Of all of the comedians who are part of Chelsea Handler's writer/roundtable circle, Jen Kirkman is perhaps the most interesting. Not just because I'd actually heard of her and heard her stand-up before seeing her on Chelsea Lately, but also because when I saw her more recently in Los Angeles, her stand-up offered something a little different from the rest. Here's a clip of Jen Kirkman via Candor (no embed, because that would be, what, too easy?). As 2009 comes to an end, I sat down at my computer and asked Kirkman some questions. She gladly obliged. This is what resulted from that!
Your chat with Marc Maron for his podcast was compelling. What kind of feedback did you get from fans and fellow comedians about revealing how you don't want to have kids, and/or going to therapy and taking medications to deal with people and the world?
First of all, thank you for finding it compelling. My fellow comedians and friends have known since they met me that I don’t want kids. I sort of defensively wear that posture on my sleeve, for better or for worse. And lots of them agree with that stance and the ones who don’t agree just procreate on their own and leave me alone about my choice. I think once you have kids you realize how hard it is & what a commitment it is. All of my friends with kids say to me, “If you know you don’t want them – good. Don’t have them. It’s hard and the only thing that makes it worthwhile is if you have always wanted to raise a child.” As for fans – any fans I have already know I don’t want kids. I’ve been talking about it in my act for a while. So, I assume they were just bored to tears. I did make some new fans from doing Marc’s show – some people emailed me to applaud me for my choice and my honesty about it. And some people emailed me and made comments on Marc’s message boards that I was a “creep” for not wanting kids. Someone said I was very selfish and that I watched too many Woody Allen movies as a kid. I beg to differ. I didn’t watch enough Woody Allen movies as a kid. I didn’t see my first Woody movie until I was 21. Perhaps if I had seen his stuff as a kid I wouldn’t have felt so alone in the world.
As for therapy and medications – my friends and fans already know that about me. And again a few new fans wrote to me to tell me that they related and then someone wrote Marc and he told me about it – they said I should give up wheat and then I wouldn’t panic on a plane. I can respectfully say – they are wrong. And just to make it clear – I don’t take medication to deal with the world. I find the world to be impossible to handle and because of that it makes it easy to handle because I resign myself to not trying to handle it. I only take Klonopin (an anti-anxiety pill) when I fly on airplanes to prevent panic attacks. And then pretend I had a funny sentence to cap this all off with.
I saw some of the TwitVids you shot in Australia during your brief week there with Chelsea Handler and the comedians of Chelsea Lately? Did you manage to get outside of office buildings and hotels and actually see some of Australia?
First of all – the best part of that office building was that it was the Foxtel studios in Sydney – and the floor we occupied was set up just like the set of The Office. There were people in cubicles about 10 feet away from us that had nothing to do with show business. All of a sudden, 12 very noisy and boundaryless Americans set up shop just desks away from them. They went from typing in silence to having to hear us yelling words like “pussy” and “fuck” and all kinds of things. The other great part was that there was a skin cancer screening clinic going on in a conference room just steps away from our desks. Whatever company worked on our floor was having screenings all week for their employees. (The hole in the ozone layer is pretty much directly over Sydney so they are really careful there about sun exposure.) And people would walk by our desks saying, “Is this where I get screened for skin cancer?” And the loveable idiot dudes I work with would always say, “Yeah, take off your clothes.” They were kidding and would never let it get to the point of people undressing but we forget in real life that the comment itself is offensive. And one of the girls in the office would always end up saying to the person, “He’s kidding. The skin cancer screening is that way. Sorry, we are Americans visiting on a stupid TV show.”
But yes, we did manage to not be in the building for at least 60 percent of the trip. We went out to great restaurants and pubs and clubs nightly. Australia is weird about drinking. If you go to a nightclub – they have security cameras that measure your every move, starting with watching you get out of a cab. A few times bouncers said to us, “You are too drunk to come in.” Every time that happened, none of us were drunk or even buzzed – sometimes we were completely sober. But if they saw you do anything weird getting out of a cab, they take it as a sign of intoxication and won’t let you in because they have trouble there with bar fights. So because we were stupid Americans who didn’t understand the Australian currency – we’d be exiting a cab and fumbling with our change, trying to read it, “Is this a dollar or a quarter?” - that type of stuff, which read as ‘drunk.’
We also got to take a yacht around Sydney Harbour for two days and that was the best. It’s a wealthy place. The architecture and real estate is insane there. Beautiful. Even the bad areas of town look like America’s good parts of town. I will say that the service at restaurants and bars is SLOOOOW. If you order a margarita – you might as well order two at once because it takes 25 minutes to get one and even longer to get the second.
Recent Comments