Photograph by Mike Defilippo
I. Bombs over Bloomington
“Today, I went into QuickTrip to get a pack of cigarettes, and, as I was walking out, there’s this fat guy. Now, we’ve all seen fat people, but this was the kind of fat that makes you say, ‘Wait ... is that a suit?’ And he’s wearing this shirt that says—in big letters across his man-boobs—’American and Proud of It.’ Have you ever noticed that the people who are most proud to be American are the people you’re least proud to have?”
About halfway into an otherwise uneventful set, Jeremy Essig lost it. He lost a lot of things, actually: his cool, his grip on the crowd, his control over the part of your brain that keeps you from saying things you’ll regret tomorrow. It started out innocently enough, with a bit about President George W. Bush, some innocuous, non–policy-, non–war-related crack. Granted, the Iraq War had just started the previous week and the country was flush with American pride—“Would you like some levity with your Freedom Fries?”—but the joke had worked in Sioux Falls a couple of days earlier and, hell, if it flew there, it damn well shouldn’t have started a riot in a liberal place like Minneapolis.
But it did.
So when the lady in the front row of this little club in the Mall of America, of all places, took exception to Essig’s shot at the commander in chief and told him he couldn’t talk about the president, it pissed him off. He could have just let it go. He could have moved on, finished the set, thanked the crowd and told them to tip their waitresses, but dealing with hecklers was never his strong suit. The whole reason he got into this business—aside from the fact that a friend signed him up for an open mic when he was 22 and he ended up really liking it—was because he had important stuff to get off his chest, societal ills to lampoon, so damned if some ultrapatriotic bitch in a mall was going to get self-righteous and try to censor his set.
“You know what, if you don’t like what I’m talking about, go to the bar,” he said, jabbing a finger at the door. “I’ll be off in 15 minutes, and then some other jackass will be up here juggling.” He pointed his finger back in her direction. “But don’t tell me what I can or can’t talk about.”
There was no going back now. The opening salvo had been launched, he’d returned fire and pretty soon the floor was littered with shrapnel from spent F-bombs. The crowd was lost, polarized by the Bush joke and debating the war across tables and across the room. Half of them got up and left, but the other half stuck around long enough to see Jeremy bring an abrupt end to the conflict with his female heckler—and, more or less, his set—with yet another four-letter word, one that applies to the female anatomy and can make even foul-mouthed frat boys wince. With the woman stunned and the remaining crowd appalled, he left the stage, shaken, and went home.
The next day, Essig showed up at the mall for another show and found a security guard and the club manager waiting for him at the mall entrance, ready to escort him to the rear exit of the club—away from the angry mob from last night’s crowd that was waiting for him at the front door.
II. Is That a Girl in Your Bed, or Are You Just Happy to be Talking to Me?
“I just found out a couple months ago that my grandma was part of the Hitler Youth. My friends ask me if I ever ask her about it, but I haven’t, because, well, that’s awkward. But you know what? I’m going to start. We’ve got a family wedding coming up, and when she gets all liquored up and decides to play Let’s Embarrass Jeremy in Front of His New Girlfriend with ‘Hey, Jeremy, remember when you were 2 and you and your sister came out of the bathroom naked and you pointed at her stuff and said, “Grandma, what’s that?”’ I’ll just be, like, ‘Yeah ... Hey, Grandma. Remember when you tried to kill all the Jews?’”
Jeremy Essig is not “the next Dane Cook,” which is to say that it takes a certain level of sophistication and intelligence to get his humor. It’s also to say that mainstream success isn’t in his immediate future. And he’s OK with that. “I would like to have a Wilco- or Sun Volt-like following,” he says. “They definitely have a fan base and they can go do whatever they want, but they’re still not living in the two major media markets.”
His material ranges from politics to drugs, from family to religion, and all of it reveals disappointment in government, his fellow man, himself. On stage, he’s disenchanted, disenfranchised, disheartened. He’s also damn funny.
Essig spent four years playing to three-person crowds in Michigan, conservatives in Ohio and touchy housewives in Minnesota. Now, at 28, he’s settling into St. Louis after two years of living here, and his material is every bit as biting as it used to be ... he’s just not quite so in-your-face about it.
“A lot of the time when he was young, he was so angry that the audience didn’t really know how to take him,” says Lisa Grigsby, the owner of Jokers Comedy Café in Dayton, Ohio, where Essig got his start. “They didn’t necessarily laugh at him. They were more scared.”
But by the time Essig did a show for Matt Behrens at the Funny Bone in Westport Plaza in the spring of 2004, his act was starting to jell, even if he was still a little rough around the edges. “There’s a bit of a new breed out there, and he’s part of it,” Behrens says. “There are a lot of comics that do political stuff, but you can’t really fake it. You better know what you’re talking about if you’re going to do something political. He’s just got really smart stuff.”
Essig was still in Cincinnati at the time, but Behrens offered him a lot of work if he’d move to St. Louis. Essig didn’t think twice. “I was living with an ex-girlfriend ... in a studio apartment,” he says. “I went right back to Cincinnati and told her that horrible idea was going to end.”
Earlier this summer he was back on his old stomping grounds of Cincinnati for a couple shows, and he made time between the tour’s obligatory guest spots on local radio for an interview. Eventually the conversation turned to dating. He’s interested but rarely has the time. He’d always thought he’d get married, but he’s not sure now.
Dating has to be difficult, with you on the road all the time.
“I often feel bad for anyone who falls into that,” he says.
Falls into what?
“Uh, having to do that with me.”
Date you?
“Yes, because it seems really shiny at first.” [Outside sounds, like cars and birds, suddenly compete with his voice.] “Can you still hear me? Sorry, I had to leave the room. There’s actually a girl in my hotel room right now, so I didn’t want to get into the topic of dating in front of her.”
III. Expectation is a Bitch
“Here’s my idea for a commercial: There’s a woman, and she’s got a baby, and she puts the baby in a car seat, gets in the car and starts driving. And then, after a while, she stops, gets out and puts the baby next to this post and just drives off. And as she’s driving away, the camera pans back and you slowly start to see that the post is connected to a sign, and it just says, ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.’”
Essig was adopted, and it wasn’t until after his parents brought him home that they found out that they’d also be having a baby the old-fashioned way. His sister, Jenna, was born several months later. He doesn’t elaborate much on the subject, except to explain that he always knew: “It’s not like they were standing over my crib, announcing it to me, but I don’t ever remember not knowing.”
His father was a doctor with a private practice, and his mother had a degree in mathematics and a master’s degree in computer science. Both were “education hounds,” so they approved of his decision to go to Wake Forest, in Winston-Salem, N.C. (“When I went there, it was number 24 or 25 in the nation,” he says.) He liked it because it had a pretty campus and was a five-and-a-half-hour drive from his hometown of Zanesville, Ohio, where the bonds of small-town life were already starting to tether his Catholic-high-school classmates to their parents’ businesses and to the families they hadn’t started yet but might as well have.
Four years later, with an undergraduate degree in psychology and a vague desire to counsel kids, he enrolled in the school-psychology graduate program at Miami University in Ohio. A couple months later—four days before classes started—he called home to tell his parents that he’d done two open mics, they’d gone well ... oh, and he was dropping out to try standup as a career.
The conversation didn’t go well.
“I’d never even told them I wanted to do comedy,” he says. “They were, like, ‘Wait, what? You’re leaving school to do what?’ They were really unhappy with it. I’m still not sure they’re happy with it. I think they’re just resigned to it.”
There are two things Essig is rarely without: his iPod and a notebook. The iPod filters out the noise, offers him a safe place to retreat before a show. (Someone broke into his car, in a Cleveland hotel parking garage, in June and stole his previous iPod, along with his favorite Les Paul guitar, a pair of shoes and all of his Lucero and Ryan Adams CDs. The thief was picky, though: They left the Dinosaur Jr. and Public Enemy.) The notebook is for writing, which he does almost all the time. He writes after reading the newspaper; he writes after walking around his neighborhood in University City; he writes when he thinks back on his life.
“One thing about Jeremy—and you can ask anybody who knows him—he writes probably more than anybody out there,” Behrens says. “He comes up here on Tuesdays for open mic when he’s not on the road, and he always has new stuff. That’s probably the biggest knock on any comic out there, the lack of writing. Comics will sit around all the time, bitching, ‘Man, I gotta buckle down and write’—but Jeremy does it.”
In an industry where the chances to prove yourself are measured in minutes—and where the difference between great, proven material and good, untested material can mean the difference between working a room for a week each month and working it once—Essig’s jokes (even those that kill) are rarely safe from the churn, never far from being ground up and reabsorbed. Other comics give him a hard time about it and try to get him to slow down, to refine certain bits for a bigger laugh, but it’s not necessarily the crowd’s approval he’s after.
“The joke is really only fun to me about the first time,” he says. “That first time you say it and it hits, that’s the excitement. After about six months, I’m, like, ‘I gotta get that bitch out of here. I’m sick of saying that.’”
After some more thought, his tone turns serious:
“My dad was a really hardworking guy. I didn’t really see him much as a kid. That was the one thing I took from it: ‘You’ve got to write jokes every day, because you just have to. If you want this to be your job, then this is your job—make it your job.’ That’s where the turnover comes from. I keep writing, I think, for no other reason than to justify this to my dad: ‘Hey, at least I’m working really hard at it.’”
The father issues, it seems, have never exactly been a secret to those who he’s worked with. “He went to all of these great schools and had all of this great potential, and I think what comes out onstage is some of his own self-assessment,” Grigsby says. “Without a doubt, he thinks he’s a loser.”
IV. Ours is Not to Question Why ...
“I hate dating. I’m at the point in a new relationship with a girl where she might spend the night, and it’s just hard when you have to figure out each other’s weird sleep things. That first night, when you’re drunk, doesn’t count: ‘What? You make walrus noises? Here’s a fish—let’s go.’ But that first sober night is hard. Like, I woke up this morning, just punching the wall. It’s hard to explain to a girl when you finally get her home, ‘I take the right side of the bed, I get up at 8 ... oh, and I might start beating the shit out of you in the middle of the night. Don’t worry, it’s just because I thought you were a bag of snakes.’”
Essig’s back in St. Louis after his week in Cincinnati, hanging out at the Westport Funny Bone. He’s closing the first night of the Best in St. Louis Contest, a three-round American Idol–style tournament for local up-and-comers. It’s a thankless gig—he’ll tell a few jokes and keep the crowd occupied for 20 minutes while the judges tally the audience votes—but he knows the score and just appreciates the chance to work out. (“He really jumped on the grenade for us,” Behrens says later.)
He’s sitting in the back with a pack of Winston Lights and his iPod, one earbud in, before the first comic goes on. The slightest sheepish grin curls one edge of his mouth, and he’s showing signs of giddiness, no doubt from the week he spent holed up in that Cincinnati hotel with his new friend. “I’m still trying to deconstruct this week,” he says, showing off a coaster-size hickey on his neck. “Apparently she’s a biter and I have a high pain threshold.”
In seconds, the giddiness turns to resigned negativity. He and the girl (she’s already calling herself his girlfriend, but he’s not there yet) have mutual friends, and he’s confident it’ll go down in flames just like his previous relationships have. “I’ve been me long enough to know it’s not going to end well,” he says. (Behrens will reveal that the girl is a waitress at a club in Cincinnati and that the relationship may be doomed after all. “He just broke the number-one rule in comedy,” he says. “He screwed a comedy-club waitress.”)
After 20 three-minute sets, what seems like 20 variations of the same joke about dating, plus one creepy bit about a guy whose teenage daughter still sleeps in his bed, it’s Essig’s turn. By now the crowd is drunk, rowdy and a little disappointed that this didn’t quite turn out to be like Last Comic Standing, so it’s rough from the start. He just riffs, throwing in a couple polished bits here and there but mainly making it up as he goes. His joke about kids (“See, kids need things I don’t have ... like money and hope.”) gets a good response, but his bit on immigration (“I’m all for it. We just need to work out a trade. You want to send us a million hardworking Mexicans? Great. Here, take Mississippi.”) stirs up a few groans.
One guy, apparently upset about the Mississippi crack, starts talking back, but it’s unintelligible. Essig stops, asks him to repeat himself. The heckler still isn’t making sense, says something that sounds like “slow Mississippi.” “Slow Mississippi?” Essig asks. “Right now I’m slow Missouri, because I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He grins. The crowd laughs; they’re back with him, but only temporarily. The set dissolves as crowd participation increases. Hecklers lob comments at the stage; Essig bats them back playfully, at one point putting someone on the spot, asking for clarification. No response. “No, go ahead, man,” Essig prods, but he gets nothing. “I’m sorry. I’ve made everything awkward for everyone. It’s like a first date: Everyone’s staring, and we have nothing to talk about.”
The votes have been counted, and he’s done. He thanks the crowd, and, as he picks up his Heineken from the stool at the back of the stage, a girl calls back, “You hate us, don’t you?”
“I don’t hate you,” he says. “This was great. I got to reference, like, 40-odd things that nobody understood. It’s like a normal conversation for me.” He walks off stage, sits down, puts in an earbud and lights another cigarette.
Laughing Stock
It’s not always easy to get a seat at a St. Louis open-mic night, which is virtually unheard of elsewhere. Chalk that up to jokers like Essig and these local comics who are easily worth the $5 admission.
Some St. Louis comics who hit it big leave for the glitz of L.A. Greg Warren didn’t. OK, he did, but then he came back this spring to be a part of what he calls one of the top five comedy scenes in the country. He regularly headlines at clubs across the country, but he’ll still make it out to open-mic at the Funny Bone, where he riffs on everything from the world’s most annoying uncle to the world’s dumbest high-school wrestler: “I’d characterize my act as ‘Conversations with Idiots.’”
Originally from Appleton, Wis., Andi Smith started her stand-up career at a Funny Bone open-mic night on a dare—and it turned out to be slightly more fun and less soul-crushing than the cubicle hell she’d been living in: “Sure, there were some accomplishments, like, ‘Everyone really liked my PowerPoints ... now I’m going to kill myself.’” She came away from the job with more than just grist for good material, though; she’s putting her talents as a web designer to use with RooftopComedy.com, which hosts free streaming video of up-and-comers.
Brett Clawson says he does stand-up because he can’t find a job, which might have helped inspire the name of his sometimes-tour with Essig and Andi Smith (“The Disappointments”). But if that’s the case, the last nine years of unemployment have been good to him ... even when the audience hasn’t. “There’s just something about being in a club where the staff laughs but the crowd hates you,” he says with a laugh. The comedic masochist and North County native has made a name for himself across the Midwest, and after a year in Louisville, Ky., he’s back in his home town.
With his shifty eyes and squeaky delivery, Mike Strantz walks the line on stage between slightly and severely deranged. But the former Late Show intern and full-time bean counter is usually just goofing. “I’ll do stuff like go through the drive-thru and try to pay with an IOU that I write myself,” he says. “It makes me laugh.” That kind of “entertain thyself” attitude led him and another local funny guy, Gabe Kea, to dress up as bishops and film “The Daception Code,” a spoof about The Da Vinci Code protesters.
