by michael fox
correspondent
As comedians go, Jeff Garlin is what you might call shtickless. He’s an ordinary guy, calmly navigating the everyday oddness of modern life. Or is that his shtick?
“I try and go grocery shopping and go to the dry cleaners and do all those things,” he confides, “because I feel like when you’re out there, there’s more opportunity to experience something that’s frustrating that will create comedy.”
As a stand-up comic and as the executive producer and co-star of Larry David’s popular HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Garlin is one of the leading proponents of observational humor.
That style is disarming and effective in 20-minute club sets and half-hour TV shows, but can it sustain an 80-minute movie? With his low-key, kinda romantic comedy “I Just Want Someone to Eat Cheese With,” Garlin delivers a qualified yes. “Cheese” is pleasant and amusing, but it doesn’t carry a lot of weight — its chunky main character notwithstanding.
Garlin wrote and directed the charming, quietly funny independent film, and also plays the central role of James, a genial yet frustrated 39-year-old Chicago actor who still lives with his mother.
“I just wrote what I knew, you know?” he explains in his Fisherman’s Wharf hotel room, several hours before performing at Cobb’s Comedy Club. “ The character’s Jewish, but the movie wasn’t about me being a Jew. But it certainly was about the food, and about the mother just shoving the food down. Growing up, it was always amusing to me that my mother thought certain shirts were the reason that I looked fat. Not all the food I’d been eating, and not my actual fatness.”
“I Just Want Someone to Eat Cheese With” opens today in San Francisco and Berkeley.
Rest assured that the movie is not a veiled attack on Jewish mothers. To the contrary, James and his mother have a warm, loving relationship. Nor is Sarah Silverman, playing a potential romantic partner, meant to be viewed as a kooky stand-in for all Jewish women, Garlin says.
Garlin is a student of comedy, and lists Robert Klein, David Steinberg, Shelley Berman, Woody Allen, Albert Brooks and Phil Silvers as his favorite Jewish comedians. His No. 1 comedian of all time, however, is Jack Benny, another fellow whose persona was that of an ordinary guy rather than a performer.
As for contemporary Jewish comedy, Garlin has a whole theory worked out.
“There’s a lot of Jewish television producers,” he observes. “The Jewish contingency went from being stand-up comedians to television producers. We used to dominate the [stand-up] field; we don’t anymore. I think one of the big reasons is when Alan King was a boy he had nothing to lose by being a comedian. But once we became doctors and lawyers and that sort of thing, and executives and all that crap, Jewish parents were very apprehensive to allow their children [to become comics].”
Garlin was born in Chicago, bar mitzvahed in South Florida, and now lives in Los Angeles with his Jewish wife and two children. He spent long years touring the country building a stand-up career, and still has the bruises to prove it.
“I find that Jewish audiences are really great if they know who you are,” Garlin says. “With Second City [in Chicago], we used to call it ‘Jews against comedy.’ Because if you’re not famous, Jews don’t want anything to do with you. If you’re Jerry Seinfeld, they’re gonna give you all they got. Right now I’m in demand, they know me, but I can tell you many times in my youth I was very funny and I was stared at by Jewish audiences because they didn’t care. It’s really a strange reaction. They love their big Jewish comedy stars.”
For all his success, Garlin comes off as a regular guy. A regular guy, that is, with a healthy paycheck and a ton of friends.
“Every year at my house we have the big break-the-fast,” he says with some pride. “When I say big, it means 150 people. It’s a big thing that we have every year. It feels good doing it.”
As Garlin himself would say, that’s a big bowl of Jew.
“I Just Want Someone to Eat Cheese With” opens today at the Lumiere Theatre, 1572 California St., S.F., and Shattuck Cinemas, 2230 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California