Hour 2: HIT IT, BRUCE! (feat. Walmart Austin Butler)
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is the Dan Levitar Show with the Stugatz Podcast.
Make sure to get me that Mad Dog Sound so I could get to it before the end of this hour. But we've got someone here who might even be funnier than Mad Dog Sound. He's buzzed about, right? He's the comedian right now that is super hot and he's selling out shows. On his national tour, lucaszelnik.com if you want full tour dates and tickets uh thank you for joining us lucas i appreciate it and i'm wondering on your career path here what made you more nervous the first time you did stand up or when you told uh the people who love you that you wanted to be a comedian for a living you know what i think i made the right call and i didn't tell the people who love me that i wanted to be a comedian until after i'd done a fair amount of stand-up
Okay, so you weren't, was it because you weren't sure that you wanted to do it as a career or you weren't sure what they'd say?
It's just like being a comedian is kind of like being gay. Like you want to really make sure you are before you go out and tell all your friends you are. Nothing wrong with it if you're sure, but you don't want to have to walk that one back.
So how long did you go before you, like how much doubt was there before you realized, no, I'm going to go ahead and try and make a go of this and I can make a go of it successfully?
Honestly, it was like two, probably two years, which I think makes it different from the gay analogy. I think if you tried being gay for two years, you'd probably know pretty quickly. But comedy, I don't know, because the pandemic really changed how comedy was working. So I just didn't know if it was going to be like a career path. I know I liked it, but I was pretty bad when I started too. So I just wasn't sure.
So where and when did crowd work make an appearance on the popularity scale? Because crowd work is now, and I know comedians have different opinions about this, but it's just a chance to be clever very quickly the way you've probably been all your life whenever you discovered funny, right? And so it's being rewarded and it seems to also be changing the game. And some older comedians seem to not respect crowd work very much because they think it's a little bit lazy or whatever, but you're exceptional at it.
Well, everyone does it a little bit in in like an hour long set, you know, even if they don't mean to. It's just like if you're doing a live set for an hour at a comedy club, you usually end up riffing or talking to someone for some amount of it. Usually people don't, you know, completely ignore the live element of the show for a full hour. But I think, yeah, people I think older comedians certainly don't respect the way in which New comedians are using it as clickbait to draw people out to shows. I always had like a natural knack for it.
What makes Lucas Zelnick nervous about his comedy career?
And it did start from being bad at comedy and not being able to do my jokes, which is the that's the knock on crap work. It's like, oh, these are for guys that don't have good jokes. It was for me in the beginning. Nowadays, I think my act is a lot stronger, so I don't have to do it if I don't want. But You know, I enjoy doing 10, 15 minutes of it if I'm doing an hour set anyway. No one needs more than 45 minutes of jokes. But I realized I was good at it, truly, because I think people started to give me more time up there, and I didn't have the goods for it. So it is kind of the negative stereotype. I was like, oh, I guess I'll just... Make fun of some guy in the front row, you know, and then and then I did that and that worked for me.
So then I that's but that all happened around 2021. And I think that kind of coincided with the moment that a lot of people were on TikTok discovering stand up comedy. A lot of people that, you know, the pandemic was happening. They had never been to a live show. Maybe they were young. Maybe they were under 21 years. you know, when the pandemic started and then all of a sudden, you know, they could go to a live show when it ended. So I got very lucky with that timing and that kind of people were really eating it up on the internet back then.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:52
2
What makes Lucas Zelnick nervous about his comedy career?
2:52–5:39
3
How does Lucas compare being a comedian to being gay?
5:39–10:22
4
What role does crowd work play in modern stand-up comedy?
10:22–14:48
5
Why do comedians use crowd work as a strategy?
14:48–17:42
6
How does social media influence the comedy scene today?
17:42–20:32
7
How does Lucas handle hecklers during his shows?
20:32–40:10
Speakers
6 identifiedMore from The Dan Le Batard Show
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