When Mike Seville was growing up, he loved watching comedians on TV and often thought he could do better, but he was well along with his career as a correctional officer in prisons before he found the courage to perform at a comedy club in Richmond.
“Comedy is a hustle. If you want to do comedy as a living, you’ve got to hit the clubs, you’ve got to travel. You’ve got to live on a shoestring.”
Still, he enjoyed the occasional performance.
“Maybe it’s a little bit thrill-seeking, because you’re either going to bomb or do alright,” he explains.
And he did better than alright -- time and again winning comedy club competitions.
A skinny guy with glasses, dressed in a coat and tie, people sometimes said he made them laugh even before he told a joke, and a talent scout once gave him a surprising piece of advice.
““Your material is great," he recalls, 'but drop the funny voice,' 'and I’m like, ‘I cannot. This is my for-real voice.'"
So when the Virginia Department of Corrections hosted a TEDx at the Greensville Correctional Center, an hour south of Richmond, the prison’s warden was asked to perform.
“Anyone with children in here? Yes? Yeah -- me too," he began. "I have six. You have to remember I didn’t have cable. You know what happens when you have six kids ? You get more kids. When my kids would be outside, people would just stop their car and drop their kids off. ‘Oh, here’s where all the kids play. Go ahead.’ One day it was nice out – a spring day. A little girl I never saw before in my life comes blasting through the screen door, stops in the kitchen, looks at me and says, ‘Where are the popsicles?’"
He shared the secret ingredient for effective fatherhood – reading from the back of a box of the antihistamine Benadryl.
“'Do not use to make children drowsy.’ What? Come on Benadryl 'Warning! You’ll be broke,' because that’s the only reason people buy this stuff.”
Noticing that the director of the Department of Corrections was in the crowd he added…
“I just want you to know, ‘I don’t really drug the kids to sleep – very often.”
He recalled the challenges of raising a teenaged daughter who needed a dress for homecoming – and a few months later a dress for prom.
“‘I think you just got a homecoming dress. Wear that.’ She said, ‘I can’t wear that.’ I’m like, ‘Why not?’ She’s like, ‘People saw me in it.’ And I know all the ladies in here are going, ‘Yeah. You can’t wear that.’ So the very next year she comes to me again and says, ‘Dad, I need a homecoming dress.’ I said, ‘No, we are not doing this again. I got this all figured out. You wear last year’s prom dress to homecoming, homecoming to prom. You mix it up, and no one knows.’ She’s like, ‘Yes they will.’ I was like, ‘They won’t remember last year.’ ‘Yes they do. They took my picture.’”
And then there’s the story of his own childhood – trying to go high enough to flip the swing set in his backyard. He got close before falling off, then sitting up in time to get hit in the face by the swing.
“I jump up. I put my T-shirt over my face. My sister gets off the swing and says, ‘Oh my god, don’t tell on me.’ She ran in the house to find our sisters who were the babysitters. They said, ‘Oh my god, his eyeball’s missing.’ ‘Oh my god. I don’t have an eyeball, so now I’m really freaking out. They’re freaking out. Everyone’s freaking out. They run to the sink and get the dish rag and slap it on my face. It still smells like soup and Clorox.”
Seville says it’s a great story to use when he’s training new prison managers. His students can’t look away.
“Because you’re like, ‘Which eyeball got knocked out.’ Right?”
It turned out he’d suffered a cut across his eyebrow and lid, causing so much bleeding that no one could tell his eye was there and unharmed. Seville says he finds humor in many situations, but he has yet to tell a story set behind bars.
“Not that funny things don’t happen, but + I have six children, so that’s decades worth of material.”
Inmate David Annarelli, a jailhouse journalist who writes pithy columns about the problems in what he calls the Virginia Department of Corruption, was in the audience that day. He’s never had a kind word for the warden until now.
“I was pretty impressed. He was really good. I give him props. He was a good comedian.”
Seville hopes that by sharing humor with prisoners and guards he can build a better working relationship. He claims comedy can diffuse a lot of situations, because it’s hard to feel stressed out and laugh at the same time.
