Comedy journalist interviews comedy journalist about covering comedy in the 21st century!
Above: Jeff Ross and Dave Attell roasting Julie Seabaugh for her 40th birthday party at The Comedy Store’s Belly Room in February 2020.
Julie Seabaugh grew up on a farm and discovered stand-up when Dave Attell performed during her senior year at the University of Missouri, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism. In 2003, after moving to New York City, Seabaugh launched her earliest independent effort into comedy journalism with the online magazine, Two Drink Minimum. A career with alt-weeklies followed, with stops across the country from the Village Voice in NYC to the Riverfront Times in St. Louis, Las Vegas Weekly and LA Weekly. In 2018, she published her first book, Ringside at Roast Battle: The First Five Years of L.A.’s Fight Club for Comedians, and her love of Mitch Hedberg led to producing/hosting 2020’s Hope on Top: A Mitch Hedberg Oral History for SiriusXM’s Comedy Central Channel. Seabaugh caught up with me over Zoom to talk about her latest project, co-directing and producing the documentary Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11, which premieres on VICE TV on Sept. 8, just before the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that took down the World Trade Center. Her film also will have a commemorative screening on Sept. 11, 2021, at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Seabaugh spoke with dozens of comedians for the documentary, and now she speaks to me.
I first heard about Seabaugh in the very first days of The Comic’s Comic, because I launched the site while on my first work trip to Las Vegas for HBO’s The Comedy Festival in November 2007. Seabaugh was writing for Las Vegas Weekly at the time. I didn’t meet her then and there, but Todd Jackson at Dead-Frog (who was there) talked her up a bunch and even had her freelance some pieces for his site back then. She and I eventually did meet and see each other a bunch, as there still aren’t that many full-time comedy journalists in the United States in 2021, and there certainly weren’t in the late 2000s. At one point, she had some of the handful of others contributing to a review site called Chucklemonkey (RIP). She worked for Brown Paper Tickets in association with Doug Stanhope for a while (I’m not sure what she was doing for them exactly, but she was there in Austin at SXSW 2011 when Stanhope recorded a podcast with myself and Brody Stevens that somehow vanished into the ether without ever seeing the internet airwaves. SIGH). Seabaugh even lived in my neighborhood in Queens for a little bit, but since headed to Los Angeles, where she has stayed for the past several years.
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Here’s a slightly condensed and edited transcript from our podcast chat!
Sean L. McCarthy: Congrats on the movie. Last things first: What’s your 9/11 story? You don’t talk about your own 9/11 story in the movie. What’s yours?
Julie Seabaugh: Oh, yeah. I was a junior at the University of Missouri in journalism school. And I only had one class on Tuesdays, which was an 11 o’clock, intermediate writing class with Professor Steve Friedman, and we all went to class and complained that we had to be there, and he led us out early, and me and my friends went across the street to the journalism bar that we kind of had all claimed for ourselves, the Heidelberg, and got drunk the rest of the day. And that was my 9/11. Yeah, so I was still back in Missouri, I was not in New York. I’d actually been to New York a few different times as part of the Magazine Club. We would always visit New York every February and visit alumni at their offices and network and learn how to be a journalist in New York…we went to Newsweek, Esquire…
Me: I guess if you’re in a magazine club, New York City is the place to go.
Seabaugh: We actually had one of those trips and stayed down at the Embassy Suites right there by the World Trade Center…But yeah, it was also at that time, getting The Onion delivered to my party house in college, on North 8th Street in Columbia, Missouri. Because it was huge at the time, you know, all the comedy writers loved it. Cool college students loved it…but I remember getting the 9/11 issue that they did a week and a half later delivered on my door and just being, you know, having the experience that I realized so many years later that a lot of other people had.
And I very much remember having that visceral gut feeling of like, OK, comedy is still going to be able to happen. We can kind of take steps towards normalcy and that issue is actually when I bonded over with my co-director Nick years later, in 2016, when we started making the film — that now at this point, predates the Trump presidency.
Me: I was gonna say, you started working on the documentary before the Roast Battle book, right?
Seabaugh: Yes, yeah. The book came out 2018 For the fifth anniversary of Roast Battle so yeah the, the documentary… it switched on and off from front burner to back burner, several times over those five years. But yeah, we started filming in Montreal, at Just for Laughs in 2016, and kind of pieced it all together, just the two of us on our own for a good four years and so we, you know got connected with Pulse Films, who has you know The History of Comedy on CNN and a lot of other great documentaries, mostly music stuff, and now we’re kind of able to break them into the comedy documentary world, and they hooked us up with Hazy Mills, Sean Hayes’s production company, and finally Vice, which is where we’re going to be premiering Sept. 8, 2021.
Me: But getting back to September of 2001. At the time, you’re a journalism student at one of the probably three places that you’re supposed to go as a journalism student.
Seabaugh: They tell you that over and over.
Me: But anyhow, you already knew you wanted to be a journalist. How did September 11, and that ensuing month, impact how you felt about journalism?
Seabaugh: Ah, interesting. I always knew I wanted to live in New York. Anyway, I say this as someone who now lives in Los Angeles, moved to New York, you know, four times. And I mean still, as a journalism student you think you know it all. And you’re going to get out of there and you’re going to conquer the world. I don’t remember if it was necessarily the coverage of 9/11 was connected to what I wanted to do with my life at that point, because I hadn’t actually discovered comedy. Yet, it took until another year senior year when Dave Attell came and did a show there. I was more at that time writing about film and music, and then everything post-Dave Attell was like, oh I’m supposed to write about comedy.
Me: He was your bright light experience.
Seabaugh: He got me into it. But at the time also, you know, journalism was more important than it was today. And what you saw was, you know, trustworthy, and it didn’t have the spin on it. There’s definitely a bit of a juxtaposition with what we see today and I know you deal with this too, you know, journalism now is a bit more about having a hot take and opinions and listicles and, you know, having some quotes out of context and reacting to it. It’s not even journalism. It’s content. So part of the thing we tried to do in the film, was we have a lot of highlighted newspaper headlines from the time when journalism, like was important though this is actually before social media, how we learn and connect the two things. See I don’t know if it necessarily at that time, journalism had as much of a huge impact, but making the film it definitely reminded me of when, when journalism was a bit more respected as a career.
Me: You were in the magazine club. You were probably aspiring to be at Esquire or Newsweek. Is that what you were intending when you did graduate?
Seabaugh: It wasn’t at first, and then you kind of quickly realize, I maybe don’t have the right attitude to have a full-time, work in an office, journalism job and do the stories that you’re assigned to do, you know, when an editor, tells you you have to do something… I know back in the day they could actually have a career in real life, and just you know, staying out at night and hanging with comics, I kind of realized that it would make more sense to pitch things freelance. When I moved to New York, 2003, there was really no one covering comedy in a full time capacity. It was shoved in there with the music and calendar listings.
Me: So how did you decide to start Two Drink Minimum? To start up your own magazine club online?
Seabaugh: Two Drink Minimum was the online comedy magazine I started back then, I was at Carolines, again seeing Dave Attell. And if you remember they used to have those old headshots, that would come up on the TV monitors, you’re like ‘Whoa! Look at this person back in the day.’ And it’s like, I wonder who has actually followed Dave Attell’s career as a whole, or any comedian, you know, because, again, at this time, comedians were all sort of just lumped in together as comedy, and you would see a show at a comedy club and have no idea who was playing. It took a long time for comedians to kind of establish their own fan bases to the point where people would go see them because they like their style and their outlook on life. So sitting there thinking about that, it’s like, I would love to see someone cover comedians like they do musicians or filmmakers, and that’s where the old Two Drink Minimum came from.
Me: So how is that set up in 2003? I know Blogger dot com was kind of like the big one. I guess TypePad and WordPress were around. What were you using to publish?
Seabaugh: I had a friend Daniel who was actually with me at the Dave Attell show at the University of Missouri. And after the Attell show I like woke up on his bathroom floor puking because he’d gotten us all drunk on Jägermeister. So Dan already understood my love for comedy and he was also in New York at that time. He was a web designer, so he basically did everything for me. And the technical aspects, we probably have to refer to him. I just put everything together on, you know, the typical Word, and he did the actual magic.
Me: OK, now did you have any sort of budget or did you not care about finances at that time?
Seabaugh: Everybody was working for free, including myself, yeah. It was like all things, a labor of love, with very, very little financial compensation, and probably because of that it only lasted about like two years and then I got kind of pulled up into the Village Voice media chain, and became an editorial fellow there and moved back to Missouri and got a job at The Riverfront Times in St. Louis and from there I was in Vegas and then LA and New York and the magazine kind of didn’t survive all those transitions.
Me: So when you were working for all those alt-weeklies, whether it was St. Louis, or Vegas, New York and LA, were you always laser-focused on comedy? Or were you doing other other things for them at the time?
Seabaugh: At Las Vegas Weekly I was a staff entertainment reporter kind of my only quote unquote job I’ve actually ever had as an adult. We did go into the office and you have the meetings and you get to pitch things and you have to wear shoes. I remember that being an issue. I was trying to wear flip flops all the time. So, I was covering all things in Vegas but obviously I always had a soft spot for comedy and I would always preview all the shows that were coming through town and catch them all and even think I had a little comedy blog for Las Vegas Weekly for a while but again that was another two year stint.
Me: How did you decide it was time to move on and then become what you’ve been doing since then, which has just been doing your own stuff?
Seabaugh: If you remember 2007, 2008, the financial collapse was sort of when journalism took a big nosedive because if nobody has any money in their advertising budgets, they don’t advertise in the newspapers and then newspapers get small and they lay people off. So I didn’t really have much of a choice in that one. But at that point, I just think I had established so many contacts and knew so many people, and was done with working in offices where you couldn’t wear flip flops, but it just made more sense to yeah, just keep pitching and see what happened.
Me: You picked a good time because that’s right when comedy began to boom again, the digital boom of comedy, because there was, there were points where like you had, like, back-to-back covers of the Village Voice.
Seabaugh: There was even a week where I had Roast Battle cover of LA Weekly and Village Voice cover Bridget Everett in the exact same week. That was a good one.
Me: What was the first time you experienced Roast Battle? Because obviously you fell in love with it enough to write the definitive book about it.
Seabaugh: So Roast Battle started in the summer of 2013, if I’m remembering it all correctly, and I kept hearing from, I remember, Brody Stevens was actually one of the ones who was like, ‘Oh, you got to go see it.’ I think Josh Adam Meyers was another one, but people kept saying yeah you get to see the show and, you know, like, you hear that a lot. Like, there’s a lot of shows I gotta see, I know. Whatever. I’ll get around to it. And I was there for something else. I was downstairs and you can kind of hear it upstairs, you know all the people yelling and chanting and oh my gosh and there’s a DJ going. And finally, you know, when you make your way up the stairs for the first time it is standing room only, packed, sweating, and there’s people jumping around and you’re like what is this show? I’ve never seen anything like this. And the more I watched, the more I liked it for just the way it’s kind of served as an ultimate equalizer. There are things we all don’t like about ourselves, and instead of having anxiety about them, it’s better just kind of get them out in the open and laugh at them, and we all feel better for it. I mean, not me personally, I’ve never done a roast battle.
Me: Jeff Roses or Brian Moses never convinced you to do one?
Seabaugh: Nobody’s ever asked me. They know better than that. I did judge the week when the book came out just for, you know, promotional stuff and I did all right you know. I made fun of Jeff a little bit…I just always appreciated the fact that it was very, the most amazingly diverse show I’d always seen, and nothing was off limits, and at the end of it, you hug, and there’s a real kind of community behind it, even though it doesn’t seem like there would be on the surface. I think the only time I’ve actually ever been onstage in a comedy capacity was at the end of my 40th birthday roast last year in the Belly Room also.
Me: So you did get roasted.
Seabaugh: Yes, yeah, Attell was there, and that was like the best birthday present ever. It was the best. But I wrote all those jokes myself. And I just kind of had that little sampling. I’ve never really had an interest in being onstage. It was always about the writing aspect of it and turning people onto comedy they should be aware of.
Me: So having said that, when you hear comedians who are upset about criticism, say that critics are just wannabe comedians, how do you feel when you see them lash out at criticism?
Seabaugh: I tend to ignore it. And then also remember them and never talk to them again. Like, I’m not gonna be involved in that conversation, I have better things to do, but there’s all, there’s a few comics who have said things over the years, not about me necessarily but just comedy reviewing in general, and I’m like yeah, you’re off my radar, officially just because I don’t want to deal with it. If comics can say that, you know, make these projections about what people think and feel about them, then they should be able to kind of turn it back around to and realize that no you’re actually wrong. That’s not at all what I’m thinking. Yeah, I don’t. And to be honest I don’t even really catch up with a lot of that stuff anymore. I tend to not be on social media these days and read comedy coverage. I feel like I’m trying to finally less make my career about responding to things that happen in the comedy industry and more things that other people will respond to. Hence me jumping into the movie world.
Me: Both writing a book, and directing and producing and making a movie. Both are these long projects that allow you to get out of, like you said earlier about the current state of journalism, like the content machine or the attention economy, perhaps, like everything is about getting the clicks so we need to get your attention so we can get your clicks, but once you take yourself out of that equation to work on, like, five or six years on making a documentary, you’re so focused on that, you don’t even have to worry about all of the nonsense that’s going on about cancel culture or whatever the latest gripe that comedians have.
Seabaugh: Attention culture, that’s precisely it. And, you know you’re always told when you get those inspirational advice quotes of like, just do your own thing, man, don’t worry about anybody else, you know, create what you want to see in the world. And it took a while for me to finally figure out like, oh, that’s exactly what this means, like we’re here for a limited time, and our brains are only functioning for so long, why am I worried about all this other nonsense? I’m just gonna go on to the next project that I give a shit about, as opposed to all these other tiny little stories that are just kind of paying rent in my head. At the time, there’s got to be something more to it.
Me: Both your book and the documentary, they both kind of delve with the same idea about the idea of, is there a line that you can or cannot cross in comedy. You know because roasting is all about like deliberately crossing the line but it’s with consent, right, because the people have consented the battle so it’s like all rules are off except it’s mostly kind because you have to hug at the end. But with Too Soon, it’s like, even now 20 years later, if you were to go on social media Julie Seabaugh, you would see that we’re having the same exact debates, except now we have social media to have these debates 24/7. Now, instead of just through the lamestream media about. I mean, I remember, like, when I was working at The Arizona Republic. I wrote a story about comedy and 9/11 for April Fool’s of 2002. To see how much the conversation had like spun all the way around by April. Whether irony was really dead. But cancel culture, wokeness, social justice warriors, it’s all kind of still that that question of is it too soon? Are certain things off limits. Is there something about that question that annoys you or excites you?
Seabaugh: I always been drawn, as someone from rural Missouri who grew up in a very conservative white area that worshiped Rush Limbaugh, been very interested in finding where’s the line between the truth that we’re told, and the truth that we discover for ourselves, which is kind of why I was gravitating towards comedy, you know, it’s all about people’s experiences and perceptions and conveying those to an audience and hope it connects. There’s like nothing I love more than like being in the back of the room and seeing a very, like, diverse comedy crowd from all different areas of life. You’re coming together and it’s one moment and they’re laughing at the same jokes, like that is a form of truth. And I think the biggest takeaway from these projects for me is that you can’t. And other people will take on your truth. So that’s kind of something we see debated online these days, where it’s like, no, this is right, no this is right, there’s, there’s a lot of black and white, that goes on in Twitter where I’d say things are so much more grayer than that. And the biggest message, I think, to take away from Too Soon is not that all comedy is inappropriate, anytime we want it to be. It’s more that you can’t tell people what they can, again, and we’re never going to find there’s not an answer, it’s just, this is part of, you know, something that is continually evolving in society. If you think about the things that, you know like Bill Hicks, and George Carlin and Lenny Bruce were talking about, you know, they helped shift what is socially acceptable to think and talk about. Comedians are always on the cutting edge of that, but it’s, it’s something that we’re shifting to. So, yeah, in my mind, the question isn’t what is too soon. It’s that we should be more aware of the fact that other people have different opinions than you do and you can’t force yours on others.
Me: What do they say about opinions, everyone has one. So to leave this on a lighter note, perhaps, is it too soon for me to ask you what you now think the truth is regarding the Amazing Johnathan?
Seabaugh: Oh my gosh. Wow. Are people gonna know what you’re talking about? Well, yeah, I don’t know how familiar people are with this but there were two Amazing Johnathan documentaries made, and I accidentally showed up in one of them, I would say the better of the two, where I had previously done a cover story on him for Las Vegas Weekly — which I won second place in the Nevada Press conference for.
https://lasvegasweekly.com/news/2015/jan/15/body-failing-mind-fire-amazing-johnathan-legacy/
Me: It was a great story.
Seabaugh: It sounds probably like bragging, but it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, honestly. And I kind of always stayed in touch with him as he was, you know he has, he has a history of his heart is failing and, you know, it’s been happening for a while, I think it was was it 2014 when he announced that he was dying on WTF with Marc Maron. So then I kind of followed up with him and did the 2015 cover story if I’m getting my dates right. And then a few years later I saw he was going to be in Ventura and caught up with him to do a little q&a for KNPR. And you can kind of see the back of my head in the film. And then I went backstage and interviewed him and he was talking about how he’s going to get these famous producers to produce his film, which was news to the person who was actually filming. And when he saw the story that I wrote about who was working on his movie, the filmmaker was quite surprised and sort of spun his film off in a different direction. What I saw of Jonathan when I was spending a week with him in Vegas, was that he was actually in pretty rough shape. Tons of meds everywhere. I saw his toe falling off. Which I, you know, in hindsight, could have maybe been a prop. But the real thing that can convinces me that he was dying, and has kind of not found a cure for, but found a way to postpone an untimely death, I don’t know if I’m actually legally allowed to talk about. It involves stem cells from places.
Me: It’s covered in at least one of the documentaries, so you’re good.
Seabaugh: Right, yeah, so he that he had definitely talk a little bit about heroin with me and yeah I and he ended up having, he sold a ton of stuff, which is I think also in the documentary, it’s been a while since I’ve watched it, but he used to have like two warehouses full of stuff. And he sold it all to pay his medical bills. So, I do believe there’s definitely something there, but it has been a while since I’ve thought about it. Although now I’m wanting to like delve into it again.
Me: Yeah, that’s the next project.
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