Stand up comedy can be a tough world to break into. It can take years of painful soul searching, disappointing performances, and pounding the pavement day in and day out with very little reward.
I get messages from 21-year old white dudes who have just gotten out of an expensive college and say 'Hey can I pick your brain?' and I have nothing to say to them because A. They already have all the advantages and B. My advice would be the same as anyone else: Go do open mics.
When I was a kid, there was so much talent outside of recorded music.
Be persistent and just keep going to open mics no matter what, even if just to watch and not perform. You'll find that even at your worst keep your head up because you'll still be better than other people's best.
When I started, I was very deliberate about making friends with people like John Mulaney who were really funny and wanted to go up and do as many open mics as I did.
Improv classes were too expensive, so I just started going to open mics. And the day I did it, I did, like, three because I just loved it so much. It was so much fun. And it wasn't good, it was just fun to do. It felt like a release.
I started by doing a little funny story, and then I started going to open mics. I realized I had a lot of work to do - you have to get over the stage fright and get your stage presence up. It took me some time, but I finally feel that I'm at a point where I feel comfortable on stage and giving my point of view.
I started working full time as a comedian in 2005, shortly after we did the Vince Vaughn 'Wild West Comedy Show.' I worked at the Four Seasons hotel from 1998 to 2005, so about seven years, just trying to put some food on the table and pay the rent while I went out to the open mics and got my feet wet with stand-up comedy.
I used to sing as a kid, but it was quite squeaky. I think I was about 19 or 20, and we used to go to these jam sessions and open mics. I just got the courage to sing one day. I don't think anyone expected it to sound like that.
I was always just like, 'Standups are making it up.' A lot of people have that myth about standup. And so it wasn't until I was in college for theater school in Boston that I realized I can actually start going to open mics and figuring this out.
I grew up in the spoken-word community. Before everybody had a home studio, or before we could get booked for shows, open mics were the only way to be heard by other people. It really gave me a chance to develop as a performer. Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10,000 people.
I go to more open mic nights than open mikers.
My friend gave me a VHS tape of Eddie Murphy's 'Raw.' I watched it so many times, I fell in love with it. I would watch it every day, just picking it apart. And then I started doing open mics around Maryland and D.C.: that's where I'm from. And I haven't stopped since.
There's a lot of open mics, a lot of comedy clubs. Whatever money I could make was OK with me. As long as I could pay the rent, eat food, and tell jokes, doing it was good enough for me.
I feel like most standup comedians do it the way I did it, where you just go to open mics and cut your teeth. Sketch and improv - they take a lot of classes. It's not unusual, the way I did it. It's just that, with standup, no one knows how to start because there's no book for it; there's no place you can really go.
When you get started in comedy, you're at the bottom of the totem pole. Not only are you not getting paid at these open mics. You're actually paying to do them.
Nick Kroll, A.D. Miles, Chelsea Peretti - those were the people I was always doing open mics with.
Before YouTube, I was playing in restaurants and doing open mics - every once in a while, I'd throw an original in there. And then YouTube kind of just opened doors for me, so once I felt like I had an audience to share music with, I began to share my original music.
I started going to the open mics every day in 2003. You make the comics laugh, they get you work, and you build up your reputation. It was a slow process.
