That’s all the more remarkable given that, when Mauss moved to Boston from his native LaCrosse, Wisconsin, three years ago, he had never told a joke onstage. The oldest of three kids, Mauss describes himself as a quiet, reserved type who began jotting down jokes when he was 16. He didn’t play sports or get involved in school activities or even really pay much attention in class. “No,” he laughs. “I smoked a lot of weed.”
His conservative Christian parents (his father is a countertop maker; his mother, a manager of a health clinic) didn’t condone his behavior. Mauss guessed they probably wouldn’t approve of his jokes either, which they heard for the first time last week on Conan. Performing the next night before a crowd of 20 at the Comedy Studio, he riffed, “My family was calling me all day. ‘Congratulations! You really disappointed us!’ ”
Mauss bypassed college and headed to Boston because a friend of his was moving here to work at MIT. “In my head, I was like, well, I have to get to a coast. You go to New York, and you become a stand-up comic. It’s just that easy,” he said. “I figured [Boston was] close enough to New York.”
His jokes, however, weren’t yet close enough to funny, as he learned his first time onstage at the Comedy Studio. “I forgot what I was going to say,” he said. His notes couldn’t save him, either. “I reached into my pocket. There was nothing there.” Club owner Rick Jenkins told Mauss to take a class if he was serious about comedy, so he enrolled in Rich Gustus’s program at Brookline Adult & Community Education. Mauss also started showing up at the Emerald Isle in Dorchester to practice. “I’d get one laugh every week,” Mauss recalled. Not great at all. But, by the time he finished the class, he had learned to put all of those one-laughers together for a full set of gut-busters.
In January 2006, Mauss hit the stage every night as the Comedy Studio’s monthly comic-in-residence, using that time to prepare for the Boston Comedy Festival, which had rejected him the year before. “You have to make your own breaks, it seems,” he says.
That is so especially in a scene such as Boston’s, which is overflowing with both young aspiring comics and veteran headliners who never moved away, all looking for gigs. The region remains fruitful for stand-up comedians because of its huge college-age population, providing both an ample talent pool and ready audiences; a blessing if you want steady work without having to leave your family behind for the road, a curse if you’re not an established comic with the proper veteran-headliner connections. Even after his initial brush with success in Boston, Mauss had troubles getting booked.
He clearly needed a manager, and after Aspen, he found one in The Collective’s Max Burgos, who also represents Katt Williams (HBO’s The Pimp Chronicles). He also signed with Douglas Edley of the high-powered Gersh Agency.
Edley, a Boston University grad, calls Boston “a great place for him to grow as an artist and as a comedian.” Edley is busy fielding calls from TV networks and movie studios curious about Mauss, but he insists that the comedian’s prime objective should be to write more material and to get more experience on the road.
“The important thing is not to jump too quickly, jump too high,” says Edley.
The big break
Waiting backstage to greet Conan O’Brien, Mauss posed for photos with his girlfriend, fellow comedian Maggie MacDonald, Boston comedian Micah Sherman, and members of O’Brien’s band. MacDonald and Sherman seemed more excited and nervous than Mauss. Even during the commercial break before his network TV debut, Mauss felt weirdly calm. “Instead of paying attention in school, I was always focused on something like this happening,” he said.He remained modest later that night at a viewing party in his hotel room, taking phone calls and responding to e-mails and MySpace messages. Friends joked about his weirdly unwrinkled designer duds — MacDonald had purchased his TV outfit from the Lucky store at Copley Place. They hushed one another when O’Brien introduced Mauss. Afterward, they celebrated with a Champagne-cocktail toast. And yet, after the biggest moment of his career so far, Mauss wanted to show friends another comedian’s work online. “This is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said, pointing to an online cartoon by Brad Neely on Super Deluxe.
Mauss says he wishes the camera had given him a full body shot for the punch line to his act “Crazy Maggie,” about his girlfriend’s premenstrual sexual openness (“I’m Crazy Maggie and I’m giving it away!”). But he really wished he could’ve plugged his home club, the Comedy Studio. Instead, O’Brien promoted Mauss’s upcoming appearance in June on Long Island — something the club wanted in exchange for booking Mauss. “I wanted to surprise Rick (Jenkins) with that,” he said. “That was my first taste of what show business is about. I was like, what?”
