Jim Gaffigan Reveals His Biggest Regrets About Trump and ‘SNL’

Jim Gaffigan is heading into 2025 an even bigger comedy star than he was before—thanks to a guest-starring gig on Saturday Night Live as vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, a headlining spot alongside Donald Trump at the Al Smith dinner, his latest stand-up special The Skinny (which delves into the secret behind his massive weight loss) and a big national tour with Jerry Seinfeld.

In his return to The Last Laugh podcast after more than five years, Gaffigan goes deep on the state of his career and how his approach to stand-up has evolved over time. He talks about being in the room with Trump and Kamala Harris at key points during their campaigns and reflects on his decision to risk his clean comedy brand by unleashing a profanity-laced tirade against Trump during the previous election.

Gaffigan opens The Skinny by addressing the elephant in the room: “I look good.” And while his previous specials were full of jokes about food—people still yell “Hot Pockets” at him on the street—he spends the first several minutes of his new hour discussing his dramatic break-up with processed foods.

“What people have to understand is, I don’t think I struggled with my weight. I lost,” the 58-year-old comic tells me. “And my family lineage is filled with people that have lost the battle. Before the obesity epidemic was a thing in America, it was a thing in my family.” Now that he’s on the appetite suppressant drug Mounjaro, Gaffigan says, “It’s not as if I’m not hungry. I just eat like a human. Whereas before, I would eat like a dog.”

The transformation has allowed Gaffigan to replace his self-deprecating fat jokes with equally self-deprecating dumb jokes, including an inspired bit about his struggles to prove he’s not a robot on the internet.

“You can track the food jokes diminishing over the specials. And then the awareness of dumbness [going up],” he says. “Having teenagers really makes that glaringly obvious.” The two “consistent threads” in his comedy, he says, are religion and the realization that he’s “not equipped to be an adult.”

After 35 years as a professional stand-up comedian, Gaffigan believes he’s still “getting better” with every special as his audience gets to know him more intimately. There’s a shorthand there that he can tap into in a way that would have been impossible when he was just starting out. But he also still works his craft in a painstaking manner, “constantly rewriting” jokes until they consistently kill. “I’m much nerdier than most comedians,” he admits. “I think some people don’t even write things down.”

Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation. You can listen to the whole thing by following The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.

Hearing you talk about how much you prepare for your stand-up makes me realize even more how insane and difficult SNL must have been for you to come in and play Tim Walz in these cold open sketches where you really couldn‘t prepare at all and were getting the script that day sometimes, right?

Oh yeah. And it was changing from dress [rehearsal] to the show. It was so interesting because there would be notes, but usually they’re trying to make things work from a logic standpoint, or if something’s really unfunny. But the performance of the character is really left up to you.

They’re like, figure it out!

Yeah. I mean, I don’t have to tell you, or even the listeners, how significant this piece of modern comedy SNL is. But what I thought was really unique was me being inserted, not even as a host, but just to do the cold opens. And I was also inserted with SNL Hall of Famers: Maya [Rudolph], Andy [Samberg], Dana [Carvey].

Did you have ambitions to be a cast member on SNL early in your career? Was that something that was on your radar?

I never auditioned for SNL. There was a time when—and I don’t even know if the guy was serious, tt was a manager. This was in the early nineties, ‘94, ‘95. I mean, I’m that old, right? And someone said they’re having auditions to be a writer. And I was like, I don’t want to be a writer. Because I thought, if I wanted to do SNL, I wanted to be a cast member. I didn’t realize the politics of it, that you sometimes go in as a writer, and then become a cast member.

Yeah, that’s happened a lot. Even around that time, David Spade came in as a writer and then joined the cast.

Yeah. And you know, there are different generations of SNL. And I think in the early nineties there was this sentiment in New York that they only took stand-ups as writers.

Or maybe you could only do “Weekend Update” as a stand-up.

Yeah. And of course now it seems silly, because I feel like there is much more of a melding where it all kind of mixes together. So yeah, it was weird. But it was always, obviously, a goal of mine to get on there.

What about hosting?

Well, I’m also very respectful of the process.

You’re not supposed to lobby for yourself, the way that maybe your team did to get you on as Tim Walz?

Yeah, well, I think it’s also that none of it should be public. It’s all behind the scenes. And believe me, I’m a whore. I’m a total whore. And I’m a nudge. I’m a Midwestern guy that can pull off being a nudge, because I look like Jesse Plemmons. Or Jesse Plemmons’ dad. But when I know that I shouldn’t, I don’t.

Well, I will say, if Nate Bargatze has hosted twice, I feel like you could host once.

That would be great.

Your stand-up is famously not political at all, so the Tim Walz thing felt like one of these moments during your career when you’ve deliberately punctured the brand you’ve built for yourself. Another one of those moments came in the summer of 2020 when you decided to tweet your thoughts about Donald Trump. [“I don’t give a f— if anyone thinks this is virtue signaling or whatever. We need to wake up. We need to call Trump the con man and thief that he is,” Gaffigan wrote at the time.] How do you think about that decision now?

I regret that people think that I was criticizing people that support Trump. And that was never the intention. I regret—someone said like, now I can’t follow you anymore and I kind of said “F you” to them. But it’s weird because I think authenticity is really an important thing, not only as a comedian, but also with your children. For me, I don’t regret it, but I also do acknowledge that there are true die-hard Trump fans who probably enjoyed my comedy, but because they feel so passionately will never forgive me. But also, something I’ve noticed in doing stand-up for so long is, you’re going to lose people. You’re also going to attract people. But there are going to be people who are like, you know, I don’t have kids, I think he’s funny, but I don’t get this.

But there is a fear that people talk about, like when Taylor Swift came out against Trump. Will that somehow lose her this huge percentage of her fans, or have this big impact on her career? Did you feel that at all?

I wouldn’t say it was measurable. But there were definitely comments on social media, and there are still some. My son, who’s so funny—I posted something, and my 18-year-old son commented, “I liked him until he went on his Trump rant.”

You did get some blowback comments after you performed at the Al Smith dinner, right? I remember you responded to them a bit on Instagram. And that was something where you took this gig to host the Al Smith dinner for Catholic charities, thinking that it was going to be both Trump and Harris on the dais. And then, of course, she backs out. Did you worry after she backed out that it was going to be, like, you and Trump headlining this show? Because that seems to be the criticism that you got, is that you were supporting him in some way.

I was “normalizing a fascist,” right? I knew going into it that I was going to get criticism from both sides. I’m not a roast comedian. I mean, I love politics, but I just don’t talk about it. So I knew that if I did jokes about either side that there was going to be some blowback. But I also thought it was worth it. You know, I turned down the White House Correspondents’ Dinner a couple of times. And I was like, you know what? I’ll do the Al Smith thing. Some of it was, I like the challenge of possibly doing this in a nimble way. Like, I have religion jokes where, if you can do it in a way where you can make the believer and the agnostic laugh, it’s mission accomplished. So I wanted to go about doing the Al Smith dinner in that same way. I knew that it was going to feel like a Trump home game. And I knew that if Kamala was there, there were going to be people that were very protective. But what I thought was interesting about this election is, and maybe because it was so important, and maybe because it was such a short election for Kamala, that people were like, don’t criticize her. And my whole thing is, that’s actually bad to have to have that approach. And I think in hindsight, a lot of people feel that way.

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