tom shillue
written by Ken Carlson
(Mar/Apr 07)
“I had a girlfriend about ten years ago. Her mother was always in our business. She had been an actress and used to say, ‘I don't know how you kids do it. You don't know where your next meal is coming from. You don't know where your next paycheck is coming from. I admire you, but I don't know how you do it.’ I said, ‘Listen, Harriet, I can make a room full of people laugh pretty consistently for a half an hour. Sometimes an hour. Any 
audience, corporate or college; I'm going to make them laugh. You think I'll be secure as a computer programmer. But, there are a lot of computer programmers. When times get tough, there are layoffs. There are no layoffs for guys who can make people laugh. Even when times get grim, you can always work.’ She said, ‘Tom, I never thought about it that way.’”
“It might have been my third or fourth show ever. Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was going up at Catch a Rising Star. The booker was Robin Horden. He seemed like a pretty serious guy. But, I was cocky. I went up the first time and got some laughs. I remember John Graff was hosting. He came up to me after the show and said, ‘That was pretty funny. You're gonna be good someday.’ ‘Gonna be good?’ I was a little upset I got the ‘gonna be good’. So I went back another time and got some more laughs. Then the third time I went back, I must've gone over. I wasn't aware of it, but I saw the light blinking away in the back of the room. So, I decided to wrap things up and got off. Robin Horden cornered me in a closet and he pointed at a picture of Jerry Seinfeld and said, ‘Jerry Seinfeld plays this club and he doesn't go over (his time). Who the fuck are you?!’ What happened to my cozy relationship with this club? I didn't work there again for a couple of months. It was a crushing defeat because I was about to ask when I could get a weekend spot. When you start out, you better be cocky or you'll never get anywhere. Luckily, I had a falsely high opinion of my act in the beginning because that's what keeps you going. Robin turned out to be a good guy, he just liked to intimidate comics who went over time. To this day, I never go over my time, no matter what club I'm in. As time went by, he started giving me spots. He was one of the first to take a shine to me. Then, I moved to New York, probably too quickly, before I paid my dues in Boston, and started right at the bottom. I didn't realize what I had, a pretty good room that put me up regularly on weeknights.”
“The commercials kicked in before the stand-up did. I've been doing voiceovers and commercials since 1994. The two fed each other. When I was struggling for stage time at Caroline's and Stand-Up New York, my face would show up on TV. I'd be at the bar at Caroline's and I'd appear in a promo for Comedy Central, then an ad for Snicker's. The club owners saw this and thought, ‘He must be doing well.’ I started getting spots. It was the perception of how I was doing.”
I sat down with Tom Shillue recently downtown at Rififi. He had just come from a corporate gig, dressed in a jacket & tie. When he met other comics and shook hands he looked like he was running for city council.
Tom doesn’t look like a comedian who’s spent the better part of 14 years on the stage. He has a straight-laced, serious manner about him. Could be an insurance agent. Perhaps a high school history teacher. It’s not until he launches into his stories do you see it, then it’s too late – you’re hooked.
“It's funny. When I started doing stand-up, I was more of a storyteller, which is why I struggled. You've got to get up and do five minutes, and I would take the first five minutes to get warmed up. So, I had to go back and learn to make it punchier to survive in clubs. Then, if I got any road gigs, 10-20 minutes outside of New York, it had to be set 'em up/knock 'em down. You learn to keep that rhythm. But, once you get audiences that likes you, came to see you, you can loosen things up a bit. Only in the last five years, I started telling stories that really kicked in for me artistically.”
“As a stand-up, Tom Shillue breaks the mold: He's disciplined, has no ego and is genuinely funny. That’s not a dig at most comedians – yes, it is – it's a testament to Tom's talent as both a performer and person. With engaging stage presence and flawless comic timing, Tom makes you forget you're watching a performance. That's a great comedian.”
– Craig Baldo, comedian
“I would start doing it (telling stories) at alternative shows, like Moonwork. I would get up and tell a story and the audience would eat it up, because they're a patient audience, ready to listen. Slowly, I would start to do it when headlining or doing corporate gigs, and it would go over just as well. It was always a struggle of how to pull that material over. Once I started doing it, it wasn't really a struggle at all.”
Tom strikes me as a pensive guy. He likes to pause, take a moment, before he speaks. He'll begin a statement, then I think he looks ahead to see how it would read.
“I don't think the audience thinks of comics as characters, even when they are. It helps (pause) for yourself, but I don't think the audience cares as much, what they think of you. They'll see a guy like Emo Phillipps on stage, ‘Well, that guy's just a weird dude.’ Take Larry the Cable Guy. Obviously he's a dressed up character that he's developed over the years. People hear him say, ‘Git her done’ and think ‘He's my kind of guy.’ I think, for yourself, it helps to think of yourself as a heightened character because when you're on the stage, you want to make yourself watchable. That means bigger than life. Oddly enough, I feel the longer I've done stand-up, the closer it gets to me. Lately, I think it's getting very close to being myself on stage. It's like two lines that are converging.”
“It's harder in a mainstream club on weekends. I don't like it, but I do it. Everyone in their career wants weekend spots in clubs. I like weekday spots because the atmosphere is a little more laid back. It's more about them on the weekend. During the week, they're there to see you. (Similar to the view expressed by Jeff Caldwell in the Jan/Feb issue of the comedians.) There was always this brass ring to get weekend spots. Once I got it, I wallowed in it for about a year. I got tired of it. I can't work in new material on friday or saturday nights. That's what I'm interested in doing, trying new stuff. I can only do that on weeknights. In mainstream clubs, working clean is liking running with ankle weights on. You're going to have to do a clean set when you're on the Tonight Show or Conan, so you might as well not fall back on the easy dirty stuff that's just going to get you junk food laughs. Now, if you've got a dirty, filthy mind, if you're depraved, like Jim Norton, god bless you. You want to get on stage and reveal that. That wouldn't work for me. People would look at me and think, I don't believe that is what you do when you're on a Motel 6 on the road. Now Jim Norton does depraved things in Motel 6's, so...”
“Some people are neurotic and whiny. If they play that on stage, similarly to someone who's dirty, it can work for them. I saw that movie, Sideways, which everybody loved. I couldn't stand the main character (played by Paul Giamatti), because he was a whiny man. There's nothing more annoying than a man complaining about his station in life. I kind of liked his sleazy buddy. He was a proactive guy. He wasn't leading his life in a good way, but at least he wasn't whining about his life. He was doing something. While I might be closer to the leading person, I liked the wayward character. Why? I don't like kvetching and whining. Almost every comic complains about breaking up with his girlfriend. During the course, of my career, I probably broke up with four girlfriends, but I never mentioned it on stage. It's a little bit unpleasant talking about personal stuff (and yet he much of his material are true stories that happened to him). I guess it's because of the distance. I tell stories that happen to me now as well. I think it's the element of complaining. I'm uncomfortable with insecurity. I like to appear secure and I like to share things I like or interest me. It's the lack of that neurotic kind of personality. Of course, for eight out of ten comics, neurosis is the key.”
“I say they (stand-up comics) are a motley crew. There are two kinds of people drawn to stand-up. One is someone who is so secure with himself that he's very self-confident and they just want to share their interesting view of the world with other people. They have no qualms about getting up in front of a crowd and doing that. The other kind is so insecure and wracked with neurosis, they have nothing to lose by getting up and spilling their issues with the audience. They are seeking the love of strangers in a huge way. The latter is a majority. But, there a lot of comics that are analytical about the world. We grew up with Bob Newhart and Jonathan Katz Jonathan is able to perform with MS. He walks with a cane and was on the same bill with me recently. There are certain comics, like Bobcat Goldthwait or Sam Kinnison, there careers would be over. With Jonathan, it just seems like another thing in his career. He just did ten minutes and Caroline's and is doing Conan tomorrow night. They look to the world in a way that is interesting and they want the crowd to groove in that way. I think Demetri Martin is that way. He's someone I love to spend time with because we don't talk about comedy. Jeff (Caldwell) is the same way. When I'm with them, we'll talk about stuff, something you read in the paper, whereas some comics just talk about the business.”
“I generally am contented, not racked by anything. I've got the wife, the baby, everything's great. What could be better?”
“I'm not going to get on the road now with a baby. I've not ever really done the road. The reason is, I started getting up in New York and getting commercials and voiceovers. It was never feasible for me to leave town. You don't make money in New York. The clubs don't pay well. They pay a little better now because of the New York Comedians Coalition. Most guys order their lives with three weeks on the road and a week in New York. Because of the commercials and voiceovers, I never had to do that. It was fortunate that I could do my stuff in New York, have a great life in the city, and not have to hit the road. For some comics, it makes them so much better. I don't know if it would with me. I like to get out of town. But life on the road, comedy clubs in the middle of nowhere, would not be a good fit for me. I'd be angry that I couldn't pick up a Wall Street Journal. I always wanted to get out on the road for about a year. You want to get out there, get the stories, get roughed up by road audiences. It's a romantic idea you have in your head. To be honest, it probably would have kicked my act into shape in the late 90's. It would've made me come up with a headliner set sooner. In the end, I'm glad I didn't. It might've taken it in a different direction. I wouldn't have found the voice I have now in the mix of mainstream rooms and alternative rooms that have given a new life to my act.”
“I just did a corporate gig where I had to get up and knock 'em over. Throw 'em right over the plate. I got up and did 15 minutes of stuff from my Comedy Central special that makes them laughs every time. It's not terribly interesting, but I like to do it. That's why I like to play some weekends. I like to play the big room full of people laughing at material that works. Home Run Derby style. It's like hitting them out with a pitching machine.”
“It's by doing it in front of a crowd. A lot of my stuff isn't that funny, when you get down to it. It's just the relationship between the audience and me. If you can get them to be on your wavelength, if I can use a hippie term, then they're going to laugh. To a lot of comics, there's this macho attitude that if the material's good, it can play anywhere. I'm not sure that's true. I feel a lot of my material is basically an understanding between me and my audience. I know there's a lot of stuff that I do at Moonwork or Rififi, that I'll get up and try it for the first time and they'll go with it because they can feel that I'm winging it. There's that energy, like an improv show where they're making it up on the spot. Afterwards, you've got to look at what you've done, boil that stuff down and pound it into material that's more universal. So, sometimes I will try a story not fully worked out. They might laugh at something I didn't know was the funny part of the story. It might remind me of something else and go off in a different direction. It's very improvisational and I find some real gems that way. If I try it a second time, it might fall flat. Then it's back to the drawing board. It hardly ever matches the first time.”
“I could use more hustle in a career sense. I can't short myself in terms of artistic hustle. I always work on new stuff. I do work very hard. I like it. I like running around. I know some guys who made a living making commercials, then moved out of the city and don't want to get out to hang out at the (Comic) Strip. I never considered that. I like getting out every night, or most nights. I think I have a good work ethic, but as far as career hustle, I could use a Tony Robbins cassette tape. My wife thinks I work very hard, but I poopoo that notion. I work 11 hour days, six days a week. I'm out auditioning at 10 in the morning and out at clubs until 11 at night. It's long hours, but I like all of it. I love doing commercials. I love coming here and doing a show for nothing. I love doing a corporate gig and raping them for everything I can get. It's all fun, so I don't think about it as work. If it was another line of work, it would seem like a long day. Kudos to myself for a good work ethic, but I can't pat myself on the back too hard because I enjoy what I'm doing.”
“He is a great person off stage and on stage he is unflappable, in even the most unruly of circumstances. You have to look at the breadth and strength of his comedy, because included within each story he tells are a ton of brilliant jokes, observations, and hilarious meandering tangents. By the time you even notice how packed with comedy his story was, it's over. You're left with this sense of ease of artistry you rarely encounter in modern comedy. Tom Shillue is easily my favorite comedian in New York City.”
- Sean Crespo, comedian
“It is bizarre. I don't go to see anybody (perform stand-up), but it's because I'm busy. If I worked in a lab, would I want to go see someone play music? No, I'd want to see someone tell stories. That's what I would like. It sometimes crosses my mind. I can't believe these people bought a ticket, came down to see me.”
“I've done four solo shows. One kind of goes into another. There's definitely hours of material within that format. I did one this fall, called All About the Story. I did one recently called, Dad 2.0. They're very different shows in theme, but it's all stuff about me. I didn't even think of them as different shows, although the content was quite different.”
“This latest show, I did at ArsNova. I put a bunch of stories together that I thought would be fantastic. I did it and they said they liked it and wanted to put me with a director. They matched me with Virginia Scott. I wondered if she might, ‘Impede on my free-flowing way I do business.’ She did. She thought I was trying to tell a specific story but it was all over the place. I like to be all over the place. Can't the audience figure it out? I obviously had some problems with structure. I like to go up and just fire it off and be improvisational. She thought that if I was doing a solo show in a theater, I owed the crowd a reason for being there. What did I want to say? I wasn't comfortable with that. We hashed it out for months. It became about my baby daughter. I used stories I crafted around the idea of what kind of father I'd be. I had stories about my dad. It became an examination of how I'd do. Now, we had an arc to the show. We put it up on stage, lost the microphone, added theatrical lighting. I did it and it was theatrical, but I was losing power. It was more like Spaulding Gray. So I went back to the microphone and now it's a happy medium. It's a theatrical show, but I still have my security blanket (microphone) and can work the crowd. I don't want to do Conversations with my Father on Broadway. I want to be do what I do best. It was a good give and take with this director. She was good at things I was weak at.”
“Stand-up doesn't have to have a point. I like to make them laugh, keep it light. Enjoy your drinks! Good night! It's what's fun about a comedy club. It's what's annoying about solo shows; you have some guy staring out the window, looking for his dad. It's horrifying that I would be put into that position. That was what I was insecure about. Generally speaking, that's not the strength of a comic; an arc. We don't want to create an arc. It doesn't help us get any laughs. People like arcs. They like stories. Maybe this will kick it up a notch for me artistically.”
“The CD is coming out in March, Over Confident. What runs through my set, is this idea of a nerdy guy who thinks he’s a little bit cooler than he is. I don't have much material about it, but there's an undercurrent about it that runs through my work.”
“I am not one of those comedians who says, ‘Never blame the audience. It's always your fault.’ Sometimes it isn't. I will be firing on all cylinders and sometimes the audience is dead. I don't lose sleep over it. It's a phenomenon of the weekend. Whenever you do a weekend, you've got these big Friday and Saturday night shows. Then you come back to do the Sunday night show and it ruins your whole weekend. You leave with this lazy, slow audience on Sunday night. It takes the wind out of your sails. There's nothing you can do about it.”
“One thing I used to get from my managers when I started was that they were always looking for something more. ‘You've got to punch it up to get on the Tonight Show.’ With my first manager, I didn't have the act that would get me on Star Search or whatever it was back then. The club owners who didn't like my stuff didn't have me at their club. I heard that I was too white; that there were too many guys like me out there (e.g. Bob Saggett). You need to set yourself apart. In a way that’s true. When you're starting out, you just want people to laugh at you. You don't want to tell them your inner most secrets. Lewis Brind at Caroline's said I'd be great right away. Rick Newman at Catch a Rising Star had me MC-ing a show on weekends when I wasn't very good yet. It was those guys who gave me the encouragement to stay in it. I never had the desire to play every club; just find the ones that like me and play there.”
“I think my family likes it. I'm the only of five kids to be a performer. My folks were very unconcerned. They didn't push us into anything. That's a credit to my parents. A lot of people complain about their parents. We weren't the Waltons, but my parents did a lot of things right. They were extremely laissez-faire about career choices. I dropped out of school. My dad said, 'Great, I don't have to pay for that tuition.' I never finished college. He wasn't concerned. A lot of comics, after five years, they have to show something. I never had that. Whatever happened was fine. I'm sure my dad thought that I'd try it for a few years, then open an ice cream store and everything would be fine. But, that didn't happen. I think they like seeing my stuff on TV. My mom loves the commercials. I've been on network television. Not impressed. If I'm in a commercial, she calls the neighbors, sets the TIVO. She goes crazy. To her, that's legitimate.”
“The time tested skills I've developed of performing in front of an audience. If you bring some guy who tells jokes at a water cooler down here, he's going to have a heck of a time. How do you do it? It should be easy. If you can make your family laugh, or your co-workers and college roommates, you should be able to make strangers laugh. It isn't that complicated a process. But, it's about ten years and a lot of lonely nights in bars and clubs. By all accounts, Freddie Prinze was a genius at 19. He was funny out of the gate. Some people are like that. I'm not that funny. I do analyze. I remember watching Bob Newhart as a kid, thinking, ‘How does he do it?’ I knew that Robin Williams from Mork & Mindy. He made people laugh by being silly. How did Bob Newhart do it? He would talk into a phone or sit across from someone in a therapy session. He did it with timing. I would watch these guys and analyze. Freddie Prinze had a lot of energy and a lot of spirit. He'd come out on stage and knock them down. Eddie Murphy was like that. There are some people who are funny. Will Ferrell's another one. I'm not funny all the time, but I'm a pretty shrewd guy to know what works. Conversely, when you get an audience that laughs at everything you do; especially when you have a guy who comes out of the gate and has a special or CD; everyone goes crazy for them. They believe their own press. If you get big in comedy, you can come out and make everybody laugh based on their paying 55 bucks to see you. It doesn't have to be brilliant. You can phone it in. You see people doing it. It's hard to stay funny when you're rich and famous because people will eat up whatever you say. When I see Chris Rock working on a new special, he doesn't get up at Caroline's at get all 'Chris Rock' at everybody. He sits on a stool, looks down at the front row and quietly utters it into a microphone. If he puts on the voice, people go crazy, but that's no way to learn material. He's wise to tone it down. He knows the seductive nature of the easy audience. At the same time, Bill Cosby has an easy audience. Let's face it, they're going to eat up everything he says. But, instead of using it as an easy way out, he embraces it and does long concerts. He'll talk about what he had for breakfast and make it funny. He'll use that love of an audience. He's not lazy about it, but it's not about a finely crafted joke at this point. It's about embracing the love in the audience and taking it to a new level. The ethic that most comics have, is that you have to have tough audiences. While I don't like it exclusively, I like an audience ready to go wherever you want to go, once in a while. Then, I do some of my best work in front of an audience. I start to talk and feel free and start to talk about stuff I never talk about with a road audience or if a talent scout from the network is in the audience.”
When I saw Tom that evening on the little black box stage at Rififi, he closed out the show. He got up there and asked the audience, “What shall we talk about? It's cold outside. That's something we can latch onto. When I was in high school in Norwood, Mass...” He adds details in his stories – colors, weather, names. Start with something small, then follow that thread.
“Tom Shillue is the true gentleman of comedy today. He's a nice fellow, and is flat-out funny. He's a total throwback to what we imagine what 'the good olde days' of comedy would have been, yet he's always on top of what's happening now. His storytelling is Homeric, and always hilarious.”
– Nick Stevens, comedian
“I think I'm where I want to be. You always see headliners, like Brian Regan. If I could get to be that funny that consistently, I wouldn't need anything else. But, he has something that I don't have. He has a different kind of energy. It works with the crowd. They die laughing. I'm not a crusher, killer, destroyer, but I do have high hopes for me in ten years. I'm starting to get good at this. When you see an old guy up there, working a crowd, and they're so good. Even a musician, like Mel Torme, who I used to go see when I first moved to the city. That guy never got off stage from the time he was a teenager; just a great, great performer. That kind of stage presence, you cannot buy. That's 45 to 50 years of stage presence. I often feel good about myself after I get off stage, but I know there are older guys I go to see and they're something special to behold. I just hope someday I can get there, to make other young guys feel the way I do now. The guy who used to close Moonwork, Rusty McGee, died a few years ago. He was the one who got me on Moonwork and the one who started me doing autobiographical material. He would close the show playing piano, singing songs, talking about his weekend. The crowd loved him. They were in the palm of his hand. I wanted that. I wanted to be like Rusty. How cool is it, that now that he's passed away, they have me closing the show? You want a TV show, you want to get ahead, but sometimes you see a guy, maybe a jazz player at The Blue Note that nobody knows. God bless that guy. I'm so glad he continued to play his instrument all his life. I want to go up on stage and tell him I don't care if you never made a dime playing your whole life, you're the greatest person in the world. It's hard because success is around us all the time; acceptance in the industry. In the end, you want to be able to get up there and be the best there ever was, or at least be a craftsman.”
To find out where Tom Shillue is performing, you can find him on MySpace or visit
tomshillue.com to purchase his CD.