![]() All the videos that I made before, I was trying to match the tone of my comedy and the pace and kind of the stiltedness, but also, I wouldn’t call it minimalism, but just “let’s see how much we can do with one shot.” Marty Schousboe, the director of the show, really helped develop that style a lot further. How important was that to you?Įxtremely important. It’s as if “True Stories” were directed by Terrence Malick. So I was doing a joke onstage, “What is the best breakfast club? It’s going with your full-grown sons.” It kind of came from that, the guilt that I’m not there. I was home, my dad was talking about some friends of his that go to breakfast regularly at a bagel shop, and he made feel bad we weren’t with them. Like the breakfast club episode in Season 1. A lot of my stand-up was talking about a little bit of guilt that I’d left my family in Buffalo to be in New York. A lot of my friends from school became music teachers, and now I get to spend like three, four months each season in the Midwest shooting and pretend to have an alternative life, where I wasn’t a comedian but a choir teacher. I didn’t want to do another show about a stand-up comedian. What are the lines between you and the character? You’re obviously different from the person we see on screen - you moved to New York and exposed yourself to the brutality of the comedy scene. In the odd and oddly lovely “Joe Pera Talks With You,” premiering in back-to-back 11-minute episodes Sunday at midnight on Adult Swim, the New York-based comedian Joe Pera plays a middle-school choir teacher of the same name in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, with a sideline in “presentation.” Television Review: How this critic found art in the 11-minute episodes of Adult Swim’s ‘Joe Pera Talks With You’ So the sale of the house is moving away from ties to the past and figuring out who he is in another way. But Conner O’Malley was like, “You should continue to deal with it realistically, all that aftermath of death you don’t want to deal with.” Also the character was raised by his grandparents, and he has to kind of rebuild his life without them. It wasn’t as bad as having to deal with her death in the previous season that was tough to write and perform and edit while keeping the proper amount of weight and balancing it with the comedy. Are those difficult moments for you to play? In the new season, you’re dealing with the sale of your grandmother’s house. The curiosity and slow-paced nature and being distracted by wanting to dive into subject matter is from them very directly. ![]() ![]() He was always tinkering in his backyard, letting me start a fire there whenever I felt like it - you know, let a kid be a kid. The character and myself in real life are curious about things in the way that my one grandfather was we’d drop him off at the bookstore and pick him up, and he’d have two shopping bags full of books that he would never read but just say, “Oh, I’m fascinated with that” and have great intentions about learning about it. One set of grandparents were antique hoarders. He is obviously not exactly the person he plays on television - he refers to him as “the character” - but there is surely a lot of Pera in there it is not a mask so much as a window. Pera, 33, has been coming your way for a while now, leaving tracks in the web since college, making the odd late-night talk show appearance. Most episodes are cartoon-length and somehow packed with events while never breaking into so much as a trot. Sincerely interested in ordinary human rituals and the wonders of nature - the show encourages an attitude of appreciation - it’s a comedy I am just as liable to watch with tears streaming down my face as laughing. But everything veers off into something quite different, and often quite profound. Briefly stated, it’s a show about a soft-spoken, round-shouldered middle school choir teacher in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula who offers “presentational” videos - they have titles like “Joe Pera Takes You to Breakfast,” “Joe Pera Answers Your Questions About Cold Weather Sports” and “Joe Pera Gives You Piano Lessons” and involve talking to the camera. That such a singular and delicate thing has survived, even thrived, in the roiling seas of television is a seemingly small but not inconsiderable mercy. These are trying times, but we may take some comfort in the fact that a third season of “ Joe Pera Talks With You” comes to Adult Swim Sunday.
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