Sam Morril knows when to turn it off

Boston Globe

7 days ago

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Morril's 'The Errors Tour' comes to the Wilbur August 7. The show features more stories than quick one-liners in comparison to Morril's earliest specials, and they draw from real life. He offers his observations about dating and where things go wrong, runs through a segment about his anger over getting turned away from the Anne Frank exhibit in New York, and tells a story about being on a plane that almost went down and how in that moment a friend he was traveling with thought 'his life was more valuable than mine because he has children, and I said, 'F- you, I've got a better apartment than you. So I don't want to die either.''
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'These are weird thoughts, but they're honest,' he tells the Globe, adding that he still holds a small measure of disbelief that he gets paid to 'follow my f-d up thoughts.'
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'It's an insane way to make a living,' he says. But having dark thoughts doesn't make someone a bad person. 'I sit in a coffee shop with a legal pad and write them down and trust my instincts that these f-d up thoughts might be funny to other people.'
(And, as a trained professional, he is always managing the flow of his show. 'My Anne Frank story might work well next to my Hitler bit — they're part of the same neighborhood, really, but then you think, 'Now I have too many Jewish jokes together, so I've got to dial it back,'' says Morril, who is Jewish.)
He's fine if a few people walk out of his shows, but he's not aiming to alienate people. 'I'm not out there thinking, 'This will show you,'' he says. He expresses disdain for shock comedians who just want to push buttons or blurt out their darkest thoughts like it's a 'badge of honor.'
'That's what a witless person or a child would say,' he says, adding that especially with topical jokes, the quick angle is usually obvious and not the best path for a joke, so he likes to sit with his ideas. 'Anyone can say a f-d up thing, but can you examine it from a different perspective and say it skillfully?'
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If you just listen to your gut reactions and say things out loud, then you're 'not that different then the guy on the subway. That's not enough. There's a lot that gives me a gut reaction. But you need to examine it and it needs to be funny,' he says.
Done properly, he argues, these jokes can even offer a redeeming value. 'F-d up jokes are a way of bonding with people over what's f-d up in the world,' he says. 'Don't these jokes make the world a little less f-d up if we can laugh at them?'
Morril takes his work seriously, but not himself. He refuses to refer to himself as an artist, calling that 'pretentious' and adding, 'I think standup is an unpretentious form of entertainment. I think of myself as an entertainer. Whenever I've heard people describe themselves as artists, I just cringe.'
Despite steady success, Morril — whose fifth special, 'You've Changed,' was released on Prime Video last year — still wears some of the insecurities and doubts that he uses to comic advantage in his sets. 'You want a healthy amount of self-confidence with a nice hint of self-loathing,' he says. 'That keeps you writing and keeps you normal-ish.'
When asked about feeling confident, he says he usually feels that way onstage, but quickly says as an aside, 'I don't mean in life, you know,' and then goes on to admit that if he's working on new material in a club like the Comedy Cellar in New York, 'the second you start bombing you think, 'Do I suck? Am I bad at this?' I think you always feel like a bit of an imposter.'
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Still, Morril notes that while the jokes come from one part of him that he leans into comedically, he's not his onstage persona. 'I'm happy being able to be a human, being able to connect with others,' he says. 'I feel pretty secure in my skin at this point.'
He wasn't always that way. He started seeking laughs growing up in a blended family with half-siblings. 'I was trying to showcase for my new brother and sister, and I used to get all my mom's attention, but now I had to share it with these other people,' he says. 'I needed attention. There's a desperation and sense of urgency to stand-ups that's off-putting, but also necessary. But I don't want to feel desperate in real life and now I don't feel that.'
He can shut down the dark side off stage. 'If I was on all the time like that, I'd be insufferable,' he says, adding he knows not to say those things at a dinner party, or to an old lady in the elevator.
I tell him it's pretty easy to know not to tell an old lady about how weird it's going to be when sex robots start having ads — in his joke, the sex is interrupted by the 'Liberty, Liberty, Liberty' jingle — but he counters, 'That one I'd tell her. That was a pretty good joke.'
SAM MORRIL
7:30 p.m., Aug. 7, $49+, The Wilbur, 246 Tremont St., Boston,
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