Before TJ Miller was one of Variety’s Top 10 Comedians to Watch in 2008, before he stole the show on ABC’s Carpoolers, before he starred in Cloverfield, and before buzz began to follow him around in Chicago, TJ Miller was just a guy who liked making people laugh. When an encounter with stand-up comedy provided him with the desire to learn more about the craft, TJ hit the books. While he may have discovered that, ultimately, there’s no better way to learn than by doing, TJ’s studies have lead him to the edge of comedy, where he currently stands creating its future.

TJ Miller’s comedy is a reflection of what he perceives in the world and what he sees is tremendous absurdity at the core of all human experience. TJ’s aim is to present that absurdity via every avenue available to him, whether it be film, TV, the Internet, the stage, photography, or just when out and about. By presenting the absurdity that pervades our being, TJ aims to make it easier to live with. At the very least, he’s certainly going to make us laugh at it.

Ben Kharakh: What is the story of your high school drama teacher saying that you were the only one in class who could maybe do stand-up for a living?

TJ Miller: I credit a lot of my beginnings and my performance career to my drama teacher, Melody Duggan. I’d never heard of someone teaching stand-up as part of the drama curriculum in a high school, except for East High, where she still does it. As a performance art, it’s easily shunned, especially at high school level drama. She said, “It’s important for all of you as actors or people in this drama class to learn the stand-up form. Most of you will never do stand-up again. In fact, the only person that could actually do stand-up for a living is TJ.” That really caught me off-guard. I was ill-prepared when I did my performance. I brought up all my papers and it was, of course, very dirty, and the principal walked in during the middle of it. I had to totally switch the tone of my material and everybody in the class knew that, so then it was even more uproarious. That sort of gave me the confidence to say, “Okay, well let’s start reading about it.” I read books about it and biographies of comedians, and studied stand-up comedy for many years. Toward the end of college was the first time I ever even did an open mic, so I had read, since high school, all of Judy Carter’s book and all of Gene Perret’s books. He was the head writer for Bob Hope. I really had delved into it in an academic way. And then, of course, the axiom that we all know now but we can’t when you’re that age, is that it isn’t really worth much until you actually try it.

BK: What was it like to approach it from an academic perspective?

TM: I tend to be a bit academic with everything in my life, especially comedy (ironically, because I’m not into traditional schooling). That’s helpful for me. I think completely grasping a form from as many angles as you can gives you the best chance of mastering it, which I have obviously not yet achieved. I think that studying something and understanding the people that did it before you will help you have a chance at mastering it, but also it gives you more of a framework with which to try to create something that’s unique or different. If you don’t know what’s come before you, how can you possibly strive to make something different from that?

BK: What is it that finally pushed you to attempt stand-up?

TM: I don’t think I ever really understood that you could be a comedian and not do stand-up. I remember having this revelation, “Will Ferrell is not a stand-up? Ben Stiller is not a stand-up? How did they get to where they are today?” I just subscribed to the belief that if you were going to be a comedian, then stand-up had to be in your skill set. I obviously thought, “Well, this must be the foundation of being a comedian because it’s just you.” For me, it is the foundation.

BK: What are some things that are useful to know before you take the stage?

TM: Be prepared to bomb. It’s something that you have to learn how to do yourself. You also have to create your own material. Judy Carter has these workbooks that say, “Name three things that you hate and write material about them. If you’re fat, come out and talk about being fat. You have to have an opening line that endears you to the audience.” Ultimately, that’s helpful in sort of beginning and understanding what the dynamic between the performer and the audience is, but honestly, you have to create and recognize your own perspective and write from there. The learning really begins when you start going out. That’s when you learn by watching other comedians. The actual literature on stand-up that I read really doesn’t do a whole lot for you. It’s good to have because there’s more in your storehouse of comedy knowledge, but ultimately, you just have to get up there. I remember asking a guy for advice at the DC Improv and he said, “Well, just start bombing. Just go out and bomb.” I thought, “Oh what terrible advice. I don’t want to bomb. I want to do well.” And what I didn’t understand is that he wasn’t saying, “Go and bomb,” he was saying, “It doesn’t matter whether or not you bomb. Just do it and don’t worry about failing.”

BK: I thought, when you talked about reading about it, that maybe one thing you were trying to figure out was what does it mean to be funny? What is happening in the process of telling a joke? What does it actually entail?

TM: Biographies are very helpful in understanding what it means to be funny and how people approached the task of becoming a stand-up comedian. I’m not sure I read a lot about joke structure or anything like that because, as Andy Dick’s son recently told me, in one of the weirder conversations I’ve had in a while, “I like your material. It’s like you’re not doing jokes.” The truth is that I’m not doing jokes in the traditional sense. I have some jokes like that, but joke structure really wasn’t a concern of mine. I was busy trying to figure out what I thought was funny, what the audience would think was funny, and align myself with them. There are things that I think are funny that an audience wouldn’t think is funny, and there are things that an audience obviously finds funny that I don’t find funny. There are things that both myself and the audience agree upon, and so my work is trying to figure out how to connect those two sensibilities. I’m reading a book right now, it’s Conversations with Woody Allen. He’s one of my biggest influences. He has these great passages where he’s talking about how there’s this material trap that comedians get caught up in. They think, “Well, if my material was better, if I bought better material, then I would do well.” He said, “It’s not really about the material.” When he first went up, he was just reading the material. He said, “These jokes are so funny, I can just read them,” and nobody laughed. It’s the comic character and who you are as a performer that the audience is interested in. If it’s accompanied with great material, then all the better, and it should be, of course. It’s your job to try to create great material in addition to being a great comic entity. But first and foremost, you need to create your onstage entity and perfect that entity.

BK: The way I see comedy is that you, as the comedian, perceive an absurdity in the world, or create your own absurdity, and then try to present it to the audience in such a way that they see it just as you do. And then the funniness of the joke is determined by how good of a job you do in conveying that absurdity.

TM: Yeah, stand-up is its own lexicon; it’s its own type of language. So you can be hilarious in conversation, hilarious at a dinner party, you can be just the funniest person out of your friends, but you’re going to have to learn how to frame that and how to communicate that funniness through stand-up, because it’s different. As a stand-up, if you think something is funny, you just have to figure out how to present it in a way in which the audience agrees with you and frame it in a way that they will be able to see exactly how you’re seeing the subject matter. Sometimes my stuff isn’t, “Oh, look how absurd this is.” Sometimes I become the absurdity. I’m presenting it directly; I’m not commenting on it verbally. At times, I become this character that is a representative of the absurdity that I see, like the guy who thinks that women are intimidated by his giraffe facts, or making this huge proclamation about the imagining of my legs being ketchup bottles. Those things aren’t me going, “Isn’t it absurd that people are like this? That guys think that women who don’t like them must be dykes? Like, that’s crazy.” But I’m not going to say that. I’m going to actually become that thing and then they can take from it what they want. So that’s an interesting thing. I kind of do both. I will comment on absurdity and try and frame it in a traditional way, and then other times I try to do it in a way where I am the absurdity that I am trying to comment on.

BK: When the audience hears your joke, they laugh at it, but what about you when you’re coming up with it? Do you laugh while writing your own material?

TM: Yeah, definitely, but not always. My favorite ideas and my favorite material are when I am almost taken aback by the absurdity of it, or if I’m laughing at the idea of a human man writing what I’m writing — like the idea that a pen has been manufactured, shipped somewhere, put on sale along with a notebook, both of those things are bought with American currency and traveled with me to various places, and finally they’re coming together to create this absurd notion that I’m having. Even that will make me laugh. I have a character that I’m doing now — this guy who whistles when he listens, and he kind of does that and then he has to explain himself and he’s says, “I listen when I whistle, so if I’m whistling, I’m listening. I call it listling.” [Laughs] See, I’m even laughing about it now. There are things like that where I just laugh that I wrote it. Who knows if it will ever even make it into my act? Like, I wrote something about how much I hate women with those rabbit mouths, those half-human, half-rabbit faces, and how they really need to get that shit checked out by a doctor. Things that catch me off-guard definitely will make me laugh. Sometimes I’m laughing when I’m doing stand-up; I’ll laugh at the absurdity of me presenting the type of material that I’m presenting to people. I do have moments where I catch myself and I say, “You do realize that there’s hundreds of people right now watching what you’re about to do and you know how ridiculous it is, and they have some idea but they can’t possibly totally know.” And this is how we’re spending our time. Pete Holmes would say this sometimes: “This is what we’re doing right now. We need to be aware of that and conscious of it.” But I don’t even think I need to make them conscious of it. I think it’s just funny to me that we’re all in the same room. This is how we’re spending our time and it happens to revolve around, hopefully, some of the most ridiculous things they’ve ever seen in their lives.

BK: Where would you say you are in your comedic development now?

TM: I’m just now getting to the point where people say, “Why don’t you do this anymore?” I know that you’re always going to get somewhat tired of material and there are certain things that I need to step away from because you don’t ever want to be at that point. I think that’s the trick — to always stay a step ahead of your act in terms of always creating new things. That’s what’s so great about stand-up is that they’re not coming to see a play and you don’t have to do it a thousand times. They just want to see you. So whatever it is, you present it, and as long as it’s funny, it’s fine. So you’ve got to figure out how to keep pushing yourself. Right now, I’m at the five-year mark. I’m just now seeing myself as being able to come up with material and say almost immediately, “I bet this will work,” and being able to bring new ideas on stage and not totally bomb but be good enough that I can work on them. I’m beginning to see a shift in myself as a stand-up just now.

BK: In our first Q & A, you said, “I do comedy because I believe that life is ultimately tragic and the creation of any escapism from that reality, no matter how ephemeral, is a noble pursuit.” When did you come to this conclusion?

TM: I think that belief system began to crystallize in college as I was becoming a philosophical dilettante. I was reading Camus and Ionesco and those types of people, and it became clear, because I’m an atheist pretty staunchly, that there was even actually more importance in comedy than I had originally thought. I recently read Larry Wilde’s book, and he says, “Well, stand-up comes from people that either come from poverty-stricken backgrounds or people that didn’t get enough attention as a child and need love and attention now,” and I found that to be such bullshit. I know so many people where that is not the case, and I, specifically, am so offended by that -– that the reason that I’m doing stand-up is that I need approval. I have had many a friend and girlfriend who have tried to pin that on me in a derogatory way during a fight. It’s simply not the case. I don’t need the people in the audience to like me. That’s evidenced by the fact that I choose to do material that’s much riskier and has more of a propensity for failure. If I just needed people to like me, then wouldn’t I just do easier jokes? Wouldn’t I just do bathroom humor and low-brow stuff so that I could ensure a positive response from the audience? But I don’t. I think that’s proof of the fact that, like Seinfeld or Hedberg, I’m trying to show the audience different perspectives of the world that they live in. That all kind of happened in college. I sort of began to become almost religious about comedy because I realized the value that it had outside of just having a good time. I realized that people used comedy as a sort of coping mechanism.

BK: Which do you think is more absurd — the world or the world that you present in your stand-up?

TM: I think they’re both equally absurd. Real life is the source of everything that I do. It’s not like I’m coming up with this stuff out of thin air. I talk a lot about how life really is absurd, and most people just haven’t tapped into how absurd it is. It’s our job to present that to them. Not everyone can go around thinking, “Oh okay, just everything is absurd.” That doesn’t work, obviously. But if you can have a little bit of that perspective, then it should make things, hopefully, a little bit easier. You can just sort of laugh at things rather than saying, “This is the third time my car has gotten towed in a week.”

BK: With your characters, you present them very quickly, as though we’re getting a glimpse into a world where they exist. When you’re out and about, do you ever think that maybe people are characters and you’re just waiting to discover what’s funny about them?

TM: I talk a lot, almost ad nauseum, about the idea that you only come in contact with most of the people in your life for only a minute or so. There are few people that you spend any real amount of time with, so you only get a snippet of most people’s existences. I guess I am doing that to a certain extent. Recently, I was walking down the street and a very large man — a really gigantic man, you know, heavy-set, big guy — was walking past me, and as we passed, he turned his head just a little bit away from me and burped very loudly and walked away. And that’s it. That’s all I get from him. I’ll never see that guy again. He has parents, he has a belief in whether there’s a God or not, he has an opinion about broccoli and how he likes it or how it should be eaten…but all I got from him was that, as he passed me, he burped to the left a little bit, and I think that is pretty weird. I’m presenting people that, on the one hand, you can half-relate to and on the other hand, there’s no one like them. And some of them have underlining meaning; some of them are satirical and some of them are just simply ridiculous.

BK: Are there any jokes that you wouldn’t want to do?

TM: There is a time and a place to make light of very tragic events, but there’s a right way to do it. I’m opposed to comedians who will make some stupid cancer joke with no real perspective behind it or intelligence. A lot of people will just say, “Oh yeah, I’ve got the herps.” There’s just a lot of herpes jokes right now. Unless you’re talking about the experience of having herpes or somehow bringing something to the table with it, then I think you should probably shut the fuck up. I absolutely hate that because my job is not to alienate the audience. Look, I can alienate the audience as a whole or alienate sections of the audience — they all paid the same amount of money. If they don’t find me particularly funny, then that’s their own issue. I’m fine with alienating those people. Not everybody is going to like my comedy, but if a little tiny small person comes to a show of mine and I start talking about midgets because it’s an easy laugh and people laugh at it, I alienated that person. That person still paid to come see my show. A small human, a person with herpes, or somebody who’s recently been affected by cancer — those are the people that I need to be making laugh. Not some asshole jock who thinks it’s hilarious to talk about picking up midgets. Not that guy. I don’t need to make him laugh; he’s got a Mercedes. Ultimately, his life is probably empty and tragic as well, but I’m more concerned with the people that are having a lot of obstacles presented in their lives everyday. Those are the people I’m working to make laugh.

BK: How should people expect you to make them laugh next? What’s coming up for you?

TM: Oh great. My favorite question until I don’t have anything going on, and then it’ll be the one I’ll hate the most. I’m currently shooting a small part in Mike Judge’s next film, Extract, which is extremely exciting. Then we’re editing the short that I wrote and was in, Successful Alcoholics. We’re trying to put together a DVD for this company Shout Factory. It’s going to be a representative of the work that Jordan Voght-Roberts and I do, which is kind of short videos, visualizations of stand-up, and live stand-up comedy. We’re going to put that out as a DVD. And then just waiting for She’s Out of My League to come out in the spring. And, of course, I’m doing a lot of stand-up on the road and being deadly serious about comedy during interviews, like this one now. I’m doing this one right now.