Matt Braunger, whose stand-up you might have caught on CONAN, The Tonight Show, The Late Show with David Letterman, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, or his Comedy Central special Shovel Fighter last year, will be performing two shows at Comedy Bar this Saturday, November 16th. (8 and 10:30pm. Buy tickets here, $20.)
We interviewed him.
Are these shows you’re doing in Toronto part of a tour?
It’s nice to be at the point in my career where I can be picky about where I go, and I don’t have to be staying in a Holiday Inn off a turnpike in Southern Florida. You can call it a tour…I wouldn’t say I’m always on tour, but I’m on the road at least two weekends a month. It’s a tour that’s been going on with varying material for about six years, if you want to look at it that way. I’ve done specific themed tours, like touring with a friend of mine supporting his book.
Which friend was that?
We just wrapped up the East coast portion, we’re about to do the west coast portion – are you familiar with the Twitter character @dadboner?
Yeah.
Mike Burns, who wrote that Twitter feed and got a book deal out of it (Power Moves: Livin’ the American Dream, USA Style), he and I went on tour and he hosted it and we had a couple of local comedians who would go between he and I. Everybody reads out of the book at the end of their set, more often than not at random. We ask audience members to call out page numbers, and people invariably yell out “69!” and we have to say “no, not that one.” It’s a blast watching comedians of all different ethnicities and sexes reading as Karl, this ruined middle-aged man.
This has been an ongoing tour, kinda, but you’ve had a Comedy Central special in the last couple of years or so…
Yeah things are always happening along the way. I did a half-hour one in 2009, then an hour one about a year ago. Now I have a new hour that I’m gonna be making in to a special hopefully in the next four or five months.
There’s sort of this new industry standard that seems to have been set lately where everyone has to have a new hour every year. Do you conform to that or don’t you care about it?
I think we all create at our own pace; I’m a big proponent of the Ernest Hemingway adage, “it’s not what you leave in, it’s what you leave out.” I would rather have an hour in a year-and-a-half or two years that’s rock-solid than an hour that’s good but not great in a year. That was really set by Louis CK who’s the Superman of stand-up comedy; he pretty much owns stand-up right now and for good reason, he’s amazing. He makes it look effortless. The downside to him getting up there and talking and it being hilarious – not that he doesn’t workshop his stuff all the time – is other comedians think they can do the same thing. Louis can do that because he’s got it down to a science, it’s just a second-nature thing to him. But then I’m sure there are comedians who could come up with a new hour every six months, it just depends.
I want to get an answer to this question, cos newer comics might appreciate it: do you think there’s intrinsic value to talking in to a microphone, or do you think it’s a waste of time if it’s to a crappy room where nobody’s paying attention and you’re really just ambushing a restaurant of, like, six people? I mean for a comic’s own development.
I think anytime you get on stage, it’s always worthwhile. You never do not learn, whether it’s a great set or a shitty one, you’re better off than you would be if you were sitting on a couch and trying to write. I had a friend I did comedy with back in Chicago and years later he said he was thinking about getting back in to it, he lived in this rural area of Ohio, and he said there’s nowhere to go up so he was just practicing at home and I was like “that’s not doing it, man!” It’s about the give and take of the moment, and you kind of reading the audience. That’s one thing I love about stand-up is you can’t recreate it. Even like comedy specials, I love watching them, but it’s not as good as being there and seeing it live; with stand-up the audience is as much a part of it as the comedian.
They’re your instrument, nearly.
Absolutely. You can’t fake it, it’s not something you can imitate.
I’ve seen a few of your sets on late-night shows like Letterman and Conan. What is the difference between that and every other stand-up format? Because that is so old-school.
Sure, it’s so regulated. They’re like you can’t do more than four-and-a-half minutes. You have to submit it, you have to write the whole thing out, it has to go through Standards and Practices. It’s a nerve wracking thing, because you barely have enough time with the audience for them to know you and feel comfortable with you. It’s very unique, very different to doing a special or anything else.
That’s funny because a new comic doing five-minute sets every night would be so intimidated by the thought of doing an hour, but a comic who regularly does that is intimidated by the thought of having to do five minutes.
I think it can be tricky for anyone who doesn’t do one-liners. Like myself and a lot of people are very anecdotal, how do you tell a good story or two? I did The Tonight Show and started out with a quick joke then used the rest of the time doing this long joke I had. I don’t regret it, it went well, but looking back I kind of wish I’d done a couple of different things and not just had that one theme.
You don’t see that so much now, one-liner comics, the only one I can think of is Anthony Jeselnik. Are there any you know of you’d recommend who are working today?
Jim Hamilton. He’s pretty much all one-liners. He has an album out called Poems about the Sea. That’s very funny.
Thanks for chatting!
Thanks, take care!