Interview: David Cross on his cathartic new tour, why he’s quitting Twitter, and that infamous NYT article

David Cross has had a difficult year.

First came the allegations of racist behaviour from comedian Charlene Yi last October, and then the now-infamous New York Times piece on Arrested Development in May, in which Cross and his male co-stars were accused of not supporting their castmate Jessica Walter as she broke down describing the emotional abuse she received from series co-star Jeffrey Tambor.

Rather than deny the criticism, Cross has owned up to it, admitting that conversations with his wife, actress / writer and Time’s Up / #MeToo activist Amber Tamblyn and his Arrested Development co-star Alia Shawkat have helped him reshape and examine his attitudes and approach.

We caught up with Cross while out on the road for his current Oh Come On tour to discuss how the past year has impacted him, why he’s planning on quitting Twitter, the reason he’s been cutting Trump jokes from his set, and much more. Cross performs at Montreal’s Olympia Theatre on Wednesday, July 25th at 7:00 pm. Tickets are $49.90 – $58.95, available here. For the complete Just for Laughs schedule and tickets visit the festival’s official site.

Bad Feeling Mag: You’re in the midst of the “Oh Come On'” tour right now, how should we take that? Is that a resigned “Oh Come On,” or is that an outraged “Oh, Come On.”

David Cross: I will let you decide; you can apply to it whatever you want to apply to it. But, it is also a reference to something within the set.

You started this tour just a few days after the New York Times article on Arrested Development came out — did that influence the material in any way? Is that something you wanted to discuss in those first few shows?

Nooo. No, no, no, no, no. [Pause] That feels like it would be really defensive, and self-indulgent. I pretty much said everything I have to say. I’ve done a couple of interviews since, where that was touched upon, as part of a greater, bigger idea about social media. But yeah, that’s all water under the bridge at this point. Is that the right analogy? No, that ship has sailed? Well, they both have to do with water.

Was that a difficult time to start this tour?

Oh yeah, that is my second kind of … foray into, “Uh oh, social media hates you, better get off.” And my wife was very instrumental in like, “Get off of Twitter, stay off for a couple of weeks.” And I did, and it magically goes away. When you get off Twitter, it just goes away. I mean those strangers who I’ll never meet, who are basically just yelling at an avatar, just have no access to me, so just go away. And then it’s healthy for everyone concerned, and I can concentrate on what’s important, like the set and that’s what it is.

Do you envision a time when you’ll quit social media for good? Or have an account that only publicizes projects but doesn’t engage?

I absolutely will disengage … I mean, I’ll use it to get the message out that I may be somewhere or there’s a project I’d like you to know about, but as far as interacting, no, those days will be over as soon as this tour is done. Oh god yeah. I have a kid, and I can’t tell you how depressing and just … my heart sinks when I notice myself or my wife on our phones when my kid, even when she’s got her back to me and she’s playing with a toy and she’s perfectly content, the fact that I’m sitting on my phone is just abhorrent to me, and I just have to get off of it and get rid of it. And also, Twitter is just a cesspool, just awful, awful people. People I would never hang out with if I have the choice, so why am I hanging out with them, it’s stupid, it’s foolish. And I’m a better person for not having that in my life, in my head, occupying that space.

You were mentioning how your wife Amber Tamblyn was instrumental in getting you that break from Twitter, and there have been a lot of pieces recently about the ongoing conversations about the past year you’ve been having — have those helped you reshape how you think about this tour in any way? Or future standup material you might be putting together?

No, it doesn’t affect my material. There’s probably been … one or two things that weren’t important, that were kind of little throwaway lines, not bits but a line here or there that I dropped because she didn’t care for it, or it’s just sort of extraneous. It’s an easy to drop line, so I dropped it. It hasn’t altered my material as far as like, the topics that I tackle, or the things that I mention within those topics, it hasn’t shaped that in any way. For better or worse. And I also don’t ever want to go into standup with parameters. I mean I have my own parameters that I stick with, that have grown based on the culminative experience I’ve had on-stage, and what works for me and what doesn’t, I have those parameters, but I’m never going to approach anything I don’t think, going, “I need to talk about this, what can I say about it.” If the idea occurs to me, if that thought occurs to me while I’m walking around, great. But I also wouldn’t not do something, not do this idea I believe in, because it might offend a stranger, I don’t do that either.

On your last tour, Making America Great Again, you obviously weren’t afraid of offending people, there was even a walkout in the filmed special — how does that feel when that happens? Is that better than having a roomful of people agreeing with everything you’re saying?

You know, it’s just different. I’ve been in situations where  — not in standup, but in things that I’ve said where I’m part of a panel or something — where I’ve had people shout me down, and really be very angry with me. It’s happened a couple of times, and it’s a very disturbing, uncomfortable feeling. But [walkouts] don’t bother me, I’m fairly used to it.  I know how to handle it, and my concern are the people that are staying, and I’m not trying to appeal to the people that are gone, I’ve lost them already, I’m not trying to get them to come to their seats, I don’t give a shit. They’ve made their decision, they can go, it’s probably better for everybody. And now my concern is the audience that are fans and want to see me, that don’t want me to waste my time dicking around with those people. I’ve got an obligation to entertain them.

Is it harder to find humour in current events today than it was for your last special?

No, there’ll always be humour to be found in everything, but I would say the tenor is different. And there’s a palpable feeling I’ve never experienced before of fear and concern and kind of outrage that just wasn’t there before. And I feel like there are parts of the set that are probably very cathartic for some people, you know?

What do you think is hitting them about that material?

I think it’s a feeling of comfort, of community, feeling that for an hour they can get together and there is some feeling like, “OK, there’s some sanity here somewhere, so that’s good.” And then again, a little bit of catharsis.

Things in the world have changed so drastically since your last special two years ago, has that special influenced the current material in any way?

No, I think the current material would exist with or without that last special. It doesn’t feel like it’s a sequel or anything, or like I’m commenting on that past time. I’m talking about how I feel right now about the situation, and that’s only a third of my set. I mean, by far, most of my set is not about Trump or politics. It’s the same thing as the last special, it’s roughly a third of jokey stuff, a third of anecdotal stuff, and a third of political stuff.

You’ve said that you don’t talk too much about Trump in this new show but you do talk about his supporters, what makes them more interesting to you?

Well, I mean, I talk about Trump in an overall sense, and I talk about this in the set, that it’s just, it’s a foolish endeavor to make fun of the specifics of Trump. I mean, for two reasons: one is, there’s no reveal of his character, he is what he is, he never fooled me for a second, not for one second, not for one second did he fool me, he’s a lying, con man, he’s full of shit. And that’s obvious. And we’ve all known that for years, there’s nothing to make fun of there, or at least nothing interesting or unique, there’s no new angle to explore.

And then the other side of it is, is policy — you can’t make fun of a thing Trump said or a policy he suggested because there’s no permanence to it, ’cause it’s a constant flow of sewage, you know? And I talk about that briefly in the set before I move on to other stuff, about Trump — and because the set has spread so much already, I’ve dropped certain bits. I had this whole bit about Trump doing commercials when he leaves the Presidency, and this whole thing about straight white Christian males and stuff, and I had to drop it. But that’s also about his fans. Most of the Trump stuff was more about his cult.

Can you talk about the way you put this show together with the workshopping shows you did in New York? Is that something you wanted to do for a while? How did those intimate shows help build up the set?

It was an approach that I’ve never taken before, I’ve never done it this way. Usually when I went on tour there was a 5-year gap because I was just constantly working on something that wouldn’t allow me to get this material together. You know, TV shows or movies, things that take quite a bit of time. And back in, I want to say October of last year, I was looking at my upcoming calendar, and I was finishing up some projects and knew I was going to be waiting to hear if this show I did in the UK got picked up or not, and I wouldn’t know the answer for that until mid-April, end of April. And I was winding up these other things and was like, “I don’t want to sit around assuming they’re going to pick it up or not.” And if they don’t pick it up I want to be ready to go with something, so it seemed fairly obvious that the answer was, “Oh, I’ll put a set together.” Because it’s standup, if the show got picked up and I had to go to London and move back there for 9 months and just work solely on that show for 14-hours a day, 6 days a week, I would have all this material ready to go when I did find space to tour.

And it takes anywhere from 3-6 months to put that tour together, to schedule the routing and figure out where you’re going to go and all that stuff. So I called my booking agent and said, “Here’s the plan. I’m going to start getting this material together, you start getting the tour together, we’ll know in mid-late April whether we can do it or not, and as soon as I know we can either pull the trigger or put a pin in these places.”

And then I just started getting the set together, as opposed to all the other sets where it was like, “Oh, I have all this material ready to go, ’cause it’s been five years and I never stop doing standup.” I always do little sets here or there or benefits or whatever. And then I’m just culling from a couple of hours worth of material, and putting the set together. This was just completely from scratch, outside of two bits that I did, I would do one of those bits occasionally as an encore in the last tour. So some people in some audiences may see one bit that they’ve seen before, but outside of that everything is new.

What an enjoyable process it was, just 3 nights a week, getting on my bike and going to one of these clubs in Brooklyn, very small, you know, basement of a bar type thing with maybe 100 seats or whatever, and just going up with a notebook, taping all the sets, that run of shows was called Shooting the Shit, Seeing What Sticks, and that’s where all this material came from. And over weeks and months it started presenting itself, like, “Oh, here’s the show. And this bit is good, I’ll put this bit over here, and this bit leads into this bit.” It was really, really fun, and I got to hang with my kid. It was great [ laughs], I would readily do it again.

David Cross performs at Montreal’s Olympia Theatre on Wednesday, July 25th at 7:00 pm. Tickets are $49.90 – $58.95, available here. For the complete Just for Laughs schedule and tickets visit the festival’s official site.