If you can, you should.

Occasionally, a comedy friend will come to me, frustrated, and confide they're thinking about giving up comedy. Stand-up's costly, it's hard to develop your work, and it's hard to get booked once you've become good. There are moments you feel like you're rocketing ahead, and there are moments when you look around and feel like you've gone nowhere.

My instinct with those folks is always to rush in and convince them to keep at it, but that instinct is wrong. The right answer is if you CAN quit comedy, you SHOULD quit comedy.

Now, I don't mean that in the "fine -- go ahead and quit" vein. I don't want you to quit. What I mean is the only reason for anyone to romance the cruel, sweet bitch-goddess Standup is that you can't live without the intense, indescribable joy of a room full of strangers laughing at your stuff. There's no strong argument other than that in its favor.

You probably won't make it big. Most don't. You probably won't even make a living at it. If you're lucky, you'll pull in more than you spend, making your momentary laughter fixes free to you, as you get better and better over the years.

There will be dry spells, both in opportunity and in your own creativity. There will be unfairnesses -- perceived and real (as a white male, I've had fewer of the real variety than many others in the field, but we all get them).

None of those negatives are overcome by the likely benefits of stand-up, unless you're a person who can't not be funny. If you can't not be funny, you owe yourself the sound of a room full of strangers laughing, and you'll move mountains to get to those moments any time you can.

If you can't not be funny, there are positives. First, of course, you get the laughter you can't live without. You also get special friends, who become very close because they inhabit the same splinter universe with you and share the same struggles and rewards.

You get the ability and self-permission to look at the worst life events with perspective and humor. You get a sense of competency that can, occasionally, bleed into and help market other areas of your life.

None of those positives can tip the scales, if you're not that person who can't quit stand-up. Being the person who can't survive long without the crazy thrill of a nuclear set is the only way to wring any success out of the field and the only way to make sense of the accompanying cost / benefits ledger. It's also your only shot at being one of the few who do make it big.

So please don't quit stand-up, if you can't quit stand-up. But if you can quit stand-up, well, you probably should.