Onstage, Matteo Lane radiates ease. Often, he says, he’ll get this comment after a show: “It felt like I was sitting there catching up with a friend.” On his podcast, I Never Liked You, with Nick Smith, that effect is perhaps more pronounced as Lane sits, legs crossed, and delivers wry witticisms with understated but obvious confidence. “I’m exactly who I am,” he says.
In one joke, performed at the Comedy Cellar in New York City, Lane holds a hand underneath his chin, miming pool water. Before he got hair transplants, he says, he’d float around with his head above the water, “like a gay alligator.” Lane’s gayness matters to him — his sets often revolve around gay themes and speak to the heart of the community.
Lane is many things: comedian, actor, opera singer, and visual artist. He’s studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, studied oil painting and opera in Rome, been a professional storyboard artist for commercials and TV programs, and painted a mural for Barack and Michelle Obama’s office in the Aon Center in Chicago.
He doesn’t do those things very much anymore — in Chicago in the early 2010s, he began performing stand-up comedy at open mics. It stuck. “You will see me in a wheelchair and a diaper on stage, performing with a respirator,” says Lane. “I’ll do stand-up till the day I die.”
Lane, who was named one of Variety’s “10 comics to watch for in 2022,” has performed all over the world with comedians like Chelsea Handler, Hasan Minhaj, and Bob the Drag Queen. He’s featured in Netflix’s queer stand-up special Stand Out as well as The Comedy Lineup.
On Friday, Aug. 30 and Saturday, Aug. 31, he’ll perform at Provincetown Town Hall in three Payomet Road Shows.
His home club is the Comedy Cellar, where he usually performs about 15 shows a week. “I’m not one of those people who thinks, ‘I’ll do this till I get an acting job or a sitcom or a movie,’ ” says Lane.
Most of the people Lane started doing comedy with are done, he says. “There’s just a small group of my graduating class, so to speak, that I still see around.” The comic’s life is hard. He flies from one country to another, often touching down in a city where he knows no one.
“The first time I’ll speak to someone is when I’m in front of a crowd of 2,000,” he says. “I’m just there to make them laugh, and then I fly back home.”
A good comedian is honest, he says, someone you can trust. “You’ll see a younger comic, and they’re really tense and nervous,” he says, “and now the audience is tense and nervous.” The experienced comedian is unflappable, unless they’re flapping funnily.
That sort of ease takes practice, says Lane: “It’s the same process as singing, and the same as painting or drawing. It’s the consistent working of things until they get better and better.”
Usually, he says, a joke takes six months to develop. With time, he comes to know his jokes inside and out. “I know the beats of the joke, I know where to hold and where to land,” he says. “I know this word is funnier than that word.”
At the Comedy Cellar, he says, where the sets are only 15 minutes long, other comics are in the audience. There, he can try new jokes in front of more constructively critical observers. “You’ll get off stage, and a comic will walk up to you and say, ‘You should say this.’ ” Michelle Wolf once gave him a suggestion for a better punchline; he kept it forever.
“That’s what it means to be a comic,” says Lane. “It’s camaraderie, it’s community, it’s helping each other.”
People come to his shows ready to laugh, says Lane. And they do. But some leave having experienced something more. “People will message me, ‘This is the first time I’ve laughed since my mom died,’ or ‘This is the first time I’ve laughed since my divorce.’ ” Lane delivers a punchline in an instant, but some in the audience might remember it forever.
The first time he told a joke that clicked, says Lane, was at an open mic in Long Island City. “We were in a basement, and there were, like, 50 comedians,” he says. Each comic performed for two minutes, no more, and each one hoped to impress the other comics in the audience. Lane, completely unknown, walked up to the mic and sang a line from an opera in a shimmering falsetto. Everyone stared.
“Then I go, ‘That’s the true story of how I came out to my dad.’ ” Everyone laughed. “It was the first time people remembered me.”
Not Just for Laughs
The event: A comedy show with Matteo Lane
The time: Friday, Aug. 30, 7 p.m., and Saturday, Aug. 31, 7 and 9 p.m.
The place: Provincetown Town Hall, 260 Commercial St.
The cost: $49 to $89 at payomet.org
