Today we’d like to introduce you to Jimmy Brogan.
Jimmy, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
It took me a while to get up the courage to try stand-up comedy.
After I got kicked out of graduate school at Notre Dame for organizing a kissing marathon on the main quad, I did volunteer work for a politician for two and a half years. With my help, he lost four elections in a row. After the 4th soul-crushing defeat, he said to me, “You’re going to have to find something else.”
So one night I convinced my friend Larry Lee to go on stage with me as a comedy team. We called ourselves The Brogan Brothers. Seeing as Larry is Chinese-America, we thought this would be hilarious. Our opening joke was me saying, “We’re The Brogan Brothers…and I’m the adopted one.” Absolutely no reaction from the audience. Not a single laugh. Larry froze. He couldn’t speak, and I ended up stumbling through our two-man jokes by myself. So the act appeared to be a mute and a guy with dual personalities muttering to himself. That was the last performance of The Brogan Brothers.
At that time, Dick Cavett came out with a book. For some of our younger readers, Dick Cavett was a talk show host that was really the only major rival to Johnny Carson in Carson’s 30-year run. In Cavett’s book, he talked about how he started out as a stand-up comic, what he learned and even getting advice from Groucho Marx. I desperately wanted to buy the book to get this valuable information, but I couldn’t afford it. It was $8.95.
At this point, my Dad asked me to drive his car to Florida for the winter, and I had a certain budget for the trip. So rather than stay in a motel one night, I slept in the car in North Carolina. When I got down to Florida, I bought the book and devoured it. Armed with that knowledge, I wrote my first stand-up material and then went back to New York and started doing comedy.
Now the amazing thing about this story is that nine years later I did my first appearance on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and the guest right ahead of me was Dick Cavett. And after the show, I was able to thank Dick Cavett for his book and his wisdom that gave me a career.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I think any career and especially one in the show business is a bumpy road. I was talking to a friend of mine recently who had dropped out of show business years ago. He asked me why I thought he didn’t make it. I said, “You got out too soon.” After a few disappointments he quit. A lot of success is just persistence.
For example, I was fired from my first TV job. I was hired to be a host on a kids show in Philadelphia. I couldn’t figure out how to interact with all the puppets, so I decided that I would react to them in a hesitant manner like Bob Newhart. After one read through, they fired me. They told my manager, “We didn’t know he had a stammer.”
As disappointing as that was, if I had done that show I would have been in Philadelphia that month and I would not have been seen in New York by the producers who hired me to star in a sitcom in Hollywood.
So my advice is to stick with it and keep doing the work. You never know when that door is going to open.
Please tell us about Comedian Jimmy Brogan.
I’m a comedian.
Although I have appeared on Carson, Leno, and Letterman and even wrote for Jay Leno for nine years, I’m probably best known in the comedy clubs as a comedian with no act. I just ask people where they are from and what they do for a living, and somehow the funny happens. Don’t just take my word for it, here is what Los Angeles City Beat says, “The funniest audience-interactive comic in the business.”
Although this is great fun for me, sometimes it can be tricky. When I was first starting out in NYC, I auditioned for the owner of the Comic Strip comedy club on a Tuesday afternoon. He was the only one in the room.
He said,” OK, do your act.”
I said to him, “Where are you from?”
He said, “No, do your act.”
I said, “That is my act.”
He said, “Thank you.”
That was my entire audition.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
My favorite memory is my mother telling me stories from when she was a child.
She once told me this story from when she was little. At Sunday morning breakfast when her father would finish his half a cantaloupe, he would take it, turn it over and put it on her head and yell, “We’ve got a new Pope!”
Contact Info:
- Website: www.JimBroganonline.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jimmybroganhaha/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jimmy.brogan
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/JimmyBroganHaHa
Image Credit:
Dave Banks
Michael Schwartz
Rosa Martinez
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