Red Broadwell
After years of playing the neurotic host, including earlier this year in Stress Positions, John Early shows a truer, groovier version of his comedy. In his Emmy-nominated special John Early: Now More than Ever he alternates between serenading the audience and hilarious bits all framed by sketches reminiscent of This is Spinal Tap.
I had the chance to speak with Early about creating the eclectic vibe of his first stand-alone special, believing in the promises of technology, and why we need to bring back the art of dance. Below is an abridged transcription of our interview as well as the full audio recording.
On doing his first stand-alone special
JE: It was totally terrifying. It ended up being one of the more profound artistic experiences of my life and, in my opinion, one of the more successful of the stuff that I’ve made. I don’t mean that in terms of numbers–we’re in the streaming wars–but I mean in terms of my own feelings of making something that gave proper access to me and delivered an emotional catharsis. At a certain point it kind of swells into something that is hopefully full of feeling for people. I feel really great about what we did. It’s a funny thing to say, but I’ve always been almost private about my stand-up. It’s obviously, inherently a very public thing to do, but in the world of the Internet performing for a room of real people actually feels so much more private than what you do on any given day: just debasing yourself for the entire world.
I felt a little sad and scared about the idea of filming it because I also didn’t want to know what it looked like. I’ve been living in ignorance for the first twelve years of doing stand-up. I never film it, I never watch it, I don’t even record the audio as I’m sure you can tell by the incoherence of the jokes. I try to get my feedback from the audience, and it’s a very sacred part of what I do. So, I was really scared to film it, but I thankfully chose two very good friends–Leah Hennessey and Emily Allan, who co-directed the special–who are just the chicest, coolest people ever. I knew they’d understand the music part of it and the rock doc part of it. I felt very protected by my girls.
On the creative process of building Now More than Ever
JE: My live shows always take on this manic patchwork kind of form of music and sketch and stand-up. This special is similarly kind of frenzied, but in a really great way that I think the footage is infused with. I just went on tour, and I’d never really done a proper tour. I toured a little bit with Kate, I’d never done a proper tour as a solo performer. That’s where I really whittled down material, wrote new material. It was because of the tour that I also forced myself to make some final decisions. You can’t really experiment with songs, you have to really prepare them. At one point, instead of the Neil Young song, it was going to be Madonna’s “Take a Bow” which is an incredible song and, I think, does have some emotional power to it. But, the Neil Young is more of a statement.
Normally when I do a show and there’s no special to it, it’s very free-wheeling and last minute and groovy. With this I had to really commit, since there’s a legal aspect to since you have to get the license. I had to really be very deliberate about the song choices, and I’m so happy that I switched out the Neil Young and found that moment of the underscoring and grouping the material that, in my mind, feels kind of poetically related to the Neil Young. Basically, to answer your question, I just went on tour. Hess, who plays the keyboards and arranges all the music, came out with me and it was really beautiful. We took it all very seriously and the whole experience was very moving to us. I hadn’t really done big shows like that in so many years because of COVID and I had so many crazy back surgeries. It was really affirming to do the tour right before the special, I forgot how much I love doing those types of shows. Carrying that spirit into the taping was so nice.
On cabaret artists
JE: I’ve resisted it for so long, but I’ve always had this jealousy of cabaret artists. I’m sure they would laugh at me because often I think they’re ignored or maligned. I liked the way music makes the spoken part of it more emotional. I’ve never let myself do that, I’ve always been very compartmentalized about the music part of the show and the comedy part; they’re totally separate, it’s a grab bag. It was really nice to integrate it. I’d always previously done music just to create a vibe, I want my shows to feel like a party and I want people to feel like they can dance. This was the first time that the meaning of the music infused the stand-up and the stand-up infused the music. It was a little more integrated. My friend Cole, who is doing a show on Broadway right now about being a kind of closet cabaret performer, came to the taping. After the show they came up to me, in an ironic but loving and sincere way, was like “You’re a cabaret artist!” and I burst into tears the next day. I was so touched by that. And I don’t claim to have any of the musical skill of your average cabaret artist, but I do like the form. I feel like the special is a half-measure, it’s me coming into that. But, unfortunately for everyone, my next special is going to be full cabaret.
On Neil Young and the sermon in Now More than Ever
JE: To take it back to the special, I think the Presbyterian in me is what led me to do that kind of sermon in the middle of it. I was trying to justify it as cabaret, and then when we were editing Leah was like “Yeah when you do that kind of sermon thing”. And I realized that of course that’s what this is. This comes from all those hours I put in dragging my feet to church. They were worth something.
That’s my favorite part of the whole thing. I’d done this group of jokes for a while that was roasting, so to speak, a sort of Internet-bred kind of language that I think a lot of millennials, myself included, passively received and took as how we talk. The way I used to do that bit was a little more classically roasty, a little more caustic. People liked it. I think people like to be roasted, especially the crowds I tend to perform for who are kind of coastal millennials. I only sell out shows in cities where there’s an Amazon headquarters. There has to be a kind of tech component to the culture for me to sell a show which is devastating, to be clear. But, these are the new jobs, these are the kind of jobs people tend to get now. I think those people don’t get roasted in the way they need to, or that they want to. We’re coming out of a period where comedy was kind of in crisis post-Trump. It became very self-righteous and pointing out the enemy and not doing the thing that comedy is very good at doing which is pointing at yourself and making fun of yourself. I think that people were ready to be roasted again.
It used to be a little more caustic. Once the Neil Young came into it and once Hess began playing the piano underneath it on tour, I realized this was very exciting for me. It’s bringing out the despair in my stand-up, which is always where I write from. I write from a place of what first feels like rage, then I realize very quickly that it’s actually despair….you have to let the rage out to get to the despair. I feel a lot of despair about the state of culture because I feel like a victim of these tech companies. A lot of people in my generation are waking up to the fact we gave our entire youth to the phone. It’s really scary, and I think people are starting to realize the way it’s made us all so alienated and broken these social bonds. It’s really devastating to think “what could I have done in my twenties and thirties had I not believed in the promise of social media and of the Internet?” What could I have written? What movies could I have made? What kind of relationships could I have had and what kind of sex could I be having? Would I have taken a Fosse class?
On the syntax of Ask App Not To Track
JE: The “Ask App Not To Track” was a joke that was brand new. That was something that was developed for the special, and I think you can tell from the insane length of it and the refusal on my part to pair it down. I had to accept that. I signed a contract to do this special before COVID in 2019, and it got delayed by so much. I wasn’t comfortable doing all that old material, I had to do new material. There is stuff I had to accept that I was going to be working through this material on camera and that’s okay. I was trying not to beat myself up about it, it’s part of the charm of the special. There’s a shagginess to it and a messiness to it that I think gives access to me in a strange way. Ask App Not To Track was a huge moment since that’s the joke that leads into the piano. That’s very deliberate. That’s the joke that introduces all those ideas. It was me trying to find something universal. I, as an artist and as a victim of our new kind of entertainment model of being forced into a little echo chamber, I feel so disconnected from reaching a wider audience. I often don’t know how. It did occur to me in making this special that the only remaining universal thing that all of us can agree on is the phone. It was very exciting for me to talk about a little prompt from Apple that we have all trained ourselves to just accept and ignore.
People really love that joke and I think it’s because they never thought to notice that and pay attention to it. People tag me all the time and screencap and tag me in “Ask App Not To Track”. It thrills me that my joke is actually tripping them up a little bit and forcing them to look at it, not that I did that joke with any sort of social justice implications. That is essentially the point of it, to look at these things that we all experience every day on our phones and make them feel strange. That’s the high falutin answer to your question. The real thing is I thought it was so funny. How can this be what they decided on? This is such a crazy arrangement of letters and syllables and sounds when they could’ve said “no”! They could’ve said “no” or “don’t allow”. Wouldn’t that be the clearer thing? If it’s about making these two choices clear, that’s not what you choose. When you look at it, it looks like a different language. It was really cracking me up. It’s the dream of a stand-up because I was just making my friend laugh talking about it and she said “you should do it in stand-up” and I was like “WHAT”. That’s always what you want to hear, it’s so hard to be as funny as you are in real life on stage. I felt this potential of just not always having to talk about some obscure part of pop culture that only gay guys in Fort Greene understand. I feel like I’m in a prison of my own making where I find that kind of specificity funny and I never strive for something universal. This is such a high-minded way to talk about a joke where I’m just screaming for eight minutes, but it’s my honest answer.
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