When I first began doing comedy after 10 years as a juggling act, I promised myself to have just one rule: don’t pander. If I couldn’t figure out how to make what was funny to me funny to others, I told myself, then I’d move on to the next thing. As a juggler I’d tried to entertain every audience imaginable just to make a living, and I couldn’t see the point of going down that road again with comedy.

There was plenty of trial and error in that process. Comedy is more susceptible to the instant gratification of bad habits than most professions, because verbal self-indulgence is all but required for the beginning stand-up. Cheap laughs are lifesavers for a struggling newcomer, and the thrill of wantonly crossing the line can be heady stuff.

But both of these tactics can also backfire, with the crowd either turning off – or worse, turning on the comedian. Experience, plus a couple cautionary tales from other comedians, eventually led me to adopt two additional guidelines: Don’t pick on the powerless, and never tell a joke than can get your legs broken.

I’ve crossed both lines since, though infrequently. I can vividly remember bringing an audience member to tears once with a cruel (but funny) comment. And while I’ve never been physically threatened because of a routine, I have been fired because of one.

It was on my first-ever cruise ship gig, back in 1990. I had a Dan Quayle bit that involved playing an actual recording where he mangled the United Negro College Fund’s motto: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste”. What the then Vice-President said was – and I quote -  “what a waste it is to lose one’s mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful”, thus achieving the ultra-rare Freudian misquote. I followed this recording with an admittedly tasteless joke about how Quayle and John Kennedy, who he’d been famously compared to during the 1988 vice-presidential debate, were indeed similar, at least in terms of the condition of their respective brains.

It wasn’t the tasteless part of the joke that got me fired, though. It was the fact that I had dared to mock the vice-president. After the show I saw a short, portly, bald man in a Rat Pack era tuxedo complaining stridently to the ship’s West Indian captain that he did not pay his money to “hear America’s second in command made fun of”. The captain noted the complaint, though he also asked the passenger with a look of concern if there was still free speech in America, or had that been changed? Nonetheless, it was almost a decade before I got another offer to perform on a cruise ship, leaving me with a strange debt of gratitude to Mr. Quayle.

In late 2005, I actually met the former vice-president. It was backstage during intermission at an Alice Copper Christmas benefit, where I’d just closed the first half. In deference to my guidelines, the season, and my mother’s side of my nature, I took a pass on the opportunity to thank him.