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Thursday Transcripts: Nick Vatterott

Real Time with a former Andy Kaufman Award winner

Not all Andy Kaufman Award winners are created equal.

But Nick Vatterott seemed a worthy winner back in 2011, and a decade later, too, releasing his comedy special, Disingenuous, unto an unsuspecting world of comedy fans at the end of December 2021.

You can get a glimpse of that here in the trailer for Disingenuous:

It’s currently available to rent or purchase from the following platforms:

Not that I’ve ever found Nick to be literally disingenuous. More hilarious and groundbreaking, or rule-breaking, but not disingenuous.

I mean, look at him looking at me look at fireworks on the Fourth of July way back in 2015 from the roof of the old Creek and the Cave back when it was still in Long Island City!

Suffice it to say, I had a fun time finding out more about Nick’s background in comedy and how he found his particular voice.

If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so here, complete with all of the podcast links if need be:

Piffany
Last Things First: Nick Vatterott
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2 years ago · 1 like · Sean L. McCarthy

And now, here’s an edited and slightly condensed transcript of our chat!

You’re in St. Louis with your family for the holidays. But you don’t consider yourself a St. Louis comic at all, right?

No, no, no, not at all. There wasn’t really a scene here when I started, you know, and there’s like this amazing scene here now, which is very cool. It’s really awesome what’s happening here now. But I consider myself a Chicago comic. I always feel like people were like, ‘What’s in the water in Chicago, man?’ Well, it’s like, it was more what wasn’t in the water in St. Louis, you know, and there was a lack of a comedy scene. Same in Iowa. All the people I knew, well, half of them were not from Chicago. Chicago just had places you could go up that so that’s why we all went there.

Well, there are some great St. Louis comics. Greg Warren. Nikki Glaser. Tommy Johnagin. Before your generation, Kathleen Madigan. Cedric the Entertainer.

Yes. Sklar Brothers are from there too. And those are all such great comics.

So did you head straight to Chicago because of comedy?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because I mean, you know, me and Mizzou, were like, you know, we were not really seeing each other anymore, but still living in the same house. Our relationship had kinda like petered out. And I was like, literally living in Columbia, not going to school anymore. Second City had come through Columbia, from Chicago, and I had done the open mic contest at Deja Vu Comedy Club, which is the only comedy club in the world that is the same name as a strip club. Why they named it that? I don’t know. It’s like calling it Private Eyes Comedy Club or something like that.

Well, comedians have been compared to strippers before.

Who bares more!? Just kind of putting yourself out there. For other people’s amusement.

Being vulnerable, being exploited.

Giving all your money to somebody else if you ever make any.

Okay, so Second City came through, you won a contest. So when you went to Chicago was it with the plan to join Second City?

Oh yeah. Didn’t win the contest at all. Did very badly in the contest, but it started a little bit of a fire. I feel, of me wanting to be — like I’m enjoying my time in Columbia. I was writing a column for the school newspaper, My Humble Opinion.

That’s the title of it.

Yeah, that was before Substack. You do Piffany, right?

Yeah.

And how fun is that? It’s got to be so fun to do, to have this outlet to like, you know, speak your mind. And I feel like so years before you had stuff like that, it was like writing in the school newspaper. And that was fun. And I did the improv group. And I was like, I want to do this. This is what I like doing. And the school stuff isn’t working. Second City went through. Let’s go to Chicago, because I assumed there was a comedy scene there and I knew Second City was there. So I drove there in my 1970 Volkswagen Bus, went straight to a Second City class. Got out. Then tried to find a job and then started dancing around the stand-up scene. Second City said there was this place called improvOlympic. So I go to improvOlympic and asked, ‘Do you guys do stand-up here?’ They were like no, but you want to go to this place called The Lyon’s Den. I would go to The Lyon’s Den and find that that would be like one of the most influential things in my entire life. Where I would meet Hannibal (Buress) and Kumail (Nanjiani) and Pete Holmes and all these amazing comics. Oh, I like this. And also in Chicago, too. And I feel like this kind of is like a little bit influential and my special which just came out. I think in Chicago, we didn’t know what alternative stand-up was. We didn’t know how to do it. So we kind of guessed. And I think a lot of crazy stuff came out of The Lyon’s Den, where you just do whatever the heck you want.

OK, so in Chicago. There was also this group called the Blerds.

Yeah, absolutely.

But you weren’t part of that, right?

No, no, no. I think I wrote like a guest thing, because Blerds originally was blog nerds, that was the hyphenated word or whatever, but like, they wound up doing videos later, which again, you know, I think that inspired Mash Up, the TV show. But it was originally like just writing things. I think I wrote a couple things for them. And then helped out with like a videos but that was like a different core group of people. Those guys are all so very funny. And that was a huge thing in Chicago when they like all went out to LA to like, you know, shoot a thing and they started you know, they were very great at what they were doing at getting stuff on the Internet.

I’m curious about about the way the Chicago scene was in the mid aughts. There was that collective. Then there were other people like you and Hannibal and Kyle Kinane. Did everybody fit together? Was it cliquey?

Oh, no, I feel like we all fit together very well. I was doing other things that other people weren’t part of, but I would bring them in when I could, you know, we were all kind of doing our groups. I was doing Heavyweight, a sketch group. I was in like, you know, 12 different sketch groups throughout my time in Chicago, I was doing as on probably 15 different improv teams.

Right. There was an improv team when you guys first came to New York.

Oh yeah, me and Bob Kulhan and Micah Sherman.

And TJ Miller?

Chuckle Sandwich. Yeah, that was an improv group in Chicago, and then I kind of hopped in with them, you know, in the latter half of their existence that we did like the DC Comedy Festival together, and stuff in New York. I think we might have done a Del Close Marathon show or something like that.

That’s where I saw you. Were all those sketch and improv groups… were you and your and your comedy buddies operating independently of improvOlympic and Second City and The Annoyance? Where do you fit into the scene, or how do you feel you fit into the scene?

I was one of these people that like wanted to do as much comedy as possible. So I like kind of went everywhere. There was guys like, you know, like TJ and Micah, who had a foot in like improv and in stand-up but for most part, the improv scene was kind of their scene, and the stand-up scene was their scene. And, you know, I was on Harold teams at improvOlympic, playground teams at The Playground theater, did musical improv, did some shows at the Annoyance theater, then I had an independent group that was TJ and Brady Novak and Mark Raterman, called Heavyweight.

We were a sketch group that did stand-up and improv. We were always like, does our improv make our stand-up look sketch? We would always like kind of combine the three forms together to kind of like to serve our shows. And, you know, and then there was people I would meet in the improv and sketch scene and I would work on like, kind of form groups with them. Like KNC and Trim The Fat and then in the stand up scene, there was Chicago Underground Comedy that I kind of helped start with a bunch of other comics. I was in Chicago this week, and I feel like the vibe I get now because the scene has grown so much. And I don’t know because I don’t live there now, but I get, from conversations that there’s a couple different circles of groups, you know. New York’s so big that we don’t know everybody. There’s people that I never met in the seven years I lived there. Which is crazy. In Chicago, it was this perfect amount of people, with the Lyon’s Den being like the big show that it was, if you went to the Lyon’s Den every Monday for a month, you saw everybody in the scene. And I think that kind of helped make it felt like we were kind of one big family. I was never like part of the Lincoln Lodge. You know, I was never a part of the cast or anything but never felt like I was excluded or anything like that. There’s people that weren’t in ChuC, Chicago Underground Comedy, you know. We all booked each other. We all hung out afterwards. It all felt very cool and supportive. I also think sometimes there wasn’t anything to get in Chicago. So there was no like, stepping on each other’s throat. Does that shape the picture of how it all fit together? I was literally like taking classes all the time, and meeting different people and finding new people that I liked. to work with, you know, and in the stand-up scene specifically. Yeah, I mean, there was the Blerds I feel was like, Mike Bridenstine and Mike Holmes and some of their friends, I think they kind of had like a writing group that would like work together all the time with Kumail and all those guys. I feel like it grew out of that. They were doing just stand-up. I’m glad. That’s awesome. That Blerds happened. I was doing stand-up and running over and doing all these other sketch and improv shows. So it was great to see like all these little other different projects kind of grow out of the entire scene.

Well, you did that you did eventually, like, work with them in a respect when Mash Up happened with Comedy Central. There’s elements of that, that kind of carry over to Disingenuous in terms of being able to break out of the stage and take the premise and the scene in new directions.

When I was in Chicago, and I had all these different projects I was working on, you get like a comedic idea and you’re kind of like, where does it go? Is this a sketch? Is this a stand-up bit? Do I let sit in the back of my head and it organically comes out in an an improv scene? You know, when I was touring with Second City. I was on this cruise ship, and we went around the world. I went to this Salvador Dali exhibit in Istanbul. He was like a guy who was like, at least it’s the way it said, is that he never like, he never like sat down and was like, I want to do a painting today. He would have an artistic idea. And he would be like, what’s the best way to express this? A poem, a movie, a painting, a sculpture, whatever it was, and I was like, I love that. I love the idea. Because I’m not like a guy into you know, I mean, I have to now, for what I write for Real Time (with Bill Maher), but like, you know, as far as stand-up goes, I’m not a guy who like, sits down and goes, OK, what’s a joke? It’s more like holding a net out the window as I drive around through life and catch up and kind of see what I caught. See what goes where. So I’m in Chicago, and I never liked the idea that stand-up had to be this like, particular thing. I played around with this idea of like, stand-up comedy theater. Or this idea that, it’s a stage, you have five minutes, you can do whatever you want. You know, I feel like sometimes people fall in this trap of like, especially when they first start out that they’re like, well, I’m this person. You know, I look like whatever you know, I look like so and so and so and so had a kid. This was my upbringing. And that’s great if that’s what you want to talk about, but I feel like sometimes people do it because they think that’s what it has to be. Do it because you want to talk about it. Don’t do it because you think that that’s what stand-up has to be. It has to be this thing. It’s five minutes to do whatever you want. You know, that’s fine. Did you see like Julio Torres’s special on HBO? I love like, anytime someone does something different with the form. It’s like so encouraging, inspiring.to me.

Where did you first get inspired to to play with the form like that?

The Lyon’s Den. And this might be a little OCD, you know, but like, I did a different set every Monday for like, four years. Of like three minutes. I had a weird OCD where I would never do the same set at the same venue. You know, or the same set twice in a week. But then after a while, I kind of broke out of that because we have to work on stuff.

It has to get better.

You can’t be a complete mess! It’d be like Salvador Dali, going, I do half a statue you know, and then I don’t work on it anymore. I never work on the same statute twice.

I only grow the one mustache.

That’s it. But when you paint yourself into that corner. You wind up like trying to figure out like, OK, well. What am I going to do this week? I think I started getting excited about being like, what else can I do up there, outside of just telling a couple of jokes, you know? Sort of explore what is possible up there. I remember I was working at TGI Fridays, and this bartender was running around maniacally. I was trying to think of what I wanted to do for my set the next week, and rolling silverware, and the manager was running manically looking for these milk jugs. He can’t find them. He needs them to make this drink. That was so funny to me. Somebody panicked, looking for milk jugs. What if I do that? What if I get onstage and I can’t. I’m trying to do stand-up but I can’t because my mind is on these milk jugs? I do this thing where I like kind of do my stand up and I break down crying and Josh Chaney, who’s on the God Mic at Lyon’s Den, was like, ‘Nick. Are you OK?’ It’s just my milk jugs. I lost them. They were a gift. I’m so stupid. I left them at the bar last night. Why did I take them to the bar? I don’t even know. I just made this whole thing up and start crying. He’s like, ‘Aren’t those them behind the curtain?’ And I looked back there, find them, you know and then start playing ‘Time Of My Life’ from Dirty Dancing, do a whole Dirty Dancing thing, you know? And it was like, super fun to do. And I was like, well, that was like really fun and not a couple jokes. What are other things like that? And I think like, you know, doing sketch and improv sort of, like, you know, I think influenced you know, the want to do that kind of stuff. And Lyon’s Den. A lot of comedy clubs, I get sort of frustrated with because they’re like, they don’t want to do that kind of stuff. They’re like, just do jokes. And that’s fine. You know, but the Lyon’s Den was sort of encouraging to do whatever you want. So I think that was really where a lot of this stuff sort of like grew from.

In your new special Disingenuous. You have a joke that that humor was your evolutionary Hail Mary, and I just wanted to make sure I asked you how much truth is in that joke?

There’s a lot of truth to that. I’ve analyzed, I’m sure you have, too, why people are funny. What is it about a specific individual, or people in general, you know, I get in heated debates with other comics about it. And I mean, I think about like, first joke I ever told, I remember, or the first time I said something that made people laugh, was in third grade. We would play soccer at recess at St. Joseph’s. Soccer was just, you know, at St. Joseph’s their soccer field was just a giant parking lot. You know, with the blue car was one goal, and those trash cans were another goal. And 50 kids just run around in a big pile, you know, kicking a ball around right? And they’d pick teams. One kid takes 30 people and the other kid picks 30 people and I’m the last kid. Nobody wanted me, which is hilarious that I was so bad that I would influence anything that would happen in the big pile. And I remember saying something like yeah, I didn’t want to play anyway, I made some joke about it. Just joking around how I didn’t want to play and everybody laughed. It defused the moment. I got out of it. It cushioned that devastating moment for me. And I feel like oh, this is like a defense mechanism I’ve grown to sort of get people to not hate me as much. You know. So then that grows into like, dating or something like that. And I feel like OK, listen, I’m no Paul Rudd. You know, I’m not the sexiest man alive yet…Well Nick, your face isn’t cutting it. And your body’s not working for you. What is something we can bring to the table that might be, you know, attractive in some way. I do think there’s some truth to that joke. I think it’s entirely true. You know, I think that’s always been the people that I you know, laugh with, has been my most successful you know, romantic relationships for sure.

You mentioned earlier in this conversation about how you like to do something different every single time, like a new set every Monday at the Lyon’s Den, for example. And then I’m thinking about how you had to shift to your setlist bit like the idea like you might have just thought that was one time at the Lyon’s Den. Then that becomes like your centerpiece, big thing, that gets you New Faces which then gets you Fallon, which then gets you noticed.

It’s crazy. What’s funny is I never did that set at the Lyon’s Den. Because all my Lyon’s Den stuff was always stuff I’d never done anywhere else before. Cayne Collier had this show. It was called The Elevated, and I remember Deb Downing, who was on Second City at the time. She had in her bio in the little pamphlet, all of her thanks and one of them was the alternative stand-up comedy show, Elevated and I was like, what is this thing? So I went there, went and watched and then I wound like getting booked on and I was like OK, well I gotta do an alternative thing. So I remember walking around Chicago trying to come up with something. I’d seen guys bring their set lists up. People always looking at the setlist onstage kind of bothered me. It kind of removed the performance. This is supposed to be a performance. You know, you’re up there for three minutes, you really can’t remember?! By the way I bring my setlist onstage all the time now. But it kind of bothered me at the time, because you know, especially your new, it’s a performance! You should memorize it! So I did it there and then I never did it… I would do it like once a year, at like a big show. So I only did it like five times in Chicago my whole time I was living there. So then cut to New York. And yeah, I’m sitting there. I’ve done Montreal. I auditioned for Montreal like seven, eight years in a row. Never got it. Always did my best stuff. Like my, the stuff that I feel like I would if I went to a comedy club. That was my showcase five minutes. Boom, boom, boom, joke, joke, joke, joke. It never worked. And I had a thing. bartending, just kind of sitting there. Thinking about my upcoming audition. I was like, if I’m not going to get it again, I want to not get it on my terms. I don’t want to sit there and not get it because I did what I thought they wanted, and then didn’t get it again. I want to not get it because I did what I wanted. And so what’s a bit that I always loved? Oh!So I decided to do that. And that was funny because I ran around New York, and it went from this precious thing that I would only do once a year, to working on it and doing it several times a week, and yeah, it got better. Sure enough, I did it in the showcase and I got Montreal that year, then I got Fallon from that. So yeah, that was a huge, huge bit for me.

You win the Andy Kaufman Award. You move to LA. You and Nick Turner Get Rich Nick. Where does falling into Bill Maher’s orbit…how does that fit into all these plans? Was this a Get Rich Nick scheme that actually worked? Because I can’t see Andy Kaufman working on Real Time, so how does Nick Vatterott make it work?

It’s two things. So Get Rich Nick. Nick Turner’s hilarious. One of the funniest people. We wanted to work together on something. We’re trying to come up with a fun idea. And originally, it was like, you know, Three Stooges. The premise of every Three Stooges is they’re trying to make money somehow. For the most part, they’re trying to get some dumb job and it blows up in their face, and there’s a lot of comedy. It’s a classic and we thought that’d be like a very funny thing to do. To go out and do. Go to a horse track, go down to Tijuana and try to sneak stuff back, you know, from the pharmaceutical business and have it all blow up in our face. That sounded like a funny thing. You know, and then the pandemic happen and we couldn’t go out and do our things anymore. And then dogecoin happens and AMC (stock) and all this kind of stuff happened and it’s sort of in our wheelhouse. We still like the idea of getting back to that at some point, because it’s ridiculous. We’re poking fun at getting rich sort of stuff.

You are still selling your ebook!

Absolutely. That is a real thing. I think it’s a great ebook! That was a good kick in the butt to write that whole thing, and put that out there. Tell people what it’s like and how to do it. Because podcasts, if you can make people laugh, that’s great. There’s some sort of storyline to it, that people can learn something from, that’s great. We thought that that kind of checked all three boxes. When I’m in Tijuana and I’m buying a giant industrial thing of mayo to put a little ritalin pill in the middle, to sneak it across the border, there’s a lot that can go wrong with that. That’s what we love. And so then you have Real Time with Bill Maher, which…I wasn’t a comic, like talking doing political comedy onstage was sort of the furthest thing from what I was doing in my act. Here’s the thing. Facebook came along, you know, and like Michael Brown happened and all these political social things kind of started like becoming more at the forefront of a lot of our minds. I don’t know, I’m sure a lot of the stuff was always there. You know, it’s funny, I got a newspaper recently. It’s like, see what stories were on the day you were born and read it and it’s like, oh, a lot of this stuff has been going on the whole time, you know, liberals losing their hold in three states, are they eating their own? You know, it’s like, all that kind of stuff has always been around. But, I would go on Facebook and kinda rant about a lot of this stuff….And so like when I like, kind of like submitted that packet, I kind of took a lot of these, like, sort of what I felt were kind of humorous rants on Facebook and kind of like, shaped and molded them into different editorials that kind of fit right in with the show and submitted it and they liked it and they hired me. So I think like it really kind of came from a more of a writing based part of me, you know, than the performance part of me..

So are you able to compartmentalize the different parts of you? Like the Nick Vatterott that we see in Disingenuous which is out there breaking the mold versus the one who’s like writing to a strict formula.

It’s sort of perfect in a way because like, I’m not super interested in talking about Trump onstage. But I do have these like, feelings.I feel like there’s a lot of comedy and making fun of a lot of the political sort of atmosphere. It doesn’t fit into my act. So it’s sort of perfect to have all these you know, intense feelings and be able to put them somewhere in a better megaphone than Facebook. Now instead of me, you know, ranting on Facebook and having half the people scream at me because they don’t like my jokes about whatever I’m complaining about, in what I feel a humorous way. Now I can give it to Bill and have him get these messages out to a bigger audience. And that’s pretty cool to do that. So yeah, and it’s totally, totally separate from that. Like, I’m not writing to Bill like ‘OK, so you have this fake girlfriend named Jebra in the audience…

Or, I know it’s a live show, but what if we just pretended that it was urine stuck in a time loop?

I would love to do that kind of stuff.

Or what if you just walked offstage and you’re like, walking down Hollywood Boulevard.

I feel like I do need to be reeled in at some point. I understand the tone of the show and a writer, a very important job is to know the tone but I will push some kind of like, you know, outside stuff.

If you want new rules, let’s make new rules! The show should have new rules! Everything about the show should be different.

Right. New rule: monologue at the end. Credits in the beginning. I wanted to do, I think I pitched one thing one time. Remember how like, everyone was doing the shows from home during the pandemic? Adorable where the guy was on Zoom and his kids kind of came in the background, he had to shoo them out.

And I wanted a bunch of different people when Bill was in his house. I wanted to have just crazy people coming in the background that he had to keep shooing away and they’re like, Nick, that’s not what we do. But I will pitch some stuff and they will bite. It has to be the right perfect, you know, like outside of sort of thing. Like Shazam for phones, that lets me know if the song you listen to, if the artist is problematic. Problam! Or something like that. So then we’ll write a fake song that he has to Problam. And I think he likes doing that stuff, too. It’s sort of like, he’ll dress up like QAnon and pretend he’s QAnon and stuff. It’s like, how far can you push it and still be in the realm of the show. I feel like sort of that a little bit of my role over there, to sort of, kind of do something, bring a little bit of what I like to do inside of the context of what works there.

And then the other positive aspect is that when you go home for Christmas, you get to tell your parents you have a real job.

Yeah, yeah, and it’s fun, too, because my extended family loves that show, Real Time, so much. Tt’s very easy for my mom to explain what I do to other people.

Right, when you have a TV show, it’s easy to explain. Whereas before, she’s what, telling people you’re weird onstage for a half hour?

Yeah, it’s very hard to explain. Or even me talking to my mom about like, you know, what I’ll do after you know, I don’t work for the show at one point to be like. ‘He filmed this thing in his where he ran around Chicago, but he wasn’t really in Chicago for part of it.’ Yeah, exactly. Just like total total nonsense.

What do you want people to say about you?

I want people to just, once it’s done, I just want them to kind of just completely forget about me and move on to the next thing. I mean, let’s let bygones be bygones, you know? I don’t know. I will say that I appreciate when people sort of like notice or take note of what I’m trying to do. I forget, I saw somebody recently. And they were talking about, like a zoom show. But they mentioned like, Nick was pushing the form of the Zoom shows. Which is hilarious, which is so funny, which by the way, I want to just lean into that character of like somebody who’s just like yeah, I’m doing some really interesting things on Zoom right now. But the reality was, I did do Zoom and I tried to utilize the background and then I filmed things and then tried to incorporate me interacting with these things behind me that I shot and stuff because I thought that was like, well, we’re gonna do this. It’s like, have fun with it. If there’s anything that I want people to like sort of take it’s just like, have as much fun with whatever form you’re using as possible. To sort of influence people and I’m so like, gosh, I saw Lizzy Cooperman the other day perform and I got so like, excited and inspired. I love so much of what she was doing. I get so much out of that from other people, if I could return the favor in some way where other people are like, yeah, we gotta like, you know, keep trying to push things in whatever way is possible. I think a lot of people push things in an edgy way and that’s, that’s fine, you know, but you can push things in a lot of different directions than just one particular way in so many different forms. I think that would be good if that kept going and growing. I did that show Clusterfuck in New York and L.A., where I tried to take improvisers and stand-ups and put them together in the same show, make each other do the same thing, so the improvisers would do stand-up and the stand-ups would improvise. So I like to sort of take forms and kind of mix and mash them and push them together. I think that’s really healthy and fun, too. So I hope, that would be cool if more stuff like that happened.

Well, it’s always enjoyable watching you break the mold, and it was fun catching up with you today. So thank you.

Thanks for taking the time. I really appreciate it.

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