Interview: Dave Coulier. Cut. It. Out.

Dave Coulier, best known as the lovable “Joey Gladstone” on the smash 90’s sitcome, ‘Full House,’ is back on the road doing his first love, stand up comedy.

(Coulier stops in Cleveland, OH at Hilarities, January 8 – 10. Details, HERE!)

Dave phoned our hotline in advance of his Cleveland engagement to reminisce about his Full House days and talk about his post-sitcom star life.

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CleveRock: How is your current tour going? Are you debuting any new material?

Dave Coulier: “The material is always a work in progress. Stand-up is one of those things where you always have to be out writing new stuff, so that’s what I’m doing!”

CleveRock: I know you pride yourself on being one of the “clean” comedians currently doing stand-up. Why did you decide to go that route?

Dave Coulier: “Well it wasn’t such a conscious choice many years ago when I first started. My goal was to get on ‘The Tonight Show’ with Johnny Carson, and when I did my first stand-up on the show, it had to be clean, and I have just never veered away from that. I think the world has so much vulgar comedy that it’s nice to offer people the alternative of, ‘look, if you want to come out and not hear F-bombs hurled every other joke, then this is the show for you!’ I’m not reinventing the wheel. We have been watching clean stand up material for years on ‘The Tonight Show’ and Letterman for years. My sets are just ones that I would be comfortable doing on national television. If you look at the biggest touring comics today: Jim Gaffigan, Brian Regan, Seinfeld; these guys aren’t hurling F-bombs. They are working clean and they are selling out 5,000 seats. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that there is a huge market for people who want to come and laugh and don’t want to feel uncomfortable.”

CleveRock: You are a very successful voice-over artist. Is this a natural talent that you were blessed with, or is it a talent that you had to work hard to develop?

Dave Coulier: “When I was younger, I wouldn’t call it be me being ‘blessed.’ It got me into a lot of trouble in school. It just made me laugh. I’ve been a jock my whole life, I’ve always played hockey . When you have twenty guys sitting around putting on hockey gear it’s a captive audience, so I would do impressions of coaches and fellow players or other people that guys on the team knew and everyone would just crack up. That’s really how I got started, was doing locker room comedy. I just did voices that made guys laugh. I do have to work on it. Especially when I’m pitched a new series. Disney is pitching me a new series right now and they are very specific about what they want, and it’s my job so that when they are listening in their heads they go, ‘Ah, that’s the character, that’s what we want. That’s exactly how this character should sound.’ I have to work at that sometimes to tweak it. Other voices come easily and those are wonderful moments when that happens. But, some I really have to work at.”