Over the course of his strange comedy career, Chris Gethard has hitchhiked to Bonnaroo for a Web series and dangled himself over a pellet-gun-toting audience while dressed as a duck. But no experience could have prepared him for Career Suicide, his new HBO comedy special. In it, the Jersey comic discusses his history with anxiety, alcoholism and depression. He details a suicide attempt at age 21, in which he tried to get hit by a truck but wound up crashing his car on someones lawn. I think I overestimated my ability to handle discussing it onstage, Gethard said one afternoon last winter. The material has kind of weighed down on me a bit. Judd Apatow produced the HBO version of Career Suicide, which Gethard workshopped as a one-man show off-Broadway. When you see the final version, you dont realize how difficult it is to tell those stories in an entertaining, truthful way, Apatow says. Its a very special piece.
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The show is Gethards first bit of mainstream acceptance after a career as an oddball outsider. For years, he was a favorite at New Yorks Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, where he invented characters like Gallagher Three, a lost sibling of the fruit-smashing Gallagher brothers. Things were going great, until he started having panic attacks backstage. A crowd laughing was a short-term fix for a very long-term problem, he says.
Gethard entered therapy and left UCB to start an early-Letterman-style TV show that aired on a New York public-access station. It was a cult hit, and Gethard snagged guests like Diddy, who offered useless relationship advice to teens, and Jon Hamm, who took part in a sumo-wrestling match. (The show will begin airing on TruTV in August.) A conversation with comic Mike Birbiglia, who cast Gethard in his 2016 movie, Dont Think Twice, convinced him to explore his mental-health issues onstage. I thought it was too dark, Gethard says. Career Suicide has made Gethard a poster boy for depression, so much so that its been difficult for him to keep up with notes from fans sharing their stories. A lot of comedians are gonna go, Oh, thats pretentious bullshit. And theyre right. Im very lucky that I live in a culture where comedy can be pretentious bullshit.