With Anthony Jeselnik hitting town on Thursday (Vogue Theatre), I thought I'd run the transcribed phone interview I did with him a couple weeks ago, which was fashioned into this story I wrote on him for the Georgia Straight. There's always more that I can't fit into a story, however, so here it is in all its glory.
Anthony Jeselnik
May 24, 2013
"I’m kind of like the horror movies of comedy." – Anthony Jeselnik
Guy MacPherson: Jeselnik!
Anthony Jeselnik:
Hey, what’s up, Guy?
GM: How are you?
AJ: How you
doing, man? Correct me if I’m wrong, we’ve met before, right?
GM: We have. Twice.
AJ: Twice. I
remember with Sarah Silverman. I remember going to dinner with you and your
girlfriend, right? Or your wife?
GM: Yeah, me and my wife.
That was after the show. And the night before the show me and a Vancouver comic
went up to her room and you were there.
AJ: Yes, with
drugs! Now I remember.
GM: You three. I’m a
clean-cut guy.
AJ: I remember
that, too. How’s it going, man?
GM: Good. It’s nice to
see your success after seeing you when nobody knew who you were.
AJ: Yeah! You
were right on the cusp before I was discovered.
GM: That’s right. What I
like is that you’re the same comic I saw. I know it’s hard sometimes for an
opener who’s not known, but you killed that night.
AJ: Oh, thank
you.
GM: I saw both shows,
too. And while nobody really knew you, your jokes really stood out.
AJ: Aw, thanks. I
miss those days when I was totally unknown and I could just surprise the hell
out of everybody. Those days are gone. But I’m still the same comic. It’s a
different kind of show now that people know who I am. It’s more of a
celebration rather than a ‘hey, you’re gonna get this, hope you like it.’
GM: There are pros and
cons to both. You’re too young to remember when Steve Martin got people
cheering for him rather than listening to his jokes and laughing…
AJ: No, but I’ve
read his book and everything. I think it’s different now. I look back fondly on
my early days of stuggle. I think Steve Martin didn’t really change his act
ever. I think comics today have to just be constantly writing new stuff. More
people have seen it. Like this show I’m bringing to Vancouver is half brand-new
stuff no one’s ever heard and half classic stuff from Caligula or Shakespeare.
And then I take questions and just try to keep it fresh so the audience doesn’t
have a chance to start yelling out my jokes and just cheering the whole time.
Because they want to hear the new stuff.
GM: When did you stop
filming The Jeselnik Offensive?
AJ: It’s a weekly
show so we would film every Thursday before the final Tuesday. I think maybe
four or five weeks ago we stopped. Amy Schumer took my timeslot and I’ve been
on tour this whole time. I think Vancouver’s my last weekend. When I come back
from that, I go right back into season two of the show.
GM: How quickly do your
jokes go from pen to stage?
AJ: I would
consider my jokes to be like a clock: it’s either going to work perfectly or it
doesn’t work at all. So when I write a joke, I usually know right away. There’s
not a lot of tinkering that goes on. I’ll write a joke and think, ‘Oh, this
seems good.’ I’ll try it out and if it works, then it’s in the act. But my
jokes have gotten shorter now that people are starting to guess my punchlines
or trying to guess my punchlines more. And now that they have these two albums
worth of material to draw off of, people are getting better at it. So I’m
making my jokes a little shorter, a little smarter just to offset that so
people can’t really guess. It’s taken a while. And a lot of it is just doing
theatres where it’s all my fans. They go a little crazier. The material goes a
longer way in a theatre than it does in a club. So that’s been helpful. But I’m
always trying to write new jokes. It just gets tougher the deeper I get into
this because I’ve covered so many things in so many different jokes already.
GM: It’s a nice
challenge, though, trying to make them tighter and quicker and smarter.
AJ: Absolutely.
People are like, ‘Why don’t you do longer jokes? You can kill more time and you
can have a new hour every year.’ I’m like, no, I’d rather work a little harder
and subvert audience expectations. That’s the point of jokes. And even if they
kind of know what they’re getting into in terms of darkness and offensiveness,
I still want them to be kind of on the edge of their seats trying to figure out
where my punchline’s coming from.
GM: You have a background
in creative writing, right?
AJ: Yeah. What
that means is I went to college for literature and took some creative writing
classes. Those are the only ones I tried. But yeah, I loved creative writing. I
wanted to be a novelist. But I figured out what a novelist’s life was like and
didn’t want that. I would rather have a comedian’s life where, when I was young
and just out of college, I could go out every night. Even though I was going to
open mics and bombing, that was more fun to me than sitting in my apartment
struggling with the great American novel that nobody wanted to read.
GM: That background helps
with editing and making your jokes more economical.
AJ: Absolutely.
Absolutely. And, I think, just knowing what writing looks like. I think one of
the quickest things I learned in joke writing was to cut out all the extra
words. I think that’s true for any kind of writing. I would structure my jokes
almost like a haiku because I could see any extra word that didn’t belong and
just cut it out and keep everything as short and tight as possible.
"If you’re a comedy fan and you understand comedy, it’s very easy to like me and to understand that I’m a nice guy. But not everyone is really into comedy." – Anthony Jeselnik
GM: Having met you, I
know that you’re a nice guy. I read where you said a nice person being mean is
funny whereas a mean person being mean is mean. But how are most people to know
you’re a nice guy when all they see is you on TV?
AJ: It doesn’t
really matter to me that they know it. When people are like, ‘God, he’s such a
jerk,’ they should understand that I’m on stage holding a microphone being
billed as a comedian. If people actually get mad, it’s kind of their bad. It’s
like people who get too upset to watch a horror movie. They’re not wrong for
that, but I know when I watch a horror movie there’s always part of me that
knows this is just a movie. And I can enjoy it. Whereas some people, it’s the
last thing in the world they want to do. I’m kind of like the horror movies of
comedy. If you’ve really thought about it, you understand that these people are
all actors and someone wrote this down and it’s special effects. But if you
don’t get that and see it as just a surface level thing, I can’t help you. It’s
not my job to convince you I’m actually a nice guy and that these are just
jokes. People tell me sometimes I smile on stage and that lets them know, and
maybe that’s a clue to you but I’m just enjoying myself. I’m enjoying the crowd
joining in with me and laughing at these horrible things. That’s why I smile.
I’m not doing it to say, ‘Hey, I’m just joking.’ Because I hate that. I hate
that ‘I’m just joking’ thing.
GM: I’ve read that you’re
unlikeable on stage or that you thought you were unlikeable. But I don’t get
that at all.
AJ: I think
people can see what they want. If you’re a comedy fan and you kind of
understand comedy, it’s very easy to like me and to understand that I’m a nice
guy. But not everyone is really into comedy. If you don’t have a great sense of
humour, you’re probably not going to like me. Not everyone has a great sense of
humour but there are comedians who are out there just for people who don’t have
a good sense of humour.
GM: When Tosh got
lambasted for his rape jokes, I thought there was a context there that they
were missing.
AJ: Absolutely. I would do interviews where
they’d say, ‘He said he wanted people to rape the woman in the audience, and
that’s funny?!’ And I’m like, ‘That’s not what he said. That’s what you’re
hearing.’ That kind of drove me crazy. That was a lot of people who didn’t
understand comedy.
GM: And even some people
who did.
AJ: And even if
he did say that, you don’t know the context, you don’t know how it was
happening. It drove me crazy to see people who would normally be defending
comedy going against it, like, ‘Well, I don’t have a rape joke because I would
never say that.’ Well, not everyone can pull it off. It’s not bad to joke about
something, no matter what it is. It’s never bad to joke about it. It has nothing
to do with how awful that thing is. And that makes me crazy with people. Like,
‘How can he tell a joke about this? How can you joke about this thing?’ Why
not? I’m a comedian. I’m gonna joke about the worst things in the world and
it’s never wrong to joke about something. Never.
GM: To be fair, sometimes
a misstep can be made, like anyone can, and you go, ‘Whoops, maybe I didn’t do
that right.’
AJ: Absolutely.
It’s just as off-putting for a comedian to make an edgy joke or a dark joke
about a subject and then be like, ‘Where’s my applause? Why are people getting
upset?’ You’ve gotta understand when you go into those realms that you’re going
to upset people and you just have to take it. Some people are kind of ignorant
to comedy or they just might not care enough about comedy to not be upset by
what you’re talking about. You have to take that, too. And hopefully people
will defend you and you can say it’s a joke and it goes away. But you can’t
expect everyone to laugh or to applaud you for doing these edgy things. And
sometimes you’ll miss. But I think comedians are artists and there’s a value in
failure. You can’t just be worried about failing with a joke depending on the
subject. So it kind of works both ways between comedians and audiences. The
audience has to understand that comedians are going to sometimes tell a joke
that doesn’t work out with dark subjects, and the comedian has to understand that
sometimes they’ll fail and it’s not the audience’s fault for not getting it or
loving it. You just have to take it. You have to be aware that that’s a
possibility.
GM: But in the current
culture of comedy, truth is paramount. So maybe people are confused. Comics are
talking about their real lives and now here’s a guy who’s making jokes that
have no basis in reality so they might be thinking that’s really coming from
you.
AJ: I’m sure
that’s a part of it. But if you really look at it, that doesn’t matter. If you
think it’s coming from a real place, that doesn’t mean the comedian’s wrong. A
comedian doesn’t have to come out and say, ‘Hey, these are all just jokes and
this is a persona.’ If you really study someone, you can figure that out. But
most people don’t give it that much thought. And when people get offended,
they’re offended for a day, maybe two days tops. It’s not that big a deal. But
in the moment they’re very upset and they want an answer in that moment. And
now with social media, they can go on Twitter or Facebook and demand something
in the moment. And then it goes away. If you don’t respond to it, it completely
goes away. So I think audiences are getting a little more testy about comedy
where they want that instant gratification of an apology. They want the
attention, kind of: ‘I was offended by this.’ And it’s become a big thing. If
you’re smart about it, you’ll never respond and you just leave it be and two
days later everything’s okay.
GM: It was funny to me
that you could last a year writing for Jimmy Fallon without getting jokes in
the monologue.
AJ: I got jokes
in the monologue. Some people were disappointed I took that job: ‘Why are you
doing that?’ Because it was interesting to me to be on a late night show that
was starting out and trying to add my voice to it. I thought Jimmy told great
jokes on Weekend Update and I was
like, ‘I want to do something like that.’ And when I got to the show, it was
clear that wasn’t really what they were interested in. They hired me as a joke
writer; they didn’t hire Anthony Jeselnik. And they didn’t even really know
that until I started submitting stuff. But I knew I wanted to be there for a
year because that was the job I got into comedy for, was to be starting a late
night talk show, especially a 12:30 one. Just to be there in the beginning
grinding it out. I waited a year before I left because I didn’t want to answer
that question of, ‘What happened here?’ It didn’t work out. They liked me and I
liked them but it was just an experience I wanted. My TV show now, The Jeselnik Offensive, the only reason
that exists is because I did that year on Fallon.
All of my frustrations of what I wanted to do on the show ended up coming out
on this show now. People were disappointed when I took the job and people
thought I was dumb when I left: ‘It’s a good job and smart money, why would you
do this?’ And I think I was right to take it and to leave it.
GM: It was gutsy to quit.
AJ: People said
that. I was like, ‘Here’s what I’m gonna do: I’m gonna quit, I’m gonna go
headline, I’m gonna do an album and keep touring.’ I ended up getting the
roasts out of that. If I hadn’t left that show, I never would have been on the
roasts and we would not be talking right now. I don’t think I’ve made a bad
decision in my career yet.
GM: It worked out but if
it hadn’t, you could easily have gotten another job writing for TV, I would
imagine.
AJ: Oh,
absolutely. Once you have that first thing on your resume, I mean, a year
writing on Fallon goes a long way.
That’s a ton of work you have to do, especially that first year of a show. I
could get hired anywhere. If I wanted a writing job right now, I could kind of
pick my shot, I think. Not that I would want to do that. The only way I’ve
taken any writing work since then has been if it’s something I really wanted to
do. Like the roasts. And Robert Smigel asked me to write on A Night of Too Many Stars a couple years
ago for a couple weeks and I was like, yeah, I want to see what it’s like to
work with Robert Smigel. I would be interested if something cool came up. Seth
MacFarlane asked me to write for the Oscars for him and I just couldn’t do it
with my show, but that’s something I would have entertained.
"I’ve done roasts three times and I’ve shown what I can do. I could do another one; I just don’t know if it interests me as much. ... If I never did another one, I would be fine with that." – Anthony Jeselnik
GM: You’ve done three
roasts. Are you doing any more?
AJ: I don’t know.
They were going to do one this summer and they couldn’t pull it off, they
couldn’t find the person. I would have done that one for sure because it would
have been right before the premier of my second season. But I don’t know. It’s
not something I think about anymore, where it used to be like a dream to be on
them. I feel like I’ve done them three times and I’ve shown what I can do. I
could do another one; I just don’t know if it interests me as much. It depends
on who it is. I don’t know. If I never did another one, I would be fine with
that.
GM: I was looking forward
to seeing you that first time because I knew you, and I knew that you’d be
perfect for that format. But it was great because you took a lot of people by
surprise because they didn’t know you. But what was so interesting was that
these days you never hear of one show making a career the way the old Tonight
Show used to with Johnny Carson. It was
like that for you with the roasts.
AJ: Oh,
absolutely. It changed my life. It was a night and day thing. That was the
greatest moment of my life, I think, to go up and they had no idea what was
coming. I’ll never forget sitting there watching Lisa Lampanelli go up and
Whitney Cummings go up and being afraid that they would have my joke. Like, ‘I
hope they don’t say something I was planning on saying.’ And I realized very
quickly that I was like ten times meaner than anyone else up there. I was just
so happy. It was a great feeling. But then you get on the next, the Martin
Sheen roast, and then it’s, ‘Oh, you’re the guy from the roasts.’ You had to do
two of them before you were the guy from the roasts. And you may as well have
been on all of them from that point. So perception changes. It’s been a year I
think since the last one, or almost a year, and now people almost forget that
they ever happened. TV’s a crazy thing. When you’re on it, you couldn’t be more
on it. And as soon as you’re off for a couple of weeks, people forget
immediately. It’s fascinating.
GM: I saw you on Conan and you said you were a mean kid in high
school but I can’t buy that. That’s just your persona.
AJ: I think I was
on Leno when I said that. I was kind
of a jerk. Like, I would try and be funny and try to defend the people being
bullied. I would be a jerk to the popular kids. I would try to make fun of a
teacher. There was some mean-spiritedness there but I certainly wasn’t a bully
at all. I just had a dark sense of humour. I was more disrupting class than
picking on kids.
GM: Did you do well in
school?
AJ: I did all
right. I was the classic underachiever. My parents were always hearing, ‘He’s
smart, he just doesn’t apply himself.’ I would get B’s and C’s, maybe a couple
of A’s. But I wasn’t a good student. But I was always reading books. I was
always kind of studying what I wanted to study, what I was interested in. But I
never bought that ‘you’ll use calculus one day’ crap.
GM: You’re very cool on
stage and I know that’s a conscious decision. Were you cool as a kid? Or
off-stage, even?
AJ: No. Every kid
wants to be cool. I didn’t like getting emotional or upset about things. But on
stage I just wanted to be economical with everything. I didn’t want to have any
unnecessary words that I would use or unnecessary motions. I just kind of
became a comedian that I would have wanted to see. And I would have wanted to
see a guy being kinda cool and just being like, ‘These jokes are so great and
so brilliant that I don’t need to really work at it. I’m just going to give
these to you and you’ll be grateful for it.’ And it’s worked for me. But I’ve
certainly seen people try it and fail.
GM: You’re a classic
example of fake it till you make it in the confidence department.
AJ: Yeah, people
are always saying, ‘How do you get so confident?’ You fake it. You fake it for
years. And only until you start getting credits, like ‘You’ve seen him on Conan’ or ‘You’ve seen him on the
roasts’, those things kind of build your actual confidence. I hated being a new
comic. I hated being two months in so I thought why not just pretend? The
audience doesn’t know. You could pretend that you’ve been doing it forever and
you started when you were five years old and now you’re this amazing genius. I
thought just pretend you’re that and the audience kinda started to buy it.
GM: You mentioned Fallon
on Weekend Update and that’s
something you wanted to do. Hey, Seth Meyers is leaving. There’s an opening.
AJ: Oh, don’t
think I’m not aware. I know that this would be my chance. If I was ever going
to host Weekend Update, it would be
in this moment. I told people that work for me, I’ve said, ‘Hey, listen, I just
want my name brought up in the room.’ That’s all I want, is for someone to say
my name. And that happened. It’s one of those things where I don’t think I’d
take the job now. Like, I have my own Weekend
Update that has my name in the title and I have total creative control
over. SNL, that was a dream job,
something that I would love to have done, but I don’t think I could walk away
from my show to do it. And I don’t think they would want me. I’ve got a show
with my name in the title. They want to either discover someone or take one of
their cast members and do that. And I honestly think it’s going to be John
Mulaney. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t but I was surprised his pilot didn’t get
picked up so what do I know?
GM: I’ve got to ask about
the most controversial segment on your show: the shark attack. Even if you
won’t admit it, there is a line you wouldn’t cross.
AJ: Uh, I don’t
know. Everyone has a personal line. Afterwards, people were like, ‘You know
what you shouldn’t have done? You shouldn’t have mentioned his family and you
shouldn’t have shown his picture and had his name.’ And I was like, yeah, when
I mentioned his family, I did not know he had a family. But everyone has a
family. It was just a funny line of, ‘Yeah, he’s dead. And he had a family and
everything.’ It was absurdly insensitive so I thought that’s okay. And when I
found out we could show his picture, I thought there’s no way we could do that.
But Comedy Central says you can show his picture. So let’s do it. I’ll get away
with as much as I can. It’s my favourite bit that we’ve done on the show
because it was so absurd. And I think the only misstep was showing his picture.
But also, New Zealand doesn’t know who I am. They’ve never heard of me. My show
doesn’t air there. It never occurred to me that his family would ever see this
thing. The media went and took it and went, ‘What do you think of this?’ And
that’s how the whole thing blew up. They would have had no idea. A guy died the
next week from a shark attack in Jamaica. I think if we had done it on that guy
instead of the New Zealand guy, I don’t think it would have blown up. We tried
to answer the controversy on the next episode. Like, I want to answer New
Zealand on this. Like say something. It was a joke statement but it was
something to that effect. And people in the audience didn’t know what the hell
I was talking about. No one here knows it was a big deal unless you look at my
Wikipedia or you are from New Zealand.
GM: I saw it and I
cringed. Because it seemed to be celebrating that this real person died rather
than an abstraction like most of your jokes are. When you were on Conan and
were celebrating in a general way sharks beating humans, I thought that was
hilarious. But with this guy, you just sort of empathize and imagine him being
your best friend or brother or father or son who died and now here’s this
comedian celebrating it in a way. You know what I mean?
AJ: Sure, I can
see how you’d take it that way. We thought it was just so absurd. And 30 people
die a year from a shark attack. It’s this rare freak thing that happens. My
thing is everyone’s going to die. That didn’t affect me in that way. Afterwards
I thought we shouldn’t have done the picture. But if we hadn’t shown the
picture but said the guy’s name, you wouldn’t have felt that way? Or do you
still think you would have been upset by it?
GM: Well, I can’t say I
was upset by it; just that it made me cringe a little. All your other jokes in
standup are about vague or general topics, like cancer or rape, and they
involve your fictional girlfriend or mother. They’re abstractions. They’re
concepts.
AJ: Oh sure,
everything in my act is completely defensible because none of it’s real. These
are all just concepts. The show is kind of, ‘What if the devil had a talk
show?’ Would the devil do a bit celebrating a guy getting eaten by a shark?
Yeah, he probably would. I think that’s part of the thing of us learning exactly…
I mean, I want everybody to laugh at these things. I didn’t want to hurt the
family. I thought the family would never see this. I think if we did that
again, we would have taken out his name and not shown the picture. The picture
was the big mistake. We wouldn’t have done that. But I stand by the bit. I have
no problem doing it. Or making a mistake. But it’s almost impossible to find
online. It’s been pretty much scrubbed out of existence.
GM: You make a good case
for it in saying you thought it was just so absurdly offensive, which it is
because nobody in their right mind would ever celebrate such a thing. So I get
that point.
AJ: We did a
thing where we were talking about the Connecticut school shooter. I forget his
name, but I said his name then I kind of hit my heart and pointed to the sky,
like ‘I miss you, bro.’ And Comedy Central was upset about that. And I was
like, ‘That’s so absurd.’ If I had mentioned the victims and done that, you
would think I was making fun of the victims. And they won’t listen to that.
They don’t care. So I think there’ll be some changes in season two but I think
it’s part of finding your way around those things. It’s the most fun part of
comedy, I think.
GM: I think that’s funny.
But it’s so subjective.
AJ: Exactly.
Everyone has their own line. But I don’t. But I’m not a sociopath. I’ve asked
my therapist that repeatedly.
GM: Do you have an opener
coming with you?
AJ: Yes. I will
have Raj Desai opening for me. He’s one of the writers for The Jeselnik Offensive. Very funny guy and very dry. If you think
I’m dry, you’ve not seen anything.
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