We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Harrison Tweed. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Harrison below.

Harrison , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.

Well I guess the thing I do that a lot of comedians in this day and age don’t do is I don’t put too much on social media. Comedians follow social media trends and I find it extremely antithetical to what great standup is supposed to look like. Carlin, Pryor, Rivers, etc didn’t give the people exactly what they want and that’s why they’re some of the greatest ever. Challenging the ideas of the consumer and still leaving them satisfied is much more interesting to me. I think it reflects in my material that I don’t write to hit an algorithm. Look, I’d love to pop on IG or something but I’d rather do the best standup I can do and for the live audience to love it. I don’t want to hawk blue chew to “make it”. I want to express myself in the most genuine way I can. When you see me doing standup I’m on cloud 9. I don’t want the thirst for success to hinder that.

Harrison , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I got into standup at a young age. When I was about 14 Dane Cook was really popular and especially popular with my age range. He made a lot of his material about things kids could relate too. As I got older Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Mitch Hedberg and Demitri Martin all came into my life. I loved it, but didn’t see it as an attainable thing to do. Years later at college I was on a bus to class downtown. I passed by a comedy club and googled it later. It said it had an open mic. I did maybe 15 sets in that year but just liked saying I did comedy. I wasn’t committed. It wasn’t till 2015 that I finally said I was gonna seriously pursue it. I was in New York City just bopping around from mic to mic. Eventually I started doing shows, running a show, and eventually doing paid gigs.
When the pandemic hit we moved to my hometown in Durham, North Carolina. It was next to Raleigh, home of Goodnight’s Comedy Club and The Improv. I started doing host and feature work for people like Steve Byrne, Drew Morgan, Liza Treyger, and Jon Lovitz. I also started touring breweries and opening for Byrne in places like Nashville, Cincinnati, and Syracuse New York, I was in heaven. The great thing about Steve is that he doesn’t care what comedy he’s following. Never told me to lay off a topic. His comedy is more centrist leaning than mine, which is HARD LEFT. I think one of the things I’m most proud of as a comic is writing standup as a city kid with pretty specific politics and making my comedy work in rooms that go left, right, and apolitical. My philosophy is that if you want to write a joke about cops that’s truly killer, it’s gotta get laughs in bars that hoist a blue lives matter flag. Bring the funny and heart baby!
I think my appeal is what sets me apart. When I was a comic in brooklyn I’d see comics who I loved but felt like their comedy wasn’t gonna get passed Manhattan. These comics weren’t thinking of its appeal to the masses. That’s fine if you want to just have a niche following, in fact in many ways I share that goal, but you gotta make your jokes as strong as possible. So, making people laugh at things they don’t necessarily want to laugh at is extremely intoxicating.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I needed and still need to unlearn my professional competitiveness. I’ll never unlearn the hunger to be the best comic , because I think that’s positive. But, I gotta continue to not look at the paper next to me. If I gotta walk dogs in Manhattan for 10 years before I’m a full time comedian that’s okay. That just means when I do pop I’ll be that much better.

Can you share your view on NFTs? (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

Dumbest shit in the world. Take a screenshot dipshit.

Contact Info:

• Website: Www..harrisontweed.com
• Instagram: @tweedyjokes
• Other: @tweedyjokes on threads

Image Credits
Dalvin Nichols Photography, Forte Photography, Tim King Photography