Earlier this year, while hosting a comedy open mic night at Soggy Bottom bar, JeCorey Hawkins was in the middle of a story when he accidentally talked too close to the microphone and it slightly brushed against his mouth. What resulted was an incredibly funny and personal 2-minute divergence about being a “slight germaphobe” and admitting to the audience that his “night is ruined” now.
Those ‘surprise’ moments, where he has to adjust or think on the fly on stage are some of his favorite parts of performing.
“I have an educator background, so I like the opportunity to kind of just be in front of people and speak about things,” he said. “I think my favorite thing is genuinely coming up with things in the moment. That connects the room and really brings everyone into the space. Those are like hit or miss or one of a kind moments. I can’t prep anything that happens in the room beforehand. And so when I have those opportunities to have a laugh with everybody, I just really like that part.”
For anyone who has seen Hawkins perform before, those are all hallmarks of his skill onstage: an ability to quickly and expertly pivot between topics or call an audible when something funny catches his attention, combined with his willingness to share and laugh at personal elements of his life.
“Anything that happens in my life, I just kind of view it as facts or information,” Hawkins said. “And once I view it like that, I can talk about it like not from a connected perspective if that makes sense. Life sucks, things happen, but I feel like life is a comedy or a drama, depending on how you live it. So I like to laugh, I’ve always been goofy, so any of the things I’ve touched on, my perspective and who I am, I just have a funny view of it. And at some point, it gets to where I find a joke, I find something that’s funny, or I see something that’s similar in comparison to something else in life, and it just kind of starts from there.”
Hawkins, a Flint native who grew up on the city’s northside, said that he always felt like he was a funny person in social situations with friends, and also liked public speaking in college. “I was always concerned that I was more of an in-person, casual funny as opposed to stage funny,” he said.
But he decided to test that out in 2019 when a friend who puts together a monthly show called the 810 Comedy Improv invited him to participate.
“She let me get the opportunity to perform at one of the shows, kind of like in an opening spot,” Hawkins said. “And from that point on, I fell in love with it and really started to go after it.”
His work as a performer paused shortly after, though, for global and personal reasons: the COVID-19 pandemic hit, causing most establishments to stop doing live performances, and he became a father. But he picked it back up as venues started to reopen, and he has since started performing all over Michigan and organizing his own monthly show.
“How much I perform really depends month by month, week by week,” Hawkins said. “I’m not at the point where it’s like I’m just always on the road or doing tours and all that stuff. That could happen one day. But right now, I have my monthly show that I do for sure. That keeps me busy. And then I have a good connection throughout the Michigan environment of comedians. So I’m always looking for opportunities and finding opportunities through there.”
Currently, he’s been hosting shows at Soothing Tunes on Hemphill Road. His desire to put local comedy nights together was borne out of his own need to get more practice. But he didn’t want to be the sole focus of those shows, and his growing network of comedians he’s met inspired him to organize nights where multiple people trying to perfect their craft can get stage time.
“What got me to it was that I needed more reps on stage, and I didn’t want to have to drive an hour to Detroit or Grand Rapids or Ann Arbor because they have bigger comedy scenes,” Hawkins said. “Putting shows together here, I like comedy a lot. There’s a lot of comedians that I know who are always looking for space.”
Initially, Hawkins didn’t like organizing shows simply because he’s already balancing a lot with a full-time job, as a parent, and trying to perfect his own craft. Organizing shows requires working with vendors, paying money out of his own pocket to create flyers or marketing materials, booking comedians, and other logistics. But over time, he’s started to enjoy those elements because it helps build more of a comedy scene locally.
“It kind of transformed into starting to enjoy the process of putting on something for the city,” he said. “I feel like people have a negative connotation of Flint, like, there’s nothing to do here. So just giving one more thing to do here that people don’t have the opportunity to see that much of, it works. If you put on enough good shows, you’ll be able to create a scene for people to say, ‘Hey, you can go to Flint for comedy.’ But you gotta create a name for it before it’s a thing.”
As a performer, Hawkins already has some impressive accomplishments. He won a comedy competition at Mark Ridley’s Comedy Castle in Royal Oak called ‘Detroit to L.A. Comedy Challenge,’ which resulted in him getting the opportunity to perform at the Burbank Comedy Festival in California.
He also had the chance to perform at the famous Laugh Factory in Los Angeles earlier this year in their series called ‘First Impressions.’ Hawkins had been on a waiting list for about four years before getting the opportunity to perform there in August.
“It was amazing to see the true entertainment scene out there,” Hawkins said. “That really expanded my network, and it was just cool to be around that energy.”
Off stage, Hawkins delivers funny content on his Facebook and Instagram pages. Those are also the places to find information about his performances and upcoming shows he’s organizing. Although being funny is the main requirement whether he’s on-stage or creating content off of it, Hawkins has worked to master the best ways to gain an audience no matter the platform.
For social media content, even if it only results in a short video, there is a lot of work behind the scenes that goes into what he produces. He has to decide on topics that are being discussed or shared, make videos and then cut or edit them, sometimes he uses a green screen, and then reviews a finished product all while trying to publish in a timely enough fashion to match how quickly social media moves on from topic to topic. Hawkins uses his social media as a way to work on and practice material, but his first love is performing live.
“Some (social media) topics, if it’s personal enough, I can still use it on stage,” he said. “But when you’re on stage, you’re talking to people and you’re gonna get a reaction immediately, either a laugh or silence or whatever. You have the energy in the room you can interact with and bounce off of.”
Hawkins said he’s lucky to have a support system in his life that helps further his comedy career. He is able to work from home in his full-time job, has a healthy co-parenting relationship with the mother of his child, and credits many people he says he can lean on while he performs on weekends.
“Life has worked its way out where I can pursue this dream without also struggling with time management elsewhere,” he said.
Among his future goals, Hawkins sees a lot of potential for a comedy scene to grow in Flint, and he’d like to organize a comedy festival here in the near future. His goal would be to make it representative of the city and the talent that exists here.
“I definitely think we can have our own resurgence (in comedy),” Hawkins said. “There’s a lot of us here that I feel like are putting in leg work to figure that out. Comedy is something that if you create a space for it, it’ll grow. People like to laugh. One of my mentors in comedy, he told me, ‘If you put on a good show, people will come back.’”
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to catch up on all of our headlines every Tuesday.
