CuratedLA gets 'whatever' with

👋 MAX WITTERT _{is a comedian and illustrator from Los Angeles.}

^{Max combines his drawings with his performance, in a one-man illustrated comedy hour. Max and friends will performing in Los Angeles at The Elysian on Sunday, March 19th in his new performance, I Can Steal Your Mother.}

I grew up on the westside, and I was there until I was about twenty-two. I did a back-and-forth between Los Angeles and the Bay area for a few years, before I moved to New York two years ago. So, I have been in Los Angeles, collectively, for about twenty-five years.

There have been two occasions in my life where a moth has flown into my mouth when I was stoned.

I was born to two artists.

In my youth, my father was a comedian, an actor, and a writer. When I was eight, he went back to school and became a speech pathologist. He was in some films, and did TV. He also wrote some episodes of Beetlejuice, which was very exciting for me when I was young.

My mother was a stylist, an artist and a designer. So it was a very Los Angeles, eighties kind of dream. And I grew up in this really cute, award-winning, colorful, 1980s apartment building in Santa Monica.

When I was four years old my mother died. Which of course was a foundational shift in my life, and greatly affected how I moved through the world.

My father remarried when I was about ten years old, and that marriage came with a stepsister and, then a few years later, my little half brother was born. There were a lot of complicated dynamics, but I think my role in my family was that of a sullen, nerdy gay youth who keeps to himself.

I remember watching an episode of Dexter's Laboratory. I was maybe in middle school and there was this one line in it where Dexter’s mother said something to the effect of, ‘I have no idea what that boy does in his room all day.’ And of course, we as an audience are excited by the notion that he has a secret laboratory and is doing all these incredible, fantastical things. And I sort of attempted to mimic that in so much as I locked myself in my room and sort of tried to create this domain for myself. I am by no means anything close to a scientist, unless you consider experimental comedy. But I really kind of doubled down in my own little world for a long time.

I went to Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, and then I went to Santa Monica High School, where I graduated in 2005. Had you known me in middle school or high school, that would not be a benefit to you, socially speaking. I was an extremely nerdy outcast. Even though I always had a lot of friends, they were never the type of people to be picked first for quite literally anything.

If we were friends in high school, we would probably be watching a lot of shitty horror movies, dead sober and getting into absolutely no trouble at all. And maybe if you and I were really, really close in high school, we would go to Barnes and Noble and steal comic books together.

In high school I watched uncountable hours of stand up comedy. Because my father was a standup comedian, I sort of assumed that comedy could always be a backup plan for me. When I was a kid, I remember thinking, well, if all else fails, I'll just do standup comedy, which is funny on multiple levels, not least of all because it's an incredibly unstable backup plan, but also because my backup plan is so many people's dream. I now have no backup plan.

I tend to think of comedy as a type of processing tool. Comedy is sort of this tool through which we perceive things and therefore comedy can become a sort of coping mechanism. I find that people that are good at comedy tend to be people that have used humor to deal with a lot of stuff. So. A lot of my early influences, besides my father, were Mel Brooks, Jim Carrey, MadTV, Monty Python, and every single cartoon in the 90s.

After high school, I got scouted on MySpace for my ‘quote unquote natural beauty,’ for a cell phone gaming company that no longer exists, but I modeled for their website. And while I was getting my makeup done, they asked me what I was into, where I told them that I was into drawing and painting. They hired me as an art intern, which didn't really mean anything except that I was just testing for flip-phone games, which was not nearly as fun as it sounds. It was actually quite hellish.

Due to budget cuts, I was let go, which was a devastation to me at eighteen. But eventually I got a job working at American Apparel and simultaneously going to community college, which was a very formative period of my life. I guess that’s my background–I could go on, but frankly I shouldn’t have said half of that, as it is.

I love cooking and baking, and I also have been in this home improvement modality as of late, but I keep fucking things up. So it's sort of a lateral movement of home improvement. Besides that, I mostly just have a lot of sex.

I just finished Marvel Universe Origin Stories by Bruce Wagner, and that was really incredible. I am now reading Transit by Rachel Cusk, which is a little bit lighter. It's a slightly more airy writing, but no less profound.

In terms of watching, I've been watching sexy nineties thrillers and my default visual comfort food is Absolutely Fabulous. I watch a lot of true crime as well.

“Whatever”

I'm one of many comedians who is riddled with anxiety and attempting to shake things off. I'm also a bit of a nihilist. The phrase whatever is actually pretty meaningful to me.

But I would also say that my biggest motivator is fear. Self-loathing can come in handy to motivate. But it can also do the opposite.

I think the fear of failure is what drives a lot of people. You know, this line of work or this artistic practice has a gamble inherent in it. You go on stage and there is actually no guarantee as to how well you will perform. You can do your best performance and still have an audience not respond at all, or you can do quite badly on stage, but still have people laugh.

I think that for people that are struggling to move past their fear, you just have to remind yourself that on the other side of each performance, by and large, you're guaranteed to still be alive. So it’s just an experience.

So in other words, whatever.

Before the pandemic I was performing a different solo hour called Max Wittert: Portrait of the Artist Seated with Grapes. It was also fully illustrated, but it was a little bit more disparate and kind of bit-based, so it didn't necessarily have a totally cohesive vision. And it was certainly not particularly personal.

Like most people in the pandemic, I was in this psychedelic chamber of my own mind and doing a lot of self-reflection. And I came out of it wanting to make a show that was more autobiographical and personal, largely because those are themes that I avoided for a long time. Drawing from personal life struck me as kind of hack–an easy go-to, and maybe a shortcut to, I don’t know, sympathy or something. An easy way out. I wanted to connect to people through my ideas and humor and vibe, and not these pesky details of my life. But I got into the habit of doing things that I had been avoiding, and so this new show I’m doing (I Can Steal Your Mother), came about.

On first performance…

I remember one of my first open mics quite well. I met two of my best comedy friends Sam Taggart and Julio Torres. Both of them introduced me to this outsider-y open mic called Do Something that was hosted by River Ramirez. A group of Brooklyn alt-comedy people gathered there and did such weird stuff, in this windowless back room of a bar that no longer exists in Bushwick.

I would try to do things that would impress those people, which meant pushing myself to do something a little stranger than straight-up stand-up. And that's when I developed this style that I utilize now, performing alongside my drawings. That was kind of my comedy genesis as it stands today.

There is an earnestness that can be quite cringeworthy on stage. And it's a sort of scary line to ride, especially, if you have a lot of respect for the people in your personal life. I wrestled for a long time about how to format this show and how to approach it. There is some heavy subject matter whose sacredness I wanted to retain for myself, but also keep it engaging and not too cloyingly sappy. It’s a balance to strive for, and I don’t know if I achieved it, but I think I’ve at least come close.

On his upcoming show, ‘I Can Steal Your Mother’

I Can Steal Your Mother is a line pulled from the show, with this notion that I'm able to captivate other people's mothers when I reveal to them that my own mother died when I was quite young.

I'm kind of terrified of being too earnest on stage, and I am hoping to undercut that as much as I can. Greta and Sydnee are two of my favorite stand up comedians that I met in New York, and they've since moved to Los Angeles, much to my chagrin, but also much to my benefit, since they’re now able to open for this show. Interestingly, and I didn't even realize this when I booked them, but they are also individuals who have lost parents. So there’s a bit of an emotional through-line there, too.

Much of stand up comedy is reliant on not just what someone is saying, but their facial expressions, the way that they're saying it, and their body language.

For the most part, I am removing that, and replacing it with drawn imagery.

Some of the discomfort in watching live comedy is the fact that it is another human on stage and people feel implicated in that relationship to some degree. But if you sort of remove this, and replace it with images, it allows people to get a little bit lost. And I think that they're able to experience it a little bit more like a storytime for kids or like a movie or something, in this dark theater staring at a screen.

I am particularly excited about this LA show because I think I might get my dad to perform with me for a portion of it. Which I think will be funny and exciting for people in the audience, because my father is extremely charming and obviously a very good, natural performer.

I love being in L.A., I love it in Los Angeles. It feels very natural for me. I do miss it a lot.

I'm going to get rocks thrown at me for saying this, but I do like Gjusta a lot… oh, God.

Gjusta is this expensive cafe in Venice that has beautiful food and has an extremely intolerable clientele, of which I declare myself amongst their ranks.

But it’s also not uncommon for me to just hang out, somewhere by the beach in the morning.

My friend Regan's house.

It’s a heavy duty question for me because I have a lot of thoughts. Something that is frustrating about L.A. is the way that it sort of evades description.

But in my mind, I think of Los Angeles as being the heart of the country, which I think a lot of people would shake their heads at. But in my opinion, America's biggest export is the American story. And that’s distributed through movies and film and TV, the vast majority of which is, historically, produced in L.A.

Los Angeles has qualities to it that are kind of like the Wild West. It's this incredibly sprawling city that still feels largely unknown to most of the people that live there or are from there. It's too big. And it is exciting for those reasons.

Fat.

I Can Steal Your Mother is Sunday, March 19th at The Elysian, from 7:00pm - 8:30pm-ish or whatever. Tickets are on-sale now.

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