What I Learned at JFL 42 in Toronto (and Anthony Jeselnik)
Sweet notebook I got at CBC HQ at the Because News live event, part of Toronto's Just For Laughs Festival, September 2016.
Take notes all the time. I learned that. After the fact. Packed very minimally and used up half my tiny notebook on the plane! Luckily, a few days in, at a live broadcast of the headline-mocking quiz show Because News, a producer came up and said, “Over there. Free notebook."
Thanks to notebook, latter half of this report is an almost verbatim transcript of Anthony Jeselnik's interview responses at JFL confab, Comedy Con.
On with the show.
I ARRIVE
Sept 23, 2016: Land in Toronto, train into city and rush with suitcases to Jackie Kashian’s live Dork Forest podcast panel featuring Todd Barry, Maria Bamford and Amanda Brooke Perrin. They're onstage at Second City, an excellent, storied and intimate venue of maybe 250 seats.
Caught the last half of the chat; a bit unremarkable, but who cares? Being road creatures, the comedians talked about where to eat in this and that city. Bamford said LA is sometimes lonely due to constant hustle, as in: “I can’t come to your wedding cuz I need to do this catering gig and make sixty bucks.” Amanda Brooke Perrin is shortly moving there to be Stef Tolev’s roommate and that’s neat. They'll drive down together soon --laughing all the way, I'm sure.
Margaret Cho walked in right past my legs, like a god entering a pantheon. She's always top-dressed, and her subsequent show at the mid-century and beautiful Queen E Theatre blew my mind. She and Bamford, major innovators in the genre, are not to be missed live.
Afterwards, Todd Barry is in the hall making self available though, alas, I'm too shy to talk. We introverts really must train ourselves into functional extroversion. I made forty business cards for Toronto and gave out seven, including one to a lady who got injured by my luggage, so that doesn't count.
Haven’t learned that much yet. Am just happy to be at large.
PLANET TRAVELLER
In the hostel room (six bunks), the bottom level of my bunk bed is occupied by a blond Irish girl of about twenty who nonetheless comes off as about six. She's wearing headphones and a fuzzy onesie as she reclines on her pillow surrounded by sparkly pink childish accoutrements and cosmetic items strewn everywhere on the bunk and surrounding floor.
Turns out she won't get out of bed for first 12, then 24, then almost 36 hours in favour of watching her phone. I'm still jet-lagged and cannot figure out if I should get involved. She seems to have some kind of deal going on. Luckily, just before I have no choice but to ask her if she's alright, at 36 hours exactly, she jumps out of bed, throws on a half shirt and track pants and goes out partying. Much better (kind of). Anyways, the next day she and all signs of her are gone. Off to next bunk bed, I suppose.
Overall the hostel room has a migratory feel. Most of the people seem to be travelling for work or serious relocation purposes. There's a mother from middle America travelling on business who sleeps with a large bible and repeatedly calls her son "champ" on the phone. I don’t have a single conversation in the room for nine days which is oddly fine by me. No one's grabbing me and there's too much coming and going at all hours with everyone on a mission.
The hostel is so busy with businesspeople and ambitious immigrants rushing around that the boastful Australian boozer who hogs the lounge and TV remote every night seems especially absurd. With faux countercultural authority, he categorically refuses to let me watch the first US presidential debate because he must watch monster trucks.
When the other hostel guests from Brazil and Europe rally with me, the Aussie coughs up the remote, and the rest of us watch bronzered Donald sniff his way through the first presidential showdown on a giant screen in high definition.
At intermission, I converse for a short while with a pro-Russian Latvian so fiendishly obsequious that the hot Swedish patriot guy listening in has to excuse himself so he doesn't send a fist right through the Latvian.
JESELNIK INTERVIEW
Anthony Jeselnik showed up on 8th day of the festival for shows and a one-on-one discussion at Comedy Con. “Welcome,” said the interviewer. “Thank you,” said Jeselnik. “I feel like Toronto is the best city in this piece of shit country.”
And we’re off.
Jeselnik explained his deal: “I like to see comedians make others laugh by making themselves laugh…I try to do the most difficult topics and try to get laughs…My persona is a suit of armor…If you talk about the things I talk about, you have to be confident, you have to be, ‘This is great’…If I’m going to watch a comedian, I want him to be confident… like a quarterback…Like you might not believe I’m this confident, but I would pass a lie-detector test.”
At fourteen years in, Jeselnik doesn't often second guess himself. “If I’m in a room and they don’t get it, that is really a problem for them. (At that point I just say) That joke wasn’t bad. You’re bad.”
He talked a fair amount about the importance of maintaining a strong sense of self and own style. “I’ve seen comedians do great in LA and go on tour and come back terrible.”
Defence against dilution? An unflinching point of view or stance: “I think in art, it’s important to be hated,” he said. “If a guy says he likes me but says his wife doesn’t care for me, I’m like, ‘That’s perfect.’”
“(Same time) I’m the worst,” he said. “People come up to me and say, ‘Anthony, you’re so funny. You say what I think.’ And I’m like, ‘Get the fuck away from me.’”
For Jeselnik, stand up mastery came from being unable to write well for anyone else, like Jimmy Fallon, for example. “When I started, late-night writer was a dream job, and it was very hard to get those jobs.” He got on Fallon because Fallon knew him and, “I had some heat on me." (He'd just just done a 30-minute special).
These days, though, “The job (of late-night writer) is more meat grinder,” he said. “Closer to the beginning, writers could do any crazy stuff,” as in the first years at Conan when Louis CK was a writer, etc. “Now it’s ‘See what the lowest common denominator is.’”
Jeselnik’s not particularly a fan of confessional comedy. “People say, ‘It was so deep and personal’ and I’m like, ‘What? You mean not funny?’”
Agents have approached him to do a book, but one does not seem likely at this time. He attempted one, a Jack-Handy-meets-Brett-Easton-Ellis endeavour. Not surprisingly, “It didn’t work.” He goes on helpfully, “A book needs a hook,” he says, and agents have pitched, “‘What about a book of fake apologies or a book about the presidents?’"
"Uh, no."
He explained that The Jeselnik Offensive failed because, “The show never got in enough trouble…We weren’t allowed to use our show to get eyes on our show for the trouble we were getting into,” he said, citing the example of a 'Shark Dance' they staged, “…to celebrate a guy who was eaten by a shark.” Following the broadcast, producers in New Zealand got death threats, but Comedy Central wouldn’t let Jeselnik address it on air.
There was bad blood between Jeselnik and the network for a while, but today he would consider working with Comedy Central again because a certain executive is gone. “I think my last special was as good as it was cuz I was angry at the network.”
Overall, he’s fine with the cancellation. “The greater you fail, the better off you’re going to be.”
Jeselnik considers cultural appropriacy to be a roving line, and suggested that it is any comic’s job in any age to find that line and determine how best to cross it. “Henny Youngman had a tonne of dead baby jokes, (and) PC (politically correct) culture has done great things. It also gives me a chance to fuck around. You just hafta do it in a smarter way.”
If you are a comedian like Jeselnik, “You create an anti-safe space. Like if someone comes up to me and says, ‘I didn’t like that 9-11 joke,’ I go, ‘Well, what did you think of that child molestation joke?’”
While still a new comedian, Jeselnik liked Steven Wright best and recommends ripping off your favourite for the first year. “I ripped off Jack Handy for a year and no-one knew.” Now, he avoids comics like himself and listens, rather, to comedians like Nate Bargatze (who delivered an outstanding set at JFL 42, by the way, while opening for Jim Gaffigan).
All told, Jeselnik doesn’t watch comedy much at all though he is watching Natasha Leggero and Rikki Lindhome’s Another Period and considers The Sopranos, “…the best comedy ever made.”
Success is a matter of elbow grease: “You’ve got to write and perform as much as you can. The more you perform, the better you get.” At the same time, “It’s important not to work too hard. The biggest laugh we got in the first season (of Offensive) was when Kumail Nanjiani spilled his drink.”
The effort makes you confident. “I work harder than anyone else. Last night a joke didn’t work, and I said (to the audience): ‘You fucked up. I’m not trying this out. I’m showing off.’”
“If you think I’m a pompous asshole, go introduce yourself to Jerry Seinfeld…Once you are worried about who you are pissing off in the industry, what’s the point of being a comedian?”
“Every comedian has an ego as big as mine. I just lead with mine.”
The interviewer remarked, “I think Trump is the anti-Christ," to which Jeselnik seemlessly responded, “I feel like the anti-Christ would be a bit smoother.”
He went on: “I don’t even blame Donald Trump, but the American people should be crucified.”
Jeselnik said more TV is likely and mentioned that he had taken a pass at penning a Louie-style show but quit. “I might do a show like this (pointing around at Comedy Con encounter), but with better-looking people.”
“Stand Up is better once you’ve been on TV. People come and see you and they’re more excited, and I can get away with…my Q-rating (being) worse than Hitler.” The unlikely concept of Jeselnik doing charity work yielded predictable results. “I just made fun of the charity, like Sick Kids. I was like ‘We need to stop doing this cause some of them might be contagious.’”
Using a deliberate style of minimalism. “I paint myself into a corner and keep pulling things out…It helps when people know what they are getting.”
“I’ve always been fascinated with how in Hip Hop you can say horrible, terrible, misogynistic things cuz there’s a beat to it.”
Ultimately, success all comes down to the effort, the dedication: “(I realized early) If I write a million jokes, a few will be brilliant.”
