Meet Kevin Bennett

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kevin Bennett.

Kevin, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I started telling jokes as a child in kindergarten and preschool. One of my earliest memories is telling a “playground” joke to my godmother. I had about ten minutes of ’em stored up in my head. For some reason, which makes me laugh tends to stick in my brain.

I never thought about memorizing anything. I just remembered because all the details fit together so nicely–like a cognitive puzzle. I stored up probably an hour’s worth of “street jokes” through junior high and high school. When I was a senior, in 2004, I went to see George Carlin live in Rapid City, South Dakota–the nearest venue where he was performing.

Myself and friends Reese Jenniges and Ryan Hile made the trip in Ryan’s car from Gillette to Rapid City, about two hours. We got seats six or seven rows from the front–maybe even three or four, it’s foggy now. It was Ryan and Reese’s idea; I just tagged along. We’d been listening to comedy albums at lunch all week. I’m not into the “dirty” stuff, but some of Carlin’s bits really clicked with me. So I saw this show in early 2004. Never laughed so hard in my life. Carlin was a hilarious dirty old man, and he was at the top of his game–it was about four years before he died. He hadn’t gotten to his “poetic” stage yet; it was just a gestalt of his best material. I think he did two straight hours; he might have done an hour and a half. Either way, nobody got up to hit the restroom, everyone was rolling in the aisles. The man was a zoot-suit riot. We smoked cigars on the ride home, feeling we’d crossed some boundary of awesome.

After that, I got a degree in theater, which had been my plan for a while. I was blackballed owing to my ideology during my junior or senior year at Cornell College in Iowa (that’s the “Sam’s Club” version; Cornell University is in New York. My school was seventeen years older but infinitely less effective.) I got an associate’s degree through a theater scholarship at Casper College in Wyoming. I moved on to Cornell with a $10k/year scholarship for a $30k/year theater program. Though blackballed from any meaningful role (except background work) among faculty productions, I did manage to get the role of Gaston in Steve Martin’s “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” a student production.

Gaston is a nasty old Frenchman who is an archetype/stereotype of dirty old French dudes. In 2008, January, my Grandmother died. She was living in Florida at the time, so I went to Florida for her funeral, saw the family, and wrote a brief eulogy that, on reflection, I realize was my first stand-up comedy set. It wasn’t meant to be that way. I was an actor, and I knew how to speak in front of people, and my grandmother–German though she was–loved to laugh. I never knew a lady who knew how to laugh more. So I told some of the funniest stories I could remember from her life, and every single one hit. They hit hard. I couldn’t believe it. I expected folks would hate what I was doing. This happened during the time I was playing this French character in a Steve Martin play, which debuted in February of 2008.

Now two weeks before the show started, I was given an accordion, an old busted thing with one strap, and told to go on stage with it and pick it up at one point during the revelatory portion of the show, where Einstein and Picasso dream about the future as young men. Here’s the thing: I didn’t mean to, but I stole that show. We had three performances, and the whole school turned out. They loved my take on Gaston, and this also took me aback, because in rehearsal everybody pretty much just let me do my thing and tried not to get entangled in any deep conversations with me.

Well, I graduated Cornell in March of that year (because they have a block system of education which consolidates courses to 3.5 week periods), and made my way back to Wyoming. There I worked at Belle Ayr coal mine and trained at Eagle Butte. In 2008, these mines were owned by Foundation Coal. As of 2019, another company bought them out, ran them into the ground, and put 600 people out of work.

While working at the coal-mines, I’d drive a haul truck (they look like those Tonka dump-trucks from when we were kids with the big bed—the real ones are 1.2 million pounds fully loaded, 850,000 pounds empty). I’d listen to stand-up comedy during my shift; I listened to all the greats for hours on end. I worked as much overtime as I could that summer just to pay off my debt with Cornell. The total bill was something like $68k. I had $20k in scholarships and $20k in a loan I got from the bank, leaving me with $28k to pay off (and the loan, which I’d been taking care of incrementally).

I worked from May of 2008 to October of 2008, putting in so much overtime I averaged $5k a month. I only had to renegotiate the bank loan a month out from the original term, and I paid that mother off. However, the mines wouldn’t keep me around past October. I was a summer intern, and I was hoping to be made a full-time employee. But they went with five candidates who fit their HR rubric. One was married to a shovel operator, one was pregnant, another had some sort of trembling disease, one dude was from Michigan with a family, and some other cat barely spoke English. I was just a pasty white dude who recently graduated college–believe it or not, HR did not want me.

So I became aware I only had two weeks of work left, and I was at a crossroads. On the one hand, I could try to find work at another mine in Wyoming, put $10k in my pocket in a handful of months, then head to LA (Thank God I didn’t do that, I’d have ended up in methamphetamine Van Nuys porn. I was 21 at the time and very dumb.) On the other hand, I could go to Colorado and pursue comedy. I didn’t know what to do. I prayed over a coin and flipped it; it came up Colorado, I went to Colorado in 2008.

By November, I was moved in and had a job. I went looking for comedy, couldn’t find it, and immediately gave up until 2011. In the meantime, I wrote several novels (one of which became published, “The Thief and the Sacrifice”, though the publisher is no longer around–you can find it on my Facebook page of the same name, there’s a free galley copy that can be read, and I printed off a handful of copies hoping some other publisher might pick it up at a future date), got into a relationship, and was summarily dumped. I wanted to marry the girl, she wanted to play crotch hopscotch with any crotch she came across–we had our differences.

She dumped me the first week of November 2010, I went on a bender and got a DWAI by driving backward through a McDonald’s drive-thru. Now DWAI is Colorado’s version of DUI-light. DUI is Driving Under the Influence, DWAI is Driving While Ability Impaired. Essentially, it’s the legal designation for when you’re not over the legal limit, but you ‘r not under it, either– you’re right on the line. To be fair, I was high on spice (a cannabis derivative) at the time, so I did deserve what I got. But here’s the irony: I made it home, ran upstairs, grabbed some glue, and I was frantically trying to put the mirror back on my car (which I knocked off on a vehicle in the McDonald’s drive-thru line) when four squad cars showed up. Now if I had just shut up and said nothing, they couldn’t have done anything to me. But I told them the truth–and that’s how I learned the government doesn’t view humans as people, but as their “job.”

Anyhow, I got convicted and lost my license in January of 2011. I had to ride my bike four miles from my apartment to the bus stop at 4:20 in the morning (how ironic) so I could catch a bus that drove from Fort Collins to Boulder at 4:45. It was always late. One morning it was literally -20 degrees Fahrenheit. I heard an icy sound like bells riding to the stop; I looked behind me–my ass had frozen off and was skipping down the pavement from where it had slid off my body. Okay, that’s hyperbole, but you get the idea. It was cold. I’ll never forget that morning. If it wasn’t for the crackhead at the bus-stop telling me how he got high on meth and carpeted a whole building across the street, I’d have died of cold.

Anyway, I was at the lowest of the low, and my buddy Reese, who had gone to me with Ryan to see Carlin in 2004, told me there was an open mic right in Fort Collins. In fact, it was only a block up from the bus stop. See, he had found stand-up down in Colorado and had started pursuing it even before I had. I was dumbfounded. I’d searched hard for a month and found nothing–because comedians are broke and very bad at marketing.

Well, I went to that mic at Hodi’s Halfnote in Fort Collins the first week of February 2011. I saw how the comics conducted themselves, took note, rode my bike back to my apartment (because I was still without my license), and put together a set. The next week I came back to Hodi’s, and I had a fake Scottish patois I used to tell a handful of jokes like: “I love blackberries, or as I prefer to call them, weeee grapes.” (It’s funny (ish) in a Scottish accent.) In the middle, I revealed I wasn’t Scottish and blew everybody’s mind, so they put me on a showcase at East Coast (another bar about a block away from Hodi’s). Here I was, doing comedy twice in one night, and I couldn’t even FIND it before.

Well, I was off like a rocket. I had a theater degree, I had always wanted to try my hand at comedy, I was 23, and I was raring to go. I developed about fifteen or twenty minutes of so-so material while working at IBM in Boulder. I got my car back in Feb., with an interlock device. I’d memorize my bits driving to and from work, then perform the five minute bit twice on Mondays–until the guy running the East Coast showcase decided to be a jerk and wouldn’t let me come in every week anymore. This went on through October 2011, when this guy named Luke, who was a fake Scotsman came through town. Luke did this Andy Kaufman-type thing where he would pretend to be Scottish when in reality he was just from like Arkansas or something (I found this out later). Well, I had a Scottish thing, but I wasn’t headlining with it, he was. I realized I’d have to change up my whole act. And this is why I think God gave me French Accent.

French Accent is an acronym; it stands for “Francois Raphael Edgar Norbert Celestine Herbert Absalon Corentine Clement Emmanuel Nathaniel Telesphore,” the initials of which spell FRENCH ACCENT. Now when I wrote the character while working as a hardware customer entitlement specialist at IBM, my idea was to write a guy who was very boring–a bureaucrat who told the stupidest, least-interesting stories like he just blew up the Death Star. Not a strong character. But then God stepped in.

My parents wanted to send my brother to Colorado to study for his high school diploma because Wyoming has fewer people than Alaska. I didn’t want to chaperone my teenage brother, but I agreed, and while I was moving to the place I’d live with him, I leaned my keyboard against a wall, and the weight of the keyboard broke the AC adapter where you plugged in power. Well, I’m quite musical, this put a wrench in my works. However, the previous Christmas, Mom got me an accordion, because I wanted to busk with it–an accordion is like a portable acoustic piano. Only it’s way more complicated; I wasn’t aware of that at the time. In any event, I picked up that accordion because my keyboard was broken, and I needed to explore a new comedy character. And I had an eyepatch from when I played Snake Plisskin for Halloween a few weeks earlier. I had a beret because as an actor, I always had an odd array of hats around. I put these things together because when I played in Steve Martin’s play, I remembered how hard that accordion hit with the crowd. Also, I loved Mitch Hedberg, who at times would have a bassist play a little riff in the background while he told one-liners. DING! I had my character.

I wrote five minutes of material on crazy French shenanigans, and had one of the best sets I’d had in my first year of comedy–it took a full nine months, and then French Accent was born. I still have that set on my YouTube page.

By January of 2012, I had my first paid gig, where I did about fifteen minutes as French Accent and was paid $20. In February, that fake Scottish dude who never broke character brought me on the road with him. I would spend three straight months traveling the country doing comedy. In that time, I figured out how to feature and headline, and grew in ways I never have before or since. That was like my comedy boot camp. I did comedy in Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Colorado, Washington, Idaho, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Florida, Alabama, Wyoming, and other states.

About a month into our journey, I realized he wasn’t really Scottish because when we were driving through Kansas, he became afraid of potential ice. I asked how he learned to drive; he told me he took his car out in a field in Scotland and drove around. Well, that was utter nonsense; if he could drive in the winding roads of Scotland, he would have been well used to the bitter cold. I knew right then not only had this guy not learned to drive in Scotland, the blighter had never been there. But I was on the road with him, and I was barely a year into comedy, and I was learning a ton, so I stayed on the road with him.

He ran a scam that worked like this: he told the guy he was traveling with that he was offering a “feature” slot of thirty minutes. Then, when you got to the gig, he would say: “Och! Mate, the booker double-booked it. Sorry, mate. But I can get you a guest set of five minutes.” Meanwhile, he’d have you split the bill for gas and food. Here’s the thing: I was so wet behind the ears, if he had just told me this straight out, I’d have gladly come along and learned. He didn’t have to lie–the braggart got off on it.

I spent three months learning how to live in a crazy situation on the road with this matchstick man, then got left high and dry in Arkansas so he could get his willy wet and had to catch a Greyhound back to Wyoming.

But it was ON from there. I knew I had years on my comedy peers, and I went to work. I spent the next four years working for bookers like Tribble, Entertainment Max, Charter, and Summit. I hit up the World Series of Comedy in 2013 and realized it was a festival of shenanigans and not much more. I traveled all over the country doing low-paying gigs and getting in wrecks. At one point on a weekend of Tribble gigs, I spun off the road twice, hit a deer, and got a speeding ticket. But I hit all three of his gigs and the fourth one I’d booked myself. And I put a Jesus sticker over the rust in the dent from the deer in my car; a metaphysical joke of sorts.

In 2015 I realized I’d topped-out Colorado. Sure, I could stick around playing politics with the other back-stabbing comedy rats (some weren’t rats, but many comedians are outright weasels) for a few more years, and peak out below the entry-level for big comedy players in places like LA and NY. But I thought what might be better is if I took my car and lived in it throughout LA for a few months. I started planning this in 2015, then ran afoul of the local comedy scene by being opinionated, and my buddy Chris suggested I get a Chinook. A Chinook of yesteryear is basically a small RV cab on the back of a truck. This got me to thinking, and I came to another crossroads.

I was watching Breaking Bad, and I noted they got that RV for $10k with $5k upfront. I thought: I’ll bet if they can get a nineties RV for $10k, I can get an older one half that size for $5k. Then I figured: well, that’s just going to fall apart anyway, what if I go cheaper and fix it up for a year’s use? I said: “God, you want me to do this crazy thing. I want to find an RV with less than 85,000 miles on it, and for $2,500.” I prayed over it, flipped, it came up heads, I went looking. I found a 1978 Dodge Honeybee for $2,500 with 84,600 miles on it, talked the guy down to $2,200, put about $3k into fixing it up, and hit the road for the west coast in 2016, June.

There are 200 pages of adventures I wrote on that, which I have yet to publish, though I’d be interested in the future–I could even serialize it. Two instants stand out that are relevant to this section.

One, I got in a wreck, and God sent me down another road. Two, I nearly gave up. The first instance was in Eugene, Oregon. I was going to go down the I-5 all the way to San Francisco, but I had thought about the 101. I prayed over a coin, and it came up the I-5. Well then I got in a fender-bender in my RV in Eugene and had to work double-time writing content articles of the SEO variety to cover the cost (I’ve been doing that since 2015 to pay the bills when comedy won’t, which it seldom does. Before that I was a substitute teacher from 2012 to 2015).

While writing articles, this old lady started talking to me in Starbucks. I wanted to ignore her, but I felt a twinge in my spirit telling me not to, because it wasn’t loving to ignore people just because they weren’t attractive to the eye or mind, or in a different station of life. It developed that she was blind and had just had an operation, but used to be a trucker. This is why she just started talking at the room and waited for someone to respond: the poor old hen couldn’t see. So I chatted with her while I was typing, and on a whim asked her whether to take the I-5 or the 101. See, she’d been a trucker, and when I asked her about this, she was able to relive her life as a trucker traveling the casinos of the coast, and I could see she liked reliving this memory—by just talking with her, and asking questions, I was incidentally able to ease the pain of post-op blindness.

She said to take the 101, which was perplexing to me because I’d prayed over the five already. However, if I had not prayed over the 5, I would not have asked her whether to take the 101–I was testing God, in effect, but without intending to. Well, she said the 101, so after I was done that day I prayed again, and it came up the 101. I said: “Shoot…well, I’ll take the 101.”

Here’s what happened: my brakes went out in Eureka, California–after I’d spent a week cruising around there. I got them fixed at Antioch Automotive (no coincidence there, right? lol), though they were listed as “Antich” online for some reason. A faithful man ran the joint. Here’s the deal: if I had gone down the I-5, there are no real opportunities to even hit the brakes. You’re in an old RV, you just cruise at about fifty, and people pass you. No need to hit the brakes. On the 101, you gotta go up and down and all around–you need to tap them brakes! If I had gone down the I-5, I’d have had my brakes go out in San Francisco, and some of those hills are cliffs leading to busy intersections. I might just have died. Because I followed the twinge on my spirit, my adventure was “renewed” for another season, if you will.

I spent a month in San Fran after that, then headed to LA When I was in LA, my thermostat on my radiator didn’t work, I had a solenoid go out–there were a laundry list of problems so bad that the day I got there, I had a major mental breakdown and was just willing to throw up my hands and head back to Wyo/Colorado with my tail between my legs. God said, “No” when I flipped the coin again. So I stayed. I got the thermostat fixed. I got the solenoid fixed. I put in a new battery and fixed some other things–all in all I stuck around LA about a month and a half in 2016. Two weeks into being there, I was on Kill Tony, and I rocked it–check out the early November 2016 Kill Tony sets, I’m the last guy on I think the show that was right before the 2016 election or the one right after.

I came back to Wyoming, had Christmas, came back to LA through the end of February, drove up to Seattle for a gig after I did the Cannabis Cup in Vegas with Jeffrey Peterson (the 420 comic) and Dave Burger, and made it back to Wyo in March, where the RV nearly broke down. I got it cleaned up and sold it for $1,250. At that point, I just worked writing articles, and by June of that year I found a 1999 Winnebago Rialta I picked up for $12k after taxes, and I’ve been in that vehicle a little over two years now.

In the meantime were two more holiday trips. At the end of 2017, New Year’s, I dated a gal in Wyo for about a month which turned out to be pretty darn basic, though I was just lonely and rough enough in life I didn’t notice it. Thankfully she broke up with me when I left for LA again in January of 2018. I say thankfully because I auditioned for America’s Got Talent that year, and before I left, this little strumpet was trying to low-key talk me out of being a comedian, and I was low-key listening because this road is long and depressing at times.

But I got on AGT, and I kind of did this by accident. Stephen Holleman essentially presides over Comedy Chow, which is a group of dedicated comics running shows on the Hollywood Strip and elsewhere. He likes my stuff and gave me a chance. He posted in the LA Facebook groups that a casting director from NBC was coming to watch network clean comics give their best two minutes. I was the first one out of the bucket and wasn’t prepared! Thankfully, Mikey Mckernan was there, and he took the slot for me while I threw on my accordion and eyepatch. The casting gal (I won’t say her name here because I don’t want to cause her any undue trouble) loved my stuff, had me jump through the hoops, and in March of 2018 I did the live AGT audition in front of Simon Cowell, Mel B, Howie Mandel, and Heidi Klum. It aired in June of 2018. Thank God I didn’t follow that basic Wyoming girl’s ideas–the gal who thought I should totally throw away my act; what a joke.

It is now July of 2019, and as of this year, I’ve had at least eighty booked gigs, probably closer to 100, because there are a number of showcases I’ve stumbled into over the last six months. I know I’ve done at least a hundred shows, I still hit up the odd open mic every week or so. Sorry, this took so long, but you can see there are some interesting little vignettes in there! I’m not where I need to be yet, I’ve still got some climbing to do, but I’m getting there, and I keep chipping away at the comedic ore finding flecks of gold. Hopefully, I’ll be able to move out of the RV into a house or apartment in the near future, here.

I don’t know that I’d call my story a breakout success tale yet, but I’ve come from the coal mines of Wyoming to the streets of LA, and I’ve been here the better part of three years, excluding my trips to Wyo for family during Christmas. I meet people, I do shows, and I keep at it. It’s a lot of work, but I gave myself ten years for comedy in 2011. It’s 2019, I got at least a year and a half more until I hit that period of time. Will I keep going then? Maybe–a lot can happen in a year’s time. All I want is a circuit to get involved with, an agent, or agency. So finally: if you’re an agent reading this, please! Hook a joker up!

Has it been a smooth road?
It has not been a smooth road. I’ve been in jail, I’ve been blackballed, I’ve been broke down on the side of the road, I’ve been in car wrecks, hit deer, spun off the road, gotten traffic tickets, I’ve been in fights (didn’t cover any of those in the previous section), I’ve been depressed, I’ve made mistakes, I’ve been stabbed in the back, and I keep coming back for more.

So, as you know, we’re impressed with your work – tell our readers more, for example, what you’re most proud of and what sets you apart from others.
I do a little bit of everything. I’m an entertainment buffet. I got a BA in theater, and I have two novels out; “Amphibian” (https://www.amazon.com/Amphibian-Kevin-Bennett/dp/1632132141) and “The Thief and the Sacrifice” (https://www.facebook.com/thethiefandthesacrifice/). “Thief” is no longer available in print, but you can read a free galley copy on my Facebook page. “Amphibian” is still available on Amazon.com, it’s like $10 and 100 pages. I have two music albums that have been released online, and half a dozen at a site I don’t use anymore. The albums are “Between Dystopias” and “Weather, Local.” However, now I’m using Drooble.com, which has allowed me to post 89 individual “singles,” including many songs from either of those albums. (I’m here on Drooble: https://drooble.com/kevin.bennett1)

I run my own YouTube Channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/pianoman69/), and I used to regularly provide input on OutrageTV, though now I just check in from time to time (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKJ9P2Ag1QW3dGc05dl-oeg).

In terms of comedy, I do adult or clean, depending on the audience and booker needs. I can headline a full hour with either; I’m most comfortable not being booked for more than 40 minutes on the “clean” side.

My comedy consists of music, one-liners, stories, audience participation, impressions, dialects, and other shenanigans. Basically, I’m an entertainment buffet that is impossible to ignore. I’m trying to take Steve Martin’s advice. For any burgeoning comics, I highly recommend his book “Born Standing Up,” which I read in one sitting while on the road with the faux Scotsman I mentioned elsewhere in this interview. It’s 200 pages and an easy read.

Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and the least?
I like the opportunity and climate about LA best. I can’t stand the prices or method of thinking, which characterizes the majority of the populace.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.facebook.com/kevin.bennett.969
• Phone: 970 581 3907
• Email: clarkstaplesbennett@gmail.com

Image Credit:
Nick DeSuza and Billy Batz