Mike Mulloy [Interview]

Happy Wednesday Everyone! I’ll be damned if we don’t have a fantastic comedian to showcase today. This is a guy that I have admired from a far for quite some time, thanks to a string of events that have led me down a comedy rabbit hole over the last 5 years or so. It all started about 4 years ago when I discovered a little thing called a “podcast”, which has allowed a displaced American comedy fan the opportunity to listen to the modern philosophers of our era that are comedians, just talk about shit. Somewhere along the way, I discovered a brilliant comedian named Sean Jordan, who informed me on this very site about an up and coming podcast he was regularly appearing on entitled “All Fantasy Everything”….and it truly has rocked my fucking simple world since. And today’s guest is a man who is heavily engrained in this world that we should all know and love. It’s motherfuckin’ Mike Mulloy, Y’all!!

Mike is a salt of the earth, no holds barred comic with a brilliant outlook on everything imaginable. Often referred to as “enemy of the podcast”, both on and off mic over at “All Fantasy Everything”, it is his brilliantly abrasive and fuck it all comedic style that is so damn intriguing. And while the digital stain on humanity that Twitter probably isn’t the best product to judge someone’s talent within, I will say that if you are not following @fakemikemulloy on Twitter, you are missing the fuck out people. Mulloy’s take on anything you can imagine is destined to be hilarious, and one of the few reasons I continue to monitor the chaos that ensues on that damn website.

In more recent months, Mike Mulloy has teamed up with 3 other established members of the “All Family Everything” to create what sounds to be like the best comedy show in the Los Angeles area, which is called Faded. He created the show alongside the aforementioned Sean Jordan, fellow past guest David Gborie, and possible future guest Zak Toscani (and by possible, I mean definite. Like, this Friday). The show takes place at Blue Rooster Art Supply every Friday, and If I weren’t literally ten thousand miles away, I would be there every fucking weekend. The always have the best guests, including our dear friend and past guest Christi Chiello, and just a grip of comedians who I am dying to have on the site as well, including The Lucas Brothers, Bri Pruett, Kenny DeForest, Kyle Kinane, Roman Rivas II, Sam Jay, and literally dozens more. Seriously Folks, if you aren’t at Blue Rooster each and every Friday whilst living in the L.A. area, what the fuck is your problem?

Mulloy also has another damn fine and truly unique show entitled On Deck Comedy, which we will discuss in great detail below, which is insanely unique and a testament to the brilliant mind of Mike Mulloy. The show also occurs at Blue Rooster Art Supply, check out details HERE. Past guests have included hilarious folks like our very dear friends Amy Miller & Lydia Popovich, as well as wonderful comedians like Courtney Karwal, Rhea Butcher, Chris Cubas, Megain Gailey, and so many more! We will get into it!

So let’s get right into it, shall we? Please enjoy some wonderful words from the absolutely brilliant Mike Mulloy! Enjoy!

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Photo by Ed Ballart. Taken at Faded.

When did you discover that you were a hilarious human being, and that you were destined to make people laugh for a living?

I’ve just always been someone who’s loved to laugh.  I think my love of comedy came more from liking to laugh than it did from making others laugh.  I love to make others laugh, but I also just like thinking about the things that make me laugh.  Just thinking about weird, dumb shit has always been something I’ve enjoyed.  That’s really the basis of all my comedy.  This made me laugh.  I hope it makes you laugh, but at the end of the day it makes me laugh.  When a joke or a premise stops making me laugh, I usually stop doing it because an audience can tell when you’re not having fun with a bit anymore.

Though I have not been fortunate enough to catch On Deck live, the concept of it seems hilarious, and you always seem to have very funny people appearing on the show. Can you tell us how you came up with the idea of this show? And for our readers who may be unaware, what exactly is On Deck Comedy?

Jamel Johnson, one of my cohosts, had just moved to LA and I really wanted to work with him.  He’s honestly one of the funniest mother fuckers on a planet and I can’t understand how the town isn’t all over his dick.  Sometimes spending so much time with him makes me forget how damn funny he is.  But when he got to town I just knew I had to come up with something for us to work on.  We were at my place just chilling and drinking and smoking and trying to come up with what our show was gonna be and On Deck was what came from it.  I couldn’t even explain the show when we first came up with it.  In fact, we barely knew what it was during our first show.  We almost bailed on the whole concept in the first show because the comics were confused, but luckily the first team was Dan St Germain, Debra DiGiovanni and Matt Donaher, all fantastic comics, who insisted they figure it out.  And they did.  They did and they killed it and then told me how much fun they had and I knew it was something we had to stick with.

Basically the show is two teams of three comedians, doing jokes for 27 minutes as a team (Like the 27 outs in baseball).  Each jokes we give a single, double, triple or home run (with the rare out, that’s only happened twice in the nearly 3 years we’ve been doing this) and the team with the most runs wins.  It’s silly and it’s fun and you get to see comics working together which a. you rarely see b. you’d rarely see the comics we group together working together.  It’s just fun and different.

When we set out to build the show, I wanted something different. I was on so many show cases where the host would bring me on and just leave the room.  My thinking was “how can you expect these people in the audience to give a shit about my set when you, the person who booked me, doesn’t even care?”  So I wanted to make something that forced me as the host to sit there and watch the comics I booked.  I wanted something where if the audience was ever in doubt about how they should be reacting to a joke, they can look to us at the table and see we’re laughing.  It’s really just about putting comics over and making them seem important.

I also know, but again haven’t had the privilege of witnessing in person as I am about 10,000 physical miles away from L.A., that you have another show features our friends, past guests David Gborie and Sean Jordan, as well as future guest Zak Toscani. Can you tell us a bit about this show and why anyone who lives in the Los Angeles area is a mark ass hater for not attending yet? What are they/we missing out on?

Honestly, I can’t even explain Faded, it’s just this wild positive vibe.  Stand up comedy can be scary as an audience member for someone that doesn’t attend shows regularly.  A lot of times people think the comics are gonna fuck with them and that’s really not what we’re going for.  We just want to put comics who we love in front of them and show they why we love them.  But the show is really becoming a hang out for so many people, comics and audience members alike.  There’s some weeks that we have comics come hang and I look in the back of the room and think “Shit, we have been comics just hanging out here than some other shows have booked tonight”.  We have people who come every week.  We have people who come to Faded one night and come to On Deck the very next night.  We have people who FLY IN just to experience Faded.  This show has existed for 17 weeks, that’s insane that people are that committed to it this early in the process, but it’s by design.  That’s exactly what we wanted to create.  Los Angeles is a scary place.  It’s really hard to make friends here that aren’t based around “what you’re here for”.  But in 17 weeks we’ve had people just coming and meeting up with the friends that they’ve made at the show which is really insane to think about.  We’re just trying to build a community.  The fact that I get to do it with my best friends is really a bonus.

Photo by TWS friend, John Michael Bond, taken at Faded.

Holy Shit, Folks. I am beyond excited to share

You have managed to engrain yourself in the very charismatic and cult-for-good-dudes podcast that happens to also feature the solid performers mentioned previously, David Gborie and Sean Jordan, that is known as All Fantasy Everything. This podcast introduced me to your comedic talents, and I’m sure others as well. With that in mind, I am curious to know what has been your favorite pick that you have made in your multiple appearances on the show?

Probably the “Create a movie one”, cuz it was the only one that I really prepared for and thought out thoroughly.  A cast of all black women and then Elton John as the villain caught people off guard but then it all made sense to them when I painted the whole picture.

While I know it is very cool to shit on the disease that is the website Twitter, I have to admit that it is because of folks like you that I keep coming back to it. You are definitely one of the best “Twitter Follows” I have ever encountered. And I am curious to know just how much effort you put into Tweets? And have you managed to have something from Twitter actually make it into your stand up? Or is it a completely separate animal? 

I’ve scaled back on Twitter considerably lately because I think it’s melting my brain some days, but a lot of times I’ll test a concept on there to see if what I think is funny is funny to anyone but me.  If something really clicks, then I might look into expanding on it in my stand up, but most of what I do on Twitter is just fucking with people. Whether it’s bad people who I think need to be brought down a peg or silly traps that I set for unsuspecting people to get caught in.  As dumb as Twitter is, I probably owe everything I have to it.  Ian found me on Twitter.  He really didn’t know me that well, we’d done one or two shows together, but when he was writing a sports comedy for Comedy Central, I was one of the people he reached out to because he liked my sports tweets.  Without that, who knows if I would have become as close with him, Sean, David and Zak, but I really don’t know what I’d be doing if I didn’t have those guys in my life now.

What does the future hold for you? Anything you would like to plug to our readers?

Honestly, who knows?  I think about my career a lot differently than I did when I was starting out, even differently than I did when I first got to LA.  I spend less time thinking about how to get into doors and more time focusing on just building my own thing.  The things I’m given can be taken away, the things I build myself really can’t. So I don’t really want to be at the mercy of the decision makers in this business, because most of them don’t know their asshole from a hole in the ground. I’m gonna build my own audience and figure out how I can deliver things to them myself instead of finding someone else to give me a platform to their audience.  My audience really does a lot of the work for me, because most of them have been watching me do this shit for a while and they want to see me succeed.  If I just grow my base, I’ll be fine.

Nothing really to plug, just Faded and On Deck.  Keep an eye on the Blue Rooster as a whole because I’m basically turning that into my own personal comedy club house.  We did a live All Fantasy Everything there this weekend, sold out in under a day and was just an amazing experience.  Really hoping we do some more of those and bring some other fun shows into the space.

What was the last thing that made you smile?

I’ve pretty much been smiling all weekend.  It’s really cool seeing something you created is turning into the vision you first had for it.  I feel pretty unstoppable at the moment and that feeling makes it hard not to.  Just knowing that it makes my enemies sick helps too.