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| Mike Schmidt in the midst of his San Francisco performances. They had to close the bridge for the fanfare. |
Mike Schmidt tells me this the afternoon before performing for 2-1/2 unbroken hours, and the day after performing for an hour and forty minutes. "I haven't even done any real, live stand-up in 3 years."
"This is going to sound weird, but I was worried about filling the time." Anyone who listens to his mostly unscripted, anecdote-based podcast, The 40 Year Old Boy, will not share that concern.
Aside from a headlining set in his first year of stand-up, Schmidt has always been a middle act. With his work-in-progress one man-show, Success Is Not An Option, Schmidt is putting himself back in the spotlight.
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| Mex draws Schmidt: Open Mike |
"I used to go out with Jimmy Pardo as his middle act, and I was gripping the whole time. I looked at it as very much me against the audience. I never realized how good I had it, that I was able to speak for a living. And that people would listen to me and laugh.
"It was a dream, but I would wind myself up: 'Dude, what if I bomb?' That weird energy. And Jimmy hated it."
What was The40YOB's Biggest Moment in 2010?Where Pardo excels at crowd work, Schmidt found it difficult to balance his written set with audience interaction. "I don't do good with the friendliness. I never got the chops to roll through sets. Sometimes, I scorch-earth everybody. Some guy will say something to me, and I cut his head off."
Despite occasionally decapitating ticket-holders, Schmidt loves performing stand-up. "I miss it terribly."
The podcast is proving to be the perfect conduit for a comic who loves to talk, wants to get back into live performance, and craves the comfort of a room already on his side. He's building an audience clamoring to see him in person.
However, crafting a tight, scripted one-man show is a completely different discipline than performing on the podcast. "You don't have to reign yourself in; that's the cool part about podcasting. You can just talk. And it seems like I always have something to say, good or bad."
Schmidt began podcasting with Pardo and Matt Belknap in 2006. Personal conflict prevented Schmidt and Pardo from continuing to work together on Never Not Funny, and Schmidt's run ended after 59 episodes. However, he was not eager to start his own podcast right away.
"Pardo can sit down with you, me, Conan, or President Obama, and it would be interesting and funny for an hour. So, to compete with that, after I had been in the best atmosphere I could possibly be in with the 3 of us being funny? There was no way. What am I going to do?
"I still didn't even know who I was as a performer or as a comic. I had the easy job on Never Not Funny. Jimmy held it down, Matt was Matt, and I got to be funny. I got to lob in bombs and laugh. So how could you do that on your own?"
Enter Eric Butterfield.
"I would not be doing this show without Eric. He called me and said 'I will do everything.' He liked me from Never Not Funny. He said 'Dude, you're cheating yourself and people who like you. I will do everything you need to get a podcast on the air.' If I don't do it then, I'm scared, you know what I mean?
"So, I said 'Alright'. And I panicked. I didn't know what I was going to do. And I actually sat down the night before I was supposed to record and I wrote down what I was going to say. I typed out, like 15 pages of a story."
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| Producer Lili VonSchtupp |
"I could not do the show without Lili. She is absolutely integral, and there is no way ... not even from the technical aspect, where I don't know what to do. I couldn't upload it, I couldn't edit it, I couldn't do those things. But the most important thing is that she is there, and that she is a receptive audience.
"On, like, the 3rd episode with her, she actually laughed out loud. It changed the show. It changed the entire complexion of the show.
"Because then I had an audience, and it allowed me to perform rather than mining and searching and not knowing what I was going to do and being tentative and just recounting an anecdote. I was able to spin off a bit, and play off of her laugh, and look for more and more and more levels of funny in what I was saying."
MIKE'S FRENETICISM + LILI'S LAUGH = THE 40 YEAR OLD BOY
Schmidt is quick to share credit for his podcast's success with VonSchtupp and David Hernandez, a.k.a. Mex. "He does all the art for the show. And all the music for the show. And produces the commercial spots for the show. And designed all of my website."
As with many podcasts, listeners to his free, weekly show are never lacking for an opinion. "Look, there are people who don't like what I do, and that's fine. But it makes me laugh that they'll say stuff like 'Oh, it's just kind of pathetic to hear him talking by himself.' And I laugh because I just go 'Are you even listening to what I'm doing?'
"Essentially, yeah, I'm talking about myself. But it's a never-ending conversation with myself. It's not like I'm just 'Today I went to the store and I bought some oranges.'
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| Mike at UCB-LA, Photo by LiezlWasHere |
Before you start believing that Mike Schmidt is an insanely confident man, let's go back to talking about the one-man show.
"I'm still trying to get my head around the fact that people want to come and see me talk. It's dumb, it makes no sense, I've been doing this 20 years. It's only a recent phenomenon where I stiff-arm everybody who wants to say 'Oh, we really like this, we want to see this, we're excited about it.' I'm just like 'Yeah, sure.'
"How much of a problem do I have with myself that I can't accept that other people might like it? There were people from Canada, Seattle, from 4 hours away in California, crazy. It was great."
That must be an amazing feeling.
"Yeah, but I also have a shame deal, where I'm also like 'Why did you even bother? That makes no sense.'"
So, performing live is an amazing shame-steeped experience that Schmidt misses terribly. The 40 Year Old Boy provides an outlet, but it's no substitute for being onstage. "[The podcast] makes me want to do it more and more."
"I have to get back to doing standup, and getting out and getting noticed, and hopefully that will grow the podcast and vice-versa. I wish I was doing it every day. It's a gift to be paid to be yourself."
© 2010 CHRISTINE E. TAYLOR
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