Robyn Von Swank
With his laconic delivery and offbeat sense of humor, Wyatt Cenac’s standup is closer in spirit to a barroom storyteller than a working comedian. But Cenac has been a working comedian for more than a decade now — and between his masterfully crafted jokes and large cult following, it shows.
Isthmus caught up with Cenac, a former Daily Show correspondent, in advance of his Nov. 5-7 headlining run at the Comedy Club on State to learn more about his life and career.
April 19, 1976: Wyatt Cenac is born in Manhattan.
“Dallas is where I grew up, but I’ve always felt a connection to New York, in big part because of my grandmother and the time that I would spend there [with her] as a kid.”
ca. 1980: Moves to Dallas with his mother and stepfather and becomes childhood friends with future acclaimed comic book writer Brian K. Vaughan.
“[Brian and I] would play Batman and Robin. Whenever car dealerships were having some big event, they would get those floodlights and shoot them in the air. We would see that and think it was the Bat Signal and just go running around the yard. That definitely made it okay to love comic books.”
1994-1998: Attends the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“I wanted to study TV and film, but there wasn’t necessarily a TV/film department, so it was all kind of wrapped up in communications. I’m very grateful for my time there, and I think the lessons I learned at that school were probably way more outside of the classroom than inside. I had an opportunity to go to NYU, but I turned it down. Sometimes I look back at that like, ‘You know, that might have been a smarter thing if you wanted to do this professionally’ — but it all worked out.”
1996: Interns at Saturday Night Live.
“I was an intern in the research department. If a cast member was doing an impression of a politician, I’d go down to the Today show and get some video clips for them. And for Weekend Update, they would do a lot of stuff with Associated Press photos. I would go to the AP and get a stack of those photos, and then the Update writers would look at them to come up with jokes. I got to kind of watch and absorb, and it was a very cool experience.”
1998-2008: After graduating from college, Cenac lives in Los Angeles.
“I got offered a job at SNL as a receptionist, and I thought, ‘Well, I’d love to work on SNL, but I don’t know how many people go from receptionist to cast member.’ I felt like maybe I needed to go to L.A. and make my bones there, and if I worked hard enough a job would bring me back to New York. In my head, it seemed like maybe it would take me a couple of years. It took about a decade, but that was always the thought — that L.A. is just kind of an investment to get back to New York.”
2003-2005: Works as a writer and story editor on King of the Hill.
“The first [episode] I wrote was called ‘My Hair Lady,’ where Bill gets a job at a fancy, trendy hair salon — but to get the job, he had to pretend to be gay, and, once there, he’s sort of living this life that he’s never lived before where women are opening up to him and aren’t repulsed by him.”
2008: Becomes a writer and performer on The Daily Show in New York City. He leaves the show in 2012.
“I auditioned for [the job] a few times because they would always have auditions in L.A. The year I got it, they had asked me to write my own thing as well as perform a piece that they had written. And that piece was for John Oliver, so it was a little weird because there were a lot of references to being English. The piece I wrote was actually the first thing I ever got to do on the show. It was about how the Democratic primaries weren’t that interesting and that I wished they were a bit more like the television show Lost.”
2013: Contributes to Marvel Comics’ Now What? e-book with fellow comedian and future Daily Show head writer Elliott Kalan.
“We wrote five or six one-page stories called ‘Wy-Ifs,’ which were like the What-If comic books — but instead of what, we asked why, with ‘Wy’ also being short for Wyatt. Elliott is a much more knowledgeable comic book reader than me, so they were just silly questions I had about comic books that he would answer. Those were a blast to do.”
Oct. 21, 2014: His second and most recent standup special, Brooklyn, premieres on Netflix.
“When you think about it, a televised special is not the ideal way to experience standup. The best way is to be at the show, and second best is probably just to listen to it, because you can focus in on it. If it’s on television, you’re listening but you can also check your phone or walk away to make a sandwich. So I felt like [I should do] something visually to add to the televised experience of it — and that was puppets. I’ve always been a fan of puppets, and I thought, ‘Oh, I have a puppet of myself. This might be a fun, cool way.’”
Nov. 5-7, 2015: Cenac will play Madison for the first time since performing the same night (but different venue) as Dave Chappelle in 2014.
“Now if nobody shows up, I don’t have an excuse.”
