Can Comedy Be Funny Anymore? | Andrew Schulz | TEDxColumbusCircle

[Music] [Music] hi everybody how are you good okay this is my first time speaking with this microphone and it is very uncomfortable I didn't realize that so right now I feel like Britney Spears but uh let's do it I know we are here to talk about being bold and brave I'd like to acknowledge something right off the bat as a comedian I am at the low end of the spectrum of brave okay I understand brave people are soldiers firefighters police people battling terminal illness comedians are here okay kpop dance groups around here okay so I know where I am on the spectrum not trying to say I'm this incredibly brave person I like telling jokes it's fun I would I was told my mom that I was gonna do a TED talk and she's like is it gonna be weird to stand in front of people and not make them laugh and I said mom you must have forgot about the beginning of my career there's a lot of TED talks going on then and bars all over New York City so we've come a long way to go full circle I want to talk a little bit about the shift in culture what's going on right now with maybe political correctness and how that's affected my industry and how you can possibly be bold and brave in that regard times have changed we've got a lot more sensitive can you guys feel it yes okay now not only sensitive we've got a lot more entitled to our feelings if we feel something it's important we let everybody know okay now why did this happen does anybody have kids here yes a couple people no one two three photo now everybody has kids okay second ago barren now everybody has a hole so you guys [ __ ] it up you guys [ __ ] it up with the kids okay your parenting sucks and I'll explain why all right when I was growing up and I got in trouble in school which was a lot I would come home and I'd tell my parents mom dad the teacher doesn't like me okay and my mom and dad would say who gives a [ __ ] in life people are not gonna like you figure it out now you guys when you have kids in elementary school they come home they go the teacher doesn't like me and you go well let's get the teacher fired because my kids perfect and everybody likes my kid so you instill in his brain or her brain that the world should bend to them and now I'm doing comedy and I tell a joke about something and someone stands up and they go I don't like that well why not because I don't well everyone else is laughing but that doesn't matter cuz in this moment I don't like it so now you have to leave you get kicked out of my show I had an instance recently a girl had a seizure at my show that's how funny I am now I talked about killing anyway so she had a seizure at the show we checked on her she was fine she leaves everything's good so I started to make fun what happened in the situation and a girl in the crowd stood up she's like you can't make jokes about that that's not funny and I asked what she did for a living she says she was an EMT and I was like why didn't you help [Laughter] and you know why she didn't help is because this is what we do now we complain but we don't help because we think that's enough anyway so here we lie in this situation where there's certain topics that people say you cannot joke about they're taboo cannot joke about violence sexism rape incest these topics you cannot make any content about whatsoever until Game of Thrones comes on you know then you can make a whole show about it for eight seasons it's only literally about those topics but after that you can't you know not anybody else you can or unless you're president you know so all I'm saying is I want the moral obligations of the president is that that much to ask I don't think that that's too much to ask of a comedian right but unfortunately for me we live an environment where people want to be very critical of what you say so how do you be bold and brave in that environment here is my journey I had a lot of success early on in television but not necessarily stand-up comedy I wanted to do stand-up but the stand-up industry for whatever reason would never let me in so I had to find a way around this blockade or whatever it was I sat there and I go ok you know what I'll do I come from two hard-working parents they would do it themselves I'm gonna do it myself so we go out we film this special we shoot it for different comedy clubs in New York City we get the cab rides in between and we really dive into what a night of comedy is for a New York comic okay we put it together we cook it up we pitch it to everybody everybody said no lowest point in my whole career but it was actually the most interior couple things one adversity introduces a man to himself that's an old phrase I'm sure if they said it now it would be adversity introduces a non-binary person to themselves or whatever forgive Abraham Lincoln it was a different time he was progressive for his time of course he'll so we pitch it everybody everybody says no everybody says no now what do I do okay the doors are closed for everything I have to figure out this business something I learned in life is from nothing comes everything and again you learn these things later in life you know sometimes the lessons that happen in the moment they don't hit you two months years after so I started kind of looking at the business and figuring out if I could hack it in some way you know I've always felt like my competitive advantage and whatever I do is problem-solving so how do I solve this problem and I think you can learn everything about whatever business you're in by asking people who are not in that business oftentimes we're too close to understand the problems that we all have okay so I asked my friends that watch stand up what they were watching and how they liked it and they would all tell me about the things they were watching and then they would all say the same thing every single one would be like yeah watching it was funny but I didn't finish it that's interesting yeah it's really cool like this guy I didn't finish it huh nobody's finished it okay specials are too long so I decided to take this hour special that I had cut it down to 15 minutes and put it out on YouTube all right we made this thing I was really proud of it I just want to get it out there in the world right it stops becoming an outcome-based endeavor and just became something that I was proud of and want to share does that make sense okay good even though you didn't respond so what we did is we put this little 15-minute special out okay and immediately that weekend I sold out a bunch of shows in San Diego and I was never a sellout guy you know I'd sell maybe a few tickets but I never sold out you know the club I was like maybe that's a coincidence maybe I got fan base in San Diego and I kept doing different tour dates in different places and more and more people came out and I was like well maybe there's something too given away this material online so I started putting out a clip every week on YouTube I was gonna do it for a year every week I put a new clip out on YouTube and these clips would start to go viral and they would blow up in places all around the world India Bulgaria Romania Russia you know obviously America as well and I would start to sell out these shows and it was crazy to see these people start to gravitate towards me and my career kind of really blow up off of just putting out this material and I realized something I decided to break it up in these small bits and create tons of different ports of entry to me as an entertainer right and by doing this we saw this crazy effect happen on YouTube where person would watch one video and then they would be watching for the next two hours okay so my problem initially was the business would not let me in and then the business itself had a problem where people would not watch their whole hour special and somehow I found a way where people would watch two hours of comedy in a row and why was it is because it was two things authenticity and choice I always felt like the best sleep I have every night is the nine minutes I get when I press snooze okay I wake up I'm exhausted snooze that nine minutes is like uh-huh I could have just did that I didn't need the other six hours just let me snooze right I applied the snooze effect to stand up online you watch a three-minute clip and then all of a sudden YouTube goes you want to watch another one you go snooze I'll watch another one and just like when you sleep in you end up snoozing for two hours that's what you did with me okay my career kind of explodes because of it the other part authenticity I've always been drawn to and we'll wrap this up right now but I've always been drawn to Larry Dave and I try to figure out why Larry David with it was this amazing character that breaks all cultural barriers anybody you meet did his experience Larry David loves Larry David right he's not just old Jewish people's favorite comic he's young Puerto Ricans favorite comic too right why and it's because Larry Davis is an experiment in authenticity it's what would it be like if you were your true self 24 hours a day right hey you can I have a bite of your sandwich no why not I don't like your mouth we all want to say that but don't so when we see somebody say we gravitate to that and I think that what I always believe is I was gonna do authentic material I was gonna do material that came from me it hits you in your gut I don't do material for how you want the world to be and stand-up I do material for how we know the world is down here and I realize that by putting it out there in the internet right I put it out there on YouTube where they're billions of videos out there somehow it was able to somehow is able to touch people and people gravitate to her all around the world because you cannot deny your gut and that is what I learned and that is what I share with you today that if you want success in whatever industry you are in obviously find ways to hack it but by being truly authentic you do not have to gravitate to the world the world will gravitate to you my name is Andrew so let's have xi an okay

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 2,254,415

Rating: 4.9470534 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Entertainment, Comedy, Culture, Emotions, Humor

Id: dl2MQq4qO4Y

Length: 11min 4sec (664 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 10 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/dr_drizzy24]

Thank you for this.

[u/rjmason9]

This was great.