When Myq Kaplan was the first comic called out in the Last Comic Standing finale in August, there was an immediate reaction around Boston and wherever the Boston comedy community reaches. People Twittered and posted on Facebook, saying that Myq deserved to win. Some (and I may have been among them) even decided there was no need to watch the rest of the show.
Kaplan is thankful for that, but he’s still happy to be touring with the top five contestants, which includes eventual winner Felipe Esparza, Roy Wood Jr., Tommy Johnagin, and Mike Destefano. The tour stops at the Wilbur tonight.
If you can’t get out to see Kaplan in person tonight, take a look at this animation of his savior as octopus bit. It won’t completely make up for not seeing Kaplan, but it will help you imagine a slightly more angular and evil looking Myq. Then take a look at a few thoughts from Myq on LCS.
What were your thoughts when they called you first in the finale?
Well, since there were two people whose name start with "Mike" as long as they weren't spelling out the announcements, my very first thought when I heard the first name was "I'm glad there are two Mikes."
When I heard my last name, I was initially disappointed, but also relieved that it was over. I mean, of course I would have loved to win, but given that only one person can, I'm in good company with every comedian that didn't win. I'm just thrilled that I made it as far as I did.
There was a pretty strong reaction from Boston fans that you were robbed. Have you had that discussion a lot with friends from the Boston comedy community? Or from comedian friends in general, for that matter?
A lot of people have told me that they were surprised I didn't win, which is very nice. My friends have obviously been very supportive, though most of my comedian friends know that comedy is subjective, contests can be arbitrary, and a public vote doesn't make everyone happy (that last part is not just specific to comedy). Some fans have written to me to tell me they're positive the thing was rigged, and I really appreciate the sentiment.
It's nice to know that my comedy made so many people feel as though I was objectively the best, to the point where they disregard the fact that there is no objective reality to it. Everyone in the top 5 is great, and we all have our die-hard fans who tell us we are the best, I'm sure. Which is part of what's cool about comedy. So, to everyone who thought I "should" have won, thank you very much.
Did you see a lot of familiar faces on Lowell and Worcester?
Several comedian friends came out to each of those shows. Boston comics Josh Gondelman, Jono Zalay, Peter Gross, and Sean Wilkinson were in Worcester, and Tom Morello drove me to the show in Lowell after I spent the day in Boston, having breakfast with Renata Tutko and watching Tony V in "The Town." (To name some of the other familiar faces I saw along the way.)
Has the show or the tour opened anything up for you in terms of career opportunities since last we spoke?
I forget what we last talked about, so the answer is maybe. The show has been great because it let millions of people watch me do comedy every week, so now I have a larger base of people who know who I am, some of whom care. And that's what it's about for me now, reaching the people who do, can, and will care. As far as any more career specifics, we'll see. Thanks for interviewing me.
Former Boston comic Myq Kaplan will appear again tonight on NBC's Last Comic Standing, one of seven finalists. Kaplan is a smart writer, and he generally writes short material, giving him an edge in a competition where your success depends on two or two-and-a-half minute sets. And he's been on the rise for the past few years, appearing on The Tonight Show and Comedy Central, and opening for two sold out shows for Bo Burnham's Comedy Central special taping earlier this year.
I caught up with him by phone last Tuesday, the afternoon after last week's Last Comic Standing aired. [Ed note -- more of this interview will appear later today once I have transcribed it].
So what’s your schedule like these days with Last Comic Standing?
They fly us out the day before. The day before, they have a rehearsal, a walk through and stuff. They fly us out on Saturday, and we do that stuff on Sunday, then do the show on Monday, and then Tuesday’s the travel day back.
Are you still getting to play out elsewhere during the week?
Mostly I go back home to New York and do shows there, in the meantime.
I’d assume some of your time now is spent trying to drum up votes.
Yeah. Some of it is. I mean, I have fan pages and mailing lists and my family has friends that they call. Everybody, friends and family, is on board. Every week that there is a vote I try to make sure that everybody who might want to help knows.
Did you have a plan going in for that kind of thing?
I didn’t have a specific plan, other than doing what I’ve been doing, which is amassing as many fans in real life and on the computer as possible. And telling them about it. And then obviously trying to get as much of me out there so that people who don’t know me might find me.
How much of your set do we see in the final project? I’ve heard a lot of comics complain in the past that they’ve been heavily edited – you put five minutes down to two minutes, sometimes things don’t come out.
I’ve been happy with the way I have been portrayed. Some of the sets are edited, but in the finals, but starting with the ten finalists, everything is done live to tape. We tape an hour show, and the set that you see, like the set that you saw last night was the set that I did.
It was sort of unusual, I didn’t think of you as having to change much of anything for TV, but obviously you had to reword the gay joke a bit.
I had to do that for The Tonight Show, so I’ve had that as a TV clean version of the joke that I’m happy with.
You’re very particular about the wording of your jokes. Do you think it takes away from the impact to do that kind of joke on TV?
I wouldn’t do it if I wasn’t happy with it. There are some jokes that I have that I could change to be TV friendly that I think would lessen the impact. This is one that I don’t feel does that. In preparing for The Tonight Show I went around to a lot of – I practiced the set a lot with that wording just to make sure that it did feel right to me and got the response that I wanted it to. It passed that test to me. Audiences have been responding to it. There’s no way to test an audience with both lines, obviously, because once they’ve heard one, the other won’t have the same hold. But as far as I can tell, they both work, and I’m fine with them being interchangeable.
I feel like you’re particularly well suited for a competition like this. You have a lot of material you can parse and it’s shorter, and you can put together a two-minute set or a two-and-a-half-minute set more easily than some comics.
I feel similarly, not thinking about anybody else or comparing myself to anybody, but certainly I’ve historically written – I have a lot of shorter jokes. I’m not a lengthy storyteller in general. I enjoy storytelling. I have some jokes that are longer. Should I do three jokes that are one minute each, four jokes that are less than a minute each, or some combination thereof? I feel I do, because of that, have more options than some others.
Had you run across any of the final seven before the show? Are you familiar with any of these people?
Let me think. I did now know Filipe at all. I did know Rachel Feinstein. She lives in New York and we’ve done many shows together and are friendly. I would say she is the one I know the best. I didn’t know Jonathan Thymius. I didn’t know Mike D, even though he’s from New York. I knew who he was, I’d seen some of his stuff on TV and online. But we only met at Last Comic Standing. Tommy, same thing. I was familiar with his work but we didn’t meet until the auditions. Then there’s me, I knew me pretty well. And Roy Wood, Jr. I did know. We both did the Norfolk Great American Comedy Festival together two or three years ago.
It’s strange sometimes watching the show when you know the host or the judges know the comic that they’re commenting on. You know that they’re all sort of in the New York scene together or another scene, and you can tell that the judges know them well, and to have to give some feedback on someone they might have played a gig with before. It must be awkward.
The whole prospect is awkward in general. I think the judges do the best that they can in not making anybody feel bad, being as fair as possible, and elevating the best comedy, as far as they know and can tell. But the circumstances, they’re not natural for comedy. Comedy in its most obvious genuine form isn’t a competition. That makes for an awkward dynamic to begin with. But I think the judges have done as good a job as possible of being as honest and kind and complimentary and constructive and funny, for the most part, when possible.
But certainly somebody like Laurie Kilmartin, she came up I think with Greg Giraldo. So seeing that sort of dynamic, where they’re essentially peers, but due to these circumstances, they are not peers, in this context, that is odd.
There are a lot of comics who don’t like the show, and some portion of those comics are now posting links to vote for you after the show. That’s a strange mix, as well.
Oh sure. There are a lot of things that people have historically disliked about the show. I think the largest, most visible, was in the second season when Dan Naturman was clearly, it seems, chosen by the judges but rejected by the producers or somebody else. Which, to the show’s credit, they did air all of that. They didn’t hide it, they didn’t keep it secret. But it was what it was.
It’s not just a pure show based on merit. Obviously not every comedian is going after it. The best comedians in the country or the world, your Chris Rocks, your Seinfelds, your Brian Regans, are obviously not competing because it’s not necessary for them. So some people are like, “This isn’t finding the best comedians.” Then they’ll say it’s finding the best unknown comedians. The some people will say, “These people aren’t unknown, they have TV credits.”
An American Idol singer can never have sung in public and be great. But a person who has never performed comedy in public is, I think, much less likely to be great. So that’s more of a concern for non-comedian. The comedians understand that the people who stand in line have less of a chance of getting in. Which I think is an issue – some people are not clued in to that.
It’s very hard to explain to somebody who hasn’t followed comedy or done comedy how much of the job is just doing it. They’ll often compare it to music, like you said with American Idol. They think you can just emerge from a room after writing all of this stuff and just be consistently funny from day one.
Oh, yeah. I didn’t know anything about comedy before I did it. I watched some of it when it was on whenever I started out. Especially when the show does seem to be made in the vein of an American Idol style contest. So people outside of comedy will be like, oh, this is finding the unknown comic they way Idol does singers, finding a nobody and turning them into a somebody. But as far as comedians, I think in the past, because of that Dan Naturman situation, people grew suspicious that the show might be fixed or cast in a way that seemed unfair.
But I think they’re pretty up front, at least at the end of the shows, they do put a disclaimer across the screen that says choices are made by the judges in conjunction with NBC and the producers of the show.
It feels to me that they have the people they really want to be on there, and at these auditions, you really would have to blow them out of the water to dislodge what they wanted from the beginning.
I honestly don’t know the process that they go through. If I was chosen beforehand, I wasn’t informed about it. Back at the initial auditions, there was no guarantee. I could have done different jokes that might not have hit them as strongly. There were plenty of people they told they were funny but they didn’t think were right for the show, or right for the show now. They chose, eventually, a couple of hundred people to be in the nighttime showcases. And that was pretty much merit-based. If you did really well – obviously there’s some arbitrary nature to it, why does one good person get a spot and another person does not.
But I don’t think they said, let’s get these two hundred people, and watch them and from them, let’s get these forty people. I think you had to do well in the showcase to move on. It’s possible they might have been rooting for some people to do well. But I think something can always go wrong. The crowd could not react the way they want, they could have a lousy spot on the show. Anything could happen.
There is little Kathleen Madigan hasn’t done in her roughly twenty years in comedy. She’s left her original profession (in her case, journalism), done the big move from St. Louis to L.A., toured the country, done every conceivable TV talk show, and even done reality television as a contestant on Last Comic Standing. Most recently, she’s played to the troops in Afghanistan, made the leap from clubs to theatres, and found herself on the set of the Dr. Phil show.
But unlike some for whom stand-up is a means to an end, the comedy is the thing for Madigan. It’s what sustains her. “[It’s] Just fun,” she told me, speaking by phone from Florida, where she was visiting family. “Just stupid fun. I mean, if I wasn’t onstage telling jokes I’d probably be just at a bar talking to somebody. It’s kind of the same, except somebody’s paying me.”
I spoke with Madigan about comedy, Dr. Phil, staying healthy, and a plethora of subjects ahead of her show this Friday at the Comedy Connection Wilbur Theatre. The vast majority of that conversation is included here.
I have to apologize, I’ve got kind of a cold and my brain’s kind of a big slug.
That’s okay. I just had one for three days, it’s finally going away. It was a killer.
How do you avoid stuff like that when you’re on tour?
Euuch. All these airplanes. You just keep going and getting more antibiotics and the doctor just stares at you like you’re crazy, but what are you gonna do? There’s no way to avoid it, unless you want to walk around like a crazy person with a mask on your face like Michael Jackson, which I just can’t bring myself to do.
Do you have a lot of interactions after shows with fans and such?
If I go out for a meet and greet. And I’m not a freak about germs, but you do think, man, I just shook, I don’t know, a hundred people or more’s hands. You can’t think about it too hard. You just have to go, oh well. I think I got this from a plane. I think planes are the worst because it’s just recycled air, so if there’s one person sick, it’s just bluh bluh bleah.
You were already touring a lot before Last Comic Standing, did that get you bigger venues?
You know, not bigger venues, but just more people… By the time I did Last Comic I had already been on the road, what? Twelve years, I guess. And I’d already done a bunch of Tonight Shows and Lettermans and Comedy Central stuff. But there’s a bunch of people who don’t watch all that stuff, they only watch prime time TV. They don’t stay up that late. So it’s like a whole different audience you pick up. It’s weird, because when I do daytime TV, whether it’s Bonnie Hunt or the Dr. Phil stuff, that’s a whole different group, two.
There’s three different groups of TV watchers, the late night, the prime time, and the daytime. And they don’t seem to criss-cross. You know, they have their time, and that’s that. So it helped me get new people who didn’t know who I was. And then the bigger venues have just come with time. I don’t really work any clubs any more except a couple of my favorites. And that’s usually when I want to work on something and do a bunch of shows in a row.
You’re also on VH1 and CNN – are all of these segmented audiences that don’t overlap?
Believe it or not, E! and VH1, that’s the gym crowd. They see me on there but they don’t even hear it. They just know they’ve seen me somewhere. And CNN people, they don’t seem to really go out.
I didn’t see the Dr. Phil show but I read about it on your site – how strange was it to be on a show with a guy who’s essentially a huge comic target?
Really strange. It was like I had taken percoset after a medical procedure. Because, like, they put me in the audience, and then I was onstage with him, and I was running around the audience asking them questions. He’s a huge comedy fan, though, and he listens to Sirius radio and they play me a lot. So that’s where he heard me, and then his son is friends with Ron White, who I’m also friends with. He wants to make the show, some days, a little lighter and a little less intense. Which is great. Me and Ron White and Jon Lovitz actually did it a couple of weeks ago, I guess. It was a two-parter, they aired the first part. The second part hasn’t aired. Where, you’re actually talking about the subject but in a lighter way. Not so heavy, PhD people with facts. They’re there, but we’re there to lighten it up a little bit. [There are videos linked from Madigan's site, including this one, but no embed codes.]
I was surprised. He has a great sense of humor, he laughs a lot, his wife is lovely. And as a comic, we do tend to be cynical, and I kept thinking, are they faking this? IS this real? [aside] I’m fine, dad, I got her. I’m holding one of my sister’s twins, who’s being very good right now. I will not be obnoxious and put you on the phone with her. “Say hi!” God, I hate that.
It was really strange, but he’s actually sincere. He’s not full of shit. And, I don’t know, I guess I just assumed that everybody on TV was kind of full of crap. I’ve seen him stay after the show and talk to people for like an hour. He could leave. HE could go home, and say, too bad, so sad, you signed up for the show, it is what it is, you knew what it was going to be, and I’m out. But he doesn’t. And I have no reason to lobby for the guy.
It just seems strange to hear he’s a comedy to think of how many times his name must come up when he’s listening to that [Sirius radio].
I don’t think he would mind. He’s actually like, all Texas, all the time. He understands if you’re making fun of him. He’s a good sport about it, put it that way. He doesn’t take himself so seriously. He would love it if someone did a skit making fun of him. He gets it.
He also has a sarcasm quotient that’s pretty high with you, Ron White, and Jon Lovitz.
Yeah, his tastes, the people he picks off of Sirius radio – he knows my CDs – it’s odd to me, he does have a pretty high cynicism, sarcasm meter, because there are comics that are way less cynical. Like if you took Bill Engvall, Engvall’s just nice. I mean, he’s funny, but he’s a nice guy. You know what I mean? There’s nothing cutting or edgy about Bill. I would think that he would lean towards that, but he goes for – I mean, out of the four Blue Collar guys, Ron is definitely the edgiest. And that’s his favorite.
Has the job of comedian changed a lot since you started? The Internet has exploded, there are a million more niche channels than there used to be.
Overall, the biggest change is, success is not going to come overnight. It’s not going to come with one television show like it used to. You used to go on Carson, and you figure, there’s only three channels, definitely a third of the country is watching you, usually two-thirds of the country. So the next morning, you would be famous. Two-thirds of the country would know your name if you’re Roseanne and you go on Johnny Carson the night before.
Now, there’s a hundred channels – five hundred channels – there’s a bazillion media outlets. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. It used to be a sprint to Carson, and then bam, you could headline Vegas. The whole thing just changed. My god, I’ve done the Tonight Show twelve, thirteen times, Letterman five, Conan two, the rest of them. I’ve done them all. It’s a build, it’s a slow build, and you just can’t quit.
I see too many comics who, they get frustrated and they quit. If somebody said, “What are you proud of?” it wouldn’t be any of the TV shows or any of the things that took a lot of work and perseverance, it’s that I haven’t quit. That’s the only thing that I’m really proud of, because there are many times where you have to rethink the whole thing and think, really, seriously, what the hell am I doing? Am I going to be some 50-year-old woman in some club called Bonkers? [laughs] Really? You have to assess it frequently and go, okay, okay, okay, can I keep doing this? Can I hang on?
And I see a lot of people who just fold, and they either go to writing or – because people want a normal life, they want a family, they want a house, they want all that. So they just say screw it and fold. And some of them shouldn’t quit. Some of the funnier ones go, that’s it, I’m out. And then some of the ones that suck keep going.
It seems like there’s got to be thousands of people who quit this job every year, if not every month.
Or they try it. Every single person in L.A., every waiter and waitress, go, “Oh, I do stand-up.” Oh, okay. Really? Do you really do stand-up? Or did you go to a coffeehouse and get up and say something. There’s a very big different.
Did you go straight from St. Louis to Los Angeles?
Yeah, but slowly. I did the Tonight Show and I did some other stuff out there, and then I got an apartment. It wasn’t like one day, I just packed up and moved. It was like, okay, I’ll get an apartment here, I’ll have some stuff here, and then I’ll just throw some stuff in my parents’ basement. It was kind of ramshackle for a few years. I was wherever I was. And then over time, it was like, okay, this is actually where I’m going to kind of live. Even now, I’ve got a guy out buying furniture for my townhouse because I’m not even there. I don’t even have time to go get furniture. So he’s going to get it and sending me pictures of it. And it’s like, okay, that looks great, leave it there. So it seems like I have a home.
Is that a good position to be in, or would you rather have a sitcom or something where you could settle down and be in the same place more often?
I don’t know. Lewis Black had a show on Comedy Central called The Root of All Evil for a couple of years, and he’s one of my best buddies, and he said will you perform on it but write some stuff as well, and write some stuff for him, and I said okay. So I was home for three months in a row and it was super strange. I was still going out on weekends and doing my gigs, but Monday through Friday I was home and had a job like I would go somewhere at ten o’clock in the morning and the same people would be there every day. It was fun, but it was only fun because I think we knew it was temporary. I don’t think I could sign up for that.
The one thing that we have that’s awesome is freedom. Right now I’m just in Florida with my family hanging out between gigs because I can. I’m really close to my family and they’re in Missouri most of the time. They say a sitcom’s thirteen weeks, but really it would be more. You have to be somewhere at a certain time every day. I don’t know, you just lose a lot of control. And that’s one of the other big things that changed. They’re not really giving comics sitcoms anymore.
They’re more ensemble pieces now.
I wouldn’t mind being a second banana on one of those. I wouldn’t mind. Like, David Spade’s had a nice career, as far as that stuff goes.
If you hadn’t left newspaper writing as a profession, where do you think you’d be right now?
I think I would have somehow become a flight attendant. And then I’d be that crabby, 40-something flight attendant that wants to kill everyone on the plane. And also probably addicted to some sort of pain medication from pushing that cart up and down an aisle.
Where you’re playing in Boston is a 1200-seat theatre. Is that the norm for you these days?
These days, it is the norm, between 800 and 1500, depending on where I am.
When you look at where your career is now, playing theatres and selling CDs and DVDs, are you where you want to be? Is there something you’d like to add to that?
No, I’m exactly where I want to be. I really try not to think past Friday. I’ve gotten really lucky with this train of thought. Stuff just comes up. You could have asked me a million things that you thought would happen. I never thought Dr. Phil would call my cell phone. Never. It wouldn’t have been within the range of things that could possibly happen.
