Since he introduced himself to the online video world as one of the original hosts of SourceFed, Elliott Morgan has worn a lot of different hats. We’ve followed him across his various gigs, and his latest one is his most ambitious yet: He performed an hour of stand-up for Premature, a comedy special produced by Supergravity Pictures and distributed through Vimeo On Demand. With Premature set to arrive, we chatted with Morgan about his voyage from SourceFed to stand-up. Here’s what he had to say about his journey:
Tubefilter: How did this thing happen?
Elliott Morgan: It came to be maybe a year ago. I’ve been doing stand-up for about 3 years. I started doing stand-up after I felt myself getting comfortable at SourceFed. I always loved stand-up and I tried to do it. I didn’t tell anyone. I was going to open mics and trying to build minute after minute of material.
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After I went to Mashable, I kept on working on this stuff. I then connected with [Supergravity co-founders] Max [Benator] and Marc [Hustvedt] and I started talking about stand-up and the special organically came out of that. Now it’s a real thing.
TF: What do you get out of doing stand-up?
EM: I grew up doing theater and I originally did acting. When I became a host, I wanted to get back to a more performance-based type of thing, and stand-up provided that thing. It’s almost a mixture of theater and hosting. I also got to inject bigger themes into stand-up than I would with a three-minute YouTube video. I got to offer audiences a different version of myself that wasn’t jump-cut or edited or based on YouTube material.
TF: What’s your stand-up like? Describe it.
EM: It’s like…do you know at the end of a wedding when they release the flock of doves into the sky? And it’s like, you get this rush of endorphins, and everything in the world makes sense, and you start to question how you got to where you are, and why you’re at that wedding, because you don’t know the people and you just showed up, and you stare at the doves and wonder how long they were in the box for?
I do very dry humor with performance-based skits that comment on how I am a middle-class white male individual and poke fun at that. I try to kind of poke fun at things that people on the Internet maybe don’t want to poke fun at, but I try to do it in a way so that everyone is in on the joke. I don’t do shock value, but I do try to ruffle feathers a little bit….not terribly unlike a flock of doves.
It’s an hour of content. If it’s an hour of content, you’re probably looking at laughing for a good 30 seconds of it, so that’s pretty good.
TF: How long did it take you to get that hour of content?
EM: It took a long time. That’s why i love stand-up so much. Because you can grow with it. I have jokes in the special that I’ve had for years, to the point where it was nauseating to say them, but I’d spice it up. I didn’t want there to just be an hour of jokes. So I spent the last year stringing them together. [The special] starts out commenting on social media and YouTube and more of where I come from and growing up in a religious environment, and ends on more personal stuff.
TF: How was the crowd?
EM: Dude, it was awesome. My parents were there. There was a buddy of mine who’s a philosopher, and another philosopher, and this weird mix of people. Halfway into the set, I kind of make fun of the bible, and I was kind of nervous. Then, right before that, there was this music that was playing over the speakers and it was like God himself had come down on the special not to disrupt it but to say hi, which was a cool thing for God to do.
TF: How do you see the stand-up Elliott Morgan working with and growing with the YouTube Elliott Morgan?
EM: I think they both complement each other in different ways. I think YouTube connects in a way that nothing else does. The disconnect with stand-up is that you can’t connect with viewers that way. Moving forward, I may want to mix the worlds a little bit. The goal is that the audience is connected to me while I’m in the stand-up world as well, so they’re still with me and they also see a journey into a different art form…I’m really excited for people to see it.
Premature will become available through Vimeo On Demand on December 10th. It costs $5.99.
