Christian Finnegan Interview

Best interview ever
Interview by Scott Bolohan
Staff Writer

You may not recognize the name, but Christian Finnegan is everywhere. He is the guy on VH1’s "Best Week Ever" that does the segment "What Your Purchases Say About You." He appears regularly on "The Today Show." He has his own "Comedy Central Presents" special. He hosts a game show on TV Land on Monday nights. And yes, he is Chad, the only white roommate from the infamous "Chappelle’s Show" skit, "The Mad Real World." But upon the Oct. 24 release of his first CD, "Two for Fliching," Finnegan established a firm identity as an up and coming comedian. He will appear at the Ryan Auditorium at Northwestern January 27. Finnegan called The DePaulia from a noisy New York Deli and talked about everything from his hatred of Star Jones to getting hit on by Katie Couric.
The DePaulia (TD): Are you excited for the tour?
Christian Finnegan (CF): I’m really excited about it. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. I don’t get to travel with other people very often, so I’m actually looking forward to that aspect of it as well. That, you know, I won’t just be by myself, which is usually the case.
TD: What were you like in college?
CF: I think college is a very evolutionary time for every person. It’s the last time in life when you get to reinvent yourself. In high school you might have been a band geek or you might have been this or that. But in college everyone tries to reinvent themselves as something different. Usually, after a semester or so you’ve given yourself up and people realize you really actually are a dork. That first semester of college is great when you are pretending you’re really deep or really athletic or whatever. I spent a lot of college trying to figure out who I was. That’s in a lot of ways what college is for. Most people haven’t ever lived away from home before and it’s only then they find out, "I am sort of a clean person" or "I guess I am a messy person" or "I guess I am a p**n hound" or "I guess I am an alcoholic." It’s kind of like at Chuck E. Cheese. The ball crawl, you know that big pit where they have all the balls? You can fool around and be an idiot and not worry too much about getting hurt in the safe environment. Once you get out of college, you can’t. You have to be a little more thoughtful about how you can hurt yourself (laughs).
TD: Do you think college crowds are different from your typical comedy club crowds?
CF: Yeah, they definitely are. The best audiences in the world are college audiences and the worst audiences in the world are college audiences. Sometimes you go to a school and they’ll have a beautiful theater with a really good sound system and other times you’ll go to a school and they’ll have a riser set up in the corner of the cafeteria. You’ll be performing and there’s people eating Quizno’s sandwiches during the show. Those audiences don’t tend to be very good, but it’s not their fault. Comedy requires a certain amount of ambiance. There’s a reason why the lights on the audience go out. There’s a reason why a theater has certain acoustics. Cafeteria shows just tend to be awful. But when a college crowd is great, there’s never going to be a more enthusiastic crowd. Which is great, but sometimes you have to change what you do for a college crowd. They’re kind of there for a party. They want to hear jokes and stuff, but they also want to scream "whoo." They don’t want your subtle stuff, they want you to kind of hit them in the balls.
TD: When did you know that you wanted to become a comedian?
CF: Any day now (laughs). It’s one of those things where I’d love to say I was not one of those kids who fantasized about it since I was 5 years old. Although I realize looking back, that I had all these comedy albums when I was a kid. I never really thought I should start doing it. Much more than my friends, I had Steve Martin albums and Woody Allen albums, and Eddie Murphy’s "Delirious" and all these things I was obsessed about. But I never really thought, "Hey, I want to do comedy." It was just something I liked doing. I hated stand up comedy when I was in college. My reinvention of myself in college was as a pretentious bastard. I was wearing black turtlenecks and reading philosophical books. In a lot of ways comedy was a perfect fit for me because you’re performing, but it’s your own stuff, it’s your own thoughts. I always felt that stand up comedy is a great career choice for someone who is egocentric, but has a short attention span.
TD: Do you feel pressure to be funny all the time? Do people expect you to be funny when they meet you?
CF: Only unlikable people. It does happen and I understand that. I understand that everyone likes to laugh, everyone wants to have a good time, everyone wants to hear a good joke. Everyone loves that. And so when they find out you do that for a living, I think it’s a natural impulse to want to see it in action. Like, "Come on, dazzle me!" If I told people I was a tax assessor, nobody would say "Hey, value my property." That said, it can be really fatiguing when people just want you to be funny. I can’t stand people who need to be funny all the time. A lot of people feel like they need to be the center of attention all the time, and they’re annoying ... Not everyone is a Robin Williams-type person, thank God.
TD: What do you think is the best and worst part about being a comedian?
CF: I would say the best thing is that there’s a feeling that you get; the feeling you get when you come up with an idea that you just know is going to work. When you just stumble on to a line or a premise, and it usually just happens when you're at home, at three in the morning when you’re flipping channels, or you’re on the subway and you pull a piece of paper out of your pocket and you write something and you’re like, "Oh my God." You just can’t wait to get up on stage and try it. I can’t even tell you how great a feeling that is. And secondly, the feeling that you get when it’s going well on stage, it’s so intoxicating. You really feel like you’re completely in control. I always equate it to the scene at the end of "The Matrix," when all the sudden you can see the matrix and you can stop the bullets and all that cr**. But then there’s other times when you’re on stage and you’re like, "Where am I? Who am I fooling? Why did I think people would think I was funny?" Those moments happen too. They both happen a lot.
TD: Is it tough for you to come up with jokes every week for "Best Week Ever?"
CF: It really is. I don’t mean to make it sound like it is rocket science, because it certainly ain’t, but it can be exhausting. It can be difficult, like what more do I have to say about Tara Reid? What could I possible say about the show "24" at this point?
TD: What was your favorite news story of the past year?
CF: I loathe Star Jones with such a burning passion, and so anything Star Jones-related I tend to enjoy. Not even necessarily making jokes about her, I just found it hilarious to watch. So I would say probably the whole Star Jones thing. And the Mel Gibson thing, just because it was so hilarious and weird, not just the whole anti-Semitism thing.
TD: Along the same lines, how did you feel about the Michael Richards thing as a comedian?
CF: I was troubled by this and I actually wrote about it on my Web site, which I do sometimes to figure out how I feel about something. I don’t remember who this quote is by, but I’m going to totally embarrass myself by misquoting this person and probably getting the person wrong. But I think Thoreau (note: actually E.M. Forster) had this quote, "How will I know what I think until I see what I say." The whole Michael Richards thing bothered me in a sense that, as a comedian, my initial impulse is to always defend the comic to always have the right to say what they want to say and to assume that an audience just isn’t getting it. But, in Michael Richards’ case, no. I think in the end what makes me feel like I do not need to defend him is that he is not a comedian. He’s a TV star biding his time until his next wacky neighbor role comes along. I think he was pissed and thinking people shouldn’t be talking during his set, and no comic likes it when people are talking during their set. There’s ways to deal with it and ways not to deal with it. But I thought he threw that out and that he was going to be able to get to the other side of it and make it funny. But he couldn’t because he doesn’t have the ability, because he’s not a comedian. He’s not a writer at all ... I’m not even saying that insultingly. But just because you’re good at prat falls doesn’t mean you’re good at stand up. I don’t feel like I need to defend that guy. For me, it just wasn’t him throwing out the N-word, just saying the N-word is so craven, it was all the other stuff that really was ugly ... There’s no joke there, that’s just ugly, that’s just vile, pure vile. So screw that guy, I don’t feel the need to defend that guy at all.
TD: Do you find yourself rooting for celebrities to do stupid things?
CF: What you find is you don’t have to. What I get excited about is when there are new kinds of scandals. That’s what was so great about the Mel Gibson thing, it was just so different, so weird. It’s hard to constantly make jokes about somebody getting into a catfight at a dance club. That sh** happens all the time. Sex tapes, things like that, those are done. They’re just over. But something like the Mel Gibson thing, or even something like the Michael Richards thing is just so "Wow!" and weird and out there. Those are the ones I get kind of thrilled with.
In a lot of ways, comedy can be just about button pushing. If you push the right button, people will have the physical reaction of laughing, and that’s great. You can get up and do 20 minutes of fart jokes, and Lord knows, I’m not above a fart joke. But I love a fart joke you remember two weeks down the road. That, I think, is the end goal. (Laughs) (Baby crying in the background) This baby totally needs a punch in the face.
TD: In your act you always talk about being a dork when you were younger. Do you feel that you are less dorky now that you are a comedian on TV?
CF: My life is not particularly exciting. I think a lot of times, especially in college students, you guys, and I don’t mean to sound condescending or anything, but you guys don’t remember a time before basic cable, when there was just NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox. So to me, I look at what I do on VH1 as being like AAA ball. The people who are on "CSI," those people are playing in the major leagues, and I’m basically a pickup softball game. A lot of times, college students, when you’ve grown up and had MTV your whole life, TV is TV. To a lot of you students, I might as well be on "CSI" or "Seinfeld" because they just don’t understand I’m standing in a conference room in front of a piece of colored construction paper, and not getting paid particularly well to do it. (Laughs) Of course I had some issues growing up. My story was the story of a lot of kids though. Nobody is in third grade thinking, "Man, I am so popular."
TD: Did you think the "Chappelle’s Show" skit "Mad Real World" was going to be as big as it was?
CF: I had no idea it was going to be that big. I knew it was going to be that funny. When I read the script I was just blown away. I was like, "Aw, God, I can’t believe I get to do this." A lot of "Chappelle’s Show" is like when you see one of those really great episodes of "South Park" and you just wonder, why isn’t everything this funny? I remember reading the sketch and thinking, "I can’t believe how funny this is." I got really fortunate because I bumped into Neal Brennan, who is Dave’s writing partner, when he was in the process of editing the piece before it was on the air, and at that point it was 23 minutes long.
There’s a lot of stuff that was on the cutting room floor that I wished they would put out on the DVD because it was very funny. I’ll be honest with you, that part really isn’t that far from me anyways.
That character is probably me at age 15, in terms of I certainly didn’t have a lot of experience knowing a whole lot of black people growing up in suburban Massachusetts.
I mean, I wanted to. I loved the idea of knowing black people, but I didn’t actually have any experience with it. So I was able to tap into that very easily.
TD: Do people still recognize you as Chad from the sketch?
CF: It used to be insane, not a day would go by. For a while, it was probably five times a day. And it’s never like "hey." They’ll just either yell "Chappelle" or "white boy" or "you stabbed my dad" ... There are just so many lines, "What’s the square root of this apartment?" That’s the amazing thing about that sketch is there’s probably 20 lines that people can quote that most people would know what they’re quoting. I don’t even think Dave or Neal even knew it was going to be that big.
You can never predict a pop culture phenomenon like that. I can’t even fathom it. Sometimes you’ll get people who will recognize you half way through your set and they’ll start yelling, "You stabbed my dad" or "Chappelle" and it just brings everything to a grinding halt. If anyone is coming out to the show at Northwestern, please don’t yell out "Chappelle" things. What I always tell people when I’m off stage is when they tell me, "Hey man, I was the one who yelled out ‘Chappelle,’" I’m like, "In your mind, what did you envision happening? When you yelled that out, what was the best case scenario?
What was I going to say? You know what? You’re right, "Chappelle." What then? I can’t believe you’ve actually seen ‘Chappelle’s Show.’ You must be a special person." The thing is, I don’t take it lightly ... I can’t even fathom what it was like for Dave.
Dave Chappelle is not one of those people who did stand up so he could break into the acting game. He’s a stand up who happens to have had a TV show and has been in some movies. Chris Rock is the same way. So I think that’s one of the things that really contributed to Dave just wanting to pop that balloon.
People were not letting him do what he loved to do, which is to do stand up. I can understand the urge to be like, "You know what, f**k this. I’m going to go on the lam for a year, kind of start over again and make it smaller."
I’m not saying I would have done it. I probably would have stuck with it because I’m a p***y, but I can understand why someone would want to do that.
TD: Do you have any good Matt Lauer stories?
CF: I will say that Matt Lauer is a funny dude with kind of a dark sense of humor. Off camera, he’s kind of biting. He’s a little bit of a d**k, like in the best possible way. I remember the first couple times he had a couple of insults and I was like, "Wow that was a zinger."
It’s so funny, you see these people that do these shows and you’re watching these people on TV, and you’re like, "Who are these people? They seem so dumb and so easy." If you ever are on the set of "The Today Show," I’m amazed that they’re able to do what they do. It’s really like juggling in a lot of ways, so I admire the ability to do that.
I remember one time when he interviewed Britney Spears, who was chewing gum the whole time. He was wearing loafers without socks and we were on "The Today Show" the next week. And we, especially Sherrod Small, were giving him the business about not wearing socks and how awful his ankles looked and apparently we heard back from the producers that he was a little bit insulted by that.
There was also a moment where Katie Couric sort of propositioned me sexually. It was joking, but it was a little bit creepy. They were doing a segment about mammograms, the screening for breast cancer, and Katie had a mammogram and they were showing footage from it and we were the next segment.
And Katie said something like, "I know you guys have always really wanted to see my breasts." And I made some joke like, "Oh yeah Katie, I know, it’s been weeks." And then she just looked at me dead in the eye and completely without smiling or anything was like, "Well come on up to the dressing room afterwards and we’ll see if we can change that."
She was joking, she was just being silly, but she really just held the eye contact for an awkwardly long time. And she walked away and I thought, "Oh my god, Katie Couric just invited me to go upstairs and look at her boobs."
TD: Do you hear from a lot of celebrities who were offended by what you said?
CF: Well, never to your face. And to Matt Lauer’s credit, it’s not like he was a d**k about it.
A lot of time the people working around the celebrities are the ones who take that stuff personally because they’re all trying to justify their job and trying to anticipate potential issues. Celebrities are just like anybody else,.Maybe they’ve been skinned in their own way, and of course being on camera all the time probably makes you more vain than other people.
The way you look physically is important to your career, it’s something that’s in focus, so by sort of insulting Matt Lauer’s ankles it may have meant a little more to him than if I insulted my dad’s ankles in public.