We're All Doing Comedy, Dummy: An Interview with Kyle Kinane

So you’re in Chicago right now?

I’m in Madison, Illinois, its where I grew up. I’m out taking a walk. Its cold and now all the cool places are now Subway Sandwiches.

You're doing a mini-tour with Sean Patton and Chris Trew before Hell Yes Fest; are you looking forward to hanging out before you come to Austin together?

Yeah. I met Chris last year and Sean and I are pals, so I know we will have fun. I’m kind of enamored with the idea of touring and just going to a place for one night. That show has to be, you know, it's going to be really fun because you’re just going to be there one night, put all your energy into it, as opposed to when you are at a club for a week, and you’re just like, "Oh well I’ll be back tomorrow night and the night after that and the night after that." Sean and I have done festivals and stuff before. We get along real well so I think its going to be a nice, good time.

Like a vacation, only busier.

Pretty much. Vacations can be work, that style of constantly touring clubs.

Do you see touring as an intense, official job?

I never want to come off like I’m complaining, because it's still a million times better than the other options you have in this world to try to get by. So the fact that I get to do comedy means I’m really luckier than 99% of people in the world because I got to pull this off. That doesn’t mean you can’t fine-tune your own career, and it doesn’t mean you can’t fine-tune everything that makes it better. You can always improve on your life if you want to. For every club that I do, I like to still know that I can go out and just do a tour with other comics where the sensibility is not so much club-oriented, but otherwise show-oriented.

You talked to The AV Club about all the jobs you worked while you were trying to launch your comedy career - do you remember the moment where you realized you could quit your day job and focus on this?

Oh yeah. Well, I had to. I got to the point where I still, I don’t know if it’s a Midwestern thing or something, but you always bring home a paycheck, that’s what you do. You never just get completely irresponsible, you know you got to fulfill your duty as a member of society. I got to the point where so much work was coming in and I liked the place where I worked, I didn’t want to just up and quit. I didn’t want to stick it to them, you know. Cause they were nice. They were really accommodating to begin with; when I needed extra days off to go to comedy shows, they understood. So when it came time it was like, I can’t put them in a position of me taking all these days off. I’m gonna have to either negotiate or get fired, to try to make a go of it. But they were fine. Lucky for me it worked out.

Your column on The Rumpus, "I'm Dead and It's All My Fault," is awesome. Are you planning on starting that back up?

I was starting to go through old ones. I wanted to come up with some other plans and either try animation or getting a single-panel comic going with it. I really wanted to keep the quality up and I'm running out of good ideas, so that's why I stopped. I didn't get bored, I was just kind of upset with myself for some of the quality I was putting into it, so I stepped back for a bit, and lately there's been a little bit of a resurgence about it. So now I'm like, "Alright, I'll give it a shot." It's nice to hear somebody actually reading that.

Do you do a lot of writing for projects outside your act?

Obviously, Twitter has forced some people into trying to write concise jokes, which is fun, to get back to trying to write a joke, or something really funny in that short amount of time. Especially when my act is me rambling on about some story for ten minutes. I think people forget that when you put something on Tumblr or on Twitter, people might read it. I think it's an abused forum. It makes me want to write - makes me want to put a better quality of writing out there, instead of just like, "I'm a comedian! So you should just like anything I fart out!" No. I try to write something decent for those sites. But as far as other places, I've been kind of lazy.

It can take a lot of time to write a complete joke in 140 characters.

Well, I think people don't give the reader enough credit to think maybe they're smart enough to put together what happens before and what happened after. And you can toy with the idea, like you can read a quote out of context or something, and laugh at it. And once two characters are established, you don't really need to know that much about either one to get the idea of their stories.

What are your thoughts on podcasting?

I do a lot of podcasts. It depends on if it's fun. Again, I think there's so many things out there, that if you're going to embark on that, you need to come at it with a unique angle. You know, I don't want to come off as sounding arrogant, but when podcasts say, "Oh, how did you get started in comedy," that information exists in the world very readily. And so, I don't know. If I were to interview somebody, I'd want to get information that doesn't exist, you know, that isn't easily accessed in the world already a bunch of times over. That's me assuming everybody knows what I've done, nobody can know shit about me, nobody knows what I've done. It's a totally relevant question, but I just get sick of answering it.

It's almost the opposite of Twitter, in that it's so accessible and easy to make, sometimes people end up sitting there like, "Well, I've got this whole hour, just gonna keep talking."

You have to be conscious that the market is already instantly flooded, because anybody that can buy the equipment can have a podcast. So the ones that hit on being the best are where somebody has a personality that you can just sit there and bullshit with them for an hour, and all of a sudden it's like, "Oh, we've been talking for an hour and a half, we'll have to edit this." And you don't even realize it, because either you're friends with them already, and those are a blast, they're already my friend and you already know each other enough to sit and shoot the shit, or somebody has a personality - like a talk show host or something - where they know how to steer a conversation. How to get somebody either to talk deeply, or if it’s funny, how to bounce things off and set somebody up for a joke or this and that. And other times its just people that bought the set up because "Oh I can have a podcast!" It’s just a blog where you talk. Just cause anybody can have it doesn’t mean they should.

So you moved from Chicago to LA for the comedy scene. Is Chicago much more improv-focused, harder for stand ups to break into?

I think it’s really switched. I think when I started it was definitely Improv Olympic and Second City and then stand up, which really was one club, Zanie’s. I'd actually been working there, for the first time ever a paid employee after 12 years of comedy. But they were The Ones, unless they were paying you to do comedy there really wasn’t much else going on in the city. Some guys did stand up because they wanted to do it. It was very pure in that sense, in that nobody was taking clinics and there was some crossover to sketch in the Second City. But nowadays, at Zanie’s they realize they have to open their doors to a newer generation of comics, and they’re also supposed to be opening a Laugh Factory and some other venue out there. It’s really turned around. I mean, stand up everywhere in general has gotten a lot bigger and more popular, so Chicago’s embracing it now with these clubs. Who knows if it’ll be good for the local guys. Sometimes clubs come in and they still just book their out-of-town guys. You get to MC there once every few months, but...

The comedy scene in Austin is going through a big growth period like that. It was great to see all the comedy events at SXSW so packed, with lines around the block for someone like Marc Maron, like he's a rockstar.

It’s funny, in Venice City it’s no big deal for a sketch and a stand up to mix, but in Chicago it’s this totally taboo thing. Back in the day, I mean, not now so much, but back when it was this weird divide of two groups of nerds trying to protect their stack of building blocks that nobody gave a shit about. And I was like, why would you divide an already small scene? Looking back, I was at fault as much as anybody else. But you look back at it, and it’s just this immature and playground mentality of, you need to have this group of people to feel special. Strange. So I like it in Austin’s where it’s you’re doing [stand up] at a sketch and improv theater. That’s nice, I mean why shouldn’t that be the case, whereas ten years ago in Chicago people would be like, "I don’t know, they’re not going to like it, we’re going to be outsiders." We’re all doing comedy, dummy.

Kyle Kinane will be performing in three shows at Hell Yes Fest; catch him Thursday, April 7 at 9 p.m. with Sean Patton, Rogelio Perez and Chris Trew at The Mohwak; Friday, April 8 at 9 p.m. with James Adomian, Shane Mauss and Vanessa Ramos at The ND; or see him Saturday, April 9 at 9 p.m. with Chelsea Peretti, Eliza Skinner, Karl Hess, Matt Ingebretson, Amber Bixby, James Adomian and JT Habersaat at Red 7.