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Every stage you never took is the only real failure. The rest is just data.
Jo Koy, the comedian who has sold out SoFi Stadium and won Showtime at the Apollo, sat down with Lewis and told the story of driving Vegas to LA with a broken taillight for a $40 set, getting a ticket both ways. He rode a Greyhound nine hours home from an unpaid audition. He walked to the front of a line wrapped around a building with a fake resume and a headshot his dad took, and asked a promoter for five minutes she did not have to give him.
She gave it to him anyway. Three weeks after crawling through a curtain as an unannounced warm-up act at Def Comedy Jam, he won the Apollo. Years later, when Netflix passed on him, he paid for the special himself, shot it, and brought it back to them. They bought it, and then he broke Mariah Carey’s attendance record in Hawaii with 22,000 tickets.
He still prints flyers. Ten thousand of them, for sold-out shows, put on windshields by hand. He talks about his mom rolling lumpia to sell at work during her divorce, about his stepdad teaching him that a messy bed is a messy head, about hugging his son on stage in the same arena where he watched Eddie Murphy at fifteen.
This one will make you uncomfortable in the best way, because you will start counting the lines you did not walk to the front of. Jo’s definition of greatness is doing what you love for absolutely nothing, and he says he is still asleep, still dreaming the thing he dreamed at nine.
Mixed Plate: Chronicles of an All-American Combo https://amzn.to/4cpLPzm
Jo’s Website https://jokoy.com/
Jo’s Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jokoy/?hl=en
Jo’s YouTube https://www.youtube.com/Jokoy
Watch Jo Koy: Blue in the Face https://www.netflix.com/title/81697661
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00:00:00 Intro
00:01:04 Transferring Energy on Stage
00:01:53 Born for Comedy
00:06:26 Why Failing is Essential
00:13:20 Sneaking Onto BET’s Comic View
00:23:01 Winning the Apollo
00:30:05 Overcoming Childhood Trauma
00:35:06 Navigating Racism in Comedy
00:42:47 Passing Out 10,000 Fliers
00:51:18 The Ultimate Art Form
00:56:57 Lesson From His Stepdad
01:00:50 His Mom’s Hustle
01:08:43 Financing His Netflix Special
01:14:17 Three Truths & Greatness
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