Through a joke, darkly
Denver comic Sam Tallent’s debut novel confronts stand-up’s demons
Sam Tallent, a nationally touring Denver comic who prides himself on his manic, seat-ofyour-pants improvisation and punk-rock credentials, is ready to be taken seriously.
“My comedy’s silly and stupid,” the 33-year-old said last week. “It works at the Oklahoma comedy club as well as in Denver. But if you’re a comedy nerd, you can find interesting things there, too.”
Stand-ups often labor to balance smart and stupid in their acts, but Tallent’s sets frequently blow past that goal on the way to surreal, blissful chaos. Rapid-fire wordplay rams headlong into ridiculous, inventive premises as the physically imposing Tallent roams the stage, constructing bits in real-time.
“The economy of words is important in stand-up,” said Tallent, who makes up one-quarter of the Fine Gentleman’s Club, the Denver comedy institution that formerly ran weekly showcases under the Too Much Fun banner. “I could never write a joke down on a piece of paper, like some of these other comics.”
That’s funny, considering his latest project.
The deal (or lack thereof)
Tallent self-published his first novel, “Running the Light,” on his own Too Big Too Fail Press in May. He had tried shopping it around to traditional publishers via United Talent Agency, but the offers that came back felt too low to Tallent’s agent -- who had worked on bestselling memoirs from comics such as Chelsea Handler.
“He loved my book but didn’t know who the market was for it,” Tallent said. “Eventually he said, ‘I’m not doing you justice,’ and a month later, COVID hit. I didn’t want to self-publish at all. I wanted literary prestige. I wanted it to be reviewed by The New York Times.”
Despite that, Tallent has gotten
rave reviews and promotional help from national comics such as Kyle Kinane (the “voice of Comedy Central,” who wrote the introduction to the novel) and Doug Stanhope, who’s welcoming Tallent to his Bisbee, Ariz., compound for a podcast recording this week.
In addition, Tallent estimates he’s made “20 times more money” on the book by self-publishing and selling directly than he would have with the best deal his agent was offered (signed copies will set you back $25 via samtallent.com). Sales have recently passed the 3,000-copy mark, and Tallent is nowhere near done promoting it as he hand-delivers copies to buyers during the shutdown.
It’s not an unusual place for Tallent to find himself. The Elizabeth native, who moved to Denver in 2005 to attend Metropolitan State University and later dropped out, made a name for himself in Denver in the 2010s with his fiercely DIY ethics.
As a comic, Tallent hosted arguably the two most brutal comedy nights in the city — the infamous Squire Lounge (taking over from Greg Baumhauer) and The Lion’s Lair (with Roger Norquist), both open-mics on East Colfax Avenue — as well as one of its most prestigious and popular stand-up showcases, Too Much Fun.
A roaming night that eventually settled at the Deer Pile art space above City O’ City, Too Much also spawned its own, scrubby festival (Too Much Funstival) and welcomed drop-in guests such as Dave Chappelle and other Comedy Works headliners.
But Tallent also helped preside over massive parties at his Mouth House punk-rock/comedy compound (we’ll get to the alligator in the bathtub in a minute) at 29th and California streets, and drummed in bands such as Red vs Black and Big City Drugs.
“The first time I ever killed on a stage was during my senior-year football banquet,” said Tallent, an all-state football player who manned right tackle for a lefthanded quarterback. “I was roasting the coaches and teammates and my dad said, ‘I didn’t know you were funny until you crushed at that.’ ”
After high school, Tallent began taking improv classes at Bovine Metropolis Theater and studying comedy and rhetoric at Metro. He received a C grade in his comedy final because he couldn’t make the class due to performing on Bovine’s main stage that night.
“The irony was not lost on me,” Tallent said.
He entered Comedy Works’ prestigious New Faces competition a couple of years later and made the finals, but choked, he said, due to his inexperience. He then split his time between Denver and Ithaca, N.Y., where old friend and Red vs Black bassist Clay Dehaan lived. From there, he toured with his band Red vs
Black, released albums and generally lived the “dumpster diving” lifestyle, scrounging, partying and devouring books along the way.
It wasn’t until Tallent met Denver comic Nathan Lund, who was cooking up a new comedy showcase with buddies Bobby Crane and Chris Charpentier, that Tallent decided to invest in Denver comedy again — having previously found the scene to be unbearably cliquish.
“I lived off that $25 I got each Monday from the Lion’s Lair,” Tallent said. “But the first ten years of my life in Denver had really been all about music.”
Once Too Much Fun launched — influenced both by scene regulars like Troy Baxley and Chuck Roy, and DIY landmarks like Los Comicos Hilariosos (which would later become The Grawlix) — Tallent shed his disdain for the “hipster popularity contest” that was Denver’s unforgiving, underground comedy scene at the time.
Tallent also began touring his stand-up, opening for bigger comics, dropping in at festivals, and otherwise carving his own path in cities that he would come to visit repeatedly. He moved into the Mouth House, as it was called, where touring punk bands and national comics performed during raucous parties that caught the attention of undercover police detectives.
“Their way of trying to look like punks was having all of them wear Social Distortion T-shirts,” Tallent said with a laugh. “All of them. They’d walk around the parties asking how old people were.”
At the same time, Tallent and his 15 roommates rented bouncy houses and alligators to add to the dilapidated circus atmosphere at Mouth House.
“We befriended this alligator farm owner from Alamosa who would charge $10 per picture to get snapshots with it in our bathtub,” Tallent said. “The (expletive) thing is that we only had one bathroom, so people would be (relieving themselves) in the yard while this guy’s daughter held the alligator upstairs.”
Around 2012, the Mouth House came crashing down when cops smashed through its gates and threatened to arrest partygoers for underage alcohol consumption. Later, as Too Much Fun was winding down and many of Tallent’s peers were fleeing to the coasts to pursue careers, Tallent moved to Las Vegas with his wife, who was there to complete her first two years of medical school.
Without good friends, or much of fire in his belly for performing, he began to write.
On stage, then the page
“Running the Light,” Tallent’s 287-page debut novel, follows comic Billy Ray Schafer, a casually racist, deadbeat-dad drug addict who acts as an archetype for the hundreds of aging, self-hating comics Tallent has witnessed over the years.
Of course, the character should not be confused for its author, Tallent said.
“I don’t think there’s anything to applaud in him. Modern literature wants you to root for the protagonist, but some of the best books are about pieces of (expletive),” he said, noting novels such as Philip Roth’s “Sabbath’s Theater” and Cormac Mccarthy’s “Blood Meridian.” “I like a disgusting main character, but I don’t aspire to be like them.”
That’s a good thing, as Schafer’s life is likely to leave many readers with a vicariously sour taste in their mouths. In vivid, electric sentences that read like cinematic tracking shots, Tallent recounts a string of bizarre and depressing gigs that Schafer performs, including trips up and down the Interstate-25 corridor, as he flounders in his personal life.
“A bare bulb in the ceiling yellowed the chamber visible,” he writes about a backroom where a bar owner pays Billy Ray for a night’s work before producing a baggie of cocaine, “illuminating a row of stainless-steel kegs lining the wall like the torsos of B-movie robots.”
Besides the settings, many Denver comics and people in the scene will likely be interested in reading about Tallent’s barelyfictionalized versions of the region’s stand-ups, bookers and club owners, although some characters are amalgams.
“Billy Ray is the guy young comics fear turning into,” Tallent said. “These guys who get trapped in the cage of not having any other skills and blowing money and getting addicted to drugs. He’s the man I fear becoming.”
Tallent keeps saying “men” because stand-up is a statistically male pursuit. Although, as Tallent reminded, his main character’s misogyny, racism and depravity should not be confused for his own. An insatiable reader, Tallent’s writing betrays influences ranging from Hunter S. Thompson to the aforementioned Mccarthy and Roth. Rough characters, he said, are the point.
“I never outlined it and had zero plan for what the book was going to be,” he said. “It just poured out of me.”
Now based in Fort Collins — his wife is working a three-year residency at Uchealth Poudre Valley Hospital — Tallent is halfway finished with his next novel and increasingly drawn to writing over performing, despite the lack of instant, unequivocal audience feedback that drew him to standup in the first place.
“I think the book is the best thing I’ve ever done, creatively,” he said. “It’s like the pebble in the water — a few people bought it, reviewed it online, and told their friends about it, and that’s led to even more sales. My ego wanted the prestige of a (traditional) publisher, but I’m also proud of the fact that I have complete control over it and that people seem to like it.”