Joe DeVito
written by Ken Carlson
“What’s helped me was when I started doing this,” says comedian Joe DeVito, “my dream was never to be a comedian. I love being funny. Part of me liked performing, but I never knew you could do this. It never occurred to me you could just start being a stand-up comic. So for me it’s all gravy. I just want to get really good at it. We’ll see what happens. It’s not like the old days where if you had a clutch Carson appearance you were kind of famous. The world doesn’t work that way anymore.”
The Huntington Street Café, a coffee house and sandwich shop across the street from the village green in the quiet part of Shelton, Connecticut. Light Traffic drifts slowly past. DeVito is seated at a metal table outside the room that recently began its Saturday night summer comedy series. A steady stream of friends, relatives, and former bandmates stop by to josh and wish him well. It’s a bit of a coming home for the headliner this evening as he prepares for an easy going show for a full house, primarily those from the town where he grew up, New Milford, CT, and the college he went to, Fairfield University. “Watch me bomb,” he muses just before heading in. DeVito just celebrated his 8th year anniversary in stand-up, the last two as his sole source of income, right on the tail of his appearance of NBC’s Last Comic Standing.
Joe was a professional writer at one time “Advertising writing,” as he describes it, “marketing, stuff like that. I had grown up in Connecticut and took a job in Long Island with Doubleday and didn’t like it. I got a better job with Book-of-the-Month Club in New York City. The two companies merged which sent me back to the office I had left. I was there about a year and started to think about making a run at comedy. I got laid off and decided it was the perfect time. I freelanced and did various things until some money came in. Last Comic Standing gave me the push to make it on my own.”
“Last Comic Standing for me was pretty good,” says DeVito. “I got a lot out of it for someone who didn’t make it to the finals. I only made it to the semi final round, the top 32 for Season 5. You can’t beat network prime time TV. There’s nothing else that can get you that much exposure. Everyone was very nice to me on the show. I can’t complain. It’s their show. They’re picking people. A lot of comics say, ‘Oh, it’s not the funniest people (who win).’ It’s a reality show, featuring comics. If it were the funniest comics out there, it would be Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock. Obviously it’s not that. It’s the people who they think would make a good TV show. There’s even more of that the season after I was on.”
Long Island. DeVito has called it his home for the past twelve years. He identifies himself as a New Yorker, the city that gave him his start in stand-up, the city his family came from. The balance gives him the outsider’s view of the region to pick up on its funny aspects that people who are from there may not notice.
“I grew up in New Milford, CT,” says DeVito, “a small boring New England town. When I was growing up, if you wanted to see a movie, you had to drive half an hour, forty minutes. On Long Island, you’re so packed in, you hear people say, ‘I’ve never been to Bellmore.’ ‘You live in Freeport! It’s only five minutes from there!’” It’s provincial like that. Plus there are a lot of Italian people there and my family’s Italian. It’s nice to go to New York City, do my thing, and go home to some place sane.”
DeVito travels around the country, getting on a plane about twice a month to go somewhere. He enjoys living in an area that has so many options. “I have the city clubs, Long Island, Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, the Poconos, Atlantic City,” DeVito says. “It’s different doing it here, than if you’re working out of Denver, where you don’t have so many choices. But I started this as a grown-up. I don’t have the stamina to be a road comic. I talk to guys who drive from Jacksonville to Louisville and we have an arrangement where I’ll talk to them on the phone so they don’t fall asleep. I have no interest in that life. I’m old with a bad back and don’t like sleeping in my car. I get more than my share of shitty gigs anyway. I’ve done some theatres, some big crowds, some rooms in New York City. There is nothing like a small room that is packed. The vibe will be a little different here because it’s a coffee house. I’ll know three quarters of the people here, including my parents. The hope is that since there’s so many people here, that the level of intimacy increases. That’s when the really cool stuff can happen. I’ve been lucky to play theatres that have two thousand people. There is nothing like the laughs you get there. But here, there’s more of a personal connection.”
That connection, key to the success of many comedians, is DeVito’s strength. He maintains it, not through an abundance of crowd work as some do, but through a series of tightly spun bits that are creative, yet grounded, both smart and smart ass. His demeanor is self deprecating enough to draw in an appreciative crowd, but concise enough to be an even fit for today’s sound bite society. That’s why he’s good on televised appearances, such as FOX News’ Red Eye, or the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. That’s why his act suits today’s suburban and urbane rooms.
“For me,” says DeVito, “since I came from a writing background, I knew how to write stuff that if you just read it, it was funny. The big adjustment for me was that you can’t just walk on stage and read your jokes. It was getting my performance skills up to par. I had terrible stage fright when I started. I’d get nervous, be in the bathroom throwing up beforehand. It took me a long time to get past that. Its been a matter of refining the visual aspects of what I do. There were plenty of times when I thought, ‘I’m not going to make it. I’ll pass out, pee my pants!’”
Now his ability to handle stress has strengthened. “I do a show on FoxNews, Red Eye with Greg Gutfield,” he says. “They send me a packet around 4 in the afternoon. I have to sit down and figure out what I want to talk about by 7. It’s pretty easy. I don’t have to think about how I feel, I just have to write jokes.”
For DeVito, the gigs that have become misadventure or rites of passage, have tended to stray away from comedy clubs; the black college where they started booing as soon as he walked on stage, the retirement party, where as soon as he walked on, everybody ran to the open bar. “There are all those little milestones you hit,” says DeVito. “I remember one night my first year, when I was ‘Saying My Jokes’, an apt way of putting it. You just speak these things that you think are funny. But, I wasn’t struggling to remember what the next thing I was going to say was. I was actually noticing things in the room. I wasn’t sweating up there. On the flip side, the longer you do this, you can be in the middle of a lame gig, and realize you’re just talking, trying to remember if you mailed in the cable payment.”
“Let’s say I’m doing a weekend at a club,” DeVito says, “maybe two shows Friday and Saturday night, same location in the same town; roughly the same kind of people. I kind of know what I’m going to start with, and I know what I’m going to end with. I have different chunks of things in between. If I’m in the mood, I’ll also play with the crowd. I’ve never done the same set twice, except when I had the TV thing coming up and I was drilling the same four and a half minutes over and over and over again. For me, I like to see what’s going to happen. The strange thing about playing with the crowd is people really like it because they think they’re getting something unique to that show, something just for those people who came in at 8:00, not those others at 10:30.”
“On the road,” Devito continues, “my two favorite clubs are Cap City Comedy Club in Austin and the Ann Arbor Comedy Showcase in Michigan. That club (Ann Arbor), the people are sitting as close as you and I are. It’s a 270 seat room with a tremendous feeling of intimacy. At Jokers Wild (a relatively new club in New Haven, CT) it’s insane and I had a great time. It’s a rock and rollin’ room. You can’t just walk up there and do your planned act. You have to go up there, push people around and play with them. I found it very rewarding. It’s like the wild west. Now, in New York, there’s Comix Comedy Club and Gotham. Gotham has really good people there. It’s a very classy place, not always easy. It can be tough. Comix has a great sound and vibe.”
“It’s very juvenile,” says DeVito, on how he makes a living. “I get up and tell jokes. It’s very silly. I wonder about it all the time. Why are people coming out to see me talk? It’s strange. But then, from my side, I see so many people try to do this and I know how difficult it is. I’ve watched tapes from when I first started. It’s excruciating. Everyone’s awful when they start. By everyone, I mean me. I found an old tape. I thought if I went over them I might pick up on something that would help me. It turns out I did a lot of jokes I still do. But there are some jokes I did then that took two minutes to tell. Now they take fifteen seconds. I’ve learned to distill and cut out the crap. Some times, it’s the same joke, but now it’s funny.”
DeVito is single, which he admits is good for his lifestyle. “To me it’s not a problem to subordinate the social life to this,” he says. “I don’t have an issue with that. There are some women I know who would say it’s hindered my social life in that regard. But, I let them know, ‘Forget the ‘I’m an artist and this is my passion’ shit.’ It’s about making a living.’ If I make plans with someone for Thursday at 8 to get together and I get a gig, I have to take it. No one likes to hear that but that’s the way it is.”
Prior to his set, DeVito meets with a hippy sound engineer as they go over the taping of this show. They are recording it to analog and may transfer it to digital for a CD. DeVito realizes he’s missing out on a fair amount of money, selling them after shows. Plus, like a lot of guys who have made televised appearances with a fair amount of proven material, not that it’s dated, he wants to get the media out there, and put the pressure on himself to keep writing new stuff.
“I’m a fan of those guys who turn over their act that quickly,” says DeVito, “Guys like Louis CK and Gaffigan. You get a cable showcase. I got Live at Gotham and Premium Blend before that. Then a national appearance like Last Comic Standing. You get a late night slot - I got Ferguson. Then you do them again and maybe you get a half hour on Comedy Central. You keep building and adding to it and hopefully you’re still working. You go from there.”
“Joe is very generous with his advice,” says comedian, Helen Hong, “and encouragement to younger comics. He’s been a valuable mentor to me and has provided crucial guidance as I’ve been coming up in the business. If I find myself in a situation and I’m unsure how to handle, he’s always a quick text away. He’s a good person, a great friend, and a terrific comic.”
“It’s about confidence,” DeVito says, “stage presence. That accounts for a lot of it. That was a hard battle for me. I did a show recently where the opener tanked, the next guy had some trouble. I got up there and got a couple of quick laughs. You could see that the audience recognized that, ‘Oh, this guy knows what he’s doing, so we’ll trust him.’ They have to trust that this person that will guide us through this night of comedy. Making someone laugh is like making some one sneeze. You can’t sit there and say, I will begin laughing in five seconds. It either happens or it doesn’t. It’s involuntary, like a spasm.”
Another reason DeVito is putting together a CD, is to publish his own work and lay claim to his material. “If I have a bit that I’ve done a few times and it’s good enough to commit to it,” says DeVito, “without having anyone publish it; I take my video clip, because I try to video tape most everything, and I put it online (YouTube, MySpace) and it’s there. There’s Joe Devito doing that bit. It’s great for current events stuff which is notoriously hard to write and quickly goes out of date. Now if I have a good riff on current events I can get it out there immediately. Some lawyers at the University of Virginia did a study on Intellectual Property for comedians (search under virginia.law.edu.com). It’s a problem, but what are you going to do? I’ve had a comic try to make my life difficult because he said I tried to steal one of his jokes. His friend heard me talk about the same topic. I said to him, ‘Are you serious? You have all the eyeglass jokes?’ That’s one extreme. On the other side, I did a show where a guy did a joke almost the same as mine. But, if you do a joke about a TV commercial, that happens. God, if it weren’t for four hour erection jokes and Cialis, I don’t know what some guys would talk about.”
“Joe’s a great comic because he’s got the material, plus he’s got confidence and a great work ethic,” says comedian Sue Prekel. “He also just really loves getting on stage and having control of the room. The audience always knows he’s in charge when he’s up there.”
“I really didn’t know what it would be like,” says DeVito on his career. “One of the great things about this journey I’ve been on, is; I bought all the books on comedy I could find because when I get into something I tend to do a lot of research. There was a book that I read my first year in comedy, that I thought was pretty good. Two years after it, I picked it up again and it was a completely different book. Obviously the book didn’t change, but my understanding of things had. If you were to say to me when I was at open mics, sweating it out, that I was going to get a late night TV appearance. I would have said, “Get out of here! That’s not going to happen.” So, all of this is bonus.
To see where Joe is performing, visit JoeDevito.com.