Comedian Brian Posehn is in town. Get off your ass and go see him. He’s funny. Imagine now sitting quietly in the audience. In your head the laundry list of dilemmas and anxieties, that thunderous roar that scrolls ever-present in the mind, aching and deafening, will for a few gorgeous moments of life be absolutely inaudible during his hilarious stand-up routine.

Posehn headlines Tampa Improv on April 15-17 and his new CD Fart and Wiener Jokes comes out on Relapse Records on April 27. He is also doing an album signing at Vinyl Fever on April 17th for Record Store Day 2010.

Warning: video footage is rated R.



REAX: What are you doing when you’re not touring and filming The Sarah Silverman Program?
Brian Posehn: Usually I have some sort of writing gig. I’m pretty busy. Today I’m rehearsing, I’m performing at the Golden God’s, this heavy metal award show. I’m performing for the first time my new song.

REAX: Which song is that?
BP: It’s called “More Metal Than You.”

REAX: That’s the song with the live band?
BP: Yeah.

REAX: How is it going?
BP: Really well. It’s the first time I’ve ever done anything like that live.

REAX: Is the preparation different than stand-up?
BP: A big part of it is memorization, just learning a song, but I’m not really a singer and I’ve never performed music live. It’s a little daunting, it’s a little scarier than just doing stand-up, which is something I’ve done since I was a kid.

REAX: Now that you’re more experienced, how do you prepare your stand-up? Do you walk around your house repeating it over and over again?
BP: I don’t really, I know it all pretty well. Even when I’m working on a new bit, I kind of know the rhythm and I know it pretty well by the time I’m at a comedy club. I don’t really have to rehearse bits anymore. That was a thing I had to do, but I feel now I know what I’m doing, I’ve done it for so long. There’re certain shows where there’s more pressure, I’ll be more nervous especially if I’m doing a live taping or working on a bit I’ve never done maybe.


REAX:In your show you notice the difference between a stand-up comedian and what it’s like to perform in a band. In past tours, do your rent a car? Have a schedule?
BP: No, when I’m touring by myself, it’s usually not the kind of tour where you’re doing much driving. I fly in everywhere. Usually I’ll have the feature comedian meet me. It’s just way nicer to have one of your friends on board with you than to just kind of show up and hope you get along with the other comedian.

REAX: Who is coming along this time?
BP: This guy Kyle Kinane. He’s really funny. I’m not sure where he’s from originally but he’s been out in LA for a little while now. We’ve worked together a couple times.

REAX: Your new CD is called Fart and Wiener Jokes. How long have you been working on that material?
BP: The record took about two and a half or three years to come up with that new set. It usually takes me about two years to come up with a new hour. I recorded it almost a year ago. So since then, I’ve compiled like twenty, twenty five minutes of new material. The set now is part of the record that’s coming out and that extra twenty minutes of new material, which has been written in the last year.

REAX: How do you judge when to slowly fade out the old material? Is it just on your personal cycle?
BP: Yeah, some jokes that are left over form the record I keep doing because now they’re a little fresh. I keep them fresh because I’ve added stuff to them. It might even be different than what I did on the record, when I recorded my last special, so they’ll have a little more life to them. But eventually, hopefully within a year from now, I won’t be doing anything from the record. That’s kind of the idea. When everybody hears it, it’s time to retire it.

REAX: Do you play any musical instruments at all?
BP: No. That’s part of the reason why I got into comedy. You always hear about every rock guy wishing he was funny and every comedian wishing he was a rock star kind of. Sort of true for me because I tried to play the drums when I was a kid and I couldn’t sound like Dave Lombardo from Slayer, no matter how hard I tried so I gave up.

REAX: It says on your Wikipedia page that you are a classically trained pianist. Is that true?
BP: Not true. I love that that is still on there.



REAX: What does your last name mean?
BP: I don’t know. It’s an old German name. But I’m not aware of what it means.

REAX: When you were kid what were some of the more creative names children used to call you to make fun of you?
BP: Let’s see, well they weren’t always coming from my name, but I had teachers that weren’t even nice to me. A PE teacher called me ‘Potion’ and ‘Poison.’ Yeah I got those a lot, and I got ‘Poseur’ too. Even though I never really was a poseur and didn’t think that name fit. But people did it because it was close to my name. No the really mean stuff had nothing to do with my last name. ‘Faggot’ doesn’t rhyme with my name but I got called that a lot.

REAX: Do you think your act will change in the next couple years because you’re a new dad? Like you’ll have that fifteen minutes of “how my life has changed because I’m a dad now” bit.
BP: Yeah it will go through that, it already is starting to transition, and mainly because, as you’ve observed my act, I talk about things that actually happen to me. This new twenty minutes of material is so far pretty much about that, about being a dad and the kind of the transition I’m going through and I’m real wary that I don’t want to lose anybody or make it unrelatable to those that aren’t parents, or haven’t gone through that, because a lot of my fans are younger. I have to lookout for that, but also my act is so much about being myself and the things that actually happen to me. I’ve got to walk that line, I’ve got to be careful in the next couple years. I used to do a joke (about how) I hated it when comedians would change because they had a kid. They’d be edgy and then wouldn’t be suddenly after they had the child. So it’s real important I stay myself.


1 comment
This is Awesome!

Posted by Anonymous on Wed 14 of Apr., 2010 17:16 EDT
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