Comedian Chris Gethard: 'Failure is the fertilizer of success'

I've been doing comedy at this point for 16 years in New York City and I'm not the most well-known guy in the world. But I do have a cult. I have a following that's very devoted and that's very nice and empowering. I think there's a lot of comedians who are maybe more popular in a mainstream way who say things that maybe aren't as much from the gut, and they've met with success that is beyond mine. But what I do know is that the people who are responding to my stuff are caring about it in a way that's really protective. There's almost like a militant [attitude] like, This is ours. I'm happy to take that trade. I'm happy to do something that means a lot to fewer people than to do something that reaches more people but ultimately is empty calories. 

Yeah. In a big way, I feel like nothing I've ever done that people have regarded as interesting or compelling, none of those are things that I've knocked out of the park with the first swing. I'll fail big and the kinds of things I build in the rubble or recovery period are the things that tend to hit hardest. I feel like I've learned over and over again that, as an artist, you have to fail. Especially as a comedian, 80 percent of the time is failing so that you can get to the 20 percent of the time when you know what works.



If you're not willing to fail then that's fear, that's ego, and you're just never going to have a thick enough skin to survive. You might actually be able to survive, but you'll always land in the middle ground. If you're not willing to fail big, you'll never succeed in the most interesting ways and you'll just land in a safe place that's not interesting. I regard failure as the fertilizer for success. They go hand-in-hand. You need one to get to the other unless you're okay just being kind of average. And that's totally fine. I don't judge people who are. But I don't think anybody who's ever been brilliant has succeeded 100 percent of the time. 

It's a combination of all those things, honestly. We were on public access for over four years. In four years time, there were many moments when I wanted to quit, many moments where it felt embarrassing or like I was sacrificing too much to chase this dream. One time I wanted to hang it up and I remember the guitarist from our house band, a pretty quiet guy, my friend Johnny, pulled me aside and he said, Hey, I see you're struggling. I see you worrying if you're leading all of us down this dead end path. Just so you know, take a step back and realize, everyone involved in this thing is still having fun. They're having so much fun, why would we quit? That was a big one I remember.



I remember one time wanting to quit and I got this beautiful email from a kid in Ireland. We'd put the videos on YouTube and people were finding it everywhere. This letter from Ireland that I never forgot was from this kid who told me he had what sounded like the most brutal job where he worked at a suit store right next to a funeral home. The whole scam was that families who came in last minute or who had to get to town because a loved one died, who maybe didn't pack a nice suit, they had the suit store right next to the funeral home. And they just price-gouged these suffering people. He was like, I'm so miserable and there are so many other things I want to be doing with my life and I'm seeing that you guys are going all in on this dumb thing in New York, you're losing money on it and everyone watching it knows it. He's like, I do this job for money and I realize, I don't want to make money exploiting the sadness of grieving families. I want to go and do something that I think is cool and your show has made me realize that. I read that and I think, Wow! No advertisers are scrambling for this. That's such a weird convoluted answer to your question, but it's the one-on-one interactions that saved me.

I feel like for most of my career I was watching other people around me attain success that I always dreamed of. Then kind of throwing my head against the wall and not getting it and then having to reconcile that and say, That's okay and if I'm not destined for these big high profile things. Maybe I need to look and see what's actually making me happy. I realized it was all ego that made me want those bigger things. But I feel like the entertainment industry was saying, over and over again, No, you're not one of these special people, you're a really regular person. Rather than settle for being a regular person, I think I embraced the fact that I'm a regular person. I like that my podcast is about regular people getting to tell their stories in their own words. I feel like I've settled into this nice place where I'm in the entertainment world and I'm a comedian, but I think a lot of people who like my stuff almost regard me as their surrogate in the entertainment industry rather than an actual part of the industry.

I think so. What's interesting too is that we live in an era of technology that allows people to try and make their own stories public more than we ever have. We don't really think of Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat as that. They seem like frivolous things. But, at the end of the day, now people have a platform to try and make their own stories public. And my podcast is a long-form version of that. Just on a basic level, there's a lot of things in the world where you can hear celebrities talk to other celebrities, and a lot of them are about how awesome it is being a celebrity or, even worse, how hard it is being a celebrity. 

Exactly. And I don't want to throw anyone under the bus, but I don't know if I need to see two very rich people drive around in a car and get coffee together. That's a case-by-case thing for me on which of those I enjoy. I mean, I love Jerry Seinfeld. I've run in the opposite direction, which is that you can be anyone from anywhere and tell your story to the world. You have a right to tell it for not just regular people, but for anonymous people — people you could meet in your life any day.

It has unintentionally built into a major part of my public life, that I speak very frankly and openly about my issues with depression. It's been overwhelming to see how many people have reached out and shared their own stories and actually said to me they haven't had anyone else to talk to about it. To me it's very scary to know that people don't feel comfortable with their families, their teachers or their friends. I get people who email me or send me messages on Facebook who say, I literally have never heard of you. I just googled depression and a blog post [you] wrote came up. And it's people who don't even know me as a comedian. They have nowhere else to go, and that's very scary.

Yeah. I remember very clearly how terrifying it was to feel like something was broken with me and to feel like I couldn't talk about it. I remember a couple of conversations of trying to talk about it with people and they had nothing to say. It was just, I don't know, good luck and uh... And it just made me feel so alone. So I'm happy to serve that function for other people who need it, but the dialogue surrounding that isn't as open as it could be and it makes a lot of people scared. It's so disheartening that [often] the only time you see discussions of mental health come up are when a maniac shoots up a college campus. All that does is make people who are suffering feel like they need to keep this quiet because they're some sort of broken freak. I don't think that's kind and I don't think that's correct. 

Even before we were on public access, we were a stage show at the UCB Theater in New York. Even when we were at UCB we would get a lot of press and people saying this was a very strange new look at the talk show. Different productions reached out and networks sent word that they were keeping an eye on it. And that went on for years. We were a public access show that the New York Times gave a positive review to. That doesn't happen.

No! And we were getting these very notable publications saying that something special is happening here and yet nobody would take a chance on us. One of the things that makes me smile the most about this clip is that I say, Sandy, you think I haven't thought about that? And in another aspect, that shows why they didn't want my show for so long, Sandy is a street performer in New York known as the "Naked Cowgirl." She wears the legal minimum of clothes and collects tips in New York, and she walked into our studio one day so we made her a part of the show. It's one of those funny things where you can hear me desperately saying, I don't get why they won't take our show. And the person I'm expressing that to is a street performer. She is the reason why. She's not the most anchored to the mainstream reality.

I think it comes from the major adjustments that I made in my life as a person in my mid-twenties. As a person who was riddled with anxiety and really depressed to a dangerous degree, like in a medically diagnosed way, where it got dangerous. When I came out of that I realized I needed to let my guard down. In my everyday life, I needed to trust people more. Somebody said to me, Chris, people can really surprise you, but you have to let them. That was a massive readjustment in my approach to life.



It's funny because I've always been obsessed with late night talk shows, but I think they're extremely cynical and formulaic to where I think a lot of the hosts have actually publicly said they don't enjoy monologue jokes anymore, but that's how it's done. My show is not cynical, I don't wear a suit and I don't tell jokes that I'm not into telling. I kinda think [Johnny] Carson set the mold for what the talk show is. Carson existed in a world that was more cynical than our world is today. I think Judd Apatow really shifted comedy away from that. My talk show — a lot of people look at it and say that it's pretty weird and bizarre, but if you actually pay attention to what it is, you'll see that it's heartfelt and honest. What I have found many times over between my show and my podcast is that, if I could pinpoint the one emotion that all young people share, it is an extreme amount of frustration — this feeling that you can never let your guard down and just relax and be yourself. 

That is certainly a big one. I love my underground credibility, but I also love not putting 40 hours of week on something that I lose money on. I would say about 85 pecent of our crew and cast are people who worked on public access. 

Yeah, I fought hard. Actually, there were times when other networks showed major interest in the show. And there were these moments to choose for me where there was one network in particular — that shall remain unnamed — that said, We want this show, but we don't want the rest of the cast. We want you to rebuild the cast and recast more in the demographics of modern times. I said, I think the demographics of modern times that people respond to on my show is a bunch of friends who clearly have a lot of affection for each other. I don't want to give that up.

I said no. Creatively too, there was another network that was asking if we [would make] the show about upcoming movie trailers and ComicCon properties and [my] commentary on them. I was like, Well, you don't want my show. You want whatever you think my show has. Fusion gives us a salary and a lot of trust and freedom — more than I think any other network was willing to think about.