When I started stand-up – and this is in the ’90s – there was definitely people hadn’t watched decades of Comedy Central, where people are really much more educated on stand-up comedy.
I was able to make the jump to theaters without having a TV show. My passion for getting a TV show just plummeted. It was like I had already achieved what I wanted to achieve.
It’s a balancing act of you feel horrible that you’re away but there is something about the road that is rather liberating.
There are a lot of good looking men on this planet. It seems like once a week someone will tell me, “I know someone who looks like you” and I don’t know what say to them except, “Tell them hi.”
Comedy is a very lucrative business now, but when everyone first went into it, it didn’t make sense from a financial standpoint.
Twitter allowed me to talk about parenting in short snippets and find out what I really wanted to say about it, which is that I’m a dad who had no idea what he’s doing.
I personally have no interest in being a star or a celebrity. I want my stand-up comedy and how I think as a comedian to be recognized and successful.
We tend to outdo ourselves.
Television’s very much a writer’s medium, as it probably should be, but if you’re not the writer, then as the performer, you defer to that. It’s just kind of how it’s constructed. Is there some leeway? Yeah. But I also don’t want to come across as a jerk.
I’m kind of like a guy who’s missing a little bit of the guy gene. Like, I love steak, but the notion of golfing is the last thing I would want to do. I love women, but I’m also a mama’s boy, and some of my best friends are women. So I’m kinda half guy’s guy.
I don’t have any delusions. I’m not a novelist – I’m a comedian who writes. I love doing the stand-up and the touring and the albums and all that, but it’s pretty amazing to go into a library and see your book there.
I’m a guy who comes from a small town in the Midwest. It’s not in my nature to say the most explicit things in public.
I’m not a foodie; I’m an eatie. I don’t have anything against foodies. I just don’t have the time or the interest to do that much research.
I’m much more interested in making people laugh than getting applause breaks.
I’m there to make people laugh. I’m not trying to come across as sexy.
The entertainment business is such a strange, crazy perception business that you’re either given way too much respect, like people saying, “You should be the head of the sitcom!” Or you’re given no respect, where they’re like, “You should audition to be the garbage man that lives four houses down.”
There are people that are vegetarians that love bacon.
I’m definitely hesitant wearing shorts during the summer. Like for a pale person, you know, summer – everyone in the world is so excited for summer, but pale people, we’re just like, oh no.
I like bowling. It’s just one of those things where I can do so many jokes about it because I do know bowling. Somebody once said, “The whitest things in the world are Jim Gaffigan and bowling.”
I always want my standup act to appeal to everybody in the room, and when I started standup, and I would see people talk about their kids and their wife, and I’d always cringe a little bit, like, ‘I can’t get a date, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
If someone picks up one thing you’ve written, you want them to go, ‘Wow, this is pretty good.’