April 29, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:11:02
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Two. | |
| One. | ||
| Yee-haw! | ||
| Hello, Anthony Jeselnik. | ||
| How are you, sir? | ||
| Great, Joe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good to see you. | |
| What's going on, buddy? | ||
| Are you fully committed to the beard now? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I want to keep it as long as I can. | ||
| Are you going to go mountain man? | ||
| Or are you going to just trim? | ||
| Do you trim a little? | ||
| I trim a little bit. | ||
| The lady who cuts my hair trims it every four weeks when I go in for a haircut. | ||
| But I don't touch it at all. | ||
| I'm afraid if I tried to trim it, I would just ruin it. | ||
| But I love, love having a beard. | ||
| Why do you love having a beard? | ||
| It's like sunglasses for the bottom half of your face. | ||
| Oh, you can hide from the world. | ||
| Kind of, yeah. | ||
| It chills me out a little more. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Especially on stage. | ||
| You're under the lights, you know, and my lip would start to get a little bit sweaty. | ||
| And I'm thinking about my lip and I'm like, should I wipe this? | ||
| Should I move it? | ||
| Then I start to sweat more. | ||
| But now that I have the beard and mustache, my lip gets a little sweaty. | ||
| You can't tell. | ||
| So I don't get more anxious. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you used to like think, boy, there's a little couple of beads on that upper lip. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, and I'm like, can they see it? | ||
| Should I wipe? | ||
| Is it too much if I'm wiping? | ||
| It drives me crazy. | ||
| You know what gets me? | ||
| Boogers. | ||
| If I think I have a booger. | ||
| Like, what is going on with my nose? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Is that a booger? | ||
| Shit, can they see that? | ||
| Oh, I check for sure before I go on stage. | ||
| There's always a booger check. | ||
| But I'm so animated, and I'm always yelling and screaming. | ||
| I'm always worried that something is hanging off the tip of my nose. | ||
| And the people in the front row can't even enjoy it. | ||
| Like, what the fuck, man? | ||
| Your nose, bro. | ||
| I've had definitely a fly-down situation, but never like a booger that ruined the show. | ||
| Those are two things that people love to laugh at. | ||
| You fly down, and if you put a beer down on stage, and the foam comes over the top. | ||
| Like, oh my god, your beer's coming! | ||
| Those are those things, right? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| High humor. | ||
| Yeah, high humor. | ||
| Sweat, like weird sweat stains. | ||
| When I've done specials, speaking of which, Anthony Jeselnik's new comedy special comes out tonight, I hear. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| This evening. | ||
| Midnight, I guess? | ||
| Netflix does it. | ||
| Ah, excited? | ||
| Very excited. | ||
| Wow, I've been seeing your set. | ||
| It's fucking fantastic. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I think this is the best I've ever done. | ||
| So I'm pumped for it. | ||
| It's the beautiful thing about comedy, man. | ||
| Keep working. | ||
| Keep paying attention to it. | ||
| You get better at it. | ||
| You know, really? | ||
| I mean, Don Marrera and I had this conversation just a couple of months ago. | ||
| He's like, Joe, he goes, I've never been better. | ||
| He goes, I'm fucking a thousand years old. | ||
| He goes, I've never been better at comedy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As long as you don't quit, you don't ever get worse, I don't think. | ||
| Right. | ||
| As long as you don't give up. | ||
| Because some guys don't quit, but they give up. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, they just go through the same material every single time. | ||
| You're like, what are you doing here? | ||
| You're just trying to get out of the house. | ||
| You're not trying to get better. | ||
| There's a little of that, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's like, if you're not right, I guess that's the difference between also guys who put out specials, or I say women too, and people who don't. | ||
| Some people just don't put anything out, you know? | ||
| Yeah, once you put it out, like I put it out because I'm like, I'm done with this now, it's getting boring, it's not going to get better, it's as good as I can make it, but because of that, then I have to come up with a new hour. | ||
| You have a pretty specific schedule you like to follow too, right? | ||
| If I'm correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I try. | ||
| I did a year in LA, like at the store every night. | ||
| You know, and like once a month I do Largo and try it all out at once. | ||
| And then at the end of that year, I had about 40 minutes. | ||
| Went to clubs for a year, every weekend for a year. | ||
| And then once that, I had the hour after that. | ||
| Then I did a year of theaters. | ||
| And at the end of that year, I taped the special and was done with it. | ||
| So you're on like a three-year plan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Pretty much. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that might change, you know, as I've gotten older. | ||
| The idea of a four-year plan sounds a little bit nicer. | ||
| You have other things going on that it's not as – I'm not as worried. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was trying – I think two years seems to be right for me, but it might be better to give it a little more time, right? | ||
| Just a little more time to tighten things up and polish and, you know, add layers and extra punch. | ||
| It's like, you know those guys, like, when I started out in Boston, there was guys that had been doing the same set forever. | ||
| There's pros and cons to that. | ||
| And the pro is, god damn, they had that shit down tight. | ||
| Where it was just punchline, rapid punchline, pause punchline. | ||
| They knew the economy of words was perfect. | ||
| There was no fat in the bits. | ||
| They had tightened all that stuff up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One of my biggest fears is taping the special... | ||
| And then coming up with a great tag. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That I want it to be done when I shoot it because that feeling is awful. | ||
| Yeah, it's the worst. | ||
| I've done that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So have I. It sucks. | ||
| It sucks. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| I once went back in my last special, Thoughts and Prayers. | ||
| I ADR'd a line. | ||
| I walked off stage and was like, oh, fuck. | ||
| I should use this word, and it just occurred to me in the moment that I was using the wrong word, so I went back and ADR'd it, and you can obviously tell. | ||
| It's like me talking, and then it's clearly a different voice, just one word, but I had to do it. | ||
| What does ADR stand for? | ||
| I know what it means, but what does it stand for? | ||
| Jamie knows. | ||
| He's an actual audio guy. | ||
| Automated dialogue replacement. | ||
| And why it's automated is lost in my head forever, but that's what it means. | ||
| Ah, okay. | ||
| I wouldn't have guessed that in a million years. | ||
| I knew what it meant. | ||
| I've done ADR. Yeah. | ||
| I did it like Fear Factor, like every episode. | ||
| I had to do ADR. It was the worst. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because you were just mispronouncing names? | ||
| No, it was usually because they wanted to tighten segments up. | ||
| We would film for three days, and we'd have to slam that down to 44 minutes. | ||
| So sometimes you needed brevity, or sometimes... | ||
| clarification for certain things like like we would explain the rules to them like very specifically and they would have to read these rules and it took a long time but then like sometimes in the moment like on television you wouldn't explain it as clearly like while we're filming like we would we'd show them like this is what you have to do this is what you have to start here you go from here to there but sometimes when you would want to put it on TV you want to be more precise or more concise yeah Yeah. | ||
| So every fucking week I had to do ADR. I hated it. | ||
| You did? | ||
| It seems like it would be fun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fear Factor? | |
| Fear Factor, but just ADR seems like easy, it's relaxed, you're just in the booth. | ||
| No, it was boring. | ||
| No? | ||
| No, I didn't like it. | ||
| No, the fun thing about Fear Factor was when the checks came. | ||
| That was a fun thing. | ||
| And then when nice people won, that was fun too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those things were fun. | ||
| But really, that was a great job. | ||
| But it was a job. | ||
| It was like a job. | ||
| Like, you know, if you had a great, like, yeah, I really like working here. | ||
| Whereas, you don't really say that about stand-up. | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, I don't think about it as a job. | ||
| It's just fucking fun. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's a get-to-do. | ||
| Yeah, a get-to-do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's my new thing. | ||
| It's a get-to-do versus have-to-do. | ||
| How long have you been doing it now? | ||
| Almost 17 years. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Isn't that crazy to say? | ||
| It is. | ||
| It blows me away. | ||
| 17 years just seems like forever. | ||
| And I had in my head that 20 was an important number. | ||
| When you get to 20, that means something. | ||
| I think I must have made that up. | ||
| People say 10 years is a big deal, but 20 doesn't seem to... | ||
| I thought that's when you're really relaxed. | ||
| Ten years seems like you're a pro. | ||
| When I see someone, I'm like, how long have you been doing it? | ||
| Eleven years. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| I buy it. | ||
| When someone says, six years, I'm like, good luck. | ||
| You might quit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I hate the people who are like, I've been doing it for like 12 years. | ||
| When's the last time you got on stage? | ||
| Six months ago. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| No, you started doing stand-up 12 years ago. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You've not been doing it. | ||
| Yeah, you've got to go fuck yourself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those people that take giant chunks of time off and then come back and want to go on the road with you, I'm like, hey, man. | ||
| Yeah, it's like, no, that's not how this works. | ||
| You gotta be putting in the work yourself, otherwise, why am I doing you a favor? | ||
| Yeah, well, it's just, it's one of those things like, if you wanted to run a marathon, you have to run all the time. | ||
| Or, you're gonna be really sore and tired when it's over. | ||
| You know, you're not gonna really be able to do it. | ||
| You wanna be able to actually do it and really run. | ||
| This is the same with stand-up. | ||
| For whatever reason, it seems so fucking easy when you're watching. | ||
| When you're watching someone do it, this is one of the reasons why everyone thinks they can do it. | ||
| Because we're just talking. | ||
| It's not like we're doing Cirque du Soleil up there. | ||
| And some people are like, oh, that's not that funny. | ||
| I could be not that funny. | ||
| It's not that big a deal. | ||
| Yeah, you could. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you started out, what city did you start in? | ||
| Here, Los Angeles. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did you really? | |
| Where? | ||
| What was your first club? | ||
| My first ever show was at the Belly Room in the Comedy Store. | ||
| I took a class. | ||
| I took a class. | ||
| Greg Dean. | ||
| I was working at Borders Books and Music. | ||
| It was my first job in LA. Remember that big bookstore? | ||
| I just found the thinnest book on stand-up comedy that they had and bought that and read it. | ||
| At the end, it was like, this guy teaches a class in Santa Monica. | ||
| So you went, and people were surprised that I took a class. | ||
| It's like, the class didn't teach me how to be like this. | ||
| It just kind of gave me the courage to go to open mics. | ||
| And I don't think I could have just gone to an open mic. | ||
| I was too scared for that. | ||
| I was like 23. But after the class, I had a seven-minute set that I would go and do. | ||
| What did the class teach you? | ||
| How do they start a class out? | ||
| There were two sessions. | ||
| It was like beginning and advanced. | ||
| And they would talk a little bit about joke structure. | ||
| They would talk about simple things like taking the mic out of the stand. | ||
| But be careful because some people walk up and they take their teeth out. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Things like don't run the light, show up early. | ||
| Things that were just, may not have been common sense, but it gave me comfort to know the rules so that I could try to break them. | ||
| You know, later on. | ||
| And then did a set at the belly room, like, with a bunch of other, like, people in the class who are all terrible. | ||
| None of them are doing stand-up anymore. | ||
| And I, like, killed. | ||
| Like, I thought I killed. | ||
| I had the tape. | ||
| I sent it out to everyone. | ||
| And one of the jokes from that first set I ended up using in the Donald Trump roast. | ||
| Really? | ||
| So I was like, oh wow, maybe there's some gold in there. | ||
| And I went back 10 years after I did it and watched the set again and had a panic attack watching myself. | ||
| The way it was in my head was not what was on screen. | ||
| It was bad. | ||
| Do you think that's just psychological protectants that you throw up? | ||
| What is it that makes you think that you were better back in the day? | ||
| I think it's excitement and just being stupid. | ||
| When people get into stand-up later on in life, I'm like, I don't know if you can do this because you have to kind of be dumb enough to go through the things you have to do when you start out. | ||
| But I'm glad I was 23 when I was running around to open mics and not knowing any better. | ||
| That's a really good point. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I was 21. I was really dumb. | ||
| You just went right to an open mic? | ||
| Yeah, well, I went to an open mic to watch first, and that's what gave me the courage to go on stage. | ||
| Because I had always thought, like... | ||
| Stand-up comedy was going to be Jerry Seinfeld or Richard Pryor. | ||
| And if you go there, like, you know, and I wrote a bunch of stuff and I practiced a bunch of stuff into a tape recorder and it was terrible. | ||
| But, you know, I was trying to say it like a comedian. | ||
| But then when I went to an open mic and I realized how bad some of those people are, I was like, well, I can be that bad. | ||
| I can do that. | ||
| I know I can pull off what they're doing. | ||
| Yeah, there's something about, like, performing for comedians that really angered me. | ||
| If an audience wasn't laughing, it was like, alright, whatever. | ||
| But if comedians, it's like, no, you guys should get me. | ||
| That really ticked me off. | ||
| That I didn't have any friends in the open mic community. | ||
| That would laugh? | ||
| No, I didn't have friends at all. | ||
| I was just the guy who showed up and did a set and would just get angry and angry. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Why were you angry? | ||
| Because I was mad that they didn't get that I was funny. | ||
| It's my job to prove it to them, but I was like, these people should understand that I'm funny. | ||
| If a comedian doesn't like me or doesn't respect what I do, I'm just like, I can't believe you're a comedian. | ||
| I really feel that way. | ||
| That's a funny way of looking at it. | ||
| Well, it's one of those things where you want to be good so bad, you'll sort of convince yourself that you're good. | ||
| Or you convince yourself that you're better than you are. | ||
| Like, I remember the feeling of... | ||
| Being at an open mic night and not being sure whether or not I was going to go on stage or not having a spot. | ||
| And watching these guys going, God damn it, I want to go up there. | ||
| If I got up in front of that crowd right now, I could kill. | ||
| You just convince yourself that you were good. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I knew that my performance was bad. | ||
| I knew I was funnier than what I was putting out there. | ||
| And that was what frustrated me. | ||
| It's like I've got to keep writing new jokes to get to be able to prove myself. | ||
| To get to your potential. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's an interesting thing because it occurs in almost everything that's difficult to do. | ||
| It's like you see the path, you're like, okay, just keep going. | ||
| Like martial arts, for example, it's a perfect example. | ||
| It's like you'll practice with a white belt and you kind of think like, oh, I kind of get this. | ||
| I'm going to get good at this. | ||
| And then you'll practice with someone who's really good, who does it every day and is a black belt. | ||
| And you just feel helpless and you feel like, goddammit, I'll never get to that spot. | ||
| And I used to feel like that about stand-up. | ||
| There was a guy, when I first started out, you probably never heard of him, but he's one of the best comics of all time. | ||
| His name is Teddy Bergeron. | ||
| And he was a Boston legend. | ||
| He had a problem with substances, to put it mildly. | ||
| And his timing was impeccable. | ||
| He went on a Tonight Show back in the day, and he would play piano as well. | ||
| And he had like... | ||
| Like, the ultimate set on The Tonight Show. | ||
| I mean, just fucking murdered. | ||
| Sat on the couch with Johnny. | ||
| I mean, and just was killing it. | ||
| And just super... | ||
| And then went off the rails. | ||
| Like, the pressure of success and everything. | ||
| And pills and booze and woo! | ||
| And the whole thing. | ||
| But when I was an open miker, one of the early, early sets that I did, I remember I did a set and then he went on You know, there was a bunch of open micers and then some professionals would hop on and do like five, ten minutes. | ||
| And he went out but did that. | ||
| And he was so fucking good and so polished, I almost quit. | ||
| I was like, what am I doing? | ||
| I'm terrible. | ||
| I don't have a point of view. | ||
| I don't have perspective. | ||
| I don't have that kind of timing. | ||
| I definitely don't have that kind of swagger. | ||
| Like he had a casual swagger on stage. | ||
| Did you have like an idol, like someone you were trying to be as a stand-up? | ||
| I think there's probably a bunch of guys. | ||
| I sounded a lot like Richard Jenny in the beginning. | ||
| I was kind of stealing. | ||
| Like, almost stealing his timing. | ||
| And then I realized that one time I was on stage and I heard myself sound like him and I was like, alright, I gotta fix this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I did that with David Tell in New York. | ||
| Everybody did a tell. | ||
| I would run downstairs and watch a tell set and then one day I caught myself not doing one of his bits but like one of his mannerism kind of things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just fun to do and I felt I was like I gotta stop this and I went and told Esty the woman who books the comedy seller I was like I gotta stop watching Dave Attell and I said it like a confessional and I thought she was gonna be like you're not a real comic then everyone watches a tell and she goes good like more people should stop watching Dave Attell like People are just ripping him off, and I understand why. | ||
| He's got such a bizarre sense of timing, and it's so infectious, you know? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Just so fun. | ||
| So fun to watch. | ||
| I've known Dave for like... | ||
| 28 years, I think? | ||
| And he's always been like that. | ||
| He's always had that very strange way of talking! | ||
| You know? | ||
| Oh, it's a box! | ||
| I've known him maybe 10 years, and I don't know him at all. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| We've talked a couple of times, but I don't know anything about the guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I think I met him after he had quit drinking. | ||
| So I think he was a different guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I knew him in the heart. | ||
| When he was on that show, Insomniacs, and he was getting blasted out of his gourd every night. | ||
| Every night he was going to these places, and it was killing him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he stopped doing the show for that very reason, because everywhere he would go, it would just be shots, shots, shots. | ||
| And... | ||
| And then he, one time I ran into him at the improv and it was like 1 o'clock in the morning and I was headed home and he's like, hey, is there an after party? | ||
| Where do we go? | ||
| I was like, where do we go? | ||
| Like, go home. | ||
| Go to sleep. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then the next time I saw him, he was totally sober. | ||
| He's one of those guys, though, that got sober and didn't stop being hilarious. | ||
| No. | ||
| A lot of guys do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They sober up and then they become annoying. | ||
| And then they want to talk about their sobriety. | ||
| I cannot stand recovering addicts. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| They're worse than people who just find yoga. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They just won't shut the fuck up about recovery. | |
| I'm guilty of that with many things. | ||
| if I get into something I can't shut the fuck up about it but I get it you know for them it's like this pivotal moment in their life where all of a sudden they have their shit together and they just want to talk about it all the time the thing that drives me nuts though is when they judge yes they always get a little judgy They're like, are you sure? | ||
| Like, do you need that last drink? | ||
| And I'm like, yeah, I do, and I can handle my shit, so leave me alone. | ||
| Hey, I'm super sorry you got that fucked up gene. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, whatever it is, bro. | ||
| I'm sorry you went too far with it, but I've got it under control. | ||
| I like being a little buzzed. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| And luckily, the drugs in the drinking that I do, if I'm going to drink, I drink high-quality stuff, smoke a little weed, but the other drugs don't really do it for me. | ||
| Have you fucked with the other drugs? | ||
| I've tried just about everything. | ||
| I've done cocaine and the next day I've been like, I just feel stupid. | ||
| I feel like everything that came out of my mouth last night was dumb. | ||
| I feel like hell. | ||
| Weed chills me out. | ||
| I like beer and wine and vodka and whiskey. | ||
| I have not done a lot of things. | ||
| I've never done mescaline or peyote. | ||
| I think they're pretty much the same thing. | ||
| I've never done coke. | ||
| I've never done meth. | ||
| I've never done any real amphetamines. | ||
| I've always been scared of those, though, because those are the ones that I've seen people really lose their lives for. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I don't mess with amphetamines at all, and I don't enjoy it. | ||
| Someone who grinds their teeth, that's awful. | ||
| And I found with comedy, you can't be funny on cocaine. | ||
| I'm always shocked at comics who do cocaine and are funny. | ||
| Because I just find it to be like, I can't laugh at anything, and I can't, like I'm talking too fast, my timing's off, and I'm not thinking in a funny way. | ||
| But I've always been surprised at comics who have coke problems. | ||
| Yeah, Joey Diaz talked about that, because Joey Diaz did coke for years, but he's never done coke and gone on stage. | ||
| He goes, every time I tried it, I was fucking terrible. | ||
| He goes, it takes away your soul, your heart. | ||
| You got no heart when you're up there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I guess, again, I've never done it, but what I get is just, I get that whole speedy thing where you just like, your sense of how people are perceiving you is distorted. | ||
| Your timing is distorted. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, I don't even go on stage high. | ||
| I may have a couple beers. | ||
| I don't want to be slurring. | ||
| If I haven't even smoked pot at all that day, it's a worse show for it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wonder what that is. | ||
| I think I'm just in my own head. | ||
| You know, it makes me want to get through the set as opposed to being present and enjoying it. | ||
| Like, I just want it to be over so I can go chill out. | ||
| You know? | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| It's only with weed. | ||
| One of my favorite things to do when I would take guys on the road with me is get them so high that they could barely talk and then put them on stage. | ||
| Dude, the first two guys I would open for on the road, it was Doug Benson and Brian Posain. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| And they were like, they wanted to smoke all day. | ||
| That I was like, every time I was a feature act, like almost every time I was a feature act, I was terrible. | ||
| Because I thought like, I have to smoke. | ||
| I have to smoke with these guys so they won't take me on the road. | ||
| But I'm like barely getting through this half hour and I'm terrible. | ||
| It's not a smart move for someone who's just getting going. | ||
| To be that high on stage. | ||
| But one time I did... | ||
| I really didn't smoke pot until I was 30. Like, really smoked pot. | ||
| But I did it a handful of times when I was younger. | ||
| And one time, when I was like 21, I was living with my buddy Jimmy. | ||
| And him and one of his friends came over and he had pot. | ||
| And we smoked some pot during the day. | ||
| I think we had a barbecue or something. | ||
| And then I had a gig like six hours later. | ||
| I was still high. | ||
| And I remember being on stage... | ||
| And my timing was excellent. | ||
| And I was so locked in and focused. | ||
| And I remember being terrified that I was going to be terrible. | ||
| Terrified. | ||
| But I really nailed it for whatever reason. | ||
| But then I never did it again. | ||
| And I was like, boy, I got away with it. | ||
| And then I started smoking when I was 30. And it kind of changed my act. | ||
| It made my act more introspective. | ||
| I started talking about weirder subjects. | ||
| I started talking about things that I was actually more interested in. | ||
| Did you start to write on stage more when you were high on stage? | ||
| Yeah, I kind of always have written on stage a little bit, but mostly tangents. | ||
| I'd go off on a weird branch. | ||
| If I knew how to get back to the river, I would take a weird stream off to the right. | ||
| As long as I knew how to get back to the river of whatever the fuck I was talking about, I'd be fine. | ||
| But when I'm high... | ||
| I'll just, like, go wandering through the woods. | ||
| Like, I'm not even concerned about the river. | ||
| I'm like, you know, there's the river of thought, the pattern that you're following. | ||
| But when I'm high, I'm like, who the fuck wants that? | ||
| Why would you be that person? | ||
| And then I start thinking, like, I remember when I was a kid, and then I'll just, like, out of nowhere, have this idea, and I'm hoping it's going to go somewhere. | ||
| And those moments, I feel like, they're like, it's like, Foraging for food, like occasionally you find it. | ||
| Like if you go out looking for mushrooms, you don't know where they are. | ||
| You might find edible mushrooms. | ||
| Hopefully you're going to find them. | ||
| Sometimes you won't. | ||
| Sometimes you come home with an empty basket. | ||
| But sometimes you get them. | ||
| And the only way you find out is if you forage. | ||
| And that's kind of what it feels like when I'm high on stage. | ||
| But then I'm also really worried that I'm going to be boring. | ||
| I know I'm trying to develop material, but I also know I'm entertaining these people in the present. | ||
| So it's like a fine line. | ||
| Yeah, I don't have that confidence to waste the audience's time. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| I'll see Chris Rock. | ||
| Chris Rock's a friend of mine and he'll go up and just like with nothing and just sit there and like very comfortably for 45 minutes and just kind of talk and look for things and has no problem with it whatsoever. | ||
| What else? | ||
| What else? | ||
| He'll go, what else? | ||
| What else? | ||
| And he'll like stare at the sky, look at the ground. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| You know who was the master at that? | ||
| It was Damon Wayans. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Who a lot of people forgot. | ||
| A lot of people forgot was one of the fucking still is one of the best comics ever. | ||
| Damon was a goddamn murderer in the 90s. | ||
| Oh, I loved him coming up. | ||
| But I remember going to the Ha Ha Cafe. | ||
| They would do like a show every Tuesday that my friends would run. | ||
| And Damon Wayans would always drop in. | ||
| And do an hour and ruin the show. | ||
| Like, he would have no material, and he would just attack people in the crowd. | ||
| By the time he was offstage, like, the audience was furious. | ||
| Like, they went crazy when he came out, and then by the end, they were just like, why is he doing this to us? | ||
| And we were like, oh, fuck, Damon Wayans is here. | ||
| And it was so funny, somebody looked up to as a kid and, like, loved. | ||
| You're just like, oh, man, this asshole again. | ||
| Wow, that's crazy. | ||
| I wonder why he was doing that. | ||
| I guess it was probably because he couldn't do it at the store anymore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How many years ago was this? | ||
| I mean, at least 10, 12, 13 years ago. | ||
| Yeah, see, that makes sense, right? | ||
| Because that's around 2005. Yeah, that's like probably he stopped going to the store. | ||
| The store probably tightened up the way they used to. | ||
| Because they used to just let anybody just drop. | ||
| Like, Eddie Griffin would drop in. | ||
| Wasn't on the schedule. | ||
| He would drop in at 9 p.m. | ||
| and get off stage at 3 a.m. | ||
| And that was real. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that was real. | ||
| Six hours. | ||
| That would kill me. | ||
| That would kill me. | ||
| And then when he was done, he'd be like, who's next? | ||
| Who's next? | ||
| Who's next, dude? | ||
| You did six hours. | ||
| What's the longest set you've ever done? | ||
| I think an hour and 40 minutes. | ||
| Maybe a little longer. | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| But I think an hour and 40 minutes is probably the longest I've ever done. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that's too long. | ||
| Too long. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| An hour and 20 is more than anybody should ever have to hear you talk. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And even that is like pushing it. | ||
| I like to do, when I do like a theater, I do an hour or an hour and 10. And I just want to just start and then finish. | ||
| Just come on down. | ||
| Go! | ||
| Ready? | ||
| And then for one hour, I want everything to be tight and concise, and I would way rather have an hour and ten minutes that people really enjoyed versus an hour and a half where they're like, oh, an hour of it was really funny. | ||
| Because then it leaves you with this, even if it's the same hour... | ||
| That extra time. | ||
| I also just think the audience doesn't want to see more than an hour of comedy. | ||
| People are like, oh, I did three hours the other night. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| The audience must have hated it. | ||
| Chappelle used to drop in at the cellar. | ||
| He and Dan Cook were going back and forth for who could do the longer set. | ||
| Longest ever. | ||
| World record, right? | ||
| They had world records. | ||
| Yeah, and I think Bob Marley eventually broke it or something. | ||
| Bob Marley from Maine? | ||
| Oh yeah, didn't he do like two days on stage? | ||
| Yeah, he did something insane. | ||
| But Chappelle was down there one time and I was like, oh, I'm gonna go check it out. | ||
| And it was like almost unwatchable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it was like the pacing that you have to do in order to be on stage that long. | ||
| And he was funny, but it would be like not funny for long stretches, then a big punchline. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then back into it, you're like, all right. | ||
| That was when Dave was on hiatus, right? | ||
| That was when Dave kind of took time off of comedy for a long time. | ||
| He wasn't doing specials, but I think he was doing surprise shows. | ||
| He was always kind of on tour in weird venues. | ||
| He's still doing that now. | ||
| He's not always doing big, giant theaters. | ||
| He'll just want to book a 20-seat room and make his agents crazy. | ||
| Well, he's been doing the lab at the improv, that little tiny room, which is what, 50? | ||
| 50 seats? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Yeah, he did it. | ||
| Aziz did it. | ||
| That's a place where comedy dies. | ||
| That little fucked up room. | ||
| I have always hated that room. | ||
| That room sucks every dick on the planet. | ||
| When people are like, oh, you can try out new stuff. | ||
| It's like, I can try out new stuff in the main room for a good crowd. | ||
| Like, why do I want to do this little terrible room? | ||
| I don't know why it's even there. | ||
| Well, it's a weird one, because the belly room is perfect. | ||
| The belly room works. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But for some reason, that lab seems like, why is there comedy here? | ||
| Why is the door right there? | ||
| Why is the street right there? | ||
| What is this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What is this here? | ||
| What do you got going on here? | ||
| Everything about it is bad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was trying to tell them. | ||
| I go, turn that into the comic screen room. | ||
| They're like, no, there's good comedy there. | ||
| I'm like, shut your mouth. | ||
| You shut your mouth, you turn that into the comic screen room. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They used to be where the bar was, remember? | ||
| They used to be where everybody would hang out before the show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was great. | |
| It was great! | ||
| And you'd go in the other room to go on stage. | ||
| And you would go from that part to go on stage. | ||
| Now everybody goes from the front door to go on stage, so you're trapped in that little hallway. | ||
| And you're like, where the fuck? | ||
| Where do I hide? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's nowhere to hide. | ||
| That's why I love the store so much. | ||
| Because there's so many places to hide. | ||
| But the store has that little problem with the OR. Right before you're about to go on stage, you're in the hallway. | ||
| Yeah, I don't like the hallway, but I like those seats against the back. | ||
| Just for comics, you can kind of sit there and go over your notes and leave you alone. | ||
| I love that back bar. | ||
| That back bar is my favorite. | ||
| The back bar is the shit. | ||
| The secret comedian's bar. | ||
| What they've done in this new generation of managers and the people that run the place now... | ||
| They've sort of really paid attention to what's going to make these guys happier? | ||
| What's going to make this better? | ||
| You've got to give them a place where they can hide. | ||
| So give them that back bar. | ||
| And you go to the back bar any day. | ||
| It's filled with people just hanging out, talking shit. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| It's like a fun place. | ||
| I go there. | ||
| I gravitate. | ||
| And I get into the back air. | ||
| I'm like, oh, look at all these cool people. | ||
| This is a great spot to hang out in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They did that. | ||
| They added security. | ||
| It's night and day to the way it used to be. | ||
| Oh, I never used to go there. | ||
| I didn't like hanging out there. | ||
| I didn't like any part of it. | ||
| And then once the new management took over, I was like, oh, great. | ||
| I once did a show there. | ||
| I did a benefit. | ||
| There was a kid who died. | ||
| I forget his name. | ||
| He was a comic who died in a car accident, and they had a benefit for his family. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| That's Josh Adam Meyers' friend. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Angelo, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, Angelo Bowers. | ||
| I did not know him. | ||
| I didn't know him either. | ||
| But I guess he was like a fan of mine. | ||
| And I was like his favorite comic that they could get. | ||
| And I'm like, I'm on the marquee. | ||
| It's a sold out show. | ||
| I have a great set. | ||
| I walk off and Tommy comes up and he's like, the old manager's like, Anthony, that was great, man. | ||
| We got to get you around here. | ||
| You got to start hanging out. | ||
| You got to start hanging out and doing the open mic and stuff. | ||
| And I'm like, Tommy, my name is on the marquee right now. | ||
| You just watched me headline this show. | ||
| like what are you talking about and i then i i don't think i ever saw him again next thing i knew he was fired and they were like what can we do to get you back here well i love it well that's adam you're right adam did that the same thing to me he told me that tommy got fired and came to visit me the improv so you were gone seven years seven years from the store yeah and then when tommy left they brought you back in yeah well there's two reasons uh | ||
| One, I had to go physically to the store because Ari was filming his Comedy Central special. | ||
| Ari's just one of my best friends. | ||
| And I knew him from the time he was a doorman. | ||
| And I knew that him filming his special there was so important. | ||
| And there was no way I was going to miss it. | ||
| I was like, I have to be here. | ||
| Like, I have to see this at the store. | ||
| So I was like, ah, fuck. | ||
| All right, I got to go back. | ||
| And so I decided to go back. | ||
| I think he was filming on a Wednesday. | ||
| What night is Bros Battles on Tuesday, right? | ||
| So I went down there on a Tuesday. | ||
| I said, let me go down on a Tuesday just to see what's up. | ||
| And I went to Roast Battle, and I was like, holy shit, this place is electric. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| Like, the environment is so much different. | ||
| It's so creative. | ||
| And the night that I was at Roast Battle was fucking fantastic. | ||
| It was so good. | ||
| There were so many funny roasters. | ||
| And I remember thinking, wow, this place is just different, man. | ||
| It just feels so much different. | ||
| And it wasn't like it is now. | ||
| Like, now, like, you'll go on a Saturday night. | ||
| They'll have six sold-out shows. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| They have two shows in the belly room, two in the OR, two in the main room. | ||
| Everything sold out, packed with headliners, and it's chaos. | ||
| It wasn't like that. | ||
| It was still sort of shitty in terms of the numbers, but the vibe and the creativity was way different. | ||
| And the new guys and girls that were coming up, they were fucking good, man. | ||
| I was like, wow, this is a different vibe. | ||
| I had been gone for almost a decade. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that brought me in. | ||
| Like I said, I had to be there for Ari. | ||
| There was no way. | ||
| There was no way I could miss it. | ||
| I had to be there. | ||
| So I'm like, alright, I'm just going to swallow it. | ||
| And that was probably what Adam for sure helped, but I might have stayed away forever if it wasn't for Ari. | ||
| I just had to see it. | ||
| Do you like Ghost Battle? | ||
| Do you like judging that? | ||
| I cringe sometimes because they're so fucking mean. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Sometimes people are so mean, you know, but I do like it. | ||
| I do love the writing aspect of it. | ||
| I love the fact that it's a joke writers form, but I don't want to name any names of this one comic that I'm friends with. | ||
| That does really well on Roast Battle. | ||
| And I said, hey man, how come you, when you roast, you have all this good new material, but you're doing the same stupid shit when you go on stage all the time? | ||
| Like, you were doing the same set for years. | ||
| You're not advancing. | ||
| Because you're not writing a lot. | ||
| But you're writing a lot when you write for roasts. | ||
| And I'm like, you should treat your material the same way you treat your material when you have to roast. | ||
| The thing about the roast is, say, if you are going to roast with Tony Hinchcliffe. | ||
| You guys know each other. | ||
| You know who you're writing for. | ||
| All right, Tony, what does he look like? | ||
| You start fucking around with, oh, I know this about Tony and that about Tony. | ||
| This is going to be funny. | ||
| And it forces you to be creative. | ||
| Whereas I think there's so many guys that they develop a framework of a set. | ||
| And then they just kind of like, that is their comfort. | ||
| The comfort is in the fact that they know, even if it's not good, they know that they can go from this to that, and that to this, and they know where they're going, and they're not lost. | ||
| And I think that the beautiful thing about the roast is none of that material you can do in any other place. | ||
| You can only do it right there. | ||
| So you have to work on that. | ||
| And so oftentimes you see what a comic's capable of when they're roasting. | ||
| Versus what they're doing when they're actually doing the real set, which seems stale. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I feel like it's almost... | ||
| I agree with everything you're saying that it's almost like it's not beneficial to be like a really good at roast battle and not as a stand-up. | ||
| It can take away from stand-up and people think it's like this path to glory and I'm not sure that it is. | ||
| No, I don't think it is. | ||
| I think it's a good exercise if you're treating all of your comedy the way you treat the roast battle. | ||
| Like you're always working on it. | ||
| But I think there's a lot of guys who just aren't working on it. | ||
| I think part of our problem is There's no other art form, like stand-up, where there's, like, you were telling me, you were saying how you took a class to learn to get on stage, but you were quick to add, and almost every great comic does this, that you really didn't learn anything in that class. | ||
| But it got you to the stage. | ||
| That's weird. | ||
| That there's nothing, like, the best... | ||
| The education that we have is talking to each other. | ||
| Like, how do you write? | ||
| How do you do it? | ||
| And I'm always, I've been doing comedy 30 years, and I'm always like, how do you do it? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| What are you doing this way? | ||
| Are you doing it that way? | ||
| What do you write? | ||
| Do you write it out? | ||
| Like, everybody's got a different thing. | ||
| Like, Bill Byrd doesn't write anything out. | ||
| He has notes and he works it out on stage. | ||
| He has these ideas in his head and then he rants and he uses his podcast to develop a lot of his material because his podcast is unique and it's just him talking. | ||
| But everybody's got a different thing and there's no one who's right. | ||
| No. | ||
| No one's right. | ||
| Stan Hope who said that if you give a comic advice, you're just telling them how to be more like you. | ||
| You know, that I kind of agree with it. | ||
| You can say, like, write more, get on stage as much as you can. | ||
| You know, that's important. | ||
| But there are things even in comedy that, like, you hear early on that it takes 10 years to understand. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, like, I remember the movie... | ||
| The movie Comedian with Jerry Seinfeld was like a huge influence on me. | ||
| And there's one point where Seinfeld's kind of depressed and he's like, Colin Quinn's like, what's the matter? | ||
| He's like, I just don't know when I'll be back. | ||
| You know, when I'll feel like I'm back again with this new material. | ||
| And Colin Quinn says, when you're on stage and you're killing and you're miserable, that's when you'll know you're back. | ||
| Like when you're just like, great, I'm making these idiots laugh. | ||
| And Seinfeld is dying laughing. | ||
| And I was like, I saw that and I didn't understand what he meant. | ||
| And now I know exactly what he meant. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Well, if I could go back to when that was filming, I would grab Orny Adams and go, don't do it. | ||
| Don't let them do this to you, man. | ||
| How long have you been doing comedy? | ||
| Don't let them do this. | ||
| They're doing this to make Jerry look better. | ||
| Don't let them do it. | ||
| I mean, he must have thought it was the biggest thing in the world for him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm so mad. | ||
| I love that movie. | ||
| I watch the DVD once a year, and there's no Orny Adams commentary track. | ||
| They should give him one, right? | ||
| They'll reference it. | ||
| Like in the other commentators, they'll be like, Ornie will talk about this in his, and I think he was so angry with the way he was portrayed that he refused to do one. | ||
| Well, that's weird. | ||
| They just edited him, the worst aspects of it. | ||
| They didn't want to give a nuanced perspective on who he is and what he's doing. | ||
| They just wanted him to be like the young guy who's trying to figure it out versus the old, you know, legend. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| But my friends would use them as an example. | ||
| If I was acting like a jerk, they'd be like, you're behaving like Orny, Adam. | ||
| I came in second in a comedy competition, and I was mad about it. | ||
| And they were like, don't be like Orny. | ||
| And I was like, thank you. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| Well, he's doing great now. | ||
| I mean, Orny's doing fine. | ||
| I've met him a couple times. | ||
| He's always been nice to me. | ||
| I once did a show at the Improv. | ||
| This is years ago. | ||
| And it's an 8 o'clock show. | ||
| I'm not the headliner. | ||
| Orny's going on after me. | ||
| But it's like I'm the biggest name on the marquee. | ||
| And I get there and there's six people in the audience. | ||
| And two of them were like friends of mine who had never seen me perform before. | ||
| And I was like, this is humiliating. | ||
| I'm like yelling at the staff. | ||
| I'm like, how do you have six people here at 8 p.m. | ||
| on a Friday? | ||
| I can go to the store right now and the five rooms are sold out. | ||
| Like, what's going on? | ||
| And I get on stage, and I'm so embarrassed that my friends are seeing me, that I'm yelling at the staff. | ||
| Staff members are walking by, and I'm screaming, yelling at the sound guy. | ||
| I don't even do a joke. | ||
| I put the mic down, I'm like, fuck this place, I'm never coming back, and I leave. | ||
| And I see my friends a couple days later, and I'm like, so sorry about that. | ||
| They're like, no, you were funny. | ||
| They go, the guy who went after you, that guy was angry. | ||
| And I'm like, that guy was angry? | ||
| I yelled at the sound guy for 15 minutes, like, what the hell did he do? | ||
| The improv had those dark moments. | ||
| They still kind of do sometimes. | ||
| Like, Sharp did a show there recently on a Friday night. | ||
| There was 25 people in the crowd. | ||
| I blew up at the new booker. | ||
| They called me up and were like, we would love to have you back. | ||
| We see you at the store. | ||
| What can we do to get you back at the improv? | ||
| And I'm like, email me once a week and tell me what spots you have and I'll tell you when I can go. | ||
| Like, alright. | ||
| I'm booked for a Wednesday. | ||
| I see the lineup. | ||
| It's like me, five people, Tiffany Haddish. | ||
| I'm like, great. | ||
| Should be a good show. | ||
| Day of. | ||
| The improv emails me and they're like, listen, Tiffany Haddish wants to do an hour and she wants you to introduce her. | ||
| So it's just going to be the two of you guys, no MC. And I'm like, did you just bump me down to opening act? | ||
| And not asking if this is okay, just like, you're now the MC going up cold. | ||
| And I'm like, alright, I'll be there, but know that I'm furious. | ||
| And they're like, why don't you just cancel? | ||
| And I'm like, because I want you to know how mad I am, and I'm never coming back here. | ||
| And Tiffany was great, I was nice to her, but I couldn't believe that they would treat me like that. | ||
| I'm there tomorrow night. | ||
| At the improv? | ||
| I'm there all the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You want to do a set? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| It was sold out. | ||
| It was sold out. | ||
| Actually, I'm going to dinner to celebrate the special. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's good if you catch it with a packed crowd. | ||
| It's just they didn't have... | ||
| The right approach to marketing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's all it is. | ||
| But when I first started, that was the club. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, that was where I went when I left the store. | ||
| When I left the store for seven years, I did my sets at the Improv, at the Ice House, Ha Ha. | ||
| I did just anywhere else but the store. | ||
| Laugh Factory? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| Never? | ||
| They film you. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they put people up. | ||
| They've done it with me. | ||
| They put your shit up online. | ||
| And they say they don't do it anymore, but it's too late. | ||
| You can't just do that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And their attitude about it was very disappointing. | ||
| Like, when I told them that I wanted them to take my shit down, they were not... | ||
| They weren't... | ||
| They weren't understanding or apologetic until it became a big deal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, big deal. | ||
| Like, you know, like how to get other people involved. | ||
| It was not good. | ||
| It's not wise to think that you could just film people and put them online when they're working out for free. | ||
| Yeah, and not tell them. | ||
| Yeah, especially like a guy like you, who's going to do a fucking Netflix special, so you're going to release this stuff and put it online long before Netflix gets a hold of it? | ||
| And the attitude about it just wasn't good. | ||
| I mean, it's a great club. | ||
| I've worked there many, many times. | ||
| I just don't do it anymore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Get it together. | ||
| You know, this is the fucking big leagues. | ||
| We're in Hollywood. | ||
| This is not like some fucking shithole comedy club in the middle of nowhere that nobody goes to. | ||
| This is on the Sunset Strip. | ||
| This is in Hollywood. | ||
| And you're doing that? | ||
| Like, what are you guys, what are you doing? | ||
| Yeah, you couldn't trust them. | ||
| It just was ridiculous. | ||
| But it's a great club. | ||
| I mean, you go there, you'll see great comedy. | ||
| It's a fucking killer setup. | ||
| You know, there's a lot of the pieces are in place for it to be amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was going back for a little bit, but they would use me to promote the whole show. | ||
| It's like as if it's just my show, but I'm just doing 15 minutes and making the same money as everybody else in the lineup. | ||
| If I'm at the comedy store, it's like me, you, Delia, Sebastian. | ||
| You don't feel that pressure, and we're all in it together kind of thing. | ||
| I enjoy the store a lot more than just the way they promote. | ||
| I feel less pressure. | ||
| Yeah, the quality of the comedy is better at the store. | ||
| And there's something about that that I think is like, one of the things that's happened from the seven years ago, or the seven years when I was gone versus now, which I've been back like almost four years, it'll be four years in November, or five years in November, is that... | ||
| It's better for me to see guys like you and to see guys like Neil Brennan and all these, just working with killers, just this lineup of like, where I know that if there's 400 people in that audience, they're coming to see everybody. | ||
| They're not just coming to see me. | ||
| And I think that's critical for developing material. | ||
| I think it's critical for putting, piecing stuff together and putting an act together. | ||
| It's like, I need a balanced audience. | ||
| I don't want to perform for the converted. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I feel like the store is like a gym where you're working out. | ||
| I don't get the same laughs at the store that I do if I go to Largo and every single person there has paid $30 just to see me. | ||
| It makes it easier, but because I've worked at the store, it's like I've earned that at Largo. | ||
| But if I just did Largo all the time and that was it, I wouldn't be as good. | ||
| You need to suffer a little bit. | ||
| They're so nice at Largo. | ||
| I did Whitney's show at Largo. | ||
| It was so nice. | ||
| I did this bit about mocking feminists. | ||
| And I could say, like, I don't like feminists for the same reason why I don't like white people who are only into white people. | ||
| Like, I like people who like everybody. | ||
| Like, I'm not interested in anybody who's really only into one thing. | ||
| You know, like, come on. | ||
| Stop. | ||
| Like, it's nonsense. | ||
| Like, do women need equal rights? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I don't want to hear you talk about it all the time. | ||
| It's annoying. | ||
| And you can see the tightening up, like someone saying that they don't like feminists. | ||
| It's like, oh, you guys are indoctrinated. | ||
| I see what this is. | ||
| And so then I felt like, and it helped me actually develop this one piece that I was doing, and that sort of a It rounded out this one piece I was doing because I was trying to figure out a way that I could explain it to someone who might have a preconceived notion about who I am. | ||
| To say it in a way that makes people that were hesitant Laugh. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Versus savages at 11.30 on a Saturday night that are hammered. | ||
| Yeah, so Whitney Cummings' crowd wasn't into your anti-feminist? | ||
| They laughed! | ||
| They laughed. | ||
| Because the punchline was good, and I had a place to go with it. | ||
| And the place to go was ultimately mocking men's rights activists. | ||
| The real thing was... | ||
| The setup for that joke is, I don't like anybody who's into one thing. | ||
| And I go, but what drives me the most fucking crazy is men's rights activists. | ||
| Like, every men's rights activist I ever met, I just want to grab them and go, dude, we got them all. | ||
| We got all the rights. | ||
| We got them all. | ||
| I can't believe that's a real thing, a men's rights activist. | ||
| Well, it's a real thing if you get divorced and you have child, it's for child custody. | ||
| Those things are real. | ||
| Like, guys really, I know men who have gotten really fucked over in divorce, where their wife hired a fucking killer lawyer, and they dragged them through. | ||
| See, the thing about, and I learned this from Phil Hartman, Unfortunately, before he died, I was trying to tell him to get divorced. | ||
| And I said, just give her half, man. | ||
| You'll make more money. | ||
| He goes, it's not half. | ||
| He goes, it's two thirds. | ||
| He goes, the fucking lawyers take a third. | ||
| It's a goddamn scam. | ||
| You know, he was furious about it because apparently he had been trying to figure it out, like how to do it. | ||
| But I had a friend whose wife, ex-wife, Dragged it out on purpose because she wanted him to pay the legal bills. | ||
| So he had to pay for her lawyer, he had to pay for his lawyer, and then he had to pay for all of the times that she decided to change the goalposts and renegotiate. | ||
| No one can say that you can't renegotiate. | ||
| So she would just renegotiate and just drag things out. | ||
| And her goal was to try to drain him financially. | ||
| So she was doing this on purpose, like targeting him. | ||
| So he was essentially paying for the general of the army that was plotting to murder him. | ||
| And he was slowly going crazy and I was watching my friend go crazy and it took several years for it to be completely resolved and he's still paying her. | ||
| He's been divorced for I think 12 years now and he still pays her. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| They didn't have a child. | ||
| And he has a family now. | ||
| He's married with children now. | ||
| And he still pays this person. | ||
| Like, he fucked her so hard she can't work. | ||
| 12 years later. | ||
| Yeah, so that's where men's rights activists have a point. | ||
| Because if you're in a state that's particularly progressive or liberal in regards to alimony and child support... | ||
| Well, the only thing that we win on that is Tom Arnold. | ||
| We got one on the board for Tom Arnold. | ||
| But the problem with that is I love Roseanne more than I love Tom Arnold. | ||
| No offense, Tom. | ||
| But I do. | ||
| So it bothered me that Roseanne had to pay him. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| You can work. | ||
| How come when you were the successful person, if that successful person says, fucking kick bricks, get out of here, you have to pay them? | ||
| That person has to pay the person they're getting rid of? | ||
| Why? | ||
| Oh, he's used to her lifestyle. | ||
| What? | ||
| That I'm used to it is the craziest thing. | ||
| It's crazy! | ||
| The only thing that makes sense is childcare. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| Like, hey... | ||
| This person is taking care of the children. | ||
| They're your children. | ||
| You guys had these children together. | ||
| You have to contribute to the money that it costs to raise a child. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| What I don't get is alimony. | ||
| I just don't get it. | ||
| We're not together anymore. | ||
| Know how we were before we were together and you didn't have any money and then you met me and now I have money and then you got used to having money? | ||
| Well, you're going to have to get used to not having money because now you don't have any money because now we're not together anymore. | ||
| Or like a year, maybe. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, let her take some time to get back on her feet. | ||
| Don't be a prostitute or anything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You don't have to be a... | ||
| I think it's just bitterness. | ||
| It's like, I want to take you for everything that I can. | ||
| Like, one of my friends who was going through a divorce, he was like, of all my friends who've gotten a divorce... | ||
| 80% of them, if they have kids, the wife accuses the husband of molesting the kids. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| Just for visitation. | ||
| For negotiation. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Well, lawyers are onto that now. | ||
| This is actually something that my friend was warned of when him and his wife were splitting up. | ||
| Like, is your wife malicious? | ||
| Will she make some sort of a baseless accusation? | ||
| And he's like, how so? | ||
| And then they went into that. | ||
| Yeah, man, there's evil people out there. | ||
| And there's also this thing that happens when people break up with someone. | ||
| If there's someone who doesn't want to be with you anymore, someone that you deeply loved and cared about, you want them to suffer. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| I mean, it's normal. | ||
| So I guess it's not that weird. | ||
| But the evil, vicious jealousy. | ||
| You know, like, you see that vicious jealousy in chimpanzees? | ||
| Like, one of the things that chimpanzees do when they attack people, one of the things they attack people over is unfairness. | ||
| Like, there was a terrible story about a guy who had kept a pet chimp and then brought the chimp a birthday cake on his birthday. | ||
| Brian Posehn has a whole bit about it. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| Does he really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the other chimps found out that this chimp was getting a birthday cake, and they saw it, and they weren't getting any cake, and they were fucking furious. | ||
| So someone had inadvertently left one of the gates open, so the chimps got out and tore this guy apart because of a birthday cake. | ||
| But it's that thing. | ||
| It's not like it was affecting them. | ||
| It's like he was doing something bad to them, so they got out and killed him. | ||
| No, they ripped his dick off because they didn't like the fact they gave the other chimp a birthday cake. | ||
| Took his dick, took his fingers. | ||
| Took his feet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Posehn's bit's so funny. | ||
| He's like, the worst thing about that story for that guy is that everyone's going to want to hear it forever. | ||
| Because it starts with, so I was bringing a birthday cake to a chimpanzee, and then you've got to hear the rest. | ||
| But that anger and jealousy, there's an evolutionary basis for it. | ||
| Oh, is that what he looks like now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh my god. | ||
| I'm not going to show it. | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| His fingers are missing. | ||
| His face is missing. | ||
| He's got one eye. | ||
| His nose is gone. | ||
| Oh, look at that frown. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Well, his face was ripped apart. | ||
| He probably stitched it together that way. | ||
| Awful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it's fucking awful, man. | |
| Yeah, you can't own a chimp, you crazy assholes. | ||
| They're the most vicious of all the primates next to people. | ||
| Aren't they good for, like, you can put, like, train them for, like, the first, like, five years of their life, and then they forget everything. | ||
| They just decide they're gonna fuck you up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they're so strong. | ||
| What is that one doing? | ||
| Is that the chimp? | ||
| No, no, but it just popped up in the same group of pictures. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| Hairless chimp. | ||
| They're so mean. | ||
| It's such a mean species. | ||
| You know, there's a problem with colobus monkeys in parts of Africa where chimps live, because they've eaten so many colobus monkeys that their population's down 97%. | ||
| Yeah, they rip them apart and eat them while they're alive. | ||
| Are they tiny colobus monkeys? | ||
| No, they're not big. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Big enough to eat. | ||
| But this is a David Attenborough documentary from the 90s where they first discovered that chimps eat monkeys. | ||
| They really didn't know. | ||
| They thought the chimps were basically herbivores. | ||
| And then they got this video footage of them hunting these monkeys and the way they would corral them and beat them through the trees and catch them. | ||
| And this monkey's screaming while this chimp is ripping it apart from the hips, just chewing it and pulling it apart. | ||
| And he's like... | ||
| And he's like basically ripping his legs and his ass end off and just eating it alive. | ||
| Goddamn. | ||
| They're fucking mean, man. | ||
| They're fucking mean. | ||
| It's a mean animal. | ||
| But I get the fact that, look, everything's mean in the jungle. | ||
| There's big cats and poisonous snakes and spiders and it's just a hard, hard, hard world. | ||
| But the thing that gets me is the jealousy. | ||
| Because I don't think other animals experience jealousy. | ||
| The way chimps do. | ||
| Is that it right there? | ||
| From the Attenborough documentary. | ||
| The end of the clip where they actually caught it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's a monkey in his hand. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| Yeah, dude. | ||
| The videos of it, killing it while they're pulling it apart. | ||
| But that jealousy that, I want you to suffer. | ||
| I didn't get that fucking cake. | ||
| Oh, you don't let me have that cake? | ||
| I can't get any cake? | ||
| I'm going to pull your fucking dick off. | ||
| I'm going to bite your nose off. | ||
| That is a... | ||
| That's a strange trait for an animal to have. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I think it's a terrible trait for a human being to have. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| We are animals. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's something you've got to work on. | ||
| But when it comes to divorce, that's that same thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's like that same, I want you to fucking suffer. | |
| I want to pull your dick off. | ||
| And that's why people hire hitmen and shit to kill their ex-wives and kill their ex-husbands. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, yeah. | |
| People don't get less crazy as they age. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. | |
| A lot of times they get more because then they realize it's almost over. | ||
| The ride's over, and now, you know, you're a 65-year-old lady, no one wants to fuck you. | ||
| And you're a 65-year-old man, no one wants to fuck you either. | ||
| And now, all of a sudden, you guys are battling, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Battling over finances and this and that. | ||
| I gave you the best years of my life. | ||
| That's my favorite. | ||
| I did a girl once when we broke up. | ||
| She said, I wasted all this time with you. | ||
| I said, oh. | ||
| I go, I thought we were dating. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I didn't know you were investing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wasted it. | ||
| Oh, you wasted it. | ||
| Well... | ||
| I guess every relationship when it's over is a waste. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| That's so bizarre. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Bizarre way of looking at it. | ||
| Yeah, enjoy the present. | ||
| Enjoy the time you had together. | ||
| Yeah, but if you're thinking about it in terms of, like, hitching a rod on a successful train. | ||
| Yeah, if your goal is to get married, and you're with someone for five years, and then you break up, like, oh, you know, I should have been with someone else. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Who would have married me? | ||
| Now I gotta find someone else. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The jealousy thing about the breakup, it's so normal. | ||
| It's so hard for people to not be jealous. | ||
| Very few people ever break up and go, Hey man, she's cool. | ||
| It just didn't work out. | ||
| I was a dick. | ||
| She needed some growing. | ||
| We both needed time away. | ||
| Hey, I wish her well. | ||
| I've never really gotten jealous. | ||
| I always like when they move on. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| When they get a new boyfriend, you're just like, oh, thank God. | ||
| But that's because you're a comic. | ||
| You have opportunities. | ||
| Yeah, true. | ||
| But it's like you're not their responsibility anymore. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| If they're single, they can still call you up in the middle of the night. | ||
| Get mad at you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Still get mad about things. | ||
| Let's talk about this again. | ||
| Once you're dating someone else, you're like, all right. | ||
| You're someone else's problem now. | ||
| The best is when they have a kid with someone else. | ||
| You're like, yeah. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| It's over, baby! | ||
| Yeah, never talk to you again. | ||
| I'm free. | ||
| It's interesting, man. | ||
| It's an interesting thing when you decide to... | ||
| Touch naked bodies with a person. | ||
| You create this bond by doing things with your bodies and spending time together. | ||
| And then you separate. | ||
| But you're always going to have this, yeah, but I used to touch naked bodies with her. | ||
| Yeah, we used to get together and we used to do things together. | ||
| We don't do it anymore, but I did it. | ||
| I did it back in the day. | ||
| I got her naked and we got naked together. | ||
| Yeah, you had history. | ||
| Yeah, it's history. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| She'll never forget. | ||
| I won't either. | ||
| We touched each other. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I like the idea of relationships, looking back fondly on relationships. | ||
| I never felt like, oh, I wasted my time. | ||
| There are people that I've dated that I'm like, probably shouldn't have done that. | ||
| But for the most part, I try to have good feelings about it. | ||
| You don't want to hate a period of your life. | ||
| No, it's pointless. | ||
| But there's lessons learned. | ||
| Those ones that I've had that were like, ugh. | ||
| That's how you know when you date someone and it's cool. | ||
| When they're good, you get it. | ||
| I dated this girl a long, long time ago who was super negative. | ||
| Just super negative all the time. | ||
| And then I dated this other girl right afterwards who was not negative at all. | ||
| She was always laughing about stuff and joking around no matter what. | ||
| Even if her car could get in an accident, she'd take a deep breath and go... | ||
| Well, that car's fucked up! | ||
| And she would start laughing. | ||
| And I was like, oh, there's different ways to handle things. | ||
| Like, if you get stuck with your high school sweetheart, and she's a pain in the ass forever, like, you never understand. | ||
| Like, there are the exact same circumstances. | ||
| One person is going to handle it completely differently. | ||
| And if you're with that person, it's going to be a totally different experience. | ||
| Where it'll be a bonding experience versus them woe-is-me-ing for the next six months and bringing it back to... | ||
| I can't even look at a Taurus because it reminds me of when I got in that accident. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A Taurus hit my car! | |
| Like, fuck, that was a year ago! | ||
| I like when people are together for a long time, they break up, and then the guy gets married to the next woman he runs into. | ||
| Instantly. | ||
| Instantly. | ||
| He just found the opposite of what he'd been dealing with and was just so over the moon about it. | ||
| They had to marry her right away. | ||
| That happened to a buddy of mine. | ||
| He dated an actress. | ||
| And then it was just brutal. | ||
| Everything was career this, career that. | ||
| It was about her career. | ||
| He was trying to help her career. | ||
| And then they broke up. | ||
| And he's like, I'm never getting married again. | ||
| A month later, he's with this new chick. | ||
| And he's living with her two months later. | ||
| And then he's married six months later. | ||
| I'm like, what happened? | ||
| He goes, I realized it wasn't that I didn't want to be married. | ||
| He goes, I just didn't want to be married to her. | ||
| Because I realized, like, there's some people out there that I get along great with. | ||
| And if you don't bail on a bad relationship, you don't know that there's, you can be, and you are going to be different. | ||
| That's the other thing. | ||
| Like, I'm different with different people. | ||
| You're different with, like, you react better to certain people. | ||
| And certain people's personalities, you jive better with them. | ||
| You have more fun with them. | ||
| It's more entertaining. | ||
| And you get to reintroduce yourself. | ||
| The other person knows you for this five-year period of time when maybe you weren't at your best. | ||
| But you've already used all your tricks. | ||
| If you give a girl diamond earrings, you can never give her diamond earrings again for as long as you live. | ||
| That present is over for now. | ||
| And then when you get this one with someone new, it's a clean slate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You can impress them. | ||
| Yeah, they haven't heard your fucking dumb stories already. | ||
| You can be like, I'll listen to this. | ||
| Well, I always tell guys, strive to be the person you pretend to be when you're trying to get laid. | ||
| If you can be that person, that real person all the time, which is very difficult to do, but if you can be that person most of the time, if not all the time, you'll have a better life. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I would agree with that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's fun to try to impress people. | ||
| It's fun when you meet someone. | ||
| Like, boy, wait till they see how witty I am. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think it's weird, like, with me, I'm like... | ||
| I don't like, when someone's just into me just because they know who I am, you're a famous comedian, I'm like a little annoyed, but if they have no idea who I am, I'm also a little annoyed. | ||
| You know, it's like, there should be perks to this that I'm missing out on here. | ||
| Yeah, did you not Google me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, you're not a comedy fan? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Are you from another country? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Could you imagine dating someone who didn't like comedy? | ||
| Anthony, I love you. | ||
| You're amazing, but I don't like stand-up. | ||
| I mean, if it was someone who just didn't like stand-up but thought I was great, I could handle it. | ||
| They didn't like stand-up in general, but they like your material in particular. | ||
| Like, do you watch a lot of stand-up? | ||
| Me? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I watch it at the clubs. | ||
| I very rarely sit down and watch a special. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| Do you watch a special ever? | ||
| Like, right now I'm working on it and trying to put together a new hour, so I'm trying to go back and watch stuff, but for years I didn't watch anything. | ||
| But like, it's funny, like the three comics that I watch are you, Delia, and Sebastian, because I follow you guys at the store. | ||
| So it's like, I'm in the room sitting there, and you're the only three that I watch. | ||
| I could like recite your act word for word, and I don't watch anyone else. | ||
| It's so funny to me. | ||
| Well, I think it's great to be, again, at a place like the store where you can see all these different styles and all these different people doing it. | ||
| And you also see how we kind of influence each other in the slightest bit. | ||
| And, you know, that we're all working in these really hot rooms where it's all packed. | ||
| But I think it's good to sit down and watch, you know, John Mulaney when he did his, what was that? | ||
| Where was his? | ||
| Radio City? | ||
| Radio City. | ||
| Radio City. | ||
| Or, you know, Dave Chappelle, wherever he did his. | ||
| He did his in D.C., I think, right? | ||
| The big one. | ||
| Wasn't it in D.C.? The last one. | ||
| I think it was in L.A. The last one? | ||
| Well, he did the store with the belly room with the little one. | ||
| He did the belly room. | ||
| He did the other one where he's wearing like the military shirt. | ||
| Yeah, with the C on it. | ||
| The O.J. thing. | ||
| We talked about O.J. That was in L.A. And there was one in Austin. | ||
| There may have been one more in D.C. I thought the most recent bigger one was in D.C. But either way, maybe you're right. | ||
| Well, Jamie will find it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I think it's good to see. | |
| It's good to see how different people do it. | ||
| I always enjoy watching Cat Williams, particularly in the beginning, because a lot of times he'll just run out on stage. | ||
| And he's running around on stage for five or ten minutes before the fucking first joke comes out. | ||
| And he's pointing at people in the audience and sweating and going crazy. | ||
| And it's so different than the way anybody that I know does it. | ||
| It's good to see that, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think the most discussed stand-up special of the past year was not in Annette. | ||
| It was Cat Williams. | ||
| Did you see it? | ||
| Yes, the one he did from Florida, where it opens up with 10 minutes of Florida material. | ||
| Like 15 minutes of Jacksonville material that is apparently destroying it. | ||
| I couldn't get enough of it. | ||
| We watched it 100 times. | ||
| Yeah, but it tapered off pretty hard. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I tapered off real hard when he was doing the Trump stuff. | ||
| It's like, wow, this stuff is like half-baked. | ||
| Yeah, it looked like he had a bit that they made him cut. | ||
| And so he had to just do the hour anyway. | ||
| That's what I assumed from having watched it. | ||
| I doubt they do that, though. | ||
| They don't tell you to do shit. | ||
| They don't tell me to do shit. | ||
| I don't think they're going to tell him to do shit. | ||
| They may have been like, this is already a bit. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| As simple as that. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It seemed to me that it was almost like he had some shit to say, but maybe hadn't been doing a lot of stand-up. | ||
| I don't know how much that guy works out. | ||
| I don't see him anywhere. | ||
| I always wonder about those guys. | ||
| The guys who you don't see in the clubs... | ||
| You know, like, Bill, you know, Bill Bird saw a special one day, and we were doing a set together at the Ice House, and he came into the green room, like, frothing up his mouth, and he's like, he goes, the fucking guy, I forget, I know who he was talking about, I'll tell you later, but he was like, the fucking guy doesn't do the clubs anymore. | ||
| He doesn't do the clubs. | ||
| He goes, he's watching this cringy bullshit, and he was, like, angry, you know, he's like, you gotta do the fucking clubs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| People get too comfortable. | ||
| It's only their fans. | ||
| They're just preaching to their fan base. | ||
| A guy like Bill Maher, who's not changing anyone's mind, just like people are applauding. | ||
| They know they're going to applaud before they even get there. | ||
| I would never do a comedy club. | ||
| He doesn't do comedy clubs at all? | ||
| I'm sure he does not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whew. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I think you really have to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I think so, too. | ||
| Yeah, well, he's in this weird category, too, right? | ||
| Where he's not just doing comedy. | ||
| He's got to do, everything has to be political. | ||
| Because this whole thing is about political shit. | ||
| Like, his show, his persona, who he is. | ||
| You know, he donated a million dollars to the Democratic Party. | ||
| Like, he's, it's all politics. | ||
| Oh, all of it. | ||
| And I can't stand political humor just because it's so easy. | ||
| You're either making everyone mad or you're making everyone really happy, but it doesn't really matter what the joke is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's, uh... | ||
| And then, if you're doing stuff about, like, the Speaker of the House... | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| When someone's like, so the Mueller report, it's like, fuck, man. | ||
| Like, no. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know who's, like, super deep into politics on the right is Nick DiPaolo. | ||
| Like, every time I talk to him... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He wants to talk about the fucking Steele dossier. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Let's talk about all this different, all the shit Obama did. | ||
| How about when Obama did this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How do you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How do you even know this? | ||
| I know. | ||
| The knowledge of it, like, I once got a phone call, like, before the last election, like, you know, a year ago. | ||
| And they're like, we want to ask you about, like, how involved would you say are you with politics? | ||
| And I'm like, very, actually, I'm pretty passionate right now. | ||
| And they're like, how informed would you say you are? | ||
| I'm like, I'd say I'm very informed. | ||
| And they're like, okay. | ||
| And they start asking me questions, and I did not know what the fuck they were talking about. | ||
| Like, I hadn't heard of any of these things, any of these bills. | ||
| Like, I have no idea. | ||
| I have no idea what's going on. | ||
| It's like the difference between a casual sports fan and someone who really understands all the drafts and all the picks from different colleges, and this guy's got potential, and this guy needs to work on his defense. | ||
| Another 40 times. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Yeah, the people who know the combine numbers. | ||
| Yeah, bench press 225, 47 times. | ||
| There's people that know that stuff. | ||
| It's exhausting. | ||
| Because it's so involved. | ||
| If you really want to be paying attention to everything that's going on with Nancy Pelosi, you've got to be paying attention to that all day long. | ||
| And most of the people that do that, they're nuts. | ||
| It's like sports. | ||
| It's sports, but in a different way. | ||
| This is the thing that you're wrapped up in. | ||
| Although, it does shape our world. | ||
| As right-wing comics go, though, there's not a lot of them. | ||
| Nick DiPaolo's the king. | ||
| Because he's actually really fucking funny. | ||
| He's right-wing as a person, and he's conservative, but he's also a great stand-up comedian. | ||
| But did he get more rights? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| As he got older? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I remember DiPaolo. | ||
| He's one of my favorites when I would see him on TV as a kid. | ||
| And I know him a little bit now. | ||
| But the right things seem to come up more and more in the past 10 years. | ||
| Yeah, he was always an angry guy. | ||
| But he became like an old angry guy that's really into politics as he got older. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I guess part of it is it works for them. | ||
| People love to hear it. | ||
| There's not a lot of those guys. | ||
| Like, who does the right have to bank on in terms of, like, comics that they could go see? | ||
| Tim Allen. | ||
| Barely. | ||
| Does he do stand-up anymore? | ||
| I think he does, like, I think he goes up to the Laugh Factory. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Does he? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, so maybe he's one of those guys, like, when was the last time he went on stage? | ||
| Six months ago. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe I'm wrong. | ||
| But who else? | ||
| Okay, so you got Tim Allen and Nick DiPaolo. | ||
| There's gotta be more. | ||
| There must be. | ||
| I mean, Norton kind of leans right a little bit, more libertarian. | ||
| But he doesn't do a lot of politics jokes. | ||
| He'll talk about it. | ||
| But who the fuck else? | ||
| There's, like, no one. | ||
| But if you wanted to, like, left-wing comedians, you could start with Michelle Wolfe and work your way up. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| There's millions of them. | ||
| Michelle Wolfe wasn't even, like, left-wing. | ||
| I think the correspondents, everyone's like, this is a star-making turn, and I think it almost ruined her. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Like, yes, because her show, Netflix, was called The Break. | ||
| Like, it was called The Break, and it was like, we're going to take a break from all of this and just talk about, like, other things going on in the world. | ||
| We don't need to be focused on politics. | ||
| And after that, after the correspondence dinner, it was like, the opening show was like her going after Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and you're like, oh, you got forced into this, you know? | ||
| You found a niche. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's tricky. | ||
| If you find a thing that, like, works, and then people are like, you should really concentrate on that. | ||
| Like, I remember Jamie Massad gave a friend of mine advice once, way back in the day. | ||
| He's like, you should be Generation X guy. | ||
| When you go on stage, you should be, I'm from Generation X. Every time, you know, like, my generation, Generation X think this and talk like that. | ||
| Like, he was giving him advice. | ||
| And I was like, listen to me. | ||
| Don't listen to that. | ||
| Has Jamie Massad ever given good advice? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Ask Tiffany Haddish. | ||
| He manages her, right? | ||
| So he's doing something, right? | ||
| He manages her? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, recently? | ||
| I heard she fired everybody. | ||
| Maybe she fired him, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| She's a wild woman. | ||
| She can do whatever the fuck she wants now. | ||
| I'm so happy for her. | ||
| I knew her when the shit wasn't going well. | ||
| She's always been wild, though. | ||
| She's a wild person. | ||
| In a good way. | ||
| She's one of the two people that I saw on stage and was like, oh, you're going to be a star. | ||
| I didn't know anything about her, but I was like, you're just a star. | ||
| Was it when she was queefing into the microphone? | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| It was not that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was not that. | |
| You ever see her do that? | ||
| No. | ||
| Dude, she can make the most ungodly sounds with her vagina. | ||
| Like, for real? | ||
| Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. | ||
| She takes the microphone, she puts it on her pussy and goes... | ||
| Like, she knows how to do it. | ||
| She has, apparently, she has an ability to make a noise with her vagina on cue. | ||
| Man, I'm glad I did go before her at the improv. | ||
| If I had to follow that, I'd be furious. | ||
| In front of six people? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Can I get a new mic, please? | ||
| Yeah, I've followed her before. | ||
| I didn't even think about it. | ||
| I probably should've. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I figured, like, the genes are filter enough. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You'd hope so. | ||
| Yeah, we'd hope. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Still, it's not ideal. | ||
| Yeah, like, that type of person, like, that wild personality that, like, a gal that has, like, what the fuck else could she have done other than stand-up? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But there's a lot of those people out there that never find stand-up. | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| And their life just becomes chaos. | ||
| Like the crazy person at the office. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it's just stuck there. | ||
| And, you know, you get fired from enough of those jobs, you can't even get that office job anymore because, you know, word gets out. | ||
| Oh, yeah, don't hire Tiffany. | ||
| That crazy bitch, she's never going to be there. | ||
| And when she is there, she's going to queef into the fucking loudspeaker. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, part of me says, no, I don't wish that there was some sort of an organized program to get into comedy, because figure it out. | ||
| I figured it out. | ||
| You figured it out. | ||
| All of us did. | ||
| But then part of me says, man, there's so many kids out there. | ||
| There's probably a 16-year-old kid right now who sees the hypocrisy In all the things these adults are doing, and he fucking hates class, and he's sitting there right now going nuts, or there's a girl who's feeling the same way about all her stupid friends and her mom and all these fucking people that want her to be a certain way, and she's like, Jesus Christ, I gotta get the fuck away from these people. | ||
| And she makes her friends laugh, but nobody ever tells her, hey, listen to me. | ||
| You could do this. | ||
| You could talk shit about things. | ||
| You could be a really funny comedian. | ||
| You gotta figure out a way to do that. | ||
| Nobody does that. | ||
| It's so... | ||
| The number of people that have the... | ||
| How many people have you ever met in your life that have the potential to be a comic, but never did it? | ||
| You're around them, you're like, damn, this guy's funny. | ||
| Could have been a comic. | ||
| Five or six. | ||
| There are people who were as funny as me in college, who just went on and got jobs, and I got funnier. | ||
| You know, like, I knew people like that. | ||
| One of the funniest guys I've ever met in my life was, like, an executive producer's PA. But he was so goddamn funny, I couldn't believe it. | ||
| But he, like, I don't think it would have translated to the stage. | ||
| There's something, like, there's something you have to figure out in yourself to become a good comedian. | ||
| Even if you're the funniest guy in the world. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know, it's a different muscle, you know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I like that there's so many different ways to do it. | ||
| Like, I started in L.A. And people are like, you should not start in L.A. Hinchcliffe did, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Ari did, too. | ||
| I think it helped me because it was like you had to get good right away. | ||
| Well, Ari did open mics in D.C. at first, but then basically started out in L.A. When I met him, he was a doorman at the Comedy Store and just a raw open miker. | ||
| It's hard to start out in LA, but it can be done. | ||
| Especially now. | ||
| Especially if you don't know any better. | ||
| I found out years after I'd started in LA that you should not start in LA. It wasn't like I was going to move and go. | ||
| I was already living here when I decided to do stand-up, but I wasn't going to move to Chicago and start there. | ||
| Some people do. | ||
| It doesn't seem to work. | ||
| No. | ||
| I don't know anybody who's ever moved from LA to, like, a satellite community, like Denver or somewhere like that, unless they were, like, already really established. | ||
| I don't know anybody who was starting out who moved somewhere where it worked out well. | ||
| No, they always, they come back or, like, they go to Austin, you know, I'm going to try it out there, and it's like, it doesn't, you're just starting over. | ||
| Yeah, you got to start there. | ||
| There's, yeah, there's no right or wrong way to do it, but, man, it would be nice if somebody sort of, I've collected thoughts on what to do and what not to do. | ||
| Yeah, some people are like, oh, you've got to get in the road. | ||
| Just get in the road. | ||
| And it's like, no, that's not great advice if you're doing C-rooms. | ||
| It's just going to make you hate the road. | ||
| I've seen people who just look worn through. | ||
| Every night they're going up and they either have to be a crowd pleaser because the person's just coming to see comedy. | ||
| I'm so lucky people come to see Anthony Jessel and not just a comedy show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Because that can be brutal and painful. | ||
| And I know a lot of people who are like, no, just get in the road. | ||
| And then their act suffers. | ||
| They have this hacky act all of a sudden because they had to do it like that. | ||
| You know what gives me serious anxiety? | ||
| When I find out that someone got a Vegas residency. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I go, how many nights a week? | |
| Six. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Six nights a week at the stratosphere. | |
| It sounds... | ||
| I mean, someone told me David Spade was thinking about doing one. | ||
| And he went to go see Louie Anderson, who was doing one. | ||
| This was before Baskets. | ||
| And he was like, it was just the saddest thing I'd ever seen. | ||
| That was like Carlin's Last Stand was a Vegas residency. | ||
| Did he have a Vegas residency? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where was he at? | ||
| I forget where he was, but he had a meltdown where he went off on the crowd, just calling them all pieces of shit. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, and then had to go to rehab. | ||
| Was like, I'm addicted to painkillers. | ||
| And then I don't think he ever performed again. | ||
| Well, he died before... | ||
| He died like he was performing when he died. | ||
| I mean, I think he was at a hotel. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm pretty sure he was sleeping in a hotel that he was performing at when he died. | ||
| I would believe that. | ||
| But that last special he did was terrible. | ||
| He's reading half of it. | ||
| Oh, I didn't see that. | ||
| It was just like a swan song for him. | ||
| But I think that was after the Vegas residency, so he must have been doing more. | ||
| Yeah, his schedule was very, very hectic and unusual. | ||
| He was doing one hour a year. | ||
| An hour special that he would film, and he would write it all out. | ||
| He would write it all out and then tweak it a little bit, but it was more of a monologue than it was set-up, punchline, jokes. | ||
| He was falling into this more of a social commentator in some aspects than he was a stand-up towards the end. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Oh yeah, and someone told me that a lot of the reason he did an hour every year was because of tax problems. | ||
| The IRS was coming at him hard, and so he had to be working that much, and it kind of made him miserable. | ||
| You know the story about his 9-11 story, right? | ||
| Tell me. | ||
| Where he recorded a special called I Kinda Like It When A Lot Of People Die. | ||
| That was the name of the special. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, that's right. | |
| And he has this whole, it closes with a big long 20 minute thing about like when he hears about people dying, he like the more the better. | ||
| And he filmed it on like September 10th. | ||
| And then the next day came in and was like, we've got to cancel this. | ||
| No one can ever see this or hear this. | ||
| And now you can get the album. | ||
| But even in the album, he's reading it. | ||
| They destroyed the actual footage from the taping. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They destroyed it? | ||
| Oh, he was just like, no one can ever see this. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| He recorded it in Vegas at MGM Grand on September 9th and 10th. | ||
| September 9th and 10th. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What was it called? | ||
| I kind of like it when a lot of people die. | ||
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| He must have woken up the morning of September 11th and go, did I manifest this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| I kind of like it when a lot of people die. | ||
| And so the audio CD, it's just him talking? | ||
| It's like him working out the... | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| It says streaming. | ||
| Like the audio streaming with Amazon Prime's audio. | ||
| So there's no video of it? | ||
| No. | ||
| See if there is. | ||
| Some person who works somewhere might have preserved it. | ||
| I mean, I feel like I would have heard about it. | ||
| I mean, I listened to the bit, and he's like, I've got to read this. | ||
| This is how I do it. | ||
| So it's like a very early version of it. | ||
| But it's not great. | ||
| But I mean, I can't even imagine taping a special on September 10th. | ||
| He had some dark moments in his career. | ||
| I took some friends to see him in 1988 at the Hampton Beach Casino. | ||
| I think that's what it was called. | ||
| In Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. | ||
| It was like a place where people would go up for vacation. | ||
| And we went to see George Carlin there way back in the day. | ||
| And he always had the same opening act. | ||
| I kind of knew even back then. | ||
| I guess I was an open-miker then. | ||
| I was just starting out. | ||
| I knew there were certain guys who took people on the road with them that were terrible. | ||
| They took people on the road with them that just didn't... | ||
| They weren't good comics, but they made them look like heroes. | ||
| They did it because they were friends with them, or because they just wanted to have the worst comic ever go up before that? | ||
| It's a good question. | ||
| I guess it would vary. | ||
| But for sure, there's certain comics that like it when people go out in front of them suck. | ||
| They want that. | ||
| There's certain comics that you see them taking people on the road and you look at it and you're like, what the fuck? | ||
| You're taking that guy with you? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Why are you torturing people like that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the opening act did better than George. | ||
| He had a terrible set. | ||
| He had this whole rant that he was doing. | ||
| Unquestionably one of the greatest comics of all time. | ||
| But he had hours that were just not good. | ||
| And there was a period of time where it seemed like he just missed it. | ||
| Like it was missing. | ||
| Whether it was his personal life was off or whatever it was. | ||
| But he had this whole rant that was like, fuck this. | ||
| And he was like, and fuck Israel. | ||
| And fuck comedy clubs. | ||
| Like, he was saying, fuck comedy clubs. | ||
| Like, this is like this whole bit. | ||
| And he was reading it off of a yellow legal pad. | ||
| And the whole audience was standing there not understanding where this was going. | ||
| We're waiting for the jokes. | ||
| Where's the hilarity? | ||
| And it just didn't exist. | ||
| And my friends were mad at me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Because I had taken them from where we live. | ||
| We lived in Revere. | ||
| And we all drove all the way up to New Hampshire. | ||
| Like, yeah, we're going to go see George Carlin. | ||
| It's going to be awesome. | ||
| And it was terrible. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| I remember Louis C.K. in an interview years ago was talking about how the pressure came off of him to always have a good show. | ||
| But he said audience members love saying, oh, I saw George Carlin once, and he was awesome. | ||
| But they really love saying, you know, I saw Carlin once, and he was horrible. | ||
| Like, they still get the experience and the story of it. | ||
| And it's theirs forever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I guess. | |
| So you don't have to worry about doing a bad show. | ||
| It's way better, though, if they say you were funny. | ||
| I think to see a legend bomb would be great. | ||
| Well, if you were a Carlin fan, you got to see those. | ||
| If you went to see him live a bunch of times. | ||
| Yeah, he had those rough spots, man. | ||
| You know, it's one of those things. | ||
| If you're going to do an hour of stand-up every year, you're going to have some rough ones. | ||
| There's no way around that. | ||
| Oh, 100%. | ||
| It seems like that's just... | ||
| I mean, it can be done. | ||
| I think it can be done. | ||
| I mean, I think you can put together... | ||
| Like, I'm six months in from my last special. | ||
| I think I could do another special in six months, but it wouldn't be as good as my last one, I don't think. | ||
| I just don't think it would. | ||
| I just think you need time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One a year is crazy. | ||
| One a year is insane. | ||
| There are guys like Jimmy Carr who, while they're touring, they're writing jokes and just putting them away. | ||
| So at the end of the tour, when they tape the special, they have all these jokes they can go through and look at and then start the new tour. | ||
| From that, that seems like... | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| people just want the money and they're famous enough they can just go up and just get through it and i'm like this is your legacy yes like why would you want to put out a bad special ever i don't care what they're paying you make sure it's great i feel the same way And I feel like those people that watch that, when you do do that, man, if you don't acknowledge that you fucked them over, they're never going to trust you again. | ||
| If you don't say, hey, look, that one wasn't a good special. | ||
| I gave it a shot. | ||
| It just wasn't right. | ||
| It didn't come out right. | ||
| I thought it was pretty good. | ||
| And then the taping didn't go well. | ||
| If you don't do that, they're not going to listen to you, man. | ||
| They're like, this is my best work. | ||
| Oh, this is your best work? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, what the fuck? | ||
| You can fool them once. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| If I went on tour right now and just did the same material from the special, people would be like, okay, but they're not coming back the next time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're going to get mad at you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you do a special, once it's on Netflix, you're done with that material. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| Done. | ||
| Some people don't. | ||
| I try not even to remember it. | ||
| I'm an idiot in the way that I assume that the entire audience has seen everything I've ever done. | ||
| Good. | ||
| I really do think that. | ||
| Even if it's one guy in the back who's like, I've heard these before, no one else has heard it, it still drives me crazy. | ||
| I've got too much pride. | ||
| I have the same feeling, and I'll say sometimes, too, and here's, like, if something comes up, I go, I have an old bit on this, and I'll say the bit, but I'll let them know, this is an old bit. | ||
| Like, this is, you know, I got this old bit. | ||
| Yeah, some people though, when someone comes to see Jim Gaffigan, if they don't see Hot Pockets, they get fucking mad. | ||
| I saw Gaffigan in Toronto a couple years ago, and he did a killer hour, just walks out, does the hour, says thank you, goodnight, walks off stage, walks right back on, and does Hot Pockets. | ||
| Doesn't ask who wants to hear Hot Pockets, just goes right into it, does the whole 10-minute thing, and then says goodnight and walks off stage. | ||
| Well, Bert Kreischer's that way with the machine. | ||
| Like, he has to tell that fucking story. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even though people have seen it, they want to see it live. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's trapped. | ||
| And maybe if I had more stories, I could get away with it. | ||
| But once you hear the joke, you know, it's over. | ||
| It doesn't work again. | ||
| Yeah, Seinfeld still does old, old stuff. | ||
| He does really old stuff. | ||
| And he's done two specials of old stuff that he's already put on specials. | ||
| I went and saw him at the Palladium about a year or two ago, and it was one of the worst shows I've ever seen. | ||
| I had a splitting headache, and I was furious. | ||
| And one of my friends, another comic that I respect a lot, gave him a standing ovation. | ||
| And I was like, are you fucking kidding me? | ||
| And he was like, I understand why you feel the way you do, but I just love seeing the act. | ||
| And I was like, I couldn't believe it. | ||
| And then I saw Seinfeld again at Clusterfest, He was on the big outdoor stage for kids. | ||
| Completely different hour and murdered. | ||
| Like destroyed. | ||
| He has corny stuff depending on what the audience is. | ||
| If everyone's sitting there wearing a yarmulke, he's got one act. | ||
| And if it's a bunch of kids, he's got a cool hip act. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you went to the yarmulke crowd? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| What was bad about that? | ||
| It was aggressively corny and just... | ||
| Aggressively corny is a funny phrase. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, thank you for coming to the show. | ||
| I know. | ||
| You know, we're like, should we go to the show? | ||
| Should we go? | ||
| Should we go to the show? | ||
| Should we get... | ||
| Do we need an Uber? | ||
| How do we get to the show? | ||
| Do we really want to go? | ||
| And I'm like, I can't believe he's doing this right now. | ||
| But people were eating it up. | ||
| Like, everyone around me was going nuts and loving it. | ||
| But it was just like... | ||
| Old Man Corny. | ||
| Old Man Corny! | ||
| Because you see Seinfeld on a talk show, and he's mean and kind of biting, and you're like, oh, this is great. | ||
| He's hilarious, and I expected more of that. | ||
| But when I saw him at Clusterfest, I got that. | ||
| What is Clusterfest? | ||
| It's the third year this year at that festival in San Francisco. | ||
| It's at Comedy Central and Coachella put together a thing. | ||
| It's all comedy? | ||
| Comedy music. | ||
| There's some music there, too. | ||
| Whenever I see festivals, I always assume someone's getting ripped off. | ||
| That's what I think. | ||
| My impression is, alright, who's getting the money? | ||
| Who's getting the money out of this? | ||
| That's how I feel about Montreal. | ||
| But there's the occasional, there'll be a festival where you're like, okay, this much for one show in Toronto? | ||
| Like, yeah, I'm totally in. | ||
| I'm totally in. | ||
| So sometimes it's great, and sometimes it's nothing. | ||
| Yeah, the Just for Laughs thing, my issue with that is I got in when I was a zero. | ||
| Like, I got in Just for Laughs... | ||
| When I was four years into comedy, I think? | ||
| Five? | ||
| I was terrible. | ||
| You know, I had like a ten-minute set that I could do, and I could get some laughs, but I became a part of Just For Laughs. | ||
| It was helping me. | ||
| I wasn't helping it. | ||
| But then when I see festivals where I see a lot of names on a thing, and I'm like, well, who's funding this? | ||
| Sponsored by Southwest Airlines. | ||
| What is this weird corporate mishmash that you've put together? | ||
| And who's profiting off of this? | ||
| It's not the comedians. | ||
| I get you put it all together, but then you find out how much the comedians are getting. | ||
| Well, where's the rest of the money going? | ||
| There's a lot of money in that audience. | ||
| This is a big place. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Some are better than others, but like... | ||
| And sometimes they're just like, we're going to take a loss. | ||
| All the sponsors are going to lose money on this, but we're going to... | ||
| Like that Riot Fest in LA they would do every year. | ||
| It's done now, but they did it like four or five years in a row. | ||
| I don't know what that is. | ||
| And they never made money. | ||
| It was a comedy festival in downtown LA. Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| See, that's how much I have an aversion to those things. | ||
| I don't even know when they're taking place, because I say no to everything. | ||
| I'm like, no. | ||
| You're not just priced out of it? | ||
| No. | ||
| Because people are like, oh, I haven't done a college in years. | ||
| And it's not like I've got a problem with colleges. | ||
| It's just like they can't afford... | ||
| Well, I stopped doing colleges when they could afford me. | ||
| Because I would be performing in front of 18-year-olds. | ||
| I'd be like, this is ridiculous. | ||
| There's too many of them that don't have life experience. | ||
| They're growing minds. | ||
| And you can make them laugh at some things, but they haven't experienced... | ||
| What I like... | ||
| It's like, I'm happily married, but if I wasn't, I'd like a chick who's a little bitter. | ||
| I like an older chick who keeps herself fit, who's experienced a lot in life, who understands. | ||
| She understands that life is up and down. | ||
| There's hardships. | ||
| I'm not interested in anyone who's young and delusional and bubbly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No. | ||
| When you go to perform in front of 18-year-olds, they have this delusional version of what the world should be, and social justice, and all these ideas about the economy, and all these ideas about socialism, and all these ideas. | ||
| I'm like, I'm exhausted already. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| I can't do this. | ||
| I still think it's fun. | ||
| I think it's fun to watch them just be like, holy shit, you don't have to do one show. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's like, maybe they can leave if they want. | ||
| I don't feel any pressure. | ||
| I mean, now I do casinos more than colleges. | ||
| But I love, like, even if it went bad, it was an interesting bad. | ||
| And you're getting paid so much money that you're like, I don't care. | ||
| I don't care how this goes. | ||
| And I've had some go real, I used to go to the college and say, what should I not talk about? | ||
| And then whatever they said, I would open with that. | ||
| And it worked every time except Colorado School of Mines. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Colorado School of Mines? | ||
| It's an engineering school. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like a good one. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| School of Mines? | ||
| Mines, yeah. | ||
| It's a famous... | ||
|
unidentified
|
M-I-N-E or M-I-N-D? M-I-N-E-S. Oh, okay. | |
| Like digging... | ||
| I thought you were saying Mines too. | ||
| I thought I was with Joe. | ||
| But yeah. | ||
| And they said, do not talk about abortion. | ||
| And I was like, okay. | ||
| And I went up and opened with an abortion joke and then died for an hour. | ||
| Like, they never forgave me. | ||
| I just completely ate shit. | ||
| Was it a good abortion joke? | ||
| I assume. | ||
| To have a bad abortion joke, if you're going to have a joke about abortion, it better be great. | ||
| Or you're in some real trouble. | ||
| Well, there are those people that think that when you touch on controversial subjects, There's weight to objects, right? | ||
| There's certain things that have more weight to them. | ||
| If you can get through, if you can actually get the bit to work, it will have an artificial amount of momentum connected to it because of the fact that it has all this weight. | ||
| Yeah, it's more tension. | ||
| But if you can cut that tension, the laugh is bigger. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But if you can't, it's over. | |
| They're just like Matty for even trying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't think people get mad, really, that people make jokes about awful things. | ||
| They get mad at the idea that people think it's funny. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not so much you told a cancer joke, it's like, you think cancer's funny? | ||
| It's like, no, I don't. | ||
| That's why I'm making a joke about it. | ||
| That's the process. | ||
| But I really think it's hearing an audience laugh at it more than hearing a comic. | ||
| If a comic tells a cancer joke and it bombs, no one really gets mad at them. | ||
| If it's killing, that's when people get upset. | ||
| Well, your act is so controversial. | ||
| You have so many subjects, and there's so much tongue-in-cheek, and there's so much where you say mean shit on stage. | ||
| I would imagine that you get people upset at you quite a bit. | ||
| I used to, and honestly, now it's like I've been grandfathered in. | ||
| It's funny, I used to get people, I would tweet a joke, and some people would, the comments of people getting mad at me. | ||
| And now what happens is I tweet a joke, And then my fans start tweeting their own jokes underneath it, like tagging them. | ||
| And people get mad at them. | ||
| It's like, I'm just like the guy who is allowed to do it. | ||
| People just stopped getting mad at me all of a sudden. | ||
| Well, you had a show called The Jesselneck Offensive. | ||
| I mean, you are sort of grandfathered in, but it's also like your style. | ||
| It's like being mad at Slayer for being loud. | ||
| I'm like, what do you... | ||
| That's what they do. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| Yeah, but I like classical music. | ||
| It's like, so what? | ||
| Go listen to that. | ||
| That is the weird thing about comedy, too, right? | ||
| It's like, when you go to see comedy, you can see all sorts of different styles, whereas when you go to see music, if you go to a club, it's like a blues club, you expect to see blues. | ||
| Like, you're going there on purpose. | ||
| It's not like a blues band followed by a country band followed by a hardcore band. | ||
| Like, it doesn't... | ||
| But that's what you get when you go to a comedy club. | ||
| You can get Guns N' Roses followed by Barry Manilow. | ||
| And you're like, what is this place? | ||
| A main room show on a Saturday night. | ||
| You're going to get virtually every genre of comedy there is. | ||
| I mean, I like that. | ||
| I'm glad it's like that. | ||
| Because I hate, like, when I used to tour, and I couldn't bring my own opener. | ||
| I would get to town, and they'd be like, oh, Jake has been begging us to open for you. | ||
| He wanted to open for you so badly for months, so we're letting him open for you. | ||
| And he does my act for 15 minutes before he brings me on stage. | ||
| I was like, I hate this. | ||
| Have you had someone actually do your actual material? | ||
| Not my material, but my mannerisms, short, dark jokes, my attitude. | ||
| They've just taken it. | ||
| And they're like, oh, if Anthony sees me, he'll be like, oh, you're like me. | ||
| Come do that. | ||
| And I'm like, I don't want to see me. | ||
| You know, I don't want to see anyone like me. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| I don't want to, like, someone's like, oh, this guy does really dark one-liners. | ||
| You'd love it. | ||
| I'm like, I don't ever want to see it. | ||
| I don't ever want to look at it because that's what I do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, I like, I want to see goofy, silly, just like the opposite of me. | ||
| Yeah, Joey Diaz likes to bring girls on stage. | ||
| He likes to bring girls on the road with him because he said he wants the audience to see something totally different and he wants to give the women in the audience that are with their boyfriends that are there to see him He's like, this is good. | ||
| It'll balance it out. | ||
| I bring a lot of female openers. | ||
| I want completely different. | ||
| I don't want them talking about the same subjects as me. | ||
| That usually avoids it completely. | ||
| I don't know how much I'm doing it for the girlfriends of the guys who come. | ||
| There are people who come afterwards and they're like, I liked you better than the headliner. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| It is weird when you start taking someone on the road with you and then their act starts morphing and becoming like yours, like their style. | ||
| They see what's working and so they start, it's like a natural thing, like you saying that you can't watch and tell anymore. | ||
| You know, especially with someone who's opening for you, you gotta think they're in the developmental period. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| I've had MCs who by the end of the weekend are like, that's a great joke. | ||
| And I'm like, that's my line. | ||
| Like you can't, I know it's fun to do, but like you can't do it when you're opening for me. | ||
| Like you've just been watching me all weekend and now you're copying my manner. | ||
| That's annoying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cause then you have to think about it. | ||
| Or you have to watch them. | ||
| Is there any places where you just don't work anymore? | ||
| Like any cities where you're like, fuck this place? | ||
| Do you work in Miami? | ||
| Miami, I try not to. | ||
| I'll do a theater in Miami or close by, but I would never do a club down there. | ||
| Miami's like New Orleans. | ||
| New Orleans is one of my favorite cities in the world. | ||
| But they have shit going on. | ||
| They don't care about your comedy. | ||
| Miami, there's just too much else to do. | ||
| In New Orleans, they've got their music and their food and their alcohol. | ||
| They don't care about comedy. | ||
| You can do a show there, but it's not that fun. | ||
| It's not that fun. | ||
| Yeah, but... | ||
| Miami might be the one, but I'll do like Fort Lauderdale, you know, places around that. | ||
| Florida can be tough. | ||
| Miami adjacent. | ||
| Florida's tough, man. | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| That is the weirdest fucking state in the country, for sure. | ||
| I'm trying to think of any other place that I was just like, there are clubs I would never go back to. | ||
| What about Connecticut? | ||
| Connecticut. | ||
| I think I just did somewhere in Connecticut and had a great time. | ||
| They were grateful that I was there. | ||
| Some places you go and they're just like, I can't believe you came here. | ||
| This is awesome. | ||
| I went to one club where the owner of the club made the green room his office. | ||
| And would just sit in there and be watching TV and talking to me the entire time. | ||
| I'm like, surely you're going to leave with 20 minutes before I go on stage. | ||
| And just in your face the whole time. | ||
| That was why he owned the club, was to talk to comics. | ||
| And I just lost my mind. | ||
| Where was this? | ||
| I probably shouldn't say, but I will. | ||
| Don't say. | ||
| What did it sound like? | ||
| Columbus, Ohio? | ||
| I think Hoosiers. | ||
| Think what? | ||
| Hoosiers. | ||
| Hoosiers. | ||
| What are they? | ||
| Indiana? | ||
| Next Door. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You ever been there? | ||
| I think I did a show there once. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Coming up, it was like a cool club to go do. | ||
| And then I finally got there like a year or so ago. | ||
| And I was like, you know, my friends, I was like, why does everyone love this club so much? | ||
| And they're like, we couldn't wait to hear what you thought of him. | ||
| We couldn't wait to hear how mad you would get at this guy. | ||
| The weird thing is when a guy owns the club, but then he's also the MC. Have you ever heard that happen? | ||
| Oh, the worst. | ||
| The absolute worst. | ||
| I can't stand that. | ||
| Yeah, that's not good. | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is there any places overseas that you really enjoy working? | ||
| Yeah, I went on a big European tour this summer and did the standards. | ||
| I did a couple nights in London, a couple nights in Edinburgh during the festival. | ||
| Those were fun. | ||
| And then places off the beaten path. | ||
| I was like, I want to do Berlin and I want to do Warsaw. | ||
| And they were like, there's no market. | ||
| And I'm like, I want to do those. | ||
| Those are the two most fun shows of the whole tour. | ||
| And it was like 300 people maybe. | ||
| But they were just so grateful you were there and they were awesome. | ||
| And they understand English. | ||
| They understand it better than they can speak it. | ||
| So they laugh at every joke. | ||
| Nothing goes over their heads. | ||
| They don't have to change any references. | ||
| I really loved the European tour. | ||
| That's cool, because if you're doing a place of like 300 seats, even if it's a primarily German or Polish-speaking country, there's going to be enough people that speak English that can come to your show. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of expats, you know, and they all say they got comedy 10 years ago. | ||
| YouTube is what did it for them. | ||
| So they have these stand-up comedy scenes that are all 10 years old, and they're all like... | ||
| They're bad for people doing it 10 years old. | ||
| They're still hacky. | ||
| They're a generation away from getting good. | ||
| But I remember in Warsaw, they were like, this is a historic day for Polish comedy. | ||
| You're the first American comic, big American comic, to come here and do a show. | ||
| And now I think Burr's going there, or maybe just went there. | ||
| But they're getting more and more people. | ||
| Warsaw... | ||
| What is Poland like? | ||
| Honestly, we got into the airport, saw our luggage wasn't there, went straight to the gig, went on stage, went to the hotel, and the next morning flew to Budapest. | ||
| We didn't get to see any of Warsaw or do anything there. | ||
| That was one of those cities that was just nothing to do. | ||
| But when I had my old Comedy Central show, the Jeselnik Offensive, someone at Comedy Central says, listen, we can look at Google and tell you where you're Googled all around the world. | ||
| America, by far the most. | ||
| Canada, close second. | ||
| And then Poland is number three. | ||
| And I'm like, Poland, why? | ||
| And they go, they think you're Polish. | ||
| You look Polish, they assume you're Polish. | ||
| So I'm like, let's book a show there and have all these people come out. | ||
| And whoever told me that fucking lied to me. | ||
| Like, they were like, what? | ||
| We don't think you're Polish. | ||
| Like, why would you think you're Polish? | ||
| Like, no, we don't give a shit. | ||
| I don't know who's told you that. | ||
| But what is Jeselnik? | ||
| Slovenian. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you ever go there? | ||
| No. | ||
| Never been. | ||
| Why don't you do a show there? | ||
| It's kind of... | ||
| I think I thought about it, but it was just like routing. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's like, do I want to deal with what I have to deal with to get to Slovenia when I can just go from... | ||
| Do you Australia at all? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just did Australia. | ||
| I did a few weeks, like one week at the very end of the tour. | ||
| What'd you do? | ||
| I did Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney. | ||
| Melbourne and Sydney is the only places I've done, but it's fucking amazing. | ||
| They're great. | ||
| I love those too. | ||
| Yeah, if the World War III hits and that place doesn't get nuked, that's the spot. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| Yeah, it's on the other side of the planet. | ||
| Wasn't there a book, though, where that happens and everyone goes to Australia, but there's a cloud of radiation coming that's eventually going to get them? | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| Maybe we just get a big fan. | ||
| Blow that shit to Russia. | ||
| I bet that would work. | ||
| Not for the giant fan. | ||
| Look, if they can figure out how to nuke an entire country with a few bombs they drop out of airplanes or shoot out of rockets. | ||
| They should be able to build a giant fan. | ||
| Build a big fan. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why is that so hard? | ||
| Like, I was reading this shit about space junk. | ||
| Do you know how much space junk there is? | ||
| There's stuff floating around in space. | ||
| Thousands of pieces of shit just flying around. | ||
| Broken satellites and parts. | ||
| Is it all just broken satellites? | ||
| All kinds of shit. | ||
| All kinds of stuff. | ||
| Stuff from when rockets take off and then they eject and they leave little pieces of stuff up in there. | ||
| And is it like in a ring? | ||
| Like a Saturn type ring? | ||
| Or is it just everywhere? | ||
| It's everywhere. | ||
| It's all over the planet. | ||
| It's in the sky like it's in the ocean. | ||
| It's like there's pieces of shit just flying around above our head, and they have to be cognizant about it if they're going to launch a rocket. | ||
| You could run into it. | ||
| Space debris and human spacecraft. | ||
| They all travel at speeds up to 17,500 miles an hour. | ||
| More than 500,000 pieces of debris or space junk are tracked as they orbit Earth. | ||
| Think of that. | ||
| They travel at speeds up to 17,500 miles an hour. | ||
| Small enough for a relatively small piece of orbital debris to damage a satellite or a spacecraft. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| They're not all that big. | ||
| That's how... | ||
| What was that movie with Sandra Bullock? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Gravity? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Isn't that space junk that comes across? | ||
| Yeah, they're like fixing a satellite and something comes by and like... | ||
| It hits them. | ||
| ...nicks it and the next thing you know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck. | |
| That shit can happen. | ||
| And they don't know what to do either. | ||
| Like to throw a net up there? | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| I'm thinking like some kind of like magnet satellite that would just attract everything. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But then it would probably get too heavy. | ||
| I think it would probably take out things that you needed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is this the junk that we can track? | ||
| Over time. | ||
| It starts in 57. There's only two things out there. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| We're gross. | ||
| We're so gross. | ||
| I bet the ocean's a similar story. | ||
| Wow, look at all the shit around. | ||
| The ocean's even worse. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| That's all real? | ||
| 2015, the entire near-Earth orbit is covered with shit. | ||
| Space debris. | ||
| Satellites and nonsense. | ||
| I mean, at what point in time? | ||
| I mean, we've only been traveling into space since the 1960s, right? | ||
| So when is this going to end? | ||
| Like, that's not that long ago. | ||
| That's 50-plus years ago. | ||
| What are we going to do when it's 100 years from now, 500 years from now? | ||
| I mean, are we going to be able to see the sun? | ||
| Are we going to just look up and just see space shit floating overhead? | ||
| It said it was only 500,000 pieces. | ||
| The Earth's pretty fucking big still. | ||
| We'd have to get a lot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I guess. | ||
| I had a Snapple fact that if you dug a hole through the earth, it would take you 42 minutes to fall through it. | ||
| It's like, how fucking big is that? | ||
| It's a long drop. | ||
| Yeah, it's a long fall. | ||
| Then I was thinking, would you stop in the middle? | ||
| You'd die. | ||
| You'd get cooked. | ||
| I know, but in theory... | ||
| But if you didn't, yeah. | ||
| If it was just a tube, a zero temperature or neutral temperature tube. | ||
| I wonder how accurate Snapple facts really have to be. | ||
| Has anyone ever called bullshit on a Snapple fact? | ||
| I don't drink that shit, so I don't read those things. | ||
| I didn't even know they had Snapple facts until you just said that. | ||
| What? | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| They used to have little things on the caps. | ||
| You say it, it makes sense to me, but I don't think I've ever read one of them. | ||
| I used to always read them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I can't remember any of them. | ||
| You ever get angry? | ||
| Have a snap effect? | ||
| No. | ||
| I have gotten mad at like a Bazooka Joe comic. | ||
| It's been like, this fucking... | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Yeah, they phone it in sometimes. | ||
| Yeah, big time. | ||
| Well, comics in general, I think, there's great comics, there's really funny comics, but then there's comic strips that have existed forever and they're fucking terrible. | ||
| And for some reason or another, they just still exist. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Do they anymore, though? | ||
| I haven't read a newspaper, like a physical print newspaper. | ||
| I think it's smaller and smaller than it ever has been before, but they're still cranking out Garfield. | ||
| Garfield's still a thing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the guy, Jim Davis, credit Garfield, has nothing to do with it. | ||
| He's, like, golfing and, like, collecting money. | ||
| And he's got ghostwriters. | ||
| So it's just, like, the worst shit ever. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| So he hires people to do it, and he makes all the money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| He's probably worth a billion dollars. | ||
| Oh, I guarantee. | ||
| The merchandise, those fucking things you stick in your car alone. | ||
| Remember how those were everywhere? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They're, like, yeah. | ||
| It's all... | ||
| So I think the Calvin and Hobbes guy would never let them make toys of Calvin and Hobbes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| He sold the books. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He didn't want that money? | ||
| Calvin and Hobbes blood money? | ||
| He didn't want his creation being like... | ||
| He didn't want to be like Jim Davis. | ||
| I think the best comic ever got to be Gary Larson's The Far Side. | ||
| Those things fucking hold up. | ||
| Did you ever read those back in the day? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He retired a long time ago, but they're still great. | |
| Who did Doonesbury? | ||
| That's like the political one, right? | ||
| Trudeau? | ||
| Is that his name? | ||
| Maybe, yeah. | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| Who the fuck was... | ||
| Is it Trudeau? | ||
| What's his first name? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Gary. | |
| Gary Trudeau. | ||
| Isn't that... | ||
| What's the name... | ||
| The guy who runs Canada? | ||
| Justin. | ||
| Justin. | ||
| That guy. | ||
| Yeah, I never got Doonesbury. | ||
| I never like... | ||
| It was like too clever. | ||
| I was like, okay, I guess they're taking down Ronald Reagan or something, but I don't know what the fuck they're talking about. | ||
| Doonesbury's weird, too, because they basically... | ||
| They pigeonholed Hunter S. Thompson and turned him into this. | ||
| They had a character that they were doing. | ||
| I think he wound up suing them. | ||
| Yeah, there's his character. | ||
| It's basically the exact same guy, just slightly different. | ||
| And he was always shooting off guns and doing a bunch of crazy shit. | ||
| I forget his name. | ||
| I forget the name of the guy. | ||
| They gave him a different name, like Uncle something or another. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that was their... | ||
| I mean, that was Gary Trudeau's take on Hunter S. Thompson, and it wound up driving Hunter S. Thompson nuts. | ||
| Is this still real? | ||
| He's still doing... | ||
| Like, he's doing Trump? | ||
| That's 2017. Wow. | ||
| No kidding. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, but he... | ||
| So he created this character that was basically the most exaggerated versions of Hunter S. Thompson when Hunter S. Thompson was fucking around. | ||
| And it sort of defined who Hunter S. Thompson was to a lot of people. | ||
| Because instead of being this brilliant journalist who, you know, this great writer... | ||
| He also became this kind of, like, guy who just shoots guns and is always drunk. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then you fall into that trap. | ||
| I think comedians that have a persona, like, oftentimes fall, like, you know, Dice, that's not, you know, his real name is Andrew Silverstein, and the Dice character was a part of his act. | ||
| He had a bunch of different things. | ||
| He would do impressions. | ||
| He would do drawings. | ||
| Travolta impression? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Phenomenal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Phenomenal Travolta impression. | ||
| And then the dice man became a part of his act, and then he just decided that's the best part, so I'm just going to do dice all the time. | ||
| And then he decided, you know what? | ||
| Fuck living like a regular person. | ||
| It's going to be dice all the time. | ||
| So he became the guy in his act. | ||
| I mean, that's who he is most of the time. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Kinnison? | ||
| Kinnison had a similar situation. | ||
| I never met Kinnison. | ||
| Kinnison, I mean, he died well before I got into stand-up. | ||
| But I've never met Dice. | ||
| And I've always, like, sang his praises. | ||
| Like, I think The Day the Laughter Died is one of the greatest comedy albums of all time. | ||
| And I've just never met him. | ||
| He's great! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'll introduce you next time I see him at the store if you're there. | ||
| I've heard great stories. | ||
| He must, like, he must know who I am. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| He must be aware. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I once did Governors. | ||
| What if he wasn't? | ||
| Will you be mad? | ||
| I wouldn't be mad. | ||
| I would be surprised just because I've spoken about him publicly that, like, if he was wondering why he sold, like, a thousand copies of The Day the Laughter Died after I, like, talked about it on a podcast, like, he would hear that. | ||
| If someone says something nice about you, you find out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I was at Governor's once and they were like, Dice was here last weekend and he left one of his gloves. | ||
| You know, the fingerless gloves. | ||
| And I was just like, give it to me. | ||
| Like, what do I have to do to take this glove home? | ||
| But I still have it. | ||
| I wear it around sometimes. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| Do you wear it and write jokes with it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh! | |
| I'll walk around just doing little O's. | ||
| Smoking cigarettes like this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But yeah, love Dice. | ||
| But those characters, when guys get lumped into a character, when you get locked into that, it can be very self-defining. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| For Kinison, I think it was very self-defining. | ||
| Oh, big time. | ||
| I thought about that when I was creating my persona. | ||
| It was like, what's going to age well? | ||
| You know, like... | ||
| I think of a guy like Nick Swartzen, who's just like, party all the time, like he's a college kid forever. | ||
| It's like, how long can you do that for? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| He still kind of has to do it. | ||
| And it's still great. | ||
| But I'm like, are you enjoying this? | ||
| I want to be able to kind of hold on to my dignity. | ||
| You know who's the best version of it? | ||
| Emo Phillips. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's the best example. | ||
| Because it's like, wow. | ||
| Because when he was a young, sort of cute guy, it was kind of strange to watch him do comedy like this. | ||
| When you're 60, though, and you're doing that, people are like, hey, man, this is just weird. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, Bobcat talked about that. | ||
| Like, that Bobcat had this moment where he stopped being Bobcat. | ||
| And people are like, hey, man, how can we not do the scream? | ||
| He's like, fuck you. | ||
| I'm not doing it! | ||
| He told me the best story ever. | ||
| He said he's at Comedy Works in Denver doing a weekend, and he's eating shit every show. | ||
| And every show he's just bombing and everyone's going, do the voice! | ||
| Do the voice! | ||
| And he's like, no, I don't do the voice anymore. | ||
| I'm not doing the voice. | ||
| Late show Saturday, someone in the back yells, we're from Aurora! | ||
| Do the voice for us! | ||
| And he goes, oh, you're from Aurora? | ||
| At least you learned to sit in the back. | ||
| And he said, and this is like a year after the shooting, yes, a year after that, and he said the entire audience, the entire audience just pretended he didn't say it. | ||
| They didn't boo, they didn't laugh, they just acted like nothing had happened, and he did the rest of the show, and he said it made the whole weekend worth it for him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just to say that. | |
| Just to say that, yeah. | ||
| Dude, I was, speaking of which, I was watching a video today. | ||
| You know how YouTube, for whatever reason, just starts recommending things and you click on it? | ||
| Watching a video today on, oh, this is what it was. | ||
| I was looking at bulletproof clothing. | ||
| For whatever reason. | ||
| Because I was like, I saw an ad on Instagram where this guy had a bulletproof hoodie on and it looked like a regular hoodie and he shot himself. | ||
| Is it like a John Wick situation where it's like... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's like sewn in between the fabric? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So this guy had a regular hoodie and he shot himself in the gut with a 9mm just bang while he was playing this video with like a regular hoodie. | ||
| I was like, this is crazy. | ||
| And this hoodie, it looked like a regular hoodie but it's some sort of Kevlar or something. | ||
| So then it recommends this next thing. | ||
| And this next video that I watch Is on whether or not you should carry with a bullet in the chamber. | ||
| So it's this guy who's just speculating that there's two kinds of people. | ||
| There's the kind of people that thinks they're going to have enough time to rack a bullet, and there's a bunch of people that realize that when something happens, it's like being in a car accident. | ||
| It happens quickly, and you've got to be prepared. | ||
| You're not going to have enough time to rack a bullet. | ||
| And so there was this long discussion as to whether or not you should have a bullet in the chamber or not when you conceal carry. | ||
| And he was talking about how this guy was open carrying, but he could see that the hammer was shut down on the pistol, which means he was going to have to cock it, because it was a, not a revolver, but a, you know, whatever, an automatic, a semi, what is it when, what is it when you call, what do you call one of those? | ||
| When you have to load it like that. | ||
| Like a 9mm, like a Glock. | ||
| What is the difference? | ||
| One's a revolver. | ||
| Revolver revolves. | ||
| So it's not a revolver. | ||
| It's just a pistol. | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| He was saying because of the way the hammer was, he could tell that this guy, you know, he was going to have to pull that hammer back. | ||
| He was going to use that gun. | ||
| And I was like, this is like next level thinking. | ||
| Like these people, everywhere you go, someone's worrying about shooting you. | ||
| And then I go on to Twitter, almost like this is... | ||
| Synchronicity. | ||
| And Eric Weinstein, who's a friend of mine, says, is this the year where the debate is something in terms of, is it appropriate to bring a loaded gun into a place where you worship now to protect yourself? | ||
| Because there's been so many attacks on people in synagogues and churches and mosques. | ||
| And I'm like, fuck, man. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| What is happening here? | ||
| I mean, it's bad. | ||
| I'm not a gun guy. | ||
| There's two more today. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| There's two more attacks today. | ||
| At synagogues? | ||
| One was in a church. | ||
| What were the ones that happened today? | ||
| There was two smaller ones. | ||
| There was the church that was in San Diego this weekend. | ||
| No, the synagogue in San Diego this weekend. | ||
| But there was another one. | ||
| Like, this morning when I was reading the news. | ||
| In Los Angeles? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What was it? | ||
| A former 26-year-old U.S. Army soldier served in Afghanistan and has been charged with plotting terror attacks in Los Angeles area. | ||
| Rally in Long Beach? | ||
| It's on the front page. | ||
| You got some sounds leaking through that. | ||
| Did he do something or did he just got caught plotting? | ||
| It says he was accused of targeting Jews as they walked to a synagogue police officer's military facility and crowds at the Santa Monica Pier. | ||
| I think there was another one, too. | ||
| There was another one somewhere else. | ||
| It might have been outside the country. | ||
| Today. | ||
| It's like, fuck. | ||
| Like, this shit is ramping up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's getting worse and worse. | ||
| Are you a gun guy? | ||
| I have guns. | ||
| I wouldn't say I'm a gun guy, but I have them. | ||
| Hunting or just a case? | ||
| I have hunting guns and I have safety guns, like security guns or personal protection guns. | ||
| I hunt with a bow and arrow, mostly. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I'm not opposed to... | ||
| Why do you say of course? | ||
| I've been sarcastic. | ||
| I'm not opposed to it. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| California synagogue attack latest. | ||
| San Diego, yesterday. | ||
| Oh, this is the yesterday. | ||
| They found a social media message, I guess, right before it happened. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think there was another one that I saw. | ||
| I believe it was in another country. | ||
| That's all right. | ||
| It's enough. | ||
| There's so many. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I know. | ||
| You're just numb to it. | ||
| Well, also, they're targeting places of worship now. | ||
| Like, what the fuck, man? | ||
| Do you have guns? | ||
| No. | ||
| Would you ever own one? | ||
| They make me uncomfortable. | ||
| I'm not against. | ||
| People want to have guns, okay. | ||
| It's not on a hill I'm going to die on. | ||
| But I think what's happening with schools and churches is reprehensible. | ||
| We are the only country where this really happens. | ||
| Not anymore. | ||
| It's happening around the world, but it's a lot here. | ||
| Happens much more often here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, there's certainly an argument for that. | ||
| The real problem is the guns are already there. | ||
| It's like, what do you do when you live in a country of 300 plus million people with 300 plus million guns? | ||
| How do you ever eradicate that? | ||
| How do you shift... | ||
| The path that we seem to be on. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| I mean, everything is like, you know, people talk about this, and they're like, you know, how do we do? | ||
| Is it the culture? | ||
| Is it this? | ||
| And you turn on the TV, and it's like a video game commercial or a commercial for a movie, and it's just a supermodel spinning around in circles, shooting everything she sees. | ||
| And you're like, you don't think this is having an effect? | ||
| Like, they just make it look so cool that if you want to be the hero, you've got to have a gun. | ||
| How about John Wick? | ||
| John Wick 3. John Wick's my fucking favorite thing ever. | ||
| And I'm like, this is the most glorifying gun shit ever. | ||
| But I love it. | ||
| That's a problem, right? | ||
| It is a problem. | ||
| I mean, it hasn't made me turn to guns. | ||
| I mean, I wouldn't say that video games are making people more violent. | ||
| I don't believe that. | ||
| I don't know if there's evidence to back that. | ||
| But I mean, I've always loved... | ||
| James Bond movies. | ||
| You know, things like where guns are a big part of it, and it's never made me want to pick one up. | ||
| Well, there's a real argument that that alleviates some of the need for violence. | ||
| That people like seeing it, and in seeing it in something like John Wick, it actually relaxes people. | ||
| There's a real argument for that. | ||
| And there's a real argument that you can make with that with video games too. | ||
| But that's not with everybody. | ||
| The problem is certain people are very susceptible to influence. | ||
| They're susceptible, they're vulnerable to being influenced or excited in one particular direction. | ||
| Whether it's excited to become radicalized and become a white nationalist and want to shoot up, you know, whatever, figure out whatever the group is. | ||
| Or whether it's, you know, there's certain people that, you know, They'll see something in a movie or a video game, and it'll make them want to act that out. | ||
| But they're usually mentally ill. | ||
| I mean, that's the real problem. | ||
| The real problem is mental illness. | ||
| The type of person that could go into a synagogue and just start shooting people, that's a mentally ill person. | ||
| Regardless of whether or not they have a gun or not, that's a sick person. | ||
| So we have to figure out what's causing this massive... | ||
| Amount of mental illness in this country. | ||
| Because that's a big... | ||
| The guy in Aurora is a perfect example. | ||
| That guy was... | ||
| They knew he was sick. | ||
| They knew there was something really... | ||
| I mean, if you see photos of that fucking guy, look at his eyes. | ||
| He was completely batshit crazy. | ||
| I think it's something too, like when they, now they've started to refuse to show the guy's face. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what I mean? | |
| They won't show it because like this guy's getting glory now and the next shooter wants to top that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I think they're getting a little bit smarter about it. | ||
| But what's the quote? | ||
| No man chooses evil because it's evil. | ||
| They only mistake it for happiness. | ||
| Like I believe that. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good quote. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They mistake it for happiness or they want other people to feel what they feel. | ||
| They want other people to suffer the way they're suffering. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, when you ever have a giant country filled with people, you're going to have a broad spectrum of people's experiences. | ||
| And so you're going to have a certain number of people that are on the low end of experiences. | ||
| The worst experiences all the time. | ||
| Sexual abuse, physical abuse, violence, mental illness, pills, drugs, this, that. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| But Japan is one of the most unhappy countries in the world. | ||
| The suicide rate is off the charts. | ||
| But they take themselves out. | ||
| In America, it's like, who can I take with me? | ||
| And I don't know what that is. | ||
| Well, Japan emphasizes humility and they reward it. | ||
| They emphasize being polite and orderly. | ||
| It's really interesting. | ||
| There was a... | ||
| A piece I was watching on YouTube of these people that live in cyber cafes. | ||
| They have cyber cafes that are open 24 hours a day in Japan and they have these little cubicles that you take in there and they're just online on their computer and they have all their things there and that's where they live. | ||
| They shower and they go back to their little cubicle. | ||
| But this woman was saying that it made her feel like she wasn't alone, but she wasn't with people either. | ||
| She likes that. | ||
| She wants to know that there's people around her, but she doesn't want anybody in her life. | ||
| This is dark. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's super fucking dark. | ||
| Sad. | ||
| Just the loneliness. | ||
| That's a giant issue, apparently, in Japan, is how lonely people are, which is incredibly ironic when you consider that it's probably one of the most population-dense places on Earth, in Tokyo at least. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I think they're just working their asses off. | ||
| I mean, they fucking love to jump in front of trains. | ||
| They live for it. | ||
| Like, it really is, like, of countries, it's the least happy country in the world. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I think the happiest is like someone in Scandinavia. | ||
| Yeah, Sweden or some shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Finland, I think Finland ranks very highly on that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| The thing I was watching said it was like a sense of community. | ||
| A lot of them live together and they eat their meals together as like a neighborhood almost. | ||
| And they just like... | ||
| Everyone contributes and they're just happy and content. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| The numbers are smaller, too. | ||
| I think that helps. | ||
| Also, it's gorgeous up there. | ||
| That helps, too. | ||
| There's a lot of factors there, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, what's a big city in Finland? | ||
| Helsinki? | ||
| How many people is that? | ||
| 50? | ||
| How many people live in Helsinki? | ||
|
unidentified
|
50. 50 people? | |
| I bet 50, yeah. | ||
| I bet you're right. | ||
| I bet Helsinki has 1.2 million people. | ||
| How many people Helsinki have? | ||
| That's a wild guess. | ||
| I don't know why I had to put the.2 in there. | ||
| I'm hedging my bet. | ||
| If I was on the prices right. | ||
| This thing says it's the biggest, but the thing I pulled up doesn't say. | ||
| The second largest says $279,000. | ||
| This doesn't say what Helsinki does for some reason. | ||
| If you Google population of Helsinki... | ||
| This is the very first thing I had, which was the biggest cities in Finland. | ||
| I figured I would have had it. | ||
| It says it's $558,000. | ||
| 558,000? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That ain't shit. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's why they're happy. | ||
| It's basically like four Boulders. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Four Boulder Colorados and it's a whole country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| You go to Boulder, they're some of the nicest people ever. | ||
| Why? | ||
| 100,000 of them. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Hard to build there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Beautiful. | |
| Gorgeous. | ||
| Great people. | ||
| A little on the socialist side, but I get it. | ||
| A little too many Birkenstocks and Tevas and... | ||
| Girls can use a little bit more makeup. | ||
| Put a little makeup on, gals. | ||
| Follow it up a little. | ||
| It's not pronounced Teva? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know what the fuck it is. | |
| I always thought it was Tevas. | ||
| Maybe it is Tevas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I haven't even heard the word in forever. | ||
| Weird leather sandals and shit. | ||
| But it's a cool place, man. | ||
| But I think that's what you get if you live around nature. | ||
| You get a bunch of fit people that like hiking and shit. | ||
| A lot of North Face jackets. | ||
| They got great weather. | ||
| Yeah, they really do. | ||
| They have blizzards and snowstorms and shit, but it'll be 30 degrees in Denver or Boulder, and then the next day it'll be 60. It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Would you say Denver's the best comedy town in the country? | ||
| It's up there. | ||
| It's up there. | ||
| I fucking love it there. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| I'm going there in August. | ||
| I'm doing that place again. | ||
| I fucking love it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's one of my favorite places on the planet, period. | ||
| If I was going to leave LA, Denver's one of the spots that I would pick. | ||
| I think about when I eventually leave, where would I go in Denver? | ||
| Denver's at the top of the list. | ||
| I used to want to go to Seattle or Portland, and then I read that article, that terrifying article about how- Everyone talks about the big one earthquake in LA. They're like, what's really going to fuck shit up is the tsunami that's going to happen on that fault line. | ||
| They're like, Portland and Seattle are going to be gone with that tsunami. | ||
| 100%, right? | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Yeah, it's just whether it's 100 years from now or two. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| Imagine if we wake up one day and Seattle's gone. | ||
| 13 million people dead. | ||
| It goes deep into Washington State, all the way to Tacoma. | ||
| The ocean goes to Tacoma. | ||
| There was an article where they talked about how it would happen. | ||
| Minute by minute in Portland with this going on. | ||
| It was just terrifying. | ||
| Yeah, fuck that. | ||
| Too risky. | ||
| Also, seasonal depression's real. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| I have a buddy of mine who moved to Portland and started a jiu-jitsu school out there. | ||
| And I was like, do you like it? | ||
| He was like, dude, I fucking love it. | ||
| I go, you don't miss LA at all? | ||
| He was like, no. | ||
| I go, what about the rain? | ||
| Is it bothering you? | ||
| I was like, no, no, it's nothing. | ||
| Two years later, he's back in LA. I go, what happened? | ||
| He goes, the fucking weather. | ||
| I go, you liar. | ||
| I go, you were trying to convince me. | ||
| You were trying to tell me. | ||
| And he started laughing. | ||
| He's like, I'm convincing myself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He bought into it. | ||
| He goes, I go, what happened? | ||
| He goes, I came back one time when it was raining out there and it wasn't raining here. | ||
| And I was like, what am I doing? | ||
| I go, I'm less happy there. | ||
| It makes you less happy. | ||
| If it's raining all the time, it makes you less happy. | ||
| If you live in LA and it rains, we're all happy. | ||
| You're like, oh, this is cool. | ||
| It's raining out. | ||
| Oh, vitamin D is important. | ||
| It's not just vitamin D either. | ||
| It's like a feeling you get. | ||
| Like you're going to be cold and wet. | ||
| You're going to be cold and wet and you're going to bundle up and get inside. | ||
| Quickly get inside. | ||
| You can't just be free. | ||
| You can't be outside sitting in the grass, eating lunch, just looking out, just relaxing. | ||
| I like my hammock. | ||
| Yeah, fuck that place. | ||
| And then fuck places that have, like, too much snow, too. | ||
| Like, all the people that want to move back to New York, I'm like, you can keep that. | ||
| Good luck with that. | ||
| Yeah, New York, the summer and the winter is what killed me in New York. | ||
| Like, waiting for the subway when you're just, like, dripping sweat was just brutal. | ||
| Dripping sweat with moist piss smell everywhere. | ||
| That moisture that's carrying those piss odor molecules in the subway. | ||
| You're like, what in the fuck are you people breathing in down here? | ||
| And I never got the rubber boots. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I always just had sneakers. | ||
| I was trying to get to Fallon at like 7 in the morning. | ||
| Walking to the subway through the slush. | ||
| It was like, it would be beautiful while it was snowing. | ||
| And then as soon as it was on the ground, you were just like, get rid of this shit now. | ||
| Did you write for Fallon? | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| What was that gig like? | ||
| I mean, it was frustrating. | ||
| I started when he started Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. | ||
| I was one of the first guys there. | ||
| And they didn't like any of my jokes. | ||
| It was impossible. | ||
| Too mean? | ||
| Too mean or just like, this is going to make Jimmy unlikable. | ||
| It wasn't about being funny so much as coming off as smart and friendly and likable. | ||
| I was there for a year. | ||
| And they barely used anything I ever did. | ||
| But they knew I was funny. | ||
| They liked me. | ||
| And I thought, for some reason in my head, I thought that if I quit before a year, that it'll follow me. | ||
| People will be like, what happened with Fallon? | ||
| Why were you only there a year? | ||
| And then when I left, it was like, no one would have given a shit if I'd left after 10 weeks. | ||
| It wouldn't have mattered at all. | ||
| It was an interesting experience, but I did not enjoy it. | ||
| Being a writer for other people's voices has got to be very difficult. | ||
| For me, it's impossible. | ||
| I write in my voice, and you either like it or you don't. | ||
| I've written for Jimmy Kimmel, Sarah Silverman, and if I loved a joke, they loved it too. | ||
| But with Fallon, it was not the case. | ||
| It was almost never. | ||
| He would laugh at the joke, but he'd be like, I can't say this. | ||
| I can't do it. | ||
| What are they trying to do? | ||
| What is he trying to do? | ||
| He's trying to be like middle America. | ||
| There's a market for that, right? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| He just wants everyone to love him. | ||
| He just wants everyone to love him. | ||
| That's not a bad trait to have in a late night host. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Probably the best trait to have in a late night host. | ||
| I'd like to see him drunk one day, just shitting on everybody, though. | ||
| I think it would be hilarious. | ||
| It is hilarious. | ||
| Does he do that? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I've heard that he quit drinking. | ||
| I don't know if that's true, but he liked to get drunk in shitty bars and hang out with the staff and the crew. | ||
| He's like a man of the people, and he didn't just want to go home and drink. | ||
| He wanted to go out and go to some weird bar that was in a subway that no one knew about and have beers. | ||
| He was a fun drunk, but he did a lot. | ||
| Yeah, there was always those rumors that he's got a problem. | ||
| Jimmy Fallon's got a problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think that's, like, the pressure of just being this, like, super friendly, sweet guy on TV wanting everybody to love you? | ||
| That you're like, oh my god, get me a fucking drink so I can cut loose! | ||
| I think that could be part of it, you know? | ||
| That's why I always thought, like, with my persona, like, let's be the meanest person you can so that it allows you to be nice offstage. | ||
| It gives you a little bit of distance. | ||
| But the guys who come off as your best friend on stage tend to be monsters off stage. | ||
| Some of them, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I got another story I'll tell you when we get off the air. | ||
| About one of those. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Well, let's wrap this fucking thing up, man. | ||
| Your special, it's out tonight at midnight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's it called? | ||
| Fire in the Maternity Ward. | ||
| And you have... | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Yeah, once you think of that title, you gotta go with it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Every now and then when someone says a title of a special and you have to, whoa, that was one of those. | ||
| So you got me. | ||
| You have several, though. | ||
| So what are the other ones that are available on Netflix now? | ||
| Thoughts and Prayers is on Netflix. | ||
| Fire and the Maternity Award comes out tonight. | ||
| I've got a podcast on Comedy Central called the Jeselnik and Rosenthal Vanity Project. | ||
| Oh, that's right, yeah. | ||
| Who is it with? | ||
| My friend Greg Rosenthal is an NFL analyst. | ||
| We've been best friends since college. | ||
| So we just kind of like, we're supposed to talk about sports, but we just fuck around. | ||
| Like, we never talk about sports. | ||
| Yeah, it's fun. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| All right, well, good luck. | ||
| Good luck with the special. | ||
| Thanks for doing this, man. | ||
| Appreciate you. | ||
| Yeah, great to finally be here. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| And I can't recommend his comedy enough. | ||
| For real. | ||
| If you're a fan of stand-up comedy, Anthony Jeselnik is the shit. | ||
| So thank you, sir. | ||
| Thank you, Joe. |
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