So you're famous-ish....
Right?
Hi it’s Emily from Bite Size Vegan and welcome to another vegan nugget. Myq Kaplan, spelled
like that because he’s special, is a 2010 Last Comic Standing Finalist and has appeared
on the Tonight Show, the Late Show with David Letterman, Comedy Central Presents, Conan,
and many other places that you might not care about. You can listen to Myq’s podcast,
Hang Out With Me, on the Keith and The Girl network. His debut CD, Vegan Mind Meld, was
one of iTunes’ top ten best-selling comedy albums in 2010, followed by Meat Robot in
2013 and the upcoming Small Dork and Handsome in 2014.
And he needs to update his website bio… (it’s 2015)
Anyways, the most important aspect of Myq for our purposes is that he’s vegan, which
defines him over everything else he may identify himself by and outshines any other accomplishment
he’s ever made.
When you're vegan, people think you're weak because look, but I will [audience laughter]
I will fight anybody in here in...I don't know, 40 years when I'm still alive, and you're not probably because...
I read a statistic that says vegetarians live an average of 7 years longer than non-vegetarians.
Vegans, live up to 15 years longer because we're not invited anywhere fun or dangerous. [audience laughter]
We sit at home crying and drinking, careful not to cry into the drink because tears are a product of animal suffering. We're not allowed [audience laughter]
Well recently Myq was travelling across the country moving his girlfriend Kasey and simultaneously
doing a tour, and I was fortunate enough to snag a bit of their time. As a note, my dog
Ooby was out on the porch with us so you will hear distracting noises and possibly see the
top of her head from time to time.
Alright, so I’m here with Myq Kaplan and his girlfriend Kasey who are moving her
across the country progressively and doing a show at each stop?
Yep, pretty much.
Okay, this is the final…?
Yes, tonight is the final night of the tour.
Awesome. Alright so, I guess just for people who might not know you, or know your
story, can you talk a little bit about how and when you became vegan, and maybe about
how you got into comedy?
Sure. I was...I think like many people, I grew up eating meat because that was normal,
you know, the thing that your parents did it. In high school I remember thinking ‘maybe
it’ll be good to not kill animals’, and then I was like ‘but burgers’, so I just
kept eating. Then when I got to college...there was a vegetarian station in the dining hall
and there was a lot of different foods. And I was like ‘maybe I’ll give it a shot’.
And so, I became...I’ll try being vegetarian and if I fail, then I’ll stop. And it just
it worked so I did that for a while, and that sort of became my new normal dietary
wise. And some people were like ‘well, isn’t it limiting to have less food?’. But it
was actually...I never had indian food, or cambodian food, or tons of different kinds
of asian food. There was all this stuff that I wasn’t...you know, I just grew up eating
like pizza pretty much, and burgers, and hot dogs. And so, I was like ‘there’s so much
more food. Did you guys know?’. Maybe everybody already knew. But I don’t feel like most
people who are making that assessment or like necessarily all the most adventurous. They
are the foodist foodies. But then a few years after college, probably when I was around
24 I had read some Peter Singer stuff about animal rights, animal liberation, and learned
about factory farming, and all the…I’m glad now, I’m glad now...I think here’s
the reason to become vegan so you don’t have to watch anymore of the horrendous movies.
I got it, I get it, everything is...animals are being treated horribly. And so, I just
felt like, to align fully my philosophy with my actions, the meat industry and the dairy
industry are intravenously linked. So, if you’re like ‘I don’t like how the meat
farmers are treating their animals’, then the dairy farmers, they’re the same. It’s
the same animal, it’s the same treatment so, that’s when I became vegan. And that’s
also right around when I started doing comedy, I think unrelatedly. I started doing comedy...I
was a musician sort of inspiring. I was starting my vegetarian and music career at the same
time. And then shifted to a vegan, and comedy, also paralleled paths but unrelated.
So you been on television and a number of respected, comedy central, with Letterman,
and whatnot. Just being in the public eye as a vegan what has been the general response
that you’ve gotten?
The response that I like the most is sometimes...sometimes I don’t talk about
being vegan all the time. I think every album that I’ve put out has some jokes about it,
but it’s not like extensively, exclusively all that I talk about because it’s not all
that I am, or think about, or the way life...obviously you eat food everyday but there’s other...hopefully
you’re doing other things too. So, the response that I like, the couple of responses that
I like the most are ‘oh, I didn’t even know you were vegan’ or ‘you don’t seem
like a vegan or that vegan’. A joke that I wrote that I think I don’t even really...I
don’t think it’s recorded; I should do it. It was like, when I switched from being
vegetarian to vegan one of my worries or concerns was just like, will I be able to do it? Is
it going to be more work? Am I going to have to read things and ask questions, and be annoying?
Well, I love doing all those things. So, I legitimately, you know, ultimate now, it’s
sort of like...it is easy enough but I don’t...I come at it, I guess to answer your...the way
I come at it, is I know that most people aren’t vegan. Most people aren’t vegetarians. And
that there are, sort of stereotypes and connotations, and I think misconceptions like the classic…
[Ooby breathes heavy - everyone laughs]. (There’s a fun dog here). The classic sort of joke
about the vegan is, ‘how do you know someone’s a vegan? They’ll tell you.’, but which
is I understand is a, good joke, whoever came up with it. But there’s so many people...of
course the one’s that tell you they’re vegan are, but there’s so many people. There’s
stealth vegans out there. There’s people just living their life, not making a big deal
about it, but of course you wouldn’t know because they’re not making a big deal about it.
It’s like, you don’t have to be an activist, you know picketing, in order
to change your diet to be, you know, either more environmental, healthier in some ways,
or better to animals in a lot of ways. You can do whatever degree of whatever you want.
And so for me, I’m not necessarily coming at it to be an activist. This is the thing
that seems reasonably to me. And I think that another thing a lot of people do respond to,
which is ‘oh yeah, the things that you’re saying make sense’. Like most people, like
I was in high school are like ‘oh yeah, probably’, most people aren’t sociopaths.
‘If I could have the same life as I have now but also fewer beings experience unnecessary
suffering, yeah, I’m on board with that’, and that’s the place that I’m coming from
when I talk about it in comedy or otherwise. So, I think that...I’m not trying to shame
people. I’m not trying to...or if I do it’s like jokingly, it’s sort of both ways. I
understand how vegans are perceived. One of the first jokes that I wrote was ‘I’m
a vegetarian, are there any other douchebags here?’. And then I’ll say ‘I’m here.
I’m not here to push my views on you. You can go on living incorrectly all you want’.
Just understanding sort of where...Louis C.K. had a great joke once about, I think it was
something like ‘I know that eating animals...I know that killing animals is wrong. I just
don’t care that it’s wrong’. I think that encapsulates where most people are with
respect to that issue and most issues that are say, questionably sort of the grey areas
of the ethics between what we want to do and what we do.
What has it been like when you started to get more recognition,
and be on television and such. Has that changed your view in any way do you think?
The same way that every year you have a birthday and someone is like ‘do you feel
older?’. No, because it’s just a day older than yesterday which was a day older. You
yourself...you see yourself in the mirror everyday if you look in the mirror everyday.
And then 6 months go by, and you see a friend that you haven’t seen in 6 months, and they’re
‘oh, your hair is a lot longer, you’ve lost weight’, or whatever it is. I didn’t
notice at all. There was a period of time where I got into really exercising a lot,
eating super healthy, and I’ve lost more weight than I need have. And people were like,
when I got back to school after this summer, people were like ‘hey, you look real thin’.
And then I saw a picture of myself and ‘oh, I do’. I didn’t notice it happening. And
so, similarly with gaining experience in the comedy world, whether you’re getting on
TV more. It used to be, probably in the 80’s, you get on Carson and then millions and millions
of people would see you. The whole country would be watching and then your career would
be legitimately, objectively different the next day. They’d be like ‘well, now you’re
working all the time’. Whereas now there is no sort of like, ‘king maker’ or ‘queen
maker’, we don't need royalty. There is no magic bullet; I don’t like violence.
There is no potion but all the late night shows that I’ve gotten to do...like every
one of them, some people seen me. I remember somebody see's me, every once in a while someone will see
me on the street, like when I was doing Last Comic Standing, and said ‘hey, I just saw
you on that thing’. That was probably the one where the most people were watching week
after week, millions of people. And so, I’d say every week a couple of people would recognize me.
It’s never gotten to the point where I’m like ‘uh god, please leave me alone’.
It was always a nice thing to be recognized to the point where, here’s the thing, the
worse...this is a dumb ‘worse thing’; a very champagne problem. I was in Toronto
a couple of months ago and I went to this vegan restaurant. I think I get recognized
more in vegan restaurants and comic book stores than anywhere else. Maybe because there’s
a higher concentration of people who be more likely to have seen or enjoyed my comedy there.
But a guy who was working at the restaurant was like ‘Myq Kaplan!’. I was like ‘oh
hey, thank you’, and he was like ‘we worked at a summer camp together’. I'm like ‘oh
yeah, of course. Good to see you’. That’s like my friend Henry Phillips, who’s a super
funny comedian, who has a joke about being in...I don’t even know if it’s a joke,
it’s a real thing that happened to him. He was in a Montreal airport I think, it’s
always happening in Canada I guess. He was in the airport and someone comes running up
to him and like ‘Henry Phillips! Are you Henry Phillips?’. He was like ‘Yeah!’.
He's like ‘You left your credit card at the bar’. And that’s like all of Henry, he’s so great.
But I don’t...I definitely, when you ask, ‘has doing what I’ve done or accomplished
what I’ve accomplished’ changed me?, every...every moment changes me.
Those landmarks, getting to do Letterman for the first time. Getting to do the Tonight Show.
Getting to do a Comedy Central ½ hour...having a special. All those things now are just things
that I’m glad...the thing that I’m most glad for is that, it gets my comedy out there
for people who would enjoy it, to find it. So, that now they can come to live shows.
They can buy new CD’s. They can just listen to my podcast. They can take in more of what
I’m putting out. To just enable me to keep my comedy machine flowing. One specific thing
that came out of doing comedy and gaining a higher profile amongst people who watch
comedy, and listen to comedy is I do a lot of podcasts, I have a podcast, and Kasey met
me, found out about me because of that. She listened to the podcast ‘Keith and The Girl’
that I was on, I'm a frequent guest on, and my podcast is on their network. So, she found
my podcast through that, and we met because she wrote me an email that said she listened,
and enjoyed what I said, and who I was, and what I did. Then when she was living in California
and I was living in New York. So, when I was in California, I would go there sometimes
and she came to some shows, and we met, and that’s why we know each other. So that is, I'd
say right now, the biggest way in which doing comedy has changed my life in
a specific way for the best.
Well I feel like you’ve sat here the whole time. Is there anything
you want to...bust out, or add?
Kasey, when didn’t you become a comedian?
My whole life. I will say that my own vegan choices were really inspired by hearing
Myq talk about them. So, I think it’s good for public people to keep expressing their
opinions because it really does create change, and I want to show it to people.
Kasey is the change that I see in the world.
Ohhh. Gandhi relationship. [laughs] That’s awesome.
Yeah, Gandhi while he was on his hunger strike was totally vegan.
Yeah! This is very true. Well, I just wanted to thank you so much for your time,
both of you, for taking the time out of your tour to come by, and for everything that you do.
Thank you....for you doing everything [laughs] awesome.
I hope you enjoyed hearing from Myq, and Kasey at the tail end. (sorry about that).
Stay tuned to the channel for part two with them where we discuss how to mix humor with something
so often serious as veganism and how Myq manages to be an optimistic vegan, which is a bit
like a minotaur riding a unicorn into Narnia.
And also you can find all of the links to connect with Myq in the video description below.
Now I’d love to hear what you thought of what Myq had to say in the comments below.
If you enjoyed hearing from a vegan in the public eye who’s actually vegan, give the
video a big thumbs up and share it around. If you’re new here, do hit that big red
subscribe button down there for more awesome vegan content every Monday, Wednesday, and
some Fridays and not to miss out on part two with Myq. If you want to help support
Bite Size Vegan, check out either of the support links in the video description below or click
the Nugget Army icon or the link in the sidebar.
Now go live vegan, remember to laugh, and I’ll see you soon.
Talking about....why do you keep trying? You haven’t gotten any smaller.
Ah, Ah, Ah...go the other way.
I know she...every once in a while she remembers and does it.
Most people are people that come to comedy shows.
Every once in awhile I do a vegetarian food festival or an animal rights event [music begins]
I think the stereo type that vegans or vegetarians don't have a good sense of humor [TRIUMPHANT SOUND - OOBY FINALLY SQUEEZED THROUGH]