about me

TLDR;

I’m a sketch and improv comedian who worked at Second City and SNL and now work in advertising. My hobbies are a wee bit nerdy. I’m a good writer and leader who makes my teams feel cared for. Go Bills.

Long form:

My path to advertising was unusual. I majored in biomedical engineering but instead fell in love with improv comedy. So I moved to Chicago to pursue Second City. I took sketch and improv classes around the city and performed with the Second City Touring Company before landing on a the stage there. I learned to write by improvising ideas on their feet in front of well-liquored tourists, and then honed my skills writing sketches late at night in a nervous, sweaty panic at Saturday Night Live. Both were fun and terrifying. This informs my approach to advertising— it MUST be entertaining.

I believe creative teams need to feel protected and allowed to take risks. Too often I’ve seen creative leads almost gleefully shit over work they don’t like, as if the damage to the creative teams’ confidence would have no long-term negative effect. But course it does. So, I like to focus on ideas that are working and nurture the hell out of them. I only give notes on an idea that isn’t working if there is something to be learned from it. Maybe it falls into a common pitfall, maybe it has a device that has been overused in the category, maybe it accidentally contains a weird landmine, like their CMO hates pandas.

Good advertising requires a loose, playful and irreverent mind, but it also takes an analytical one. Sometimes you need to doodle a narwhal drinking a Stella and sometimes you need to apply The Effective Advertising Algorithm. As an engineer and comedian, I can swing both ways.

My hobbies are cartooning (have submitted to the New Yorker a few times), close-up magic, playing D&D, guitar, sax. I love Radiohead and the Buffalo Bills; they thrill me and break my heart, in roughly equal parts.