Ed Marques
Treats a comedy club stage like a bizarre public experiment.
1 special · 1991
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An Ed Marques set feels like you just interrupted him in the middle of a thought. He talks to the room in a rambling, unbroken stream, treating the microphone like a tool for public experiments. If he feels depressed that night, he tells the crowd he is depressed. If he is tired, he complains about being tired. He might walk on stage wearing a head-to-toe shiny suit, looking entirely out of place, and just pull the audience into his strange, wandering conversation.
Specials
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MTV Half-Hour Comedy Hour: Episode #1.77 with Laura Lynn Berrios, Ron Darian & 6 more
A 1991 cable comedy showcase featuring Tom Kenny and Laura Kightlinger.
MTV · 30 min
On stage
He belongs to the early nineties wave of alternative comedy, coming up through San Francisco clubs before the industry caught on to what those rooms were doing. When MTV decided they needed weird club comics to fill out their programming, they gave him a job. He was exactly what that era wanted: too strange and structureless for a standard late-night set, but completely at home talking directly into a camera between music videos.
He avoids typical comedy rhythms entirely. You do not watch him for a tight setup and a clean punchline. Instead, he performs with a distracted point of view that feels entirely unscripted. The bits seem to occur to him in real time. If a premise stops holding his attention, he simply drops it and starts talking about something else.
Raised in Half Moon Bay, he built his act in the Bay Area before moving to Los Angeles. There, he folded his specific stage presence into sketch work at the ACME Comedy Theatre and character acting on television.
At a glance
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