FINDING THE FUNNY SIDE
McHale brings comedy to city
It’s the morning of May 18, and comedian Joel McHale is preoccupied with a very unfunny topic.
The Seattle-raised star of the cult series Community came of age in the thick of his hometown’s grunge explosion and was understandably hit hard by the death of musician and Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell, which had been announced earlier that morning.
“I turned on MSNBC, CNN and Fox News just to see what they were talking about and no one mentioned Chris Cornell,” says McHale, in an interview from his home in Los Angeles. “I was like, ‘What the hell is going on?’”
McHale goes on to talk about the personal impact of Cornell and Soundgarden’s music, which he says changed his life. The death would, of course, go on to receive plenty of media attention in the coming hours, days and weeks. But McHale’s point actually related to another conversation altogether, one that his country seems consumed with 24-seven these days: the stranger-thanfiction farce unravelling in the Donald Trump White House.
It’s an unavoidable topic for all Americans, of course, but particularly comedians. Having become an increasingly in-demand host for events like the Webby and People’s Choice awards, McHale is no stranger to peppering his monologues with timely and political jokes. He even hosted the White House Correspondents Dinner back in 2014. Of course, back then the seemingly absurd notion of a Donald Trump presidency could be safely covered with a hair joke or two (“Will Donald Trump run again? And the answer is, ‘Does that thing on his head crap in the woods?’” was McHale’s contribution.)
While it continues to provide great fodder for comedy, McHale says the non-stop Trump attention also shows America’s penchant for obsessive navel-gazing.
“Believe me, I love talking about him and the government and I will definitely bring it up,” McHale says. “But it does get to this point where it is the only thing being talked about in this country. There are many other things to talk about and they should be. In no way am I saying avoid the subject. But talking to Stephen Fry — name-drop! — he said it takes about eight seconds before Trump comes up in every single conversation. That’s some sort of weird narcissism in itself that all we can talk about is us. Now I’m getting really serious: there’s a human tragedy right now in Yemen and no one is talking about it.
“That got real heavy...,” he adds after a pause.
McHale assures us he has no plans of bringing up Yemen as part of his standup act, which he’ll perform Friday and Saturday at Hotel Blackfoot’s the Laugh Shop. Trump will likely factor into it somewhere, but McHale says his standup is never completely scripted. He got his start in comedy participating in Theatresports as part of Seattle’s improv group Unexpected Productions in the 1990s. That training has stuck with him throughout his career, coming in particularly handy when he began adding commentary to pop culture clips as host of The Soup series in 2004.
“I did tons of improv and that back and forth was really where I learned on stage how to be,” McHale says. “Hopefully it will be me feeding the crowd and feeding off them. I love improvising, so I try to find out stuff about crowds everywhere I go.”
He has a bit of a head start, having played Calgary a few years back. His mother is from Vancouver, so he is also half-Canadian.
“Everyone is like, ‘(Calgary) is the Houston of Canada!’ ‘It’s the Dallas of Canada!’ ‘It’s the Texas of Canada,’” he says. “Maybe Texas is the Calgary of the United States. Why can’t it go that way? People are like, ‘Horses! Cowboy hats! Oil.’ That’s what everybody keeps yelling at me.”
McHale’s comedy tour happens to fall when he is between TV projects. The week of this interview, he had also received the bad news that his CBS sitcom, The Great Indoors, would not be renewed for a second season. The series, which co-starred the aforementioned Stephen Fry, had McHale playing a former “adventure journalist” forced to oversee a staff of millennials when his magazine becomes an online-only operation. Fry played the magazine’s founder.
“It was a ball, and I will look back on this year as highly pleasurable,” McHale says. “Sure, I would have liked it to have gone on. But that’s the thing with the entertainment business: it’s like surfing. It’s like, if you don’t catch this wave, you wait for another. If you fall on this one, you swim back out and do it again.”
Even Community, the NBC cult phenomenon that ran from 2009 to 2015 before being picked up for one season by Yahoo! Screen, had its well-documented ups and downs when its ratings didn’t match its critical acclaim and devotion by fans. McHale played Jeff Winger, a disbarred lawyer who becomes the de facto leader of a group of misfit students at Greendale Community College.
“We were constantly on the bubble with NBC,” he says. “They were constantly saying, ‘We’ll see if it comes back.’ Every year I would get a call, proverbially 10 minutes before. It was like, ‘Fine, we’ll take you back.’”
Community was also known for the public feud between creator Dan Harmon and Chevy Chase, the comedy veteran and one-time SNL star who played millionaire Pierce Hawthorne on the series.
Interestingly, one of McHale’s yet-to-be-released projects is A Futile and Stupid Gesture, a Netflix biopic about National Lampoon co-founder Douglas Kenney. Will Forte plays Kenney and McHale plays a young version Chase, who got his start in the National Lampoon stage show.
“I called Chevy to let him know and ask what he thought and he thought it was a great idea,” McHale says. “They were best friends. I think he’s very happy that (Kenney’s) life story will be told. To play someone I know was weird when I got the role. But once I got into it, it stopped being weird (and) I really started playing it and playing it well, hopefully. Hopefully they will like what I did. I think Chevy will.”