DMA#51: 'Truths Are Just Jokes That Nobody Laughed At' with Myq Kaplan

Let me tell you who Myq Kaplan is, because if you’re not already a fan, that changes today.

He’s been doing comedy for going on twenty-five years. He has a Comedy Central special. He was a finalist on Last Comic Standing. He’s been on Comedy Bang Bang and Keith and the Girl more times than I can count. He has two specials on YouTube - AKA and Rini - and a new one he’s just recorded. He runs a Substack called Myq Kaplan's Arty Har-Hars, which you should subscribe to immediately after this. He is one of the most densely packed laughs-per-minute comedians working anywhere in this city, and I say that as someone who has been watching this scene very closely for fifteen years.

He is also the reason I once shot IPA out of my nose at a comedy show on Second Avenue. But we’ll get to that.

The first thing you need to know about Myq Kaplan is that his name is, by design, a barrier to entry.

“I brought it upon myself, obviously, the spelling of my name,” he told me, almost immediately after we started recording. “There’s a little bit of a barrier to entry. But once you get past, then I feel like there’s a lot of reward.”

He then, in the same breath, held up a microphone.

“That’s a Myq” he said.

I say “by design” because everything about Myq’s comedy is by design - the spelling of his name, the precision of his phrasing, the way a simple prop becomes the punchline to a joke that is also, if you look at it properly, a philosophical position about the rewards of paying attention. Nothing is accidental. The commitment to craft runs so deep that it’s become invisible, which is when craft becomes art.

The name story is one I’ve been dining out on since 2014. I was a young, fledgling comedian appearing on a certain popular podcast, and I was doing my plugs at the end of the show. Bob Kelly was hosting. I was reading names off the lineup for an upcoming show - I think it was the Producers Club - and I arrived at Myq’s name, and I said: “and Meek Kaplan.”

The room turned on me. Louis J. Gomez. Dan Soder. Joe List. All of them looking at me with the particular expression that New York comics reserve for someone who has just revealed a catastrophic gap in their knowledge.

“You f*****g Australians,” somebody said. “How have you never heard of Myq Kaplan?” They laid into me for twenty minutes. About my accent. About my ignorance. About the basic expectation that someone doing comedy in New York should know who Myq Kaplan is, which is, I’ll grant them, a fair point.

And then, having absorbed all of this - having been fully educated and corrected and aware - I subsequently introduced Myq on stage that night as “Meek Kaplan.” Again.