QUEENSRŸCHE's TODD LA TORRE Reflects On His Stand-Up Comedy Debut: 'I Was Terrified'

QUEENSRŸCHE singer Todd La Torre spoke to the "Brutally Delicious" podcast about his first attempt at stand-up comedy, which took place on April 30 aboard the Monsters Of Rock cruise. Regarding how he ended up trying his hand at stand-up, Todd said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "I'm good buddies with [professional comics] Don Jamieson and Jim [Florentine]. Over the years, Don would say something funny to me and I'd hit him back with another thing and we'd kind of riff in real time with each other. And I think he saw a comedic sense about me. And one day he was, like, 'We have this thing that we do where we have professional comics do their stand-up and then we'll have, like, a guest musician that's never done it,' yada yada. 'Would you wanna do it?' Then I was, like, 'I don't know, man. It really makes me nervous just thinking about it.' And he was, like, 'Dude, I think you'd be really good at it,' this and that and the other. And I said, 'Well, I'll come up with things that I think are funny,' and I put 'em in a draft e-mail. They were doing this thing in the [Florida] Keys, and so I started kind of crafting some jokes and some stuff, and then I was, like, 'Look, I've got so much going on, dude. I can't do it in the Keys.' He was, like, 'Well, we do it on the cruise.' And I was, like, 'Okay. Well, that's a couple of months out. That would give me a little more time to prepare and feel better with the material.' I said, 'I'm not gonna commit to it yet. I still don't know. I'm really nervous about it.' He [said], 'Dude, I really think you should do it,' blah blah blah. And then Courtney [Cronin Dold], who is part of this 'Punchlines & Backlines' [comedy event], and she's a professional writer; she's a professional comic writer. She's worked with Roseanne Barr; she's done stuff with the 'Gene Simmons Roast', and she was, I think, working among guys like Bill Burr and all these people for… That's been her career. She's really funny and she's a super sweetheart of a person. And so we ended up jumping on a Zoom [call] for about an hour and 45 minutes. And I said, 'Don't judge me, but I've got a bunch of stuff I wrote, and you can sift through and tell me what you think is good, what's not, and then we can build on it, if that's cool.'"

As for how he did at his Monsters Of Rock stand-up debut, La Torre said: "I tailored everything around the cruise and '80s music and a lot of self-deprecating jokes. And so I ended up doing it, and it was a lot of fun. I was terrified. I would say there was probably — I don't know — a few hundred people in the club. When you have your band, that's like your blanket. You have all your buddies around you and it's the music. I can sing in front of a hundred thousand people and I'm not freaking out. When it's you and it's dead quiet, [it's a totally different thing]."

Todd was realistic about the prospects of him having a future career in stand-up comedy, saying: "I obviously had a total different advantage [on Monsters Of Rock] because I'm on the cruise where people already know who you are. They probably wanna laugh for you, and everything was tailored to stuff that I know everybody in that room was gonna laugh at… I think they want you to do good. When you're in a real comedy club with real strangers that don't know who you are, it's 'make me laugh.' And you've got all these different demographics and what part of the country you're in; maybe this joke doesn't fly here. So that's the real litmus test. This was really fun to breathe, do my thing, which my bit was almost 10 minutes."

La Torre joined his first band BLACKWELL as the drummer, performing in high school talent shows and entering into the club rock music scene in Tampa Bay, Florida. In 2009, Todd was suggested to CRIMSON GLORY guitarist Jon Drenning by a mutual friend to help with some vocal rehearsals in preparation for a CRIMSON GLORY memorial concert. This would pave the way for more collaborations with the band, eventually joining as the band's new permanent vocalist. La Torre was the lead singer for CRIMSON GLORY from late 2010 until resigned from the band in early 2013. In 2012, Todd became a household name in the metal world when he officially became the new lead vocalist of QUEENSRŸCHE. The band immediately began touring globally and started writing new material for the self-titled 2013 album "Queensrÿche". To date, QUEENSRŸCHE has released four studio albums with La Torre: "Queensrÿche", "Condition Hüman" (2015),"The Verdict" (2019) and "Digital Noise Alliance" (2022).