-up 101, a course that promises to take neophytes from zero to hysterical in six weeks. The man on this fool’s errand is Jim McAleese, a genial semi-retired comic. A lifelong Catholic, McAleese had a religious experience in 1972 at Massey Hall when he saw George Carlin, the counterculture icon whose legendary bits included “The seven words you can’t say on television.” “Here was a guy in a T-shirt and long hair,” McAleese told the class. “I was just a teenager but I knew when I saw Carlin what I wanted to be.”
It would be seven years before McAleese worked up the nerve to step on stage at the original hub of comedy in Toronto, Yuk Yuk’s. He killed that first time, even though he had vomited 90 seconds before going on stage. He was soon working main shows. Nearly four decades and a million guffaws later, he is passing on his hard-won wisdom to novices like me. He spends the first session walking us through the basics—punches, tags, callbacks and act-outs—before getting the cardinal rules of comedy. “It has to be true,” he said. “It has to be personal. It has to be visual . . . you’re standing there but they have to see a movie. It has to be tight, tight as a frog’s ass, which is water-tight. But just say ‘tight.’ And did I mention it has to be true?”
Okay, this is true. Six months later, everyone in that class has stayed in touch on a daily, maybe closer to an hourly, basis, kicking around material, booking trips to open mics around town, two or three nights a week. The cosmetics person, Nora Marku, dons a babushka to honour her Albanian roots and avoid getting carded. Dan Donnelly, the bagpipe player, and owner of a Ph.D. in musicology, has ignored our imprecations to work Amazing Grace into his act. The hip-hop artist, John Orpheus, trained as a Shakespearean actor but has embraced stand-up because he was tired of being typecast as Othello. In the role of Morticia Addams is Liisa Ladouceur, a Gothic vision in chalk and coal dust. The albino from Pakistan is Danish Ahmed, who has no fear of audiences because, with 20/200 vision, he can’t see them.
Along the way we recruited Muslim businessman Miraz Manji, Chinese model Ophelia Wang and Derek Richards, a guy who is a ringer for Larry the Cable Guy, except he actually works for a cable company. With me factored in, we’re surely over-representing the white male demographic in Toronto’s astonishingly diverse stand-up grassroots. The group needed a handle, and for now it’s Shameless, Still Nameless. The Nameless for short.
By the estimate of Joe Tuccitto, owner of the Corner, 200 comics are out there nightly in Toronto, most working two or three shows, some as many as five sets in clubs, at open mics, wherever there’s a stage and a spotlight. Tuccitto figures another 1,500 get out once or twice a week, like the Nameless. Odds are 100 to one against that any of us will get as far as Jim McAleese did, headlining clubs.
Our motivations range widely. For the driven Miraz, stand-up is a start-up business and he’s giving it a year or so to find out if there’s money in it, which is what you’d expect from a guy named the Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year by Toronto’s Board of Trade. For me, well, I could reach for the sportswriter’s handbook of clichés and put it down to love of the game. But there is a crossover between sports writing and stand-up. Ever since I got into the biz 30 years ago, my favourite sports scribes have always been the funniest—in L.A., Jim Murray was at once king and jester, every column reading like Johnny Carson’s monologues. Bill Simmons, a guy who worked with my former editor at ESPN, went completely Hollywood; Simmons did double duty, writing for Jimmy Kimmel by day and filing columns by night. Murray and Simmons set the bar impossibly high.
In writing about games people play, funny has the highest degree of difficulty. Many in my tribe try gags to break up the monotonous cycle of one-game-at-a-times and giving-it-100-per-cents. Most fail. Much safer to go poignant. Or wistful. Or angry. You try the comic at your peril—dreading your editor’s “I don’t get it.” I’ve heard that one too many times to think I have a future in stand-up. The best-case scenario: My friends in the Nameless make it and give me an opportunity to write for them, just for old times. More likely Miraz will need a nightwatchman down at ManjiCo world HQ.
Okay, you’re asking: What happened to the Bay Street broker? He quit. What chance did he have, with his mentions of Holt Renfrew’s valet parking and his reunion at Lower Canada College? With stand-up comedy, the privileged need not apply. Stand-up is the martial art to which the outsider resorts when trying to avoid harassment or persecution. Imagine Don Rickles as a little shmendrick raining down insults on a playground anti-Semite’s tiny forehead. You saw Trump on SNL, right? In stand-up, the well-born really can’t be expected to overcome all of life’s advantages.
As for what places me in life’s margins, I’ve resided there for as long as I’ve covered the perspiring arts. I don’t golf, I don’t smoke cigars and the last steak I ate was grilled in 1974. Along press row I’m like George Carlin rolling a joint beside the Rat Pack swilling martinis: A square, soy-based peg.
I’m in front of the audience at the Corner, my 16th open mic. I wait for the applause to die down. Which it does immediately. I can hear the toilet flush. To open, I do a callback to the gross-out comic’s last joke. My one-liner features three of the seven words you can’t say on TV, and a colostomy bag. The joke is in such colossally bad taste it could not have been reprinted in a family magazine—or the pages of Hustler. And of course it was the biggest single laugh I’ve ever got.
With a strong start, my set flies by. I can see by the stopwatch on my phone I’ve hit the four-minute mark, time to finish strong. True. Personal. Visual. Tight. And true.
“Can someone time 10 seconds for me?” I ask.
I get a volunteer. I put my finger to my wrist.
“I take my pulse more often than you check the time,” I said. “Every hour. Not to see if it’s fast. Just to see if it’s there.
“Ten years back I came down with pneumonia. Doctor checked me out. He said, ‘Your heart is operating at 15 per cent efficiency. Do you have any questions?’ I said, ‘Yeah, should I spring for a yearly parking permit or just go monthly?’
“I got the paddles three times. Trying to get my heart into rhythm. Didn’t work. The only lasting effect: I get sick to my stomach when I call CAA for a boost.
“So I had to have heart surgery. I get wheeled into the OR. Do you know what it’s like when you don’t know if it’s the last time you’ll see the love of your life? My missus said, ‘I love you.’ I couldn’t bring myself to say what I wanted to: ‘I hate sticking you with the credit card bills.’
“She was weeping. Maybe she knew.
“I’m right as rain now. Heart’s like a bass drum. But I check my pulse. If I ever check it and it’s not there, well, I don’t know what I’d do. I’d figure out something fast.
“Thanks for being a great audience. I gotta go charge Joe’s defibrillator.”
I hand Vandad the mic and step off the stage. I slump in a chair among the Nameless. If I’m going to die, let it be here.
I had a lot of fun writing the piece from Maclean’s. That’s a good thing because I didn’t make a dime doing it. As a staffer at Sportsnet which was launching a magazine, I was an employee of Rogers, but writing stuff other than sports and writing for Maclean’s, the outfit’s general-interest magazine were not in my job description. Nonetheless it was deemed that I did this on my own time and of my own volition. All I came away with was the warm feeling that comes with the knowledge that I had made a personal contribution to the company’s most profitable quarter ever.
That’s not the only grievance I have, you. The mag sent a photographer to shoot the crew from the Second City stand-up class and our new found friends—all came out to the Corner in their Sunday best with the hope that we’d come away with a 8-by-10 of the group that we could use for publicity purposes. Alas, when the story ran, it featured only a photo of the least-arresting member, me, the shot that appears at the top of this SubStack. The photographer never returned our calls. Less than ideal.
This was only made worse when a friend who was editing another Canadian general-interest magazine—figuring out which requires little use of your imagination, as there’s only one other—told me that she wished I had written the story for their pages. You and me both and not simply for filthy lucre.
Reader, I know there’s at least one do-over in every entry on the How to Succeed in Sportswriting (without Really Trying) Substack and in this one there’s more than a few. Fact is, the piece feels squeezed, almost desiccated.
I’m not taking an issue with the line edit in Maclean’s. I don’t know that you can track down an editor I’ve worked with who would tell you that I’m difficult to work with. I’m the farthest thing from the change-not-one-comma-of-my-copy prima donna and they are legion in the business, never invited to the staff Christmas party.
No, the issue was editorial real estate: The piece was accorded two pages in the magazine—not insignificant space in the grand scheme of things and you might think more than enough for a first-person essay. That’s said, the online version of the story could have run much longer than the one that appeared in the print edition.
I can hear you saying, “Contrary to your opinion, we actually could get too much of you.”
My hope was not to get more of me into the text, but rather more of everyone else. I tried mightily to strike a balance—no more space dedicated to me than to Jim, the comedy teacher at Second City, and Joe, the proprietor of The Corner comedy club. Alas, my friends from the comedy class were reduced to, well, not thumbnail references so much as little-fingernails, mere cut-outs of the cut-ups. An online version of the story could have filled in the characters. What’s more, the online version could have even featured video of the folks in the class performing.
The piece for Maclean’s doesn’t overstate it: Despite having nothing in common, we fairly instantly bonded. Here, though, I regret to report what you might have presumed to be the obvious—it was too good to last.
We tried to co-ordinate Nameless shows but organizing events is a challenge with three people holding down jobs, never mind the better part of a dozen and a couple of them coming in from other area codes. So it was that people fell off the list, a couple pulled themselves out of the rotation and a few others stopped doing comedy completely. We’d gone three months, probably more, without a single sour word being exchanged in our daily conversations and messages exchanged … but, as would seem inevitable, in time at least one was miffed at someone about something and suddenly a comedy room with dozens of empty seats wasn’t big enough for the two of them.
Yeah, not just not funny, but the seeming antithesis of comedy.
I did stay in touch with Dan Donnelly and he’s still doing comedy and still not working the bagpipes into his sets. An untold bit of his story, which couldn’t be addressed for reasons of space: Dan was struggling to find work in academic circles, a not-so-small crisis given that, as an American citizen with an expiring work visa, he needed gainful employment to stay in Canada.
I did stay in touch with Derek Richards, the Larry the Cable Guy doppelgänger. Derek was the most organized of us—only a few of us kept running notebooks bit Derek compiled spreadsheets for his material. Full-time fatherhood and uncertainty in his cable gig prompted him to enrol in teacher’s college and these days he’s playing for an audience of fourth-graders. Tough room.
I did stay in touch with John Orpheus, whose skill set I vastly undersell in the Maclean’s piece. I did a few sets with him at comedy clubs but also saw him at a musical residency that he had in Toronto’s west-end. I remember one day sitting in Sportsnet’s offices watching one of JO’s videos.
My editor came by my desk and asked me what I was doing watching something so clearly outside my demographic. When I told him that the guy behind the shades was a friend of mine, my editor didn’t believe a word of it.
PenguinRandomHouse also published JO’s critically acclaimed memoir under his square name, Michael Antonio Downing and Saga Boy has set him off on a writing career.
(I’m going to track down my good friend and do an entire SubStack entry with him—I’m hoping to line him up for the Toronto Mike’d podcast, one where I co-host like I did with Don Stevenson of Moby Grape last week.)
Dan, Derek and the Artist Occasionally Known as John Orpheus aside, I feel like poorly served Danish Ahmed. (His name as listed on Facebook is listed as Danish Saood Ahmed, because the name seems to be something like South Asia’s John Smith.
OKAY, I’ll get this out of the way. The first impression I had of Danish is that he smoked weed to a degree that would have scared Mitch Hedberg. I don’t partake but after a night at a show with him I couldn’t have passed a urinalysis because of second-hand toke. I guess I could have hinted at it in the piece, but like I’ve mentioned above, space fairly limited me to a couple of details about each of my classmates and his wide, wide circle of friends were really what set him apart.
Fact is, I thought they were something more than friends. It seemed like he inspired a cultish devotion. When I was in the class and in early days in stand-up I didn’t get it. As is so often is the case in my career and life, I finally got it, far too late.
Details from his Facebook profile
Social Media Manager at Danish Ahmed;
Executive Producer at Ordinary Words;
Former Founding Canadian Arc Angel; Canadian Faculty at Humanity Unites Brilliance;
Went to Northern Secondary School;
Lived in Toronto, Ontario;
From Karachi, Pakistan; Single.
A slightly more than thumbnail profile: Five years prior to Second City, Danish had run for the Ontario provincial legislature as a candidate of the Party for People with Special Needs. He was an advocate for special-needs folks and a motivational speaker.
On December 30 2017 he posted three messages on Facebook, aphorisms marinated in positivity.
IF YOU WANT LIGHT TO COME INTO YOUR LIFE, YOU HAVE TO STAND WHERE IT’S SHINING.
This seemed completely apropos, a piece with a class that we took preparing us to stand on stage under a spotlight.
TAKE A MOMENT TO APPRECIATE HOW AWESOME YOU ARE.
Yeah, take that moment. It will help balance out the feeling of gut-wrenching insignificance that is your alcohol-free hangover from an open-mic in front of a crowd of five people yawning and waving for their cheques.
BE WITH THOSE WHO BRING OUT THE BEST IN YOU, NOT THE STRESS IN YOU.
I hadn’t seen Danish in a while … I could have read judgment into that, but soldiered on.
Actually, I exaggerate. I hadn’t seen Danish much, but I saw him on or about December 27 at an improv show at Social Capital on the Danforth. He was coming out to support a friend who was performing and he told me that he was doing more improv than stand-up. Pretty separate circles in Toronto, which would explain why I hadn’t seen him.
On the last day of the year a friend of his named Ash Silva posted this message:
I'm in shock that my long time friend and the young man we produced our very first big event together 10 years ago in 2008, is no longer with us. Rest in peace Danish Saood Ahmed
Danish, inspite of his many challenges from being sexually and physically abused as a child, coming to Canada and enduring the bullying not just because he was from Pakistan but also being albino and to top it off Danish was blind .. yet despite these challenges, he went on to study and immerse in his self and personal development travelling far and wide to take courses, toastmasters, writing books to entering the world of improv so he could master his presence on stage and impart his wisdom and inspiration that the world is a good place and that anyone struggling had only to know and reach out for help that was always there from a kind word to a hand up
In fact he became so connected on Social Media that he maxed out on not one but two FB pages with 5000 friends each and had to start a third one. Through the last 10 years we became great friends and had a chance to discover Danish' dreams which he never stopped dreaming for himself and others to make our world a better place for all
Danish, leaves those of us who knew him with a hole that asks why? and while i may never understand what pain can cause this .. we can know that our world is a better place because Danish lived and made our lives brighter because of his
Thank you Danish Saood Ahmed for shining your light on mine
Yeah, I tried to boil his life down to a couple of lines, even a sight gag. Sometimes fail is just baked into the journalism.
I heard different accounts of how he died and none matter at all, only that he wasn’t around anymore. I posted this.
A few of my Facebook friends made notes.
I was lucky to find my little entry among thousands—yes, thousands—of tributes to him popped up in social media. I was also lucky to find the video of Danish’s set when our Second City stand-up class played our grad show at Absolute Comedy. (Click on it below.) As mentioned in that Facebook entry above, I wrote a bunch of jokes for Ahmed and a whole bit about getting stereotyped as a ghost. A couple of things in this set have my fingerprints in it—the don’t-adjust-the-colour is obviously Joycean.
My piece in Maclean’s did him no justice and that one-liner was so wrong it hurts. No colour? The man was all colours, encompassing the entire spectrum, everything on the artists palette, pastels, Day-Glo and Technicolour … and I did nothing more with him than an outline in charcoal.
Oh, and our sets were supposed to be only five minutes—the light comes on at four minutes and anything more than five-and-a-half is considered extremely bad manners. Danish blew his time to bits but it was impossible to hold it against him when he couldn’t see the light but felt the love.
One footnote on the reference to “fifty-something sportswriter” was the funniest line according to my buddies. I was fifty-nine and seven months at the writing.
Another footnote added later: I found this Facebook entry with our comedy class going out to drop our first sets, with Danish’s being the last comment on a good night out. I wish we’d been able to hang together more closely—I see John every now and then, not often enough, and Dan I bump into occasionally. Beyond that, though, out of touch completely.
