Let me tell you who Myq Kaplan is, because if you’re not already a fan, that changes today.
He’s been doing comedy for going on twenty-five years. He has a Comedy Central special. He was a finalist on Last Comic Standing. He’s been on Comedy Bang Bang and Keith and the Girl more times than I can count. He has two specials on YouTube - AKA and Rini - and a new one he’s just recorded. He runs a Substack called Myq Kaplan's Arty Har-Hars, which you should subscribe to immediately after this. He is one of the most densely packed laughs-per-minute comedians working anywhere in this city, and I say that as someone who has been watching this scene very closely for fifteen years.
He is also the reason I once shot IPA out of my nose at a comedy show on Second Avenue. But we’ll get to that.
The first thing you need to know about Myq Kaplan is that his name is, by design, a barrier to entry. It’s pronounced “Mike”, not “Meek”.
“I brought it upon myself, obviously, the spelling of my name,” he told me, almost immediately after we started recording. “There’s a little bit of a barrier to entry. But once you get past, then I feel like there’s a lot of reward.”
He then, in the same breath, held up a microphone. “This is a Meek.”
I say “by design” because everything about Myq’s comedy is by design -the spelling of his name, the precision of his phrasing, the way a simple prop becomes the punchline to a joke that is also, if you look at it properly, a philosophical position about the rewards of paying attention. Nothing is accidental. The commitment to craft runs so deep that it’s become invisible, which is when craft becomes art.
The name story is one I’ve been dining out on since 2014. I was a young, fledgling comedian appearing on a certain popular podcast, and I was doing my plugs at the end of the show. Bob Kelly was hosting. I was reading names off the lineup for an upcoming show - I think it was the Producers Club - and I arrived at Myq’s name, and I said: “and Meek Kaplan.”
The room turned on me. Louis J. Gomez. Dan Soder. Joe List. All of them glaring at me with the familiar expression that New York comics reserve for someone who’s just revealed a catastrophic gap in their knowledge.
“You fucking Australians,” somebody said. “How have you never heard of Myq Kaplan?” They laid into me for twenty minutes. About my accent. About my ignorance. About the basic expectation that someone doing comedy in New York should know who Myq Kaplan is, which is, I’ll grant them, a fair point.
And then, having absorbed all of this - having been fully educated and corrected and aware - I subsequently introduced Myq on stage that night as “Meek Kaplan.” Again.
Myq received this with extraordinary grace. “Your trauma is my treasure,” he said.
But the real first time I encountered Myq Kaplan was not that night. It was earlier - 2011, or thereabouts. I was still coming to New York as a tourist then, once a year, for a month at a time, in the way that people who are going to end up living somewhere do before they commit to actually living there. I was going to as many comedy shows as I could, trying to understand the scene, sheepishly introducing myself to people and then overthinking every conversation afterwards on the subway home.
The show was called Kabin. It was on Second Avenue, the back room of a bar. Rebecca Trent booked it. It was, by the general consensus of everyone who was there at the time, the best comic hang in the city. Their fifth anniversary show, I think it was, went from six in the afternoon until five in the morning. 11 hours. I was in that room for most of it.
I had a beer in my hand. Sean Donnelly was hosting, or someone like Sean Donnelly. Whoever it was said, with the full weight of insider authority: you are going to love this next guy.
I took a sip.
Myq Kaplan walked on stage and said something. I genuinely do not know what it was. I have never known. What I know is that the beer - an IPA, specifically, which made the whole thing considerably worse - travelled at velocity through my nasal cavity and exited my face in a direction that beer is not supposed to exit. My eyes were streaming from the carbonation. I was making sounds that grown adults should not make in public. Eight minutes later, Myq left the stage, and I was a different person.
It is a trauma-memory. The kind that’s vivid, not because it was bad, but because it was so involuntary. The laugh didn’t ask my permission.
“That’s very, very kind, very thoughtful for you to share,” Myq said when I told him this story on the podcast. “Better than a spit take. Your trauma is my treasure.”
