A Wall Street Banker Turned to Comedy for Happiness and a Career Change [Videogum]
You see it all the time, that seemingly incongruous combination of a Wall Street banker and a stand-up comedian. One of those guys who started out in Wall Street and now wears a suit and tie, drinks martinis, and makes more than everyone else. And he does it by being funny, and by being a really good communicator and writer, and by being a really good listener. And he can’t help but be an entertainer. He has a show on Comedy Central.
Anyway, on the day after the terrorist attack on Monday, December 7, 2009, I was listening to NPR and the guy on the radio was discussing this Wall Street banking crisis in the Middle East, and he was talking about that crisis with the head of JPMorgan, who was a very powerful man at the time, and he was talking about that crisis with the former head of the New York Fed, and all of a sudden I thought to myself, “Man, I wonder what’s going on in Dubai? We haven’t watched news on CNN about these attacks, and all we’ve heard about is the Wall Street crisis. And I could be wrong about this but I’m pretty sure that Dubai is pretty upset about the attacks. And I could be dead wrong here but I think that they’ve made a deal with the terrorists. And I could be dead right on this.” So I had my first inkling that perhaps I should be a journalist.
I don’t know what I said to my mom, but I probably told her, “Ma, I think I’m turning into a journalist.” Then I walked over to my father, who is a journalist, and asked him if he had any other career plans for me. He was like, “Well look, you are young. Your mind is pretty flexible. What could you possibly know about a reporter’s career? I mean, you are not a journalist, you are going to be a novelist. You don’t like writing. You think that you are not going to be a writer and you don’t like writing; you like writing.” But as funny as that all is, we were still talking about this job until the day after the attacks.
Then I did a Google search for “Wall Street banker turns to comedy and how to do it”. I got a whole bunch
