While on a walkabout today at my local waterfront park, I realized I’m on the verge of not just a milestone birthday, but also two landmark anniversaries in my life. It was just about 25 years ago now that I auditioned for and received an invitation to join my first professional comedy troupe in Seattle, marking the first of many times I’d get paid to goof off in front of strangers. And a decade before that, or 35 years ago this autumn, I snagged my first byline as Sean L. McCarthy in my school newspaper. How time flies.

It was 16 years ago, in the summer of 2005, that I took over the comedy column at The Boston Herald and convinced my editor to let me carve out my own online space for anything and everything that didn’t fit in print. The fall of 2007 when I left my staff job reporting for the New York Daily News to launch The Comic’s Comic.

So how did we get here? Why am I on Substack? Why am I asking you to subscribe to Piffany?