The Curb Your Enthusiasm star says British comedy was his touchstone. Now he's about to try out his mix of personal pathos and vulgarity on audiences here. He just hopes they get him
'If you react poorly to something, we will discuss it." With the roguish affability native to his unscrupulous Curb Your Enthusiasm character ? Jeff Greene, manager and accomplice to Larry David ? Jeff Garlin addresses the crowd at the Upright Citizens Brigade, Hollywood's improvisation hotspot. It's one of a flurry of appearances to fine tune the act for his run of shows at London's Soho Theatre, and he relishes the ridiculousness of inviting the audience to trash it as he performs. No one takes him up on the offer ? they are all enjoying themselves too much.
Garlin is noticeably slimmer than his blobular Curb physique, the result of a "get lean and go green" campaign detailed in his 2010 memoir My Footprint: Carrying the Weight of the World. But even after two and a half years without fast food and sugar, his 6ft 1in frame still houses a big build to match his big, husky voice. His features have shrunk into sharper focus, though, and with his close-cropped brown hair and black retro-geek glasses, Garlin now resembles a supersized Jewish Elvis Costello.
In his standup, Garlin mines human pathos ? mostly his own. Whether discussing his elaborate strategy for hiding the fact that he had eaten an entire tube of refrigerated cookie dough, or the time he went to the Sleeping Beauty castle at Disneyland to throw his infant son's foreskin into the moat, Garlin twins vulgarity with sensitivity, demonstrating how our dignity and best intentions are hamstrung by our vulnerabilities.
At the Upright Citizens Brigade, Garlin launches into a funny bit about blow jobs for a cancer cure, disarming a straight male audience member into revealing a heretofore unexplored willingness to perform fellatio. Gesturing around himself on the stage, Garlin acknowledges the crowd's laughter and claims his space at the same time. "I always say that the reason for doing my job is to ease people's pain. But now both of my parents have cancer, and in the last couple months I'm doing more standup than I have in years. And it's easing my pain."
The audience stills to an empathetic hush, recognising that Garlin is perhaps revealing something he hadn't intended to. He pauses, then brightens, as if struck by a workable solution to his sadness. "I would give the best, most thorough blow job to cure my parents' cancer. It would be a great blow job. I know what I like."
The next day, we are sitting in his Los Angeles office, a small, spartan room hung with 60s TV comedy stills, a framed Radiohead poster (he is friends with the band) and a board covered in scene breakdowns for a film he is writing. A leather recliner for napping and meditation hulks in the corner.
He's pondering the questionable work ethics of his writing partners. "The young guys I work with go to a website where you look at a photo of a woman, and you guess what her festival looks like." By "festival", Garlin doesn't mean maypoles and Morris dancing.
"They guess right every time!" he marvels. "But I have no desire to guess what someone's vagina looks like: full hair, landing strip, Hitler moustache. I'm pro-clothes. That's my speed." He starts to laugh, a helpless, hooting giggle. "I'm like, wow, a clothed woman." Another explosive laugh. "Maybe that's just where I'm at as a man now."
At 49, Garlin is a standup veteran of 29 years, an executive producer and co-star of HBO's hit series Curb Your Enthusiasm, the voice of the Captain in Wall-E and Buttercup the Unicorn in Toy Story 3, and a writer/director of indie projects, including his 2006 feature, I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With.
Not so funny is his list of health problems, including a heart defect, epilepsy, diabetes, attention deficit disorder, and the compulsive eating that fleshes out his comedy ? as well as the stroke suffered before shooting the first series of Curb Your Enthusiasm. "If you watch the first season, I am so strokey," he says, recalling that he used a golf club as a cane. "It's funnier to walk with a golf club. But Curb was the best rehab I could have had . . . the [improvisation] alone did wonders."
Improvisation is his bailiwick. His comedy club sets are a ramshackle blur of ridiculous stories that peter out in false dead ends, only to resolve hilariously with spontaneous postscripts.
"It's almost like surfing," Garlin explains. "The wave comes, I ride it, and then it dies and I start up again. I'll go with whatever feeling I have in the room. At least a quarter of what I do is new every night. I try reinventing it. I feel pretentious if I say I'm influenced by John Coltrane or Charlie Parker, in terms of taking a standard and improvising on it, but that's what I do." He adds self-deprecatingly: "And I'm calling my own material 'standards'."
Asked about Garlin's ease with a crowd, Mighty Boosh/Snuff Box's Rich Fulcher says: "Jeff's standup is so easygoing and seamless that it leaves you feeling like you've actually had a conversation with him." Sarah Silverman, who played alongside him in I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With, seconds that emotion: "There is no one looser or more relaxed onstage. He talks to the audience like he talks to his friends - so familiar and honest."
Garlin's book, which details a lifetime of compulsive eating ? including an astonishing run of gluttony triggered, ironically, by his resolve during Curb season eight to lose weight and go green at the same time ? is appallingly honest. It is funny, disturbing and inspiring all at the same time ? much like the "Living XL" catalogue Garlin received in the post at the start of his initiative. Thumbing through pages of fat-friendly pistol-grip extended toenail clippers and 86st capacity toilet seats alerted him to the grim future that awaited his ever-ballooning self. At his heaviest, he was nearly 23st.
"You see how much eating I do in the book," Garlin tells me. "Reading what I was writing made me realise that I was an addict. The first bite of a doughnut, the first bite of a cookie, the first lick of an ice-cream cone, I'm gone. It's over. I'm back to my old ways. Food has had a history for me of numbing feelings. Now I do Transcendental Meditation. My goal is to be a wise man. And the only way to be a wise man is to be open to learn. I think with comedy you have to be vulnerable."
While he is brutally candid about his personal failings, he is also gleefully grateful for the good fortune of his creative chemistry with David. "We discovered our connection during the audition process for the initial Curb special, and it felt instantly like we'd worked together our entire lives. I don't know why we have this relationship, but we do. Maybe we were slaves together in an earlier life. And in Curb Your Enthusiasm we were doing what we did and not having a clue whether people would get it or like it. The fact that it's gone on to be a big success, I am shocked. Because it truly was something that was organic, that we did to make ourselves laugh."
British comedy is a touchstone for Garlin. "Monty Python changed my life. I watched the original Office. I love The Mighty Boosh and The Goon Show. I'm a fanatic about Ealing Comedies. And Fawlty Towers is probably my favourite thing that I've ever seen come out of England.
"I tried writing a project with Steve Coogan for HBO, but I'm a big morning writer and he's a big afternoon guy, obviously because he likes staying out late at night. We got along great and it was coming together slowly, but it didn't work out. I love collaborating, though."
His Soho Theatre dates have sold out, but London was not as welcoming some years ago. "I tried getting up at the Comedy Store the last time I was there, and they wouldn't let me. This was before Curb Your Enthusiasm ? nobody knew who I was. It's all right. I may stop in this time."
But with Garlin's eco-commitment, how will he get to London? "Well, I am flying on an aeroplane. No carbon pledge there. But I'm hoping I can walk from my hotel to the theatre every night. I don't like walking for the sake of walking, but I enjoy walking with a destination. That makes me very happy. My wife'll say: 'You want to go for a walk?' - 'No I don't wanna go for a walk,' which frustrates her, but I want a destination. That's actually a funny bit, I should write that down."
He scribbles "walking with a destination" in his red ideas notebook. "This is what I go up with: 'walking with a destination'. Where it ends up, or what's funny about it, I'll discover when I'm on stage. When I say on stage, 'Let's see what happens', it truly is a big bowl of 'Let's see what happens'."
Is Garlin as sanguine about that final unknowable: the reception of his British audiences?
"I've no expectations, which horrifies me. I think I could destroy, and also they might not dig me or get me. Both are possible. It's so much better to have realistic or lower expectations. Not dreams, not goals ? keeping those realistic and low is bullshit. But in terms of what could happen, it's just so wonderful to be surprised."
? Jeff Garlin's standup tour, No Sugar Tonight, is at the Soho Theatre from 23-26 June.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/jun/22/jeff-garlin-curb-your-enthusiasm
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