Photos by Maren Machles.
Down a few metal stairs, through the entrance of Harvelle’s, stands a six-foot-something man with long, tangled hair pulled back with an elastic headband, a plaid button-up, a half-empty glass of dark beer, and an innate skill for making fun of the world hiding behind his big smile (and one wandering eye).
The man, Shaun Latham, a stand up comedian born in Los Angeles and now living in Long Beach, is welcoming guests to the bar, where he performs weekly at the Arrogant Bastard Underground show.
“It’s a very sexy room,” Latham said with a smirk.
The room is drenched in red velvet, red lighting and red leather. With sort of a gentlemen’s club vibe, the atmosphere creates more of a socially-lubricated, risqué feel than your average comedy club. But Latham says that is what makes it great.
“It’s a non-comedy club room, but its really good for comedy,” Latham said. “I just talk a lot. It just becomes this place where I just think of these things throughout the week, and I just come here and I run my mouth about them, you know?”
Latham seems to be thriving off the intimacy of the room, performing more rough and off-the-cuff material, using vulgar language to convey the stupidities he runs into daily.
“It’s all stuff we’ve had to deal with—I just bring attention to it,” Latham said. “That’s the art form: knowing how to bring things that you don’t even know are a topic and you bring it out and talk about it.”
The stand up’s beef today was with FedEx.
“I want to make fun of the scam that FedEx has going on,” Latham began. “They can get a package 30,000 miles away in one day, but I can’t load an email with two files that are 6MB each and print them in under 3 minutes. That’s impossible. With their fucking 1997 internet speed.”
Latham did not actually get into comedy until he was 14 and started watching Martin and Def Comedy Jam. It was not until 2001, when he got a temp job working as a waiter at the Improv that he realized he wanted to give stand up a try.
“A few guys there I became buddies with were doing stand up, open-mic guys, rookies,” Latham said. “So, I started hanging out with them and they started making me kind of want to do it and I just started doing it with them.”
He started performing in Arizona and with the support of his friends he felt he was ready to move out to LA and pursue a career in comedy.
“Then I realized, the very first show, I was a piece of shit, I was not funny whatsoever. So, I started brand new right away,” Latham said. “There are guys that have been grinding since 1988 that got hour specials, TV shows that didn’t win… They’re regulars at clubs. They got amazing material and that’s the people you’re standing next to. So, you’re really just a piece a shit, go get a job cleaning pools or waiting tables.”
This has not stopped Latham from performing and bringing some of his Angeleno friends down to Long Beach.
“LA is more saturated with Hollywood,” Latham said. “Everyone is an actor or a singer there. Here it’s regular people, regular jobs, regular lives, non Hollywood.”
And hecklers? Latham states it succinctly when he says, “You can’t mirror their energy. A lot of people bail out and that’s the problem and then people pick up on your bailing out. You just have to keep trying and commit or look like an idiot.”
The comedian has appeared in shows on MTV2, toured with Gabriel Iglesias a.k.a. Fluffy, headlined Stand Up and Deliver on NUVO, performed at the Oslo Comedy Festival, and appeared on a Gabriel Iglesias’s showcase, Stand Up Revolution: Season 3, on Comedy Central and is planning to film another segment, to be released October 17.
“[The tour with Fluffy was] amazing but it’s easy to get comfortable—that’s the problem,” Latham explained. “You feel like you made it, but you didn’t make it; Fluffy made it.”
Though Latham had the opportunity to perform a practiced routine repeatedly in front of an arena with 12,000 filled seats—“When you do a Fluffy crowd, they’re ready as long as you’re funny”—he admits that it is harder to go back to the comedy club scene but enjoys the pressure of needing new material every week.
“You can’t keep a lot of your jokes if you’re past your 5-year mark,” Latham said. “You grow as a person and your material grows so you want to keep writing no matter how good the shit is, you got to keep writing more and more and more as you evolve and become more intelligent experiencing the world. That’s why I love the show.”
Arrogant Bastard Underground occurs every Tuesday at Harvelle’s, located at 201 E Broadway. For specific show times and tickets, click here.
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