Joe Pera reveals secrets of quiet, artful comedy
Creator feels joke’s in straightforward delivery on series
These are trying times, but we may take some comfort in the fact that a third season of “Joe Pera Talks With You” recently premiered on Adult Swim. That such a singular and delicate thing has survived, even thrived, in the roiling seas of television is a seemingly small but not inconsiderable mercy. Briefly stated, it’s a show about a soft-spoken, round-shouldered middle school choir teacher in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula who offers “presentational” videos — they have titles like “Joe Pera Takes You to Breakfast,” “Joe Pera Answers Your Questions About Cold Weather Sports” and “Joe Pera Gives You Piano Lessons” and involve talking to the camera. But everything veers off into something quite different, and often quite profound. Sincerely interested in ordinary human rituals and the wonders of nature — the show encourages an attitude of appreciation — it’s a comedy I am just as liable to watch with tears streaming down my face as laughing. Most episodes are cartoon-length and somehow packed with events while never breaking into so much as a trot.
Pera, 33, the show’s creator and star, has been coming your way for a while now, leaving tracks in the web since college, making the odd late-night talk show appearance. He is not exactly the person he plays on TV — he refers to him as “the character” — but there is surely a lot of Pera in there; it is not a mask so much as a window.
“We just give a quick glimpse in 11 minutes, and then drop notes of other stories going on, and make the world feel complete and real,” Pera said.
This interview with Pera has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: In the new season, you’re dealing with the sale of your grandmother’s house. Are those difficult moments for you to play?
A: It wasn’t as bad as having to deal with her death in the previous season; that was tough to write and perform and edit while keeping the proper amount of weight and balancing it with the comedy. But Conner O’Malley (who writes for the show and plays Joe’s high-strung neighbor) was like, “You should continue to deal with it realistically, all that aftermath of death you don’t want to deal with.” Also the character was raised by his grandparents, and he has to kind of rebuild his life without them. So the sale of the house is moving away from ties to the past and figuring out who he is in another way.
Q: What are the lines between you and the character?
A: The big thing is the career change. I didn’t want to do another show about a stand-up comedian. A lot of my friends from school became music teachers, and now I get to spend like three, four months each season in the Midwest shooting and pretend to have an alternative life, where I wasn’t a comedian but a choir teacher. A lot of my stand-up was talking about a little bit of guilt that I’d left my family in Buffalo (New York) to be in New York (City). Like the breakfast club episode in season one. I was home, my dad was talking about some friends of his that go to breakfast regularly at a bagel shop, and he made (my brother and I) feel bad we weren’t with them. So I was doing a joke onstage, “What is the best breakfast club? It’s going with your full-grown sons.” It kind of came from that, the guilt that I’m not there.
Q: Do you cast locally? Some of your performers seem to be nonprofessionals.
A: We cast a lot of our friends from the comedy scene right off the bat. Gene (Kelly, who plays Joe’s best friend) was a cameraman working at “Seth Meyers” that Conner started writing bits for while he was working there. We find a lot of people while we’re scouting. We had to find the right-looking beauty parlor for last season, and the owner, Yvonne, was just such a wonderful personality, we were like, “Please, you’ve got to give this a chance.” And she was excellent; she spent her career doing hair and talking to people and making them feel good, why wouldn’t she read wonderfully on camera? I was doing YouTube videos with my grandparents for years, but then my grandmother was in the Christmas
special we did. You just don’t know what’s going to happen, which is scary on a TV schedule, but it’s worth it. You always get that one moment or expression or delivery of a line you could never possibly plan.
Q: It’s easy to get emotionally invested in the show. I’m so happy that you and Sarah are still together in the new season.
A: Yeah, it would be a shame to cut Jo Firestone (who plays Sarah and is also one of the writers) out of the show, she’s so funny. We never made a show before this, only videos, and we’re all kind of learning. I want it to feel like a community-made show and have the quality that somebody just picked up a camera and started filming around town and is doing the best they can. We make mistakes, but we don’t mind incorporating them because we think it’s funny.
Q: Your “quarantine” special, “Relaxing Old Footage With Joe Pera,” with its images of nature … is full of Joe-style jokes and observations, but it is truly relaxing.
A: I think we probably made that out of a desire to relax ourselves, but also we try to make good on the promises that are titles of the show. Like with “Joe Pera Talks You to Sleep,” I’m delighted when anybody says that it works for real. I want people to truly feel relaxed, and I think people wanted it real bad at that moment. (With “Relaxing Old Footage”), we had so much b-roll of this and that from previous seasons, we always joked about making a three-hour tree documentary, and we finally stitched it together in kind of a coherent way. It made me feel better to make it, and I’m glad if it made anybody else feel better.
Q: Given Joe’s oddball character, there’s some temptation at first to take the show as ironic, but it strikes me as completely sincere.
A: If anything, the joke is how straightforward we are about stuff. I like the directness of it. I always use the example in the writers room, there’s a joke Dan (Licata) wrote that unlocks a lot of the humor: “You know what I like most about barbecue? The smoky flavor.” (Laughs.) It’s just literally that. (Keeps laughing.) There’s something so funny — it’s just stating a fact.