Eugene Mirman: Burger On A Sesame Seed Pun

For his most recent comedy album, I'm Sorry (You're Welcome), Eugene Mirman recorded "over 45 minutes of crying." What he didn't realize was that he'd have to listen to it several times over to make sure there were no audio flaws. "In a sense," he told host Ophira Eisenberg, "I mostly pranked myself."

Mirman is no stranger to committing to a bit. Over the last few years, Mirman aired some of his grievances in the most public way possible: via full-page newspaper ads. "You'd be surprised how effective it is...Time Warner Cable escalated me to be a customer you help... which you would think, is just [all] customers, but no, there's different tiers." The ad was only in a few local papers, but was covered in the Wall Street Journal and ABC News. "That's how you do it," he advised the audience at the Haverford College taping. However, he cautioned, "Don't take out the ad in the Wall Street Journal-- that's pricey."

Mirman is perhaps best known for voicing Gene Belcher on Fox's Emmy Award-winning series "Bob's Burgers." Similarities between him and his character are, he told Eisenberg, purely intentional. "Loren Bouchard, who made the show, cast each of us as our characters, and then we all sort of developed it together. So each of our characters has a lot of our actual personality in it...Gene is sort of like a 42-year-old child."

In homage to all the punny burger specials on Bob's Burgers (like the "If Looks Could Kale Burger"), we describe an AMA-style special burger, and Mirman guesses its punny name.

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.