About Me

Hello and thank you for checking out my content. I am Austin Davenport, the Comedy Apprentice. Currently, I work full time as a Bartender and server. The restaurant/club life is great, and I've learned a lot from it. I've met some of the most amazing people in my time in the industry. You learn to work fast, efficiently and calmly through some very stressful situations. Now, if you put out fires for a living then you might think “How stressful could waiting tables actually be?”. And you’d be right in asking that, as your work is more stressful. The stress in hospitality in general comes from wanting to perform at the highest level.

There is some stress in being a crappy bartender. The kind where you don’t really pay attention to customers, get the orders wrong all the time and pretty much never improve yourself in any meaningful way. But if it’s someone that has been doing that for a few years, then they are probably immune to disappointing people and the frustrations that arise when you waste the time and money of the patron. But I’m not like that, I’ve never been like that. I am a guy who obsesses over quality. I’ve learned everything that I can about technique, mixology and recipes. I’ve learned the quickest way to perform my tasks and the most effective method of preparing myself for a big evening.

I’ve had some serious downs and some awesome highs in the restaurant/club industry and I’m so thankful for all that I’ve learned. The books that I read, the techniques that I practiced and still practice, are now big parts of who I am as a person. If you ever need a mother fucker who can sling some quality drinks quickly, then I’m that dude. What I’ve done as a individual in the years from 2016 to 2020 has changed me for the better and I’ll never forget these transformative and very challenging years. I finally came to grips with the fact that I need depression meds and help with that depression. I finally told someone just how in love with them I am and how I want to spend our lives together. It didn’t work out but it’s the attempt that matters.

I’ve had my heart torn out by losing friends and loved ones over these several tumultuous years. I didn’t have the occasional, or the weekly or the ever so often suicidal thoughts. I had the every day for months and then years suicidal thoughts. This pain and struggle eventually weighed me down to such an extent that I had to decide if I wanted to do anything more with my life. Do I want to get help and go on pursuing something that I think will make life worth living? I concluded in that moment that even though nothing could make me laugh right then, I would make the world laugh eventually.

I have dedicated the rest of my life to comedy. I take my meds and I work my day job and in every other moment, I work towards being a better comedian. I am more than happy to listen to any critique of my work. My goal is to improve and to create comedy writing for the rest of my life, however long that may be. My embracing of critique is why I chose the name "Comedy Apprentice" for this blog. I hope to let the public mold and form me into a great comic. So, I am technically the apprentice to the public. Which I guess we all are in some way.

I have a few specialties as far as my content goes. They are dark jokes, dark humor in general and the writing of short jokes. I love to write short jokes because they are the most skillful and efficient for getting laughs. The less words you use and the bigger the laugh that you get, the better it is for everyone. I think anyone can agree that it’s better to get more laughs from less words in the same way that it’s better to get more money for less work. We all want more for less, and that’s why short jokes are so much fun.

I mentioned earlier that I enjoy dark humor and dark jokes. Not all, in fact, maybe a relatively small amount of my jokes could be called dark jokes. However, almost all my content falls under the umbrella of dark humor. I am drawn to dark humor because of the experiences that I’ve had in life. I think it also has a lot to do with my broken as shit serotonin receptors. For the uninitiated, I’m referencing depression. Major Depression, and not the kind that is a sad, high ranking military man. Some of you would call that last joke cheap or scraping the barrel, but some others laughed at it and it made them feel a bit better. Whatever the case, you can all fuck off.

I’d rather you didn’t fuck off. I need someone to read this blog or else it won’t really exist. I mean, that’s what a stoned physics student told me at a college party once. I can’t refute, deny or prove anything that he said to me, so I’ll just have to agree. Agree is what I go to when I couldn’t give a fuck less what happens one way or another. As a pro tip, anybody who says that they “Just Don’t Give a Fuck” is quoting Eminem to be funny or is lying. There is a third category, but they have actions that prove that they do not give a fuck. I’m in the third category. I have this website and “Freelance Comedy Writer” on my professional resume right now. That’s career suicide for most people but just a Tuesday afternoon of dicking around for me.

I mean that it’s crazy for me to have “Freelance Comedy Writer” on my resume because one day I might need another bartending job. But I’m not worried about that. I say every day something that would get most people fired in an instant. Something of that nature comes out of my mouth sometimes more than once, frequently more than once at my work on the daily. I’ve had something like 14 jobs and my own landscaping company, and it’s been that way for me at every single one of those jobs. I’m only 26 so you can probably do the math on this one. The answer is I don’t care about getting fired, I’m here to get laughs.

This is where I return to the topic of dark humor. My sense of humor turned permanently dark because of the days, weeks, months and now years that I’ve lived with depression. At some point, I wanted to laugh again. But I my perspective was permanently skewed from looking at life through the miserable lens. I couldn’t laugh at dad jokes and knock-knock jokes and the “You might be a redneck if you…” kind of stuff anymore. I have since recovered from that state of cynicism and can appreciate almost any joke. If a joke gets laughs, then it’s all good in my book.

I started laughing at the more fucked up jokes. Jokes that have to do with topics that people typically do not laugh at. There is probably a seriously hilarious comic out there just waiting to make it big who exclusively does funeral home jokes. I will absolutely love his material when I discover him/her. There is no darker a subject or joke than the ones that make us laugh about tragedies.

 But there is plenty of humor to be found in the darker side of life and in the misery of loss. Like joking about making a lot of money and never having any important relationships. So, who do I leave my money to when I die? The orphanage? Or should I just go on a gambling, drug and booze binge once I know that I’m about to die?  I’m pretty sure I would go for the binge in real life, but you never know till you have that tragic news thrust on you. Which is another moment that is full of comedic potential.  

I almost said that the moment when your doctor tells you that you’re going to die soon is a moment pregnant with comedic potential but then I remembered that having kids is like the death of the cool person you used to be. So, two funerals in one lifetime for you is a lot to go through. Plus, for all the parents of psychopaths that read my work, having the little shit probably ruined you right? So, let’s not think about that. That is unless you want me to write some dark jokes about your worst moments with the little tyrant.  

Dark jokes are the high points of dark humor. Dark humor is just having a laugh at subjects that people typically do not laugh at. Dark jokes are the exaggerated and aggressive manipulations of topics that people don’t normally laugh at in order to get huge laughs in night clubs, or in my case, big laughs from somebody reading my content on their lunch break at work. I think nearly 60% of my traffic comes from mobile devices, so that’s cool. Don’t get too caught up in my stuff and get in trouble with the boss man. You don’t want to have to sit through one of his lectures about wasting company money and time. These speeches wouldn’t leave you suicidal if they weren’t 58 minutes long with follow up emails.

It’s those little moments when you’re so fed up with waiting on the printer that keeps breaking, tired of listening to the idiots at work who never get anything done and listening to the boss who won’t shut the fuck up that make you think “I’ll just rip the printer out of the wall and then throw it and myself out the fucking window, right this instant.” Those little moments are all too frequent in our modern world. We need to joke about those moments in order to detach from the dark feelings that they come from or inspire. I’m not a psychologist, I don’t know which one comes first. We want the world to stop wasting our time and putting us through utterly meaningless moments of total bullshit. Dark jokes, for me, are a way out of these feelings. They are the harmless revenge that I take on having to deal with little moments of burning rage and hatred for my own existence. Taking harmless revenge is what creatively venting your feelings is all about. Maybe Therapists should market it that way: “Harmless Revenge only $70/hr!”

But dark jokes don’t just help me deal with the utter ridiculousness of working life. They help me to cope with extreme grief, loss and tragedy. I don’t make dark jokes that specifically have to do with my own experiences in those matters. I make dark jokes that exercise the feelings that I have towards those experiences in a harmless and healthy way. Harmless to the rest of the world and healthy for my own mental health. I make my dark joke with misplaced humor when I pretend to think that there is some minute detail that is more important than the real tragedy that has happened. This would be something like being pissed off about the traffic situation you had to endure while 9/11 was happening. It would seem heartless and cruel if you did that joke the week of 9/11 back in 2001. But if you do it now, 19 years later, there has been enough time for the wounds to heal.

When I make dark jokes about ending my life or jokes that involve some comical death or mass destruction. It’s to make light of my own shared fears about such experiences. I joke a lot about my destruction and mass destruction. I also like to joke about tyranny. This is because I am afraid of these evil things. Dark jokes allow me to detach from these fears and go on living my life like a normal, for the most part normal human being. I can play video games with friends, have some champagne or a cocktail with buddies out on the town and go on dates without becoming a conspiracy theory wacko because I express my fears in dark jokes.

In summary, I want every joke that I write to be a short joke. More laughs for less words is my gold standard. Plus, I need to be dealing in the atmosphere of dark humor. This is because my perspective has been skewed by looking through the misery lens. Dark jokes are the extreme expressions of my own fears about the preservation of me and humanity/all that I know the world to be. Dark jokes are my contribution to the people who know that life can get much worse, but we all still need to be laughing about it anyway. 

I’m not intentionally phrasing the dark jokes stuff to make myself seem like a hero. I write the way that I do for myself first. I need to write this way in order to be healthy. I need to get much better at writing jokes and I need to be a much, much better comic in order to do the kind of good via bringing joy to others that I dream of doing. Bringing joy to others is not a civic commitment that I’m doing because someone must do it. Bringing joy to others makes me happy. I feel inspired by it and I want to work hard at it, to be one of the best at it. Therefore, you should hire the carpenter that really seems to only care about carpentry and the work that he does. As dull as he might be to have lunch with, that mother fucker will care more than anyone about making sure that your house doesn’t cave in on top of you one day. He will get the job done right because getting the job done right is a part of who he is. He unveils the contents of his soul to you via the quality of the work that he does.

One day, far down the road in life I’m sure, I will be the comic version of that carpenter. I will certainly be entirely incapable of building your house, but hopefully by then I will have worked hard enough, planned well enough, dreamed big enough and made myself into a comic that can put a smile on your face no matter how hard things are for you at that moment in your life. Until then, I have so much wisdom to gain, mistakes to make and jokes to write. By reading this site you’re joining me on my mission to be as funny as I can be. So, thank you once again for reading and I’ll see you on the next one. Cheers!