Comedy typically doesn’t come from the perfect, the pristine, or the picturesque. Nah, it usually comes from the messed-up, hence the name of my new podcast: Messed-Up to Set-Ups (Subscribe on Spotify or YouTube). Comedy often comes from the cracks in the foundation, the glitches in the matrix, the stains on the carpet. Humor usually isn’t born in the places where everything’s neat and tidy; it crawls out of the mess, looking half-broken and oddly triumphant, like me, after trying to exercise, in other words. And I’m not just saying comedy comes from brokenness because, as I said in my previous post, one of my favorite hobbies as a kid was taking things apart and breaking half of them in the process.
In my experience, jokes often come from what’s off—what’s awkward, uncomfortable, inconvenient, or downright wrong. And as bad as it might sound, sometimes the worse the situation, the richer the soil for comedy. That’s why comedians often get themselves in trouble. (More on that in another post.) But moving on, take last month, for example. I was on the road in South Carolina, performing a show during election week. Now, if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that people are not their best selves during election week. Can I get an Amen?
During election week, people are on edge. Every conversation feels like a potential landmine. You could be at the grocery store saying, “I think I’ll grab this loaf of bread,” and someone will jump in with, “Typical liberal grain. Figures.” Then you go to grab the white bread instead and someone else says, “Hey everyone, look at Mr. White Supremacist over here!” The tension is so thick during election week it feels like we’re all on the season finale of America.
So, already, the vibe was tense during election week. People were intense. But, as if the universe had decided to up the ante, 43 fugitive monkeys had escaped from a lab somewhere in South Carolina. And when I say “freaking out,” I don’t mean mild concern; I mean local TV stations were doing breaking news segments with graphics that looked like a low-budget horror movie: Monkey Madness 2024. It was glorious. And chaotic. And, let’s be honest, deeply messed up.
Now, when you’ve got a gig just hours after the election results came in, the temptation might be there to play it safe, to just avoid even going there. The easy way out is to talk about universal stuff—weather, relationships, food. But why settle for safe when you’ve got two incredibly messed-up things sitting right in front of you, practically begging to be roasted? Election tension. Escaped monkeys. Despite certain comedians avoiding political jokes because it seems too low of a hanging fruit for them, what I had in front of me was the kind of messed-up material that I knew I could have fun with.
So, I leaned in. I started riffing on the monkeys and the elections, weaving them together into something ridiculous. People laughed. Which, honestly, felt like a miracle, because I had committed a rookie mistake right out of the gate and, if you watch the video below (or HERE on YouTube), you’ll see it: I forgot to move the mic stand. (Every comedian will notice that right away!) There’s nothing worse than trying to deliver your punchlines while accidentally playing peek-a-boo with the audience behind an upright piece of metal and plastic. But even with that blunder, the humor landed because it came from that shared sense of, “Man, he’s right, this is all so messed up.”
And that’s the thing. The messed-up stuff is a gift. It’s the material that keeps on giving. Sure, nobody wants to live in a perpetual state of chaos, but chaos makes for great comedy. Think about the dedication in Stephen Rosenfield’s book, Mastering Stand-Up. It’s one of the most unique and wild dedications I’ve ever seen. He writes, “To the snake in the Garden of Eden. Without this snake, humankind would lack the two absolute essentials of comedy: problems and knowledge. Adam and Eve were happy before the snake arrived and that’s nice, but happiness is not funny. The laughs start when the problems start and we have knowledge of them.”
Rosenfield nails it. The snake brought sin into the world. We came up with punchlines in order to deal with it. Because happiness, while wonderful, is boring. Nobody wants to hear a story about how everything went perfectly. Where’s the tension? The stakes? The opportunity for a well-timed callback? Problems create the conditions for comedy. The bigger the problem, the more potential for humor. Without problems, Adam and Eve would’ve just sat around the Garden of Eden eating perfect fruit and talking about how great everything was. No one’s lining up to hear that Netflix special. Comedy lives where the cracks are. It’s not just “messy” that’s funny—it’s “messed up.” Christianity’s “gospel” message is compelling because it is the punchline to the mess-up that leads to a set-up.
Of course, life doesn’t have to be tragic on a grand scale, either. What we encounter in the day-to-day can be something small—a messed-up circumstance, a messed-up person, even a messed-up photograph. That’s where the joke lives.
What I’ve realized over time is that comedy is a way of coping with the messed-up stuff. It’s a way of taking something awful or awkward and twisting it until it’s absurd enough to laugh at. And, let me tell you, that has gotten me through some hard days this past year. Escaped monkeys and election tension? That’s just South Carolina on a random day of the week. But when you put them together and push the ridiculousness as far as it’ll go, suddenly it’s funny. It gives people a way to release that tension, to acknowledge the chaos without being overwhelmed by it.
That’s the beauty of messed-up things. They give us perspective. They remind us that no matter how bad things get, there’s always something funny in the cracks. Sometimes it’s buried deep, but it’s there. The problems don’t just create the context for comedy, so long as we’re open to seeing it anyway, they make life bearable. I mean, sure, I’d rather not live in a world where monkeys can escape from labs, but since they already have, I might as well make the best of it.
And honestly, I’m grateful for a way to get through and past the messed-up stuff. It’s what makes comedy possible. Without it, there’d be no hope. So here’s to the chaos, the cracks, the elections, and yes, the monkeys. Long may they reign—just preferably not in my neighborhood.