Workdays With Maury: Stand-up Joe Mande dishes on his intern days with The Maury Show
The Maury Show, like all television taped before a live, studio audience, would not exist without the thankless wheel greasing provided by its bright-eyed and delusional unpaid interns. Internships in television rarely lead to staff positions or a meaningful future, but you generally dont come to that realization until youve been floundering out of college for a few years in an unrelated field. Therefore, its especially satisfying when former interns make proper use of their experiences by taking their stories public.
Pithy stand-up [Joe Mande], co-host of the popular Rififi show Totally JK and the winner of the Emerging Comic Award at this years ECNYs, bites the hand that didnt feed (or pay) him with a new outing at the UCB Theater called Workdays With Maury, a meditation on the time and energy he gave to help make The Maury Show the gassy shit-parade it is today. I talked to Joe about working for MoPo and learned that when life hands you unexpected results, youve gotta learn to make due. Sorry Maury, you are the father of this baby. And he seems a little colicky.
As a former intern at Late Night myself, we were forbidden to talk to guests. Conan was somewhat off-limits too, or at least he seemed that way to me. Were any similar rules and advisories in place at Maury? Yes. Interns at The Maury Show were told to never speak to Maury Povich (or even look in his general direction), which really wasnt that hard considering he was hardly ever there due to his busy schedule of golfing all day and buying turtleneck sweaters.
What were your duties there? My main duty at The Maury Show was to read and organize all the viewer mail. But I did a lot of other stuff too. Like: I answered The Maury Show hotline (1-888-85-MAURY), I checked Maurys voicemail, I got high in a stairwell by myself a lot and sometimes I did sit-ups in the green room when it was empty.
Connie Chung is a beard, right? I believe shes an Asian.
How long have you been doing stand up? I started doing stand-up with a bunch of my friends, including my Totally JK co-host, Noah Garfinkel, at Emerson College about four or five years ago. We started performing at this great place in Harvard Square called the Comedy Studio. Then I moved to NYC in late 2005, blew everyone I could, and now here I am. Living the dream. Making that ECNY money, son!
Then is Workdays With Maury your first one-person show? It would be a lie to say Workdays With Maury is my first one-man show, because it actually stars two other people playing all the supporting characters. So far, Jenny Slate, Gabe Liedman and Chris Gethard have all done the show with me. Theyve been great. Some other very exciting comedians have told me theyll do the show if it continues on into the summer and fall. But yes, this is the first thing Ive ever done with light cues and blocking and stuff like that.
One of my favorite things on The Maury Show is watching a crowd of riled heavyset ladies scream Its a man! at someone of ambiguous gender as the person pulls a sign out of their pantsuit that says, Im a woman! Everyone is just floored by the resultsits so jarring. Were the results just as shocking from the control room or the monitors? Sadly, my entire time at The Maury Show was during the summer when they werent taping any shows. My job was pretty much all pre-production bullshit. It sucked. When I applied for the position, I thought it would be all feeding fat babies and administering paternity tests. But, no. It was actually super lame. However, I did walk in on Maury Povich taking a leak once and definitely caught a glimpse of his old, Jewy penis. So, that was a thrill!
[ Workdays with Maury at The Upright Citizens Brigade Theater], 307 W. 26th St. (near 8th Ave.), 212-366-9176; July 2 & 9 at 8, $5.