Comedian Richard Jeni has to balance the old with the new when he hits the road to reap the rewards from the buzz created by his latest HBO comedy special.
Jeni is on an extended tour with “A Big Stinking Pile of Me,” the same title of his third HBO special, which debuted in January and continues its run on the cable network. He plays the Paramount Theatre on Saturday.
“You go to Denver and you do some of the stuff you did in the show but not all of it,” he said. “If you do all of it people will say, ‘Well, I guess that’s all the material he has. So there is no reason to ever buy another ticket for him again.”‘
On the other hand, people assume that the material a comic does on television is his best stuff, so they expect to see some of it, Jeni said in a telephone interview this week from Los Angeles.
The audience thinks you’re just practicing new stuff on them if you don’t do some of the TV material, he said.
“So you need to do enough of it that you can satisfy all the people who told their friend, ‘Wait till he gets to the bit about his girlfriend having PMS,”‘ Jeni said. “Then, you don’t make them look silly but have enough new stuff that they have a reason to come back and see you again.”
Comedy fans who haven’t seen Jeni for a while may be surprised to hear him doing political humor.
He traced the change in his act back to Sept. 11. He said that, like many people then, he was asking himself what he could do.
“You realize that you are not going to actually go get a gun and kill anybody,” he said. “So what do you do? You do comedy.”
Jeni said the challenge of doing that also intrigued him, noting that any comedian can make an audience laugh with Michael Jackson.
“So you say, ‘Let’s see if we can separate the men from the boys,”‘ Jeni said. “Who can go out and say something worthwhile about this tragedy without offending people and without being rude?”
Terrorism, the war in Iraq and a presidential election in the midst of a war made people more politically aware, allowing for a deeper look at politics than when Bill Clinton was president, he said.
“When Clinton was president, there were no real problems except Monica Lewinsky’s dress was dirty,” he said. “To me if you make jokes about the president being horny, those aren’t political jokes. Those are horny-guy jokes that happen to have a president in them.
“If you go back to the Clinton presidency, to talk about things like the military or foreign affairs, it would have seemed very anachronistic. People would’ve went, ‘Military? What are you? Beetle Bailey. What is this?”‘
His goal is not to change people’s opinions but to make them laugh even if they disagree with what he says.
That is the genesis of the name of the show and tour.
“It was a way of saying something that I believe, which is everybody’s opinions are ultimately self-serving,” Jeni said. “You don’t want to get preachy in a stand-up show. … I think the most important thing that you can do for people is give them relief. Make them laugh. That is why human beings laugh. It is a little emotional steam valve.”
And in the end, it really doesn’t matter if it’s the new material or the old that opens the valve.
Staff writer Ed Will can be reached at 303-820-1694 or ewill@denverpost.com.
Richard Jeni
COMEDY|Paramount Theatre, 1621 Glenarm Place; 8 p.m. Saturday|$29-$44|303-830- 8497 or ticketmaster.com
