For many comics, a steady gig is the light at the end of a very long tunnel. A job as a TV host can be the final frontier, after countless club shows and hundreds of hours on the road. Not the case with Chris Fairbanks. After serving his time as a personality and writer on Fuel TV, he’s just getting started. Chris, a regular on the comedy fesitval and late night circuit, is starting a self-described “grassroots” initiative to re-energize his comedy pursuits. We recently chatted with Chris before his SF Sketchfest show to talk how speech impediments can be motivational (and hilarious), balancing skating with comedy, and why we shouldn’t expect his “cat video” to drop any time soon.

ROOFTOP: You’ve racked up some considerable festival creds at Montreal’s Just For Laughs, Aspen, SF Sketchfest among others. How do all of these events affect your style as a performer?

CHRIS FAIRBANKS: I think that when I first did festivals like Montreal, there used to be more of an expectation as far as what they would do for your career: trying to get management or trying to get someone to see you. But the game has changed so much now because of the internet and people being able to put themselves out there. They don’t really need festivals, which is bittersweet. I like that. So now, festivals have become the thing, like Sketchfest and even smaller ones like Bridgetown, where they’re just about having fun. There’s no pressure. I was so scared when I did Montreal in the past. Now the bad part is there isn’t necessarily industry watching you, but I don’t think you need festivals for that anymore, which is awesome. There are other people getting recognition because their YouTube video has a cat in it or something. They get exposure without paying their dues in stand-up and then they end up doing stand-up. There’s people I know that headline the Improv seven months after one of their videos got 4 million hits and they end up getting management and they’re thrown in a comedy club. So that’s the downside of the internet serving what festivals used to do.

RT: So we’re still waiting on that Chris Fairbanks’ cat video?

CF: Yeah, I got to get a cat video together. I have a cat, but he’s far from entertaining. He’s right here in front of me. If I had a camera right now, no one would watch me.

RT: Just in case, I’ll get a release form to you right away.

CF: For the cat. You got to take advantage of the cat.

RT: What are you looking forward to this year in your career?

CF: For the last year and a half, I was working on a TV show, writing, sitting at a desk—which I never wanted. In my whole life, I was doing everything I could to not have a job like our dads had. It’s kind of funny that that’s what stand-up led to. The show was a Fuel TV show that covered action sports and had me go out and interviewing athletes and actors and going to press junkets and writing a live variety interview show. That was an everyday job and then it got cancelled. I wasn’t doing stand-up for a living. I would do it around LA occasionally like a lot of comics here. It felt weird to not feel like a professional comic. I was doing it less. If you work 55 hours a week, I was getting real lazy. I would not do stand-up for a whole month. Now, I’m just looking forward to doing stand-up again, but it is nice to make regular income. I’m already missing that a lot, but it just feels better to be on stage. On the other side, having a bad set is the worst. It’s a weird love hate relationship, so I just want to get to where I’m usually having good sets. Then I’ll be happy, right?

RT: How did you get attracted to action sports?

CF: That was something I got into when I was fourteen. I’ve been skateboarding for some 20 years. That was already happening. It was kind of cool that it intersected with my comedy career. It’s neat when they all intertwine because, usually, stand-up is separate from skateboarding and so is my art. Right now, I’m trying to figure out how to do the comedy and art together. I guess I have to do a comic book or try to pitch a cartoon or something—which I’m actually working on right now. I have a meeting coming up and I’m totally unprepared.

RT: Just show up on a skateboard and you’ll be fine.

CF: Yeah, “Look at three things I do half-assed!” That’s the thing. For a long time I was doing stand-up and artwork for a living. I also had a regular thing with Thrasher. You stop and you wonder, “Should I commit 100% to this?” I’m not a super-motivated person that can live the professional life of barely one person, much less try and be a professional full-time artist. If you have your foot just part-way into a couple doors…

RT: On stage, you have these moments when you almost trip over your words. It comes across as wonderfully spontaneous and also gives the sense you’re really enjoying yourself up there.

CF: That’s where I think comics are actors also. Most of the time, I’m acting like something is happening right then or that there’s even a mistake so that I can have the freedom of riffing right then. If you do that and you do plan a few of those moments, then that allows you to do more truly improvised moments. It’s a 50/50 thing where some of them are planned and I know they’ll get a response, so then I’m free to riff on something else that’s happened—usually not with the audience, just with myself. People don’t heckle anymore, so I’m kind of heckling myself I guess. Some of them are planned and I’m pretending to say Champell’s Canky instead of Campbell’s Chunky, but it’s planned because it happened organically once. I learned that early. All these mistakes that would happen do happen because of my legitimate inability to speak. I have a messed up speech impediment. I used to have to suck on buttons on a string and they’d put a cage in the roof of my mouth to poke my tongue, so I would quit thrusting my tongue toward my teeth. I’ve always been real conscious of that.

RT: What else do you have coming up?

CF: I’m going to work the road a bit. I’m illustrating a children’s book with my sister.

RT: Is focusing on stand-up making you cut back on your other passions like skating?

CF: Totally—it’s just like with the art thing. Every time I go skating, I’m like “Why am I doing this?” It’s not even necessarily something that brings me joy. When I’m skateboarding, I’m just complaining, but I just can’t quit. Even though girls are like, “What? You’re 36? How old are you? You still skateboard?” That’s when I stop talking. I know that right now all I need to be doing is doing stand-up. My whole career, something comes from stand-up. That’s how I got the Fuel job. As long as you stay good at that, you don’t have to worry about any of this Hollywood crap.

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Follow Chris on Twitter @chrisfairbanks. Chris’ album, Fairbanks!, is available through iTunes, Amazon, and the Rooftop store.

We’re proud to announce the start of this year’s Next Big Comic, a yearly competition we’re producing with CMT. The search is on this year as 12 very comics face off. Check out all the clips over on the CMT site and be sure to share your favorites. Show your support and you can vote as many times for as many comics as you wish. The comics with the most votes will advance each week and the four finalists will perform at the famous Stardome in Birmingham, Alabama. Who are these 12 contestants exactly? You’ve seen them headline clubs all over the country and they’re some of our favorite comics:

Andy Beningo

Shane Mauss

Steve Gillespie

Tom Simmons

Andy Pitz

Felicia Gillespie

Kelly Collette

Lance Weiss

Chris Pennie

Adam Norwest

Dave Stone

Tim Wilkins

Be sure to keep up with the action on Twitter (#NextBigComic) and spread the word! We want to know who you’re supporting. Next week, the eight comics with the most votes will move on and we’ll have new clips for you to consider.

Check out our new series Crashing the Market, now showing on MSN. It’s a weekly send-up of all the business headlines and gossip you may have missed. From McDonald’s fumbles in social media to financial tycoons losing their knighthood, we’re here to help you laugh at the absurd world of business. Click through the link below to watch the first episode, featuring host Mariah Castle. Take a look and let us know what you think!

Crashing the Market – Episode 1

Dana Gould made a stop at Jimmy Kimmel Live and we’re awfully glad he did. Dana killed it with a great set, taking some time to muse on feathers as hair accessories and Stephen Hawking as an inspiration to schlubby Joe Shmoe’s everywhere–naturally. Definitely worth a few minutes of your afternoon. Be sure to follow Dana on Twitter (@DanaJGould) and see him live at SF Sketchfest and regular shows all around LA. Nice job Dana!

Patton Oswalt sat down on the Conan couch last night to promote his new film, Young Adult. The conversation, though, didn’t just focus on the Jason Reitman-directed film that looks awfully good and the logical perplexities of Patton adding a love scene with Charlize Theron to his resume. Naturally, the holiday season came up and Patton wants to know the Little Drummer Boy’s secret to soothing babies (Jesus or otherwise). Watch his full interview:

The wonderfully weird and recent Andy Kaufman Award winner Nick Vatterott delivered a distinctly quirky set on Conan last night. Apparently he’s gearing up to do some shows for kindergarten students and that sounds just about perfect. Nick also reflected on his own (distracted) childhood and the inherent awkwardness of the letter “Q”. Be sure to watch the rest of Nick’s clips on Rooftop and keep up with him on Twitter. Great job Nick!

Las Vegas doesn’t immediately jump to mind when people think of comedy hotbeds. For Bryan Bruner, though, that’s where he got his first gigs and where he jumped the first hurdle of stealing people’s attention from the slot machines. Since then, Bryan has only been improving, crafting his own style that’s a blast to listen to on his debut album, Welcome to Djibouti. We recently sat down with Bryan to talk about some intense (and violent) heckling, Kal Penn’s relationship with cheetahs, and the comedic muse that is Florida’s swingers’ community.

Rooftop Comedy: What was it like to get your comedy start in the Vegas scene?

Bryan Bruner: It was tough because it still is a very young, tiny scene. It’s not like New York, where there’s six generations of comics and an established way of doing things. In Vegas, it’s starting. It’s creating itself. You’re doing video poker bars. People’s attentions are everywhere but being geared up for comedy. People are figuring it out though. They’re figuring out how to set up the room and how to give comedy a fighting chance. Coming from Vegas definitely gave me the chops to have the fighting chance to survive in New York.

RT: So how about that one time a Marine attacked you while you were performing onstage?

BB: I think I was doing stand-up for six months and I was hosting this show and it was in the back of the bar. I’m dying on stage. I’m getting nowhere. My mom’s in the audience. My grandma is there. It’s her 80^th birthday. I’m eating so much dick. I’m getting no laughs and one of the jokes tanks and I turn and I repeated the punch line at this guy or whatnot. Out of the blue, he comes out of nowhere and spears me from the side, knocks me into the TV and into the wall. Just a few minutes earlier, his buddy had heckled me and I made fun of him. It wasn’t anything mean. It was kind of a shitty comeback. Anyway, his buddy heckled me and I went back into the bit and then after that bit is when he just charged me onstage. It was a weird thing where I got stuck in the wall and I had to unplug my ass out of the wall. After that, I think I quit doing stand-up for quite a long time. [Ed. note: you can watch the incident on YouTube]

RT: How was it going on a U.S. Army tour overseas?

BB: We were in Djibouti and our tour—we were just a bunch of no-name comics—but there was also a USO tour called the Hollywood Handshake tour. It was Christian Slater, Kal Penn, Zachary Levi, and Joel David Moore. So their tour meets our tour and we’re in Djibouti and they take us to this cheetah refuge. Some of them are contained behind a fence and there was one cheetah that was actually domesticated and you could pet the cheetah. I’m a little stand-off-ish about this and I’m sitting next to Kal Penn and some military officer was like, “Hey Kal, don’t try to ride this cheetah”, because in Harold and Kumar, they have to ride a cheetah back to White Castle. So they start fucking with Kal Penn and Kal Penn for a second was like, “Dude, I don’t think you guys understand. I really fucking hate cheetahs. When we were filming the movie, they purposefully didn’t feed the cheetah, so it would come across meaner”. So when Kal Penn wouldn’t go into the cheetah refuge, these military guys would just give him shit the whole time. I’m glad I’m not a movie star.

RT: Your album features a few stand-out long-form stories, including one about your introduction to the swingers’ community in Florida. Are these bits pretty polished at this point, or do you continue to develop the delivery?

BB: Yes and no. It’s got to change and it’s got to evolve. I can’t do the same thing every time. My problem that I have is sometimes I load it too much with detail and it loses focus. I’ll know I have a good story, if I feel like I’ll be embarrassed to tell it. If I’m like, “I don’t even know if I should be telling you about this”, well then that’s a story everyone wants to hear. For me, the hardest part is just getting out there and saying it. The more I say it, the more comfortable I become talking about it. What I’ll do is I’ll just go to some open mic and I’ll take my five minutes or whatever I’m allotted and I will just tell the story. I don’t care if it works or if it doesn’t. I just need to get the beats down. I’ve always been a storyteller for my friends and whatnot. Honestly, though, it was something I just started getting into before we recorded that record.

RT: You also produce the Sorta Secret Comedy Show. How did you decide to host a comedy show in your New York-sized apartment?

BB: Obviously, like everyone in New York, I have two roommates and they’re stand-ups. I wanted to do a show in a parking garage or in an auto shop and I started coming up with all these weird places I wanted to do it. We wanted to do one in our living room, but our landlord is a dick. We have a really big place. We kind of looked at each other and were like, “That’s so crazy of an idea that it just might work”. We started taking tape measurements of the room and started figuring out how we could line up couches and where we could get chairs. We charged $10 to get in the door and then it’s free beer—all you can drink. I think at our first show we had 45 people. The biggest show in our living room we had 55 people. Now, we’re taking it elsewhere. We’re working on getting into a laundromat. We just did the top of a hotel. Brown Paper Tickets totally sponsored us and rented us a sick as rock star suite at the top of a Holiday Inn. We really want to get into a Planned Parenthood.

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Keep up with Bryan on Facebook and follow him on Twitter. Welcome to Djibouti is available now on iTunes, Amazon, and the Rooftop Comedy shop.

In case you missed it, Rooftop friend and owl look-alike Sean Patton stopped by Conan recently. Sean hit his stride right off the bat with a spin “dance move” that Conan really enjoyed. In a great set, he revealed his tricks to picking up ladies, including some surprising tips from the owls. He also congratulated himself for quitting smoking cigarettes and marijuana–an accomplishment that’s had some unforeseen effects (no more tuna-mac cakes!). Nice job, Sean! Don’t forget to catch out all of his Rooftop clips–you don’t want to miss his analysis of how college students party. You can follow Sean on Twitter.

Tig Notaro returned to the Conan stage last night, building off her hilarious last visit in September. Topics of the day included unusual reflections on her name, the bathing style of toddlers, and stool sounds. Be sure to watch all of Tig’s Rooftop clips. You can catch Tig on her weekly podcast Professor Blastoff, where she is joined by Kyle Dunnigan and David Huntsberger. Great job Tig!

Rooftop Comedy Productions is proud to release Christina Pazsitzky’s It’s Hard Being a Person. Christina’s debut comedy album shows off her style of comedy that’s taken her everywhere from Last Comic Standing to Chelsea Lately. Christina’s not afraid to wear her “Going Out” sweatpants to someplace fancy like Applebee’s or talk about her thing for fat guys, including her very funny husband Tom Segura. We recently chatted with Christina right before Thanksgiving to discuss this generation’s Brett Butler, her personal identification with sausage, and comedy in old Hungary.

Rooftop Comedy: Are you doing any traveling for Thanksgiving?

Christina Pazsitzky: No. Thankfully, my relatives are here in Los Angeles. My husband and I are hosting this year to get our drink on.

RT: You’ve expressed your intense dislike for the term “girl comic”. Do you think there’s still a degree of pressure on funny female stand-ups to be cutesy?

CP: I think the pressure is always there for girls to be agreeable and attractive, comic or not. The culture is starving for a female voice that doesn’t reinforce the norm.  It’s all well and good to be girly—I’m not taking a dump on the girls that do that—but I think the culture is ripe for somebody like Roseanne or Brett Butler to kind of be that other voice. There needs to be balance in the comedy universe.

RT: Just this week, GQ magazine named Kristen Wiig “Bro of the Year”.

CP: Like Kristen’s so funny, she’s guy funny? It’s odd to have Comedians in GQ at all. Gone are the days when you could just have a personality and have a career. I’m trying to think…who’s that guy? Marty Feldman? He had one wonky eye and that guy was in a bunch of movies in the ‘80s. Well that culture is gone. I think it’s because of people like— not to knock him or his comedy—but Dane Cook, who was the first of that, “Oh my god. You’re so attractive and you’re funny?” Dane can sell tickets to guys and the girls who think he’s hot. But as far as posing for lad mags…I don’t see myself doing it, unless it’s the way Sarah Silverman did. She posed in a gorilla costume, which is great.

RT: So you were born in Hungary.

CP: Actually, no. For storytelling purposes, I condensed the details a bit. That popped out of my mouth in a Chardonnay haze during recording. My parents escaped from Hungary in ’69, fleeing the Communist regime, and they were put in a camp in Italy for a year and then the Catholic Church sponsored them to go to Canada. I was born in Canada, in Windsor, Ontario, across from Detroit.  My father worked at a car factory in Detroit and we moved to Los Angeles when I was four. I grew up in a working class immigrant household. My parents never told me I was a “little princess” or any nonsense like that.  On the outside, I look like a white blonde girl, but I’m made of sausage. I’m made of Hungarian kolbasz.

RT: Speaking of, sausage seems to be a common theme on It’s Hard Being a Person.

CP: I think it’s such an unconscious thing for me, because I really have a love for all processed meats. It’s just part of my upbringing. If you opened my father’s fridge right now, you would find at least 4 links. To me, sausage really speaks to what class you’re from, because it’s all the meat you’re not supposed to eat, but if it’s flavored just right, you can make it really good. But you can’t think about it. It is kind of a metaphor for life. You’re given these nasty bits and you try to put it together and make it palatable and tasty.

RT: What’s the comedy scene like in Hungary?

CP:  I don’t know what exists now, I’m assuming they get our movies and stand-up. Stand-up is a really American art form, with some Brits and Australians thrown in, too. The only Hungarian stand up I ever knew of was a guy named Hofi Géza and he was a stand-up comedian during the Communist regime. Hofi was one of the very few subversive elements allowed during the regime, because he would make jokes about stuff that you knew had a double meaning.  He was taking jabs at what was going on, but it was permitted because everyone loved Hofi.  I’d listen to my dad’s records  of Hofi when I was a little girl. I’d pick up on stuff here and there. I didn’t understand all the humor.

RT: When you were on MTV’s Road Rules, was there any pressure from the producers to be the funny blonde woman?

CP: I was actually, for many years, goth and punk growing up. I was very angry and very depressed. When I did Road Rules, I was studying philosophy in college and took myself very seriously. At best, I was snarky and sarcastic. They didn’t cast me because I was funny. They casted me because I was—I don’t know why. I was dumb, that’s for sure. I just wanted to see the world. I know my humor comes from being an angry, 14 year-old punk. I love that fiery, conscious, action-driven, DIY ethic. I’m proud though, to have been on Road Rules and in a time when they didn’t vote people off or set them on fire. Nobody even hooked up on my season. We were just a bunch of douche bags in a Winnebago having fun—good clean, honest, drunk fun. I’m still very close to a couple of my cast mates, they’re like family.

RT: What factors went into your decision to release an album now?

CP:  It was time and I was finally a full-time comic. The title, It’s Hard Being a Person, came from a promise I made to myself when I was working in telemarketing years ago. I was so miserable. It was one of those jobs where you just call people every day and just get shit on—rightly so, because you’re calling people at home and offering them a survey on eggs. This guy David I worked with was so funny. One day, I just slammed down the phone and was like, “Man, I fucking hate this job”. He goes, “Yeah, well, it’s hard being a person” and I thought “Ah! That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard”. The most existential—it is hard being a person. I swore that when I became a full-time comic, I’d name my album that. The time came and I did.

RT: Do you like working the rooms in LA more than touring all over?

CP: I love LA. Because I grew up here, I understand the crowds better. I like to develop new jokes here. I do the Comedy Store a lot when I’m home. Bits are born in LA and then taken on the road to be honed. I see no value in being a comedian that only five people get. Your job as a communicator is to make your ideas understandable to a large audience. I’ve really started to enjoy the Midwest a lot. At first, I didn’t know what to expect, because I grew up in LA and had no idea how the rest of the country lived.  But they’re down to earth people. They care about family and the neighborhood. And they love hot dogs. I can respect that.

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Christina will be headlining at Crackers Comedy Club in Indianapolis Dec 14-17. Her podcast “Your Mom’s House” is available for download on iTunes. It’s Hard Being a Person is available now on iTunes, Amazon, and the Rooftop Comedy Shop.