Opening doors
Almost overnight, Shane Mauss went from struggling comic to 'Conan'
Life can be surreal for a comic on the rise. A few weeks ago, riding the buzz from winning best stand-up comic at the prestigious US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., Shane Mauss found himself in a warehouse studio in Los Angeles taping a stand-up spot for the Playboy Channel's "Night Calls" show. The spot, which airs tonight at 10, features two sexy female hosts who dispense explicit advice, often in the nude.
For the 26-year-old comedian from Wisconsin, it was more than a little distracting to compete with nude women for his audience's attention . "The girls behind me were trying to comment on my jokes and be a part of it, and I have very specific timing," Mauss explains. "At first, I acknowledged them and that encouraged them, so I had to ignore them. It was a strange thing."
It has been a steep climb for someone who first stepped onstage barely three years ago. For a while, Mauss couldn't get a Boston booker to return his calls. Now he's got plenty of attention, making his television debut on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" last month and dividing his time between gigs in Boston and auditions for commercials and game shows with Nickelodeon and MTV in New York and Los Angeles. He'll open for John Heffron tonight and tomorrow at the Comedy Connection, then perform for 40,000 music fans at the Bamboozle festival in New Jersey next week.
Mauss is an odd fit for stardom. He's tall and a bit gangly with lank hair, built more like a farmhand than a comedian. His speech is somewhat thick-tongued and flat. And he's too well-grounded to buy into the hype surrounding him.
"They build you up, and it's kind of like, 'Hey, I am really good. This guy's right,' " he says. "So you have to kind of take a step back from it all and look at it more realistic and get a game plan together."
Mauss's goal is to make his name in stand-up, headlining clubs and producing specials. The best way to do that, he figures, is to stay in Boston and work. That was hard to grasp for some of the management groups and agencies that were trying to lure Mauss with the promise of screen time with stars such as Will Ferrell.
He was flattered, but didn't think he was ready to be an actor. "I'm really interested in stand-up and developing," he would tell them, "and they'd be like, 'Oh, stand-up, that's great. So we've got these movies coming out. . . .' They just weren't listening."
Two weeks after Aspen, Mauss got his chance to fulfill a dream he'd had since he was 8 years old, to appear on late - night TV. He had just signed with the Gersh Agency when a guest dropped out of "Late Night With Conan O'Brien." The agency got him an audition, which he had to do by phone walking the streets of New York.
"Fortunately, I'm not that animated of a person so I didn't look that foolish," he says. "They said, 'So are you interested in being on Conan?' and I said, 'Uh, yeah. I might have an Elks Lodge that I might have to cancel, but yeah.' "
Mauss's incredible run started last summer, just in time to save his career. After two years in comedy, he found himself broke and questioning his aspirations. That's when he got the call informing him he had made the cut for Aspen.
"I'm not keeping up with rent, am I going to be homeless?" he remembers thinking. "That call was really something. I knew it was going to change my life, and it did."
The summer before Aspen, he made the finals in the Boston Comedy Festival competition and was singled out on a national radio program by Paul Provenza, producer of "The Aristocrats," for his performance at the Original Las Vegas Comedy Festival. Still, in comedy circles, Aspen is the biggest of big deals. Yet Mauss didn't get off to an auspicious start there. Travel delays caused him to miss his warm-up shows, and his luggage was lost.
But it didn't take long for Mauss to make an impression, even though he was first in the line-up, which comics consider the worst position. "His first set was unbelievable," says friend and fellow comic Dan Boulger , who also played the festival. "He took the bullet in his first show and just went out and crushed."
The Gersh Agency's Douglas Edley knew immediately that he wanted to represent Mauss. "I think he's just a really sharp, smart writer, which is really important," he says. "You don't always see that with a lot of the young kids coming out. He really puts time into crafting his jokes and you can see it when you see him onstage. He's absolutely hysterical."
Word traveled fast around Aspen. Mauss says people recognized him on the streets, something that hadn't happened in Boston. "I'd go into restaurants and the wait staff would know me," he says. "It's like being famous or something. So that was a cool feeling."
Comedy Studio owner Rick Jenkins remembers the bumbling kid who first stepped on his stage three years ago. "He couldn't remember his material so he pulled out his notes and couldn't read his notes," he says. "I think the whole set was maybe two and a half minutes and had maybe one or two jokes."
Mauss has come a long way since then, grabbing every minute of stage time he could working toward the dream that brought him to Boston from Wisconsin in 2002. He has honed his persona into an innocent everyman with a hedonistic streak, making explicit jokes about sex or talking about getting drunk on the job or his strange audition experiences.
Yet Jenkins sees a comic who has worked hard to get comfortable under the lights.
"He's so relatable," he says. "There's a real sincerity and a genuineness as a person and I think that comes through onstage."
Mauss may get a bit impatient playing low-paying gigs at dive clubs or taking opening spots when he wants to headline, but he knows that experience makes him better, and he is on the verge of being the comic he wants to be.
"I realized a while back you just have to look at the people who inspire you, Jim Gaffigan or Dave Attell ," he says.
"They're just at a level so far above, that's what you're really working toward. The rest will work itself out." 