October 2026 Newsletter

Essential Info - effort level: bare minimum

Shows This Month: (click event for tickets)

  • October 3 - Cafecito comedy @ARTIZEN

  • October 5 - Big Stuff Comedy @Steiny's Pub

  • October 13 - Headquarters Comedy @Flophouse Comedy Club

  • October 18 - Comedy Mob @New York Comedy Club East Village

  • October 25 - Laughing Buddha @New York Comedy Club Upper West Side

  • November 7 - @The Idea Kitchen (I’m doing a 20 minute set! But this is way up town so I’m not pressuring anyone to come)

Less Essential Info - effort level: elementary reading

Career Wins:

  • My mom subscribed to the newsletter!

    • with two different emails!

    • and did not check the "send me newsletter" box either time!

    • so she will not see this!

  • I got booked on two shows this month where THEY reached out to ME

    • Imagine being on a dating app for years and only getting matches you initiate. And then one day someone finally likes you first. I feel like a reformed comedy incel.

  • PASSED AT RODNEY'S COMEDY CLUB

    • Last week, after two auditions, I was officially "passed" at Rodney's Comedy Club and the affiliated show Comedy Mob. This means that instead of having to bring guests and sign up for specific open-calls, I am on a list of approved comedians who they will book consistently. I’ll probably just get one spot a month to start. This is huge because this is only the second club that I've been passed at. By some measure, my career is going twice as well as it was two weeks ago. It feels like I have to beg and chase people down for almost every opportunity, so anything reliable/consistent feels really nice.

  • A note on "regular spots" vs audition shows

    • The value of consistent, reliable spots from a venue is more than just "I don't have to chase down leads to get on stage." The significant difference between audition/sign-up shows and regular spots is how you can use them to become a better comic. When I do an audition show, I'm trying to have a really good, tidy, well-polished 5-minute set. Like most sensible comics, I will only do my best "tight 5" for these shows, jokes I've been doing for a year, two years, or more at this point. But if you're mostly doing audition/sign-up spots that you're hoping lead to something else, you don't have as much chance to work on new things, experiment, grow as a comic. So, the creative luxury of getting guaranteed monthly spots from a venue means you now have a place where you can take risks without fear of losing opportunity. You're able to turn off the desperate desire to succeed and turn on the freedom to grow. Of course, there are limits. You can be "un-passed" if you're consistently doing horribly but from what I hear, it takes a lot to truly get yourself banned from somewhere. If you hear that I've been banned, it means I'm reaching creative heights the general public cannot handle.

Career Losses:

  • I keep trying a joke about how the all the fish at the beach are naked. Nobody likes it.

Asahi Made Stuff:

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

TRIGGER WARNING: Long text, don’t yell at me if you get bored

I'm having a lot of fun on stage
In last month's newsletter, I talked about how I started comedy wrong. By doing nothing but open mics attended by sad, weird, incompetent loser comedians like me, I tricked myself into thinking comedy was not fun.

At the end of August, God intervened in the form of a husky Persian comedian from Toronto named Neema Naz. I was on a couple of shows at Greenwich Village Comedy Club with him, some of the eight precious "real" shows I was awarded for my residency. I watched Neema's set before mine, mostly to get a sense of the room but I ended up getting a much needed mindset shift. I noticed that Neema, like many skilled comics, would start his set by getting acquainted with the crowd, having a conversation. I, hoping that performing tight planned sets would help this residency lead to more spots, never veered too far from my script. Up to that point, I would get up there, say hello and dive into the predetermined list of jokes I prepared. There was little freedom in my sets because freedom is scary. I felt safer reciting a list of jokes and getting middling reactions than trying something spontaneous and failing. That night, I watched Neema and something clicked very acutely. I observed him play around, ask a woman a question, she answered, and he came back immediately with a funny off-the-cuff remark. And I vividly remember thinking "ah, that's what being funny is." Obviously, I also think well-written and creatively performed art is funny. But at the bare bones, if you strip away the microphone and the stage, when I think about what it means to be funny, to me, funny is when you're talking to someone and they say something in response to what you just said and its humor and the speed at which it was calculated both delight you. So I looked at what Neema had just done thinking, "man, he's funny." And then I had a sad thought: "am I even funny like that? Or do I have to spend months writing two sentences to make people laugh?" Years of dogshit open mics had made me forget the arrogant impression that I was funny.

I had another set on the 9pm and the 11pm shows. So after a meh performance, I had a 15-second sit-down with myself in the back of the club that basically went:

"On the 9pm show, you are gonna get up there with no plan. You are going to play with the crowd, the way you would with people at a lunch table, at a party. I can already feel you getting ready to pussy out and just do planned jokes. It's scary but you have to do this. We need to find out what happens."

And it was terrifying. For like 5 seconds. And then it was so much fun. I played around with some dudes who were having a "guy's night." I made fun of a weird guy with a pony tail and said he looked like he wanted to buy a katana from me. He said his go-to kareoke song was "Bohemian Rhapsody." I told him having your go-to kareoke song be 6 minutes long is selfish behavior. I told a mixed-race couple and their teenage children that I have doubts about whether biracial love is really worth all the trouble, speaking from personal experience. Basically, I had a fuckin' blast. I felt funny, not just like my jokes are funny but like, me as a person I am funny, which once again, is a feeling that gets beaten down from doing open mics.

I recommend everyone read a book called The Inner Game of Tennis, which teaches mainly the idea that when we mess up in performance endeavors, it's often because our neurotic consciousness gets in the way of our much smoother subconscious. What I thought I learned from this book, but had to re-learn watching Neema, was that I needed to ground myself in my confidence that I am capable of this thing I'm trying to do. When I go on stage now, I'm not just thinking "okay joke B comes after joke A and don't forget the grandma line." I'm trying to think, "oh fuck yea, look at these people, they wanna laugh, I'm funny I'm about to go make these people laugh." And it doesn't always work. I still eat shit sometimes but it works way better than what I was doing before. And I'm having much more fun.

Full disclosure, I'm coming off the high of a really good set a couple nights ago so I'm viewing comedy and myself with rose-colored glasses right now. Ask me about this after I bomb later this month and I might rip this newsletter up in embarrassment. But for now, this will be a time capsule of my renewed youthful arrogance, riding the thrilling steep part of the improvement curve before I plateau sometime in the future.

P.S. please to send in questions!

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

Come see me perform. Click on an event for ticket link.