TONIGHT! Watch a rehearsal of the new TCGS *LIVE*!
Hey guys -
Geth here! I hope all is well. We have two rehearsals left before we make the big jump to Fusion and one of them is tonight!
Because I am a notorious MAN OF THE PEOPLE, I am going to stream this rehearsal live! 11 PM eastern time, live from the UCB Theater East, you can watch me stress out as I ponder my future while trying to be funny!
I’ll put it live on Periscope when it starts (maybe a bit beforehand) so you can watch there. AND I want to encourage everyone to watch collectively and chat about how it’s going at www.icanhazchat.com/tcgs - if you haven’t checked out that chat room already, you really should. It’s built into a legitimate community of its own and I’m so happy to see it.
Ok! Seeya tonight! Let me know if you have any questions!
Gethard’s book A Bad Idea I’m About To Do is now available in the TCGS store!
There’s a few benefits to buying the book here if you don’t have one already
1) I’ll sign every copy that’s ordered through this site and--
2) Many times people have asked me “What version of buying your book puts the most of the money in your pocket? E book? Paperback?” The answer is now officially – buying it here through this site supports me as an author and artist the most. It’s official.
Also a great bargain - the cheapest place you can buy the book new!
This will be a quick one. But I was really struck by something simple recently and feel like it’s worth writing down.
I got to go to New Orleans last weekend to do stand up and after the show I met a guy who said “I called your show once. I used the name Taint Puncher.”
I remembered that call. It was a good call. I was so psyched I got to meet Taint Puncher.
I’ve met so many fans of this show while I’m out on the road and they are universally nice people. Sometimes they’re awkward, sometimes they seem a bit troubled, sometimes they seem totally happy and normal - but across the board they’re very nice.
It’s an honor to be a part of this community.
It made me realize, that’s what Fusion understood that no other networks we met with did. Regarding most shows when you say “What is this show about?” the answer is simple and digestible - “It’s about a guy who loses his job and has to move back home,” “It’s about a bunch of people who all hang out in the same bar.”, etc.
When you ask “What is The Chris Gethard Show about?”
Well, it’s about the people who watch it.
That’s what’s hard for traditional people to wrap their brain around. But to me, it makes total sense.
Fusion Diaries 5: A Hurricane That Taught Me The Power Of Comedy And Also Almost Killed Me
This is a story about how my family’s working class background and a natural disaster that almost killed me also lead me to discovering how much I love odd comedy.
My parents had no money when I was a kid; I didn’t know and I didn’t care. That’s a huge gift that they gave me - any stress they had about money never extended to me.
I look back and realize they’re saints for doing this, because from the adult perspective I see that it wasn’t easy. When I got married last summer my mom told me that when she and my dad got married, their combined bank accounts covered just over two months of rent on their apartment in North Jersey. This was in the 70s, so they had like straight up $600 total to their names. That’s stressful. I don’t know how they did it.
She reminded me a few years back that we used to get one pizza a month and throw a family party around it. That was a huge treat, and they made it feel like a big deal. As an adult, I now understand where pizza stands in the food chain and how much a pizza costs, and realize how good my parents were to turn something small into something special for us.
There was a lot of stuff like that - celebrating small things and my parents making us feel like we had a lot when we had a little. One of these things was camping. Almost all of our vacations were camping. My parents made us feel like we were seeing all corners of the world when we went camping. And most of the campgrounds we went to were in northern New Jersey, which is not all corners of the world, especially considering that we lived in northern New Jersey.
We had bad luck with vacations. One non-camping place we went a lot was Philadelphia. Again, my parents made us feel like world travelers when Philly is two hours away on the turnpike. Here’s an example of the type of luck we had - on one Philly trip it rained so incessantly that we had to stay in the hotel most of the time, and from the hotel window my brother and I saw a man beating his wife in the parking lot. That was a classic Gethard vacation.
One of our camping trips was to Cape May, New Jersey. This is far south Jersey, which felt like a huge adventure to me when I was nine. By this time, my father had purchased this tiny trailer - the kind you see people towing on the highway. It was one of these things where you get to a camp site and turn all the knobs and it rises and tent material things extend and you sleep inside it.
Pretty much as soon as it was set up, the rain started. Then the wind started. Then my dad turned on the radio and realized there was a hurricane warning. Or a tropical storm or something. I was nine. All I know is that it was bad, and warnings were on the radio, and I will refer to it as a hurricane from this point forward for simplicity’s sake.
Hurricanes are impressive. Being from the northeast I’d seen a few already and thought they were cool. But you know what isn’t cool? Being in a tiny little trailer during a hurricane. Especially when the trailer is parked on Cape May. Which is, ya know, a cape. It is surrounded by ocean and sort of the prime disaster zone for the exact damage a hurricane can cause.
We huddled in the trailer all night and to call it “fucking terrifying” is an understatement. There was lightning and wind and it felt completely unsafe and was not cool. I remember acorns pounding into the top of the trailer and along its sides and they sounded like gunshots. It was real fucked up and we were all scared. It was pretty ape shit.
Eventually, things calmed down enough that my dad fell asleep. That relaxed me and I fell asleep too. But my guess is my mom was too freaked out to sleep, and my brother has always loved any excuse to stay up late at night, and they were both wired and when I fell asleep they were still wide awake.
Late that night I woke up because I heard a noise. I opened my eyes and realized it was the sound of my mother and brother choking back laughter. They were both doubled over swallowing big laughs, and I could see in the glow of the tiny black and white tv they were watching that they were fighting back tears.
They were watching Letterman. I was vaguely aware at that age that a man named “David Letterman” existed, but I had no idea what that meant. They were watching him and were rolling, making eye contact, laughing. It was the best. I pretended to still be asleep, and was laughing quietly on my own, but even not being a part of it - seeing my mom and my brother laughing that hard after such a stressful night - it was the best.
After that trip I would go on to watch Letterman as often as I could sneak it, and as often as I could find tapes. Remember, this was before YouTube or Hulu or any of that. You just kind of heard about stuff he did and tried to see as much as possible late at night without getting grounded for staying up til two am on a school night. My mom got us a copy of Letterman’s Book of Top Ten Lists a few months after the trailer incident and I can tell you that I read it cover to cover about 35 times in the first two weeks we had it and it became like a bible to me. I fell in love with Letterman and the bizarre shit he did - wearing alka seltzer suits and tormenting the real deli guy across the street and using his actual mom in bits and doing interviews that seemed totally un-planned and that often crashed and burned for his own amusement. I would see and learn about all this stuff over the years and can say confidently that pretty much everything I do comedically with TCGS is in some way chasing what Letterman did in the early 80s. (I showed a bunch of clips of him I like to some of the people who work on the show a few years back and someone mumbled “Oh, I thought we were original” afterwards.)
I could write an even more long-winded post than this one about David Letterman and how much I love him. I’ll save that one - for now, I’ll just say that about 25 years ago my parents were trying to show me a good time, and my parents didn’t have a lot of breathing room on life. On top of that, we were in a terrifying storm that my parents put a brave face on and I have a feeling it was even more dangerous than I knew back then because like always, my parents were protecting me in the face of something scary.
And even with all that going on, comedy made my mom and my brother laugh. Hard. And on a really bad night. We were a family that in the immediate should have been shitting our pants with fear about being in a storm. Instead, my mom chose to sit and laugh at a smart man doing dumb things. I could see it right in front of me; laughing made her feel better, and I bet her ability to always laugh is one of the things that made her have confidence that overall, things would work out fine someday for our family. (They did - my dad later made a bunch of money off of Viagra and they are happily retired. Not a bit. Will share someday.)
Seeing my mom happy and seeing my brother not scared - all because a gap-toothed guy with curly hair and a baggy suit did idiotic things for the amusement of others. I think it left this impression on me of what comedy should ultimately do.
It’s not about my ego, it’s about making other people laugh. Giving someone a laugh is making their day a little better than it was before they had that laugh. When it’s at its ideal, I really believe that comedy is about giving laughs and relief to the audience, not taking glory from them.
I’m writing this because it’s been on my mind lately - as we head to a bigger platform than we’ve ever been on before, what is TCGS? It’s not about me, it’s not about being accepted into a more exclusive world than public access was - it’s not about our own validation or being a cool kid.
It’s about having a platform to reach more people. To connect more people. To make more people laugh.
And maybe those people will be people who can really use a laugh. Maybe some of them have recently lived through something rough, maybe they’re putting a brave face on, maybe they’re convincing their kids that a pizza is a party.
Maybe there are some hard working people out who spend a lot of time hiding their stress. Maybe I can help them laugh at the end of a tough day.
Those are the people I really want to be in the trenches with, and I think a lot about these theoretical people every time an episode of TCGS is about to begin taping.
Even though I doubt I’ll ever meet him and assume he will never ever see it, I wonder almost every day if David Letterman would like our show.
We want to give a huge huge thank you to whomever the mystery person is that just sent an ice cream cake to our brainstorm room demanding that we bring back Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.
Conspiracy theories are already circulating that Matthew Perry personally sent it.
