Lee Camp

Early life and beginnings of career Camp was born July 21, 1980 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, until 1989. His father is a psychoanalyst who served 20 years in the military as a doctor. His mother is a social worker. In 1989 the family moved to Richmond, Virginia, where Camp stayed until he went to college at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. He started writing comedy when he was 14, then got his humor columns printed in the high school literary magazine. Upon arriving at the University of VA, he won a competition to become the humor columnist for the school newspaper "The Cavalier Daily". Camp then wrote a weekly humor column for all four years he attended the university. He began performing stand-up comedy on his 19th birthday at an open-mic night at Matt's Pub in Richmond.[2] The Richmond Comedy Club was downstairs, which was where Camp got his first paying gigs. He also performed regularly throughout the rest of his time at UVA university, opening for Jimmy Fallon, Darrell Hammond, Lewis Black, and Tracy Morgan when they came to do shows at the university. In his final year of college, Camp self-published a book of his humor columns entitled "Neither Sophisticated Nor Intelligent". Upon graduation he moved to New York City. Professional career Stand-up Camp spent the following years performing three shows per night at Ha! Comedy Club, N.Y.C. and performing at between 70 and 100 colleges per year. Camp performed at the first five Netroots Nations for the liberal blogosphere as well as the 2008 Democratic National Convention, performing during presentations that also featured President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Harry Reid, and John Edwards. He gained a lot of attention when he appeared on Fox News morning show Fox & Friends in 2008, when, before the presidential campaign, they asked him to do left-wing jokes along with a right-wing comedian. Instead he went live on air saying "What is Fox News? It's just a parade of propaganda, isn't it? It's just a...festival of ignorance. The video clip went viral online and was viewed by millions. He was featured running for president on Comedy Central's "Fresh Debate '08", and also appeared on ABC's "Good Morning America" that year. His web series "Moment of Clarity" started in March 2011. It became a short podcast as well in June, 2011. There have been over 240 episodes. Camp is a regular performer at the Montreal Just for Laughs comedy festival and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He is featured in the new book “¡Satiristas!” by Paul Provenza and Dan Dion. Camp bears a tattoo on his left forearm, a quote from Howard Zinn, which says “Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power than can transform the world. Writing Camp's first book was "Neither Sophisticated Nor Intelligent", a collection of his best humor columns from "The Cavalier Daily", the University of Virginia newspaper. Cartoons were supplied by his younger brother Dean, who is also a filmmaker and author. Dean has a hit web video called "Marcel The Shell With Shoes On," and the children's book of the same name was a New York Times bestseller. With Nick Alexander and Alan Lord, Camp co-authored the 2005 BIGfib Book of Bollocks, a collection of stories from the satirical website BIGfib.com. Camp is a contributor to "The Onion" since February, 2009, and was a staff comedy writer for The Huffington Post for ten months. He wrote and hosted OnDemand's "The Movie Loft" for three months in 2009. Camp's most recent book is made up of the transcripts from his webseries and is titled "Lee Camp's Moment of Clarity: The Rantings of A Stark Raving Sane Man." The book got as high as #5 on Amazon.com's list of top political humor books. Television Camp was a staff writer for the 2009 TV comedy "Inside the Cinema". He is featured on the new Showtime show “The Green Room with Paul Provenza“. He has also been featured on ABC's "Good Morning America," BBC's "Newsnight," Fox News's "Fox And Friends," Current TV's "Viewpoint," MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," MSNBC's "The Dylan Ratigan Show," RT's "Breaking The Set," Al Jazeera English's election night coverage, and RT's "The Keiser Report." Acting In 2005 Camp played the role of a waiter in Gwyneth Paltrow's short film "Dealbreaker", a Sundance Film Festival official selection. That year he also appeared in the episode "Intoxicated" (season 6, episode 19) of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. In the 2006 TV short "Exposing the Order of the Serpentine", Camp played the role of Ashamed Man. Radio Camp's comedy is played regularly on SiriusXM radio. Activism Camp is a supporter of Occupy Wall Street and has recently collaborated with Peter Joseph, the Zeitgeist movement founder - and his new series "Culture in Decline". Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.