Julie Bowen Didn’t Think She Was Funny Enough for ‘Modern Family’: “I Can’t Tell a Joke”

Julie Bowen didn’t think she was funny enough to land Modern Family, the actress said this week.

“I was like, ‘I can’t tell a joke, I’m not funny,” Bowen recalled during an appearance on The Three Questions with Andy Richter.

The actress played Claire Dunphy on Modern Family, which ran for 11 seasons from 2009 to 2020 and is widely regarded as one of this century’s best sitcoms. As a result, Bowen is well-known for her comedy chops today.

Nevertheless, the actress almost didn’t audition for the role. At the time she told her team, “Don’t give me those three-jokes-a-page kind of things.”

Luckily, her managers pushed back and told her, “You know what? Helen Hunt isn’t funny.” Hunt charmed audiences as Jamie in Mad About You, which ran for seven seasons in the 1990s and then returned for an eighth in 2019.

“I said, ‘[Helen Hunt] just won like five Emmys,” Bowen recalled, to which her managers responded, “Yes. So she’s funny in a different way. She’s not three-jokes-a-page funny. And yet she is wildly funny. Try to be Helen Hunt.”

When Richter said that Bowen must have eventually found her funny bone, she said: “You’ll notice I didn’t do too many jokes. I fell down a lot.”

The actress went on to say she felt she was better on dramedy shows, like Ed. “Ed was during when dramedy was a thing,” she said. “There was like Ally McBeal at the time. These were hourlongs with like, where there’d be big fighting scenes and then there’d be nice warm, funny scenes. And all things could exist at once. That was a long time ago, and it’s not the same anymore.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Bowen also shared that she was sure she wouldn’t get the Modern Family job because she was pregnant when she auditioned. “I didn’t think I got Modern Family because I was so pregnant,” she said. “I was testing for two pilots, and I wanted Modern Family, but the other show, the character was pregnant. And I was like, ‘I’ve got a shot at that one.’”