Jim Gaffigan
Armed with a deadpan wit, a healthy sense of self-depreciation, one of the paler complexions in show business, and a near limitless supply of observations about junk food, Jim Gaffigan seems uniquely suited to stand-up comedy.
He’s been performing regularly since the ’90s and is seemingly always packing fresh material for a new CD or special. He also skirts around the fringes of film and television as a comedic character actor, popping up in titles ranging from Three Kings to The Love Guru, and remaining a mainstay on the late night talk show circuit, memorably contributing the animated shorts Pale Force to Late Night With Conan O’Brien. He even made a successful Broadway debut recently in Jason Miller’s That Championship Season and is currently developing a new sitcom for NBC. For a man never more than a few minutes away from cracking a joke about his laziness, Gaffigan is incredibly prolific.
Currently touring to prepare for a new Comedy Central special, Gaffigan will be performing at Massey Hall in Toronto on Jan. 21, and The A.V. Club was able to catch up with the comic to chat about the various avenues of his career and, of course, his latest fast food obsessions.
The A.V. Club: You seem to always have new stuff. How often are you writing and working out new material on stage?
Jim Gaffigan: Well, I would say I waver from thinking that I have a pretty good work ethic to thinking that I have an absolutely horrible one. I write everything with my wife, so it depends on our schedule. We have other projects that we work on, so we’re always juggling, but we try to keep writing the stand-up material regularly. It usually ends up happening at like 1 a.m. after I do a spot and we deal with some of the hectic family stuff. But it’s all good.
AVC: Do you try to maintain a schedule so that you have a new half-hour every year or so?
JG: We usually just try and write every night, depending on how early we have to get up. If there’s a specific chunk that we want to work on, we might set aside time to focus on that a little bit. You know, it varies. If my wife is at a show with me, she might have an idea to discuss or we might just drink a glass of wine and talk about different topics we could explore. It’s a pretty sweet gig. We just wrote a pilot for NBC, which had its own challenges. With stand-up, you can be like, “I’m kind of sick of this right now, let’s go work on something else.” But when you have to write a script, it ends up being a bit of an inconvenience to be used to this writing style.
AVC: How is the NBC show coming together?
JG: It’s good. You know, it’s an absolute long shot. I wrote it with my wife, and it’s a show about a lazy, selfish comedian who has four kids and lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. I don’t know if it will work. I think most television shows are a crapshoot anyways. We’re giving it a whirl, but I’m not holding my breath, that’s for sure.
AVC: So, will it be a single-camera show or a more conventional family sitcom?
JG: It’s single-camera. It’s interesting going through the process, because a family sitcom seems like a lay-up, but there are some restrictions that you’d never think about. You’d think that with my comedy that deals with food and laziness there wouldn’t be any censorship issues, but inevitably I always have to deal with censorship, because I talk about major advertisers. I remember when I did that Night Of Too Many Stars for Jon Stewart, you know, Sarah Silverman was on there and Triumph The Insult Comic Dog, and they could just beep out a curse word. But with me, if you’re tearing apart McDonald’s, they can’t necessarily beep that out.
Right now I’m working on a new special, and we had a preliminary conversation with the executives, because one of my main chunks right now that people really respond to is about McDonald’s, and they don’t want that because they’re worried about alienating a sponsor. You never think about that when you’re writing, but it happens. Even the Hot Pockets thing I did 100 years ago was cut out on Comedy Central because Hot Pockets was a major sponsor. There’s always censorship, even where you wouldn’t necessarily think there would be censorship.
AVC: That’s so odd, because Hot Pockets got a lot of exposure out of your routine.
JG: Oh, it absolutely helped them. Even with the McDonald’s chunk, my Twitter feed after a show is just packed with people telling me they’re at McDonald’s. There’s a great irony behind it, because it really is a “bad press is better than no press” kind of deal.
AVC: How was your Broadway experience on The Championship Season? Was acting on stage something you’d even considered before?
JG: Well, it was another long shot of an idea that I always wanted to do. I didn’t see it as a feasible option. It was a great opportunity, but the whole acting thing is just truly absurd to me. I guess I’m spoiled by the certain amount of meritocracy that exists in stand-up. Granted, if I looked like Brad Pitt, maybe it would be a different experience. But whenever I feel like I’m getting some momentum in the acting world, I become very aware that there’s a lot more luck involved in the acting than one would think.
AVC: Did your years of stand-up experience lend itself to that type of live performance at all?
JG: Yeah, but the Broadway experience was still different. The stand-up experience definitely helped in terms of timing, stage presence, and performance, though. It’s interesting. I think stand-up audiences are better than Broadway audiences, in a way. It depends on which city you’re in of course, but if you’re talking New York, half the audience might not get a very simple joke or they might not think it’s funny. You really have to work. It’s weird, because what they’ll laugh at in a play is much different. If some of the jokes that work in a play were in my stand-up act, people would be throwing tomatoes, but the magic of theater helps a lot. I don’t mean to sound like I’m bashing Broadway. It was really an amazing experience and fun to do. I have an obsessive personality, so the notion of repeating the same play 150 times really plays into what I like to do. I guess I just had a different expectation. I thought everyone in the audience was going to look like the guy from Monopoly. It seems more highbrow than it actually is.
AVC: I always enjoy seeing you pop up in small character roles in films. Was that something you always had an interest in pursuing in the early days, or did it just come up through the comedy success?
JG: I really love acting and always have, but it’s a much different discipline than stand-up. I think that’s why I love doing both. With stand-up, if you end up programming yourself to peak at 10:30 at night, you’re going to end up having an incredibly destructive lifestyle. It’s one thing to watch something at 10:30 at night, it’s another thing to have to be at your best at 10:30 at night. It just moves your clock back so that before you know it, it’s 3:30 in the morning. Maybe a more disciplined person could be doing yoga or something or meditating until they fall asleep, but not me.
On the acting side, the humiliation of auditioning for roles is soul-crushing. I have a lot of respect for actors for just going through that. Next week I’ll probably spend 6 hours on an audition, and I’ll walk in and they’ll instantly look at me and say, “No, you’re not right.” That sort of thing isn’t easy, either.
AVC: Do you have any fondness for Toronto after shooting The Love Guru?
JG: I actually shot my part in Manhattan. It was kind of an afterthought; I think they’d shot everything else already. I don’t know about the movie, but that was one of those rare times that I didn’t even have to audition, so I liked that job even more. I was like, “Alright, Mike Myers, Stephen Colbert, and I don’t even have to audition, I am all over it. As long as I’m not having sex with an animal, I’ll do it!”
AVC: You were the Wendy’s voiceover guy for some radio campaigns. As a junk food connoisseur, what was that like?
JG: Well you know, I do love Wendy’s. We can talk fast food because I do think there’s a certain odd quality there. When you have to travel a lot, you can either have some crappy salad in an airport or you can have Wendy’s or McDonald’s and get fat like I am. It’s one of those things where eventually I’m going to have to grow up and stop eating it. I realize that. If I want to be at one of my kids’ weddings, it has to stop. But it’s hard. I mean, if I’m going to Canada, I’m going to get some poutine. That happens whenever I travel to a city. I’m doing a bus tour now and when we arrived in Kansas City I was like, “Well we have to get barbeque.” My wife looked at me and was like, “You don’t have to. The citizens of Montreal aren’t going to be angry with you if you don’t have smoked meat.”
AVC: You should plan a whole tour around food-related cities.
JG: I haven’t gotten that pathetic yet, but I’m not far off. I was excited about performing in New Orleans, but I’m trying to get over that. Some of it is also that I use food as a reward. I’m very lucky, but if I’m traveling for 6 hours and I’m only going to be in a city for 20 hours, then chances are I’m going to eat something terrible as soon as I get there.
AVC: Does your 1999 Business Week award for “Salesman Of The Year” still rank as your proudest accomplishment in show business?
JG: That qualifies as proof that I need to do something more important. That was funny. Commercials, particularly in America at that time, always seemed to require a dumb white guy. They can’t have a woman be dumb or an African-American guy be dumb. We’ve moved along a little now, but back then, every commercial had to be about a dumb white guy and I’m extra white, so I was perfect.
AVC: Do you have any interest in getting into podcasting, since that’s become a fruitful venue for comedians?
JG: Well, it sounds like a lot of work. I enjoy being a guest on podcasts, but I don’t know if I’ve ever even listened to one. I don’t have a car, I have four kids, and I’m kind of lazy, so it hasn’t really come up. I don’t know. All my friends have them, but I waste too much of my time on Twitter for anything like that.
