The Three Questions with Andy Richter - Chris Gethard

Episode Date: May 31, 2022

Chris Gethard joins Andy Richter to talk about building a community, the toll fame takes on mental health, being honest on stage and more.

Hi everyone, it's Andy Richter and this is the three questions, the podcast that asks the same three questions, or implies the same three questions to every one of my guests. the same three questions to every one of my guests. And today, I have a very funny, very talented guy, kind of in the same milieu as me, improv, talk show, self-loathing. I'm talking today to Chris Gethard. How are you, Chris? I'm good.

I've never felt more in common with someone when you lay it out like that. I knew you would know it was meant with love and appreciation. Yeah. A lot of truth there, too, on my end. And you said before we started, you're wearing some Orange Beats headphones that you got from the Conan show. Yeah, these were given to me in some sort of gift bag when i did your show and as the video popped up i i said i better call this out i'm not wearing them to butter you up oh no i wouldn't i wear them on a regular basis they're mates they look uh they look red from here so i wouldn't even have really sort of clocked them should have my mouth shut oh

that's all right that's all right and i mean and they i just sort of thought they were orange headphones anyway i mean conan might have been like he's you know he i'm sure that he his ego is large enough that anything orange is his he assumes yeah at this point yeah yeah yeah like fair yeah any florida team is like just ripping him off in his estimation. Well, how are you? Where are you at right now? I'm in New Jersey where I live, and my son is sleeping while my wife is out buying mulch for the garden. It's a very idyllic, lame, boring, suburban life that I have now.

I was a very cool underground comedy person up until just a few years ago. And then when I went lame, I went like all in on being lame. Yeah. Well, you got to hit it hard. There's no, yeah. Because that's really, if you're going to go from cool to lame, you got to go as hard on the lame as you did on the cool. And I mean, you know, you were practically fond of it. It's not cool to fond halfway with the name oh yeah i

mean my reputation in new york was true true tastemaker absolutely oh yeah now did you actually uh was this a return to new jersey because i know you're originally from new jersey yeah i grew up in jersey and then i started doing comedy when i was still a kid. I went to Rutgers University. So my whole life was New Jersey. I worked at a magazine about New Jersey, like everything was New Jersey and then started doing comedy when I was at Rutgers. And in the summer after, I was just so horrifically because it made me happy. And UCB had just started up their classes there. So when I was 19, I started taking the train into the city. And for years, for three or four years, I was just a Jersey guy who would come into the city and do comedy. And then eventually, I lived in New York for 16 years. And then we had our kid, and it was time to go home. It was time to go raise him in Jersey. I mean, was that a difficult decision to go back to Jersey?

Or were you kind of happy to return home? I was cooked. It was harder for my wife. My wife had lived in the city for 25 years. She had no affection for nor connection to New Jersey. Right. So that was a hard sell. But luckily, her brother lives here here and he has two kids.

So it made a lot of sense to get our son around his cousins because our son will be an only child unless a real accident occurs. So it was very hard for her. I was ready to go. I had a very interesting few years there where, you know, I kind of, this is going to sound like a person complaining about success. I want to recognize that I am aware of it. It doesn't mean that it wasn't real. and wound up on TruTV, live show, going out national. That was very cool, but there were posters on the subway and stuff. I had fought my whole life to get more successful, and then I found out that it was making me very paranoid and very stressed.

When we were on public access, there was a point where it hit this sweet spot that I will always pine for where like, I would be, I'd like walk. I remember once walking through Washington square park with my wife. And as we walked past this person was just like, yo, Chris, what's up, man. And I was like, nothing, dude. How are you? He's like, good, man. And my wife was like, people are watching. You're like a New Yorker guy. Like you're a New Yorkie guy that New York likes because of our public access show. Then I went to cable and I'll never forget. They put up subway posters, but I was not successful nor wealthy enough to, I still

took the subway every day. Yeah. So this is like really strange stretch where I was like, I don't, I don't like this. I need to be able to take the subway. And there's like a thing where somebody took a picture of me while I was eating. I was eating in a diner by myself and someone tagged me in a picture of me eating in that diner at that time. And I was like, I think I got to get out of the city, man.

I got to get out of this city. Was there any sort of concrete fear or was it just kind of the general paranoia of the sort of animal fear of people staring at you? There was one time where I was waiting for the F train with my wife and somebody was whispering the word Gethard behind us going, Gethard, Gethard, Gethard. And I'm the type of person, if somebody comes up to me and is like, hey man, Gethard, Gethard. And they, like, I am the type of person, like if somebody comes up to me and is like, hey man, I like your stuff. I'd be like, oh, that's amazing. Thank you. And we would talk the whole ride. Like, that's what I was used to. For years in New York, I occupied a very sweet spot. But they just kind of wanted to see if I was going to turn around and react. But you got to realize, like, I've had real mental health problems in my life. There was a

stretch where I was on a medication called Risperdal in my 20s, which is for people with paranoia. If you look it up, it's a pretty heavy duty drug to be on. Because I used to think that police were following me. Like I would drive my car and I would become convinced the car behind me was a cop car and I'd pull over and let them pass. Like that was happening on a regular basis. So like I've been medicated for extreme paranoia. Yeah. Yeah. So I couldn't,

I couldn't do it. I was like, Oh, I don't know. I don't know how people do. I don't know how you do it or Conan does it. Like I was on two episodes of the office after Steve Carell left and people still talk to me about it all the time.

I'm like, what's your life like if you're Rainn Wilson, you know like, what's your life like if you're Rainn Wilson? What's your life like if you're John Krasinski or Andrew Kinsey? I mean, my career the past few years has been very suffering. And some of that is just outright self-sabotage because I didn't handle that well. Yeah. Well, I mean, unfortunately, you had been medicated for paranoia, you know, where you feel like people are following. So, yeah, you were, I mean, I don't mean to be a dick, but I mean, I mean it more as a joke. You were asking for it, you know, like you. I fought so hard for this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I fought so hard for it. Yeah. I mean, and I don't, I mean, I'm a fairly, and I mean, and this isn't, you know, I don't think that this is like strange at this point or it's so weird to hear that yes, I want to perform for people, but I want to control the context of it. That doesn't mean that I'm like a buffet that you can just step up and demand entertainment from at any time. especially early on like in the early 90s and I've talked about this before going back to Illinois at Christmas time and taking my mom to Best Buy so she could do some Christmas shopping and I was sort of just browsing and when we left she said there were a couple guys from Best Buy following you around and whispering and pointing at you and she said it is like isn't that great and i was saying mom think about that like that's yeah you know like think about if i told you there were people following around pointing and whispering you know why you know the logical

reason why you understand it intellectually but you're still basically feel like you're being followed and stared at. And, you know, that's, you know, on one hand, that's what we asked for. But on the other hand, it's not great when you're out in the world, you know, my shrink talked to me about it. Cause at first my shrink was like, I can't hear you complaining that people are taking pictures of you when you've tried to be on TV your whole life. Like, you got to get over it. And I took that note and I was like, yeah, I get it. This is weird. But then she came around and she was like, you know, the worst stretch of your life,

you used to think people were following you. And she's like, and now there are people actually taking clandestine photos of you. It happened three times. It happened at a diner. There's another time I was on a date with my wife and someone posted photos of you. It happened three times. It happened at a diner. There's another time I was on a date with my wife and someone posted photos of it. And another time where there was a guy, a guy posted photos of me on the subway. And he said, man, Chris Gethard bites his nails a lot. And he posted a picture of me biting my thumbnail. And I actually wrote him a message. And I was like, Hey, like you can post whatever you want. I was like, just so you know, I was chewing on my thumbnail because you were acting so... I know exactly who you are and you

were making me so nervous that I was biting my nail because I could tell you were doing something and I'm glad you were just taking a photo, but I was really... And the person to their credit wrote back and was like, oh my God, I'll take it down. I'm so sorry. But my shrink was like, there was a stretch in your life where you were really kind of going crazy. And you used to think cops were following you when you were 23 years old. And she very astutely pointed out, she's like, now people are taking clandestine photos of you. And she was like, I think what's happening here is you're really scared you're going crazy again, because it's bringing back all these feelings. But she was like, this time it's real. So it's okay. Like scared you're going crazy again because it's bringing back all these feelings but she was like this time it's real so it's okay like you're not crazy

yeah she's like you're reacting you only remember this feeling when it was not real and that scares the shit out of you because yeah it was real that that was so scary she's like now it's real so for you to feel this paranoia now it's real it So for you to feel this paranoia now, it's real, it's justified. You can let it go. I was like, oh, thank you. But I, you know, that was a big part of moving back to Jersey, obviously to raise the kid around his cousins. But for me, I also, I know this place so well. And I know that the people of New Jersey in a way that I am such a fan of are just pretty thoroughly unimpressed by everything. And that feels really good. Yeah.

That feels really good. So that's why I came back here. Because I don't know if you feel the same way about Illinois, but I'm like, I've never, ever felt totally comfortable in the entertainment industry. Like as everything at the UCB theater blew up, I always felt like I was still somewhat on the outside looking in when I finally got there. I always felt like I felt like I finally got there from the perspective of an

outsider. I did public access TV to kind of force, I forced to show on public access to get such a cult following that the networks picked it up. Like everything always felt like outside looking in and with Jersey, I just understand backwards and forwards. Like people don't care. Like they,

in a way that's great. They're, they don't care if like, Oh, you're on TV. Fancy you. Who gives a shit? And that's kind of how I always grew up feeling too.

So I feel really comfortable and even when people have recognized me here it's it's generally on a wavelength where they quickly sense that like I don't care and they don't need to care and it's all good it's a gig yeah that I actually I mean it's funny because I actually find that more in New York that people are kind of blasé about it. Because, well, you know, and it, well, and in L.A. too. But I mean, in L.A., everybody's kind of always looking for somebody famous, even when you're at the hardware store. You know, there's a chance you might see somebody from tv or somebody from the movies but in new york it always seemed and what i liked about new york versus la was that it's not you know la is just show business town pretty much you know i mean and whether that's

music or whatever it's just a show business town whereas the important, fancy, noticeable people in New York are from all different kinds of things. Like show business is just one of the categories of like, there's a guy you recognize. I mean, you know, where, you know, in the old days it could have been like, there's Donald Trump and he wasn't show business. He just was, you know, a man about town or, you know, there's fashion people or literary people that you can see. I always found it more so when you go, like when I would visit my ex-wife's family in Louisiana and we'd go to the mall, that's when I would feel there would be 10 kids following me around the mall in Slidell, Louisiana. And that was when it was like, okay, this is, they're just not used to seeing anybody they recognize. So, and they got time.

So they're just going to follow me around. And that's when it felt weird, you know? But I mean, go ahead, go ahead. Well, I feel like Jersey is perfect. I feel like Jersey is perfect, period. Like I'm a big fan, but like I grew up in a part of new jersey where if you if you took a right out of the front door of my house walked up the hill

half a block and turn around you could see the new york city skyline yeah like where it's this amazing place that's so used to being close to all of that and also feeling immensely far away from all of that it's's like, you can see it. You can see the skyline from where I grew up. From my block, you could see the skyline, which is really frustrating. As a kid who was like, had no idea how to get into the arts, I was like, it's right there.

But also it's like, it's not Louisiana. You know what? It's not a small town in Louisiana where it's impossible to encounter. Yeah, yeah. Where it's completely crazy that you'd see. No, it's like you grew up close enough that everyone kind of just quietly is like, New York is New York. They hate us.

They think everybody makes fun of Jersey. Like, all the New York people are fancy. Like, that's fine. Like, I remember in school there was a real divide, too. There were, like, some kids where their parents, like their dads would commute into the city for work every day. And those kids, kind of everybody sort of made fun of or resented of like, oh, you think you're better than us, like your city, your city family.

Yeah, yeah. So it sits in this real sweet spot of like people aren't blown away by the idea of stuff being fancy but they're not craving it either and man do i love it yeah and do i love it well what kind of household did you grow up in what what did your parents do and how many kids were there you know it was me and my brother um i grew up in a house directly across the street from the house my dad was raised in. My grandparents still lived there. His sister lived around the block. We could look through my neighbor's yard into her yard. My mom's parents lived two blocks away. My mom's sister lived two blocks away in the opposite direction. So it was very close-knit, very Irish Catholic family. My grandparents on my mom's side were both from Ireland, both immigrants.

And there's a Catholic church three blocks away, pretty much the whole neighborhood. All those families went to that Catholic church. We weren't the only family where like a bunch of your aunts and uncles and cousins all lived in the same area. So pretty Irish Catholic that way, pretty close connection to my grandparents. Like my bedroom window, I could see into my grandfather's backyard and he wound up being

like a real crazy person in a way that I really loved and found inspiring. So yeah, it was really, Um, so yeah, it was really, it was really in that sense. I always felt like I grew up in the eighties and nineties, but sort of felt like I was raised in a very 1950s feeling neighborhood. Um, I always, I always felt that like most, uh, my parents met at the Catholic church that I mentioned my grandmother on my dad's side was a teacher there. And I always felt like there were a lot of families like that so it always felt like it was hanging on to being like 50s 60s type values yeah well that's very much a that's a it's a rarity I mean it's a rarity and especially yeah

yeah to have and also you know to hold on to kind of an ethnic kind of identity too. Yeah, yeah. I grew up in this town that's legendarily diverse and always has been. Like when I was a freshman in high school, they told us there were 40 different languages spoken amongst the student body. And that was in 1995. Wow. languages spoken amongst the student body. And that was in 1995. Wow. But it was this town that was really diverse, but where we lived on the blocks that were mostly Irish Catholic. And then next to us was the black neighborhood. And then there was a Haitian

neighborhood. And then the Italian neighborhood, the Jewish neighborhood, the Protestant neighborhood. And then right in the middle was this very weird thing where there was a private community. Actually, the first gated community in the United states is this place llewellyn park which is right in the middle of my town and you're not allowed to drive through it you're not allowed to walk through it and it's immensely rich people like thomas edison used to live there whoopi goldberg lives there now wow so it was this real it when you think of it like that like there's this town in the middle that you can't walk or drive through and the rest of the town was like a donut that surrounded it. And wherever you lived on the donut, you could probably point at anywhere on the donut. And in my generation, I could probably tell you what your economic status was and what your ethnic background was based on where you lived on the donut. Wow. was and and what your ethnic background was based on where you lived on the donut it was a very very strange place to grow up and i have a lot of a lot of love for it and also i look back

at a lot of it and i go it was complete chaos very much raised like in that generation that was like i've been laughing a lot lately because I have a three-year-old son now. So I'm looking back at it a lot and I go, I was in this exact generation where it was like, like there's Satanists everywhere. And if you ever see a van, it's probably someone who's going to kidnap you.

And look at the milk carton. There's kidnapped kids on the side of the milk carton. And if anybody ever hands you a Mickey Mouse tattoo, don't take it. It's LSD. Like every Halloween, check the apples. There's probably razor blades in them. And that was everything that was drilled into our heads. And yet I was also of that generation that was like, okay, the sun's up. Go outside, come back for lunch if you feel like it. If not, we'll assume you ate lunch at one of your friend's houses. Just once it gets dark, come back for dinner. And there's no cell phones. Our parents did not know where we were at any given point. Yeah, mine neither, yeah.

Yet we were completely convinced that like satanic D&D playing evildoers were gonna kidnap us at every turn. Yeah every turn. So I was right in that. And also growing up in North Jersey, we had the extra added bonus of them saying, you know, I was, I was right at the last generation, uh, where the cold war was still a thing. So we were also told, Hey, if the Russians ever nuke Manhattan, um,

the people, a few towns closer to New York, they'll be lucky because they'll just die, but we'll all just have third-degree burns and radiation poisoning out here. So it was this really strange place to grow up, a strange time and place where it was kind of like the kids ran the asylum, and we were all going to get nuked anyway,

and kidnappers, and it was weird it was weird it was a weird way to grow up yeah think about it a lot it's it's also interesting that it was so defined like you could really you know like you said you know you know where where you're from and who you are and like where you belong you know and and that's probably, I imagine in some ways that could be kind of stifling. Oh, it filled me with an anger that I still am getting over. I've had friends point out to this day, like, you know, I moved back to Jersey and it was the pandemic and I just had a kid and I reconnected with a bunch of my Jersey friends pretty hard

when I moved back out here. And we'd always stayed in touch, but you know, I was always kind of off chasing the, chasing the dreams. And I've had a lot of people tell me like, I didn't, I did not realize that I was perceived as angry as I was. Like I was very driven, but I was also pretty pissed. And I think I had a pretty acute sense from a young age. I did not like authority. I did not trust adults. I was just from a young age. I was like a pretty shy, nerdy kid, but I had some anger in my guts. And I think a lot of it is growing up there. Like, like you say, like very well aware, like I grew up on the half, half of town that was the less well to do half of town. And I saw that certain kids had it really hard because of that. I saw that kids from the better areas were cut a

lot more slack in school. I'll never forget, like a pretty defining thing for me was, I remember a kid who got suspended in high school for a thing that I would not have gotten suspended for, but he was a black kid from a really bad part of town. And I remember being like, man, he got no leeway. That kid got no leeway. And he was a good, funny kid. I had known him my whole childhood.

I was like, he got expelled for handing out a flyer. To be granted, he was handing out a flyer saying, hey, party at my house this weekend. Bring your own booze. Bring your own weed. Which is like, yeah, you're going to get in trouble for that. That's a pretty dumb flyer to hand out at school. It has your address on it. It's at your house.

But he got expelled like instantly and i remember all of us a lot of people just going like whoa he was a nice kid yeah i don't think he gets expelled if he's from a different part of town i think he gets suspended or he gets detention right or he gets a call home but i don't think we're just talking to yeah yeah and just i remember from a young age being like like, where you're from and how much money you have really matters, and I hate it. Yeah. And I still kind of hate it, and it's taken me a long time to come to grips with the fact that it was such a part of my anger growing up. part of my anger growing up yeah i always i i because i have authority issues too but it's not it's probably more uh sublimated than than i think yours are and and i mean i was always

but i always found i think it was i think it was just the powerlessness of being a kid. Yeah. And, and it was one thing that I always wanted to, and I mean, and that was, you know, it was sort of like, I think it started with my mom and dad splitting up and being taken away from my dad and moved back to my grandparents. dad splitting up and being taken away from my dad and moved back to my grandparents and then my mom kind of because of the end of her marriage kind of checking out and just kind of being left with my grandma and grandpa and just feeling like hey i didn't have any where'd everybody go why are we here why can't i see my dad and all this just this powerlessness and and then also kind of like never really feeling any like there was any respect for me as a human being as a kid and that was something i always tried tried to show my kids was at least some respect for them and and which which included

sort of the ability to apologize to them if i made a mistake because i never felt i i never felt like anybody made a mistake you know like i don't it was always if if i got in trouble for something or if i got yelled at for something that wasn't my fault it was kind of like well tough shit you know like yeah you got yelled at you just gotta you know lump it uh and i i i mean did you do you think was that kind of thing happening at home too where you were kind of you weren't feeling listened to or something or is it do you think it was mainly just the milieu that you were in well you know my my parents are great and they're still great and they were great. I look back,

my dad makes a lot more sense to me now that I have a kid. Yeah. There's like some things that until I had a kid never made total sense about my dad growing up. And now I'm like, okay, he was stressed out and he was exhausted and he was tired. Like he was one of those like dads who he worked around the clock. I think he took a lot of pride in work but also to a degree

where it was like he was... I've had a few friends of mine tell me my new stand-up hour I'm talking a lot about how I'm like now I'm a dad and I'm thinking a lot about my dad. I've had two different friends from childhood describe my dad as like,

he's the nicest guy I ever met. But the day I met him, I knew I never wanted to see him angry. Like that was like, you could just tell like, don't piss this guy off. Like, and he was that.

So my parents were pretty great. My house is safe. But like one of the defining aspects, I think for me is that growing up in kind of a tough neighborhood my older brother um he got bullied bad and i was a few years younger than him and i was seeing it and i saw that there were no consequences for it so i always had a real bullshit detector for authorities because i I was like, there was, there was like an incident I'll never forget where we got, my mom got a call. You got to get down to

the school. There's been a thing. We go down there and my brother had gotten, this bully had gone after him and we had to pick my brother up and he was in bad shape. And my mom said, you know, so what's going to happen? And they said, well, we, and this is sad. And I don't know the answer. But I know that they did not do the right thing. They basically said this kid who went after your son, his parents are alcoholics. And if we get him in trouble at school, he's going to get abused.

So we have to just let it lie. And it's like, that is bad on every level. That's bad on every level. And I was younger than, my brother was in middle school, so I was probably in fourth or fifth grade when this thing happened. And I never forgot realizing,

I look back now, I go, okay, so you should be calling the state, the Division of Youth and Family Services should be in that house getting that kid away from those alcoholic parents. But what you can't do is say, okay, get the kid to school because that's a safe haven. And if he's violent to another kid, that kid just has to take it. And we're, because his parents, we're not going to step in when we know his parents are abusive and we're not going to step in when he's abusing other kids. We just have to let it go. his parents are abusive and we're not going to step in when he's abusing other kids. We just have to let it go. There were things like that. I remember that same middle school, everyone I've ever met who went to my middle school around my time, we all joke about how we are completely traumatized. I had a friend who lived in my neighborhood who, there were rumors that there were these kids from a neighboring town, much tougher town coming up and they were like beating kids up and taking their stuff. And my friend and his brother went to walk home from school one day. We were in sixth grade. And my friend gets to this corner and sees these kids and they turn around, they go back to the school. They go, hey, these kids that we've heard these kids are coming up from Orange and beating kids up. And we think they're right there. And they said, oh, where are they? And they said, oh, they're standing by the billboards. And they were told by the teachers who they went to, oh, well, that's off school grounds.

So we can't do anything about it. And they said, so what do we do? And they said, well, you have to deal with it. It's off school grounds. It's not for us to deal with. And my friends said, okay. And they tried to walk home and these kids beat the shit out of them and took their stuff. And I was just young and seeing things like that and going like, you can't trust teachers.

You can't trust, you know, like there'd be, we'd all go and hang, like we'd play down at the church parking lot. There were basketball courts down there and there'd be fights down there. And I'm like, the priests live right next door and they're not doing anything about it. I was like, everyone who's an authority figure

is making like, just, I just felt so on our own as kids. Like you felt very unlistened to. I've always felt more like, oh, you can't, adults aren't going to do shit for you. And you kind of have to learn how to protect yourself. So I was a very angry kid for a while and a very defensive kid for a while. And it was not until, it was not until my early 20s where I started to realize that not everybody felt that way or grew up that way. There was a strange amount of kind of tolerated violence when I was a kid, or like a real strange amount of looking the other way. And I look back and I go, oh, you know, like that story about the kid with the alcoholic parents.

I'm like, you're not protecting that kid by letting him be violent in school. You're not doing anything to help him. No, no. I don't want this kid's abusive parents to beat him up. But now I'm in my 40s and I'm like, fuck that. Pardon my French. I'm like, you didn't help him.

You didn't help my brother. You just let this weird, dark cycle go. Right. You just said life is really tough yeah life is horrible nothing we can do about it let's let it resume and i just i was a very and there's a million as you can imagine there are a million examples of things like that that just as a kid made me feel like well i don't trust anybody i don't particularly like authorities and i don't really trust people yeah and it took me a very long time to unwrap that very long time can't you tell my loves are growing at what point i mean how does then kind of wanting to entertain people live alongside that? I mean, because I imagine that's something that started as a young person.

Like you mentioned seeing the city and being a young person and wanting to be creative. Was it what, I mean, were you interested in entertaining people or were you interested in kind of just like being acknowledged by people? I think probably acknowledged. I think that's a really good way to put it yeah um and i also think i need an outlet to place this stuff somewhere um i when i was in eighth grade the summer after eighth grade my brother grabbed me one day and he was like, my friends are putting on this concert. You should come. And him and another friend of mine, my age, my brother brought us to this church basement in another part of town. And his best friend had booked a bunch of punk rock bands. They had gotten involved in like the

New Jersey punk rock scene. And that was the first time where I was like, oh, these are like other kids. Like these people are two or three years older than me and they're screaming and they're yelling and they're playing music. And I saw that and I loved it. And I, it was like, you know, in a way, in a way that's very cliche for, in many ways, like I saw punk rock and I was like was like oh these people barely know how to play music but the i it's clicking with me on a level where that's not what matters like what matters is me going like oh these are other people from this area of the world like these kids are from nutley one of the bands was from nutley i was like two or three towns away i was 13 they were like 17 i was like oh they're finding a way to scream and shout and nobody's stopping them

and um and have fun it was the having fun yeah yeah and turning it into this thing too where it was like and here's a bunch of people who all like are kind of freaks and nerds and they're in this room and they're bouncing off the walls and people are shouting and singing and it's fun. It's like angry and it's unapologetic, which I really liked and it's fun. And then I wound up going to a ton of shows throughout high school and that became a big part of it. And punk shows, punk shows. Yeah. Like going to concerts and VFW halls and,

and Elks lodges and people's basements and seeing bands like local bands and bigger bands passing through. And there was this guy, Adam, in his package who was from Philly, who was really big for North Jersey kids of my age, because it was just him writing these really funny songs. But it was just him and like electronic programmed music. And he didn't have a band. Like the package was his computer and it would play the songs and he'd write songs about meatballs and he'd write songs about you know he has a song where the

whole premise of the song is how come goalies and hockeys aren't just big obese men who weigh a thousand pounds and can block the entire net and i would listen to that and that was that was inching closer because it was like, there's comedy, comedy. And there's a band called Westin from Pennsylvania. And I loved going to see Westin. And I realized because they would talk so much in between their songs. They'd like tell a bunch of jokes and take off, you know, strip down to their underwear and play the whole set in their underwear and be making fun of each other. I started to see in the music scene, oh, set in their underwear and be making fun of each other. I started to see in the music scene,

oh, there's these examples of people that are really funny. And I'm kind of like gravitating towards the punk thing, but a lot more of it is about being funny. Like there's a band called Servotron that dressed up as robots when they played. And I love, I look back, I'm like Servotron, it's not like Servotron was like, you know, the next Bob Dylan as far as like, you can imagine what the lyrics were. But the idea that this band was all robots made me laugh hard. And I loved that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Simultaneous to that, I was a big pro wrestling fan. And I saw the Andy Kaufman I'm From Hollywood documentary, which I originally watched because it was a wrestling thing.

And then I was like, who's this? Yeah. I became obsessed with andy kaufman and that was on comedy central in those early days so that's where i saw the young ones and kids in the hall and that all started to mix together and um you know mystery science theater 3000 in that early comedy central way for me and then you I look back too, and for me as a kid watching SNL, when I was in that formative age where we all love SNL, it was Mike Myers. And then you find out later, he had a background in punk rock and kids in the hall were all punk rockers. And then

not to blow smoke with you, but when you and Conan, back in those pimp bot masturbating bear days, it was just another example of like music taught me to feel a certain way that was very, very good. And I'm finding out that there is comedy that pushes the same buttons. Yeah. And I don't know if that's intentional. And I don't know, you know, you later come to find out how many comedians also were exposed to independent music. But for me, it was this segue of like, my anger led me to punk rock. My punk rock led me to comedy.

And then I was just in this generation where, um, you know, it was that mixture of Letterman and what you guys were doing, being totally obsessed with Andy Kaufman to like a, a, a strange degree as a child. And that's how it all kind of mixed together into being creative. And a lot of me getting

on stage was just like, holy shit, people are actually stopping and listening. And I get to say, I get to talk about stuff that makes me very angry and people are laughing and then I'm less angry about it. Like it was, it was a psychological thing for, I was doing comedy for two or three years before I ever did therapy. And, uh, I don't, I think that they were very, very much hand in hand with me in the early days. Well, now those, those two did kind of marry in, in, especially with some of your like your most early work where you you know you did a show about about you know your mental health and and about you know and and was that like something was that a conscious decision or did that just sort of and maybe talk a little bit about so that people that don't know the exact history of that can kind of understand how just being an improv guy led to being

you know someone who made self-examination and revelation uh you know like a big part of what you do yeah well it's because i came up at ucb and i was there in the relatively early days i started in 2000 um and it's funny, I had Mike Birbiglia pointed out to me, me and Mike Birbiglia are very good friends at this point. And he was like, you know, out of all the people from that wave of UCB success, he's like, there's this like much like hallowed talked about era of UCB. He's like, everyone is known for being an actor except you. He's like, you're the only one who's known for being Chris Gethard like Bobby Moynihan was one of my best friends he did SNL like Zach Woods one of my best friends he did The Office like Ellie Kemper like The Office like

you know people well Birbiglia is what he's saying that about you but he's you know yeah but he's known as being Mike Birbiglia yeah but he wasn't as hardcore he predated ucb more than i did like he already had things up and running and like stand up that he was doing yeah as far as like a guy who signed up for a class one day and then came out of that place and that was the extent of my really the extent of my experience like the only one and and you could you were there like you were there in the early days too and you can vouch me. That first theater that they had on 22nd Street, I wasn't there for the solo arts days. But walking in and being someone who felt like punk rock, I walked into that first UCB theater. I was like, I get this vibe.

This feels to me like how it used to feel to go see a bunch of punk rock bands in a basement. Yeah. Made sense. It felt very Chicago to me too and actually my my then wife at the time and i lived four doors down the street so we were very very much i mean and that was just a coincidence that was just a coincidence and then matt walsh who i've you know been friends with for 30 years or something used to live on the above it you know used to live above it so we in fact i think their first year we had a shared new year's eve party where like some of the party

was down there and some of the party was at our apartment and people were like going from one to the other uh so yeah no it was it was definitely a very fun, exciting time. It was very addicting and it was very cool. And it's sad that it fell apart in New York for a number of reasons, but I was lucky to be there when it was just, it was pretty pure. And, you know, I think with the mental health stuff, because I did eventually do an HBO special about it. I've been very explicit an HBO special about it. I've been very explicit in my work about it. It was, it was a lot of people came to know me because I was a guy who's

kind of getting very real about that stuff. But at a certain point at UCB, I realized like I knew I was good, but I was getting invited to do ASCAP, which was mind blowing because it used to be, I would go take my level one class I'd drink a 40 in a parking lot with these two friends from my class where in New York you wouldn't like I feel like after a certain point you'd just get arrested chugging 40s in a parking lot after yeah yeah there was still a little Giuliani hadn't totally cleaned it up yet so I would be 19 years old I'd drink a 40 and I'd go watch ASCAP and ASCAP would be, you know, it'd be like Amy and the Matts and Ian, and then like you and Tina Fey and Adam McKay and then John Glazer.

And I'd just be like 19 years old drunk. Just like, this is, this is the greatest thing I've ever seen. Like it's the greatest thing. And then come up in the system there and eventually get invited to do the show. And I remember nights where I would do the show and this was many, many years ago where it would be Amy and Seth Meyers and Jason Sudeikis and Jack McBrayer and Brian Stack and Rachel Dratch and me. And that was the cast.

And you can imagine how scary that was for me. And two things started happening was one, I started to realize like, it is not a reflection of low self-esteem to say, I'm not going to be the funniest person on stage tonight. It's realism. When you're up there with Amy Poehler, guess what? You're at best, if you have the best night of your life,

you're still going to be the second funniest on the stage. Right, right. She's automatic in that context. Automatic, let alone with Jack and Glazer, all these people, you know, trying to keep up. So I go. It could be freeing. You know, you could be like, you know,

like I don't have to do too much lifting here. Pressure's not on me. Yeah, yeah. They're going to do more than enough. But I started to realize, like, I can't be the funniest one, lifting here pressure's not on me like yeah yeah they're gonna do more than enough but i started to realize like i can't be the funniest one but i'm just i'm the most willing to be honest out of most of the people up here and that's not a knock on them so ask cat i started doing the stories more than the scenes yeah um and i'd get up there and i'd just tell these very real stories

and i just realized like and this was not just Ask Kat, like even when I was coming up, like I said, like my two best friends coming up were Bobby Moynihan and Zach Woods. It's like, guess what? Like if that's who you come up with, that's a really good thing. It raises the bar for all of you. And that's how improv works, right? As you find your generation and you all keep raising the bar, but like, I'm not going to be funnier than those guys. They're too good. They're Bobby's too funny. Zach's too too smart but i'm the one who will also get up here and say like you know i got put on a new medication that makes me shit blood and fall asleep at random times so let me tell a story about that and the crowd would respond to that and i'd go oh a lot of people in improv want to get behind a character

and kind of wear it as a mask. For me, improv's teaching me how to be totally comfortable on stage so that I can just say the realest thing possible. So it was kind of born out of this necessity of like, how am I going to stand out? Like, what's the muscle that I have that maybe some of the other people here don't use as much? Can I make that the strongest muscle?

So while I was doing all that, I started a lot of shows where stand-ups would come through UCB and they started noticing that I was a very honest guy and they started inviting me to do their stand-up shows. And that kind of dragged me out beyond the borders of UCB and I became known as this guy who would just go on stand-up shows and tell some very honest stories and then that mix kind of all synthesized I got a job on a sitcom in 2010 which made a lot of sense for a UCB person who had been doing it for 10 years. And then the sitcom bombed and my agents told me to move to LA. They were like, you know,

even though it bombed, like you can, pilot season's going to be great for you the next couple of years. Like it's going to open a lot of doors. And I was like, I just don't want to. And I wound up doing my public access show less than a year after this sitcom had been canceled. And a lot of it was just me going like, I've gotten really good at just saying like raw stuff and doing weird stuff and being comfortable failing and, you know, doing shows at UCB that literally start at one in the morning where it's like the most fucked up bits and it's you know jason manzoukas is dressed as osama bin laden and rob riggles doing fake coke off of a baby doll and then i get to go out and do a bit and i'm like that's what i'm in love with yeah so can i just go do that and public access wound up being that the way for it and uh yeah a lot of that a lot of that stuff i still needed to get off my chest i I was like, I just want to make a show that's that I don't want to do more sitcom stuff. Yeah. Were you, I mean, were you struck by the fact that it was kind of,

that you were put into an artistic situation, you know, you're, you're doing improv with these people that you feel like, you know, I gotta, I gotta keep up my end of the bargain, which is also then kind of like a professional. I mean, it's artistic, but it's also professional. We're all there because we want to do this for a living. And that somehow that you're then like, that's the horse that's leading the personal cart. I mean, do you feel like that there was growth when you were sharing this stuff, like that there was some kind of therapeutic use to it

that had been sort of motivated by more professional competitive concerns just with other performers? Yeah, it's really astute. Because I started realizing I'll go here and it'll get a big response and not everybody and we'd get backstage sometimes and people would be like the other improvisers would be like dude holy shit like is that story true and i'd be like yeah and

they'd be like you really went there you know and then they're doing scenes and making up characters based on i started to realize oh like i'm getting the respect of my peers for doing this too like i'm finding my own lane out of necessity and they're really respecting the fact that I'm going there. And then simultaneous to that, I will never forget one of the weirdest nights of my life where I realized that things were changing for me. I got to ASCAP one night and before we started,

one of the people who worked at the ucv theater comes backstage in the green room and is like get there do you know what's going on out there with all these kids i'm like i don't know what you're talking about he's like there's a bunch of kids who all have t-shirts that they made with your face on them and name on them i'm like what the fuck are you talking about and we all ducked our heads out, and this crew of kids, it wound up they were all college kids from NYU, had made like, let's get it started in here shirts. And there was this weird thing where I had been on this like streak at ASCAP

where it was, I was generally, it was really, it was an era where it was like Manzoukas and me were the two people who hadn't been on TV much yet. And everybody else was either a writer at Conan or on SNL or blah, blah, blah. And it was like, they all started to notice that I was telling these really dark stories. And then this crew of kids just decided I was their guy. And like, it was really strange. And it was almost like they realized I was the underdog

and they just decided to vocally root for me. And that was kind of the beginning of this very empowered stretch of my creativity where it was like it was like oh like people are noticing and like they specifically like me because i'm not doing well like they specifically like i'm like the one guy who's not famous and i'm getting up there talking about like oh yeah i got put on a new medication and I almost passed out while I was driving. So I pulled over in a rest stop and slept for four hours and I missed dinner with my parents. And I'd like tell a story like that. And they'd be like, yes, you're like not famous. You're not successful. You don't have your shit together.

Yeah. You seem like you've given up. There's no hope love you for all the and it was like whoa like it's hit a point it's hit this weird point where i've gotten honest enough about my massive insecurity and especially i mean this was like 2007 2008 so i don't think that you know the idea that i'd get up there and be like yeah i got put on a new medication and it gives me like a boner, but I can't ever come. Like that wasn't a conversation people were having. Like I just jerk off forever. Now it fucking sucks.

You know, unintentional edging. And like, I'd get up there and tell stories and people would be like, well, and I'd make, I'd be able to make them funny and charming enough. But it was pretty shocking in 2007,

2008 to go up and say some stuff like that. Yeah. Now less so, thank God. But I'd get up there and I'd tell stories like that. And it was this group of very young UCB ASCAP fans that were like, you are our guy. Yeah. And that became the basis of me having this hot streak

in New York where I could put on shows and reliably sell tickets now. And I could try some very, very strange things because I knew the crowd was down and then those things would get some press. And that started attracting some of the other performers who I think felt very much like they didn't have a place, like the people who didn't fit a certain mold. They started showing up to my stuff and we all kind of became friends and working together. And it became like this, like you, you know, I feel like I'm rambling a lot, but the question is bringing back a lot of positive nostalgia of like, I had to find my lane personally in order to have a little bit of my own space professionally. And then that carved out more space personally and that led to more professionally. And there's a few years there

was this very, very strange thing where I was like, I'm still not making any money really. But I feel like I have been given this like blank check of creative freedom in the New York comedy scene because I got honest enough. And then this crew of college kids decided that they were going to just live and die. Like they were just going to ride or die with me no matter how dark or weird I wanted to get. And that just built. And I got so lucky.

And I still today wonder how I'm going gonna have health insurance in two years like i still have that but i feel i look back i go man what a strange and very lucky ride i got to go on yeah and then you had and then you kind of uh well it's sort of like you expanded what you you know what you were doing personally into its own little universe on the cable network or on the cable access show. Where it is like, it's like, okay,

we're going to get weird. We're going to experiment. And we're going to just kind of, me and a bunch of other people, like-minded people, we're going to have this ethos, you know, and just kind of me and a bunch of other people, like-minded people are going to have this ethos, you know, and just kind of live in it. Yeah, very much so.

Very much so. And then that, that started to catch enough buzz and my name got out there and then there was this, this beautiful stretch where it would be like, oh, and now I get booked to be on an episode of the office. I get booked to be on an episode of parks and recreation, you know, largely because I know Amy and half the writers are from UCB. And I can go do that. And then I'll fly back to New York. And on Wednesday, I'll have booked a kickboxer. And if I get a trivia question wrong, he'll beat

the shit out of me on public access television. And I can have both. i can have both these things i can kind of come up for air and do this mainstream stuff that helps pay the bills and makes you feel good it makes gives my parents something to be proud of and then i can also you know have a dominatrix dripping hot wax on me and as i take phone calls from teenagers on public access tv and have both and it was it was a real real real golden age of my creative life and my life in general yeah and then but you can't be on tv without it eventually on a situation like that people are gonna and you're gonna eventually expect well i gotta do this we gotta make some money on this god had to try i mean because tv's not everybody's bluff you know tv's not a poem you know what i mean like tv is there to sell shit and you know and

that's and so it's it's always there's always this very kind of you know, and that's, and so it's, it's always, there's always this very kind of, you know, varying in varying degrees of discomfort between commerce and art. And, you know, that transition, I think, well, I mean, it was kind of like there were false starts, right? Didn't you kind of, people were approaching you to try and do more TV stuff and then. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We have comedy central bought a pilot of it and passed. I had so many networks call me in for meetings. Some of them very gross. Some of them like people saying,

Hey, like maybe if you like fire the rest of the cast and we get you a hot girl as a sidekick, we can buy your show. And me being like, no, come on. Like, why are you even talking to me? No, this is a gross conversation. And then another very funny thing, which you realize there's some development people

who you start to learn they feel like they're trapped in a hell where they have these corporate mandates. And I go, oh, they're bringing me in and telling me they're like people would come and be like i've watched your show for like years and they're like quoting things back to me and bringing up their favorite bits and i'm like oh my god this person's a legitimate super fan and then you start to realize oh they can't buy my show they just want to have a meeting that makes them feel good in the midst of their they want to meet you yeah yeah in the midst of there. They want to meet you.

Yeah. Yeah. In the midst of their hellish life where they have all these corporate mandates, they want to feel cool for an hour. So I've, I flew to LA so they could feel good about taking this meeting for an hour and all these things.

But eventually a very small network named fusion picked it up largely because of this one development person named Alex Fumero, who like managed to get us on. It made, it was so funny that network, I don't even know if the network still exists, but it was aimed at appealing to the English speaking generation of Latina and Latino millennials. Wow. And he just loved our show so much that he convinced them that we somehow fit. But I had to keep fighting to make it happen just because I was like,

like what? And this is not, this is not bullshit. Like the first time I did your guy's show, it was huge because I had acted on, like I was one of those UCB guys that used to like, you know, come in and dress me up as like a dress up as an elf or a robot and come out and be in a bit. And that was in the early UCB days. And then I wrote a book in 2012 and the book publicists were like, yeah, we pitched it to a Conan and they want to interview you. And I was like,

oh my God. And you guys showed a clip of me getting my ass beat by a kickboxer on public access. And that was huge for us. That was huge. That was like one of the turning points that helped get us on cable eventually. Because I always have, I'll say, and I'm not trying to blow smoke. Like, I don't know if this is everybody's experience. I've been on almost all the talk shows at this point. You and Conan are the two people who like, when, when it actually goes to commercial and it looks like that chit chatty BS conversation, like you're actually

talking, I'll never forget. You guys showed the kickboxer clip. And then we went to commercial and Conan turned around to me and he's like, Hey, what you're doing is cool. You got to keep fighting for it. Like, it's good. It doesn't make sense. These people are not going to get it though. So just get the audience big enough where they can't ignore you. Don't give up on this, please. And I was like, holy shit, like Conan's telling me not to give up. And he's saying he sees what I'm doing here. And that was huge. That was huge. And then the fact that you guys were also willing to share your audience with us and show that clip was huge. Cause then there were a whole bunch of people that got on board with us who found us through that. And we just had enough things like that happen where it'd be like, Seth Meyers would bring me on and we'd get maybe 2% of the people watching that night would go,

we get what this kid's going for. You guys would bring me on. And I think to your credit, I think the Conan fan base, it would be more like 8% would get what we're going and go, oh, okay. And we just built enough of an audience that they had to give us a shot, had to take us seriously. And then it became that weird thing of going, oh, I still get to have all this fun there's this weird

network pressure on it now but also like 80 people have jobs because of this thing that i didn't give up on and that became its own point of pride it was strange you're making me you're making me reminisce and ramble i apologize for that's allble I am. That's all right. No, that's the idea. That's the idea of this. Yeah, yeah. It is a talk-based medium, yes. Well, tell me about the difficulty of making that bridge into getting on to Fusion,

and then you were on TruTV the last season, right? Yeah. It traded over. And tell me, you know, like, why did it sort of end like what what was it was it that transition necessarily that made it end or was it just do you think it was going to end at some point anyway and that's just when it ended i think it probably should have ended a little sooner oh really yeah how come well uh i had like a, in 2016, 17, like we had gotten the show onto cable.

It was going really well. Then I had this podcast explode. It got featured on This American Life and it like, it was getting like hundreds of thousands of downloads a week after that. And Birbiglia directed this movie about an improv troupe called Don't Think Twice and he put me in it. And I got really good feedback from that and I had started doing this one one person stand-up style

show about my depression that went to HBO and all those all those things happened within a year and a half of each other and I went on this hot streak and then we were in between seasons of the cable show and my manager was like, you're right now at this place where you're like, you just had your HBO special get all this critical praise and between Birbiglia and This American Life, you just blew up with all the NPR lovers

and he's like, I know you will not give up on the Gethard show because that's like your family. He's like, but as a manager, I just have to be a good manager and's like, I know you will not give up on the Gethard show because that's like your family. He's like, but as a manager, I just have to be a good manager and say like, now's the time to try to jump on all this momentum and go for it. Yeah. And I was like,

yeah, I can't, I gotta do it. And we did the show for another batch of episodes, probably about another six to eight months. And, um, I look back and i realize the network was

putting so much pressure on us that i think it was showing up on screen a little bit that i uh that the ideas were not totally they were probably 75 under our control instead of 100 and with a show like ours that really had an effect and i I remember once Tom Sharpling, who I think you know. Yeah, I do. Very good friend of mine. He called me once and he had been a big champion. He had really, you know, his radio show, he had let all his fans know about us in the early days.

And he called me one day and he's like, there used to be a thing. He's like, I would watch your show and it would go to commercial. And I'd see you like literally run up to the, because our fans all just sat on the floor people weren't in the bleachers or anything he's like i'd watch you like run up and be like high-fiving kids or like kids would be jumping up and dancing to the house music and you'd run into the crowd and dance with them and he's like i just want you to know i watched your show last night and you threw to

commercial and the music started and you put your head down and walked off stage in a beeline, clearly depressed. And they had a perfect overhead shot of it. And I was like, oh, shit. Okay. A friend of mine watched me be demoralized. And a lot of that was because the network was beating the hell out of us. And then one of the things I haven't talked much about publicly was that one of the very sad things is that real life does happen. And if you have a TV show, it doesn't really accommodate for real life.

You know, like you said, they, at the end of the day, just need to keep selling those commercial slots to advertisers. And I had some very, very hard stuff happening in my personal life and some very very sad stuff that in brutal fashion coincided with our years on cable just the three years we were on cable were three years where if none of that had been happening stuff happening in my personal life would qualify as three of the hardest years I ever had. And it caught up with me. I just didn't have enough gas in the tank.

Like I'll never forget. I had gotten some really, really bad news in my personal life. It's some really hard stuff was happening. And then that day we had a notes call with our network about an outline we turned in the notes call went four hours oh boy mad at us um keeping in mind we're a live show so they were giving us notes before the show happened so i'd go out onto the on on air going up four hours of them mad at me in my head. And the episode that they gave us four hours of notes on Matt Walsh,

who to bring in first full circle, he was the guest. And the premise was that I was locked in a cage for the episode. And we went around to different New York city barbershops and salons and legitimately did this gathered up a hundred pounds of human hair. Our interns and PAs had picked through it to get like old razor blades out of it. It was disgusting. Yeah, of course. A hundred pounds of hair was over this cage and I was locked and there was a key somewhere on the set. And if Matt could find it and free me before a certain point at the episode, I'd be fine. And if not, 100 pounds of

human hair would fall on me while I was locked in a cage, which I think is a funny, dumb idea. Like, I think you can see, like, there is a part of me that looks at what Letterman used to do, like dropping shit off the ceiling of a studio, what you guys used to do with your characters. Or run stuff over with a steamroller, like he used to do that.

Yeah. And then I'd look at what you guys were doing and how obsessed i was with it and we do our characters and i'm going this is me trying to take letterman and conan and like make it smoke meth and just that like let's can we just do no monologue take that seven minute totally fucked up bit they would do and make it that full hours just that that's all we were trying to do is rip you guys and rip letterman off we i just want it to be another step in that lineage you know and i'm proud of like 100 pounds of human hair falling on the host of a talk show while he's locked in a cage i think that's funny i think the idea of the host having no power to that degree is very funny

but it's like when i've just found out bad medical, I don't want to get yelled at for four hours about what's the best way to have human hair fall on you in a cage. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We are all taking this too seriously. Like, there's six network people on the call. I'm like, this call should be one of you for 15 minutes. Yeah, yeah. I don't need six people unloading on me so you can all justify why you somehow have a job. Hair falls out of the sky on a man in a cage.

It's pretty simple. I mean, we would put the phone on mute and I would just sit there and talk to my showrunner and be like, tell them to cancel the show. He'd be like, don't do that. I'd be like, cancel the show. I don't want to get yelled at for any more about the hair and then he'd be like 80 people have jobs i'd be like fine we can't cancel the show yeah and i'd just get yelled at for hours and then also you know be checking my email and being like oh another email from a doctor with more bad news what is this and that's

why sharpling is then telling me hey i'm like watching you get depressed on air. Yeah. It's a bummer. Yeah. It probably should have ended a few months sooner. Well, you know. It's tough. What can you do?

Yeah. I mean, and there's still a, I think the goodwill that people have towards you and what you did and like the things like what conan said i think i think definitely will outlast the four hours of six people 100 who end up you know god knows where those people are now you know i mean and so yeah it's like it all comes out in the wash and people remember that they don't remember, you know, they remember the ambitiousness. They remember the joy of it.

They remember the the funniness of it. They remember the daringness of it and all that other shit. Just kind of, you know, and unfortunately, you're not, you know, that you can't take that to the bank. You know, that's not going to pay your mortgage. And that's the bummer of like a lot of this shit is like, you you know like oh yeah it gets yeah they're also like i have a child i gotta pay for it exactly yeah and it's also sometimes i'll like you know i i still am so close some of the people used to call the show every week and like i just did a show in pittsburgh this weekend and got breakfast the morning after the show with this kid todd from pittsburgh he used to call my show all the time yeah i'm still i still get to have this

closeness from a certain era of the show and there's some people who i feel like watched it and they're like oh he sold it out oh it lost its heart and i'm like oh like i can't go on i can't what am i gonna do tweet out hey guys i'm getting really bad medical news that i can't i don't have right no yeah i can't tell you i can, how do I remind you that I have a real life too? And that even like the money, like the money, like you said, I'm like, yeah, I still got to, today's my birthday. I still have like, Oh, happy birthday. Thanks. I'm like, I still have 20 solid years to pay a mortgage and find health insurance for my family. And I, how do I do that? And like, but the, the cool thing that I'm at now that will never stop blowing my mind is there's now some people getting successful who were fans of my stuff 11 years ago. Like there's, um,

there's a cast member on SNL now who's doing stuff that I think is really brilliant. And, you know, just like everybody, I watched the show and sometimes I go like, ah, this is not for me. And I'm, I'm in my forties. It's not for me. And then every once in a while, something will happen where I'm like this show can still be cool. And one of the cast members doing that when I met her a year, I met her a few years ago before she was on. Is that Sarah Sherman?

Yeah. I wasn't going to six and I want to pat myself on the back too hard, but I met her and we were in a green room and she was like, she had been catching a bunch of hype. I noticed her doing a bunch of stuff in Chicago and I had heard like, oh, there's this show, Hell Trap Nightmare, and you would really like it. And I looked into it. I was like, man knew if i would tell you this she's like i used to apply to intern on your public access show and i went and found these old emails from when she was like either late high school early college where she's like let me know if i could come and help and i'm like yeah yeah how cool is this that there's someone on snl now who i'm not taking any credit for no there's no world she's brilliant but where i'm like she liked my stuff when she was in high school. That's so cool. It's one of the best things is to have been a young comedy person looking to do something different, looking to have your heart in the right place and to look to other performers that have their hearts in the right place and then have the same thing like to to continue that cycle where the stuff that you do matters to kids the way that stuff that your heroes matter to you yeah that's pretty damn great you know yeah and if

that's all my legacy is at the end of the day i sit there and i'm like that's better than a lot of people can say you know yeah and for to bring it back to some of the stuff i was saying before of like to have been such a combination of angry and scared for a lot of my childhood. Yeah. Like I always said, like the show I was trying to make in my head, like me and my brother had it pretty shitty sometimes. And some of my happiest childhood memories are being in my basement with my brother,

Greg and us finding like, there was this game show on one of the Spanish language stations called El Gran Juego de la Oca. And we didn't know what was going on, but we thought it was the greatest show in the world. You know, we grew up in North Jersey. So I talked about this on another,

like podcast in the Conan family tree, but like Uncle Floyd Vivino was a god to us. Like Uncle Floyd had this homemade TV show. He's the older brother of the Vivino brothers. podcast in the conan family tree but like uncle floyd vivino was a god to us like yeah yeah uncle floyd had this homemade tv show he's the older brother of the vivino brothers like he who are conan band guys yeah and we would watch him on the uhs stations and we'd be like oh my god this is nuts and amazing yeah we're watching like ecw wrestling when it first started and yeah just like some of my favorite memories were being in my basement with Greg,

just laughing our heads off at the most bizarre things we could find on TV. At weird stuff. Yeah. And I always would sit there and I'd go, I'd like sit with the people who wrote my show on public access. And I'd go, we got to make a show that me and my brother would have liked in our basement when we were 15.

Yeah. And I think I did that to the point where now I'm in my forties and sometimes people come up to me and they'll be like, oh, my favorite episode of your show is the one where you did X, Y, and Z. And I'll just sit there and go, oh my God, like today I can't even fathom thinking that's a good idea to do that. Yep. But back then I was very driven to make something specific because i had a lot of anger

in my guts and i'm like yeah you look back you go i think a lot of it was maybe me going like can i make a thing that will make the current day version of me less pissed off than i was like can i find a 16 year old now and make them a little less scared a little less pissed because i'm so resentful of how much i felt that as a kid can i give them the thing that made me feel the same way that that servotron record felt or that adam and his package record felt where i listened to it and i was like oh someone out there slightly older than me isn't an asshole. Like, can I do that? Can I do that?

Yeah, yeah. Well, where are you going from here? I mean, what do you want to do with your time left on this planet? You know, decades, sure. Hours, you know, decades and decades and decades. Well, that's always the scariest part, right? Yeah, yeah. It's tough because I certainly feel less relevant than I ever have.

And I don't, some days that fills me with real panic. And some days I feel extremely content with that. I work on my lawn a lot now. I recently signed up. I'm a volunteer ambulance driver in my small town in New Jersey. Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah. Yeah.

And things like that. And that matters. Yeah. That just matters. It just matters. It does. It does. It does. And then some days I sit here and I go, there was a time where my phone was ringing a lot more than it is now from my manager and my agents. And have I made choices?

Have I made a series of choices that have made it harder to do things like make money and pay the mortgage and find health insurance? And I think some of those have been driven by choices I've made. And there's days where that scares me and where I'm filled with panic. But I'm learning that these feelings of irrelevance on their best days are feelings of really being content. And that's not a feeling I'm used to. So I'm trying to figure out how to turn the dial where the contentedness outweighs the fear of the irrelevance.

Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, if you're just going to look at it in a relative sense, you know, you can only feel the irrelevance because you really were hitting it for a while. But when you were hitting it, you didn't, you know, I mean, and I look at this in my, you know, I'm talking for myself because, you know, my phone doesn't ring enough for me. Yeah. You know, now, I mean, the Conan show ended. I was on, you know, off with Conan for 11 years on the TBS thing and, you know, the year before that for the Tonight Show. So I haven't been out in circulation and like my phone is not ringing as much as I would like it to be. And I'm 55 years old.

I'm like a 55 year old white guy and there's you know it's like who gives a shit about those that that particular demographic right now yeah so yeah it's like it's always sweaty it's always nerve-wracking but you're feeling irrelevant because you really were relevant there you know and that's not that's that is not a bad thing that's like a good thing you know and then i think too and i go i was also relevant particularly in a sphere of things that were underground and things that were anti-establishment and anti-corporate and i really did live I really did live and die by those things. Like that was very real, you know?

And you did what you wanted to do. There's a lot of people that, you know, that get into this business and they never get to do what they want. Yeah. And I feel great about that. And like I said, like there were times where there was a network that told me,

we want to buy your show. We need you to fire these three cast members for us to do it. And I just said, goodbye. Like I did it the right way. Of course. Of course. And called some bluffs. And when I think about being relevant, I go particularly in that space, a 42-year-old white dad of a three-year-old shouldn't be relevant forever like it's good

like like since her name came up i sit here and i go sarah squirm is on snl and she's doing this like she just did a thing the other week it's like her with a camera following her giving you a backstage tour and like one of the props gets messed up and she just rolls and i'm going that's what i want live tv to look like i want it to to get messed up. I want it to feel loose and sloppy. And I want someone like her in charge of it. I don't know that someone like me should be in charge of that anymore. It gives me so much joy and hope to see someone like Sarah on a platform as mainstream as SNL on NBC and things getting messed up on TV and her cackling with joy when it happens. And I don't know Sarah well enough that I've reached out and said this to her, but I sit there and I go, stuff is getting messed up on SN and her cackling with joy when it happens. And I don't know Sarah well enough that I've reached out and said this to her,

but I sit there and I go, stuff is getting messed up on SNL. Like they, the outside perspective, I was a guest writer there for two weeks in 2007. I don't know how it works, but they don't like when stuff gets messed up. It's messed up and she's giggling about it. And I love that. And I hope it happens more and more. And I go, it isn't someone who looks and feels like me who should be the rabble rouser in 2022.

I was the rabble rouser in 2011 and it made sense. But now that should be someone who doesn't look and sound like me. And that should be someone who's pissed off about things different than the things I was pissed off about a decade ago. Like there's people, you know, at the end of the day, all the comedy needs to be funny. Right. But like the rabble rousing comedy right now, like there's people whose rights are being taken away. There's people who feel trampled. There's people who feel bullied. And I don't know that that's me anymore.

I graduated out after a certain degree of acceptance by the industry and the mainstream. And I had some years where I made some decent money. And I have a kid now and I don't have the energy to go on public access TV and explain all the things that piss me off anymore because I'm older and more tired and there's less things that piss me off. And also there's people who have a lot more reasons to be pissed off. And I really want to see the art they make. And I really want to find ways to support it. Yeah. So yeah, when I see people like Sarah, when I see people like Megan Stalter starting to blow up, I'm like,

good. I've been loving her stuff for years. And like, yeah. Z-Way do it. I have these interviews Z-Way does where she just makes people so uncomfortable on purpose where I'm like, good, yes, there are people out there making some stuff that is really funny and also pretty uncomfortable and has some teeth and has some fire in its guts. And I'm happy about that.

And ultimately, I'm happy that it's not me because it's good that it's not me. But it's also scary because I got a kid and he needs insurance. Yeah, but also it's like this. Yeah, but you've got a kid. So it's like you can't get, you know, you were living for a cable access show. And then you were living for a cable show. You don't need to do that anymore. Live for you.

You know, you're married. You got a family. You got a house. You got a yard. Live for you. You know, you're married. You got a family. You got a house.

You got a yard. That's all, I would say, equally important in terms of, like, your history. Like, you know, you did a great show, but now it's time to raise a kid. It is. And you don't want that divided attention. You know, I mean, you got to make a living for sure. Yeah. But, you know, that's's like that was one of the beautiful things about going back to work for conan is i had 11 years where i lived seven minutes from

work and i was home for dinner every night it's the best from when my kids well when from when they were one was 14 and one was nine until now. That's incredible. Yeah. Even less than that. Yeah, it was even, because, yeah, no, 10 and six, they were. And you wouldn't trade that for anything. Absolutely. It's been the silver lining for the pandemic for me

is I haven't been able to go on the road as much. And my wife at one point was like, you and Cal have a friendship that you wouldn't have if you were gone every weekend and absolutely i i love that i think she's totally right and i love it yeah i love it well what what do you think is the main thing you can take away from your journey this far and i say journey you know with a grain of salt because a lot of people say that and it makes me puke. But, you know, I mean, do you kind of feel like there's a moral to your story thus far? Well, you know, I think the number one thing that I look back on is it revolves around the idea of community. There were times where it felt like such an uphill battle and it felt like I was just shouting into a void.

But when I was very young, it felt very much like I had my guard up. Found music and I saw this community where people belonged. And I felt like I was on the fringe of that. And then comedy, I found a way where I was right in the center of it. And then I look at a lot of the stuff I did and I go, there was,

I needed a community that didn't exist so I went and built it. And I think that at the end of the day is the moral of the story is I think everyone needs some sense of community or you start to go insane. And I think creative people in particular need a sense of community and you go insane.

And I feel like I was someone who was very lucky to have a few different phases of my life where I found a community where I felt safe. And when it felt like that was wearing off, where I built communities where a lot of other people felt safe, particularly creatively. And I think for me, the moral of the story is that it really never was about money. It really never was about fame.

I look back and all these years after the show got canceled, they go, Oh, the thing I miss the most is that I got to be around other driven creative weirdos all the time. And that sense of community got us all through some, some stretches that were not the easiest. And finding that community, I think, is key for anybody. And I admire the people who are out there finding it now. And I actually have almost no regrets. I have almost no regrets. And if there's one regret I have, and I'm lucky that I realized it while I was still in the thick of it, before I had my kid, before I was married, when I still was able to like stay up all night for the sake of art.

Like there was, there were some times, there were some stretches where I would sit and I would stress about, man, it's happening for other people. And I came close to another job and didn't get it. And, oh, this person I taught in an improv class I came close to another job and didn't get it. And, oh, this person I taught in an improv class at UCB is on TV and famous now. And like, I gotta just keep doing the work, but I'm stressing, I'm stressing. And I look back and I realize, like those were some of the best.

If I knew how much fun it was to just sit in the back of mcmanus on seventh avenue with my other improv friends at three in the morning eating fries and drinking whatever depending on what stage of my sobriety i was at if i understood how much that was the golden age of my life i wouldn't have dwelled on the stress of it as much as I did. Because that sense of community was just like, I look back and I'm like, it was just burning so white hot. And not everybody gets that.

And I'm glad I was able to build some communities along the way and be a part of some other ones. I'm glad I was able to build some communities along the way and be a part of some other ones. And if there's anybody hearing it who identifies with this, I would say the one thing I will encourage you is when you're in that stretch, when you have four roommates and you're picking up weird day gigs and you're not sure how it's going to end. Like the stress is real. And also understand that that is simultaneously the most fun you will ever have. So enjoy it more than I did. Well, that's a good place to leave this.

Chris, I really appreciate your time. Where can people, where can they get you at now these days, Chris Gethard? I still got the Beautiful Anonymous podcast which is a lovely, lovely thing in my life. I go on the road. I'm doing a new stand-up hour that is very emo as you might expect from me and I'm doing the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

this year with that. I'm taking it all over the country. ChrisGethard.com for tickets and those are the big ones. Alright. Yeah. yeah well thanks again for for spending some time with me oh thank you it's a true joy every time i get we get to talk and i mean it i do too i mean that i i agree uh ditto as they say and thank all you out there for listening and uh i'll be back next week with another guest here on The Three Questions. Bye-bye.

I've got a big, big love for you. The Three Questions with Andy Richter is a Team Coco and Earwolf production. It is produced by Lane Gerbig, engineered by Marina Pice, and talent produced by Galitza Hayek. The associate producer is Jen Samples, supervising producer Aaron Blair, and executive producers Adam Sachs and Jeff Ross at Team Coco, and Colin Anderson and Cody Fisher at Earwolf. Make sure to rate and review The Three Questions with Andy Richter on Apple Podcasts.