Most working comics would be as grateful opening a cruise ship as they would opening for Jerry Seinfeld – at least if the audiences were there.
Phil Palisoul has done both, and nearly everything in between. He has written for sitcoms, appeared on “The Tonight Show” and Comedy Central, and dropped into music videos, both as the host of NBC’s Friday Night Videos and as a character in a Toni Braxton spot.
The 43-year-old Denver native flies under the mainstream radar, despite his numerous successes – a fact placing him squarely in the company of most professional comics. His recent move back to Denver from Los Angeles has as much to do with economics as homesickness, though he doesn’t regret his time in California.
We spoke to Palisoul in advance of his Saturday homecoming show at Comedy Works about the absurd grind of writing for network sitcoms, why Denver crowds are better than Omaha crowds, and the joy of the cruise ship.
Q: You and your wife used to write for sitcoms back in the day. Can you talk about that a little bit?
A: Most notably it was “Caroline in the City,” but that wasn’t on for too long. Three out of four new shows every season fail, and we were fortunate to get jobs, but unfortunate to get jobs on shows that failed.
Q: Did you set out to be a sitcom writer when you moved to L.A.?
A: My wife and I became a writing team completely by accident. We wrote for a show called “Life’s Work,” which aired between “Roseanne” and “Home Improvement.” You’d think that had pretty good prospects. The next year we were on a show called “Union Square,” between “Friends” and “Seinfeld.” That went about 20 episodes and was canceled. From there on it was just sort of grabbing shows at a time when there was less and less available.
Q: Is that because of the glut of reality TV?
A: “Survivor” and “Who wants to Be a Millionaire” came on and pushed the sitcoms out for awhile. But I’ll be the first to tell you the sitcoms sort of killed themselves. After awhile you couldn’t tell the shows apart and they sort of ate themselves.
Q: Is that what made you return to standup?
A: My nextdoor neighbor, who was an executive, showed me a list one day of 500 writers looking for work. I missed doing standup. I missed the immediacy of telling a joke and hearing the laughter. It’s just not as fun to think of a joke in the writer’s room, then going through the whole process of seeing it approved and filmed and aired on TV.
Q: You’ve found success opening for Seinfeld and Dennis Miller, and playing Vegas, The Aspen Comedy & Arts Festival and “The Tonight Show.” Is it because of – or in spite of – your “clean” brand of humor?
A: I’ve been doing this for 16 years, and I’m always amazed at the fact that my calendar fills up. But I think it’s a little bit of both. I don’t consider myself a dirty act, although I talk about making love to my wife, or porn on the Internet. It’s just not in a way that’s graphic or crude.
Q: Do you modify your material on your stints for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines? Like adding jokes about the Norwalk virus?
A: I don’t. I want my act to be accessible everywhere and I feel like if I make boat jokes then I’m tailoring what I do to a specific place, and I end up only being able to use it there.
Q: How long have you done the cruise ship thing?
A: Since May of 2001. Royal Caribbean’s been very good to me in the amount of work I get and the type of work it is. Sometimes the auditorium I’m working is 1,300 people. It’s as big as a Vegas showroom. In a comedy club I feel like a comic, and in a cruise ship I feel like a comedian.
Q: Are you looking forward to playing Comedy Works again?
A: Oh yeah, it’s not so tight that it’s uncomfortable but it’s close enough that it’s intimate for the art. There’s no real moat that your joke has to jump over. Plus the cross-section of people you get here … In Denver there’s not one kind of thinking. You go to Omaha and you do a joke about pot and they grumble. You do a joke about homophobia and they love you. That’s just not true in Denver, and it gives the comic a pretty good base of hit-and-miss type jokes.
Staff writer John Wenzel can be reached at 303-954-1642 or jwenzel@denverpost.com.
|Phil Palisoul
COMEDY | Comedy Works, 1226 15th St.; 8:30 p.m., Saturday | $25 | 303-595-3637 or tickets
at the door an hour before show.
