Comedian Jeff Simmermon is set to release his debut stand-up comedy album, And I Am Not Lying on June 9th via Comedy Dynamics. “The best stories are the ones that you want to listen to over and over again. They speak to you and you want to listen to them the way you listen to music: to hear lines and phrases as well as the rhythm of the whole thing.” So says Jeff Simmermon, who’s always been a storyteller.
Simmermon recorded the album at the Black Cat in Washington, DC at the tail end of 2016 and he describes is as, “an oratory carnival into Simmermon’s chicken band, slaughtering kangaroos in the Australian outback, cancer, subway groceries, dinner with the Reverend Al Sharpton, dating following a surprise divorce and so much more.”
In Simmermon’s art-rock band, Royal Quiet Deluxe, he played the typewriter as a percussion instrument along with two chickens improvising on toy pianos. His ludicrous yet whimsical anecdote on this subject weaves from performing in Virginia and their potential tour of Japan to illustrating this musical endeavor to the Reverend Al Sharpton while seated together at a formal Hampton Roads dinner reception.
Take a listen.
Simmermon can remember doing stand-up at a show-and-tell when in the 5th grade, “I told some jokes I heard on the radio, then lost the room when I tried to repeat a chunk about drinking and drugs from Robin Williams’ Live at the Met.” He eventually learned the power of the comedic long-form growing up listening to Prairie Home Companion with his parents and then running upstairs to listen to Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor records.
“I really believe in taking full responsibility for my role in a story,” adds Simmermon. “A personal story can span a number of timeframes and locations; the only constant is me. I like to think about why I reacted the way I did, how I got myself into a situation, what it is that I wanted that either led me in deep or made me ignore any number of warning signs to press onward.”
I think that every story should be able to answer the question, ‘well, why didn’t you just go home?’”
Simmermon will be on the road this summer performing stories from the album, dates coming shortly.
