It wasn’t until he opted to take an improvisation class at Portland State University that Ian Karmel discovered his passion for comedy. A political science major, Karmel needed a course to fulfill his arts credit, so he decided to take the improv class his uncle taught.
“It felt like I’d been naked my whole life and finally put clothes on,” Karmel said. “I loved it immediately. It clicked.”
His passion for improv developed into a career in stand-up, and now Karmel is known for his time as a roundtable regular and writer on E!’s “Chelsea Lately” as well as a writer for the “Late Late Show with James Cordon.”
Karmel, who performed at the Comedy Attic for the first time a year ago, returns this weekend for shows Friday and Saturday.
He said he’s excited to come back to Bloomington, a crowd he said reminds him of those in his hometown of Portland, Oregon.
“There are a handful of cities that are the perfect comedy cities: Portland, Austin, Madison, New York of course, Chicago. And Bloomington’s one of them,” he said. “It’s a joy to do stand-up there.”
Karmel left college to pursue a career in improv comedy but after moving to LA, he returned to Portland expecting the people there to be as excited about improv as he was. When they weren’t, he decided to switch to stand-up.
“That clicked even more than improv did,” he said.
Since then, he hasn’t gone more than five days without performing, he said.
Karmel admits although it took him years to find comedy, he was the kind of kid who always craved attention.
Rather than being the class clown, he was the one always trying to make the teacher laugh, Karmel said. His first memory of being inspired by a comedian was when he was on a family vacation in Mexico at 14 years old.
While there, he had a bad stomach illness for a few days and was badly sunburnt. So when his family went out to the beach, he stayed inside and watched the Eddie Izzard special “Dress to Kill.”
Karmel called Izzard one of the best comedians he’s ever seen.
“It changed me, watching that special,” he said. “I think that has been my biggest influence in comedy. He was whimsical and very funny, but he would be serious about very silly things and silly about very serious things.”
Even though it was still five years before it occurred to him he could be a stand-up comedian, that was first time Karmel saw someone whose brain worked the way his did, he said.
Through comedy, especially through writing for the “Late Late Show,” Karmel has been able to meet some of his heroes. He worked with — and wrote a sketch for — Mel Brooks.
“I will never do anything cooler than that,” he said. “That guy is like the Jewish pope.”
Karmel said sometimes he has to stop and remind himself how cool this job really is. He has gotten to meet Drake and some of his favorite rappers. Maybe the best, though, was getting to know his hometown NBA team, the Portland Trailblazers.
Several times Karmel was a guest analyst and commentator on a Trailblazers post-game show.
Since then, he’s gotten to know the players and done charity work with them. He said it’s one of the coolest places comedy has taken him.
“If I would have told 10-year-old me about what my life is like right now, that’s the thing he would’ve been most excited about I think,” Karmel said.
Comedy has also led Karmel to become a writer for the Tony Awards, which he’s working on now with a few other comedians.
He said he loves never knowing what he’ll be up to in the next six months — but he also has some plans. Karmel wants to create a comedy talk show about basketball and maybe write and make a sitcom.
But all of those things lead back to stand-up.
“You do those TV things so more people know who are and they get to understand why you’re funny,” he said. “And then you get to go perform for bigger and bigger crowds of people who are excited about you. So you do it for that, and then also because it’d be great to have a swimming pool.”
