Milan Patel: Growing Up Running a Motel

Milan Patel walked into the studio with a loaf of freshly baked facasha he'd made the night before and a batch of tiny cookies his girlfriend had been developing. "You can't just be like, you make all the bread, nobody gives you anything," he told Tom Papa. "That's lame." The gesture got him in the door, but what kept the conversation going was the story of how a kid who grew up working the front desk of his family's motel learned to tell jokes for a living.

The Motel Education

Patel's family runs motels and hotels, and he started working at one when he was about ten years old. "Me and my siblings were renting rooms when we were like 10," he said. The work meant dealing with adults who didn't want to talk to a child about their lodging problems. One time, when he was four years old and his 13-year-old sister was cleaning rooms, a customer whose car had broken down started screaming at him for help. "I have no skills to help you," he recalled thinking. "It's run by children."