Admittedly, it was a pretty tough crowd, but Joe DeRosa had seen tough crowds before. He once drove two and a half hours to do comedy behind a liquor store for 40 bucks. He’d performed at the Gathering of the Juggalos. But this was different. Far worse than meager pay or excitable, facepainted goons spraying Faygo with reckless abandon. This audience was made up of tweens. Not just tweens, mind you, but Bar Mitzvah youngsters dancing around together, having a great time, discovering the opposite sex and trying to actually speak to it. Terrifying. Everything was going great until they cut the music and some jerk took to the stage to tell some jokes.
“It really sucks when you’re getting heckled and trashed and booed and ignored by children,” DeRosa remembers in a sobering deadpan. “What can you do? All their parents are there, watching the kids. You can’t do anything to defend yourself. You can’t yell or curse at them, you have to just sit there and take it. I don’t think I did one joke. I came off stage and was walking to get my jacket, in my head thinking, ‘What am I doing? Why would I accept this gig? What is happening with my career? What is happening with my life?’ I was on the edge of a breakdown.”
Luckily, a 12-year-old savior appeared like so much light at the end of a very lonely tunnel.
“He goes, ‘Hey, buddy, you were funny. These kids are a bunch of assholes,’” DeRosa says, laughing. “That really happened!”
You might say that was the point where DeRosa knew this comedy thing could become a career. Then again, there have been a few moments like that. Even if it was the opinion of a 12-year-old (“I’ll take a compliment wherever I can get it”), it felt good, somehow justifying all the hard work he’d put in growing up in Philadelphia. Tough sets at the Laugh House, held up by lots of support from people in the area, including friends who encouraged him to move to New York and pursue his dream. Eventually, he would draw the attention of big names along the way. It all kinda snowballed from there, to the point where he was hosting a Dave Attell show back in Philly.
“Dave Attell, to me, still is the funniest person that literally ever lived,” DeRosa gushes. “Doing that show with him was such an honor. And to be doing the show at the Tower [Theater], that was another layer, because I was wearing a Frank Zappa t-shirt, and while I was waiting to go onstage, it dawned on me: ‘Oh my God, Zappa played here a bunch of times.’ I have recordings of Zappa at the Tower. It was all of a sudden a perfect storm. It was a real comedy show, and it was professional, and I was being paid, and it was my hometown and it all kind of just came together where I was like, ‘This is what I should be doing.’”
In addition to Attell and Patton Oswalt, another supportive big-name standup in DeRosa’s life is Louis C.K. DeRosa opened for him a few years back, but more recently he appeared on C.K.’s critically acclaimed show Louie. In the late-Season 2 episode “Halloween/Ellie,” DeRosa has a brief part as a film crew assistant who exchanges a few bitchy lines with the show’s titular character/creator.
“I was excited to be doing his show,” DeRosa says. “It was cool to be on set. When he came in and said hi to everybody, I got a little pat from him, that moment where, like, hey, we kind of know each other. It was a really fun and funny part to play. He gave me all these extra lines. I thought that was awesome.”
Like C.K., DeRosa operates within a distinctly dark area of comedy. Jokes are made about being broke and fat. Sometimes you’re left wondering if you’re laughing with him or at him, but that also makes the whole thing seem that much more relatable. He’s not out to mock you; he’s ready, willing and able to mock himself. Moreover, it’s nice to see a guy like this finding success in a competitive comedic world. A guy who clearly is interested in other things, things such as film (he references Woody Allen and Alexander Payne in casual conversation), while he worries about the people he’s performing for as well (“I try not to take it too seriously or think that I’m saying anything so important that it needs to be done at the expense of the audience’s enjoyment,” he says). At the end of the day, Joe DeRosa is a regular guy who feels like he’s pulled in any other number of directions every day, direction that each have their own, complicated set of concerns, concerns that, luckily, he manages to turn into entertaining jokes.
“I think most of what I talk about is pretty universal,” he says. “I don’t think I’m saying anything too drastic or too out there. I’m not a black-or-white kind of guy, because when too many people start going in one direction, that annoys me. I think the reason why a lot of people don’t go out on protest lines or hoot and holler about a certain cause, is because a lot of people feel like there’s more gray area than the media points out. There’s a lot of people in the middle of that.”