The Dry Bar Comedy Podcast · Dry Bar Comedy

Ep. 30 - The Wrong Way To Sneeze w/ Heath Harmison

·44 min·2 clips

Heath says his third stand-up set was in a 1,000-seat theater with 800 people and he had only done comedy twice before.

Jordan and Taylor open with their usual back-and-forth. They trade jokes about lunch, a $17 sandwich, rye bread, pastrami, and whether a restaurant name is worth saying before the money clears. The banter stays loose and a little petty, which works. That sets up a clean handoff to the guest. He says he did not know the rules of comedy, the light, or much of anything when he started. He also says he had always been a storyteller. At the time, he was working as a mascot at school. The story lands at a junior college in Twin Falls, in southern Idaho, where he was the eagle and had cheerleaders and basketball players around him. His first set ran twenty minutes. He liked it enough to go back the next week with different stories and do another twenty. An organizer for school entertainment heard him that second week. He offered him a paid show for the school. The gig was set in a thousand-seat auditorium. It would be advertised. It would be just him. He asked how long he was expected to perform. The answer was an hour. He says that in his head he already knew he had about forty minutes he could try. He also thought he had two weeks to find another twenty. Then the schedule got messy. The open mic he planned to use for practice was canceled. With one week left, the pressure tightened. The conversation circles back to the awkwardness of a bomb. Jordan notes how a bad moment can make your whole body sweat. The hosts laugh through the close. That keeps the ending loose rather than polished. They thank the guest. They point listeners to his special on YouTube and the Dry Bar Comedy Plus app. They end on the joke that the whole setup was weird.

As heard by us

A campus booking turns a comic's early grind into a loose origin story.

Heath Harmison's episode plays like a quiet origin story, moving from storytelling into paid stand-up without making the leap sound neat. It starts with lunch talk, a $17 sandwich, and who should be named on air, then settles into the first real run: 20 minutes at a junior…

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Why you'd press play

When a first 20-minute college set turns into a paid hour in a thousand-seat auditorium.

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