Comedian Chris Gethard named his album ‘Taylor Ham, Egg and Cheese.’ Then South Jersey turned on the grill. – NJ.com

Chris Gethard is known for name-checking his beloved New Jersey and all its many quirks and splendors.

But even in the context of the Gethard canon, the comedian’s latest album is the ultimate treat for New Jerseyans, so much so that he actually named it “Taylor Ham, Egg, and Cheese.”

And what’s New Jersey without a little infighting? Within hours of the album’s surprise release on Wednesday, Gethard found himself inundated by criticism from those at the other end of the whole Taylor ham/pork roll “debate.”

Gethard, 39, grew up in West Orange — safely within the confines of Taylor ham territory — and lives in Queens (“I think Queens and Staten Island are kind of the New Jerseys of New York City, in many ways,” he says).

He took a break from wading through messages from perturbed South Jerseyans to talk about this meditation on his favorite place in the world.

Gethard, the former host of truTV’s “The Chris Gethard Show,” now hosts “Chris Gethard Presents” on Manhattan Neighborhood Network. He also has a podcast called “Beautiful/Anonymous” which features his conversations with anonymous callers.

Gethard starred in the 2017 HBO comedy special “Career Suicide” and is the author of the books “Lose Well” and “A Bad Idea I’m About To Do.” He’s appeared on TV series including “Broad City” and “The Office,” and can be seen in the upcoming Netflix comedy “Space Force” and Comedy Central’s “Awkwafina is Nora from Queens.”

The comedian recorded his new album at the Asbury Park Brewery, which is not located in a Taylor ham stronghold.

“I knew I was walking into the lion’s den, that’s for sure,” Gethard tells NJ Advance Media.

Still, his album, filled with tender little nuggets of Jersey gold, covers oh so much more. It xxxx from the essential function of New Jersey (to keep New York and Philadelphia in check) and The New York Times’ insistence on rebranding places in New Jersey as boroughs of New York (see: Maplewood) to the urban legends surrounding state theme parks, the correct pronunciation of “Newark” and the mystery that is Bayonne.

You can listen to “Taylor Ham, Egg, and Cheese: A Comedic Tribute to New Jersey” below. It’s also available for purchase on Bandcamp from New Brunswick-based Don Giovanni Records.

You suggested a great exotic dancer name on the album — Taylor Ham. As for the actual breakfast sandwich, I heard you got some backlash for confirming that Taylor ham was the correct name all along, and the fact that you made it the album title solidifies that. What has the response to that particular part of it been like?

I would say the biggest feedback after 24 hours since launching the album has been not related to the content of the album at all, simply the title. South Jersey is very mad at me. I would say a solid 70% of the things I’m seeing on social media directed towards me are people saying the words “pork roll.” And then every time I’ve just been writing back the word “no.” That’s been most of my sense of it, and then my friends Mark and Mark over at Weird New Jersey, they posted about the album. When I say every single comment is an enraged South Jersey citizen, I am not exaggerating. Every single one was about pork roll, to the point where they had to jump in and say, “Everyone needs to calm down. It’s a joke. It’s comedy.” Most of the reception, from what I can tell so far, is just South Jersey is very angry. I have not heard if people actually like the album yet.

You mentioned on the album that you’ve been a vegetarian for the past few years.

Yeah, about three and a half years now. I’m actually a pescatarian, which means I eat fish, but nobody loves hearing that someone’s a pescatarian. Like, I feel like that’s kind of an annoying way to describe yourself.

I know. I’ve been a pescatarian since I was as teenager and I don’t even bring it up because people don’t understand. Would you ever make an exception for Taylor ham?

I do crave Taylor ham sometimes. I have to imagine that if I ever did break down and eat meat again it might be Taylor ham. I think it would be even more likely that I would go out and eat a Jimmy Buff’s Italian hot dog, because I grew up just a couple blocks away from Jimmy Buff’s in West Orange and I still crave it. I go by there, I get the potato sandwiches. They’re delicious, but every once in a while, I’m just like, “Ah, throw a hot dog in there. Throw a sausage in there.”

Now on to our cities. If, as you say, Trenton is the brain of New Jersey, Newark is the heart, Paterson is the gut, Camden is the bowels and Bayonne is the appendix, what do you think would be Jersey City? Atlantic City?

Oh! That’s a great question. I haven’t thought about further expanding the anatomy analogy. Let’s see. I mean, Jersey City, I would imagine, would be probably like the flying fists of New Jersey. Like the tip of the spear. Atlantic City — ooh. Atlantic City would probably be the colon. Like we all know it serves a function, but if it gets bad, it gets bad fast, you know? And you’ve really got to monitor it. You’ve gotta go and you’ve gotta get the doctor strapping on that glove and checking it out once a year to just make sure that nothing gets too insidious.

You used to work for Weird NJ (he also wrote the book “Weird New York”). In this album, you reference a monkey man who lives down by the tracks in Bayonne. What is your favorite weird Jersey thing, whether man, monster, something edible or not?

I was exposed to so much of the weird stuff. I mean, I spent a solid half-decade of my life driving around New Jersey for them. I will say that it’s been knocked down now, but up on the border of Caldwell and Verona there used to be an abandoned mental hospital (note: Gethard is referring to Overbrook Asylum, which opened in 1898 and was demolished starting in 2016). Growing up in West Orange, we all called it The Bin, as in looney bin. My older brother and his friends used to talk about how they used to sneak up there, and they claimed they’d see, like, Nazis around bonfires and crazy people lurking in tunnels. I’d heard all these stories about it growing up. And then, when I was in high school, some friends of mine invited me to play paintball and we went up there. I saw the graffiti on the wall, and I was like, “Guys! This is The Bin! We’re in the Bin!” So my first exposure to breaking into an abandoned mental hospital was actually by accident. But when you grew up in Essex County in the ‘90s, everybody heard about Bin.

On the album you say you know you’re in Bayonne not because you see a sign, but “because you feel weird in your stomach.” You also outline a conspiracy of silence around what really goes on in Bayonne. Has anyone come at you for Bayonne slander? Or are people pretty much in agreement?

I find it very revealing. I got nothing against Bayonne. I got nothing against people from Bayonne. But it’s just sort of a mysterious place. It’s just kind of doing its own thing and that’s fine. But South Jersey has been coming at me so hard because I named the album “Taylor Ham, Egg and Cheese.” Jerseyans are vocal people. Bayonne? I haven’t heard one complaint.

It kind of proves your point. You also say that everyone in Jersey is a little bit Italian, Irish Catholic and Jewish. But you’re actually Irish Catholic, right?

I am. Both of my maternal grandparents were from Ireland. West Orange has a huge St. Patrick’s Day parade. My last name, Gethard, that’s weird. We don’t really know where that’s from. There’s rumors that it goes back to one of the Hessian soldiers who fought down near Princeton and Trenton in the Revolution. My other three family surnames are Kelly, Cunningham and Byrne. Very Irish Catholic.

You mention this a little bit in terms of guilt. What are the characteristics of that culture that you see grafted onto other New Jerseyans?

Especially when I first started traveling to New York to do comedy, I would come up with a bunch of my friends from Rutgers and I felt like all of us, across the board, sort of felt like, “We just kind of want to stay out of the way. We don’t want to bother anybody. We don’t want to put anybody out.” I saw it in a big way. All my Jersey friends, when we would leave the borders of Jersey, we had a little bit of an attitude of like, “Ah, we’re not trying to bother anybody. Let us know if it’s too much.”

Having become a New Yorker, what was your biggest growing pain as someone who grew up in New Jersey who had to adjust to the city life?

I once went to a deli in Queens, and I was really shocked. I saw that they had Taylor ham on the menu and I flipped out because you can’t get it in New York. This is when I still ate meat. I went ahead, I ordered it. I was so psyched. Ordered the Taylor ham, egg and cheese. They took it and they just sliced it with the deli slicer as if it was ham, and they just put it on a roll, cold and thin. I was honestly feeling nauseous.

The idea of eating cold, thin Taylor ham? Listen, whether you call it Taylor ham or whether you call it pork roll, I think we can all agree: Don’t serve it cold. You’re asking for trouble. You’ve got to fry that bad boy up and kill all that bacteria in there. Whatever’s floatin’ around in that meat, you need to kill it before you eat it. I had to actually explain to them, you gotta cut it thick, you gotta fry it up, you gotta wait till the edges curl, you gotta cut the sections so it can curl a little more so it’s got those little slits in it.

I also want to make sure I’m on record in saying that I moved to New York specifically to do comedy and now that I’m getting older, and I feel that I’ve accomplished enough, I’m actually moving back to New Jersey. Before anybody says this sellout is a New York guy tryin’a capitalize on his New Jersey roots, no, no, no. The plan was always to come into New York, conquer it on behalf of New Jersey, and move back. And I don’t know if I conquered it, but I am moving back next year.

I’m turning 40 and I have a kid and New York City’s such a beautiful place in so many ways and affords so many opportunities, but also about three weeks ago I was on the F train and a guy started touching himself. And I’m just like, “I can’t raise a kid like this. There’s just no way.”

You’re a new father (Gethard’s son Cal is 8 months old), and on the album, you talk about the priceless nature of a New Jersey childhood. Would you have your child grow up anywhere but New Jersey?

It’s hard to say, because if the winds took me in different directions, I would manage. But I’m very happy that I do have the opportunity, that things worked out. All jokes aside, New Jersey really shaped me. In a lot of ways, I feel like man, we all kind of grew up being a little tougher than we had to be. But I also have gone out into the world now and realized what an asset that was. So I’m psyched that he’ll get to see that a little bit. I’m psyched that he’ll kind of know a little bit of the same attitude, and I hope that I can maybe give him a version of it that was slightly healthier than what I had, but I’m very psyched he’ll get some of those values.

This year you criticized your alma mater, West Orange High School, for suggesting your material on suicide would have to be changed or censored in some way before you could perform there. Did you ever end up doing a set there or talking to kids?

Well, I’ll tell ya, that caused a lot of controversy. I didn’t anticipate it going as big as it did. I was definitely quite upset to receive an email that said, you know, this isn’t an appropriate topic to talk about with kids, because I think mental health should be an appropriate topic. I think feeling like it wasn’t an appropriate thing to talk about when I was a kid did a lot of actual damage for me, and I think a lot of other people, so I was very dismayed.

I did not wind up speaking there, but I did wind up interacting with the principal of West Orange High School, Hayden Moore. He reached out and let me know that that did not come from him directly and that times have really changed and he’s actually made it a real priority to speak more openly about things along those lines. So I actually felt a huge sense of relief, and I was able to apologize to him that everything kind of exploded the way it did and kind of blindsided him. He was also able to let me know that they’re working really hard to make sure that my hometown is a more open place. That made me feel really good.

In the album, you take us through an imagined night in the life of a Medieval Times knight (from the Lyndhurst castle). Have any knights reached out to you yet?

I haven’t heard from any knights. I haven’t heard from any maidens, haven’t heard from any wenches, haven’t heard from the guy who handles the falcon. But I will say I heard from a childhood friend of mine who actually knew one of the knights growing up. He told me that I had it really wrong. He said the knights actually are kind of known to be real ladies’ men, inside and outside of the halls of that castle. I may have really pegged it totally wrong.

When I see certain license plates on the Parkway or highway I immediately reference a lifetime of lived experience with drivers from those states, whether it be New York, Connecticut or Pennsylvania. You say that people from North and South Jersey only really get along out of state. But who is a New Jerseyan’s most natural enemy, either on the road or in our general natural habitat?

I have to say, I’ve been in New York a while now, doing my comedy stuff. I am outright ashamed that my car has New York plates on it because you were very kind in phrasing that question diplomatically, but we all know that if someone does something stupid on the Turnpike or the Parkway, we’re always going to be mad about it. But if they have New York plates, it’s five to 10 times worse. If someone’s driving slow in the left lane and they have New York plates, it’s particularly unforgivable. If you see North Carolina plates or Kansas plates — sometimes you even see Canadian plates — and you’re like “Oh OK, that’s cute.” But when you see New York plates and someone’s driving stupid, you’re like, “You should 100% know better. This is unforgivable.”

You talk about the house rules of what makes a diner a legit diner (the waitstaff, for one, has to be 17 and younger or 55 and older, he says). You mention vanilla Coke and pre-buttered toast being non-negotiable items. If it’s 2:30 a.m. at a diner that fits the bill, what are you ordering?

Wow, I mean it’s a great question. The good thing is that you could straight-up order lobster tails and they would have ‘em, but no one’s ever gonna do that because we’re not insane. If it’s 2:30 in the morning, a couple things come to mind. One, the idea of a 24-hour breakfast goes a long way, so French toast might be on the docket for me. A lot of the diners have Greek roots. I might go with spinach pie, that jumps out to me. Might go with an egg and cheese on a roll and sit there wishing it had Taylor ham. I always go with a vanilla Coke (Coke with vanilla syrup added). I will say that early feedback has been a lot of people don’t agree that the vanilla Coke point on my album is essential to a diner, so I’ve had to begrudgingly admit that may just be that I really like vanilla Cokes.

I think the larger point I’m at is you can’t rattle a New Jersey diner waitstaff. They can’t blink twice at that. They can’t go, “Wait, what is that?” They just have to go, “Yup, I got that,” in the same way that you might sit down and go. “All right, I want a full plate of spaghetti. I want a side of flounder. Can you sauté some spinach, and then also give me a dish of mint chocolate chip ice cream with hot fudge and caramel?” and they’ll just go like, “Yeah, whatever. Is that all you want, you lightweight?” and walk away.

Do you have any all-time favorite diners?

Sadly, a lot of the diners I grew up with have closed or changed their names. I grew up close to the Eagle Rock Diner in West Orange on Eagle Rock Avenue. That shut down. I think it reopened as another diner (note: yes it did, as the Chit Chat Diner). I loved the Versailles Dinner on Route 46, which I just heard also shut down (note: the diner, in Fairfield, is now the West Essex Diner). The Pilgrim Diner on Route 23 (which also closed). All those Essex County diners jump out to me. I like the Six Brothers on Route 46. Obviously the Tick Tock and the Park West. For some reason, when you grow up in West Orange, you have a rivalry with Livingston that I look back on and don’t quite understand. For some reason, we hated the Ritz Diner on Route 10 but I think it was actually a pretty good diner. It was just this weird standoff that we had.

Thank you for talking about the album. If people haven’t heard about it yet, we’d be glad to share with them all the treasures contained within. I’m sorry about all the flak you’re getting from South Jersey.

I think they’re being as proud of their half of the state as I am proud of mine. If I could just make it clear, to all of South Jersey: Your complaint is registered. I get it. We can have fun fighting about it. I do also want to be clear: There’s 13 other tracks on this album that have nothing to do with Taylor ham or pork roll. Even if you go in and just never listen to the first track, I think you’ll get a real kick out of the other 13/14ths of the album, so please, find it within yourselves to look past the Taylor ham fiasco and just enjoy the rest of this thing, if you don’t mind.

Have a tip? Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.

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