On a blustery Wednesday night this past December, the newly opened TriBeCa branch of New York’s 92nd Street Y was host to a stand-up comedy show, but you’d never have guessed it from the goings-on backstage. The only people in the modest, disconcertingly spotless greenroom were the opening acts: two smartly dressed, well-spoken, polite comedians in their early 30s, both of whom could have passed for architecture students, or graphic designers, or even grass-roots organizers for the Obama campaign. No entourage was in evidence; marijuana was alluded to, but never actually smoked; gourmet hummus and He’brew ale were partaken of, but only in moderation. And the headlining act, the reason for the capacity crowd buzzing with controlled impatience in the 300-person theater just a few feet down the hall, was not in the greenroom at all. He was crouched just offstage with his back to the curtain, running intently through “Joy to the World” with a trio of young tuba players he’d recruited that morning from Craigslist, looking less like one of the great new hopes of American comedy than the leader of a severely underfunded marching band. He didn’t look like a comic at all, in fact, and he certainly wasn’t acting like one. Which, as it turned out, was precisely the point.
COMEDIAN AT WORK Galifianakis backstage at Bamboozle.
THE AWKWARD AGE Galifianakis’s road to the mainstream has been doggedly counterintuitive. Galifianakis’s "film" for Absolut vodka.
“What I call the ‘geography’ of a room — its size, its layout, the overall feel of the place — really determines how far you can push things,” the comic in question, a cherubic man with a fiery red beard and the distinctly unshowbizlike name of Zach Galifianakis, told me in the greenroom a short time before. “I love to do shows in unlikely places, because the audience’s expectations are less fixed. If you’re going on right after a guy with suspenders and a skinny, 1980’s-style comedy tie, who’s been striking crazy poses — doing the same type of material that worked in 1991 — there’s no space for trying unconventional stuff. A place like this, on the other hand, is more of a blank slate.” Galifianakis took a deep, unsteady breath (the first sign of nervousness he’d shown) and stared down intently at the tips of his New Balance sneakers. “Which is lucky for me, because I have no idea what I’m going to say to those people out there.”
Coming from most other performers — even most other stand-up comics — such a statement might seem coy, if not outright preposterous; from Galifianakis, it comes close to being credible. When Galifianakis hit the 92Y stage in his customary jogging shoes and corduroy blazer, instead of breaking the crowd in by leading off with a few jokes, he regarded them blankly for a moment, then handed out a fistful of short yellow pencils and white slips of paper. “I don’t know what to say to you guys tonight, so I’m taking requests,” he announced. “Write down a song you feel like hearing.” The front tables looked to be a mix of stand-up fans and 92Y regulars reserving their judgment, but the slips were duly filled out and collected. Galifianakis rifled through the slips as he walked over to the baby grand piano at stage right, then stopped short, frowned and looked back at the crowd. “ ‘Joy to the World,’ huh?” he murmured. “I’ll see what I can do.” Then he turned and gestured to someone off stage left.
Suddenly, like a conjuring trick, the trio of tuba players stood center stage, playing a tightly rehearsed rendition of the requested song with businesslike looks on their faces. The reaction of the crowd was a mixture of astonishment, confusion and childlike pleasure at the unlikeliness of what they were seeing; the gag was, essentially, a bait and switch, but with no agenda other than delight. The mood in the room was now closer to that of a sweet-16 party — or, for that matter, a bar mitzvah — than any stand-up show I’d ever been to. Galifianakis looked out at the crowd as the trio played on, beaming as childishly as anyone else in the room. He appeared to have forgotten, along with the audience, that he was the featured performer of the evening. “That’s not really a joke,” a 30ish man just in front of me observed to the woman beside him. She nodded at him and kept laughing.
The considerable cult that has grown up around Galifianakis’s performances over the last few years, both live and on video-sharing sites like YouTube, has done so largely because his routines are, arguably, the most unpredictable in contemporary comedy. A typical hourlong set might meander from carefully composed, conceptual one-liners à la Steven Wright to profanity-drenched tirades against members of the audience to slapstick to solemnly tacky musical interludes (Galifianakis is an able pianist) to Andy Kaufman-esque attacks on the genre that seem less concerned with eliciting laughs from the crowd than with confounding its notions of what comedy or, for that matter, entertainment ought to be.
Perhaps more than anyone else in the business, Galifianakis embodies the rebellion against the outmoded Comedy Club circuit — the exposed brick, the two-drink minimum, the indifferent audience, the “regular guy with an attitude” routine — which has come to be labeled the “indie comedy” movement. “Zach is so conceptual,” Sarah Silverman, who has known and worked with Galifianakis since the mid-’90s, told me. “He’s definitely part of the excitement of this shift, this idea of comedy as art. Whether he’s at his piano, offering deadpan one-liners, or trying out some brand-new conceptual piece — like the ways he uses musicians, or flip-board messages, or the first thing that comes into his head — he is so totally original and thrilling to watch.”
The Internet, with its steady appetite for eccentric and off-the-cuff content, has been crucial to Galifianakis’s growing prominence, and to the rise of indie comedy as a whole. “College kids these days have an appreciation for randomness — just completely bizarre stuff,” Galifianakis told me, “and they didn’t get that by going to Uncle Chuckle’s Comedy Hut.” Of all the Galifianakis clips, gags and sketches currently in Internet orbit, none have done more to cement his reputation as a leader of the comic avant-garde, curiously enough, than a series of three ads in 2008 for Absolut vodka. “This advertising firm from Sweden called me out of the blue and asked me to do an ad,” Galifianakis said. “The one request they had was to not make it look too ’80s, since Absolut is perceived as kind of an ’80s brand.” He paused there for a moment, clearly savoring the memory. “That’s what gave us the idea to make the skits a kind of homage to ‘The Golden Girls.’ ”
The resulting three sketches, made in collaboration with the absurdist comedy duo Tim and Eric (of “Awesome Show, Great Job!” part of the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming), attain levels of absurdity — and, at times, flat-out stupidity — that test the limits of belief, even in this golden age of irreverent, self-reflexive, cooler-than-thou advertising. The premise is simple: in each clip, a man named Zach — played by Galifianakis himself, in a flaming-red wig that might best be described as the love child of Bea Arthur and a tsunami — pours his similarly bewigged friends, “Tim” and “Eric,” grotesque amounts of vodka, swills it with them perfunctorily, then loses his temper for no apparent reason. The sets look hastily thrown together, the video is cable-access quality at best and the mood of each sketch progresses seemingly haphazardly from awkwardness to tension to inappropriate rage. There is nothing inherently funny in this scenario — with the possible exception of the obvious disdain its creators feel for the product they’re ostensibly selling — but the ads are both hilarious and, paradoxically, highly effective.
“My only editing note to Tim and Eric, after we’d shot the first clip,” Galifianakis said, “was ‘Let’s make it impossible for someone to think that this is an actual ad.’ After we finished that first clip, the creative director of the ad campaign told me that it was his favorite thing he’d done in 10 years. He really seemed to appreciate how far we’d taken things.” He paused a moment. “I was pretty surprised by that, to tell you the truth.”
It’s a testament to how much the mainstream has mutated over the last decade that Galifianakis’s current position as a prince of indie comedy has begun to bring him starring roles in Hollywood. “The Hangover,” a big-budget comedy by the director of “Old School,” in which Galifianakis gives a movie-stealing performance as a neurotic man-child set loose in Las Vegas, opens on Friday, and he has just finished work on “G-Force,” a 3-D Jerry Bruckheimer project about a team of talking guinea pigs. It’s hard not to suspect that in both cases the directors approached Galifianakis for the same reason Absolut did: to connect with a demographic more interested in the margins of comedy than in its bland and mealy center.
Galifianakis has been a presence on the comedy scene for more than a decade, but his true ascent began a little more than four years ago, with a shoestring-budget movie about stand-up. “I was playing a doctor on a dramatic show on Fox called ‘Tru Calling,’ trying my best to get fired, when Patton Oswalt called me up and saved my life,” he told me. Oswalt, a veteran of the stand-up circuit perhaps best known for his role as Spence on “The King of Queens” on CBS, was organizing a tour of like-minded comics, “The Comedians of Comedy.” It was modeled on something that had recently worked well for other performers on the fringes of the mainstream: doing shows at indie-rock venues instead of at traditional comedy clubs.
The tour itself — and the documentary of the same name that it spawned — became a kind of “Buena Vista Social Club” for the indie comedy scene, drawing together a group of disparate, edge-of-the-radar performers and presenting them as a unified collective, possibly even a movement. The film was the hit of the 2005 South by Southwest Film Festival, was adapted by Comedy Central into a six-episode series and established Galifianakis’s reputation virtually overnight. “That movie really made a difference,” Galifianakis told me. “A lot of people saw that who’d only known me from pretty bad TV shows, or didn’t know about me at all.” He smiled. “Now slightly fewer people don’t know who I am.”
Despite his fondness for making jokes about his girth (“I’m gaining weight for a role — ‘The Zach Galifianakis Story’ ”), Galifianakis, 39 years old and 5-foot-8, makes a curiously delicate impression in person: small, precise hands, clear blue eyes and a face that can radiate wholesomeness, perversity or demonic glee in equal measure. “Zach has one of those faces, like Buster Keaton or W. C. Fields, that can make you laugh with just a look,” the comic Andy Kindler, a longtime friend of Galifianakis’s, told me. “You’ll be hanging around him and catch yourself cracking up without having a clue what you’re laughing about. To me, he’s a great physical comic.” There’s also a slight but definite quality of menace to Galifianakis’s onstage persona — obvious when he’s throwing one of his famously over-the-top tantrums, but present even in his most lilting piano interludes — that keeps his audience in a constant but almost intangible state of tension. Comics from Lenny Bruce to Richard Pryor to Chris Rock have made use of tension of this kind, but Galifianakis’s anger has a peculiarly surreal effect, perhaps because its source is so mysterious. “Zach has a darkness,” Silverman agrees. “But at the same time he’s mostly silly. We were standing backstage at a club in L.A., U.C.B., that shares a hallway with a restaurant called Birds. On the door that goes into the restaurant, it says ‘Birds employees only,’ and Zach just took his pen and put a comma after ‘Birds,’ so it said, ‘Birds, employees only,’ as if they were telling birds that they are not allowed through this door. He sees every situation as an opportunity.”
Like most comics, Galifianakis mines any and all stereotypes for material, especially those that hit closest to home: his spectacular losses of temper, for example — an audience favorite — play on his fiery red hair, his celebrity, his ethnicity, his profession, even his weight, and they often seem jarringly real. Offstage, however, Galifianakis is eager to distance himself from the persona he creates (and, often as not, publicly dismantles) in his performances.
Since the early ’60s, a multitude of clichés have accrued around the professional comic — the drug use, the womanizing, the fits of self-destructive rage, the angry-clown persona — that a few prominent talents, like John Belushi and, more recently, Chris Farley, seemed to embody. But none have been more tenacious than the belief that the gift of comedy is developed, or at least refined, by a traumatic childhood. “That character comes out of me, but that’s not who I am,” Galifianakis told me recently, over multiple pints of Guinness at a pub near his apartment in Brooklyn. “I had a comfortable childhood in North Carolina, wonderful parents, a big Greek family that was always laughing. I think my sense of humor grew out of that — out of jokes with my big brother and my sister and my cousins. My brother was torturous, I guess, but in a funny way. He used to say to me, ‘I’m giving you a gag order,’ then stuff his dirty underpants into my mouth. He used to drag me stark naked across the lawn, then hold me up by my ankles for the passing cars to see.” When I pointed out that such treatment could, conceivably, fall under the childhood-trauma heading, Galifianakis laughed. “I do sometimes tell my brother, ‘You designed me.’ He doesn’t like to hear that very much.”
While still in high school, Galifianakis developed what he considers his first full-fledged comic “character”: an effeminate redneck, with a wildly exaggerated lisp, whose mother warned him about coming into physical contact with black people. “The black kids at school loved it,” he told me. “They used to bump into me in the hallway, just to hear me go into my bit.”
He thought about pursuing acting, but when high school ended, Galifianakis deferred to his parents’ wishes and enrolled at North Carolina State University — John Tesh’s alma mater, Galifianakis noted — and majored, as Tesh did, in communications. “Most people make a lot of friends in college,” Galifianakis said. “I didn’t. N.C.S.U. is an agriculture school.” He made some attempts at acting while at college — his mother ran a community center for the arts, and he’d always been curious about theater — but he was less than overwhelmed by the experience. He says he failed his last required course by one point, then had a “nervous breakdown” and “came to New York to find a really good acting coach.”
Galifianakis arrived in the big city, after four squandered years, as serious about acting as only a 20-something-year-old from the middle of nowhere can be. Comedy, let alone stand-up comedy, couldn’t have been further from his mind. He worked as a nanny, a housecleaner and a busboy at a downtown strip club, and he wrangled a role in a single play. “I took a few acting classes, but I always had problems,” he told me. “I’d start laughing during the exercises.” As often happens, however — especially to ambitious young men in their 20s — his true vocation found him in spite of himself. And it found him by way of a girl.
“Zach came up to me one night in 1995, in Max Fish, a bar on the Lower East Side,” Lisa deLarios, a Texas-born comic in her mid-30s, told me. “He pointed at some guy in a suit at the end of the bar and asked me to ask that guy to buy me a drink. When I asked him why, he said, ‘So I can have it.’ I thought he was cute.” Galifianakis began tagging along to deLarios’s stand-up gigs, and from then it was only a matter of time. “My first show was in the back of a hamburger restaurant in Times Square called Hamburger Harry’s,” Galifianakis recalled fondly. “As soon as I got offstage, I knew that this was what I wanted to do. The next 35 shows were terrible, but that didn’t matter. I was going to every open mike, seeing every show, taking every gig that I could get. I did shows in Midtown, standing on bar stools, with a hockey game on, and everyone in the bar looking the other way. You were literally yelling over the sound of the game, trying to get people’s attention.” He shook his head at the memory. “I figured out pretty early that comedy comes out of discomfort.”
It was clear from the beginning, both to Galifianakis and to the people who booked him, that he was an awkward fit for the conventional comedy-club format: a video of an early gig shows him sitting at a decrepit upright piano, banging on a single out-of-tune key over and over, threatening not to end his set until it was fixed. Over time, however, he became aware of a community of more established comics, primarily based in Los Angeles — Bob Odenkirk, Sarah Silverman, Janeane Garofalo, David Cross — who were equally impatient with the prevailing conventions of stand-up. This extremely loose-knit group had little in common other than their aversion to cliché, their relative youth and the fact that they were actually funny.
“What we were trying to do back then was to find a way out of how comedy was marketed,” Kindler explained. “There was a kind of comedy boom in the ’80s, all these clubs opening up all over the place, with a ton of lowest-common-denominator material being pumped out to meet the demand. That bubble sort of popped in the early to mid-’90s, a lot of the clubs closed and suddenly the last place anyone would think of going to hear something funny was a comedy club. That kind of left the door wide open for people to try something new.”
“There was a scene in the mid-’90s, at a bar on Ludlow Street called the Luna Lounge,” Galifianakis told me. “The comedy there was more like performance art. My favorite skit was by a group called Slovin and Allen, who eventually became writers for ‘Saturday Night Live.’ They built a time machine that only went 30 seconds into the past. They’d just keep repeating the same thing over and over, every time they flipped the time-travel switch. That was so friggin’ funny.” Galifianakis laughed and took a sip of his Guinness simultaneously — a piece of performance art in its own right — then frowned thoughtfully down into his pint. “Of course, that would never have worked in a comedy club.”
At the same time that Galifianakis was hanging out on Ludlow, he was exploring more orthodox channels to success, and in 1997, on the strength of a “holding deal” — essentially a contract for potential parts in existing sitcoms — he made the requisite move to Los Angeles. Bit parts in movies soon followed, as well as a recurring role on the ill-fated NBC sitcom “Boston Common,” but the work was a far cry from the scene he’d been a part of in New York, and the glamorous life was slow in arriving. “When I first got to L.A., I had a pretty good setup,” Galifianakis told me. “I convinced a mechanic to let me live in an Audi that was waiting to get fixed. I’d drive it around for a while, then it would break down and have to be fixed again, which meant I got to keep it for a little while longer. It was kind of an everybody-wins situation, except for the poor lady who was waiting for her Audi.” He continued to do stand-up in his plentiful down time — “in churches, art galleries, wherever they’d let me” — and gradually made a name for himself on the West Coast. Then, in 2001, the big break came, the holy grail of every mainstream comic: his own late-night comedy show.
“Late World With Zach,” which ran for nine weeks on VH1, would simultaneously provide Galifianakis with his greatest popular exposure to date and threaten to derail him completely. The show was heavily promoted by the network, but this investment brought restrictions, both corporate and self-imposed. “It was not the place to be doing comedy,” Galifianakis said. “VH1 put up a list, in the office, of artists — Cher, Nickelback, whoever was big at the time — that I wasn’t allowed to make fun of. In a way, it was like the cable TV equivalent of a comedy club, and I knew — I just knew—that it wasn’t going to last.” He took another slow sip of his pint. “Also, I was eating a lot of pot cookies at the time. That might have had something to do with it.”
The exigencies of television — even of late-night cable television — can be brutal, and Galifianakis was, as he saw it, just beginning to come into his own when word came down that “Late World With Zach” would be canceled. “That was freeing, in a way, knowing we were getting axed,” he told me. “When you’ve got nothing to lose, you tend to go a little crazy.” In addition to refusing to plug any more shows, bands or products, Galifianakis turned his dissecting wit on the format itself, performing his opening monologues in a preschool, in an old-folks’ home and on a Los Angeles city bus; he hosted the show from his distinctly shabby house in Santa Monica; and in an episode toward the end of “Late World,” he played to an audience of exactly one person. The show’s unpopularity (and Galifianakis’s own obscurity) were running gags from the beginning. In one particularly memorable segment, he interviewed people waiting in line for tickets outside his studio; virtually none of them had a clear idea of which show they were waiting to see, let alone who the host was. “I don’t think the network executives liked me very much,” he told me. When I asked why, he shrugged. “Mostly because I made so many jokes about nobody watching the show. That, and I kept describing them as pigs. On the air. To preschoolers.”
The final episode of “Late World” was a party to celebrate the show’s cancellation. “To me, it was very funny to play the part of the ungracious, ungrateful host,” Galifianakis told me. “I didn’t want to be there, so I decided to use that as my material.” When the reality of what happened began to sink in, however, and new roles proved scarce, his equanimity began to suffer. “Once you have a show, and it fails, people see you as a has-been, and that’s it,” he confessed. “The general attitude, from everyone around me, was ‘You blew it.’ I just had that feeling, like I was a wash-up pretty early.” Galifianakis spent the next few years performing where he could, taking the occasional acting role, even auditioning for game shows. When I asked whether the transition was hard, Galifianakis fell uncharacteristically silent. “When you go from having your own talk show to doing stand-up in a bowling alley,” he said finally, “you can react by getting mad or depressed, or by just going away, like people expect you to.” He took in a slow, thoughtful breath. “I reacted by growing my beard.”
Galifianakis’s beard has since become indispensable, both as source material for his jokes — “When you look like I do, it’s hard to get a table for one at Chuck E. Cheese” — and as a symbol of sorts to his burgeoning fan base of young hipsters, many of whom are defiantly furry themselves. It also seems to have made him funnier. Distinctive hair, facial or otherwise, is nothing new in comedy — Chaplin’s mustache, Andrew Dice Clay’s sideburns, Carrot Top’s carrot top — but in Galifianakis’s case, it actually serves as an organizing principle for his career, a useful dividing line between his formative and mature periods. The less hirsute Galifianakis of “Late World With Zach,” “Boston Common” and “Tru Calling,” was a talented wisecrack, a perpetual adolescent, smirking his way through the conventional stations of showbiz; the post-“Late World,” fully bearded Galifianakis plies much stranger waters, and he has adjusted his exterior to match. The beard lends him a subtly beatnik air, a link to the first generation of stand-up iconoclasts, like Lord Buckley and Lenny Bruce; at the same time,it gives him a professorial quality — dare I call it a gravitas? — that makes his more meatheaded material jarringly effective. Galifianakis himself put it more succinctly: “I look like a homeless guy now. People seem to appreciate that.”
One of the people who appreciated it was Kanye West, who saw Galifianakis perform at a Hollywood club called Largo in 2007. “I was doing a bit about how much I hate celebrity egos, and that seemed to resonate with him, for some reason,” said Galifianakis, with a barely perceptible grin. “He asked me to do a video for him, and I said yes, with one condition: I just go off by myself and shoot it, and he doesn’t get to look at it until it’s done.” To everyone’s surprise, West agreed. The resulting video, in which Galifianakis and the indie-folk icon Will Oldham drive a tractor around a cornfield while lip-synching West’s hit single “Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” has been viewed nearly half a million times. “I wasn’t sure what Kanye would think of it, to be honest,” Galifianakis said. “But his response was perfect, considering how we’d first met. He said it was the best video he’d ever made.”
The pint-size orange tractor that Galifianakis and Oldham frolic on in Kanye’s video sits at his farm in the mountains of North Carolina, not far from the Virginia border. When I met him there one damp, sunny morning in March, we took it for a spin — moving at a tortoiselike pace, perhaps to make the property seem bigger, perhaps because it’s as fast as the tractor can go. I balanced somewhat precariously on the tractor’s rear fender, and every so often a sudden lurch threatened to plant me facedown in the mud. “This tractor is painfully slow, but whenever you let your guard down, it screws you,” Galifianakis yelled over the whine of the engine. “My comedy is like that. You can put that in your article, if you want.” He was dressed like a gentleman farmer, in boots and a herringbone blazer, but his enthusiasm made him seem like a 12-year-old boy. “We’ve just passed through Lower Lickbottom,” he said grandly, gesturing at a clump of pines behind us. “And straight ahead is Pondoleezza Rice.”
An abundance of puns is not the only surprise in store for visitors to Galifianakis’s farm. Here in the country, his beard carries an altogether different set of associations — less “Pull My Daisy,” more “Deliverance” — and his demeanor seems to change subtly to match. His relationship to his home state is a complicated one (he refers to a nearby town, for example, as “the mouth-breathing capital of the world”), but Galifianakis, whose father moved to the U.S. from Greece at the age of 3, has a traditional side that the hill country brings to the fore. “I’d spend all my time here, if I could,” he told me, heaving a yeomanly sigh. “It would make my parents happy, for one thing. I pitched a sitcom once that would have been shot in the next town over, where they’ve got a racetrack for lawn mowers. It would have been a great show, based on stuff that actually happens around here.” I asked what happened to the sitcom idea. “I couldn’t get anybody interested back then,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Maybe these days I’d have better luck.”
Fortune does seem to be smiling on Galifianakis these days, but he has always been interested in seeing exactly how much he can get away with. The subject of race, a favorite since his stint as the effeminate redneck in high school, has remained a staple of Galifianakis’s stand-up, both because of his small-town Southern background (always fertile ground for comedy) and because of its status as the great American taboo. “It’s not a selfless thing,” he told me. “Wherever there’s something that people don’t feel comfortable talking about, that’s where the good jokes are. People might misunderstand you, but I decided, right after my show was canceled, never to dumb my material down for anybody. A bad comic follows his audience, catering to whatever they want; a good comic will always lead.”
Galifianakis is especially proud of “Apology,” a two-part bait-and-switch routine he developed a few years earlier. Several years back, performing at a dinner theater in L.A., Galifianakis delivered the following one-liner: “When I get drunk, sometimes my Southern accent comes out, and I say words like ‘y’all’ . . . and ‘nigger.’ ” It went over the way his jokes tend to: an instant of silence, then loud, slightly horrified laughter, sprinkled with the occasional boo. Then it became something more. “The audience was getting very upset — people in the crowd were yelling, ‘You’re a racist,’ ” Galifianakis told me. At this point, he interrupted his act to address a young black woman sitting in the front row. “I said, ‘I want to publicly apologize for this joke,’ ” Galifianakis told me. “I brought the woman up onstage, and I began to read an apology I’d written out, to the tune of Michael Jackson’s ‘Black or White.’ Halfway through it, another black woman came out from backstage, and we did an elaborate dance routine together. That was the close of the show.”
When I asked whether setting up the audience that way was satisfying for a comic — revenge, of a kind, for being misunderstood — Galifianakis surprised me by shaking his head soberly. “That’s one of the great things about comedy: we can — and should — say the things that other people aren’t supposed to say. If we didn’t do that, if we didn’t push against those limits, we’d just be standing around onstage and yelling.”
By that measure, one of the most illuminating moments during Galifianakis’s performance in TriBeCa came when he parted ways, momentarily, with his audience. After performing a few “characters,” like Guy From Queens Who Is Obsessed With Cargo Shorts — a regular bit that changes only in the particulars from show to show — he announced one that seemed to have been made up on the spot: The Kid Who Doesn’t Know, Down In His Living Room, That His Uncle, Who’s Upstairs, Has Suddenly Gone Deaf. Like many of Galifianakis’s characters, the intro was more elaborate than the performance itself, which consisted of Galifianakis shouting, ‘Uncle David? Uncle Da-vid!’ in an increasingly nervous little kid’s voice. The audience appeared more puzzled than amused, which isn’t especially unusual in the course of a typical Galifianakis set; what was unusual was Galifianakis’s response. The ‘Kid’ sketch went on so long that a number of people in the crowd grew noticeably restless — and then it went on even longer. Much longer. Even the hard-core fans in the room seemed to get a bit uncomfortable. By the time he finally finished, everyone in the room had experienced the awkwardness — and even, to a small degree, the terror — of improvised stand-up firsthand. When I asked Galifianakis about the “Kid” later, he said it was his favorite moment of the night.
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