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Welcome to another episode of the Comedic Pursuits podcast. It’s going to be fun. It’s going to be wacky. So far, season one has been a good time. I’ve been enjoying all of these interviews. I’ve gained a lot of knowledge and all sorts of really cool backstories of people and learned some really cool lessons. It’s great. I love it. I’m gonna keep doing it.
If you enjoy this show: like it, subscribe to it, share it with your friends, write reviews, rate it, all that good stuff.
Today we’re going to listen to an awesome interview with Erik Beringer, a stand-up comedian and improviser from Charlottesville. I was really excited to sit down with him and talk to him about his stand-up experience.
You can check out some highlights from the interview below or listen to the full version by downloading or following the podcast.
Highlights from my interview with Erik Beringer
Erik started doing short-form improv in middle school, eventually moved to DC, and got into all sorts of stand-up craziness. Now he tours and gets paid to do stand-up, which is kickass. He’s moving to LA soon, so catch him in the DC area while you still can.
Some of the interview questions and answers below have been edited for clarity.
What’s your comedy background?
My first intro into anything comedy-related was improv. When I was 14, I took a class at Bent Theater, which was a short-form improv group in Charlottesville. They liked me, so they asked me to audition for their house team. We traveled around a bit and did some shows in Maryland, southern Virginia, Norfolk, and a couple other places.
That was in high school, so I was between the ages of 14 and 18. That was my first time doing comedy a lot. The group started performing at a resort in central Virginia, and that was my first realization that someone could get paid to do comedy.
But the Charlottesville comedy scene sort of fell apart because a lot of the people who were talented and involved enough to put it together moved away and onto the next thing. Bent Theater survived, but pretty much nothing else did. After high school, I came up here and started doing improv at George Mason University, where I went to college.
My first year at Mason, I auditioned for the Mason Improv Association, and I didn’t make it. When the team roster came out, I went and found the other people who didn’t make it, and we started an indie team called Big In Certain Countries. That was with Elijah Sloan, Alex Galloway, and Eric Schlein. We did some shows in DC, and I think we ended up performing more and meeting more people through that than we might have through the college team.
How did you get into stand-up?
I’ve been doing stand-up comedy since I was 16. But actually doing it well and getting shows, it’s been two years. When I was a kid, I asked my parents if, instead of college money, I could have a bus ticket and starter money to go to Second City in Chicago and enroll in their program. They said no.
How did your improv experience inform your stand-up?
I think doing short-form helped a little bit with my stand-up because short-form is definitely a lot about mugging and going for the laugh. People can get as artsy as they want about stand-up, but if you’re not going for the laugh, you’re probably going to have a bad show.
But I would say that a lot of my short-form experience probably got in the way of getting better at long-form because so much of it was going for the laugh. With a lot of what I was taught by people up here and a couple people that I met in Chicago and the people that I’ve met in New York the general consensus is to focus on the scene and your partner more, and don’t try to be funny. So when I was first starting out up here, when I first came to school, my interest in being funny was actually creating a lot of problems because it was ruining scenes.
I did an exercise with Big in Certain Countries where we performed a serious improv scene. It was supposed to be a drama. That helped me latch onto the idea that improv could just be entertaining. For the most part, I still feel that improv should probably be funny. I think it’d be hard to hold people’s attention for a really long, really serious improv show. But things can be interesting without being funny.
How did you go about getting serious about stand-up?
When I was getting ready to graduate from school, I saw a post about this company that was looking for new talent. I sent some stuff in, and I didn’t hear from them for a really long time, so I assumed it was dead in the water. Then they reached out and said they had stage time at Sully’s Comedy Cellar in Parkville, Maryland. My audition for them was on the day of my college graduation ceremony, and my family that was in town ended up being my audience.
Right now, I don’t really do that many gigs a week. I do a couple a month. I’m trying to keep it small. I’m at a point where, unless it’s something I’m excited to do, I don’t really have to accept it. I don’t do open mics anymore—and I should because I’m definitely not so good that I don’t need to do them. I see comedians who work professional shows multiple times a week on Facebook who are still hitting up a bunch of open mics. And I’m not better than them. I’m just like, “I’m tired.”
But now I’ve got four or five gigs a month. At least three of them are usually paid, and, like I said, I don’t have to do not-paid stuff unless I’m really excited about it.
Do you notice a difference between DC crowds and road crowds?
That’s all up in the air. I made fun of the Confederate flag on stage in Statesboro, Georgia, and that went about as well as you’d think it would. It was like they were finding out the Civil War was over. A bunch of my material is about growing up Catholic, and I start that off by asking if anybody in the audience is Catholic. When I asked the Georgia crowd, it was silent. I expected some person in the back to stand up and say, “Not since we run ’em out.” And I had to do 45 minutes there.
But from there, I did 45 minutes at Alewerks Brewing Company in Williamsburg, Virginia, and that show was incredible. It was so packed that the bar manager wheeled her office chair out because they ran out of seats. Everybody was having a great time. I was onstage while people in the audience were sending me beers.
But literally the night before, me and these two Atlanta comics walked up to the bar in Statesboro, and the bartenders said, “Can we get you something? That was rough.”
What’s a joke or bit that you’ve tried multiple times that just doesn’t work?
My favorite joke I ever wrote—literally only my girlfriend’s little sister and a headliner from a show I did in Chicago like this joke. It’s so dumb. It goes:
My cousin has horses, and I was out there visiting one time. I went up to one of the horses, and I said, ‘Why the long face?’ And the horse said, ‘Because all of my people are slaves to yours.’
I love that joke, and everybody else’s reaction is, “You need to scrap that.” When I first met my manager, I asked what he thought about it, and he said, “If you ever tell that joke again, I’m gonna fire you.”
What’s your go-to object work?
I always open a cabinet and look for stuff. I’ll either open a cabinet or make a drink. But if you watch me make a drink—this is just a little thing for me—in my mind there’s a shelf, some rocks glasses, and a decanter of whiskey. I don’t think people normally notice this, but I open the decanter, pour a glass of whiskey, and then leave the glass and take the decanter.
It’s probably bad, too, because if anything, if anyone saw that, they wouldn’t say, “He took the decanter.” They would think, “That guy did shitty object work.”
What’s been your biggest “aha moment” in comedy?
For me, the biggest thing that I realized recently is that it’s a very small percentage of artists who don’t have any sort of day job and still have the sort of personal stability that I would want. It would be possible for me to do road shows permanently and have no regular job. But I’d also be on the road twenty-five days out of every month. So I should do comedy for the sake of enjoying it.
But there was a long time where I thought, “As long as I work at a regular job, I am failing.”
You hear about some performers, like Pete Holmes or Kevin Hart, who were homeless for a while to pursue stand-up. And my “aha moment” was that I love doing comedy, but I don’t “become homeless” love doing comedy. I would definitely pick having an apartment over doing comedy. And I think there are a lot of people who would say, “Oh, I guess you don’t really love it.” And my response is, “Okay, that’s fine. I like to sleep inside.”
What’s been your biggest failure in comedy, and how did you overcome it?
It’s hard to pick which failure was my biggest failure. I’ve had tons of shows that either didn’t work out or people didn’t come.
A perfect example would be when I was doing “Go Get My Mom.” It was me and two other comedians, and we did two nights at the Philly Fringe Theater Festival. The first night, only two people came, but they loved us. The next night, we sold out the theater, and they fucking hated us. They hated us so much that one of the guys finished and waited until the end of my set, then went and got the car and got everybody that was in our crew into it. Then I finished my set, thanked the audience, shook the booker’s hand, kept walking, walked out of the club, got into the car, and left Philadelphia. It was awful.
We salvaged some of the funny stories that we have from that weekend. It was a cool experience, and I really learned how to be in charge of my own stuff. I had to go up there weeks in advance and tour. You have to find your own venue for the Fringe Festival, so I had to tour venues in a city I hadn’t been to since I was a kid. I think there was a lot of good stuff that came out of it.
After Fringe Festival, we came back and did the DCAC. We sold out, and it was incredible, and the crowd was on fire. It was the same show, and it was better because we’d done it more, but we definitely needed that DC show after the Philly show.
It’s just that comedy thing. You get over it at some point, but sometimes people hate you.
Where can people find you?
I’ve got Twitter, Facebook, and a website where you can find my upcoming shows.
Thanks for tuning in!
This has been Comedic Pursuits Podcast, and we will catch you at the next one. Subscribe to the podcast through any of the links below, and like and rate us on any site where you listen to podcasts.
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