Story – Robert McKee's Creative Storytelling Magazine Issue 005 – Drew Carey | Page 33

MCKEE
INTERVIEWS
MARK WHITNEY
tially a spoken word festival. So
people are doing a play that they
wrote for 60 minutes or they’re
doing a rewrite of Shakespeare or
they’re doing a lot of one-person
shows. They’re fringe festivals, so
people come in and they get an
hour and they’re uncensored—
RM: To do whatever they want.
MW: You do whatever you want.
You end up paying like 500 bucks,
and you get to keep the money!
You keep the money—at least 70%,
sometimes 100%
RM: You lost me there. You pay
to perform?
MW: You pay for the venue. That’s
basically what you’re paying for.
It’s usually about 500 bucks if you
get in. You pay an application fee
of about 50 bucks, they pull your
name out of the hat, and you pay
about 500 bucks for your venue. You get a tech person, someone selling tickets and they have
a website and people buy tickets.
The point is this—
RM: With the tickets sales—you
get your money back?
MW: You get to keep the money.
You get at least 70%, sometimes a
100% and the point is this: These
are independent art festivals,
which means 95% of it is pure shit.
When you go to one of these festivals, with a great show, you will

sell out the run!

RM: Some things are pissing
you off.

RM: Of course you do.
MW: You make 20 to 25 thousand bucks and nobody knows
who you are. The same guy who
is reviewing the Broadway tour of
Mary Poppins for the Washington
Post is reviewing your show. You
end up with a portfolio full of reviews. Mark Twain meets Lewis
Black. Fine, I can work with that.
RM: That’s marvelous: the people, the opportunities.

MW: He walks out and says the
same thing every time: “I’m gonna
start tonight with a few things that
are pissing me off.”
RM: “Children.”
MW: And then he’s off. Exactly.
RM: Children, right? Then he
starts in on kids. [laughter] Comedy, in my point of view, is the
angry art. What motivates the
comic is anger.

MW: Unbelievable opportunities.
RM: Now let’s talk about this.
You get an opportunity and you
decide you are going to go to
one of these festivals, or maybe
there’s an open mic night somewhere. Let’s talk about material.
You want to be a comic. I think
that is a common ambition.
Not for everybody, but there
are people—enough of them.

MW: Yeah. Imagine a comedian
comes out for an hour and talks
about how great things are. Oh I
really want to see that show!

MW: There’s a lot of them. Like
cockroaches.

RM: Now, you got a lot to be angry about because you got dealt
some really bad cards. But did
you start with that when you
were a stand-up—when you first
started in the one-man show
business? Did you start with
your biography—your autobiography—or something else?

RM: They want to be comics.
One of the questions I would
always ask of anybody who
wants to be a comic is, “What is
pissing you off?”

MW: Yes, the one-man show was
always intended to use my story
as a metaphor to reflect back “zero-tolerance America” to the audience. That’s what it’s always been.

MW: That’s how George Carlin
started every one of his 12 HBO
specials.

RM: From the beginning?

Story Magazine // Issue 005

MW: Well, it’s taken me five years