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Ifart in your general5/31/2023 Until a few years ago, I used to be a lot heavier-I was up in the upper 270s-and one of the consequences of having changed my physicality is that hopefully I won’t die soon. “When I got up on stage, I could see it in people’s faces: that dude is sure I’m gay, and he’s totally not buying this whole wife bullshit. Early in the new DVD, he lets the audience know that, despite what they may be thinking-au contraire, indeed!-he is married, and she’s not a beard. It’s nice to kind of not have to worry about some drunk down in the front row being like ‘What the f- is this homo talking about?’”Īnd Finnegan does get some of that. But I love that I can work at the absolute top of my intelligence, being as obscure as I want to be or making an odd historical reference. I spend an hour or two trying to write jokes, and then you say them once and they’re gone-which is so different from standup, where you might do a joke 50 times before you really get the wording down and find out what works and what doesn’t. “It’s fun, but very pressure filled, because I get called to do it that day and don’t know what we’re talking about until around 5:30pm. But that’s not really where I want to exist as a standup.” He’s relishing his current fortnightly-or-so appearances on Keith Olbermann’s show, which exercise completely different comedic muscles. I won a car on a game show a number of years ago for knowing ‘80s music videos. “I always worry when somebody says ‘I love Best Week Ever- I’m gonna come to your show tonight!’ I’m always like, ‘Just so you know, I’m not going to be talking about Dancing with the Stars, and I hope that’s okay with you.’ I love throwing pop culture references into my act. So it may come as a surprise to anyone watching Au Contraire that he goes in more for relationship humor. But he really came into his own a few years ago as a regular on VH1’s Best Week Ever, where he riffed on gossip and pop culture. And it just feels natural and fits better for me.” Finnegan first found a measure of TV notoriety with a short but indelible appearance in a sketch on Dave Chappelle’s old show (playing the only white guy in an otherwise all-black parody of The Real World). I like people who are willing to explore a topic for a long period of time-Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Doug Stanhope, Louis CK, Greg Geraldo, people like that. But I really enjoy people who have something to say-even if it’s stupid it doesn’t have to be political or socially responsible. “It’s cool now to be kind of a oneliner comic, or do a neo-Borstch Belty or neo-Steven Wright thing. That’s sort of my sweet spot: If you’ve ever read a philosophy text and yet you also have the iFart application on your iPhone, you’re the perfect audience member for me.” But that mix of tone and subject matter is not to say that Finnegan goes in for completely random comedy. “But I kind of like that, because the people who can relate to both are the people I’m trying to reach. “Sometimes I find that I’m too dirty for the people who want to hear really highfalutin comedy, and too highfalutin for people who really want to hear about boobs,” Finnegan notes. Is his comedy sophisticated, or does he work blue? Will he go for the lowest common denominator, or take the comic high road? The answer to all of the above would be… yes. And as you watch the opening minutes of Au Contraire, it may not be easy to peg right away exactly which vein of comedy gold Finnegan intends to mine. Yet when it comes to his standup act, he chucks purely topical humor out the window in favor of getting personal. He’s highly recognizable to the TV-viewing comedy cognoscenti for being a regular on VH1’s Best Week Ever and Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC show. And now I’m going to tell you why you’re wrong.’” But maybe Au Contraire also fits as a title because Finnegan is a bit of a self-contrarian, when it comes to having a comedy style that’s not easy to pin down. Because that’s a major element of my comedy: ‘You are wrong. It was very indicative of me, in the sense that it’s a little foppysounding, but also a little bit defiant. “Then I thought of Au Contraire, which is just a throw-off phrase that I used in the middle of a joke. “But they all seemed a little too standup comedy-ish to me,” he explains. When Christian Finnegan was trying to arrive at a title for his first DVD release, he rifled through the punchlines in his comedy act, looking to find the right snappy, snarky one-liner.
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