Episode 134: The Mystery of COMEDY: Stand-Up Steven Randolph!

in Los Angeles, California, and they are both fantastic. They are also into the paranormal even though Chelsea gets freaked out by it a lot more than Stephen does. Stephen has actually been here to Las Vegas and gone out UFO hunting with me at night, and one of his most popular characters is a parody of self help gurus named Martin Martin's. We'll talk about that. But I find there's a strange overlap between comedy and an interest in

the paranormal and metaphysical. You'll see what I mean. So, I've been wanting to have Stephen Randolph on this show for a long time to delve into this mystery. Why do we even find things funny? And why do we laugh? And is there something mystical about it? You just never know where we're going to go on this program, do you. So his website is Stephenorandolph dot com and that's st E V E N R A N d O L P H Randolph dot com. And later I will tell you how to find him in various places online because

he is especially active on TikTok and Instagram. So anyway, without further ado, here we go. Steven Randolph, Welcome to the show.

won too many in there. So I don't even really count that. And I was like, where do Where do I start? And my friend had started working at a comedy club called the Haha in North Hollywood, California, and he said he started doing stand up as well, and he said, uh, just come over, man. I said, I'm really nervous. I kind of had this. It was newly sober. I had all these nerves and these these emotions that I wasn't used to just being on the planet fully aware,

and I was so scared to do it. And he goes, come over to the open mic and watch your confidence sore. Everybody sucks here, don't worry. And I went over and I went to the open mic and nobody was exceptional. That wasn't the thing. It was the entry point to stand up comedy. So I went over. I watched a bunch of people bomb and try new things and mostly for the most part, not be funny. And I was like, Okay,

at least I feel comfortable doing this. So I went the next week and signed up and signed up at the Haja Cafe open mic, and that's where it all began. I started doing open mics and the rest is history. I never stopped in fourteen years.

Tony Robbins. He is a want to be motivational speaker and life coach, and he lives in a broken down Winnebago and he's losing everything he has, but he's he's hell bent on helping you have a breakthrough rather you know, whether you want to or not. And so I started doing that at the comedy Store where I was performing all the time. I saw Tony Robbins special. It was I Am Not Your Guru on Netflix. It was great

and I cried during it. I was like another comic in the green room goes, you should go home and watch Tony Robbin's special. And there was a guy that was kind of a tough guy, and I never thought, I go, really, and he goes. I cried, I dare you not to cry? And I go, now I have

to go see this. I got emotional. I started tearing up halfway through, and I thought, you know what, I wonder if I told my friend, I wonder if I bought a remote headset and put on a turtleneck and started healing crowds and having breakthroughs instead of telling jokes, would that be funny? And my buddy goes, I think that would be hilarious. I go, I don't even know where to go. He goes, go to Guitar Center on

Sunset and see if they have the thing. And so I walked in and said, hey, do you guys have any the Tony Robbins kind of styled headpiece. They go, we have the exact one. He uses it's five hundred bucks. So I bought it on a credit card I borrowed my wife's. Well I still use it. It's a woman's turtleneck with bell sleeves on it. It doesn't fit me.

My gut hangs out. I look insane. And I put on a headset remote, a headset microphone, and I went to go check in at the comedy store and the sound guy goes, oh, man, you know what you could do with this. This is remote up to three hundred feet from the stage. Why don't you start your set walking off on the sidewalk, So they cut the lights. He hit a big spotlight and said he's coming from Clearwater, Florida, Martin Martin's. My friend made up the name. In the hallway.

He goes, your name should be Martin Martin's and I go, that's perfect. And I started my set like from down the hallway and walk in and everybody just started applauding like crazy, and I started healing people. I said, you know what, your wife's going to come back. Your dog loves you. I just started painting out the winds, the people. I'm hugging them and staring at them awkwardly, and everybody

just started loving it. And I haven't stopped, and I'm actually about to pitch a TV show on it right now, so really excited about that character.

You're not that interesting. So at the very least, you got to have some kind of interest in the character that you're spoofing, and I definitely have a huge interest in Tony Robbins. I believe in what he's doing. I love self help, I love healing people. It's a little goofy how he does it. It's a little theatrical, and

that's kind of what I magnify. So I just go out there and sometimes I'll have the sound guy put a spotlight on somebody in the audience, like Tony does, and Tony will just stare at them for forty five seconds, and it's so dramatic and it's so crazy that I'll just stare at somebody for two minutes, and after the first minute, no one's laughing, and after a minute and a half, everybody in the audience is breaking down hysterically

laughing for I don't even know why. I don't know the science behind it.

shocked or was uncomfortable. And something that I've had to do recently, like I used to do crowd work and if someone would heckle me. I never had a problem with that because I came from a really mouthy Italian family, so I would always have stuff to say back, and sometimes I would go too hard, or sometimes I could tell the person that I was doing you know crowd work. With CrowdWork is when an a comedian breaks the fourth wall and starts talking to the crowd in the live performance.

But I would go, oh, man, that person really didn't want to be involved in this conversation. Maybe they got bullied into sitting in the front row. So now what I do is I look for people's eyes who want

to play. I could just see it, I could smell it on them, like, oh, this person wants to have some fun on stage or you know, in a conversation, and especially with the Martin Martin's character, when I mean, as Martin Martin's the motivational speaker, when I say, hey, you need to lose weightiter, hey that girl's too hot for you, or blah blah blah. See you're real sick

out because you've just laughed. But about nine out of ten, So a room of three hundred, there'll only be four four psychos laughing really hard, and everybody else is going to, oh, man, this guy's a jerk. So what I've learned with Martin Martins is my friend says, you just want to pay out the wind. So I'm just complimenting people in the most creepy, weird way, but it's still a compliment, you know. I'm like, you have beautiful toast, sir. I'll kiss him

on the forehead. The guys, well, what are you doing? Can I massage your feet? He's like no, but it's so yeah, it's making him a little uncomfortable, but it's not. It's not I'm not saying anything bad about him. So so yeah, those that it helps when someone pays the price. I think what I've come up with is that I'm an emotional stunt man, and if anybody is going to be seriously uncomfortable by my art, it's going to be me because I can handle it and that's what I do.

So so yes, I think a little bit. We're just like experimenting with saying crazy stuff to strangers all the time.

they are going to disappear any moment. So Buddha is spelled b U d Dha. Go to the buddhastone dot com. And now back to my interview with stand up comedian Steven Randolph. So, from a technical perspective, Uh, what is a joke? How does it work? How do you construct one?

But when I first started stand up about fourteen years ago, yeah, about fourteen years ago, there was always these athletes foot commercials and soap scum commercials like four h nine and cleaning commercials. Whenever they animated a germer, a bug, it always had a New Jersey accent. And I noticed that, and I said that to my friend in the car when I first started doing open mics, they go, whenever they animate a germer, a bug, or a fungus on TV, it always sounds like a New Jersey Cabby. You know

who I am. I'm Mucus. I live in you know. So I went on stage the next night to a bunch of people and I said, how come every time they animated germer a bug on television. It's always got a new Jersey accent. Everybody started laughing. So a lot of other people were like, yeah, that is true. I

never thought about that. So if you feel passionately about something really strongly usually annoyed, that really help the collective of people in the audience who have had that same experience go oh yeah, and there's something there's something funny about us all suffering or being annoyed with the same thing.

and he goes. He goes, you know, I'm not telling you what to do, but you might want to be a little more inclusive with your comedy. And I'm like, what do you mean? And he's a comedy fan that does not do comedy, and he goes. You're in a dark, dingy club at the late hour of the night, and people are usually crawling in and sitting in the back because they feel alone and they're depressed and they just

want to be uplifted. They're not going there to see you be super crazy and weird sometimes that there's a time for that, but most of the time people are going because they just don't want to feel alone and they want to laugh a little bit. Man. And I was like, oh, so there is part of this job where I'm supposed to I'm supposed to create a nice sandwich for someone to eat. I'm not just supposed to be throwing mustard on the wall when someone's hunger and

look at that. You know, so like I think when you first start out, you're just so nervous and so excited and you know, unbridled that you're just making this abstract At least that's how there's twenty fifty percent of comedians like that that you're just doing crazy, say, saying stuff for reaction because you don't you don't understand the craft yet, so you're just saying buzzwords you're not supposed to say, you're you're just being crazy. But then afterwards

you're like, oh, I do want people to laugh. So I think it's to energize and to give hope, to give hope in happiness and contentment for people who otherwise don't have that or are struggling with that.

teasing lions. It's a deadly game. But they're jumping down and pulling lions tails, and the lions are getting are the tigers are getting so fear they're trying to kill the monkeys, and like he's just jumping back up and the trees, laughing hysterically, and I think, like that's comedy, that's high, that's risky, risky comedy. But they're doing it because they're bored, and they're probably wanting to make their friends, their their monkey friends laugh and and all that. Dolphins

knock people off surfboards. I have a little bulldog and he has a sense of humor. He'll grab me and fake bite me on the leg and then run away and run in circles and run into the wall. And I'm like, he's being silly right now, Like he's not. He doesn't just want my attention, like he's he's being funny. And so my dog, Yeah, I think they do because up setting my dog too. I have English bulldogs are very moody, very wacky. But he'll just do crazy, funny

stuff and I'm like, oh, he's being funny. So I believe that. Yeah, animals and stuff understand humors. Some do. Cats don't seem to be too funny. They're not trying to play those games.

that was the precursor for me. It went Unsolved Mysteries, then Coast to Coast a few years later when I got a little older, but those were my two go tos, and Unsolved Mysteries with Robert Stack was just scary. And there is a episode dedicated to the Comedy Store that you could find on YouTube with Robert Stack talking about the Comedy Store. So all these comics from the seventies and eighties were talking about the crazy stuff. So I already heard the stories and knew that it was haunted.

And then once I got into the guts of it and started I worked there for seven years. Brenton Biddlecombe, one of the one of the comics over there who was kind of who worked and did their social media and stuff, and it was there answering the phone lines during the day, gave me the whole rundown on and that's how I'm able to give the tours. I love giving tours of the Comedy Store today the tour I

gave you. But there was I don't know, between one hundred and one hundred and fifty one hundred and fifty people killed in the building in the forties and fifties before Mitzi Shore, Who's poly Shores to see some other ran it. I guess it's been around for one hundred years. So it had an illegal abortion clinic at the turn of the century, and then it was Zero's Nightclub, a mob run nightclub in the forties, fifties and sixties, and I guess that's where they would say, hey, come over,

we need to talk to you about some business. And that's where they would whacky. In fact, on these stairs that go up that lead up into the sound person's little nest up there on the top of the main room, there's three different stages. You could see bullet holes all over the walls, and so, you know, it's kind of been said that a ton of people lost their lives on those stages, that stage, and so a lot of people have just died in that building, and a lot

of weird stuff has gone in that building. My friend Gypsy Danny, who you met, I introduced you to Gypsy Danny. He did a walk through there and he, you know, he was telling me there's portals all over this place, and there's he was seeing ghosts left and right, and and so I had an experience there. It's so unique about that club is it's open till three four in the morning sometimes, like if Chappelle comes in and stays on,

you're open un till four in the morning. So it's it's more of a comedy hangout for it's an artist community too, so like everybody just hangs there and gets really intoxicated and has a good time and wildness. It's just really wild.

it's hard to describe. There is a portal of energy that is burned onto that stage that's so powerful that I think anybody would feel a bit disoriented. And that's why it's all the more intriguing that during the investigation that I did, when the only people who were there was myself, Stephen Chelsea, and then at one point, I think maybe a couple of other tech guys kind of

popped in and out. But you know, we had the whole main stage to ourselves, the whole theater to ourselves, and at one point, and I've told you about this before, we turned a special full spectrum camera toward the stage and actually captured something on that stage that was invisible to the naked eye. And later on in this podcast, I'm going to tell you how you can go and see that footage on my website, as well as footage from Chelsea and Stephen interviewing me on camera for over

two hours that same day. So there's just so much great content wrapped into this particular edition of the show. And did you realize that comedy is such a mysterious and often paranormal, certainly mystical and metaphysical thing. I'm Joshua P. Warren, and you are listening to strange things on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal podcast network, and I will be back after these important messages.

new listeners. Our YouTube channel offers many different Coast to Coast am hour long pieces of audio on numerous topics including uphology, extraterrestrials, conspiracies, strange creatures, prophecies, and much much more. There's even a section that includes our most popular uploads, such as many of the David Polaidi shows on people did Disappearing in national parks. To visit or subscribe, just go to YouTube and type in Coast to Coast AM Official.

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so many sad and often spooky events. Actually, in fact, at the Comedy Store, I think it was maybe nineteen seventy nine, something terrible happened. A lot of the comedians went on strike, and one comedian climbed up at the top of a tall building next to the comedy Store and jumped to his death. He committed suicide and left a little note explaining that he had done it because of his relationship with the Comedy Store. You can imagine these stories about that building just go on and on.

So it's not really surprising that Stephen Randolph and others witnessed something paranormal on that stage after he had only been working there for a matter of weeks. So here is Steven Randolph telling you what he I saw.

so much about show business. But my second week working there, so three showrooms are running at once, I'm in the original room. It's one five am. Heyesus. Trey Hoad's, a very funny comedian, was going on. I didn't even know him at the time. I know him pretty well now. But he walked on stage. There was me, a drunk guy in the very back, and three people up front. So there's four people in the room. But it just stays open, you know, all night. And they told me

no smoking in the rooms. No this, no that, you know. I just had to watch out for some things. And people can't vait too much. I would let people do it a little bit here there. All of a sudden, about three or four minutes into his stand up set, he's on stage a huge what looked like a vape, a ball of like vape vapor was hovering over his head. And I was like, oh, someone's vaping in here. You know what, I'm new at this job. It's late at night. I don't really care that people are vaping in here.

Who cares, you know? And the ball of smoke didn't go away. It just became more perfectly symmetrical. And I was like, I've never seen a vape ball of cloud of vape smoke do that. It didn't dissipate, and it became a globe and it started rotating around the guy's head. It's one forty at night. I've been working since six pm. Man, I come from another job. So I was, you know, an hour fourteen of working for that day, heard so

much comedy. I go, I'm going crazy. So the drunk old man that was sitting kind of in the back with me, like near the little our little checking booth, I said, hey, man, is that sick? Are at smoke or bag? Smoke. He goes, I don't know what that is. And he goes, he goes, I'm drunk right now. I said, I'm tired right now. I said, let's watch it. We watched it for another minute and it started rotating like a globe. So now you've got a ball of smoke

hovering over the guy on the stage. I'm sitting there watching the guy on the stage. Hey, Sue's treo, and you could talk to him about the story. Runs off the stage. You don't leave the show, no matter what. The show must go on. He runs off and abandons through there on the microphone and runs off stage, and everybody's just freaking out in the audience, and so I race in the kitchen where there's a kitchen where everybody

kind of hangs out at the comic store. He's back there, looking like like he'd just seen a ghost, you know. And I said, hey, man, Steve Randolph, I don't know if we've met. I kind of something weird happen while you're on stage. And he goes, I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear it. And I go, no, man, I got to tell you, And I go A globe of smoke was hovering over your head while you were

on stage. He goes, I didn't see the globe of smoke, but something was yelling at me from behind the curtains, and everybody in the front row was it was screaming at them, and they were screaming at egg, going what is it? What's going on? And it was screaming at everybody. I didn't hear. I was in the same room with the microphone. I didn't hear the audio, and nobody else saw the smoke except for me and the old man.

And so there was two levels of what would you call that, like senses or like they're like I was seeing stuff that they that other people weren't seeing, and they were all hearing something that I wasn't hearing at the same time, and he was freaked out. He did not want to go back on stage that night, and we got someone else on there and kind of carried on with the show. But that was one of many things that happened there.

sure enough this person would be weird. I just I know when something crazy is gonna go down, like three or four minutes before it happens, because I'm like I think, I think artists are super sensitive and high tuned I

think stand up comedians are extremely sensitive. We've all been traumatized to come overwhelmingly from trauma, and so I don't know if that opens up some kind of sixth sense that maybe other people are blessed to not even have to use, because they just just walk around blisfully unaware. But I think stand ups for the most part, have

that sixth sense channel open, and we're extremely sensitive. And not only do do fun observations and jokes come in and present themselves, a lot of other stuff does too. I've seen, I've seen a UFO. I've had a lot of paranormal experiences, probably because I'm open to it and I believe in it. But I've had I've had quite a few supernatural experiences, and the same can be said for a lot of comic friends. Are right, a lot a lot of comedians experience that.

I we were having this conversation the other night. He's a very successful musician. His name his name is Casey, but his band is called Adult Karate. Check out Adult Karate. But he's really into supernatural occurrences. And we both came up with the fact is it's a thing with comedy. It gives us hope, the fact that there's possibly some advanced civilization in the sky that could possibly help us,

help us evolve. It's incredibly comforting to me, and it's it's it's it's scary too at the same time, and it's big and it's funny. It's like a nervous laugh almost, so like the two are very connected for me. You know, Scena goes you have what are you gonna do? Yelling it? You have to go. If you if you and I Joshua were walking around and we saw some crazy ghost walk through the wall, I would probably start laughing after the initial oh my god, oh my that's me. I

have no words for it. I have to laugh. I have to have this emotional release because what I just saw was so big and unexplainable. I don't even know how to put it into words.

So I'm peeen, I'm smoking, I'm just kind of looking at this ball. And I go to look back at my group of friends who are probably thirty feet away from me, and they're all looking up into the sky. So what are the chances that we all, you know, we're all kind of self obsessed, neurotic people, and why did we all look up at the same time? But they're looking So I'm looking at them, they're looking. I zip up my pants really quick. I raced over to them. I go, what is that? And my buddy goes, I

don't know, and I'm like, that's so weird. Look at that. He goes, no, no, look at that over there, and there was another silver ball. Then my other friend poured out another silver ball. So we were all watching three individual silver balls go across the sky, and I thought, that's so weird. Then they zipped and joined each other into a perfect triangle and started zipping around that way, and then it shot into hyper space and I was like,

that is so crazy. Came back, disassembled, did the little dance, zipped all around it like they were having fun. It was like a couple of dolphins out of a pod. And then they all collectively formed this triangle shot into hyperspace again and we didn't see him. I'd been into UFOs since I was a little kid and unsolved mysteries, and you know, every book I wanted for Christmas was

a book I was supernatural. So I that the black, unmarked helicopters always come after a major sighting, right, So I told my buddy and I go, are you an UFOs? And she goes no, and I go, well I am, And if this isn't the UFO, there's gonna be some black helicopters that are going to come.

to me. It was not only weird that we saw it, that the helicopters came afterwards, but it was weird that my other friends kind of almost just dismissed it a few weeks later.

of work on there. And I'm going to be touring across the United States, so hopefully I'm going to state near you, and I'll put that on my website Steven Randolph dot com. That's Steven Randolph dot com. But I put my all my dats and stuff on Instagram, so I would love to connect with your fans. Well.

if that's linked up there. You check him out on YouTube especially, But anyhow, he says he's most active on Instagram and TikTok, so his Instagram is of course Instagram dot com and then Ford slash Stephen Randolph the Number two or TikTok dot com, Ford slash at Comedian Steven Randolph, so find him one way or another. Now, if you would like to see the footage that we shot when we were doing our investigation at the Comedy Store. This

was on October the twelfth of twenty nineteen. I had with me a full spectrum camera that was capable of shooting for you out there who were in techno stuff two hundred and eighty to twelve hundred nanometers, so it's able to see things that you cannot see with the naked eye. And at one point I think I had handed it off to Stephen and he was the one

who might have actually shot this footage. I don't know one hundred percent for sure about that, but he whoever was holding it, pointed it at the stage and there is this anomaly on stage that looks a lot like what he described seeing in a way, it's almost like this violent vapor that's just sort of swirling around on

the stage. Go look at that. And then on the same page, I just modified it so that after that you can watch the video from that same day, earlier that day actually of Chelsea Skidmore, and this is the Chelsea Skidmore show, but she had Steven in there and Chelsea and Stephen are interviewing me on camera for over two hours about everything you can imagine, and it's actually really not only insightful, but it's also, as you can imagine,

you know, very funny and truly creepy at times. This is one of my my wife Lauren's favorite interviews that have been done with me. So all you have to do is go to my website Joshua Pwarren dot com.

There is no period after the P and you'll see the Curiosity Shop in the menu there, and you click the link to the Curiosity Shop, scroll down and you'll find somewhere toward the bottom of the word comedy co O M E d Y. And if you click that, it will take you to the page that has both of those videos that you can just click and watch

for free. Of course, while you're in my Curiosity Shop, if you like this show and you want to support it, do yourself a favor, buy yourself something cool, Buy something cool for yourself or a loved one, and everybody comes out of winter. Also, while you're on my website, I hope you'll sign up for my free e newsletter to stay informed and get some more free gifts, and you'll see how you can sign up on the homepage there

in about two seconds at Joshua Pwarren dot com. Here is the last thing I want to share with you, because, as you may or may not know, I own the Haunted Boulder City Ghost Tour in Boulder City, Nevada, which is about thirty minutes drive outside of Las Vegas, and I have been working with the Chamber of Commerce there. And guess what if you are a part of a bluegrass or country western band, or you know somebody who is, we have an amazing contest going on right now called

the Boulder City Life Contest. I actually wrote and produced a rough draft of a song about Boulder City, Nevada, and we're having a contest to see who can produce the best version of it. And if you win, the prize package is amazing. You get a Las Vegas prize package with two free nights stay at the south Point Hotel, casino and spa, including buffet, breakfast, lunch or dinner, Headliners showroom tickets. You get in Boulder City fifty dollars worth of a bar credit at Cleveland's Lounge.

Terms and conditions apply, I always have to say that, but again, this is this is really, this is something that is going to be fun for everybody, and I am so happy that we're able to offer some great prizes to people who do that as well. Bouldercitylife dot com. Well, I hope you enjoyed that interview with my friend Steven Randolph. I'm sure at some point I will get Chelsea on here because she has got plenty of wild stories off her own. It's been a true pleasure to meet both

of them. And you know, sometimes people contact me and they say, man, I just heard this show for the first time, and I can't believe how much fortune I've had by listening to this tone that you play at the end of the show most of the time, which is called fittingly the Good Fortune Tone. People listen to it every week and then email me and say this has changed my life. So here we go. I'm going to play it for you in just a moment. This is exclusive to this show, and what I want you

to do is take a deep breath. If you can close your eyes, it's okay. If you can't, kick back, relax. If you have a glass of water, you might want to put that in front of your speaker and see if you can charge up the water with this tone. It'll only last like twenty seconds, and then drink the water and see how you feel.

and I will talk to you again soon. You've been listening to Strange Things on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.