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Posts tagged 'Having a comic persona' (4)
Everything I say is mean, so that makes everything less mean. If I’m up there talking about relationships and making fun of milkshakes and then all of a sudden I have a rape joke, it would make it seem that much more awful. If everything is rape and death, then it takes the pressure off of those things. People can feel a little better about laughing at something awful when it’s surrounded by other horrible things.
i don't talk in person the way i do on stage because it's a performance and it's disstilled and the language is more deliberate. I make the same kind of jokes with my friends and family for sure and i have safe relationships where I can float a crazy or wrong idea and find out where it goes just as a life excercize and some times those things end up on stage.
Question: How long did it take you to figure out your persona? Is there a video out there of you early in your career making Gaffigan-esque jokes?
Answer: No Gaffigan-esque videos out there, but it took me years to put this persona together. Just endless nights of open mics and trying new things.
I just noticed that audiences didn't want to laugh at me because of the way I looked, so I just went with that. It seemed fun to play a villain on stage and I wanted my jokes to be so good that I could just calmly tell them on stage. I didn't want to show any neediness. It was important to me to be cool up there.
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Anthony Jeselnik