Griffin Sciarra has spent the past four and a half years making people laugh as a standup comedian.
When the Seymour native was attending Ball State University, he would do short 5-minute routines in Muncie or traveling to Anderson, Kokomo, Fort Wayne and Indianapolis.
While living in Indianapolis, he mainly did shows in that area.
Then moving to Chicago, Illinois, in November 2021, the shows he was doing there led to bigger opportunities, including being a host to a headliner’s shows on a cruise ship.
In April 2022, he became a full-time comedian, finally getting paid for the work he was doing.
Now, the 24-year-old is embarking on a first in his career: A tour.
“Unknown, A Standup Comedy Show,” started Jan. 7 in Indianapolis and continued this past Saturday in Nashville, Tennessee. The remaining six dates booked are in the big cities of Chicago; Tucson, Arizona; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; San Diego, California; and Fort Myers, Florida, and he also has a show close to his hometown.
On Feb. 4, the 24-year-old will be doing standup comedy at Royal Off-the-Square Theatre in Brownstown.
The venue will take a break from its normal hosting of theater shows and provide a night of laughs. The show starts at 8 p.m., and tickets are $10 and are available online at tktassist.com/Tix/?u=JCCT, by phone at 812-358-5228 or at the door.
Sciarra will take an honest look at his year through a series of absurd stories and jokes about relationships, family and his string of increasingly odd jobs. He recommends parental guidance for youth under 18 due to language and adult content.
“I can’t handle the Chicago winter, so I was like, ‘I want to get out of there in January, February and March,’ so that’s why I lined up shows like this,” he said.
“I’ve been trying not to be afraid to ask people because you need so much help,” said Griffin, who is an independent standup comedian. “I’ve gotten so much help from people these last two months. … I’ve heard some comedians say you just get influenced by the people that are nice to you. I want to be nice to people, and just a lot of people since I’ve started have been like, ‘I’d love to come to a show,’ like people from Seymour.”
He looks forward to entertaining people he knows and those who don’t know him.
“I like this community a lot,” he said. “People just want to laugh, and how many times is there a standup comedy show here? I get so selfish and narcissistic thinking about how I don’t want to do it here, but it’s like, ‘Why would I not?’”
In 2022, Sciarra did two shows in his hometown. One was Knights of Comedy in June at Knights of Columbus Council 1252, and the other was in September at Brewskies Downtown.
He grew up in Seymour and graduated from Seymour High School in 2017. He said at that time, his dream was to write comic books, specifically Spider-Man, and he applied to schools in New York where some of his favorite comic book writers went.
Sciarra, however, opted to go to Ball State and earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism with a concentration in magazine media.
He started doing standup comedy in August 2018 when he was 19. He had just finished a summer internship at a Seymour manufacturer.
“That summer internship had me thinking that I didn’t want a real job,” he said, smiling. “I never really understood standup comedy as a genre, which not that many people do. It’s just like someone being funny up there. My friends and I would watch ‘Tosh.0,’ but we didn’t see this like, ‘That’s a standup comedian.’ We were just like, ‘Oh, it’s a funny guy.’”
Then he watched Daniel Tosh do standup specials on Comedy Central, and that changed his perspective.
“At the time, I was like, ‘The episodes where he just talks for an hour, I like those way better than the dumb videos and all that,’” Sciarra said. “That’s when I started to understand it as like, ‘This is something that someone could do.’”
Earlier in the year, he and a friend had watched a standup compilation of comedian Dave Attell.
“He’s just incredible, and I couldn’t believe that someone that I didn’t know who they were could be that hilarious and incredible and just raw and funny,” Sciarra said. “I was like, ‘I’ve got to try this.’”
His first open mic was at Be Here Now in Muncie, a night club near Ball State’s campus where students hang out.
“I went there, they put an X on my hand because I was 19, I threw up before I went onstage and I really did pretty well for the first time,” he said.
“A lot of people go up there and try to tell a story or whatever, but I just had a joke and then another joke, just one-liners, because that’s who I liked first,” he said. “I got really enamored with just joke structure and someone from Don Rickles to (Rodney) Dangerfield to today, cats like Jimmy Carr and Anthony Jeselnik, just like the short form, and I knew that would be the easiest way to start because I knew going up there and trying to tell some big story would have been difficult.”
He was onstage for 5 minutes, which he joked seemed like an eternity for his first time. Afterwards, he said he had more adrenaline.
“I guess whatever I could compare that to would have been like big sports game, asking a pretty girl out, just stuff like that, it was that times a thousand, like nothing that I had put my body through before, like an experience that I hadn’t put myself through before,” Sciarra said.
He knew he wanted to do it again.
“That was like a turning point,” he said. “I didn’t almost drop out (of college), but I was like, ‘I think I really want to do this, like really, really want to do this,’ but I also knew I needed a common experience with people, and I thought it was still good to finish out college.”
Sciarra said he knew he had the skills to do standup.
“When you first start out, you have no idea how you could get good at it or make money at it or anything like that, so I still did my classes, but my GPA did drop off a little bit because I did shows every night pretty much,” he said. “You’re just so bad at it when you start, and you just get infinitesimally better every show.”
He did shows four times a week, 5-minute sets each time. He stayed around the Muncie area when he was there for classes, but he would venture over to Louisville and Cincinnati if he was in Seymour.
“Once you get into it, it’s so hard the first time, but then you make one friend and they are like, ‘Hey, I go do this show on Wednesday. Why don’t you come?’ It’s really a domino effect,” Sciarra said. “You just have to fall into it and figure it out.”
The COVID-19 pandemic stopped standup for a while, but around June 2020, Sciarra started doing a couple of outdoor shows a week.
After graduating from college in 2021, he was living in his sister’s basement in Indianapolis and got a job as a janitor at the Indianapolis Zoo and also was an intern at a credit union.
“Those were two perfect jobs for me because the credit union was completely remote and easy and I could be home and chill in her basement, and then at the zoo, it’s very menial work, so I could just think all day,” he said. “I picked both of those purposefully. I knew it would be like, ‘This is going to suck, but now, I have like 15 minutes about the zoo in my act.’ That’s what I’ve been learning at this age. It’s like everything just feeds itself and you just keep moving forward.”
Also that year, he entered the Leslie Norris Townsend Clean Comedy Challenge at Gutty’s Comedy Club in Greenwood. There were 37 aspiring standup comics competing over a period of three nights, and Sciarra wound up winning the competition, earning a trophy and $1,000.
He moved to Chicago that November because he could do four sets a night. Four months in, a friend he opened for was going to headline on cruise ships for four months, and he asked Sciarra to be the host.
“I was like, ‘Yeah, I would do that,’” he said. “I sent him a clip, and then bing, bang, boom, two months later, I’m on the Wonder of the Seas. I had never been on a cruise ship before.”
The ship started out of Florida and went to Mexico and Honduras before crossing over to Europe. Sciarra hosted two shows a night for four nights a week. After he did 10 minutes of jokes to open the show, the headliner would take the stage.
Ever since that point, Sciarra has done standup full time.
“It’s complete DIY,” he said. “I don’t have an agent or manager. I’m manager, agent, press agent.”
Most of his shows have been short sets, but on his current tour, it’s the first time running for 50 minutes as the main act.
“I’ve only done more than 45 minutes like twice,” Sciarra said. “You always feel like it’s your first time, and I’m just trying to baptize myself by fire, and the hope is that after all these shows, it’s like March is when I get to chill and go back to shows.”
Sciarra has signed up for some fringe festivals this year and plans to go to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland in August.
“When you’re inside 10 years of standup comedy, there’s no bad show to do,” he said. “You have to do it. You have to get onstage. You have to get better for the sake of getting better because no one cares about you because it’s so big, there’s so much going on. These first 10 years are about learning what you want. … I’m just at my best when I’ve got something to look forward to and I’m working.”
While he said standup comedy is a grind, Sciarra likes what it’s teaching him and what he gets out of it.
“It feels good to connect with people,” he said. “I don’t even know if I can put it into words. It’s like I have to do it. It’s like you’re addicted to it. It’s a bad relationship. Sometimes, it’s a good relationship. It is just like when you find the thing you’re supposed to do, you don’t really think about it too much. This is what I do. This is the problem that I like to solve every day. This is what makes me want to pull my hair out and feel like I’m on top of the world.”
If you go
What: Seymour native Griffin Sciarra’s “Unknown, A Standup Comedy Show” tour stop
When: 8 p.m. Feb 4
Where: Royal Off-the-Square Theatre, 121 W. Walnut St., Brownstown
Who: Parental guidance for youth under 18 recommended due to language and adult content
Cost: $10 (available online at tktassist.com/Tix/?u=JCCT, by phone at 812-358-5228 or at the door)
Information: If you want to check out Griffin’s style, go to youtube.com/@griffinsciarra