Morgan Jay is not your typical stand-up comedian.
Armed with an acoustic guitar and a microphone loaded with Autotune, he sprints down the aisles of the theaters he’s performing in, joking with fans and leading in songs.
He poured tequila shots straight from the bottle into women’s mouths, persuaded couples on their first date to “smooch” each other, and pushed audience members in wheelchairs across the venue, recruiting “villains” to sit on his lap. All the while, he stares directly into the lens of a walking camera, which follows him and projects his face onto the Jumbotron.
He has the health and fitness habits befitting a pop star. “Run every other day, go to the gym every other day, do yoga, stretch for 20 minutes a day, practice your vocal skills every day while on tour, don’t drink, smoke, smoke, and don’t eat after 8 p.m.”
“It’s an investment for people to come to a show,” Jay says. He does the math. The total for tickets, parking, merchandise, two drinks, and a hotel was easily over $500. “We hate not being able to give our fans the best show we can.”
Jay’s set combines two elements that comedy purists might scoff at: music and crowd work. Still, his shows and the viral clips they generate have catapulted him into one of the fastest-growing artists in live comedy. This week, he plays three headline shows at the New York Comedy Festival, as well as three sold-out performances in New Jersey. The 10-day festival marks a homecoming for Jay, who grew up across the Hudson River and started performing open mics in the city. “I never thought of myself as a comic’s comic, so it’s great to be back and perform in such a big venue,” he says.
Case in point: With about 15,000 tickets sold in the New York area this week, Jay said, “Madison Square Garden could have easily sold out.” But even 10 years after he started doing open mics, he still wants a sense of belonging to the club. In October, he asked his agent if he could audition for the Comedy Cellar, which only seats a few hundred people.
Jay performed at the legendary Greenwich Village club as part of a lineup that featured stand-up veterans like Judd Apatow and Louis CK. As expected, he was the only comedian with an acoustic guitar. “No one respects musical comedy until someone does it really well,” Jay says. He follows in the footsteps of hybrid acts such as Steve Martin, Adam Sandler, Flight of the Conchords, Reggie Watts and Bo Burnham.
Just as Burnham is the quintessential comedian emerging from YouTube, Jay embodies the TikTok era of comedy. He posts about one crowd work clip a day to his 9.4 million followers, singing into a pitch-corrected microphone while asking questions about where he’s from, who he’s with, and whether he’ll sleep with them after the show. It sounds like 808s & Heartbreaks-era Kanye West making dirty small talk with strangers.
Jay has become famous for this kind of audience interaction, but he says it’s only for the first 20 minutes of his set. The rest of his shows follow a more rigid structure, with pre-written songs and traditional stand-up comedy interludes. No, Autotune is not always on.
“Most of my fan base finds me on platforms where they only get to see me for 30 seconds to three minutes per clip,” he says. “The goal is: How do we turn dopamine into a 70-minute show?”
Jay recognizes that for many fans, his show is their first introduction to live comedy. He attracts a younger audience by treating his performances like concerts. While many comics require cell phones to be sealed in pouches to avoid leakage, Jay allows the audience to take out their phones and film him. And not only is he performing to the crowd, he’s also performing to the camera behind him, so even someone with a nosebleed can get a good view of Jay on the jumbotron. You can also create a clip farm from your own shows, turning your tour into a self-fulfilling “marketing machine.” As he says, “I look into the camera for people watching in bed at night.”
Courtesy of Morgan Jay
Jay is the youngest in his family and grew up as a self-proclaimed “attention seeker.” From an early age, he realized that he was not destined for a “normal job”. He studied theater at New York University and signed up for an open mic night on his second day of college. “I thought there would be about 20 people in the audience, but there were 400,” he says. He remembers his first five-minute set being messed up, including jokes about the woods in the morning and how it would make more sense for Spider-Man to shoot cobwebs out of his butthole. “I did really well enough that people recognized me on campus,” he recalls. “When I look back on it, I probably cringe.”
Soon, Jay became obsessed with open mics, hopping to multiple venues a night. “I felt like Superman going out at night, hiding his true identity,” he says. Even before playing guitar on stage, he was leaning towards the musical line-up because “it was a more welcoming environment,” and he was sometimes given up to 20 minutes for some shows, four times the amount of time he would get at a comedy venue.
After graduating from college, Jay landed an internship as a production intern on NBC’s “The Tonight Show,” hosted by Conan O’Brien, during its single season. Working on a late-night show taught him “how to be a ruthless editor of my own material.” “Conan prepared three or four pages of jokes for his opening monologue, and the interns were asked to come down and watch Conan rehearse so they could get live reactions,” Jay says. “He read the joke and immediately said, ‘No, no, no, no, yes, no.’ He was not materially precious.”
Around the same time, Jay continued to perform and repeatedly auditioned for Just for Laughs. He had a revelation where he was bored with his set and asked himself, “Can I buy a ticket to my show?” He had always been singing and playing the guitar, so a friend suggested he incorporate that into his live activities. He spent the summer writing songs and refining his sets, gigging at night while working various day jobs.
After “The Tonight Show,” Morgan worked as a bicycle tour guide, performing his own show for tourists cycling around Central Park. Then he got a job selling iPhones. “Ninety percent of the work in the Apple Store is resetting passwords,” he says. However, this gig gave him training in digital editing and production software that later came in handy.
When Morgan was 20, he made a deal that if he didn’t make money within 10 years, he would stop doing comedy. “Just after 10 years, I quit my job at the Apple Store, got into 40 colleges the next year, and booked some commercials. From that point on, every year just got a little better.”
The pandemic was a turning point in Jay’s career. He concocted his signature recipe for auto-tuned crowd work while trying to liven up corporate Zoom gigs. Pitch correction became a mainstay of his live shows, giving the audience confidence and freedom and providing a sonic barrier for singing and speaking. As the comedian says, “Everyone in the audience can be Travis Scott.”
Jay currently tours the world from Dubai to Spain to Australia. In Brazil, he once performed half of his set in Portuguese. He noticed that Morgan Jay’s ducks appeared in certain locations. “People send me videos,” he says. “There’s a guy in India who’s doing the same thing as me. There’s a guy in Germany and Korea. It’s an honor.” He’s especially grateful that his viral success was coupled with a decade of open mic efforts. “When I started going viral on TikTok, thankfully I had 10 years of experience and a backlog of material,” he says. “Some people blow up on TikTok without having 20 minutes of material.”
Looking to the future, Jay has his sights set on the arena and hopes to do more acting. He recently appeared in a Live Nation Productions film and will also appear in the Chloë Grace Moretz and Anthony Ramos romantic comedy Love Language. Additionally, he is developing an original TV series with A24 that will have musical elements.
“People only see me as a comedian on TikTok,” he says. “I have a lot of sides of myself that I want to show.”
