Stirring up late night laughter across the valley

If Jack Schutze gets his way, laughter will be rolling through the hills of the Wimberley Valley.

Schutze, who considers Wimberley his hometown, has set his mind on bringing Austin comics and their comedy to Rough House Brewery and Savage’s Hill Country Bar.

Very familiar with the area, Schutze attended third through sixth grade in Wimberley, but still considers it home as family members live here. He graduated from Cedar Park High School, and then followed that with an accounting degree from Texas State. It certainly wasn’t the ledger that taught him to laugh, but it might have been his stint as a chef and manager of a restaurant. Those hours, and working with different schedules than wife Katie Pasternak Schutze, he finally decided to follow that degree into accounting.

Serious health issues hit him around Christmas last year, an autoimmune disease.

“I basically couldn’t walk for two weeks, it attacked my legs. And part of it was stress related, part was just poor diet, COVID, once I got over it, and got stabilized, it was kind of: ‘If I die tomorrow, the one thing or I would regret is like never having tried to do (comedy).’”

Accountant by day, comic at night. Isn’t that how Bob Newhart got started?

“I just got my first actual booking, it’s only five or 10 minutes. But I do have material and that’s what I opened the show with, five minutes of stuff. Before I started doing comedy, I’ve been writing for a couple years just like ideas, never really punchlines or anything.”

But getting serious about comedy, he picked up his ideas and started to think of how to make the situation even more comical.

“People don’t think they can write jokes. But really it just takes time, like marinating on the subject and turning it over in your head, and you find something weird or clever or silly about it. And then if you listen to enough stand up comedy, you’ll absorb the structure of a joke.”

He needed time on the microphone, or mic time, to be comfortable on stage. His wife’s relatives, the Pasternaks who own Roughhouse Brewery, offered him space for comedy.

“When they first opened the brewery, they asked me about comedy and I said, ‘Oh, it’s too brutal. It’s too brutal. People won’t get it. It’s going to be rough.’ But after meeting Austin comics, and getting to know them, I thought, ‘No, I think I can book the right comics for this place. I can find people that are relatable that aren’t doing too heady material.” Comics in Austin fight for mic time, and in Wimberley it is available.

Since August it’s been a monthly show at the brewery. Then his brother’s friends, owners of Savage’s, heard about it, and decided they would like to do a show too. “It can’t be the same, they’re too close. The Savages show is more of a free flowing kind of wild show where people can sign up at the last minute, and it’s a little all over the place. It’s kind of like a train wreck on purpose, but it’s fun. My show at Roughhouse is very structured. It’s a little bit tighter as far as the performers. I won’t let people come out and do new stuff. Everything’s got to be really tight. And so that’s the formal official showcase.”

Comedy looks easy, especially when you are with your friends. But finally being serious about it and performing it is hard.

“I always thought about comedy. It was really my health stuff that just triggered it, because I was probably scared to go on stage. I thought there was some magic to it. I thought you had to be magic to write comedy. And you really don’t. It takes work. It takes effort.”

“We warn that it is not a kid friendly show. ‘Adult themes and politically incorrect’ is how we advertise it so people can’t get upset when they show up and get offended.”

The shows at Rough House are on October 14 and November 11 at 7:30 to 9 p.m. and at Savages 1st and 3rd Wednesdays from 8 to 10 p.m.