Scientist evolved to career as comic
Tim Lee’s earliest stand-up wasn’t attempted at a comedy club or open mike night, but in the halls of academia, where the comedian remembers sneaking a slide of actor Tony Randall into a PowerPoint presentation about migrating fish.
“Salmon are semelparous, which means they breed once and they die,” Lee recalls. “At this point, Tony Randall had just had kids in his 80s. So I explained by saying, ‘Like Tony Randall; he’s breeding and now he will die.’ Some people thought it was funny and others were like, ‘No …’ ”
The mixed reviews didn’t deter Lee. The comedian no
longer uses his doctorate from UC Davis for research, but his science and PowerPoints have become a cornerstone of his full-time comedy career. The comic, who got his start in San Francisco, returns to the Punch Line comedy club on Tuesday and Wednesday, Jan. 10-11, and then heads to the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz on Friday, Jan. 13.
Lee graduated with honors from UC San Diego in biology in the 1990s and did field research counting whales and dolphins with the Scripps Institute of Science and Technology. He planned to become a college professor, doing graduate work in Davis, but while researching the salmon population in California rivers, he quickly fell out of love with higher learning.
“I don’t think I saw a salmon in the five, six years I was working on my project,” Lee says. “I was just getting data and analyzing it. … It got to the point where I didn’t enjoy it.”
After working different post-graduation jobs, including a stint at Charles Schwab working on software, he decided to try comedy. Lee crammed for his first stand-up appearance like it was finals week.
Comedy “looked very hard, and I tend to gravitate toward things that are hard,” Lee says. “I wrote down some jokes, and I worked on them for a while. I read quite a few books about stand-up comedy, which helped.”
Lee’s first try during comedy night at BrainWash cafe and laundromat in San Francisco got a mixed reaction, but he was hooked. By 2009, Lee decided to pursue comedy full time.
But the comedian didn’t exactly leave his degrees behind.
A Tim Lee performance includes a PowerPoint presentation, often with fairly complex scientific principles that are simplified into jokes everyone in the audience can relate to. In one of several popular YouTube videos that have received more than 500,000 views, he gives a lecture on the covalent bonds found in
Tim Lee: 8 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 11. $20. Punch Lineb, 444 Battery St., S.F. www.punchlinecomedyclub.com; 8 p.m. Friday, Jan. 13. $23-33, $9 for students. Kuumbwa Jazz Center, 320 Cedar St. #2, Santa Cruz. www. kuumbwajazz.org diamonds, before segueing into the absurd. (“I have a new discovery called a supercovalent bond, the strongest bond in the known universe, that forms between my roommate’s body hair and a bar of soap.”)
Aside from traveling to clubs around the country, Lee is also currently featured on the Science Channel’s “How Do They Do It?” But he says nothing about comedy has seemed easy — even after the hard work that went into getting an advanced degree.
Lee, who lives near Carlsbad in San Diego County now, still produces his own shows. He co-wrote a sitcom about a pharmaceutical company, which the comic says has been hard to get produced because of the potential to alienate advertisers.
Perhaps worst of all, he had to leave San Francisco several years ago. Lee loved living in the city, but has a family now and can’t afford it.
“I always talk about it with my wife. I’d love to live there, but it’s just too damn expensive,” Lee says. “We can’t afford a three-bedroom place in San Francisco. I could win the lottery and not be able to afford a threebedroom place in San Francisco.”
There’s no element of self-pity in his voice. Lee chose comedy when he was at a crossroads in his life, unsure if he wanted to be a scientist, or take a bigger risk for something that would make him happy. Turns out he could do both.
“I knew what I didn’t want to do any more, but I didn’t know what I did want to do, and that’s a hard place to be,” Lee says. “I thought I’d try comedy just to see if I liked it. It turned out to be something I love.”