Interview with Paul F. Tompkins

Or: How PFT Learned To Stop Playing The Comedy Clubs.

Comedian Paul F. Tompkins. Photo by Liezl Estipona

Paul F. Tompkins performs in Austin on Saturday, June 5th at 8pm & 10pm, at the United States Art Authority, 2906 Fruth Street. For information visit www.coldtownetheater.com.

Paul F. Tompkins: You Should Have Told Me world premieres on Comedy Central on Friday, June 11 at 10pm CST.

Everyone has heard the old showbiz saw, “The show must go on!” But why exactly? As Rita Rudner once explained, “Otherwise the comedian doesn’t get paid.” Party hearty comedy club audiences who are ready to laugh and leave the real world behind for a brief while may not give pause to the travails working comedians must endure. Yet this is not a sob story, hardly. For many comics (particularly younger males), “the road” can be rather romantic with all the traveling, ratty hotels, comedy condos, drink tickets, drugs, hook-ups, and road food. However, anyone who is half-way serious about becoming an original artist and crafting his or her unique comedic voice is generally disabused of any would-be Dean Moriaritis after one winter’s week at the Westward Ho in Grand Forks, North Dakota— where rose-colored glasses get fogged up fast.

For many headlining performers, there are inherent flaws with the comedy club model that even the better rooms cannot avoid: drunken hecklers, the constant selling of things, the settling of tabs during the comic’s set, and having a chunk of the audience who are radio prize whores or rowdy bachelorette parties. In the Aughts (most notably with David Cross and then the “Comedians of Comedy” tour spearheaded by Patton Oswalt), there was a migration of taking stand-up to rock clubs so artists at least knew they would be playing for their fans or like-minded folks. Forty-one year old Paul F. Tompkins has been doing stand-up for nearly twenty-four years (this is not to mention his impressive film, TV, CD, and writing credits). He tried the rock club route but prefers “civilized places where people can sit down like human beings instead of standing around like veal.”

Tompkins, a newlywed and Philadelphia native, has been based in Los Angeles since 1994. He continues to be one of the most talented, unfailingly funny, and most respected American stand-up comedians. He is the consummate “comic’s comic,” even though the few who are tagged with that label will roll their eyes and do their best to dodge such a notion. The fact that Paul F. Tompkins isn’t a household name, yet, has no bearing on the scope of his brilliance. He is a gifted raconteur whose facial expressions and body language organically further the words along. He shares the effortlessness and core decency and joviality of Bill Cosby and Bob Newhart. However, Tompkins’ onstage persona is uniquely his: a mix of charismatic smarty-pants sarcasm, quick wit, and absurdity.

As evidenced on his CD Freak Wharf (released in December of 2009 on ASPECIALTHING Records), Tompkins is moving towards more spontaneous, conversational, and intimate material than the observational style which had long been his stock in trade. And therein lies the conflict of being an artist operating on his own terms and venues that sell Jell-O shots. Enter the “Tompkins 300” social media campaign. As his web site succinctly puts it: “A man! A plan! Several Facebook groups! Panama? Maybe eventually!”

I recently spoke to Mr. Paul F. Tompkins by phone at his home in Los Angeles prior to his two shows at The United States Art Authority on June 5^th.  And I would like to briefly comment to you, gentle reader, about the use of [Laughs] in this transcript. I usually avoid this device to indicate laughter because I think it can be annoying and more so, it is grossly one-sided. I was doing the lion’s share of laughing but there isn’t really the means to demonstrate that. I’ve elected to include the instances where there was more than a passing guffaw since “print” strips away the context from the tone and inflection of Tompkins’ voice. Something can read as being rather stern when that was not in fact the case. Thank you. Happy reading.

Photo by Rex Bullington.

Steve Birmingham: What clinched the Pulitzer Prize for Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire was the Ethel Barrymore Theatre’s steaming baskets of seasoned curly fries yet you seem to have a bold new theory on the performing arts?

Paul F. Tompkins: [A pause then laughter] Yes! I’m saying it’s time to go in a new direction, Tennessee Williams. You don’t have to settle anymore for such conditions [laughs]. Yeah, I had just gotten fed up with the comedy club system. The way it works is that you get booked in a club and you hope the people will show up to see you. You hope that enough people will show up that if you have a little bit of notoriety, like I do, that enough people will know about it, that you’re going to be in their city at that time. And then you hope the comedy club will do a good enough job of letting people know that you’re going to be there. Then, you have to go on morning radio which is usually the most popular and listened to radio show in a given area and hope that those people will like what you sound like on the radio, will have heard of you perhaps, will think you’re funny enough on the radio if they’ve never heard of you, and will be free and will be still awake by the time you’re going to be performing. So that just seemed like not that great of a system to me anymore. And the older I got, the more tired I got by just the traveling itself, much less all the rigmarole that goes along with it. So with the dawn of the social networking age, it just seemed like “There must be a better way to do this.” I’m able to reach people directly now through Twitter, Facebook, and all these different platforms so if I’m able to talk to these people and tell them, “Hey, I’m going to be where you live,” maybe there’s a better way to do the bookings themselves, if I can get the word out. I wish there was a way I could circumvent the radio. I wish there was a way I could circumvent having to stay in places for three or four nights because that’s how the guarantee works, that’s the deal that the club works out and that’s how I make the most money. “I wish there was a better way to do this.” Well, as I’m thinking this and just kind of doing it and not being that happy about it, I do a gig in Atlanta, I’m going to record a special for Comedy Central and it’s [at] this tiny little intimate theater. I’m doing more personal material; I think, “This is great.” I’m going to play this small place and do this very personal, story-oriented material. I get to Atlanta the day before I am supposed to record and the tickets are not sold-out. Now, I’m going to record this thing over four nights in a seventy-four seat theater and none of the shows are sold-out. So I take to Twitter and I say “Hey, essentially I need three hundred people to come out and see me over the course of four nights and eight shows in Atlanta.” Three hundred people, seventy-four per show. Please, come out and spread the word.  So people are spreading the word and retweeting it and there’s a big push to get people to come see the show. So in the midst of that, a comedian that I’d never met before, Bob Kerr from Toronto, writes to me and says, “Why don’t you come and do a show in Toronto?” It’s a unique frustration when you’re trying to get people to see you in one place and somebody says, “Hey why don’t you come here, where I am?” It’s maddening because I’m anxious about this; I need people to be there. I need an audience to do this show. So I wrote back to him, “Surely,” sarcastically and angrily, “you get 300 people to say they’ll see me in Toronto and I’ll do a show in Toronto.” This guy, I think almost immediately, started a Facebook group called “I Wanna See Paul F. Tompkins in Toronto!” And he outlined it to everyone on this page as, “Look Paul F. Tompkins says if we get 300 people together who are committed to seeing a show (like they will definitely see a show) he will book a show here. So if you’re going to join this group, you gotta really mean it that you want to see this show and you’ll go to a show. It can’t be that you like the idea of it. Don’t join it just because you like joining groups and you think you’re helping me out. If you’re joining this group it is because you are pledging, yes, I am going to see a show.” So within a couple weeks he got it up to 300 and he tweeted me and said, “Hey, we hit 300.” So I said, “Well, I’m as good as my word, I’ll book a show.” I explored a few different venues then decided on the Rivoli theatre because it has such a great comedic history in Toronto, it’s where Kids in the Hall got their start. So I got really excited about this. There’s a little trepidation because I’d never done this before. What was this going to be like, you know? So I booked one night, two shows. I flew up there, I was coming from the East Coast but it was a bit of a long flight and I got in and I was really tired from traveling. I had just taped the night before for John Oliver’s [New York] Stand-up Show for Comedy Central. I was still kind of getting used to the time zone, I had flown in to do that taping and then the next morning got on a plane to Toronto. So, I just went to the hotel and crashed and got up and went to the show. It was packed. I met Bob, who was going to open for me, and Katie Crown (another very funny Toronto comic) who was doing time on the show. And the shows were amazing. It was one of the best nights of my entire career and I thought, “Okay, this is maybe the answer to my prayers.” Maybe this is how I can do things from now on— to get the audience in place first and take a gamble that way. The safe bet, which is I’m definitely guaranteed some money and there’s going to be an audience there, if not an audience that’s necessarily all there to see me. And that was the comedy club way. This way, I’m saying, “Okay, there’s enough interested in this [city] that I’m taking the gamble that, yeah, enough people are going to show up to make the show worthwhile.” And so I posted a blog about it on my web site and on Facebook saying, “Hey, this is how I’d like to do things. So if you want to see me in your city, start one of these groups. That way I’ll know that people want to see me in different places.” So the groups started springing up and they’re still springing up and they’re still adding people. As of this conversation I’m getting ready to do the sixth city in Madison, Wisconsin. And so far so good. The only two disappointments, just in terms of turnout, were Memphis and Dallas. Dallas, in particular, ended up being an amazing show but just not that many people came out… but the show ended with a standing ovation. They were an amazing audience that was with me every single word. They laughed at everything that I intended them to laugh at. I mean there are some little asides I throw out there that are mostly for me (I still like them, they still make me laugh so they’re in there) but not every crowd laughs at them, and this Dallas crowd laughed at every single thing and really got it and were following me every step of the way. It was an amazing show. The last ones I did were in Seattle; it was two nights– one show each night. Both of those ended in standing ovations. I really made a connection with the audience, which is what I’m trying to do and keeping it to smaller venues. If it’s a really small place that seats 100 to 200, I’ll do maybe two shows if there’s enough people but to play a place that’s 200 to 300 seats is perfect. It’s big enough where you have a nice size crowd but small enough where there’s still a connection that can be made with the audience. And I’m going to continue to do it this way and hopefully it’ll continue to work out.

SB: It’s very exciting for fans and just as an aside, so you don’t feel bad, Dallas is the place where dreams go to die.

PFT: [Laughs] As far as a comedy town, what I had known was there’s a Dallas Improv, you know, and really no other precedent for a place to play except this place that I ended up playing which was too big. It was a place called the Lakewood and people said, “Oh, Louis C.K. was here and Kathy Griffin and Patton [Oswalt] and Zach [Galifianakis].” Well, okay, those guys are definitely going to sell out a big place but I’m not going to. And they said, “Oh, no, no. They can shrink it to make it smaller.” Which, as far as I could see was not done [Laughs]. It still seemed every bit like a 700 seat theater. I saw all those other seats clear as a bell. So I don’t know if they just expected more people or I don’t understand what “shrinking the room” means.

SB: You’ve seen stand-up go through a few cycles: a boom, a bust, and re-boot. How much longer do you think the traditional comedy club will be relevant? They’re certainly still vital to upstarts and young comedians.

PFT: I don’t think they’re going anywhere. It makes it very simple; it’s a “comedy” club. So if you feel like seeing comedy, that’s the place to go. Papering the room** is really where, I think, these places make most of their money. It’s the movie theater model. The comedy is not really where the money comes from; it’s the booze. It’s the food. It’s the concessions. I think that as long as they can get people in there with the promise of comedy and they can sell their drink and nachos and stuff, then they’ll make money. It’ll be a success. As long as you’re making more money than you’re spending, you’re always doing well. And they can always keep getting people in there. If you give someone free tickets to something… it’s like “We have free tickets to a show that will make you laugh. Do you want to go see it?” Well why not, you know? If you have free time and free tickets, you got nothing to lose. If you were going to go out and have some drinks anyway, that’s just a different place to have drinks. It’ll be a successful model for a long time to come. I don’t think it’s going anywhere. For me, it became an unsuccessful model. As my stuff became quieter, I needed a quieter place to go. I needed to have a situation where I didn’t have to win over a bunch of people who had a different idea of what comedy was than what I do.  There are comics that try to tell you that there are rules to comedy. That this is what comedy is and it doesn’t matter how drunk or dumb the audience is, if you’re a true comic you can win over anybody. Well, that’s absurd.

**[“Papering the room” is the fairly common practice where nightclubs widely dispense free tickets via myriad channels to ensure having “asses in seats.”]

SB: I agree.

Freak Wharf CD Cover. Painting by Jeff Ramirez.

PFT: I’m doing my comedy for everybody. I want everybody to laugh at it but that doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody is going to laugh at it. I can only do what makes me laugh and what I think is funny. I don’t have a whole other act that I can do for drunk or dumb people. For me, it was: well, I don’t have anything to prove to other comedians certainly, so I’m going to try to find places where I can go and an audience feels the same way that I do— where they might like to have a better experience than a comedy club. Because, let me tell you something, the people that like me, I think, don’t like going to see comedy in comedy clubs. I went to a place in New York where I had performed many times, and it’s one of these places where the club treats the comics great. It has a reputation for treating the comics so nicely. And then I went there as an audience member to see somebody else’s show— a comedy review, it wasn’t stand-up. And it’d been a while since I had played the place, and the staff, there’s a lot of turnover at places like this, so the people at the front did not know who I was, they were not expecting me. It’s like they were not handed a headshot, like, [mockingly] “Hey, this guy is going to be attending a show tonight.” So I walked in there and nobody knew who I was and the treatment I got as an audience member was horrible. It was horrible. I was mortified because of course all I thought was, “Man, every time I’ve played here and friends of mine have come to see me this is how they were treated! And fans of mine, people that I don’t know, that shouldn’t have to put up with this because they don’t know me personally— this is how they were treated too.” I asked friends of mine, “Hey, has this been your experience when you’ve gone to this club?” And they couldn’t look me in the eye. They kind of looked down and [softly replied], “Yeah, yeah that’s how it is there.”

SB: Wasn’t it in Seinfeld’s movie [Comedian] where he popped in that club and then posed the question, “Who do you have to be…

PFT: Yeah, I think, “How famous do you have to be so people won’t talk during your show?” That was at Governor’s on Long Island. I think he’s on record as one of these guys that says, “If you’re famous that only buys you so much time. That might buy you five minutes but then it’s got to be funny after that.” Those are the same guys who immediately [say], “How famous do I have to be so everybody will shut up [Laughs] and listen to my set?” Um, apparently a little more famous Jerry. But I understand what he’s talking about. That’s not something that I’ve had to deal with— overcoming my own fame in order to get people to pay attention. To me, it’s like, “How much of a human being do you have to be in order for people to shut up long enough to hear what you have to say?” The idea that, “Hey, you just have to deal with it. You just have to tolerate it.” Like, you’re going to go to places where the people are assholes and you’re supposed to win them over. Why? Why does it have to be that way? Just because it has been that way and because people put up with it, why do I have to put up with it?

SB: You can’t heckle a symphonic orchestra and somehow get away with it but stand-up is relegated to this “entertainment” notion where the comics come with the drinks kind of thing.

PFT: There are so many misconceptions about heckling. As you say, there’s no other situation where it’s acceptable to just talk through a performance. There’s no other situation. In a movie, where the people on the screen can’t hear you, it’s rude to the other people around you to talk during the movie. At a comedy performance, for whatever reason, people have gotten it in their heads, maybe because it’s “talking,” there’s the idea that it’s part of the show. Like, you’re expected to do it. Of course there’s going to be heckling! There’s the idea that, “The comedian likes it. They love it when you do this.” [Laughs]. There’s even the idea that you are entitled to do it. No! Like, if you don’t like it you’re entitled to say something. That’s not the way it works. If you have a problem, go to the person who booked the show and say, “Yeah, I don’t like this comedian.” And that person will tell you either, “Get out,” or best-case scenario, “Here’s your money [inaudible] get out.” You don’t take it to the comedian because the comedian has no idea what you think is fucking funny. That’s not the way it works. Like I’m supposed to second-guess this entire group of people? I’m supposed to have a whole other back-up act ready to go. Really? Let me find out what you think is funny. Okay, good. I do have a whole other 45 minutes of that type of material.

SB: In 2010, there’s still this notion for some people of “Let’s go see comedy.” Where they don’t go “Let’s go see rock-n-roll.” “Who’s playing?” “I don’t know; it’s rock-n-roll.” And with that, I happened to have my clock radio A.M. band on and there was a real clearly, rather vehemently right-wing talk show on and they broke away to say, “Hold on, we have tickets to give away”[ to the local comedy club]. And I just thought outside of a Dennis Miller, I don’t know who this radio audience would appreciate that might otherwise be at this club.

PFT: Mmm hmm. It’s the lack of respect that everybody has for the comedian. And the thing that drives me crazy about it is that it’s the club’s lack of respect or consideration for individual comedians. The comedy club, which should know better, is kind of saying to you, “Hey if you’re a comedian, you should be able to be funny in front of anybody. This is a business.” You know, all that kind of thing. “It is a business for you but for me it’s art.” Hey, I’m a capitalist. I want to make money. I want to pay my bills and I want to have a nice life. That’s why I got into show business. I wanted to have fun and I wanted to get paid for having fun. I want to do something that’s a little more interesting than just earning money. If I just wanted to earn money, I would have gotten a job that I didn’t give a shit about. If money was my primary goal, my only goal, it wouldn’t matter what my job was, I would just go for the highest paying job possible. As it happens, I want to do this. I have a burning need to do this, to do stand-up comedy, to write sketches, to express myself creatively. I have to do that. That’s in my soul. So okay, I’d also like to make a living at it. That, to me, would be the ideal life: that I get paid to do this thing that I love. I think that’s kind of how most people would like it to be. Right? That’s not the craziest fucking notion. So when I work at a comedy club and their attitude is, “You’re just like everybody else.” Like, “You’re another employee here. If we tell you to do something, you’ve got to do it.” So I don’t have any say about doing the radio. If I don’t want to do the morning zoo, even though it’s not going to help get people in to see me. If I’m your headliner, that’s not going to help. They’re not going to think I’m funny on this station because my sensibility has nothing to do with those guys. That’s not a consideration for these comedy club owners. They’re like, “You do the radio or you don’t work this club.” That’s the way it is.

Photo by Seth Olenick.

SB: Exactly. And not to interrupt you…
PFT: Please interrupt me.

SB: But you’ve literally polled an audience about who had come there via morning zoo and weren’t the results…

PFT: No response. Not a single person. And everywhere I’ve gone that I’ve done that, it’s always the same: not a single response. Nobody, nobody, nobody ever applauds. The only thing that happens is the comedy club thinks it got free advertising, I lost sleep, and had to be uncomfortable. And had to be uncomfortable with people who have a comedic sensibility that’s nothing like mine at all and were looking at me like I’m being an asshole for not being funny in the way that they are funny. Comedy is fucking subjective. So, I got this [radio] guy looking at me like, “C’mon dude, you got to fit in around here.” I can’t, I can’t! I can’t invent a different sensibility and I can’t just go along with you. I’ve been doing this too long. My way of doing things is too ingrained for me to all of a sudden shift gears and be laughing at the same dumb shit that you’re laughing at. That’s not the way adulthood works, stupid. I can’t just change who I am in a matter of seconds… because what am I going to do then? Because that’s not what I’m going to do onstage at a comedy club that night, right? I can’t turn on Radio Paul for 45 minutes in front of the comedy club audience. I can’t win. But I’ll tell you what did get accomplished then— the radio station got to waste time. The radio show got to waste time. And the prime directive of radio is, “We have to fill time. How do we fill time? Let’s get this dude in from the comedy club! These idiots think they’re getting free advertising.”

SB: You wrote that your second CD, Freak Wharf, recorded last March at Chicago’s Lakeshore Theater, documents a transitional period of moving away (I’m paraphrasing) from concise and conceptual to conversational material. And it commandingly opens with three different “riff suites.” Is the genesis of this jazz-like stream of consciousness a very deliberate decision to keep you entertained or more of an organic evolution of your style? Or both?

PFT: Look, I just end up entertaining myself so it’s not like I had to invent something to keep me entertained. I will always add stuff on to existing bits and my goal is to be in the moment, always when I am on stage, and to be aware of my surroundings. The plus to that is that I get a lot of stuff that is spontaneous that would not have happened otherwise. That’s not just me doing the bits by rote but to be able to expand on an idea even if it’s just a couple of extra sentences to a bit that I’ve done many times before— in case somebody’s heard it before, you know. Sometimes people come to more than one show in a city. I’m conscious of that, I would say in a good way, and I try to mix it up as much as I can even if I’m doing the same material. My point with that is; I’m always going to be doing stuff like that. The riffing came about… my manager told me about seeing this guy, Frank Skinner, in London, who’s a famous comic over there. I don’t remember if he had an opener and then there was an intermission or he did a set and then there was an intermission and came back out. But my manager was saying, “Yeah when he came back out after the intermission he was just kind of chatting with the audience for a little bit and doing all this spontaneous stuff.” It dawned on me that he was warming the audience back up for himself. I could not get that idea out of my head. I thought, “That’s so great!” To start off… somebody knows who you are and they’re there to see you. Like, they’re already on board, right? Why not just start off with some riff stuff? A comic has a tendency to do that anyway. You walk out on stage, you observe your surroundings, you’re talking about whatever has happened before you, if there’s other acts on the show, there’s all kinds of things like that that you just end up naturally doing. I love doing that stuff, so why not expand it? I’ll go until I feel like the audience is ready and then I’ll get into the material. So I started doing more and more of that. I think there was a little intermission [for] the recording I did at Lakeshore that became Freak Wharf. There were a couple acts and then an intermission so people could buy more drinks and then I came out. So I thought, “Okay, I definitely gotta riff a little bit to get them back on track, so they’re warmed up, so that by the time I hit the material it’s going to be a good recording.” So then what happened was it was such a long time between when we recorded those shows and when I listened to the material. It was all brand new to me. My memories of that set and performing that night had faded. So I was hearing it as freshly as I possibly could and I was not only so pleasantly surprised by the material— which I was so nervous about that night, it was St. Patrick’s Day weekend and the theater had changed from being this very sophisticated venue to kind of rowdy slinging drinks. So I was really anxious about it, so my memory of it was that I just felt like I had to work so hard and that, “I don’t think I’m going to like that recording.” I was so pleasantly surprised by the material and then I was even more pleasantly surprised by the riffing because I absolutely did not have any memory of that stuff. It was completely spontaneous, completely off the top of my head. So there was no way I was going to retain all that stuff, much less for months. So when I heard it I thought, “Wait a minute, I might be crazy but I think this stuff is kind of good. I think it kind of stands on its own.” So I asked the guys at the label [ASPECIALTHING Records], “Am I nuts or do you think this is okay to release?” Because I really wanted to capture that thing, which is a part of what I do on stage now. I wanted to put it out there so people could hear this part of a live experience, to get it as close to being there as possible for the listening audience. And those guys said, “No, we think it’s funny too. Let’s do it.” And then I was really nervous [Laughs] to listen to the CD because I was already thinking, “People are just going to say they liked the first one better.” I thought this was going to be sophomore slump. I thought people were going to say, “It’s not as good as Impersonal [Paul’s first CD].” And then I thought (with the riffing) I probably made a mistake, I probably made a mistake. I think people are going to hate it, they’re not going to get it and they’re going to be like, “What is this? This is bullshit!” So I was so delighted that people felt the same way that I did about it— they got what I was going for.

SB: Even while riffing you still have a great capability for an economy of words and then coupled with your distinct cadence. For example, I died from just: “Church! Still hanging in there! Weird, right?” That’s seven words…

PFT: [Laughs] Thank you.

SB: … and the bit goes on. Do you try to boil bits down or is it just come what may?

PFT: I don’t know what the opposite of an occupational hazard would be? An occupational benefit maybe? The idea of spoken comedy, I think a lot of it, is an economy of words. Really, “How do I boil this down into its funniest component? What will pack the most punch?”  And it becomes something you just get used to doing over time but also when you start to know your own voice you’re better able to do that.

SB: Is it just comedy muscle from nearly twenty-four years on stage or do you especially relish word play and vocabulary? I’m not tagging you with aping a Carlin-esque word fetish but you certainly can extract laughs from just “jaunty,” “mono-logue,” or “king hat.”

PFT: As much as I hate puns, I do love word play. I think I hate puns so much because they seem so terribly easy to me. It doesn’t seem that clever to me when words sound alike…It’s a word association that happens in your brain. That’s not work to me.

SB: Puns can be easily accidental.

PFT: Absolutely! [Laughs] That’s why we have to have an expression that says, “No pun intended.” [Laughing] That’s why you have to say, “Don’t get me wrong, I did not think that was supposed to be funny. That was just an accident.”

SB: It’s passé to bag on somebody like Dane Cook but he would be an example of a comic I would point to who maybe did not fully grasp the concept that words matter.

PFT: You know what? I will disagree with that because any comedian absolutely knows that words matter. Even if it may not seem apparent to you, thought goes into the words that are used. Even if it’s not your sensibility and the kind of comedy you like, all those words are chosen for a reason. It might seem to you to be haphazard or ill-chosen or whatever, it’s not. It’s honestly not. That guy is writing for the way that he talks. He’s writing for his style and his voice and there might be other words that come to his mind to use and he says, “Nope, that’s not going to sound right if I say it. It’s not going to have the same impact because this is the way that I talk.” And for me, it’s the same thing. It’s just a different means of expression. It’s like me saying; “I know this will be funny if I say this word.” It’s not necessarily funny if somebody else says it but I know how it’s going to sound coming out of my ridiculous mouth.

Paul F. Tompkins. Hilarity's Ambassador.

SB: Tell me about your new TV special; which I believe you said was recorded last August.

PFT: It’s called [Paul F. Tompkins:] You Should Have Told Me and that’s the one that I recorded in Atlanta that inadvertently lead to the creation of the Facebook groups.

SB: I’m wondering is the style going to be somewhat of a hybrid? You have gone to a more conversational/riffing thing but I don’t suppose Comedy Central said, “Oh just go out there and wing it.”

PFT: Oh, they let me do whatever I wanted to do. They knew what I intended to do, that it was going to be really personal stuff and I wanted to do it in a smaller theater. This is me talking about my life and talking about my feelings and telling stories from my actual life. It’s the first time I’ve recorded anything like that. They just didn’t want me to do it in a nightclub because usually where they tape their specials is a big theater in New York or something. And I didn’t want to do that because, I keep using this word, but this was way more intimate material. And I thought that I didn’t want to have to do it that loudly. I don’t want to have to fill a big place with this stuff. You know, I’m telling a story about my mom dying and I don’t want to have to yell that to a theater with a balcony. So I had heard about this place called the Laughing Skull Lounge (which had approached me about a booking) and when I heard about how small it was, I thought, “Man, why don’t we combine these things. Why don’t I do that booking and we’ll shoot there since the week at the Laughing Skull is structured that you do four nights, two shows a night.” I asked my director, Neil Mahoney, “Is this even possible to shoot it in a place this size?”  So we went and scouted it out and he said, “Yeah, what we can do is just shoot different angles on different shows. We can’t have all the equipment in there at the same time. The way you would normally do a shoot, there’s no way you can do it with all the cameras happening at once. We’re going to have to shoot it over the course of four nights.” Well, ultimately, 99% of the material came from one show anyway. But the beauty is, we used these RED cameras, they’re called. It’s a specific type of digital camera that you can do so much stuff with. A shot that’s ostensibly a wide shot, with these cameras, you’re able to punch in and make it a close-up without any loss of quality. It’s amazing, but most of what you see in that special is going to be from one performance and I think it was the last one. I told Comedy Central, “It’s going to be personal stories, there’s going to be longer material so editing it is going to be a little more challenging.” But I was able to get it, pretty much, timed so there will be editing within certain stories but hopefully not too much of that. But yeah, it’s going to be different from the stuff I have on record so far.

SB: Social media is allowing you to make an end run around the traditional comedy clubs and we’re a long way from Johnny Carson’s couch but I’m curious about your take on television’s sway over a comedian’s career trajectory today?

PFT: It’s certainly not the way it used to be. I just read a book called I’m Dying Up Here [: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-up Comedy’s Golden Era by William Knoedelseder] and it’s about the comedians’ strike in the 1970’s against The Comedy Store and how that all came about and what happened afterwards— it’s pretty amazing. I was a kid during this era but when Carson was the only late night show on and if you went on The Tonight Show, so many people saw you. So many people saw you. And it was a make-or-break thing. Now, obviously, there are so many outlets for stand-up, there’s all these different late night shows, it doesn’t hurt by any stretch but it is not the star making machine that it used to be. I think Carson had a lot more comics on; maybe I’m crazy… I’m not a Tonight Show watcher so I don’t know if they have a regular rotation of comics that they use. I know that Letterman does. Letterman has a handful of guys that can count on having an appearance once or twice a year of doing stand-up. And then they will work in some new people but there are precious few slots. It’s not easy to get in even if you can get a shot at it. You always could have a lucrative career without necessarily being a household name. You have your following. I think that Dane Cook probably had a huge audience before the general public knew about him thanks to MySpace. He really knew how to work that shit and it worked for him and made him a huge success. He was able to essentially build an audience in private (if that makes any sense) before the general public knew who he was on television. He had a vast audience online. So it’s great in a way because it’s keeping the artist as much in control of their career as possible. You’re hopefully not getting ripped off as much. You’re not being told what to do as much. That’s another thing in the club system is that you have to deal with club owners telling you sometimes (it’s never happened to me but I’ve heard this from friends), “Hey you can’t joke about that here.”

SB: I’ve seen contracts about that at like a club near a nuclear reactor. I’m not kidding. I’ve seen contracts that said no joking about this plant or that reactor.

PFT: Wow, I’d never even heard about localized stuff like that. I’ve just heard stories of my friends that do political stuff being told, “You can’t do political material here. You’re insulting the audience. People just want to laugh.” That kind of thing— that satire is not allowed in some places. Or even people telling you, “Hey if you want to make people laugh, here’s what you gotta do because they just came here to have a good time.” You’re not supposed to be making them think, that kind of nonsense.

SB: Do you sit down to write, like regimentation, I’m not asking if you stand, or are you apt to make note of an idea or topic as it hits you?

PFT: I pretty much make note of ideas as they hit me. I’ve gotten better about doing that because I’ve lost a few things to not making some sort of note of it and then it’s gone and that’s a heartbreaking feeling. And I try to flesh it out as much as I can in the moment so I don’t look at it later and think, “Ooh, I know there was something to this but it’s gone.” And trying to do the forensics on that and recreate it is maddening. So yeah, I try to make as detailed notes as I can and then when I’m ready to do a bit on stage for the first time, I will do bullet points and I’ll work from that. But if a particular turn of phrase pops into my mind fully formed and I like it, I will write that phrase down word for word to remind myself to say it word for word. For the most part, it’s just like a skeletal structure that I work from.

SB: Is the live Paul F. Tompkins Show at the Largo on the Coronet your de facto clubhouse? And is it six or eight years in the making now?

PFT: I started in 2002, I took a break in 2007 for a year, and started it back up in 2008 then I moved to New York and so I missed a year there, and then came back in late 2009 and started it back up again. So it is six or eight years depending how you look at it. I started the show eight years ago, in 2002, and that has become the first place I do any stand-up. And that’s where the bulk of my modern material (I would say half of the stuff that’s on Freak Wharf and all of the stuff that’s on You Should Have Told Me) will be from, sets at Largo. That audience trusts me enough that I am completely comfortable in front of them that I can work stuff out in front of them and it doesn’t feel like “working stuff out.” It feels like a conversation and so it becomes more of a conversation for me. So I’m able to really talk and get funny ideas out. I can make ideas funny in front of them without it feeling like I’m standing there with a [cocktail] napkin going, [loser-y voice] “Uh, what else?” That definitely is the place where I get most of my work done and that show is my favorite thing that I’ve ever done. I wish that could be my job.

SB: Seinfeld allegedly retired his “greatest hits” set and I believe it was you who called b.s. to me on Steve Martin lamenting that he had to stop stand-up because the whole Universal Amphitheater, or wherever, knew his act word for word. And I believe you said he could have chucked his act and started over.

PFT: Yeah, that’s what you’re supposed to do anyway. [Laughs] You know what I mean? That’s what you’re supposed to do anyway. You’re not supposed to do the same material forever. You’re supposed to gradually work on new stuff and you’re allowed to do that whenever you want and you can do comedy wherever you want.

SB: Paul, I think we can end on that.

PFT: [Laughing & with a delightfully emphatic tone] You can do comedy wherever you want!

Paul F. Tompkins performs in Austin on Saturday, June 5, 8 & 10pm, at the United States Art Authority, 2906 Fruth Street. For information visit www.coldtownetheater.com.

Paul F. Tompkins:You Should Have Told Me world premieres on Comedy Central on Friday, June 11 at 10pm CST.

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