Comedian Chris Gethard

Josh Hamilton: I’m Josh Hamilton.

Joe Skinner: And I’m Joe Skinner.

Josh Hamilton: And this is the American Masters Podcast, where we have conversations with the people who change us. Today, we talked to comedian Chris Gethard.

Chris Gethard: All I’ve ever done is worked hard and tried to be honest and tried to connect with an audience whose looking for the type of values I bring to my work, and I don’t ever want to apologize for that. I’d rather connect with 200 people who identify with the idea of being earnest or vulnerable or sad at times, than a football stadium full of people who don’t.

Josh Hamilton: Chris Gethard grew up in West Orange, New Jersey and is a proud Jersey guy. Known for a confessional style of comedy, he’s never one to shy away from inserting very personal stories into his work.

Joe Skinner: Yeah, he’s a real salt of the earth guy, too. He definitely has a Bruce energy.

Josh Hamilton: He mines his personal history in Jersey in his book, Lose Well, where he emphasizes the importance of failing and uses some hilarious and dark episodes from his own life to illustrate the point.

Joe Skinner: This is kind of a defining quality in his work. In his HBO special Career Suicide, Chris details his own struggles growing up with mental health issues and it’s pretty groundbreaking in the way that it destigmatizes medication. It’s alarmingly honest, and its really more of a one man show in the vein of Spalding Gray than a comedy special. The foundation of it all is personal biography.

Josh Hamilton: He strikes me as an artist whose really actively practicing empathy, which is not necessarily something that comedy usually brings out in people. There’s kind of always been a dividing line in comedy, and it feels especially present right now, between sincerity and irony and Gethard may be the spokesman of sincerity. His podcast, Beautiful Anonymous, further blurs the line between comedy and drama.

Joe Skinner: Yeah. He tweets out a phone number, a stranger calls it, and he has to talk to them for an hour straight. Since he has a background in improve at the Upright Citizens Brigade, Chris is able to navigate these calls into some pretty intense territory.

Josh Hamiliton: Gethard’s career is hard to define. You might know him as an actor on The Office, Broad City, or in the film Don’t Think Twice and we’d be remiss not to mention maybe his most legendarily hard to define work, the Public Access project The Chris Gethard Show, which ran just shy of ten years across multiple platforms. And he’s constantly touring and performing stand-up around the country. He’s a very busy guy. But, he took some time to sit down with Joe recently, here in the studio.

Joe Skinner: Hi Chris, thanks so much for coming in.

Chris Gethard: Oh, it’s a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Joe Skinner: I was just reading your book Lose Well and something that I found really universal about it is just that middle school really sucks.

Chris Gethard: Yeah, junior high school was probably the worst stretch in my life. Yeah.

Joe Skinner: What about this time period really helped set you on a path towards a life in performance and comedy, do you think?

Chris Gethard: Well, you know the surface level answer is that I look like I do and my last name spells out the words get hard. So, as far as feeling like a little bit of an outsider looking in, I think that the bar was set pretty high around that age and I think a lot of comedians and a lot of performers are people who maybe feel that way a little bit like they’re on the outside looking in and I kind of have this theory that maybe when you feel that way you spend a lot of time analyzing the world in front of you and trying to figure out what it is that’s not clicking and therefore you can comment on it from the perspective of comedians. So yeah, it was a, it was rough. It was a rough time. That stretch of my life was…I went to a school that was pretty poorly run, looking back on it. The kids were kind of on their own and I walked out of it with a chip on my shoulder for sure.

Joe Skinner: And was there a specific moment from this time period where you kind of were able to dive into performance?

Chris Gethard: Oh. Of course, yeah. You’re leading me towards that. I thought we were talking about the more broad sociological aspects. Yes. So I when I was in eighth grade a couple of friends of mine convinced me to try out for the school musical because they lived on the other side of town and, you know, when you spread out like that you don’t really get to hang out that often. So they were like yeah just do this we’ll get to hang out all the time. And I joined up and inexplicably got like a non-chorus part. I thought I was gonna be in the chorus but I got cast as the part of Randolph in Bye Bye Birdie which is the little brother in the main family and, if you know the show Bye Bye Birdie, it’s about this Elvis like guy coming to a small suburban town and everybody’s flipping out and, the kid who played Conrad Birdie, the kid who played Elvis–he’s just Elvis, right. Like, they just couldn’t get the rights to the name. The kid who played Elvis was my friend Danny Tobia and he is the coolest kid. And he got in a fight with the director and left and I had this whole show memorized because I was a nerd and last minute they switched and I became Conrad Birdie. I just re-watched the video of it recently because I was working on the book and telling that story and it’s really cringey. I was a solid foot shorter than most of the girls who were flipping out about me and I had a very, very regrettable bowl haircut and very weird outfits and the stage moms who did makeup just kind of threw a bunch of mascara and rouge on my prepubescent head and marched me out there. I got big laughs, though. I remember getting big laughs and I’ll never, ever forget the first night that I went on stage and did that because I remember so well that, like, I remember being aware, “oh, they’re laughing at me.” A kid who looks like I did, people shouldn’t be fainting with, you know, a sexual overwhelming want. No one should be doing that to me–a doughy faced little boy who looks like I’m 8 years old. So I understood I was being laughed at but I loved it. And when the curtains closed I remember just standing on the stage just kind of like jumping up and down and spinning in a circle with all this energy and that was really out of character for me at that age to show that much sort of just energy and enthusiasm so definitely sort of got thrown into the shark pit as far as being a public performer with this situation. That was very, sort of weird and, in a way, almost sort of like a performance art take on this popular musical and I think you can look at a lot of the stuff I’ve been interested in since and it’s probably trying to recapture that feeling of making an audience just go, “what are we looking at right now?” “Why is this funny to us? This feels like it’s not reality as we know it.”

Joe Skinner: And I know you talk really openly about dealing with anxiety in your performance. As a kid, you know, dealing with anxiety it feels sort of counterintuitive to, you know, connect so much with such a public act.

Chris Gethard: Yeah. Yeah, it’s something I thought about a lot and the best I can say is that it never felt confusing to me even though consistently people have said like, “oh, for someone who is so often scared to have a conversation or so often apologizing to everyone for everything, it’s kind of an odd choice to get on stage.” But the best I can say is that, when I am on a stage, that’s when I actually feel the most comfortable and I might actually say the most powerful. When I have a mic in my hand and everybody therefore is honor bound to listen and I can get a roomful of people laughing, I always feel like, on some level, their laughter is saying to me, “oh we get it. We understand. We feel that way too.” And I hope that gives the audience a lot and I know it gives me a lot. So, yeah, it’s funny. Last night I did one standup set so it was 15 to 20 minutes and those were definitely the 15 to 20 minutes where I felt most confident, comfortable, like myself, in my own skin. Yesterday it was a really hard day for me, actually, filled with a lot of bad feelings and self-doubt which I still suffer from all the time. That 15 minutes on stage, which for most people would be the most terrifying 15 minutes they could imagine, is for me the only 15 minutes where I feel sane.

Joe Skinner: Yeah, you write about it in the book too. There’s this part where you say something about you use performance as an opportunity to kind of take control of certain things and take control of situations where otherwise you may not have had that kind of power and it gives you know affords you that kind of power.

Chris Gethard: Yeah I mean I’m someone who legitimately gets interrupted all the time, ignored all the time. I know what cloth I’m cut from like you see me in a line at a bodega and people liberally feel okay about just cutting me in line and I say that just to be like, I have always lived this sort of Charlie Brown life. Even the other day I did a show in London and I flew back and my seat was directly next to the toilet. It is a seven-and-a-half-hour flight. And like, friends of mine tell me, they’ll be like, “Oh why are you still so nervous about your career. It’s like you’re over the hump and you’re a little bit famous now.” I’m like, if that is true, it doesn’t change the fact that I get just like jammed in next to the toilet and big-timed by everybody, all the time. So, performing is certainly a way for me to grab onto some sense of agency and sort of have a little bit of a voice once or twice a day. Sorry, I feel like this is becoming a bummer. That’s on brand for me.

Joe Skinner: Was there a moment when you realized that, you know, looking back and mining some of these stories from your youth or from any part of your life really doing kind of an autobiographical approach to comedy–was there a moment when you realized that this was going to be kind of the next step in your career?

Chris Gethard: There’s a few. There’s a few that stand out. One that I think about a lot is that I came up as an improviser and came up at the Upright Citizens Brigade during an era when it was just kind of like a success factory. You’d see people getting on sitcoms all the time, students of mine who I taught in improv classes, you know, the two guys who I felt closest to coming up, one of them wound up on the office. One of them wound up on SNL and it just wasn’t happening for me and I realized that I’m not strong at characters and I’m not strong at voices and these things that these actors do. But what I am good at is being myself and letting people see how I feel on stage. There’s a show called ASSSSCAT at UCB that’s been running on Sunday nights for decades now and they started having me go up and do the storytelling part instead of the improvising part and that really was the thing that made me realize, “Oh, I’m good at being myself.” Mike Birbiglia told me recently– he’s been a mentor to me over the years–and he told me recently, he’s like, “you know you’re the only person to come out of UCB who’s known for being yourself.” Everyone else is known for playing actors. I think, as I maybe fell out of love with improv was when I started connecting to this idea maybe I can just be me. Maybe that’s the most interesting thing I have to offer. I’m never gonna be as funny as my pal Bobby Moynihan but I can be more honest than anyone else I know. I’m comfortable just sort of eating it in public and letting people see the rough edges and the dark sides and I think if I’m good at anything, it’s sort of taking it on the chin publicly and letting everybody experience that with me and seeing what happens on the other side of it.

Joe Skinner: When you were at UCB you had something called the Magic Bus of stories.

Chris Gethard: Yes. That kind of build out of the ASSSSCAT experience that I set. So I started telling these stories on stage and people started flipping out. And things started happening where this group of kids at the time– they were freshmen at NYU–they all started showing up. One day I go into the green room and some of the staff at the UCB is like, “hey, there’s all these kids out there. They have T-shirts. They drew your face on them. They drew your name on them.” I was like, “oh, what’s going on?” and I realized that, you know, I was up there with all these legitimate celebrities. I mean these shows would be Amy Poehler, Seth Meyers, Jack McBrayer, Jason Sudeikis and Chris Gethard. And I realized I was becoming kind of like the people’s champ like they were rooting for me so hard as this like guy right on the fringe of this thing and these kids–I thought they were messing with me. I thought it was a joke and I thought they were making fun of me and it actually hurt my feelings. And they said no we really love your stories. We want to see the places in New Jersey where they took place so I kind of called their bluff. This was all on Facebook and I was like, “alright, yeah. Let’s rent a bus and go,” thinking it would be the end of it and they’d go, “yeah, alright, we’ll back down.” But no. They called bus companies and it sold out instantly. And I mean like within like 20 minutes we’d sold out like 60 seats on a bus so people could follow me around New Jersey and I could be like, “yeah, so this is the basement. I lost my virginity right here on a couch.” And we’re like in the basement of the house where I grew up and the guy who owns the house now–I’ll never forget–he’s in the back of the room and I tell that story and he just goes, “c’mon man. come on man.” It was this very odd day where I realized that something had broken through and I was maybe underestimating the validity of what I had stumbled into and a lot of these younger kids at the time were genuinely rooting me on. And it wasn’t a joke and that I had maybe fallen into some sort of performance style that was a little bit hard to define and that was kind of on the edge of storytelling and performance art but that nobody else was doing. It got a bunch of press. It was the first thing I ever did that anybody kind of cared about outside of just the tiny little improv scene. And it was life changing. It was life changing. I’m still in touch with a lot of those people. I keep my eye on them. One of the people who was in that early wave of my supporters actually just was cast on Saturday Night Live, which is such a fascinating thing to see, to have been around so long where it’s like one of the people who was, you know, rooting me on in 2009, 10 years later he gets cast on Saturday Night Live. It’s really beautiful. It’s a really beautiful full circle thing to see.

Joe Skinner: Yeah. I feel like mentorship and this mentor/mentee approach has been pretty consistent across your career. People often talk about you discovering or nurturing a lot of young talent that’s gone on to great things.

Chris Gethard: I’m really proud of it. I remember what it felt like to be this guy renting a bus feeling like, “man this is really weird.” And I doubted it. I would do these performance art sort of projects that were just kind of experimental and then I’d get embarrassed and be like, “well, my friends are on the Office and I’m doing a weird show where we shoot each other with paint balls in front of a crowd.” And I’d get really embarrassed and I remember that feeling of being alone in it. feeling like no one else was doing it. So I remember a lot of the people who mentored me and how much that helped and I have always felt honor bound when the other when the other young bucks come along and I see some of the other people who are trying the strange stuff. I always reach out and, if there’s any world in which I can lend a helping hand, I do. My TV show that kind of was born out of this whole attitude eventually went to cable and I was able to give a lot of people their first job.

Joe Skinner: Have you intellectually thought of what you’re doing as community building?

Chris Gethard: Yeah, I mean, I was aware that was a major element of it. Even if you look at where–my show was on public access, which was such a game changer for me. Everyone on the crew had a nickname. We all hung out. Everybody got sucked into being on camera. You know, again, I hate to be depressing but for most of my life I’ve felt like someone who did not have a community. So I had to kind of go and build my own.

Joe Skinner: We should definitely talk about this foundational piece of your career–The Chris Gethard Show–and how it started.

Chris Gethard: It goes back 10 years now. Which, I was hoping to keep it alive for 10 years. I thought that would be a nice round number but it’s very much within the sort of story of the show and the ethos of the show to crap out at 9–one short. That’s kind of everything you need to know about this show, is that we were hoping to make it to 10. Nope got cancelled at nine. The show started at UCB. I’d been doing a lot of the storytelling stuff and a lot of the odd stuff. The artistic director there, I sat down with him at one point, and I gave him so much credit because, you know, I said, “ I kind of want to do a talk show live on stage.” He was like, “Well that’s been done to death. Everybody’s done it.” But he’s like, “I want to give you a slot. You do a talk show that reflects the fact that you rent buses and have done all this other– like I once had a show where comedians were boxing each other on stage. Just stuff that was just weird, man. He was like, “just own all that stuff. That’s what you do best.” And It blew up. I don’t want to buy into too much legend-building or mythology-building but I can look back now that it’s over and realize, like, there was just some stuff that happened that was magic. Very early into the run of the show, I went on Twitter–and this was in 2011. Yeah. The bus tour was 2009 and it was in Twitter’s early days, is the point. And people hadn’t really figured it out and I asked Diddy– Sean Combs. Puff Daddy if he would come to my show and inexplicably he was like, “yeah what’s your show? I’ll come do it.” And everybody flipped out. I think it was written about as one of the early things where people were like, “Oh, Twitter’s an actual tool that can connect people across boundaries.” Like, I should not have access to Sean Combs in any world especially back then, let alone now. And he just came and did it and it became this thing where it took him 13 months to actually show up and every month, people thought he was coming so the show would sell out. And then, the stuff we were doing, the people I was showing off as this hot crowd would show up. It became this movement and we switched over to public access TV as I thought the show was dying out and a guy I knew from–I had taught him in an improv class, he’s like, “I work at the public access station you should come do it. Your show would be great on public access.” And at first I was like, “Oh my God. That’s kind of cringey to be told you would be great on public access.” And then, once I got over the ego, I was like, “man they have a three camera studio, they stream it online, you can do the show live.” I’d say the first four or five months on public access were really difficult. Hard to push through, hard to find an audience and then when things clicked, it just became this sort of gang of renegades beaming out comedy to the world that often didn’t even work. Then we’d start getting calls. I remember. First we’d be getting prank calls from within Manhattan and then all of a sudden we’re getting calls from Jersey. Now we’re getting calls from Connecticut. And then I remember like, the first night we got a call from Canada. It was like, “What?” Then all of a sudden within a year or two we’re getting calls from Sweden, from Brazil. We sold a pilot of the show to Comedy Central. A guy flew from Honolulu. A girl flew from Brazil. People flying from San Francisco just to attend our pilot taping–our studio audience pilot taping and I started to realize there were a lot of outcasts spread all over the world who came to view this weird little show as representing them in the same way that I remember punk rock bands making me feel that way. I mean we had people from all over– Australia. Someone once told me they were watching the show on an iPad in the back of a convertible in Dubai. Once got an email from someone who said they had to hack a firewall in China just to watch our show like, committing crimes that the Chinese government would be mad about just so you can see a show that’s literally at times like me laying on a table shirtless having a burrito built on my belly. There’s no world in which I would claim that this is high art but something about the attitude behind it actually, maybe, did attain that status for a certain segment of the population.

Joe Skinner: And you were literally dragging the studio gear in and out of your car.

Chris Gethard: Oh, it was pathetic. I had a Ford Fiesta. First it was a Nissan Sentra. At some point I upgraded to a Ford Fiesta but, point being, tiny trunk of the car and like, any prop we had, had to live in the trunk of my car. There was no storage space for public access so I would, every Wednesday night it almost became this weird ritual for me. And this is like the Irish Catholic in me that feels like you have to have a ritual to punish yourself in order to earn anything. There’s many psychological layers, but I’d park the car on 59th Street and 11th Avenue and, you know, the closer I could get to the studio the better but very often I’d be around the block and I’d have a big banner made out of canvas. We had a stand for the banner. We had a big suitcase full of all sorts of wires and hard drives and stuff. And then on top of that, any props we had for the show which would be like, “Okay now I have four Nerf guns and a bag of, you know, pardon my French–double headed dildos and it would be me with all this stuff balanced on my back dragging the suitcase behind me. And like, you know, 50-60 pounds of gear on my own back and I’d schlep it up to the studio and sometimes it would be funny because I’d pass kids who were like killing time in the neighborhood or like we’re coming to the show. You know, there’d be somebody who’d be like, “I’ve been watching your show for years and I took a bus from Michigan.” I’m like, “Yeah, this is me dragging all this junk up the sidewalk myself.” And it felt like I’m never going to phone it in. I’m never going to ask people to put in work that I’m not willing to put in and every week my crew will see me sort of stumble in with all this stuff on my own back as this sign that I know we’re in it together and it’s not about me and it’s not about getting my name out there. It’s not about my ego getting stroked. It’s about us really trying to do something together that is allowed to fail and that doesn’t prescribe to anything that the mainstream would push upon us and that, in fact sometimes often, didn’t make sense intentionally or failed ambitiously almost in a way to sort of throw up a middle finger specifically to the idea of mainstream comedy. And then, of course, we eventually got picked up by cable, which was very, very nice. I looked back and realized that the story of the show is the show of public access studio and then in very stereotypical fashion the pressure of being on a network and their mandates did eventually, I think, squeeze a lot of the attitude out of it and that’s when I knew it was time to end it. They kind of called me up and they said, “we’re willing to keep going if you are majorly down to restructure things,” and I said you know what, We got let the legend of this thing be what it is. I’ll be mad at myself forever if I totally water down what I do in the name of money. Can’t do that.

Joe Skinner: Yeah I mean, it reminds me a lot of going to underground shows when I was a kid or going to see some music when I was a kid and then eventually those venues shutting down and it being this kind of cathartic process. You said music was a big part of this for you too, growing up.

Chris Gethard: It was huge. It is huge. And I look back and realize that I owe such a debt to, you know, the independent music that I think started rolling. You know, this idea of punk rock being intentionally sort of like outsider art that lived outside the mainstream, that started in the 70s and then moving on to, you know, college rock being like a distribution system where people could find non-traditional stuff. The bands that I look back to, you know, thinking about how like Black Flag toured relentlessly. Minor Threat. A lot of these bands that I think really built the infrastructures of being an independent artist. I feel like I won’t say I was the first by any means but I definitely, maybe took one of the biggest swings at emulating some of their attitude and some of their infrastructure and I never forgot my first punk rock show ever. I was in eighth grade. Summer between 8th grade and 9th grade. I’ll never forget just the feeling of shock that the people on stage were only a few years older than me and they hadn’t asked anyone’s permission and it didn’t necessarily sound great. But they had their T-shirts and they had their records and their tapes for sale and they just went and did it. I just always had a little bit of anger in me and always found that to be quite inspiring and I really thought a lot about music. When I was building my show on Public Access, I thought about music a lot more than I thought about comedy, actually. As I was feeling these stresses about friends of mine getting these mainstream gigs and me just whiffing on that hard, I had to really reconcile and say, “It’s so arrogant to be mad about that because my friends are getting sitcom jobs and I don’t watch sitcoms.” That’s not a judgment. I’m not rolling my eyes. Millions and millions Americans love them and that’s beautiful. I don’t watch them. So what am I exactly searching for to want to be on one–to be on a type of entertainment I roll my eyes at? A friend of mine, you know, getting on SNL. I almost got a writing job at SNL at one point. It devastated me I didn’t get it. But again, no offense, I have friends who work there, I’ve seen brilliant stuff come out of the show–I don’t watch it. I don’t watch it. It’s not for me. So I’d sit there and really realize I’m probably betraying my own values or my own ethics chasing these traditional versions of success. I never once locked in with a band who played stadiums. I wanted to be in a VFW hall or a church basement. I wanted to look them in the eye. I wanted to be there with 30 other people feeling like I was getting something personal so I had to kind of pump the brakes on my own ego. Start building entertainment that felt like that.

Joe Skinner: A lot of your work is refusing to just stick to one genre of just capital C comedy it feels like you’re really trying to pull together all these different places.

Chris Gethard: For better or for worse. For better or for worse because it makes it very, very hard to define. You know it’s kind of hard to get momentum going when no one can quite explain to their friends. The most famous episode we ever did we wound up putting– whole premise was, we put a human being in a dumpster and people had to call up and guess who was in the dumpster and that doesn’t sound totally appealing to someone who likes How I Met Your Mother. You know? And I get it. And I get it. But it is hard to describe and hard to latch on to but I think for a person of a certain mentality it feels like something that maybe makes them kind of like pump and pound their chest with a little bit of pride that there’s still some strange stuff that exists.

Joe Skinner: Yeah you mentioned the artistic director at UCB Anthony King and he said that you’ve become an adjective for “weird.”

Chris Gethard: There was a stretch in New York where the phrase “A Gethard Show,” had gone beyond just this show I was staging and people being like, “Yeah I kind of want to do like a Gethard Show thing,” and that would invariably be like, “we’re going to set up for kiddie pools and fill them with pudding and the whole audience has to, like, dive in there looking for a key to a safe.” And it would be some like elaborate nonsense and sometimes I’d hear that stuff and I’d be like, “Oh that’s awesome.” And then sometimes I’d go, “Oh my. That’s what my name is getting attached now. Alright. Alright. A decade in this business and that’s what it’s come to. Alright.”

Joe Skinner: And then mixing all these different styles and you know I think often mixing drama with comedy or tragedy with comedy you know eventually leads to another huge highlight in your Career Suicide on HBO.

Chris Gethard: Yeah. Outside of character acting gigs I would say that’s the thing I’ve spearheaded, that is the most likely that you have actually heard of If you’re hearing this interview. It was a special on HBO where I talked pretty in-depth about my mental issues and some flirtations with suicide. And, yeah, that was a big one. I’ll probably never do anything I’m more proud of than Career Suicide.

Joe Skinner: Did Career Suicide always have a confessional style from it from the earliest invocation of it?

Chris Gethard: Yeah. Well, my might stand up in general does. When I started doing standup, I very much gravitated towards the storytelling style. Not really setups and punchlines. And you know, thinking about storytelling style someone I linked up with was Mike Birbiglia who I think, if you follow comedy, I think he’s probably one of the people who is most known for sort of fleshed out stories narratives within his work. And I’d been doing comedy a long time but I went to Mike–I saw him at a festival. We were doing Bonnaroo together and he saw me perform and he said, “dude, you’re getting a lot better at stand up,” and I said, “if you need an opener, I’ll do it.” I knew that I was humbling myself because I had already been around for, you know, over a decade but I also knew I would learn a lot and I’m a big fan of getting out of my own way when it comes to ego. So I was doing it with Mike and telling these confessional stories on stage, you know, in my own work and then opening for him and we had this night where we were driving through the middle of the country in between two of his shows and he was like, “You know, you mentioned this depression stuff in your work. What’s the most real it ever got?” And I told him a story I had told probably less than a dozen people in my whole life which was about the time that I was in a car wreck and it was something that I knew was happening and allowed to happen because I thought it was a good way to you know to pass away intentionally without being judged. And I told them the story and he–I’ll never forget—we were driving through Iowa or Kansas or somewhere and he just pauses and he’s like, “Wow. That’s hilarious. You’ve got to tell that on stage,” and I was like, “That’s the darkest, saddest thing I’ve ever been through.” And he’s like, “If you can connect with that, it’s going to be something really special. It kind of made it clear in the course of that conversation of, it might be something that people connect with in a way that they’re not getting elsewhere. And that, again, I always think back to when I was 13-14 years old and then again when I was 19-20 years old and I was terrified of this side of myself. I couldn’t find much of anything that spoke to it. So, if I can make the thing that speaks to it and there’s someone else out there who feels lonely, scared, sad all the time, lonely all the time, if I can just send something out there that lets them know, “Hey there’s someone else out here who understands,” it’d actually be very selfish not to.

Joe Skinner: Was it challenging to have to relive this over and over again? Because, you’re performing this over and over.

Chris Gethard: It was the worst. It was hard. It was hard. I did it. I workshopped it for well over–I think about a year and a half and then I did the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where you go and do it 29 nights in a row in Scotland like a country where I know no one and then I did it off Broadway. When I did it off Broadway, I was doing it six, seven sometimes eight times a week with the matinees and there was a really sad stretch where my wife was out of town. She was working on the road in her own right. She’s out of town and I’m getting off on stage eight times a week telling jokes about the time I tried to kill myself. It was hard. It was hard. It was hard and then I beamed it out to the world on HBO and I felt immensely proud to get there but was also quite happy to move on. And my own relationship with that piece, moving forward, has been very difficult because its opened the floodgates to having to think about it all the time from my perspective and other people’s perspectives. But, yeah, I definitely felt like– not to be too dramatic, but I felt like I bled a little bit for the sake of the greater good and it left some scar tissue.

Joe Skinner: Was a surprising to see the reactions to the show?

Chris Gethard: It was. It was. It was really eye opening. I mean, I had people coming up to me saying, “I’ve never told anybody I’m depressed and that’s the first I’ve ever heard someone talk about it where it rings true to me.” And I had people telling me, “I’m gonna go get help for the first time,” or, “I’m gonna go get back on meds,” which was amazing. Made me feel, again, like, man I bet if I had this when I was 15 I wouldn’t have suffered as much. And the ones that were more meaningful? Sometimes people would come up to me and go, “I’ve always thought my kid was just the dramatic baby about stuff but I’m realizing no I have to take it seriously.” You know, I had someone who told me they had a kid who was only 7 or 8 years old who whose doctor was trying to prescribe them meds and they were resistant and rolling their eyes and they said, you know, I don’t know if we’re gonna go that route but we’re going to take it more seriously, you know? I had some people tell me, would say things like, “you know, my brother took his own life and it was really hard to watch your show but I think I maybe understand how he was feeling more than I used to,” and to hear people say things like that in a positive way made me feel good. And as you can hear from my long pause, good in a layered way that has a lot of confusion behind it but ultimately I felt like, you know, I’m pretty content that at some point I’ll be on my deathbed and I’ll know that I at least tried to do my part to make the world a little bit easier for people for whom it is often hard. I’ll feel good about that.

Joe Skinner: I feel like you really flew with that with Beautiful Anonymous. Your podcast, you know, you mentioned earlier that it’s so hard to describe a lot of the stuff you do and there is this kind of amazing moment in your career where Beautiful Anonymous comes out. It’s actually, kind of, remarkably easy to explain what the show is.

Chris Gethard: Finally I did a thing that someone can explain in two sentences and their friend will go, “Oh, that sounds cool.” Finally something easy. Yeah, it’s a podcast where I tweet out a phone number and whoever calls, we pick one person and then I talk to them for an hour and they don’t tell me their name and that way they’re allowed to feel some freedom to share and I just can’t hang up for an hour. That’s it. An hour-long phone call from an anonymous person talking about their life. Nice and simple and clean and easy.

Joe Skinner: I mean this show really feels like it’s a continuation of Career Suicide almost to me.

Chris Gethard: In a lot of ways, yeah.

Joe Skinner: I remember early episodes. It really felt more like kind of a straight comedy podcast. Do you even consider it a comedy podcast anymore?

Chris Gethard: No and that took a lot. I had to reconcile that. It was it was featured on This American Life and they put out an episode that I think was much more serious than funny and that meant that all the people who found it through that show–and I’m so, so incredibly grateful that they spread word on it—but, all the calls coming in were serious. But again, I had to realize it’s not about me. It’s my insecurity that this isn’t reflecting that I’m a comedian. I was very insecure about it but insecurity gets you nowhere. And I had to realize it was something that meant a lot to people and when I take a step back and look at it, you know, I look at the Gethard Show which is so weird and Career Suicide which I poured so much work into and Beautiful Anonymous and I think the thing they all have in common is that there is a real effort behind all of them to say you are not alone out there like, you know, all of them have that and they’re just poured into containers of different shapes.

Joe Skinner: Was there an episode of Beautiful Anonymous that made you realize that this is the direction the show’s really going in?

Chris Gethard: The first one was a guy who hated his job and was sitting in his car. I’ll never forget–he was working in a place called Bank Tech, which I thought was a hilariously grim name for a job if you don’t like it. And he was talking about how he wanted to move on but he was scared and I convinced him to just start shouting as loud as he could to vent his rage and, I mean, so many of the calls just blew my mind, you know? One where someone told me what it was like to escape from a religious cult. One that I think has been massively impactful on me was a mother who called from the waiting room of the hospital because her daughter was awaiting results for some cancer tests. Calls where people talk about their sexuality and where I feel very proud knowing like, there’s probably some people in the world who, the first time they ever heard a trans person tell their own story in their own words, was on my show. There’s one that I think was really eye opening where, in early 2016, we had a call from a lady who was planning on voting for Trump. She was very, very enthusiastic about it and could not explain why and this was an era where I was going, you know, I was very respectful. I’m like he mocked a reporter for their disability and she went, “Yeah I can’t get behind that.” “He makes immigrants feel like they’re going to get killed. He’s whipping them.” “Yeah. No, I don’t like that part,” and I always think back to that and I’m like I wish that some Democratic strategists had maybe listened to that episode because it was an early canary in the coal mine of this sort unrelenting support for a guy who had some major flaws. I don’t know. A bunch. A bunch. I’m always blown away. The answer is that I never cease to be amazed by the stories I hear from regular people on Beautiful Anonymous. Never.

Joe Skinner: Your background in improve really, kind of, ties it all together for me; it makes it, gives it an extra spark, I think.

Chris Gethard: Yeah and it’s funny with Beautiful Anonymous. Oftentimes the people on the phone don’t realize I’m playing by the rules of improv. I got to a point where I’m cocky about very few things but I was a very good improviser and a very good improv teacher and all those skills are still there. And as far as listening, I spent about a decade training myself to listen harder than people normally listen and a lot of times on the show I sort of internally giggle because I’m like, “Oh. I’m just the straight man in a comedic scene,” but it’s not a comedic scene. it’s a phone call about something grim from your life. But I’m still playing by the rules of being an active listener.

Joe Skinner: Do people more often or less often know the game that’s happening?

Chris Gethard: I’d like to think they don’t. I’d like to think that it’s a show that, at its best day, people would listening and go, “Oh. anyone could be the host of that show,” but if they sat down to actually do it they’d go, “Oh this is actually a tightrope to walk.” And I’d like to think that I hide that tight rope part of it as often as possible. Only because A) I think that that’s a reflection of skillful entertainment that you don’t see. You know, you don’t see the gears. And also I think it makes the caller on the line feel safe to know that there’s somebody really locking in with them and they don’t need to see the strain of any particular training or strategy I have. They just need to feel safe in conversation with me.

Joe Skinner: We’ve kind of entered an era with comedy where there’s become this huge backlash against political correctness, in a lot of ways, in the comedy world. And I see you as a flag bearer for earnesty and sincerity in a lot of ways. Do you see yourself in that way?

Chris Gethard: I do. I do. But I’d also like to think I’m not. I’m not out there criticizing other people who aren’t that and I just don’t understand why sometimes it’s viewed as weakness to be vulnerable in your work with comedy. It’s baffling to me and I’d like to think that maybe I’ve helped carve out a space and I’m certainly not the only one there’s people, you know, people I really admire. You know, some of the names that come to mind right away Maria Bamford Tig Notaro. People have really put some stuff out there that’s personal and raw and real. Mike Birbiglia, again, I bring his name up. He’s been a great influence on me. A lot of people have done it and I’d like to think that I’m a part of that and just the week that we’re recording this, I got crushed by another comedian who called me out hard on a podcast and it was one of a few things he said that made some national news and I did not appreciate being sucked into it. All I’ve ever done is worked hard and tried to be honest and tried to connect with an audience who’s looking for the type of values I bring to my work and I don’t ever want to apologize for that. And it maybe will make me forever live as a little bit more of a niche artist or a little bit more of an underground artist but I’d rather connect with two hundred people who identify with the idea of being earnest or vulnerable or sad at times than a football stadium full of people who don’t and God bless all the people who can sell enough tickets to sell a football stadium. It’s awesome. It’s amazing. It’s good for all of us that there’s that many options out there but, yeah, sometimes I feel like I’m an outlier for being earnest and sometimes I feel like within the comedy scene I get judged pretty harshly for it but all I do is work hard and I can’t apologize for that.

Joe Skinner: Do you think comedy’s reflective of society at large?

Chris Gethard: I will say that having been around the New York comic scene for 20 years, I have found it increasingly strange that it feels like comedy has become this sort of like bellwether that’s a societal predictor. If you look at the downfall of some of the, you know, some of the most popular comedians of their era they clearly, kind of, were a precursor or an early part of the me too movement. Look at how people talk about things like race and gender and there’s so many think pieces about what comedians say and do about this stuff. I go back and forth because on some level I find it very strange that an art form as disposable as comedy is a thing that people get so worked up and mad about. But there’s also a very strange sign of the times too where there’s a lot of comedians that I think feel very genuinely committed to being woke for lack of a better word. There’s other comedians who I think are very much like, “No. Political correctness is the enemy of free speech,” and those are conversations that are just so prevalent across the board culturally right now that it’s just so odd that comedy is a battlefield for all these sort of societal changes to me. I think the main thing I walk away thinking is that comedians have every right in the world to say what they want and experiment and they just have to be willing to take the consequences for that. You know I do think that in the course of comedy, I would say probably Lenny Bruce being the first name that comes to mind for me of him taking on censorship. Carlin taking on censorship. Prior taking on, you know, I think so much of, you know, what was happening in the 60s and 70s as far as racial movement in society. I feel like comedy has certainly had its moments where it does crack the veneer of traditions as societal change happens but this is a particularly tumultuous time in comedy where it has come to represent something for people. Constant turmoil and think pieces and lack of, you know, just sometimes a lack of responsibility within the comedy community to take ownership of that an– very strange. I have to say on my level that in 20 years of doing it, I don’t know if there’s been a time where I have, sort of, felt less certain of the footing of what it means to be a comedian and I just try to stake my claim and do my part to make work that I’m proud of and that I think represents something good and try not to judge other people for what they do and I just hope that by doing what I do and leading by example that I can make some work that makes people who share my values feel like they have a they have a comedian they can go to when they want to laugh. Yet another rambling answer but that time at least it was a legitimately confusing question because being comedian right now, it is weird.

Joe Skinner: Thank you for that.

Chris Gethard: It’s weird. That could have been the short answer. Yeah man, it’s a weird time to be a comedian. That would’ve been the short one but it’s a lot. It’s a lot to think about and it’s a lot to think about what your responsibilities are. Should I still be performing at clubs that put up people who have, you know, caused some news for some really not- good stuff, to say the least? Well if I walk away from those clubs, there was one night I was at one of the clubs and a female performer was like, “Well if a guy like you leaves, I’m even more alone. I’m not in a position career-wise where I can leave.” So I’m going, “Well, what does it mean? How do you navigate all this?” How do you try to be someone who puts your head down and does the work and is proud of being able to do what you do while also maybe having some misgivings about some of the attitudes both from within and without. Very strange times

Joe Skinner: This is sort of tangential–loosely related, but, you know, a figure like Morrissey who, I know you’re a huge Smiths fan but he’s also a complicated figure.

Chris Gethard: It’s getting harder and harder. Yeah.

Joe Skinner: You know I’m also a Smiths fan so I can relate. But how do you mesh with that? How do you– do you subscribe to separating the art from the artist?

Chris Gethard: It has become more difficult for me. Even you right there. Let’s all point out– very crafty– I am a Smiths fan. That’s a delineation that a lot of people–a lot of people will right now say I’m a Smiths fan and not necessarily phrase it as I’m a Morrissey fan. A major running through line in Career Suicide was that I was singing Morrissey lyrics and talking about how he was the musician that got me through a lot of my dark nights. And I’ve been so proud that people have watched that special and said, “Well you wound up doing that for me,” and I always felt like that was in some way honoring an artist that did have a profound influence on me. And now you turn around and read quotes where he says things like, “people just want to hang out with others of their own race and I don’t see what’s wrong with that,” and I just don’t see how that’s doing the world any good. I don’t see how an artist who, for a few generations of people who were depressed, people who felt like their sexuality made them targets, people who felt bullied and picked on, that band in particular was one that made us feel like we were allowed to be proud of who we are and maybe even throw some punches back by standing up and saying who we are publicly and proudly. The idea that he’s now the guy saying, “why was that kid alone with Kevin Spacey anyway? That’s bad parenting,” These are statements that make it harder and harder to reconcile. And I know that he probably uh, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m thinking about getting my tattoo removed. I don’t know. It would be such a sad day if I did. But I have a son now. I have a five-month-old son. When he gets older and says, “Who is that guy?” or he just goes and Googles him, Is he going to say, “Do you believe in that stuff too?” And I don’t. , I think I’ve learned a real lesson about the difference between being affected by an artist’s work and maybe putting that artist on a pedestal to a degree that can come around and bite you.

Joe Skinner: You know I think something that is really cool about your work, though, is you’ve always been kind of breaking down those rules around celebrity too.

Chris Gethard: Trying to. Trying to. Some of that, I think, is just outright anger that I’m never gonna be in the club. You know? Like, my show to my show bombed out on cable and I’ll say to you some bitterness. Like, the year Career Suicide was out, I was really hoping that it would get nominated for an Emmy. It on HBO so I felt I had a chance and not so I could have validation but because I was like, “Man, if this story can be told more places, I think it will do more good.” Not so I can sell more tickets, not so I can have more attention but I realized, I was like, “Man. I thought that one was good enough to at least get a nomination. It was on a platform that often does.” I just had to realize at some point I’m not in the club. I’m not in the club and it’s, again, another moment of feeling it would be arrogant to feel like I get to be invited into the club now because my work, like you said, I’ve needled that celebrity culture. I’ve tried to poke holes in how ridiculous it is. An era of reality stars and Instagram influencers. This is not–this is something to roll your eyes at. Entertainment that feel so often like it’s just being spoon fed to us in an easy way. I don’t mind that people sometimes say my work is impenetrable to them. I don’t mind that there’s so many comments on the Internet from people making fun of my old TV show because they don’t get it. I don’t want those people to get it. That’s fine by me. So, I can’t then turn around and be bitter that I’m not in the club when I’ve spent most of my career standing outside the clubhouse throwing rocks at it. It’s not a surprise that I don’t get invited in. They’re not like, “Hey, come in. Have a drink and a sandwich on us.” Like, no. I’ve spent a lot of time kind of angrily, in my own way, saying it’s an artificial world that is unhealthy and I don’t like it.

Joe Skinner: Well you can never match up with whatever people decide as prestige or decide as award-worthy and you can’t line up with it.

Chris Gethard: I know this. I will say in another response to your last question about poking holes: I do feel like two of the fan bases– if I could combine the different circles of people who like my work– The Gethard Show is all millennials and Beautiful Anonymous, a surprisingly large number of people who follow that are women in their 30s-40s and above and I do feel like those are two groups that feel perpetually un-listened to right now. And I am proud that my work is embraced by people who feel like they’re not listened to. Just people who feel like they have eyes rolled at them all the time. That’s who I want to entertain. I don’t need to entertain the people who want it to be easy or who want it to be mean. I just don’t need it to be that. I don’t want to make that stuff. That’s fine. If that means that I have a harder time paying my rent sometimes than someone of my experience level should, that’s fine.

Joe Skinner: Do you see yourself doing your project in the future that doesn’t have your face on it or it doesn’t have you as a subject matter?

Chris Gethard: Yeah, I’m done with that day again. I think that’s the type of thing that catches fire in your gut in your 20s and my 30s I felt like I needed to get over the finish line. No more books with my face on the cover. No more shows with my name in them. I’m very happy to fade into a more happy obscurity. I think a lot about pulling a J.D. Salinger that you know, a lot less people care about. But I think a lot about moving the woods and giving up on it. Especially in relation to the questions about the current state of the comedy scene and the divisiveness that surrounds it. I just wonder if it’s for me anymore. So, the thing that is most exciting to me is, you know, doing things that a) are small and personal. I love Beautiful Anonymous because of that. I feel like it feels like once a week you get to have a conversation that is sometimes in many ways with me and this other person that you’re included–intimate. I like the idea of smaller intimate stuff. I also like the idea of continuing to find the up and coming artists who are still driven, who do still have that fire in their gut. Anything I’ve had to prove, I think I’ve proved it and I don’t know if that means I’m just gonna fade away but if I do I will do so very contentedly. I still see young artists that I’m so impressed by. So impressed by it and it makes me so happy to shout to the hilltops about them. Comedians I love right now. Like there’s Carmen Christopher, Martin Urbana, Christie cello. There’s a girl who just moved from Chicago her name is Meghan Salter who I think is so full of joy and so brilliant and I still get so happy and so excited to come across people who are so driven, to do interesting work in their own way and that still gives me so much happiness and so much joy. So, I’d rather spend my time and energy telling the world about other people now because, also, I’m 40. You don’t get to be cool when you’re 40. Like I’m not going to be the hipster running around on Public Access and whatnot anymore. I’m realistic enough to know that so I’m happy to fade away. Happy to fade away, figure out what the next thing is but let it be more lowkey. I’m tired. I’ve done a lot of work I’m proud of but I’m awful tired but there’s also something to be said for, you know, gracefully knowing when it’s time to let someone else pick up the torch and run with it. That’s another thing I think about. Career Suicide came out, what, three or four years ago? I’m very happy that–It felt shocking when it first came out. To hear someone talk about suicide that publicly. I don’t think it feels as shocking anymore. I’m proud of that. My show, when we first went to Public Access felt very, very progressive and forward thinking but the writer’s room, the kids, you know, it’s me and three other white guys who met every weekend to plan it. It felt very, very progressive and different back then. It was championing stuff. I’m also aware that in 2019, maybe a guy who looks like me and is as old as I am, maybe should take a little more of a backseat to younger artists who have other things to say. I don’t know if I matter as much as I did and that’s fine. That’s good to realize it’s fine. I swear. I swear I’m okay with it.

Joe Skinner: Well thank you so much for opening up about that. Last question. What’s your favorite New Jersey body of water?

Chris Gethard: Oh wow. Finally a question that’s waking me up. My favorite New Jersey body of water. There’s so many good ones. I mean the Jersey shore up and down. I mean the Raritan River represents a lot to me as a Rutgers alumn who was not happy there. favorite New Jersey body of water. I tell you what, I’ve been looking at houses that are on lakes out there. That might be my J.D. Salinger. A couple of lakes. I’m not going to name them because I don’t want people bothering me. I don’t know. I will say, there’s a brook that runs along the bottom of my street that I grew up on and I have said publicly that I would like my ashes scattered there so it probably has to be the brook at the bottom of Allen Street in West Orange New Jersey. I grew up on the same block as my grandparents and my earliest memories—some of my earliest memories–involve playing in this brook and if I want to be cheesy I will say I very often think about the fact that I make my work for who I used to be. What’s the stuff that me and my brother would have laughed at? If we found it on the UHF channels in our basement when we were kids who, you know, honestly got bullied and felt like we didn’t have a voice. So, I would have to say the broke at the bottom of Allen Street, West Orange New Jersey. That’s where I want my ashes scattered. That’s the one.

Joe Skinner: Well thanks so much for coming in. I really appreciate it.

Chris Gethard: Oh, please. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me and, again, sorry I ramble so much. I’ll always find a way to apologize.