His girlfriend is drinking out of a paper bag in the projector room as the crowd file in below us. Ryan Drake seems a little nervous, but that’s to be expected. These are all the people he cares about, and that care about him.
“Can I get anybody a drink?” I ask again.
“I really have quit,” he tells me.
That picture of him slugging down a bottle of whiskey in this week’s Gazette was staged, apparently, and he’s a little sore about it.
“They wanted to take some photos with a prop, so I grabbed the bottle and they thought that was funny.”
“He asked them to use any other photo,” his girlfriend, Bailey Mcbride says, “And that’s the one they chose.”
There’s a vulnerability to Drake that makes you want to stick up for him. He shouldn’t have posed for the picture, but bad decisions are part of the package. He’s built an act around them. On Twitter, and his podcast, he’s a self-professed douche-bag–creep, spitting out one-liners as the world burns.
“Pessimism is really big on Twitter, people think it’s hilarious. But nobody wants to be around that in real life,” he tells me.
Drake has nearly 8,000 Twitter followers, and credits the social network as the most important factor in his entering comedy. He got his start tweeting jokes and watching the website Favrd, where people would up-vote them. It pushed him to be funny.
He tested this one out on Twitter a few weeks before the gig, and it landed.
“I’m way more of a caricature of myself on Twitter. To be funny all the time in real life is impossible. I still get that, where someone will meet me and say, ‘You’re not the same person I thought you were.'”
The disconnect is understandable. Online, Drake is sardonic. The self-flagellation might be pathetic, but for his bravado. He looks down on us in his Twitter profile picture. The accusing finger pointing towards his forehead resembles a pistol.
In person Drake is tall and a little heavy, always casual. Stubble is winning the battle over his face and neck. He peers through glasses with eyes that never seem to make it all the way open.
He’s a little awkward, a little out of time. But he’s happier now that he’s on the other side of darker times.
“I don’t want to be a professional stand up comedian,” he says, “That kind of life is so depressing. There are lots of them killing themselves.”
Drake has learnt to come to terms with a split identity, and to define his persona, rather than let it define him. He’s learnt from experience the dangers of hitching your self-worth to something as fickle as comedy.
“I admire people like Joe Rogan and Donald Glover. They are successful and they do comedy on the side.”
Why comedy?
“That’s all I know. That’s how I’ve gotten through life, by getting people to like me.”
During his set he tells the story of a recent breakup and ensuing relapse, after which he woke up with a telling search history on his phone. It included the search, “Drinking games for one”. The crowd laugh, “There are none,” he mutters into the mike.
Drake’s hostility is turned inwards, attacking and undermining himself, almost exclusively. He’s the underdog in this fight. You can’t help but root for the underdog, like him even.
“This is good,” Drake kept saying throughout the gig. He’d been nervous. His friends and his mother were in the audience for this recording of his live album.
“This is good.”
He had the crowd in hand, buoyed by their laughter. His twenty-seventh birthday. His crowd. It’s in part due to his work on Twitter, with OKC Comedy, his live shows, radio shows, podcasts, festival appearances, and his willingness to get involved with things like Confluence – to cross-pollinate – that Oklahoma City has a comedy scene at all.
