on awkwardness

Galifianakis is especially proud of “Apology,” a two-part bait-and-switch routine he developed a few years earlier. Several years back, performing at a dinner theater in L.A., Galifianakis delivered the following one-liner: “When I get drunk, sometimes my Southern accent comes out, and I say words like ‘y’all’ . . . and ‘nigger.’ ” It went over the way his jokes tend to: an instant of silence, then loud, slightly horrified laughter, sprinkled with the occasional boo. Then it became something more. “The audience was getting very upset — people in the crowd were yelling, ‘You’re a racist,’ ” Galifianakis told me. At this point, he interrupted his act to address a young black woman sitting in the front row. “I said, ‘I want to publicly apologize for this joke,’ ” Galifianakis told me. “I brought the woman up onstage, and I began to read an apology I’d written out, to the tune of Michael Jackson’s ‘Black or White.’ Halfway through it, another black woman came out from backstage, and we did an elaborate dance routine together. That was the close of the show.”

When I asked whether setting up the audience that way was satisfying for a comic — revenge, of a kind, for being misunderstood — Galifianakis surprised me by shaking his head soberly. “That’s one of the great things about comedy: we can — and should — say the things that other people aren’t supposed to say. If we didn’t do that, if we didn’t push against those limits, we’d just be standing around onstage and yelling.”

By that measure, one of the most illuminating moments during Galifianakis’s performance in TriBeCa came when he parted ways, momentarily, with his audience. After performing a few “characters,” like Guy From Queens Who Is Obsessed With Cargo Shorts — a regular bit that changes only in the particulars from show to show — he announced one that seemed to have been made up on the spot: The Kid Who Doesn’t Know, Down In His Living Room, That His Uncle, Who’s Upstairs, Has Suddenly Gone Deaf. Like many of Galifianakis’s characters, the intro was more elaborate than the performance itself, which consisted of Galifianakis shouting, ‘Uncle David? Uncle Da-vid!’ in an increasingly nervous little kid’s voice. The audience appeared more puzzled than amused, which isn’t especially unusual in the course of a typical Galifianakis set; what was unusual was Galifianakis’s response. The ‘Kid’ sketch went on so long that a number of people in the crowd grew noticeably restless — and then it went on even longer. Much longer. Even the hard-core fans in the room seemed to get a bit uncomfortable. By the time he finally finished, everyone in the room had experienced the awkwardness — and even, to a small degree, the terror — of improvised stand-up firsthand. When I asked Galifianakis about the “Kid” later, he said it was his favorite moment of the night.

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