Meet Tom Clark

 

We were lucky to catch up with Tom Clark recently and have shared our conversation below.

Tom, thank you so much for joining us. You are such a positive person and it’s something we really admire and so we wanted to start by asking you where you think your optimism comes from?

This I think after 30 years in comedy, it’s realizing that there’s always going to be peaks and valleys over the course of your career. Currently I don’t have an agent to send me out for auditions. It’s a tough time right now, especially for actors and writers. Since the actor and writers strike there really isn’t a lot happening unless you’re a bigger name, so you just have to wait it out. I’m lucky that my main gig is stand up and I can stay busy and make money doing that. That’s another part of staying optimistic is to focus on what is happening for you, not on what isn’t happening for you.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

Right now I’m focused on my stand up and developing a stand up special to shoot myself. I did that previously and I was really happy with how it turned out. It’s currently available on Amazon and I just put it out on YouTube. The first 10 minutes were just a lot of weird things I always wanted to see in a stand up special…so not necessarily jokes, but just making fun of what can go wrong in a stand up special. You can check it out at YouTube.com/tomclarkcomedy

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I think the three qualities that helped me were:
1. I was naive. That doesn’t sound like a good quality, but it really helped me because I had no expectations with stand up comedy. I did it because it was something I always wanted to try and I really enjoyed the process of figuring things out. I had no desire to get my first 30 minutes or anything like that I really just wanted to make people laugh and was willing to try a lot of different things to get there.
2. I diversified my portfolio. Just like when you invest your money, you have to diversify your skills. About a year into stand up I started doing improv at ComedySportz. It really changed my life and my approach to stand up. It taught me to trust myself on stage and to believe whatever I said in the moment was the exact right thing to say. Believe me there were times that didn’t work out, but it helped me learn along the way. Dick Chudnow was the founder of ComedySportz and he really believed in me and I was able to move to the main stage pretty quick. Later on I joined the Dead Alewives and learned so much from people like Mondy Carter, Bo Johnson, Dylan Bolin and Eric Price. When I moved to LA I took acting classes at a variety of places and most recently I’ve been taking some screenwriting classes…it all helps.
3. I failed. I took a lot of big swings early in my career and I had a lot of big misses too. But doing weird and unusual things on stage–I had a song about a Potato and I told a street joke where I’d screw up the whole joke–It helped me stand out. When I submitted a tape for a contest with Comedy Central, the person who watches the tapes, told me she called all the executives in to watch me sing the Potato Song–they loved it. I ended up finishing second overall in the competition and eventually appeared on Comedy Central’s Premium Blend. It goes back to being naive and taking chances.

What was the most impactful thing your parents did for you?

They let me figure out things for myself. I was a very quiet kid and I was really unsure what I wanted to do with my life. I spent six months in Ciudad Juarez working with gangs and it really gave me a lot of confidence. Once I got back I took a stand up class. I had literally no money when I got back from Mexico. I worked as a social worker for six years and did stand up on the side. I remember I was doing my “weird act” and about three years in, I bombed opening for Pauly Shore. I was so bummed and ready to quit, but my mom wrote up this quote from Robert Frost:
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
She really didn’t want me to do stand up but she knew I also loved it and that was her way of saying, “Look you’re doing something different, if you don’t give stand up a fair shot, you’re always going to wonder “What if…”

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Tom Clark

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