Ta-da!
Photo: Emilio Madrid
On its face, Josh Sharp’s new show Ta-da!, which is currently playing Off Broadway at the Greenwich House Theater, follows the one-man show formula to a tee. It begins with some gross-out sex comedy about Sharp’s youth, transitions to his mom dying when he was 22, then ends with a section about his own near-death experience when a wave knocked him out in Mexico in 2024. But then there’s what’s going on behind him onstage — specifically, the PowerPoint presentation. Throughout the show, Sharp runs through a total of 2,000 text-based slides, cuing each one up in real time with a clicker in his hand. What begins as an opportunity to include more types of jokes (the word cum can be written in so many different ways) evolves into the show’s whole idea: that humans are gloriously capable of mentally juggling two things at once. In this case, that refers to both what Sharp is saying and what the audience is reading on the screen behind him. And, through that, Sharp bucks the formula — a one-man show is supposed to have one clear idea, and Sharp is presenting two.
Sharp has long been one of New York’s filthiest comedians. His most notable work, until now, is 2023’s Dicks: The Musical, an A24-produced musical parody of The Parent Trap, which he co-created with his frequent collaborator Aaron Jackson. It has incest, a flying pussy, and a pair of grotesque puppets known as the Sewer Boys that Nathan Lane feeds like a mother bird. Prior to Ta-da!, nobody would expect Sharp to make a show in what is perhaps the most staid genre in New York. In a post–Mike Birbiglia world, every year sees more comics turning their trauma into fodder for pleasant-enough one-man shows that have clean arcs and are perfect for taking your dad to when he’s in town. So what is Sharp — a man who once wrote the words “God is a faggot and all love is love” — doing making one of those?
What was the impetus to do a one-man show?
I love to do stand-up, but coming out of COVID times, when we all stopped doing stand-up for a year and a half, I wanted to make it more interesting for myself. I was using slides in my stand-up as a ten-minute bit, then it became a 20-minute bit, and that became a 30-minute bit. The “two at once” of it all was interesting to play with, both as content meeting form, and as something I hadn’t seen comedically. I can highlight language that I want you to see written in front of you. I can be saying one joke and bury a second joke behind me, or I can shoot a look and label it and get a laugh off of nothing. There’s something interesting about PowerPoint as a percussion instrument.
How did you develop Ta-da!?
A year and change ago, I finally did the hourlong version. After that, I was like, Girl, I think you make this a one-person show. So I did it in Washington, D.C. — a beautiful city, but it felt like a safe space to do it in case I flopped — and I folded in the mom stuff and a rudimentary version of the accident, which had happened just three months before. That felt good enough that I was like, I can do this in New York. I did it a few times that summer, and by fall, Sam Pinkleton, Mike Lavoie, and Carlee Briglia came to see it. Friends who’d worked with Mike and Carlee loved them as the rare producers who are truly supportive of artists.
Sam and I were friendly, but I invited him because I was like. I’d love his thoughts, but he’s definitely too busy to do this. Then we talked for an hour or two, and at the end of the conversation, I was like, “Wait, I have to vibe check: Do you actually want to direct this?” And he did.
How has the collaboration been?
He’s the best. For months before the run, he was a sounding board, and I would talk shit out with him. I had a good grasp of the comedic stuff, but we talked a lot about the storytelling and theater pieces. I can’t imagine doing it without the team he built.
Why did you choose to do a one-man show and not a stand-up show?
There was an aspect of, If I’m going to be at this theater talking to a microphone, and you all paid money to be here, I want you to see at every moment how hard I’ve worked for this. This is the least lazy version of a show I can imagine. I forced myself to memorize all these cues, and you’ll know when I fuck up. If you strip away the PowerPoint, it is the canonical one-man show: It’s a stand-up who goes downtown and tells his jokes and his stories, but there’s narrative afoot.
What were your preconceived notions of a one-man show?
I loved Jacqueline Novak’s Get On Your Knees and Kate and Birbiglia’s work. I do think there’s a version of this show that’s done downtown in lesser hands that is just sort of solipsistic: Here are the stories about why I moved to New York and started in the arts. I get why people dislike that. You’re paying theater prices for a stand-up show. Which isn’t to say stand-up isn’t a legitimate art form, but I get why an audience says, “My price was high, so where are the sets?” Even when I was doing this show in comedy clubs, I wanted to figure out how to make a one-man show a stunty, cunty production.
I confess to being suspicious of the form. To me, it seems like one-man shows require a pat narrativizing of the teller’s life, with a clear moral, and that clean of an arc often feels dishonest.
We tried to leave in real life’s mess. We had to do WNYC this morning, and Sam and I were talking about how we have trouble pitching the show because it’s hard to tell you what it’s about. Even the pitch of “Guy does comedy with a bunch of slides” is not really what the show is, but it is a device we’re playing with. I told him from the beginning, “I’d love it to be a thing that does a lot of things, and yet all makes sense together as what comes from my brain.”
There’s a moment in the show when you say, “My director, Sam, told me ‘Don’t be afraid to make this show about something.’” Why did you feel the need to give him that credit in the text, instead of just making the show have a point?
There were drafts where I just tried to do that, but then we realized this show needs me to embrace the idea that something else will be going on behind “the point” that both undercuts it and also says a different thing. Some of that is the dystopic nature of where we’re at in media: Everybody’s watching TV while they’re on their phones. People are able to take in two streams at once. So, in that moment, the things that are coming out of my mouth are not dishonest. I wrote the honest version of me landing the plane, one-man show style. But really, the message is the form, and isn’t it cool that both those things are true?
Once you figured out the form of the PowerPoint, how did you decide on the content?
The story about my mom was first, and then I was fleshing out the show and I almost died, and that felt worth folding in. I first did a version where I touched on the near-death experience before Sam came on, but I didn’t know how they were linked. It felt different because one of those stories is something I’ve sat with for a while and have perspective on, and the other is like, Girl, I’m still in this. When I crossed the precipice from This is an interesting mechanism for stand-up into “one-man show,” I knew the story of my mom would be in there. The story of mom is what allowed for the 30 minutes of cum jokes. One is a little more Bell House, and the other is a little more This American Life.
When you were on StraightioLab, you asked a hypothetical question about the show that I’d like to ask now: “How much are you trying to explore an unexplored space, and how much are you just standing in the way of your own success?”
When you’re concocting these things that are niche or wild or specific, you are always interrogating yourself: Is this my voice, or is this me just trying to silo this thing away so that I’ll have a reason why no one ever loves it? But I no longer feel that way about this show. I said that before I was doing it in the theater context. Now that we’ve put it in front of an audience, I don’t need to ask my therapist if I’m just making things hard on myself for no reason. Or, if I am, isn’t that sort of fun sometimes? Isn’t it cool my brain can do this? So, let’s let her run.
Do you feel you’ve previously stood in the way of your own success?
Not really, honestly. I think that’s deep-seated anxiety stuff. Well, I guess only if we define success as being purely on commercial terms. But is that what we’re in it for?
What are you in it for?
I think one of the most simple pleasures in life is just making cool shit with your friends. That I can get paid for that at all rules. So some of it is that, and then some of it is about making stuff that I wish I saw in the landscape. It’s about trying to make something that is specific to me.
I do think the one-man show, though, is sometimes a rather naked ploy by comedians for increased success.
That’s why I’m glad we’re doing it where we’re doing it in the way we’re doing it. Can I get “woo-woo” with you? Hollywood, post the epic strikes, is still in a strange space that’s sorting itself out. It will in time — that is the history of showbiz — but to find myself in a theater moment right now is witchy. In rehearsals, in tech, and now in shows, I feel like I built a coven. With theater — especially this type of theater that’s big, compared to me doing it alone in Gowanus — you really are in that room, chasing the best version of the show. That process means more to me than how well this show goes.
So what does the most successful version of this show’s future look like?
You and my WNYC interviewer are on the same page. She was like, “So, I must imagine you’re thinking about a special.” And, quite honestly, I was like, “No.”
HBO comes. You’re like, “Boo”?
If HBO came to me right now and was like, “Would you shut down this run earlier to tape it?”, I’d be like, “No.” It is a theatrical piece, and I want to chase down the life of it as a thing we all do together in a room. While I’m bringing the stand-up portion into this theater space, the part that feels really fun is that I can see every single person’s face. I’m attuned to the energy of this space. I’m tightly tethered, but I’m still trying to do the stand-up exercise of asking, How do I play it for you people?
I’m doing this live as much as I can. Could I do it in other cities in a similarly theatrical sit-down way? That feels more fun to me. I’d rather tell these stories to as many people as I can before my body gets too tired, then decide it’s done, and then revisit the idea of if it should ever be on film.
How did you adjust yourself to performing “theater” versus “comedy”?
The show still exists on that tightrope. But I did think it would be a comedy show, and the show is reading more as theater. I’m like Wait, y’all are coming for a theater experience? Slay, let’s do that then. Sam had a big note where he was like, “In the back half, you don’t recognize how much the audience is with you.” It shifted how I tell those stories. Now, I’m fully taking a bath. I can be inside of this story. There’s times where the stand-up and the actress are at war, and I don’t know which one should win. When it gets to the back half, I’m like, How can I tell this story from inside of it and not from outside commenting on it? Then I realized the slides behind me can comment on it. It feels like a two-man show with me and the PowerPoint. I can be in it and let her do the work of saying “lol faggot.”
In conversation, I find you to be a lot more earnest than you typically are onstage. This show is the first time that I’ve seen those things combined. How does that feel?
I love earnestness. I think it’s fun to cry, and I like to talk about my feelings, and a lot of that is tied into my mom dying when I was 22, which is in the fucking text. But I think there is a version of honesty that surpasses earnestness that is about being totally true to your sensibilities in an unfettered way. My crassness or nihilism or absurdity is real. There’s this idea that just being “vulnerable” onstage is the highest form of honesty. And I think it can be a form of honesty, but I also think that when Aaron and I are improvising as the witches who did 9/11, that, to me, feels so honest. I’m letting you in here (taps brain), and I’m not really giving thought to how you will receive it.
Something I felt in the audience was that some people there were just theater people who didn’t know your style of comedy, and they were a little shocked by the amount of come mentioned. Others were surprised by the theater aspect. What’s that bifurcation like for you?
On Saturday night, the five o’clock show was all theater people, and the eight o’clock show was all drunk comedy people. Both played great but vastly differently. The comedy people are going so buck wild for the first half-hour, and then when there’s a turn and it becomes about storytelling, I’m like, You’re so surprised it went here and you’re loving it. The theater crowd, for the first half-hour, is smiling and sometimes laughing, but I’m not sure they know they’re allowed to laugh. They’re confused. When the turn happens there, it’s just a theater of people crying. There are parts where it’s, like, full “sad,” but I’ve snuck three inappropriate jokes in. So sometimes the theater crowd won’t laugh at those, but you can tell they want to. In the comedy crowd, I’ll see a woman crying who then will bust up at a line in the middle.
