[IMG:L]Whether he’s combining the zesty taste of nachos with the strategy of Yahtzee, berating his university mascot or knocking his own son’s ability to write a decent knock, knock joke, fans of Michael Ian Black are bound to find fun in his first comedy album I Am A Wonderful Man.
The stand up comedian, writer, director and actor became a cult favorite with MTV’s The State and Comedy Central’s Stella, but gained an even broader fan base as Stuckeybowl employee Phil on the dramedy Ed and host of the I Love The series on VH1. Hollywood.com called up the comic, 36, to get the scoop on his debut comedy album, his tour and more.
Hollywood.com: Congrats on your new comedy album! Will you be doing anything to celebrate?
Michael Ian Black: I hadn’t thought about celebrating. Look, I’m all about surviving man. Celebrating? That’s ambitious.
HW: What was the inspiration behind the title I Am A Wonderful Man?
MIB: Literally, I thought to myself, ‘I should think of a title for the album.’ So I typed “Album Titles” on a little on Microsoft Word electronic paper, and that was literally the first thing that popped into my head. I thought ‘Okay, that’s good.’ It was born out of laziness more than anything else.
HW: I heard you are going to be touring with your old friend Michael Showalter from The State and Stella. What are you two like on the road?
MIB: Generally what we do when we go out on the road is I rent an inexpensive car. We drive to different cities, play a show, look for whatever is the closest place that we can find to play poker, and go do that until dawn. Play for a few hours and then do it all over again.
HW: Do you guys get sick of each other?
MIB: We’ve been friends for almost 20 years and our point of getting tired of each other is so far gone that … I mean, we are so sick of each other that we’re just tremendous friends all over again. We know each other’s idiosyncrasies so well and eccentricities so well that we just know how to navigate each other very, very well. We don’t really fight or anything. We get along really well so that’s why I like to tour with him because it would be terrible to tour with somebody with whom you didn’t have that kind of relationship with.
HW: Your material includes Christians, Nazis, terrorists–and even your own children. Is anything off limits?
MIB: No, I don’t think so. I think comedians in general feel like nothing is off limits. You just need to figure out what it is that you are saying. I’m not particularly interested in shocking people or being offensive. If I am that, it is never really intentional. I think my comedy can be a little edgy to certain people, but I’m not interested in shock value in particular.
HW: Where do you like to test out your material?
MIB: Oddly enough, I don’t really test out material. I live in the woods so there aren’t a lot of comedy clubs in the woods so it is not like I can show up and do five minutes somewhere. So I generally sort of keep my act and then slowly work in new stuff and try out a thing or two each night and let it kind of evolve from there. I don’t really have a place that I can go and stand on stage and tell new jokes. I do it in front of 800 people, 1,000 people.
HW: You don’t even try it out in front of the mirror or in front of your family?
MIB: No, oh no … I don’t try it out for friends! I just sort of do it and hope that it works–and sometimes, it doesn’t.
HW: So you book an actual gig and then try out fresh material?
MIB: Yeah, this will be part of a tour for example, but I know that people have paid money to see me so I’m not being totally masturbatory up there either. I’m trying to give them a show, but if you see me in one city three weeks later you might be seeing a totally different act even though in my mind I’ve been doing the same act for three weeks because it is constantly evolving. The album you hear is essentially a snap shot, this one moment in time where I’ve been working on this material and I’ve gotten it to a place that I’m comfortable with. I think there are at least a couple of jokes on the album that I hadn’t done before I recorded the album.
HW: When a joke bombs, how do you transition?
MIB: Retreat. [Laughs] Run away. I sort of skew it back toward stuff that I know is going to work so it is sort of a game you play of old stuff and new stuff. Part of the fun of stand up is you can try stuff out and you can experiment and you can play around and, hopefully, you are not trying the audience’s patience and they are enjoying it.
HW: What do you do in a heckler situation?
MIB: I love it. I love it to a certain extent. I don’t get heckled in the sense where people are like “You suck!” because I am in a situation where if I’m playing in a rock club, people know who they are coming to see so it is not like they are going to be outraged that I show up. But there are often people who just feel the need to shout things at the stage and I’ve figured out ways to deal with those people in ways that can be funny, constructive and helpful to the show. The only time it gets bad is when it is too much when too many people do it or when that one person just won’t shut up and then at a certain point I will say something like “Shut up!” [Laughs]. I will just suspense with any sort of comedy and say “Do me a favor, shut up.”
HW: Do Ed fans ever come to your shows?
MIB: I’ve worried about that in the past, especially with the shows I was doing when I was first starting out. There would be a room full of like twenty-something hipsters or whatever and then there would be like a guy in his mid-40s just sort of standing there looking confused. I always felt bad for that guy because I knew he was there because he liked Ed and I knew whatever I was going to do that night was not going to live up to his expectations.
HW: Do you see yourself returning to network television?
MIB: Yeah sure. I had a great experience on Ed. I liked the people, it paid well and lunch is free–so yeah, I would love to do a traditional TV show. There are definitely creative constraints if you are just an actor on a show that can be frustrating, but the time I didn’t spend writing on Ed I was writing screenplays and doing other things that have born fruit later. As long as I feel like I am using my time wisely, yeah I would love to do it.
HW: Can you tell me about your very first stand up experience?
MIB: The very, very first time I did stand up was actually with Michael Showalter. I think we were freshman in college and Doritos was hosting a stand up contest [at NYU] and we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to go do that.’ What I didn’t take into account was that I would actually have to have something to say once I got on the stage. I was sitting in the audience waiting for my turn to go up and literally had maybe two sort of half-baked jokes. I don’t even really remember it except to say I remember that I was terrible … I was really scared and I don’t think I did stand up again until maybe 12 years later.
HW: Were you scarred?
MIB: I wasn’t scarred. I just didn’t know how to do it, I didn’t know how to approach it, and I didn’t really know anything about it. Ultimately I finally decided that if I was ever going to do it, I just needed to start doing it. So that’s what I did.
HW: What do you think about all the drama going on in comedy these days? Are you afraid it will lead to censorship?
MIB: I think it is a great time to be in comedy in general. There are so many avenues to get whatever you want to get out there out there. It’s also a good time to particularly be doing stand up because I think younger audiences are pretty receptive to it in the way they are receptive to indie bands. There is a kind of equation–at least among my contemporaries of comics–between comedy and indie rock music. So when I am on tour I don’t play comedy clubs, I play rock clubs.
HW: Why do you prefer indie rock clubs?
MIB: Because the environment is just much better. I either play rock clubs or theaters, but I won’t play comedy clubs. In terms of the political climate, I don’t worry about it. I’m not really interested in shocking people, I’m just trying to make my point the funniest way I know how. I think sometimes that’s using language in ways that could make some of the audience uncomfortable, and if they are uncomfortable, I’m okay with that. I’m not Jeff Foxworthy, that’s just not what I do. That’s not a knock on him–I think what he does is great–I’m just not that guy.
HW: Is the Joe Rogan and Carlos Mencia thing just old news or is joke stealing still a topic of concern among comics?
MIB: As long as there have been comedians, there have been other comedians accusing them of stealing their jokes, so I don’t know. I’m really not in that world. In a weird way, I don’t know a lot of stand up comedians. There are kind of two worlds of stand up comedians: there is the Carlos Mencia/Joe Rogan world where you are out there at the clubs every night doing shit, and then there is my world, which is a little more indie rock band world. I know those people but I don’t know the more mainstream stand ups. Among my peers, I’ve never heard anybody bitching about somebody else stealing there material.
HW: Your screenplay Run, Fat Boy, Run was directed by David Schwimmer. Did you guys know each other?
MIB: No, there is no connection. He had read this script and wanted to direct it, so it was in the hands of a production company that bought the rights to it and they let him direct it. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m told it is really good.
HW: What did you think when you found out?
MIB: That it was Ross from Friends? I knew he had directed episodes of Friends. I didn’t have an opinion one way or the other and I wasn’t willing to write him off because he was a sitcom star. I thought that would be stupid. One thing I thought that would probably be true is that his rolodex would be pretty big and he would be able to cast the thing, which is often the hardest part of directing a movie. It opened this past weekend in the UK and it did really well, so hopefully it will do well here.
