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Saturday 30 May 2015

Well, who wants to be "normal" anyway?

Jim Gaffigan has always made me laugh, and often made me think.
On July 15, “The Jim Gaffigan Show” premieres on TVLand,  “The Bible Story” is [one] episode of the show.
The show is a fictionalized version of the life of stand-up comic Jim Gaffigan (as himself), his wife, Jeannie (played by Ashley Williams), and their five children, all stuffed into a two-bedroom New York City apartment.
In the online episode, Jeannie asks Jim to pick up a Bible from their priest on his way to the comedy club. It proves so large that Jim can’t hide it from view, and he winds up being photographed holding it.
The photo goes viral, and when Jim tries to deal with the ensuing media firestorm, his constant fumbles cause him to anger people on all sides.
There’s nothing normal in our society about having five kids; there’s nothing normal about being Catholic; there’s nothing normal about going onstage and making strangers laugh. That’s one of the conceits of it.
We started this show because, in my stand-up, I’ve always been fortunate enough to have audiences with mixed views. I love the fact that, in my audience, there’s the Mormon family sitting next to the lesbian couple, and you know what? They don’t care that they’re sitting near each other, because in the end, they’re just going there to laugh.
We made a point that this show is based on our life. Jeannie and I executive-produced it. Jeannie’s amazing. … We live in an environment where we constructed this show where Jeannie is this devout Catholic, the “Shiite Catholic,” but to balance it out or deal with the kind of biases we live in, because that stuff happens today.
Just because she is a devout Catholic doesn’t mean that she’s not open to friends that are leading a different lifestyle. The show has been constructed on a lot of different, conflicting lifestyles — my lifestyle being a father of five, versus Adam Goldberg’s character, who we’ve described as aggressively single. Honestly, Jeannie and I have heard that some people are watching the show and saying they’re Adam.

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