While he was growing up in Eastmoreland, comedian EJ Marcus, 27, spent countless afternoons in his neglected backyard pool. It was more like a pond, water thick with algae. A family of ducks took up residence near the abandoned water filter. Still, Marcus was swimming: despite the muck and, often, rain, he found joy and freedom in a setting uncomfortable to most, entertaining himself in a goofy, if not a little lonely, way. 

His upcoming set begins and ends in his backyard pool. “My hope for the show is that that atmosphere carries through all of the different elements,” he says, “that even while I’m talking about having a job as a 20-year-old and a coworker saying something weird about gender to me, like, you’re also thinking about this kid who’s diving for rings in this disgusting pool.”

Now living in LA, Marcus has made a name for himself—and accrued 500,000 (and change) TikTok followers—by capturing the humor in people’s discomfort, gently and lovingly, via short, impression-based skits: The friend who can dish it but can’t take it. (“Like, okay, haha, like, I took a risk with platform boots one time.”) Your boss who just found out about polyamory. (“And do you participate? Don’t answer that. I didn’t ask that.”) Offline, Marcus often performs material about growing up here; however, his August 31 show at Mississippi Studios will be his first time testing his Portland material against his hometown audience. Now he’s the one squirming. “Usually, you know, I can say whatever I want about Portland when I’m performing in New York; no one’s gonna know,” he says. “But in this crowd, I’m like, You guys know the streets.”

Brooke Jackson-Glidden: You grew up in Portland. What was that like? 

EJ Marcus: At this point, my parents have been in the Portland area for almost 30 years. Definitely their roots are there, but my dad, especially because he’s from New York, he fights it every step of the way. He refuses to accept that he’s lived in Oregon for most of his life. He’s always like, “I didn’t even know what Oregon was when I was growing up.” Growing up with his voice in my ear, I’d be like, Yeah, what even is Oregon? while I’m fully born and raised there. In many ways I had a pretty idyllic childhood. I grew up going on field trips to fish hatcheries—it seems so normal to me to be so familiar with the life cycle of salmon. But that’s not, like, a universal experience, I’ve found. 

BJG: How did growing up here impact your comedy? When I first stumbled across your TikTok videos, I did feel like your voice was very Portland.

EM: I think I was a hard sell as a kid. I was extremely, extremely hyperactive. I wanted people to like me desperately, and I didn’t know how to make that happen. I found that people in Portland were just trying to keep the peace so often. But I think that there’s a definite sense of politeness with ulterior motives. That was definitely the beginning of things for me. I was also simultaneously blessed and cursed by having parents who thought I was so, so funny. I think that [my humor is] Portland related, and also family dynamics.

I do think there was a constant feeling of otherness growing up in Portland. As a kid, I could tell that I was getting things a little wrong. And I made a conscious choice, like, I’m gonna pay such good attention to how people are acting and interacting with each other that I’m gonna get good at it. In retrospect, it’s easy to be like, Oh, it was all connected to this longer plot, to be a good artist. But I think a lot of it was just me trying to be liked and have an okay time as a kid, and it kind of evolved into this. Through paying really close attention to people, I was like, Oh, I love people.

People are so weird and specific. I became obsessed with the way that people talk. You start to notice those really interesting mannerisms that people have, speech patterns and the way friends talk to each other. Even the way people listen to each other. There’s so much that’s funny in that. And myself too—I’m trying so hard all the time.

BJG: That love does come through, I think. This is a thing you’re maybe making fun of them for, but it’s not like, “God, I hate this person.” You can feel that they’re like a friend or a family member.

EM: I feel really, really passionately that any character or story that I tell in my comedy, online or in live performances, comes from a background of love. I really don’t like to judge the people that I portray. My live show structure involves me depicting a lot of different characters and I think of each of those characters as a whole, complex person. All of them have connections to people I know in real life, but all of them are a little bit of me, too. So I don’t want to hate these people. Any character that I write is gonna be someone that I know intimately.

BJG: How close do you get to the source material, so to speak?

EM: With my parents especially, they’re very aware that I’m listening. I’m having conversations with them, and then I’m like, “You know what? That would make a really funny video.” And they’ll say, “Oh, go do that one, that would be funny.” And then there’s others where I meet a person and I’m like, I did not know this kind of person existed. I’m having a conversation with someone, and I’m like, this is a new one for me. When I was first starting to make videos, I had multiple people in my life be like, “Was that me?” It’s not literally you, like, I’m not recording our conversation. But if the shoe fits….

BJG: What did your comedy career look like when you were growing up? Were you in drama, maybe, in high school?

EM: I always loved being onstage. I was like, get me onstage in the biggest way. My best friends were doing musicals, so I was like, great, I will do musicals. I went to Oberlin College in Ohio, and I got there fresh out of being, like, a high school theater kid. Oberlin has a ton of kids from New York City, and I showed up in my flannel and hiking sandals, which were super cool in Portland. And I was like, Oh, this is not what is cool here. So I took a break from being a performer and spent college writing about trees and rain—really bad poetry. By my senior year, all I wanted to do was be onstage. That’s when I started doing more comedy.

BJG: Did you move to LA to get yourself on a stage? You worked at a preschool there, right? 

EM: The preschool was a day job. I’m an avid journaler—I have this journal entry from the week that I moved here—I was like, “All I want to do is get onstage. And if I can find a way to be onstage in front of any kind of audience, then I know I will have made it.” I had absolutely no plan. Prior to making videos on TikTok, I was very much the friend in my friend group that didn’t have an Instagram. I hated social media. 

BJG: So the TikTok thing was essentially an avenue to live performance? What was the initial impetus to pick up a phone and get on social media?

EM: A lot of [comedians I admired] were like, “Yeah, you should try to put your stuff online. These are the times that we’re living in—the more eyes you can get on you, that's all you can ask for.” I was like, okay, I have funny ideas, I’m just gonna see what happens.

BJG: Are there characters that feel straight out of Portland to you, either in the live show or on TikTok?

EM: With the characters on TikTok, that felt very grounded in my life in LA; I was really getting inspiration from that. But my live show is rooted in Portland. It’s about my childhood, which is why I’m particularly nervous to be doing it in Portland. It feels extremely loaded for me, because I talk about us losing our house, I talk about being a scholarship kid at the fancy school in Beaverton. I have a character in the show who is based on a popular girl at the school that I was going to—blonde and super wealthy and completely passive aggressive. I’m like, Oh God, she’s gonna reach out to me. But, you know, the show itself is an exercise in processing how much I was raised in Portland. I haven’t lived in Portland since I was 18. I don’t think of it as something that’s deeply enmeshed in my being. And yet, when I sat down to write this show, I was like, it’s gonna be in Portland. These are the granules that make up who I am today. And, of course, my mom’s texting me saying my high school drama teacher is going to be in the audience.