Chapter 1: What insights does Joel Kim Booster share about the Scrubs reboot?
everybody aged really well. Like when Arrested Development came back, it was like, ooh, what are we watching?
And everyone just- Everyone looks like a slightly older version of themselves, not a lateral move, different face human being because of the work that they've done. Like, I don't know the work situation. I know Sarah Chalk has had no work done. Um, she's very afraid of it. And I remember her daughter came in at one point and was like, like giving her mom notes after a scene. She's cute.
She's an adorable girl. And she was like, I didn't like all the facial expressions you were making in that scene, mommy. And I turned to her and I was like, you should be thanking your lucky stars that mommy can make facial expressions. All right. Because a lot of women in her position cannot. It's breaking bread.
I had just started dating the guy that I am now married to when I did that Zoom with you and 4chan, getting ready to shoot the movie. And I remember because I said something about looking terrible, looking like a slug, and he listened to the podcast back or watched it and was like, you didn't look like a slug. And I remember being like, oh my God, he's listening to the podcast that I go on?
This is terrible. This is terrible.
That's great. So I played somewhat of a role. Oh yeah, you're a big part of our love story. You're in the fabric of the love story for sure. Well, I hope that you and or your husband eat bread because I baked this for you.
Oh, I'm so hungry.
Are you? So, yeah. Because I read a thing, I read your GQ thing about, it was all about starving yourself. And I'm like, but I also got a sense that you're disciplined, but you let loose. Oh, yeah.
It's all about, I cheat every day, probably. Some days more than others. But yeah, I'm definitely, I mean, I'm married now. So what do I got to say?
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Chapter 2: How does Joel Kim Booster view the challenges of corporate comedy?
I've never seen a bread knife like that before.
Yeah, it's pretty cool. And then this thing, all the crumbs go in it. You're a genius.
Shark tank, my friend.
I'm slowly becoming the Martha Stewart of comedy. Now, let me ask you, because I was getting ready and we know each other a little bit. What is the is there pressure? It's it's so much pressure just to be a comedian. Yeah. And then, you know, the good thing about being a comedian for the most part is that we get to sidestep all of the stuff of being beautiful people.
But then I'm gay and sort of cancels that out a little. that sort of evens the playing field a little bit. Yeah, but it's like a whole nother factor to be handsome and attractive.
You know what I will say? It is difficult sometimes. I actually dress a very specific way when I'm performing. Because if I'm wearing a crop top on stage, not only is it distracting depending on the audience that I'm performing for, but it is harder to get people on your side when you...
are good looking it's like as a comedian nobody wants to laugh at a hot person i know for a while it was like it's kind of changed a little bit but when i started it was like if you showed up just even in shape yeah people were like who did they think he is yeah yeah do we have a napkin by any chance just in case oh right there okay good well there you go no this is all for you this is all for you
Yeah, we've got cigarettes. My God, if we could smoke right now.
Do you smoke? So I smoked for seven years, quit, then started vaping after the pandemic. You did. And then in order to quit vaping, I started smoking cigarettes again. And it worked like a charm. I didn't touch the stuff for a year and a half while I was smoking cigarettes again. And now I've weaned myself off cigarettes and I'm back on the vapes.
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Chapter 3: What personal experiences does Joel share about body image and being gay?
That is really what it is. It's just, yeah. How much can you withstand being uncomfortable? Yeah. Sometimes they'll go great. Yeah. Once in a while you get a great one. But if they go south, they go south.
I often find it depends on how surprised they are that there's a comedian there. That's a big part of it. Because oftentimes if they're well prepared, they know this is part of the programming. But I did one where they were like, and our special speaker today is a comedian. And it was just like...
You'd think that they'd be happy they didn't have to listen to whatever other special speaker they had. But no, they were furious.
Yeah, they're like, why?
They were like, this is an even bigger waste of time than hearing from an HR expert.
And I get it because it's their conference. If it's a big party, that's one thing. But when it's those kind of things, it's like... They're thinking about this all year. They got to come. They're like in sales. It's their moment. They have to accomplish whatever they have to do for the next couple of days. And now you're up there like, so let me tell you about my relationship. They're like, why?
Who are you? Yeah.
Why are we listening to this? I don't care about your dog. Oh, my God. That and birthday parties. Have you ever done a birthday party? Sure. That's the worst, man. Sure. It's the absolute goddamn worst. Yeah. why don't we stop the party where everyone's having fun right now so that you can go out to the backyard, sometimes no microphone.
Sometimes it's like a karaoke mic and you're just like, okay, I'm going to do this and no one cares if you live or die.
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Chapter 4: How does Joel Kim Booster navigate the pressures of being a comedian?
I always say you can't stop the clock.
It is one of those things, though, where I would say 80% of the time, the bigger the check, the worse the experience is going to be. Because clubs are great. I love a club audience. Yeah. But... I'm not paying my bills most of the time with what I'm making at a club. It's not the thing that brought me out of poverty, ultimately. It was, unfortunately, Chase Bank.
Chase Bank and colleges, which are also like sort of touch and go depending on where you're at.
Did you do a lot of colleges?
I did a ton of colleges.
You did?
I did a ton of colleges back in the day. Did you do those NACA conventions? I never did a NACA. I sort of got grandfathered out of the NACA, which was nice. The first time I ever did an hour was at a college. Oh, wow. Yeah. And yeah. So I don't remember. I think after I did Conan... Suddenly there was like interest and stuff like that for me. How old were you college adjacent?
No, I was probably 27, 28 at the time. So like older, I will say I made a decision post 30 when I was still doing colleges that I could no longer fuck college students. Um, which I know is like such a rite of passage. Every male, like straight male comedian does it.
But like I had this point where this guy came over to my hotel room and I think he was like 19 or 20, um, on the app, but he showed up and I was like, I'm so sorry, but I actually need to see your ID. And I was like, you know what? If I need to card them, I probably shouldn't be fucking them. But I was like, I'm not going down this way, man.
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Chapter 5: What are Joel Kim Booster's thoughts on the impact of AI on creativity?
I couldn't believe it. Oh, man. Where did you start? New York?
Chicago. Oh, Chicago. I say Chicago is where I started doing stand-up. I don't think I got good until I moved to New York, though. Right. And I will say, in Chicago, I was only in Chicago for about two years before I moved to New York. And it was funny because I...
I was not fully ingratiated into the comedy community in Chicago before I left, because I went to Chicago to do theater, be a playwright. And so most of my community, most of my friends were actors or theater people. And the thing about stand-up that you really don't understand until you're doing it is that hanging out And being a part of that scene is like, that's how you get booked.
That's how you get ahead. You have to hang out. And it was so hard for me to extricate myself from my close friends in Chicago to then spend all my time at open mics and then staying after my set and then doing the shows. I was doing weird gigs, too, because I was a part of the theater community.
I was opening for plays at Steppenwolf sometimes, doing a lot of nontraditional, not stand-up shows, basically. How cool was that, being around Steppenwolf? I mean, it was great.
It was a dream.
I've always wanted to like do a play there. And so this was the next best thing was like opening. They did like two comedy plays that they were like, and I knew people through doing theater in Chicago and they're like, oh, do you want to do this? And so I would go and warm up the crowd before the play would start. Really? Yeah. It was a really bizarre gig.
And then I, when I realized that standup was what I really wanted to focus on, I was like, well, I got to get out of this city cause I got to hit reset. Right.
And,
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Chapter 6: How does Joel Kim Booster's background in theater influence his comedy?
And it's like, I ended up back where I wanted to be originally, but it just was through standup. And so like, you know, I, I still like, you know, when I wrote for TV or when I made my movie, like I was using those same skills that I was using before. And it's like, it's definitely helpful because I know a lot of standups who get asked to act
who don't know what the fuck they're doing and are bad at it because it's not a natural one-to-one like going from standup to acting. And luckily I'd spent a lot of fucking money to learn how to act in college. And so it was like writing- Where'd you go to school? I went to this tiny school called Milliken University in downstate Illinois. It is not a famous theater school by any means.
It's fairly well known if you're on Broadway, I guess. But it does not turn out a lot of people like me, I will say.
But that's great. I did the same thing. I went to just a small school because it didn't have football and it had theater. And I was an athlete my whole life. And I was like, I just want to go act. And it was this tiny little school in New Jersey. But I got to be the lead in all the plays because the department was just growing.
And really, it was the greatest education because I wasn't competing with people who were really good yet.
Yeah, it's really funny because in college, I didn't know I was funny until I started... I changed my major to playwriting and started writing plays. And I was only interested in drama at the time. I thought I was going to be either a Shakespearean, classically trained actor, or I was going to be writing on the wire. Those were the two paths that I really wanted to do.
Were you smoking cigarettes when you started smoking cigarettes?
I was smoking cigarettes in high school, man. And then I... I started writing plays and getting them put up and I only wanted to write about fucked up shit. Like, you know, like deeply fucked up, dark, dark, dark stuff. But I would put up these plays and people would laugh at certain points, at moments where I did want the character to be funny or something like that.
They weren't laughing at parts where I was like,
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Chapter 7: What unique challenges does Joel face in the entertainment industry?
And so I would figure out ways to do that. But like the ways I would make my family laugh would be like, a giant burp, you know, like, yeah, just like timing, timing and like, you know, contrasts and stuff like that. But like, I, I never, you know, watched a lot of standup when I was growing up. Not because I, you know, I absorbed, uh, A lot of, like I, my mom was a huge Paula Pell fan.
Paula Poundstone. Paula Poundstone, sorry. And so I would, we watched Paula Poundstone specials a lot. I remember on my MySpace, the people that I admired slideshow that I had on my MySpace included Kathleen Madigan, because for some reason I had seen like one of her specials on Late Night on Party Central or something like that. That's great. And then Margaret.
Obviously, it was a huge inspiration to me for a lot of reasons. But honestly, the big stand-up, I was not a teenager or in college during the golden age of stand-up comedy at the time when I was coming up. And as a comic, I think really was like the last great like golden age that we had where there were so many shows and so many of us working.
But like, you know, Dane Cook was the number one guy when I was in high school and no shade to Dane Cook, I laughed too. I thought he's a funny guy, but nothing that Dane Cook was doing said, this is for you. Like this is,
Cause this was still a time when like you go, you would go to a comedy show and as a gay person or as a woman or as anything, you would sort of expect to be at some point the joke, you know, like, especially if I, if they were doing crowd work or something like that, I would always be like, Oh God, not me. Cause then they'll know. And then they'll make this a thing. And so I never felt like, Oh,
this is a viable career path. This is a dream that I should make good on. I enjoyed it. It just like, it wasn't until I moved to Chicago and started to experience the quote unquote alt scene in Chicago, which now looking at the landscape of comedy, the fact that we considered any of these people, Beth Stelling was like, like one of the top alt comedians in Chicago.
And it's like, nothing that Beth does is alternative. She's a very like traditional stand, like great standup comedian. Yeah. Yeah.
It was just so funny that at back then, if you were gay, a woman or a marginalized, like racial identity, other than black, you were considered all, you know, even if you were doing the same shit that everybody else was doing, but just talking about your life instead, it was like, Oh, we're going to listen to them.
That was the, that was the old part of it. Um, so,
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Chapter 8: What future projects is Joel Kim Booster excited about?
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But at the end of your tapings, I'm sure not everybody's like going to so-and-so's apartment and hanging out and getting high. It's just, you just, we're all grownups. It's that time of your life combined with theater is such a...
No, and yeah, that's the thing is, I think the younger actors on Scrubs are doing a lot of that. Probably. But like, I'm at this point, I'm like, I want to go home, watch something with my husband over FaceTime, smoke a joint, and go to bed.
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