This story starts with a cow in the middle of a Utah road, mooing, perhaps, but not moving. Joe Klocek, a self-described, fledgling, 27-year-old comedian at the time, who owned nothing but the car that hit this cow and the contents inside, suddenly found himself walking through the Utah desert with a backpack on and $60 in his pocket.
Fast-forward. One night, before Joe performed at Club Deluxe, his friend Dhaya Lakshminarayanan dared him to tell the story about the cow, which he had been telling friends for years, instead of doing his bit. “I gave the audience the entire emotional backstory it happened in as well as the completely vulnerable, complete honest truth,” Klocek says. “When the laughter came it was richer, longer, deeper and coming from a place inside the audience that I rarely felt like I was connecting with. I was being a complete, real person so they laughed like real, complete people.”
That was one year and four months ago. The show, Previously Secret Information, has sold out almost every single month since then, with two performances each night, at Stage Werks’ underground theater. Featuring no more than four performers, PSI forces artists with stage experience to drop the act and, without notes, tell a true story. I recently spoke with Klocek about the differences between PSI and traditional comedy shows.
(How) has this show changed your feelings about standup?
Storytelling is the next logical place for comics who are evolving and want to share themselves with an audience in a more complete way. When you think about it, a comic’s job is very limited. We have to make you laugh every thirty seconds. Eliciting the same emotion over and over from a crowd limits how much of myself I can express. After 20 years of learning how to make audiences laugh, I realized that there was a huge part to being human I was editing out of my “act.” … I love stand-up, always will. [But] As I have gotten older it has felt more restraining.
