Standup comedian from Gary launches new podcast
For more than 40 years, Michael Joiner traveled the country as a standup comedian, actor and entertainer. His heart, though, never left the Miller section of Gary, where he was raised.
“There’s something about Miller … something magical,” Joiner told me from his home in Kansas City after he finished shooting a new film in North Carolina.
Joiner, a 1977 graduate of Wirt High School, has launched a podcast about his upbringing in Northwest Indiana. “Miller Beach Podcast” shares stories, memories, and the names of people that viewers haven’t possibly thought about in decades. But once they hear these dusty names, stories roll in like waves crashing on a beach.
“Remember Mr. Gonzalez at Wirt?” Joiner asked me.
“Remember him?” I replied. “I’m still scared of him.”
Joiner recalled Gonzalez’s sneaky way to see if students were smoking pot in school, a commonplace occurrence in the 1970s at our high school.
“He didn’t smell our breath,”
Joiner said. “He smelled our fingers.”
Joiner’s podcast website echoes the feelings from a generation of Miller natives: “Growing up in Miller and Aetna in the ‘70s and ‘80s was totally boss.”
Joiner told me, “For years, whenever I got together with anyone from Miller, our conversation eventually got to stuff we did back in high school or living in Miller and Aetna. These are stories that you can’t make up, and even though we may have heard them a million times, we still told them to each other.”
This decades-long conversation captures the essence of his Miller Beach Podcast.
Its third episode is titled, “Unforgettable People, Foot Fetishes, and a Crazy Hitchhiking Story.” One listener, Natalie Parfenoff Matuszak, commented, “Best last four minutes ever! Cried and peed my pants, I laughed so hard.”
As an entertainer, you can’t beat that review.
Joiner’s podcast reflects his true personality, somewhere between his stage persona and public image. “It’s definitely closer to who I really am,” he said.
The podcast reflects his natural smart-aleck sensibilities, which have become a trademark of his standup work. He’s known as a “clean” standup, meaning he doesn’t have to use curse words to conjure laughs.
“My audiences usually don’t realize I’m clean until after the show,” Joiner said.
He doesn’t like being billed on the road as a clean comedian because of its “unfunny reputation.” Joiner is anything but unfunny.
“Going to high school in Gary, when an English teacher asked what comes after a sentence, our answer wasn’t a period. It was parole,” he jokes on stage.
He’s performed sold-out comedy tours, hidden camera pranks, and internet skits for 25 years, featuring his sarcastic style of observational humor. He’s also written for other standups, as well as for “The Tonight Show” and “Politically Incorrect.”
“Growing up in Gary is Indiana’s best kept secret,” said Joiner, who will be returning to the area this summer for Wirt’s multi-class reunion. “The first time I showed my wife the view of the Chicago skyline from Miller Beach, she couldn’t believe it.”
He met his wife, who was raised in Missouri, while living in Griffith in the 1990s. Joiner was hired to perform his standup comedy routine for a church banquet.
“When I knew she was the one, I moved to Missouri and that’s where we got married and started our family,” Joiner said. “I remind her all the time that I was on my way back to Hollywood.”
In 1986, Joiner moved to Hollywood to find stardom, or at least his first acting job.
“I worked as an extra, which is not the way to get into acting,” said Joiner, admitting that he did too much drinking and partying at the time.
He landed a role as Bruce Willis’ photo-double in the hit TV show “Moonlighting.” In 1988, Willis gave Joiner advice, prompting him to return to Northwest Indiana and learn the craft of live community theater. He found his way to Valparaiso, where he began stage work with other local thespians.
“What a great place to cut your teeth as a young actor,” Joiner, now 62, recalled.
A few years after marrying his wife, the couple moved to the Hollywood area so Joiner could seriously study acting. He found an agent, earned his chops through 350 auditions, and got hired for acting roles. He remembers auditioning alongside standups like Jim Gaffigan, another Northwest Indiana native.
In 2008, when the recession hit, acting roles faded to black for Joiner so the couple returned to Missouri to continue his career. Two years later he landed a major role in the film drama, “The Grace Card,” leading to other feature films.
“As someone from Aetna who made a lot of dumb choices as a teenager, I feel so fortunate how my life has ended up. Anything could have happened back then,” said Joiner, who was raised without his biological father.
“My friends used to think it was cool that I didn’t have a dad who was always on my case. But I soon learned that they were the cool ones because they had dads who taught them discipline. I’m learning lessons even now that I should have learned back then.”
On his podcast’s second episode, recalling high school crushes, Joiner’s public confession about a girl he once knew prompted her to contact him after watching the show. What woman wouldn’t enjoy such a distant memory that feels like yesterday?
Most people have an affinity for romanticizing their teenage years, as well as where they spent those years. It doesn’t matter if that period was wild and crazy or quite unremarkable. We tend to glorify and crystallize it anyway. Joiner’s podcast plays into this nostalgic vibe. Each episode puts together a puzzle of memories that needs listeners’ pieces to complete it.
“I wondered if other people would also enjoy these stories,” Joiner said. “It turns out they do.”