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

Hi Nick, thanks for joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

I’ve never been a very career minded person. I have a short attention span and way too many hobbies. I’ve never really known what I wanted to be professionally, but I’ve had a really good time trying to figure it out. I’ve worked retail, the service industry, child care, broadcasting. I’ve dug graves, hung sheet rock, walked dogs, acted in a few things. Once I got paid to drive a pair of vintage water skis to a guy in Pittsburg. I love to work, downtime isn’t something I’ve ever felt totally comfortable with. That being said, “What do you want to be” always sounded like an irreversible decision, you wake up one day at a job, then you wake up and do it again and again until you save up enough money to stop. I don’t really think that’s the case for most people today. I think that most folks have the resources to try to make a living on their own, or at least give it a shot. There’s nothing wrong with job security, but it doesn’t seem to exist in the same way it did a generation ago, so why not get weird with it?
I still don’t know where comedy will take me. but I didn’t get into it to take me anywhere, I just like doing it. I think most people who start doing it think that they can pursue it, and they’re right. The hardest part is starting, and the second hardest part is not quitting. The first time I thought I could pursue something creative and potentially make a living doing it was about a year or so ago. I had been performing for a few years, making twenty bucks here and there. Then I got a regular hosting job at a comedy club, but also lucked out and got asked to go on the road as a feature act. It was the first time that earning a living in comedy seemed like even a remote possibility. On top of that, I had been designing stickers and T-shirts on the side with the hopes of starting a small DIY distro. None of this sounds sustainable, and maybe it isn’t, but that makes no difference to me.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My name is Nick Fierro and I’m a comedian from New Jersey. I also write, draw, play music, quite poorly, but I have fun. I got into comedy in the mid 2000s when my roommate Pat Byrne and a few of our friends started writing comedy sketches together. We’d perform a few times a year at the PIT Theater in New York, the Creek and the Cave, basement comedy shows in New Brunswick, and Montreal Sketch Fest. Eventually Pat got a radio show on WFMU, the world’s largest freeform radio station. 24 hours of nonstop, commercial free creative chaos. I was bartending on Tuesdays, and after I closed down the bar, I would join Pat for his weekly overnight show fro 3-6am. We’d stay up and play music and answer phone calls, have guests, and try out bits and characters and sketches. We started performing a live version of a late nigh talk show once a month called Prove it All Night. We had on guests like Joe Pera, Michelle Wolf, Chris Gethard, the

Amazing Kreskin, it was a truly incredible show.
By the time it’s run was complete I had really fallen fo comedy. I spent years playing characters, building costumes, and writing, and didn’t want that feeling to go away so I started performing standup in my 30s, among some of the best young comics coming out of New York, which was an incredibly humbling experience. I bombed ten times a week for months, maybe a year. I felt like I had started completely from scratch. Sketch comedy and character work are completely different muscles than standup, and it took me a while to learn how to perform as myself, and not Lemmy from Motorhead, or a grown up version of Emily Elizabeth from the Clifford books.

When I started standup, the one thing that I avoided the most was hosting shows. I hated it, going up cold, trying to get people excited, keeping the show’s momentum going. It wasn’t something that I thought was a god fit for me. Now I love it, even though it felt like starting from scratch again. The same goes for writing with a group. I used to only be able to write alone, but over the pandemic I joined up with five other comics and we started a weekly writer’s workshop. We’d assign homework to each other, collaborate on weekly projects, and basically keep each other sharp. Some of the pieces that we worked on back then are still being used today. I turned a sketch that I wrote into a comic book that was illustrated by Anthony Bartolacci.
I’m the most proud of the things that I’ve helped build from the ground up. Shows that I’ve helped run, sketches I’ve helped write, all the little things that add up in the end. I had a roast battle this past weekend, and wound up making a muppet style puppet of my opponent. It could’ve gone either way, people might get it, might not, but going over the top, going absolutely crazy for a joke is always worth the risk of it not landing. Plus, in the end, now I know how to make puppets.

Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?

I am nowhere near financially competent enough to speak on the investment properties of an NFT, but I would like to say that has been an absolute pleasure watching people with just as much lack of expertise speak with such overwhelming confidence about something that we can all agree, out of the gate, is only worth what someone else is willing to pay. I’d like to think that the vast majority of people who lost money on them could afford to lose said capital. I’d hate to think of a family selling their car because their Dad bought a $100,000 animal cartoon that’s only slightly different from the one that sold for $250,000.
It was interesting to see everyone spontaneously agree that money is fake, while simultaneously turning their money into Crypto currency, and buying NFTs with the Crypto,,,,in an attempt to get money?!?!
I’m probably just missing the point.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

It’s become a total mess, but there was a time when social media was pretty great. Early twitter was the most entertaining thing I’d ever seen. So many smart, hilarious and weird people shot out of the ether and found each other. I can’t remember the last time I just read tweets to laugh. I resisted social media during its golden age. I logged out of Facebook for the last time in 2004 and didn’t have an instagram until 2018. I did a lot of cool stuff in that time, and while I’m happy that most of my youth went largely undisclosed, a social media presence is pretty crucial to a person trying to market themselves as a viable candidate for employment. I feel like there’s a huge gap on my comedy resume that exists as picture of me in the background of someone else’s post from 2009 that says, “Nick’s not on social media, but tonight he pulled a 40 foot paper streamer out of his mouth while dressed like Geppetto from Pinocchio.”. That might not be the best example, but being able to network with people is a skill that took me long time to understand. I’d meet someone at a show, we’d have a blast, then I’d just say goodbye, which seems like a missed opportunity.
Also, if I could go back in time, I’d learn to play the piano. You ever see someone walk into a room where there just happens to be a piano, and they just sit down and play like it’s no big deal? It’s like watching someone control fire or talk to animals.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.nickfierro.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/schtickfierro/

Image Credits

Personal photo by Alex Mendoza

Additional photos:

Stairwell pic by Alex Medoza
All others by Mindy Tucker