Today we’d like to introduce you to Patrick Rowland.
Hi Patrick, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I started out taking sketch and improv classes in Chicago at The Second City and iO Theaters after seeing improv for the first time at the Chicago Improv Festival in 2006. I was working at the post office and was miserable so I thought the classes would be a fun distraction.
Cut to 2009 when I got placed on a Harold team at iO which caused me to quit my job at the P.O. where I had been working for 10 years, to pursue comedy full time. I felt life is too short to be miserable and I should follow my passion, which was to make people laugh and be creative. I performed, took classes, and watched shows every day to hone my skills. It paid off when I got to audition for SNL in 2013, they flew me to New York and everything, it was surreal. Around the same time, I helped form 3Peat an improv/sketch group filled with some of the most talented Black performers in Chicago, I also started doing a late-night talk show as Barack Obama called “Barack All Night”. 3Peat became the hottest team in Chicago selling out shows in Chicago and around the U.S., our sketch “The Blackening” written by Dewayne Perkins went viral and has been turned into a movie coming out this June. I continued to pursue a career in comedy but centered a little more on writing for late-night talk shows.
I submitted packet after packet, all while also still performing and teaching improv/sketching to pay the bills. Made the move to LA in 2018 and then a couple of years later the pandemic happened and shut everything down. I was able to get a job at Target but my creative outlet was gone since theaters were closed down. I started filming things on my iPhone and taught myself how to edit them so I could put my sketches on YouTube under the name “The Patrick Rowland Sketch Show”. In March 2021 Amber Ruffin asked me to submit a packet for her show “The Amber Ruffin Show” which I immediately did because who wouldn’t want to write for Amber? In a matter of a week, I went from working in the grocery section of Target to being a writer on one of the best late-night talk shows around.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
It has and it hasn’t. It has been in the sense that I surrounded myself with amazingly talented people who are just nice, kind, and supportive. Their successes were my motivation and celebration of how awesome they are. It hasn’t been smooth in the sense that I was BROKE all the time! Relationships with family and childhood friends got strained because I got so hyper-focused on being successful. There was barely time between work, classes, and shows to visit people who weren’t part of that world. I started doubting myself after so many years of trying to get cast or staffed on a tv show, but through all of that, I kept going because I truly loved what I was doing. I was making good money at the post office but I was miserable, I was making no money doing improv and sketch comedy, but I was the happiest I’d ever been. When I was 17 I was shot in the back and almost died, I never really got therapy for it and I lived in fear and my own little bubble for a good 14 years after that. When I started taking improv classes it was the first time I really felt alive since that day and from then on I felt that life was too short to be miserable. You never know when some jackass with a gun may come and try to take everything away from you, so now I try to live my best life.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am a writer, performer, teacher, and coach. I think I specialize in making people laugh and giving them a little joy in this messed-up world of ours. I am most known now for writing on “The Amber Ruffin Show”. It is truly one of the best writer’s rooms in the industry, Amber and Jenny set such a great and positive atmosphere where we can really create and flourish. I am most proud of the contributions I have been able to make to the show, rather it is a killer monologue joke, desk piece, sketch, or a Herschel Walker impression, that I’m thankful I won’t have to do again because Georgia said: “Not today Satan!”. I am also proud of the Writing for Late Night classes that I am currently teaching. What sets me apart from others is the fact that I’m me. There is no one like me and there will never be. So many people set out to be “the next so and so” when we already have them, be the first you, you’re awesome and the world will want to know you!
Can you talk to us a bit about happiness and what makes you happy?
First I’ll say, my wife! She has been my best friend, supporter, and favorite person, she truly has made me a better person. Second, being able to create through my writing, acting, and improvising. I would hold back a lot growing up in fear that I would be ridiculed for being different or weird, which I was, but when I started viewing it as a good thing as opposed to it being bad, it really opened me up to be able to be myself and put things out in the world that gives a little bit of happiness and make people think. To have the outlet and ability to see someone enjoy something I created is so fulfilling to me.
Pricing:
- Writing for Late Night TV 4 Week Zoom Class $250
Contact Info:
- Website: www.patrickrowland.net
- Instagram: @prowland76
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/psmoov123/
- Twitter: @patrickrowland3
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/psmoov
- Other: https://linktr.ee/PatrickRowland
