David Cross, the alt-comedy hardliner who caught the chipmunk script

David Cross

Photo: Greg2600 / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 4, 1964 Roswell, Georgia
Occupation	Comedian and actor
Known for	Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Men in Black, Kung Fu Panda
Awards	Emmy (shared)

When Patton Oswalt wanted to explain what had become of alternative comedy, he told a joke about a script. He and Brian Posehn, he wrote, had both been offered the part of a sleazy record producer in a talking-chipmunk movie, and both had thrown the pages across the room in disgust. “David Cross caught it.” The line stuck because Cross was the last comic anyone expected to be standing there: the co-creator of Mr. Show with Bob and David, a man who had spent years on stage mocking exactly the kind of family product he was now selling. What his career has argued since is that the two halves were never as far apart as the joke implied, and that a comic who takes the studio’s money can still end up owning nearly everything else he makes.

The suspicion of comfort comes from somewhere. Cross grew up in Roswell, Georgia, the oldest of three children of Barry and Susi Cross, a Jewish family with little money. His father, an immigrant from Leeds, left when David was ten. The family was evicted at one point, and he spent stretches of his childhood in motels and at friends’ homes. He started doing stand-up at around seventeen, and the day after he graduated from Northside High School in Atlanta he moved to New York with no plan at all. A single semester at Emerson College in Boston lasted long enough for him to join a sketch group called This Is Pathetic and to work a club circuit he later described as “a loud, dumb, pandering, racist, homophobic-type scene.”

That description is a key to the work. By 1990 Cross, born on April 4, 1964, was back in New York, playing several nights a week at Catch a Rising Star alongside Janeane Garofalo and Louis C.K., and running a thirteen-member troupe, Cross Comedy, that planted fake hecklers and introduced comics who did not exist. The prank on the audience, the joke about the shape of the joke, became his signature. A writing job near the end of The Ben Stiller Show brought him a shared Emmy in 1993 and, more usefully, Bob Odenkirk.

Mr. Show with Bob and David ran on HBO from 1995 to 1998, never drew a large audience and collected three Emmy nominations anyway. Its sketches bled into one another, its favourite target was television itself, and its cult reputation outgrew its ratings by a wide margin. Cross kept doing stand-up the whole time. Comedy Central later placed him 85th on its list of the 100 greatest stand-ups, and his first album, released by the indie-rock label Sub Pop, earned a Grammy nomination; a self-released record did the same in 2016.

Then came the part the wider public actually knows. Tobias Fünke, the psychiatrist turned hopeless actor of Arrested Development, was written as a minor role and grew into one of the sitcom’s central engines of embarrassment. The show ran on Fox from 2003 to 2006 and returned on Netflix from 2013 to 2019. Cross gave Tobias what he had given Mr. Show: a complete absence of vanity about looking stupid. Around it he built a busy screen career in other people’s films. He was Newton, the morgue attendant in Men in Black, Allen Ginsberg in Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, the voice of Crane in Kung Fu Panda, and Ian Hawke, the record executive of Alvin and the Chipmunks and its two sequels.

That last role is where the public image cracks. Critics were kind to his work in the first film; it was the third he could not stomach. He called Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked “literally without question, the most unpleasant experience I’ve ever had in my professional life,” described being made to spend a week on a Carnival cruise in a pelican suit with no lines, and accused an unnamed producer of antisemitism. Saying so in public cost him a $150,000 bonus under a non-disparagement clause. It is the purest version of his contradiction: the comic who cannot stop telling the truth, bound by contract to a product that paid him to keep quiet. His candour has not always flattered him either. In 2017 the comedian Lo Mutuc, then known as Charlyne Yi, said Cross had made racially insensitive comments to them years earlier. His first response floated the idea that he had been doing a Southern redneck impression; only five days later did he write, “Charlyne I’m sorry that I hurt you and that this whole thing played out as it did.”

The more lasting answer to the chipmunks has been ownership. With Shaun Pye he wrote and starred in The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, 18 episodes for Channel 4 and IFC. His first film as a director, Hits, premiered at Sundance in 2014 and skipped distributors altogether: Cross released it through BitTorrent’s paid bundles, which The Verge reported made it the first feature distributed that way, and backed it with a pay-what-you-want Kickstarter campaign. He had, as it happens, been the first investor in Kickstarter itself. A year later he and Odenkirk reunited for W/ Bob & David on Netflix. His recent specials, I’m From the Future and Worst Daddy in the World, went first to his own website and only then to YouTube.

This year has been his busiest stretch in a long time. His ninth special, The End of the Beginning of the End, taped at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia, went on sale through his site in March and reached YouTube on April 7. In June, Bob and David Climb Machu Picchu premiered at the Tribeca Festival: an 80-minute documentary about a four-day trek on the Inca Trail that Cross pushed for after Odenkirk’s 2021 heart attack, and that the two made independently. “It’s about friendship,” Cross said. “You don’t have to be in the movies to relate.” This summer he became the voice of Dr. Kenny Finch, the eccentric scientist and inventor of President Curtis, the Adult Swim spin-off of Rick and Morty that premiered on July 26. In September he played Jaden, a fellow alien abductee opposite Sam Richardson, in Into the Sky, which premiered at Fantastic Fest.

Cross married the actress and writer Amber Tamblyn in 2012, and the couple announced the birth of their daughter in 2017. He holds dual British and American citizenship, and he was raised Jewish but describes himself as an atheist.

The next stop is the road. Cross spent late September working out a new hour in Salt Lake City and has club dates booked through the autumn, from a benefit show in Brooklyn on October 20 to Skokie, Illinois, on November 15. The pattern is set by now: small rooms, his own camera, his own store. The comic who caught the chipmunk script has spent the years since making sure nobody else gets to hand him the next one.

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Tags: actors, comedians, Bob Odenkirk, David Cross, Arrested Development, Alvin and the Chipmunks

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