
When a pot comic quits pot, are they still a pot comic? That's a question facing 'Mr. Show' and 'Just Shoot Me' actor-comedian Brian Posehn after recently dropping the habit, a move he attributes to fatherhood and wanting to get healthy and be "clear-headed for a while."
"I quit," he told Marc Maron on his popular WTF podcast. "It's weird because I'm the pot comic. Like, I've just had to do shows talking about getting high with the audience. I said, I have to make it through this. I don't want to be this guy anymore, and I don't like the way it makes me feel."
The nerdish metal head, who most recently played half of a gay couple on 'The Sarah Silverman Program,' taped the podcast a while back and said on Twitter this week that he's "three months in and feeling better."
Why would one of the nation's most popular pot comics, others include Doug Benson, Jim Breuer and Bill Maher, give up something that has peppered his stand-up for years?
"I wanna get healthy, but also I don't want to have that talk [with his child]," he said. "That's part of it, but then uh, I also hated who I was. I hated that that became my thing."
He also said that when his wife became pregnant, smoking pot became an outside activity and being relegated to the backyard helped him turn a corner. "Once it became this outside thing ... that's the beginning of the end for me when I decided I needed to stop this thing."
Quitting pot, it was actually easier for me to become a vegetarian ... you know, quitting meat. Because your friends never show up at your house with a sack of beef. Going 'Dude, twist up a link, Star Trek is on.' I have to quit smoking though, because I can't write jokes when I'm high. I always think I wrote the most genius joke of my life. The next morning no fail I'm looking at a cocktail napkin that says 'chicken monkey.'"
Posehn, 44, told Maron that he knew that being that "rebel" pot guy was part of his reputation that he simply held onto to it for longer than he should. He went to AA and not NA, "because those guys have real problems ... I do feel better. I feel like a cloud's lifting, but it's taking a while. I'm cranky a bit."
Maron, who has been sober for years, gave Posehn a verbal pat on the back, but he joke-warned, "talk to me six months from now when back right in it."
"I just wanna be clear-headed for a while. I have some stuff I need to do."