Rory Scovel

Rory Scovel is a comedian.  And a temp. Here, we talk with him about the glass ceiling of comedy.



Chief Magazine: You were featured on Comedy Central.  What was that all about?

Rory Scovel: I did their show Live at Gotham, which aired this past June. I wasn’t so much a feature, but I was on a show. I think they ran eight episodes with five or six comics per episode. It was my first big time thing, so it was a lot of fun.

You'd think that's all it would take, huh?  I mean, you were on Live at Gotham on Comedy Central, and you’re still working temp jobs?

Oh yeah, absolutely. I would still be temping even if I were to do a half hour special. I’m in that phase where I’m not getting a full year’s worth of work, comedy-wise, but I'm getting enough work that I can’t hold down a full-time job because of travel. So I’m in a really weird in-between phase. The Comedy Central thing is really a stepping-stone that you hope goes on your resume and then leads to other work around the country.

How long have you been doing this? Was there a point where you were like, “Fuck it, I’m going to give this my all?”

Well, I started three and a half years ago and moved to D.C. specifically to do this. I was working a really good day job as a receptionist and, almost exactly a year ago, I got a chance to go on a three-month tour through Canada, as well as a month-long stay in Seattle for a comedy competition. I had to quit that comfortable day job. It was at that point that I had to make the decision to really try to make a full-time career out of it, however long it was going to take, as opposed to doing it every now and then.

How did that come about, the tour in Canada?

Almost everything I’ve gotten in comedy has been from networking. The tour came about because my manager is friends with this guy, David Moroz, at a Michigan agency called Aspen Talent. He saw me perform, and I think he asked me to join out of sheer kindness, because he had already put most of his clients on the tour. I jumped on it right away. I said absolutely, I’d love to get to work for two straight months.

David took a gamble on me, and it turned out great, and I’m going to be doing the tour again. I’ll be leaving for Seattle at the end of August.  Even though the money isn’t great, I hope it becomes an annual thing, because the experience of performing that often really starts to evolve your performance style. So I’m excited.

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Tell me a bit about the contest in Seattle.

Right before I started touring in Canada, I spent a week in Seattle for Bumbershoot and got to meet a lot of the local comics. They were really nice guys, and when I went off to do the Canadian tour, I kept in touch with them. They ended up telling me I should enter the competition, so I got my DVD, resume, headshot, and sent it to them. They submitted it for me and vouched for me. Again, it’s another thing I ended up getting to do just because people were nice enough and willing to help me out when they didn’t even know me that well and had only seen me perform a few times.

Being at the contest can last a week or for the entire time of the three week competition. I was lucky enough to get to the finals, which was definitely a different experience. You travel all through Washington State with these comics from all over the country and Canada. To this day, they still help me out.

I’ll get to do the Vancouver Comedy Festival this September because of the people I met at the competition. What I’ve learned over the past three and a half years is that if you’re a nice person and perform well, people are willing to help you out. As long as you’re not an asshole or full of yourself, people are always willing to stick their neck out and vouch for you when necessary and try to help you get other work.

Are there a lot of assholes out there?  I imagine there are a lot of assholes in the comedy business.

Yeah there are, there are just as many assholes as there are nice guys, which is unfortunate. Doing stand-up comedy is such an independent thing. I think a lot of people just stay independent offstage, and that’s unfortunate too. I met most of my best friends through stand-up comedy. Those relationships have kept my career going, as opposed to just my jokes. I can’t even imagine what it would be like having to do this alone. I can’t even imagine how big of a mountain this career would be if you were so independent that you weren’t willing to make any friends.

How did you first get involved in comedy? Certainly you didn’t study comedy in school…

I come from a pretty big family, and all of us are kind of smartasses. Ever since I was a kid, the way to get attention was to have the best smartass comment, and then everyone would egg you on. I think that constant pursuit for attention made me realize I crave it, and the only way I can get it is through humor. I enjoyed comedic acting, but I never pictured myself doing stand-up until I tried it once, and I was like, “Oh, this is absolutely the outlet that I want to get my comedy ideas out there.”

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So what do you think, nature versus nurture?

I think you need a little bit of both. With a lot of really good comics, it’s just sort of natural because of how they grew up. They’re burying something in their head, like trauma.  They make light of situations as opposed to dealing with them.

As for nurturing what you have, you really have to be honest with yourself, your performances, and know when you’re doing well. You need to try to read the crowd and figure out why they’re laughing.  Obviously you hope that they’re laughing because of your ideas and not becasue of how horribly you’re doing. A Good performance runs on a fine line. I did a show in Brooklyn the other night and got pretty strange. People said they enjoyed it, but sometimes people get a nervous laugh, and you end up asking yourself, “Okay, what did I do that was actually good, and what did I do that just made people so uncomfortable that they just kind of gave up?”

Well, that’s what it seemed like at your performance. I mean, you told some jokes, but a lot of it seemed to be improvised.

With stand-up you’re putting together an act that you’ll be doing for ten years, and I just get so bored with that. I’d rather improvise. To stay interested, I try to incorporate as much improv as I can with the scripted jokes. I think my improv gives the act some kind of life that it wouldn’t have if I stuck to a script. Right now, I’m learning how to apply the right amount of improv without losing everybody.

Do you ever just get really, really high before a show?

Oh yeah, all the time. Not literally, but I’ve had a lot of fun performing high.  It helps me loose my inhibitions and then I don’t mind taking risks on stage.

You’re a recent New York/New Jersey transplant, from D.C., right?
 
I moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, with my girlfriend. We got to the point where we realized that it was time to get out of D.C., and we already knew people in Hoboken.

Do you feel that if you really want to do it you have to be in New York?

Yeah, people say New York or LA, but I think that it’s important to start off in a supportive community that isn’t that big. That way, you have a better chance of getting a lot of attention and stage time, and you also get the chance to be close friends with a lot of the local comics.

D.C. used to be a really great community for stand-up comics. It died down for a while, and my friends and I were the second generation of comics to help breath new life into it, so we had a really supportive community there. Even so, you eventually need to surround yourself with other comics, and New York is obviously filled with a ton of full-time national headliners. So that’s why I’m here. As far as communities go, Seattle’s probably one of my favorites. If I had to do it over again, I’d probably have moved to Seattle and started there. Those guys are incredible and it’s such a supportive community.

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Where are you from originally?

South Carolina. Yeah I grew up there, and pretty much lived there until I moved to D.C. when I was 23.

So did you go to school in South Carolina?

Yeah, I went to college in Spartanburg, South Carolina at USC Spartanburg.

What’d you study?

Journalism and communications. I’ve always thought of myself as a being filmmaker, and I shot short films in high school and college. After I graduated from Spartanburg, I was working for a TV station doing news stuff and realized that I didn’t have the drive for filmmaking anymore. That’s when I tried stand-up, and decided that it was the perfect way for me to stay in the entertainment business.”

I feel like there’s no middle ground in stand-up. Stand-up comics either get the big break or they don’t. Is it possible to make a living with it, without being on a sitcom?

I think so. There are many, many tiers of talent and success within stand-up comedy. Everybody wants to be successful like Seinfeld or Dave Chappelle, where you’re making money off TV for the rest of your life. But there are people all over the country who don’t play the A-list rooms. The money isn’t as great, and the lifestyle’s a little more hardcore, but for some stand-up comics that’s as far as they want to get – or can get. So it is possible to make a career out of it and not get the sitcom or movie. I think a lot of it is how much you put into it, and how much you’re willing to be honest with yourself as a performer.

So what kind of shit makes you laugh, if you see a comic or a movie? Are you into fart jokes, or…

I think there’s a lot of stuff that people label as overdone or hackneyed, but when something makes you laugh, it makes you laugh. You can’t really decide what it’s going to be. I actually have a pretty wide spectrum of what I think is funny. I really like political humor, I like absolutely silly humor. It’s a turnoff if your whole act is fart jokes, but everybody has stupid, throwaway material. As far as comics, films, or TV shows go, I like pretty much anything original and unique, as opposed to a more generic format. I appreciate people who look at things differently, comics that are themselves on stage rather than some kind of character.

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So who are the orginal kings, the sort of Richard Pryors or Mitch Hedbergs for you?

I never really listened to a lot of the guys that are considered great, like Richard Pryor or George Carlin. I do like Steve Martin. Then there are a lot of comics who are just sort of becoming really big today, like Daniel Tosh. I also really like Todd Glass and Zach Galifianakis. Have you seen him live at the Purple Onion, where he makes fun of his own name? If I ever meet him, I want to get his name wrong.

Who I like changes every time I listen to someone new, but what I love about stand-up comedy is that there’s always something I haven’t heard. That’s what inspires me to keep creating.





Website

www.roryscovel.com

Photos
Heather Christianson
Quincy Ledbetter

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