For Billy Gardell, a career as a stand-up comedian was really just the beginning. He stars with Melissa McCarthy on the hit sitcom Mike and Molly. The 45-year-old hosts television’s Monopoly Millionaires’ Club and is in a new movie, Dancer and the Dame, available on DVD now. 

Q: You have so much going on. I’m presuming you are making enough that you don’t have to work so hard.

A: That’s the Pittsburgher in me. You’ve got to work like you don’t have a job. You keep working while you can work.

Q: At what point did you know you were funny enough to go on stage?

A: You know, my humor comes from that Pittsburgh mentality that is just don’t take yourself too seriously. The other thing that I always saw in Pittsburgh with my dad and his buddies was we are an industry town — or we were — but we’re still a hard-working town. To get through a hard day’s work, a little levity helps. I think Pittsburgh is great at that. [laughing]

Q: Did you ever have an incident during stand-up or at another point in your career where you thought this is not going work?

A: Usually you live and die as a stand-up by your last show. I had to spend many an hour re-evaluating what it exactly it was I was doing with my life. [laughing] It’s usually after you bomb terribly. On the good nights, you think, “Oh, I will do this for the rest of my life.”

What happens is, once you have been doing it for 15 years, you realize you don’t have a choice. This is your gig because what are you going to put on a resume? I’ve been making funny noises and telling jokes for 15 years. You are in too far.

Q: You have really taken off. Did you find the transition pretty easy into acting?

A: I have been very lucky, very blessed. Yeah, you know I have a great cast, and I learned a lot from them. I got to do some stuff early on in my career that kind of built up to that. I would say working with [executive producer] Jimmy Burrows during the first two years of Mike and Molly was a huge help. He really, really took me under his wing.

Q: A lot of comedians talk about a dark side. Is there a deep darkness or is it all joy?

A: I think at one point there was. Yeah, man, I came from a broken home. My mom was divorced a couple times so we had to go through a couple stepfathers and be separated from my dad. I don’t think any life doesn't have a little bit of rain. We certainly had ours, and it affected my comedy early on.

In your early 20s, you don’t know why you are mad, but you think you are supposed to be mad. As life kind of unfolds, then you you see where you’re at and things are OK. I started to come to a kind of a gratitude that I had a wife and a child, and I’ve been able to do this for a living my whole life.

Q: Because you are doing Monopoly Millionaires’ Club and have guest hosted talk shows, I was wondering if you would ever want to do a talk show?

A: That is one thing that I would love to do. I got to guest host The Late, Late Show. I really enjoyed it. It fit like a glove. If that were ever to present itself, I would absolutely do it.

Block News Alliance consists of The Blade and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Patricia Sheridan is a reporter for the Post-Gazette.

First Published June 19, 2015, 4:00 a.m.