#2559 - Sam Morril

Good to see you, brother. It had been a couple years, and I wanted to hear how Europe felt for an American comic right now.

Last year was weirder. My single friend would walk up to women in Berlin announcing he was American, and they’d tell him to fuck off. I told him, say North America—say Winnipeg if you’re trying to get laid. In Copenhagen they sold little Trump baby toys demanding Greenland, so there’s hostility, but the audiences were great.

I went from Lisbon through Athens and Zagreb, and people’s English is excellent. The Balkans love comedy. Maybe if you’ve lived through a recent war, a laugh hits different. Sweden was great too, though Scandinavian crowds can laugh huge, then go still; Milan applauds after a few jokes. You reset what good energy looks like.

That’s cultural. You’re getting laughs, but they may not sustain because they’re processing a second language. Europe has that contrast: Viking cultures became some of the calmest, most organized places on earth. Neutrality probably helps—except banks are never neutral.

Finland and Poland still feel alert. Russia is right there. It’s wild that we’re seriously talking about invasions again, but the rooms were welcoming.

After a special, do you stay in town until you’ve rebuilt the hour, or constantly take it on the road?

Both. I’m out with maybe twenty-five or thirty new minutes, slipping in older material, and it’s miserable. A special drops and I’m at the Cellar watching some young killer destroy with fifteen polished minutes while I’m eating shit with brand-new stuff, thinking, maybe I should quit. Slowly it gets respectable enough to tape again.

Loose-format shows help if comics aren’t repeating the thing everybody saw on Fallon. Audience suggestions or off-the-cuff shows lower the stakes because people know it’s being made up. But crowd work can fool you: it kills live, then you make it a bit and realize it wasn’t that good.

You put new stuff beside the killers. Louis used to open with the closer from the prior hour—genius and brutal. I keep doing sets because if I tell the same joke without finding a tag, I hate myself. Time goes from twenty-two to twenty-five, collapses to twelve, then climbs again. That’s the process.

I’ve got an orphans folder for bits that never found a home. Writing on a pad helps too. It’s slower than typing, but physically making the letters puts it deeper in your head. A legal pad tells the crowd you’re working; a phone makes them think you didn’t prepare.

I like yellow legal pads. You rip a page out and it feels like a job. I write sober, but get stories by going out. Sometimes I’m blocked and think, fuck it, have an adventure. Most nights nothing happens; once in a while the night hands you a bit. No kids yet—that’s why I can still get away with it.

Comedy hazing is people talking trash, not dangerous humiliating garbage. College was mostly a way for me to avoid admitting I wasn’t going to college. Now, if you’re disciplined, you can learn a lot online without all that debt.

I paid for my own tour mockumentary because development can eat years. It’s a fake documentary about a tour going wildly off the rails, with comics and friends playing ridiculous versions of themselves, and Netflix bought it for next year. Mark and I also have a buddy comedy about two loser liquor salesmen. I got tired of waiting for permission.

That’s why AI-made movies bother me. The output may look impressive, but a movie’s disasters, personalities, blood and sweat are part of the pleasure. It’s coming anyway; the scarier part is where it scales—fake footage, systems probing institutions, things we can’t verify with our own eyes.

We’re already trained by feeds serving exactly what we like. Give somebody a beautiful robot partner that remembers every preference, never runs out of conversation, and says they’re fascinating? That’s a powerful trap. Real people push back. Rejection and awkwardness build a personality. A little friction is good for you.

Exactly. If we erase rejection, death, inconvenience—all the parts that make you deal with reality—we’re inching away from being human. Your phone is a tiny dopamine drip; imagine affection so convincing it feels like a drug.

I want a partner with interests I don’t have. I want to ask what they like about something and hear them light up. My algorithm is already ninety-nine percent old baseball footage—Greg Maddux and Barry Bonds breaking down an at-bat. I don’t need my whole life reflected back at me.

We went down dark rabbit holes—JFK, cults, serial killers—but I keep coming back to how malleable people are. Put someone in a war zone or violent crew long enough, and horrifying things can feel normal.

I’m happy keeping my world small: the road, jokes, pickup ball with comics, coffee, a normal life. That’s luxury to me—fewer things pulling at my head. Somebody stole years of my Facebook money because I wasn’t watching, but I’d still rather think about the next joke than become my own accountant.

Your Netflix special is out now, and I’ve heard it’s great. You taped three shows at that gorgeous Tampa theater, which is smart—you loosen up, get options, and Tampa crowds are wild. We’re lucky we get to do this.

It’s either my best special or my second best. I was hungrier and angrier on the 2020 one, but I gave this one more time, and it was a blast. I’m back rebuilding in Omaha, Madison, Cleveland—all those clubs. Humbling, miserable, fun. We’re lucky. That’s the whole thing.

Good seeing you, brother. We’ll wrap it there.