The Daily Times

The reaction Matt Ward gets when he tells a joke from the stage is usually two-pronged.

The first is the “I-can’t-believe-he-just-said-that” look of disbelief, the surface reaction to a withering personal observation or a skewering bit of social commentary. The second is the dawning realization on the part of those in the crowd that, in the backs of their minds, they’d all been thinking the same thing.

They were just afraid to acknowledge it.

“I think that, a lot of times, I say the stuff that people think but never say out loud,” Ward told The Daily Times this week. “Generally, it’s the stuff they’d be ashamed to say out loud, but there’s a dark part of them that agrees with what I’m saying. I’d describe it as raw, uncensored and honest. I’m not afraid to cut on myself, but also afraid of nothing.

“The whole thing about Tracy Morgan — I don’t talk about gay or retarded people, but he’s a comedian! He’s up on stage to get a reaction! I think there needs to be more shots taken at the fact that he’s not funny.”

Ward, who headlines a free stand-up comedy show on Sunday at Two Doors Down in Maryville, knows funny. He readily acknowledges he may not be the funniest guy out there, but over the years he’s studied the masters of the craft and dedicated himself to that admirable trait possessed by the best — becoming better.

Originally from Ohio, Ward was living in North Carolina, near the coast, and looking to buy a home when he ran up against high taxes and insurance costs. Doing some research, he settled on East Tennessee as a landing point. Already, he’d gotten into doing stand-up, and the Knoxville area seemed like a good base of operations.

“In the Wilmington area, there were five places that did comedy,” he said. “Within a few hours’ drive of Knoxville, there are more than 20. There’s just more opportunity, and it’s geographically centered.”

Ward got his start as a comedian by accident. As the marketing coordinator of a music festival in Northwest Ohio, he was drafted to be the “face” of the festival. That meant he was often in front of the microphone to make announcements and introduce bands … and because many of them were chronologically challenged jam bands, he often found himself with plenty of extra time in front of the audience.

“They were never ready to go when they said they were, and it was usually the bass player,” he joked. “I’d ask if they were ready, and they’d all say yeah, but then the bass player would go, ‘Wait! I need 5 more minutes!’ So I had to come up with something to say that was entertaining and didn’t lose the crowd. That was the very beginning of my improve comedy.”

Even before that, friends had encouraged him to give comedy a try. The final straw, he said, was checking out what passed for it on Comedy Central.

“I saw how many god-awful comedians were on Comedy Central,” he said. “I said, ‘I know I’m not that funny, but certainly I’m funnier than this.’”

In East Tennessee, Ward has become something of a comedy union leader — he promotes live comedy throughout the region on his own website and that of http://www.knoxcomedy.com , he started a Sunday comedy open-mic night at Preservation Pub in downtown Knoxville and he’s trying his hand at organizing shows in Maryville — the first being Sunday night. It’s a lot of work, but then again, comedy always is. It may seem like a dude on stage telling jokes, but there’s a lot more to it than that, at least as far as Ward is concerned.

“My ultimate comedian is George Carlin,” he said. “If you compared him to a type of musician, he would be the Jimi Hendrix of comedy. He was someone very diligent about the practice of it. He was outspoken, but he would always practice his craft. He was never happy with where he was. He wanted to get better and better at what he did.

“That’s how I look at my comedy. What drives me insane about 80 percent of comedians is that they keep the same set their entire career. To me, that says, ‘I have no intention of having people come back and see me again,’ because they’re doing the same thing you saw them do the last time.”

So far, smaller communities have provided the warmest receptions. Tazewell, for example — the audience members there loved him, so he has high hopes for this weekend’s Blount County show. Of course, he has one limitation no matter where in East Tennessee he performs.

“I don’t have any jokes about Jesus,” he said with a chuckle. “That’s the one thing about East Tennessee I’ve found it’s best to stay away from. Everything else is pretty much fair game.”

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