Patrick Hastie Still Loves the Midwest

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If you regularly attend stand-up shows in Brooklyn, you have probably heard Patrick Hastie’s voice. Hastie is a stand-up comedian originally from Iowa whose fast-paced, charming, and story-driven work has been seen on stages all across New York, from the former Creek and the Cave to the packed-out coffee shop in Lefferts Gardens where he co-hosts a monthly show. Having been a fixture of the New York stand-up circuit for over a decade, so long in fact that he was at one point the host of an open mic featuring one barely-passable comic who would soon realize his time was better spent conducting interviews than writing jokes, Hastie is set to release his debut album I WIll Fight All Of You on July 20th, and will be putting on his Edinburgh Fringe show My Grandpa’s Grandpa’s Dad throughout August. With I Will Fight All Of You being more focused on Hastie’s dad and their relationship, and My Grandpa’s Grandpa’s Dad being based around his ancestry on his mother’s side, Paste talked to Hastie about his background, getting started in the NYC scene, and how he’s evolved over the past decade of crafting and developing material.

Paste Magazine: Your family and your background inform a lot of your material. Do you consider yourself a ‘Midwestern’ comic?

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Hastie: I really like the Midwest, and Iowa. Sometimes when you tour in New York and tell people you’re from Iowa, they’ll be like “That sucks,” but I don’t know about that. Politically, it’s bad, but I love it there, that’s where my family is, and if they had a comedy scene like New York I’d probably still be there. Especially when you go back and tour places in the Midwest, they want to see stuff, they’re excited to see you there. My humor is very much from the Midwest, and I feel connected to it.

Paste: You’ve been in the NYC comedy circuit for around a decade. How has that helped you develop your style organically?

Hastie: Yeah, there were a few years where I was hitting up every open mic I could get to. I also ran an open mic for three years at The Creek and The Cave, and as well as the relationships I formed with other comics, I got good at comedy and found out the type of comedian I was by doing comedy there. You’re running a show, you’re in charge, you’re doing work, but you also have to be funny all the time and keep the show going. Especially in New York where the audiences for open mics are almost all comedians, when you get laughs going in a room like that, it feels great.

Paste: Do you ever feel jaded working the circuit for that long a time period?

Hastie: When I started doing comedy I was 25, so I had already made mistakes, I had already worked in the world, I had insurance, I had already met the woman who would become my wife. That’s helped me think of this more as a choice I’m making, an art I’m dedicating myself to. It’s also helped me understand that this is all a crapshoot.

Paste: What can you tell us about your upcoming album, I Will Fight All Of You?

Hastie: I see it as a collection of greatest hits, in the sense of “This is what I gave the last 12 years of my life to.” It’s all the jokes I love, in a room where I had fun and had everyone on board. It’s an hour I’ve built. There’s a joke on there that I wrote at an open mic in Omaha, Nebraska in 2012, and it’s followed by a joke that I wrote a month before the taping. Generally, I find it easier to tell stories about my life than to write a joke about a situation, so it’s more of a biographical hour. I grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere, but I was also a punk kid, ended up moving to New York. It’s an hour full of jokes, it’ll make you laugh, but it’s also a little biography of my life.

Paste: You mentioned this album has jokes spanning your entire decade in New York. How has your style changed over the years?

Hastie: I started doing comedy during the podcast boom in 2010/2011, and everyone was listening to Marc Maron and talking about “finding your voice,” and those years running open mics and grinding sets helped me to develop that, and I hope set me apart from every other schlubby, Midwestern, white comedian. Because when I look at a set of mine from 2013, I talk very slowly, and I was influenced by Nate Bargatze and his style, and I wanted every word to mean something. Now, I’ll run over sentences and speak quickly, and if someone misses a punchline, there’s another one coming.

Paste: Do you see the album as a sort of culmination of your years spent grinding those open mics?

Hastie: I had planned to release the album in 2020, I had a date locked in, and then obviously the pandemic came and changed everything. And I, like most people, am a completely different person. And so I’m excited to have something to point to and say, “I’ve got that now. This was that time period, and now I can move on to the next thing.”

Paste: You have a show, My Grandpa’s Grandpa’s Dad, debuting at the Edinburgh Fringe in August. Did you change anything to adapt to the more storytelling-heavy stand-up shows that tend to excel at the Fringe?

Hastie: I’m still very much in the process of writing it all, but I did make some changes for exactly that reason. I spent 10 years writing and testing the material that’s on the album I’m releasing, and I started writing My Grandpa’s Grandpa’s Dad in February 2023. And you always have that thought when you make a different style of show of “Well, I’m good at this thing (stand-up), and now that I’m doing something slightly different, I have no confidence at all.” I don’t usually sit down and write jokes, I talk my way through them, but you can’t open mic a full hour, so I’ve been running this show over the phone to friends, even on my roof. I’m just gonna do stand-up, it’s what I do, but the show does have these grand throughlines, it is all connected and one big story. And I’m excited to see how it grows. I have no idea what this show will look like at the end of August, except that I will have done it 30 times.

Q: Is there anything else you’d want people to know about your comedy?

A: It’s not clean, and I wouldn’t want some old lady from my hometown to think “What the heck is this?”, but I’m also not some “edgy” shock comic where she’d think, “What’s he gonna say next??” It’s right in the middle. Real stories, there’s truth to them, they’re funny, but I talk about cum.

I Will Fight All Of You is out on July 20th.

Dylan Fugel is a sketch comedy writer living in New York, NY. Check out his work with Young Douglas, Story Pirates, or DM him Knicks tickets on Twitter @dylanfugel.