Yes, I can relate to that myself at my all boys senior school. Once I got over the hump of seventh grade, which is just so horrible, you get through those rough periods and then you think ‘oh, if people are laughing then they like me.’ I get to have some control over them laughing at me as oppose to me just trying to exist and them laughing at me.” Drew Droege in Bright Colors and Bold Patterns I was very lucky in that I had lots of friends. You don’t get bullied if you’re making people laugh and also in the South I used to make people think that I was possessed! So that kept people away, because I knew that if they thought that I had the Devil in me they wouldn’t bother me, they’d steer clear! And I really did it mainly to make my friends laugh. “It’s a weird survival technique that I wasn’t even really aware of. So as with a lot of people that started in the classroom for you? I’d wondered when you first realised that you had the ability to make people laugh. I was going to ask about that, being the class clown. So I learnt all of that in sort of a weird backwards way.” I think it’s a good lesson in not trying to be funny, just play the truth and really try to mean what you say and then hopefully other people will laugh, but you have to be committed. I was so reluctant because I didn’t trust that it was real acting, I thought ‘I want to make people sob, that’ll mean I’m good!’ I try to remind people of that when I teach, you can sling over the other way and try too hard to be funny and then you’re not. It took me a while to come around to doing comedy. I wanted to be a serious actor, I always wanted to do drama, but I would get laughs and I was really mad about it because I didn’t want to make people laugh then. But I was also really obnoxious in school and made my friends laugh! I was always well-behaved at home and then I would get to school and just do anything I could do to make my friends laugh. Then I realised that I could be someone else and I just could express so much of myself through playing someone else and at least trick myself into thinking ‘oh, I’m such a different person when I’m up here.’ That gave me so much confidence. I didn’t start doing theatre until High School. I had a wonderful upbringing in North Carolina in the 1980s and 90s. “I was actually always the quiet kid that was upstairs in my room reading, living in a fantasy world. How did the performer in you first manifest itself, were you performing one man, or one boy, shows for your family as a kid? Before we get on to that, I just wanted to take you back a little. James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: Congratulations on Happy Birthday Doug. With Drew Droege currently back Off-Broadway at the SoHo Playhouse with his new one man show, Happy Birthday Doug, The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann caught up him to talk what makes good comedy, writing himself flawed gay men to play, why The Golden Girls is still funny and what he loves about Greg Berlanti’s The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy. That show was filmed by Broadway HD winning Droege an Oustanding Performance award from Outfest Los Angeles in 2018. He recently wrote an episode of the RuPaul starring Netflix show AJ and the Queen, had a scene-stealing recurring role as Mr Dennis on the Paramount show Heathers and had an extended Off-Broadway run of his one man show Bright Colors and Bold Patterns. But there’s far more to Mr Droege than his hit YouTube videos.
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