This week, we’re highlighting 24 talented writers and performers for Vulture’s annual list “The Comedians You Should and Will Know.” Our goal is to introduce a wider audience to the talent that has the comedy community and industry buzzing. (You can read more about our methodology at the link above.) We asked the comedians on the list to answer a series of questions about their work, performing, goals for the future, and more. Next up is Youngmi Mayer.
Tell us a story from your childhood that you think might explain why you ended up becoming a comedian.
Growing up, my entire family was super-depressed. No one has been formally diagnosed with depression, but going home felt like entering into a dark-cloud realm. My dad flew cargo planes in Angola during the civil war, and looking back, I think he was suffering from a lot of very obvious signs of PTSD.
In stand-up terms, I feel like I was raised in a family that was like a tough crowd, and I had to work really hard to land my jokes. In a way, my entire childhood was bombing in a room of people who did not want to laugh. I think that made me resilient in a way and prepared me for doing stand-up as an adult.
If you were immortalized as a cartoon character, what would your outfit be?
I already wear a cartoon-character outfit, a.k.a. the same outfit everyday: hot-pink tennis skirt, mesh crop top, pink bra. It’s giving dumb-bitch cartoon character that fucks everything up and thinks she’s the main character, and she kind of sort of is but in a villain-adjacent way.
What’s your proudest moment/achievement of your comedy career so far?
I feel really proud when people come up to me and say they enjoy my work personally, and it feels a lot more real than achieving career milestones like being featured on the Today show or whatever. When someone reaches out to tell me they genuinely liked something I did, it blows my mind, because it’s so rare that people are impressed by something to the point of approaching them in public.
I also think because my content is so niche and extremely personal, the people who relate to it are usually people that I would be friends with or feel close to, and generally when they come up to me in public, they are super-cool and extremely hot. It doesn’t happen that much, but when it does, I am so incredibly grateful and proud of myself for creating a connection with a stranger just by being open about the shit I’ve been through.
Which comedian’s career trajectory would you most like to follow?
I don’t really think about stuff like this, because for me, there is no clear-cut path. I don’t think I am marketable as a comedian in the traditional sense, so I don’t even let myself fantasize about a trajectory. I think in a lot of ways, being unmarketable gives me freedom and helps me move away from the toxic competitive-comparison cycle I see consume some of my peers. In that way it is good, but it’s also bad, because I can’t really default to a path that’s been carved out for me already. I don’t have a fantasy of where my career can go, so I just stick to the goal of being able to sustain myself financially from just doing comedy. Also to have tits as naturally big as Patti Harrison’s.
Tell us everything about your worst show ever. (This can involve venue, audience, other acts on the lineup, anything!)
Once I did a show at a Jewish retirement home in upstate New York. I had to get a ride with the other comedians on the lineup. We got there, and the show took place in a fluorescently lit dining hall during their dinner at 4 p.m. When I got onstage, I started off by saying, “So I’m a single mom …” and this 90-year-old grandma in the back just yelled out “BOOOO!” and did a double thumbs-down. I don’t really remember anything after that. I think I just slowly walked offstage. Like, what could I even do to recover from a double-thumbs-down “BOOO!”? Nothing.
What have you learned about your own joke-writing process that you didn’t know when you started?
I cannot write jokes while sitting down at a computer at 9 a.m. with a cup of coffee, no matter how hard I try. In the beginning I would set aside “writing jokes” time. I just cannot write comedy or jokes in that way. The only way I can write jokes is onstage. There was literally a two-year period where I just stopped doing bits onstage and would just riff by going up with zero material. It was horrible, but now I feel like I can do bits, and they are way more dynamic and fluid. I think joke-telling has to be sort of spontaneous for me. There’s something about being pushed into a hairy situation that makes me funny in a way I can’t, for the life of me, preplan.
What’s the biggest financial hurdle you’ve encountered since becoming a comedian?
The biggest financial hurdle since becoming a comedian is becoming a comedian. I am so fucking broke, OMG. I do have to say, though — I was talking to my friend who has a “normal” 9-to-5 job that she fucking hates, and she is also so fucking broke. I have to say, in this day and age, when no job is really paying a living wage, it really no longer makes sense not to do whatever you want to do. Like, we are all broke? We all have to get side hustles as Uber drivers and restaurant servers anyway, so why not do our dream jobs on the side too?
At the end of the movie 8 Mile, Eminem’s character, B-Rabbit, starts his final battle rap by dissing himself so the person he’s battling has nothing left to attack. How would you roast yourself so the other person would have nothing to say?
I think my entire comedy career is roasting myself so no one has anything to say. I think it goes back to when I was a kid, and my job in my family was to make everyone laugh because my entire family was depressed. I was a really fat kid, and I realized what made my parents laugh the hardest was when I made fun of myself. So I learned that the ultimate sacrifice in comedy is to cut yourself down for the benefit of others.
After doing that all my life and sort of building a career out of self-deprecation, I realized I had this superpower where no one can actually say shit to me because I’ve said all of it already — and way worse, actually. There is no one who hates me more than myself and no one who knows more about me than myself. I know this sounds sort of depressing and negative, but it’s also weirdly the road to self-love. If you take the time to really know your shortcomings and really authentically face how shitty of a person you are, then you learn to forgive yourself and accept those parts of you. From that place, the place of truly knowing and forgiving yourself, you are indestructible.
When it comes to your comedy opinions — about material, performing, audience, trends you want to kill/revive, the industry, etc. — what hill will you die on?
Sorry, this is going to be a really unsatisfying and abstract answer. I have a lot of hills I die on for myself, but what I learned is most important is that those are only the hills for me and can’t be applied to other comedians or artists.
For example, for me, the hill I will die on is that I will always think doing comedy that’s off-the-cuff and not doing formulaic bits is always better and funnier. But that’s strictly for me. I think a lot of comedians get into trouble when they come up with these theories and subjective POVs that ring very true for them and their peers and then start to try to enforce them onto other comedians or forms of comedy. Comedy is weird in that it is extremely subjective, but also, the art form needs the performer to have a very rigid and black-and-white delivery style. This leads a lot of comedians to start getting weirdly rigid and reductive. That’s when the whole “hill I will die on” shit gets annoying. When these dude-bro comedians have these very narrow-minded views about something extremely loose and abstract, they start annoying podcasts that appeal to really narrow-minded dude-bros that unfortunately make up the bulk of society and end up getting like 5 million subscribers.
The hill I will die on is that most people who have hills they die on and enforce them on other people are the worst.
What is the best comedy advice, and then the worst comedy advice, you’ve ever received?
The best comedy advice I’ve ever received is in regards to online content, and it was from my friend who told me to just post anything I thought was funny and not to be too precious about it or think about it too much. Also, he told me not to post or act on social media in a way to “game the system” and always just keep true to what I thought was funny.
The worst comedy advice I’ve ever received was when some old stand-up comedian told me to focus only on stand-up and never get into doing online content because it will kill my live performances. Although I understand where he was coming from, the truth is, in this day and age, all comedians need to hone the skill of making content. It’s a separate language, and being good at it doesn’t translate to the stage and vice versa. All comedians need to learn both languages. It’s not going to harm your onstage presence just because you also learn how to do online videos. I think older comedians place too much importance on classic stand-up, while newer comedians only think content is important because it’s such a quicker and more effective way to make a bunch of money. But I think, honestly, both are important and shouldn’t be thought of as either-or.
