As comedian Tom Papa was building material for his latest stand-up special, he found himself reminding audiences, “You’re doing great.”
“I got this feeling that people have an overwhelming sense of anxiety right now,” Papa tells me on this week’s episode of The Last Laugh podcast. “They feel like everything’s going to hell and that in their personal life they’re not doing enough, they’re not as fabulous as people they see on social media, they’re not making enough money, they’re always up against it.”
That’s why he chose to name his new special, which premieres on Netflix this week, You’re Doing Great!
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“It’s an illusion that your life is shit,” he adds. “That’s not true. You’re actually doing pretty great. I decided I’m going to be less cynical with my stand-up and convey what I really feel, which is more hope than malaise or unhappiness.”
Like his longtime friend and mentor Jerry Seinfeld, who first put him on the map by making him his opener in the late ’90s, Papa has never been a cynical comic, instead choosing to focus his comedy on observations about everyday family life. He may be just as outraged about Trump as the next guy, but unlike America’s political-minded late-night hosts, he doesn’t “find it that funny.”
“Life isn’t perfect,” he says from the stage. “It never was and it never will be. We’ve all got stuff to deal with. You’re doing great.”
Highlights from our conversation are below and you can listen to the whole thing right now by subscribing to The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, the Himalaya app or wherever you listen to podcasts.
On keeping politics out of his comedy
“Ultimately, it is an escape. At my shows, you’re not going to be hit with all this heavy political stuff. But if I was really good at it, I’d probably be all in on it. My stuff is more about things that last over the lifetime of a human being, it’s not about the politics of the moment. There are people that are great at that and they should lean into it. I like reading about politics, but I don’t find it that funny. I can’t help at this moment [but] to watch Alec Baldwin come out dressed as Trump [on Saturday Night Live] and think, ‘You’re really helping him more than what you think you’re doing. And you’re making this palatable.’”
How he became friends with Jerry Seinfeld
“I think why I was able to talk to him and become friends with him while he was coming back to do stand-up in the clubs in New York [after Seinfeld ended] was because I was hustling so hard that I wasn’t watching TV. I wasn’t watching the show. So I wasn’t so in awe like everyone else was. He was the biggest star in the country at that time. I remember asking my girlfriend, should I be telling him that I like episodes? But I think he was relieved that I wasn’t like, ‘How’s Kramer?’ I wouldn’t have stuck around if I was trying to ask that stuff.”
Why ‘The Marriage Ref’ ultimately failed on NBC
“It wasn’t a big success. But I tend not to look at all of my failures as devastating. Ultimately I guess it is a failure because it should have been on for 10 years and it was on for like two. There were a lot of things wrong with the show. But I had no control. Part of what hurt was that the first year, it was Jerry’s rolodex. So you had Larry David and Ricky Gervais and Madonna and all these crazy high-level people. It was cool, but it was complicated because it was Jerry’s thing. We thought the show was going to be this little, quiet Sunday night family show. And now it is ‘Seinfeld’s return to Thursday nights!’ During the Olympics! In the promos, they wouldn’t even show me. They’d just show my hands. It wasn’t well-received in the first year. And that affected Jerry. And Jerry stepped away the second season, so it was kind of dead at that point. With Jerry not being behind it, [NBC] wasn’t behind it.”
How NBC used his sitcom to ‘try out’ Steve Carell for ‘The Office’
“I get a little sitcom called Come to Papa and it does really well in the pilot phase and everybody loves it. The president of NBC at the time, Jeff Zucker, leaves and Kevin Reilly takes over and he’s not into our show. The show is just goofy and fun, me hanging with my friends, and he says, no, it should be a workplace and I’m going to work at a newspaper all of a sudden. So they put Steve Carell in as my boss, because they have a deal with him. It was a try-out for The Office. As he was starting to film our thing, they were already making a deal with him to do The Office. And we had no idea. They were like, we have this property The Office or we have this Come to Papa thing and they had to choose and we got screwed. They had to kill us to free him to put him in that.”
Next week on The Last Laugh podcast: Stand-up comedian Russell Peters, whose new special Deported is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
