Episode 6: What’s Your Thing? (w/ Ithamar Enriquez)
There’s nothing quite as thrilling as watching a brilliant comedian whom the world has yet to discover. It’s like being in on a secret. Ithamar Enriquez is one such comedian. You may have seen him before - at The Second City or perhaps in any number of brief television appearances. Yet, chances are you’ve yet to behold his greatest work: Ithamar Has Nothing To Say, a silent one-man web series produced by Comedy Central’s Key and Peele (along with Maker Studios and Principato-Young Entertainment). Episode 6 of #TheEarlyDraft Podcast sits down with Ithamar to discuss race, failed auditions, and his journey from an out-of-place nobody in the vast Chicago comedy pool to becoming a series creator hailed by press as “a Charlie Chaplin for the 21st century.”
A note about time: In the past few months, I had begun feeling that perhaps podcasting was a waste of my time. I’ve been getting enough opportunities to perform and send out my writing that it seemed obvious that the hours I spend editing and interviewing could better be used to prep scripts, pitches, etc. After all, I constantly feel the same pressure you do: Move, move, move! You need to get discovered. You’re running out of time!
But there’s something about Ithamar’s episode that immediately calmed me. His story is a reminder that the energy we expend trying to get noticed and picked is energy we divert from the one thing that actually matters: finding something that we love. Finding our own thing. Every guest I have on the show seems to affirm the same fact: the road to comedy success is insanely long. On it, you have nothing but time. The question is, how are you going to spend all that time? Chasing something you covet, or building something you love?