Oct. 8, 2020 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:31:13
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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The Joe Rogan Experience. | |
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Colin Quinn, I had to move to Texas to get you on this podcast. | ||
| I tried forever to get you in LA. You said, no chance. | ||
| Not true. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Every time we see each other, we just, yeah. | ||
| I was always like, yeah, I'll get out there one of those days. | ||
| I'm glad I waited this long. | ||
| It's kind of, I can savor, I can appreciate it. | ||
| I'm savoring it right now. | ||
| If I was on one of the first podcasts, I'd be like, yeah, I was on Joe's and I was on this one. | ||
| This is like, you know, you're getting the respect you deserve now. | ||
| I see. | ||
| What is it like in the lockdown for you? | ||
| You still living in New York? | ||
| Yeah, I live in New York. | ||
| Is it weird? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I was telling everybody, it's very... | ||
| It's not like... | ||
| People are like, oh, it's like New York in the 70s. | ||
| Now, the 70s was a whole different vibe. | ||
| But now, it's all boarded up stores. | ||
| The store in my corner, like the corner bodega, basically, just closed. | ||
| And it was around for a long time. | ||
| And... | ||
| You know, it's depressing. | ||
| Like, you're on the subway, there's only a few people on, and it still smells. | ||
| It smells as bad. | ||
| They've been cleaning it every day, and it still stinks. | ||
| It doesn't even smell better. | ||
| That's how ingrained it is. | ||
| And, you know, the pigeons are homeless because Antifa took down all the statues, so they have no place to live. | ||
| Yeah, it's a very weird place. | ||
| You can't say, like, people that say it's like the 70s, like, no, the 70s, it was like, it was the 50s and the 60s and the 70s, like, it didn't change much. | ||
| It was seedy and weird, but it was always like that. | ||
| This is a drastic change from six months ago. | ||
| You can't say it's like the 70s, because it's not. | ||
| It's like something's deteriorated. | ||
| There's a collapse, and then there's all this weirdness that comes along with that. | ||
| Well, the 70s was kind of a collapse, but it was a different type. | ||
| So like in the 70s, all the stores at night would be locked up, but they were open during the day. | ||
| So at night, if anybody was out after night at night, that was on them. | ||
| But I mean, but it was not like now. | ||
| It's just 24. You're walking down deserted streets. | ||
| There's nobody out. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Have you always lived in New York? | ||
| Depressing. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| So it was sketchy in the 70s. | ||
| Oh my god, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I did a whole show about it, basically, but I mean, it was basically like, in part, one of the jokes from my own New York story was that, and it wasn't a joke, it was, if you walk down your block, because there's no cell phone, so if you walk down the block from the train after nine at night, people would lean out the window and be like, genuinely surprised, like, good for you. | ||
| You made it home. | ||
| If you stayed out after nine, like Times Square, people would go to Broadway shows and By 11 o'clock, it was deserted, except for criminals, because people would leave the Broadway show. | ||
| They wouldn't go out for a drink or dinner. | ||
| They would get in their car and get out immediately. | ||
| And Giuliani's the one who cleaned all that shit up. | ||
| Giuliani cleaned it up, yeah. | ||
| Isn't that amazing? | ||
| That guy gets no respect now. | ||
| No, I know. | ||
| He went a little crazy, but he did what no politician has ever done in history, which is he said, I'm going to transform this, and he did. | ||
| He turned it around. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He really did. | ||
| He really did. | ||
| Maybe a little too far. | ||
| It may have been a little too far. | ||
| Times Square became like a mall. | ||
| Yes, Times Square is very uninspiring. | ||
| It became like a big Applebee's. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly what it's like. | ||
| Now I look back and I'm like, oh, taxi driver, New York, it was edgy, it was fun. | ||
| But at the time, it was no joke. | ||
| People, you know, I glamorized it through rose-colored glasses, but it was serious. | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing about crime and crime-ridden areas. | ||
| Like, people always glamorize it after the fact. | ||
| But if you're living there while it's going down, it's fucking terrible. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, most people loved New York once he took over. | ||
| In the 90s, people forget that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That everybody was just like, oh, I can go out at night. | ||
| Oh, I can work. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Before that, it was crazy. | ||
| And I used to bartend around Times Square and... | ||
| I mean, the stuff you saw, you know, was just brutal. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Well, one of the things we're finding out from this lockdown is that it really is important who your mayor is. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes! | |
| It used to be important. | ||
| He didn't really care. | ||
| People didn't care who the mayor of L.A. was. | ||
| Half the people didn't even know. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And now they're like, who is this motherfucker that's keeping everything closed? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And the same thing with New York, right? | ||
| De Blasio from day one. | ||
| A lot of people are like, ugh. | ||
| And now everybody hates him. | ||
| But this is his second term. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He got re-elected. | ||
| Oh, he swept both elections. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's hilarious. | |
| You know? | ||
| And now we're finding out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, he's a dipshit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It took something where it was a crisis where you realize, like, this is not a leader. | ||
| And everybody hated Bloomberg for running a third term. | ||
| They wish they had him for a fifth now. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Remember, he was like, oh, he's forced him to run for a third. | ||
| Nobody misses a guy like him. | ||
| Could he go back? | ||
| Could he run again? | ||
| Because he can't be president. | ||
| He's not going to vote for him for president. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| He was so terrible in the debate. | ||
| It's so funny because... | ||
| The thing about Bloomberg that disappointed me was when he was mayor, when he first got elected mayor, Daryl Hammond had to bail on some show he was supposed to do. | ||
| So at the last minute, they asked me to do a favor and do a guest shot at the show, which I go up. | ||
| Really didn't go that well, but I did what he asked me to do. | ||
| What kind of show? | ||
| What was it? | ||
| A stand-up show. | ||
| But it was a stand-up show for Bloomberg? | ||
| Yeah, Bloomberg was trying to get the Olympics here or something. | ||
| I think it was the Olympics. | ||
| So he asked me to, you know, Daryl was supposed to do the show and he had something else. | ||
| So I ran over. | ||
| I lived in Midtown. | ||
| I ran over, literally ran over, did the show in front of the Olympic Committee or whatever the committee was. | ||
| I think it was the Olympics. | ||
| And, you know, 30 people in this uncomfortable room. | ||
| And then afterwards, Bloomberg shook my hand. | ||
| And I knew he was already a billionaire. | ||
| And he goes, I owe you one. | ||
| I go, thanks, thanks. | ||
| He goes, no, no, no. | ||
| I don't just say that. | ||
| I always repay my debts. | ||
| I owe you one. | ||
| So I was kind of hoping to be president and then I could call in my chit because I never did the whole time he was mayor. | ||
| I realized he was busy. | ||
| I let it slide. | ||
| He still owes you though, huh? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You got it on a ledger somewhere? | ||
| No, but I just have my oral. | ||
| I believe in the oral history. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I thought it came right out, didn't it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You got it. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So maybe if he becomes mayor. | ||
| Can you become mayor again? | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| Can't be president again. | ||
| Can you be mayor again? | ||
| I guess you can. | ||
| Yeah, why not? | ||
| There's probably no law. | ||
| Well, governor of California, that Jerry Brown guy, he became governor again. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So if he can be governor, he's got to be mayor. | ||
| He was governor in like the 90s, like the early 90s, I think. | ||
| I think in the 80s. | ||
| Because I think Johnny Carson used to make those jokes. | ||
| Confer smoke and crack. | ||
| Didn't he win again in D.C. for being mayor? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yeah, Marion Barry. | ||
| Yeah, Marion Barry. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| I wonder how many terms he did, though. | ||
| I wonder if there's a limit on how many terms he could be. | ||
| You're more politically minded than I am. | ||
| I don't know that kind of stuff, though, no. | ||
| How many terms can you be a mayor? | ||
| Because someone like Bloomberg has got to come back in and clean New York City up. | ||
| Because you're not going to get there with this social justice warrior attitude that de Blasio has. | ||
| It's just going to lead to a complete deterioration of that city. | ||
| Yeah, but it may be too late. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| Too late. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| I mean, nobody likes to think of New York that way. | ||
| But it's like, a lot of people, so many people moved that I was shocked moved to the suburbs. | ||
| That I was like, wow, this is serious. | ||
| Like, I didn't really believe it. | ||
| Just because I'm so New York-like, I just, I don't even think in terms of leaving New York, even though, you know, it's irrevocably changed to me before any of this happened. | ||
| So many people moved out. | ||
| I was like, this is getting serious. | ||
| What did you think about that Altucher-Jerry Seinfeld feud about New York is dead? | ||
| Fuck you, no it's not. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, look, you can argue either side of it and be right. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, I don't want it to be dead, but at the same time, I'm not going to pretend it's not... | ||
| In deep trouble. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just don't know how it gets out. | ||
| That's what my worry is. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Unless COVID gets cured, and then Ari Shafir thinks artists are going to start moving in again, but he's one of those guys. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He's got that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Because you need to be gritty. | |
| New York City needs to be gritty. | ||
| He's one of those guys. | ||
| Never been mugged, that's why. | ||
| Never really had the fuck beat out of him. | ||
| You do need a couple of those in life. | ||
| You just need to know that it's possible. | ||
| You just need to be like, ow! | ||
| What does gritty mean to you? | ||
| Let me tell you. | ||
| It's not Midnight Cowboy. | ||
| That's a movie. | ||
| Real gritty is you get stabbed and then it gets infected. | ||
| Then you're in the hospital for six months. | ||
| Yeah, you need to at least have regretted laughing because you're holding your broken rib at least for six weeks in a row. | ||
|
unidentified
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You're like, is this ever going to get better? | |
| Yeah, that gritty shit is like, boy. | ||
| Yeah, I see what you're saying. | ||
| I know, yeah, some places that are gritty, they're fun. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's fun. | ||
| And like I said, when I'm watching Taxi Drive, I'm like, yeah, I miss New York. | ||
| But I mean, I remember walking through Times Square We don't even have to ask what I was doing. | ||
| At 12 o'clock at night, by myself, 1980, 81, and literally, they had like thieves' dens above the porno theaters. | ||
| They had thieves' dens. | ||
| So like, they had a little turnstile. | ||
| I went in one once with this kid. | ||
| He was taking me there. | ||
| I forget, we were trying to do something shady, I'm sure. | ||
| And we went up, and it was like 50 thieves, like Oliver. | ||
| Only New York. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Like a gang of people with illegal goods, trading illegal goods, right on 42nd Street. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| It was crazy. | ||
| So you'd see gangs running down. | ||
| If anybody was, they would just swarm somebody, take their stuff, leave them on the ground, and just keep going. | ||
| The thing about it is though the the disrespect to the police right now, right? | ||
| It leads it to a very difficult situation of trying to bring it back It's like that didn't that wasn't the case in the 80s and 90s people respected the police like when they when Giuliani brought it back there wasn't this Overall nationwide resentment of the police force like we're having now, which is pretty unprecedented Well, I mean there sort of was in New York actually at that time There's a couple of incidents where, you know, but yes, not like this. | ||
| This is a different level. | ||
| This is a luxury that people are able to indulge themselves by putting all, you know, lightning rod, sort of, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, the police, to me, it's like a proxy war, you know what I mean? | ||
| Everybody knows cops. | ||
| Everybody knows cops are nuts. | ||
| We all had the friend that you grew up with, you're like, whatever happened to him? | ||
| He became a cop. | ||
| He became a cop. | ||
|
unidentified
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Jesus. | |
| But... | ||
| But, you know, no one denies that part. | ||
| Even cops know that about themselves. | ||
| But that being said, it's easy for everybody to just go, okay, like I say, proxy war. | ||
| So all the bottled up racial resentment in the country, and it's like the people that have to actually go and say, hey, listen, here's what has to happen. | ||
| They're going to be the fall guy for that. | ||
| And that's, you know what I mean? | ||
| That's what this is, in my opinion. | ||
| Well, you know what it is. | ||
| It's like social media only captures the things that are viral, right? | ||
| The things that you're going to watch are only going to be viral. | ||
| And the ones that go viral are the ones that are really bad. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, nobody wants to see... | ||
| There's no viral videos of a cop pulling a guy over and having to laugh with him. | ||
| And so, listen, man, you're going 63 in a 55. Just do me a favor. | ||
| Slow it down. | ||
| All right, sir. | ||
| I'm a big fan of the police. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Appreciate you. | ||
| Appreciate you. | ||
| Shake your hand. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| Take care. | ||
| No. | ||
| Instead, you have some... | ||
| Asshole grabbing some black woman and pulling her out of the car and body slamming her and you're like, these motherfuckers, they keep doing this. | ||
| But you could have millions of interactions with cops and you're only going to see one and you decide that all cops are pieces of shit when there's these hundreds of thousands of cops that are great guys. | ||
| They're just Doing a really difficult job and trying to keep it together. | ||
| But one or two a week is going to go bad. | ||
| And that's all you need to know. | ||
| And everybody thinks that the world is falling apart. | ||
| Because you see those videos, and those videos get 2, 3, 4, 5 million downloads. | ||
| And everybody just thinks that all cops are terrible people. | ||
| And it's not the case. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, exactly. | ||
| But try telling people that and they think you're a cop apologist. | ||
| Yeah, they say you're a piece of shit. | ||
| Yeah, you're a white supremacist. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Stand down and stand by. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's right. | |
| What the fuck was that? | ||
| Trump, I tell the white supremacists to stand down and stand by. | ||
| And it's one of those moments where you're like, you know, it's basically like the one thing you wouldn't... | ||
| It reminds me like, not like Nero fiddling while Rome burns. | ||
| I feel like it's when... | ||
| All the Roman senators going, so what are you going to do now, Nero? | ||
| And he starts taking the fiddle out of the case and like, no, he's not going to fucking... | ||
| Is he going to fiddle right now? | ||
| He's really fiddling? | ||
| He's kidding, right? | ||
| You were saying earlier when we were talking outside that he had just called the KKK... I didn't say that. | ||
| Somebody else was out there saying that. | ||
| He called them a terrorist group, right? | ||
| Didn't he say that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Was that the case, Jamie? | ||
| Someone out there was saying... | ||
| I forget who said it. | ||
| He called the KKK a terrorist group like the week before. | ||
| Or label them? | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| I don't know about wording it that way is correct. | ||
| I don't think he called them that. | ||
| Well, let's see what he said. | ||
| Again, he didn't call them that. | ||
| The White House labeled them that. | ||
| Oh, the White House labeled them a terrorist group. | ||
| He didn't say it somewhere or whatever. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that opportunity, it was so funny. | ||
| Like, he's telling Joe Biden... | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| I want you to say law and order. | ||
| You can't even say it. | ||
| And he didn't say it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then he said, you know, I want you to denounce white supremacy. | ||
| And then Chris Wallace is like, Mr. President, do you denounce white supremacy? | ||
| I tell them to stand down and stand by. | ||
| The people that were, like his strategist, probably like, what the fuck? | ||
| Yeah, he's like... | ||
| You can't say stand by! | ||
| He's like, whoa! | ||
| Hey, come on. | ||
| I don't want to go that way. | ||
| What about... | ||
| All he had to do is say, yes, I denounce white supremacy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Of course. | |
| That's all he had to say. | ||
| See, but that's why you should be moderating this debate. | ||
| Because you could be physically grabbing both of them and saying, listen, here's what's going to happen now. | ||
| Instead, Chris Wallace is like, excuse me, guys. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| He's not... | ||
| You need alpha... | ||
| You have to be able to physically walk up to the podiums and put people... | ||
| Well, that's what I was saying. | ||
| They need big John McCarthy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| They need the UFC referee, Big John McCarthy. | ||
| He's a big, giant dude. | ||
| He can handle that shit. | ||
| He would tell people to sit the fuck down. | ||
| He was a cop. | ||
| He knows how to control. | ||
| I would be laughing. | ||
| The problem with me, I would be like, oh my god, what a shit show. | ||
| I would turn to the camera. | ||
| I'd break the wall. | ||
| I'd be like, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We've got a real fucking problem here. | ||
| Folks, you may want to tap out on this country. | ||
| Yeah, I'd be like, Jesus, Canada doesn't look so bad right now. | ||
| I know that Justin Trudeau is kind of a pussy. | ||
| What do you mean he was a boxer? | ||
| Was he? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I already was. | ||
| I've played basketball a couple times. | ||
| I don't call myself a basketball player. | ||
| Well, maybe he's the kind of boxer where they're like, hey, listen, that's the Prime Minister's son, so if he hits you, just flinch. | ||
| Don't hit him. | ||
| Oh, one of those. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know. | |
| Yeah, there's a lot of that going on. | ||
| I've seen that before. | ||
| No, I'm sure. | ||
| Actually, he did have a boxing match. | ||
| He's a little too handsome for my taste. | ||
| Yeah, I don't like it either. | ||
| Beautiful man. | ||
| He did blackface at least 30 or 40 times. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Didn't he? | ||
| In Canada, it's different. | ||
| He played Indian people or something. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| It was like brownish. | ||
| Yes, it's indigenous face. | ||
| It is kind of funny. | ||
| It's First Nations face. | ||
| Whiteface is like no problem at all. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| You could be whiteface. | ||
| No one cares. | ||
| Can you play a redhead if you're not a redhead? | ||
| Is there any shame in that? | ||
| Well, would you want to is the first question, but second of all, nah. | ||
| If someone had to do the Andrew Santino story. | ||
| But I don't know Andrew Santino. | ||
| He's a comic from LA. Can we make it Bill Burr? | ||
| Yeah, but Bill Burr, he's bald now. | ||
| He's too bald to be called Redhead. | ||
| It's hard to call him Redhead now. | ||
| Who would be like Carrot Top? | ||
| Okay, Carrot Top. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's the most famous, like, clearly, I mean, it's in his name, Carrot Top. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Could you be, is there any shame in that? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| Know why? | ||
| Nobody ever owned redheads. | ||
| No. | ||
| Maybe they did. | ||
| Because there were a lot of Irish slaves, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Back in the day, the whole thing was Irish. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're the original redheads. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, it's probably from the Scandinavians. | ||
| The Vikings had a lot of redheads, like Erik the Red. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| That's the only reason I think the Vikings had redheads. | ||
| The guy's name was Erik the Red. | ||
| Probably had a red beard and blonde hair. | ||
| Probably covered in blood, too, right? | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Those motherfuckers. | ||
| You ever see those people in Iceland that win those strongman competitions? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They're the remnants of the Vikings. | ||
| They are beasts. | ||
| Enormous human beings that live in the frozen north where the Vikings lived. | ||
| The only thing I know is that the word berserk comes from them. | ||
| Berserkers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They used to come down and go berserk. | ||
| You know what they used to do? | ||
| They used to take mushrooms. | ||
| They did? | ||
| Yeah, that was their big thing. | ||
| They would take mushrooms and slaughter. | ||
| Now, wait a minute. | ||
| Where'd they get mushrooms up there? | ||
| I thought mushrooms are from South America. | ||
| No. | ||
| Mushrooms are from all throughout Europe. | ||
| Mushrooms are all throughout North America. | ||
| They're native to a lot of different climates. | ||
| Well, they would preserve them, too. | ||
| They would get them in the summertime, and then they'd preserve them in the wintertime. | ||
| But I'm 99% sure that was a part of the history of the Vikings, is that they would take a lot of mushrooms. | ||
| Well, when I was growing up, I mean, I consider myself the early... | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Fly algaric mushroom. | ||
| Yeah, that's the Amanita muscaria. | ||
| The first account of Vikings going berserk because they ate magic mushrooms was hypothesized in 1784 by a Christian priest named Oddman. | ||
| He came to a conclusion that connected the berserkers to the fly algaric mushroom because he read that Siberian shamans did the same thing when they were healing. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| That show Vikings? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You ever see that show? | ||
| No. | ||
| Fun show. | ||
| They take mushrooms in that show. | ||
| Did Vikings eat mushrooms? | ||
| Let's see that. | ||
| See, they connected to the Amanita muscaria, red and white mushroom. | ||
| See, that's not the same mushroom in the Viking television show. | ||
| It looks like they're taking psilocybin. | ||
| Some scholars propose that certain examples of the berserker rage had been induced voluntarily by the consumption of drugs, such as the hallucinogenic mushroom, Amanita muscaria, or massive amounts of alcohol. | ||
| But here's my problem, is that when I was growing up, we ate a lot of mescaline, which was basically mushrooms in organic, you know, it was like chemical. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| Sort of. | ||
| Mescaline is actually peyote. | ||
| But mescaline is that, I think it's more, it's in the stimulant category. | ||
| Well, even more so that's going to prove my point. | ||
| When you're eating mescaline acid, any of this stuff, mushrooms, you don't tend to want to get violent. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| So if you live in a completely violent world and you took mushrooms, I don't think it would turn you peaceful. | ||
| No, and I turn you peaceful, but you might be like, I'm just going to stay in the forge. | ||
| You know, these guys are going on a stupid trip. | ||
| You're going to go on an 18-hour trip to go and rampage through some civilization. | ||
| Here's why I disagree. | ||
| It's become a thing with fighters to take mushrooms and fight. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah, it's actually really common. | ||
| And the thing is, they're not really testing for it. | ||
| So there's certain fighters that are taking mushrooms and then competing in kickboxing, competing in MMA. On mushrooms? | ||
| On mushrooms, yeah. | ||
| That's the hilarious, that's one of the greatest things I've ever heard. | ||
| Well, they say it makes them way more effective, and they almost can read things better. | ||
| They're locked in better. | ||
| I can see locking in, but you also get trails and stuff like that. | ||
| This goes on, you know? | ||
| Maybe it's how much you take. | ||
| Maybe you just take a dose that's... | ||
| Also, you've got to realize, these people, their adrenaline's through the roof. | ||
| The effects of the mushroom is probably very different if you're about to go into a fight. | ||
| My adrenaline was through the roof when I was 17. Now listen... | ||
| Doc Ellis, of course, took the acid. | ||
| That was a famous one, right? | ||
| Yeah, but that's not violent. | ||
| Did he have a good game? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| He's pitched a no-hitter. | ||
| He pitched a no-hitter? | ||
| Yeah, pitched a no-hitter on acid. | ||
| There's real evidence that, though, in some circumstances, psychedelics can enhance your performance. | ||
| Well, I'll tell you a story. | ||
| Probably the third time I took acid, maybe. | ||
| I was 16. And this is a fight. | ||
| It's got violence in it, but it's not that I was... | ||
| So I was at a sweet 16 in Brooklyn. | ||
| It was a mob run place, by the way. | ||
| So you do a sweet 16. This has a lot to do with my whole life when I really look back on it. | ||
| So I was 16. I was in love with this girl. | ||
| She wasn't dating me, but she was at the party. | ||
| But the way they set it up, so it's like, here's a Sweet 16. Here's an office party. | ||
| They're all in the same room. | ||
| And then there's a stage down at the bottom. | ||
| And here's, you know, some guy that, you know, just got his, you know, you retired from the, you know, job, whatever's job. | ||
| Then you have, you know, so it's like 15 different events of two tables each at this place. | ||
| Palm Shores Club, it was called in Brooklyn. | ||
| So, I'm at the party with my friends, and there's this girl I'm in love with, but I haven't dated. | ||
| Yeah, we ended up going out for a couple of years after this. | ||
| So, I'm tripping on acid. | ||
| And then, one of the other groups that was with our group, because the girl up in Sweet 16 had our other friends there too. | ||
| One of these guys sold pot to the girl I loved. | ||
| We sold her a bag of weed. | ||
| So she's like, you know, Brooklyn, she's like, look at him. | ||
| He beat me on his weed. | ||
| He sold me like four joints. | ||
| So me, she's a knight in shining armor. | ||
| And I go up to him. | ||
| I don't know the guy. | ||
| There's long tables, two, three long tables. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| Tap him on the shoulder, you know. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| She feels like she's short of the... | ||
| I'm not dating. | ||
| I'm just, you know, I'm in love with her. | ||
| She shorted you on, you shorted her on the Swede, so, you know, you might want to give her a couple more joints. | ||
| Guy's like, no, I didn't. | ||
| Turns away. | ||
| Listen, excuse me. | ||
| You know, she feels you did. | ||
| You gave her four joints, whatever. | ||
| In those days, you get like six joints for a bag, a $5 bag, right? | ||
| Maybe seven, you know. | ||
| I was like, yeah, he kind of shorted her. | ||
| I'm still not short to this day if he shorted her, by the way. | ||
| I didn't count the, you know. | ||
| You were just being a white knight. | ||
| I was just being a white knight. | ||
| So he goes, no, I didn't. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| You know, just basically like, you know, he has to show his pride too. | ||
| He's letting this guy tap him on the shoulder a couple of times. | ||
| He's with his friends. | ||
| I'm with my little friends. | ||
| And I go, and he goes, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| Like, you know, just, you know, now I'm starting to annoy him, you know, and he's like, was this bad? | ||
| You know, he had to do that. | ||
| So I was like, ah, bah, jump on him. | ||
| Start punching him. | ||
| In the middle of a giant event. | ||
| Oh no! | ||
| Jumping, punching him. | ||
| A ruckus erupts. | ||
| It's like a whole place. | ||
| So our table's going crazy. | ||
| Screams, fights. | ||
| And the grandmother, my friend wrote a song about it, by the way, the next day. | ||
| Because the grandmother kicked me in the ear. | ||
| My whole ear was caked with blood. | ||
| Because I'm ruining her granddaughter's... | ||
| The grandmother kicked you in the ear? | ||
| Yeah, the grandmother. | ||
| While you were scrambling on the ground? | ||
| While I'm on the ground. | ||
| My ear was caked with blood because I'm ruining her granddaughter's 16. I don't blame her. | ||
| And... | ||
| They're breaking up. | ||
| But meanwhile... | ||
| Oh, so anyway, long story short, I'm tripping. | ||
| So this is like the third time I've tripped, maybe. | ||
| Maybe the second. | ||
| On acid. | ||
| I had done mescaline and everything else. | ||
| So I'm tripping. | ||
| So finally they drag me out. | ||
| I'm picked up bodily. | ||
| It's a mafia place. | ||
| Remember? | ||
| Downstairs in the basement. | ||
| These two guys, a couple of young mob guys. | ||
| I could tell they were young, thin guys. | ||
| They didn't look to me like mob... | ||
| And start punching me. | ||
| And then they just look at me. | ||
| I could tell they were just like, look at this guy. | ||
| He's so pathetically pussy whipped. | ||
| They could just tell in my eyes. | ||
| I was just like, get him out of here. | ||
| And just toss me onto Emmons Avenue. | ||
| It was a big street in Sheepshead Bay. | ||
| And then my friends drove by. | ||
| I'm walking, you know, stumbling along. | ||
| Like three minutes later, my friends drove by because they left too. | ||
| They had to leave. | ||
| And they just could not stop laughing. | ||
| I'm just standing there. | ||
| But here's the weird part about the story is that On stage was this old man who at that moment was doing stand-up comedy. | ||
| And to this day, anytime I have hecklers, I'm like, that's karma because I was the guy that ruined his show. | ||
| And he's going, come on, fellas, calm down. | ||
| I heard him say that. | ||
| And at the time, I noticed because I was like, why is there a guy so old doing stand-up? | ||
| But he's probably a guy, you know, doing it at that time. | ||
| And she said some knock-around joint. | ||
| Getting paid. | ||
| Getting paid. | ||
| And then an idiot ruins his whole show with a brawl. | ||
| Over a $5 bag of weed. | ||
| Over a bag of weed, which may or may not have been shorted. | ||
| And when you think about that, have you ever done gigs like that? | ||
| Did you ever have to do a kid's party or anything like that? | ||
| Oh my god, yeah. | ||
| Did you? | ||
| You mean gigs where you just don't... | ||
| I mean, sure. | ||
| Haven't you ever... | ||
| I did bachelor parties. | ||
| I did a couple of those. | ||
| But bachelor parties, they suck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But at least it's not like... | ||
| You ever do a gig where you don't... | ||
| When you're first starting out where you're not... | ||
| You don't have enough clean material and you walk in and you go, I can't. | ||
| I have to cut every curse out and you have nothing left. | ||
| You realize I have nothing to say to these people. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Because my act is for nightclubs and this is not a nightclub. | ||
| It's a daytime club. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've done a couple of those. | ||
| Like, just small events where you feel like it exposes every flaw in your comedy. | ||
| It does! | ||
| It does! | ||
| So do small shows. | ||
| It does. | ||
| That's the beauty of small shows. | ||
| They're like a cleansing agent. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| All the fat in your act. | ||
| All the fat. | ||
| All the cheat. | ||
| All the momentum that's just based on them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All the horseshit. | |
| All the curses. | ||
| It's just all right there. | ||
| And these people are looking there and they dress nice. | ||
| And I did a car show when I... I think two years in. | ||
| It was like an afternoon show, like $200, which in those days you're like, ooh, $200, an afternoon show. | ||
| I went there and it was just maybe $50. | ||
| And I was too new to know that I was walking. | ||
| I didn't even realize. | ||
| Like now, if you walked in, you'd be like, okay, this is a nightmare. | ||
| Here's what I got to do. | ||
| That was like a really smart thing that Chris Rock used to do a lot, is he would show up at the store unannounced late. | ||
| So he would go there where the audience was down to like 15, 20 people, and then he would go up with his shit that he was working on, and he would find out what's good and what was bad. | ||
| Because when there's 15 people, and they're spread out, there's like three here, two in front of you, and five over there. | ||
| You really know what the fuck is good and what's not. | ||
| If you're there in front of 300 people, they're like, oh my god, it's Chris Rock! | ||
| Everything he says is amazing. | ||
| With your date, you're like, wow, we got lucky tonight. | ||
| Chris Rock's here. | ||
| But if you're there and there's fucking 15 people, it's one in the morning, then you find out how much of your material is nonsense. | ||
| Oh my god, yeah. | ||
| No, of course. | ||
| That's where you really get exposed. | ||
| And you have your best sets. | ||
| But the negative side of it is then you listen to the tape and a lot of that was free association. | ||
| You listen to the tape and you're like, that wasn't that great. | ||
| Well, that's the thing about comedy. | ||
| I feel like comedy, to really develop a good set, it's almost like cross-training. | ||
| You need to lift a little weights, but you also need to do some jogging. | ||
| You need to do a bunch of different things. | ||
| You need to have a big crowd. | ||
| So you see if this is a set that's really worth filming, and then sometimes you have to have a little crowd where they're not impressed by you. | ||
| They're not there to see you. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And you see if this stuff really can resonate with people that don't even know you. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, that's the beauty. | ||
| The reason we're all still so obsessed with comedy is because of these little... | ||
| That it could still surprise you every time and still challenge you every time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a million things where you're like, I can't believe... | ||
| I know so much and I know so little after all these years of doing it, you know? | ||
| Well, the beautiful thing, too, is every time you do a special, you become a beginner again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because even though you know how to craft the material, the material you have is dog shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it's like... | ||
| It's on Bambi legs. | ||
| And you gotta figure out a way to get it moving again. | ||
| And that's why... | ||
| My new theory, which you're going to like this for the Austin Comedy Club, is that down south now, because nobody can work out up north once it gets to be winter. | ||
| So it's going to be like baseball, how all the Dominicans became. | ||
| All the south is where all the great comedians. | ||
| It's still warm here. | ||
| Year round. | ||
| Because the COVID's going to hit New York City and shut everything down again once flu season kicks in. | ||
| Yeah, it's already shut. | ||
| It's never opened. | ||
| Comedy clubs have an opening. | ||
| But they're open outside, right? | ||
| A few of them? | ||
| Outside, yeah. | ||
| How are they doing that? | ||
| Are they on the street? | ||
| What are they doing? | ||
| They have parking lots or something? | ||
| On the street? | ||
| Well, one comedy club is on the street, but most of them are in parks or in parking lots. | ||
| There's a lot of parking lots. | ||
| That's so weird. | ||
| So how do you get people to pay to sit in a park? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| Because otherwise, people could just walk up and stand on the outside and listen. | ||
| They don't have to pay. | ||
| Yeah, and the parking lot, you always just... | ||
| The problem with doing a parking lot is even though you could be doing great, you know there's some idiot outside the parking lot that could start screaming. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like when I was 16, I would have done. | ||
| Sure! | ||
| Honk your horn. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Or just play Andrew Dice Clay really loud in your car. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Just something to distract the community. | ||
| You're giving them a good idea. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I did a gazebo a couple of weeks ago, a benefit up in Connecticut. | ||
| Like a wedding gazebo? | ||
| Yeah, like an outdoor... | ||
| Like how Chappelle's doing it in New York? | ||
| Or in... | ||
| Is that a gazebo? | ||
| Yeah, he's doing it in Ohio. | ||
| Well, it's like a wedding chapel. | ||
| Outside wedding chapel. | ||
| That's where he's doing his shows. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| It's in the town square. | ||
| I was just doing a benefit. | ||
| And yeah, a couple of kids drove by when the guy before me was on and just honked and screamed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Ruin, you joke. | ||
| Do you know Burt Kreischer? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Burt's doing a lot of these drive-in shows. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I know he is, of course. | ||
| I go, what was the show like? | ||
| He goes, it was great. | ||
| It was 700 cars. | ||
| Like 700 cars. | ||
| That's a lot of cars. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just did it for HBO Max. | ||
| I did like a comedy outdoor special with a bunch of comedians from New York and 30 cars. | ||
| And it went back far. | ||
| How did he get 700? | ||
| He's doing giant places. | ||
| This was 30 cars, and it was way back. | ||
| This must be like, I mean, I can't imagine how far back it must go. | ||
| It goes far, and they all light their lights and honk their horns and shit. | ||
| That's right, that's what they were doing. | ||
| Oh my god, 700. Now I'd like to see that. | ||
| Yeah, but Bert's hammered too, right? | ||
| So he's barely aware of what's happening when the lights are flashing and people are honking. | ||
| He's having a great time. | ||
| Yeah, there you got video of it. | ||
| By the way, I'm 99% sure, so I'm just going to say this. | ||
| This is all his idea. | ||
| Look how big this is. | ||
| It's huge. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Wow. | ||
| There he is in Philly. | ||
| And he did it all across the country. | ||
| Takes his shirt off every show because it's important. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Oh my god, yeah. | ||
| Well, now he has to. | ||
| Yeah, now he has to. | ||
| He's like Ellen dancing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's trapped. | |
| Right. | ||
| She has to dance every show. | ||
| He's trapped. | ||
| So this is how he did it. | ||
| So he would go out and do these crazy shows where he's in the parking lot. | ||
| They'd set up a stage with lights and everything. | ||
| Wow, look at that. | ||
| He's been touring. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| He's one of the only guys that through this pandemic has been regularly touring in a pretty safe way. | ||
| Look at all those fucking cars. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| That's crazy. | ||
| Pretty safe way. | ||
| That's kind of cool. | ||
| It's actually really cool looking. | ||
| He enjoyed it. | ||
| He said it was great. | ||
| He enjoyed it. | ||
| Yeah, but Bert's the kind of guy that enjoys things like that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, I could see myself getting aggravated by this, and Bert's like, it's the greatest! | ||
| You know, he'll be... | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is all right! | |
| He'll jump in their car, start making out with them. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, Bert enjoys stuff. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, I just... | ||
| You know, I miss real comedy. | ||
| Like, Mark Norman said it best. | ||
| He's like, this is all methadone. | ||
| He goes, we're all doing methadone. | ||
| He goes, I want a real shot. | ||
| He goes, I want the real hit right in the veins. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He really is. | |
| He goes, I don't want to take this methadone. | ||
| These park shows, these outdoor shows, and the virtual show's the worst. | ||
| Oh my god, yeah. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I've watched good comics bomb on Zoom, and I'm like, stop. | ||
| Stop doing that. | ||
| There's no one there. | ||
| You can't do that. | ||
| No, it sounds like pigeons. | ||
| You don't hear laughing. | ||
| You just hear this weird look. | ||
| Is that a laugh? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| It's so bad. | ||
| It's just not a bad... | ||
| It's a terrible way to do comedy. | ||
| No, yeah. | ||
| But that's, again, what I love about it is that it makes us really, like, you realize a lot of people are going to fall by the wayside, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because the money's going to go down. | ||
| Thank God. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Thank God. | ||
| The money's going to go down. | ||
| Prepping people for low salaries at Austin Comedy Club. | ||
| The money's going to go down. | ||
| You're going to design Austin Comedy Club for me, right? | ||
| I would love it. | ||
| Design the room. | ||
| I'd like to curate the audience. | ||
| How are you going to do that? | ||
| Already we had a conflict when I was telling you I don't want those drunks at the audience. | ||
| You're like, yeah, let them have a few drinks. | ||
| I'm like, no, Joe. | ||
| You want to test them all to make sure they're not drunk. | ||
| Yeah, because I don't like it. | ||
| You're like, well, some drugs don't heckle. | ||
| I know. | ||
| But then they sit there like this and you think they're listening to you and their eyes are closed. | ||
| One time I was in Cleveland and I was yelling at the whole crowd because they were drunk and just horrible. | ||
| And there was this beautiful couple up front. | ||
| Guy and girl. | ||
| Blonde. | ||
| Dressed. | ||
| Expensive. | ||
| Like, I mean, they just looked like model movie stars. | ||
| And I was like, these people, people like this come to see a show. | ||
| I just yell at the crowd because it was like, heck, it was a late show, you know. | ||
| And then I finished. | ||
| Then like five minutes later, the couple got up to go to the bathroom and they both face planted and passed out. | ||
| They were so happy. | ||
| They didn't even know I was talking. | ||
| They didn't even know where they were. | ||
| We finally have a rapid test. | ||
| So here, we got tested. | ||
| We got the same test that the White House uses. | ||
| So we have a machine, do a nose swab, and get a result in 15 minutes. | ||
| So you could conceivably have a show where people would show up, say, 40 minutes early. | ||
| Everybody gets in line, gets tested. | ||
| When you get cleaned, you can get inside and have a drink. | ||
| So you could do a comedy club and have everybody with no mask on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You could conceive. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The thing is, people are like, even if people get tested, wear a mask. | ||
| Like, everyone's so mask conscious now. | ||
| Like, when we do the UFC, I can't do in-person interviews with the fighters. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I'm tested and they're tested. | ||
| Everybody's tested. | ||
| You have to be tested to even be in the building. | ||
| You have to be clean the day of to be in the building, but yet still they want everybody to wear a mask. | ||
| Like, that doesn't make any fucking sense. | ||
| No, but it's also because when you live in a In a country that's built on lawsuits, everybody's like, whoa, that sounds like a law... | ||
| There's 80 people going, don't wear a mask. | ||
| I want to see what happens. | ||
| Just so they can try to sue you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's... | |
| Well, you'd have to sign a waiver. | ||
| If you're going to get to Austin Comedy Club, you'd have to sign a waiver. | ||
| Well, Austin Comedy Club, I hate to say this, it sounds like I'm already abusing the system, but I think the MC should have to do the testing. | ||
| They should have to be registered. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| A nerd. | ||
| You have to be a nurse to be an emcee. | ||
| You want a host, you gotta be a nurse. | ||
| You gotta get there early. | ||
| Save yourselves a few bucks. | ||
| Yeah, you know, like, hosts would have to pitch chicken wings at some place. | ||
| You know, try the wings in this place. | ||
| Well, I used to bartend when I started comedy. | ||
| I would bartend at the comic strip and they wouldn't let me on because they were like, no, it's a conflict of interest. | ||
| It was a big ethical problem. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| You had to quit your job as a bartender? | ||
| I quit before I could audition, yeah. | ||
| Oh, that's ridiculous. | ||
| But the store is the opposite. | ||
| The store, all the people that work there are comics. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Everyone, the doorman. | ||
| But they actually, like Ari, when I met him, he was a doorman. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He was? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And then the beautiful thing was he eventually filmed his first special at the store, his Comedy Central special. | ||
| So it was like, wow, what a full circle he made. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He seems more like a comedian than a doorman, if I may say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He's a terrible doorman. | ||
| I don't give a fuck where you sit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sit wherever. | |
| This place is gritty. | ||
| This place is crazy. | ||
| Yeah, but everybody, Tony Hinchcliffe, everybody that works there as a doorman is a comic. | ||
| Everybody that works the cover booth is a comic. | ||
| A lot of the people that work behind the bar are comics. | ||
| Well, you guys' crew really turned that place around. | ||
| Because I was there in the early 90s. | ||
| And the comedy store, I was there working, you know, I didn't even work that much when I was in L.A. It was a shithole. | ||
| Well, not only was it a shithole, Monday was considered gang night. | ||
| And it wasn't like, it wasn't an inside joke. | ||
| Like, everybody knew gang night. | ||
| The gangs knew it was gang night. | ||
| So they would have gangs. | ||
| It was just this crazy atmosphere, like this tense atmosphere. | ||
| Every Monday night was gang night. | ||
| Yeah, it was not good when I got there in 94. I got there in 94, it was pretty rough. | ||
| But occasionally it was good. | ||
| Occasionally, Damon Wayans would stop by, or Martin Lawrence would stop by. | ||
| Someone good would be there, and you'd go, wow, okay, now I get to see a real comic. | ||
| But a lot of it was half-empty, not even. | ||
| A lot of Bodak's. | ||
| Oh, yeah, that's right. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of guys that really just shouldn't have been there. | ||
| And my theory was that, like, Kinison had left there somewhere around 86. Right. | ||
| And when I got there in 94, eight years later, it was just still, like, because before that it was booming, right? | ||
| There was Kinison and Letterman and all these guys were there. | ||
| And then when he left and he was banned from the store... | ||
| I think he took everybody with him. | ||
| And I think when I got there in 94, it was like he was already dead. | ||
| And it was like the echoes of that, that his generation had already kind of died off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, I was, when I was in LA, I was in LA in 89, I guess, 90 or something, 88, 89. And the improv was the respectable club. | ||
| It was what the store became. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And the store was already crazy. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It was like that in 94. Yeah. | ||
| The agents wouldn't go there because they couldn't get in for free. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Because Mitzi was like, I don't give a fuck where you work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| If you were an agent and you wanted to get a table, it's like, pay. | ||
| Tell them to pay. | ||
| You know what, though? | ||
| I don't blame her because the whole town was an agent. | ||
| She wouldn't have made a dime. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and not only that, they didn't pay attention. | ||
| She would say they would talk in the back, and they did. | ||
| I remember I went to see a showcase once, and they, for whatever reason, William Morris had a showcase at a nightclub, and there was the downstairs where they had people seated, and the upstairs was like this little balcony where there was a bar, and it was filled with agents, and they were talking full blast. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| While the show was going up. | ||
| And I said, I'm not going up. | ||
| I told my agent, I'm like, I'm not going up. | ||
| There's no fucking way. | ||
| And DePaulo was on stage. | ||
| And DePaulo was on stage and he's yelling at these fucking people that are up in the balcony. | ||
| Like he's talking shit about them. | ||
| It was terrible. | ||
| It was like the worst atmosphere for comedy. | ||
| And the agents didn't give a fuck. | ||
| It was agents assistants, a lot of them. | ||
| They were drinking and talking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're just laughing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're having a social time. | ||
| They're having free drinks. | ||
| It's like this is their opportunity to chit-chat. | ||
| So while the show was going on, I mean, full-blown bar-level talking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was terrible. | ||
| So that was what Mitzi tried to avoid. | ||
| She's like, get him out of here. | ||
| No, she definitely had the right spirit. | ||
| I didn't even know Kenison was. | ||
| I remember Kenison was there one night. | ||
| Rich Jenny told me, rest him in peace, too. | ||
| Love that guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Great guy. | ||
| God, he was good. | ||
| But he knew Kennison. | ||
| And Kennison owed him $100. | ||
| So he went by the comedy store to get paid. | ||
| He was in town. | ||
| He's like, you know, the guy's doing great now. | ||
| He's making a lot of money. | ||
| It's like 1988, 1989. And he goes, I'm going to get paid. | ||
| I'm going to go borrow them. | ||
| And he goes to the emcee. | ||
| When Kennison gets off, I'm getting $100. | ||
| He owes me $100. | ||
| He never paid me. | ||
| He's rich. | ||
| I'm just, you know, working the road. | ||
| And then just then, Sam starts screaming at somebody. | ||
| He goes, I can't. | ||
| You know that bit he used to do where he goes, I'm going to take this napkin. | ||
| I want you to write down the names of all your loved ones, your dead grandmother that always treated you. | ||
| You know, you go through the whole, you say to somebody in the audience, you go, write down your dead grandmother that was always there for you. | ||
| Write down your uncle that paid your way through, you know, and I want you to write them all down. | ||
| And then I want you to hand it back to me because I'm going to wipe my ass with it. | ||
| And he said that. | ||
| He said the guy just exploded, attacked him. | ||
| Sam's bodyguards just started punching, you know, turned into like a brawl at the comedy store. | ||
| The guy was so mad, you know. | ||
| And then the emcee goes, Jenny, maybe you should just ask him for 50. Yeah, I missed all that. | ||
| I saw him live a few times when I was an open-miker, when I was in Boston. | ||
| I went to see him three times while he was alive. | ||
| One time was at Great Woods, and one time was down the Cape, and then there was one other time. | ||
| And it was just... | ||
| It was interesting to see, because it was like he didn't have new material, and he was trying to do some of the bits from the old stuff, and people would call out the punchlines, and so then he had to kind of write new shit while he was touring, and the HBO special had just come out, because it was kind of a new thing back then. | ||
| There weren't a lot of HBO specials. | ||
| It wasn't a real common thing. | ||
| No. | ||
| And he had developed that act over years and years and years. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then all of a sudden, he's this hugely famous comedian. | ||
| They come to see him, and he doesn't really have a lot of new material. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, that definitely happened to a lot of guys back then, where they'd just be like, they weren't used to people knowing their act. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And people are like, I don't hear... | ||
| That's the thing about comedy. | ||
| Musicians, people are calling out for their best hits. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| If you do something new, they get mad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Comedians, it's just the opposite. | ||
| I know, it's crazy. | ||
| It's such a hassle, but it's the way it is. | ||
| And especially Samzak, because it was all build-up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then the big punchline, so there was no in-between. | ||
| Yeah, so I got to see his B-level material. | ||
| I never got to see the A material live. | ||
| I got to see it on TV, but when I saw him live, it was all kind of like half-assed stuff. | ||
| It wasn't really that good. | ||
| But it was also because his crowd was so annoyingly screaming at him that he almost couldn't develop. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because like you said, he should have been what Chris did. | ||
| Go in when there's 15 people. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| He should have done that. | ||
| Well, he was just touring, right? | ||
| He developed his comedy by going up late at the store. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That was the thing. | ||
| Going up late, he put that act together over years of struggle. | ||
| And then all of a sudden he was huge and now he's got to do these thousands of seats and it's not the same. | ||
| You can't develop an act. | ||
| It's just, you can, but it's hard to develop an act in front of thousands and thousands of people. | ||
| And how about, I know, yeah, I don't know how you could do it. | ||
| I mean, how about the fact that him and Pryor are both from Peoria? | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Isn't that wild? | ||
| Weird. | ||
| But he started in Houston. | ||
| They said Sam in Houston, him and Bill Hicks, all of them looked at that. | ||
| And they said Sam one time, he like tied himself to the thing outside. | ||
| Yeah, the annex, because they censored him. | ||
| They wouldn't let him go up. | ||
| Yeah, those guys, they had developed a real scene down here in Texas. | ||
| They really did. | ||
| And Hicks had a real scene in Austin. | ||
| Hicks started out here and then eventually went to Houston. | ||
| Maybe he started in Houston and went to here eventually. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I think he started in Houston, did Houston and Austin, and then when he came to die, he died out here. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, I used to call them the Houston comics that hate God. | ||
| Well, it was odd because Texas is often thought of as being very religious. | ||
| That's why they're so obsessed with it. | ||
| I think Garofalo came out here. | ||
| I think she came out here during that time too, right? | ||
| They had a bunch of... | ||
| Because it was like a scene. | ||
| I remember hearing that she was coming out here because I knew her from Boston. | ||
| I was like, wow, that's kind of wild. | ||
| Texas is that... | ||
| It made me rethink what Texas is in my head. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Brett Butler was here. | ||
| This was during the 80s. | ||
| This was during the Kinison era. | ||
| And that was when they had Ron Schock. | ||
| Do you remember him? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| And do you remember Andy Hinton? | ||
| Jimmy Pineapple. | ||
| I worked with Jimmy Pineapple. | ||
| One of the first times I ever did the Houston Laugh Stop, I worked with Jimmy Pineapple. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, those guys. | ||
| Speaking of laws of comedy. | ||
| Andy Hinton used to have a joke, which, you know, he goes, so these girls having sex younger and younger these days. | ||
| I overheard my sister's friends talking about it. | ||
| They're 14, and she's having sex. | ||
| I pulled her aside. | ||
| I said, first of all, what we did was wrong. | ||
| Second of all, telling people about it is not going to make it better. | ||
|
unidentified
|
LAUGHTER Fuck. | |
| Today you'd get cancelled for that joke. | ||
| Oh my god, yeah. | ||
| You'd be in real trouble. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You'd be in real trouble. | |
| All female comics would start Twitter threads about you. | ||
| Expose him. | ||
| But Andy Hinton, him and Ron Schock once did acidity. | ||
| T. Sean Shannon, you know him. | ||
| He's from there too. | ||
| And he told me the story about Ron Schock and Andy Hinton were tripping one time. | ||
| And, you know, Ron Shock was, you know, he just was like kind of regular. | ||
| And he goes, and then Andy Hinton goes, Ron, you're going to make it when they first started. | ||
| He goes, I know. | ||
| And he goes, he was waiting for him to say it back to him, you know, because you're two comedians anew, so you say it back to each other, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| And he goes, and finally Andy couldn't take you, he goes, I'm going to make it too, Ron. | ||
| He goes, sure you are, Andy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure you are. | |
| They had a great open mic night back at that laugh stop. | ||
| That was one thing about the laugh. | ||
| Did you work that place in Houston? | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| The Laugh Stop? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It was a great club. | ||
| But they had the bar area was an open mic night. | ||
| And then they had the main showroom area. | ||
| And I remember I came in to do the show there. | ||
| I did two shows. | ||
| And from the moment I got on stage, they had the open mic going. | ||
| And then by the time I was off stage, the open mic was still going. | ||
| So the open mic would go to like 2 o'clock in the morning. | ||
| They had guys still going up. | ||
| It was a real comedy community there. | ||
| They really worked on their craft. | ||
| They didn't tolerate any hacks. | ||
| No. | ||
| No bullshit there. | ||
| They were a serious thing. | ||
| It was a great place. | ||
| It was a great, great scene. | ||
| That crazy Mark Babbitt ran it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That crazy fuck. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was a nut, but he really loved comedy. | ||
| He loved comedy and ran it good. | ||
| You've got to have a nut. | ||
| People think, well, that guy wasn't the best businessman. | ||
| You're not going to get the best businessman to run a goddamn comedy club. | ||
| You're going to get nutty people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, no, exactly. | ||
| Like, Mitzi Short was a different kind of nutty person. | ||
| Mark Babbitt was a different kind of nutty person. | ||
| But all the great club owners were all crazy. | ||
| Well, the reason Boston was a good scene, too, was a great scene when I started. | ||
| You know, I came in like 85, let's say, to Boston, right? | ||
| First time ever. | ||
| Was because Lenny Clark and Mike Clark... | ||
| Mike Clark, the money they paid in Boston was like three or four times more than any other place. | ||
| Three or four times. | ||
| Like a gig in New York would pay $80 to be the middle. | ||
| In Boston, it would pay $290 or something. | ||
| Because Lenny and Mike was not ripping people off like that. | ||
| Yeah, Mike's a great guy. | ||
| I'm still good friends with him to this day. | ||
| I was texting with him yesterday. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I love that guy. | ||
| And he, whatever his thing was, he was just this guy that was like, yeah, you should get paid. | ||
| And it was like this Valhalla. | ||
| And what was regulated, it was also the big four. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It was like the Mount Rushmore of Boston. | ||
| Sweeney, Gavin, Lenny, and Rodgers. | ||
| And they were just... | ||
| They just set a tone. | ||
| Everybody's like, whoa. | ||
| And they were big guys, too. | ||
| They were big guys. | ||
| Lenny Clark's a fucking gorilla of a man. | ||
| They were these big dudes. | ||
| It was an interesting place because they were men. | ||
| We thought of comedy as being these dweeby interests, but those guys were doing coke and punching people. | ||
| They were wild fucks. | ||
| All those guys were hammered all the time. | ||
| They're all a bunch of wild people. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| They were insane. | ||
| They brought me up to be Sweeney one afternoon at Nick's, and he was just in the back like this. | ||
| You know, like, you want to be Sweeney? | ||
| It was just him in the dark and just looking like it was this, you know, audience with the Pope. | ||
| Were you there during the Coke days where they would try to pay you in Coke? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, not me. | ||
| I was already clean. | ||
| But, yeah, they paid people in Coke all the time. | ||
| It was psychotic out there. | ||
| What's the only way you get great comedy? | ||
| I think it's like, it doesn't last because it's not sustainable, that kind of a business model. | ||
| And then the comics never pay their taxes. | ||
| They all wind up getting audited. | ||
| And you stop writing because you're coked up or you're just waiting for the coke deal. | ||
| Oh yeah, when they had the guy on the side, I mean, they're dealing coke in uniform. | ||
| It was nuts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I was a famous, I'm sure you heard that story, when I went up there and they pulled the old... | ||
| thing where Sweeney and Chance went on before me and just left me destroyed on a Friday the 2nd show and then I end up literally because I remember I'm from New York so I don't understand it's 1985 or 86 so I don't understand the culture so I see a bunch of guys in polo shirts and With blonde hair, deck shoes, white pants. | ||
| I'm like, oh, these must be some spoiled Kennedy guys. | ||
| Like, they look like yuppies. | ||
| Like, they look like rich- They're bank robbers from Chelsea. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| Yes! | ||
| But I'm looking at this audience full of these guys in pink IZOT shirts. | ||
| You know, and that's exact. | ||
| And they're these badasses. | ||
| They're savages. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| So I'm like, so I go cursing them because I'm bombing. | ||
| So, you know, we get into it. | ||
| They're like, fuck you. | ||
| I'm like, fuck you. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| And just, I go, God, go fuck yourself. | ||
| You know, I'm just giving them a finger. | ||
| I say, you fucking asshole. | ||
| Go back to, you know, Hyannisport and go play touch football, you little pussy. | ||
| And these guys, and I start to notice. | ||
| Then finally, I start to notice, wait a minute. | ||
| Some of these guys have tattoos back in the days when, you know. | ||
| I'm like, these guys have like Chermark tattoos. | ||
| I may be misreading them because I didn't know anything about Boston as far as the neighborhoods. | ||
| I don't know what's going on there, you know. | ||
| I just wore pink eyes on shirts and, you know. | ||
| Facial scars. | ||
| You start seeing things. | ||
| Crooked noses. | ||
| Some of these guys are pretty muscular, too. | ||
| And then, long story short, it got so ugly that Joe Yannetti had to come on stage from the back of the room. | ||
| They go, Joe, go up there. | ||
| Save it. | ||
| Because they're getting ready to rush the stage and beat the shit out of me. | ||
| The whole crowd almost felt like. | ||
| And Joe Yannetti goes on stage and he goes, Folks, I'm from ISTE. This is my friend. | ||
| We're going off stage now. | ||
| You leave us alone. | ||
| And he literally had to explain to him, I'm from Eastie. | ||
| He's from one of the neighborhoods. | ||
| So, you know, I'm a legitimate person. | ||
| And then we just had to hide in the kitchen until the whole crowd emptied out. | ||
| Well, if you were a New York guy, you already had three strikes against you going off by the stage. | ||
| Yes, I knew none of that. | ||
| Yeah, they set you up, too. | ||
| I saw them set up Billy Crystal. | ||
| Well, that's great. | ||
| I walked in after the fact. | ||
| I didn't actually see it, but I walked in after the fact. | ||
| They were all bragging about it. | ||
| They set up Billy Crystal with like Sweeney, Knox, Gavin, boom, boom, boom. | ||
| They just had a murderous assault of local humor. | ||
| You couldn't follow. | ||
| They're talking about fucking Cape Cod, going down the Cape, having con. | ||
| They're talking in the Boston accent. | ||
| Everybody's dying. | ||
| And then you would go up and be like, I'm Billy Crystal. | ||
| Hey! | ||
| Do you like the Emmys? | ||
| And they're like, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| They did it to everybody. | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| It's funny you say that because of the local references. | ||
| The last thing I remembered before I went on stage, I mean, they're ripping, is Chance, Sweeney, Sweetie's got a mop in his head like dreadlocks. | ||
| Chance is playing guitar and they're singing a song called Come Back to Jamaica Plain. | ||
| That's where I lived. | ||
| I lived in Jamaica Plain. | ||
| It was all local stuff. | ||
| That was a real problem when I started doing The Road. | ||
| I had so much local material because they loved local material. | ||
| It was like a cheat code. | ||
| You can get a laugh you didn't deserve with local material. | ||
| In New York, you're doing that subway stuff. | ||
| You're in North Carolina. | ||
| People would be like, what are you talking about the subway? | ||
| We know what it is. | ||
| But it's funny you said the after, I was there for the aftermath, because I pictured the room when an aftermath, when, you know, sometimes you go into one of those clubs in New York too, but in Boston, Knicks, and there was just broken shot glasses thrown around the room, just chairs turned over, and you're like, whoa! | ||
| What happened here? | ||
| But it was just a crazy business model that they would set up these headliners for failure on purpose all the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if you didn't know, like if you were a guy from New York that was doing The Tonight Show and you're starting to do movies and you thought you were the shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And they would let you go on stage and they were like, oh yeah, we're going to have this guy headline. | ||
| He's been on The Tonight Show. | ||
| And they would set you up with four murderers would go on in front of you. | ||
| I don't blame them. | ||
| When you're making that much money locally, you don't want a bunch of people come horning in. | ||
| But by the way, I wasn't a headliner. | ||
| I was just up there visiting. | ||
| I was staying at Tony V and Dennis Leary's house. | ||
| I wasn't a headliner. | ||
| But they just did it for whatever, for sport, to keep in shape. | ||
| No other place would do that. | ||
| If you went to Houston, they would give you like a local act. | ||
| It would be an opener. | ||
| It would be normal. | ||
| I mean, you have good comics, but they wouldn't have headliner after headline after headline trying to blow you off the stage. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They did it on purpose. | ||
| Yeah, they did. | ||
| Oh yeah, I know they did. | ||
| They wanted you to eat shit. | ||
| These guys would do their best 20 minutes. | ||
| And you would go on stage an hour and 15, an hour and 20 minutes into a show where the audience was beaten into a pulse. | ||
| And then these guys would bomb. | ||
| It happened to me. | ||
| That's exactly what happened. | ||
| And I wasn't even the headliner. | ||
| And here's what happened, by the way. | ||
| I just remembered it. | ||
| I was the middle. | ||
| But Chance goes, I'd like to get home early, Colin. | ||
| Would you mind if I went ahead of you? | ||
| Oh. | ||
| And I was like, yeah, okay. | ||
| Dirty trick. | ||
| Because the first show had been fine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So I was like, yeah, fine. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Dirty trick. | ||
| I didn't know him. | ||
| I didn't know anybody. | ||
| It was really funny. | ||
| Dirty trick. | ||
| They do that on purpose. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, do you really blame? | ||
| Look, here's the way it is. | ||
| You're in the city. | ||
| You're making great money. | ||
| You know, you're getting paid in coke. | ||
| Everything's set up correctly. | ||
| Plus you're Irish. | ||
| So you're like, these assholes think they're going to come in here and big shot their way around. | ||
| It's the perfect Irish arrest to just go, we're going to show you what a fucking big shot you are. | ||
| The pleasure they got in their souls out of watching that week after week. | ||
| Of course they did it constantly. | ||
| The only person I saw survived that... | ||
| That gauntlet was Dom Herrera. | ||
| Dom Herrera, he murdered. | ||
| He went up there. | ||
| He was famous enough at the time that a lot of the audience was there to see him. | ||
| And he was working so much. | ||
| He was cool as a cucumber. | ||
| He would go on. | ||
| And his material was so goddamn good. | ||
| So funny. | ||
| So solid. | ||
| He went up there and he killed. | ||
| And I remember at the end of it, he goes, ladies and gentlemen, I've been Dom Herrera. | ||
| I've been great. | ||
| You guys were okay. | ||
| You weren't a bad audience. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| He just had this casual confidence and he survived the gauntlet. | ||
| They tried. | ||
| They tried to take him out. | ||
| I could see it. | ||
| One after the other they set people up. | ||
| I saw some crazy shows. | ||
| I saw Bill Hicks get set up there. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Bill Hicks got set up there, cleared the fucking room, and never stopped. | ||
| Never stopped swinging. | ||
| It was me and Greg Fitzsimmons. | ||
| We were open micers at the time. | ||
| And we were sitting in the back of the room at Nick's Comedy Stop. | ||
| And Hicks started out with 300 people, and he was down to maybe 40. Maybe 35, 40 people at the end. | ||
| And everybody had just gotten up and left. | ||
| And it was a row of comics in the back, laughing our fucking ass off. | ||
| It just, like, he was looking up. | ||
| He had some bit about someone taking a shit, right? | ||
| So he's, like, grunting over a toilet bowl. | ||
| And he looks up. | ||
| And he goes, this usually clears the room. | ||
| And people are just getting up. | ||
| And just the crazy thing about it was the calmness of his bombing was stunning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Always. | ||
| I was like, he's so relaxed while bombing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I never saw anybody who literally would just be like, he had such a zen-like attitude about Kyle because he did it since he was like 15 or whatever he was. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And T-Shawn speaking, they all knew him when he first began. | ||
| And they said his whole act was joke jokes, hilarious joke jokes. | ||
| Like he had all this material, but it was all like one-liners that he wrote. | ||
| When he was 16 and 15. Yeah, there's a video of him when he was really young. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was real smooth. | ||
| And the video is him before he was 18. He's fucking smooth. | ||
| And then he was like, hey, guess what? | ||
| I want to do this a different way. | ||
| I mean, he was just a searcher, you know? | ||
| And also, when I caught him, when I saw him, I saw him live a few times, he'd already quit doing drugs. | ||
| He was already clean, and he just saw this really strange, introspective, thought-provoking act. | ||
| And people didn't know what to make of it. | ||
| He really changed comedy in a lot of ways, because a lot of people imitated him, because they would see him, and they would go, you know, comedy can kind of be profound. | ||
| It doesn't just have to be funny. | ||
| This guy made me feel like what I was talking about was stupid. | ||
| That I was dumb. | ||
| I remember in the back green room in the Atlanta punchline, the green room had graffiti on the wall. | ||
| And one of the things that said, quit trying to be Hicks. | ||
| Because there's so many guys that were trying to be hicks. | ||
| It's so common. | ||
| People would tell the audience how dumb they were and how dumb America was. | ||
| I know. | ||
| They were trying to be profound without doing all the work first. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| How many people masquerade as... | ||
| Freaking out the crowd with their brilliance when it's just that you're not that funny. | ||
| I mean, you know, first be funny. | ||
| Like, doctors first do no harm. | ||
| First be funny. | ||
| Then, if you can be profound, that's great. | ||
| That's another level. | ||
| But don't be up there going, hey, you guys don't get it. | ||
| I'm ruining your middle-class bourgeois mentality. | ||
| He's like, no, you're not stupid. | ||
| When Lenny Bruce did it, yes, that was shocking and it was groundbreaking. | ||
| Don't be acting like, you know what I mean, Hicks or Lenny Bruce. | ||
| I would have loved to see Hicks with a podcast. | ||
| Goddamn, he would have had a great podcast. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He would have had a really interesting podcast. | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| There were some real interesting interviews with him where he would do an interview and he wouldn't really try to be funny. | ||
| That was the thing in these interviews. | ||
| Guys would be half doing their act. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| He did a little bit of that, but for the most part, he would actually talk about shit. | ||
| No, yeah, I'm going to do that for the second half of this, going to my act. | ||
| That's what I was getting to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Trying to work you into that. | |
| You don't have to be funny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Remember when they used to do that in radio in the 80s, at least when I started? | |
| They go, listen, tell us what you set you up for. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Dude, the 80s? | ||
| I had someone try to do that to me in like 2014. I did the Bomb and Tom show back then. | ||
| I was like, what? | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| Maybe it was 2005, but it was the 2000s. | ||
| In the 80s, that was the normal thing. | ||
| If you said no, they'd be like, oh my god, this guy's going to be terrible. | ||
| In Bomb and Tom's defense, they didn't care, but the producer was adamant that I need to have specific things to talk about to go into. | ||
| I was like, what? | ||
| I'm not just going to go have fun. | ||
| These guys are fun. | ||
| I'm fun. | ||
| Just relax. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So you flew out here. | ||
| How was your flight? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it was pretty good, but there was a guy next to me. | |
| Yeah, the morning radio thing. | ||
| There was a lot of guys would do their act on morning radio. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Because nobody was recording it. | ||
| Because it was like, you know, there was no internet back then. | ||
| And comedy was so new that people would be driving and go, hey, this guy's pretty funny. | ||
| Let's get out there. | ||
| I mean, it was there for a reason, you know? | ||
| Guys would do routines in the morning. | ||
| And it worked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It got people to come out to the club, and then they would hear the same jokes at the club. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was the other thing, too, is that nobody wrote new material back then. | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| I know so many guys that were so funny, and they'd write maybe 40. And that was it. | ||
| And they were as funny as anybody. | ||
| Forever. | ||
| Forever. | ||
| And then you fade away. | ||
| But I mean, yeah. | ||
| And they had fun. | ||
| It wasn't that the material was dated. | ||
| It was just once you stop writing that stuff, something about you becomes dated in some weird way. | ||
| Well, their act would get so polished. | ||
| It would be like a samurai sword. | ||
| They would hammer it down to just a perfect sharpness. | ||
| Like Don Gavin, his fucking timing was so precise. | ||
| So funny. | ||
| Ba-bing, ba-bang, ba-bang. | ||
| And you'd be crying. | ||
| He was so confident and loose. | ||
| But they never left. | ||
| They never left Boston. | ||
| They stayed. | ||
| They had that 40 minutes. | ||
| And they were as good as any comic that has ever lived. | ||
| As anybody. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And people didn't know. | ||
| But in New York, too. | ||
| There's a bunch of guys in New York that were just... | ||
| Great in the mid-80s when I started. | ||
| These guys were so funny. | ||
| I was afraid you were going to say that. | ||
| Well, like a guy like John Heyman. | ||
| Hilarious. | ||
| He became a writer. | ||
| But I'm saying he would get up and just... | ||
| So funny. | ||
| And he was just... | ||
| He was the guy that would just sit at the bar all in the community. | ||
| Just clever, witty guy. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| He could have been one of the greats. | ||
| And everybody knew it. | ||
| New York had a different thing in that the clubs were smaller. | ||
| Because space was more limited. | ||
| So the people were on top of you. | ||
| So you had a lot of guys working the crowd. | ||
| Because they were so close to you, you almost felt like you had to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, yeah, most of the clubs in New York, it was a lot of crowd work. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which was good and bad. | ||
| It was good in the sense that, you know, it's funny to watch somebody be, you know what I mean? | ||
| It keeps it, but it's bad in the sense that a lot of people just became great at crowd work. | ||
| I mean, how many guys that are just great at crowd work? | ||
| Crowd work's fun and it's funny, but you got to discipline yourself. | ||
| If you're not writing, when you're going to do a show and the stage is up there and you're talking to imaginary people, which a lot of people do, and you're like, hey, that guy. | ||
| And then after the show, when you start and you're like, hey, that guy wasn't fat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey. | |
| She was... | ||
| Her tits weren't out. | ||
| Why is he saying she was dressed like a hook? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This guy's... | |
| This is fake crowd work. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of guys that do that. | ||
| Well, the crowd work is like... | ||
| It's like local material. | ||
| It's a cheat code. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| When people think that you're coming up with it on the spot, they think, this guy's brilliant. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The part I object to is when somebody does something every night, spontaneous, and then they pretend they stumble into it and then start laughing at themselves. | ||
| Oh, that's ugly. | ||
| The fake laugh at yourself. | ||
| Sometimes you will laugh at yourself. | ||
| Yes, it happens. | ||
| But the audience knows when it's not real. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They know. | ||
| They know. | ||
| Unless they're retarded. | ||
| Some people don't know, but most people know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they might let you get away with it. | ||
| But when you're laughing at saying the same joke for the 50,000th time... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, it's crazy. | ||
| I mean, it really is a great thing about modern comedy is that everybody knows you've got to keep putting out new hours. | ||
| That's the great thing about modern comedy. | ||
| Yeah, with specials. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you've done an interesting thing where you've done these theme shows. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What led you to want to start doing that? | ||
| You had ideas that you wanted to do that way, like a one-man show? | ||
| Yeah, I remember seeing one-man shows when I first started. | ||
| I saw Eric Boghossian. | ||
| Do you know him? | ||
| Yes, I remember him. | ||
| He did these one-man shows, and I was like, oh my God. | ||
| This guy's the coolest guy. | ||
| He's being funny, doing his characters. | ||
| So I wanted to do that kind of stuff. | ||
| So I did this stuff in the early 90s, just one-man shows on my free time. | ||
| And I watched Lily Tomlin did one. | ||
| Whoopi Goldberg did a really good one back then. | ||
| And I'm watching these one-person shows, and I was like, I want to do that. | ||
| And I did this one called Irish Wake about growing up back then. | ||
| But then I just went back to stand-up, because stand-up is, you know how it is. | ||
| It's so... | ||
| It keeps you from being out of the loop mentally in some way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That you can't... | ||
| Because it's just... | ||
| You know, I just talk to Jerry about it all the time and it's like going into the water and just getting hit by a wave. | ||
| Because all the theoretical stuff, like even now, here we are talking, stand up this and that. | ||
| It's all theory. | ||
| Once you're on stage with a crowd, you're like, ah! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah! | |
| Ah! | ||
| You're surviving. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's like, yeah, I'm going to do this. | ||
| All my strategies. | ||
| But now you got to, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's a fight. | ||
| When you watch a guy like Jerry, who's been doing it forever, who's such a polished pro and is having a tough spot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's weird to see. | ||
| Be like, yep, we're all still just comics. | ||
| We're all still comics. | ||
| But that's the beauty of it, is that the crowd is just like a wave. | ||
| They'll give you a couple minutes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, look, Colin Quinn's here. | ||
| Hey, he's funny. | ||
| They'll give you a couple minutes, and after a while, like, come on. | ||
| Yeah, they're like the three guys I never heard of were making us laugh, and the guy I know is not. | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| I paid money to laugh. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And that's the beauty of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because whatever you want to say, like we're talking about with Bill, whatever you want to say, that's great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you still have to make them laugh, or it's not, by definition, it's not comedy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You may be a philosopher. | ||
| You may be the most brilliant, or TED Talk, as they say today. | ||
| But it's not comedy. | ||
| That's the importance also of showcase clubs, where there's a bunch of comics going up and they're not just there to see you. | ||
| Because if people are just there to see you, they'll laugh at things. | ||
| If they're just a giant fan of whoever it is, Jim Gaffigan, they go to see Jim Gaffigan, and Jim Gaffigan's a very funny guy, but they will laugh They will laugh at him. | ||
| But Jim Gaffigan will go to these other clubs to work out, too, because you have to do that as well. | ||
| You've got to go to a place where they don't necessarily come to see you. | ||
| They come to see a show. | ||
| And you're on the show, but you've got to perform. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, exactly. | ||
| It doesn't have an art form like that. | ||
| No. | ||
| Musicians don't have to do that. | ||
| No. | ||
| There's no other art form where you need the audience to help you write, edit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You literally need them. | ||
| That's why this coronavirus is so brutal for community because without the audience, you're going to ramble on and on. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You'll go into long setups with little punchlines and you won't even know. | ||
| The audience will be like, no, no, no. | ||
| Get to the joke. | ||
| And you're like, oh, I forgot to edit. | ||
| End this thing. | ||
| How can I do this for this many years and forget? | ||
| You need an ending. | ||
| Did you see Cosby at all before he wound up going to jail? | ||
| Did you ever see him live? | ||
| No. | ||
| I never saw him live. | ||
| I mean, I saw him live once when I worked at Great... | ||
| I was actually working as a security guard when he was there live. | ||
| But I didn't get to see... | ||
| I wasn't a comic back then. | ||
| I was 19. I didn't get to see the whole show. | ||
| I really paid attention to it. | ||
| But... | ||
| He never worked out. | ||
| And he talked about it. | ||
| He said, I know what's funny. | ||
| I know how to do funny. | ||
| I don't need to work out my material. | ||
| So he would just kind of write. | ||
| And then he would go up and do these. | ||
| And from all accounts, like Chris Rock said it and Burr said it, they went to see him. | ||
| They said it was fucking brilliant. | ||
| Brilliant. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he didn't work out. | ||
| I would like to see what that was like. | ||
| I would like to see it, too. | ||
| Yeah, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, they always said they went to see Bill Cosby and loved it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I wonder about that. | ||
| It's a little hero worship, too, right? | ||
| Like, how much of it is you're supposed to love it? | ||
| How much of it you love it because it's great? | ||
| Yeah, I guess. | ||
| I mean, if they hero-worshipped him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Before he got arrested, everybody hero-worshipped him. | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| You didn't? | ||
| I didn't like his act that much. | ||
| I mean, I thought he was... | ||
| One time I did a big benefit, a big Connie Hall show. | ||
| It was right after 9-11, and Cosby was on. | ||
| And it's an interesting night for two years, but one of them is... | ||
| He asked to meet me after my set. | ||
| He was here worshipping me, Joe, in my opinion. | ||
| But he brought me up because he wanted to meet me because of my set. | ||
| So I go up and I brought my girlfriend at the time. | ||
| Very, you know, pretty. | ||
| And... | ||
| I walked in with her and she had a certain look that I could, you know, like very exotic looking too. | ||
| And, you know, dressed up. | ||
| And Cosby was there in sweatpants smoking a cigar in Carnegie Hall, which, you know, only certain people get away with. | ||
| He's in some dressing room in Carnegie Hall with a cigar. | ||
| And he's talked to me for 20 minutes. | ||
| He looked at me for about eight seconds. | ||
| He was literally looking, but he made it a joke, but it was dead serious. | ||
| But he was looking at her while he was talking to me the whole time. | ||
| And we're all like laughing like he's in on the joke. | ||
| But it was so, like she thought it was so weird. | ||
| But the same night, Tom Papa was there with his wife, Cynthia. | ||
| And Bill Clinton was there too. | ||
| It was like a big, you know, right at the 9-11. | ||
| And Clinton was shot. | ||
| He walked around the room. | ||
| He just, he was so smart, you know, everything they say about him. | ||
| But then he starts talking to Tom Papa. | ||
| He starts flirting with Cynthia right in front of everybody and we're all laughing. | ||
| But he's like, hey, I love her. | ||
| It was one of those nights. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| In retrospect, right? | ||
| It was a Me Too benefit in retrospect. | ||
| I remember I called Bill Cosby a douchebag on your show when I was on Tough Crowd. | ||
| You were ahead of the time. | ||
| He was being interviewed by Wanda Sykes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And Wanda was interviewing him and he starts chastising her for the way she's talking to him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| And he had sunglasses on. | ||
| I go, that guy's a fucking douchebag. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| And I remember thinking like, geez, who the fuck am I to call Bill Cosby a douchebag? | ||
| I mean, this is like... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, when was Tough Crowd? | ||
| What year am I talking about? | ||
| 2003, 2004. Yeah. | ||
| And I was like, he's a fucking douchebag. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| I remember that when he was like, yeah, you... | ||
| She was just having fun and talking to him. | ||
| She was just trying to be funny. | ||
| And he chastised her for the way she was speaking. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| It was real weird. | ||
| Like, who the fuck are you to tell her how to talk? | ||
| Especially on TV at that time. | ||
| Everybody loves Wanda. | ||
| Yeah, just walking around the crowd. | ||
| And she's just working. | ||
| She's a comic. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Nothing she did was offensive. | ||
| It was just her talking. | ||
| And I remember being on the show, and then I remember leaving going, Jesus, I should want to call Bill Cosby a douchebag? | ||
| I probably shouldn't do that. | ||
| I feel like a lot of people left the show saying something like that. | ||
| That show would not be possible today. | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, it really was like a podcast in a lot of ways, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It really was. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was. | |
| It was a fucking great show, though. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| It was a great show. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| It really was. | ||
| And you were the perfect host for it, too, because you were loose enough and light enough with everything that you can kind of keep the glue together. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I took as much abuse as anybody on that. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| But it was a rare moment where, like, in perfect name, too. | ||
| Tough Crowd was a perfect name for it. | ||
| Has there ever been a talk about bringing that back? | ||
| Oh, God, yeah. | ||
| Everybody talks about it, but I'm like, where? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| What about as a podcast? | ||
| People say that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Why not? | ||
| I mean, because, first of all, I resented at the time that I was like, nah, you They didn't want it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, who knows what I'm presenting? | ||
| I'm fighting against something that's not even part of the podcast world. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But then I was just like, I don't know. | ||
| Then I'm going to, you know what I mean? | ||
| Getting everybody together. | ||
| And, you know, people's careers would fall left and right if we did it. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I mean, anybody on there, would they be able to really even speak honestly today? | ||
| Kinda. | ||
| You gotta have a career that's pretty locked in already. | ||
| Or you gotta be on the come up where you got nothing to lose. | ||
| It's the guys that are on a television show that are fucked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like the guys who get a TV show where you're really worried about losing it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Those guys can't. | ||
| They can't do a show like that. | ||
| But back then you could. | ||
| Oh, back then we did. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Colin Quinn, tough crowd. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There it is. | |
| Look at that. | ||
| That is Patrice O'Neal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Patrice! | |
| Oh, he was the star of that fucking show. | ||
| Well, Norton was great on that show. | ||
| DePaulo was great on that show. | ||
| Everybody was great on that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Giraldo. | |
| There's Giraldo. | ||
| Giraldo. | ||
| I remember when Giraldo and Leary went at it. | ||
| That was one of the great moments of that show. | ||
| Ten years until Giraldo's dead two days ago. | ||
| Yeah, him and Larry, that was a good one. | ||
| And Lenny Clark was there. | ||
| It was just a great setup. | ||
| Like, the way you had it, it was just a great setup. | ||
| Patrice literally, it was basically his show. | ||
| As you can see from that footage, I was a guest. | ||
| He was the host. | ||
| Little chubby Jimmy. | ||
| Look at Jimmy back in the chubby days. | ||
| I know, he really looks like a fat fool. | ||
| But, um... | ||
| This is a great fucking show, man. | ||
| How many episodes did you guys wind up doing? | ||
| 200, I think. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| 220 or something. | ||
| I have no... | ||
| Can we get you to do it as a podcast? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Because you could get guys like me, guys like established comics would do it, and it would be wild. | ||
| You could still do it. | ||
| It could still be done. | ||
| As a podcast. | ||
| Because you have a guy like Joey Diaz on, he doesn't give a fuck. | ||
| You can have those guys and they will talk freely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And people would love it. | ||
| Oh my God, they would love it. | ||
| Yeah, it might be. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, over the years, obviously, people have brought it up to me and I was always like, no, because I could never be free today. | ||
| No, but I got a better one. | ||
| Do you own the name? | ||
| The original name, which everybody talked me off of. | ||
| Which is the expression, really more than tough crowd. | ||
| Tough Room. | ||
| And I think I do own the name. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| Either way, Tough Room is better. | ||
| Tough Room is a podcast. | ||
| Tough Room. | ||
| Why not? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Maybe. | ||
| How many guys in New York would do it? | ||
| A lot. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Easy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Norton would do it, for sure. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Well, he wouldn't be invited on, but you're right. | ||
| You brought up the one name. | ||
| Someone that's not welcome on the show. | ||
| There's plenty of comics that would do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know, I know. | |
| Joey Diaz is in Jersey now. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| He's out there in the East Coast. | ||
| Yeah, he got the fuck out. | ||
| Most people are leaving. | ||
| L.A. is just a sinking ship. | ||
| Yeah, everybody's leaving. | ||
| Yeah, it's sad. | ||
| It's sad. | ||
| But it's also good. | ||
| Things move on. | ||
| Like I said, comedy. | ||
| I'm not even kidding. | ||
| What if it becomes this outdoor thing? | ||
| Everyone's going to move down south. | ||
| It could be an outdoor thing, but I think more than anything, it could be a thing where you just... | ||
| I think they're going to have some sort of a treatment for COVID sooner or later. | ||
| And it's just a matter of like... | ||
| Look, the reason why LA was LA was because everybody came out there to do TV and movies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Right. | ||
| And then they wound up doing comedy as well. | ||
| And then they did comedy while they were doing TV and movies. | ||
| But it was always... | ||
| When I started in the 90s in LA, it was a means to an end. | ||
| When I came out there, I came out there to do a television show and there was a lot of people that were doing stand-up hoping they would get a TV show. | ||
| I came out there with a TV show hoping to get passed as a paid regular at the store. | ||
| And then once I was there, I was like, this is weird because I don't really want to... | ||
| I was doing TV for money. | ||
| And every time a new TV project came up, I was like, okay. | ||
| But really, I had this dream. | ||
| My dream was like, I would really love if I could just do stand-up. | ||
| Like, I'm doing all this stuff so I can make an... | ||
| Like, Stan Hope said it best. | ||
| He goes, basically, we're doing TV to make sure we have an audience so that we could do stand-up. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But now, that doesn't exist anymore. | ||
| Nobody gives a fuck about TV. Nobody cares. | ||
| For a lot of comics, if you get a TV show, it's like, ah, poor guy, he got a show. | ||
| It's like, now you're fucked. | ||
| You're right! | ||
| You're gonna get less money. | ||
| You can't say what you want. | ||
| You can't talk wild. | ||
| And you never know when you're scheduled. | ||
| You can't go on the road. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And you have to deal with all these weird politics of sets now. | ||
| It's like every set has to be diverse. | ||
| The casting is weird. | ||
| It's all fake. | ||
| It's like you're not casting the best people. | ||
| You have to make sure you have an Asian character or this character. | ||
| Where's your gay representation? | ||
| If it's an urban gang, they have to all look like Greg Kinnear. | ||
| But it's just, nowadays you don't need that Hollywood environment anymore. | ||
| It's actually an impediment because it comes with executives and it comes with agents and it comes with all these people that are going to get their greasy hands on the formula and fuck it up. | ||
| They're going to tell you what to do and what not to do. | ||
| They're going to pull you aside. | ||
| They're going to give you shitty advice. | ||
| Their creative input is going to be dog shit. | ||
| Well, a place like this, Colin Quinn, out here in Texas, you don't have that. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Are you going to move here? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I do love it. | ||
| I love the idea of moving here, and I love it. | ||
| I'm trying to get everybody to move here. | ||
| I know. | ||
| That's half the goal of having people on this podcast. | ||
| Yeah, well, I'd like to... | ||
| If I move here, I'm going to do it. | ||
| I want to be one of the early ones. | ||
| I don't want to be one of the guys that comes in... | ||
| Like, oh, now he's jumping in the bandwagon. | ||
| Fifth year. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No, I don't want anyone... | ||
| If I do it, it'll have to be in the next year because I can't be one of these guys that's, you know, coming in late to the party. | ||
| Well, you're going to help me design the club, right? | ||
| Maybe I come down as the designer slash manager of the club. | ||
| And, well, maybe I secretly book the club. | ||
| And people go, who's the prick that's booking this club? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| Like, you leave your... | ||
| We both know better. | ||
| Yeah, you can't have a single person that people can call to get booked. | ||
| Or I've always felt, even as much as I love comedians, and I love comedians, they're my favorite people, I always feel sorry for bookers. | ||
| Because having to deal with us, people don't understand the mental disorder, you have to have to be a successful comedian. | ||
| Which is, you have to think... | ||
| If I was up there right now, no matter who's up there, I'd do good too. | ||
| I'm as funny as anybody. | ||
| And if you don't think that, you can't last. | ||
| The sad thing is people that think that, or no one else thinks that. | ||
| The other comics know they're not good, and they're like, I don't get the respect I deserve. | ||
| No, but you do. | ||
| Here's the thing about comedy. | ||
| Everybody gets the respect they deserve. | ||
| Anybody who says, you know, I didn't, you know, they made it seem like I had to earn their respect. | ||
| You do. | ||
| You do have to earn their respect. | ||
| And you get what you deserve in this. | ||
| This is a meritocracy. | ||
| It's the closest thing to a meritocracy that could exist. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Out of any job in the world, it's the closest thing to a meritocracy. | ||
| Whenever you see a comic saying, I'm not getting the respect I deserve, you're like, oh, no, that's not true. | ||
| You do get what you deserve. | ||
| Because when people are murderers, everybody bows down. | ||
| Everybody goes, that guy's fucking great, or she's amazing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Everybody does it. | ||
| Well, unless they're real hacks. | ||
| There's hacks that I'll never follow. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because they're killers. | ||
| And I bow down to the fact that they can do that, even though I hate them for it. | ||
| But I'll say, I give them a little bit of credit. | ||
| I know what you're saying. | ||
| I know what you're saying. | ||
| They figured out a way to juke the system. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But in terms of a great comic. | ||
| Right. | ||
| A comic that the audience likes that we all respect. | ||
| Whoever you want. | ||
| With a guy, girl, gay, straight. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| White, black, Asian. | ||
| No one gives a fuck. | ||
| Are you a killer? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are you a killer? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if you're not a killer and you think you are, it's a rough road. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I don't get the respect I deserve from this club. | ||
| But you do. | ||
| But you do. | ||
| If you were laying it down every night, they would all be like, God damn, he's killing it. | ||
| But this is what I'm saying. | ||
| Bookers, everybody thinks they should be at that place right then. | ||
| Everybody thinks you should be on stage all the time. | ||
| So to be a booker, you're going to make a lot of enemies. | ||
| And then there's people that think that there should be a certain amount of women. | ||
| There should be more women on this lineup. | ||
| No, there shouldn't. | ||
| No. | ||
| If they're funny, they should be. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| But look, I've always said, and I still maintain this day, I think it's a difficult road for a woman. | ||
| I think there's a lot of men that don't want to hear women talk about politics. | ||
| There's a lot of men who don't want to hear women tell them things that maybe they don't know or say comedy in a way like they're explaining things to the men. | ||
| There's a lot of men are sexist. | ||
| I think it's harder. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Sure. | ||
| Harder for them to talk about sex. | ||
| Christopher Hitchens had a whole article he wrote in Vanity Fair about this back in the day. | ||
| It was very controversial. | ||
| It was called Women Aren't Funny. | ||
| And all these women got really upset at him. | ||
| But he was basically saying if you want to be a woman and be a comedian, you kind of have to adopt male characteristics. | ||
| You have to either act like a slut or act like a guy or be butch. | ||
| Well, I don't agree. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| It's not true because he's not a comedian. | ||
| No, it's not true. | ||
| But what is true is it's harder. | ||
| It's a harder path for a woman. | ||
| You have to be... | ||
| Yes, it is hard. | ||
| And you have to be... | ||
| Undeniable. | ||
| You have to be a dominant personality. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Like a Roseanne. | ||
| Like Roseanne came out and she was not playing. | ||
| You have to have that energy, I guess. | ||
| Or Sarah Silverman, right? | ||
| She figured out her path through it. | ||
| She was cute, but she would shock you with her takes on things, but it was well-crafted. | ||
| Yes, she was almost like a different, totally different, but like Sam Kennison, and the fact that you'd be like, oh, this person's saying this, and then you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa! | ||
| You know, it was like a joke. | ||
| Yeah, and she was pretty, so it would throw you off. | ||
| And she was charming. | ||
| Yes, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But Roseanne was interesting in the same way Kinnison was interesting because she became that person after she had a brain injury. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah, she got hit by a car, just like Kinnison. | ||
| I didn't know either one of them got hit by a car before they did stand-up? | ||
| Yeah, their personalities changed. | ||
| It's really interesting. | ||
| They both got really hurt bad. | ||
| And when you get really bad brain injuries, one of the things that happens is you become ridiculously impulsive and wild and oftentimes violent. | ||
| That was the thing with Kinnison. | ||
| His brother wrote in the book My Brother Sam. | ||
| His brother Bill wrote a book about Sam and what Sam was like before the accident and then after the accident. | ||
| I think he was hit by a pickup truck. | ||
| But like really fucked up. | ||
| Like brain injury and then he became a different person. | ||
| Like he was like quiet and reserved and then just became wild and uncontrollable. | ||
| Same thing with Roseanne. | ||
| She went to a mental institute for nine months after she was hit by a car. | ||
| How funny is that? | ||
| That people have to get hit by a truck. | ||
| What does that say about us? | ||
| What does it say? | ||
| We're fucked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What does it really say? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I believe, in a different vein but the same psychologically, I believe you have to be at a place where you just... | ||
| It's almost like an existential crisis. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where you're like, I don't care if I bomb. | ||
| I don't care about... | ||
| I don't place enough value in this planet that I give a shit. | ||
| I'm going up and I'm talking about what I want to talk about. | ||
| It's almost like a level of depression. | ||
| It goes beyond where you're just like, I don't care. | ||
| I really don't care. | ||
| Because people care about this public speaking so much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That there has to be something with us that's off where we're like, I don't care. | ||
| Or you have to develop it over time. | ||
| You have to develop that callousness about the way people feel about you. | ||
| Eventually, yeah. | ||
| Or you got to get so good that you know that even though it's so terrifying to bomb, you could slip through those waters and ride the wave of success. | ||
| What I always tell people starting when they ask... | ||
| Even when they don't ask, I tell them. | ||
| The audience can hate you, but they can never feel sorry for you. | ||
| The one thing you're not allowed to have in comedy, in my opinion, The one thing you're not allowed to indulge in is you can't ever be uncomfortable. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You can be anything. | ||
| You can be an asshole. | ||
| You can be a psycho. | ||
| You can be offensive. | ||
| You can never be uncomfortable. | ||
| You're not allowed to be. | ||
| Isn't it weird that you could feel it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You feel it when someone's uncomfortable. | ||
| If you paid somebody to come in right now and do a set for us three, they're not allowed to be like... | ||
| Well, it's a weird setup. | ||
| They can say, this setup sucks. | ||
| You pay me for this. | ||
| They can attack us and we'll probably love them for it. | ||
| But they can't be uncomfortable. | ||
| You're paid to not be uncomfortable. | ||
| No matter what. | ||
| You can't be ashamed and you can't be uncomfortable. | ||
| Anything else can be. | ||
| It is such a strange art form. | ||
| It's like they feel you. | ||
| They feel how you feel. | ||
| Even if the words come out perfect, with the perfect timing, they feel how you feel, and they won't laugh if you seem uncomfortable. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like alchemical or something. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And it's such a... | ||
| I used to always hate this, even though it's true. | ||
| People decide how they feel about you. | ||
| The first 10 seconds, I was like, oh, what the fuck is that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Judge me in 10 seconds. | ||
| But the truth is, when somebody comes on stage and they don't make eye contact, like they're either looking down or looking above. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right away, the whole crowd knows. | ||
| And they're like, what's this part? | ||
| Are they uncomfortable? | ||
| Then why are you being a comedian? | ||
| Get off stage. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You have to be like, I don't give a shit. | ||
| Just like with a heckler. | ||
| Like people had tried that. | ||
| Hey, the heckler. | ||
| It's like, no, no. | ||
| We're living vicariously through you in the audience. | ||
| The asshole at work that we can't say that to because we'll get it fired or get our ass kicked. | ||
| You have to say that to. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even if you don't say the greatest thing, it doesn't have to be the most clever thing in the world, but it has to be basically, fuck you, you fucking idiot. | ||
| You gotta address it. | ||
| Coming here trying to fucking ruin it. | ||
| People love it because they can live vicariously to that, you know? | ||
| Well, it's such a classic... | ||
| The heckler is such a classic person. | ||
| The person that thinks their opinion is more important than the entire audience. | ||
| You're going to stand up and put a stop to it. | ||
| That their ego allows them to literally yell out to the person with the microphone. | ||
| Nice shirt! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was another beautiful thing about the store that was terrible, but also beautiful. | ||
| There was no crowd control. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No one took care of the crowd. | ||
| No. | ||
| You had to develop the ability to handle shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When things are going sideways, no one stopped anybody. | ||
| No one kicked anybody out. | ||
| No. | ||
| And then eventually they did. | ||
| Like in the new version of the store, like 2014 on when I came back, they would fucking clean it out, man. | ||
| They wouldn't let anybody heckle anymore. | ||
| And I was like, this is interesting. | ||
| It's like these young guys coming up. | ||
| This is good, but it's also bad. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because you've got to learn how to handle this chaos. | ||
| And if you would go somewhere else, one of the things, you would go on the road, and if you would go on the road and people would heckle you, like, do you think I'm not used to this? | ||
| I get heckled every night. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's such a normal part of the experience. | ||
| It has to be a normal part of the experience. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Because there's nothing, even as a guy who's been in forever, when somebody... | ||
| When you watch a comedian and somebody heckles them and you see their faces like they're startled by it. | ||
| What you want to see is like, okay, asshole number 6,000 in my life. | ||
| Listen to me, you fuck. | ||
| You don't even want it to be like that outraged. | ||
| You want to just be like, oh, you fuck. | ||
| It's part of the thing, you know? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| There's that great Bill Hicks set where he's doing that with him, you know, the recording. | ||
| Remember where he's like yelling at the whole crowd? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he just reads him the right act and you just tell he's been doing it forever. | ||
| Yeah, there was a lady yelled at him and he goes, oh, I'm a cunt. | ||
| He goes, I got a pussy so I get carte blanche. | ||
| I heard a recording of Lenny Bruce from 1959. There was this guy, Hal Wilner, who just died. | ||
| And he had all these old great recordings of music and everything. | ||
| But he had this Lenny Bruce recording from 1959. And he just let me listen to it once. | ||
| And it was Lenny Bruce at a club going, just stop listening to me. | ||
| Here's what bothers me. | ||
| They always put you people... | ||
| At that table, too. | ||
| He goes, you're always at that fucking four, you know, four top. | ||
| And you could tell there was a couple of couples. | ||
| He goes, you're two couples that want to, you know, you think you're clear, you're drunk. | ||
| He goes, and after the show, you're going to come up and go, we were helping you. | ||
| And I was like, that was in 1959. Isn't that crazy? | ||
| Because that is what they say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Hey, we were helping you. | ||
| We yelled out. | ||
| If we didn't yell out, you wouldn't even have a show. | ||
| Yeah, if you didn't show up tonight, I would have been screwed. | ||
| I wouldn't have had a show. | ||
| It's funny that people actually do think that, though. | ||
| Comedy is kind of like a form of hypnosis. | ||
| That's what I always say. | ||
| When a guy is on stage killing, if you're on stage and you're killing and I'm sitting there watching, even though I know I'm a comic, I let you think for me. | ||
| You're thinking for me. | ||
| You're saying things and I'm empty. | ||
| I'm on the ride with you. | ||
| I'm just letting you think for me. | ||
| And the whole audience does it together. | ||
| It's such a weird art form where we're tapping into these states of mind that aren't really available to other people. | ||
| This state of mind where There's a person on stage and they're crafting an experience and everyone else in the audience is sort of going along with it if it's going well and it's accentuated by the people next to you who are also laughing at it. | ||
| I know. | ||
| And speaking of COVID, that's what makes you nervous. | ||
| You're like, shit, people have to be next to you to really make it work for an hour. | ||
| I think we're going to look past this. | ||
| I think they're going to come up with some sort of a treatment or something. | ||
| Within two years, we're going to, at the very least, have a real appreciation for what it's like to lose this. | ||
| Well, yes. | ||
| And I think that Austin Comedy Club is... | ||
| I'm a little too big to just run one club. | ||
| How many are you going to run? | ||
| Well, I mean, a chain of southern clubs. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Where else? | ||
| Nashville? | ||
| I've watched probably 50 episodes of Bar Rescue like most people, so I understand what to do when I go into the place. | ||
| I understand the culture. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not Nashville, because they have Zanies. | ||
| I'll respect a real institution like Zanies. | ||
| Maybe you could be Comedy Club Rescue and come in with, like, you have to have a hook, like a polka dot suit or something crazy. | ||
| Oh, all right. | ||
| Um... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was like, I didn't like it, then I was like, yeah, I wouldn't. | |
| Blue velvet? | ||
| Something cool? | ||
| How about a chain of like, where the ceiling, like in case COVID or something comes back, where the retractable ceiling, so you can have a skylight come. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| It's going to be expensive, but I'm sure it's a lot cheaper than it was. | ||
| I think outside only works in the sun. | ||
| The thing about they're saying about being outside, the only good thing about outside, outside, is the circulation. | ||
| Like, people aren't breathing in your face. | ||
| Like, the air is not trapped. | ||
| But the real way that outside works is, like, UV light and sun is supposed to kill COVID. Well, I'm going to say something. | ||
| I don't care if people get sick from COVID. I want to market it so people think they're safe. | ||
| I don't really give a shit once they pay their cover. | ||
| How about a fan? | ||
| This is a goddamn business. | ||
| Blows all the bad air away. | ||
| The guy that's working for, you know, R.J. Reynolds in 1950. Hey, listen. | ||
| Cigarettes are bad. | ||
| Do you think you would live outside of New York City ever, though? | ||
| Seriously? | ||
| You seem like you're inexorably tied to that city. | ||
| I mean, I feel like I am, but like I said, a lot of my family is moving. | ||
| A lot of people I know are moving to the suburbs in the past six months, seven months. | ||
| And sometimes I'm like, yeah, there's something... | ||
| There's something not there in New York sometimes where I'm like, it's not how I used to feel about New York. | ||
| Let's just put it that way. | ||
| Maybe it's me, but I think it's the city. | ||
| How long did you go without doing stand-up? | ||
| How long did you go during the COVID? Four months, five months. | ||
| And then what was your first show? | ||
| Was the one with the cars at the parking lot one. | ||
| That was the first one? | ||
| HBO Max, yeah. | ||
| The first one was a recording? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Chris DiStefano was on there, if you know him, and he goes, yeah, this is great. | ||
| We used to work our acts out. | ||
| Now you're like, I'm working out on HBO Max. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So you didn't warm up for it at all. | ||
| You just went up and did it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I didn't warm up, but I listened to my tapes a few times. | ||
| That's kind of crazy. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| But it's... | ||
| You know, stand-up is... | ||
| After you've been doing it for that long, you can still bomb, but it's a little different. | ||
| Plus, the crowds, you're not doing an hour. | ||
| If I was doing an hour, it's a different ballgame. | ||
| I did the Houston Improv, and I did a weekend there. | ||
| I think I did it in July, so... | ||
| Four months, five months, whatever it was, four months in. | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| Me, Tony Hinchcliffe, and Brian Moses. | ||
| And it was so strange. | ||
| But it felt so good. | ||
| But doing an hour is a different ballgame. | ||
| It was headlining. | ||
| I mean, I was doing a real show. | ||
| People don't realize what headlining means. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, they pay to see you. | ||
| It's a different... | ||
| I was lucky, though, that I actually had already worked out this hour over a year or so. | ||
| So it was a real hour. | ||
| I had recordings. | ||
| I could listen to recordings. | ||
| I had all my notes. | ||
| I could go over my notes. | ||
| The first show, I was like, can I do this? | ||
| And then once I did it, I was like, I remember all this shit. | ||
| I might have fucked up a few taglines or something like that. | ||
| But by the end of the weekend, it was like a real show. | ||
| I was rolling. | ||
| So how many times did you listen to your set before you went on? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, a lot. | |
| A lot. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| I always do. | ||
| I don't play games. | ||
| Yeah, I don't either. | ||
| I record all my sets and I listen to them. | ||
| Usually I would listen to them. | ||
| I would drive home from the store. | ||
| I would listen to them on the way home. | ||
| But this is the difference between people that really want to last. | ||
| If you don't respect it, you have to respect it enough to go, hey, guess what? | ||
| These people in Houston... | ||
| Paid to see. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I'm going to do my best. | ||
| It might not be perfect. | ||
| It's going to be the best I put all my effort in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Then you really, you know, you're doing it. | ||
| You might be a little clumsy if you haven't done stand-up in five months, but you are going to do the work that's required to get it done. | ||
| And they're going to know that you care. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The worst is when someone pays to see you and you see the person on stage with like a notebook and like, what else? | ||
| What else? | ||
| And they don't give a fuck. | ||
| What else? | ||
| Oh, it's the worst. | ||
| It's the worst because it's that feeling that you don't have a sense of urgency that these people have paid to hear you talk. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A lot of people, it's like a little defense mechanism for them. | ||
| Like, I don't give a fuck. | ||
| It's just a show. | ||
| I always call it the Joe DiMaggio principle. | ||
| When I saw this article once where Joe DiMaggio was like 40 years old or something. | ||
| He was already in the Hall of Fame. | ||
| And he slid into third base. | ||
| And there was this kid that said, you know, you play so hard. | ||
| Like, why are you doing this? | ||
| Like, you're already in the Hall of Fame and this and that. | ||
| And he goes... | ||
| Because somewhere out there, there's someone who hasn't seen Joe DiMaggio play, and I don't want to let him down. | ||
| Yeah, it's great. | ||
| I remember reading that and going, that is a great way to look at it. | ||
| That's a great way to look at it. | ||
| If people are paying to see you, they're paying money. | ||
| Do you feel like he used that line on Marilyn Monroe the first time? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I hope he did. | |
| He's probably like, I don't know, Marilyn, but I figure somebody's just like, what a nice guy. | ||
| Cut to an hour later. | ||
| Well, his thing was always kind of sad, right? | ||
| Like she left him and she was banging all these other guys. | ||
| And they said that even after her death, he would always show up at her grave and leave flowers. | ||
| That's sad shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I also already treated it like shit. | ||
| Didn't he like smack her or something? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did he? | |
| I could be making up some horror. | ||
| I'm slandering the name of the great American hero. | ||
| I'm calling Joe DiMaggio a wife beater based on something I may or may not have read. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I feel like he beat her. | ||
| He is Italian. | ||
| I feel, yeah. | ||
| Well, that's part of it. | ||
| And I feel like he beat her and then Arthur Miller emotionally abused her. | ||
| And the Kennedys killed her. | ||
| Well, that... | ||
| Most likely. | ||
| That kind of stuff, you do wonder. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I don't wonder. | ||
| If I had $100,000 on a bet... | ||
| Yes or no, red or black, I'm going with they killed her. | ||
| It certainly was a strange one, wasn't it? | ||
| Well, she was apparently, she had loose lips and she fucked both of them. | ||
| And she was drinking and like, ah, fuck this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I fucked Bobby, I fucked Jack. | |
| But it was like, yeah. | ||
| But here's what I don't understand. | ||
| If they killed her. | ||
| They had the mob do it for them, right? | ||
| Somebody. | ||
| But the mob hated them, so why would they do it for them? | ||
| Well, it doesn't necessarily have to be the mob. | ||
| I mean, you think Hillary Clinton's using the mob to whack all those people? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| There's people out there that'll kill people for you, Colin. | ||
| Yeah, I guess there will. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Yeah, they exist. | ||
| And they don't have a problem with it because they've killed people before. | ||
| It's not that hard. | ||
| It's shockingly easy to get someone to kill somebody for you. | ||
| Yeah, I guess for money, why not? | ||
| If you're a president of the United States and you got some lady who won't shut the fuck up about blowing you in the Rose Garden or whatever. | ||
| Nowadays, though, it's a lot harder, you know what I mean? | ||
| Because everything gets exposed on social media. | ||
| But I mean, yeah, back in those days, you'd get away with it. | ||
| Say it to Epstein. | ||
| They killed that guy when he was in prison. | ||
| Yeah, well, in prison it's easier. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| They turn off the camera. | ||
| They turn off all the cameras, but still. | ||
| But if that was in the street, 80 people have cameras. | ||
| Epstein! | ||
| Hey, Jeff! | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Maybe it's easier to kill him in prison. | ||
| I think it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just one camera. | ||
| And he's dead. | ||
| I miss him. | ||
| Everybody's like, oh my God. | ||
| Yeah, one was asleep and one was just... | ||
| Yeah, and all the cameras are broken. | ||
| I don't know what happened. | ||
| Weird. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's crazy. | |
| He broke his own neck. | ||
| Strange. | ||
| I guess he really feels bad about having sex with all 16-year-olds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| Yeah, but I mean, the minute that lists... | ||
| Well, what about Jazane Maxwell? | ||
| What's going to happen with her? | ||
| That's a good question because she doesn't go to... | ||
| I don't think she goes to trial until... | ||
| I want to say next month. | ||
| I think she goes to trial... | ||
| Well, this month now. | ||
| We're in October. | ||
| Jamie, when is she supposed to go on trial? | ||
| You don't hear a word about that, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| She's in the Jack Ruby cell. | ||
| I read a fascinating book. | ||
| Next year? | ||
| Next year? | ||
| What the fuck are they waiting for? | ||
| They're trying to figure out how to kill her. | ||
| I think you know what they're waiting for. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| Next year? | ||
| When next year? | ||
| Next December. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When are they going to do it? | ||
| Why would they wait? | ||
| That's so weird. | ||
| Look, they put Harvey Weinstein right in the court. | ||
| Why are they waiting for her? | ||
| That's so strange. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| There was a report recently that Bill Clinton had an intimate dinner with her a couple years back. | ||
| Juzaine? | ||
| We gotta talk. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is there a ledger? | ||
| She was just denied bail recently and current trial date is set for July 12, 2021. That's a long time. | ||
| That's a long time. | ||
| July of 2020. That's the seventh month of 2021. And here we are in October. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's so much time to kill her. | ||
| Well, I mean, nowadays it would be easy. | ||
| You put COVID on the side of one of the surfaces and wait for her to sniff it. | ||
| Not good enough. | ||
| It's not going to kill her. | ||
| You were saying something about the Kennedy, about Jack Ruby? | ||
| Oh, yeah, there's a fascinating book called Chaos, written by this guy Tom O'Neill. | ||
| I had him on the podcast. | ||
| And it's all about the CIA and the CIA's... | ||
| Well, it's about the Manson case. | ||
| But how this guy, Tom O'Neill, who's actually Greg Fitzsimmons' neighbor, it's an amazing book. | ||
| He researched this book over 20 years. | ||
| He started writing it. | ||
| And then as he was writing it, he was writing it as an article. | ||
| And as he was writing the article, he kept uncovering more and more and more information. | ||
| And he connected the Manson family to the CIA operatives that would give people LSD and they would run these experiments on people. | ||
| And they think that they use the Manson family to discredit the hippie movement and to experiment with what they could do with LSD. | ||
| And they did it with him while he was in prison. | ||
| And the guy that was involved in this CIA LSD operation, this is all like heavily documented, was the same guy who went to visit Jack Ruby when he was in jail after he killed Oswald. | ||
| And Jack Ruby, from this guy visiting him in jail, immediately went crazy, was hiding underneath the table, was saying that they're burning Jews in the streets, and he had a meltdown. | ||
| And they think this guy dosed Jack Ruby while he was in jail and might have dosed him previous to that to get him to shoot Jack Ruby or to get him to shoot Oswald in the first place. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| It's crazy. | ||
| They connect this CIA MKUltra mind control LSD experiments that they were doing with this guy. | ||
| What is his name? | ||
| Jolly West. | ||
| Jolly West, who is this operative for the CIA, they ran a thing called Operation Midnight Climax, where they would run brothels with two-way mirrors, and they would hire these hookers to give these Johns LSD, and they would watch to see how they would react. | ||
| They would give them a drink, and inside the drink there would be acid. | ||
| And these poor guys thought they were going to have some sex with a lovely lady. | ||
| Poor guys. | ||
| They get sex and they get a free acid trip. | ||
| I don't know what's so bad about it. | ||
| It's not bad if you know you're going to have an acid trip. | ||
| What about the... | ||
| It's a great book though. | ||
| It's called Chaos. | ||
| Chaos. | ||
| Because Gabe Kaplan, he was a comedian and... | ||
| Poker player. | ||
| Yeah, and he worked, he told me one time, he goes, yeah, I worked for Jack Ruby. | ||
| He worked for the Carousel Club, whatever the name of the club was. | ||
| He worked in the Dallas, I go, what was he like? | ||
| He goes, he was a real thug. | ||
| He goes, he was just like, hey, get out of here. | ||
| Like, he just shoved me, you know, just, he was a real... | ||
| A mob guy. | ||
| Well, the Dallas mob. | ||
| I mean, did you ever read that book about the Dallas mob and Lyndon Johnson and his, and the... | ||
| No, what was that book? | ||
| I have it on my phone. | ||
| But I mean, um... | ||
| It was basically... | ||
| It was like the most compelling argument. | ||
| I felt like, wow. | ||
| Like the Dallas mob being involved with whoever they were involved with to go out and really kill the guy. | ||
| It completely makes sense. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Jamie's got it here. | ||
| Betrayal in Dallas? | ||
| Yes, that's it. | ||
| How good is... | ||
| Oh, Jamie. | ||
| Goddamn Jamie. | ||
| Jamie, you know what? | ||
| Betrayal in Dallas. | ||
| I'm glad you didn't get tested. | ||
| LBJ, the Pearl Street Mafia, and the murder of President Kennedy. | ||
| Yeah, Pearl Street. | ||
| Good stuff? | ||
| Oh my god, it's great. | ||
| Because it connects the lieutenant governor who was not going to get re-elected, and it was all LBJ stuff. | ||
| It was really good. | ||
| I've got to take a picture of that so that I can get it later, so I don't forget. | ||
| But the Manson thing is... | ||
| The Manson thing is crazy. | ||
| Tom O'Neill documents all the times they let Manson out of jail. | ||
| They would arrest him while he was on parole. | ||
| Clear parole violations. | ||
| And one of them was... | ||
| That's the book right there. | ||
| I can't tell you enough good things about it. | ||
| But they kept releasing him, and one of the sheriffs said that it was above my pay grade. | ||
| Like, they told him. | ||
| The CIA came to them and they let the guy go. | ||
| And they wanted him to go out and keep doing all this crazy shit. | ||
| And one of the reasons why they wanted to do it is because they wanted to discredit the anti-war movement. | ||
| The CIA and the government at the time was involved in a lot of really shady shit. | ||
| And one of the reasons why they were doing that was because they were trying to stop what they thought was this subversive movement to try to get us out of Vietnam. | ||
| And this was a part of it. | ||
| I mean, the Kennedy thing was a part of it, too, I guess, really. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| I mean, they just happened to have the happy... | ||
| I mean, this book I was talking about is more like the Dallas Mafia, but I'm sure the CIA said, hey, if it's going to help us... | ||
| I mean, they were together in the Bay of Pigs, so why don't we be together on this? | ||
| Well, it's really crazy that the video of the Kennedy assassination, the Zapruder film, was actually put on television by a comedian, Dick Gregory. | ||
| Dick Gregory brought that to Geraldo Rivera's TV show, and I think it was 10 years after the murder. | ||
| It might have been 12. It might have been like 75. Geraldo Rivera's TV show was like 74, I remember. | ||
| Yeah, it was back when people had bell bottoms on and shit. | ||
| And Dick Gregory brought that film. | ||
| There it is, Goodnight America, 75. There it is. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Did I say 75? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| March 6th, 75. Look how blurry it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Good Night, America. | ||
| That's how the screens used to look. | ||
| Yeah, and so they played the Kennedy... | ||
| I mean, because Dick Gregory, what a fascinating guy he was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Great fucking comic, too. | ||
| Great comic. | ||
| A lot of people don't even know how good he was. | ||
| Well, Time Life had this... | ||
| They had purchased this. | ||
| You know, after the assassination in 63. And they held on to it all these years. | ||
| And they played it on television. | ||
| And I remember Geraldo Rivera telling people this is going to be very disturbing. | ||
| And you could see him getting shot. | ||
| And you see his head going back into the left. | ||
| And everybody was like, wait, what the fuck is going on? | ||
| That's the first time? | ||
| And seeing him grab his neck where he got shot in the front, in the neck. | ||
| In the autopsy, they had two different versions of it. | ||
| In Dallas, they said it was an entry wound. | ||
| And then in Bethesda, Maryland, when they looked at him there, they said, oh no, that was a tracheotomy. | ||
| They shot him in the neck. | ||
| Shot him in the back, shot him in the neck, shot him in the head. | ||
| They were shooting at him from different angles. | ||
| It was more than one person. | ||
| I guarantee, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I don't guarantee, but a lot of people don't think... | ||
| That's the weirdest argument when people think that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. | ||
| That is one of the weirdest arguments that... | ||
| The weird mental gymnastics that people have to play with themselves to get to the position where they think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I'd like to see a movie. | ||
| I mean, JFK was good for what it was, but I'd like to see a movie about all the people that got killed in the aftermath. | ||
| Oh, a lot of people. | ||
| But that would be a good movie. | ||
| There's a book called Best Evidence by this guy, David Lifton. | ||
| And David Lifton was an accountant who was hired to do something with the Kennedy assassination. | ||
| I forget what he was hired to do, but he went over the entire Warren Commission. | ||
| And, you know, it's a huge, many, many, many, many pages, right? | ||
| And he found all these inconsistencies and all these things wrong with it and all these things that don't make any sense. | ||
| And he realized, like, they put this together to try to wrap it up tight and make it seem like there was an obvious conclusion. | ||
| But it wasn't an examination, like an objective examination of the assassination. | ||
| No, because in those days... | ||
| The mob and the CIA were as powerful as any, and they were not playing games. | ||
| They would just tell you, look, man, if you do this, don't do this. | ||
| They wouldn't even have to tell you what was going to happen. | ||
| You knew what was going to happen. | ||
| They killed the president. | ||
| They're like, don't do this. | ||
| If we kill him, you don't think we'll kill you? | ||
| And so many of the people that were witnesses wound up dead. | ||
| So many of the people. | ||
| I was thinking... | ||
| Hit list. | ||
| In-depth investigation into the mysterious death of the witnesses. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Richard Belzer! | |
| Ah, Belzer. | ||
| Belzer is a nut. | ||
| How funny is that? | ||
| And he's a conspiracy guy. | ||
| Oh, he's so deep. | ||
| But how funny is the title of his book, you know, because he lost the testicle of cancer? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did he? | |
| His conspiracy book is called One Lone Nut. | ||
| That's pretty funny. | ||
| It's pretty funny. | ||
| He had another book called UFOs, Bigfoot, and Flying Saucers, I think. | ||
| Elvis, Bigfoot, and Flying Saucers? | ||
| UFOs, JFK, and Elvis. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's another book that I read of his that is an all conspiracy theory book. | ||
| Yeah, no, he's all about conspiracy theories. | ||
| I had a conversation with, I only met him once, but we had a long conversation about UFOs and Bigfoot and aliens, and he's a, that motherfucker believes everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| He's like, he's all in. | ||
| Yeah, some people are just predisposed to be. | ||
| They love them. | ||
| I think they just, you know who's another one like that? | ||
| Dan Aykroyd. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| I had him on the podcast. | ||
| He believes in everything. | ||
| Ghosts, psychics, you name it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| All that. | ||
| Extraterrestrial life? | ||
| All of it. | ||
| Everything's real. | ||
| He probably thinks the coins are real. | ||
| Crystal skulls. | ||
| All of it. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| He's all in. | ||
| Well, I was like, really? | ||
| It was a weird conversation. | ||
| I was like, he didn't have any skepticism at all. | ||
| It wasn't like, who fucking knows? | ||
| There was none of that. | ||
| There was none of that. | ||
| He was all in. | ||
| All in. | ||
| All in on psychics. | ||
| All in on Bigfoot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All in on UFOs. | |
| He was all in. | ||
| He was the oldest 23-year-old. | ||
| He was on SNL. He was 23. Was he really? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He seemed like he was like 40. Yes. | ||
| But I like this idea. | ||
| Great guy, though. | ||
| I like this idea. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I like this idea of doing this, all the people that got killed after JFK. Yeah. | ||
| You know, I mean, I'm not discrediting Belzer's book, but it doesn't look like the kind of thing I was envisioning. | ||
| I wanted it written by some investigative reporter, not by a stand-up. | ||
| They all got murdered, parked their cars on train tracks, jumped off of buildings. | ||
| On my days off at Austin Comedy, I'm going to drive to Dallas two days a week and start researching for the movie. | ||
| One thing you do if you do drive around there, another thing that drove me crazy, everybody's like, the scope on the rifle didn't even work. | ||
| Like, what are you talking about? | ||
| How do you know it didn't work? | ||
| Like, what does that mean? | ||
| Because when they got it, it didn't work? | ||
| If you have a scope on a rifle and you just drop the rifle, that scope doesn't work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah! | ||
| Like, a scope on a rifle is of... | ||
| Like, if you fall... | ||
| And this happened to me once on a hunting trip. | ||
| I fell, and my rifle was off. | ||
| And we took it back to the range. | ||
| It was off by six inches at 100 yards. | ||
| Like, on a rest, where you just squeeze off rounds. | ||
| When you knock a rifle, like, if you fall down, and the rifle drops... | ||
| It's going to adjust the scope. | ||
| And you're shooting a bullet, you know, a couple hundred yards or a hundred yards. | ||
| Any little wiggle, like if it's an eighth of an inch to the left or the right, you're going to be way off by the time it gets to the target. | ||
| So when all these people were saying, oh, the scope on the rifle didn't even work well. | ||
| Like, what are you talking? | ||
| You don't know that. | ||
| Like, they found this thing. | ||
| He could have dropped it after he shot JFK. I think Lee Harvey Oswald was probably in on it. | ||
| I think he was probably, you know, he's probably one of them, but I think they definitely, like when he said he was a patsy, they're like, yeah, most likely. | ||
| Yeah, most likely he was a patsy. | ||
| By the way, what was a better description of the JFK assassination than Full Metal Jacket? | ||
| Oh, it was a great one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Outstanding! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was really beautiful. | ||
| It was, the way he said it. | ||
| Because it was just like, hey, guess what? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Life is hard. | ||
| Here's what I say about this thing. | ||
| Also, letting, prepping these guys to be killers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And that what you're rewarding is someone who's really good at killing, even if he shot the fucking president. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's like, I don't give a shit what happened. | ||
| I'm just telling you this guy was a Marine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What is this guy? | ||
| Emery? | ||
| Lee Emery? | ||
| Lee Emery, yeah. | ||
| God damn, he was good. | ||
| He was so good in that role. | ||
| Well, didn't they say he was there to advise and then they just hired him? | ||
| Play that. | ||
| Let me hear that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not working? | |
| What do we got here? | ||
| Is there no audio in the actual... | ||
| So sad. | ||
| This is a professional show here. | ||
| That was... | ||
| On Spotify. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But look, even the way they shot it, like, there's clouds overhead. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dreary. | ||
| I bet he loved the fact that it was dreary that day, too. | ||
| You got it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know who Charles Whitman was. | |
| None of you dumbasses knows. | ||
| Private cowboy. | ||
| Private cowboy. | ||
| That's affirmative. | ||
| Charles Whitman killed 12 people from a 28-story observation tower at the University of Texas. | ||
| From distances of up to 400 yards. | ||
| Anybody know who Lee Harvey Oswald was? | ||
| Private Snowball. | ||
| Sir, he shot Kennedy, sir. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And do you know how far away he was? | ||
| Sir, it was pretty far from that book suppository building, sir. | ||
| All right, knock it off. | ||
| 250 feet. | ||
| He was 250 feet away and shooting at a moving target. | ||
| Oswald got off three rounds with an old Italian bolt-action rifle in only six seconds and scored two hits, including a headshot. | ||
| Do any of you people know where these individuals learned how to shoot? | ||
| Private Joker. | ||
| Sir! | ||
| In the Marines, sir! | ||
| In the Marines! | ||
| Outstanding! | ||
| Those individuals showed what one motivated Marine and his rifle can do! | ||
| And before you ladies leave my island, you will all be able to do the same thing! | ||
| That's great dialogue. | ||
| Kubrick was so good. | ||
| One motivated individual. | ||
| He's like, it doesn't matter what it means in the grand scheme of things. | ||
| We're Marines. | ||
| I'm just telling you something for here. | ||
| Training you. | ||
| But it was such a great scene too because Kubrick is really highlighting what has to go on when you're taking a regular kid and turning him into a killer. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You're really brainwashing him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| That was brainwashing. | ||
| Yeah, oh, absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They all say that. | ||
| Kirk was so good. | ||
| His movies were so goddamn good. | ||
| You know, he used to do, like, complex mathematics in his spare time. | ||
| He did? | ||
| Yeah, for fun. | ||
| Well, I don't understand what complex mathematics is, but one time I was in the elevator with Norm MacDonald, and we were in the elevator with these guys, because Norm MacDonald in an elevator is very, you know, he'll just, he will literally say the worst thing you can say about somebody and then leave, and you're left there with all the people. | ||
| That's his thing, one of his things. | ||
| But there's two guys who were talking about some complex mathematic thing. | ||
| This is in the late 90s at 30 Rock. | ||
| And they're saying this like, I didn't even understand what language it was. | ||
| It was a really deep mathematic thing. | ||
| And then Norm MacDonald, who had never brought up math or anything like that to me in his life, goes, and starts speaking to them in what sounded like tongues. | ||
| And they're like, oh, you know... | ||
| And they start speaking the binary... | ||
| And he starts speaking this mathematic talk. | ||
| And then they leave. | ||
| And then he goes to me like, yeah, those guys are nerds or something like that. | ||
| And I was like, how do you know that? | ||
| How did you know what they were talking about? | ||
| How did he know? | ||
| He's a nerd too. | ||
| He knows something deep. | ||
| He knows these things sometimes. | ||
| He's a very smart guy. | ||
| Really smart. | ||
| He'll just pretend not to know something. | ||
| And then you're like, anybody walks in a room, he knows what they're talking about. | ||
| Yeah, he's the guy that really should have had a podcast a long fucking time ago, and I know he's doing something now. | ||
| He sent me a text message the other day that he's starting to do a podcast now. | ||
| Hey Joe, I'm doing a podcast. | ||
| Doing that thing we talked about. | ||
| He should have done a lot, because he had that show on Netflix, but they kind of, they muzzled him. | ||
| When he went on the Howard Stern Show, and he was saying something, and he didn't want to say retarded, so he said, you'd have to have Down Syndrome to believe that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He thought that would be a better thing to say. | |
| But here's the thing about Norm. | ||
| I'm still not sure if he thought that would be a better thing to say. | ||
| Right, you never know. | ||
| Because he's so smart. | ||
| He might have been doing it as a double troll. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Norm is capable of the double troll. | ||
| It's like, yeah, I don't want to say retarded. | ||
| Down syndrome. | ||
| The double troll, exactly. | ||
| Yes, he's the master of that stuff. | ||
| I randomly wound up sitting next to him on planes twice. | ||
| On two different occasions, just like, I go, Norm! | ||
| Like, out of nowhere, and he's sitting next to me. | ||
| And one time, we're sitting there, we're talking, and we're having a good old time, and then he's talking about, oh, I quit smoking. | ||
| He's telling me how he quit smoking, and fucking, yeah, finally quit smoking. | ||
| And he's telling me all these things, and then when he lands, he literally, like, you can't stop him, so runs into the airport store and buys cigarettes. | ||
| And he's lighting it as he's leaving. | ||
| I go, I thought you quit. | ||
| He goes, I did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But all that talking about smoking makes me want one. | ||
| And he's like, before he even got out the door, he's lighting the cigarette. | ||
| He just couldn't stop himself. | ||
| But I like that he goes, all that talking. | ||
| He's the one talking about it. | ||
| All that talking. | ||
| He always puts it on you. | ||
| That's what's great about it. | ||
| But it was... | ||
| He's like, this guy talks about smoking. | ||
| He got me back smoking. | ||
| But it was so crazy because I was like, that's great, Norm. | ||
| It's so great you quit. | ||
| And he's like, Mark, I want a cigarette. | ||
| He always was like, yeah, I mean, I don't drink. | ||
| You know, I quit drinking. | ||
| And it was like, oh, really? | ||
| Did you drink a lot? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I quit. | ||
| I finally had to quit, you know. | ||
| It's hard, but I didn't. | ||
| And they're like, oh. | ||
| He goes, yeah, because I got fucking wasted last night. | ||
| And I said, I'm never going to drink again. | ||
| I was drunk. | ||
| And people are like, wait, I think you quit. | ||
| Yeah, I quit. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, he's always This is last night! | |
| It's like an elaborate, like, Abbott and Costello. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| Well, the gambling, too. | ||
| He fucking loves gambling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Loves it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| But that's the thing. | ||
| Like, a lot of these great comics are, like, really impulsive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's, like, something about, like, the ability to say some of the crazy shit that he says. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's, you have to have this, like, hot wire. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just like, yeah! | ||
| You just want to touch it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah! | |
| Yep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh no, he's one for the books. | |
| The conspiracy theory thing is an interesting little obsession that a lot of people have. | ||
| The wanting to uncover these secrets, the wanting to know, get to the bottom of things, find out how it all works, who killed Epstein, who killed Kennedy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, the Kennedy one is so, it really, what's so amazing too is you see the country change because almost like subconsciously the whole country knew that this was something else that was kind of the beginning of the destruction and downfall. | ||
| And 57 fucking years ago too. | ||
| That's what's crazy. | ||
| And there's still, yeah, there's still mystery and it's like they got away with it. | ||
| Whoever did it got away with it. | ||
| Whoever did it is long gone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This idea that everybody gets caught for things. | ||
| Like, not everything is an episode of Law& Order. | ||
| No. | ||
| And they talk to all those... | ||
| Anytime they interview those mob guys, you know, they all say that stuff. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| They all say, well, I heard this, I heard that. | ||
| I don't know, but this is what I heard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And I'm sure it's, you know, it's a badge of honor to go, yeah, I know what's happening, but still, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, that was the other weird thing about New York for years and years and years, right? | ||
| Is that New York was essentially run by the mob. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And Giuliani helped clean that up, too. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| He busted it. | ||
| I mean, he helped clean it up in the 80s. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He did that commission case. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's crazy how this one guy, Giuliani, was responsible for a lot of the improvement in New York City. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| A lot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Sometimes it takes one guy like that. | ||
| What? | ||
| He's like the Buford Pusser of New York City. | ||
| Because... | ||
| Walking tall. | ||
| Taking the fish market down was... | ||
| Everybody was going, he's going to get killed. | ||
| Really? | ||
| When he became mayor, he went after the fish market. | ||
| Explain to people the whole... | ||
| Well, the mob ran, like Joe was saying, sanitation. | ||
| Even things like... | ||
| I was in the restaurant union, so I didn't know. | ||
| I just paid my dues. | ||
| I'm like an idiot. | ||
| But like... | ||
| They ran the restaurant, but when you run the restaurant, you don't just run the bartenders and the waiters. | ||
| You run the linen supply, like the mob was linen supply, and the liquor distributors, like all the mob kids, when they were just related to somebody, they'd be driving the liquor trucks, and the food, the meat. | ||
| Remember they had the famous thing with Frank Perdue and Chicken and stuff? | ||
| So they really ran like, you know, they'd run an industry, but there's like 20 jobs that are close to that industry where they're involved, you know? | ||
| And a lot of guys had no-show jobs. | ||
| And all those no-show jobs in the Javits. | ||
| I had a buddy, the Javits Center. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| You just said it. | ||
| I had a friend of mine who had a no-show job at the Javits Center. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I knew a few people who worked over the Javits Center. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Look at Giuliani back then. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He said the mafia put an $800,000 bounty on his head. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Isn't it amazing that they didn't kill him? | ||
| It's amazing that they didn't... | ||
| Yeah, I guess there was still a few of the old-timers that, like, we don't do... | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It was still that thing about the United States, like, we don't kill them doing their job, I guess, you know? | ||
| I guess. | ||
| I think they probably tried. | ||
| They just couldn't get to him. | ||
| Maybe, yeah. | ||
| But it was also that law that was... | ||
| You know, that guy that... | ||
| It all came from that RICO law. | ||
| There was some professor who just came up with this law and somebody in the DA's office, somebody goes, that's a great... | ||
| We could use that law. | ||
| I forget how it worked, but that was an interesting story. | ||
| Racketeering. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was just some guy that had this concept of a law, but he wasn't... | ||
| He was like upstate New York or something. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And that's how they got them all. | ||
| And that's how they ended up taking... | ||
| I mean, they're still around, obviously, you know, but it's... | ||
| You ever hear that guy, Michael Franchese, you know who that is? | ||
| I've seen him be interviewed. | ||
| Interesting guy, right? | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| Charismatic guy, right? | ||
| Well, it's fascinating that he's just out there running around. | ||
| Yeah, but I guess he didn't rat anybody out or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And I said, you know, that generation's gone, so they're probably just like, ah, the hell with it. | ||
| But, you know. | ||
| What the fuck was the guy's name, the hitman for Gotti? | ||
| Oh, Sammy the Bull. | ||
| Sammy the Bull Gravano, right. | ||
| He's out too. | ||
| Sammy the Bull, yeah. | ||
| People have interviewed him too, like long interviews, long form interviews. | ||
| Talked to him about, I mean, he's a murderer, just out there wandering around. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And even got arrested later in his life for selling Ecstasy. | ||
| Ecstasy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, he was trying to keep young. | ||
| He said it was his... | ||
| Hitman, Sammy the Bull Gravano, is now a social media star promoting his own podcast and showing off his cozy new family life in Arizona, 35 years after turning on the Gambino family and John Gotti. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow, he's 75. And he's just starting his podcast. | |
| He's like Norm. | ||
| He's just starting the podcast. | ||
| They should do a podcast together. | ||
| Look at him there. | ||
| Two guys that should have done one years ago. | ||
| He looks great. | ||
| He does look good. | ||
| He looks great. | ||
| He's 75? | ||
| He looks fucking great. | ||
| Well, what they always said about him was he would go to the gym, the other guys would go out, he wouldn't stay out late at night, you know? | ||
| That's kind of crazy. | ||
| And he's doing a podcast, just like Hillary Clinton. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Couple of murderers doing podcasts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Look how good he looks, though. | ||
| That's so weird. | ||
| Joe, he doesn't look that good. | ||
| I don't know why you keep saying this. | ||
| Look, go back to that. | ||
| Go back to that picture. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| If I look that good at 75, come on. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| He looks fucking good there. | ||
| You gotta admit. | ||
| For a 75-year-old guy... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he looks... | ||
| Using the same microphones we use, Jamie. | ||
| Coincidence? | ||
| He looks 65. No. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| He looks good. | ||
| Oh, it just goes to show a nice smile like that, you know? | ||
| He's about 62. He looks about 62. All right. | ||
| 13 years younger than he really is. | ||
| That's what I say for that picture. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You think his podcast any good? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Would you be a guest? | ||
| I bet it's a... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You know, I don't go on that many. | ||
| I don't like going on that many podcasts. | ||
| How many have you been on? | ||
| Plus, what would he ask me? | ||
| Let me ask. | ||
| You know, these mob guys. | ||
| People are going to kill it now. | ||
| They're not the best comedy. | ||
| Maybe he is. | ||
| Maybe him and Michael Francesi could tell stories. | ||
| Well, Francesi seems more like... | ||
| You know, like he was like a... | ||
| You know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| More like a guy like we would understand. | ||
| He is a very charismatic guy. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, um, who knows? | ||
| Sammy DeBolt might be, you know what I mean? | ||
| He's got that street intelligence. | ||
| How many guys are in jail for life from selling pot? | ||
| They're watching these guys doing these podcasts. | ||
| They've killed nine people. | ||
| Go, what the fuck? | ||
| What kind of shit is this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What kind of lawyer did I have? | ||
| The lawyer's like, listen. | ||
| Where's the hundred million? | ||
| The bad news. | ||
| Oh, Franchese, there's a hundred million missing? | ||
| Oh, he's got a hundred million buried somewhere? | ||
| A hundred million? | ||
| See, he looks like a former mob boss. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Look at that nice suit he's wearing. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Really well-dressed. | ||
| And how was he out? | ||
| How much time did he have to do? | ||
| I don't know, but I know he was in jail, but... | ||
| But he wasn't in there for murder. | ||
| He was in there for some kind of... | ||
| Remember that gasoline? | ||
| There was a big gasoline thing in the 80s. | ||
| I don't know how they did it, but it was one of those things with the Russian mob. | ||
| I think he was involved with them in some way. | ||
| Yeah, they sold billions of gallons of gas. | ||
| The family would collect the state and local gas taxes, but keep the money instead. | ||
| At the same time, they were often selling the gas at lower prices... | ||
| Then at legitimate gas stations, the mid-1980s Fortune magazine listed Franchese as number 18 on its list of top 50 wealthiest and most powerful gangsters in the world. | ||
| That can't be good for you. | ||
| He made billions of dollars over the years, not only for himself, but for the five families as well. | ||
| By 1984, his greatest net worth was a staggering $20 billion, making him one of the richest gangsters of all time. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| Nobody's worth $20 billion in 1984. Says he was? | ||
| Wikipedia's line? | ||
| Even Bill Gates wasn't worth $20 billion in 1984. In 1985, Franchese was indicted on 14 counts of racketeering, counterfeiting and extortion in the gasoline bootleg racket. | ||
| In 1986, Franchese pleaded guilty on two counts. | ||
| He was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison with $14 million in restitution payments. | ||
| The guy's worth $20 billion. | ||
| That ain't shit. | ||
| So that's where the $100 million is. | ||
| So what is he doing now? | ||
| First of all, if he has $20 billion, why is he only $100 million buried? | ||
| I would have buried $10 billion. | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| Keep scrolling down that page. | ||
| I was going to try to find the $20 billion thing. | ||
| What does it say at the bottom? | ||
| I want to find out what happened. | ||
| If that was me... | ||
| When did he get out? | ||
| He's a motivational speaker now. | ||
| This is how you steal! | ||
| Well, he got out in 89, got resentenced for violating his parole terms. | ||
| Oh, what did he do to get arrested for tax fraud in LA, sent back to New York. | ||
| Whoopsies. | ||
| He started making the balance of the court-ordered restitution payments earlier that year. | ||
| Prosecutors also said Franchese was not considered by the government to be a cooperating witness. | ||
| That's why he's alive. | ||
| He was released in 94. Wow. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So he made an autobiography. | ||
| Well, he sounds like a fucking hustler, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He's been interviewed by Jim Rohn. | ||
| He's obviously a smart guy. | ||
| He persuaded New York Yankees players who owed money to the Colombo Lone Sharks to fix baseball games for betting purposes. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| 2003 Franchese published Blood Covenant, an updated and expanded life story. | ||
| He's out now. | ||
| I mean, he's out there doing things. | ||
| He's out for 25 years. | ||
| But I mean, he's out there doing things. | ||
| I saw him being interviewed by somebody recently on YouTube. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I'm sure, you know, like you said, if he didn't cooperate and most of those guys are dead anyway. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| They contacted me. | ||
| Yeah, really recently I got a request to have him on. | ||
| Yeah, bring him on. | ||
| I don't know if I want him to know where we are. | ||
| Good point. | ||
| Just in case you piss him off. | ||
| Yeah, there he is. | ||
| Okay, he's being viewed. | ||
| Yeah, but that value-tainment guy, that guy does a very good show. | ||
| He's on YouTube. | ||
| Yes, he's very good. | ||
| He's very good. | ||
| That's where I've seen him. | ||
| Yeah, he's got a bunch of YouTube shows. | ||
| Look how Confident and comfortable that guy is. | ||
| Out of jail. | ||
| Looking good. | ||
| Nice little pocket scarf. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Gentleman. | ||
| Looks like a real mobster. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wonder if he was at the Palm Shores Club that night. | ||
| I'll never know. | ||
| When I was friends with Fitzsimmons, Fitzsimmons lived in Little Italy, and he lived right above the social club. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Where John Gotti and all those guys used to go? | ||
| He lived right there. | ||
| When I went to visit him, I was like, Jesus, Greg. | ||
| Like, he was right there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hilarious. | |
| Yeah, he rented this place from this old Italian couple. | ||
| Oh, that's really funny. | ||
| Yeah, he was right there. | ||
| You see those guys walking down the street, walking to the social club. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| They probably had him checked out, making sure he wasn't, you know. | ||
| A guy like him could be a federal agent, you know. | ||
| But Justin Simmons has that look. | ||
| If they saw his act, they'd know. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| He's too funny. | ||
| It's also like those days when the mob ran New York. | ||
| It's like the mob ran Vegas. | ||
| Everybody has these romantic notions of those days. | ||
| But again, it's just like gritty New York City. | ||
| As long as they weren't fucking you over. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's all fine until you're trying to get paid. | ||
| Like that great Richard Pryor routine. | ||
| Remember that one? | ||
| What was that? | ||
| Oh, right, right, right. | ||
| Trying to get paid by the mob. | ||
| He's just laughing when he pulls a gun out. | ||
| The good old days. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I mean, of course, you miss New York. | ||
| Whatever flavor, you know, that's what you miss, is whatever that other intangible thing was. | ||
| Yeah, the madness. | ||
| But it did get, like you said, Times Square cleaned up. | ||
| It was the worst. | ||
| Times Square was horrible. | ||
| I mean, I hated Times Square. | ||
| Everybody hated Times Square. | ||
| and then it got cleaned up and right away we're like hey it looks like disneyland it did get to be like a big applebee's like we were saying it really did get real it became like a like just real chain yes chain restaurants i feel like that was one of the downfalls was chains but they're the only ones that could do you know what i mean like Small business owners weren't going to be in, you know. | ||
| They weren't able to afford the rents. | ||
| Yeah, and the small business owners were all porn stores before that. | ||
| Well, that was also when you got there, like, Caroline's changed. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because Caroline's was right on Broadway, and I remember Caroline's at one point in time was like, you guys, none of you people are from here. | ||
| Like, Caroline's became like this tourist trap. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like, if you did Gotham, you got New York City people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But if you did Caroline's, you were getting, like... | ||
| All tourists. | ||
| Yeah, it was weird. | ||
| They're all from Kansas and shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| First time in New York. | ||
| Well, people would say that if you want a good test of Iraq to see if it would work nationally, it was Caroline's. | ||
| That's what it became. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because like you said, it was really tourists. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it wasn't always like that. | ||
| When I lived in New York, Caroline's was like a real New York club. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But because they cleaned up Times Square, they cleaned up Caroline's too. | ||
| Yeah, because people didn't want us to go to Times Square in the old days. | ||
| I mean, in the 80s, nobody wanted to go to Times Square unless you were up to some devious behavior. | ||
| There was no point to being there. | ||
| Is Dangerfields still open? | ||
| Dangerfields is exactly the same. | ||
| How is it possible that it's still open? | ||
| Well, maybe ask your buddy. | ||
| Talk to Fred Chasey! | ||
| He's selling gas in the back. | ||
| Dangerfields has not changed in 35 years. | ||
| I was there like three years ago. | ||
| I was laughing so hard. | ||
| I used to love that club. | ||
| Oh, I love it. | ||
| Because you could really work out. | ||
| Oh, nobody was there. | ||
| Nobody's there. | ||
| 30-minute sets. | ||
| Do you remember Bobby, the doorman? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bobby. | |
| Big old fucking Scottish guy. | ||
| Powerlifter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bobby. | |
| I saw him pick a man up by his neck. | ||
| Some guy was heckling. | ||
| He grabbed the man. | ||
| Bobby was an enormous human being. | ||
| Grabbed the man by his neck and lifted him up in the air. | ||
| Carried him out. | ||
| Like he had one hand on his belt, one hand on his neck. | ||
| Because he was such a tank. | ||
| He picked the guy up like the guy was an empty suitcase. | ||
| But even that's an old school technique for a bouncer. | ||
| By the belt and the neck. | ||
| Is that the greatest? | ||
| Yeah, Bobby. | ||
| Yeah, Bobby. | ||
| He goes, you'd get off stage, even if you're killed. | ||
| He goes, oh, you tricked him again with that bag of shite for an act. | ||
| It was a great place because I knew that Kinison had performed there and Roddy Dangerfield did those Dangerfield specials there. | ||
| I mean, it was his spot. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| But you would go there and it was like, why is this place empty? | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They made all their money in prom season and I guess... | ||
| I did prom shows there. | ||
| I did them with Otto and George. | ||
| Otto and George and I did prom shows. | ||
| Those were fun. | ||
| They were wild. | ||
| They were wild. | ||
| They never rotated the show. | ||
| They would just put in more people. | ||
| And they told you to never change your act because they wanted people to leave. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| Folks don't know what prom shows are. | ||
| Prom shows are you would get there, and this is no bullshit. | ||
| You might do a 7 p.m. | ||
| show, and you might do five shows a night. | ||
| So your last show might be like 2 o'clock in the morning. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you would leave there. | ||
| It would be light out. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I mean, it was crazy. | ||
| It really didn't make any sense. | ||
| And they were all 17 years old. | ||
| High school kids. | ||
| And they're leaving their prom, and they would get them in there on limos and pump them into the club. | ||
| And the kids were hammered and drunk. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yeah, I saw a kid go on stage and took the microphone away from Al Lubel and blew cigar smoke in his face. | ||
| I was like, Jesus, this is rough. | ||
| This is a rough show. | ||
| It was wild, man. | ||
| And they were so dumb, these kids. | ||
| They were so stupid. | ||
| Otto and George was on. | ||
| He was fucking hilarious. | ||
| And this kid's like, I could see his lips moving. | ||
| His lips are moving. | ||
| He was mad that you could see the ventriloquist's lips are moving. | ||
| He didn't even care that it was some of the funniest fucking material. | ||
| So funny. | ||
| Do you remember when he had a Kennedy head? | ||
| Did you ever see when Otto and George had a Kennedy head? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| You know, George the dummy, he had rigged this thing up where George's head would flap back and it would like expose his brain and he was working on this thing. | ||
| We would have like a Kennedy head and he said, he goes, yeah, I want to get it so it squirts blood so I can get blood to squirt out of his head. | ||
| I mean, it was really, I mean, I guess they're all like that, but he has such a sick relationship with that goddamn George. | ||
| Oh, it was weird. | ||
| It was like an episode of The Twilight Zone. | ||
| It really was. | ||
| Yeah, it was. | ||
| Yeah, a couple of people told stories about the time they'd be out and, you know, somebody would say something and Otto would just go crazy and attack them for verbally abusing the dummy. | ||
| Well, a Puerto Rican guy stabbed the dummy on stage one day. | ||
| That's right, that's right. | ||
| I don't remember where that was, but I remember the story. | ||
| I remember the story, too. | ||
| He would sometimes have to check on the dummy. | ||
| Like, open the trunk. | ||
| I've got to check on George. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a girl. | ||
| It was a girl one time. | ||
| I forget that story. | ||
| But it was something with the girl, and she said something about the dummy. | ||
| He goes, he stays with me. | ||
| And he went crazy, and she just ran out of the house. | ||
| She's like, he's a psycho. | ||
| Don't really blame him. | ||
| Do you remember that episode, The Twilight Zone, where the guy's dummy starts talking to him? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Yeah, there's something about dummy acts. | ||
| Duncan Trussle used to have this dummy, and someone stole it. | ||
| His dummy was Little Hobo. | ||
| And Little Hobo, in the act, the dummy was his grandfather's dummy. | ||
| And his grandfather had died, and his grandfather's dying wish was that Duncan would bring Little Hobo on stage one last time before he buried him with his grandpa. | ||
| So he'd have the dummy on stage, and then the dummy would start talking to him. | ||
| He's like, wait a minute, how the fuck are you talking? | ||
| It was like this crazy thing where the dummy would take him over, and he would play Pink Floyd. | ||
| He would sing along. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| LAUGHTER I took him with me to the UK, and they did not know what to fucking expect. | ||
| Wish You Were Here, so he would play that song, Pink Floyd song, Wish You Were Here, and him and the dummy would be singing at the same time, two different voices, because he had it synced up. | ||
| He had a whole setup with recordings and everything. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| That's great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Living in a fishbowl, year after year. | |
| And his eyes would roll back in his head and the dummy would be singing. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| Do people believe it? | ||
| No, they would love it. | ||
| It was so good. | ||
| It was such a good routine. | ||
| And then someone fucking stole Little Hobo. | ||
| Someone stole it. | ||
| And so he had to get a new Little Hobo. | ||
| And the new Little Hobo was even creepier. | ||
| He hasn't done it in forever. | ||
| I would love for him to do that routine again. | ||
| But would that be his closer? | ||
| Yeah, oh yeah, you couldn't follow Little Hobo. | ||
| Is it in there? | ||
| Give me some volume. | ||
| We got a problem with our system. | ||
| I have to mute like five different things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
One last chance on stage and dedicate a song to my grandfather. | |
| Is that okay with you guys if I do that? | ||
| Let's not wish you were here. | ||
| Oh, that was when someone was getting married, that fucking Satanist. | ||
| What's his name? | ||
| Stanton LeVay. | ||
| Anton LeVay. | ||
| Yeah, I took a photo with that guy and nuts online are convinced that that's the evidence that I am a Satanist. | ||
| Because the guy was doing the devil horns and shit, and he was getting married, and Duncan performed at his wedding, and I had to go, because it was the craziest fucking shit ever. | ||
| Duncan was there, and they hired him to do his little hobo routine at this guy's satanic wedding. | ||
| So he couldn't use Wish You Were Here. | ||
| They're like, you know, we're more into this kind of heavy metal. | ||
| No, no, he did Wish You Were Here. | ||
| That was the program. | ||
| Because, yeah, it's hard to take a Satanist seriously when he does the devil horns. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm sure the father didn't go for that kind of stuff. | ||
| I think he was the grandson or the son of Anton LaVey. | ||
| I forget what it was. | ||
| But their idea of what Satanism is is a little different. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, you think, oh, he worships the devil. | ||
| Their Satanism was like hedonism, really, what it was like. | ||
| It was like giving in to your carnal instincts and just living for the moment, doing whatever you wanted to do. | ||
| But I don't necessarily think... | ||
| Now I sound like a Satanist apologist. | ||
| That's what the grandson said? | ||
| The son of the grandson. | ||
| The Satan apologist. | ||
| They were trying to explain it to me. | ||
| I'm like, so you believe in the devil? | ||
| You worship the devil? | ||
| Like, what is this? | ||
| Well, it's like, you know, the grandfather probably was a real deal. | ||
| I think it was just, they're being silly. | ||
| No, it's like Bob Dylan versus Jacob Dylan. | ||
| Jacob Dylan's talented, but, you know, Bob is just, it's a different, you know. | ||
| It's a different kind of talent. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jacob's like pop. | ||
| I mean, he's got great songs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But he's not like Anton LaVey. | ||
| Where the fuck did Jacob Dylan go? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I met him back in the day when I was filming Fear Factor. | ||
| His kids were like Fear Factor fans. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And they came to watch one of the episodes. | ||
| I met Kenny G that way too. | ||
| You did? | ||
| They came to the episode? | ||
| Yeah, they came to watch it being filmed. | ||
| But the episodes were like outside. | ||
| Yeah, they came to watch. | ||
| They came to watch people eat dicks and stuff. | ||
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's Duncan. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| It's the evolution of. | ||
| Oh, that's two little hobos? | ||
| It was a wild night. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| So he did some experimental work. | ||
| I see that. | ||
| That was like that painter. | ||
| I forget his name, but it's like, yeah, I see what he's doing. | ||
| He had different phases of his career. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's the problem. | ||
| When you have a closer like that, then you just can't really get inspired to keep working because you're like, this closer's going to change. | ||
| It was weird to follow because I brought him with me on the road. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| You should have made him come back up and do it at the end. | ||
| No, it was awesome. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| That's so funny. | ||
| So, Colin Quinn, what happens with you now? | ||
| Where do you go? | ||
| Where do you go from here? | ||
| That's the question, isn't it? | ||
| You need to do stand-up again. | ||
| Where do we all go from here? | ||
| Well, maybe... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Like, legitimately. | ||
| Have you thought about it? | ||
| Where am I going to... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I write, you know, I write every day. | ||
| I'm writing scripts, I'm writing books, I'm doing all that stuff. | ||
| You write every day? | ||
| Yeah, something. | ||
| Do you sit down at a specific time and do it? | ||
| No, I don't have that discipline, you know. | ||
| But I make sure I write, you know. | ||
| But I'm like, I'm sure like every comic, like I'll write... | ||
| Like five days in a row and I'll be like, I'm a beast. | ||
| I'm a disciplined person. | ||
| And then the next day I'll just be like, I just start eating and, you know, watching. | ||
| Like any Narcos offshoot show. | ||
| Any show that's related in any way to Narcos is the greatest show to me on Netflix. | ||
| Why do you like Narcos? | ||
| I just love all those shows. | ||
| I love Fauda. | ||
| You ever watch that one? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| The Israeli one. | ||
| No. | ||
| Fauda. | ||
| That's another Netflix. | ||
| I only watched the first two seasons of Narcos. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You did? | |
| Once it wasn't Pablo Escobar anymore, I kind of lost my interest. | ||
| Was that guy not the... | ||
| Well, they did it in Mexico. | ||
| It was great, too. | ||
| But nobody was as good as that guy to play in Pablo Escobar. | ||
| He's incredible. | ||
| Because most evil, like even what I expected to see Pablo Escobar was like this guy that's like, rah, and he's just playing this other thing. | ||
| This dull kind of banality of evil guy who's just like looking and then just, oh boy, was he an actor. | ||
| I believed it though. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| That's what I mean. | ||
| All in. | ||
| All in. | ||
| When he confronts those cops. | ||
| On the bridge. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| And it was like silver or lead. | ||
| It's your choice. | ||
| And they're like, oh, take the silver. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| The fuck? | ||
| Yeah, that's a great... | ||
| It's just, again, I got a huge photo of Pablo Escobar in the old studio. | ||
| Huge. | ||
| Of his mugshot, his big smiling face. | ||
| And people would see it in the photos because I'd take pictures with the guests in front of the werewolf with this Pablo Escobar photo. | ||
| And people would get mad. | ||
| They're like, you're celebrating this guy. | ||
| Like, he was terrible to Columbia. | ||
| Like, for me, as an outsider who loved that Narco show, I was like, look at this chaos. | ||
| This fucking guy who controlled Columbia for so many years and made so much money selling coke. | ||
| But for the people that had to deal with it, it's the same as, like, the romantic notions of Times Square. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like all, and even me, who knows better? | ||
| That photo. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| That huge mug shot. | ||
| We had like a five-foot version of that at our podcast studio in L.A. That's funny because that shot, and he probably loves that shot and probably hates that other shot, where he's as fat as a house. | ||
| That can't be him, can it? | ||
| With the wife, yeah. | ||
| That's not him. | ||
| That's him. | ||
| All those pictures are him. | ||
| Jesus, boy, he let himself fall apart, huh? | ||
| Well, he's just doing coke and drinking. | ||
| I mean, what a party that guy led until the end. | ||
| I mean, he never really got the hair under control. | ||
| You know, all that money. | ||
| You should wear a hat. | ||
| What kind of hat? | ||
| Yeah, how about that in front of the White House? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fucking wild. | |
| It's weird when you go by the White House how close it is to the street. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I know. | |
| It's confusing. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| How has nobody fucking shot that place full of holes yet? | ||
| No, the bedroom's probably in the back. | ||
| Well, even if it was, still. | ||
| It's weird how close it is because back then, you know, you had muskets. | ||
| I'd like the bedroom up front, wouldn't you? | ||
| Just so you can look out and say, hey, people don't realize the president's looking at you. | ||
| You live wild. | ||
| You live on the edge. | ||
| Yeah, why not? | ||
| Right there. | ||
| We live in the back of the White House. | ||
| That's why you're never going to be president. | ||
| That's one of the reasons. | ||
| You might be able to be president. | ||
| You know a lot about politics, probably more than any comic I know, next to Dave Smith. | ||
| I feel like I would be a good president, but that's the first step. | ||
| You have to be narcissistic enough. | ||
| That's why I have to read that book. | ||
| To think you're a good president. | ||
| Yeah, to think I could do this. | ||
| I have two copies of that narcissism book if you want it. | ||
| I like the idea better that we save them to the green room just to watch the fury and then we film. | ||
| I mean, Joe, I hope we're going to have some cameras in this thing. | ||
| We film the anger in their faces when they say, he's gave this book to me. | ||
| I feel like you're honestly considering moving here. | ||
| Yeah, well, I do love the idea of it. | ||
| Do you really? | ||
| Legitimately, all bullshit aside, you would move here? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Ron White lives here. | ||
| I don't know if I would move here. | ||
| Do you know Ron White? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah, he's here. | ||
| But I don't know Ron White well enough where it would influence my move. | ||
| I can introduce you to him. | ||
| No, I mean, I know him. | ||
| We could get drunk together. | ||
| I don't think he'll sweep you over my feet. | ||
| No. | ||
| Ron White's lifestyle and my lifestyle would not be... | ||
| You can just hang out while he drinks. | ||
| I'll drink for both of us. | ||
| I'd rather watch you do whatever violent stuff, like throwing spears. | ||
| I don't know what you're doing on the ranch, but shit like that is more interesting to me. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I'm sure you got archery. | ||
| I'm sure you got all kinds of fun stuff to do. | ||
| My old studio, I had an inside range. | ||
| I had a 45-yard indoor range. | ||
| You did? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I had a rubber elk to shoot arrows into. | ||
| Are you going to get all kinds of stuff like that? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| That's kind of cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, the next place where we have a studio will 100% have a range. | ||
| Oh, I thought you meant in the house. | ||
| I have it in my house, too. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I have it in my house, but I mean, the next studio, I'll have a range. | ||
| I like to do it after shows. | ||
| It clears my mind. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| Have you ever practiced archery? | ||
| Yeah, once. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I tried it. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| Just something about hitting a target. | ||
| Something about letting it go. | ||
| Yeah, it's like seeing that arrow hit its mark. | ||
| It's very cleansing for the mind. | ||
| I feel like the invention of guns took a lot of the purity out of war. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In the old days. | ||
| But even archers, really. | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| You're fighting with sword. | ||
| You're used to a certain kind of... | ||
| And suddenly all these asshole archers that are thousands of yards back just, you know, release the archers, you know, and then... | ||
| Well, the craziest shit was catapults, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just launch a ball-covered flaming tar flying at you. | ||
| That's how they took Constantinople. | ||
| I was watching this thing all night, and I was like, man, those goddamn catapults. | ||
| They didn't expect them, you know? | ||
| And they just, yeah, flaming ball. | ||
| They just took it down. | ||
| They were like, what is this? | ||
| So when I do open up a club out here, I'm going to send out the signal. | ||
| I'm going to let you know. | ||
| But honestly, I would love it if you came by at least and worked. | ||
| Of course I would. | ||
| And I will test everybody now that we've got the rapid testing. | ||
| We can get results in 15 minutes. | ||
| I think we could do a whole crowd in an hour. | ||
| I think if you have an 8 o'clock show, tell people to get there at 7. Yes. | ||
| 200 people, you could do it inside an hour. | ||
| Easy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Easy. | |
| Get a staff of nurses. | ||
| Everybody's masked up until you get tested. | ||
| Wouldn't be that hard to do. | ||
| I mean, yeah, if you even have to by then. | ||
| But I mean, I love the idea. | ||
| And people want to get there early. | ||
| Plus, it'll get people there early. | ||
| Nothing worse than a bunch of latecomers. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Then when they come inside, they can have a drink once they pass. | ||
| You can take your fucking mask off and live like a person. | ||
| You're inside. | ||
| You don't have to worry. | ||
| Everybody's been cleared. | ||
| Everybody's been tested. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I love it too. | ||
| I love the fact that right now I'm clear. | ||
| You're clear. | ||
| Just from outside. | ||
| You know it. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It feels great. | ||
| It does feel great. | ||
| Today I think was my, what did I say, 37th test? | ||
| I think today's my 37th test. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Yeah, I think it can be done. | ||
| I just want them to come up with some sort of a treatment where we could just get... | ||
| But I am going to fucking appreciate things now. | ||
| I mean, I do appreciate things, but I'm really going to appreciate stand-up again. | ||
| When we get back to it... | ||
| Yes, you're going to savor it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Because sometimes it gets to the point where you're like, I want to do good. | ||
| It's not that you don't enjoy it. | ||
| You can't help but enjoy it if you're a stand-up. | ||
| But you're not, say, you're like trying to get to the goal. | ||
| I want to kill. | ||
| Instead of the whole journey of like, sometimes I'll do an hour and I'm like, I feel great afterwards. | ||
| I want to feel great during it too. | ||
| What if we lured you here by producing Tough Room? | ||
| Producing and promoting Tough Room. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Will you think about it? | ||
| I'll think about it for sure. | ||
| I really will. | ||
| Because if you did it as a podcast, I think it would be fucking giant. | ||
| I really think it would be giant. | ||
| I think if we take the time and really think about it and organize really good guests, like organize guys like Joey Diaz, guys like Greg Fitzsimmons, funny fucking people, have them come in. | ||
| They're going to do stand-up at the place. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| They'll do stand-up at the place and do it just like you did Tough Crowd. | ||
| We have subjects in the news. | ||
| You bring it up and you have a table full of great comics talking shit like a podcast. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'll think about it for sure. | ||
| Please think about it, Colin. | ||
| I will, I will. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| That's great. | ||
| Listen, man, I'm glad you made it here. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| It was an honor. | ||
| It was a pleasure. | ||
| It was really... | ||
| We do it again? | ||
| We'll do it again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Okay, we'll do it again. | ||
| And when the club opens, I want you to be there like one of the first weeks, please. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's great. | |
| I would love it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Yeah, I love it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Do you have social media? | ||
| Do you have all that jazz? | ||
| Yeah, Twitter. | ||
| But I mean, my book... | ||
| Do you use Instagram? | ||
| I haven't even promoted my book. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| Tell everybody about your book. | ||
| My book is called Overstated. | ||
| It just came out. | ||
| It's a roast of the 50 states, basically. | ||
| So it's basically talking about the United States right now. | ||
| And we've all been to... | ||
| I've been to 47. I haven't been to 50. Maybe you've been to 50. I've been to 47 states. | ||
| I haven't. | ||
| I've been to the Dakotas and Wyoming. | ||
| I was just going to say that. | ||
| I haven't been to the Dakotas and Wyoming. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| That's exactly what I was going to say. | ||
| I've been to Alaska and Hawaii. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Overstated. | ||
| Coast to coast roast of the 50 states. | ||
| I haven't been to... | ||
| I guess I've been everywhere else. | ||
| I kind of think... | ||
| Nope, never been to New Mexico either. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, I think I drove through when I was a little kid, but that's it. | ||
| I don't think I've been anywhere else. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's it. | ||
| I did shows in New Mexico, and we went to the hotel. | ||
| I was like, oh, I like it here in Albuquerque. | ||
| I'm lying there in the room. | ||
| I'm like, this is nice in New Mexico. | ||
| It was like a drive-by next door, and it was a nice hotel. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Albuquerque, that's a wild west. | ||
| That's Navajo country. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tap Tap Tapia. | ||
| Remember Johnny Tapia? | ||
| Yes, I do. | ||
| That fucking big, what was the mother? | ||
| Virgin Mary. | ||
| Yeah, on his chest. | ||
| Guadalupe, that's right. | ||
| Virgin of Guadalupe on his chest. | ||
| He was a great warrior. | ||
| He was a bad motherfucker. | ||
| He was. | ||
| He died. | ||
| That was awesome. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| Colin Quinn, you're the best. | ||
| I appreciate you, brother. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| As soon as Austin Comedy Club opens up, you're in. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Goodbye, everybody. |
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