Entertainment
Comedian Sam Jay Shares How Starting Late Helped Her Succeed on Next Episode of ‘Masters of the Game’
Jay herself got here to comedy relatively late—she began doing stand-up when she was 29. She had a tricky life before that. Her mother died, after which her brother went to prison. Jay was sick, depressed, and confused. She spent years recovering from loads of trauma. But in her late 20s, after coming out and finding herself, she turned to comedy and did it with a vengeance. Now, somewhat over a decade later, she’s a star.
Jay was a author on “Saturday Night Live” after which hosted an HBO show called “Pause With Sam Jay.” She also had a giant role in the Netflix movie “You People.” She’s a hysterical slapstick comedian who pushes boundaries and is open about her sex life together with her fiancé. In this incredible episode of “Masters of the Game,” we met in Brooklyn and spent a day chatting about her life and her craft. She reflected on what it was like when she finally began focusing on stand-up, wanting to be memorable. “I just wanted to be the best stand-up comedian in the world,” she said. “I thought, I just want to be great at this one thing, and I’m just going to put all my energy into being great at this one thing. I just wanted to be able to walk into a room and have people say, ‘I’m something special, you know, I do it well.’”
She now thinks that starting late gave her a bonus. You see, in the Nineteen Twenties, when she wasn’t doing stand-up, she was still a fan, and he or she considered it often. “In all the years that I wasn’t doing it,” she said, “I was subconsciously studying it. So I understood it as a mechanism and a contraption. I didn’t necessarily understand how I fit into the mechanism and the contraption, but I understood what it was and what it was supposed to do, when it was good, and how it was supposed to go together, as I understood it.”