https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Z0-W60EFzYw
So what did you do for MTV? My first thing I did on there was Wild N Out. I did four seasons of that. I was like the youngest cast member. It was right after Pete Davidson left there to go to SNL. They needed a white guy, and I happened to fit like that exact mold. Went on there, learned so much. So that’s a very strange diversity hire. Oh, of course. Yeah, we’re short of white guys. Let’s call Matt. Never hear it anymore. No, no, that’s not a likely diversity hire. But this, it could not have been a better learning experience because I was a very insecure, shy kid, and I was going on a show with comics. This was the revamp of Wild N Out. This was after Kevin Hart, DeRay Davis, Corey Holcomb, all these amazing, Kat Williams, all these fantastic comics had left the show and they rebooted it with a lot of comics I knew from the Atlanta scene who were monsters. Carlos Miller, DC Young Fly, Chico Bean are all killers on stage, and I had to compete with them. And I knew I couldn’t, but I at least had to hold my ground. And in doing that, I just went through the gauntlet over there. Everyone at that show turned me into a man with confidence on stage. And I’m so grateful for that. I can’t imagine I would’ve gotten that experience anywhere else. So I did a few seasons on the show, and the show was fun. I enjoyed my experience on there, but I had a very niche role to play. Every joke I said had to be about me being the white guy on the show. If I ever tried to step out- Oh yeah, that’s a very constrained routine. Yes. And each time I try to step out of it, people will be like, what are you doing? I’m like, oh, I thought I was gonna do a clever joke. And they’re like, no, no, no, no, no. Do the thing you’re here to do. And although I enjoyed it, and I had built a little bit of a name for myself, I was like, this isn’t what I wanna do for ever. That’s an interesting set of constraints, right? I mean, it’s a very tight set of constraints. And one of the facts that emerges from the literature on creativity is that you tend to get creative responses when people are constrained very severely. Best example I know of that is, so there’s a Japanese poetry form known as haiku, which has very strict rules. Well, MIT nerds set up a website decades ago now that was devoted to haiku that could only be about the luncheon meat spam. And there’s like 50,000 haikus. There’s literally 50,000 haikus online in the online haiku spam archive. And they’re hilarious, but partly they’re hilarious because, well, it’s bad enough that you have to just do haiku. Because that’s pointless and constraining to begin with, but then to restrict it even further. So specific. Well, yeah, well, it forces a kind of wit. And so I can imagine that having the constraint of only being able to make jokes about being the white guy must have also been one of the things that sharpened your wit. I think so too. And I think, unless I’m misconstruing this, I think that’s probably why crowd work works the best for me because I’m very constrained. Like I have to talk about, I have to answer what they’re saying to me with a funny response in association with what they’re talking about. I don’t have vast options. It has to be now, and it has to be about what they’re saying. Okay, so you said that you were a shy kid. And obviously the last thing in some ways that you would expect a shy kid to be doing is to be doing online standup comedy in front of live audiences and then taping that that’s specifically devoted to crowd work. Because I can’t actually imagine a situation, maybe if you threw someone on stage and said like, sing naked, that would be about the equivalent of inducing self-consciousness. So how did you get to the point where, what did you have to do so that your shyness was no longer making you self-conscious on stage? And how is it that you orient yourself towards the audience so you don’t become self-conscious when you’re, now you’ll become self-conscious because we’re dealing with self-consciousness. No, no, not at all, not at all. This is the cheapest therapy session I’ve ever had. So I’m curious about how you keep yourself not focusing on whether or not you’re being funny, for example, when you’re interacting with the audience. It’s purely confidence, whether it’s real or fake confidence. I think when I was younger, I did develop a fake confidence. I was bullied a lot in high school, not like getting shoved into lockers, but to the point where I wasn’t in anybody’s group. I was class clown. I was the butt of a lot of people’s jokes, which didn’t hurt, at least I tell myself, but I think that’s where you learn to deflect. You have two options at a moment when somebody makes a joke you expense. You can either laugh along and play into it and go with it, or you can be embarrassed and everybody sees you’re embarrassed, which is even more embarrassing. Yeah, right, that just invites through the abuse. So I think growing up, I developed this sense of false confidence where I went, hey, if I also make fun of myself and I get in on your guys’ joke, it won’t hurt, or people can’t tell that I’m obsessive. So why false though? People think it doesn’t bother me. Because obviously, so I’m gonna challenge your supposition that that was false. Well, because the thing about being funny is that if you’re false, you’re not funny, and if you’re not funny and you’re being bullied, you’re just gonna get bullied worse. So you were obviously, it seems like you were able to generate responses that were witty and that were funny. It’s purely a defense mechanism, I think. It wasn’t for the point of like, oh, I hope I get a good joke off here. I have to deflect them saying a mean thing with me saying a funny thing. Right, but that isn’t, that is, so I would say that is a good, that’s actually a very sophisticated defense. Because I mean, one of the things that people do, guys do this particularly in like relatively rough working class jobs, is they’ll throw pointed barbs at each other to see, are you the sort of person who gets irritated and flies off the handle and can’t be trusted in a crisis? Or are you the sort of person that can roll with a joke and maybe even say something funny? And so I wouldn’t say that the ability to do that is false. I would say that’s a sophisticated, it’s more sophisticated form of defense than physical aggression. I mean, physical aggression can be useful, but that’s a, there isn’t a more sophisticated way of parrying like a pointed remark than to turn it into something that’s funny and to toss it back. Oh, well thank you. Yeah, I mean, it was a totally subconscious skill set. I had no idea until right now, apparently, what I was even doing. So A, thank you, and B, I think it starts then, and then the longer you do stand up, you realize you’re funny. Eventually, you do realize you’re funny. Chris Rock talks about this all the time when he talks about, when comedians can’t tell a joke on stage and it doesn’t work. After a certain point, you know you’re funny, you’re just not saying your joke correctly where the audience perceives it the way you want them to perceive it. Right, so you don’t experience moments of global doubt. It’s localized. Exactly, so I think after a while, I mean, after doing comedy for 12 years and having had shows of uproarious laughter and standing ovations, you know you’re capable of being funny and putting on a good show. Right, right. So I think that confidence is paired with the control of an audience. When you’re on stage with a microphone, people are there to watch and listen to you. Right, they’re also hoping you’ll be funny except for the audience. Of course, of course. So they’re on your, they could be on your side. Yes, and then once people see how you can handle that kind of power, that you can be funny, that you can shut somebody down, I think people are more apt to take the seat and just go, okay, let me just see what he does. Right, right, they’re gonna give you more of the benefit of the doubt. [“The Star-Spangled Banner”]