Greg Giraldo

Greg Giraldo
Giraldo at his final performance, September 24, 2010 in New Brunswick, New Jersey
Born	December 10, 1965(1965-12-10) New York City, New York, United States
Died	September 29, 2010(2010-09-29) (aged 44) New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States
Medium	Stand-up, television
Nationality	American
Years active	1992–2010
Genres	Observational comedy, black comedy, surreal humor, roast comedian
Subject(s)	Current events, everyday life, self-deprecation, marriage, parenting, pop culture
Spouse	? (1989-?) Maryann Giraldo (1998-2009) (divorced) 3 children
Notable works and roles	Stand-Up Nation Comedy Central Roasts Lewis Black's Root of All Evil

Greg Giraldo (December 10, 1965 – September 29, 2010) was an American stand-up comedian, television personality, and retired lawyer. Giraldo was best known for his appearances on Comedy Central's televised roast specials, and for his work on that network's television shows Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn, Lewis Black's Root of All Evil, and the programming block Stand-Up Nation, the last of which he hosted.

Early life

Gregory C. Giraldo was born in The Bronx and was raised in a predominantly Irish lower-middle-class neighborhood in Queens. His father, Alfonso, was from Colombia and worked for Pan Am, and his mother, Dolores, was from Spain. Giraldo was the oldest of three children (brother John and sister Elizabeth) and was raised Roman Catholic.

Giraldo was an excellent student and was accepted into the prestigious Regis High School in Manhattan. He then went on to earn a bachelor's degree in English from Columbia University in 1987 and a law degree from Harvard Law School in 1990. While at Columbia, he was an active member of the Psi Upsilon Fraternity.

Before becoming a comedian, Giraldo worked as a lawyer, spending eight months as an associate for Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom before changing his occupation.

Giraldo said of his decision to leave the legal profession: "My family was disappointed. But I always wanted to do something creative. I've always had real trouble knowing what my actual desires and goals are. I've just been dragged along by fate. I can't even tell you why I thought to go to law school."

In August 2000, Giraldo was featured in an Esquire magazine article, which profiled several members of the Harvard Law School Class of 1990, who ended up choosing different career paths other than the legal profession. Despite his prior career, Giraldo rejected that persona and very rarely discussed his days as a lawyer.

Career

Giraldo performed regularly at the Comedy Cellar comedy club in Manhattan. He was a regular panelist on Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn. Additionally, he was the star of the short-lived sitcom Common Law. Giraldo also starred in several pilots, including Drive for CBS (which was not picked up), and The Greg Giraldo Show, Comedy Cabana, and Gone Hollywood for Comedy Central. In 2004, he was featured in the spoken-word Lazyboy song, "Underwear Goes Inside the Pants."

Giraldo performed more than a dozen times on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Late Show with David Letterman, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and appeared regularly on The Howard Stern Show. He also appeared as a member of the panel in the NBC show The Marriage Ref.

He appeared on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn, Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, Fox News Channel's The Full Nelson and Beyond The News, Louie Anderson's Comedy Showcase, Showtime's Latino Comedy Festival and Funny is Funny, as well as on the BBC's Live at Jongleurs.

He had two half-hour specials on Comedy Central Presents, wrote segments for Last Call with Carson Daly, and was a panelist on Comedy Central's 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time special. In 2004 his stand up material was featured in Comedy Central's animated series Shorties Watchin' Shorties. Giraldo also made several appearances on the IFC show Z Rock, playing an angry record producer.

Giraldo said on Late Night with Conan O'Brien on July 7, 2005, that he had quit drinking alcohol but was now addicted to SweeTarts.^{[citation needed]} His series Friday Night Stand-Up with Greg Giraldo began on Comedy Central in late 2005 and ran until 2006. His CD Good Day to Cross a River was released in 2006 by Comedy Central Records.

Giraldo appeared in Comedy Central's annual roasts, roasting Chevy Chase, Pam Anderson, William Shatner, Jeff Foxworthy, Flavor Flav, Bob Saget, Joan Rivers, Larry the Cable Guy, and David Hasselhoff, as well as the TBS roast of Cheech & Chong.

Giraldo was a regular on Comedy Central's television series Lewis Black's Root of All Evil and was one of the advocates lobbying for his side to be considered the "root of all evil." He won in two of his nine appearances. Giraldo served as a judge during season seven of the NBC reality competition show Last Comic Standing.

In 2008, Giraldo appeared in venues across the United States as the headlining act of the Indecision '08 Tour, produced by Comedy Central. Midlife Vices, his only one-hour special for Comedy Central, was released in 2009.

Personal life

Giraldo was married twice, telling an interviewer in October 2009, "I got married when I was 23. And that didn't last very long at all." In that same interview, he said he had been living apart from his second wife for a year and was in separation proceedings, and that his oldest son was age nine. In a 2005 interview, Giraldo stated that he had been married for seven years to a former Carolines comedy club waitress, and that they had three sons, ages five, three and nearly two. At the time of Giraldo's death, he was divorced.

Giraldo was very candid about his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction, and the challenges of life on the road, stating in 2005: “I would go on the road and live like a fucking maniac, that’s just the way it was. And then eventually it starts bleeding into your regular life. At first, it starts out on the road and it’s no big deal. So you keep denying that you’re about to destroy your children’s lives because it’s happening in Phoenix as opposed to home. Slowly but surely though, it starts impacting everything and then you have decisions to make. There’s part of me that wants to be an uninhibited, unrestrained lunatic doing whatever I want. Frankly, that was a lot of the fun of it at the beginning. You hear people make grand artistic statements about why they love stand-up. But really, you’re choosing to tell dick jokes in a nightclub for a living. So if you go on the road and get fucked up all the time, you have to take everything that comes with that. You can’t have it both ways. You have to be a reasonable adult or a maniacal party road machine.”

Death

On September 25, 2010, Giraldo overdosed on prescription medication. After he failed to appear for a scheduled performance at the Stress Factory, police officers found him in his hotel room at the Hyatt Hotel in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and rushed him to nearby Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. TMZ reported that he had been in a coma for five days when his family had life support removed. He died on September 29, 2010.

Tributes

On September 29, 2010 on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Jon Stewart honored Giraldo by playing a clip of his stand-up, in a one-time segment deemed "Moment of Greg". On September 30, 2010, multiple comedians and celebrities expressed their sorrow for Giraldo's death on Twitter, and Comedy Central posted a series of clips from Greg Giraldo past works titled "The Best of Greg Giraldo" on their website. On November 2, 2010, Comix comedy club in New York hosted the Jim Florentine roast, which Giraldo had originally been scheduled to perform at. Throughout the show, many of the comedians on the dais paid tribute to Giraldo, in roast-style fashion. Host Rich Vos joked: “I wasn’t the first choice to host. Greg Giraldo was asked, but he said he’d rather be dead than host this.”

Seth MacFarlane, Anthony Jeselnik, and Jeff Ross paid tribute to Giraldo during the Comedy Central Roast of Donald Trump in March 2011.

On March 18, 2011, Comedy Central aired Give It Up for Greg Giraldo, a two-hour television special honoring his memory in which multiple comedians, including Jon Stewart, Nick Swardson, Colin Quinn, Jeffrey Ross, Denis Leary, Sarah Silverman, Dave Attell, Tom Papa, Lewis Black, Bill Burr, Daniel Tosh, Conan O'Brien, and Whitney Cummings, talked about his life and career. It also contained short clips of his roasts and other acts. Mike DeStefano, a comic who also appeared in the special, died 12 days before its airing.

Discography

• Good Day to Cross a River (2006) Comedy Central Records
• Midlife Vices (2009) Comedy Central Records

External links

• Greg Giraldo at the Internet Movie Database
• Greg Giraldo at The Comedy Hall of Fame
• Greg Giraldo's MySpace Site
• Greg Giraldo Official Website [site is no longer active]
• Archive of "Giraldo's World: Interview", The DePaulia, 2007, n.d.
• "Comedian Discusses Cornell and his Specialty in Candy" (interview), The Cornell Daily Sun, April 25, 2007
• "Court Jester: Greg Giraldo states his case" [1] (interview), Philly City Paper, October 9, 2007
• Greg Giraldo on Failure, Psychology Today, May 13, 2009
• Greg Giraldo at Find a Grave