The Making of Zach Galifianakis

From The Making of Zach Galifianakis
By JOHN WRAY
Published: May 28, 2009
Article found in its entirety here.



On a blustery Wednesday night this past December, the newly opened TriBeCa branch of New York’s 92nd Street Y was host to a stand-up comedy show, but you’d never have guessed it from the goings-on backstage. The only people in the modest, disconcertingly spotless greenroom were the opening acts: two smartly dressed, well-spoken, polite comedians in their early 30s, both of whom could have passed for architecture students, or graphic designers, or even grass-roots organizers for the Obama campaign. No entourage was in evidence; marijuana was alluded to, but never actually smoked; gourmet hummus and He’brew ale were partaken of, but only in moderation. And the headlining act, the reason for the capacity crowd buzzing with controlled impatience in the 300-person theater just a few feet down the hall, was not in the greenroom at all. He was crouched just offstage with his back to the curtain, running intently through “Joy to the World” with a trio of young tuba players he’d recruited that morning from Craigslist, looking less like one of the great new hopes of American comedy than the leader of a severely underfunded marching band. He didn’t look like a comic at all, in fact, and he certainly wasn’t acting like one. Which, as it turned out, was precisely the point.

“What I call the ‘geography’ of a room — its size, its layout, the overall feel of the place — really determines how far you can push things,” the comic in question, a cherubic man with a fiery red beard and the distinctly unshowbizlike name of Zach Galifianakis, told me in the greenroom a short time before. “I love to do shows in unlikely places, because the audience’s expectations are less fixed. If you’re going on right after a guy with suspenders and a skinny, 1980’s-style comedy tie, who’s been striking crazy poses — doing the same type of material that worked in 1991 — there’s no space for trying unconventional stuff. A place like this, on the other hand, is more of a blank slate.” Galifianakis took a deep, unsteady breath (the first sign of nervousness he’d shown) and stared down intently at the tips of his New Balance sneakers. “Which is lucky for me, because I have no idea what I’m going to say to those people out there.”

Coming from most other performers — even most other stand-up comics — such a statement might seem coy, if not outright preposterous; from Galifianakis, it comes close to being credible. When Galifianakis hit the 92Y stage in his customary jogging shoes and corduroy blazer, instead of breaking the crowd in by leading off with a few jokes, he regarded them blankly for a moment, then handed out a fistful of short yellow pencils and white slips of paper. “I don’t know what to say to you guys tonight, so I’m taking requests,” he announced. “Write down a song you feel like hearing.” The front tables looked to be a mix of stand-up fans and 92Y regulars reserving their judgment, but the slips were duly filled out and collected. Galifianakis rifled through the slips as he walked over to the baby grand piano at stage right, then stopped short, frowned and looked back at the crowd. “ ‘Joy to the World,’ huh?” he murmured. “I’ll see what I can do.” Then he turned and gestured to someone off stage left.

Suddenly, like a conjuring trick, the trio of tuba players stood center stage, playing a tightly rehearsed rendition of the requested song with businesslike looks on their faces. The reaction of the crowd was a mixture of astonishment, confusion and childlike pleasure at the unlikeliness of what they were seeing; the gag was, essentially, a bait and switch, but with no agenda other than delight. The mood in the room was now closer to that of a sweet-16 party — or, for that matter, a bar mitzvah — than any stand-up show I’d ever been to. Galifianakis looked out at the crowd as the trio played on, beaming as childishly as anyone else in the room. He appeared to have forgotten, along with the audience, that he was the featured performer of the evening. “That’s not really a joke,” a 30ish man just in front of me observed to the woman beside him. She nodded at him and kept laughing.

The considerable cult that has grown up around Galifianakis’s performances over the last few years, both live and on video-sharing sites like YouTube, has done so largely because his routines are, arguably, the most unpredictable in contemporary comedy. A typical hourlong set might meander from carefully composed, conceptual one-liners à la Steven Wright to profanity-drenched tirades against members of the audience to slapstick to solemnly tacky musical interludes (Galifianakis is an able pianist) to Andy Kaufman-esque attacks on the genre that seem less concerned with eliciting laughs from the crowd than with confounding its notions of what comedy or, for that matter, entertainment ought to be.

Perhaps more than anyone else in the business, Galifianakis embodies the rebellion against the outmoded Comedy Club circuit — the exposed brick, the two-drink minimum, the indifferent audience, the “regular guy with an attitude” routine — which has come to be labeled the “indie comedy” movement. “Zach is so conceptual,” Sarah Silverman, who has known and worked with Galifianakis since the mid-’90s, told me. “He’s definitely part of the excitement of this shift, this idea of comedy as art. Whether he’s at his piano, offering deadpan one-liners, or trying out some brand-new conceptual piece — like the ways he uses musicians, or flip-board messages, or the first thing that comes into his head — he is so totally original and thrilling to watch.”