#1681 - Brian Simpson

Joe Rogan (0:14)

Hello, Brian Simpson. Good to see you, my friend.

Brian Simpson (0:16)

Hell yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

What's happening?

Brian Simpson (0:18)

I'm chilling, man. I'm just living my best life.

Joe Rogan (0:21)

That's the thing that a lot of people say, and they don't really mean it. But I believe you.

I believe you. Yeah. Last night was fun, right?

Brian Simpson (0:29)

Hell yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:30)

Those shows at Vulcan are lit.

Brian Simpson (0:31)

That was a good ass crowd, man.

Joe Rogan (0:33)

They're real good.

Brian Simpson (0:34)

Always good crowds there.

Joe Rogan (0:35)

It's a good spot too, because everybody's on top of you. You're just in the mix of everything. Once they shortened that stage, remember how they had the double stage and they knocked it down?

Brian Simpson (0:43)

Yeah. Well, I like every... I find it as I'm going around more and more, it was almost like Zany's.

And Nashville was like, any club that has a little people up above you, I love that shit.

Joe Rogan (0:55)

Yeah, yeah.

Well, anytime they're just stuffed in on top of you. Like one of the best clubs I ever worked out was the Comedy Connection in Boston. Not the one in Fanny Hall, but the old one, the original one. It was, I mean, it maybe sat 150 people, but they were stuffed into this room with like a low ceiling, and it was magic, man. You would kill, and it was so contagious. The laughter was so contagious, because everybody just smushed on top of each other.

Where did you start?

Brian Simpson (1:24)

I started comedy in San Diego. Really?

Joe Rogan (1:27)

At La Jolla? Where'd you go?

Brian Simpson (1:29)

No, no. I started on a club called The Mad House.

Joe Rogan (1:38)

I heard of that place. Diaz used to do that place.

Brian Simpson (1:39)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like started by comics or a comic, and it was just one of those places where I got lucky right away.

They started giving me a lot of stage time. I started right when they opened.

Joe Rogan (1:51)

Were you from San Diego?

Brian Simpson (1:53)

No, but I got stationed there a long time ago, and I went back there to go to school, and that's where I just chose to start.

Joe Rogan (2:00)

What branch of the military are you in?

Brian Simpson (2:01)

Marine Corps.

Joe Rogan (2:02)

And so did you always know you wanted to be a comic? Like, where did it come from?

Brian Simpson (2:07)

No, I just kept being told to do that. I tell the story all the time, but I was the only black person in my platoon for a couple of years.

And before I got there, some racial shit went down, and they like, you know, somebody, an officer got removed, and they took black people all out of the unit. And I was the first black person back in the unit.

And I didn't know none of this. And then I got to damn, you know, I could feel everyone like walking on eggshells around me. And one day, my warrant officer asked me, like, hey, how you doing? You know, like, is everybody treating you well? And I was like, well, sir, everybody's fucking acting weird. Like, you know, I can hear conversations hush up when I come in the room. I can you can feel people like editing themselves and shit. And then he told me what happened. And and I realized, like, this can't work. So I told everybody, hey, just say whatever you want to say. Don't worry about if you offend me, because if you do, I'm just going to try to hurt your feelings, too. You know, like, I'm going to say what I want and you say what you want. And I'm going to win most of those.

And then so then I sort of had like a little more leeway than everybody else to speak my mind.

Joe Rogan (3:20)

Right.

Brian Simpson (3:21)

And so every now and then, I would say some shit that I knew everybody was thinking, but nobody could say but me, and people would laugh.

And that's when I started realizing, oh, I can make, I can do this. Like, just me complaining is funny.

Joe Rogan (3:34)

So you had no thoughts, like, one day, I want to be a stand-up comedian. It was sort of introduced into your head by that?

Brian Simpson (3:41)

Like, I started getting laughs all the time, like all the time.

And those friends were the ones that started being like, you should do fucking comedy. You know, that's when I started wanting to do it.