Nick Griffin: You Always Want a Donut

You get a heavy sense, from Nick Griffin's comedy, that his world doesn't sparkle. His material covers depression, poverty, overdrinking, sexual frustration, insecurity, and the apparent cause of it all: divorce — which he reminds us is a lot worse than being scratched by a cat. Actually, divorce might be the result of it all. Either way, he has churned that fetid bubbling brew into a potent stand-up act.

Originally from Kansas City, he's been a part of both the L.A. and New York comedy machines, currently churning out of New York. During his recent stop in Indiana, I had a chance to talk with him about his writing, his traveling, his projects, and what he calls his "dopey Twitter account."

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My wife with Nick Griffin in the barely
lit lobby after his show in Lafayette, IN.

Lafayette Indiana is so small and simple that when Nick Griffin tells me he's on his way "downtown," that's enough to make our paths cross. When his next message tells me he's on Main and 9th, I don't text him back; I just look up. Because I'm already on Main and 9th too. He sees me from the car, waves, parks, then crosses the street to shake my hand. I have to add that he doesn't have to look for parking, and he barely has to look both ways before crossing the street. Downtown Lafayette is ghostly.

Why is he riding into a small town like this, for a single show? It can't be the coffee shops. The only one we can find is about to close, and it's barely past 6:15PM. What could have pulled him out here from New York?

"It's another gig," he says. "I kinda have to take it." Certainly he doesn't really "have to." Griffin isn't begging for spots. He works and travels almost constantly. He could take a break. But a look at his itinerary makes it clear that a big part of why he has to, is his work ethic.

This is the second time within the space of a week that Griffin has visited and performed in central Indiana. The previous weekend he headlined four nights at Crackers in Indianapolis, where I caught one of his sets. He believes that at a typical club show there are maybe 10 or 15 people who came out to see him. "The rest of them have no idea who I am. They just wanted to go out to a comedy club." But for the show I saw, he had the Saturday night crowd sustained in laughter as successfully as any comic I've seen. With a steady pacing that rolled as if on rails.

The consistent tightness of his writing is always impressive. Each joke works well on it's own, but he doesn't just fire them off in isolation. Griffin is a joke writer, with well-crafted chunks, connected thematically. Not only does he want each joke to serve a narrative on stage, he wants it to fit his own perspective. "As I grow older I think I would like to have material be as reflective of my thoughts as possible. I don't hold on to material if it doesn't say what I want it to say."

Altho he admits to sometimes being harder on himself than necessary, he recognizes the benefits of his self-flagellating criticism. "Quite frankly it's so hard to write great material. I saw Jerry Seinfeld talk about having this really great act, and how hard it is for a new joke to get into that act because it's such a high standard." He pauses. "Not that my act is on that level." But he trusts his standards and knows that at least being hard on himself is another way of pushing himself to write honestly. "You do feel like there's a certain standard of a great joke and you want to have every new joke be up to that."

He writes every day, then tries the material onstage. He records every set, and listens to it later, then hones the jokes. Writing. Testing. Revising. Retesting. Of course that effort and intense crafting can start to wear. "I'm one line at a time. Thirty seconds at a time." Tho there are the occasional epiphanies "where there's a joke out there in the ether, and I find it. You know immediately that that's the one. It happens very rarely, like maybe a couple times a year where you'll think 'I don't even have to try this. I could just not do this joke, and still know it's a great joke.'"

He's in awe of comedians like Louis C.K. and Bill Burr who have been almost eerily prolific. "I just watched Burr's hourlong special, Let It Go, and I just can't believe how good it is. It's tons of material, and it's chunks, and it's thematically consistent, and it's great."

Shaking his head in disbelief, "I just don't have that. Even a good month for me is like two minutes or three minutes. It's not ten. Never has been."

He hasn't taken too naturally to his Twitter account, @TheNickGriffin. He updates it occasionally, but he's wary of putting unfinished work out there with his name on it. He's not at all critical, however, of comedians who use the internet to gain exposure. "I think it's an exciting time. I think it's a creative boom maybe, even more-so than a financial boom." And he realizes the opportunity of online exposure isn't a shortcut to anything. "There's so many good comics, and only so many venues. You've gotta find a way to market yourself." Something he admits isn't his strength. "It's hard to keep up with, quite frankly."

Among the spotlighting venues that consider Griffin a go-to guy is the Bob & Tom morning radio show, based in Indianapolis. He's a regular there. This has given him a good midwest fan base, helping to set up shows like his appearance here in Lafayette with fellow Bob & Tom regular, Tim Cavanagh.

Griffin has done a half-hour for Comedy Central Presents, he's been on Craig Ferguson's Late Late show a few times, and he recently did a spot on Conan's new show.

One of the greatest sources of pride: he's becoming a familiar face on David Letterman's Late Show. Griffin has long admired the late-night host, and feels lucky to be in the stable of repeat acts. It's especially heartening, considering the dark direction where his humor tilts. Griffin's disturbed perspective is what kicks most of his material into action. So, predictably, a lot of his best stuff isn't quite sweet enough for the networks. One of his jokes complains about his inability to date younger women.

"Because young girls are filled with sugar and spice and everything nice. And I'm filled with anger and semen and shame."

"Maybe one of my favorite jokes I ever wrote," he says. But when he took the set to Late Show talent coordinator, Eddie Brill, semen had to be changed to Prozac. "To be honest with you I don't think I even asked them if I could say semen. I just knew they weren't gonna let me." But, of course, doing the show is a huge honor, and he's happy to do it every chance he gets.



One of his appearances on Late Night caught the attention of John Markus, a writer and producer on The Cosby Show and The Larry Sanders Show. Markus contacted Griffin about developing a sitcom. They got Letterman's company, Worldwide Pants, to help pitch it to a network, and ABC went so far as to pay them to write a pilot. It didn't go any further, but Griffin is pleased to have gotten a chance to learn about the avenue.

"I would love to have a show" he says. "If someone allowed me to do it, like Seinfeld did, where you can be the comic that you really are, that'd be great." For him, a sitcom wouldn't be a way out of stand-up. It would be a way to do more with it. "It brings more people out to see your stand-up. It's better venues. You wanna get better. You want to develop. And you want people to see you. I didn't grow up wanting to be an actor tho."

And now, to his club and TV and radio appearances, he's added a new album: Bring Out the Monkey.

Griffin is a very quotable comedian. His jokes are structurally solid and thematically direct, making them memorable, and very portable.

On despair:

Sleep is like killing yourself, but you wake up refreshed. You ever wake up refreshed but you go back to bed anyway? Yeah. That's called depression.

On laziness:

If my generation had come over as the pilgrims, this would not be the United States of America. This would be that place where all those pilgrims died.

On arousal:

I think about sex a lot. A lot. I don't know who is running the projector in my brain, but he is very immature.

The point of view and the character that says these things is clear in his act. Recently, he's been opening with material about being envious of vampires. A woman in the Lafayette audience calls out "The real ones!" She apparently doesn't appreciate the prissy vampires prancing thru the Twilight series. Griffin shrugs and reminds her: "I've got news for you. They're all fake." That's the backbone of his comedy: bare reality. He says what he believes is true. And his delivery is perfectly suited to the humor. His pauses and his rhythm are deliberate but natural. There aren't gaps; there's space. He knows how to give each joke time to connect and hit. It seems almost unfairly fortunate for him that he's such an appropriate messenger for his humor.

So it's easy to imagine him getting the attention of the right people at the right time to throw his career into a new level. He mentions the sudden sensation and discovery of Jay Pharoah, whose celebrity impressions on YouTube got the attention of Lorne Michaels, earning Pharoah a spot as a featured player on SNL. "There's a lot of different ways to develop ideas and I'm hopefully going to keep trying all of them, and maybe one of them will break thru."

He's aware of his competition. "There's a million comics. There's a million actors. I think the internet is going to create some really great comics, and it's going to create some really bad comics who'll become really famous." Not being in the second group is a source both of pride, and some frustration.

Griffin is not unknown. He's not obscure. He's getting work and he has the solid respect of other comedians. Marc Maron considers him a "kindred spirit" and Joe Matarese has called him "the top of the Letterman guys," saying that all the sets are "homeruns" full of "unbelievable jokes."

Griffin's dedication to comedy has him swirling around the country, and bouncing between the coasts. From his stint in Indianapolis on the 30th of April, he went back to New York for the week, then came back to Indiana for the show in Lafayette on the 6th, then back home again. He'll be in Columbus Ohio, from May 18-22 at the Funny Bone, and a week after that he'll be at the San Francisco Punchline. The week after that he's at the Omaha Nebraska Funny Bone.

"I used to be able to route things a little bit better" he says. "The last few years have gotten kinda weird."

The last few years have also revealed Letterman's obvious regard for him. He's already slated for another spot this coming Friday, May 13th. Maybe it'll be that consistent presence combined with his sole-thinning tour strategy that will eventually pay off.

His face is already getting recognized. As we're finishing up our conversation, a young couple walks past us on the sidewalk. They whisper something to each other, then turn back around. "Are you a comedian," the guy asks. "Yeah, I am. Nice to meet you" Griffin says, and shakes the guy's hand with a smile. The kid is excited. "Yeah, I saw you and I knew you looked familiar."

Later that night after the show, an obvious fan who looks about college age, stands in line to shake Nick's hand. He excitedly tells Nick "Right now, I have a picture of you as the wallpaper on my computer."

That's gotta be a compliment he doesn't hear too often. But if great sets, a strong new album, national TV spots, and a foot in the sitcom door aren't enough to turn Griffin into a Pollyanna, I doubt that being on another guy's computer screen is going to do the trick. But Griffin smiles, and talks to the kid for a while, shaking his hand with what looks like sincere appreciation.

It may not yet be the broad and intense fame that packs every club with nothing but fans. And he may still feel a responsibility to grind out the circuit. But it should be a good reminder that he's doing what he's doing, very well. "If I get to be a really good comic along the way, I'll be OK with that."

So maybe Griffin is doomed to always be chasing after something more than OK. Because he passed "really good comic" a while ago.

Before you go, Remember this…

MEETING NOTES:
DICK: We need a young family-friendly comic. Nothing dirty. Nothing controversial.

ED: Yeah we can find that.

DICK: He needs to tailor the set to our show.

ED: You mean… be not very funny?

DICK: Hey! It can be funny, but he's gotta ruin it with awkward commentary. You know, like when you talk to Johnny and me.

ED: Just any commentary?

DICK: No. he's gotta tie it all in to bloopers and maybe a practical joke.

ED: Who's gonna write this material for him?

DICK: Let him use his own jokes. If he's bright, he'll figure out a way to do the tie-ins.
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Jerry takes the stage:
Thank you very much. Thank you. Bloopers… You know, I flew in on a plane. Talk about bloopers. You don't want bloopers on a plane. Stewardesses, they uh, they never make a mistake. They're too happy. They do their job. They come out there. They put on their little show. You know, before the plane takes off.

DICK AND ED: [in the wings] This is better than we could have imagined.

Mandy, Presented by The Sims 2

I spent a summer playing the Sims. It's addictive and time consuming. I spent a few weeks getting a good job, building a mansion, making friends, hitting on the hot neighbor, then proposing to her in front of a fireplace. She caught fire and burned to death.

I decided to stop there because my 4 minutes of uncontrollable laughter were going to be impossible to top.

So I started playing The Sims.

This video is about 4 years old. But it holds up because of 1:47.

Can I Violate You with a Rubber Chicken?

Wired magazine recently devoted an issue to humor. Which means that Andy Samberg was on the cover and a couple articles were about jokes and comedians. Yeah, They went all out.

The issue includes an article by Joel Warner, "The Humor Code: One professor's attempt to explain every joke ever with a single Venn Diagram." Here's the quick summary of Peter McGraw's theory of humor, "the Grand Unified Theory of humor—in his words, 'a parsimonious account of what makes things funny.'"

photo from Janelle Keith's Blog (link)

This theory of "Benign Violation" looks easy to describe. It proposes that we laugh to signal our understanding that a challenge to dignity or other "norms" poses no real threat. Warner writes of one study carried out by the professor and his associates:

McGraw determined that funniness could be predicted based on how committed a person is to the norm being violated, conflicts between two salient norms, and psychological distance from the perceived violation.

That's a simple claim. All you have to do in order to find out if someone is going to find something funny, is measure the size of their values; identify what expectations they have and are able to perceive, and get out your "psychological distance" tape-measure. That's all. When you know those numbers, you know if something's going to be funny.

Here's the obvious problem with the theory: it's impossible to find a number, or value, for something like "psychological distance." And even if there was a number there, how would you measure it? And someone's commitment to a norm is probably even harder to fence in. But perhaps a questionnaire, and some psychological profiling will get us halfway there. So fine, if we accept that those are the variables, we know that we should measure them. Somehow.

But I'm very committed to the norm of not murdering someone. I'm planning to go my whole life without murdering anyone. And yet, I can find a joke about murder extremely funny. So am I more OK with murder than I thought?

Then, how is something that's said ironically, processed as a violation of anything other than discourse? How is a punchline that the teller doesn't "really believe" a violation of anything other than some rule about 'what shouldn't be said'?

To navigate thru that challenge, a theory like McGraw's would have to introduce something like 'a commitment to norms regarding ways of expressing commitment to a norm.' In other words, 'how sensitive someone is to comments about, or representations of, a norm.' In familiar words: a sense of humor.

One of McGraw's go-to analogies is tickling: we recoil from tickling because it's a violation of space and body comfort, but we laugh because we know we're not at risk. And we can't tickle ourselves because we can't violate ourselves. Well, in that case, I guess wasn't really caught doing anything that one time.

And even tho McGraw claims to be able to predict what isn't funny, all he seems to do is predict that some things aren't going to be funny to some people. They fail to be funny if the violation threatens the audience or its "worldview." But then why are some things that turn out to be benign violations not funny? Why is a car spinning on a bridge and stopping right at the edge, not a hilarious event? And what's the Venn Diagram for the difference between a successful and a botched joke? If someone messes up every joke with bad rhythm or a tipped punchline, how does this theory explain that failure? There are millions of ways of ruining a joke—most of them have nothing to do with the meaning or the content of the joke, or the issues being played with. The Venn Diagram only allows for two explanations for a failed joke: either it didn't violate, or it isn't benign.

Of course, I'm just going based on the Wired article. And despite every oversimplification that I've committed in this post, I'm always skeptical of dumbed-down versions of ideas. I still haven't read McGraw's paper, but I do plan to. He presented it in the journal Psychological Science last year.

In the article, Warner quotes Purdue Linguistics professor, Victor Raskin, who calls the theory "flawed and bullshit." Louis CK also weighs in. When McGraw tries to explain the theory, CK interrupts and protests "There are thousands of kinds of jokes. I just don't believe that there's one explanation."

There might be one explanation for all the different types of jokes out there. Puns, pratfalls, impressions, exaggeration, insults, absurdity and on and on. It's possible that all those varieties lead to one response—laughter—because of one feature or structure common to all of them. But in an attempt to keep it simple, McGraw's theory as reported doesn't offer anything beyond a restatement of the very dynamic it's supposed to predict. It doesn't look like this theory does what a theory should: make a disprovable claim. McGraw basically says that people find those challenges funny, that fit into their category of things that are allowed to be funny.

That's a violation of my belief that humor is more than mere disagreement. And it doesn't look anything like a threat to my worldview. Maybe that's why I find it so laughable.

Aflac's new Quacksperson.

It's been about a week now since Aflac announced their new duck-voice: Daniel McKeague. It's a pretty masterful PR move to make people care about a soccer coach from Minnesota getting a VO gig.

Did they go for a new sound? Did they go for an impression? The first video doesn't make it clear. it's almost a split between Gottfried and Donald Duck. But McKeague explains that he did have an impression in his pocket. "Whenever that ad would come on I would imitate the duck and the kids loved it."

The second video, strangely, sounds like a completely different voice. Not at all Donald-ish or Gilbert-y. I wonder if they checked every contestant's tweets before deciding.