Review Mode: From the Shame Reel’s Greatest Hits

Here’s an interaction from 2021 that’s sort of a shame classic for me — a clip pulled from the best-of compilation reel that’s always projected on loop on the back wall of my brain.

Welcome to Review Mode, a biweekly newsletter where I mark up my social interactions, mining my, like, medical-grade self-monitoring for your reading pleasure.

Okay, before you read the below, I need you to know that I know it’s bad.

It’s shallow, it’s slimy, and it’s not totally un-sociopathic. Which is a bummer — usually, I strive for not at all sociopathic. Anyway, here’s a story of how I burned a bridge.

So, we’re going back to Fourth of July 2021. I was at a party with this cool, gorgeous comedian who we’ll call Lana. She was in town from London doing a few shows.

Lana’s someone who, like — if you were to invent someone for the sole purpose of triggering my desperate need to be liked, it would be Lana. She’s like if the most popular girl from your high school was queer and did comedy that was alt enough to make you feel less cool than her but mainstream enough that everyone liked it. Also, she’s nice enough that, if she doesn’t like you, you know it’s your fault.

Plus, we had just enough mutual friends that getting her to like me seemed attainable but still a reach.

I was chatting with Lana and some of her other hot, cool, aspirational friends, and we got onto the subject of how networky the party was.

“Right?” I said. “Like, this is bad, but I feel like, when I find out someone I’m chatting with isn’t a comedian, I immediately get less interested.”

Bad, right?

She agreed. Ended the conversation immediately, excusing herself to get another drink.

But hang on. I wanna give you guys some context for where I was at in this moment. It came down to a scarcity mentality thing. (And look, I’d love to cultivate an abundance mentality, but with so many people already doing that, I feel like there’s barely any abundance left for me.)

You remember the summer of 2021, right? We’d all just come out of quarantine. Everyone was so grateful to be in shared spaces that it felt like we were all living in one big Don-Draper-created Coca-Cola commercial.

Pre-COVID, I’d really struggled to make friends in comedy. Comedians, famously, aren’t the nicest people. (For instance, comedian Lukas Arnold once called me “Hunchback of Not-a-Dame,” which sounds really mean if I deliberately exclude the context that it was in a roast battle.) I was starting to feel like maybe I’d never find community.

But that summer, with so many new people in the scene looking for connection, I was starting to find my social footing. People were being nice and like inviting me to stuff. It was crazy. Still, I had the feeling, This could all go away at any minute.

As you may have gathered from the premise of this newsletter, socializing can be pretty draining for me. So, I’d decided that every second I was spending out needed to be an investment in building my comedy community. I felt like I had to strike while the iron was hot. (The iron being comedy friendships and hot being everyone else being almost as lonely as I was.)

Flawed, but kind of understandable, right? Right? (Please say it’s kind of understandable.)

Still, even if you can get onboard with why I was being kind of cynical about socializing, it doesn’t explain why I would choose to admit it to random acquaintances. And really, that just comes from a lack of self-awareness. Like, I knew it was bad, but I thought it was little-bad, not big-bad.

Any success I’ve ever had connecting with people comes from leading with the embarrassing. It’s my one move. You know, like, “I never know where I’m supposed to stand at parties like this,” or “I feel like everyone here got a better SAT score than me.”

(Incidentally, someone who did get a good SAT score would know that it should technically be “better … score than I.” And this is why I have trouble making friends.)

Apparently, my whole confession strategy works less well when what I’m leading with is, “I’m looking at people exclusively in terms of what we can offer each other professionally.” Not so endearing, turns out.

I wanna be really clear that this is not how I relate to people anymore. I’m not that guy at a party who’ll stop talking to you just because you don’t do comedy. In fact, I’ll be desperately relieved to hear it, and then I’ll probably monopolize your attention until you, too, need to go get another drink.

I’m not sure whether that change is actually a sign that I’ve changed or just a sign that, now that I have made friendships I feel secure in, I no longer need to be that calculating. Maybe, if I ended up in the same situation again, I’d be just as a-little-sociopathic.

Lana continues to avoid me while she’s in town, which frankly is to her credit. That’s a pretty good reason to not like someone. (Interestingly, Lana’s friends have been pretty forgiving. Guess those guys have no discernment.) It’s a bummer that Lana’s not gonna whisk me off to cool, hot people land.

It’s okay, though — there are plenty of other people I desperately want to impress whose opinions of me I can still use as a measure of my worth.

The lesson I sure hope I learned from this: Don’t treat people like commodities. Or, if you’re going to treat them like commodities, at least for the love of god don’t tell anyone.

Carson’s life updates:

• Happy Chanukah! I haven’t lit a menorah once yet, which feels weird, but my dad and I did say a shehecheyanu together at the Yo La Tengo Chanukah concert, which feels like it counts.

  • Yo La Tengo had a jam band open for them, and for a minute, I was like, “Huh, maybe I do like jam bands,” and then it kept going, and I was like, “never mind.”

• Happy New Year’s! For 2024, I had three resolutions — a professional one, a romantic one, and an inappropriate one. I only accomplished the inappropriate one. This year, I’m hoping to put up better stats.

• If you’re a gay trans man who had odd relationships with gay cis men before transitioning, HMU. I’m working on a writing project, and I’d love to hear more about your experience.

The Boilerplate

Carson Olshansky (still they/them, despite the haters) is a Brooklyn-based comedian and writer. If you don’t already, you can follow them at @carsonolshansky on Instagram and TikTok and at @carson-olshansky on YouTube.