Luke Cunningham
written by Tabitha Vidaurri
“WHEN YOU DO STAND-UP REALLY WELL, and you have the audience waiting for a joke, there is this part building in the back of your head that’s like, ‘Oh shit, they’re completely on the line for this. I can feel it coming,’” says comedian Luke Cunningham. “You feel your synapses fire and you’re like ‘Oh they’re going to get it’ and…boom! It’s almost like a magic trick.”
When I saw Cunningham hosting a show at the Luca Lounge in the East Village it was at one of those shows where the comedians outnumber the actual audience members. You know the kind of show I mean. There’s a lot of inside jokes and the comics bust each other’s balls quite a bit. I noticed that every time one of the other comedians took the stage they would make some kind of crack about Cunningham being a big jock.
In all fairness, if you look at Luke Cunningham without knowing anything about him, he does kind of look like a jock. Then when you find out he’s really into rowing and attends boat races. He went to Brown, you think Ivy League jock. He’s lanky and rangy, and has this sort of all-American prep thing going on. However, if you see him do stand-up, all preconceived notions pretty much go out of the window.
“I’ll say this about Luke,” says fellow comedian Nicholas Cobb, “From the very beginning, he already had his voice figured out. There was no trial and error for him. He didn’t necessarily know what he was going to say, but he already knew how he was going to say it. That’s huge. And it wasn’t even something he tried hard to accomplish; it was already there. “
I’M INTERVIEWING CUNNINGHAM in his mercifully air-conditioned Upper West Side apartment. Behind me, there is a pair of oars at least eight feet long leaning against the wall. When asked about said oars, Cunningham tells me he recently attended a regatta in Philadelphia. His day job (and health insurance providing job) is selling boats for WinTech Racing. His interests in rowing and comedy keep him on the road pretty regularly. He has a good system going, because all of the rowing hot spots tend to be good places for stand-up as well: Boston, DC, and Philadelphia. He spends most of his time in the latter.
“Philadelphia is a beautiful place to row,” he says. “Get down there early in the morning, kick off… it’s like going to church. There’s no noise, its just you.”
“The only reason I have an Ivy League degree is because I’m six foot six and was good on a rowing machine,” Cunningham says with a self-deprecating smile. He was crew racing and performing in sketch comedy shows at Brown. “When I was a kid, I was a big fat kid who wore red all the time. Everybody in my neighborhood called me Red Delicious,” Cunningham laughs. “Everybody that was on our crew team in college was six foot three or taller. We found either they were a big fat kid or their mom was very well endowed. It was a weird thing, either you were fat or your mom was breast-feeding you until you were like, three, that’s what you needed in order to be a big dude and be good at rowing.”
Recently, Cunningham has been working on a new live show called Alt Stars, a monthly alternative comedy showcase that debuts in September at JD McGillicuddy’s in Philadelphia. He also performs at Hug Life, a first-Friday gig at the Luca Lounge with a rotating cast of comics and free pizza, which I was psyched about.
When asked what his favorite place to perform was, Cunningham replied, “One of the best sets I’ve ever had was at Whiplash [at the UCB Theatre]. That night, I thought, ‘Oh my god, I prepared four more minutes of jokes, but there’s been so many applause breaks that I’m not going get to do them!’”
Cunningham grew up in the Philadelphia suburb of Upper Darby. After graduating with a degree in history, he took the big, post-college, leap and moved to New York. “I was terrified to do stand-up at first, it took me forever to work up the nerve to do it,” he recalls.
“I assumed everyone here would be really good, and then I went to an open mic and realized that is not the case,” he laughs. “Before people go to a [standard] comedy show and be say, ‘That guy wasn’t very good’, they should have to sit through three open mics; you know, so they get to see how the sausage is made.”
After moving, Cunningham wasn’t exactly sure where to start. “I ended up doing a lot of improv first, which I think is good, but there’s not a lot of movement forward in improv,” says Cunningham. All told, he ended up taking improv classes for about eighteen months. “The first time I did stand-up was at UCB at their show Liquid Courage. That was summer 2005. By that point I was twenty-six. I feel like everybody else had gotten started so much earlier.”
“I think people think they’re working towards a goal sometimes, and then you see who is actually working towards the goal and then you go, ‘Oh I wasn’t working at all,’” Cunningham reflects on his earlier days in New York. “I thought. ‘I’m taking an improv class one night a week, I am really pursuing comedy.’ Then I went and did stand-up and saw see these comics doing three or four spots a night and hitting multiple open mics and I went, ‘Oh that’s actually pursuing a goal. I’m going to do that.’ So now, when I can, that’s what I do. I’m up multiple times, every night, and now I feel like I’m honestly pursuing it.”
Regardless of whether or not Cunningham got what he considers a late start, he made up for lost time. About six years ago, he began hosting at the Comedy Cellar, which led to further gigs, including production work on Important Things with Demetri Martin and a stint playing Abraham Lincoln on the Colbert Report. Cunningham is currently writing a weekly blog for TV Guide that painstakingly chronicles the cringe-worthy details of each new episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm as it premiers on TVGN.
As a comedian, you don’t necessarily know right away what your approach is going to be. It can also be extremely hard to choose a medium. However, Cunningham’s period of trying out different forms of comedy before arriving at stand-up helped hone his skills as a stand-up comedian. “In improv, you have a degree of dispensation from the audience. They’ll let you off the hook a little bit because you’re coming up with the stuff off the top of your head,” he explains. “In sketch, you can prepare it so much, and you have other people to rely on, so you’ve got it down. But stand-up has all of the pressure of sketch, where you have to know your jokes and hit your beats, but none of the dispensation of improv. Nobody goes into stand-up and is like, ‘This guy’s coming up with this stuff off the top of his head.’ But they kind of expect it; like when you deliver it, it better look like a point you’ve just arrived at.”
“Luke has a casual style with a witty, rapid-fire delivery that keeps the audience on their toes,” says close friend and Philadelphia comic, Tommy Papa. “Luke is one of the few comedians who isn’t fully self-absorbed. He’s the same person on and off stage. He listens and internalizes his surroundings, and it shows in his material and crowd work. Although his presence and intellect are intimidating, he creates a lot of likability by actually caring about people.”
I asked Cunningham about his creative process. Does he tend to take grievances in his everyday life right to the stage, or is there some kind of filtering process? “I have a very hard justice meter, and I’m big on fairness,” he answers. “When I see things that aren’t fair, I call bullshit right away. I think a lot of comics are like that.” He continues, “I write down ideas all the time, then I usually flesh them out on stage. I’ll start combining. Lots of times it will be like, ‘that joke didn’t work, but there were two phrases that would hit. Let me see if I can work those phrases into this other joke.’ What you think is going to be the foundation never turns out to be the foundation. At least in the way I process things.”
“I always try to infuse myself into the joke, because they work way better if I use the first person,” Cunningham explains. “I have a bit on evolution vs. intelligent design. My joke is, ‘I was not always a fan of the strict literal interpretation of the bible, then I spent forty days and nights inside the belly of a whale.’ It used to be, ‘What’s with these idiots who don’t believe in evolution, maybe they all spent forty days and nights inside the belly of a whale, am I riiiight?’ When I changed it to the first person the audience responded better,” he says. “It’s just that one subtle shift, and that’s all stuff that your elementary school teacher told you when you were a kid. Show, don’t tell. Put yourself in the story. Try not to use pronouns. It’s elementary education that people forget.”
“I’ve always been impressed,” says stand-up comic Chelsea White, “by Luke’s ability to weave in a reference or draw a parallel in his jokes that strikes the perfect balance of being unexpectedly obscure and universal all at once. He has a knack for reaching every type of audience member in one cleverly creative sentence.”
“We all work from the same awful rubric, the same romance everyone has to aspire to in Western culture. And everyone has to aspire to Romeo and Juliet…it’s always around. It’s been around for four hundred years and it’s terrible! Juliet was fourteen. Romeo was sixteen. They dated for six days, and then they both killed themselves. Like, if that happened now, it would just be the sad Goth kid footnote on Verona’s class of 2010 yearbook. ‘Hey, do you remember those two weird kids who used to wear a ton of eyeliner and use giant words out of context? Did you know they both killed themselves because they couldn’t get tickets to see Slipknot at the Mayhem Festival?’”
“If you get the jokes really humming and everything’s going downhill and flowing, you kind of feel like you’re singing to them,” Cunningham muses. “That part is better than any drug I’ve ever tried. Nothing beats it on earth. Like taking a roomful of strangers and undressing yourself a little bit and charming them. It’s a wonderful gig. It’s the best job on earth, and it’s the worst business. Know what I mean?”
I think we do.
Tabitha Vidaurri is a writer from Philadelphia living in New York.
For more on Luke Cunningham, visit lxcmaps.blogspot.com.