- Wait, you have a TV? - No, I just like to read the TV guide. Read the TV guide, don't need a TV. (rock music) - Hello and welcome. It is Wednesday, which means it's time for an all new episode of TV Guidance Counselor. As always, I am Ken Reed, your TV Guidance Counselor, and I am extremely excited about my guest this week. If you are tuning in for the first time just to hear my guest, normally the format of the show is they pick an old TV guide for my collection. I own every single edition of TV Guide. And we go through that week in TV and see what they would watch. This week is not a format episode. This week my guest is the one and only Mr. Paul Provenza, somebody who I've wanted to talk to for a long time and many things he's done have come up on the show very frequently, we get to all of them on here from kids' court to fax a life to comics only. And I think you'll enjoy this conversation. As I said, this is a guy who I've wanted to talk to for years, he was a huge influence on me growing up, the things that he made, and we get to talk about it. And I am incredibly grateful for this show for being able to do these sorts of things. You can check out some of his many shows, including The Green Room, which is fantastic. You can check out Setlist, which just had a series in the UK. Please enjoy this week's conversation. And if you enjoy it, even a tenth of as much as I enjoyed talking to him, this will be your favorite thing ever. Please enjoy this week's episode with Mr. Paul Provenza. ♪ Do you need me right tonight? ♪ ♪ Do you need me right tonight? ♪ ♪ Do you need me right tonight? ♪ ♪ Do you need me right tonight? ♪ ♪ We're gonna have our demons. ♪ - Mr. Paul Provenza, thank you so much for doing this. - Thanks for having me. - You're very welcome. It's, you're a guest that I've been trying to get for a while because a lot of the things you've done come up on the show often. - Really? - A lot, yeah, surprisingly. To people, when I tell that to them, they're like, "Really? Why?" - Wow. - But, all right. - It really is, it's kind of fascinating that the thing that everybody that I talk to, who is sort of a comic that is in my peer group, is everybody watch Kids' Court, first of all. - Oh, yeah. - And when I point out that you were the guy from Kids' Court, they're always like, "Oh my God, it's like a rosebud moment." (laughing) - Yeah, I know, it seems so out of character for me. - Well, that was the first thing I remember seeing. - Well, you would let me around Kids with all those restraining orders. - You're telling them if they didn't watch the dishes, if it's right or wrong. - That was a really fun show. That was a really interesting show. What a lot of people don't realize is how much thought went into it, actually. - I could see it. - Do you know who the technical advisor on the show was? - Is it Linda Allerby? - No, it was Alan Dershowitz. - Oh, really? - Yeah. - Really? - Well, Linda Allerby actually did. - You're right, she did contribute to a certain degree. I can't remember the capacity, but yeah, but Alan Dershowitz would actually, like we would send him these issues of fairness, which can mark cases, you know? And he would look at them and he would find real world parallels. - Like legal precedent for women? - Yeah, like for example, the one example I like to use for this is there was a case where one kid had a toy water gun and he had a hidden under his bed and his brother found it and was playing with it and broke it. But as it turns out, the both kids were prohibited from having toy guns in the house. - That's why I was hidden under the bed. - Which is why the kid who had the gun was punished as opposed to the kid who broke the gun. - Right. - Well, Alan Dershowitz looked at that and said, this is a contraband case. This is the same case as, you know, if you get ripped off during a drug deal. - Right, they stole my pot. - You can't go to the police and say, yeah, I got ripped off. - Yeah. - So he said this actually has, you know, real parallels in the real world. So a lot of that went on and a lot of those. - Which is taught a generation of kids. If you're gonna rob someone, rob a drug deal. - Rob a drug dealer. - Right, exactly. I mean, that's- - Which is good for the economy. - It is and that's how I find out it's my trip out here. But so that was kind of the first thing I remember seeing you on it. It must have been pretty early in the stuff you had done on television. - I think it was probably about '87, '88. - Yeah, somewhere in there. - And so you grew up in New York? - I grew up in New York and I got, I graduated from University of Pennsylvania in 1979. - Okay. - And I had already been doing stand up. - In Pennsylvania? - At Penn, but also I had passed auditions at the improv in New York. - Okay. - So I was driving up from Philly to New York on long weekends, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I was actually already, you know, a working professional comedian while I was in college. And then when I got out of college, because I had already been working in New York, I got spotted by somebody at ABC who was casting a pilot and they ended up getting a pilot within six months of graduating. - So you did hand. - So you moved out to LA. - So I came out to LA to do the pilot, went back to New York for about another six months and then moved out here. So from in the early '80s, I, when it came out here after this pilot deal, which went nowhere, but by the way, co-starred Charlie Fleischer. - Okay, yeah, yeah. - So he was my first LA comedian pal who took me under his wing, taught me soul, watch was great. - Yeah, I talked to Charlie a couple of weeks ago. He was a master since doing a convention. - Yeah, he's amazing, what a polymath, he is. - Yes, absolutely. - So on the heels of that pilot, even though the pilot didn't get picked up, I ended up with a development deal and that meant I couldn't work for any other network for a year or so. So I was, you know, watching three movies a day. - It's a good education. You went to film school basically, in the meantime. - And this was, you know, this was back in the day. So I would have to go to a movie theater and watch movies. So I would find out what movie theater is in the area. I haven't seen the movies at and then I would work out the schedule so that I could buy one ticket and go see four movies. - That's a very, that is a very New York thing. I feel like that's the kind of thing that only in East Coast, New York, it would come here and be like, they haven't discovered the loopholes. - Yeah, really seriously, Bill, just watching this. You couldn't believe it, so. So I would just sit around and watch, you know, three, four movies a day and just, you know, write and do whatever I could because I was basically off the TV market. - Right. - And development deals, as you know, rarely go anywhere. - Yeah. - So that went nowhere. And then I ended up in another development deal with Keenan Waynes. - Right. - Which kept me off the market again for another couple of years. And then the comedy boom kicked in. - Right. - And I was on the road 40 weeks a year. So most of the '80s for me is sort of really sporadic in terms of television. - Right, 'cause it was sort of the late '80s that I started seeing you on stuff. - Yeah, that's when. - Was the Keenan, did anything come out of the Keenan thing? - There's no, like most development deals, that also went nowhere. - Didn't you wear a pilot or? - No, because it ended up being a rights issue. We were gonna do an updated comedic version of I Spy. - Okay. - And that makes sense. - I had done a show in Palm Springs at which Robert Culpe was in the audience. And Keenan had done a tonight show with Bill Cosby as a guest host. - Okay. - So we both had, we had met them and talked to them and they knew our work and everything. So Keenan called Cosby. I called Culpe and they both were on board and they said they would even come in and do the pilot. - Wow. - And I did not get raped. - Right. - Right, right. - And what did you probably felt a little bad about? - I still feel that since then, I went to Catholic schools for like the first three, four years and never got, never got fingered. - Were you the wrong guy? - No idea, the kind of self-respect issues you have when you're the only one not getting fingered. - Makes perfect sense. - Anyhow, so what happened with the Cosby thing was quite simply that the rights were tied up by Sheldon Leonard who said that he didn't wanna release the rights because he was working on a feature film which came out in the late '90s or early 2000s or later. When that show stayed off of syndication for years because of that too, a huge deal out of it when it finally was able to come back because it hadn't aired for like one year. - Right, he was really invested in making something happen which ended up taking 20, 30 years longer than it intended but so that's why that went nowhere. - Right. - And by the time all of that came down the development deal had dried up. - Right, so now you're on the road and then it catches up with you in the late '80s and we get to kids' court. - Yeah. - But what would you use to watch a lot when you were a kid growing up because you kind of now have a reputation as sort of a comedy, you know, a real comedy nerd. - Well not even a comedy nerd. - You know, with all the stuff you're doing now and comics only which we'll get to in a moment of being one of the comics who's a real fan of comedy. - Yeah, yeah. Well, I used to watch, see it's an interesting, it's back, you know, I grew up as a little kid in the '60s and the teenager in the '70s and that's two very different kinds of comedy. - Very different kinds of comedy. - You know, by the time the counterculture came after the late '60s, you know, we were dealing with would you prior, had you started to make a crossover where Carlin had gone through his transition and became a counterculture voice. Cheech and Chong were around, the Derek and Clive tapes had come out, National Lampoon had made its marks and that live started actually a little bit later in '75, I think it was. - So that's when like comic records weren't the sort of dirty party records that they kind of were in the '60s? - Well they were, I mean, you know, like a Red Fox record was like, you know, it was the same photo on every album, same typeface, different titles, different color. That was it, there was like a dozen of them that look exactly the same and Rusty Warren and there were some of those. But, you know, there was also, you know, being Italian, a lot of people around me had Pat Cooper albums. - Okay. - But I also cut my teeth on, this is what I was saying about the '60s and the '60s into the '70s and even beyond, it started to really change in the mid to late '80s where, you know, in the '60s and early '70s, when you were watching TV, you could see Richard Pryor, you could see George Carlin, you could see Cheech and Chong on Don Kirsten's rock concert, all those things, right? But you would also see on Ed Sullivan and the Hollywood Palace, you'd see Jan Murray and Jackie Mason and Jackie Gayle and, you know, Shecky Green. - It was a weird crossroads. - Alan Rossy, Tony Fields, Phyllis Diller, you know, they were as present as the younger, more rebellious comics were. - Right. - So I came from this generation where we sort of brought the past with us and the new stuff-- - You actually had a sense of history, which people don't necessarily have now. - I think it's changed, ironically, because with YouTube, you could see virtually anything. - Yeah, and that's a point that comes up on the show a lot where it's where you have access to everything in the world now. - Right. - But because you're not stumbling on anything, because you have to already find things you already know about, you're not exposed to a lot of stuff and I think that people-- - Yeah, it's like if you have five books on the shelf, there's five books on the shelf. If you're in a library, you have to be in the right place in front of the right stacks, in front of the right place. - Exactly. - Exactly. - It's that kind of thing, yeah, yeah. - So you know, you might have been drawn to watching one of the shows 'cause "Pryers" on it, but then you get exposed to all these other people. - Right, and also back then, it was a weird thing with talk shows, they would have the most eclectic guest mix. - Totally, even really sort of mainstream kind of, kind of, you know, "Home Sponge" shows, like "The Mike Douglas Show" or "Dina Shore." - I have it there. - Yeah, yeah. I mean, there'd be these strange combinations of like, you know, Richard Pryor and Gore Vidal, you know, which made for just amazing interactions too, and it's something we've, I think, lost with the talk show format in the States. Sometimes they see it on stuff like "Grand Norton." - Yeah, "Grand Norton" actually, that's an interesting point, that actually is probably the closest in terms of how eclectic the mix of guests are, and "Grand Norton" keeps them all together. - They all come out at once. - Yeah, which is a show, it's not just like, here's a bunch of segments, what movie are you doing? - Yeah, and I actually did a nod towards that phenomenon on the green room, where it meant a lot to me to have, you know, Rick Overton and Jonathan Winters, and as well as Robert Klein, you know, and to have, you know, Gary Shandling with Bo Burnham, you know, I really, it was from being steeped in that, in that era of seeing such an eclectic mix of people. - Because it tells it too, like, you're kind of, when you have these people in a different context, they don't tend to tell the same stories that they tell on everything else, when it's just them, you know, what has happened with the talk show format now is it's really just become a pipeline for, you know, publicity and promotion. - Right. - That's really all it is. - Yeah, it's a YouTube clip generator, and a promoter. - Yeah, you know how we have people who are celebrities now, just for being celebrities, but you know, we have the Paris Hilden's and the Kim Kardashian's. - What I always say is infamy and fame are now the same thing. - Yeah, well, we had celebrities back then who were famous for the talk show appearance. - Yes, absolutely. - You know, who were writers and Calvin Trilling, you know, you had all these thinkers and people who were just sort of aerodyte entertaining talkers and their other field of work was not performing writing, but they became household names. - Even from game shows. - Just from being on talk shows. - And game shows, but it's surf on game shows. - Yeah. - Yeah, yeah, that kind of thing. - Yeah, and we very rarely have, I mean, I think you get it a bit with things like NPR where they'll have writers and stuff that are on these game shows and use them in different contexts. - Right. - What other than that? - Right. - And that's almost a holdover. - Yeah, I mean, that used to be the, you know, the- - Well, Govardale's a great example. You know, your dad's watching Lonnie Anderson on "The Tonight Show" and it's like, "Hey, Govardale." - Yeah. - And then that's where- - Jack, what was his name with it? He had a Japanese wife and they were always- - Oh, yes. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Jack's something, Jack. And I would see him on "The Tonight Show" and they were so funny together. - Yeah, Jack. - He was so funny and so on. No, no, Jack's original host after Sam Allen, but I forget his name. - Yeah. - I'm sure one of your listeners- - I'm sure I'll get an email immediately. - But I got turned onto his writing and started reading his writing just because he was so funny and smart on "The Tonight Show." - And so that was immediately kind of what you were drawn to as a kid, these like more panel talk show type stuff or were you watching? - Well, I was drawn to wherever they had comedy, but when I got there, it was a mix that was very, very different. - Right, right. - And so that informed a lot of what I watched. - Right. - I mean, I was a huge Allen and Rossi fan. You know, I mean, who's an Allen and Rossi fan that like champions Allen and Rossi? I was like, you know, I gotta get home so much. - Alan and Rossi are on, you know, craziness. So I watched anything that pretty much had a comedian on it. - Right. - So I ended up watching a lot of the variety shows and I've told this story before but it's kind of interesting 'cause my grandmother claimed until the day she died that she didn't speak English. I think she understood a lot more than she let us know. But, so as a result, you know, after Sunday dinners or whatever, we'd all sit around and watch the Ed Sullivan show because you didn't have to know English because there'd be a dancing bear on it in 20 minutes. - Yeah, right. - A Japanese, accurate, Chinese, accurate thing or yeah. Or Topogigio, you know, is a real variety show. But every episode always had a slam of comic. Generally an old school cat, sometimes, you know, younger comics but, and I remember being like really young, like maybe seven or eight when I realized I specifically honed in on that form as something extraordinary to me. And so that really drew me, yeah. I think it had a lot to do with the fact that, you know, I was sort of, I was always a really annoying kid because I wanted to know why. I wanted to know, I was always questioning things and always getting, and eventually it was just like, you know. - I have a sister, yeah, an older sister. But it's pretty much when the rubber hit the road, it was children should be seen and not heard in my family. And the idea of somebody just standing there and having the entire audience listening to what they want to say. - That's the opposite of being heard. - That's my little armchair psychology on I think why it spoke to me. - It makes perfect sense too. I mean, especially as a family, if you're all in silence, sitting and listening to this one-person talk, it's kind of the-- - Yeah, it just struck me as, wow, what power. - How close to New York City were you? - I was in the Bronx. - 'Cause you were in the Bronx. You ever attempted to try and go get tickets to Sullivan or kind of see any of these shows live or was it? - No, but I started going to the improv as like a 15-year-old me. - Okay. - And I was at the improv. The first time I ever went on stage at the improv, I was 16 or 17. - Wow. - I've been going like every month before that for about a year or so. - When did you make that connection that these people I'm seeing on TV are actually so close I can go to a place where they are? - It came from watching people like George Carlin and Richard, probably Robert Klein, who was a profound influence on my generation. I don't think he gets enough due. - No, he was the New York comic. - He was everybody. - He was the college educated post-immigrant experience. - Comic, he was the voice for the entire Seinfeld generation. - Right, absolutely. - He was the first one that broke through that, you know, he wore his education on his sleeve. - He was doing deconstructive observational stuff. - So interesting. - Joke jokes. - Yeah, but he's actually really aware of it. I've had the good fortune to become friendly with him over the years and had a lot of conversations about this. And he was very aware that what he was doing was where somebody like Carlin was coming and playing with the form and turning it into something in the language of the young culture. Most of the counter-cultural comedians were doing that. Whereas what Klein did was he dove way, way deep into the very conventional traditional form and tried to change it from the inside out, tried to change the subject matter, tried to change the values of it. But he wasn't trying to create a new form. - Right, 'cause on the surface you look at Klein, especially then, you know, he's a guy in a suit and he seems like a adult. - Actually, that's true, but he actually sort of split the difference. He was the, he used to come out, you know, cardigan sweaters and a very collegiate look. - Right, right, right. - Not a professorial look, more of a student look. - But not Bill Bottoms in a, you know, in a tank. - Yeah, he wasn't trying to be a hippie. He was trying to be himself. - Right, right. - Which was great. I mean, as was Carlin, but his, you know, Klein's bent was more middle-class immigrant New York. It was a little bit easier to swallow for probably people who were more used to the Ed Sullivan comic, traditions, people. - And that's what I mean, is that he went in, he didn't defy the form, or say I'm gonna, I'm just gonna cut off all the, you know, smooth edges and turn it into something, you know, spiky, he just goes right in. - Yeah, yeah, he's like, this is a great form. How do I make this form relevant? - Right, right. - As opposed to, I gotta change this form up for it to be relevant. - Right. - So he was a really profound influence on that generation that came in the '70s. 'Cause that's such an amazing thing to be able to do, where you've latched on to the comedians that you see on TV, and had to have more or less immediate access to them. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - It's kind of a-- - Well, that's the thing is that all the younger comics, whenever they were on any of the talk shows, it's, you know, they'd always say, so where'd you get your start, you know? And almost everybody at that point was, at some point, would say the improvisation. - Right. - So I went to the phone book, which I don't know if people remember what that was. - Right, you sometimes sit on it. - I went to use the sit-on, it used to be a great thing at dinner table for short people. I went to the phone book, and so the improvisation, and I called him up, and I said, how do you be a comedian? (laughing) - I put my name in. - And around, like, you know, 15 or 16, 14 or 15. - Yeah. - And they told me the whole thing, whatever, and I decided I would just go down to start seeing things. And the first time I went there, it was amazing. The only comedy I had ever seen live was if my parents went away, you know, took the family away for a weekend at the Catskills, you know? - Right, so you'd see a baggy pants kind of comedian there. - And a little bit more, the Catskills thing was a little bit more as close to Vegas, not quite baggy pants, but I, you know, you could see Alan and Ross in the Catskills, you know. - But it was still kind of a generation removed. - Yeah, absolutely. - It was a big showroom stuff. - Right. - And so by the time I went to the improv for the first time, I had only seen maybe three comedians live, and I actually remember who they are, if this interests you. - Yeah, yeah, absolutely. - The first one I ever saw, I was a little kid, I was about eight years old, we were on vacation in Florida, and one of the motels on the north end of Collins Avenue had a little lounge, and they had an x-rated comedian working there named Tubby Boots. - Tubby Boots. - And Tubby Boots's thing was, I don't know if he's still around, but Tubby Boots's thing was, he was huge, he was obese. - I believe it was him, Tubby Boots. - And his big hook was, he did this stripper character, and because he had his own breasts, he would put pastes on his own breasts. - Hold him. - The hook, I spent eight. And it was close to kids, but it was one of those old places that had been built in like the '50s, so it was a lot of glass window, glass walls with aluminum division partitions. - The glass brick, yeah, like a diner. - No, not even bricks, just full glass. - Full glass. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. So for the lounge, they had covered all those windows and walls, glass walls with black velvet. - Right. - This is Valour's class. - And the door opened at one point, and I snuck in, and I zipped between the window and the curtain, and I hit there and nobody saw me, so I watched-- - It's like velvet. - I watched it were crack in the velvet. - Oh my God. - I watched this show, and I was just mesmerized because it was adult. - Yeah. - You know, not only was it a comic live, but it was also adult, and it was-- - And you weren't getting in the clandestine kind of like yayering creepage ads to the atmosphere. - Yeah, yeah, and it was, and you know, he was doing all this raunchy stuff, so I was like, you know, I really shouldn't have been there. - Right. - But I was in heaven. - Right, right, right. - I was in that vibe of that little time, it seemed maybe a hundred people. - Right. - That little tiny thing, and just that event was just like so like-- - 'Cause now it's an experience. - Yeah. - That's it, that's it, that's it. That's it, that's it. I got a sense of the experience of live comedy in a small room with a hundred people, as opposed to one, television or a big show. - Which is very, very different. So if you're watching these people in Sullivan, after that, you probably have that experience on the back of your mind where you're saying-- - Yeah, so they do this somewhere that's like where I've been, where it's gonna be better. - Exactly. - So it's like having only seen movie trailers, and then suddenly finding out there's movies of those things as well. - Yeah, yeah. - There's a whole thing? - Or that the movie's about a real person. - Yeah, oh yeah. - When you go find out a real person. - Yeah. So Tubby Boots was the first one that was, it'll list it. The next one that I saw live, I went out to a college in Long Island to see a show, who was it, it was um, who wrote "Welcome Back" Carter theme song? - Oh, give cap, oh, wrote the theme song? - Yeah. - John, he was in the band. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the guy. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Thomas, it's my tongue. - Oh my God, what's the band he was in? - Oh, John, I'll think of it tonight when I'm trying to go to sleep. - Okay, well. - But I know the guy who did the theme song. - The guy who wrote the theme song, "Welcome Back" Carter, well, Gabe Kaplan opens for him. I guess that's how that hook up happened, okay? So Gabe Kaplan was opening for him at this college, and my parents wouldn't let me go because I was too young, but my sister was a couple of years old and I was a fan of John. - Oh, it's so close. - So she said, "I'll go." - Right. - So I went to see the opening act, and she went to see the closing act. And so that was the second time I saw a comic live, and the funny thing is, because it was at this college, it was like in a gymnasium, you know? And I could see Gabe Kaplan after his set. I could see him. - She's hanging out. - In the hallway, and there was no security or anything. Post-cotted, before. - Okay. - Yes, before. In fact, I think it was even before his album came out. - Okay. - Holes and mellow rolls. - So how would you have heard of him just from seeing him? - You see him on TV. - Gotcha. - And so I saw him standing with me, and I went up to talk to him, and I said, "I want to be a comedian." And he said, "Don't, it's horrible." - Right. - That was my first time talking to a comedian. - Yeah. - I was like, "Whoa, that game's got some issues." - Yeah. - Yeah. - Oh, yes. - So that was the second time I had seen it. - Yeah, yeah. - It's seen us a live stand up. And then the third time I saw a live stand up was... - Was... - But thus far two times that you're not supposed to have seen a live stand up. Like you've kind of had to... - Well, I said no, the second time was legit. I mean, you know, I bought a ticket to go see a show, but again, wildly different experience from watching comics on TV, seeing them in a college gymnasium, haven't seen Tubby Boots. I forget who the third one was. But anyway, I had seen very few of them. And so when I went to the improv, I was seeing comedy in the place that it felt like it belonged. - Right. - Smoky brick walled, like a jazz club. Like, you know, as I started to learn more about the beat generation and the comics that came out of that, like Lenny and Professor Erwin Corey. - Yes, yes. - And all these really often get led to Lord Buckley. - Right. - You know, I realized that they came out of the theater and the theater. - From the theater, yeah. - Mort Sahl. - Right. - And the people that started in the hootnand, these are coffee houses. - They came from sort of the art angle versus the same angle. - They came from the jazz, bebop, world, which folded into the folk world, which meant that they were around Lenny, they were around Bob Dylan and John Bayou. - It was all these different sort of threads of comedy and culture. - We're all kind of coming together artistically at that time. And so when I went to the improv, it was that kind of vibe. It's still to this day. When I think of that room, to me that's the definitive, perfect, the romantic comedy incubator. - Right. - The closest thing there is to it on the planet that I know of to this day is the comedy seller in New York. - Okay, yeah, yeah. - I mean, you walk in there and it doesn't feel like a comedy room. - Right. - It's like a jazz room. - Yeah. - So I went to the improv, found this incredible vibe. You could go there at 15, 16 at the time. They just couldn't drink, we're underage, but they rarely checked ID, so I drank a lot. - Right. - Anyhow, that's the first part of being a comedian. - That I was able to see comedians who were working, who were professionals, who were great, like great, but I've never heard of them before. - And a lot of them too. Like instead of the other times, you're just one guy and you act as like 10 people. - I can say that the place used to close it four in the morning, or when the last audience member left, which you have a king, so I was always there until four in, I was there until they closed those doors. - Right. - And you know, the people I saw when I first walked into the place were like, you know, Richard Belzer, Larry David, Gilbert Gottfried was actually a working pro, when I was still like, you know, 16, 17. Elaine Bruzler, who was still half singing, started as a singer, she was still singing. - I had no meaning, chart off on the show, and she was also doing like singing songs at the improv at that time. - Maybe, maybe. - Maybe character songs. - Maybe, I might have seen her. Franken and Davis, Gagan and Fine, there's so many, I mean, so many, whose names would jump out of you. Like the night that I first auditioned, Jay Leno was the house MC, you know. And I see, again, this is one of those things that I'm sure you've heard a million people say this, but people don't realize that Jay Leno was one of the best that ever set foot on a massive stage. - Yeah, I mean, coming from Boston, he was phenomenal. You know, people think of him now as the Tonight Show, but as a whole different gig, you know. - Oh, absolutely. - And he made a lot of choices, whatever, but as a straight stand up in a nightclub, none better. - But again, that's almost the opposite of what we were saying before, where it's, you know, you see the people on TV and know that sort of this whole different thing is happening live. Leno's sort of the same thing. It's like almost two completely different things. - Exactly. Andy Kaufman was around those days. And then, as I started working there, as I passed the auditions and became a regular and would work there, you know, the people that were just starting out around the same time as myself, or, you know, Seinfeld, Bill Maher, Carol Leif, Ray Romano, came a little bit later, actually. Keenan Waynes came a year or two later. - Yeah. - Paul Reiser, Dennis Wolfberg. - Oh, yeah. - Ronny Shakes. Have you ever heard the name Ronny Shakes? - Yeah, yeah. - Die very young, but genius. He was as close to Stephen Wright as anybody could be about 10 years before Stephen Wright. - Freddy Prinz was probably around. - Freddy Prinz had already gone out. - Okay. - Robin would stop in all the time. - Okay. - Jimmy Walker had already gone out probably. - Well, Jimmy Walker was mostly West Coast. - Okay. - I didn't see him much on the East Coast. - Oh, everybody that you could possibly imagine at that time. - Yeah. - It's kind of before everyone wants to sit calm and moves out here. - Right, and that's an interesting thing, too, is that that period of time, late '70s, before the comedy Boom, was a time where there really was not any middle class to speak of in comedy. - Right, right. - You either broke through and became a star and were doing television, whatever gigs came with that, or you carved out on yourself in a particular circuit, whether it be the college circuit or the condo circuit, or the country Western circuit, whatever, and you kind of had your own thing going, or you were really, you know, hand to mouth. - Yeah. - Yeah, the middle class was very small. There were very few people who were just making enough money to live and have a family and live decently. It was either one end of the spectrum or the other. - Steve Martin or Yorkarni. - Right, yeah, yeah. - Kind of, kind of. And so that changed when the comedy Boom hits, which makes that period of time particularly unique. Yeah, and we'll never have that again. I mean, I think that I don't see how we could. - I think once comics start, or not even comics, it's kind of the people who go, "Oh, those comics are now actors." That's how you become an actor. In a day, it's a little bit less pure, I think. You have people who-- - Well, I wouldn't say that anymore. I think there was a period where that was true. Certainly during the comedy Boom, it became a thing you could do to get what you really want. - Right, exactly. - More so than-- - That's how I get noticed. - Yeah, but more so than now. Now A, that path doesn't really work that way anymore. - That would just be perfect. - And B, there's a lot more opportunity for somebody to be doing something original, to be not taking any of those conventional paths, and still break through and be able to make a living, and maybe even become rather successful. - And to me, I feel like that, part of that is, I come from a punk rock background, I was in a punk rock band, and the sort of DIY-- - You don't look the type. - No, really, I weirdly addressed exactly the same, and I've had the same haircut, then, too. - But ironically. - If I run it, no, it's just kind of like, this is what I look like. But having the ability to sort of do a podcast, and release it yourself, and book your own show, and do your own thing, is kind of a great-- - You can now break through without having to listen to any of the arbiters that you need to deal with. No gatekeepers for what you wanna do now, and if you find an audience great, and if you don't, you can keep plugging away, and find that audience. And now, this is one of the biggest differences I can say, is we used to have to go on the Tonight Show to, what is it, 20 million people, 15 million people, whatever, to find the 200 people that we wanted to come see us in Chicago in that next weekend. Now, we can write directly to them. - To those people, yeah. - And they're gonna be engaged, too, like-- - There's a whole different thing. But that's beautiful, and by the way, when I talk about these different phases, I don't have any, you know, there's nothing negative about it, and they just-- - They're just here for it. - Yeah, and I think there's a lot of opportunities now, and I think that any young comic who is of the belief that they have to modify what they do to be successful is just mistaken. - And I am constantly saying that to embossing, because we're so isolated, comparatively, to the major cities. And I'm always like, if you're just doing stuff that you think is good, if something's gonna happen, it'll happen. If it's not, it's not, but at least you've still done good stuff. - Here's the weird thing, man. We live in a world where a chipmunk gets 20 million views on YouTube, so it's like, whatever you do, somebody seems to like it. - Yeah, exactly. - So you don't have to listen to anybody telling me what's good, or what's bad, or what is right or wrong, or what we like, or don't like. You just do what you want. - 'Cause you don't need someone to finance pressing your words onto a piece of vinyl. - There's all that, and yeah, so it's just a different element. We know of the phenomenon of YouTube stars, but they're also Twitter stars. I mean, there are people who were just so funny and compelling and interesting on Twitter that they're able to sell on live shows, and the live shows came after the fact. - Yeah, absolutely. - Which is, talking about opportunities, but it's phenomenal. And I think we're seeing and hearing a lot more original voices because of that. - And TV now is not, it's almost completely reactive. It's not driving those things, like when you're watching it, comic appearing on TV is now driving their success. - The rest of the career, yeah. - But here, it's almost like, if someone has success before TV, then they'll get on TV, 'cause TV goes, "Oh, we know people will watch." - Exactly, exactly, exactly. They're now looking at young performers. It's like, you become celebrities, and then we'll call it, as opposed to, "Oh, we're gonna help make you a celebrity." - Right, which is very odd. And you see, I think, so many fewer comics built by television these days. - Absolutely. - Maybe Chelsea lately is the only thing I can think of that was like building comics to an audience by having them on frequently and giving them a sort of flavor to a specific audience. - Yeah, none of that has gone away. It still exists, but it's not as meaningful or the only path where, exactly. But it's interesting because talk shows have really, it's been quite a while now. It used to be that if you were going on the road and you did a letterman or you did a tonight show, you, you know, the phones would ring and you could basically sell out a small club wherever you were going, you know? Now it's barely a blip on the radar. - Yeah, it's totally a blip on the radar. It's very interesting whether or not it's an aggregate of everything else that makes a difference, or it is one other thing in particular. - Well, I think the people that go out are no longer the people that watch those shows. - Right, having said that, Kimmel and Conan are a little bit different. They still do have a little bit of impact because they appeal to younger audiences, but not to the same degree by any stretch of the imagination. - No, no at all. And one interesting thing that you haven't mentioned watching any fiction shows, but did that appeal to you at all? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, I didn't. - I mean, I was, obviously I was driven by comedy. That is mostly what I watched. Outside of comedy, the things that I was really addicted to were it was Man from Uncle. - Okay. - Yep. - I was a local fan. I spy, which I actually kind of perceived as comedy as well. - I thought it was comedy as well. - I always did too. - Kinda was ahead of its time in terms of being a dramedy or whatever they call them. - It's a buddy cop movie. It's a comedy like Lethal Weapons of Comedy. - Not, but it's a much more subtle kind of comedy. - It is much more subtle, you know. - 'Cause of the times. - And it was more sort of witty dialogue. - Yeah. - And you know, I think the closest thing, but even amped up, it's like on 11, was moon lighting. - Yeah. - Moon lighting was kind of I spy, but on 11. - I mean, there's still stakes. It's a comedy, but someone might get murdered. - Yeah, there's still a mystery story. - Yeah. - Right, right. But mostly I'll watch comedies and comedies of talk shows. - I really loved, I loved talk shows. - 'Cause especially if you're discovering this real world, then you can see at 15, 16. I imagine watching Happy Days is not gonna be that appealing because you're like, well, I could go into the city and see-- - It's comedy and see, you know? - Yeah, and I also felt like I felt from a very early age that a lot of what claimed to be comedy wasn't what I believed was comedy. - Right. - Because I had experienced a really very specific idea. - Raw comedy that I loved. - Right. - And that ultimately evolved to something I've been saying for years, which is that most comedy on television is not really comedy, it's a comedy like substance. - Right, fair enough, yeah. - It's like cheese food. - Yeah, yeah. - You know, it tastes like cheese, looks like cheese, feels like cheese, but it's not actually cheese. - Well, it's on two 'cause it's put like a three camera sitcom, which can be very funny, is put in the same category as a stand-up when one is more or less the creation of one individual person. - Yeah. - And the other is hundreds of people. - But there are exceptions to that. - And one of the greatest exceptions to that is everybody loves Raymond, which I feel like when you watch everybody loves Raymond, you can hear a stand-up comic at work. And I do believe that most of the writing staff was either practicing stand-ups or former stand-ups, Lou Schneider was there, I mean, I know a bunch of 'em that was down the shore, down the shore. - That's right, that's right. - That's right. - Very funny guy, but so when you watch Raymond, what you see in the way they handle comedy, it has its roots and stand-up, and it speaks to me as closer to being real comedy than most others said. - Go to Seinfeld's probably a similar-- - Driven by character, a certain nuance to even the most bludgeon of jokes, whether that nuance be in the delivery or the reaction to it, you could also see that the joke doesn't end where the joke would end in any other show. They would have a little tag, a little tag, and kick it up again. - It's the same structure. - With your stand-up. - Callbacks. - Your stand-up writing, you know. So, everybody loves Raymond proves that you can do real comedy in that format, which is why, and that was so hard to come by, which is why I loved the really, really great comedies like "Mera Taro Moore" and "Raph Newhart". All in the family of course, sort of somewhere in the middle there, because it was much more of a conventional sitcom form. - But driven by a very strong personality. - Driven by a very strong personality, and even though the jokes may have been set up punchline jokes, they were so edgy and so, so great. So great that made itself very, very special. - Right, and of course it's subject matter, whether the issues that we're tackling were just so, you know, you'd watch an episode, and just, I would watch an episode of "All in the Family" like, "Oh man, I can't wait to talk to Jake Holpahn "about this tomorrow morning." - Everybody thinks how this was, yeah. - Yeah, yeah. - They're sort of tackling the same things that Pryor and Karla are doing at the same time, almost in the same format, in the same format. - And maybe even more so actually, because they have the strength of all these different viewpoints. - Well, it's almost back to Klein. - In many ways. - They're using the format people are very used to in a very sort of traditional way. - In a breakthrough way. - They sort of subversibly stick that into people's homes where they're sitting around the television, watching what they think they're doing. - Yeah, and it's funny because, you know, I refer back to "All in the Family" a lot, especially in this day and age where we have so much confusion about what's irony and what's, you know, not and what is racist and what is a commentary on racism, all that. Well, "All in the Family" in the '70s, we're talking about the early '70s here. "All in the Family" was right square in that pocket of, you know, there are people who were watching Archie Bunker and knowing the joke and like half him. And then there were people watching it thinking, oh, he's speaking what I really believe, he's my champion. And that to me is the satire sweet spot. - Absolutely, and it's almost irrelevant what the intention was because now it's, is it ironic? Is it a comment or is it the real thing lies in the viewer? It's almost not even in that. - And it opens discourse. - Yeah. - Exactly. - Yeah, exactly. - Which was meaningful. - Right. - At least the discourse around that show. - Right. - So that makes sense to all of those kinds of shows. - Yeah, those are the kinds of things that are really dug. I mean, I really was attracted to the stuff that, because I had been steeped in so much classical stuff and you know, went back to the Marx Brothers and I like, I discovered the Marx Brothers in, you know, the revival of the late '60s, early '70s. And so here I am sort of like, you know, 13, 12, 13, 14, whatever. And my cousin Bob would take me down to the Thalia in New York. - Yeah. - 24-hour Marx Brothers marathons and things like that. And it must keep marathon- - And those were like, you're seeing people your parents age, but that are like wise asses. - That's the thing, not only were they wise asses, but I'm sitting there looking at stuff that was made in the '20s and '30s and it's about anarchy. - Yeah. - And then I looked at, you know, then you look at how live comedy had evolved and all the anarchy sort of fell away. And then all of a sudden in the early '70s of the counterculture movement, anarchy was coming back strong. So I can look at the Marx Brothers and get a huge swath of what's happened in the art form and how it just keeps circling and everything. And so I was inadvertently really kind of curating my experience. - Yeah, you know, my true lesson. - Yeah, my being exposed to things. And I really gravitated towards stuff that's still to this day, I think, is more interesting than most of the other stuff. - Yeah, I agree. And I think that part of it is too, like a lot of those guys, and I look at Ernie Kovacs this way as well. - Yeah, when I discovered Ernie Kovacs, which by the way, I had to see by going down to the Museum of Television, and you see my broadcast. - Yes. - Which was new when I was a kid, and you'd have to go there with some things you wanted, and then you'd have to go and pull-- - Yes, 'cause you didn't have written a thing. - And all that. It was like a major archival effort. And I just covered-- - Which made us more special, too. - Yeah, and that's when I started to see the Ernie Kovacs stuff, and I was just like, "Oh my God, I can't believe it." - 'Cause these are guys that I think weren't raised on a format that was new. - They were inventing the format. - The format, and they weren't-- - Steve Allen. - Yeah. - You know, I'd been a huge fan of "Tonight Show" on Johnny Carson, by the way, for your younger listeners, Johnny Carson in the '70s was, I mean, pure genius. I mean, in that peak, you know, that peak period there, all through the '70s, but definitely the late '70s and the early '80s, I mean, Johnny was untouchable, and he was not just good at what he did. He was a genius at what he did. - And he was doing it for the first time. Like, he was-- - Well, he had made it his own. I mean, it was really, all that stuff really, if you had to say it was invented by anybody, it's Steve Allen. - Yes, yeah. - Who, Letterman, basically, you know, adopted a whole cloth, but also acknowledged it, you know? 'Cause Carson never, although he did with the sketches sometimes, I don't think he embraced the-- - He was served as much as Letterman. - Johnny was a Midwestern guy. - Yeah, you know, that wasn't his personality. So he really figured out, over the '60s and early '70s, he figured out what this was that was his, and it came, and it was also the period when Pam McCormick was writing for him, who was a complete, you know, dadaist comic mind, you know? So there, so I would see, you know, Johnny Carson, I'd appreciate all the things that I appreciated about Johnny, and then I'd go to the Museum of Broadcasting and see the old Steve Allen shows, or every once in a while, they'd be like a special on PBS, where they'd show clips and things like that, and I'd be like, oh my God. - It's been done. It's like cave paintings. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not only has it been done, nothing's new again, it just comes up in a different flavor or whatever, but also there is, there are no rules. You can really do anything and everything. - Right. - You know, you just gotta figure out what's right for you. - You have to make it work. - It's just gotta be funny. - Yeah. - And that's the craft and the talent of it. - Right. - You know, just like there are only so many of notes in the audible range. - Right. - Yeah, you can play so many songs. - Yeah, you can play so many songs. - And you get Johnny Ramones and. - So that's a interesting transition to comics only to me, because I kind of was able to see the Journey Cobex on early Comedy Central, actually, when it was the Comedy Channel. And I think that was only was on HAH, that's where it had combined. So a lot of people kind of don't know it on, it was, I think January 1st, 1990 or 1989, the Comedy Channel was launched as CTV, and I stayed up and the second it came on the air, I watched it launched. - Wow. - And then like two months later, it became Comedy Central. - It became Comedy Central when HAH wasn't doing great and that wasn't doing great, and they kind of combined into it. - Well, it was the HBO Comedy Channel. - Yes. - MTV's HAH. - Yes. - And then they merged and they called themselves CTV for about a minute before Canadian television. - She came down on them and then it changed the comics. - And HAH had all of the SNL reruns and they had a lot of the more big name classic stuff, and the Comedy Channel was basically MTV for Comedy. - Right. - They had V-J's, V-J's, V-J's, V-J's, and they would show clips from any Cobex, they would show, Higgins Boys and Gruber had a show and I'm a rich hodder show called Onion World, which is insane. - That's right. - That's right. - Rachel Sweet had a show and those in short-term spent theater. - And you had Eddy Gordetsky writing and all this stuff. - Yes. - And it was very New York and it was like-- - It was, you nailed it on the head. It was more like the MTV, the early 80s MTV format. - Right. - Of short-form V-J personalities, blocks of programming. - Right. - Whereas HAH tried to do-- - HAH was, well, it didn't work. - It didn't work. - Whereas HAH went more towards half hour blocks of programming and they would do things like what comedy, the comedy channel was doing, but they would do it within the confines of a show, which is what John Stewart started on stand-up sit-down. - Shortest interest in theater, yeah. - You had an Allen? - Where he was basically introducing clips. - Right, exactly. - But that was that half hour. - Right. - And the next half hour would be Alan Habie's show, which is a full half hour show, not clips. - Right, it kind of split the difference after a while. - Yeah, Alan Habie's show and then Alan King had inside the comedy mind. - Sit down, stand up. - Yup, sit down, sit up. - Sit down, sit up. - Yeah, and so it was sitting and standing at some point. And then you had comics only, which was a show where I got exposed to all kinds of amazing comedians in a capacity that was different enough that it really made me pay attention because it was like a Carson or whatever, but with just the panel. - Right. - And that was amazing to me. - Oh, I'm glad to hear that, 'cause you know I'm putting clips up online. - I know, I've been watching them. You've been watching them, yeah. - I can't find the masters. - Yeah, I have a few episodes. - Uh-huh. - So if there's something you can't find, I may have some. - All right, I'll get you on that. But so they just really, I'm just digitizing 30-year-old VHS stories. - Yeah, yeah. - So they're very archivaly, but I'm putting them up a little by little. It's just a time-consuming thing. It's 165 episodes. - Well, you can see how ahead of every time you were with that show. - Oh, you're very kind. - Did you really were? I mean, it's stuff that people are doing in podcasts now. - Yes. - From 1991 to '91, '92. - Yeah. And you know, what's interesting on that show is that I gave the guests the option of either like doing a conventional panel shot, which is when you prepare a material in conversation form, or winging it, and most people ended up somewhere in the middle. - Yeah. - But there are some that are, you know, clearly, you know, they're structured panels off. - Like Louise actually. - Yeah, Louise, yeah. - It's straight panel. - Yeah. - And you don't get any piece of kind of delouy that people know now from that. - Right. - Which is interesting for a different reason and in hindsight. - Yes, yeah. - And the people that really appealed to me were the people that went off book. - Right. - So like, the Bill Hicks, the first time I saw Bill Hicks. - Right. - And I took him off, I took him off a lot. He ended, you know, Bill Hicks is a slightly different example. 'Cause Bill did the show like three or four times. - Right. - And you know, we were friends just from the road, and we have mutual respect and a lot of mutual friends. And, but because it was so hard for Bill to get on TV here. - Yeah. - He very consciously said, "I wanna get as much material out there as I can." So most of his stuff is basically material in Ursat's conversation form. - But there are a lot of people who are just all over the map and just crazy fun. The thing about comics only was, you're right, it was the Tonight Show with just comedians. If the Tonight Show just had comedians on, that was the initial premise. So the sort of meta premise of it was kind of Klein-like. - Right. - We're gonna embrace the form and usurp it from within. - 'Cause people, if they're flipping through channels, they'll go, "Oh, this is something I've seen before." I kind of know where this is gonna go. - Right. - And it doesn't. - Right. - Because even the sketches you would do with Fred Wolfe. - Pretty dark and weird. - Very dark and they so reminded me of stuff that like Conan would do like four years later. - I'll talk to you about that off the mic. - But I remember, I mean, there are things that I probably saw once on that show that are burned in my brain. - Really, like which one? - Like the Pillsbury Doughboy. - Yeah, with the come out and you'd have raspberry sauce. The Bad Day worst day stuff, there's one that Fred had that was a bad day blood in my urine, worst day Conan in my urine. - Right, right. - There was one- - The Happy Suit. - The Happy Suit. - Which we did in the thick of the riots. - Yeah, and the stuff with like the cut to the dressing room and it's goodbye voices, sounds of the lambs kind of thing going on in there. All that kind of stuff was fun. - Well, thank you for saying that. The way we got away with that is kind of a funny story, which I'll tell you about as well. But I do, I just do want to say this that that was an example of my dream was coming true there in terms of, and by the way, not every episode is kick ass and I look at a lot of them now and I kind of wince a little bit but they do still have a certain charm to that. - So it's time and also real early appearances by Foxworthy and Ellen DeGeneres and Rip Taylor was our Larry Bud Melman. It was just craziness that is so cool when I look back on it now. But the idea that I could hire a writing staff of all Conan, almost everybody who worked on the show was a comic. - Did you do that out of LA? - Yeah, we did it out of LA and we were a migrant show. We taped in, because we got such weird orders because it was a new network and I don't know if they knew what they were doing or whatever, but our first order was like 24 episodes. Our next order was like 35 episodes and then we got an order for 60 episodes and then we got an order for 15 episodes and we would just put it up and down wherever it was available when we got an order because it was so unpredictable. But that also gave us a lot of opportunities. But it was kind of like that thing that Conan talked about in Satteristas when I asked him about how they do some of their stuff. He was like, for a long time, people just weren't watching. Nobody was minding the store. Like, unless there's a problem you don't want to hear about. And that's kind of what happened. But we did pull a fast one with a lot of the material. As you corroborate from me here, some of the material was very dark. - Do you remember the one where I talk about Fred and I had come back from doing a gig in Dallas? - We basically recreated. - Oh, did you ever think? - Yes, I do remember that. You showed the still flies. - Yes, absolutely. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. We did a lot of really dark stuff. - And that kind of stuff you're watching, you sit down to watch the family-friendly Tonight Show-looking thing and you would see this kind of stuff. And they would have comedy, central, whatever, the two in the afternoon. I mean, it was right after school. - I know. - Like I'd rush off to school. - We'd watch this. - Here's how we got away with it. We started producing when it was hot. Before we hit the air, it had merged and become CTV then Comedy Central. - Right. - During the move, they moved to offices, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and producer on the show, Jerry Kramer, had gone to New York, met with them at the offices. And as he was looking for somebody, I opened the door and it happened to be what looked like a storage room. - Right. - But there was a fax machine in there. And you know, the number of the fax line was written on the machine. - Yes, he wrote down that number. - So, and then he came back to LA and we were producing and everything. And he was faxing all the material to the fax machine in the storage closet. And apparently nobody knew it was there. And when we delivered the shows, we got this phone call going, "We can't do this." - We sent it to you. - We can't. - We sent it to you. What are you talking about? We sent to you, well, like a year after that, somebody found, you know, that the role had run out and was all piled up under the thing. And that's how we got away with it. Was it actually came down to, we actually delivered them, like, you know, the first 24 or 25 episodes, whatever that first order was. We actually delivered to them. They said, "We can't put this on there." And it was so, we actually just said to them, "Look, why don't you put it on the air and see?" - Right. - Before you were assuming these finishing problems, because, you know, my attitude was, comedy fans are comedy fans. - Right. - You know, and that's what you want anyway, right? - Right, that's what we do. Like, you guys already paid for it. You probably have nothing else to air. - Exactly. So, what are you gonna show up? - So, just put it on the air and see what happens. So, they put it on the air. And not only did they not get any shit for any of it, not a single complaint. They had, you know, a handful of people, by the way, at the time, you know, it had maybe a 25% penetration. Not even everybody had comedy center yet. But, you know, it was press and you got to see the show. It's weird and it's different and it's all out. - Yeah. - So, that's how we got away with it. - Yeah. - It's a very Jay Leno movie. It reminded me years later, when I heard the story about Jay hiding in the closets at NBC, hiding in the storage closets. It's open to hearing conversations. It reminded me of that. - Yeah, we're like phantoms. And that just worked here. Yeah. - So, the mystery facts. - Well, it was there. I can prove it. - Yeah. - It's like an alibi. - Exactly. - It's like perfect crime. - Exactly. - So, one thing we haven't discussed that as the thing that kind of comes up on the show frequently is, it sounds like you never have any aspirations to be an actor. - Oh, no, no, no, I've always had aspirations to be an actor. When I was in college, I took a leave of absence from Penn and went to study at the Royal Academy in New London. - Okay. - So, no, I'm actually very trained as an actor. - Right. - And I always wanted to do that, but I never saw them as being mutually exclusive. - Right. - I never started doing stand-up and being an actor as inseparable. As my life went on, I realized that there is, just in terms of focus, you kind of really got to figure out what you're about. - Right. - But that's always hurt me. Because I do a lot of different work in a lot of different directions and it's not helped my career. - Yeah. (laughing) - I started from kids' court, which was that just to go in for an audition and you get that, you know? - That actually, the producers on that, it was a company called Chauncey Street Productions. - Okay. - And they actually were fans of mine and they actually sought me out. - So they kind of built you into it? - Well, you know, they wanted a bit of a reverence. They wanted someone who had a good rapport with kids, which, how did they know I had a good rapport with kids? I don't know. - They were hiding in closets and they're following me around schoolyards. (laughing) Somehow, they contacted me and it became a really exciting thing to me because then it was like, oh, well, this is like, I can be funny here, but this is also something, you know, valuable. Yeah, it's just escapism. This is, the object here is to, the whole premise of the show was something that's still, you know, I'm very involved in the skeptic community and the critical thinking community. And that's what that show was about. It was about critical thinking. It was about teaching kids how to be critical thinkers, how, you know, 'cause I don't know if you remember, basically we would create a scenario where it sounds like a black and white issue of fairness and then we would just add little bits more of shades of gray, a little bit more shades of gray, a little bit more shades of gray. And the cool thing about that was I actually got a letter from like some parent teachers organization or something, whatever, where I was awarded the role model of the year for teachers and there was nothing funnier than that to me than that. It was a stone of cable in the classroom. It was a huge, which was this movement where they were, you know what, they used to, teachers used to tape the shows and show it in classrooms and stuff. Use it as dialogue starters. Exactly, exactly. And you know, well, that was, I never anticipated that or I was fired to that. I just felt like, you know, I love the idea of having fun, and being funny and doing comedy for kids, which is a different kind of thing, but doing comedy for kids, that's a different kind of comedy than they were aware of. It's coming out of real conversation and not talking down and stuff, and it's like a non-religious moral compass instructional thing as well, you know, where it's like, it's a critical thinking, which encompasses all of those things. The fate of that show was kind of interesting because it was on the air for a couple of years, right around the time that the FCC mandated that there had to be a certain number of hours of educational children's programming. That coincided with a decision made by Nickelodeon, which was another MTV network, made by Nickelodeon as to whether or not they were going to go the slime route. Right. And you know, or they were gonna. It was before they had moved to Nickelodeon Studios, Florida. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Still kind of an MTV-ish, a little more subversive, a little more. A little more experiment with what's possible. Right. Nickelodeon's programming, and eventually they decided to go down a more mainstream route, which I understand I got the rights with. But ABC, when Comedy Central, I mean when Nickelodeon decided not, they basically had a philosophy change, went down this other route, Kids' Court ended up not getting picked up again, but ABC needed a program to fit the new FCC regulations. So they tried to buy it, but Nickelodeon, this is the story I heard, and Nickelodeon wouldn't give it to them because they knew that it would be successful, and they didn't want to give a successful show to another network. Right, right. That which puts you in the middle of just an awful situation. Sella TV, yeah, exactly. And you also, at the same year, were in the final season of Facts Life, which-- Was that the same year? It was '88, yeah, it was the last season of Facts Life, and that was after you had done "Pursuit of Happiness" in the fall of that year, I think, which was your show. Was the show built around you, correct? Jesus, you're like my Boswell. Oh, well, hey, that's what Ollie did was watch TV. Yeah, at least thanks. Wow, man. That was very exciting. You actually know it better than I do. I'm a little hazy on the internet. Well, I'm happy to help. But I'm happy to help. So I imagine "Pursuit of Happiness" and "Kids Corps" were probably around the same time, or maybe-- Yeah, they were around the same time, yeah, yeah. And the Facts of Life thing came about because for a number of years before I was on the show, I was the warm-up. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, yeah, I did studio warm-ups. OK. In fact, I was kind of regularly employed by embassy, because that was embassy-- Yeah, it was embassy, yeah. [MUSIC PLAYING] --with the star. I had been doing warm-ups. It's a great gig for a comic when you're in town, not making money on the road, whatever. It's a great gig. And it's a hard gig. It's a really-- That's hard gig. Hours of trying to keep people not angry. The rule? I mean, the restrictions-- the parameters of doing that gig are so complex because you're babysitting, you're entertaining, you can't get in the way. You can't start. You never know how long a break is going to take. You're also kind of in the fall or two minutes for them to change the light bulb, or it could be 15 minutes of them screwing around with shots. You have no idea. So you have to be able to go into something and pull out of something and keep it all together. And it basically held prisoner. The audience is basically held hostage. It's a really challenging gig. As it turns out, if you do it well, they know this. They know this. And so I had been doing well enough to get a really, really long run of being one of the NBC go-to, NBC television go-to guys. And I ended up basically doing maybe five, six seasons of "Facts of Life" as a warm-up, as well as, you know, I was the warm-up on the pilot of Paul Rodriguez's NBC CD, which was a lawyer, AKA Pablo. AKA Pablo. Yes, yeah. Yeah, his brother. Yeah, and you know, they do a spin-off of a show that's-- I did a couple of warm-ups for "Gloria." Oh, yeah. It's kind of all in the family. Yeah. A lot of shows. But it's a great education of seeing how things are made. Oh, my God. Not only did I learn so much about sitcoms, I learned about what it's like to really be on the floor, acting with sitcom. I learned what the directors are concerned about. I learned how many things on the tech side will make a difference in you being in front of the camera, trying to do a joke, you know? Right. You're absolutely right. I got a real 360 on that, because I was around it so much. And eventually, when you're not doing pilots, when you're doing a series, you become part of the family. Right. You have crew nosy, you have lunch with them. You know, all this good stuff. Yeah. Yeah, everybody knows each other. So I could hang out with the boom-mic guys. I could hang out with the cameramen. Really, I learned so-- Because you know what their job is. And people probably also-- not discount you as the warm-up comic, but overlooking it just enough that you can be around to learn stuff that they may not be as aware of you kind of hanging around. Well, you know, you have such a specific space within all of that that doesn't overlap with anybody else's. Right. So yeah, they would do-- Kind of leave it at your own device. Exactly. You're the fact machine in the closet there that-- Yeah, one of the things that I ended up doing in our effects of life was the boom guy was so good. You know those long-boom mics with the cables that you know, they turn in 360 and it's telescoping in and out? Yeah, yeah. To get rigs, right? Well, there's one guy who was so great at that. He was so deaf at how he moved that thing that he and I had a little puppet show going. He's one of the things we did when he was free on a break. I could play with him and then it was like a big giant dinosaur pet that was playing with stuff. I have these crew of people to call upon. Yeah, it was so much fun. And the girls were just fantastic. Oh yeah, I loved that show. So when the opportunity came around, you know, I got a phone call from John Bowman, who was Series Director at that point. And he said, listen, you know, I've always been a fan of yours and I've always been looking for something on the show for you. And here's this idea. And blah, blah, blah, blah. So I said, hey, great. You know, I mean, what an easy, comfortable thing. You know, normally when you're going into a series that's been on the air for so long-- 10 years, yeah. It's comfy. I mean, I had the experience of that with northern exposure. Right, that's what I was saying. It's a hurdle, you know? It's like being a second husband in a very tight-knit family. You married into this, yeah. Well put, we're asked with Facts of Life. I just knew everybody. Yeah. It was really comfortable. And so I agreed to do it. And it just so happens that I had committed to it. And I was actually a semi-regular. I was like, you know, 12 out of 15. It was the back half of the season, basically. For the most part. When they aired. It was a couple of seasons, actually. What was it you? 9 and 10? I did semi-regular stuff. So I'd be on like six episodes, one season, and then a bunch of episodes, the next season, whatever. In the interim, after having committed to that, and started doing a couple of episodes, I ended up doing pursuit of happiness. Right, OK, so that was in between. Right, I see. So when pursuit of happiness came up, I actually had to navigate downtime on pursuit of happiness. So I'd never had any time off that season, because whenever I had a week off on pursuit of happiness, they'd schedule an episode for me on Facts of Life. And we'd go back and forth, and they were sometimes where I'd be rehearsing two shows at once. Wow. Which was wild. Yeah. It was two very different shows. Two completely different shows. Very different. They had a different sensibility, and the sense of humor was very different. Yeah, yeah, really different. The thing about Facts of Life, do you know Bob Meyer and Bob Young? Yes. Well, I had to go on college with them. OK. And we were in the same performing arts groups, and all that sort of stuff. And actually, they were ahead of me. But we overlapped it. And yeah, we were really good friends. And they started working on Facts of Life, and they told me an interesting story about how they would write these episodes. They all thought were really funny. And then they would get them back, and all the jokes would be gone, all the jokes would be gone. And they said they actually went to the producers at the time, and complained about this. And the producers actually explained to them. They said, look, you need to understand what this show is. The show is not comedy per se. It's not comics, not jokes. Life lessons. It's life lessons. It's warm, fuzzy feelings. And it's upbeat. Right. That's the Rita Dillon side of the show, probably, that she was saying. Yeah, you're probably right. But I think there's pretty much probably the manifest of working the guitar. Yeah, absolutely. Which was why your season was fascinating to me, because it got really weird. Well, that's why they brought me in. Because I even said to them, when we were having this conversation about coming in, I said, look, you know-- I'm not a warm and fuzzy life lesson. That's what I brought in. They said, I understand what this show was about. Because Bob and Bob had made it so clear to me that that was a stated manifest. Right. They said, that's not really me. And I don't know if I'm the right guy for this. And that's when they said, no, we want to go in a darker direction. We want to go someplace more interesting. We want to get into issues and all this stuff. And ultimately, possibly, do some spin-offs. They had maybe five spin-offs they'd try to do back to a pilot's of the last season. Well, one of the things they intended to do was to spin off with me and Lisa Welch. Yes. Because you were a couple on the show. Which was all the trial and order, exactly. And there's that episode where she gets in the car accident and is in beautiful anymore, which is almost just a completely straight drama episode. It is a drama episode. It absolutely is, right. And at the time, I didn't appreciate the show in the same way, because I was so steeped in comedy. It was like punchline for a lot of comics at that time. Yeah, probably. But I do understand now that in its own way, it was doing something unique. Absolutely. And the thing that resonated with me as a kid, especially those last seasons, was seeing a show that was on "Forever" and was a show that I didn't identify too much with when it was this about teenage girls and life lessons. And now, back to the rubber client thing, I'm seeing these interesting things coming through with the show. Got into pregnancy, a middle-aged woman pregnancy, abortion talk, abortion talk, drug drugs. Yeah, they really did do some really interesting things. At the time, I would have loved to just be on a hilarious smart sitcom, like a mere Tyler Moore or something. So I never really felt like, oh, this is my thing. But now, actually, in retrospect, I do realize that they were doing something very, very interesting, with a really good heart and soul. Did you met Clarice Leachman before that? Because if I had not met Clarice Leachman, it would have been interesting to her. Oh, my God. Because when I started, it was still short. It was so short. And then when she was leaving the show, I said, oh, I wonder who they're bringing in. And then I found out it was Clarice Leachman. I was like, oh, my God. And she's a wack-a-doodle. Oh, absolutely. She is a wack job. She was a blast. And really interesting to watch her work. Really interesting to watch her work in this format. Yeah. I learned a lot just from being around her. But mostly, what I learned is she's a nuts job and love it. Yeah, absolutely. And love how funny she had a weird, weird, and that was part of the weird environment as well with that show. And there's an episode-- you're not in this episode, but it's the one that people always mentioned from that season where like Maurice LeMarsh is playing Rod Serling. And it's like a dream murder episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's just crazy things. And another one of this was where they were trying to move Natalie into an apartment with Richard Greco and David Spade. Uh-huh. Spade was on TV. Ray Romano. Ray Romano. I played Natalie's long-distance boyfriend. And they were a couple of great episodes. Oh, yeah. And one of my favorite. They also did some great bottle episodes. Yes. Yes. Really great one. Come back to the Five and Dime Natalie Green, where she's in this dining room. Do you remember the one where they're all studying for finals or writing papers and all that? And they're all just basically-- Losing their minds. It's them in one room in the entire show. Yeah. It's hilarious. It's like a Barney Miller episode. Right. Yeah. It's great. It's great. And I really, truly did not appreciate, at the time, what it was, because I thought it felt like-- It's what it used to be. --it's what it used to be. Which it was at some point. And then changed, which is-- I've noticed shows that are on for more than eight years. The last few seasons tend to get bizarre. We've kind of done everything. And the network's kind of not watching anymore, because they're like, well, I just get the reason we don't care what you're doing for people. Yeah. Yeah. And you know you're on the fence already anyway. Right. Right. You may as well go out with a bag and take some shots. Yeah. So I love that season. And because I had seen you on Kids Court, and I watched Pursuit of Happiness, which I enjoyed, I was like, oh, wow, this guy's in these interesting things. And so when comics only came up, again, that's why I was like, maybe something interesting that it won't happen here. So if only 20 million people had as much interest as you do. Well, I tried to convert them at the time. Which is the opposite of Northern Exposure, which was a show that had a very public falling out with Rob Morrow over Money, which was every issue of TV Guide and whatever, it was huge. And then you have to step in there, which I'm sure was in not an enviable position. Well, let me say this. It was because it was perhaps my favorite show on television. It's a great show. One of few shows that I ever had anything to do with, or even audition for, that I actually watched, which is going to be strange. So I was excited just to be a part of it. And the dauntingness of replacing the guy that the audience was in love with for five years already didn't even really factor in. I was just excited to be doing work that I loved with the people that I admired. I thought the cast was phenomenal. That is just a murderous rhetoric. It's weird, is that that was right around the time that I started to get up to the late 20th century and get online. And it was so early in my understanding of everything. And, in fact, the phenomenon itself that I didn't know that you didn't have to respond to everybody that just says the most horrible words about it. Well, because people didn't do that. You wouldn't write someone a letter. I don't even be like, you're the fucking devil of, I hope you die. And I'd go in these chat rooms, because the Northern exposure fans were like Trekkies, and they were hard. They were hard. They were the people that kind of ditched twin peaks after the first season, and they all went into an exposure. Yes, we had this very culty thing, very rabid. And I understand why, because if I had known that that sort of thing existed, I could have gotten hooked in myself. Yeah, absolutely. Because it was great, weird, cool show. Totally weird show. Did you just shoot that up in Canada? Vancouver. Vancouver. No, I'm so sorry, that was a different show. It's Seattle. It was in Seattle, and all the Alaska stuff was shot in Snoqualmie Falls, and out in the Boonies, and a little town of Roslyn was an actual town. And they would do things like we'd shoot like two episodes of interiors, and then spend a few days in these other locations doing all the exteriors for those two episodes. Which probably makes that cast and crew even more of a tight family, because they're-- And let me tell you this, of all my experiences in television, this seems to be true. Being on a series that people are actually watching, but you're not in Hollywood? Yeah. Heaven on Earth. Yeah. Heaven on Earth. It's the best you've ever been. Yeah, because all you do is focus on the work. Once you leave the work, it's not Hollywood. Right. So all of that bullshit isn't a part of the experience of doing the work. Until the internet. Well, I don't know. It's been a while since I've been doing a TV show outside of LA. But it was great. And being in Seattle was great. And everybody knew the cast. They all lived there for four or five years at that point. Everybody knew them. They were just like community members. It was just such a great experience. And my first day of shooting that, my first scene was with John Corbett, who I fell in love with in Nanos. Yeah, all I can imagine. And we're doing the scene on his radio show. I think the scene was that I'm the new Doctrine Challenge, went on the radio show. And he had just pages and pages of these rants and everything. And he never memorized them. And it would just take forever. And he would be funny and hilarious. And then I'd do a couple of things. And I'd get all these notes. And he would say to me, don't listen to these people. You don't need to listen to them. I'd better just do what you want. And I howled. And so that became our relationship with him just cracking me up all the time, trying to get me in trouble. It's amazing. Yeah, at that point, he was going to bust him on anything. So he literally would barely even look at the script. Yeah, he doesn't even do a fire mix. He gave his work a real sense of-- That's a character. Yeah, it was perfect. I adore him. He is so funny and so smart and such a good actor. I mean, that's a show that it's such a weird, great show, but funny and sweet and sincere. Yeah, it had a lot of layers to it. And it was about a lot of different things. And I like that it had messages and it had statements and all these sorts of things, but they were oblique. Yeah. They weren't hitting you on the head, but drugs are bad or-- Yeah, it was much more sophisticated show. It was artful. Yeah, absolutely. And I really love that. So I was really pleased to be a part of it. And I'm more than happy. It was such a good experience. And I enjoyed it so much. And I loved being a part of it so much that I have no problem being regarded as the reason for its cancellation. Do you think we take that? I'll guide you as the reason for the cancellation. All I know people do, but you know-- I didn't tell Rob-- I didn't make Rob-- Rob, Rob, leave. See, that's what I was telling you before about getting online. I would go into these chat rooms where people would be talking about it and say, look, you've got to understand something here. I didn't make Rob leave the show. Don't get mad at me. I'm just a guy who went for a job and got it. And I hope that I can do the best I can. But if you want to be mad at anybody, be mad at Rob. I didn't want to be mad at you guys. I would turn them against him. That's the best way to comment at him. The most of the thing is it's like, you could have had no even more seasons. If he just left, it would have been done. You wouldn't have even seen anybody. So at least you had that. Well, actually, that's another interesting story. The background of the last couple of seasons of that show is really fascinating. The show was deficit financed, had already been sold in syndication for what, at the time, was some sort of a record. And once you hit 100 episodes, if you make 125 episodes, you don't get-- whatever you got per episode for 100, you don't get 125 times that. The value of each specific episode decreases. Because you're buying an album in a year. But it's also, if you buy 125 of anything, you don't pay the same price as if you bought a wholesale purchase. Exactly. So as they increase more episodes on paper, what they're actually doing is decreasing the value of each individual episode. Which works for them. And when you're an accountant and you're looking at how much longer should we go with this project or that project, this project, it's actually decreasing in value. So why should we continue it? Then they got hit with a plagiarism suit. And they lost it. And had to pay a big hunk of money to-- It was a freelancer or something that he sent to a student of one of either brand or Falsy. And I think I told this story on another podcast. If anybody is hearing both, I apologize for repeating it. But it is kind of interesting. One of the two brand or Falsy, I don't remember which, had a creative writing class. Now, when a plagiarism suits it's very complex. And it usually takes a long time, long drawn out, whatever. This one lasted about a week. Because the guy came in with the script that was almost identical and had either brand or Falsy's notes in the margins. So there was just no question. And they ended up giving a huge hunk of money and damages to that guy and cutting him in for a percentage of the profits down the line, which meant that not only is the show losing money per episode, more episodes you make. Now, it's like a big thing. And for the last season, there was somebody behind the scenes there who said something to me that I can't verify. But they said that one of the reasons that it went even that next season that I did was because the show was actually making a shitload of money in merch. Yeah. Oh, yeah. There were books that were shows that were to these. Any bears. Because the music choices on the show were so interesting. It's the four volumes of the soundtrack. It's like crazy. Yeah. That was actually enough for them to put it on another season. But when it came time for the last season, and new network president came in, the last season that I was on had, I think, five different time slots. Yeah. It got jumped around forever, and that would not be on for a few weeks. And then they do two on a wrong night, and you could tell that it was coming. And it was interesting as a viewer at the time, too, because they were always planting the seeds for replacing a red bar, like they introduced anything. Yeah, it was a character. And it was like, oh, hell, even though just slot him in. And then it was like, you know, ER kind of happened. So they had to do this and this. And it was like, even as a viewer-- And part of it was, it was like moonlighting of the '90s, and that you, all of the behind the scenes stuff, was everywhere. It was one of those shows that match right on, too. Yeah, and when you-- if you bought DVDs or VHSes of it, it had all that stuff on. Yeah, yeah. So you probably had-- it was probably the first time you were-- the behind the scenes of what you were doing was subject to the entertainment-- You know what, that's a good point. I never realized that you were absolutely right. That was another aspect to it that I had never experienced before, because you got to be a little more anonymous before, and you're just doing a job. And now, all of a sudden, you're the subject of this bile from people from their favorite show. But the good news about that is by actually communicating to the people who are running those forums or what they call them at some point. BBSes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All games, style, phone, things. And then I would also be touring, doing clubs around the country. And I would invite some of them to come see me. The kind of see me would hang out, and they'd get to know me a little bit. And then by that time, some episodes started coming. It was very clear that I was the flip side of tomorrow. You know, Rob Morrow was the guy who didn't want to be there and right there, and then didn't want to-- You weren't a clone of his character. Didn't want to admit that he was happy there. Mine was the opposite. I wanted to go. I'm disappointed, but I can't accept that. You're not the new Darren Duh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's funny. And so eventually, all that stuff started turning around, and people were writing, like, no, I'll give him a chance. I went, so I'm talking to him, blah, blah, blah. Did you see the episodes? They're the good, whatever. It's just total grassroots. I mean, you were grassroots at what people do now. And I was doing it because it was too naive. And the internet hadn't become the internet yet. But here's the great thing. One of the greatest experiences on the show was that because they made the character Italian, again, to get away from the Fleishman thing, they went into another distinction. They sent David Chase up from LA to spend a week with me in Seattle, so he could get to know me, and he could start thinking about stuff. And he wrote my favorite episode that I did there, which was a little Italy episode. Yes, yes. And the other character was played by an old stand-up comedy friend of mine, Joe Napodie. It was great spending a week with David Chase, not knowing what the hell he was doing. I didn't even realize that that's what he was doing. He didn't tell me how to write it to you, yeah. So they were starting to write stuff that, you know, fed into what I brought to the table, and what have you. And that was a really, really nice experience. Yeah, and that's going to make you feel good, too. They're not just like, oh, we're just slotting you in here. It's like, no, no, we want this to work, and we want you involved, and this is working with you. Yeah, which is not what I felt at Facts of Life. Right, I felt at Facts of Life was they had an idea that they wanted me to fill, and, you know, it was fine. But this one, I felt like, you know, they were making investment to making my character part of the real experience, which was kind of cool. Yeah, oh, absolutely, I can imagine that would be amazing. Yeah, so those were the shows that, as I said, these come up a lot on the podcast that people very fondly think of these shows. Cool. And so now you've become sort of this commentator about the comedy world in a lot of ways, with the green room, and which is sort of continuing things you did on comics only. Oh, I love you so much. It's the flip side. It really is, yeah. What I did on comics only was I took the form and tried to subvert it from within. Right. What I did in green room is eliminate the form. Right, because you don't need it anymore. Right, that's, there was a real, they are, in fact, flip sides of each other, and not a lot of people recognize that, and that's good for you to say. I always look at comics only like the college and then green rooms like grad school. You know what I mean? It doesn't have destruction. You don't live in a dorm anymore. We assume you're an adult, and you can just get to the-- Yeah, I mean, I really wanted to go jazz with the green room. Yeah. And not make it about it. Nobody had the option of doing material. Right. I mean, yeah, people would slip a joke in here or there. But they would do that in a real green room. If we were talking, they would do that anymore. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So that was the point of that was sort of like, I went down one direction with that idea. Because the impulse is the same. The impulse of both those shows for me was the same, which was I wanted people to experience what changed my life when I became part of the common world, when it was more than just a thing that I was a fan of, and it became the thing that I did and divided my life to. It was a huge shift. And what it was more for me than just being a comedian and standing up and getting paid telling jokes and touring and having my own career as a comedian, I felt like what happened when I went into that world was the first time I ever felt part of any sort of community. Yeah. And it was the first time, as Jada Apatow puts it this way in Satterista, as he says, it was like the kid in the bee costume, in the blind melon video, like all of a sudden, like people, yeah, it's like, oh, you know, dogs at the dog run, sniffing each other's ass and going, oh my God, we're the same species. We're the same species. And outside of this context, we're fucked. But in this context, we're golden, you know? And that was life-changing for me. And being around having intelligent conversations with people who are thoughtful people, who read a lot, who experienced a lot, but had a skewed view of it all. And we could have real meaningful conversations and conflicts that never ended in anything other than understanding of where each other are coming from. You know, by being funny through it all, we were communicating to each other real heavy ideas without finding, without hostility. It was, you know, we could really understand one another, not only in terms of sort of ideologies, but also in terms of individual experiences. And that experience of it, what it felt to me, finding an entirely different way of being in the world, right, comics only was born of that impulse and Green Room was born of that impulse to give an audience experience of what it's like to be around people who look at the world differently from everybody else. And I feel like that comics only was at the sophomoric effort at that. And Green Room was a much pure expression of that. But as you said, that's, you know, 25 years older. - Part of it is from you, and I think part of it is from the way that people watch things then. I mean, it was new. Now people have seen so much more. And what you're just saying really brought me back to what we were talking about with All In The Family, where it's almost the same thing, where you're showing these heavy conflict. If you look at the way All In The Family approached things like the Vietnam War and talking about them, where people have different viewpoints and they're arguing and it's heated and they're talking about it, but you're still understanding where people come from. And if you look at the way. - And they felt very real. Like you had an uncle that actually thought that. - Absolutely, absolutely. - And you had a cousin that actually thought that. - Absolutely. And then they're interacting and you look at the way we present those ideas now, which is on Fox News or even on the other side on MSNBC. We're now not having the conflict. It's a one-sided conflict. It's everybody's wrong. And we don't have to tell you why they're wrong. They're just right. - And nobody's actually communicating. - No one's actually communicating. And we don't have necessarily the fiction doing that now. So it is kind of like things like "Real People Comics" or "Real People Doing That" is kind of the only way we'll get that. - Well, interestingly, I mean, comedy seems to, comedy satire really seems to suddenly be something a lot of people are looking at. - Yeah, absolutely. - For better or worse and for whatever reasons, the fact is that comedy and satire are more meaningful now than I think I've ever known them to be in my lifetime. I've never read so much about comedy and satire. Obviously with the Charlie Hebdo thing. - Right. - It's just gone through the roof. But that's not an isolated incident. It's been happening all the time. And I think one of the reasons is because comedy is an art form that depends upon context. - Yeah, absolutely. - Not context within itself. - Right. - But also the context of the culture you're in. - Right. - You know, music, I don't think really matters that way. I can be painting matters that way. I don't think any other art form matters in the same way. In that if I say something to you, the tenor of the time is going to inform how you respond to it. - Absolutely. - And it lives or dies based on that. It's not like a painting where the tenor, it brings certain things to it, whatever, but it still remains this painting for you to judge, whereas if it doesn't laugh or the flames or whatever the case may be, like you have to deal with that. And it's the only art form really where that's true. And I think that's why it's become so meaningful and why people, it's just in everybody's face all the time. But people saying things that are being turned into discussion points for one reason or another, I think that's because of the very, very special nature of comedy to reflect its times in a way that is not conventional, that is fearless, that is mysterious. - Right. - 'Cause you know, how do you do that? I don't understand how you do that. - Yeah, I mean, half the people are going to read a modest proposal and go and believe it as fact and half the people are going to read it and get that it's that. And that conversation is the most interesting conversation. - And I would say that people often say comedies and defense mechanism, which I think it totally is. And the people, many of us that do comedy, we've broken a certain way. And the result is the defense mechanism of comedy in a lot of ways. But the aspect that I don't hear a lot of people talk about is I think that culturally it's a defense mechanism. It's a defense mechanism for culture and society as well, not just on an individual level, which is why what's going on in the world and the very now is still reflective of comedy 'cause it's how when there's a national tragedy, that's how we get through it. There's a gala, you know, it's also, we see this, you know, like, the response to the Charlie Hebdo's. - Yes. - You know, it's like, well, you know what? A lot of people go, no, I'm not Charlie. - Yeah. - I believe in everything that a lot of people who are saying just we Charlie believe in, but I'm not Charlie for whatever reason. And I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with anything, but that conversation then becomes about us, not the subject of the cartoons or the comedy or any of that. It becomes about how we're reacting with things, how we're dealing with things. And you know, I mean, the Daily Show is perhaps the most sort of specific and iconic aspect of this, but what you see a lot of comedy reflecting now, and it reflects it in ways that aren't obvious, that are subtle sort of nuanced stuff, but you're seeing the reaction to how we're reacting. - Yes. - You know, and that's really, really interesting because that's our responsibility. - Absolutely. - Each of us who chooses to react to anything has that responsibility. - And again, it's back to this is about you, not the original content. - Exactly. - That's how you're reacting to it. - Exactly. Are you really know about this issue? Have you really looked at all the sides of this? - Well, it makes me realize what's too bad in your heart. - Yeah. - Yeah, you know, everything has become, it's why, here's what it becomes. I'm a huge Bugs Bunny fan. - Right. - Couldn't give a shit about Mickey Mouse. - Right. - The Bugs Bunny was chaos and anarchy and sharp and you had to be a step ahead. - Right. - Mickey Mouse is just sentimentality. - Yeah, yeah. - You wouldn't want to hang out with one. - And that's the thing. - That shit happens. Are you going to sentimental route or are you really going to sharp, biting, smart, look at this route? - Exactly. - Do you want to forget about it or do you want to take it on? - Right. - Basically, that's all it is. - There you go. You want to make yourself feel good? Or do you want to get dirty, get down there and try and fix some shit? - Right. - Or at least fix your real understanding of things and where you fit in. And maybe feel better at the end. But maybe feel worse. It's a cost benefit. - Growth never goes smoothly. - Yeah. - Exactly. - Thank you so much. I appreciate you taking the time to do this. - Thanks for having me, man. I'm honored. I know that you've had, I know the list of people who have been on your show and who will be on your show, include some of the all-time greats. - Oh, thank you. - And I'm honored to be a part of that group. By the way, speaking of that sort of odd little encapsulation that is Boston Conody, and have you seen Francois LaMita's documentary? - When Stand Up, Sit Up. - When Stand Up, Sit Up. - Yep, wonderful. If anybody of your listeners have not seen it and they're interested in comedy, that's a beauty. - I highly recommend it because it is. - Oh, it's so great. - It's unique to the comedy, where Boston has some strange things going on there. - Yeah. - It's very well done. - And I thought Francois LaMita did an amazing job of encapsulating that. And I think it is almost a cautionary tale. - It really is. - Isn't it? - The second is, again, I said to you earlier, it came from this punk rock world, and the 80s Boston hardcore punk rock, there's actually another great documentary called All Ages, that actually is a bookend to When Stand Up, Sit Up, 'cause it's about this punk rock world in Boston at the same time. - The punk rock iteration of the same phenomenon. - It's the same people. - It's the same people. - Yeah, yeah. - The singer from the band Slapshot is Vlinny Clark. You know, it's like the same-- - Oh, that's great. - The same cautionary tales. It's fascinating. - I'm gonna kick that one out. That's great. - Yeah, it is a different perspective. - I mean, actually, is it still a very different perspective? - It is. - It definitely is. - Has it sort of swung back towards the early days of Boston comedy, as it's sort of segregated-- - It has. - It results again a little bit. - It hasn't, it hasn't. So we had this big alt movement, and it's interesting, 'cause everyone I see that is basically the people who are creating comedy now, that's mainstream and huge, is either from Boston or came up through there, the sort of-- - Well, you did, you had that huge Harvard crowd. - Yeah, the Harvard crowd, and then you had Catchurizing Star, which was Marin, Garafolo, David Cross. In all that, you know, Louis, Laura Keitlinger, Dana Gould, all of those Marin, all those people from this one scene, and Jonathan Katz was living there then, and John Benjamin, and all these people. And then the next iteration of that alt scene, you had Eugene Merman, and you had Larry Murphy, and Jen Kirkman, and all those people. So they've kind of weirdly influenced this generation of people from Boston. - There's a little bit of a Boston flavor that still remains a Boston flavor. - Yeah, and it's good to hear. - It's good for the country, but it hasn't been great for Boston, because we get new people who go, "Yeah, that's what I'm gonna do." I'm like, "You don't understand, it's not up." And so we get a lot of people moving before they really should, 'cause the great thing about Boston is that it's a small town that you can get good at, and get you at. You can become what you're supposed to be doing. - Yeah, you can become an individual. - And people, I don't see people doing that as much, and all the people that I started with have moved and are doing well, and I don't see people doing, I always say that people are career ambitious, but not creatively ambitious, and Boston always used to be the opposite. That's a very good way to put it. And so I hope it'll swing back, 'cause I'm kind of trapped there for the time being, but we'll see, it's at the lowest point I've seen it in 15 years of going to shows there and being a part of the scene there. And you also, you need to think about Boston as you have all the people from when standup who stood out for the most part, are still doing the same rooms and the same things that they were doing then. So that scene is completely inaccessible, depending on it. - But they've become institutions. - Exactly. - Yeah. - And the people who go see them, tend to go see them because it's almost like seeing a cover bin you saw in high school or in college. It's more of a reunion thing. - There's almost a local pride in going to see them. - Yeah. - Yeah, because they are so-- - Right. - So don't see it with the boxes on the scene. - It's, yeah. - Or like going to see Mike Pritchews. - Exactly, exactly. And so you don't get the people who are latching on a new comics as a fan base like that. - Right. - And because Boston's such a sports town, it kills the arts there. - Oh my god, that's so true. I remember having gigs canceled because the play of games showed up that night. - It happened last week. - Yeah. - And no other town is like that. - Yeah, it's really funny. - And people don't realize it, you know, when the more I travel outside of Boston, I'm like, "Boston is fucked up, like it's bizarre." - There's another interesting thing about Boston is that it has such a huge swings of audience types. - Yeah. - You know, you go from the, you know, the hip, area dynamics, - Very smart. - Articulate, Cambridge crowd, to, you know, the blue collar, you know. - Fifth generation, yeah. - Yeah, the ones that Dennis Leary comes from, and Quinn comes from, you know. And then you get those fucking wicked racists, and then you get those incredibly, almost to a San Francisco type over, you know, weaning degree of the PC going, you know. - And you have weird hybrids of those two. - Yeah. - I find unique to Boston. Like you get the tough guy, blue collar, liberal, who's like, "I don't fucking care if he's a fag." - Yeah. - You're offensive, but defending him, you know. - Yeah, there's such a weird thing there. - Well, see, I grew up in the Bronx. - Which has to be so similar. - Which was so similar. So when I went up to Boston, I was like, "Oh, I kind of get what's going on here." You know, I kind of get this thing. Although I never, you know, I, when I started cutting my teeth in New York, it was in Manhattan crowd, and it was a, in the '70s comedy wasn't a sort of mainstream thing, so it was a very hip crowd. It was a crowd that was looking for something different. - They were the people going to some deep throat, not 'cause they wanted to laugh. - Yeah, yeah. - You know what I mean? - It was interesting. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - But because, and they were, you know, they knew that there was weird, interesting, cool stuff happening, it had a bit of jazz. - Yeah. - And so I was playing into that mostly, and then I got to Boston, I was like, "Oh, wait a minute, these are the people I grew up with that. I'm not playing to. - Yeah, yeah. - This is my chance to do it. - And they have, people always say, "Vosten's a racist town," which I think, you know, parts of it are, but I don't think it's racism, so much is straight-out xenophobia. It's a very tribal xenophobia, which ends up the same way. - The same way, the way that Chicago, the same thing with Chicago, is the entire parts of Chicago that are, like, identified. - Right, and they'll be so well, you know? - Yeah. - Yeah. - They won't be like, "I don't like you 'cause you're black." They'll be like, "I don't like you 'cause you're from four miles away." - 'Cause you're not from a year, yeah. - Yeah, and it's such a weird thing that is a slightly different flavor. - But you know what, it's the same thing all around the world. Edinburgh is a 30-minute train ride from Glasgow, and they both treat each other like they're, you know-- - Well, Boston gets that from them. - Who twos and chutesies. But I would say, I think that Alan Moore said this phrase, and I don't think he coined it, but it's in England, 100 miles is a really far distance, and in America, 100 years is a really long time. - Oh, that's right. - And that is so, 'cause people won't go 20 miles away, that's totally different. - Yeah, yeah. - But Boston's inherited that sort of weird England, Ireland, Scotland, tribalism. We still have that. - And to a large degree, a lot of the classicism that comes from me, from the British society. - Absolutely. - And Boston also has a unique situation where 30% of our population are students, and they leave every year. - Right, right, right. - And so everyone, every year goes, we're being invaded, 30% of the crowd is gone, and now being invaded again by people who aren't from here. So that just feeds into that, "You're not from here, who are you?" And it's very weird. - Yeah, it is, it is odd. - Yeah, all that was actually a huge, long plug for Fran's movie. - Yes, usually one. If you enjoyed that, - We'll stand up soon out. - Totally encompasses that, it's been a movie. - Thank you, Paul, I appreciate it. - Thank you, man. - You're welcome. - Thanks for having me. (upbeat music) - Paul Perrenza, what else can I say? We got all of the behind-the-scenes info. Alan Dershowitz, we heard about warm-up comics for Facts of Life. This is my second guest who's appeared on Facts of Life after Joanne Willette, and my guest who appeared on Facts of Life the most. So this is important stuff for me, everybody. Northern Exposure, so many shows that come up often, plus they stand up, and all the stuff he does now, really, really nice guy. I really appreciate him taking that time to talk to me, and it was maybe one of the highlights of my 2015 thus far. And again, I said I put all the social media links to his stuff up on tvguidenscounselor.com, so you can find all that there. In addition, you can email me at canadikendread.com or tvguidenscounselor.com. If you have questions or requests or anything about the show, feel free to like us on Facebook as well. We have a lot of discussion on there among the fans, which is hilarious for me to say, and you can subscribe. We don't just have episodes on Wednesdays. There's special edition episodes. There's live episodes. We've done Saturday mornings. We've done homesick from school. We've done summer specials, so you never know when one's gonna come out, so make sure you subscribe. And please rate and review the show. It's a huge help in getting the word out about the show. And I will see you again on Wednesday for an all new episode of TVguidenscounselor. (upbeat music) - Jesus, you like my Boswell, the kid in the bee costume in the blind melon video? He had his own breasts. He would put pastes on his own breast.
