Interview Chris Gethard 

An audio version of this interview originally appeared on Bullseye, a weekly radio show and podcast hosted by Jesse Thorn. You can listen to it on select public radio stations, at the Maximum Fun website, and via iTunes.

Chris Gethard first gained a following for his work at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York, where he staged a regular show with bizarre stunts. Once, inspired by his own battles with depression, Gethard advertised a contest to make a young, struggling fan a rock star for a weekend. True to his word, he flew a young comedy fan named Mitchell Fesh out to New York and tailor-made him a festival starring his favorite comedians. Last year, Gethard used the power of Twitter and YouTube to convince Sean “Diddy” Combs to make his comedy debut on the show. Then, when Comedy Central pulled the plug on his sitcom Big Lake (which also starred Horatio Sanz and Chris Parnell), Gethard turned to the next best thing: public-access. The Chris Gethard Show, viewable on New York public-access television and the Internet, is based on his stage show at the UCB. Each week, anything goes, as a fun, chaotic panel of regulars (and strangers) gets together and viewers are encouraged to tweet and call in suggestions to drive the action. We talked to Gethard about his do-anything, get-punched-by-anyone spirit, which ties together the experiences in his new book, A Bad Idea I’m About To Do. 

The A.V. Club: New Jersey is really at the heart of your book, which is largely about your adolescent and post-adolescent years. Tom Scharpling on The Best Show On WFMU has always been a promoter of New Jersey in the face of New York, and he’s a sweet guy, but very angry, and that same tone shines through in your description of New Jersey. Is New Jersey sweet but actually very angry? 

Chris Gethard: I think so. I’m a Scharpling fan as well. He’s been a guest on my show, and I’ll be in one of his music videos that’s coming out this year, and I definitely think that I can identify with him. It’s not uncommon. Growing up in New Jersey, it’s the total suburbs by and large, but it’s a very weird place that puts a chip on your shoulder. You grow up in New Jersey, but all you ever hear on TV is about Real Housewives and Jersey Shore, and a million jokes about how dirty and gross it is. I feel like being a kid there really sets you up to have a chip on your shoulder for sure. And I think for a lot of the creative people—not just comedians, there’s a lot of music that comes out of Jersey—I think so much of it is born out of that. You are young and you’re consistently told over and over again that because you’re from this place, this is an awful place and you’re a product of it, and everything that comes out of there is garbage, mobbed-up or spray tanned. That’s all you hear about, and it puts a chip on your shoulder. I think it’s a very unexpectedly odd place to grow up, but I enjoy it and have such a love for it, and it really has informed most of my creative projects. New Jersey’s right at the heart of things. 

AVC: Most of New Jersey really is quite beautiful, but it’s also immediately proximate to the most urban parts of the United States. 

CG: It’s true. Growing up and being a kid, I knew that creativity was at the heart of what I wanted to do. I always had this feeling of wanting to be a comedian and wanting to be an actor, but where I grew up was a very blue-collar place where [it was thought] that’s impossible, that’s just not something people from here do. And in the meantime, when I walked out of my front door and looked to my left, you could see the skyline of New York City. Your dreams are so close, they are literally visible, you could see the New York City skyline from my town. It was very emblematic of, “I’ve got to get out of here, I’ve got to try to bust loose of this.” A kid from Tulsa, when somebody tells them they can’t have their big-city dreams, they don’t have to be looking at the city while somebody tells them that. They can’t physically see it when somebody tells them that. 

AVC: The book reads as though your childhood involved children roaming the streets like packs of wolves. 

CG: I don’t think that’s inaccurate. I grew up in a neighborhood that was very, very Irish. My one set of grandparents lived across the street and my other set of grandparents would be blocks away. I had one aunt who lived three houses away, another four houses away in the other direction. And there were a lot families like that. It was a very, very neighborhood vibe. Every kid I knew would wear blue jeans and a white T-shirt and had a crew cut. It was very West Side Story. I think we were raised on very old-school values in that area of the world, because everyone was so entrenched in the neighborhood they grew up in. We roamed a lot in the summers. When I didn’t have school, my mom would open the door at 10 a.m. and would say, “All right, see you at dinner,” and we would go and see what trouble we could get into. Which was fun as a kid, but it was only when I was an adult that I started to realize how messed up and odd things were around the town where I grew up. 

AVC: What kind of stuff did you do that when you were 25 you realized was not all that typical for someone who was born at the beginning of the ’80s?

CG: The first house that I ever lived in, the kid who lived next door to me was a dwarf, and he was about six or seven years older than me, but because we were the same size our parents would be like, “You guys go hang out.” So I look back on that, and that’s not a cool thing to do to me or the dwarf. I was like, three or four, this kid was nine or ten, but because we were both little, that was the logic, that we could play together. He was furious, you know? This kid who had to play with this little infant. And he used to torment me, he used to push me around and there was a sandbox in my backyard and he would throw the sand at me, intentionally throw it in my diaper. I used to go nuts and cry and tell my parents but they could never catch him in the act. But finally, when I was three years old, the dwarf pushed me too far, and I grabbed a wiffle bat and I beat him with it, this child who was older than me. My parents still say to this day that they watched from the window and laughed because, “He kept pushing you around and you finally fought back and gave him what he deserved.” That was the sort of thing that as I got older I realized was not normal. Your parents shouldn’t watch from a window as you beat a dwarf with a bat at the age of three. That’s not a funny, charming family story we should be telling at every holiday. That’s weird. There’s like, nine different things about that that are really weird. 

AVC: You have a whole chapter in the book about this kid in the neighborhood named Koozo, who feels like a mythic ogre that lives in your village. 

CG: Yeah, like I talked about in the book, he used to ride a moped around and terrorize people. He’d pedal to our street and then you’d just hear him hit the engine, the headlights would come on, and he’d literally chase us on a moped. He was a very scary person. When I was a kid, that was just a part of your everyday life, that this maniac on a moped shows up and hunts you like an animal. That was just how we grew up. And I was talking to my mother about that in the process of writing the book, and I was like, “Oh yeah, I’m writing this story about Koozo”—we call him that in the book so he won’t sue us—“and I look back on him and he was really terrifying, but to adults he must have been some kid with ADHD,” but she was like, “No, he was legitimately terrifying, he was a terrifying human being.” And our neighborhood dealt with that by allowing him to do whatever he wanted all the time, even though we all knew it was a problem. Being raised like that was psychologically damaging. I look back now that I’m a little more well-adjusted. Hopefully it led to a funny book. 

AVC: There’s also an element of emotional unpredictability when you write about your grandfather and other relatives who lived nearby. It seems epically tumultuous. 

CG: I think that’s a very adept two-word phrase that sums up my being a child at most times. It was weird because it was such a family vibe; my family was around, a lot of the kids who I grew up with, their cousins and aunts and uncles all lived in the neighborhood. Which you would think would make it a very warm place, but in reality the attitude was kind of, instead of being protective, more like, “Go deal with it yourself, go be a tough kid and go handle your own business.” It was sort of an old-school mentality that way. I’m glad that I find it so comedic, but there was a very damaging element to it. We were kids who grew up and there weren’t very many consequences to things. Outside of the stuff that I turned into comedy, that’s all rooted in the weirdness of growing up in a place where there was strange violence. There were kids who would behave in a way that was very dangerous and no one ever did anything about it, so you did feel like you were on your own, which is probably magnified by the fact that you live around all your aunts, parents, and grandparents. Those feelings bounced off one another in a way that really messed me up as a kid, as I talk about in the book. At the same time, I’m so glad I grew up the way I did, and I have so much love and affection for New Jersey, probably because it sort of shapes you unlike any other place I can imagine.  

AVC: Were you the kind of adolescent who schemes and fumes?

CG: Oh yeah, I was an angry young man. When I first saw the movie Rushmore, I was astounded at how similar Fischer was to me. I was that kid who did every activity when I was in high school. There wasn’t a day that I didn’t stay after school to do something. I just had my hands in everything. And I was similarly very, very angry. I was an angry little guy. A lot of drive, but also a lot of surging emotions that teenagers have. But I was the kid who was constantly trying to stay as busy as possible, trying to get momentum going by just getting involved in something. I was a very short late-bloomer who was full of anger. 

AVC: How did that affect you when you moved out of the house?

CG: Pretty quickly after I started at Rutgers University. I did not stray far from my hometown. By the end of the four years there, I knew I had to straighten things out. I quit drinking before I graduated college—I think there’s very few people who say that. I was in therapy shortly after I graduated college. So as soon as I got out of my hometown, it was a pretty rocky period of realizing that, whoa man, now that I’m sort of seeing the bigger picture of how the world can be, I’m kind of messed up. The way I behave, some of the things I’ve been around growing up are not necessarily normal and I need to straighten those out. So pretty quickly I started branching out; went to college, started traveling to New York City pursuing comedy, starting to see the world. It was a very quick process of realizing that things were off. It was not an easy or pleasant process, but within four or five years I did realize that I needed to get a shrink. Clearly that needed to happen. 

AVC: You write a little bit in the book about realizing that you are bipolar. There’s this Stephen Fry documentary about being bipolar, The Secret Life Of The Manic Depressive, and he interviews all of these different bipolar people who all have these terrifying stories: One woman had a manic episode where she thought her child was Jesus; one guy threw himself under a bus. But they all end up saying that they wouldn’t change that about themselves. If they could go back to zero and not be bipolar, they wouldn’t. 

CG: I would say the same for myself, actually. I’m not convinced any of my relatives are Jesus, but I had my own quirks and my own flaws and versions of that episode. Knock on wood, I’ve been really on top of it, much healthier the past few years. But I also think I’m a unique person and I think that those sorts of things made me that way. One thing that I would say that I am very proud of is that I think a lot of the stuff that I’ve been through—which I’m open about talking about onstage and in all my creative work—a lot people who have seen me in New York City where I do have a little bit of a following, a lot of those people are the same age as I was when I was dealing with this stuff really heavily. The stretch where I really thought I might not make it was from about 18 or 19 to 22 or 23. I had depression issues all through high school; stretching back to about sixth or seventh grade I can remember thinking, “Wow, I was a really depressed kid,” but also smart about hiding that and making sure that people didn’t realize where I was at. I was very good at that. 

But 22, 23, 24 was when I straightened my head out, and now a lot of the people finding me in New York who really made a point to come to my shows and invest themselves and get involved in them, are kids at NYU or Pace University and a lot of the different colleges around New York. I hope they enjoy my comedy and I hope people come to my shows to laugh, but if as a side effect there are some young people who may be feeling the same way I was, who maybe can sort of know that they’re not alone or see that there’s in an end in sight where they can see they might wind up okay, to me that’s something I wouldn’t trade. So between the way that a lot of the issues and the way that I grew up weren’t necessarily pleasant, they informed my voice, which I wouldn’t trade for anything, and they also give me an ability to connect with other people and see that in other people and help them. Not that I’m a hero or a grief counselor or anything like that, but the idea that a whole lot of people have told me, “You talk about this stuff and I feel similar.” I can’t really say I would change it, I wouldn’t want to change it, I wouldn’t want to go back and change anything. I have a lot of opinions on the stuff that I’ve been through, but very few regrets.

AVC: The two poles of bipolarity are mania and depression, so let’s start with the depression. So how did the depression manifest itself for you when it was at its worst?

CG: When it would show up it would be feelings of doom, just sort of feeling down and constantly feeling exhausted and just feeling entirely convinced that that was how the world was. If anyone did anything negative, I would just constantly convince myself that that was the base level of all people. People were negative. People had no good intentions. And that snowballed. When it was at its worst, I would have panic attacks and anxiety attacks. Probably the worst thing that happened, and I thought I was out of the woods, but it was 2007 and I was a guest writer for Saturday Night Live. It was my biggest break until that point, and I was there for a few weeks, it was just the dream job, and I went in and submitted this packet to stay on for that summer. And looking back, the packet was really watered down. I mean, I knew they liked me. The packet was just like, “Here is what you already do.” It was a bad way to approach anything. And I didn’t get hired and I blew my shot. I thought that was my biggest shot and the only shot I was going to get and I just blew it. And I had an anxiety attack that lasted uninterrupted for three days. I couldn’t catch my breath, I was constantly feeling dizzy and nauseous. I couldn’t carry on a conversation. And it’s scary to live that way for that many hours. At its worst, I would act like that. But that’s the last big one I had.

AVC: What do you do when that happens?

CG: I have a handful of very close friends, so I’m lucky. And I live in New York, so my family is very close by. My brother, during that episode, he drove up from Philadelphia to be there. And I have a roommate who is pretty much like a second brother, and he would sit up with me. He’d say, “You’re clearly not in a good place,” and he’d sit up on the couch with me. I have a lot of people around me who know that occasionally I will have episodes where I can’t handle myself. Luckily they are familiar enough with that that they can help me cope. Everyone has their own version of that. But this has gotten more serious than I thought, and I just want to say that I’m not the only comedy nerd who has these issues. And you are not a hero if you shoulder the load yourself. For so long I had this chip on my shoulder and thought, “I can handle it, I don’t need help, that means you’re crazy.” And part of that, I think, was growing up blue-collar, but anyone can identify with this. There is no shame in getting help. Don’t mess around, go get it. It’s not worth it, or stronger, or more noble to not get help.