Andy Daly Interview

You may have seen Andy Daly on Mad TV, Crossballs, Lewis Black’s Root of All Evil, or Semi-Pro. It’s also possible that Andy’s seen you. Maybe you didn’t notice he was watching. It could have been at the store, the gym…anywhere. And if it wasn’t you he had his eye on, then it was someone just like you: a normal person with secrets — hilarious secrets just waiting to escape and make Andy laugh!

The same sort of secrets, tragedies, and closeted skeletons that tickle Andy are revealed when the characters on Nine Sweaters, his debut CD, walk onstage. You don’t expect catastrophe or horror to befall someone as chipper as Skip McCabe of the Sing-Along-Gang, or Paddy O’Shaughnessy, winner of the 2008 Limerick, Ireland Blarney Contest. In fact, when they take the stage, you’re sort of disarmed. You expected comedy, not a monologue from someone who reminds you of your uncle or that guy you met at a party once. Funny things don’t happen to such normal dudes, right? Wrong! They start happening and keep happening for over two hours. And once it’s done, you’ll want to hear Nine Sweaters all over again.

Ben Kharakh: Do you consider the things that happen to Skip and his family to be funny or tragic?

Andy Daly: What I think is funny is the juxtaposition between how cheery Skip is and how he’s the last guy in the world who you would think would get caught up in anything, and it just gets worse and worse. He came so chipper, he’s ready to lead the sing-along, he’s smiling ear to ear, but, “Oh, I just need to mention one thing,” and it’s a list of horrors. That’s what I think is funny. I don’t think it’s tragic.

BK: How do you view the relationship between tragedy and comedy?

AD: Tragedy can be funny if it’s framed right, and maybe that’s something that happens on this album a lot. A situation is set up, a character is established, and tragedy is injected into the character’s life in a way that, I think, results in comedy. The violence and the horrors described would be pure tragedy outside of the characters and situations that have been established.

BK: Do you think it’s possible to find humor in all tragic and serious things?

AD: Probably — if you do the right things with it.

BK: Sometimes people go on stage with something tragic, like AIDS or rape, and then things don’t go well. Where do they go wrong?

AD: In my case, the violence and tragedy is coming out of the mouth of the perfect neighbor or the cheeriest guy. There are a lot of other ways to handle it, some of which work and others of which don’t. If somebody brings up rape, for instance, just to show that they’re edgy, shocking, or upsetting, then that’s a place to go wrong.

BK: I guess because their goal is to shock and upset rather than to amuse.

AD: I feel like I see people trying to prove how edgy and alternative they are by carelessly throwing a concept like rape at the audience and not trying to find a way to make it funny. I think I find a way to make rape hilarious, and that’s why I went into show business.

BK: For you, what makes good comedy good comedy?

AD: I like it when the audience is presented with a realistic situation that they can buy into, really suspending their disbelief, and then the situation gets more and more ridiculous. That, I think, is my favorite experience as an audience member — to really suspend my disbelief and say, “Alright, I’m with you,” and then to be gradually taken to a place I never expected to go. That’s what I try to do on the album.

BK: People like your characters likely do exist off the stage. Do you think they’re funny?

AD: Yeah, I do! The way I interpret that question is that there are people whose dark underbelly you don’t get to but you see on a surface level, and I’m always amused by that. I will say this: Danny Mahoney, the “Life of the Party” guy, who may be the worst human being on the album, is based pretty directly on a guy I saw once who I just found hilarious. He was so angry, unreasonable, and explosive. I wouldn’t want him as my roommate, but seeing him at the fitness club, which I did, was absolutely hilarious, and I just stood there giggling. I also find the chipper, regular guy funny. I am always interested in the guy who comes in and knows everybody in the diner. I’m dying to know more about him. I gotta believe that he’s got skeletons in the closet.

BK: Is it his skeletons that get to you most?

AD: I think so. I was recently at a diner, sitting next to a guy who clearly came in every day and had some sort of relationship with everyone who worked there. On the surface, it seemed completely normal, but then, when you think about it, it’s not normal. There are a lot of places to eat! What is it about this guy that he’s got this Norman Rockwell attitude toward this diner, where he’s all, “I know everybody here, I have my paper, and I’ve always got a few things to throw out at the waitress”? And the waitress is busy! She’s got other responsibilities. She can’t hear your 50 observations about what’s on the news. Here’s a guy trying to live in a certain type of world, which seems to be an old-fashioned concept of what life is like, but there’s another side to it which is, “Why are you not eating at any of the other restaurants in town? And why do you think these people are your friends?” I’d love to know how much he tips them. Does he think they’re friends and he doesn’t have to tip? And I’d love to know how the staff really feels about him.

BK: Do you ever come close to finding out the answers to any of these questions?

AD: Sure! Here’s one. This is astounding that this happened. I was picking up my car, which was being serviced, and the guy who worked at the service center was flirting with a female customer. He was making awful jokes, she’s tolerating it, and at some point — and I don’t even know how he got into this — he starts saying, “You know, I used to be in a heavy metal band.” The guy’s in his 50s. And he says, “We used to open for a band called Iron Maiden. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of them. A friend of mine came to see us open for Maiden once and he said, ‘You guys were so wonderful! I loved it so much.’ I asked him, ‘How many people were on the stage when we were playing?’ and he says, ‘I gotta tell ya, I don’t know.’ And that’s when I realized I was on the wrong path. The people out there are so wasted that they don’t even know how many people are playing on stage.” This guy’s working at a garage, fixing cars, and he’s created this world view where he’s touring in a band, opening for Iron Maiden, and this is a terrible waste of time because people in the audience weren’t counting the number of people on stage. Now he’s where he ought to be, which might be true, but this guy, in his 50s, flirting with a girl in a garage, has quickly led us into his weird biography.

BK: Do you want to ask questions when this happens?

AD: At that particular instance, I just really wanted my car. I was so annoyed! I do want to ask questions, unless the person seems really crazy. I like to ask questions when I’m never going to see the person again. I went to a Christmas party in my neighborhood and I was surrounded by people I’d never meet again, so I realized, “I have to find out what everyone here does for a living and what they think about it.” I got a good, long lecture from a guy who works in direct mail marketing. He was thinking, “Man, I must be boring this guy to tears,” and I was just thinking, “Your passion for direct mail marketing is wonderful!”

BK: How long have you had the desire to ask people questions?

AD: I think I’ve always had it. I don’t do it a lot because I think I’m going to meet somebody I can’t get rid of. You have to be in the right frame of mind. There’s something a little dishonest about it because I don’t engage these people in difficult conversation. I didn’t ask the direct mail marketing guy some of the questions I wanted to ask like, “Aren’t you wasting trees?” I’m furious when things arrive in my mailbox that I didn’t ask for. It just fills up my garbage can. I’m just sitting there trying to draw something out, going, “Wow! Wonderful! I agree with you!” I end up feeling a little bad about it sometimes.

BK: How long did you have an interest in humor? Did your parents bring humor into the household, for example?

AD: I don’t know about that. My parents are appreciators of comedy. My parents grew up with George Carlin in Washington Heights, New York in the ‘50s. They had his albums in the house, but they only had them in the house because, with an album like Class Clown, for example, it perfectly described their adolescence and what my parents lived through. They would not have owned comedy albums otherwise. I started listening to them at a very young age — 10 or 11. I would listen to them again and again, memorizing cadences and word choices, and trying to pick up on what made the audience laugh and wondering if they would laugh if I said it.

BK: What sort of lasting impact did those albums have on you?

AD: Class Clown was the one I really listened to the most. I didn’t feel like he was doing comedy. It seemed like he was just telling stories. When I was young, I kind of believed that he never told those stories before, but rather was just up there trying to relate what it was like to grow up in those times and the things he did, and that he was just finding on the fly the things that were hilarious about it. He’d thought about it, obviously, but I don’t think I realized to the extent to which everything was so fully nailed down. I think that has shaped my concept of comedy over the years. I find it difficult to think in terms of setups and punch lines, which is why I go up and tell stories as characters, or I do setups and punch lines as a character. There’s something very appealing to me about the audience not feeling like they’re there to see comedy. I feel like the audience at the Class Clown recordings could have, plausibly, felt that way. “I’m just hearing this guy tell me his life story and just buried in there are beautifully crafted, hilarious jokes.” But they don’t feel like jokes.

BK: When you go on stage as a character, how well-developed, in your mind, is what you’re going to do?

AD: Everything on this album is fully well-developed. I knew we were recording, I wanted it to go well, so I pretty much performed it as close to written as I could. Normally what I do when I create a character or a bit is that I write it out 80%; I memorize 60% or 70%, and I go up and wing it from there. At a certain point, I start to nail down things that work, examine things that lagged, and find ways to punch them up. When I get to the point that I have a fully written bit that I’m performing is when I usually lose interest in it and no longer want to perform it anymore. That’s why putting this out on an album is such a refreshing thing to do, because it’s a way of being able to perform in perpetuity on your stereo. It’s better than me having to do it.

BK: What were you like in school?

AD: I don’t know when I decided I was funny. The first time I ever got a laugh was in nursery school and it was my job to carry a tray of little Dixie Cups full of juice from the kitchen into the classroom. I dropped it by mistake, but everybody laughed thinking it was on purpose, but it was a very satisfying laugh. And I got in trouble. I could have said, “Don’t laugh, it was an accident!” But I loved the laugh so much that I was like, “Yeah, fuck this juice!” From a very young age, I felt like I was funny, and getting laughs was my main focus above and beyond what I was being taught. I was never a true class clown, surely not in the George Carlin sense, because I think his definition is the guy who’s constantly being sent to the principle’s office for being disruptive. I was never willing to go that far. I liked being funny in a way that the teachers could also enjoy. I was combination of teacher’s pet, kiss-up, and class clown, which required a lot of mental energy.

BK: Which of the characters on the album is most like you dropping the juice?

AD: What I enjoy most about the dropping the juice situation was that I didn’t mean for it to be funny, but everyone thought it was, and then I take credit for it even at my own expense just because I love the laugh. The perfect “Drop the Juice” bit on here might be Shooter’s “Bon Voyage” set, where we hear him talking about how excited he is about taking his comedy around the country, which is perhaps the moment where a four-year-old boy has a tray of Dixie cups filled with juice that he’s proud to be carrying into the classroom, and then we start hearing his jokes and we know, but he doesn’t know, that these jokes are not going to work. And that’s the moment everyone is covered in juice.

BK: Did you inject humor into your assignments at school?

AD: I got to the point in high school where I was a very bad student because I got to the point where I would not do something that completely disinterested me. I guess you could say I had no work ethic or discipline. What I was mainly interested in was doing comedy, so if I couldn’t find a way to make the assignment at least somewhat amusing to me, I wasn’t interested in it. And you can’t make math funny. So yes, I was always writing comical book reports on the Red Badge of Courage. It was the only way to keep me engaged. Oh, and are you familiar with Andy Blitz?

BK: Yes.

AD: We were buddies in high school. We were actually a sketch duo. We put a lot of our work on tape, and if there’s ever a time when we’re in LA at the same time with enough notice, we want to get together and screen our comedy sketches from high school.

BK: You grew up in Ridgewood, New Jersey?

AD: Yes. It’s an idyllic and very old-fashioned sort of suburb. There’s a right side of the tracks and the not-as-right side of the tracks in Ridgewood. I’m not going to call it the wrong side of the tracks because even those people are doing okay. We lived on the not-as-right side; our neighbors were teachers and cops.

BK: Did you see a lot of chipper people in your community?

AD: A lot of my characters would feel right at home at Ridgewood. There’s a small business district with no chain stores. I’m sure a lot of people there were nuts, if not absolutely crazy. If you choose to live in a town like Ridgewood, you’re choosing, to some extent, to walk into a Norman Rockwell painting, and nobody fits there. Everybody gets angry and has crazy fits in their house that their neighbors can hear. Everyone gets into a stupid argument downtown over a parking space. And it all seems incongruous in such a town setting. I also spent a lot of time at town council meetings and really seeing people at their worst, which is wonderful. I recommend it to anybody who lives in a small enough town. You see people involved in their civic hobbies, making boring proclamations into the public record of how well their fundraiser went, while others go on racist rants. People have paranoid delusions and they show up with something to get off their chests about the different races in town, how they can’t all possibly get along so people should stop coming to this country… The town council is the perfect place for people who are furious about something that affects only them, and then they want public money to fix their problem.

BK: The idea of going to the town meeting and waiting for something funny to happen makes me think of Mustache TV, your party game, because you take a mustache, put it on a TV, and wait for it to line up in such a way that it’s funny. But is a real mustache funny?

AD: Absolutely not. There’s nothing funny about people with mustaches. Some of them look good and others don’t look good, which is not so funny. But yes, Mustache TV is funny. What’s funny to me about it is how long you usually have to wait before someone on TV is wearing a mustache. And the anticipation is captivating, it really is! If you put it on at a party, people get really invested in it and crowd around the TV, and it’s not boring because they think it’s inevitable. It is going to happen! The chances are so remote that no one would ever wear the mustache, but it takes a while. At some point, you start to laugh because what you’re waiting for with such enthusiasm is so stupid and yet, when it happens, it feels so wonderful. But it shouldn’t because it’s so dumb, but it does!

BK: Do you ever feel the same way when you’re people-watching?

AD: I do, but it’s not as palpable. I can’t think of a time when I met someone who wasn’t showing me what’s funny about them but I knew it was there. But we’ve probably all talked to someone that’s made us think, “This guy’s a character, but I’m not sure how! Let’s keep going until we find it!”