Jared Logan
written by Ken Carlson
“BEING A COMIC, I don’t think I could do anything else,” says comedian Jared Logan. “I am proud of it. But I don’t like to philosophize about it too much. It’s also a job. A lot of guys [in stand-up], my friends and I as well, often go around and around in discussing the Art of it – What are we doing for humanity? How are we creating something new? – That’s not what’s important at all. That’s what people who write about it can do. Comics don’t have that skill set. No comic knows what their act is like. What’s more important is that you’re enjoying yourself, making money and supporting yourself, doing something you enjoy, and that you have a good work ethic where you put on a show that your audience enjoys.”
While Logan’s philosophy regarding his craft may sound typical and obvious in the same way that short, sharp, shock should be a standard formula for most punchlines, Logan’s act is anything but. Peppered among his societal jabs are the types of references most folks may not have equipped themselves when they looked in the mirror after getting dressed for a night out. Who tells jokes involving Susan B Anthony & Sylvia Plath anyway? Maybe the kind of guy who knows his Morningstar from his Scythe, or why Charisma may be more important to a Paladin than Strength or Constitution.
“Jared is a hilarious human being,” says comedian Myq Kaplan, “a top-notch comedian. From his on-the-fly, off-the-cuff, in-the-moment riffs to his solid, wonderful, and always fresh material, Jared always delivers and audiences are always happy to receive. He is at once humble and polite, yet in-your-face and super-intelligent; a total gentleman, yet also a man of the people.”
“I MADE A RULE– NO COMEDY TALK AT THE TABLE,” says Logan, referring to his role-playing association he has organized with fellow comics in New York. It’s like the regular basketball game that’s existed for comics in Queens, without all that unnecessary exercise and sweating.
“I really wanted these guys to get together, interact, without talking about comedy,” says Logan, who wears the weird nerd label with honor. “You know so many people through comedy. If you don’t know someone really well, you go immediately to talking only about comedy. I do it all the time. There’s talk about combining it (gaming) with comedy, bring in a video camera, start a blog and I’ve had to tell them, ‘No, no, no! This is us just not doing that. We see each other all week, doing that stuff. This is recreational.’”
Logan’s been playing Dungeons and Dragons since junior high. He took a couple of years off to attend to other things, but has returned to the table and made plenty of friends in doing so, with a session every Sunday in Brooklyn.
“We have a large number of geeky comics here; very geeky,” says Logan. “We’ve been playing for about a year and a lot of funny people on the scene have joined us. We don’t just play D&D. We play all kinds of games, like Call of Cthulhu, based on HP Lovecraft’s stories, and Shadowrun, which is like Blade Runner.”
“It’s the ultimate nerdy/theatre fag/commie thing. But it’s great for improvising, being in the moment. If I play that on a Sunday, I feel warmed up, like I’ve already done a set, especially if I’m running it. There’s a lot of verbalizing, a lot of quick thinking on your feet, and something about it that feels so frivolous, it’s shameful,” he says, relating his fantasy based story-telling to the written form. “Have you ever met someone who won’t read fiction? ‘It’s a waste of time and I’m not learning anything.’ Are you kidding me? You think a non-fiction book is more legit than a fiction book? Fiction can teach you just as much or more, if they’re well written and have a good experience tied to it. A lot of non-fiction books are full of shit.”
LOGAN MOVED TO NEW YORK two years ago. It been another dramatic change in scenery in his life as he’s strayed farther away from the type of place where he grew up, West Virginia, to where he went to school, Memphis, and where he got his foothold in comedy, Chicago.
“It’s going great!” says Logan “There’s no industry in Chicago, really. There are good and bad things about that. The good thing is comedians there feel they can do whatever they want on stage. It’s free, wildly creative. Nobody’s worried about people seeing you, or getting on that next talk show. You’re just doing your own thing. That creates a lot of really cool, creative stuff and horrible, sad bizarre stuff. The community’s a little tighter there and that’s probably because there are fewer comics. The bigger a group gets, you can’t hang out with everybody. Here, there are more, different groups of comics. It’s more competitive here, and that’s good too. At a certain point, if you’re performing well and writing well, perhaps not at the height of your creative powers, but you’ve found a process and it’s going well, then it’s time to start thinking about your marketing – How do I make money? The challenge here isn’t the comedy, it’s living here; dealing with high rent and all kinds of things like that. How do people find out what I’m doing? New York is a crash course in that. Those things are very important here. I’ve always had the attitude that I’m lucky that I get to do what I want to do. Marketing is the side I had to learn, the business side. If I want to be super funny in your festival, I have to be a print shop? I have to be an ad agency and a web guru?”
“Jared Logan brings unadulterated joy to whatever he’s talking about,” says comedian Steve O’Brien, “even if he’s talking about something he hates. He revels in every subject he tackles. He ping pongs between the dark and the surreal effortlessly because he delivers it all with the enthusiasm of an 8th grader who just saw Jurassic Park for the first time.”
THEY HATED EACH OTHER, is a two-man show Logan is putting together at Upright Citizens Brigade with comedian Dan St. Germain in a Thursday 8 pm slot. As a side project, Logan takes extra pride in producing something else with a friend to spotlights his talents and widen his exposure. “It’s the best thing you can do as a comedian,” says Logan. “Some guys just want to do stand-up, and if you like that, that’s great. But if you can show your world in other ways, it helps. The show is about famous people in history who hated each other; Tesla and Edison, Cain and Abel, that sort of stuff. We’re fighting as we tell the story. We’ve been working on it for a while. We put it up at a couple of places, like The Creek and The Cave in Long Island City, and at other people’s shows, 15 minutes at a time. If we don’t get a run at UCB, we’ll put it up somewhere. The show is about people who fight, and we (Jared & Dan) have an argumentative relationship, almost brotherly, in that we pick on each other. We’re pretty straight up with one another if we don’t like something, so a lot of work gets done. He’s way more focused that I am and kicks me in the butt to get work done and I calm him down a little bit, or try to.”
Where Logan is making the most of his stand-up income these days is at colleges. The two or three a month he performs provide a solid paycheck and receptive audience.
“I try not to think there are tough audiences out there,” says Logan, “just different. If you take into account their likes or prejudices, and think about that and write enough material to adapt, you won’t have too much of a problem. That’s something I’ve learned the hard way. College audiences tends to like material rooted in the ‘right now.’ That can mean pop culture, but doesn’t have to. They don’t want to hear anything that’s old fashioned to them, and old fashioned to them could be Seinfeld. They can be as rowdy as a club crowd, or like an East Village crowd and hang on very intricate stuff. If you’ve got them, they’ll listen to a long story, really enjoy it and love it. You have to take into account their prejudices and what’s going to get them excited. Sometimes I am surprised what they’ve heard of. They hate self deprecating humor sometimes. A lot of comics have self deprecating material. Being a portly gentleman, I have a couple of jokes about that. I accept my body and have come to terms with it. A college audience doesn’t understand, Why don’t you just eat what you want? They’ve never had that kind of hardship. Anything about how work sucks or getting older, they’re like, What do you mean? What’s work?”
“One thing that I bring that I’m proud of,” Logan continues, “I don’t just stand there and run through my material. Ever. I really try to have a real conversation with people. A lot of the time, I’m out in the audience, and I’m trying to make something happen that wouldn’t happen at any other show. I’m listening. If you say something and I hear it, I’m going to interact with you. I like to improvise. It makes it exciting for me. I also like my material and there are nights when I really want to do that. But most nights I want to acknowledge what’s going on in the room. If something weird’s going on, I don’t want to ignore it, I want to confront it. If I’m getting a vibe that they want to have a conversation, let’s have a conversation. I’m not talking about hecklers. Sometimes people will talk to you and that’s cool. I don’t understand this attitude that ‘Anyone who says anything while I’m on stage is heckling me.’ I don’t think that’s correct. It should be a conversation, interactive. You’re really there. They’re really there. They’re not watching a video of you. If they want to just see your material, they can just watch the video of YouTube that you’ve put up. I always want to interact and make that evening unique if I can. Just because I have a microphone I shouldn’t be a part of that conversation? Is there a risk in that? Absolutely. But that’s why it’s interesting. A lot of these people aren’t like me. We don’t have a lot of common ground. That’s what you write books and stories about. I have gotten mad at hecklers and will probably continue to in life, but when I’m at my best, doing what I want to be doing, I would rather have someone yelling out than someone just sitting there silent.”
“Jared,” says comedian Joseph DeRosa, who co-hosts a first rate showcase Tuesdays with Logan at Ace of Clubs “is sincerely one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met. He’s got this great mixture of wit, charisma, and theatrical ability. He’s also a tremendous writer. When it comes to hosting a show, Jared is the perfect type. He’ll adapt to absolutely anything that’s thrown at him and, in turn, throw fantastic stuff at you.”
THERE ARE LESSONS that every performer picks up from common experiences in their lives and uses in performance. Tom Hanks has spoken endlessly of how much he learned from working with Denzell Washington in Philadelphia. UCB’s Billy Merritt used to mention his ever-present elven bag of magic where he would store pieces of knowledge and character traits for later use in improv. For Jared Logan, he gathered an important tidbit by watching ill-suited films with his mom. “I tried to watch There Will Be Blood with her. She was just disgusted by it. She said, ‘I work all day. I want to see people happy; cops putting people in jail, and all is right with the world, like Law & Order.’ I totally get that. But I’m the total opposite of that, as are a lot of other comics. We experience so much humor, that the darker the humor the more we find it funny. So I want to see everything go wrong. I just want to see tragic stuff happening, like horror movies. A movie to me is only as good as how often it surprises me because if you can’t predict anything in a movie, it’s not good. Horror movies are the best kind of movies to me, because they’re trying to surprise you more than any other movie. Because they’re trying more, statistics say they do. They have their tropes, but I love the idea of a genre just trying to surprise you all the time; like the job of a comedian is to be funny and be in the moment, absurd in a surprising way, making sure everybody has a real experience.”
Logan was a theatre major in school in Memphis; studying at being in the moment, utilizing his Meisner training. However, time often illustrates the differences between theory and application. “That’s all good stuff,” he says, “but it’s not the point. Go do it and see if you notice it in your act. I’m not going to say, ‘OK Jared, remember to use the Four steps of the Illusion of the First Time, then run your vocal exercises.’ Fuck that. It’s tearing it to pieces and taking the fun out of it. I don’t have an elaborate process before going on stage. They [his teachers] would make you hum to yourself, breathe out of your vagina, do all these vocal exercises, laughing together. That doesn’t do anything. They’re just placebo pills to help your confidence. Just be confident. You’ve done it before. It’s worked. You can do it. Great actors know how to make it look like it just happened the first time. Great comedians do that with their material, like it’s coming out of their mouth the first time. One way I try to practice that, is along with my material is to say other things for the first time.”
Logan adds, “There’s nothing new under the sun. Try to make it unique and that has to come from you.”
“He’s got this energy,” says comedian Nate Fernald, “about him that just commands laughter. I’ve probably seen Jared on stage more times than I’ve been on stage and every time I still laugh just as hard.”
For more on Jared, visit JaredLogan.com.