Submission 14

Comedian Bio

Alex Stypula has been featured on the cover of the Pittsburgh City Paper, has a weekly segment on WDVE Radio (Pittsburgh), and has opened for acts such as TJ Miller and James Adomian. He also won the Gilda’s Club of Pittsburgh Great Comic Search for best comedian in the city. Since 2010 Alex has approached dark and bizarre subjects with quick wit and short jokes. His style and delivery are truly unique in the comedy world, puzzled looks upon hearing a joke set up quickly turn into riotous laughter as the punchline lands.

Story

It’s hard to really gauge what the single worst onstage experience I’ve had is, because there have been so many, but one certainly sticks out. It was the year 2012, and I had recently won a competition that named be the best standup comic in the city of Pittsburgh. A local booker saw me do well at one of the preliminary rounds and asked me to do a set at the Improv. This was a big deal to me at the time, I was excited to be asked to perform there and I thought it meant my trajectory towards “making it” was on target. When this all took place I had only been doing comedy for about a year and a half, so I still had fresh, untempered dreams about a huge career in comedy. This naivete, coupled with the ego boost of winning a “best comic” competition less than 2 years into comedy meant I was due for a serious reality check. Cut to the night of my first performance at the Pittsburgh Improv: I was incredibly nervous, and I was supposed to do 18 minutes when I think I had previously maxed out at 8. So I wrote a set list with every possible joke I could muster from all the sets I’d ever done and I thought I would safely hit 18 minutes. I would have gotten there, but the crowd had a decidedly different idea. I started off with a joke that mentioned God, not making fun of religion, or mocking those who believe but just saying the word. At the time I was unaware that even touching on certain subject, however lightly, could set people off. I’d lost them from the get-go. The crowd was noticeably rambunctious as I tried to struggle through my set, and eventually boos started to emanate from throughout the room as my nerves withered. As I had never performed there I didn’t know where the light would be coming from, they had lit me 4 minutes into my set. Since I didn’t notice and was trying to power through to the end the manager came up to the stage waving a towel and set it on the ground next to me. He literally threw in the towel on my set. I wasn’t shattered, just disheartened, I still got $100 but was never booked on that show again. It was then that I got my first glimpse of how difficult “making it” in comedy would be. Five and change years later I’m making hundreds of dollars every year doing comedy! Hell I probably made a couple grand last year touring (not counting traveling expenses that definitely put me in the red)! So the dark reality of standup for me is plugging away at it year after year knowing there is no such thing as a “big break” but learning that there are hundreds or (more likely) thousands of extremely talented comedians everywhere who are seeking the same opportunities as I am, that we might be in the right place at the right time to even get a whisper of a chance to do the thing we love and get paid a barely living wage to do it as a career. Oh and I’ve done like 2000% percent more cocaine than I would have if I’d never started doing this.