Buffalo Literature: Buffalo artist has done poetry, comedy, theater, film … now onto fiction

By P.A. Kane

This month’s featured local author is long-time, multi-dimensional Buffalo artist Tim Joyce. Joyce is a writer, actor and comedian. He’s toured his one-man play Blood Stained Tee-Shirt from Glasglow to Los Angelos. He has had plays produced in Chicago, Buffalo and the Canyon Moon Theatre in Sedona, Arizona. He co-starred in the film Love.Meet.Hope with Ed Asner, which won the best drama at the Los Angelos Independent Film Festival. He’s headlined at The Improv, Laff Factory, Comedy Store in Los Angelos, The Improv in Chicago and The Village Lantern in NYC.

These days, Joyce teaches improv and hosts poetry readings at Dog Ears Bookstore & Cafe. He is also working on his first novel. You can find him on Facebook and on the Tim Joyce Poetry Readers private group.

PAK—We both went to South Park High School in South Buffalo in the mid/late 1970s at the start of forced busing in the city. For many of us, it was our first exposure to people outside of our tribe, and for the most part, we got along and liked each other. For me, there was a little magic in that place on Southside Parkway. How did that experience shape and contribute to your development as an artist and a person?

TJ—I went to a Catholic grade school and it was ninety percent white Irish, Catholic, and the other ten percent was Polish and Italian kids. It was St John the Evangelist, and I had never really spoken to an African American until I was a freshman in high school at South Park. It opened my eyes to how racist my neighborhood really was. You know in the ’60s and ’70s, if you had a friend who was Polish, you could call him a Polack, an Italian friend a Wop—and they’d laugh. They would call you a Mick—and you’d laugh. But I found out that the “big word” for black people, doesn’t get a laugh, and I learned it the hard way. I had said it, thinking it was casual. Luckily, the guy I said it to became a friend of mine for four years. He explained to me there was a lot of history to that word, and I didn’t get to use it. I went home and thought about it, and knew he was right. As controversial as it was at the time, I think bussing was one of the best things America ever did. You know, it made a white working-class kid, like me, learn black kids weren’t some scary sort of thing and vice versa. They had dreams and aspirations, just like I did.

As an artist it was just exposure to different people. I had the same experience when I met gay people in the theatre department at Buff State. Suddenly, you are talking to somebody who is black or gay, and you realize their skin color or sexual orientation doesn’t matter. It matters to them because white people are oppressors. I mean, all you have to do is look at the MAGA movement, and you know that. In high school I learned, and it’s not a cliche, that if we all just met each other, it’d be a better world.

PAK—You’re a writer, actor, comedian, teacher, and I’ve heard you do a credible job singing The Pogues’ “Dirty Old Town.” That’s like hitting for the cycle. What fostered such a wide range of creativity?

TJ—I come from an extremely creative family. I’m the youngest of eight. When I had my first book published, it was a humor book I co-wrote with my friend Carl Kozlowski, and it was published by the eighth largest publisher in America at the time. We were actually selling well, and then Sept. 11 happened, and comedy books just tanked. But I was the fifth person in my family to get published by a real publisher. Everybody in my family sang, and all three of my older brothers acted on some professional level. I got to act with two of them. As far as singing, I have a nice singing voice—I can’t take credit for it. That’s an athletic skill. What’s terrible, as you get older, you lose an octave. Nothing you can do about it.

PAK—I’m not a big fan of poetry that requires the reader to do a lot of heavy lifting. I like story poems that take you by the hand and lead you to some new or higher understanding through imagery, insight and imagination. That’s what I like about your poetry—it can be read, understood, and enjoyed in real time. That said, how would you describe yourself as a poet? 

TJ—I think story poetry is interesting because there’s no denying it. Yet, in the community of people who get PhDs in writing, it’s almost as bad as being called sentimental. I’m occasionally sentimental, but I like to think of my poetry as confessional. To me, if you’re not talking about what you feel and using imagery to talk about it, and if you’re not talking about the quotidian day to day things of your life, who are you aiming for? I write longer lines than a lot of people. I try to really chop them down a lot, but to me, I like to let the metaphor speak. It’s funny, because my favorite writer is James Joyce, who is, like, the most coded writer of all time. And I really like Thomas Pynchon, who’s a very coded writer as well, but ironically, I don’t like writing that way. The first draft of the novel I’m working on is very close to being finished. I’m almost ready to show it to people in publishing and others. And in going back over the first draft, I realized I had repeated the same ideas over and over again, and found I had to chop them down in service of the story.

PAK—Since we’re here, let’s talk about the novel you’re writing. I know it’s about being a road comic. What was most challenging? What was most gratifying?

TJ—The most gratifying thing about the book is I didn’t realize how much it’s based on my experiences and my life. But the main character is not me, right? You know, he’s very close to me, but he’s a much shittier version than me, I hope. All the years on the road as a comic, there’s this dissipation of your morals and your ethics. You start becoming a compromiser. a liar, a cheater. Being away from home so much, suddenly anxiety and depression become issues. So, I excused all my behavior to that. Also, within 10 years, seven of the guys I started out with in comedy were dead and I wanted to write about that. So the book is about the toll that being away from home takes on a road comic. I think it takes a toll on anybody who is on the road, especially if you’re married.

PAK—So what was your process in writing the novel?

TJ—Mostly it was to sit at Dog Ears and pound it out. I didn’t work from any kind of outline because I was using my life on the road as a template. I had this incredible story of what happened to me out in LA as a basic story, only my character reacts differently than I did. I wrote it without looking at it until the first draft was complete. What I thought would take six months took two years, and once I wrote the final sentence of the first draft, I let it sit for a month before going back at it. When I read the first chapter, I said, ‘Holy Fuck, I’ve got so much stuff to fix in this’—not the least of which was that it was too flowery, too poetic, too clever. Looking at it, I also realized I had made the same point and used similar anecdotes in several chapters. But I had made it to the editing part. The first thing when I taught solo performance at Buffalo State, no matter what you’re writing— short story, poem, or whatever—finish it. Because you can fix shit that’s no good, but you can’t fix what doesn’t exist. The tragedy of most books or plays isn’t that they’re bad, it’s that they’re unwritten.

PAK—How does novel writing differ from writing a play or comedy or poetry?

TJ—The novel gives you an immense amount of freedom. You can write whatever the hell you want, because you can go back and change it. So I have a lot of room to cut, which makes me feel comfortable. I have a lot of room to rewrite, and the editing is largely rewriting for clarity, to make imagery better, and to not over emphasize the theme. I was so worried about the theme and the message, I realized by about the 10th chapter that we fucking get it—this guy is lonely. This guy is making bad choices. I said it a million ways, and I had to simply make him cry less. I mean, he was crying so much, which is funny, because my experience on the road as a comic involved tons of crying.

When it comes to stage writing, as I’ve experienced it, it works well when you show somebody your draft at a table read. What’s really nice about the table read is sitting back with my eyes shut and listening for the lines that don’t belong, clang. They sound like a pipe wrench hitting a brick wall. The lines that don’t belong cut themselves, they just go like shit. After you cut stuff, you might find missing or confusing stuff in the staged reading with people walking around and have to write  a scene to explain it. Once again, there’s the clanging noise.

PAK—You host The Fourth Friday Poetry Night at Dog Ears. Can you talk about how the evening is structured, what the vibe is like, and what newcomers can expect when they walk through the door?   

TJ—My wife, Connie, has become my partner. She takes care of the business side of it, collecting the donations that go to Dog Ears, which is a non-profit.

The vibe is pretty casual. I was very surprised—one, that we attracted an audience in the first place; two— that the audience was mostly writers who were my age or even a little older. But what I take the most pride in doing as the MC, while people are reading, I take notes and try to find really positive things that I think the writer themselves might not have realized is in their writing. So much of poetry is connector lines, and sometimes you don’t realize how beautiful they are. I try to find the connector lines and the connector concepts. And amazingly enough, people really like it when you point out the beauty in the connector lines. It’s a way to show that’s there’s more to the poem than the writer even thought. It’s really hard to do because I have to listen and write notes, and then I have to interpret those notes when I comment on the poem. But the most important thing I am looking for is the beauty in the writing that they are not noticing, because a lot of times, writers are way too self-critical. When Connie and I read our poetry to each other we’ll talk about cutting lines, and often the lines we want to cut are the most daring ones. So I try to find the daring lines and remind the writers they are beautiful. I try to point out the beauty that the writer missed, and they have more freedom in their poetry than they thought they did.

PAK—Tell us about the improv class you offer, also at Dog Ears. Again, how’s it structured, what’s the vibe like and what can newcomers expect?

TJ—The improv class is extremely intense. Partly because I studied at the training center of Second City, during my Chicago years, which is where they find the pool of talent they are going to eventually hire. I made the semifinal cut three times and was close to getting hired. That might seem discouraging, except I became the head writer of a sketch group there, which is where I learned to be a playwright.

When you come to Dog Ears for the class, you work on the core basics of how to improvise. You work on how to create a scene between two people that is real, that has real characters with real connection to each other emotionally. And if it’s funny, fine. If it’s not funny, fine. And we do some pretty deep exercises, working on spontaneous speech, one of which is called : It’s Tuesday, in which you’re given a two-word suggestion and you have to talk off the top of your head. And it doesn’t have to be about those two words, but you have to talk off the top of your head. It can include what happened in your day, what’s happening in your life, wherever the phrase takes you. But I don’t stop you until you’re too tired to talk. Sometimes I think it’s too soon, and I say “What about this? What about that?” So it’s a two-word prompt. It’s what in Zen Buddhism they call a Koan. And from there we work on doing actual scenes.

PAK—What can a newcomer who’s never done it expect?

TJ—Total acceptance. It’s amazing. We’ve been doing it at Dog Ears for two years, and I have a core of seven or eight people who almost never miss. But usually three or four new people show up, and we work on getting the basic techniques of improv. There are really only four or five basic rules that are easily explainable and demonstratable in less than a half an hour. To the people who have come a bunch of times, having those basic rules reminded to them is actually good. It’s like being a baseball player and having somebody telling you to keep your elbow up at bat. If you drop your elbow you’ll hit a pop fly, but if you keep your elbow up you’re more likely to drive the ball, so it’s a matter of proper stance. I basically put people in the proper stance and then let them go. And then, if they’re doing an interesting scene that’s beginning to go off the rails, instead of stopping it and saying, “You’re done,” we pause and talk about this choice or that choice.

One of the biggest things I believe in is the reveal. A person can learn a lot from the reveal. I have a huge following of people who take the class that are primarily writers, because it opens up your writing a ton. As a writer you learn how to spontaneously fix mistakes when you make them. The other thing that’s really cool about improv is that thing I said about a play—you can’t fix what doesn’t exist. But if you make a mistake on stage, the job of your improv partner is to guide you into fixing it. And the fixes are usually simple.

PAK—You were a road-comic for 30 years. Do you still have a set you perform, and what advice would you have for someone trying to get into that type of comedy?

TJ—I haven’t done a comedy set in four years. It’s my past. But if you want to give it a shot, get to every possible open mic. Comedy or even poetry open mics like the one we do at Dog Ears. I wouldn’t mind. It’s still spoken word, right?

As far as advice, I tell people where they lose the audience is in the setups. Stand up, like a newspaper article, should be the fewest words possible. If you were to go to an open mic tonight and you saw somebody do five minutes with funny ideas, but didn’t make you laugh, I guarantee the problem was that the setups were too long. The best setup contains all the information the audience needs to know to get the joke in the fewest words possible. The briefest possible setup to get you to the punch line. For example, I have this punch line from one of the most perfect jokes ever written. It’s more than a hundred years old and it was written by Henny Youngman—I met a man who said he hadn’t had a bite in three days. So I bit him. That setup is perfect. I met a man, he hadn’t had a bite in three days, so I bit him—it’s a good joke in about ten words, right?  

When I was on the road, making a living at it, I was obsessed with cutting down bits. Early on, the first time you take a bit to an open mic it’s a good idea to record it. Then listen to it and see what’s clanging. See what’s getting in the way of the punch line. One of the best structured jokes I ever wrote took me years to get it right. It goes—I used to work as a disc jockey, then I got fired. Next day, I got a job working as an operator for 9-1-1. That didn’t work out. See, I kept only sending an ambulance to the 15th caller. I can’t make it briefer than that. Sometimes, as a stand-up, you have to accept the fact that what you think might be a four-minute bit is actually just one good joke, right?

PAK— Of the various formats you’ve worked in, is there one you like best?

TJ—It’s changed over the years. I love improvising, but I can tell you that ’til the end of my life, which hopefully is not soon, I’m primarily a poet, and a writer. Part of me will always want to perform. The last dream I have is to front a bar band for just one night. That would be fun. Yeah, that’s it, just be the singer for one night.