Sitting Down With the Stand-ups

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“When I was in high school, I had the biggest crush on Margaret Cho,” David Murphy ’02 recalls. “I would have dreams where I was on a talk show with her.” For Murphy and fellow stand-up comics Paul “PK” Kim ’98 and Eddie Gorton ’01, Sept. 6, 2024, was a dream come true—the chance not only to perform at their alma mater in an iconic space (Thorne Hall) but to open for a pair of comedy veterans: Saturday Night Live alumna Melissa Villaseñor and Cho herself.

“For an hour or so before the show, we were back in the green room just chopping it up,” Gorton says. (Of the trio, only Kim had met Cho before, having interviewed her several years ago for a Laugh Factory podcast.) “The three of us were starstruck with both of them—Melissa being on SNL and Cho just being an absolute legend in the game. I’ve known about her since I was a kid. I was sitting there thinking to myself, ‘Don’t say anything stupid.’”

At the encouragement of Cho’s assistant, Murphy shared his adolescent dream with the Asian American comic pioneer. “She was very receptive,” he says. “She has all these tattoos and I have tattoos. Hopefully, I’ll run into her again one day at a comedy club.”

As for the show itself—Laugh Your Class Off!—which was supported by the First-Year Engagement Program Fund through a gift from Oxy trustee Larry Solomon ’84—Villaseñor’s vocally dexterous set, including pitch-perfect impressions of Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson, and Natalie Portman, brought much of the crowd to its feet, including President Tom Stritikus. And if anyone was fretting that the notoriously profane Cho would tone down her act in the august surroundings of Thorne Hall, worry not; her ribald barbs would have made Charles Thorne blush. “The students went crazy,” Murphy says. “The energy in there was powerful.”

In terms of stand-up seniority, Kim did his first open mic at the Laugh Factory a quarter-century ago. Murphy first took the stage in January 2014, and Gorton went on in March 2019, just shy of his 40th birthday.

Perhaps you’re wondering: How did a philosophy major, a psych major, and a econ major get to this place? “When PK, David, and I realized we’re the only three alumni doing stand-up in L.A. that we knew of, I began pushing this idea of getting on stage together,” Gorton says. The trio performed for the first time collectively on Nov. 15, 2023, at an Oxy L.A. alumni mixer at the Laugh Factory Hollywood.

The event was such a success that they did a second show at Oxy in April 2024, part of an evening of comedy in the Cooler assembled by Steve Eulenberg, Occidental’s assistant director of student involvement and concert production. Other comics on that bill included Fahim Anwar, Andrew Adolfo, and BT Kingsley, with Carlos Aguilar ’98 (Kim’s longtime friend and Oxy roommate) emceeing the show. “The Cooler was mostly  full, but not packed,” Kim says. “Thorne was on another level. That was an epic night.

“There are probably other Oxy alumni who have done stand-up, but we’re trying to keep that dream alive,” he adds. “I hope one of us three can make it big, because we’ll all help each other.”

PK Kim: “I always wanted my son to be a leader in America. I wanted to name him Martin Luther Kim—the leader of Asian American people. My wife always said, ‘That’s so much pressure. Do you want to do that to him?’ So, our second choice was Abraham Lynn Kim.”

“Many first-generation immigrants only use biblical names,” Kim proclaims. “Growing up, I knew five other Paul Kims, so everybody called me. ‘PK.’” He was, indeed, a preacher’s kid, and his father pastored a big church in El Sereno with a congregation of more than 3,000.

Growing up in a strict religious household, “I wasn’t allowed to listen to music on the radio—it was all the devil’s music—and I wasn’t allowed to watch anything vulgar,” Kim says. “When my friend gave me a tape of Eddie Murphy Delirious, I was blown away. [Gorton likewise cites the classic 1983 stand-up special as an early influence.] After my parents went to sleep, I would stay up and watch Johnny Carson’s opening monologue every night. And the fact that The Tonight Show was in Burbank made it feel real to me—that people did this for a living.”

Having endured his share of verbal taunts as a teenager, Kim turned to comedy in self-defense. “I would recite these stand-ups that I was watching, and that gave me an ‘in’ toward different groups of friends where I would be self-deprecating,” he says. “Socially, comedy helped me a lot.”

Academically, he admits, “I did not do well at Oxy. My mind was all over the place, and I got my ass kicked in philosophy. But my professors rocked my world. Occidental opened my eyes—it was like ripping a Band-Aid off for a kid who grew up in a boxed-in church life.”

At age 23, Kim launched an Asian talent show called Kollaboration as a showcase for what he calls a “very fragmented” community of Asian American performers. “I was trying to show people, ‘Hey, we’re not just math and science geeks—we actually have singers, dancers, poets, and comedians.” Kim poured $5,000 of his own money into the show, renting a 1,200-seat theater. The first event sold only 200 tickets, he says, “but the kids in the show emailed me messages like, ‘This really made a difference in my life.’”

Eventually, Kim turned Kollaboration into a nonprofit, spending 10 years as executive director while training youth for leadership roles, building a network of Asian American performers, and expanding the program into 13 cities nationwide as well as Toronto. “It got really big,” he says. “For our ninth show at Shrine Auditorium, 6,300 people came out.”

Around the time that Kim launched Kollaboration, he started doing stand-up at the Laugh Factory, a Sunset Strip mainstay since 1979. On Tuesdays he would see a line outside the venue for Open Mic Night, where owner Jamie Masada would take the first 10 comics in line for a guaranteed two-minute  set (with an additional 10 chosen in a random drawing). “People waited in line for six hours, maybe longer,” Kim says. “Some guys wore diapers if they couldn’t leave the line.”

Kim did the line (but not the diapers) for about a year, starting his day selling ads for the L.A. Times’ Food section at 6 a.m. every Tuesday so he could leave early. Then one day, Masada asked him if he wanted to host a weekly Asian Night. “I thought that was my break right there,” he says. “I worked so hard promoting that show, bringing so many people to the Laugh Factory, and hosted that show for almost 20 years.”

Kim has performed at the Laugh Factory hundreds of times over the last 25 years—not only at the Hollywood mother ship, but also Las Vegas, San Diego, and Long Beach. Perhaps his most popular video is a 2013 clip titled “North Korean Comedian,” which has 2.4 million views on the Laugh Factory’s YouTube channel.

As a father of three, a hotel event director, and running a wedding event company (Prokreation Entertainment) on weekends, comedy is fourth on Kim’s call sheet most days. “I have all the excuses, but I need to find a dedicated time to write,” he says. “Stand-up used to be all about material, but now all the clips that are going viral are crowd work. I’m really trying to strengthen that muscle.”

David Murphy: “I’ve been dating this woman who’s a little bit older than me. I didn’t realize she was older until she gave me her email and it was Sarah[at]hotmail.com. And I said, ‘You were the first Sarah to sign up for Hotmail—no underscores, no numbers?’ God created the universe, and his email is Jesusdad1225[at]hotmail.com.”

“When I started doing comedy, I would see PK at the Laugh Factory,” Murphy says. “He’s the sweetest, most encouraging human there is.” The two connected over Oxy, and Kim put him in a show he was producing.

“I did really well and after I got offstage, PK said, ‘Oh, man, I’m so glad you’re funny. All I knew about you was that you went to Oxy.’” Murphy chuckles. “He was so relieved.”

A graduate of Daniel Murphy (no relation) High School, Murphy played basketball for three years under Coach Brian Newhall ’83 and majored in economics at Occidental. He thought that he would pursue a career in business like his dad, but the class that had the biggest impact on him was an elective he picked up to impress a “cute” theater major.

“I took an acting class from Professor John Bouchard,” he says, “and everyone did a scene at the end of the semester. After class, Professor Bouchard pulled me off to the side and told me, ‘You have something.’ As I turned around to walk off, he said, ‘I’m serious, David. I wouldn’t say it’s developed or anything, but there’s something about you on stage, that’s all.’”

His first job after graduating was in sales for a national insurance company, complete with an Amex corporate card and traveling  for work around the country. Even so, “I wasn’t happy being in the office,” Murphy says. “I realized I didn’t have the money-at-all-cost gene that some people have. Life was too short to do something that I wasn’t passionate about, and I definitely did not have a passion for insurance.”

Consequently, Murphy started traveling abroad on his own, a passion that continues to this day. “I went to a couple places and that changed me. I saw people being happy in different parts of the world who didn’t have as many material things.”

Over the years, Murphy has visited about 26 countries. “I’ve traveled to Bali four times now,” he says. “There’s no status there. Everybody’s on scooters and wearing beach clothes—tank tops and board shorts. Everything is chill and the cost of living is really cheap.”

Making the leap into stand-up “took me a while,” Murphy admits. Though he would land the occasional acting gig, memorizing lines “was never really my thing,” and he grew frustrated with the industry’s red tape: “Too many people had to say yes.”

On Jan. 13, 2014, Murphy went to his first open mic at a place called Amsterdam Cafe in North Hollywood. “It was scary,” he recalls. “A comedian friend of mine said, ‘Come to the open mic.’ I think there were five people there. Maybe a minute and a half into my set, I was thinking, ‘Man, these three minutes are moving slow.’ But I fell in love with it. When I told my dad, ‘This is what I want to do,’ he told me, ‘I don’t care what you do. It could be whatever you want. So many people spend their lives on the platform. Don’t wait to get on a train—just pick a train.’

“A lot of comedy is what happens offstage—your ability to engage, network, and be friendly with all kinds of people,” he says. “Everybody always tells me, ‘Murph, you’re so good at talking to people,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, because I went to Oxy. There were so many different types of people there, and   I’ve always been fascinated by people.”

After the Thorne Hall show last semester (“a bucket-list moment”), Murphy felt the same warmth about the current generation of students that he knew a quarter-century ago. “Oxy still has the same friendly culture on campus where you can talk to anybody,” he says. “I went to the Cooler after the show and when I tried to pay for something, these kids were like, ‘No, I’ll get the pizza. I have so much money on my card.’ I remember doing the same thing as a student when visitors would come to campus.

“Comedy has a lot of ups and downs,” he adds. “You’re driving three hours down to San Diego just to do six minutes without getting paid and turning around. I’ve done shows in laundromats and on sidewalks. Everybody thinks of comedy as just clubs. The truth is, you do a lot of grunt work, but you love it.”

Whether it’s telling his own jokes and stories or writing material for others, comedy is Murphy’s full-time pursuit. In recent years, he’s gone out on the road opening for headliners Theo Von, Eric Griffin, Amir K, and Damon Wayans Jr., among others.

For much of his career, commercials have been his bread-and-butter. Murphy has appeared in about 50 national commercials for brands such as McDonald’s, Apple, and Tide. For a national commercial like the one he did for AT&T last year, he says, “You might make $40,000 from that one day.”

Murphy recently wrapped production on  the second season of the BET comedy series Churchy, on which he is co-head writer. Last year, he and his writing partner wrote a feature film script for Churchy creator and star Kevin “KevOnStage” Fredericks as well. He’s done some punch-up jobs on writing jobs with the Farrelly Brothers—two seasons of the streaming series Loudermilk as well as The Now, a 2021 show for the Roku Channel.

“My dream is to write for a network TV show for ABC or NBC or something,” he says.  “I feel like it’s in the universe. I went on a walk yesterday with a buddy who just sold a show to Amazon. I’m around it. I’m seeing that it’s doable.” (Fun fact: Murphy’s high school basketball coach was Kenya Barris, creator of Black-ish and a host of other series.)

“If I can go through life and not have to wake up and go to something I don’t want to, that’s a super win for me. I don’t need to be rich. I like traveling. I spent two months in Bali last year. And if I want to go to lunch with my dad, I can go to lunch with my dad. But that comes with keeping a low overhead. I just hope to be doing this for a long time.” 

Murphy’s dad has been to two or three of his shows, “but not because he won’t come,” Murphy says. I just tell him not to come. I still get nervous. I only recently had my first show where I was OK with bombing. It took me 10 years to realize he’s still gonna love me even if I don’t do well.” His mom has never come to a show, but for a different reason: “She thinks I talk about her too much.”

Eddie Gorton: “I’m the only one of my friend group from high school that made it out and went to college. It’s a lot of pressure when you’re the only one. Clap it up if you’re the smart person in your friend group—even if you came here with your dumb friends. They won’t know.”

Last May, Eddie Gorton taped a game show hosted by Travis Kelce titled Are You Smarter Than a Celebrity? We won’t spoil the episode (which premiered on Amazon Prime Video in December) but Gorton misspelled a word for $15,000, he says: “The kids at school have been reminding me how to spell that word ever since.”

When he was applying to colleges in 1997, Gorton was looking to enroll at San Jose State and play football as a walk-on when he got a phone call from Marcus Garrett ’93, an assistant football coach for the Tigers. “Oxy’s football team was looking for some speed and I ran track as well at that time,” says Gorton, who grew up in San Mateo. “Once I got to Oxy, I played football and ran track for a couple of years.”

Later on, as a psychology major, he gave up sports (“I wasn’t going to the NFL”) and started focusing on student life, helping to revive Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity’s Lambda Rho chapter and reinvent campus radio station KOXY. “Going to Occidental was the best decision I ever made,” he says.

When he graduated from Oxy, “I didn’t have a plan,” Gorton admits.“I didn’t have a car, an apartment, or a job. But within a week, I got hired by Enterprise Rent-A-Car, found an apartment in Pasadena with some friends from Oxy, and got a used car. Once I got micro-established as far as survival goes, I decided I wanted to be a teacher.”

Even as a first-grader, Gorton says, “I remember thinking, ‘I can do this better than my teacher, Mrs. Trailor.’ She was so boring, and I would be funnier than her doing this. I was like 6 or 7, right? I always had that in the back of my head.”

Fast-forward 16 years: As luck would have it, one of his customers at Enterprise was a principal, and he put Gorton in touch with a colleague who needed to replace a teacher in a combined fourth grade/fifth grade class with four months remaining in the school year.

“I think of teaching as an art, not a science,” he says, “and I always had that ability to talk to kids and work with students.” Pointing to Malcolm Gladwell’s maxim, he says, “If you do the math, it takes about 9½ years to get to 10,000 hours in front of the kids. I was maybe in my ninth year when I thought, ‘I’m really good at this.’ ”

After 12 years, he left the classroom to become a Title III English Language Instructional Coach. He did that for two years, followed by nearly 18 months as a restorative justice coordinator for about 25 schools in the district, and three years as an assistant principal at Strathern Street, Sylvan Park, and Carpenter elementary schools.

In September 2020, Gorton accepted a job as principal of Colfax Charter Elementary School. “Administrators were clamoring for a new voice,” he says, “and I think they reached out to me because they wanted to bring a little more jazz to the situation.”

In 2022, Colfax was one of two LAUSD elementary schools to be named a National Blue Ribbon School by the U.S. Department of Education. “Coming out of COVID, we were just really smashing these state tests,” Gorton says. “My teaching staff is by far the best that I’ve ever worked with. I ended up in a great spot.” (That same year, Gorton received the Alumni Seal Award for service to the community from Occidental.)

Gorton got the nickname “Principal of Comedy” before he got the Colfax job. “After I started stand-up, the host of a show I was doing knew I was an assistant principal,” he recalls. “When he introduced me, he said, ‘Here’s the Principal of Comedy.’ I took that name and branded the heck out of it.”

For years, Gorton had been channeling his inner stand-up in the classroom and at school assemblies. In the summer of 2018, with his 40th birthday on the horizon, he was at a dinner party where guests went around the table talking about a work of art that inspired them. “I mentioned this HBO documentary about Robin Williams [Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind] and said, ‘I’ve been thinking about doing stand-up for the first time.’ This guy across the table gets up and says, ‘You should do it. And if you don’t do it by the next time I see you, f*ck you.’ He kind of playfully cussed me out, but I was thinking, ‘Now I’ve got to do it.’”

The very first joke he told on stage was based on a true story. “I lost my Social Security card when I was about 25 and had to go down to the office and get a new one. In the government system, my ethnicity was listed as Caucasian, because my mom is white—when I was born in the hospital, the nurse checked the box next to Caucasian. I was legally white for 25 years. And when the lady across the table asked me if I wanted to change it, I replied something like, ‘Yeah, let’s get this party started!’”

The story builds to a climax that really happened: On his way home from the Social Security office, Gorton was pulled over by a patrol car. “The cop comes up to my window and asks me, ‘Do you know why I pulled you over?’ And I said, ‘I’ve been Black for 12 minutes. Y’all don’t mess around.’ We both laughed, and he didn’t give me a ticket.”

Comedy isn’t Gorton’s primary job, of course—he was judging a spelling bee at Colfax on the day of this interview—but he tries to maintain a routine for his side hustle. “Once a week I’m writing,” he says, “and twice a month my goal is to get up at a legit venue and tell some jokes. The buckets that I usually play with are things that happen at school, things that happen with my wife and kids, and things that have happened to me personally that involve race.

“Growing up, my immediate family at home was all white people. My mom, dad, and sister were all Irish. Along with your general childhood experiences, I was surrounded by alcoholism and quite the blended family. So, you pull from all that and make it funny.”

 In his second year as a stand-up, Gorton got the chance to open for comic Dan Mintz (best known as the voice of Tina on Bob’s Burgers). “Our kids were in kindergarten together, and we became friends,” he says.

A typical weekend of stand-up goes like this: “You do five shows in three days—a Thursday show and two shows each on Friday and Saturday,” Gorton notes. “I flew all the way to Tampa for my first time ever going out with Dan. And on the way there, he told me, ‘If you bomb on Thursday, you will be hosting on Friday.’

“I never looked back,” he declares. “I was funny on Thursday.” And he’s been funny every Thursday ever since.