Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1286 - Anthony Jeselnik
Uploaded: 2019-04-30T01:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1286 - Anthony Jeselnik' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-04-30. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1286 - Anthony Jeselnik' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-04-30. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1286 - Anthony Jeselnik

Two, one, yee-haw! Hello, Anthony Jeselnik. How are you, sir?
Great, Joe. Good to see you.
What's going on, buddy? Are you fully committed to the beard now?
Yeah. I want to keep it as long as I can.
Are you going to go mountain man? Or are you going to just trim? Do you trim a
little?
I trim a little bit. I just like the lady who cuts my hair, trims it every four
weeks when I go in for a haircut.
But I don't touch it at all. I'm afraid if I tried to trim it, I would just
ruin it.
But I love, love having a beard.
Why do you love having a beard?
It's like sunglasses for the bottom half of your face.
Oh, you can hide from the world.
Kind of, yeah. It chills me out a little more.
Yeah.
Especially on stage. You're under the lights, you know, and my lip would start
to get a little bit sweaty.
And I'm thinking about my lip, and I'm like, should I wipe this? Should I move
it?
Then I start to sweat more. But now that I have the beard and mustache, my lip
gets a little sweaty.
You can't tell. So I don't get more anxious.
Hmm. Interesting.
Yeah.
So you used to like think, boy, there's a little couple of beads on that upper
lip.
Yeah. And I'm like, can they see it? Should I wipe? Is it like, is it too much
if I'm wiping? Like, it drives me crazy.
You know what gets me? Boogers. If I think I have a booger. Like, what is going
on with my nose? What is that? Is that a booger? Shit. Can they see that?
Oh, I check for sure before I go on stage. There's always a booger check.
But I'm so animated, and I'm always yelling and screaming. I'm always worried
that something is like hanging off the tip of my nose.
Yeah.
And the people in the front row can't even enjoy it. Like, what the fuck, man?
Your nose, bro.
I've never had that. I've had like definitely a fly down situation.
Oh, yeah.
Never, never like a booger that ruined the show.
These are two things that people love to laugh at. Your fly down, and if you
put a beer down on stage, and the foam comes over the top.
Like, oh my God, your beer's coming. Those are those things, right?
Mm-hmm. High humor.
Yeah, high humor. Sweat, like weird sweat stains. Like, when I've done specials,
speaking of which, Anthony Jeslinovich's new comedy special comes out tonight,
I hear.
Yep.
This evening.
Midnight, I guess. Netflix does it.
Yeah.
Ah, you excited?
Very excited.
Well, I've been seeing your set. It's fucking fantastic.
Thank you. I think this is the best I've ever done. So I'm pumped for it.
It's the beautiful thing about comedy, man. Keep working. Keep paying attention
to it. You get better at it.
Mm-hmm.
You know, really? I mean, Don Marare and I had this conversation just a couple
of months ago. He's like, Joe, he goes, I've never been better. He goes, I'm
fucking a thousand years old because I've never been better at comedy.
Yeah. As long as you don't quit, you know, you don't ever get worse, I don't
think.
Right. As long as you don't give up. Because some guys don't quit, but they
give up.
Exactly. Yeah, they just go through the same material every single time. You're
like, what are you doing here? You're just like, you're just trying to get out
of the house.
You're not trying to get better every single time.
There's a little of that. Yeah.
Yeah. It's like, if you're not right, I guess that's the difference between
also guys who put out specials, or I say women too, and people who don't.
Some people just don't put anything out.
Yeah. Yeah. Once you put it out, like I put it out because I'm like, I'm done
with this now.
It's getting boring. It's not going to get better. It's as good as I can make
it. But because of that, then I have to come up with a new hour.
You have a pretty specific schedule you like to follow too, right? If I'm
correct.
I try. I did a year in LA, like at the store every night, you know, and like
once a month, I do Largo and try it all out at once. And then at the end of
that year, I had about 40 minutes, went to clubs for a year, every weekend for
a year.
And then once that, I had the hour after that, then I did a year of theaters.
And at the end of that year, I taped the special and, and, uh, and was done
with it.
So you're on like a three-year plan.
Pretty much. Yeah. And that might change, you know, as I've gotten older, uh,
the idea of a four-year plan sounds a little bit nicer.
Uh, you know, you have other things going on that, uh, that it's not as, I'm
not as worried.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I was trying, uh, I think two years seems to be right for
me, but.
It might be better to give it a little more time, right? Just a little more
time to tighten things up and polish and, you know, add layers and extra punch.
It's like, you know, those guys like in, when I started out in Boston, there
was guys that had been doing on the same set forever.
And there's pros and cons to that. And the pro is goddamn, they had that shit
down tight where it was just punchline, rapid punchline, pause, punchline.
They knew the, the economy of words was perfect. There was no, no fat in the
bits. They had, they had tightened all that stuff up.
Yeah. My, one of my biggest fears is like taping the special and then coming up
with like a great tag.
Yeah. You know what I mean? Like that. I want it to be done when I shoot it
because that feeling is awful.
Yeah. It's the worst. I've done that.
Yeah. So have I.
It sucks.
It sucks.
What do you do?
I once went back in my last special thoughts and prayers. I ADR'd a line. I
like walked off stage and was like, oh, fuck. I should have used this word. And
I, it just occurred to me in the moment that I was using the wrong word. So I
went back and ADR'd it. And you can obviously tell it's like, it's like me
talking. And then it's like clearly a different, like a different voice. Uh,
just one word.
Yeah. But I had to do it. What does ADR stand for? I know what it means, but
what does it stand for?
Jamie knows he's an actual audio guy, automated dialogue replacement. And why
it's automated is lost in my head forever, but that's what it means.
Ah, okay. I wouldn't have guessed that in a million years. I would have never,
I knew what it meant. I've done ADR.
Yeah. I did it like fear factor. Like every episode I had to do ADR. It was the
worst.
Why did you, because you were just mispronouncing names or you would.
Well, it was usually because they wanted to tighten segments up. Like, you know,
we would film for three days and we'd have to slam that down to 44 minutes.
So sometimes you needed brevity or sometimes they needed clarification for
certain things. Like, like we would explain the rules to them, like very
specifically.
And they would have to read these rules and it took a long time. But then like,
sometimes in the moment, like on television, you wouldn't explain it as clearly.
Like while we're filming, like when we would, we'd show them like, this is what
you have to do. This is what you have to start here. You go from here to there.
But sometimes when you would want to put it on TV, you'd want to be more
precise or more concise.
Yeah. So I would, every fucking week I had to do ADR. I hated it.
You did. It seems like it would be fun.
Fear factor, but just ADR seems like easy. It's relaxed. You're just in the
booth.
No, it was boring. No, no, I didn't like it. No, the fun thing about fear
factor was when the checks came. That was a fun thing. And then when nice
people won, that was fun too.
Yeah. Those, those things were fun, but really that was, that was a great job,
but it was a job. It was like a job, but like, you know, if you had a great,
like, yeah, I really like working here. Whereas you don't really say that about
standup.
No. I mean, I don't think about it as a job. It's just fucking fun. It's
awesome.
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It's a get to do.
Yeah. I get to do. Yeah. That's my new thing. It's like get to do versus have
to do.
How long you been doing it now?
Almost 17 years.
Wow. Yeah.
Isn't that crazy to say?
It is. It blows me away. Like 17 years just seems like, seems like forever. And
I'd had it in my head that like 20 was an important number. Like when you get
to 20, that means something. And I, I think I must've made that up. Like people
say 10 years is a big deal.
Yeah.
But 20 doesn't seem to, uh, like I thought that was like, that's when you're
really relaxed.
10 years seems like you're a pro. When I see someone, I'm like, how long have
you been doing it? 11 years. All right.
I buy it. You know, when someone says six years, I'm like, good luck. You might
quit.
Yeah. I hate the people who are like, I've been doing it for like 12 years.
When's the last time you got on stage? Uh, six months ago.
Oh no, you started doing standup 12 years ago. Yeah. Uh, you've not been doing
it. Yeah. You gotta go fuck yourself. Yeah. If you're not, if you take those
people that take like giant chunks of time off and then come back, you know,
want to go on the road with you. Like, Hey man.
Yeah. It's like, no, that's not how this works. You gotta be, you gotta be
putting in the work yourself. Otherwise why, why am I, why am I doing you a
favor?
Yeah. Well, it's just, it's one of those things. Like if you wanted to run a
marathon, you have to run all the time.
Or you're going to be really whole, really sore and tired when it's over. You
know, you're not going to really be able to do it. You want to be able to
actually do it and really run.
This is the same with standup for whatever reason. It seems so fucking easy
when you're watching when you're watching someone do it. This is one of the
reasons why everyone thinks they can do it. Cause it's just, we're just talking.
It's not like we're doing Cirque du Soleil up there.
And some people are like, Oh, that's not that funny. I can be not that funny.
You know, like it's not that, it's not that big a deal.
Yeah, you could. Yeah. Maybe. Uh huh. Yeah.
When you started out, where'd you, what city did you start in?
Here, Los Angeles. Did you really? Where? What was your first club?
I, uh, my first ever show was at the belly room in the comedy store.
I took a class. I took a class, uh, Greg Dean. Uh, I was working at Borders
Books and Music. It was my first job in LA.
Remember that play? Like that big bookstore.
And they, I just found the thinnest book on standup comedy that they had and
bought that and, uh, read it. At the end, it was like, this guy teaches a class
in Santa Monica.
So you went and, uh, people were like, I was surprised that I took a class. It's
like the class didn't teach me how to be like this.
It just kind of gave me the courage to go to open mics. And, uh, and, and I don't
think I could have just gone to an open mic. I was too scared for that.
I was like 23. Uh, but after the class, you know, I had a seven minute set that
I would go and, uh, go and do.
What did the class teach you? Like, how do they, how do they start a class out?
Like there were two sessions. It was like, it was like beginning and advanced.
And they would talk a little bit about joke structure.
They would talk about like simple things like taking the mic out of the stand,
you know, like, but be careful.
Cause some people walk up and they take their teeth out. You know what I mean?
And like things like don't run the light show up early, like things that were
just, um, may not have been common sense, but it like, it gave me comfort to
know the rules, uh, so that I could try to break them, you know, uh, later on.
And then did a set at the, uh, belly room, like with a bunch of other, like
people in the class who are all terrible. None of them are doing standup
anymore.
And I like killed, like I thought I killed, I had the tape. I sent it out to
everyone. And one of the jokes from that first set, I ended up using in the
Donald Trump roast.
Really?
So I was like, oh wow, maybe there's like some gold in there. And I went back,
you know, 10 years after I did it and watched the set again and had a panic
attack watching myself.
Like the way it was in my head was not what was on, uh, was not 