Will Abeles takes home-town humor to the stage as 'The Pride of Hagerstown'

Will Abeles graduated from North Hagerstown High School in 2007. Now he's a Nashville-based comedian whose first comedy album, “Regrets of My Father” debuted at No. 1 on iTunes in 2017. In September, he debuted his comedy special “The Pride of Hagerstown” on YouTube. In fact, his routines frequently feature material about his hometown.

The Herald-Mail recently caught up with him for an interview about his work has been edited here for length and clarity.

A lot of your stand-up material is about growing up in Hagerstown. How do audiences in Nashville relate? Do they know where Hagerstown is?

A funny thing about the Nashville to Hagerstown pipeline is a lot of musicians know Hagerstown because of (Interstate) 81. They know the Waffle House. It was a very funny thing where I didn’t have to explain where the town was or anything. And a lot of people come from similar towns. So it wasn’t even the references were strictly about Hagerstown. They resonate with people in terms of, "I come from a town like this, too." It’s one of those towns where you run into people you know all the time and still have your buddies from high school and that kind of stuff.

So how did Hagerstown become the basis of your comedy?

My career stems from coming out of Hagerstown. A lot of the guys I grew up with were very funny storytellers, just very funny guys, so I felt like I had to compete a little bit to stand out as the funny guy in the group.

I left Hagerstown, I went to college in Boston, and I went to New York, but throughout my career there’s always been points when I come back to Hagerstown and do something. One of my first long sets I did at the old Port City Java (now Rooster Moon Coffee House).

True story: My first album debuted at Number One on iTunes, and that was mostly because people in Hagerstown downloaded the album. I came home to do my first show after the album came out. Somebody asked me if I’m doing Jokers Bar in Funkstown the next day, so I went, and the guy introduced me as “the Pride of Hagerstown.” That was so funny just given how many athletes we’ve had come out (of Hagerstown). It’s one of those things that just cracked me up, so I kept developing the act around that.

You started your comedy career goofing around with your friends. How did you make that leap from just being a funny guy to getting paid to be a funny guy?

There’s a couple of things. I did drama at North High. I did drama club at Northern Middle. I knew I liked preforming early on. I tried stand-up once when I was in eighth grade, but I just did jokes from Seinfeld and Sinbad.

But when I first started really looking at this as something I wanted to do, I was in college. The first time I did comedy at Emerson (College, Boston), the jokes were terrible. Then I just told one story at the end that was a popular story I told with my friends at the time, and it got an applause break, these laughs and I was like, “I should be doing storytelling.”

And the way I kind of mined out those stories was I thought back to high school when I was telling some stories to my friend, Tommy, and he goes, “I don’t consider you the funniest guy in our group, but you tell 10 stories a week, and nine of them are terrible, but that one story is the funniest story I’ve never heard.”

That’s how I’ve approached comedy, just trying to figure out what that one story is every single time. Sometimes I do have to tell nine bad stories, but then I find that one. Doing it professionally, I just kept working, and one day someone started putting money in my pocket. Not a lot, but it’s still very fun and I enjoy it.

Maybe as the “Pride of Hagerstown” and someone who has lived in the North and South, you can settle an old debate — is Maryland part of the South?

If you ask anyone in the South, no. For me, I’ve always thought Washington County is so different from the rest of Maryland. I’ve never had a Southern identity, but I think there’s parts of it that do relate to the South. When I first went to college in Boston, people thought I was Southern. If you’re from the North, then maybe it’s the South, but if you’re from Arkansas or Tennessee, you’re like, “No way.”

I think if you talk to most people in Pennsylvania, they even identify as the South.

Now that I’m starting to put myself on a bigger stage, I am going to have to start being more wary of my comments on that. I did get a funny comment where the guy clearly didn’t listen to the whole joke, but he was like, “Hagerstown is way more hillbilly than Nashville wants to be.” I was like, “I can’t tell if you’re making fun of Hagerstown or Nashville,” but it’s also just some troll on the Internet.

Growing up next to Antietam Battlefield, I know the Civil War was a very real part of Washington County, so in that way I understand the Southern part of it, but in the day-to-day, I don’t think a lot of people would say, “I feel Southern,” they’d say, “I’m from Hagerstown.” Hagerstown is the identity, really.

I think Hagerstown is so interesting because so many people come there and they make it what they want. I think it’s because there’s this opportunity to go to D.C., go to Baltimore, go to Philly. I guess people, as we get older, take the stuff they like from the cities and bring them home [to Hagerstown]. There’s always something new opening. There’s like another arts festival or Bluegrass festival, or anything like that. I think the identity of the town is pretty strong and the people who live there do want to keep growing the city and growing it up in a positive way.

I even found out Hagerstown has its own accent. I actually didn’t know this until I went to Boston. I learned very quickly that no one knew Hagerstown, so I started saying I’m from Maryland. Me and five other guys were on this trolley tour to explore the city a bit, and the guide asked where we were from, and I said, I’m from Maryland, and he goes, “Are you from Hagerstown?” And I was like, “How’d you know?” and he was like, “Yeah, you have a Hagerstown accent.”

After that I’d listen to my youngest brother and sister talk, and it’s a very faint accent. It kind of disappears once you leave. There’s very specific words that kind of sound like Baltimore, and other specific words that sound very Southern, and for the most part it’s a very Connecticut accent. It does have its own kind of sound.

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This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Will Abeles grew up in Hagerstown, is now a Nashville-based comedian