A TASTE OF JIM
GAFFIGAN’S
STAND-UP
“You know what it’s like having
a fourth kid? Imagine you’re
drowning, then someone
hands you a baby.”
“Big families are like water-
bed stores; they used to be
everywhere, and now they’re
just weird.”
“Bacon’s the best, even
the frying of bacon sounds
like applause. ... You wanna
hear how good bacon is? To
improve other food they wrap it
in bacon. If it wasn’t for bacon
we wouldn’t even know what a
water chestnut is. ‘Thank you,
bacon. Sincerely, Water Chest-
nut the Third.’”
A scene from The Jim Gaffigan Show.
The Jim Gaffigan Show is about a food-obsessed stand-up comedian who lives with his wife and five young children
in a Manhattan apartment.
In real life, Jim Gaffigan is a food-obsessed stand-up comedian who lives
with his wife and five young children in a
Manhattan apartment.
“There is one significant change from
real life,” says Gaffigan, whose show
returns for a second season this summer
on TV Land. His real-life wife, Jeannie,
is executive producer of the show, giving
her a formal title that denotes their long
comedic collaboration.
“There are a lot of people involved on
the show, but the writing is just me and
my wife.”
The show, which returns for a second
season this summer on TV Land, started
with a pilot that felt “more networky,”
Gaffigan says. But he and his wife gradu-
ally developed their voice and their sense
of ownership of the show.
Initially, he says, they also might have
settled for an early take, but they quickly
realized that TV Land had granted them
independence. So “we said, ‘Let’s do this
how we want and keep going.’”
Gaffigan, who is more successful
in real life than on the show, called on
plenty of famous friends for appear-
ances, including Chris Rock, Jimmy
Fallon and Jon Stewart.
The confidence led to a surprising
meta-episode in the first season finale,
which features Alec Baldwin and Steve
Buscemi as a guardian angel.
The evolution also led to the “The
Bible” episode, which touched on Gaffigan’s “fears and paranoias” in a comic
look at his faith and the way media distorts reality.
Gaffigan promises plenty more along
this line in the second season.
“I write about stuff that is very per-
sonal, so we are less likely to get caught
in the trap of writing typical TV story-
lines,” he says. “I just wrote something
last night that was inspired by me eating
a pastrami sandwich and then having
vivid nightmares.”
Gaffigan likes to describe himself as
lazy, but he’s always on the move; this
summer he’s on a stand-up tour of 30
cities in the U.S., with nine stops in the
Northeast from Maine to Pennsylvania.
And he just acted in The Bleeder, a movie
starring Liev Schreiber as boxer Chuck
Wepner.
“I got to dress up in ’70s outfits,” he
says. “I felt like a kid. It didn’t feel like
work.” —Stuart Miller
The Jim
(and Jeannie) Show
JIM GAFFIGAN AND HIS WIFE, JEANNIE, TEAM UP FOR LAUGHS
ON HIS TV LAND SERIES
Gaffigan
performs on
stage at “An
Amazing Night
of Comedy.”
