With His New Show, ‘Ta-Da!,’ Josh Sharp Finds the Magic—and the Music—in a 2,000-Slide PowerPoint Presentation

This show has 2,000 slides that you present in 80 minutes. What was the memorization and rehearsal process like?

As long as I’ve been doing it, there always were a ton of slides. Even from the beginning, it was like a thousand, and every time it would grow. When we were [talking about doing it] off-Broadway, I was like, “2,000 feels like a nice, round number,” so I just sort of kept fleshing it out alone in my bedroom.

And honestly, this sounds fully psychotic, but I’ve taken to learning it more like it’s music than text. Like, I can’t really see the script and do it—I have to just sort of have the rhythms of it. Which is, to me, what most of comedy is: it’s just making the funniest sounds at all times and hopefully putting them in a context where they make sense. So a lot of times I’m telling a joke and I’m just going, like, doot-dah-doot-doot-dot in my head.

And then the movement was stuff we worked on together, because when I was doing it at comedy clubs, I was just wandering around while I pressed the clicker. Here, both for purposes of lighting and also for it being sort of the next dimension of can you believe this idiot learned all this shit?, the thing is blocked. I’m playing PowerPoint like it’s a percussion instrument, and then in rehearsal we added a lot of the blocking and movement and redesigned everything around that.

I’m curious, given the multitasking and, dare I say, the overstimulation that you are asking of the audience throughout this performance: What is your relationship to social media and being online?

The truth is, I sort of hate it, honestly. But I do think it has rewired our brains. One of the first times I did this show, a friend was like, “Oh, you’re doing that thing of how we watch stuff now, where you’re always, like, watching TV while you’re on your phone. You’re doing two things at once.” And that was not at all my intention, but then I sort of ran with that. I hope [the show] is sort of harnessing this thing we’ve sadly taught our brains to do, but for a new mission. I do think it’s a big ask of the audience, but I sometimes feel that I’d rather ask more of them than less of them. Also, you can have a show that’s smart and dumb and stupid and sad. And on the social media of it all, I do think it’s reduced some of the ways in which we pull in nuance, or just hold two opposing ideas in our head at once. I don’t know—we got big, beautiful brains and you can take in a lot at once.