I GO WHERE I’M ALLOWED AND TELL JOKES. Interview with CHARLEY McMULLEN

MP: Have you confronted any hecklers?

CMc: Sometimes. I’m usually the type to ignore people if they’re just yelling random shit out. If you respond to that, you have to first figure out what they’re saying, then make it funny, then use it against them. If someone’s good at crowd work, I say make that your whole set. It’s hilarious if you’re doing it right. I’ve never been much for crowd work. I think that’s because I’m an extremely non-confrontational person in my everyday life. However, if someone yells something about me or something I said, I’ll respond. It can look weak to the audience if you don’t at least defend yourself.

MP: Do you ever run out of jokes? I’m asking because I can imagine there’s some kind of pressure to write new stuff, or to fill the running time of a show or an album. Do you ever struggle to come up with a joke, or do your jokes just write themselves?

CMc: Oh, this shit writes itself!! No, not really.

Like most people in creatively-driven professions (notice resisted using the term “artist” because not all humor is art. If I’m proud of a joke for how smart I think it is, I can call it art. If I’m proud of it for a pun, or a shocking misdirection, or just an admittedly dumb punchline, I’ll tell it if it seems like the right crowd, but I can’t consider that art.), there is a lot of pressure to remain productive. Also, like most other art forms (fuck it.), there are times when you are just blocked and in a slump. All you can do is refocus your brain to something like comedy until you get past it. For instance, right now (FEB. 21st, 2015) I have been doing stand up constantly, but haven’t been able to draw anything for anyone (an occasional source of supplemental income as a cartoonist) in months.

Being productive in whatever way you can be is just sort of a responsibility for any person, and it’s not always easy. For a comedian, the pressure to keep writing new material is especially hard when you’re starting out. If you’re like me, the first two months or so of your comedy career were spent in front of roughly the same audience made up of your friends and people your friends were able to bring. Especially in a small town. That’s the case until you go out of town to perform. Even then, you’re performing to an audience of other open mic comedians most nights, and they have already heard a lot of your jokes. If you DON’T write new material, other comedians notice and hold that against you.

After my first year of doing stand up, I made a rule for myself to do at least one brand-new joke at every show. If it’s an important show that someone is paying me to do, I won’t do that because in that situation it would be an unprofessional dick move on my part if one new joke tanks a whole set because it does so poorly. But most nights I still do it. That’s the primary reason I have for using social media.

The first place I put a knew joke is Facebook. I do that because it gives you a date and time of when you came up with that joke. Also, I take stock of how many people “Like” a joke in the first two hours and, of them, how many are other comedians and, of them, whose opinions do I value the most. Facebook, to me, is like an audition for a joke. If it does well, I do it at an open mic and, if it does well again, I’ll do it in a showcase, and so on until it’s on an album. Once you have solid, rehearsed jokes that you can get a lot of time out of because of the performance, collect them until you have about two hours of new material, then that’s edited down to your next album. That is the metamorphosis/life cycle of a bit! Once it’s on an album, I -if not completely retire it- only do it once in a while.

MP: You have some really good jokes, but is it the only requirement to be successful at stand up? There are celebrity comedians that seem more popular than movie stars, but nonetheless some of them are labeled as painfully unfunny. I guess I’m asking if stand up is a part of the American dream: do you only need to be good at comedy and try really hard to get rich and famous, or is there something more behind successful people? Advertising budget and connections, perhaps?

CMc: Stand up is definitely part of what I consider to be my version of the American Dream. That’s my ultimate goal: Do stand up for, let’s say, 9 months out of the year (that’s not a paternity joke, by the way. It just seems like a round number, though it’s literally an odd number.), and spend one month on an issue of a comic book (that I could sell at live shows the following year, then spend a month on other shit; short films, podcasts, etc, then regroup for a month). Stand up would be the backbone of it all for me.

I’ve seen a lot of guys whose American Dream is to be famous, in which case stand up just looks like the easiest stepping stone. Even when it works, you have nationally touring comedians who are getting so popular because their material is so dumbed-down and mass-marketed. Guys like Gabriel Eglasias, Dane Cook, Tyler Perry and Larry the Cable Guy are great examples of success achieved through popularity rather than being genuinely funny. They all have material that feels intentionally broad and dumbed-down so that it will appeal to the most people. Which is fine if you want do be a movie star, but it makes it that much more of a stretch for the educated audience when legitimately-funny comedians are trying to get them to take a chance on paying to see a live comedy show. Fame is the American Dream for those guys. I’ve also seen hilarious comedians quit out of frustration because they refused to even relate to an audience, much less pander to one.

Luck -especially regarding connections to other people in entertainment to sneak you past the gatekeepers- is definitely part of it, but I think a good comedian who deserves success is one who has found a way to be themselves and and make that funny. I’m not likely to ever have a catchphrase, is all I’m saying. Although, on the other hand, If a writer approached me with a script, and I really thought it was funny, and a studio offered me Madea-money to star in it, I would totally do it if I really, truly thought it was funny. I don’t think that is a requirement for people who just want to be movie stars, thus a whole lot of painfully unfunny performances in a lot of painfully unfunny movies starring former comedians.

But, we’re all entitled to our dreams. My simple one that I’m still trying to achieve is no more or less heartfelt than the enormous one Carrot Top has already achieved. As long as you’re not hurting anyone, you are free to be as dumb and successful as you can be!

MP: Let’s talk about your album “Zen As Fuck”. How did the process of making the album look like?

CMc: The album was my idea and, in retrospect, I kind of feel like I took that initiative a bit prematurely. At the time I decided to record an album, I was hosting a weekend for the second time at a comedy club in Colorado Springs called Loonees. Hosting a weekend at a club means you do 15 minutes at the top, bring up the feature who does 30 minutes, then come back, thank the waitstaff, advertise for next weekend’s show, then bring up the headliner who does 45 minutes to an hour.

So far, I had seen every feature and headliner that I had opened for carry in boxes of their own CDs, sell them after all five shows and, in some cases, make more than what the club was paying them. After all the karaoke and filmmaking projects, I had learned a fair amount about recording sound, so I just booked a show in Pueblo at a place that was not normally known for comedy, and let people know that I was going to do 45 minutes to an hour -which was the longest by far that I had ever done up to that point- and that I was going to record it for an album. I even advertised it as Charley McMullen’s Album Show and recorded everything by hooking my video camera (Canon XL-H1) directly into the soundboard, then usind a second on-stage mic facing the other way to record the audience. It was a learning process, but we just uploaded the footage from the camera into John Brown’s Mac, isolated the audio from the video, deleted the video, and we had a recorded album that could be edited in GarageBand for absolutely no money invested. That’s why we gave it away for free on Geek Juice. I like the DIY approach and am using what I’ve learned with Zen as Fuck for the next album, tentatively titled “Like A Gentleman”.

The material on Zen as Fuck represented what I thought was the best I had as of 2013 and, almost two years later, there are a couple of really good jokes that I still do sometimes, but a lot of that record sounds now like a more nervous and awkward version of who I am after those extra years of experience. I love the record, but if I had it to to over again, I would’ve waited another year or so before recording an album. It’s blowing my mind how well it’s been received by the online community. As a guy who started out on a podcast, I can say you guys really support your own.

MP: What are your perspectives? What are your goals? How far ahead do you plan your career?

CMc: My perspective is something I struggled with early on. In the beginning, I learned that I didn’t have a “hook”. If a guy is overweight, his whole set could be about that, if a guy is black, or Hispanic, or gay, his whole set could be about that. There’s nothing about me for an audience to grab onto right away. Eventually, enough people started responding to the weirder material and wordplay jokes, so I just kind of settled on “confused outsider”. Now, comedians who look like me (beard, glasses, black hoodie) are practically their own sub-genre. I guess my perspective caught up with me. My goal is to do comedy for a living. How far ahead do you plan for something like that? Overall, my plan for the future is to do be a comedian for the rest of my life. In the day-to-day, I just try to book my next show every day, so planning ahead for me is dictated by who’s willing to let me be a comedian. I pretty much just go where I’m allowed and tell jokes.

MP: Many thanks for the conversation. Where should we go to listen to Charley McMullen’s Zen as Fuck?

CMc: My album is still available for free download at www.geekjuicemedia.com. While you’re there, check out the other shows, podcasts and articles on the site. Those little weirdos are doing good work over there. Thanks for the interview, man. I LOVE YOU, POLAND!!