This week, we’re highlighting 25 talented writers and performers for Vulture’s annual list “The Comedians You Should and Will Know.†Our goal is to introduce a wider audience to the talent that has the comedy community and industry buzzing. (You can read more about our methodology at the link above.) We asked the comedians on the list to answer a series of questions about their work, performing, goals for the future, and more. Next up is Brian Bahe.
Tell us a story from your childhood you think explains why you ended up becoming a comedian.
When I was in seventh grade, my teacher was bald, had thick glasses, and would fully sweat through his shirt by 10 a.m. every day because we were in Phoenix and the school had terrible air-conditioning. He was a cartoon character of a person, in that it seemed like he could never catch a break and no one respected him. And for some reason, he chose this profession in which he was surrounded by seventh-graders five days a week, a demographic that is historically unempathetic and actively hateful for no reason. Another random thing about him that I feel adds to who he was is that he drove a red convertible.
Every day, someone in our class would say or do something to him that would send him spiraling with anger. His face would get red and he’d start yelling. One day when we were all coming in from break and he wasn’t in the classroom yet, I decided to write “Increase the fecies†on the whiteboard for some reason. I didn’t do it intending to be funny nor was I a troublemaker or class clown. I just wrote it because it felt right to do in the moment. He didn’t see it and taught a good chunk of the day not realizing it was there. When he did see it, he went into one of his rage spirals asking who wrote it. No one said anything. Then he started saying that the person who wrote it is dumb — they’re a stupid person because they didn’t even spell feces correctly. So he erases fecies and replaces it with the correct spelling, “feces,†and for some reason the class really ate that up. We laughed and laughed. Then he left that on the whiteboard and went back to teaching.
For a while, people would come up to me and just say, “Increase the feces,†and I found that very satisfying. So I got into comedy because I realized if you say poop when you’re not supposed to, it can upset some people — and that is funny.
What unscripted or reality series do you think you’d excel at? What archetype do you think you’d be?
I don’t watch a ton of reality TV. I like Survivor, though, and that’s something I’m actively pursuing trying to get cast on despite not really knowing how to swim. My archetype would be the liar/backstabber/betrayer. I would be terrible at the physical challenges, but I would excel at the social game.
I come from a big family. My mom is one of eight kids, and my dad is one of nine kids. So my entire childhood, I was surrounded by countless cousins, aunts, and uncles. I got really good at moving under the radar, listening in on conversations unnoticed, and trauma bonding. I’d use those skills in the game to land a spot in the final four where, in one of the defiantly least Indigenous (I’m Indigenous) acts of my life and most gay (I’m gay) acts of my life, I would be eliminated in the fire-making challenge because I never learned how to make a fire.
What’s your proudest achievement of your comedy career so far?
My proudest moment is when I quit my office job. Unfortunately, it was one of the only office jobs I actually liked. I was doing social media for this nonprofit called IllumiNative. I had been there only four months, but then I got hired to write for the TV show The Great North and moved from New York to L.A.
But quitting that job was, in a way, representative of quitting all of the previous bad, random, boring jobs I had before I was able to make a living with comedy. I delivered food; I worked at, like, three different pizza places; I was a copy editor; I was an administrative assistant; I was a receptionist; I worked at a movie theater. Leaving that job for a comedy-writing job was this stamp of approval that I kind of made it … That being said — because of the writers strike — I am now looking for an office job again, so if you’re hiring, DM me!
Also, onetime comedians Marcia Belsky and Jake Cornell were doing their play at Union Hall, and I did a stand-up set to open the show. I didn’t realize until the end of the show that Oscar Isaac was in the audience. He and his wife were hanging out at the bar after the show and I found myself standing next to him, and he turned to me and complimented one of my jokes and even quoted part of it back to me, and I was like, Damn, Daniel. This is cool.
What have you learned about your own joke-writing process that you didn’t know when you started?
I’ve learned to give myself room to breathe and lean into who I actually am and how I actually am.
Starting out, I felt like there was this pressure for every joke to be full-throttle, nonstop punch lines the moment you get onstage. I started comedy in New York and would go to some open mics where you got only, like, 90 seconds because there’d be 70 people trying to get up at that open mic. I saw the people who did well at those open mics were doing these setup–punch-line jokes, so I’d try to replicate that. Once I was able to move past those situations and I was doing eight-to-ten-minute sets or a half-hour, I was less concerned about getting nonstop laughs and more concerned about what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it.
I’ve been enjoying jokes that are a slow build. My favorite comedians were never the ones who had the most laughs per minute; they’re the ones who made me see the world through their lens for a bit. So that’s how I try to approach joke-writing now.
Tell us everything about your worst show ever. (This can involve venue, audience, other comedians on the lineup — anything!)
I actually want to go on record that I like doing bad shows. I think it’s funny to do stand-up in a really bad environment, whether it’s because the stage isn’t really a stage, it’s a toilet; or there’s no audience; or there is an audience, but they’re toxic people. That is objectively funny. Like, if you zoom out to this third-person perspective and you see that situation for what it is, which is a person trying to pursue this creative endeavor and they’re failing at it for some weird reason out of their control, that is funny. I’ve experienced that many times, and it never feels good in the moment, but I’m always able to look back at it and be like, Okay, it was kinda fun.
So that being said, there was this one time post-9/11, post–COVID-19 vaccine, pre-monkeypox where I did this show in Connecticut. It was a show with an all-queer lineup. I took a train to Connecticut with two other comedians. Then we got picked up and driven to some bar in a quaint-looking beach town. I don’t remember what time the show started, but it felt early because the sun was still out. It was a pretty packed room. But the crowd was giving retirement community, which I would later find out was the vibe of the whole town.
I think I was first on the lineup after the host, and I was doing 20 minutes. I was really excited because this was the first time since COVID that I traveled to do comedy and also the first time in more than a year that I was doing a longer set. I started with this joke where I reference Michael Barbaro, the host of The Daily podcast, and the room was silent the entire joke. I followed it up with some questions: Do you know who Michael Barbaro is? No. Do you listen to The Daily? They’d heard of it. Do they own guns? Some of them. And I was like, Great, I have 18 more minutes of jokes to go. And I proceeded to bomb.
I remember, pre-COVID, really trying to be one of those comedians who could make any audience laugh, and what I realized post-COVID, and as a result of this show, was that I don’t need to — nor do I want to — make every audience laugh. I just have to do what I think is funny and not try to tailor my jokes and, in a way, my career, to what I think people want to hear. But would I do that show again? Absolutely.
Let’s say we live in a “Kings of Catchphrase Comedy†alternate dimension where every single comedian is required to have a hit catchphrase. What’s yours and why?
I would pull out my phone and look at it for several seconds and then I’d casually say, “Just checking my stocks.†And then the audience would go nuts.
Living in New York and being gay, you encounter finance gays or just gays with money. One time I hooked up with one of them, and afterward we were lying in bed and he started looking at his phone. I ask him what he’s looking at, and he was like, “I’m checking my stocks,†and he shows me his phone and he has this stocks app open. I found that to be so funny that he was dead serious about stocks. Stocks and people’s interest in them are one of those things that I can’t wrap my head around. Like, I can understand murderers and why they murder. That makes sense to me: They have this intense emotion or lack thereof and then they murder. But someone who has stocks and then checks on those stocks — like, I can’t even begin to think what is going on inside their head.
Nominate one comedian you don’t know personally you think is overdue for wider recognition and why you’re a fan of their work.
I’ve said hi to Johan Miranda maybe twice, but I don’t really know him at all. I think he’s super-funny and just a great joke writer. I loved his Twitter (I don’t really keep up with Twitter anymore, which is why that was past tense). I think he’s writing for This Fool now, which is a show I love. Johan, if you’re reading this, let’s get coffee or something.
Also, Shawn Escarciga’s (a.k.a. @missladysalad) Instagram feed is slay mama house down boots.
When it comes to your comedy opinions — about material, performing, audience, trends you want to kill/revive, the industry, etc. — what hill will you die on?
I remember when you (Vulture) ran that nepo-baby article last year, it was surprising and not surprising. I knew nepotism is a whole thing, especially after living in New York for almost nine years. Just meeting people, you’re kind of like, Oh, everyone who is successful and wealthy is that way because their parents own the company or go golfing with the company’s owner. But reading that article and seeing the names and faces of so many successful people in entertainment whose dad is an actor or a TV producer was pretty discouraging. It feels like our fate is already sealed in a way. I’m not saying we do away with nepo babies, but for every project that a nepo baby gets green-lit or job that they book, they should have to help someone who isn’t a nepo baby get their non-nepo project green-lit or job booked. And it can’t just be someone who is exactly like that nepo baby. Straight white guys can’t just help non-nepo straight white guys. Nepo babies need to seek out creatives doing things and telling stories that are completely unlike theirs. Honestly, even if just five nepo babies did this, it would be a step in the right direction and probably end climate change. Cut to me being evicted from Hollywood.
If you had to come onstage to just one song for the rest of your life, what song would it be and why?
It would be “Call Me, Beep Me!,†the theme song from Kim Possible, the Disney Channel cartoon from 2002 to 2007 about a crime-fighting teenage girl. Any time I’m asked what song I want to come out onstage to, it’s that song. I wasn’t even that much of a Kim Possible stan when it was on the air, but the song is undeniable. It’s by Christina Milian. Its message is timeless and still resonates today, especially in this cultural and political climate. I’m also shocked at how many people still know the words to it when it plays at a show. Basically, if you’re into that song, there’s a 60 percent chance you’ll be into my comedy, and those are good odds for me.
What is the best comedy advice, and then the worst comedy advice, you’ve ever received, either when you were starting out or more recently?
The best comedy advice I got was actually writing advice from one of my creative-writing teachers in college. She said that whatever artistic field it is you’re pursuing, you need to consume that art. It sounds obvious, I know, but at the time it kinda blew my mind. I’ve applied that logic to comedy. Like, when I’m at a show, I try to watch as many of the comedians as I can — same for movies, TV, any kind of media. I just try to consume as much as I can (and even that’s not a lot, TBH).
This doesn’t mean I like everything. I think it’s more of a practice of being open to experiencing whatever it is for what it is and not being a curmudgeon about seeing something new. I think once comedians stop taking in new stimuli because they think they’ve heard and seen it all — and maybe they had, in a way, up to that point — they miss out on a lot. [Matthew McConaughey voice] Things move and change while they stay the same. Then they look up one day and they’re like, Why is the world so different? And it’s like — not everything stops moving forward just because you did.
The worst comedy advice I got is … Every once in a while, someone will tell me that I should do more jokes about being Native American. It’s always a white person who says that. I usually mention that I’m Indigenous pretty early in my sets. I have a quick joke where I say my traditional Native American name is Chipotle Bathroom Code. So when someone says I should do more jokes about being Native American, it feels like they’re saying I should do more jokes like that. But I don’t think that’s what they actually want. What they want to hear are jokes from an Indigenous perspective. But the tea is that all of my jokes are from an Indigenous perspective. My jokes about dating, my parents, getting pubic lice from a Greyhound bus … all of those jokes are about “being Native American.â€
A lot of people see Indigenous people as this exotic group. Native people also have so many negative stereotypes thrust upon us — that we’re uneducated, poor, alcoholics, literally nonexistent, like we’re fictional or something — when, in reality, my experience as an Indigenous person is that we’re messy, flawed, trying our best, and horny, just like everyone else. So when someone tells me to write more jokes about being Native American, they’ve kind of missed the point of stand-up, which is, at its core, to unify an audience through laughter. It’s about taking a specific experience and through jokes making it this universal, relatable thing to laugh at.
More From This Series
- 2023’s Comedians You Should Know Reflect on a Big Year
- Zach Zucker Dares to Say Comedy Is About Being Funny