“I was like, I just want to be great at this one thing, and I’m just gonna put all my energy into being great at this one thing,” said the former SNL alum.
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
Sam Jay came to comedy relatively late in life — she started doing standup when she was 29. Before that, she had a rough life. Her mother passed and then her brother went to prison. Jay was sick, depressed and lost. She spent years just recovering from multiple traumas. But in her late 20s, after she came out and began to find herself, she went into comedy and went at it with a vengeance. Now, just over a decade later, she’s a star.
Jay was a writer on “Saturday Night Live” and then she hosted an HBO show called “Pause With Sam Jay.” She also had a big role in the Netflix film, “You People.” She’s a hysterical standup who pushes boundaries and is open to talking about her sex life with her fiancée. For this extraordinary episode of “Masters of the Game,” we met in Brooklyn and spent the afternoon together talking about her life and her craft. She reflected on how when she finally began focusing on standup, she wanted to be unforgettable. “I just wanted to be the best standup in the world,” she said. “I was like, I just want to be great at this one thing, and I’m just gonna put all my energy into being great at this one thing. I just wanted to be able to walk in a room and people be like, she’s quite something, you know, she does this thing well.”
She now thinks that starting late gave her an advantage. See, in those years in her 20s when she wasn’t doing standup, she was still a fan, and she was often thinking about it. “All the years I wasn’t doing it,” she said, “I was subconsciously studying it. So I understood it as a mechanism and a device. I didn’t necessarily understand how I fit into the mechanism and the device, but I got what it was and what it’s supposed to do when it’s right, and how it should connect like I understood it.”
For more of Sam Jay’s life and career, watch “Masters of the Game” at 8 p.m. ET Friday and 12 p.m. ET Saturday on TheGrio Cable Network.
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Toure is a host and writer at TheGrio. He hosts the TheGrio TV show “Masters of the Game,” and he created the award-winning podcast “Being Black: The ’80s” and its upcoming sequel “Being Black: The ’70s.” He is also the creator of “Star Stories” and the author of eight books, including “Nothing Compares 2 U an oral history of Prince.” He also hosts a podcast called “Toure Show.” He is also a husband and a father of two.
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