On stage at the Regent Theatre in Arlington, 2018, and at the Rockwell in Somerville this fall, he looks at first the same. I was 11 years old in 1987 I am middle-aged now.
I fell in love with Emo Phillips in the 1980s, watching him on British TV, lost track of his career for 30 years, then saw him live at the last two iterations of the Boston Comedy Festival. “Wait a second,” Emo muses, “if that’s Jimmy Peterson, he’d have grown up, too.” “Walking down the street, I say to myself, ‘That’s Jimmy Peterson I haven’t seen him since the third grade.’” Emo swoops over and slaps his friend on the back - “How’s it going, you old moron?” - knocking him to the ground, where he screams, “Mommy! Mommy!” “The weirdest thing happened today,” Emo whines. The first joke in Emo Philips’s 1987 special, Live at the Hasty Pudding - after the physical joke of his appearance, lithe and spindly, hair cut in a long black bob, almond face, wide eyes and waistcoat - is the joke about Jimmy Peterson. Learn more about the performers online at TICKETS: Festival passes and individual show ticket pricing is available online at Billed Into Silence: Money and the Miseducation of Women MORE: This year’s headliners include Emo Philips, Patton Oswalt, Jimmy Pardo, Cristela Alonzo, Erin Foley, Carmen Lynch, Ben Moore, Ryan Singer and Sasheer Zamata. WHERE: Various venues including the Comedy Attic, the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, the Bishop, Ivy Tech John Waldron Arts Center and the Back Door. I don’t think I could bear to perform in a world of easy laughs. Q Can you imagine a future where you’re not performing comedy in some way?Ī Perhaps if marijuana’s legalized. But I don’t consider that kind of behavior strange I consider the people who don’t do it strange. Q Do you prepare for a comedy festival differently than when it’s just you as a featured comic in a club?Ī I’ve had fans attend eight shows in a single week I’ve had fans drive 36 hours straight to see me I’ve had fans name their cats after me. Later on, I realized she laughed hysterically at everything that everybody said, but by that time I had already done Letterman and it was too late. Q When did you first decide you wanted to be a comedian?Ī When I was a kid my mom used to laugh hysterically at everything I said. I’m astoundingly lucky that a viable stand-up option was open to me by the time I reached adulthood had I come of age even a couple of years earlier, I would have encountered a world (or at least a Chicago) with no comedy clubs. Q How did you develop your stand-up persona?Ī I was pretty much always the same as I am now, even before I became a comedian. The audience laughing at the finished gag has no idea of the feeble incarnations that previous audiences had to suffer through there’s a wonderful “Groundhog’s Day” element to the process. Quite a few of my best jokes started out this way. Q What do you do when a joke just doesn’t go over well with the audience?Ī If it gets no reaction, I will probably never try it again, but if it gets even the tiniest laugh, I’ll change a word or two and then spring it on the next audience, and if it then gets a slightly bigger laugh, I’ll change another word or two and try it on a third audience, and so on and so forth, much the same way a primitive man painstakingly tries to turn a glowing twig or two into a roaring fire. I got two laughs in 10 minutes, and left the stage feeling happier and more excited than I had ever felt before. I went there and told the musicians I was a comedian and asked if I could go on during their next break. Q Tell me about your first experience performing stand-up.Ī I was 18. Out of 100 people that read it or hear it, 99 of them will be people I’ve sent. These days, whenever I do an interview, the editor or podcaster or whoever will always beg me to tweet about it. How has the business changed?Ī I’m old enough to remember a time, when a comedian did an interview, it was the comedian who got the publicity. Q You’ve been doing stand-up for many years. Philips agreed to answer a few questions via email. He’s also appeared in feature films and has several voiceover credits. Along with his stand-up performances, he’s recorded three comedy albums and made appearances in film and television. Philips, 58, is from Downers Grove, Illinois, and started doing stand-up when he was 18. One of the festival’s featured performers is seasoned comedian Emo Philips. This weekend, the second Limestone Comedy Festival kicks off with performances at four different Bloomington venues.
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