Chris Cubas, Broke Comedian, Hits It Rich for One Month

chris-cubas

What would you do with $30k that you had to spend in a month? Would you just buy the biggest televisions you could find?  Would you drink the best scotch?

Comedian Chris Cubas had the chance to enjoy spending $30,000 in a month, and you can watch him enjoy every minute of it in a new documentary from Fusion network, Chris Gets Money.

Cubas has always been poor.  As he says, he’s really poor. Food stamp poor.  Selling blood plasma for money poor. Eating nothing but potatoes that you bought with quarters for a week poor. Working multiple jobs in addition to performing comedy, and still having nothing in your bank account poor. So when Fusion gave him the chance to infiltrate the super-rich world for a new documentary, of course he said yes.

Chris figured out that to be in the Texas 1% you need to make about $360,000 a year, which if you can do the math– is thirty days, thirty thousand dollars.  And he had to spend every penny, just like a real life Monty in Brewster’s Millions. Starting with a Best Buy spending spree, he goes on a fabulous 30 day run, including an upgraded address living among the richest Austin, Texas residents and encounters some interesting reactions along the way.

Having the chance to examine the important political issue of income inequality while actually enjoying all the things the good life affords is pretty much a perfect job, and Chris was the perfect person to do it. If you aren’t familiar with him, you can see from the picture that Chris is a big guy, and he stands out. You won’t meet a sweeter friendlier guy, but some people do judge a book by its cover, so watching him ‘blend in’ with Austin, Texas old money and seeing them react to his efforts is a big part of the doc. It’s really fun to watch, and addresses issues really near and dear to his heart. We talked with Chris about his month as a part of the Texas elite.

Chris Gets Money premiered Friday, October 21, and you can watch it on FUSION Network as well as on Apple TV and Roku and Fusion execs told us this is just one of a series of documentaries with comedians we can expect to see from the network in the future.

The Interrobang: How much fun was this to do? We’ll talk about the implications of this, of course, too, but was it fun to do?

Chris Cubas: Yeah, it was super fun. It’s the middle of July and I got to have my own giant pool for a month. It was pretty sweet. Yeah, there’s something about not having to worry at all about money that is incredibly relaxing.

The Interrobang: Yeah, and you know there’s no point in your life where you will ever be given any money where you’re not told you must spend it, which has the added bonus.

Chris Cubas: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. People are like, “Oh, was it hard to do?” No. No it wasn’t. Spending money is quite easy, as it turns out. It was super fun. I got to do a lot of stuff. I’m never going to play in a charity golf tournament again. That was super fun. Just the overall experience. I don’t know, there’s something about being in a rich neighborhood where you … I can’t stress enough how there are just no worries. You know what I mean? At the end of the month, there was no new shit. No. Not a concern. Already taken care. Don’t have to worry about it. No worries they’re tearing up my street. There’s no water pipes. I can’t sleep. No, not up there. You have a landscape that has the property in such a way that it drowns out all outside noise. It’s just quite the experience.

The Interrobang: Okay, so you decide you’re going to do this. Obviously $30,000 is a lot of money but you could spend it on one thing if you wanted to. How do you divide it up? How do you go about making this list of things you’re going to use the money on? 

Chris Cubas: You plan a good amount of it, but plans really change. The idea was always to use this money– I got to go to Best Buy and go on a $3,000 spending spree or whatever. All that’s awesome. The main idea was to use this money to gain access to a world I wouldn’t have access to otherwise, right? How do we do that? Oh, well, charity golf tournament. That sounds like something rich people do. Let’s go to that. Let’s try to get into the country club or whatever.

It wasn’t necessarily just about spending money. Yeah, like you said, I could have bought a car and moved on. It was more about using that money to get around people that I wouldn’t normally get around and try to ask some questions. Now, was it successful? You’ll have to watch. Spoiler alert: rich people can, I think, kind of smell their own. As much money as I had, I think I was still an outsider.

The Interrobang: Did you like being around them?

Chris Cubas: I will say this. The ones I was able to get around and talk to and spend time with were much nicer than I would have expected going in. They were genuinely … “Wait, they’re nice people.” You could have a nice conversation and laugh or whatever and fun. Now at the end of the day, do I still think they’re exploiting their employees and gaming the system to keep themselves rich at the expense of everybody else? Absolutely. I don’t think we’ll ever be friends, but we can be friendly. You know what I mean?

The Interrobang: That’s a great distinction. I honestly don’t want to give away too much of the documentary, but you mentioned the celebrity golf tournament. What are some of the other things that stood out for you that you did?

Chris Cubas: Something that was really interesting for me, and it wasn’t even really a money thing so much, but it was just educational. There’s a professor at UT here named Eric Tang who’s a professor of African and Afro Studies and we went on a driving tour, like a historical tour of Austin. I’ve lived here for going on 9 years, 8 or 9 years now, and I just learned so much about Austin’s history of economic segregation; racial segregation. Just so much stuff that I just never would have imagined.

You drive through this one part of town where it’s sort of the wealthier old money section of town, on the West side. You see all these gorgeous houses and they’re old architecture and it’s really beautiful. You get in your head, okay, I’m sure this is where white people are likely to live. Then you find out that the deeds on all these houses have provisions in them that, even as a white person, you’re only allowed to buy them if you promise to never sell them to a black person. It’s in the deed. It’s still in the deed on a lot of those houses. Now is it going to stand up in court? I doubt it in 2016, but just to know that that exists. I never even thought about it that way but just to realize that’s still a document on that whole part of town. It was very interesting and just stuff that I would never have had the opportunity to find out without this project.

Also, I went out on a boat with this rich dude and that was fun because I’ve never been on a boat before. I got to do a lot of stuff I wouldn’t normally have gotten to do, like spending money on stuff. I had a $100 glass of whiskey. Shit like that that was definitely awesome. For me, the biggest part of this experience was learning a lot that I didn’t know going in. I spoke to an economics professor and stuff like that. Financial advisers and stuff. The learning of all that stuff, to me, was the most interesting.

The Interrobang: Did the people around you know that you weren’t really rich?

Chris Cubas: Not so much. It all depended on the scene; on the situation. Mostly I would just say, “Hey, I’m newly wealthy. I’ve come into some money and I’m trying to meet people of my economic means” and what to do with new found money sort of thing. We wouldn’t necessarily tell them the crux of the argument. It was more like, “Yeah, you know, I’m starting to do all right. For instance, I made $30,000 this month.” I would say shit like that. Telling them what was going on without actually telling them what was going on. You want to get people to open up and be honest with you, you know what I mean?

Not to spoil huge things, but I tried to throw a barbecue for the people in my neighborhood to try to meet the neighbors and nobody came. Yeah, so people aren’t necessarily the most open. Also, once you sit down and actually talk … like if I can get you alone for a couple of minutes, I can get you to talk to me. I know how to interact with people so at some point– if I can get past that initial moment of “Oh, no thank you” — if I can get past that, then it’s usually not too bad. Pretty much everybody there was pretty fun. There was some stuff and then at the end of the day I ended up … I don’t want to spoil too much. I went to some pretty extreme measures to try to meet some wealthy people so you’ll see that all in the doc.

The Interrobang: What was it like afterwards? Going back to regular life.

Chris Cubas: The experience was definitely not a let down. Taking the bus back to my house afterwards wasn’t the best. At the end of the day, you kind of know going in, “Okay, this isn’t going to last.” You have a date on the calendar, right, when this is over. There was enough of a plan ahead like, “Don’t get used to this too much.” Also, I missed my dog, you know what I mean, so getting home was good. My girlfriend couldn’t stay the whole time up there with me because she had to work and whatever, but she came for a while and spent some time up there. I missed her, I missed my dog so getting home was good. Sure, I would have liked to have another $30,000 waiting for me when I got home, but at least I got to bring all my toys with me.

The Interrobang: You didn’t feel like, “Shit, I can’t go back to drinking cheap whiskey now” or maybe the opposite, like it wasn’t that impressive and you didn’t feel like you were missing out on … ?

Chris Cubas: No, it was super impressive, don’t get me wrong. I miss that pool and I miss that money. I would say really, the money didn’t really change who I was at all. My first instinct when I got that money and that house was to invite all my broke comic friends over and throw a big barbecue and feed them and get some drinks and everybody hang out. Who I am as a person who just wants to share what I have and be around my friends and my family … My friends and my dog and my girlfriend and whatnot. At the end of the day the money was nice but it’s not going to change that aspect of me. Getting home was still like, “Okay.” It’s still home, you know?

The Interrobang: Did anything surprise you? 

Chris Cubas: I think I went in expecting a lot more black and white like, “Oh, these are rich people. I’m a poor person. We’re enemies and I’m just not going to like you.” I think I kind of expected them to be more cartoonishly evil than they were. The case is not so much. Like I said, they’re all pretty nice. They’re all pretty friendly. They seem to genuinely … For instance when we went to that charity golf tournament and I was like, “Okay this is just a write-off for these people. They don’t give a shit about charity. They just want an excuse to play golf” and blah blah blah. When I got to talking to these people, that really wasn’t the case. A lot of them genuinely felt like that being charitable and doing good works was their responsibility. I was surprised by that, pleasantly. That’s nice. Okay, there’s still decent people and you can still have money and be a decent person on that level.

I’m still of the mindset, again, that if you’re milking a system and you’re making your money because you’re able to pay $7 an hour, you’re still not a good person. You can still do good things even if you’re not a good person so nothing is as black and white as I kind of thought going in.

 

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