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Comedian Drew Michael toyed with the idea of naming hiseponymous new HBO specialWatch the Whole Thing.
That dialogue sets the stage for the overarching theme of Michaels special: relationships.
For the performer, its about how his personal relationships run parallel to his relationship with the audience.
Jerrod and I, we just made it.
We were trying to figure out what that was.
The live audience is experiencing something in the moment.
They dont necessarily know that its all going to pay off.
They dont know where its going to go.
Those moments feel more dangerous.
You lose a lot of what makes stand-up cool.
I dont really know what to call it, and it doesnt matter to me.
If people want to categorize it to make it more marketable, whatever.
You forwent an audience altogether and just said, Lets have me in a room talking.
Personally, thats not a deterrent to me because I dont think in those terms.
Once the idea was hatched, there was no going back.
I couldnt get out of that mind-set.
It wasnt a matter of, Should we do this or shouldnt we?
It was, Now that were doing this, whats the best way to do it?
We started looking for visual inspiration and what we could do to bring it to life.
Do you remember what that first conversation with Jerrod was like?
We started talking about how to portray that and how to capture it.
This was before I had asked him to direct it.
We were just kicking around ideas.
I said, When you see my special, what do you see?
We both had the shared vision of me in a void.
That was all we knew.
We started playing with different theaters and different arrangements setups to maybe mimic that.
We were saying that we almost wanted it to be like there was no audience there.
I remember I was in Minnesota touring and he called and said, Im going to pitch you something.
Youre going to have to think about it and call me back.
Dont talk about it now.
Ive got to shoot you without an audience.
I was laughing about how simple and effective I thought it was going to be.
From that point on it was full steam ahead.
Given all the people who made this possible, it honestly doesnt feel like its mine.
It feels like a real communal project that we made.
The void is visually represented well.
I started stand-up in Pittsburgh.That was one of the worst gigs Ive ever done.
I was in front of probably 200 people a night.
I got more laughter shooting the special without an audience than I did in Pittsburgh.
You were talking about the interwoven narrative concept.
She kind of has the last word.
Normally, the comic goes out on their big closer.
Is that how you feel when you write, perform, wake up in the morning?
Do you feel like what you do is just masturbatory and self-serving?Ah, yes.
That was a real moment, a realization.
No matter how confessional you’ve got the option to be, theres still another side to it.
Its not totally vulnerable because youre still limiting the scope of what is being seen.
Thats not to say that people are being disingenuous.
Its just the nature of this form of communication.
Considering this was shot without an audience, how did you work out the material?
You learn your beats and develop your rhythm by paying attention to the audience feedback.
I didnt know it was going to be this way until a couple months before we shot it.
Some of the material doesnt work for everybody.
Its for the thing Im building toward.
I knew I was going to put this together into a special of some kind.
It wasnt,Does this work here?
It was about figuring out the arc of it the start, middle, end.
In terms of adapting it, Im always feeding off of whats given to me.
In the case of nobody being there, I just had to feed off of myself.
I think it created a loop where Im shadowboxing instead of sparring.
It was new and daring.
I didnt know what the fuck I was doing totally.
But I trusted myself, all the people around me, and the work we put in.
We just let it rip.
Hopefully, I did it justice.
