Six months before Brian Posehn turned 21, he rang Laughs Unlimited in Old Sacramento to ask how he should go about getting into stand-up comedy. They told him he needed to be of drinking age, so he spent the next half-year preparing a five-minute set. I ate it so hard, but still loved it.
Those Sacramento open mics laid the first bricks on a path toward a sprawling career that led Posehn at first to San Francisco and later to Los Angeles. Posehn was raised in Sonoma, but moved to Sacramento when he was 17 to attend American River College and live with his grandpa.
The initial plan was to become a rock journalist or a DJ, but his foray into stand-up comedy rerouted that course. When did the stand-up comedy segue into an acting career? I wanted to write sketch comedy and late night stuff. It must be so frustrating to anybody who wants to act, but I just happened to do a set in L. That was the first thing I did and it was such a fluke. When you got on board with Mr.
Show, could you tell it was something special? I knew David Cross first through San Francisco because he was coming up to the city a lot.
Through David I met Bob [ Odenkirk ]. By the time it turned into Mr. Show , I was such a fan of those two guys. The first four episodes of season one I acted in, but they wrote all of those by themselves.
