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A Bunch of Weirdos: Part Two of an Interview with Comedian Shane Mauss
Wednesday, August 31 - Saturday, September 3
Cap City Comedy Club (8120 Research Blvd)
Shane Mauss will be performing six shows at Cap City Comedy Club: Wednesday and Thursday evening at 8 p.m.; and Friday and Saturday evening at 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. Tickets for Wednesday - Thursday Shows: $9 -$12; tickets for Friday - Saturday Shows: $15 - $18
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[Editor's Note: Both parts of this awesome interview were guest contributed by local writer and amateur comic Jared Walls.]
Shane Mauss is a stand-up comic who, for the past year, has called Austin “home,” a relative term for a comic as busy as Mauss. If you find yourself at Cap City on a Sunday or Tuesday night, or at the Velveeta room on Thursday, you may be fortunate enough to catch him working out new material. But you may have also caught Mauss on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Comedy Central's Live at Gotham, Showtime's Comics Without Borders, or maybe his own Comedy Central Presents special. His jokes cast an irreverent lens on topics ranging from theme park disasters, to time travel, to the absurdity of truck commercials. His comedic voice is as distinct as his actual voice (he’s unmistakably from Wisconsin). Punchline Magazine named his debut album, Jokes to Make My Parents Proud, one of the Top 10 Comedy Albums of 2010. In Part One we chatted with Mauss about Australia, Wikipedia K-Holes, and crappy sitcoms, and here we talk his thoughts on the sadness of tough guys and his favorite kind of weirdoes.
A lot of your jokes, at least the ones that are on your first album, they hinge on a naive persona, like the one about steroids where you didn’t have to work out or, or being called a “pussy.” Is that sort of inherent being from the Midwest? I’m from east Texas, so I kind of have the same thing. Do you look at the world in Wisconsin-colored glasses?
Yeah, I think so. I also just like especially in more of my newer stuff, I’ve always liked the idea of talking about harsher subjects. I have lots of silly things, where the same applies, where I’m like, “Hey, I’m a dumb naive guy that doesn’t know what’s going on.” I like not looking like I know what I’m doing, but it coming through in my material that I clearly knew where I was going.
I think it lessens the blow a lot when you can talk about really dark things or really graphic things or harsher things or whatever it might be, and coming at it from the side of just being very naive and not understanding I’m saying anything wrong, I think, allows me to get away with more. I don’t know, I’ve always felt, especially regarding sex and stuff like that, I’ve always just been fascinated by people’s ridiculous behavior or the things you read about like weird fetishes and stuff people have. I like looking at that from a, “Golly, gee whiz! I didn’t know you could do that sort of a thing!” It sort of cracks me up because existentially I think all sex is very weird. If our brains weren’t wired to enjoy it so we would breed and procreate no one would be doing it. There’s too many bodily fluids involved.
So I’ve always been fascinated by things like that, or I’m big into the macho character. Being from the Midwest, I’ve always found that to be - and growing up as a kid and just like trying to pretend like I was going along with the macho tough guy, which I never was.
Right, one of the dudes.
But I love people that are like that because I feel a little bit sorry for them, because it’s never genuine in any way, and it’s always just like an odd masking of your insecurities and trying so hard to have people perceive you in a way that you think is cool for people to perceive you because you saw it in a movie or something like that. I don’t know, I just get a kick out of that sort of thing. So like my truck joke, for example, off of my first CD, is a good example of me making fun of macho-ism. But my new act, I don't do anything from my old CD anymore.
So, I got rid of all that material to work on a new act. I'm getting real close now to where I'm really happy with my hour. I'm pushing to do maybe an hour special. Maybe sometime this winter or something like that.
So, yeah, that's what I've been working on for a couple of years now. It's starting to reach the peak. I'm still adding a lot of things and, I mean, I love taking chances on stage. Just about any show that you ever see me on I'll be trying out at least a couple of things. Right now I have two really long projects that I've been working on. Or, just pieces of material that I've been working on for two or three weeks now. That I just keep on adding and expanding and changing. And they're higher concept ideas that I've been building up. So, I've been having a lot of fun with that. And so, my live show is still not totally put together and what my hour will be like on tape. Which will be a lot more interesting for me because by the time I'm ready to record an hour I'll be so sick of all the material.
All honed and tightened up just right. And I'll have said it a thousand times and so, yeah, I look forward to that so I can get rid of all my material and start over.
After you’re here in Austin for your week at Cap City, you're gonna be doing the Bob and Tom Tour. I was just curious, have you done anything like that before? Have you done Bob and Tom before? I mean, you've done their radio show.
Yeah. I do the radio show a fair amount. I do that. I try to get on there once every few months. It just depends with the routing and everything. If I get close to that area I'll stop in and take an extra day so I can get on their show. Cuz they've been really good to me. I've gained a lot of fans off of it and everything. This is my first tour that I've done for them. And my schedule actually doesn't reflect it yet because I don't have all of the, I pretty much have all the details but I don't have all of the links or anything. But there's actually a second part of that tour that puts me through the rest of the year. So I'm gonna be pretty busy with them.
I'm always working a lot, but I'm not always booked up very far in advance. And so, even though my work is continuously coming in, I'll start a month and not have anything for the following month and it's always just very nerve wracking. So that's the great thing about this Bob and Tom Tour. Now I can just focus on my writing and not have to stress about where my next gig is gonna be. And how I'm gonna pay the bills. So, yeah, they've been good to me.
Are part of those stretches gonna be on a tour bus?
Yeah, just that first two weeks that's on my schedule, that's on a tour bus with a few other comics. And then the rest of it is just on weekends, Friday and Saturday, where I'll be flying out to places.
I would imagine being on the road with other comics is probably more fun, or better than hanging out at a comedy condo for a week or so.
Yeah. I sometimes get, I mean, it doesn't register to me as being lonely.
But, there's symptoms there like, why am I depressed all of a sudden? Something like that. Sometimes when I've just been alone in a hotel room writing for four days straight. I just started driving myself a little bit crazy.
So, it's definitely nice. And I like running jokes by people and everything. I do that. My friend Myq Kaplan for example, I will call once a week or a couple times a month, anyway. And run jokes by each other and give each other notes on things. But it is fun hanging out with other comics. Comedians are my favorite kind of people. They're all a bunch of weirdos. And really unique people, and very genuine and usually have interesting lives and whatnot. So yeah, it's a big mixed bag of people and I love it.
