I spoke with comedian Bo Johnson for my podcast Daily Comedy News about his appearance on OFTV’s stand-up series LMAOF. I like Bo’s comedy a lot, and had a great time talking with him. The program I used to record the interview gave me some audio that’s been pretty hard to clean up, and believe me I have tried.
Below, is an AI generated transcript that I have massaged a bit, using my memory to fill in and/or clarify some parts where the audio dropped out.
JOHNNY MAC: I was reading your various bios, and I love that your influencers or interests were Hedberg and Hannibal and Mike Birbiglia. I love that style of comedy. I could probably talk about Hedberg for a while, but what attracts you to that style as opposed to the, I don't know, East Coast, New York aggressive style?
BO JOHNSON: I think that a lot of the comedy I liked when I was starting, before I even found stand up, was like, there's a Northwest cartoonist named Gary Larson, who drew The Far Side, where it's all very simple, like, everyday life humor.
And Mitch Hedberg was like the first comic I found. When I started putting out the half hour specials, I was in middle school, so I would move lawns and buy all of those. And I love Hedberg and all these jokes where they're a thought that you've almost had, but never put together.
Which makes it so much more impressive, because all of the ingredients are in there.
JM: I'd love when he'd get halfway into a joke and just, you know, Hey, here's a setup, uh, nevermind. And just bail on it in the middle of a set. Were you familiar with Stephen Wright before Mitch?
BJ: I was, but I think he was a big deal, but it wasn't like the generation before me.
I kind of found him later. I don't really do one line of stand up, but it's a lot of my favorite stuff to watch.
JM: Walk me through the sets at Don't Tell Comedy (which are pop-up comedy shows at quickly locations) I'm seeing an increasing amount of articles about that, and it seems to be really buzzy scene. How does that work? I watched your set, which was fantastic, and I'm curious about what kind of room you actually wound up in.
BJ: Thank you. Yeah, I did a show in, in Santa Monica was a furniture store with about like 150 people. I'd say I've kind of done three to four tapings at this point. So the first two were like, really early on Comedy Central and then Kevin Hart's channel, LOL. And both of those, I was like, three years into stand up, so I was kind of ready…I had like a of material to pick from, which was very nice.
JM: I programmed, um, comedy for SiriusXM for 10 years and in the last 10 years I've been programming it for Live One. And anytime I find something clean, I find it to be gold, because there's plenty of guys who are just, you know, screaming and yelling F You. And then the clean comedy I can play on more of the stations.
So I don't want to pigeon you as “clean comedian” (but you’re not Dice).
BJ: You can play more rooms. I think you can definitely work a lot more. For me, it's never been intentional. It's just kind of, I'd say maybe about 60 to 70 percent of what I'm writing, I'd consider like PG 13 and 30 percent is dirty. And I will get like booked for stuff sometimes where they're like, you're a clean comic, can you do this?
And I'm like, well, I can work clean. But I think I more just look like I'm a clean comic than I fully am. I love the look like a clean comic. That's really good.
JM: If you label a comedy station clean, you get into this whole thing of, well, what's clean? Obviously language can be one thing. I used to define it as like match game naughty, meaning we can make a good quality Dolly Parton boobs joke, to use a very dated reference from half a century ago.
I grew up in the Northeast, so I didn't realize how annoyed people would get at a good goddamn, but I learned that from Dear Mr. Radio station, please cut it out.
BJ: Yeah. But I think it's also what people consider kind of funny. Because I'll have people come up to me after a show and be like, I love that you don't have the maturity to be funny. And I'm like, I can't. I closed on a joke comparing my girlfriend to a good boy in the bed with a clip on tie, where it's not graphic, but I'm like, this isn't really a good joke, and it's the last thing I just said.
JM: Only Fans (which now has a comedy component), they're positioning themselves as clean sets. I hear Only Fans. I think of a certain thing.
How did you get involved with Only Fans? Because again, there's a connotation to that brand that maybe isn't there.
BJ: Yeah, I mean, I've seen, I have like two or three friends who have done takes in Chicago and New York, and then I watched them, and it's kind of, anyone in comedy has a little bit of a reflex where you see someone, something that looks cool, you're like, how do I get that?
And so, I just got into contact with my buddy Simon Fraser, who's a really funny guy on, on OnlyFansTV's channel too, who's got a bunch of great jokes about moving from, from London to the U. S., and, What I really liked was kind of the same way the difference between, like, late night visual taping. I could kind of pick what I want.
JM: I found their, their stuff too to be, maybe this is unfair to them, surprisingly really well shot. Like it looks great!
BJ: The production was awesome. I was stoked with how it came out.
JM: I was also surprised because I hadn't been on the website, uh, prior to doing the prep here. It's all in front of a paywall. I didn't have to log in or anything. And there were a good 50 half hours up there. And I don't think I was served any commercials.
I'm trying to figure out what their business model is other than to get me to click Only Fans and maybe hope I go deeper.
BJ: I think that it's kind of the same way you can get any platform where you can try to reach your fans directly, but a little bit less of an algorithm and you can give people something that they want to pay for or to have have a lot of things that are available free and then purchase.
JM: I teach a couple of college classes and we've been talking about the democratization of media.
It's just amazing now how you can get things out there. I mean, it wasn't too long ago that Comedy Central was king, and I'm sure, uh, both you and I would have liked the 10 years ago, big, ridiculous Netflix money that was there for a little bit, but now we have all these distribution options.
JM: How do you feed the beast on YouTube? Do you do a lot of, a lot of crowd work? I would guess from here that your style isn't naturally crowd work.
BJ: I do some crowd work, but it's been much more of, if something comes up organically in the room, I'm not that interested in, like, looking at everyone front row and what they do for a living.
But if someone has an interesting response to the show, or is kind of vibing way, what am I actually about? (If) there's something that's true to what's going on in the room or this that I'm in.
A real thing happened where I was, it was an Indianapolis helium club and this guy was listening to, like, a comedy on his phone and my joke came on. Then I came out and he saw me, and it's almost like a real life version of when you're talking about something and you see an ad for it on your computer later.
JM: Did you catch Sandler's newest special?
BJ: I've seen like the first 15 minutes. I really liked it so far.
JM: I feel like more comedy specials should just go, ladies and gentlemen, Joe Blow! and just come out on the stage. A lot of specials will have those three, four minutes, before, but the way Sandler did it was interesting. But what you're talking about with the only fans that got me thinking is he has this conceit in the special that he's playing a rundown club and things are going wrong.
And none of that is true. Like the dog running around. That's not true. The equipment failing, that's not true. And then he's doing a normal standup set. Around the artifice. It's just, it's really interesting direction.
BJ: I think what I'm curious about, I know they have the bit about how the monitors aren't working, which obviously is intentional in production, but I think the audience reaction to that probably is as if that's what's happened.
I just watched a really great special by this guy, Conner O'Malley called Stand Up Solution,…
JM: Oh, that's fantastic!
BJ: …Yeah. It's like satire for anyone listening, basically satire, Ted Talk back where he's in there for an hour delivering a presentation on a fictional product, but it's as( funny) as anyone who's putting out like regular standup.
JM: What's the decision process on quote unquote burning material for say one of these projects as opposed to, you know, let me hold something back in case Netflix calls.
BJ: (Here the transctipt is quite garbled, but the sentiment is that Bo would want your first introduction to him to be strong, so he uses his best stuff. and if that he repeats things, the majority of people haven’t seen the jokes in the other outlet)
… I want that to be good jokes that I'm proud of, and in this case, I was allowed to repeat some material.
JM: I was just speaking with Gianmarco Soresi and he said the same thing that the temperature has sort of changed. Whereas back in the day, once you put it late a joke down, you can't use it ever again. And he's of the mindset of. At his stage in his career, not everyone knows who he is yet. So why would he park some of his best material?
There's always going to be people like, Oh, I heard that already. But those are your super diehard fans. So I think it's smart to, you know, use stuff, I guess at some point, if it is the big, uh, HBO Saturday night special, okay, it's time to put that stuff away. But I don't think that's crazy at all to do some stuff.
BJ: I feel like. I'm kind of working for it. I have over an hour material of, like, an hour and a half to two hours, you know, and not all of that is material. You could open on some as material that has to live in the middle of a long chat. I couldn't just rotate it out in front of a roadshow. But it's kind of, I'd like to record something and at that point move away from that material.
But not all people have seen it. You aren't really going to write the joke to serve a similar purpose, so you're forced to do it.
JM: You're making me laugh because one of my current pet peeves is I watch a lot of specials because of what I do and my wife 100 percent of the time will show up 37 minutes into a special with a laundry basket and stare at the TV for 40 seconds and go, is this guy funny? And then I hit pause and it kills the room. I try and explain to her, well, you see what he did there? It's a callback to something he set up 18 minutes ago. And then he told a long story.
And I mean, you know how comedy works, explaining to you. I'm like, Oh, you just, you can't judge Minute 37.
BJ: I think that the way that you open like the hardest part.
Because for someone at my level, there's a lot of if I'm doing 1 night in a 50 seat room in a major city, those people know who I am, and I probably have goodwill when I'm on stage. But most of the time, maybe 5 percent of the room knows who I am, and I have to perform for the 90%, where if I address, I'm low energy, this is kind of how I look. This is what my vibe is, and I just dump in these longer stories. Or, or something that's a little bit less accessible, it wouldn't make any sense at all. And those builds don't even work necessarily.
JM: Do you ever punt and realize, this set's just not happening, let me just work out the last six minutes?
BJ: I mean, I feel like that's tough. I feel like it's such a hard balance in terms of knowing. If a crowd is not having a good time, or if they're kind of silently, like, more smiling, because I feel like I've seen it go where you almost address, hey, you guys could have more energy and it totally turns the room in a good way for them to kind of warm up, realize that their energy is just as important as whether the jokes are funny.
And then I've also seen it from doing it or watching comics. Where they're like, you guys could laugh more and at the end of the show people are like, we had a good time. We like, just didn't realize we could laugh.
JM: Do you work when you're working on material or using an old school notebook, voice recorder, notepad on your phone?
BJ: I'll do a lot of premises either in a notebook or in my staff for the phone. I feel like the writing process for me is. Yeah, and then I have 2 to 3 friends…where we go back and forth and over a bit, a little bag kind of practice saying something.
JM: I'll tell you a story since you're a Hedberg fan. Um, about a year after he died, I called up his wife, Lynn. Um, And I said, you know, Hey, we wanted to do something and it's not in my nature to be like, Oh, your husband died yesterday. Can we do something on the radio? I waited, and she came in and she brought in, I think she has shared this online, Mitch's actual notebook with jokes that he just never got around to recording.
It was just so cool to go through it and look at the material that he never performed. So back at that time, this was at Sirius. Jim Breuer was doing afternoon drive and Jim would sometimes do a live show called comedy covers. And what comedy covers was, was you'd get up like a cover band and do somebody else's material.
But then the comics started twisting that and being like, okay, I'm going to do Chris Rock's material, but as Mitch Hedberg and that sort of thing. So some of those jokes actually got performed with Lynn's blessing, of course.
BJ: Oh, that's really cool. Yeah, I, I hadn't heard of that, but I've seen some things about that book, where I think it's called Modern Comedian.
It was like a little YouTube series by a guy out in Seattle, really, who was doing many documentaries on comics. And the early ones were often Seattle people, even once they left. So, like, Maurice Gold, Seattle, briefly, like, Andy Haines, who's a really fun, smart comic from Seattle originally, and who came out this year….but I think there was an episode with her about the notebook.