Alex English should be on summer vacation when I call him on a Thursday afternoon, but instead he’s just finished two comedy gigs in New York and is packing his bags at the last minute to catch a red-eye flight to London, where he’ll be taking the stage at the Top Secret Comedy Club that weekend. The work is never done when you’re, well, a working comedian.
Since I joined the SNL In the 2021 writers’ room (season 47), English has shown an uncanny knack for the kind of humor that hits you in the right place (which is even more impressive considering he had no prior sketch experience before). SNL). In his brief but remarkable tenure, he has blessed the public with “Hot girls hospital,” “Nice prison”, and the instantly iconic“Lisa from Temecula,” which, he tells me, was inspired during a vacation trip to Detroit, his hometown.
English says the source of his humor is not found in social media, but in analog experiences. “I talk to people, to my family. I read the newspaper. I also read a lot of books,” he says. “I love to watch people. I’m an older man.”
English belongs to the next generation of exciting (and passionately queer) comedians, including comedians John Early, Bowen Yang, Sam Jay, and Joel Kim Booster. What they strive for is not a viral moment, which English says is the longing of many aspiring comedians, but a shared understanding through life’s absurdities. In fact, English is convinced that social media has ruined not just the art of comedy, but our relationship to it. So I asked him to explain how we got here, and how we might get back.
Jason Parham: What scares you about the current state of comedy?
Alex English: I was on a flight recently. Another passenger was watching a video on their phone and I was like, “Oh, I know that person.” Seven seconds into the video, they just walked away from the video. I’m sure at that point the comedian was either setting it up or talking to the audience. That freaked me out. I was like, “I don’t want anyone to do that to me. I don’t want anyone to walk away from me.” You know how it is, too: because everyone is doing it now, it’s become so saturated. There’s nothing unique about the videos I see. It’s not an insult to the people who do it. I just feel like it’s not the way it should be done.
That’s fair.
Gone are the days when you could go perform at a club, someone in the industry would see it and want to put you on a platform to elevate your work. Instead, now the business is: Do you get 500,000 followers from recording material that you put on the internet or from talking to an audience? When it comes to audience work, I’m the one who came to work. The audience didn’t come to work. They came to laugh. I don’t understand this obsession with that. When I’m on stage, I don’t care as much about the audience. It’s like, “Are they dating?” Who cares? There’s no unique story to that. And they didn’t pay for it.
Whose fault is it?
I realized, especially after the pandemic, that Instagram and TikTok, as it relates to comedy, have ruined a lot of audiences. They’ve changed audiences’ perception of what comedy, specifically stand-up comedy, really is. I did a show a few months ago that went well. A woman comes up to me after the show. She had been sitting in the front. She was like, “Oh my gosh, I thought you were going to talk to us tonight. I thought you were going to make fun of us.” I said, “Is that what you think stand-up is now?” There’s an expectation from audiences now because of what they’re consuming online.
