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Caloroga Shark Media. Hello Johnny Mack with your Daily Comedy News. My guest today is the very funny, hilarious John Marco sir RAIZI. He is one of Vulture’s comedians you should know and will know. We talk for about a better part of an hour here.
During the summer, he released a little something Special which is one of my favorite things of the year, very very funny, fifteen seventeen minutes something like that. But did Biden chunk in it? Then? When Biden didn’t have such a good debate and looked like he was going to drop out, John Marco was like, oh, let me get this thing out there now. So he’ll explain to us how that came out.
He also has a recurring show in New York City called The Silver Lining, which has been sold out consistently for over two years and theater adults the show coming up at Joe’s Pub. He will explain what that is. I may have tried a little too hard here in the first couple questions. I just I try not to be like, so you’re a comedian, huh, And I try and come with a different angle. So I’m not sure he was totally feeling me the first minute or so here, but then we really clicked.
Sitting here and just making sure that I sent out the proper link of everything I’m clicking on an industry trade. This is totally random, but I figured it’s hopefully more interesting than just going So what do you think of cancel culture? A press release? A comedian media store with over eighty followers is about to launch a podcast, So is that really good publicist? Or you know?
I always set the bar low, so you got exceed expectations. So the big stress of my life today is what happens if the DMV calls me in the middle of this interview. I figured, let me just start with awkward things, So why would the DMV call me? Long story medium. I went to get my license renewed and a New Jersey was like, sorry, your license is suspended in New York.
I haven’t lived in New York in twenty something years. Twenty five dollars. Fine, I have to get a letter from New York and it’s it’s not like you click on the website and they send it to you. So supposedly the DMV’s going to call me and no offense, love you. But if they actually call me, I’m going to have to bay otherwise, I my Chad drive.
Me to work. Man. Sure listen, I hear about. That’s a good excuse, so you keep me posting. I was catching up on your podcast.
I enjoyed recently dropped a Patreon episode with some AI written Italian style comedy, some very hack comedy. I thought that was amazing. Yeah, it really because I don’t talk about food. It was all about food. So really all the AI was able to do is they said, he said he’s Jewish, they said he’s Italian, and then let the stereotypes roll and it was all this food.
I don’t talk about any food in my app. There’s at least one comedian that I can think of that could deliver that material. Now, I didn’t think the material was particularly written for your wheelhouse, but I can think of one guy, if he had the crowd rolling and did it in his delivery at his stadium shows, could have performed that material. The materially itself, in the right environment, maybe could have flown. Are we talking Sebastian on a scalco You can go sure, sure he could act it out.
He could take that. He could take a soft punch line and show him serve with the batsa ball soup or serve with a PASTRAVI he could make it work. I could see it. You’ve got the right name for it. I was thinking maybe you could do like a bobcat Gouldwaite thing and open for yourself, Like could come out and just you, really John Marco, and then you come out and do your normal act as a closer.
Maybe give yourself a different first name for the second part. Listen if I leaned in, if I leand into the Italian thing, and honestly I would, It’s just I wasn’t raised like in an Italian community. My dad’s a little Italian, so I just don’t have that many jokes about it. Believe in me. I would be that comedian if I could.
But my dad was making cup of noodles, not spaghetti and meatballs. But you grab three other guys with Italian sounding names, you start a tour, you go out. I’ve tried to think the Italian. It’s got to be like the mob bosses of comedy. Okay, I’m well ahead of you on the AI twenty minutes ago.
I’ve got ten for you. You’re ready, Here we go. Sure, some of these even for Hack or Hack. But the Gobbelgool Gang. I liked that they added the gg the Gobbegle Gang, you and three of the guys.
This one is in Hack’s Corner of hack Town. Boughta being Comedy jam though they had a jam. Sure, Pasta and punchlines pretty awful. The Canoli Chronicles, Oh, brutal spaghetti and stand up these are so bad. I like this one, Sauce and SaaS sure, the Forget About It Funnies is just awful.
The Meatball Mafia awful, Manja and Mirth and the Mozzarella Mirth Tour. Yeah, and the short stuff is too on the nose. I just put it in now. The don of comedy sounds cool, but that it looks like that exists already. But listen, chat GPT is already good enough to replicate at least eighty percent of the stand up comedy world, and it’s eventually it’ll get better enough.
Sometimes I’m quite a comedy snole. My daughter is working in a local theater and part of her job is to just research acts that they could potentially book. And she came home one day and was like, have you ever heard of this? And it was one of these. It was the Italian American Wise Guys of Comedy, and I just said to her, I go, there’s no way that’s good.
It’ll probably sell out, but there’s no way it’s good. Sure I did when I did Just for Lasts last year, it’s last year. I did the Just for the Culture Show, which used to be called the Ethnic Show. And before the Ethnic Show, they had the Italian Show, the Black Comic Show, the Jews Show, and then last Society Guru. They’re like, okay, well combine the ball.
Okay, We’ll call Just for the Culture. And I was on the lineup with Judy Gold and I was like, oh, they think she’s the Jewish one and I’m going to be the Italian the stand up in SaaS and they we really just ended up being a Jewish, very Jewish lineup between me and Judy. My name can be misleading. Do those nights still exist? I’m rusty, but LA used to have Asian Invasion and Chocolate Sundays was one of them.
Those are still around, Chocolate Sundays, and I would say, crack them up. Comedy is also like the Black Show or the Urban Show at the Comedy Store. In the belly room. So those still exist. I don’t know about the Asian invasion, but listen, I think of those theme shows, even they’re not seen, but centered around identity, can bring in a lot of people who have never seen a stand up comedy show before because they go, Okay, this is geared for me.
I guess, and so I had scripted. If you look at a lot of comedy club lineups, you might as well call them the straight white guy show. So what’s fine? Maybe we need to create some special pockets of shows. Dude’s a prep.
But I always find it fascinating anytime I google you, there seems to be a fascination with headline writers. It’s frequently Italian Jewish comedian or Jewish Italian comedian. And I look at that and I’m like, you know, are we booking Irish Catholic Jim Gaffigan coming to town? Like, I don’t get it. Yeah, I just think people people think that that’s going to give you everything you need to know about someone’s comedic dialings.
I guess to go, oh, Jewish, he’s gonna be a neurotic again. I’ll talk about his gil pig mom and then Italian it’s like he’ll talk about food. You know, it’s hard to write about comedy in a way that has massive peel. What are you going to say, a mix of Anthony Jesslnik and John Mulaney with a theater kid background. No one’s find tickets to that show.
They’re going to say, obviostly Jesslink or John m’laney on their own. So I whatever they want to say, I think theatrical and dark are the words that I want to Then I think i’d want to get through just so just to deter someone who’s very doesn’t want anything mean. I think that would be the thing of it’s not going to be it’s not warm, that’s not going to be the evening ahead of you. That’s the only thing. But also that’s not a great title.
Eight come to see that not warm and fuzzy. John Marco SIASI. I never noticed the Mullany. You’re in the same vocal range. You’re not a mulleni clone.
But if we put a suit on you and shaved and made you play Millennie in a sketch. You could do that. I think Mullaney musically, I think the way I have to limit how much I listened to it to him because I just think the way that he made it a little nasally and it just fits comedy, and I really do. And I’m sure apparently there was a comedian who works at the Seller, the Comedy Seller, named Dan Natterman, and someone told me that when mulaney started, people called him like Dan Natterman, ripoff or something like or he was imitating Dan Baderman. So I like to believe that, like the music of comedy, which I feel like it doesn’t get talked about as much, just like the musicality of the way people deliver jokes, Milani’s is just in a certain kind of range and register that I think is just feels right when I’m joking with my friends, if I’m trying to have riff off with them.
It’s just the place that I do. It’s a little bit presentational, it’s really clear. It helps you make a clear setup and you different to the center for the punchline because you change the often and it’s fun. That’s fantastic. So but I have the ear for this because I’ve worked in radio for my career in podcasting, so we always when you build a team, you want to make sure people aren’t in the same range.
So, for example, you and Malaney would not partner up on an audio only radio show, whereas you and Sebastin Maniscalco would because. You wouldn’t be like, which one is talking? Sure, that’s really cool, I’ve mad sense now that you say it, But yeah, you’ve got to there’s podcasts where I go I still don’t know which voice is which guy. It all just bleeds into one. After listening for two years.
Right, yeah, how are you enjoying podcasting yourself? I dig it. I certainly wish we had more listeners, but the clips and the videos that we get out of it are enjoyed. And ultimately, when I started making the podcast, I had all these ideas, these high concept ideas, and I had a friend who was like, come up with something that you’d want to do, even when you’re in a terrible mood, even when you don’t want to do it. And ultimately it was like a looser concept the downside complaining with a good friend as a co host, And I’m so glad that I picked something that I not only loved, but also where the podcast could be notepad for ideas.
I could talk about stories, I could talk about whatever’s going out of the news, my family, my life, and I just it richens my work. I think I get a lot of joke ideas from that podcast. So I love it, and I’m glad that I prioritized kind of something I loved over maybe something with a clearer hook. Because it’s so much work and the rewards are still minimal. It’s financially devastating, but I love doing it and I love being able to see my friends on a regular basis and just choot the shit with him.
So naively respectfully, you said it’s so much work, So what is the difference between a perception of you just show up and riff for an hour and fifteen minutes and you go home and it’s a lot of work. Sure, I think. First, we have guests for a lot of episodes, and I like to do my research. I like to if they’re a stand up, I’ll listen to their most recent special, I’ll comb through. There are tweets, some interviews just to seek what they enjoyed, talk talking about what aspect of their life are they willing to get into the weeds and talk shit.
And then there’s a lot of. Post work where it’s I built kind of the engine of my comedy career off social media and clips. So I go through a transcript of every episode. I’m picking out what’s the clip that best catch is it, what’s going to pop online? Send it to my editor, check the caption, schedule, all the posts.
So it just becomes a huge And I think when we have a really great guest, the episodes can d of be two hours two and a half hours. So the better it’s going, the more work it generates. And I think I’m going to make. Sure even though it is loose, I got to cut with my pockets filled. I had an acting teacher that always talked about coming to a role with your pockets filled.
What happened that week, what do I want to talk about, what’s a cool new segment, what’s a little prank I can play on my co host? And I think the key to having all that looseness really work is you got to have kind of some hidden structure underneath. Does it work as a sort of workout room? Are you testing material or is it the opposite that a conversation goes somewhere in spurs an idea. I think it can be a workout room.
My co host has a great laugh. Pete Holmes, he is his own last track on his podcasts. He provides it for me. That’s slit. And it’s my co host who’s a laugher, and he is not.
He’s allergic to joke jokes when I love joke jokes. So I think it’s not fully a workout room. And I’m saying what I would say on stage, but I think it’s if we get into an idea that really gets him going, and really we start risks and I go, oh, there’s something there, and then I got to do the work after the fact. So in a way, it is a workout room, but not as strict as let me run this bit. Let me try to sneak in this bit, because if my co host sniffs the manipulation around a joke, he’s out.
He’s out. I beg him. I say, please, let me tell you my jokes from performing at the Fish Festival this weekend, and he’s okay. But it doesn’t It just doesn’t work. Like those old style horrible talk show guests.
Hey tell me about podcasting. Never mind podcasting, let me tell you about the airport, the TSA. These those guys, I think. Codin O’Brien, Johnny Carson was very clearly like a Rodney Dangerfield panel interview and Johnny, I don’t know how much prep they did, but Johnny was always really good at just like stay in that one line to keep it going and never screwed up a joke of Rodney Dangerfields.
And then I think.
Conan did a much more evolved form where Norm McDonald was there to tell his moth joke and Codin had to figure out like how to be frustrated that he was taking so long without disrupting the tension of the jokes, and Cody was so good at that. And I sometimes have guests on ZARNAGARV. I think is a perfect example, guests who like, she’s got some jokes she wants to do, and she likes the old school panel style, and I can sense, I like to think I can sense when she’s going into kind of a bit of a routine and I go, okay, how can I support this in the podcast sphere where it doesn’t feel corny but she’s supported and instead of been feeling like a punchline, it feels like the most genius, spontaneous thought a person has ever had. And that can be fun if you can pull it off. Yeah, I’m a big Bob Hope fan.
A lot of people judge Hope by his last fifteen twenty years, but if you look at the entire work of his century, some really great stuff. But Johnny Carson hated Bob as a guest because Bob would basically declare, I’m coming on your show and it’s NBC, and Bob Hope’s the one person Johnny Carson can’t tell to go hose yourself. But Hope would do what we just talked about and just sit down and Johnny go Hi, good morning or good at good night, and Hope would just go in as material. And Carson hated it. In a tourbiously, where as I haven’t consumed that much Bob Hope, Like, where do you start?
What’s the thing that I would Is there an album of his best hits? I think if you can find video. So he had a very popular radio show, and then when television came along, all the radio shows became TV. So if I’m sure they’re on YouTube, his very early television shows are basically a radio show with a camera in front of it, so he’s standing up to stand up Mike and when the announcers going now from NBC the Bob Hope Show, and he’s just doing the monologue and mugging for probably the camera guy. But you can see how quick he is.
And this is probably I don’t know Bob in his forties, maybe early fifties, not the eighty five year old reading off Q cards guy. But he was just so quick. So I would say that period of around I don’t want to TV really come in, say nineteen fifty one Bob Hope just to throw a dart, and of course his movies. You got somebody who can sing with Bing Crosby and dance with Jimmy Cagney, and you got to give him some props there. But I digress.
Oh can you just Carson’s in my mind? Now? Can you imagine as a comedian if we go back it’s fifty years now, what a huge spot that was, because now you can self markets there it’s can I get on the Tonight Show and I’ve got I don’t know what was it, five minutes eight? It was probably five? Right?
You got a type usually think Johnny waves you over. That must have been insane. Yeah, I think about it a lot, because because sometimes it can be very frustrating what it feels like. Man, it feels borderline impossible to do one thing and have it like catapults your career. There are so many There’s just a million little things you can do, and maybe something crazy happens that goes viral that maybe it boosts you a little bit.
Be on the Tonight Show. Now, I did Cordon, and I think maybe one person in my whole life has said to me after a show like I loved your courting, and I think it’s this mixed thing. Yes, it is. Cool that the Carson you go on there and your whole life would change, unless not cool if the booker didn’t like your vibe or you pissed off whoever that guy was going to the comedy store and you never had a shot Carson. It definitely feels like it was just way too much power under this one kind of cranky guy who’s asked you had to kiss.
And personally, I’ve always struggled coming up with clean deaths that I like love, or at least by today’s. I sent a set into the Tonight Show after New Faces, and the response I got was a holocaust joke. Yikes, And I was like, oh, no, I’m not getting this, and it was like at the time, it was like that was and that was the centerpiece. I had this a joke that mentioned the Holocaust and I loved it. And I don’t know if back then, if I would have been in easy to fantasize, Oh, I would have been in.
I would have had that Tonight show. I would have killed it, got into the couch. But there’s another world. Where he didn’t like me. I didn’t have the set, and then I would have been dying for Instagram to let me gradually build myself up.
So I think it’s there needs to be a middle grounds. I think that tonight soo when I hear about it, it sends a shiver down my spine because I just go, God, that guy controlled whether you had a stand up career or not, and that’s not good. I just did a story for the podcast. Somebody else wrote a hot take. Joe Rogan is too powerful in comedy now, and I’m like, Joe Rogan’s good for comedy.
Not everybody likes Joe Rogan, that’s fine, but he’s good for comedy. He basically created a third Coast. Sure, I had my previous touring agent I had was like, you have three ways to succeed in touring. And this might have shifted a little since then, but it was like big social media, you’re on TV or Joe Rogan’s podcast, and I was like, geesus christ. I think I was saying this last night.
I was at the Comedy Cellar and I was talking with Nathan McIntosh about so many people will come to shows and we’ll say afterwards and say, this was my first stand up comedy show. I don’t think that happens a lot with music. I don’t think people at the end of concerts but this is my first concert. But like, stand up. Comedy is such an untapped market.
There’s so many people who don’t necessarily know they would be into this. So there’s a degree where I go, Yeah, Joe Rogan talking NonStop about stand up comedy makes a new generation of men. If we’re speaking about Rogan and being honest, get into stand up comedy, and great. Maybe they get into that, and then there’s tastes to expand beyond Joe Rogan’s sphere. I think the fear is that Joe Rogan creates a specific kind of thing and that universe, that kind of really wants to see a white guy say a slur that you’re not supposed to say anymore, and that’s their definition.
That’s the only fear I think of the kind of ideology of that general sphere. I hope it ex fans. I hope it intermingles. I hope all comedians start splitting up sharing lineups. But that’s ultimately.
I do think it’s good for comedy that he exists. And I’ve had audience I remember an audience member years ago came up and they said, Oh, I saw you’re working on new material. That’s so cool. Joe Rogan talks about how comedians and imes have to work on new material during the show, and I’m like, you know what, God bless if he’s educating our new comedy fan as to how this all works, and you’re into it. Great.
You talked about spheres, and it reminded me there are all these spheres that I guess don’t touch each other. What came to mind was when Kat Williams went on Shannon Sharp’s podcast and started throwing heat that surface to maybe a different audience. The whole Atlanta scene and the various beefs that go on in that sphere of comedy, and that probably doesn’t cross over with the Rogan verse unless Gat goes on Rogan. I think ultimately. When you separate these worlds is it doesn’t benefit the quality of the comedy because suddenly you’re not dealing with the cream of the crop.
You’re dealing with the cream of your little sphere. And it’s just the quality goes down overall whenever people are And it’s the same with you could call it the opposite of the Joe Rogan universe, but like the Brooklyn world, like there is the world of you could call it old comedy or just left leaning comedy, where if you never mix with another world and the best from that world, it just gets worse and worse. And I think that’s happened to a degree with the Austin scene. I think that’s why New York is such a powerful is still, in my mind, the best place to keep doing comedy, because there’s more colliding, there’s more a mix, and that elevates everyone, that forces them to be good to continue to participate. And I have nothing.
I don’t know Austin well enough to have any kind of hard opinion about the Austin comedy scene. I just know from more secondhand and occasional shows that I do there, that I could use a little mixing. To put it politely, it could use a little mixing, and I think it will happen. I do. I don’t think these worlds can stay itsler forever.
I think I think we need more panel shows, and we need those panel shows to be a mix and I think one day, I think kil Tony will get to a point where it does have some comedians that you wouldn’t think would do it now, and it will expand the vocabulary and show more people what great comedy can be. And I’m hopeful that kind of will come to pass. We did a show at Serious early in my run there. He used to run the comedy properties there. It was called four Quotas and it was basically a tough crowd rip off, except we just leaned into the four quotas.
There was some gimmick that the government had passed the law you had to have a white guy, a black guy, a woman, and then the wild card position just to make the booking easier. And I look back one of those early episodes was Jim Gaffigan Lisa Lampanelli Asi’s I’m sorry, and I forget who the fourth you thought about being diverse? That was a really fun show, a little too early in the runned series for it to take off. We talked about isolating one joke, and we talked about the civilians coming in, and I think there’s something to be said for taking in an entire set. My wife will often come down.
I will be watching a special and she’ll show up thirty six minutes into it with a laundry basket, stand there at the TV for forty seconds ago, is this guy funny? And it’s just I have to hit pause and it kills the whole room, and I’m like, you know, I can’t go into you see that line There is actually a calling back to eighteen minutes ago where he set this up, and that was a headshake, like it’s just is that guy funny? They what? First of all? I sometimes I have to acknowledge.
And sometimes it’ll happen, like when a clip goes viral and some people go, this guy is not funny at all. Some people don’t like stand up and that’s fine.
And then someone who loves musical theater I know more than anyone that like …
Someone will see a Stephen Sondheim musical, the most agreed upon, the greatest composer of all time, and they’ll go, eh, that was no good and it’s okay. You don’t like the form and that’s fine. And it’s the same for stand ups. Some people don’t like those jokey things. But I agree.
It’s always hard with a partner when you don’t love the same piece of art. Sometimes he fights could be brutal. Now, my girlfriend, she’s a manager, she’s a comedy manager, so she represents comedians, and she doesn’t want to watch as much stand up as I do. And because sometimes I’m watching it, Okay, what’s going on here? What’s okay?
What is the best amount of scalco talking about right now? What can I learn from the cameras? And our rule is when she can guess three of the punchlines, it goes off automatically and it happens a lot. And I do like to think that her bar keeps me sharp because I’m like, even in conversation, if I’m trying to be funny with my girlfriend, I gotta if she guesses three times, she’s going to break up with me on the spot. So I gotta keep my comedy game high.
So I found it interesting there how you explained how you’re watching comedy and the cameras as I have a producer’s breen. The night of the attempted assassination of President Trump, I clicked on CNN because it’s what one does, and I knew it was six point thirty on a Saturday, so the d team was anchoring and I’m watching it. I’m like and I’m like, actually, she’s doing a really good job. She’s doing it. And I said to my daughter, I go, Wolf Blitzer’s in a cab and somebody’s calling Anderson Cooper in the Hamptons.
Now going, dude, get here right away as soon as you can get there, And sure enough, top of the hour came, Wolf’s in the chair. You wait another hour, Anderson’s in the chair. So like, I’ll tend to watch breaking news and not actually care about the news part and just look at all the what’s going on behind. Oh, they got caught with their pants down. Biden stepped down at one forty six pm on a Sunday, so nobody’s there to cover it, so they’re stuck in an infomercial.
I love that stuff. Yeah, that’s really There was a very funny thing on Twitter because wolf Blitzer had just tweeted a picture of him like getting a martini called the wolf Flitzer, and he looked like really fun.
And then an hour later it’s him at the desk and he looks a little just oh my …
We all know you’re buzz dude. All right, natural segue. You dropped a special because the President announced he wasn’t rerunning, so you released Sorry, I dropped my notes here. I want to get it. What’s the title again?
I want to get it right? A little something special, A little something special. Yeah, so walk me through that was that going to be part of a longer special? And he went, oh my god, this chunk just got. Need Honestly, it was like I was waiting on a couple different things to see if they wanted an hour from me, different streaming networks.
Do you want an hour? Do you want an hour? Do am I going to release something on my own? Let’s wait, let’s see what they say. And I just have a chunk of material that felt I want to release this yesterday, and it feels like it feels just so on the pulse, and I go, well, if you know xyz stream or wat this, they’re going to film it in five months, it’ll be released in a year.
Especially when you’re not famous, famous. You you could record something and it could come out so far away. Your ability to be topical is more limited than I think if you were Chris Rock or John Lady and I think I just had these jokes and I was like dying to get out there. I felt like if they came out a year from now, they just wouldn’t be quite as exciting to hear, And so very last minute, I just picked a weekend I was doing Comedy Connection in Rhode Island. I had a good one night or the year before, so I was like, this will be good.
I guess my opener is also a great cinematographer and editor and producer. He basically put it together. We did three cameras, we flew in two people, and he could very scaled down version and I had a very specific I was like, I want to do this fifteen minutes. And it touched on mister Beast, It touched on trans writes, It touched on Roe v. Wade being overturned at abortion rights, and then it opened with some jokes about Joe Biden versus Trump again, and just one particular joke was how I was able to recycle all my twenty twenty jokes about them going against each other.
So I felt really good about it. I was going to just release it and then cut it up into clips, and I had a whole schedule planned for the end of August. I was going to Australia in August. I said, I’ll come back, release this, do podcasts.
And then one night it was my girlfriend’s birthday and I wasn’t watching the …
And he was one of the guys who was saying, like Biden, he’s got to stick it out. He’s the guy who can win, and he’s just an institutionalist. And he texted me in the middle of this dinner he said Biden needs to drop out right now. And I was like, oh. I was like, what what could have possibly happened at the debate and my girlfriend’s birthday.
Because I’m a workaholic and because her work is Tommedy, we had agreed that this why we weren’t going to talk about work. I wasn’t going to talk about if it works things. And I get this text and suddenly my mind goes racing, like, oh my god, all my opening jokes are about Biden being the nominee. And I watched the clips and I said, this is not looking good. And all the op eds came out and the next morning I said, they’re in bed at eight in the morning.
I’m just like, I feel like I have to release it today because I didn’t know if it was going to happen that day. It felt so the first surge of Biden being called to step down was very intense that first day after and I thought it could happen that day, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and I was like, I got to get this out now. And thank god, by editor, we had gotten a lot of stuff done in advance. Sound was mixed, it was edited, it wasn’t captured, it wasn’t clipped. But I basically said, oh, I got the day wide open.
Let’s release it by three pm today. No podcast, no press. I don’t know what he’s going to drop out. I don’t want to cut the beginning of it off. I don’t want to have to like be like, hey, guys, I know the beginning’s a little dated, but check it out anyway, And we got it done, and by we by my team, my social media team, my editor, my captioner, my girlfriend was there to let me run even the clip captions by and I was so glad we did.
And ultimately he stayed in the race, I think for three weeks after, maybe a month after. But I was so glad that we put it out in a time again where it felt topical. Although I will say it, if I ever record something like that again, I will be a lot more hesitant if it’s a special to include political material that isn’t very big picture, because that’s the risk we run in comedy, and a lot of comedians the day Trump’s assassinated, comedians now were. Like going, what’s the joke? What’s the joke?
People are recording it that night, they’re captioning it that night, and why because on social media, it can pop, It can get into the stratosphere, it can go viral, it gets featured in news, and there’s a real struggle between are you just making the obvious joke? Are you just regurgitating all the natural jokes? That would come out of this. Do you need time to make a deeper joke? And have we ultimately made our humor more shallow by feeling like we need to immediately react to events.
That used to be Late Night’s job and they had a writing staff, And now it’s every comedian the moment a tragedy happens or anything crazy in the news. We got to be like going up in twenty minutes, what’s the joke? What’s the joke? And I had a boss at Sirius who one time asked, us, how come we don’t have our own version of the Daily Show? And I’m like, me and my staff of two, I’m like, you’re gonna give me twenty writers like you want us to bang out a half hour of top notch comedy four nights a week?
Are you insen? But Late Night even now the new cycle so fast you recorded five thirty. By the time eleven thirty rolls around, there’s three new things in the news you’re not talking about in your monologue. It’s really hard. I don’t know what to like.
I once had the thought, and I just don’t think it really works in practice. But I always think to myself, Man, the best jokes. Twitter has made it in a way where like, the funniest jokes are in the moment, and it’s because it’s it’s thousands of people taking a stab, and then the ones that go viral are the best, and you go, these Twitter jokes are better takes than a writing staff of five on the East Coast. And I always thought that when it be fun, if you have a late night show where somehow they were paid and they wanted to be a part of this, you could have. I think if you told me after a day’s events that I could look at the best tweets and craft a monol out of those jokes, I think you could have a fucking electric in the moment monologue that night.
Now, obviously would those people be into that, what would the pay system be, how would it work? But I do think there is something about telling a joke out loud to an audience that gives it an extra dimension. And I wish we could combine the kind of incredible power of social media making the best jokes rise to the top and live entertainment. Maybe someone will try it someday, Maybe I’ll try it. It’ll fail miserably, but that’s the problem with topical jokes, and I think sometimes stand ups in certain scenarios, I have to go, you know what, I don’t have the best joke about this, And if I try to always chase the topical joke, I’m never going to build the deeper joke that is more universal, reaches deeper, is more original.
And I have to make sure I have a balance, because if I lean towards in the moment, I’m just going to create a lot of kind of fluff that expires the next day, and that’s not what I want to do. I did want to ask you about feeding the beast. I don’t want to bore you with a crowd work discussion, but it’s got to be insane now just to have to constantly put up something on social media. And is that fight the development cycle of a proper routine to use an old timey. Word, Yeah, it’s very I enjoy again, like I enjoy that I can put out a joke, I enjoy also the capacity I can put out a joke that is, I think it’s a good joke, but I wouldn’t put it in a special I think that’s cool.
Then I can still get it out there and get some kind of visibility awful thing that I like but isn’t my final forms. So you can use social media, I think, to feed your creative process. And if some joke does better than I thought it, that I can go, oh, is there more there to explore? Can I bring this? Can I incorporate it into something else?
But ultimately, You’re right, it’s incredibly exhausting, and I think it’s very hard to decide how do I develop my quote unquote act with what I’m putting out there, especially the concept of burning material. I think a lot of comedians are we used to be. My friend Jay Jorden used to be We’re comedy stops, and there was a degree off. You do it on your Comedy Central, it’s burnt, or if you do it on your special, it’s burnt, And then it’s like if you release it on TikTok, then even if it goes viral, even if it’s seen by millions of people, when you have a show at Banana’s Comedy Club and Hasburg Heights, New Jersey, maybe there’s one person in the audience who saw that clip, and do you get rid of a joke that’s tremendous because that one person, or do you go, I’ll never post my finest material, okay, but then you don’t have any fucking fans because you didn’t put enough out there to build up a fan base. I saw Mike Bribigley last night.
At the Comedy Cellar and he was mentioning how he said there’s some jokes from his first album I believed that he had done on a show recently, and he was shocked because nobody had heard them before. And there’s this thought of, oh my god, why would I not do this incredible joke I worked on for so long and made so good, and no one in the audience knows it. And I’m not doing it because why Because that’s the comic code, because there could have been two people who knew it. All those conversations I think are evolving, and I’m figuring out an hour that I want. To film, and I have to come up with my own rules.
I did a set on Netflix. Not a lot of people saw it. Is it okay? If I use one line that’s a really good bridge between my divorced material and my theater material. I’ve asked myself that in some cases, I go, yeah, this is a shit backit.
Just do it. If it makes the hour great, do it. This is a lot of people’s introduction to you.
And then there’s the other part of me that goes, I should move on, I should l…
And it does make it harder. It does make it a lot harder. But also. He gives me an ability to show my best joke to someone who’s never going to watch a comedy special. If I have a joke about drag queens, it’s going to get to an audience of people who will never see a comedy show, who will never go to Netflix to watch a comedy special.
But they did get to watch a minute of me telling a joke that I’m really proud of. You win some you lose. So that makes sense to me, especially pulling out a line or two. And any artist is going to have their super fans. But oh, we heard this already.
I liked him better when he was in the clubs. But I think that makes a lot of sense.
And then I’m thinking, as you were speaking the other way, if it’d be very ol…
I’m not sure I’d be upset. I’d be like, oh cool, I get to hear carl and do that now. I would hope the rest of the hour were new. But if he went into that thirty years later, it almost like the stones dusting off start me up. I’d be like, Okay, I think it’s again.
I think someone told me that Louis C.K. Back in the day after his shows, he would come out and say, are there any bits you want to hear? And he would like, let the audience request their favorite bits, and he would do it like that. I think there’s listen. I think comedy is relative to music, is still a younger art form, and I do think there’s room for us to figure out, like, oh, you know what they do like when I go into this chuck, they do like if I bring this thing back and maybe you do it as an encore, maybe you slip it in there a bunch amongst and a lot of other new stuff.
But at the same time, I do have that it’s an old school impulse that was kind of taught to me of just if they know if they’ve heard it before, they’re not gonna like it. And I just think the world is too fractured in terms of you have a special on HBO and nobody sees it. The world is too fractured to live by those old rules, because then what happens is if you’re trying to churn out too much new material. And I struggle with this too, it doesn’t become as strong. I have jokes that I can tell you when I first started telling a worse version of them five years ago, five years ago, seven years ago, and I go, it didn’t reach its vital form until so many years.
And with our current system, it’s hard to think that a joke would live that long without being quote unquote burnt. So we’re all going to have to navigate it. And I think I’ve seen a lot of comedians used to be very strict about levoz on comedy centrals. It’s done, completely give up on that notion because that’s just not what’s supported anymore. Is there peer pressure from the back of the room.
Look at John Marco’s being lazy, He’s just doing his good joke. You get that crap. I think a little bit less. I don’t know what it was like. I’ve been doing comedy for ten years.
I don’t know what it was like back in the day, if like comedians watched each other more or commented more. But no, unless someone like really does not ever seem to change their act at all, I don’t think people go always doing that bit. Again. I notice the people who I go, Jesus Christ, you haven’t changed a single bit of your fifteen minute set? Aren’t you bored?
But no, I think, and I don’t think this is good, but I think comedians’ eyes are more unlike how each other is succeeding in this career, more than artistically. And I don’t think that’s good. But I think we’re in such a doggy dog world. It’s such a real ruthless climb. That’s where people’s minds are right now.
I always found it as a civilian, not a comedian, never want to be a comedian, not claiming to be a comedian, not a performer obviously, but just as a guy in clubs. I always found that the comics either appreciated if one of their peers was crushing or eating it. They would find if you were eating it fun as well. It was that middle ground of you’re not even trying. That tend to be the comedy snobbery.
Yeah, there’s times when I’m working on more news stuff and immediately I go, I’m not doing really well. Everyone watching here is things that I suck.
And then I try to remind myself that when I see comics that I really admire w…
I go, yeah, that’s what you’re using this Sunday night spot at the bar show for. And I think that impulse to crush is always there, and you have to fight it sometimes. I remember just seeing Bill Burr at a comedy club. And he was like he wasn’t doing great, and he was very clearly like sticking on a topic and just hidden every possible thought he had on that topic. And I’m sure the audience, as they do with more famous comedians, went like, yeah, he was okay, but I.
Knew from the back of the room as a comedian. I was like, yeah, this is his workout room, my hot Friday night show room at a comedy club in New York. For this moment, I need to use this because I’m doing Madison Square Garden tomorrow. I’m going to work, and I think the great comics and the prolific comics they have to fight that urge to kill every time and bombs sometimes if it means take a risk, and you see someone kill with the same set for years, I do think, I go, what’s the point though? What’s the point of killing on this random bar show right now?
With jokes already work one hundred percent? What do you gain? And when I’m doing spots, I really like to gain something. I like to learn something, and if I don’t, who cares. Yeah, I always appreciate an artist going for it, even if it misses like I as a snob.
I hate the sitcom with the dead that looks like me, that could lose some weight and has the hot younger wife and she thinks he’s stupid, and We’ve seen the sitcom five hundred times and I’m like, you’re not even trying. Whereas I appreciate something that is coming from a different angle aspiring to be something, which is my lead in to ask you about theater Adult, which I don’t want to misdescribe, but as I read it, and I’d rather you explain it, here’s somebody trying to do something. Basically, I came from this acting background and I have a lot of theater jokes related things talking about theater. I would have people complain about my podcast they go Jesus Christ another musical theater episode where you talk all about community theater and bad shows and teachers and all of that. That says to me is that, oh, okay, Like I have a very specific interest that I do want to cultivate.
I’m drawn to and so it’s okay. So where in my life can I create a vessel for all my theater thoughts, my theater jokes, my my theater just talking about it. So I made the show Theater Adult, and we’re about to have our second one at Joe’s Pub where I open it with some stand up and I get to go deeper into my theater jokes. Fred Armisson did a comedy special where it was for drummers, and it’s like, if you never drummed, you’re not going. To get most of the jokes.
And I’m like, this is for all the people who this is for theater kids, this is for people who did theater, who do theater, who love theater, and I can go deeper into the those jokes get more specific and then I can do I do a lot of I do a lot of crowd work at my headlining shows, and I love talking to people about their theater disasters, the shows they did in high school and what do they do now, How does being. A theater kid. Does it play into their own life now? What are they like when they do karaoke? So I want to create like a show where I could open with my theater standup, go into my theater crowd work, and then from the podcast side of it, get someone who either used to be a theater kid and now is whatever a lawyer and just an actor, a comedian, or someone who is on Broadway but did theater when they were younger.
I focus on that part of their life and I want to find out about the disastrous performances, the summer camps where they came out of the closet an acting class. I want to hear that story. I want to use the theater to talk about deeper things about their own life, their family, their romantic life, their dreams, their failures, and then just to make my dreams come true in fuse it with a little bit of singing, so I have my guests sing some songs from their old high school productions, even if they’re totally wrong for it. Lot of there’s a lot of non Jews who played Teva and sitting around the roofs and I go, here’s a space where I give you permission you can do if I were a rich man.
And then at the end I join in for a duet from my own theater past.
So it’s just like a space that I think I can infuse my comedic sensibilities with my love for theater and the nostalgia of a lot of us when we were in school, was I have a sports or theater that was just the division. And so there’s a big swath of people out there who have this experience who, even if they don’t love theater, now they did it and they can enjoy talking about it. And I’m really excited about just making it a more regular show in New York at comedy festivals where I can get a really cool guest that people are excited to hear about their past, use it to just have conversations that they haven’t they wouldn’t have a normal interview circumstance. I think that’d be great for festivals, definitely great for New York. I love the feedback of stop talking about theater on your podcast.
That’s like, hey, Rogan, stop with the MMA talk like you know, you know. One of the things if you google you, theater kid tends to come up. Like Rogan like it’s a and shouts people who go into Rogan ago, it’s it’s another it’s an MMA guy, I’ll skip this one. And it’s yeah, that’s fine. That’s fine too, And that’s why Rogan ultimately he goes on the it does panel for the MMA and it’s okay, you find a space for your interest too.
I’ll let you go because we’re way over, and I appreciate you giving me so much time. I didn’t want to ask you how much you enjoyed Australia. I was there in twenty fifteen. I just loved it, and it’s not easy to get to, especially for a East Coast, but I would love to get back and just I want to someday in my maybe in my sixties. I’m gonna tell my wife I’m going away for three weeks.
I want to rent a car and just drive around the entire circumference. Growing up in Queens, I’m always attracted to nothing. If I go out to Arizona or Nevada, I like going out in the middle of nowhere and being around nothing. So there’s something about Australia that appeals to me because, all right, they’re Sydney, there’s Millbourne. But if I go thirty miles that way, I could be in the middle of nowhere.
That’s very that’s a you sound like an easy vacation, or that sounds like easy. It’s the I loved Australia. I think first of all, the comedy was great in the sense that, like, they know so much about America that I didn’t really have to adjust to what I wanted to talk about. I was able to just play with with. Just American topics and they understood everything, and they’re excited because they know this is the one time I’m going to be there, probably for two years maybe, And the audiences were just so just smart, and we’re very much people who have known my work for years and there was never a chance to see me.
So they just bring that excitement to the shows. And in terms of the country, it’s the food, it’s incredible, the views are astounding. Sydney. The bridge in Sydney was just so pretty, at night. I could never be that chill.
The people there are very chill. Everything moved at a much slower pace, and I think after a week and a half I’d be like, oh, come on, please, please, can I have a refol of my water? I’m begging you. But it was really it was a special trip and I want to go down even longer next time because it’s just different world, dude. And I didn’t make it to New Zealand.
When I went, it was long enough ago that I used a travel agent to help me put this trip together. Sure, and the travel agent was like, you can’t do Australia New Zealand in two weeks, you need that’s a separate trip. But you hit New Zealand. How was it? It was fast and furious.
The food was just so great. I just got there’s so many There’s just so much like Japanese food in New Zealand, and sashimi which I love, and fresh fish and I didn’t I wasn’t really into doing the Lord of the Rings thing, and it was at the end of the trip, so I was a little bit worn out. But just the food, just every single meal, you go, what are they feeding us in America? Because everything here. Is feels fresh, if the blueberries are bigger, and.
Next time I hope I can hop around the islands a little more. That’s awesome, shen Marco. Thank you for your time today. Looking forward to seeing you on the Botta Being Comedy Jam during US Paul and then coming to to Netflix. I appreciate that.
Thanks, thank you, appreciate it. Shenmarco is a razy Thank you for coming on the show, repeat guest. He’s really fantastic and he is one of Vulture’s comedians that you will know and should know. And we’ll talk about that list on tomorrow’s podcast and see it then