Artist description Storyteller/Comedian

Music Style Spoken Word

Musical Influences Eric Bogisian, Eddie Izzard, Dennis Miller, Denis Leary

Similar Artists Eric Bogisian, Eddie Izzard, Dennis Miller, Denis Leary

Artist History Raised in a room with no door and educated by the steady hand of angry nuns (who longed for the good old days of the Spanish Inquisition) at a variety of catholic institutions, Jack Roach managed to survive only by developing a thick, bitter personality and by observing life from the fringes of society. Many were the days he returned from being mentally and physically flogged (through the good will of Christian ethics) only to find his dinner of bangers and mash cold and his house crumbling around him. (Of course, he found all this strangely amusing—and you will too.) Strangely enough, his relatively tortured childhood (well, OK, not compared to some people but for the sake of drama, yeah, it was tortured) made young Jack into something of a performer, leading him not into a summer camp for emotionally disturbed children but rather into the theater. Of course, things don’t often turn out as we plan them and the name Roach couldn’t make for himself in regional Shakespeare faded altogether by the time he became an adult. In the years that followed, he relegated himself to drunken yammering in various Northern California bars, drawing rooms, living rooms, family rooms, dens, and offices. It is during this period (to be known forever by biographers as “The Congealing Years”) that Roach congealed his bitter humor in the strangely faceted diamond that it is today. His stories began to become known, actually requested, and while he was not actually INVITED to repeat them anywhere, surely it can be said (and with vigor) that his reputation preceded himself. The culmination of this period occurred on dark and rainy night in September 1995 when Roach test ran his act in Seattle, Washington at the Improv. History will remember him as a second place winner that night. Perhaps second place that night fueled him the way a failure to enter art school fueled a certain maniacal mass murdered named Adolf Hitler (who, incidentally, history will remember as a first place winner in that field). In any case, what was discovered that night was a formidable talent in the field of comedy and spoken word. The bitterness of Roach’s personality had developed into a genius for storytelling, a storytelling which holds within it fear, pain, joy, bitterness and most of all truth. He is a comedian, yes, but one somewhere between the tradition of Eric Bogosian and Spaulding Gray and the tradition of Denis Leary, Eddie Izzard, and Dennis Miller. Well known to almost no one as a genius in the field, Roach is a storyteller first and foremost and each story he tells is colored by his pitch black sense of humor. His first spoken word CD project, “Britain At Last,” is just the kind of rant Roach is famous for (or rather the kind that he will be famous for). Tight, pointed, delivered with a sense of intensity that makes it seem as if the words are fighting to be released, Roach spins a tale as only he can. It is bitter and dark but also very funny, at times poignant and meaningless, at times joyous and sad. It is Jack Roach at his very worst, which is to say that it is Jack Roach at his very best, which is to say the only thing that ultimately need be said about this project: it’s Jack Roach.

Location Colfax, California - USA

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