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Comedian and actor Nick Offerman.
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Nick Offerman calls Pittsburgh his 'Disneyland'

Nick Offerman calls Pittsburgh his 'Disneyland'

Nick Offerman is known and loved as a star of stage and screen, but it was one of his little part-time jobs that brought him to Pittsburgh in the spring.

He has a side gig on the tours of indie-pop duo Nancy and Beth, which, in spite of the name, is co-fronted by his well-known actress wife Megan Mullally.

“I’m their main roadie,” he says, in that declarative way he has, during a phone interview. “Generally, I carry some of the equipment and sometimes I appear dancing in a number or two.”

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He was here to do just that at Mr. Smalls in May. It was one of several trips he’s made here in the past few years. In the summer of 2016, he visited the city on the “Summer of 69: No Apostrophe” comedy tour with Ms. Mullally, and back in 2014 he was here to film “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.”

What do they like do while they’re in Pittsburgh?

“Well, there’s a plethora of places to eat and drink,” he says, “but Pittsburgh, for my money, is one of the best-looking cities in the country and we love to just walk around. We love rivers and bridges, so Pittsburgh is like our Disneyland. Maybe ’cause I work really hard and I’m traveling a lot, and if I’m on a plane, I’m reading a script on my computer, so to actually just be outside in the air ... and for some reason I just love walking over a bridge over a river in a city. And the charming location of Pittsburgh on the three rivers just seems like something out of a superhero story to me. I’m crazy about it.”

On Sunday, the 47-year-old comedian who became a household name as Ron Swanson, the deadpan, meat-loving libertarian boss of Amy Poehler on “Parks and Recreation,” will return, minus Ms. Mullally, on the Full Bush tour, an evening of stand-up comedy mixed with offbeat songs.

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“It’s sort of a treatise against consumerism,” he says of the tour, “with an eye towards how angry everybody is, day in and day out these days, because of the sad situation of contemporary politics. And so, as a response to that, instead of talking about it, which I think we’re all pretty sick of, the show focuses on how to get outside of that information and focus on your neighbors and your loved ones and engage in a Full Bush lifestyle that involves looking people in the face and living in the moment and making things with your hands. Of course, with a lot of dumb and funny songs thrown in.”

Unlike many sitcom actors, Mr. Offerman didn’t get into the business via stand-up, so it hasn’t been a completely natural transition. After growing up in the Chicago suburbs and earning a Fine Arts degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, he formed Defiant Theatre with fellow students in 1993 and became active in other Chicago theater companies as well.

In 1997, he moved to LA with a Mexican girlfriend who had had enough of winter and, eventually, had had enough of him. He got some bit parts in bad movies and TV and then in 2000, he decided to get back into theater, and met Megan, who was two seasons into “Will and Grace,” doing a play at the Evidence Room. His come-on line, which he’s revealed in other interviews, wasn’t exactly a winner: “I think you’re really funny even though you’re on TV.” He himself didn’t even have a TV, but was starting to get more parts on the small screen, including a role as a plumber on a “Will and Grace” episode. They married in 2003 in a “secret” wedding, one where the guests thought they were just going to a party.

He got more screen time on shows like “24,” “George Lopez,” “CSI NY” and the cable series “American Body Shop.” What he didn’t get was the Michael Scott role on “The Office,” which went to Steve Carrell in 2005. Three years later, he was asked to audition for those same producers, Greg Daniels and Michael Schur, in a spinoff show. He didn’t get the part he auditioned for, a character that never materialized, but they did cast him as the manly, anti-government parks director.

While on “Parks and Rec” he was invited to do stand-up, but mostly shied away from it, and then in 2014 he stepped out for his first comedy special “American Ham,” which included his 10 tips for better living. AV Club described it as being “like an 80-minute conversation with a good-natured stoner.”

Asked how the “dumb and funny” songs come about, he says, “I generally have an idea like, OK, I want to write a song about how scary it is, like I have a phobia that I’m going to lose myself into the internet. Like, I need to be vigilant forever not to lose myself down some internet wormhole because like any monkey with a shiny object, I’ll go looking for a pair of work boots and suddenly six hours have gone by and I’ve literally just been looking at work boots and, like, logging jeans, and so I’ll have an idea that I want to write a song about that. So my songs, there’s nothing fancy about them. I love a good A-B rhyme scheme, so I’ll cobble together an idea and then this friend of mine named Mark Rivers who wrote all the music for Mouse Rat on ‘Parks and Rec,’ among other things, he’s a really talented songwriter, he helps me with my music quite often because I’m not great at composing melodies. Megan is amazing at that, and she wrote most of the melodies for ‘Summer of 69,’ our show together.”

The musical elements to “Parks and Rec” were largely left to Mouse Rat, although Swanson did occasionally sneak away to play sax in the Duke Silver Trio. Mr. Offerman really does play sax and really is a master carpenter, so it’s not uncommon for people to figure that Nick Offerman and Ron Swanson are pretty much the same guy.

“Really, I feel like it depends on how much reading people do,” he says, “because people who do a lot of reading, I find, tend to have a greater understanding of how the world works, and people who exclusively watch television forget things like, um, these are actors and that a show is fictional and it’s written by writers. I do run into a certain percentage of people who for some reason think that the show somehow discovered me and I am Ron Swanson and I somehow got them to insert all my personal politics into the show. So I try to gently remind them that I’m actually not Ron Swanson and that, frankly, he’s a very brilliantly crafted comedy character but in real life he wouldn't be nearly as fun.”

Sometimes he’ll have to remind them of that when they’re basically calling to book Ron Swanson for a gig.

“People will say ‘We want Nick Offerman to come play at our college, but really we would love 90 minutes of Ron Swanson,’ and I say, ‘Just remember the Ron Swanson that you love, you’re getting him in like two-minute doses and if he came for 90 minutes, he would just make a chair and you would think that was hilarious for about four minutes and then it would get completely boring.’ That's the brilliance of comedy writing and it’s why comedy is fast. I’m not fast.”

And he doesn’t eat like a caveman.

“I actually have a song called ‘I’m not Ron Swanson’ that details this very dilemma where I say, ‘If I ate like Ron Swanson, it would kill me.’ No one can eat or drink like him because he's a fictional character and my colon is controlled by nature and his by the writer’s room, so give me a break.”

NICK OFFERMAN

Where: Benedum Center, Downtown.

When: 7:30 p.m. Sunday.

Tickets: $39.50-$59.50; trustarts.org.

There’s another assumption often made about Nick Offerman, and that is that he is a symbolic of the Midwestern, tough-talking, small-government Trump supporter.

“Again, people who aren’t very thoughtful can make that leap,” he says, so what he asked “Parks and Rec” writer Schur to help him address that.

“People kept saying of Ron that he would definitely be a Trump supporter and I said, ‘Mike, please write me up a little thing.’ So he wrote a nice little piece about how Ron would despise Trump, not for the reasons you might think, but because he made the choice to go from business into politics, which is one of the most shameful things you could do in the eyes of Ron Swanson.

“And it’s a funny thing about TV that people sort of cherry-pick ideas and can take a character and turn it into what they want it to be. So, you could take a character like Kramer on ‘Seinfeld’ and he could be beloved by the hippies for one reason and be beloved by the NRA for a different reason, and neither were the intention of the writer or the performance. It’s just how people interpret it.”

Scott Mervis: smervis@post-gazette.com

First Published: November 1, 2017, 1:34 p.m.

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Comedian and actor Nick Offerman.
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