Joel McHale is much more than just a condescending smirk, though to be fair that smirk is what’s keeping his family in chicken dinners and new school pants. In addition to discussing Community and The Soup with Collider, McHale reveals how he got started on his three-year-old stand-up career: “The money was terrific. No. My booking agent said, ‘If you put a set together of Soup jokes and you start building an act, you will have an instant audience because people follow the show and you’ll make a lot of money.’ And I was like, ‘Really?!’ So, I started doing that.”
While he’s currently promoting his upcoming children’s movie Spy Kids: All Time In The World (which has Jeremy Piven as a villain named Timekeeper, which is a whole other thing), the Community star will appear as Steve Martin’s business partner in the upcoming comedy The Big Year. “Once again, I felt like I had won an auction item, where I got to hang out with Steve Martin for a few weeks,” Joel explains. “It was great. He’s terrific. They always say, “Don’t meet your heroes because you’ll be disappointed,” but he is the opposite of that. You will be more than pleasantly surprised. He’s great. He is a pioneer. He’s a true renaissance man.” The interviewer gently pointed that, with the millions of projects McHale is currently be juggling, he might by default be filling the Martin role for today’s youth. “That’s so sad!,” McHale laments. “Kids have got to aim higher, like Carrot Top, at least.”
