Paul F. Tompkins on why he’s more storyteller than comedian these days

The A.V. Club: Since we first spoke in 2007, your material has grown increasingly personal, and more story-oriented and less joke-joke-joke, like Impersonal. The conceit of the special, a run through the jobs you’ve had, makes it one-man-show-esque. Do you feel like this special is the apotheosis of the slow change of your material?

Paul F. Tompkins: Yeah, the last couple of hours that I’ve done, and the current one I’m working on, have been story-oriented like that, and it’s just really creatively satisfying for me to just go at a different pace and at a different length than just the traditional stand-up that I started out doing. It was kind of a turning point to letting myself be able to do that because there’s a lot of “rules” to how you’re supposed to do it, and you’ve got a lot of unsolicited advice, and then there’s a lot of people that will rail against other types of comedy that they don’t think is true stand-up comedy. Then after a while I just sort of felt like, “Well, maybe what I’m doing is not stand-up comedy anymore. It’s not really a play, but maybe it’s somewhere in between, and it’s just storytelling.” I just think of it now as storytelling.


Paul F. Tompkins on why he’s more storyteller than comedian these days / by Kyle Ryan / April 20, 2012