Brad Wenzel’s Punch Lines by the Minute

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Photo: Brad Wenzel - bradcomedy.com

Brad Wenzel

Brad Wenzel

Have you ever heard a comedian roll through one-liner after one-liner and wonder, “How long does it take to put together a set with so may punchlines?” 

Brad Wenzel, a comic who gives audiences their money’s worth when it comes to punchlines per minute, gladly reveals his professional secret when he shares regarding his latest special and album, joke. joke. joke.. 

“It took five years to make it,' he says in reference to his 2018 debut offering, Sweet Nothings, “but, also, I had to take over a year off because of the pandemic. So, more like four years. The sequencing takes a lot of trial and error, I headlined in 34 cities to work on it. It’s like a 70-piece puzzle. I think you get a little faster at turnover as your skills develop.”

Wenzel will elicit a high ratio of chuckles at The Laughing Tap (706 B S. 5th St.) for three shows over Friday May 12 and Saturday May 13. The transparency with which he is willing to share his creative process extends to his onstage demeanor, where he can outright tell audiences that that he's there to amuse them and admit self-effacingly admit to bits he doesn't believe to be his strongest, 

“I do it all the time,” Wenzel states of his Brechtian methodology of exposing his machinations. “I think starting in Michigan,” he recalls of his early career in Ypsilanti, and Detroit, “you really had to know how to riff onstage. Usually on the road, the audience wants you to prove you’re funny in the room before you can do your material. It also just keeps people engaged, makes you more present.” 

His engagingly low-key presence is something is something Wenzel has been practicing in front of stand-up lovers for all his adult life. But that would be the case for a comic who first regaled a crowd in high school! 

Hooked on Humor

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'joke, joke, joke' by Brad Wenzel

Wenzel recollects, “I started trying to write jokes when I was 15, but had no real plan for telling them. My older cousin also liked stand-up. He told me I was funny and if I ever wanted to do an open mic, he would drive me. I wrote jokes for about a year and then when I was 16, he drove me to my first open mic. 

“I was hooked, but didn’t really know where I could perform because I wasn’t 18. That lead me to taking a comedy class at one of the Detroit comedy clubs, Mark Ridley’s Comedy Castle taught by a local headliner, Bill Bushart. That graduation show is what I consider my starting point. That was my senior year of high school.” Wenzel’s wit has doubtless sharpened in the intervening years; his look, however has gotten shaggier, though agreeably so.  

“I grew it out during the pandemic, and it felt more fitting,” Wenzel observes of his tresses and facial hair. “Audiences seem to understand me, get on board with my jokes faster now. I like that.” A change from the cleaner-cut visage with which he started in comedy also puts him in the lineage of some of his forebears in the stye of humor he employs. 

Of graduating from his childhood appreciation of Adam Sandler and other mirth makers discovered through Saturday Night Live and Comedy Central, he says, “I loved all the one-liner comics like: Steven Wright, Mitch Hedberg, Demetri Martin, Zach Galifianakis. I wanted to be a part of that genre.”

And being firmly established in the tradition of offering comedy aficionados zinger upon zinger, Wenzel has no other agenda than to generate guffas. Or, as he says, “If you’re burnt out on culture war comedy and just want funny stuff, I’m going to tell funny jokes and goof around.” 

Here, Wenzel reverses the dynamic of “yo’ mama” jokes to the potential confusion of those who would be subject to them: youtube.com/shorts/gKrGY8ih0ms.

Stream or download joke, joke, joke by Brad Wenzel on Amazon here.