
Earlier this year, Chris Gethard noticed an uptick in the number of people tagging him in posts about The Chris Gethard Show, his anarchic late-night talk show that aired on various platforms between 2009 and 2018.
That trend grew in the wake of John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA—a show with a similar spirit and which Gethard found great joy in.
“Mulaney is a cornerstone of modern comedy to a degree that no one can ignore it now,” Gethard told LateNighter. “And moving forward, you can’t just have another boring talk show that looks like every talk show since 1950… Mulaney has cracked that open.”
Shortly after bringing The Chris Gethard Show back for one night only as part of the grand reopening of the Upright Citizens Brigade’s new New York City theater, Gethard chatted with LateNighter about his earliest creative inspirations, how The Chris Gethard Show might fare in the streaming wars, and worshipping at the altar of David Letterman and Conan O’Brien.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
LateNighter: Off the top of your head, are there any moments that come to mind as far as early late-night moments that most inspired you?
Chris Gethard: For me, like a lot of people my age, it’s Letterman and Conan. My parents tell me I used to fake being asleep as a little kid at like three to four years old. I would pretend to be asleep on the couch, then they’d realize I was sitting there watching Johnny Carson with them.
But Letterman was the real game-changer. I remember the first time I stayed up late and watched Letterman with my older brother… I was definitely on the younger side of it, but someone who was built to understand this guy is kind of being a troublemaker. He’s not Carson. Carson is what it’s supposed to look like. This guy’s not doing that.
On top of that, a lot of my favorite stuff was stuff that Letterman platformed. You look at Andy Kaufman, Chris Elliott, Howard Stern. Not only did Letterman do a lot of stuff that really shook things up, he took the people who were really outlandish and gave them a national platform.
As far as individual bits go, I have so many joyful memories of the Top Ten Lists, of him messing with Rupert at the deli, involving his mom on the show, working the Taco Bell takeout line. Those things were huge for me.
And then Conan felt completely insane. Conan really felt like if you took the smartest version of me and my brother and our friends, and put them on TV and just let them do whatever they want. I’ve often said that if there’s only one piece of comedy I could ever watch in my entire life again, it would be Conan Takes Mr. T Apple Picking. If there’s anybody out there who’s familiar with me or anything I’ve done, I think you’d go, “Oh, that makes sense that that’s the brass ring for you.”
And then I will say, too: I think there’s a little bit of a dialogue that happens amongst comedy nerds, when you think: what’s the best sketch group of all time? And you go, you know, Kids in the Hall, Monty Python, Upright Citizens Brigade, The State, whoever you want to say. But I really think that Conan’s writing staff from that era—Brian Stack, Brian McCann, Kevin Dorff, Andy Blitz, Allison Silverman, Jon Glaser—if you just put that in a vacuum, that’s one of the best sketch comedy groups ever assembled. It just happened to exist under the umbrella of this larger talk show. That’s the best of the best of sketch comedy of that generation, all under one roof, operating at a super high level.
When you were starting The Chris Gethard Show, were you actively thinking of how you could incorporate those same sorts of elements that influenced you into your show?
There were a lot of things I was just chasing, especially with Letterman and Conan. If I can do anything as funny as Dave dumping 10,000 bouncy balls off the roof of the studio onto the streets of New York, I’ll die happy. If I can do anything as interesting or funny as a Conan staring contest bit, I feel like that’s worth doing it.
But there was definitely a part of me that was like: These guys don’t like doing these monologues, these political jokes, especially back then. That’s just how Carson used to do it, so you’re making them do that. I wish a late-night show didn’t have to have that monologue. It seems like the part that the hosts like the least.
You can feel when these hosts are having fun and when it’s loose and when the guest is excited to be there. And you can feel when a publicist has really locked down exactly what the guest is supposed to talk about. I could feel that watching from home.
I wished I could just turn down the dial on those things and turn up the dial on the stuff I loved—which was absurdist characters and unpredictable moments and sending people out into the streets to see what would happen.
The Chris Gethard Show was far from perfect. I’m not saying we nailed it even the majority of the time. But I think some of the reason why it developed a cult following was because people saw us going, “Let’s see what we can do to maybe totally turn down the stuff we don’t like about talk shows, and then just pour gasoline onto the stuff that we do.”
The phone call-in element was a big part of the show. Where did the idea for that originate?
We can’t underestimate the fact that I did grow up watching a lot of public access myself. And my older brother loved prank-calling call-in shows. There was one [on] a local TV station in New Jersey called Family Talk. And it was like, ‘Let’s call up and just talk about family issues of the day.’ My brother used to relentlessly call in, then goad me into prank-calling them for his amusement.
And then on top of it, Howard Stern… I don’t stand by everything Howard Stern did back then, but there was a lot of really interesting, form-breaking stuff. When I tell you that, on the school bus to high school, the driver would put Howard Stern on, and we’re 14 years old, that’s not an exaggeration. You can’t underestimate how omnipresent Howard Stern was in the Northeast in the ‘90s in North Jersey. A lot of that call-in stuff was really great as well.
When The Chris Gethard Show ended, you said you felt like you were over the grind of producing the show regularly. Do you still feel that way? Or do you miss it more now?
I miss being creative with my friends. I miss the public access era pretty desperately, and even the cable era.
I’ve had some heart-to-hearts with friends who worked on the show who are like, “It really was just that last six months.” That last six months was made to be as painful as it kind of could have been. It was just dying for six months in a way that was painful.
I have some regrets about how I reacted to that, how I retreated from that… Look, it was great. But also, I was so stressed out that I was grinding my teeth at night all the time and I had two teeth fall out in our writer’s room. It’s hard to miss that.
My life is visibly more relaxed and happier than when I was young. And a lot of the ideas that led to The Chris Gethard Show were driven by some really unbalanced brain chemistry on my end; some really manic stuff that needed to go somewhere. I’m intensely proud of the show, but I’m also a less troubled person than I was when I came up with it. So it’s a really tough question.
Brainstorming for [September’s one-night-only revival] and reconnecting with those people, I feel those synapses firing for the first time in half a decade. So it has felt good for that to come back to life.
It’s been odd. The show has largely been forgotten in the past six years. If anything, I think some comedians have maybe taken potshots at it; made fun of it—which I get, because it was very goofy and strange. You look at a screengrab of it and you’re like, “What the hell was going on?” If anything, I’ve sort of felt like the world moved on from wanting that.
But sometime in the past six months, I started seeing a lot of chatter online where I’d get tagged in stuff that was people like, “You know what I really miss? The Chris Gethard Show.” And then those kind of kept building.
And then when John Mulaney did his show, I saw a big explosion of people—in a way that I thought was really healthy. I’ve known John for many, many years now. But I saw all these people going, “Whoa, man, this show has The Gethard Show inside it.” And I was really nervous about that because, just to be clear, John Mulaney does not need to rip me off in any way. He’s a very brilliant guy.
But a lot of it was very healthy. I was seeing a lot of the old fans of The Gethard Show going “This is cool to watch this Mulaney show.” And seeing old Gethard Show fans jump in and say, “If you like this, you might really like this thing I liked back when I was in high school. Here’s a link to the YouTube page. They’re all still up there.”
I e-mailed Mulaney after the first couple of nights of his show to say, ‘It’s so cool to see what you’re going for. It’s bringing back a lot of positive feelings for me. You’re taking big chances on live TV and I really love it.’
I talked to my old showrunner and he was like, “The cool thing is that late night always builds on the history of late night.” Carson built on Steve Allen, Letterman was building on Ernie Kovacs… Then Conan built on Letterman. And I never, ever hide the fact that my show was worshiping at the altar of Letterman and Conan.
My old showrunner was like, “The cool thing is, I think some of our DNA is in [Everybody’s in LA] to some degree.” Mulaney’s such a big deal that, moving forward, everybody’s going to build talk shows reacting to what he just did. And I think that’s f**king awesome for TV. I think it’s awesome for late night.
One of the things that always used to drive me with The Gethard Show was: Saturday Night Live is a live show. It’s probably the biggest live show that’s not sports or news in American television history. They haven’t done any bits that are like, “Hey, you write the end of the show,” or “Vote on Twitter for which character does X, Y, and Z.” The interactive sh*t. Where the f**k is it? Let’s get going, man. Make TV interesting. The Mulaney show made TV really, really interesting.
The Chris Gethard Show happened at a point where it was kind of after the days of linear TV, but still a few years before the streaming wars, where every major company has a streaming platform and is throwing money at stuff to set themselves apart. Do you have any thoughts as to how your show would fare now?
It’s always tough to say. We’d do a lot of things differently today. There were a lot of aspects of the show, as far as encouraging the sort of parasocial side of things, that was not cool, looking back on it. People calling on the phone, and people who I don’t know who’d kind of become characters on the show. Then you realize, ‘I don’t know these people and their lives and where they’re at, and if they necessarily want this to be recorded.’ There are a lot of things I don’t think we would do again.
But to speak directly to your question: When we were first streaming the show, there were not many platforms to even stream it on the internet. Imagine if The Gethard Show existed when Twitch and Discord were a thing?
The technology wasn’t there. Now, with a couple of cell phones, you can do so many things that we had to actually, in some cases—no joke—build infrastructure to be able to stream the show. We were a solid 10 years ahead of our time, just as far as the technology that supports it.
I wish that there was easy streaming technology when I started my sh*t, because then maybe it wouldn’t be as lost to time. But I can’t complain. We had an incredible run.
Every comedian who starts at a place like UCB, like I did, has this idea of: What if I can make a show that actually gets on TV and feels like the raw sh*t that we do onstage? And I think I probably came closest. It’s me, it’s the Human Giant 24-hour marathon, and it’s that time Adam Pally took over that episode of [The Late Late Show] one night. Those are the three things that feel to me like the energy and spirit of New York alt-comedy that people hear of now as this Golden Age.
You recently helped start an organization called Laughing Together. Can you talk about that?
Absolutely. In my old age, I’m thinking a lot about how to connect with people, how to use comedy for good. Laughing Together is a nonprofit that I helped found. I linked up with a larger nonprofit called Wellness Together that places mental health services in schools, and we built a whole comedy-focused art program. These psychologists who really study what’s needed in education are like, “Go use all your exercises that make kids comfortable with failure. Use all your exercises that get them connecting on a non-verbal communication level.”
Just all the things that are good about an improv class, that are just about human connection and getting people to let their guards down, [we] bring it into schools. And it’s been a beautiful thing. We launched last year. We’ve helped over 3,000 people already in seven different states. It’s really just getting started, but it’s also been huge and I’m excited to see if it can just keep growing.