Episode 1680 - Christopher Guest

All right, let's do this.

How are you, what the fuckers?

What the fuck, buddies?

What the fuck, Nicks?

What's happening?

I'm Mark Maron.

This is my podcast.

Welcome to it.

How's everybody doing?

Grim times.

I don't know.

I don't really

keep up with social media that much.

I don't know what's going on on TikTok or Threads or Facebook or Twitter.

I don't, I really don't.

I do engage with Instagram a bit.

I do poke around a bit

there to see what's going on elsewhere.

Sometimes I generally read the news.

But

I don't really, I am out of the loop.

sort of day to day

with a lot of what's trending or infecting the minds of the masses.

I'm not really on YouTube.

I don't know if it's an old man thing.

I don't know if it's

a zero fucks thing.

I don't know if it's just how I budget my time,

but

I'm just not

on the pulse of all that, though it did come to my attention somehow through this or that

that the

rapture is happening tomorrow, which, yeah, on some level, pretty exciting.

I mean, that's sort of a big day.

I guess that's when all the believers just kind of rocket into the sky like, you know, lit fireworks and,

you know, kind of zoom up to heaven.

I'm not sure where it leaves the rest of us, but I don't guess it can be any worse than where we are right now.

And I have to assume that with a lot of those people raptured up,

it might be relatively pleasant for, you know, for as long as whatever's supposed to happen down here to happen.

I, you know, what can we do?

You know, the rapture's out of our hands.

But I think some things that may be in our hands

are what's happening in terms of just blatant authoritarianism and

fascism, which go hand in hand.

I believe the government is sort of a...

authoritarian operation beneath Trump, who's just a godless autocratic monster.

It's kind of a symbiotic, perfect storm of a fucking nightmare politically.

And the administration being driven by the 2025 guys is, you know, they've put jack boots on Jesus and

it's unfolding into a very, you know, very efficient and

frightening authoritarian driven fascist operation.

And I spoke about this a bit, and I don't see any reason not to continue speaking about it.

That anybody who's dismissing the firing of Jimmy Kimmel as a business decision, that's a shallow point of view.

Sure, ABC, owned by Disney, made a decision to take Jimmy off the air, but this is how

corporate entities who are not people

capitulate to

government strong arming, this government being fundamentally authoritarian.

So you can say it was a business decision, and you can say that late night was dying, and you can say that

network TV is dying, all that to be true.

But what is more sort of frightening is that the corporate entities that represented show business are

no longer have strength.

They're competing against streaming,

and they capitulate.

So, in an optimistic view, if by some miracle of corporate democracy, these corporations stand up to this administration and fight for what is really the freedom of speech,

maybe we have hope.

But

I've not known corporations to operate at the behest of democracy.

They do at the consumer.

And I guess some of these boycotts of Hulu and Disney are maybe making an impact.

I don't know what will happen to Jimmy, but the bottom line is

that this was strong-arming from an authoritarian administration to shut him up and to make an example of him for anybody who speaks out against the administration.

And as a comic and as somebody who believes in the First Amendment, the only part of the First Amendment that this administration,

through

their

policy and through the people within it, seem to defend are the words, shut the fuck up.

And behind that is the power to implement shut the fuck upness.

Now for democracy to work in this one, the response to shut the fuck up is

go fuck yourself, fuck you.

Now without being able to have the go fuck yourself, fuck you response to shut the fuck up, we just get, you know, enforced shut the fuck upness, and that is not democracy and

historically and from my point of view there's a lot of fuck you in art there's a lot of fuck you in satire there's a lot of fuck you in painting there's a lot of fuck you in theater there's a lot of fuck you in music these are the arts that you know stand up to uh fascist bullshit in one form or another i'm not saying all art some of it's just pretty and the stifling of these voices of fuck you or hey this is you know i'm out here on the edge of fucking human understanding and consciousness and creativity I'm a fucking astronaut of art just because you don't understand it or it makes you uncomfortable you're going to see it as some sort of leftist plot or you're going to shut it up I mean accommodating the the sort of most shallow least sophisticated least interesting most boring among us because they're uncomfortable with people who aren't like them or art doesn't kind of fall into

the parameters of what they understand, which is forest paintings or AI-generated Trump masterpieces.

The more we accommodate that, the more we're going to homogenize into some thoroughly fascist country on one level and just frighten people who are afraid to explore.

And if you start sort of demonizing the arts because you don't understand it or it threatens your way of thinking, then what the fuck do we have?

I mean, it's look, this is what's happening.

This is the portal they're using, the death of Charlie Kirk, to stifle all voices of resistance.

And that's, you know, straight up authoritarian bullshit.

Already many people are afraid to say, fuck you, to shut the fuck up.

But, you know, if it becomes

enforced, you know, no more fuck you're to our shut the fuck up.

We're, you know, it's over.

Now, look,

I'm not sitting here with big solutions or big hopes, and I guess you just have to fight for it any way you can.

On a lighter note, today I talked to Christopher Guest, very funny guy.

I've tried to have him on for years.

Anytime he had a project,

I would try to have him on.

It just never happened.

All it took was for his wife, Jamie Lee Curtis, to say, give him a call uh and it happened he came over you guys know him from the movies he wrote and directed like Waiting for Guffman Best in Show A Mighty Wind and of course he's been part of Spinal Tap for more than 40 years.

There's a new Spinal Tap movie.

He's here and we had a very pleasant talk.

I got a couple of names wrong, but he corrects me.

That's just old.

Just oldness.

The oldness coming through.

The documentary about me, Are We Good, opens on October 3rd in New York and Los Angeles with special screenings around the country on October 5th and October 8th.

Go to arewegoodmarin.com to see where it's playing, get tickets.

And there's still a couple of weeks to pre-order the graphic novel WTF is a podcast on Kickstarter.

And here's the deal with that.

If we get enough pre-order to push the Kickstarter past 200 grand, Box Brown is going to create a special what the fuck trading card featuring me and the original Garage Cats.

And that will be sent to everyone who pre-ordered the book through Kickstarter.

If it reaches $250,000, grand, we're going to make a frame set of four different cards for every person who ordered a book.

Go to z2comics.com/slash WTF.

I also, I just saw

one battle after another.

I went to a small screening.

I just, I wanted to see it.

I was willing to wait, but I went to a very intimate screening in a relatively small screening room, and I'm ready to see it again tomorrow on fucking IMAX.

What a goddamn movie.

I'll try to to get a few words in about it after I tell you a little bit about,

okay, let's do this.

When you think of home security, what do you think of?

Probably some sensors on your doors, an alarm, maybe some cameras inside your house.

But here's the thing: those all come into play after someone breaks into your house.

That's a reactive approach.

We've recommended Simply Safe on WTF for years because they take a proactive approach.

Simply Safe is designed to stop crime before it happens on your property.

SimplySafe's active guard outdoor protection uses AI-powered cameras that can identify a potential threat like someone lurking on your property.

SimplySafe's professional monitoring agents can use two-way audio to confront the intruder, letting them know they're being watched on camera and that police are on their way.

That's real security.

And SimplySafe is so confident in what they do.

There are no long-term contracts or hidden fees.

You can cancel any time.

Right now, you can get 50% off their new SimplySafe system with professional monitoring and your first month free at simply safe.com slash WTF.

That's simply safe.com slash WTF for 50% off and your first month free.

SimplySafe.com slash WTF.

There's no safe like SimplySafe.

I wanted to add to the First Amendment discussion that as a comic doing club work,

I see a lot of comics still, you know, speaking very freely and pushing back and doing the funny that

is in the name of fuck you, in the name of of resistance, in the name of satire.

These are

the tools that the comic, the satirist, the humorist, the playwright,

the artists have, you know, to keep power in check.

You know, with no checks and balances anymore in terms of the norms that have been destroyed.

within the government itself, you require voices of resistance and fuck you-ness and funny to be a check on power.

I mean, now that none are left, if you take away the speech of those individuals courageous enough to do a funny kind of, you know, go fuck yourself with that intention, like, look, this is why this is wrong.

This is what's really happening.

This is who you are, this is who we are, that, you know, you lose one of the last bastions of

a check on power is artists, comedians, playwrights, musicians.

Once you start fucking shutting them up, there's no check.

And this is not a reliable check.

This is not like

some sort of

means to balance power within the government.

Those have all been destroyed through single-party rule.

But we're out here in the trenches of being human, you know, with a lot of fuck you and us.

And, you know, it's frightening.

I mean, are they going to start putting National Guard troops in comedy clubs?

I mean, the comedy store, you know, you can put, they put the phones in the bags so you can release what you want to release if you record yourself.

But you don't have a bunch of rats in the audience looking to start shit with your words, you should still have some control over that.

But that's the whole other thing.

All these platforms by which everyone thinks they have the freedom to say whatever they want, corporate owned and

completely vulnerable to government interference and control of algorithms.

All right, look, it's a bigger conversation.

It's not really my wheelhouse on some level, but I'm trying to keep abreast of the situation.

And, you know, I'm just trying to keep, go fuck yourself, fuck you.

You know, a healthy answer to shut the fuck up in America.

One battle after another.

Paul Thomas Anderson's new movie is spectacular.

It's got a fucking great pace.

It's rooted in the Thomas Pynchon book, Vineland.

So it's got a lot of that great Pynchon-esque, satirical kind of writing and names and ideas.

On a deep level, this is a satire, but in terms of balancing the humor of the thing,

it's not prescient, it's happening.

So there is a terrible core of this movie that is very reflective of the culture we're living in.

Though much of it is funny and framed as funny, if you look at the situations and the language,

that

the kind of balance between funny and just abject terror because of its representation of what we are very close to in terms of a police state.

It's a very provocative balance.

And Paul Thomas Anderson pulls it off.

I think, you know, drawing from Pynchon more directly in Inherent Vice, which I watched a while ago, which is also a hilarious satire.

of a different time, you know, he's kind of perfected it now through the pace, the music, the characters,

the framing.

I mean, it's just

a stunning film that just kind of keeps punching.

And the performances are great, but it is

foreboding

because it is a reality we're very close to living in, if not already there.

And the humor is good.

It's enough.

And it still packs a punch.

I've got nothing negative to say about this movie.

It's essential watching, and it will be used by right-wing ideologues as an example of a truth about

left-leaning resistance.

Mark my words on that.

Go see it, though.

It's spectacular.

I'm going to go see it again.

I'll wait to talk about it again until everyone else goes and sees it.

Okay, you guys.

Chris Guest is here, and it was an honor to talk to him because he's important in the history of modern comedy and he's a great guy and he's brilliantly funny.

Spinal Tap 2, The End Continues, is now in theaters.

And this is me talking to Chris.

i'm going to open this now so i don't

i've never had one of these really even though it's our one of our it's you know it's it's just water it is well we did this commercial where

we say it's beer yeah and they say no it's not it's not beer

it's beer it's what it's beer yeah no it's not it's not beer it's water.

Is it p

w l lager?

It's not beer.

Not any kind of beer.

That went on for a while.

So, no.

Anyway, they didn't.

I have not seen it yet.

I have to see it.

Are you mad about that?

I can't say I'm mad about it.

No.

Yeah.

I just haven't.

I've been doing it.

No, I don't really.

I do things.

Yeah.

And then I d move on.

I do other things, you know.

Yeah?

But you don't get preoccupied with the reaction?

No, I don't read anything about show business.

I haven't since 19 early 80s what what turned you off to that

i didn't

i just didn't like it what i didn't like any part about it i don't read anything about show business i read

period i read other things i read books i play a lot of music um every day yeah record several times a week i was recording today

when you um this thing like it's

this is not going to help you in any way no i you know people ask about that.

You know, the old garage was cluttered with stuff, and then when I moved into this more sterile environment, I had to pick some of the clutter.

There is some sort of backstory on that.

I bet it's not that interesting.

Well, it was never

my hammer.

Oh,

the backstory on the knife is, you know, I had a person who, it's not even sharp.

I'll take this one, though.

Yeah, go ahead, take the knife and take whatever you want.

Except for, well, you know, you can have whatever you want.

So the music thing, though, now, are you in a situation where you have too many guitars?

Well,

I have been giving away guitars for 30 years.

I started getting guitars in 1966.

Okay.

And I started playing in a band probably then.

Yeah.

And

over the years I've had a lot.

But then I figured I didn't want to sell them.

I wanted to give them away to musicians I knew that couldn't get really good guitars.

So I've given away some

really crazy

ass.

What was the one that you picked up and said?

I'm giving one away.

Well, I had a friend come to my house a few years ago, and he is one of the great players in the world today, and he played everything, and then he got to this one, and he said, ah, uh-oh.

I said, yeah, that's pretty great.

And so I thought about it, and he left town.

I thought, he needs to have this because he is

probably the great guitar player in the last 50 years, I would say.

Who is it?

A person I know.

He said, he's a jazz player.

Okay.

And I gave it to him.

And what was it?

It was a 1955 Les Paul Goldtop.

Oh, with the P90s?

P90s that I had bought for $500 in 1981.

Oh, that's like my dream guitar.

Les Paul signed it for me.

I played with him on a T V show.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

And it was a great, is a great guitar.

And he plays it

at gigs.

Yeah.

Not solely, but it's one of his guitars that he plays.

Specific sound, that P90 sound?

All of my, well,

most of my guitars have P90s.

Oh, but do you play them?

I like them because they get dirty.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we've toured, you know, for the last 40 years in this guise of these odd people that we created.

And so we've been fortunate to play big tours at big venues, Wembley and Carnegie Hall, and Albert Hall and the rest, Carnegie Hall.

And so I've taken typically 12 to 15 guitars on the road in our shows.

And then you finish and you say, well, I don't really need six of these.

I'll give them to people.

And I have.

I'm now if I can get rid of another six or eight, I'll be good.

Yeah?

Yeah.

I want to take, like, there's a few that I got for free here and there.

None of them are classic.

But I just like to consolidate and take in a lot of the stuff that I don't really use, but I just have, and to get like one thing that I really want.

Which is like, well, I'd like to get a real gold top.

I have a reissue of a 56 over there from Gibson that fell down and the headstock broke off.

Yeah, that happens.

And it's on there good now.

We did a good bonding and it still plays plays well.

But to have a real one would be great.

Like, yeah.

Well, you can.

I can have one.

You can get one.

I know.

I don't know where to go exactly.

Maybe

I can help you.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

And just because

I've got a Les Paul custom back there that's not old.

And I've got that old Vibroverb amp over there.

I could get rid of that.

And like these, I like.

That's a 73 Telly Deluxe.

That's a 61 Les Paul Jr.

This FJN, I think, has been altered, but that's sort of a nice acoustic.

But like, yeah.

I had a 56 Les Paul Jr.,

like that one.

Yeah.

And I played that for a long time.

And I played it actually in the first Spinal Tap film.

I played that.

And then I gave that to a friend.

And

most of my guitars are kind of super

good, I guess.

Yeah.

Which is nice.

And you've had them forever.

I've had some of them for a very, very long time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

again, I play them virtually every day.

I go through probably four of them in a day.

Wow.

Every day.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What's the pract, wait, like what kind of music are you practicing?

What's your practice?

Are you concerned with

I'm not concerned is the first key.

And I heard you speaking about this.

Well, I don't know if it was recent.

I don't know the date of that.

But it affected me because you sounded

as if there was anxiety about playing, about performing,

which I understand.

I guess I've been doing it for so long, it hasn't been really

a thing.

I've had

fortunately been able to go out and do these things.

But I can recognize what that is because I've played with enough people where you feel that.

It's not practice necessarily in scales or anything else.

I do that occasionally.

It's mostly thinking of a song that I want to record, a random song,

and then laying down all the tracks.

So I'll put down the piano part first, and then I'll put down guitars, mandolins, mandola, mandocello, then I'll put down electric guitar, acoustic guitar, and then put in string parts, and then the next day I'll say, don't like the violas, I'm taking them away.

And that's what it is.

And it's only for me.

It's not for anyone else.

Just to sit there at the end of it all and go, like, this is nice.

It's not even the end of it all, I'm hoping.

Yeah.

Because then I have to check, I have some lunch things I have to do.

But let me know if you've heard something that I.

Well,

we can check the news.

It's probably debatable.

And I don't, I mean, you're in a world where you are active in a sense.

I, in what I do, whatever that is, I'm not on any social media.

I don't read, again, about the business.

I really wouldn't know anything unless someone told me by

accident.

Someone told me...

Well, they'll say, da-da-da-da-da.

I mean, literally, da-da-da-da.

And I'll say, oh, I didn't know that.

I don't keep looped in as much as

I could, I guess.

But I mean, at some point, I mean, I love the movie The Big Picture.

Ah, okay.

You're allowed.

Yeah.

And

that was before the improvisational movies, correct?

Or had you done either?

We had done tap.

Right.

Yes.

But it seems to me that you had a pretty, like you talk about not checking in with show business, but there was a time where you lived within it.

Well, I was doing things, but I wasn't playing the other part of it.

If this is, this may or may not be interesting to people, but it's kind of a fluke beginning, which was, I think I was 21 or two, and a friend of a friend said,

they're starting this magazine.

I was living in New York.

Yeah.

And

maybe you could write something for them.

And that magazine was the National Lampoon.

It was the first year of the magazine, 1970.

And I wrote a piece with a friend who was my

which guy?

His name was Tom Leopold.

Yeah.

He's a comedian.

And you're just living in New York?

Living in New York.

I was going to the School of the Arts.

It's now called Something Excellent.

Tisch?

Yeah, right.

Now it's called Tisch.

Okay.

And I was in school with Michael McKean, and we were writing songs beginning in 1967 together.

Yeah.

And so I started writing for them and they said, yeah, well,

and I said,

not understanding how things work maybe, I said, oh yeah, we'll write.

And they published the thing.

It was the first year.

I said, what I think I really do is I write music.

I do voices and things.

And they said, oh, sure.

Well, then we'll build a studio.

I said, great.

So they built a 16-track studio.

Lampoon did.

Sure.

Yeah.

And they said, and you can basically do whatever you want.

And then we're going to have a radio show.

And you can do whatever you want.

I said, great.

So no one ever said no

from the very beginning, which is not necessarily a good thing because you would then think you're going to get slapped down pretty hard.

But I didn't really get slapped down all that hard because I did a lot of plays in New York and I had started something where I had control of everything, virtually everything.

The National Lampoon Radio Hour?

The Radio Hour, the show Lemmings, which I co-wrote with some of the other Lampoon people.

And this is 72?

That was 73, maybe?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then more albums.

We did, I think, six albums.

But let's talk about that for a second because, like, for me, the National Lampoon was a brain-changing magazine.

That when I was a kid, because I'm, what am I?

61?

I'm going to be 62 in a week.

Yeah, well, I could be your dad.

Well, not quite.

Well, if I was.

If you had me when you were 10?

No, no, no.

If I had you when I was 16.

Yeah, I could be your dad.

So, yeah.

If I had a weird weekend, let's say.

Well, it wouldn't have been that.

A great weekend.

That wouldn't even, honestly, no, things were pretty good.

It could happen when I was 16.

But

I grew up in the crashing wave of what happened in the 70s.

Sure.

So, you know, picking up on the lampoon and then going back and getting back issues, mad-magging the lampoon, listening to lemmings.

Yeah.

Like, it was, and Robert Crumb.

These were important things

developing what it was.

It was a big change in

It was an explosion.

And I just happened to be in this place.

And we would walk around the East Village, McKean and I, in 67, 68.

And this is after he's done with Carnegie Mellon or whatever?

Yes, he had left there.

He was there for a year.

Was with Alan, right?

With

the actor, Dave Lander.

Dave, Dave, yeah.

He had left also,

as did Loudoun Wainwright.

He left also.

And we then ended up in the same very serious acting school.

Very serious.

And they had said to me, I had auditioned.

Yeah.

And they said, I was 18 or whatever.

They said, are you willing to give your blood for the theater?

And I thought, give my fucking blood?

Yeah.

What are you talking about?

I'm 18.

I was hoping to meet girls.

Yeah.

And do some weird stuff that I didn't even know I was going to do yet.

My blood.

And I was so intimidated intimidated by that that I went to Bard College for a year and then thought.

Where is that, New Hampshire?

No, it's in upper state New York.

Well, it's just up the Hudson Way.

Then

I didn't ever think I'm going to give my blood for the theater.

I thought maybe this was better.

So I then ended up being at NYU and writing with McKean, and we'd walk around the East Village, and buildings were painted in psychedelic colors, and people were wearing mime makeup, and 90% of the people were tripping.

So they were walking around holding fake flowers that weren't even there and watering the sidewalk where there was nothing.

And I just thought, hmm, it wasn't my thing, actually.

I didn't really do that.

Not directly.

I may have been the only person who was watching this unfold in front of me.

But McKean and I would basically do what we did then 50 years later, which was whatever that was.

We would start a running thing at,

he crashed in my apartment because he'd broken up with his girlfriend.

We would would start at 8 in the morning, this thing.

Yeah.

And we were making each other laugh by 8.15, and it wouldn't stop.

And we thought, there's no name for what this is.

It could have been annoying to other people, I suppose.

But we found it fun

improvising.

And doing music.

And doing music and writing songs and playing.

And yeah.

So it seemed like it was quite fun.

So the Lampoon guys,

like, who was at the helm of Lampoon at the beginning?

Well, when I was there, the head really was Henry Beard.

Sean Kelly became a very big part of what I did because he wrote lyrics to the songs that I wrote.

He was a brilliant guy, huh?

He was great.

And

he was great.

I know his son's a writer.

Yes, Chris.

Yeah.

Taffer.

Yeah.

He was.

Yes, he was great.

And Henry was great.

And Tony Hendra?

Yep.

O'Donoghue was there.

O'Donoghue.

And again, this was was walking into this thing every day, and people would look at each other.

And it was like gunfight at O.K.

Corral.

So we walk in and look at each other.

At the magazine.

Yeah.

And then the look was

a gunfight.

Yeah.

A verbal gunfight.

Yeah.

And that's how you generated stuff.

I thought this is not even close to being a problem here.

This is

don't.

Just don't.

Don't what?

Don't even start.

Don't even start.

Because

whatever I do is essentially verbal.

I don't sit down.

I write outlines.

Eugene Levy and I have done a bunch of movies that we wrote, but essentially we write an outline for six months.

But then we are doing this movie where we are talking with no rehearsal.

We are just talking.

But the outline is pretty thorough.

Very thorough.

And is that the way the radio hour worked too?

Well, for me, after I wrote that one article, I started doing the records and the radio show, and that was improvised.

Yeah.

And Lemmings was all improvised?

No, no, no.

We had to write that because that was eight days, eight shows a week, and that was a thing.

No, that would have been

maybe more fun.

I don't know.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: But I mean,

did you feel like, was there

an agenda?

Was there a manifesto to the humor, or was it just to push the envelope?

I would say pushing the envelope was mainly the thing.

And that famous cover of The Dog with the Gun.

The gun, yeah.

That shows the sort of, oh, yeah.

And people were shocked by a lot of that stuff.

That wasn't my humor, by the way.

Much of that was not my humor.

Whatever I did there was what I thought was amusing, I guess at the time.

It may or may not have been.

But

I didn't subscribe to that

pushing that just to push that.

That was like Michael O'Donoghue.

That was mainly O'Donoghue.

It wasn't Sean's thing.

It wasn't Doug Kenney's thing, for that matter.

It wasn't Henry Beard's thing.

There was a group of people who thought, we'll just keep pushing this and we'll do,

see how far, and nobody ever said,

get out of here.

They never did.

So we were just, they kept doing it.

I guess, well, there was a balance to it.

You had a couple of those guys and a couple of guys who were just being funny.

I guess.

Yeah.

And when you did Lemmings in the radio hour, all this talent that later went on to become fairly significant guys, you're all just a bunch of kids, really.

I was 22.

Yeah.

It's so so crazy because it's mythic.

Well, it's mythic.

It wasn't mythic at the time.

It wasn't mythic, obviously.

In retrospect, we were just given the keys to this thing where they paid us to do whatever we wanted to do.

And that was unusual.

But isn't it amazing that so many of those people

at that time, just by coincidence, turned out to have the talent and the longevity to remote money?

I guess looking back on it, and 80% of them are dead, by the way.

Is that true?

Sure.

I think about that a lot.

I think because I'm older and

I think

on my fingers,

I think,

yeah,

easily 80% are dead.

I think, oh.

Well, I guess it happens.

Dead.

Well, it does happen.

Apparently.

Dead, dead, and dead.

Yeah.

So a lot of dead, but that is what happens.

But with that specific group group of people,

it's a high percentage.

Aaron Ross Powell,

well, a lot of them were living hard.

A few went down because of that, but not as the other thing is just dead.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm not a doctor.

I should have explained that before I came on because you looked at me in a kind of reverential way when I walked in to suggest that I somehow had like a degree in medicine.

In life.

And I didn't want to burst your bubble in the first five minutes.

Well, I appreciate that.

And I really don't know that much about it any more than you would or anyone else who didn't go to medicine.

But they are dead.

I do know that.

It does happen.

It does happen.

But I think it's interesting that because improvisational,

like outlining and working improvisationally and with music as well, because I think about this a lot with myself, because that's how I generate on stage.

It's all through improvising and outlines.

That

is really the most satisfying part.

So it sort of speaks to why you don't, after it's done, you know, why check back in?

The act is what is.

And it's about the, it's gone.

Yes.

It's gone.

Right.

It's pure.

It's jazz.

I compare.

I've been interviewed a million times about this.

Yeah.

A million and one.

In about a few weeks, I'm going to New York to do this interview at the New Yorker Festival.

And inevitably, someone will say, describe how this works.

And I'll say, well, I work with Eugene and work for five or six months and work out this thing.

And then we go to the set and we're on the set and everyone knows their back history and they know the thing.

And then someone will say, So tell me about the rehearsal process.

And I say, There is none.

What do you mean?

Okay, hard to explain.

We just start talking.

And we are, I guess we're good musicians because we're not going to start playing in a different key.

We're not going to play a solo at the same time someone else is doing it.

Can't actually explain it unless you do it.

So there you are.

And because you do what you do and you play, you would know the idea of sitting down and playing with someone.

And someone would say, well, how do you know what to play?

You just know.

You can hear it and you're following someone or they're following you.

And it is the same thing with what we did in those movies where you're sitting with a really good band.

Yeah, and also that the moment there's nothing better and nothing that can really top.

Like, if I'm on stage and I've got an idea that's funny enough to get laughs, but I know it's not finished.

And

I sort of frame it as like I corner myself on stage to be funny.

I'll wait for the thing to reveal itself.

And then when the punchline or the moment comes, I don't know where it comes from.

No.

And you can't explain it.

No.

There's no way to articulate that.

And it's the best.

And to me, that's what I've always always done since I was a kid, even not knowing even there was a thing that I was doing.

And it's the most fun thing to do because it's pure.

I think it's pure.

And that's the,

it's not, if you look at some forms of stuff where scenes in movies and comedy movies where people have done it 10 times and now we're on the 15th take, it's not surprising that it would seem not that good or not funny or not fresh or not, because they've done it a lot.

Yeah, it gets played out.

And you just, yeah, and it's not, and

I just work in a different way.

It's not, it's what I do.

But it's interesting too, because because you do the entire, what is happening?

It's my fault.

I like it.

It's pretty.

But it's my phone coming through.

My producer hates that.

It's not you.

Oh, where is your producer?

In Brooklyn.

Really?

Are they on, are they listening to this?

Nope.

No.

No, that's not.

It's funny.

This is the color of a pedal I have, which is a reverse pedal.

That is just a piece of art.

It does nothing.

Yeah, but it's the same color as my reverse pedal.

I like it.

What's a reverse pedal do?

Oh, it's tantalizing.

I have several.

One's made by this Chase Bliss company, which makes

amazing

art pedals.

It's backwards.

Oh, it plays it backwards?

It's in real time.

It's kind of everything is.

So you get that weird psychedelic, Beatlesy.

Well or nuanced which is a thing.

Yeah.

So was it at the beginning though was it going to be music for you?

I did everything at exactly the same time.

Everything evolved.

Yeah.

So I did,

I worked as an actor, I was writing, and I was playing music.

All in New York.

All New York.

And I remember someone, I went to an audition.

And someone said,

the man at the table said,

when are you going to decide?

I said, decide what?

He said, well, it says that you do.

I said, why do I have to decide?

And he rolled his eyes

as if this was a problem.

Yeah, how do we package you?

I thought, but I like doing all of the things.

And his look was,

right, good.

But at some point.

And I said, but I don't feel there is that point.

And he was, whatever, he said.

And then you figured it out.

Or I didn't, but I just did it.

Well,

what I was going to say about improv versus scripted is that because you do full films that are all improv, like there are moments in scripted movies that are obviously moments that happened once in the midst of 15 times shooting something, and they're usually the most transcendent moments.

And they just

shows you that organically,

people understand, even if they don't.

know how to describe it.

They understand that something's different about that moment.

But then why is the other stuff so shitty?

You see, because it makes the other stuff look worse.

Yeah.

If someone it's that's what's called an ad-lib if it's in the middle of a structured thing as opposed to improvisation.

But again, this,

40 years I've been discussing this to no avail.

Yeah.

But you've done this both, so you would understand.

What would the avail be?

Well, it's a fool's errand because I expect

the minute I start describing it, the eyelids start to

shut.

Yeah.

And I think, well, of course, but they don't, how am I supposed to explain this?

I don't know how to explain this.

I mean, what you've sort of opened up for the world is singular.

I mean, you know, the first spinal tap, it started the whole mock documentary trend.

Yes.

Which infused itself into television almost everywhere.

Yes.

Yes.

The difference is that those things are not improvised.

Yes.

They're just shot.

It's a faux

version of that, where they use a technique which looks like it's that, and they make the camera move like this which it wouldn't normally be anyway and then they do what they do you're making me feel good about something

okay uh in that i'm not a guy that uh when people say you know it's all about the process it's about the journey yeah i i generally think like i guess but it's kind of nice to finish something

But yes, the way you're talking about it, you know, and I know it for myself as a performer, that nothing beats that moment we just talked about when something comes right out of nowhere and it's the best and you can't you can't recapture it sometimes no and and that really is what you're living for that i have to assume that the nature of creating music and the nature of creating improvisational comedy films or improvisational comedy that is the lifeblood you know like the fact that it comes into a complete movie and is edited all together but i really believe for you that the process of these things is what it is about totally and and editing those films,

whether it's Best in Show or Waiting for Guffman, these movies I've done,

we edited, I sat with Bob Layton, the editor, for a year and a half, eight hours a day.

But without feeling pressure, just enjoying that as well?

And here's a big key to this.

When we did Spinal Tap, we took it to places we had made 20-minute version

because we couldn't explain this.

And these executives looked at it and they said,

what is this?

Well,

they said, who are these people?

They seem not that bright.

We said, well, that's us, first of all.

That's us in the thing you're seeing.

But I don't,

what is this?

Well, it's supposed to be in a documentary form following this band.

But who are these people?

That's us in the thing.

So no, no, no, no, no, no.

And Rob Reiner eventually went to Norman Lear, and Norman just said, oh, okay, just get off my back here.

Yeah, just go and make the movie.

Yeah.

If it hadn't been for that, never seen the light of day.

And the second one that we just did would never have seen the second,

if the first one.

Because

the grandkids of those people that we went to, same thing.

What is this?

Yeah.

Really?

Oh, absolutely.

Not even a clue.

What is this?

Well,

it's a band, and they're

yes, so that's what that is.

But what do you attribute that to?

Well, I think that would be presumptuous to say.

Yeah.

Okay.

I mean, you work on the edge of things in what you've always done.

And

there are certainly people that would look at what you do as being scary or

he said that.

Yeah.

What?

And that's a different crowd that goes to

a place where there are people eating and the guy comes out and says, freeways.

Yeah.

What is this?

I'm on a freeway and then the guy behind me, he's honking.

What is that?

You know what I mean?

Now, to me, that is

like being executed.

Just putting a thing over my head and shoot me then.

Because there's nothing there.

It's not funny.

It has the rhythm of what is supposed to be funny.

But

it's not funny.

It's not an adventure of any kind.

So, whatever this other thing is, is not immediately accessible.

I understand that.

Again, when I've done my things, I've said, I just want to do this little thing.

It's a little thing, and maybe some people will like it enough so that I can do another thing.

I'm not trying to make mission impossible.

I'm trying to do this weird little thing.

But they still, there's no question in my mind that

no one would have bitten.

No.

So you were really kicking around as an actor at the beginning.

Well, I wouldn't.

Kicking around sounds a little like a hobo.

I worked in New York on stage for about six years, and I was doing great.

I was just doing plays.

I love doing plays.

Not just comedies, all kinds of plays.

Oh, no, no, not comedies at all, actually.

I was just doing plays.

And then I got a phone call in 1975 when people had phones,

actual phones.

Sure.

The phone rang in my apartment in the village.

Yeah.

And a person said, hi, this is Lily Tomlin.

And I said,

hello?

Hi.

She said, I want you to be on my show.

Okay.

Yeah.

And she brought me out to L.A.

I'd never been out.

She said, I want you to write and be on this show with me.

I said, oh, great.

So then I I got to write that.

I got to be on the show and I got to write music for that show.

And I was,

you know, 26 or 8 or whatever I was.

And I thought, this is then, and from there on,

what meant a lot to Rob was Norman Lear saying, here, do this.

Yeah.

Rob said the same thing to me later on.

Rob started Castle Rock.

Yeah.

And he said, do you have any ideas for a movie?

I said, actually, I do have an idea.

Yeah.

Which I wasn't going to tell anybody about.

Honestly, I don't go to meetings and say, please.

And he said, what is it?

I said, da-da-da-da.

He said, go and do it.

Which one?

I was waiting for Goffman.

Great movie.

He said, yeah, just go and do it.

We'll see you at the premiere.

So I did that.

I did several other films with them.

They just said, do whatever you want.

It was a small budget.

I had control of that.

Go and do it.

Write the music.

Yeah.

Go and do it.

There you go.

So if that person hadn't said, there's no way in in the world I could have gone to a conventional studio and said, well,

it's in this little town.

Sure.

And there's this guy.

You see.

Yeah.

I'm sorry, I'm losing.

What?

There's no way to explain it.

Rob trusted me.

I've known him.

There's no way any of that has improved.

And so I say, I think I said at the outset, I've been very fortunate to have fallen into some things and not have had to slog around.

I don't have anything in a drawer that hasn't been done.

And when you come up with, well, I guess what I was referring to when I, when I about kicking around as an actor, you did show up in movies here and there.

Well,

show up, meaning have one line in a death wish or two lines or whatever it was.

Yes, I was 23 or whatever I was.

Yeah.

I was at the Lampoons, and I had an agent, which was amazing.

And they said, you can do one line in this movie.

Oh.

Was it with Bronson?

No, the scene was with Vincent Gardinia.

Oh, yeah.

They didn't send you the script.

It was just a guy.

And the director was this, I guess he's dead.

Yeah.

Like the other people I told you.

Yeah.

Long dead.

Yeah.

And he was a famously horrible man.

And I was in the show Lemmings at the time.

And he said, yes, you're going to play this part.

My hair was down to here.

Yeah.

So there are pictures of me with Chevy Chase and Belushi, and we all had hair down to the party.

He said, I'm going to have have to shave your head.

I said, Well, I can put it under the hat.

And he said, He was an Englishman,

no, no.

In the scene, you see, I'm going to have you remove your hat.

And I said, Well, New York cops don't take their hats off.

In this case, they will, however.

And I thought,

I'm going after this guy because I know what this deal is now.

They cut my hair short.

Yeah.

Of course, I didn't take my hat off.

Right.

And we're shooting in the middle of the night.

And I thought, I'm going to, I hope he fires me on the spot.

So he'd say,

Christopher, I want you to walk over here.

And I said, do you mean here?

Or should I walk over there?

Wouldn't it be better?

And the crew started

laughing.

And he,

I said, because it would be wonderful if I could not only walk there, but also here, you see.

Because then

kept doing it.

Boom, boom, boom, boom.

He didn't know what to do.

I was furious and did the rest of Lemmings with shorthair.

Yeah.

A box of Cuban cigars arrived at my house the next week.

And it was the perfect thing of a bully, someone coming up against that and going, no.

The fuck you, yeah.

So that was that little thing.

Yeah, so of course when you're starting out, you do one line, two lines.

I mean, it's not, you don't know what the movie is.

It was a horrible movie.

You don't even know what the film is.

You just don't know the context.

So I did a few of those things.

And and then the Lily Tome thing happened, and then that was a different thing.

Well, I think it's important, too, to realize that,

you know, what drives some of us, and maybe I'm projecting here, but you have to have a healthy amount of fuck you in you.

Hmm.

Oh, well, I don't know if ⁇ I don't know.

You could also say that's insane, because I had no

right

to

do that.

You know, most people just do what they're told, and they do it.

I thought, I really don't care.

I really, truly hope that he says go home because it's 3 o'clock in the morning and in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Yeah.

And I would go home.

Yeah.

So it wasn't a pushback against being.

No, no, it wasn't a political thing where I'm saying I'm going to just...

No.

I just wanted to get fired.

And I had nothing to back any of it up.

Yeah.

Right.

Right.

Other than youth.

Other than me, and youth, and whatever that is.

And the fact that you wanted wanted to have long hair for the Lemming show.

Exactly.

So working with Belushi and Chevy and all those guys, you know, at that time,

who were the primary Lemmings?

I wrote it with Doug Kenney and Sean,

and the other cast members were Belushi and Chevy Chase, Paul Jacobs, and Alice Playton.

And I had co-written it with, I'd co-written the music and the other stuff with, but the cast members didn't write it.

We were just in a was there a sense th where you were like, these guys are the fucking funniest people in the world?

No.

No.

No sense of that.

We were just doing a thing.

Well, there were circumstances which made that answer appropriate, which was that,

how do we say in America, they may not have been doing their best.

Right.

Yeah, at that time.

Yeah.

Because they were young and

yes, drugs.

Well,

I mean, the saddest part is that

they

were

half of what they had was diminished before they even went to SNL,

easily.

From what?

From

lifestyle.

Yeah.

And it was a lot of ODing

in 72, 73.

Yeah.

And

by the time 75 75 rolled around or 76,

it was severely diminished.

Really?

Oh, yeah.

And I'm not, yes, absolutely.

So I had a difficult time, frankly.

John was a really funny guy, but he was hurting himself and other people were hurting themselves.

That early.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, when they were 22, 23.

Because that was sort of what people were doing at the time.

Well, some people were doing it, yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

But you saw the danger of it.

Well, I saw, what I saw was that this

there was a thing going around where and a lot with musicians where and they weren't musician musicians per se yeah but with musicians in in 1966 7 8 people thought if we're really wrecked yeah if we're really stoned we are going to play so well

yeah that'll be really good right and it looked like they were to their they their faces looked like they were playing well yeah but if you're not in that state of mind and listening to it, it's not.

Yeah.

So

that's that.

So going to the Fillmore, where everyone is, the band, everyone is, and I thought, man, this is bad.

This is really bad.

It sounds like a seventh grade garage band, basically.

Right.

But they thought they were killing it.

Oh, they're killing it.

They're just killing it.

Now, look, there are people.

maybe one in a million, Jimi Hendrix, there are people who can go out there.

Cold training.

There are jazz people who can go out there,

and that is a rare thing.

Yeah, it's

certain musicians on the dope.

I'm thinking,

when I was 20,

I was given, I knew the, my family knew the owner of the Village Vanguard, which is a very famous jazz club in New York.

And he said, you're in college, do you need to make a little thing?

Yeah, sure, that would be great.

He said, yeah, you can make $5 if you work taking money at the door.

So

go down the steps.

It was $3.50 to get in.

The problem was I couldn't add.

This became a thing.

So I'd see six people coming down the steps.

It was $3.50.

And you're thinking, I don't understand what's so hard about that.

But for me, I thought, oh, God, oh, no, no, no, no, no.

No, no.

Hi.

Yes.

Here you go.

Give me a 20.

Six.

Three.

And I would fake the amount I'd give them.

Yeah.

Just here you go.

And they would walk in.

It was dark.

They wouldn't even go in.

I think, oh, God, God, you chipped.

You owe them $5.

And I'd go back into the club.

Excuse me.

I gave you the wrong amount.

Oh, well, that's so nice, son.

That's so nice of you.

Let me give you a ten.

No, no, I don't want.

No, I just gave you the wrong thing.

I was sweating.

I'd go back into that thing, a little box with a key box with their money.

Yeah.

Seven people coming down the steps now.

And I thought, I didn't learn anything from the six people.

I still don't know what that amount was.

Seven,

three, nothing, just blank, zero.

Here, here you go, there you go.

I thought, oh no, no, I owe them $8.

I owe them.

They would go in, they went in, and they sat next to the people that had just, that had just been.

And I thought, now they're going to think this is a bit where I'm being the nice, the thing.

And I had my back to the second group.

I said, here, just take this, just take the money.

Thank you.

Well, I should give you, no, don't, no, don't give me.

Then Max Gordon, who was the owner, said, Maybe this isn't the best job.

So the next thing I find myself with Roland Kirk, who later became Roshan Roland Kirk, sitting in the kitchen.

Yeah.

And he was blind.

He would sit there.

I'm moving my head back and forth.

And he said to me one night, he said,

Chris,

where I am right now, you can't write to me.

Oh,

yeah.

Yeah.

I thought, that is amazing.

Yeah.

And I would lead him out to the bandstand,

and he was

where you couldn't write to him.

He was

out there.

Yeah.

He's way out there playing like, what, two or three saxophones at once?

He would play

a middle one, which was a drone, and then he would play harmony with the left and the right.

Is he one of your big jazz guys?

I would say Bill Evans.

Oh my gosh.

Bill Evans, Jim Hall.

I was deep into any jazz guitar players and I got to see them at this club which was just Larry Coriel, just these people.

Wes Montgomery?

Wes Montgomery.

I got to see these people close up and it was just amazing.

It was just

great.

How old were you?

I think I was 20.

Maybe 19.

And the other thing was

you didn't always recognize people.

So a guy in a black suit, white shirt, black tie.

Oh, excuse me, sir, that's 350.

Max is that's Bill Evans, so you can actually let him go in.

Ah, yes, I'm sorry.

That's Nina Simone.

She can

just go in.

An onslaught of famous people that seeing them in the

Village Vanguard.

How there?

How did you get that gig?

Well, I wouldn't call it a gig.

A gig sounds important.

Max Gordon, who started the club in the 40s, and it's still there, and it's the place to play, and the greatest albums have come from there.

He was a friend of my family's, and he said to me, you're in college, you might want to make a couple of bucks.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

And there I was in

the amazing part of Bebop, because that was really early 60s

to the late 60s.

That was the boink, you know.

And so all of the great players came through there.

But did you like jazz going in?

Yeah.

You did?

Yeah.

Well, it started the fact that I liked guitar players.

So I'd heard Charlie Christian and I heard all these people who were playing jazz.

I didn't have a particular thing.

Any good guitar player was great.

Yeah, but

so do you, I mean, to be put in that world and then to be able to stand and watch it

and listen,

it must have reconfigured your brain.

Well, again, you don't know because

you're not comparing it to anything.

Okay.

You know, it's not as if, holy shit, man, I'm standing in its historical thing.

No, but the creativity.

Oh, no.

It's so deep to

people of that level, you know.

And there's a version of that which is the equivalent in comedy for me.

Who's that?

Well, and it's another luck thing, just total ass luck,

as Benjamin Franklin used to say.

He used to say that a lot, actually.

Yeah, total ass luck.

He would say things, and they didn't always write these things down.

Because when he'd say to John Adams, or he was the older one, but

he'd say, and you'd think, well, it doesn't sound like it's of the time.

He'd say, get your badass out of here, he would say.

And you'd think, well, it couldn't have been that, literally.

Sure.

But it was.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I happened to be in London when I was 12.

My father was English, and we'd go back and forth a lot.

Yeah.

And I got to see a show called Beyond the Fringe.

Ah, yes.

And that was the seminal moment in my life.

Really?

Absolutely.

And who were the players at that time?

The people that created it were Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller.

Yeah.

All smarter than anyone walking upright, period.

And funny.

And I thought, this

is a really good combination.

Just blazing intelligence and funny.

And it became

sort of a bedrock thing, subliminally, I guess, for me in some way.

And it was a new thing there because you didn't have people coming from university that went into comedy.

The comics were coming from working-class people

everywhere.

And this was, it's not so much a class thing, but they had all gone to Oxford or Cambridge and they came out of that.

And the same thing then happened with Python, and then the same thing happened with...

They They were the next generation of that.

How much of that was improvised?

None of it.

Yeah.

None of it.

But they were wildly...

Well, Peter and Dudley could improvise, and I got to do them with them at the Lampoon, actually.

We were in New York.

But it wasn't about that.

It was about that

combination of smart and funny, which was

You know, Jonathan was a neurosurgeon.

He was also funny.

He was directing opera.

You know, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were doing their thing.

I mean, it was just, and Alan Bennett, the last one alive, is still with us and wrote some of the greatest plays.

And

anyway, that to me that was a foundational thing for me.

Yeah, it's just so, like, well, that mixture, that combination of witnessing

improvisational creativity and jazz and then intelligent, you know, highbrow kind of like killer British comedy, that just.

Well, and it was luck.

It was luck

my parents knew someone who knew someone.

We were in London.

I got to see that.

Some of the cast, when they came to do it in Broadway, then lived with us in New York.

I was 12 or 13.

Wow.

I was absolutely, my head was exploding.

And then later, I had the effrontery to write to Jonathan Miller and say, would it be okay if I worked on your next project?

Doing what?

Abe Lincoln would say.

Well, again, following in the thing of Franklin.

Yeah, sure.

Same kind of thing.

These people spoke in a different way than you read because they want history to think that they were sort of elevated in some way.

Not the case.

Anyway, I don't want to besmirch these people.

So I wrote him a letter, as people did in those days, an electrical letter.

And he said, sure.

And I was 18.

Yeah.

And when she was in the middle of the day, I went to London and his assistant on a film he did called Alice in Wonderland.

And

every famous English actor in that thing, Peter Sellers, John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave, Peter Cook.

It was just me being in that thing as a kid, just watching.

Ravishenko wrote the music.

I'm in the studio.

What?

I'm just standing there

thinking,

just this is being injected into my bloodstream thinking, this is heady.

This is really heady.

Yeah.

And I wrote a whole journal about that summer.

Where's that?

Oh, like.

In In a jar?

It's a good question.

It's a good question.

You should revisit it.

It would be interesting.

Are you afraid?

I don't like revisiting what I do.

But that would just be checking in with the old you.

Like, you know, your feelings.

You have no desire to.

It makes me uncomfortable.

Yeah, I know.

I just saw some footage of me doing stand-up in 1988, and it's the worst thing I've ever seen.

But everything's out there now, right?

If you look on YouTube, and you could probably find your stuff.

Some of it, but this was actually part of a documentary a guy made on me.

And I gave him from the box of tapes I have that I never looked at.

And when do we get to see that?

It's coming out in October.

Great.

And people that like you are going to love that.

You may think.

For me, it was the most uncomfortable thing.

And it was only for a few seconds.

I can't.

No, I can, yeah, I can understand that.

But aside from you, pushing you aside for a certain people are going to like that.

So

I think so.

It's an emotional thing.

It's a lot to watch two hours of yourself from an outside perspective.

It's not.

Yeah, I wouldn't be able to do that.

Yeah, it's not great.

Yeah.

What is it?

You keep holding this

hair bomb or something?

What is that?

No, it's just nicotine.

But in what form is that?

In a little tobacco-less pouch.

I don't understand.

What does it say on the lid?

It says Zin Spearmint 3 milligrams.

It's a brand of tobacco-less pouches that give you a little bit of nicotine.

Oh.

Never even heard of that.

Yeah, well, I mean,

it's like chewing tobacco, but no tobacco.

Or snuff.

Right, but no, no tobacco.

So

when you were a rodeo rider,

you would use the real stuff there.

Sure, big watts of Cope and hate.

Yeah, hate, you know, Cope.

Yeah, sure.

Big dip of that.

That usually when I was on the bowl, it would start to separate separate because I always had a trouble keeping it into one little thing.

And I'd get violently ill, and it made me ride better.

As we're going to look at now, can we put that up?

See the clip?

Another embarrassing clip.

So, in terms of generating the stories for

the movies,

you know, Guffman, Mighty Wind, for your consideration, you know, where does that usually start for you?

Is that something you do with Eugene or is that something, you know?

It came from me.

Yeah, all of them.

Yeah, just walking around.

And I was at a dog park and we had a dog at the time, a mutt dog.

Of the best of show.

Yeah, and I was just walking our dog.

He was a rescue dog.

Yeah.

And this woman with a purebred dog came up to me and she said,

what's that?

He said, what do you mean?

It's Henry.

So our dog.

But what is well, he's a mixture.

Yeah.

And she gave me a look, which is, I'm so sorry for you.

I feel so badly that you have to put up with this.

And I thought about that in the deepest way of thinking, it's sort of racism.

It's sort of a lot of things.

Elitism.

And it led me to that.

And then I said to Eugene, I have this idea, as I did with these other things.

And he fought me on a lot of these things.

And once we sat in a room, it kind of all took off.

And he was a great writing partner.

So from there, you thought about the world of dog shows.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

I was in that world briefly.

As?

My dad was into showing dogs for a brief moment.

We had a purebred

old English sheepdog.

Wow.

Where was this located?

We were in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The dog's name?

Yeah, I grew up there.

No?

Yeah.

Wow.

I grew up there and the dog's name was Chirio Lord Raglan.

Nope.

Nope.

Yep.

Nope.

100%.

Did you name it that?

No, that comes from the breeder in each name.

That's right.

It goes down.

Yeah.

Cheerio Lord Raglan.

And my dad would spend hours with the table and the brush because it's in Old English.

And I remember a couple of going to dog shows, being in that world.

Like it's a real memory.

Wow.

Did you go into that world?

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

We spent almost a year researching this.

Yeah.

We hadn't been.

We went to all of the local shows here.

We went to Westminster.

And

it was quite a thing, as you know, because you had the actual thing.

I was so young, but yeah.

Absolutely stunned by how cutthroat it was, way more than we had in the movie.

There would be people in the grooming place backstage, and these guys would come by with shears and just cut a huge hunk out of one of the dogs and keep walking,

ruining that dog's chances for another year.

Oh, my God.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

And I thought, I can't show that because we were told all these stories.

I can't show that.

It's too horrible.

It's weird enough as it is, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But

that was fun to do because it was a real bizarre world for me.

It was an eye-opener.

And it's just like from there, you and Eugene, you start to focus on character building, right?

Well, the story.

What story?

What's the first, second, and third act?

Yeah.

It's meeting people.

We create the characters, meeting these people, the mid-part where they're on their way to the show, and then the show.

It's a conventional premise in the sense of how it's, you know,

but each different character, you know,

that comes from just talking, improvising?

Talking, knowing that Fred Willard should play what this, it's also done specifically.

We say Fred has to play this, Catherine Harris has to play this.

You've got your players.

Parker Posey has to play this.

These are the musicians in this piece.

Yeah.

And we know they can play these things.

Right.

And now that is a great thing in the same way, using that same analogy of music of saying, I have this idea for a song.

Oh, fuck, wait a minute.

This guy's a great pedal steel player.

I know the bass player.

Yeah, yeah.

That's the band.

This is the band.

My girlfriend still talks about and is lifelong, has a lifelong attachment to the name every nut bit.

Okay.

Well, tell her,

if you see her.

Yeah.

that we found ourselves, well, didn't find ourselves.

We were making a movie, apparently, but I drove my own vehicle, which we didn't have the money to get someone pull us and shoot the way they would do in a professional thing.

So I'm driving this motorhome in Canada

and it's raining.

I'm thinking, I have no idea where I'm going.

We didn't have police, we had nothing.

Yeah.

Just driving along.

And I said that.

I said, da-da-da-da something nuts.

And I thought, as I said that,

what the hell is the matter with you?

You don't know any names of these things.

And I started in real time doing that.

No plan, no concept concept that I knew more than one or two things.

It just kept going and going.

Yeah.

The nuts.

The nut thing.

Now, I guess, like, in terms of

the closest to you personally

in terms of these movies, it has to be The Mighty Wind, right?

In terms of my background, yes.

And what you lived and saw.

I grew up in the village in the heart of that thing.

Yeah.

Walk out the door, Bob Dylan walks by,

et cetera.

All these people.

I played in Washington Square Park when I was a kid, when I was 12, 13.

Guitar, mandolin.

Guitar.

Yep.

Then mandolin.

Yep.

Yep.

And then whatever.

Yes, that was from my experience.

The first thing I thought of was

a person who was in that world, who I will not name.

Yeah.

Are they dead?

They may be dead, but I don't know.

But

the idea that a folk musician would have this massive ego yeah and talk about what they do as if it's you know

vladimir horowitz or something yeah and they have this sort of thing where they say you know chris uh i've written a lot of songs about miners and uh

mining people and railroad workers and you know i did uh hobo for a while i thought what the what the hell is going no sense of humor but there's no perspective right and so we of course on the first album did uh

a piece about the Spanish Civil War, where, as you know, I thought, well, go on.

Just this blind thing, which amused me to no end.

Yeah.

Because

there wasn't a hint of you're kidding.

No, not kidding.

Earnest.

Yeah.

Fully earnest.

Sure.

Yeah.

Which movie was really the most fun in terms of discovery?

All of it?

It's all

fun.

All fun all the time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I've learned, if nothing else, if you can't be self-deprecating, just as a general sort of thing,

in life,

you're in trouble.

You're in really big trouble if you can't look at what you do and go, boy, that was stupid or whatever.

Because that separates in the world that we know today, there are people we know that we read about in the papers that could never do that for a second.

Right.

And it's important

to humble

yourself.

I think so.

And that's where the funny is.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And those people that we play or the parts that we Gene and I put together were people that these are not bad people.

They're not great talents.

Right.

Yeah.

They're not

big thinkers.

Yeah.

They're doing the best they can, and their earnestness is what's funny.

Right.

And their delusion is what's funny.

Right.

Because in their world, this is the biggest thing.

And Waiting for Gruffman, that play is the biggest thing in the world.

Yeah.

It's going to be huge.

Yeah.

In the Mighty Wind thing, they think this is going to lead to other things.

Right.

And for your consideration.

Yes.

And

that is the darkest of all.

That is really dark.

And I wanted it to be dark.

And when I saw it, I went, boy, this is, wow, okay.

No one's going to see this because who wants to watch the darkness of this?

People saw it.

Well, someone saw it.

But what I'm saying is that there is no relief from the darkness,

from the real

disappointment, from the,

you know.

But there are people like Catherine O'Hara you must go way back with.

Not so far.

No.

I mean, I didn't know her during SCTV.

I didn't meet her until the 80s, I guess.

But McKean you've known forever.

Yeah.

Balaban?

No.

No.

I didn't know Bob until the 80s.

Wow.

Yeah.

No.

Yeah.

But again, you meet these people in a millisecond you know that they can do this kind of work.

Higgins is kind of a marvel.

He was a new ⁇ oh.

Nobody smarter, nobody funnier, nobody more musical.

Just an absolute brilliant.

He is in the new tap film.

Oh, good.

And Shearer you've known forever.

Yep, I have.

And when you did the big picture, the choice to do, that was a scripted movie.

It was.

But, like, almost to, like, you know, you were making a movie about movies and you were satirizing movies to a certain degree.

And so that choice and that experience of doing a scripted film that had to look a certain way

specifically.

It's a conventional movie in that sense.

Yeah.

So I had to.

plot out every shot and just people had to learn their lines.

The stuff with Marty Short, people assume that's improvised.

It isn't.

It's all written out, his scenes in there.

And when I pitched that, as the kids would say,

I hadn't been Mr.

Pitcher.

I hadn't gone to hundreds of meetings, but I went to this meeting with the head of a studio, and I'm doing, explaining this,

and he fell asleep.

The president of the studio fell asleep three times in the pitch.

And his neck would fall back and then he would wake up like you'd see people on the subway.

And

he'd nod,

and he'd keep nodding and then the eyes would start to shut and he's out again.

And I'm still explaining this.

And then the last time his head snapped back and he snapped forward and he said, great, let's do it.

Yeah, oh good.

And I got up and I left and my writing partner in the hall said,

fucking great, we get to do a movie.

I said, I'm not doing a movie with that guy.

He never,

there's something wrong with this.

This isn't right.

I don't care if he said, let's do it.

This is not, this is wrong.

And he didn't do it with him?

Nope.

It reminds me of a story, but my buddy Jerry Stahl was pitching something to an executive, and he walked into the room, and the guy was diswraught.

He looked upset.

And Jerry was going to pitch a comedy, I think is how it goes.

And

he sits down, and the guy goes, my mother just died.

And Jerry goes, oh, my God.

And he goes, but go ahead.

Go ahead with the pitch.

Sure.

But go ahead.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I know what I would have done.

So you didn't do it with that guy?

Nope.

Yeah.

Nope.

But was the experience of doing a scripted movie,

I don't want to say challenging, but did you learn a lesson there in terms of like, maybe I don't want to do this?

Well, what I did know was that the other thing was what I love to do the best.

Right.

That's what I did know.

Yeah.

So can we just talk briefly about the royalty thing?

The royalty thing.

The royalty thing.

Well, I'm ASCAP, so when I do a song,

I'm talking about British royalty.

I don't know what you're talking about, sorry.

Yeah, you're somewhat barking up the wrong tree.

Okay.

Yeah.

I think.

Because people confuse royalty

with the other thing.

And

in England, there is a group of people called peers,

or as Abe Lincoln used to say, he used to say peers of the fucking realm, what he would call them.

People would say that's weird.

The lost quotes.

Exactly.

And a peer is

a hereditary peer is someone who

in the history of that family, someone makes that person something, and then it goes down to the person, down to the person.

Yeah, right, right.

And then there are peers that are life peers that are appointed by the Prime Minister, and they get to do that for a year, and then it goes away.

So that's the basic premise.

It's not royalty, it is a different thing.

And then people get to sit in the House of Lords, which is the upper body of Parliament.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And this is something you did.

Sure, why not?

And that was the reason.

Why not?

Why not?

Yeah, I had thought about not doing it.

Yeah.

And I got a letter from a peer

saying,

I think you would find this opportunity to be a good one.

He said, it's a benign and seductive place.

And just for the experience?

For the experience.

So for several years, before they changed the rule where they said to hereditary peers, you can go home now,

it was fascinating.

What did you learn?

I learned many things.

One thing I learned was that there are people who still use earhorns.

Oh, good.

And I'm doing this so you can't.

I'm calling the ear horn.

But it's a thing you see in movies where it looks like a powder horn that's in your ear, but actually you can hear better.

There were actually people using those for real.

Yeah.

There were occasions where we got to wear these robes that were crimson robes and sit.

That's like being in a movie, except Victor Mature is not there.

And

I met some amazing people that were in my boat and just were happened to be people who just could come down through the family.

They may have been documentary filmmakers.

They may have been musicians.

They were just, isn't this weird?

And you just got that through your father?

My father, his brother, his brother.

I mean, some of these things are.

What was the title?

Well,

it's a long title.

You get sent this thing.

I remember thinking, this is horrible because I know this is going to happen, but my dad has to die for this to happen.

Then you get a letter saying you get a writ of summons written in

medieval

writing that says

the monarch requests the

thing of the wisdom of your thing, the thing.

It's this long thing.

And what's written on that is the right honorable,

the Lord Hayden Guest,

Baron of Saling in the County of Essex.

So it's not something when you're ordering from Wendy's, you don't say, you don't, if you're giving a name or coffee at a coffee, your coffee name, that's not a good coffee name.

No, my coffee name is Dr.

X,

which is not a real person, I don't think.

I mean, for people who follow those movies with, you know, those movies, comic book movies.

And I did this off the top of my head, and this person looked up at me and said, you're Dr.

X?

I said,

what?

You're Dr.

X?

I said,

yes.

And the person was impressed, really impressed.

And I couldn't figure out if this was an Avenger thing that I had never heard of.

Yeah.

Because that goes deep.

And I still don't know.

Someone will call in.

Well, not literally, because I'm going to go home.

Yeah.

If that was a thing, but that's my coffee name, Dr.

X.

And you were on SNL for one season?

This is in 1984.

My friend was producing that.

Lauren was gone for five years.

And when he left, my friend Bob Tischler from New Jersey took over as a producer.

He said, You should come on the show.

I said, Well, I'm doing this movie with Spinal Tap.

I think.

Well, then come after that.

He said, We said, I was with Billy Crystal, Martin Short, Harry Shearer, and

we said, we'll sign one-year contracts.

And they paid us.

And they said, you can do whatever you want.

I said, I want to direct all the movies.

I'll be on the show.

I'll write the show.

We did it for one year, and we left.

Good times?

No.

No.

No.

What's amazing talking, because I only met you once in an airport.

Yeah.

And I've seen you and heard you.

Yeah.

But

you are,

you were so hopeful when you said that.

You had this great look on your face when you said good time.

Seriously, it was, it made me feel bad that it wasn't.

Because

on the first day, no, it was on a Monday,

I was sitting next to Marty Short,

and he said, What are you writing on this piece of paper?

I was writing

American Airlines Flight

Two.

I'd called my lawyer on the Monday and said,

can I go home?

He said, probably a little late at this point.

I had just met my wife, Jamie,

and I said, that is more interesting to me than this is.

I really just.

Don't undo it.

No.

And he said, it's going to be hard for you to get out of this.

And we would fly on alternate weekends back and forth to L.A.

She would come, I would go there, and we were married five months later.

So, yeah.

You had other things on your mind.

Oh.

Yeah.

I like that there's a, the, that, this is sort of a callback to Death Wish.

Well,

yeah.

Deathwish moment.

Yeah.

Where you're like,

who can I make fun of on this one to push the uh no, there would have been no way.

And Bob was a friend of mine.

And it was, look, most people would have said, they're giving you a lot of money.

You can do whatever you want.

You can leave in a year.

What's the matter with you?

Yeah.

And it just wasn't even the improvisation or even the work, the curve.

You know, there were moments where we had fun and we got to do some weird stuff.

Funny stuff.

I did stuff with Billy that was, we had fun and we laughed.

But

I would have gone, if he had said yes, I would have been out of there.

Really?

Yeah.

All right.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

All right.

So to sort of bring this all together,

I think that the threads are

improvisation, jazz,

discovery, comedy, the funniness of

earnest people.

But I think we should, in music, but I think this fly-tying thing, because when I texted you, I mean, not only did you say fly-tying, tying flies, but you had specific types of flies.

Is this a real thing for you?

It's so deep.

It is deep.

It's huge.

I have experience with it.

Okay.

So this is another thing I do every single day.

So the day is I wake up, I read six newspapers roughly.

Not about show business.

Not about show business.

You avoid the arts section.

Completely.

Okay.

Not even ever nothing.

Yep.

I read that.

I exercise for an hour.

What's that look like?

Treadmill.

I have a gym where I can do different things

and I rotate through those things.

I do that because I need to keep fit-ish because I walk in rivers a lot and I ski and I do a lot of outdoor sort of things.

So I started tying flies 40 years ago.

And after I work out, I then tie flies for an hour and then I'll play music and then I'll have lunch and then I'll do it again in the afternoon.

Same thing.

With the exercise.

Correct.

Different patterns.

But I have thousands.

I tie 3,000 flies a year.

You look worried.

The thing is, it's for people who do that, it's

totally can't explain,

but I've done this for a long time, and I use them and I give them away to people.

And they've been successful, and that's really fun when something works.

So you'd invent your flies?

I have, but it's more about doing them well and doing a really good job of or even if it's an offshoot of something, and doing them well and they they work, and they last, and they're kind of like

organizers full of feathers?

Oh, no, I have an entire workstation

of that stuff, drawers, thousands of threads, thousands of feathers.

Yes, the answer.

And I can swivel around, and my music thing is right there, literally in a chair.

I can swivel and then record behind me.

So I can do both in my office.

Aaron Powell, it's like the two worlds.

It's the world of

control and

fun.

Every time I do that, it's fun.

Huh.

And do you fly fish?

A lot.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Where do you go?

Well,

we bought a house.

We built a house on a river 40 years ago.

Yeah.

And I've gone all over the world, but I travel with a friend and we camp out in the wilderness on rivers.

And I pull this little trailer thing.

He sleeps in this little trailer.

I sleep in my truck thing.

I'm leaving tomorrow to do it.

Okay.

And I do this a lot and have for since 85, I guess.

So it's a big part of what I do.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And is it ⁇ I don't want to use the word spiritual or meditation or anything else.

The pace.

I think that, no, and people say that must be very Zen or there must be something.

I don't know how to, I always liked being in the outdoors.

And this was this weird thing growing up in New York City

where I only wanted to be in the mountains.

And now you are.

I got to do that when I was a kid.

I would go away and have chances to do that and ski, and I was never happier than that.

And that with, so in high school, I was in a band, but I was also on all the teams.

And those two groups never

met.

Yeah.

So I had good friends that did both, but they never, I was the middle sort of person, connective person.

Well, that's good.

That's good for humor.

Maybe.

I don't know.

I mean, I hear music in in people's voices.

So if you hear a coach.

Well, the thing you got to do is, see, you're going back three steps.

You got to take two.

And then you throw it.

I hear that's music.

Someone just played that music, and I want to hear it, and I want to play that, what he just said.

I want to play that.

That's an interesting thing.

So you really see it all as music.

It's all music.

Voices are music.

So if I come upon a character, it's music.

And if I feel I can do that as I'm driving along in the country for endlessly, then I know that I can,

then it'll be okay.

Great.

This has been amazing because I've seen you from afar, and I was sort of afraid to enter your zone because you're passionate about what you do and say.

And I thought, well, I don't know if this is going to get into an interesting area for you, but here we are.

Did you enjoy it?

I did very much.

Well, thanks for doing it, Chris.

What a great guy.

I'm going to take up fly fishing.

I'm going to tie flies.

Spinal Tap 2, The End continues.

It's in theaters now.

Hang out for a minute, folks.

Hey, people, the full WTF archives are now available on Supercast.

For $3 a month, you can get every episode of WTF ad-free, plus hundreds of bonus episodes as well, including this bonus episode I did about the doc about me.

Are we good?

There's one thing where I'm at home after being in LA, you know, probably before I went into rehab.

I'm not sure when it was, but I was clearly like, you know, kind of being kind of dicey, you know, like dice clay-ish.

I could see that, you know, my brain was pretty fucked from everything I was taking in.

And I saw myself as this drug warrior.

And, you know, I was smoking cigarettes and, you know, kind of my hair was long and fucked up.

And like, and I'm, you know, taking this position that was not earned.

And, you know, who the fuck wants to earn that anyways?

Right.

Like,

it was all a fabrication,

personality fabrication to, you know, to be something.

Or also to be, it was like you were wearing like fucking Iron Man suit in those things.

Like it was such armor.

Like that's what I saw.

Yeah, but it didn't fly.

No doubt.

No power at all.

To sign up for the Full Marin archives, go to the link in the episode description or go to WTFpod.com and click on WTF Plus.

And a reminder before we go, this podcast is hosted by ACAST.

I'm going to play some guitar.

And I want it to be known that I am a okay amateur guitar player who enjoys playing and I believe is getting better.

According to

Joe Bonamasa, I'm a fraud and talentless.

And I assume he's talking about my guitar playing and not my comedy because I think I

poked the bear a little bit on some podcast that got picked up by

guitar podcasts.

And yeah, I'm not going to necessarily apologize, but I just want people to know I'm not pretending to be anything.

I'm not as a guitar player.

I wouldn't say I'm talentless and I'm not a fraud because I'm not pretending to be anything, but I'm okay.

Here's

some okay slide guitar.

Boomer lifts, monkey and the fonda, cat angels everywhere.