ILIS Interviews Jim Gaffigan

[Itslikeimsayin]

Jim Gaffigan is currently on "The Sexy Tour" leading up to the taping of his next Comedy Central special in Austin in early December. Before that, however, he has shows in San Francisco and at the Wiltern in Los Angeles next weekend, Nov 7 & 8. In November he's doing 12 shows in a span of 11 days in Boston and New York (check Jim's Tour Schedule for details).

Almost two years ago, Jim met with isoS/Matt for an episode of AST Radio that covered his Midwestern upbringing, his formative years in standup and the benefits and difficulties of being part of such a rich, burgeoning comedy scene in early-'90s New York City. Earlier this week, I spoke with Jim on the phone to further examine his comedic process, his unrelenting performance schedule, making the leap from comedy clubs to performing in theaters and much more.

[Itslikeimsayin]

One thing I've always noticed about you is that you tour very consistently. Lots of comics go on tour and then disappear for a while, but when you look at your tour schedule, for the last two or three years there's not one month where you haven't performed at least one or two times, if not many more. What keeps you inspired to keep performing so regularly?

It's definitely a situation where I enjoy it. It was not that many years ago where I was doing late-night spots at some comedy club trying to get stage time. I mean, the opportunity to perform in a theater and doing like an hour-ten is pretty attractive to me. There's other motivations behind it. Obviously this tour that I'm doing right now is leading up to an hour special that I'm taping in Austin. Mostly I would say that it's fun and I also like the challenge of... I feel like I'm getting better. I'm not really bored with stand-up. I guess some people get bored of doing it. I'm not crazy about getting on a plane, but I enjoy doing the shows. And it's as basic as that. I think most comics would admit that it is kind of this addiction, you know? I love doing shows in New York and L.A. but I really love doing an hour-long set in a theater. For me that's my favorite thing to do.


With touring so much and performing so regularly, how do you get time to write and have your act evolve?

Being kind of a – I guess the term would be eccentric observationalist, or whatever my label is, I have no idea – but for me, it takes a long time. This will be a new hour, and my last one came out in 2006. It takes me a long time. My excuses are that I'm dealing with really mundane topics and I'm trying to really kind of work with it in chunk format. So I'll find a topic and I'll try and really kind of cover it from top to bottom, whether it be something as silly as ketchup or bowling. My stand-up is very much... I try to find a topic that hasn't been beaten to death, but I also like the challenge of it being mundane, whether it be doors or Waffle House. Once I identify a topic, I really want to hammer it out. Everyone does their own thing. There's the social satirist who reads the newspaper and they go from there, and there are people who do a little bit of everything. Doing what I do, it takes a while. I always use the example, it's not like Cheney can shoot someone and I get five minutes. Then again, my material has more of an evergreen feel to it. It'll last and have legs. So it takes me longer to get it, but I feel like it's got longer legs than others.


I just interviewed Louis CK a couple weeks ago for AST, and on the topic of you said how you try to get everything out of a bit, he was talking about how that's something that he developed as he got better. Do you think you've been able to examine a topic more thoroughly with more experience in the business?

Oh yes. I definitely would say that. The reason stand-up is so fun and so rewarding is because I do feel like I'm getting better at it and evolving. I would almost say that how I'm approaching stand-up now will probably change in the next couple years. My interest in mundane topics, that will probably evolve away. But to answer your question, yeah, I definitely feel like I know my voice and I know how to attack a topic from a lot of different angles, but it's ever evolving. There's really kind of a larger thing of...that's why stand-up is so rewarding. You're in charge. You're not only the writer and the performer, but you're producer of the thing. So you could decide to go in a different way. Even Louis has kind of done that. Louis was an observational guy who moved to a more autobiographical kind of bent. I watch that and I go, "I don't know what I'm going to be doing in three years."


You mean you could possibly go in that direction yourself.

I have no idea. If I talked about my wife the way Louis talked about his wife, I'd probably get killed. It's weird. You learn so much about yourself through stand-up and through how the audience knows you and how they respond to it. I like politics, but if I try to talk about politics, I might get some good laughs but it kind of takes it to a screeching halt. I have to keep that silly kind of angle on it and keep it in my point of view. That's not to say I censor myself, but if I'm doing an hour and ten minutes, I want it to be a complete show. I don't want it to be funny in 10-minute chunks and there's these gaps that's just kind of me talking about my views.


On the AST Radio interview a couple years ago, you mentioned that you and your wife write much of your act together. Can you explain how that process works and what part she plays in it?

As our family grows, the opportunity to do that seems to diminish with time. But it's very much a process of I identify topics and kind of run through them with my wife. I feel like I've kind of brainwashed her into my point of view. She's obviously a very funny person. I don't think any comedian would marry someone that's unfunny. It's similar to any type of writing. Someone's giving ideas and pointers and it's someone that understands your sensibility. There are plenty of comics that I like that might give a suggestion, but if they don't understand my point of view or the tone of where I'm taking it, the suggestion might not be worth anything. My wife understands all of that. Like I said, I feel like I've kind of brainwashed her into my comedic point of view.


Do you write while you're in the midst of a tour, or do you write and then go perform it all and go back to writing for a while, or how does that work?

I almost feel like the whole notion of "tour" is a little misleading. I mean I am on this Comedy Central tour and I'm going to be at the Wiltern and I'm going to Boston and New York. But it's not like I'm The Rolling Stones getting on a bus for a month. Granted in New York and Boston I'm doing six shows. I'll get to the answer of your question, but I always feel like people are like, "So where next?" It'll be like a Sunday night. Where next? I'm like, "I'm goin' home." I'm sure someone like Chris Rock could do every single night of the week, and maybe I could, but I just like to do Thursday, Friday, Saturday. The initial plan is to do Friday and Saturday and then shows are added.

My process is very much that I write and try out stuff Monday through Thursday, and then Friday and Saturday I'm crafting or working on the hour and constantly updating. About six months ago, I took all the stuff out from "Beyond the Pale." When I do an hour show, unlike say Chris Rock or Louis, if it's three months after this upcoming special, I'm still going to be doing some of that stuff. Chris and Louis would just get rid of that hour and start from scratch. My view is that if you're doing a theater show, there's an unwritten rule that you're coming with new material, but people would rather see a kick-ass hour show that's all home runs rather than you trying stuff out that might whiff. That's not to say there isn't an improvised element to it. Hopefully I'm being articulate.


Yeah, that definitely makes sense.

I do think there's something about an hour show, shifting and shaping it and doing it numerous times, that makes it really strong. It's like changing the order. This chunk might leak into the following chunk or I might move it up. I've been working on this hour since June and parts of it I've been working on for a long time. You see a theme or a premise that'll come out after a while. It might not be that apparent to somebody who's just there for a laugh. I feel like this hour – it's always been my comedic point of view – romanticizing of the id or the lazy point of view that we all try to fight against. I know that sounds really pompous, but you sit there and try to work on it for a while and you go, "Alright, this is how my point of view has shifted in the past couple years." There's a clarification almost to it.


I wanted to ask you about that. Your onstage persona is obviously this guy who sits around eating bacon all the time and is too lazy to get up off the couch to look for the remote, but when you look at you as Jim Gaffigan the comedian, the writer, the performer, the actor, you're obviously a very busy, driven guy. At what point in your development did that kind of "lazy schlub" character come about or is that who you always were on stage?

It definitely took some time. Some of it might be my neuroses, that I might be doing all of those things, but I still feel lazy. I do procrastinate. I spend many hours on aspecialthing when I should be writing or returning emails. So I am busy, but it is sort of a self-criticism of myself. Also, it's the romantic notion. All comics, whether they're doing okay or not, there's this downtime that's kind of inherent in all creativity, which is just really insane. If we were able to just simply sit down and write for three hours and come up with material and do it a relatively disciplined way, that would be great. But that's not how it works. But there is a lot to be said for that it's a desire. It's not something I can indulge in. I do have those days when suddenly I just have to watch TV for three days.


Let's talk a little bit about your transition from working clubs and the comedy club circuit to theaters. How did that come about or how does a comic know that you can make that jump?

I had no expectations that I would be able to make that leap. I was doing an hour special. Comedy Central had done a couple of people like Ron White and Carlos Mencia, and my manager was there and he knows Ron White's manager so he pitched me. I had been trying to get a Comedy Central Presents, a second one, for about, I dunno, four or five years and so they said, "Yeah, he can do an hour." So my manager, who comes from an agent background at ICM, said "Let's try to do some theaters." There was part of me that was like, "This could be very humiliating."

So we just kind of did it, and it happened to coincide with the hour having some appeal. There was the Hot Pocket thing, and the holiday jokes. We only did it in cities where I had been headlining and sold out shows for a while, and it ended up working out. If you'd asked me three years ago if I was going to be doing theaters, I would have thought it was very unlikely.

But I love it. Theaters can be all ages. The appeal of people coming to see you. They're not just kind of wandering off, they had a bad week so they're going to a comedy club. People are going to see you. It's really kind of the sweet spot of the bat. You're going on in a beautiful or a historic setting in front of people who know your point of view. In a lot of ways, it's almost like a guaranteed good situation.

That's not to say that I don't love clubs and enjoy the intimacy of clubs. And obviously alternative rooms, there's a creativity vibe that's unique to say, Invite Them Up or Comedy Death-Ray that when you're doing a theater show, people aren't like, "Let's see him experiment." It fits my process of working on stuff during the week, trying stuff out in the week and taking the "A"s and working it into the weekend.


Is there anything else that you need to do differently performing for 2,000 people instead of 150 or so in a club?

The one thing I would say about theaters is there's always kind of the balancing act of dealing with an agent or a manager that's always trying to hike the ticket price up to a ridiculous level. And then there's also the size of the venue. There's some cities that you're either doing a 4,000 theater or you're doing someplace that you'd have to do three or four of them. Some of the historic theaters, like say the Fox Theater in St. Louis, that's what you do. I dunno, I don't want to go off on that tangent. But there is a balancing act, because I'm not hopping around on stage. I'm very kind of nuanced and vocal inflections, I don't have an interest in doing arenas. I have done them, but then you have the JumboTron. It's just weird. It's kind of like, I've got kids so when you bring them to see the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, it's like you're watching TV in a theater.

It's weird because there's so many factors that play into it. If someone is going to a theater show, I want to make sure that it is the intimate conversation, as pompous as that sounds.


When you did the interview with Matt a couple years ago, all the people you mentioned coming up with – Louis CK, Todd Barry, Dave Attell, Greg Giraldo – that must've been an exciting time in New York. Did you realize at the time all the talent you were surrounded with?

Oh yeah. I don't know if I was clear in that interview. There are these mini generations, at least in New York, and the generation right above Giraldo and I – every couple years there's a band of comics that kind of come up – and the generation above us was Attell, Louis, Todd Barry, this incredible group of comics. It was during the early '90s when comedy was essentially dying. A&E and Evening at the Improv had just kinda killed it. People had seen all the crappy stand-up on TV so people weren't really going out.

So there was this mini-generation or whatever you want to call it above us that was like, they were finally getting spots at the Comedy Cellar and all this. For Giraldo and I, not only were there too many comics, but the comics ahead of us were Todd Barry and Louis CK. So Giraldo and I used to go out to Long Island. John Trueson, who now runs Governor's, was nice enough to give us spots, even though we probably weren't that good, at this club, Chuckles. It was pretty interesting. Also in that generation above us was Chappelle, when he was probably 18 or 19. Then there would just be these people in New York that would come in and, like Chappelle, would come in and just explode out of the scene. And then Dane would come in and explode out of the scene. I didn't really have anything to compare it to, but when you look at how good Todd and Louis and Kevin Brennan and Attell and these guys were, there's a good reason why I wasn't getting any spots. I did Letterman and I still couldn't get a weekend spot because there were all these great comics that could just crush. There's a lot of other ones that I'm not even mentioning. Fitzsimmons was there. Just way too many good comics. It was before the alternative scene really even started.


When you say Monday through Thursday on an average week you're trying out new stuff at smaller rooms – alternative rooms or smaller venues – do you find that material works in one venue but doesn't in another, or is it pretty universal that if one audience thinks it's funny, everyone's going to?

Oh no, there's definitely jokes that work in one place that don't work in another. That's why alternative rooms are so great but also important. They're kind of like a truth serum. When I say a certain joke that works in a regular comedy club in say, Largo, or an alternative room like Sweet in New York, when I hear myself saying it, it's almost like, "Okay, thanks you guys." It almost fuels the inside voice kind of thing.

But yeah, there's definitely jokes. Like I had a bunch of jokes on USA Today, all about how the only reason I read it is because it's outside my hotel door and all this stuff, making fun of the USA Today. People at Invite Them Up might identify with that point of view but in front of a comedy club audience or at a theater show, it really falls flat because people are like, "What's wrong with USA Today?" It's one of those things that just doesn't... And again, I'm not up there as some social satirist attacking the mediocrity of the media. I'm just trying to be funny.

There's innumerable things. Every comic writes things that just doesn't fit their act. It's funny, but if you put it in your show, it's just going to take things to a screeching halt.


You said as your family grows, you have less and less time to work with your wife on things. How do you balance having a healthy home life with your tour schedule and working a lot?

Well, you know, in the end, the one job you don't want to suck at is being a father or a husband. There are different priorities. Obviously family is my priority and I'll kind of make a point to always have dinner with my wife and kids and helping them to bed and stuff like that, but working on this hour for this new special forces you to trim away other things besides family stuff. I would be pursuing acting roles much harder, but I'm working on this thing. I mean acting is such a jerk off anyway. The process of trying to get an acting job is such a jerk off. I'm not gonna go chase these auditions. But you know, I auditioned for some animated film where I'm sure there's an offer out for the role that I auditioned for. I just try to limit those.


My Boys is coming back next year. And are you working on new Pale Forces, too?

Pale Force we're working on a DVD that'll come out in February, and yeah, My Boys is coming back.


One thing I meant to ask you about but didn't is how did the "meet and greets" come about after the theater shows?

That was something that pretty much most comics do after shows in clubs. I think a lot of them do it, don't they?


Yeah, I guess so where they're just hanging out after a show. But I think you make a little more of a point to invite people to come up and say hi.

Yeah, I definitely do because it seems like, I dunno, there's part of me that feels like, "If you want me to sign your ticket, that's not really that big of a deal." I am somebody who's really truly grateful that I'm getting this opportunity to do these theaters, so if me taking a picture with you is going to help you see the night as a good experience, I'm more than happy to do it and it's not that big of a pain. It's also something that... It's amazing how much that has changed. There was a time not that long ago, before the whole CD thing, if you were selling anything after the show, it was the cheesiest, lamest thing to do in the world. And then there just kind of came a point where people had CDs and they were like, "Alright, I'll sell 'em after the show."

Initially, it was really awkward. I'm not the most incredibly outgoing person in the world. When you're starting stand-up, I was always so embarrassed whether I did well or not, the whole idea of standing near the exit is really kind of counterintuitive. But I think once people came out with CDs, it changed that because it was like, "If you're going to DC or you're playing at the Irvine Improv, and if you sell a CD to people that liked the show, they'll take the CD and they'll listen to it with a friend. And that friend, the next time you come to the Irvine Improv, is gonna come." It's just gonna make sense. I don't know if I'm even making sense.

It's one of those things that I think most comics do do it. I know Daniel Tosh does it. I don't know if Louis does it or not. There is part of me that sometimes is like, "Hey I just wanna go back to my hotel." But it's really not that difficult of a thing to do. That's my whole point.


Does it ever lead to any fun anecdotes or is it all kind of the same people shaking your hand and walking away?

It's pretty interesting. It's interesting because it's also fun to see the different types of people that go to your shows. For me, it'll be like the goth girls and then the next group will be a youth minister with three friends. So it is kind of fun. There's always the person that's like, "Can you sign this to eBay?" There's always that one person who does that same eBay joke at every meet and greet.

And I think with Facebook, it's just a fun thing to have a picture from a concert you go to with the person. And again, I really do appreciate someone spending 30 bucks or whatever to go to my show, you know? If they want my photograph or they want a picture with me, I'd rather do it there than at the airport at 8:00 am. The meet and greet thing – it's weird, because I feel like I get so much more credit for that when I feel like everyone's doing it anyway. But somehow because I say it at the bottom of my emails or whatever that it's a meet and greet, I feel like I almost get too much credit for doing it when most people do do it.

[Editor's note: At this point Jim acted like he wanted to say more, but said he didn't want to sound like an asshole, but I encouraged him to say whatever he wanted to say with that serving as a disclaimer. – ed.]

Maybe I'm just so midwestern, it just seems like not that big of a deal. I'm always kind of surprised. The shows are like an hour-ten, and people will stand in line an hour-ten, and I'm just like, "Alright." I always jokingly when I sign a ticket, I always say, "Take this and throw it away." I have friends who have all this concert stuff, but I figure most of them are going to throw that crap away anyway. Or it's an inside joke at the office with them, the Hot Pocket thing, so it's like as a joke, "Let's get our picture taken with the Hot Pocket guy."


After San Francisco and LA, you have six shows in Boston and six in New York, too. What's that feel like to have that many shows in each of those cities?

It's awesome. It's very cool. And again, I'd rather do Town Hall six times than Radio City – now watch, in a year and a half I'll be at Radio City – because Radio City is like 6,000 people. Having been in the back half of Radio City, maybe if you're seeing Jesus or something, but it's just like, "Really?" You're just watching it on that big screen. Maybe I'm blind. I don't know.


Photo courtesy m. berru

[Jouster]

Another great one. Thanks for doing it, ILIS.

[crimestick]

Great stuff, ILIS.

[jon]

Yeah, this is great. Hurrah for ILIS (and Gaffigan).

[Phil]

Awesome, thank you!

[isoS]

This was great!

[TastyJay]

Nice piece!

I've always appreciated the tone of Jim's interviews. So many comics either give flippant, jokey replies that don't answer the question or answers that show that they take themselves way too seriously. Jim gives thoughtful answers that are respectful of the interviewer, but doesn't blather on about being a grand artiste.

[aenemaTron]

I didn't say anything before because it was too popular. But I am honored to be associated with this kind of a class act.

[Shane]

NIce work, ILIS

[thecomicscomic]

Jim Gaffigan and I both referenced AST when we chatted on Tuesday night. I apologize in advance for the cinematography (my Flip camera insists on making everything too dark when it compresses for uploading). At least you can see our shiny pale foreheads. Comedy nerds. Yay!

http://thecomicscomic.typepad.com/th...interview.html

[scamboogah]

A very bold decision to point the camera at a mirror so that you can film yourself too....

[thecomicscomic]

A very bold decision to point the camera at a mirror so that you can film yourself too....

If you take another look, you'll see that Gaffigan put the camera there. Nevertheless, a choice that looks better on my Flip camera than it does online. At least you can still hear it all OK, right?

[Itslikeimsayin]

Just a reminder: San Francisco tonight, L.A. tomorrow. Jouster and I will be at the late show at the Wiltern. Go see Jim!

[Scratch Lightning]

I saw this show last night at Town Hall in NYC, and it was unbelievable. The most impressive thing was that I don't think I've ever laughed so hard without profanity being involved in some way. There were little kids in the audience and the edgiest word in the whole act was "diarrhea", and he killed anyway. Amazing.

[Cameron]

Did any Austin ASTers attend any of his tapings this weekend?

[Itslikeimsayin]

Looks like the Austin show will be released on CD and DVD March 31. It's called "King Baby" and can be pre-ordered here.

[SteveAgee]

I only just NOW realized that ILIS stands for ItsLikeImSayin