At the Buzzer

There are moments where life calls upon you to have an answer, to make a decision. It happens to everyone, whether they know it or not, and comedian Jared Sterling has seen those “at the buzzer moments” with more clarity than most. Jared sat in his backyard with me, smoking weed (which he didn’t offer me by the way), telling me about the times he felt like a blank slate. For Jared, identity and passion go hand in hand, so before comedy entered his life, he felt as if he had no identity. In a way, this goes against a principle I typically have, which is that identifying with your art gets in the way of it; however, Jared focuses more on the fact that passion leads to purpose and purpose is the material that identity is made out of.

Moving away to college is the first time that he discovered he was lost, swept away in a sea of thousands of students like him. It unnerved him. What I find interesting is that he told me he turned to the divine and found brief solace in a Christian campus group, describing it like a premade community. But that wore thin, until eventually he found his way to his current calling: comedy. “This to me for some reason called me right at the buzzer to be the thing that was like, ‘hey man, this might be you.’ And I was at a point where I didn’t really see a reason to not try.”

The biggest reason that Jared felt drawn to it was the raw truth that great comedy always has. “Comedy forces you to do a lot of obviously introspective thinking, self-reflection, and all that stuff. And you end up digging up a lot of pain, and that pain is where you get the art from,” he tells me. I was honestly surprised how much the concept of truth in art and disdain for lying came up in our conversation. It was sobering to hear a perspective that gets at the root of bad art and bad community, which is any form of lying. Comedians, at least good ones, have the privilege of saying the quiet part out loud without getting in any trouble. “Comedy forces you to do a lot of obviously introspective thinking, self-reflection, and all that stuff. And you end up digging up a lot of pain, and that pain is where you get the art from…You gotta be honest. You gotta be real. Even God laughs.”

The most nefarious of lies are the ones that try to comfort and welcome us. People like Jared can’t accept a place that makes them feel belonging at the cost of truth. “Everyone just wants something. An ad is essentially some form of a lie. The dream that your boss is selling you at whatever, like a corporate climb the ladder next year, that’s a lie. The kind of, ‘We’re a family here,’ that’s a lie. There are lies that are embedded in things to get people to believe that you value them when you really don’t. That’s a very malicious thing to do. It’s awful,” he laments. Frankly, it’s a stressful way to live. To wonder if the people you’re around value you, as a person, and not your output or bottom line. But his craft and the laws of it set things right, permitting him another day of navigating the bullshit. Bullshit that he can spew back on stage for a laugh. “It’s almost like comedy has laws of nature attached to it and doing that (lying) breaks one of the laws of nature…if you try to play some sort of character or archetype on a stage, if somebody in the audience, whether they are 14 or 84, will be able to tell. You can get called on your [bleep] immediately.”

Jared’s not a paranoid guy, though. He’s laid back and looks to be on his way to finding great success and peace, with movies like Monsters, Inc. to help give him guidance. “Remember, the only thing they were able to replace crying for in Monsters, Inc. was laughter.”