Chris Gethard

chrisgethard

Chris Gethard is a comedian, actor, writer, and obsessive Knicks fan who lives in Queens, NY. A notoriously weird dude, he is the host of <The Chris Gethard Show , a public access television program that is always odd and sometimes violent and that can be watched live every Wednesday night at 11pm at his website. He's also the author of the book "A Bad Idea I'm About to Do," a collection of generally humiliating stories that explain his fragile mental state.

Recent Posts

All-Star memories: Cedric Ceballos’ blindfolded dunk

Posted by Chris Gethard under 2012 All-Star Weekend, All-Star Memories, Los Angeles Lakers on Feb 24, 2012

When asked to think of my definitive All-Star Weekend moment, I immediately thought of an incident that served as a formative aspect in my development as an obsessive basketball fan. It’s not what made me love basketball in the first place, but it is an exact time when I can pinpoint realizing that I loved basketball to a ridiculous degree — Cedric Ceballos’s blindfolded dunk in the 1992 Dunk Contest.

Don’t get me wrong, I can think of at least a dozen dunks more impressive than Cedric’s right off the top of my head. Anything by Michael, Spud, Dominique, Nate or Dwight comes to mind. But the Ceballos blindfolded dunk is branded on to my personality as a basketball fan unlike any other for one simple reason.

I listened to that shit on the radio.

I don’t remember why I was unable to get to a television to watch that year’s dunk contest, but I do remember stopping everything I was doing to make sure that I at least had the ability to listen to dunks. I was 12 and this shit was important. I look back now and realize that the whole point of the dunk contest is that dunks are visually impressive. It didn’t matter to me. I had to know who won that year’s dunk contest, even if it meant listening to someone verbally describe impressive visual feats. It was my first moment of being a ridiculously obsessive NBA fan.

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The ups and downs of the Jeremy Lin experience

Posted by Chris Gethard under New York Knicks on Feb 08, 2012

The esteemed Mr. Trey Kerby recently asked me to write a piece on Carmelo Anthony. And it makes sense. I’m a very melodramatic Knicks fan and Carmelo is the centerpiece of my favorite team. Clearly, this should have been easy for me.

But I spent about a week wracking my brain trying to figure out what I could say about Melo that hasn’t been said. He’s a fantastic scorer. His commitment to defense is questionable. He seems to mess with both the flow of the offense as well as other peoples’ confidence within the offense. He’s an insanely cool person. Attending the game where Gallo returned to the Garden and outplayed him was a panic-inducing knife twist of an experience that made me question almost everything about my life. I once was an actor in a commercial where I played an obsessive stalker-y fan of his and he accurately gauged that I was indeed an obsessive stalker-y fan of his and had his guard up around me the whole time. And that’s when he was still with the Nuggets. (Side note: I did another commercial as part of this series with Paul Pierce, who was a nice guy but scolded me for making fun of Smush Parker.)

Then the basketball gods intervened and Jeremy Lin happened. He fucking happened.

Trey asked me to divert my attention from Carmelo to Lin and I was more than happy to do so, because I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but at the time of this writing Jeremy Lin has had TWO good games in a row. In New York, that means he is the savior who has descended from Heaven to save the Knicks from anything ranging from D’Antoni’s horrific coaching, Toney Douglas’s downfall, or the existence of Jared Jeffries. He’s had two full games of impressive stat lines and moments where he’s demonstrated an ability to run an offense to a passable degree. And these two games have exposed how the minds of Knicks fans work. In the New York media/blogosphere, Jeremy Lin’s two good games in a row are miraculous game-changer turning points in our season on par with the following:

  • The French agreeing to help the Colonials during the American Revolution.
  • The Elves showing up last minute to help fight at Helm’s Deep in the movie version of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
  • Jay Z inexplicably rapping over Linkin Park songs and making otherwise rational people think for just a nanosecond that Linkin Park was catchy.

I’m able to step back from my Knicks fandom long enough to note our ridiculousness regarding our reaction to Lin, but I’m also a full-on fanboy buying into it. Lin’s two games in a row have made Knicks fans collectively forget that he has never played well at the professional level outside of this week, he’s physically unimpressive to a degree that one has to wonder how many games in a row he can play, and most remarkable of all, that he brings up Christianity within the first 10 seconds of every interview he’s ever done in a way that New Yorkers would usually distrust immediately.

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How fantasy basketball makes us terrible people

Posted by Chris Gethard under Fantasy on Jan 10, 2012

Pardon me while I write about the psychological effects sports have on people. It’s a played out topic, I know. Sports serve as an outlet for males to get their aggression out by proxy. Blah blah blah. Sports teams embrace regionalism in a way that’s dying. Yada yada. Team sports emulate war, allowing people to experience battle up close in a way modern civilization doesn’t allow. I know, I’m yawning too.

Here’s a new thesis I’d like to put on the table, one that maybe hasn’t been dealt with as heavily as the tried and true topics listed above: Fantasy sports can and will turn anyone into a completely terrible human being.

While obsessively reading NBA news sites the other day, I stumbled upon a headline that sent a chill down my spine: “Rockets’ Kyle Lowry Charged in Vegas.”

The chill wasn’t produced because another NBA player had apparently wound up on the wrong side of the law. It wasn’t the result of any sympathy or empathy towards the alleged victim. I knew nothing of the circumstances regarding Kyle Lowry’s apparent arrest and charges, I’d only read the headline. The chill that ran down my spine was accompanied by only one thought: “I have Kyle Lowry in three fantasy leagues. Kyle Lowry is fucking badass. I can not have Kyle Lowry missing any games.”

I went on to read that Kyle Lowry apparently lost his mind and threw a basketball at a female referee following a training game at a Las Vegas gym. Lowry, reports say, had spent the game taunting this referee before seeking her out to wing a ball as hard as he could into this poor lady’s chest.

And I breathed a sigh of relief. Because the headline “”Rockets’ Lowry Charged in Vegas” could mean a lot of things. I mean, an NBA player being charged with something in Vegas?  That could easily mean any number of things that would lead to a weeks-long suspension. If Stephen Jackson had been charged with something in Vegas, four strippers would probably be dead.

Upon reading the specifics of the article, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. “Assaulting a female ref with a basketball?” I thought to myself. “They’ll probably wait until the end of the season to deal with that.”

I’m not that kind of person. I don’t think it’s cool for a professional athlete to throw a large object at a woman, let alone with ill intent. That’s completely screwed up behavior. I was raised better than that. I think it’s wrong.

But sadly, I also know that Kyle Lowry is currently the 19th-best player, statistically speaking, from a fantasy perspective and therefore I will let him get away with a lot. Like, a lot.

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The Island of Misfit Knicks: Why New Yorkers should cheer for Jared Jeffries

Posted by Chris Gethard under New York Knicks on Dec 23, 2011

Chris Gethard is a comedian and writer who lives in New York City.

I am a lifelong Knicks fan. I am also something of a lifelong loser. This is a real chicken/egg pairing in my life. Did I fall in love with the early 90s Knicks because I identified with their habit of coming close but never quite achieving their dreams? Or am I someone who comes close to but never quite achieves my dreams because of the psychic imprint left on me by the early 90s Knicks? I have legitimately discussed this with my shrink. She didn’t really know what I was talking about.

I recently had the chance to attend the Knicks open scrimmage. This event was both awesome/hope-inducing (I got to see the Carmelo practicing the pick-and-roll with Amar’e) and ridiculous/dread-inducing (I had to see Mike Bibby and Devin Green guard each other.)

There were 10,500 people in attendance. All of them were psyched about Tyson Chandler. Chandler is the player, perhaps more than any other in the league, in which Knicks fans see the old style they fell in love with. While there will never be another player as scary as Charles Oakley (who punched not one, but TWO players during pregame warmups in his career) or Anthony Mason (who carried himself like someone who would slash you with a box cutter and steal your 8-Ball jacket), Chandler is clearly the sort of tough, gritty, offensively-challenged-but-defensively-loudmouthed type of player that Knicks fans unconditionally love.

That being said, there was a truly sad moment during the player intros at the scrimmage: Jared Jeffries was resoundingly booed on his way out of the tunnel.

By close to 11,000 people.

At an event designed solely and specifically for Knicks fans to celebrate their team.

No presence of an opponent. Not even a mention of them. Jared Jeffries was effectively booed out of the building during a pro-level high school pep rally.

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