Strike drives Kiley to standup stage

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on January 21st, 2008

The Boston Globe’s Nick Zaino writes about Conan writer Brian Kiley‘s return to Boston this past weekend. Kiley, like other striking writers, has been hitting the road doing standup because the WGA action has meant no paycheck for the past ten weeks.

“I’ve been pretty lucky doing stand-up, getting pretty good gigs,” he says, “but now I’m taking everything and sometimes it’s like, oh, that gig sucked. That was a long drive. I’m remembering now, I forgot how hard stand-up is.“[…]

His style of comedy also makes headlining a bit more difficult. He is a gifted one-liner comic, which means he has to write a lot more material than a comedian who tells longer stories.

“The nice thing is, if you get on TV, you have a bunch of quick punch lines, which is what they want,” he says. “The bad thing is, in the clubs sometimes they’re like, oh, can you do 10 more minutes? It’s like, oh, what, 40 jokes? That makes it tricky, believe me.”

We had the pleasure of working with Kiley in NE many times, before he became employed in late night television 13 years ago.

He nutshells nicely the dilemma of the setup/punchline comic.

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