Myq Kaplan
written by Rob Turbovsky
On this particular Friday night in Boston, Myq (pronounced “Mike”) Kaplan is opening for Greg Behrendt at the Wilbur Theatre, featuring at the Beantown Comedy Vault down the street, and then heading over to Cambridge to close ImprovBoston’s nightcap stand-up show at midnight. Three sets in four hours and here’s the weird thing: Kaplan doesn’t even live in Boston anymore. While the 30-year-old comic was a staple in the town for years – placing in the top three in the 2007 and 2008 Boston Comedy Festival, opening for big names, hosting or co-hosting lively shows in Somerville and at that alt-mecca The Comedy Studio – he’s recently migrated to New York City.
The Friday schedule (which he conquers with ease and which exhausts me even to write about) says something about him, which is this: Myq Kaplan is a comedy machine, in the best possible way. The way that some machines vend soda or prevent other machines from killing future revolutionaries – that’s how Myq Kaplan does comedy: relentlessly, methodically, unblinkingly. Watch Kaplan’s act, whether it’s when he’s doing a spot on Comedy Central’s Live at Gotham, hosting for Patton Oswalt at Caroline’s, or playing a longer college gig, and you can almost see his mind at work as he takes a premise, disassembles it, examines the pieces, and puts them back together in a configuration far funnier than what you started with. I say you can almost see it not only because minds are invisible but also because catching all of the punchlines and tags upon tags upon puns upon callbacks is like trying to watch all of the oranges, knives and flaming torches of a juggling act all at once.
“When I hear the phrase ‘stand-up comedian’,” says Micah Sherman who co-hosted Fridays with Kaplan at the Comedy Studio in Cambridge. Now, they host Fridays at the PIT in New York. “I picture a faceless silhouette onstage in front of crowd and when that faceless silhouette steps out from the shadows Myq’s face is usually on that stand-up’s body. It’s like one day Myq decided to become a stand-up comedian and never looked back from there. “
“The idea is that you just get better by doing it,” Kaplan says, and he believes it too. He talks about himself and his comedy without stammers or even pauses. When I ask about the daunting nature of the road to improvement and success ahead of him, Kaplan refers to a “reason-based faith.” “It’s working. That’s the thing. I believed all the veteran experience [that I heard]. You just do it and it gets better and it works. I look back on my tapes from years ago and my performance is not as good. I’ve never made concrete efforts to do anything specifically different, other than, ‘Oh, maybe I should slow down a little” or ‘Maybe I shouldn’t breathe out that way after a punchline.’ But, mostly, from when I started until now, I didn’t make any conscious decisions. I just naturally got more natural. People have told me over the past couple years that I have a really defined persona and a really established character and they ask if that’s a conscious thing I did, and I said, ‘I have no idea what it is at all.’
On stage, Kaplan, who is a little more than 5’6”, tends to stand with one leg twisted back behind the other, leaning backwards during the setups and then quickly pivoting his whole upper torso towards the audience during the punch. It’s like watching one of those pointer hunting dogs that gets perfectly still in the seconds before it pounces. That’s not to say, however, that Kaplan ever makes the audience feel like it is being attacked. As dry and bookish as his jokes can get, he always seems to be aware of how to keep the crowd with him. He shrugs with his whole body, often gesturing with one hand in a way that says in the most inviting way, “This is ridiculous. Don’t you agree?”
“Part of my comedy is jokes like, ‘This is a funny idea that has no specific bearing on the world. It’s just a piece of comedy,’” Kaplan explains. “There’s the more socially-oriented stuff that comes from things I care about. There’s people being intolerant and damaging and harmful, so trying to talk about that. If people disagree, at least put things in as positive and significant a light as possible. Then, I guess, there’s some stuff that’s personal. That just comes from my experience. When I started out, the ratio was different. I was mostly trying to be funny, just jokes. Like, my girlfriend [New York comedian Myka Fox], in her comedy, she cares about originality and saying important things that she thinks people would be interested in, even if she doesn’t have the joke-joke established. That definitely influences me. I want to be as interesting, original, honest and funny as possible. Sometimes, if it’s a few of those things and not others, that’s fine too.”
“The fascinating thing about Myq’s material is that it’s very personal,” Sherman says. “He talks about being Jewish, vegan, a nerd, his love of language and media. However, his method of writing is surprisingly scientific, logical and detached. He’s able to step back from his material and look at it almost as if he’s writing for someone else. Then, when he performs it, he slips back into the material like a foot in a sock in a shoe.”
“I had a fairly, arguably, potentially terrible adolescence,” says Kaplan. “I went to a private school with twenty kids in my class until 7th grade. Then, my parents moved so I started over. I was very introverted, way geekier; slicked down hair, gigantic glasses, braces, no social skills. I did not have friends through most of high school. I went to camp and I had camp friends.”
An arts camp also gave Kaplan his unusual first name, though he downplays any significance it might have. “I came up with the alternate spelling when I was a teenager [there] right after Prince changed his name to a symbol. He did something weird, I did something weird. It’s not a big deal but it stuck, and at least now makes it much easier to Google myself, though much harder for people to know how to pronounce it if they only see it in writing, and much harder to know how to spell it if they only hear it pronounced “Mike.” But in the ideal circumstance where people see and hear it simultaneously, it works out.”
At camp, Kaplan says, he “started playing guitar and started writing more and actually learned how to be social which spilled over into my regular life, so by senior year of high school, I had a small group of friends and a girlfriend. But, up until that point, it was like, ‘I don’t know how high school works.’ I’d eat lunch at my locker alone. My parents got divorced when I was 13 or 14, and that can be traumatic. I’m always think the glass is half-full. I thought if that was what they needed to do... I don’t think it affected me that much, but maybe it did.”
Kaplan can convincingly make the case that his humor does not spring from any kind of particularly advanced neuroticism or childhood trauma other than growing up in New Jersey. It becomes clear that, for him, pointing out absurdity is closer to a compulsion, which his work ethic (“I’ve never seen him take a day off from writing,” Sherman says) allows him to harness.
“I think my funny was more annoying at times,” Kaplan says of his grade school years. “I’m learning about being more aware of actually how I’m perceived by others as opposed to just saying and doing what I feel like. In elementary school, I remember one time I was on the bus and this girl said, ‘I have a surprise for Anna. Don’t tell her,’ and I got off the bus and I ran and told her. Why tell me not to do it? I’m just going to do it.’”
“What makes Myq’s persona onstage unique and funny, is the idea that he can be a smart and somewhat nerdy guy without being self-deprecating or resentful,” says Boston comic Josh Gondelman, who has taken over the open mic Kaplan once hosted at Somerville’s Sally O’Brien’s. “Myq onstage is very self-aware about how he’s perceived, but he’s never inducing the audience to laugh at him, I don’t think. With some comics, they get these unintended groans of sympathy, because the audience doesn’t realize that the comedian is in on the joke, too. Myq always seems like he’s in full control.”
For many comics, the search for a singular voice or point-of-view becomes so central to their performance and outlook that they become perhaps too obsessive in their self-editing, looking to carve out Their Style with no uncertain borders. Kaplan has, for years, done jokes on anything that he sees a comic possibility in, which, of course, is everything. He can be smart-silly: “I try to fight ignorance and stereotypes with karate, like the Asians do.” Or, silly-sarcastic: “I lost a cellphone. It’s like losing a child. Well, not exactly. It’s like losing a child who had memorized all the names and numbers of all your friends and family. It’s like losing an autistic child.” With a sort of mesmerizing economy, Kaplan delivers the punchline, waits out the mild resistance from the audience, and then hits them again: “I ran that by an autistic kid, he seemed fine with it.”
Kaplan will be receiving his masters in linguistics from Boston University this spring, and it’s easy to see a connection between his academic study of language and the almost mathematical approach he takes to writing material. In a well-received bit at the Behrendt show, he suggested about a dozen more positive slang terms for breasts by replacing the “boo” in “boobies” with “yay.” Yaybies, hooraybies, etc.
“The thing I always enjoy most about Myq’s material,” Gondelman explains, “is when he can combine his goofy pun intensity - puntensity, he might call it - with his really strong sense of social justice. So then there’s something for everybody. If you agree with the logic of the joke’s thesis, then great, you’re already on board. But even if not, you’re probably going to laugh at the wordplay.”
“I have strong opinions about what is right and what is a reasonable way to be in life. I’ll try to pepper in a message within a joke, when possible. I have some anti-organized religion jokes, because I think religion does some unreasonable things,” says Kaplan. “I don’t even know if my message is it’s bad to be picked on if your smart, or if that’s breaking any new ground. But, I do think it’s sort of a weird thing. Why is being smart – how did that get to be bad? ‘Hey, stop being smart, smarty.’ That does fascinate me whenever I think about it. I am happy to be able to create things from that.”
Myq Kaplan keeps a blog of head-spinning puns and portmanteaus (you know, like “spork”) at godzillionaire.blogspot.com – “If God were a zillionaire, this is the blog he would buy.”
You can also visit him on the web at MyqKaplan.com. He and Micah Sherman will be running the Micah/Myq Club Spectacular at the Chernuchin Theatre on March 11, 18 and 25 on West 54th Street.
Rob Turbovsky is a writer from Boston.
Visit robturbo.blogspot.com.