Sebastian Maniscalco is a rising star in the comedy world, with a busy 12 months ahead on stage and screen.
Despite a packed calendar, however, he’s found time to head to Australia with his Aren’t You Embarrassed? tour. We catch up with the US comic to talk about his craft and where he draws his inspiration from.
“The material I’m going to be doing hasn’t been performed before,” he explains of his forthcoming shows. “It centres on family – my father is a big part of my act and now also my wife, who I have been married to for two-and-a-half years. It also centres on observational humour, my point of view and my disgust with human behaviour.”
Clearly Maniscalco’s internal conflict between being both a traditionalist and a contemporary comedian makes for great stories and material.
“Maybe it comes from the way I was raised,” he ponders. “My parents instilled work ethics, how to behave in social settings, to always bring a gift to a party and to never show up to someone’s house empty-handed. It was always black and white growing up, there was no grey area. So every time I see grey I get disappointed,” he laughs.
“My wife kinda lives in that grey area. She’s always saying, ‘Maybe they don’t know better,’ but I want to hang out with people that do know better! Maybe I take these little idiosyncrasies in life and blow them up and exaggerate them for comedy, but the core of it is my disappointment in how people act in public.”
Maniscalco hints at something that makes comedy a unique art – comedians are able to get away with criticising and making fun of human behaviour, which Maniscalco certainly isn’t shy about doing onstage. I wonder whether he calls people out on their behaviour in public, or if he saves it for his act.
“I’m not walking around in a grocery store going, ‘Stop feeling the fruit,’ but I often whisper to whoever I’m with. I’ve kinda brought it to social media with the hashtag #ArentYouEmbarrassed. Anything I see while I’m at the airport or at dinner, I’ll try to film it and make fun of it. It’s all in good fun – it’s not like I’m being malicious or mean about it, it’s just laughing at what people do. Sometimes I even turn the camera on myself when I’m doing something embarrassing like dry riding a scooter.”
With that mental image firmly in place, the conversation turns towards Maniscalco’s home life. Marriage is a topic that is often mined for comedy, so it hasn’t caused Maniscalco too many problems on the domestic front.
“It’s something [my wife has] been a great sport with,” he says, “because a lot of the material has to do with how her family behaves. She’s been great about it, and besides, I also poke fun at my family. My father comes from Sicily and he’s an immigrant, so it was a different way of growing up. He’s very old-world and hard-working. It was a loving family but also one that always told you to go out and make something of yourself.
“But my wife’s family is very nonchalant in the way they behave. They say, ‘Whatever makes you happy,’ when for us it was, ‘Whatever puts food on the table. Go get a job.’ So I definitely exploit those differences in my act and I think people can relate to both ends of the spectrum.”
Seeing as his family placed so much emphasis on hard work and practicality, it’s a wonder Maniscalco ended up in show business.
“My father is a hairdresser and my mother did creative writing,” he says. “So creativity was definitely something that was very prevalent in our house. The unique thing about it is that although my father was very strict when it came to earning a living, he was also very supportive of me doing something that I enjoyed. When your son or daughter goes into the entertainment business, it isn’t something that is lightly swallowed, because it isn’t consistent, it’s not stable, you don’t know where your next dollar is coming from. But my parents were very supportive from day one and still are. My father is my biggest fan and my biggest critic – he’ll come backstage after a show with a notepad filled with things that didn’t work and things that he liked.
“As time goes on, I feel a lot more comfortable not only discussing our families but the things we go through on a day-to-day basis,” Maniscalco says. “At the time it might not seem funny – for example, we’re remodelling our house right now. It took me a while to find the funny in all of that, because it is taking so long. Sometimes time heals wounds.”
Pain is something that seems to be a common thread with comedians. Stand-up can be a way to process or deal with the past or difficult situations, but it hasn’t always been easy for Maniscalco to incorporate this kind of material into his shows.
“My parents got divorced five years ago and I was never able to talk about it because it was really close to home; it really affected my sister and I. Normally it happens when kids are ten and here I am at 38 years of age dealing with my mother going on dating sites. At the time it wasn’t funny, but now I can look back and poke fun.”
Sebastian Maniscalco’s showAren’t You Embarrassed? is on at Enmore Theatre Saturday June 4.
