Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Stilson Zone Spokane Native Jeff Stilson Hits The New York Comedy Stage

You’re watching HBO, Comedy Central or “The Late Show With David Letterman” when suddenly the comic on the tube starts telling Spokane jokes.

What? Did you mistakenly click over to Spokane public access? Or did you enter “The Twilight Zone”?

No, you’ve merely entered the Jeff Stilson zone.

Stilson is a 1977 Ferris High School graduate and one of New York’s top comics. He is a common sight on both network and cable TV. He premiered his own HBO stand-up comedy special on Oct. 11. He has appeared many times on “The Late Show With David Letterman” and was a staff writer for that show for 1-1/2 years; he was an on-air correspondent for Michael Moore’s “TV Nation” for a season; and he is now producing “The Chris Rock Show,” soon to debut on HBO.

Actually, on his national TV appearances Stilson usually avoids Spokane jokes in favor of more universal material. But the fact is, you can’t take the Spokane out of the boy (see sidebar), even when he’s been living a virtual “Seinfeld” life for the last eight years on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

“That ‘Seinfeld’ scene, that’s exactly what it was when I first moved here in the late ‘80s,” said Stilson. “You’d meet your comedian friends in a cafe and talk about material, and then you’d go onstage. Jerry used to work at Catch a Rising Star, which was my home club. You’d get together, bounce jokes off of each other. It was really an exciting time.”

Today, his life is a bit more sedate. He’s married, owns a co-op in a brownstone, and has a pug dog named Ernest that he walks every day in Central Park.

On this particular day in Manhattan, he was holding forth not in a Seinfeld-like diner, but in the Cafe Mozart, a Viennese-style cafe near his home that specializes in coffee and strudel. Stilson frequents this classical-music haven because it reminds him of the year he spent in Austria, teaching at an international school in Salzburg.

Teaching is not the usual preparation for a comedy career, but Stilson is not the usual comic. In fact, he may be the only comic working today who has a degree in economics.

He got it at the University of Washington in 1982, although he has no idea why. He is also a proud alumnus of Hamblen Elementary, Sacajawea Middle School and Ferris High School in Spokane. Even back at Ferris, he was in love with comedy.

“I was always a big Johnny Carson fan,” said Stilson. “I’d stay up and watch every night. But how do you become Johnny Carson? There’s no school for that.”

So he spent five years at the University of Washington taking economics and anything else that appealed to him.

“I was going to be an international businessman, but I knew I wasn’t very well-suited to the business world,” said Stilson. “So I just went overseas for a year because I didn’t want to work.”

He ended up teaching English to Austrians. He knew German, but as he told Conan O’Brien on a recent “Late Night” appearance, he didn’t know how to swear.

“If someone cut me off in traffic, the vilest thing I could say was, ‘Go away, you big bad man!”’

When he came back to Seattle, he still had some business ambitions. So he got a job in a stock brokerage.

“I had a horrible time,” he said. “I had to make cold calls eight hours a day. I was just annoying people, essentially, for eight hours a day. The hardest thing about that kind of job is knowing that if you were to call yourself, you would hang up.”

Yet he still nurtured that dream of stand-up comedy, so one day he stepped on a stage in Seattle and tried it. People laughed, and he knew immediately it would be his career. He was named “Newcomer of the Year” on the Seattle comedy scene that first year.

He discovered right away that the life of an upcoming comic was certainly not all “The Tonight Show.” Comics in the Northwest often have to do out-of-town gigs in some unlikely places.

“I remember working in Nanaimo (on Vancouver Island),” he said. “It was a fishing village, and they’d have comedy on Thursday nights in the town disco. All of a sudden, they’d turn off the hockey game and say, ‘OK, it’s comedy night!’ They’re drunk, they’ve been fishing all day, and now three morons are up there telling jokes about Bush or Reagan.”

He also worked a few cruise ships, but Stilson would rather be keelhauled than work another cruise.

“The worst thing about a cruise ship is that if you don’t have a great show, you’re stuck on the ship with the audience that hated you the night before,” said Stilson. “You have to sit at a different table at dinner every night. So you have to explain to a different group of people why you stunk.”

So he moved to New York in the late ‘80s and tried to see if he could make it there. He did, helped by the fact that comedy was absolutely exploding at the time.

“On Friday nights, I’d do five or six sets, and on Saturday, seven or eight,” said Stilson. “You’d bounce from club to club. I took cabs - I had it all down. I just needed an hour between sets. In the cab, I’d have a little things-to-do list, and I’d go over jokes I hadn’t done yet. That’s how you get good, when you’re constantly turning over your material.”

He made numerous appearances on Letterman’s show, and at one time his name was bandied about as host of a proposed 12:30 a.m. show on CBS. Nothing came of that, but Stilson ended up as a staff writer on Letterman’s show when it first moved to CBS.

“It was great to be part of a No. 1 show, and when I was there, we never lost a week,” said Stilson.

However, the job did have its drawbacks. He sat alone in a room with a computer 12 hours a day and punched out reams of jokes, most of which would never be used. He was one of 15 writers, all doing the same thing.

“There’s a head writer, and you dump all the stuff you’ve written into his office, and he pitches what he thinks would work to Dave, and Dave says yes or no,” said Stilson. “It’s frustrating - maybe 5 percent or less gets used. It’s like cold-calling. If I got one monologue joke and one Top Ten idea and one desk piece (which Letterman used at his desk), that’s a big day. That’s a hat trick.”

The job had its compensations, including two Emmy nominations. However, those nominations did not exactly do much for his ego:

“That first year, we were getting ridiculous numbers in the ratings, and it was just assumed that we (the Letterman writing staff) were going to win. So we were literally out of our seats when they said, ‘The Dennis Miller Show.’ I’ve never felt anything like that before. You’ve flown across the country, you’re in your tuxedo, you’ve got your cologne on, you’re ready to go up there and get your Emmy. And all of a sudden you go from that to, ‘I’m a loser!’

“I lost on ‘Star Search,’ too, and this was far more humiliating. I lost again for ‘TV Nation,’ so counting ‘Star Search,’ I’ve been declared a loser on national television four times.”

He eventually quit the Letterman staff in order to pour his energy into his own stand-up career. He also landed a job doing four segments on the sarcastic docu-comedy “TV Nation.” One of his most memorable pieces was called “Hell Town.” It was a look at a county in Alabama which, according to some kind of complex Baptist calculation, has the highest percentage of people going to hell.

In the meantime, he went to Australia to work on the staff of the Australian equivalent to Letterman. He met his Australian wife, Joanne, there. They were later married at his parents’ cabin on Priest Lake.

“The worst thing for me about marriage was proposing, because I really have bad taste in jewelry,” he told O’Brien. “I would have preferred just handing my wife the money.”

She now works at Parachute Press, a publishing house in New York that specializes in the “Goosebumps” series.

This year, he spent his time honing his live act for his HBO Comedy Special (it will be repeated at 5:30 a.m. New Year’s Day; set your VCR). It was filmed in front of a live audience at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco.

Stilson also spent part of the summer producing comedian Chris Rock’s utterly hilarious segments of “Politically Incorrect” at the Republican and Democratic national conventions.

Now, he’s deeply involved in writing and producing “The Chris Rock Show” for HBO, which will be a combination talk show and comedy-variety show.

“Chris is probably the hottest stand-up in the country now,” said Stilson.

Stilson still gets back to Spokane a couple of times a year to visit his parents, Beverly and Roger Stilson, and to stay at the family lake cabin.

So keep an eye out for Stilson on HBO or on Letterman. Maybe you’ll even hear a few new Spokane jokes.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: SPOKANE HUMOR Two of Jeff Stilson’s old Spokane jokes: “Our zoo in Spokane was named the worst in North America. Admittedly, it was pretty bad. Most of the animals in it are native to the Spokane area. They just happened to be on the grounds when the zoo was built.” “We named our airport Spokane International Airport, although it had no international flights at the time. We got the idea for the name from the International House of Pancakes.”

This sidebar appeared with the story: SPOKANE HUMOR Two of Jeff Stilson’s old Spokane jokes: “Our zoo in Spokane was named the worst in North America. Admittedly, it was pretty bad. Most of the animals in it are native to the Spokane area. They just happened to be on the grounds when the zoo was built.” “We named our airport Spokane International Airport, although it had no international flights at the time. We got the idea for the name from the International House of Pancakes.”