Meet Johnny Beehner

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Johnny Beehner. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Johnny below.

Johnny, so excited to have you with us today. So much we can chat about, but one of the questions we are most interested in is how you have managed to keep your creativity alive.
The key to keeping my creativity alive is through avoiding complacency. That is not easy when you are married and have kids. I have not always been married with kids, obviously, so it used to be a lot easier. As a stand-up comedian, my main creative outlet is sharing what I see in the world, or MY world rather, onstage in an interesting, unique, and entertaining way. When I started stand-up, it was pretty easy to be creative as every experience I had had never been put through the funnel of my writing process. I also wasn’t tainted with worrying (or knowing) about what other comedians might think of my act. After the novelty of doing comedy and being a working comic wore off, it became harder to come up with premises and force myself to write as regularly as I had when it was so exciting.
Through both chance and diligent observation, I learned that my most prolific bouts of creativity coincided with big life changes. In this line of work, you learn quickly not to let big things happen without dissecting them for comedy gold as they happen or you risk losing the shiniest nuggets.
Some examples of my original point about avoiding complacency include:
-Moving to Nashville right after getting married even though we had no ties or real reason to other than “why not?”
-Starting a family! Now, I’m not saying I had children to source material; I am just saying that when it came to the topic of having kids (each time), it helped me to see the challenges that would follow as opportunities instead of just cons on a pros/cons list.
-Starting a new job/learning a new skill. I became a substitute teacher, started driving for ride-share companies, did some freelance comedy writing for others, became a copywriter, and had many other jobs, too.
In general, I have found that I feed my creativity by doing things that I would find it pretty easy to say, “Meh, I’d rather not do that” when the idea first arises. Not only does it give me a lot of fodder to work from, but I think pushing yourself and making yourself uncomfortable keeps the mind sharp and trains it to see and think about things differently. It works for me, anyway.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I am a stand-up comedian. I started performing stand-up in 1999 in New York City. I had to borrow my older brother’s id to get into some of the rooms to perform. I have been traveling around making a living from stand-up since 2008. For me, stand-up comedy is so much for than just a job, and I believe that is true of most stand-ups. It’s like a calling, a passion, a drug, and therapy all wrapped into one. My wife claims she can always tell how my last show went based on my overall disposition. I got into performing for attention. I am the middle child of seven, and vividly remember telling my mom that I don’t get enough attention quite regularly. I started performing theater in school productions and started getting praise for doing something I actually liked doing. It was pretty great.
As a father, a husband, and just a guy that’s been through some tough times, I see what I do as more than just having fun saying funny things. I see it as a way to make people happy. We all have stress, we all have anxiety about something. I like to think that when people are listening to my string of jokes, they are able to put that other stuff aside for a while and catch a breath of joy. Some need it more than others, and I just feel blessed that I love providing that service. I’ll be honest, I’d be doing it whether they needed it or not, but I like thinking it helps.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
I am not sure how helpful this is to others, but I think the three qualities most impactful to my success have been naiveté, ambition, and an ability to read people. I say “naiveté” because, like most comedians, I pretty much got into this career not knowing what it entails. I just knew I wanted to make people laugh. The “ambition” comes from wanting to make people laugh so much that I would do whatever it took to make that my career instead of the jobs I had had prior to making stand-up my career. I just had no idea how much rejection and how many obstacles there were just to get the opportunity to try to make people laugh. If I had to do it all over again starting from scratch, of course I would, but the not knowing how it works the first time made it so much more fun. As far as being able to read people, I don’t think I always had that. I think I have developed a much stronger ability throughout my career and my life. It is a skill that helps both onstage and offstage. Onstage, being able to read your audience can help you navigate your show, but it also can help increase your likability onstage, which sometimes can go further than material. Offstage, it helps because being a comedian is basically being a salesperson. It’s a lot easier to sell yourself when you can get a good read on who you are selling to. If there’s someone reading this that is just starting out their journey in stand-up comedy, my advice is to just enjoy the ride. People will give you advice your whole career. Hear it, but only follow what you think works for you. By the way, the irony of me giving advice of not following people’s advice is not lost on me. Just get onstage a lot and the skills you need will come.

We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?
I feel it is ALWAYS a safe bet to work on improving yourself. It is, of course, easier to ride on your strengths, but growth and improvement comes from looking at your weaknesses. I believe this to be true with career, with life, with relationships, just everything. I look at it like, “You’re only as strong as your weakest link.” If you’re a basketball player and your strength is lay-ups where you just cannot miss a layup, you should make sure your bball-handling skills are right up there otherwise you’ll get the ball stolen and won’t be able to use those lay-up skills as much. Maybe that’s a lame example. In my career of stand-up comedy, I never want to get comfortable. When I have relied on my strengths to coast through a show, that’s generally when I have a disappointing show. I don’t want to be one of those comedians that blames a sub-par show on outside circumstances. I want to be undeniable. As a headliner, you never know who you will have to follow. If your opener kills for 30 minutes doing crowd-work, you need to have some strong crowd-work skills. I once ate it so hard getting boo-ed in an urban room following a guest comic that turned the room into def comedy jam. I watched her set thinking, “I’ll be fine. I’ve always done well in this room. I’ll charm them with my general likability and do great.” Nope. I got off the stage that night thinking, “I don’t ever want that to happen again.” What were my options to make that come true? Well, I could avoid urban rooms, or I could review the tape of that show and learn where I lost the audience, and figure out new techniques to get a crowd on my side.
They always say you learn more from bombing than you do from killing, and it’s true. When I watch a tape of my show, I am looking for weak spots, slow stretches, gaps. The parts where I’m destroying, that’s fun and all, but there’s no value in basking in that part of the tape after the show’s over.
My philosophy is to always try to improve my areas of weakness. It makes me a more flexible and well-rounded comedian, and it also, incedentally, strengthens my strengths.

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Jesse Chieffo, Jason Hillman

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