Zach Galifianakis kept the crowd laughing at the New Yorker Festival

November 10, 2011

Last month Zach Galifianakis participated in a Q & A event as part of the New Yorker Festival in which he kept the crowd laughing all night.

One of our contributors, Denise, was at the event and sent us the following report:

The Budweiser can you see in the pictures was part of a joke, as soon as he walked onstage he had a bag and presented the host with a smaller, regular size beer and then took out one for himself that was this very tall can, twice the size. It was pretty much Zach making jokes most of the time, but he did talk about his family and growing up in North Carolina.
He said his family was very supportive of him and he had a great childhood. He said one of his earliest memories of laughing hysterically with his family happened in church. His father was trying to light a candle during mass, but the wick was so imbedded in the wax that by the time he was able to light it and bring it up to his face, everyone else blew out their candles.
He also talked about his web show Between Two Ferns and how it’s based on his love of cable access TV. He also loves ridiculous infomercials that are on in the middle of the night. He said when he asks celebs to guest on it, they have to arrive on their own, without their handlers tagging along. There’s a loose outline of what will be said and then the rest is made up as they go.
His early influences were Eddie Murphy’s Raw and Bill Murray. He moved to NYC in his mid-twenties “just to become something” and his first gig was doing stand-up at Hamburger Harry’s in Times Square. He said doing stand-up gave him the confidence to go to auditions, but whether he actually went to auditions was based on how far he had to drive!
Bradley Cooper was also there (he was standing in the back). Zach said they were at dinner together beforehand and he joked that he had to tell Bradley to stop looking in the mirror. It was Zach’s birthday on Saturday so he had 500 mini cupcakes from Babycakes brought in for us too. The host of the event thought we could sing “Happy Birthday” but Zach requested “Purple Rain” instead. We couldn’t get the words right for that so he requested we sing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” for him.

Next week Zach heads to Louisiana to begin shooting Dog Fight with Will Ferrell. Glorioso Casting is still looking for extras to appear in the film. If you’re interested in applying, fill out the application here.