Humans of MIT: Ryan King-Shepard, 2014

I do a couple of improv comedy shows when I can, a couple of open mic nights in the clubs of Boston. They’re fun, or dangerous. One of the two. We had one guy throw a bottle at one of the comics and it missed him and almost hit me, and I was like, ‘Wow! First night, already scared as hell-- Whoo!’

[On getting into comedy] So I’ve always loved being the funny kid. I watched a lot of cartoons and they were hilarious, so I was like, ‘I’d love to be just like them one day. Animals and everything.’ The goal was to get my mom to laugh, and she would never laugh. Everyone would else laugh, but she would always smile and be like, ‘That’s funny,’ and I’d be like, ‘No it’s not, stop kidding.’ So I formally got into when in 8th grade we had this drama teacher (love you, Ms. McGuire!), who said to me, ‘You want to do improv? You seem really funny,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah why not.’ And I LOVED it. So I just got into comedy there.

Ryan M. King-Shepard '14/'16

In 2014, four MIT students created Humans of MIT, a Facebook portrait-blog inspired by Brandon Stanton's Humans of New York, that captures life in the MIT community through a single photo and the subject’s own words.