What's So Funny? Headlining Comic Joe Zimmerman ’05 Finds His Voice and With It Success

Zimmerman came to Davidson with a sense that he wanted to do something creative but that was about as far as he got.

“People always ask you what you're going to do after college,” Zimmerman recalls. “And I would say, ‘I'm not sure yet.’ And they'd say, ‘Well, you have plenty of time to decide.’

“And then, senior year, they're like, ‘You should probably decide,’” he says. “You run out of time very quickly.”

However, late in his senior year, fate intervened. A classmate grabbed Zimmerman’s arm at a party, telling him that his wry remarks were the reason this student dragged himself out of bed for their 8 a.m. British Romanticism class.

“Humor was kind of a survival method in this class because I could not keep up with the reading,” Zimmerman says. “I found that if you could chime in with something slightly funny, it would show that you're listening and engaged and the teacher usually appreciated it.”

His advisor, English Professor Emeritus Zoran Kuzmanovich, remembers how visible Zimmerman’s sense of humor was from the front of the classroom.

“Joe has round, wide open eyes,” he remembers. “And he would tilt his head to one side. It was pretty clear that he was reacting to what a classmate had said.

“I could never figure out if he thought that what the person had said was silly, or stupid, or wise. He just kind of had that look. A little glint in the eyes.”

But that passing comment at the party—Zimmerman can’t remember who said it—made him think that comedy could be more than a last resort. Maybe it was his calling.

He really hadn’t even thought about comedy as an art form until a friend handed him a Mitch Hedberg CD during his sophomore year. He’d attended maybe a handful of actual stand-up shows. He was so new to it that his friend and classmate Peter Meyers remembers Zimmerman reading a Comedy for Dummies book near the end of his senior year.

“It’s insane,” he says of his decision. “It’s like me saying I’m going to be a professional guitar player having only heard four songs.”

Two decades later, Zimmerman is a headlining comic whose jokes fill rooms that are orders of magnitude larger than Chambers classrooms. He’s released CDs, specials and appeared on a host of TV shows and networks. He’s performed across the United States, Europe and Australia and New Zealand.

Turns out, a lot of people feel like that mysterious student who loved Zimmerman’s jokes.

Haha Hustle

That kind of success would be sweet for anyone, but it’s particularly meaningful for those who knew Zimmerman at Davidson.

To them, Zimmerman still sounds like the same person they knew back in college; the guy who didn’t really act like the comedians they saw on TV.

“It was never a doubt about whether he was going to be funny or whether he had the material,” Meyers says. “It was always like, does he have it in him to get up on stage in front of people and do that?”

Zimmerman’s style is understated; almost placid. His voice is soft. His voice is so soothing, in fact, that Zimmerman has posted YouTube videos of himself reading books out loud. (The video of him reading The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane has accumulated more than 100,000 views.)

And his posture—hand on his belly—is casual.

The relaxed vibe, however, belies the effort that goes into his routine.

“He may look casual and laid-back but that is not really the case,” Meyers says. “Under the surface, he works at his craft tirelessly.

“It's fun to listen to the same joke 30 times and see what little twists he puts in it this time and what lands and what doesn't. It opened my eyes to the craft of stand-up,” Meyers, who is a family medicine doctor in Minneapolis, says. “Seeing how many times he'll try a joke before he finds the right formula, it takes talent to put those pieces together.”

Zimmerman spends most mornings in Brooklyn coffee shops, filling notebooks with ideas. (He has bins of old notebooks dating back to 2006 in his apartment.) He performs more than 100 sets a year and records every one, continually optimizing his act—a habit he developed right when he started.

Kathleen Cook ’05, lived with Zimmerman and another classmate in Davidson shortly after graduation.

“Joe was just getting started in comedy and doing a lot of open mic nights in Charlotte,” she says. “He had a tendency to interrupt whatever you were doing to try out a joke, always prefaced by ‘Tell me if this is funny.’”

Reading the Green

Zimmerman played golf for the Wildcats for four years and remains a passionate player.

He and buddies Peter Meyers, Charlie Hapgood and Russ Burns still get together every year and usually build their reunions around golf.

This probably isn’t a surprise to anyone who’s watched Zimmerman’s measured delivery on stage, but he also moves at a deliberate pace in most other places—including the golf course. His buddies have given him a handful of nicknames that reflect his pace of play: Slow-pa or, most recently, Slowy-Z.

“He is just a little slow-moving in the morning,” Meyers says. “He's kind of a guy who likes to take his time, or at least he did in college. On the golf course, that definitely comes out. He's lining up every shot.”

“I have always moved slowly or deliberately, or appeared that way,” Zimmerman says. “In fact, in ninth grade, my soccer nickname was briefly The Sloth.”

Zimmerman and Nate Bargatze frequently pair up during the dead times on tour.

“Nate loves golf and he knew that I played golf,” Zimmerman says. “So we get to play some really nice golf courses.”

On a Roll

Zimmerman’s journey started just down the street from campus at Summit Coffee on Main St.

“He worked for us as a barista and was just great behind the bar,” says Tim Helfrich ’00, one of the owners of Summit Coffee. Helfrich was managing the Main St. location at the time. “The staff loved him and the customers loved him. He took the job seriously without taking anything too seriously. He was just easy to be around.”

When he wasn’t busy, Zimmerman would turn to his notebook, jotting down ideas. At night, he was taking his first steps toward comedy, doing open mics in Charlotte. But he kept it quiet for about six months.

“Sometimes you get a feeling when an employee, you know, asks you for a meeting, and I could tell that he was no longer going to work at Summit,” Helfrich says. “He was very gracious about it and I asked him what he was going to do and he said, ‘Well, I'm going to try stand up-comedy.’ And I thought he was joking.”

Zimmerman moved down I-77 into Charlotte for an AmeriCorps Vista job helping a Habitat for Humanity retail store open a non-profit coffee shop. (Coffee, it turns out, is one of the throughlines in Zimmerman’s life.) The new gig allowed him to hit bars, theaters and open mics where he could get time on stage and develop the calluses young performers need to withstand hostile audiences, low pay and late nights.

After two years, he had built a network in Charlotte and was one of the leading comics in town. But the Queen City isn’t exactly a launching pad for young performers. He would have to leave Charlotte or find something else to do.

“I was probably funny. But I didn’t have professional comedy chops,” Zimmerman says. “I was thinking, ‘I‘m 25 years old. I‘m old. I need to get this career going and this is it.‘ You gotta jump off the cliff if you're gonna do it.”

So he quit his day job and hit the road, working as many gigs as possible. He moved his home base to Asheville, North Carolina, where a good friend offered him a place to live—for cheap.

There was only one catch: That living space was a garage.

“I never got a key to the house. I just had a garage door opener,” he says. “I would just pull my Ford Focus right into my bedroom.”

Turns out, that’s a pretty apt metaphor for those lean years.

“If anybody was concerned about me, they would have been right,” he says. “I just did very strange gigs that barely made any money after gas. It was kind of the opposite of living at Davidson.”

The crucible of those early years helped Zimmerman find his voice. He is a “clean comic” today but he didn’t necessarily start that way.

“I found that if I said a curse word or anything slightly edgy, it just didn't jive with my personality,” he says. “For some comedians, a curse word adds a little pop to the punchline but for me, that just wasn't really the case.”

After five years of doing comedy in North Carolina—and anywhere that would have him—he moved to New York City, where he still lives.

Zimmerman repeated the formula that got him to NYC—hard work, and as much stage time as possible.

Zimmerman appeared on The Late Late Show and at the Montreal Just For Laughs Festival among many others before recording his own Comedy Central’s The Half-Hour in 2014. That same year, he came back through Asheville and recorded his first CD, an hour-long set called Smiling At Wolves. By 2016, he was headlining clubs, making money and becoming the kind of comic people show up to see; not the opener they bump into.

The momentum has continued to build. His second album, Innocence, came out on Comedy Central Records in 2018 and a year later, he recorded a special that has been viewed more than a million times on YouTube.

He has built a reputation and forged relationships with established pros like Maria Bamford, Brian Regan and, crucially, Nate Bargatze.

“You end up crossing paths with hundreds of good comedians. And at the time, [Bargatze] was just an up-and-coming guy on the New York scene,” Zimmerman says. “It's not like I was networking. It's more like we grunted at each other.”

Zimmerman and Bargatze work well together. Their observational and family-friendly humor overlaps neatly. (They also both love to golf. For more, see the sidebar.)

Zimmerman has opened for Bargatze for a couple of years, watching the venues grow in step with Bargatze’s following. Bargatze’s 2023 “Be Funny” tour sold out NBA arenas across the country, with Zimmerman opening the shows to 20,000 faces.

When Bargatze’s scale reached the point that he could launch The Nateland Company, his own production shingle, Zimmerman was one of the first comedians he signed.

“I love working with Joe. Joe fits perfectly with what I am doing with The Nateland Company,” Bargatze said via email. “Obviously, Joe is very funny. But he is someone I can rely on. When he goes on stage, I have no worry that he is not going to crush it … Joe has always been one of my favorite comedians and I was lucky he helped me launch Nateland.”

Last March, almost 10 years after he recorded his first CD in Asheville, Zimmerman returned to his adopted hometown to record Cult Classic, an hour-long special that’s now available on YouTube. Bargatze himself directed the special.

Cult Classic showcases Zimmerman’s trademark jokes—finely observed and delicately worded—but it also shows him leaning into crowd work and showing off his astonishingly quick wit.

Wildcats will notice that the acknowledgements for Cult Classic are loaded with Davidsonians. There’s Steph Curry and a handful of Davidson friends—including Meyers and Cook. Cook, along with Allison Wilner ‘05, Hannah Legerton ‘05 and William High ‘08, surprised Zimmerman by sitting in the front row for the recording.

“He knew we were coming, but none of us knew we'd grab such good seats,” she says.

Zimmerman also thanks his professor, Kuzmanovich.

Kuzmanovich, naturally, is proud of his former student.

“Anytime I see somebody making money with words,” Kuzmanovich says, “that makes me a very happy professor.”

The retired English professor has seen Zimmerman perform a few times and easily recalls some of Zimmerman’s jokes—particularly a bit about airport security. Kuzmanovich has had a couple of joints replaced and is forced to go through the slowest TSA lines, so he finds himself smiling at Zimmerman’s jokes while he waits.

“There is a patient, almost tender attitude that Joe has towards the world,” Kuzmanovich says. “Yes, the world is absurd, but that doesn't mean we can't be tender towards it.”