Soresi, who recently filmed a special at L.A.’s Elysian Theater, is grateful for the success he has attained in recent years. But his knack for filtering life through a dark prism means he worries about the drawbacks of headlining for crowds of enthusiastic fans. “I thrive on the endless feedback,” he says. But when people come primed to laugh, he adds, “there’s a danger that your calculations can get way off.”
Performing all over in Paris, Milan and other European cities helps. Not everyone understands all the jokes and “the laughter is more muted,” with crowds instead applauding insights instead of laughing. “That can mess up the timing along the way,” Soresi says. “It’s a good experience as an artist. I’ve learned to shift the musicality, like if you sing a song at a different tempo for a remix. It makes you more flexible, more nimble to live off the audience.”
This fall he’ll be in less glamorous locales: Rochester, N.Y., West Des Moines, Iowa, and Richmond, Va. “My comedy is going well, but going from Paris to Richmond, two equally cool cultural centers of the world, has me wondering what kind of life I want to live and what helps me create good art,” he says.
“Every couple of months, it feels like my creative system can no longer bear the weight of the amount of time I’m performing,” he says, adding that many of his peers get so caught up in posting new material to social media to build a brand “that we stretch ourselves so thin that we just start sucking.”
Soresi, who also hosts the podcast “The Downside With Gianmarco Soresi,” wants to protect his own quality, adding that he misses having time for smaller shows to comfortably develop his new material. “If I’m performing for 500 people, it’s stressful thinking about going for a 25-minute chunk of fully new material. But I’ve gotten better at pushing myself.”
He’s self-aware enough to know this can all sound pretentious but he adds, “If you’re dedicating your entire life to comedy, you have to take pride in it. So I take it seriously.” —Stuart Miller
Reps: Agency: WME; Management: Brillstein Entertainment Partners; Legal: Cohen Gardner Influences: Anthony Jeselnik, John Mulaney