Zach Galifianakis’s beard has since become indispensable, both as source material for his jokes — “When you look like I do, it’s hard to get a table for one at Chuck E. Cheese” — and as a symbol of sorts to his burgeoning fan base of young hipsters, many of whom are defiantly furry themselves. It also seems to have made him funnier. Distinctive hair, facial or otherwise, is nothing new in comedy — Chaplin’s mustache, Andrew Dice Clay’s sideburns, Carrot Top’s carrot top — but in Galifianakis’s case, it actually serves as an organizing principle for his career, a useful dividing line between his formative and mature periods. The less hirsute Galifianakis of “Late World With Zach,” “Boston Common” and “Tru Calling,” was a talented wisecrack, a perpetual adolescent, smirking his way through the conventional stations of showbiz; the post-“Late World,” fully bearded Galifianakis plies much stranger waters, and he has adjusted his exterior to match. The beard lends him a subtly beatnik air, a link to the first generation of stand-up iconoclasts, like Lord Buckley and Lenny Bruce; at the same time,it gives him a professorial quality — dare I call it a gravitas? — that makes his more meatheaded material jarringly effective. Galifianakis himself put it more succinctly: “I look like a homeless guy now. People seem to appreciate that.”

One of the people who appreciated it was Kanye West, who saw Galifianakis perform at a Hollywood club called Largo in 2007. “I was doing a bit about how much I hate celebrity egos, and that seemed to resonate with him, for some reason,” said Galifianakis, with a barely perceptible grin. “He asked me to do a video for him, and I said yes, with one condition: I just go off by myself and shoot it, and he doesn’t get to look at it until it’s done.” To everyone’s surprise, West agreed. The resulting video, in which Galifianakis and the indie-folk icon Will Oldham drive a tractor around a cornfield while lip-synching West’s hit single “Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” has been viewed nearly half a million times. “I wasn’t sure what Kanye would think of it, to be honest,” Galifianakis said. “But his response was perfect, considering how we’d first met. He said it was the best video he’d ever made.”


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