by Steve Desroches
On January 24, 2023 comedian Sam Morrison achieved a dream most every stand-up comic has: to appear on late night television. Television is still an incredibly powerful medium and appearing on most any show is worth it no matter how small the ratings. But when Morrison got a call to do about five minutes of material on Late Night with Seth Meyers all the hard work, all the bizarre gigs in people’s living rooms or odd-mark open mic nights, all the time he’d perform for five or six people were worth it and all the broken promises, comedy clubs that didn’t pay him, and opportunities that dried up were all forgotten in the moment. This was his first big break made all the more special that it is still relatively recent that LGBTQ comedians can go on late night television and be fully themselves and be celebrated.
Morrison started out in comedy six years ago and even in that small amount of time things have rapidly changed for the better for LGBTQ comics. And as he prepared to take to the stage, the production crew at Late Night with Seth Meyers was still reviewing his material and in the end asked he change next to nothing. Here was a gay man going out on national television and telling unvarnished and uncensored jokes about his life as just that.
“I was able to say ‘poppers’ and ‘bottom’ on a late night television show,” says Morrison. “If that isn’t progress than I don’t know what is! And you know what? It worked! The live audience for late night television shows are often tourists from Middle America looking for something to do during the day. And the jokes hit. I do think late night television has changed so much. So much has changed.”
Morrison dove into the world of stand-up comedy while still a student at Cornell University taking the train to New York City to perform as much as he could. And it was during those years he realized that he continually found himself attracted to older men, and often bears. When he first visited Provincetown for Bear Week in 2017, he described it as something of a personal “sexual revolution.” He knew he’d want to be associated with the Bear community forever, and in turn he made his Provincetown debut in 2018 during Bear Week with his solo show Hello Daddy! One Man’s Journey to Cure Heterosexuality.
In the time since, he returned to Provincetown several times, and he had also been pounding the keyboard as a comedy writer and developing his craft by working the stages of New York and beyond. Morrison was on his way. But as life has a way of cruelly complicating matters and throwing curve balls our way, Morrison funneled a personal tragedy into his art, which led to his greatest success to date. During Bear Week 2018 here in Provincetown Morrison met Jonathan Kreissman at Spiritus Pizza after last call. The two fell in love and began a relationship. Sadly, Kreissman died of Covid-19 in February 2021 at 52 years old. Morrison took his grief, as well as his experiences managing his diabetes and his attraction to older, larger men and penned his solo show Sugar Daddy. After performing the show at various comedy clubs and here in Provincetown Morrison took Sugar Daddy to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in the summer of 2022 where it was an enormous hit followed by a critically-acclaimed off-Broadway 14-week run at the SoHo Playhouse (with three encore performances) and then a sold-out run in London. As personally trying as the story within Sugar Daddy is, and continues to be for Morrison, his writing and performance is exactly the kind of daring it takes to become a star. No one gets good without taking risks and being honest with their emotions. And it can take time to get an audience to go along, especially when you’re largely unknown, as Morrison recalls of the days when he was trying to convince people to come to his show in Provincetown.
“It wasn’t easy,” said Morrison. “I did have to flyer in my underwear every day. I’d be doing these vulnerable, narrative solo shows for Bear Week and I felt like the audience showed up for an orgy and I’m like ‘No! Let me talk about grief!”
While Morrison is working on bringing back Sugar Daddy to Provincetown, this Bear Week he’s bringing an all-new stand-up show to Red Room that promises to be silly and raunchy with a bit of skin. In Sam Morrison’s Stand Up and Strip Show he’ll lean heavy into the stand-up tradition sure to be a delight for Bear Week. And he’s thrilled to come back to Provincetown, a place that means so much to him professionally and personally. While his career is rising, he is of course still processing his loss. And there is also the ongoing strike by the Writers Guild of America that he is in solidarity with, and as such there is a corresponding stress that writers like him cannot make pitches to networks or streaming services for new products until a fair contract is reached. Provincetown will be just the place for Morrison to be, especially now as his audience has grown and his caché as a comedian all the richer.
“It does feel good to go back to Provincetown with some credentials behind me,” says Morrison. “It’s such an important place to me, obviously for personal reasons. But as a comic, Provincetown was part of my start. The most important thing as a comic is stage time, and Provincetown has given me so many hours of stage time. It’s also a place where I developed an audience, which is also hard to do. And Provincetown gives me some of my favorite audiences. I’m very grateful.”
Sam Morrison’s Stand Up and Strip Show is at Red Room, 258 Commercial St., Provincetown, Monday, July 10 and Tuesday, July 11 at 7 p.m. Tickets ($35/$45) are available at the door and online at redroom.club.
