Most people aren’t exactly delighted when their precious offspring pour scorn on their parenting, but the moment David Cross’s daughter told him he was “the worst daddy in the world”, he felt nothing but gratitude. The comedian had been struggling to come up with a title for his latest show, until his six-year-old landed on the perfect distillation of her father’s standup vibe: a darkly comic melange of goofiness, pugilism and needling contrarianism. “I was like: ‘Oh, there you go, a name for the tour! Very good.’”
Said show, which he brings to the UK later this month, is not exclusively parenting-themed, explains Cross over Zoom from New York, facial hair fulsome but trimmed back from the wild, grey Garibaldi beard he has been sporting in recent years.
When it comes to standing in opposition to conservative, Christian, so-called “family-friendly” America, Cross is no novice. He began performing comedy in his native Georgia in 1982, the week before his 18th birthday. Having witnessed “awful, corny, hacky” local open-mic sets, he decided that as a staunch outsider (“I looked weird; I had an earring, I didn’t wear nice clothes, intentionally”), he could provide an alternative. By the early millennium, he would become one of the defining figures of cult gen X comedy.
Yet despite helping to define alternative culture in the US, it was only by playing Tobias Fünke in the 00s sitcom Arrested Development that Cross broke the UK.
Today, however, Cross does not want to talk about Arrested Development, greeting my effusive inquiries with a look so intensely withering I decide not to press him, lest this interview permanently taint my feelings towards my favourite TV show of all time. “I don’t know if there’s anything to say that hasn’t been said,” he sighs, by way of explanation.