Nick Vatterott

A Nick Vatterott set feels like a gig going wrong on purpose. He hits the stage moving fast and immediately starts sabotaging his own material. He will set up a basic premise, stop halfway through, pivot to a completely different joke, and then trigger an audio track of his own voice to argue with himself. The microphone cord and the stool become physical obstacles. He sweats, he yells, and he acts like he has no idea what is happening. The hour is built to look like a mistake.

He is a deep cut for people who watch a lot of standup. He won the Andy Kaufman Award because he refuses to just stand in one place and tell stories. He plays the kind of rooms where the audience wants to see the format messed with, and other comics watch him to see how far a bit can be stretched before it snaps.

He builds jokes inside of other jokes. A routine about a mundane topic gets interrupted by a fake technical difficulty, which turns into an argument with an invisible sound guy, which loops back to the original punchline twenty minutes later. His 2014 album For Amusement Only captures the noise of this, but the live act is where the physical panic really works. Sometimes his commitment to stalling out the show is so intense that the room gets quietly confused before laughing again.

He wants them in that pocket.

He built his act in Chicago before moving to New York. That background in sketch shapes everything he makes, including The Nick Vatterott Show, a podcast where the permanent premise is that he missed the recording and a bizarre character has to host instead.