This is the Comedian Who We Most Want To Play Santa Claus in a Christmas Movie

Playing St. Nicholas in a hit, family-friendly Christmas comedy movie this century shouldn’t be the exclusive privilege of Ed Asner and a convicted cocaine trafficker.

It sure seems like it’s been a while since we got a smash-hit, Santa-centric Christmas comedy film that showcased the talents of a stand-up comedian who is primarily known for entertaining adults – at least, that’s the impression I get as a childless Millennial who only goes to the theater for a PG movie when it has the Pixar logo on the poster. Back when I was growing up, Christmas meant Will Ferrell skipping around New York City in Elf, or Jim Carrey enduring literal torture to become the Grinch, or Tim Allen committing contractually binding Christmas Eve manslaughter in The Santa Clause.

The struggling movie business is overdue for a blockbuster Christmas comedy, and the first step in assembling such a festive hit is to find the right A-list comedian to play Santa Claus. To that end, I would like to submit stand-up star Jim Gaffigan for the role of Ol’ Kris Kringle – so long as he’s okay with substituting milk and cookies for his Mounjaro.

Now, to be fair, Gaffigan does have a bit of a head start in our movie Santa sweepstakes – he's played the role of the jolly old elf twice on TV already, first in the Muppets holiday bash “Once Upon a Sesame Street Christmas” and then in the animated CBS special “Reindeer in Here.” However, what we're looking for here is not so much a safe, sanitized, broadcast TV take on Gaffigan playing Santa, but a full-on, self-deprecating, stand-up persona Santa Claus on the big screen – not even straight to streaming will suffice.

Think about it – roughly half of what we know about Santa Claus is food-related, between the aforementioned milk and cookies tribute and the jiggling “bowl full of jelly” stomach that hundreds of millions of milk-and-cookies meals would naturally produce. Gaffigan has spent his entire career joking about food on stage, and who's to say that eggnog and gingerbread won't be his next Hot Pockets?

Plus, as a father of five, Gaffigan has always (mostly) played clean, and he presumably knows how to make kids laugh with his famous, airy, high-pitched other-person voice, which, in our project, will probably represent Mrs. Claus more often than not.

The most successful depictions of Santa Claus in comedy movies aren't the ones that perfectly imitate the mall version of the myth with his booming “Ho ho ho” and the twinkle in his eye. Audiences like it when Santa is a little off-kilter, either when he's a divorced dad just trying to get through the holidays, as in Allen's case, or when he canonically knows what went on in all those Times Square porn theaters back in the day, as did Asner's Santa.

Gaffigan would bring a sarcastic, self-aware, observational edge to the most important role in holiday cinema that we feel is desperately needed now more than ever, with so few fun-for-the-hole-family Christmas movies coming out. However, if he did land the role, he'd probably have to clean up his routine about the Christmas tree: