Comedian Chris Gethard on Getting Diddy to Appear on His Public Access Show and the Time He Did a Show For 2 People and a Dog

Gethard outside of Toronto's Comedy Bar. Photos via Kadeem Ellis.
Chris Gethard’s ascent in the comedy world is a singularly weird phenomenon. After cutting his teeth alongside improv mainstays at New York's Upright Citizens Brigade like Saturday Night Live’s Bobby Moniyahan and Silicon Valley’s Zach Woods, Chris began hosting a deranged talk show in the basement of the UCB theatre. After a year there, the show moved to public access TV, where it immediately became an off-kilter international cult favourite.

His oddball talk show was powered by a series of outlandish stunts that made it a form of can’t-miss-TV, including Gethard cracking wise on a microphone while taking a busload of fans on a tour of his neighbourhood that ended at his childhood home, fun yet slightly dickish pranks like Chris surreptitiously taking the girlfriend of a friend and frequent on-air guest on $1,000 date and showing the footage to the show’s studio audience, and starting a Twitter campaign that culminated with Diddy appearing on his public access show, garnering press from the New York Times, New York Magazine, and the Source. These wild antics led to various successes. Gethard was given the lead in a short-lived Comedy Central series called Big Lake after Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon Heder dropped out, he wrote and published a well-received memoir, and he appeared on This American Life in two memorable stories. Oh, and he also wrote a column for us for a while! With Chris in Toronto for a few shows a week ago, we decided to catch up with the fearless talk show host to talk about the process of convincing Diddy to appear on his public access program, the weird places touring the country in a RV will bring you, and burning himself with ice cream while in the nude.

VICE: It’s been years, but for many people, you’re still most well known for getting Diddy to appear on your public access show.
Chris Gethard: We had good buzz rolling through the UCB show because of some outrageous stunts we had pulled, then I sort of randomly asked Diddy if he would be a guest on our show, which is ridiculous because he’s almost like a god…. A lot of people thought it was funny, so we encouraged them to tweet at him and hashtag it “#DiddyGethard.” It started spreading rapidly.

About a week later he tweeted at one of the people and was like “What is this #DiddyGethard thing people keep tweeting at me?” We were all like holy shit. Then he DMed me and asked me for my number. He called me on the phone and said he would do the show. Then he tweeted it to his million followers, saying “This kid sounds pretty cool, I’m gonna do his comedy show,” and it just blew up. People would show up every month because it was like, “What if this is the month that Diddy shows up?” It took him 13 months to actually nail down the date. It really put the show on the map and made a lot of people really invest in it.

Were there any pranks or stunts that you guys pulled that you feel like backfired on you?
We just did a show at SXSW in Austin where I got totally nude and sat in a big tub while people threw ice cream on me. We invited the whole crowd out and gave them all spoons, saying they could eat me like a sundae while I say hello. It was a really silly idea and I thought it would be like a big dumb thing where I’d be sitting in a pool of melted ice cream, but the problem was there was so much ice cream that it didn’t melt—it stayed frozen. So I had all these half-gallon blocks of ice cream touching my bare skin. I actually wound up with a series of blisters on my left arm because I got frostbite. I had second-degree burns. We took that a little too far.

Wow. That sounds like a nightmare. Besides burning yourself with ice cream, you went on a tour in an RV a few years ago. How did that go?
The whole premise of that was that we wouldn’t decide anything about the tour. We did a Kickstarter where if you gave us $500 we would go anywhere and perform. A few theatres around the country were like, “500 bucks: let’s do it!” Those were the only pre-planned stops. The rest of the tour, the whole premise was that we’d wake up, tweet out where we were, and see who wants to hang out, or see if there was something cool to do locally.

Where was the weirdest place you ended up?
A girl in Taos, New Mexico knew about us and said, “You gotta come visit me in Taos, it’s a really strange town.” And it is. It’s like a ski resort but it’s also very artsy and hippie-ish and it has like a little bit of a Twin Peaks feel. It was a closed off, fascinating culture and we wound up driving to the top of a mountain to eat at a pizza place the hippies ran.

On the way down the mountain we picked up these two hitchhikers. And they got on the bus and we explained who we were and they saw our cameras, then they were like, “We put on shows at our house. You should come do a show there some time.” And we’re like “Alright. What about tonight?” And they’re like “Well, we won’t be able to get a crowd” And we’re like “That’s OK. We’ll put it on. How many people there?” and they’re like, “it’s us two, two others and a dog.” So we went to this house. These guys, they didn’t even live in this house. They lived in yurts—those Mongolian tent things—in the back yard. We just put on a show for four people and a dog, in this strange commune where people live yurts.

Ain’t no party like a yurt party. Hey, you have a propensity for putting yourself in strange situations. Have there ever been any times when you’re travelling somewhere and you felt legitimately unsafe?
Yeah, definitely a few times. The people who run Bonnaroo were fans of my show and asked me to come up with a concept of something I could do for the festival. I decided to do a new version of the RV trip, but by myself, trying to make my way across the country.

One night in St. Louis, after not sleeping all night, I fell asleep in the Waffle House. When I woke up all the workers were staring at me incredulously. I ended up walking around St. Louis and I wandered into a graveyard. Then I started hallucinating because at this point I’d been awake for two straight days.

I was in an old, slave graveyard and I got to the top of this hill, where there was an abandoned house. I went into the house to look around. Out of the corner of my eye I saw this rabbit run by, then I saw another rabbit and another rabbit. And I realized,

I had pushed myself to a point physically where between not eating right, and not sleeping at all the past few days, I was like wow, I’m starting to lose my grip on reality. And that it was just something I needed to be aware of. I started posting all these photos on Twitter and I specifically turned on the location because I was like, “I might pass out in this graveyard and I want someone to be able to find me.” That was really unsafe.

Sure sounds like it. Have you ever had moments where you were kind of close to quitting comedy?
I’ve been on the verge of quitting many times. There were long stretches in my life where it was a very depressing and scary thing to realize that “Wow, a lot of the people I came up with have moved on.” Most of my friends are in LA, writing for shows, appearing on shows and I think it’s so awesome. There’s definitely been some moments over the years where, like, why not me, man? Am I going to be OK?

It’s head-spinning to realize like, “Oh, I’ve come close a few times and it just didn’t work out.”At the end of the day I wouldn’t really change that because it forced me to take a step back and think, “What are my priorities with this, why did I start doing comedy?” The vanity of being successful and the security of having a ton of money would be really great and it would feel good. But I’ve been forced into a position where I had to continuously remind myself—those things are secondary. And what’s really important for me is not where I do this—it’s why I do this.

At the end of the day, being kind of put in the position where my back has felt a little up against the wall made me kind of choose to just push back hard. A lot of the stuff I’ve done I’m really proud of. The Chris Gethard Show is a really underground thing and not many people watch it, but the people who do live and die for it. In a way, I couldn’t top this. If the sitcom I was on went really well, I wouldn’t be connecting with all these kids. And I don’t know that I would prefer looking at the fact that the show ceased to mean something to these kids and maybe has helped them in certain ways. People tell me it’s something that really helps them and that thing is like a far bigger success than a monetary one.

What’s next for you in terms of what you hope to accomplish? Pitching another show in the same format?
I think right now it’s pitching to get the show. I really believe in it and there are a lot of networks in the world. Maybe we’ll find a good match. And from there, I’m not sure. I’m getting married in August. I’m thinking about maybe having some kids in the next couple of years and I’m sure that will really light a fire in me, and my priorities will change. But right now, I can very honestly say that my priorities are basically to keep doing things my way. It hasn’t been working out by the standard definition of success, but I feel really good about it.

@jordanisjoso