Hey everybody and welcome back to the ground up show. I'm your host, Matt Diabella, and today I'm

sitting down to speak with the very funny comedian and writer, Blake Wexler. His last album went to number

one on iTunes. It's called 12 years of voicemails from Todd Glass to Blake Wexler, and I'll let

you do the math there to figure out what the album's about.

It's an incredibly funny, very creative.

I recommend everybody check it out.

On this episode of the podcast, we talk about self-distribution versus working with

production companies.

He's had experience taking both routes and was very informative on that.

We discuss how he got started as a comedian,

how he improved his craft, and one of the earliest experiences he can remember's bombing. It's pretty

bad. It's pretty brutal. But it taught him a lot about how to take things to the next level and how to deal with doubt and rejection.

It's a very, very good podcast.

I think you guys are going to like it.

Let's waste no more time.

This is Blake Wexler. For a lot of comedians specifically, you kind of have to be in either New York or L.A., right?

I think there's certainly exceptions, and there's certainly ways to kind of break through apart from that.

But it's such a part of being a comedian is the community, right, and connecting with people in person.

Yeah, I think I know three comedians who have made it work without being here, but they did spend extended series of time in New York or L.A. I mean, it depends on what you want to do, too.

Like, you could live anywhere and make a living off stand-up, you know, but if you want to write or if you want to act, God forbid, you could, you have to live like in New York, L.A.

Yeah, I actually had a similar trajectory where I was doing freelance work and all the gigs I was getting were weddings,

like local TV commercials. And all that stuff has to be, you have to be local to be able to do it.

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