Hello. I’m
Slade Ham
Hailing from Houston, Slade Ham has performed in 60 countries on six continents. His new full-length theater special, Signal/Noise, is out now. Ham has headlined Sirius/XM’s Best of Texas as well as the feature length The Whiskey Brothers Comedy Special. His latest special looks at what is and isn’t important in our lives, and it showcases his signature storytelling style alongside clever social commentary.
Offstage, you can read Until All the Dragons Are Dead, his collection of critically acclaimed stories. Ham also hosts the weekly Slade Ham Experiment, the wildly popular bi-weekly Whiskey Brothers Podcast, and is featured in over 30 episodes of Slade Runner, a travel series following his adventures around the globe. His live show is what does best, however. It’s stand-up all the way down.
Thoughts and Blogs
Measuring Sticks
In the world of the independent artist, there aren’t obvious measuring sticks by which to judge our progress. It’s why we often compare ourselves to our friends and peers. My special has gotten 30,000 views this month. Is that extraordinary? Just ordinary? A miserable failure? How would I even know? There are only a few ways. You can Google averages and metrics, but national averages are hardly useful. You can also look at what similar artists are getting, but that is also deceptive in a world...
Survival Mode
My new stand-up show talks about how being in survival mode and being happy are mutually exclusive. In the show I use wildlife and relationships as illustrations, but it probably applies more to an artist's career. You want to be happy? You have to take yourself out of the grind first. You have to get out of clawing for the next dollar and hoping things work out. That feeling of always running - always having to think your way out of a corner – is survival mode. Have you ever seen a peacefully...
Sora and AI Film Making
There’s a lot of talk about the capabilities of Sora, the AI text-to-film generator. There’s no escaping that artificial intelligence will play an inevitable role in our entertainment from here forward. As an entertainer I worry about this, though perhaps not as much as my graphic design, fine art, photographer, and filmmaker friends. It has implications in a variety of written mediums as well, from novels to screenplays. My Kindle home page is already full of LLM-written children’s books....
What Myth Persists?
I often think about how quickly stories can change. How I can’t turns to I can just because it has no choice. I think about the things we hold to be true at any given time. I’m not smart enough. I’m not very creative. Good things never happen to me. Here’s one I hear a lot: I can’t listen to the sound of my own voice. That’s a big one. When I ask other comics if they watch tape of their sets, many tell me no. And the majority of those cite not being able to listen to themselves on tape as the...
We Did It!
Hello from the edge of the universe! That’s how far you’ve got to walk to get things done sometimes. We’re sliding into the last remaining hours of 2023, and in them, I get to present the trailer for Signal/Noise! We’re a bit behind schedule, but all of it for good reason. We (myself and my creative team) decided to delay the finished film slightly to add a few bells and whistles. The opening of the special is a real piece of art, I think, and the final edit on the special itself is light...
