Who Makes Nick Offerman 'A Giggling Mess'? Megan Mullally, Of Course

Talking about what makes him laugh ahead of a run of Australian tour dates, the first thing to come to mind for Nick Offerman is his wife, Megan Mullally. Mullally is probably best known as Karen Walker in Will & Grace, and appeared opposite Offerman in Parks And Recreation, as Ron’s ex-wife Tammy II. As one half of cabaret group Nancy & Beth, she too tours Australia in June. 

“My sense of humour really started in the Catholic Church when I was a kid,” Offerman begins. “And also in school – any place where you weren't supposed to laugh, that's where I immediately began devising my straight face and my deadpan to try and make people laugh or to make friends with people that made me laugh without getting in trouble. All through my life those are the people I've been drawn to. 

“When I met Megan – we were doing a play together about 20 years ago – that was our immediate vibe. We sort of looked across a cast of 24 people and said, 'Oh, you're gonna be my confederate in this situation.' I just thought she was so funny, she's so perversely funny, she still makes me laugh every day.” 

Offerman and Mullally met performing in Charles L Mee’s The Berlin Circle in 2000, a play set in the East Germany of 1989, after the fall of Communism, where a young American woman, played by Mullally, finds herself caring for an abandoned baby. 

He’ll return again and again to Mullally over the course of our conversation, but first he speaks about growing up in Minooka, Illinois, a rural farming community, where his grandfather was the mayor. 

“I grew up in a big family, I have three siblings but it's a big farming family in Illinois, right in the middle of America, and there's something about having a confederacy. So when the grown-ups say, 'You guys, this isn't funny, take this seriously,' you all wanna look at each other and desperately hope that you can squeak out a small farce and then blame it on your little brother. That's sort of the goal of life.”

“We're a clown team. Wherever we are, anything that life hands us we try and make each other laugh."

His “partner-in-crime at church” then was his cousin: “He's the one I would try to make laugh and then he got good at it so the two of us then ganged up on our older sisters.” 

Nowadays, he’s pinning the blame on – or perhaps it’s better to say teaming up with – Mullally, who he describes as his “comedy partner”. 

“We're a clown team. Wherever we are, anything that life hands us we try and make each other laugh. It comes in handy because we're often trying to make people laugh for our jobs. I can't speak for her but quite often when I'm performing any kind of comedy, I sort of, usually am, subliminally playing it to her.” 

Offerman’s deadpan demeanour – where he plays a kind of straight man next to Amy Poehler in Parks And Recreation, for example – is likely influenced by his grandfather, a man he describes as having a “really dry sense of humour”.

“He would make jokes to me with sort of a really stern face. I think pretty early on I was really attracted to a deadpan sensibility, and that's always stuck with me.”

That’s not to say his sense of humour hasn’t shifted as he’s gotten older – he’s retained that dryness, but now, he says, he’s less likely to rely on nudity as a bit. 

“Like any human I suppose, my humour was more sophomoric in my teens and 20s and then probably across my 30s I became less apt to take my pants off at any given moment. I still know how to drop my trousers, just now the context has to be much more appropriate. Back then I would do something stupid at the drop of a hat.

“On one hand [my sense of humour]'s matured – I hesitate to say it's gotten more classy, but I suppose it has by at least a few degrees. But at the same time my wife and I both just still love the stupidest jokes and the bluest humour just will crack us up.”  

Offerman says he’s “spent a career teaching myself not to laugh at things”. He describes his castmates in general as “some of the funniest people in the world”, imbuing their roles with a kind of manic energy – he calls them “incredible comedy factories”. He, on the other hand, sees himself as a “theatre actor”, moving between comedic and dramatic roles. 

“When I'm doing the funny stuff I am not a comedy factory, I just am good at standing next to the dynamo, and then I can come in with a couple one-liners and they call that a complementary team.”

Working on Parks And Recreation, he could withstand the onslaught of jokes from people like Aziz Ansari or Poehler, but the one person who could make him laugh mid-take was Mullally. 

“Megan knows literally the most intimate buttons to push on me, and so when she would just fix me with her gaze and approach me to even begin her bit, I would lose it,” he chuckles. “That's something that I'm still pretty defenceless about is when she fixes her eyes on me and lets me know she's about to start doing comedy to me, I become a giggling mess,” he laughs again.

The new show Offerman is bringing to Australia is called All Rise, and he sees it as a response to a world that appears “fraught with disaster and incredibly dangerous governmental forces”. 

"It certainly seems like at the moment we absolutely need the medicine of comedy and we need our performers to assuage our fears and our rancour."

He calls upon Aristotle to explain the role of “comedians and tragedians” in society: “Our bag is holding up a mirror to society to provide the medicine of self-reflection, and, in the case of comedy, laugh at ourselves.” 

Then it’s Mark Twain and Woody Guthrie to describe why it’s so interesting that people seem to be turning to late-night comedy hosts for honest takes on the news, “the news media has all become slanted one way or the other”.  

“They all said the same thing, [Twain and Guthrie] said, we know we're in trouble when our comedians – or our humourists – are who we turn to for the truth. It makes you say, 'It must just be the human condition…' It certainly seems like at the moment we absolutely need the medicine of comedy and we need our performers to assuage our fears and our rancour.

“The point of [All Rise] is to take a step back from all of the partisanship going on and say, 'Look, you guys, we're all in this together, we all got ourselves in this mess together, we all made this civilisation together, let's laugh at all of us as dumb human beings because man, we have really screwed it up.' The opening song to the show is We Fucked It Up and so it says, 'Ok, we've really pooped the bed, now how can we begin to see our way clear of this mess?' So you know, I think that's always the job of a comedian. But in my lifetime it certainly seems more dire right now than it did a couple of decades ago.”  

Offerman is actually speaking while on tour in New York with Nancy & Beth. Mullally is even in the hotel room with him when he chats to The Music – together they order room service: “Megan got a burger and I got a salad” – overhearing every fond chuckle when he remembers something funny she’s said or done. 

He performs “a little bit of comedy in her show” every night in NY, although he won’t be appearing at Nancy & Beth’s shows in Australia. Instead they’re doing two concurrent tours, a decision made in keeping with their “two-week rule”.

“We're never apart for more than two weeks, which involves some very careful planning when one of us gets a job in England for six months, or when one of us, books a tour, and so we always have to plan meticulously.”

Their parallel Australian tours will also serve as a holiday for the pair, which they’re very excited about: “It made sense [to tour at the same time], because we could do is we could each do a few shows then we get together for a few days and go pet some koalas and what have you, and do some hiking and kayaking and then stay in our hotel room and engage in conjugal marriage activities.”

Nick Offerman tours from 2 Jun.