I have been a comedy writer and performer for most of my life. It started in the sixth grade, at Laurens Central School, when my teacher, Mrs. Rollins, told us we could just write whatever the hell we wanted. It was only a matter of time before whatever the hell I wanted contained jokes and, quite often, was co-written with my best friend and future comedy partner, Dan Gomiller. The following year we recorded one of our co-written stories as an “audiobook,” which we’ve since lost, but then, after hooking Dan’s phone up to his tape recorder and prank calling people, we eventually decided to sit and improvise with each other after a year of listening to (and not understanding much of) Cheech and Chong’s Greatest Hit together. We called our first tape The Headcleaners and our first “full-length” tape Dan and Jay’s Komedy? Hour’s Greatest Hits, and from there a 3-decade-plus comedy partnership was born, as were some characters and sketches that continue on in our subsequent actual comedy albums and our podcast, Dan and Jay’s Comedy Hour. Together, Dan and I also created an early viral video, and Dan played a huge part in my first feature film, the mockumentary Looking Forward (2012).
During my time in LA, I wrote innumerable screenplays, some entirely on my own, some on spec for smaller production companies, and two (a co-written pilot and a screenplay) for the production company of a well-known comedian. I produced another viral video called Dinosaurs: They Certainly Were Big while in college, and in 2004 it found a place on a pre-YouTube video sharing site and won a short film contest. It appeared on Frontier Airlines’ in-flight entertainment and I was subsequently interviewed in the New York Times. My film trailer/pilot teaser for Looking Forward was later chosen as a semi-finalist in two national pilot contests for Comedy Central and FX (the only short to do so), and was the only one of those nearly 7,000 nationwide entrants to be a finalist in Comedy Central’s contest.
In 2010 my life changed forever when I became a founding member of A Drinking Game, an award-winning stage show recreating classing 80s and 90s movies onstage, in which the audience and the cast get progressively drunker. Add dollar store props, accurate costumes, and dead-on impressions and you have a recipe for a show that lives on in Minneapolis, NYC, and Vienna, Austria.
In 2011, I started the Comedy on Vinyl podcast to talk about comedy records with my best friend, and then eventually some famous comedians. By the end of the show’s decade-and-change run, I finally interviewed my white whale – Weird Al Yankovic. In 2012, Looking Forward was finally released, online, for free, as a feature film. 2015 saw me publishing my second book, the fake internet history Post-Modem: The Interwebs Explained. In 2016, I started the podcast Dispatches from Fort Awesome with my friends Allen Rueckert and Jen, about the sitcom NewsRadio, and began shooting my mockumentary Looking Forward 2016 as a series of vlogs that would end up totaling 18 hours of footage in addition to interviews. In 2018, I started the “Family Albums” mini-series on Comedy on Vinyl, interviewing the family members of comedians and comedy groups who made albums I found fascinating. In one episode, I discovered the true identity of long-lost 1960s comic Dick Davy.
In 2023, my first nonfiction book We’re not Worthy was put out by 1984 Publishing. In 2025 I produced my first vinyl comedy record, Presenting… Dick Davy (an archival release of Dick Davy’s unearthed material from acetates), which was released by Stand Up! Records. I also released my first cylinder record, The Inquisitive Florist, by Dan and Jay’s Comedy Hour. I then donated the Comedy on Vinyl record archives to the Detroit Public Library for a collection I’m proud to say will have my name on it. 2026 will see the release of my next nonfiction book through 1984 Publishing, as well as (hopefully), Dan and Jay’s first comedy album in over a decade.