Connor Wood Is Living the ‘Viral Star Turned Touring Comedian’ Dream

In the early days of the pandemic, when most of the early TikTok stars were doing viral dances or sharing on-trend recipes, Connor Wood became known on the app for just … talking. “I was like, ‘Oh, legally I can post whatever,’” he says. He mused on life and riffed with his friends, but didn’t realize what he was really doing until a talent agency reached out and told him, “This is comedy.”

Now, Wood—who hails from Texas and says he’s 20-“redacted” years old—is in the middle of a sold-out standup tour. He’s hardly posted any of his material online, and yet, his dates sell out before he even has time to share the link with his 849,000 TikTok followers. He’s currently making his way across the United States and will stop in London and Dublin at the end of November.

If you haven’t seen Wood’s videos on TikTok, there’s still a good chance he’s come across your For You page via clips of the video podcast that he does with Brooke Averick, Brooke and Connor Make a Podcast. It was there that Woods’ now-infamous “luckily I have purse” soundbite was born. I asked him how often people still parrot the line back to him. “Every day,” he says with a tinge of disbelief.

Here Wood talks about the social-media-to-comedy pipeline, selling out shows as a novice, and the career he’s building for himself once TikTok finally, maybe, at some point, gets banned.

GQ: TikTok was such an unprecedented boon for creators. Is this close to how you thought your life would go?

Wood: No. I went to school for engineering and then failed every class. I changed to business and then I changed to advertising. I worked at Vans for a little bit in college on the marketing team, and then I went to Bumble senior year, and I actually worked with influencers and content creators—a lot of them that I’m friends with now, which is weird. So I knew the other side of influencing, working on the brand side, of all that. And then I moved over to Bird scooters, which is actually why I moved to LA. A lot of startup experience, which actually provides a lot of content for standup.

I realized really quickly after being [brought on] at these places that I was a personality hire. I was like, “Oh, people like hanging out with me ’cause I’m kind of the court jester.” But then when it came down to quarterly reviews, the court jester met none of his goals. I was like, “When I get to LA I’m gonna start doing open mics.” I’m all talk. I never did it. And then I got let go during Covid. I’m living with my friends. I’m posting these videos. It was fun at first, and then they all got back to their jobs. And I couldn’t get a job, so I kept posting. And then eventually down the road at some point, when I got signed at UTA, they were like, “This is comedy. If you wanna do this on a stage, this is standup comedy.”

When you first joined TikTok, what kind of videos were you making?

It was a dancing app. That’s what everyone was doing. And I was like, “Oh, legally I can post whatever.” It felt like you couldn’t, but you totally could. I started talking to the camera. And there were only a couple people doing comedy on TikTok, which I think played to my benefit a lot. It was so fun during that time. It’s still fun right now.

And you mentioned living with your friends. Were you in a content house?

At first, no. When I moved up to LA, I moved in with Brooke [Averick], who’s my podcast co-host; Jack Martin, who’s an actor; and Sally Darr Griffin, who is another creator. And we were like, “We should just do content.” That was where I learned to treat it like a job. We gotta wake up and we gotta clock in, send emails, do calls, write stuff.

Brooke is a frequent collaborator of yours. Is that how you met?

The four of us had been grouped together because we were some of the only people really talking to the camera. We’re not doing stunts or dancing or whatever. And she ended up coming out to visit LA and we would do videos together, and every time we did videos together, they would go 11-million-views viral. And it was just us talking. So we got reached out to, and they were like, “You wanna start a podcast?”

Why do you think you guys work so well off of each other?

It’s an act of God. I don’t know. I’m like, AI could never do the dumb, dumb conversations that we have. It’s not forced at all, which is nice. We sit down and I forget that the cameras are rolling.

So how did you finally give standup a go?

The first show that I did, it was a five-minute set [right before comedian] Lisa Ann Walter. I killed, and she was like, “That was a great set.” And then I was like, “I’m a comedian, I did five minutes, I killed it. This is it.” Next set, I did seven minutes—bombed. And my team was like, “You need to go up again.” I bombed so many times after that, but also killed so many times after that. It was another comedian, Tim Dillon, who was like, “You need to go up.” I was reading a lot of books about standup and he was like, “You could read a bunch of books about tennis too, but unless you go play tennis, you’re not gonna get any better.” It is about just going up and sucking or doing well to get reps in.

It becomes part of the work. Does it feel like that yet?

Yeah. I had two shows last night, and the first one murdered. I was like, “I’m great.” Second one, at the beginning I was like, “Oh crap.” It is also crowd-dependent. It’s kind of a mental game where it’s like, “Wow, if that crowd would’ve been first, I would’ve cut those jokes and the second crowd, they wouldn’t have gotten those jokes that they loved.” It’s a guess-and-check experiment. I don’t think you ever stop.

I’ve interviewed a few different types of creators who are comedians, and some go all-in on posting clips on TikTok. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen yours. Is that purposeful?

I haven’t posted clips yet, and it’s funny ’cause I’m selling out every show. So people just kind of trust the process. And I’m like, thank God. I am making sure stuff’s tight before I start posting. I did start posting clips and then someone actually left a comment on the clip and was like, “This is an almost-good joke. I think if you did it a couple more times and posted it when you had it tighter, I think this would go Matt Rife level.” And that stuck with me.