Can Comedy Be Funny Anymore? | Andrew Schulz | TEDxColumbusCircle

Hi everybody how are you? Okay, this is the first time I speak with this microphone and it is very uncomfortable. I didn't realize that I feel like Britney Spears until now, but let's do it. I know we're here to talk. about being bold and brave I would like to acknowledge something up front as a comedian I am on the lower end of the brave spectrum okay I understand that brave people are soldiers, firefighters, police officers, people fighting terminal illnesses, comedians are here okay k-pop dance groups around here it's okay, so I know where I am on the spectrum, I'm not trying to say I'm an incredibly brave person, I like to tell jokes, it's fun, I won, I was telling my mom I was going to give a ted talk and she says is it going to be strange to be in front of people and not make them laugh and I said mom, you must have forgotten the beginning of my career?

There are a lot of Ted Talks going on at the time and bars all over New York City, so "I've come a long way to come full circle. I want to talk a little bit about the change in culture, uh, what's happening right now." , maybe with political correctness and how that has affected my industry and how it is possible to be bold and brave in that sense We have changed, we have become much more sensitive, can you feel it Yes, okay, now we are not only. sensitive. We have much more right to our feelings. If we feel something, it's important.

We let everyone know. Okay, now, why did this happen? Does anyone have children here? now everyone has kids okay ah a second baron ago now everyone has a full troop so you guys get up with the kids okay your parenting sucks and I'll explain why okay when I was a kid and I got into. problems at school, which was a lot. I would come home and tell my parents, mom, dad, the teacher doesn't like me, it's okay, and my mom and dad would say, who cares? People aren't going to like life, now guys, figure it out, when you have kids in grade school, you come home, you leave, the teacher doesn't like me and you go, well, let's get the teacher fired because my son is perfect and everyone likes him. so you instill in their brain or their brain that the world should bow to them and now I'm doing

comedy

and I tell a joke about something and someone stands up and says, "I don't like that, well why not?" Well, everyone else laughs, but that doesn't matter because right now I don't like it, so now you have to go, they will kick you off my show.

I had a case recently, a girl had a seizure on my show. It's

funny

now I'm talking about killing anyway so she had a seizure on the show we reviewed she was fine let everything be fine so I started making fun of what happened in the situation and a girl in the crowd rose to its feet. Like you can't make jokes about that that's not

funny

and I asked her what she did she said she was a paramedic and I asked her why didn't you help and you know why she didn't help it's because this is what we do now we complain but we don't help because we think it's enough anyway, so here we line up this situation where there are certain topics that people say you can't joke about, they're taboo, you can't joke about violence, sexism, rape, incest, these issues.

I can't make any content about anything until Game of Thrones comes along, you know, so you can make a whole show about it for eight seasons, it's literally just about those topics, but after that you can't, you don't know anyone else, you can or unless "You're president, you know, so all I'm saying is that I want the moral obligations of the president to be a lot to ask for. I don't think that's too much to ask of a comedian, but unfortunately for me we live in an environment. where the People want to be very critical of what you say, so how can you be bold and brave in that environment?

This is my journey. I had a lot of success at first in television, but not necessarily in stand-up. I wanted to do stand-up. up. But the stand-up industry, for some reason, never let me in, so I had to find a way around this block or whatever, and I sat there and said, “Okay, you know what I'll do? "I come from two working parents they would do it themselves, I'll do it myself, so we went out, we filmed this special, we filmed it in four different

comedy

clubs in New York City, we took a cab in the middle and really We dive into what a night of comedy is for. a new york comic, okay, we put it together, we cooked it, we presented it to everyone, everyone said there was no lowest point in my entire career, but it was actually the most priceless moment in my entire life because I learned a couple of things that adversity presents to a man. to himself that's an old phrase, I'm sure if they said it now it would be adversity, it's presented to a non-binary person or whatever, forgive me, Abraham Lincoln, it was a different time, he was progressive for his time, for of course, so we launched everyone everyone says no everyone says no now what do I do well the doors are closed to everything I have to solve this business uh something I learned in life is that everything emerges from nothing and again you learn these things later in life you know, sometimes Lessons that happen in the moment don't affect you two months years later, so I started looking at the business and figuring out if I could hack it somehow.

You know, I've always felt like my competitive advantage and whatever. What I do is solve problems, so how do I solve this problem? I think you can learn everything about any business you're in by asking people who aren't in that business. Many times we are too close to understand the problems we all have. I asked my friends to stand up and see what they were seeing and how they liked it and they all told me about the things they were seeing and then they all said the same thing, each one said: yes, I saw it, that's how it was. funny but I didn't finish it, I'm like, oh, that's interesting, oh, that was funny, yeah, that was really cool, like this guy didn't finish it, huh, no one's finishing it.

Okay, the specials are too long, so I decided to take this one hour special I had. cut it down to 15 minutes and put it on youtube, that's fine. We did this. He was very proud of it. I just want to put it out into the world. It stopped becoming a results-based effort and just became something. what he was proud of and wanted to share, does that make sense? Okay, you didn't respond though, so what we did was we put out this little 15 minute special, and immediately that weekend I sold out a bunch of shows in San Francisco.

Diego and I was never a sellout guy, you know, maybe I would sell some tickets, but I never sold them out, you know, the club I was at, maybe it's a coincidence, maybe I have a fan base in San Diego. and I kept doing different tour dates in different places and more and more people came out and I thought wow, maybe there's something giving away this stuff online, so I started posting a clip every week on YouTube. I was going to do it for a year. Every week I put a new clip. on youtube and these clips would start going viral and blow up in places all over the world india bulgaria romania russia obviously also in America and I would start selling out these shows and it was crazy to see these people start to gravitate towards me and my career really exploded just by putting this stuff out there and I realized something, I decided to break it down into these little chunks and create tons of different ports of entry for myself as an artist and in doing so.

We saw this crazy effect on YouTube where a person would watch a video and then watch it for the next two hours. So my problem initially was that the business wouldn't let me in and then the business itself had a problem where people wouldn't watch their full hour special and somehow I found a way where people could watch two hours of comedy followed and why it was because authenticity and choice were two things. I've always felt like the best sleep I get every night is the nine minutes I get when I hit snooze okay I wake up I'm exhausted snooze that nine minutes it's like uh I could have done that I didn't need the other six hours just let me snooze okay I applied the effect from snooze to stop When you're online, you watch a three-minute clip and suddenly YouTube says: you want to watch another one, you go to sleep, I watch another one and, just like when you sleep in, you end up sleeping for two hours , that's what you did with me, okay?

My career exploded because of that, the other part, the authenticity, I've always been attracted to and we'll end this now, but I've always been attracted to Larry David and I tried to figure out why Larry David was so amazing. character that breaks all cultural barriers, anyone you know who has experienced larry david loves larry david, right, it's not only the favorite comic of old Jews, it's also the favorite comic of young Puerto Ricans, right, why and It's because Larry David is an experiment in authenticity, that's what it would be. like you're your real self 24 hours a day, right?

Hey, can I have a bite of your sandwich? No, why not? I don't like your mouth. We all want to say that, but we don't when we see someone say we gravitate towards that and I think what I always believed was that I was going to do authentic material, I was going to do material that came from me, it hits you in the gut, I don't do it. material for how you want the world to be and you stand up. I make stuff about how we know the world is down here and I realize that by posting it on the Internet, posting it on YouTube where there are billions of videos, it was somehow able to touch. people and people gravitated towards everyone because you can't deny your instinct and that's what I learned and that's what I share with you today: if you want to be successful in any industry, obviously you will find ways to hack it, but uh being truly authentic you don't have that gravitate towards the world the world will gravitate towards you my name is

andrew

schultz I'm eleven nine okay