Jeff Garlin has quite the interesting career, which has involved everything from writing and directing in his own films, co-starring on Curb Your Enthusiasm, providing voices for some of Pixar’s greatest films and writing a book based on his weight-loss goals.
This year alone, Garlin has toured with Guster and played fathers in Safety Not Guaranteed and ParaNorman but Garlin has much more on the horizon. We talked to Garlin about his second tour this year, and exclusively talked about his upcoming project with Pixar, his part in the upcoming season of Arrested Development and announced the cast for his second film, Dealing With Idiots.
Paste: So a few years ago you stated that you might consider retiring from doing stand up, but now with the “Built for Comfort” tour, this is your second tour this year. What drew you to tour again and how will “Built for Comfort” differ from your Guster tour?
Jeff Garlin: This tour will be different because it’s me doing, with Guster I did like a half an hour, thirty-five minutes, here I’ll be doing over an hour, so that’s different. Second of all, I stopped doing the grind of comedy clubs, week in and week out. That’s what I was stopping and I have still stopped that for the most part. I’ll do comedy clubs maybe two or three times a year and it’s just to work out stuff, not like what I’m doing on the road. No, I’m doing a lot of theatres on this tour.
Paste: What type of topics do you plan on covering in the show? Do you have a theme?
Garlin: I don’t know yet. I don’t know until that night, I improvise, I’m writing material now, I’m really…I don’t know yet. I always surprise myself. All I know is that I’ll be funny.
Paste: So do you go out that night with any specific plan or do you go out and wing it?
Garlin: I used to go out with a very loose outline and then sort of played off that. Now, I notice that I got no bonus points when I would kill and the audience wouldn’t know that I improvised the last hour and ten minutes, you know? So I’m putting an act together for the first time in 30 years.
Paste: You’ve been working on your second film, Dealing With Idiots. What can you tell us about the film?
Garlin: The movie is about the parents of a team of children’s little league baseball. So, it’s all about the parents, not about the kids. It’s an improvised movie, it’s kind of like, it’s my own style, but if you were to compare it, I’d compare it to Curb Your Enthusiasm or a Christopher Guest movie.
Paste: Will you be starring in that as well as writing and directing it?
Garlin: Yeah, I star in it and I wrote and directed it. I finished shooting it, I’m just putting it through the post-production now and it’ll be out in April or so.
Paste: Have you announced who is in the cast yet?
Garlin: We haven’t announced anything, and I don’t want to leave anybody out, but it’s all great people before that you’ve seen on Curb, you know, Christopher Guest, Fred Willard, Bob Odenkirk, J.B. Smoove, Gina Gershon, Kerri Kenney, Jami Gertz, Timothy Olyphant, Richard Kind, Steve Agee, Jim Sheridan, Nia Vardalos…I know I’m missing people. Someone is going to read this article and say “why didn’t you mention me?”