INTERVIEW: Shawn Carter
WBTU DJ Danya Trommer chatted with Boston-based comedian Shawn Carter about the New England comedy scene, hitting the Billboard chart, and sharing a name with Jay-Z
Danya Trommer: You just put out an album, 100 Problems, and you made it to the top of the iTunes chart. What spot on Billboard are you on right now?
Shawn Carter: This week we’re at number seven on Billboard.
DT: That’s pretty crazy. How’s that feel, having a Billboard topping album?
SC: That is pretty crazy. It feels insane. The iTunes thing I thought we could do because it’s a little easier, but Billboard [takes into account] more info. I got a message from somebody that was like, “Hey, we’re with Billboard. Can you verify this info because you might hit the chart.” I sent it to my wife and I was like, “This is fake, right?” But it was real. It feels great.
DT: So this is your first album, right?
SC: Yeah, first one.
DT: So the title 100 Problems, that comes from you having the same last name as Jay-Z–
SC: I have the same full name as Jay-Z.
DT: Oh yeah! He’s Sean Carter as well. Was that your go-to title for the album?
SC: It used to be a joke I would do about how we have the same name and I’d be like, “Oh we’re almost the same, but I have more problems.” That did well, I kind of dropped it from the act. I thought the album cover could be the first joke of the album.
DT: How long have you been doing comedy for?
SC: It’s been like 12 years now.
DT: How long has this album been in production? Like the specific material that’s included on it?
SC: It’s hard to say. Some of it is ten years old and I’ve just been doing the jokes forever. I didn’t have an album, so I never put it on a different one, you know? For the most part, everything has been the last couple of years. Really the past year I’ve been planning on doing it. It was a lot of doing long sets, trying to figure out where everything went.
DT: So a little birdie told me you’re going on tour to promote this album. Is that what’s happening?
SC: I’m trying to in a few months, seeing where some chips fall. I’m trying to get an RV and travel the country. I feel like it’s as much of a sightseeing tour as a promotional tour [Laughs], but it would be nice to get some to some other cities and meet some new people.
DT: Do you venture out of Boston a lot?
SC: I like going to Vermont; they got a great comedy club there in Burlington. I’ll go to New Hampshire, Connecticut. I’ve gone to Vegas, but really the New England area is where I like to stay around.
DT: So for the 12 years you’ve been doing comedy, New England has kind of been your home base.
SC: Sure, yeah.
DT: Is there an advantage to staying in the same area? Have you built up a community?
SC: I think there is an advantage. I’ve gotten to know so many people through comedy. Three nights a week I’m out doing shows with friends of mine. I get to see my friends three nights a week and go out and entertain crowds at the same time. That’s been my real reason for staying in Boston so long.
DT: Your community?
SC: Yeah, exactly. I think in the next year, it would make sense to travel around a bit to try and spread out a little.
DT: So, you’re a full time comedian, right?
SC: Yeah.
DT: Do you have a goal?
SC: Sure. You always have to have goals, which I guess wasn’t always the case. When I started, somebody asked me what my goal was–somebody who was very business-oriented–and was like, “I can manage comics.” She helped people get certain festivals–that was their goal–or TV spots. When I started, I was such an idealist that I was like, “I wanna be the best comedian I can be. That’s my goal.” But after a while you’re like, “My goal is to be a feature at this club. My goal is to be a headliner at this club. My goal is to put out an album next year.”
DT: So setting kind of short term goals?
SC: You got to. The goal right now would be to get more people around the country to know who I am rather than just Boston. I feel like with Boston, I have an ok handle on the comedy scene, maybe not necessarily that many other people know me, but like if you are a big comedy fan you might be like, “I like obscure comedians [like] Shawn Carter!” [Laughs] But even outside New England, if I went to a different city, other comics won’t even know me there.
DT: So you’ve very much been focused on this area.
SC: Yeah, it’s been like all Boston.
DT: I’ve noticed that you’ve done some promotion on Reddit and stuff like that. I’m interested in the business aspect of comedy. How have you been marketing yourself?
SC: I go on Reddit sometimes. I’ll post a picture with like a joke on it or something. It’s very hard to know what it is that works. You get somebody at a show, and 90% of the time you go like, “Oh, who brought you out to the show?” hoping they saw your thing on Reddit or saw your thing on Facebook, but 90% of the time people go like, “Oh my friend told me about this show.” Word of mouth spreads more than anything. I have these ideas where I’m like, “Oh, I’ll put a joke up on Reddit,” and what happens is 30 people will tell me I look like some celebrity but fat [Laughs]. Then you’ll get a couple people that are like, “This is a really good joke,” then there’s a couple of people who are like–
DT: You should die.
SC: [Laughs] Yes exactly, like, “You don’t deserve oxygen,” and I’m like, “It wasn’t that bad!”
DT: I’m a Reddit user, I totally get that. So, you’re the host of [podcast] Pick a Side Stupid. You guys have had 43 episodes, started out in November of 2017. [Quick plug, every Friday night at Maggy’s Lounge in Quincy at 7 p.m.] I love Pick a Side; I listened to it a little bit before I was on it. It’s so much fun. Have you done any podcasts before Pick a Side?
SC: I had a podcast for a while called The Unscene Comedy Podcast. I was trying to pair it with a website that I ran. After I stopped doing that, I had a podcast with my friend, Ted Pettingell, called Fart: The Podcast. We couldn’t think of a name. Even the people who liked it would try and convince other people like, “You should listen; it’s not as stupid as you think.” [Laughs]
DT: What exactly was it?
SC: It was really just me and Ted getting together with a third comedian in Boston and just sitting down and talking about stuff. We’d look up news stories and we’d try and get people to guess if it was a true news story or if we made it up. There were a couple of segments, but it was really just a silly show that we did with a couple of comics. It was a lot to keep up with, so we moved on from it and now Pick a Side Stupid is the project. I like the format–getting a lot of comics involved in it.
DT: It’s a great way to meet other people in the comedy community. It introduced me to most of the people I know. The subjects of the episodes are all over the place. Like you’ve had a Metallica episode, which seems kind of out of the blue. What is your process for picking your subjects?
SC: Sometimes it will just be a thing that me and my friends have been talking about a lot. Like the Metallica thing–I had this ongoing thing with Chris Post where I keep saying The Black Album is the best Metallica album, and he gets super angry about it. And so I was like, “We’re going to do a whole episode just on Metallica.” I know some friends that are super interested in Nicolas Cage so we were like, “Let’s do a Nicolas Cage episode.” And then it’s other things that just interest me, like urban legends. They’re so weird and I feel like there was a lot of questions we could write about it. I really just pick them as I go with no real system.
DT: If you do end up going on tour, what’s going to happen to Pick a Side?
SC: My plan is, if I’m able to go on tour, I would like for the people that have been most involved in the show so far to host like a month, then hand it over to somebody else for a month. So I’d figure out my top three or six or however long I go. So it should be able to survive. Maybe it’ll become even more popular when I’m gone [Laughs]. Hopefully I’ll be able to walk right back in, and we can keep going.
DT: That’d be great. So for this tour, do you have a dream destination in mind to perform at?
SC: I don’t. I just want to hit certain cities that I haven’t been to that I hear are cool.
DT: What cities do you have in mind?
SC: I’d like to go to Austin, Texas. I think Denver, I hear good things. Vermont Comedy Club has had me up there twice already–that’d be like a fun either kickoff to the tour or on my way back, because that club is killer. Really, I’m looking forward to seeing different clubs and meeting different people.
DT: On your album you talked about how you’ve performed at colleges. I liked your MIT bit. Do you think you’re going to do any campus shows?
SC: I’m not focused on that. For the most part, in my experience, unless you specifically know somebody at the school that wants you there to do a show, it’s hard to get booked there. Certainly, if anybody was to ask me to do it, I would do the show, but I don’t have a college agent or anything like that, so mostly I’d just be going around to different comedy clubs and stuff like that.
DT: Have you been on tour before?
SC: Nope. This will be the first time.
DT: Do you have any anxieties about going on tour for the first time?
SC: I feel good about it because the idea of getting an RV and being with my wife.
DT: So you’re not just going to be alone?
SC: Exactly. That would be the part that would worry me–if I was going alone I’d just be so lonely. Going with my wife, I’m going to have a good time no matter what, even if the shows are tough. Just going around the country and travelling will be great.
DT: That’s so sweet! So one of my favorite bits on your album is the one about Quincy hospital, with how you worked as a security guard and had to usher the dead people down to the morgue. Is that the worst thing you saw while working at the hospital, the dead people?
SC: The dead people were definitely not the toughest part of working at the hospital.
DT: They couldn’t fight back [Laughs].
SC: That’s the thing! They don’t move. When you do move a body, it’s in a bag already when you get to the floor. You try to picture it as, “Oh, we’re moving like a bunch of bricks.” You don’t try to think about what’s in there. There were some interesting stories. We had a guy come in drunk once who we were supposed to watch because you can’t let people leave if they’re drunk–they’re a danger to themselves. He doesn’t want to be there and he’s this big burly guy. I don’t want to have to stop him. He’s complaining, and he’s like, “Look, I can walk a straight line.” The doctor is like, “Alright, show me, walk a straight line.” He does, sort of , and the doctor really doesn’t want to deal with him, so she’s like, “Alright, I guess.” She sends him out, and he doesn’t have any money, so they give him a cab voucher. The secretary makes the call, they send him out, whatever. Like five minutes later, they’re like, “Who did we send over to the Fowler House?” which everybody thought was like a group home or a shelter. I go, “The drunk guy that was in here earlier, why?” And they were like, “Oh, that’s a bar.”
DT: Nice.
SC: So yeah, we sent him back to the bar that he came from. That’s one of the fun stories.
DT: So you talk a lot about the different odd jobs that you’ve had over the years in your album. You also talked about being a mail carrier and jobs like that. What’s the worst job you have worked?
SC: Oh boy. The worst job is probably landscaping. Although, you can make a case for retail. Anybody that works retail can tell you, “I would rather be breaking my back in 100 degree weather than–
DT: Than talk to a person.
SC: Yeah!
DT: Yeah people suck! They’re horrible! [Laughs]
SC: Having a customer roll their eyes at me because I don’t know the price on this thing or whatever. Physically, landscaping. Mentally, retail is the worst.
DT: I would agree with you there. So, I know that you dropped out of community college–
SC: It’s like I’m starting a job interview right now [Laughs].
DT: I know that you know about the college comedy scene. We were talking outside of the interview about how it’s hard for college kids to get off campus because it’s kind of scary out there. Do you have any advice for college comedians getting started?
SC: I never really started comedy as a college student, so I guess I can’t really understand that side of it, but I can say as a comic that the more stages that you hit and stages that have different people in the audience, the better off that you’ll be in the long run. Sometimes it’s just harder to do comedy in front of people that are not your age, not of the same mind set and stuff like that. I don’t think you necessarily need to change your act for them, but maybe learn how to tell your jokes in front of them and if they don’t love them–
DT: It’s about adapting, kind of?
SC: Mhmm. That goes not just for college students, but anyone. You want to get to a bunch of different spots, you want to get on different stages, you want to be able to entertain everyone. I would say if you are under 21, contact the venue ahead of time. A lot of them are at bars, and some of them will be like, “Yeah, not a problem, we’re like a restaurant and bar,” while others will be like, “You need to be out by ten,” and others will be like, “Don’t come here.” I would say getting out of the college scene and going around to as many places as you can, not only will you see those different stages, you’ll meet a lot of people that you wouldn’t have met on your college campus. You’ll make friends and connections and people who can help you get other shows too.
DT: Do you have any networking advice?
SC: I would say don’t force it. Talk to the people you enjoy talking to and that’s your networking, basically. Get to some shows, and if you’re talking to somebody and you’re just having a bad time, don’t force it. You’re just going to wait your time, because they probably don’t like you either. They’re not going to be like, “Let’s put this person on a show.” If you get along great with somebody, that’s awesome. Ask for something that you want. If you want a show, ask for it.