Killer Beaz has been knocking them dead since he was just three, his first brush with comedy coming when he made mourners laugh at the funeral home where he lived. Now, this coming Saturday he will bring the audience to life at the Park Theater when goes on stage.
“I lived in a funeral home where my dad was a funeral director,” Beaz said, recalling his earliest memory. “I would see sad people come and go every day. I had no concept of funerals but I found out way back then that I could do silly little cute things back then and the people would come over to me and smile. I mean, in retrospect, they needed a distraction since they were at a fricken funeral. That was one of my earliest memories that I made sad people smile.”
His compulsion to comedy continued into his school years, Beaz noting he was a small kid going up. “I learned that if I made the bullies laugh, they couldn’t pick on me as well,” he recalled. “They can’t twist your arm as hard if they’re laughing. That was kind of a self-defense deal.”
In 1982, after having several different jobs, Beaz first had a chance to do standup comedy at a venue in Jackson, Ms. “It was a paid gig and it was 20 minutes,” he said. “Two minutes can be a life-time before you’re used to it.”
Beaz suspects he was probably terrible in the beginning. “Making people laugh when you’re hanging out with them is one thing but when you walk on a stage looking at people with their arms folded, that’s a whole different environment.”
Beaz says its repetition that makes a comedian. “It’s building up that scar tissue from embarrassing yourself,” he said. “There’s no handbook that tells you how to do stand up. “If you sit at home and recite your jokes that is 180 degrees different from what you will go through when you’re on stage.”
He noted he did a showcase at Zany’s in Nashville three years later and that’s when he began his upward progression in the business. “They snatched me up and moved me to Nashville. That’s when I started doing TNN and CMT, was in Rolling Stone magazine, Entertainment Tonight and all that stuff.”
Hard work is the best advice he can give to young comedians. “It’s a very detailed oriented art form,” he said. “The set is going to be different every single time because the audience is different every single time. That’s what I tell the young guys; get on stage a million times, do it wrong a million times until you finally get it right.”
Now in his 37th year of show business, he is his busiest. “That’s a good thing about stand up,” he said. “You can have longevity. It’s not having to carry heavy things up ladders.”
Beaz says he is looking forward to returning to the Park Theater Saturday, March 16 at 7 p.m. However, he noted that since his first appearance a few years ago at the Park, some things have changed. “I’ve completed 130 ocean cruises,” he revealed of his comedy on the high seas on Carnival cruise lines. “I do five show per cruise, times 130 cruises. I do five totally different shows. This has been like advanced black belt class, doing that many bits and not repeating material during those shows.”
He has also done three seasons on Moonshiners on the Discovery Channel. He said it is fascinating seeing how moonshine is made. “These moonshiners are absolute geniuses,” he said, noting he first thought the Smoky Mountain moonshiners were hillbillies but quickly learned they are a lot smarter than they look.
Beaz admits he brought some of the moonshine from Pigeon Forge to his home in Mobile, Ala., recently. “I drove home with four jars of moonshine,” he said, noting he sold one of the jars to an ex-cop. “Now I have street cred. In Mobile, Ala., I am gangster. I am Killer Beaz, O.G. Now all my buddies are calling me for moonshine making advice.”
Beaz says he hasn’t been lucky in life, but instead, he has been blessed. And, he hopes that he will be blessed with a capacity audience Saturday night at the Park in McMinnville.
