Good humor man

Oct. 6—David Cross knew from an early age he wanted to make people laugh. But that didn't lead to him being an overnight success. Cross, who is working his way through a stand-up comedy tour that's taking him to 70 cities, will play Santa Fe's Lensic Performing Arts Center on October 27.

"I didn't come up with a truly clever bit for years," says Cross, who began his stand-up career right after high school. "I had some funny ideas, but it was quite a while later that I started getting past being quirky and odd and getting actually truly funny and interesting."

That's hard to believe from a man who made serious comedic offerings in HBO's off-color sketch comedy series Mr. Show, which premiered in 1995, and again on the 2003 sitcom Arrested Development. But Cross struggled behind the scenes well before emerging as one of the funniest comedians in America.

details

Lensic 360 presents David Cross: Worst Daddy in the World Tour

8 p.m. October 27

Lensic Performing Arts Center

211 W. San Francisco Street

$50 to $150

lensic.org, officialdavidcross.com

As a youngster, Cross played the comedy clubs in New York and later in Boston after enrolling at Emerson College, but he dropped out early to pursue his dreams. Cross and a friend, John Ennis, traveled from Boston to Los Angeles, and at age 20 or 21 at the time, Cross says they were far from headlining The Comedy Store.

"It was an adventure," he says. "I'm an East Coast guy. I had never really been out West before, and certainly not Los Angeles. The whole thing was culturally different as the North is to the South. It was very different and very interesting, but I was [messed] up for a very long time. I just continued to be there, and I wasn't very responsible. Any money I ever made, I spent it on Fat Burger and whiskey and beer and weed. I was also trying to do sets, but I had no plan of action. Eventually, it petered out, and I was like, 'I'm think I'm going to go back to Boston and crash on some couches there instead of LA.'"

Over time, Cross figured out what worked for him on stage. He became a regular at the Catch a Rising Star comedy club, where he appeared alongside Janeane Garofalo and Louis C.K., among others.

The comedy scene in Boston was incredibly supportive, he says, and his fellow comedians made each other laugh in clubs and helped pull each other up to new gigs. His first big break came in the early '90s when he landed a job as a writer on The Ben Stiller Show, thanks to an assist from Garofalo. That's where he met Bob Odenkirk, his future writing and acting partner on Mr. Show — but it wasn't instant comedy chemistry.

"At first, he was kind of a dick to me," says Cross. "I had come into this situation completely naive. I didn't know anything about writing TV or what the diplomacy or dynamics of how it worked or what you're supposed to do outside of pitching ideas and writing. He did — he had worked on Saturday Night Live.

"He knew some of the guys, and when I came in, I didn't know anybody. I knew Janeane, who was on the cast and who was helpful in getting me hired as a writer. ... But he was a little bit of a jerk. And he admits it. And to be fair, I had some attitude too. I came into this with this Boston stand-up world [attitude] like, 'There's a purity to what I do.' Whatever."

Cross and Odenkirk had several friends in common and wound up hanging together outside of work. They made each other laugh and saw a seed for something bigger: Mr. Show, Cross says, began as a bunch of sketches for a stage show.

They pitched it to HBO, and the show lasted four successful seasons. They didn't encounter much pushback from executives, Cross says, despite frequently pushing boundaries. In one skit, The Joke: The Musical, Cross and Odenkirk spin a mock musical based on an old joke about a traveling salesman and a farmer that can't be repeated in these pages. Jack Black co-stars as both the Devil and as the Farmer, and Cross, the salesman, winds up getting killed by a milking machine played by Odenkirk.

Pull Quote

It's wild, but that was the point.

"At the time, there was no streaming," Cross says. "Cable was still in its infancy in a relative sense, and they needed stuff that separated them from the networks. They were like, 'Just do crazy stuff.' Part of how it worked was that we didn't have much of a budget, and that helps. It's not like they were going, 'Nobody is watching this, and we gave you a million dollars.' They were like, 'We gave you $120, so it's fine if nobody watches.' They were encouraging us to do what we wanted."

Mr. Show ran until 1998, and Cross released his first stand-up comedy TV special The Pride Is Back in 1999. In 2003, he became Tobias Fünke, the impossibly neurotic foil to on-screen wife Portia de Rossi in Arrested Development. The writing was so sharp on the ensemble comedy, Cross says, that he didn't do much improvising.

"I ad-libbed more in the beginning because there was more space to ad-lib within," he says of the first season. "But then in the second season, the scripts were so dense, and Fox was cutting the show back 30 seconds. Every year, we'd lose more time to advertising. By nature, you still improvise, but it's not like any of that stuff makes it onto the screen."

Cross, now decades into the work of a touring comedian, released his latest routine, Worst Daddy in the World, exclusively on his website earlier this year. His work habits and touring schedule revolve around his 6-year-old daughter and his life with spouse (and actress and author) Amber Tamblyn. So rather than write his material at home, Cross says he works it out on stage.

As his tour progresses, he records every show and listens back, making note of a particularly good riff that becomes part of the show. That process can take several months, and by the end of a tour, a set can be completely different. But that's part of the fun for Cross, who now travels the country in short spurts.

"The last tour, I had a tour bus and my wife — who among many things is an author — had a book tour simultaneous with my tour," he says. "So we had our daughter on the tour bus, and a nanny, and we all went across the country and Canada. But now she's in school. I'm not out on the road for four or five months at a time. So now I have been doing five or six shows and then coming home for four days and go back out again. It's easier to do shows on a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, and then I come home."

Cross has a sharp edge on stage but is kind and considerate off stage. When asked about one of the only public dustups in his comedy career — a pointed tête-à-tête with Larry the Cable Guy — he immediately clarifies that they've never met each other. But in a 2005 Rolling Stone article, Cross criticized the Blue Collar Comedy Tour stalwart for making anti-gay and racist jokes. Larry the Cable Guy responded to Cross in his memoir, and Cross fired back in an open letter to the comedian on his website. Today, nearly 20 years later, Cross says there's no lingering animosity between them.

Cross got a little more comfortable with another one of his targets: James Lipton, the late host of Inside the Actors Studio, got teased by Cross as being pretentious in The Pride Is Back. Later, they worked together on Arrested Development.

"He was awesome, and he kind of put me in my place," Cross says of Lipton, who died in 2020. "He smartly kept his powder dry until the right moment for maximum awkwardness. I think he enjoyed [messing] with me, and that's absolutely what he gets to do. ... We had whole scenes together, and I thought he was really talented. ... He definitely kept up with me every step of the way."