Comedy, i love you
(a photography project)
It took me a while to understand how to combine my love for photography and comedy but given the genres that I primarily shoot photographically (documentary and street) it maybe should have clicked sooner (pun intended). At any rate, I have a whole long blog post about this so this’ll be a TLDR version of that story plus some sweet bonus action. Anyway, here it goes:
I’ve long been an aspiring comedian. I’ve done standup, improv, some sketch, and tried my hand at a lot of different approaches for comedy. —Writing even! Eventually after a few years I had to put comedy on the shelf as I was making it too much of a “job” and it felt like it was ruining the best part about comedy (it’s supposed to be fucking fun). —That and my life was a little chaotic at the time so I needed the break to deal with “that whole life thing.”
You can stop performing stand up but you can’t stop comedy. It’s a language, and once you’ve dedicated a part of your being to speaking, understanding, and creating in that language you will always crave for more. Or at least that’s how it works with me. Like my sickness of needing to have a camera with me at all times (you never know when you’ll see the shot of a lifetime), I have the same sickness with jokes. If there is a joke opportunity, I HAVE to take it. Like I said, it’s a sickness. A good sickness… but a sickness no less.
Anyway, including the pandemic I think I had been away from comedy, specifically stand up, for like 2+ years. (It’s impossible to know the exact amount of time). After some major life changes, waiting out a global pandemic, and getting vaxed I was ready to get back into it, but I also wanted more than to just get back on stage and do the same old dick and ball jokes that I was doing five years ago. So I brought my camera and headed downtown to my old watering hole (I actually don’t drink), The World Famous Mad House Comedy Club. Located in the Gaslamp District in Downtown San Diego.
That was when it dawned on me. The open mic scene is a street and documentary photographer’s dream. All the characters! The interactions! The drama! There is ample photographic subject matter everywhere you look. You’ve got the youngsters just getting started, full of energy and hope, grinding. And you’ve got the jaded vets who are closing in on a decade of primarily unpaid work. But at the end of the day, the comedy club is a building full of dreamers and I eat that shit up like cereal because I AM A DREAMER’S DREAMER. Seeing this fascinating community with 2+ years of additional hardcore documentary and street photography under my belt it was like a revelation. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned about photography is that a lot of great photography has to do with access, and this was a scene that I had a backstage pass to not that it’s exclusive or difficult to sign up for an open mic, but let’s be honest, there’s no way most people would even dream of it.
Most comics who have spent any significant amount of time in and around a comedy scene can tell you that the open mic days are some of the best days of their lives. Coming back into a scene after years away meant I was essentially starting over from scratch. But along with that meant another round of some of the best days of my life.
Click on the pictures and look at that shit big.
