The AGT comic whose dad was a lobster

Name: The AGT comic whose dad was a lobster
Uploaded: 2019-09-21T13:00:12Z
Duration: 14 min 27 s
Description: People ask Ryan Niemiller dumb questions all the time. One he hears a lot is "Is that genetic?" His answer on the America's Got Talent stage is yes. His mom was Irish and his dad was a lobster.

People ask Ryan Niemiller dumb questions all the time. One he hears a lot is "Is that genetic?" His answer on the America's Got Talent stage is yes. His mom was Irish and his dad was a lobster. more

Ryan was born without most of his fingers, and he builds his act around it. Before the lobster line, he says stand-up is what he always wanted to do. He used to juggle chainsaws, and "it went well for a while," but he had to get out because he "couldn't take the politics."

Kids are the worst, he says, because they have no filter. If a kid says you're ugly, you're ugly, so "deal with that, buy a hat." He starts a story about an eight-year-old girl who screamed when she saw him, then wanders off on a side note and never gets back to her. Now, when a child stares at his arms, he pretends he is discovering them for the first time too.

The next time out, he has just flown in from Indiana, "and boy are my arms missing." One woman asks if he can drive, then if he can read, and he tells her "well, not Braille." A drive-thru worker talks with him the whole time, then signs thank you as he leaves. He still can't tell if that's just her quirk, or if she thought he might have all the disabilities and was covering her bases.

Dating is hard, because women are always like "no," and he doesn't know what that's about. Dressing better might help, but a button-up shirt is too dangerous, since he can get every button except the top one. If he doesn't take anyone home, he sleeps in it, then runs around the house looking for scissors. Then he remembers he is not supposed to have scissors under ideal conditions, let alone near his jugular.

A man with curly hair, glasses and a beard holds a microphone to his mouth on a brightly lit stage. A headline runs in white letters across the lower third. — Ryan explains why one top button makes a dress shirt a trap.

For his next set he wears a buttoned-up shirt, a detail fans love to point out. He opens with "What's up, Club Nub," then explains that nobody checks on New Year's resolutions, which is how he ate an entire cake on January 2nd. His best friend told him to get a Fitbit, which works great "if you were fortunate enough to be born with wrists." He has been counting how many times he drops it, and he's getting 8,000 a day.

He knows some people get uncomfortable when he jokes about his disability, "but this is my life, this is who I am." He's the one telling the jokes, so it's fine, and you're on the team now. Come on in, he says, the water's nice, though he's not getting in himself, because he'd drown.

He grew up in a trailer, where the tornado is the number one predator. When the news broke in with a warning, the advice was always to go to the basement. In a trailer you'd be better off going outside and fist fighting it, "and I did not have fists."

Later he says he drove from Indiana to Los Angeles for the show, "because I'm dumb." Utah is beautiful for about ten minutes and takes nine hours to cross, until it feels like an old Looney Tunes cartoon with the same cactus going by again and again, flipping him off. He also got a one-armed sunburn, which is rough when you're a ginger and have to tan in sections.

A man with curly hair and glasses smiles as he speaks into a microphone on a stage. A headline runs in white letters across the lower third. — Ryan opens another set, this one about a long drive west from Indiana.

He can't swim either, and when his friends ask what happens if he falls off a fishing boat, he has his answer ready. "I'm gonna drown. I've come to terms with that." At the end of his last set, he thanks America for voting him that far, and plenty of viewers still call him their favorite act of the season, whatever the final results were.