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Ahh 4th of July week — America’s celebration of freedom and notoriously a dead zone for show attendance.

With good reason. Get TF outside and stay TF outside!

After a killer weekend working with the legend, Jim Norton, I’m trading the stage grind this week for a pivot to the unsexy work: content, photo shoots, writing, and pool time.

Actually, that might be a lot sexier than the usual comedy grind. Comedy is NOT at all glam… although Jim and I did stop at the world’s largest truck stop in Iowa on our route to Chicago and I-80 had everything from showers to a whole ass night club inside.

Pretty fancy if you ask me.

So here's what "admin week" actually looks like behind the curtain.

Monday: writing session that produced exactly four good jokes and one Google Doc titled "misc thoughts" that I will likely never open again.

Tuesday: a day FULL of meetings, a feature film table read getting scheduled, and an evening podcast recording.

Wednesday: gettin’ my hair did — ladies, we know this takes most of the day.

Thursday: photo shoot with one of the biggest photographers on socials (her sessions usually cost $100k omg) and new material night for veteran comics at The Lincoln Lodge

Friday: pack the car, drive to Wisconsin, and become a person who exists exclusively in a swimsuit, with a white claw glued in hand, until Sunday.

This is the part of comedy nobody puts in the highlight reel. No applause breaks. No green room small talk. Just a week of the slow, unsexy accumulation of material and promotional content that you’ll see the aftermath of months later.

It's not glamorous. But that’s show business, baby!

The Hustle

Nobody claps for a spreadsheet.

Nobody hoots and hollers when you finally nail the edit on a reel, or when you remember to actually invoice someone and they pay on time, or when you spend forty-five minutes picking the right font for a poster.

There's no green room for content week. No applause when your PR team emails about a role request.

But this is the actual job. The stage is maybe five percent of it, and it's the only percent anyone ever sees.

The other ninety-five percent is the writing that doesn't make the cut, the meetings that go less than nowhere, the meetings that go somewhere and you can't tell anyone yet, the photo shoots, the pitches, the relentless behind-the-scenes machinery required to make the eventual five percent look effortless.

It’s so funny that people think we make our living off telling dick jokes on stage LOL it’s literally 18 full time jobs in one.

In the early comedy days, the hustle meant being on stage every night, multiple shows a night, chasing the next set, grinding the open mic circuit. That was NPH 2013.

The hustle these days is long sets, headlining dates, bold career moves, and often sitting at a desk doing the deeply unsexy work of making all the other shit happen.

If you could only see me right now in my green sweatpants and pink stripe linen shirt with the AC blowing on me because its 95 degrees outside. Fuck it. You can see me. Here’s the unsexy snapshot in real time:

This is the BTS of a life in comedy. Hot, I know.

So this week, no major shows. Just the unglamorous architecture of a career, built on a shanty town of google docs, scrap notes, calendars, zoom meetings and dirty sweatpants.

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The Chill

Then Friday hits, and the shanty town gets evacuated for family and friends and pool time in Wisconsin.

No laptop. No notes. No "circling back." Just the homies, floaties, a Chicago dog in one hand and a white claw sweating in the other, surrounded by friends who knew me before any of this was a real career — back when "the hustle" just meant scraping together gas money for an open mic three hours away.

There's something about poolside time with people who've known you for decades that resets your whole nervous system.

Nobody's asking what I'm working on. Nobody needs anything from me. The biggest decision of the day is whether to reapply sunscreen or risk it because the sunscreen is “way over there.”

I think this is the actual point of all the admin week chaos. It's so that when Friday comes, I get to fully disappear into something that has nothing to do with output, and everything to do with the people that got me here.

I talk about Wisconsin a lot but I had the best upbringing with the best people and one day I’ll dedicate an entire comedy special just to that.

The version of me floating in Wisconsin this weekend isn't thinking about TEDx, or table reads, or whether the font on that poster was the right color. She's just thinking about whether someone's going to chuck a nerf football at her head and spill her beverage, or whether that hot dog has enough mustard on it.

Backstage business gets you to the stage. But poolside friends business is what keeps you wanting to go back.

Cheers to the unglamorous part of this life, and the friends that make it all worth it.

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Upcoming Shows

To my Wisconsin peeps — I’m headlining a night at Madison Comedy Week this year and bringing amazing comedian friends on the show with me! I’ll be working through new material that won’t be on my upcoming special taping.

Tickets are discounted through July 4th only with code: NPH

TIX: Friday August 7th - NPH and friends at Madison Comedy Week

Love you all and cheers to the hustle + chill. We are un-glam and we loves it.

xx NPH