March 27, 2024 • 30 mins
Ep. 4 – 2020 Changed My Career - The Funny Life Podcast with William Lee Martin
In this episode:
o Tour Schedule recap
o How I went from 40k followers to 400k followers
o Social Media During the Pandemic
o How to stay true to you in a social media world
27-year comedy vet William Lee Martin along with his ensemble of smart, knowledgeable team including tour manager, Lisa Bruce and producer Ron Phillips, dive into life, entertainment, and the world of show business. You don't have to be a comedian to enjoy this podcast! Take us in the car, on a walk or watch on your phone while lying in bed or hiding out in the restroom at work! And William Lee will teach you How to Kinda Succeed in Comedy & Life!
Watch on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/@WilliamLeeMartinComedy
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-funny-life-with-william-lee-martin--5894622/support.
In this episode:
o Tour Schedule recap
o How I went from 40k followers to 400k followers
o Social Media During the Pandemic
o How to stay true to you in a social media world
27-year comedy vet William Lee Martin along with his ensemble of smart, knowledgeable team including tour manager, Lisa Bruce and producer Ron Phillips, dive into life, entertainment, and the world of show business. You don't have to be a comedian to enjoy this podcast! Take us in the car, on a walk or watch on your phone while lying in bed or hiding out in the restroom at work! And William Lee will teach you How to Kinda Succeed in Comedy & Life!
Watch on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/@WilliamLeeMartinComedy
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-funny-life-with-william-lee-martin--5894622/support.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
This week following a plan designed justfor you, plus how to expand your
social media numbers. Oh on thenew edition of how To kind Of Succeed
in Comedy and Life. Hi,and welcome in everybody. I'm your host,
Weebley Martin. Welcome to the HowTo kind Of Succeed in Comedy of
(00:23):
Life. And I'm bouncing in mature. I'm bouncing. I'm excited because when
this podcast airs, the Texas RangersWorld Series champion World Champions, even though
we only play it in two countries, but world Champion Texas Rangers will have
started their new season, and yeah, what a fun time it is.
(00:47):
So I bought this. I'm prettysure this was made by some fine Indonesian
kids ten to twelve years old,so I'd like to thank them for their
craftsmanship. Plus I put Martin onthe back and sixty six because I was
born in sixty six, so Idon't want somebody else's name on my shirt.
I always think it's weird when agrown man wears another grown man's shirt
(01:11):
with their name on it. Butwhat a great week it was last week
in Lowell, Arkansas. And we'llget into that and the tour schedule though,
that's coming up. I'm in Tifton, Georgia on Friday night, which
is good Friday, and it's sellingwell, so grabbed a few remaining tickets.
(01:32):
I'm in Doltan, Alabama on Saturdaynight and there are a lot of
great tickets to Dothan, Alabama,tickets still available. And then Baton Rouge
in a couple of weeks and OceanSprings the day after, and then we
first time ever we go to Concordia, Kansas to do a theater there.
So thank you all for buying thetickets and spreading the words. You know,
(01:57):
the way we do the comedy showis not the way I've always done
it in twenty seven years. Butafter twenty four years of trying to figure
out who I am on stage,you know, we we really, I'm
really having a great time. SoI appreciate everything. And we're going to
get into a couple of milestones thatwe hit today as a matter of fact,
but I want to welcome in myco host and there she is already.
(02:23):
Look at you. Now. Idon't understand how you put two little
dots behind your head on the wall. And yeah, last week she threw
me under the bus, so Iwas already ready to go with. No.
I just noticed those two dots today, and that's all I'm gonna focus
on when I play back. That'sall the viewers are going to watch it
(02:46):
exactly exactly. But it's not becauseof me. It's because you hang so
much crap on all the walls anyway. Well, it's true, no,
no, it is, I do. I've actually gone pretty conservative with the
hanging of the stuff uh here,because normally every space has to be taken,
(03:06):
every space, and and and whatI did. We only noticed the
dots behind your head because I puta little lamp behind you, just a
little lamp. Good, give it, give her a solid right there,
look a little lamp. And andI also threw out a couple of the
old DVDs there too, you know, yeah, yeah, I touch.
We're trying not to burn the curtainsdown or anything. There was an inch
(03:28):
not covered, so put that's notmind too. Every inch is covered with
something. Well, and I haven'tintroduced the guy who busted the balls last
week on my gut and everything.I don't remember busting anybody's balls on your
well. You know, I'm gladyou brought that up because I have it
on footage and uh no, butRon Felt. It's good to have you,
(03:51):
buddy, Thank you buddy. Yeah, man, uh so we hit
a milestone today. Yes, it'sso exciting. Seven hundred thousand followers on
Facebook right now. That's amazing.Congratulations. Thanks. Yeah, it's a
team effort right there. Just soon on Facebook is seven hundred thousand,
(04:14):
on TikTok where almost at four hundredthousand, on Instagram almost one hundred thousand
because I don't really do a wholelot of Instagram, and then YouTube is
still setting at about thirty nine thousand. And you know, we're going to
get into a lot on social mediabecause obviously, if you're trying to be
successful in comedy and in life thesedays, social media is part at Yes.
(04:36):
Unfortunately, you know, my brother, I'm so jealous of him because
he's on none of them. He'son He's not on Facebook, he's not
on Instagram, humbler. What's theone where you find a girl and a
boy or whatever, you know,I don't know where they are. That's
the farmers. Yeah, next timeyou do like that, kick off your
(05:00):
shoes before you say it. Puta female dip in the yellow Girls that
dip. Yes, yeah, highschool. One of our good friends did.
And it was like, that's notattractive, not attracted, not attractive.
But farmers. Oh no, no, no, it's just a whole
bunch of them. But I don'tknow, but wife and tender, See
(05:20):
I knew, I knew wrong.Well, I think there's also plenty of
fish or there's Grinderville. Have youonly fans? I know that one just
because there was a teacher, youknow, yeah, there was a Oh
it was funny. I read afollow up story on her. So if
(05:41):
y'all read anything about this teacher,we did it in the last season of
the of the podcast, and Iwas like, go, girl whatever,
Yeah, so she she did youhear about her at all? She she
was like in Mississippi or something,and she had an only fans account and
she got caught and she got fired. And I think the joke that I
(06:04):
said on it is that they weretipped off by the number of dads that
were showing up to parent teacher conferences. Yeah, I'll go check on the
kid with that girl. And soshe got fired and then she went to
work for another company. I justread a follow up story and then they
fired her. They fired her fromfive days into it because of her social
(06:27):
media. They didn't know about thesocial media history, and yeah, so
she got fired. So I'm noton only fans, but we're on Facebook
a lot and seven hundred thousand followers. Yeah, and that's where we do
Yeah, and that's where we doso much of our advertising as well.
Yes. Of course, of course, when I first came to work here
in twenty nineteen, you only hadlike forty something thousand followers. So what
(06:50):
do you think escalated it to sevenhundred thousand. Well, you know,
I think a lot of it.And we struggled a long time to had
any sort of numbers. And yeah, in twenty nineteen, when you got
here twenty nineteen, we were likeforty five thousand, and we couldn't get
anything on Facebook. And and weeven you know, toured with one of
(07:12):
those Internet sensation kind of fell usin twenty sixteen, and and you know,
we we hooked our to the wagonto him because you know, we
thought it would be a mutual thing. I had the CMT special come out
in twenty fifteen, and and hehad like a million followers. Yeah,
just from talking to Ring in thetruck yeah, writting in the truck,
(07:33):
rating in the truck. And butyou know, he didn't really he really
didn't help us like we thought wewould with the social media, and I
was still struggling with about forty fivethousand followers and then uh, and then
we had the two specials come outin twenty nineteen. At the end of
(07:54):
it November December, right, Butand then I hired a marketing team and
it wassive. They were kind ofhelping me a lot, you know,
but the numbers really weren't moving,really weren't moving. We call them the
Facebook Brothers, but it was athey're a good group of guys, guys
(08:15):
called Honest Fox. And they alsohelped Leanne Morgan and stuff. And then
the whole world shut down during thepandemic and they came to me and they
said, hey, what you needto do is do a zoom show when
the pandemic happened. And I'm like, what's a zoom show? And they
(08:35):
said, well, you do yourstand up comedy, but there's no audience.
Oh and that makes you go,oh, well wow, that makes
me feel good. Yeah, nobodyto laugh at my jokes. Yeah,
And and comedy is absolutely a marriagebetween the audience and the stand up comedian.
And I said, Fellas, that'sjust a lecture, okay. And
I saw a lot of people trythose zoom shows by themselves, no audience
(09:00):
it's at all, And I thoughtit. I thought it hurt their brand
completely. I also thought, notonly did it hurt their brand, but
it also made them seem a littledesperate. Yeah, there were a couple
of things that, especially early inthe pandemic. If y'all remember right,
it was like second week of thepandemic, people were starting to put tip
(09:22):
jars, uh you know that ontheir podcast and all these other things,
and and their zoom shows and everythingelse. And I thought, boy,
I'm so glad that i feel blessed, but I also feel like I've done
it smart where I don't have justtwo weeks worth of of savings saved up.
(09:43):
But they were in a panic.So I didn't want to do that.
I didn't want to do a zoomshow, and I didn't want to
look desperate. And they said,but we had these specials out and they
said, well, turn on yourcomputer and talk into it. And I
said, Fellas, that's the dumbestidea I've ever heard, Why would anybody
want me just to talk into thecomputer? Right? And and then then
(10:07):
on a Sunday, my wife waswatching Meet the Press and I call it
Meet the Depressed. Yeah, andthey were saying, remember I think you'all
remember they were saying that we weregoing to be shut down for ten fifteen
years. Yeah, it was goingto be a long time. Yeah,
fifteen years on some of those pressstuff. Yeah, there were senators and
(10:28):
congressmen and especially on one side thatkept saying, you know, this could
last for years. I was strugglingwith fourteen days to what do you do
the curve? What's what was thedeal? Oh to you know, oh
the to uh what was the phrase? I don't see. I threw it
out there in the middle of thelive show, and now nobody knows.
(10:50):
Nobody knows what it was to lessenthe curves. The curve yeah kind of
yeah, y'all remember all that.Yeah, And then the and then the
distancing and six feet six feet inthe arrows in Walmart. Crazy. It
was just the other day, butit seems like a lifetime ago. It
was. People won't absolutely believe thatthat's how we try to deal with with
(11:16):
a airborne disease is oh, well, let's all go in the same direction
in a Walmart, And that wasa rebel. I didn't go in the
same direction. Well I didn't either. Through that crack. I well,
I you know, I was deemednon essential from day one almost, you
know, suddenly we didn't need standup comedians or anything else, or at
(11:37):
least they said so, even thoughwe've now proven that stand up comedians were
necessary for this country and entertainers alltogether, you know, you needed to
be able to take your mind offof mind. So I'm watching Meet the
Depressed with Michelle and they're literally saying, you know, one guy was saying
that it's going to be ten orfifteen years that, you know, we
(11:58):
could be ship down. And atmy age, I'm like, well,
that puts me out of the businessaltogether. My career is done. And
so I go outside and I'm workingin the yard, which, by the
way, during the pandemic, myyard was immaculate. I mean, it's
amazing what that yard could look likewith a full time landscape of living on
the proper act. But I wasout in it, and I'm working out
(12:20):
in the yard, and I happenedto have my computer out there. I
was watching something else, I thinka movie or something, and at four
o'clock I turned on the computer andwent Facebook Live, and I simply talked
about what I was feeling and howto get through life with a smile on
your face. I didn't talk abouthoaxes. I didn't talk about that one
(12:41):
side was right and the other sidewas wrong. I didn't talk about anything
political with it. I just talkedabout how to put a smile on your
face. And my point was alwaysthat we all go through bad stuff in
our life. Most of the time, we're not going through it with three
hundred and thirty five million people.And even when the pandemic was over,
(13:03):
my position was that you had tofigure out how to put a smile on
your face. And then the nextday I did it again at four o'clock,
and then again at four o'clock,and it turned into four o'clock Daily
Talk, and we would go liveevery day at four o'clock dur in the
pandemic, and it was it wascrazy numbers. I mean it would be
twenty five, thirty, forty fiftythousand people watching at once, you know,
(13:28):
And then we went from forty thousandto four hundred thousand in about six
months, you know, and itjust exploded on and we did other stuff
during the pandemic. Remember, wewent twenty four hours straight in a broadcast,
So I went live. You dida twenty four hour marathon during the
pandemic. I did you tried didn'tyou try coffee or something during that?
(13:52):
Oh? I did all kinds ofYeah. Remember because he didn't drink coffee.
That was the first time he'd evertried coffee. Yeah. So but
when we got low down, everybodywas saying, well, this would be
a good time to try the guitaror whatever you wanted to do. Right,
So I took the twenty four hourDaily Talk and I made it Saturday
(14:13):
from twelve pm noon and went allthe way to twelve pm noon on Sunday,
and I had people call in andI try coffee for the first time.
It stood disgusting and I'll never drinkit. Play video game. I
also, Yeah, the video gameswas fun because I told everybody between four
(14:33):
and six am, I am notgoing to talk at all. I'm just
going to play Red Dead Redemption,which, by the way, Red Dead
Redemption probably did as much for meto get through the pandemic. As anything.
I would literally get up in themorning and go to the loft which
is above our garage in my littleman cave, and I would ride my
(14:54):
horse into town and get a bathwith a whore on Red Dead Redemption.
No, he's not even sorry.It took me a second to catch up
to what you were saying, andthen oh my god, I see what
you did there. No, Ilove Red Bed. I would actually with
Red Dead, I'd either go intotown, into Strawberry, or go into
(15:18):
Uh. There's like four or fivecities that I absolutely love, but Strawberry
is probably my favorite because they wouldalways bring in the dirtiest horse in there.
They'll give you a bath and yeahit's fifty cents extra. But wow,
But this this game, I didlike it. This game. This
game is literally you live in theOld West and so you have It's it's
(15:41):
a game like I've never played.It's a game that never ends. It
literally, it's not like it's notlike a mission that you go do.
There are missions that you do,but you can literally get up and ride
your fake horse uh and go huntingor fishing, and it's the exact same
adrenaline feel that you do if youactually go hunt and fish and it's easier
(16:03):
to clean and it's cheaper. AndI did it all the way. I
got a question, I got,I got a question. Bill. Was
it in VR? Did you dothis game? No? No, it's
not available in VR yet. It'snot available. Cool. Yeah, but
I still to this day if Ineed, especially that whole bath. Yeah,
oh that would be that creepy yeah, cep creepy, creepy at all.
(16:27):
So you well you have in thisgame. You got to sleep,
you've got to eat, and uh, and then every once in a while
you got to clean yourself up.So you're in the bath and then you
hear this knock. Do you wanta little extra service? And then you
get to and then what I lovedabout is like, uh, it's a
like scrubbing arm or scrubb a legor something, so you can hit that
(16:51):
and then it says, uh chator no talk, no talk. I
don't want no talking from my fakewhore. Gosh, this is so funny.
See, we don't have those buttonsin real life. No, we
do not have that. You know, you have to pay extra if she's
mute. What that's weird, anyhorse, any hor Let's move on.
(17:19):
See what you did. But duringthe twenty four hours I played Red Dead
Redemption between four and six PM,and I averaged between five hundred to one
thousand people watching play Red Dead atthat time in the morning. That's crazy
and the numbers that we got fromthat thing were great. But we also
(17:40):
we had a T shirt during thepandemic that said one minute, one hour,
one day, and that was alsothe philosophy that we really started preaching.
And that's the philosophy that we learnedwhen we did Cowboys who Care with
these kids with cancer, is thatyou learn that sometimes the greatest thing that
you could we get through to getthrough a bad time is the old saying,
(18:03):
how do you eat an elephant onespoonful at a time? Yeah,
one bite at a time. Andso we started talking about sometimes you just
have to get through the minute,to get through the hour, to get
through the day. And then westarted selling those shirts and those things went
crazy, and then people would wearthem and then send pictures and stuff.
(18:25):
But we really started building the numbers. But it's also a great lesson now
that got us to full hundred thousand, and then people started going back to
work and everything else. So allthe things that you had, all the
plans that you had on social mediathat were working just you know, three
(18:45):
months ago, no longer worked anymore. And so that's when we had to
start pivoting, and you had tostart figuring out that the market changed,
and the market did change. Now, like if I go live now,
it'd be good if I have onehundred people and we have seven hundred thousand
followers because it changed. But longclips. We used to put up long
(19:10):
comedy clips, and now it reallywas laying next to my wife watching her
how she consumed social media, whichshe usually has a pretty long attention span,
but she was just scrolling through everything, everything from TikTok to Instagram to
everything else. So I met withthe brothers and I said, listen,
(19:33):
I want to change my philosophy becausethey had a lot of clients at the
time, and they were putting outthe exact same thing with all of us.
Everything the same, everything, allthe layouts looked the same. So
if it was a holiday, everybodyhad some sort of goofy. Independence Day
was one of them. Grap thefont on the print. Yeah, And
I said, listen, there's liketen, you got like ten or twelve
(19:59):
conservative, and don't I guess Iam conservative because I don't cuss and stuff
on stage are the cleaner kind ofcomedy. And but you know, how
are people going to distinguish me nowfrom your twelve clients? And because I'm
following eleven of them and they alllook like the same thing. And so
what I wanted to do was shorteneverything up, and I told them short
(20:22):
staccato notes, which is dot dotright, So instead of doing a three
minute bit on stand up, let'scut it down to fifteen seconds to a
minute at the time, you know. So we shortened that up and that
that was working. So I letthose guys go when we started doing our
own thing, and we shortened upall the notes. And now I didn't
(20:42):
notice that they now do short noteson other clients. Now they figured out,
and yeah, after I was calledthe asshole for wanting to buck the
system, and it's absolutely true.But now the trend has changed again.
So we just found that that withYouTube is always still a minute for a
(21:03):
short, but for Facebook reels andInstagram rooms, you can do a minute
and a half. And what Ialso found was my comedy needs that minute
and a half because if you cutdown comedy, stand up comedy down to
a minute, then it's pretty hardto get somebody to get the gist of
Yeah, you have to cut outsome of the meat, so much of
(21:26):
it. And you know, that'swhy so many of these comics have resorted,
and I say resorted in a niceway, but resorted to doing crowd
work for their their their post andthat kind of thing, because crowd work
doesn't require a setup and a punch. It really just requires you saying something
to an audience member name saying somethingback, so there's not a development of
(21:48):
the bit, which is hard todo over a Zoom con. I was
gonna say, how would that haveworked for somebody, you know during the
pandemic on Zoom who does a lotof crime there is skilled to doing great
crowd and there are times that Iwill I will absolutely go and work in
a crowd. I personally don't wantto do that though all the time,
(22:10):
because now you're showing up to seethe audience instead of the audience showing up
to see you, and that issome of the toughest things to do.
And stand up, you know,that's one of the reason why I got
out of the cruise ship business isbecause I realized that the audience was coming.
I was going to see them.They weren't coming to see me,
you know, they would go seethe comic, whether or not it was
(22:33):
me or Lisa or Ron standing onstage. And then when the pandemic happened
and we finally got numbers, Iwas like, I told Michelle, I
was like, I actually want tosee if people will pay to see me
instead of me doing the opposite.And that's when we kind of pushed back
on the entire cruise ship thing.And that was scary because you know,
(22:53):
once the cruises came back, thatis a steady income. It was a
good income, and everything we're doingnow there's not a guarantee in any of
it, right, you know,So if we sell two tickets, then
we lose money. If we sellyou know, all the tickets, and
then then we've done our job inthe right direction. But there's no safety
(23:14):
net anymore in this audience office.And it's been like that for for really
since the pandemic, because I didone cruise ship coming out of the and
you were miserable, and it wasterrible when he would come off the ships
because you would be gone. Wasit two weeks? It was usually a
week, yeah, but the wayit laid over, it was two cruises.
(23:36):
Yeah, so it was like almosttwo weeks and then you'd be home
like a week. And Bill,they didn't mean you stayed on the cruise
the whole time, right, Youdidn't get helicoptered out and brought back.
No, no, no. Sowhat I would do is I would fly
out to like an island or somethinglike Bahamas or Belize or any of those
kind of places, and I wouldmeet the ship halfway and we would bring
(23:56):
it back into Galveston, maybe astop and bring it into Gallston, and
then they would bring on new audience. Yeah, the old ones would get
off the new cruisers and we wouldtake it out to a new island and
then I would get off in thatisland and fly back home. So it
was too cold, you know what. That makes sense though, So you
had two different audiences because you werehalf half of one cruise in the first
(24:21):
half of the seconds. See.Yeah, but I was also in a
cabin on Carnival without any sort ofwindow. The room. My cabin was
half of this. It was literallyhalf of this, this this entire podcast
studio. So about a six bytwelve ten kind of room, sometimes just
(24:48):
a twin bed in there, andthen a small path to the bathroom.
And so I used to always jokethat my room was a six or a
ten by twelve. In the stateof ta As requires a twelve by fifteen
for the prisoners. Otherwise it's crueland unusual punishment, right, Yes,
And when he would come back tothe office the next week, he was
(25:11):
never in a good mood. No, I was terrible. I was like,
go, this guy's supposed to befunny. I came to work for
him, and you were doing cruises. It was like, yeah, it
was hard to be It's so hardto be isolated. And then I really
was alone, you know. Sothe crew you get on the ship,
and it wasn't always the same shipobviously, you know, you go from
(25:32):
ship to ship or whatever, andthe crew they would be on there for
six to ten months together. Butyou are the outsider, you know.
So not only not only was Imiserable, I was also drunk every night
too. The only way that Icould sleep at night was to go into
the crew bar and I would justdrink and I would I was miserable.
Yeah, and that's when I juststarted making a lot of the changes in
(25:56):
my life. And and really thepriess of of going from forty thousand to
four hundred thousand started even before thatin twenty Like I said, in twenty
sixteen, when I decided I wasgoing to make wholesale changes and not only
the act but also who I wasas a person on stage as well.
(26:18):
And I was praying about it oneday and I was literally mowing the grass
and my special would come out,and I'm like, Lord, why can't
I grab the brass ring? Youknow, you let other people grab it,
and why don't you let me?And the voice in my head literally
said, Hey, I made youinto William Lee Martin. Why don't you
try to be that guy for awhile. You know, you don't cuss
at home, you don't do allthose things, and you get on stage
(26:41):
and you go filthy with the wholething. Why don't you try to be
the guy that I've created, theguy that wanted to be a preacher,
the guy that really I just madeto be to get people laugh. You
don't have to drop the F bombevery third word, like you are right
now. And I made those wholesalechanges and then and that was like nine
months after my CMG my one hourspecial came out as Cowboy Bill, and
(27:06):
I didn't think by just dropping thelanguage was enough. I thought I need
to be William Lee Martin, andthat's when I changed it. But all
those things just tells you from twentysixteen to now, from when we had
no followers to seven hundred thousand followers. First of all, if you want
some good, solid advice, betrue to yourself whatever you do on social
(27:33):
media, because you got to livewith that. I know a lot of
people that created these great characters onsocial media and now they are a slave
to that character because that's how peopleknow them, and it really becomes difficult.
So if you're going to create abrand, you better be in love
(27:55):
with that brand. If that's whatyou're going to create on social media.
You know, I've had people askme and that, well, why don't
you do this? And why don'twhy don't you do why don't you do
a rent? You know, arant and and all these other kind of
Well, I'm not a oracle andI'm not a rant kind of guy,
and or create you know, usea filter. I know people that got
(28:15):
famous by using a filter on there, but then when they're out in public,
people are like, oh, that'sreally how you look. And so
just my only advice if you aregoing to create something on social media,
one, enjoy it. Two youbetter be in love with the person that
you're creating, because that thing cangrow bigger than you ever imagined it could.
(28:37):
And I think that's why people arestill gravitating to what we're still doing,
is because I think I'm pretty genuinewith my stand up and who I
am on and off stage, SoI think so too. Yeah, so
don't forget. We got tour schedulecoming up. But you can find all
of it on social media, aswe've all talked about, you know,
(28:59):
just go to my website first ofall, William Lee Martin dot com,
William Leemartin dot com, and youcan do the jump off. From there,
you can get me on Instagram,Facebook, TikTok, and more importantly
YouTube. YouTube is where I reallywant to see some growth. So that's
where you'll find this podcast and youfor a broadcast, but you can also
(29:21):
find the podcast if you want tolisten to it on iTunes you can find
it on Apple, you can findit on spreaker. Hell, you can
find it on the website too.Weemleemartin dot com. Yep, hey,
let's do though. Oh and thetours schedule also Tipton, Georgia. Don't
forget this weekend, Doltan, Alabama, bat On Rouge, Louisiana, Ocean
Springs, Mississippi, and Concordia,Kansas. And then also Arlington, Texas.
(29:48):
We will be there for my birthdayweekend May eighteenth, and all those
tickets are available at William leemartin dotcom. So on behalf of Liza Bruce
Bye and Ron Phillips there you knowwhat, go out there and you know,
try to be kind of successful incomedy and life. M
This week following a plan designed justfor you, plus how to expand your
social media numbers. Oh on thenew edition of how To kind Of Succeed
in Comedy and Life. Hi,and welcome in everybody. I'm your host,
Weebley Martin. Welcome to the HowTo kind Of Succeed in Comedy of
(00:23):
Life. And I'm bouncing in mature. I'm bouncing. I'm excited because when
this podcast airs, the Texas RangersWorld Series champion World Champions, even though
we only play it in two countries, but world Champion Texas Rangers will have
started their new season, and yeah, what a fun time it is.
(00:47):
So I bought this. I'm prettysure this was made by some fine Indonesian
kids ten to twelve years old,so I'd like to thank them for their
craftsmanship. Plus I put Martin onthe back and sixty six because I was
born in sixty six, so Idon't want somebody else's name on my shirt.
I always think it's weird when agrown man wears another grown man's shirt
(01:11):
with their name on it. Butwhat a great week it was last week
in Lowell, Arkansas. And we'llget into that and the tour schedule though,
that's coming up. I'm in Tifton, Georgia on Friday night, which
is good Friday, and it's sellingwell, so grabbed a few remaining tickets.
(01:32):
I'm in Doltan, Alabama on Saturdaynight and there are a lot of
great tickets to Dothan, Alabama,tickets still available. And then Baton Rouge
in a couple of weeks and OceanSprings the day after, and then we
first time ever we go to Concordia, Kansas to do a theater there.
So thank you all for buying thetickets and spreading the words. You know,
(01:57):
the way we do the comedy showis not the way I've always done
it in twenty seven years. Butafter twenty four years of trying to figure
out who I am on stage,you know, we we really, I'm
really having a great time. SoI appreciate everything. And we're going to
get into a couple of milestones thatwe hit today as a matter of fact,
but I want to welcome in myco host and there she is already.
(02:23):
Look at you. Now. Idon't understand how you put two little
dots behind your head on the wall. And yeah, last week she threw
me under the bus, so Iwas already ready to go with. No.
I just noticed those two dots today, and that's all I'm gonna focus
on when I play back. That'sall the viewers are going to watch it
(02:46):
exactly exactly. But it's not becauseof me. It's because you hang so
much crap on all the walls anyway. Well, it's true, no,
no, it is, I do. I've actually gone pretty conservative with the
hanging of the stuff uh here,because normally every space has to be taken,
(03:06):
every space, and and and whatI did. We only noticed the
dots behind your head because I puta little lamp behind you, just a
little lamp. Good, give it, give her a solid right there,
look a little lamp. And andI also threw out a couple of the
old DVDs there too, you know, yeah, yeah, I touch.
We're trying not to burn the curtainsdown or anything. There was an inch
(03:28):
not covered, so put that's notmind too. Every inch is covered with
something. Well, and I haven'tintroduced the guy who busted the balls last
week on my gut and everything.I don't remember busting anybody's balls on your
well. You know, I'm gladyou brought that up because I have it
on footage and uh no, butRon Felt. It's good to have you,
(03:51):
buddy, Thank you buddy. Yeah, man, uh so we hit
a milestone today. Yes, it'sso exciting. Seven hundred thousand followers on
Facebook right now. That's amazing.Congratulations. Thanks. Yeah, it's a
team effort right there. Just soon on Facebook is seven hundred thousand,
(04:14):
on TikTok where almost at four hundredthousand, on Instagram almost one hundred thousand
because I don't really do a wholelot of Instagram, and then YouTube is
still setting at about thirty nine thousand. And you know, we're going to
get into a lot on social mediabecause obviously, if you're trying to be
successful in comedy and in life thesedays, social media is part at Yes.
(04:36):
Unfortunately, you know, my brother, I'm so jealous of him because
he's on none of them. He'son He's not on Facebook, he's not
on Instagram, humbler. What's theone where you find a girl and a
boy or whatever, you know,I don't know where they are. That's
the farmers. Yeah, next timeyou do like that, kick off your
(05:00):
shoes before you say it. Puta female dip in the yellow Girls that
dip. Yes, yeah, highschool. One of our good friends did.
And it was like, that's notattractive, not attracted, not attractive.
But farmers. Oh no, no, no, it's just a whole
bunch of them. But I don'tknow, but wife and tender, See
(05:20):
I knew, I knew wrong.Well, I think there's also plenty of
fish or there's Grinderville. Have youonly fans? I know that one just
because there was a teacher, youknow, yeah, there was a Oh
it was funny. I read afollow up story on her. So if
(05:41):
y'all read anything about this teacher,we did it in the last season of
the of the podcast, and Iwas like, go, girl whatever,
Yeah, so she she did youhear about her at all? She she
was like in Mississippi or something,and she had an only fans account and
she got caught and she got fired. And I think the joke that I
(06:04):
said on it is that they weretipped off by the number of dads that
were showing up to parent teacher conferences. Yeah, I'll go check on the
kid with that girl. And soshe got fired and then she went to
work for another company. I justread a follow up story and then they
fired her. They fired her fromfive days into it because of her social
(06:27):
media. They didn't know about thesocial media history, and yeah, so
she got fired. So I'm noton only fans, but we're on Facebook
a lot and seven hundred thousand followers. Yeah, and that's where we do
Yeah, and that's where we doso much of our advertising as well.
Yes. Of course, of course, when I first came to work here
in twenty nineteen, you only hadlike forty something thousand followers. So what
(06:50):
do you think escalated it to sevenhundred thousand. Well, you know,
I think a lot of it.And we struggled a long time to had
any sort of numbers. And yeah, in twenty nineteen, when you got
here twenty nineteen, we were likeforty five thousand, and we couldn't get
anything on Facebook. And and weeven you know, toured with one of
(07:12):
those Internet sensation kind of fell usin twenty sixteen, and and you know,
we we hooked our to the wagonto him because you know, we
thought it would be a mutual thing. I had the CMT special come out
in twenty fifteen, and and hehad like a million followers. Yeah,
just from talking to Ring in thetruck yeah, writting in the truck,
(07:33):
rating in the truck. And butyou know, he didn't really he really
didn't help us like we thought wewould with the social media, and I
was still struggling with about forty fivethousand followers and then uh, and then
we had the two specials come outin twenty nineteen. At the end of
(07:54):
it November December, right, Butand then I hired a marketing team and
it wassive. They were kind ofhelping me a lot, you know,
but the numbers really weren't moving,really weren't moving. We call them the
Facebook Brothers, but it was athey're a good group of guys, guys
(08:15):
called Honest Fox. And they alsohelped Leanne Morgan and stuff. And then
the whole world shut down during thepandemic and they came to me and they
said, hey, what you needto do is do a zoom show when
the pandemic happened. And I'm like, what's a zoom show? And they
(08:35):
said, well, you do yourstand up comedy, but there's no audience.
Oh and that makes you go,oh, well wow, that makes
me feel good. Yeah, nobodyto laugh at my jokes. Yeah,
And and comedy is absolutely a marriagebetween the audience and the stand up comedian.
And I said, Fellas, that'sjust a lecture, okay. And
I saw a lot of people trythose zoom shows by themselves, no audience
(09:00):
it's at all, And I thoughtit. I thought it hurt their brand
completely. I also thought, notonly did it hurt their brand, but
it also made them seem a littledesperate. Yeah, there were a couple
of things that, especially early inthe pandemic. If y'all remember right,
it was like second week of thepandemic, people were starting to put tip
(09:22):
jars, uh you know that ontheir podcast and all these other things,
and and their zoom shows and everythingelse. And I thought, boy,
I'm so glad that i feel blessed, but I also feel like I've done
it smart where I don't have justtwo weeks worth of of savings saved up.
(09:43):
But they were in a panic.So I didn't want to do that.
I didn't want to do a zoomshow, and I didn't want to
look desperate. And they said,but we had these specials out and they
said, well, turn on yourcomputer and talk into it. And I
said, Fellas, that's the dumbestidea I've ever heard, Why would anybody
want me just to talk into thecomputer? Right? And and then then
(10:07):
on a Sunday, my wife waswatching Meet the Press and I call it
Meet the Depressed. Yeah, andthey were saying, remember I think you'all
remember they were saying that we weregoing to be shut down for ten fifteen
years. Yeah, it was goingto be a long time. Yeah,
fifteen years on some of those pressstuff. Yeah, there were senators and
(10:28):
congressmen and especially on one side thatkept saying, you know, this could
last for years. I was strugglingwith fourteen days to what do you do
the curve? What's what was thedeal? Oh to you know, oh
the to uh what was the phrase? I don't see. I threw it
out there in the middle of thelive show, and now nobody knows.
(10:50):
Nobody knows what it was to lessenthe curves. The curve yeah kind of
yeah, y'all remember all that.Yeah, And then the and then the
distancing and six feet six feet inthe arrows in Walmart. Crazy. It
was just the other day, butit seems like a lifetime ago. It
was. People won't absolutely believe thatthat's how we try to deal with with
(11:16):
a airborne disease is oh, well, let's all go in the same direction
in a Walmart, And that wasa rebel. I didn't go in the
same direction. Well I didn't either. Through that crack. I well,
I you know, I was deemednon essential from day one almost, you
know, suddenly we didn't need standup comedians or anything else, or at
(11:37):
least they said so, even thoughwe've now proven that stand up comedians were
necessary for this country and entertainers alltogether, you know, you needed to
be able to take your mind offof mind. So I'm watching Meet the
Depressed with Michelle and they're literally saying, you know, one guy was saying
that it's going to be ten orfifteen years that, you know, we
(11:58):
could be ship down. And atmy age, I'm like, well,
that puts me out of the businessaltogether. My career is done. And
so I go outside and I'm workingin the yard, which, by the
way, during the pandemic, myyard was immaculate. I mean, it's
amazing what that yard could look likewith a full time landscape of living on
the proper act. But I wasout in it, and I'm working out
(12:20):
in the yard, and I happenedto have my computer out there. I
was watching something else, I thinka movie or something, and at four
o'clock I turned on the computer andwent Facebook Live, and I simply talked
about what I was feeling and howto get through life with a smile on
your face. I didn't talk abouthoaxes. I didn't talk about that one
(12:41):
side was right and the other sidewas wrong. I didn't talk about anything
political with it. I just talkedabout how to put a smile on your
face. And my point was alwaysthat we all go through bad stuff in
our life. Most of the time, we're not going through it with three
hundred and thirty five million people.And even when the pandemic was over,
(13:03):
my position was that you had tofigure out how to put a smile on
your face. And then the nextday I did it again at four o'clock,
and then again at four o'clock,and it turned into four o'clock Daily
Talk, and we would go liveevery day at four o'clock dur in the
pandemic, and it was it wascrazy numbers. I mean it would be
twenty five, thirty, forty fiftythousand people watching at once, you know,
(13:28):
And then we went from forty thousandto four hundred thousand in about six
months, you know, and itjust exploded on and we did other stuff
during the pandemic. Remember, wewent twenty four hours straight in a broadcast,
So I went live. You dida twenty four hour marathon during the
pandemic. I did you tried didn'tyou try coffee or something during that?
(13:52):
Oh? I did all kinds ofYeah. Remember because he didn't drink coffee.
That was the first time he'd evertried coffee. Yeah. So but
when we got low down, everybodywas saying, well, this would be
a good time to try the guitaror whatever you wanted to do. Right,
So I took the twenty four hourDaily Talk and I made it Saturday
(14:13):
from twelve pm noon and went allthe way to twelve pm noon on Sunday,
and I had people call in andI try coffee for the first time.
It stood disgusting and I'll never drinkit. Play video game. I
also, Yeah, the video gameswas fun because I told everybody between four
(14:33):
and six am, I am notgoing to talk at all. I'm just
going to play Red Dead Redemption,which, by the way, Red Dead
Redemption probably did as much for meto get through the pandemic. As anything.
I would literally get up in themorning and go to the loft which
is above our garage in my littleman cave, and I would ride my
(14:54):
horse into town and get a bathwith a whore on Red Dead Redemption.
No, he's not even sorry.It took me a second to catch up
to what you were saying, andthen oh my god, I see what
you did there. No, Ilove Red Bed. I would actually with
Red Dead, I'd either go intotown, into Strawberry, or go into
(15:18):
Uh. There's like four or fivecities that I absolutely love, but Strawberry
is probably my favorite because they wouldalways bring in the dirtiest horse in there.
They'll give you a bath and yeahit's fifty cents extra. But wow,
But this this game, I didlike it. This game. This
game is literally you live in theOld West and so you have It's it's
(15:41):
a game like I've never played.It's a game that never ends. It
literally, it's not like it's notlike a mission that you go do.
There are missions that you do,but you can literally get up and ride
your fake horse uh and go huntingor fishing, and it's the exact same
adrenaline feel that you do if youactually go hunt and fish and it's easier
(16:03):
to clean and it's cheaper. AndI did it all the way. I
got a question, I got,I got a question. Bill. Was
it in VR? Did you dothis game? No? No, it's
not available in VR yet. It'snot available. Cool. Yeah, but
I still to this day if Ineed, especially that whole bath. Yeah,
oh that would be that creepy yeah, cep creepy, creepy at all.
(16:27):
So you well you have in thisgame. You got to sleep,
you've got to eat, and uh, and then every once in a while
you got to clean yourself up.So you're in the bath and then you
hear this knock. Do you wanta little extra service? And then you
get to and then what I lovedabout is like, uh, it's a
like scrubbing arm or scrubb a legor something, so you can hit that
(16:51):
and then it says, uh chator no talk, no talk. I
don't want no talking from my fakewhore. Gosh, this is so funny.
See, we don't have those buttonsin real life. No, we
do not have that. You know, you have to pay extra if she's
mute. What that's weird, anyhorse, any hor Let's move on.
(17:19):
See what you did. But duringthe twenty four hours I played Red Dead
Redemption between four and six PM,and I averaged between five hundred to one
thousand people watching play Red Dead atthat time in the morning. That's crazy
and the numbers that we got fromthat thing were great. But we also
(17:40):
we had a T shirt during thepandemic that said one minute, one hour,
one day, and that was alsothe philosophy that we really started preaching.
And that's the philosophy that we learnedwhen we did Cowboys who Care with
these kids with cancer, is thatyou learn that sometimes the greatest thing that
you could we get through to getthrough a bad time is the old saying,
(18:03):
how do you eat an elephant onespoonful at a time? Yeah,
one bite at a time. Andso we started talking about sometimes you just
have to get through the minute,to get through the hour, to get
through the day. And then westarted selling those shirts and those things went
crazy, and then people would wearthem and then send pictures and stuff.
(18:25):
But we really started building the numbers. But it's also a great lesson now
that got us to full hundred thousand, and then people started going back to
work and everything else. So allthe things that you had, all the
plans that you had on social mediathat were working just you know, three
(18:45):
months ago, no longer worked anymore. And so that's when we had to
start pivoting, and you had tostart figuring out that the market changed,
and the market did change. Now, like if I go live now,
it'd be good if I have onehundred people and we have seven hundred thousand
followers because it changed. But longclips. We used to put up long
(19:10):
comedy clips, and now it reallywas laying next to my wife watching her
how she consumed social media, whichshe usually has a pretty long attention span,
but she was just scrolling through everything, everything from TikTok to Instagram to
everything else. So I met withthe brothers and I said, listen,
(19:33):
I want to change my philosophy becausethey had a lot of clients at the
time, and they were putting outthe exact same thing with all of us.
Everything the same, everything, allthe layouts looked the same. So
if it was a holiday, everybodyhad some sort of goofy. Independence Day
was one of them. Grap thefont on the print. Yeah, And
I said, listen, there's liketen, you got like ten or twelve
(19:59):
conservative, and don't I guess Iam conservative because I don't cuss and stuff
on stage are the cleaner kind ofcomedy. And but you know, how
are people going to distinguish me nowfrom your twelve clients? And because I'm
following eleven of them and they alllook like the same thing. And so
what I wanted to do was shorteneverything up, and I told them short
(20:22):
staccato notes, which is dot dotright, So instead of doing a three
minute bit on stand up, let'scut it down to fifteen seconds to a
minute at the time, you know. So we shortened that up and that
that was working. So I letthose guys go when we started doing our
own thing, and we shortened upall the notes. And now I didn't
(20:42):
notice that they now do short noteson other clients. Now they figured out,
and yeah, after I was calledthe asshole for wanting to buck the
system, and it's absolutely true.But now the trend has changed again.
So we just found that that withYouTube is always still a minute for a
(21:03):
short, but for Facebook reels andInstagram rooms, you can do a minute
and a half. And what Ialso found was my comedy needs that minute
and a half because if you cutdown comedy, stand up comedy down to
a minute, then it's pretty hardto get somebody to get the gist of
Yeah, you have to cut outsome of the meat, so much of
(21:26):
it. And you know, that'swhy so many of these comics have resorted,
and I say resorted in a niceway, but resorted to doing crowd
work for their their their post andthat kind of thing, because crowd work
doesn't require a setup and a punch. It really just requires you saying something
to an audience member name saying somethingback, so there's not a development of
(21:48):
the bit, which is hard todo over a Zoom con. I was
gonna say, how would that haveworked for somebody, you know during the
pandemic on Zoom who does a lotof crime there is skilled to doing great
crowd and there are times that Iwill I will absolutely go and work in
a crowd. I personally don't wantto do that though all the time,
(22:10):
because now you're showing up to seethe audience instead of the audience showing up
to see you, and that issome of the toughest things to do.
And stand up, you know,that's one of the reason why I got
out of the cruise ship business isbecause I realized that the audience was coming.
I was going to see them.They weren't coming to see me,
you know, they would go seethe comic, whether or not it was
(22:33):
me or Lisa or Ron standing onstage. And then when the pandemic happened
and we finally got numbers, Iwas like, I told Michelle, I
was like, I actually want tosee if people will pay to see me
instead of me doing the opposite.And that's when we kind of pushed back
on the entire cruise ship thing.And that was scary because you know,
(22:53):
once the cruises came back, thatis a steady income. It was a
good income, and everything we're doingnow there's not a guarantee in any of
it, right, you know,So if we sell two tickets, then
we lose money. If we sellyou know, all the tickets, and
then then we've done our job inthe right direction. But there's no safety
(23:14):
net anymore in this audience office.And it's been like that for for really
since the pandemic, because I didone cruise ship coming out of the and
you were miserable, and it wasterrible when he would come off the ships
because you would be gone. Wasit two weeks? It was usually a
week, yeah, but the wayit laid over, it was two cruises.
(23:36):
Yeah, so it was like almosttwo weeks and then you'd be home
like a week. And Bill,they didn't mean you stayed on the cruise
the whole time, right, Youdidn't get helicoptered out and brought back.
No, no, no. Sowhat I would do is I would fly
out to like an island or somethinglike Bahamas or Belize or any of those
kind of places, and I wouldmeet the ship halfway and we would bring
(23:56):
it back into Galveston, maybe astop and bring it into Gallston, and
then they would bring on new audience. Yeah, the old ones would get
off the new cruisers and we wouldtake it out to a new island and
then I would get off in thatisland and fly back home. So it
was too cold, you know what. That makes sense though, So you
had two different audiences because you werehalf half of one cruise in the first
(24:21):
half of the seconds. See.Yeah, but I was also in a
cabin on Carnival without any sort ofwindow. The room. My cabin was
half of this. It was literallyhalf of this, this this entire podcast
studio. So about a six bytwelve ten kind of room, sometimes just
(24:48):
a twin bed in there, andthen a small path to the bathroom.
And so I used to always jokethat my room was a six or a
ten by twelve. In the stateof ta As requires a twelve by fifteen
for the prisoners. Otherwise it's crueland unusual punishment, right, Yes,
And when he would come back tothe office the next week, he was
(25:11):
never in a good mood. No, I was terrible. I was like,
go, this guy's supposed to befunny. I came to work for
him, and you were doing cruises. It was like, yeah, it
was hard to be It's so hardto be isolated. And then I really
was alone, you know. Sothe crew you get on the ship,
and it wasn't always the same shipobviously, you know, you go from
(25:32):
ship to ship or whatever, andthe crew they would be on there for
six to ten months together. Butyou are the outsider, you know.
So not only not only was Imiserable, I was also drunk every night
too. The only way that Icould sleep at night was to go into
the crew bar and I would justdrink and I would I was miserable.
Yeah, and that's when I juststarted making a lot of the changes in
(25:56):
my life. And and really thepriess of of going from forty thousand to
four hundred thousand started even before thatin twenty Like I said, in twenty
sixteen, when I decided I wasgoing to make wholesale changes and not only
the act but also who I wasas a person on stage as well.
(26:18):
And I was praying about it oneday and I was literally mowing the grass
and my special would come out,and I'm like, Lord, why can't
I grab the brass ring? Youknow, you let other people grab it,
and why don't you let me?And the voice in my head literally
said, Hey, I made youinto William Lee Martin. Why don't you
try to be that guy for awhile. You know, you don't cuss
at home, you don't do allthose things, and you get on stage
(26:41):
and you go filthy with the wholething. Why don't you try to be
the guy that I've created, theguy that wanted to be a preacher,
the guy that really I just madeto be to get people laugh. You
don't have to drop the F bombevery third word, like you are right
now. And I made those wholesalechanges and then and that was like nine
months after my CMG my one hourspecial came out as Cowboy Bill, and
(27:06):
I didn't think by just dropping thelanguage was enough. I thought I need
to be William Lee Martin, andthat's when I changed it. But all
those things just tells you from twentysixteen to now, from when we had
no followers to seven hundred thousand followers. First of all, if you want
some good, solid advice, betrue to yourself whatever you do on social
(27:33):
media, because you got to livewith that. I know a lot of
people that created these great characters onsocial media and now they are a slave
to that character because that's how peopleknow them, and it really becomes difficult.
So if you're going to create abrand, you better be in love
(27:55):
with that brand. If that's whatyou're going to create on social media.
You know, I've had people askme and that, well, why don't
you do this? And why don'twhy don't you do why don't you do
a rent? You know, arant and and all these other kind of
Well, I'm not a oracle andI'm not a rant kind of guy,
and or create you know, usea filter. I know people that got
(28:15):
famous by using a filter on there, but then when they're out in public,
people are like, oh, that'sreally how you look. And so
just my only advice if you aregoing to create something on social media,
one, enjoy it. Two youbetter be in love with the person that
you're creating, because that thing cangrow bigger than you ever imagined it could.
(28:37):
And I think that's why people arestill gravitating to what we're still doing,
is because I think I'm pretty genuinewith my stand up and who I
am on and off stage, SoI think so too. Yeah, so
don't forget. We got tour schedulecoming up. But you can find all
of it on social media, aswe've all talked about, you know,
(28:59):
just go to my website first ofall, William Lee Martin dot com,
William Leemartin dot com, and youcan do the jump off. From there,
you can get me on Instagram,Facebook, TikTok, and more importantly
YouTube. YouTube is where I reallywant to see some growth. So that's
where you'll find this podcast and youfor a broadcast, but you can also
(29:21):
find the podcast if you want tolisten to it on iTunes you can find
it on Apple, you can findit on spreaker. Hell, you can
find it on the website too.Weemleemartin dot com. Yep, hey,
let's do though. Oh and thetours schedule also Tipton, Georgia. Don't
forget this weekend, Doltan, Alabama, bat On Rouge, Louisiana, Ocean
Springs, Mississippi, and Concordia,Kansas. And then also Arlington, Texas.
(29:48):
We will be there for my birthdayweekend May eighteenth, and all those
tickets are available at William leemartin dotcom. So on behalf of Liza Bruce
Bye and Ron Phillips there you knowwhat, go out there and you know,
try to be kind of successful incomedy and life. M
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