Comedian, actor, and now author Dulcé Sloan was tricked into writing her collection of uproarious personal essays, Hello, Friends! – Stories of Dating, Destiny, and Day Jobs.
“I was bamboozled, I was hoodwinked,” she tells me over Zoom. Sloan’s manager, Reg Tigerman, convinced her to take the meeting, then write the proposal, and before she knew it, she had been roped into writing a whole entire book.
“I wanted to call it Don’t Call It A Memoir, I’m Only 39, and the editor was like, ‘That’s not a good title.’ I thought it was hilarious,” Sloan recalls. I agree with Sloan’s assessment, but eventually they decided on Hello, Friends!, her favorite way to greet people, and the book hit the shelves on February 6.
Sloan may have been duped into writing her memoir, but there are upsides to the project. For one, she hopes that now people will grasp that she is a Daily Show correspondent, not a writer. She also wants people to understand that her career highs—besides The Daily Show, she voices Honeybee on The Great North and was featured on Netflix’s Verified Stand-Up—haven’t just cropped up out of nowhere.
“I want people to be able to see me as a person. I want people to be able to see that success is not overnight,” she shares. Hello Friends! achieves that, taking us from Sloan’s childhood—spent in Miami, Oklahoma City, Colorado Springs, and Atlanta—to her time in college to present day, and woven together with funny, endearing anecdotes.
Sloan originally aspired to be an actor (her dream job would still be playing a Klingon in the original Star Trek series, with “long wavy hair, titties popping”), majoring in Theatre Performance at Brenau University. However, Atlanta-based comedian Big Kenney Johnson’s encouragement and a dream of her mother’s, in which the whole world was laughing at Sloan, changed her trajectory.
“That’s why I took [Big Kenney’s] stand up class, because she had a dream. And she said she didn’t understand the dream, like, ‘Why are people laughing at my child, what had happened, what you do?’” Sloan says. She was unemployed at the time, but Johnson believed in her so much that he waived the class fee: “He was like, ‘You’re supposed to be a comic. I’m not gonna charge you.’”
She put in years of effort working at random day jobs to get where she is now (she owns a house with a dedicated craft room!). In Hello, Friends!, Sloan delves into her employment history: As a kid she sold wholesale toys at the Florida City flea market, and since then she’s worked everywhere from Victoria’s Secret to used car lots. Sloan would punch the clock at a stucco supply company during the day, then at night would do stand-up, and sometimes at the weekend take on extra gigs doing crafts at kids’ birthday parties (crafting is still a big hobby of hers: she creates a portrait of her manager Tigerman for his birthday every year in different mediums).
That’s why, when I ask how Sloan manages to balance her time these days between stand-up, The Daily Show, The Great North, her podcast Hold Up with Josh Johnson, her recently launched lip gloss company Giggle Gloss (with fellow comic Lace Larrabee), and this book (not to mention some other projects I’m either forgetting or unaware of), her answer is nonchalant.
“I’ve never not had multiple jobs,” Sloan explains. “So for me, it’s something that I’ve always done… It’s never been a thought of how to balance it. It’s just: This is what it is.”
In addition to her current commitments, Sloan is developing “something new” with Daily Show writer and her podcast co-host Josh Johnson, though she can’t say much about it at the moment.
“I love working with Josh… He’s one of my good friends. One of my best friends,” Sloan says.
Another pal she has plans on working with is Shalewa Sharpe, who started doing comedy in Atlanta in 2009 around the same time as Sloan. She previously produced Shape’s show Don’t Reach in the Bag, which draws on Sharpes’ half a dozen years working at an Atlanta adult video store, and they hope to bring it back.
“She’s one of those comics that I would watch and just go, ‘Am I writing jokes? What am I doing?’ So she’s always been such an inspiration to me. And I just love her performance style because it’s very low key. She’s just an amazing joke writer, and I wish the whole world knew about her,” Sloan explains.
As our conversation comes to a close, I ask if she has any parting wisdom for Paste readers, like the little nuggets of insight she ends most chapters of Hello, Friends! with.
Her thoughtful response is still sitting with me: “If you’re worried about a balance between the personal and your professional life and you’re having more success in one than the other, don’t feel like you live half a life, because everything works together and the longest thing you’ll ever do is be alive.”
Hello, Friends! – Stories of Dating, Destiny, and Day Jobs by Dulcé Sloan is out now.
Clare Martin is a cemetery enthusiast and Paste’s assistant comedy editor. Go harass her on Twitter @theclaremartin.