MC Mr. Napkins
written by Rob Turbovsky
Zach Sherwin is on stage, screaming, grimacing, turning red in the face as he takes off his belt and whips himself with it. He’s around six feet tall, with a big ponytail of curly brown hair that bobs and bounces with every thwack of the belt. This harmless bit of masochism is his big ending to a rap song about an elementary school student who misspells “irrevocability” in a spelling bee and regrets it for the rest of his life. The sparse crowd and even the comics who have seen this before laugh approvingly at the commitment and the absurdity.
It’s Thursday night at the Comedy Studio in Harvard Square. For roughly fifteen years, The Studio has been Boston’s hippest, most intimate comedy room, frequented mainly by those who’d rather see someone interesting over someone famous (though a few big names with roots in the area do stop by occasionally). It’s located where every great Boston comedy club has always been located, inside a Chinese restaurant, and Thursday is the MC Mr. Napkins Show. MC Mr. Napkins is what Zach calls himself when he’s performing, or as he mockingly puts it, “rocking the mic.” It’s less an alter ego than a way of saying to the audience: Be Warned! There Are Raps Coming! And They Will Be Funny!
“I tried this recently,” said Sherwin, “and it doesn’t make laughs, despite me thinking that it would. I say, ‘I’m MC Mr. Napkins. The MC part means I’m a rapper. The ‘Mr. Napkins’ part means it’s gonna be super hard core.’ And the crowd goes, ‘Eh.’ I think they kind of think I still mean it.”
“I don’t want it to be just goofy,” said Sherwin, “I Googled myself recently and saw that (DJ/comic/TV host) Chris Hardwick had seen some of my stuff and had talked about it on his blog. And, he’s a nice guy. We Myspaced and it was really positive. He was like, ‘I was recently forwarded this link. This guy has every strike against him going in. Comedy rap is really rarely good and add a kooky name on top of that, you’re already at two strikes. But, I really like this song.’ I thought that was good. I hope it doesn’t turn people off and that there aren’t times when people are like, ‘Fuck this guy! I don’t even care.’ They’re going to know within a minute tops that I don’t think I’m a real thug rapper. I do feel pressure. I want to let people know right away you don’t have to worry about offending me if you laugh. Don’t think that I’m really serious about this rap.”
“He seems to write more than any other comic I know,” said comedian Jono Zalay, “which makes sense, because not only does he have to come up with a compelling and funny idea, but he has to make it rhyme. Ask a comic to put his or her material into lyrics and most would rather register and vote Republican.”
In the raps of MC Mr. Napkins, there’s not much on bitches, snitches, or guns. Instead, it’s absurd autobiography and joyful wordplay, stories of spelling bees, state mottos, and the formal name of the device used to measure your blood pressure (for the record: a sphygmomanometer). It’s easy to imagine him in his childhood – he grew up in Ohio and Missouri, with a year in Israel in between – as a white kid drawn to rap and wondering why. But, Zach seems authentic in a way that white kids doing rap, intentionally comical or not, rarely are. And, it’s not mere slam poetry or amateur open mic grasping either. He’s only 28 years old, but there’s an inspired economy of words here, and you can feel the re-writes. He varies his line deliveries, crisscrossing from hip hop to a spoken word vocal that wanders around the beat like a Lou Reed song. Some of his songs have a crisp, set up/punchline-like regularity to the laughs. Others are shaggy dog stories, or personal sketches that start in close-up, on a word or a phrase (“How big are your breasts?”) before zooming out, line by line, to reveal the joke. His rap on the meaning of “antepenultimate” builds up virtuosic steam with the verbal gymnastics. The question of how he comes up with this – let alone memorizes it – would be a distracting one if you weren’t so busy laughing.
“What’s nice about writing a rap song is this,” said Sherwin, “sometimes, when I watch stand-ups, I think it’s hard to name exactly what the nugget is of this joke. This is not a diss to other comics, I’m just saying this is something I use to help myself: I think it would be helpful if you had to write a chorus for every one of your jokes, then you would have to think ‘What is this joke about?’ It’s like a thought clarifier in a way. It forces me to think about it a little harder to turn it into a joke foundation.”
“His rhymes are tight,” remarked comedian Myq Kaplan. “His topics are varied and incredibly original. His brain seems to work on so many levels. He’s a genius rapper talking about bees (spelling and otherwise), smoothies, and sphygmomanometers. Most stand-up comics aren’t doing that.”
“I’ve been writing raps since I was like 10”, Sherwin recalled, “It kept ebbing and flowing throughout my teens and twenties. Then, about a year ago, I don’t know why it took me so long, but I finally threw out my first funny rap. Before then, at first, they were parroting what I’d heard in rap that I’d listened to, like Wu Tang and Cypress Hill, so it was lots of stuff about guns and drugs and bitches. I think the thesis moment of that (sphygmomanometer) song is when the beat drops out and I say, ‘It’s for my motherfuckin’ sphygmomanometer.’ It’s a perfect juxtaposition of the dorkiness and absurdity of comedy with the hard core outlook of hip hop. Which is a tension I kind of feel. I spent a lot of my teenage years wanting to belong to that tougher thing. But, I realized this is much more who I am. Then, years later, I realized this is how I can access it, in my limited little stunted way. “
When Napkins banters with the audience in between raps, there’s a natural sort of playfulness. He attributes what works on stage to skills he honed by being in a sketch comedy troupe started by his friends while he was studying political science at Brandeis, outside of Boston, and ended up touring with them for five years. He says the shows they did during that time developed a kind of looseness, which is reflected in the non-rap parts of his performance. He sits on a stool and tells a few brief anecdotes, occasionally scrunching up his nose at the punchline as if to apologize preemptively if the crowd doesn’t like it. Here in the open-minded, intimate digs of the Comedy Studio that served as the drawing board for Eugene Mirman, it’s an unnecessary apology. But, still, he worries.
“You just automatically know that he likes you,” says Rick Jenkins, comedian/owner of The Comedy Studio. “He likes you so much that you want to like him. That’s just his personality. When people come up to him after a show and say, ‘I like this, I like that,’ he’s genuinely blown away. One night he was like, ‘Wow! Canadians are such nice people! They were telling me they liked the show!’ Other people do that too. It’s not just Canadians.’”
“I’m really insecure,” said Sherwin, “I don’t have any song that if the show sucks, I can do Track 12, and bring it out. I feel like I have a really long way to go. And, it’s limiting. If you’re not expecting hip hop or you’re a more traditional audience, I often fail to win those people over. And, it’s not their fault, I have to work to bridge that. Thank god I haven’t done a lot of die shows. That’s less about me and more on where I choose to do shows. I do a lot of shows in Cambridge when I look at my MySpace page. That’s a pretty unrealistic picture of what comedy is like. I don’t think I’m at the level yet where I can really kill; too raw, a lot of rough edges.”
“I don’t think I write any raps that aren’t deflationary,” said Sherwin, “They’re either explicitly deflationary, like stories about me and my friends doing dumb things. Or, like, the spelling bee one, which is completely premised on how absurd it is to still care about that kind of thing. Or, I’m doing raps like sphygmomanometer, that are about goofy things, which is sort of the other category my raps fall into other than personal stuff…the sort of philosophy behind it I think is that it’s so stupid that someone is writing a rap about this with the same ‘to the break of dawn’ catchphrases that are used for raps about sex or drugs or guns. And, I think that’s self-deprecating to do, and I hope that’s how that comes off.”
Earlier this fall, Shane Mauss, a Boston comedy star and 2007 winner of the Best Stand Up Award at the HBO U.S. Comedy Arts Festival, passed one of Zach’s tapes on to his agent at the Gersh Agency, which also represents Dave Chappelle, Brian Regan, and Patton Oswalt, among others. At the same time that he was signed by Gersh, Zach landed a deal with Pepsi for a video that he was to shoot two days after our interview. The company was flying him out to L.A. to film a viral short for his spelling bee rap with the help of onetime Human Giant showrunner Tom Gianis. He’s also working with a record producer to put out an album of his raps.
Rob Turbovsky is a writer from Boston, Massachusetts.
Visit his blog at robturbo.blogspot.com.
For more on Mr. Sherwin or MC Mr. Napkins,
visit myspace.com/mrnapkins.