We recently connected with Kenny Gray and have shared our conversation below.
Kenny, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to start by getting your thoughts on what you are seeing as some the biggest trends emerging in your industry.
I see a shift where comedy is drifting away from traditional Hollywood. People are getting their comedy on social media in increasingly smaller formats (i.e. TikTok, Reels, Shorts). I heard Judd Apatow posit that perhaps people watch so much comedy on their phones that they’re not super interested in seeing a comedy movie anymore. Which feels true to me? We’re soaked in comedy. Everything is “funny” ads, brands, soda bottles, hot sauce, and video games. So, to me, a fun opportunity would be to make comedy that uses the tone no one seems to be using, which is “sincerity” and “earnestness”. Imagine “There Will Be Blood” but it’s dumb as hell, and played totally earnest? I’d watch that.
I would also wager that it’s not too long before studios / tech companies / someone starts creating major labels of content creators similar to the old studio model. There’s too much money being made by influencers not to be sucked up by a corporate entity. Imagine if the Paramount Studios lot was full of influencers/content creators all sharing resources and production capabilities to make TikTok videos. Sort of like Funny or Die used to do.
But right now, it’s the wild friggin west, which is both terrifying and a huge opportunity. People like Tim Heicdecker and Dropout and Vulfpeck are showing how it can work all independently of traditional systems with the internet. And they are, importantly, not creating what corporate interests “want” but making exactly what *they* and their audiences want (even though it means fewer total viewers than 90’s sitcoms had). I think there’s a quote attributed to the band Anvil, which is something like “It’s better to sell 20,000 records and own it outright rather than sell 2 million and have a label own it'”. And that’s proven true by the Patreon model. The niche audience industry is the future, as I see it. King Gizzard sold out the Hollywood Bowl, and they’ve never had a #1 hit. So, does that even matter anymore unless it’s what you want it?
The other trend I see is a growing interest in live comedy. As digital content becomes increasingly available, a live experience is still something you can’t capture or have on demand. Therefore, it becomes even more valuable in my mind. I’m personally putting a lot of my eggs in the live comedy basket.
I think we are at a similar junction to when the camera was invented, when painters asked, “Well, what’s the point of what we do anymore?” because until then, painters had served as the function to capture reality, but the camera does it infinitely faster and cheaper. The result was weird stuff like cubism. My point is that live performance has an opportunity to have a similar “surreal” movement. You see this a lot in clown. I believe it was Zach Zucker who said realism is captured best on film/tv, so why try and compete? Get weird. Make the stage something a video could never fully capture. Break the rules of reality. I don’t know if this makes any sense but it’s what I think about a lot.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I do character comedy and music. I tell people what I do exists somewhere between Fred Armisen, Bo Burnham, Nick Kroll, and Weird Al (all very big influences). What I am most proud of is my solo show <i>Kenny Goes to Sleep</i>, where I do an hour of characters (with lots of music in it), and a comedy Christmas album I made with my friend Will Gianetta called <i>A Very Chili Christmas </i>by Killjay (streaming now!).
Here was my path:
#0. Shy kid who really liked Monty Python, Les Mis, The Mortal Kombat Soundtrack, and the band Kiss.
#1. Get involved with musical theater at 14/15, fall down the rabbit hole hard and fast
#2. Around 16 I also start playing in a Wolfmother style rock band, things go well.
#3. Do musical theater and play in a band for a few years while attending college in Boston for business. Work as a musical theater camp counselor during the summers.
#4. Mid college: Band ends, musical theater ends, I get heavy into DJ’ing/electronic music and improv comedy. This is a strange time in my life.
#5. Graduate college, move home, try to be in a band, start doing improv at ImprovBoston. Classic failure to launch stuff. Things are going kind of weird (except improv, I get onto a Harold team and meet a bunch of amazing people! I’m laughing all the time and feels great).
#6. Move back to Boston and attend Grad School for Business. At the same time, comedy starts to take off in my life. Doing it basically every single night and it’s going… really well??
#7. Finish grad school and get a job working as a copywriter outside of Boston, doing Mainstage at ImprovBoston. It’s a nice life. But am I truly satisfied??
#8. Lose my job in the pandemic. I get sober. Start taking online classes with teachers in LA/ do a writing program at NYU, They say very nice stuff to me.
#9. A crossroads has appeared. I’ve always wanted to go to NYC or LA and give it a real shot. I decide to leap off the cliff and move to LA. Get involved with UCB, The Groundlings, and character comedy. I go sicko mode and do as much as possible to make up for lost time.
#10. 2 years later and here we are. Smashed all my experiences into whatever it is I “do”. I’m a music/comedy guy I guess? Don’t really over analyze. I make stuff.
honorary #11: gets involved with clown and friends in Boston laugh every time they hear me saying “I’m doing clown”.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice
They’re so funny.
Unless they are successful, in which case I’ve always loved them and knew they were the asset of the future.
(They let me choose a question from a list, so this is the one I chose. Pretty funny choice, right?)
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
Work til you break because it gets you respect and street cred and is cool.
I thought that self-flagellation equaled true effort. No one could question how hard I was working if I was literally killing myself doing it. I often felt insecure about my abilities, and so I thought, well, what I can at least do is work one thousand times harder than everyone else. It’s a way to get something done once, but not a lot of stuff done over time. For example, I employed this extreme methodology to create a show called “Somerville Night Live” which is exactly what it sounds like. I burned myself out, but the show was awesome! But I had scheduled three more after that just a week or two later. I instantly started dreading it cause I knew the process involved sacrificing sanity. Honestly, getting sober made me realize I was inflicting a lot of my own pain onto my life through how I worked. It became intolerable without numbing out, which is unsustainable! I had to find a new way to work, which involved honoring my limits – and the results, I think, speak for themselves.
But there’s always this little voice saying that if I’m not constantly working harder, someone will lap me, and I’ll get left behind. It’s nonsense, but it’s hard to unshake. If you follow that voice you forget to live life. I started doing the Artist’s Way, and it’s been helping me. I now have a more consistent flow of smaller work rather than huge explosive destructive bursts. I’m still a quantity in the pursuit of quality kind of guy but, I just don’t take it so far that I destroy myself. Or at least I *try* not to (I just did Edinburgh Fringe, so I am a little bit of a hypocrite here). But what was I going to do? NOT do it??
Contact Info:
- Website: www.kenny-gray.com
- Instagram: @k3nnygray
- Twitter: @k3nnygray
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@kennygray9620
- SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/ianaware
Image Credits
Ian Zandi & Will Gianetta