George Civeris took a roundabout path to a career in comedy. After graduating from Stanford University in 2013, he lived in San Francisco and worked in the tech industry. Like many young people in the midst of their first jobs, however, he felt there was something better out there for him.
“I had this very narcissistic idea of thinking I was very unique for thinking that tech was evil,” Civeris told PGN. “I wanted to go to grad school to write critically about tech. That was my dream — I wanted to be some sort of social scientist who wrote about how social media is very harmful and bad for communication.”
That goal took him across the country, where he attended graduate school in Boston. But he soon found himself spending as much time at open mics as in the classroom.
“I kind of fell into stand-up, because on a lark I decided to take a stand-up class on my winter break there,” Civeris said. “Through that class, I met a lot of people in the Boston comedy scene and met the people who ran the Comedy Studio, which was the local club in Cambridge. I was very lucky because the right people saw me and booked me on shows, and within a few months, I felt like I was part of a community.”
Civeris’s early interest in stand-up paid off. Today, he is the co-host of the popular comedy podcast StraightioLab, alongside fellow queer comic Sam Taggart, and has been featured regularly on Comedy Central. He is currently in the midst of a solo stand-up tour, which will come to Philadelphia on Aug. 22 for a performance at PhilaMOCA.
When PGN spoke to Civeris in mid-July, he had just performed in Pittsburgh on a fortuitous occasion.
“It was sort of a trip, because the show happened on the night that Trump was shot, and that happened like 45 minutes away from the venue [in Butler, Pa.],” he said. “I had the amazing chance to break the news to people when I was onstage. I also got to break the news to my opener, and then made him go out and do stand-up comedy right after finding out there had been an assassination attempt.”
The tour will take Civeris all over the country — in addition to his former home bases of Boston and San Francisco, he’ll be playing Seattle, Portland, Chicago and Washington, D.C. as well. He began working up his current hour at shows in New York and Los Angeles throughout the past few years.
“There’s a good 20% of material that is formed from things I’ve been doing for the past three or four years, so it’s pretty tried and true,” Civeris said. “That’s the stuff that I know does well and is not really correlated to any specific theme. I wrote the first draft [of the current show] in about one month about a year ago, and I did that first draft in Brooklyn last July. Then I didn’t really look at it again for three months — because I went on vacation, and then Sam and I went on tour last summer — and then I returned to it and started editing it. I’ve probably done it a total of ten times, and each time, I’ll usually choose a part of the show to workshop.”
Some of the material Civeris handles in on the more topical side.
“I have this closer that hinges, without giving too much away, on people recommending books that everyone should read that would unite the country before the election,” he said. “I workshopped that basically by doing crowd work over and over again and seeing what books came up, then workshopping why the books would divide, rather than unite.”
Since embarking on the summer tour, Civeris has found that his target audience is broader than he might have expected.
“I feel very connected to everyone who comes,” he said. “I feel like they could be my friends, my sisters’ friends, my parents’ friends, depending on their age. There have been a few things I didn’t expect. In Chicago, I met this woman who drove from Indiana. She was probably in her forties or fifties, and she came with her husband. I guess I always assume that everyone who listens to the podcast is very similar to us — that it’s all people who are queer, in our age group — so it’s a nice surprise that other people from other places are listening and getting something out of it.”
Civeris won’t have much time to kill when he gets to Philly, although he’s looking forward to the return after performing a live episode of StraightioLab at City Winery last summer.
“If anyone is at the show and wants to take me out, please come talk to me after the show!” he said with a chuckle.
George Civeris will perform at 8 p.m. (doors open at 7:30 p.m.) on Aug. 22 at PhilaMOCA, 531 N. 12th St. For tickets and information, visit dice.fm.
