He's gaining a lot of good attention lately, and the college circuit seems to be treating him well. A little over a week ago I caught his show at a small college halfway between Chicago and Indianapolis: right at the center of nowhere. The tiny Catholic school of maybe a thousand students struggled to eke together an audience for the remote ballroom on the edge of campus. But when Sherwin hopped up on stage, he showed not only full enthusiasm and dedication to doing a good show, but an added specific interest in the people who came.
And he did hop. He's got the energy to show commitment and confidence. He's goofy with skills. Animated but calm. There's a meek aggression in his material. He's created a character that is at one point scared by a stinging bee, and at another, driven to a violent madness by a spelling bee. He's self-deprecating with the assurance that it works for him. And that translates well both on stage and off.
It takes a tiny bit of nudging to get him to admit that he's a musician. When asked about his musical background he says he had none, then he deflects the question by telling me that the music tracks are all layed down by Upryz (or as his cousins call him, Dan Fox). But when pushed to acknowledge that his rapping is a musical ability, Sherwin admits having taken some mediocre guitar lessons: "He just showed me the shape of the blues scale then said, 'Now play a solo.'" And he adds "But I guess I've just always loved hip-hop." He obviously respects the form and does good job pushing a lot of internal rhyme, consonance, off-rhyme, slant rhyme, and other free rhyme types combined with lots of ambitious syncopation.
In his interview with Lucas Lewis of Punchline Magazine (link above), he explains
You can take on weird topics and my hope is that the flow and rhyme schemes will be really rewarding to listen to and will establish, I hope, my bonafides as not just a guy who figured out how to do like, “buh-buh-buh, cat / buh-buh-buh, hat” — and then wrote songs about dicks.
From what I know about Zach Napkins, I'm guessing he pronounced bonafides with the traditional 4 syllables. And if he reads this, even tho it's pretty obvious, I kinda hope he uses it someday in a rhyme with with "on a fetus."
Language play is a big part of his act, and it should be no surprise to learn that he's a good friend of Myq Kaplan, the two of them even collaborating on a "twofer" twitter-account/joke-structure/word-puzzle. Kaplan got his masters in Linguistics, and I can't help but wonder if he's the one that introduced Sherwin to the word "Antepenultimate." Linguists use that word all the time. That's just how we roll. Word-stress to your mother.
More than anything tho, the quality of Sherwin's comedy comes from the likelihood that if you listen to it repeatedly, you'll keep noticing something new. He puts a lot of comedy of different styles in there, so you can't predict what angle he'll attack from. Kinda like that bee.
Here's his video for Krav Maga. Directed by Jay Karas.
I love "word-stress to your mother." It makes me wish I was a linguist.
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