Jim Jefferies

The hard-driving Aussie comedian takes on love and bananas, what the new Star Wars movies got wrong and the changing face of late night

Q1: The Jim Jefferies Show debuted last year. What are the best and worst parts about having your own talk show? 

JEFFERIES: You get to meet the people you want to meet. We just interviewed Noel Gallagher two days ago. The only reason he’s on the show is because he’s one of my favourite rock stars, but the interview turned out great. I asked him about stuff like Brexit, health care, the #MeToo movement, gun control. The worst part: I get far more abuse on the internet than I used to when I was doing my sitcom, Legit. Back then, the worst thing people would say was “This show’s not funny.” People didn’t hate-watch it. People do hate-watch this show, as they do with anything that’s opinion- and news-based. Now they’re like, “Libtard!”

Q2: Your 2014 gun-control clip — in which you urge people to admit they’re pro-gun simply because guns are cool — went viral and arguably led to you getting your own political talk show. How do you look back on that bit? 

JEFFERIES: What I like about the gun-control routine is that it gave people a lot of fun arguments to have at dinner parties, rather than just getting angry, yelling at each other and rattling off statistics. I wrote the whole thing the day after Sandy Hook. It came to me very quickly, because we were on the set of Legit, and I was having a debate with another actor, who was pro-gun. The whole routine came out of the argument we had over lunch. It actually would have been a one-off if people didn’t write me so much hate mail about it.

Q3: The New York Times called your brand of comedy “enlightened crudity.” How does that grab you?