Denny’s Restaurant is the comedian’s home away from home, the place where comics spend millions of hours. So how does a comedian get 1.4 million views on TikTok while drinking coffee at Denny’s?
Sam Miller sends a stranger sitting at the counter an egg. As the waiter serves the egg, the surprised man spins around, pumps his fist in celebration of Sam’s gift and shouts, “Fuck yeah!” The comedian’s eyes twinkle, and we’re oddly touched by this gentle giant’s quirky community outreach. His random act of generosity becomes viral history.
Santa Cruz Comedy Festival producer DNA describes the 360-pound, six-foot-six-inch comic as “a sweet man, with a beautiful family, whose only goal in life is to make strangers laugh and turn them into friends.”
Clean and sober for 16 years, Miller, 42, makes jokes about what it’s like to be a sober parent, what jails are like in Yakima, and what it’s like to be homeless. When people ask him what it was like when he was drinking and doing drugs, he lifts his shirt and shows a tattoo on his belly that says, “Let’s Dance.”
Watch Sam Miller’s stand-up on his TikTok and Instagram posts, and you’ll see him radiate positivity; his eyes sparkle as he relives the hardest days of his life. “Whether it’s folks I was on the streets with, whether it’s folks I was locked up with, whether it’s folks I got sober with, we laugh at very hard stuff and that’s the best thing we can do.” Miller says a lot of his fans are in recovery, a lot are not, but it doesn’t matter because “I’m really funny.”
His material presents the unvarnished truth of his early tumultuous life, but along with his blunt self-assessment comes how he deals with it, and we start feeling we could cut ourselves some slack for our own mistakes as well.
“What’s great is, a lot of my stand-up is me talking about parts of myself that I don’t like, or things that happened that I didn’t like, whether it’s incarceration or homelessness.”
Beyond his likability, Miller has the most valuable quality a comic can have: We trust him. “It’s hard doing comedy and being fat because people eat in front of you. I like big women, man. Skinny women are fine unless it’s, like, windy. Big women got more room for tattoos.”
For a comic, if you can make your audience cry, then make something come out of their nose, and then make them pee their pants, that is called the comedian’s hat trick. Sam proudly says, “When I talk about how I used to live under a tarp, that can be the funniest shit. Once I made a cop shoot a piece of French fry out of his nose.”
Miller has worked with Santa Cruz Comedy Festival producer DNA for six years. “Honestly, we kind of hit it off,” Miller says. “He is very fucking genuine, and I love that shit, you know? He just doesn’t mince words. He says what he intends to say, and I have no issues with that, because I don’t have any skeletons no more. I sleep good these days.”
Miller says he feels at home in Santa Cruz because he finds it similar to his hometown of Olympia, Washington. “Olympia has big liberal arts schools, like Santa Cruz, and the people are real, just like here.”
Comedians travel thousands of miles to make rooms of drunk people laugh. Their shows may be called monologues, but the standup comic’s real job is to connect with the room, to bring comic and crowd together for a call-and-response dialogue. Connecting with the crowd is what Sam Miller has in mind when he comes to the Santa Cruz Comedy Festival: “I like sitting in front of coffee shops and staring at people. I’m good at that. Santa Cruz is a great town for that.”
Sam Miller is part of “Invasion of the Headliners,” taking place at 8pm on Oct. 4 at the Rio Theatre. He also appears Oct. 5: 11:30am at the Homeless Garden Project farm as well as in the evening Abbey Coffee Lounge and Woodhouse Blending and Brewing. More information at santacruzcomedyfestival.com.
