Kevin Nealon’s YouTube web series, Hiking With Kevin, is the evolution of his comedic craft one would hope for, a 15-minute parcel of witty banter, thoughtful conversation, and satisfying silliness. An impressive list of his contemporaries like TIffany Haddish, Adam Sandler, Tig Notaro, Martin Short, and Conan O’Brien, have joined the veteran comedian on his weekly trudge through SoCal sagebrush to discuss life, work, a little politics, and, most endearingly, trading bits.
“You know it’s funny, Grant, I asked my friend — he’s an actor — Matthew Modine if he wanted to go on a hike with me in a canyon near my house,” Nealon explains to me about the series’ inception during a phone interview last week. “So he said, ‘Sure.’ While he was on his way over, I was thinking of a funny bit, just a little sketch idea, for an interview show Hiking, where I’d be so out of breath you couldn’t understand my questions and he was so out of breath you couldn’t understand his answers [laughs], So that worked well. And then on the way down, I interviewed him some more and asked him ‘what regrets do you have in terms of turning down roles in your career?’ And he started listing all these roles he’d turned down, and I thought ‘oh my gosh! This is crazy!’ It was, like, Back To The Future, Wall Street, Top Gun, Big — all for the leads, you know?
Yeah, so I thought that’d be a fun show to do weekly, or whatever, as a series, where I’d have different celebrities. And that’s what I started doing. I held the phone in my hand the first time because I didn’t know we were going to do that. And then I got a selfie stick, and my equipment has constantly been improving and evolving since I started.”
Making his stand-up debut on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1984, Nealon landed in NBC’s Studio 8H just two years later as a nine-season cast member of Saturday Night Live, three of which he would spend behind the anchor desk of the show’s staple news feature, Weekend Update. He would also receive a 1988 Emmy nomination as part of the show’s writing team. Nealon’s versatile comedic brand paved the way for film roles in All I Want for Christmas, Happy Gilmore, Anger Management, Little Nicky, Daddy Day Care, Good Boy!, Grandma’s Boy, and Blended. He also found success on the small screen with prime roles in Curb Your Enthusiasm, Still Standing, Monk, and The Outer Limits. From 2005-2012, Nealon appeared as Weeds series regular Doug Wilson, and in fall he’ll return to his role of Don Burns for season three of CBS sitcom Man With A Plan opposite Matt LeBlanc.
In July, Nealon will also appear on NBC’s American Century Championship, an annual celebrity charity golf tournament that will donate its 2018 proceeds to the Stowers Institute for Medical Research.
“I do like golf, but I’m not an avid golfer, actually,” Nealon clarifies when I mistakenly call him an avid golfer. “For me, lately, it just seems like it takes up a lot of time and I’m not good at it, so it’s kind of frustrating. But I’ve been doing this tournament every year, so a couple of weeks before it, I start practicing and try to get myself together. The great thing about golf is that every hole’s a new start for you.”
This Friday and Saturday, Nealon will return to his stand-up roots for a four-show engagement at the Columbus Funny Bone.
I was watching your guest spot on Conan last week and loved the little conversational game the two of you were playing because, in my mind, that really sort of captured your essence as a comedian. You have this sense of play with the audience that makes you pause and question where you might be going next. And it’s not pretentious or mean-spirited; it’s inclusive and it draws you in. What’s your center of gravity as you write and develop that material?
“My mantra since I started was to be original and unique because there are so many comedians out there, more so now where you don’t stand out unless you’re unique or original. So I try to follow that guideline when I’m coming up with stuff, and also to keep the audience guessing. I was always a fan of Andy Kaufman, you know, so I like to keep the audience guessing because that’s really what comedy is — it’s kind of verbal misdirection. It’s like a magician, only it’s verbal misdirection. And you fool them, and they go ‘how did he do that? How did he do that?'”
Before The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live, you were a working comic. What are some of your recollections about that period in your career?
“Well, I love doing stand-up, so I didn’t mind going to the open mic nights. It was always really exciting for me. And I think even if I’d never made it as a comic I’d still probably be going to open mic nights [laughs]. It’s kind of like you’re very observant about everything as a comic. You’re watching what the comedians are doing, you’re watching how they craft their jokes, and you try to come up with your own style. And that takes time to figure out what you want to say and how you want to say it. And then you do all the open mic nights, and then you strive to get regular club dates and work on the road. Then the next thing is getting talk shows, and then getting your own special, ultimately.
I remember when I was first starting out, before I was on TV, I would get in at the end of the line outside the comedy club. And I would ask the last person, or the last couple of people ‘who’s performing tonight?’, you know? [laughs] And most of the time, they’d say ‘we don’t know.’ They were just there for the comedy.”
There’s been a tremendous amount of discussion about comedy and its place in our current social and cultural landscape and how younger audiences have different expectations of how comedians contend with politics and other topics that might be contentious. Do you think that’s now shaping comedy in negative ways?
“It’s a tricky time we’re in right now, because people are fighting for political correctness and equality in many different ways. Comedy has always been…it hasn’t always been politically correct, and often what makes people laugh is the shock of something, or the political incorrectness of something. But it seems like a lot of people now are kind of on that wagon…and in your life, that’s great, but when you’re at a comedy club, you’ve got to let down your guard and know that you’re going for a ride and you don’t know where it’s going. And know that if you don’t like the act, you can leave.”
And do you find comedians to be fundamentally different than they were in the 80s?
“Things have certainly changed since I started out. I remember when I first started in comedy clubs, the only comics you’d see there would be mostly Irish, Italian, Jewish, Black — that was pretty much it. And now there’s every culture and ethnicity — Arabs and Iranians and Indians. It’s become so much more accessible. And the time we live in is unlike any other time with politics and the way things change. I think even the style of comedy has changed a little bit. You know, when I started out there were still guys like Milton Berle and Henny Youngman — the one-liners. And then it became more set-up-and-punchline. Now a lot of the younger comedians are doing more of this alternative attitude kind of shock stuff. They’re ranting stuff.”
Your television work has been expansive. As you’ve been working on Man With A Plan, has scripted comedy been evolving in different places?
“I’ve done just about every medium of television ranging from single-camera, talk shows, to animated, and I’ve also done multi-camera, which is what Man With A Plan is. And that really hasn’t changed much at all, it’s a pretty traditional format for a TV show. You know, it seems like on these multi-camera shows, it’s got to be quick — set-up, joke, joke, joke, joke. And I guess that’s what people want for 22 minutes, or whatever it is. And stemming from Roseanne, it seems they also want edgy, biting comedy. So I don’t know how much that is going to change some of the other shows.”
Kevin Nealon will be at the Columbus Funny Bone, 145 Easton Town Center, on Friday, June 22, and Saturday, June 23. Tickets are $25 (ages 21 and over only) plus applicable taxes and fees, and can be purchased here. More information can be found on Kevin’s official website.