Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver: Not Jim Gaffigan

Episode 33 in a series of true rideshare stories

He looks like Jim Gaffigan. A lot like Jim Gaffigan. Actually, he looks so much like Jim Gaffigan, that for a second, as I am pulling over to pick him up, I am trying to remember whether Jim Gaffigan is doing a show here anytime soon.

He is heading to a tire shop to pick up a vehicle. He says that he is having the tires changed on all four of his family’s vehicles, and he has had to take all of them into the shop himself. “You’d think, in a family full of drivers, some of them would be able to take their own cars in,” he says, “but no, they’ve gotta Dad do everything for them.”

That settles it. He’s not Gaffigan. If Gaffigan told me that story, it would be hilarious. This guy just sounds tired.

When somebody looks this much like somebody else, you always want to tell them. I’m not sure why we have that impulse exactly, but we do. It’s not enough to just recognize a similarity in two faces, we have to verbalize it, and maybe ask if other people verbalize it on a regular basis. If they say they get it all the time, we feel validated. If they say they’ve never heard that before, we want to get out our phones and prove it to them.

The problem is, a lot of Gaffigan’s act is self-deprecating jokes about his own appearance. When one of my passengers yelled to a guy in the car next to us that he looked like Mark Zuckerberg, I told her that nobody wants to look like Mark Zuckerberg. I’d be a hypocrite if I told this guy he looked like Jim Gaffigan. But it’s so hard not to tell him.

He asks if I’m working much longer and I tell him I’m clocking out soon to do a standup show. He finds that interesting and starts asking me about places in town to see standup.

“I haven’t been to a standup show in a long time,” he says. “I wanted to see Seinfeld when he was here, but the timing didn’t work out. Oh, I know the last one I saw. That guy… um… what’s his name? The heavyset guy. Real pasty. He has a lot of jokes about how he looks.”

I can’t believe we’ve gotten onto this subject.

“Jim Gaffigan?” I ask.

“Yeah, that’s the guy! I saw him when he was here three or four years ago.”

“I bet that was fun,” I say, biting my tongue so hard it’s bleeding. “He’s a funny guy.”

“It was a good show,” he says. “The only thing that sucked was, when I went into the lobby, a bunch of people started coming up to me going, ‘Mr. Gaffigan! I’m such a huge fan! Can I get a selfie with you?’”

Somewhere inside me, there’s a spirit jumping for excitement, wanting to brag that I recognized the similarity from 150 feet away, when I was driving up. But he doesn’t sound thrilled about it, so I suppress the urge.

“Ehh,” I say. “I guess I can kinda see it. If I squint.”

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Memoirs of a Rideshare Driver is a series that tells true stories of my 10,000+ trips as a rideshare driver. I will post them every Monday.