Emo Philips has kindly consented to a SHECKYmagazine.com Interview. He made his first appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, touching off Emo fever throughout the land. He has been delivering his consistently high quality (and distinctively Emo-esque) material on both sides of the Atlantic ever since. Not only is the quirky comic from Downers Grove a favorite with standup afficianados, he also makes the top ten lists of many a standup comic. Often when a comic comes along and makes a big splash, a conga line of pale imitators will follow. Emo Philips is one of those comics who is so good at what he does, so singular, so "Emo," that no one else has endeavored to imitate him or emulate him. His new CD "EMO" is available through his website, emophilips.com.

SHECKYmagazine.com: Do you remember much about your first time onstage?

Emo Philips: I made my first stand-up appearance at the age of eighteen at a little lounge (not a comedy club) near my home. It was called The Trieste. I walked back and forth in front of the place for over an hour until I worked up the courage to go in. There were perhaps two dozen people inside, including the staff and the musicians. I asked the head musician if I could go onstage during the next break and he said sure. I got two laughs in twenty minutes, and walked out feeling more elated than I had ever felt in my entire life. The glory of that triumph contented me for two full years.

SHECKYmagazine.com: What was the Chicago comedy scene like in 1976? What type of venues did you play?

E.P.: I started standup comedy for real in June of 1976. There were only two comedy clubs in the Chicago area: The Comedy Cottage and The Comedy Womb. Both featured a continuous stream of standups from 9 PM until well past midnight, with each comedian allotted between five and twenty minutes. I would play both clubs six nights a week. I would be the first act at one club, going onstage at 9 PM before hardly any of the audience had arrived (members of the audience arrived and departed whenever they pleased back in the carefree '70s), and then I would perform dead last at the other club, to a handful of drunks. This was my schedule all summer. It was tough, to be sure, but the things I learned, such as bitterness and envy, have served me to this day.

Looking back, the old showcase system, where comics went on all night long, and some sucked, and some only slightly sucked; and where the audience didn't expect much anyway, because a) they got in free, and b) many were only 18 and had never experienced better, and c) even the worst comic is at least somewhat entertaining, if only in a pathological way, for five minutes; looking back, the old showcase system was a wonderful environment in which to learn, far more nurturing than the comedy club of today, which has a rigid mc/feature/headliner system, and which draws an older, paying crowd with no patience for amateurism. When I began standup, I was like a kid playing baseball in a vacant lot with other kids. Now a begining standup is like a kid playing with the Chicago Cubs. Well, that's a bad example, but you know what I mean.

SHECKYmagazine.com: Who were the big Chicago comics of the day?

E.P.: These are the "old timers" who had already been doing standup when I first came onto the scene: Tom Dreesen, O'Brien and Severa, Ted Holum, Ed Fiala, Ken Smith, Paul Kelly, James Wesley Jackson, Jim Wiggins, Judy Tenuta, Bob Rumba and Brian Schmidt. Oh, and the resident "blue" comedian, Orlando Reyes, who compared to most of today's comedians was a choir boy.

SHECKYmagazine.com: Was your onstage persona pre-meditated or did it happen organically over time?

E.P.: I had my personna from the start: it is the default persona when one has no stage presence.

SHECKYmagazine.com: What was the extent of your stage experience prior to your first attempt at standup?

E.P.: In college I was one of six males who auditioned for five male roles in a comedy play. I was the one rejected. At that moment I made up my mind never to place myself at the mercy of some pompous, goateed, black-turtleneck-shirted "should I yay him or nay him?" pantywaist ever again.

That's what I love about standup: no pretentious loser phony can tell you that you suck if you get huge monster laughs for an hour. (My gosh, I forgot how much I still hate that director. Thanks alot for unrepressing THAT memory, SHECKYmagazine.com.)

SHECKYmagazine.com: When we first saw you perform live in 1985, you spent most of your set putting together and taking apart a trombone that you never did actually play.

E.P.: The symbolism of the never-played trombone was to show that, while I was admittedly a clown, I was a clown with a frustrated artistic side. Like Gacy.

SHECKYmagazine.com: Have you ever gotten a bad review?

E.P.: No. And since standup comedy is almost never reviewed anymore, it looks like my perfect record will hold!

SHECKYmagazine.com: In many ways, you are one of the founding fathers of alternative comedy.

E.P.: I am very proud to be one of the founding fathers of alternative comedy, along with Artemus Ward, the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Olesen and Johnson, Bob and Ray, the Goon Show, Beyond the Fringe, Monty Python, Albert Brooks, Martin Mull, Steve Martin...

SHECKYmagazine.com: You made your first Letterman appearance in 1984 at the start of the comedy boom. How would you compare standup in the '80's to standup in the New Millenium?

E.P.: I think there are just as many comedians doing comedy today as there were in the 80's. It's just that back then you had a lot of non-comedians doing comedy as well.

SHECKYmagazine.com: By the time the comedy bust happened you were making it big in Great Britian. Was that a deliberate move on your part or merely a happy coincidence?

E.P.: I think my leaving America caused the bust. Terribly sorry!

SHECKYmagazine.com: Was your act affected at all by the wave of politcal correctness that washed over both sides of the Atlantic?

E.P.: Not at all...I still joke however I please about womyn.

SHECKYmagazine.com: How hard was it to go onstage after you cut off your pageboy? Did you really experience any self-doubt?

E.P.: Please...no haircut questions! Interviewers always used to ask me about my pageboy haircut, and it drove me nuts: it almost made me suspect that there was something strange about it. So I cut off my pageboy...and now I'm asked about it even more. It's like having a child, and you think, "How can this child be any more the center of my universe than he already is?" And then he's kidnapped.

SHECKYmagazine.com: You've successfully made the transition from "boy" comic to "man" comic. Do you ever wonder what it will be like to be an "old man" comic?

E.P.: (shuddering out loud)