Chad the Bird to opine on human life at the Columbus Comedy Festival

Josh Zagoren – actor, voice artist, and the man behind the stand-up comic/essayist/puppet Chad the Bird – uses first-person plural pronouns when discussing his career as a puppeteer.

“I feel like if we had a publicist,” he said early in our interview, “it would make all this so much easier to do.”

At first I thought such anthropomorphizing was mere affectation, but shortly into my talk with Zagoren, I changed my mind. Zagoren, who lives in Chicago and will be performing at MadLab at 9:30 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 28, as part of this weekend’s Columbus Comedy Festival, has been performing Chad for 16 years, plenty of time for the entity of Chad to take on a larger place in Zagoren’s psyche than a lifeless puppet. For Zagoren, in other words, Chad the bird is alive. 

Which I think is why Chad the Bird is so brilliant.

Zagoren attended Emerson College in Boston in the early 2000s, where he learned some salient lessons from successful actors. “They brought in all of these new performing experts,” he said. “So, while I was there, we were being lectured by like Whoopi Goldberg, Christine Baranski, John Lithgow, like all these big time folk would do these workshops, and then we’d have this intensive.”

One such intensive was taught by Paul Zaloom, the puppeteer behind Beakman from the ‘90s educational show “Beakman’s World,” which Zagoren loved as a kid. 

“It was so fun,” he said, “and the characters were so deep and interesting and weird, and they were also doing these breakdowns of things that I could use in my day-to-day life, like ‘Sesame Street.’ I grew up on ‘The Muppet Show,’ ‘Tales from the Crypt.’ I love my animatronics. I love my gore effects. I love my horror movies. But ‘Beakman’s World’ was different because it was like, ‘For 15 minutes, we’re gonna hit you with as much information as we can, and we’re gonna do it in a way that you’re going to remember.’”

When Zaloom came to Emerson, “I freaked out,” Zagoren said. “My teacher was like, ‘What?’ And I was like, ‘Dude, that’s Beakman. I grew up with that guy. I would love to take his course.’ So she brings me down, I meet Paul Zaloom, and I take his intensive – all found object stuff. He would pull out a bag of junk, dump it on the table, and then start manipulating it.”

Although the experience was profound, it didn’t bear fruit until a handful of years later in Chicago, where Zagoren hoped to cut his teeth as an actor in the plethora of theaters then active in the city. For one such event at the Cornservatory, Zagoren wrote a sketch about a human and a puppet having sex for the first time – a play on the awkwardness of first sexual encounters amplified by the logistics of puppet anatomy.

“I went into the basement of the theater. And, you know, this is back in the day, so like it was 2 a.m. and they didn’t care,” Zagoren said. “So, I’ve spent like six hours in the theater, you know, in the basement drinking whiskey and smoking and finding whatever I could, and cobbled together out of a bunch of stuff this bird puppet, and then did the bit. They loved it, but they loved the character, and so that’s kind of how it started.”

The next step involved Christopher Piatt, the creator and host of the Paper Machete, asking Zagoren if he would be interested in using this character as a correspondent.

“And then there was a lot of conversation,” Zagoren said. “Is he a puppet? Or are we doing the Randy Feltface thing, where he’s aware of his puppetry, aware that he’s a puppet? And I didn’t like that. I was like, no, man, I’m a Henson kid. Like, hide your puppeteers. You don’t call Kermit a puppet. He’s a frog. So, Chad, he’s a bird, [and] that’s what we’ll call him. … Then the focus was on like, well, what do the birds think about people? So that’s the nexus.” 

Earlier, when Zagoren mentioned that “all this would be easier if we had a publicist,” he was referring to navigating the vagaries of making it as a performer in present-day America. It is, as we all know, a real crapshoot. On the one hand, Zagoren’s Chad the Bird character is a unique entry into the stand-up canon: an intellectual avian delivering punchy lectures about human life. Chad the Bird is a true original.

On the other hand, nuance isn’t exactly heralded as the greatest attribute of populist cultural material in our world today. Chad the Bird shows are silly and fun, yes, but they are also erudite and have genuine points to make. He’s been honing his craft at a weekly show in Chicago, the Paper Machete, a live periodical involving lots of other performers, in which Chad’s time is limited. And since Zagoren’s bits always have a legitimate point about history or culture or, you know, that time the tour bus of the Dave Matthews Band tried dumping 800 pounds of shit and piss into the Chicago River only to inadvertently hit an open-top sightseeing vessel filled with tourists, there’s little room for improv.

“I have created this thing,” Zagoren said, “where Chad doesn’t have any time to talk to the audience, to do any crowd work, to do any of that. It’s like, I got 10 minutes to tell you about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. So shut up and listen to me, so I can get this out.”

If this doesn’t sound like the tone of a stand-up comic, then rest assured that Zagoren does not consider himself one. 

“I don’t consider what we do standup,” he said, again falling casually into those plural pronouns, “and sometimes we get asked to do standup shows, and have to kind of reconnoiter what we’re doing to kind of fit into that form, because I’m like, you know, a lot of my best friends are standup comedians that I met doing shows at clubs. And these guys, their format is different from what we’re doing.”

Zagoren actually cares about the insights he’s trying to make, more so than the humor. He thinks like an essayist more than a comedian, and while this makes Chad the Bird all the more interesting, it also makes him a harder sell to general audiences.

“But part of the problem is, it’s just me,” Zagoren said. “My wife helps me with some things. And my good friend Cody, who produces our show Class out here, helps me with handling emails. My manager Curtis is booking me for shows, and then I’m a voice actor in Chicago. Then I have my agent out here doing that, but nobody’s really in charge of putting Chad out there except for me.”

Chad the Bird is the kind of rare, perfect combination of wonderful invention and perfectly suited inventor – check out clips of him on YouTube or Instagram and then try to find anyone who does something similar, with as much panache and charisma and intelligence as this wild, pink-haired bird with a jock’s name.

Go ahead. I’ll wait.