Jim Gaffigan interview

Here's a chat I had with Jim Gaffigan over the phone last month. He was calling to plug his upcoming show (which has come and gone) but we also talked at length on his latest book, his working relationship with his wife, and his "first bus" theory of comedy writing, among other things.

Jim Gaffigan

September 5, 2014

"I like the idea of hitting people after you've hit them. There's nothing funner than laughing and then you have to laugh again before you can catch your breath."

– Jim Gaffigan

Guy MacPherson: Hello, Jim?

Jim Gaffigan: Yes, hey. Thanks for doing this interview, by the way.

GM: My pleasure.

JG: I recognize that name. Have we talked before?

GM: Yeah, we've talked twice before.

JG: All right. But wait a minute, you're in Vancouver and we've talked twice before just about Vancouver?

GM: Yeah.

JG: Wow, that is crazy. So then we talked when I was doing that Late Night Comics of Letterman show, right?

GM: That's right. With Jake Johannson and Eddie Brill.

JG: Oh, that's amazing.

GM: And I think I met you after that show.

JG: Okay. It's so funny because I have a horrible memory but I was like, 'I recognize this name.'

GM: 2005 was when we first talked.

JG: Yeah, that's a million years ago. You just do Vancouver? Or do you sometimes do Toronto?

GM: Nope, just Vancouver.

JG: All right. Oh, you know I also have a book coming out in October? Food: A Love Story.

GM: Another one.

JG: Another one.

GM: And you write these yourself.

JG: Yeah. I mean, I write everything with my wife.

GM: Yes, I knew that. But does she get credit on the book cover?

JG: No, she doesn't. It's a strange predicament. If the point of view of the book is this out of shape, pudgy blond guy, then I don't think it should be from both of us. But the good thing is I'm doing a TV show where she's totally getting credit, where she's an executive producer and I'm an executive producer. So that balances that a little bit.

GM: What is the TV show?

JG: It'll be called The Jim Gaffigan Show on TVLand next June.

GM: A sitcom?

JG: It's going to be a single camera comedy.

GM: Nice. You got it going on.

JG: It's all going on.

GM: She may not get credit on the book, but you make it clear in interviews and stuff that she is your writing partner.

JG: Yeah. Logic would tell you that if it's Food: A Love Story by Jim and Jeannie Gaffigan, you're going to have a different expectation. But Food: A Love Story by this one guy, you have a certain expectation: Oh, Jim Gaffigan is obsessed with food. Whereas my wife, we worked on this book together and there were plenty of times where she's like, 'I completely disagree with this.' So it's not her point of view, the book. It's her kind of turning some of my dribs and drabs of a madman into a more readable essay.

GM: Kind of like an editor or second set of eyes?

JG: Yeah, but her comedic writing value is pretty significant so I don't want it to feel like she's just an editor. Essentially I'm trying to not get in trouble.

GM: This is your second book, right?

JG: Yes, second book. The first one was Dad is Fat. That was about me being the father of five young children. And this one's Food: A Love Story which is all about why I'm fat.

GM: I see a theme here.

JG: Yeah. A big, fat theme.

GM: How do you find the time with five kids to write two books, let alone travel. Although travelling you can get away from them.

JG: It's very much a balancing act. It's one of those things where I used to romanticize laziness, just doing-nothing days and now they're just a fantasy of doing nothing. But the reason I find time is it doesn't feel like work. I mean, it's definitely a grind and there's a lot of late nights, but I was excited to write this book. Food is something that I've been writing about for 15 years so a lot of the elements were there. It's like standup: After hopefully being a pretty decent parent all day, the idea of going out and doing a show at 8 or 9 o'clock at night would seem unappealing but I enjoy it so much, I look forward to it even if I'm tired.

GM: What are the age ranges of your kids?

JG: Ten, eight, five, three, one. The one-year-old will be two on the 27th.

GM: And don't you still live in the same apartment?

JG: We moved. We moved from a two-bedroom I like to say to a one-bedroom. But no, we moved to a much bigger place.

GM: Still in New York?

JG: Yeah.

GM: How long does it take you to write a book from start to finish?

JG: I would say Dad is Fat came out I wanna say May 2012 and they made an offer I think the second week it was out for another book. And I had always thought of doing a food book. And again, I had tons of notes on different food topics, just as a comedian. So I'd say it took me a good year to write it. Dad is Fat was 260 pages and I think this one's 360. And my expectation was that I was going to cut a bunch of stuff, because when you write things you're like, 'Well, this is completely overlapping.' But stuff didn't overlap. So I have an essay on cheese and I have an essay on crackers and I remember saying, 'Well, maybe I'll get rid of one of these.' But there wasn't an overlap. I mean, I definitely cut some stuff but I thought there was going to be more cuts but it ended up where I didn't need to, if that makes sense. Do you know what I mean? But you know as a writer, there's things that you like about certain things you write and things you like about other things you write.

GM: And cheese and crackers go together.

JG: Yeah, they do.

GM: You can't have one without the other. Was there any crossover from your act to the book?

JG: Yes. Very much so. For instance, there's an essay on bacon, there's an essay on hot pockets. But in standup, there is a focus on efficiency and getting to the nub of the joke, whereas in an essay all the pieces that didn't even fit in to a topic, such as doughnuts, I could include in the essay. Do you know what I mean? If I write like ten minutes on bacon, my bacon chunk in standup might only be six minutes but I still have those other four minutes. Or there's some stuff that I've written in standup, that I've tried in standup, but for different reasons it wasn't working or I didn't like the way it was going but it makes a great essay. I have stuff about sushi that I tried a couple years ago that makes a great essay that I don't know if it'll be standup. And then also I had this whole thing going way back about going out to dinner. Once I did that as a topic in my standup, I would come up with other observations about going out to dinner but I'd already done the topic. So it fit better in the essay than starting another topic. I think I had 20 or 30 pages on salads alone because there's different salads: there's the taco salad, which I kept kind of working on over six or seven years but it still never ended up in my act. And then there's an essay portion on the salad bar, there's an essay portion on how mayonnaise can turn everything into a salad. Obviously when you write a book, you read it so many times. It's just insane. You see my personal view of an attitude toward a food item, hopefully it's funny but it's a little bit – when I consider how I've written about cheeseburgers over the past 15 years, you realize there's just an insanity to it. There's also something very universal about it.

GM: Well, I'm thinking now with how food shows are so popular and books, the foodies will love it.

JG: Yeah. I didn't end up using this comparison in the book, but the foodie thing is, I'm an everyman food lover. I don't consider myself a foodie. Just like I like the Grateful Dead but I don't consider myself a Dead Head because I don't have their knowledge. A foodie will dedicate time and research an item whereas I'm much more of 'I'm coming to Vancouver. Where should I eat?' I'll ask like four or five people or I'll bring it up on Twitter and then I'll follow that one suggestion. I'm in town for one day. But I'm not on a never-ending journey to find unique dishes. I'm seeking gratification. And I'm a bit of a tourist even. If I'm in Montreal or Ottawa, I'll have to get poutine but if I'm in Calgary someone might say, 'You gotta go to this doughnut shop,' then I'll find that doughnut shop. But other than that I won't find this secret barbecue place that no one's ever heard of.

GM: You're known for long chunks on one topic. I love it when someone exhausts a topic rather than just giving me a taste of it, to use the food analogy. If you're doing five minutes on stage, how much does that translate to the page? It seems really substantial on stage. Is it substantial in book form as well?

JG: In the essay form, it's much longer and it's a different puzzle. In standup, the shorter distance it takes for you to get to the joke is better. But in an essay you take your time and you can weave in other observations that don't necessarily have to be singles. I had six minutes on bacon and there was all this other material that I never did on bacon that maybe was too similar to another observation or it would just lead down to a tangent. But if you're doing an essay on bacon, you can go down every tangent you want. Hopefully that made sense.

GM: There was a comedian in Canada, Irwin Barker, who died a couple years ago. Great writer. Like you, he'd have these huge chunks on, for example, grapes. He said it came from a challenge when someone told him to write about some mundane topic. He would first write an essay. Just a factual essay like you would in high school, then go back to it, add jokes, and trim. That's how he built it. What's your process like?

JG: I definitely don't do the essay version. It's also ever-evolving. For instance, if I get a topic – in my last special I did weddings. Some of it was inspired by this underlying view that weddings are silly, which is a relatively universal concept. Some of it is improvising on stage on the topic. Then I would say I've got two minutes on weddings, what else about weddings are the facts about it? So there's the registry, there's the rehearsal dinner, there's the honeymoon. It's compiling every kind of sub-topic on a topic and then going through and seeing my point of view on it and then elaborating on it. Some of why I stick to a topic is, again, the efficiency of standup is the less time in between laughs... It's kind of like boxing. If someone keeps punching someone, they don't have time to get their footing. So if I have to introduce a new topic outside of weddings, I have to spend some time setting that up. Usually with a comedian people will understand a comedian's point of view and kind of go along with it and have fun with that point of view. But I think there's a lot of value in staying within a topic. I definitely believe that volume is important. And thoroughness. I like the idea of hitting people after you've hit them. There's nothing funner than laughing and then you have to laugh again before you can catch your breath. This is kind of ridiculous, what I'm saying, but some of it is just the style of how it works for me. Some people go for big homeruns; I'm like a singles hitter. I like to hit a lot of singles because there's going to be different jokes that appeal to different people. The power of a tag is pretty important. It's weird because hearing myself talk about it, I'm kind of annoying myself.

GM: The same comic said it's like looking for something. Most people will stop when they find whatever it is, but he keeps looking because he might find something else.

JG: When I write with my wife, I always call it the first bus. The first bus is what people would expect. That might be a sexual innuendo, that might be a sarcastic, sardonic take on something. If you're waiting for the bus, most people get on the first bus but my whole thing is what's the second bus? If comedy is a little bit of the surprise and maybe being a half-step ahead of the audience, then that's where the comedian gains some ownership over the conversation, which is standup. So if you're talking about a topic, for instance crabs, and you don't go immediately to the crabs that we eat is also what we describe an STD, if you save that for later on... So like if you talk about crabs and how you think it's disgusting, even if people immediately went to the STD, they're going to forget it and then you can bring it up later on. 

GM: You hit them with what they know later on for a bigger payoff.

JG: Yeah. It's just like an engaging conversation. Why we think our friends are interesting and why we like certain TV shows is 'This is not what I thought was going to happen.' And there's something kind of gratifying about that.

GM: Does your standup tour have a theme like your book does?

JG: No. I guess I'm on my fifth hour of standup now. And some of it is just trying to be funny and when I do a theatre show, making sure that everyone who leaves that theatre, if I come back to town, they're going to want to come back. I certainly don't take an audience for granted. But I don't really work from a particular theme. It's weird, part of me is always kind of running away from labels: He's a clean comedian, he's the guy with five kids, he's the food comic. The reason my last special was called Obsessed is because I had tried so many specials before that to not talk about food that on Obsessed it was like, alright, I'm just going to talk about food. And I talk about other things, too. So now I'm trying to evolve. Maybe there's a little bit more storytelling. I don't have that much control over what I'm doing. The most important thing is to be funny. I'm not trying to completely reinvent myself. I think comedians get way too much credit and criticism for what they do anyway. I'd love to say, 'Well, this time I'm being much more socially conscious.' The point of it is I'm trying to be funny and get better at it. That's the important thing, I think.

GM: You write your standup with your wife, too. She's your writing partner. I'm sure there are others that do but they never admit to having anyone else work on their act with them. They could never admit it, like it's a weakness or something.

JG: I kind of have the attitude of I've been doing this so long, I don't have any concern about my ability to write material. Someone might think, 'Oh, I betcha his wife wrote that.' You know, I mean, I don't care. If it's funny. But I also know that on that same topic, writing the books that I've written with my wife, I made a point of not wanting to have a ghost writer, which is an option. I didn't want to do that. I want to be someone of substance. If you look at time-value of money, I'm probably making like two cents a book, you know? But also, it's rewarding. And I still have horrible grammar. I'm not saying I'm a novelist or one of the great essayists, but it's still rewarding that I did that, that I have two books on a shelf that I wrote with the immeasurable assistance of my wife.

GM: But going back to standup, because you work on your standup together, too, and there seems to be a stigma.

JG: I totally get it. Standup is a very personal thing. It wasn't that long ago when people would hire writers and there are some huge stars that have writers that write their standup. Supposedly Paul Mooney wrote Richard Pryor's hour or whatever. The whole thing is, it's a really personal thing for standup to not have a writer. That being said, I don't have a writer; I have a writing partner. I think of my wife as kind of a secret weapon. If I'm on my fifth hour, without my wife I certainly wouldn't be as successful as I am. I might be on my third hour as opposed to my fifth. Some of it is efficiency. Also, there are times when you just feel funnier. I'm funnier around my wife and she's funnier around me so it's a great collaboration.

GM: And she has a comedy background, right?

JG: She did sketch comedy and she did standup for a little bit so she knows the world. In a way I feel like I've brainwashed her to my point of view so she'll come up with lines that are great that I might have come up with later on but maybe not.

GM: In your voice.

JG: Yeah. Which is also very rare because what you have to consider is every comedian deals with people coming up and saying what about this or that? And ninety percent of the time, it's not useful information. But with my wife, ninety percent of the time it is useful.

GM: Comedians also offer each other tags. Is it like a situation like that except she lives with you?

JG: I think you also nailed something where there's a lot of people that collaborate with their wife or their husband or their best friend or stuff like that. That doesn't cheapen their talent or their success. It's just that I'm much more forthright with my collaboration. Particularly on the books. I mean, everything, but we're starting to write episodes for the TV show and it's like the collaboration is vital there.

GM: What's the premise for the TV show?

JG: The TV show is essentially my life. I'm a comedian with five kids who's married to a super mom and I'm trying to balance standup comedy with being a father. But it's designed to be a show about everything really.

GM: I see why you work so hard and strike while the iron's hot. With five kids, you've got to.

JG: Absolutely. That's the other thing – and by the way, hopefully this will be the last book I write – but that was the other thing, the book also was one of those things where it's like I had done so much of this work and I knew I could do this food book so yeah, let's strike while the iron's hot and I have a thousand children so I have to pay for it, too.

The Buck stops at the Tonight Show

After 17 years, the Jay Leno era has ended. At least as far as the Tonight Show is concerned. He'll be back in the fall with a new nightly primetime series.

I was a huge fan of Leno back when he was a standup and appearing monthly on David Letterman's old Late Night series. It's hard to believe all these years later, but those appearances were must-see TV. Any serious fan of comedy wouldn't miss them.

What happened? I think not only did he alter his style somewhat for the venerable chat show, but the style, either way, didn't mesh with the show. Too grating, perhaps. Too whiny. I wasn't a fan.

So now it's Conan O'Brien's turn. His tenure begins tonight. Can't say I'm a big fan of his, either. His recorded comedy segments where he goes in the field are unbelievably great, I'll grant you. But I just can't take his mugging and constant interruptions. Still, I'll give him a shot. Hell, I keep giving Jimmy Fallon a shot and Conan is about a million times better than Fallon.

Anyway, I noticed with great interest that Conan's new stand-up comedy booker for the Tonight Show will be J.P. Buck. Buck has a bit of a local angle. He helped out Will Davis a couple years at the Vancouver comedy festival.

I interviewed Buck for a story I wrote in Vancouver magazine back in 2005. You can read the whole thing here. But as always there were tons of quotes I simply couldn't squeeze in so I dug 'em up for the blog. Here's the new Tonight Show comedy booker talking about, among other things, the level of talent here in Vancouver. But first, he gives us his resumé:

“I’m a freelance producer. I started out working for various networks in Los Angeles. I did a show for Fox. It was called 30 Seconds to Fame, which was a variety show. It didn’t last too long. It was kinda like a Gong Show. But I’ve always had a love for comedy. It’s been what I’ve always wanted to do. I saw Bill Cosby at the age of 11. I saw him live at Radio City Music Hall. I even heckled him at one point. And he actually responded to me, but I soon realized what I had done. I just slumped under my chair. But I’ve always loved comedy. That gave me my first foray into actually going out and scouting. And after that my next job was booking talent for Star Search. The Arsenio one, which was on CBS. And then I did two years of syndicated programs, two of which were for the Showtime at the Apollo people. And after that I moved over to the US Comedy Arts Festival, which is run by HBO, and went over there to run their talent department... geared towards finding the best up-and-coming and also current comedians and sketch troupes and theatre shows.”

“In every one of these jobs I’ve been travelling around the country and going to one-horse towns and see their best comedians. I would have open calls, I’d set up showcases. So over my travels I’ve seen probably about 8000 comedians.”

“I’m looking for comedic ability. My job is not to close the door to somebody because of the way they look. That comes further down the line in terms of the networks. I’m looking for the next comic genius. That’s what I’m expected to do. Further down the road they can become writers, they can become stars on sitcoms. I think that if you’ve got enough personality, it certainly gets you over the hump. There are plenty of leading men out there on TV nowadays that aren’t that good-looking. I think men get away with it moreso than women.”

Now the part about the relative quality of Vancouver comics in the greater North American market:

“I was scouting for the US Comedy Arts Festival. I’d chosen my cities originally. The cities I wanted to go to and the cities where I knew had the best comics. We were based in New York. We were going to New York, LA, Chicago, San Fransisco, Seattle, Austin Texas, and Atlanta and Toronto. Those are the cities that we had mapped out that we were going to go see. So in my discussions with my various scouts around the country, I got referred to Will Davis and got in a conversation with him. And he said, ‘I would love to show you my guys up here.’ And I said, ‘Well, great. I’d love to have you come down to Seattle and see the guys there.’ And so he came down to Seattle and then picked me up and we drove back up to Vancouver, and he put up three shows for me of, like, 36 guys, maybe. And I was really, really impressed with the depth of talent there and just the variety of performers, of material, and how original a lot of the comics were. Because usually whenever I go to a city, I’ll maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll find two or three out of thirty that I’m impressed with. And when I came back from Vancouver, I probably had on my list at least eleven guys that I had no fear of recommending for the festival. And actually two of them got in, which is still a great rate.”

“We were lucky to get one out of every city that we went to. So two out of Vancouver was great.”

I asked Buck if Vancouver was an untapped market:

“Absolutely. Ever since I’ve been there I’ve just been singing its praises to everybody down here. I’m just telling everyone how amazing the talent is up there and how much people are missing out on. I think there’s maybe been a bias. I don’t know enough about Canadian culture enough to say that there’s an east coast bias. But I think Toronto, Montreal, those cities are getting so overworked. But I think the years that Vancouver’s been neglected by the rest of the country I think has been beneficial because it’s created this community of comics that... It fosters an environment where they can write their own material, think differently, work on their sets and their skills, and become much better comics for it, and not get overexposed too soon.”

He even offers an assessment of us, the Vancouver audience, and how we've helped the comics without even knowing it:

“Another great thing about Vancouver is that Vancouver has possibly one of the most discerning, and also toughest crowds, I’ve ever seen. You’ve got these amazing comics on stage... And it’s funny, if you see these comics in other cities, I think you’d get audiences that are flocking to them. But the toughness of winning the crowds over makes the comics work even that much harder here.”

I suggested, maybe ignorantly in hindsight, that Vancouver's scene was better than Seattle's just because we're just one of three major markets in the country, while the U.S. has so many:

“I agree [Vancouver’s better than Seattle]... Boston used to be a mecca for comedy. San Francisco was that as well. But I think both of those cities had their moments and now they kind of need to recharge. And at that moment while they’re down, Vancouver’s the one that’s come up. I don’t want to forecast anything that’s horrible but I think what you’ll see is you’ll see all these Vancouver comedians that come up, become big and move on, and then there’ll maybe be like a little bit of a lull of years before the next wave comes. But I definitely think right now that there’s such a wealth of comics. The audiences are almost spoiled.”

“The only style I can maybe put it under is unapologetic. That’s the beauty of the comics that were out there -- they weren’t all of the same mould. I think maybe when you go to some of these other cities like Boston or San Francisco or LA or New York, there are comics that are so successful that they kind of almost unfortunately influence all the other ones. But I think everybody in Vancouver is working so hard they’ve had time to kind of form their own styles.”

Buck ended up taking both Simon King and Dave Nystrom to the HBO Festival in Aspen:

“That was kinda why we took both of them because there was a little bit of something for everybody that came to our festival. Like, here’s a sample of one guy from Vancouver; here’s another style from Vancouver.”

“That’s something that we’re really trying to make sure we have. What we’re doing is having one group of shows called Rising Stars, which is the guys we’re thinking that over the next few years will do really well. Right now we’re looking at different groups, and in each one of those groups, we want to have one Vancouver guy. There are plenty of comics that deserve to be on it. We want to find a way to kinda get them in to almost every type of show that we have. We have these TV sets that we’re doing where guys will do five minutes of TV-clean material for the industry people that are coming in. We’ll also try to get them to host other shows so whenever people from LA and out of town are driven to see these big names, they’re also getting a taste of what Vancouver is. We want to make sure that the Vancouver comedians are sprinkled throughout the festival.”

“What helps to draw people up there are some of the American names. We’re trying to say to the LA and New York executives and industry and agents and managers, ‘Come on up here and see Leno perform on this show, see Jake Johannsen perform here, Jim Gaffigan. And Zach Galifianakis is a huge Vancouver name that will attract attention. But on top of that, while you’re there we’re hoping that we can kind of influence them with all the great Vancouver comics and say, ‘Hey, this is actually a comedy Mecca and you should come here a lot more often.’”

Interesting that at the time Buck thought Galifianakis was a Vancouverite. Maybe that informed his opinion of the scene. Zach was filming up here and playing all the local rooms.

“Believe me, you can say that about comics in just about any city outside of New York, LA, Toronto and Montreal. Because none of those comics understand what goes into getting a deal or getting on a show or getting in a film or being able to perform standup on Comedy Now or any of those shows. It comes with experiencing, unfortunately, rejection or having someone from the industry tell you what the industry’s looking for. Because a lot of times it doesn’t always go to the funniest person, unfortunately.”

“It certainly helps to be in LA of all the US cities. But you don’t want to come here too early. You want to be able to come here so that people can see you and they know who you are, but at the same time if you come here too soon, if they see you too early, and you don’t do well, they’re going to write you off and never want to see you again. That’s the unfortunate thing. A lot of guys in the States make the mistake of ‘Okay, I’m the biggest fish in this pond so it’s my turn to go to LA’. And they go to LA maybe after performing stand-up for two years, which is the wrong thing to do. You almost want it to come to the point where you’ve got an agent or manager calling you to come to LA: ‘We need you here because I’ve got stuff that I want you to do.’”

“Vancouver’s such a perfect city for us to hold this festival. You want to get the people coming from LA and there’s no sense in flying all the way to Montreal when you can just go to Vancouver and see these comics.”

“I definitely see it becoming a major player, absolutely. And I think the timing is perfect because I think there’s been a lull over the past few years. Unfortunately it’s hard to sustain a festival for so long. I think people maybe are looking for something different. I definitely think it can become one of the top international festivals. We’ve definitely booked some great international acts this year. So I’m excited about that, too.”

And some advice for all comics:

“The worst thing a comic can do for himself when he’s peforming in front of a bunch of people from the industry is to actually comment on how bad the crowd is. You’ve probably seen it a lot where comics will be like, ‘Wow, you guys aren’t getting this stuff.’ If they could just plow through. It’s a lot easier said than done, but if they can make it through that often can speak volumes about them.”

So will this lofty impression of the city's talent translate to a Tonight Show appearance for one (or some) of them? It should, but we'll have to wait and see.

Maron & Gaffigan

Hey comedy nerds, got a great clip for you. Two of my favourites sitting around talking about comedy, kids and other stuff.

Marc Maron is a host on Break Room Live (and former guest on What's So Funny?). He's also full of existential angst, self-hatred, brilliant and really funny. Jim Gaffigan is a comedic force. And a pale one. He's in films (Away We Go hits the theatres soon), sells out theatres all over the place and has hit CDs and DVDs. Of course, any self-respecting comedy nerd already knows that.

There's some great stuff here. The Caroline and Costaki they reference are Canadian comedian Caroline Rhea and her hubby Costaki Economopoulos ("the biggest name in comedy"), who recently created a human. Maron is a single, childless man while Gaffigan is a father of three. Maron has been putting off visiting the baby because, well, he's not interested in kids. Gaffigan says he should. They discuss.

As a father of one (in fact, my wife was pregnant with ours when we first saw Maron in concert), I'm gonna side with Maron on this one. While my child is endlessly interesting and fun to me, I could care less about other people's kids. I mean, some of them are cool, but I don't need to meet them or interact with them. And since many are far from cool, why risk it? I can wait until they're more fully-formed human beings.

Gaffigan spoke of how great it is to be a parent, even with all the worrying. It reminded me of what Louis CK told me just five days before my son was born. CK crystalized the parental conundrum for me. It's must-reading for anyone who doesn't get having kids:

Here's the thing about it: It sucks on paper. If you write down things you're going to have to do and the way your life is going to change, there's just no way to justify it. It's the dumbest thing in the world to do.

But it doesn't matter because you'll be happy to do all of it. There's nothing going to be imposed on you. You're going to completely, voluntarily change your life in a way that if you could look in the future and see it from now, you would say, "Why the fuck would somebody do that to themselves?" But that's how powerful a force it is to have a kid. And it isn't like, "Oh, but they're so wonderful" and you're paid off for every hard moment with them giving you a daisy and saying "I love you, papa" -- although that happens, and it's pretty great. It's just that it's so important to you. It's such a big deal to have a kid that it just changes your motivations. It changes everything.

You can read the whole interview with CK here. While we're at it, here's one I did with Gaffigan, too. And let's not forget Maron, who I first interviewed in February of 2004.

Now here's the Break Room chat: