Before Langston Kerman became one of the most exciting stand-up comedians around, he taught poetry to high school students. As he tells audiences in his first Netflix special Bad poetryHe was desperately looking for another path for his life.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Kerman talks about getting his big break writing for Oscar host Chris Rock (even though he didn’t manage to tell a single joke on the show), convincing his favorite comedian John Mulaney to direct his special, trying not to scare away Larry David during his very first Hollywood gig, and why he fears fans of HBO’s Unsure will never let him be “free”. He also tells some stories from his time as the author of the most brilliant and strangest talk show of the year, Everyone is in LAincluding the one pitch that Mulaney deemed too strange.
“I just wanted to make something that felt like a great articulation of what I think is funny and what I’m capable of,” Kerman says. “And I’m super grateful that John Mulaney was willing to see the vision behind it. That certainly pushed it forward in terms of its place at Netflix.”
The 37-year-old comedian, who pursued a career in spoken word poetry before turning to stand-up, is probably still best known for a six-part storyline in the first season of the HBO series Unsurewhich is known for its passionate fan base that likes to hold the show’s actors responsible for their characters’ behavior.
“Honestly, it sucks, I don’t like what this fan base has done for me over and over again in my life,” says Kerman, pointing out that on the show he played Jered, a lover of Yvonne Orji’s Molly, who admits to once having a sexual experience with a man, something fans still tease him about eight years later.
“They don’t stop,” he adds. “The number of people, even now, looking at my comments while I’m releasing my Netflix special – let me be free! I just want to be able to tell my little jokes and not be harassed.”
If anything can help Kerman finally overcome this limited perception, it is an hour of comedy as original and self-confident as Bad poetry. After seeing him play the set that Bad poetry live, Mulaney decided to make the film his own directorial debut.
“I always think of specials as album titles, and every one of them is a hit to me,” Mulaney recently told Vulture. “My main criticism of most specials is — and I always try to be extremely hard on myself, too, and I’m open to criticism if people disagree — that every part has to be good! Just wait if you don’t have it! That hour was so tight and ready to go.”
“I think there’s really no substitute for someone who’s been through a process as many times as he has,” Kerman tells me. “And his insights into how we should shoot it, the things we would need to make it look as sexy and cool and fun as we want it to, were invaluable. If it had been entirely up to me, it would have looked a lot shittier and probably sounded bad, and I would have worn stupid clothes.” The only thing Kerman then takes back is that he “probably would have worn the same outfit.”
He concludes, “I’m grateful that I had a guy who understood the essence of the format so well, but also understood that there were certain rules I wanted to break, and he was great at helping me make that happen.”
The two comedians also brought this rule-breaking mentality to Mulaney’s week-long Netflix talk show on a much larger scale. Everyone is in LAlast May. Kerman was opening for Mulaney when the tour was halted so he could bring the unconventional series to the stage.
When Mulaney asked Kerman if he wanted to work on the project as one of his writers, Kerman said “absolutely” – even though he “didn’t really understand what it was about.” He’s “not even sure” he understands it now.
“It was just a cool space where a guy you respect and think is really, really funny tells you to be really, really funny,” he says. And although an elaborate plan to infiltrate the Nation of Islam in Inglewood didn’t pan out, he was able to realize his dream of fully investigating actor Terrence Howard’s extremely strange theories about math and science.
“I haven’t heard from him,” Kerman says when I ask him if he thinks Howard’s sketch ever surfaced. “I pray that it has, and I pray that I hear from him. I think about him almost every day. And so it would mean the world to me to spend even a moment with the man who inspires me so much. But I haven’t had the pleasure yet.”
Listen to the episode now and Follow The Last Laugh To Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Googleor wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
