Comedian, content creator, and musician Kyle Gordon sat down with BitRake’s Joseph Walsdorf this Wednesday to talk his new album, his recent appearance on The Simpsons, and why the fuck he has a musket. Gordon is perhaps best known for playing the character DJ Crazy Times in his Europop parody song “Planet of the Bass,” which went massively viral last summer.
Q: What was it like having Planet of the Bass blow up the way it did? Did you expect it to happen so quickly?
GORDON: It was awesome. It was a really, really cool, crazy experience. I’d had videos blow up, but not in such a mainstream sort of all encompassing way. Like with media attention, and all the other craziness that came with it. So it was definitely a cool new experience for me. You know, I always had confidence in the song and the concept, and I was really proud of it. But no, I definitely didn’t think it would blow up as big as it did. And I definitely didn’t think it would blow up as quickly as it did. The original plan was that people would sort of catch on to it slowly. I put out the first clip on social media that ended up blowing up, and then the idea was the song would come out a month later, and we ended up having to move up the release date. So that month’s timeframe was sort of an indication of how long I thought it would take for people to like, give a shit about the song.
Q: How does it feel to be the person who discovered DJ Crazy Times, and does it bother you that you guys look so similar?
GORDON: I know, there’s a lot of speculation. And let them chat, you know? Let them talk. But no. I mean, he’s stunningly beautiful, so it doesn’t bother me at all. But yeah, I mean, people don’t recognize the side of my business, which is discovering and developing talent and artists. I was on one of my many trips to the former Yugoslavia, and I was looking for new talent. And I stumbled across this village and you know, they were all saying “crazy time, crazy time, DJ crazy time.” I was like “what’s all this about?” And so I just, you know, followed this sort of crazy scent of gasoline and sandalwood incense, and I followed a tunnel. It was in a former fallout shelter, and there were just 70,000 young Croatians in there. It was wild. No bigger than a football field. And jammed into this crazy space and who should I see on stage but DJ Crazy Times? And I just said, I gotta bring this guy to America.
Gordon has been enjoying online success on TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, and other social media platforms for a few years now, having currently over 3 million followers on TikTok. One of his first characters to achieve mainstream success was a whiny, bratty, pedantic child Gordon calls “The Kid That’s No Fun.”
Q: What do you think made people resonate so much with The Kid That’s No Fun? Why do you think it got so big?
GORDON: I mean, as cartoony and broad as that character is, it is some of my more grounded material, because a lot of my other characters are not necessarily people you would meet in everyday life, especially for Americans. You know, I have British colonists and Croatian DJs— just a lot of really, really big, cartoon-y characters. But [The Kid That’s No Fun] was one of the more classic ones. I think everyone knows that kid. Even though obviously there have been bratty kids in media before, I like to think it’s a combination of it being very relatable, but also, I think I did it in sort of an original way.
Q: I haven’t seen you do another character as many times as you did [The Kid That’s No Fun] or iterate on it as many times as you did. Did you enjoy getting to hit him up over and over again, or after a while were you ready to move on to something else?
GORDON: Yeah, I’m, I’m glad you asked that question, because I think I was able to iterate on it so many times, because I just knew that character so well, and it felt very easy and seamless. Because I mean, it’s a little bit of me, a little bit of my brother, a little bit of a bunch of kids I knew. And my impulse, I think, talking about finding your voice, is to put stuff out when I feel like I have something new and funny to say. I think the reason I stopped doing [the character] is as soon as I heard that voice in my head, say, “You’ve got to do the kid that’s no fun, people want more of it,” or “those always perform well.” That’s a bad voice that you should not listen to. As soon as you’re listening to that voice and not the voice that says, “I have something interesting to say as this character,” that’s when you need to hang it up. I may revisit him again, just because I haven’t really done a new video in that character for probably at least a year. So you know, he’s, he’s not dead. I haven’t murdered that boy. I just knew early on, and maybe it’s just because I’d done comedy for a long time, that that was a bad impulse to give in to. I think I’ve been pretty good at resisting that.
Q: I think you’re kind of a front runner in a new scene of comedy that’s coming up, so who’s in your circle? Who do you watch? Who are your peers in your comedy?
GORDON: I started doing improv in New York in 2014. And then I started getting sort of into like, alternative Brooklyn, that was like, sort of my main scene in and still is, for the most part, like the people who I like, perform alongside and see and know and in New York. And so yeah, people that I would have come up with that you would know like the Please don’t destroy guys from SNL. They’re like Chloe Troast, who just got on SNL. I performed along with her. For a while Rachel Sennot was kind of in Brooklyn, and then so many other amazing comedians that I love that I could just go on and on and on about.
Q: I don’t mean to pry, but your Tiktok bio says “I have fun every day.” So has it happened yet? Are you scheduling fun for later?
GORDON: Wait, let me do some quick math. Okay. So I’ve been alive for about 11,000 days. And yeah, I’m batting 1000.You know, I’m always open to the possibility it could happen. But just given my track record so far, I feel pretty confident that I’m gonna ride it out to the end, actually, the end being eternity because I’m never gonna die also, right? I’m God. Just based on my experience in life thus far. There’s nothing to suggest I will either not have fun, nor will I ever die.
Q: Did you know you wanted to do comedy or was it something that came to you unexpectedly? When did you know you wanted to pursue it?
GORDON: It’s cliche, but I was always the class clown type personality. But it really didn’t even occur to me till my senior year of college that it was even something I could actually go out and try to pursue. I didn’t even know where to start. But I went to school outside of Columbus, Ohio. I went to a few open mics in Columbus, and then I just got a taste of how you might even go about pursuing it. So that’s when I decided to move to New York City and try it.
Q: I’ve often heard it said that it takes about 10 years to find your voice as a comedian. Do you think you’ve found your voice now, since college?
GORDON: Yeah, I had my 10 year reunion this year… I feel like I have a really strong sense of what I do well, and what I think. I feel pretty confident in saying that I’ve found my voice. But I do think that math is about right. I mean, it’s a fucking slog.
Q: Was there a come to Jesus or an “I might give it up” moment somewhere in there?
GORDON: Not really. But I mean, COVID came at a kind of really serendipitous moment for me. I would have been 27 when COVID hit, and then 30 years old starts looming on the horizon. I definitely remember right before COVID I did have that talk with my dad where he was like, “you gotta start having a backup plan.” Which, I’m shocked it took him that long to be exceptionally concerned about my life choices. But yeah, so I never really had that moment of like, “fuck, I can’t do this anymore” or want[ing] to give it up. But we were getting there.
Gordon’s online success, he said, was unexpected.
GORDON: 5 years ago nobody knew who I was. I was just doing improv and lugging my guitar around New York, doing little basement bar shows. I was not a very online person, so to be where I am now is the biggest shock.
Q: But now, I mean, you’ve had a great two months. You’ve put out the album. You just were on The Simpsons, and you just did Netflix Is A Joke. So were some of those bucket list items or were you surprised to find these opportunities for yourself?
GORDON: My bucket list is pretty vague in that I’m not like, “if I don’t get on the fucking Simpsons by the time I’m 35 I’m gonna in firebomb my parents’ house” or something. My sort of general life philosophy is I keep pushing as hard as I can and try to create things that I find exciting and cool. I have a lot of short term goals, like to finish the next album, finish the screenplay, do XYZ. But in the long term, I always like to say wherever I am in five years, I’ll look back at this moment and be like, “How the fuck did I get here?” Like, this is what I’m doing? I’m, hosting The Price Is Right for kids or whatever the fuck I’ll be doing in five years, who knows?
But with that being said, being on The Simpsons was particularly crazy and meaningful to me just because it was huge for me growing up and it was also huge for my family. My family is all obsessed with The Simpsons. And so like if I had been on The Office or even South Park… all those things would have been cool, but not as meaningful as The Simpsons was. 12 year old Kyle would have never thought that I would have been on The Simpsons, so that was a pretty cool milestone.
Q: Who are some of your influences, both comedic and not, if you come from a big Simpsons family?
GORDON: You know, because of that episode I started rewatching The Simpsons and I forgot how much The Simpsons have shaped my whole taste and worldview and approach to life, essentially. But other than that, Chris Farley is like, number one on my Mount Rushmore, like, the funniest person I’ve ever seen ever, so he’s huge. Also, I love Christopher Guest, not only in terms of his his movies and being the king of the mockumentary like a long, long before The Office or any of the those big shows, but also he is like, the template for me in terms of great musical comedy with like Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind, personally. I also got to open for David Cross. It was a really cool, kind of last minute thing on Monday. I used to listen to his first two albums incessantly as a kid.
Q: I’ve seen your videos for a while now and you were doing so much sketch and you had a little bit of music, but were you putting a lot of hopes on [Planet of the Bass] kind of helping you break into that musical comedy space?
GORDON: So funny enough, actually, started putting out videos on social media in November 2020. But actually, before that, musical comedy is what I’ve been doing for many years. Before that I was doing comedy in New York. Yeah, so it’s kind of funny. For most of the world who followed me and knew me from my videos online, the music was like sort of a new pivot. But really, for me, it was like a back to basics kind of thing. And now taking all the stuff that I’d been doing live, and putting it out for the world, and having fully produced versions of a lot of these— most of the songs on the album were bits and songs that I’d been performing for years. So it’s kind of a fun, weird, inverse trajectory that I had.
About a month ago, Gordon released his first comedy album, Kyle Gordon Is Great, and is already writing material for another record.
GORDON: I kind of approached the album in an old-school way. It’s obviously a comedy album, but the component parts are more like a traditional music album, in a way. The thing I obsess about is 20th century music and how the music business worked back then. Essentially in the back of my mind I knew that you make a record and then you release singles, instead of how a lot of artists do nowadays, recording a song and immediately putting it on streaming. Even thinking about [Kyle Gordon Is Great] as an album. I had these interstitials in between, because I wanted you to consume it as a piece, you know. It’d be listenable and I can guide you through it.
Q: I love that if you listen to the album on shuffle that it’s kind of fucked.
Kyle then laughed a laugh that I found incredibly silly as I listened back to this Zoom call at 2x speed.
Q: Speaking of those interstitials, on track 14, Radio Station #7 College Radio, you mock college radio hosts. As a college radio host I have to ask, what did we do to you?
GORDON: What did we do to we? I was a big fuckin’ college radio host. That’s the most authentic track on the whole thing. Spoken from lived experience.
Q: What kind of radio show did you host?
GORDON: Actually listening back on the album it’s kind of in line with my music and my characters. Each week I would have a different theme, and I would try to make them as fucked up as possible. One week I did Ukrainian Top 40. One week I did propaganda, like, jingoistic anthems, so I’d play God Bless The USA and then I’d play the North Korean National Anthem. We were in Ohio so I did an Ohio punk week. Ooh, I did sellouts before and after. My favorite one was the Goo Goo Dolls— I played [their song] Sex Maggot and then I played Iris or whatever. There was some good stuff.
Gordon talked about his experiences growing up listening to classic rock radio, then picked up his whole computer and showed us his impressive vinyl collection. In case you were wondering— some AC/DC, some rare Jamaican records, and Dillinger’s Bionic Dread on a shelf that I assume has other records but we have no way of knowing.
Q: This is more of a personal question. How many storage units full of costumes do you have? Where does it go?
GORDON: This would be another good “Kyle picked up his laptop and took you” kind of thing. People in LA, just because they have so much more space than we do in New York, they’re able to store a lot more shit, but the whole underside of my bed is packed with costumes. I’ve got a whole chest. Now we have a backyard. I have a chest outside. My girlfriend made me get rid of a bunch of shit. But look at—
And then he reached under the desk and pulled out something that made Joseph laugh another silly 2x speed laugh that I got to listen to which made me laugh at a regular speed.
The man pulled out a whole musket.
GORDON: Why do I have a musket right here? Why the fuck is next to my desk a musket?
So you can write it off on your taxes, Kyle. For the IRS. Possibly for America? And definitely for protection.
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