Jordan Peele Talks About How Live Comedy Helped Prepare Him For Failure

Over the last five years, Jordan Peele has reinvented himself as one of the most acclaimed horror filmmakers working today. His directorial debut, "Get Out," won him an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, which is about as successful as you can get for a first-time filmmaker. However, as any "Key & Peele" fan knows, Peele comes from a comedy background, and for him, the road to movies like "Get Out," "Us," and "Nope," was paved with as much failure as success.

Sketch comedy is one thing, of course, but live comedy can be especially brutal for a performer onstage if and when their jokes bomb and they have to deal with rejection from the audience in real-time (not unlike the classic "Key & Peele" sketch where an insult comic meets his match). On a recent episode of the Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard podcast, Peele discussed how enduring the travails of painful comedy failures earlier in his career helped toughen him up mentally, saying:

"I did so much live comedy in the beginning of my career, I look at it as an era that helped teach me to fail. It still didn't quite protect me for how painful some of these failures have been, but I feel like I'm past my largest failure. Even if I have a bigger failure. I feel like I'm past the one that will hurt me the most."

Movies can be judged quickly, too, as they tend to live or die nowadays by aggregated critic and audience scores and their opening weekend gross at the box office. Though Peele as a filmmaker has mostly enjoyed success on that front, he also knows what it feels like to put something out there and have it meet with hostility or utter indifference. That's a challenge many less established filmmakers face as they contend with a crowded streaming marketplace where recognition or outside acknowledgment isn't always forthcoming.

Beyond directing, Peele has also served as an executive producer for shows like "The Twilight Zone," "Hunters," and "Lovecraft Country," not all of which have enjoyed renewal. Amid the white noise of a culture with so many entertainment options, Peele seems to have cultivated a healthy attitude that enabled him to weather failure and not let it derail him from further creative endeavors. He concluded by saying:

"I think the thing that I'm always trying to engage the conversation with myself is this idea of the ego monster. Because when something doesn't go your way, or you don't get your credit or your love or your thing, you know there's that really dark physical feeling that happens, that you really have to work at. You have to just kind of remind yourself to be able to exist without fearing that your existence is in jeopardy. But so much of the way that we, I'm assuming, have gotten to this position is this protective zone that has served us in a lot of ways, but has also sort of prevented us from other creative things that hopefully we can do."