Comedian Jim Gaffigan, a Chesterton native, reflected on growing up in Northwest Indiana and how that shaped his life.
“There were funnier people in my high school,” he said.
When he tells people where he grew up, they might or might not recognize it. “Indiana is a state that a lot of people have driven through,” he said.
“I’m a good Northwest Indiana boy.”
“There’s this perception of what Indiana is like, and there’s this reality of Northwest Indiana,” Gaffigan said. “It’s urban but also close to rural,” he said. That reality is reflected in many region residents’ attitudes toward Chicago.
“We should go to Chicago. Nah, I don’t want to deal with the parking,” he recalls people saying when he grew up.
Gaffigan’s humor includes edgy lines, even when reflecting on bygone institutions like restaurants here: “Do you miss the Red Lantern? You know that bowl of cheese? Did you know that it’s made from humans?”
Gaffigan’s favorite hamburger? “I love Schoop’s,” he said. When he brought his wife back to Northwest Indiana to visit, he had to stop there. She agreed with his fan favorite. His brother even brought Schoop’s burgers to him at a Hospice of the Calumet Area fundraiser.
As a teen, Gaffigan remembers working on the Adam Benjamin Center with other construction workers. They offered him a beer when they took a lunch break. You drink beer at 11 a.m., he asked. Yeah, we’ll have a couple of them, they told him.
Two of his brothers joined him on Sunday, Nov. 24, to share stories about growing up in Northwest Indiana. Gaffigan appeared at Blue Chip Casino’s Stardust Event Center as part of the Purdue Northwest Sinai Forum lecture series. About 1,200 people attended.
“I was the first in our family to get into the National Honor Society,” he said. His brother Joe prompted him to tell the rest of the story about the party afterward. “It was that night that I was arrested,” perhaps the first in the family to be arrested.
His brother Mitch loves and appreciates cars, as far back as their adolescence. “I just know what color they are,” Gaffigan said.
Mitch told the story: “Chris and I, my wife, we dated, and the very first date I was three hours late because I was detailing the car, and her dad said, ‘You shouldn’t go.’ She said to him, ‘Just look at him. I mean, he’s beautiful.’” The car was, too, after Mitch spent so much time detailing it.
Jim needed the car the following morning. The brothers argued over it. “That’s the only black eye I ever got,” Mitch said.
“Now I sound like a criminal who has a great story. ‘He was very violent and has a criminal record,’” Jim said.
Gaffigan’s brothers have had a big influence on his life. “I do feel like I am kind of a combination of all my brothers,” Jim said. Mike had dark jokes, going too far. “He was the evil brother.”
At an Al Smith roast in New York City, Gaffigan pocketed some of his planned jokes.
One was about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was sitting next to his wife. “It’s not her fault that he’s kind of a scumbag,” Gaffian said.
Then there was the joke he planned to tell about Donald Trump.
“My joke was to turn to President Trump and say, ‘You survived three assassination attempts, and I speak for about half the people in the room who hope you’re OK.’”
Appearing on the Michigan City stage before his brothers joined him, Gaffigan told the audience, “I’m wearing a suit because I respect you. I’m also wearing a suit to cover my man boobs.”
“If we are created in God’s image, that means that God has man boobs. That means that he didn’t put much into it,” he said.
Gaffigan told of people who brag about their fitness routines, waking up at 4 a.m. to hit the gym. “I didn’t realize the time you did a workout was important.
“You know, I get up at 4 a.m. It’s to pee,” he said. So the people who get up at 4 a.m. get big muscles.” Gaffigan has his own bragging rights, of a sort.
“You know, multiple doctors have told me my prostate is huge,” he said. “When I pee in the bed, my wife is furious.”
A photo of Gaffigan appeared on the large screens, showing him in a Purdue University football uniform in the 1980s. As usual, there’s a funny story behind it.
“I was a football player at Purdue for maybe three weeks, was it? Long enough for that photo to get out there.”
Gaffigan applied to six colleges and didn’t get into one of them, he said. “Back in the 1980s, you could apply to Purdue by sending in a postcard.”
“I think my dad literally signed me off to walk on” for football, Gaffigan said. “I hadn’t really decided that I was going to do it.”
“I was a lineman, and the coach was like, why are you here?”
An audience member asked Gaffigan about playing in the sitcom “My Boys,” which aired for four seasons on TBS beginning in 2006.
“That was a very strange experience. There was such a nostalgia associated with Chicago in that show,” he said. It brought back childhood memories. “I would watch the Cubs games because they only played during the day, and then I would fall asleep listening to White Sox games.”
It also brought back a childhood baseball memory: “That’s how I got on base in Little League. I would lean into the base for the pitch, and that’s how I would get on base.”
On “Saturday Night Live,” Gaffigan played Tim Walz in the cold open for the show’s 50th season opener.
“Folks, I haven’t been this excited since I got a 10% rebate on a leaf blower from Menards,” Gaffigan, portraying Walz taking the podium, said in that show.
Gaffigan recited the line in the script as the writers wrote it even though he knew the rebate offers, which ended on Thanksgiving, were actually 11%. “You don’t want to correct the writers in the first week,” he said.
Northwest Indiana booster Don Babcock, now director of economic development and community relations at Purdue University Northwest, asked Gaffigan how to counter negativity toward the region.
“I think it’s actually admirable. It’s the opposite of the arrogance of Texas or that overconfidence of New York,” Gaffigan said. “I think that like I wouldn’t interpret it as necessarily negative; I think it’s just kind of self-effacing and maybe self-aware, but I don’t necessarily consider it negative.”
“I love Northwest Indiana just like you do, but if you think about, like, the auto commercials ‘in Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana,’ we are part of Chicagoland. I’ve lived in the northeast for 30 years. There is always in every kind of tri-state area, there is kind of like ‘and Connecticut’ and ‘and Long Island.’”
Gaffigan had just come to Northwest Indiana from Detroit. Both have been referred to as part of the Rust Belt. “I don’t have to tell anyone here it’s real.”
In 1939, Gary was considered the most beautiful city in the world, honored on the cover of Time magazine, Gaffigan said. His dad, working in Hammond, kept hearing, “It’s coming back. It’s coming back.”
“It’s not coming back,” Gaffigan said. “But that being said, there is a certain kind of self-awareness – I don’t know, it sounds like I’m kind of dodging it, but I also feel like this, even like Detroit the self-awareness they have about the struggles that Detroit had, is endearing. It creates an authenticity and becomes surprising.”
“I do think that whenever I meet people from Northwest Indiana the fact that we are not necessarily embraced by Chicago or Indiana makes us stronger,” he said.
“This has been so fun coming back.”
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
