Comedian Ryan Hamilton didn’t need to clean up his act. It’s just who he is

If you watched Ryan Hamilton’s 2017 Netflix special Happy Face, you already know—he keeps the jokes to himself. Hamilton often banks on a laugh about his own facial expression or, as the title suggests, the ones he doesn’t even try to make. And he’s clean—you wouldn’t mind if a kid overheard him deliver a punchline. The Idaho native first went on tour after winning Sierra Mist’s America’s Next Great Comic in 2005, has since been twice named a semi-finalist on Last Comic Standing, and recently performed sets on Stephen Colbert and James Corden’s shows. Ahead of his performance at the Helium Comedy Club on January 24, Hamilton and I started the interview with the unavoidable—that “clean” comedy label.

You’re often referred to as a “clean comedian.” Is that intentional on your part?

Yeah, I guess at a certain point it becomes intentional. It’s always the way I’ve performed. It’s authentic to who I am, so it comes out that way. The comedy from the beginning that I loved and admired and that I looked at as career models were always kind of clean comedians, too.

A lot of your jokes stem from playing off of yourself rather than other people or things. How do you balance your show’s feel before it’s too much self-deprecation?

Every once and a while I go: I look like I am really coming down too hard on myself. [Laughs]. I need to balance this out a little bit. You’re right, it’s something that I am aware of. But you know, every joke needs a target. And it’s natural to who I am. I do a lot of self-evaluating and “Who am I?”—worrying about these things within my own self….Yeah, I don’t know how to fix it really. [Laughs.] It’s who I am.

What should people expect from seeing you in person rather after your 2017 Netflix special Happy Face?

I’m doing very little material now from the special. The current show is 80-90 percent stuff that they haven’t seen. I’ll still do some stuff from the special because I feel like people want to see some of it. I choose a couple of highlights from the special that I’d like to do in the set, for me and for the audience. 

What is it like to perform a show knowing it will be a Netflix special?

It’s scary. That was my first time doing anything like that. Doing the pre-production and knowing the reach of Netflix, it was a stressful time for me… It was really hard to get it all together and make sure everything was in there that I wanted. I am a perfectionist, so I was seeing a lot of details that I wanted to take care of. The main thing I wanted was to be happy with it. If I were happy with it and it was out there and it wasn’t a success, I could live with myself. But if I wasn’t and it was out there and it wasn’t a success, I knew I would be disappointed.

You often open your acts with, “Should we start with my face?” How did that joke come about?

Comedians are always looking for a quick way to get a laugh from the beginning of the stage, especially when you’re an unknown comedian. When you first get on stage, people are not really listening to you, they’re evaluating what they’re seeing. So if you can address something that they’re thinking about—acknowledge “I know what you know”—it’s a laugh. Somewhere along the lines I started hearing people talk about my smile, so I started mentioning it here and there. I kind of thought of it as a way to get into the jokes I want to tell.

How do the jokes you tell now differ from ones earlier in your career?

[In the beginning] the style was very different, but the tone of my act hasn’t changed that much over time. It’s always been kind of observational, self-deprecating, somewhat broad and clean, but I used to try to do one-liners. I was very much in the vein of Mitch Hedberg, trying to be a little more assertive than I am now. But the tone has always stayed the same—you don’t have a lot of decision in that, you are who you are.

Is there pressure to change it up as your career continues?

There’s pressure to keep creating. After releasing Happy Face, people mostly just went: “We want more of this. Where’s the next one?” I also feel pressure to maybe create something that’s not standup as well, like if there’s people who’d like to see something that’s scripted.

There was a lot of talk about Tiffany Haddish’s bombing a show on New Year’s Eve. As a comedian, how do you combat the fear of a poorly received performance?

When I hear that stuff, it makes me go, “Ah, I feel for that person.” There’s a general disconnect with the general population about how comedy is made and how long it takes and the process of it. I read some of those stories saying she just wasn’t prepared. But it’s like it takes a long time to prepare this stuff, years to develop jokes. I think standups are becoming more accepted and there’s a larger audience of people who enjoy standup so I think slowly people are becoming more attune to what it takes to develop standup. With musicians, people go, “Oh, that’s very difficult. It takes a long time to write a song.” But I don’t think people understand that about comedy yet.