How to Standout From the Crowd of Competition Surrounding You

by the end of the year i had a spreadsheet of every topic that most black comics nationally were discussing and i just went okay cool you got your perspective i just want to be happy don't you so let's get right into what i think you do as well as anybody in the world which is why we're so happy to have you here from a content creation standpoint from a creative standpoint how do you personally as a human like think about that how did you come you know what kind of process even at a child to back to being four did you have comedy around the house did it come natural were you distracting teachers in third grade like what was your early process of what has become your professional process uh comedy was escapism for me i wasn't

in the same school system for more than two years until high school so it was the constant re-acclimation to the social scenes and circles of people around birmingham and like i would take the radio my father uh was in journalism and so i would follow him to speaking engagements and stuff like that and you know he was a lot more working he worked at me in terms of his content and what he spoke for and what he fought for but the oration part of it i'm sure i got from him um i'd say the biggest the first big deal was in the sixth grade um i decided to make my own comic book i was obsessed with comic strips we read the newspaper as a family every sunday morning that was our thing we sit the paper down and pull it apart like a turkey and everybody would read a different section and so you know i was into marmaduke and garfield and calvin and hobbes the whole run and i drew my own comic book and then i would charge students 50 cents to read it and then you had to bring it back it was like a one comic book blockbuster and i think that was my first hustle the concept of a copy machine and a stapler just didn't you missed it i was like no this is the only one you have to give it back on thursday because of getting ice cream money right right on the record who tried to not bring it back on time in the history of this business uh everybody there was a guy trey mcclure we're friends now so i can call him out by school he held on to mr goose a little longer than he should love tray i know this is going to get back to you because alabama likes to gossip um so for me that was kind of where you

know being funny started and high school was really where things started moving i got cut from my high school baseball team my freshman year but i wanted to learn and see well if i suck what are they doing right so i volunteered to be the bat boy equipment manager whatever you want to call it and i just trailed the varsity kids around for a whole season and they did the food fundraisers where you sell the chips to raise money to pay for the uniform and i outsold everyone in the school interesting so that was when you start noticing how you need to build relationships and sometimes it's not what you're selling it's who you are the product becomes secondary uh to a greater degree uh there's a gentleman that my father worked for named aj gaston who was one of the first black millionaires and a. g gaston had a mantra it was

called find a need and fulfill it and so that always stuck with me and to bring you to the present comedically and where content creation is concerned for me it's always been about seeing all right what is out there and is there a way to make that feel like something that's already happening now i sold a project to comedy central that we ended up shooting a pilot for we're still in development uh and it's about a probation officer and his relationship with his client and to kind of show a different side of what law enforcement is probation is law enforcement it's closer to social work on the spectrum of you know kicking ass but it is law enforcement and when you really boil the show down to a lot of degrees there's a procedural element to it but so it feels like something you've seen before but it's about a world that you know absolutely nothing about and i think there's a value in being unique and for me that came i got turned i guess when i think about it now all my best moments came from when i was rejected bt passed on me for comic view for one year in 2002 so much like baseball okay y'all didn't pick me who did you pick let's see what they did and i stepped for an entire season to watch comic view it's like 40 episodes six comics an episode and i just catalogued every topic that was breached on the show interesting and i just kept a list of how many comedians talked about this this and this and by the end of the year i had a spreadsheet of every topic that most black comics nationally were discussing and i just went okay cool i won't do any jokes about that so let's just start there and see if we can be something that hasn't been heard before it off that alone that should get me a look it doesn't mean that my joke is going to be the funniest but it will be the most different and if i can at least have that advantage over you when it comes time to pick tapes then i think that's something worth exploring and so right it's interesting you bring that up because for me and i'm a i talk a lot i produce so much content but so much of my strength and so much of what i attribute the good things that have happened to me is about listening and the story you just told is a really strong listening story the baseball story was a strong listening story do you feel like observation and listening is foundational for you yeah i think that's more important than execution because you got to know where to shoot you gotta know where to aim the gun before you it's the inside it's a strategy yeah it's a sniper it's you're

sitting for hours and hours taking in information and deciding when is the exact proper moment you know to mount your attack and so for me it's definitely about listening it's definitely about assessing the marketplace seeing what's being sold and seeing what's getting on and then also trying to you know pull away gretzky and be ahead of the puck uh which is why kovitt is so interesting to me you know in terms of comedy creation and content creation as a whole because not only do you have a pandemic where people are in pain and people are going to be hurting and regardless if a vaccine came tomorrow there are going to be a lot of people that are going to be dealing with a lot of fiscal hurt a lot of emotional hurt i lost an aunt in february so i can't imagine what other people are going through so where there's pain there's laughter there's an opportunity for a laugh but you don't know how long and then on top of that you have an election coming on the back side of this and if you think that elections don't affect the type of content that ends up on television you're wrong so it's about looking and figuring out okay what can you picture what can you create today that's going to still have an impact no matter who wins in november and no matter what people are going through you know the thing that the thing that's interesting now about comedy chris rock said um and i'm paraphrasing him but he basically said everything that i do is to convince people to come see me live everything in his portfolio was about getting you to pay the 50 or whatever he's not 50 days probably like 100 now but to come see me live this is what come see this movie watch this tv show whatever well the come see me live element isn't really there right now for comedians and you don't know when that's going to come back so you have to do things that maintain relevance so that when people are ready to go back out and when people have enough money on a regular basis to go back out you know because i'm not gonna sit here at like what i do is similar to the other people we're gonna talk to today you know what i do is a disposable income activity that can hopefully alleviate a little bit of i'm no different than a super wine for me that's right it's a hundred percent escapism it's a you know a hundred percent so you know i think when people get back on their feet and the unemployment dries up the first thing you are thinking about is coming to see some jokes from me inside of a corona hut which is what a comedy club is as far as a low ceiling everybody together that's a hut that's the corona hut yeah you know so it'll be a while so it's about figuring out content and ways to do things that keep you relevant and keep you on that note because uh for everybody's joining in marketing for the now uh please tell us what you think about this interview with roy uh these are about 15 minute blast so before i lose right talk to me about the call in digital show because i think as i'm listening to you it makes a whole lot of sense why you're leaning in that direction well because i feel like when i get into too much detail about it i feel like it's an opportunity to unite people and i see where i see what's happening with a lot of the zoom shows now like if you look at if you pick the game from the beginning of quarantine where you had a surge and people becoming content creators so there's fewer consumers of content you know everybody's grabbing a microphone i've gone to the camera stores in new york and every time i try to get a camera component it's sold out or there's a two week back order because everybody's buying the same stuff now um i think that we are all one and so i did morning radio for 10 years and the best part of morning radio was talking to the streets and i think that's the most interactive way you know to go about doing things and radio was a place where i was able to really build a lot of relationships because i did print phone calls and so with the print calls i took print phone calls and this is pre youtube this is 0203 so the only way you went viral was over an email where someone would send you an email and say download this and you would just download random stuff to your laptop and that's kind of how i was able to kind of grow my comedy a little bit and so through that what i learned was that it's laughs that connect people so if we can all laugh together then i think there's something that's there's something collective about that and so when i look at the marketplace when i find a need to fulfill i think that the sense of collective conversation comedically um it's all you know most comedy conversations are observational they're voyeuristic hey watch me talk to this person versus hey let's talk and i think that's the cool thing about instagram live is that you know people have a direct line i think there's a way to kind of set that up a little bit more you know more formally uh real quick um please like colton what we did because i was having trouble breaking into prank phone calls in other markets and it just goes back to finding a need and fulfilling it um i was having trouble breaking into comedy clubs in certain markets because i didn't have a television credit but i think that most comedy clubs value comedians that have media reach and so the thing i knew about radio at the time is that most radio and smaller double a triple a baseball cities omaha syracuse's columbia missouri's of the world they're carrying jocks in the afternoon or in the morning that are by themselves or it's a two-person show so they don't have a lot of content we're only playing the prank calls in birmingham they're not and then they go in a vault forever so i would contact djs in cities where i wasn't getting booked at the comedy club and mail them to print phone calls for free and just say play them and say my name i don't care what you do with them after that they're yours forever and they would play them i'd let that marinate for three months then i would call the comedy club and say hey i'm on the radio in your city every week you should probably book me at your club and that's how i was able to expand my reach comedically and able to leverage those fans the one mistake i made was not having an email list you didn't have the data do you understand the data i would have had if i had just been collecting emails since oh yeah that's the one no but honestly i think the one thing that you know that's fine but i say this a lot to my team a lot of people value data very highly and the world does and i do but actual attention and brand really gets underestimated and the part you know i was listening very intently say my name and say it right and that's it was exactly the punchline of why you're sitting here today and i'm really thrilled to be uh co-hosting this uh day with you and i appreciate you and thanks for getting up early hey everybody on youtube first of all thank you so much so humbled for your time i don't wanna watch but time is the biggest asset so thank you for watching that video if uh if you got some value out of that there's a plenty more where that came from feel free to check it out