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All it takes to put a lie to this long-standing myth that all standup comics are fundamentally broken, tortured people is about 10 minutes in the company of Will Lampe.
The 28-year-old is remarkably levelheaded and rational for a person who, onstage, refers to himself as “inferior, in every way. I’m 100 pounds and mentally ill. My wife is Jewish and opens jars for me.” Sure, he seeks approval from strangers at comedy clubs and open mics around the state on the regular, but his origin story as a standup is more folksy than gloomy.
“My twin brother is a civil engineer,” Lampe says, as we try to settle in at an awkwardly designed communal table at Sterling Coffee Roasters on Northwest 21st Avenue. “He’s very smart, making buildings and bridges and things. My older brother is very athletic. And I was…there. I think as a twin you’re always fighting to differentiate yourself to get attention, so I had to do something, and I was more of an English lit person.”
Growing up in northern Kentucky, raised by parents that were, as he puts it, “conservative, but not crazy,” Lampe fell in love with comedy early via Adam Sandler movies and boxed DVD sets of The Simpsons, but didn’t see making folks laugh as something people could actually turn into a career.
“I used to think that it was just a fake job that Jerry Seinfeld had on the show,” Lampe says. “And then someone, when I was a kid, said, ‘You should be a standup,’ and I remember saying, ‘That’s not a real job!’ And then when they told me it was, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s the only thing I want to do.’”
His path to actually getting up onstage and doing it was a bit of a winding one. Lampe tried doing standup a couple of times in college, and immediately knew he wasn’t ready. It was an itch, though, that remained unscratched in his brain even as he moved to Portland after accepting a job with the Make-A-Wish Foundation as an event planner. And when the pandemic descended, it gave Lampe ample time to write for a couple of hours each day until he finally, as he says, “had a joke that I was like, ‘Well, I’d laugh if someone said that.’”
Once the world opened up, he dared to get up at an open mic at My Father’s Place and found that strange comfort in making people laugh at your own failings as a human and skewed view of the world.
For as well-adjusted as Lampe appears to be, there’s a lot from his life that is ample fodder for material. In addition to his neurodivergence, he grew up in a funeral home. (Save any comments you might have about Six Feet Under. Lampe’s never seen the show.) It’s an experience that, onstage, he mines for some truly great bits, such as the day he realized how not normal growing up around dead people was. “We read this book in the second grade about this sick old lady,” he says. “She died at the end, and my whole class is sobbing, learning about death for the first time. I’m sitting there stone-faced, thinking, ‘I bet that casket’s $1,495.’”
“My grandpa and my uncle who run the funeral home, they think it’s pretty funny that I do a couple of jokes about them,” Lampe tells me. “I just didn’t want them to be nervous that I was going to tank their business.”
While it remains to be seen whether Lampe’s onstage endorsement will have an effect on the funeral home’s bottom line, his act has been paying some sensational dividends for his standup career. In addition to being able to work all over Oregon, he took second place last year at Helium’s Portland’s Funniest Person, an annual summer competition that dates back to 2011. His participation in that event also wound up leading to an invitation to perform at The Bell House in New York in a showcase of promising comedians.
Proud as he is of those accomplishments, Lampe keeps his expectations and ambitions fairly muted, looking toward hopefully doing more road work outside of Oregon and continuing to work with fellow comics he loves like Susan Rice. Yes, being a full-time standup is the goal, but Lampe is the first to admit, “I don’t even know how that works.”
“I don’t post on Instagram that much, or on TikTok,” he continues, where many standups ply their wares through short punchy clips of their acts. “All of that stuff is really foreign to me. Right now, I’m just trying to get a really good 45 minutes to an hour and then I’ll deal with that.”
What’s the funniest thing Will Lampe has seen in Portland? A random pot shot. “I got off the bus and there’s someone struggling on the bus. Their face was covered with dirt and they were yelling obscenities and stuff. I looked at them and they looked at me, and you could kind of see the humanity come back to them. They looked at me and said, ‘Where you goin’, string bean?!’ You can just get bullied by anybody.”