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Welcome to Hot Mic, actor and comedian Michael Cruz Kayne’s column in which he laughs with—and at—your favorite comics.
I first met Sam Morril a little over a year ago, at the legendary Lower East Side pick-up basketball games run by author and comedian Joel Walkowski. My preconceived notion of Sam, drawn both from his viral standup clips and his famously who-gives-a-fuck morning TV appearances, led me to expect a morose grittiness. Would he be standoffish? Rude? After a year of Sundays playing ball with him, I can tell you he is nothing if not an ideal teammate and player: forgiving my mistakes (“keep shooting” after I’ve bricked a middie), generous with compliments (“great box out”), an all-world rebounder, and an absolute bucket. In fact, between my interviewing him and writing this piece, I’ve guarded Sam for two hours, during which he relentlessly Kevin McHale’d my ass to a humiliating degree. “I got lucky on that one,” he whispered to me after his fourth fadeaway bankshot in a row. He had definitely not gotten lucky. Fucker.
Even though my interactions with Sam were relegated to a middle school gymnasium, he bobbed into my life in other ways. A friend of my wife blushed “do you know him? He’s so funny. And Jewish! How old is he?” as she turned to show me a clip of Sam onstage at the Cellar. In December, my son asked if he could accept his best friend’s invite to a show at Carnegie Hall. “You’re going to see a symphony?” “No. My best friend’s favorite comedian.” It was Sam. Later that night he raved “it was actually really really funny. He said some stuff most people would never say.”
Sam has navigated the tricky balance between edgy masculinity and progressivism in a way that many other comics who share his tone and delivery have completely eschewed, lazing instead in the boring territory of Boo Hoo Cancel Culture™. In a previous Netflix special, he called bullshit on faux outrage over trans athletes in a way that established his bonafides as someone willing to buck the trend of comics raised in clubs trashing trans people. And, unlike many of his peers, he’s refused to over-dramatize Dave Chappelle’s supposed cancellation. Those principles, combined with his brutal wit, have made him the rare comedian who gains a following without losing himself. And the jawline probably doesn’t hurt.
We spoke over video call from our separate homes, me in Williamsburg and Sam in Greenwich Village. This interview has been edited in whatever way I saw fit, mostly to make me sound smarter, but also for clarity and brevity.
Sam, I’m coming clean: I’ve never done this written interview stuff before. So, we’re going to talk for an hour and I’m just going to cobble it together.
Cool, just make sure you take out all the “uh” and “um” stuff. You ever read an interview and they leave in all the ums? Clean it up!
I actually do an avant-garde thing where I cut out everything *except* the ums.
I had someone try to do an avant-garde thing once. I was making a documentary during COVID with a friend and he would film the weirdest shit. I said “stop filming homeless people. This is a fucking comedy doc.” I was talking with another comic and he was filming us and a homeless guy took a shit behind us, and my friend zoomed in on the homeless guy. He said he was capturing the realness of the city. I was like, “dude, you’re not making Mean Streets. You’re making a comedy doc.”
What’d you do before this interview?
I went to the gym. I made my girlfriend watch clips from “Slapshot.”
Sounds like a hostage situation.
She makes me watch stuff too. If you’re gonna make me watch another recipe video, I’m gonna make you watch Paul Newman say slurs in the ‘70s.
What are we doing at the gym?
Light weights. You get to a certain point when you’re on too many flights, and you stiffen up, and you gotta just not fall apart.
How often are you on the road?
Well, I was only home [for] maybe three days in September. That was a lot. And then I’m not really out hard again until mid-November. I took a lot of the summer off because you hit too many cities on these tours, and you just gotta take a breather. And you have to live to have stuff to talk about, you know? You can’t just go from club to club or theater to theater. You have to accumulate life stories and life experience, or the material’s gonna get pretty boring.
Speaking of stories and experience, there are a few big stories in your new Netflix special “Incorrect.” When you told them for the first time, how much did they resemble what’s currently in the special?
The first time you tell them, you just hope that you have something there. You’re talking to a friend and say “dude, you’ll never believe what happened.” Sometimes you even get a gift where the story already has a great ending. The rat story [in “Incorrect”] had such a clear ending: the exterminator beat and murdered a rat with hockey sticks. They sent me a picture and I said, “Did you find him like that?” And he goes, “We made him like that.” I was like, alright, well, that’s gonna get a laugh.
But you didn’t stop there.
That ending was enough, but can I do one more? Is there something else there? I felt I had to address animal rights people, ’cause I got a few messages saying “How dare you laugh at a dead rat?” And I was like, look, it’s sad that it got killed, but they’re not my favorite. Like, there’s no Save the Rats Foundations [Editor’s note: there is]. Let’s chill out a little bit. So that line at the end, where they said, “that’s a really inhumane way to kill a rat” and I said, “We’ll throw him in a glue trap. We’ll make it look like an accident.” I like becoming this mafia-type guy at the end of that bit. I like the iciness in my response.
For lack of a better word, your comedy is “edgy.” Does that come naturally to you, or did you cultivate it?
Coming up at open mics, it’s hard to get people’s attention. So I would skew towards short jokes that were a little shocking. Like, when I was 19 I had this joke: I was talking to a girl and she said she wants a man who treats her like a princess. So I hired paparazzi to chase her and she died in a car crash. It crushed. It made people curious about what I was gonna say next. You need those jokes that are on subjects people don’t want to talk about, but they give a little jolt, like a defibrillator.
This is a very cliché question to ask, but are there ever things that you won’t touch?
No, nothing. I was trying to write a joke on the Cornell 7, but it hasn’t hit me yet. I don’t have the right angle for it. It has to be funny. But also, I’m not gonna tell a joke about socks if it isn’t funny.
That willingness to try any topic must make people assume certain things about you as a person.
Well, people are shocked to find out I’m not an asshole. When my act is the way it is, there’s a very low bar for how kind you have to be offstage so that people are blown away. I’ll say something fucked up on stage, and they think I must be a prick. So then I just have to act normal and they’re like “Man, you’re really nice.”
After months of working out the show, how do you decide which jokes stay in your set?
It’s like the Yankees setting their lineup: is Jazz Chisholm playing like trash? Let’s replace him with a new guy. Is Anthony Volpe hitting? You’re just literally replacing pieces to make it a good lineup. You figure out what pieces aren’t working and you swap them out for better ones. You’re always tinkering.
To continue the metaphor, what kind of lineup are you looking for? Do you want different kinds of hitters, base-stealers, left-handers, et cetera? Or all Aaron Judges and Ohtanis?
Oh, definitely the well-rounded one. I want some speed. If it’s all home runs, your style gets repetitive and you’re not going to hold their attention. But still, you’re rooting for every joke. Every time you tell one, you’re like “dude, I’m rooting for you to make the team.” And to be honest, sometimes you keep one just for you, even if it isn’t working. LIke there’s this one joke in the special…
Are you about to say “constipation of ‘98”? [Editor’s note: In ‘Incorrect,’ during a long story about an annoying and terrifying flight, Sam includes a joke about the few times he’s prayed in the past, including a constipation incident in 1998. It falls somewhat flat with the audience—the kind of joke most comics would edit out.]
Yes.
I knew it! I wrote down when I watched it, “this one is for him.”
It was the first time I ever prayed. I got so sick I couldn’t go to school. I just threw in this dumb little tag. Gary Gulman used to do it, too. I remember him pronouncing “karate” the Japanese way. And he’d say “I know you’re laughing, but that’s the correct pronunciation.” It never got the laugh that it deserved but I always thought it was so funny.