A can’t-miss regular on the Chelsea Lately round table, staff writer — and self-appointed “staff homosexual” — Guy Branum also shows off his pop-culture savvy and shameless salaciousness for Comedians of Chelsea Lately, a live stand-up comedy tour starring the rotating panelists on Chelsea Handler’s late-night E! talk show. The abundant Branum (who performs at the Warfield in San Francisco December 5 and at the Grove of Anaheim in Anaheim, Calif., December 6) gives Advocate.com the skinny on how to craft a good gay joke and why his bombshell boss doesn't love you as much as Kathy Griffin.

Advocate.com: You recently celebrated a birthday. Judging from the drunk e-mail I got from you that night, I’m guessing you had fun.
Guy Branum: I cannot tell you how obliterated I was. I turned 34 on a Thursday, so I totally went to TigerHeat at Avalon, the trashy and amazing 18-and-over night in L.A., where I listened to pop music, got shit-faced, and talked to people who were born when I was in high school. I also drunk-texted Chelsea, but she always deals very well with my drunk texts. I’m the sort of guy for whom five or more drinks can result in some sort of existential revelation or just deeply needing to tell people how much I love them, so she generally gets one or both of those texts. She’s a great boss, and Chelsea Lately really is like one big family.

Before Chelsea Lately you wrote for shows on TechTV, which was later absorbed by G4— a network devoted to technology, the Internet, and video games. Was that a gay-friendly environment?
Nerds can be socially awkward, but they’re smart and open-minded, so I was very comfortable in that situation. I also had to do crowd warm-up for a bad talk show I worked for called Unscrewed With Martin Sargent, and all I had were butt sex jokes. Pretty soon my sexual tastes were something my coworkers could come listen to any day. Our audience was primarily 15-year-old boys, so I got to have cool moments where I could reach kids who’d never been exposed to gay people. One time I was playing World of Warcraft with a teenager from the South who thought my job was the coolest thing in the world. He was making homophobic comments, and we talked about why he shouldn’t say those things. It was nice to bear witness to him about homosexuality — to use the vocabulary of evangelical Christianity.