Episode 1682 - Judd Apatow’s Favorite WTF Moments

Speaker 1 Lock the gates!

Speaker 2 All right, let's do this. How are you, what the fuckers?

Speaker 3 What the fuck, buddies?

Speaker 4 What the fuck, Nicks? What's happening?

Speaker 5 I'm Mark Marin.

Speaker 7 This is my podcast. Welcome to it.

Speaker 9 Oh my god, it was my birthday.

Speaker 9 Saturday was my birthday.

Speaker 10 62 years old.

Speaker 11 Maybe I'm feeling it.

Speaker 12 Maybe I'm feeling it. I don't know.

Speaker 6 Joints are getting a little

Speaker 14 achy at times.

Speaker 3 Just had a physical,

Speaker 15 which you should do.

Speaker 16 I guess it's okay.

Speaker 2 A couple of things. First of all, Judd Appetow is here today, but it's a specific type of show.

Speaker 18 Judd's been a fan of the show from the very beginning.

Speaker 2 He was an earlier listener, an early booster for the show.

Speaker 7 You know, he was on the show about one year into doing it for episodes 103 and 104, where he gave us all these tapes that he had made when he was a teenager of him interviewing big comics.

Speaker 27 You know, I believe in the dressing room of the comedy club because his mom, I believe, was a hostess there.

Speaker 30 So he was doing WTF way earlier.

Speaker 23 And when we announced that the show was ending, he texted me this.

Speaker 33 I'm quoting here.

Speaker 6 Maybe we could do an episode of WTF called Judd Appetow's Favorite WTF Moments, where I play you a clip I have chosen, and then we talk about it.

Speaker 18 You know none of the clips in advance.

Speaker 28 And that's exactly what we did.

Speaker 32 And as many of you know, because of my process,

Speaker 38 I don't listen to the shows.

Speaker 23 In this episode with Judd, this is going to be the first time I'm hearing a lot of these clips as audio clips.

Speaker 28 I was in the room when I did them, but my memories, that's hard to keep all those in.

Speaker 39 So I'm actually hearing them for the first time.

Speaker 18 It's just the nature of how I do it. I don't listen to it.

Speaker 30 I do it, and then Brendan does his thing, and then it goes out into the world.

Speaker 24 Rarely do I listen.

Speaker 27 Also, I think I can announce confidently right now that the end date of WTF is now official.

Speaker 6 The final episode will be on Monday, October 13th.

Speaker 41 And I don't know, it's going to happen right on time for a couple of reasons.

Speaker 15 You know, I'm dealing with Charlie, and it's not good.

Speaker 30 He's figured out a way to open the door.

Speaker 2 How the fuck did that happen?

Speaker 4 So now, like, when I think everything's safe, I'm out here in the studio and I hear Buster being destroyed.

Speaker 30 And I go, I've got to go in there and be like, how the fuck did you open the door?

Speaker 27 I don't know.

Speaker 41 He jumps up, grabs hold of the doorknob.

Speaker 19 I don't, it's not good.

Speaker 27 But it's fortuitous, if that's the correct use of the word, that the show is ending because I can reconfigure this studio, studio, which is an ADU, into kind of like

Speaker 24 another kind of office situation, maybe a screening room or where I can watch movies or work or sit down or whatever, but Charlie can live out here.

Speaker 21 I can re-home Charlie in my home.

Speaker 1 Huh?

Speaker 49 Huh?

Speaker 24 It's giving me, I don't know if that'll be the final decision, but it's giving me a little reprieve from the anxiety of the Charlie situation.

Speaker 16 Folks, I'm back at Dynasty Typewriter in LA for two shows in October, Saturday, October 11th, and Friday, October 17th.

Speaker 52 Go to wtfpod.com slash tour for tickets.

Speaker 18 The documentary, Are We Good, opens this Friday, October 3rd, in New York and Los Angeles.

Speaker 34 I'll be at some of the screenings here in LA this weekend at the Alamo Draft House and the AMC Americana, as well as at the Vancouver Film Festival.

Speaker 34 There are special screenings around the country on October 5th and October 8th. You can go to arewegoodmarin.com to see where it's playing and get tickets.

Speaker 7 We're also doing a screening at the Arrow Theater, and I believe Larry Charles is hosting the moderation on that.

Speaker 34 The Kickstarter for the graphic novel WTF is a podcast past 200 grand, so that means everyone who pre-ordered through Kickstarter will get a special box brown design WTF trading card featuring me and my original Garage Cats, Boomer, Monkey, and LaFonda.

Speaker 34 If it keeps going past $250,000, everyone gets a framed set of four trading cards. Go to z2comics.com/slash WTF.

Speaker 56 All right, so a couple of things happened that I think I should address in my life, not in the world.

Speaker 59 Some people saw a video of me at Norm's Guitars, which is a very famous guitar place for very fancy guitars, collectible stuff, and they've just been, is it champing at the bit about what did Mark buy at Norm's?

Speaker 61 Well, you should know Mark well enough by now that Mark is not going to spend $50,000 on a collectible guitar.

Speaker 28 I was just trying to lighten my load, so I brought Norm a few guitars I didn't really play and an amplifier so to kind of start cleaning out the studio.

Speaker 39 And I just wanted to maybe trade it.

Speaker 18 I don't need the bread, but I wanted to trade it for one guitar that I would use.

Speaker 62 And I needed a telecaster.

Speaker 18 So those people that are wondering.

Speaker 52 What it is I bought, I bought a 1973 black telecaster that was called, I think it was Player Grade or Play or something.

Speaker 6 It wasn't all original in terms of one of the pickups have been replaced, but it's the paint's original and it's got a nice weight to it, like the old 70s tellies.

Speaker 32 And it's got an interesting pickup.

Speaker 62 Great sound. I played at the end of this episode.

Speaker 34 So that's what I got.

Speaker 1 Reasonable.

Speaker 4 No $20,000 to $80,000 guitars for me.

Speaker 41 The other thing I wanted to mention: when I was talking to Pardo,

Speaker 27 we talked a lot about podcasters at the beginning, and someone brought it up that I didn't mention Jackie Cation,

Speaker 34 which I should, because Dork Varrest, her podcast has been around forever.

Speaker 65 It was there at the beginning.

Speaker 39 I did it a couple of times.

Speaker 18 She was definitely in the community, and it was just an oversight.

Speaker 39 And I think it's a reasonable shout out.

Speaker 44 I want to give her some love.

Speaker 10 Love Jackie.

Speaker 1 Also.

Speaker 18 You know, I've been talking a lot for a lot of years.

Speaker 62 And lately, sometimes I talk on Instagram and it seems to really get around

Speaker 1 lately.

Speaker 30 But I also just want to, you know, I just want to tell you, the audience, that I appreciate your emails when I get to them.

Speaker 44 And I appreciate the fact that in many cases, I've had a profound impact with this show and with my guests and with what I talk about on people's lives one way or another, helping out or, you know, keeping someone company or helping them reframe something that's been troubling them.

Speaker 41 It's something that happens that I would never have anticipated at the beginning of doing this show.

Speaker 29 And I appreciate it.

Speaker 70 I'm grateful that it has that impact.

Speaker 32 I thought I'd share just an email along these lines of like, I really don't know how my voice is going to impact anyone's life or change anybody's approach to life or help them in any way.

Speaker 74 And this example, I think, is, it's not exactly the podcast, but I think it speaks a lot.

Speaker 18 Hi, Mark, longtime listener, first time caller, just wanted to send you a note of thanks.

Speaker 41 My lady and I watched your special recently and you shared how one of your cats' balls was always under the stove.

Speaker 75 Obviously, a separate ball from the balls on the cat.

Speaker 34 Our beloved black cat cookie had a small blue ball toy. That's her favorite, which she's had since birth, but it had gone missing.

Speaker 34 When your your bit about the stove hit us, Taha immediately ran up to our stove, and sure enough, the ball was there. Thanks, sir, for improving the cat experience of our household.

Speaker 34 See, it's a little thing, but to that cat, what a life-changer. The cat thought it was gone forever.

Speaker 1 His favorite ball.

Speaker 54 And now, peace, peace, and excitement is reignited.

Speaker 56 See, it's a life changer, this show, and it's not lost on me.

Speaker 9 Okay,

Speaker 34 Judd Appetow.

Speaker 51 Now, look, he's got a new book out called Comedy Nerd, A Lifelong Obsession in Stories and Pictures.

Speaker 77 That comes out October 28th.

Speaker 30 You can pre-order it now wherever you get books.

Speaker 51 And this is

Speaker 36 Judd bringing the goods to kind of walk me through the history of my own show.

Speaker 6 So, listen, something people keep saying to me about the podcast ending is that I should take a vacation.

Speaker 23 Look, I used to take vacations.

Speaker 21 I used to love to go to Kauai.

Speaker 2 I enjoyed Kauai.

Speaker 73 I would go there, you know, once a year, usually.

Speaker 40 I haven't been on a vacation.

Speaker 41 I can't remember the last vacation I've been on.

Speaker 44 I was just talking to somebody about traveling to Tuscany and Umbria.

Speaker 36 I do need to take one.

Speaker 34 But if you're planning to take a vacation, there's always the question of what to do with your empty house while you're away.

Speaker 24 Of course, there's the option to host your place on Airbnb to make some extra cash.

Speaker 26 And now it's easier than ever with Airbnb's co-host network.

Speaker 34 You get a high-quality local host to take care of your home and your guests.

Speaker 18 They manage all the hosting details, send messages and updates, and are available to be on hand when your guests are there, just to help out with anything that might come up.

Speaker 34 So your co-host handles the details and you still make some cash while you're enjoying your vacation. Find a co-host at airbnb.com/slash host.

Speaker 59 So, Judd.

Speaker 81 Here we are.

Speaker 56 We are here, yeah, and I appreciate you coming.

Speaker 51 And you have a plan.

Speaker 1 I have a plan.

Speaker 82 You're dictating this.

Speaker 1 You know, I wanted to get on here to push my book, Comedy Nerd. Books good.
And it's kind of like, we were talking about that it's kind of like the old Marx Brothers scrapbook,

Speaker 1 the SNL scrapbook, with all the projects I've worked on. And I wrote essays.
Uh-huh. And pictures.
It's a lot of pictures, thousands of pictures. You're in there.
Everybody's in there.

Speaker 83 I am. What do you got of me in there?

Speaker 1 Just you performing. Oh, good.
And, but I literally put everything in it. It literally has like my autograph collection.
Oh, yeah. You can see my autograph from Andy Kaufman and Jack Klugman.
Right.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's great.

Speaker 43 I used to have an autograph picture of Buddy Hackett that I wrote away for.

Speaker 1 That's what I would do. I would sit and I would write like a hundred letters to just see who would send me an autograph.
And then I would get like Jackie Gleason and Gilda Radner and all these people.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And like a really young hoarder, because my hoarding must have started then.
I have all of it in pristine condition.

Speaker 1 And now I feel like I can throw my hoard out because I put it all in the book. Are you going to throw it out? Well, I'm going to try to throw a lot of it out because.

Speaker 34 What about like the, you know, the, where your papers, put it with your papers.

Speaker 1 I always hear about that, like, we have the papers of one of the guys from Peter, Paul, and Mary.

Speaker 1 Who looks at the papers?

Speaker 14 Well, it's like, I guess colleges have these libraries and they employ employ these

Speaker 1 curators, librarians.

Speaker 29 It's a librarian job to manage the papers.

Speaker 22 I just don't know. Like, I've got so many fucking things of papers and people are like, well, you know, we should archive that.

Speaker 86 I'm like, for what?

Speaker 1 Well, it's like the Bob Dylan Museum.

Speaker 33 And it's pretty great.

Speaker 87 Have you been there?

Speaker 1 I haven't been there. And I'd love to go, but I know that mine would not be good.

Speaker 1 What do you mean?

Speaker 23 You got all these pictures?

Speaker 51 I mean, yeah, sure, you don't have the original tangled up in blue, Eric's.

Speaker 1 I don't have that. But I have like a little piece of paper where like I thought of a dumb joke, like Steve Carell peas with a boner.
And I'm so proud of that little

Speaker 1 scrap of paper. But I hopefully will be able to let go of some of it.
But the proceeds go to

Speaker 1 the fires, for victims of the fires. And so you do all these shows at Largo, too, where that are all benefits for different things.
I know, I realize that.

Speaker 1 I'm the only one who literally has never taken a dime from Largo. Yeah.

Speaker 89 Well, I mean, do you need it?

Speaker 1 I think it's that. And like, am I really good enough to ask for the money?

Speaker 37 Well, the weird thing is, you are, but obviously, but the good thing about Largo is you can, they like to see you process there.

Speaker 14 It's a very odd thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they like to see you working on stuff.

Speaker 9 Yeah, people came to see my hour like again and again, and then they watched the special and they're like, we saw this early on, and it's really good what he did with it.

Speaker 73 And that's why when I did the special, there was a bit in there where I'm like, I got to, I don't know if I should do all three beats of this bit because it's going to be exactly the bit that's going to alienate, you know, people.

Speaker 29 And it wasn't the bit I cut.

Speaker 85 It was really, how far do I want to go with that, the Sarge character, the babysitter guy?

Speaker 15 And Lipsight, my buddy's like, you got to do all of that.

Speaker 1 You got to go all of them.

Speaker 1 Well, when I saw that,

Speaker 1 I was excited for you to open up like that. I'm all for people

Speaker 1 really opening up. It's funny because I've been working on all these documentary projects.
We have one about Mel Brooks,

Speaker 1 one about Maria Bamford, one about Norm McDonald's.

Speaker 1 And I realized

Speaker 1 I do like seeing the deep emotional part of people.

Speaker 76 Some of those people wasn't on stage.

Speaker 1 Yeah, just

Speaker 1 what all of our struggles are. Maria is full struggle.

Speaker 29 Norm, not so much, like the opposite.

Speaker 1 Hard to know with some of these people. You did one of the best interviews with Norm.
Yeah. I think of all the interviews anyone ever did with Norm, your interview was the best.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 That feels like a transition into what we're going to do. Okay.
Yeah. Well, I mean, start there.

Speaker 93 Well, you've been, you know, a big supporter and listener of the show, you know, on your own.

Speaker 55 You know, Noah, you found it and you stuck with it.

Speaker 56 And the interesting thing about this, and I've talked about it with Brendan, and people, they asked me about, do I listen to podcasts?

Speaker 62 And I'm like, I don't.

Speaker 29 And I don't even listen to mine.

Speaker 11 So almost all, I would say 99.9% of my recollections of interviews are whatever stuck in my mind because I don't listen to it again.

Speaker 47 Unless Brendan sort of like, I worked really, this one took me hours to make him sound like he knew what he's talking about.

Speaker 91 And then I'll listen to it, but I don't listen.

Speaker 68 Yeah.

Speaker 21 So whatever you're about to do,

Speaker 1 I'm going to play some clips for you. That's what we're going to do.

Speaker 6 Well, it's going to be, it's going to be interesting because sometimes people, like Brendan, can quote things because he's listened to him over and over again.

Speaker 83 And I'm like, I said that. That was pretty funny.

Speaker 1 I mean, I get the idea that

Speaker 1 of not listening to things again i remember uh meeting people who wouldn't watch anything owen wilson didn't i know

Speaker 1 he doesn't watch any of it yeah adam driver didn't watch i think almost maybe he saw one episode of girls he was forced to at the uh premiere bill hayer didn't want to watch anything reme schumer forced him to sit and watch train wreck and then years later

Speaker 1 I think he

Speaker 1 finally sat down and watched some of his SNL stuff. You know, his Really? His wife at the time said, you really need to see what you've accomplished.
And then he had to make Barry. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then he, you know, he saw how helpful I'm sure it was to be in charge of your performance and to edit yourself. And he had to deal with watching himself.

Speaker 23 It is helpful, especially with the acting.

Speaker 32 But like, also, I don't quite understand how you can just be satisfied with acting, you know, in, you know, as, you know, the process.

Speaker 28 Like, there's some part of me that's like, yeah, it was okay you know doing those little bits and pieces and then it all comes together but like how does owen you know not watch any of the stuff to see the work

Speaker 1 do you know what i mean like it's not satisfying enough for me just to do the acting well i think some people they just want to

Speaker 1 be so uninhibited and the thing that allows them to be uninhibited is that they will never watch it right and i i think that's what oh i think

Speaker 1 someone like adam driver uh thinks about it is i i can be 100% present because there's no part of my brain that's like, oh, this might really be embarrassing. Right.

Speaker 1 So I get it. Like, I realized recently that

Speaker 1 I generally don't watch the movies I've worked on again, and then not consciously.

Speaker 1 Usually I'll watch the ones I produce. Like I'll watch Step Brothers every single time.
Yeah. But the ones I've directed, I don't watch.

Speaker 15 But you've spent so much time with them.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you get kind of burnt out on them. Like recently, you know, it's the 20th anniversary of the 40-year-old virgin.
Yeah. So they showed it at the Academy Museum with a thousand people.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I hadn't watched it in 20 years.

Speaker 2 And I got to watch it like a fan.

Speaker 1 Like I didn't remember for real 80% of the jokes. Really? And how funny it was.
And I was laughing.

Speaker 1 They're putting it in the theater at the end of August, Trainwreck and 40-year-old Virginia. 40-year-old Virgin for their 20th and 10th anniversaries.
But I thought, why don't I watch them?

Speaker 1 And I don't know. It's almost like it's emotionally overwhelming.
It's like bumping into an ex-girlfriend or something.

Speaker 92 Yeah, the awkwardness.

Speaker 1 But we're going to do it right now. So I asked to do this.
I said, let me pick some clips as conversation starters. And maybe it'll be interesting because you haven't heard most of them since.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's true. Well, maybe we should start with the Barack Obama clip.
Okay.

Speaker 1 And then we'll discuss what we make of it now. Yeah.

Speaker 97 The more you do something

Speaker 98 and

Speaker 99 the more you practice it,

Speaker 97 at a certain point it becomes second nature.

Speaker 97 And what I've always been impressed about

Speaker 97 when I listen to comics talk about comedy is how much of it is a craft, right? And they're thinking it through, and it's

Speaker 97 and they have a sense of when it works and when it doesn't. And then the longer you do it, the better your instincts are.

Speaker 29 Same with president.

Speaker 97 Yeah, same with president. And also,

Speaker 97 I guess the last thing is

Speaker 100 you lose fear.

Speaker 97 That's right.

Speaker 97 I was talking to somebody the other day

Speaker 97 about

Speaker 97 why I actually think

Speaker 97 I'm a better president

Speaker 97 and would be a better candidate if I were running again than I ever have been. And it's sort of like an athlete.
You might slow down a little bit. You might

Speaker 97 not jump as high as you used to.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 97 I know what I'm doing and I'm fearless.

Speaker 44 For real. You're not pretending to You're not fearless.

Speaker 29 Pretending to be fearless. That's exactly right.

Speaker 97 And when you get to that point, freedom.

Speaker 97 And also part of that fearlessness is because you've screwed up enough times

Speaker 97 that you know that.

Speaker 102 It's all happened.

Speaker 97 It's all happened. I've been through this.
Right.

Speaker 19 I've screwed up.

Speaker 97 I've been in the barrel tumbling down Niagara Falls.

Speaker 97 And

Speaker 97 I emerged and I lived. And that's always...

Speaker 97 That's such a liberating feeling.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. Right?

Speaker 97 It's one of the benefits of age. It almost compensates for the fact that I can't play basketball anymore.

Speaker 1 Well, good. All right.
Well, thanks.

Speaker 103 It was great to talk to you. There we go.
We're good. That was fun.

Speaker 18 I appreciate it, Mr. President.
It was great.

Speaker 1 All right, man.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 44 I don't think I realized how truly present and somewhat vulnerable he was.

Speaker 41 Yeah. In the conversation, because that's what I'm hoping for.

Speaker 74 And that's the end of the conversation.

Speaker 30 But we were both comfortable, but I could hear it in his voice.

Speaker 57 He wasn't

Speaker 51 doing the politician him.

Speaker 59 And also, like, I'm always amazed at my fearlessness to go ahead and, you know, finish even the president's sentences.

Speaker 1 That's a level of narcissism that most people don't have.

Speaker 1 Is it narcissism or is it just impatience?

Speaker 74 I don't.

Speaker 30 you know, because like he took it, you know, when I pop the word in there, he's like, yeah, because sometimes it's really not, it's not self-centeredness.

Speaker 30 It's sort of like, I'm like, you know, I just want to keep a pace going.

Speaker 30 You know, so it's more in any moment when I do that.

Speaker 34 It's generally like either I've heard this before or

Speaker 85 let's keep it going.

Speaker 36 I don't like dead air that much.

Speaker 1 And a president could take 11 minutes to answer each question and then you got four in. That's right.

Speaker 44 And that was like, that was why we crafted that interview the way we did because he has a tendency.

Speaker 78 And if you talk about politics with him, you're going to get in the weeds, man.

Speaker 75 And we only had an hour and we did have to cover some stuff at the beginning.

Speaker 23 But he was very, he's always pretty thoughtful and deliberate.

Speaker 78 But there was a vulnerability there that I don't think I remember.

Speaker 1 Well, I think that it's nice to hear a president talk about how difficult these decisions are to make, as opposed to a president who will never admit that anything is hard or that he's ever made a mistake.

Speaker 1 There's such a madness to the fact that our president never says, I screwed that one up. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it's almost like a mental health issue. Well, it's a blame.

Speaker 51 He blames someone else.

Speaker 33 That's narcissism.

Speaker 1 Someone else put Ghalain in the nice prison. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 30 Or just like, yeah, I didn't know about that.

Speaker 59 And, you know, I guess they took care of it. Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I don't know. I don't know about the case.
I like that he keeps saying,

Speaker 1 I don't know why anyone's interested in that. It's like, like, it's boring.
Well, yeah.

Speaker 47 Well, he is the public face of his job, as it turns out,

Speaker 73 despite all their doublespeak, is to, you know, to

Speaker 15 make the deep state

Speaker 65 publicly

Speaker 1 charming

Speaker 29 like he is a rep he is the deep state and he is a puppet of it yeah and the the real deep state and now it's sort of like deep state is sort of like let's put this guy out there they like him so you know we'll be uh you know sort of national sweethearts what would you have done if donald trump wanted to come on wt we we had an agreement that if when he was president and before now again on the basis of fair play if he would come on with the same terms as Obama, which was we get final cut, they don't get questions, they, you know,

Speaker 98 and

Speaker 36 that's that, we would do it.

Speaker 38 But, you know, we didn't pursue it, but we said if they came to us, we would have to do it.

Speaker 26 But, you know, he would have done that and it would have just been what it is.

Speaker 69 I mean, it's like he doesn't, you know, he'll just yammer on about whatever.

Speaker 1 Did you have sympathy for the people interviewing Trump about how difficult it would be?

Speaker 1 Or did you feel like, nah, there's four or five things you could have pushed him a little bit on that it still would have been respectful, but we would have got a clear answer on something about what he might do.

Speaker 49 Maybe.

Speaker 29 I don't know if you can get a clear answer from that guy.

Speaker 27 You know, I think that I don't know what my approach would be, but generally it's to get them grounded in how they got there.

Speaker 82 So it would be interesting to kind of get into his childhood and his

Speaker 78 development.

Speaker 1 And I don't know how willing he is or how he has that framed but I would probably approach it the same way I do other things yeah well there's other people here now a big a big moment in in the history of the show yeah was when you spoke to Louis C.K.

Speaker 1 about your friendship right and what am I correct in saying that that

Speaker 1 really made the show take off in a lot of ways. People were very interested in that confrontation.

Speaker 62 Well, it seems that

Speaker 36 at that time in podcasting, which was a smaller world, that those two episodes, you know, really jumped out in terms of, you know, how I do it and what was done and how we sort of

Speaker 72 kind of dealt with something, you know, real and there was a human tension to it.

Speaker 38 But I think it did sort of

Speaker 33 represent the possibilities of the medium in terms of how I do it at that time. And I don't think it had been done really.

Speaker 1 Where people and especially men looked each other in the eye and got honest about what their

Speaker 1 conflicts and disconnections were.

Speaker 41 Yeah, and I was, you know, in retrospect, willing to take some hits

Speaker 45 because, you know, Louis kind of dictates the interaction generally.

Speaker 48 But, you know, all in all,

Speaker 71 it was interesting, you know.

Speaker 96 I haven't listened to that in a while.

Speaker 113 You're about to.

Speaker 115 I think you're changing the tone of how television can be made, and I'm very proud of you, and I'm excited for your success.

Speaker 103 Thank you, man.

Speaker 115 And it's great to see you. Yeah, you too.
And I'm

Speaker 115 glad we had this talk.

Speaker 103 Yeah, you know, it's when you know somebody for a long time, it's a very

Speaker 103 valuable thing. Yeah, it's beautiful.
I mean, we were best friends for a long time. I know.

Speaker 101 A long, long time.

Speaker 1 I know.

Speaker 103 Well, it's hard. There's times where it's hard to be your friend's friend.

Speaker 114 I know, but I don't have them.

Speaker 114 It's not like I have new friends.

Speaker 103 It's not like I was replaced by anybody. No.
That would feel worse. No, I'm still the same guy in a lot of ways.

Speaker 103 Well, look, here's, I can give you, and you don't have to put this in the podcast if you don't want to, but what I would say as far as trying to stay friends with somebody that you have a hard time thinking about what they're doing against what you're doing

Speaker 103 is focus on them needing a friend. Yeah.
It takes a good friend to stay with you in hard times. Yeah.
It takes a good friend to stay with you in good times. Everybody needs needs support.

Speaker 103 Everybody does.

Speaker 103 So you're letting me down.

Speaker 103 If you see me doing something and you have a hard time coming to terms with it because you're feeling about your own life, what's really happening is you're letting me down as a friend.

Speaker 103 You're being a shitty friend by being jealous. Okay.
So think about the other person.

Speaker 103 Think about what they might need.

Speaker 103 I could have used you. I could have used you.
I got divorced. I got a show canceled.

Speaker 103 You know, I had some tough times. I could have used a friend.
But you didn't have to do that. During those times that were making those times that were making you jealous, I was struggling.

Speaker 103 I was having a hard time.

Speaker 103 But even doing the Louis show was really hard. Trying to keep my family together.
It was hard.

Speaker 114 But the thing is, is that in the way our friendship always operated, it was not that I was kept up to date in the day-to-day things.

Speaker 114 It wasn't a day-to-day call that we had, but it seemed that most of the time, the thing that made our friendship so deep and so strong was that when we did talk, we made each other feel better.

Speaker 103 No, it's true, but you shut me out. You shut me out because you were having a hard time.

Speaker 114 Okay, well, I apologize again.

Speaker 103 Well, I apologize to you because then I did it to you probably out of resentment.

Speaker 103 Ignored your emails because you ignored my phone calls back when there was no email.

Speaker 114 Well, can we get back on track or what?

Speaker 103 Yeah, I think we can.

Speaker 114 Because I, you know, I mean, you understand me, you know, I mean, not a lot of people do.

Speaker 114 And the one thing that, and even when I tell stories about it, you know, it's just that, like,

Speaker 114 you always, you know, are able to, even in your weird way, and even if I thought you weren't listening, even when you did pick up what I was saying, that you were able to

Speaker 114 give me a great deal of relief

Speaker 114 fairly quickly. And I missed that.

Speaker 103 Well, we understand each other's flaws very well because we share some. Yeah, yeah.
And we've known each other long enough to understand them.

Speaker 103 So that's why we're able to look at each other, like tell each other about moments that we don't want to tell anybody else. Yeah.

Speaker 103 And to be able to have the other person go, yeah, I get it, instead of going, oh my God, why did you do that?

Speaker 101 Or the only time I did that?

Speaker 103 Well,

Speaker 103 don't be stupid. Do this instead or whatever.

Speaker 1 That happens.

Speaker 114 And the only time I said, oh, my God, was when I realized that that I had missed so much of your life and I felt horrible about it.

Speaker 103 You know, it's funny, I did the same thing when you got divorced the first time. I got mad at you.
Yeah. And I know now why, because I was married and

Speaker 103 I didn't want you to get out.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 103 It's hard. I mean, because being divorced, it has changed my relationship to a lot of people that are married that I knew before.
It just changes things. People look at you differently.

Speaker 114 I love you, man. Let's just try to fucking

Speaker 101 better friends.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God.

Speaker 13 Yeah,

Speaker 13 interesting.

Speaker 49 Well,

Speaker 91 what's interesting about that is that there is,

Speaker 38 especially in our world, because of the nature of what we do and that we're all pretty flawed people, that the community, like there is a shorthand, you know, that there's very few people who I have a day-to-day friendship with, you know.

Speaker 85 uh which i do neither of them are comics

Speaker 1 but with comics because they because they're your cats okay

Speaker 48 You got me.

Speaker 95 No,

Speaker 51 they're just guys that are in different elements of creative life, Sam Whipside, Jerry Stahl.

Speaker 53 But comics, you know, a lot of our communication is very precise, whether it's busting someone's balls or, you know, I get it, you know, and

Speaker 16 it's almost unspoken.

Speaker 57 You know, and there are some guys that can see right through my shit.

Speaker 41 And, you know, I love when people, you know, kind of, you know, take me down to size if I like them and they're funny.

Speaker 14 And because of that entry point, you do have sort of an understanding because it used to be a much smaller and rarefied community of weirdos that were all kind of on the spectrum of whatever the fuck is wrong with comics.

Speaker 41 And with Louie, the weird thing is that it did really come out because I didn't know how he framed that.

Speaker 17 In terms of our friendship, you know, what best friends implies to a lot of people is like you travel together, you're friends with each other's wives or what, whatever.

Speaker 37 But with me and Louie, mostly because I was and am still a pretty isolated person, you know, with a small social circle, you know, he would dip in and we'd connect and we'd hammer it out and we'd get some laughs and he'd sort of give me some insight.

Speaker 41 He's a pretty philosophical guy and a fairly wise guy because he's an autodidact who is brilliant and he crams his head with trying to understand himself and trying to understand the world.

Speaker 3 And he'll sit there and read the the biography of Teddy Roosevelt and glean some life advice from it.

Speaker 46 You know, so that was, but he's also very funny, but he also knew, you know, how crazy I was. So I think, you know,

Speaker 94 the idea of best friends, you know, becomes sort of a, you know, a confidant thing, like he said.

Speaker 41 And also that the time you do spend together, you know, is

Speaker 38 helpful to both of you.

Speaker 14 You know, I think that I don't ever remember him really, you know, leaning on me or needing advice.

Speaker 34 Sometimes, you know, I'd be on the list of people he would call to say, like, I don't know

Speaker 109 what to do or whatever.

Speaker 11 But it wasn't just me.

Speaker 34 You know what I mean?

Speaker 34 But yeah,

Speaker 93 we were there at weird pivotal times for each other's lives.

Speaker 75 And I think a lot of that stuff holds up.

Speaker 56 And then ultimately what happened is, you know, we were not able to sustain the friendship through his trials and tribulations

Speaker 64 because I had to speak publicly about it because of those podcasts that we were sort of connected.

Speaker 74 And I, you know, I was pressed for a reaction to what he was going through.

Speaker 35 And although I felt like I handled it diplomatically and correctly and still making myself available to be his friend, I feel like he felt...

Speaker 21 I don't know that he felt betrayed, but I think he felt like

Speaker 18 I fucked him somehow.

Speaker 83 which if i think if you listen to to how i handled that i i don't think that's true and since then you know he did send me an a rather awkward email saying like you know the the contents of it is unimportant uh really

Speaker 28 so as not to start shit but i said you know he said but i'd be willing to talk you know i'd say well yeah that'd be great but i'm not i'm not gonna you know rehash how i handled your situation and he was like well then i i don't think we we can do it then.

Speaker 11 I'm like, Okay, I've been okay for a few years now.

Speaker 51 So that's fine.

Speaker 41 And then it was weird when I'd see him and like there was this, you know, like, uh,

Speaker 14 weirdness there.

Speaker 7 And then, like, the last time at the cellar, I don't know what changed or why, but you know, I was there and for it was like for some reason at the table, like Santino and Bobby Lee were in town, and Chris Rock was there, and Darren Aronofsky and Louis was there.

Speaker 113 And I was sitting at the table, and they, Louie and Chris, and come in, and I'm like, how's this going to?

Speaker 32 And, you know, he was perfectly nice and, you know,

Speaker 11 making space for me to talk and, you know, friendly, like old, old-time me and him.

Speaker 41 You know, but nothing ever happened after that.

Speaker 1 But that happens. I mean, the whole issue of like

Speaker 1 your friendships in the world of your job and comedy is always interesting because now we've had those relationships with people for 30, 40 years. Yeah, I know.

Speaker 1 While we're watching everyone go through all sorts of

Speaker 1 life changes, marriages, kids, turmoil, diseases. Yeah.
And it's interesting who you stay connected with, you know, who become your go-tos and people you were so close to.

Speaker 1 People just drift off sometimes for just completely natural reasons.

Speaker 1 They got four kids. And

Speaker 1 you get that.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 64 And I don't know that I fully understood that when I was younger, you know, because I was sort of self-involved.

Speaker 27 But, you know, in grown-upness, you know, I don't get close to a lot of people in a way that

Speaker 62 would be an emotional risk to me, unless I can really trust them, which isn't easy.

Speaker 30 And I'm not in the loop with a lot of people's lives.

Speaker 62 And I had an experience recently with a comic that he had misunderstood something and he just shut me out of his life entirely.

Speaker 44 And for a long time, for too long.

Speaker 11 And when we finally, you know, coincidentally saw each other publicly, I was like, you know, what, what is going on, dude?

Speaker 27 And he's like, you want to do this?

Speaker 117 And I'm like, yeah.

Speaker 83 And he told me what was up.

Speaker 25 And I'm like, that, that is like totally wrong.

Speaker 83 It's all, it's all in your head and what it doesn't even make sense and then he was like oh

Speaker 49 okay and then but it's too late yeah

Speaker 104 you know it's like you know we you know I see him now and and you know we talk and stuff but I you know I did consider him a friend and also this idea of I could have used you and whatever fucking call me man

Speaker 40 I mean there's very few times I'm not available despite whatever you think you know what I mean like but this idea that you get something in your head and then you fucking detach and then you're like you weren't there for me I'm like what am I supposed to do if you don't call me or text me or say, let's have lunch?

Speaker 18 Jesus Christ, it's not like I'm doing a million things, certainly back then.

Speaker 1 Well, that was what Gary Chanling always found most interesting when we were working on the Larry Sanders shows. He always said that people are so rarely honest and real with each other.
People never.

Speaker 1 look each other in the eye and have it out

Speaker 1 in a very direct way. And I think that's what people found so interesting, especially in the early years of this show, was that you were doing that with people and it's just almost unheard of

Speaker 1 to do that. Here's another one of someone you had a conflict with.
I don't think you cleaned it up, though,

Speaker 1 with this person.

Speaker 114 I put you in the context of the history of comedy.

Speaker 1 You were a profound presence on the comedy saying you made 14 one-hour shows. I know that.
Gallagher. I know.

Speaker 1 I'm not saying you didn't write original material.

Speaker 1 I'm just asking where you're coming from.

Speaker 119 I was just asking where you're coming from. That's all.

Speaker 27 I respect you as a comedian.

Speaker 120 Do you see any lesbian jokes in my 14 one-hour shows?

Speaker 1 No. No.

Speaker 40 But what happened?

Speaker 120 One night, I told some I heard on the street, and everybody's up in arms over it.

Speaker 121 No, no, but why the shift?

Speaker 1 Why did you...

Speaker 120 It's not a shift. It's only five jokes.
I do a two-hour, two-and-a-half, sometimes three hours. I get on at eight, I'm off at 11.
Okay. Everybody focuses on one thing.

Speaker 1 No, no, I focus on all of these things. I focus on all of them.

Speaker 120 I'm the problem. Do you think when I'm dead, gays will finally have an opportunity in America? Have I really been holding them down?

Speaker 1 No, you don't hold them down.

Speaker 40 No, no, no, no, wait a minute.

Speaker 117 You don't hold gays down.

Speaker 1 Well, then what's the problem with that?

Speaker 106 No, I don't have any problem with you.

Speaker 114 I'm just saying that you reaffirm prejudice.

Speaker 120 Okay, can we tell a Jew joke that they don't want to pay?

Speaker 36 Why? It's not true.

Speaker 120 It's not true. Why do people laugh?

Speaker 122 Because it's a stereotype that's been established.

Speaker 121 Most people that you laugh at those jokes don't even have a Jew in their life.

Speaker 1 You can do any joke. You can see you can do it.

Speaker 120 You can do whatever you want.

Speaker 1 You can do whatever you want.

Speaker 120 Black comedians only talk about the difference between blacks and whites.

Speaker 122 Well, there are some stereotypes. Look, I am a person that thinks that some stereotypes, some parts of stereotypes are obviously true.

Speaker 1 The Jewish ones.

Speaker 40 They don't act.

Speaker 120 Well, no, but if you're picking on white people,

Speaker 1 they don't do it.

Speaker 106 Or talking about black community stuff.

Speaker 106 And I understand that there are stereotypes that fit.

Speaker 120 They only talk about fat. There's this midget comic that only does midget jokes.
I watched his whole act.

Speaker 1 Well, what else is he going to do?

Speaker 23 That's his wife.

Speaker 120 No, he could be generally funny. There's a comp.

Speaker 1 But he's getting laughs.

Speaker 77 But by your context, if he's getting laughs, laughed.

Speaker 120 Yeah, change the subject. We're bored.

Speaker 1 Are they if they're still laughing?

Speaker 120 No, there's no dynamics.

Speaker 120 Most comedians are terrible. They should listen to me.

Speaker 103 Okay, I will hear you out.

Speaker 120 And I help them when I can.

Speaker 121 What is your problem with most comedians?

Speaker 120 Well, like I just said, their show has no dynamics, and it's not a show based on their knowledge of the audience. It's a show about them.
And comedy is not therapy. Just because it's a challenge.

Speaker 106 Wait a minute.

Speaker 18 But if you're talking about a show about them,

Speaker 18 if you're saying that a person that talks about themselves on stage is not a comedian, then you're dismissing a great many great comics.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 47 Yeah. So you're...

Speaker 1 They didn't do it wrong. No, they didn't do it wrong.

Speaker 120 You walk in a doctor's office and he talks about his problems instead of...

Speaker 43 But that's an old joke.

Speaker 18 If a comedian talks about himself, and that is funny, if a comedian is a storyteller, see, by your rubric, you're dismissing.

Speaker 125 He can't work a state fair.

Speaker 124 Who the fuck wants to work a state fair necessarily?

Speaker 31 Everybody.

Speaker 1 Really? Yeah.

Speaker 79 So in order to work a state fair, you have have to take the Gallagher class.

Speaker 120 You have to work faster and more general. There are families out there, and they're not interested in your long, subtle story.

Speaker 57 Okay, that's fine. That's a state fair circuit.

Speaker 79 But the comedy club circuit, the cabaret circuit, can indulge a different.

Speaker 123 Why can't you just see it as all being part of show business?

Speaker 121 Why are you doing it?

Speaker 120 Because there's no show involved. They're a bunch of slobvenly,

Speaker 120 they hunch over, they turn their back on the audience, they take a

Speaker 1 style. Water.

Speaker 122 It's show business. Why are you drawing lines?

Speaker 120 Why are you taking the other side of everything I say?

Speaker 102 I'm not. I'm just saying.

Speaker 1 You are. I'm a motive.

Speaker 120 Why did you want me to do this interview if you don't think I know anything about what you're asking me?

Speaker 1 I'm just telling you.

Speaker 1 I'm done. You're done? I'm done.

Speaker 120 You're just arguing.

Speaker 125 It's Howard Stern and

Speaker 123 I was just having a conversation.

Speaker 123 I have more respect for comedy.

Speaker 1 You're trying to be controversial.

Speaker 26 I am not. Yes, you are.

Speaker 120 You're just arguing with me. I have 30 years of experience.

Speaker 77 Well, then tell me about comedy.

Speaker 122 I just think that show business is show business.

Speaker 120 Well, then just why don't you do the interview and tell people your opinion?

Speaker 21 We were having a good conversation.

Speaker 33 Oh, come on, Gallagher.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 36 that didn't.

Speaker 1 Come on, maybe it really went well.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 115 I'm certainly not going to chase after him.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Come on, Gallagher.

Speaker 60 Well, I haven't heard that in a while.

Speaker 1 That was pretty early in the run.

Speaker 104 I guess, and it was like coincidental.

Speaker 62 It's not like we booked him. I just knew he was in town.

Speaker 70 The best part of that whole experience with him was we were at the hotel and I met him in the lobby.

Speaker 68 He's like, I'm going to show you a trick.

Speaker 10 And he's like, we're going to get free coffee because there was some sort of thing in the conference room.

Speaker 108 He's like, come on.

Speaker 1 You know, he's been doing that in all the hotels he's worked in his whole life. Like, you know, there's a commissary for the employees.
They'll give you free chicken tea. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 77 So I, but I have, like, in my mind, thought, like, well, was I indicting him?

Speaker 30 And I don't think I was.

Speaker 54 I think that was, you know, I was trying that my

Speaker 15 argument or, you know, what I was trying to sort of expand on with him was valid.

Speaker 1 Was he in trouble for some jokes? Is that what happened? There was something else.

Speaker 6 Yeah, well, he had, you know, done these like, you know, old street jokes, but he's clearly at the moment where he says, you know, black people talk about white people all the time then you know it's game over because he's dug into something that is not it's a false equivalent you know and it and it's clearly uh

Speaker 3 you know racially motivated so like his his idea is like if people laugh at it uh you know what could be wrong And well,

Speaker 26 again, you can say whatever you want and you might have an audience for that.

Speaker 93 But in the big picture,

Speaker 111 it may not be wrong, but it's insensitive and he doesn't give a fuck.

Speaker 1 Or worthy of a debate that doesn't have to be where he goes into total meltdown.

Speaker 53 Yeah, I mean, it took a minute, but he wasn't, the truth was, is that it could have, if he could have said, like, I understand your point, but this is, you know, this is how I do it, it would have been different.

Speaker 66 Yeah.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 67 I do not think I was being, I think I was trying to get to the place where we could talk about his career.

Speaker 66 And

Speaker 28 again, I just interviewed him because I knew he was in town and it happened.

Speaker 16 And I had to bend my brain into that place where it's like, you know, this guy was at the store in the 70s.

Speaker 27 You know, he's a guy.

Speaker 41 He did his own thing.

Speaker 29 Everybody knows him.

Speaker 23 So he has a place in this.

Speaker 104 And I think in the conversation,

Speaker 36 you know, about the idea of putting on a show, I mean, that's valuable.

Speaker 32 That makes sense.

Speaker 16 That is where he comes from.

Speaker 28 It's almost a street performer or

Speaker 57 pop singer idea because it's more than just having a big closer.

Speaker 71 It's having, you know, he's a prop act.

Speaker 9 So, you know, you kind of evolve this big show.

Speaker 30 But the fact that he sees that as the only viable form of comedy is ridiculous.

Speaker 1 When he decides he doesn't like anyone talking about themselves. Yeah.

Speaker 52 Yeah.

Speaker 11 And if like if that's any indication of who he was, it'd be impossible to sit through.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Then there's, I mean, I get when some people, you know, have fun with with that, like everyone's opening up too much. Like, there's certainly

Speaker 1 a discussion to be had about the bloodletting that's happening. I always enjoy anyone open in a vein.

Speaker 11 But it doesn't happen.

Speaker 67 Like, that was sort of like the

Speaker 51 false promise of alt comedy

Speaker 113 is that because most of those people did not go on to have big comedy careers, really, that whole scene, because it was indulgent.

Speaker 40 And, you know, in San Francisco used to be a little indulgent, but there is a way to to do that.

Speaker 23 And I guess, you know, I guess it is sort of, you know, outside of

Speaker 32 like, if you really think about people who do that for real and the toll it takes on them and how they have to frame it, it's really only Richard Lewis.

Speaker 6 Right.

Speaker 46 I mean, who else was really doing that?

Speaker 17 Like, you know, like, okay, I go to therapy, whatever, a couple jokes.

Speaker 27 But to live in, you know, the mental illness that he had as being the only resource for him to make jokes.

Speaker 53 I mean, and and it's sort of specific.

Speaker 67 I mean, and I think a lot of people like Richard Lewis, but a lot of people probably don't because of that.

Speaker 27 So I think that line of figuring out how to be that indulgent because your point of view is limited to you, which I decided to do, you know,

Speaker 29 out of not wanting material to be stolen or to cross streams.

Speaker 44 You know, it's challenging because there's always going to be people calling you a navel gazer or you're just doing therapy or whatever.

Speaker 11 Because a lot of people would do that, but they do it in character.

Speaker 69 Like Woody Allen was in character.

Speaker 62 So all the analysis jokes and everything else in terms of true vulnerability around going through life was tempered by that.

Speaker 1 Also the personal stuff, I think, seems to hold up better over time. The Richard Pryor material about his life

Speaker 1 really holds up. And I think some of the other styles of comedies aimed at.

Speaker 23 Well, he's like the template because he had this whole like canvas of characters and social position.

Speaker 57 you know but once he started up and there's bits and pieces in some of the records leading up to the the massive up you know the two like you know the one where he shot the car which was earlier and then the one where he set himself on fire so of course it's going to hold up because a guy set himself on fire the funniest man in the world set himself on fire smoking crack or free basing always a solid story totally

Speaker 1 and uh speaking of which uh there was a comedian who's no longer with us who's on the show named Mike DiStefano,

Speaker 1 who had an amazing bunch of stories he told on your show. And I think he did it at like the moth.

Speaker 92 Yeah, that was a big breakthrough for him.

Speaker 1 And someone who we all lost way too soon. So I thought I would play a clip from that episode.

Speaker 125 I said, why is she so mad at me? He goes, well, she just feels like you're moving on with your life and you don't love her anymore. Like you have this motorcycle.
And

Speaker 125 he said, you don't need her anymore like that was a strange thing and i realized how much i did need her like i loved her like she was my best friend and so what i did was i went home and i brought some of my work shirts back to the hospice so uh i bring these shirts these work shirts into her and she was sicilian so i said franny my shirts are a fucking mess i need you to iron them for me she got all you i'm in the hospice you know like what yeah so i went i left i come back 20 minutes later all the shirts are ironed you know she got up and then she's like where's the motorcycle now she's excited about i guess and that guy was right she just wanted to know that that i still needed her like i loved her you know what i mean like people aren't dying they don't know they're dying they're they feel i'm alive dying is an event they pass away at one moment up until that moment they are alive and they want to be loved and they want to give yeah and share you know in that case so so she want now she wants to see that i take her out she wants to sit on it.

Speaker 1 I put her on it.

Speaker 125 She wants to start it up. Now she's wearing fucking a paper dress, you know, essentially.

Speaker 125 She's got her morphine pole next to her. And she's sitting on this Harley.
And I'm worried about her burning her freaking leg off. So I'm, she says,

Speaker 125 can you just take me for a little ride around the parking lot? I'm like, no, I can't. I'm thinking, get the fuck.

Speaker 21 You got a drift IV with?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 125 And then it just hit me. I'm like, no, you have to.
Yeah. Like, you're in this moment.
You have to do this motorcycle ride. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 114 You know, and it's dangerous.

Speaker 125 And what if she falls? And, you know, what if I, one day I'm telling the story. Yeah, my wife, she almost died of AIDS, but then I've killed her on my Harley.
She fell off and banged her fucking head.

Speaker 125 That's how she, you know, that's a fucked up story. So,

Speaker 1 you know, so

Speaker 125 that's when I realized, you know, fuck it. Fuck, of course.
Yeah. So I'm riding around the hospice parking lot.

Speaker 125 And then my friend comes barreling in this man who's a crippled in the wheelchair, laughing. What are you doing?

Speaker 125 I said, I'm riding frannie around franny's like could we just go out on the street a little bit where's the morphine drip she holding it she's holding the pole

Speaker 125 mark it was a pole with four wheels on the bottom yeah and we're riding around this hospice you could hear the goddamn wheels jangling and banging yeah it was insane and then i passed the front door and all these nurses are standing out front and they're all crying They're watching.

Speaker 125 I said, they're fucking crying. And I didn't know why they were crying.
I was like, why are they crying? I didn't get what they were seeing.

Speaker 125 I didn't know. Because I was just in it.
I was living it. I knew

Speaker 125 my wife who had suffered the suffering that she had been through in her life. She was a prostitute.
She was a fucking heroin addict. You know, she was beaten by fucking pimps.

Speaker 18 This is her past.

Speaker 125 And then she ends up with this AIDS and she's dying. And all she wants is a fucking ride on my motorcycle.
You know, what a gift, you know? So next thing you know, we're on I-95.

Speaker 125 Because women, it's never enough for them. We're on 95.
She's got, she unhooks the fucking pole and she's holding the morphine bag over her head with a, with her gown on that's flying up in the air.

Speaker 125 So you can see her entire fucking naked, bony body with the morphine bag whipping in the wind. And I'm dry, and we're passing by these guys in their Lamborghinis and shit.

Speaker 18 And I'm looking at him like, what the fuck? How do these people,

Speaker 1 what are you doing? What kind of life are you living? Look at me. I'm on top of the world here.

Speaker 125 And, you know, that was the last thing thing I did with her, you know, and, you know, I feel so blessed and lucky. Like, you know what I mean? Yeah.

Speaker 125 I feel like that was, you can't ask for a better moment in memory than that, you know?

Speaker 101 So. Yeah, it's heavy, man.

Speaker 125 Yeah, it's beautiful stuff, you know, and it's what we all.

Speaker 125 You know, the biggest things that we're afraid of are really can be the most beautiful if you look if you look them right in the fucking eye and you don't flinch because there's something really beautiful behind it.

Speaker 1 Hmm.

Speaker 10 Hell of a story.

Speaker 1 Do you remember doing that interview? Yeah.

Speaker 105 Yeah, I think we were in Florida.

Speaker 107 And,

Speaker 60 you know,

Speaker 44 the range of personal experience, you know, of

Speaker 51 sadness, trauma,

Speaker 30 you know, losing control of your life.

Speaker 105 It's all varied, but the impact is always similar if you connect with it.

Speaker 11 But I think what's beautiful about

Speaker 93 him, about DiSefano, is that

Speaker 38 this is a

Speaker 36 hard life, but it's also

Speaker 36 a life that could be judged

Speaker 27 by

Speaker 92 proper culture.

Speaker 21 He was a sober guy,

Speaker 73 and when he talks about what his wife did and who she was and who he was, you know, this is an easy sort of

Speaker 68 humanity to dismiss as degenerate or, you know, like,

Speaker 62 what a fucking out-of-control loser or whatever.

Speaker 91 But to find the humanity

Speaker 47 in those moments for people that have had that type of rough go at it, whether it's jail or drugs or

Speaker 62 horrendous abuse, it's very powerful

Speaker 83 to humanize things that can be dismissed as

Speaker 35 weak-willed or criminal or whatever.

Speaker 105 Because the struggle is the same.

Speaker 71 And when people transcend

Speaker 64 those types of

Speaker 27 situations with their humanity,

Speaker 41 it's humbling, and it's powerful, and it's a testament to the human spirit, and it transcends whatever judgment you're going to put on it.

Speaker 1 What did you think when you first realized that this was going to be a certain portion of the show that it wasn't just funny chats with comics about their road adventures?

Speaker 1 Like, you didn't see this coming, I would assume, that people would open up in this way.

Speaker 6 No, but like, when it started happening, I realized that it was fundamentally

Speaker 27 helping me by forcing me to make the space.

Speaker 18 for that kind of empathy and to sort of like naturally like, you know, once I, you know, once you get, if you're with a comic and you're doing the thing and you got that going, that's good.

Speaker 41 And you can take some good shots.

Speaker 35 And there's certain people whose balls I can bust and they get a kick out of it.

Speaker 18 But once you enter this other space,

Speaker 30 my need for connection stops.

Speaker 86 And then

Speaker 39 after that stops,

Speaker 78 my empathy builds.

Speaker 16 So once that space started opening more, it was like, well, this is the real stuff.

Speaker 45 If we can get to, you know, anywhere in this, in this spectrum of

Speaker 86 sharing vulnerability and engaging with empathy,

Speaker 29 that's the human stuff that is missing, I think, from a lot of people's interactions, like you said.

Speaker 1 Don't you think that on some level makes you believe in

Speaker 1 the universal intelligence or spirituality or God that somebody like you that was struggling with issues of empathy or self-involvement

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 somehow you're drawn to do a show that has conversations with people that forces you to learn all these lessons and changes you while helping other people.

Speaker 1 People are presented with these opportunities and they can take them or not to learn and grow

Speaker 1 and get over their

Speaker 27 I don't know if it implies universal intelligence because if you're not...

Speaker 1 Why you got to find universal intelligence? Just say that's what it is.

Speaker 1 This is your next lesson. I'm going to teach it to you.

Speaker 46 No, I do.

Speaker 18 I'm not going to deny that there's universal intelligence, but I'm also not going to deny that humans, either collectively or on an individual level, can push back on that and become monsters.

Speaker 36 So, you know, honoring the universal intelligence, or if you want to call it God, you know, honoring God, you know, finding the humility in whatever God you choose is, you know, it requires a vigilance and it requires a connection.

Speaker 48 And, you know, if this...

Speaker 29 if this exists as universal intelligence, that doesn't guarantee that humanity is going to be decent or that humanity is not going to fuck itself by pushing back on that or or misinterpreting it and using it for evil means.

Speaker 73 So this is all in your special.

Speaker 34 Different way.

Speaker 67 It's suggested in the special.

Speaker 18 This might be more in one of the past specials.

Speaker 60 But no, I agree with you, but I do think that in a in a culture that is divisive to the point where

Speaker 55 it's not even group divisive, it's divisive on an individual level because of the way we take in information, that you know, these

Speaker 98 stories that elevate the human experience and the humanity of it and the humility of it, you know, it's like food, dude.

Speaker 93 And it's food that is not readily available as much as it used to be.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 33 I'm going to put on a clip of something funny of Robin Williams

Speaker 1 talking about suicide.

Speaker 1 So, but funny. Yeah, of course.
But very, very, very funny. But I think one of the best of all of the interviews that you did.

Speaker 129 So

Speaker 129 before you had the heart problem, I mean,

Speaker 129 you don't seem to me someone who's like morbidly fascinated or hung up on death. No, I mean, that's weird.

Speaker 129 I mean, when I was drinking, there was only one time, even for a moment, where I thought, oh, fuck life.

Speaker 129 And then I went like,

Speaker 129 then even my conscious brain went, did you obviously just say, fuck life?

Speaker 129 You know, you have a pretty good life as it is right now. Have you noticed the two houses? Yes.
Have you noticed the government? Yes.

Speaker 129 Have you noticed that things are pretty good, even though you may not be working right now? Yes. Okay, let's put the suicide over here on discussable.

Speaker 129 Let's leave that over here into the discussion area. We'll talk about that.

Speaker 129 First of all, you don't have the balls to do it. I'm not going to say it out loud.
I mean, have you thought about buying a gun? No. What were you going to do? Like, cut your wrist with a water pick?

Speaker 129 Maybe. So that's erosion.
What are you thinking about that? So, can I put this over here in the what the fuck category? Yes, let's put that over here over what the fuck.

Speaker 129 Because can I ask you what you're doing right now? You're sitting naked in a hotel room with a bottle of Jack Daniels? Yes.

Speaker 129 Is this maybe influencing your decision? Possibly. Okay, we're going to put that over here and tomorrow morning.
And who's that in the bed there? I don't know.

Speaker 129 Okay, well, don't discuss this with her because she may tweet it. Okay, this may not be good.
Let's put that over here in the what the fuck category. We're going to put that over here.

Speaker 129 Possibly for therapy if you want to talk about that in therapy. Or maybe a podcast two years from now.
Do you want to talk about it in the podcast? No, I feel safe.

Speaker 129 You're talking about it in the podcast? I know. Who is this? It's your conscience, asshole.
Oh, okay. So,

Speaker 129 have you ever thought about it since then? No. During the surgery, were you thinking about death?

Speaker 129 No.

Speaker 129 Why? Because you just were thinking everything's going to be fine. Was that your mother talking? Maybe.
She was a Christian scientist who had plastic surgery. Wow.
Is that a mixed message?

Speaker 129 Yeah, that is. Okay.

Speaker 129 We're going to go back to the podcast now because Mark's sitting here. We're talking now.
It's going to be, I know it would feel like golf commentary, but look, Tiger's back. Tiger's playing.

Speaker 129 Tiger's doing well. I was hoping that some of the tweets would have golf metaphors like, you know, choke up rather than choke,

Speaker 129 or like, you know, I'm going to hold you down and putt from the rough. No, you didn't say that.
You know, it's all good. We're back.
Thank you. That was wonderful.
Thank you. It's a nice interval.

Speaker 129 A nice interval.

Speaker 129 Discussions of death.

Speaker 129 It's very freeing. Thank you.

Speaker 13 Wow, man.

Speaker 61 I haven't heard that since it happened. So

Speaker 91 what's amazing about that is you get his whole life story.

Speaker 70 You get his weird improvisational genius.

Speaker 64 And you get, you know, a real sort of sense of struggle.

Speaker 48 Like, and

Speaker 62 it's like no matter what anyone said about that guy, you know, repeating riffs or hackiness or whatever.

Speaker 26 I mean, that, that is the genius, you know, in that little piece, you know, because, you know i i could see him doing that on stage and that his innate uh need to find a funny line i mean you know who's that next to you i don't know i mean that where does that

Speaker 44 to have that in the moment you know because he was going through it like one of the reasons i did that interview you know

Speaker 46 and his death you know in light of that i i think has to be separated for

Speaker 58 the the intentions, you know, his struggle with with not wanting to live in the midst of alcoholic self-pity is different than making a choice in relation to a chronic debilitating disease.

Speaker 1 Well, he had Lewy body dementia. Yeah.
And so it wasn't

Speaker 1 really about depression. It was somebody who was

Speaker 47 like, yes.

Speaker 48 And I think that

Speaker 94 however you feel like that about that, that the choice is different than to

Speaker 8 have a bad night and

Speaker 62 make the mistake of killing yourself.

Speaker 62 You know, it's obviously something thought through.

Speaker 45 And for reasons that even if you're morally uncomfortable with it, it's understandable.

Speaker 36 But the reason I did that interview was interesting because it was really like, you know, you got to love Robin.

Speaker 30 And, you know, even with all within our community that sort of each stole jokes or he's hacky or whatever.

Speaker 94 When I'd hear young comics, you know, diminish,

Speaker 41 his stature, you know, there was always part of me that's like, all right, even my personal feelings aside, you know, I don't follow everything Robin does, but he has done everything that you want to do brilliantly.

Speaker 41 Like, you know, he, you know, he was an inspired comic, a singular voice. He was, you know, the center of

Speaker 72 a hit television show that honored his voice.

Speaker 28 He had a range that enabled him to do, you know, tons of movies.

Speaker 26 Did he win Academy Awards?

Speaker 1 For Goodwill Hunting. Yeah.

Speaker 36 So, like, and you're going to sit here and go like, nah, he's a thief and a hack. It's like, go fuck yourself.

Speaker 15 So part of my intention

Speaker 24 was to

Speaker 35 elevate him with a new generation of comics.

Speaker 1 Well, I was watching the documentary about him on HBO literally last night.

Speaker 1 The amount of incredibly brilliant jokes is ridiculously high. Yeah.
You know, I think that he's underrated in a giant way.

Speaker 21 That was what drove me.

Speaker 48 Yeah. You know what I mean?

Speaker 107 That

Speaker 42 it was like, who the fuck are you to like take any shots at this guy?

Speaker 72 You know, and God knows when I was younger, you know, the joke stealing thing, you know, it has an impact or whatever.

Speaker 29 You just send checks.

Speaker 14 It's like, but I had a moment with him up at the Throckmorton after he saw me at a show where I saw it happen.

Speaker 11 There are guys that just have a certain, and it's not, I'm not being an apologist for it, but

Speaker 44 It was funny because he watched the whole show.

Speaker 15 I was on stage and he was up in the, you couldn't see him.

Speaker 29 He was in a balcony seat.

Speaker 92 And anytime a joke would just not do quite well, I'd hear, oh,

Speaker 1 he was there for you.

Speaker 126 But I also knew on some level he wanted me to bring him in.

Speaker 98 Do you know what I mean? Yeah.

Speaker 64 Because that's just the way he was, but I couldn't handle that.

Speaker 15 But after the show, we're backstage and he's talking to me and he's doing that bit I used to do about the demon, the tired demon.

Speaker 25 You know, like, you know, it used to be like, let's go out and get some booze and pussy and, you know, whatever.

Speaker 94 And now it's sort of like, oh, that's an ice cream.

Speaker 3 And he started to paraphrase it to me to my face and then kind of run with it make it better right and i'm like that's how it happens yeah you know it's just one next step to where he thought of it and it's it's not necessarily forgivable but i get it you know and it happens and that's just the way it is Well, I

Speaker 1 don't think I've been in such a soft spot. I'm sure he did.
But

Speaker 1 I have such a soft spot for him because my first job was working for comic relief. So when I was 18, I would watch the rehearsals.
I was just a PA.

Speaker 1 I just got to watch him from a distance for many years.

Speaker 1 Just how kind he was. Yeah,

Speaker 1 how brilliant and

Speaker 1 just a special person. And when he passed, someone said, you know, we all took him for granted because he was such a joy machine for so long, so consistently that people.

Speaker 1 didn't appreciate it because it was just he was always there constantly doing doing his thing uh i'll uh switch to music for a moment okay

Speaker 1 because i i know how much you love music. And one of the great interviews you did was with Bruce Springsteen.

Speaker 1 And I think one of the reasons why it was so strong was I don't think he is one of your favorites of all time. He's not your Rolling Stones.

Speaker 1 And as a result, you were very loose and real. And you had a very intimate conversation about depression and fathers.

Speaker 1 And I think it's one of the best interviews he's ever done because he was having a riot with you and it was like people discovering each other.

Speaker 50 That's right.

Speaker 78 I got him engaged, you know, with me,

Speaker 27 which was, you know, because he's a guy whose public persona is like, yeah, me and the boy.

Speaker 49 You know,

Speaker 50 it's very dug in and pretty broad.

Speaker 78 Like, you know, he can put on the Bruce show, you know, in conversation.

Speaker 83 I think after this podcast, something shifted in him.

Speaker 29 I'm not going to take responsibility for it.

Speaker 109 But then, you know, comes the one-person show, comes, you know, but before that, before this interview, that was not what was happening.

Speaker 51 And again, I'm not taking responsibility for it, but

Speaker 36 it probably was the book.

Speaker 68 You know, going out on the road and reading pieces, that book that is very sort of in-depth, candid, and really shows his flaws, shows the family that he came from.

Speaker 68 You know, it's relentless and kind of brutal.

Speaker 31 But

Speaker 62 I loved, there's a moment I always talk about from that interview that was just the best

Speaker 90 where,

Speaker 66 you know, he didn't know me.

Speaker 51 You know, the publicist set it up and I'm at his house.

Speaker 29 It's Christmas week and we're in Jersey, me and Brendan.

Speaker 35 And we're waiting in this separate building that's like a studio and this motorcycles are there, equipment, guitars and stuff.

Speaker 29 You know, it's a nice big space. And we're just waiting.
I got my little Zoom over there.

Speaker 29 And I just see him walking down from the big house, you know, little Bruce.

Speaker 33 And he's walking down.

Speaker 41 He's got his book because I think he's used to like, you know, you want to read some of it. And I'm like, he has no, yeah, it was a moment he has no idea what he's getting into.

Speaker 29 And I just started the way I usually start.

Speaker 76 I'm sure it's on there.

Speaker 75 I paraphrase myself because I could just listen to what I exactly say.

Speaker 11 But I remember he comes in, he sits down, you know, with that Bruce kind of weight.

Speaker 31 You know, like, who are you?

Speaker 23 You know, like, but it was, so I said, so what's going on at the house?

Speaker 68 A lot of craziness, Christmas, cooking, presents.

Speaker 1 He's like, correct.

Speaker 33 And I'm like, I want to talk to that Bruce.

Speaker 36 Whoever that Bruce was.

Speaker 1 We got to go there.

Speaker 60 You know?

Speaker 81 And a year or two later, I found, you know, Ta Wilkenfeld, right?

Speaker 73 The bass player, the prodigy, who plays with all these guys.

Speaker 95 And apparently she was in conversation.

Speaker 29 She was talking to Bruce candidly about doing a press tour for her record.

Speaker 107 And

Speaker 95 he said, well, when you do interviews, you just tell them what you want to tell them.

Speaker 35 You don't have to answer their question. You take control of it.
You tell them what you want to tell them.

Speaker 36 You guide it.

Speaker 38 And she goes, oh,

Speaker 38 that's good advice.

Speaker 14 You know, because my friend Mark Maron interviewed you, and he said he pushed.

Speaker 1 You got it out of him. Yeah.
Well, let's take a little listen.

Speaker 131 I mean, you talk a little bit about boundaries in the book, but what you had to do in your mind was sort of build the wall.

Speaker 132 Yes,

Speaker 132 I built quite a few of them.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 80 You know, just to protect this other part, which leads to this thing, you know, I do stand-up and I've doing it for years.

Speaker 18 And there was something I identified with in the book, which was for some reason, and this is me now, and maybe you can help me.

Speaker 21 Maybe you already are.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 14 I can open up in front of a crowd.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 29 Like, and like and put it all out there.

Speaker 132 Well, that's easy to do.

Speaker 1 I guess,

Speaker 1 if you're that kind of person. Correct.

Speaker 80 Right. But, like, when I get home or I'm in a relationship, you know, I'm like, what do you want?

Speaker 126 What do you, what?

Speaker 1 What's happening?

Speaker 132 Well, there's certain kinds of people, you know, that only feel at home in a crowd.

Speaker 132 Performing for them.

Speaker 1 Performing. You have control.

Speaker 102 Number one.

Speaker 132 You have tremendous control. Tremendous control.
Everybody's listening to you.

Speaker 1 Isn't that great?

Speaker 123 But what about those times, though?

Speaker 80 I don't know if you ever did it, but

Speaker 67 it seems like that you really kind of had a practical way of addressing fear, know, heading into things.

Speaker 80 Like you didn't want it. I have to assume it was there, but somehow.

Speaker 1 Of course. Right.

Speaker 21 But did you ever have those nights where, you know, you, you, you, that one place where you have control, you go up and it's like, listen, I mean, I know you talk about one gig in London.

Speaker 132 Yeah, of course. Well, your desperation has to be greater.
than your fear.

Speaker 132 You know, your desperation, your hunger, your desires, your ego, your ambition has to be greater than your fear of complete humiliation. And so

Speaker 132 as long as you have that equation correctly balanced, you're going out there, my friend, no matter what happens.

Speaker 1 Because you have to. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 40 Yeah, but it's like, it's funny, though, because there was an interesting realization that you had.

Speaker 95 And I assume a lot of this stuff in the book, it's you thinking about this stuff.

Speaker 80 Like, I have to assume that some of the stuff you write in the book about the past is you now going, like, oh, yeah, well, now that I know this, of course, that's what I was doing.

Speaker 43 Of course.

Speaker 36 But back then, you're like,

Speaker 1 who knows? Yeah. I'm just going.

Speaker 132 All of this stuff is inside me,

Speaker 132 working its magic. Yeah.
And I'm just following it. And I'm stumbling out on stage because I have to.

Speaker 132 I'm not sure why I have to at the time.

Speaker 132 And then I'm just, you know, exploding and letting letting things take their course but those nights where it's like that you didn't get the love you needed out there that's bad

Speaker 132 well that means that because that means yeah there ain't no love nowhere

Speaker 1 that's why those nights are bad if you've squeezed all the rest out of your out of your daily life and then you're not getting it there

Speaker 132 there ain't no love nowhere my friend it's a lonely world when that happens and you went through months like that well sure.

Speaker 132 I mean, now most of the time, you know, we're not about the crowds, but where you take, you were out in the exile in a way.

Speaker 132 You know, I went through that for years, you know, years and years, you know, in my real life.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You know.
Yes.

Speaker 132 But,

Speaker 132 you know, I always fell back on my pretend life where I got to pretend I was Bruce Bringstein. And

Speaker 132 I always had that to fall back on for three or four hours a night, you know.

Speaker 1 Right, right. Yeah.

Speaker 21 When things get real dark, it's sort of like, let's do the show.

Speaker 132 Yeah,

Speaker 132 at least that's something that I know where the fuck I am, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's just

Speaker 132 there. I know what's going on.
I know what's expected of me. I have no problem busting my ass to deliver it.

Speaker 132 And at the end of the evening, I can go home and put my head to sleep on my pillow in a short moment of peace.

Speaker 1 I did it. I did it.

Speaker 132 And then you wake up and hell starts all over again.

Speaker 1 Holy fuck.

Speaker 33 I'm pretty good at this.

Speaker 1 Why are you stopping?

Speaker 1 You're going to keep it going after this episode.

Speaker 1 But I did go through the list of all the episodes. Yeah.
You really did get almost everybody. I know.
And so when I went through it, I thought,

Speaker 1 I mean, obviously, I was one of the people who was like, you definitely shouldn't stop doing it. Just do it less.
But when I went through the names, there is a sense that it is completed.

Speaker 1 And also there is an arc to you telling your story through all the people from the comedy store that you interviewed and working through things.

Speaker 1 And there does seem to be a sense of the circle has closed.

Speaker 96 Yeah, I believe that.

Speaker 40 But that Bruce thing was like, you know,

Speaker 46 It's kind of amazing because I don't listen to these, but, you know, we were locked in.

Speaker 126 He was getting laughs.

Speaker 48 He felt comfortable, you know, he was like, you know, he was exploring it in a different way than he did in the book.

Speaker 62 And there was another one when I was telling him some story about myself about, you know, never feeling like it's quite enough.

Speaker 60 And he's like, of course you don't.

Speaker 91 Like, you know, that there was this, you know, he was in.

Speaker 46 And

Speaker 104 I just did a small part in that movie.

Speaker 46 And it was, it was kind of great, you know, because it's a very small part.

Speaker 41 And I was kind of like, oh my God, I got nothing to do in this movie.

Speaker 89 But he and Landau were in the video village the whole time.

Speaker 1 And you're the producer?

Speaker 15 No, I'm just an engineer. A sound engineer.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Wait, so you're acting in spring scenes at the monitor. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 107 Yeah.

Speaker 29 And it was very helpful, I think, for Jeremy Strong to have Landau there because he's so meticulous.

Speaker 57 So if he had a check of behavior or something, he could go.

Speaker 30 But for me, you know, you know, cut, and I could go out there.

Speaker 25 And because I had that experience with him, he's like, yay, you know, and you know, we could sit and talk about guitars and shit.

Speaker 27 It's an amazing thing because, you know, out of all these guys,

Speaker 77 the thing that becomes

Speaker 15 really kind of enlightening is that you do talk to them as people

Speaker 87 and they are just people, but they can do this amazing fucking thing.

Speaker 91 Like the, you know, it's like magic.

Speaker 100 How the fuck do you do?

Speaker 28 I still can't answer that.

Speaker 130 It's just like us.

Speaker 1 You could just go in a room and write Candy's room.

Speaker 34 Yeah, but perform it for four hours to sort of hold that space for that many people.

Speaker 42 And,

Speaker 42 you know, and it's

Speaker 28 no matter how you talk about them, it doesn't explain that.

Speaker 41 That's the fucking gift. You can't explain that.

Speaker 46 Why is Keith Richards like Keith Richards?

Speaker 41 I still watch Keith Richards on stage, you know, old stuff, new stuff with a guitar.

Speaker 22 And I'm like, and there's like 30,000 people there.

Speaker 40 And they're just like doing it.

Speaker 88 How the fuck do you do that?

Speaker 28 You know, it's, and it's not the same with comics.

Speaker 48 You know, like,

Speaker 86 I always think when comics are playing like arenas, they're, they're, they're doing something other than what i think stand-up is

Speaker 22 you mean doing arena shows is different than being in a in a club well yeah just doing like you know that kind of like down and dirty you know even even a showroom an arena thing is has different requirements i don't understand why people go to see comedy at arenas really because you have to you know you kind of you have to change your timing you know your decisions are all based on punchlines that are so solid that you have time to wait for them and you know it's just not it's the intimacy is not there.

Speaker 70 And I kind of thrive on that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, whenever I'm around people

Speaker 1 who've achieved like that, I feel like people like him have evolved to a place where the work is a giving gesture. It's not just the work.
Yeah. He feels like he's on a...

Speaker 1 on a long journey with his audience, filling them in about his life, being an avatar for their experiences. And at some point, it just becomes this other thing.

Speaker 1 And I do think in comedy, in your work, when you share your experiences, you know, with your dad, what's happening with your family, that that's the comedian's version of sharing.

Speaker 79 Yeah. And also the podcast, the evolution of that.

Speaker 48 But also like there's something magic about music that, you know, there's no analogue for that in comedy in that

Speaker 29 people, you know, spend their life with those songs and those songs grow with them.

Speaker 70 And they represent different points in their life.

Speaker 41 And sometimes, you know, music that you listen to as a younger person and you listen to it as an older person, it continues to evolve and grow with you.

Speaker 62 And that's just fucking magic.

Speaker 128 Who the hell knows what that is?

Speaker 1 But it's also easier because you do get to play your greatest hits. So, you know, a comedian every couple of years has to start over.
And how fun would it be if you had your...

Speaker 1 Born to run

Speaker 1 and you could enjoy this period of your life,

Speaker 1 just having the, you know, the result of your entire life's work.

Speaker 1 And then just do it and the crowd is just enraptured yeah about it it's with a comedian like i got to write a whole new thing yeah i know i know and and and also with but there there is something to be said about jokes because jokes do last as long as anything else if not longer than music i mean there are jokes that you enjoy telling because you know you know how to do it and they could be old as fuck

Speaker 1 like you know if someone asks you what's your favorite old joke you have one and you tell it and it's like wow that thing's got life it's always gonna have life well the old timers used to keep the same act their entire career well so they were able to do it so so maybe we all made a mistake by thinking we needed to keep writing the set uh okay we're gonna switch to uh a lighter a lighter story you know i tend to go heavier yeah uh and this is a clip from the great molly shannon I hopped a plane when I was 12.

Speaker 133 We told my dad, me and my friend Ann, we're like, we're going to hop a plane to New York. And he was like, he dared us.

Speaker 1 So we went to the

Speaker 1 house. We were like 12.
Oh, good. That's what we're doing.

Speaker 133 We went to the airport and we had ballet outfits on and we put our hair in buns and we wanted to look really innocent. And this was, again, when flying was really easy.

Speaker 133 You didn't need your ticket to get through.

Speaker 106 Apparently, you didn't need an adult either.

Speaker 133 And we told my dad, and we were just like, we saw there were two flights. We were either going to go to San Francisco or New York.
And we thought, oh, let's go to New York. It's leaving early.

Speaker 133 So we went. We said to the stewardess, we just want to say goodbye to my sister.
Can we go on the plane? And she was like, sure.

Speaker 133 And then she led us on. And it was a really empty flight because it was out of Cleveland, Ohio.

Speaker 133 And we sat back there and then all of a sudden you just hear like

Speaker 1 the plane takes off. We were like,

Speaker 133 and we had like little ballet outfits and buns and I was like, hey, I'm Mary Philip Grace Lord's with the muscle.

Speaker 1 And she's told me my mother got praised. Now they are.

Speaker 133 And then the stewardess that had given us permission to... to go say goodbye bye to my sister came by to ask if we wanted snacks or beverages and she was like, can I get you ladies something to eat?

Speaker 133 She looked like she was like, oh motherfucker. You know, so she

Speaker 133 so we we wondered if we were gonna get in trouble, but she ended up not telling anyone and then when we landed in New York City she was like bye ladies

Speaker 1 have a nice trip

Speaker 134 it's such an exciting story but the irresponsibility of all the adults in this story is somehow undermining my appreciation of it.

Speaker 1 You were 12 year old girls in fucking ballet outfits, and everybody's sort of like, have a good time.

Speaker 1 What world was that?

Speaker 1 It was a crazy world.

Speaker 134 What did you do in New York?

Speaker 1 And now you're going to say, we got drunk and we went to a.

Speaker 133 Well, again, because I had a crazy childhood, we called my dad. We were like, we did it.

Speaker 120 And he's like, oh, dad, Molly.

Speaker 133 Oh, geez, we'll try to. So basically, he couldn't see.

Speaker 1 Try to what?

Speaker 133 He didn't know what to do. He said, try to see if you could stay, go find a hotel that you could stay in.

Speaker 133 Me and Mary, my sister will come meet you. We'll drive there.
So basically, we were like, all right, we'll try to find a hotel. But he was kind of excited because he liked crazy stuff.

Speaker 133 But basically, we didn't have that much. We just had our ballet bags and a little bit of cash.
So we went to a diner and we dined in Dash and we stole things. We were like little con artists.

Speaker 123 Wait, did you actually make it to the city?

Speaker 133 We made it to the city. We just asked people.
I was like, how do you get to Rockefeller Center? Because I'd just seen TV.

Speaker 106 And you're still in your ballet outfit.

Speaker 1 The ballet outfit? Yeah. Really?

Speaker 134 Nobody said, are you girls lost?

Speaker 114 Nothing like that?

Speaker 1 No, nothing. They went into a bar and they got drank up, ladies.

Speaker 133 So we did try to go to hotels and my dad would call and ask, could they just stay there till we get there? And none of the hotels wanted to be responsible. Oh my God.
So

Speaker 133 he was like, all right, you got to come home. He was like, but I'm not paying for it.
So try to hop on one on the way back.

Speaker 133 So we tried to hop on many planes, but the flights were all so crowded.

Speaker 133 So we ended up having to have him pay for it, it and he made us pay for him, pay it all back with our babysitting money.

Speaker 1 That was the big punishment.

Speaker 133 Yeah, there was no punishment.

Speaker 1 No, I know. I mean, clearly,

Speaker 118 was there any sort of like, oh, you survived. I was just testing you.

Speaker 133 He loved that kind of stuff. Like I said, he was wild.
He used to, in his drinking days, he would, you know, go to bars. And if somebody didn't let him in, he'd be like, damn it.

Speaker 133 You know, he'd go into the bar and knock all the glasses down. He was like a kind of guy who could maybe get arrested.

Speaker 1 Like, it was crazy.

Speaker 134 I love the

Speaker 4 sort of strange nostalgic excitement you have

Speaker 131 for this borderline child abuse.

Speaker 133 Yeah, it was complicated.

Speaker 134 Oh, now you're going to say that?

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's just one story that's complicated.

Speaker 133 But he was also a very loving parent. I think it's complicated.

Speaker 133 He was also really supportive and kind of made me feel like I could do anything.

Speaker 133 And so in that way, it felt really free and wild.

Speaker 133 But then in other ways, I had to learn the rules of like how regular people live.

Speaker 5 From other people, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, from other people.

Speaker 133 Like professionals.

Speaker 120 Like people you pay.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean? I do know what you mean.

Speaker 12 I have them in my life.

Speaker 1 Wow. You had a lot of live ones.

Speaker 1 In the beginning, you stopped doing them. Yeah.
But did you enjoy doing the live versions?

Speaker 9 Yeah, of course.

Speaker 45 You know, because I think I'm even better at it now of like having the freedom of mind to just, you know, be funny and be because I can be pretty quick and I know how to get laughs.

Speaker 44 But the live ones are great because it was really about that.

Speaker 33 We knew going in that this is going to be an entertaining show and you want to do it.

Speaker 29 So you elevate the guests and then kind of carry it along with being funny.

Speaker 57 And there were panels during those live ones that were great.

Speaker 113 I remember I was never more thrilled than to have Ira Glass and Artie Lang on the same panel.

Speaker 14 I thought I had done something miraculous.

Speaker 1 Do you ever wish that you did do an official TV talk show?

Speaker 78 Sure.

Speaker 70 I mean, I did a pilot for one after short attention span theater,

Speaker 10 you know, that, you know, before the daily show, which ended up being the show that became that.

Speaker 76 But I did a sort of a straight sit-down talk show pilot.

Speaker 35 And I remember the guests were Chappelle, very young Chappelle, and Stephen Weber.

Speaker 18 You know, we did two episodes.

Speaker 10 I think it was, you know, called the Mark Marum Project, but it was straight up, you know, sit and talk.

Speaker 86 And

Speaker 8 I don't know if I had the chops end, you know, but I certainly do now that they're no longer, you know, viable or going to be in existence much longer.

Speaker 1 Well, those formats didn't allow for what you did.

Speaker 33 No, it would, none of them did.

Speaker 62 You know, even when people talk about long-form people like Dick Cavitt or somebody, I mean, the closest one would be like a Charlie Rose situation, but that's not an audience.

Speaker 29 And that, you know, I just assume do this.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 68 I think there was a way, it was sort of more like what Letterman did on Netflix, but he had the gravitas of being Letterman.

Speaker 1 And do you are you satisfied with the path that revealed itself?

Speaker 1 Totally.

Speaker 21 You know,

Speaker 21 totally, because

Speaker 78 we dictated it, you know, me and Brendan.

Speaker 70 And there's something about not being beholden to cameras or that timing or the, you know, the sort of...

Speaker 51 elevated atmosphere of being on camera and then being on camera in front of an audience that I think that the intimacy that gets created here is something unique.

Speaker 59 And it's unique even more so than,

Speaker 51 you know, say Terry Gross, who's the best, but she does a different thing.

Speaker 70 And even when I recently talked to her a couple of weeks ago,

Speaker 18 there was something more candid about her approach with me, but I was never doing that kind of interview.

Speaker 105 So once it started to unfold that I was doing something that didn't really exist in any space with some consistency.

Speaker 47 I sort of had a pride in it and

Speaker 51 accepted it.

Speaker 29 Initially

Speaker 27 I kind of always thought it was going to diminish my stand-up.

Speaker 51 And so it was really kind of like, that's part of my interrupting style was like, no, I'm a comic and I got to be in here.

Speaker 12 This is about me.

Speaker 109 But that was different.

Speaker 1 And now all the podcasts are switching to video. I mean, when will they all start getting an audience? Will it all reverse itself?

Speaker 41 I don't know how it works, but I have noticed that because of the contraction in mainstream show business and the ability for people to sort of build their own separate show businesses, that you get these bubble audiences.

Speaker 32 Some of them are huge and some of them aren't as huge.

Speaker 112 But I do you do start to realize, and I'm sure you do as well, that

Speaker 45 the quality is it lowers the bar tremendously

Speaker 92 what a show looks like.

Speaker 29 And sadly, I think people will just adapt to that and not really take into mind just how many talented people and what goes into making a good talk show.

Speaker 55 Like, I think they're just dealing with like, this is enough.

Speaker 19 What else do we need?

Speaker 64 And so that whole sort of

Speaker 29 context of what these shows were, which were big, beautiful show business, you know, they just don't give a fuck.

Speaker 111 And you're just getting, you know, sort of afternoon radio of some form or another.

Speaker 128 But the audience has shifted and they just don't care because everything is disposable and fleeting and segmented.

Speaker 56 So, you know, all that show business built has,

Speaker 33 you know, been overshadowed by amateurs and people are fine with that.

Speaker 1 Well, it is, you know, like kind of,

Speaker 1 you know, on one level, there's, you know, a lot of voices are allowed in, but at some point, you need the lunatics who want to really take it to the next level creatively and to not just do the simple version of it.

Speaker 1 The thing that we all loved about Letterman or Mark Conan was

Speaker 1 they grinded to find ways to do it the way no one had ever done it.

Speaker 1 And we're not really seeing that yet, although it could happen where

Speaker 1 someone goes, well, what else can you do here? It's so cheap to do it. What other kind of

Speaker 1 can you do?

Speaker 73 I haven't seen much of that at all lately, except for Nathan Fielder, where it's just sort of like, I don't even know what that is, but it's something.

Speaker 1 He's going deep in a way where we think we're going deep. We're not even close.

Speaker 86 But using the sort of tools of money and network support to execute a vision that is truly unique is rare.

Speaker 46 I do think that

Speaker 71 what undermines the possibility of what you're talking about is just laziness and the need to chase content generation.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and it's hard. It's just, it's like really, it's

Speaker 1 hard work. You know, we did 13 episodes of the Ben Siller show back in the, in the day.
And I still stay, that was the hardest six months of my life. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, we would be shooting all day, going to the sound mix at one o'clock in the morning,

Speaker 1 trying to write these things. And it was

Speaker 1 as exhausting, like where you had nothing left, but it was fun.

Speaker 3 But there's a drive of a collective to try to do something new and great.

Speaker 36 Like, I don't don't know if that exists among

Speaker 18 at least 80 to 90 percent of what's being generated out there outside the

Speaker 68 umbrella of mainstream show business.

Speaker 28 So, I don't know.

Speaker 1 Well, one

Speaker 1 super original voice who had a great show called Lady Dynamite, and you had her on a bunch of times,

Speaker 1 was

Speaker 1 the great Maria Bamford, who I'm working on a documentary about.

Speaker 135 You know, like I had a relationship where a person was, uh,

Speaker 135 I was frightened. I started to get frightened.

Speaker 1 Of him.

Speaker 135 Of him. And friends and family said, hey,

Speaker 135 wow, what's are you okay? And stuff like that. So then,

Speaker 135 but in that, you know, the element, you know, of control is like, yeah, I, I think I kept thinking, oh, well,

Speaker 135 I want to have, I'm going to fix it, which is a totally could like I'm going to, I'm going to either do the right thing so the person won't have, uh get enraged anymore, which was

Speaker 135 a rager? Yeah, yeah, where I couldn't I couldn't do the right thing. I couldn't figure out all the things that I needed to do to to to so it wouldn't happen again.

Speaker 135 But it would always keep happening. And then it was like, well

Speaker 135 you know what uh

Speaker 135 and I I learned to d do I it got better with it where I wouldn't react as much to it and I would just kind of be like, oh, this person is you tried to detach?

Speaker 135 Yeah, detach with love, you know, going like a, you know, just repeating back what they said, saying, I hear this is what you're saying.

Speaker 135 And, and, but then it is so upsetting over time that it's like, uh,

Speaker 135 you know, I gotta let them go because I'm I'm feeling so feeling so bad. But but also to say that that person is wonderful, like has incredibly wonderful qualities.

Speaker 135 And like, and uh, but I felt like I wasn't helping anymore. Like I was starting to.

Speaker 136 And also you felt probably...

Speaker 114 It's emotional abuse.

Speaker 135 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 136 And you start to lose touch with yourself.

Speaker 135 Lose on yourself. And, and also, I felt like my own possibility of me getting abusive, you know, of me going, wow, wow, wow, you know, and it's like, oh, God, you know, like, I,

Speaker 135 yeah, so I, and I think some element of it was.

Speaker 135 Like that whole idea of I'm going to help somebody.

Speaker 136 Well, that's that's my problem.

Speaker 136 I was the guy that would walk into an uncontrollable rage and, you know, not stop until my ex-wife was crying and then i'd feel bad and then i'd apologize but it doesn't go away after a certain point in time it doesn't go away and i from what i i mean i've read a bunch of books on a no maybe you can help me because well yeah my mom is a it works for a domestic violence center and you know domestic violence you know

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 135 i think

Speaker 135 what i've read is that um and my boyfriend at the time he uh his dad had been physically abused

Speaker 135 he had seen physical abuse and i I think on some level, equating emotional or physical abuse with intimacy.

Speaker 135 Also, they said, you know, so that if I love this person on a subconscious level, this is what's going to go down. And they can handle my rage,

Speaker 135 you know, if they love me.

Speaker 135 And then, you know, it's... Was she physically abusive?

Speaker 135 One occasion, one occasion. And that was it.

Speaker 135 No, no, no, it wasn't actually, which is super sad.

Speaker 135 You know, I was like, and actually then it it was very classic violence where it was like denied that he did it said oh that wasn't me I was like well oh you know that whole like

Speaker 135 gaslighting like oh you're crazy you know like and I was like oh oh okay yeah and okay quietly okay I get it go in the other room no no but I I didn't get that because because you love the person right you know you love the person and you do respect them on a lot of levels but you know again nobody is all bad or all good like that's right lovely, loving, super loving person.

Speaker 135 We had a lot of good times, too. So it's, it's confusing, I think.

Speaker 64 The fact that I did that while I was driving is always interesting.

Speaker 1 That's the only driving one you did. No.
There's another one.

Speaker 41 There was one with Pepitone.

Speaker 41 And there's a couple intros I did in the car.

Speaker 113 The intro to Robin, I think, might have been in the car because I did it in real time driving to his house.

Speaker 1 But you were talking on another show that the audience that you have for this show,

Speaker 1 you know, that in addition to to being entertained, there are a lot of people that, you know, Maria, something like Maria opening up about this might help them look for the help they need to deal with their issues.

Speaker 1 And a lot of people dealt with their sobriety as a result of you talking about yours and a lot of people talking about how they

Speaker 17 got sober.

Speaker 2 I just, well, totally.

Speaker 51 I didn't expect that.

Speaker 29 And it's always very heartening.

Speaker 14 Yeah, a lot of emails about helping people get sober, helping people not kill themselves,

Speaker 41 learning about things that they didn't know other people had or experienced.

Speaker 35 It's been a huge part of the impact of the show.

Speaker 113 But I just fucking love her.

Speaker 47 Like, I can't say enough.

Speaker 1 She's the funniest.

Speaker 30 Totally.

Speaker 45 And I say it anytime anyone asks me, who's the funniest comedian?

Speaker 113 I'm like, seriously? Maria Bamford.

Speaker 68 There is no one funnier than that.

Speaker 1 Go on Spotify and just do a random playlist of Maria Bamford and have your mind blown.

Speaker 15 I remember a couple of years ago, I hadn't really seen her in years.

Speaker 112 And we were on a co-headlining gig for like I think the Toronto Comedy Festival and you know our venue was like out

Speaker 86 away from everything and it was this old weird venue but we were both doing an hour or whatever.

Speaker 35 I hadn't seen her in years and I just both both nights I'm like what am I even doing?

Speaker 108 What's the point?

Speaker 1 Well the funny thing is we're putting together the documentary now. There's footage of her when she first started.
And the whole thing was fully formed. Sure.
Just her way of seeing the world.

Speaker 72 Yeah.

Speaker 27 And it was like outside outside of stand-up in a way.

Speaker 48 It kind of bordered on, you know, what you would more classify as

Speaker 1 performance art.

Speaker 67 But, but she hammered it out in clubs.

Speaker 25 She is a stand-up.

Speaker 67 And it's just that, you know, the fact that people can dismiss her because like, I don't get it.

Speaker 45 You know, she's weird.

Speaker 19 It's like, you fucking idiots.

Speaker 67 You know, they're like, you know, she's like Jonathan Winters level.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, people, you got a lot of play when you said she would be on your

Speaker 1 Mount Rushmore of comedians.

Speaker 21 Yeah, totally. Oh, yeah, with Jesse.

Speaker 83 Well, the funny thing is about the impact it has on people.

Speaker 29 It's a very funny dice story. Because, you know, despite when anyone thinks of dice, I fucking love him.

Speaker 71 Like, because, you know, outside of whatever he's known for, just him talking is the best.

Speaker 38 Like, I used to, he would come into the OR.

Speaker 58 This is like,

Speaker 28 you know, not that long ago, just to

Speaker 17 talk about his day.

Speaker 42 And he does it.

Speaker 17 He definitely has a way of looking at things.

Speaker 36 That's funny.

Speaker 72 But I'm in the hallway with him.

Speaker 29 It's not that long ago.

Speaker 78 And he's telling me like, yeah, we're going to do the garden.

Speaker 25 I got big things.

Speaker 19 Always the big things.

Speaker 15 He's talking to me. Some guy comes up to me.

Speaker 126 He goes,

Speaker 62 I'm sorry to interrupt you guys.

Speaker 68 But Mark, I was going to email you. And

Speaker 56 it's just, I'm happy that I'm running into you in person because I just got to thank you.

Speaker 111 You know, you got me through a...

Speaker 8 a real dark time. And

Speaker 29 I don't know if I would have gotten through it if you hadn't been there.

Speaker 15 And I just really wanted to thank you for that.

Speaker 29 And I'm like, yeah, sure. I'm glad to help out.

Speaker 62 And that guy walks away and Dice goes, I never get that.

Speaker 1 I get, you're the reason I lost my job.

Speaker 11 You're the reason my wife left me.

Speaker 33 You're the reason I got kicked out of school.

Speaker 1 Well, I used to see Dice when I was a kid. I was a dishwasher at a comedy club in like 1983, 84.
And he was just doing impressions back then. Yeah.
He was just doing like Jerry Lewis and John Javalta.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. So I saw the whole evolution of how it turned into that.
But he would kill

Speaker 1 doing his impressions.

Speaker 112 He's got this very kind of like

Speaker 29 alpha Jewish confidence.

Speaker 1 He's so funny right now. Like the act is pretty amazing.
And his Instagram, if you want to say something super weird, just him walking the streets, walking up to people,

Speaker 1 really funny. Are you Mildred?

Speaker 22 Joanna?

Speaker 34 Or when he's got Lovett walking around with him?

Speaker 1 Seems like it takes work.

Speaker 1 He's really putting in some time.

Speaker 12 Yeah. Let's do one more.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, one of the reasons to stop is because you've gotten all of the white whales of

Speaker 1 show business. So I thought I would play one of them,

Speaker 1 a person no one gets that you got, which is, you know, the legendary nobody better Albert Brooks.

Speaker 1 That's great.

Speaker 11 That moment when the mate, the room service comes to the door.

Speaker 67 He's like, should I just keep talking?

Speaker 1 So we get a meeting with Jack Benny on Tuesday.

Speaker 1 He dies that Friday, which nobody knew meeting him.

Speaker 1 But we're sitting in his office and I say to him, so Mr. Benny, I'm doing a record album.

Speaker 1 And on this record album, I would love if you would do something because we're doing this old-time radio, and I never got any other word out.

Speaker 1 My hero says to me, three days before he dies, radio, radio, that's all I'm remembered for. I've done everything.
I've done television. I've done movies.

Speaker 1 And I'm going, I don't even know you from radio. Oh my God.
No, no, I know that. I know that.

Speaker 1 And Harry and I left. I drove home, Mark, with a profound, maybe one of the most profound lessons of my life, which is you better not hold on to anything.

Speaker 1 Because if the king, if the god of comedy, in my mind, doesn't even know three days before he dies how

Speaker 1 important he was, if he's still going. And you know, you and I get it as we get older.

Speaker 89 It's happening to me now.

Speaker 1 Okay, so you just can't go there. If you try to hold on to your life, you're going to be really sad.
You can't do it. It's impossible.
How was that interviewing Albert? The best.

Speaker 28 The funniest thing was

Speaker 28 he didn't want to come here.

Speaker 72 He didn't want me to go there.

Speaker 59 So we're in that hotel down on Santa Monica, that old pretty hotel.

Speaker 64 I forget what it's called.

Speaker 113 It's almost Victorian looking or kind of deco.

Speaker 25 And it was just such a thrill, you know, because he, you know, he's just so fucking funny and such a powerful presence in my mind.

Speaker 108 I remember it was, I'd been trying to get him for years.

Speaker 70 And there was that moment at

Speaker 14 Shan Wings Memorial.

Speaker 113 You know, everyone's leaving and he's wearing that golf hat.

Speaker 62 And I'm just walking.

Speaker 72 I just just feel these two hands on my shoulders.

Speaker 1 And he says, let's do it now.

Speaker 1 And is that how it happened?

Speaker 44 No. And then took years more.

Speaker 73 Two years later.

Speaker 38 Yeah, I just was so thrilled

Speaker 41 because he's one of those guys where it's so effortlessly funny. It's so wired into him.

Speaker 98 And, you know, he can't help it.

Speaker 56 Even if he's not trying, if you love him, it's just the whole thing's going to be the greatest.

Speaker 1 Who are the other ones that you didn't get?

Speaker 1 You're trying to get Adam Sandler.

Speaker 50 Yeah,

Speaker 54 but of that generation, you know, I don't know.

Speaker 33 Like,

Speaker 52 you know, I'm sure there's people I've forgotten.

Speaker 17 There were some old-timers that I would have liked to have done.

Speaker 1 Mike Nichols would have been good.

Speaker 54 That would have been good, yeah.

Speaker 55 And like Shecky Green, there was an effort to do that.

Speaker 111 But we had an exchange, me and Shecky, and that was kind of brutal.

Speaker 1 You try to get Elaine May?

Speaker 109 Yeah,

Speaker 68 I think I did try to get Elaine May, didn't I?

Speaker 1 I don't know. I don't know.

Speaker 1 Is she still around? She's around.

Speaker 33 I wonder why that hasn't happened.

Speaker 44 Her daughter is amazing.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. No, I was very proud of the fact that I got to guest edit an issue of Vanity Fair.
Yeah. And they let me pitch articles.
And I said, what about an interview with Nichols and May?

Speaker 1 And they did pull it off. Yeah.
And it was the last interview that they did. How was that? And they hadn't done one in like 20, 30 years.
Oh, wow. It's just a great

Speaker 1 article. Well, the other person that you interviewed and did one of the great interviews with was

Speaker 1 Gary Shanling.

Speaker 137 I started the box about

Speaker 137 11 years ago. Right.
Just started the box. And the reason is

Speaker 137 twofold. One is

Speaker 137 out of my comfort zone completely. Never was a kid who got into fights.
And so the idea of really being in a ring where someone's going to start throwing punches.

Speaker 137 And then the really main reason, the other one is that you don't have time to think. So it becomes completely intuitive.
Someone's throwing a punch, you have to counter, or you move, or you

Speaker 137 step back, or you move in, or you keep, but you can't think about it. And when you land a punch, you can't think about it.
Are you getting good at it?

Speaker 137 Well, I'm sure getting better than I was. Yeah.
Which is better than getting worse. Do you wear headgear?

Speaker 137 I do.

Speaker 137 I wear headgear that goes from my

Speaker 137 head down to my knees. It's quite a long one.
It's the biggest one they've ever seen.

Speaker 107 It's weird because hearing these back again in the moment, I don't realize how you know, close they're

Speaker 41 like these are genuine tones. You know, he's speaking as himself.

Speaker 74 There's not, you know, he's not,

Speaker 76 there's not public talk.

Speaker 93 And it seems to happen a lot.

Speaker 33 Because, I mean, you know him.

Speaker 14 He was definitely, you know, not, you know, he was all there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he could be guarded in a lot of situations. Yeah.
But when he opened up, he would really open up.

Speaker 36 Yeah, yeah. And it got pretty good there.

Speaker 32 And again, because as much as I love him, you know, I wasn't dug in to Shanley as like one of my guys necessarily.

Speaker 41 So when that took that spiritual turn where he got comfortable and started to engage with me or whatever my situation was, it was pretty exciting.

Speaker 18 And I know he's like one of the funniest guys ever, but it took me a long time to really get it.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Well,

Speaker 1 it's a unique person who's, you know, who's struggling. Yeah.
And he's the funniest, but he's also struggling. And you never know what you're going to get with him.

Speaker 1 One day you might get like the gregarious version and another day he might be shut down.

Speaker 1 Oh, really? And so it was just,

Speaker 1 he was on a ride. I feel like Gary being gone really left, for me, like the biggest hole where all the time you're like, ah, man,

Speaker 1 you know, we feel his absence. Yeah.

Speaker 1 All the time.

Speaker 52 Yeah. He was so good and so sweet and

Speaker 54 wise.

Speaker 73 And the struggle that he was on to make himself whole or self-accepting or any of that was so earnest and vigilant.

Speaker 94 You know, like, this has got to work.

Speaker 35 You know, whatever he landed on spiritually, it's like, it's got to work.

Speaker 1 Some of the stories that you told that I remember,

Speaker 1 one was you telling the long Sam Kennison

Speaker 1 what made you leave town.

Speaker 74 Yeah, I did that recently.

Speaker 45 Yeah, that's a good one.

Speaker 34 I pissed on your bed, Baron.

Speaker 1 You had a period where you had a lot of comedy store people on. You had Jimmy Schubert, who's really painted a picture of what that place was like.

Speaker 138 It's so funny. The first time I did mushrooms was with you.

Speaker 1 We had a good day. That's right.
We had a great day.

Speaker 138 And we started doing them. I remember I'd never done mushrooms before.

Speaker 1 And I was like, oh, man, you're going to love these, man. You'd have lost it.
And Rod's going, all right, man.

Speaker 1 And we had planned the whole day. And I remember we just started getting off going, oh, this is great.
It's great. And then out of nowhere, out of the blue, Sam shows up.
Kennison pops in like a bus.

Speaker 1 pops in like a like he was like a trip coach. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He goes, oh, you guys are doing monsters. Oh, you're going to love them, man.

Speaker 1 He goes, now, and he was just, like, just as he was saying stuff, you were like, time's going to seem to go by real slow.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. It's going by real slow.

Speaker 1 You pull out a joint. And he goes, great.
He goes, now let's get it. You just guys are going to get off.
Yeah. Smoke this joint.
That's going to make everything all right. All right, man.

Speaker 1 But it was like that. And then, and then, and it was, I mean, I swear, man, we had the best day just laughing.
And then we went worked. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. And then we went, we got to do it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but we did them like two o'clock in the afternoon. Yeah, by that time, nine o'clock for all the way, we could go down.

Speaker 106 I forgot that Sam showed up and was actually, you know, kind and giving.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, man.
I mean, he was, you know,

Speaker 118 he definitely understood that world.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, but you're right. I mean, he had his moments of that kind of, you know, behavior.

Speaker 118 I mean, it's, you know, I remember the one moment where he pulled out something that looked like a jar this big, like a jelly jar with cocaine in it.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 118 he's like, and we're standing in one of the rooms at Crestel.

Speaker 102 He's like, you want to bump?

Speaker 1 And I'm like, yeah, what do you want me to do? Where should I do it? And he said, Put your thumb in between your finger like that. Yeah.

Speaker 102 I learned that from the mob.

Speaker 118 I'm like, Okay, I don't even know if I want to know the rest of that story.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, it was,

Speaker 1 but I remember you would sit around that table. Oh, yeah.
And me and you were, of all the guys that were up there hanging on. I mean, we were talking about comedy until all hours of the night.

Speaker 1 What do you think about this? I know. Sam explained a slow burn.
I mean, were we better people for it? Probably not. But I mean, you know, we were, we, but we were interested.

Speaker 1 We were willing to learn, man. Stay up.
And how did you you come over there? And what do you do for that?

Speaker 118 And, you know, that's funny. That was your agenda.

Speaker 1 Mine was like, what does Satan look like? You know, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 118 I thought he was some sort of black magician, some sort of wizard that had secret fucking wisdom.

Speaker 1 He was just a douchebag like everybody else.

Speaker 102 Just a fucking comic.

Speaker 1 Just a flawed fucking human being with fucking problems, just like the rest of us.

Speaker 62 I needed to do that for myself.

Speaker 19 the comedy store stuff because you know i was a young guy and i was kind of out of my mind and on drugs and once i sort of enmeshed myself with that place and the history, I was haunted by it forever.

Speaker 47 That it

Speaker 35 profoundly changed the wiring of my brain.

Speaker 13 You know, just what it meant, what it represented, the history of the place, all the pictures on the wall, you know, being on Coke and losing my brain there and, you know, integrating the

Speaker 41 comedy store into some sort of mythic significance.

Speaker 107 And

Speaker 27 I really had to talk to all those guys because my relationship with a lot of them was with those pictures on the wall

Speaker 17 and also just with the idea of them.

Speaker 16 Like I said to you before we started, I had this weird thing with that book about old movie stars.

Speaker 1 I didn't like the old movies, but I just look at these faces.

Speaker 32 And then realizing that all of comedy came through there, all of modern comedy, it just seemed to be like a great template for me to sort of

Speaker 108 have some

Speaker 105 answers about that place and about

Speaker 29 my place there and about my history.

Speaker 29 I've got Mitzi Shore's driver's license,

Speaker 29 her last driver's license, because I did Binder's documentary and that was just like laying on the floor in her office.

Speaker 1 Oh, you told that story to Letterman.

Speaker 11 Yeah, yeah. I got to show you something.
Hold on.

Speaker 116 This might weird you out, but just.

Speaker 1 I seem to be alone now.

Speaker 116 I don't know why I have this, but I can tell you how I got it.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 121 But for some reason, it means a lot to me.

Speaker 1 This is the driver's license for... Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 Well, a crime has been committed here.

Speaker 99 This is Mitzi Shore's driver's license.

Speaker 1 It is, man.

Speaker 100 Mark, how did you, I mean,

Speaker 1 first of all, why were you rifling through her purse?

Speaker 40 Here's the thing, you know, Binder, Mike.

Speaker 102 Yep.

Speaker 80 Peter Shore kind of, like, I interviewed Binder here, right?

Speaker 116 And he was like, I want to talk about the comedy store.

Speaker 1 And then i started saying how could you not want to this is that's where you come from and then he started talking about it and then it kind of got into his brain and then peter short reeled him in to make a documentary about the place right right right yeah he reached out to you yes well he i i think i'm actually uh visiting with him tomorrow great

Speaker 106 so so he wanted me to be there when he did he did a bunch of footage in mitzi's office and they were going to go through some stuff.

Speaker 80 He had permission and he wanted me to be the guy to be in there with him.

Speaker 131 And as I was walking out, this driver's license was on the floor.

Speaker 12 And I'm like, I think I have to have that.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 102 It feels a little weird and a little wrong.

Speaker 1 No, no, now with that explanation, it feels just right.

Speaker 1 And Sammy Shore. Just passed.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Did you know him, though?

Speaker 1 I must have met him, but by the time I came to California, he was out of that business. Right.
Yeah. But yeah, I...
Not out of comedy, but out of the comedy store business.

Speaker 118 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 10 You lost the store to Mitzi.

Speaker 116 See, like, for me, didn't this give you the chills a little bit?

Speaker 1 Yes, absolutely. First of all, she's very

Speaker 1 young looking in that, and I only remember her,

Speaker 1 she was stricken

Speaker 1 after

Speaker 1 this time. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I don't remember her looking that hardy. She reminds me of

Speaker 1 when I was younger.

Speaker 42 Yeah.

Speaker 75 Like she had such a, the whole place had such a

Speaker 112 hold on my mind when it was so fragile. And it took years to sort of shake that thing,

Speaker 33 the mythic and paranoid thing.

Speaker 19 And now it's just like the only place I work in L.A.

Speaker 75 And I'm so happy to be comfortable there.

Speaker 1 But when you're young, it's also about that they're the gatekeepers of your dream. And so there's this place, and everyone wants to do the thing you want to do.

Speaker 1 Most of them are better because they've just been doing it longer. And there's this one person that gets to decide if you're allowed to do it.

Speaker 1 And I didn't have the version where I was on drugs was the part of it. But the pressure to go, can I belong here? Can I earn it?

Speaker 1 Can I be better than a lot of these people to climb to the next level?

Speaker 1 That pressure. And then it's also that youthful madness that it might be possible to pull it off.
Yeah.

Speaker 83 I don't know if I had that climbing thing or even the competitive thing, but I did know that was kind of lost.

Speaker 51 And that for some reason, you know, being part of that world was very specific.

Speaker 51 And at the time I was there or when I came back to LA in 2002, like it was just this haunted shithole that nobody wanted to go to.

Speaker 11 It got to a point where people were like, why would you go to the comedy?

Speaker 117 Like it represented some darkness, which I always knew was there.

Speaker 105 And it's necessary for that place to exist.

Speaker 29 I told Peter Shore recently, I'm like, you know, you got to be careful with that place because you know as well as I do, it's very susceptible to charismatic leaders.

Speaker 19 That a personality can take that place over because she like enabled it.

Speaker 29 And I was there during the Canison and Dice period, you know, which happened kind of back to back.

Speaker 15 But I just wanted to be, I thought it was an exclusive, amazing community, the coffee store.

Speaker 1 With the best folks.

Speaker 49 Oh, yeah, man.

Speaker 29 Like, you know, it got to the point where I was like so dug in there and like living in her house, the one she owned, and walking down to the club in the morning to make coffee behind the bar and shit.

Speaker 46 But like, you know, it would just be that thing where, you know, I'd be living at that place and be like, hey, Joey Gaynor, there he is.

Speaker 89 You know, like, who knows Joey Gaynor?

Speaker 41 You know,

Speaker 121 it was just like, these were the pictures on the wall, and now I was part of it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I can't imagine. I mean, I can't imagine the addiction part in it also.
My addiction was just,

Speaker 1 can I succeed workaholism? Yeah. But I was afraid to be high or drunk because I don't think I felt confident enough in what I was doing that I could.

Speaker 1 be that vulnerable to be out of my head. Yeah.

Speaker 92 I just, I, I kind of thrived on it because it connected me with this bunch of people that, you know, in retrospect, it's all very dangerous, you know, but this idea that you're, you're, you're at the table, you know, with these wizards who are going to impart something on you, but also very funny and very, it was, it was out of control and weird.

Speaker 9 But

Speaker 64 I was all about it.

Speaker 1 But there's a way to bond with those people because you would do drugs with them.

Speaker 2 Sure.

Speaker 39 And also you had a secret, you know, to be bouncing around that place as a door guy with Coke in your pocket.

Speaker 1 It's the fucking best.

Speaker 1 And you also, you had Lorne Michaels on the show, which I always thought was a was a big moment because there were so many episodes where you recounted

Speaker 1 meeting with Lorne and not getting weekend updated. It became so mythic in your mind.
And then when you finally talked to Lorne,

Speaker 1 the fact that Lorne remembered it, but also to him,

Speaker 1 it's like he's explaining like, here's how show business really works.

Speaker 1 You don't get that the decision isn't based on what you think it's based on. Right.

Speaker 131 I came in here.

Speaker 124 I waited an hour or so uh tracy morgan was out there waiting with me do you know what day of the week it was where we were in production uh maybe i i wish i remembered that i you know i decided before i got here uh i was smoking a lot of pot at the time but i thought maybe i shouldn't smoke too much uh-huh

Speaker 131 And I got here, and Tracy Morgan was there, and his hair looked very shiny.

Speaker 116 The hair was in very good shape. Yes.

Speaker 124 And I waited a while, and I was reading a Bruce Wagner book, I remember, and I came in here.

Speaker 131 Had he been on stage the night that you performed who Tracy yeah I don't know if he was I mean I know that we went to stand-up New York right I remember yeah anyways I come in here in my recollection there were books over here uh-huh was there it's probably pretty much the same as it is always right Steve Higgins was there I walk in and you said um

Speaker 5 uh how was Conan last night did they laugh did they laugh at you It's better when they laugh. And that was nice.
It was nice. I wasn't scared.

Speaker 18 And

Speaker 18 you'd done Conan the Night before, right?

Speaker 110 And then I sat down and then

Speaker 116 you used a zoo analogy of comedians.

Speaker 119 Have you used that before?

Speaker 139 Monkeys and all that?

Speaker 1 Yes. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 So that's a regular thing.

Speaker 139 No, it wasn't a regular thing. It was just my sort of beginning to piece together where comedians stood in Hollywood.

Speaker 29 Right.

Speaker 29 The lions are scary.

Speaker 1 When you go to the zoo, the first

Speaker 139 thing you want to see is the lion because the lion is the king of the jungle and

Speaker 1 it's regal. Yeah.

Speaker 139 And the second thing you want to see are the bears because they're the strongest and the fastest.

Speaker 139 And the third, you want to see the monkeys because they're funny and occasionally one of them jerks off.

Speaker 80 Right.

Speaker 124 And what I said, I don't think you had added the jerk off line yet. Uh-huh.

Speaker 131 Because I said, as long as they're not throwing their shit at you.

Speaker 101 Yeah.

Speaker 119 Got nothing. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Got no laugh from you.

Speaker 102 Nothing.

Speaker 1 Well, I would have gone softer, as you saw.

Speaker 119 Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Speaker 5 And Steve Higgins was like,

Speaker 102 this is not going well already.

Speaker 139 And did you know Steve before?

Speaker 131 Kind of. I'd met him once or twice.
Like on the scene.

Speaker 119 Right. And then you just looked at me for a little while.

Speaker 1 Uh-huh.

Speaker 110 And

Speaker 5 Steve actually went Lorne. And you said,

Speaker 5 it's important to look in someone's eyes. You can see a lot in someone's eyes.

Speaker 10 And then I was trying to exude some star quality of some kind, which was not successful.

Speaker 1 God, you really remember this.

Speaker 102 Yeah, I remember it.

Speaker 131 And then in my recollection, there was a smaller bowl of candy.

Speaker 8 And

Speaker 5 yeah, that's the Tootsie Roll one, but it's a Jolly Rancher in my mind.

Speaker 1 No, it would have been Tootsie Rolls.

Speaker 5 Well, I remember I took one, and at that moment, you shot a look at Steve, and I thought I'd failed the candy test.

Speaker 139 Oh, yeah, no, no, there was. No candy test.
There was no alternative candy.

Speaker 1 There was just the one. There was popcorn probably there.

Speaker 119 Right there. No, I didn't get popcorn.

Speaker 131 And that was sort of like

Speaker 29 my experience with it. And then I waited and nothing happened.

Speaker 131 And I'd heard a couple of things over the years.

Speaker 1 I'm not hung up on that. No, no, no.
But

Speaker 139 where were we in 95?

Speaker 97 Was this when

Speaker 116 Norm was about, was renegotiating his contract?

Speaker 39 But it was interesting because at that time, remember, we were doing alternative comedy

Speaker 1 downtown.

Speaker 106 And I mean no offense, but you said

Speaker 5 one of the first things you said was like, I don't know what you think you're doing down there below 14th Street.

Speaker 1 Yeah, right.

Speaker 131 But it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 43 I was trying to be helpful

Speaker 139 and save you a few years.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 21 Yeah. Well, I appreciate it.

Speaker 1 No, I was just being playful. Yeah, I know.

Speaker 30 That was a very revealing and amazing time for me to finally get to talk to Lauren and to put that story to rest, that it was really just

Speaker 29 a decision-making process, you know, based on an ensemble.

Speaker 112 Well, that was what he told me, and that's fine.

Speaker 17 But more what I came out of that with, whether it's his

Speaker 23 calculating presentation of himself or not, is that this guy is a guy that works at this building.

Speaker 78 I mean, you know, he's a billionaire and he's produced amazing stuff his whole life and he's

Speaker 94 a cultural icon and the show is.

Speaker 27 But just seeing him at this age,

Speaker 68 wandering the same halls since the early 70s or mid-70s, it's kind of crazy because he's a guy who goes to work.

Speaker 100 He's a TV producer.

Speaker 27 But like I had made him into this mythic almost god who decides people's

Speaker 25 future, which he is.

Speaker 87 But it's really, it's not in the sense that he's vengeful.

Speaker 80 It's just that he's got an eye for fucking talent.

Speaker 94 And

Speaker 80 he runs the show. But he is essentially a guy who works at 30 Rock.

Speaker 1 Who someone gives him 30 sketches and he goes, these eight.

Speaker 1 He has a job.

Speaker 27 That's right.

Speaker 106 And he's standing there watching it unfold.

Speaker 25 And so it was humanizing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you're one of 10,000 decisions he's making. That's right.

Speaker 63 And it was all very humanizing, you know, but after all is said and done,

Speaker 11 I know as a grown person, and I've known it for a few years, that I wasn't ready for that job.

Speaker 29 There was no fucking way.

Speaker 29 I had no control over my talent.

Speaker 38 I had no, you know, sense of who I was really as a performer.

Speaker 98 And

Speaker 16 I was

Speaker 11 nowhere near ready for the job.

Speaker 1 So Lorne was right again. He was.

Speaker 19 And the way he told me he made the decision was, I thought, diplomatic and it was easy on me.

Speaker 104 But you know, because he could have said you weren't ready and I knew that.

Speaker 71 And I would have took that.

Speaker 130 But the idea that he's sort of like, there's a lot of things that are happening and everything has to, you know, I'm like, that was a nice thing for him to do.

Speaker 33 It's a nice gesture.

Speaker 1 I'm glad we got to do this. Yes.
How was it listening to yourself? It was great, man.

Speaker 18 I think I should go back and listen to a few episodes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'll tell you the good ones.

Speaker 4 Yeah, you got there's like a whole bunch more there.

Speaker 56 I'll go check them out because I trust your opinion.

Speaker 1 There's a whole bunch more. Maybe we could end

Speaker 1 on Mr. Norm McDonald's.
Oh, please. Talking about Norm things.

Speaker 80 Aren't you still afraid of everything?

Speaker 29 I am.

Speaker 18 I mean, I try to hide it and deal with it, but on a day-to-day basis, I

Speaker 99 know I'm not afraid of everything. I'm afraid of very few things.

Speaker 1 Like what?

Speaker 99 Illness? Death.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 18 How'd you get peace of mind out of of the other shit?

Speaker 99 Well, when I was,

Speaker 99 when I was very, this is a weird thing that happened to me when I was young. Yeah.

Speaker 99 I don't know if this means anything.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 99 I remember it, but it was a moment I had that was,

Speaker 99 it wasn't religious or eponaphic or anything, but it transformed me to some degree is that I was always fucking so afraid of everything.

Speaker 99 And if I went to a store, I'd have to walk around forever before I could even face a person in the store to buy a pack of gum. I don't know why the fuck I was like this.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 99 But anyways, when I was nine,

Speaker 99 there was a blind, we lived in rural Ontario, and there was a blind friend of my dad's that I had to, he said, take him to the store. I was like, what the fuck?

Speaker 99 Like, I have to take this blind fucker and I'm already shy and shit. So I'm taking him to the store, and then the fucker wants me to explain everything,

Speaker 99 describe everything. to him.
Yeah. So I'm like, there's some grass over here and now there's a lamppost.
And this guy's all happy. What about the lamppost? I mean, it's just the lamppost.

Speaker 99 So it goes on and on.

Speaker 99 But something happened to me during, it sounds bizarre, but something happened to me where I was actually, instead of always looking inward, which I think I'd always done before that one time, I was looking outward.

Speaker 99 Anyways,

Speaker 99 While I was talking to him, I suddenly had a sort of a hysteria.

Speaker 1 Like I was laughing.

Speaker 99 I started laughing and stuff. And I don't even know why I'm remembering this, but I started laughing about everything.
And everything seemed like

Speaker 99 very, very funny to me. And then a couple of weeks later, I saw a homeless guy and he was talking about, he was, he was talking, he started talking to me.
Yeah. And he was talking to me about John D.

Speaker 99 Rockefeller. He's like, I was at John D.

Speaker 1 Rockefeller's funeral.

Speaker 99 Yeah. And all this shit.
And I was laughing at him and shit. And then he started laughing.
And I was like, it's all fucking crazy shit. Like it's something came to me.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 99 Where I started. And so now I find everything funny except like fucking real serious.
Like Like, I'm no fear of going on stage or anything about death and shit. Right.

Speaker 99 And so, uh, but the other thing, I, but the problem with laughing is I will get

Speaker 99 it will build to a hysteria sometimes that I have to

Speaker 99 crank a couple of benzos to

Speaker 99 kind of panic attack.

Speaker 1 Really?

Speaker 99 Yeah, I can get panic.

Speaker 27 You can laugh yourself into an anxiety attack?

Speaker 99 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I start laughing and then it gets out of control, like

Speaker 99 hysterical. It's

Speaker 99 and I still have extreme sensitivity to

Speaker 99 things. Like I can

Speaker 99 not not to norm not to life things,

Speaker 99 but to like

Speaker 99 literature or art or something like that. I have incredible sensitivity.
I kind of have to stay away from it.

Speaker 119 Like what's an example?

Speaker 33 Like a painting or a yeah, fucking paintings.

Speaker 99 Like I don't know anything about art. Nothing at all.

Speaker 1 Really?

Speaker 99 But I have had fucking experiences that have

Speaker 99 been so hard on me. Like one time I was in New York and somebody dragged me to a fucking art museum, which I hate art.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 99 And I was looking at this picture, this girl,

Speaker 99 and I was like falling in love with her. She was so fucking beautiful, this fucking girl in this fucking picture.
Yeah.

Speaker 99 And then a guide was telling me the fucking thing was written, you know, drawn in the 16th century. Obviously, this lady was dead, long dead.

Speaker 1 And here I am fucking in love with her. Yeah.

Speaker 99 And so I'm like, ah, fuck it. It was like so hard on me for so many days.
So I try not to. It sounds crazy, right? Not really, but I can be very.

Speaker 21 It sounds like that's a very good painting.

Speaker 1 It was an incredible painting.

Speaker 1 Well, thank you for having me. And thanks for doing the show.
I enjoyed the show.

Speaker 1 For I was 16 years. I enjoyed it.

Speaker 29 I was always thrilled that you were a fan of the show, and we've had conversations, and your input and excitement about interviews was always

Speaker 62 something that propelled me in times of doubt.

Speaker 1 Oh, I appreciate that. It's my favorite type of thing.
And let me tell you, the biggest tribute I have for you, my tribute to you, is that this show is so amazing that I didn't do a podcast.

Speaker 61 I kind of knew you were on the fence for a while.

Speaker 1 I knew it couldn't be topped.

Speaker 78 Well, you did it when you were a kid.

Speaker 1 I did it when I was 15.

Speaker 1 I tried to invent it. A very early version.
Thanks, buddy. Yeah, that was fun.

Speaker 44 There you go.

Speaker 53 A lot of stuff.

Speaker 67 Hope you enjoyed that.

Speaker 18 You can pre-order Judd's book, Comedy Nerd, a Lifelong Obsession in Stories and Pictures.

Speaker 21 It comes out October 28th.

Speaker 79 Hang out for a minute, folks.

Speaker 23 Hey, you guys, if you want all those old episodes Judd was playing for me, you can get a subscription to the full WTF Archives, which gets you every WTF episode ad-free, including the first five years, which are not available in the free feed right now, as well as every bonus episode we ever did.

Speaker 53 There are about 300 of those.

Speaker 16 Go to supercast.com and put WTF in the search bar, or go to WTFpod.com and click on WTF Plus.

Speaker 2 And a reminder before we go, this podcast is hosted by ACAST.

Speaker 44 And here's that new telecaster on that beautiful telecaster, BridgePickup.

Speaker 8 Boomer lifts, monkey lafonda, cat angels everywhere.