https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Sk0_p2g7eb8
Okay, so first of all, you said you started doing open mics when you were about 15. Where? The Columbus Funny Bone in Columbus, Ohio. I went on the Comedy Club’s website when I kind of figured out open mics were the thing to start with. I don’t remember how I found that out. I remember going to their website, finding out it’s 21 and up, as most comedy clubs are due to liquor license, and the owner’s email was on there. And like a naive kid, I just emailed the owner. I was like, hey, this is my name. This is how old I am. I know I’m supposed to be 21 and up, but if I have like a parent guardian with me, could I come in to try the open mic? And any rational businessman would say, no, I’m not going to risk my liquor license for some kid to come in here and tell a joke. What could possibly come out of that? But for some odd reason, he said yes, and it allowed me an opportunity to go and practice and enjoy this new thing that I was just doing for fun. I had no idea anything like this could ever happen to me. It was just something I was doing for fun to like make my grandpa laugh. And did you make your grandpa laugh? Oh my God, he was my number one fan. I miss him every single day. Oh, yes. So did you have a good time in Columbus doing this? I did. But it’s most like most Midwestern towns, there’s a ceiling, you know, and if you have bigger dreams, you have to escape. You have to go see what else is out there. So tell me how your career progressed from Columbus. How many shows did you do at Columbus? What was the arc of your career? So I started when I was 15 and then I got a manager at a comedy club in Atlanta over Twitter, believe it or not. Oh, look, well there, Twitter was good for something. I know, make or break you. I promise. It’s like the one time Twitter has been good for something. Exactly. Well, it’s good for getting canceled, actually, if you want to get canceled. Twitter is excellent for that. Yeah. Jesus. That is its primary use. What else is it? It’s just negativity. It’s the worst app. People who thrive on Twitter rarely do well in life. It’s so bad. But this is when Twitter was kind of brand new. So what would happen was comics that I was a fan of would come through the state of Ohio, whether Cleveland, Toledo, Dayton, Cincinnati or Columbus. And this was a time where Twitter was so new, you could access anybody. Like this was a time when like Ashton Kutcher was like the only person to have like a million followers on there. Like most celebrities had maybe 10,000 followers on there. You could tweet to somebody and they would see it and they would respond. So I would tweet to favorite comics of mine when they were coming through the state of Ohio. And I’d be like, hey, I’m a big fan. I’m a kid. Can I do a guest spot on your show? And some would say no. Some would thankfully say yes. So who gave you an early opportunity? D.L. Hughley actually gave me my first ever guest spot, which was so funny because when I was 15 years old, my extent of my D.L. Hughley knowledge was just soul plane. And where he played a bathroom attendant, his smallest credit to date has to be. I had no realization that he was one of the kings of comedy, like one of the greatest to ever do it and go on one of the most famous tours of all time. But he was so kind to me. He gave him my first guest spot. My second guest spot was Finesse Mitchell. And then it was Ralphie May, who was like a brother of mine. He’s one that really helped me out in my younger years. But through Twitter, there was this comedy club owner in Atlanta who knew D.L. for a very long time. And he saw D.L. Hughley and I just going back and forth, choking back and forth with each other on Twitter. He reached out. My mom and I drove down from Ohio to Atlanta, it’s like a nine hour drive, to come perform at his club for a weekend. Went there. We hit it off really well. He explained to me the things he wanted to do for my career. And I didn’t know any better. So I was like, yeah, however you want to help. And my mom was also like, yeah, whatever. Keep some off drugs, I guess. So did that work? Did it keep you off drugs until like my early 20s? Yeah, I would say so. Well, that’s not bad. That’s probably better. He did a fantastic job. Exactly. I’m from Ohio. I’m lucky I didn’t brush my teeth with fentanyl growing up. It was bad. My hometown was so trashy. So he finds me on Twitter. We go down there. We meet. We hit it off. And he offers me to come down there the summer between my junior or senior year of high school. And I go down there and I live on a comics couch for three months, my entire summer break. I go down there and I’m doing nine to 11 shows a week. I’m going to the malls. I’m passing out free tickets. I’m hanging posters up to promote shows. I’m going in to the comedy club at 3 p.m. to like practice my set while he throws tennis balls at me and honks horns and jingles. Anything he can do to distract me to a very Mr. Miyagi. That was part of the training regimen. Exactly. And I think to this day, I think it helps me keep my composure in the pocket. Like I’m not thrown for a loop when somebody yells out something. That typical exposure therapy from a psychological perspective. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Face what you’re afraid of. Yeah. Oh, that’s cool. So how did he know to do that, do you think? That’s smart. I’m not sure. He’s a fantastic guy. His name’s Gary Abdo. He’s very prominent in the comedy community. He’s helped out a lot of people starting out their career. He was very prominent in Chappelle’s early years. He was like a late teenager, earthquake. So he’s probably seen people thrown by hecklers and so forth and by trouble. Absolutely. Because you can’t get knocked out of your groove. Well, his comedy club down there was called Uptown Comedy Corner. And it was notoriously known as like one of the harshest comedy clubs in the country. It was a tough environment. They either loved you or they would boo you off stage. Oh, yeah. So for me to go in there as a kid, yes, you have the novelty of like, he’s a kid, give him a chance. Right, right. But only so far. Yeah. So you’ve got to get them in the first couple of minutes. Otherwise, they’re not going to sit there and watch you do five or 10 minutes. They just don’t have that patience in them. So I go down there and I get trained in like one of the harshest environments possible. And in doing that, I meet more comics who are coming through the club. I would pretty much open for like anybody that came through the club down there. I met a lot of comics who lived out of LA. So then I went back to high school for my senior year. I knew I didn’t want to go to college. I knew comedy is what I wanted to do. So I flew out to Los Angeles and I took the Chespie, the California proficiency exam, which in certain states is kind of like college where you have to have a certain amount of credits to graduate high school. The Chespie is essentially a test. You can take it any time that basically tests you out of high school. You’ve learned everything you need to learn. Oh, really? Oh, that’s a great option. It’s fantastic. So I flew out there, took the test, came back. I had to wait like two weeks for my results, but I had a good feeling about it. So I was just going to school for two weeks and just like sleeping throughout class. I wouldn’t do any of the work. I wouldn’t take any of the tests. How old were you at that point? I had just turned 17. Maybe I had just turned 17. I was maybe still 16. And so that’s after you came back from LA? Yes. I came back from taking the test, waiting for the results, got the results back at like the first week of January, moved out to my friend, Eric Griffin’s couch two weeks after that. So I was about like four or five months early from graduating high school, moved out there, lived on his couch for the first couple of months. Then my manager at the time, his son, graduated film school. He moved out to Los Angeles. I stayed on his couch for the next year. And I was just going to comedy clubs every single night. I would go and just hang out. Some of them wouldn’t even let me hang out inside. Until finally people would vouch for me. People wouldn’t show up on the lineup. And somebody was like, well, he’s here. All right. So you’re hanging around enough to get your opportunity. Exactly. But funny enough, sometimes I would get the opportunity to go on stage and I literally couldn’t step foot in the comedy club until they were like announcing and Matt Reif. And then I would have to run through into the comedy club, go on stage and leave immediately after because I wasn’t 21. So they still had to abide by their own rules in a very loophole way. And in doing that, I just kind of stayed consistent in the scene. I was getting more and more prominent stage time. I started to book smaller and smaller, smaller turning into larger TV appearances, which was some Disney stuff that led to a bunch of MTV stuff. And then after I left on my MTV stuff, I just became really dedicated to stand up and transferring over to acting and producing and developing and all that kind of stuff. 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. He’s white. Never hear it anymore. No, no, that’s not a likely diversity hire. But 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, D. Ray Davis, Corey Holcomb, all these amazing Cat 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 have 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. Very constrained. Yes. Anytime I tried to step out of it, people would be like, what are you doing? I thought I was going to do a clever joke. And they’re like, 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 want to do. That’s an interesting set of constraints. 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 meets 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. Of course. That’s pointless and constraining to begin with. But then to restrict it even further. So specific. 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. 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 stand-up 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, you know, 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 this. No, no, not at all. Not at all. 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.