Stand-up Bert Kreischer chronicles the journey behind his megapopular joke.
So I want to start with a question I sometimes ask people: Have you seen the movieIt’s with Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman and they’re magicians.I have not seen that movie in a long time, but I feel like it’s a really good metaphor for an artist who is not just committed to their work but literally lives their life to feed into the work they create. I bring it up because when the Machine story was literally happening, you were not a comedian. Being a comedian was just a glimmer in your eye.
When I started telling it onstage, there was so much silence. I mean, you have no idea. It’s a 13-minute story, and that’s 13 minutes of mehow to tell it, 11 if I cut chunks out. But if you don’t know how, that can be like a 15, 17-minute story.and then that dictated the way I wrote all stand-up. It was a real game-changer.That’ll never happen again. That was painful.
That’s indicative of who I am in storytelling, and I think I borrow that a little bit from joke writing. Let’s take Bill Burr for example: He’ll give you the premise of “I don’t like white women.” That’s a bit of an overstep, but you know what I’m saying: “I don’t like X,” and now you’ve got their attention.
We’re now at what I would call “the meeting of the mentor.” You’re going to meet Igor; you’re building to that. It was Russia in the ’90s, your teacher paid off the mafia, you planned to befriend the mafia. And in your book, this process is a bit longer: You talk about the plane ride, your relationship to your teacher, and you also set up a bit more about Russia at this time.
With the next section, you essentially “yada yada” most of the summer: “And then we became friends, and we did a pool-hall scam and we stole a boat.” That’s interesting. I understand why you cut it out — because it’s a story about you in Russia, not “Let me tell you a story about what Russia is like.”
From reading it in the book and hearing you talk about it, the thing you cut out the most is how afraid you were for your safety, especially when you were robbing the train. Was that a thing where you were like,Listen, there are things I keep back that would turn this into a very sad story! [] Like, let’s just say their language, the mobster’s language, wasn’t technically “progressive” back then. The things they were saying were pretty aggressive.
I had no takeaway. I think at one point you get so caught up in the momentum of a story like that where you don’t think about it, you know? I just wanted it to be good, I wanted to prove to myself I could tell a story. I don’t think I had any insight into what the message was. It changed everything in my life, that one story. I’ll say this across the board: If you want to be a successful comedian, you need one thing to shift the needle … I think that the Machine story, for me, was my ‘shift the needle.’
When I listen back to the first “Machine” appearance on Rogan, there’s this really funny moment, especially in retrospect, where he says, “You gotta be careful telling this story. People are going to start wanting to party with you.” And you brush it off and say, “I don’t think so. I don’t really do that anymore.” The irony is that’s exactly what happens. People want the Machine.
I look at everything — I say “in my business,” but I mean as a comic — simply as a consumer. I don’t look at it as a comic or “You know what would be good for my brand?” I look at everything as a fan.
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