-Hey, everybody.
We are joined now by one of my favorite comedians,
a great guy, and he has a YouTube show
that he started this last month,
called "Dinner with the J-- Dinner with the Gaffigans."
It's "Gaffigan," right? not "Jaffigan"?
-Sometimes it's Jaffigan.
[ Both laugh ]
-We're here with Jim Gaffigan. Hi, Jim.
-Hi. It's nice to talk to you.
I -- I'm not sure exactly where you are,
but I am in downtown Manhattan.
My wife is high-risk, so we are under double-secret quarantine.
I am with my five children.
We've been here for a month, and they're still alive.
So I should get an award.
-You should get an award.
I mean, don't take this the wrong way --
I've always thought that you were a little crazy
that you have five children,
you travel with them everywhere you go.
You're incredible parents to them.
But you must be regretting it a little bit right now.
-I'm absolutely regretting it.
I think if there's one takeaway from this segment,
it should be to encourage people not to have children.
And if you have them, give them away now.
No, I -- It's this thing called distance learning,
which is -- obviously, the schools have shut down,
and distance learning was created by people
that truly hate parents.
Because I have five kids, so you'd think,
five kids, five screens,
five places in a New York City apartment.
But it's not even that.
It's five different schedules for five different kids
on five different screens in a New York City apartment.
And the school, they just send these kind of assignments, like,
"Hey, have your 7-year-old do all this stuff."
I'm like, "I'm not doing this."
So I'm raising them to be farmhands.
-You have -- I think, if I have it right, three boys, two girls?
Are they handling it differently?
-The girls are civilized.
The boys, who only want to play on iPads,
once it comes to their distance learning,
which is essentially teleconferencing with a teacher,
that suddenly, they don't know how to turn on a computer.
You know what I mean?
Or the iPad is confusing to them.
But I understand, it's difficult.
You know, school without friends,
that's appealing, right?
-Right, sure.
Are they getting their work done?
Are you a taskmaster with them? -You know, I --
I don't know. It's too --
There's too many of them,
and there's too many different projects.
You know, I think, yesterday, I spent two hours
trying to print from my son's school iPad to our printer.
So I know that I printed out the assignment.
I don't know what happened to it, though.
He'll be fine. -So at the end of the day,
you don't sort of gather them all around and say,
"Let's show me what you've done?"
-Not really. No. You know, eventually,
it gets to 6:00 p.m., we do "Dinner with the Gaffigans,"
and then, I pretend to like them
for like 40 minutes during the show.
By the way, we've done, I think, 26 --
we've done a whole -- we've done 28 episodes.
-That's crazy. -That's a whole season.
You know what I mean?
-That's like a season back in like 1950.
-Right? I don't know if we've been picked up.
I don't think -- I don't want us to get picked up.
But there is -- you know, it's like --
And we don't really have contracts,
so my kids could come back and really have high demands.
-Yeah, I think you could threaten --
A lot of sitcoms replace child actors.
-That's true.
-This is basically you just filming family and dinner.
Like, where did you get this idea?
-I was on tour in Latin America.
I was in Bogotá, and I was about to head to the theater,
and my manager called me and informed me that Argentina
had closed its borders, so I would not be going to Argentina.
And, you know, things were moving fast.
So I decided to fly back home the next day.
And while I was at the airport, there was a --
You know, I was existing with the knowledge
that I might not get back, or I might be separated
from my family for an extended time.
And so, the "Dinner with the Gaffigans"
was something that serves as just --
'Cause I know that there are some people
separated from their families, or they're just by themselves.
I have friends that are by themselves.
So it was just something light,
and also, it would be something to serve as a break
from the constant, you know, consumption of news.
Like, I don't know how many times --
I feel like, at this point, there's got to be three or four
Sanjay Guptas, because that poor guy,
he's working so hard. -Yeah.
-And all those CNN anchors, they're like,
"My friend, Sanjay Gupta..."
He doesn't like any of those people now.
-[ Laughs ]
-They're like, "Sanjay, can you be on my show?"
He's like, "I haven't slept in three weeks."
No, but we wanted "Dinner with the Gaffigans,"
which is streamed on YouTube,
and it has an interactive element,
so people can ask families,
and we do charades and stuff like that.
So it's totally a distraction from, you know,
what we're dealing with.
-I want to -- We're gonna put up a photo
of sort of a typical "Dinner with the Gaffigans,"
and then, I want to put up a second photo where
it looks as though your youngest son
is wearing a Spider-Man mask. -Yes.
-So, was that for the whole dinner?
-Well, there's different themes.
Not for the whole dinner. But there's different themes.
One -- and by the way, it's --
the enthusiasm from my children has disappeared.
I'm like, "Do you guys want to dress up
since we're having bratwurst?
Do you want to do German things?"
And they're like, "No, get outta here."
But there was a dress-up, like, a superhero dinner,
and Patrick was the only one that dressed up.
But what we've done recently,
probably for the past week or two,
is we've added a charity element
where we're attempting to raise money
so that we can buy food trucks
for hospital workers in New York City.
And, you know, obviously, there's the PPE,
but like, on our YouTube, there's this super chat
where if you donate $2, your message gets highlighted.
And so, then we comment on it.
And sometimes we make fun of the person
that donated or make up a lie about them.
It's all very simple, nothing --
no huge, high entertainment value.
But it's kind of comfort food.