Zach's in the airport in Charlotte, North Carolina, on his way back to the farm. He's just deplaned, and he's moving past the Queen City Gifts News and the Great American Bagel and the banks of humans waiting for the flight to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Zach Galifianakis walking to baggage claim in his Zach Galifianakis suit: The beard that somehow precedes him. The belly. The clothes of a man who works in either illustration or automotive repair. From a distance, he sees that some kids recognize him. Adolescents. Zach pretends to get on his cell phone. ("It's not like I don't want to be gracious or talk to them. But I don't want to be gracious or talk to them!") But they're in pursuit anyway. And while Zach is pretending to be on his cell phone, his cell phone actually starts ringing. He doesn't let that stop him from pretending to talk on it. It's ringing in his hand, and he's like, "Get that fad to me immediately," which he thinks is funny, because who fas anymore? Finally, he slips into the bathroom to escape his pursuers. But the teenagers just follow him in there. "At that point, it ain't that funny anymore," he says on his farm, a location secure against airport-bathroom infiltrators. This episode happened just yesterday, on his way out here. "It's major." Not just because there were four 13-year-olds watching him urinate—there's probably a camera-phone picture somewhere of him pissing and "talking" on his cell phone. But because it was the first time he had a legitimate famous-person event. This is something that makes him very tense. He believes that fame will fuck you up and that when you seek it you become a bad person, and he tells the story like it's the craziest thing in the world that this happened to him, and you almost believe him.
This isn't to imply that he's lying. After The Hangover, which was the most popular R-rated movie of all time or something (actually third, officially—450 million in ticket sales so far), Zach has achieved some higher, transcendental stage of fame. And for a good reason. It would be hard, I'd argue, to see that movie and not think: This is the funniest person in movies right now, and I will go see anything with him in it I would go see a remake of Terms of Endearment with Zach Galifianakis playing every part. But Zach becoming extremely famous isn't the strangest turn of events. He's been a little famous for about fifteen years, though it's mostly the kind of fame where he's famous to other slightly more famous people, in this case comedians.
Zach was a fixture in the bipolar entertainment worlds of Hollywood and New York—mainly through membership in the loose coalition of rarefied indie comics who hung out at exclusive, hip places like Largo in L.A. He was one of a type of entertainer who is better known inside the machinery of Hollywood than outside. He was ambivalent, at least, about being accepted by what he saw as the Entertainment Industry. He told the world that he was not part of Hollywood in as many ways as he could. In his everyday life, he cast himself as the fat guy in the old sweater who shouldn't really be at the party. He slept in a small, basically unfurnished house-ette in Venice when he was in L.A., or in a likewise post-collegey apartment in Brooklyn when he was in New York. And in his working life, it wasn't unusual for him to take a meeting with Todd Phillips (who directed The Hangover and Old School and a bunch of similar movies) but ride his bike there and misjudge the distance and have to ask Todd to put his bike in the trunk of his fancy car and drive him home. None of this is shtick, this persona. It's the product of an attempt at being an authentic human being, and also the product of being an authentic mess.
"It's hard to have a normal family life in this business. I'd like to have kids and let them run around in the woods. Watch them grow up. Maybe shoot at them."
"Hollywood's built on insecurity," he says, talking about why he absents himself from L.A. as much as he can. "People are trying to prove things. And I probably have that. I probably do. Probably guilty of it, in a way."
There's a kind of wary, demented tension between Zach and Hollywood, not unlike the tension between Zach and his audience when he's doing stand-up. Sometimes he'll be playing the piano onstage and saying something creepily earnest and then will suddenly ad hominem start screaming at an audience member to shut the fuck up in a way that's momentarily startling and off-putting, I imagine. But it's also too warped to seem angry, exactly. I'm going to entertain you, he's saying, but I'm laying some rules down now. I don't need you to love me.
Coming from the Charlotte airport, you cross the Carolina plain, start up and into the Appalachian foothills, and in five minutes you're deep in the place Zach has called the mouth-breathing capital of the world. The trees are heavy with leaves. The air is heavy with, I guess, oxygen. There are dairy farms, Confederate flags, poverty in the form of houses that look made out of paper and obese people immobilized in their yards like they've been shot with tranquilizer darts. After the seventy-fifth church, I turn onto a gravel road, on one side of which there is a weightless woman a thousand years old smoking a cigarette, who rises from her lawn chair on spindly legs and approaches my rental car to steal my living soul through the window. On the other side of the road is Zach's farm, sixty miles from where he grew up and went to high school.
It's so thick out that it seems like the sweat's already in the air and you just need to let it collect on you. Zach is wearing a faded blue golf shirt, canvas pants, luminous yellow-lensed BluBlocker sunglasses. His girlfriend (we'll call her Nell Zach's open, but he's also private), who's weeding the patio, scoops up one of the kittens as she rises to greet me. (She rescued them she's very much the kind of person who rescues kittens.)
I tell her I like the kerchief she's wearing.
"Nell has cancer," Zach says. On principle, saying your girlfriend has cancer knocks an interviewer off balance a little. It's a little object lesson in the way Zach does discomfort comedy.
Nell throws her weeds in a mulch pile. Zach gets out some Duvel beer and makes sure my trip went okay. He has a way of looking at you and listening to what you're saying that transcends politeness. He pours the beer into glasses they got from a guy down the road when he gave them some moonshine.
"Those sunglasses make you look like you're dressing up like that character in The Hangover," Nell says. Zach doesn't really like being told he's copying a movie character that made him famous. I bet she knows this.
"I wore BluBlockers before I ever filmed that movie!" he says. "They make everything look amazing."
But he takes them off. His blue eyes up close are clear and intricately detailed and seem backlit. You could fall in love just by looking into them. Seriously. I think that's part of what's going on when he's acting. The intelligent eyes play against, say, the star turn given his round, hairy naked ass on-screen in nothing but a jockstrap. He's also surprisingly good-looking. In the most recent installment of his mock talk show, Between Two Ferns (more on this later), he scripts it so that Charlize Theron calls him a fat garden gnome. But while he might dress himself up like a fat garden gnome, with a happy-gnome's tummy and a beard that looks hacked out of a block of hair with a Swiss Army knife, under the costume he's a handsome man. It's part of that tension: good-looking man hidden behind the largest beard in working Hollywood.
They've been all over the world in the past few months. Nell says she thinks it was nine countries. Zach says that's if you count Canada, where she's from. He doesn't think Canada's really a country. They also went to Malawi.
"What was that for?" I say.
"She's trying to revive slavery," Zach says. "She was meeting with some guys over there. Some colonists."
The farm, he calls it Farmageddon, is for real. It's not some lovingly restored manor house with a screening room and a skeet-shooting range. It's like a new-construction log cabin, maybe three bedrooms. I didn't get a look at the whole house, but my sense was there isn't a ton of furniture involved. I did admire the length of PVC tubing Zach installed on the stairs to the basement so he can throw beer bottles into a recycling bin without having to go downstairs, and the composter he built. There's no cell-phone coverage here. There's a regular phone, but they don't have long-distance service hooked up.
"We put some barriers up," Zach says. "We're too connected, normally. I mean, I can't believe these comics who, like, Twitter their every thought."
He will admit, though, that the Internet is responsible for his getting cast in The Hangover.
"The Internet caused me to get recognized a little bit," he said. "It was kind of this weird grassroots thing that happened. Slowly. Slowly."
He's talking about the Between Two Ferns videos, specifically. A series of terrifically awkward interviews he does with celebrities. Like the one where he tries to feel up Michael Cera, or the other one where he says to Natalie Portman, "You shaved your head for V for Vendetta. Did you also shave your V for vagina?"
"Fucking Hollywood stuff ," he says. "I don't know. I've kind of made a career of shitting on it and making fun of it. And now I'm in it. So it's a weird position to be in."
That's when he tells the story about the kids watching him pee in the bathroom. It's a parable about fame. You can live like a hillbilly and cut off your phone service, but you cannot escape pimply-faced teenagers pointing at you as you fake a phone conversation while urinating.
It's time to take the tour, he says, so we get into his truck, which contains a diligently curated sample of many of the sandwich wrappers available on the North Carolina interstate. Especially a place called Bojangles'. There is also a white Macintosh laptop that looks like what you might call his "outdoor" computer.
As we check out the blackberry bushes and drive past the property of a guy Zach believes might end up being a killer, I tell him I'm just going to run through his résumé and ask him for some free association. "Presuming none of your biographical information has changed…"
"I did change my name."
"To what?"
"Banjo Pussy Willy."
"Banjo Pussy Willy?"
"Yeah. Banjo Pussy Whistle."
"That has a ring to it."
"It's also a ringtone."
You could say that his first real job was on a sitcom called Boston Common when he was 26. When he got that, he quit busing tables at the Four Seasons in New York. That's the bright line for him: the time when he never went back to being a busboy again, not even at the strip club. Busboy is shorthand for a lot of crappy jobs he had: being a housecleaner, being a nanny (which he actually liked), wearing a sombrero outside Rockefeller Center, handing out menus while saying, "Humor me… Humor me… Humor me." He was also a private investigator for a day, and an envelope licker, and he picked up beer bottles at Webster Hall while rave kids were still in the middle of raves, which was as much fun as a bag of dicks.
"And I worked for an events planner," he says. "And then the events planner put his hand on my thigh in a rowboat on Cape Cod. That ended."
"I can imagine."
"I was like, 'Get your faggot hands off me.' That's the second time I've said that to a guy." We stare ahead at the thick Appalachian foliage. "Actually, no, I've said it many times."
When he got the deal that led to Boston Common, he moved to California.
"Was Boston Common a bad show?"
"It was a show."
It wasn't as bad as this show called Tru Calling that he did on Fox later, not even five years ago, about a person who worked in a morgue and had the power to live the same day over again, which made it so she could stop murders. That was actually the premise of the show.
"It was the dumbest show I'd ever seen. I remember calling the ecutive producer and saying, 'This show is terrible, doesn't make any sense, and it's insulting.' I tried to get fired. We'd do a table read, and as soon as we're done, I'd be the first one up, and I'd go, to the writer of the episode or whatever, 'Great script, Janet.' And I'd throw it in the trash can and walk out. Then I told the lead actress she was eating her way to cancellation. They thought it was me being Funny Stand-up Guy. But it was an incredibly happy time in my life, because I was biking everywhere. I was smoking so much pot, which was… You know, I was playing a doctor on TV, and I had to memorize all this medical jargon, and on, like, take 17—it was so unprofessional."
He was also in a movie that took place entirely in a bathroom, and a snowboarding movie where he was the chubby guy in the hot tub with a hot girl in a bikini. He played a lot of homeless guys. ("It's such a good gig. Homeless guys barely have to talk. Don't have to memorize lines.") He was in Corky Romano. He was in What Happens in Vegas, starring Ashton Kutcher. ("The Kutch. 'You must be good if you made me laugh.' He actually said that to me. I was very, very quiet on that set.") He did a film where the director was simultaneously directing a dog movie on the soundstage next door. "I remember the director commanding the dog to do things: 'Get the dog to do this.' 'I want this from the dog.' Then the director would come back, and when he was talking to me, it sounded just like he was talking to the dog. It was terrible. I was like, this is why people lose their minds."
He was on an MTV show called Apartment 2F. ("I have a feeling it wasn't that terrible," he says.) He was on the Comedy Central prank show Dog Bites Man, which was funny but violated some principle sacred to him. "Once we started filming, I had serious issues. I cried. We had a hundred lawyers, and you're in somebody's basement making fun of him, and he doesn't have anything. It was not for me. But I did get to ask the Grand Wizard of the KKK if he's ever seen Big Momma's House 2—which is probably the highlight of my career in many ways."
"You did Into the Wild. That had to have been fun."
"So Sean Penn called my cell phone, what, two years ago? Three years ago? And he's like, 'Hey, it's Sean Penn.' And I'm like, 'Uh-huh.'" Here's where we almost get stuck in a ditch. "I'd heard he was trying to get in touch with me, but I thought this was a prank. He said, 'What are you doing next weekend?' I said, 'I'm going to Arby's.' That's what I said! He said, 'Have you ever read the book Into the Wild?' And I said yes. And he said, 'I'm doing a thing. Would you want to be in it?' I said, 'I don't know, send my Jews the script.' I don't think there was a laugh there."
We come to a stop in a field and get out of the truck and stand looking at a new barn.
"That's not a barn," he says. "It's a goat house. I already read two books." He inspects a blackberry bush. "Not on goats. But I've read two books in my life."
The second floor is going to be fid up as a guesthouse, so if a Farrelly brother or someone comes down for Christmas, he can sleep above the goats. And down there, Zach says, where that stand of trees is, that could be where the music and writing school for kids could be.
"Why do you want to have a music and writing school?"
"It'd be fun to ride around on your tractor and then go down there. 'What are you working on, Josh?' 'Nothing, I'm just writing this opera.' 'Ah, let's hear it.' He brings out his flute. 'Josh, that sucks.'"
We drive a little farther and stop by a creek, sit in the bed of the truck, and listen to the water. He takes all his guests on this tour: the Farrelly brothers when they were here a few weeks ago, his Hangover co-stars. I know he took another reporter here. It makes me feel a little bit like a slut: I know this moment right here isn't special, I know you take all your girlfriends here. But unless I'm wrong, this place is very, very important to him. And even though he may say his girlfriend has cancer or that Josh's opera sucks, what he is essentially doing—opening himself up to you, being a kind host the way he was raised to be as a southerner—is a generous if possibly painful act done out of some obligation he feels to be a normal human.
"My father was a girl until he was 6 years old," he says.
…?
"He was the youngest of three boys. All the women in his family, his mother and his sisters, wanted a girl. So they dressed him up as a girl. In pictures of him when he was 3, he has long curly hair below the shoulder and a dress."
"So they dressed him up like a girl?"
"No. He was a girl."
A slight drizzle appears on the windshield as we drive back to the house. Zach makes a worried face and looks up at the sky.
"I'm going to ride this storm out," he says.
Unprovable Statement: Zach wouldn't be nearly as funny now if he'd been more successful earlier in his career. I'm thinking of one fulcrum point in particular. He did a talk show for VH1 about seven years ago called Late World with Zach. The show got canceled in nine weeks. It didn't even get funny until it was clear that it was going to be killed. That's when he displayed on the air a sign that said I do a show for a network that thinks creed is cool and did his now famous segment where he waited in the ticket line for his own show and no one recognized him. If Late World (a name not even the CW would give a teen-vampire show) had been a smashing success, or even a moderate success, no way would he have done Between Two Ferns, no way would he have grown that beard so thick or gained the weight or purified himself into a more flawless vessel for Zachness. It's like when Al Gore lost the 2000 election and grew his beard and became the angry man of global warming. Rejection by public referendum must cure you of worrying about the public's opinion—it's got to galvanize a man and sharpen his core beliefs. Zach did us a great service by not having gotten really famous until now. The man needed to ferment.
Zach now gets to be famous, or at least act in movies, on his own terms. He can now be funny in the kind of perverse, opposed-to-the-Hollywood-machine way he was previously permitted to do only in avantish comedy clubs. It's probably better not to try to work samples of his jokes into this it's not the kind of material that's at its best when typed. But people tend to have a favorite Zach joke, the one that for them captures the brittle, angry weirdness that makes him funny. Like his "pretentious illiterate" character ("Uh, I told you," he'll say, "I don't know how to read"), or the "timid pimp," or the "effeminate racist," or the "self-deprecating nuclear physicist." Some people were won over when he went onstage dressed as Little Orphan Annie and lip-synched "Tomorrow" while revealing pages on a large easel that said things like I call my balls the bush twins and kill dane cook. Or the very odd joke he once told about how he won't sleep on a futon because he'd never sleep on anything that rhymed with "crouton." There was the time he was filling in for Letterman and instead of a monologue he goes out and tinkles on the piano and says, "My New Year's resolution was to stop saying 'You go, girl' to myself." He falls silent and plays a few bars. Then he softly says, "You go, girl." I personally like a joke he told only to a reporter: He was on a subway platform in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with a bunch of hipsters waiting for the train, and he wanted to yell, "The choo-choo is coming!" The part in The Hangover where he pretends to jerk off the baby, which he improvised, is also a favorite.
Sarah Silverman's favorite Zach joke is his impression of a 5-year-old with a beard: "I don't like having a beard! It hurts! My beard hurts!" Comedian Patton Oswalt's is about a kid who has been the victim of statutory rape by his teacher: "I heard on the news today that he died… Apparently he died from high-fiving." Writer Jonathan Ames, who created Zach's new HBO show, says his favorite joke is when he told a gossip columnist at a premiere that it took him thirty years to learn how to spell Galifianakis.
What happens to a comedian when he's no longer able to convince himself he's working in opposition to The System is… that sometimes the irreverence isn't convincing. That could be a problem for Zach. You can't tell anything from the stuff that's being rolled out now—he's in the HBO series Bored to Death, and a Michael Cera movie called Youth in Revolt that's out in January—because that stuff was made before all this went down. Before he blew up. He may never again make a movie for the same reason he made G-Force this summer.
"As I told my mom," Zach says, "I will never smoke pot and agree to go to an audition again. I happened to be smoking pot in Venice, and I get a phone call: 'There's a movie where you'll be talking to guinea pigs.' And when you're stoned you're like: 'Of course.' "
The tour having ended, he parks the pickup truck, and we go out to buy a tomato. He's got a kind of off-road scooter that we ride onto a country road. It's getting dark now, and there are no people anywhere, just empty porch swings and screen doors ajar. This is the house where the guy lives who gives them produce. And that's the house where the 16-year-old girl lives who rides her horse bareback to Farmageddon to take care of the cats when Zach's not here. When we get back, he and Nell make spaghetti.
"In three years, I think I'll quit," he says. "I'm not sure if my interest will hold. I'm not sure. I see that I could be interested in other things."
"No one quits," I say. VH1, with its legions of former famous people trying to be famous again, is evidence that people don't quit. "Look at Chevy Chase. That guy is still out there trying to get us to like him."
"Yeah, but he probably has really expensive stuff to take care of. I don't have a lifestyle to take care of."
There's a discussion about the difference between Pentecostals and Primitive Baptists, because the latter have a lot of churches nearby. Nell cuts an onion. Zach wants her to cut it chunkier. Someone appears in the driveway.
"Here come the meth people to kill us," he says.
But it's a guy who works on the farm, coming to get a camera he left on the tractor.
"As far as, like, quitting," Zach says, "it's hard to have a normal family life in this business. I'd like to have kids and sit around with them and let them run around in the woods. Just not have to go anywhere. Watch them grow up. Maybe shoot at them."
We're on the back porch now. Nell's inside somewhere. Two kittens are playing or else humping.
"Kids need to socialize with other people. But I wouldn't mind them being wild. They would be polite enough to know you have to look another person in the eye and say hello. But also kind of superkids, where you come home and they're up in the tree writing poetry. No Nintendo, none of that horseshit. And they're very acrobatic. When they get off the tree, they would do a flip. Acrobatic wood kids."
"Really?"
"I don't know. But there's more to life than being an actor in a Hollywood movie. I'm not going to adapt my life after that existence, where a lot of people do. And they get the publicist, and they get all that stuff, and it becomes them. I think it's a stupid way to live your life. A really dumb way to live your life."
Devin Friedman is GQ's senior correspondent.