Martin Urbano Is Toying With Us
May 21, 2023
Jordan Ashleigh
The 2023 Moontower Just For Laughs Comedy Festival is blessing us with 2 weeks of comedy, film, live podcast, and afterparties. Comedy Wham is featuring our favorite conversations from this year's festival. Enjoy!
I’ve been in love with Martin Urbano since the days of Sure Thing shows at the now-shuttered North Lamar location of Austin Java. Throwing out small pictures of actress Parker Posey to his audience as part of a joke setup, Urbano’s creativity has always been on display. Even his Mad Lib bit from his earliest days of performing is seared into my brain as something that no one could ever replicate. Lucky for you, you can see a finely honed version of the Mad Lib bit by watching his appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
On his 3rd visit to our podcast, this is the most-self-assured and confident (and definitely the most opinionated) version of Urbano yet. Did New York City play a part in this evolution?
In the city that never sleeps – and before the COVID pandemic – Urbano was able to refine his comedy with ample stage time; in our 2018 episode with Urbano we discussed the ability to hit 4 – 7 mics and shows in a single night. It certainly helped living in the same city that was home to the creative alt-comedy gem The Chris Gethard Show. Gethard’s show was an elaborate take on the cable access show concept and Urbano performed regularly. I’m particularly fond of Urbano’s multiple part series of “Comedy Amateurclass” lectures. For legal purposes, I use the word “lecture” very, very loosely here.
Urbano still has an air of friendly Brownsville, Texas native more than a rough and tumble New Yorker. New Yorkers, if I may generalize, are known for having a confidence and self-assuredness that they put on full display, and I really love that familiarity in this version of him as much as I loved the version I watched on Austin stages in the mid 2010s.
It wasn’t just New York that shaped this current version of Urbano. COVID forced a lot of people to reshape their visions for the future. It wasn’t an option for him to come home to Texas, but don’t worry, he’s not banned from the state: he just happens to love New York too much to leave. After several months of COVID lockdown, during which he literally did nothing creative – unless you count hours and hours of playing video games – Urbano was ready to create something new.
Would you have guessed that Urbano’s first large creative project would be a game show?
No, we wouldn’t have either. The weekly game show Who Wants $2.69 with Martin Urbano? launched during the summer of 2020. By the way, read that show title slowly for full effect: it’s another masterful display of his wordplay prowess.
Modeled after Who Wants to be a Millionaire–but with a decidedly smaller payoff prize – Urbano, it turns out, is a great game show host. He authored the questions himself, which meant an aggressive exercising of comedic writing muscles. The show ran for as long as it took the New York live comedy stages to reopen.
The limited run show offers insight into Urbano’s ambition is to be a game show host on a larger scale. To that end, his latest endeavor is a new game show concept debuting at the end of May in Brooklyn called Why Would You Ask Me That?. This is clearly a man on a quest: “I want to host … Wheel of Fortune or something. That’d be fun. Eventually, Pat [Sajak] will die.” We’re ready to petition for him to be handed the keys to the wheel when Sajak retires. Again, for legal reasons, our petition will be based on retirement, not death.
The world needs to see more of the magic potion that Urbano is brewing. Vulture.com captured Urbano’s comedic style aptly by saying: “His work combines edgy, almost-over-the-line humor with – get this – really good jokes”.
It’s easy to say jokes that cross the line…something that happens more often than it should in the Austin comedy scene. It takes hard work and persistence to tell jokes that get very close to the line, but keep you likable, which is precisely Urbano’s gift.
Urbano shares that after COVID he’d open for Gethard and “the silence that those bits would get discouraged me. Should I just drop these jokes completely? So I was like, okay, I gotta drip the irony a little bit more, get a little sillier with it, get a little whinier with it.” In typical Urbano fashion, he wraps up the tale of his hard-fought retooling with “And now those bits are very strong … You know, it’s more of a mixed bag. Like sometimes they’ll like me, and sometimes they’re like, Who’s this? What’s going on?”
Urbano performed at several Moontower JFL shows this year, including the wickedly weird Good Pollution show. At Good Pollution, he delivered a solid, tight, traditional standup set and his jokes reflected who he was in Austin, but with a veneer and polish earned in New York. The Urbano that I adored at Sure Thing is still there, but with even more crafty word play and the continued perpetuation of the “creep on stage” persona.
I love Urbano the standup comic, but increasingly what Urbano excels at is character work. The other Moontower JFL performance for Urbano was for the concept-bending, Stamptown, brain-child of Zach Zucker. Urbano’s character in Stamptown was as a pseudo-journalist critiquing the evening’s performance. Stamptown ran over the course of 4 nights and each night is different so Urbano had to be on his toes to improvise his journalistic critiques. He excelled on the night I attended and was one of the memorable highlights of the evening. I can’t discuss the other memorable highlights of Stamptown, because I try to keep things family friendly.
Playing a memorable character is a newfound skillset for Urbano. If you didn’t fall in love with Hulu’s This Fool, you missed a brief appearance by Urbano. I was sad it was one and done due to the nature of his role, but during our interview, Urbano dropped the exciting news that the show was bringing Julio Tambien back for season 2. The other exciting news shared is his attendance at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August. The nerves, the planning, the logistics, the financial cost, all frighten and thrill Urbano and we hope that he delights audiences in Scotland as much as he delights them here.
We should also not gloss over the fact that Urbano recently completed a stint as a writer for The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. You can catch Urbano for his Apology Comeback Tour, which has limited dates in the midwest and northeast. Selfishly, we’d love to see a national tour in Urbano’s future because frankly, catching a 10 minute set and his role as pseudo-journalist at 2023 Moontower JFL was not enough.
While there’s a lot we miss about the Austin comedy scene that Urbano was a part of, there’s a definite thrill to knowing that we can say “we knew them when”. (We’ve been saying that a lot lately of the alumni of the pre-COVID Austin comedy scene.) Urbano holds a special place in our hearts because he’s always been willing to play along.
Whether it’s playfully throwing pictures of Parker Posey from his pocket at the audience, playing with Mad Libs on stage, or even his 2015 guest appearance on a Radio Tatas episode where he played along with Lara Smith’s and my warped vision of a silly podcast. It was, and remains, the only time I’ve ever had a spit take, after he said something so unexpectedly hilarious while I was drinking my first (and last) Red Bull. Or the time he spent an evening with me and Lara on our 2018 visit to New York and we all playfully donned goofy hats to cap off the evening. All this playing along is exactly what continues to set him apart. Suddenly, it makes perfect sense that all this playing along was training for Urbano’s ultimate goal — toying with audiences and keeping them on their toes.
Follow Martin
- Linktr.ee- linktr.ee/martinurbano
- Instagram — @martinurbanojr
- TikTok — @martinurbanojr
Martin can be seen and heard:
- Jimmy Kimmel Live set — youtu.be/JimmyKimmelLive
- Chris Gethard Presents — multiple appearances, including the “Comedy Amateurclass” series — youtube.com/@chrisgethardpresents
- This Fool (Hulu)
- Previous appearances on our podcast
- Apology Comeback tour
- 2023 Edinburgh Fringe Festival
Valerie Lopez
Valerie Lopez