By Nick A. Zaino III Globe correspondent, Updated September 4, 2024
The entertainment industry is relentless. Comedians, especially, are often caught up in a cycle of auditioning for TV shows and movies, writing their next one-hour special, and trying to figure out what platform it will be on. But Sam Jay, who stops at the Wilbur on Saturday as part of her busy tour schedule, is in a relaxed place at the moment, concentrating on enjoying her tour and not stressing so much about industry pressures.
“Right now, I’m just kind of having fun with comedy again,” said Jay. “I kind of like not being in this development of an hour mode, because it’s a different part of your brain that has to work to do that. I’m just having fun doing stand-up and connecting with audiences again, and just playing with ideas as they come.”
Audiences at the Wilbur this weekend won’t see Jay working out a particular theme. Instead, the material will depend on her mood. But fans who have seen her 2020 Netflix special, “3 in the Morning,” or last year’s HBO special, “Salute Me or Shoot Me,” will recognize her signature mix of social commentary and brutal honesty in examining her personal life.
“There’s going to be some political jokes in there because that’s just a part of my repertoire,” she said. “There’s going to be some observation in there, because that’s what I do. But to say it’s going to be this or that, I really don’t know what it is going to be.”
Since the start of her career, Jay has eschewed the setup, getting right to the story, trusting the audience to follow along with her naturalistic, conversational style.
“I never was a comic that would get up there and be like, ‘I’m a black, gay woman,’” Jay said. “I always just started talking. I never really set the table in that way.”
“I always was like, ‘I was over here, this thing kind of happened to me,’ and I still approach comedy in that way,” she added. “So I’ve never felt a need to explain myself like that.”
But Jay’s skill set is getting deeper the further she goes and the more she challenges herself to improve. She may be reaching a tipping point where the person she is onstage more closely resembles the often silly, physical person offstage.
“The more I’m up there, the more I learn, the more I know about myself,” Jay said. “So with that, the comfortability comes.”
Jay’s career took off in 2017 and she hasn’t had much of a break since. She grew up in Dorchester and started her comedy career in 2011 after college. Just six years later, she was a “New Face” at the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal, recorded a half-hour special for Comedy Central, and got tabbed to write for “Saturday Night Live.”
Jay left the “SNL” writing job and starred in her own HBO series, “Pause with Sam Jay,” for two seasons from 2021 to 2022. She had a supporting role in Netflix’s “You People” in 2023, alongside personal stand-up hero Eddie Murphy, as well as Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jonah Hill. Her next gig is never too far away.
Jay is currently working on some new projects, but nothing is in a stage where she can talk about it yet. Her name is also attached to a couple of projects as an actor, but she’s not sure of their status. One is a voice-over role, and when asked if that’s something she wants to do more of, Jay admitted, “I just like creating [things], bro.”
“If it makes sense creatively, I’m for it, you know?” she added.
Earlier this year, she got to indulge her Boston sports fandom by participating in “The Roast of Tom Brady” on Netflix. Her set was appropriately incendiary, calling out Brady for everything from his Uggs to his parenting style, but ended with her saying, “I’m a Patriot fan, I’m a Bostonian” — which drew cheers from the audience — “and loving you is a scarlet letter that I wear proudly.”
“They let me pick who I wanted to talk about,” Jay explained. “I knew that I had very passionate feelings about the Patriots and Tom, so it was just kind of easy to tap into that stuff.”
Being from Boston is an important part of who Jay is, as a comedian and a person. One advantage to coming up in the local comedy scene that she especially values was the ability to play to a wide range of crowds.
“I think, particularly, what I got in Boston was an ability to get in front of diverse audiences, [when I was] super young,” Jay said. “There’s just few places that can offer you that, that ability to talk to like a lot of different types of people when you first start out.”
Her busy tour schedule will take her across the county in September, from the East Coast to Sacramento and across the Midwest, including a string of European dates in October. But she’ll be happy to spend a little time in Boston in the middle of that.
“I’m always excited to come home,” Jay said. “I’m super pumped for this Wilbur show. Just always like to come back and remember all those stomping grounds where I was just a little open miker, and now I’m doing the Wilbur. That can’t not feel good.”
SAM JAY At the Wilbur, Sept. 7 at 7 p.m. thewilbur.com