Exclusive Interview with Jeff Barrett

Check out our Exclusive Interview with Jeff Barret!

This is the 114th post in our Celebrity of the Day series.

Jeff Barrett is a comedian that has been all over the country performing in comedy clubs. He has even been featured on the Showtime, but he tempers that by the fact that he has also been on America’s Most Wanted (for a reenactment). Jeff Barrett’s comedy is filled with current events and nonpartisan political commentary. He is never afraid to tell it as he sees it in both his comedy and his art.


Stephanie Schoppert: So how did you get into comedy, because that is most times that’s not exactly a chosen profession.

Jeff Barrett: No it is not. I had been interested in comedy from the first time HBO had a comedy special. And Saturday Night Live, I used to go over to one of my best friends’ house because his mom didn’t care if we stayed up late and watched TV. So we would just die laughing watching Akroid and Belushi, so I was always into comedy and I remember sneaking to a friend's house while we were on vacation and they had George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on TV. So I remember I’d let everyone else go out and play and I’d sit in the bedroom and just listen to that for an hour.

After I graduated high school I went to the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and graduated from there and came down to Central Florida and worked my way up to Art Director. But I was going out to comedy clubs in Orlando, way before Bonkerz there was club that was in town and they had an open mic once a month. It took me about 3 years, I finally got the nerve up and wrote my own five minute bit of material and went up on open mic under several gin and tonics. Man all it takes is getting that one laugh and you’re hooked.

It took me about another year before I worked on some other stuff and then got back out and started hitting open mics. Then when Bonkerz came to town, that was back in the early 80s I got hired on as one of their house MCs so I got to work with great acts, Seinfield, Rosie O’Donnell, Paula Poundstone, I toured with her for a bit, on her Florida dates. And you know, just worked my way up and that’s what it is, there is no school. The school is the clubs, so you got to the clubs, you watch comics that you like, you try not to steal the material but learn how they got their style and that’s it.

I think a lot of young comics don’t do that anymore or as much as we used to. It was every chance you got to watch a big name comedian, you took it, cause that was your education. So we used to work the comedy clubs, work around comics to get advice from them and then a lot of us would go to some late burger joint, it would be Denny’s usually and you’d stay there till four in the morning. Comics would just share stories, share ideas, and help each other write bits and you know you move on from there.

Stephanie: So do you ever get heckled?

Jeff: Oh yeah, still get heckled and it’s no fun either.

Stephanie: Now come on, don’t you talk back and have some fun?

Jeff: Well here’s the logic with hecklers and for some reason people are trained to think that’s what you’re supposed to do is go to a club and disrupt a show. It’s one thing to get heckled, and I don’t mind hecklers as long as somebody’s getting a laugh, I don’t care if it’s the heckler or its me. I don’t have to be the dominate one but yeah its real easy to slam people and usually that’s all it takes, but when you get somebody that’s so drunk that you can’t even reason with them. One you can’t even understand what’s coming out of their mouth that proves to be a challenge cause how do you come back to jibberish. I have a great line I use, where I just got heckled by a doctor of all people, a drunk ass doctor in a show. He was yelling something incoherent out and me and the crowd could not understand what he was saying. So I turned to the crowd and said “let me look up Rosetta Stone for drunk asshole doctor and see if I can manage the language to communicate.”

So those are things you keep in your pocket for worthless heckles like that but for the most part, it’s not fun, it can be fun slamming people but you know we had a show that we came prepared to do and so like I said if somebody heckles and you slam them and move on, then it’s great for everybody. But if its somebody that has to keep coming back for more, it gets old, it wears you out, it wears the crowd out and it just gets old. If you’re working great clubs then they’ll usually handle that. They’ll let you take care of the heckler until it gets out of hand and then they’ll come and police the room and tell people they are out. So I don’t mind it, I get heckled from time to time, it’s just part of the business. But the more seasoned you get at it, I mean I’ve jumped the gun too early and gotten heckled or I’ve slammed somebody so hard to where the crowd turned against me, so the key is, you got to let them piss the crowd off first before you get to vicious, then it’s gold. It’s patience just like anything else.

Stephanie: So have you ever had a bad show?

Jeff: Oh yeah, I’ve had lots of bad shows. I mean you don’t want a bad show and it can be a number of things, it can be that you’re not right for that crowd or it could be so much to do with atmosphere of how a crowd is set up. You know a lot of clubs, especially one nighters that are in bars, they don’t think anything about atmosphere. For a comedian our voice is our instrument so if we don’t have a good sound system, that’s to our disadvantage, horrible lighting or no lighting, again if you are doing facial expressions nobody can see your face and if you’re performing in the dark well then you must not be that important for this show.

But I’ve had bad shows just where I’ve started off wrong or wasn’t in the right kind of rhythm. It just happens. And again it’s nothing you really want to happen and sometimes a show will start off slow or bad, and you can turn it around and sometimes it gets progressively worse. All comedians still can have bad shows from time to time, it’s just the unluck of the draw.

Stephanie: So what do you do if you are starting off in a bad show, how do you try and turn that around?

Jeff: Well your mind starts racing and you know most of it for me is usually a rhythm. I can get up there and I can tell my rhythm’s off, like if I tried something new and it didn’t come over well. So your mind is racing, so it’s like okay what do I got to do. So it’s either you’re looking at it from a pace standpoint where you got to speed up your pace or maybe you got to slow it down, maybe you’re going to too fast and you’re trying to rush stuff to get it out. So sometimes it just means taking a deep breath, taking a swig off of beer and going ok, lets try this again. I’ve done that. And things will happen in your show, where a whole tray of glass might drop and break and you know if you just come up with something witty. A typical stock line is “Oh just put that anywhere.” But it’s just being able to work fast on your feet so that comes whether you have hecklers, or disruptions in your show or a bad set in the stage you are standing on or your show is setting off sluggish, it’s up to you to turn it around.

But I always tell comics, especially younger comics that the crowd has no idea what is coming out of your mouth. So a lot of times people put more effort on screwing up you know. I always said the crowd doesn’t know when the punch line is coming typically, unless they’ve seen your show. So if you do a joke, you know in a split second whether it is getting a laugh or not and instead of drawing more attention to it by saying “Oh I guess that didn’t go over” you know tighten it up, move on to the next joke. All they know is it was a long setup, they didn’t know that they were supposed to laugh at a certain point.

You know you can only do that for so long before people start going well okay this guy’s not funny at all but you just have to like I said be fresh. There’s times where I haven’t been up for a show and I had to. I’ve been sick as a dog in my room and it’s all I can do to get to the show and get to the stage and then you’ve got to muster up every ounce of energy to put on a good show. Then go back to your room and die a horrible death. So there’s a lot of elements and when you’re booked you’re booked, you’re going to go on.

Stephanie: So do you consider yourself to be an observational comedian?

Jeff: Yeah probably if I had to put a label on it. Observational. Political. I do political humor but I don’t do like left-right humor. The political humor I’ve been doing especially in my current show is consumer based. So I do a lot of politics but my politics are about healthcare, about medicinal marijuana, on hemp being illegal for a ridiculous amount of time, so I do like social awareness comedy, I guess you would call it.

Stephanie: Have you ever been criticized for being too offensive or going to extremes?

Jeff: Oh yeah constantly. I happen to love the F-word and unfortunately never everybody has the wonderful ambition that I have to use it. But there’s times that I don’t. But yeah I get criticized a lot, everybody gets criticized, you open yourself up for criticism, especially when you are speaking your point of view. I used to do a lot of, and I still do, anti-smoking jokes and so I would go on these rants about smokers and you know I was addicted to tobacco so I’m not an entire hypocrite about it. But I would get people coming up after the show going “you’re an asshole” and I said “why because I told you everything you should know and should do?” and he goes “yeah” and I go “well you’re an asshole because you’re still smoking.”

But yeah I get criticized and that’s just nature, people criticize art, people criticize music, they criticize comedy, that’s their right, that’s their opinion. I’m pretty solid in the political stuff that I’m throwing out there, like I said I rip on fad diets, and healthcare and big pharma companies, I show no mercy with those people. But I have a lot of people on my side, especially now. I’ve been doing jokes about this stuff for ten years and people now are just finally starting to wake up. I’ve been screaming about it, they just weren’t listening. But especially any time you are doing social commentary jokes you’re opening yourself up obviously.

Stephanie: You are also an artist, do you have the same personality in your art as you do in your comedy?

Jeff: Yes and no, as far as my own personal art, I would have to say yes. I did a painting for a show once at the Orlando Museum of Art and the title of the show was “Humor in Art” and I went well I’ve been wanting to get involved in these shows and I’m a comedian and artist so it was a no brainer. So it was pretty much that was the topic “Humor in Art” and you could paint whatever would spring a smile or make somebody chuckle in a painting. So being a vegan that I am and wanting to get a point across I did a beautiful airbrush painting close-up of a baby breastfeeding. And the baby’s looking at the viewer, while he’s breastfeeding and I put a milk moustache on the baby and called it “Got Breasts?” And my artist’s statement that had to go with the painting was all pro-breastfeeding, pro-women and anti-dairy and milk and formula, and wrote a humorous stint about it.


And the painting got rejected from the show. So I called the woman that I got the rejection letter from, who I knew and asked “well was it because it was an airbrush painting?” because a lot of art galleries snub airbrushed art like it isn’t art. She said No, it was a beautiful painting, and I come to find out that it was a bunch of old ladies on the committee and they thought it was distasteful. They obviously didn’t read my artist’s statement which was trying to prove a point that breastfeeding was something natural that everybody should be able to do and not be scrutinized.

But yeah some of my art gets criticized and that’s fine with me. You know art is a story, just like comedy is a story, hopefully humorous, but I love criticism. I would rather hear criticism than praise because for the most part you know when you’ve done a good job and I want to improve. Not that you have to take anybody’s advice, the criticism isn’t always the right criticism.

But yeah my art, time to time I’ll do straight beautiful pieces that people admire and then I’ll do you know which is the stuff I love to do which is the stuff that…I was to raise consciousness and that is what art is supposed to do. It’s supposed to make you stop, think and have a lot of imagery.

So I have the best of both worlds. I’ve had people ask me, which do you like better? Comedy or Art? It’s like well why do I have to choose? I love them both. I don’t need to choose I can do them both, freely.

Stephanie: So who is your favorite comedian?

Jeff: I have a lot of favorite comedians but I have an older comedian and I have a newer comedian that unfortunately has passed away. But I’m a big fan of Lenny Bruce, him and I share the same birthday and he was a big political satirist in his day and obviously rustled a lot of feathers wherever he went. And he was never known as like a drop dead funny comic. He was always known as that Lenny Bruce was “dirty” of course over history and stuff nobody really knows a lot about him unless you are really into comedy. He hardly ever cussed, he would use foul language in his act, he was in a nightclub and he had a lot of great social humor and was constant criticizing whether it be the government or the status quo and he had great audiences with lawyers and all kinds of people that really appreciated that kind of humor. So Lenny Bruce is one of my favorite comics and Bill Hicks of course.

He was a comic’s comic and just about any comic will tell you that he is right up there as one of their top favorites. I’d say he was the Lenny Bruce of our generation and I got to actually meet him and work with him and he unfortunately died at 32. He did a lot of Bush 1 jokes and its funny because he is getting real popular now and unfortunately he’s dead, but a lot of his jokes about Bush were relevant to Bush 2 when he was in the White House. And he was alive when Clinton was still in term and he would definitely take his shots at Clinton. But he was just a great social critic comedian and you know now all you can do is watch his videos and listen to his albums. But those are probably my two favorite comics.

To learn more about his website.