Just when you think you have it figured out, it’ll change on you. Just when you think you know how it works, it doesn’t.
I am, of course, a fan of comedy. I love comedy and comedians. Even after all these years. It can take more to make me laugh, and I know what sucks and why it sucks more than your average person, but watching great stand-up live or a great special is still one of the best feelings—it’s art. (Side note: Nothing is as deflating as hearing someone you like or your friends or family praise mediocre comedy or a comedian you don’t like. You feel a little piece of you die when it happens.
“You know that Clark Doreshin is such a funny guy!”
*dying inside*
“Yeah, he’s uh, definitely got something about him. Very funny.”
“Have you heard his joke about hairspray? It’s like it should be called Facespray because your whole face gets sprayed!”
“That is funny.”
You have to let it go and remind yourself that they don’t know any better and you have to let people like what they like, but still, it’s the absolute worst. If that sounds petty, it is. Comedy cliques are like middle school.)
A one-hour special is the cornerstone of achievement for any stand-up comic, and in 2012 I wanted to get my own. Comedy specials are how I discovered stand-up. When I first saw Eddie Murphy’s Delirious I laughed harder than I ever had in my life at that point. His swagger, his total command of the stage, the voices, the characters, ice cream! Eddie was an introduction to what was really funny. There was the funny you had experienced in your life thus far and then there was Eddie. I didn’t know a human being was capable of this level of hilarity. In a similar way, seeing Chris Rock perform Bring the Pain was a total revelation. Never before had I been so mesmerized for an entire hour. This was a different kind of funny, it was punching you in the face. It was fearless and smart. His bit about needing bullet control instead of gun control was an undeniable work of art. And Louis CK’s Shameless was effortlessly hilarious and honest. He articulated observations that I’d never heard in stand-up before, like hating a friend who has dumb questions like “What would you do if you had a time machine?” And the way he broke down “suck a bag of dicks” with genuine curiosity made me realize how genuinely examining even a crude insult can result in hilarity.
I had been a comedian for ten years in 2012. I had worked my way from being an MC who greets audiences as they order wings and beers to a “feature” act who does twenty minutes of material to warm up the crowd for the headliner to becoming a headliner myself. I was at the place I wanted to be, but there was one big problem. Even though I could perform an hour of material and kill, I couldn’t get anyone to buy a ticket to see me do it. Nobody knew who I was. I needed an hour special, and I needed it to air on a big platform so people could see my special, love it, and then buy tickets to see me perform. I told my manager at the time that I was ready for this. He made some calls but soon came back to me with a disappointing answer: Not now. The big players at the time, mainly Comedy Central, signaled that maybe later was an option. I didn’t feel like waiting, so I did what I would have told another comic to do: Do it yourself.
I hired an audio engineer, and I recorded an album on my own called White Girls with Cornrows. The title was based on a bit in the hour about knowing you are in a terrible neighborhood if you see a white girl with cornrows. If you see one, you can be sure she is down for whatever. Of course, this wasn’t the hour special that I was really hoping to do, but still, an audio-only recording of this material could reach a bigger audience than me touring and performing for people who were getting free tickets. It wouldn’t air on Comedy Central or HBO, but I could sell the CD at shows and I’d own the audio rights, so when Sirius XM or Pandora played a track, that $0.000023 generated was coming back to Papa.
I recorded my album at the Comedy Works South club in Denver. That’s the bigger of the two venues in Denver, but also the less desirable one. I wanted to record at the downtown location because that’s the club where all the comics love to perform, and with good reason. Comedy Works Downtown is like a cheat code for doing stand-up and it’s hard to explain why, but essentially, it’s the perfect comedy club. You go downstairs into a dark performance space with tight, low ceilings. You can pack the room with people so there’s maybe 280 bodies in there with not a lot of room for much else. The sound when you are killing is deafening. But the most impressive thing about it is it’s also the club where one of the greatest albums of all time was recorded: Skanks for the Memories by Dave Attell.
You become a fan of different comedians at different points in your life. I had gone through my Cosby into Murphy into Carlin and Def Jam phases, and by my early days as a stand-up I was at Attell. I was a latecomer to Attell’s comedy, but I fell in love with his work right away, and it was Skanks for the Memories that completely changed the way I thought about doing stand-up. Attell was all about the jokes.
Isn’t every comic all about the jokes?
No.
Comics care about different things. The message is important to some, the truth is what matters to others, raw vulnerability is at the top of some comics’ lists, but Dave put all that aside. His motivation was simple: What’s the funniest thing I can say about this? That’s all that matters.
Watching Attell work was always a treat. He would have crowds in the palm of his hand, and he did it in a way that I completely fell in love with. First, when he arrived at the club he would talk to the staff at the club like he was there delivering beer. He had this salt-of-the-earth quality that made me realize that a big-time act could actually behave that way: personable and accessible. He didn’t have any aloofness or arrogance to him. He talked to audience members so casually during a show, and he’d go from whatever he had asked them into an off-the-cuff hilarious comment, then into a masterfully crafted joke. It was incredible to watch. He took risks too. He’d do a joke on Thursday that killed, and then on Friday he’d try a different line instead of the punch line that already worked, then Saturday instead of going back to the proven line, he’d try yet another. It was inspiring. That might be hard to believe about a guy who can do thirty minutes on anal beads, but it’s true. And while we’re on the topic of anal beads, I’m here to say that dirty jokes aren’t lesser jokes. The notion that dirty makes it easy is nonsense. Go watch an amateur comedian tell “jokes” about blow jobs and sex and you will cringe at how badly it goes. That’s because simply being dirty isn’t enough. You have to craft the joke to make it funny.
There’s a danger when you become a huge fan of another comedian while you’re still young and honing your own act: You try to incorporate some of their techniques, but you end up just doing a shitty impression. I’ve seen it many times over the years, but looking back at yourself doing it is harder. First, I copied Chris Rock’s stage persona, and now I’d moved on to copying Dave Attell’s cadence, pacing, and I was even dressing like him! Yes, for a few years I looked like I was living by an underpass writing a manifesto.
Me doing my best Attell.
So I wanted to record my album at the Comedy Works Downtown location because it’s the better club for audiences (Downtown brings the young people, South club brings the suburban types) but also because it’s where Attell recorded his. But the club didn’t make it available to me. I just wasn’t big enough of an act. So I accepted the offer to play at the South club, and I did the recording there.
I hired a photographer I knew from the improv clubs to do the cover and graphics and boom—I had an album. A few major companies approached me about releasing it and distributing it through their shiny corporate labels, but I declined their offers. I wanted to release it myself. I figured if I had done all the work already, why chop it up with someone who is just going to put it on sites where you can sell or stream it? The technology had evolved to the point where we, the comedians, could do that ourselves. So I found a website called CD Baby that was actually developed for musicians, and I posted White Girls with Cornrows there. The site made your album available for purchase on all the big sites like iTunes and Amazon and allowed you to have physical copies manufactured as well. I clicked a button and ding ding ding—I had put out my own album. Something I had written, performed, and now owned. I wouldn’t have to split any part of it with a corporation, just a small fee with CD Baby. I was able to earn enough where I could move and pay bills for a while. It also gave me monthly deposits in amounts of money I had never seen at that point.
I always encourage comics to take this route and love seeing when they take it upon themselves to get their material out. We live in a time where you no longer need permission to be creative. You can actually do it all yourself. You should.
The next year, I got the opportunity I had been waiting for, praying for, pacing for: to do a one-hour special.
The path to getting it was different than I had imagined. See, in 2010, I was lucky enough to do a half-hour special on Comedy Central after my third year submitting. The long-running series was called Comedy Central Presents. Some of my favorite comics ever had a Presents, and when I got the call that I’d be doing one, I thought life couldn’t be better. I was following in the right footsteps.
I remember the day I recorded it, one of producers pulled me into a dressing room and said, almost as if it were something they could foresee, “This is going to change your road business,” meaning, “You’re going to start selling tickets now.” I felt a surge of adrenaline. I knew not to tell anyone, but I was secretly beaming. It was as if I had auditioned and was told, “Don’t tell anyone, but the director loves you.”
The night I filmed a Presents in 2010 with Matt Fulchiron, Kyle Kinane, and Jay Larson, who all shot that night as well.
Your road business changing is exactly what every comedian wants. Comedians want to be able to do shows and sell tickets. They want to perform for people who want to be at that show and who know they’re going to see a specific person, you know, a fan. That’s an important distinction, because all of us do shows for a long time for people who don’t necessarily know who they’re going to see perform. Before people know who you are in the world of stand-up, you perform to crowds who get free tickets. That’s right—free 99 is the price. How does that work for a business like a comedy club? It’s simple. Comedy clubs hire not-yet-famous comedians and pay them a small fee. The club “papers” or gives away free tickets to hundreds of customers who then watch a show for free but have a “two-item minimum.” The customer must order at least two items: burgers, nachos, beers. That’s where the money really is for the clubs: in the food and beverage. For a comic, those shows are tough but necessary. You learn how to be a real pro, and you end up eating shit a number of times along the way.
I have had world-class bombs. I had a table of twelve leave when there were only fifteen people in the audience. I don’t remember how our disagreement started, but I do remember calling a woman at the table a cunt, and that was over pretty quickly.
I was disinvited to a golf outing the day after a charity show I was asked to perform at for Carson Palmer, who at the time was the quarterback for the Cincinnati Bengals. My set had been chaotic. Of the 150 or so people in the room who were all standing and talking to one another before my set started, about six stopped to watch me perform. The rest just continued mingling as if I were a public service announcer letting them know about the parking situation. I ended up finding a younger kid in the crowd, and I talked to him directly since no one else would listen. I told him I was Brett Favre and he believed me. I told him the key to my success was eating ass at a young age. Show. Over. No golf either.
I was booed offstage at a comedy club in Winnipeg. It was a sold-out Saturday night, the early show. I had just taken the stage after the middle act, a Black Canadian comic, had a great set, like he’d had all week. Nothing signaled to me that anything was going to go south. But a few minutes into my set I heard a guy two tables from the stage speaking loudly. I called him out and he replied sincerely that he was talking about his dog. He literally said, “I’m talking about my dog.”
Oh, that’s nice.
It was odd that he would share that, since it was obvious that a show was going on. I responded the way I think a comic should, by insulting him.
“You should think about putting your face in a bowl like a dog does because none of us want to hear you talk.”
What I didn’t realize at that moment is that the guy wasn’t just there with the people at his table. I mean if they got mad, who cares? It’s four people. They can leave. He was there with a group of eighty. This was their holiday outing. When I told one of their own to eat out of a bowl like a dog, they took it as an insult to all of them. The booing started and it grew. Twenty minutes later they were shouting, “Bring back the Black guy!” And soon I obliged.
No wonder the Jets, their NHL hockey team, had left the city in 1996, I thought.
I told them they were the worst and I brought him back onstage.
All these disasters had one thing in common: The audience had free entry to the show.
Selling tickets is by far the hardest thing to do on the business side of stand-up comedy, so I needed something that would change my road work.
My half-hour special was the first to come out, in January of 2011, and the effect was amazing—and by that I mean it did absolutely nothing. I should point out that it was a well-received half hour. Comics and industry people all gave me props. People seemed to dig it. There was only one problem: It didn’t help me sell one more ticket. If it did, it certainly wasn’t notable. Clubs didn’t really give a shit that I had a Presents, and it was just like, well, nothing had happened. When people say, “Why is so and so who is funny and has a funny special not selling tickets?” I’ve come to a conclusion:
I don’t know.
Neither do you and neither does anyone else. Everyone has theories but none of us know anything. Why was Big Bang Theory a bona fide megahit? Why isn’t Geoff Tate doing arenas? I don’t know. People say it’s luck, circumstance, talent, timing. It’s all of that, maybe?
In 2013, my manager called me and said, “Let’s run your hour and invite people to come and see it.” Meaning: networks. Meaning, most importantly, Comedy Central. Comedy Central was the mountaintop outside of HBO, which was just completely unapproachable because HBO was reserved for only superstars. Chris Rock. George Carlin. Robin Williams. You had to be an absolute megastar to be on HBO, but Comedy Central seemed attainable and, again, it’s where so many comics I looked up to had a home. I had already been on the network a few times doing shorter sets and then, of course, my half hour. In my mind there was no better place to be, and I didn’t have much doubt this was just ceremonial. I was going to be doing my first hour on Comedy Central. I set up a special night at Flappers in Burbank where I had offered tickets to anybody who wanted to see the show on my podcast.
We actually got hundreds of replies. People were willing to come and watch the show and be a great audience for my set. I ran the set and felt really great about it. The crowd was incredible and I knew I had nailed it. In spite of all that, the feedback I got from the network was, “What’s the theme? There doesn’t seem to be a theme.”
Huh?
That’s what I was told Comedy Central’s feedback was. “What’s the theme?”
“The theme is funny jokes.”
“I know. Yeah, that’s what they’re saying.”
“Well, what the fuck, man? Does there have to be a throughline to this? Like there has to be something that carries from beginning to end? What am I, fucking British?”
That was that. That’s how I found out I wouldn’t be doing an hour special on Comedy Central. My manager had told me they were looking for a theme. In retrospect, they just didn’t want it. At least, some executive who never wrote or performed comedy but somehow was given the task of selecting who is worthy of a large platform didn’t want it.
That was it. That was my dream, and it was over, and I didn’t know what to do.
Then I got the call that a company named Comedy Dynamics was willing to shoot it on spec, meaning they would take the risk and incur the cost of shooting the special. They would give me a small fee and a percentage of ownership, and then they would be able to license and sell the special. It didn’t just feel like a consolation prize, it was one. But it was the only one I was getting so I said, “Yes.”
In November of 2013, I shot Completely Normal, my first one-hour special. I chose to shoot it in Minneapolis because it had always been a great comedy city to me in the times that I had been there before. A couple months later—after the horrific process of watching myself, and editing, and color correcting, and mixing—I got a phone call while I was driving up La Cienega and I pulled over. My manager at the time told me, “You have an offer.” I got excited. Comedy Central must have seen the special and realized they should have made it. I braced myself for a triumphant moment.
“Comedy Central passed.”
Fuck. Really?
I said, “Dude, they already said no.”
“I know, but this time we sent them the special and they passed again.”
You know how that girl said she didn’t like you? I called her for you and she said she still doesn’t like you.
“Why are you telling me? I only knew that they had said ‘no’ once and that was enough. You’re double confirming the ‘no’?”
Then he said, “HBO passed.”
“We sent it to HBO?”
“Yeah, we sent it to everyone.”
I was legitimately excited that someone at HBO had even seen it.
“Well, you have an offer.” My heart was racing, my breath got short. I needed to compose myself.
“Where?”
“Netflix.”
“Netflix?”
It might sound crazy as you read this, but it was not the same as getting that phone call now. Netflix had just started coming out of their business of mailing DVDs to consumers and was trying this new “streaming” thing. It was definitely a letdown.
My manager could sense it.
“Yeah, you know, they keep growing. They have like forty million subscribers now.”
“Oh, okay. That’s… good.”
He goes, “Yeah, that’s almost as many as HBO. And you know, Burr has one on there. It’s doing really well for him, so I think it’s a pretty good opportunity.” And I said, “Well, then I’m happy to be there. I mean, yeah, let’s go to Netflix. Too bad it’s not Comedy Central.”
A few months later, in March of 2014, my special debuted. And after a week or so, I honestly didn’t think much more was going to happen than some tweets and some comments. Just like a few years before when I had done my half-hour special. A couple people stopped me on the street. But something happened in June. I was working the Cleveland Improv, and after the weekend, the manager came up to me with his paperwork of my ticket sales from the weekend. I remember like it was yesterday. He said, “I don’t know what the hell happened, but you hit some bonuses this weekend.” I didn’t really get what he was trying to say. He looked at me incredulously. “People bought tickets to see you, but I don’t know why they’d do that.” He was such an asshole, but he was right. It didn’t even register to me that it had anything to do with the special.
As the year went on, it was happening more and more, and by the end of the year, I was selling out clubs and adding shows. Finally, I was selling tickets.
Sincerity is frowned upon from comedians. I get it. People turn to us for jokes, for laughter. Even and especially other comedians will give you a hard time for being sincere. They’ll mock you, often in hilarious fashion, for expressing anything from the heart. I told a struggling comedian friend I’d do “anything” for him because I would. I know some of the tough times he’s been through. When I said it, I meant it. He looked at me like he was going to cry and then he took a beat, unzipped his pants, and stared at me. It was funny and, no, I didn’t touch his penis. But that is why I’m prefacing the following by stating that I want to be sincere here. I promise that the following sentences are not a joke. I especially want to say this to artists: I’m improbably successful in the comedy world. You don’t know the full scope of it, but it’s almost unimaginable. I’m not telling you that to brag. I’m saying it because I’m really not special. I wasn’t chosen, and I didn’t have a team of tastemakers behind me making my dreams happen. I made them happen, and you can make yours happen too. I mean it. If you’re a comedian, writer, actor, painter, director, dancer, or any other type of artist, you can make your dreams happen. You can have the career and the life that you dream of. The only thing I did was believe I could do it, and I took action. You must do the same. You have to know you are meant to do your craft and you have to act. You have to write, dance, paint, get onstage, express yourself however you feel compelled to, and you have to take a chance on yourself. I recorded my own album, submitted for what was available, and started my own podcast. I’m not special, but I didn’t wait for something to happen. I took calculated risks, and you can and should do the same. Make the life you want happen for yourself because you really can.