“I changed to my dick hat,” says comedian Jordan Firstman as we exchange pleasantries during a video call. “I had an interview that I felt had to be more formal before this, so I was working another hat, but I felt for SPIN I could wear my dick hat.”
He’s absolutely right; SPIN is the place where you can wear a royal blue baseball cap with the word “dick” displayed boldly in white letters during an interview.
Besides the cap, Firstman is sporting a dark gray T-shirt and a thick, silver chain around his neck. I was expecting him to have bleached-blonde hair, or even purple or blue, as I’ve seen online. But for our interview, it’s his natural dark brown, with a matching full beard.
Firstman has done everything there is to do in the TV and film industry. He’s been a producer, writer, actor, and a director. Now, he can add singer-songwriter to his résumé, with his new comedy music album, Secrets.
Born in Long Island, New York in 1991, his parents, Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan, were both newspaper reporters at Newsday and together wrote a nonfiction crime book, The Death of Innocents: A True Story of Murder, Medicine, and High Stakes Science. While his mother stayed at Newsday, his father continued to write books. “And then they got divorced,” he says.
Moving to Los Angeles at age 20, Firstman first got a job at a gym for children on the autism spectrum called We Rock the Spectrum; a position he was let go from. He moved on to working as a photo booth operator at bar-mitzvahs, which he did for two years before landing a gig as a writer on Search Party from 2016 to 2021, a show on which he also had a recurring acting role as a character named Luke.
But this wasn’t Firstman’s writing and acting debut. He wrote, directed, and co-starred in a comedic short film called The Disgustings, which premiered at the New Orleans Film Festival in 2014. He went on to write, direct, and star in two other comedy short films, 2016’s Call Your Father, about two men who spark a romantic relationship but are forced to come to terms with the rather wide age gap that divides them, and 2017’s Men Don’t Whisper, about a gay couple who decide to start sleeping with a bunch of women. You may also have seen him on the Disney+ show Ms. Marvel, on FX’s English Teacher , as well as his production work on Netflix’s Bad Mouth.
While his short films and TV writing earned him acclaim, it was his series of seemingly random, unapologetically crass Instagram videos of low-fi impressions and his “Secrets” series during the COVID pandemic that has since earned him almost a million followers on the platform. It also was the inspiration for his new album; a first for the man who seemingly has done everything there is to do in show business.
“I had been doing ‘Secrets’ on Instagram since the pandemic started,” Firstman says. “I was making up songs from the beginning. It was like, there was one secret, like haven’t had sex in a year, but not for lack of trying. And I was like, [sings] ‘Haven’t had sex in a year, but not for lack of trying.’ So I was always kind of doing music. And then two years ago, I enlisted my friend Brad Oberhofer, a big part of the album. And I was like, ‘Would you want to just try to make some songs?’ I had no idea if it would work. And then that first round it was just kind of like magic. And, and we went from there.”
Making an album was a different experience for Firstman; one that provided the kind of instant gratification that he never got in the television industry, where developing a TV show often takes years and is never guaranteed to succeed, let alone get made. That happened twice, each project in development hell for four years, with Firstman writing and rewriting whole seasons. The end result? Both projects getting killed, never seeing the light of day. With making records, he says, rather than taking four years to complete, he leaves the studio after four hours with a completed, recorded song.
“The immediacy is really thrilling for me and just feels validating,” he says.“No one has ownership of that but me and the people who were there that day. It felt like I was making a real piece that would be mine and that no one could tell me that it wasn’t going to be released.”
Through this experience, Firstman became addicted to writing music and being in the studio, he says. Together with producer Blake Slatkin (Lil Nas X, Lizzo, Sam Smith, SZA), he wrote and recorded the six tracks that make up Secrets. The album is Firstman’s foray into multiple genres including crooner jazz, Auto-tuned R&B, motorik EDM, country, U.K garage rock, and funk. All of the songs were inspired by real “secrets” that his social media followers submitted to him via Instagram DMs.
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“I Wanna See More Dicks,” which Firstman released as a single and YouTube video on March 14, is an ode to fraternal bonding. “I was friends with Blake, so he was doing me a huge favor by doing this one session,” says Firstman, about the making of “I Wanna See More Dicks.” “I knew I had four hours with him, and I knew the title. It just felt pop to me. This one was kind of more like Cake, LCD Soundsystem vibes. And once we heard that [I knew] we had it. You can also tell probably from the album that I love the gang vocal. I love the way it sounds.”
Despite the fact that Firstman is gay and the song does have homosexual tendencies, he says he wrote the song for straight guys, too. “Obviously we will want to see each other’s dicks. We’re gay. But straight guys do, too,” he says. “And so I kind of wrote it as an anthem for them. And it’s already being misinterpreted so heavily. When you have different points of view, especially right now, you have to be prepared that people are not going to understand it.”
But Firstman, despite being gay and Jewish, doesn’t want these aspects to limit his creative life in any way. “I don’t like being seen as a gay writer,” he says. “I don’t like when people are like, ‘Oh, he made that gay movie.’ I make the things that I want to make and I am the person that I am.”
Besides his new music career, he’s also currently shooting the second season of English Teacher (he plays the character of Malcolm), then he’s slated to be on Rachel Sennett’s upcoming half-hour comedy show on HBO. Oh, and he’s also locking in his first feature-length directing gig for late summer or early fall. But music, he says, is where he’s able to express himself in the most authentic way he knows how.
“All of those setbacks with my TV shows…I have not been able to have my voice out in a way, off the internet,” he says. “Even when the stuff I act in is written for my voice, it’s not really me. So this is my first real project out there that is full-length and has my voice in it. So I’m excited about that.”
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