When I first moved to New York 12 years ago, I did what every terrified transplant does: I asked other comedians for advice…
This was a mistake, because comedians are a bag of cats and no two of them agree on anything. One told me to do every open mic in the city. One told me to do none of them. One told me, with great seriousness, to “find my inner hobgoblin,” which is the kind of thing people say when they have no actual information to give you and would like you to leave them alone please.
But there was one piece of advice that came back every single time, from every single person, like a liturgical response…
“Go get yourself a Mindy.”
Stop using Facebook photos for your headshot, you absolute disgrace, and go get a real one done by Mindy Tucker.
So I did. That’s how we met. I schlepped to her studio in Brooklyn, helped her haul lighting gear around Williamsburg in search of a wall that wasn’t a condo yet, sweated through a shirt, and carried the gear back up the stairs again. We did things this way because we couldn’t afford a studio, and back then you could still shoot outside before the entire borough turned into guarded glass.
That was twelve years ago. This week, Mindy came on Draw Me Anything, and I finally got to tell a few thousand people what the New York comedy scene has known for two decades: she’s the best there is.
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Here’s the thing about Mindy that took me years to understand. She doesn’t just take a good photo. She gets something out of you that nobody else can.
Comedians are a nightmare to photograph. We’re always on. We’re cracking wise, busting balls, performing, running a bit, because the bit is a shield and the camera is a threat. Point a lens at a comic and watch them deploy their entire personality as a defence mechanism.
Mindy disarms all of it. Her trick, which is not really a trick, is time. She found that comedians needed more time, and that if you gave people time they seemed to calm down and stop being nervous. She gives you a job. She has you help her move a light. And somewhere in the puttering and the “oh wait, stay right there,” the armour comes off, and she catches the actual person underneath.
When I told her this, she explained where it comes from, and it’s the best origin story: Her dad was a chaplain. Not a desk chaplain, a sports chaplain. He’d pray with the team before the game, sit through the game, and if a player got hurt, he’d be the one riding in the ambulance, relaying what was happening back to the church. And Mindy looked at me and said, with total clarity:
“Basically what I’ve done is I’ve taken what my dad has always done, and I’ve added photos.”
It was recently Jim Gaffigan, of all people, who first pointed this out to her. Four years into shooting comedy, he told her: “Your dad’s a preacher*, that’s why you get along with performers, you lived with a performer.” He just read her whole life back to her like a palm. She didn’t fully clock it herself until later. The wax-on-wax-on moment; this realisation that she’d been training for the thing her whole life without knowing it.
(*Other famous preachers-turned-comedians include the incredible Sam Kinnison and one-time NYC Regular Justin Smith)
A million of us. In a box.
Now to the actual reason she came on… Mindy’s launched something called Mindy’s Comedy Archives, and you need to understand the scale of it before you understand why it matters:
She has, at last count, over one million photographs. A million. And that number was current as of the day she taped her second and third episodes, so it’s already wrong, and wrong in the upward direction, because she keeps adding to it…
I went on a bit of a tear about this on the show, so forgive me, but: there is no real history of New York comedy. There are scattered special reviews, the odd opinion piece in the Times, a Chortle write-up here and there. But there is no cohesive, visual, living document of this absurdly specific art form in this absurdly specific city.
Except there is. It’s in Mindy’s hard drives.
Last week I had Myq Kaplan on, and we talked about the brutal churn of a comedy career: the bright-eyed arrival, the agent, the manager, the late-night spot, the sitcom, the rollercoaster with no terminus. Myq’s point was that once you realise that’s the career, the constant insane flux, that’s the whole thing.
What Mindy has is that flux, frozen, frame by frame. One comedian over an entire career, from their very first nervous headshot all the way through shows and festivals and late-night spots, and you watch them change. Their posture, their costume, their face. They age. They evolve. Nobody else has documented this the way Mindy has. She did it by accident, one shoot at a time, for twenty years.
The format
is beautifully simple.
A comic comes in and gets handed a box of photos. It starts with the very first photo Mindy ever took of them, and they go in chronological order, telling her as much or as little as they want about what was going on in their career and in the New York comedy scene at the time.
The first episode, out this week, is with Rosebud Baker, and Mindy calls it the blueprint. Rosebud starts in a 2014 group photo, a gaggle of comedians, and by the end they’ve done a Netflix special cover and land on her book cover.
“That’s why we live here.”
The first episode didn’t go perfectly. The blog post wasn’t up on time. The workflow wasn’t sorted. And Mindy’s attitude toward all of it was the thing I keep turning over. She told Rosebud, essentially: it’s not perfect, can you help me get started?
