Gaffigan goes beyond the pale
Chris Serico • The Journal News • Jan. 8, 2010 • Photo: Martin Crook
Jim Gaffigan was just a twenty-something guy with a Georgetown University business degree, pursuing a finance career before picking up a mic to try stand-up comedy.
Almost 20 years later, the 43-year-old star of TBS’ “My Boys” is one of the most popular comedians in the country, with legendary routines on everything from the paleness of his skin to everything you ever wanted to know about bacon and a certain microwavable sandwich-in-a-sleeve.
“The Hot Pocket (routine) really was inspired by how amazingly bad those initial Hot Pocket commercials were, and how simple the product was, and how bad the name was,” Gaffigan says. “That was pure luck. Who would have thought that I would start doing jokes (about something) literally every teenager or single person or divorcé would eat?”
Returning to the Lower Hudson Valley for the first time since a 2006 set at Tarrytown Music Hall, Gaffigan is prepping for two shows Saturday at the Paramount Center for the Arts. New venues are exciting to the comedian, but he never knows quite how they’ll play until he gets in front of a microphone and a crowd.
“Some of them are designed perfectly for Catskill-era (comics) with a mic or one person dancing on the stage,” he says. “And then you get these venues that are built for, like, Cirque de Soleil, where you’re just standing up there, telling diarrhea jokes. It’s a little awkward.”
Although part of a funny family, Gaffigan never expected to make a living out of comedy.
His late parents, Mike, a banker, and Marcia, a housewife, raised him and his five older siblings in Indiana. One of his sisters, Cathy, helped inspire the high-pitched, third-person voice he uses, onstage and off, to criticize himself.
“The running joke in my family is that I’m third-funniest,” he says, citing brothers Mitch and Joe as supposed superiors. “But I’m more successful in the comedy industry than either of them.”
After high school, he followed his father’s path to Georgetown, where he focused on studying at the McDonough School of Business instead of developing his laugh craft.
“My father was the first one to go to college in his family,” Gaffigan says. “It was kind of like, ‘We’ve made it to the middle class. Don’t mess up. Get a job where you have a white collar.’ And me, wanting to go into the entertainment industry, was something that no one in my family would really take seriously. … Stand-up and acting was a like a pie-in-the-sky idea.”
Nonetheless, the prestigious university has a knack for pumping out comedians, including Mike Birbiglia, John Mulaney, Nick Kroll and Alison Becker — a fact Gaffigan finds intriguing.
“It was a big surprise to me when Birbiglia looked me up through some kind of college thing,” he says. “But maybe (the comedy comes from) kind of the Catholic suburbanite thing.”
A year after graduation, he moved to New York City. Fraught with stage fright, he waited years to take a stand-up class, then delivered his first set at 55 Grove in the West Village. Because performers were expected to invite their own audience members, the crowd wasn’t huge, but it was responsive.
“It was a very nice audience, which I think helped a lot, because I was so terrified,” he says. “It was great. It was highly addictive to get on stage and make strangers laugh.”
The entire first set is included on the DVD of his latest comedy special, “King Baby,” which made its debut on Comedy Central last year.
His comedy influences include Jonathan Winters, Dave Attell, Brian Regan, George Carlin, Palisades resident Bill Murray and North Salem resident David Letterman. Gaffigan’s first big break might not even have been his debut performance on Letterman’s talk show.
It could have been soon thereafter, when the host oftered Gaffigan a development deal for a sitcom that would become CBS’ short-lived but critically acclaimed “Welcome to New York.”
While that show lasted only one season, Gaffigan followed it up with a stint on Ellen DeGeneres’ sitcom, recurring roles on “Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist,” “That ’70s Show” and “Ed,” and cameos on “Sex and the City,” “Third Watch” and the “Law & Order” trifecta. On the big screen, he’s been featured in “Super Troopers,” “Three Kings,” “13 Going on 30” and “Away We Go,” among others.
But his knack for stand-up has made him a regular on the late-night talk-show circuit. His brother-in-law, New Yorker cartoonist Paul Noth, created Gaffigan’s “Pale Force” cartoon series, in which Gaffigan and host Conan O’Brien use the sheer paleness of their skin as a weapon to fight crime. Launching years before the Internet legally streamed TV shows on a regular basis, the cartoon remains a Web phenomenon.
The “Force” seems to be with him. His comedy album, “Beyond the Pale” has gone platinum, selling more than 150,000 DVDs and more than 170,000 CDs.
But Gaffigan also hopes to be known as an actor with a dramatic side. In addition to his “Law & Order” appearances, he’s also brought gravitas to “The Great New Wonderful,” in which he plays an office worker trying to cope with tragedy in the aftermath of 9/11.
Gaffigan says it’s difficult for comedians to be taken seriously in a dramatic medium: “When you’re a comedian, people say, ‘I can’t believe you can say a straight line!’ … It’s like this perception that kind of goes back to medieval times. ‘Well, the court jester can’t be here; it’s a funeral!’ “
But even if his legacy is forever linked to Hot Pockets, he says he’ll be content with that.
“I would hope to be considered a good writer who was prolific,” he says. “But I think, right now if I died, people would be like, ‘Hot Pockets Guy died!’ … As long as it’s nothing really negative, I don’t really care. If I’m known as the Hot Pockets guy, it’s not the end of the world. I’m still doing what I love.”
