Jim Gaffigan remains one of the biggest comedy tickets in Las Vegas, continuing a years-long series of performances at Wynn while releasing riotous specials—The Skinny is the latest, streaming on Hulu—and touring the country’s top stages, winning Emmys and receiving Grammy nominations along the way. He also pops up in movies and TV shows, including a recurring role in Saturday Night Live’s election-year sketches as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
It seems like Gaffigan has accomplished everything in the comedy world, but he has a different perspective. “There’s stuff I want to do, but I guess I learned a long time ago that it’s the creative fulfillment I should focus on,” he tells the Weekly. “It sounds corny, but there’s nothing better than coming up with a new joke.
“I realized this when I finally appeared on Letterman, which was such a huge goal of mine, and after that I was kind of confused. Well, what do I do now that I achieved this goal? It made me evaluate what I really love about it.”
Gaffigan loves the process. That’s not to say he doesn’t enjoy performing at Wynn’s luxurious Encore Theater. “That’s important to me. I don’t want that to go away. But the creative fulfillment of coming up with a new joke or special or getting a cool acting role is probably more important than whether that movie role is seen by a lot of people.”
Here’s more of our recent conversation with Gaffigan to enjoy before you catch him at a weekend show on the Strip.
Plenty of comedians have told us they love to play Vegas because the audience isn’t just people that live here. Are your Vegas shows special for that reason, or for other reasons?
I feel like what it’s like at Wynn is pretty dramatically different. The Wynn is such an elevated kind of experience, but all of Vegas is amazing. What I love about Wynn is everything is so self-contained. As amazing as Vegas is as a city, I really don’t have to leave for the weekend. And that room is small and intimate so I think people get a pretty special show. Wynn is one of the smaller rooms I do on my tour. And I love the fact people can come from all around the country, but the Vegas community is great, too. There’s a savviness there to entertainment, where they can appreciate it but they’re not as jaded as, say, an LA audience, if that makes sense.
Your family has grown up and your kids are basically the whole spectrum of teenager. Have you brought the whole family along for tour dates?
We haven’t done that in a while. My kids went to Vegas [when] I was doing the Mirage … but it’s all such a blur now. They are [ages] 12 to 21 so when we are all together it’s usually around the holidays. They consistently have no interest in attending my shows, but when they were little, we threw them on the bus for a month. They’ve explored the world a little bit.
What was it like to be doing SNL during the election cycle? Were you heavily involved in that manic process of planning the show or was it less collaborative?
It was as bizarre as what you would think, but also, I was usually done after the cold open, so it was gearing up for two minutes of work. As somebody who does stand-up for like an hour, I kind of missed some of that longer process. But it was an opportunity I could never imagine, just so amazing, and doing the 50th season was so incredible.
If anything, it really surprised me because that was the first time I’ve done something where I feel like most people saw it. Maybe they didn’t see the show but they saw a clip of it, so that was the first time I was involved in something like that. There are very few people who are like, what is SNL?
JIM GAFFIGAN Thru 5/31, 8 p.m., $107-$206. Encore Theater, ticketmaster.com.
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