It has been a while since I posted here, but I have a couple of bits of comedy-relating news I wanted to share, resulting from a conversation I had with Mr. Gary Gulman. I spoke with Gulman for The Boston Globe for an upcoming piece on Dr. Katz Live, which is happening on RushTix.com on March 28. The piece will be in the Globe this weekend.
One of the things Gulman loves about Jonathan Katz, the comic mind behind Dr. Katz, is his non-linear way of making comedy. In discussing that, Gulman brought up Chris Fleming, who has a show tonight (March 23) called Chris Fleming: Through the Baleen, the tagline of which is “a virtual show deep inside the belly of a whale.” Gulman had a lot to say about Fleming in his comparison.
“There aren’t that many surreal comedians where there’s there are so many, for instance, cynical comedians, and that’s a well-represented genre,” says Gulman. “But there are there are few and far between in the sort of surreal or abstract comedians. And that’s what I love about people like Jon Katz, and I think you’ve you’ve seen Chris Fleming, who’s from Stow, Mass. That ability to do things that are that are that are not linear, and not in the common realm of comedy. So I it really stands out, especially if, like you and I have seen so much comedy that that you see somebody who’s silly and is not coloring in the lines. It’s really refreshing and compelling.”
I have profiled Fleming a couple of times for the BDCWire and The Boston Globe, and spoke to him for my old Boston Comedy Blog when he was getting ready to leave Boston for LA in 2010.
The first time I saw him was at the now-defunct Mottley’s Comedy Club in Boston on a showcase show. He studied dance as a minor at Skidmore College, and it was evident in a routine he did about birds and their mating dances, which immediately brought Monty Python’s “Ministry of Silly Walks” sketch to my mind. I told Gulman my first impression was that Fleming seemed fully formed already, which is an impression he shared.
“There are only a handful of comedians,” says Gulman, “like Patrice O’Neal was one, where I remember when I saw him for the first time and just my reaction and it was it was startling. It was so good. And I mean, as young as he was, even if he had been doing it 20 years and he told me that I would have believed that because he was, like you said, he was so fully formed.”
Gulman considers Fleming not only a great performer, but a friend. “I met him at The Comedy Studio in 2010, I think,” he says. “I watched him and immediately went out of my way to become his friend because I just, I love being around him. He’s so he’s so thoughtful and funny and encouraging. And he loves comedy. I just admire him so much.”
Tonight’s show is only the second live virtual show he’s done since the pandemic hit in March of 2020. Gulman hasn’t done any Zoom shows. “I was married on zoom in October,” he says. “So that was a bit of a show in that I got dressed up. But other than that, I would say that I haven’t done any performance on Zoom.”
“It’s the feel of the audience that I rely on and for my for my timing. It’s not that I need that for my for my confidence, but I need it for my enjoyment. I can’t enjoy it unless I feel as if I’m connecting in some way, and even doing interviews that I had to do to promote things, I was not able to feel the connection when saying things that I that I thought were funny that were in joke form. Something was lost. And so very early on I said I’m not going to I’m not going to do this to myself.”
While he has only gotten to go onstage twice in the past year, Gulman has been able to concentrate on writing, and getting feedback from a couple of people who he allows to see the unfinished work. “As far as my creative expression, I just had to put it all into my laptop and my notebook and put aside the performance for a while,” he says. “I mean, I miss it, but I get through it, just recalling how fortunate I was and how grateful I am that I was able to get my most personal work out, The Great Depresh, before all this all came out.”
Gulman had built up a lot of momentum around The Great Depresh, a landmark HBO special that delved into his personal life both in the material and in documentary-style segments that followed him at home, with his family, and in comedy clubs. He was poised to build on that in 2020 before the pandemic hit. When asked if this might have been frustrating for him, he answers that he considers himself fortunate compared to others who had to cancel weddings or miss their senior year in college.
“I know that I wanted to record a new special this coming, well, what would be now, like in the spring of 2021, I thought I would record a new one,” he says. “And we were on track to do that. So now I’ve just had to adjust it until maybe a year from now. Again, that’s fine. But yeah, I lost some momentum. But some people lost their lives. So I pinch myself from my luck.”
He had his next hour of comedy already written by the time the tour for The Great Depresh ended and had already started working that material on the road. Gulman says he was already doing two-hour shows and might have a third hour of material at this point, but doesn’t like to go for that long onstage. That just means he’ll have more to choose from when touring starts again in earnest. “It’s a great position to be in because so many times in my career, I’ve had a hard time coming up with that next hour because my stage time was so limited for so long,” he says. “I used to always say when I’m starting off in Boston, once I get all the stage time I need there’ll be there’ll be no stopping me. And I was I was right.”
Find tickets for Dr. Katz Live here. Find tickets for Chris Fleming: Though the Baleen here. Find out more about Gary Gulman on his website here. And check The Boston Globe website or the print edition this weekend for the Jonathan Katz story.