Stepping Out From Gabriel Iglesias' Shadow

He's both literally and figuratively one of the biggest comedians in the world – and when Los Angeles legend Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias’s 2010 TV special put him on millions of screens and won him worldwide fame, he decided to share the love.

“I met Gabe back in 2000,” says Moreno, who began doing stand-up into his 30s. “I started comedy in late ’99. He’d been doing it a couple of years before me but he was still on the grind, like any comic, just constantly working shit out in the open mic rooms. Then we started touring together in the clubs.”

When that I’m Not Fat, I’m Fluffy special aired, “things went bananas”, Moreno says. “We were working five days a week sometimes, doing two shows a night, living on the tour bus. And then Comedy Central wanted to do a TV show because the fanbase was there.”

I wanted to be a paramedic but a couple of drunk driving charges shot that down so I worked in the hospital.

That’s the seed of the Stand-Up Revolution, a show conceived and curated by Iglesias and co-hosted by Moreno, now in its third season. “Gabe put a demographic that didn’t usually get on television on television,” Moreno says, “A lot of brown people, a lot of people of colour, and a lot of veterans of the game. Usually television’s looking for the next guy that’s gonna pop, for youth. He just said ‘Fuck it, I’m booking funny.’... A lot of people got a lot of opportunities because of that. It’s mind-boggling to see how far Gabe’s comedy reaches, and everybody under the ‘Fluffy umbrella’ gets to come out there and taste what it’s like to perform in an arena, which is something very few comics get to do. Plus Gabe’s comedy is universal ... Mine is a little more fucking crazy. It’s a lot harder to get any television play because of that.”

Iglesias has brought his good friend on tour to Australia now twice, and felt “a lot of love”, but this year, Moreno’s headlining his own Stand-Up Revolution line-up as it travels Down Under – including G Reilly, Lance Patrick, and Hooter Moreno. “I used to work with G Reilly back at the UCLA Medical Center in the late ‘90s, and eventually we both quit our jobs to do comedy full time,” Moreno says. “I was in healthcare for a long time. I wanted to be a paramedic but a couple of drunk driving charges shot that down so I worked in the hospital, kind of a jack-of-all-trades in the procedure room.

“Lance is one of those guys who’s just funny, likeable – and pretty! And Hooter Moreno is my son. He said ‘Dad, I want to do comedy,’ and I was like, what am I going to do, say ‘Don’t follow your dream’? He’s been around comedy since he was nine years old. And if he wasn’t funny I wouldn’t be taking him with me, but he makes me laugh. The little fucker talks about me up there sometimes but I can’t get mad at him.”