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Comedian Myq Kaplan to perform at TACAW

Kimberly Nicoletti
Special to The Aspen Times
Myq Kaplan headlines TACAW's comedy night.
Courtesy photo

Myq Kaplan originally had his sights set on being a singer and songwriter, but his music quickly led him to stand-up comedy.

After playing violin since age 4, he ended up teaching himself guitar in high school and writing some funny songs. In college, he studied philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and math (which have all played a role in his comedy) and decided to try his hand at The Comedy Studio in Boston, where the audience welcomed his humorous tunes, he said. Soon enough, he began talking in-between each song, and sure enough: People laughed.

“It became intoxicating,” he said.



And, it meant he didn’t have to lug a clunky guitar around to all his gigs.

His first big break came in 2009, when he appeared on The Tonight Show. After seven or eight years of persistently sending in tapes and contacting agents, he landed on the Late Show with David Letterman in 2011. But, his real turning point came a year prior, when he made the finals on the seventh season of NBC’s Last Comic Standing, a decade ago.




“Before Last Comic Standing, people didn’t know who I was. Now, people do,” he said.

Throughout the years of performing nationwide, appearing on late night shows and Comedy Central, becoming a quarterfinalist on America’s Got Talent and producing albums (his first, Vegan Mind Meld, made iTunes’ top 10 comedy album of the year, and his latest, A.K.A., debuted at No. 1 in 2020), he’s learned to focus on topics that truly interest him, as opposed to anything that’ll fetch a laugh.

He’s been a vegan for 20 years, so his last album revolved around “love, kindness, and not murdering,” he said. He’s also fascinated with religion, spirituality, and psychedelics — and his experiences with them.

Tonight at TACAW, he’ll focus on the next hour-long show he’s currently working on: imPerfect. In it, he takes material he and his girlfriend have curated about his “growth as a human being, as a man, as a comedian — whatever I am,” he said, adding that he’ll fuse it with religion, history, philosophy, and a dose of psychedelics in an examination of “how to be a human being in a relationship.

“It’s mainly about the love we share,” he said.

As he concurrently works on an hour-long show about his grandma, who died two years ago, and continues to host a podcast called Broccoli and Ice Cream, where he talks to people about their work and joys of the world they experience, he describes his overall comedic theme as:

“Leaning into the people and the things that I love.”

If you go…

What: Comedy night, featuring Myq Kaplan
When: 8 p.m. today
Where: TACAW, 400 Robinson St, Basalt
Tickets: $22 members; $35 day of show
More info: tacaw.org
Strange, but true warm-up act: Myq Kaplan’s legal name is Michael Kaplan, so it seems only natural (sorta) that Aspen Skiing Company president and CEO Mike Kaplan (who wants to make it clear that he is not a comedian) will open for the full-time comedian (along with others), because, as the press release points out: “The chance to have Mike Kaplan open for Myq Kaplan was simply too good to pass up. Kick off the winter with more Kaplan than you could have possibly imagined.”

kim@kimberlynicoletti.com