For most of us, it’s not hard to remember what it was like sitting in the back of a classroom for all those years of grade school. For comics Stephen Taylor and Lou Pharis, as former teachers it’s even easier, and they’ve got plenty of absurd material to share about the experience.
Teaching is a throughline in the stand up routines of Taylor and Pharis, who tour as The Unteachables. It isn’t a comedy show designed specifically for teachers, but rather for anyone who has gone to school or who has a job, highlighting the universal experiences of what it was like to be in classrooms back in the day.
“We have a lot of teacher material, but we’re comedians,” Pharis says. “We consider ourselves comics before teachers.”
“Everyone’s been around, everyone went to school, everyone remembers those kids in their class, or those teachers in their class,” he adds. “All the comedy is relatable to everybody. Everyone’s had those exact same stories and exact same feelings.”
In addition to being comics, Pharis is currently a teacher, while Taylor left the profession after being fired for posting his jokes on TikTok. For those who aren’t teachers, however, Taylor goes on to say that any person with a job will be able to relate to the group’s jokes, especially if they don’t necessarily love going to work every day.
“I mean, we don’t like our jobs,” Taylor says with a laugh. “That’s pretty relatable to most people.”
Pharis points out that he does, however, enjoy teaching because it’s different from a regular, “boring” desk job, even if it can be a little bit crazy at times.
“It’s chaotic, but I kind of thrive in that chaos,” he says.
The two say they began doing comedy as The Unteachables “on accident” following Taylor’s firing incident, and they kicked it into high gear when Pharis was “soft fired” from another comedy group called Bored Teachers. Since then, they’ve been featured on NBC, The Breakfast Club, The New York Post, and in the Roast Battle League, to name a few appearances. They also recently filmed a comedy special in Denver that’s slated for release next year.
“I don’t really know how it works,” Taylor says of the joke-writing process. “For me, it’s always been writing at a mic, taking an idea of, ‘Hey, this is what I think is funny,’ thinking of, ‘What is funny about it,’ and then going on stage and trying to figure it out,” Taylor explains. “I can’t really explain the science behind it, but it’s just being aware and being open to what’s funny.”
“And I think, ultimately, it’s about not taking it too seriously,” he adds.
Pharis likens comedy to a haunted house, noting that it’s one of the few outlets in which people gather to either experience emotions or take a break from emotions. In either case, Taylor says that comedy is probably “more natural” than it is “important,” though The Unteachables routine is something that seems to offer a unique release.
“When I’m sitting watching Lou do really well at a show, and I’m watching the crowd, the laughs aren’t like a normal comedy crowd laugh,” he says. “It seems cathartic. It seems like people are releasing things. So it’s been pretty rewarding to go through.”
One instance that came to mind for the pair was a show at The Rialto in Casper, Wyoming, during which a heckler kept talking over Pharis for much of the set. “You just got to keep making jokes, being like, ‘I see why you’re sitting alone, you couldn’t find any friends to be here, and that’s okay, one day you’ll get there,’” recalls Pharis.
He says that the crowd quickly turned on the heckler as he kept his cool on stage. Soon thereafter, security came and escorted the heckler out, eliciting an enthusiastic applause from the audience and one final quip from Pharis:
“I made a joke, I was like, ‘I can’t believe that I can’t even get admin to take a child out of my classroom, but the workers here at this theater got rid of the problem immediately. That’s the education system.’”
Pharis adds that it’s taken time to sharpen his skillset for managing hecklers, and that classroom management definitely helps.
“If you attack an audience member too violently or too quickly, the audience will turn against you,” Pharis says. “You just gotta realize that the audience is on your side, and they’re expecting you to take care of the problem, and so you just kind of go with it, and you have to shut them down.”
“At The Rialto, it was a beautiful kind of master class,” Taylor adds.
So long as they don’t heckle, audience members can expect a unique evening of comedy at one of The Unteachables’ events. First, the two put on a traditional stand-up routine for about an hour or a little longer, before opening up the floor to the audience for a live Q&A session—which Taylor says often results in some of the funniest stories of the evening.
The two also say that, unlike some teaching-focused routines, The Unteachables is a grittier, more-adultlike routine that even errs on the side of being a little raunchy.
“I don’t want to call us bad teachers, because I think all of us are actually really good teachers, but I think we’re just, we’re definitely explicit,” he adds. “I think we just try and have as much fun as we can possibly have. We don’t care about the optics of it.”
Catch The Unteachables at The Comedy Fort in Fort Collins on November 13, and at The Moxi Theater on November 30.
