Episode 336 – Jake Johnson

Jake Johnson showed up to his first Hollywood insurance physical excited. A top doctor, paid for by the movie, the kind who sees George Clooney. "They're gonna tune up this old jalopy," he thought. "I'm gonna be speeding down the road." Then the doctor asked if he drank. "These days every day." Drugs? "Just weed. A lot." Food? "I've been going sideways." She looked at him and said: "Do you know where you are? To be insured for a movie. Do you want me to write all these answers down?" Johnson realized he was at a "fake doctor" — one who would write whatever was needed to get him insured. "I was like, oh my god, you're a fake doctor. I was like, oh, he goes to a different doctor."

The long road from sketch comedy to learning how to act

Johnson knew he wanted to do stand-up in seventh grade, after hearing George Carlin's Class Clown and Steve Martin's Let's Get Small at two different friends' houses in the same week. "I was like, this is a job. You can keep doing this." He spent ten years in a sketch group called the Midwesterners, traveling the country, playing UCB in New York, doing fringe festivals. The material was strong, he says, but they never found an audience. "We'd share the stage with other groups, and you'd be like, they just got a deal, and we're better. And we can't even get commercial agents."