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During a show at Harvey’s Comedy Club, Bryan Bixby joked that he hates people who are in shape so much that he understands why joggers get murdered. Afterwards, he was confronted by an angry audience member.
“This guy saw me outside and he was like, ‘That was really messed up. My friend was murdered on Thursday,’” Bixby recalls. “And this was a Saturday show.”
The exchange might have left some comedians feeling contrite. Not Bixby, who is an ardent believer in saying the unsayable for the sake of catharsis.
“I don’t want to be gross or be awful or anything like that,” he says. “The point is to make bad things a little bit better.”
Making bad things better is Bixby’s life’s work. No subject—his body, his family, his love life—is off-limits. He twists heartbreak and humiliation into entertainment so naturally and forcefully that, at times, it’s hard to believe his claim that he’s not a confident person.
“I think everybody has a lot of the same insecurities and fears,” he says. “It’s just, being confident is not giving into that in the moment, which is how I can go onstage and come off as a pretty confident presence, even though I’m really not that at all.”
Bixby is a master of soliciting multiple reactions simultaneously. In mere moments, he can make you go from “ew!” to “aw!,” like when he does a bit about watching incest porn.
“Not for the sex—I just like to fantasize being in a different family,” he quipped at Helium Comedy Club’s 2019 Funniest Person contest. “Like, ‘Aw, both parents are there! What a lovely Christmas!’”
Bixby’s comedic dexterity dates back to his childhood in La Farge, Wis., which was a target of his standup routine at Helium: “I recently witnessed something very racist. I was visiting my hometown in Wisconsin. And that was it! It was fucked up.”
As a child, Bixby wasn’t just funny—he was a provocateur. While he dug the physical comedy of Jim Carrey and the Three Stooges, words were his weapons of choice.
“I was always a huge fan of sort of provocative comedy and things that were maybe inappropriate—making people laugh at things where it feels wrong or they’re disgusted, but they can’t help but laugh,” he says. “Even when I was in school, I remember once a teacher told my dad, ‘Bryan says a lot of inappropriate things for school, but sometimes it’s just so funny I can’t help but laugh.’”
At 15, Bixby did his first standup set—at his high school.
“I had to submit a full script of all the jokes I wanted to do to the principal to get her approval on it, and I think all but like three or four jokes were rejected,” he says. “I was just thinking how far back it goes, that sort of crossing the line.”
Portland has provided Bixby with plenty of opportunities to cross the line. Case in point: his appearance at Comic Strip, a Funhouse Lounge event that invited comedians to perform wearing as few articles of clothing as they pleased.
“I wore two pairs of boxers and the bottom pair had a giant hole on the underside,” Bixby says. After removing the first pair, he “sat on a stool and let my balls drop out the hole and did a joke about manspreading. But that’s as far as I went.”
When Bixby talks about performing at Comic Strip, he speaks with reverence. “It was really cathartic and just felt really freeing and good,” he says. “You have nightmares of showing up in class and realizing you’re naked. Once you’re to that point, ‘It’s like, what could go wrong from here?’”
Bixby sometimes satirizes current events—go to his Instagram page and you’ll find gags about gas prices, Russian vodka and the Winter Olympics. Yet his most memorable jokes are the ones that dig into his psyche, transforming pain into art.
“Last year, I went through a breakup, and by the next` day, I was trying to write jokes to process it,” he says. “I was doing a lot of that material to work through it all. When something like that happens, there’s a moment of just feeling sorry for myself, those negative feelings, and then I try to right away go into like, ‘What’s kind of funny about this?’”
There’s a dash of poetic license in Bixby’s material about his breakup—it didn’t actually occur on a tandem bike—but the anguish behind it is real. And there are other traumas featured in his routines, like his great-grandmother telling him he was “too fat” when he was 10 years old (right before she died).
“At the time, it hurt my feelings,” Bixby says. “But now, I look at those like, however much it hurts or makes me feel embarrassed, it’s all worth it if I can write a joke.”
Maybe that’s why Bixby cops to feeling extraordinarily comfortable onstage. Out of the spotlight, life is unpredictable and cruel. He can’t control an audience’s reaction to his material, but when he faces a crowd, he gains power from each story he tells—including the ones that have hurt him.
“It’s weird,” he says. “Onstage is the place that I feel the most comfortable. If I’m onstage and people are laughing, then nothing makes me uncomfortable, really. It’s the one time that I don’t feel any of that.”