Australian-born stand-up comedian Jim Jefferies had a pretty solid pitch for why you should come to his show in Pittsburgh on Saturday.
“It just so happens that I’m gonna be recording a special in a couple of months’ time. The best time to see a tour is just before the special because all the jokes are ready to go and they’re all polished and good. The worst time to see a show is just after someone’s recorded a special and they’ve run out of material. So it might be a bit long, to be honest with you. … I have lots of jokes that I need to filter out before I actually record the special,” he said.
Jefferies — whose often raucous and raunchy comedy covers everything from daily-life anecdotes to social issues — most recently released a special on Netflix with 2023’s “Jim Jefferies: High and Dry.” He’s released nine other specials going back to 2008.
The stage always called to Jefferies, who attended the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, where he studied musical theater.
“I was always a big fan of stand-up comedy. I used to watch Eddie Murphy specials all the time. We used to rent them out at the video store.”
He started doing open mics at 17, and then took a break from comedy for his other studies, picking it up again three years later.
“I haven’t really had another job since then. … I thought, I want to do any job that wasn’t behind a desk or manual labor. So I thought I’d do a job that was really cushy where I just had to perform an hour a day or something like that. So, it was really out of laziness that got me to this occupation.”
Jefferies co-wrote and created the FX series “Legit” for two seasons from 2013-2014. He also hosted “The Jim Jefferies Show” on Comedy Central for three seasons from 2017-2019. Recently, he hosted the game show “The 1% Club” in Australia, and he will appear in the American horror film “Him” later this year.
During his formative years, he was a fan of funny people who didn’t quite reach outside of Australia, such as Anthony Morgan.
“People like George Carlin and Richard Pryor, I’d never seen their stand-up until I actually became a stand-up, they just weren’t on Australian TV. I used to think that Richard Pryor was an actor. I didn’t know that he was one of the greatest stand-up comics of all time and now I’m a Richard Pryor buff.”
Jefferies lived in the United Kingdom after leaving Australia for his career. He currently lives in California with his wife and their son, who was born in 2021. He said that he used to believe that comedy was different in different cultures, but there isn’t as much of a distinction in humor as many think.
“Now that I’ve been on Netflix and I’ve been all around the world, I get the same laughs in Tokyo that I get in Pittsburgh. Netflix has really brought the world together. Everyone’s watching everyone’s specials now.
“It used to be like, I want to go conquer this country. So you go to that country and you start doing all the comedy clubs and you hope that you can get a little following, and you do a couple of their late-night shows. That doesn’t exist anymore. People just watch comedy all over the world, and it turns out that funny is funny anywhere you go,” he said.
He doesn’t buy the common belief that Americans don’t understand ironic humor, or that the Brits prefer their wit dry.
“The British were quite silly in their comedy. … So it’s all the same. It was just what we were exposed to on TV that defined who we liked and who we didn’t like. But now that you can go on YouTube, look anyone up at any time, people are deciding on their own who they like and who they don’t like.”
That being said, he’s dealt with hate from all sides of the political spectrum for his commentary on social issues and hot-button topics. For example, he became somewhat infamous after a portion of his 2014 special “Bare” about gun control went (repeatedly) viral. He pays attention to how people respond with laughs — and not what the Internet has to say.
“You can’t be judging your material on what people are writing in comments underneath a clip. So, there’s only one way to know if it’s any good, and you can feel it right away. It’s the beauty of stand-up comedy — you instantly know whether something’s successful or not,” he said.
His process for writing material is fairly unstructured and organic. “Most things that I write — if it’s about a social issue or something about myself — comes from me telling the story to my wife or to one of my comedian friends. As a comic, you’re in cars with other comedians for hours on end and chatting. And in those chats, often you write something or someone will say to you, ‘Oh, that could be a bit, what you just said there.’ Sometimes it takes another person to actually tell you that that’s a bit.”
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Other jokes just come to him while he’s going through daily life. “I’ve never been a bloke who just sat down with a notebook and said, ‘I’m gonna write a joke today.’”
He’s a prolific player of the video game series “Call of Duty,” though he claims he hasn’t gotten good at it in 20 years. “Yeah, it’s something to do, though, isn’t it? That’s all life is. All life is is trying to find a laugh, innit? Trying to find some little break in the monotony. That’s why you’ve got to come to the show. It’ll give you something to do for a couple of hours.”
Jim Jefferies will bring his “Son of a Carpenter Tour” to Heinz Hall in Downtown Pittsburgh at 7 p.m. Saturday. For tickets, visit pittsburghsymphonyorchestra.org.