David Cross on His Dedication to Stand-up, The Umbrella Academy, and Collaborating with Bob Odenkirk
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The post David Cross on His Dedication to Stand-up, The Umbrella Academy, and Collaborating with Bob Odenkirk appeared first on Consequence.
David Cross might have an impressive resume of acting work, in addition to his own projects as a writer and director. But, he tells Consequence, stand-up will always play a role in his career, because of “the simple fact that I love doing it. I will always want to do it, I imagine.”
His newest special, Worst Daddy in the World, debuts on YouTube this week, after making its initial premiere on the comedy streaming service Veeps last November. Doing the Worst Daddy in the World tour was “a blast,” Cross says, something he valued even more because he wasn’t able to tour with his previous special, I’m From the Future, due to the pandemic. “I’ll always be disappointed that I didn’t get to take that set out on the road, but that was a fun one to do. And I’m so glad I got to go out on the road again, because there was a period of time where I didn’t know if that was ever gonna be a possibility. So there was more joy than I normally would have, and I have a lot. I really enjoy doing it.”
Like the vast majority of stand-up specials, Worst Daddy in the World was edited together from two different performances, recorded on the same night in Chicago, Illinois. Unlike most stand-up specials, where the editing ideally creates the illusion that this is just one performance, there are multiple points where that artifice is abandoned, with clear edits between performances — which Cross says wasn’t “a calculated approach.”
“That just appeals to me,” he continues. “I don’t like anything too slick.”
This stands out most prominently midway through the special, as Cross invites audience members up to the stage to perform a scripted scene with him, and the editing flows between the two different versions of the bit. “If nothing else, it shows you that I did this every night, every show. So I like that. And it allowed me, once I established it, to take the more interesting takes from each person. So you’re still doing the script as is. But also I definitely wanted to include the whole thing where the guy did not understand how to read that one line. I thought that was funny. So it’s the best of both worlds, really.”
Bringing an audience member on stage like this, Cross says, is a “a fun sketchy theatrical kind of element,” but as he adds, “you never know how it’s going to go. Some people I had to stop and ask them to leave, because either they were too drunk or they were obnoxious, or they were trying to punch it up. That happened in when I was in Glasgow — the lady decided she had her own jokes, and I was like, ‘You have to leave, because I did the work already, thank you very much.’ And some people were too nervous, even though they volunteered to come up. So it’s an element that is not just a guy doing a monologue on stage. It has a very live feeling to it, and every show is different.”
Asked to rate the two audience members featured in the special, Cross says “I thought the lady did a pretty good job. I would give her a 7.7. I think the gentleman was a little less in tune with it, and I would give him a 5.8.”
One detail of note is that during the special, Cross stays hydrated on stage with a red Solo cup. That’s not his normal choice when drinking a beer, though; instead it’s a “trick of the trade,” as the cup’s opaque nature means that the contents aren’t visible, avoiding the possibility of continuity issues as they cut between the sets. “If I had a bottle of beer, the level of liquid would rise and fall and rise and fall, depending [on the take],” he says. Sure, at other points, he’s not hiding the editing, but as he says, “I’m already doing that, so no reason to have [the beer] be a distraction, you know?”
Worst Daddy in the World gets into some darker subject matter as it goes, and knowing the right time to delve into those topics is all part of the process. “The way I accrue material is, I just go on stage. I do all my writing on stage, and the last phase of that process is sequencing,” Cross says. “I’ll put it all together, so it’s not just disparate bits, and that’s all with an eye towards, you know, ‘Am I doing too much of this here? Am I doing too little of this here?’ Even asking the audience, like, ‘Does this feel like I’m dwelling on this thing too much, and should I lighten it up here?’ And that’s the last part of the process before I hit the road.”
The Chicago taping, Cross says, was his 40th show of a 76-show tour, because “I always tape [the special] in the middle, and then record the album at the end, because there’s different material in there by the time I get to the end. It’s the same title, but the audio will be like 25 or 30% different than the material in the special.”
Cross likes taping the special midway through a tour, he says, “because the material’s had time to percolate and get crafted,” but that also gives him a long enough interval to get the special ready to debut “pretty quickly after I end the tour. And a lot of my stuff’s topical, so I want it to come out as soon as it can.”
Like many specials, the material evolves as it goes — in fact, a section devoted to Ron DeSantis’s Stop Woke Act was added as he toured. “I probably had only done that maybe, you know, eight or nine times before I shot the special,” he says. However, the album version, which he recorded in Boise, Idaho (his fourth-to-last show of the tour) will feature a more polished version of that run, thanks to the extra time on the road: “The material’s a little tighter and I found more jokes within it. So it’s a more realized bit.”
Right now, Cross says stand-up is “the one thing that I self-generate — I develop the material and then I have a touring agent and a manager, and we get together and set up the tour and go and make that money. I’m not dependent on somebody else saying yes or no, I don’t need anybody’s permission, it’s not financed by a studio and I don’t have to pitch the concept and then accept the deal and work on the deal and go back and forth and then write the shows and then see if they want to make it after I write them and see if they want to make more after I do a pilot or a first series. So it’s important that way. I just do it.”
David Cross, photo by Timothy M Schmidt
Financially, in comparison to the film and TV work he does, “it’s kind of in the middle. I’ve done numerous kinds of indie films that don’t pay much at all. And I’ve done big-budget films that pay a lot of money. And I do arcs on shows where you don’t get a ton of money, but you get something, and I’ve done my own shows, which pay me more because I’m writing, directing and producing and sometimes acting — and [stand-up’s] sort of in the middle there.”
Cross also recently dived into the realm of podcasting — reluctantly at first. “I did not expect to enjoy it as much as I have,” he says of the Headgum series Senses Working Overtime, which features him in conversation with guests like Jason Bateman, Michael Cera, Marc Maron, Janeane Garofalo, Amber Tamblyn, Eugene Mirman, and Steve-O. “I had been asked for years to put something together and just didn’t have any interest, and then I was like, all right, fine. But I really enjoy it. It comes so naturally to me, and these are all interesting or funny people or friends.”
What pushed him into it? “Coming to the realization that, ‘Look, if you want to keep touring and you want to make money touring, then the podcast will help you with that.’ And I was like, ‘All right, fine.'”
Cross remains quite active as an actor in other people’s projects, of course, with his next high-profile role coming in the fourth and final season of Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy, an experience he enthusiastically calls “the best.”
“I only had heard of the show,” he says of his initial casting. “I’d never seen it when I went to shoot the first couple of scenes, because I got the call like on a Friday at five o’clock — I was actually on my way home to relieve the nanny — and I was on a plane Monday morning. They’re like, ‘You have to get here now.'”
However, he continues, “I went back and started watching it and was immediately hooked. That show is so up my alley. I love stuff like that. And the cast is great, and the casting is great. It was a really fun set to be on and just a treat. Sometimes, if it’s a good project, acting is like a paid vacation, because you’re having fun, and they let me improvise… It was a really, really pleasant, fun experience. Nothing but good things to say. I really was so honored and psyched to be a part of that world and that show.”
The Umbrella Academy (Netflix)
And he’s also starting to work on his next stand-up special. “I’m in the very beginning stages of doing that again, for the next tour that’ll probably start in the fall. I finished the [Worst Daddy in the World] tour in October, and I think it was on Veeps in November. So then that material’s burned, and I took two months off, and then I started the process again, just fairly recently, doing these shows I do shooting the shit, seeing what sticks. That’s where I develop all the new material.”
There’s never any shortage of projects to discuss: The morning that Consequence speaks with him, Cross happens to be in Los Angeles to pitch a show “that would feature Bob Odenkirk and myself.” This would be far from Cross and Odenkirk’s first go-around together — Odenkirk was even the inaugural guest on Senses Working Overtime. However, Cross says that the idea they’re pitching is “something a little different,” in the realm of “comedy slash reality.”
The 30th anniversary of their breakout HBO sketch series, Mr. Show, is coming up next year. Back then, did Cross anticipate continuing to collaborate with Odenkirk over the years that followed? “I mean, in a random casual way, I’m sure I would’ve said ‘Yeah, sounds great.’ I don’t know how realistic it would’ve been, I think certainly after we finished Mr. Show, I would have felt that way. I was a different person with different experiences when we were first starting. But yeah, I mean, why not? It worked so well the first time.”
Right now, Cross says, when coming up with ideas for projects, about “one-third of the time,” they’re projects he imagines collaborating with Odenkirk on. “And that’s a lot of ideas.”
Worst Daddy in the World begins streaming on YouTube Wednesday, February 28th at 10 PM ET.
David Cross on His Dedication to Stand-up, The Umbrella Academy, and Collaborating with Bob Odenkirk
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