As a youngster, Jeff Caldwell ’84 made people laugh. “Usually it was the teacher laughing and not the kids,” he recalls. “I enjoyed making quips in the classroom, but my humor always appealed to an older set.” Instead of Bugs Bunny or the Three Stooges, Caldwell’s childhood heroes were Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, and the members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
But it was only after a stint working as an engineer and a couple of years in an engineering PhD program that Caldwell, now a professional comedian who has performed for both David Letterman and Craig Ferguson, decided to give comedy a serious try. “Between finishing my undergraduate degree and starting my graduate work, both at Hopkins, I worked at sewage pump stations,” Caldwell says. “I hated it. I had no idea what I was doing. I think my education had been, up to that point, more theoretical. My boss wanted me to do things like size a pump and I had no clue.”
Caldwell may not have realized it at the time, but that experience was the beginning of the end of his engineering career. He first got his nerve up to try stand-up comedy in front of a crowd in 1986, at what was then Baltimore’s Charm City Comedy Club.
“That first time did not go so well,” he recalls with an amused smile. “I’m not by nature an extrovert or a public speaker and I’m sure it was totally awful.” However, three weeks later he gave it another shot and within a year was no longer doing free open mikes but was getting paid regularly for his act. He dropped out of the graduate program (“I was being foolishly practical by studying engineering,” he concludes) and put all his efforts toward comedy.
“I just decided I was going to be myself and tell jokes,” he recalls. “If they didn’t laugh, well, that would be OK.” But they did laugh. And soon Caldwell was hanging out with and learning from some of the up-and-coming comedians of the time, such as Paula Poundstone, Paul Reiser, and club owner Bob Somerby. “I got to learn from the best and, meanwhile, develop my own style,” he says.
That style earns Caldwell a unique reputation that is most often typified by two adjectives: clean and clever. “I don’t have a problem with dirty humor,” he says. “I just am not dirty.” Comedian George Carlin describes Caldwell as “funny and smart.” For his part, Caldwell finds no “inherent value in insulting people. I thought the whole point was to make them laugh,” he says.
And laugh they do. Today, Caldwell performs regularly on television, for corporate audiences, and in comedy clubs across the nation. One recent spate of travel took him from a comedy club in Dayton, Ohio, to a bar in Manhattan, to a fundraiser for the symphony orchestra in Jackson, Tennessee—all in a week’s time. And this past fall, he performed for Hopkins students at the newly opened Charles Commons.
Caldwell ties his routines to reality—and his own life—as much as possible. Take his opening joke for Late Night with David Letterman: “I used to have a real job. I was a civil engineer. But, you know, people begin to talk when your third bridge falls down.” The audience roars. He gives them a few seconds, smiling as if he approves of their response. “You know you’re not mechanical enough to be an engineer when you use a screw driver and have to say ‘lefty loosey, righty tightey.” By the second joke, he has the audience members in his pocket and they never die down.
It seems his engineering education is paying off, after all.