My initial process was to write those things down as they occurred, bring them to audiences at open mics, do ten of them, if a couple of them hit be like, “Well, I guess I’ll keep doing those,” and then try more the next night and the next night. Initially, I didn’t have a real narrative (not that I necessarily do now)—I would have one joke about being a vegetarian, and another joke about plumbers, and another joke about pizza. It wasn’t until I’d been doing it for a few years that eventually I had a few jokes about each of those topics and I thought, ‘Ah, now I can group them together and at least make it seem like I’m talking about one thing for a little longer.’

It used to be that I just wrote something and then brought it to the audience, like, “Eh? a joke?” Eventually, as you gain more confidence, it’s more like, “A joke.” To paraphrase Brent Weinbach: He has a joke where a lot of people answer the phone like “Hello?,” but he answers it like [in a deeper, more confident tone]“Hello,” because you don’t question the phone, you answer the phone. When you start out, you have to have some confidence that you’re like, “I’m doing a thing,” even if it’s delusional. You have to have some kind of combination of delusion and self-awareness. Most people, a few years in, realize they weren’t good at all when they started. They’re like, “Well, if I’d known how bad I was, I would have been demoralized, and maybe quit. So it’s a good thing I didn’t know it. And now, I know I’m a little better.” So at every stage, you can look back and say “Ah, thank goodness, I’m improving.” Eventually you get to a point where you’re not asking jokes anymore. 

JCS: Are you saying you have a little more confidence and you’re willing to build a set up to be a bit longer?

MK: That is, essentially, something that it sounds like I was implying (which I believe is true). Most of my ideas still start as shorter things. I will improvise and riff a lot more than I ever did in the beginning, because I didn’t know that that was a thing. I watched people like Rory Scovel and my friend, Micah Sherman (Rory’s also my friend), people like Paul F. Tompkins, and people like Jimmy Pardo, who are amazing jazz aficionados of being in the moment with words and concepts, of just following a train of thought and a stream of consciousness. I would see Rory tell a joke and, sometimes the next night, it would start in a different place or end in a different place, more would be added, he would just follow it wherever he wanted, or leave it. And I was like, “Oh, I guess I could do that.”