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The Act Out - S02E03 - Cecil Armstrong Aka: Shuckey Duckey

·56 min·4 clips

There was no shucky-ducky.

Duck opens by calling Shucky Ducky a legend and says he first saw him at an open mic at the Arlington Improv, where he crushed it. He also says he knew the name from Herman Cain's "Shucky Ducky quack quack" line, but had not seen him before that night. Shucky Ducky then explains that comedy was not the original plan, because he was taking a continuous-education course that taught him how to market ideas and get publicity. Jerry Oaks helped him get his corporation laid out and think more clearly about promotion. A market survey with kids did not land the way he hoped, and one kid suggested the material would be funny if Eddie Murphy said it. That pushed him toward stand-up as the way to promote the idea. He went to an open mic night at the West End with a few street jokes and no real rehearsal. After he got off stage, Christopher told him he liked his voice and stage presence and pointed him to the Comedy Gym, which was at the Funny Bone in Greenville at the time. He signed up and started building material from five minutes to fifteen minutes and eventually toward forty-five minutes, all in 1987. The result is a grounded origin story about how promotion, stage nerves, and a few street jokes turned into a real comedy path.

As heard by us

A veteran comic's road from promo hustle to real stage mileage.

Shucky Ducky's story ties a marketing hustle to the first step into stand-up with plain, useful detail. The early stretch lands best: continuous education, meeting Jerry Oaks, learning how to promote, testing the idea with kids in a market survey, and then choosing stand-up when…

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Why you'd press play

You want the backstory behind a comic who built the act from scratch.

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