Mike Lukas - Interview All About The Standup Comedy He Teaches Show #263

Fun interview with standup comic, Producer, Author, and Teacher of this amazing art form. Mike Lukas shares it all on this interview, so Listen and Learn about this business we call "Show" (and standup comedy).

Mike Lukas has built a multifaceted career in comedy, transitioning from a corporate job at AT&T to gracing the stages of Florida's vibrant comedy scene. Known for his versatility, Lukas expanded his reach by co-hosting a radio show and later delving into writing, crafting successful works that highlight his comedic insight. Taking a hiatus to focus on family, he recently reemerged as a performer and instructor at the Dallas Comedy Club, showcasing his enduring passion for the craft. Grateful for his diverse opportunities, Lukas remains enthusiastic about his current projects, constantly adapting and inspiring others with his humor and experience.

(00:00:54) "Versatile Comedy Journey of Mike Lukas"

(00:09:46) Diverse Opportunities in Comedy Industry Transformation

(00:12:09) Multifaceted Skills of Stand Up Comedians

(00:18:32) Tailoring Comedy Acts for Diverse Audiences

(00:25:13) Adapting Pathways: Evolution in Comedy Careers

(00:26:33) "Developing Comedy Material with the Humor Blueprint"

Transcript

Announcer: 0:04

This is another episode of Stand Up Comedy. Your host and emcee celebrating 40 plus years on the fringe of show business stories, interviews and comedy sets from the famous and not so famous. Here's your host and emcee, Scott Edwards.

R. Scott Edwards: 0:21

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the podcast. We got an amazing interview coming up for you. This gentleman has been in comedy for a long time. He's quite the professional. He's performed in Florida, Chicago, Los Angeles. He's done tv, He's a huge guy in Texas, God knows why and he's the author of a few books. He is a very talented stand up comic. But let's talk to him and find out more. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Mike Lucas.

Mike Lukas: 0:54

Oh, wow. Oh, thank you. Listen to these. This crowd is hot.

R. Scott Edwards: 0:58

Yeah. Hey, it's great. Speaking of hot, hot comedy, Mike, nice to have you on the podcast. You've been in the business quite a while. I know you got your start in Florida at what age and what got you into stand up comedy?

Mike Lukas: 1:12

Well, in Florida, you're right. That was my first. I had a corporate entertainment job. I worked first. I had a corporate job at AT&T in Cincinnati for two years and I got bored doing that. So I auditioned to be at Disney MGM Studios and I got picked by them to be in Superstar Television, which was a three camera shoot. And I got picked for them to be in the Star A Day program where we would interview B and C celebrities and they would do a pseudo star. You know, where you put your handprint in the, in front of the Groman's Chinese Theater. They did their version of that for their guests in Orlando.

R. Scott Edwards: 1:49

Yeah, I've seen. That's cool.

Mike Lukas: 1:51

Right. And we would interview them and we feel like talk show hosts. And so it was a real like jump and foray into the entertainment world. And then at night I would do stand up comedy in Florida. So in Orlando and Daytona and Tampa and all the way up and down the coast down to Miami. And I would just do as many sets as I could and I got better and better at it until I was able to quit my day job at Disney, MGM and eventually Universal Studios and just go on the road. And that's when I hit the Chicago and got into the second city. That's the, the where they do improv.

R. Scott Edwards: 2:25

Right, right, right. But let's back up a little bit. What age were you when you made this transition from corporate to comedy?

Mike Lukas: 2:32

Well, I was 23 years old when I began my comedy career. So I was older than a lot of comedians who Start, you know, a lot of them start in their late teens, early 20s, and I was, you know, on my verge of mid-20s, so.

R. Scott Edwards: 2:47

Yeah, but 23 is not that old and you're still finding yourself. And the fact that you were able to take the, this great gig at Disney and turned it into a comedy career, I mean, that's a better launch than a lot of people might think.

Mike Lukas: 3:06

Yeah, then the comedians that start out at strip clubs and have to really pour it from the bottom of the barrel.

R. Scott Edwards: 3:14

Right, right, right. But the other thing that was interesting, and this was a little later, I would guess, year wise. But Florida is not known as a hotbed of comedy. But you were able to find enough professional rooms to showcase and play in to really build your craft. That had to be a little bit of a challenge in itself.

Mike Lukas: 3:36

Well, you know, what's funny is when you're hungry to get stage time, you'll take anything. And so there was a big league club in Orlando, one in Daytona, one in Tampa, and one in Miami and one in Fort Lauderdale. And so between that, there were a lot of one nighters. And so at the very beginning, when you're trying to get stage time, they're not letting you on those big stages yet. They're, you know, you're, you're hungry for any stage time you can get. So I would go to these bars that would have one nighters on a Tuesday and there'd be, you know, 24 people in the audience just hammered and they're facing the wrong way and you're having to get their attention and, you know, and so in Florida they had that sort of world when I was starting out, which you got to remember, this is back in 1990 and so this was just after the comedy boom. So there was quite a few of these A, B and C rooms that were available.

R. Scott Edwards: 4:30

Okay, well, that's where you're educating me because I come, you know, I got going in 1980 a good decade earlier. So there was really no comedy in Florida in 1980. But by 1990, it's good to know that there was some places to hit the boards and do your stuff. What's interesting is that you're saying the same thing that I've given as advice to wannabe comics in that you wanna hit every possible stage. And whether it's 12 drunk people on a Friday night or 200 seat sold out show, you gotta be there, you gotta, you know, that's what the kind of the whole idea of show business, you have to step up and do what you're getting paid to do, and a lot of times you're not even getting paid in the beginning, and that is to entertain people. And I think that even though it's a really hard road, you learn so much through those early gigs. Now, did you find yourself as an observational comic? What kind of comedy really grabbed you? Were you talking about your own life, about situations?

Mike Lukas: 5:43

Yeah, in the beginning, I was very physical. I'm still very physical. I do a lot of act out. My wife describes my act as I enchant. I'm an enchanter. I bring things to life. I give. Like, if I could give your desk an opinion about you sitting at it, you know, and your desk can have a voice and talk about.

R. Scott Edwards: 6:02

I think that's genius, Mike. I mean, that's a different hook than I've seen in a lot of other entertainers, and I've seen thousands. And that sounds really fascinating.

Mike Lukas: 6:16

Yeah. Like, one of my bits that I did on the Tonight Show, I was able to get this bit on there. I did my bed, seducing me back into bed in the early morning because it's so comfortable. And so I was able to just skirt the edges of decency for the Tonight show, because you have to be very clean on the Tonight Show. You know, the bed says, you know, eventually one of the big lines is the bet says, I want you in me. And so that is sort of a double entendre that I got. I snuck onto the Tonight show, and that's not easy.

R. Scott Edwards: 6:49

And you were on the Tonight show with Jay Leno, a good friend of mine. So that certainly was a great plateau. But let's again, not jump too far ahead when you describe your physical comedy and the way you bring inanimate objects alive through comedy. I bet a lot of that comes from your Chicago experience.

Mike Lukas: 7:11

Yeah. With the Second City. What the Second City trains you to do is to do two things, primarily. One is to really listen to what people are saying and then agreeing with what they say and heightening it, and all of that combined is called yes, anding. And when you. Yes, and something, you really listen to what someone says, and then you absorb it, and then you agree with it, and then you heighten it. And when, like, one way that you could describe heightening is to make something worse, you know, like, to exacerbate it. And so in the improv world, you're really trained to do that over and over again. And that's how it seems like you're doing scripted material off the cuff. And so to have that sort of language that I can speak in addition to my standup, I'm able to add those elements of performance to my stand up act and it gives a level of sort of improvisation that it feels like it's coming natural and live for each audience I do it for. So I think people really enjoy that.

R. Scott Edwards: 8:19

Well, that's a great explanation of improv and you hit the nail on the head improvisation, which is not, by the way, to be honest. My favorite type of comedy is a situation where two or more people are interacting amongst themselves. And I think that's why it's not my favorite because stand up comedy is all about engaging with an audience and in improv you're engaging with your co stars on stage. However, the tactic of listening and that's so funny, Mike, I'm glad you brought that up because I'm also an entrepreneur and a salesman and one of the great rules of sales and being a strong CEO is being able to listen. And in comedy you're interacting with an audience. So it's important to listen to the audience. It's called in the show business, read the room. But in improv it is so important that the people on stage interacting to bring out hopefully some funny situations is, as you said, listening and then carrying on with a concept or idea. I think it's so great that you bring that out. Mike, thanks so much. That will be helpful to our listening audience. Now, at what point did you leave Second City and find yourself in Los Angeles?

Mike Lukas: 9:46

Well, it's funny, I did the Second city in the 90s and that's when I was touring with them. I was the understudy for one of the main stage actors, Jim Zulavec, who was there with Rachel Dratch and Tina Fey and Scott Adzit and that group. So I got to perform with them on a weekly basis because Jim liked to go watch the Cubs play. So he often called it sick. So that was a real benefit for me. And because I did that work and I got scene in front of the producer, Kelly Leonard, he called me up when I, when I moved to la, he called me up and said, hey, do you want to do the main stage in Vegas? We have a show going up at the Flamingo and we're going to do what we do in Chicago, but in Vegas. And we were looking for a group of people who are strong that can be on that stage. And so I was called from Los Angeles to Vegas to live there for a year to do their show. I opened this show with, you might know, Jason Sudeikis, was an actor at the time there. He and I were roommates, actually, at that Vegas gig. And so for a year we got to pal around with each other and write scenes and do workshops and teach classes.

R. Scott Edwards: 11:01

Well, that's amazing. I knew about the Los Angeles connection. I didn't know about Las Vegas. And for a young entertainer to get a whole year paid working in a show business town like Las Vegas, and then when you take the other great gift of improvisation, especially when you're in a set show like in Las Vegas, it opens up that opportunity to write comedy. And that is one of the hardest things for people to get to in the industry is to become the writer. And what's great again about stand up comedy, my audience has heard me say this before, is that not only do you have to have the balls to get up in front of an audience and perform and try to make them laugh and engage with them, but you have to be a writer. You have to write your material. And that can be such a challenge for so many people and why a lot of people fail in the industry. But getting a whole year in Las Vegas just to hone in on improv and writing and the whole comedy scene, Mike, that must have been so helpful to your career.

Mike Lukas: 12:09

Oh, for sure. And it's helping me now as I teach classes at the Dallas Comedy Club and I teach standup. And so what I say to my students is what you just said, which is, hey, congratulations on taking a stand up class. But what you've really done is taken a writing class if you're not a writer. I have some really bad news for you. You might want to take an improv class, because to get ready for an improv class, you have to do no work. You have to empty your mind. You have to be in the moment to get ready for a standup class. You have to write, you have to write jokes, you have to pitch jokes. You have to do them as if they're the first time you've ever done them, even though it's the 19th or 20th time you've done them that week. And so it's a real. What I say, Scott, is I say that there's a five tool. We're five tool players as stand ups. And I use that sort of metaphor from the baseball analogy, which is, you know, a five tool player in baseball is somebody who can hit for average, hit for power. They can throw the ball, they can catch the ball, and they can run for speed. And if they have all five of those tools, they're considered A five tool player. And agents go nuts over them and teams go nuts over them because they're rare. And comedians have to be five tool players as well. We have to be writers, we have to write our material and make it original and relatable. We have to perform it. We're performers. So that's the second tool. We have to over and over deliver a script as if it's the first time we've ever done it. The third tool, we have to be directors. We direct our show. We are in charge of our own set list, our own themes, our own where we stand on stage and how we deliver our material. And then our fourth tool is we're travelers. That's what people don't realize, how big of a deal it is for comedians to travel. You can't do comedy in your living room, so you have to get good at traveling. And if you don't, you risk burning out. And if you burn out on the road, it's really hard to recover. And then the fifth tool, just to wrap up that idea, the fifth tool is you have to be a business person. As a stand up comedian, you have to develop a following. You have to book your gigs until you have a manager or an agent. You have to do all those sub tasks, arrange your career in such a way that you can make a living. And that's a fifth tool that you have to get good at. And so if you're not good at all five of those tools, your career will suffer. I teach that in a new book I just wrote called the business of comedy 21 Things Every Comedian Should Know about the Business of Stand Up Comedy. And so it's real, it's a real, like multifaceted job skill.

R. Scott Edwards: 14:39

Well, I mean, you are hitting all the right notes. I think you and I are comedy brothers in this. It's so interesting to hear what you're saying, Mike, because I've never used the five tools reference. I'm not as big a baseball person, but it makes so much sense. And the one that really grabbed me, that is never talked about in the industry is that fifth tool, the financial aspect of being your own boss. You know, every stand up, especially professional standup comics are basically entrepreneurs. They have to not only, as you said, write and perform and entertain and all that, but they have to run their business. They have to run their career like a business. And that means budgeting and dealing with contracts. And, you know, you're both an agent and a marketing rep. I mean, you have to kind of do it all. And so many People fail because of all these different tools are hard to put together. Mike, congratulations on being able to put that all together and the book, the Business of Comedy, I'm going to have to try to get a copy out of you. Sounds perfect for that. Now you are in Vegas and in LA. How did you find going on TV like Late Night with Conan O'Brien and the Tonight show with Jay Leno. So did you find going on TV and having the restrictions of television and time restraint a challenge or did you use your improv skills and make it work for you?

Mike Lukas: 16:16

Well, on TV they really discourage you from doing a whole lot of improv because they want to know exactly what's going to happen. And if you don't stick to what you said you were going to do, you could raise some red flags for them. And so it's kind of frowned upon, although people do it all the time, especially comedians, because comedians are meant to be rule breakers. And so there's a real like sort of fine line you have to sort of play in doing that. Now I pretty much stuck to the scripts that I was assigned, which was my act on the Tonight Show. It's interesting. The first time I went on there, it went really smoothly. The second time wasn't as smooth. The second time I went on, I had a migraine headache. I had. There was somebody in the audience that had a, you know. You know when you're at a college football game and you hear that like a, you know, an air horn. Somebody had an air horn in the audience while I was kind of.

R. Scott Edwards: 17:08

And they didn't stop them?

Mike Lukas: 17:11

No, they couldn't. Because they didn't. It's a sort of live to tape TV thing. So all they could do is they could edit it out in the post production. But in the production set.

R. Scott Edwards: 17:22

Yeah.

Mike Lukas: 17:23

Well, it didn't ruin it, but it, it made it a challenge, you know. And that was. The thing is I was pretty young when I got that. I was maybe seven or eight years into my career. And so I wasn't used to handling all those types of things. And so, you know, I handled it as best as I could, but still it affected me, you know, mentally. Where you're like, oh my God, why, why, why is nobody stopping this air horn?

R. Scott Edwards: 17:46

Right. And it's so fascinating they would let something like that happen. But I think you also bring up another point, is that one of the great abilities of a professional stand up comic is being able to adjust to whatever's happening. And you and I both know that there's a Huge difference between a Wednesday night show with 30 people, a Friday night late show with 150 drunk people, or a Saturday sold out show of sober date night people. Every situation is so unique and every show can be special and unique in that way. One of the reasons why I love standup comedy, but also, as you're pointing out, one of the great challenges of the industry.

Mike Lukas: 18:32

Yeah, I love the fact that you have those different types of audiences each night because what it does is it forces you as a comedian to adjust your act. And so you always do your act, you always do it the way you do it. But I'm going to do it differently for 30 people than I'm going to do it for 100 people. I'm going to do it different for a sober crowd than I'm going to do it for a drunk crowd. I'm going to do it different for a crowd of couples versus a whole crowd of what's obviously single groups. And I'm going to adjust it, I'm going to tweak it and I'm going to know how to do that because I've done so many sets that I get what works and how to best present what I do to a group who's different. And to me that's the art form of stand up, the directorial tool that you have to. The hat you have to wear as a comedian.

R. Scott Edwards: 19:17

Yeah. And you say it so well that it is part of the job. And it's also where your training at Second City and your first gigs in Florida have brought you to a place of professionalism that you can do all that. Now, speaking of unique situations, you have performed both at the Montreal Just for Laughs Comedy Festival and also at the famous Aspen Comedy Festival. Those crowds are there for comedy. How was that experience for you?

Mike Lukas: 19:52

It was gorgeous, man. It's like a set that you just can sit back, relax and just have a blast and do your comedy. And the crowds are really hip. They get sort of meta jokes. They're there to have a fun time and they all feel really lucky to be there. And. And so it was really great. That's how I got my Conan O'Brien set was off of the Just Relapse Comedy Festival. The woman who booked that saw me there and wanted me to come on and do that. Although I had done another Conan before that as an actor when I was living in New York for a year. One of my friends, Brian Stack, was one of the writers for the Conan show when it was on NBC and he said, hey, we need a bald guy to come in and play a monk. So I came in, I shaved my head because I'm going bald. So I dressed up as a monk. And so the sketch was this. Conan was playing Santa Claus and there was a real life kid that was on his lap. One he said, santa, could you tell me the meaning of life? And Conan was like, well, you know what, kid? I'm just Santa Claus. I don't know the meaning of life. But how would you like to see a monk get his hand deep fried in oil? And the kid was like, okay, sure. And so they cut to me and I was dressed in a monk costume and I just slammed my fist into a hot oil, a fake hot oil machine, like a french fryer and screamed. And so the kid was like, all right. And that was the whole bit. So you never know. You never know what's going to come out of those festivals. And I did Aspen just to come clean on Aspen. It was when Rooftop Comedy was in charge of Aspen. And Rooftop Comedy is a company that was in charge of my CD when I produced a CD with them that I sold after shows. It's called Mike Lucas. A Fun bunch of Guys. It sort of represents my act, which is I'm a fun bunch of guys where I play a bunch of different characters and I do a bunch of different things to make just various things come alive. And I always give a different perspective that people appreciate.

R. Scott Edwards: 21:57

Well, I think that you're. Your world of experiences and all these different types of stand up comedy and acting that you've been able to pull together for your career is just amazing. And now you spent a year in New York, man, you've been all over this country. Congratulations. And that goes back to what you're saying in the five Tools. You have to be able to travel and keep your life together. But based on that, and you've been to New York and Florida and Chicago and Los Angeles and Vegas, how the hell did you end up in Texas?

Mike Lukas: 22:31

Isn't that interesting? Well, what happened was in 2008, my wife and I had been doing a radio show for CBS Radio in Los Angeles. And we'd been doing it for about five years. It was called Cracking up with Gretchen and the Lukes. And the show was really fun. Just real quickly, we would take the weird news and we would make the stories come alive by bringing our improv friends from Los Angeles, people from Second City and Improv Olympics. We'd invite them in to the studio and they would play the characters that were in the weird news stories. So for Instance, if there was a story of a squirrel collector in New Jersey that was made in the news, we would have some, one of our friends play the squirrel collector and we would have him talk about why he is so fascinated with squirrels.

R. Scott Edwards: 23:13

That sounds like a great idea for a show, right?

Mike Lukas: 23:17

It was great. We did it on Friday night, from Friday night at 11 o'clock till Saturday morning at 1am and we had a real eclectic audience in Los Angeles there that followed us. That show lasted until 2008 when the FM talk industry ended with the housing bust. That was when Adam Carolla lost his job, Tom Leykis lost his job, Tim Conway Jr. Lost his job. Everyone that was at the FM talk station where we were at in LA, which was CBS radio, the whole station changed formats and just no longer did this FM talk thing. And so we decided at that point that we were going to go ahead and have the kid that my wife was pregnant with. We found out right then that she was pregnant. And so we, we said, okay, well we're going to move to Cleveland, where I grew up. And so we moved to Cleveland from Los Angeles and we lived there for five years. And that's when I was working cruise ships and the clubs and just getting back into the standup. And then what I realized real quickly was as a father of soon to be two children, a boy and a girl, I couldn't stand being on the road anymore. I was leaving town and I'd come back and I'd say, kids, it's me, dad. And they'd be like, remind us what are the challenges? Yes, right. It's me, your father. And so I just hung up my cleats and I stopped traveling and I gave up stand up comedy for a decade and I just used that time to help co raise my babies. And then finally they're teenagers now and, and by last August they were both like, dad, you need to get out of the house. It's time. It's starting to stink in your room. So I started getting back into comedy. So what I did was I introduced myself to the Dallas Comedy Club and they were very quick to take me under their wings. And so they hired me as a stand up comedy instructor and they also hired me to be on their house improv long form team. So now I perform every Thursday night for them.

R. Scott Edwards: 25:13

Wow, Mike, what an interesting and diverse career. I mean, from those early open mics and working at Disneyland to going through Cleveland, which is not your usual path, and ending up back in the industry in Texas. And by the way, taking a Decade off to help raise your kids was probably really smart for your family, and I know your children and your wife appreciated that. But it does make it interesting. Whereas in a lot of people that go to work for General Motors or something, they get into a career and they don't leave that job for 20, 30, 40 years, whatever, it's like one place, one stop. It's one cubicle their whole life, and they're fine with that. The fascinating thing about being a standup comic, especially a professional one like you, is I mentioned earlier, it's a lot like being an entrepreneur. You have to be ready for the next adventure, the next project, and be able to pivot into that deal. And you pivoted so many times in your life to so many different things. And then you become an author and you're doing this book, the Business of Comedy, which is a great concept and really needed in the industry. How did the book come about?

Mike Lukas: 26:33

Well, the book came off of my book series, the Funny Muscle book series that I wrote. And the first book is called Finding youg Funny how to Create Laughs Like a Pro. And in this book, I really geared it towards. I wanted to give comedians who are trying to become comedians a methodology to write material while they're sitting at their desk so they'd have something to do while they were on stage at an open mic. Because what I found was happening when I was at the right before I was ready to stop my career for my kids, is I didn't know exactly how to write my material. I would really sort of rip it on stage, but I didn't know how to sit down at my desk and write material. And it really hurt me. I felt like the limit that put on my ability to create new material really paused my career in a way that I could have fixed if I had a better methodology. So that's what I sort of was. What came out of this. Finding your funny Muscle was the methodology that, first of all, it teaches you how to find your commie lens, which to me is the most important thing a comic has to discover in the beginning, which is your brand. It's who you are as a comedian. Your commie lens is sort of the metaphorical portal through which you look to find your humorous takes. And if you don't have that, you become sort of like a corner quipper, sort of like a punster of somebody who's a generic jokester who gets annoying after a while. But if you have a comedy lens.

R. Scott Edwards: 27:59

We all know those guys.

Mike Lukas: 28:01

Yeah. And it gets old, right? And. And and, but if you have a comedy lens, then you're more original, you're more relatable, you're, you're, you're, you're doing comedy that comes from a place that's, that's unique. And people remember that. They tell other people about that. They relate to you. They go, oh, yeah, I have an uncle that's like that, or oh, my husband's like that or whatever. My wife is that way.

R. Scott Edwards: 28:21

Yeah, but I think, you know, you again, because you teach the industry, you're hitting all the right notes and I appreciate that for my audience. But you are so true about the comedy lens or finding in sales, it would be finding your hook. You want to be able to pinpoint who you are and what you're bringing to your industry. And it's the same as any other industry in stand up comedy. You want to be an individual, you want to be unique, and you have to find yourself on stage doing material through your comedy lens. However, Mike, I have to ask, what in God's name were you doing taking the Vince Champ story and turning it into an action adventure novel?

Mike Lukas: 29:11

Oh, yeah, how did you like that? I loosely modeled that antagonist after his story. I always thought that was fascinating, what he did a sick way. Like he, he obviously what, what he did was awful, but how he went about it as a comedian and he, he created this pathway that was untraceable because he was diverting himself from his gigs to, to small colleges around it. And it always fascinated me that someone would think that way and plan their, their evilness around that. So I made him into my antagonist loosely, just very loosely.

R. Scott Edwards: 29:50

Two things for the audience. Vince Champ was actually a friend of mine. He worked my club for many years.

Mike Lukas: 29:58

Oh, no kidding.

R. Scott Edwards: 29:59

No, he was a serial rapist, which, you know, we didn't know at the time. It was, you know, it's kind of like nobody did. It's like Ted Bundy, like a really nice guy when he's not killing somebody. Now, of course, Vince Champ didn't kill anybody, but he was a serial rapist. And he used colleges and universities as he did his comedy tour as a stand up comic. He was always changing cities and that's why the cops had such a hard time catching him. But it is a fascinating story and if you want to go to the Googler, you'll be able to find information on it. But I think the fact that you use that as the protagonist of your book is such an interesting thing.

Mike Lukas: 30:39

Well, he's the antagonist, he's the bad guy. He's the. Yeah, yeah, no, no, the good guy is Ted Roosevelt. No relation. And he is a spin kicker by birthright. And so he is the one who eventually helps put a stop to this antagonist. But yeah, I definitely painted him in a bad way. But again, it's a real loose correlation to the.

R. Scott Edwards: 31:06

Oh, yeah. And I'm sure you don't mention him by name, but it is interesting that the story is there. And I think it's genius, Mike, as an author, to take what you know in a unique. I mean it's, it's a story that people in the industry know, but it's not like universally known. And to take that story, which is really fascinating, and turning it into a short novel. What's the title of that book?

Mike Lukas: 31:34

That book? It's not a short novel. It's a 325 page. I call it a page turner. And it's, it's called Spin Kick, the Hiss of Death.

R. Scott Edwards: 31:42

Spin Kick, the Hiss of Death.

Mike Lukas: 31:46

And it's a martial arts vigilante crime thriller.

R. Scott Edwards: 31:52

Well, that's funny in itself, right?

Mike Lukas: 31:55

It's got everything you could possibly want and it's done real well. And so far the reviews have come in really positively for it. And what people say is they really appreciate the fact that there's like five different stories that all come together into one story at the end. And it's one of those kind of books that just sort of leaves you turning the page and wanting to read the next chapter.

R. Scott Edwards: 32:17

Well, I got to tell you, Mike Lucas out of Texas, you got Spin Kick, you got the funny muscle, you've got your business, a comedy series, you've got all these great books out there, ladies and gentlemen, Go to Amazon, go to the Googler, find these great outlets of creativity and humor and lessons and stories. And Mike Lucas, congratulations on being such a successful author.

Mike Lukas: 32:47

Thanks, I appreciate that. Isn't that funny?

R. Scott Edwards: 32:51

It's incredible that you've had this fascinating career in stand up comedy and now you've got this secondary career side gig as an author and doing so well with it for my audience, if they wanted to see you perform or find any more information about you, how best to learn about Mike Lucas or find you maybe want to book you.

Mike Lukas: 33:15

Sure, you can go to funnymuscle.com is where you'll get all my comedy information. That's where my epk, my electronic press kit is. That's where you can find information about all those books and then also where you can find information about my other books like Spin Kick and like my short story. Collection. The twisted short story is called Frog Belly Beans. You can go to mike-lucas.com Lucas is spelled L U K A S. So it's mike-lucas.Com and that tells you all the information you need to know about those other books. And also, if you ever reach out to me@mikeunnymuscle.com I'll email you back. And I like to talk shop and help people find their comedy lens and help them find and use the humor blueprint that I teach, which is sort of that methodology. I talk about where I give people 36 humor heightening devices that they get to use to find their punchlines. And it's a real fun way to become funnier and it helps people who are new at the craft and it helps people who are experienced at the craft. If you already know what you're doing and you want some guidance to help you figure out different ways to get different punchlines, this is a great book for that.

R. Scott Edwards: 34:25

Well, ladies and gentlemen, we want to thank Mike Lucas for being on the podcast. You've brought so much quality information, great stories and what an amazing career you've had. Be sure to go to funnymuscle.com and learn about his books and his training and ways to reach him. Funnymuscle.com and if you get a chance, go to mike-lucas l u k a s.com for even more information. Mike, thanks so much for being on the podcast today.

Mike Lukas: 34:56

This is great. Thanks so much. I love the conversation.

R. Scott Edwards: 34:59

Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for enjoying this interview as much as I did. Mike is a tremendous comic. Now working at a Texas. If you're in that area, be sure to check them out. And we'll be back next week with another one of our stand up comedy shows. Mike, thanks again for being on the show. Take care, ladies and gentlemen. We'll see you next week. Bye.

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