Ever since his childhood, IU junior Simon Mayer loved making people laugh. Now, he’s taking his passion to a bigger stage.

Growing up in a “comedy household,” Mayer, 21, bonded with his family by watching various stand-up comedy specials on TV. It was John Mulaney’s 2015 Netflix special, “John Mulaney: The Comeback Kid” – which he first heard in his hairdresser’s studio while getting a haircut –  that first inspired his love for the art form.

“[My hairdresser] had it on in the background, and I remember audibly laughing, and I couldn’t even see the TV,” Mayer said. “I ended up going home and rewatching the whole thing, and I remember where I was in my house when I watched it too.”

Although Mayer was a huge fan of the comedy world, he initially did not consider trying to pursue it himself. However, that all changed during lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic.

While isolated at home, Mayer began posting skits of himself on his TikTok account. Before long, his content began growing in popularity. Currently, his page has 1.1 million followers and has amassed over 190 million views on the platform.

“I started gaining some tractions within the first couple weeks of the start date of me posting,'” Mayer said. “After about a month, I had already had about 50,000 followers.”

After receiving positive feedback from his content on TikTok, Mayer decided to pursue other avenues of comedy to flex his muscles. During his senior year of high school, he and his friends decided to put on their own stand-up comedy show for their friends and families. Despite it being his first time performing stand-up, Mayer performed onstage for an entire 16-minute set.

“There are some jokes in there where I think, ‘That was pretty good,'” Mayer said. “And then there’s also some stuff where it’s very obviously an amateur, very obviously a beginner, and very obviously a 17-year-old.”

Since his freshman year at IU, Mayer has explored multiple avenues of the Bloomington comedy scene, including his newest passion – sketch comedy. Now in his junior year, Mayer is an active member of Boy in the Bubble, IU’s longest-running sketch comedy group.

“The ability to make a large group of people laugh is such a cool experience, and it’s cool to do it with your friends as well,” Mayer said. “There’s a synergy that comes with that. My favorite thing sometimes is when something goes wrong, and you are just reacting to that.”

Although Mayer regularly performs in sketch comedy, he makes it a priority to keep practicing his stand-up routine. One way he does that is by practicing his sets at open-mic nights at Bloomington’s iconic venue, The Comedy Attic. Mayer himself has performed at the Attic over a dozen times, and loves welcoming atmosphere for new comics.

“It’s a safe place to start and to try which is really critical,” Mayer said. “There’s a lot of college kids that go through the Attic, and really grow and really give themselves a foundation.”

When it comes to his writing process, Mayer has “different gears” from writing stand-up versus writing a sketch for Boy in the Bubble. He says that he likes to think of performing comedy as working on your muscles in the gym.

“I kind of have to shift my brain from sketch [to] ‘stand-up mode,'” Mayer said. “After a couple of workouts, after a couple of days or weeks of constantly thinking about it, you’ll finally get yourself into that mode.”

When he is in “stand-up mode,” Mayer uses his notes app to jot down potential joke ideas. Many of these ideas draw from observations, personal interactions, or random thoughts in his head.

“My notes app is insane, it looks like the notes app of a crazy person,” Mayer said. “It’s a lot of dumb ideas, [but] usually the good ideas come out of the notes app.”

Once he has a set planned out, Mayer workshops his jokes with his roommates, who are also aspiring comics.

“I know a joke is good when [they] will start to riff off of it, and come up with their own jokes,” Mayer said. “We both want to be better, so it’s great to have someone to bounce ideas off of.”

By the time Mayer is ready to perform, his set has been reviewed, polished, and rehearsed in his head dozens of times. Although it is a long, tedious process, in Mayer’s eyes it all becomes worth it once he gets to perform the material.

“I really honor and like just the work of it all, honestly,” Mayer said. “There’s a feeling right after you say something that you wrote, and that’s been in your head for a while, and it gets a reaction, and you have this little ‘I did it’ [feeling].”