CHRIS HARDWICK at the Sony Centre (1 Front East), Saturday (September 26), 9:45 pm. Passes $69-$129 (includes one headline act), individual tickets from $32.50. jfl42.com.
In the past four days, Chris Hardwick has taped four half-hour comedy shows, recorded five hour-long interviews and taken a red-eye to Texas to do a stand-up set. This is, he says by phone from Houston, a “not atypical” week for him.
Still, he adds, “even if I map out my day, there are still pockets where I go, ‘Oh, I could have filled that with something.’ I think most people would find that no matter how busy you are, you still waste chunks of time. It’s up to you whether you wanna fill that or do something leisurely or waste it staring at the internet.”
To be fair, for Hardwick, staring at the internet or watching cult movies is valuable research.
TV viewers might know the 43-year-old best as a host-for-hire, starting with a stint on MTV’s Singled Out in the 90s. In addition to interviewing Walking Dead stars and celebrity fans about zombies on Talking Dead, an after-show for the AMC drama, he’s found a steady gig on @midnight, an internet-inspired comedy game show, playing traffic cop to a motley crew of entertainers.
In comedy and online circles, however, he’s synonymous with Nerdist, a miniature online media empire with The Nerdist Podcast at its heart. Some of comedy and pop culture’s biggest names have sat down with Hardwick and his co-hosts Matt Mira and Jonah Ray: Last year, William Shatner, Lewis Black, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Eddie Izzard all appeared within a few weeks of one another.
Over the course of each intimate chat, you’ll hear just as much about Hardwick’s struggles with alcoholism, his father’s recent death, or the horror movies he watches with his fiancee as you will about the celeb guest.
Predictably, that grinds the gears of a vocal subsection of nerds who tuned in specifically to hear backstage tidbits from the set of Battlestar or Back To The Future.
“A lot of people are actors because they don’t have to be themselves,” Hardwick says. “So when you sit them down and then just hit them with a bunch of questions about themselves – a lot of the time questions they’ve answered a million times – it’s just not fun for anyone. The reason we share about ourselves is that it’s a way to coax guests into revealing about themselves. And that’s why it’s frustrating if [listeners] go, ‘I don’t give a shit about you! I’m here to hear about the guests!’
“Honest to god, when people like Paul McCartney or Patrick Stewart say, ‘This was so much fun – I never get to talk like this – I’d love to come back on sometime,’ it makes me feel like what we’re doing is maybe not so shitty.”
Hardwick keeps his half-dozen jobs remarkably compartmentalized. I’ve never once heard him slip and scream “POINTS!” at a podcast guest, @midnight-style. He tells me that’s deliberate.
“I know that every project needs a certain tone,” he says. “If I’m the ‘points’ guy in life, and then I host every after-show – I try not to cross the streams. I don’t ever want to be defined too much by one thing.”
That also goes for his persistent cate-gorization as a geek-centric comedian. On his current tour, aptly named Funcomfortable, he ditches the topical gags (on his last stand-up special, Mandroid, he turned the tale of losing his virginity into a raunchy Harry Potter metaphor) for something more emotionally resonant.
“There’s a whole chunk [in this new show] about death, with my father, and then there’s me overcoming anxiety and trying to fold that in and function in a relationship,” he says.
“It’s sort of like life and death, love and loss – which, obviously, nerds do experience, but I wouldn’t say that’s just a nerd plight. I think sometimes people come to a show, and they’re like, ‘Uh, you didn’t do any Miyazaki jokes,’ or whatever. Yeah, I know, but I have other facets to my life.”
He borrowed inspiration from fellow comic Mike Birbiglia, who told him that he deliberately pushes himself into uncomfortable places to spur his writing process.
“I would feel like I was being dishonest and inauthentic if I just did all nerd stuff on the next special, but I really wanted to talk about dealing with the death of my father, and how parts of that are, actually, really funny. And if I were feeling those things and I didn’t do anything that related to that, then I would be lying.”
Though Hardwick sees the tougher topics as safe territory for comedy, he’s careful to use his powers for good. After @midnight recently took some flak from viewers for airing competitors’ punchlines about Bill Cosby and Jared Fogle, Hardwick says, he “kind of went off on a tangent” mid-episode about the importance of comedic intent.
“I think some people just hear [those jokes] and go, ‘Well, you’re making fun of victims,’” he says. “We go, ‘No, no, no, we’re not. We’re comedians, and we’re ridiculing the peo-ple who deserve ridicule,’ in this case the offenders, the aggressors. I can’t go up to Jared Fogle and punch him in the face, which of course is what I would want to do. So as comedians, we punch him with jokes.
“When [The Producers and Blazing Saddles director] Mel Brooks was on the podcast, he had the most perfect definition of it, which is that comedy should be about subverting power,” he continues. “For example, if you’re going after someone with disabili-ties, well, why? What are you gaining out of punching down?
“We’re all human and we’re all flawed, but the purpose of comedy is to process things and deal with things and help us not go crazy in a world filled with horrible stuff.”
nataliam@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto
