Morgan Jay, Matteo Lane, Riki Lindhome & More Talk Music In Comedy

Music being incorporated into comedians’ shows isn’t new, and Billboard brought in our top picks of musical comedians, including Morgan Jay, Matteo Lane, JR De Guzman, Bridget Everett and others to share why they started using music, how their audience reacts, and more!

Who’s your favorite musical comedian? Let us know in the comments! 

Morgan Jay:
My name is Morgan Jay. I am a musician and comedian. I would describe my show as kindergarten for adults. We kind of like take those cool caps off that we’ve slowly put on, and I feel like I create a space where people can just have fun. It’s like a little bit of a party now. It’s very experiential. It’s less I’m performing and you listen, and more like we’re all in this together, type energy.

The quick run of the evolution of my act was stand-up, guitar comedy, crowd work, guitar comedy. Then it was the pandemic happened, and then it was like Zoom comedy, and then the AutoTune clip, one clip went super mega cuckoo banana pants viral, and that kind of changed everything. And then little by little, I’ve noticed that, you know, my audience is a little bit younger, and because they’re kind of like, so trapped in the phone, you know, which I understand as I am, too. I wanted to create a show where the phone is allowed. Not only is it allowed, you could film and photograph everything.

I was already playing music and singing on my own. I like to sing, and so that’s kind of where the transition happened. I was like, if I’m gonna keep doing this, I better enjoy it, right? Because, let’s say it does pop off, right? You’re gonna have to do that for the rest of your life, you know what I’m saying? So it’s like, we better like this, because I don’t want to be, you know, doing a 10,000 seat arena one day and then go to my hotel. 

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