How Forgetting Contributes To Greatness
The Grossweiner Law & Stand-Up Comedy (Comedy Mindhacks #14)
I’m always on the lookout for mindhacks in relation to comedy and, well, life, too. Recently, I discovered The Grossweiner Law. And no, I didn’t get the idea after downing a gas station hot dog followed by an emergency trip to a truck stop bathroom. Put simply, the Grossweiner Law says: mess up, move forward. I heard about it, oddly enough, while watching the new Owen Wilson series Stick.
In this show, Wilson plays a washed-up pro golfer turned life coach/driving range philosopher. And in episode 2, Wilson’s character explains this law by telling the story of PGA golfer Marvin Grossweiner. He was a man so committed to short-term memory loss, he could miss twenty putts in a row and still step up to the 21st like he’d never missed a shot in his life. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. It was that he refused to dwell in the failure.
Put differently: he had unshakable confidence... or possibly a minor head injury. (Either way, inspiring!) So, The Grossweiner Law is about what you do when you fail, fall, or in comedy speak, bomb. I lived it out just last week. I was workshopping a new multi-part joke before an open mic with half-a-dozen comedians I’d never met before. I got on the mic and ran my jokes by a few comedians and the silence was so heavy, I checked to see if I’d accidentally put them in airplane mode. It was like my joke made them power down.
Realizing it, I did what Grossweiner would do. I moved forward. I did so in this instance by cutting the majority of the joke from my set. I kept rolling. I didn’t cry about it. I didn’t send the joke to therapy. I just moved forward. And the 2 small parts of the joke I told in front of an actual audience, well, they didn’t land like I’d hoped.
So, when you bomb a joke and see the audience’s souls leaving their bodies, what do you do? Do you fold or keep going? You keep going! You can drop a saver line. You can roast yourself. Just don’t freeze. It’s the same kind of mentality Steph Curry has. The guy can miss 20 threes and still pull up from half-court with more confidence than God himself. Not really. But you get the point. It’s what makes Curry unshakable.
But the Grossweiner Law doesn’t just apply to comedy. It’s for life, too. You mess up at work? Keep going. Your kids find out you enjoy watching 90 Day Fiance? Move on. You send a risky text and autocorrect replaces “duck” with something less family-friendly? Don’t look back. Actually, on that one, you probably need to explain yourself a little and fix it. We’ve all been there.
When Wilson talked about the golfer, Grossweiner, he didn’t do so in the sense that he was great because he never missed. No, he was great because he forgot his misses. That’s what makes athletes and anyone else like him great. It’s not always the flawless execution, but lawless resilience and the willingness to forget your misses.
I think that’s part of what turns a comedian into a great, too. It’s what turns a parent into a pro or any other human into a functioning adult who occasionally showers. And that’s why I say it again as I end here: The Grossweiner Law is simple: mess up, move forward. Bomb at something? Move on. Miss the pitch? Swing again. Because truthfully, nobody but you really remembers how bad your last joke was, especially if you tell the next with enough confidence.