At the end of 2021, “Impractical Jokers” star Joe Gatto made the shocking decision to leave the TruTV hidden camera series due to personal reasons, adding that he was excited to create new ways to entertain fans.
Over three years later, Gatto is living up to that promise with the launch of “Messing With People” — his first-ever stand-up special — on Hulu. The special was filmed at Long Island’s Paramount Theater, the first venue he played on his “Night of Comedy” tour.
“It is cool to be part of a major streamer and get a little recognition that way and also open myself up to a new audience. There is a lot of perks that come with it,” Gatto told TheWrap. “I toured for two and a half years and then it was over and I was like, ‘Well, I don’t want this to go away.’ And you can self-produce your own specials and I worked so hard and wanted this to be remembered.”
The tour was Gatto’s first time jumping into stand-up by himself, and putting together his set for the special was filled with trial and error to figure out which stories and jokes would land best with audiences.
In the special Gatto covers everything from tips for the audience to live their most awkward lives to stories about his son’s traumatizing experience on a “Star Wars” ride at Disneyland. He also tells stories about being recognized by his neighbor’s kids while having to catch one of his dogs who got loose, and his Sicilian mother taking matters into her own hands when Gatto was getting bullied as a kid.
“You just try to be funny. That is the number one thing. I always want to put something out that makes me laugh and what I think people will enjoy about my personality,” he explained. “I have been performing live since 1999, so the performance aspect was no problem, but I was always with a group. So once I created it, I was like ‘Oh, this is fun. This is good. I like this.’ And then once I built the hour and found the stories I liked and things I could talk about it was like, ‘Oh, okay, I’m proud of this. This is something I really like. So let me run with this.’ For me, the perspective came to make it a night out that people could laugh while the world was falling apart. It was like a safety net for people and that is what I focused on.”
While Gatto is best known for participating in wild challenges and punishments on “Impractical Jokers,” the comedian admitted that, surprisingly, he was more reserved growing up.
“I was this nerdy kid,” Gatto said. “Back in the day, I used to make tests for my father. He would be at work, and I would open up the encyclopedias and prepare a multiple choice exam while he was selling life insurance door to door for 12 hours. He would come home and I would hit him with a pop quiz. I was super geeky and now I am completely different than that.”
He recalled growing up in a household filled with laughter, describing his mother as being more outgoing and his father, who was more of a wallflower, would deliver “killer one liners.” Gatto and his father would watch Tim Allen’s “Home Improvement” and Mel Brooks films such as “Young Frankenstein.”
“I think that is what made me also want to be a filmmaker,” Gatto said. “I saw how much joy it brought my father and my family, and I was like, ‘this can be fun.’”
Gatto’s comedy career would take off after meeting his life-long friends Sal Vulcano, Brian “Q” Quinn and James “Murr” Murray at Monsignor Farrell High School in Staten Island, New York. The group would form an improv and sketch comedy troupe The Tenderloins in 1999 and in 2011 would star in TruTV’s hit hidden camera series “Impractical Jokers,” which has run for 11 seasons and sees the friends compete to embarrass each other by performing outrageous dares in public, with the loser punished at the end of each episode.
“A lot of the stuff I did on that show I had done in real life, just to make people laugh – grab a stranger’s hand, talk too close, say something silly, talk with an accent, all these things. They all would hate to take an elevator with me because I knew when those doors closed and a stranger came in, it was over. I was going to do something weird. So it just translated really well,” Gatto said.
One of Gatto’s favorite moments being on the show was the challenge where the guys had to steal items out of people’s carts at the supermarket and pass them to each other.
“It started with us just filling our own carts and then we just looked like jerks taking stuff out of people’s carts. So I was like, ‘Oh, it will be funny if we sneak and have to pass it to each other.’ And then we ended up coming up with that supermarket game where two people stood on opposite sides and you had to steal something on somebody’s cart and throw it over your head. It added a layer where it was like, ‘Okay, now it is a game, now it is stupid, we are dropping these watermelons on aisle three.’”
And sometimes, complete and total strangers would jump into the fun, he said.
“We had huge rolls of toilet paper, and whoever ended up with the most in it when they were in the zone won. And people would just start blocking, playing, hanging up the cart that would fill up, and did not care,” he recalled. “So it was cool to see that the public was down to clown around a little bit. That was a really fun part of the whole show for me.”
He also recalled moments where the guys had unexpected surprises, like when Q met a man named Dave Jacobs, an Olympian who described himself as a “superhuman athlete.” While the two were talking, Gatto came out and pretended to recognize him and took a selfie with him. Vulcano and Murray would join in, with the former dropping bread in shock at seeing Jacobs, while the latter pretended to be on the phone with his wife excitedly talking about meeting Jacobs.
“We all took a group selfie and then we just disappeared and saw him on camera be like ‘what the hell was that?’,” Gatto said. “That was such a fun moment.”
When the pandemic shuttered TV production and had everyone locked inside their houses in 2020, Gatto, Vulcano, Murray and Quinn also created “Impractical Jokers: Dinner Party,” which gave fans more of an inside look at the four friends’ personal lives as they had dinner together over Zoom.
“It basically was our version of a video podcast, which was great, you know, the four of us talking around the dinner table. But then we just started doing fun stuff and creating this local lore and getting surprise guests and all that stuff. That was so fun. People responded to that show, I think, better than Jokers because it was a time when people really needed entertainment. It was just so authentic and super personal. But hands down, if I had to pick one of the things I’m most proud of us doing, I think it was creating and executing that show during the pandemic. I was so mad when they didn’t re-up it.”
Though Gatto remains open to collaborating with the other Jokers, he emphasized he has no plans to return to the series full-time or in a guest star capacity, but would be open to an appearance whenever the series comes to a final conclusion to tie everything up.
“I am not going to guest on my own show. It does not feel right, and I can not commit to coming back to it. I’ve moved on from the show, the show has moved on from me. I am so removed from it,” Gatto said. “We are still friends, just not friends from work anymore. But I am so out of that mindset. I did a decade, 300 episodes. I have told all the jokes I want, but when it comes to an end, I would of course love to close it in a fun way. We talked about that a little bit. I would say it is definitely not the end of me collaborating with those guys. We have been doing it for decades before that and we will be doing it for decades after. We work on little side things here and there together. I love working with them. So who knows?”
In addition to “Messing With People,” Gatto co-hosts the Two Cool Moms podcast with fellow comedian Steve Byrne and released his first ever children’s book “Where’s Bearry?” He also runs Gatto Pups & Friends, a non-profit that advocates for the “Adopt, Don’t Shop” movement and has facilitated adoptions for nearly 200 dogs – mainly those that are senior, disabled and unwanted.
Gatto is also an aspiring filmmaker and teased that he has two scripts, for a comedy project and horror project, that he is in the process of shopping.
“I never imagined I would be in front of the camera. It just happened because I could be myself, and I was with all my friends, and that is it,” he said. “I do not consider myself an actor. I could do little bit parts or little character stuff, but I do not aspire to be in front of the camera. This was just a good formula for me to be myself.”
His new comedy tour, “Let’s Get Into It,” also kicked off in September and will run through the end of June, at which time he will take the summer off to spend time with his kids before heading back out on the road in the fall.
“I got to pick out different things and talk about what I have not talked about a lot yet and get a little bit more vulnerable about stuff like when I had to leave ‘Impractical Jokers.’ So it was fun to tell those stories, talk about my father, which I have never spoken about really anywhere, even on the show,” he said. “It is interesting to look at all that, and I weave the stories together of how different experiences develop your core personality and then how you take from your parents and also pass to your kids.”
Gatto anticipates that his new tour will likely also go the stand-up special route.
“I will tour with it as long as I can, but then when it is over, I am gonna feel like, ‘Oh, I do not want this one to go away.’ So it is good to be able to capture it for posterity,” he said. “I think about my kids being able to watch it when they get older and see it. I think it will be kind of fun for them to have. And, just to be a big thing that people could turn it on when they need me. If life is going bad, they can just throw something on and laugh a little bit. I think that is really important.”
“Messing With People” is available to stream now on Hulu.
