My Feud with a Famous Crowd Work Comedian

I have been known in the past to occasionally tweet a barb or two about this one very successful crowd work comedian.

Mostly harmless tweets like ‘his success is an indictment on our entire culture’ and ‘Not since George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words have we been graced with such a timeless bit as this comedian asking if someone in the front row is gay’.

In these moments I wasn’t thinking of the comedian as a real human being but simply a perfect symbol for comedy’s spiritual decline into algorithm-feeding, fatuous, drivel devoid of any real point of view and further chipping away at our already decaying artistic standards.

Often my posts would get push back from comedians who would say he must be doing something right, he’s selling out arenas! To which I would reply that, based on this metric, Adolf Hitler should also be congratulated (Obviously I am in no way comparing this comedian to Hitler; say what you want about Hitler but he always went straight into material).

And so I continued on this bitter, mean-spirited track. And then one day when I was reading an interview with this comedian to find something to be outraged by, I spotted this quote:

“I definitely suffer from imposter syndrome.”

While ‘syndrome’ struck me as the incorrect word to describe this comedian’s ailment (he suffered from as much Imposter Syndrome as The Talented Mr. Ripley and Rachel Dolezal), I did feel a strange tug of empathy in that moment. Naturally I tried to push this feeling down as it contradicted my worldview in which he was the enemy of all that was good. But try as I might, I couldn’t fully extinguish this connection I was now feeling towards him, as I myself struggle with imposter syndrome despite being a comedic genius.

A couple days later I was pitching an idea for a sitcom to an exec at Comedy Central. As he was explaining to me that, while the idea had a lot of potential, unfortunately Comedy Central had shut down three years ago and he was just a crazy person squatting in their abandoned office, I started to reflect on my one-sided feud with this comedian. What had he done to earn my wrath besides being a constant reminder of the ongoing lobotomization of stand up comedy? So what if he got rich pandering to the lowest common denominator while still having the audacity to demand to be seen as controversial and edgy?

Has culture become so spiritually bereft that at this point everyone is entitled to find their own grift just to survive? And was the true essence of my anger merely the fact that I had yet to find one that has worked for me?

As I was leaving Comedy Central’s abandoned office, I turned the corner and who did I run into but this very same crowd work comedian.

Though we had never met, he immediately started yelling at me.

Apparently my tweets had gotten back to him and he was not happy.

I wrongly thought the millions he had accrued had alleviated his insecurities and lack of self-worth but they appeared to have magnified them instead.

He called me gay, he mocked my weight, my disheveled appearance, my smudged, dirty, glasses.

And honestly, the barbs he was throwing at me were quite good.

A couple I couldn’t help but laugh at.

For you see, I realized in that moment, admittedly a little too late, that it really is better to see this comedian live. His clips on Instagram did not do him justice.

While the content (me being fat and gay and retarded) was not unique, the brilliance was in his rapid-fire delivery and the imaginative variations on these themes.

As I continued to watch him perform his new hour, I felt my view of comedy had been greatly altered. This man was indeed great at crowd work and deserved all the success he had achieved. And not only was I wrong to make fun of him, if I knew what was good for me I would try and learn from his business acumen and crowd work skills.

And while not one element of this story is true (otherwise known as a one-man-show), I am grateful for the epiphany this crowd work comedian bestowed on me: We’re all in this together, and we all have talents that should be extolled, not derided. Why do artists demand that every other artist be similar to them, when if that was the case, it would deprive them of their own uniqueness?

Like a Jew in Auschwitz having to begrudgingly admire the immense organizational effort that lead him to be there, I take my hat off to to this King of Crowd Work…knowing all to well he has a killer joke about my hat locked and loaded.