All roads lead back to comedy
By: Gracie Hanson
Before making people laugh under the stage lights became a reality, Aidan McCluskey was just another Midwest kid from Gainsville, Wis., trying to figure out his life after high school. His path has taken him from failing out of classes to headlining Acme Comedy Comedy Club in Minneapolis.
It wasn’t until Acme that things began to feel real. With its dim, speakeasy atmosphere, the club felt intimate and slightly quirky; a room not for only watching comedy but engaging with a community. Influx Magazine asked McCluskey, now in his mid-20s, to share about his life and craft. His answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Q: | Before comedy, what did life look like for you?
A: | “Honestly, I had no idea what I was doing. I always liked stand-up in high school, but I grew up in a small town, so I didn’t have any sort of direction on where to start. I remember getting an iPad in school with no blockers on it, and that’s when I was suggested a stand-up clip on YouTube. I thought then that there were maybe a total of four comedians in the world. I fell down this rabbit hole and started watching guys like Dave Chappelle all the time during my classes.”
“At the time, my parents really wanted me to get a degree, so I went to Western Tech for business. I completely failed out of my first year. I thought my friends and I were all failing together, and then I quickly realized, oh, you weren’t? I went back, finished my associate degree during COVID when everything was online, and then I worked in construction and retail. I managed a Dollar General for a while. There was never some grand vision. I hit the goal posts of high school and college and didn’t know what came next.”
Q: | How was it like first performing, and how did you decide to fully commit to comedy?
A: | “My first open mic was in Winona in 2018. I was driving an hour and a half from my parents’ house every Thursday night to go to this little venue in Rochester called Goonies. I had maybe three minutes of material written out, and I would just repeat the same jokes over and over at open mics. About a month in, the Funniest Person Contest at Acme came around. I had only performed a solid three or four times, and the older comics around me were all signed up. They told me, ‘You’re probably not going to win, but people will start to pay attention.’ So I signed up.”
“The first preliminary round was the first time I ever performed at Acme, and I won that night. At the finals, I thought I had placed second and assumed I was done, but the scores were cumulative, and I ended up winning the whole thing at 19. I didn’t even fully understand what that meant yet, but it felt like I had just gotten a taste of what I was capable of just through winning the contest.”
Q: | What is it like creating jokes? Where do your ideas come from, and how do you know when they will work?
A: | “In the beginning, if a joke didn’t land, it would crumple me. Now, if I say something I think is funny and the audience doesn’t laugh, sometimes that almost makes it funnier to me. Most of my material comes from personal experiences or darker thoughts that have happened to stick with me. But you never really know if something works until you say it live.
I have had jokes absolutely bomb at Acme and then crush it at a random bar show later that night. After enough shows, you begin to realize it’s not always that the joke isn’t good, but sometimes it’s just the wrong crowd.
“When I am performing, I go early and watch people come in. I do stereotype them a little, like what they’re wearing, what they’re drinking, and I try to get a sense of what might connect. For example, if there’s people wearing trucker hats and Hey Dudes, I know I can tell some of my darker hometown jokes that may not work on a more urban style audience. But, there truly is no safety net, you just have to try it.”
Q: | What accomplishments or regrets do you have so far in your career, where do you see yourself headed?
A: | “Headlining Acme was a huge accomplishment for me. After winning the contest, that was the next goal for me. So to sit in the green room with my fiancee and friends, I could remember that I did the one thing I set out to do. But doing this full time does come with trade-offs. I have missed funerals, weddings, important milestones, all because if I don’t work, I am not getting paid. My schedule doesn’t look like most people’s.”
“One of my biggest regrets is not spending more time with my grandma who was ill during my first time back in Minneapolis after spending some time in Las Vegas. I was so focused on getting hired at Acme that I didn’t go home as much. When I finally did and I told her I got the job, she had fallen asleep on the couch. The next time I saw her, she had passed. That sticks with me.”
“Right now, my goal is consistency. Some months I lose money; other months, if I kept going forward with the same income, it’d be a six-figure year. I am trying to make it all sustainable. If I could tell my younger self anything, it would be, once you accomplish something, you can’t revel in it for too long. Somebody else is working ten times harder to get where you are. This is my life. I have to do this.”