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Caloroga Shark Media. Hello again, I’m Johnny Mack. My guest today is John Marcos s Raisi his new special, Thief of Joy. You’ll find it on YouTube. It is up there for best special of the year.
It’s right there with Maren. I love this special the more I think about it. So behind the scenes here John Marco was doing me a favor as he was traveling around. I’m friendly with his bubble System’m like, he got a couple of minutes, and he had a couple of minutes, but literally, he’s in a car here, so I didn’t use my usual setup, and this is phone quality. Now.
The reason I’m bothering you with that is because the poor guy was in the virtual waiting room for five minutes while I’m bothering his publicist going hey, I don’t like he’s there yet, and then she’s like, he’s in the waiting room waiting for you to let him in. So then I let him in, and then I couldn’t hear him, and I finally figured out what was wrong, and it was me that was wrong. So this guy who’s having a moment is kind enough to talk to me, I make him wait for five minutes and then I make him wait for two more minutes as I figure out the tech. So John Marco, Sirasi, thank you so much, and I hope you come back again sometimes because I always liked talking to you. So all that is the preamble too, that I didn’t go along here with him.
I wanted to respect his time. I hit the questions I wanted to hit. Could I have talked to him about other things? Of course, of course, but by design I had five questions written down and we just flew through him. And here’s in a car.
John Marco, SIIESI. So I wanted to ask you on today. The real question I had you on is a sandbag question. Did you cancel Disney Plus? Or are you supporting fascisms?
I think I’ve been using my girlfriend’s sister accounts, so I am morally. Free of Eddie guilt. I’ll tell her she should cancel it, and I hope she doesn’t. No, no, we don’t hope she doesn’t because the parent company, Hulu, they’re going to bring out money for Hulu specials. So we love.
Disney, Yes, we love him. We love him. It’s listen to These platforms are so good. It’s they’re doing good and bad, so we’re kind of stuck. So I wanted to ask you why you went with YouTube and not the others.
And then an hour before we were scheduled to talk, I saw the answer on a V club. They did a great profile with you. So I know the answer. But can you just tell everybody why did you pick YouTube? Yeah?
I mean, listen, I’m not gonna I’m not going to pretend like everyone was like knocking down the door for the special. But the bottom line is like I needed to release it on my own time. And you know, a lot of these places they schedule stuff out far in advance, and I have so much material, I write so much, I have so much like new stuff that I wanted to move on to that when I was ready to pull the trigger, and and when we decided on the Allegian Theater, I was like, we just got to do it. We got to do it the next weekend available, which was February Valentine’s Day, as my girlfriend likes to point out.
And then when we were ready to have it released, you know, I just I just need…
So I was like, I was like, let’s have the full control. I don’t I don’t want to have to run and buy additional people. Between my executive producers and me, I felt confident in the artistic integrity of the writing and the show.
And then the bottom line, as I said in that AV Club article, is that I think …
You know, there’s there’s audiences out there who don’t know who Sebastin Menascalco is. He is the number one touring comedian two years ago, one year ago. And it’s like, that’s how fractured things are. And my goal as a business person, because I kind of see myself also as like the CEO of the company that is me, is I want my jokes in every corner of the Internet, in every corner that people get their entertainment from. And that isn’t limited to one network.
You know, some of these networks are surely very far reaching. Others, though, are not. Others others are cost prohibitive, others don’t air in certain countries, and I want to be able to take the hour Special, which I want people to watch in full. I think I really was. Determined to make a piece designed to be watched in full.
However, a lot of my joke writing has come at the time of the Internet, so I do write in a way in chunks that can become clips, and I want to be able to take my hour Special and break it up every which way. For every social media. Platform sex currently exist, that will exist, whether it’s vertical, horizontal, or some new fucked up shape that will need to be made. Whether someone will make a video player that’s in the shape of a star, I’ll be ready to do it, and I’ll do it on my board in my own rhythm that fits my career. And there may be there may be future times where I go, oh, going with a platform is worth it for the validation, whether it be self validation or public validation.
But right now, my goal is to make my work known to the world, and I went with the avenue that let me control the material fully. So so if if if there’s some airline in South Korea that is looking for comedy specials, Boom. I can. I can give it to them for. Free if I want to, in the hopes that I’ll tour South Korea someday.
If if, if I find out linked In is a good place to start posting flips, boom, I’ll put it there. You know, people go to so many different places. I’ll see something on an injure Imgur, which I’ve never visited on my own accord, but you’ll see like someone makes a comic strip out of a joke there and it has ten million views, and I go, okay, I want those ten million people that use injure for their entertainment to know about me, and I hope that the goal ultimately is to see me live, and that when I come to your city, you want to pay the money to leave your house and trust me to entertain you for an hour or more. I’m happy here. You’re working on another special.
As I watched this thing, there are so many jokes. I’m going to say jokes per second because I don’t want to get into the Dane Cook laughs per minute metric. But you literally subscribe to Bobo theory of you know, tell enough jokes in a minute, and some of them might land. And I don’t mean that as a backhanded compliment because they land. My friend, like, oh my goodness, the amount of jokes that are just per minute laughing.
I wrote a note as I was watching, and I’m like, he’s got to have nothing left in the can because he’s used so much material there. So you are prolific. I appreciate it. I mean, you know, some of these jokes, you know that they’ve evolved, but some of the some of the real bangers were cultivated when I was working at really really, really bad comedy clubs and your your sign just had to just explode or you would lose the audience. And in a way, I think there’s this kind of dual there’s two sides of it, where there’s one version where you want to evolve out of that horrible comedy club space so you can share bigger thoughts, you can explore with more nuanced the same way.
That, like, you know, if you. Listen to a story from an entertaining friend, you trust them and you will listen to the whole story, maybe get some more details. Well. At the same time, I do believe in that like Razor Sharp boom boom boom boom, boom. Have you worked on it so much that every sentence, if not two sentences pops.
And I really try to I try to have both. I try to have my cake and eat it too. And I set bar for myself of like how funny a joke needs to be to stay in the act. And that’s you know, like that that art surgery which I close about to spin about my dad’s put up a bypass. You know those some of those jokes could be traced back to.
Year what and they’ve evolved and I learned how to stack them and thread them in and incorporate them. But each one of those jokes, like I could, I could write a passage about the journey of those jokes. And and I really try to take both worlds of like the club comedy every time needs to pop, and the idea of wanting to weave a narrative and tell his story and really hold myself to account to combine them both at all times. I don’t want an answer to this one because I don’t want to ask the magician, you know, how to just sell the lady in a half. But there’s a moment in the special where I was like, huh is he play acting.
Is this a real moment? I couldn’t tell, don’t care, don’t want to know, don’t tell me. But as I was watching it too, I started to think about your physicality, and for maybe like two seconds, I was like, is this physicality help selling the material? And I quickly landed on no, you’re just a physical performer. As we’re recording this, you’re in a car, even just speaking to some idiot with a podcast, You’re very physical as you speak.
Yes, So I don’t think at all that the materials being propped up by the way you were moving around the stage using the physical space. I closed my eyes just to test this theory and the material. This thing is great, this special, and you’re seeing the pressure getting everybody. What are you saying that this is a great special? So congratulations on this.
Thank you. I feel really I feel really proud of it. You know. I think I when I was a little kid, I used to dance in the living room and I this is how either narcissistic or just entertainery I was. I told my parents, I was like, we need to get this living room onto a stage so people can watch me dance.
And in a way, I feel like I’ve done that to a degree my physicality. It’s really like how I how I I have trouble dancing at a wedding, but when everyone’s looking at me, I feel like I come to life. And so I really at a certain a certain point, I was like, oh, yeah, the way that I want to move, I’m allowed. To do that on a stage. In fact, I’ve picked one of the only professions where I can just let my body naturally express itself.
And I certainly, like in the last couple of years, have have challenged myself to like feel free, to to like have a physical body that naturally just moves along with However, I want to tell a joke without choreographic. Jen Marco’s a specialist called Thief of Joy. It’s on YouTube. More coming up. I was joking with your publicist, Now, as great as your comedic timing, is no one better your marketing timing.
I’m gonna leave something to be questioned. You had that great Joe Biden chunk that you had to put out rather quickly because the new cycle changed, and then you go and your release one of the great specials of the year. You know, it’s between you and Maren. I think at this point in the race for who we’re going to give the award to, and you just decided to drop that, And then Jimmy Kimmel might have slightly stepped on the news cycle. Yeah, yeah, listen, it’s it’s it’s really hard.
There’s you can’t control any of that stuff. The Biden the special last time that opened with like a big Biden chunk for those who don’t know, it was like we were going to release it, you know, two months later, and then Biden had the debate and I saw it and I was like, I thought he could drop out like now, like that night. And obviously he delayed it three weeks, but I was like, it’s over, and if he drops, the beginning of this special feels dated. And by the way, I will never make that mistake again. I will never open a special.
You know, I assumed. I guess in my mind that well, certainly whoever’s the president will be the president in a month. Not in today’s world, we cannot be we cannot be so trustworthy of society. So you know, you drop a special, something else is happening in the news. He can’t control it, you know.
For all I know some people they want to get away from all the noise and drama of the political world and lean into escapism. You just this is kind of my point of like, I go, I want to control things on my own because because you know, the same way you could you could drop a special on HBO and they decided for the same week as The New White Lotus and it goes viral or some other movie and you’re just not part of the conversation. And I think I had faith that, you know, if anything, the thing I was most scared of was Caleb Huron had a special coming out that same day, and we have we have a ven diagram. This is a much bigger circle. But I thought, like, oh, all my fans, they’re they’re all my fans are probably Caleb here on fans.
They’re gonna watch his special first, and you just go, I can’t control it. I believe the quality of the product, and I believe it’s doing well now. And the thing with the internet is like it it could do well next week, it could do a month from now. I wrote this special to be as evergreen as possible, and I. You know, I believe it will continue to have a life.
And I also believe that the American political drama is probably never going to settle back down to a nice, peaceful spot. So you just have to accept that as an entertainer that you’re. Always going to be competing with something Trump did in terms of creating a released special, so different than being in the room. Are you pulling a closer and moving to the front. I’ve seen Bert Krascher and some other comedians talk about for a Netflix special versus.
I worked with the. Carolina State for a while and they explained how Carlin will come out and do rat attat tat jokes, then the big arc and then let the audience breathe and go back to rat a tat tat. But Kreischer saying he’s pulling his closer and putting it up front. What are you releasing? I honestly like I always chomp around with sets as I start getting closer to like what I’m going to do, Like most of my headlining sets will usually be between seventy five to ninety minutes, and I’ll jump around, But I generally I do like an opener that really sets the stage.
And this opener particular, like I was using this for a while and I just wanted to find tune it so I would never you know, I could start with heart surgery, which is how I edited a special, and really test out like how it works, and I throw things around. But sometimes when I find an opener that I love that I think sets the stage, I go, let me rehearse this into the fucking ground, so I can articulate the wording and the musicality in multiple circumstances until it’s the best that it can be. So this opener about my family, I kept it for at least three months prior to and I do think experimenting can be good. Always, always good. But I also think that if you.
Keep the same opener in different environments, whether it be a club spot, a headlining set, headlining set in the South, the headlining set overseas, you will learn even more nuance of that one joke. Then if you are always moving it around. In a week like this, where there’s the Kimmel story, which is really a larger story, do you feel the need to address that or do you just go sitmash the miniscalco and say I’m here to tell pasta jokes like which where do you go? If I have good jokes, I will always address it It just depends if I have time, and I don’t want to be preachy. But like with Kimmel stuff, like you know, there was some stuff that came to mind.
Twitter is my writing pad, and I had a couple jokes and I fine tuned it. It felt so topical. I released it the next day, and then beyond that, I said, well, a lot of the fans, if they’re at this next show, they probably saw what I posted, so I drop it, and you know, it’s it’s just kind of luck of the draws. Then is go see me and I’ll be talking about what’s going on. Sometimes I just put out something because I want to stay on the edge and.
You’re just gonna get a show. But but you know, I always try to. It’s just things evolve so quick, and I don’t want to be mediocre in my jokes. I’m either going to have a really good joke about it or I’m not going to have a joke at all. Last time I spoke to you, you busted into a really good, spontaneous John Mulaney impression, and then I wanted to share back with you.
Somewhere between then and now, I saw somebody on threads or somewhere say the best way to get into a poor man’s mullaney is to do Fred Schneider from the B fifty two singing love Shack, And that has just stuck with me, and I think this is a really good way to do it. I’ve tried to do it. I can’t do it. You probably can. I’m not asking you to do an impression, but I just wanted to share that back with you.
I so love shack the like love shack. Yeah, it’s a ema, it’s tough. I’m driving a car. It’s as big as a whale. That being like the way into a breeting.
You said you couldn’t do it, You just did it. That was incredible. Please get out of here. Final question, as you’re doing press and you’re talking to dumbass podcasters who can’t get their technology together, how do you put up with that crap? You know?
I think it’s like just I try to answer questions freshly each time because the time that I used to have to sit down and write has gotten more and more limited, and I have to view, whether it be podcasts or interviews, as a space to explore my own mind, and so I try to break away from the rote answers and just answer something from where I’m at any given moment, because I’ll often find ooh, some idea sprung into mind, and I have to, especially at moments of a lot of press, see it as a creative adventure as opposed to a chore, because that’s the only way I can continue churning out new material. Well, I appreciate you always coming on. I forgot to mention it when as I was watching the special, I thought I was going crazy because I’m like, why do I know these two jokes? And I was like, oh, because he was at Montreal and so were you, and that’s where you heard them, and that’s that’s where you know them. Troblem.
I was like, oh, okay, again, you’re clearing in a car and you probably said he’s running around. It’d be kind of have to give you a couple of minutes. So I’ve taken my couple of minutes. I will let you go. I hope we can speak again in the future.
But big fan, thank you Absolutely, thanks a lot, man, Have a great day.