On the “City Lights” series “Speaking of Comedy,” Atlanta’s funniest locals share insights on the perks and perils of their profession. This edition features Ty Colgate, a comedian in Atlanta who began his comedy journey in his early 20s.
For Colgate, like many entering the field, this meant stepping behind his very first open mic at a small coffee shop and bar. “The first one I ever did was in Orlando, Florida, at a place called Drunken Monkey,” he said. A year later, he moved to Atlanta and started serving up jokes on the local scene in earnest.
Though proud to call Atlanta home, Colgate says it’s “a brutal city to do comedy in.” Though the audiences can be tough to win over, he doesn’t consider that a necessarily bad thing. “To me, it’s always felt good to do it here, because steel sharpens steel,” said Colgate. “Atlanta’s a city that demands realness and authenticity. If you fail to bring that, a lot of times you’re going to struggle with Atlanta crowds.”
Despite Colgate’s warnings, our featured clip reveals the comedian eliciting generous laughs from his audience as he pokes fun at his girlfriend, and a mishap she encountered in her skincare routine. “My girlfriend accidentally made herself white,” he said. “She’s supposed to be Puerto Rican and Jewish, but for the past three years, my girlfriend’s been using this banana skin lotion from South Korea…. it turns out that it was a banana skin-whitening cream.” Colgate added, “I didn’t even notice she stopped getting pulled over… I never imagined racism would smell like yellow Laffy Taffy.”
He’s also mastered the delicate art of crowd work after cutting his teeth for years with hard-to-win local audiences. “There’s a certain chaos to it. I think crowd work brings a certain jazziness to your set, because people can see now, ‘Oh, you’re not just playing sheet music,'” he said. “You have the ability to improvise. You can go places with it. You’re not just some guy that can write something funny; you’re just a funny guy.”
