Tim Wilson is a comedian and singer who represents Southern culture and lifestyle. His stand-up is often featured on national telecasts of the syndicated radio shows, The Bob and Tom Show and the John Boy and Billy Morning Show. He has also been featured on the late night comedy circuit and has released a dozen comedy albums featuring his original songs where he has seen cross-promotional success on the Comedy and Country album charts.<\/p>\n
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Amy caught up with him to preview his show and discuss Southern roots in comedy and the assimilation of music into the genre. Tim Wilson will be performing at The Taft Theater on January 20th<\/sup>. For plenty of laughs, it should be a night of great entertainment.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: Tim, tell us about your comedy style.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: Well I am kind of an in-betweener. I am a comedian and I write warped comedy songs. That is how I describe it and what I call them.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: I have been listening to some of your music this week. What is your process to write new material and who do you test it out on?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: Usually songs hit me when I am out driving. When you go between Cincinnati and Nashville, it gets a little boring driving and songs kind of come out of the air a little bit. There is a frequency somewhere that sends you songs. Stand-up routines, I usually watch TV and yell at the TV and something pops out and I take that on stage with me. As far as songs go, I usually try them out on crowds. I get a song idea and take it on stage and put it between two that work and try it out and see if it gets a laugh. If it does, I keep working on it. If it doesn\u2019t I go to something else.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: I was laughing at some of your stuff as I researched it. I live in Cincinnati but I am from Tennessee as well. I was home at Christmas time and\u00a0with just my family I think there is enough material to write comedy. This is true at almost any family gathering in the South.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: All families are full of material.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: I have found that even when you think someone\u2019s family is normal when you dig deep on any family, there are always crazy things.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: Yeah, that is true. I have a routine called \u201cThe Family Reunion.\u201d It talks about aunts that say crazy things. That\u2019s why I always tell everybody I know what Southerners are going to say before they are going to say it because I have been to so many family reunions. (In Southern Aunt voice) \u201cY\u2019all get in here and eat some of these fried taters before they get away. Does anybody want any cake?\u201d I have been to plenty of family reunions.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: What is the worst heckling experience you have ever had?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: I was arrested in Nashville one time for helping a heckler out of a club. That taught me a big lesson, never, ever leave the stage, ever. You duct tape yourself to the microphone stand if you have to, don\u2019t ever leave. That one pretty much cured me. Hecklers are somebody trying to sabotage your show and that\u2019s what I sort of got in Nashville about five years ago. I don\u2019t really get a lot of hecklers. I get a lot of overly-enthusiastic types who want to help you.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: I\u2019m sure it breaks your rhythm though when you have people yelling out.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: And that is so big. Civilians don\u2019t understand that comedians have done it before and we know what we are doing so it\u2019s really not all that difficult, you just have to sit and laugh or don\u2019t.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: That will be good advice for any crowd, laugh or don\u2019t.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: You either laugh or don\u2019t but you don\u2019t really have to help. In a way, a comedy show is best when there is a little bit of controversy. If somebody says something and it is relatively harmless, I mean that is fine, a lot of times somebody will say something and I will make a bigger deal of it than it really was. A comedy show is best when it has a little touch of controversy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: When you are not performing on stage or on the radio, do you feel pressure to always be \u201con\u201d and be the funny guy?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: Well maybe when you are young you do, but I have been doing comedy for 28 years and when the lights go off, I kind of go back to Tim Wilson-dom. If I am selling CDs or shirts after a show, I may try to entertain a little bit as we go. But comedians, in a lot of ways, are kind of quiet. We are more observers. On stage hopefully, I am entertaining and afterwards outside meeting people I am entertaining but other than that I am kind of sitting there thinking.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: How did you end up with comedy as a career anyway?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: Well I just sort of wandered into it. I wanted to be a songwriter and I was living in Atlanta, Georgia. A bunch of guys in the Atlanta Rhythm Section<\/em>, which was a big Southern Rock band in the 70\u2019s, they helped me. They brought me into the studio and taught me how things worked and played on a lot of my songs. That wasn\u2019t going anywhere and I was working at a mall and I was driving a girl home from work one day and passed a comedy club and I thought, \u201cWell I haven\u2019t heard of that. I know I can do that.\u201d I had done a lot of work on stage in school, MC\u2019ed talent shows and that kind of thing so I knew I could do that. So I went in there and started on an open mic night and that was in 1983. That was when comedy first started happening so it was easier to get road gigs.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: If you weren\u2019t doing comedy, what do you think you would be doing?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: If I wasn\u2019t doing comedy, I would have probably gone to law school and been a defense attorney because I am pretty good at coming up with bullshit to get somebody off. I have a comedian friend of mine, Roger Keiss, he and I wrote a book about Ted Bundy, which is a complete departure from comedy. It is a serious book and in it we are trying to prove that Ted Bundy murdered four women in my hometown in 1978 and in the course of doing that, I found out that there was one man that got executed for killing two of the women that Ted Bundy actually killed, and when I looked at the shamble of a defense that the man had, it made me want to be a defense attorney in a lot of ways. I would definitely be a Cold Case investigator or defense attorney, or if I could get a job as a singer in a Southern Rock band and get guaranteed a million dollars I\u2019d like to do that as well. I have a lot of different interests.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: Who is your favorite all-time Southern Rock Band?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: My favorite band of all time is either the Atlanta Rhythm Section or Lynyrd Skynyrd. I am a Southerner and if you grew up in the 70\u2019s and you didn\u2019t know Lynyrd Skynyrd, you were sort of on a different planet.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: I saw you played guitar in some of the videos that I watched. Do you play any other instruments?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: I can pick and peck on a piano. If I am writing a song, I can write it on the piano. I am the same way on the guitar. I am not much of a guitar player, but play well enough to play comedy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: I watched some of your songs on YouTube, \u201cThe Paul McCartney Lawyer\u201d or the Michelle Obama bit. Have you ever gotten contacted or called by somebody famous or a personality that you wrote something about?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: I once wrote a song called \u201cMichael McDonald Had a Farm\u201d and Michael McDonald ended up playing it at his 50th<\/sup> birthday. I knew his sister in Nashville and he wrote me a note on one of his CDs and that was nice.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: What is your favorite city or venue to perform at?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: Over the years I liked working at Lexington, Kentucky. They have a club called Comedy Off Broadway that is very good. There is a Zanies in Nashville. There is a place called Comedy Catch in Chattanooga, Tennessee.\u00a0 I have done a lot of CDs there. If you are a Southern comedian and you can\u2019t get laughs in Chattanooga then you need to change careers.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: Obviously you are Southern and a lot of your comedy is about Southern people. Do you find it harder when you go up North or in different parts of the US to get laughs?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: It sort of depends on where you are. Right now, my favorite places to play are in the Midwest. I can go up to Lansing, Michigan and my act has no problem. I work a lot up in Michigan, and in Peoria, Illinois, and Iowa, and a lot of Midwestern areas like Cincinnati, Ohio. In Middle America, my act is fine. When I go to New York City, it is hard for them to understand what I am saying. \u00a0I have noticed on some TV shows when they have Southerners, they put closed captioning on the bottom to understand what they are saying, but upstate New York is not a problem. It has to do with whether or not the crowd wants to like you or not. Plus I do a lot of radio, I do a lot of Bob and Tom which is out of Indianapolis, and I do a lot of syndicated radio, a show called John Boy and Billy Show which is out of Charlotte, and those go out to so many different towns, it makes it possible for me go to a town in Kansas that I have never been to, but if they have Bob and Tom, they sort of know what I do ahead of time.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: What advice would you give any young comedians starting out?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: What advice would I give them? Let advice go in one ear and out the other. The key to comedy is sort of a long process of learning yourself. Somebody else can\u2019t tell you who you are. That is why in the comedy business after ten years you start really learning how to write for yourself and after 20 years, you understand why God has put you on the Earth and so you write completely for yourself. Advice from other people is nice and everything but it really doesn\u2019t help you that much. And two, a comedian has to go work every week. He has to work every week and keep banging on it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: I know it takes a lot of practice. It looks easy sometimes but I think it is really hard I assume.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: There are comedians who get the hang of it really fast and there are other ones like me who have been doing it for 28 years and I am starting to get the hang of it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: I found it really interesting lately because comedians are the new rock stars it seems. When I open my Rolling Stone<\/em> magazine every month, they are always highlighting new comedians like Aziz Ansari, Aubrey Plaza and Chelsea Handler. Do you have any thoughts on this or why they are blowing up more than even musicians from time to time?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: I think comedians are truth tellers. Our job is to tell the truth. There are some people that get a handle on it and get on the right horse and it helps them get popular. I think Chelsea Lately<\/em> is a great show and she is very funny and she is very willing to take a lot of risks. The media has changed a little bit, the way people watch YouTube a lot. My little son is 13 and what he thinks is funny is different than me because I don\u2019t watch the same things on computers that he does. The world has changed a lot and you sort of have to get a handle on that. I am in the record business and all the record stores are closing. That is because I am 50 years old and I think of the record business as it was in the 70s and that\u2019s not the way it is. You have to learn how computers work. It is a big, long learning process.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: I saw some of your stuff on YouTube is very popular, some of the Bob and Tom stuff had over 500,000 hits.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: Yeah. I had one video called, \u201cBut I Could Be Wrong,\u201d I think is my biggest one on YouTube, just went over 2,000,000. That is in about a four year period. It is fun to look and see but I wish I could get paid for it. 2,000,000 hits on YouTube is a lot different than 2,000,000 Singles sold. But it is a good thing, it doesn\u2019t hurt anything. My top, the most downloaded song that I have is called \u201cBooty Man.\u201d It is a very weird song. It gets played on cruise ships in Jamaica and people like me and ask me if I am a Jamaican singer. It is a weird song and it is kind of monotonous. If you get a chance listen to \u201cBooty Man.\u201d That is my most downloaded song. I have a song called \u201cWhere the Blank is My Jetpack?\u201d which has done pretty well and then I have my standards \u201cFirst Baptist Bar and Grill\u201d and \u201cChurch League Softball Fist Fight.\u201d I have a song called \u201cAcid Country\u201d that is one of my favorites to do. I write a bunch of songs that nobody else will write.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: What can the fans expect here in Cincinnati on January 20th<\/sup>?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: I do about an hour and a half or so. I\u2019ll come out and do about 45 minutes of stand-up which is kind of opinionated. Then I get the guitar out and I\u2019ll play as many songs as you want to hear.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: Any thoughts on the election?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: I don\u2019t know. I can\u2019t get excited about anybody I am seeing in the Iowa Caucuses. I think Obama is a good person. I like Obama. I don\u2019t think anybody can do that job. It has gotten so peculiar lately in this country that I don\u2019t think any person can solve the problems, and I am damn sure nobody in the Iowa Caucuses can.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: I\u2019m sure there is a lot of song material there, in the Iowa Caucuses.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: There is a lot. The only problem is that the Republicans don\u2019t have anybody with enough personality to make fun of all that much.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: We have had some lively debate around my house about the Iowa situation. It has been scary.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: I grew up a Republican when I was a kid. I used to write to Richard Nixon when I was 9 years old and he\u2019d send me pictures back. Now I don\u2019t think the Republicans have a strong enough candidate. In 2016, I think that Jeb Bush will be President.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Amy: Really, he is kind of lying low right now.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tim: Jeb Bush should have been President in 2000, but he wasn\u2019t. The wrong one won.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tim Wilson is a comedian and singer who represents Southern culture and lifestyle. His stand-up is often featured on national telecasts of the syndicated radio shows, The Bob and Tom Show and the John Boy and Billy Morning Show. He has also been featured on the late night comedy circuit and has released a dozen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1261],"tags":[1267,1262,1266,1263,1265,1264,1836,1269,1268],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thefirst3songs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2141"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thefirst3songs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thefirst3songs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thefirst3songs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thefirst3songs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2141"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/thefirst3songs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2143,"href":"http:\/\/thefirst3songs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2141\/revisions\/2143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thefirst3songs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thefirst3songs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thefirst3songs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}