Comedian Billy Corbin joins Jemele to discuss his life as a stand up comedian and how he juggles being a dad to two kids, a wife, and being a stand-up comedian. He also talks about what it's like working with Dave Attell and how much money it takes to be a standup comedian, and how to balance it all with a family life. He also discusses how he got into standup comedy and what it s like to have two kids and a wife. He talks about how he balances his family life with his comedy career, and why it s important to have a good night out with your kids. And he talks about why he doesn t want to be an Uber driver. It's a good one, and it's a very funny one. Thanks for listening to Jemele and Alex's first episode! Thank you so much for being a part of the podcast, and we hope you enjoy this episode and have a great rest of the week. See ya next week! -Alex and Jemele Logo by Courtney DeKorte Music by Zapsplat Artwork by Jeff Kaale Theme by Ian Dorsch Subscribe to the podcast "Goodbye Outer Space" by Suneaters and "The Good Ol' Days" by The Good Fight Crew -The Good Life Project, & "Outer Space Music" by is a production of SPOTIFY by & (feat. & The Good Life . in the Bad Girl (featuring , ) and on the Good Life Music by ( ) and . ( ) & , and ( AND can be found on Soundtrack by , "The Bad Girl Is Good, The Bad Girl's Bad Girl, & the Good Girl's Good Life ( ) at ? / or etc. (Thank You, ) and "I'm Too Effort, , etc., ! And + Can't Stop This Is Good? // -- Is This Is Better Than That's Good, I'll See You, I'm Too Good, And I'll Have A Good Place & I'll Hear You Say This, I Can't Have It Like That,
00:01:22.000It's so funny, too, because he's known me probably 15 years, and the other day we're hanging out, this is just me and him bullshitting, and he goes, He's got two kids.
00:01:32.000Their house, you can tell they have two brand new kids.
00:01:35.000Ellis is running around like a lunatic with a balloon running into walls.
00:03:08.000I mean, it was just, it was like I was doing stand-up, not in front of people sitting down, but in front of people in a constant state of moving, sitting down, and getting up.
00:09:26.000I always remember seeing Bill Hicks' Relentless, which is the one he did in the UK. It's a big theater in the UK. With a duster and a cowboy hat.
00:10:15.000I was such a fan that watching him was important to me.
00:10:19.000I wanted to watch it, because I felt like he was a very important figure in comedy.
00:10:23.000Even though Ari Shaffir shits on him, relentlessly.
00:10:25.000But when I was watching him, I was thinking, she's right.
00:10:33.000It's not really making me laugh at all.
00:10:35.000But I know the material's well thought out, and it's very good.
00:10:41.000But it's just, and I recognized it, it's like that one show thing.
00:10:45.000You're filming one show, you got one shot in it.
00:10:47.000See, I think because I come from a baseball sports background, I like having pressure on me.
00:10:54.000I love that feeling of you got one shot.
00:10:56.000So in Philly we did two, and the first one, it rained, the generator went out, and we had to hold the audience in the rain for an hour and a half.
00:11:17.000Like, I remember telling my buddy Tony, who produced it, I go, oh, I've had bad shows where, like, when you're moving, you accidentally stand on the mic, and you go to move, and then the mic moves away from your mouth.
00:13:57.000Right before I did my special, my closing bit I do on the show, on the special, the closing bit, I sat with you for a fucking hour in the back room, because I took it up in the main room, following like D'Elia, and I just said, here we go.
00:14:10.000And I, man, that club can really let you know where the silence is.
00:15:58.000But that one guy got booed offstage in Montreal because he's been performing to fans.
00:16:02.000Oh, well, here's the other thing about that guy.
00:16:05.000That guy goes up on a show where there's all these other comedians on, and then at the end of his set says that comedy shouldn't be about preaching.
00:16:17.000It should be about making people laugh, right?
00:16:53.000If you're from the South, they're really funny.
00:16:55.000Unless someone's doing your shit, unless they're stealing or stealing from somebody else, just do your fucking act.
00:17:03.000Unless something happened before you that's so egregious and ridiculous that you feel like you have to address it when you go on stage because it's just sitting in the room, and to just try to do...
00:17:12.000Ever notice, you know, when you pick up your phone, if you just try to do that and everybody's like, what the fuck?
00:17:17.000You're not gonna address what just happened?
00:17:18.000Sometimes you have to address what just happened.
00:17:21.000Sometimes someone will go on before you and just eat so much shit that you have to say something.
00:17:33.000To tell someone what comedy is and what isn't, I had read an article about that this, I'm assuming she's a gay woman, wrote About trashing Hannah Gadsby.
00:17:43.000And going, hey, we're gay and we're doing stand-up comedy.
00:21:00.000If somebody came up to you, one day, you're gonna have to ask someone whether they're a boy or a girl, and it's gonna be very delicate, and you're gonna have to ask them what their preferred pronouns are.
00:21:11.000It's real soon, like within 10, 15 years, and then everyone's gonna be, there's gonna be a lot of ambiguity, ambiguity, that's a weird word, ambiguity.
00:23:41.000Yeah, you know like there's something dirty about even if everyone is just washing their hands close to each other in the sink It's like everyone's creeped out.
00:23:49.000I can't wait to get the fuck out of here.
00:23:50.000The tension's so thick That's in a bathroom.
00:23:54.000It's crazy that you can't just shit and piss in front of people No, you can't you can't see we grew up where you can shit in front of dudes like we used to shit in front of dudes like if if like I'm still kind of like this but like If me and you were talking, I'm like, hey, come in, I gotta take a shit.
00:24:08.000I would have shat, and you would have stood there, and I would have finished telling you my story.
00:24:10.000I bet Joey Diaz is that kind of guy, too.
00:24:12.000Oh, Joey's taking horrible shits in front of me.
00:24:57.000I was just telling Jamie back, like before you got here, how important those videos were.
00:25:04.000All the videos you shot with Red Band and Ari and Joey, the Joey Karate video, all the stuff you guys used to put online, that's so important to where you are today in my opinion.
00:26:22.000Like, that Mencia video, that was part of why that video was so popular, because it's a long-ass video, but his editing skills were so good.
00:26:36.000The whole thing was, you know, he's a really good editor.
00:26:41.000He's really talented at it, but it's so time-consuming and it drives him nuts that he'd rather just fuck around and do podcasts and have a good time.
00:26:49.000But when he was doing it, like when we were going on the road together and he was filming a lot of stuff and splicing things together and we'd make a video every couple months or something like that.
00:27:56.000I'll do those stories aggressively if I'm running the triathlon, running a marathon, doing a big event.
00:28:01.000And that's, I mean, not to, Tip the hat or whatever or tell you guys my business plan, but that's what I do like I like to do big things and then that's how my stories and then I'll fuck around on the weekend and I'll put up maybe like three stories a day five stories a day and I'll show you my life a little bit but for the most part I Like I try to I try to distance myself from it for two reasons number one it fucks with my eyesight Like if I'm on my phone a lot.
00:28:27.000Yeah, and number two it does cannibalize your life and But what I want to do, I think the next level of this business is honestly going backwards and doing what you and Redband were doing with those videos, but getting yourself out of it and having a guy like Redband,
00:29:08.000He had special effects and music and, you know, what he was doing was he was figuring out a way to make sometimes mundane situations interesting and interesting situations way more interesting.
00:29:50.000So I go through out on the weekend, like when I'm normally killing time looking on the internet, and I just leave all those tabs open on Safari, and then I go in and I just go through and close them and tell you what they are and show you the video I was watching.
00:30:02.000It's a lot of videos of you and all my friends, because I watch all my friends do shit.
00:30:08.000If Bill Burr kills on some interview, I show that.
00:30:12.000A lot of them are the interviews you have with these guys like David Atiyah and Cam Haynes.
00:30:19.000Cam Haynes is all those really inspirational guys.
00:30:23.000I'll pull up videos of them, and then all of a sudden I'll get obsessed with flash floods.
00:34:40.000And what it does is it hides your electrical signal and one of the things about fish is that fish apparently they read your electrical signal like the like you you can take a there's certain machines that like you could hover your hand over them and it'll register that an electrical signals coming off of your body But then when you put this hex suit on you run your hand over the same exact machine it shows nothing and Really?
00:35:06.000So this suit is something that – it's very controversial in the hunting community because some people don't believe it really works because there's no real, clear, absolute studies that it works on animals, but there are clear studies that it shields your body's electrical signal.
00:35:21.000But it works pretty unequivocally on fish.
00:36:43.000Ari's all about living life, and if I can fold that into my family and let my wife understand that, like, you know, once a quarter I gotta do something crazy, you know, then my wife's like, ah, she's cool with it.
00:36:54.000We talked to, uh, what's the ultramarathon runner that you had on?
00:40:39.000And then when I got done, I just, you know, I think a lot of, like I was thinking about last night, I didn't drink, I didn't drink last night, obviously.
00:40:47.000And, um, And I was like, I was in the shower today.
00:40:51.000I had a really hard time sleeping last night.
00:43:00.000It was super helpful and then I learned little tricks like drinking on planes.
00:43:04.000I still may have a few drinks before I get on a plane or a couple drinks on the plane, but the difference is if it's an early morning flight, I don't need a drink to get on the plane.
00:43:51.000Because I was a lunatic on Alpha Brain, because I could feel it really immediately.
00:43:56.000If you take it before, like I take a double dose, so like if I'm like these packets, you're supposed to take one packet, I would take two of these packets.
00:44:18.000Like, you realize you're a dream and they don't wake up.
00:44:22.000They get lucid, and you're in the middle of them.
00:44:25.000You know, the way I describe lucid dreams, lucid dreams are like a delicate bubble that a kid would blow, and you can kind of almost catch it on your hand, and then pop, it pops.
00:47:02.000And there's a lot of people, as bizarre as this sounds, whatever we decided to do with these competitions, that got inspired and lost a ton of weight.
00:52:55.000You ever been on a movie set and you talk to actors about what they're on?
00:52:58.000Well, you know, my Welbutrin wasn't doing it for me, so I got on Lexapro, and I'm on Zoloft, and I really find it just, it's really balancing me out.
00:53:07.000And I started taking this, and I started taking that, and Xanax a little here, and a little there.
00:53:17.000You go to Columbia for eight weeks, and you live in Columbia, and do the, I know Mark Wahlberg did that mile 22. He just lived in Columbia for eight weeks.
00:54:26.000You're never going to be able to be really authentically yourself with all these executives and producers and network notes and all that shit.
00:54:36.000They don't know what the fuck they're doing, man.
00:55:26.000But yet they're telling you what to do.
00:55:29.000And then you have to think about their notes and you got to bring in the gay roommate and the fucking the black neighbor and the hot chick down the street that everybody wants to fuck and everyone's like tripping over.
00:56:11.000They don't understand that every time you break that momentum, now I'm thinking about you and I'm thinking about that camera and I have to reset again.
00:57:50.000You lift up the dick, you pop the knife in, and then you've got to hit the other side of it within like six seconds, and that's a humane death for the crab.
00:59:11.000If you get a piece of beef from a restaurant, like a steak, a lot of times it's aged.
00:59:18.000Because the bacteria on the meat actually starts to break it down, and it makes it more tender, and it actually gives it a lot of that mold that they cut off of it.
00:59:27.000You ever see dry-aged beef before they slice it up?
01:00:54.000It seems like he's throwing that fat away.
01:00:57.000So he keeps a lot of the fat on, and the fat on top is dry-aged.
01:01:03.000So he's not losing any beef on top, he's just losing the sides.
01:01:06.000Well, yeah, you're losing the outside edges in this particular cut, but on some steaks, you know, it depends on how long he's dry-aging it, too.
01:01:15.000Like, when some people go really ham with that shit, they'll, you know, like I said, they'll dry-age for hundreds of days.
01:01:22.000There's a lot of experimental stuff they're doing now.
01:01:25.000I'm going to find this dude on Instagram.
01:04:57.000Sous vide's interesting, man, because you could have something and cook it, like, say, at 125 degrees, which is, like, where you want your steak to be, and you could have it in there for hours.
01:05:07.000Yeah, what you do is you take your steaks, and you've got to vacuum seal them, sous vide them, and then you can just let them sit.
01:05:12.000You're not going to overcook them, and then sear them.
01:05:44.000When you go travel, when you go to Thailand and stuff, do you get foodie and go in and try to find something dangerous and crazy, or do you just pretty much stay?
01:05:51.000I didn't eat bugs, but I ate some really hot food.
01:08:37.000He goes out now and he looks for them.
01:08:39.000He runs to the chicken coop and then he circles the chicken coop, looking to see where these motherfuckers are getting in, see if anybody's around there, see if anybody's slipping.
01:08:47.000But I was on the road and my wife sent me a picture of Marshall with a squirrel in his mouth and she's so happy because she doesn't like squirrels because the squirrels are fucking up all the...
01:09:50.000Yeah, well, he brings things to you always, because he's a retriever, so he has a little box of stuffed toys that he has in the house, and he's the only dog that I've ever had that doesn't mangle every toy you give him, because I've had pit bulls and mastiffs, and you give them a toy, and they just...
01:10:40.000If the kids are playing in the pool, and I'll let him out the door, he runs to the pool, stands on the edge, and then leaps into the water and splashes.
01:13:06.000Marshall's this old old old dog, and I'm gonna have to put him down too, you know?
01:13:11.000It was depressing and the other one Brutus the Shibu Ino English Bulldog mix he was better than Johnny for a long time still I've known for the last two years that they didn't have much time left You know they were they were both struggling hard, but Brutus took a real hard turn over the last few months where He wouldn't even come in.
01:16:14.000Dude, the sweetest dog gets up in bed with you in the morning and just puts her face right up on you and just does one of those big cow breaths.
01:20:57.000If you could go back to one point in your stand-up career, for one year, you've got to live one year in your stand-up career.
01:21:04.000You can't pick right now where you are right now, but you've got to go back to one point when one year, every day you show up and it's either like the store in 97 when you're meeting Ari and everyone and you and Duncan, Duncan's living on your couch or whatever, I don't know what year that was, but around then or...
01:21:19.000You go to the part where it's that, I mean, probably one of the more interesting parts is when you get banned from the store from them and see a shit, and you're literally like, fuck it.
01:21:32.000That's one of the more interesting parts in your story and your life, in my opinion, is when everyone fucking backed out on you, and you were like, nah, I don't go out like that, motherfuckers.
01:22:31.000I think I was probably 22, 23. She's probably somewhere around the same age, 22, 23. And we're just young and it's the summertime and we hung out and we wind up banging in my car.
01:22:45.000I had like a Honda Accord and we didn't even go in the backseat because there was really barely a backseat, right?
01:22:51.000We like folded down the front seat flat.
01:22:54.000And then the windows rolled down and we're just sitting there hanging out and laughing.
01:22:58.000And I remember having this unique moment where I realized, like, this is not going to be my life forever.
01:23:06.000I'm not going to be 22 years old with like $100 in the bank, not knowing what I'm doing, not knowing where I'm going, not knowing what the future holds, but yet okay with it.
01:23:19.000You can only be okay with that for a certain amount of years.
01:23:23.000When you're 45 and you have $100 in the bank and you don't know what you're doing and your career is not really established, you don't really have a clear path, that's scary.
01:24:22.000Right now, you're basically just a couple of years out of high school.
01:24:27.000And, you know, you did a comedy gig, and you're meeting some pretty girl, and you guys are laughing, and you're hanging out, and you're having a good time, and it's summer, and the windows roll down, and the air is warm, and it's just...
01:27:00.000But if you had to go back to any time in your comedy career, when would you go?
01:27:05.000Right when I first started headlining, like that first time I just had kids, they were young, I was making $1,300 a week on the road, and I was so passionate about stand-up.
01:27:16.000I was kind of pretty hacky, I bet, but I just would give everything, every night, you do everything.
01:27:23.000Six shows, Thursday through Sunday, and I'd fly in early for press, and I'd get excited to do press.
01:27:28.000And I'd come in, and I'd just be like...
01:27:30.000And I had my notebook with me all the time, and I was like...
01:27:33.000Every idea was like a brand new field.
01:27:35.000It felt like you just discovered the internet, and every page had so much to offer.
01:27:55.000Like right now I feel like I'm back to this place where I go, like I'm just writing so fucking much where I'm like, oh God, like everything.
01:28:16.000Whereas we're both aware of those people that don't write.
01:28:19.000And they sit around for a long time with the same material and then it goes year after year after year and then it gets staler and staler and flatter and Or the kind of people that write the exact same joke next year.
01:28:32.000Their hours, the same hours, just they say it differently.
01:28:36.000For me, I took this hour so fucking seriously.
01:28:40.000I took it, like I was saying to someone the other day, I did 150 sets.
01:28:45.000I performed that hour 150 times before I did it on Netflix, or before I did it in the truck.
01:29:21.000This sounds silly, and you won't notice this when you watch a special, but because that place is so old, there's little particles of dust everywhere.
01:29:29.000And you can almost see them in the back.
01:29:30.000It looks like little stars in the back.
01:29:51.000So what I do is if I see something, or if something happens, it's usually something happens to me, and then I go, oh, that's the bit.
01:29:56.000And I'll write it in my phone, and I'll just put it in my phone, or I'll also write it in my book.
01:30:01.000Because I bring my book with me on stage, and I'll go to my book, and I'll see the one-word thing.
01:30:05.000And, you know, I say I tell stories, and I know I'm known for telling like 12-minute stories, but like most of my stories are a little tighter now, and what I'm writing is a little tighter, so I kind of work it out on stage.
01:30:53.000Yeah, so I'll write bullet points, like I'm trying to think of the, okay, so like I have a, the joke, my best joke I'm telling right now, without a doubt, is about, it's kind of about you.
01:31:03.000But it's not about you at all, but the opening thing was just some, and the only part I'll tell you is, I went into a Starbucks and I thought I was getting recognized, and a young black kid behind the counter came up to me, he's like, dude, like, oh my god, and I'm like, yeah, and he's like, I'm a huge fan of Joe Rogan's.
01:31:45.000And I find the things that make it rhythmic and the things like, for me, things that catch an audience is like I go, and then he fell down.
01:31:53.000And then when the woman said something, he gets up, leans up, like it's almost the rhythm of the way to say it for me, along with the joke, if that makes any sense.
01:34:44.000My daughters will see me doing it where I'm like, we're out to dinner and something will happen and I'll just be like, Like mouthing to myself, and I'm working the bit.
01:38:21.000You just talk, and it'll voice to text.
01:38:24.000On the plane last night, or wherever I was yesterday night, I was trying to type in white supremacist, and it came up white supreme hoodie.
01:38:35.000And I thought, oh, that's funny that you'd try to, like, I ordered a white supremacist hoodie on accident.
01:38:42.000There's nothing to it right now, but I wrote it and I go, all right, we got that in the pocket.
01:39:12.000And you've got to water those seeds, and you've got to take chances with them, and you've got to know how many of those dud seeds you can plant in a set while people are sitting there paying attention.
01:39:21.000You've got to give them real bits, too.
01:40:55.000Howie Mandel went on stage at the Laugh Factory once, and he was talking about how scared he was that he could say something on stage and someone could tell his bosses, because he does a family show, and that he could get fired.
01:41:37.000But when I was watching him say that, I was like, that is the craziest thing I've ever heard.
01:41:42.000He's worried about getting fired for saying something on stage, like saying fuck in his act or talking about something in his act that someone deems too inappropriate for a family show.
01:41:52.000And he can lose this gig at America's Got Talent.
01:42:37.000And I was like, man, fucking, I wish you worked for the New York fucking Times.
01:42:43.000Like, that is the greatest compliment, but...
01:42:46.000I mean, I talked to Jamie about it after.
01:42:48.000I was like, I don't mind shooting content, making free content, putting it out on my own watch, like going to swim with orcas in Norway, and me shooting it, and doing it, or me and you going spearfishing in Miami, and covering it, and shooting it, and editing it, so that it's badass music.
01:43:03.000And I don't even care if it's monetized, but it's something that people watch and are like, fuck, that's badass.
01:43:35.000So yeah, it's nice to know that you go, like you say something fucked up on stage, and your only repercussion is the one chick that's like, that was fucked up.
01:44:45.000It's like when we all started doing this podcast with you and showing up at your house, the little things we'd see, we'd be like, I remember Tom was saying something about, remember sitting on that couch?
01:45:08.000Yeah, after I got it out of my podcast studio, I had it shipped over to Ari, and then he used it as his couch, and then I think he sold it online.
01:45:36.000I had a lot of people come to my house, though, and it was weird.
01:45:39.000It was cool when Bourdain was over, or Jim Jeffries is over, but every now and then I'd have someone over, I'd be like, I don't even know if I like this guy in my house.
01:45:49.000Some fucking weirdo who I brought on the podcast, and now they've been to my house.
01:46:27.000What we should do is we should get another space.
01:46:30.000Build it up just like this space and have one that's got like four studios in it and a bunch of us can use them and you just pay a certain amount of rent per month Man, that's where I'm at.
01:46:39.000I look at and Jamie and I talked for a little bit before you got here But like you know men's health covered this but I shot the whole fucking thing like I shot all of it I shot the Spartan race and edited it and And it's fun for me.
01:46:52.000I just went around and set up a camera, go do the event, grab the camera, set up the camera, do the thing, give the camera to Mike Bertolino, do the thing, and I did that with the marathon, covered the whole fucking thing on my phone.
01:47:04.000It's like, if I could get myself a junior fucking editor, bro, I'll put out content every day.