How I Came to This Comedy Writing Life

 When people say “That’s so interesting! How did you get into that?” upon learning what I do, I give them the nutshell history. Because it’s en excellent question and, as I always so, I came to this work of custom writing funny speeches, roasts, presentations, lectures and other public speaking products and documents very organically.

I fell into standup comedy in the late 1990’s shortly after moving to Los Angeles. I moved to LA with creative showbiz endeavors in mind, but leaning much more toward screenwriting and acting. Standup was not even a thought as I arrived in a rental car, driving down from San Francisco, where I’d been living for a few years, a Boston native seeking some version of the California Dream.

As a kid I’d always absolutely loved comedy, humor, jokes, funniness- whichever terms one might use. I was laser focused on and enthralled by Saturday Night Live sketches, and avidly consumed records on my parents’ shelves by comedians like Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Mel Brooks with Carl Reiner. Shortly later I’d go get my own comedy records, like Steve Martin’s Let’s Get Small and Wild & Crazy Guy, and The Wedding Album by Cheech & Chong. In Mr Pradell’s 6^th grade class, in our Boston suburb, I would recite memorized Steve Martin bits for my table mates, noticing that they seemed, if not utterly captivated, then at least modestly entertained by the impromptu show.

Joking around and doing silly voices, coming up with catchy inside slang terms for use by my circle of friends, writing a produced play in 4^th grade titled Alexander Graham Cracker- while none of these were of the level of work required of an adult in entertainment, as with pretty much all comedians, these modest outputs of crude humor laid the foundation-- they were building blocks of an affinity and an aptitude for being able to make people laugh.

After moving to San Francisco a few years after graduating from college, I started attending a drop-in improvisational theater class, taught by this charismatic actor who’d been in some widely seen and heard in some TV and radio commercials around the Bay Area. Later I joined the more formally structured Bay Area Theater Sports for a couple of levels, and although improvisation doesn’t strictly necessitate “jokes”, anyone with the slightest mind for humor will often come up with lines that have a comedic twist. You don’t need to be funny, but good funny is certainly effective and appreciated.

After moving down to Los Angeles, it was around a year before I even attempted a standup open mic. I had been going as an audience member to an especially magical sort of comedy show at the old Largo (they’ve since moved locations into a theater space), a bar/restaurant/showroom where many excellent, creative and smart standups would work out their material- old and new- at a Monday night show. Watching that inspired me to try an open mic at a coffee house in Santa Monica on a Sunday night, and getting any laughs at all led me to keep on going to mics and finding my way.

Within a few years, a handful of comedians I was friendly with asked me to write jokes for them. I did it for the thrill, the challenge, the satisfaction of hearing them use the jokes on stage at clubs, or on one of their late night TV spots.

Through the years since then, writing sketches, short films, bits for TV shows, humor pieces for magazines and a LOT of standup jokes and bits, it made good sense to me to share what I’ve worked on and gotten really good at with “regular”, non-entertainment people, professionals who benefit immensely from being funny in a real life or work situation.

In the last couple years I wrote a large part of 2 very well-selling creative-exercise books, with a lot of humor, for a top LA marketing guru; had a few humorous greeting cards I wrote sell good numbers for the Frank N Funny series; and a short, comedic film script I wrote was produced in West Texas by a successful director/producer with a half dozen feature films under his belt.

I feel grateful for the projects I’ve gotten to work on, and whatever project I work on with whichever clients, I bring the totality of that experience to the work. Comedic writing isn’t what I thought I would get into when I was a little kid, but now it feels like it’s where I’m meant to be.