Isabel Hagen at the Bitter End features Hagen’s sharp joke writing and off-beat point of view mixed with classical viola playing and original songs. Drawing from her life as a working classical musician with anxiety, she blends existential humor and raunchy anecdotes with Bach and Mozart.
Hagen filmed the special at the Bitter End in New York City in May. In addition to writing, directing, and performing it, she produced alongside Torrance Shepherd, with Will Canzoneri and Zac James Nicholson serving as co-producers.
“Isabel is a singular talent who perfectly embodies the intersection of world-class comedy and live music,” said Veeps Head of Comedy Bart Coleman. “At Veeps, we are always looking for specials that feel at home alongside our concert programming, and the way Isabel weaves her viola mastery into her stand-up is both seamless and incredibly fresh. We are excited to give ‘Isabel Hagen at The Bitter End’ a global stage, as it represents exactly the kind of cross-genre performance our audience loves.”
A NYC-based performer recently profiled on Deadline’s Comedy Means Business podcast, Hagen started stand-up comedy immediately after earning her Bachelors and Masters degrees in viola performance from The Juilliard School. While at Juilliard, she dealt with a repetitive stress injury in her wrist which forced her to take time off from playing, which sparked her desire to try stand-up comedy.
Now, Hagen has two performances on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon under her belt and just premiered her debut feature On a String (which she wrote, directed, and starred in) at the 2025 Tribeca Festival, where it won Best Screenplay in a U.S. Narrative Feature. She has also been named a New Face of Comedy at Just For Laughs Montreal and has performed sets for both Don’t Tell Comedy and Dry Bar Comedy.
Hagen still maintains a career as a musician, most recently as a touring member of the band Vampire Weekend for their Only God Was Above Us tour. She is represented by Omnipop Talent Group and Reliant Talent Agency.
The aptly named “Out of Nowhere” tour finds celebrated comedian Tig Notaro doing a long weekend of Florida dates, including one here at the Plaza Live.
The Renaissance woman — comic, writer, director, actor and (inevitably) podcast host — has carved out one of the most eclectic careers in modern showbiz, careening from Star Trek spin-off Starfleet Academy to the achingly confessional stand-up album Live on through to producer credits on evocative new doc Come See Me in the Good Light about poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley’s cancer journey.
Make attending this one a late New Year’s resolution.
7:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 15, Plaza Live, 425 N. Bumby Ave., plazaliveorlando.org, $66-$203.
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Mary Gallagher will tell you she’s “a comic, actor, and writer,” but that doesn’t really cover it. She’s a survivor of Midwestern discipline, a student of chaos, a quiet storm turned loud truth-teller. She’s also a working mother, an educator, a late-night TV comic, a Colbert alum, a voice in the room helping actors find their own voices. And she’s the kind of performer who can walk onstage and, without a script, build a moment that feels alive and electric — and entirely hers.
“I grew up introverted,” she says. “Not by choice. I was forced to be introverted.”
Mary was raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in what she describes as a conservative household. Both of her parents are former Marines. Being funny, in that environment, was not really encouraged — at least not out loud. “I thought I was funny,” she says. “But I was not allowed to be funny. So I drew a lot of cartoons.”
It was her workaround. “My mom really liked the cartoons, so she’d let me be funny on paper, in the other room,” she says. She’d make her mother laugh with sketches and little visual jokes. It wasn’t necessarily about the creativity it was a bid for connection. “It’s such a standard story — trying to get a parent’s approval — but that’s exactly what it was. Trying to get my mom to pay attention.”
When Mary was just starting to come out of her shell when she left home for the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay and discovered theatre.
“I said, these people are really weird, I want in on this” So she became an actor but money was a problem. If you’re a college theater major, your days are in class and your nights are in rehearsal. There’s no time to work a normal job. So when she saw a listing for a singing telegram performer — good pay, in and out, fast — she went for it.
There’s one catch: “I don’t sing,” she says, deadpan.
But the owner never actually asked if she could.
So she invented her own version of the job.
Instead of singing, Mary built a whole character performance around whoever was being “telegraphed.” She’d call the buyer of the telegram and interview them for 45 minutes, gathering inside jokes, embarrassing habits, what their friends teased them about, what they secretly loved about them. Then she’d walk into a bar in character — sometimes as a cop, sometimes as Marilyn Monroe, sometimes a banana — and stage an ambush roast.
“I’d come in like, ‘Where’s James Thompson? I’ve got an arrest warrant for him,’” she says. “Then I’d handcuff him to the bar, take his beer, drink it, spit it out, and just take the stage.” She’d perform a custom, precision-targeted takedown of this guy in front of his friends and family. “Nobody cared that I wasn’t singing,” she says. “They were too busy laughing.”
That was her first taste of live comedy: high-risk, high-contact, immediate.
“I realized, ‘Oh, I’m really good at this.’”
From there she built a two-woman act in Green Bay. The duo did lip sync sets in gay bars — “way before TikTok,” she says — and started winning contests. That momentum led to a booking that sounds like a dare: opening for Sam Kinison in 1988. “Absolutely the wrong room for two young women,” she laughs. “But I learned. I just kept learning.”
After college, the move was obvious: Chicago.
Chicago meant Second City. Second City meant sketch and improv. Improv meant permission — permission to experiment, to say something insane and then justify it, to fail and survive it. It also meant meeting the first real creative lifeline of her career, a fellow performer and writer named Michael Markowitz.
Markowitz eventually moved to Los Angeles to write professionally (he would go on to co-write “Horrible Bosses” and work on the animated cult series “Duckman”). He called her and said, essentially: You need to get out here. You belong here.
So she did. Thirty-plus years ago, Mary Gallagher packed up and came to Los Angeles knowing one person.
From that one person, she met another. And another. “That’s how it works,” she says. “That’s how you build a life.”
She started booking. Commercials. TV. Voiceover. One of her earliest notable breaks was a guest role as “Tilly” on Friends. The way she even got in the room is perfectly Mary: she was dog-sitting the producer’s dog. “That’s not how I got the part,” she clarifies, “but it is how I got the audition.” She laughs. “I’ve always worked. I’ve always hustled.”
And she never stopped doing standup.
“I’ve carved out a life here,” she says. “Got married, got divorced, raised my daughter, kept performing. I stayed in it.”
Her daughter grew up in Burbank, in and around sets and comedy clubs. “Sometimes I couldn’t get childcare,” Mary says, “so she just came with me. She’d sit through auditions. Sometimes casting would ask, ‘Can we use your daughter to play your daughter in the commercial?’ And I’d say, ‘Sure, let’s put that toward college.’” Her daughter, now 20 and studying pre-law, grew up thinking it was normal to watch Jim Gaffigan’s ‘Hot Pockets’ bit on YouTube every night while eating an actual Hot Pocket because she had just met Jim Gaffigan. “That was just Tuesday in our house,” Mary says.
Burbank, for Mary, wasn’t just a ZIP code. It was stability. “I moved to Burbank for the schools,” she says. “I wanted my daughter here. I loved that you could live right next to the entertainment industry, but not in it. People think ‘beautiful downtown Burbank’ is just a joke from Carson. But to me, it feels like a village.” She pauses. “I feel really lucky to live here.”
In recent years, Mary’s work has taken a turn. She’s still a comic. She’s still an actor. She’s still writing and performing. But now she’s also teaching — and not just how to write a joke, but how to survive yourself.
She began running workshops through SAG-AFTRA’s continuing education program, initially pitched as “standup as wellness.” Actors would come in, she says, not necessarily to “become standups,” but to confront fear. To find voice. To turn their own story into material on their own terms.
“I love working with actors,” she says. “I love when standup and acting and the self all start to merge.” She’s helped people build five-minute sets, coached them through their first open mics, even prepped actors for film roles. Recently she worked for months with an actor playing a standup in an upcoming romantic comedy, taking him to mics, shaping his material, walking him through that particular terror. “He did great,” she says. “I asked if he’d ever do standup again. He said, ‘Oh God, no.’ I was like, ‘Perfect.’”
For her, comedy is no longer about polish. It’s about presence.
“I used to think standup was about crafting jokes and memorizing routines and being clever,” she says. “That’s completely changed. Now, it’s about being in the moment. Truly being in the moment. Letting go of control.”
She used to white-knuckle it. She’d write tight, she’d rehearse, she’d go up there and deliver. She climbed the traditional ladder: host → feature → headliner → late night. She landed a set on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. She taped a Dry Bar Comedy special. She hit the career markers you’re “supposed” to hit.
But all along, she says, something was missing.
“I didn’t really know me in comedy,” she says. “I’d have these flashes where I felt totally free onstage, where I was just alive in the moment, and I’d think, ‘Wow, that felt amazing.’ And then I’d go, ‘Okay, forget that. Go back to the plan.’ Now I understand — no. That was everything.”
The shift, she says, is personal and it’s late. It came after marriage, after motherhood, after divorce, after burning herself out being the ‘good girl,’ the caretaker, the people-pleaser. “Once I woke up to that,” she says, “it was like: Oh. I’ve been editing myself my entire life.”
Today, what matters to her onstage is not whether a joke is ‘perfect.’ It’s whether it’s honest. Whether it’s alive. Whether she’s actually there.
“When I feel whole, I don’t care what anyone thinks,” she says. “And it makes everything so much more real and so much more electric.”
She laughs and corrects herself. “I used to think ‘not giving a shit’ meant being unprofessional — showing up late, making everyone wait, blowing off the job. That’s not what I mean. What I mean now is: I care about the work, I care about the people I’m working with — but I don’t care if you approve of me existing. That part, I’m done with.”
Mary is, in a word, opening.
She’s teaching. She’s studying. “For the last week I’ve just been binging Richard Pryor,” she says. “I’m calling people going, ‘Did you know this?’ And they’re like, ‘Yes, Mary. Welcome to 2025.’” She’s listening to Wayne Fetterman on standup history. She’s talking shop with Jay Leno and Jimmy Brogan. She’s asking questions.
It’s not nostalgia. It’s appetite.
“I’m absorbing everything,” she says. “I’m opening up to all of it.”
And even after three decades in Los Angeles, she still feels new here.
“Every day I wake up and I feel like I just got to L.A.,” she says. “Like I’m starting over. And I kind of love that.”
Stand-up comedian and The Daily Show writer-performer Josh Johnson brings his sharp humor to the Plaza Live for two sold-out performances.
Armed with relatable storytelling, keen topical humor and progressive sensibilities, Johnson turns the bleak everyday into disarming laughs. The Louisiana native got his start performing at open mics in Chicago before landing writing roles on The Tonight Show and TDS, where he now also appears as a correspondent.
Named one of Variety’s “10 Comics to Watch,” Johnson continues to earn acclaim for his specials # (Hashtag) and Up Here Killing Myself, praised for biting humor with empathetic heart.
4 p.m. & 7 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 9, The Plaza Live, 425 N. Bumby Ave., plazaliveorlando.org, SOLD OUT.
Interviewing a famous podcaster who has interviewed many famous people himself, including Barack Obama, Robin Williams, Bruce Springsteen and 15 years’ worth of other A-listers, can be intimidating. So, as a fan, I was both excited and nervous when I was asked to speak to Marc Maron ahead of his Phoenix stand-up show, “All In.”…
Over the last few years, Danae Hays has become one of TikTok’s biggest comedy stars. With characters that poke fun at her Southern roots, the Alabama native can hardly go anywhere without being recognized. Her wife Mandie often acts as costar, presenting a glimpse of their life together.
Recently, Hays has been making a push to expand her audience beyond social media. She’s embarking on a 28-city standup tour starting July 19, and she’s beginning to land parts in movies.
Hays has also been recording music. Embracing the early ’90s country sound her parents loved, she’s released the singles “All It Takes” and “Rode Hard.” Working with real Nashville songwriters, she creating a style that straddles the line between legit country music and satire.
So how did Danae Hays go from college softball player to rising comedian? Watch her talk to Jordan Edwards about the origins of her career, embracing her Southern roots, and the humane way to prank call a stranger.
Comedian Marlon Wayans plays Orlando for three nights
White Chicks and Scary Movie star, In Living Color trailblazer and renowned stand-up Marlon Wayans performs at the Funny Bone for a three-night stand this weekend.
Picking up where he left off after a strong performance at UCF’s Homecoming Comedy Night in 2022, this comedian finds humor and heaviness in topics of acceptance and grief, making you laugh about experiences you didn’t know you could laugh about.
One of Wayans’ latest specials, Marlon Wayans: Good Grief, includes very affecting material about acceptance of his transgender son and other family-related humor. Pregame with the aforementioned Amazon Prime special and get ready to witness a key part of one of America’s first families of comedy.
Thursday-Saturday, June 13-15, Funny Bone Comedy Club, 9101 International Drive, orlando. funnybone.com, $54-$84.
David Spade makes Orlando stand-up appearance this week
David Spade, a living and breathing bemused smirk if there ever was one (no shade!), is heading to Steinmetz Hall this week. All the better to hear his eyebrow arch in an acoustically perfect environment.
Spade came to fame as part of Saturday Night Live in the 1990s, with his prescient skewering of celebrity that was the “Hollywood Minute” segment on Weekend Update. Since then, he’s found a whole other level of stardom in film with Joe Dirt and Tommy Boy, and in sitcoms like Just Shoot Me — which we recommend you revisit on Roku. (It holds up mostly due to Spade’s relentless mugging as a manchild courtier working at a fashion magazine.)
Currently you can see Spade on the Fox game show Snake Oil, or hear him on the podcast “Fly on the Wall,” alongside fellow SNL vet Dana Carvey. But all through this lengthy career, Spade has been doing stand-up during rare lull periods, and this week he brings his “Catch Me Inside” tour to the City Beautiful.
“I’m not going to retire from shooting my mouth off.” This Friday, D.C. native Lewis Black comes home for his “Goodbye Yeller Brick Road, The Final Tour,” which he insists isn’t his retirement but rather his last national tour.
WTOP’s Jason Fraley previews Lewis Black at the Kennedy Center (Part 1)
He grew up in the D.C. area before finding fame on “The Daily Show” and Pixar’s “Inside Out.”
Lewis Black returns to the Kennedy Center on Friday, May 3. (Courtesy Kennedy Center)
Lewis Black returns to the Kennedy Center on Friday, May 3. (Courtesy Kennedy Center)
This Friday, Lewis Black comes home to the Kennedy Center for his “Goodbye Yeller Brick Road, The Final Tour,” which he insists isn’t his retirement but rather his last national tour.
“I’m not ‘retiring retiring’ … I’m just not going to do 120 to 150 shows a year, I’m not going to be wandering around the country the way I did before,” Black told WTOP. “I will occasionally do a show, I might do a ‘Rant Cast’ that I do live, I might open for someone. … I want to write a little, I want to write either a book or a play and just have a life. … I’ll still be on ‘The Daily Show,’ that’s rolling along. I’m not going to retire from shooting my mouth off.”
Like “The Daily Show,” there’s no shortage of pressing political topics to rant about on stage.
“How do you satirize what’s already satiric?” Black said. “My work is done, the newspaper is reading like [fiction]. … Banning books is beyond belief. They want to take these kids’ books out of the library — where’s the best place to hide a book from a kid? You put it in a library! Then you’ve got the people who are banning the books, a group called Moms For Liberty. How am I supposed to make that funnier? That’s like out of [Kurt] Vonnegut!”
Born in D.C. in 1948, Black graduated from Springbrook High School in Silver Spring, Maryland. After a year at the University of Maryland in College Park, he transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to study playwriting, followed by his Master of Fine Arts at the School of Drama at Yale University in 1977.
“I worked for what essentially became the Round House Theatre, I was their playwright in residence for a year, they’re out in Bethesda now,” Black said. “I really spent time in New York, I ran a space out with some friends and we did one-act plays below a restaurant, we had a bar and a stage downstairs with essentially 100 seats and we’d do shows, we’d do two one-acts a week. It was as much fun and as fulfilling as it is being a standup.”
After dabbling in standup at the West Bank Cafe in New York City, he shifted to comedy full time around age 40.
“I was always kind of doing standup for fun because it interested me,” Black said. “It was a way I could write something and get it out there, because otherwise you send it to a theater and you could wait two years to get an answer. I was fascinated by it. … I got more relaxed on stage, I finally found the persona that I wanted on stage and people seemed to enjoy it and there was more of a response to my comedy than there was to my playwriting.”
He’s best known for his “Back in Black” segments on “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central.
“Being on ‘The Daily Show’ was like having an advertisement for yourself each week,” Black said. “I’d do the ‘Daily Show’ then get on a plane, fly across the country to a comedy club and they’d just seen me the night before on television. … It was huge. Comedy Central ended up putting me and Dave Attell as the face of Comedy Central and it really established both Dave and I, got us out there, got us names and we ended up touring together.”
Now, another generation knows him solely as the voice of Anger in Pixar’s Oscar-winning animated gem “Inside Out” (2015). He’ll soon return for the sequel “Inside Out 2” alongside Amy Poehler on June 14.
“The visuals are extraordinary because it’s Pixar; they just get better and better,” Black said. “The script itself, they’ve added characters that are phenomenal, the new Envy and Anxiety are exceptional as the new emotions, then you’ve got the oldies and goodies. … It’s another step forward in terms of helping kids understand what emotions are. When I was a kid I had no clue! Nobody cared about your emotions; ‘just sit on them and shut up!’”
WTOP’s Jason Fraley previews Lewis Black at the Kennedy Center (Part 2)
Listen to our full conversation on the podcast below:
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Kathy Griffin may be the most resilient entertainer in modern history. She was not only canceled by social media, but the entire country questioned her integrity…
Kevin James: Irregardless is a stand-up comedy special featuring Kevin James, who delivers uproarious, unfiltered insights into parenting, marriage, and the aging process. With his signature humor, the comedian tackles diverse topics, urging kids away from video games, expressing skepticism towards technology, and even embarking on humorous challenges like determining the number of Tater Tots that can be accommodated in his mouth.
Here’s how you can watch and stream Kevin James: Irregardless via streaming services such as Amazon Prime Video.
Is Kevin James: Irregardless available to watch via streaming?
Yes, Kevin James: Irregardlessis available to watch via streaming on Amazon Prime Video. In this candid exploration of life, the actor and comedian delves into unfiltered reflections on parenting, marriage, and the aging process. From motivating kids to step away from video games to expressing distrust in technology, the show covers a range of relatable topics. The humor extends to quirky challenges, like determining the number of tater tots one can fit in their mouth.
Watch Kevin James: Irregardless streaming via Amazon Prime Video
Kevin James: Irregardless is available to watch on Amazon Prime Video. The streaming platform offers an unparalleled streaming experience, delivering a vast array of movies, TV shows, and original content. With an expansive library, exclusive releases, and seamless accessibility, it caters to diverse tastes. Amazon Prime Video captivates audiences with high-quality entertainment, providing a world-class streaming service at your fingertips.
You can watch via Amazon Prime Video by following these steps:
$14.99 per month or $139 per year with an Amazon Prime membership
$8.99 per month for a standalone Prime Video membership
Amazon Prime is the online retailer’s paid service that provides fast shipping and exclusive sales on products, so the membership that includes both this service and Prime Video is the company’s most popular offering. However, you can also opt to subscribe to Prime Video separately.
The Kevin James: Irregardless synopsis is as follows:
“Kevin James delivers a hilariously unfiltered take on parenting, marriage, and getting older. As only James can, he covers a range of topics, from motivating children to put down their video games, to why he doesn’t trust technology, and how many Tater Tots he can fit in his mouth.”
NOTE: The streaming services listed above are subject to change. The information provided was correct at the time of writing.
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Ricky Gervais: Armageddon is a comedy special on Netflix where renowned comedian Ricky Gervais takes the stage to share some of his funny, yet, quite controversial thoughts.
Here’s how you can watch and stream Ricky Gervais: Armageddon via streaming services such as Netflix.
Is Ricky Gervais: Armageddon available to watch via streaming?
Yes, Ricky Gervais: Armageddon is available to watch via streaming on Netflix.
In this thought-provoking stand-up special, writer-comedian Ricky Gervais riffs on topics such as artificial intelligence, political correctness, family weddings, funerals, and the end of humanity.
Watch Ricky Gervais: Armageddon streaming via Netflix
Ricky Gervais: Armageddon is available to watch on Netflix. It is a pay-per-view, over-the-top streaming service which is available worldwide in several languages. It mainly distributes original and acquired films and television series from a variety of genres.
You can watch the stand-up special via Netflix by following these steps:
Enter your email address and password to create an account
Enter your chosen payment method
The cheapest Netflix Standard with Ads Plan provides all but a few of its movies and TV shows. However, it will show ads before or during most of its content. You can watch in Full HD and on two supported devices at a time.
Its Standard Plan provides the same but is completely ad-free while also allowing users to download content on two supported devices with an additional option to add one extra member who doesn’t live in the same household.
The Premium Plan provides the same as above, though for four supported devices at a time, with content displaying in Ultra HD. Users get to download content on up to six supported devices at a time and have the option to add up to two extra members who don’t live in the same household. Netflix spatial audio is also supported.
Ricky Gervais: Armageddon’s synopsis is as follows:
“Ricky Gervais dishes out controversial takes on political correctness and oversensitivity in a taboo-busting comedy special about the end of humanity.”
NOTE: The streaming services listed above are subject to change. The information provided was correct at the time of writing.
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Def Comedy Jam Season 5 remains a beloved chapter in Def Comedy Jam’s history, showcasing the show’s ability to reflect the zeitgeist while delivering side-splitting laughter.
Here’s how you can watch and stream Def Comedy Jam Season 5 via streaming services such as Amazon Prime Video.
Is Def Comedy Jam Season 5 available to watch via streaming?
Yes, Def Comedy Jam Season 5 is available to watch via streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
The season solidifies the show’s reputation as a platform for bold, unapologetic humor that tackled sensitive topics with a sharp comedic edge.
Season 5 boasted three different hosts: Adele Givens, Ricky Harris, and Joe Torry.The season showcased established talents like D.L. Hughley, Willie Brown, and Paul Mooney, alongside rising stars like Cedric the Entertainer, Tracey Morgan, and Mike Epps.
Watch Def Comedy Jam Season 5 streaming via Amazon Prime Video
Def Comedy Jam Season 5 is available to watch on Amazon Prime Video. The platform’s availability on a variety of devices, including popular smart TVs, gaming consoles, and streaming devices like Amazon Fire TV Stick, widens its accessibility. This multi-device compatibility ensures that subscribers can enjoy their favorite content across different screens, adapting to the changing dynamics of modern media consumption.
You can watch via Amazon Prime Video by following these steps:
$14.99 per month or $139 per year with an Amazon Prime membership
$8.99 per month for a standalone Prime Video membership
Amazon Prime is the online retailer’s paid service that provides fast shipping and exclusive sales on products, so the membership that includes both this service and Prime Video is the company’s most popular offering. However, you can also opt to subscribe to Prime Video separately.
Def Comedy Jam Season 5 synopsis is as follows:
“Def Comedy Jam is a HBO television series produced by Russell Simmons.
The series had its original run from July 1, 1992 to January 1, 1997. The show returned on HBO’s fall lineup in 2006. Def Comedy Jam helped to launch the careers of several African-American stand-up comedians.’
NOTE: The streaming services listed above are subject to change. The information provided was correct at the time of writing.
Marlon Wayans is planning to dedicate his next comedy special to his trans son, Kai Wayans.
Source: Gilbert Flores / Getty
Marlon Wayans stopped by The Breakfast Club to promote his latest stand-up comedy special, “Good Grief.” During the interview, he revealed that he wanted to get even more personal in his future stand-up comedy specials and dedicate the next one to his trans son, Kai.
The special titled “Skittles” or “Rainbow Child” would be about his “daughter who transitioned to a son.”
“My daughter Amai (Wayans) is now Kai and so I talk about the transition – now their transition – by my transition as a parent going from ignorance and denial to complete unconditional love and acceptance. I think there’s a lot of parents out there that need to have that message and I know I’m dealing with it,” he said.
“It was a very painful situation for me, but man it’s one of the best funniest hours I probably could ever imagine.”
Of course, being the comedian that he is, he joked with his daughter about the decision saying, “‘N***a you transitioning into your brother! You look just like him!’ I can’t tell the difference between her and Shawn. I swear to God.”
Marlon Wayans’ History Of Supporting His Transgender Son Kai
Source: Shareif Ziyadat / Getty
It’s no secret that Marlon is a proud supporter of the LGBTQIA community. He has always made an effort to show up and gracefully love his child out loud. The comedian and actor took to Instagram to wish his son a heartfelt birthday. The tribute thanked Kai for teaching him how to love people unconditionally.
“Happiest bday my baby… daddy loves you to the moon and back. I’ve always asked people to love me unconditionally, thank you for teaching me what that really means. Be you! Your best you! You’re the gift and I’m wrapping paper… love love love you for life. Excuse my ignorance, chalk it up to growth. Love you so much, thank you for making me a man. So proud. ð” he wrote.
The first time Marlon opened up about his son was back in 2019 when he took to Instagram during Pride Month to show love and support. Unfortunately, the post was met with much criticism and backlash.
He wrote, “Happy pride ð to my pride and joy. I wouldn’t change one effing thing about you. Love you to the moon around the sun, through the galaxies, and back again.”
One user wrote, “Another brother from Hollywood who failed his kidsð¤¦ð¾âï¸ð¤¦ð¾âï¸.” However, not all feedback was negative! Some users opened up and expressed their gratitude for the support of the community.
Be on the lookout for the release of Marlon Wayans’ stand-up comedy special, “Good Grief,” dropping soon!
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
In the middle of a quarter-life crisis, I began evaluating my professional career choices. While working a day job as a sales executive at a very large and successful tech company, I became jaded by corporate jargon, acronyms and daily standups. So, to spite my professional career, I started a personal blog as an attempt to go out on my own and build an audience. The premise for my blog, a.k.a. Justin’s Live, was that every weekend, I’d visit a new restaurant or bar with friends in San Francisco and write up a comedic review of the weekend shenanigans.
My thought was that the reviews would be informative and hilarious. What I learned was that my reviews were in fact useful, as I observed readers cross-posting on their travel blogs; However, no one thought the content, or the producer of the content, was funny or entertaining.
So, in an attempt to become a more entertaining writer for the blog, I decided to sign up for stand-up comedy classes in San Francisco. Every week, I began writing jokes and standing up at open mics throughout San Francisco. While I don’t believe I got that much funnier, I believe every entrepreneur should try stand-up comedy at some point in their lives. Here are a few ways that a failed career in stand-up comedy made me a better entrepreneur.
The first time I stood up at SF Comedy College for an open mic, I delivered the perfect fart joke. It involved my grandparents, a church pew and the act of confession. Not a single person in the room laughed. Not one.
Fart jokes aren’t unique or special. They’re funny when the actual fart happens, but someone talking about a fart isn’t all that entertaining.
It’s no different when you’re a valuable startup that solves a real customer problem. My former investor, Phil Libin, uses the analogy of building new apps into a developing ecosystem. When Apple launched the concept of mobile apps, there were hundreds of fart apps, but none of them stuck. It took years to build quality experiences that solved real customer problems. Farts are a shortcut. Same as the F- word. Go deeper to find substance versus relying on cheap laughs.
The blinking red light
Whenever a comedian bombs on stage, they get the flashing red light indicating that their time on stage is over. The quicker you fail on stage, the faster that red light flashes in the back of the audience. I became really accustomed to seeing that flashing red light, or in other words, experiencing rejection from an audience that didn’t think my aforementioned fart jokes were funny.
It took six months of visiting late-night open mics before my sets progressed beyond two minutes. What’s more, throughout the process, my skin thickened. I noticed my performance in my day-to-day selling career improving. I was able to manage more difficult conversations, and I didn’t take “no” personally. The blinking red light taught me how to deal with rejection and failure in a very public manner. No matter how bright or fast that light blinks, don’t be afraid to face the red light.
On several, if not most, occasions, my written material bombed. So, during many of those sessions, I was forced to “riff,” or improvise, by engaging directly with an audience.
As every improv purist knows, stand-up comedy and improv are two very different things; However, there are a number of skills from applied improv that carry over to stand-up comedy. The ability to take cues from an audience, accept their offer and riff on it, is one of the most important and valuable skills I’ve obtained as an entrepreneur.
Whether it’s handling sales objections, defusing conflict or collaborating on a whiteboard, the ability to listen to a group of people, take what they give you and build upon it is a superpower.
Nailing the punchline
With every open mic set, I made it a goal to get at least one joke to land. It took months to get a full two- to three-minute set where I was stringing a handful of decent jokes together to avoid the blinking red light.
These were a couple of things I learned in the process of nailing my punchlines:
I found that the more specific I got into the details of real-life scenarios and problems, the more those stories resonated with my audience.
I learned to use hard consonants because words with letters like K, B and P are just funnier.
By using the foundations of joke structure, I could take an audience’s preconceived opinions and expectations about everyday scenarios, like going to the grocery store, and break those expectations by injecting an unexpected outcome to make them laugh.
The more life experience I acquired, like getting married and having kids, the more relatable my material got.
Coincidentally, this process and these insights were identical to the work that was required in finding product-market fit and crafting stories that resonated with investors, partners and customers. More specifically:
The more I focused on the specific pain of our customers and understood their business and lives, the better my “material” got.
During my startup pitches to VCs and customers, I learned to focus on the language I used to communicate my ideas.
In scenarios where venture capitalists or prospective customers had established beliefs about a problem area, I could break their expectations by showing them a better way forward.
The more work experience I obtained, the more I could speak to real-life business problems and tell a story about how to fix them.
It goes without saying that I’ll likely never become Dave Chappelle or Chris Rock, nor will I sell out an entire stadium to hear my legendary church pew joke. There isn’t a blinking red light big enough for my stand-up comedy career; However, not to “toot” my own horn, but I’m confident those late-night open mics helped me put the gas on my entrepreneurial endeavors. So, entrepreneurs, what are you waiting for? Let ‘er rip! (Ok, I promise that was the last one).
Feature Special to be live and taped on Thursday, Jan. 30, 2020, at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m.
Press Release –
updated: Jan 7, 2020
LOS ANGELES, January 7, 2020 (Newswire.com)
– Brash Boys Club is a one-night stand of gay comedy, daring to be the first gay, male stand-up comedy special and addressing the dearth of gay, male comics in the stand-up world. Come watch Brad Loekle, Owen Alabado and Dash Kwiatkowski record a 90-minute comedy special on Thursday, Jan. 30, 2020, at 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. at CSz LA (The Monroe Forum) at the El Portal Theatres in North Hollywood, 5269 Lankershim Boulevard, North Hollywood, CA 91601. Bridget McManus will be the show’s opening comedian.
BRAD LOEKLE was a semi-finalist on season 9 of NBC’s Last Comic Standing, and TV audiences will recognize him from his eight seasons on the hit TruTV series, World’s Dumbest. Logo featured him in their 2016 Aspen Comedy Special. And Brad’s made guest appearances regularly on an assortment of shows on VH1, MTV, LOGO, E!, and many more. He was a writer for Fashion Police and has performed in over 70 countries around the globe.
OWEN ALABADO is “The Straight Gay” Comic who has headlined at Flappers Comedy Club, The Icehouse, and The Michigan Gay and Lesbian Comedy Festival in Detroit. For the past two years, he has had an ongoing show at Flappers Comedy Club called “Owen and Friends”. He recently performed in his hometown in Wisconsin to a sold-out, 300-seat theater. He has appeared in TV shows such as “This Is Us”, “Shameless” and the comedy “*Loosely Exactly Nicole”. He is also the writer/creator of the award-winning web series “Dudes”, a comedy based off of his comedy and personal life. “Dudes” has won eight awards, including “Best Web Series Pilot” for the Austin Indie Fest, “Best Webisode” for the Hollywood Boulevard Film Festival, and “Best Web Screenplay” for the Canadian Diversity Film Festival. He is also in the development of producing a new Filipino-based comedy series called the “Flipside”. Owen brings the funny, pulling from his life: from being a gay guy who hangs out with a bunch of straight guys, a half Filipino half Caucasian, as well as a singing-dancing trained martial artist who goes to about five to eight weddings a year!
DASH KWIATKOWSKI (they/them) is a New York-based stand up and podcaster. They’re a non-binary Sadboi and a big ol’ queer. They play Dungeons and Dragons as part of a podcast called Lost in the Multiverse (dnd.cool), and they tour all over this terrible country telling jokes at strangers. They’ve performed in Limestone Comedy Fest, 208 Comedy, SF Sketchfest, and SF Comic-Con. They’re the leader of the Bummer Club and the Queen of Strong Style, and you didn’t hear this from me, but they might have a big crush on you.
The show opener is BRIDGET McMANUS, a television host, screenwriter, producer, director and award-winning performer. She created and hosted two television shows for the Logo Network: the award-winning comedy talk show, Brunch with Bridget, and Bridget McManus Presents: That Time of The Month. McManus is one of the few female warm-up comedians in television, and her credits include the Emmy Award-winning The Real, Netflix’s Tiffany Haddish Presents: They Ready, Fox’s sitcom Patty’s Auto, The Teen Choice Awards, NBC’s The Wall and Last Comic Standing, etc.
Please note that this is a live taping, so come early and be prepared to laugh. Beer and wine are available for purchase. Tickets link: http://brashboysclub.com
Directed and produced by Quentin Lee, an acclaimed independent filmmaker who has directed seven features. Quentin has created Comedy InvAsian, the first Asian American stand up TV series premiered in 2018 as a Hulu Exclusive, and Brash Girls Club, the first all-female stand up limited TV series now streaming on Tubi TV (http://tubi.com). Besides Brash Boys Club, Quentin is producing Kim McVicar’s Please Notice Me and Ed Hill’s Candy and Smiley, two comedy specials for Comedy Dynamics.
