Biography

Quit drinking alcohol in 2003.

Son of bowling Hall of Famer Billy Hardwick.

Studied philosophy at UCLA

Hardwick met a struggling comedienne, Joan Rivers, where he and his family went to see her do an opening act for Rivers's own mentor Johnny Carson, in Las Vegas, Nevada, when Hardwick was just a little boy. They were friends for 39 years, until her death in 2014.

Was engaged to Jacinda Barrett.

[on quitting drinking] Ultimately, it's the best decision I've ever made in my life. There's an economy of energy that you have in your life. You just have to devote it to things that are good for you, for the most part, that's more constructive than drinking. And one of them doesn't end in uncontrollable vomiting and crying...The first thing I noticed about sobriety? I lost about 20 pounds within a couple of months. I started getting compliments. This was highly motivating. Years later, and through much therapy, I would come to discover all of the really bad things (as opposed to weight gain) alcoholism caused, like anxiety, paranoia, and perpetual emotional infancy.

[on why he quit drinking] When I was 22, I got a job working as co-host of Singled Out (1995), MTV's mass human-fluid transfer experiment. It was a weird accident, and had I been mentally prepared to handle the responsibility, it would have been a good thing. But the erroneous lesson that I learned from getting hired at MTV was "work just falls into your lap." What followed were several years of laziness, drinking, and fuck-ups on my part. This "woo-hoo par-tay" attitude piloted my brain through my twenties as I tried desperately to ditch the scared, wienerly nerd I had always been to fit in with the "cool kids," whoever those oft-referred-to assholes are. Three years after the MTV gig ended, I was doing stand-up full-time and unwittingly tripped over my 30th birthday. It was at this first mortality mile-marker that I began to look around at my life: I was consuming a baby elephant's weight in alcohol every day. I lived in a shitty apartment near UCLA (where I had gone to school-apparently I had become that dude who wouldn't leave), my apartment was always a mess, I had ruined my credit, and I had no real work prospects. I had become what I'd always dreaded being-the fat, drunk guy who used to be on television. Back when I was working at MTV (which oddly, at one time, aired short films set to popular music), people used to talk about an MTV curse-that you might not "hit it any bigger" after your time there. I always recoiled at the thought of this curse, and here I was taking active steps every fucking day to make it happen... I knew that I had two choices: I could continue living the way I was living and die pickled and unemployed, or make sweeping changes with the hope of salvaging my life.

[on his lifelong friendship with comedienne Joan Rivers]: I'd gotten to be friends with Joan; who I adored. I actually got to see Joan, over for Johnny Carson; when I was a kid in Las Vegas. My parents took me, I was like 4 years old; it was like 'Let's go to Vegas,' like I was. We were there and met her there and I got to be friends with her, again, a couple of years ago.

[Who talked about being influenced by: Mel Brooks and Joan Rivers]: That's what I noticed, is that when we've had performers on who are a bit older and maybe they're people who haven't done as much in recent years or they don't really want to be performing anymore, they don't ask those kinds of questions because they don't care. But Joan was the same way. In fact, I'm having lunch with Joan next week to talk about digital media. And she and Mel, they're people who want to figure it out. Larry King was another one, too. They want to figure it out, and those are the people that will keep creating because they don't push the world away or say, 'Well, this other way was really comfortable, so this new way is dumb.' They say, 'All right, so there's a paradigm shift, and we want to figure out how to be a part of it.' That's very inspiring because everything's changing so fast, and the media landscape's going to look a lot different even five years from now. If you care about this stuff, it will never end.

[Of Joan Rivers]: Joan is any comedienne; who is worth their weight in jokes; loves (as far as I'm concerned) Joan Rivers. I saw her when I was a kid, and she is a tireless performer, 79-years-old and still performs, every week, and flies back and forth to LA to do 'Fashion Police'. It's just .... she's a comic's comic; she's a comic's comic.