A few questions into this interview, comedian Geoff Tate pauses, sizes me up from across the table at the Blue Jay Restaurant in Northside and asks, in the wryly laconic manner that characterizes his stand-up, “You do that thing where you don’t say anything to see if I keep talking, don’t you?”
I admit as much and justify it with, “I don’t want to cut you off in the middle of saying something brilliant.”
“There’s no chance of that,” he shoots back. “The best you can hope for is ‘accidentally incendiary.’ ”
Don’t believe a word. Tate’s sometimes-subdued delivery cloaks his flamethrower wit, which has earned him opening slots for Doug Benson and Doug Stanhope, appearances at South By Southwest and Bonnaroo and his own Cheers-themed podcast, MSHD PODCASTO. Tate has been ecstatically praised by The Huffington Post, City Pages, Comedy Reviews and The Laugh Button, but his greatest reviews have come from his comedy peers, including Todd Glass, Ryan Singer and author/actor/humorist John Hodgman.
“I got to know Geoff in Boston at the Wilbur theater,” Hodgman says via email. “He was doing (Doug Benson’s) Doug Loves Movies in the afternoon and then I was going to do my show. Backstage, I immediately liked him for the same reason everyone does, onstage and off: He’s a shrugging, funny, huggable mess of a nice guy. I asked him if he wanted to do 10 minutes before me and then I saw the rest of Geoff Tate: All of the hem-hawing self-deprecation, the gruff-love (and) the weird beard, shifted slightly — like a Transformer — as he deployed his smarts, his principles, his vulnerability.”
On his recently released fourth album, People Are What People Make ‘Em, Tate takes intentionally inflammatory aims at onions (“When did we decide onions are OK in everything and it’s my fault for not liking them?”), the contemporary lack of respect for jugglers (“Have you ever thrown one chainsaw? If I threw a chainsaw to you and you caught it, everyone would be like, ‘That was fucking cool’ ”) and religion in the business community (“I think it’s a way to get people to take your sub-par fucking service just because you have the same favorite book”).
You won’t hear Tate banter onstage about the current political landscape. He acknowledges late-night talk show hosts have a more frequent podium from which to address those increasingly timely issues, but he has a more direct explanation for his own acquiescence from the debate.
“If a joke I tell (is what) convinces you that Trump is bad, then you’re just unbelievably stupid,” he says. “I don’t like to do it just to do it. If I talk about it, it’s got to be useful in some way. If I’m just venting, that doesn’t help anybody, even if it’s funny.
“The people that don’t like him don’t need my jokes either. They came (to my show) because they probably want to get away from all that. I want to get away from it. We should all just establish that he’s the worst and then, here’s comedy.”
Beyond that, there is little about Tate’s world that is off-limits as comedy fodder. He’s referenced a party at Ohio University that he attended while tripping on acid, the catch being he didn’t know it was a Halloween party until he arrived — the story includes Tate tackling a group of Storm Troopers who have Chewbacca in handcuffs. He’s also done a bit about a friend having a seizure in church summer camp and the counselor ignoring possible medical reasons for the attack and immediately assigning the cause as demonic possession.
That last anecdote-turned-routine is particularly relevant to what Tate calls his “origin myth.” With his itinerant minister father, housewife mother and fellow captive, his brother Troy (who accompanied him to the interview and offers helpful reminders and additions throughout), Tate lived in a dizzying number of locations as a child to accommodate his father’s profession.
“I can’t do it in any order but here’s the places I lived: Hawthorne, Inglewood, Camarillo, Campbell, Granada Hills, Turlock, Stockton, all in California; Weiser, Idaho; Olympia, Washington; and Grayville, Illinois,” Tate says. “Then we moved to Landen (Ohio). I think I might have missed a couple. Our father kept changing churches; we had about 15 months on average at each church. When we got here, there was enough in the area that we kept switching churches, but we didn’t have to leave Cincinnati.”
Tate’s sense of humor was the saving grace in dealing with the perpetual motion machine that was his childhood. With little time to establish friendships and almost no chance to maintain them, Tate turned being funny into an emotional Kevlar vest.
“It was a defense mechanism for every time we moved,” he says. “It was easier for me to be funny than it was to be another type of kid. No matter how much basketball I played, I was going to be the funny guy who played basketball, not the basketball player who was kind of funny.”
Once the Tates found their footing in the Cincinnati area, the brothers became slightly more grounded as they moved from Landen to Springdale to West Chester, but remained tied to a central location. Tate and Troy attended the same high school for the duration of their teenage years.
“We went to a private school — not one of the good ones,” Tate says. “It was where pastors’ kids went for half tuition and tuition was already the cheapest. At that time, it was pastors’ kids and the kids who had been expelled from any public school they could have gone to already. If you know anything about pastors’ kids, they’ll give hoodlums a run for their money.”
Shunning football, the Tate brothers found their bliss on the court rather than the gridiron. Troy recounts that, while all school basketball records remained safely enshrined while they were on the team, they still had their followers. “We each had a couple of games — him one year, me the next — where a contingent of students was chanting for us to come into the game,” Troy says with a laugh. “We were a couple of Rudys.”
The relative stability the Tates enjoyed in the Cincinnati area may have led them to remain here permanently. The brothers currently reside in Northside, where they routinely dine at the Blue Jay and shop for their other passion, music, at Shake It Records. In fact, the cover of Tate’s second album, 2014’s Just Another Clown, was shot in the store’s basement as a tribute to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Hard Promises.
Music figures prominently in Tate’s big bag of influences and chief among his musical icons is the late Petty, as evidenced by his album titles. People Are What People Make ‘Em is from the lyrics to “I Forgive It All” on the second album by Petty’s group Mudcrutch. Tate’s 2012 debut, I Got Potential, and Just Another Clown are references to lyrics in “Nightwatchman” and “Something Big,” respectively. And Tate’s third album, 2016’s Again, could have come from several Petty sources: “Fooled Again (I Don’t Like It),” “You and I Will Meet Again,” “It’s Rainin’ Again,” “Christmas All Over Again.”
“Nothing has influenced my life more than Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers,” Tate says. “I don’t end up in the same situations as them, but I take my cues from Tom Petty. He seemed to have a pretty solid idea of what was important in the business and to himself: the ability to walk away.
“At some point, you’ve got to decide, as a comedian, who you’re doing it for. There’s a guy in Columbus that books, like, 13 Funny Bones, and a lot of people in this region try to figure out how to do comedy to get that guy to like them. And I did, too, but that wasn’t what I liked about comedy. I had to be willing to not be a comedian anymore. That’s a hard point to get to. I wasn’t ever what that guy in Columbus was looking for, but I’m still a comedian.”
Regarding comedy influences, Tate’s peer group from his nascent career certainly looms large, but a comedy icon from his childhood is still the object of his adoration.
“To this day, I love Sinbad,” he says. “He tells long stories but is also a goof and a clown. When Afros and Bellbottoms (the 1993 TV special and video) came out, I was like 12 or 13. We probably watched that 50 times. I watched it recently because I wondered if that was just funny because I was 13. No! It made me laugh a lot now. And it broke my heart when he said, ‘I’m 36,’ and I (thought), ‘Oh, fuck, I’m older than Afros and Bellbottoms Sinbad now?’ I saw him a couple years ago at a festival; he did like two hours and it was unbelievable.”
Tate’s stand-up journey began in his early 20s, a decade and a half ago. He balanced restaurant work with open mics at Go Bananas in Montgomery, honing his material and learning to navigate comedy’s treacherous waters. Tate rose through the ranks, doing endless nights of open mics, then hosting shows, then doing middle slots. He worked locally and regionally, got fired from nowhere jobs and even worked the door at Go Bananas.
“When I worked the door, I didn’t tell anybody I was a comedian,” Tate says. “It’s weird sometimes when you go into a club and everyone’s a comic, and everybody’s judging from that specific angle. So I was like, ‘I’m the door guy and I’m good at it.’”
Tate’s big break came in 2006 when renowned comic Mike Birbiglia was scheduled at Go Bananas and Tate was working the door. That night, Birbiglia’s opener failed to show up and Birbiglia got lost on his way to the club. It was proof of Tate’s observation that you don’t decide to go the next level in comedy, the next level presents itself.
“The manager comes up to me and goes, ‘You gotta change your shirt and go next,’” he says. “ ‘And also, we don’t know where Mike is.’ I’d never done more than 30 minutes in a row and that was pushing it a bit. I had to do almost an hour; the guy that was hosting the show was supposed to do 15 and he did like seven. I had known Mike for a couple of years, but as the door guy. So Mike walks in, sees the manager and goes, ‘Your door guy is doing pretty well.’ ”
Tate’s impromptu set for Birbiglia paid big dividends; he added Tate to his Secret Public Journal Live tour in 2007 and, at a point where Tate thought he’d have to go job hunting, Birbiglia filled the bulk of the rest of Tate’s year with opening slots.
“One of the shows was one of Mike’s hour-long specials, so everybody from Comedy Central was there,” Tate says. “I got on Live at Gotham the next year. I was able to travel the country with Mike my first year. I got to meet a lot of people. That’s where I met Todd Glass. I’m still good friends with Henry Phillips and John Mulaney — I think he’s president of comedy now. I made more money that year than any of the years since then. I think I’m still chasing that much money.”
Subsequently, Tate has opened for Stanhope and Benson, and become a regular on Benson’s Doug Loves Movies, Getting Doug with High and High Court podcasts; he’s been a frequent guest on Marc Maron’s podcast; he made an appearance on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson; he’s crisscrossed the country dozens of times; he has over 15,000 Twitter followers; when you Google him now, only 70 percent of the results are about the former Queensryche vocalist; and he’s released four albums in five years. The door guy did pretty good.
Oddly enough, Tate actually tried to quit doing comedy at least twice in recent years, which prompted him to seek the help of career counselors and a therapist. The counselors showed Tate how to quantify his feelings over the things he loved and hated about stand-up, and the therapist helped him deal with his long-simmering childhood issues, particularly with his father, who appears in his act with cathartic frequency.
“The only time my dad ever got offended by anything I said was when I made it sound like he was a bad Republican,” Tate says. “I’ve made jokes where he was a bad father, a bad Christian, a bad husband, a bad minister, a bad teacher, an all around ne’er do well. When I made it sound like he was a bad Republican, he tried to stop the show. I heard about it later. I couldn’t tell what made me more mad: that he tried to do it or that he half-ass did it.”
Tate’s past shows up on the cover of People Are What People Make ‘Em with a scrapbook photo of him and his brother as children. Their examination of the shot is a bit unto itself.
“The idea of the title came from the picture,” Tate says. “A picture of us laughing, probably moments away from being yelled at for laughing.”
Through experiences on the comedy circuit and with career counseling and therapy, perhaps the most important thing Tate has acquired over the years is perspective. He takes his work seriously, but he never takes himself or his place in the comedy food chain seriously. After 15 years of figuring out the “rules” of comedy and navigating his way around, through and over them, he has come to a fairly simple conclusion about his place in the grand scheme of things.
“There’s no fucking boss in comedy,” Tate says. “I don’t have to kiss anybody’s ass or live in L.A. People in L.A. spend all their time trying to convince other people they’re funny. I just want to do stand-up.
“I don’t have time to convince (bookers). You either come to the show or you don’t. If you want to see if I can do the thing, come watch me do an hour. If you want to see if I can do an hour by watching me do four minutes, you’re fucking stupid. I’ve ended up being friends with most of the people I looked up to 15 years ago when I started, so it must not all be garbage. I’d be friends with a bunch of shitty hacks if I was a shitty hack.”
Learn more about Geoff Tate, his projects and upcoming tour dates at justanotherclown.com.
This article appears in Feb 14-21, 2018.
