Before Langston Kerman was one of the most exciting stand-up comedians working right now, he taught poetry to high school students. As he tells the audience in his debut Netflix special Bad Poetry, he was desperate to find another path for his life.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Kerman talks about getting his big break writing for Oscars host Chris Rock (even if he didn’t get a single joke on the broadcast), convincing his favorite comedian John Mulaney to direct his special, trying not to alienate Larry David during his very first Hollywood gig, and why he fears that fans of HBO’s Insecure will never, ever let him “be free.” He also shares some behind-the-scenes stories from his time writing on the year’s most brilliantly weird talk show, Everybody’s in LA, including the one pitch that was deemed too weird by Mulaney.
“I really just wanted to make something that felt like a great articulation of what I think is funny and what I’m capable of,” Kerman says. “And I feel super grateful that John Mulaney was willing to see the vision inside of that. That certainly pushed it forward in terms of it finding its landing spot at Netflix.”
The 37-year-old comedian, who pursued a career in spoken word poetry before turning to stand-up, is probably still best known for a six episode arc on the first season of the HBO series Insecure, which is well-known for its passionate fan base that likes to hold the show’s actors accountable for their character’s behavior.
“It sucks, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t love what that fan base has continued to do for me in my life,” Kerman says, noting that in the show he played Jered, a love interest for Yvonne Orji’s Molly, who admits to once having a sexual experience with a man, something fans continue to troll him for eight years later.
“They don’t stop,” he adds. “The number of people, even now, if you look at my comments as I release my Netflix special—let me be free! I just want to be able to tell my little jokes and not be bothered.”
If anything can help Kerman finally move past that limited perception, it’s an hour of comedy as original and confident as Bad Poetry. After seeing him perform the set that would become Bad Poetry live, Mulaney decided to make it his own directorial debut.
“I always think of specials like album tracks, and each of these is a hit to me,” Mulaney told Vulture recently. “My main critique of most specials is—and I always try to be extremely hard on myself too, and I’m open to criticism if people think otherwise—every part of it has to be good! Just wait if you don’t have it! This hour was so tight and ready to go.”
“I think there’s truly no substitution for somebody who’s been through a process as many times as he has been,” Kerman tells me. “And the insights that he had in terms of how we should shoot it, the things that we would need in order for it to properly look as sexy and cool and and funny as we want it to look, were invaluable. If it were completely left up to me it would have looked a lot shittier, and probably sounded bad, and I would have worn dumb clothes.” The only part of that Kerman then walks back is that he “probably would have worn the same outfit.”
Ultimately, he says, “I’m grateful that I had a dude who understood the essence of the format so well, but also understood that there were certain rules I wanted to break, and he was great at helping me activate that.”
That rule-breaking mentality is something the two comedians also brought, in a much bigger way, to Mulaney’s week-long Netflix talk show, Everybody’s in LA, this past May. Kerman was opening for Mulaney on the road when the tour went on hiatus so he could mount the unconventional series.
When Mulaney asked Kerman to come on the project as one of his writers, Kerman said “absolutely”—even though he “didn’t really understand what the thing was.” He’s “not even sure” he understands it now.
“It was just a cool room where a dude who you respect and think is really, really funny telling you to go be really, really funny,” he says. And while an elaborate idea about infiltrating the Nation of Islam in Inglewood didn’t pan out, he was able to realize his dream of fully investigating the actor Terrence Howard’s super weird theories about math and science.
“I haven’t heard from him,” Kerman says when I ask if he thinks the sketch ever made it onto Howard’s radar. “I pray that it has, and I pray that I do hear from him. I think about him almost every day. And so it would mean the world to me to have even just a moment with the man that inspires so much in my life. But I have not yet had the pleasure.”
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
