Mintz

Today I am interviewing Mintz, a comedian born in Paramus, NJ who has been doing comedy for almost three years. To find out more about Mintz, please visit his website.

Why did you start doing stand-up comedy?

I was always an oddball character in school, and a class clown. In high school, I would make these videos with a webcam (and this was like 10 years before youtube and vlogging), and then I would e-mail them to like, 2 people in my grade, as an inside joke. I’d be like, selling action figures of people we knew. Unbeknownst to me, they would send these videos to their friends, and then they’d send them to all of their friends. The next day at school, some cool kid or some really hot popular girl (who never in my life would I ever talk to) would come up to me and be like, “Hey, I saw your video. That was hilarious.”. I did the same thing with these comedic rap songs I made. I also remember someone talking at lunch one time, about a kid he knew who went to an open mic in New York, and did standup. And I just remember thinking, ‘Hmmm...That sounds interesting. I’d like to do that.” And then high school ended. My grades were terrible, I got rejected from every college I applied to. I ended up at community college. And I knew if I got all As, I’d be able to transfer to a regular college. The only problem was, the days of joking around in class were over, because now I was taking classes seriously. But there was this mass communications class, which involved a lot of performing in front of the class, and I kind of used that as an opportunity to start messing around again. We were given an assignment to do a presentation on an exotic animal. And I forget what I got, but I just remember that my presentation got a lot of laughs. It just felt right. Like, “Hey, the rest of this class blows, but I actually enjoyed that part.” And I was sort of shy around all these new people, so after you show that side of yourself in class, people want to talk to you outside of class. That was probably a defining moment in why I started to do this. I remember the day of that presentation, I was called two things. The teacher wrote on my review, “Good presentation...but you were like a Carnival Barker”, and then one of my friends saw me outside (I was wearing a suit for the presentation) and he said, “You look like a Game Show host.” I think to a certain extent, I still exude both of those qualities. But anyway, to wrap this up, I then transferred to a college in New York City, one of the kids in my dorm was doing stand-up, and I had another one of those moments, like, “I’d like to actually do that...”. And so then I just started doing it like a month or two later.

What was your first year doing stand-up comedy like?

Well I did it in New York for about a month. Then for the next 6 months, I was doing it in Philadelphia, where I’d transferred to another college. It’s harder to get stage-time when your starting out it Philadelphia. There’s only two clubs in Philadelphia, each has only one mic per week. One time I lied and said I was another comic on a lottery list, just to get stage time. I ended up getting heckled off the stage by the owner of the club during my set, “Liar! You’re not him!”. Quite dumb of me to think they wouldn’t notice, especially considering I sort of stuck out, because for the first 6 months, I was doing this character called “The Swami”, or Swami Mintz. I would go on stage with a pink “Turbi-Twist”, which is like one of those shower turbans they sell at Bed Bad and Beyond, or the As-Seen-On-TV stand at the mall, and Oakley sunglasses. And then I’d shoot off these one-liners in this weird voice. But I wanted every one liner to follow this theme of, “The Swami is a guy who likes to ruin stuff.” So every one liner would be the swami telling his escapades of destruction. Like one was, ‘I like to open up cans of tuna....and hide them inside of perfume stores...” . Now you might be wondering, “I don’t get it...why would a Swami be a prankster?” I don’t have an answer. I just really liked Andy Kaufman as a kid, so I wanted to do something weird like him. It was a very basic structure, and after 3 minutes... very redundant. But it would get a pretty good response...sometimes. Then I came back to New York, because it’s obviously a much more fertile land for comedy. I still occasionally whipped out The Swami, but I also started doing stand-up just as myself. The Swami was too limiting. And then one day I just got rid of The Swami. Though I will say, when Mike Myers was making the rounds at the Magnet Theater in 2007, developing his “Love Guru” character for his next movie, I had this fantasy that he’d see The Swami do a set, and then write him in as The Love Guru’s arch nemesis . I’d like to think that could have saved that movie.

How do you feel about freedom of speech and political correctness and stand-up comedy?

I really don’t even consider it an option. To me, it’s just always been a given; There is nothing you can’t say. Now whether or not saying that will get a laugh, that’s really the issue I think. Of course depending on how far your edgy joke might cross the line, you should definitely be mindful of the room you perform it in. It might offend or insult the entire audience, which in turn wouldn’t get any laughs. But I don’t really do anything edgy or racy like that, so this is all just theory, or what I’ve observed from other comics. The closest I’ve ever come to practically considering something like that, would probably be during my time spent in Philadelphia. The Laugh House is an urban crowd. There’s hardly any white people in the audience at their mic (the mic gets real audience). I did this one joke, “Halloween is really popular for some reason in Philadelphia, even more popular than anywhere else. I think that’s because it’s the only night of the year white people get to actually scare black people”. And it got laughs, and no one was offended. But really, if this was a panel, I would have fielded this question to the next person down. All in all, my 3 years in comedy have been the best 3 years of my life. This road has been a rough one, and the road ahead is even rougher, but I couldn’t imagine not doing this.