Jaycee Woods

Worked on edit to my “Routine Breakup” draft. The spartan dialogue in the draft began:

Colt: Hey why do you look funny?
Willow: (giggles) N…no reason.
Colt: Are you sure because you are looking at me strangely?
Willow: (gulps) Yeah I’m fine, don’t worry about that.
Colt: What’s the gag? Do I have something on my face?
Willow: N…nothing! You’re fine you look gorgeous babe.
Colt: You look like you are about to explode. Tell me. I have ways of making you talk.
Willow: I don’t wanna say it…
Colt: Correction, you both do and don’t want to say. Listen to the angel on your shoulder telling you to spill.
Willow: Okay…okay…I’ll tell you…
Colt: Yes?
Willow: …..I…..I’m cheating on you…

Colt becomes Wally in the edit. I changed it from a dialogue into a scene of a comic doing standup, the beginning is becoming:

“Is it better to take the stage after a comic who died or one who killed?” asked Wally as he nervously faced a hostile and now drunk audience. “A show is supposed to increase momentum as each comic builds upon the prior to an orgasmic climax of laughter. Tonight, the venue appears to be breaking with tradition to follow a progressive approach. I’m gonna embrace that to lead you all into the cataclysmic fiery crash.”

Wally eyed the crowd for a reaction. Not even the truth could make this long-suffering crowd even smirk. Tonight, a parade of claptivist ‘comics’ abused the crowd with the same trite politically correct talking points. The last woman was the worst as her unoriginal words were not funny when better comediennes told them years before.

“My vagina…” Wally began. Audience members looked at each other confused as the formula was not being followed to cast the spell dissolving ‘the system.’ One guy in the audience leaned forward curious where the comic was going to take him. “…is gone. Recently, I broke up with my girlfriend. Don’t feel any sympathy for me as she told me that it was all my fault.”

Surveying the crowd Wally saw recognition gleam in the eyes of both the men and the women. The men remembered when they had been in Wally’s position of being shamed and blamed during a breakup, which an experienced man avoids with a quiet ghosting. The women anticipated the comic confessing how he was to blame.

“She said I worked too much,” Wally admitted. The women in the audience clapped hearing the familiar charge that a man was to blame. The men looked away while sheepishly grinning in the face of their own memories of romantic losses credited to that same cause.