Aug. 13, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:43:11
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| What's up, man? | ||
| How are you? | ||
| Good to see you. | ||
| Outside the store. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Isn't it weird when you run into a comedian that you don't normally hang out with outside the store? | ||
| I mean, I would recognize you, but sometimes you'll meet someone that you met at a meeting and then it's like at a Ralph's and you can't place the context. | ||
| That's bad. | ||
| Especially if it's like an executive and they really like you to remember them. | ||
| Are you good at faking it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| Terrible. | ||
| What's your tell? | ||
| I just say, I don't know. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Do you do this thing where you go, it's good seeing you, instead of nice meeting you? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| I've done nice meeting you, and they go, we've met five times. | ||
| I go, shit. | ||
| I don't think people understand the volume of people that comedians, especially at your level, come across every day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, how many shows we do. | ||
| People come up to you afterwards and being like, oh, great set, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And how many meetings in general. | ||
| Are you aware of Dunbar's number? | ||
| Oh, is that like how many number of people? | ||
| Is it like 100 or something you can keep in your head? | ||
| I don't think it's an exact science, but I think they think it's somewhere around 150. I believe it. | ||
| You got about 150 people in your head. | ||
| And after that, you fucked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| It makes sense, right? | ||
| There's no way you can keep them all in there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| That doesn't make any sense. | ||
| It's cool outside the store, you know, having a chat. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like you feel the most camaraderie with other comedians outside the store when you run into them at an airport. | ||
| I was just thinking about that. | ||
| Every time I go to LAX, I'll bump into, like, someone, Joe Coy, or last time it was Burt Kreischer, and, like, Jesus Trejo, we're going to do, I think, Utah. | ||
| It's just, like, a hub for all of us. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So, you'll see so many. | ||
| Because we're all just transients. | ||
| We're here for the middle of the week, and then when the weekends come for the clubs, we're all going somewhere. | ||
| Yeah, like, people that want to come to the store, Tuesday is, like, probably the best night. | ||
| And people don't understand why it's so stacked. | ||
| Like, why is it you? | ||
| Why is it Burr? | ||
| Why is it Kreischer? | ||
| Why is it Joey Diaz? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, well, we're just biding time until the weekend. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| And practicing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's one of the weird art forms that you can't practice alone. | ||
| You have to use an audience. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Don't you think? | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| And even I'll be telling the same joke, and I won't really change the words, but it'll be like an inflection. | ||
| It's almost like, I don't know, when a jazz musician or something plays a note just a little differently. | ||
| You ever notice that a joke won't work? | ||
| Maybe because I'm making a meal out of this word. | ||
| But if I kind of just throw it away... | ||
| Oh, now that fixes it. | ||
| It's interesting to do it long enough where you realize it's not the words sometimes. | ||
| There's a performance nuance to it to fix the joke. | ||
| On paper, it's the same joke. | ||
| You know what's really weird is that none of this shit is written anywhere. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Like, what we're talking about. | ||
| You know what the worst is? | ||
| Like, I did... | ||
| Like, JFL, they're doing a taping out there for TV, and they're like, send us your transcript. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ugh. | |
| So that means you have to sit at a computer and, like... | ||
| Write out your act? | ||
| It takes the magic... | ||
| Like, whatever your seven minutes you want to do for the taping, they want you to sit on, like, on a Mac and open up Word and be like, how you guys doing? | ||
| Or whatever. | ||
| Just, like, type it all out. | ||
| You need a better manager. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No, but the thing, I didn't do it. | ||
| Good for you. | ||
| I just dodged it. | ||
| I asked Aaliyah, because I used to do it in the past, and I was like, yo, they're asking me to write this out. | ||
| It's taking all the fun and organic. | ||
| I feel it would really hurt my performance if I literally wrote a transcript, and I'm like a robot up there. | ||
| And he was like, just don't do it. | ||
| And I go, what happens? | ||
| He's like, nothing, nothing happens. | ||
| LAUGHTER He's like, I've done it a million times. | ||
| Just be dodgy. | ||
| It's some pencil pusher. | ||
| That doesn't make any sense. | ||
| I think they get, you know... | ||
| Well, they have power over people that don't have a name yet. | ||
| I think they have people above them breathing down their neck and then, you know, shit rolls downhill. | ||
| So then they keep on asking, like, where is it? | ||
| Where is it? | ||
| Just change your number. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, that's why I had the reps kind of be a buffer and I was very aloof and very busy. | ||
| Did they contact you at all? | ||
| Was it direct to you? | ||
| The thing is, I would see them throughout the fest. | ||
| And they're lovely people. | ||
| I love these people. | ||
| And they would say, where's the transcript? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I'd be like, ah! | ||
| No, I play the game a little better. | ||
| I go, I'm not there yet. | ||
| I'm not in your mother's pussy level yet. | ||
| I still gotta be like, I'm gonna go back to the hotel room. | ||
| It's a funny thing to say. | ||
| In your mother's pussy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Where's the transcript? | ||
| You didn't check your mother's pussy? | ||
| I swore that I... Your mother's pussy has a fax machine. | ||
| I faxed it to her. | ||
| It should be in there. | ||
| You should go check. | ||
| Check around the corner. | ||
| Yeah, so it's the worst having to type it out. | ||
| Well, it's also like Just for Laughs is a weird situation. | ||
| It's evolved, right? | ||
| Well, yes, it's a weird way of looking at it. | ||
| It used to be very valuable for comedians. | ||
| Now it's very valuable for Just for Laughs because they have this enormous platform and you go there and everybody knows that all these great comedians are going to be there and they make an enormous amount of money off the comedians. | ||
| It used to be the comedians would go there because the industry would go there, and the key to the whole thing was development deals for sitcoms. | ||
| And they tossed out so much money. | ||
| I always hear about the gold rush and the heyday of JFL and how deals are getting thrown out left and right and lives were made. | ||
| I don't know that JFL. But fake lives were made too. | ||
| They ruined it. | ||
| I have a theory about people who aren't comedians. | ||
| They see people laughing at stuff and they see something's funny. | ||
| They think it's funny. | ||
| But a comedian can go, this is just tricks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, because the amount, the volume of comedy that we watch on a regular basis is so much. | ||
| So we can discern, like Ian Edwards and I will talk about this. | ||
| We're students of comedy. | ||
| We watch a lot of comedy. | ||
| People can get like a huge pop out of the room, but like Ian can cut through the bullshit and know that like, oh, that's a parlor trick. | ||
| Or, yeah. | ||
| So it's a different type of thing. | ||
| But I think a lot of times, you know, suits and everything, they just hear decibels or right place, right time. | ||
| And they believe this lightning rod moment or whatever, this great set, is indicative of their entire comedic being instead of, like, a lucky role. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you ever hear... | ||
| What is that guy's name? | ||
| Was his name Chicken? | ||
| Is that what his name was? | ||
| I always hear that as an example. | ||
| Like, I heard you blew the roof. | ||
| He was the guy that ended it all. | ||
| Like, literally. | ||
| Because I think they gave him a half a million dollars or something crazy like that. | ||
| I kind of want to see this chicken set. | ||
| Like, what was the set that just blew everyone's mind? | ||
| He was a handsome fella, and he was young, and he was very energetic, and they thought he was going to be the next Jim Carrey. | ||
| Did you see him around? | ||
| Was he an L.A. guy? | ||
| No, I don't know where he was from. | ||
| But I saw him at Just for Laughs. | ||
| I saw him quite a few times. | ||
| And he was a nice guy, but he was terrible. | ||
| I mean, in the way that, like, it was just a bunch of blah! | ||
| But there was no substance to it. | ||
| There was no thought to it. | ||
| So they tried to put it together. | ||
| They tried to make... | ||
| Like a development deal and he did a little touring, but it all went south and it fell apart and he eventually committed suicide. | ||
| Do you know how many years he was doing that? | ||
| He hung himself in front of a school. | ||
| A school? | ||
| Yeah, like that's what I had heard. | ||
| Like he hung himself on a tree in front of a school. | ||
| Jeez. | ||
| This is his last piece of performance art. | ||
| I don't know if that's true. | ||
| See, the thing is, like, I shouldn't even say it on a podcast and millions of people can listen to him, but I did. | ||
| But the hanging part is right, right? | ||
| Yes, he definitely committed suicide. | ||
| It's one of those things, man, where, like, if it didn't work out and he didn't develop, it didn't, he didn't, he never became, like, a legit comedian. | ||
| But thing alright over there, Jamie? | ||
| Yeah, I think if that had happened and he actually had, I don't know, the equity of a stand-up comedian and been doing it for long enough, that would be like a bump in the road, but you can come back from that. | ||
| If that's just sort of like your lotto ticket, then that's why it was so drastic, I think. | ||
| Well, some people are just not... | ||
| They're great comics, but they're not really into acting. | ||
| They're not the best at acting. | ||
| And they get kind of forced into acting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I love Mitch Hedberg's joke where he's a great stand-up, you know? | ||
| And they'll come up to me and they'll be like, can you act? | ||
| That's like going up to a chef and being like, can you farm? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's true. | ||
| I mean, I'm butchering it, but yeah, they're such different things. | ||
| But you have an agent, right? | ||
| And the agent wants to make money, so it's an avenue for cash. | ||
| And you look at Seinfeld and Tim Allen and Roseanne and Brett Butler, and there was all these comedians in the 90s that made a... | ||
| Ass load of money. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Doing sitcoms. | ||
| Well, that's the quicker payoff, too. | ||
| I even noticed it with my own career. | ||
| Like, when I was a younger comedian out here in my early 20s, when I moved from Seattle, like, when I first got reps and stuff, I was going out on these auditions for, like, CW shows or just whatever. | ||
| They just throw you against the wall. | ||
| You're an actor. | ||
| Comedy is this thing you do at night. | ||
| They don't even really give a shit that you do stand-up. | ||
| They probably don't even think you're funny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know? | ||
| It's just a cute thing you do. | ||
| It's like a kid, like a dance recital or something. | ||
| They don't care as long as you're going to these auditions in the daytime. | ||
| So they just hope that you hit on a series regular. | ||
| And then that's some cash flow for the biz. | ||
| But luckily, I mean, I don't know, I think your successes are carved by your failures. | ||
| So I'm kind of fortunate that I would get some acting things here and there, but never anything substantial enough to take me away from stand-up. | ||
| Well, never anything substantial. | ||
| The worst is when they tell you to stop doing stand-up because it's messing with your acting role. | ||
| Like, that's what they did to Tim Allen. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, because his acting, he was, you know, he was on Home Improvement. | ||
| It was a gigantic hit. | ||
| They were making kazillions of dollars. | ||
| But he was a, I don't want to say he was a blue comedian, but he, some of it was a little risque. | ||
| So how did Saget deal with it? | ||
| He stopped doing stand-up. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So he stopped. | ||
| Dude, Saget stopped doing stand-up forever. | ||
| Forever. | ||
| He really didn't start doing it again until after that show was done. | ||
| What the fuck was that show again? | ||
| Full House. | ||
| Full House. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He stopped doing it for a long time. | ||
| And then kind of drifted his way back in and now he does it regularly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that's, you know, maybe they did that at the time, but it's almost detrimental to let go. | ||
| Because stand-up is your car. | ||
| Like, it's your business. | ||
| You're in control over it. | ||
| And the TV stuff, it's like one hand washes the other. | ||
| If you let that go, you're letting go of this revenue stream so that when the acting gig is over, you're kind of fucked because this wasn't like building along with it. | ||
| It also was a point of confidence where you understand what's funny and what isn't. | ||
| You know how to be funny because you're funny in front of a live audience all the time. | ||
| All the time, yeah. | ||
| When you're at the store, you have to be there all the time. | ||
| You're there more than you would expect someone at your level to be at. | ||
| You have to be there. | ||
| You can't slack off. | ||
| Everyone knows those really famous guys that slacked off and started to suck. | ||
| And the good thing is nowadays, the cycle of comedy, we all do a special basically every two years. | ||
| Pretty much all of us. | ||
| Burr, Kreischer, Segura, Ari. | ||
| Everybody kind of does a special or tries to do a special somewhere around every two years. | ||
| So every two years you throw it all out and you're a beginner again. | ||
| You have no fucking act. | ||
| You're terrified. | ||
| You have to come up with new premises and scramble and that requires a lot of performing. | ||
| I like how Burr was on here talking about it. | ||
| It was cool to hear a guy like him even talk about just the dilution of specials where he's like, they're not special anymore. | ||
| It's just like a flyer or like a brochure that I'm still around. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's all it is. | ||
| A little bit, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, obviously there's different degrees of polish with some of the specials and how great some of them are, but there's so many now. | ||
| It's a weird name. | ||
| Special. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's just leftover from yesteryear. | ||
| It's like, why are albums a certain length? | ||
| Because of the... | ||
| Yeah, but at least an album is like a collection of music that is all in one thing that you get that's kind of been consistent forever. | ||
| A special... | ||
| It's like, what is it anymore? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| I guess 45 minutes to an hour of jokes strung together. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To let everybody know. | ||
| But it's also like an album. | ||
| Like if you go to see Fleetwood Mac, I don't know why the fuck I came up with Fleetwood Mac right now. | ||
| Yeah, I like Fleetwood Mac. | ||
| I do too. | ||
| But you're expecting the hits. | ||
| Whereas a comic, you're expecting the shit that's not on the special. | ||
| You're expecting all new stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that is interesting. | ||
| Sometimes you'll get them where they're like, do the... | ||
| That's a very rare type of act though. | ||
| That's like, Gaffigan gets that for sure because he's got some classic bits and I think that also happens with Russell Peters. | ||
| I think he gets some requests for classic bits. | ||
| Do you ever get that? | ||
| No. | ||
| They do. | ||
| I don't know how to do them anymore. | ||
| Oh, I know. | ||
| I purge them. | ||
| I barely know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Someone was yelling out Bruce Jenner the other day. | ||
| I was like, I can't do that bit. | ||
| I don't know how to do it. | ||
| I'll fuck it up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, you don't want it. | ||
| You don't want me to do a sad version. | ||
| Of what you could remember. | ||
| Where I forget the taglines. | ||
| Oh, let me do it again. | ||
| Let me start again. | ||
| Yeah, redo, guys. | ||
| I fucked up, guys. | ||
| Remember how much fun you were having? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's go back to one. | ||
| So, you are one of the rare comedians that doesn't smoke pot. | ||
| Yeah, I guess so. | ||
| We talked about that. | ||
| And it's kind of interesting, especially being in this industry, not taking advantage of that, because it's all, especially the store, like, you'll do a show, and they're like, hey, do you want these three bags, these three pillowcases of weed and CBD oil? | ||
| And you're like, nah. | ||
| You don't take the CBD oil either? | ||
| I haven't done, like, is it good? | ||
| Oh, it's great for you. | ||
| What would I use it for? | ||
| It's great for anxiety. | ||
| It reduces inflammation. | ||
| A lot of people use it for sleep. | ||
| It's just good for you. | ||
| It's a nutrient. | ||
| It's healthy for you. | ||
| It's hot right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's very hot. | |
| If I was in the biz, I'd be like, get CBD on the phone. | ||
| Love CBD. I love what CBD's doing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Love it. | |
| CBD, how you doing? | ||
| Canola's out. | ||
| CBD? Yeah, canola is bullshit. | ||
| That stuff's bad for you. | ||
| Can you cook with CBD? That's a good question. | ||
| I bet you can't. | ||
| I would imagine it has a low flashpoint. | ||
| Like it would burn quickly. | ||
| I don't know, let's find out. | ||
| I think it's usually mixed with coconut oil. | ||
| Coconut oil has a high flashpoint. | ||
| Wait, doesn't grapeseed oil have a low? | ||
| Grapeseed oil, I think, has a high flashpoint, too. | ||
| I think it's good to cook with. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Okay, so it takes longer for time? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay. | ||
| It's a high temperature, high before it smokes. | ||
| Some people said they've cooked with it. | ||
| Yeah, fucking burnouts, stoners, bunch of losers. | ||
| I bet they stink. | ||
| There's some people that do everything with weed, and they need to just stop. | ||
| Where's the hemp people? | ||
| I feel like you don't hear from them as much anymore. | ||
| Yeah, they're in weight. | ||
| They're laying in weight. | ||
| Yeah, was that like the back door? | ||
| Like, since hemp is cool, what about... | ||
| Well, CBD is for grandma. | ||
| That's how you get people to vote for it, because grandma and grandpa use it, and it helps their joints. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And they're like, well, I'll tell you what, this CBD, I mean, it's not doing anything for my brain. | |
| I'm not getting high, but my joints never felt better. | ||
| I feel amazed at the CBD, and I'm gonna vote for it. | ||
| And I really want to get a hold of Trump and let him know. | ||
| That's not bad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
CBD is... | |
| It really is the future. | ||
| What is his region from? | ||
| The guy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| It's random, random old guy from the middle of nowhere. | ||
|
unidentified
|
CBD is what revolutionized nutrition and really affected my life in a very positive way. | |
| I feel like it's a little south, maybe Maryland, maybe somewhere outskirts of Baltimore. | ||
| People don't know you have that gear or you forget. | ||
| You do voices really well. | ||
| I don't have that many, though. | ||
| I can only do a few. | ||
| Are you the type, though, where if you're doing a bit and you need this person to talk or whatever, you'll figure it out? | ||
| Yeah, there's a few voices I can get out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, because you're Alex Jones and like... | ||
| But I've known Alex so well. | ||
| I've known Alex for like more than 20 years. | ||
| So that's just easy. | ||
| Yeah, I've hung out with that guy. | ||
| We've been hammered together so many times. | ||
| It's like it's... | ||
| That is the most misunderstood guy on the planet. | ||
| He just needs somebody next to him. | ||
| He needs someone to go, Alex, slow down. | ||
| You had a really good point there. | ||
| You just need a manager who's always with him? | ||
| He even agreed with me. | ||
| We talked about it. | ||
| I said, you just need a rational journalist who's next to you. | ||
| He goes, you're right. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| I do need that. | ||
| You need someone who's just... | ||
| He balances it out. | ||
| Look, he was right about all this Jeffrey Epstein shit. | ||
| That is a fucking fact. | ||
| Alex Jones called this years ago. | ||
| Years ago. | ||
| He was saying that they take a lot of famous people to this island and they have all these young girls that this guy hooks them up with. | ||
| He was talking about this years ago. | ||
| Now it is mainstream news. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And this human hybrid experiments going on. | |
| Yes! | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Which sounded like a complete joke when he said it. | ||
| When he brought it up, we were like, what? | ||
| We were like, what? | ||
| Now it's fucking mainstream news. | ||
| This is a fact, man. | ||
| Like, people want to write that guy off because he'll tell you he's crazy. | ||
| He'll let you know he's crazy. | ||
| I mean, on my show, there was one of the funniest things he ever said. | ||
| He's like, look, I want to be honest with you. | ||
| I'm kind of retarded. | ||
| I fell to the ground. | ||
| But that's who he really is, man. | ||
| People just have him lumped in. | ||
| It's like some people, they don't represent the best aspects of themselves right to people. | ||
| And then other people try to define them. | ||
| People try to define you. | ||
| It's really kind of weird about the more famous you get, the more people try to define you in a way that's Detrimental or a way that's dismissive and limiting. | ||
| I've noticed that after this Bernie Sanders thing that I did. | ||
| So anybody listening to this, if you're saying this, I am not right-wing at all. | ||
| So stop saying that. | ||
| It's silly. | ||
| It's foolish. | ||
| I've interviewed right-wing people. | ||
| I am 100% left-wing. | ||
| The only thing that stops me from, the only things that I disagree with about left-wing people is support for the military, support for police, and the Second Amendment. | ||
| That's probably it. | ||
| Everything else across the board, I lean way left. | ||
| In terms of, like, Bernie Sanders made a ton of sense to me and I would 100% vote for him. | ||
| Tulsi Gabbard is my favorite. | ||
| I mean, I'm not a right-wing person. | ||
| So this nonsense, like, so many people were saying that, you know, that Bernie Sanders spent this time on a right-wing podcast. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| What are you saying? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| And don't you think he weighed the pros and cons of, like, it was an opportunity for him and I think Everyone thought it was a win as well. | ||
| I don't think he had any idea who I was. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think it was one of his young staff members who's friends with Kyle Kalinske, who is a really good left-wing progressive talk show guy on YouTube. | ||
| And Kyle hooked it all up. | ||
| And this idea that... | ||
| It's bad for someone to talk to people. | ||
| It's foolish. | ||
| There's a weird thing that's going on right now. | ||
| I thought it was a great platform for him to get his ideas out there and to be heard in something other than just sound bites that could be taken out of context. | ||
| It's a great platform, I think, for anyone who's running for anything to have a long-form conversation. | ||
| And it's good for us, too, because we get to find out who they really are. | ||
| You really can't hide In a long conversation. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Three hours? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I only did an hour and ten with Bernie. | ||
| That's all he had. | ||
| Because, you know, the guy's running for... | ||
| He's legit running for president. | ||
| Like, he could be president. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| He's not like... | ||
| You know, like, there's some people that are running for president. | ||
| They're like, all right, bro. | ||
| You know, like... | ||
| What is that guy? | ||
| Zoltan? | ||
| What is his name? | ||
| He was the guy who was running the transhumanist platform. | ||
| Ishtavan. | ||
| How do you say his last name? | ||
| Very nice guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sorry, I forget his name. | |
| Is that for this coming out? | ||
| No, it was the last one. | ||
| It was 2016 and we had him on. | ||
| But, you know, it was like one of those guys who were like, alright. | ||
| Sure, why not? | ||
| Like Ben Glebe. | ||
| You're like, alright, good luck. | ||
| You don't think Ben's gonna win? | ||
| Oh, I do. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| But you gotta respect the swing. | ||
| That's what's great about this country, you know? | ||
| The swing? | ||
| The swing? | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| You could run for president? | ||
| No, no, not that swing. | ||
| Just like... | ||
| Anybody could run for president? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it sounds far-fetched, like, yeah, okay. | ||
| But I mean, you've got to be crazy enough to think you can be you. | ||
| Well, look, anything can and will happen when it comes to being president. | ||
| Like people get assassinated. | ||
| People get exposed as being a criminal. | ||
| Like, look, do you remember when Michael Avenatti was the hero of the left? | ||
| The Democratic Party was like, he's the guy that's going to run against Donald Trump and I mean, there's a compilation of left-wing pundits talking about the hero that is Michael Avenatti. | ||
| You don't hear a fucking word from that guy anymore. | ||
| So you were in a time capsule, right, a year ago, when everyone was Michael Avenatti crazy, and they just... | ||
| And then they woke you up. | ||
| Fahim, it's 12 months later, and you'd be like looking over the news. | ||
| Where's our guy? | ||
| I mean, I was... | ||
| That happens on both sides. | ||
| They'll have their champion, and then this other shit, you know? | ||
| D or R, there's always... | ||
| They ascend, and then there's some, like, dark shit from the past, and then you don't see them anymore. | ||
| But then there's guys that you know. | ||
| Like, one of the things that I was getting during the Trump campaign when he was running for president the first time was like, this guy's not going away. | ||
| Like, this is not going away. | ||
| He knows what he's doing. | ||
| He knows how to fuck with people. | ||
| When did you know? | ||
| Like, how early in the campaign did you kind of realize? | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| Also, did you feel like you had a better read on it just doing stand-up across the country? | ||
| Because I feel like you could be in a bubble, you could be in New York and LA and just be like, oh, it's never going to happen. | ||
| This is ridiculous. | ||
| But doing stand-up in some red states, you're with the people, you're doing jokes, and you get a temperature of an audience more so than someone who just has a desk job. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| But also, I have a lot of right-wing friends. | ||
| A lot of right-wing friends, especially from the hunting world. | ||
| I have a lot of friends that live in Iowa and Oregon, and they have a lot of right-wing friends, too. | ||
| There's a whole part of the country that the big cities, New York and Los Angeles and the big Democratic-leaning cities, they were all dismissing. | ||
| The Democrats thought that Hillary was the most experienced and Trump was a buffoon and that that grab her by the pussy tape, that was it. | ||
| We got it. | ||
| It's in the bag. | ||
| They all believed that. | ||
| But the middle of the country did not believe in her. | ||
| They didn't trust her. | ||
| They thought she was some Sleazy politician who's been involved in the business forever and she licks her finger and figures out which way the wind's blowing and that's what she says. | ||
| And that they thought that Trump was a straight shooter and he's going to drain that swamp and he's going to do this and bring jobs back and he's talking about clean coal. | ||
| It's almost like I think he's just so outside of the system like that it seemed like he could have done anything. | ||
| Just like we want someone to throw a wrench into it. | ||
| Yes, that's it. | ||
| There's a lot of people that just wanted a wrench thrown into it. | ||
| And he definitely threw a wrench into it. | ||
| And I think, ultimately, that's going to be good for the left as well. | ||
| Because they're going to realize that you can't just get away with that same stupid, old school politician style of doing it anymore. | ||
| I think he's just blown up the playbook. | ||
| Even Bernie calling Trump... | ||
| Was it stupid or an idiot in a post or something? | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| This is a new paradigm. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They're adopting, they're taking pages out of what worked for Trump. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, look, we've got to take some bully tactics. | ||
| And then even Moscow Mitch. | ||
| I'm like, oh, they get it. | ||
| Nicknames are the only thing that stick. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yelling at the rally, like, Moscow Mitch. | ||
| This is part of the playbook now. | ||
| Sleepy Joe Biden. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's my favorite. | ||
| As evolved as we like to think that we get as adults, when it comes to politics, it goes back to grade school. | ||
| The only thing that seems to be effective is yelling Moscow Mitch, or, you know, Sleepy Joe Biden, or Pocahontas. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| These are like stand-up rules. | ||
| It's just like Rickles. | ||
| Yeah, it's so interesting. | ||
| And my favorite about the Pocahontas one was when people were saying that he's racist for calling Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas. | ||
| It's a Disney movie. | ||
| You can't go that far. | ||
| Yeah, if someone called me Aladdin, I'd be juiced. | ||
| Aladdin's cool. | ||
| He has a pet monkey. | ||
| He eats apples. | ||
| Did you see the most recent one? | ||
| I did. | ||
| It was pretty good. | ||
| Got bad reviews. | ||
| I didn't understand it. | ||
| What were they expecting? | ||
| What I read was that Will Smith modernized it too much. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I prefer a classic genie. | ||
| He used modern, urban vernacular. | ||
| They just weren't uncomfortable with that. | ||
| You remember how, you know, the first photos came out of Will Smith as a genie? | ||
| I love how little it takes to whip this nation into a frenzy. | ||
| Like, I'll wake up and open up Twitter, and then the Will Smith genie, everyone is freaking out over that. | ||
| And it's crazy how we put them on the same pedestal, like some sort of Trump scandal or like Pedophile Island, and then the Blue Genie or Sonic looks weird. | ||
| Sonic the Hedgehog. | ||
| Both take on the same amount of fervor online. | ||
| Yeah, same amount of psychic energy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I think one of the biggest gaffes, biggest mistakes ever was Ben Affleck thinking he could be Batman. | ||
| If Ben Affleck never ran for Batman, he would have 50% less hate. | ||
| You think? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Aren't there some people who liked? | ||
| Or no? | ||
| There's no one who liked Ben Affleck as Batman. | ||
| Even Ben Affleck didn't like himself as Batman. | ||
| When was the last time you heard anybody talk about Ben Affleck as Batman? | ||
| Ready? | ||
| Go. | ||
| No one. | ||
| Christian Bale's Batman, motherfucker. | ||
| Even Michael Keaton's Batman, but he's old. | ||
| That's so hard, though. | ||
| You know you're not going to hit a home run with Batman every time. | ||
| But everybody who does it and fails their career hits a ditch. | ||
| Who do you think? | ||
| Okay, Kilmer. | ||
| Leveled up or no from Batman? | ||
| Well, Kilmer did it once and he did a good job, but then he decided to get fat. | ||
| He's like, fuck this business. | ||
| He went crazy. | ||
| Is he in the Top Gun movie, the new one? | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| That'd be great. | ||
| But the lady's not in it. | ||
| The girlfriend? | ||
| The really hot blonde? | ||
| What was her name? | ||
| Kelly something or another? | ||
| McGillis? | ||
| Is that it? | ||
| Yeah, she was beautiful back in the day. | ||
| I think she might have gone the Val Kilmer route, if you know what I'm saying. | ||
| What about Clooney? | ||
| Look at that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Clooney... | |
| Ah, Clooney! | ||
| He's fine. | ||
| He's selling Nespresso and tequila? | ||
| Nespresso. | ||
| His was like a comedic take. | ||
| Arnold Schwarzenegger made way more money than George Clooney in that movie. | ||
| Me and my buddies, we have a thing. | ||
| We just say, cool party. | ||
| We just say it to each other, no matter what party we're at. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Alicia Silverstone? | ||
| She was in that? | ||
| And Chris O'Donnell? | ||
| What? | ||
| Why did I forget about that? | ||
| He was Robin. | ||
| Now he's on a TV show with LL Cool J. What is that one? | ||
| Is it like a NCIS or something? | ||
| That is something that the same people who talk like that guy I was making fun of, that's what they DVR that. | ||
| Oh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a wonderful show. | |
| Once you get to certain parts of the country, isn't it interesting to find out what their favorite shows are? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's where all those NCIS shows, that's where they get all their millions of views. | ||
| For sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a wonderful show. | |
| Chris does a great job and he just pairs well with LL Cool J. He's a little aggressive to me. | ||
| I mean, he's alright. | ||
| He's a good fella, I guess. | ||
| But I really love Chris. | ||
| I wish we'd get more work. | ||
| We should bring him back to the movies. | ||
| I think he'd be an excellent Captain Kirk. | ||
| He could be Captain Kirk. | ||
| Also, like I'll go to my aunt's house and that's just playing all the time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Like Burn Notice. | ||
| I mean, that's not even on anymore, but like these USA shows. | ||
| Yeah, Jag. | ||
| Remember Jag? | ||
| Oh my god, Jag. | ||
| Yeah, reruns of Jag. | ||
| My brother. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my, show's on. | |
| Jag. | ||
| Love it. | ||
| And the thing is, like, we can laugh about these shows, but they're like, 20 seasons? | ||
| Jack was on for 20 seasons? | ||
| Well, we were just going over Survivor the other day. | ||
| Survivor was on when Fear Factor debuted. | ||
| It was already on the air. | ||
| And that Fear Factor came out in 2001 or 2, somewhere around right after September 11th. | ||
| I remember that. | ||
| Because I remember being asked questions like, was it appropriate to have a show about fear after September 11th? | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Some guy asked me that. | ||
| I literally wanted to climb through the phone and strangle them. | ||
| I'm like, you fucking... | ||
| What was your answer though? | ||
| That's nonsense. | ||
| It's a game show, stupid. | ||
| You're like, I'm sorry, I didn't know that fear would play such a factor. | ||
| For you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So Survivor's been on, what did we say it was? | ||
| 28,000 seasons? | ||
| On the 39th, I believe. | ||
| 39th season. | ||
| It's still going? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| You didn't even know? | ||
| No. | ||
| I think The Amazing Race is still going, too. | ||
| Do you remember that show? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| CBS is killing it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That one won the award every year for the Emmy's best game show or whatever reality. | ||
| I don't know what it is, but yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| 12 times in a row or something. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Crazy. | |
| Did you like Fear Factor more than, because I remember I loved news radio. | ||
| That was one of my favorite shows. | ||
| So did you enjoy that more, Fear Factor? | ||
| Are there different things? | ||
| They're definitely different things. | ||
| I enjoyed the paycheck from Fear Factor far more. | ||
| I liked working without actors. | ||
| But I loved NewsRadio way more. | ||
| NewsRadio was just a far better show. | ||
| It was a really good show. | ||
| Well, they're different things. | ||
| They're very different animals. | ||
| It ruined me. | ||
| It's like going from the Comedy Store to Uncle Fuckstick's Chuckle Hut on Monday night. | ||
| It's like every other sitcom that I looked at, every other sitcom that I read for, or that I got scripts for, rather... | ||
| I was like, oof, this is just not good stuff. | ||
| Isn't it interesting when you get sides, like just sides, just like one scene or two scenes for a show, and you can tell it's good just from that? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| That's so rare. | ||
| It is rare. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When someone's a good writer. | ||
| Good sitcom writing is hard to do, man. | ||
| That is a really hard gig. | ||
| But then some people have bad sitcom writing, but they know how to make a bad, successful sitcom. | ||
| There's bad, successful sitcoms that last forever. | ||
| They're just unoffensive enough to stay on the air and keep you watching with your mouth slack. | ||
| I mean, formulas exist for a reason. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Those Big Bang kids, they're so clever with their writing. | |
| That's what keeps me tuned in. | ||
| I'm waiting for the vocabulary. | ||
| Does this guy ever shut off CBS? No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just keep it on the whole time. | |
| I tried Fox, but they're too hostile. | ||
| Did you know that your TV has other channels, sir? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah, there's other channels, other programming you could watch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, when they took Bill O'Reilly off the air, I said CBS is my channel. | |
| That's my channel now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You ever been in an audition and it's terrible, but everyone goes through the motions where everyone's just cracking up like it's the greatest show on earth. | ||
| Like it's Def Jam because the writers and the directors are in the room. | ||
| They fake laugh to get everybody excited. | ||
| Yeah, they have to because I think they need this rocket fuel to get this project off the ground. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And they need to give the writer confidence. | ||
| They have to give the director confidence. | ||
| They have to give the studio people confidence that it's all good. | ||
| It's a fake moment. | ||
| The fake laugh. | ||
| It's gross. | ||
| And the thing is, though, like, it's also not only is it gross, though, but it's the 30th time. | ||
| There's 30 people in the waiting room, and they're laughing like it's the first time. | ||
| They're faking it left and right, up and down. | ||
| And we know fake laughs. | ||
| Oh, we do know fake laughs. | ||
| It's offensive. | ||
| If someone's fake laughing at you, it's almost worse than not laughing. | ||
| It is worse than not laughing at all. | ||
| If you say a joke and they're like, ha ha ha! | ||
| Oh, you're like, get him out of here. | ||
| You get out of here, you bad person. | ||
| You, you, you, you, you, you. | ||
| It's the quickest way to heckle though, right? | ||
| Just like, ah! | ||
| No one can say anything. | ||
| When I'm laughing, it's like the Fredo thing. | ||
| No, I thought your name was Fredo. | ||
| That Fredo thing? | ||
| Dude, I was talking to my buddy. | ||
| I thought that you were Fredo. | ||
| Did you see that? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| Did you see it, Jamie? | ||
| That Chris Cuomo guy. | ||
| Donald Trump had the best line today. | ||
| Donald Trump won the internet today with this. | ||
| He said, should we red flag Chris Cuomo? | ||
| Because he seemed unhinged. | ||
| He was using terrible language. | ||
| Should not have a gun. | ||
| He basically exposed those red flag laws. | ||
| He was like, you see a guy like that, he's irrational. | ||
| That guy's irrational. | ||
| He goes, I'll wreck your shit. | ||
| I'll throw you down a flight of stairs. | ||
| I like the stairs comment. | ||
| I enjoyed that. | ||
| What is he talking about? | ||
| Because a guy called you Fredo? | ||
| And he was saying that Fredo is the same thing as the N-word? | ||
| I didn't know Fredo was derogatory. | ||
| Or maybe I'm new to it. | ||
| Not that I would ever try to call someone Fredo. | ||
| It's not! | ||
| It's a fucking character in a movie. | ||
| It's like Aladdin. | ||
| Is it like there's no, like, I don't know. | ||
| Cultural context? | ||
| I'm Italian. | ||
| There's no cultural context for Fredo where people are like, what the fuck did you say? | ||
| It doesn't exist. | ||
| It does not exist. | ||
| Well, you could say it for someone who's a traitor, but that doesn't even make sense with Chris Cuomo. | ||
| It's just a loser in a movie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Well, I guess you know what he's trying to do. | ||
| I mean, obviously he's trying to insult him. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Even if there is no history of this word existing for, you know, I'm ignorant. | ||
| I don't know if it does exist or not. | ||
| But, like, you know this guy's trying to take shots. | ||
| It's certainly not a compliment. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's a loser in a movie. | ||
| It's a brother that always fell short, and he turned on his own brother, who was the godfather. | ||
| Because he wanted to be the godfather. | ||
| What if he explained this insult to Chris Cuomo? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That would be great. | ||
| He goes, Fredo was a weak Italian in the movie, and I'm referencing your character. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You are the son of a great man, because he's Mario Cuomo's son. | ||
| Let's be honest about why you're here. | ||
| The name is familiar. | ||
| It helps. | ||
| But it's that Italian energy that – and again, these are my people. | ||
| You're full Italian? | ||
| No. | ||
| Three-quarters though. | ||
| But these people that react that way are common. | ||
| It's like, what? | ||
| What the fuck did you say to me? | ||
| I'll fucking wreck your shit! | ||
| But you're not supposed to be a respected political pundit and behave like that. | ||
| That is nonsense. | ||
| That's nonsense. | ||
| That's nonsense. | ||
| It's a silly way to behave. | ||
| It's silly. | ||
| That guy needs to work out a lot. | ||
| But he works out a lot. | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| Might be on too much testosterone. | ||
| Tell your doctor, just pare you down a little bit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Take whatever you're at, just drop it by half. | |
| Settle down, bro. | ||
| Or just work out really hard before you go outside. | ||
| Do some yoga. | ||
| Meditate. | ||
| I like when those... | ||
| Because LA's pretty passive town for the most part. | ||
| You'll get some of those. | ||
| You'll get like an East Coast guy. | ||
| You're like, oh shit, who's this guy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what I mean? | |
| Long Island. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Like visiting from out of town. | ||
| Like, whoa, whoa. | ||
| No one... | ||
| Hey, Fredo! | ||
| Yeah, we don't actually fight here. | ||
| We just talk big. | ||
| Go get my shine box. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was a very embarrassing moment, but I think it's a very important moment. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| First of all, he is Fredo for life now. | ||
| I hope he understands that. | ||
| He's Fredo for life. | ||
| Unless you want to get tossed down a flight of stairs. | ||
| He ain't tossing anybody down a flight of stairs. | ||
| That's nonsense. | ||
| He doesn't want to get sued. | ||
| He's not going to do that. | ||
| He's not going to touch somebody. | ||
| He'll hire someone. | ||
| He's not going to do that. | ||
| He's not doing shit. | ||
| He's not doing a goddamn thing. | ||
| That's one of the reasons why it's so funny. | ||
| He's not doing nothing. | ||
| That is Fredo. | ||
| You'll never get away from that now. | ||
| Better embrace that shit. | ||
| Better start selling Fredo t-shirts with your face on it. | ||
| Listen, CNN's probably going to fire him. | ||
| I would imagine. | ||
| No, I think they're standing behind him. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are they really? | ||
| For now. | ||
| I think they felt like he was attacked or unprovoked. | ||
| What? | ||
| By someone calling him Fredo? | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Those are fighting wars, dude. | ||
| Someone call me Fredo. | ||
| I'm not even Italian. | ||
| I would snap. | ||
| I go, how dare you? | ||
| He's a silly man. | ||
| That's what exposes him is that he's a silly man. | ||
| It wasn't like someone was being equally aggressive to him and he was defending himself. | ||
| Sometimes if you're in a situation where someone's very aggressive to you, you almost have to be aggressive back just to let them know, hey, I'll go there with you. | ||
| We could go to a dark place right now. | ||
| And, you know, I'm not going to let you hit me. | ||
| I'm not going to let you do something to me. | ||
| If you think that I'm a pushover, you know, I'm here to defend myself. | ||
| But that wasn't that way. | ||
| Like, someone was mocking him and he turned violent. | ||
| I think it was a little bit of a honeypot situation where he just wanted to get a rise and he was recording from down low. | ||
| They wanted him to do something. | ||
| Chris Cuomo, this is CNN. CNN's lost their fucking mind. | ||
| Chris Cuomo defended himself when he was verbally attacked with the use of an ethnic slur in an orchestrated setup, the spokesperson said. | ||
| We completely support him. | ||
| For now. | ||
| Listen to me. | ||
| This is not done. | ||
| This is not done. | ||
| This is just beginning to take on a form of its own. | ||
| You can't say that's an ethnic slur. | ||
| That is a fucking character in a movie. | ||
| Yeah, there's news to me. | ||
| It's not an ethnic slur. | ||
| And him saying this, like calling it the N-word, that is so preposterous. | ||
| That is so offensively stupid. | ||
| Do you ever get that, like, people trying to take shots or get you to slip or something? | ||
| Most people are nice. | ||
| Yeah, for the most part. | ||
| I've had guys say goofy shit to me, and I try to say goofy shit back to them. | ||
| Like at shows or just on the street or what? | ||
| Yeah, just in both things. | ||
| But I'm not a hostile person. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I look hostile. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I'm not hostile. | ||
| Like, I'm nice for the most part. | ||
| I've had people get dicky with me. | ||
| And then what do you do? | ||
| How do you handle it? | ||
| Get dicky back. | ||
| Just like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You see how three don't fly the stairs. | ||
| I don't say that. | ||
| It never escalates to that. | ||
| It's like some people get weird. | ||
| You know what gets weird? | ||
| The fucking autograph people at the airport. | ||
| How do they know, man? | ||
| Would you be surprised sometimes? | ||
| Somebody tell somebody off. | ||
| Somebody pays somebody off. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| Do you sign or do you just keep walking? | ||
| Tell them I'll sign one. | ||
| I'll sign one. | ||
| They get mad at me. | ||
| I got a stock in these. | ||
| I go, no, no. | ||
| I'm not working for you. | ||
| Not working for you. | ||
| There's people that charge people. | ||
| They'll go to those conventions and they'll sit at a booth and they'll charge someone X amount of dollars. | ||
| It's like 20 bucks or more for an autographed photo. | ||
| I don't do that. | ||
| I'm not going to do that, ever. | ||
| I don't even want you selling my picture. | ||
| I don't want it to be sold. | ||
| I don't want my autograph to be valuable. | ||
| But if I thought someone was really a fan and they wanted me to sign something... | ||
| That's different. | ||
| Yes, I would sign something for them. | ||
| I'd be happy to. | ||
| Instead of a four-year-old guy with a ponytail and a stack of... | ||
| You have a stack of fucking photos of me in various... | ||
| You're selling those. | ||
| I know you're selling those. | ||
| So one guy got mad at me. | ||
| He was like, follow me around... | ||
| LAX. I was like, dude, I'm not signing anymore. | ||
| He's like, next time I see you, okay? | ||
| I'm like, I'm not signing anymore. | ||
| But you know by signing one of them, you're making it very valuable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't care. | |
| If you sign the whole stack, you're cheaping. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's fine. | |
| I'm not going to be rude. | ||
| I'm not going to be rude. | ||
| So I'm just trying to, like, look, I'll sign one. | ||
| And I tell them that. | ||
| Like, I got a bunch of them in Portland this weekend. | ||
| There was like 10 people met me at the airport. | ||
| I said, I'll sign one. | ||
| I think one is good. | ||
| They can't complain. | ||
| But I ran into a guy in Philadelphia. | ||
| They got mad. | ||
| He tried to get me to sign another one. | ||
| I go, I'm not signing that. | ||
| And he goes, you fucking forget your fans. | ||
| I go, you're not a fan. | ||
| I go, you're selling these. | ||
| He goes, what, you think they're worth a lot? | ||
| I go, why do you hear that? | ||
| This is like some weird mental gymnastics. | ||
| You think you better? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're like, your fucking autograph's worth about $6.95. | |
| I go, and you're a mooch. | ||
| I go, you're over here trying to get me to work for you. | ||
| I go, go get a job. | ||
| And so we had this weird conversation. | ||
| Like, what are you saying? | ||
| You want me to sign these so you could sell them, but you're saying they're not worth anything, so I'm a loser. | ||
| But you're meeting me at the airport to try to get me to sell things. | ||
| You looked at my flight. | ||
| It's so silly. | ||
| It's so silly. | ||
| But I just don't like the idea of it because primarily I don't like the idea that there's some weird loophole where someone can get you to work for them. | ||
| They're just showing up and you're signing these real quick and I'm going to sell them. | ||
| Because you're asking someone to work for you, even if it only takes five minutes. | ||
| Or they're taking something from you. | ||
| One guy had 30 pictures. | ||
| I go, how many you got there? | ||
| He goes, 30. I go, are you out of your fucking mind? | ||
| How long is it going to take? | ||
| If you sat at a Starbucks and you just did them all? | ||
| You're like, hold on, family. | ||
| I'm just going to get through these. | ||
| The UFC makes fighters do that. | ||
| They sit down, but they give them out to fans and they do stuff with them. | ||
| They're promotional materials. | ||
| It's not one guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| And everybody signs them. | ||
| All the fighters in the card sign them. | ||
| They're valuable to fans. | ||
| As a fan, I have a signed poster out there from Efren Reyes that I purchased. | ||
| And Efren Reyes is the world's greatest pool player. | ||
| I love pool. | ||
| And he's this Filipino wizard. | ||
| They call him the wizard. | ||
| He's an amazing pool player. | ||
| So I bought it. | ||
| It was signed by Efren Reyes. | ||
| I got so excited. | ||
| But I would never ask Efren to sign something and then sell it. | ||
| You're not going to track him down to the airport? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Someone at the promotion for the tournament, they probably got him to sign a bunch of them. | ||
| They sold them. | ||
| And it probably helped offset the costs and things along those lines. | ||
| But the autograph collector is a different animal than the autograph seller. | ||
| So if you're a person that is just like, I love Fahim's comedy. | ||
| He's really funny. | ||
| I want to go to the comedy store and see if I get him to sign something for me. | ||
| That's a fan. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| But if you have 30 of them, you're going to go on eBay and you're going to try to make 50 bucks. | ||
| That's what you're doing. | ||
| Well, you're not going to make 50 bucks. | ||
| I'm just going to tell you right now. | ||
| They might. | ||
| If they hold on to it. | ||
| You're a funny guy. | ||
| You have a lot of talent. | ||
| What have you seen? | ||
| I'm always surprised because I came to the store. | ||
| I always see you at the store. | ||
| And you're like, oh man, your videos are funny. | ||
| And I don't know what you watch. | ||
| You're just on this other level. | ||
| So I don't think it even reaches you. | ||
| No, that's nonsense. | ||
| That other level thing is a complete total illusion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| I'm here to tell everybody. | ||
| Yes and no. | ||
| Because you are a rarity, I think, of the comedians at the store who have gotten to a certain point where you kind of have a relationship with everyone at the comedy store, from the door guy to the waitresses to stand-ups like me or Santino or Ian. | ||
| You have a relationship with everyone. | ||
| You come through, you spend time at the store. | ||
| You're being pulled by a lot of things, like UFC and the family and all this stuff, the podcast. | ||
| But you will hang at the store. | ||
| Well, that's a community. | ||
| It's very important to me. | ||
| That community means a lot. | ||
| It means a lot. | ||
| And I like supporting the up-and-coming people. | ||
| I think it's very important. | ||
| I think all the door people, the guys worked a lot. | ||
| Those guys, we're all going to work together someday. | ||
| It's very possible. | ||
| I'll be at one theater, they'll be at another theater. | ||
| I'll be at a club over here, they'll be at a club over there. | ||
| We're all the same. | ||
| It's just an illusion. | ||
| It's just time. | ||
| And I think it comes from martial arts. | ||
| Because in martial arts, everybody trains together. | ||
| You know, I'm a black belt in jujitsu, but I'm as friendly to the white belts as I am to other black belts. | ||
| We shake hands. | ||
| We hug. | ||
| If I roll, I'll roll with a guy who's new, who's just starting out. | ||
| I'll give him tips. | ||
| I'll help him out. | ||
| You know, we're all in it together. | ||
| And I feel like that's the approach that I take with comedy. | ||
| The same approach. | ||
| I don't believe in this elitist shit. | ||
| I think it's stupid. | ||
| I think it's bad for everybody. | ||
| It's bad for the person who becomes elite, even more so than it's bad for the up-and-comers. | ||
| Because the up-and-comers, if you dismiss up-and-comers and you treat them like shit, you treat them like you're better than them, you're above them, you don't need to talk to them, you don't make eye contact with them, you ignore them when they're trying to talk to you. | ||
| And I've seen that from comics. | ||
| And I think it's bad for you. | ||
| For them, it just makes them angry at you. | ||
| They can't wait till... | ||
| And I have been in that position before, where someone's dismissed me and been shitty to me, and then I surpassed them, fame-wise, and then passed by, and then they become friendly and weird with you. | ||
| And you never forget. | ||
| And they kind of remember. | ||
| It's very strange when you see the 180s, and you'll be in comedy long enough to see plenty of 180s. | ||
| I'll give you some names after the show. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Oh, I would love that. | ||
| Some good names. | ||
| Some juicy names. | ||
| And then you act however the relationship is now at this point in time. | ||
| But that's always in the back of your mind. | ||
| You're like, I remember when it was not this. | ||
| But there's also I want to give someone an opportunity for redemption. | ||
| I want to believe that they've changed. | ||
| So it's hard. | ||
| I don't want to be that mean person who's like, fuck that guy for life. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| But I do... | ||
| Hopefully that they grow. | ||
| Maybe they've grown as a person. | ||
| Maybe been humbled because the career kind of skid and came to an abrupt halt and they're trying to rebuild. | ||
| They used to be someone that thought that they could... | ||
| There was a time Mostly pre-internet, where comics looked forward to doing a couple things. | ||
| One thing they looked forward to was bumping people. | ||
| And doing a lot of time? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| But the bumping people was the big part. | ||
| It wasn't just doing time. | ||
| So if you're doing a time thing, if Dave Chappelle calls up and says, I want to do a half an hour, nobody cares. | ||
| He's really good about it, too. | ||
| He'll wait until everyone's gone up, and then he'll go out at the end of the night. | ||
| He's a beautiful person. | ||
| I love that guy to death. | ||
| He's the exception to the superstar rule because he's a sweetheart of a guy. | ||
| But there are some that wanted that spot of the bumper where they could just show up. | ||
| Oh my God, Mike's here. | ||
| Mike's here, Fahim. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Mike's going up. | ||
| Mike has to go up. | ||
| And Mike looks at you like, I'm going up. | ||
| There's a few of those guys. | ||
| Mike fed them. | ||
| Yeah, feeds them. | ||
| It feeds them to let you know that you're not on their level. | ||
| I feel like that happens way less now. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Well, first of all, because people like us talk about it on podcasts. | ||
| Like, if there's one guy that was like a super dick to you, and you're like, let me tell you something, Joe. | ||
| There's a fucking guy. | ||
| You know, it's... | ||
| We're all comics, man. | ||
| Just like when you go to a jujitsu school, you take a class or two classes, you're a fucking martial artist. | ||
| You know, you might suck, but you're a martial artist. | ||
| If you're up on that goddamn stage, you're a comic. | ||
| In my eyes, you're just like me. | ||
| I've been doing it for 30 years, and you've been doing it for less. | ||
| Yeah, that's what it is. | ||
| That's the only difference. | ||
| It's just a time in. | ||
| And if you get 30 years down and what you get out of those 30 years is that you're better than everybody and that you can act like you're better than everybody and you're aloof and you're dismissive, you've missed everything. | ||
| Like when I come to the store, I like that I get hugs. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I was surprised because when you first started coming back, like, I would just think, like, I'd be on the wall or whatever, but you're like, yo, what's up? | ||
| What's up, Behem? | ||
| And, like, give me a hug, you know? | ||
| And, like, we hadn't really, like, talked a ton, but something as little as that goes so far. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, that's nice. | ||
| Yeah, I hope it does go far. | ||
| I want comics to feel good about the community that we have. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I remember, because when I got past the store, it was the Dark Ages. | ||
| I know the stores had various Dark Ages. | ||
| Bobby talks about the 90s and stuff. | ||
| But you were at the Ice House. | ||
| So you weren't even really part of the story. | ||
| You were still just going there a lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it was very cool for you to come back and then Adam take over and then it just kind of evolved into what it is now. | ||
| It's crazy now. | ||
| Because I remember when it was not that. | ||
| And there was kind of a beauty in it though. | ||
| I'm pretty fortunate in hindsight that I got passed then. | ||
| What year was this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think I got passed in 2010. Yeah, that was three years into the Dark Ages. | |
| The Dark Ages started in 2007. Yeah, it's also crazy to know that, you know, the history and see the video and then, oh, I exist on this timeline now. | ||
| The store was just, you know, when I'm living in Seattle, it's this faraway place. | ||
| Even Hollywood and entertainment and all that, it's just this place that exists on a box. | ||
| It's not real. | ||
| It is and it isn't. | ||
| This isn't a real thing. | ||
| And then you move to LA and I'm hanging at the improv. | ||
| I'm a ghost. | ||
| You know, people are walking through me. | ||
| You know when you first come to town? | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| I swear to God. | ||
| I'm literally like, guys, I do comedy. | ||
| And they're walking through me, and I'm just like, my hands aren't. | ||
| And I would just hang out, and that's part of the deal. | ||
| You realize leaving your apartment is a win in itself. | ||
| You may not be getting up as much as you want to, but even just being out... | ||
| It's a win. | ||
| Because someone will be like, oh, you should do my, you know, because out of sight, out of mind. | ||
| So I would just loiter at the improv. | ||
| I was nobody. | ||
| And then I would, it was like Sandler and someone, and maybe Kevin James. | ||
| I think Sandler and Kevin James. | ||
| And that was like, I'm sure that's very standard. | ||
| I mean, I've been here so long, it's very standard now. | ||
| You see a million people. | ||
| I don't get starstruck at all. | ||
| But it's kind of like, Oh, fuck. | ||
| Those are people in a box. | ||
| Those are people in the box that I watch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And they just walked in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that was kind of like a little mind fucking adjustment, you know? | ||
| Well, when I was in Boston in 1988 when I started, Mecca was the store. | ||
| That was where Pryor performed and Sam Kinison and Hicks started out there. | ||
| He was a doorman there and Letterman was there and Robin Williams was there. | ||
| It was Mecca. | ||
| I thought, when I first started doing comedy, when I realized, like, okay, this is what I want to do. | ||
| Like, after the first set I ever did, I was like, okay, this is what I'm doing. | ||
| I'm doing this now. | ||
| I'm all in. | ||
| You know, it took me a while to get funny, but I mean, I had it in my head that I was going to get to the comedy store. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And then when I finally got there, I remember thinking how surreal it was. | ||
| Because I was like, I guess I was 26, 25? | ||
| No, 25 or 26, I think, the first time I stepped foot in the store. | ||
| And I remember sitting in the back of the room going, holy shit, I can't fucking believe I'm here. | ||
| Isn't it odd? | ||
| It's just a place. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it isn't. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| It's not just a place. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| I know, but like when you, I guess the manifestation of the place, like, okay, it's a stage. | ||
| There's chairs. | ||
| There's a table. | ||
| You ever see it in the daytime? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You're like, all right, this is just a space. | ||
| I like going there in the daytime. | ||
| It's odd. | ||
| It feels like it's waiting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like it's waiting. | ||
| But it doesn't come alive until nighttime. | ||
| Yeah, it's like a bedded animal, like a hibernating bear. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And at nighttime, man, the drinks start clinking and, you know, the comedy starts flowing and Jeff starts playing the piano. | ||
| It's an interesting room, too. | ||
| When you first started doing it, was it difficult? | ||
| Because it's not an easy room. | ||
| The OR is not an easy room. | ||
| Yeah, the OR. I consider the OR the comedy store. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| People will come through and be like, oh, yeah, I've been to the store. | ||
| I go, what room? | ||
| They're like, we're going to the main room. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay, cool. | ||
| Main room is cool, but it's not the heart and soul of the comedy store. | ||
| The OR is intimate. | ||
| Nothing gets lost. | ||
| The main room, it's so big, and there's that second tier, you know how the step goes up, to be able to have that laugh wave hit that back row? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're really working. | ||
| You're performing. | ||
| And the stage is so big, you have to be more theatrical to kind of do a serviceable job in that room. | ||
| But in the OR, it's like, literally, you're just watching a man gather his thought or woman, you know, just like, you can be real, you can be, you don't have to be like, you don't have to project as much. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, there's different kinds of comedy, right? | ||
| What's the largest crowd you've ever done? | ||
| I've been watching your stories and stuff, and that's fucking insane. | ||
| Like, even when you're in the green room, and you just hear these murmurs, it sounds like an angry mob is going to kill you or something. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| But they're all just, like, filtering into this giant theater. | ||
| Maybe 3,000 or 4,000. | ||
| And that was a trip for me. | ||
| That's big. | ||
| But you notice when you do 3,000 or 4,000 that you have to give them more pause. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| More time. | ||
| For the set, the joke, the punchline to settle, the laughs to settle before you move on to another. | ||
| But what's great about doing it so long is stand-up is this conversation with the audience. | ||
| So you know to wait. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like you have inherent timing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Another comic would just kind of know the timing of the club and just like plow into the next joke while they're still getting laughs from a theater. | ||
| Yeah, you can't do that. | ||
| But I took, I was talking about this yesterday with Tom Papa, that one of the reasons, one of the best lessons that I ever had was actually sitting in the audience at one of Richard, not Richard, Lewis Blacks, not Richard Lewis. | ||
| I mean, I would confuse it, yeah. | ||
| The word Lewis. | ||
| A Louis Black show in New Jersey. | ||
| He was there the night before me and Joey Diaz and I sat in the audience and he would hit a punchline and people would laugh and then he would hit the tag and I couldn't hear the tag because all the other people were laughing around us. | ||
| And I was like, oh, you got to be like a little more selective. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can't just hammer them. | ||
| Like in the store at the OR, you can hammer them. | ||
| Punchline! | ||
| You could beat the fucking shit out of them that way, and it's a different kind of comedy. | ||
| If you have that style of comedy, you might struggle a little bit with a theater, and you'll definitely struggle in an arena. | ||
| Arenas and amphitheaters are another animal. | ||
| I feel like just having no ceiling. | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| Is that good? | ||
| I did a Saturday night in San Francisco. | ||
| That's more for music, huh? | ||
| I had a great time. | ||
| We had a great time. | ||
| Ally Mikofsky killed. | ||
| She had a great time. | ||
| Ian killed. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| It was fun, but it's definitely different. | ||
| I think it's different because I think they're such fans, and obviously they're going to be tuned in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that helps. | |
| It's different when you're like, I'll do some festivals sometimes, or back in the day you would do a college or something, and it's just outside. | ||
| And if they don't know who the fuck you are, and it's daytime, and it's outside, you flew to pick up a check. | ||
| All you got to do is not lose your mind on stage and you can collect your check. | ||
| If you're like, shut the fuck out, then you're not getting your money. | ||
| Well, it's a matter of whether or not you're having fun. | ||
| If you're having fun and you enjoy performing and your material is good, so you know it's good. | ||
| You can have fun. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And whoever's tuning in can have a good time. | ||
| And the absurdity of the situation is funny. | ||
| But obviously, it's not going to be like a regular club set or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Dude, I'll take you if you want to come. | ||
| I'll take you. | ||
| I'll take you to one of the crazy places. | ||
| I mean, that just seems like such a mind trip. | ||
| That would be like a stand-up float tank. | ||
| You know, Ally's only 22. Yeah, she's so young. | ||
| Yeah, she's great. | ||
| And I've been taking her with me. | ||
| Her and Ian came this weekend. | ||
| Ian's one of my favorites. | ||
| And the first arena she ever did. | ||
| Well, here's Ally, right? | ||
| She's done clubs with me. | ||
| She does improv with me all the time. | ||
| She does a store with me all the time. | ||
| And she works the door at the store. | ||
| She works the door. | ||
| That's the beauty of the system at the store. | ||
| It's like one of the last places like that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There's a system in place. | ||
| She works the door of the store and she performed in front of 10,000 people on Friday nights. | ||
| And then went back to checking IDs. | ||
| That's the mindfuck of being a young comic. | ||
| You'll do these crazy things and then you're back at your job. | ||
| But she's wild and hungry. | ||
| I don't worry about Allie. | ||
| She's fine. | ||
| She's great. | ||
| She's really talented too. | ||
| But... | ||
| You know, so the first big show she had done before that was the Mirage in Vegas. | ||
| I love that club. | ||
| I started doing that club and then I went to bigger arenas and I came back to that club because it was so much fun. | ||
| Because most of the time when I do Vegas, I do it the night before UFC, like on Friday night. | ||
| And I was doing these big giant places like the Ka Theater, which is like a hundred foot tall, more than a hundred feet tall ceiling. | ||
| It's Cirque du Soleil place. | ||
| But it was too weird. | ||
| It wasn't the right setup for comedy. | ||
| And the Mirage is so perfect. | ||
| Is that the Terry Fedor Theater? | ||
| Yes, yes, yes, yes. | ||
| So I went back to... | ||
| So that was the first time she'd ever done anything big. | ||
| And she walked out there like she fucking owned the place. | ||
| She owned it. | ||
| She had the best set I ever saw her have there. | ||
| And then I said, okay, you want to do arenas? | ||
| She's like, ah! | ||
| So we did this crazy place in Portland. | ||
| Portland was insane, man. | ||
| Goddamn. | ||
| I was off the charts. | ||
| Almost too big. | ||
| Almost too powerful. | ||
| Not almost too big, but almost too powerful. | ||
| Do they do concerts in there normally, or what is that space? | ||
| Basketball. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| That's what the Blazers play? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For real? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Don't it be great if you just have a t-shirt cannon before you're set? | ||
| You're just like, thunk, thunk. | ||
| Yeah, I had my buddy Cam Haynes, who lives in Eugene, which is real close to there, was in that same place a couple weeks before that for a game. | ||
| And he's like, dude, I can't fucking believe you're coming here to do comedy. | ||
| Like, what is this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It was nuts. | ||
| You'd almost think as a consumer of comedy, what is that experience like? | ||
| And is it still... | ||
| The beats have got to be so different than a club? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It was fun, man. | ||
| I was watching Ian on stage and he was murdering. | ||
| And I was laughing my ass off. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| It's all in the acoustics of the building. | ||
| And the Moda Center in Portland is a really new theater or a new arena. | ||
| It's really well made. | ||
| So the acoustics are excellent. | ||
| So nothing is lost? | ||
| Because that's my worry. | ||
| In a space that big that no one can hear what you're saying and it's muddled and... | ||
| I've done some big places where it's not the best. | ||
| I've done some big places where you hear a little echo and you're like, ooh, this could be a problem. | ||
| So you have to be a little clearer with what you say. | ||
| Like you almost got to take some of the spice out of your joke, you know, a spice out of your delivery. | ||
| Because it's a little echoey. | ||
| The best, though, the best is the ice house or the store or the improv. | ||
| Like, 200 people, 300 people. | ||
| Bam! | ||
| Nothing's lost. | ||
| Bam! | ||
| Well, that's why comedy clubs are a certain size. | ||
| If it ain't broke, don't fix it. | ||
| It's also because that's all they could see. | ||
| I mean, it's hard to sell. | ||
| You should have, like, Joe Rogan comedy clubs and they're all, like, 20,000 seats. | ||
| They're like, yeah, I mean, it's also not when Joe comes around, but we're having a tough time getting people to come out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's... | |
| I mean, how many... | ||
| There's not that many people that are doing those places. | ||
| Like, Kevin Hart, Dave... | ||
| Oh, that's so crazy, too. | ||
| Like, you guys teaming up to do a tour. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my God. | |
| If you're a comedy fan, how great is that? | ||
| Dude, we did... | ||
| 25,000 people in Tacoma. | ||
| We broke the all-time attendance record. | ||
| Oh, you got my brother in. | ||
| I think he hit up Ian, and Ian was like, because I think I was in London, so I was sleeping. | ||
| The time was off. | ||
| So then he just DMed Ian, and he was like, hey, I'm his brother. | ||
| Can I come to the show? | ||
| The Dave things are crazy, though, because he brings a DJ, and Donnell Rollins gets out there and gets everybody hyped up, and the fucking DJ's in between the sets. | ||
| It's like he's getting everybody hyped. | ||
| That's next level, yeah. | ||
| Oh, it's so next level. | ||
| That's like a concert. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Plus, it's just, you feel crazy. | ||
| Like, is this really happening? | ||
| Like, even Dave, he was like, this is fucking crazy, man! | ||
| Like, we were all like, this is crazy. | ||
| To get him to say this is crazy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We were all like, this was crazy. | ||
| We all realized this was something. | ||
| Because people were so pumped that we're doing it together. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was mad. | ||
| It's like the Watch the Throne tour. | ||
| Kanye and Jay-Z. Whew! | ||
| Yeah, we're going to do more. | ||
| We're trying to figure out where and how, but we had a great fucking time. | ||
| Yeah, why not? | ||
| It's just so rockstar shit. | ||
| They show up at places and have IVs ready. | ||
| They do intravenous vitamin infusions with glutathione and get B12 shots. | ||
| How did you feel after? | ||
| Like I could run through a fucking wall. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For real? | |
| Yeah, I could pull a tree out of its roots. | ||
| How did you feel before and then after? | ||
| Were you just like out of it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was a little tired. | |
| You know, we're traveling and we're up late the night before and then you get juiced up with vitamins and you just... | ||
| You're like, where's that tree? | ||
| Yeah, you feel fucking excellent. | ||
| This, I guess... | ||
| You know, they don't... | ||
| Rockstars know what they're doing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm sure you're only doing a fraction of what they do. | ||
| They're doing coke. | ||
| Yeah, we're not doing coke. | ||
| And they have something different than IV. They probably have some other bag we don't even know about. | ||
| Probably. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's probably some illegal shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, they're probably doing NAD. They're probably doing a lot of different things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This looks insane. | ||
| At the end of the day, though... | ||
| Back to the grind. | ||
| Like tonight, I'm doing the belly room, you know? | ||
| That's so funny. | ||
| You're just back in the belly room. | ||
| Yeah, back in the belly room, doing the belly room. | ||
| Then I'm doing the improv. | ||
| I got a 10.30 at the improv. | ||
| Oh, dang. | ||
| Double dip? | ||
| Yes, always. | ||
| You don't do factory, really, huh? | ||
| Is that because they tape? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, they taped me. | ||
| They tape everybody. | ||
| They put your shit online. | ||
| They say, we're not going to do it anymore, but they still have the camera up. | ||
| Do you just not trust them? | ||
| Because they'll send it to me with the clips, and I'll be like, it's not ready, or I don't want to put it out there. | ||
| And then they respect it. | ||
| That's what Bill Burr said. | ||
| Yeah, and then I found the shit online. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, look at that. | ||
| He's like, what the fuck? | ||
| I was like, yeah, man. | ||
| There's somebody working there that's not listening to this. | ||
| And maybe they don't do that anymore, and I hope they don't. | ||
| But why chance it? | ||
| It just doesn't feel good. | ||
| Especially a bit in progress. | ||
| The way it was handled was very poor. | ||
| The way it was handled was like, you should be happy that we're putting it online. | ||
| It was not good. | ||
| I'll tell you all about it later. | ||
| But there's plenty of room at the improv and the store. | ||
| I don't need to go there. | ||
| I hope it does well. | ||
| It's a great club. | ||
| It's fun to work at. | ||
| I know what you mean, though. | ||
| I'm in Tarzana now, and someone will be like, hey, do you want to do this show in Irvine? | ||
| And that's just like saying, my show's on Mars. | ||
| Irvine at 8 o'clock, you might as well leave your house yesterday. | ||
| Like, Burr, can you chopper me to Irvine? | ||
| Have you been in a chopper with Burr? | ||
| No. | ||
| You gotta go. | ||
| But when I was working at Boeing, I had a co-worker who was learning, well, he had his hours up and everything, so he flew choppers, and during our lunch break, he's like, do you want to go in the chopper? | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| I was like, sure. | ||
| So then he's like, let's take the doors off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| This guy's trying to kill you. | ||
| Nah, but it was fine. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| I figured, when else am I going to go in a chopper? | ||
| That's true. | ||
| So for my lunch break, I went in a chopper with this guy. | ||
| I recorded it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And then my mom saw it, and she just flipped out. | ||
| She was like, what are you doing for him? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love you. | |
| Don't die. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| Yeah, if I had a son and I was a woman and my little boy was in a plane flying around LA with the doors off. | ||
| Yeah, maybe then I shouldn't have told her that it was my co-worker. | ||
| Yeah, you should have said it was like a super experienced fighter pilot. | ||
| He's a military guy. | ||
| He's had 20 years experience. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's weird when you go up in a bird with someone you know so well. | ||
| I did it first in high school. | ||
| When I was in high school, my friend Mike, Mike Warbell, he was taking small plane lessons. | ||
| And we flew around this little small plane. | ||
| He was my age. | ||
| Maybe he was older than me, like one year. | ||
| I think I was 16, he was 17 maybe. | ||
| But no more than that. | ||
| You just gotta trust him? | ||
| And he was flying in a fucking plane. | ||
| He had a co-pilot who was like an instructor. | ||
| Oh, that's better then. | ||
| Yeah, he was taking lessons. | ||
| Instead of just you and him. | ||
| But that was the first time I was ever in a little tiny ass plane. | ||
| I was in high school. | ||
| You ever want to do that? | ||
| I have no desire to do that. | ||
| It seems like a rough way to die. | ||
| I just don't, like even with all the training and all that, I'll leave it to the pros. | ||
| Like if JFK couldn't do it. | ||
| Well, I think the JFK story was more complicated. | ||
| I think he was involved with, I think that flight was like no visibility. | ||
| I think you ran into fog. | ||
| Like a more experienced pilot would have known the weather conditions aren't the best to be going up. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And also, you have to understand how to read the gauges, because you've got to know what altitude you're at, and the gauges have to be 100% functional. | ||
| I don't know what the whole story was with his death, but I believe... | ||
| Google whether or not JFK's body had cocaine in it. | ||
| Google that. | ||
| No, RFK. What's his name? | ||
| JFK Jr. Not RFK. JFK Jr.'s body had cocaine in it. | ||
| Because I think there was some cocaine involved. | ||
| If I'm not mistaken. | ||
| It's like, fuck, I can fly in the clouds! | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in the clouds, bitch! | |
| He doesn't even have any lessons. | ||
| He's just like, it's getting a plane! | ||
| I think he knew how to fly. | ||
| And I think he was... | ||
| I think he was unprepared for no... | ||
| You know how it is. | ||
| He was off the Cape, right? | ||
| It wasn't somewhere near Massachusetts. | ||
| That fucking... | ||
| Those clouds get thick, bro. | ||
| I mean, you don't see jack shit. | ||
| So you're flying around in that. | ||
| Imagine just flying, right? | ||
| You're on 500 miles an hour, and right in front of you is white. | ||
| That's all you see. | ||
| 500 miles an hour, through the white. | ||
| And just knowing. | ||
| Kind of just knowing this isn't a good situation. | ||
| Yeah, you're fucked. | ||
| And you kind of know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, when I lived in Colorado, I remember there was a time that I was driving up this hill. | ||
| We were pretty high up. | ||
| We were about 8,000 feet above sea levels, 3,000 feet above Boulder. | ||
| And as we're driving through the hills up to the house, the fucking clouds were so thick, you couldn't see five feet in front of the car. | ||
| So you're driving on a mountain road that sometimes has no railings to the left or to the right. | ||
| And it's just death to the left. | ||
| And you're driving up this mountain road and you can't see jack shit. | ||
| So you literally have to turn the fog lights on. | ||
| So the regular headlights are no good. | ||
| You gotta shut those off. | ||
| And you have to have fog lights on. | ||
| Because fog lights just kind of light the ground. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's why they exist? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, people don't even think what a fog light is, because most of the time you don't really have to deal with fog. | ||
| Fog light is a little light down below. | ||
| So you can see a little bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Instead of blinding it, just with the light. | ||
| Yeah, otherwise you just see bright white. | ||
| I don't see anything about that, but they were... | ||
| You gotta check Infowars.com. | ||
| Yeah, you're going to the wrong source, dude. | ||
| Did you use Google? | ||
| Bing it! | ||
| Bing it, Jamie! | ||
| 8.30, 9 at night, and they were flying over water that had no features. | ||
| So they were over water, it was dark and foggy. | ||
| So it was basically pitch black. | ||
| And he didn't have a flight plan either, and he told an instructor that offered to go with him he wanted to do it alone. | ||
| Oh, but you didn't find anything about cocaine? | ||
| I googled that and nothing popped up. | ||
| Something popped up that they might have had a past of that, but nothing said that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Can you put a drug test in an autopsy? | |
| Nothing said that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Maybe I made it up. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| Let's put it in the Wikipedia page just in case. | ||
| My memory varies so wildly. | ||
| It's confusing. | ||
| And I'm wondering if it's old age or if it's just an overwhelming amount of data in my brain and my hard drive has just completely run out of space. | ||
| Maybe there's some overlap. | ||
| Like a similar story. | ||
| For sure there is, because I'll have conversations with someone sometimes, and they'll ask me, we'll be just talking about something. | ||
| I go, well, that's not exactly how it happened. | ||
| This is what happened because of this, because as they evolved, they developed the ability to do this and that. | ||
| And I just know this. | ||
| I'm like, why do I know? | ||
| And someone goes, what are you, a fucking biologist? | ||
| I'm like, no, I'm an idiot. | ||
| I do retain a lot. | ||
| I remember things, but I don't retain some things. | ||
| Sometimes I forget who I was talking to, or who said what, or where this idea came from. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's not selective. | ||
| Yeah, it's not that good. | ||
| But it helps when I'm taking nootropics, which I didn't today. | ||
| Today I didn't take any alpha brain. | ||
| Why don't we have any here? | ||
| How come we don't have any here? | ||
| Oh, give me that. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| How does this work? | ||
| Well, your brain's going to grow. | ||
| I hope your head's flexible. | ||
| Just like the headphones break. | ||
| Should I throw this in here? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I used to work at Boeing. | ||
| Is this like an Elon Musk moment, guys? | ||
| No. | ||
| Am I going to be a mural? | ||
| I know, right? | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Crazy for me too, man. | ||
| I didn't even think twice about giving him weed. | ||
| Really? | ||
| You didn't think like, oh, this will be a moment? | ||
| No! | ||
| I thought we were just hanging out. | ||
| Me and my buddy Elon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Smoking a little weed. | ||
| Like normal. | ||
| Stockholders are like, no! | ||
| You see the Ross Baines painting in the green room? | ||
| Where in the cloud it says 6%. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Yeah, go look at the smoke cloud again, because he lost 6% of the stock. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jeez. | |
| But he got it back. | ||
| It was up to 9% the next day. | ||
| It went up 3%. | ||
| But his street cred went fucking through the roof, dude. | ||
| Through the roof, bitch. | ||
| I drove his car here. | ||
| That guy deserves everything he gets. | ||
| That car is a goddamn time machine. | ||
| I'm still a Mazda 3 2007 man myself. | ||
| Ooh, nice. | ||
| Yeah, I'm a purist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nice. | |
| Sometimes I'll get a brochure in the mail like, get the 2019 Mazda 3. No chance. | ||
| I'm going to put a bullet in my head if I get two Mazda 3s in a row. | ||
| Don't get a Mazda 3, but get a Miata. | ||
| A Miata? | ||
| Those are dope cars. | ||
| Isn't that like a punchline? | ||
| I don't give a fuck who's making that joke. | ||
| They don't know what they're talking about. | ||
| Alright, I'm gonna do it. | ||
| I'm gonna get a Miata. | ||
| Everyone's making fun of me. | ||
| No bullshit, man. | ||
| Dude, a Miata is a fucking fantastic car. | ||
| I'm not bullshitting. | ||
| It has very low horsepower, but it's super lightweight. | ||
| This will be my defense when people make fun of me. | ||
| They have a lot of horsepower. | ||
| It doesn't have a lot of horsepower. | ||
| It's very low. | ||
| I think it's less than 200 horsepower. | ||
| 181. Yeah. | ||
| But Miatas are amazing cars. | ||
| But as a comedian, how many times do you hear it as a punchline? | ||
| Those are hacks. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Those comedians are nice. | ||
| Isn't it funny? | ||
| There's certain words that are just like go-to, like Chipotle's a great punchline word. | ||
| They still make them in standard, with a standard transmission. | ||
| I just want to say thank you, Mazda, or you're welcome, Mazda, for... | ||
| It's a fucking great car, man. | ||
| I'm not kidding. | ||
| They're really fun to drive. | ||
| They handle really well. | ||
| I like mine. | ||
| They're very tactile. | ||
| But a Mazda 3 is different than a Miata, right? | ||
| How much different is it? | ||
| I mean, probably pretty different. | ||
| What is that one right there? | ||
| 2019 Mazda MX-5? | ||
| MX-5 Miata? | ||
| What about the RX-8? | ||
| You see that red one? | ||
| That cool red color? | ||
| Yeah, but the one above that, please. | ||
| Look at that, with the removable roof. | ||
| Ooh, that's like a Targa. | ||
| I could be on the beach with that. | ||
| Bro, that is a dope car. | ||
| People are crazy. | ||
| They just want it... | ||
| They want higher horsepower. | ||
| If that was instead of a Miata, if that was a Tesla, if Tesla made an electric Miata that goes zero to 60 in one second, everybody would want that car. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dude, it's a great car. | ||
| Drive one. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You know, I'm going to do that after this. | ||
| I'm going to test drive a Mazda Miata. | ||
| It's cheap. | ||
| How much is a Miata? | ||
| It's like 28 grand. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dude. | |
| Come on. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| I'm not bullshitting. | ||
| For 28 grand, you get a great car. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| I'm not kidding. | ||
| I would drive a fucking Miata. | ||
| I just would never think that you would have this much passion about the Mazda Miata, and it's really refreshing. | ||
| I am an automobile enthusiast. | ||
| I love cars. | ||
| I saw the cars here. | ||
| I love engineering. | ||
| I'm a fan of mechanical things. | ||
| I love how people design things. | ||
| And what they've done with the Miata... | ||
| Is they've made a car that it always has a loyal fan base that continues to buy them. | ||
| Because they don't break the bank. | ||
| It's not something that you pull up to the club and everybody thinks you're like some super baller. | ||
| But it's a fun car to drive. | ||
| They're a really fun car to drive. | ||
| They're super lightweight. | ||
| They're very agile. | ||
| They handle great. | ||
| They still make them with a manual transmission. | ||
| Yeah, mind stick. | ||
| Yeah, they're fun, man. | ||
| It's a fun car to drive. | ||
| Don't be hating on me, honestly. | ||
| All right. | ||
| But how do you feel about Mazda 3? | ||
| I want the same love for the Mazda 3. It's not that good. | ||
| God, motherfucker. | ||
| It's kind of boring. | ||
| It's like you might as well get a Prius. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're in the Prius category. | ||
| You know, what's happened with Tesla, it's interesting, because when you, for a while, you could be driving a Prius and no one knew if you were rich or poor. | ||
| It was the great equalizer. | ||
| Still to this day, Larry David drives a fucking Prius. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| But Tesla came along and they were like, yo, now you can stunt and save the earth. | ||
| Now people know you're rich and pious. | ||
| Before, you didn't know if this guy's poor or DiCaprio. | ||
| Yeah, but now it's like, so all the poor guys who want to go green are kind of fucked. | ||
| But a Prius is different because it's a hybrid. | ||
| But that was the only option back in the day. | ||
| That was the only option. | ||
| Mercedes has an S-Class Mercedes, top of the food chain Mercedes, that's also a plug-in hybrid. | ||
| It's just a new one that they just released. | ||
| Jeremy Clarkson was raving about it. | ||
| It's supposed to be this incredible car. | ||
| So Mercedes is actually making plug-in hybrids for their top of the food chain vehicles. | ||
| That's pretty cool. | ||
| Seems like that's new. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It is new, but it's also a little bit of a step back because it has gasoline. | ||
| But the step up is going to be a car that charges... | ||
| And it charges in a normal amount of time, like an hour or two. | ||
| How long does yours take? | ||
| Forever. | ||
| Oh, how long? | ||
| We have a supercharger here. | ||
| We have a supercharger installed here. | ||
| And it still takes, I don't know, probably like five hours. | ||
| Five hours? | ||
| If it's dead, it'll probably take five hours, maybe six. | ||
| You know, but like, if I come here and it, like full charge is, what does it get? | ||
| 300 and fucking 90 miles or something like that. | ||
| Somewhere around that range. | ||
| But not really. | ||
| Are you having to be a little better with your planning? | ||
| Like, alright, I'm going to put it in here. | ||
| I'm not going anywhere with it. | ||
| I go to LA. I go to the comedy store. | ||
| Like, this weekend I'm in Anaheim for the UFC. I'm not driving that fucking thorough. | ||
| Are you crazy? | ||
| I'm not getting stranded. | ||
| What happens when you get stranded? | ||
| Does anybody have a battery? | ||
| Does anybody have electricity that can siphon? | ||
| Anybody can sit here with me for eight hours. | ||
| There's not a goddamn thing you can do. | ||
| You have to call a tow truck, and they have to bring it to a charging station, and then you have to sit there like an asshole. | ||
| Yeah, it's for six hours. | ||
| It's, uh, but the technology, if you get, you can't, look, obviously I'm kidding in some way, because it's super simple. | ||
| It's got, you've seen one on the inside, right? | ||
| The giant screen? | ||
| I've only seen from the outside. | ||
| Bro, there's one right here. | ||
| Go sit in it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, cool. | |
| Because the comedy store has turned into a Tesla dealership. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It's kind of how you know. | ||
| It's Callan's got one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Neil's got one. | |
| That's how you know the store is in a renaissance where it's like so many Teslas coming in and out of that place. | ||
| Not just Tesla, it's like Russell Peters pulls up in a Ferrari SUV. And like a Bentley too. | ||
| He's got a Bentley. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A Ferrari. | ||
| Oh no, a Lamborghini. | ||
| Lamborghini SUV. Dude, like now must be the most trying time to be a lot guy at the comedy store. | ||
| Just imagine the bullets they sweat. | ||
| Oh my god, yeah. | ||
| Having to move because that parking lot in the comedy store is like Tetris. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a finite amount of space and they've got to fit all the paid regulars cars in there. | ||
| And the price tag on all these are insane now. | ||
| The problem is they're letting these promoters park there. | ||
| Aren't they being better about saying you can't park a lot? | ||
| They should detonate their cars. | ||
| Instead of a tow truck, it's just a stick of dynamite? | ||
| Just a giant Kevlar tarp that they throw over those cars and just detonate them. | ||
| Just during your set, you just hear a promoter. | ||
| Because there's so many people that park back there. | ||
| Like, you're not even a comic. | ||
| Like, what are you doing back here? | ||
| Not only that, though. | ||
| Like, the back bar. | ||
| And then also the back patio area. | ||
| They get weird. | ||
| Because that's, like, our home. | ||
| That's kind of where we hang out before we have to go on stage. | ||
| And we want to see guys like you or Santino and just, like, chop it up before we have to go on stage. | ||
| And then it's like, who's this? | ||
| And they talk to you and they interrupt conversations. | ||
| And not in a snooty way, but it is a bit of a... | ||
| It's like a dugout. | ||
| It's like a baseball dugout. | ||
| Adderall people go back there. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| They talk too much to you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You don't need that in your life. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But they have more confidence than me back there. | ||
| Because they have Adderall. | ||
| They have Adderall confidence. | ||
| I've never done Adderall. | ||
| Good for you. | ||
| Have you done it? | ||
| Isn't it big now? | ||
| Like, every student has taken it? | ||
| A lot of people are taking it. | ||
| It's a big thing amongst journalists. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because they get more work done. | ||
| Because you're on speed. | ||
| Like, there was a guy that I had in here that was writing a book on... | ||
| He wrote that book on Hunter S. Thompson. | ||
| What is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh... | |
| What is his book? | ||
| Something Gonzo something. | ||
| Anyway, he was talking about how he needs it to write and he can't write without it. | ||
| Is it just the deadlines and the workload is insane and that's a way to kind of cope with it? | ||
| You don't need it to write. | ||
| Can you move your fingers? | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But there's a mental fatigue. | |
| Take a break, go for a walk. | ||
| That's the natural thing to do, but some people want the quick fix. | ||
| Well, it's not necessarily a quick fix. | ||
| It's like you can get a good Timothy Denevy. | ||
| Nice guy. | ||
| Very nice guy. | ||
| Isn't there like a mental debt if you keep on taking it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's the name of his book? | |
| What's the name of the book? | ||
| Yeah, Mental Debt. | ||
| Yeah, it's called, you become a crackhead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Freak Kingdom. | |
| Freak Kingdom. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You become someone who is on stimulants all the time. | ||
| And I know several people that have an issue. | ||
| I know one guy has completely lost his fucking mind, thinks everybody's against him, thinks that everyone's done him wrong, and he's just out there cracked out in the middle of nowhere on fucking Adderall every day. | ||
| And making YouTube videos. | ||
| And there's a lot of people like that, man. | ||
| There's a lot of people like that. | ||
| It is a meth-like drug. | ||
| It's very, very, very, very similar to meth. | ||
| It's just a different release in terms of how quickly your body processes it. | ||
| It's crazy how widespread it is for something like that then. | ||
| It's fucking stimulants, man. | ||
| If you can effectively do your job and you don't commit any crimes, and they can sell you that stuff and make a profit, and then you actually are more profitable when you're on that stuff than not, then fucking have at it. | ||
| That's how people look at things. | ||
| And, like, look, when I was, uh, when pop was sort of legal, when it was medically legal, I had a bullshit prescription. | ||
| Your back hurt? | ||
| Oh, yeah, everything, bro. | ||
| What was your excuse? | ||
| I used a bunch of different ones. | ||
| Did you go to the hot doctor? | ||
| You know, like, you would see on Sunset Boulevard, it's, like, this, like, Persian chick who's, like, I would describe you. | ||
| No, I went to a black dude with dreadlocks. | ||
| He was awesome. | ||
| This is how he looked at me when I went in there. | ||
| I feel like that's the best weed doctor to the black guy with dreadlocks. | ||
| Like, oh, this guy's good. | ||
| The best. | ||
| Do you remember those vaporizers? | ||
| They're a bag. | ||
| They're called a volcano. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I remember when I stayed with Ari Shaffir in New York, and he had those. | ||
| And I had never seen that before. | ||
| It just seemed like such an odd contraption. | ||
| Some of the early podcasts, we vaporized with that bag and they're the dumbest conversations because we had no idea what we're talking about. | ||
| I would like correct myself halfway into a sentence because I forgot what I was saying and then I would forget what the original correction was and then I'm like, no, that's not what I'm saying. | ||
| What am I saying? | ||
| I was so fucked up and it would take like an hour into the podcast before like the fog would settle. | ||
| So was that just the medical marijuana delivery system? | ||
| Well, no. | ||
| It's just a delivery system. | ||
| You can use it right now. | ||
| I feel like, do a lot of people use it that way? | ||
| A lot of people vaporize with those bags. | ||
| What's the upside of that? | ||
| No, smoke. | ||
| You're just getting mist. | ||
| You're basically getting the THC crystals. | ||
| It's turning into mist. | ||
| When you vaporize, you're not getting the burnt... | ||
| Plant material. | ||
| It's almost like Hershey connoisseurs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| There's a million ways to get what you need. | ||
| Yeah, or wine dorks or cigar dorks. | ||
| It's like real similar. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But anyway, I walk into this guy's office and he's just the fucking coolest. | ||
| I wish I kept in touch with this dude. | ||
| It was somewhere in Hollywood. | ||
| I forget where it was, but the dude looked at me and goes, You look sick! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| You look sick! | ||
| He goes, you need some medicine! | ||
| You need some medicine! | ||
| And he had this big smile on my face. | ||
| I said, thank you, sir. | ||
| I feel sick. | ||
| And I feel like I need some medicine. | ||
| He goes, what are you here for, brother? | ||
| And I said, it helps you sleep. | ||
| He goes, good enough for me. | ||
| And he runs in his sleep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's writing a prescription. | |
| He gives me a prescription, and he pulls out the biggest bag. | ||
| He had a custom vaporizer bag for the volcano. | ||
| And I'm telling you, I'm not exaggerating. | ||
| It was four feet long. | ||
| It's this four feet long bag. | ||
| He puts it on this... | ||
| It pumps up like a kid's bouncy house. | ||
| Fills up with weed. | ||
| He does it there? | ||
| Oh yeah, we were blasted. | ||
| We got blasted at his place. | ||
| The doctor's office was connected to a grow-up, right? | ||
| So we smoke, we vaporized, right? | ||
| And then we go into the back where they're growing the weed and we're barbecued, right? | ||
| I'm barely in this dimension. | ||
| And I go in there and I see all these plants and I get a feeling from these things like they're alive, like they're conscious. | ||
| It felt so weird. | ||
| To this day, I miss that feeling. | ||
| I go, was I so high, I was hallucinating? | ||
| Is it possible that if you get really high on pot, and then you go around the pot leaves, you pick up their frequency? | ||
| And you understand that they're a living organism and that's one of the reasons why they make you feel so good when you get high. | ||
| Like one of the reasons why you're interacting with whatever they are, with the molecules, the THC and the cannabinoids. | ||
| You're interacting with it. | ||
| And then when you go around the actual potted plants and they're all super healthy because they got this crazy hydroponic setup and they're all the right nutrients and these lush green plants in this perfect environment for growing because, you know, they're experts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm like, these things are alive, man. | ||
| These things, they know you're there. | ||
| They're like, hi. | ||
| So it was a successful trip. | ||
| Oh, yeah, man. | ||
| It took me hours before I knew what I was doing. | ||
| Afterwards, it's like hours later, trying to figure it out. | ||
| I just love how he took the onus of an excuse off of you. | ||
| You look sick! | ||
| That's the moment I walked in. | ||
| You look sick! | ||
| You need some medicine! | ||
| And crazy dreadlocks and circular glasses. | ||
| He was amazing. | ||
| God, I wish I kept in touch with that guy. | ||
| He was a great doctor. | ||
| I've had a bunch of good weed doctors. | ||
| I had one of them, though. | ||
| I had to stop going. | ||
| He went crazy 9-11 on me. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| He was trying to tell me that the towers were brought down by Tesla technology. | ||
| And I was like, what? | ||
| He's like, concrete doesn't vaporize that way. | ||
| I was like, what do you mean, vaporize? | ||
| I used to try to do a bit about how, you know, you hear about white privilege and everything. | ||
| I go, one of the things about white privilege people don't really think about that much is you're allowed to have any conspiracy theory you want. | ||
| I can't be like, 9-11 was an inside job. | ||
| Jet fuel can't melt steel beams! | ||
| They're like, whatever, Ahmed. | ||
| Sure thing, Aladdin. | ||
| No, you don't understand! | ||
| Right. | ||
| Dead's different. | ||
| Yeah, if you looked at the pie chart of people that are really into conspiracies and looked at race, white would be overwhelming. | ||
| What would it be, the pie chart of conspiracy theorists? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| Like three-quarters of the pie chart, white people. | ||
| Yeah, it would sound absurd coming from me. | ||
| I don't believe that. | ||
| But imagine if I'm like, 9-11 was a brown guy. | ||
| They're like, sure thing, you're not getting off that easy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Inside job. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You worked for Boeing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that what you did? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| What did you do over there? | ||
| I was an aerospace engineer in Long Beach. | ||
| Were you involved at all in 9-11? | ||
| Did you have anything to do? | ||
| This is a hatchet job! | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm out of here! | |
| You can tell us! | ||
|
unidentified
|
You were lulling me into a false sense of security with the comedy in the comedy store. | |
| For years I've been your friend. | ||
| So anyways, you were involved with 9-11, right? | ||
| Did you train those pilots? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What did you do? | |
| What did you do at Boeing? | ||
| I did stress analysis for the floor beam. | ||
| It's very unglamorous. | ||
| It's kind of cool, though. | ||
| I guess so. | ||
| It means you're bona fide smart. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I'm able to jump through hoops with a goal in mind. | ||
| Like, I have a high threshold for academic pain. | ||
| So I took a lot of math. | ||
| I took a lot of... | ||
| It wasn't that hard for me. | ||
| It was like... | ||
| I mean, it's difficult to get the degree. | ||
| But, all right, they do these steps. | ||
| You get this number. | ||
| There's this formula. | ||
| You have the tools. | ||
| They show you how to do it. | ||
| Monkey see, monkey do. | ||
| Interesting way of describing it. | ||
| You have a high threshold for academic pain because it is like a little painful, right? | ||
| I think just it seems so daunting to the average person and they just don't want to be bothered with that to even get over the hump of learning something like that. | ||
| They're just like, I could never. | ||
| That's for brainiacs. | ||
| But the thing is, engineering was a means to an end for me to do stand-up comedy. | ||
| Like my parents were going to pay for my college. | ||
| But only certain degrees. | ||
| So at first... | ||
| Because I knew I wanted to do stand-up when I was like 17. Really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| How'd you know? | ||
| I think two things happened. | ||
| So I didn't grow up with stand-up. | ||
| I didn't really know it was a thing. | ||
| It wasn't on my radar. | ||
| I grew up with The Simpsons, SNL, and like Conan. | ||
| Late Night Conan. | ||
| Those were my jams. | ||
| I feel like that's my comedy DNA. But then I was 17. Like on my 17th birthday, we rented Delirious... | ||
| So we watched Delirious, Eddie Murphy's Delirious, you know? | ||
| It was like the greatest thing in the world. | ||
| And that just planted the seed of comedy. | ||
| So that coupled with my love for SNL, and I'm like, I don't know if Google was around even, or maybe, I don't know, I just researched how do people get on SNL. Maybe Google wasn't around. | ||
| So I saw they came from two camps. | ||
| They were either stand-ups or they came from improv. | ||
| So like Second City, UCB, Groundlings. | ||
| This was like the pedigree. | ||
| These are the schools they picked from. | ||
| And then I researched those schools. | ||
| They were in Chicago, LA, New York. | ||
| You had to pay money to take these classes. | ||
| You may not pass. | ||
| You have to go back to 101 or whatever. | ||
| So it's like a school. | ||
| And stand-up is just you. | ||
| It's just you out there with a sword. | ||
| I'm like, oh, I could do that. | ||
| And there's comedy clubs in Seattle. | ||
| I can count on me. | ||
| I don't have to rely on other people to zip-zap-zoop with each other. | ||
| Improv is a great thing. | ||
| I'm not knocking it or anything. | ||
| It's such a different... | ||
| You have to dedicate your life to one or the other. | ||
| I think it's very hard to be great at both. | ||
| and there's not a lot of career paths for improv it's like you get to a certain spot and that's it like there's some people who are very very talented in groundlings in like ucb and then how do they monetize that if they book a commercial they're still beholden to a lot of other people they have to be the right guy or girl the right look there's so many variables that are outside of your control as a talented improv performer But as a stand-up, you could do a weekend. | ||
| We can always make money. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Once you get to a certain level. | ||
| Is anybody famous, like, in terms of going on the road as an improv guy? | ||
| I guess whose line is it anyway, guys? | ||
| Yeah, but you'll have to – maybe they'll start doing stand-up because they've built some – you'll see that, right? | ||
| They'll build some credibility, like a notoriety, and they come from the improv background. | ||
| But if they want to start making some money on the road, they start doing stand-up. | ||
| But they're no better off than someone like a 22-year-old doing stand-up now because you've got to put the hours in. | ||
| Just because you're good at this other thing, you still have to start over. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's like the farm. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| The beauty of stand-up is you can't skip steps. | ||
| It's so, when you see a comic on stage, it's like when you cut a tree open and you see all the rings. | ||
| You can just tell, like, oh, this guy's been doing it 20 years. | ||
| You can't fake that. | ||
| So I chose to do stand-up because it was just me out there and I could rely on me and I could do it while I do engineering school. | ||
| So I chose engineering because I knew I wanted to do this stuff. | ||
| So I thought I needed a theater degree. | ||
| So I was like, can I do theater? | ||
| And my dad was like, no, you can't do theater. | ||
| And then it kept on getting more and more watered down. | ||
| I was like, can I do directing? | ||
| No, you can't do directing. | ||
| They told you what you can and can't do. | ||
| Yeah, and I love it. | ||
| In hindsight, I'm so grateful. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Dude, if I had a theater degree right now, I'd be fucked. | ||
| If anyone's watching and you have a theater degree or you're thinking about getting a theater degree, don't do it. | ||
| You don't need it. | ||
| You're not going to be Jude Law because you have a theater degree. | ||
| You could do it on the side. | ||
| Think of how many people have come to L.A. or New York. | ||
| It's a different thing, okay? | ||
| Like if you're at Juilliard and you're this instrument or whatever and it's like a top, top, top theater school and it's a feeder to like that world, okay, okay? | ||
| Or if you're the son of like a huge actor or daughter, sure. | ||
| But if you're like in, I don't know, Ohio and you're going to theater to school, you're just lighting your parents' money on fire. | ||
| That's all you're doing. | ||
| They're letting you go in a 20-year-old jungle gym for four years. | ||
| The thing is, you see sometimes an actor, or rather an athlete or someone, will be an actor in a movie, and they'll do a fucking amazing job. | ||
| Here's an example. | ||
| Like Oprah. | ||
| Here's an example. | ||
| The color purple. | ||
| The highest paid actor is The Rock. | ||
| What theater school did Dwayne the Rock Johnson go to? | ||
| The Theater of Hard Knocks. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So you might as well do wrestling as opposed to... | ||
| So it doesn't... | ||
| Theater degree does not equal acting job. | ||
| Right, but that's a different kind of acting than, say, like Jake Lillenhall or... | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think you're learning that at all? | ||
| Here's the other thing, too, that I always thought was so interesting. | ||
| Because I did acting class for two months. | ||
| When I was here in L.A., you know, just to try it out and stuff. | ||
| It wasn't for me. | ||
| And what's funny is, like, they'll be teaching these techniques and, like, Meisner and tapping in and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And then at the end of the class, they'll be like, all right, does anybody have any sides? | ||
| Any auditions they want to go over? | ||
| And it's all just CSI interrogation jobs. | ||
| Like, I don't know the guy. | ||
| So you're, like, you're teaching Shakespeare in class and anything anyone's ever going out for is like, oh, yeah, I used to come around here, like, two times a week. | ||
| How is iambic pentameter helping you? | ||
| And you're chomping at the bit to get this CSI delivery guy number two. | ||
| Why are you learning Meisner? | ||
| And I know there are no bit parts, only bit actors and all that. | ||
| Was it true? | ||
| No, that's what acting teachers love to tell you when you complain about getting a bit part. | ||
| They go, there are no bit parts. | ||
| Only bit actors. | ||
| And then you go, oh, I don't want to be a bit actor. | ||
| I'm happy to be a tree. | ||
| Well, there's certain comics that will tell you there are no bad crowds. | ||
| Those people are assholes. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I think we've been... | ||
| The thing is, if you're a younger comic and you're like, that crowd sucked, you don't have the bandwidth to know what's good and bad yet. | ||
| Not yet. | ||
| So you can say that. | ||
| I can say that. | ||
| We've all seen bad crowds. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And we can chalk it up for what it is. | ||
| But if you're a year in or two years in, it was probably you not audibling or just adjusting on the fly. | ||
| Or you're not very good at that. | ||
| Yeah, maybe that too. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| There's a weird thing about comics where there's certain comics where you know there's no way they're going to figure it out. | ||
| I don't know, though. | ||
| I mean, as a whole, yes. | ||
| But I hear there's anomalies to that. | ||
| Because I would hear stories about Sebastian, which is so crazy. | ||
| Because I wasn't there for that timeline. | ||
| But he's killing it. | ||
| He's so funny. | ||
| And he's like the guy now. | ||
| Well, he was never terrible. | ||
| Okay, so you're talking about... | ||
| No, I remember Sebastian in the beginning. | ||
| He was never terrible. | ||
| He was learning. | ||
| I see. | ||
| But he showed up all the time. | ||
| He was always a nice guy, and he wasn't terrible. | ||
| He just didn't do great in the beginning. | ||
| I think people just take liberties with that story then, and they make it sound like, yeah. | ||
| No, he was never offensively unfunny. | ||
| There's certain people that are offensively unfunny, where you're like, there's not a chance. | ||
| You're missing the DNA. You're colorblind. | ||
| You're missing it. | ||
| Whatever it is, you don't have it. | ||
| Can't breathe underwater. | ||
| I mean, that's the beauty. | ||
| I would hear Mitzi stories of her just telling people. | ||
| You're terrible. | ||
| You never met her, huh? | ||
| No. | ||
| I got there when Tommy was around, and it was kind of, so she was still, she was like sick, you know? | ||
| And he would say, Mitzi saw your tape. | ||
| And I don't know. | ||
| I know, I know, I know. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So he would always just, like, have this buffer between, like, Mitzi and myself. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And I would just pretend that... | ||
| Mitzi was... | ||
| She became, like, uh... | ||
| What's the guy's name from Psycho? | ||
| Norman Bates. | ||
| Just, like, up in the house. | ||
| His mom was in the fucking shower, but it was really him. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, his mom's dead, and he would put the wig on. | ||
| That was Tommy. | ||
| Tommy put the Mitzi wig on. | ||
| And then he would always, like, do her voice and stuff, and, like, when giving... | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Dude, because he would expunge wisdom. | ||
| Because I remember I would drive up from Boeing. | ||
| So I was working in Long Beach. | ||
| So I got an engineering degree, right? | ||
| And then I applied to jobs. | ||
| I did mechanical engineering because my best friend was doing mechanical. | ||
| And I was like, I don't care what engineering I do. | ||
| I'll be close to my friend. | ||
| And you were just doing that so you could have a job? | ||
| Just to support myself. | ||
| It was such a long con. | ||
| It's like, alright, I knew I wanted to do stand-up. | ||
| In the meantime, I've got to go to college. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I've got to be able to support so I can get good in Seattle. | ||
| That's really funny, man. | ||
| I guess people don't... | ||
| Do that? | ||
| Life's a long time, if you're lucky, you know? | ||
| And it's okay to have, to plan this far out. | ||
| It sounds far-fetched, maybe if I told it to someone at the time, but in hindsight, it was the most beautifully executed plan. | ||
| It worked out great. | ||
| Yeah, so I did stand-up while I was going to college. | ||
| My life was just school by day, stand-up at night. | ||
| It would actually be stand-up on the weekends, because I was living at home, and it's 40 minutes of the club, so I would just do a lot of time on Friday and Saturday. | ||
| Did your parents know? | ||
| Yeah, they knew. | ||
| And it was bad. | ||
| It was like I was doing heroin. | ||
| They were against it. | ||
| How do they feel now? | ||
| My mom has... | ||
| I took her to the premiere. | ||
| I had a small role in Whiskey Tango Foxroth as Tina Fey movies, so I took her to the premiere in New York. | ||
| And so she got to be on the red carpet and take pictures with Tina Fey. | ||
| And so she was in. | ||
| She was in after that. | ||
| And she keeps on asking me, she's like, when's the next premiere? | ||
| I'm available. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Where? | |
| When's the next premiere? | ||
| That is a hilarious thing to ask. | ||
| There was an after party, and everyone's milling about, and then my mom's like, there's Tina. | ||
| Tina's at the... | ||
| Introduce me. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, okay. | ||
| My mom's a sweetheart, but I'm still caught in this showbiz thing. | ||
| I'm, what, number 15 on the call sheet? | ||
| I don't even know if she remembers me, even though I'm in the movie. | ||
| So I'm like, I gotta pick my spot. | ||
| And then she just kind of nudges me. | ||
| Like a linebacker. | ||
| She's like, pushes me into Tina. | ||
| But it was great to have the out of my mom be like, my mom is such a huge fan. | ||
| And she's like, oh, yeah, of course. | ||
| And she was a sweetheart. | ||
| So now she's in. | ||
| She's in. | ||
| She's like, you made it. | ||
| You're actually successful. | ||
| Yeah, or she could see the light at the end of the tunnel. | ||
| What about your dad? | ||
| My dad is kind of more nuts and bolts. | ||
| He doesn't get fooled by the glitz and the glam or anything like that. | ||
| He just understands money and things. | ||
| Like, I've had a nice car or That Mazda 3. If I had a Mazda Miata, I mean, he'd be fucking sold. | ||
| Like, you did okay. | ||
| But no. | ||
| Get a Tesla. | ||
| Yeah, I guess so. | ||
| I think what has softened him a little bit, because I just got this place in Tarzana, like a house, and that's like real adult shit. | ||
| So I didn't realize that would kind of soften him a bit. | ||
| How old are you now? | ||
| 35. So you're like, wow, he's a real adult. | ||
| I guess so, yeah. | ||
| Do you have a girlfriend? | ||
| No. | ||
| So when you get married... | ||
| I don't know if he cares about that. | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| That's what an adult does. | ||
| I think my dad cares more about the security, like a real career, income, and a house and stability. | ||
| And comedy was never... | ||
| And then also, aside from just those things, you know, they're from Afghanistan. | ||
| So it's a low... | ||
| In my dad's opinion, it's kind of a low thing. | ||
| Comedy is like a low thing for someone to be doing. | ||
| Low? | ||
| Yeah, like low. | ||
| Like subhuman. | ||
| But what if he saw you at like a giant sold-out theater or something? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Maybe. | ||
| Yeah, who knows. | ||
| A big line of people waiting to see you? | ||
| I guess. | ||
| I don't know what that thing will be. | ||
| But he would always say, because we would be in shouting matches when we were younger. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| When we were both younger. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, I love my parents and I know what it was grounded in. | ||
| I think they just, they didn't want me to be eating out of a dumpster. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So they were just, they were there. | |
| I mean, most of my dad, his frustration and lashing out are just like, and not like physical or anything, just like, you know. | ||
| Like, you're throwing your life away, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| It was because he wanted that security for me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I understand it for what it is. | ||
| When I was like 17 or 18... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You don't get me! | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I hate you! | |
| Like, it just feels so... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Now that I'm older, I get it. | ||
| I get where he's coming from. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, so... | ||
| I don't know what the point was, but... | ||
| I think now that I have a little more stability... | ||
| When did they accept you? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| He would always say, um... | ||
| He's like, you're out there every night with the pimps and the prostitutes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ha, ha, ha, ha! | |
| I don't think my dad's ever been to a comedy club. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've never seen a pimp at the comedy store. | |
| I might have seen one or two prostitutes over the last 20 years. | ||
| You're out there every night with the pimps and the prostitutes. | ||
| That was his line. | ||
| Dude, you should talk about this on stage. | ||
| I did it in my last special. | ||
| I tell that story. | ||
| I talk about this story with my dad, and he would always trot that out there. | ||
| Oh my god, that's so funny. | ||
| I mean, he's not half wrong. | ||
| He's half wrong. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's half wrong. | |
| I've seen a couple prostitutes. | ||
| He's like, oh, as long as there's no pimps. | ||
|
unidentified
|
30 years I've seen maybe two or three prostitutes. | |
| The whole front row is just like fur coats. | ||
| All pimps. | ||
| And like pimp canes. | ||
| All pimps. | ||
| All greased hair. | ||
| Oh, big diamond rings. | ||
| But he would say, people should be entertaining you. | ||
| That would be the thing. | ||
| I should be the one entertained. | ||
| Not being the entertainer. | ||
| Because you're intelligent. | ||
| I guess so. | ||
| You're a serious person. | ||
| I've just found, if you want to make broad strokes, I think in the Middle Eastern community, they love art, but their kids shouldn't be doing it. | ||
| They should be consumers of art. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| But what if you were a famous painter? | ||
| I guess no parent really thinks best case scenario for their kid. | ||
| Like, eh, but what if a bunch of people buy his art? | ||
| It's always like, it's a pipe dream. | ||
| What are the odds? | ||
| Blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You're throwing your life away. | ||
| And I guess there is some, because statistically, sure, Oh yeah, statistics. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But I think like what I would do different when I have kids or whatever, I would explain the realities of how, you know, the whole theater degree thing. | ||
| I'm so glad they made me do a degree with teeth because that allowed me to have a legitimate job to get me out here. | ||
| Like I'm not a trust fund kid. | ||
| How else would I be close to where I needed to be? | ||
| Where does your family live? | ||
| There in Seattle. | ||
| Oh, so they're still up there. | ||
| They're still there, yeah. | ||
| So I would have some practicality. | ||
| I'd be like, I'll pay for your college, get a legitimate degree where there's an actual job outlook at the end. | ||
| Like, I'm not paying you to find yourself. | ||
| When did you quit the job? | ||
| Like 2010? | ||
| 2010, 2009. So right when you came to the store? | ||
| Right around. | ||
| So some things happened. | ||
| I was working at Boeing for three and a half years. | ||
| And I would just work by day and I would drive up to Hollywood in the valley by night. | ||
| I was burning the candle at both ends. | ||
| You must have been tired all the time. | ||
| I was. | ||
| Especially at first because I didn't know the lay of the comedy land. | ||
| I thought everything was worth my time. | ||
| Or you don't know until you do it. | ||
| So I would do some shitty open mic. | ||
| Did you do any backyard shows? | ||
| That wasn't a thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| That wasn't a thing yet. | ||
| As of late, you know what's so funny is like the progression of the alt scene is that first it was in weird spots like a washing or like a laundromat and then it was like a meltdown and then living rooms were a big thing. | ||
| Living room shows and then backyards were hot. | ||
| That's why I remember living room shows. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| I want to do a sketch where it's like the hottest alt show. | ||
| It's called Crawl Space. | ||
| And everyone's just on their belly. | ||
| You do really funny one-on-one sketches that you do. | ||
| Like, you play more than one role. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, thanks, man. | |
| And you do them on your Instagram. | ||
| Are you just super bored during the day? | ||
| No. | ||
| I always wanted to ask you this. | ||
| Oh, why I do them and stuff? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alright, so it's almost just some of the stuff I do is just a byproduct of, I don't know, being creatively backlogged. | ||
| So I love stand-up and I love sketch. | ||
| Those come to me naturally. | ||
| Sometimes people will be like, do you have a movie script? | ||
| Or like, you know, what's your sitcom? | ||
| And that's just more work. | ||
| There's a scaffolding there that if I was teamed up with someone who understands that world, maybe it'd be a little more easy. | ||
| But I don't want to bang my head against a wall to understand a format where stand-up and sketch just come to me. | ||
| So that's why I lean into that. | ||
| So stand-up has been a thing I've been doing for 17 years. | ||
| I feel like I'm good at that. | ||
| Sketch... | ||
| I started doing, I did it, I grew up through it. | ||
| I would do funny videos in school, like video productions. | ||
| Back in the day when you had two VCRs. | ||
| This is before Avid. | ||
| So you'd jog shuttle, you'd have two tapes, your mix down tape and your raw tape. | ||
| So you would actually make sketches on a VHS cassette. | ||
| So I was always into that because I loved SNL. And then you stop doing it. | ||
| I'm doing stand-up and then I moved to LA and I'm not getting on stage that much because it's so saturated here. | ||
| It's the biggest market here in New York. | ||
| Although I think it's easier to get on stage as a stand-up in New York. | ||
| Here you have to deal with actors and there's a real bottleneck. | ||
| So I wasn't getting up a lot. | ||
| But I'm a creative guy. | ||
| I have all these ideas and I had this idea for this video on how to attend an Afghan wedding or whatever. | ||
| And I was trying to get people to help me out and shoot it. | ||
| And then you're a runt. | ||
| No one really gives a fuck. | ||
| If you can't do anything for anybody when you first come out here, it's just sort of like... | ||
| And not in a mean way, it's just the nature of the wilderness, right? | ||
| Like, why am I gonna... | ||
| You're not a proven thing. | ||
| There's really no upside. | ||
| So you get a lot of like, yeah, I'll help you. | ||
| And then flake. | ||
| So I rewrote it to just do it all in my apartment. | ||
| So I just filmed this video, this YouTube video. | ||
| It wasn't even on YouTube yet, though. | ||
| It was... | ||
| I did this video called How to Attend an Afghan Wedding or something. | ||
| It was just called Afghan Wedding. | ||
| I put it on MySpace. | ||
| And it kind of does well. | ||
| It kind of takes off a little bit. | ||
| And then my brother was like, oh, you should put it on YouTube. | ||
| Like, it wasn't ubiquitous to put stuff on YouTube yet. | ||
| I was like... | ||
| Oh yeah, okay, I'll put it on YouTube too. | ||
| Put it on YouTube. | ||
| It kind of makes the rounds on there too. | ||
| And that was just kind of like the nudge I needed. | ||
| Like, oh, I'm good. | ||
| I could do this. | ||
| And I could do this while I'm waiting to get stage time. | ||
| So this was another avenue for me. | ||
| I do stand-up and then I do sketches. | ||
| And this was in the heyday of YouTube when there was an appetite for YouTube sketch. | ||
| Like indie YouTube sketch. | ||
| Just funny guys and there's different sketch groups and everything. | ||
| You don't think there's an appetite for that now? | ||
| Not anymore, no. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| It's become bite-sized. | ||
| No one wants to watch sketch. | ||
| People want to watch makeup blogs. | ||
| They want to watch pranks. | ||
| But how do you know? | ||
| I know. | ||
| How do you know? | ||
| Because I've uploaded. | ||
| You see the downturn. | ||
| Right, but is it because... | ||
| Now it's Instagram. | ||
| Everything's more bite-sized. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So I'm a sketch guy. | ||
| I love fully formed sketch and really taking my time... | ||
| And me and my buddy Aristotle, he's a really talented filmmaker and director. | ||
| I think I just left Boeing. | ||
| And I had this idea for this American History X type sketch. | ||
| It's called Dominoes. | ||
| And he and I did it and we put it out there. | ||
| And it was beautiful. | ||
| It's just one of my favorite sketches we've done. | ||
| And so I just kept on doing sketch... | ||
| And there was an appetite for it. | ||
| And then it started to drop off. | ||
| Like, there wasn't a lot of viewership. | ||
| Now, YouTube sketch will only work if it was on TV the night before. | ||
| Like, if it's a Key& Peele sketch that made it, or like an Inside Amy, or like a Tonight Show sketch, or... | ||
| The only way it'll make the rounds is if the sketch was on TV, and then it has the potential to do well on the internet. | ||
| Just a born-and-bred sketch on the internet doesn't take off anymore. | ||
| Instagram does. | ||
| So I just have all these ideas and I always write them down on my phone and Instagram, those like little one-on-ones is a way to get those ideas out in a very not precious way. | ||
| And it's just idea driven and people respond to it, you know? | ||
| So it's just more of like, oh, let me get this idea out of my head. | ||
| So, when you write, do you sit down and force yourself in front of a notepad or a computer? | ||
| Back in the day, like when I was first doing stand-up, I had two methods. | ||
| I would have the jokes that would just come to me, and then I would like sit down and try to manufacture jokes. | ||
| You know, like, alright, alright brain, what's funny? | ||
| What's funny about the world? | ||
| And I would come up with some stuff, but I always found the things that always worked the best were the stuff that just like came out of the ether. | ||
| It just came to me. | ||
| And then eventually I got to the point where I would get enough of those ideas where I didn't have to sit down and write. | ||
| So all I had to do was just be good about capturing what I'm receiving. | ||
| So I have my phone with me all the time. | ||
| Back in the day I had a marble notebook and all that, but phones have advanced so much. | ||
| I have Evernote. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So whenever I get an idea, regardless of what the proper medium for it is, I'll get an Instagram video idea. | ||
| I'll get a fully, fully formed sketch idea where I need production value, a sitcom idea, or a stand-up idea. | ||
| I have different notes for each of them. | ||
| And I've just trained myself. | ||
| My brain is wired a certain way where I just catch the butterflies or just put the bucket under the faucet. | ||
| So you don't sit down? | ||
| No. | ||
| I just... | ||
| I'll get the idea. | ||
| I'll jot down as many words as I need to capture it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe... | |
| I don't know. | ||
| Say something happens. | ||
| We go to... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| We go to the lake or something. | ||
| And then like... | ||
| Or we go hunting. | ||
| I get three ideas about hunting. | ||
| This many words to capture this thought. | ||
| This many words to capture it. | ||
| Like separated by commas. | ||
| So I have it. | ||
| Do you record your sets? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Yeah, I'll record them. | ||
| Do you listen to the recordings? | ||
| I do. | ||
| Well, it depends. | ||
| If I'm doing a hot night at the store, that's kind of like the hits, and I'm not going to learn a lot from the hits. | ||
| Right. | ||
| When I want to work on stuff, I'll tell Adam at the store, when I call in my avails, I go up late on Tuesday or Wednesday, whichever one I get. | ||
| I specifically ask to go late so that there's hardly... | ||
| So you can fuck around. | ||
| Yeah, there's no pressure. | ||
| There's like 10 people trying to sober up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I'm on my phone, and it's not like this... | ||
| Because when it's a packed OR, it's kind of like a, what do you got? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, I paid this much money, I got a hot date with me, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| It's a different show. | ||
| Joey Diaz started getting angry about it. | ||
| About what? | ||
| About, you can't practice. | ||
| Oh, well, you can. | ||
| You just have to choose different time slots or choose different shows to do it on. | ||
| There's new material nights. | ||
| I love those. | ||
| Like, Neil Brennan has one at Westside. | ||
| That's one of my favorite shows to do. | ||
| JF Harris has one. | ||
| So you have those new material shows. | ||
| But I'll just... | ||
| If you choose to do a later time slot, it might be different for you because you're such a draw. | ||
| But I'm nobody. | ||
| I'm a cusper right now, so I can just do late night. | ||
| But I just think you just sandwich those new bits in between old bits. | ||
| You can, but if you just want the total mental freedom of just throw spaghetti against the wall, and in a professional way, because if I'm doing a hot show and I'm trying to do a sandwich, it can still put the brakes a little bit. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And I don't need that. | ||
| I'm not Joe Rogan yet. | ||
| Yeah, but that's where it's at. | ||
| That's where you find the way out of it. | ||
| When it hits the brakes, you panic, and then you find a way out. | ||
| And sometimes that's where you find a punchline. | ||
| Sometimes not. | ||
| You have to deal with the 5 out of 10. 5 out of 10 are going to eat shit. | ||
| 5 out of 10 are going to make it through. | ||
| It's almost like being a baseball manager. | ||
| I have my A string, my B string. | ||
| So if I'm doing a hot show and I want to work on a B, so there's different levels of bits that I can polish. | ||
| I'm not going to throw a D in there. | ||
| It's prime time, baby. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| D is for 1 a.m. | ||
| D is for 1.40 a.m. | ||
| D's got no pressure. | ||
| D's got a lot of potential. | ||
| Do you do Jeremiah's show? | ||
| I love that show, yeah. | ||
| I'm doing that tonight. | ||
| Dude, that's the best. | ||
| I love shows where the audience knows the expectation. | ||
| It's like you're a fly on the wall in the process. | ||
| Yeah, and there's no pre-recorded or pre-planned material. | ||
| There's so much goodwill. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Because you don't get that when it's just like a show show. | ||
| I've come up with four or five legitimate bits that have wound up on specials because of Jeremiah's show. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's almost like a stand-up float tank. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a great little workshop. | ||
| Alright, what's this idea? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| And it's also because everybody knows that you're doing that, so it's kind of more fun. | ||
| And also, if you hit a dead end, that's funny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Because they know the theme of the show. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just wish he would do it more often. | ||
| He's only doing it like once a month. | ||
| Do it once a week, man. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe they know what their sweet spot is. | ||
| I don't think they do. | ||
| I think the sweet spot's once a week. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I think it's totally possible to do that show once a week. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I love those shows. | ||
| When was the first time your parents saw you on stage? | ||
| Oh, you know what? | ||
| This is so funny. | ||
| This is kind of... | ||
| So this is like the last bit on my special. | ||
| I talk about it like they've seen you once. | ||
| Once ever? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you bomb? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh! | |
| Oh, in the biggest way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh! | |
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Oh! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, do you want to hear the story? | ||
| Fuck yeah, I do. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So this is just a rehash of like the last thing. | ||
| So the last thing I said, I closed my special with this. | ||
| So I'm like 17. I'm like 17 or 18. I'm at college. | ||
| There's a bulletin board and it says like Apollo amateur night on tour. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So there's a flyer like the Apollo is going on tour and you can audition. | ||
| The Apollo Theater in Harlem? | ||
| Yeah, the Apollo Theater. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| So they're going to all these major cities, right? | ||
| So, I'm like, interesting. | ||
| Especially, I'm just getting maybe a year in or a few months into stand-up. | ||
| I'm like, this is going to be a great opportunity. | ||
| Isn't it funny, the level of delusion you have as a young comic? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Where you're like, I'm ready. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They got to hear what I got to say. | ||
| I've been doing this for a few months. | ||
| So, I take the, you know, take the little tab. | ||
| I have it. | ||
| I get all the info. | ||
| I go there. | ||
| It's in Seattle. | ||
| So I go there to audition. | ||
| I forget where they're holding the audition. | ||
| It's this, like, theater or whatever. | ||
| So I'm sitting. | ||
| There's 342 people just, like, wait. | ||
| It's like American Idol, pretty much. | ||
| And there's, like, a bunch of, like, older black ladies singing I Believe I Can Fly Under Their Breath. | ||
| Like, just because they're mostly singers. | ||
| So you just hear, like... | ||
| And I'm just standing there, like, waiting to do my jokes later. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god. | |
| And everyone's like, do-re-ming. | ||
| So finally, it's my time to go. | ||
| So I go out there. | ||
| I do my stand-up set. | ||
| And it does well. | ||
| Like, it does genuinely well. | ||
| It wasn't like a, oh, fuck, let's feed them to the sharks. | ||
| Like, I did well. | ||
| Like, I made them laugh, you know? | ||
| So I find out I get selected. | ||
| I think I'm one of 11. One of 11 who gets selected. | ||
| So I'm like, sweet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| And then I invite everyone. | ||
| I'm like, mom, dad, everyone from school and shit. | ||
| Oh yeah, everyone. | ||
| It's at the Paramount Theater in Seattle. | ||
| Have you been there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What is that, 4,000? | ||
| It's a big place. | ||
| 4,000, 5,000 people, something like that? | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| Maybe 3,000, whatever. | ||
| Big place. | ||
| It's in the thousands, people. | ||
| It's a big place. | ||
| Yeah, it's one of our nicest theaters. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Yeah, so... | ||
| So I invite everyone. | ||
| It's packed. | ||
| Oh, it's packed. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| So I do the dress rehearsal. | ||
| I do the dress rehearsal. | ||
| I'll go through the motions. | ||
| A lady comes up to me. | ||
| She's like, oh, the producer of the show thinks you should do this bit before instead of your hip-hop stuff. | ||
| Do this bit first. | ||
| This bit where I was talking about being Afghan or something. | ||
| You know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| I'm like, oh, okay. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Like, I'm so new. | ||
| I just trust the producer. | ||
| I'm like, I guess they know. | ||
| So I rearranged my set just based on the producer's request. | ||
| Comes the night of the show. | ||
| Everyone's there. | ||
| Blah, blah, blah. | ||
| It's my time to, like... | ||
| They introduce me. | ||
| Blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Please welcome to He-Man where I come out. | ||
| I'm like, hey, guys. | ||
| Blah, blah, blah. | ||
| I'm like, man, my name is Fahim. | ||
| It's like an Afghan name, or like Middle Eastern and Afghan to be exact. | ||
| And he's like, boo, boo, boo. | ||
| I'm out there for maybe 20 seconds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They just start booing you? | |
| It's such an interesting sensation to be booed by that many people. | ||
| So just like it starts cascading like, boo, boo, boo, boo. | ||
| And I've seen Apollo. | ||
| I know how it works. | ||
| And you hear like the, boo, boo. | ||
| And I'm like, all right, I don't need to get swept off. | ||
| Like, I know how this works. | ||
| So I get booed off. | ||
| You get booed off just from talking about being Afghan? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe it just really sucked. | ||
| Maybe it was because it was close to 9-11 and I talked about being Afghan. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| I get booed, you know? | ||
| I mean, I'm sure it sucked. | ||
| Balls, too. | ||
| Whatever I was about to say was going to be so bad. | ||
| So I was going to get booed regardless. | ||
| But I lasted maybe 15 seconds, 15-20 seconds. | ||
| So I'm just shell-shocked. | ||
| And then I'm just chilling in the hallway. | ||
| There was a desk. | ||
| There was an old-school student desk where it's L-shaped and they have the basket. | ||
| It's just in the stairwell for some reason. | ||
| So I just sit. | ||
| I just sit in that chair. | ||
| I felt like I was in a video game or something. | ||
| Because that's not a human experience, really, that many people get to go through. | ||
| So I'm just trying to make sense of what happened, and the world, and my life moving forward. | ||
| It's a lot going on. | ||
| It's a lot going on, you know? | ||
| And then, you know, I get up, I gather myself, I go up the stairwell, I get my things from... | ||
| You know, I have to see everyone else in the green... | ||
| Ugh, the worst. | ||
| See everyone in the green room area. | ||
| Get my shit. | ||
| I get my car and I think I drive home. | ||
| My parents, they take a separate car, right? | ||
| And then I hear the rest of the story from my brother. | ||
| So they're all in the Dodge Caravan. | ||
| My cousin Nilo, my brother, my dad, my mom is just silent on the car ride home. | ||
| Like, no one's talking. | ||
| Because, I mean, you know, they saw what they saw. | ||
| So no one's saying anything. | ||
| And then, obviously, my dad was never thrilled about me doing standard to begin with, right? | ||
| So he breaks the silence. | ||
| He goes... | ||
| Well, there's no business like show business. | ||
| And in hindsight, I think that's why when I want them to come out, I want it to be such a polar opposite experience. | ||
| And obviously I've come a long way from then, but I'm almost grateful that it did happen because when comics trade bomb stories, I fucking win every time. | ||
| And for me to be so young, like 17, and come back from that... | ||
| That means there's really something, like a fire in me, or I was meant to do this, or I really love stand-up. | ||
| Because that's not a pleasurable experience, to potentially think that could happen again, you know? | ||
| Now, they've seen you on television? | ||
| Did they watch your special? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, they've seen me. | |
| Did they think your special was good? | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| I never know. | ||
| My mom will tell me, but I never know what my dad catches. | ||
| When was the last time you worked in Seattle? | ||
| Did you do the parlor? | ||
| Is that open anymore? | ||
| Is that going under? | ||
| When did it go under? | ||
| A few months ago, I think. | ||
| Fucking A. So the pool hall part's gone too? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You like to play there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was a great gig. | ||
| You play pool and do comedy at the same time for me. | ||
| That's your jam. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| It's like you designed the club. | ||
| Yeah, that's how I would design a club. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so it's weird. | ||
| I mean, I could have them come out to another show. | ||
| What do they have there now? | ||
| What's the club? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think it's mostly... | ||
| No, they have Giggles or whatever in the University District. | ||
| Or maybe it's called Laughs. | ||
| It's called Laughs. | ||
| It's where Giggles used to be. | ||
| So they only have, like, one comedy club in all of Seattle? | ||
| They have Tacoma. | ||
| They have Tacoma, you know? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Spokane. | ||
| But these aren't Seattle. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| Seattle used to be a scene. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That fucking parlor live was a great club. | ||
| How did it go under? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Probably Brian Callen. | ||
| You think? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No. | ||
| Just throw it. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| What if that became true? | ||
| It's like the man who broke the parlor. | ||
| You fucking ruined it, bro. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so when your parents come to see you, will they come to see you in L.A.? I don't know. | ||
| I haven't. | ||
| You haven't decided when? | ||
| I've put on the back burner. | ||
| I mean, I guess if I do The Tonight Show. | ||
| I mean, I've done two late nights already. | ||
| Dude, it's almost 20 years later. | ||
| I know. | ||
| They've got to come see you live. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| What should I do? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Invite them to a show. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know what show. | ||
| And then pretend they're at the first show and then bring them to the second show. | ||
| Yeah, just to mentally prepare. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| You obviously have a little bit of a block if you're thinking about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not a block, but it's a thing. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, they saw you eat shit. | ||
| Yeah, and especially when they were so anti that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then... | |
| But you were right and they were wrong. | ||
| This is how it works. | ||
| I mean, my parents never yelled at me. | ||
| That I can't do comedy or else wasted my life or that I'd be there with pimps and prostitutes. | ||
| I mean, I love my parents. | ||
| We have a great relationship. | ||
| This was just kind of like one thing that was incongruent in the relationship. | ||
| Almost no parents think their child is going to make it as a comedian. | ||
| It is the most... | ||
| It's the most impossible to imagine success business that you could ever think your kid's going to go into. | ||
| Like we were talking about stand-up, that none of this is written down. | ||
| We're talking about the principles of stand-up. | ||
| There's no course you can take. | ||
| It doesn't exist. | ||
| Any class is usually taken by someone who's not very successful at stand-up, for the most part. | ||
| I don't know of any successful... | ||
| Chris Rock's not out there teaching comedy classes. | ||
| It can give you the confidence to jump off the cliff. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But outside of that, you're not going to learn. | ||
| But here's the thing. | ||
| All these principles that we're talking... | ||
| I mean, think about... | ||
| Look, comedy is obviously a viable art form... | ||
| In a large-scale venue. | ||
| I mean, I just got done doing two arenas this weekend, right? | ||
| So we're talking about something that is right up there with music or even with sports. | ||
| I mean, it's large-scale, enormous people, yet there's no real, like, pathway that's written down There's no real principles of it that are universally assumed by all people who participate in the art form. | ||
| Whereas if you learn music, you learn chords and chord progression. | ||
| You learn how to use your diaphragm. | ||
| You learn how to sing and learn how to play instruments. | ||
| You learn how to make a chorus. | ||
| There's none of that for us. | ||
| I think it was just such a foreign... | ||
| I can understand where they're coming from because it's such a foreign concept. | ||
| If you get an engineering degree or you're a doctor, you do A, B, you get C. There's a blueprint for it. | ||
| Stand-up is just so nebulous or just like the arts in general. | ||
| It's just sort of like you can't tell someone what... | ||
| Like your path to success is going to be different than Ian's path to mine. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And you kind of learn that as a comic as well early on because I think there's a little bit of imposter syndrome. | ||
| Like if somebody else gets something, you feel like it's an attack on you. | ||
| But you do it long enough, you realize like... | ||
| Oh, everyone's journey is so different. | ||
| Not in a hippy-dippy way, but your relationships are different than mine, so everyone hits at different times, and it's not right or wrong, it's just life and nature, you know? | ||
| Yeah, you're different than everybody else. | ||
| You just got to concentrate on doing your best and figure out what you can learn from other people's success and failures, but don't think of it as your own success or failure. | ||
| Yeah, and eyes on your own paper. | ||
| Yeah, I wouldn't want my kids to do comedy. | ||
| If my kids... | ||
| It would be hilariously hypocritical if one of my kids was like, I want to be a comedian. | ||
| I'm like, listen, you're not going to be a fucking comedian. | ||
| Stop. | ||
| Yeah, I think where I differ with me and my parents is if they want to do something in the arts, I'd be like, have at it. | ||
| Like, I support you. | ||
| I want it to work out. | ||
| But kind of have a foundation. | ||
| Work on that. | ||
| I don't want to send you to do communications for four years. | ||
| Yeah, but there's no school for it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Stand-up school. | ||
| Here's a school. | ||
| Have a shitty childhood. | ||
| That's the best school. | ||
| But the thing is, I had a good child. | ||
| Yeah, I was well-adjusted. | ||
| Maybe that's why it hurts so much. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Like, I gave him everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| He still did it. | ||
| Yeah, that's funny. | ||
| You might be one of the rare guys that didn't have a shitty childhood. | ||
| No, I think there's a new breed where there's people... | ||
| Obviously, there is that... | ||
| There are two more. | ||
| What? | ||
| Just well-adjusted? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Is Pete Holmes a level-headed guy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Please. | |
| Do you know him well? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| The fuck out of here. | ||
| Everyone is fucked up to some degree. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's why they're comics. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But no matter who... | ||
| Anybody you pluck off of Earth is fucked up. | ||
| So this is a universal truth. | ||
| But usually some kind of fucked up childhood is a prerequisite. | ||
| It helps. | ||
| It's like the whole... | ||
| It's fuel. | ||
| It's fuel. | ||
| It's like there's fighters that come from good childhoods too. | ||
| You know I would have this, it's a dumb thought, but I would have it as a kid trying to do stand-up and not have to face this wall of, I don't know, you know, my parents not wanting me to do it. | ||
| I'm like, oh man, I kind of wish I had like a worse childhood or like not middle class because then it wouldn't be questioned. | ||
| It would just be like, yeah, of course, what else are you going to do? | ||
| Well, I was really healthy when I was young because I was a martial artist. | ||
| I was competing all the time and I always worked out. | ||
| And I always thought, man, if I was a drug addict, I'd probably be funnier. | ||
| I really used to think that way. | ||
| Because, like, the guys who did drugs, like Kinison and Pryor, they had drug problems. | ||
| They were so funny. | ||
| I feel like, I mean, you've been doing it for a long time, so maybe you have a better perspective on this. | ||
| I think like back in the day with the doing drugs and all that, part of that, did that help? | ||
| Like was it image, like how, in terms of just seeing the comedy for what it is, was it part, it being new, rock star stuff, drugs, so you didn't have to be as tight as say like nowadays because there's so many more comedians? | ||
| No. | ||
| Or was it still airtight? | ||
| There's wildness to it. | ||
| There's wildness to it. | ||
| I think the funniest guy of all time is Joey Diaz. | ||
| And one of the reasons why he's the funniest guy of all time is the wildness. | ||
| He's truly wild. | ||
| You know what's great is watching him in the OR, especially in 2019? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| The climate we're in? | ||
| Yeah, he don't give a fuck. | ||
| You can't tell. | ||
| He doesn't know. | ||
| It's like he came out of a time machine. | ||
| He's like Encino Man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| They just thawed him out and they just threw him onto the OR. And people, they're horrified and so happy at the same time. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think even the wokest people, when they're watching Joey, and there's just this energy, and people are laughing so hard, your altruism can't break through that. | ||
| You can't deny what's happening right now. | ||
| So it kind of makes you, I guess, reassess what you're supposed to do. | ||
| Like, I shouldn't be laughing at this. | ||
| It's a weird time for comedy, but in that weird time, you're going to get some of the best stuff because it's supercharged. | ||
| When it does get through, if you can cover all the bases and make your argument soundly and logically and also have it be funny... | ||
| I'll see Burr do that all the time, too. | ||
| And, like, Joey's just such a force of nature. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You don't have time to, like, think about is this woke or is this knee-jerk? | ||
| You're just rolling. | ||
| Burr will kind of just, like, throw out this crazy premise that no sane person would be on board with. | ||
| Like, especially guys on dates. | ||
| Like, you just hear some of these arguments or whatever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He'll just throw it out there. | ||
| And he won't steamroll over it. | ||
| He'll just let it simmer. | ||
| And that's my favorite. | ||
| Because he's methodically, surgically taking his time to proving the point of this argument. | ||
| Well, a lot of these arguments, I would suspect that he's having at home with his wife. | ||
| His wife's a very powerful woman. | ||
| And she's a feminist. | ||
| I mean, what a cool woman, too. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So he has to formulate really well thought out arguments, I would imagine. | ||
| I mean, maybe he would... | ||
| But, you know, he's obviously thinking these through. | ||
| Like, this is not, he's not flippant about these points of view, these perspectives. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so I just love how he just throws a piece of baloney on the kitchen. | ||
| But when he nails it, man, it's like so much more satisfying even in the past. | ||
| Because it's like, you're making your way through the rockiest stretch of the river. | ||
| And I think those are the most rewarding bits as comedians the longer you've been doing it. | ||
| I could be silly and get a joke and sure that's fun, but it's not that rewarding as if you have an argument like Burr or something where it's just countered culture and you can methodically, it's like going through the laser field. | ||
| That's way more rewarding than just walking down the hallway. | ||
| Right, like Mission Impossible when all those lasers are protecting the diamond, you know, like fucking limbo through these things. | ||
| Yeah, what kind of movie is that? | ||
| It just walks up and has an apple and goes... | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| In the credits. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Yeah, it's an interesting time to get these ideas out there, but... | ||
| But you see by the reaction at the Comedy Store that people are looking forward to it because I think they feel the same way. | ||
| Like, goddammit, everything's going so far. | ||
| And so many people are so goddamn sensitive about so many different things. | ||
| It's not about intent. | ||
| They're just looking at magic words and buzzwords and topics that are off limits. | ||
| There's no such thing as context anymore or intention. | ||
| And you get that at the Comedy Store. | ||
| And I think it's the last place people are talking this freely. | ||
| Because I used to think, all right, we've been in a bit of a resurgence with stand-up and all the specials and all that. | ||
| I'm like, when's it going to burst? | ||
| I'm like, oh, cool. | ||
| I'm going to get to miss two comedy bubbles. | ||
| Sweet. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Yeah, but then it's proven wrong. | ||
| It's getting bigger and bigger. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| That's why. | ||
| It was a bubble when it sucked. | ||
| Let me tell you about the bubble of the 1980s. | ||
| There was a bunch of people that had a kind of way of talking about things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I got a cat in my room and the mouse was like Wild Kingdom in my house. | |
| It was a way of talking. | ||
| There was a comedy way of talking that these guys did. | ||
| There were some guys that just were not insightful and they just did comedy. | ||
| In a way that they had heard people do comedy. | ||
| So they kind of just like mimic the sounds. | ||
| It's like, you ever heard a band that sounds exactly like maybe Stone Temple Pilots or something like that, but they're not really? | ||
| Like, they're close, but like, what's so weird? | ||
| They sound so much like Stone Temple Pilots. | ||
| I don't know if you remember Gorilla Black? | ||
| No, what's that? | ||
| He sounded exactly like Notorious B.I.G. No way. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Who the fuck is that? | ||
| Gorilla Black, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Like, when I heard it, I'm like, are we doing this? | ||
| This is so crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| It was insane. | ||
| Yeah, I watched a comic one night in 1993 or something like that on stage in Montreal at Just for Laughs. | ||
| And he was basically doing a Richard Pryor impression. | ||
| And I was like, what in the fuck am I seeing? | ||
| It's like this guy was doing prior. | ||
| I mean, everything about his set, he was doing prior. | ||
| I'm like, this is so strange to see that people do that. | ||
| Well, that was a part of the bubble. | ||
| In the bubble, there was these guys who would wear the clothes they thought a comedian would wear and say the things. | ||
| And there was so much work, and there were so many clubs, and there were so many evening at the improvs, and all these different little... | ||
| So anyone can get a piece. | ||
| Yeah, people got a piece. | ||
| If you just mimic the part. | ||
| Dude, there was a lot of people back then that were arrogant, that were working, and they were headliners, and they were arrogant, and they were fucking terrible. | ||
| And I really enjoyed watching them fall off the face of the earth. | ||
| And I'll tell you some names afterwards, but the other names I was going to tell you. | ||
| But these people were doing comedy... | ||
| They weren't participating in an art form. | ||
| They were mimicking. | ||
| They were mimicking the people that were participating in the art form. | ||
| Like, love him or hate him, Jerry Seinfeld's an artist. | ||
| Oh, I love Seinfeld, yeah. | ||
| I do too. | ||
| But he's an artist. | ||
| His style, I've heard criticisms that he's not deep enough, he doesn't talk about sex or anything dangerous, whatever. | ||
| He likes what he likes. | ||
| He likes a certain style of comedy, and he's a master at that style. | ||
| But he spawned so many babies, what Patrice O'Neill would call babies. | ||
| Patrice O'Neill would say, like, hey man, you got a lot of babies out there. | ||
| There's a lot of people that are imitating you. | ||
| You got babies. | ||
| And there's a lot of, like, Dave Attell, a perfect example. | ||
| Got a shitload of babies. | ||
| Dane had a lot of babies, right? | ||
| Mitch Hedberg, I remember Mitch had a lot of babies. | ||
| Yes, he had a ton of babies. | ||
| There's a few people that mimic. | ||
| But during the 80s, there was a few innovative people and a lot of babies. | ||
| There was ten babies to every one innovator. | ||
| And you had these fake headliners. | ||
| And they would show up in town. | ||
| But they had those premises that everybody had. | ||
| They had those beats that everybody had. | ||
| They talked in the same way. | ||
| They didn't take any chances. | ||
| They were shooting straight down the middle. | ||
| And that was the bubble. | ||
| And that all went away. | ||
| That all went away. | ||
| And when that went away, those guys died off. | ||
| And there were people that were left over. | ||
| The people that were left over were the actual comics. | ||
| The actual people that were good enough where people would repeatedly go to see them at clubs. | ||
| They wrote a lot. | ||
| They practiced. | ||
| They were interested in the actual art form itself. | ||
| And I was really fortunate that I started out in Boston. | ||
| Where Boston had a very high standard, due to Barry Crimmins, really, in particular. | ||
| Oh, that documentary was great. | ||
| He was a brilliant guy. | ||
| Rest in peace, Barry. | ||
| I loved that guy. | ||
| But he was one of those guys, when he was nice to me as I got older, I was terrified of him. | ||
| Terrified of him. | ||
| Like, him seeing me when I sucked. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because I knew it was terrible. | |
| Just because he meant so much to you? | ||
| Well, I knew what a high standard he had for comedy. | ||
| And he was one of the main reasons why there was no hacks that were tolerated in Boston. | ||
| And that everybody had to be original, everybody had to do good material, and everybody sort of policed each other. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And when... | ||
| When you have a community like that, you get to see the art form flourish in a very good way. | ||
| And we had a lot of different people. | ||
| They were different, but they were all really high level. | ||
| So we would get these guys that would come in from out of town, road guys, that were babies. | ||
| They were Seinfeld babies or different guys. | ||
| And you would see how... | ||
| How poor they looked when they were surrounded by these original murderers. | ||
| So you'd have guys like Steve Sweeney and Lenny Clark would go on stage and then one of these babies would go up after them and just eat plates of shit. | ||
| Why are they going after? | ||
| They had a terrible system in Boston that was really mean and it was designed to make national headliners bomb. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| They would pay them a lot of money to book them at a club, and they would book them on a show with three local headliners. | ||
| Just killers. | ||
| And these local headliners would just fucking straight up murder. | ||
| And they would do all this local Boston stuff that made everybody excited. | ||
| And then they would have one of these guys who was used to going to Cleveland. | ||
| Hey, I was just in Indianapolis, had a great time, did a little comedy. | ||
| That's what I do. | ||
| I'm a comedian. | ||
| And they would go up there and just eat plates of shit and get booed off the stage and people would leave and they would do it on purpose. | ||
| Just to teach them a lesson or something? | ||
| No, they were just mean. | ||
| Like, those guys never, first of all, those comics never left Boston, okay? | ||
| And they would murder almost every night, and they were all animals. | ||
| They were doing coke, and they were drinking, they were fucking savages. | ||
| They'd pay them in coke. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Like, no bullshit. | ||
| Yeah, Nick's Comedy Stop used to pay people in coke. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Didn't pay me and Coke. | ||
| I never did Coke. | ||
| But I knew the whole deal. | ||
| Everybody knew the deal. | ||
| And so when these guys would come in from out of town, they would be angry at these guys. | ||
| And they're like, who is this fucking guy? | ||
| He's got Evening at the Improv. | ||
| I don't have that show. | ||
| He's on a fucking movie with Billy Crystal. | ||
| Fuck him. | ||
| And they would go on in front of those guys and light them on fire. | ||
| Light them on fire. | ||
| So who's dictating this line at the club or the comics? | ||
| Club. | ||
| They're all on Coke. | ||
| Everyone's on Coke. | ||
| So is this fun for them? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck them. | |
| That was just fun. | ||
| Light him up! | ||
| And they would do it on purpose. | ||
| That's kind of cool. | ||
| But some guys would survive. | ||
| I saw Dom Herrera in that environment, but Dom murdered. | ||
| That was the thing. | ||
| Dom murdered. | ||
| So he would go there and he would talk about how strong the lineup was. | ||
| He's like, this is amazing. | ||
| This is great. | ||
| But he would go up and murder because he was a real comic. | ||
| So Dom was there pre-bubble, during the bubble, post-bubble. | ||
| He's a comic. | ||
| I mean, those are the best guys. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Funny guys who take funny guys on the road with them. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because not everyone does that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| People panic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like the best comics are like, I want someone funny too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I want a great show. | ||
| You know, the reason why I take Ian or Santino or... | ||
| I always took Joey Diaz before he got too big. | ||
| Joey Diaz is selling out the Chicago Theater now. | ||
| He's fucking murdering it. | ||
| But all those guys, Ari and Duncan, I want to have fun. | ||
| I want to be with comics. | ||
| I want this show to be great. | ||
| I don't want to be the only one that's funny. | ||
| That's gross. | ||
| And I think it's a way to discover new comics as well. | ||
| I was opening for Neil for a bit for his tour for most of the dates and it was so fun for me because I'll headline and stuff but I'm not a draw yet, so I need to have a walk-up for whatever club I'm doing. | ||
| Comedy on State's great. | ||
| In Madison, Wisconsin, they have a walk-up. | ||
| They just have a trust with the community. | ||
| They all just come to shows. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, it's great. | ||
| Or Comedy Works in Denver. | ||
| I've never done Comedy on State. | ||
| I heard it's great. | ||
| Yeah, it's really good. | ||
| There's a theater right next door. | ||
| You'd probably be doing that. | ||
| It's such a great comedy town. | ||
| I did the theater last time I was there. | ||
| There's actually a poster for that theater in the bathroom out here. | ||
| So it's fun to do that when they have a walk-up audience? | ||
| Like the Comedy Works, like you said. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Comedy Works in Denver, they have a reputation. | ||
| But if it's a Miranda club, I'm not a draw yet. | ||
| I'm in purgatory. | ||
| But the Neal thing was cool because they're all coming for Neal. | ||
| They're theaters. | ||
| I'm just doing 20 minutes, which is like, I can shit that out. | ||
| It's nothing, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because I'm like headlining. | ||
| So there's no pressure. | ||
| They're there for Neil. | ||
| I have a great set. | ||
| And they're like, yo, you were funny. | ||
| So you get like fans from his fans too. | ||
| It's the best. | ||
| And it's a great show as a whole. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We compliment each other. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he gets to introduce people to a funny comic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm so grateful that he gets to do that. | ||
| Like pull a guy up and sort of take a little credit for like, I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's great. | ||
| That's where it's at, you know. | ||
| But I don't think this bubble's popping. | ||
| It's too fun. | ||
| It's too good. | ||
| I mean, there's too many good people. | ||
| As long as the art form is good. | ||
| The bubble only exists and pops when it's a fake thing, like it's a Ponzi scheme. | ||
| That's not really the case right now. | ||
| Yeah, there's so many good comedians right now. | ||
| And everybody's working hard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, everybody realizes that there's a lot of pressure on you, so they're all like... | ||
| That's like you were saying, like, how many sets I do. | ||
| That's why I do so many sets. | ||
| That's the only way to do it. | ||
| I do two sets a night, three sets a night, all the time. | ||
| And there's so many outlets now too, which is kind of what's helping it not pop. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You have Netflix, you have these new streaming like HBO Max and Amazon and Apple. | ||
| Gaffigan's on here in a couple days and he's got his Amazon special. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so does Alonzo Bowden. | ||
| His Amazon special is coming out soon. | ||
| And then there's a bunch of other people that have Amazon specials. | ||
| I'm seeing people advertise them on their Instagram. | ||
| So Amazon is putting together a bunch of specials now. | ||
| It's very, very exciting because they have the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which is one of my favorite shows. | ||
| So I'm just psyched that there's a lot of new venues and then there's new streaming things. | ||
| Like, who knows? | ||
| Maybe Hulu will get into stand-up. | ||
| You know, maybe some of these other streaming services will get into stand-up. | ||
| It's great for everybody, man. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| There's plenty. | ||
| Or there's guys like Andrew Schultz. | ||
| He just went straight to YouTube. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's exciting, dude. | |
| As a performer and another comedian, and I think everyone has varying degrees of, I think, angst that he had coming up. | ||
| And I kind of felt that way as well. | ||
| Like, people have varying degrees of how much the industry fucks with you. | ||
| Sometimes I feel in, sometimes I don't feel in. | ||
| I do for certain things. | ||
| And that was just really refreshing, just to take the power back. | ||
| And even seeing it happen with... | ||
| I have so many peers in the game. | ||
| Like, I've known Theo forever. | ||
| We've been puttering around town and doing shows and just obscurity. | ||
| And then doing the podcast and just seeing him take his own fan base and power back and everyone wanting to fuck with him now. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Well, in all fairness, Theo turned a corner like two years ago. | ||
| I remember watching him before, and I'm like, this guy's kind of funny, he's unique. | ||
| But then two years ago, me and Adam were in the back of the room like, this motherfucker's turned a corner. | ||
| He was just killing it. | ||
| He was just really funny. | ||
| But funny in a new way. | ||
| He had hit some new gear. | ||
| Some of the words he uses to describe it. | ||
| But he hit that gear and then everything took off from there. | ||
| A lot of it was just hard work. | ||
| Persistence, hard work, and just eventually it really clicked. | ||
| I think it was like a one-two punch. | ||
| I think it was turning that corner. | ||
| And then also just the word to the people. | ||
| Democratically just his podcast and reaching people. | ||
| And him doing other people's podcasts too. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Because he's really good on podcasts. | ||
| He's just fucking silly and funny. | ||
| And then his own podcast where he just looks right at the camera and rants and talks about shit. | ||
| And you realize how his... | ||
| Fucking unusual brain works. | ||
| Isn't it funny sometimes you just want to figure out what this algorithm is or what he's doing? | ||
| And you go, no, that's just him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You ain't figuring that out. | |
| I can't. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, you're never going to figure that out. | ||
| How would you think to call it that? | ||
| Never. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's got Theo comedy. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| But it's like what we were talking about earlier, where no one can really teach you how to do comedy. | ||
| You've got to figure it out. | ||
| And no classically trained comedian, if there ever really was one, would ever teach you how to do theater. | ||
| It would be terrible, too. | ||
| A classically trained comedian? | ||
| It would be like those babies. | ||
| It would be like those guys that are fake Seinfelds or fake Gaffigans or whatever the fuck they are. | ||
| Yeah, the Schultz thing was really cool to see because he just did it on his own. | ||
| But here's the thing, and I wanted to bring this up with you, Jamie. | ||
| Is he shadowbanned on Instagram? | ||
| Tell me what you think is going on. | ||
| I texted him when that happened because I looked it up. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| His name showed up right at the top of my list. | ||
| But he said other people... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Me? | |
| I wouldn't show up on mine. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think they changed the algorithm because I've noticed views... | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| It could be what? | ||
| It could be, but you'll have to take it like a case-by-case scenario. | ||
| Was the person that first sent it to him, are they already following him? | ||
| Do they search his name a lot? | ||
| Did they block anything he's ever done? | ||
| But people have told him, hey man, I'm having a hard time finding your Instagram page. | ||
| And so he asked me about it. | ||
| And I said, what do you mean? | ||
| And I go, I see you right now. | ||
| You're on my feed. | ||
| And he goes, no, no. | ||
| If you go to search me. | ||
| So I go, okay, let me search you. | ||
| I go, whoa. | ||
| I searched Andrew Schultz. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| I mean, a bunch of other people, but not him. | ||
| And he's got a lot of followers. | ||
| Like, let's do it right now. | ||
| Put it up on screen. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Put it up on the screen. | ||
| Let's just do it in real time. | ||
| This part of what I was saying is I follow him, so if you're not already following him, you might show up in a different way. | ||
| But I do follow him. | ||
| Look at this, Fahim. | ||
| Hi! | ||
| Now just write Andrew and give him some space. | ||
| Write space. | ||
| I haven't gotten to Andrew yet. | ||
| Space. | ||
| It should have shown up already. | ||
| Right, but just space and then type in his name. | ||
| See, it's not coming up. | ||
| Right, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| Now hit search. | ||
| I don't think you can't search on the web. | ||
| Oh, on the web. | ||
| But look, it's not showing up. | ||
| You see Andrew Schultz fans. | ||
| Even when I typed in his actual account name, it didn't show up. | ||
| Hold on a second. | ||
| What is that Andrew Schultz fans? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Click on that. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| Below it. | ||
| Below it. | ||
| Keep going. | ||
| Keep going. | ||
| Are you blind? | ||
| There it is. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Click on that. | ||
| I know, but it's not. | ||
| So it's his fans. | ||
| It's just a fan. | ||
| Oh, 165 followers. | ||
| Yes, I am. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, I know it's not him. | ||
| I'm just trying to figure out what it is. | ||
| So just in that search, it's not showing up. | ||
| And it wouldn't show up for me on my phone either. | ||
| Now, it doesn't make any sense, because what does he have, like a half a million followers? | ||
| How many followers does he have? | ||
| Isn't that interesting? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, he thinks he's being shadow banned. | ||
| What's the... | ||
| Are they trying to, like, get some money out of... | ||
| He's got 282,000. | ||
| 282,000 people, and he can't find his page on Instagram. | ||
| Is it Schultz with a T, or no? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| U-L-Z. But it's not showing up. | ||
| It's not showing up on mine either. | ||
| Now, we might be being paranoid here, and it might be just something in the search algorithm that for whatever reason his thing isn't showing up. | ||
| And he used to say Andrew Hesse Schultz. | ||
| I don't know why Hesse. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Nickname of his, I don't know. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And maybe he thought that Hezzy was fucking him up, so he took Hezzy out of his name on his Instagram page. | ||
| So it just says Andrew Schultz now. | ||
| But even though, still, you can't find it. | ||
| Yeah, that's weird. | ||
| You have to type in Andrew Schultz all together with no space, and then you'll find him. | ||
| That's what I just did and it didn't come up. | ||
| With no space? | ||
| Yeah, that's what I was just doing while you were asking me to type stuff. | ||
| Oh, so you did it with space and no space? | ||
| Yeah, that's when I did it to him. | ||
| I was like, if you're typing in no space, that's where the issue is. | ||
| If I type in all the way, it's showing up right away. | ||
| And he said, well, I'm seeing that from people both ways, so... | ||
| I go, well, if that's what you're seeing, then I'll go out on a limb and sort of say someone is manipulating that search result because you can manipulate search results. | ||
| Well, here's the thing. | ||
| They do shadow ban people on certain social media platforms. | ||
| This has been revealed through hidden camera conversations with people who are... | ||
| Whatever, moderators or engineers or people that work behind the scenes on Twitter or Facebook and they do manipulate algorithms, manipulate searches and shadow ban people. | ||
| And there's a lot of people, particularly conservative people, which he's not conservative. | ||
| But what he is is, you know, he's a raunchy comedian, and he might have done something that someone felt was not woke, or what have you, and they want to slow down the broadcasting of his signal. | ||
| That's entirely possible. | ||
| I don't know if it's true, though. | ||
| I would love to have a logical explanation that... | ||
| That's why he's not showing up. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But he's, you know, he's complaining about it, that it's a shadow ban. | ||
| Anyway, go follow Andrew. | ||
| Andrew Schultz. | ||
| S-H-U-L-Z. S-H-U-L-Z. Go follow him. | ||
| Yeah, I saw him in Montreal. | ||
| Just to tell Instagram shadow bands we can get around you, bitch. | ||
| He's a marketing genius. | ||
| It's just great to hear him talk about what he's doing and how to get around it. | ||
| It's exciting because you forget as an artist that you have a lot of power. | ||
| You're everything. | ||
| You're the product and sometimes, especially in the old models, you just kind of Waited to be anointed. | ||
| Well, he's got millions and millions of views on his special on YouTube. | ||
| And if you stop and think about if that was on Comedy Central, which Comedy Central did want to give him a special, he probably would get like Maybe a million people would watch it when it came out and that would be the end of it. | ||
| I have a special and I don't think people are watching it. | ||
| Just YouTube is accessible. | ||
| You can be in comedy jail. | ||
| You can do a great special and no one can find it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And everyone has YouTube. | ||
| Everyone can click on a link. | ||
| Everyone has YouTube. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And this was his logic. | ||
| He was like, you know what? | ||
| I'm just going to release the whole thing on YouTube. | ||
| And look, he went straight from not selling out clubs to selling out theaters like that. | ||
| And now he sells out everywhere internationally. | ||
| And it's fun from afar to watch the industry change. | ||
| Because I think early on, so much of your self-worth is put in these people, and you don't realize until later that, oh, they're just heat-seeking missiles. | ||
| The majority of them don't have taste. | ||
| It's just revenue. | ||
| Whatever's hot. | ||
| Can I get a pie of whatever this is? | ||
| Yeah, including hacks. | ||
| There's a long history of them supporting hacks and thieves. | ||
| It's just a thing where what they're trying to do is make money. | ||
| If you're an agent or a producer, there's no benefit in you supporting an artist that is not going to be commercially viable. | ||
| You have to find out, like, who's gonna pop? | ||
| Who's gonna be the next movie star? | ||
| Who's gonna be in the movies? | ||
| You know, you have to figure that person out. | ||
| What was it like when, you know, let me see, a thing went down? | ||
| What was the climate like for you, say, professionally after that went down? | ||
| Because he was at a different level at that time, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was more popular than me with comedy, for sure. | ||
| You know, I was doing Fear Factor back then, and I wasn't really working on the road that much. | ||
| I really couldn't. | ||
| You know, I was doing... | ||
| You know, 30 episodes a year plus. | ||
| So 30 weeks a year of work. | ||
| And I wasn't really enthusiastic about traveling when I was doing that. | ||
| I just wanted to... | ||
| I was exhausted. | ||
| And then I was doing the store, too. | ||
| So I was mostly just working on my act and just doing stand-up. | ||
| And they supported him because he was the one who was making the money. | ||
| I mean, in fact, I left my agency because they wanted me to apologize to him. | ||
| And then Louie wound up leaving them, and Attell wound up leaving them, and Swartzen wound up leaving them. | ||
| Everybody left them right after that because they found out that they wanted me to apologize to them. | ||
| Everybody in the industry knew what was going on, but they wanted to turn a blind eye and make money. | ||
| So did it hurt my career? | ||
| Well, I stopped going to the store. | ||
| But that didn't hurt me as much as it hurt them. | ||
| It hurt the store because I told everybody. | ||
| And then that place was a ghost town. | ||
| I mean, it went from being packed when I was there because I would let them put my name up on the marquee and I was working for free. | ||
| That's how fucking stupid Tommy was. | ||
| That fucking dummy. | ||
| But then when he got fired and I came back, it made it all worth it. | ||
| The whole thing was... | ||
| It was interesting because it could show you that if there was someone who was... | ||
| Doing what Mencia was doing that you can get away with it and even with someone who was successful like me like I got another agent like that I mean but by let my agent literally said I was gonna have to apologize to him like you're out of your fucking mind I go listen I'm not only am I not doing this is we're never gonna work this out I'll never work with you again because you're asking me to apologize to someone who is literally a Vampire someone is stealing from the work of other artists. | ||
| It's all he does and And you guys know it. | ||
| And you guys are profiting off of this. | ||
| You're making a giant mistake. | ||
| And I turned out it was correct. | ||
| But it was interesting. | ||
| Because even though it didn't hurt me financially, I got to see that they were trying to. | ||
| Because, you know, he wanted an apology. | ||
| And I was like, you're out of your fucking mind. | ||
| I'm not apologizing to you. | ||
| And as he kept getting, people became more and more aware. | ||
| Other people started finding other bits. | ||
| The real thing that sunk him was Cosby. | ||
| It's really funny now when you think about it now, but he had this like such obvious theft of a Cosby bit. | ||
| I mean, he stole all the inflections and he switched it around a little bit, but people who work with him are trying to tell him to stop doing that bit because it was a giant famous Cosby bit. | ||
| And he just insisted that he was going to do it. | ||
| And when that bit got on YouTube, that and Mexican folks finding out he wasn't really Mexican, that was a fucking knife in the heart. | ||
| When they were like, what? | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| When they found out what his real name was, they're like, you got to be fucking kidding me. | ||
| There was so much going on then, though. | ||
| That was, you know, he was really popular. | ||
| He went from selling out these giant places And, you know, kicking ass all over the country. | ||
| And people knew him from the television show, and they thought he was hilarious. | ||
| I guess what's kind of cool about stand-up is that, of all the art forms, stand-up has the most justice in it. | ||
| Now it does. | ||
| Now it does, I guess. | ||
| But there's a lot of people who made it through the net back in the day that were just criminals. | ||
| I guess it was harder to know back then. | ||
| There was no internet. | ||
| It was just sort of like word of mouth or you would hear stories. | ||
| Look, we all know that there's parallel thinking and there's even cases where you forget you heard something. | ||
| I've done it. | ||
| I've definitely done it. | ||
| Usually we hash it out, like a comic or something. | ||
| We'll be like, okay, yeah, you can have it. | ||
| We're all pals and it's bound to happen. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And you just have the conversation. | ||
| If you're a pro, you're like, all right, I don't need that bit. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And then there's also people that are like, you said that word and that's the word that I say in my bit. | ||
| And you're like, what? | ||
| Some people are hypersensitive. | ||
| It's almost like... | ||
| Delusional. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Some people get delusional. | ||
| I talk about being in a relationship, so... | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| If you could stop doing that, I really appreciate it. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| I broke up with my girlfriend recently, too, so... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I own that. | ||
| Well, especially things that are current events, right? | ||
| If they're like something like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's fair game. | |
| I can't believe you're talking about Trump. | ||
| You know I do that whole Trump bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| Are you crazy? | ||
| I've seen these conversations before. | ||
| I have a Fredo bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah, Fredo. | |
| Can you please not... | ||
| That guy's never gonna live that down. | ||
| I'm telling you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This is just brewing. | ||
| This is just starting. | ||
| He's never living that down. | ||
| That's one. | ||
| You know, I'll wreck your shit. | ||
| I'll wreck your shit. | ||
| I'm gonna throw you down a flyer stairs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Was there stairs nearby? | ||
| Or would they have to go up them? | ||
| You'd have to go find some stairs. | ||
| You're not going to trip down? | ||
| That's a weird thing to say to someone. | ||
| I'm going to throw you down a flight of stairs. | ||
| It's like you want to hurt them, but you want the gravity to do all the work. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| So it's not that tough. | ||
| It's lazy. | ||
| He has all that potential energy once he gets up there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And you just knock him over? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That's funny. | ||
| You're looking at it like an engineer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've got to use it somehow. | ||
| My dad's so proud that I pulled that out of the bag. | ||
| Do you use your engineer training at all in your stand-up? | ||
| Is there anything that you say? | ||
| No, I think one quality I can take away from all the engineering schooling, like I'm not doing formulas and equations and all that, but I think it's just a manner of which I approach things and time management. | ||
| I'm wired a certain way where I can be studious on my own. | ||
| I don't, I'm not like smoking weed on the couch and like I'm a muse or I'm a vessel, Godspeed. | ||
| Okay, what do I want to do? | ||
| What are my goals for this year, let's say? | ||
| How many sets do I have? | ||
| What am I working on for this set? | ||
| So I'm just a little industrious. | ||
| It's taught me. | ||
| And also when it comes to bits, I see them in a certain way. | ||
| The way I get the bits is very organic, and that's what I like about it, is that it's not clinical or anything. | ||
| It's just magical, how I think of something. | ||
| And I'm grateful for that. | ||
| Do you give yourself time to think? | ||
| Do you specifically do things like go on walks or anything where you can think? | ||
| Not specifically, but what I found is one of my favorite things to do is to go to a diner, sit in a booth, have breakfast, have coffee, and then you keep on refilling it. | ||
| And I'm on my phone, and I'm on Twitter and Instagram, and my mind's just kind of... | ||
| And I'm listening to music. | ||
| I love music. | ||
| So I'm just scouring Spotify and Hype Machine just for new music. | ||
| Hype Machine. | ||
| I don't know what that is. | ||
| So that's how I find music, like Hype Machine and also Spotify. | ||
| Hype Machine is this blog aggregate. | ||
| So there's music blogs, right? | ||
| There's one called Acid Stag that I like a lot. | ||
| So you can follow a blog, and they'll post songs every day. | ||
| Maybe they'll post six songs a day. | ||
| This website, you can follow different blogs, and it's like following someone on Instagram or something. | ||
| So you look at your feed, and you get to hear all the songs your favorite blogs have posted within the website. | ||
| And there's an app on your phone, too. | ||
| And these are kind of underground songs. | ||
| These aren't top 40. So it's a way to hear great music that you wouldn't hear on the radio, and they're not any less great. | ||
| There's this whole subculture and genre of music that is magnificent, but it's not on top 40, so people don't really know about it. | ||
| So Hype Machine's a great way to get some cool tracks off the beaten path. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's cool. | |
| I've never heard of that before. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| So music plays a big part with my comedy. | ||
| Hype Machine. | ||
| What's popular now? | ||
| Paco Versailles. | ||
| This is like their top 40. So even this is a little poppy for me. | ||
| I'll have certain blogs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's Poppy? | |
| I like finding... | ||
| Munya? | ||
| Dove? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| That's Poppy? | ||
| I mean, for this type of music, yeah. | ||
| Whatever makes the popular list... | ||
| Durante? | ||
| Hold on, stop. | ||
| Yeah, you're not gonna know. | ||
| Scroll back up, please. | ||
| Durante Maya? | ||
| That's Poppy? | ||
| Who the fuck knows any of this music? | ||
| Oh, there's Childish Gambino. | ||
| I know who that guy is. | ||
| If you're like a teen or early 20s, you'll know this stuff. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I just love listening to music, drinking coffee, and on my phone, and I'll just get these ideas. | ||
| But also just living life. | ||
| I'll be walking around, and I'll get an idea, jot it down. | ||
| Well, you don't have a day job, which helps. | ||
| No. | ||
| That really helps collect material, believe it or not. | ||
| I think comics have to be amused, and you have to be experiencing just life-life. | ||
| If you're working all the time... | ||
| It was harder when I was working at Boeing. | ||
| Because I had that mental fatigue of just working on parts and all that and computational stuff. | ||
| So I'm not thinking about bits when I'm calculating. | ||
| Sitcoms suck it out of you, too. | ||
| I can see that. | ||
| Because you think that, oh, it's just like, you know, I didn't really work on my act that much during the day anyway. | ||
| Now I have a job doing acting. | ||
| I'll probably get just as much material. | ||
| Uh-uh. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, you won't. | ||
| You're going to be wrapped up in whatever the fuck you're doing. | ||
| And then when you go to do stand-up, you'll be like, oh, yeah, time to do stand-up. | ||
| Now I'll think about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You really need that time to be just free to think. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's kind of crucial to the creative process. | ||
| I didn't think about that, but that's true. | ||
| Because those other jobs, you have mental focus that you're not dedicating to writing bits. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| Where I'm at a diner and my mind's just floating around. | ||
| It seems like you're not working. | ||
| Like someone on the outside would be like, you're not even working. | ||
| I might come up with a gem that might be my next closing bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That is working. | ||
| Just randomly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because you gave yourself that time. | ||
| Yeah, like you just are watering the grass and a mushroom pops up. | ||
| Even with me, I think there was a big breakthrough in just accepting that I'm an artist because, you know, my parents didn't want me to do it for so long and it was this dirty thing and it was always... | ||
| Pimps and prostitutes. | ||
| Yeah, pimps and prostitutes go to the club. | ||
| So stand-up and comedy was like a vampire feeding. | ||
| It was just this thing that I do over here and I want to do it, but it was always different than what I'm supposed to be doing. | ||
| It was always on the side. | ||
| It was like a hobby type. | ||
| There was a division within my mind. | ||
| But once I left Boeing and I was doing it full-time... | ||
| What was the impetus? | ||
| How did you make the decision? | ||
| Ideally, I always had this pie-in-the-sky scenario that would happen for me to leave Boeing. | ||
| I would think, all right, if I got to the point where I'm doing engineering and stand-up, I want to get to a point where it's glaringly obvious that engineering is holding me back from this other path, and I have to make the jump. | ||
| So I needed that to happen. | ||
| And then I think enough things happened where I kind of had that situation. | ||
| I booked this acting thing. | ||
| I booked a role on Chuck, NBC's Chuck. | ||
| I was still working at Boeing. | ||
| It was like this huge guest star. | ||
| I forgot about Chuck. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I would do these things towards the end of my tenure at Boeing. | ||
| I had a manager and I would get auditions. | ||
| So I would duck out for lunch. | ||
| And I'm in Long Beach and I would drive up to Hollywood and do an audition. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| How long would he be gone for? | ||
| That one, I would do a combo. | ||
| I'd say lunch and doctor's appointment. | ||
| And then I would do, or I would take off. | ||
| I would come in early and leave early if I had an audition. | ||
| But I had to be very strategic about what audition. | ||
| I can't be. | ||
| So this one, I went out for Chuck, and then I auditioned, and then I got it. | ||
| It was this huge guest star. | ||
| And I'm still working at Boeing. | ||
| And they need me for eight days. | ||
| I have a day job. | ||
| So I said I had a family emergency in Seattle. | ||
| I have to go back home. | ||
| And they're like, oh, okay. | ||
| But I was just in Burbank shooting Chuck. | ||
| So I'm just shooting. | ||
| And then I go back to work. | ||
| And people see you on TV? No. | ||
| Luckily, there was enough of a lead time where that wasn't coming out for a long time. | ||
| So you quit? | ||
| No, not yet. | ||
| So I just thought like, okay, cool. | ||
| I still keep on being an engineer. | ||
| And then a couple things happened. | ||
| Did anybody notice you on Chuck at work? | ||
| But the thing is, that happened when I left Boeing. | ||
| So it aired after I had left. | ||
| Oh, how much lead time was there? | ||
| Quite a bit. | ||
| Maybe like six months. | ||
| It was towards the end. | ||
| And so no one knew I did stand-up. | ||
| And the beauty of it was when I entered the workforce of engineering, everyone was substantially older than me. | ||
| They were like in their 30s. | ||
| They don't know about Hype Machine. | ||
| Yeah, they don't know about Hype Machine. | ||
| So it wasn't second nature to be like, what's your MySpace? | ||
| Because Jig would have been up immediately. | ||
| So social media was not second nature with co-workers. | ||
| So there was a big enough generational gap. | ||
| So I was able for three years, just no one know anything. | ||
| So I do the Chuck thing. | ||
| And then I also, I got really far in stand up. | ||
| NBC has the Stand Up for Diversity initiative every year. | ||
| You do a stand up competition thing from different cities, and then they have a final showcase. | ||
| So I got like second on that. | ||
| So I got some college gigs out of it. | ||
| I got quite a few college gigs. | ||
| And then I booked this show on MTV called Disaster Date, which is like boiling points for dating. | ||
| They had a cast, and I was one of the cast members, and you would just go on dates. | ||
| Friends would set up their friends with dates, and they would be like, this is the things that she hates, and you would just be the worst date ever. | ||
| And you see how long they last on the date. | ||
| So they need me for eight months, or no, three months. | ||
| Fuck, what do I do? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, three months. | ||
| So this was kind of that situation where I'm like, fuck, all right. | ||
| I just did Chuck. | ||
| I have some college geeks lined up. | ||
| This MTV show needs me for three months. | ||
| I gotta do this. | ||
| Oh, I didn't do that yet. | ||
| I tried to take a leave of absence. | ||
| Because I planned on coming back. | ||
| I was like, can I, I need, something came up, can I be gone for three months? | ||
| And they're like, no, you can't do that. | ||
| And I'm like, Are you sure? | ||
| I just kept on trying to finesse it and they wouldn't let me. | ||
| And then I was reading about unemployment and stuff. | ||
| And I read that you couldn't quit. | ||
| You had to get fired. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So I'm like, all right, here's what I'm gonna do. | ||
| So on my last day there, I wrote an email just like, Hey guys, I'll be gone for three months. | ||
| I plan on returning on this day. | ||
| And then I just went incommunicado. | ||
| I didn't pick up any phone calls. | ||
| If I was going to get fired, I wanted to get fired by them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Because I didn't want them. | ||
| I didn't want to be on the books that I quit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| For some reason, my engineering brain is like, this is great. | ||
| I'll get them on a technicality. | ||
| They'll fire me and I'll get my unemployment if I need to. | ||
| So I leave Boeing. | ||
| I'm shooting the show for three months. | ||
| And then eventually I get a termination letter in the mail from Boeing. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But then it turns out, I mean, I could have collected unemployment from the MTV show. | ||
| So I didn't even have to go out that way. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it was fine. | ||
| Ari used to collect unemployment for... | ||
| Dude, he was like my guiding light in that regard. | ||
| Because early on, especially when I left Boeing, and the MTV thing comes and goes, I do two seasons of it, but that's not like a fucking... | ||
| It's like a rock-solid thing. | ||
| And Ari would show me the ropes. | ||
| He'd be like, no, you just collect unemployment from an acting job. | ||
| You get an acting job, then you get unemployment. | ||
| That's how it fucking works. | ||
| And he taught me how to do it and all that. | ||
| I've never heard of anybody getting unemployment from acting gigs. | ||
| Ari would do a commercial. | ||
| That's how it works. | ||
| Because you pay into it and all that. | ||
| It's all on the up and up. | ||
| It's just part of an actor's, I guess, requirement or necessity of an actor is being available. | ||
| So if you book a commercial, like a Toyota commercial, let's say you make 30 grand or 20 grand, whatever, in that chunk, you've made enough money in that quarter. | ||
| To apply, because you're paying into it with your thing, you have to hit a certain amount. | ||
| And then you're eligible. | ||
| There's tiers of how much money you get for unemployment. | ||
| Then you're eligible for X amount of dollars every two weeks or whatever. | ||
| And that helped me keep afloat for like a year. | ||
| And then I got to the point where I didn't need it. | ||
| I had enough steady work coming in. | ||
| But that was the moment. | ||
| When did you tell your parents? | ||
| I thought that they would take it worse than they did, but I think we had been at odds for so long that what I've noticed is you can't stay at an 11 your whole life. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I think they had to know this day was going to come eventually because I would talk about it. | ||
| That was the plan the whole time. | ||
| I guess they just never thought that it would come to fruition. | ||
| Now, when you quit, how long did you wait or when you got fired? | ||
| How long did you wait before you told them? | ||
| They don't have a day job anymore. | ||
| It was around Christmas. | ||
| It was around the holidays. | ||
| So we were at my aunt's house and then I told them. | ||
| But it went over better than I thought. | ||
| Yeah, I was surprised. | ||
| Did you say all the good things you're getting? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| I'm not going to be like, I quit, and I'm going to figure it out. | ||
| I'll figure it out. | ||
| Might come you guys for money later. | ||
| But I'm really proud of that. | ||
| In this whole adventure, I've never asked my parents for money. | ||
| And I think that's a win. | ||
| Yes, that's a huge win. | ||
| That's a huge win. | ||
| Yeah, and I hope that they kind of notice that through the tough times. | ||
| That's a sign it's going well. | ||
| They should figure that out. | ||
| That's a giant win. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I mean, I just want to tell people if they have a similar path that you don't... | ||
| There's this romanticized version of being an artist where you just pack up all your things coming to LA. Yeah, man. | ||
| And like, no, I got to be 100% of my art. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I love it. | ||
| You can have a plan. | ||
| Do you want to set yourself up for success? | ||
| Or are you trying to... | ||
| Bro, are you an artist or are you an engineer? | ||
| Gotta choose. | ||
| Be both. | ||
| There's a lot of hours in the day. | ||
| Fuck that. | ||
| You're a prime example of that. | ||
| It's amazing all the things you do. | ||
| There are so many hours in a day. | ||
| And it's such a cop-out to be like... | ||
|
unidentified
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I've got to be all in it. | |
| I've got to live and breathe my art. | ||
| Otherwise I'm going to be a hack. | ||
| No, be methodical. | ||
| Set yourself up for success. | ||
| Well, I think you have to be disciplined. | ||
| Disciplined, for sure. | ||
| I think it's very important. | ||
| You can still be artistic and disciplined. | ||
| Contrary to popular opinion. | ||
| You can. | ||
| And you have to be careful not to lose yourself. | ||
| Once you come to LA, how many people do you know who come out here with a particular plan to be an artist or a writer and they're at fucking birthday parties every day? | ||
| When you come to LA, you can go to someone's birthday party at a bar every day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It's everyone's birthday every day. | ||
| Dude, this town's so big. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| So you get sucked up in the partying life. | ||
| You'll see it too. | ||
| Some artists just go down this networking rabbit hole and they have no tangible... | ||
| And they never want to do a bad show. | ||
| They just want to do the best shows. | ||
| And they don't just focus on getting good at stand-up comedy. | ||
| It's just, I'm going to this party, so-and-so's here. | ||
| And they have nothing! | ||
| Do you ever envision a time where one of us or maybe a collection of us writes down all these things and makes some sort of a guidebook to stand-up comedy? | ||
| I really think someone could benefit from it. | ||
| I mean, it really is the only art form that, as we were saying before, is a viable art form on large scale that doesn't have any... | ||
| I can't book or... | ||
| Nothing! | ||
| I mean, every fucking book about comedy, like how to do comedy, is terrible. | ||
| It's the worst, yeah. | ||
| You know what's weird? | ||
| You know what's scary? | ||
| There's all these formulas. | ||
| I think podcasting has taken some of the mystique out of it. | ||
| It's also created a bunch of fans of the process, too. | ||
| I've talked to people that have come up to me at the Comedy Store and said, hey, I saw you first do that bit a year ago, and then I watched it change, and then when it came on your Netflix special, I was like, holy shit. | ||
| Look at it. | ||
| It's kind of cool to see it grow and become viable. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's cool that there's an audience for that or that they value that because I think it's easy to assume the end consumer just wants to see the finished product. | ||
| But comedy fans are so savvy now, they want to see that process and they feel like they're let in. | ||
| Like, oh, cool. | ||
| Like it's not a magic trick anymore. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It's different. | ||
| Yeah, no, I agree. | ||
| Listen, man, I'm glad I got you in here. | ||
| Thanks for having me, dude. | ||
| My pleasure, brother. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| And it's always cool seeing you at the store. | ||
| You're a funny motherfucker. | ||
| Likewise. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| And I wish you all the best. | ||
| So tell everybody your Instagram. | ||
| What is the... | ||
| It's Fahim Anwar. | ||
| So just my name. | ||
| Twitter, same. | ||
| Fahim Anwar. | ||
| And then I have a special on Amazon called There's No Business, like Show Business. | ||
| So I want people to watch that. | ||
| Oh, your special's on Amazon. | ||
| Yeah, but it was acquired, so it wasn't like an original. | ||
| I did it for CISO back in the day. | ||
| Everyone knew that was going down. | ||
| Alright, brother. | ||
| Thank you very much, man. | ||
| This was fun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, dude. |
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