“A lot of the times when I’m talking about something in my show, it’s something that I do but I make it sound like it’s something I saw somebody doing,” Maniscalco says. “For example, in What’s Wrong With People [2012 TV special] I make fun of people who eat pastries out of a bag – ‘Why don’t they just get a plate and do it?’ So the joke is centred around people stuffing their hand in a bag and just eating it out of the bag, which I do, but I make believe that I don’t just for the sake of comedy. And there’s a lot of times that I will poke fun at myself, even how I grew up and my father and the ridiculousness that happened at home.
“So I’m not off limits, but when I talk about observational things and behaviour, it tends to be situations that I go out and see what’s going on around me and talk about it. And I hope it comes off in a lighthearted way.”
Mansicalco will soon arrive for his debut Australian tour, presenting the show Aren’t You Embarrassed? in Sydney and Melbourne. Given the everyday focus of his comedy, there’s no shortage of stimulus – inane or unnecessary things are forever occurring right in front of us. That said, it’s one thing to see something absurd and another to talk about it in a way that makes several thousand people laugh, and retains humour over time. But Maniscalco is an acute observer with a knack for getting others to appreciate his viewpoint.
“It’s not that I’m looking [for material] – a lot of times it just hits me and I’ll make a note of it in my iPhone and make sure I talk about it at the local comedy club in Los Angeles,” he says. “Or if I’m on the road, I’ll try to test the material in a show. The way I get my comedy is just living my life and doing different things, whether it be going to a cooking class or going on vacation or going on a helicopter ride. Basically anything that I find myself doing, I have a very specific take on it and I try to bring that to the stage and make it funny. Life is my notebook.
“The way I work is I basically retell stories. If I called my mother and I was discussing our vacation and telling her about me and my wife going to get a Turkish massage, basically walking through that story on a phone call with my mother is very similar to how I will do it onstage.”
Something you couldn’t experience during a phone call is Maniscalco’s unique physicality. He doesn’t just deliver stories and let people do their own visualising. His material often comes with a physical complement, using loud gestures to act out the scenes he’s describing. Again, this element of his stand-up has its origins in his habitual approach to communication.
“I tend to always be very expressive in my storytelling in everyday life, whether it be a facial expression or a hand movement or whatever it might be. Then I’ve basically taken that and exaggerated it onstage. I’ve noticed people gravitating towards the physical humour just because it’s something else to catch your eye, rather than standing there and telling joke after joke behind the microphone – which a lot of comedians do, and that’s great, but I really enjoy acting the stuff out. I’m having fun doing it, so it’s the only way I know how to do it.
“I don’t want to make it sound like I’m always doing material. It’s just basically how I grew up. I would go to school, come home and sit down and have dinner and tell my family what happened at lunch today. And that story was funny, I just never had a stage to put it on. So I basically took my personality and moved it to the stage. That class clown type who’s always trying to be funny was never who I was. I was always the shy kid, in the back observing, rather than always the centre of attention. But when it came time to be the centre of attention, I relished in the moment.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
