“People don’t go to the states and go, ‘You know what? I’m a first generation immigrant. What should I do? I’m going to do comedy,’” comedian Pedro Gonzalez says. “I mean, I’m not saying, ‘Wow, what a brave choice,’ because it was kind of my only choice. That’s what I was led to. But if you think about it, it’s a little crazy.”

In 2019, Gonzalez was a finalist in the New York’s Funniest comedian search and became the first Latino immigrant to perform stand-up on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. On Oct. 23, he’ll perform at The Wildish Theater.

Gonzalez doesn’t think the movie Goodwill Hunting (1997) is very realistic. In fact, he knows from experience that it’s not. He still likes it, though.

But when he moved here from Colombia at 18-years-old, the first job he got was working as a janitor at a daycare, not unlike the Matt Damon’s character in Goodwill Hunting who becomes a janitor at a college rather than attending — only to find that he’s the biggest genius of them all. “I love that movie,” Gonzalez says. “But then once I lived a little bit of what it was like to start from the bottom, it was like, ‘Oh, this movie is such a lie,’” he laughs. “I really despised every minute of it.”

Gonzalez grew up in Colombia, from a complicated, yet loving family who make frequent appearances in his comedy writing. He just recently crafted a joke about how his dad would go to the lottery every day and choose Gonzalez’s birthday for his lucky numbers. “But then on my birthday, he didn’t buy me a gift,” Gonzalez says. “I think that’s why I have to be a stand-up comedian. To be like ‘Why? Why so on the nose?”

Gonzalez and his family moved from Colombia because “like many other immigrants, we were out of options.” He says that in the U.S., “we knew that you could make a little bit of a more viable living. Not necessarily that we’re going to go and have great jobs, but even if we do the lower job in the United States, it’s going to give us a better option than what we have at this moment.”

Even still, he wasn’t exactly excited to give up his scholarship for college in Colombia to come here and be a janitor. After a year of mop-wielding, he and his brother got jobs at Dunkin’ Donuts before Gonzalez left to pursue a degree in Spanish literature at UCLA. “It was hard,” he says. “When you show up to a country and you don’t know the language, and you don’t have any safety net, or you haven’t seen your grandpa or your father go to college over here, you don’t have anything.”

When the brothers told their Dunkin’ manager that they were leaving to chase education, Gonzalez says she gathered all of the employees to give them a round of applause and a speech. The manager proudly declared, “‘We always knew they were going to go to college. We knew they were better than staying here serving coffee,’” Gonzalez remembers. “And she said this in front of people who have been working there for like 15 years. And I was like, ‘That’s so rude,’” he laughs, acknowledging that she didn’t mean to be rude, and he was very appreciative of the support. 

He stopped pursuing degrees part-way through his Ph.D. after completing his masters. “I think both the school and myself came to an agreement that it wasn’t a good idea that I continued,” he says. He chalks his college experience up to “three-hour seminars, and they’d be like, ‘Muy interesante.’ And I’d be like, well, this is not ‘muy interesante’ for me.’”

So he applied for a job with the Drug Enforcement Administration, translating wire-tapped phone calls on drug busts. He says the job was so boring and had so much downtime that he discovered his love of stand-up comedy over countless hours of watching Comedy Central on his phone while he was “waiting for something interesting to happen.” 

Painting a picture of his typical day working for the DEA, he says he’d be sitting in the wire room, tapped to a drug dealer’s phone, listening to all of his calls throughout the day. “But he’s not, like, planning the most elaborate drug operation in the world,” Gonzalez says. “He’s having phone sex with his lady in Puerto Rico. And he’s just waiting for one phone call that says ‘The shipment is coming.’” 

Gonzalez says he encountered a lot of dirty talk that he was thankfully allowed to hang up on. For every Breaking Bad-style takedown that there is, Gonzalez reports “there is like 500 hours of back-end work and a guy listening to tapes. I was that guy.”

He says that at the very least, “I got a good joke out of it.”

With encouragement from friends and co-workers, he left the DEA and took a comedy class where he graduated at the top. Ever since then, he’s been using his comedy to share stories about his views on life and the world. 

One of his most popular jokes, which he performed on Colbert, is about an encounter with a man at an airport telling him to stop getting in his way and go back to his country. The punchline references how that was, in fact, his goal. 

Gonzalez says this was based on a true story. “My wife and I were deplaning in Miami trying to make a connection,” he says, when the pilot told him that the international connections meeting South America were delayed, and anyone going on to those flights were prioritized to get off first. He says he and his wife witnessed a Hispanic woman attempting to leave, which frustrated an American man who was upset that he had to wait. “She was saying ‘Excuse me,’ because she was allowed to get out first. He goes ‘Go back to your country.’ And in my brain, I was like, ‘What do you think we’re doing?’” Gonzalez says. “I don’t think a joke has ever come to me as easy as that.”

Regarding his approach to comedy, Gonzalez says “I feel like the things that people resonate the most with are things that are really coming from the heart.” He continues, “I’m not saying comedy has to be anything, but it’s great when it’s real and deep.” And of course, he says, “it’s gotta be funny.”

Pedro Gonzalez performs 7:30 pm Thursday, Oct. 23, at The Wildish Theater, 630 Main Street, Springfield. Tickets begin at $25 and are available at WildishTheater.com.