Judd Apatow reveals his upcoming The Big Sick movie (98% Rotten Tomatoes) opens in NYC/LA that weekend, despite his anxiety over ticket sales, mirroring stand-up’s uncertainty. He credits Gary Shandling’s craftsmanship—daily joke-writing and unrehearsed HBO tapes—while debating Trump’s Twitter bans and political polarization, critiquing both sides’ blind loyalty to radical ideologies. Rogan contrasts Pryor’s legendary, unmatched live dominance (like his 1980 Sunset Strip show) with modern comedians’ struggles to follow, noting Pryor’s tragic decline at the Comedy Store. Apatow admits even Carnegie Hall’s Sandler set humbled him, underscoring comedy’s relentless demand for refinement. Their discussion ties artistry’s fragility to systemic failures—whether in politics or performance—highlighting how discipline and honesty can both elevate and expose vulnerabilities. [Automatically generated summary]
Not only do I know your manager, Sussman, Jeff Sussman, when I was a kid, I loved comedy, so I got a job at the Eastside Comedy Club, which was in Huntington on Long Island.
This is about 83, 84 years.
He was the bartender, and he used to give me rides home because I lived really far away, and I used to take a cab home and spend all the money I made as a dishwasher on the cab ride home.
But I just wanted to be in the club near comics.
Eddie Murphy was coming in.
It was crazy.
And I swear to God, this is no BS. You have those people in your life that you remember who were insanely kind and cool.
And Jeff Sussman was like that.
As a young kid, I was maybe 15 or 16, I thought, this is the greatest guy I've ever met.
He used to do a show once a week, and one of the things he did is he would just turn on the radio and scan through the channels and do improv based on what was on the radio.
So if it was elevator music, he would do a dentist routine.
If it was heavy metal, he would suddenly do a heavy metal guy.
And he would do all these bits where he would come in and out of doors as different people.
And then he did a thing where he would come out of the door, run out of one door, across the stage and in the other door, and then run out that door again as a different person.
So it looked like he was chasing himself.
It would be like a gorilla chasing Bob, but he would just change his body language as he ran in and out of these doors.
It was really creative.
No one has ever really done stuff like that since, even.
Like, what if you have an alcoholic, but they're sober, but you're so influential, they go, oh fuck it, one drink's not going to hurt, and then boom, you just throw their life off track.
Fill in rooms, let me say, as someone who makes movies and is terrified that people will show up, fill in rooms scares me as well.
Like, we have a movie, The Big Sick, it opens in New York and L.A. this weekend, and then in two weeks it opens around the country.
It's Kamail Nanjiani, Holly Hunter, and Ray Romano, based on an experience that happened to Kamail Nanjiani when he met his wife, and he's from Pakistan, and his parents wanted him to have a...
An arranged marriage, but he fell in love with an American woman.
And then she quickly got sick and had to be put into a coma.
And it's this really hilarious, fascinating true story about him hanging out with her parents while she's in a coma.
It's just a very unique story, but it works great.
It's like 98% on Rotten Tomatoes.
It's like one of those gem movies that comes around every four or five years.
There's so many hormones raging through their system that didn't exist.
They're a new person.
If you stop and think about how you are when you're 11 and then how you are when you're 15, it's only four years later and you're a totally different human.
And then whenever they give me a hard time, I just take it out and just start reading it in front of them.
But it is all about how their brain isn't even cooked yet, that your brain isn't really cooked until your early 20s, and your impulse control and everything is gone, and that what you're supposed to do as a parent is model sane behavior, and if they see you not lose your shit thousands of times, maybe that will program them to handle problems well, but they are going to freak out a ton, and you shouldn't get that mad at them, because they're not capable of not freaking out, but that is hard advice.
Yeah, you are screwed if you can't afford it, but it's pretty reasonable if you're just moving around a general area, like if you're hopping around West Hollywood and going from the store to the improv, people do it all the time.
It's a couple bucks.
It's not that big a deal.
It saves you all the worry and hassle of being a drunk.
I did stand-up from the time I was 17 until I was 24. I met my wife when I was 28 or 29. So she didn't know anything about stand-up until three years ago when I started doing it again.
And then I came back to LA and started doing the improv and the Comedy Store and Largo and...
And then I would put these benefits together at Largo once a month, and to me, that was the most fun, because I could book a show and get, like, Shanling to come and Randy Newman, or, you know, Aziz and Fiona Apple, and we did them all as benefits, and I always liked producing things like that.
And then slowly, my act got to the point where I thought, oh, I'm, you know, I deserve to be here.
Well, you know the difference between someone who writes for television and movies and the difference between that and a lot of stand-ups is when you're making a living writing and producing and directing and doing all that, you're disciplined.
You write.
You actually write.
You have notes, you have books, you're opening up your binder, you're going over your stuff.
I remember when I started, I was opening for Larry Miller, one of the legendary comedians.
And he would have these incredible bits.
Some of them were like 10 minutes long.
He had a great bit about drinking.
It's one of the best stand-up bits of all time.
And he had a bit about Thanksgiving and a skiing bit.
And they were all like 10 minutes.
And they would get funnier and funnier.
And one day he said to me, you know, this is a job.
You gotta sit down every day and write jokes.
You don't just go to the mall and watch a movie every day.
Like, if you sat down for two hours at a desk and treated this like it was a job that deserved your respect, you'll be a hundred times better than everybody else.
And I'm doing a documentary about him now for HBO. And so the most fun part about it is he always went to the Comedy Magic Club and did stand-up, even in eras where you didn't know he was doing it.
Well, he also used to go on stage with just the setup, and he wouldn't know the punchline, and he would say the setup and hope the punchline came, which is pretty wild.
He...
You know, one of the great things about doing a documentary is you get to ask people for footage.
So Seinfeld gave me the dailies for Comedians in Cars getting coffee when he interviewed Gary.
And then the people who made the movie Comedian about Seinfeld gave me all the dailies of a sequence that they only used 10 seconds of in the documentary, which was Gary and Jerry going to the Comedy Magic Club and doing sets and also there that night as Nealon and Chris Rock.
And there's 12 tapes.
It's all their performances and then their entire conversation for three hours hanging out backstage.
And it is unbelievable, the conversation, how funny it is.
There's a moment where Chris Rock is doing the joke about how Nelson Mandela got divorced, that even Nelson Mandela, after decades of being in prison, he could survive that, but he couldn't survive getting out and being married.
He gets divorced immediately.
I forgot how he worded it.
But there's a shot of Shandling alone in a green room watching Rock do this bit.
And as he's doing it, Gary's like saying what he, he's like, he's guessing what the bit is as Rock saying it, but in awe of Chris Rock.
And it's a really beautiful moment.
And that's what the best part of doing this documentary is, is just finding little magical moments that no one would ever see if you didn't dig deep.
They go to 2015. And people forget that when the Larry Sanders show came on the air, you know, the shows on HBO, it was like First in Ten or Not Necessarily the News or Dream On.
You know, Gary was the first show on HBO that made HBO go, oh, this is what HBO should be.
We should be the quality network with this kind of groundbreaking television.
And Gary was a guy who got offered all the talk shows.
He got offered to replace Letterman.
He was hosting The Tonight Show for Johnny.
Him and Leno would take turns doing it.
And he decided he'd rather satirize it than do it.
And he wanted to explore the people and not be a talk show host.
He wanted to show the world of ego that is...
Not just talk shows, but just show business.
He was fascinated with people's need for attention, his own need for attention, his own vanity and narcissism, and he wanted to explore that and satirize how we just want to be liked so badly, like what we do to be liked, which prevents us from actually feeling love because we're so obsessed with approval.
Jay and I were talking about what it was like to host The Tonight Show and how much more fun he has now doing Comedians in Cars, or not Comedians in Cars, Jay Leno's Garage.
Because that's what he really loves.
He really loves cars.
And he gets to be himself while he's doing this.
He doesn't have to have people on that he doesn't want.
He just has people on to talk to them about cars and stuff and has comics on and all kinds of people on.
But when he was talking about having that show, he was like, you would have people on that you didn't give a shit about.
To that world of being a talk show host, there's not a lot of wiggle room, especially back then, you know, as opposed to now.
Now with the internet, I think a lot of, like, subject matter and a lot of language has opened up more.
You can kind of get it, like, if you see, like, what's going on now with Seth Meyers or, you know, any of the other late night talk show hosts, they have much more room.
Like, look at Corbett.
Colbert, rather.
Colbert said that, you know, Donald Trump, the president, uses Putin, like, uses his mouth, like, Putin uses his mouth as a cock holster.
It was a crazy long rant and it was really hilarious because Trump came back and said a bunch of things about Colbert and being tasteless and talentless and being a loser and all these different things.
And Colbert came back again and he goes, Donald Trump.
He goes, I thought if there was one thing you understood, it's show business.
What he's not understanding is there are public servants who have not made the choice to be billionaires who actually understand economic theories better than the head of Walmart or something.
That just because you were able to figure out how to sell M&Ms doesn't mean you can run the economy.
That there are people that they don't want to be rich.
They want to help other people and they are very smart about ways to help the government work well.
And, you know, that's like saying Martin Luther King's a loser because he wasn't rich.
He's not smart.
And this only rich people know how to do things.
I find so offensive and I'm very surprised that people who aren't billionaires aren't more offended at the contempt.
that they're held in.
Because you could disagree on economic theory.
You could say, oh, I believe in trickle-down economics, or I don't believe in trickle-down economics.
But this is a government that thinks if you're not a billionaire, you're an idiot.
I mean, when you say you don't want a poor person running the economy, I think one argument for that would be you don't want anybody who wants radical redistribution of wealth.
One argument rather would be someone who says, like, what we need to do is we need to figure out who the richest people in the world that own 90% of the money and then just take that money and distribute it to everyone else.
There's some pretty radical arguments from poor people.
He wasn't saying, I don't want a Bernie Sanders type.
He was saying, I want...
He considers the head of Goldman Sachs to be the smartest man in the world, where there are people who don't seek to make that much money who are very smart and certainly capable of doing things.
I think he sees people who are not the heads of industry as being incapable of...
You talk to the average person on the right or the average person on the left about global warming, and you will see, like, it's really strange how you see these ideologically driven ideas that they have in their head about what global warming is, what causes it, and you can almost guess, based on their reaction to it, whether they're a Republican or whether they're liberal.
And people, you know, obviously everyone talks about this, but people have chosen a side, and so now anything that that side does, people are okay with it.
And so when suddenly we're so soft on Russia, and then all these, you know, being a Republican used to be so about the evil empire, and on a dime it's like...
I mean, it's so hard to figure out what happened here, but that Seth Rich guy, according to Kim.com and according to Julian Assange, he leaked...
He was a Bernie Sanders supporter.
He worked for the DNC. He leaked some of the information that showed that the DNC was...
What they were trying to do was they were conspiring to keep Bernie Sanders from winning the primary.
And it proved to be true that they actually did do that.
And Julian Assange was saying after that guy got shot that somehow or another he was alluding to that if you work with us there are consequences.
So you had someone who was a renegade inside the DNC who released that dump.
You don't have anybody like that on the Republican side.
It doesn't mean that the WikiLeaks is corrupt.
It just means that no one on the Republican side has done that.
Only one guy, according to them, I don't know if it's true, some people say Russia did it, but according to Julian Assange and according to Kim.com, who's apparently somehow or another involved, At least part of it had to do with the Seth Rich guy.
That doesn't mean that they're trying to exclusively release stuff that makes Democrats look bad.
It just means no one's done it on the Republican side.
Just because the information doesn't exist doesn't mean there's some sort of collusion.
He's the guy that was – he worked for the DNC and he was murdered outside of his apartment at 4 o'clock in the morning.
They said it was a robbery, but – There's a giant conspiracy theory to attach to it, but I'm just going to relay the facts.
His wallet was left, his phone was left, his watch was left.
His valuables that he might have been robbed of, his money, all that stuff was there.
So he was just murdered.
And they never found who killed him.
And then immediately Julian Assange was alluding to the idea that this guy was helping them and that he was murdered because of that.
And that has been hotly...
Contested and, of course, the Fox News narrative has, like, Sean Hannity has made a big deal out of it saying, we're going to get to the bottom of this, ladies and gentlemen, which makes me more suspicious that it's not true.
But it is a possibility that he was one of the people that was releasing information.
I would imagine if you worked for the DNC, especially if you were a Bernie Sanders supporter, and you saw what they were doing.
What they were doing is essentially they were hijacking the democratic process from inside, from the Democratic Party.
And if you were a Bernie Sanders supporter, it would be horrifying.
It would really piss you off, especially if you're someone who's You've got this idea of what the future could be under Bernie Sanders, and you realize your own party is fucking him in the ass.
And so, I don't know how much he released, or if he released, or if he was only one part of it, or Russia was a part of it as well, and hacking into the DNC. But the bottom line, at the end of the day, is it exposed corruption.
I mean, that's really what it was.
There's absolute, clear corruption in the DNC. Yeah.
And everybody got away with it.
The woman was in charge.
She went and left and went immediately to work for Hillary's campaign.
Yeah, you say that, but there's a lot of shit that happens where people do get caught eventually, and you realize, oh, how long were you guys running this?
It's very possible, very possible that Lee Harvey Oswald was involved.
It's very possible that other people were involved too.
It's very possible that he...
Shot at Kennedy and other people shot at Kennedy at the same time and then he was a patsy and he was put up like he was obviously involved in a lot of intelligence agency shenanigans He went to Russia.
He married a Russian woman came back to the United States.
He had been involved in all sorts of communist propaganda shit He was definitely not like an above-ground guy.
He was a shady dude and And it's entirely possible that he was one person out of a plot to kill the president, and they put it all on him, and they had Jack Ruby shoot him.
But everybody goes black and white on that.
You either go, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, or you go, he was innocent, and the CIA had him assassinated because he was trying to get rid of the CIA, which he was.
I mean, Kennedy was trying to pull us out of Vietnam, he was trying to get rid of the CIA, he was trying to get rid of the I always go to the simple thing, which is, why would Jack Ruby shoot him?
You know, I mean, they helped him become the president.
And there was absolute evidence that they were mad at him once he became president because then he started doing things that were against their interests.
Not only that, this whole thing about Flynn and that the intelligence agencies were warning that Flynn was compromised and that he could be blackmailed by Russia.
They had things on him.
What they had on him, we don't know, but they're very convinced that there was evidence against Flynn and that the Trump administration knew this and they were still entertaining talks with him and they're still bringing him on board.
And what's fascinating is this world of international lobbyists.
Like Paul Manafort, what are they doing?
Did you see this thing where Paul Manafort's kids, someone hacked their phones and they had all these texts where they were talking about how horrible their dad was and how he's responsible for people getting killed.
And who knows if any of that's true, but There's an entire world of Americans going overseas and being involved in dirty politics and the work of governments like the Ukraine that we don't have any clue about what that is.
Yeah, it's one of the last frontiers for really diabolical shit.
You know, like Russia is one of the last, like, what he is, what Putin stands for, is like one of the last brutal military dictators that's kind of in a costume.
Yeah, I think he does, and I think there's also the possibility that he feels that what Putin stands for is this powerful superpower, and it's better to be friends with him than it is to be enemies.
Let's just cozy up.
Hey, I wish I could do a lot of the shit you do.
A lot of people talk shit about me on Twitter.
I wish I could have them killed.
I mean, it's entirely possible that he thinks along those lines.
It's like sitting down with a mob, figuring out your price for cement.
That's what he thinks the Putin back channel is.
Like, we'll figure it out.
We'll come up with...
And I think it seems like Trump likes the idea of that what you present is a lie and what you do in private is figuring out solutions and that that's how the world works.
Who was religious and had this thought, we are going to go to other countries, we're going to take down these leaders and they are going to find freedom and we're all going to change for the positive when they don't have these dictators.
Trump is an old school guy who's like, you need the dictators to keep all these assholes in line.
Like, people that didn't understand Iraq, including Bush, did not understand, if you take Saddam Hussein out of the picture, who's kind of secular, what you're left with is this Sunni-Shia civil war.
And you're going to have this crazy situation where these two different sects of Islam are going to kill each other.
Yeah, she said, these people are going to attack each other, we're going to create a mess, we're going to open a Pandora's box, and there are no weapons of mass destruction, and we should wait, and we don't have enough information.
And she really took a beating...
For being in strong opposition to invading Iraq.
And every single thing that she said would happen in the next 10 years happened.
And she wasn't the only person.
There were plenty of people.
I remember when 9-11 happened, Norman Mailer was on...
He was on Charlie Rose that week.
And he said, this is exactly what's going to happen.
And he explained the wars that would happen, where they would happen.
And then he said, and this is what's going to happen as a result of those wars, and laid out...
The mess that was created.
And he said, you'll see, we do not have the strength to not take these steps.
I should clarify, I don't know if Janine's really a Noam Chomsky fan, but I know Chomsky was saying that, like, he was pretty adamant about that, like, very early on.
Well, I don't think anybody really is qualified to run 350 million people.
I just think it's a ridiculous proposition.
But I think you're definitely right.
Also, he sets the tone for the mindset of the country.
I mean, it really is.
We have this alpha male chimpanzee thing going on where the one, like, Robama, love him or hate him, was a very articulate, really well-spoken, calm and measured guy.
And I think that's very good.
For America.
To have this guy who's smarter than anybody you know, and he's running the country.
Like, you feel like, okay, well this guy's obviously, look, he hardly ever stutters.
They got billions of dollars in bail money and they still wanted their bonuses.
I have a contract.
My contract says I got a bonus.
They're just thinking about their house and their yacht.
People got bonuses even though the economy collapsed.
Even though the economy collapsed as a direct result of the industry that they were involved in and the businesses they were running, they still got bonuses.
I think Ross Perot was a logical third party, and it became very dangerous for people, and that's one of the reasons why the Commission for Presidential Debates changed the threshold.
Like, back then, you needed 5% in the primary in order to be included in the debates.
You put Ross Perot in the debate as an independent and extremely wealthy man who understands a lot about tax codes, understands a lot about foreign relations, and he became a huge problem and most likely cost Herbert Walker Bush his second term, right?
Are you, I mean, there are people who feel like left and right are the same thing when you really get down to it or they're protecting the same interests in some way.
I think that the most of the people that are on the left and most of the people on the right aren't even really thinking about whatever their party stands for.
They are just like you said, they are sticking with the team, whether it's the left team or the right team.
I think radical ideologies, whether it's on the left or the right, they share a lot of common traits.
And one of the things they share is that there's a complete lack of objectivity, lack of objectivity and lack of introspective thought in terms of like what their party is actually doing, what it means to be a liberal, what it means to be progressive, what it means to be Republican, what it means to be conservative.
You just get into this groove like this is what we do.
Fuck global warming.
It's not real.
You know, and then fuck this, and you can't be racist against a white person.
Like, people have these ridiculous ideas on the left and on the right.
They just dig their heels into the sand they don't even think about, and they just go with it because that's what the party says.
I'm aware of what those issues are, but I do think there are large choices that just affect millions and hundreds of millions of people.
Like, for instance, when a guy like Donald Trump says, we're not going to give money to any aid service around the world that says anything about abortion.
Forget giving out abortions.
If they hand out a pamphlet and it says that's an option, they don't get money.
So if you're a country in Africa and there's only one aid service Aid service that feeds starving people, but you also hand out a pamphlet on abortion.
Well, I had a big issue that she does not seem to understand...
Certain issues, like the speech, getting paid for the speeches, that her blind spot, and she has revealed to still have it after the election, that like, why did I go there?
Because I got paid.
I guess they've made over $100 million giving speeches, Bill and Hillary Clinton, which on one level you go, yeah.
People don't understand.
I'm going to go do a stand-up corporate gig and it's crazy money.
There's a crazy corporate speech money floating out there.
I'm just saying she has a blind spot to the potential for corruption that people see in that.
And that she, when you're getting, I mean, one article said it was like $150 billion between the two of them over like 10 years or so.
The fact that she doesn't even have a good game to defend it, that you can't go up against Trump and say he's corrupt while you're getting that much money from corporate interests.
She never even saw how offensive it was that...
It's the kind that Bernie Sanders doesn't do.
So people go, well, at least he's not lining his pockets with that money.
Hillary's basically saying, I line my pockets with that money, but I still have my own opinions.
And the blind spot, at least to the outrage of it, is something that threw me.
But...
But ultimately, the main choices that she wanted to make on a lot of issues are so much more in line with what I believe than Trump, that although not a perfect candidate, you know, Trump is doing, you know, he's trying to get this health care thing through and doesn't seem that concerned about the amount of people that are going he's trying to get this health care thing through and doesn't seem that concerned So I guess that there are certain things I sucked up about it.
I didn't have a core thing that she's like a terrible person, but I think it's pretty hard to get me to that place with people.
And I think that there's a lot of politics that's really bad and really dirty.
And I don't know enough on each specific thing to have a...
you know, a position on each thing that she said.
But I do feel like there are people who are playing the game with service in mind, and maybe they're getting dirty or making mistakes with service in mind.
And then there are people like Trump that I really don't understand why he's there.
And his general philosophy is let the smart, rich people get richer.
And something nice might happen for you that he's so dishonest on a level that you can't compare to him.
Now, I'm fully with you on this, but I think that whenever people criticize Trump or whenever the people talk about Hillary, rather, one of the first things they do is say Trump is worse.
Instead of talking about how weird...
She's such a non-ideal candidate.
She was such a terrible candidate.
She didn't believe in gay marriage until 2013. In 2013 she was publicly stating that gay marriage should not be legal.
That a legal marriage should be between a man and a woman.
I feel like there is a part of politics where people You know, like, say, my position was evolving on that.
When, no, your position wasn't evolving, you just weren't fighting for what you actually believe.
And Obama took a while to make big moves on that.
But I still think, at core, people like that are trying to figure out the system to help people, and I can't say I understand what Trump is in this for, other than to be considered the greatest winner of all time.
She's the only person I know who left the campaign for this reason.
I forgot her name, but it was very public.
She said it publicly.
plan was to come in second, to help the brand, to get some fame, to make some statements about what he believes with no belief that it was possible that he would do better than second in the Republican primaries.
And then the woman said, as it became clear that they had a really good shot of winning, she said, oh, I wasn't in it for this.
And what I find fascinating to watch is Trump slowly getting comfortable with power as he thinks he's figuring it out is interesting.
Like, I mean, even the Jared Kushner thing is kind of hilarious.
You have this son-in-law.
So now you have a blind spot that anyone in the world thinks it's weird that you give your son-in-law, a real estate developer, so much power.
And he doesn't care at all because he doesn't trust anybody except like four people.
So he's got to give them all the power.
But he puts them in charge of fixing everything wrong with the infrastructure of government and the Middle East and two or three other things.
And Trump doesn't understand how insane that appears and also how each task is impossible.
This is my son-in-law.
He's going to fix government and the Middle East.
The type of guy that doesn't realize, well, maybe there's one person for each of those jobs, that's where I just go, oh, he's full-out crazy, because who would even do that to their son-in-law?
And he's sitting there with his Ray-Ban sunglasses and his preppy outfit.
I mean, you know, it's become so comical.
You know, it's a fascinating thing because it's both terrifying and And comical.
If this was a movie, it's too broad and you wouldn't believe it.
You would just go, too much is happening in every scene, too many crazy thoughts.
And what I guess what I wonder, and maybe you have an opinion about this, there are people who say it is the destruction of truth when you just make these lies up all day long, that you change the definition of truth or even people's ability to decide what they think is the truth.
Is that a philosophy that someone like Bannon is executing in the White House or something that happens randomly and is organic out of them?
I mean, there's always the concept, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And knowing that you're in some sort of a competition, knowing that there's people trying to knock you down, and you're in this position of power, and you're shoring up your defenses, and I think there's a lot of weird stuff that goes on whenever you're the winning team.
And you realize you're being attacked at all angles by this other team.
And then you've got this guy who's the head guy who's a fucking maniac.
He's got fake hair.
He puts a spray tan on every day.
He's out there.
His eyes are white.
No one tells him.
His face is orange.
He's saying insane shit.
He contradicts himself all the time.
He lies all the time about numbers.
He's always bragging about how well his ratings are and how shows do really well because everybody knows he watches the show.
It's crazy stuff that you just don't expect from someone who's in the position of President of the United States.
I think almost all bets are off at this point.
That's the one thing that I find promising about this, that people are so upset by how fucked up this is that they're going to get politically active and that they're going to realize there's some real holes in the system.
The president shouldn't just be able to fire the head of the FBI because you don't like the investigation.
My mom died of ovarian cancer, and I just remember going through those bills, and there was a lot of experimental medicine that potentially could save her, and you didn't know if insurance would say...
Right.
And anything you needed to do, you'd have to prove you needed it.
Someone says you needed a new CAT scan, and you've had two that year.
You might have to go to war to say why you need it now.
I think there's too many things for people to consider, and I think people work all day, and then they have hobbies and families and things they enjoy doing, and they don't have the time.
I mean, each one of those issues would require a full-time job all day long, investigating it, debating it, discussing it, whether it's Flynn's ties to Russia, or what Session knows, and how many times did he speak to the Russians, or what did Jared Kushner actually do in the Middle East?
Did you see the pictures of him with the bulletproof vest on overseas and he's hanging around with the actual soldiers and he's sitting there with his Ray-Bans on?
And I haven't done something like that since basically the HBO Young Comedians special in 1992 with Ray Romano, the guy who got fired so you could have your career.
Is the best way to do it slow and calm and let people soak in the idea?
Or is the best way to do it to be intense?
What is the most entertaining way that I would be engaging this material?
Figure whatever that is and fuck with it and move it around and bring it up and bring it down and that's one of the things where the store is such a great place to focus on that kind of stuff because there's so many killers because the standards are so high that you have to really you really have to be on point and it's packed every night you go to the comedy store the main room which usually just be desolate like four years ago it's sold out like it's Vegas every night every night I walk in there I'm like I got some new jokes I'm like How many new jokes can I do
And opening up that back bar, where you gave us a place where the public can't go and the comics can go and hang out, that was giant, where there was a place to chill and hang out.
People were like, you'd be sitting there with Ron White, like, I'm on in five, see ya boys.
And he'd go out there and do a set, then Diaz would come back, and all these different people are hanging out there.
And you're like, wow, this place is like something special.
It's just the idea of being a part of that community.
And it is a community of people that are really smart, you know, really, really funny, and I think generally an incredibly supportive community to each other.
Yeah, well, I think especially now there's so many opportunities.
I don't think people feel like as starved I think there was a famine mentality that was going on way back in the day when it was everybody competing for tonight show spots And then every now and then someone got an HBO special and it was holy shit There was not that many HBO specials but other than that you had to do talk shows And you had to do like a few minutes on a talk show or, you know, maybe you were like a Richard Jenny who thrived in that format and you could do 30 Tonight Show things and then fill up arenas because of that.
But for most people, it was a scratch-and-claw environment.
And people were fighting to try to get a sitcom and fighting to try to get movie roles and all these...
There was not a lot.
But now, because of the internet, because of YouTube, because of social media, and then Netflix, which was giant, there's so much opportunity.
And the comedians have also found way more of an audience.
There's way more audience out there.
Because people realize, like, oh look, Sarah Silverman has a new Netflix special.
Oh look, Jim Jefferies has a new Netflix special.
Oh look, Bill Burr has a new Netflix special.
And just keeps going and going and going and going and going.
I can't think about it too much because sometimes I think, if there's so many people, why do it?
But I'm trying to make it very much about the audience and me and that...
You know, because I make movies and do TV, that my stand-up career really is just about getting to hang out with everybody and my relationship with that particular crowd that night.
Like, I don't need it to pay the rent so I could do it from a very pure place because it's just about these...
I think that when you don't talk directly to the crowd...
You get stale as to what people are thinking about.
I can tell, I don't know, just when I bring up certain topics, just what people's concerns are.
And it happens unconsciously.
Oh, this is what people find funny these days.
This is what people are freaking out about.
This is what people are happy about.
And when you don't do it, you're just alone in a room with your editor.
You're just sitting with one dude for two years.
And I think...
I also think you're connecting to some, you know, whatever.
The creativity of the universe because you're in spaces with a lot of people, with a lot of other creative people, and you're hooking into creativity on some level.
And I respect it, but I do not have the courage to assume when I hit editing that I am such a genius that I will not have fucked up any of this in the writing.
And he said that he got Saturday Night Live because he went in for the audition and he was retiring because his career hadn't worked out the way he wanted it to.
And then someone said, do you want to go in for SNL? And he was so ready to be done that he had an amazing audition because he assumed he wouldn't get it.
And basically it was like, fuck this business.
And then that's the moment when he was his purest, funniest self and just got it.
And while we were on the show, he and his wife actually had went to a strip club.
And this was like 1997?
97 98 somewhere around there.
So this some asshole at a strip club got a video camera brought in a video camera and filmed like a fucking video camera back then like you had to carry it and he filmed Phil and his wife at a strip cup laughing just having a couple of drinks and I think Phil got a lap dance and his wife got a lap dance And this guy put a copy of this videotape in an envelope and nailed it to Phil's garage door with
But it was different because Letterman's thing was someone he knew and this was not a guy he knew.
And this was a guy who found out where Phil lived and said, I'm going to get this to all of the advertisers that you do commercials with and all the people you do films with.
And I'm going to ruin your career unless you give me money.
Call me at this number.
The guy left his fucking number.
So Phil calls the guy, records the thing, and did it in the room with me.
And he goes, I'm going to call the guy now.
I'm going to call the guy now.
And he goes, hey, buddy, what's going on?
Listen, I understand what you're saying, but you've got to realize, I don't have as much money as you think I do.
I mean, I don't want the tape getting out, but you're making it out like it's a bigger deal than it is.
And the guy was like, look, I'm telling you, and this and that, and the guy's like, look, I'm willing to work with you.
Let's just come to a reasonable number.
So they come to this reasonable number, and this whole time where he's doing this, he's recording this, and he gets it to this private investigator guy.
And then this asshole meets the private investigator thinking he's gonna meet Phil and get paid and this private investigator guy scares the fucking shit out of him and threatens his life and takes his wallet from him, takes photos of his address and he basically says, Don't ever contact him again, or your life will radically change in a horrible way.
And the guy disappeared.
But it was weird to be in the room with him when Phil's like, close the door, close the door, I'm gonna call him.
It's always these people that have, dude, once this happens, then this is going to happen, and I'm going to be making this amount of money, and don't worry about it.
It's all going to come, but I just need a little right now.
I wasn't here until 94. Oh yeah, the late 80s and this guy Joe Drew, just the manager.
Great young guy.
I don't know where he is.
He used to say to me, Judd, come in, wait around.
If someone doesn't show up, I'll put you up.
And I was like 19 years old, and I would wait there all night, every night, thrilled to talk to everyone, because that's right when Sandler moved to town and David Spade and Schneider, and that's when I first met everybody.
And that guy would put me on.
And that's the funny thing about a career.
It's two or three people...
Who change everything for you.
There's this woman, Mary Parent, who is one of the heads of Universal, and I sold her the 40-year-old virgin, and she said, Judd, the second you hand in the script, I'm going to greenlight it.
I so believe in this idea and you and Steve.
And I literally faxed her, like page 90 to 108, and then she called and said, okay, start prepping.
But I just think being active and doing something on a daily basis, forcing your body to get used to the fact that it's going to constantly be working, constantly being under stress.
He's fucking 70. I mean, I've come back at him already.
But he also, I mean, he's not mitigating his stress.
That's part of it is your perspective enhancing.
For me, the most important thing about, I don't think, maybe not the most important thing, but one of the best things about exercise is that it gives me a perspective.
A better, a more enhanced perspective.
Because I'm not coming at it from a stressful body.
Especially for you because you're working on things all the time.
If you go in there with an idea, like I'll go in there with a bit.
Like I got this bit that I'm working on right now that's kind of complicated and sometimes I'll just be sitting there staring at the wall just thinking about this one bit because I'm trying to figure out how to structure it.
It's a super complicated bit.
And I'll go in that tank, and I'll just sit there for an hour, and I'll just try to work out this bit, try to figure out if there are other angles to it, if there's other ways to come at it.
The only confusing thing is when I have an idea in the tank, and it seems like, I got it, I got to get out of the tank, and I got to write things down.
I've been playing a lot of tennis lately as a way to wake up.
But I do know that I need to do it.
But man, when you're of the mindset that when the trainer comes, you want to punch him in the face...
It's a tough thing.
And a lot of it is that being a writer, your day becomes about waking up and engaging your brain all day.
And so you just like look at writers and eat Chinese food and you're kicking stuff around and it's like developing the wrong muscle your whole life, or at least not only one muscle.
Because I'm trying to read a lot, like, and you guys talk about it sometimes.
I heard you talking about it with Russell Brand, just, you know, quantum physics and trying to figure out how to quiet my brain and to tune into what is left to do to not be crazy.
Quantum physics theory that basically you get into a pattern of how you feel and it's in your cells.
If you're a depressed person, your cells are depressed and if you get in a good mood, your cells try to get you back to depression because you've conditioned yourself to be in a certain mood all the time physically and it affects your whole body and that you can make a choice to change how you are physically by...
Choosing to be in a certain mood and meditating about a certain mood and that you could change how your body reacts physically so it doesn't want to keep you in the same mental state you're used to being in.
I'm always real cautious about what causes depression and what makes people depressed and what, you know...
I don't suffer from depression, so like whenever someone says, you're depressed because of this, I'm always like, hmm, okay.
I don't know how to address that because I don't know what, I know there's certain people that do have absolute chemical imbalances, but what does that chemical imbalance come from?
Does it come from childhood trauma?
Does it come from just some sort of a part of their body that's not functioning correctly, like a bad thyroid or a bad kidney?
Is the brain very similar?
Is that the case?
Or are they in a bad economic situation and a bad relationship with bad friends and a bad job?
When you grow up in chaos, I think you get wired for a certain hypervigilance and a nervousness and an anxiety because you think, like, more bad shit's coming.
So if you had any kind of trauma as a kid, I think you're wired to keep your eyes open a little wider, which also lends itself to some kind of depression.
And I was a teenager, a young teenager, and I remember being in the audience while Richard Pryor was on stage slaying, and people were laughing so hard, and I was laughing so hard, I looked around.
I'll never forget this moment, because I looked around at the crowd while the movie was going on, and all these people were like, ah!
unidentified
Falling out of their chair, slapping their knee, holding their chest.
I'm like, this is an amazing thing this guy can do.
Like, I'd never seen real stand-up before.
I'd only seen, like, you know, like someone on the Johnny Carson show do a couple minutes and tell a few jokes.
That, in my mind, was what stand-up was.
It wasn't until, and I'd listened to some of the old Bill Cosby stuff and some of the old Carlin stuff on records, but I'd never seen it, like seeing the movie, live on the Sunset Strip.
And that planted, didn't plant a seed like, I can do it, but it did plant a seed like, holy shit, this is possible.
He was just kind of talking and ranting, and he would, you know, he'd be on stage with a drink, and people didn't know how to respond.
And they would give him this...
Amazing round of applause when he got on stage and took forever for them to get him to the stage because Chewy who worked the door and this guy Dave would carry Richard Pryor to the stage and slowly just move him towards the stage and all the time the people would be clapping and then they would sit him down and then they would put the microphone in place and crank that fucking thing up to 10 and then he would We're
good to go.
You know, it was more of that than it was, like, him doing really well.
And, you know, Richard, they, like, I remember, like, he wasn't supposed to drink, but he drank anyway, like, because they had him on all this medication.
Or maybe the audience understands in a different way, and they can transition.
Maybe.
They're used to comedy, and they're like, oh, now this guy, where in the old days you'd come on, and they couldn't go, and oh, we're about to enjoy this potpourri of people.
I think, you know, I was watching Louis work on his new set very seriously at the Comedy Cellar.
And he'd say, yeah, I got nothing.
I got nothing tonight and go on stage and just crush.
And then I played Carnegie Hall and had a good set for the New York Comedy Festival.
And then as a surprise, I brought Sandler out to do a surprise set after me.
And I thought I did great.
And then when he came out, the laughter went up 20%.
Where I felt it.
Like, oh, I'm at a seven, and he's at a nine and a half.
The sound changed.
And I thought, oh, there's a whole other step here that I need to kick into gear.
I always want the material to be good, but that...
There's a way to crush that's hard to do.
To get that momentum and have the ideas.
And obviously Chris Rock is one of the best of everybody at it because he has so many great ideas but understands how to get the room rocking really hard.