Don't forget! DMA#52 with Special Guest Mindy Tucker (Monday 1pm)
The best photographer in New York comedy has been quietly building a museum of all of us...
I have a face like a sat-on hat, and Mindy Tucker is the only person who’s ever made it look intentional.
Back when I first crawled into the New York comedy scene- jet-lagged, broke, convinced everyone could tell I’d been doing shitty bar gigs in Melbourne three weeks earlier- the first piece of good advice I got from other comics was:
“Get a Mindy.”
Not a comedy headshot. A Mindy. She is THE comedy photographer in this town. If you’ve stood on a New York stage and held a microphone in the last twenty years, there is roughly a 90% chance she’s the reason your face looks employable on a club poster… which is why I’m so happy she’s showing her very employable face on my show this week! (Monday 1pm)
After a decade of living here, we properly bonded at Nell’s Fest in October 2023- a comedy festival in the middle of Pennsylvania, which sounds like the opening of a film where nobody makes it home. She is, and I say this with the full authority of a man who has watched a lot of people fail to be good company in a small town in the middle of nowhere, the best. Sharp, kind, funny, and frankly wasted on the rest of us.
Now she’s launched Mindy’s Comedy Archives, a visual podcast where comedians flip through a chronological stack of their old photos -starting with their very first Mindy- and use each one to unlock the memories: the day jobs, the bombs, the breakthroughs, the friendships. An overhead camera builds a live collage while they talk. Each episode ends with “Do you remember your first joke?” and a fresh portrait for the archive.
It is, in other words, the single most Mindy idea imaginable: she has been quietly building a museum of all of us this entire time, and we only just noticed. She needs funding to keep it going. This is the part where I tell you to throw money at it.
Here’s why you should:
The New York comedy scene eats its own history. People burn out, move to LA, get a podcast about cryptocurrency, vanish. Mindy is the one person who kept the receipts: Twenty years of faces, most of them terrified, all of them young. She isn’t just photographing comedians. She’s the reason any of us will be able to prove we were here.
So go support Mindy’s Comedy Archives. Throw in a few bucks. Tell her Jason sent you, and that I still owe her for making me look like I had a plan.
I didn’t. I still don’t.
But the photos are amazing.
I can’t wait for you to meet her!
‘Til then!
Your pal,
PS. If reading this helped you delay opening a message from your mother detailing a distant relative’s gout flare-up, please restack and share it. Word of mouth is the only marketing strategy I can afford.
