A Week In The L.A. Comedy Grind

Jim Gaffigan thumbs through copies of ESPN the Magazine and turns to the receptionist. “Can I have one of these? I'm a celebrity.”

It’s Monday afternoon, and Gaffigan has just arrived at ESPN Studios from a taping for The Jim Rome Show that will air that weekend on Showtime. Gaffigan, a doughy, affable, surprisingly tall actor and comedian who wrote a book two years ago called Dad Is Fat, is wearing dark jeans, a T-shirt, and bright turquoise sneakers. He has five kids and a wife named Jeannie, and he has a sitcom — The Jim Gaffigan Show — in which he plays a dad with five kids and a wife named Jeannie.

Jim and Jeannie developed the show four years ago for NBC, but the network passed. “They said it felt very slice-of-life to them, and not in a good way,” Gaffigan says, “but that was how Jeannie and I designed it.” The show shot pilot episodes each of the next two seasons for CBS with the same autobiographical premise. After CBS passed the second time, TV Land picked it up and quickly renewed it for a second season that will premiere this summer.

Jim Gaffigan in the green room, waiting to make his guest appearance on Conan.

Nathanael Turner for BuzzFeed News

“It’s about having a show that has a broad appeal and isn’t compromising," Gaffigan says. "There are a lot of TV comedies going for people in the back row — simple jokes for people folding their laundry.”

Neil Everett, the co-anchor of ESPN’s West Coast edition of SportsCenter, will arrive shortly to tape the bit in which Gaffigan will stop by Everett’s cubicle looking for someone else and pretend not to know who Everett — a longtime friend — is. They’ll be in and out of the sketch in 30 minutes. ESPN will air it as a promo over the weekend.

“All these shows,” Gaffigan says, “they need content. I’m certainly not an expert on the NFL, but I’m someone who enjoys the NFL. I like what Rob Riggle does on Sunday — it’s topical. It’s content.” Riggle, a fellow actor and comic, does a popular sketch every week in the fall called Riggle’s Picks at the beginning of Fox’s NFL pregame show.

After taping the bit at ESPN, Gaffigan will head across town to be on Conan and then to Chavez Ravine to read the starting lineup at the L.A. Dodgers game. (“And play third base,” Gaffigan adds.) Then, barely 24 hours after he arrived, he’ll fly back to New York. Multitasking is hardly anything new for working comedians; but at a moment when there are more opportunities and more outlets than ever, managing to not get lost in the fray is its own full-time job.

“There’s so many shows,” Gaffigan says while getting his makeup touched up. “I haven’t even seen Transparent yet. That Jim Gaffigan Show is pretty good — I was pleasantly surprised.”

Kumail Nanjiani performing a short set at The Virgil.

Nathanael Turner for BuzzFeed News

The back room at this speakeasy-style club, The Virgil, holds 75 comfortably; there are probably twice that many people in here. Kumail Nanjiani of HBO’s Silicon Valley is closing the show with a bit about a visit to the dentist.

“She said she’s 90% sure my mouth has The Shining,” he says. “I knew it was going to be bad.” He pauses for a beat. “I knew it was going to be bad because when she asked if I had any symptoms, I said, ‘Ice cream on the left side of my mouth makes my spine hurt. That’s bad, right?’”

Nanjiani’s routine moves seamlessly from observational to topical to biographical. His story about watching The Silence of the Lambs with his dad in Karachi was a new bit that he was trying out, and it had the same casual polish as the rest of the routine.

“Until last year, I had all of my wisdom teeth. I had all of them, and they hurt for years.” He speaks in short, declarative bursts that give the audience time to breathe. “They hurt all day, every day, for years. And then one day they just stopped hurting, which I think is like when the check-engine light —” The crowd knows immediately where he’s going, and he lets them laugh. “— in your car has been on for a month and just goes off. You know what? Don’t worry about it. LIVE YOUR LIFE. What’s left of it.”

Kumail Nanjiani performing a short set at The Virgil.

Nathanael Turner for BuzzFeed News

Nanjiani and writer-comedian Jonah Ray host a weekly stand-up show called The Meltdown With Jonah and Kumail in a small room in the back of a West Hollywood comic book store. A taped version of The Meltdown just finished its second season on Comedy Central, which has already ordered a third.

“Who has been the longest without going to the dentist?” he asks the audience. A man seated near the back raises his hand. “Sir with the beard, how long has it been?” Nanjiani asks.

“Since September 11, 2001.”

Nanjiani didn't know that was coming, but his response is light and deft. “And you were like, never again,” he says. That response got the biggest, most sustained laugh of the night.

After Nanjiani’s set, we talk about the autobiographical impulse that runs through comedies like The Jim Gaffigan Show, Louis C.K.’s Louie, and Aziz Ansari’s Master of None. The diverse range of individual points of view on those and other shows has expanded comedy into new places and new kinds of stories over the last few years. Gaffigan is raising a house full of kids. Louis C.K. is a divorced dad with issues. Ansari is a child of immigrants. Maria Bamford’s Lady Dynamite, which premieres in May on Netflix, deals with her own bouts with mental illness. Their shows are funny, but they’re not just funny.

“I don’t think anyone is completely biographical with their comedy,” Nanjiani says. “Even Louis has observational jokes that are very funny. A good comedian has a point of view that allows you to do both of those things. That’s what I try and do.” Louis C.K.’s name comes up frequently in our 45-minute conversation, so I was surprised at Nanjiani’s answer to a question about whether Louie is largely responsible for comedy’s move toward more introspective storytelling. “Louie is amazing, but I think podcasts have a lot to do with it. It created this appetite for comedians to be themselves and to tell personal stories.”

When the production on the third season of Silicon Valley wraps in early spring, he’s planning to begin production on a film he recently wrote with his wife Emily Gordon, the talent booker for The Meltdown and a writer on The Carmichael Show. Nanjiani describes the film, called The Big Sick, with little more elaboration than to say that it will be autobiographical. Judd Apatow is producing it.

“For a long time, the only way you could see comedians was by seeing their act,” Gordon says in an interview after the film was announced. “Podcasts and all these TV shows where comedians can do things besides stand-up have changed things a lot. People that knew comedians through their jokes are now getting to know that person. It adds a context that we didn’t have before.”

Rod Corddry, David Wain, and Jon Stern in the editing bay, working on the new season of Children€™s Hospital.

Nathanael Turner for BuzzFeed News

“Alright,” David Wain says. The editor hits the space bar to stop the playback. “I think that would be funnier without Shirley saying, ‘Well,’ and without any air.”

The editor backs up the scene a few frames and cuts out guest star and Partridge Family matriarch Shirley Jones saying, “Well,” and the short pause that follows. Then he scrubs back to the beginning of the scene and plays it again for Wain, Jon Stern, and Rob Corddry, the three executive producers of Adult Swim’s long-running absurdist comedy Childrens Hospital.

They are sitting on a couch at their Abominable Pictures production office in Universal City. Opposite them is the editor, his computer, and a 42-inch display. The scene — in which Jones coaches Henry Winkler’s hospital administrator character on how to act like another character’s Grandpa Willy — is in an episode from the new season. A postproduction supervisor notes more edits to be made later.

“Can you go back to that reaction shot,” Wain says at the end of a later scene, referring to a shot of one longtime series regular watching two other characters interact. “I just, I love it.”

“Do you?” Stern asks. “The reactions in this scene are my least favorite performances of the season.”

“I know the quality you’re reacting to there,” Corddry says, leaning forward on the couch and looking across Wain at Stern, “and it’s what makes the scene funny.”

“To me it works, but I don’t know the footage,” Wain says to Stern, “so I wonder if you’re having a thing about —”

“I just see someone overacting,” Stern says flatly.

“I agree,” Wain says, “but I think it’s really good.”

“It plays like a —,” Corddry says.

“Like an SNL sketch?” Stern asks.

“No, no,” Corddry says, “definitely not like that. It plays on genre, like melodrama.”

“I see that too,” Wain adds, “but the content of the reaction shots is funny. Even if she’s not nailing it, it’s working.”

“What I’m saying,” Stern says, “is that there’s footage where she just doesn’t play it so big. Mugging it up like that, I think, lessens what she’s trying to do.”

“It’s a big performance,” Corddry says, “but I don’t see it as a dishonest one.”

Guest star Paul Scheer and show creator Rob Corddry in a scene from Childrens Hospital.

Adult Swim / Via adultswim.com

Stern, Corddry, and Wain have worked together on seven seasons of Childrens Hospital, which began as short webisodes before being reinvented in a 15-minute incarnation for Adult Swim. Corddry, who works mostly as an actor, will leave Hollywood a few weeks after this edit session for Miami to film the second season of HBO’s football series Ballers, on which he plays a wisecracking money manager.

In 2014, Wain worked on 17 different projects for film, television, and streaming video. In 2015, he spent a big chunk of his time on one project — Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp — for which he co-wrote and co-produced, directed all eight episodes, and played a hunky Israeli camp counselor named Yaron. At various points on Wet Hot’s production schedule, though, he was also acting on Comedy Central’s Another Period and getting Childrens Hospital ready to shoot.

Wain will likely return for the second season of Another Period, and there is momentum for a second season of Wet Hot that he would again produce, direct, and write. He’s circling a couple of movies to direct. And tonight, he’s performing solo at an experimental comedy show.

“When I directed Role Models,” Wain says, “and Wet Hot American Summer and Wanderlust...” The room starts to giggle. “...and The Ten and They Came Together...” Everyone in the tiny editing room is now laughing, and Wain delivers the speech with fumbly deadpan. “...and The State and Stella, I learned some things over the years about comedy.”

“I think David makes a good point,” Corddry says, laughing. “Let’s move on.”

Thomas Lennon as Felix Unger and Matthew Perry as Oscar Madison on The Odd Couple.

Michael Yarish / CBS

The audience members fill into their seats at Stage 15, a warehouse-sized building on the CBS lot. An episode of The Odd Couple, the reboot that stars Matthew Perry and Thomas Lennon, begins to play on the overhead monitors. Sets for a restaurant, a living room, a kitchen, etc., are lined up side by side across the stage like a single-floor Barbie Dreamhouse. An announcer calls out the cast of the show like they're the starting lineup for the L.A. Lakers. "As Felix Unger, Thomas Lennnnnoooon!"

In the first scene, Lennon and two of the supporting cast members are at a table on the restaurant set. The writers and producers sit in director's chairs just behind the cameras. The director calls action from a giant video monitor and quickly calls cut to work out how one of the characters will eat a French fry. He calls action again.

“I have loads of quirks,” Lennon says — fast-talking and overarticulating — midway through the scene. “I can list them alphabetically. The first one is my incessant alphabetizing.”

The line gets a laugh but not a big laugh; it’s one of several jokes that the writers flag to replace for the next take. Every Thursday, the writers deliver a new script and the cast does a table read. The writers room revises the script at the end of every day’s rehearsal until the following Wednesday’s taping. And during the taping, they keep revising. After Lennon’s “incessant alphabetizing” line gets a lukewarm reception, they throw out some suggestions. Lennon winds up improvising it.

“I have tons of quirks,” he says. “In high school, they called me Captain Quirk. And not in a nice way.”

That gets a much bigger laugh.

“I knew going into it that I was not doing an artsy kind of show that would be critically well-received,” Lennon says several days after the taping. His career began over two decades ago with Wain in The State. “This is popular entertainment. That said, I’m proud of what I’m doing in the role. In my career, even the cult-y stuff that people loved later like The State and Reno 911! never got much attention. I’ve never been in the business of pleasing television critics, but why start now, right?”

A multi-camera show like The Odd Couple is a strange amalgam of stage play, improv show, and circus. A magician or a stand-up comic keeps the crowd attentive between takes. The script is in constant motion. Everyone onstage — both in front of and behind the cameras — is in constant motion. The acting is broad and stylized, and every line is weighed for audience approval.

“You can very much hear the audience,” Lennon says after the taping. “There’s nothing more distressing than when you come out and your first line isn’t funny. It can almost undo the rest of the scene.”

Lennon plays the prissy, uptight Felix Unger role that Jack Lemmon played in the 1968 film and Tony Randall played in the ABC series in the 1970s. As much as Lennon’s lines change throughout the Tuesday night taping, his mannerisms and gestures are virtually indistinguishable from take to take. The Odd Couple premiered on CBS as a midseason show in early 2015, and the second season will run starting in April. The show skews older — ranking among network comedies last season in total viewers (11.3 million) but eighth in the 18–49 demographic (2.7 rating).

“If you start moving around with what you’re physically doing, the editors can’t cut your performance together,” Lennon says. “Even if you’re saying something different, it’s super important to look like what you looked like before — the way your hold your hands, the way your body is resting.”

In the next scene, Perry’s grouchy, unkempt Oscar Madison is in the living room of his apartment mixing a cocktail in a giant bucket. Lennon is heading out the door with two large suitcases to spend the evening at his girlfriend’s place for the first time.

“Well, I’m off to Emily’s,” Lennon says.

“You sure you’ve got enough stuff for one night there?” Perry asks.

“Just a few essentials. Eye mask. Nasal strips. Special pillow. Special sleep fragrances. Do you suppose Emily has a mister?”

“Sure doesn’t seem like it.”

That one gets a big laugh on every take.

Kirk Fox at The Laugh Factory in West Hollywood.

Nathanael Turner / BuzzFeed News