- Oh, my worst failure, oh.
I mean, I write about in the book about how probably
the failure that was the most public and the most damning
and the one that instilled me with the most fear
was I had been doing comedy in New York for 10 years
and I was at a theater that a lot of people
have now heard of, called the Upright Citizens Brigade,
where when I started there,
pretty much no one had heard of it,
and then 10 years in, it was like a comedic institution.
And all my friends were getting these high-level jobs
and people were like, "When are you gonna?
"You're the next guy.
"You're the next one who's gonna get one of those gigs."
And then that would prove not to be true.
And then people I had taught in improv classes
were getting cast on NBC sitcoms.
And people were like, "This is getting weird, man,
"but I'm sure you're the next."
Anyway, long story short, (laughing)
10 years in, I finally got a sitcom and I was the lead
and they picked it up straightaway for 10 episodes.
The guy who played Napoleon Dynamite had dropped out.
They auditioned 10 of us
and called back two of us and I got it.
There was a New York Times profile that was like,
the unlikely pressure of being a sitcom star,
and the tenor of the profile was like,
this guy's been like an underground
comedy guy in New York for years
and everybody's so thrilled he gets a shot,
let's hope he doesn't drop the ball.
(laughing)
And then it bombed so hard,
and that wasn't easy.
But it really changed by perspective on many things,
but it was a pretty hard and swift and painful failure.
- So how do you come back from something like that?
- Well, I don't know how other people
would come back for it.
I came back from it by opting to be
the only person in history who went from being a sitcom star
to the host of a public access show in eight months.
Eight months later I was on public access TV
and then I stayed there for 4 1/2 years.
Which, I say, there were people in my life
who I can say were tremendously concerned about that choice
because it worked out. (laughing)
It did work out and with the hindsight being 20/20,
people can be like, oh no, yeah,
you went and built a whole thing on public access.
And then the show I did on public access
went to cable over the years
and was a show I was actually invested in
and built from the ground up and was very proud of.
But when I went to public access,
people were like, "Oh, you sad person.
(laughing)
"Oh, you sad person."
I think the main thing I learned
from failing that big and that publicly was just,
I so distinctly remember having two thoughts.
One, I was like, this sucks and it's embarrassing,
but it doesn't hurt half as much as I thought it would.
Like, I don't care, why is that?
And that lead me to thought two, where I was like,
you know what, all of that was ego.
No offense to them.
People work on 'em and people enjoy them
and millions of people soak 'em up,
way more people than watch The Chris Gethard Show.
People like sitcoms.
I don't like sitcoms, like I don't watch sitcoms.
I haven't watched a sitcom since like Seinfeld.
It was all ego.
It was just me like, I just want a job
like Bobby Moynihan has a job, you what I mean?
How come Zach Woods got a job and I didn't get a job?
Like my friends, like being bitter towards my friends,
so I realized this is all driven by ego, that sucks.
And then the second big thought was like,
if I ever eat shit this hard ever again,
it's going to be for something I'm proud of.
And that was the big takeaway from failure,
was like, if you don't even care,
it's not gonna hurt that much,
and that's almost a sadder thought.
I'd rather fail brutally for something that I care about
than succeed at something that I don't give a shit about.
Sorry, pardon my French.
Is that okay, is cursing okay?
I should have asked. - No, cursing
is more than all right. - That's fine.
- Good.
Fuck yeah.
(laughing)
- If you had succeeded in the show,
you'd be living in a nightmare right now,
you'd be living as a Napoleon Dynamite imitation.
- You'd be out with Chuck Lorie right now.
- Yeah, I probably would be out with Chuck Lorie,
and that would not end well for me.
No, I think about that a lot.
I'm like, if that had gone, I think I would have become
a pretty lonely person and a pretty unbearable person.
I will say, here's a thing
that doesn't happen to everybody in life,
is that when the show got picked up,
have you ever heard of a Tyler Perry deal?
Do you know this TV lingo?
- I mean, I know who Tyler Perry is.
- So the Tyler Perry deal,
he's produced a number of sitcoms.
For anybody that doesn't work in TV, this is a thing,
I don't know how often they do it anymore,
but around 2010, he had established a thing
where it's like, let's not make a pilot,
and then you choose, we want a series.
Let's commit to 10 episodes and then if we pick it up,
we pick it up straight to syndication, 90 episodes.
So once you make 100 episodes, it goes to syndication,
and that's when it just plays forever, like Friends does.
So everybody was trying to make
these long-shot bets on shows.
So we got picked up for 10 episodes
and my agent explains this deal to me
and he goes, "So I just want you to know
"if it does get picked up,
"you have a point on the back end."
And he goes, "So the day it gets picked up,
"you will make $2.2 million that day."
So my life would have been bad
if I picked up that showing in an artistic sense.
(laughing)
There's other ways in which my life
would have been tremendously easy
compared to the subsequent eight years.
(laughing)
- I think you bring up an interesting point
about failure though, which is that
when you go into something feeling like scarcity
or feeling like it's a zero-sum game,
like this person's gonna get a show and I'm not going to,
the stakes get so much higher, so that when you do get it,
it becomes so much more precious
and that losing it is going to be that much more painful.
And I think that, you talked about ego
and I think it's almost like
an unhealthy kind of lack of ego, right?
Like you're just so afraid in this moment
that you're going to lose whatever thing you had
that's validating you
and making you feel good about yourself.
- I think so, and I think one of the things
that I had wrote about in the book is that
just as I get older and have made more art
and have sorta stabilized
and built a foundation that resembles success,
it's sort of weird to think about, I think,
I don't know if it's an American thing or human instinct,
but I think we make success feel like
a very black and white issue, like you pick what,
I think it's so crazy.
I look back at college and I'm like,
it's so crazy that we tell an 18-year-old kid,
pick a major that will define
what you do for the rest of your life
and go be good at it and that's it now.
You gotta be good at that or not good at that.
And if you deviate from that,
it's probably a sign that something's gone really wrong.
It's so weird to me that we have this thing,
this instinct of pick what you wanna succeed at
and that can never change, there can be no shades of gray,
that can't mutate or transform over time.
That feels like the dialogue
we're all handed when we're young.
And as I get older and older,
it just proves to not be true over and over again.
Like my vision of success when I was 15
is different than what it was when it was 25,
and now that I'm 38, it's different.
Even with my experience, yeah,
I have not made $2.2 million in sum total,
let alone on one project. - Yet, yet.
- Not yet. - But it could happen.
- You are here tonight.
- That's true. - I'm here tonight,
first of all, at The Bell House
for only 150th time in my performing career.
(laughing)
No, but I was gonna say, you think about what success is
and I'm like, I did not make anywhere close
to that amount of money on The Chris Gethard Show.
I'd spent tens of thousands of dollars on public access,
spent most of that money from my Comedy Central sitcom
to make that show.
But I met my wife, so who the hell
is gonna say that that's not success?
You know, my wife was the band leader on my show.
We weren't friends before that.
Now we're married.
So I'll take that instead of $2.2 million.
If you would tell me, we can give you,
go back in time and give you $2.2 million,
but you'll never meet your wife, I'd be like,
"Fuck off, my wife's worth more than $2.2 million.
"Go fuck yourself."
(audience cheers and applauds)
- How much is she worth specifically?
- She's worth like, (laughing)
she comes in probably at like 2.4 or 2.6.
- Okay, that's decent.
- We'd have to enter a very bitter negotiation.
That time traveler and I, I'd really be hard balling him.
I'd be like, "You give me 4.5 and two points on the back end
"and now we can talk about the time machine."
(laughing)
No, no, no.
(ringing music)