Kevin Corrigan started his career writing comedy articles and viral sketch videos for Collegehumor.com. After that he moved from NYC to Boulder, Colorado, to pursue a career in climbing media, spending the next seven years as the digital editor for Climbing Magazine, where he continued to write comedy, albeit about rock climbers, among news and other stories. Now he’s a freelance writer and editor. He enjoys highlighting climbers that are having more fun taking the sport less seriously, and writing about his own travels where he seeks out big adventures on long, approachable routes. He’ll soon be launching a climbing comedy substack, which you can follow now at Inside Rock Climbing.

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Q&A with Kevin Corrigan: The Funny Man

 

Summit Journal: Your Instagram bio reads: “Road biker. Proud father. IT specialist. Kentucky native. Foodie. None of these terms describe me.” So what terms do describe you these days?

Kevin Corrigan: I’m a freelance writer and editor based in Boulder, Colorado, originally from New Jersey. I’m probably most well-known for my humor writing (I’m the guy that invented free solo trad climbing). 

I like rock climbing, especially long bolted routes. I’ll climb trad when my partners make me, or boulder when I can’t find a partner. I also trail run, I’m a woodworking student at the local community college, I play guitar — I love punk music — and in the past year I’ve started competing in the very-niche world of grip sports, which I’m terrible at but has been great for my climbing.

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SJ: Building on the question above, one term many folks would use to describe you is “funny.” What do you think?

KC: I hope so. I tend to think I’m funnier on paper than in real life. I have plenty of friends who are funnier than me day-to-day, but couldn’t write a humor piece. It’s just a different skill. In person, I joke a lot, but my humor is very dry, so you either get it or don’t realize that I’m joking and think I’m a lunatic.

 

Corrigan outsmarted inflation when he ordered eight pairs of Sportiva Katana Laces when they announced the current redesign in 2022, fearing an inferior fit. Had he invested that money in the stock market instead, he could have bought even more pairs of Katana Laces today. Photo: Kevin Corrigan

 

SJ: Along the way, you interned at The Onion, wrote for CollegeHumor for about six years, and graduated from Rowan (Atkinson) University. Did you always want to be a funny man?

KC: Yeah. From a young age, I was obsessed with The Simpsons and would watch Spaceballs on repeat. It didn’t feel like something I was allowed to pursue, though. My parents both grew up in lower-class Brooklyn families where the priority was to make money so you could live a safe and secure life. 

When I’d express that I wanted to do comedy, it’d be dismissed with, “Oh, that’s impossible.”

I ended up going to school for journalism. At the time Rowan University had great student publications, and I spent most of my free time working on the newspaper and alternative magazine. I managed to publish 100 things by the time I’d graduated, mostly humor. Then, even though I sort of wasn’t actively pursuing it, I’d done enough comedy writing that I was able to get an internship at CollegeHumor, which turned into a job. 

Even though I didn’t believe I could pursue comedy or think I was allowed to, I somehow did it anyway without realizing it.

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SJ: How did you get into writing about climbing?

KC: I got laid off from CollegeHumor in 2013 because Facebook stole all the traffic and advertisers away from real websites. 

At the time, I was living in New York City. If I wanted to continue my comedy career, I would’ve had to move to Los Angeles or stay in NYC. I didn’t like either of those options. I did apply at SNL and The Daily Show, but didn’t get those. 

What I really wanted was to move closer to the mountains. I started my own outdoor sports website during that time. I also sent an unsolicited resume to Climbing Magazine. They had no job posted, but my timing was good. They knew their online editor was leaving. 

What followed was a drawn-out, six-month process where they offered me the job, then reposted it and interviewed other people without telling me, and my now-wife and I had to move into my Grandma’s apartment… Ultimately, it worked out, which allowed us to move to Colorado.

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SJ: You’ve stood out in climbing through your humor writing (no surprise there). Is climbing inherently funny? How do you find the funny (when thinking about potential stories)?

KC: Well, two things. First, climbing has a lot of strong personalities, so that’s a fun thing to play with. I enjoy writing in character. And two, climbing has a lot to mine for satire because so many people tie their egos to the way they choose to pursue the sport. That leads to people taking things that don’t matter very, very seriously. 

The more seriously people take things that don’t matter, the more they should be made fun of, in my opinion. 

I tend to go after attitudes I see, mostly online, that I think are negative, or stupid, or uninclusive. People who write long comments on Mountain Project or Reddit, often about tradition or preserving history or other such nonsense that boils down to telling other people the right and wrong way to have fun. That’s the kind of thing that often inspires a humor piece for me. 

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is we should retrobolt Snake Dike.

On the other hand, sometimes it’s fun to write humor that is just silly or relatable.

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SJ: It seems like there used to be more humor pieces in climbing. For example, climbing used to have its own brand of irreverence and counter-cultural humor, thinking of Warren Harding’s zine and the Vulgarian Digest, among others. Obviously, the culture and business of climbing (and outdoor sports in general) has changed, but is there still a space for humor?

KC: I have noticed that about outdoor sports media. I think the problem is that a lot of comedy writers aren’t very athletic and don’t go outside. I’m half joking.

I think the change you described is just a fact of climbing becoming more popular and mainstream. The Vulgarians were a reaction to the Appalachian Mountain Club, who, at the time, controlled access at The Gunks.* Warren Harding was the cultural opposition to Royal Robbins and the Valley Puritans. 

Now, Google engineers work out on their office bouldering wall during their lunch break; the sport isn’t counter-culture anymore, so it lacks that rebellious spirit that tends to bring humor with it. There is a lot of climbing humor today, though, maybe not in prose, but from meme accounts, podcasts, and TikTok/Instagram creators, but a lot of it doesn’t aim to be subversive like those historic climbers.

*Yes, I learned about this when I Googled it for this question.

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SJ: Do people take climbing too seriously? (This seems to be one critique you’re making in your piece in SJ 323, “I, On the Ground, Know Which Holds You Should Use”).

KC: If there’s any consistent theme throughout my climbing comedy writing, it’s that people should take the sport less seriously. 

I say that as someone who organizes their entire life around climbing and training for climbing. You can take climbing seriously without taking it seriously. That specific piece wasn’t too deep. I was making fun of beta sprayers and the fact that I always think I can see holds from the ground that don’t exist when my partners are climbing. 

Sometimes I am making fun of myself.

 

The Climbing Magazine team during the unplanned Wadi Rum bivvy, made less unpleasant thanks to a fortuitous cache of blankets they found in a bush. Photo: Kevin Corrigan

 

SJ: Speaking of serious climbing, why did you have to take an unplanned bivy on top of a 1,000-foot cliff in Wadi Rum?

KC: Haha! I blame the guidebook. So we were on a Climbing Magazine staff trip to Jordan in 2016. We climbed the 1,100-foot Pillar of Wisdom on Jebel Rum, which is right above town. The guidebook had one sentence about the descent, which was something like “Follow the descent trail down.” We expected an easy walk-off. 

It was a highly competent group which included: Ben Hoiness, who is an Exum guide; James Lucas, who has freed El Cap; Andrew Burr, who is probably the most-prolific, but least-known climbing photographer out there. Burr has been to virtually every country on earth shooting climbing; oh, and Marwan Maayta, a really talented Jordanian climber WHO HAD CLIMBED THE ROUTE BEFORE. We shouldn’t have had any trouble getting off this mountain.

We got to the top at 5 p.m. and made a necessary rappel off a ledge into a basin below the true summit. It was filled with sandstone domes, just a maze, and there were useless cairns in every direction. Maayta didn’t remember the way, it’d been a few years. We searched everywhere until after dark. We had three headlamps across seven people and were out of food and water. People started doing the thing they do when they’re lost long enough — I have observed this a few times now — where they start exploring sketchier and sketchier terrain.

I was the least competent person in the group, so at some point I announced, “If we keep going like this, I’m probably going to get hurt.” That’s when we called it for the night, figuring we’d be able to see the way down first thing in the morning. The local Bedouins go up there to hunt, and we found caches of sleeping pads and wool blankets in the bushes we were able to use. Even still, it was a shiver bivvy and we had to keep a fire going all night.

We did not find the descent path first thing in the morning. It took us three more hours and Burr scrambling up a rappel route from the true summit in jogging shoes to spot it. It was not a walk off. It was eight rappels with some scrambling and slot canyons in between. So yeah, I blame the guidebook. We could’ve used at least one more sentence.

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SJ: Humor is such an effective tool for communicating, especially for challenging, complicated, or controversial ideas (i.e., the popularity of John Oliver), and especially during challenging, complicated, or controversial times. In your own writing, how do you think about when and how to apply humor vs. more straight-forward communication? (I.e., for impact, storytelling, to get through an informational bit quickly, etc.).

KC: That’s a very intelligent question, and I wish I had a smart answer. I think my default way of communicating is with humor, so if it isn’t inappropriate to work laughs into a piece, I will. 

But it’s also an effective way to get people to click your article and keep them engaged. In today’s Internet of melodramatic YouTube thumbnails, you do have to grab people’s attention immediately in order for your content to get any traction. Humor is a great way to do that. Just, you know, don’t do it for an obit.

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SJ: For budding humorists, what advice would you give them about making a career of it?

KC: I think the advice is the same for any kind of writing or performing: you have to start doing it, and you have to do it a lot to get good at it (just like rock climbing). 

No one starts off good at writing. It’s a craft, like being a sculptor or chef or something. So write a lot, revise, get feedback from people with good taste, consume a lot of content, and think about what you like or don’t like about it. Put in the hours. If your work is good, you can get it out there and get noticed. A lot of people like the idea of being a writer, but don’t write anything. Those people never succeed. 

My most successful friends — the ones writing for Last Week Tonight, or SNL, or selling out Radio City Music Hall with their comedy Dungeons and Dragons podcast — are the ones that have worked the hardest to be great. I don’t include myself on that list because I spend too much time rock climbing.

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SJ: And to wrap things up, is pizza the best post-wedding food?

KC: Pre-wedding, mid-wedding, post-wedding, honeymoon, yeah, all of it. Not sure why you’d even eat other foods unless they’re on top of the pizza.

 

 

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Feature Image by Alton Richardson.