Park & Go

Chris Farley, John Belushi, Mitch Hedberg, and Lenny Bruce. These comedians lost their lives too soon because of their addictions. This Friday, January 20th at 7:00 pm at the Rococo Theatre, comedian and recovering addict Jesse Joyce will be headlining a benefit show for The Bridge at Cornhusker Place, a substance abuse treatment program here in Lincoln.

Joyce’s career began in Pittsburgh in 1998, but he has since moved out to New York. He was very close friends with comedian Greg Giraldo, who died in 2010 from an overdose. He was with the family in the hospital at the time.

Joyce was a semifinalist on NBC’s Last Comic Standing, he has appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and has been a writer for the Comedy Central Roasts of David Hasselhoff, Joan Rivers, Larry the Cable Guy, Bob Saget and Flavor Flav, as well as the TBS Roast of Cheech and Chong.

Read on for a candid Q&A with Jesse, who tells us about his work, his life and his upcoming show.

● Where are you calling from today?

Jesse: Right at the moment, I’m in Casper, Wyoming. Seems like a random place to be, right? I was in Cheyenne last night and then I got a show in Powell, Wyoming tonight, head back to Cheyenne for another gig tomorrow, and then off to Lincoln for you guys.

● Will this be your first time in Nebraska?

Jesse: No. I’ve been there a couple times. I’ve been to Omaha once and then I was actually in the Great American Comedy Festival in Norfolk a few years ago when they did it for the first time, it’s pretty cool because they celebrate Johnny Carson who lived there. The guy that books for Letterman is the one who picks the comedians for that and supposedly it’s supposed to be comedians that Carson would’ve liked. The year I did it, Dick Cavett got the award, which was super cool because I got to hang out with Dick Cavett. Yeah, that whole town doesn’t have very many people in it so it was overrun by comics from New York and LA so it was pretty cool.

● The Bridge at Cornhusker Place is a substance abuse treatment facility here in Lincoln, and you’ll be performing at 7:00 pm on Friday at the Rococo Theatre to benefit their program. I understand you were really great friends with Greg Giraldo, so as someone who’s gone through an addiction and seen what it can do to people you really care about, what does it mean to be able to headline a benefit event like this?

Jesse: You know it’s really awesome, I’ve done things like this before and it’s so much more gratifying in a way to do standup with this being the theme and having it be for people in recovery. The show is open to everybody, but it’s got that kind of a target demo to it. A lot of the people that come to these shows are bust-ins from rehab. Nobody quits drinking on a high note, so there’s not a lot of funny s*** going on in the first three weeks of sobriety. They’ve been through a lot and so it’s kind of cool for them to see that I’m able to laugh at it and make fun of it and alleviate some of the attention from the problem. That’s my favorite type of humor, laughing at something that’s particularly dark, which is kind of what Giraldo did too. That’s why I think taking something sort of dark and traumatic like addiction and making it funny is a really cool thing to do.

● What would you say was your wake-up call to the addiction-driven life you lived before?

Jesse: I got arrested, that’s what it was. There’s no gray area, it was pretty clear to me. I got a DUI, which, I’m the first dude in my family to get arrested for anything and we’re not “get arrested” type of people necessarily. That’s not really a wake-up call for a lot of people, but for me, I knew I had a problem for a long time and was just waiting for someone or something to intervene, so the DUI was definitely the thing I needed. According to the report at the time, when I got arrested, I thanked the cop for arresting me, and subsequently every year on my anniversary, I call that state trooper and thank him for arresting me, which for the first couple years, he thought was really weird, but now I think he kind of expects the call.

● Do you find that you have to tailor your routine for events like this?

Jesse: I do talk about my addiction a lot, and what a d**** I used to be when I drank to any audience generally, but I do have a lot of recovery-specific material at events like this just because it’s more appropriate. I’ll feel out the vibe though if I get the sense that most of the crowd isn’t in recovery themselves. A lot of the time people come because they have a family member that has an addiction, so they’re familiar with it, but I can usually get a read on whether or not the direction I take is working based on what the crowd is telling me.

● You’re also affiliated with Comics on Duty, can you explain a little about what that is?

Jesse: It’s basically like USO (United Service Organizations), but specifically with stand-up comedians. USO books Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders and Kid Rock and people like that, but Comics on Duty specifically books comedians overseas to do shows for the troops. For a little over a month, I did a six-country tour like two years ago before they closed Iraq. So I did shows in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Qatar and Kuwait, and I did an aircraft carrier too; it was kind of like all over the Middle East. It was pretty neat. There’s a lot of demand for you when you’re over there, so a lot of the time, you don’t know where you’re going, but you’ll get a call that morning saying some base has down time in the afternoon and they’ll ask if we can fly out to do a show. You end up doing like three shows over the course of a day at different bases. I got to ride in a lot of Black Hawk helicopters, which was cool.

● You’ve written for a lot of the Comedy Central Roasts and other award shows, but you’ve also toured the nation and other countries doing stand-up. What’s more difficult, coming up with bits for your routine or coming up with jokes for a roast?

Jesse: The roasts are like my favorite thing to do. Coming up with material in a way is like making your own life funny and it’s cool and sometimes it’s hard to get a perspective on that, but figuring out what makes David Hasselhoff a d**** is not nearly as hard being introspective and figuring out what’s wrong with me, you know? Like it’s a lot easier to find faults with Gary Busey. But it’s fun; it’s like a puzzle because you have all these random things to compare, like someone will say ‘Flavor Flav and Warren Sapp, go ahead and make that funny,’ so it’s a fun challenge. I actually wrote a joke that made Melissa Rivers walk out of the Joan Rivers roast. They had to stop taping for ten minutes to try to get her back, and she only agreed to go back if she could say something in the microphone, and she just went up and called Greg Giraldo an a****** and that was it. I found out that Joan Rivers and Michael Jackson had the same plastic surgeon, yeah that’s a fact, so the joke went like this: ‘You guys have a lot of things in common, you both spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to look like a creepy old lady, you’re both only popular now that you’re dead and you both raised a chimp.’ So that was the joke, which, I was super proud of.

● Have you ever dabbled in improv?

Jesse: The short answer is yes. I went through the whole Upright Citizens Brigade training program back in 2000. My improv teacher was Rob Cordry, who’s in a bunch of famous stuff now (Hot Tub Time Machine, Children’s Hospital), but he taught me a lot about improv. I think stand-up is more of my thing, because when it goes badly, it’s all my fault, but when it goes great, I don’t have to share credit with a bunch of other d****, so that’s what I like about it. But you use improv in stand-up quite a bit as far as talking to the crowd and thinking on your feet when something bizarre happens, which tends to happen at recovery shows specifically because the people who’ve only been sober for 23 days don’t exactly know how to f****** be in public anymore, so I don’t blame them. But random outbursts happen, so that’s what having an improv background is helpful for. A lot of the times when people chime in, it’s the same s***. They think they’re being very clever, but it’s at a point when everyone will talk during your set and where one of three things will come out of one of six different guys with a mustache at the same time. You know when it’s going to happen, so while it is spontaneous, you can kind of see it three steps ahead, and you can recognize who’s the problem already before anything happens.

● Was there a comedian when you were younger that you idolized?

Jesse: Not to be hokey, but Giraldo was one of them. He was one of my favorites when I was starting to get into stand-up, so it ended up being the coolest thing that we got to tour together and we got as close as we did. Dave Chapelle was another guy. Jon Stewart definitely back when he was doing stand-up, not Daily Show Jon Stewart, but stand-up Jon Stewart. Norm McDonald was a guy I loved too, and Bill Hicks, but recently Louis CK is a guy that I really like. He’s kind of just come out recently and hit his stride, and he’s kind of untouchable now.

● How has the comedy scene changed since you started out?

Jesse: I feel like the internet has provided a lot more ways for people to discover you. It’s kind of a blessing and a curse in the sense that it seems to have distinctly cluttered the playing field a lot. Now any jack*** with a video camera can now claim to be a comedian, but it’s good also because it gets people more exposure that wouldn’t normally have the opportunity. I randomly sell CDs online all the time to random places like Australia and Poland, and I’m like, who the hell knows me in Poland? I did a show in Croatia last year, and that only came up because the dude who runs the club saw me on the internet. Stand-up is getting more popular than when I started in 1998. The height of it was the eighties, but then it kind of crashed and burned because it got oversaturated, so by the time I was doing it in the late nineties, it was kind of not cool anymore; it was like trying to rock a mullet now. But with things like Last Comic Standing, I think it’s gotten cool again.

● When are we going to see a Comedy Central Presents Jesse Joyce?

Jesse: (laughs) I don’t know man, we’re working on it. That is definitely in the works; it’s one of the main goals of 2012.

● Who are some of the people you’ve had the pleasure of meeting while doing your line of work?

Jesse: Louis CK is definitely one of them, getting to be on the same show as him a couple times has been pretty cool. Dick Cavett like I mentioned earlier, he’s kind of a legend. Meeting Charlie Sheen was kind of interesting because I grew up watching that guy too. A lot of the people that I’ve met through the roasts end up being a neat experience. I guess it’s mostly comics because it’s such a tight-knit business. I’ve never gotten to meet the President; that would be awesome. I never wanted to be a baseball player when I was a kid, I wanted to be a comic, so all the guys that I get excited to meet are comics. I’m helping Dave Attell write a thing right now and quietly, that really tickles me because I grew up thinking Attell was amazing.

● You’re in an upcoming movie called Stags that’s due out February 28th. What’s it about?

Jesse: It’s Sex in the City for dudes, meets Swingers, if you will. It’s about four permanent mid-thirties bachelor guys who don’t want to commit to anything and it follows their exploits. It’s really funny, and dark. I play an alcoholic comedian in the movie, which is not much of a stretch.

● After the show Friday, where are you off to next?

Jesse: I get to go home to New York for a couple days which is nice. Next week I’m doing Red Eye on Fox News there in New York. In February, I’m going to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, so it’ll be a nice time of year to go up there, a pleasant negative 16 degrees or whatever.

● Where can people get your CD?

Jesse: It’s called Pro Joyce, you can get it on iTunes or on my website jessiejoyce.com. It was in the top twenty on iTunes for awhile, so I guess people dig it.

● Thanks so much for your time Jesse, and good luck at your show Friday.

Jesse: Thanks for having me, I’m really looking forward to it; I think it’ll be a lot of fun.

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Tickets to the show are $22 plus fees for this 18 and older show. No alcohol will be served. Doors open at 6:00 p.m.

Visit http://www.cornhuskerplace.org to learn more or purchase tickets at http://www.Rococotheatre.com.

All proceeds will benefit The Bridge at Cornhusker Place. Originally formed in 1983 as the community’s detoxification program with 24-hour medical supervision, Cornhusker Place has evolved to become a comprehensive substance abuse treatment provider.  The Bridge at Cornhusker Place offers a range of short-term and longer-term treatments for fathers, sons and brothers in our community struggling with alcohol and other substance addictions.  Learn more at http://www.CornhuskerPlace.org or by calling (402) 477-3951.

Joyce’s CD, Pro Joyce, that came out in 2011 is available on iTunes or through his website here http://www.jessejoyce.com/buy-cd/