Is Joe Pera for real? That’s the inevitable question you start asking yourself after seeing him perform soft-spoken stand-up jokes, listening to his deliberately sleep-inducing podcast, or watching his exquisitely serene Adult Swim series Joe Pera Talks With You.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Pera goes deep on how he developed his very unique comedy style and responds directly to those who think his entire comic persona might be some sort of elaborate ruse. He also reflects on the end of his beloved and deeply personal show, reveals how Taylor Swift helped inspire his upcoming stand-up tour, and tells the full story behind securing the rights to The Who’s “Baba O’Riley.”
Unlike nearly every other guest we’ve had on the podcast, Pera politely declines to turn on his Zoom camera, saying simply, “I’d prefer not to.” It only adds to the mystique he has fostered as a Midwestern comedian in his mid-thirties who speaks and moves like a man at least twice his age.
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Pera is a very particular kind of comedian, and in turn has a very particular kind of fan: “It’s hard to generalize, but I think they are thoughtful, sensitive people. But I like to think that anybody could come to a show and have a good time.” His crowd skews younger because his show originally aired on Adult Swim. “But I always think, like, what if it had aired on PBS?” he wonders.
Far more people discovered the show when it started streaming on HBO Max during the pandemic, which Pera ascribes to it being “slower-paced” than most other TV and having a notably calming effect on viewers.
The first time I watched Pera’s new hour-long stand-up special Slow & Steady, I fell asleep around the 45-minute mark. With any other comedian, that fact might seem like a criticism of their work, but for Pera, it’s more or less what he intended. In fact, he has been deliberately talking his audience to sleep for nearly a decade, leading to an animated Adult Swim special called Joe Pera Talks You to Sleep.
“I thought it’d be a fun way to close out the stand-up special in a way that I haven’t seen before,” Pera says of the special’s second half, which is accompanied by his collaborator Ryan Dunn’s soothing, ambient score. “Some of the bits before were pretty jokey, and it gets a little rambunctious, so I wanted to mellow it out and bring it down to a comfortable place to close out the show that evening.”
This month, Pera is embarking on his nationwide stand-up tour, which he decided to call The Peras Tour. “It was just too good of an opportunity to pass up naming it that,” he says of the Swiftian allusion. “I was thinking that maybe I’ll do at least one costume change during the show, maybe from a blue button-down to a green button-down,” he jokes.
The tour, which includes gigs at big theaters like The Vic in Chicago and The Paramount in Austin, is evidence of how far he’s come since he was struggling to get anybody’s attention at tiny open mics and even subway platforms when he started out just over a decade ago.
“Sometimes you’re performing to try and make the few people who like it laugh a lot rather than everybody laugh a little bit,” he recalls. “When you can get one person really going, that’s enough. If you’re making one person laugh really hard, then you know you’re onto something interesting.”
There is a certain type of Joe Pera fan who is always trying to catch him “breaking character,” a phenomenon the comedian finds a bit perplexing. He becomes noticeably uncomfortable when I bring up the people on Reddit or TikTok who seem to believe he must be engaging in some sort of long con.
“I don’t know, people on the internet think a lot of things,” Pera says a bit bashfully. “But I don’t know, I guess I can’t have a regular conversation with everybody so they could see what I’m like off stage. So I don’t know what to tell them.”
“That’s why you can’t get concerned about the internet,” he adds, noting that there are also people who think he’s actually a choir teacher from real Upper Michigan, like his Adult Swim character. “I mean, I take that as a compliment in a way that it feels believable to them, and that the details feel realistic,” he says. “But I don’t know, it does make me a little concerned that if people have that much difficulty telling the difference between a TV show and real life, what else they might believe.”
Now that Joe Pera Talks With You is no more, the comedian has been taking on more acting roles outside of his own projects, including a voice-acting role in Pixar’s Elemental as the slow-moving bureaucrat Fern Grouchwood.
“I like writing and making my own stuff, but if Pixar asks me if I want to play a talking mound of dirt, I’ll say OK,” he tells me. Asked if he was offended at all by the casting choice, he replies, “No, it’s great, that’s exactly who I should be playing.”
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
