Al Wagner

Today I am interviewing Al Wagner, a comedian born in New York, NY who has been doing comedy for six years. To find out more about Al, please visit his website.

Why did you start doing stand-up comedy?

I'd always wanted to do stand-up ever since hearing George Carlin as a teenager, but domestic discord eventually drove me to it. I'd always appreciated the intelligence and social commentary aspect of what Carlin did, but I ended up being more Ray Romano than George.

I couldn't win a debate at home, so I'd tweak the issue of the day into a suitable format for an audience and get validation from the laughter of strangers. In some ways it was the cliche of the comedian who uses the stage for therapy, but I had enough respect for and knowledge of the form to turn the rant into setups and punch-lines.

I did have a problem starting out in that I could tell a story offstage, but my respect for the form and determination to write clever comedy like my heroes George and Steven Wright and Woody Allen didn't match my normal personae or the outrage voiced in my material. I was too focused on articulating the writing and so I was completely unnatural in my first year or two.

Eventually I became more comfortable onstage and began to understand the importance of matching tone and subject matter. I also recognized that it was more important to write the way I speak than to speak the way I write, because that's the only way to be authentic if you're not playing a character.

This helped me finally experience some success as a comedian.

Can you tell me one weird thing about yourself?

One weird thing? That's like asking someone to pick one thing, just one, to take on a desert island. I guess the biggest thing I can admit to in writing is that I'm very competitive, but also very lazy, so I'm usually very unhappy.

I've learned that effort is almost never rewarded. For example, never try to win a race where the finish line is a glass door. I won by a nose, which then required four stitches.

And then there was the time I tried to lift a 115lb barbell over my head, using perfect weight-lifting technique, except I was wearing cowboy boots on a cement sidewalk.

I can still hear that metallic "clink" sound as I hit the ground, failing to get the barbell behind me, and in shock I popped right back up and asked for a band-aid to stop the bleeding that eventually required twenty-stitches and years of counseling for my friends, who were also in shock because they'd never seen a live human skull with the skin peeled off. Now I don't try so hard.

I'm also fairly cynical and don't trust people, but I still want them to like me.

I especially don't trust people trying to help me, because when I was eight my mother nearly drowned me while trying to save me from drowning in a six-foot pool of water, even though I could swim and could have bounced off the floor of the pool without help for an hour.

She said it was an accident and I believed her, because as a kid I didn't know anything about life insurance.

More recently a comic tried to help me. I was at a show and placed my laptop to record video in the back so it wouldn't be noticed by anyone, and while I was onstage I suddenly see the laptop rise up and float toward me. The comic later explained that he was helping me because the laptop was so far away that he was afraid I wouldn't get a good view of myself being distracted by my floating laptop.

Fortunately he hadn't had that sense of empowerment beaten out of him as a child, so I got to see a wobbly vision of my horrified face as I bombed instead of a distant view of my normal set.

How do you deal with rejection?

I've had extensive training in this area, and I've learned to blame myself and try to change who I am to meet others expectations.

Then I lose respect for myself for not being me, reject myself, and wish I was more like those people who don't care what others think. My goal now is to reject a few people just to see how it feels.