Spazzing Out with Christian Finnegan

by Noah Fowle

Working his comedic mojo on stage, TV and now the big screen, Christian Finnegan gets the last laugh.














By Noah Fowle

It’s a Friday afternoon and Christian Finnegan is sitting down for a leisurely lunch in New York City before he hits road. His first stop is Washington D.C. In a city so ripe for ridicule and with Finnegan’s wide array of jokes, he’ll have no trouble finding laughs. A versatile figure himself, Finnegan has the multitude of opportunities for comedians covered.

While his steady gig these days – besides stand-up – is hosting TV Land’s interstitial show Game Time every Monday, he’s still probably most famous for his turn as Chad on Chappelle’s Show’s sketch, Mad Real World. In addition, Finnegan has also recently wrapped work on the movie Eden Court, starring Reno 911’s Thomas Lennon. He also appears regularly on VH1’s Best Week Ever and NBC’s Today.

Finnegan says his ability to appeal to so many audiences is both his strength and his weakness. “The fact is that I’m never going to be the most popular guy in the mainstream room, nor the coolest guy in the alternative room,” he says. “But I can perform well in both. I’m not locked into a persona. I’m flexible. It’s probably because I have no identity of my own.”

At first glance, Finnegan doesn’t look like a comedian. He’s like a farm boy whose come to the city to win everyone over with a gregarious smile and awe-shucks attitude. He politely points out that “I always come across nicer than I really am,” but adds, “not that I’m a dangerous bad boy or anything.”

We shall see.

You tend to stay away from political humor. Are you a closet Republican?
Hardly. But when I’m in a room full of hardcore conspiracy theorists, I don’t believe all of their stuff and I certainly don’t believe Republicans. I wouldn’t call myself a moderate either. That’s such a shitty word — moderate. Comedians are supposed to be the guy in the room that automatically steps back when they hear some statement or opinion and asks, ‘do you really feel that way or do you like the idea?’ You have to watch out for hipsters and phoneyism.

Can you get away with making fun of your audience?
Most blue-staters have a better sense of humor about themselves than red-staters. They realize on some level how ridiculous it is. Liberals will gladly be ragged on for being too liberal.

What about hipsters? You have some bits on them in your act and often perform at some of New York’s more alternative rooms?
Hey, I love [Brooklyn’s trendy neighborhood] Williamsburg. I have like ten minutes of Williamsburg material and it goes over great at Galapagos [an art space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn]. The thing is, nobody thinks it’s them. It’s always that other guy in the trucker hat. You know — the one who’s faking it. But most people have a sense of humor

Are there audiences you prefer over others?
Well, I’m headed to Washington D.C. and I love it there because everyone is young, smart and aware but not cool. They were all the kids that started canned food drives and now they’ve all moved to the same city. It’s great. You can do Bush jokes and Barack Obama jokes and they’ll both go over well — not that I have any Barack Obama material. I guess I’ll have to come up with some now.

You’ve been doing stand-up a while now and have had a lot of success. Do you try and model yourself after anyone’s career?
Sure, I still look up to people. I don’t understand people who stop finding others funny. It can be hard to watch comedy without seeing the wheels move. But I can still go into a club and have a pure belly laugh and I’m not ashamed of that. Jim Norton is a great hard working guy. I admire how Greg Giraldo expresses himself. Everything that comes out of him sounds like him. Bill Burr is the same way.

It sounds like you’re quite the student of the game. Were you always a fan of stand-up?
No, I hated standup growing up.

Oh, really?
I always used to walk by the Boston Comedy Club and see the guys trying to get people to come in and think to myself, ‘what a loser.’ But on some level, I think I just really wanted to do it. You know, it’s like you always hate the people who are doing what you wish you could do. A lot of smart people were turned off by the idea of going to a standup comedy club after the lingering aftershock of the ’80s comedy boom.

So you got your start in theater as a student right?
Yeah, I went to NYU. Nobody likes to admit it. It’s the degree that dare not speak its name.

Were you bullied growing up? Is success really the best revenge or do you want the bullies to have to drink your pee?
I don’t need them to drink my pee. But I think that Gore Vidal said something like, ‘It’s not enough that I succeed. Others must fail.’ Not only must they see me succeed but I also want them to look around their shitty trailers and at their car with a ‘Hagar rules’ bumper sticker and say, ‘That person is amazing and I’m a loser.’ But that’ll never happen because bullies don’t have the self-analysis to do that. They usually go from bullying you to pretending you were friends all along.

Sounds like you had a rough go at times.
No, not really. I don’t want to make it out into something way worse. But I was bigger generally speaking than other kids. So I was a great target for anyone with a Napoleon complex. They would stand up to me and I would cry. I got into fights with smaller kids. I may have won a couple on decision. But it usually ended up like A Christmas Story with spittle flying everywhere in a tearing rage. Ultimately I learned to hide from problematic situations to avoid revealing the total spaz I am. A spaz is someone who can’t do anything physical without embarrassing results. Actually, I’m really a wussy, which is a spaz that knows to avoid this.

For more information, visit christianfinnegan.com

Greg Giraldo: Born to Mock

by Dylan P. Gadino

Comedy saved him from the clutches of corporate law. Now, who’s going to save the world from Greg Giraldo?
















By Dylan P. Gadino

Moments before Greg Giraldo arrives on the New York City set of his show, the producers fill no fewer than seven stage monitors with a brief best-of reel of the comic’s recent TV appearances. For hardcore stand-up fans, the clips are an entertaining review. For those less familiar with the veteran comic’s work, the segments serve as a primer— an appetizer to prep the audience member’s tummies so they can properly digest Giraldo’s caustic, scathing assault on the country’s politics and social idiosyncrasies.

The tall, slightly scruffy comic eventually takes to his area of the set where black pillars and a black picket like fence loosely surround his modest throne. Dressed in a chocolate-hue blazer, black print tee and distressed jeans, he looks confident — and a bit slimmer in person — studying index cards, penning notes and chatting with the crew who move furiously to make last minute adjustments. The space mimics a downtown Manhattan lounge. Some guests sit on faux- suede or tan-leather couches with squat red lamps nearby. Some perch on pillow-lined bleachers. Still others hang out at small tables adorned with martini glasses.

It’s a delicate place for a guy who doesn’t immediately present himself as such. After all, he’s made a name for himself barbing other comics and our nation’s more questionable residents. He was a writer and regular panelist on Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn. He jabbed Pamela Anderson on her Comedy Central roast and toured with Dave Attell for his Insomniac tour, where, on stage, he berated women for wearing “clit-hugger” jeans and got red in the face over restaurants that trivialize death by offering “death-by-chocolate” desserts. But for the anger and frustration Giraldo shows and for the amount of success the man has had, he’s sure to keep it all in perspective.

“My whole career has been a long, gradual two steps forward, one step back type of thing,” Giraldo says days before this particular taping from his office at Screen Gems Studios. “But each year it’s improved and it’s all moving in the right direction.”

His current full-time gig at Comedy Central, no doubt, has helped him in that direction. The interstitial Friday Night with Greg Giraldo runs two-and-half hours and features an opening monologue, interviews with other comics, hilarious field pieces and of course, Greg tossing to taped stand-up specials. “I’ve been loving doing it,” he says “It’s a quiet little corner of TV. But I’m not going to fool anyone into thinking it’s an organic show. If you don’t like puppets, you’re not going to like the episode with Jeff Dunham. There’s nothing much you can do about that.”

A NEW LEAF
Two days after the taping, Giraldo is playing to a packed room at Carolines in Times Square. It’s an amazing thing to see a comic so raw and unforgiving who can still find a way to create a cohesive hour of comedy. He lets “fuck” and most variations thereof fly somewhat liberally. He’s careful, however, not to let his masterful command of profanity become the show. Giraldo’s appeal, rather, comes from his presentation. His hostile-meets-matter-of-fact style of couching jokes leaves you barely aware that he’s performing and not just spontaneously spewing the things he bottled up that day

Most times, he doesn’t even attempt to smoothly transition between bits. Rather, he peppers his set with audible pauses like “let’s see” and “what else?” as if he’s checking off a mental list of things pissing him off. His controlled ranting allows him to work in a gem like, “… any sex that doesn’t end with you limping out of the rectory,” and has him renaming the adductor-workout machine — that’s the contraption that works the inner thighs and thus puts females in seemingly compromising positions — “the twat spreader.”

During his set, he also finds time to fire back at the audience, a solid mix of tourists and true Giraldo fans. At one point a group of twenty-somethings shout out the phrase “underwear goes inside the pants,” the name of a song by techno artist Lazyboy (aka Soren Nystrom Rasted) in which some of Greg’s best bits act as lyrics. Giraldo tells the group — as nicely as possible — to pipe down and proceeds to explain to the rest of the room that he hasn’t seen one dime for the song; eventually, he calls Rasted “some Danish cocksucker.”

And one bit in particular took on a slightly heavier meaning, if you cared to read into it and just happened to know that Greg was minutes away from turning 40. It was one of his classics about how watching MTV Cribs is depressing, especially when “I’m 39 years old sitting on my bed slash sofa” and the pop stars the show features are half that age bragging about their giant manses and fleet of Bentleys.

The way Giraldo tells it, most of what he says in his act, unless it’s drenched in unmasked irony, is based in truth. So telling that joke must have had an effect on him. After the show, he stands tucked away at the side of the room, sipping a bottle of water. “I’m doing my after-show hyperventilation,” he says. “I just turned 40 three minutes ago.”

During interviews and on stage, Giraldo has made no secret of his hard-living ways on the road and the way in which it has affected — and, infected — his home life. Greg’s been married seven years (to a former Carolines waitress) and has three sons— ages five, three and nearly two.

“Turning 40 has affected me much more dramatically than I would’ve expected,” he says. “I’ve made some pretty drastic lifestyle changes recently. With that has come real reflection.”

“I would go on the road and live like a fucking maniac,” he continues. “That’s just the way it was. And then eventually it starts bleeding into your regular life. At first, it starts out on the road and it’s no big deal. So you keep denying that you’re about to destroy your children’s lives because it’s happening in Phoenix as opposed to home. Slowly but surely though, it starts impacting everything and then you have decisions to make.”

“There’s part of me that wants to be an uninhibited, unrestrained lunatic doing whatever I want. Frankly, that was a lot of the fun of it at the beginning. You hear people make grand artistic statements about why they love stand-up. But really, you’re choosing to tell dick jokes in a nightclub for a living. So if you go on the road and get fucked up all the time, you have to take everything that comes with that. You can’t have it both ways. You have to be a reasonable adult or a maniacal party road machine.”

So which way is Greg leaning these days? “It finally dawned on me,” he says. “I didn’t know if I wanted to be a guy with three kids. Then I realized I was a guy with three kids. So you can be a guy with three kids and an asshole or you can be a guy with three kids who’s trying to do the best possible thing. So I’m trying that. It’s time to grow up and be a good man, husband and parent. That’s a tall order for fuck-up traveling comic.”

“On the brighter side, I feel pretty good about where I am both professionally and personally,” he says. “My new lifestyle has brought a lot more joy and peace into my home. I keep getting better and funnier. I’ve also gotten a lot more confident and a tiny bit more comfortable in my own skin. And I jerk off less.”


ONE LESS LAWYER
Raised in a predominantly Irish lower-middle-class neighborhood in Queens, N.Y., Giraldo was urged by his immigrant parents (dad Alfonso is Colombian and mom Dolores is Spanish) to go to college. Alfonso worked for the financially volatile Pan Am in the 1970s and suffered pay cuts and a less-than-stable work environment. So his advice to Greg was to find a job that would always be there, something where he could eventually work for himself.

Having graduated from Columbia University with an English degree and then Harvard Law School in 1990, Greg was well on his way. He even practiced corporate law in Manhattan for a year before quitting. “It was a ridiculous, absurd belief that I could ever pull that off,” he says. “Everyone agreed that I would not become the kind of person you’d want in charge of anyone else’s affairs.”

Out for lunch one day while working at the law firm, Greg auditioned for a role in the off-Broadway play Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding. While he didn’t get the part, the improvised sketch character he did at the audition got plenty of laughs. And at the director’s suggestion, Greg started performing at open mics.

A few years into his stand-up career, Giraldo landed a deal with ABC to write and star in his own sitcom. Common Law, in which Greg played John Alvarez, a capable but irreverent attorney, premiered in September 1996. The network cut the show after four episodes. “My acting was an abomination,” he has said. “I want to go back in time and slap myself.”

The canceling of the show didn’t ground him for long. Greg took to honing his stand-up chops and became the skilled performer he is today. He would later land appearances on Late Show with David Letterman and Late Night with Conan O’Brien and became a popular Comedy Central Roast comic, skewering not only Pamela Anderson but also Jeff Foxworthy and Chevy Chase.

Now more than 13 years into his stand-up career, Giraldo is in a place most comics would kill for. Though, Greg is still always up for dismembering any trace of ego with sarcasm and self-deprecation. “You have to understand that I’m extremely talented,” he says. “For me there is no downside. But for lesser beings, there’s fear and insecurity about the future. They worry about how long this can go on. Those people constantly question themselves and their abilities. But for me, I don’t sense any of those things. It’s just progress and roses.”

For more information, visit greggiraldo.com

Mitch Fatel: The Power of Panties Compels Him

by Dylan P. Gadino

The veteran Tonight Show guest’s hilarious new album proves his love for women. But at the end of the day, he really just wants to tell jokes — and see some panties.

Mitch Fatel is a tired man, having spent the previous night at his sister’s suburban-New York house, rocking and cuddling his two-year-old niece throughout the night in a desperate attempt to hasten the end of her whooping cough. His voice is hoarse, and he’s a tad hungry. So moments after his first set of the night at the Comedy Cellar in New York City’s Greenwich Village, he digs into a giant bowl of hummus and sips a bottle of water at the adjoining Olive Tree Cafe. He’s a happy man.

“I think last night for the first time I learned what love is,” he says. “I was holding my niece and eating, and she sneezed on my salad twice. At first, it was just a spray, then a glaze all over the entire thing. But I still ate it. So I’m a good uncle, I guess.”

This is some adorable talk from a guy who spends most of his act discussing the joys of thongs, the way in which girls masturbate in the shower and his altruism when it comes to giving women orgasms in lieu of having one himself , as in, “Every girl that has sex with me is guaranteed to have an orgasm, or dinner is on me.”

There’s no denying that his material is x-rated. But his delivery allows him to get away with so much. Political correctness and sensitivity aside, Mitch describes his onstage delivery voice as “retarded;” in fact, he named his new album Super Retardo. In a sick way, it’s brilliant. He can ask the college girl in the front row to see her vagina — which he does — without her snarling back.

At times, he talks in a staccato monotone and peppers his lines with a slight lisp. He doesn’t move much on stage, he looks down a lot and, at 5-foot-5, he’s usually the shortest comic on the bill. He’s a young boy at the dinner table, testing the waters with new words and ideas, dropping “clitoris” here and there and waiting to see: Will my parents slap me across the face or continue carving up their pot roast?

THE TRUTH ABOUT MF

Born in Manhattan and raised in Yonkers, N.Y., Fatel (that’s FAY-TEL), grew up in a working-class family with his younger sister, Kaurie, and his parents Robert, a financial planner, and Michele, now a retired hairdresser, both of whom never supported his decision to make stand-up comedy his full-time gig. Instead, they encouraged him to go to college in an attempt to win a traditional nine-to-five. He eventually conceded when he majored in film at New York University. That lasted a year and a half.

Since he has found success — Mitch just bought his own place in ultra-trendy Hoboken, N.J., has been on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno 20 times and is a nationally headlining comic — his folks seem to have come around. “It has turned into, “We always knew he was funny.” But when I was a kid, they would tell me there’s no way I could make a living doing this,” he says. “They say they must have done something right. I can’t win! So that’s why I’m going to kill them.”

His parents did give him a shot at stand-up when he was 15, but only to “prove I couldn’t do it.” They brought him to a class that retired Catskills comedian Dick Lord ran out of his home, complete with a stage and microphone in his basement. Though the class was for adults, Lord was so impressed by Mitch’s jokes that he asked him to join the class. After a year and a half of comedy training and performing at the seediest bars in the area, Fatel took a long break from comedy.

At 21, with his resume beefed up with a few shows at NYC’s legendary Comic Strip Live — one killer set there appears as a bonus track on Fatel’s first album Miniskirts & Muffins — Mitch made it official. He came back to comedy. As it turns out, comedy was happy to have him. Fatel quickly found what he calls his “inner voice.” “I believe everyone onstage needs to find who they are, bring it onstage, and then magnify that,” he says. “Me offstage is more of a character. Onstage, that’s really me cut to the core. It’s who I always was and who I always will be. And maybe that’s what makes me able to exist in the outside world.”

“When people see Mitch live, they often think, What’s wrong with this guy?” says good friend and fellow comic Tom Papa. “I’ve known Mitch a long time and still haven’t figured it out.”

The truth is, Mitch is pretty normal, albeit somewhat obsessive about certain things, namely comedy.

Everything in my life has come down to a very strict routine,” he confesses. In the morning, Mitch jots down ideas on a yellow pad for 30 minutes. At night, he takes another 30 minutes to transfer those ideas to his Mac; this is where the jokes start to form. Then he performs them on stage.

But the way Papa tells it, Fatel is even more studious about the process. “The only thing Mitch does when he isn’t with a lady, is write jokes,” he says. “This bastard writes more than most comics I know, and it shows. Mitch is simply a brilliant joke teller. It’s more disgusting than what he says about panties.”

HE’S ALL GROWN UP

Halfway through his hummus, Mitch drops a bomb: He has a girlfriend. It’s not a bomb because Mitch is some deformed monster with a shitty personality. The man is nice to look at. He’s well groomed, in shape and is friendly.

It’s just shocking because so much of his material deals with the pursuit of conquering multiple females. But Mitch is dead serious. She’s very beautiful and very young,” says Mitch about Jenny, his 19-year-old art-student/waitress girlfriend. “When we were first dating, she asked me what I saw in her. I said that she had the hottest ass I’ve ever seen. But after fooling around a couple times, I started realizing that I really liked this person. I changed my life for her. I became faithful. I really don’t want to mess it up.”

Clearly, Fatel has entered into a new phase of his life — one in which it’s not all about the nookie. “The most wonderful feeling in the world — better than sex — is writing a new joke and coming on stage that night to perform it, knowing that it only exists in the world because you wrote it,” he says.

The thing is, Fatel’s imagination is made of the hopes and dreams of every 16-year-old boy. So steady girl or not, it seems doubtful he’ll ever stray from his cool-awkward take on sex and the female form. In fact, it seems Mitch is set to make that material the vehicle with which he’ll rise faster than he has before; those first 10 years of slowly scratching his name into the national comedy scene are over. He’s a bit more Zen about the whole thing.

“I got into this to become very famous,” he admits. “But now, it’s more about the art and the joy of writing a joke and staying true to myself. I have a great life. I make a living telling jokes and, at the end of the day, people tell me how good I am. Where else can you find that?”

For more information, visit mitchfatel.com.