Paul Ollinger
speaker
141 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Paul Ollinger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Guy that ran the New York Comedy Festival, he's like, you know you're good. You're very good, right? And he goes, you know that's not enough though, right? You know you have to be great. And that is absolutely true in the comedy business where everybody wants to be a comic or everybody wants to be a great musician. Everybody wants to be a musician.
Well, if you want to be a musician who stands out, who sells tickets, who can support himself and his family doing that thing, you have to be great.
What's happening, John? Thanks for having me.
I'm sitting on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I can see buildings on West 86th Street out the back window of our brownstone.
origin story well the the the nurture and the nature part of it is I mean I'm a product of my family I'm one of six kids from a big catholic family in suburban Atlanta Georgia I had two amazing two amazing parents who were committed to their family and stayed together for 55 years until my mom passed away um and you know I was always part of a gang it was it was uh It was a busy, crazy household.
We weren't rich, but we had everything we needed. And there was lots of people around. And as crowded as it could be, I always knew I was part of something. And you wouldn't have put it in those terms when you were a kid. But looking back, having been a part of that gang, you have a security built into you that people who don't have that you know, maybe don't experience or at least as a child.
No, I mean like when you're one of six kids, you know, by the time I was the fifth out of six kids, you know, we were the Brady bunch, three boys, three girls. And we weren't unique at all in our Catholic church and our Catholic schools. I mean, you know, half the families had six kids or more, it seemed like.
And, you know, but when you get to high school, you know, when you're the fifth kid, by the time you show up for your freshman year, you're like, oh, you're one of the Ollinger kids. which is you want to make your own way, but at the same time, the teachers know who you are. Your older sisters tease you in the hall. Her friends are like, oh, look at him.
He's such a cute freshman or whatever, and make fun of you, and you feel like a complete loser. Yet on some level, it gives you a safety net. I think that was a very big part of my childhood. Childhood dinners were The dinner table at our family was very raucous.
Whenever one of my siblings would have a friend over to spend the night, they'd all remark, good God, I've never seen a louder dinner table than what I just experienced with your family. My dad would go around and make everybody ask the guest a question, and then the guest would have to ask everybody at the table a question. It was...
It was, you know, it was sort of, it was like not, you know, it was like eight is enough for the Brady Bunch, but it was a very wholesome, positive way to grow up. We weren't perfect. We were dirty, nasty kids, but it was a positive environment to grow up in.
My dad was a nuclear engineer for Georgia Power. So he did environmental testing around nuclear power plants as part of the Georgia Power and eventually Southern Company system. So He was a nuclear engineer when Three Mile Island happened in whatever it was, 78, 79. And so it was a very relevant thing to do. But he's a brilliant guy. It's just not one of those jobs.
And again, we had very stable upbringing, but it wasn't like he had money falling out of his pockets.
That's 100% right. And I think it made me a very earnest person. It made me very hungry for attention. But to be my own person and have something to say and distinguish myself from my older brother and my family in general, you know, when I was a freshman, my brother Cole was a junior in high school.
And for the first year of my high school experience, I just, all I had to do, I just heard the girls, the beautiful girls at my freshman homeroom table talk about what a great looking guy my older brother was. And I was like, that's the last thing I want to hear. Right. So, you know, and I shared a room with him until I was a sophomore in high school and he was a senior.
So, um, a lot of, a lot of closeness, a lot of competition that eventually, you know, not now my, my brothers and sisters are very, very good friends. And, um,
That's right. That's right. Well, I really was available to them, you know, but when I got my braces off, maybe, you know, things things start to improve a little bit. So my son's about to get his braces off. So I'm sort of like, oh, man, I wonder what's going to happen to him when, you know, in the next few months, he's he's right at that point where he's about to break out, you know?
So expensive.
Well, my, my brother was a very, uh, my old, my immediately older brother, you know, we had the benefit. He was fourth. I was fifth. We were only 18 months, all the youngest, the youngest four of us were all 18 months apart. So we were very, you know, close in proximity and in age. Um, he was a very good student. Um, he was a very good basketball player.
Um, and so that was the immediate, you know, person I wanted to outshine. So I wanted to do better than him. So he was a captain of the basketball team. I wanted to be the captain of the football team, lead role in the play, head of the student government, all that kind of stuff. And I ended up doing all that. And I was motivated.
Showing 1–20 of 141 · page 1 of 8
Next →