Comedian Gianmarco Soresi Lives Online (Like Everybody Else)

Gianmarco Soresi

The stand-up who will play The Howlin’ Wolf on Saturday reaches his audience where it lives.

Comedian Gianmarco Soresi treats the digital world as his advance man. On Twitter, he throws a wise guy elbow, tweeting, “Comedians who complain about crowd work clips are just mad there’s nobody at their shows to talk to.” Pinned to the top of his feed is a TikTok clip from his stand-up work that explains why parents have nothing to fear from drag queens.

There was a time when comedians made their name on late night television; now, it makes sense that comedians use digital content forms like podcasts and TikTok to establish themselves. What do you see as the relationship between your digital content and your stand-up in a club? One of the things I’m thinking about when I ask the question is that podcasts tend to be longer and looser than stand-up, while TikTok often isolates stand-up into moments. His The Downside with Gianmarco Soresi podcast gives us him and his friend Russell Daniels looking past the silver linings to see the gray clouds.

He can see the dangers, though. “Cynically, I think living in the digital world can only damage your participation in the real one,” he said by email. “It's made our brains less focused, our bodies less present, and shrunk our imaginations to two dimensions—and I'm no exception. But the good news is I can't check my Twitter feed when I'm onstage and, optimistically, perhaps I'm so starved for human connection that audiences will get the best of me for that all too brief hour or so.”

Soresi will perform at The Howlin’ Wolf on Saturday night with Sean Reilly opening.

These digital spaces have replaced late night talk shows as the places where people find comedians now, and when they do those shows the way Soresi did when he appeared on The Late Late Show with James Corden, it lives on past the night he appeared on YouTube.

“In many ways, the pursuit to create good stand-up comedy and good stand-up comedy content is fundamentally at odds,” Soresi said. “If you care too much about the latter, it's like inviting an audience to a film set and telling them it's a play. You've lied about what they bought tickets for. I don't know if you've ever gone into Starbucks and they're prioritizing digital orders over the people in line, but that feels disrespectful—although, like with stand-up comedians, you'd be foolish to blame the barista. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

“All that being said, I prioritize putting on a good show and letting that inform the kind of social media content I make. That means the live audience's laughter (or, more precisely, their attention) is my guiding light when I'm deciding what joke to go to next, how long to let a crowd interaction go, etc. But of course I'm cognizant of the camera in the back. I can absolutely feel myself pushing a crowd work moment further so I can get to that perfect button for the Instagram reel, repeating a set-up because an audience member had a coughing fit in the middle, or inserting a half-baked joke about Joe Biden falling because I know it'll get sucked up in the algorithm tomorrow.

“Like all things, it's a balance. I've heard from enough audience members who fell in love with a comedian online, saw them live, thought it sucked, and will never see them again for me to know that in the long run you have to respect the people who gave you their flesh and blood on their Saturday night if you want them to come back the next time you're in Edmonton, Canada.”

Last November, Hell Yes Fest and The Comedy House booker Chris Trew talked about booking comedians who were popular on TikTok. “These people sell out,” he told My Spilt Milk. “It’s not classic stand-up, but they’re funny, they sell tickets, and they have fans who want to back them and support them. It’s really compelling.”

The comedians in my TikTok feed seem more conventional that Trew saw at the time, but Soresi’s experience lines up with his. Audiences in digital spaces show up in the physical ones.

“They do translate but it takes time and for them to have seen you more than once,” Soresi says. “Occasionally I'll ask an audience member how they heard of me and it's usually something like they 1. saw my R. Kelly pedophile joke; 2. saw a different video of mine or got sent a different video of mine by one of their friends; and 3. saw an ad (that I paid for) saying I was coming to their city on a weekend when they had plans fall through last minute. A lot of comedy fans, or fans in general, now have intensely para-social relationships with the artists that they love, and that means it takes a little more to get them out of the house to see you.”