An obsession with food usually ends in a shame spiral of eating until you can tile your kitchen in frozen pizza boxes and fashion furniture from empty KFC buckets. Jim Gaffigan went the other way, shaping an entire career around his obsession with food. Almost every track on his last comedy album, Beyond the Pale, involves food. (“This guy talks a lot about cake,” whispers Gaffigan to himself after a long run of cake jokes.) His Hot Pocket (Pizza Pops to us Canadians) bit remains a favourite of audiences, so much so that fans bring boxes of the white-trash snack to his shows for him to sign.
“Well, you are supposed to write about things you are passionate about,” shrugs Gaffigan. “I love the challenge of making the mundane funny. Believe it or not, I’m trying to make furniture funny.”
Before squeezing hot chunks of comedy out of microwave foodstuffs, Gaffigan was “that guy from that thing,” appearing in a multitude of films, TV shows and commercials. He only really started developing a following after his first appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman in 1999. Before that, he was doing standup in restaurants. Now, he co-stars on the somewhat amiable TBS sitcom My Boys and co-writes and stars in Pale Force, an animated web show where he and an effeminate Conan O’Brien use their paleness and laser shooting nipples to take on Eartha Kitt. He doesn’t take his success lightly, though, staying after every show to meet his fans. It all comes down to his love of standup.
“Standup is a conversation. Unlike a play, there is no fourth wall,” says Gaffigan. “As a standup [comedian], you have the mic and control the dialogue of the conversation with the audience, but there is no guarantee what the audience will be like or how that conversation will go. I dealt with stage fright for the first seven years. I've been doing standup for 17 years now, so I guess around 10 years in, I knew who I was. If a joke is undeniable, meaning everyone likes it, a lot of that doubt disappears.”
While many younger comedians base their humour on irreverence and non-sequiturs, Gaffigan has shifted his comedy away from that. His routine focuses on the everyday, and he’s stripped all profanity out of his set as he felt it was becoming a crutch and not appropriate to his material. What has stayed, though, is his long-running inner voice, a second personality that pops up throughout his set to criticize jokes in a high-pitched whisper.
“Speaking for others was always part of my personality really,” says Gaffigan. “I used it in everyday life, but using it in my act was gradual. I used to have a character I performed that was very dissatisfied with the situation. I kind of mixed that character in. I used to only use it with ‘hot’ audiences, but eventually it became part of my act.
“Yeah, I think it's ridiculous I said ‘hot’ audience, too.”
