Comedian Conklin still cracking jokes
No sports.
No live audiences.
Not much laugh about.
To Joe Conklin, sports comedian, those are three tough pitches to take.
“You’ve got to adapt somehow,” he said.
Popular for his voice impressions, most from the world of Philadelphia sports, Conklin has continued to entertain on the Morning Show at WIP sports radio, where he long has supplied comic relief to Angelo Cataldi’s popular program. But his in-person appearances at casinos, banquets and nightclubs have stopped during the coronavirus pandemic. And even when he does what he is paid to do at WIP, and that is to elicit laughter, Conklin knows he must be careful to maintain a whole different kind of distancing.
A situation that is causing thousands of people to be hospitalized wouldn’t seem to be the best atmosphere for gagwriting. Then again, whether science would confirm it or not, there always has been some popular relief in laughter as a useful medicine. For that, it takes one with a lifetime of a grasp of the science of comedy to know where to take a bit before it twists from humorous to horrifying.
“I think it’s close to normal stuff,” Conklin said. “All the stuff with the masks and the name ‘coronavirus,’ everybody is dealing with it. So, yeah, you can put a humorous twist on it. You just can’t refer to the deaths.”
A radio comedian for more than 20 years, Conklin’s appeal often has been linked to his willingness to hustle potentially sensitive topics to the brink of shock. Some situations, and a worldwide pandemic would qualify, require an additional layer of caution. For that, WIP morning co-host Al Morganti serves as Conklin’s professional lifeguard.
“He clears my scripts in the morning,” Conklin said. “Even (President) Trump was talking about the number of deaths. He stopped that. He said, ‘100,000 would be a good number for us.’ I put something along those lines in there and Morganti crossed it out. Nobody wants to talk about that. That’s the worst part of this thing. People are dying. So you stay away from that. But masks are funny. There’s humor there.
‘Six feet away from everybody’ is kind of funny. But then you get sick of the same themes. With songs (parodies), just saying ‘coronavirus’ and rhyming it with something is not funny because you are hearing it all day.”
The coronavirus and the resulting shutdown would be a challenge to any comedian.
It is a particular challenge to Conklin, whose act uses sports, and in particular Philadelphia sports, as a baseline. He continues to amuse with his amazing imitations of Joel Embiid, Brett Brown, Merrill Reese, Allen Iverson, Charles Barkley, Charlie Manuel and dozens more. Audiences will always enjoy the classics. But if there isn’t a steady stream of athletes saying something strange, the immediate relevance that can define any accomplished humorist disappears. In the way that late-night talk-show comedians thrive on that day’s news, a Philadelphia sports comedian needs a general manager to seem befuddled, an important pass to be dropped or an athlete to wade into some off-field trouble.
“There’s no constant topicality updates that are normally there,” Conklin said. “So Angelo has to work harder. Everybody has to work harder. I have to work harder. You just have to keep looking for new angles. Like, I did Joel Embiid from home. I did Iverson from home. All of my characters.” Laughing at that very concept, Conklin said, “You just go through everybody and what they’re doing.”
They’re doing what they can, waiting for sports to resume, even if some will be contested at first in empty arenas. Odd as that may look, at least it is an option. What is not an option for a stand-up comedian is to perform in a nightclub full of vacant high-top tables.
Athletes can benefit from a supportive crowd. But there is no stand-up comedy without people there to laugh. In that, Conklin has taken an economic hit from the shutdown, losing casino gigs, workinghour appearances at companies looking to give their executives a comedic diversion and sports banquets. His website, JoeConkin.com, lists his next public appearance for June 20, when he is scheduled to appear with Big Daddy Graham at the Colonial Theater in Phoenixville.
Two months before someone can expect to laugh out loud at a comedian imitating Mike Quick complaining about an Eagles cornerback maintaining a safe social distance from a receiver?
That kind of lost income is not funny.
“Listen, for anybody in the restaurant or entertainment business, it’s a real shock to your system, to be sure, when your income stops,” Conklin said. “But I still have the radio check coming in. And a lot of people don’t have that. A lot of people are hurting and scrambling. This is a new world now. This is a new world. And you’ve got to adapt somehow.
“Talking about selling tickets to shows, some people aren’t going to come back for a couple years. But some people are going to come out right away. It’s just not going to be the same as it was, so all of us have to figure out some new angles for how we’re going to do things.
“You can do some things on social media and the internet. But like Angelo says, ‘How funny can you be in your house with no audience in front of you?’”
For Joe Conklin, who knows how to do it better than anyone, it’s just a matter of finding a different kind of voice.