Tall, Handsome Michael Kosta Has Comedy For You If You’re Attractive

Conedy Central Presents - Season 15

Michael Kosta recently released his debut album “Comedy For Attractive People” The LA-based comedian recorded it at San Diego’s Comedy Store La Jolla and released it over the holidays with a big hometown show & party. It’s available now on iTunes or you can get a signed physical copy from his website. Amy Hawthorne sat down with Kosta during a typical Saturday night at The Comedy Store in Hollywood to talk about doing comedy while being attractive and the terrible things strangers will say to you on the internet.


The first thing you notice about Michael Kosta is that he is very tall. The second thing you notice is that he’s very handsome. Like midwest, corn-fed, All-American high school jock (tennis, not football), silly charming grin handsome. Audiences can’t help but notice this either, facts that Kosta plays with onstage whether he’s joking about his head brushing the low ceiling at The Stand or playing with the audience, yelling “These jokes are for attractive people!”

“I think if you’re a funny person it doesn’t matter if you’re attractive or not,” Kosta said.  “An audience has an easier time going somewhere with someone [who looks a certain way]. I use the Chris Farley falling on the table example all the time, would that be as funny if he was Rob Lowe? But the short answer is that maybe it’s a little bit easier to do comedy if you’re an ugly person, but it’s much easier to get initial breaks and get on TV if you’re an attractive person. But at the end of the day, you have to be fucking funny.”

The title of his album, Comedy for Attractive People doesn’t appeal to everyone.  “Some people don’t like the title of the CD, but it happened because there’s such a movement in comedy for the guy with the beard and the flannel and that’s so not who I am. Do I fight it or do I own who I am? So I thought it would be fun just to go for it.”

michael kostaBut don’t let that midwestern charm fool you, Kosta’s no rube or prude. “I do talk about my family a lot, but I’m definitely not wholesome. I think people thought the same thing about Tosh for a while. I am nowhere near as dark as that, but…” And with that, Kosta inadvertently proved his point when he got pulled off to go up at The Comedy Store and did fifteen minutes of jokes covering a wide range, including plenty of jokes about dicks and all the places they can go.

Another sign that Kosta’s no hick farm boy is how well he fits in to the Los Angeles comedy scene and The Comedy Store in particular. He typically shows up about an hour ahead of his spot and will stick around afterward, sharing drinks and riffs with the other comedians at the patio bar. You won’t fit in there if you don’t have a nice, big dark streak lurking just below some very thick skin. On the other hand, his initial move to LA does smack of the old local beauty queen hopping a bus expecting to get discovered at a drugstore.

Kosta started comedy in Ann Arbor and got invited to do the Apsen Comedy Festival in 2007, where everybody there told him he needed to move to LA as the next step. “I was so stupid, I thought I just had to pack up everything and move immediately. But it was the right move and I was just blown away when I got here how professional it was and that there was a real career in comedy available.” After moving to LA and becoming a mainstay of the club scene, Kosta cashed in on his comedy skills and good looks to do a run of Late Night appearances, guest host G4’s Attack of The Show and appear on The Soup Investigates. All the while, he produced his own web series Sports. Kosta. Basement. which led to a cross country move last year to host the short-lived Fox Sports show Crowd Goes Wild’.   “I think I’m not as big into sports as people assume, but I don’t do anything to dissuade them. Sports. Kosta. Basement. basically rips athletes and makes fun of them. But I definitely grew up more in locker rooms than green rooms.”

During Kosta’s time in NYC, he became a favorite at Gotham and The Stand, where he hosted their free Monday night showcase Frantic! “LA is better,” Kosta said. “I only lived one year in New York, so if you had asked me one year into LA… I didn’t like LA until about three years in. The thing I liked most about LA was that it gave me a career, which is pretty cool.”

But New York was a great learning experience.  “I learned in my year in New York that I’m a pretty high strung guy already, so I need a place that brings me back down sometimes. When I see the ocean or a mountain, or how it’s 81 degrees today and it’s January, I just kind of chill,” he said. “When I was in New York and I was feeling high strung, I’d walk out of my apartment and a homeless guy would throw a beer bottle at me and that didn’t help. It wasn’t good for my personality. But there’s not a city in the world I wouldn’t rather explore with my friends, drink, eat and hang out. No question in my mind it’s New York City.”

New York has other advantages, career-wise.  “I can’t think of a better city to write stand-up in. Just walking to buy an apple, you bump into ten different things that could work as premises. There’s so much interaction that you don’t ask for that it creates art. Here [in Los Angeles], you only interact with the people you want to, you have to organize it. I hope to have a relationship with both cities forever, because they’re both really dope. But for me, LA is where I want to be.”

Kosta’s now back home in Los Angeles, working on a pilot produced by Joel McHale called The Comments Section, all about the world of the internet (and everyone’s favorite/least favorite
element, the comments section). “It’s actually challenging because it’s such a good idea but it’s
so broad. The degrees of separation from the title of a story to [a comment like] ‘Transformers 2 sucked and here’s why’ is so broad, it’s like ‘How did we get here?’ But the ones that hurt as a
comic are the ones that actually are accurate. If it’s just ‘Fuck you, faggot’ all you can do is
laugh. If I feel something is bad, though, I don’t go there. My own brain’s comment section is bad enough.”

When Kosta did the live show Crowd Goes Wild, he’d leave the studio at 6 pm and by 6:01 have a ton of Twitter mentions.  ” I was like, ‘Let me just fucking get home before I read these!’ And since it was a sports show, it was like call in radio without a screener. That being said, the women on our show, who are funny and smart and attractive, their comments are the worst. It’s all just sex. So at least with my comments, it’s just ‘Your brain is stupid.’ not like ‘Your tits are too small’ or whatever. So I would never complain compared to that. It’s so weird, can you imagine a woman tweeting at me ‘This guy is so stupid, I bet he has the smallest dick and is shitty in bed.’?”

Kosta plans to stay in Los Angeles for a good long while, though he sometimes dreams of moving to a farm in northern Michigan and just running a bar show. “I found that I can’t give up writing ideas down and trying to turn them into something. But if I became a millionaire, would I give up the road and certain aspects of it? Sure, but I’d still come to The Comedy Store and hang out. I just wouldn’t care if my manager didn’t write me back or I finished a script or whatever. I got into this because as a kid I used to write skits. It’s in me and once comedy is in you, once comedy fucks you with it’s dick, you’re kind of fucked. I would recommend to any young comics coming up, have some other interests, it does help.”

Follow Michael Kosta on Twitter | Visit MichaelKosta.com

Sports.Kosta.Basement.

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Amy E Hawthorne is a New York by way of LA comedy journalist and founder of ComedyGroupie.com. She's also a produced numerous stand-up shows, got a paycheck and a drinking problem from The Comedy Store and is convinced that the Big Avocado lobby are the ones who really pull the strings in this country.
Amy Hawthorne
Amy Hawthorne
Amy E Hawthorne is a New York by way of LA comedy journalist and founder of ComedyGroupie.com. She's also a produced numerous stand-up shows, got a paycheck and a drinking problem from The Comedy Store and is convinced that the Big Avocado lobby are the ones who really pull the strings in this country.