It takes a surprising amount of calculation to become a goofy guy.
You have to do stand-up for thirteen years, even if the response is lukewarm. You have to study acting, music, comedy, and theater. You need a measured belief in the mystical — manifestation plus hard work. You have to go viral and post on social media every other day. You have to be a student of the internet and play into the algorithm with tactical precision. You must tour frequently, do yoga, and eat low-acidity fruits and vegetables.
To be a goofy guy, you also have to be an incredibly dedicated person.
At least, that’s the truth for 38-year-old comedian and content creator Morgan Jay, who coined the term “goofy guy” to capture his mix of lighthearted crowdwork, musical performance, and playful irreverence. Clips from his live show, where he sings and interacts with his audience using a microphone and autotune, have helped him reach 5 million Instagram followers and 7.5 million TikTok followers.
In one clip, he talks to a guy named Ethan and asks the crowd, “Do we fuckin’ love Ethan?” That clip received 140 million views. In another, more recent clip, he asks a couple who had never met before if they would “make love tonight.” Nearly three million people have watched it on TikTok, and another 204 million have watched it on Instagram Reels.
This isn’t a case of getting lucky. It’s success with intention.
Morgan Jay
Credit: Joseph Maldonado / Ian Moore / Mashable Composite; Morgan Jay
To be clear, Jay isn’t the only comedian who takes show preparation seriously — most comedians do. He follows a long line of comedians like Aziz Ansari (he records each of his performances, listens or watches them, takes notes, and makes changes immediately between sets), Todd Barry (he likes to go on stage hungry), and Jerrod Carmichael (he listens to jazz, to enjoy the “freedom within structure” also mirrored in standup comedy). But Jay has also done something unique: figured out not only how to make his comedy work online but also how to make a live show genuinely fun to watch on TikTok — so fun that people want to show up in person, too.
“Every song I write has a structure built into it to do crowd work,” he tells Mashable. After every show, he has a meeting with his team to talk about what worked, what didn’t, and of course, which “moments we can clip.” He takes notes, hands off the footage to an editor, who cuts it down and sends it back. Together, they decide what to post.
He tells me this over a video call from his house in LA, where art dots the walls around him — four of his guitars; one-line drawings turned to sculptures; works of pinks and oranges and blues. The ceilings are tall, and natural light floods the space when he opens the curtains to his left.
“I’m a firm believer, and I know this may seem like woo-woo or whatever, but I am a firm believer [that] if you make space for better things the universe will provide,” Jay says. “Obviously, you need to meet the universe halfway… I was doing all the work, and I had a lot of experience. A lot of things just kind of came together at the right time, and it worked out.”
Mashable Trend Report
He’s wearing a Khruangbin band tee — the rock trio nominated for Best New Artist at the 2024 Grammys — and a silver chain. He isn’t fidgeting, which is no small feat for a musician being asked to sit through a multi-hour interview on his computer, but Jay is, after all, an actor who trained at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. When he thinks, he leans his head on his hand. And Jay thinks a lot.
Rewind a few years and you’d find him giving bike tours in New York City or interning on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. He appeared on NBC’s Bring the Funny, a show he (and many others) thought would be his big break — “but it didn’t go anywhere.” He spent a decade doing stand-up.
“I had a lot of almosts and maybes,” he says. “I almost got booked to be one of those talking heads on those shows like, I Love the ‘90s. I was almost a recurring character on [The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon]. I had all these almosts, dude. I just felt, for a long time, I felt passed up.”
Morgan Jay
Credit: Joseph Maldonado / Ian Moore / Mashable Composite; Morgan Jay
Morgan Jay
Credit: Joseph Maldonado / Ian Moore / Mashable Composite; Morgan Jay
In 2017, he quit his job at the Apple Store (“the truth is they were going to fire me”) to pursue comedy full-time, and he was doing just fine. But in October 2019, when he started posting on TikTok, he met virality.
“I had a friend who worked at TikTok, and he was like, ‘Hey, you should post to this app.’ And I was like, ‘Bro, I don’t want to,'” Jay says. That’s a pretty relatable instinct — artists like Halsey, FKA twigs, and Charli XCX have all complained about the pressure to post on the app, and even smaller artists have talked about the creative drain that social media poses. But it wasn’t the creative drain Jay was avoiding; he was already posting on Instagram, and the idea of adding another site to the list of platforms he had to post on sounded unappealing. “I don’t wanna be posting. It’s so many posts to post, dude. I don’t wanna do it.”
Eventually, his friend convinced him. His first post that went viral was a video of him at a Wendy’s singing about chicken nuggets.
“It got 300,000 views, and I got 17,000 followers overnight,” he says, admitting his shock at the time. He had just finished editing a comedy special, but once the pandemic hit, “nobody wanted to see it, nobody cared.” So he clipped it, subtitled it, and started posting regularly. He had a backlog of material and quickly got into the habit of posting every other day. And it worked.
Morgan Jay
Credit: Joseph Maldonado / Ian Moore / Mashable Composite; Morgan Jay
From an outside perspective, TikTok changed his life. For years, he chased traditional industry validation — late-night spots, festival showcases, TV gigs. “I wanted that for so long,” he says. “And it wasn’t until I blew up on social media that I started getting those accolades and that recognition.”
Now, he sells tickets worldwide. He recently appeared on Apple TV+’s Stick and landed roles in NBC’s St. Denis Medical and J. Pinder’s action-comedy Cotton Candy Bubble Gum, which premiered at SXSW. Next up: a rom-com opposite Chloë Grace Moretz and Anthony Ramos called Love Language, directed by Joey Power.
He is constantly thinking about how to evolve — how to keep his audience engaged and momentum going. He allows phones at his shows, he posts on social media with algorithmic precision, and he responds to comments with a strategy. “When you respond to a comment, respond with a question, because then they’ll answer the question and that creates more conversation,” he says. “If somebody leaves a negative comment or judgment, or criticism, leave it up. Don’t take it down. Let your fans fight it out for you, because that just creates more engagement.”
Morgan Jay
Credit: Joseph Maldonado / Ian Moore / Mashable Composite; Morgan Jay
But in the end, he’s not relying on social media — he says his mailing list is far more important to him than his Instagram or TikTok accounts — he’s just using it as a tool. Jay’s career isn’t a sprint, but a marathon, and one he’s already winning.
“When I was selling, like, 200 tickets, I was very content; I was very happy. And I was like, ‘If this is the rest of my career where I make X amount of dollars, I sell X amount of tickets, I tour, then great.’ This is more than I could have really hoped for. It’s such a blessing to even get to this part,” he says. He just announced his biggest venue yet — one that seats “about 6,000 people” — because he thought, “Sure, yeah, let’s try it out. Let’s see what happens.”
Morgan Jay
Credit: Joseph Maldonado / Ian Moore / Mashable Composite; Morgan Jay
Beyond touring, Jay is working on an original series with A24 and Cut To, a project he’s writing, starring in, and producing.
“I’m just going to try to collect another Infinity Stone and see if I can make something that has value and that people enjoy,” he says. “And if they don’t, that’s OK. If you can do one thing really well, people will trust you to do other things really well. It shows that you have a certain level of discipline, a certain level of ambition. I’m just going to trust myself and trust the people around me and come up with something worthwhile.”
“Dude, at this point in my career, I consider everything else just like a bonus, an extra thing.”
