Hecklers, Med School, and the Mic That Changed Everything

I share how I ended up living a double life as an emergency medicine doctor and a stand-up comedian, even when people think it makes no sense. I trace the moments that pushed me from college jokes to DC open mics, Chicago stages, COVID Zoom sets, and finally starting Pitt to Punchlines to bring both worlds together. 

• getting hooked on stand-up after a rough college hosting set and an early heckler 
• writing my first joke that actually lands and learning why reps matter 
• medical school time pressure and third-year clinical burnout 
• taking a research year at the NIH and rediscovering comedy in DC 
• headlining for the first time by building a room from my own community 
• bombing in DC and Chicago and learning how failure sharpens timing 
• balancing emergency medicine residency with open mics in Chicago 
• performing sold-out shows at Steppenwolf Theater with the Outcasted Comedy Tour 
• COVID whiplash: ICU work, moving to LA, and doing Zoom comedy 
• rebuilding confidence with sets in France and Switzerland 
• producing Courtyard Common in LA and learning how hard showrunning is 
• embracing the unique angle of being an ER doc comedian and turning it into a podcast 

I hope you guys continue to watch me over time

Transcript

Welcome To Pizza Punchlines

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Pizza Punchlines, everybody. Okay, today we are not going to talk about the fact that people think I'm Italian. We're just going to talk about how I got to where I am today, how I'm doing this comedy thing, plus this doctor thing, and how essentially I got to being this crazy in terms of trying to do this balance. All right, guys. When I tell people I'm an emergency medicine doctor and a comedian, the first thing I usually hear from them is, why the hell are you doing this? Is there something wrong? Is there something going on? Or the next question I have is, mmm, uh, what trauma do you have? And I'm like, you don't even know. But essentially, people don't really understand why I continue to do comedy if I have a career that's respectable, that is well-paying, that people give me respect for, and many other things. I, to be honest, uh for me, I don't know. I kind of love both. I don't really know how else to explain it. No one leaves a comfortable life and does something that is uh essentially uh very stress-provoking or stress-producing for a lot of

Why An ER Doc Does Comedy

SPEAKER_00 1:19

people. So uh just maybe as a baseline, why comedy for me, right? Why did I pursue this life of comedy? Essentially, I needed an escape from medical school. And I should say that it didn't always start that way with comedy, but the reason why it became a passion, and I continue to do it nowadays, is because when it started, it was an escape from the craziness of medicine.

College Hecklers And First Real Joke

SPEAKER_00 1:45

So let's go all the way, way, way, way, way back to talk about when the first time I did comedy. This is not when I decided I also wanted to pursue it so intensely, but the first time I actually did comedy was in college. Uh, in college, the first year I tried doing it for the Muslim community in college that I was part of, they always put on this comedy show each year. And this one year that asked me and my friend, who is Egyptian, to host it. Now, I'll be honest, we were not funny. We were trying to do these skits that we wrote out and planned out. And on stage, as we were doing it in between the comedians, some heckler in the crowd was like, that's not funny. And yes, it's true that wasn't funny, but come on, bro. Like it was, it was terrible. It felt terrible. Uh, that was my first experience with the heckler, and I didn't know what to do. So the next year, I was like, you know what? Fuck this skit shit. I'm not, we're not doing that. So the next year, I was like, okay, we're gonna tell a different type of joke or rather different setup for the joke. So not gonna do the skits. I'm gonna try to tell a written joke, kind of more or less in a stand-up form. And I actually still remember this joke. And I remember this joke was it was around Halloween, and I didn't really have a good costume. My co-host, she was Egyptian, so she kind of wear, uh wore a wig that kind of looked like Cleopatra. And me, I just wore this Nigerian jersey. And I remember the joke being like, hey guys, uh, it's around Halloween, and well, my co-host obviously Egyptian, you know, got the Cleopatra thing going on. I'm Nigerian, and I was trying to think of what really represents the culture and the essence of my people, but I really couldn't find anything that represented corruption. So I wore this, and it was the first joke I ever kind of wrote out, being like, I don't know how this is gonna go. I didn't go to open mics down back then. I was just uh a nerd in college who like studied all the time and did other things, but it went over super well. Uh so I remember that. So I kept on doing that like year after year uh in college, and it was great. But then I left

Clinical Year Burnout And NIH Escape

SPEAKER_00 4:00

college and went to medical school where you barely have time for yourself because you're studying so much and doing things focused on trying to become a doctor, that I did not really have time for comedy. Truth be told, I just didn't have time for it. And I will say medical school for the first two years and also the fourth year was not that bad. We were past fail, so all you have to do was pass. You studied a lot because you're still type A, but you know, it was past fail. So you had some time for other things, but I just didn't really make time for comedy as much. Uh, I remember I took a salsa class, so you know, you know, got the, you know, uh that going on. But I I didn't make that time for comedy and I just was studying and or doing other things that were close to campus. But uh I remember all of that uh disappeared uh during our third year of medical school, because our third year of medical school is the clinical year where you go into the hospital during the day, you work with different residents and supervising doctors who are called attendings, and you try to show them what you know, uh, but often you're showing them what you don't know based on the questions they asked you. And during that one year of medical school, we were graded. So in the first two years of medical school, people were super nice sharing their study guides and whatever. During the third year, people switched. Uh they became uh very intense. Uh, but the thing is that most people who got to medical school, you're already kind of very intense in terms of trying to study and get to that point. Uh, but uh it definitely turns up during third year where people try to one up one another. And I will say that for me, the third year was super hard because essentially it's like a system where you are going to school, uh trying to, or rather going to the hospital trying to show that you know something, coming back home and studying at night because you're trying to show them what you know. And then the end of each rotation, which could be four to twelve weeks, you have to take an exam, uh, both written, sometimes oral, and it's like super stressful. And essentially, the whole time you're in the hospital, you're trying to kiss ass to show these residents and or attendings that you know something or you're really interested in their field. I don't do well with just kissing ass for kissing ass. You know what I mean? I if I'm interested in something, I can show interest. But during that year, that's was part of the game. So after that year, I just needed a break. So I'm like, fuck this shit. I'm taking a year off med school. And the thing is that if you're in med school, you never really can take a year off and just like travel the world. That's not really how it works. You have to continue showing that you're interested in this field and continue kind of building up your resume in a way. So uh this year I applied for, or from the year after my third year, I applied for this fellowship in DC at the NIH. Shout up. And I got it where I could just go for a year and do research with super, super brilliant people for a year and I lived on the NIH campus. It was super cool. But most importantly, it was not as stressful and I didn't have as many responsibilities as I had when I was in medical school. So this year I had a lot more time in my hands. I knew that I went to DC because I needed an escape from medical school. But I will say that

DC Open Mics And Headlining Fast

SPEAKER_00 7:10

when I rediscovered comedy in DC, it was amazing. Absolutely loved it. I went to an open mic with some friends in downtown DC around this area called DuPont Circle. Uh, and it was incredible. So I remember after going to that open mic, I'm like, wait, I used to do this. No, I love this. I'm gonna do this. So I went and started going to open mics uh uh again and again and again, mainly around that area in DuPont Circle. I went weekly, honestly. It was great because for me, it allowed me to talk about and get people to laugh at things that I liked outside of medicine, anything from like politics to social issues to my life to so many other things. It was incredible. And I love the DC comedy community specifically because it's a very international city, but also a very smart city. And it's a city where you talk about what's going on in the news and people automatically get what's going on. Uh, it was a great place for me to start as a huge nerd and a curious person about the world. So I don't know, DC was incredible. So towards the end of my time in DC, I actually had the first opportunity to headline. And it wasn't headlining in the sense that someone paid me to come and do it. What I did was I had a friend who went to Georgetown Law School who booked a room for me. And during the time in DC, I was, of course, doing my uh uh the NIH program I had with people, but I volunteered at a certain thing and I made community there. And then I met different people in the city through other avenues. So I just invited those people and, like, yo, it's a free comedy show. They all came. We had about 50 people, and I was super new at comedy then, but I just kind of did it, right? I talked about these things and these stories, and it was super fun, and people really enjoyed it. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, but I did it, and it was super fun and had a really, really, really great time.

Chicago Bombs And Comedy Refinement

SPEAKER_00 9:00

Now, after DC, um, I uh went back to Chicago uh and I finished medical school, finished last year of medical school, which went back to being past fail. And I will say during this year, I had my first experience when I kind of bombed on stage, not once, but twice this year and like the year after. And bombing on stage is a necessary part of stand-up comedy. You may not be the funniest all the time. And if it just is not the right audience, or maybe you were off or you didn't work on your jokes well enough, you will bomb, and the audience will let you know that you bombed. And I remember there's this particular uh organization, DC, that planned a comedy show and had me be the headliner, and I just did terrible. I was super bad. And I actually remember I also bombed when I was back in Chicago later a couple years later, when there was this comedy tour, it was called the I remember like the super Muslim comedy tour. And a friend of mine, Yasmin, had invited me to be one of the comedians on it. And it was super interesting because in my comedy, I use profanity, I don't really care, but it was a comedy show for families. And I think the day before, maybe the day of the show, I remember them posting something, being like, there would be no profanity used at all. And the thing is that I was still super new at comedy then. I have a lot of material now that maybe I could probably do a cleaner set, but at that time it threw off everything, off my timing, threw off my stories. I was bad. Oof. But it's all part of the learning process. As you fail, you learn how to not fail again and you learn how to be better, learn to be more crisp with your punchlines and your timing. It sucks when you do it on a bigger stage, but you know, um, doing it on a bigger stage helps you get back out there. But, anyways, so I went back to Chicago after DC. I finished up medical school, I matched to residency. And I will say residency in the four years I was in Chicago as well for that in emergency medicine was a very difficult time to maintain comedy because comedy requires trial and error going to the open mics and working on your jokes, seeing if it works, like continue continuing to refine your jokes and like coming up with new ones. And in residency, to be honest, I was working a lot, a lot, a lot. Uh so it was kind of hard to maintain that. But that being said, through the time there in Chicago, when I did have the time in between rotations that were not as hard, or when I had more time, I would go to the scene and I love the Chicago community as well because they had a lot of incredible comedians who were super hardworking, down to earth, and very, very helpful, to be honest. Um, and I do think that sometimes my jokes with because people have told me I tend to be a very the quote unquote smart comedian where I talk about a lot of different things. But I do think Chicago really helped me further kind of bring my jokes down a level and not be as high brow and just be more relatable. And I really enjoyed it for that. Uh a really incredible scene. Really love the comics out there. And I actually had a really, really great and lucky opportunity to perform in a huge stage when I didn't have to kind of do all the things to produce a show. Me and these two other comedians, we were able to work with these uh with this uh particular uh theater in Chicago called the Steppenwolf Theater. And we uh we did this kind of comedy tour called the Outcasted Comedy Tour, where the Steppenwolf Theater hosted us for two nights. It was sold out shows both nights, and we had other people doing all the tech for us, and we just got to do comedy, and it was it was super fun, it was incredible. It was, it was, you realize that when you were at that level when other people handled the tech and like the ticketing and like the promotion for you, where you could just actually do comedy. It is really, really, really fun. But that was great. So, towards the end of my time in Chicago after residency, I knew I uh was probably done with Chicago, not because of the comedy scene, but I ooh, those Chicago winters are brutal. So I actually was deciding whether I wanted to go to LA or New York for the next step of both comedy but also medicine. So, because I was applying to a fellowship. So I only applied to fellowships in LA and New York, and ultimately I ended up uh going or matching and was planning on going to LA for a fellowship after I finished residency. And this was like in November of 2019 that I found out where I was going for fellowship.

COVID Shift To Zoom And Europe

SPEAKER_00 13:33

But as we know, in 2020, yeah, the entire world changed and uh this uh little thing called COVID happened. Uh and uh COVID was a thing. At the end of my time in residency, like everyone who came to the hospital was sick as shit. Uh we, I didn't, I had two weeks of vacation, I remember in April of 2020, but I couldn't take it because I'm like, I'm not going back home to infect my old parents, right, or my family. So I just stayed and I just volunteered in an intensive care unit for two weeks because they were overwhelmed with all the COVID patients. Uh, but then also uh it was sucked for me because I was moving to LA in a time when the entire city was shut down. So for almost a year, actually, mainly a year, I was doing Zoom comedy. We shudder when you think about that because Zoom comedy, it was tough. It was something done out of necessity, but it was not great. No one liked it. You're performing in front of a screen, you don't have the audience. It was not ideal, but you know, it is what it is. But uh that was uh uh that was a time. But after I spent that year in LA, I was doing my fellowship, working in different hospitals out here, uh, taking care of all the patients in the hospital, the COVID and non-COVID patients. I needed a break. I'm like, I'm getting the hell up out the US for a little bit. And luckily at that time we had a vaccine so we could actually travel and leave. So I actually, at the time I left, left the country, was in France for like two months because I'm a language nerd and was in south of France uh learning French. Uh but then at the end of my trip, I actually got a really incredible opportunity to perform stand-up in France and also in Switzerland. And it was incredible. It was the first time I've been on stage really in over a year and a half. And it was fun because for me, I really got to see what my stand-up would be like in other settings. And I also got to adapt and refine my stand-up for an international audience, which was super fun. Um, and that was really, really great for me. It was really confidence boosting because they laughed. And I'm like, oh shit, I can make other people laugh besides Americans and Canadians. It was incredible. It was a lot of fun. Um, so after that, I got back to LA and really kind of got to the LA grind because things were opening up at that time.

LA Grind And Producing Courtyard Common

SPEAKER_00 15:49

But what I had to recalibrate because I was not in Chicago, was not in DC anymore, had to recalibrate how to get on different shows, which is not easy because there are a lot of comedians in LA as well. Um so I had to figure out how to do that. So I was going to different open mics, uh really networking with different comedians. But I do think what really helped me get to that next level was when I got the opportunity uh with uh a co-host to take over this open mic and also start producing this show on the west side of LA. Uh so this show was called Courtyard Common, and me and my co-host, we uh we were there every week, essentially doing this open mic day in, day out uh on Tuesday nights and kind of working on how to get an open mic to become pretty regular. And then after maybe a couple months, we started to start producing the show on to one uh the last Tuesday of each month. And ooh, that was tough. But I actually do think that experience was super important in my comedy growth for many reasons because one, it really allowed me to get those reps in every single week. But at the same time, producing the show helped me really understand how difficult it is to produce a show and get people to come out and just watch up-and-coming comedians who are just really working at becoming really great at this really nuanced thing of comedy. But there are a couple of lessons that I really learned from uh hosting and producing this show for two years, and it's that first of all, uh it's really tough to get on stage every week. Uh, but you have to really do it to really improve your comedy like every week, multiple times a week. Uh, comedians are flaky as fuck. We had the open mic free for a while, and then we have people pay for it for a while. But regardless of whether we did that, uh, people will still drop out last minute. One of the things that was super fascinating to see was that you will see these people who are very new to comedy, but have such an inflated ego who come and think that they're gonna just make everybody laugh. When the truth is that they actually just kind of sucked, but you're not gonna tell them. They're gonna bomb confidently and still think they're the best comedian in the world, but actually they're not good. Uh, but I actually think that to be honest, like, you know, this was a really, really, really cool experience because we just got to see a lot of comedians who were really humble, really hardworking, who came to our open mic at the very beginning. And then we saw them grow and get better at comedy, and then we eventually put them on our show and they did excellent. I think that was one of the most amazing things to see in comedy and to make maybe a little bit of a like a comparison with medicine. So now I work as attending and I have like residents who kind of come and I see them at the beginning, let's say, of either their training or the beginning of their rotation and see how they grow and become much better over time. It was kind of like the same thing, just kind of seeing that growth was incredible. Um, I don't know, comedy was amazing from that perspective. Uh, but at the end, um, the show was great. Uh, we did it for two years, but it ended about maybe six months ago because uh the venue closed out and then we were just like, all right, boost, time to move on. Uh, we've since now passed the baton to other comedians who are gonna take over in our Instagram and like email lists and stuff like that. But it was an incredible, incredible uh two years of kind of really getting in the reps and really learning how to refine my own comedy and also networking with other comedians in LA. And at the end of that, I think what really

Turning Two Careers Into A Podcast

SPEAKER_00 19:30

helped me with my comedy too is that but just talking with other comedians, whether here or abroad or different places, as I started talking more about my experience as a doctor and also all the other jokes that I talk about in terms of different experience, people really encourage me to be like, hey, you have really great, like, you have really great comedy and really unique comedy in terms of being an ER doc and a comedian. You should not let that go to waste and talk about that. So there, well, with that information and also me becoming more comfortable talking about all these different things together, I was like, yo, let's start this podcast and like let people know and try to find a way to combine both of these things. I love talking about both comedy and the different topics not related to medicine, but also medicine and all the craziness that comes to that. So therefore came about Pitts a Punchlines, and here we are now. So yeah, that is uh how I got to where I am today. And uh, well, I hope you guys continue to uh watch me over time. Um and yeah, uh really thank you for watching me today. And uh we will see you next time.