Written By: Jon Finkel
While the world waits on the cure for the common cold, Ellen DeGeneres has found the cure for the common cold audience: Tommy Riles.
Since no comedian wants to enter a chilly room, DeGeneres employs Riles as her warm-up man, a sort of weapon of mass entertainment, released on the audience to get them fired up and ready for a taping of The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
It’s a job that he has coveted ever since he saw his first audience warm-up guy while interning for Conan O’Brien in New York many years ago.
“I saw the guy that was doing warm-up and I thought it was the coolest job ever,” Riles says. “When I saw the live studio audience and the energy I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”
BE RELENTLESS
At the time Riles was also working as a production assistant on several shows and he was constantly bugging producers to let him do the warm-up.
“I had done improv in college and I got better as the season wore on,” he says. “After a while I had my warm-up reel and I moved to Los Angeles the next year.”
But it wasn’t as if the producers of Ellen’s show were waiting for Tommy at the airport to offer him a job. In fact, he had to go back to the production assistant level in Los Angeles, which, looking back, taught him a valuable lesson.
“Whatever career you want to get in, take whatever you can when you start,” he says. “Don’t wait for the perfect job. I went back down to the production assistant level for a year until I was able to get a warm-up job with the new version of Hollywood Squares in 2002-2003. Henry Winkler, who played The Fonz, was the executive producer and I felt like I was in the big league for warm-ups.”
Riles has worked on over 150 shows around Los Angeles and he says that every job is different. After Hollywood Squares he did several shows until sometime during the 2nd season of The Ellen DeGeneres Show he was given the chance to do warm-up for one episode.
CAPITALIZE ON EVERY OPPORTUNITY
“They said we’ll give you one day,” Riles says. “Then they said we’ll let you try the rest of the week. I’m not a stand-up comedian, but they kept asking me if I could come back for another week and now the years have just gone by.”
Riles started on Season 2 of Ellen and they are currently on season 11.
“I met Ellen on my first day there,” he says. “She was super sweet. I knew I could do it and they have such a good thing going there that I didn’t want to get too excited right away.”
Nine years later, Riles has warmed-up Ellen’s live post-Oscar show crowd, he’s traveled the world with the show, including warming up an audience of 12,000 in Sydney, Australia, and he’s been asked to MC countless charity events, including Derek Jeter’s Turn 2 Foundation.
“I’m a Mets fans and most Mets fans agree that we hate the Yankees but kind of like Jeter,” he says. “He wanted to meet me before the event and he chatted with me and he was so calm and awesome. When I went on stage the whole Yankees team was in the front row. It was a huge thing.”
DIVERSIFY YOUR DREAM
In addition to Riles’ job with Ellen, he is the founder of LifeOfDad.com, one of the most popular fatherhood blogs on the Internet.
“Right when my daughter was born I started Life of Dad,” Riles said. “My daughter was born with a heart defect. She had surgery at three days old and Life of Dad really started as a family update. At first it was just a Facebook page, but instead of talking about what was going on in a sad, depressing way, I was putting a happy, positive twist on the situation.”
Thankfully, Riles’ daughter is doing really well now, and so is Life of Dad. They’ve become the fun, funny place where dads can go to talk about the trials, tribulations and good times that come with fatherhood. They’ve done exclusive interviews about being a dad with everyone from Shaq to “Weird Al” Yankovic, and the site is loaded with podcasts, videos and articles. (Full disclosure, I’ve blogged for LoD in the past.)
“Anyone can join and anyone can contribute,” Riles says. “We just have fun with it.”
Whether we’re talking about LifeOfDad.com or the Ellen DeGeneres Show, having fun has served Riles extremely well.
For more on Tommy and his hit fatherhood blog, visit: www.LifeofDad.com
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Jon Finkel is the author of Forces of Character with 3x Super Bowl Champion and Fighter Pilot, Chad Hennings, Heart Over Height with 3x NBA Slam Dunk Champion Nate Robinson, as well as Jocks In Chief, the hit fatherhood book, The Dadvantage – Stay in Shape on No Sleep with No Time and No Equipment, and all twelve volumes in the Greatest Stars of the NBA book series for the National Basketball Association, which won several ALA Young Reader Awards.
As a feature writer, he has written for Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, Muscle & Fitness, GQ, Details, The New York Times, AskMen.com, ComedyCentral.com, Yahoo! Sports’ ThePostGame.com and many more. His work received a notable mention in the 2015 Best American Sports Writing anthology.