No. I do not have a Netflix special. I do have a Dry Bar Special. I just dropped a Zanies Comedy Club micro set special (free link below) and I have a new HELIUM® Comedy Special dropping on April 26th. If enough interest in garnered with my new special, it could be bought by bigger names like Amazon or Netflix but without watches, unlikely.
The future of stand up comedy seems to be self-releasing specials on YouTube, started by my good friend Bret Ernst and perfected and made famous by Andrew Shultz. Unlike those established comedians with significantly more fans than me, I teamed up with Helium in hopes of getting new eyes on. Its called Middle Easter, Middle Western, a name my best friend Colby Payne came up with! So go watch it when it comes out and in the meantime, enjoy the microset. Its only 10 minutes! #standup #special #comedy #formerlawyer
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I heard that recently after a show. I don't really have a response to that. Like everyone, I have a personal life that can affect my work and sometimes its hard to make people laugh when you are worried about the health of loved ones on stage. The show must go on.
Because I am not a high energy comedian, I can usually get away with not showing my emotions on stage. After a show where I did really well, the other comedian in the green room said "how did it go" and when I said it went really well he told me it didn't look like it did. The truth is, I really did have so much fun on that show but I must have been thinking about something else when I got off stage, like a tag I didn't use or how much time I had to get to my next show, so I looked preoccupied. I don't have huge highs or low lows anymore. I am even keeled all the time. But yeah, sometimes I am very sad on stage. I remember as a kid when one of my favorite baseball players was struggling at the plate and we could not understand it. My friend's dad told us he was going through a messy divorce and that probably affected his work since that is hard for adults to cope with. I hope my personal life issues, when they arise, don't affect my output or performance on stage. But I guess all comedians are sad clowns after all. Thank you to all the people who made it to my show at Zanies on Tuesday and thank you all for spreading the word about my shows in Milwaukee, DC and Atlanta. Hope to see you at the shows and as always, please check out my other platforms like youtube and instagram! #standup #comedy #road #careerchange #formerlawyer #creative I recently was on set for an acting job and they asked me to bring in some different pants options, besides jeans. I only wear jeans now, but I had some freshly dry cleaned pants from 2020 when I still practiced law so I brought some of those to the set. Well, when they asked me to change into the other options, they did not fit. And it wasn't just the button, but the entire waist area of the pants was laughably small. I knew I gained some weight but did not realize that I had gone up almost 2 waist sizes in 3 years!
One thing that really sucks about being a night owl and doing comedy full time is food options after shows. Very limited. I always know what is open late in the main cities I perform in and usually head there after my show. I don't eat before my shows because it makes me feel bloated and lethargic and for an already somewhat "low energy" comedian like me, I can't afford less energy. Sadly, not a lot of healthy options exist after 10pm, especially in smaller cities. When I was last in Iowa I asked people after my show where I can get food and they laughed at me. Fast food is always an option but sadly, that is not very healthy. And I also have a sweet tooth. I always work out and when I was younger, I could afford to eat unhealthy but clearly now, I can't. I am going to try to avoid my bad food habits on this next tour of shows, but if you know of healthy food options in your city, especially Milwaukee, Slinger and Washington DC (where I am heading next), please let me know what they are! #standup #roadtrip #formerlawyer "Well, you can always go back to practice law, right?" I hear that from time to time time at my comedy shows. I guess its true I can. Weird to bring it up after a comedy show, right? Like, are you saying I should? LOL
Believe me, I think about it sometimes, especially at less than capacity shows (read as small crowds) or after a show that doesn't go well (bomb) or when a booker doesn't email me back. But I made this bed and I am happy to rest in it, for now. I had a good run as a lawyer and I hope to do the same with comedy. Some people pursue the arts first and then go to something "stable". So many friends I knew as lawyers were musicians before or chefs or whatever. I myself was a musician too. I just happen to do this later in life. I hope it never comes to that and I hope that something big happens soon so I stop hearing about my safety valve of law. I have faith good things will happen and I worked so hard to get to a higher level of success and am starting to see the fruits of that work and, to some extent, talent. In the meantime, I keep trying to do cool things with comedy, whether its stand up or podcasting or hosting one of my interview shows. Hope you can make it to a show soon and thank you for spreading the word about my shows, social media or podcast, if you have. If you have not, thats ok too. See you in court? #formerlawyer #bettercallpaul #standup #comedy It's amazing how much time and energy social media takes for creatives these days. Instead of shooting the breeze backstage at shows and making jokes, comedians are trying to master the algorithm to maximize their reach and sell tickets to their shows. "I post at 9AM for maximum reach." or "Use hashtags like ..." No matter how much experience you have or how many laughs you can get, without ticket sales, we are worth little to most comedy clubs.
For better or worse, comedy bookers now look at your social media to see how many followers you have before even watching a clip you may send. Its a business and as a former music promoter I get it. I would receive some amazing artists submitting their music to get on a music showcase I booked at the various venues in Chicago as part of Shoeshine Boy Productions. If they were good but did not have many facebook followers (this was before Instagram), we had to try them out as a smaller room. But at least we would give them a shot. Ironically, we also sometimes gave bad acts stage time because we knew they would fill a room. Its a business after all and the days of great music or comedy reaching the masses are greatly affected by how much music and comedy there is out there. Its interesting to think about if George Carlin or the Beatles would make it today. I have hired experts to help me figure out why, all of a sudden, certain sites are burying my content, sometimes the same content that a year ago would be seen by half a million people. #standup #socialmedia #laughs #comedy |
AuthorPaul Farahvar is a comedian hailing from Chicago, Ill. Archives
March 2024
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Paul Farahvar Comedy