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Maddox Pennington sat down with Puss and Kooch to talk about writing a memoir, their experience in the comedy grind, the importance of truth and inclusiveness in comedy, and their dream to be a guest on another cool podcast.
Maddox Pennington on Heavy Flo with Puss and Kooch
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. To hear everything Maddox has to say, listen to their podcast episode.
Writing and publishing a memoir: a pretty cool thing to do
I was in grad school, and I wrote a short essay about my life growing up reading the Brontës. A workshop group told me I needed to actually expand on all the information in the essay. So I kept writing, and it was 60 pages, and then 120 pages. Then my professor told me it wasn’t an essay anymore. So it just sort of took shape, and I’m proud of it.
But it’s very complicated because I just had to put “girl” in the title. And now I’m sort of in this trans-masc transition phase. It’s very weird. I want to write to Daniel Mallory Ortberg and ask, “How do you get over having the wrong name on this piece?” It’s a memoir. My life is supposed to be in there, and I left out this hugely important part.
So it’s complicated. But it’s out there. I’m proud of it, and everyone should buy it. The memoir is called A Girl Walks Into a Book: What the Brontës Taught Me about Life, Love, and Women’s Work. And I was a girl when I walked into the book. It doesn’t say what I was when I walked out of it.
The memoir traces my life alongside the Brontë sisters’ lives. I tackle each of their books and movie adaptations and the terrible relationships I was having in New York in my 20s, as one does. I’m proud of it, and everyone should buy it.
It just feels uncomfortable to try to still promote it. My mom would love it if I was still doing book events. I did 12 of them when the memoir came out, and it’s over. I know how publishing works. The life cycle ends. So it’s just a weird thing I did, a good thing. I’m proud of most of it
It’s the first memoir.
There’s definitely going to have to be a part two because I spent a lot of the book chasing an unavailable man who’s 10 years older than me. At the end of the book, I married him, and the marriage was ending.
In two weeks in 2017, I quit my day job, left my marriage, the book came out, I moved back to DC, got my first full-time teaching job, and lived in my own apartment for the first time. In two weeks, I took my whole life and was like, “You know what. What if it was upside down?”
So the end of the book is kind of funny when I reread it because it feels like I was skidding down a hill trying to stop. Because I knew I needed to change the ending, but I didn’t want to change the ending before I told my ex-husband I was leaving.
So you knew when you were writing the book that it was ending?
I knew the day we got married that it was not going to work. And the book came out two years later.
Did you ever get on roller coaster when you were a kid, and as soon as you sat down, you were like, “This is too big of a roller coaster. I should not have gotten on this roller coaster. But everyone bought me presents for the roller coaster, and we’re living together, and I’ve been told my whole life that the point of my life is this roller coaster.”
But if you had asked me the day I got married, “Why are you doing this?” I would not have been able to tell you convincingly. I think I thought if I married him, he would start acting like a husband. And what I’ve learned since is that you should make sure they start acting like that first and then marry them. I think it’s also kind of a moot point.
So that’s why I got into stand-up comedy.
Getting into stand-up in DC
I moved back to DC in 2017 and sort of outran my problems for summer. Then they all hit me in the fall. I had a lot of problems with anxiety and depression and seasonal depression, particularly. I started coming out of it in March and decided to start going to open mics. It was literally a direct result of that.
I felt like I’d been in this box where I didn’t think I belonged. And I had always wanted to try stand-up. I thought it would be a great place to work through shit. Everybody says it’s cheaper than therapy, but it’s not when you factor in transit costs.
I found a mic—rest in peace, The Pinch—where you could do on-site sign-up and didn’t have to e-mail. There are a lot of barriers if you’re trying to do comedy for the first time in DC. It’s really hard because comics are hopelessly disorganized. No one keeps their websites up. Everything’s run on Facebook. And a lot of the shows require a tape if you want to get booked.
But I found a mic with a low barrier to entry and started going religiously, every week. Because I’m a writer and had a degree, I definitely felt like I was starting on third base. I wasn’t like the 22 year olds who come out and are like, “Tinder, am I right?” I got to skip some of that. Not all of that, but some of that.
It was just like switching a light on. I felt like I should’ve been doing this the whole time
Walk us through your first open mic.
I had about 17 minutes of material prepared. I didn’t know how anything worked, so I was surprised when I kept getting bumped for people the room knew. I talked way too fast—a perennial problem.
I think what I expected was to be able to talk for four minutes and then just have a solid minute of laughter. I didn’t build pauses in. But I liked it so much. And it was good enough that the showrunners told me they did a showcase, and that I should come around. Within my first month, I was getting asked to do more shows. And then it just took off.
It was very fun and very exciting, and I found community immediately. You see the same group of people when you’re actually on the grind. I think that came from the routine. All these bars are closed now, but you’d go to The Pinch on Tuesday, Bourbon on Wednesday. There was a place to be every night of the week where you could see some of the same people. I found one of my best friends in the world out at Summers in Arlington.
It can be really special. You’re not depending on each other every night when you go up. But at the same time, you absolutely are. You’re warning each other about shitty mics and shitty dudes, and you’re really revealing stuff on stage if you’re a good comic. Friendships can build really fast.
It’s like when you go to a baseball game or an art gallery: you get to talk so much while looking at something else. So when you’re having a side conversation while somebody else is on stage, you’re bonding.
I was about to say “trench warfare bonding.” That’s not great, but it sometimes feels like that. You get a lot of rejection. You bomb, and then you all bomb together. I also love dive bars. That really helped. They just have a great disgusting ambiance that really appeals to me.
I’ve been less on the circuit lately. Partly, I was kind of leveling up to getting booked on shows. Now I don’t really do open mics. I also got far enough in that I realized I didn’t want to try to climb the comic ladder.
I want to shift over to TV writing someday. That’s my three- to five-year plan. So I sort of dialed back the “I have to be out every night” grind. I’m between dive bars, you might say.
Comedy, writing, and comedy writing
In college, I was a music major. I picked up a writing minor because I hated practicing. I started writing reviews for the local paper. So I would say my genre is “judgy.” Then I went to grad school for an MFA in creative nonfiction. For me, that was mostly essays.
So I think my style is observational writing with a personal eye. Up until I got into these TV writing jaunts, I didn’t write a lot of fiction because it always feels like me in a different hat. I read it, and it’s just me. I want writing fiction to feel like reading fiction, and it’s never going to. My friends who are novelists tell me it doesn’t feel like that.
I think that’s true of improv for me. Doing improv feels better than watching it sometimes because you’re the one in there playing the game and having fun. We’ve all seen lovely improv and excruciating improv, and that’s rough. It’s rough to not know what’s coming. But I guess that’s the joy of it.
So I would say I’m coming from more of an essayistic, very self-centered pop culture-y background.
My writing background definitely helped me in my stand-up. It’s interesting to program your brain into different formats. For a long time, I would turn anything I was thinking about repetitively into an essay. And then I had to figure out how to transform that into a stand-up bit. And then I started thinking about how I would present that same information if I wanted it to be a sketch when SNL was having its open call. And now I’m trying that again in a TV format.
It’s the exact same function, which is interesting to me. All the different ways people express creativity come from that same impulse of making something, whether it comes out through visual art or clothing design or stand-up. Creativity and all the different ways people find to use it to connect with other people or alienate other people or get back at their parents or what have you is interesting to me.
What are you doing it for?
Literally all of that. There’s some connection. There’s some striking back at childhood bullies. There’s some showing my parents I can do this, and it’s fine. My mom’s very private. She is very proud of me but wishes I would never tell anyone anything. When my grandmother used to sign off the phone, she would say, “Remember: don’t trust anyone.” So that’s the family tradition I’m coming from.
And I get up onstage and tell everyone very personal things about sex and identity and mental health, and my mother hates it. But she tries very hard to be proud of me and tell me that in a way that doesn’t reference what I just did on stage at all. It’s very funny to watch. It’s like someone playing Password, but they’re the only one playing password.
Truth and inclusion in comedy
I really think truth is what makes good comics. I think whenever you go to a show and see 10 straight guys telling the same gross jokes, no one is growing. No one is speaking truth to power. Nobody is revealing something that’s important. That’s why I think the queer and women’s comedy scenes are so important—and need to be integrated with the regular comedy scene.
Even before my transitioning non-binary process, I felt uncomfortable on women-only shows. At the same time, I think it’s a really important space. But you should just book a ton of women on your show. Don’t call it “Ladies’ Night.” Just have a bunch of ladies on your lineup. You could do that or book your shows 50/50. I don’t like the idea of creating a silo where “these jokes” live, and only a certain audience is going to go there.
I think we need as many voices as possible in comedy. You need so many perspectives because it makes everything more fun, more interesting. You’re unlikely to hear the same hacky jokes 10 times in a row if everybody’s a different type of person bringing themselves to shows.
It’s not that you can’t be a great observational comic without being personal. There’s an article from The New York Times about how Tony Woods was sort of the man behind Dave Chappelle. In the article, someone said, “Some comics say funny things. Other comics say things funny.”
So you can be a quotidian kind of comic, and your delivery is what’s entertaining. Or you can be really trying to get at something. All my favorite comics do both. Tig Notaro does a lot of commonplace things in a really funny, weird way. Mike Birbiglia does that, too. He makes ordinary stories really extraordinary by the way he loops them around.
Those are the comics I really like, the ones who are are doing storytelling or saying something important and entertaining you. They’re not just being the lowest common denominator
The future of comedy for comics and finding a way to just make your shit
I’ve been thinking about where comedy is going a lot as I’m trying to envision a TV writing career for myself. In the 1990s, every stand-up comic got a sitcom with their name on it. That was the model. And now I don’t think that works.
I think now what we’re seeing is comics popping up in ensembles. It’s actually kind of swinging more towards improv. You look at the best ensemble comedies right now, and they’re people who met in improv or Second City or The Groundlings.
I think that’s an interesting shift because it means you have to be at least a little bit of a socially-adapted person who other people can tolerate being around. We can’t all be Chevy Chase, thank God.
The advice I’ve been getting is to just make your shit. You should find a way to make it. Fleabag started as a one-woman show. There was a boom of that when YouTube first became a thing. Then there was this big glut of creators, so it became harder to find things. Now I think we’re coming back around to the web series.
I think people making their own stuff is the way forward. I was trying to write a whole bunch of spec scripts, which I think is what you did in the aughts. You had all these specs, and people would look at your portfolio and decide to hire you. But I think now I’m going to have to make a shitty iPhone version of my pilot with my friends and hope that gets me some attention.
So you have something right now that you’re working on?
I have a bunch of scripted projects in the works that I’m not excited about. Every time I look at them after two weeks, I wonder what idiot child wrote this. But then I have moments where I think things are funny. I feel that way when I open my book, too, every so often.
That’s how comics are, though. I love performing in front of improvisers, by the way. In a previous incarnation, I did LadyBits at Dojo Comedy, and it was so warm. Comedians watching other comedians just go, “That’s funny,” and they’ll nod. Improvisers don’t shame each other for wanting laughs, which is weird to me. Stand-up comics will just go, “Aren’t we all disgusting? Why are we doing this?”
District Queer Comedy Festival 2019
District Queer Comedy Festival is coming up soon, and I’m doing two shows at 7:00pm and 9:30pm on Friday, November 15. I’m excited about those because they’re at DCAC, and it’ll be a mix of queer comics and improv people.
And then on Saturday, I’m offering a two-hour joke writing workshop for anybody under the big LGBTQ+ umbrella. I’m excited because I’ve taught for years, but I haven’t tried to teach comedy in exactly this way. We’ve got some more spots left. We’re gonna try some observational comedy and some personal comedy. And then there’s an open mic brunch the next day, so you can go try out your stuff.
My goals is to demystify the scene for people who have no idea where to start. I want to talk about the stuff I wish had been readily published on a reputable website when I first started: Where do you go? How do you sign up? How does this work? But also the work of taking a story, finding the joke, and bringing that out and condensing it.
It’s really aimed at people who’ve either never tried stand-up or tried it once and it didn’t go great or who just want a place to get some editing feedback and practice talking in public.
Take the workshop. Buy the book. I’ll sign the book at the workshop.
A belief in DC comedy
I really believe in DC comedy because people find groups, and they have these little syndicates, and they’ll get together and produce a room.
I think DC comedy really does have room for everybody. There are people who position it like a hierarchy, like you have to do this rung and then this rung and then this rung. But you can be the most high-profile organization and have nobody in your rooms. And you can be just two people with a phone who know where all the Busboys and Poets are and do packed shows. I would much rather be on a packed show that somebody no one’s heard of has organized than on a high-profile lineup.
I think the fact that there are so many rooms and that, if you want to be on the grind and go up every night, you 100% can. I think that’s great. I think there are so many overlapping groups and groups of people, and it takes you to parts of the city you might not have gone to otherwise. I grew up in Northern Virginia, and comedy has taken me to dive bars all over the city where I never would have gone before.
Advice for comics just starting out
Take a night off every so often. Trust that you’re not going to lose your spot. It’s really restorative to not do it every night. But obviously, the more practice you can get is good. And I get so much practice teaching. I teach 75-minute classes three times a day twice a week.
Get the practice, but take time off. And sit up front and laugh at people. Don’t stand in the back and talk when you’re just starting. Go sit up front. Be a nerd. Let them practice their crowd work on you. That’s what I did.
Thanks for getting wet with Puss and Kooch
Tune in next week for an interview with DC improviser Molly Graham!
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