Growing up, comedian Drew Lynch says he never
imagined himself becoming a comedian.
“I moved out to Los Angeles when I was 18 and
it was with every intention of being an actor and doing stuff on screen,” Lynch
said. “I’ve grown up my whole life in and out of art schools and it's something
that I’ve known that I’ve wanted to do ever since I was young.”
Quickly after relocating, Lynch noted that he
was gaining heaving momentum working with Disney and was cast in a few
television shows until one fateful afternoon when his life took an unexpected
turn.
“The week I was supposed to go in for a final
callback for a TV show I went out with the softball team for the comedy club
that I worked at and I was playing shortstop and one of the batters hit a
grounder and it popped up and hit me in the throat,” Lynch explained. “I fell
back and hit my head on the ground and my whole team was telling me that I was
a little out of it. It was something that was chalked up to be a little injury
at the time but that was not the case.”
When Lynch, who was concussed and diagnosed
with a neurogenic stutter, couldn’t keep his audition appointments, his
representation dropped him.
“They kind of silently sort of stopped
representing me and kind of just said come back when you get better. A few
weeks turned into a few months which turned into a few years of me still having
an issue with my speech. So, I stuttered for a really long time.”
While working to improve his condition through
physical therapy, speech therapy, and a plethora of other techniques, Lynch
continued to work his job at the comedy club, which ultimately changed his
fate.
“I had some comics that I knew tell me that I
should go on stage and try to just talk about what happened. “Something that I
really love about comedy is it’s kind of all a band of misfits…everybody kind
of comes together from a place of whatever their pain or their shortcoming,
they kind of have license to say whatever it is that makes them unique.”
Choosing to take the comics advice, Lynch
found himself on stage during an open mic night and according to him,
everything took off from there.
“So, I went onstage and just started to make
jokes or self-deprecating quips about my situation,” he explained.” I could
tell the other comedians in the room had a lot of compassion for my situation,
because some of them had heard what I had gone through. But, they had also felt
how emotionally raw I was at that time because I felt so helpless.
I think that inherently the injury itself
taught me joke structure,” he continued. “Obviously word comedy is so important
and I feared that if I didn’t get to the point I would lose a lot of people's
attention which was something that was a struggle for me. The entire context of
a sentence can change within the last word or two words or syllable. So, you
can think that a whole sentence is heading one way and you can change it
completely with the last thing that you say. That is something that I don’t
think I would have been able to learn on my own if the process didn’t slow down
for me.”
After breaking the ice on stage, Lynch
continued to perform more and more for a wide range of audiences.
“I performed at Korean barbeque grills, in
hospital wings, house party basements, laundromats, at an old lady's book club
one time,” he said laughing. “I got comfortable performing in pretty much every
environment and then not succeeding in every environment as well. A comedian
told me once you do that then you’re ready to get on television.”
In 2015, Lynch auditioned for the television
show America’s Got Talent and placed as runner-up on that season. Since then,
he has gone on to accumulate more than 2 million followers on social media
while touring nonstop. He released his first hour-long comedy special
“Concussed” in 2021 followed by his second comedy special “And These Are Jokes”
in 2023.
“All of my shows are always different and
unique to the audiences…I always go off script at some point and the order
switches around. I’ve been married for a year and I think I’ve grown up a lot
since America’s Got Talent but I still acknowledge a lot of the things that
happened to get to where I’m at now.”
On Fri., Jan. 26, Lynch will hit the Johnny Mercer Theatre at 8 p.m. To purchase tickets visit ticketmaster.com.
