Nico Carney Can’t Force It

This week, we’re highlighting 24 talented writers and performers for Vulture’s annual list “The Comedians You Should and Will Know.” Our goal is to introduce a wider audience to the talent that has the comedy community and industry buzzing. (You can read more about our methodology at the link above.) We asked the comedians on the list to answer a series of questions about their work, performing, goals for the future, and more. Next up is Nico Carney.

Tell us a story from your childhood that you think might explain why you ended up becoming a comedian.
The summer before third grade, I went to a local summer camp where we did one activity in the morning and one in the afternoon. I signed up for magic in the morning and golf in the afternoon. Little did I know the last day of magic camp would involve painting our faces with clown makeup. So I showed up to golf camp with a full face of clown makeup and played three holes under the hot July sun as “Oreo the Magnificent.”

If you were immortalized as a cartoon character, what would your outfit be?
My Stan Ray jeans — those are a staple for me. Probably my white Carpet shirt (shoutout Carpet; they’re a Baltimore-based skate brand). White Reeboks. My eyes would stay the same; they’re already pretty Pixar-y.

What’s your proudest moment/achievement of your comedy career so far?
Definitely being on Late Night With Seth Meyers. I grew up watching Seth on SNL and was a massive fan of him as the “Update” anchor, so to get the chance to meet him and be on his show was a dream. A lot of entertainment is digital/social-media based now, so to get to be on TV was pretty surreal. My mom and sister came with me to the taping, and it was really special to get to share that moment with them. That was a real Pinch me, wow I’m really doing this moment for me.

Which comedian’s career trajectory would you most like to follow?
I honestly try not to think too much about career trajectories. Maybe that’s dumb of me, but thinking about careers makes me anxious. I’m going to list a few people who I’m fans of instead. Sorry to hijack the question.

The first stand-ups I loved growing up were Tig Notaro, Mike Birbiglia, John Mulaney, Brian Regan, and Jim Gaffigan. I love comedians who use language and cadence that is really specific to them. I love Greer Barnes; he makes it look effortless. I am also a huge fan of Julio Torres. His recent show Fantasmas was so inventive and singular. I love Larry David — Seinfeld and Curb are big influences on the type of scripted comedy I like to write. The best comedic actor of all time, for me, is Julia Louis-Dreyfus. If I could have even an ounce of her talent, I’d be satisfied.

If you really must know what I want out of my career: I want to write and perform in my own TV and film projects with my friends, and I want to tour for audiences who love comedy.

Tell us everything about your worst show ever. (This can involve venue, audience, other acts on the lineup, anything!)
I’ve done plenty of shows at restaurants where the audience was expecting a meal, and surprise, there’s a comedy show! Nothing can prepare you for doing anecdotal material about coming out as trans to a room full of people who just wanted to eat their burritos in peace.

One time, I did a bar show where the mic was so close to the end of the bar and the only audience members were all seated at the bar, so that was kind of like giving a toast to a group of strangers.

If I had to choose one single worst show ever, it was probably a college gig I did a few years ago that took place during a 24-hour student union event. They put me in a massive auditorium, and I performed to silence for less than a dozen students, most of whom left. The faculty member who organized it wanted me to stand in the elevator before the show and promote it. The only thing more humiliating than doing stand-up for a group of uninterested college students is barking for audience members in an elevator.

What have you learned about your own joke-writing process that you didn’t know when you started?
The unfortunate truth, for me at least, is that a lot of my material comes when it comes and I can’t force it. When I first started, I thought I could sit at my desk and write jokes from a blank page, and every once in a while that leads to something interesting or funny, but 99 percent of my material comes to me premise/punch line first, then I’ll punch it up and expand on it as I get it up onstage and see if it’s worth doing. When I was first starting out, I would Google a random-topic generator and try to write material on random topics, but I found it a lot more fun and true when I started talking about my life onstage.

What’s the biggest financial hurdle you’ve encountered since becoming a comedian?
Travel and taxes. I had a show in Ohio, and even booking three months in advance, it was going to cost $900 to fly from New York to Cincinnati. No offense to the good people of Cincinnati (shoutout Skyline Chili), but who is going there for $900? The Cincinnati airport isn’t even in Cincinnati! It’s in Kentucky. The airlines need to get a grip.

Taxes were also higher than I expected. I didn’t realize the government needed so much money from an up-and-coming artist, but I guess we have to fund this failing nation somehow.

At the end of the movie 8 Mile, Eminem’s character, B-Rabbit, starts his final battle rap by dissing himself so the person he’s battling has nothing left to attack. How would you roast yourself so the other person would have nothing to say?
“Nico looks like he gets to perform for one night only because he won his high-school talent show.”

When it comes to your comedy opinions — about material, performing, audience, trends you want to kill/revive, the industry, etc. — what hill will you die on?
I wish people would consider if their POV is genuinely interesting and funny when it comes to the topic they are discussing. In my opinion, there are very few (if any) cis comedians with funny jokes about trans people. I think the best comedy comes when the POV and the premise match in an interesting way, because it puts the joke in a context that heightens it or takes a basic premise and adds an interesting twist. I think too many comedians fail to consider what their POV does to the joke. I’ve had to navigate this a lot during my transition, because the way I present has changed, and people react differently to my jokes.

I’ll give an example: I used to open with “I’m a trans man. It’s a weird time for people like me, because I don’t know if y’all keep up with the news, but it’s a really hard time to be a white man.” That joke always crushed up until audiences couldn’t tell if I genuinely meant that because I was further along in my medical transition. So much of being a stand-up is understanding your relationship to the audience and the material, and that relationship can change for all kinds of reasons. We as comics have to be able to adapt to the way we intersect with culture and audiences, and in my opinion, too many comics misunderstand that or refuse to see it as something we must take into account.

What is the best comedy advice, and then the worst comedy advice, you’ve ever received?
The best advice I ever received was not to do crowd work for the first few years as a comic. I think we are on the come-down from the crowd-work trend thanks to a very successful comedian whose special maybe didn’t quite live up to the hype. I think a lot of young comics see it as a quick way to go viral online, but starting out, it’s so much more important to find your material and your voice than it is to learn how to do crowd work.

The worst advice I ever received was to talk less about being trans so I could make myself more palatable for larger audiences. From what I can tell, the man who told me this has never played a large audience, so I’m not sure where he’s coming from. I hope his open mics are going well. Love and light!