Damian Mason
speaker
125 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Damian Mason’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The being funny was the work. The being funny was going to the gym. the pressure was the money. You know, there's people that, I guess if you're on a trust fund, which I have no idea what that would be like, and you just get a stipend every month from grandpa's trust fund, you can endeavor into whatever you want. There's all kinds of people that endeavor into creative ventures.
Oh, we all know the rich kid that's in a band. Yeah, well, you've made less money this year in your band than, like, Corey sold a few stray soybeans and whatever. So I looked at it as... The funny part, I was a funny kid growing up. I'm the youngest of a big family. How many? My timing was good. Nine. I'm the ninth. Wow. And so I had to be funny to get attention. I was funny in school.
And I wasn't worried about the funny. I remember when I started selling the act, doing $100, $200, $300 gigs, and I talked to some agent. He says, look, what's your act? You know, you got these real cheese, you know, like Chicago style. Yeah, so yeah, I'm an agent. And it was before the internet. Yeah, so what's your act? I said, well, I come in and act like Bill Clinton. I say funny stuff.
Like, what do you say? I said, I say funny things. And then for like 10 minutes, then I take photos. Like, what? I said... Give me a live audience and I'll show you. I didn't actually have an act written up. When I first started, I came in and said funny things. Then I started working on an outline of creating it. Boom, boom, boom. The pressure was for the revenue.
The pressure wasn't that I couldn't be funny for five minutes because starting out, nobody expects you to have a 50-minute set. You grow to a 50-minute set, but you start with a five-minute set.
There you go. And then the headliner's a 50-minute set, 45-minute set, maybe an hour. Yeah, your middle act, and then your setup guy that's the opener, host, whatever. And I didn't do clubs a lot. I decided that I did clubs, but club audiences are stupid. They're not as bright.
and you get treated poorly, and they don't want to pay. And if you can do a corporate crowd, if you can be clean, if you can be a little bit intelligent, and having a corporate background, I had been in those corporate sales meetings. You've been to these sales meetings. You can be funny and clean and a little bit more intelligent. You can get paid way better.
And then when you get done, they come up and give you a beer. You work a comedy club. You want a beer and you get done. They charge you for it.
Maybe. Corey, let's be honest. Have you ever really paid for a book? Yeah, a few.
And you're in the minority if you're a farmer who reads a book. Because I get after my farm friends. I ain't got time to read. It's in my ear. I do the books on tape. Books on tape. That's a big time saver. Yep.
After the fourth version of the same song over, I can't imagine how you wouldn't be ready for something different.
Yeah.
So there's a neat thing here. I mean, we don't know each other that well, but I'm very frank about this. The bad part about comedy... I enjoyed my comedy career. You get... Comedy gets probably the least amount of respect. If you said, I pump out portable shithouses, or I'm a comedian, the portable shithouse pumper probably gets more respect than the comedian. And it's, or, oh, you're a comedian?
Oh, say something funny. And, you know, do you do this to your, do you do this to the asphalt, I run an asphalt paving company. Yeah, come paint my driveway for free. So that's the tough part about comedy. It's almost, it jades you a little bit because you don't get, it's like, man, this is my job. And it's not just me and like, oh, Damon's kind of got a hard-ass personality.
Steve Martin talks about it in his book, Born Standing Up. He was at the highest level. And if your listeners are like 25, look up Google Steve Martin. That'd be Rachel. That's true. Steve Martin, very famous, still does acting, planes, trains, automobiles, Saturday Night Live. You can go on and on and on. But he was a stage act before he was all that.
He started as a kid performing at Knott's Berry Farm in Southern California, which is like a poor man's Disneyland, right? He talks about in his book when he hit the zenith of his success as a stage act in the 70s, how he was offended that they didn't have more respect for what he had created, that the people in the upper deck were drunk and yelling and screaming.
It took him a lot to realize, well, they're the customer and they paid, so whatever. But he took it very personally that there was not more respect for his craft and his creation. And I can understand that because comedy doesn't get much respect. So I know this is a long answer to your short question, I was not, like, he talks about, he's like, I knew then that I had to get out of the stage act.
He's like, at first I was very lonely. You know, you're on stage in front of a thousand people, and then they don't respect, you know, they're screaming and yelling. Yeah, you make a bunch of money. You go back to your room, you're still wound up. And it takes you four hours to calm down and come off that high.
And all you're thinking is, didn't actually listen to my, I worked for a year on that bit. And they didn't even listen. So there's a little bit of that. So there's a side where I was not eager to get away from comedy, but to be not known as a comedian. Because when you walk into the sales meeting, oh, you're the comedian. Oh, you're the comedian.
And then you're always like, okay, what's that mean? Right. What's the expectation for that? And sometimes it's very disrespectful, and I'm not being in any way overly sensitive. I get it. I got paid. So there was that growth. And the other part of it is the growth. Yeah.
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