Breakfast!
Performing with one of the people who inspires me most in comedy.
If you’ve been rocking with me on Trial & Error for several years you know how my comedy career started. It began as a challenge for the first iteration of this newsletter where I tried things that were scary, stupid, or funny to entertain the readers.
Stand up was something I’d wanted to do for a long time but I had been afraid to try it. I knew I could tell funny stories and I knew I could be funny in the moment, but I didn’t know if I could write and perform jokes like a stand up comedian. I was afraid of failure, I was afraid of what people would say about me if I tried it, and I was afraid that I couldn’t be successful as a comedian while being true to myself.
A big part of being true to myself was being about to do clean comedy. I don’t cuss in daily life and wasn’t going to start doing so on a stage. I don’t do drugs or live an otherwise rowdy lifestyle so I couldn’t get up and make jokes about something I don’t know. At the same time, I didn’t want to be a church comedian and make jokes just for Christians.
If I was going to do comedy I needed to be able to do it my way while moving in a world that wasn’t built for someone like me. Obviously there are wildly successful comedians who are clean, Jerry Seinfeld and Jim Gaffigan are chief among them. But those guys were huge before I ever heard of them. So I never saw the journey and envisioned myself doing following that path.
It was Nate Bargatze who started to set the wheels in motion for me. I discovered him right as he was on his meteoric rise to the top level of comedy. I haven’t been following him since the early days, but it was probably about 2018 that I became a fan. And since then he’s exploded in popularity, setting records at every arena around the country.
But even at the point I discovered Nate he was 1000 levels above where I could see myself ever reaching. It wasn’t until he started the Nateland podcast, a lark he began during the days of COVID when he couldn’t tour, that I realized it was something I could potentially be successful with. The podcast was co-hosted by Brian Bates and Aaron Weber, two comedians that were at completely different levels of experience and success than Nate, but guys that he trusted and enjoyed being around. Over the years the podcast has become hugely popular and helped promote the careers of Brian and Aaron (and more recent co-host Dusty Slay). Each of them are unique comedians with successful careers in different ways. Dusty is on a path that could catch up the fame and success of Nate soon enough, with his second Netflix special dropping in late July. Aaron is younger and growing in reputation and popularity all the time. He tours constantly all around the country.
Brian (aka “Breakfast”) has always been the one that I admire the most and whose career I wanted to mimic. Brian is older and not as popular as the other guys, something that is a constant source of ribbing on the podcast. But from any other measure of comedy success, he’s doing great. I’d probably guess he’s in the top 5% of all comedians working today as far as tour dates and money. Unfortunately for him he hangs around guys in the top 0.5% or more most of the time. Brian is a devout Christian and plays lots of churches, corporate events, nonprofits, and other shows like that. Many of his shows are in driving distance of his home in Nashville.
In Brian, I see is a guy who has a career as a comedian and doesn’t have to miss most of his young daughter’s childhood. And that’s where I used to get stuck when it came to planning out a future for myself in comedy. To be successful you have to tour the country. But Brian shows that you can be successful by filling your schedule with all kinds of different opportunities and you can do it without getting on a plane or a tour bus every weekend.
That’s also my inspiration for pivoting my business to do speaker coaching, which will allow me to work with clients using my stand up skills and to give me some more freedom to pursue comedy. The more my stand up career flourishes, the more in-demand my speaker coaching services will become.
So it was a huge deal for me last week when I got to do a guest spot on Brian’s show here at The Comedy Catch in Chattanooga. I had so much I wanted to tell Brian backstage about how he’d inspired me and I wanted to ask him so many questions, but in the end I just stuck with “I’m a big fan, thanks for letting me be part of this show.” I figured if the set went well it wouldn’t be the last time I talked to him.
You can judge for yourself how it went by watching the video below, but I was very happy with it and he was very complimentary of it afterwards.
I’ll be doing a free show in Nashville this Sunday July 20 at Rosemary & Beauty Queen (Aaron Weber was on last month’s show) and then I’m hosting July 23 at The Comedy Catch for Moody Molavi, which is a clean show.
Thanks to everyone who has been supporting this journey from the start and to all the new people who have jumped onboard since. Please subscribe here for more behind-the-scenes stuff about my comedy career and other writing work I’m doing.
If you’d like more info on my career pivot to speaker coaching, you can check out my LinkedIn, but here’s a summary:
I got tired of watching bad presentations in the workplace and seeing how much people struggled with basic communication, so I decided to use the skills I learned from stand up comedy to help out.
I offer one-on-one speaker coaching for business leaders looking to uplevel their speaking skills and I do team training for teams that need to improve customer interactions or interpersonal communications.
Send an email to scott@bedgoodmarketing.com to learn more and please connect me with anyone who could benefit from this.