In another episode from Ken's Los Angeles sessions he welcomes comedian/writer/actress Laura Kightlinger.
TV Guidance Counselor
TV Guidance Counselor Episode 21: Laura Kightlinger
wait you have a TV no I don't like to read the TV guide read the TV guide don't need a TV hello it's wednesday so that means today's the day for a brand new episode of tv guidance counselor i am can read as always your tv guidance counselor and this week i am very excited for our show this is another in the series of episodes i recorded on my recent west coast los angeles trip and i couldn't love this episode anymore my guest is comedian and writer and actress laura kitelinger and laura is one of my all-time favorite comedians she's so funny i've loved watching her for years and you are really going to enjoy this episode it was so great to get a chance to talk to her so please enjoy this week's episode of tv guidance counselor with my guest laura kitelinger laura kitelinger how are you thank you so much for doing the show i'm thrilled so i uh i really didn't have a choice of staying here that's true that's true it was all just a plot to get you to do this podcast i know i wanted to can i impose on you and then also impose on you extra so i picked some some tv guides from the trumpo tv guides that i've been driving on my rental car with and you you leafed through them earlier today and tried to see what uh what sort of jogging memory is and shows that you watched growing up and you grew up in upstate new york just you and your mom yep so for the most part you were your memories are all just watching stuff with your mom right was that's like the big activity that you guys did together other than our mother and daughter swinger nights right but that's i mean yeah we that's america yeah we i remember so mom who was a single mom i remember watching one day at time with my mom and thinking because i even felt i felt kind of protective oh i guess of my mother and of the and romano character of all single moms out here that's you and that's my docent you all he's very protective of single moms yeah i'm his son i'm single uh i remember thinking i hope my mom wasn't so into the show that she'd stop wearing a bra right so you're like she's gonna see that as this is what single moms do right don't wear bras that's right my mom was getting enough action and attention as it was i thought so that would be just too much if she goes the full-on body franklin route yeah and yeah i wonder at a time as a show i really i had a problem with the handyman god i hated that he just kept walking in i never really creeped me out it was like it had a mustache yeah shnider shnider that's it that was the most off-putting thing about that show to me it was just that this weird handyman is walking in on this single mom and her two teenage daughters yeah but people loved him he was like the breakout character from that show i never did and i also because my mom was taken advantage of by you know contractors right numbers and carpenters all the time right auto mechanics and all these things yeah i mean i couldn't laugh if he screwed if shnider screwed something up but i remember coming home from school one day and these guys were fixing the porch or whatever new porch yeah there was blood all over the side of the of this yellow light yellow side and and i thought what the hell happened yeah and one of the guys cut his finger off and he wanted he would wanted to make sure that he had enough pictures of it to sue my mother oh fantastic yeah and have his dna all over the wall in case they do some testing did he end up suing her and didn't get anything i mean it was his fault yeah yeah yeah but i took my finger off and you're see i would like one day at a time if there was an episode where shnider cut his finger off like i don't know this is a much better show i know i think maybe because we grew up having maybe some kind of strange sense of what comedy and time as our own he was too over the top yeah it was so silly there was a lot of tone differences between say 70s and early 8 shows than now where they tried to really mix comedy and drama but in a way that just didn't mix that's true so you'd have these really sort of like the comedy was very light and broad and goofy but then you would have these very heavy issues that they're talking about as well and one day at a time was one of those that did that with you know there was there was episodes of just like i think there was one where mckenzie phillips got assaulted or something i'm trying to remember there was something like very dark that happened and then like shnider comes in and has like a funny clip about his mustache and then they go back to this everything i'm like this because it's very strange it's been weird for her since her dad was molesting oh yeah oh god her uh her autobiography is horrific i had to be afraid to read it but then you have uh bertinelli golly bertinelli who was like the america sweetheart on the other side of it which and she was just too bubbly for me and i also didn't believe buddy frank on birth to her ah boy that's a good point she's like no way yeah no way that happened yeah she was uh had some kind of gorgeous daughters for a small little redhead woman yeah just did one i was like what didn't that look like yeah exactly we see a small brunette woman but she only made that work so when you would watch that with your mom would she sort of compare and contrast like your own situation to her or was it just sort of escapism for her where she would she wouldn't be like that's not how it works i don't think we had things like you know mother and daughter talks about anything she was exhausted because she you know she always had two jobs so that's just something whatever i was watching i think she's lying to kind of be in the same room together was sort of a nice like bonding moment even if you're just kind of watching something at the same time right and so the other show you used to watch you used to do is party miller mm-hmm is different from one day to time as you can get yeah we both love that show and what i love about it now just from the ways that comes out now and writing for a few that there were no stereotypes yeah there was no easy joke sometimes yeah yeah and then jack suis yeah jack suis yeah he didn't speak like an Asian man yeah and and and my one of my favorite characters uh was wojahot yes yeah who's a great complicated character yeah because on the surface he could be this they could easily written him as the dumb guy character yeah and just like a meathead but he was really complicated in the episode where there's a um a draft dodger in that protesting the war and wojahot's i believe is a Vietnam vet and they have this debate that is even though i loved all in the family and that was a you know groundbreaking show about issues it was still a little bit like i'm writing uh what i think a debate about this thing is right and the wojahot's exchange is much more realistic where he is sympathetic to the other side but he kind of can't understand what it is and it was just a really complicated way to have the dumb guy character right i don't i just don't see and sitcoms that often now or you have these multi-dimensional people first of all i don't want to see prostitutes on television as often as on burning miller and they were presented as i mean sometimes they would be the butt of a joke a little bit but not in like a benny hill you know the way that they would do that in the past but like a laughing kind of way and they were real characters and they would give them a most um believable motivations for the for being a prostitute yeah and there's an episode where jack su goes out with one and that the one you just cited and it was very unusual to not only see them represented on tv but represented in a kind of respectful way right and again i think we we sort of lost that at least in comedy over the years i loved um uh we tenant uh franca louver is my favorite character oh my god yeah you're so funny it's so funny and that was one of the first shows that had a gay character on it and there's a great two-part episode called quarantine where they think there's something that's smallpox in the jail so they're all quarantined together in the one room and there's this gay couple in there and Luger is obviously an older guy and he doesn't realize that they're gay and the moment that they make him realize it's so funny because he goes uh um logo frank logo won't be here for a while together yeah he goes like oh i need to introduce himself he goes oh it's nice uh nice way he got there and he's like oh thanks it's Italian and then he has it's looking at his face he goes well what'd you say okay he was great he's so good in that that show just it had so many great character actors and i always feel like and you actually write for television which i do not but so this is strictly academic and theoretical for me but i feel like Barney Miller is everyone who wants to write for television needs to watch that show because that is the most purely writers sitcom i've ever seen yeah there's five guys in a room one room and they're just talking and all the jokes come out of their character there's not in its three-camera sitcom they can't use cinematic cut-ins and jokes like that and it's just dialogue and it's great for like 200 episodes oh it was incredible that taxi was too i thought yeah i wonder how much they both sort of had a similar vibe to them i mean they're both workplace sitcoms in New York and in like a pretty dire dirty gross scary kind of environment and i don't think you would get that now yeah and i found this very appealing too did those two shows did your mom introduce you to the two shows or were you just they were just on so you watched them yeah i think so i think i just found them sort of yeah yeah flipping through was it hard to identify with the character she was a kid where i mean these are like middle-aged people with with like work problems i mean i don't know i had a young mom too and everyone you know was just kind of getting by right in my hometown everyone is sort of you know a lot of companies and manufacturing plants whatever had been there a long time or closing right like so to me it seemed sort of i don't know what comfortable or natural that people weren't making much money yeah yeah and that's the kind of conversations they're having where i remember like i'm Barney Miller there's um you know one of the cops is like has they have to room together because they can't afford a place and right you know even though i loved you know a lot of cop shows they would never address that kind of stuff it was just about like the action of the cops yeah Barney Miller was guys doing paperwork which is probably what being a cop is most of is you're like 80% doing paperwork yeah but i think that you know if after that show is kind of just they're like highlight reels but they just want to see the action stuff all right and i wonder i can't think of any other shows that would just show like the the boring parts of a job yeah where it could be sort of any job right so i loved Barney Miller but at the time it seems almost i didn't quite get it when i was a kid i look at it i love night court which was a couple of guys that worked on Barney Miller created right because i was a little bit sillier and so do you didn't watch any of the um a lot of the sillier shows like like happy days and working Mindy no that really i i think i you know i remember watching that stuff but i mean i guess there was nothing that i was so hooked into that had to be like rush home or whatever although my mom and i watched the thornbirds regularly you know like you would not miss an episode of the thorn but that was a huge event right that's right like generational where i mean you love her but Richard Chamberlain yes my mom and i both were excited was so beautiful my mom is 20 years older than i am right she had me you know 19 and so uh yeah and and saw him recently still looking good yeah he's still looking great and he's staying at on cab that was the big word was that the first time you'd ever seen him in person yes did you just flash back to the thornbirds yes and he still looks he's just really incredibly handsome and stuff but then uh not that we would have ever had a chance of him but you know seeing him now it's uh my mom and i had a crush on my gosh i never would have looked at us right for good reason but hey at least it's not you you know that it's his thing right um it did you have trouble not being like oh my god you're from the thornbirds i actually i got to meet him afterward he was sort of just uh standing at the bar and he was really nice and talking to people so i i had to be like every other fan yeah this is like you watch the songs all right you know mom and i were so is it embarrassing for you to do that kind of thing because i imagine people do that to you a lot that's sweet nobody does that no what was very rarely what was the first thing that someone like recognized you from i mean really good feeling was my accomplishments yeah people would come up with a great show and say they really liked it and because that was all that was that came from you too so that probably felt a lot better because that was was that it was that show was that exactly what you wanted it to be it was pretty much i and i wrote it with a good friend of mine dave punch and we wrote it together it was just the two of us writing it right so it was only up to the people that i have seen to fuck it up right one of the things that i still kind of laugh about was we wanted it to be that you know in the titles just the minor accomplishments of jackie women right they had to make sure that a world understood that it was minor and not major right so one of the execs there had the word minor flashing oh well that's important yeah and then we said we really don't think you need to do that it's a little over the top and then they said oh well no you know we'll put it in a block of a different color and then finally we said hey you know what maybe you're right put it on a baboon's ass nice it must be difficult to be the creative person and dealing with someone who is whatever the opposite of a creative person i know but doesn't know that they are and i just want to have some contribution so that guy can be like yeah i was the flashing that's mine oh my god i know and in fact one of the notes i remember was uh you know what fucktastic is a funny word could you put that in there somewhere yeah i used to write for this online movie review site and it was a little bit different from my voice because it was a little more pop culturey snarky and uh they they would assign me things and i wrote an article about it was some harry potter thing or something which i never heard into and the editor wrote back and was like this is way too smart and you need to change this so that it says you know just just point out how it's a great explosion of awesomeness was that cool that she goes and i'm like i would never use the phrase "splosion of awesomeness" and i you know i reworked it a little bit and i sent it back to her and then when the article came out it basically was completely rewritten and the title was "splosion of awesomeness" and i was like why didn't you just write this article it's that awful so i'm like you know you're an editor but just write the article that's who you want so i imagine it's similar to that when you're working on a show yeah but you've been part of like uh writing teams in writer's rooms before doing that which is one of their persons that must have been really refreshing to have that sort of control i don't mind saying i'm not a team player i've been either that's what it was on i've been you know in writer's rooms before and i'm not very helpful because i'll just blurt out what i'm thinking or whatever i've never had a writing partner and dave and i i think he was the only person i could really write with well just because he's just really smart and funny and brought to create ideas and things yeah that i would never know about and we just worked really well together and that seemed like a fluke it's weird that that's not the model for how all television is made like you would think in england it kind of is you have these people one maybe two people writes a show they usually star in it and that makes sense because the best creative art comes from sort of want you know a focused vision and not by committee hey so it's very strange that the model here is you know 40 people in a room hammering the thing out and i think a lot of people don't know that's how things are made oh i know and that's why everything comes out so white and milk toast yeah just yeah it's like so homogenized but by the time you see it isn't anybody's vision but even shows like taxing bernie miller they were still written that way i mean that that sort of format started in the 50s so i wonder what the difference is i don't know you know maybe it'll swing back that way yeah because your room was only you did two seasons right but they were shorter seasons too right right it did really i mean it you know it was so well reviewed it was better than any shows they've had before or since yeah i don't know if it was actually that it was you know the writer strike count right one of the programming people and you know sometimes i just think sometimes and i hate this sometimes women become the heads of programming they don't want to look like they will help other women or they just don't want to right and so when she became the head of programming then they were one of the first things she did was to take all the women off the channel that's really weird yeah that's really weird and that's very strange yeah it's all that you know i can't really think of that many shows that were sort of created by and at least as a head writer a woman in the last 30 years i mean there's maybe a handful you know there's probably more now like i haven't seen girls but obviously that's probably the big example and you had um Linda Bloodworth who's doing like designing women and then my stuff but still even the shows that were you know starring women like we're telling more we're still pretty much behind the scenes all of very the same that you would have before knowing all this sort of behind the scene stuff does it make it harder for you to watch things now and enjoy them but do you even watch any sort of comedies now i really love game of thrones i find myself watching mostly drawless you're not thinking with a critical sort of professional eye when you're watching them probably right i know i feel like a too bitter to laugh anyway yeah yeah i find the same problem i mean like and you probably have this too like you know very rarely laugh watching stand up right because you're just like even if it's something good you're just kind of like oh yeah most comics laugh even a good laugh yeah yeah like one right like you tried to keep it in there but it just couldn't you couldn't have thought so or or you want to be kind of supportive but you don't have it in you anymore i was asked to stop going to table rates because i don't have a good game face also if something was bad yeah because i have a pretty fake elasticity yeah i can imagine you don't want me there because my fake laugh is so obvious it's ho ho ho very business would you remember what the first like table read you went to was up something you wrote or gosh i wrote on rosanne from 92 to 93 which is the great season rosanne that's one of my favorite shows oh i can't that's such a good show i remember rosanne just i don't remember the table read because there's so many writers i don't know if we all went to the table read i think it was just some of the producers but all the writers had to be at the run through on stage and rosanne actually said to us start fake laugh and that's your job because if we were i don't i don't i guess it was pretty young then i was sort of timid like yeah okay that's what she said yeah you had seen her so when we were in college you saw rosanne sort of breakout performance on the good night show yeah and you were already doing stand-up then and she had to be probably one of the most high-profile sort of new women comedians i imagine in them in the mid to late 80s obviously i'd like Joan Rivers and stuff but she was huge yeah and she her style was so different so natural and she was so funny and so completely you know who she was right and uh yeah i remember sitting and watching it on this small tv with my roommates my two roommates and we all just thought how she's it yeah everything sort of changed it because i remember her stand-up it was it was some of the first stand-up i'd seen by a woman at that time that where she wasn't the butt of the joke right because then Joan Rivers who is great and writes great stuff a lot of her materials that are her own expense right and rosanne was kind of just like no everyone else is wrong yeah exactly really different and i i believe that performance is kind of what directly led to rosanne right where she sort of broke out so you were on that show this was starting 88 to their season three season four and but that the first time we've ever met her was on the set of that show looking at her and well no actually the truth is she had seen me on comedy central and she was helping Tom Arnold he was doing a show where he was married to a woman and they were living in a trailer and they had five kids i like it already and i was to play his wife it was kind of crazy because i was 23 and my son was 18 but he was playing 15 right and i'll just skip ahead to the day i got fired i was devastated and i said to the kid playing my son gosh i think of Jason Marston oh yeah yeah yeah really cute fine kid guy now and i said um you know we're the phone it's because it's right over there babe that looks so cute but anyway but Tom was really nice yeah he said you know this part's too big and you know we don't think you're ready for this and he blamed itself and said he's not such a big actor that he can't just you know he feels like he needed somebody who's done this a bunch to support his yeah i get which was a really the sweet way of saying i thought yeah yeah i can't act anyway so he was so nice about it afterward i wrote about this some book i had put a book yeah yeah and but he was so nice about it because what can i do for you i don't want you to feel bad you know what we're thinking of is you could play the lead sister you know so you still have a role in saying that uh and all i can think of was oh my god i'm gonna have to go back on the road and bomb some more yes and he's standing so you did not like being on the road no i just it was miserable i never did well and one of the first nights and i did stand up and and catch right in star and base yeah i remember i followed a guy and i don't know why the hell oh maybe he was a host because i think i went on i couldn't have been a middle yet i probably had just like 10 or 15 minutes to but i followed a guy and they blew an animal out of rubbers oh wow that wasn't common channel yeah and um and then he that's a tough act to follow jesus christ and he yeah and he right before he introduced me he had made a wiener dog so he oh a wiener yeah a con and a condom and this guy's an incredible gift and then i come out with my you know i mean you just you're setting yourself a defail at that point i know when i say that's a tough act to follow i mean as a society i don't know if you move on past that sort of act i know and i just thought ah this is crazy i'm so dead up and i was i had like 10 minutes but you so had you done uh tv appearance uh doing stand up by that time yeah i did because i i know i was like hosting stand up stand up yeah which was a sort of an mtv style clip show of stand up on comedy central when i was fired he said we're thinking of writing you in as the you know would that be okay right and doing this and i said well how about just like a writing job yeah and then he said on my show are rosanne's and i was like rosanne's yeah if i have that choice yeah i was like wow this is even better so then he said well this is great well nobody'll know we'll just say that we we switch contracts and you're just writing on show and he said believe me it's better to not be in it from the beginning than to have it be in the pilot and then you know have not work out you know not such a big mouth i told everybody anyway oh yeah yeah both rosanne and tom were really good to me but you know it's kind of funny like at that time they had married a third they had married their assistant oh yes i remember that because this was when they were at the height of their tabloid sort of yeah and my family you know had such faith in me they thought that i was the one they married right they're like obviously if they're gonna marry somebody it's gonna be long yeah because you can get a card on something obviously that's how it works ultimately right so that was the first regular sitcom job that you had as a writer right and how did it differ from what you thought it would be like i imagine you'd probably watched the dick Van Dyke show shows really showed writers rooms right i wanted to have i wanted to go in on my first day with a little leather bow in my hair like sally yeah the Van Dyke show trip over in ottoman but that was a great trip it was really such a great time because i was with there were so many writers that there were about six writers per room working on maybe three jokes wow wow i mean it shows in that show that's a show that seems like it was written by a committee but had such a strong singular voice right which is kind of surprising that it was able to be that consistent uh and i wonder how much of that was rosanne's influence or just they hired the right people or went the right sensibilities or i don't know i mean i think it was definitely a lot of it was great writers and great showrunners but it was rosanne too like i think she was so well regarded and her voice was you know blue collar and right you know it was kind of universal in a way yeah so it was kind of it wasn't that hard to write for i think did you find it easier to write for like based on where you grew up and as we mentioned before this sort of dying factory town which seems to be exactly like what rosanne has said in and i would imagine you know it'd be much easier to write for that than something like friends oh yeah oh my god yeah growing up and i think i mentioned this too earlier i couldn't watch shows were like even the nanny um was a show that i found off putting despite they had a great cast because it was just like oh here's a show about rich people i don't even know how to watch this i agree the guy has a nanny like i don't even i don't think i've ever known anyone that's had like a living any so i know it'd be very difficult for me to to watch and yeah those shows i gravitated towards like rosanne because they seem the most sort of genuine for the first time i remember seeing you do stand up on tv i think was on i think it was a show time special could limit the night okay that was hbo hbo yeah was that one of the first times and then there yeah nine to the half hour special um another hbo half hour special then a common central special and was that the pulp comics i that's maybe my favorite stand up special of all time oh geez i had so much fun with that i love the format of that show that yours and then bob goldweights were just amazing i always lament the fact that the that didn't become sort of a go-to format for a stand up i know it would have been nice i know it's great a great mixture of uh so people i don't know it was it was stand up but then it was sort of intermixed with like related almost sketches that sort of uh built on the stand up right which it was interesting because i'm sort of a snob about stand-up where i feel like it's just a live art and when people just put it on tv it's a lazy yeah so that was exactly what i want to i'm like no they've given you something you could only get on tv how much of that was all your sort of vision did they let you just kind of go with kind of whatever you wanted well it was mine i had several i already had several short stories and things i was planning on for quick shots of false hope for my book right the person that really brought it together was michael patrick king he directed it okay and helped me pick out the pieces that would be used right and he directed those pieces oh great yeah that's really cool yeah so when we're growing up were there stand-ups that you remember or even comedy shows that you remember being things that really made you want to do that well i remember the young watching with my mom and she said she i wasn't allowed to uh watching young comic specials on hvm okay so you guys had cable yeah at times so this could have been like um illegally yeah yeah i mean it was actually dating when it's a cable guys yeah we i i i sent away in a magazine how to build black boxes from like two dollars in parts from the news settings tomorrow i would just do the other thing i used to do was our cable go out often because my mom would not pay the bill so i split our neighbors cable and fed i just put a splitter on it and fed one into my room directly and i had a B switch so when our cable would go out i'd have to be like we could just go to my room and then i would flip to their cable and have cable in my room but no one else would not have to pretend like i was reading but that's incredible so there's something to be said for having the elite i think it might be a genius i don't know i i it's difficult to unscramble the digital cable memo at a different time i know i remember i didn't know who he was i remember seeing bob shaw and i remember very specifically even before i knew about a pot or anything of him doing this bit about going into basket roberts 33 flavors and saying can you just give me a gallon of that on the spoon like a tiny spoon or yes for the free sample that yeah that's me that was so damn funny and seeing george carlin and richard pryer oh yeah and in hbo used to air the rich and pryer showed constantly and your mom told you you weren't allowed to watch it so that was because i kind of like she's out or she's asleep i have to sneak down and watch it kind of thing oh yeah i have to see it no matter what this friend of mine her older sister was always really cool and their parents were were gone a lot and so i would i would actually call my friend and say that sister can leak up can i come over and watch hbo and they do it i see it what a great effort hbo that would be yeah oh i know i know i think that's why i'm so in love with it it was something that i couldn't you know sort of too young to see and it was so taboo when it first came out and so you know everything's rated r and then i don't know i've always had this sort of like kind of thought of it as like the prom king oh yeah it's that was amazing when you got an hbo yeah on hbo like that's going through the looking glass onto the other side so i imagine that was just like a huge thrill where some other kid was sneaking down to watch your special when they weren't allowed oh that's me that's like i know i just like can't i just think you know in the early 90s like what the hell is i thinking with my hair i had like on this little pink outfit i looked terrible but i remember actually you know i remember seeing a rerun of it just by accident because i don't like to watch that unless you were to stumble upon yourself on t but it really was i actually said this bit about how i had a hard time having orgasms but now that now i i i used to be i have to watch a whole set now i can just hear my name and i can have an organ but i was in my room i was at my friend nancy's apartment in new york and she was flipping through and she goes your face i said no i don't want to see it i want to see it but anyway i sat down and just saw like a few minutes of my face and i said oh my god i had so much hope that i could just see it it looks like almost sad the world is my oyster yeah i've made it like just in my something in my expression i thought you know and that's one of the the title quick shots of false hope right right because that's i feel like has been it's just a theme every time you get something you think well this is it i made it now yeah i have the ticket yeah i don't think that way anymore yeah i mean i could see how easily you could think that way though yeah did you mom watch the specials mm-hmm yeah she was impressed she was really impressed and she seems says things like most people do i don't know how you get up i don't know how you do that yeah i whatever people's hits me i'm like i it's so much easier for me to do that than if you were like ordered pizza will you call i know i don't want to talk to that guy right but you know every couple hundred people with a light in my own no problem i'll talk about it anything man i agree i feel like i'm kind of a hermit like thinking of going out and socializing oh yeah it's difficult but if i have a set to do then i'm already out and having you know having a couple drinks and it's fun i wonder how much of that is a control thing too because you're basically having a conversation that is you're completely in control of oh well that's true oh yeah yeah i've gotten i've gotten physically attacked before oh my god you know because i i don't um i was in a punk rock band for a number of years and so it's hard for me to break that mentality but like i i always give people like three chances and this isn't even like a conscious rule that seems to just be where like my moral compass is where i'll like laugh it off a couple times but then the fourth time i just i i just snap and uh yeah one time i did this often and i feel a little it was my first or second year end and it was at the show and it was like an ambush show where people ate dinner or whatever and boston and it was just tough but just tough and there was a a hockey game on and they turned the game off to do the show and i was supposed to be headlining and this guy was just wooden stuff like i'm like come on dude like if you can go home and watch the game and he's like you know i fucking fool you know you fuck it and like you know all this stuff like that and so i just tore and like just just really me like i channeled all of my own goals who are just like part of my humor comes from them just being brutally mean to each other and you kind of have to develop a good response system but it was almost like tapping into the dark arts and i was like no you brought those up and then the guy just came at me you just like oh my god just jumped on the stage yeah yeah yeah and it wasn't like it was a club where they could have like bouncers or something so yeah i mean the other thing is i mean i could probably handle it differently too because you know i antagonize people and i've had sets where it doesn't even be often because you know i i think you can avoid it if you know not to like engage certain people and i've seen comics where they'll just be people chatting at a table just because they don't know and they'll like go at them and it's like you could have just ignored it oh i know i'm percent of the room doesn't hear it but uh this the one time i got like just i snapped at this guy really mad and i and i said like something very threatening and i always i just feel like a like a 12-year-old nerd all the time so i forget sometimes that i'm like you know i'm not like a huge guy but if i'm saying something scary it might be like somewhat scary right and so i i forget what i said it was something like i'll you know i'm gonna kick your fucking teeth in or something to this guy and then i kind of looked up and the whole crowd was now just like oh no i'm scared and i had to be like oh geez so yeah that stuff is i don't miss that sort of thing yeah and i i've come to realize in the last year that i'm wait for someone who always thought i was like a loner and very hermitty and misanthropic i actually really like chatting to people and this was like one of the things new to this podcast is i really enjoy that but uh i didn't it took me a while to rely on it right and i think that's one of the things i probably liked about stand-up was was sort of and once you force yourself to start getting out and just doing more stand-up and you wind up socializing also what we were talking about when you were growing up was you loved the music shows oh my god yeah i used to watch soul train all the time i remember i actually was kind of young i i wanted suspenders because i'd seen the lockers and i was probably about i don't know six or seven and i wanted to do the elective boogling i wanted to take i wanted to take roller disco classes and i wanted to you know just regular i guess disco dance and we're all like about like new york city yeah at that time and even though there's nothing more i mean i was born at year and then when we moved to james town it's it says remote is any small town would be like being in vermont that's like that you know that close to going to new york there's not a roller disco in james town yeah but i imagine too that was there was pre-m tv and that was really the only way people could see musical acts like it was the only time we really saw them yeah and especially soul train which you know i think for white kids that the whole black radio was especially probably in upstate new york yeah it's not something that was easily to access oh so you're seeing all these groups that you would never hear about or see oh yeah and earth wind and fire oh yeah they're at least a book comics on soul train a lot oh he did yeah there was maybe once a month they have a comic on terrible wow but uh it was interesting to see who because that whole circuit was just a completely different world yeah the sort of white stand-up circuit and so you would see these like pretty like dick gregory would be on it and oh my god that's brilliant and even midnight special would have uh stand-ups on which was also that's right yeah better yeah i like the thing i used to love up midnight special was they would have an act curate an episode so like i remember there was an episode that the car has got to book all the acts on oh and it was really weird that's brilliant i didn't know that yeah that's what they were doing yeah not every episode but frequently wow whatever like the the host sort of act act was would curate the episode so depending on who it was you could see all kinds of weird underground stuff on that show which you would never get today to have such an inconsistent voice of the show they'd be like people are gonna tune in they're not gonna know what this is right so it was probably more of like a wild west thing tv really for someone growing up fairly remotely and it was like this for me too even though i was so much close to Boston that's what introduced you to all of these amazing things and it just came right into your house right and i think that that's overlooked now i mean do you ever think you know things that you've done have that sort of reach that people who never would have seen something like this or never would have seen you in a club you know are able to see in the remotest area things that you've created hmm i mean that's a nice that's such a nice thought i actually i don't really think about it much well you know here here's here's a good example about whether or not you know you can go home and all that stuff i went a while ago to the 15th high school reunion and i had already done a couple of specials and stuff and i was sitting with my best friend from high school Heidi Swartz and i looked around at our table and i said and a few people had mentioned oh we thought your show was funny right a few people had mentioned it but we were still i said to my friend Heidi we are still at the unpopular table right it's the same lunch table that it was yeah and so but those people probably never left the town i imagine right exactly and a lot of them married each other yeah but i just thought like that's i didn't really get the come up and so i wanted whatever like to say you know they're gonna kiss my ass now look who actually left but in some ways you almost did in that they were so oblivious and almost so pathetically unaware of what's going on in the world that wasn't that way yeah and it was weird but it was almost like then remember the president of the class made a speech and he said something like laura don't be making jokes about this oh that's the worst and something else like i can't even believe i'm here right there's nothing even funny about this at all you know and we're and we're at the unpopular table still and you idiots couldn't even just you know give me the sound the back let me have my day yeah i think that it's it's weird when people see somewhere on television and they they sort of have a reaction like it's not as impressive to them it's like yeah it's almost like a new animosity yeah like uh you know it didn't like you then now we really don't like you and we're mad at whoever let you do this yeah exactly how did this happen but uh i think he went out at the end of that one so did you did you use to try to copy the dance moves you into oh my god yeah yeah i've you know when they had the self-trained lines oh yeah either side and you're danced down the middle i would like kind of try and do the electric boogaloo or whatever into my bedroom into the mirror yeah i think that's what it's for yeah teaching white kids how to dance well right and i was mad there was no line on either side of the line myself that's not as sad as if you had like lined up stuffed animals kind of like a fake line it's a little bit older than that yeah but i did this with my friend Erica too we we sometimes do the the the soul train kiss so that that was almost like the first television you're aspired to be on that yeah yeah i think i really wanted to be on there's still time i told you a sense i had a crush on Don Cornelius she was so fucking cool and so she was really cool his voice was almost a little too deep for me but it made me a little well i said i'm a crush on but uh well not actually not obviously but it was almost like in humanly deep right like you see the other world like yeah it was just so like right like the room would rumble so the other thing that you mentioned that you used to watch for saturday live during the eddie murphy euro and i imagine that that's probably pretty late was that uh also you're not allowed to watch this kind of thing right right it was but you know my mom i think was had a better sense of humor and was probably more current or hip than i gave her credit for because i remember that she was a big fan of john belushi and so like that was something that she would let me watch every once in a while yeah yeah what i remember the most is oh my god and you know what i get to see Garrett Morris but i remember the bee sketch yes loving that so much yeah and i'm two broke girls i could see Garrett all the time because it was really funny eddie murphy came in and was like the one highlight of that last night in gumbi yes all the things he did well yeah so i i had um a small part in daddy daycare played jeff garland's wife everyone on the set um on the first day um eddie was there and i think he has like this he really has like an aura right some of those people that you just meet you know like that is a famous person yeah like this special something whatever it is and everyone came in you know kind of fist bump to load him right and then i put my like fist out and then he just kind of like smiled at me and shook my hand like what are you trying to do it's almost like i wonder you know come on i'm one of the guys right i want you like you know how you go to the airport and there's the security line and then that security line you could have paid the extra fee to go right through like you've been pre-screened it's almost like the eddie murphy fist bump people have been pre-screened they've already received like they've had a background check and they can do fist bump but you haven't gone through that sort of training it was i think i was so intimidated and kind of nervous around him i feel like i my fist probably came out like in such in slow motion it's awkward right even though the proper technique of physical and i certainly didn't have the confidence to give one of those one of the things i remember about the sketches that eddie murphy used to do on that show was how reflexive it was to television the past i mean pulling a character like gummy who was really pretty obscure then right and doing it as a as an old jewish man yeah and like when he was buckwheat and even even doing the mr rogers neighborhood uh sketch mr robinson he more than anyone in that cast did the most sort of mining of television people grew up with and i wonder if that was one of the things that really made him stand out to people that i mean almost nothing he did was like contemporary right um you know parodies of like people in the news yeah which is definitely something that i i responded to right i know and i think he had a great imagination even in um his special in uh raw you know really kind of funny way an unusual way of saying things oh yeah absolutely and it was it was sort of in the tradition of like prior and Cosby and a lot of stuff about growing up but it definitely was a new voice and it changed the way that people started doing things all right so i could definitely see i i would be amazingly intimidated to meet him while i want to be in in something with him would be very very scary but on a less intimidating note you got to meet how linden this year all right he still exactly as handsome as he was and and and he's the most handsome salt and pepper man ever i mean he it just looks like he's he looks exactly like he did in barny miller but he's great yeah and he was so funny and took every you know i uh and the other writers you know we pitched lines on the fly to just try new things right got everything so fast and he killed like everything he said it must have been so weird having grown up watching barny miller if your mom did you have to call your mom and people i did i had to get a picture with him i had sent it to my mom i had to throw myself at him and hug him yeah he just seems like you just want to like have him take you to the park like just like take you out for a day at the amusement park and just like he just seems like such a nice guy or also he would just any sort of crisis you know to just be like how what are we doing tell us what to do oh i know he just seems like a very comforting present but he's so funny i know it's kind of hard to believe that he um killed those school children i know but that was in self-defense i know i know and a lot of them weren't even US citizens you're right you're right you're right i didn't need it plus it happened in international waters and hey stuff happened right yeah i mean to try to get over typecasting in different ways man that's how he did it he was in a show i really enjoyed in the day he's called black's magic where he played a stage magician who solved murders with his father played by harry morgan whoa i love harry morgan too they also harry morgan has his dad was weird wow very weird show but did not do very well it was a cool show is there anything you haven't seen in your catalog brain of tv shows do you remember the ghost and mrs mure yeah i'm really ghost and mrs mure yeah there are a few crush on the ghost i think there's a lot of crushing we've all crushed ghosts various points in our in our lessons i didn't usually have a lot of crushes on cartoons that was my oh really yeah i was a little strange were you japanese as a kid uh as japanese for two years and then i was chinese for a year and a half japanese for again and then my current race yeah we moved around a lot um yeah i don't know what that was about it was a lot of cartoon crushes like what who uh i had a crush on uh daddy robin oh okay i had a crush on most of the cast of jim which was a show about a woman who led a double life as a the head of a charity and a rock star well you're a lot younger than me so what was that what was that on the 90s no jim was like 85 oh okay yeah jim was like 85 um there were a few yeah there were there were some obviously one of women on the super friends no okay and fire star from amazing spiderman it's amazing friends oh wow yeah you did say you mentioned that you walked for Vernon surely that was like the one sort of silly show that you probably want yeah i like that a lot you know you tell a very funny shorthand that people use in writer's rooms all right when something when a joke is really teed up and the punchline is you can almost guess it yourself they call it a hello leverne and it stems from i believe from this episode where truly said the last thing i need is another creed coming over to ask me develop a lot and then if you think don't hello leverne yeah it's just sweet it's just the the whole audience should grow but they all love it for something yeah exactly that show i i haven't confirmed this but i think happy days has the most number of spin-offs that they've ever had they had they leverne surely jonnie los chachi morkin minnie uh pinky tuskadero had a very short list oh wow okay they also had a cartoon show oh i don't know uh in their in the late 70s but leverne truly was all on longer than any of them i think it was like in nine seasons jeez and that last season they moved to hollywood and it kind of didn't take place in the 50s anymore they just like stopped mentioning that it was the 50s oh weird i i don't know i have a really shoddy memory i think i remember carmine auditioning for something a big reggae and that's why is that why they all came out here i think so you know he's from massachusetts and uh new hampshire which is kind of on the border where i live they for some reason vanity license plates are like free there i i always theorize that you had to pay to have numbers otherwise they give you a word which would be a great way to make money like you just go to register your car and you're like here you go sexy chick yeah but we saw a guy driving and his license plates said big reggae and i swear to you it was him oh no we grew up here i'm pretty sure that's him wow yeah he came on to audition for something and then penny marshall quit the show for the last season she wasn't even in the last season huh it was called the very surely still with only surely that is really crazy very weird and how did they what did they do to say she's i think she was traveling or you know like like they'd do the kind of thing where it's like we got a letter from overa and let's read it you know that kind of thing i think that even even the youngest kids of that time had to be like this is bullshit yeah there's no way this works but you got to meet gary marshall recently yeah we did a scene together for buzzies a new tbs show and i was supposed to be his his uh i guess the young mistress he had on the side or something and he was really funny and great and so nice yeah it must have been cool to at least like meet gary marshall oh it was so cool and he was great and really funny and he had this line just off the cuff that became the end of the scene and it was really funny and something he thought of and spur of the moment so he's really funny i let you ever see over Brooks's lost in america yes where he's the guy that owns the casino oh i love it he's just always trying to convince him to give the money back that's one of my favorite scenes in a comedy ever and he's so funny in that where he manages to play it sort of sympathetic but also kind of like why how would you even suggest this yeah yeah it was brilliant yeah that's a great movie and then also you mentioned that you loved mary time and more that's probably the first show i can think of with i don't know if i want to call her strong female character sure but yeah she was a single woman it was something yeah who had moved to work on her own i mean she was also they sometimes were a little whiny and a little weaker but that show had to have a huge impact on just wanting to be a female character in a show i imagine right is there a show that you think there has the most direct blame to what you do with jackie woodman like when you were making it was they're like oh this is kind of like this you know not really we didn't really have anything in mind except dave and i have always felt like we were on the periphery of show business right right and you know like kind of delusional like we really for the amount of work we get we actually don't need to be here right and so we wanted to just kind of convey that with two friends like we all have friends that can't finish a screenplay right right that that's the only thing that sort of keeps them in the business that they might actually finish this thing at some point and yeah but that they rationalize you know their existence whether you know or why they're here is that this is going to be it but they can't finish it right but maybe they don't want to finish it because then you wouldn't have your reason to be here exactly then you'd have to admit defeat of course right yes that was really what it was i mean i was asked to stop describing it this way and it just because i kept saying you know just like any buddy comedy but we're two female losers and the network was like don't do that but we're all know oh actually my agent i think it's like you don't have to say that you're two female losers well but really it was almost ahead of its time where a lot of the shows now we do get sitcoms where the main people are losers but still not in a less realistic way like that show felt very real to me like it seemed like real people that were trying to make it out here and a lot of the shows that i see now the people will be losers but you know they're still like rich or successful right exactly or just like hateful bad people yeah but they're still rich and successful it's it's almost a negative aspiration i can be a terrible person and i can still be really successful in life right exactly they don't be wrong so is there show like a comfort show that you have that you watch growing up that if you just want to zone out and throw something on and watch it but not be too engaged or like if you're flipping through it's always on your stop um i got from Garrett and i found me tv yes yeah i love we've been watching taxi yes yeah it's on every night yeah tv is great i didn't know about it yeah there's a few stages like this me there's antenna there's retro tv and then this digital tv h they're they're showing a lot of the old stuff that hasn't been out but you know for like 20 i think there's a whole generation mist yeah the bottom new art show yeah yeah taxi it just is it's always so good and again such a sad show that like these characters lives are just miserable and even that i don't know if it's the lighting or just that place it's dismal it seems like it has a gray tint it's like a changing room in a department still like a bag department still like it's a bit with fluorescent lights or something it's like little different really that was the first show i remember where they all worked in a terrible place and none of them wanted to be there they're all aspiring to be something more right everyone on that show and that was pretty that's such a truthful i mean just such a kind of theme that was ahead of its time that you were allowed to always say that this is what you really wanted it right that's what i do what i really am as an actor a boxer i'm a writer exactly i don't think hollywood should be called but what i really want to really do my my night job yeah yeah you know what was interesting about taxi is that the the if you don't remember but the first how the first season there was that character who was supposed to be sort of the audience surrogate character uh his name was like john or he was like then the pilot and he was the new driver and then they just got rid of him god no i don't even remember yeah he was the first episode he started working there and then it sort of became more about alex but it was it was an interesting i think now if you had a show like that they would just cancel the show oh yeah oh we could just read you get a little bit and get rid of this guy and and have a three about these these side characters right which that's the other thing shows i don't think have enough time to sort of marinate right exactly voice i remember i kind of couldn't wait to see christopher loyd he was one of my favorite characters and he was a pretty broad character at times yeah so he was the first time i remember sort of a comment on the sixties and like in a bad way like this guy's a total just fried himself i didn't know then if it was that he was drunk or something or that he he had had a bad trip or something i think they always implied that they got around really saying exactly what it was because it was you know in nineteen seven and nineteen eighty on tv he probably couldn't even mention that sort of stuff but it definitely seemed to imply that he was drunk but also just completely did so many drugs in the sixties that he's he was just his brain was just unfixable oh my god right which is such a weird character to happen i think like that you know it's brilliant yeah and and also another sad character who like always wanted to be helpful and would just ruin things all the time and one of the first hateful sort of characters i remember was danny devillo on that show all right who was he was almost had no redeeming qualities i know and you know what i think was amazing too uh max much nick was saying that there's a rule based on his character's name the palm of the palm i yeah there's a rule that even if someone looks like an asshole it's obviously an asshole you never said you never pointed out say that right you know like he's short but you would never do a short joke right but that's not the case anymore like whatever is obvious you take them down in another way possible today and it seems like why bother like everybody knows that i mean it's too easy it definitely is too easy and one of my favorite quotes and i believe this is hitchcock says that audiences will like any character that's good at their job oh it doesn't matter what their job is or how awful of a person they're if they're good at their job audiences will like them and louis was sort of like that like he still he was good at dispatching the taxis and running that place and so people almost sort of respected that no matter how awful he was to people boy that's and that's kind of amazing he was good that hitchcock yeah i seem to know what he was doing funny kid he what amazes me is for someone who is you know sedula cive is kind of an awful fuck yes absolutely that he seemed to be so insightful and almost i don't know like he had such empathy for his characters but not for the actual people which almost makes it worse he must have recognized he should have been more empathetic and then was like no i will not do that which makes him seem so much more evil well laura i really enjoyed this conversation one last thing we have a tv guide as you know it's not just informative but it has opinions and it cheers and it jeers okay so if you could have a cheer and a jeer from television when you were growing up what would that be one cheer one jeer wow gosh well of course you know a cheer that i didn't didn't mention was mashed and a jeer might have been trapper john empty i'm trying to kind of trying to think of a show that i didn't really like oh um because my name was kitelinger i was uh teased sometimes i'm called night writer so i think just you know because of that i didn't like night writer and when you first mentioned that to me it took me a second to even i was like were you like a car like yeah i was like oh stupid and before that it was actually kind of a welcome change before that it was pipe cleaner a pipe cleaner yeah so night writer was pretty good i was what do you think of this business endeavor i have no children i have no plans on having children but i think i have this perspective where a couple is having a child and they're going to name the child they submit their potential names to me and i sit down and write every mean thing i can think of that maybe said for those names that's brilliant write them a report of like here's what your kid might be made fun of so you can weigh which of these options is the best oh my god it's like they don't even consider it or even remember that they were in school right so you do this whole dossier of like here's your potential uh for making fun of names i know i actually had this bit that about something that happened uh a neighbor of mine said oh you know we're right across the street we you should um uh do you want to come over and uh just you know we'll watch the movie or i'll make pizza or something and watch mantis and i said mantis god i hate the title who's in it and she said that's my son's name mantis her son named mantis oh my that's that sounds like there'd be a terrible sitcom about uh like an action priest who is also like a government spy and his last name's mantis called praying mantis right and yeah i mean we have to play the place violin yes it says the words but you think it's his wings but you know my stupid friend said everybody's gonna call a mantis oh yeah that's way worse yeah that's definitely the problem with with mantis i uh i work for a health care company for a while and so i'd see all the baby names and oh my a lot of uniques no oh no a wide variety of different ways for a lot of uniques a lot of uniques that's a great title for something a lot of uniques there are a lot of uniques a lot of uniques yes i don't know i might incorporate this business and you know you could have a whole writer's room of like frustrated comedians who get to be mean about children who aren't even born i think you should start it yeah i just need a snappy name uh you don't think a lot of uniques is the name of a lot of uniques could work for the company yeah yeah yeah we should work on this yeah we should work on this well thank you so much for doing this show thank you welcome and there you go that was laura kylinger from my recent trip to los angeles incredibly fascinating to me i think for you as well she's so funny everything she does i enjoy you should definitely get her book if you see a copy of it and pick up the DVDs of the minor accomplishments of jackie woodman you will be very pleased with the results so yeah thanks so much for laura for doing the show and for you guys for listening to it next week we'll have an all new episode on wednesday as always but continue to subscribe and rate and review the show if you like the show tell people about it on itunes stitcher on the sound cloud anywhere that you listen to the show and as always feel free to email me at canadikenread.com i love hearing from you guys let me know what you think of the show let me know what you think of these slightly different format tweaks if you enjoy it or even if you don't enjoy it i like hearing either way and i will see you next week on wednesday with an all new episode of tv guidance counselor remember thinking i hope my mom wasn't so into the