September 2026 Newsletter

Essential Info - effort level: bare minimum

Shows This Month: (click event for tickets)

Less Essential Info - effort level: elementary reading

Career Updates:

  • Finals of St Marks Comedy Competition:
    I made it to the finals of the St Marks Comedy Competition! This is another way of saying: I did not win the St Marks Comedy Competition.

  • Rodney's Comedy Club Audition:
    If you read last month's newsletter, I said I had won the opportunity to audition for the booker at Rodney's Comedy Club in 3-6 months. They ended up having an opening earlier and I was able to audition this past Saturday towards the end of the show. I had a fun set and I think it went well so we shall see. The organizer told me I did a good job and only had one small piece of feedback: "If you're auditioning for check spots, don't make jokes about people who are paying their check because it's your job to eat that time."
    This was a very good reminder.     Check spots are spots given to early comedians when you first get "passed" (accepted) at a comedy club. You basically get a spot on the show towards the end when the servers go around and pass out checks so people can pay for their drinks. Basically, as a newer comedian, you have earned the right/are subjected to the ritual of trying to do comedy while a bunch of people try to do math, dig through their purses, debate whether they ordered 2 beers or 3. This is not a glamorous part of the career trajectory but someone's gotta do it and I hope that will soon be me.

  • Sketch Shoot:
    A comic named Oscar Salem that I've been on shows with asked me to be part of a sketch comedy series he's creating. He initially asked if I would be willing to play the role of a soldier with PTSD. I looked inward at the lack of emotions and experiences I would have to draw on and replied "I don't think I would do a good job at that." Instead, he cast me as a bear. Like in a bear costume. It was super fun and I've never been part of a film shoot before with a big fancy camera and lights and whatnot. It was also very tedious because being on a shoot when you're not important means a lot of waiting around. One actress pulled out a sandwich because I guess she had done this before and knew to bring a lunch. She did not share it with me because we do not know each other.

Asahi Made Stuff:

not taking requests because this takes forever

Inconsequential Info - effort level: you are pooping and are trying to stay off short-form video platforms

I'm realizing I started comedy wrong
I went to my first open mic five years ago. For four years after that, I only went to open mics. I never performed on "real" shows. By "real" shows, I mean a show with an audience unlike open mics, which are attended almost exclusively by comedians and comedians only.This means the vibes at open mics are often terrible: most people are on their phones, those who are paying attention aren't always generous with their laughs, newer comics are usually just focused on what they’re going to say.

From 2021 to 2025, this was "comedy" to me: building up my courage to go to one of these humiliation rituals, usually doing mediocre, leaving and not coming back for two weeks (or months). Because of war stories I had listened to on comedy podcasts and other sources of masculine psychological junk, I assumed this was the correct path. The Catholic in me was comfortable with the idea that pursuing comedy should entail a great deal of wading through shit. I also stupidly assumed I wasn't ready for real shows so I shouldn't even try to get booked on them. (Since then, I've seen enough terrible "comedy" on real shows to know that I was overestimating the standard required to perform.)

In 2025, I started trying to get booked on real shows and once I began performing in front of real audiences, happy people who were excited to laugh, I remembered something so stupidly obvious: "oh, comedy is supposed to be fun."

I'm still glad I did nothing but open mics for as long as I did. I have a much greater appreciation for real shows as a result. I also learned some humility through humiliation. No one owes me a laugh. No one owes me anything. Unfortunately, while four years of open mics may have taught me some resilience, it didn't harden me into some kind of diamond-quality comic. In some ways, it actually made me a worse comic, or at least a misdirected one. Open mic jokes and real show jokes aren't always the same. Particularly at the Manhattan male-dominated "incel" open mics, the jokes that raise eyes from phones and get a chuckle are the often the most fucked up, extreme, dark jokes. The open micer crowds can be like worn out drug addicts, so inured to jokes that it takes saying the most heinous things to get their heart rate up. Combine this with the fact that a lot of the people at these mics are (a) new to comedy and/or (b) bad a comedy and you have the perfect ingredients for terrible jokes in terrible taste. I myself wrote plenty of jokes about Nazis, Hitler, Epstein, incest, etc in the hopes that "maybe this one-liner about school shootings will get the fellas at the open mic to pay attention and laugh."

I had Kelly read over this and she stopped here like “these are a lot of kind of insane words to just throw out there.” And it dawned on me that I’ve grown so numb to hearing these things at open mics that they don’t shock me anymore. When I see these words, my brain thinks “joke topics” before it thinks “tragedies”- further evidence that I need to be spending more time around human beings and less time around open mics.

Now that I've been performing for real crowds for about a year, I see that was misguided. I feel like I was preparing for a marathon by doing nothing but pushups. I don't need to shock people to make them laugh. I can do fun jokes, silly jokes, and sprinkle a dark joke here and there if the vibe is right. Luckily, most of my sets in those 4 years did not go well. So I have grown much more comfortable with failure. Hopefully, moving forward I can practice some success.Again, if you got all the way down here, thanks for reading!

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I’ve been doing this for 2 years, I’m not on tour

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