Packing Punch

Joel McHale figures you're either cut out for this kind of work or you aren't.

Stand-up comedy wasn't always on his resume. But McHale says it involves the same skill set as hosting "The Soup," a talent that evolved from shouting back at the television in his underwear.

"When I do it at 'The Soup' I'm just wearing pants," he explains.

The 36-year-old former football player came to Los Angeles to be an actor, ended up in improv comedy and eventually scored the hosting job on the E! channel's weekly takedown of talk and trash TV.

The next leap was to the live stage. McHale makes his headlining debut on the Strip with today's show at Mandalay Bay. "Doing 'The Soup' is like doing a half an hour of stand-up every week," he explains. "After 31/2 years of that, it seemed like something I wanted to do, plus it was lucrative."

A defined point of view counts as much as experience in stand-up. "I feel like 'The Soup' gave me that pretty clearly," he says. Or at least provided the forum for his inner snarkiness to shine forth.

"It's a way that I always have behaved. I'm probably overly opinionated about things," he says. "It becomes very annoying at parties. But I feel like I already had that sort of attitude. Which I think is one of the reasons I got the job."

Live stage work did involve coming up with some punch lines instead of letting the TV clips speak for themselves. "We try in the show to let the clips hang the people in the clips. We never want to just go, 'This is stupid. This is a terrible thing.' "

People might expect McHale to use video clips onstage, but he says "that would require a lot of technical work and all that stuff."

Instead, his stand-up offers backstage stories about Tyra Banks and other favorites who regularly feed "The Soup," as well as McHale's opinions on other E! stars -- expect plenty of the Kardashians -- and routines about his own family life as the father of a 3-year-old and an infant.

McHale grew up in Seattle and played football at the University of Washington. People are surprised, he says, when they see him in person and discover he is 6 foot 4. Because he found his way into Seattle improv groups instead of comedy clubs, "I didn't have to pay my road dues in the way that so many comedians have to do and become fantastic -- so I'm just kind of mediocre.

"There was some kind of weird guilt," he confesses, to using the TV show as a shortcut to comedy headliner. For a long time, he thought, "It seems like I'm cheating.

"But then I realized that making 'The Soup' a good show was kind of my trial, I guess, to see if I could keep something funny on the air."

"The Soup" evolved from "Talk Soup," which launched the career of Greg Kinnear in the 1990s. The air gradually went out of the tires after Kinnear left in 1995, and the show disappeared in 2002.

Two years later, McHale was onboard for a vaguely defined relaunch. "We weren't even sure what the show was going to be, and at that point it wasn't even called 'The Soup,' " he recalls. Cooler heads saved it from what might be one of the worst show titles ever proposed: "The What-the-? Awards."

"Thank God for E! giving us the leeway to experiment and to figure it out," he says. "There wasn't the expectation that it was going to be great right away. We didn't have pressure on us."

With their net cast well beyond the original's focus on daytime talk shows, McHale says his staff has an embarrassment of riches to comb through each day.

"TV will get worse and it will get better," he says. "Ninety percent of any art is bad and 10 percent has never been better." While there are "incredibly good (scripted) series on right now," the drek keeps getting worse. "With the more channels they add, TV will only get worse and it will get better."

As McHale's range of targets expands, does it increase the danger of him running into any of them by accident?

"The only person I could possibly run into in the hallway is (Ryan) Seacrest, and he's so much shorter."

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.