Jon Gabrus didn’t realize he had spent his entire comedy career preparing to travel around the country getting wasted and being hilarious on camera. But that’s exactly what he has ended up doing, along with his best friend and co-host Adam Pally, in their new truTV series 101 Places to Party Before You Die.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Gabrus talks about landing his dream job as a travel host and explains why the “before you die” in the show’s title resonates with him so deeply. He also talks about the origins of his incompetent intern character Gino Lombardo on the Comedy Bang Bang podcast, tells the story of his embarrassingly terrible Veep audition in front of his comedy crush Julia-Louis Dreyfus, and reveals why he once quit smoking pot in hopes of joining the FBI.
“This is dream job-level shit I got going on here,” Gabrus says of his and Pally’s new show, which is inspired by the book 101 Places to Get F*cked Up Before You Die and is currently airing Thursday nights at 10:30pm on truTV. “The funny thing is, I can’t figure out how I got here, but also, all signs in my life point to me eventually being here.”
Along with Pally, Gabrus started performing improv at the Upright Citizens Brigade in the early 2000s, which led to a one-man show called “Blackout Drunk” where he “drank like 20 beers in an hour and tried to remember stories about drinking.” That show ran “way too long, actually” and “got to be pretty brutal,” he tells me. When someone suggested he try bringing it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, he smartly replied, “I think I’ll die.”
Gabrus readily describes himself as an “absolute fucking glutton that can’t stop eating and drinking and smoking weed,” even if that lifestyle has became more challenging as he enters middle age.
“It’s weirdly like a Twilight Zone/Black Mirror kind of dream job where you’re like, ‘I love to party,’” he explains. “Well, now you’re 40 and you don’t love to party as much as you used to but now you’re going to go to 101 places and we know you have a hard time saying no to anything, so rock ‘n’ roll, bitch!’”
Both Gabrus and Pally turned 40 while filming the series, which takes them to locales like Denver, Miami, and Utah’s Moab Desert to eat, drink, and get high as if they were still in their twenties. “It feels like a midlife crisis that is being underwritten by Discovery and Warner Brothers,” Gabrus jokes. “You guys can watch the slow-motion midlife crisis that’s occurring all around us.”
But while their exploits can certainly seem frivolous at times, it is a midlife crisis with purpose.
“The ‘Before You Die’ part of the title is not for nothing,” Gabrus tells me. “Adam’s mom died very young and in her sleep. My dad died very young from brain cancer. Adam and I are both already prone to grabbing life by the balls, but those two events inspired us a little bit more to be like, ‘What if you die at 50-something?’ If I die at my dad’s age, I’ve got like 12 years left. What am I going to do with these fucking 12 years?”
He describes his father as a typical baby boomer “workaholic” who was “busting his ass all the time” and had a shelf of books he always planned to read and a rack of fine wines he always planned to drink after he retired. “And then he died with a case of books never read and a case of wine he never drank.”
When his father was on his deathbed, “barely functioning,” Gabrus and his family opened his best bottle of red wine and mixed it with the thickening agent that the hospital uses to help dying patients swallow liquids without aspirating. “So we stirred in an expensive bottle of red wine and were spoon-feeding my dad,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Look, dad, you’re not going to die without trying this fucking wine.’ But that has stuck with me forever: Read the fucking book. Drink the fucking wine. Spend the fucking money. Who cares? And now it’s like, fuck dying young, is the world going to end while we’re still young?
“So the ‘Before You Die’ part of the title is not just tongue in cheek,” he continues. “It really does mean a lot to the two of us, and I hope people take that advice from the show. Whatever your bucket list thing is, check it off now. Not a lot of people get warnings for how long they have left in life. Get your fucking ass out there and get after it.”
Listen to the episode now and subscribe to ‘The Last Laugh’ on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Tuesday.
