Anton Shuford
written by Tabitha Vidaurri
“You never know where this will take you,” says comedian Anton Shuford, “if you’re working night in and night out as a stand-up comic. That’s what I’ve always dreamed of, constantly getting work and performing all over.”
Shuford is based in Philadelphia and has been performing for six years. He’s a regular at the local venues, but his gigs aren’t limited to Philly. He’s making his name, from Hartford to North Carolina, and within the span of his short career he has become one of the busiest comics in the city.
Anton knew he wanted to be a comedian when he first saw Eddie Murphy’s Delirious, and got his start performing in college at Penn State. “Me and some friends put together a comedy show,” recall Shuford, “where I was expected to do thirty minutes at the end.”
After school, Shuford lived in Philadelphia scene, working first as a subsitute teacher, then a bartender while he learned the ins and outs of stand-up. “When I started here in Philly, I was going down to the Laff House. It’s a good club, because it can offer you any type of crowd. It had a long reputation for being a black comedy club. It was right off South Street, so you never knew what you were going to get. Sometimes the room would be all black, all white, or mixed. It really helped me understand comedy from the open mic perspective, by sitting in that room and watching other comics, watching the crowd reaction, and learning the importance of not judging the audience.”
Dave Walk, a fellow comedian and founder of the comedy blog Comic Vs Audience, directed a mini-documentary about Anton. In the short film, Anton openly acknowledges, with his sheepish grin and easy-going laugh, is not what you’d call intimidating. He tells a story about how one night, while walking past Jefferson Hospital, he passed two old ladies at an ATM loudly changing a hundred dollar bill. They looked right at him and continued openly counting out the money. He considered the experience to be “deblackulating”.
The area known as Center City Philadelphia is relatively small when compared to other cities. It’s also unique because the major business and shopping districts are in the same area. I met up with Anton at the Nodding Head, a popular microbrewery on Sansom Street a few blocks south of the comedy club Helium. This area is essentially Anton’s home base. “The interesting thing about Philadelphia, in general, is that the city itself is a city of neighborhoods. From the outside looking in, people think, ‘Oh, a big city like New York’ but it really isn’t. We have a small square block radius where there’s a downtown, but outside of that, the city doesn’t exist like that. That’s true with the comedy here, too. There were certain people who went to the Laff House and there were people who went the Comedy Caberet. You knew the comics in passing, but you really didn’t work and watch each other work in the same area. So, bang, Helium came!”
Since Helium comedy club opened in 2005, Anton went from doing five minutes at open mics, to featuring for comics like Louis CK. Part of it involved being in the right place at the right time. But Anton also had the foresight to get behind the new Center City right away. “Timing is everything, and it just exploded.”
It also helped to unite two otherwise separate sets of comics, the Cabaret performers in suburbs, and the Laff House comics on South Street. “That’s what was going on in the greater scene. The undercurrent of that meant that all the comics who were doing open mic shows no longer felt like there was bridge to jump to. So everyone descended on that scene. There was now a stage that was hosting big name comedians, right in the middle of the city. The prospect of success was that much more tangible. The first time they gave me three minutes, after awhile they offered me a host spot, then I moved up to feature. All that happened in the span of Helium being open. When you can see the advancement of the comics, that’ll change the whole scope.” Anton received his first break when he opened for Patrice O’Neil. “It was Helium’s first sold out run. The current feature was having a rough time, and didn’t return on Saturday and they told me ‘You’re going to be featuring today.’”
In addition, Anton participates in smaller local comedy shows like Bedtime Stories and Ministry of Secret Jokes, which mix together sketch, standup and video in a cabaret-like setting. It all makes for a place where you can flex your comic abilities and Anton has used the opportunity to hone his acting skills. He also served as a lively host for an eight episode web-based series called Illanights, which was created by the tourism site Uwishunu.com. Shot in early 2008, Illanights was filmed in the same vein as Dave Attel’s Insomniac, and it showcased the nightlife in different Philly neighborhoods.
Anton describes his style of stand-up as storytelling – taking incidents from his real life and reworking them in order to boost the drama. “I have a joke about me and my buddy walking down the street. Further down the street, there were two lesbians. Now, when they saw us, they decided to hold hands; which was a show, I guess, of solidarity between them, or one girl making the other feel secure. So in total jest, my buddy said, ‘We should hold hands just to let them know they don’t have a shot with us.’ Now, he wants to get involved in a game of gay chicken. And we can’t beat them in gay chicken, because they actually are gay. So when that instance happened, that was humorous to me. That’s the premise, so you have to jazz it up before you take it to the stage.” Ultimately he ends with, “So I tell my buddy, I’m not sucking a dick just to prove a point.”
“You just take something you see and work on it,” says Shuford. “Sometimes I’m on stage and I’m working on my jokes I’ve already written. I’ll open up and more jokes come out of it. I build from the inside out, not one on top of the other. There are more jokes in a good story than any two or three or five-year comic can realized when they first write a good joke. So you gotta keep practicing.”
The inevitable part of performing comedy is getting heckled and Philadelphia audiences are notoriously difficult. Anton however, looks on the bright side. “There’s heckling. People stand up; there are drunks. But you just get used to how to handle it,” he recalls in Dave Walk’s documentary. “They don’t understand that you’re doing this all the time. You have the mic in your hand and that’s like a super power. It’s (Hecklers) just another bank robber that Superman or Spiderman is rounding up.”
A storyteller, sure, but Anton is not necessarily easy to label, and perhaps that’s what’s so intriguing about him. “I come from the individual’s rights point of view. Most of what we see in society and most of what’s put out there on television and mass media is sort of the watered down version of a truth. So it becomes a mob rule idea. Every individual has his or her own reason for handling his or her own situation the way they do. It’s that individuality of thought that makes us more human. In individual aspects almost everybody has a friend who’s of a different race, or even homosexual, where they wouldn’t have a problem with that individual finding their happiness. That’s the kind of point of view I try to have come across on stage. “
For Anton, working constantly means success. He’s happy to be on stage five or six nights a week and content to travel around the East Coast. He’s got a no-nonsense work ethic because this is what he wants to be doing, and it’s that diligence that has allowed him to thrive. “One of the things you have to get used to is where their light is and how it shines in your face. That’s the first thing you have to do with any stage is check your vision. There’s always a bright light shining in your face.” To him, it’s that beautifully simple.
Tabitha Vidaurri is a writer from Philadelphia.
For more on Anton, visit http://www.myspace.com/antonshuford