If you’re familiar with American comedian Joe Mande, it’s most likely because of his work as part of the writing team behind TV’s Parks And Recreation, or for the website Look At This Fucking Hipster, which was later published as a book.
If you’re familiar with his actual name, however, there’s a good chance it’s because of his Twitter account. This isn’t a slight against Mande’s stand-up work; that’s just how the world works these days, and he really is that good at Twitter, even (or rather, especially) if he’s just retweeting a particularly noxious tweet.
“When you find a really purely idiotic tweet, it speaks for itself, and that’s my favourite thing – you don’t have to add commentary to it,” Mande says, fresh from singling out especially cringey 140-character emissions from Adrian Grenier and Rob Schneider. “I spend so much of day just reading garbage, trying to find stuff that’s funny, and now I’ve been blocked by so many people, it just gets harder and harder.”
Gracious though Mande is when told of his social media prowess, he simultaneously recoils at the idea of it defining him. “I agree with you, ‘internet personality’ is a terrible thing,” he says. “The other night, I was trying to get people to delete ‘internet persona’ from my Wikipedia page. That was a bad idea, because it just got people to deface my Wikipedia page for 12 hours … there was a part that said ‘prolific Twitter user’ and someone changed it to ‘pro-life Twitter user’.”
Long before publicly trolling everyone from Frankie Muniz to NBA player Gilbert Arenas, Mande got his start as part of a high school improv team in Minnesota, then officially began doing stand-up during his time at Boston University, before relocating to New York City.
“New York is a tough place, just inherently, but you just have to find your people,” he says. “I was kinda aimless, and didn’t know where to perform or what my scene was, and then you end up with people you find funny and you just kinda roll with them. For me, it was Nick Kroll and John Mulaney and Jenny Slate – we all found each other pretty early on.”
Mande is now based in LA as part of the writing team behind Parks And Recreation, for which he was recruited two years ago. As for Look At This Fucking Hipster? “I’m not super proud of it,” he admits, possibly due to how exhausted a subject it’s since become (though he is proud of it being referenced in an Aussie Honda advertisement).
For his first visit Down Under – fresh off the release of his first album, the hip hop mixtape-inspired Bitchface – he’s similarly wary of well-worn, culturally specific material.
“I’ve been told by a couple of people who performed there not to dwell too long on Australian accents, because it’s alienating and not interesting to people in Australia [laughs] … I should probably sit down and learn the name of your Prime Minister or whatever, the basics.”
Neither should one expect material akin to Mande’s Twitter account. “My stand-up is mostly kinda longer-form, often stories … I would think that if people are coming to hear me shit on Ryan Seacrest, they’re gonna be disappointed.”
Joe Mande appears at Giant Dwarf on Friday September 4 and Saturday September 5.
