Gianmarco Soresi Demands Inclusive Bullying in Comedy

This week, we’re highlighting 24 talented writers and performers for Vulture’s annual list “The Comedians You Should and Will Know.” Our goal is to introduce a wider audience to the talent that has the comedy community and industry buzzing. (You can read more about our methodology at the link above.) We asked the comedians on the list to answer a series of questions about their work, performing, goals for the future, and more. Next up is Gianmarco Soresi.

Tell us a story from your childhood that you think might explain why you ended up becoming a comedian.
Not a lot of people know this about me, but my parents are divorced. And while I didn’t really have any religion to rebel against as a kid, I did have a stepfather. He scared the shit out of me, and not in a “He might hit me” way — more like “He might make me go with him to Home Depot for six hours on a Saturday and not let me bring a Game Boy” kind of way. As such, I timidly followed all his rules, whether somewhat reasonable (I wasn’t allowed to listen to Eminem) or absurd (I wasn’t allowed to watch The Simpsons) or odd (shoes were to remain on while inside the house).

But then on the night of my 14th birthday, after a wine-infused post-Pictionary fight with my mom, my stepdad told me I would now be going with him and him alone to get some celebratory ice cream. En route to the car, with my mom out of earshot, my phone rang, and I saw that it was my dad calling for the first time that day. I went to pick it up, but my stepfather said, “Leave it. I did not get you that phone to talk to that man.” So I got in the car. My dad called again. “Don’t answer it.” My phone pinged from a voice-mail. “Fine. You can call him back, but I did not get you that phone to talk to that man.” I called my dad back, but before a minute had passed, my stepfather gestured for me to wrap it up, so I promptly ended the call, turned to my stepdad, and said, “You’re just mad because my dad fucked your wife before you did!”

I hate to use the phrase since it’s become the cliché defense of any joke that is borderline hate speech, but that was the first time I was brave enough to “say what we all were thinking.” And while this particular quip was not well received by my audience of one, it felt good for once in my life to say what I meant. And I think it’s wanting to feel that again that led me to pursue an artform that allows me to say similar shit but this time get laughs in the process.

If you were immortalized as a cartoon character, what would your outfit be?
Five-inch shorts, a T-shirt I got on Etsy for a high-school musical production I was not in (that is also a hair too short), a jean jacket that doesn’t really make sense given the shorts, and high-top Nikes where one of the colors matches the color of the shirt’s text. Let’s also throw in a thin, gold forever bracelet with a T charm that I got with my girlfriend at a casino’s tattoo convention, some Warby Parker glasses, and a brown leather watch, the two hands of which read “Memento” and “Mori” respectively.

Which musical, nobody asked? Ideally it would be Falsettos, Company, or LaChiusa’s Wild Party just to be pretentious. Although if I’m thinking about this as a cartoon for a wide audience, I would probably go with The Phantom of the Opera, even though I’ve never been much of an Andrew Lloyd Webber stan.

What’s your proudest moment/achievement of your comedy career so far?
My JFL New Faces set is probably the only important set I’ve ever done that I wouldn’t do over. Generally, I’ve found all those career milestones are fraught and stressful and imperfect, so in terms of feeling proud, they pale in comparison to a new joke working or, even better, an old joke finally working.

Actually, I did a pilot last year for a roast-based panel show hosted by Anthony Jeselnik, and he anonymously mentioned me on his podcast The Jeselnik and Rosenthal Vanity Project the following week. I know this because I’ve been listening to that podcast to fall asleep for years. I was already asleep, but my girlfriend heard it, shook me awake, and was like “Go back! Go back!” That was pretty fucking cool.

Last thing (I guess I’m more prideful than I thought): I’ve been procrastinating filming an hour (holding on to the most destructive thought a creative can have: I’ll do it when someone pays me for it), but I had some chunks that were relatively topical, and I felt like if I didn’t get them out there I would regret it. This was the exact same anxiety that pushed me to release my first sort-of-special Shelf Life, which was filled with COVID jokes that nobody wanted to hear, by the time 2020 came to a close. As is my wont, I decided with about two weeks’ notice to film said chunks as a 15-minute special-not-special-because-I’m-supposed-to-reserve-that-word-for-an-hour-long-special-someday-down-the-line-for-marketing-purposes at Comedy Connection in Rhode Island. As stressful as it was for me to construct the set, it put even more weight on my opener and videographer Liam Nelson who was able to put together a skeleton crew to film the damn thing (shout-out to Ty Colgate and Julian De Zorzi), edit it, and have it ready for release at the end of August.

But then — not sure if everyone’s aware — a lot of things shifted politically in a very short span of time. On the night of the first presidential debate/my girlfriend’s birthday, a time we had very deliberately decided was not a work night, I got a text from a friend who’s more fond of traditional institutions than I that “Biden needs to drop out immediately.” My heart sank — not for my country, but because my set opened with a “Joe Biden is running for president again” joke. Watching a clip from the debate solidified my fears that the joke might be wildly dated by the end of August, if not the next evening. So the next morning, wide awake at 7 a.m. (which I know isn’t impressive for people with real jobs), I woke up my girlfriend/producer/muse panicking, “I think I need to release it today!” She concurred, and thus proceeded a stress test of the multitude of people I work with to turn a late-August release into a “Holy fuck, if we don’t release this by 3 p.m. today, everything will have been for naught.”

In retrospect, I could have waited until the following week (I forgot how slow Democrats move), but I was proud — first of all, for getting over my perfectionism that prevents me from releasing a special, however small; but, more importantly, I felt proud of myself for surrounding myself with smart, supportive, and talented people, from my opener to my manager to my social-media team to my girlfriend, who were willing to show up when it counted.

Which comedian’s career trajectory would you most like to follow?
John Mulaney, but just in terms of his personal life.

Tell us everything about your worst show ever. (This can involve venue, audience, other acts on the lineup, anything!)
My worst show, or my favorite worst show, was getting hired to feature for a corporate gig in Santa Barbara at a casino. I believe I was getting paid $4,500 to do 25 minutes, which was hands down the most I’d ever made off a night’s comedy. My mom drove me to the casino from Los Angeles (I can’t drive, which is equal parts humiliating and motivating), and on the drive I decided to look up the company I was performing for to see if I could formulate a relevant joke or two. What I learned was that it was less a company and more a union of sorts for West Coast electrical companies with a very intense ideological bent, i.e., their newsletter had articles titled like “Has Wokeness Ruined Travel?” and “COVID, Climate Change, and Other Lies Democrats Want You to Believe.” I wish I could tell you I thought about not going through with the gig but that would be a lie.

$4,500.

When I got there, my mom and I (surely the only Jews present) found ourselves surrounded by mostly men in their 60s — thousands all wearing full cowboy garb without looking like they’d ever been on a horse. I met the other comedian, a kind and talented comic who nevertheless sold merch shirts that said “Who Done Farted???,” and the comedy show started as all comedy shows should, in my opinion: a singing of the national anthem. Then the auction, of course, which consisted of small guns, guns that were intended for warfare, training packages for you and five friends to learn how to use those guns before or (hopefully not) after a wine tasting, etc.

Right as they were wrapping up the auction with AK-47s, I looked through the playbill for the evening to ensure there wasn’t going to be some kind of cross burning at the end, and that’s when I saw the part with my name, which stipulated in big bold letters that the comedy portion of the evening was only possible thanks to a generous donation by Exxon-Mobil. You know, the evil company.

I started freaking out, thinking stupid comedian thoughts like What would George Carlin do?!, but I didn’t have any cocaine, so I tried to instead think of a joke that would in some way absolve me of the sin I was determined to pursue. Luckily, I had a bit that would work with a few modifications, and I ran it by my mom (whose usual response to any joke ideas is a curt “Not your best”). This time, however, she laughed and then told me “No, I don’t think you should do it.” But the laugh was the answer.

So I got onstage and proceeded to bomb my ass off for 23 minutes. I wish I could say this part was on purpose to spite the crowd, but it was more a mix of my lack of practice sticking to clean jokes, plus second-guessing jokes in the moment that I figured wouldn’t play well with men old enough to have served in the Confederacy. Then, with two minutes left and absolutely no momentum to speak of, I went for it. At the time, I was closing with a joke about Titanic II, a re-creation of the Titanic built by some billionaire who hopefully was on the recent submarine trip. Normally I would note that the Titanic’s voyage was much safer nowadays thanks to global warming, but this time I said it was “because the icebergs got a lot smaller thanks to my sponsor, Exxon-Mobil!”

It wasn’t a boo right away. First it was just noise — a unified, confused groan. But then, one old man was able to close his mouth enough to produce a B. I wouldn’t say it was like an Apollo-level boo; it was nothing like the Apollo, in more ways than one. But it was my first real “boo,” and whenever I have an extremely shitty gig now, I try to remind myself it’s worth it for the story.

What have you learned about your own joke-writing process that you didn’t know when you started?
I write out all my jokes to the word, a process born of neuroticism and, I think, because I started out as an actor, so memorizing a script feels natural. As such, I always try to “solve” the joke on the page. I also have, from the start, had various people in my life who have allowed me (in the beginning for free, but as with all things, money finds a way) to call and run copious amounts of jokes and stories by them (shoutout to Alice Grindling). Think of it like an hourlong open-mic headlining set with one generous audience member (I’m hoping the CIA doesn’t have a Vulture subscription, because I feel like I invented a new form of torture).

All of that has been swell, but what I’ve learned is that nothing can replicate saying a joke/chunk/story out loud in front of a full audience. Even if I haven’t come up with an alternative line, even if it means I’m gonna bomb or, worse, get a soft laugh, I just have to keep saying it until something deep in my subconscious screams out a better version loudly enough for me to hear. Embarrassment is, unfortunately, one of the best tools for making better comedy.

I’ve also tried to fine-tune the ability to go Okay, that might be funny, but who gives a fuck? or Yeah, this joke isn’t as fine-tuned, but it’s clearly what you want to be talking about right now. I tend to write far more than I would ever actually need stand-up wise, and I’m trying to be more purposeful in what I choose to spend my creative time on, because oftentimes writing a new joke is just an excuse to not finish the old one.

What’s the biggest financial hurdle you’ve encountered since becoming a comedian?
I should make clear up front that I came from a well-off family that allowed me to get a degree in musical theater without any kind of debt, and that same family paid the majority of my bills until I booked enough TV work (mostly non-union commercials) to support myself in my mid-20s. So any hurdles I’ve cleared in life have been with the assistance of a step stool.

Having acting income when I first started stand-up in earnest around 2017 is what allowed me to work at LOL Comedy Club doing almost every unpaid check spot there for an entire year (usually four a night on weekdays, and six-plus on the weekend). Had I not had residual checks coming in from my three appearances as Reporter No. 2 on CBS’ Blue Bloods, this period of my life would have been utterly unsustainable, and I also don’t know how I would have gotten the necessary stage time to get better had I not gone through it.

I’d say the two scariest moments, financially speaking, was when I got kicked off of TikTok. I still don’t know what video it was for or if it was a culmination of strikes from cursing and telling people that the vaccine would turn them into lizards, but at the time, that was my only social-media following and the only engine I had for selling tickets. Thank God I had enough friend of friends of TikTok employees that I was able to get back on soon enough, but had I not, I would have been utterly fucked and probably not on this Vulture list today. Isn’t that a healthy system?

The second was, again, social-media related. Toward the end of 2021, in another moment where finances were about to hit an alarming low point, I somehow got early opted into Facebook’s new payment program for shortform videos (when I say I got “early opted,” I mean my all-things-operator Paige Asachika noticed the offer to join and signed me up). I doubt I will ever make as much money off social media as I did in those four months. I kept thinking something was wrong; it all felt so goddamn stupid considering I was just posting old TikTok videos, usually with the audio slightly off-sync because I had to use some free (probably illegal?) website to download the TikTok videos without a watermark. I was riding high, making plans to film specials and sketches, the future was bright. But then one crowdwork clip I posted said the word “Nazi” in it (in a good way I swear), and Facebook had just added an intense oversight system (previously with shorts, they had none!! Which was glorious. To explain the absurd bleeping systems I have to implement now for videos on YouTube vs. TikTok vs. Snapchat would make you want to un@live yourself), and I was labeled as a “domestic terrorist.” I wouldn’t make any more money off Facebook (nor did my videos get any views) until over a year later, when I finally found someone who knew someone who harangued Meta for long enough that my slate was cleared of wrongdoing.

What’s the phrase? “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” I try now to be prepared for any app at any given moment to shut down or shut me out, but it’s hard to plan your financial future when it’s in the hands of brainless algorithms run by companies with no interest in customer service. Almost makes you want the government to step in and break them up as opposed to trying to ban one in America (under the guise that it’s for national security reasons and not because it shows people the consequences of our actions overseas) and consequently strengthen the others even more!

(I should mention here that I really wish I could make money off Twitter. I know it wouldn’t be much, but goddamn do I want the ability to post long videos and make money off tweets. Let that speak to just how much I hate Elon Musk/how full of shit I am acting like any of these other social-media giants are not equally contributing to the downfall of civilization and meaningful art.)

I felt self-conscious writing this one because it’s all so tedious, unartistic, and boring. But that’s what running a company is, and I don’t know what’s worse: trying to understand algorithms, or having your entire career dependent on whoever the fuck booked The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. I imagine one’s opinion would entirely depend on if that guy liked you or not. Considering I haven’t gotten on The Tonight Show now, I’m fine with the former.

These days, my financial hurdles are about trying to scale upward as fast as possible without creating an unsustainable overhead. As someone with no formal business training and an “I don’t like looking at my bank account because it stresses me out” attitude, this has been/is a tough learning process. On top of the manager cut, agent cut, business-manager cut, and sometimes lawyer cut, I pay editors, captioners, social-media managers, PR, and podcast producers while spending money on ads, travel, venue insurance (a new one I didn’t even know about), and merch. Merch will be the death of me. Any money I’ve made off merch is surely not worth the years of my life lost dealing with it. Why did I order so many “Child of Divorce” shirts? That’s like selling a tote bag that says “I Have Brown Hair” — well, what about all the people that don’t, you fucking moron?? For all I know, by the time this article comes out I will be in deep financial shit that I could have avoided with the smarts I would have gained not being so coddled at the beginning of my career/life.

At the end of the movie 8 Mile, Eminem’s character, B-Rabbit, starts his final battle rap by dissing himself so the person he’s battling has nothing left to attack. How would you roast yourself so the other person would have nothing to say?
This feels like a trick to just list my flaws. Maybe this is what employers should ask instead of the standard “What’s your biggest weakness?”

If my experience with roast battles holds true, most attacks on me would be variations of getting called gay followed by (alarming on a societal level) the biggest laughs I’ve ever heard in my life. Usually in that instance I would lean into my flamboyance, perhaps going so far as to sing and dance and whatnot, that to call me gay would feel almost redundant, which I realize is fairly similar to my regular non–8 Mile scenario act.

For a second I thought about writing out a rap verse, but then I remembered I’m not getting paid for any of this shit. It would be a lot of ground to cover: I’m a lot, I’m annoying, failed acting career, clearly dressing by Gen-Z fashion standards that I don’t fully understand, can’t drive, can’t answer simple Vulture puff pieces without using parentheses every other sentence, flat-footed, I’ve had a sty for like two weeks now that you can probably see in whatever picture I had to take for this article, I’m getting older, as someone commented on a video of mine recently “grey in beard gross,” and I quote comments on videos of mine. Is that enough self-flagellation for you?

When it comes to your comedy opinions — about material, performing, audience, trends you want to kill/revive, the industry, etc. — what hill will you die on?
It is simply bad manners, if you’re not the host, to do excessive crowdwork on a showcase show. If magic strikes, go for it — all rules are meant to be broken, and that’s particularly true in comedy — but talking to the audience for a prolonged period of time changes the relationship between audience and performer in a way that’s a disservice to the other comedians on the lineup. It’s not even a matter of This is bad comedy — it’s just rude and breaks the presumably agreed-upon premise that This is a venue for onstage joke-telling. Gather your own audience if you want to farm for clips.

All that being said, comics complaining about comedians doing crowdwork on their own shows can eat my ass. No, I don’t think audiences have become more trained to heckle or interact because of crowdwork clips (hecklers existed before the internet did). Take the stage, set the rules however you see fit, and tell good-enough jokes that they’re followed. And sometimes that won’t be enough! If someone wants to ruin a comedy show, it can’t always be stopped. But that’s not Matt Rife’s fault. We’ve all seen street performers train random crowds of people who weren’t even looking for a show into being an attentive audience; you certainly can do so while elevated on a stage with an amplification device.

(It should be noted that shortly before writing this, Chris D’Elia posted a stand-up clip complaining about crowdwork, so I ask my fellow comedians: Whose side do you want to be on?)

One more: We need to bring back bullying. Not just random acts of cruelty, of course, but like, the story of Patrice O’Neal throwing a phone book onstage while Kevin Hart was performing and saying something along the lines of “Find one person in there who thinks you’re funny.” Obviously, it can (quickly) go too far, and the boys’-club nature of stand-up led to bullying that was sexist, homophobic, transphobic, racist, ableist, etc. So I’ll articulate it further: We need to cultivate inclusive bullying that holds comedians accountable for shitty work. Art forms need filters, and anyone can look at the average quality of comedy specials right now to see that our filters have been turned off. And not because everyone’s nicer now! It’s because we all want to be followed back on Instagram, to be invited on the pod. We’ve all become (like it or not) artist/gatekeeping hybrids, and anyone who’s dealt with a comedy-club booker who’s also a comic knows that’s a recipe for mediocrity.

So shit-talk! Criticize! Call someone a hack (I know what I’m opening myself up to by saying this), say some joke is lazy (even if it’s ideologically in line with your views! I don’t give a fuck! If you’re gonna be a piece of shit, at least do it in a way we haven’t seen before), because nobody is being made into a better artist by our “‘Everyone on the lineup was 🔥🔥🔥’ Story post hoping they reshare and I get a new follower out of it” bullshit.

The more I write this out, the more I fear I’m coming off like an asshole, and I am, but there was something I gained from working at LOL Comedy Club and occasionally having an older comic boo me from the back of the room. Were they looking out for me and trying to steer me in the right direction? Absolutely not. Booing your co-worker is psychotic behavior. But art is psychotic, and the pressure to not get booed made me nervous to get onstage in the right ways.

What is the best comedy advice, and then the worst comedy advice, you’ve ever received?
A comic named Ken Boyd told me something along the lines of “Confidence is the only way through,” an axiom I saw him prove nightly by starting sets off by asking someone in the audience to give him gum and then proceeding to effortlessly kill while loudly smacking his lips. Sure, it’s stressful to do stand-up comedy, but you know what’s only slightly less stressful? Watching stand-up comedy. So I’ve found that in order to do well, I have to, at the very least, make the audience feel like they’re in capable hands, even when I know they are not. Ken Boyd also used to boo me from the back of the room (see my previous answer) and bring me onstage with, “This next guy is the gayest comedian I’ve ever seen,” which I can only assume was to help hone my confidence even more. Thanks, man.

As for the worst advice, If you can call secondhand feedback from a comedy-club booker that did not pass me “advice,” then the worst advice I’ve ever received is that I was “too one-man show.” WHAT IS STAND-UP COMEDY BUT A ONE-MAN SHOW??????

And second, yeah, she’s right (whoops!), but that’s who I am. I could try dialing it back or adding a couple more um’s and whatnot to create the illusion of spontaneity, but that wouldn’t be as fun for me. I stopped acting for a reason. And stand-up comedy is too exhausting of a career to not be yourself for the actual joke-telling part of it. If you really want me to move less, make the stage smaller.

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