TV INTERVIEW: JOHN CORBETT
From the North to the City to the United States, Actor Remains Eligible, Thoughtful & Fun
To complete Buzzine’s series of interviews filmed around the creation of the second season of The Green Room with Paul Provenza, it seems rather appropriate for us to have a late-night chat with a man who has been friends with Mr. Provenza for the more than 15 years, since they starred together on Northern Exposure. Since that breakout role, John Corbett has gone on to even greater onscreen success both by getting happily married (in My Big Fat Greek Wedding) or not quite getting unhappily married (in Sex and the City). He currently is challenged and married onscreen again, this time to Toni Collette (or technically to many different Toni Collettes) on Showtime’s The United States of Tara. John sat down to talk at the end of the night in The Green Room’s green room at The Vanguard in Hollywood, California with Buzzine’s Nicole Rayburn, and he tried to sum up all that we had seen so far…
Nicole Rayburn: Well, that was a fun shoot! Are you staying all week to check out all the shows?
John Corbett: I’m gonna be here every night. Paul [Provenza] is an old friend of mine, and I’m so proud of what he’s doing and what he’s created, and it’s great. It’s definitely a schooling with some of the pros. It’s great. When I was a kid, you had a thing called a record player, and you had records. This was in the early ‘70s. And if you liked comedy, you had Richard Pryor records, you had George Carlin records, and you had Cheech & Chong records. And those first two are gone now, but we still have Cheech & Chong, and it was great to be hanging in the same room with Tommy Chong tonight. That was a real treat.
NR: It was awesome: It’s a really cool show because you get insight to conversations that you would never see…
JC: Yeah. Comedians have ten minutes, an hour, and hour and a half to get on stage, and their job is to make you laugh, but this is a “how do you feel about the world?” sort of thing… And Garry Shandling, earlier – it was a real treat to watch where… since Larry Sanders came to an end, where his life has gone and what he thinks and feels, and how he approaches life now.
NR: You got to see a side that you wouldn’t see in any other circumstance...
JC: He’s not gonna go on The Tonight Show and have an hour to talk about just trying to be present always. He’s gonna go on for five minutes and try to make people laugh, and that’s what he should do on The Tonight Show. But this is a great forum.
NR: Do you think there’s any expectation – because it is still in front of a live audience – to still be ‘on’ in the guest’s minds?
JC: These are highly sophisticated minds… You watch The Office and you see Steve Carell do that, “That’s what she said” thing every time it’s available… Well, the caliber of comedians that are down there having a conversation aren’t gonna go for that cheap joke, but their minds still click like that, and they can just do it all day long. It’s easy to segue into a punch line or a reference. I think they probably fight the urge not to do it in a situation like that more than they let it out, but when they let it out [laughs], it’s enormously funny…
NR: Bo [Burnham] was talking earlier about certain types and certain rules of comedy. To wrap things up for for us all tonight - what do you feel is a ‘must-have ’ in comedy for you?
JC: Oh…! Boy, that’s a good one…
NR: I like that response! [Laughs]
JC: Listen, have you ever been at a dinner party and heard an old man tell a too-long joke that had a punch-line that should have come three minutes earlier, that you knew wasn’t going to be funny when it finally arrived, and it wasn’t and you threw him a nice courtesy laugh? You don’t have to do that in a comedy club. You’re in the dark and you just…well I do anyway, most people do… except maybe you’re in the front row and the light is there and you make the comedian feel good: You laugh when it’s funny.
Everybody has their own barometer for what’s funny, and I know it’s funny when it sort of bursts out of me like a machine gun and I can’t control it, and I feel a little embarrassed that I laughed like that, instead of going, “Ah ha ha ha, Frank. Good one. She didn’t have a head. Get it, everyone?”
The second season of ‘The Green Room with Paul Provenza’ premieres eight new 30-minute episodes on Showtime every Thursday night at 11:00 p.m. ET/PT beginning July 14, 2011.
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