I'd Like to Play Alone, Please: Essays

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From Matt Rife’s Only Fans to John Mulaney’s Baby J and now with Tom Segura’s Sledgehammer, you have comedians getting on the stage without a care in the world about “cancel culture” and telling jokes to make audiences laugh. I’ll tell you exactly why I cut it: I look back on older specials, and in my opinion, they’re all too long. And the 7-year-old saw me talk about him on [Stephen] Colbert, and he was really kind of fascinated, just staring. And then one of the agents pitched me about writing a book about a country music star that is a serial killer. By now, we all know Segura has a highly messed up sense of humor, and my goodness, does he tell one of the sickest yet funniest jokes I’ve ever heard.

In 2018, Segura and Pazsitzky landed a TV deal with CBS, who gave a pilot production commitment for their show The Little Things.Segura has described interning at Kopelson Entertainment and then having his first paid job in the industry as a logger, producing transcripts of reality shows such as Extreme Makeover and My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss. Because of the pandemic forcing that year to go to waste — and I still worked, doing rooftop shows, backyard shows — I ended up doing stand-up for another year, so this was a three-year turnaround. Oh, and he recently sold a pilot to a top streaming service and has not one, not two, but three feature films in various stages of development. I don’t know where this trend of comedy podcasters seeing themselves as philosophers/political pundits began, but how do you feel about it?

I did my last show in Iceland and then flew back and, yeah, at that age, you miss a month, and you’re like, “Whoa, dude, you’re like a different person.I think Sledgehammer is far and away your finest special yet and feels like the culmination of decades of honing your stand-up. When I look back at my old specials, I always regret not cutting out more, so I made this grown-up decision to cut big chunks out that had really killed.