“I’m Sorry” Area
In my last newsletter, I promised I’d send out a newsletter every month. That was several months ago, meaning that, for those still doing the math, I broke my promise. I’m really sorry!! I’m going to try to be more consistent, but honestly no promises. For my free subscribers, I don’t feel too bad, but for those who’ve paid, I’m genuinely sorry. I’m pausing billing for now, and can request a refund for the past few months. If I can make it up to you another way, let me know!
On Being a Businessperson
I’ve recently had to come to terms with the fact that I am a businessperson. It’s shocking to hear and even more shocking to say, but it’s undeniable. As my career has progressed (epic), I find myself constantly in “meetings” trying to “sell” ideas. I’m having to think about the “market” and spend time “networking.” I’d never anticipated this when I first committed to becoming a comedian, but unless you’re so successful that you have people around you immediately decide every non-creative decision on your behalf (and even then: you have to choose to hire them, requiring at least a modicum of savvy and business acumen), you must become a businessperson if you want to be an artist.
While texturally antithetical, business and comedy aren’t so different at core: they’re about recognizing what a market, or audience, wants. Ideally, comedy should be far more driven by a personal creative vision, but, unlike other arts, it necessarily must take its reception into account (business term). Business, too, is creative, a lesson I learned from watching Mad Men YouTube compilations (can’t speak to the show as a whole, never seen).
Though I’m good at comedy, I’m not great at business. I have neither the instinct for it nor the wardrobe. I give away any clothing that isn’t elastic or big enough that it’s functionally a caftan. I can’t sense whom I should trust to act on my behalf, and often can’t tell what the market wants. I’m in meetings completely credulous, believing whatever anyone says, even though Lucy from Peanuts taught me that that’s a mistake. I don’t have an intuitive sense for where money is. I spend hours on laborious projects that will make me just enough money to buy me four burritos, and fail to follow up on opportunities that would pay my rent for months. I have almost 80,000 followers on Twitter, and have made maybe only $1000 off the platform, most of which has been in the form of meal kits I’ve had to beg companies to send me after they used my Tweets without compensation on their Instagram page.
Welcome To My Amazing Life In The Gig Economy. My job is actually one billion smaller jobs in a trench coat, many of which I’m actually not preternaturally gifted at or even experienced in. To be a performer in New York, you have to produce your own work, which itself involves a whole suite of skills and knowledge. When putting up a stand-up show, for example, you need lighting and sound and staging that separates the performers from the audience – otherwise, the premise on which stand-up rests is broken and it becomes clear that this is just Some Person reciting a pre-prepared routine with faux-extemporaneity.
At some venues, like Union Hall, where Natalie and I currently host our show, they do all this work for you, thank god. At other venues, not so much. For about a year leading up to the pandemic, Natalie and I hosted a weekly show called “August Exploration” in the tiny backroom of a bar in Bushwick called Jones Beach, since closed and reopened under a different name. It was a miracle the show actually occurred; each week we faced completely novel and insane obstacles. We would show up and the microphones would be missing, or the mic stand, or the XLR cable, or sometimes the entire cardboard box that held these items amidst of sea of other electronic detritus, and we’d have to run to nearby bars and beg to borrow their equipment. Sometimes there were no chairs. Our lighting was a clip lamp we hung from a nail on the wall. One week the manager of the bar told us that a massive rat had run from the street into the backroom where our show was set to begin in thirty minutes. Not to worry though: the manager handed us a shovel, so that in the event the rat appeared during our stand-up comedy show, we could murder it. “Now I’ve heard of ‘killing’ at a comedy show, but this is ridiculous!” – me.
(Make no mistake: I loved that show and that bar!!! They had a beer and shot combo for $6 and paid us $40 to host the show, which meant we could pay each comedian $10 so they weren’t actively losing money on transportation costs doing the show)
Working as a performer has also meant doing my own graphic design, which is actually a craft people formally study for years but I practice by instinct with the app Preview, the free PDF reader on the Apple operating system, which has some cursory photo-editing tools that I’ve used to make dozens of posters and which does not allow you to change anything once you’ve closed the file so you better get it right the first time. I remember in college I anticipated that I might live a life where I’d need to design posters, and looked into taking the graphic design classes on offer, only to find out that the intro graphic design course had the single highest workload rating of any class offered at the university — compensating, I think, for the perceived frivolity of the idea of “art.” The course reviews spoke of spending multiple all-nighters a week on the studio floor, cutting and pasting construction paper. The entire first year of the graphic design program was entirely analog; the class was about the fundamentals of design and layout, so you never even learned how to use any of the available software. God forbid anybody learn a trade.
Some of my graphic design work (cut off at the sides cuz it’s from our Instagram grid). You can kind of see that I had one idea and ran with it.
Now, with my podcast, I’ve had to learn to be a sound mixer, editor, and engineer. I do all the editing for the podcast on my ten-year-old MacBook, running the 2010 version of GarageBand. It crashes at least once every time I use it since I refuse to have any fewer than one million tabs and applications open at once, so I just have to make sure to save frequently, no problem. For a while, Natalie and I were using a single Blue Yeti USB microphone placed between us to record, but it quickly became clear that we didn’t have the discipline to stay perfectly equally spaced from the microphone, making the volume vary wildly. We decided (with the help of Felipe Di Poi, another comedian who runs the great Raisin Man Arena podcast) to buy a sound board and microphones. It took us a full two months of weekly work to actually get it set up: we would buy a sound board and realize we didn’t have the right cords, and then, once those cords arrived, realize we didn’t have a mixer we could connect to our computer. We purchased everything through the venerated company Sweetwater, whose sales associate gave us his personal phone number but I think consistently assumed we knew more than we did. As part of their business model, Sweetwater sends you candy with each package, so actually in having to purchase and return things multiple times we actually came out almost a dollar ahead in free candy. So maybe I’m not so bad at business after all.
It’s strange to invest so much time into skills I barely foresaw myself needing. I sometimes resent it because I generally have a bad attitude about stuff, before reminding myself boringly that I should be grateful that I have work that puts me in a position where I “get” to learn new things. Developing skill can be logarithmic, where the initial investment in time yields the most return anyway. Here’s a graph to explain:
I was going to try to make my own graph, but I’ve also learned one of the pleasures of work is getting to a place where I can comfortably outsource it. Our live show now has two producers, Michaela Ford and Noah Weiner, and our new posters (see below) are made by the enormously talented Nick Fogarty. It’s cool to learn new stuff, but it’s even cooler to pay competent people to use their superior skills and experience
With that said: as a newsletter writer and as a businessperson, I have failed to “deliver” (business term) on my “promise” (lay person term) of “delivering” (see earlier) a consistent “product” (business term). This is to say that I promised I would send out this newsletter monthly, and I haven’t done that. It’s embarrassing to have over-promised something, but that’s what happened; writing an essay a month ended up being more than I could take on. Fortunately, this isn’t a new feeling: my career in comedy has given me lots of experience in being bad at my jobs.
Promotional Stuff
I think the last newsletter I sent out was before I launched my podcast, Exploration: LIVE! with Natalie Rotter-Laitman. Surely you’ve seen me discuss it, but let me ask you once again to check it out. We work so hard on it and it’s where the bulk of my creative output is going right now. As ever, we also have a live show, the next of which is June 11, 7:30pm, at Union Hall; you can get tickets here.
I only just discovered your newsletter and read every one of them last night. your writing is beautiful and funnier and i feel happier for having read what you wrote. i really really really hope you write another newsletter soon
I bought a midi keyboard like 8 years ago from sweetwater and my rep still calls me every christmas