STEAM  Hi Chris! This is Tamma with STEAM Magazine.

CK Hi! Oh, can I call you back in like 5 minutes?

STEAM  Um, sure.

…Tick tock, tick tock…

 

CK  Hi, how are you?!

STEAM  Doing well. So I figured out why you hung up and called back.

CK  You did?

 

STEAM  Yes, you were giving me a few minutes to get over my star-struck-ness.

CK  (laughing) I don’t think so. But you needed exactly 22 minutes, huh?

 

STEAM  Yeah, you’re good. So we have something in common. We both went to high school in Western Washington.

CK  Oh, really? What school did you go to?

STEAM  Mountlake Terrace; we’re north of Seattle.

CK  That’s cool, I went to Bainbridge Island. Not too far apart if you take the ferry.

 

STEAM  So do you go to Washington to visit? Or are you a grey sky, rain hater?

CK  That’s funny. I just got back from a Father’s Day visit. I spent five days up there and you know it was in the 80’s with beautiful blue skies the whole time. So how’s the weather in Corpus Christi?

STEAM  Hot, muggy, and beautiful.

CK  Yeah, one of the things I remember is that when you’re inside, like at the hotels, the windows would get steamed up. And you wouldn’t be doing anything, except maybe heating up a pop-tart.

 

STEAM  So were you the class clown in high school?

CK  Yeah, I think. It sounds kind of corny but I wanted to be the class clown because I always wanted to be on Saturday Night Live when I was a kid. I felt that if I wasn’t the class clown then I wouldn’t make it being funny ever.

I don’t know if I was really the funniest guy there but I was pretty bold and fearless when it came to comedy in school. I wouldn’t make fun of anyone except the teachers. I was never was mean or callous. I performed at the school pep rallies. One time I was Bono, once I was Robin Leach from the Rich and Famous TV show.

 

STEAM  So you’ve always known you’d be in comedy?

CK  I always hoped I’d be in comedy. I had a few other gifts that my family thought I should have followed, because comedy and show business has much more of a risk and emotional toll – you have to be able to deal with a lot of rejection. But anyway, I was very good at drawing and when I was 7 or 8 I had a couple comics published in a psychology magazine, so they thought that might have been a direction I should go. I really liked animation, drawing comics – like the old stuff, like from the 40’s and 50’s. I had really thought about being an animator.

 

STEAM  Animation, huh? Weren’t you just in an episode of Jake and the Never Land Pirates?

CK  I was. I was King Zongo, king of the monkeys. I never thought about doing cartoon voices, but here I am and now I’ve got the lead role in a new Warner Brothers cartoon series, Bunnicula; half bunny, half Dracula. It’s based on a popular children’s book and should start airing on Warner Brothers in October.

STEAM  That’s great! My daughter will be excited; she needs a new show to watch.

 

CK  Yeah, and actually I was doing some of the voice today for Hotel Transylvania 2; which will be coming out in October too. I play “Cakie” and have a split personality.

 

STEAM  Well, I knew you do a lot of stand up shows and are on ABC’s The Middle, but I didn’t realize you were so busy.

CK  Yeah, for a while The Middle wasn’t letting me have time off to do other work, but I found a way to make that happen and now I’m developing my own show. I get nervous talking about what’s in the can so I’m not going to talk about it anymore. 

You know show business is very unreliable and the best thing is to be on a show with a contract. But like on SNL you could be booted off any week, so every time you do a show and aren’t that good there’s no reason for NBC to hold back from just firing you.

STEAM  That’s kind of scary.

CK  It is scary, but it also makes you better. Keeps you on your feet.

…munch, chew, munch…

 

STEAM  Are you eating lunch? (laughing)

CK  I am. I’m eating chicken. A big fried breast. There’s a place here called Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles. And oh my God, so good!

STEAM  I haven’t really gotten into the whole chicken and waffle thing down here. I still crave some of the regional foods from the Northwest, mostly the seafood.

 

CK  Yeah, I guess chicken and waffles is a Southern thing, huh? So what’s the best fish down there?

STEAM  Personally I like Black Drum. It’s a really good eating fish. You know Mesquite Street Pizza and Pasta is serving seafood and steaks now.

CK  Really? That’s great!

 

STEAM  Ok, back to work. What other projects do you have going?

CK  I just did Adam Sandler’s The Ridiculous Six; which is a cowboy, western movie with a great cast. I think it’s coming out around Christmas. It’s a really fun movie, you know with cowboys, Sandler, and all.

… This must have been muffled… STEAM  Do you like horses?

CK  Yes, we had horses. That’s a weird question. No, we made them out of Legos.

STEAM  No… do you like horses? (laughing)

CK  Oh. Yeah, I’m sure I would like them more if I knew how to ride them without saddles, or just talk to them, or run with them in the wild all bareback and all. I did get to do a thing with the horse where I had to tell him what to do without actually talking to him. And I will say that when I was a little kid in grade school I had an idiot friend that told me to walk behind a horse and when I did I should slap it on the butt. I was one of the gullible kids and obviously that horse kicked me very hard and I flew a ways, so that was my big experience with horses.

 

STEAM  Wow (laughing) Like I said I didn’t realize you were so busy and yet you still find time for stand-up. Do you enjoy it?

CK  I like doing stand-up when the crowd is good and wants to have fun, which is usually the case for me. But yeah, I love doing it. I love when the crowd laughs and I’m having a good time and they’re having a good time. I have a set, but I tend to veer off and discover things depending on the audience. I like to keep everything fresh; I don’t want to be predictable.

 

STEAM  When you’re done with your Texas Comedy Tour are you headed for more stand-up shows?

CK  No, I’m going right back to LA for work. Oh, I’m also working on an autobiography of my time on SNL. It’s an honest and truthful look at my time and the funny parts are there, but I chose not to write about being funny to be funny. I really think Steve Martin’s autobiography was great and I went along those lines to tell the real story and interesting stuff.

 

STEAM  So when you meet people, do they expect you to be funny?

CK  I don’t know. That’s a question for you. I guess that yeah they expect me to be the comedy guy always and people can get very angry when things are just real. It’s very strange how that can happen too. Like I’m talking about a normal, everyday situation and I make a real comment and someone yells out, “You suck” or something, so I go back to my gay hairdresser imitation.

 

STEAM  Speaking of imitations, how do you decide who you can imitate?

CK  A lot of the characters I did on SNL really started when I was with the improv group The Groundlings. Usually it starts out that you either look like someone or you sound like them, so you’re half way there. Then you do your funny version of that person. We really end up doing impressions of their caricatures. Not really accurate, because we pull from all the funny things they do or say to build our character.

 

STEAM  Well I don’t remember seeing a caricature of gay Hitler! (laughing)

CK  That’s not even close to accurate! That came from a book where the author believed that Hitler was a homosexual. And I came up with “Sprechen sie dick!” (laughing)

 

STEAM  I love that character! Ok, so I have just one more question… How old were you when you figured out you could stick your fist in your mouth?

CK  (laughing) I think I was 7 years old.

 

STEAM  Do you still do it?

CK  I haven’t done that in a long time and no I can’t do that anymore. (laughing) I don’t know what happened; if my mouth got smaller or my fist got bigger. Which is really a bummer ‘cause it was just so attractive.

 

STEAM  Oh yes, I’m sure that’s what won all the girls hearts!

CK  Oh yeah, and it’s also one of the things I would do when I was with my pet horses. They love it, it’s how we communicate – I put my fist in my mouth to say “hello!”

 

Chuckles Comedy Club Presents Chris Kattan!

July 15 & 16, 4 Shows!

Tripp’s Ultimate Comedy Club & Humor Bar, Canyon Lake

July 17-19, 5 Shows!

Chuckles Comedy Club, Corpus Christi

July 22 & 23, 4 Shows!

Cine El Rey, McAllen

 

 

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