We recently connected with Mason Kennerly and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Mason, thanks for joining us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

Not too long ago, some creative friends and I took the big leap of trying to create our own sketch comedy show – Unearthed Tapes. None of us had any real knowledge of how our shared sense of humor would be received by the populace, and even less about how to get any sort of creative attention on the internet. Still, I always had this long time hunch that the ridiculous stuff that I found funny when messing around with my buddies would translate to others, whether they wanted to laugh at it or not. It took us several months to even get off the ground because of wanting to make sure we researched everything we could about the internet, put real thought into branding, and especially tested the waters of our individual writing styles and ideas of what’s funny and why it’s funny. But ultimately, maybe it was partly just the fear of it not working out, not getting it right, or none of it actually resonating with others. I mean, the utter stupidity that we now put out into the world is hard to bet on being received well, but even in our first volume of sketches we knew we had something to work with. It wasn’t perfect, there was lots to fix, but there was a seed there – people actually responded to it. Although those months of coming up with a creative way to brand ourselves really paid off in how unique our product has become, we had to just make the sketches and put them out there. Without taking the risk of our hard work being for naught, we wouldn’t have gotten the momentum rolling in our favor. Now, being around a year in – still early in the process – we can confidently say that every single volume we put out is better than the last. We’ve learned through the last year that it’s okay for us to put something up having no idea if it will get any traction or not, and trusting the we will learn from it by taking the time to analyze our mistakes and push forward into making something better. Still growing, we are bringing in new people every day to experience art born out of taking the risk to show something that’s real and personal to us – what makes us unique in our lives – and allowing it to be a failure or success in terms of it connecting to others.

Most creatives I’ve known have a fear of failure that can sometimes be crippling (myself included), and that’s because we’re putting out something that’s so personal to us – something we personally put together ourselves. That means scrutiny and disinterest in our creations solely falls on us, making the fear of even starting really hard to overcome sometimes. But at a certain point, as a creative we need to learn to be willing to make something that people genuinely don’t like, or we know isn’t our best. We need to be willing to take that risk of not feeling good about our first products because the truth is we will never have enough information about what’s needed out there – about what people really respond to in our work. Only through small, incremental changes when consistently putting together something new can we develop the intuition of how to connect to our audience with our work. We need to learn to be brave enough to let go of this notion that we need to “make a splash”. Rather, we need to maintain a vision of “tuning” our work like an instrument. We need to listen inside as we turn each knob one at a time, and we find a rhythm that is in harmony with the flow of our collective energy. We’re taking a risk to be patient and trusting with our own spirit.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

There was never any doubt in my mind that whatever path I took, it was going to be as unconventional as I am at my core. One of the tenants of my life has always been to wear my authenticity on my sleeve, which has always given me an aura of uniqueness. That unique vibe might also be due to the fact that I’m both absurdly and ridiculously weird. I wish I could say it’s all an act, but my charm comes from the earnestness and genuineness of the intense craziness that I express. Now, I could tell you all about how I used to be a professional wrestling nut, and how I was a teenage luchador doing flips off the top rope for a number of years, and how I always had performing coursing through my veins and knew this was my path from the start. But I feel you, as the reader, don’t need to hear me gloss over the surface of my life narrative and how I eventually found acting and sketch comedy. Because for all my weird craziness, I’ve always been a very deep soul and thinker – so in order to get a picture of what’s authentically me, I want this to be an open expression of my truthful perspective. (I think that’s more fun to read anyway!)

I didn’t find myself on the path of being an actor and creative for any other reason than wanting to explore the parts of ourselves that we don’t want to talk about, or that we’re maybe not even aware of yet. I felt the same yearning that every being feels in this lifetime in one way or another – the yearning for freedom, for security, and for truth. I found my job as an actor to not just be about having fun and playing pretend for adoration, but to be the most direct path I found to being forced to confront myself where I have trouble being truthful and authentic. In order to be a true actor, I need to face the ways that I don’t feel good enough to just be myself, I need to face the ways that I’m inauthentic in my life, and I need to face the things that keep me shackled away from the awareness that we’re all so much more than our stories here. This same principal of authentic expression extends to my pursuits in sketch comedy as well, but from the other side of the coin. Whereas I see how important it is to find the experiential connections in our humanity that unite us, sketch comedy is the ultimate expression of the joy within. It doesn’t need to be saying anything specific that could launch us into a 14-hour discussion about the ins and outs of what’s going on around us – sketch comedy can just be a pure expression of our fun, joyful, creative nature that can sometimes border on twisted. Whatever brings that flowing light energy through you that feels like joy for no reason is what sketch comedy is really about. Being able to create in that medium brings us back to that feeling of not needing a special reason to just enjoy something fun and ridiculous. These will always be the products and services that I give my best of: the most authentic expression of my truth as a human being and soul, finding my way into the universal flow that connect us all at our cores. And I can do that through my acting and through making our sketch comedy show – Unearthed Tapes.

I feel as though these are the things that make me unique and set me apart from others heading down the same paths. I look at everything through the lens of straying away from being so involved with my own melodrama, which keeps me open to both the truth of others and to my own truth. I will always bring something that’s risky to the table – and that’s putting myself on the line to be as authentic, and as real as I can be from where I sit in this world. That’s truly the most valuable thing I or anyone else can offer. I don’t want to do this for glory. I don’t want to be doing this for any other reason than it’s my way to connect to that Universal Love and share it in a way that can awaken others to their own connection. There’s a lot of ways to do that in life, and lot of roles to be filled, but this path is just the way that I can take my light and try my best to pass it on.

If any of this resonated with you, or even if you’re like what is he talking about – thank you for reading. This is the most honest and candid I could be, and if you want to follow along and watch me express something new and honest through my acting projects, or if you want to watch some sketch comedy created just for bringing out that pure light in you – you’re always welcome.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

I feel like the journey as a creative is ultimately about challenging the path that feels laid out for us in our society. We can see how our culture is built around keeping the business machine moving. The most secure path that feels like it shows the most promise is the one where you willingly end up a cog in the machine – giving your life to the system. Frankly, I completely understand why any individual would choose this path, because this path is laid out before your eyes. You can see the route to where you’ll end up in however many years at some company, and that feeling of reliability and safety is extremely enticing. However, there is a trade-off to that. Because those promises laid out on that path tell you that if you work hard for decades for a machine that isn’t built for you, you’ll reach the promise land where your worries evaporate into the life you want in retirement. The only problem is you risk giving up the spark that makes life worth living in exchange for that material desire and security. As a creative, we chose a path that’s far more daunting in the sense of having no guarantee and no real path laid out before us. It’s always going to be risky taking your life one day at a time. But in this way, I feel that creatives choose a life in pursuit of being and doing something that expresses more depth and truth than the business machine allows. When it’s all about money, truth goes out the window. The sad part of being a creative is knowing that the only way to survive in this society is to play the game, but we spend our lives trying to overcome it through our art. Even if our art takes off and is working to connect to loads of people, the second that creativity turns into just another business – that spark starts to die out. Yet, that’s what we as creatives have to strive for because we still need money to live at the end of the day – even if we have to struggle to balance making that money and why we started in the first place. In this society we are all a part of, the truth is we need both paths. Non-creatives keep our society running, and allow us to have the same conveniences and privileges as anyone else. And we will always need creatives to keep shouting in the wind for when that society drives the spirit right out of us.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

What we can do as a society to best support artists will always come down to who we are as people. The fact of the matter is that everything highlighted in our society is catered to what we as a collective show interest in and are willing to invest in. Rather than a practical, step by step process of how to support creatives, it’s just going to have to be something that evolves out of a stronger need for the truth in us. I believe a lot of media and art that gets pushed out and blown up nowadays satisfies our craving to escape more than anything else. We can go to creatives to help us forget and distract from our realities, and I think that’s what sells for a lot of people. We as the consumers that are making or breaking these creatives need to come to the point where we feel the need to instead confront our realities, and explore what we are and why we are that way, even the realities that hold deep wells of pain. That human suffering that we all feel in one way or another is a universal truth that has the potential to really unite us if we allow it to, but as a society I don’t know if we are there yet. I think things are changing incrementally in that direction, and we start to see more creatives that have something real to say. Something that isn’t just completely self-absorbed in the perceived importance of them and their problems or perspectives, but is made to truly reach out for others. So, the best we can do for creatives as individuals is to look deeply at ourselves. We need to ask whether we really want to open up to being honest with ourselves and invest in alleviating the truth of our suffering together, or whether we think it’s just easier to not care.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.unearthedtapes.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/m.a.m.a.k.222
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@UnearthedTapes/featured

Image Credits
Matt Tente