From The Comic's Comic

Episode #416

Kenice Mobley is a comedian from North Carolina, now based in Brooklyn, NY, whose star has been on the rise since the start of the pandemic. Mobley landed on Vulture’s Comedians You Should and WiIll Know list in 2021, made her late-night debut on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and performed at the Netflix Is A Joke Festival in 2022 as part of the “Introducing…” showcase. She also launched an Instagram Live and podcast called Make Yourself Cry. Now she’s more fully introducing herself to the world with her debut comedy album, Follow Up Question, out now via Blonde Medicine. Mobley joined me over Zoom to talk about how she pivoted from studying psychology to performing comedy, her work with a nonprofit seeing how comedy can change hearts and minds on critical issues, and what has made her cry along the way.

Here’s a track from her new album which establishes, indeed, she’s gonna be asking some follow-up questions of her audience:

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This transcript has been edited and condensed only slightly for your convenience. We join this conversation after some initial small talk about drinking, open windows and the sounds of New York City…

Last things first, congratulations on your debut stand-up comedy album.

Thank you so much. I’m excited.

And of course it helps, because it allows me to ask you all sorts of follow up questions. Because that’s the title of the album. First up, I know you’ve done quite a bit of press where you talk about how the original plan was to get a PhD in psychology. So you start out on that path, you get your bachelor’s in psychology at North Carolina Central?

Yes.

What happened? Because then you go from that to Boston University and doing the MFA film program at BU. So what happened in Durham?

No. So I was actually living in Washington, DC. There’s a program called, I think it’s UNC in DC. And they take students from all of the constituent University of North Carolina schools, since it’s a rather large public university system. They take students from each of those universities, and they put you in this apartment building in DC. So you live with people from different schools, from different parts of the state, which don’t honestly have that much interaction. So talking to people who’s like, yeah, my campus is right next to a pig farm. And I’m also talking to people who are like, yeah, I go to UNC. And it’s like, they’re world-class scholars here, and all that sort of stuff. So it’s really cool to be there. Some people had two jobs, I just had one job, because they wanted me to come in every day. And I worked at the American Psychological Association, which was a lot of fun. My job was speaking with different psychological organizations in England, Australia, and India, trying to make sure that there was sharing of documentation. So all of the research studies that were done here, making sure that they could be available to scholars in those other places. But I was doing that. And I was talking to a friend. And he was talking about a 24-hour movie festival where you like, in 24 hours, you’re supposed to get the prompt, write a script, shoot it, edit it, and be done with it within 24 hours. And he’s like, it’s really hard. I can’t think of anything with these random elements. And I was like, ‘Oh, well, with those elements, you would do this, this, this, or this. Or you could do another one that’s like this, this’ and he’s like, OK, it’s really weird that you just came up with four ideas for this within our conversation. Like you talk about movies all the time, but you never talk about psychology. Why aren’t you doing something with movies? And I was like, honestly, because I never thought of that before. And then I wrote to a bunch of universities, because I’m a big ol dork. And that’s probably one of my first moves. But I was like, yeah, what are the steps? What are you looking for in people that would be a part of this program? It’s something I’m genuinely interested in. And they were like, do you want to do film studies or production? And I had already done a fair amount of photography in undergrad. And I was a photographer for the school newspaper, and I really liked photography. I want to do production. So I ended up at Boston University doing film production.

So how quickly after showing up in Boston, do you get lured into the comedy scene?

So it was a long journey, actually.

So I moved to Boston. I’m in the film program. I hate that it’s so cold there. Just like this place is gross, whatever. I do the program, the program actually ends in Los Angeles. I stay in Los Angeles for two and a half years. I meet someone who’s doing stand-up, or he said he was doing stand-up. And then I went to one of his shows. And it turns out, it was an open mic, and he was terrible. And I was like, oh, they just let anyone do this. Oh! If anyone can do this. If he can do this poorly, then I could do it. And then I started listening to stand-up albums on Spotify. I think now, based on some disputes, not all of them are there. But I used to listen to them all the time. And it would just be like all day at work, listening to albums, and then taking notes on like, OK, I like this structure, but I don’t like this structure. And if I was going to tell the stroke, instead of it going like A, B, C, or even A, C, E, I would go from here to here to here to make it like a wackier thing, or I think comparing these two things is more interesting. And from there, I developed my first five (minutes).

Both of the stories you just told, involve you encountering an a field of of work that that at first seems foreign to you. But then you logically figure it out. Like the first story involved your friend who’s doing the Quickie Film Festival.

Yeah.

And you’re like, just do A to B to C to D to E. And then you just described the process of writing jokes the exact same way.

Maybe that’s the way, yeah, I think that’s how I think, I guess I never noticed that, but thank you.

Have you always loved puzzles?

OK, when you say puzzles, I do think of like a 1,000-piece jigsaw. And while I do own some of those behind me, those take me so long that I lose interest. But I do love the Wordle. And so every day, I do Wordle and I do Framed. And then there’s Actorle. Framed is built like frames of a film, and you have six guesses to guess what it is. And I do Actorle where it’ll be a person’s, like some of their movies, but instead of the name. So if it was like Secret Garden, it would be six X’s in a row, and then the space and then six X’s in a row. But it’s that, and it tells you the year for all those. And you just have to guess based on this combination of letters and years and genres, like who it is that they’re talking about. And then I also love the Sudoku puzzles in the New York Times, the Spelling Bee in the New York Times. So I like those types of puzzles that are shorter.

You love being able to something where you can like, break it down, deconstruct and put it back together.

Yes, yes.

Were you also like a big on when Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon was a thing?

Yes, I was!

Because it’s the same concept, thinking this to this to this to this.

Yes.

OK. So you’re from North Carolina originally?

I am.

So you go to BU, you decide that’s gross. But you go to school there, anyhow. And then you just said you were in LA for two and a half years. What was going on there?

So I was interning at two places. One was a place that did reality TV, and specifically a lot of interior design, like HGTV-type shows. And I was an intern there. So I worked two days a week there and two days a week at — it’s not an ad agency, exactly. But it’s an agency that represents directors who direct commercials. And that was fun. But after the program ended, I didn’t have a job. And I was slowly running out of money. And so I got a job working in the sales department for a startup that sells text-message marketing to other companies. And it would be mainly, at first, shady club promoters. But then we got contracts to work with major health organizations, which makes me have less faith in their decision-making capabilities. Because we weren’t a good company. Yet they were giving us lots of money to do something that I’m not sure we ever technically got the ability to do well, so. But it was a fun startup. And then I was like, I think I need to move back to Boston, because also a friend from grad school was like, hey, if you move back to Boston, you can produce this short that I’m working on. And so I was like, Can I take my job? And they were like, Sure. So I moved back to Boston, and then I started comedy.

So having that experience under your belt: How did that influence or impact your ambitions in show business?

It let me know that I don’t want to do everything. Like in LA, when I was there, and based on what I was doing there was this kind of, Oh, that’s so interesting. I actually do something like that or, Oh, I can do that. Aways be open, open to possibility, always kind of make it seem as though you could be interested. So never outright say no to something, but always make it seem like you could do that or you could be interesting or you are interested or something like that. And based on that experience, and then moving back to Boston, and starting comedy, it made me more clearly say: That seems interesting. I don’t want to do that. Or like, wow, cool. I hope you find that, because I can’t say yes to everything or that I might be able to do every thing. That’s just not plausible.

So you start comedy in Boston. I’m guessing The Comedy Studio probably was the main/only place to be able to get stage time as someone who’s just starting out?

No. So there are, and this is before the pandemic. So I’ve gone back since then. Or during the pandemic, we’re still in it. Yes, we’re still in it. So a lot of it has changed. But there were a lot of shows. And so I remember the first show I ever got booked on was a show called The Gas at Great Scott in Allston. And I got booked on that based on someone seeing me at open mics. My path was doing open mics around the city, being seen at those open mics, being booked by other people at the open mics to do shows. And then I think after doing comedy for about, like seven or eight months, somebody was like, hey, Rick (Jenkins), you’ve got to see this lady. He saw me and then I started getting booked there regularly, until like, I think two years later, I was doing the Comic In Residence program.

And then at what point did you realize I need to get out of Boston?

So it was around the time that I got offered to do the comic in residence program. But it was also I came down to New York, visiting a friend for just a weekend. And I was like, OK, this feels better. Like, as far as like a variety of people and a variety of styles of comedy, and just more venues to explore the specificity of what you’re interested in. Because even though I say there are some shows, that there were some shows in Boston, there weren’t nearly as many as there are in New York. And because of that, in New York, I do think that you can get really — not too niche, so niche that you can’t play in other places — but you can find places to really explore what your comedic voice is, specifically, and get some of those niche curiosities out. And also just see some of the people who were doing it on a really high level, which pushes you to improve faster. So I was like, wow, this really feels like the place I need to be. So I made a plan, like, OK, that was in 2015. And I was like, OK, by the end of 2016, I want to be in New York. So I was like, OK, I’m gonna come down every two months, and then it became every month. And then by the last two months, it was like, every two weeks, I was coming down. And that’s when I started getting an apartment and finding a job and that kind of stuff.

So then you finally make it to New York, and then the pandemic starts.

Thankfully, there was a couple of years between those two things. Maybe I’m older than — look, I haven’t aged, whatever. It’s not important. But I moved to here at the end of 2016, the beginning of 2017.

So where were you at in your career when the pandemic started? Did you have a day job or were you working in comedy by then, or?

I had just quit my day job. And I was working, I had worked on, it ended up being online sketches, mostly, but they were like, we’re going to do a show with the nonprofit Color of Change, where you’re going to be writing sketches with a team of other comedians for that. And so I thought that was going to be a longer job. It ended up being a shorter job, but I quit another startup that also did text-message marketing. I had quit that to do the sketch show, and then that ended and then the pandemic started.

(NOTE: Here’s Kenice in one of those sketches:)

and the full episode…

I know a lot of comedians wondered at the beginning of the pandemic, what is this going to do to my career? And like even people who had established — I mean, maybe even more so people who were established headliners, because they relied on road gigs, and suddenly there were no road gigs. Or you could go to Florida and Texas, but that was about it. Right? But for an up-and-coming comedian, it is like even even more of a dilemma. So I’ve talked to some comedians who TikTok became their thing. For you, you started an Instagram Live?

Yes, I started that show simultaneously. Of course, I was also like, on Redfin, and Zillow, looking at like housing prices in the Philadelphia suburbs. Maybe if I moved to this, I can make this work financially, because houses are so much less expensive there. OK, do I need to move back home? Like I was really kind of spiraling. But I did make a show based on several conversations where it was like, Oh, I don’t cry, really. So the show was Make Yourself Cry. And it would be guests, and it’s usually comedians that I know. And some people that I really look up to. So yay, thanks so much for coming on the show. But it would be me asking them about the things that made them cry, and we would see if that thing would make me cry, and a few people did it, but not that many people did.

Was that show, which you did on Instagram Live, and then also Planet Scum, which is podcasting and on Twitch. Was that related to Chris Gethard? Or do I just associate him with that?

Yes, Chris Gethard is a big part of Planet Scum. But also he had a show or two on the network.

So did that show help you more professionally or personally?

Probably personally! It’s very helpful to discuss — people should have therapy and like professionals help them. I would never say anything can replace what that does. But just especially when I felt like, totally isolated. And like I was losing my mind, it was really helpful on a personal level, to spend an hour every week talking to someone about where we were. About what makes them cry. About the things that we think are significant. It would end up turning into like, kind of where we want to be emotionally. And that was really interesting. And I mean, maybe it helped like, in that Chris Gethard has a better idea of who I am. And based on some other things, I got to have, like Roy Wood Jr., and getting to talk to them was really fun. Because seeing those people who I just think of as like, I’ve looked up to Roy Wood Jr. for such a long time, and hearing him talk about like emotional stuff, or just the annoyance of having to pick up Legos after a small child. That was really refreshing and nice.

Did that make you cry?

Um, I think I like a little bit. I would count it if it was a little bit because honestly, I don’t react to that much, which I’m working on. But like, he got me to, like a little bit of tearing. Sebastian Conelli, who’s a really great improviser, got me to all-out cry. River Butcher got me to cry, like a few people just like really got me to like, waaah.

Did your WWE experience make you cry?

Yes. I don’t know how much I can say about that. But I think they have bigger problems. So I don’t think they care much about what I have to say. What I can say about it…

That’s why I asked the question like that.

What I can say about it is, I went through six rounds of interviews where my experience with that organization was made very clear. And they were celebrating a new perspective on the material. And then the second fans miscommunicate and misconstrue how long I had been working there, and what my knowledge was, and when I had it. As soon as that happened for them to just put their hands up and be like this is all on her. Instead of saying something along the lines of yes, we are looking for people with comedy backgrounds, and writing backgrounds who have experience in making this more entertaining for you, the fans, and we stand behind our own policies. Instead just saying, she said the wrong thing. That was a little bit frustrating. Moving forward. I probably won’t talk about a job that I’m about to start publicly. But I do think that the way that some people came after me and said nasty things about me, my looks my race. I had to close all my social accounts, people on LinkedIn telling me that I was a dumb bitch. And that I was besmirching an entire community of fans, which I wasn’t trying to do at any point. That was really frustrating. And well, that was something that happened.

So what was your next move after locking up the socials, and crying a little bit? What was your next move out of that?

I went to one of my favorite places for a month. I don’t care if it makes me seem bougie or like a middle-aged character in a movie. I don’t care. I really like Paris. And so I have been a few times. And I had some savings and AirBnbs were really cheap then. And so I was like, alright, I’m gonna go to Paris for a month and I took cooking classes. And I went to Italy for a little while, and I walked through the most pretentious cemeteries you’ve ever seen. And I fucking loved it.

I agree with you. Sometimes you just have to do things. You have pamper yourself, or just or, maybe the word isn’t pamper, maybe just take care of yourself. Because we’re fragile. And when we know when we’ve been like attacked, or we feel we’ve been attacked, it’s like you can go into your shell and hide, but then that doesn’t do that much good. It just makes you hide out from everything.

Yeah, yeah. It’s also not, it’s not healthy to focus on that for too long. And I realized that I was doing that. So it’s like, I can’t think about what everyone who doesn’t like me thinks about me. It’s unfortunate. A lot of circumstances went into that. And it really, it stunk. And I was really questioning my future and what I was going to be able to do and that, but then I have to remember like, there’s a base you that exists outside of this profession that is curious and interested in exploring and learning new things. And I do think that you need to feed that part. Because if you just focus on this stuff, you’re gonna go crazy. I would never be so pretentious as to say I needed to go to Paris for a month because that’s up my own ass. But I needed to take a step back, take a breather and reassess what was important to me.

Right? It could be Paris, Texas, it doesn’t have to be.

I don’t know about Paris, Texas, OK? I don’t know about that. I’ve never been but I got some questions.

Right. It could be Moscow, Idaho, not Moscow, Russia.

So at what point do you get involved with Comedy Central and their creators program?

OK, so I should say, so as soon as I was no longer working with WWE, I started working with the organization that I had been working with since November of 2020, which is the Center for Media and Social Impact, which is a great organization that does the research into how comedy is tied to changing people’s ideas. And also does like these comedy think-tanks for different nonprofit organizations, where we’ll work with someone like the foundation that’s built to fight racism in the South, specifically speaking to a white audience, and looking at comedic ways to do that, because it’s not fun to be like, hey, Trump voters, you should believe this. Like that doesn’t work. That’s not an effective way to actually change hearts and minds. But to point out the comedy in some of the beliefs to point out the humanity and other people through comedy — that is way more effective. So we’d have little writers rooms where we’d get people together for a week and write together. This is the height of the epidemic, I mean, over Zoom, and we’d write stuff and we’d submit projects to them. And they’d go on to make some projects, like we ended up making some projects with the organization IllumiNative, which works on Native visibility, because it’s bad. And so we made a little talk show with Joyelle Nicole Johnson and Adrianne Chalepah talking specifically about the shared struggles of the Black community and the Native community. So yeah, that is what I was doing, on and off. So before WWE, after WWE, and then for a while I was doing that simultaneously to Comedy Central. So they have an application process. I got the application. I wasn’t going to do it because I’ve done it before, and I didn’t advance and I was like, I probably I don’t know if I’m what they’re looking for. But my manager was like, can you just do this? And so I made a video. And they were like, yes, we think you should do this. And so we have, I was accepted to the program. Another person was as well. His name is Brooks Allison. He’s also the guitarist for a band called Slothrust, because he’s like, really cool. He’s like a big deal. And I’m like, Oh, hey, I’m also here. And then we go to morning meetings, and we pitch projects, and we make projects. And then, like, We’re shooting a bunch of stuff this weekend. I’m really excited about it. I had to take a break this summer. But yeah, just to consistently go into a writers room where you pitch ideas and to write sketches is really, really fun.

But you mentioned this nonprofit, the Center for Media and Social Impact. And two things came to mind. First, right off the bat. I’ve had so many conversations with comedians who will debate whether comedy can have a positive social impact or not. I mean, there’s a lot of back and forth on like, are we just jesters? Or can we use humor to sneak in persuasive messaging? The second thing is, I wonder what your nonprofit would have to say to Dave Chappelle.

I’m not the person to ask specifically about Dave Chappelle. But I will say, the person who leads the center, Dr. Caty Borum, has written several books on how comedy affects it, because she used to work with Norman Lear. And they discussed frequently and also talked about how mass media can change the way that people think about things. And if we believe that, then the people who create that are often also creators and comedians and writers and stuff, the things that they create have the ability to do that. So yes, it could be stand-up. Yes. It’s what people write. Yes, it’s things we see on TV. But comedians are part of that. I don’t. Look, trans people have a right to deserve them. And that’s what I’m gonna say about what Dave Chappelle has to say.

I’ve written quite a bit about Dave Chappelle over the years and watching his path over the last three or four years has been quite stunning and baffling. But even with just him hosting Saturday Night Live again recently, people like Dave Chappelle, or people like Joe Rogan, they say, well, we’re just either we’re just being idiots. So why does anyone believe us or trust us? But then they take these big platforms, and they’re using it to spread these ideas and this nonsense that other people take seriously. I bring this up because, so you just put out an album yourself. Do you hope to be changing people’s hearts and minds with it? Or do you just want people to laugh? Or what is your approach?

My approach is always comedy first. So I do think what is funny, but my psychology background and my background in nonprofits does make me, OK, why is this the assumption? Why do we all behave this way? It’s very interesting to me how people think, and therefore how they react to some of the things that I say. And you can hear some of that on the album, but also just like, at a show I did two nights ago. We as an audience, I’m performing, but like the way that people are like expressing some preconceived notions and biases and the way that other people in the audience are like, No, fuck that. That’s stupid. I really enjoy creating that conversation. And some people do that, or attempt to do that by asking a salacious question, and then say, I’m just asking questions. But they are acting as though that there aren’t people who actually live that experience every day. They are acting as though that question hasn’t been asked before. And they are acting as though there aren’t clear answers to those questions if they bothered to look for a single fucking second, but instead, isn’t it funny to say, oh, this person that exists? What if I think their existence is silly? Or what if this is a silly thing to make fun of, even though they’re already kind of a punching bag to a lot of people? And that does feel, honestly kind of you’re responsible? I’m not famous. Some people will listen to what I have to say. I do think I’m rather responsible when it comes to larger platforms that are not my own. My own, I say the dumbest shit whatever. But when I’m doing something on another show — like a show that’s on TV, not my friend’s bar show that gets 12 people — I do think there’s a responsibility there not to make it so that another group of people have a worse life. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for? Some people are like, you’re pro-censorship, and I wouldn’t say that. But I would say, if what you’re saying allows someone to say I am right in hating a group of people — especially one that I don’t actually know about?! You shouldn’t hate groups of people anyway. That’s bad. But especially if you don’t know about that fucking group of people, and your main experience with that group is from this guy saying, ‘I don’t know, but I think he’s a he,’ like that seems fucked up. I’m sorry I’m going to go on a rant, but, yeah, that seems like why? You don’t need that smoke! You could talk about anything! If you’re at a level where people pay so much to fucking see you, they’re gonna laugh regardless. They’re gonna put it in their head that they’re having a good time regardless. You want to try to be good, and you do want to try to be funny, but that doesn’t have to mean, oh, let me shit on this group of people. That’s not what that means!

I always bring it back to the point of you as a comedian — not you, specifically — but you, specifically for your album…but you as a comedian, decide what words come out of your mouth. So, at a certain point, you decided that this was the way to go.

Yeah!

You’re not just asking questions. No, you’re like, this is what’s going to help me make more money. I would much rather talk about this thing, than this other thing.

Yep. Because it is partially like, OK, what does the audience respond to? That’s the direction I’m going to go in. But also, it has to be within my interests. And within what I want to talk about. I’m using that ‘I’ but I’m saying that generally, is a thing that is being driven by two different motivations. And to act like you aren’t in control of any of that? Is, yeah, disingenuous.

Well, Kenice Mobley, thank you for spending some time with me. I once again congratulate you on your debut album, Follow Up Question, and I look forward to asking you follow-up questions sometime later.

That sounds great. I really appreciate it.