Episode notes

(Photo: Leon Bennett/Getty Images for ESSENCE)

George Wallace has been doing stand-up for fifty years. He’s a veteran of couches on both the Tonight Show and the Late Show. He’s been in dozens of movies, and even more TV shows.  He’s practically royalty in Las Vegas, where he’s done so many residencies he’s lost count. 

Wallace came up in New York alongside his roommate, Jerry Seinfeld. 

Wallace’s humor, like Seinfeld’s, is observational. The stakes are usually pretty low. The punchlines and wordplay are frequent. It’s broad in the best sense of the word: a George Wallace joke from 1979 can still kill.

George Wallace, who talked with Bullseye in 2023, could retire now. He could rest on his laurels and not a soul would think anything less of him, but he isn’t quitting.

Clean Slate is his newest TV show. It’s streaming on Amazon Prime. In Clean Slate, Wallace stars opposite Laverne Cox. Cox plays Desiree, a trans woman who returns home after being away twenty long years. Wallace plays her father, who must process that the person he imagined as his son is, in fact, his daughter. Thankfully, his desire to repair their relationship prospers over the rocky parts of his learning process.

George Wallace talks to Bullseye about his love of the 70s, welcoming everyone in the room as a performer, and the influence of preaching on his comedy style.

This interview originally aired in November 0f 2023