Jim Jefferies – You Could Get Naked on the Stage Back in the Day

by Kristina Kratochvilová 

Jim Jefferies is one of the most famous and respected comedians in the world. He jokes about gun control and climate change as easily as about fucking his wife and the death of his mother.

He unfolds his whole life to his audience and his audience loves him for it. Jefferies is currently on a world tour called Give Em What They Want and he will perform in Prague on April 21 at Kongresové centrum. 

 

You started your stand-up comedy career quite a long time ago. What’s the most fucked up thing that ever happened during your shows?

That’s a tricky question. I had fans trying to climb up the stage or yell at me, but that’s not very common. Most of the time the most fucked up things happened on the stage. Before I gave up drinking they were mostly my fault. So I would say being black-out drunk during a big arena show might have been the most fucked up thing I’ve experienced. 

Did you manage to go through the whole show even though you were so fucked up?

I’ve been drunk during a lot of shows, but some shows were really bad, so I am quite glad to be sober on the stage now. It’s a much better experience for me and for the audience as well. I am two years sober today. But drinking got me this far so I can’t complain.

Is it hard as a comedian to talk about your jokes during the interviews? Are there any topics or questions you absolutely hate? 

Ah, it’s always the “What is the dirtiest or the edgiest joke you ever said” because that inherently gets you into trouble. Because I probably said that joke like a decade ago and if I say it now I’d probably get cancelled. So that is always a question that I try to stay away from but most of the questions don’t bother me and if there is a question I do not want to answer I just don’t answer and I dodge the question like a politician.

Are you worried about the possibility of getting cancelled?

I am less worried now than I was about three years ago. What will happen will happen. I am at the age when I think that I would just handle it and move on. I’m not worried about it anymore. I tried to make jokes to make everyone happy and it didn’t make everyone happy and I feel like some people can get angry no matter what you do, so you might as well just do what you want.  

And do you feel like comedy changed a lot in the past years?

Comedy has changed. What changed comedy wasn’t people or jokes. Camera phones changed comedy. It used to be an art form where an audience and the comedian were all in it together and it could get wild. You could get naked on the stage back in the day. It was all at the moment in the room, but now everyone pull their phones out and all of a sudden it would be seen as something different.

Now you are very conscious of the fact that everything unusual you do, people record and that sort of ruined the comedy. What it also ruined is that before when you were working on jokes and you gave it a run for the first time you still had time to develop them, but now they are instantly on Youtube and so you can’t get to work your material the same way it used to be done. 

Well, there are some musicians that forbid their audience to use their phones. Is it something that may happen in the comedy as well?

Some comedians do it as well. For example, Dave Chappelle and Kevin Hart make their audiences lock their phones away in specially designed bags so they can’t use them during the shows. I tried to use them a couple of times but it always made the show start 30 minutes late and it also cost a lot of money. 

Sometimes you joke about important topics like gun control in the US or climate change. Do you think that comedy can help people perceive these problems differently and somehow make them act on the problems more? 

I don’t know if, for example, my gun control routine changed anyone’s mind but I do think that some of my routines can start a conversation. I know that my gun routine was shown in a couple of schools and whether people agreed with me or not at least they can debate about what I am saying. I think that it can sometimes be the first domino that’s pushed in someone researching the topic a little bit more.

Because let’s be honest the stand-up routines often have very loose facts and figures in them. We are not giving a lecture, you know. Also, you can give people jokes about the topic when they are having an argument with an uncle at Thanksgiving, so they can have a few quick comebacks.

You also joke about personal things that must have hurt you when they happened. Did comedy help you overcome hard times in your life more easily? 

Yes of course. It’s like a lot of people go to therapy so they can say the things they wanna say. You can laugh the tragedy off your life. A lot of what I am talking about in this new show is my mother passing away and my dad’s having a terminal illness. These are not funny things but I feel a lot better talking about them and having people laughing about them and it does feel really liberating just getting it out. 

How do you always come up with new topics for your jokes? Did you ever have a creative block? 

I’ve had a creative block all the time but at the moment I’ve got loads to write about. I’ve got married a couple of years ago, I got a new baby, my dad is really sick, and there are a lot of things going on in my life including my sobriety. Now there are a lot of stories I can tell about the drinking and drugs I sorta kept secret because I was ashamed of it when I still had the bad behaviour, but now that the behaviour is behind me I can say all I wanna say about it because Im cured or whatever the right word is.

So I actually have more freedom to tell those stories than when I was actually drinking. But obviously, now I am married so I don’t have any more one night stands stories or anything like that so if I tell any stories about sex it involves my wife and I don’t know if she enjoys that very much but I say look, this is how we pay the bills. So she just accepts that. 

Did anyone from your family or your close friends ever got offended by your jokes?

I tell them to not watch it cuz I might say some jokes about them and they never listen and always watch it. But it turns out that for the most part, people are pretty happy if they are mentioned on the telly and it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad. My in-laws are actually coming to my show, so I will make jokes about them in front of them. Gonna do jokes about having sex with their daughter and just gonna hope for the best. I don’t ask for the permission on these jokes. It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission. So I always just do it and if they get really angry I just stop doing it.

But that happens very rarely. Even my mother never really complained about me doing jokes about her. I feel that as long as you are a pretty decent person in your personal life and you treat people around you kindly and considerately in your real life, people don’t mind the jokes. And half the time the jokes are slightly embellished so they understand it is not all real and they are fine with it. 

Are you making jokes all the time, or do you take it as your job now so when you’re at home you relax the comedian in you? 

I am not a comic who’s on all the time, but I think I am funny off-stage. The way I got my wife is by making her laugh so I don’t think I could turn that off at home cuz she would leave me. Still trying to make her laugh every day. 

You made a lot of jokes about Obama and Trump. What about Biden, is he a fruitful president to write jokes about?

Biden is inherently funny because of his age and the things he does during his speeches but I think that after Trump I’m a little bit out of politics. When Trump was in the office everyone was saying that it must be so good for comedians and it wasn’t really. It was really easy to write jokes about him but when we did the right-wing voters got really offended. You could have done a two-hour-long routine and talk about Trump just for four minutes and the reviews would say that the whole night was about Trump even though that wasn’t the case.

 

So I do enjoy going to Europe and visit places like Prague where I know absolutely nothing about the political landscape of the country. So you can’t think that I am coming in with a right or left agenda. I have no agenda. So when I come to places I don’t know anything about the politics, I can talk about the food, or public transport, or something like that and for the most part people enjoy that even more, because we can all relate to that on the same level. 

So is it harder to find topics for European countries than for the United States?

No. I find Europeans interesting. In such a small amount of land, there are so many different cultures all on top of each other and all of them are so uniquely different. I prefer to go to Europe than to go anywhere else. 

I read that you were in Prague when you were younger, drunk most of the time.

Oh yes, I was there in my early twenties and I was too drunk to remember it. I remember it very vaguely but I know I had an amazing time. The girls were really pretty which is something very important to you when you are 22 and on a holiday, and the nightlife was great. So I am a big fan of Prague. 

And we have a really cheap beer!

I used to be a beer drinker but then I moved off beer because I didn’t want to get fat so I moved to vodka and that’s when things went bad for me. I wasn’t an alcoholic I could handle my beer alright. Lager and Guinness were my two number ones. 

Well, I checked the stops you’re doing on this tour and it looks like a tour of a rock-n-roll star. I know that you are not drinking anymore, but does a backstage of a comedian typically look as wild as during the concerts?

So at the moment, my opening acts are two comedians that are a similar age to me. All three of us have children under two and I also have a ten-year-old. When we get to London our backstage is going to be like a kindergarten or a daycare. We gonna have all these little kids running around and my wife and mother-in-law are gonna be there so it’s truly not as rock-n-roll as you think. Long goes the days with the cocaine on the coffee table. 

Sounds like a lot have changed in your life. 

Oh yeh. I try to travel with my kids as much as I can because you can’t get that time back. So I try to take them everywhere I can. 

Are your kids enjoying your jokes?

My kids are not allowed to watch my show. It’s funny cuz my ten-year-old son was at school and the teacher told my son that she saw my special and then said that there are some very dirty jokes and it is not for children.

And I was like, first of all, I know it is not for children and second of all, imagine if she was teaching a pornstar kid and then she would go to him and tell him that videos that his mum makes are not for children. Just because what I do for a living isn’t for children doesn’t mean I am a bad dad. My kid is a good boy, I never heard him swear or anything.  

The name of your tour is Give Them What They Want so what are you gonna give us?

Everything that anyone ever liked about my standup I am gonna try to put into these shows. It’s also something my dad used to tell me right before going to the stage when I was a young comic. He was telling me “Give them what they want, son, give them what they want.”