Artist Profile: Comedian Jack F. Griffin ’25 on Cross Sections in Comedy From Visual Art to Data Analytics

John “Jack” F. Griffin ’25 never dabbled in the art of comedy before his senior year of high school. After a surprising and unexpected defeat in his school’s student government election, his administration pitched him an “insane” idea to stay involved with student leadership — an improvisational comedy troupe.

“I gotta make up funny things on the spot in front of my entire high school, which was like nightmare fuel for a high schooler. And not only that, but lead the group, but I agreed to do it. So I did some research into what it was, and what it took, and started a group,” he said.

While passionate about many different groups on campus, Griffin, a senior at Harvard, has been in the comedy scene for quite some time. He has been involved with Harvard’s Immediate Gratification Players for four years and serves as co-president of the Harvard Undergraduate Stand-up Comic Society — abbreviated HUSUCS, and pronounced “HU sucks.”

“When I came here, I immediately started looking for different comedy opportunities on campus,” he said.

Griffin has made significant advancements in comedic adventures of his own — he has recently become involved with the theater scene not only as an actor in a few different shows with the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club, but bringing his own comedy shows to the Loeb Drama Center as well.

The Loeb Experimental Theater, also known as the “Loeb Ex,” is a black box theater inside the Loeb Drama Center where many student plays, musicals, and dance shows from the HRDC and other theater groups have a home. It is hardly known for hosting stand-up comedy shows, but through an extensive process and endless communication with the HRDC, Griffin was able to bring an original comedy show, “Speakeasy: The Faire,” to life.

“Speakeasy was an opportunity for stand-up comics that have been talking about, ‘Oh, I want to take it further. I want to have more stage time,’” he said. “I’m like, ‘All right, great. We all want to do this. Someone just has to do the work.’”

Griffin first held “Speakeasy” in his dorm, attracting a “huge turnout” of about 80 people. When he heard that the Loeb Ex had a one-week “dead space,” during which no productions were scheduled, he decided to bring the show there.

Griffin is passionate about the arts at Harvard. Through the comedy show, he aimed not only to bring the many different art groups on campus together in one place, but allow people who don’t get the chance to showcase their talents to have a stage on which to put their work out into the world.

“Being able to do [Speakeasy] in the Loeb Ex was an awesome opportunity to connect with the theater world — the HRDC, which I was now connected with — and show them the comedy world, and show the comedy world the theater world,” he said.

Griffin combined many different disciplines in “Speakeasy,” devoting a display space to pottery and paintings from local artists while incorporating musical performances and a science experiment.

“As my friend Payton Thompson put it, it works because comedy is such an accessible art form. So, with other art forms, sometimes you need some background to understand it. But the hope is that everyone can appreciate a good joke even if they don't know the work that goes behind it,” he said.

There is still more comedy in the future for Griffin. He is currently working on a comedic play that he co-wrote with one of his closest friends, Mack D.W. Webb ’25. “Jest the Way You Are” is the brainchild of Griffin’s humor, which revolves around his “love of people” and making unique characters, and Webb’s knowledge of comedic tropes and ability to reshape them to fit a specific vision.

“This is something we’ve been working on for a little bit over a year now, with retooling the script and building this world of just trying to make the funniest show that we can,” he said.

The production plans to run at the Loeb Ex from Dec. 5 to Dec. 8.

Though comedy has evolved into a very central part of Griffin’s efforts on campus, he is also endlessly curious about and involved in sustainability both on and off campus. He helped lead sustainability conferences as far as Indonesia as part of the education program of the Harvard Undergraduate Clean Energy Group.

Griffin came into Harvard with aspirations to become a sustainability engineer, but a change of plans has directed his education towards data analytics and applied mathematics — with a serving of Theater, Dance, and Media on the side.

“People always think it’s funny when I tell them I’m an Applied Math and TDM major because they’re so different. But for me, they’re just two different ways to understand the world and explain them,” he said.

Griffin emphasizes the different ways in which comedy and data analysis have changed his way of viewing the world. For him, data analytics brings out the importance of the work that one’s subconscious puts in when figuring out the informational inputs that enter the brain.

“People value logic, like ‘Are you taking this direct line of thinking,’ but your subconscious is developed by your lifetime of human experiences. And so trusting your instincts is trusting the millions of little things in your brain that are telling you what has happened before and what you should do,” he said.

Connecting the importance of the subconscious to the arts, Griffin says that an aspiring artist simply needs to trust the instincts that they spend countless hours developing. Improvisational theater has helped him trust his instincts in that it forces him to drop his filter and trust what he is about to say.

“You’ve been in real life situations before, and you’ve known how to react. If you’re just trying to recreate them, trust how you want to react, because you have those millions of little things in your brain,” he said.

The value that Griffin holds most dear when creating art is being people-driven. To him, comedy is a tool that has the power to highlight the importance of a good story. His style, therefore, is abundant with unique characters from all walks of life. For Griffin, comedy is a way to give love to people and make them feel joyful in life.

“I am driven by my love of people — because that's all there is when you get down to it in this world — and looking out for people and also giving really true, lovely depictions of people on stage,” he said. “So, that’s why a lot of my writing is drawn from the comedy of people because they’re so funny and weird, and I think they’re so lovely.”