If you’re reading this blog, I’m going to let you in on a secret. While I did get into standup after being booed off stage at karoake, there is more to the story.
Years before I ever got on stage, my randomly assigned freshman year roommate, and very quickly one of my best friends, Jay Schultz started performing stand up during college. Since we were already business partners and co-founders of an online website that parodied Rutgers University (our now alma mater), I quickly became his stand up manager.
Since I didn’t have any show biz contacts or too many social skills, my management mostly consisted of hearing his jokes over and over again and helping him find the best delivery, walking around dorm lounges and asking people to listen to his 5 minutes of material, and collecting 10% of practically nothing.
Once we graduated, Jay moved to NYC and continued doing comedy while I remotely and terribly managed him from 100 miles away in Connecticut. Jay wound up moving to L.A. but was spending the summer in Atlantic City before the move. I was on a project in Philadelphia , which is an hour from AC. I felt a duty as his (useless but still not fired) manger to scout out the comedy clubs in Philly (all 2!) for him as he was coming to visit one of these weeks.
After watching the free open mic show for two straight weeks, I went home slightly buzzed and wrote some jokes that I thought of while watching the performing comics. I edited the jokes throughout the week, ran them by Jay and other friends, they all provided different feedback and said I should try getting up there, so I said “why the hell not?” and tried it the very next week. That was July 2008. You can view my first time diasaster here. My heart had never beaten so fast as the first time I got up there and I’ve been hooked ever since.
Dude, I never knew you did comedy…cool site by the way
I’m honored to be part of the reason you ultimately dropped out of grad school.