‘Shame, Pain’ and Damon Millard

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Photo: Damon Millard - Facebook

Damon Millard

Damon Millard

“In New York, I tell people I am a Milwaukee comedian."

Thus says Binghampton-born Brooklyn resident Damon Millard. He isn’t speaking from geographic confusion either. Discriminating Milwaukee humor lovers from the ‘00s may recall Millard as a figure on the forefront of what would become the city’s currently thriving comedy scene. He returns to the town that birthed his career for 8 p.m. shows on Friday, June 17 and Saturday, June 18 at The Laughing Tap (706 B S. 5th St.)885-0129).  

“I moved to Milwaukee in 2008 to take a job as a photojournalist at Fox 6 news,” remembers Millard. “It was my dream job come to life.; I loved it; I was really talented at it, too, if I do say so myself.”

Dreams, however, can change. As Millard puts it, “And then I found comedy, and I couldn’t get enough. It started getting in the way of my job; I was obsessed with it. I rushed through my work, cut corners, always asking to switch shifts or call in sick just to do some unpaid gig in Chicago or way up north.” Menial jobs, such as one on a ferryboat near Ellis Island, kept him sustained as he rose up the ranks of Gotham stand-ups. But Millard’s time in Milwaukee has left a legacy that continues to reverberate. 

Caste of Killers

 “Me and my friend, Jason Hillman, started a comedy group called Caste of Killers, and we started producing our own events. We built a comedy scene where there was none,” Millard recollects. “The hustle and drive that it took to do all this was insane. On top of writing and being good performers, we also had to find venues, hustle up an audience, make posters, do promotion and everything you never really think about that is 90% of a show. I took those same ambitions with me when I left this city in 2013. It’s allowed me to be able to take no for an answer; and, boy, have I heard no … like a million times. You just keep going and going and knocking on that door.” Though Caste membership could number in the teens, its core five included Millard, Hillman, Marto Robinson, Ryan Mason and currently frequent local improv headliner Lara Beitz. 

The tough breaks Millard references didn't commence with his comedy career. What he now does to elicit chuckles from others has become a way for him to make sense and light of a dire, impoverished youth. 

Of the often laugh-to-keep-from-crying tenor of his first album. 2016’s Shame, Pain and Love, he reminisces, “When I first started writing jokes, I went back and analyzed my childhood memories, trying to crawl back into that headspace. A lot of what I wrote comes from how I think now and not what I used to be like. I do my best to capture the feelings.

“I had, to be honest about how growing up was and how I coped with a hard life, being an outsider and poverty. But I’m writing this all in retrospect from a safe place, and sometimes it’s hard to get back to how I used to think. But I really try to give my old self a voice. I do my best to let that kid live again.” Millard’s more recent work about concerns adult life, but it offers only paints only a relatively rosier picture. “A lot of my new material is about my life now. I’ve had a lot happen in my life: love, loss and quitting alcohol. So, this is where I’ve been focusing,” he states.  

Hitting Hard

The way Millard describes his stand-up just about parallels the roll of a cruise director on the River Styx. “When I’m really hitting it hard onstage, and I’ve got the crowd eating out of my hand and I’m barely sticking to the script, there’s a magic that I can literally feel and I think it’s this relief happening to the crowd finally being free to look at the darkness with eyes wide open. They’re with it because I’m in control up there, navigating us through the darkness.” He describes before breaking up the gloom he paints by declaring. “Wow, how pompous can I be, right?” 

There’s no pomposity in Millard's tone, though, when he speaks of his sincere appreciation of the position he has achieved and the kinship he desires to establish with listeners. 

 “I really try to connect with my audience. They are so special to me, and a lot of people slip out of the comedy club before I ever get to tell them that. It’s like the ultimate feeling when you know they don’t have a worry in the world, and they are hanging on your every word just to hear what you say next. In the right mood, at the right show, I won’t know what I’m going to say. I love that," Millard says, “I love that back and forth of energy: the jokes and then receiving, the laughs that gives me permission to go farther. When I’m free like that I usually abandon the script, and you might actually bump into the truth once in a while.” 

In one of the less harrowing bits on Shame, Pain and Love, Millard offers some deep background on the company where he last worked before going into comedy full time, Amazon, and ... racist fish?