On stage one night, stand-up comedian Aaron Weber ’14 spotted an old high school football teammate in the audience. Introducing his buddy to the crowd, Weber took a moment to catch up.
“It’s good to see you, man. You’re a doctor now, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah,” Weber said, glancing around the room with the wincing smile of a guy at the reunion without quite so much to show for the passing years. “I’m doing this.”
This has worked out pretty well for him. A YouTube special, Signature Dish, premiered January 31, produced by Nateland, the company created by one of the most successful comedians working today, Nate Bargatze, with whom Weber co-hosts a podcast. And on February 3, he made his Tonight Show debut.
To the kid just out of college, grinding to be a full-time comedian while working in digital marketing — “doing Facebook pages for plumbers” — those career highlights seemed impossibly far off, if not unimaginable. He can tell you how many shows it took to get to the stage with Jimmy Fallon and The Roots — 1,800 booked appearances, over 3,000 if you include open mics.
Weber knows, because he’s kept a spreadsheet since his first “real” performance on August 12, 2015 — not counting his time with a Notre Dame student stand-up group at Legends. He’s tallied his pay, too. The rows add up to a lot of stage time but not a lot of money.
He had a supportive boss who’d let him leave early to drive from his home in Nashville, Tennessee, for a five-minute set in, say, Huntsville, Alabama, where the compensation might be in experience. Ten bucks if he was lucky. Any more than that he received as a full-on windfall.
“If you look at the pay column on that spreadsheet, it’s brutal,” Weber says. “I mean, for years, where I was pumped to get $30. Like, ‘30 bucks? That covers my gas!’”
The first time he had his hotel room comped, he kept the keycard. Now he has albums full of them filed away in plastic covers.
“This is basically a diary,” Weber says, scrolling through the spreadsheet on his phone. “I flip through this and see a show, ‘Oh, I forgot about that show.’ And then I keep track of who’s on the lineup with me.”
Those are the tree rings of his career, documenting the slow but steady growth that allowed him to leave his day job in 2019. His act (and the video evidence the internet retains) represents the only record of how he’s developed his craft. And, truth be told, he’d rather not look back too much at that evolution.
At the beginning, he would write jokes on paper, beat for beat, down to every “uh” and all the other rhythmical pauses he engineered with precision to perfect a joke’s timing.
“If you watch a video of my stand-up from back then, it feels like I’m reading to you, because that’s kind of how I was doing it,” he says. “I had this memorized script in my head, and then I would read it to the audience, basically.”
With time that process became more intuitive. If he has a story with a beginning and an ending, he’s confident he can bridge the distance onstage, “talking like I actually talk” offstage.
That’s not the same thing as improvising. What sounds “conversational” in performance comes from meticulously pruning the thickets inherent in talking off the top of your head, but without discarding all the “likes” and “dudes” and other signifiers of casual speech. To his peers, Weber has shorn his material of any excess.
“Just the jokes per minute, his word economy, his attention to detail,” fellow Nashville comedian Evan Berke says. “His 30-minute special is just jam-packed with great jokes, great lines. It’s really like no word wasted.”
Weber has long since discarded any residue of that stilted recitation of a script from memory. In front of an audience, chatting over lunch, backstage with other comedians thinking up the all-time baseball lineup of players whose first names start with A, he’s the same guy. As he banters in the green room before a set, it’s not hard to picture him back in Knott Hall having the same diverting conversations with roommates.
One night, toward the end of sophomore year as he remembers it, Weber decided on a whim to step on stage with the student club at Legends. Other than being a fan of the form growing up, he knew nothing about stand-up comedy in general, or the campus scene in particular.
“I was going in totally blind,” he says. “The arrogance of youth.”
In those years, the student group included others who have gone on to careers in comedy: Tommy Brennan (aka Schneeman ’16); Alex Dragicevich, a basketball player who transferred to Boston College; and Shelley Kim ’14, recognized in The Washington Post last year as one of the 10 funniest comics working in D.C.
Weber had no professional ambitions at the time, performing only a handful of sets the rest of his undergrad years, but also no apprehension about what many people fear more than death: speaking in front of a crowd.
“I was always comfortable talking in public. I did mock trial in high school; I loved it,” Weber says. “Number 1 attorney in the state of Alabama, I’ll tell you that. There’s not a lot of people that appreciate that flex. I was on the Alabama national team where we lost to Guam. English was their second language; that’s pretty brutal.”
Admission to Notre Dame — his father, Faustin Weber ’84, ’85M.A., was the principal at his Catholic high school — felt like an end in itself. Weber grew up in Alabama, finished high school in Nashville after a family move, got into the college he coveted, then coasted.
Like his extracurricular comedy, Weber did not pursue his studies at Notre Dame with career goals in mind, or much commitment to learning at all. Twice he landed on academic probation.
Back then, he was a marketing and philosophy double major — aspiring to be, anyway, the latter downgraded after his second attempt at passing a logic course. “I failed it twice. Freshman year and senior year, failed it,” he says. “So I ended up with a marketing major and a philosophy minor.”
In the return-on-investment calculation many people make to justify the college sticker price these days, Weber’s education does not pencil out.
“If I looked at college strictly as a financial investment, it does not make sense that I went there,” he says. “I didn’t know I was going to do comedy when I started there, but by the end of it, I thought I might.”
Maybe spending those four years in the machine shop of the touring circuit would have been more practical, but he has no regrets. The fun he had was worth the loan payments he’s still making.
Indifference to his college education notwithstanding, Weber serves as the resident smart guy on the Nateland podcast with co-hosts Bargatze, Dusty Slay and Brian Bates. He’s been known to dissolve into guffaws over mispronunciations such as Bargatze’s attempt at “civilization” and to be called on to explain concepts like gravity. At 33, Weber’s also the youngest among the podcast’s hosts, keeping his laptop open to search the random topics that come up so their discussions are not entirely without basis in reality.
Often festooned in Notre Dame swag, he does not hide his college bona fides, though he tries to resist a tendency for loquacious erudition in his wordsmithing. “So much about comedy, at least the stand-up I try to do, is the simplicity of language,” Weber says, “trying to communicate a complex idea without sounding like a douchebag.”
He makes fun of himself as much as anything, a big dude whose weight takes a toll on treadmills, for example, with a closet full of Carhartt because of the psychological illusion of the brand’s generous sizing. Or there’s his confusion as a student over how to read italicized words — you have to hear this one, but Weber thought “italicize” meant to use an Italian accent. His act draws on those aspects of his life, remaining steadfastly clean and apolitical, recounting awkward interactions, highlighting absurd situations, leaning into self-deprecation.
Such as the choice he faced about how to spend a free afternoon on the road in Pennsylvania when he found himself equidistant from the Gettysburg battlefield and the Hershey chocolate factory. “I had to decide between Gettysburg and Hershey World. And I do remember thinking, ‘If I don’t go to Hershey World, it’s like all these people died for nothing.’”
Then there was his visit to a Harry Potter theme park, an adult man by himself dressed in everyday clothes among the cosplaying wizard kids. During a long wait in line, an enthusiastic employee mused aloud to the children about how great it would be to have a time-turner to skip forward. “Just trying to be nice,” Weber says. “And I go, ‘You do know time-turners only work backwards, right’? And she goes, ‘Where are your kids?’”
He and his wife, Lucy Sinsheimer, a talent coordinator at Nashville’s Zanies Comedy Club, have a newborn daughter now, but long before that milestone Weber drove a minivan, itself fodder for his act — specifically sussing out how to refer to it without raising suspicion: “I never call it a van. If I say, ‘Hey, I drive a minivan,’ you’re like, ‘Oh, he’s taking kids to soccer practice.’ If I say, ‘Hey, I drive a van,’ you’re like, ‘Oh, he’s taking kids from soccer practice.’”
With his impending parenthood, comedy friends assured him the baby would be a font of material. To be prepared for the effusive muse, he brought a notepad to the delivery room. The experience yielded one scrap of an idea, which he jotted down and later pulled from his pocket to read from the stage. “My wife’s in labor, and I wrote this: “‘Yum Yum Sauce. Whoever named that nailed it.’”
Like a middle-of-the-night reverie, that one didn’t hold up in the light of day. That was the point of the “Yum Yum Sauce” joke, of course, its emptiness as a premise. Other potential topics receive more tilling to assess whether they’ll grow. The process requires presenting concepts-in-progress to audiences, which might produce a sustaining shower of laughter or withering silence.
A recent midweek performance in Nashville, which he called a slog after stepping offstage, included a bit (sort of) about his daughter, whose name is Olive Joan. Weber calls her O.J., much to the dismay of friends and family, even her doctor, who said, “Please don’t do that.”
As he tried to incorporate the implications of that nickname into his act, the audience expressed the same reluctance in its own way, a “please don’t do that” vibe evident in the club’s atmosphere. Navigating the rocky shoals of new material, he slogged on.
“I hope the comparisons end there. I hope my daughter does not resemble O.J. Simpson. That’s what I’m talking about. I don’t know if that’s clear.” Weber said. “Wouldn’t that be a tragedy? If, you know, years later my daughter, the love of my life, went out and . . . stole memorabilia from her friends.”
A cackle or two here and there did not drown out the prevailing cringe at a joke Weber liked against all evidence and admitted he’d been trying to force into his routine. Moving into the perilous “if you have to explain it” territory, he said, “That’s what he went to prison for. I don’t know if y’all knew that. And that’ll be the last time I’ll ever talk about O.J. on stage.” Meaning Simpson, presumably.
Such strategic discarding defines the stand-up craft. Sometimes jokes go nowhere on the page, their flaws evident to the eye. Most of the time, though, they need testing in performance. That makes bombing not just an occupational hazard, but almost a necessity to pan for comedy gold.
“One of the things that makes stand-up unique, it’s tough to practice it alone. You have to perform it in front of people,” Weber says. “I’d say my batting average is getting better of turning an idea into a joke. But you have to say it in front of people to know.”
The audience is the ultimate arbiter, but they don’t always have the final say. Stand-up comics reserve the right to keep certain near-and-dear punch lines.
Weber tells the story of a homeless man he often encountered outside a gas station. If he had money to spare, Weber would give it to him. One day, with only a $10 bill in his pocket, he said the guy could take it inside, buy him a candy bar and keep the change.
“I’m a Christian, so I want to help people,” Weber says, “but I’m a Catholic, so I want them to earn it.”
That gets a reliable laugh, but audiences never seem to find it as funny as he does. The joke stays in his act “for me.”
Among comics he hangs out with, Weber is not known as a “for me” guy. More interested in camaraderie than competition, he has a reputation for generosity, using his burgeoning status to provide opportunities for others, paying forward the help he had along the way.
He’s not alone in playing that role in Nashville, which Bargatze and others have built into a high-profile and welcoming comedy town. Weber’s spotlight has grown enough to invite others into it. A Wednesday show in January, billed as “Aaron Weber and Friends,” allowed a handful of buddies to work through material in preparation for their Netflix auditions later that night in an adjacent room.
After their Monday podcast recordings in a studio at the club, some of the Nateland comics stay to host a performance, inviting others onstage to practice the craft and compare notes.
“Those guys, Aaron included, have made themselves very accessible. They’re at Zanies every Monday night putting on a Nateland showcase, where they’re hanging out and they want to talk comedy,” Berke says. “I’ve seen Aaron with several guys, me included — when they move here and they’re trying to find their footing and trying to run a few sets at Zanies — be very generous about giving people the opportunity to do his show.”
Backstage during “Aaron Weber and Friends,” it was clear the title did not exaggerate. Days before his special went live on YouTube and he traveled to New York for his Tonight Show set, the other comics showed palpable enthusiasm for Weber’s success.
“To me,” Berke says, “there’s nothing more exciting than watching somebody that you’ve been observing just work super hard and do everything right, get what they deserve.”
Weber would bristle at the word “deserve.” He recognizes that comedy offers audiences something of value — a sense of perspective, a respite from everyday worries, a release through shared laughter. That, he takes seriously. Not himself. If ever he risks lapsing into immodesty, that spreadsheet going back a decade keeps him grounded with memories of where he’s been.
“Like, you’re literally a clown,” Weber says, “performing in a strip club in Greenville, South Carolina.”
He works a new class of clubs now, befitting his ascension: national tour headliner, name on the marquee and a signed photo on the wall at his hometown Zanies, a podcast and YouTube special under the Bargatze umbrella, The Tonight Show.
With success comes a new, first-world comedy problem: developing fresh material fast enough. Audiences paying to see him as a headliner today probably already know a lot of his stuff. Not so long ago he was thrilled to be the host introducing each act, or one of the openers setting the stage for the star, roles with less risk of familiarity among the crowd. Now he has to stay a step ahead.
“These are very glamorous problems,” Weber says, “but they’re real things I need to be worried about, for sure.”
Tolerance for the grind, which only intensifies with popularity, may be the single most important trait for a comedian. Responding to a listener’s comment on a recent podcast episode, Bargatze waxed philosophical about the danger of a sudden wave of viral attention, as opposed to cultivating creative chops in the shadows to build stamina for longevity.
“If something pops off and, wow, everybody’s looking at me now, it’s not about capitalizing on what that was at that moment; you’ve got to go create the next thing,” Bargatze said. “I look back at my career, and I would’ve wanted all the success when I just started — I was trying to get that. It never happened, and I look back on it now, I was blessed; thank the Lord it didn’t happen.”
There’s a flip side: Track record counts for nothing on a blank page. If burgeoning name recognition fills seats, it also burdens performers with a responsibility not to disappoint.
Weber has his own internal motivation, too. His effort not to recycle or rely on “greatest hits” has as much to do with retroactive regret at what he foisted on audiences in the past.
“You look back, even a year ago, to what you thought were really good jokes,” he says, “and you’re like, ‘Ugh, that dude sucks.’”
Even — especially? — for arena-fillers like Bargatze, once a new special or a tour comes and goes, the question comedians face is, “Do you have a new hour?” Their capacity to “go create the next thing” becomes the distinguishing factor in building and sustaining a fanbase.
When ideas occur to Weber, he types brief reminders into an app. The list, like his performance spreadsheet, unfurls across page after smartphone page, with premises dating back to college. Some are more fruitful than others.
One line just says, “Diet Coke.” He has no idea why.
Many of the seeds flourish, with careful tending, into material. Like the entry on the app that reads, “Tums too good.”
“That turned into a bit in my special,” Weber says. “I was just eating Tums and I was like, ‘This is too good to be medicine.’”
Speaking of medicine . . . remember his old friend from high school? The doctor? Weber’s sheepish reaction to their divergent career paths lasted only an instant before the riff detoured into a prideful punch line about his own profession.
“So, in a way we’re both helping people now. Isn’t that crazy?” Weber said. “And I don’t mean to knock you, but laughter is the best medicine, so . . .”
Jason Kelly is editor of this magazine.