Greg Giraldo: Comedy game plan in effect

by Dylan P. Gadino

One of the most underrated — and talented — comedians working today, Greg Giraldo has a new album and DVD, Midlife Vices, a new positive outlook on life and thankfully the same hilariously scathing approach to comedy.

Though mostly known to the masses as the dude who kills on every Comedy Central Roast, Greg Giraldo wears his skin best when he’s headlining across the country, where his target of ire is not some overblown celebrity but society as a whole and oftentimes, himself. Few comedians offer the thematic breadth he does onstage. Intense in tone, like a kettle repeatedly boiling and then spilling over, the twice Ivy League-educated comedy veteran masterfully incises life and from its pieces, molds a string of truths that are equally enlightening and hilarious.

On his new DVD and album — his second — Midlife Vices, the father of three delves into the personal (his impending divorce, his addictions), the political (Obama’s role as pussy-whipped sitcom husband), gay rights, sports and a genius set-ending spiel on immigration reform. We caught up with Greg during a recent tour stop in Columbus, OH to chat about his place in the contemporary comedy scene, his coming to terms with his success and much more.

The last time we talked at length, you were doing the interstitial show, Stand-up Nation with Greg Giraldo on Comedy Central, you were just turning 40, you were a bit bummed and you said you were trying to turn things around— trying to be a better dad, and all that good stuff. So how’s that going?
I’ve decided to not talk to my children ever. I’ve disowned them, and I’m hoping that their new daddy will just love them more than I was ever able to.

Nice.
I’m kidding! I had to start out light, you know? Actually, since we talked, I’m not married. I’ve been living apart from my wife over a year now and we’re in separation proceedings. And that part is good in the sense that it’s determined and clear, I guess, I got my little apartment very close to them so the kids are with me a couple of days a week and on the weekends when I’m home. So you know, life is kinda moving well in that direction, I suppose. Although you know the Catholic in me is having a hard time seeing that as going in the right direction, but in my gut it’s the right direction, so all is good.

Ok, that sounds good, then.
Don’t ever go through a divorce if you feel like keeping your shit. Let’s put it that way.

Yeah, I’m going try not to. So far, so good.
Yeah, one marriage is probably the way to go in an ideal world.

So on your special, you say you’re getting divorced again. Were you married before?
Dylan, I’ve been married a whole shit load of times. I’m just not willing to talk about it all the time. I was in my 20s, who gives a fuck?

Are you kidding?
Well, I’m kidding about a whole lot of times, but I was married once before. I got married when I was 24. And that didn’t last very long at all.

So you’re not officially divorced yet, but you’re going through separation proceedings.
Right, it takes awhile to be official. You know, what God has brought together, you know, it takes man a long time to tear asunder. (coughs) Sorry, I’m getting emphysema from not smoking.

It sounds like you’re reasonably happy with the way things are going.
Yeah, it always depends on what mood I’m in. My moods shift rapidly. I feel more or less optimistic. I just woke up at 2 pm in Columbus, Ohio and it’s raining out. So I feel a little less optimistic than I might if I were some place else where it wasn’t raining. But I actually feel really good about things and everything is definitely moving in the right direction.

Jokes.com
Greg Giraldo – DVD Exclusive – Marsupial Sex
comedians.comedycentral.com

Alright. I wanted to try to get a little deeper into your psyche, Greg Giraldo.
Oh really?

Yeah, I wanted to peel back the layers, if you will.
I see. OK.

You’ve had problems with alcohol, drugs and addiction. How are those things playing a role in your life now?
Oh, it’s been conquered. I will never struggle with any of the substances or the underlying emotional and psychological problems that lead to those substances ever again. It’s like I was born again. It’ s like God has shined his light of joy into my soul.

That’s a scoop.
Well, you know. It’s all going well. It’s a very complicated set of issues and there are a lot of different ways to unravel them. People do it in a lot of different ways but for right now it’s all going well. It’s an ongoing thing but it’s all OK.

So your album and DVD, Midlife Vices, which is a reference to said addictions, is out in stores and online. I feel like that’s always an exciting time for an artist. Does it mean anything to you that you have something new in stores and that people are able to get your new material or is it just another project for you?
It definitely does mean a lot to me, but I realize that I’m not one of those giddy types. I should be more excited about it. Here in Columbus, this is the first gig I’m doing where they sent the DVDs so it was the first time I’ve seen it. So I got to open the package for the first time. So I am very excited about it. On the other hand, I can’t worry about sales, and things like that, I just can’t control that and I try not to think about it too much. But I am real happy that to see that I’m starting to build some buzz. Because I’ve definitely been a little bit distracted on a lot of levels for the last year and I should have been putting out a lot more shit. But now that I’m on that sort of path I feel good about building more of a body of work. I said that like I’m some kind of fucking serious artist. My body of work, Dylan. I’m an artist.

You are an artist.
I’m starting to consider myself that, but I shouldn’t say things like ‘body of work’ without irony in it.

I think you’re allowed to.
Thank you.

You’ve done everything on Comedy Central imaginable except, up until now, the hour special. And I don’t know if that was, like, Comedy Central not having faith in you, or you just couldn’t get your shit together. Why did that take so long?
You know, actually an honest answer is I didn’t think about it that much. It’s not that I didn’t get my shit together and it’s not that Comedy Central wouldn’t have offered it to me. I changed management over the last couple years, and that’s had a huge impact on things. So now we’ve started focusing and setting goals. Before that I was sort of bouncing around and taking things as they came and that actually sort of re-enforced my own fucking weaknesses. I didn’t create a game plan. Things would come up and I’m not great at multi tasking, so maybe I’d be working on a pilot where in the mean time I should have been developing a lot more material for a special.

And the other thing is I’d write so much topical stuff that I’d have to throw away so much of it to film the hour. You need evergreen material that you could pitch to HBO or something. Whenever people would ask if I had an hour, I’d say I do but I’m not going to in three months because I have to get rid of all this other shit.

Are you happy with how comedy fans view your career at this point?
You know, I’m never fully happy about anything but yeah, I’ve gotta say in the last couple of years, I do seem to have a lot of fans that seem to really appreciate and like what I’m doing. I get a lot of emails and I see the crowds getting bigger in all the clubs and people seem to really be getting what I’m doing. So yeah, I am actually pretty happy with the way that’s going.

On the other hand, a lot of the following comes from the [Comedy Central] roasts and the roast is a very specific thing that my stand-up is not necessarily completely compatible with. Although I don’t think a lot of people come out because they love the roast and then end up hating my stand-up. So that’s a good thing. People who don’t know my stand-up seem to be enjoying it. So yeah, I guess I’m happy. When someone stops me in a small town in Minnesota and says, ‘Dude, you’re Greg Giraldo, how come you’re not doing more?’ I’m like, ‘You live here and you know who I am, obviously it’s not going that bad.’

Jokes.com
Greg Giraldo – Drinking
comedians.comedycentral.com

Yeah, I agree.
I’ll tell you one thing, I’m unmitigatingly happy and proud that 99.9 percent of the time when people stop me, or recognize me, they’re fans. Everyone that stops me has good things to say. it’s not like, ‘Oh hey, aren’t you on something?’ You know like, I could easily become famous for being cast in some piece of shit sitcom or something, and I’d have more to talk about on the roast but is that really the goal of this whole thing? I wish I’d put out more stuff over the years; there are a lot of things I wish had done differently, but for the most part I’m known for doing shit that I’m half proud of and that’s good enough.

Sometimes when I read interviews and things I’ve said, besides being annoyed at my fucking circular reasoning, I feel like they come across too negative as far as me talking about my crowds. That’s my own self-esteem issue where it’s like, you know, I have a hard time just accepting that these people are really excited to come and really excited to be there. I’m at a point now for the first time ever where I really am enjoying the audiences. I’m at a place where I’m like, ‘Fuck, man, these guys like what I’m doing, I’m giving them something that they enjoy, and this is good.’

That sounds like a healthy outlook.
Someone’s been talking to a therapist. That doctor is on to something.

Dude, I think everyone should be in therapy.
Yeah, everybody definitely should. The trick is to stay there and not to stop going when you start hearing things that make you uncomfortable.

Yeah, I think a lot of the danger is like you get comfortable and then you start to forget why you were there in the first place, and if you don’t have a really vigilant therapist, you go there for an hour and talk about nothing that matters and you leave and nothing’s accomplished.
Yeah, luckily I’ve never gotten to that stage. There’s always plenty to talk about. It’s never gotten to where we’re like like ‘Oh shit. It looks like we’re all done with this.’ I just started with a new guy a couple months ago and he’s been great, but the first day I walk in it was sort of like ‘Fuck where do we begin?’

So you’ve seen different therapists. Do they know you from your act at all or do they have no idea who you are?
Some guys do, some guys don’t. I don’t know, they don’t really talk about it much. I try to go to guys that see a lot of entertainers or people like that. You don’t want some guy who’s just excited that he’s talking to someone on television or something. You’re paying them a lot of money, you don’t want to sit there and tell them what it was like to meet Joan Rivers.

Understood. Ah, what else did I want to ask you?
I don’t know. Dylan, you’re sound kind of tortured today.

I sound tortured?
Yeah, here’s a little interview strategy guidance. Start with some softball questions and then you kind of warm up into ‘So how are your children based on your alcoholism and drug addiction?’

That’s exactly what I do with people that I haven’t interviewed and I don’ t know how they’re going to react.
(laughs) I know.

I know what your comedy’s about. I can describe it to those who don’t in the intro of this thing. I’m definitely not going to ask you how you come up with jokes. ‘Oh, so you come up with an idea and you go on stage and you work it out, is that what you do?’
(laughs) You can ask me how I feel about puppies and sunshine.

I imagine you enjoy puppies.
I do like puppies but I know they’ll soon turn into a giant horrible dog. They’re just reminders of the fleeting state of cuteness.

Wow, that’s a pretty horrible way of…
Of enjoying a puppy? Yeah.

I know we kind of just jumped into talking about your addictions…
I’m kind of in a transitional stage of in terms of how frank I want to be with all that, which is perfectly ideal for your interview. I’m in the middle of this, between the divorce and my kids. My oldest son is nine now and that’s starting to be a factor. His friends watch shit and it’s hard in terms of material. What exactly do I want to do and say and how much of my personal life do I want out there? I’m not sure how I’m going to approach the whole thing. But that’s good, that’s part of life. We’re all growing.

Jokes.com
Greg Giraldo – Pride
comedians.comedycentral.com

One of the things I really liked about the special is that you kept in that interaction with the guy who was asleep in the audience dead center. Was there a lot of discussion about whether or not to keep that in?
I was shocked at how little resistance it got. I said we should keep it in. I just assumed they would never in a million years leave it in. Also, I didn’t know if it was funny or not. And I can’t really watch my stuff and be objective. I don’t edit any of the shit myself. If there’s something I hated, I’d tell my manager, who I really trust. I let him watch it all but I can’t be objective about it. Some comedians care so much about their shit that they’re like hyper controlling whereas I care so much about it that I can’t even tell. I’ve been wrong about things that are good or bad. I just can’t tell. So I let someone else fucking decide. And also I don’t want to get into any wars with Comedy Central about what to leave in and then lose control. So I didn’t really get into a lot of battles because we let them cut basically what they wanted. Because the reality is the special is an hour and 10 minutes and they’re cutting it to 42 minutes. So that I just assumed for sure that part was going, but my manager thought it was cool.

My attitude about the version that aired was ‘fuck it.’ Everything I did on stage I liked. I thought it was all good. And, weirdly enough, that’s the thing most people seem to be responding to. People loved it. I guess because it just looked weird for a special and people are subconsciously used to seeing a certain kind of tone and to see this kind of tone broken and it’s just spontaneous, I mean it was spontaneous, of course, but I was surprised at how much people were responding to it.

Before we started chatting, you said you had to get up and do your morning ritual shit. Tell me a little bit about, when you’re on the road. What goes on? you had shows last night, right?
Yeah, last night I had two shows.

So you go to bed after that or you hang out?
It all varies. I mean right now, I’m going to go to bed after the shows. But I mean I don’t go right to bed, I still stay up. Sometimes I have friends that travel with me, and we’ll hang out or do whatever. But last night was nothing particularly exciting, I guess I hadn’t been sleeping a lot. And sometimes by the time you go to sleep it’s three o’clock in the morning. Usually, when you go on the road, you get there the night before your first gig, then you have morning radio.

If the first show is Friday, for morning radio you’re getting up at six in the morning. So now you got 3 hours sleep and you’re doing radio all day. I take a nap, go back to do afternoon radio, go to the club to do two shows and you’re already sleep deprived. And then if you go out and go crazy, then of course that’s a whole other thing, Then Saturday you just kind of dick around. At this particular club there’s three shows. The show’s start at seven so I do shows from seven until one in the morning; it’s almost like having a real job. Which is fucking ridiculous. I didn’t get into this to labor away like a worker.

How do you do three shows in one night and not get bored of listening to yourself talk?
That’s the craft work part. That’s all professional shit; it’s not fun. When you’re doing three shows, that’s the night when you’re doing it to get paid. But I’m always mixing up the order. I’m always trying to find a new ways to put jokes between other jokes, and if you try dicking around like that, by the third show you don’t remember what jokes you’ve done, you don’t remember which audience members are still there from which show. You start making a reference to guys that aren’t there in the crowd. That guy in the hat? He must have been from the last show. Oh right, sorry. So it gets very confused.

I feel now when people are coming out, they generally know who I am, they’re fans, they ask you to do 40 minutes or 45 minutes, but you feel like you’ve got to do more. I rarely do less than an hour. So doing over three hours of talking really loud, it gets a little draining, But, you know, it’s good that the people are coming. This is the part where I’m supposed to say, ‘I’m just excited to be out there for the people.’ But sometimes you feel like for the third show you’re going on autopilot. Fuck it. Could I babble more?

Sure.
Give me more open-ended questions, so I can babble for four minutes and then give you the answer at the end of one sentence that I should have been able to give you at the beginning. God, am I a fucking babbling blowhard douche.

Do you see any effect on the number of people coming out to comedy shows on the road due to the recession?
I can’t tell. For me, it’s only changing for the better, but I can’t tell if it would be even better if the economy wasn’t a factor. I mean, the clubs are saying it is a factor. Some would say people don’t have a lot of extra money after the shows. I don’t know. For me, it’s been on an up swing so it’s going well. But I’ve got to assume that if the economy was booming that maybe I’d be drawing even more.

In what cities do you draw bigger crowds?
Probably, San Francisco. I just did Ft. Lauderdale and all the shows were packed. All of them were sold out. I did Washington DC every and single show was sold out. Dallas. Actually, all the markets are going pretty well, come to think of it. Philadelphia. I should have said that. All the shows were sold out in Philly, it’s a particularly good market, I think.

Jokes.com
Greg Giraldo – 9/11 Bachelorettes
comedians.comedycentral.com

Do club owners complain about dwindling numbers?
These guys always want to downplay the good. Club owners are never going to tell you things are fucking great, like ‘I’m doing so well, next time we negotiate a contract be sure to ask for more money.’ They’ll always tell you things are bad. My gut sense is that the comedy industry, and the A clubs on the road, are doing well.

That’s kind of the sense I get as well but it’s always interesting to hear from somebody that’s out there.
Also, I think comedy is very hot right now and there’s a substantial number of name acts available. If you look at the schedule at the Improvs, it’s all famous people. I don’t remember it being that way a few years ago. There was like a couple big special event guys per year, and a lot of journeymen and headliners. Like, there’s not a single guy headlining at the DC Improv that you haven’t heard of. And that has to be helping their numbers.

It’s completely obvious to me that stand up is going to stop being a fringe form of live entertainment.
Yeah, I mean, beyond just stand up it’s like the whole idea of comedy as a cultural force is like very, very clear right now. The Daily Show and the Colbert Report, everyone wants to come up with their version of the Colbert Report and their version of the Daily Show. Even like CNN, Fox,all those guys, they’re putting comedy like Comedy-ish type of shows on there. The news is so bad you’re going to need somebody to present it in a relatively palatable kind of a way.

My concern from a straight stand-up perspective is that if that happens, stand up will become shitty and predictable. That might happen but I think that there’s enough sophistication at this point that comedy is not just comedy. Because in the late 80s these fuckers looked the same and all talked the same. It just got over-saturated and clubs started giving away tickets and it just killed things. It was fucking dead in the late 80s. So I’m a little concerned that might happen but I’m hoping that it won’t for me or for the people who already sort of built a following.

What are you doing with the rest of your day?
I’m thinking of maybe going and getting on one of these exercise machines that keep you from dying early. I haven’t exercised for awhile so I don’t know if today’s the big start, Dylan. You know, it’s rainy and who wants to leave the hotel?

What’s your gym routine like?
I just do Jazzercise, and two sets of dead lifts. That’s pretty much it.

The two extremes, huh?
Yeah, The thing about Jazzercising, I work out in a hotel gym so a lot of times I’m the only person there or a lot of times when there’s no official jazzercise class, it looks weird.

I bet.
But you know, I’m a maverick.

For more info, check out greggiraldo.com. Download Greg’s album Midlife Vices by clicking the image below.