Raygun

I can relate to the Olympic breakdancer.

Credit: Ezra Shaw

In June of 2018 I was invited to perform at a live show. I wrote a story for it. I got on stage. I read it. It crushed. The audience loved it.

Five days later, I did a friend’s show at a bar. I read the same story. This time it bombed. Hard.

I’m not talking about the kind of bomb where it probably went better than I think it did. No no. I didn’t get a single laugh. Not even a pity laugh. At one point, a man in the audience earnestly said “stay strong” in response to a line that was meant to be a joke.

It was the kind of bomb where I felt a hot shame explode in my body after I got off stage. To add insult to injury, the venue had no backstage. In order to exit I had to walk through the audience, facing the very people I’d just wronged by reading something they found so crushingly unfunny.

Me walking through Club Cumming, Summer 2018.

I was friends with the other performers on the lineup, all of them up-and-coming comedians whose fanbases were (deservedly) exploding. After the show we all went out to a diner together. As I picked on our shared plate of cheese fries I felt like an imposter among them.

What just happened? I asked myself over and over again.

One story. Two audiences. Two wildly different responses.

My broken little brain determined that the first audience was being kind. The second audience, I decided, was telling the truth.

This memory resurfaced for me as I was researching the subject of today’s letter.

Raygun is the Australian breakdancer who competed at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Credit: Frank Franklin

She scored 0 points. Her performance became meme fodder.

Soon afterwards a Change.org petition demanded accountability, calling Raygun out for “manipulating the selection process to her own advantage.” The petition amassed more than 45,000 signatures before it was taken down for false claims.

As this thorough Vox article points out, Raygun—whose real name is Rachael Gunn—earned her position in the Olympics “fair and square.”

It’s an interesting read. For one thing, it taught me that Gunn has a PhD in cultural studies and wrote her dissertation on breakdancing. But this is the part that sticks out for me most:

“Prior to her Olympics appearance, she represented Australia at multiple World Championship competitions between 2021 and 2023. She judged Red Bull’s preeminent BC One breaking contest. She’s an established local champ.”

Hm.

Celebrated and decorated within the breakdancing community. Reviled and mocked on the Olympic stage.

One performer. Two audiences. Two wildly different responses.

In an Instagram video Raygun called the blowback “pretty devastating.” She recently announced that she’s gonna take a step back from elite competitions.

Art is subjective. What some people like, others don’t. And in the absence of objective feedback, all of us who makes creative work are left to interpret the response on our own. Unfortunately it’s very easy to take the harshest response as the truest.

After that show I bombed I took a big step back from doing comedy shows, rationalizing that it made the most sense professionally. Work was picking up for me in other ways. Comedy, I declared, was something I just didn’t do anymore.

That was six years ago.

Lots of cool stuff has happened since then, but with each passing year my interpretation of that audience’s silence calcified into a truth I believed about myself.

Then, in August, my friend Karen asked me if I wanted to do ten minutes on her show. I immediately said no. Then I slept on it and realized how badly I wanted to say yes, but was so scared of bombing. I texted her to ask if the offer was still on the table. Thankfully, it was. I’ve been doing shows with some regularity since. I’ve been having so much fun.

Raygun and I are dealing with very different audience sizes. I bombed in front of sixty people. She became meme fodder in front of hundreds of millions. Still, I hope she’s able to do what I didn’t. I hope she’s able to distinguish between one audience’s response and the truth she believes about herself.