Comedian Gianmarco Soresi may be successful now, but that wasn’t always the case.
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During a recent appearance on the Smosh podcast podcast URL, Soresi explained his biggest failure.
After appearing as a spokesperson for General Electric for two years, he had earned a large sum of money. As a relative latecomer to the sketch comedy world, he decided to jump in headfirst and produce his own show.
The web series, Matza Pizza, proved to be a very expensive mistake.
“I got all this money and I spent all of it on my own sketch series called Matza Pizza Just 12 completely disparate sketches,” he said.
One sketch allegedly went “viral on Facebook,” but he never had any sort of success on YouTube.
“I must have spent maybe $125,000 and not any return. But I learned a lot,” he said. When asked what he learned, he quipped “how to make a savings account next time.”
But the failure showed Soresi that he couldn’t just bust into a space without any sort of direction or community, despite thinking that he understood how sketch comedy worked.
In his mind, there was no cohesion to the work he created or put out. And when you’re trying to make a name for yourself in the comedy world, these are things you need to consider before you start.
Despite the epic failure, Soresi hasn’t fully removed Matza Pizza from YouTube.
There are only 11 videos, including a trailer for the project. It’s true that the videos are short standalones that don’t seem to have any sort of connection to each other.
The sketches aren’t necessarily bad, but as Soresi said, they are high-budget experiments as he tried to figure out who he was as a sketch comedian.
Now, it seems that his standup work is thriving, and it’s giving him the creative outlet he needs.
But everyone has to start somewhere, even if it lands them in debt.