Special Guest Turner Sparks
Special Guest Turner Sparks
From China to New York, Turner is an international man of levity
If you want to be a comedian don’t ask Turner Sparks for directions. I mean, I love the path he took, but I think it’d be hard to follow without getting lost. Turner first moved from California to China to teach English and ended up launching the first Mister Softee ice cream truck franchise in Asia. Next he started up the first open mic in Mainland China at a little dive bar, The Drunken Clam, in Suzhou in 2009. He followed this by establishing China’s first full time comedy club, Shanghai’s Kung Fu Komedy, with his friend and business partner, Australian comedian Andy Curtain. Having him fly me over to spend a couple weeks performing there is one of the all time highlights of my comedy career.
Turner has since settled in New York. Despite touring relentlessly and internationally he’s managed to carve out time to record two fantastic comedy albums that are in heavy rotation on satellite radio.
What would say to your younger, beginner comic self? If you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice, one thing you know now that you could’ve really benefited from knowing when you started, what would it be?
I would tell myself that the goal is not always to kill on stage. The goal is to leave the room in a better place than you found it. If everyone is bombing before you, then the job is to get a few chuckles. If everyone is getting chuckles, then the goal should be to get big laughs. If everyone is getting big laughs, well now the goal is to kill.
Too many times, early in comedy I would go to an open mic or a bar show of relatively new comedians and while everyone was having a tough set, I’d say to myself “When I get up there I’m going to turn this room around”. Then I would get on stage, hit my first punchline and get a small reaction, and immediately get bummed out. The rest of my set would be ruined because I set my expectations way too high from the beginning.
Did you receive any advice when you were starting that really helped you out?
Yes. Ruben Paul (one of my favorite comedians on earth) watched me perform material that, looking back, was pretty challenging to pull off. I was opening for him along with two other comedians. I was doing my challenging material and doing ok, while the other two comedians were doing local jokes and destroying. I was too young of a comedian to know the difference in our attempts. I just saw that they were doing better than I was. He pulled me aside and told me that what I was doing would take longer to figure out, but that in the end it would be more rewarding. Little things like this along the way from veteran comedians can be wildly influential to a young comic, and without a doubt this kept me on the right path at that time.
It wasn’t until later when I became a total hack and turned my career around.
How about really terrible advice? Did you receive any awful advice, and did you take it?
Oh man, I’ll never forget the worst advice ever. I was a year into comedy and a club owner told me “A comedian needs to write jokes that get a laugh every 8 seconds. So, your written jokes need more twists and punchlines”. Luckily, I was too terrible of a writer to even come close to that. I think I went home and tried for a half-a-day to write like that and then gave up.
But can you imagine sitting down and trying to write a twist every 8 seconds?
Dave Attell can do it successfully, but everyone else would either quit right away or end up sounding like a robot-joke-machine.
Can you share a memory from starting out in comedy, whether it be your first time ever, your first time crushing, your first-time bombing, or some other notable early experience?
Let’s go with first time bombing. Everybody wants to hear that anyway right? I’ve never once been asked by a stranger about the first time I killed, but I get asked at least twice a week about the first time I bombed. I had been doing comedy for six months, with a once-a-month show where I did a new 10 minutes of stand-up every month. So in my head I had an hour of comedy.
I did relatively well every month and had major confidence. Huge caveat: the audience was a group of 50 people who were either my friends or close acquaintances, and the same 50 came every month.
With this confidence I entered into the Hong Kong International Comedy Competition, and because there were only 30 comedians on the entire continent of Asia in 2010, I made the cut.
So I sat down to pick the best 7 minutes out of this 60 minutes of material I had written, and when it was already too late I realized that almost all the material was either local jokes about my town of Suzhou, or inside jokes that didn’t make sense if you didn’t know me.
I flew to Hong Kong anyway, wrote out the set, jumped up on stage, did my first joke and predictably it bombed. I panicked and thought “that was my best joke. If they don’t like that one, they are going to hate the rest of this set”.
I switched to crowd work. Bad crowd work. I’d never done crowd work in my life and had only done 6 shows total in my career. It went worse than the joke. I asked a guy where he was from and he didn’t answer. Just stared at me and laughed, as if to say he was backing away from my sinking ship. I asked another lady on the other side of the room where she was from. She stayed silent too. I asked a third guy. He said “Nope, mate” and everybody chuckled.
Seeing no way out, and having no real act to fall back on, I said “thanks, good night” and walked off stage. When I got to the green room a comedian named Nick Rado, who had flown up from New Zealand and had met me minutes before the show, said “wow that was some killer anti-comedy!” I’d like to think I said “no, I just bombed really hard on accident, not on purpose” but I would imagine I said “thanks, yeah I really tricked em” or something like that.
Anyway. That was the worst show of my life, and Nick and I will be at the B Street Theatre in Sacramento on September 14. Get your tickets now!
That’s some excellent plugging, so natural! What words of encouragement or caution would you like to share with people thinking about trying stand-up, or just getting started?
Turn off Netflix. Stop watching YouTube specials. Find your own path, stay true to yourself and try to write/ perform 5 new minutes a week at your local open mic for the next few years. I guarantee that when you shut out the outside influence and focus on the writing you’ll find yourself creatively in a space that is all your own, and that’s the place to be.
Or, just be a hack, write about dating apps and get onto Comedy Central (or whatever the modern equivalent is) within 3 months.
Where can we find your comedy recordings, or your calendar for seeing you live?
Go to TurnerSparks.com to find everything. I’m on tour nationwide throughout the fall. Also, I have a new podcast coming soon called Black and White Advice where me and my friend Phil Duckett, who is black, answer all your question about black people and white people from an insider’s perspective.
Anything else you want to add?
Life is supposed to be fun, enjoy it.
Thanks Turner, I look forward to working with you again when you hit Northern California in September. Tickets here: https://bstreettheatre.org/other/turner-sparks/