They say that ignorance is bliss, so I shut my mind off so I could attain Nirvana. I think I shut my mind off for too long because I attained Foo Fighters instead.
Local stand-up comedian Sharkee Katz—aka Daniel Linton—didn’t make the cut during his recent audition on Last Comic Standing, NBC’s reality television talent show.
But that didn’t necessarily make it a bad experience.
“The judges loved my jokes, and I got praised rather than berated like most contestants,” says Katz. “The judges said my jokes were too cerebral and weird for the show and the average viewer, which felt better than winning 250k at the time.”
Katz, a resident of Haydenville, began his foray into comedy by performing at local art openings and noise shows in Northampton, before graduating to headlining shows in the Boston and Philadelphia alternative comedy scenes, where his brand of thought-provoking, mildly-twisted humor is gobbled up.
Last Comic Standing caught some of his video clips on YouTube, and then contacted him through Facebook to ask him to try out for the show.
His current mission is to perfect his routines and to produce and promote comedy shows in the Valley by inviting bigger regional and national names while fostering the local scene.
They say to follow your dreams but I don’t really want to have sex with a wheelbarrow.
Katz’s comedy career began when a friend who found him funny asked him to perform at an art opening she was organizing. Until that invite, he’d never entertained the thought of performing stand-up.
Katz admittedly bombed. Shaken but undeterred, he took the next couple of months to literally get his act together before mounting another stage.
“I got a really detailed act together and learned it like learning lines,” he says. “That worked a lot better. I also would write down every joke or joke idea and go through them before a performance to weed out the crappy jokes and only use the best ones.”
Katz says his first few performances taught him a great deal about presentation and practicality. “In the beginning I used one-liners like I do now, but told them in detailed short stories or bits. It was a little bit hard to remember them. After a few performances I started really using one-liners and short jokes by themselves. It took about a year of performing to really set my delivery and performance style.
“I think that my act keeps evolving. For a bit, I just told one-liners and didn’t say anything in between them. Now my act has the one-liners but I also like to make stuff up as I go along. I have a set list of jokes that are the skeleton of my performance, but my ad-libbing, making stuff up and riffing off the audience fleshes out my performance.”
If you’re a silent partner in a business and it fails, you’ll always be thinking, “I should have said something.”
Katz’ comedy was born in the nexus of art, music and stand-up.
“Lots of artists and noise performers are trying stand-up,” he says. “I think in those types of counterculture various types of performance are welcomed and accepted and provide an alternative to the normal standup seen on TV. People with abstract, psychedelic minds lead to great innovation.”
His writing process also tends to thrive when his mind is a bit altered.
“I usually don’t look for jokes,” Katz says. “They find me when my mind is in a psychedelic state&seldom do I sit down to write jokes. My mind gets in very creative modes where I might write 30 jokes in one day. Usually late at night jokes just start coming to me. I’ll see something or hear something and a joke will form. Sometimes after eating a piece of salmon my joke production soars. Maybe the boost in omega-3 oils helps my brain.”
Katz also finds inspiration in comedians he cites as major influences: Neil Hamburger, Mitch Hedberg, Steven Wright and Rodney Dangerfield. His current favorites are Zach Galifianakis and Hampshire College alum Eugene Mirman.
I want a friend named Rick Shaw, so I can get rides from him and really confuse people.
Attempting stand-up for the first time takes a lot of guts. Katz has some advice for any rookie looking to take a stab at it.
“Prepare—prepare and study the performances of others, both people considered great comedians and lesser folks. Attend open mics and watch people bomb. Know what you are getting into or just plunge in and learn from your mistakes like I did—it is kind of thrilling. Just be ready to learn.”
He also offers a few words of wisdom for handling the inevitable critics and “advisors.”
“People give me so much input like you should do this or talk slower or you shouldn’t comment on how a joke went over. I don’t think people say to a musician, ‘You should have played this chord during that song.’ It blows my mind, because people have all this advice for me that, if I listened to it, I would wind up a style-less blob of a comedian.
“I reached a point where I thought, ‘I’m just going to do whatever my instincts tell me, and if it goes bad it’s my own fault.’ Needless to say, things have worked out a lot better and I got more comfortable after I started doing things my way.”
My friend asked if I wanted to play Trivial Pursuit. It seemed sort of pointless so I said no.
Katz is amused when looking back on that first fateful gig, and pleased with how far he’s come since that art opening performance in Northampton.
“I didn’t know how to prepare,” he says. “I had ideas for jokes and thought I could recall them on stage and make stuff up as I went along. I didn’t realize how much preparation goes into honing your act. I got up in front of the audience and got really nervous—forgot most of my jokes and just talked about an episode of Nature on PBS that I had watched at 5 a.m. that morning where Ewan McGregor was trapping polar bears in Canada. I got some laughs and wanted to figure out how to do comedy correctly, which I’m still doing.”
Assuming his audition footage does not end up on the editing room floor, Sharkee Katz’ appearance on Last Comic Standing will air June 7.
For upcoming shows, visit www.sharkeekatz.com.
Some other one-liners:
Whenever I hear U2 I think: Why me?
I doubt any breastfeeding goes on in a nursing home.
I wouldn’t feel as weird about using baby wipes if they were called everyone wipes.
Mistletoe and camel toe sound like Middle Eastern foot problems.
I overheard someone talking about making a Freudian slip. I didn’t see it, so I pictured them wearing lingerie made out of a really large beard.
I met an army general and asked him: Why is your job description so vague?
I saw a dude wearing a basketball jersey. For him it had become a smoking-a-cigarette-in-an-alley jersey.
A rooster is the only alarm clock that you can turn into soup if it doesn’t work.
It went from email to gmail awful fast. What happened to fmail?
We’ll know the future has arrived when they stop making Flintstones vitamins and start making Jetsons vitamins.
