I spent this morning hungover, on a panel with a magician and a man who professionally writes for a bird.
The bird is a puppet. The man is Josh Zagoran, the bird is Chad, and Chad has spent seventeen years delivering ten-minute news rants every Saturday at a Chicago bar called the Green Mill. The magician was Hanowell (One word. Like Reacher- just… Hanowell), who moved to Columbus to work for a magic company, got laid off, and now does it full-time: the origin story of every artist you’ve ever met, minus the top hat.
Chad the Bird (Photo by Jonathan Russell Clark)
The topic was the hustle: the sideways ways people like us pay the rent. I was there as the cartoonist and the stand-up comic, which meant that in a line-up featuring a puppet and a deck of cards, I was the normal one.
Yeah, sit with that.
The moderator opened with a number I haven’t verified and don’t intend to: Roughly two-thirds of comedians make less than $100 a month. The room laughed… the way you laugh when someone reads your checking balance aloud.
Here is what I learned from the other two-thirds of the panel…
A magician can eat anywhere.
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Magic, Chris said, is fluid: a restaurant floor, a kid’s birthday, a coffee shop, a television set as a consultant. Ask a comic at a party for a joke, and we want to murder you. Ask a magician for a trick, and he’s already behind your ear with a coin.
“We’re just whoring ourselves,” he said, cheerfully. “All the time.”
He has one talent priced for six rooms. I have one act and a wobbly bronze nib.
Writing is not typing…
Josh writes Chad’s ten minutes on a Saturday morning, mostly away from the keyboard: in the garden, cleaning, doing anything that looks exactly like not writing. (Kind of like how I write mine in the bathtub.)
He structures every rant like a medieval town crier: ring the bell, hold the scroll, deliver the news, lock it in with a rhyme so the village remembers. Big opening, the goods, a callback. Which is a comedy set. And a cartoon. And this newsletter, if I’m being honest, which at a hundred dollars a month I’m not obliged to be.
“Quit your day job is something your stupid uncle says.”
That’s Josh, and I’ve stolen it. His years as a short-order cook were still the comedy career. Tom Hanks gets to just do his art. The rest of us do book illustrations, live caricatures, portrait commissions, comedy writing, New Yorker cartoons and comic strips… “Say yes to everything and figure it out later.”...
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