Joel Kim Booster

And like...

I think being comfortable, like I think most standups when they start out are good at one of two things.

Either they are good and charismatic and great at being on stage, but don't really know how to write a joke yet.

Or there are these incredible joke writers who are so uncomfortable on stage and the learning curve for them is to learn how to be comfortable.

on stage and I was definitely in the charisma like stage presence camp for the first couple of years of my career.

And it took a long time and it really wasn't until late in or early in moving to New York that I felt like I was like, okay, this is how you write a joke.

This is how you develop it.

And it was from moving to New York and suddenly consuming every single night, hours and hours of standup comedy.

And I just wasn't doing that.

So I wasn't learning in Chicago necessarily.

I was writing in my own way and doing okay, but I wasn't seeing a lot of standup.

I wasn't consuming a lot of standup in Chicago, not in the way that I was in New York.

Steppenwolf was definitely it, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I was doing a lot of like, you know, like theater was much more connected to like clown work at the time.

So I was doing a lot of like clown shows where I would be the only stand up.

I was doing a lot of like theater, thumb raisers.

I did a lot of burlesque shows and like poetry slams and stuff like that.

That was like.

where people that I knew from the theater world were involved and it was more tangentially related to theater than standup was at the time.

And so I was doing a lot of really unorthodox shows.