Sept. 7, 2022 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:11:06
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| What's happening, brother? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're up and rolling. | |
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Pleasure to meet you, finally. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I'm excited to be here. | ||
| You're one of my favorite guys. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, there's this group of guys that are coming up that are so good right now. | ||
| I feel like this is a great time for, like, fresh, up-and-coming comedy talent. | ||
| It's like there's so many guys who've been doing comedy in, like, 15-plus years who are just fucking starting to crack. | ||
| Yeah, our group is like really, you know, my closest friends, they work their ass off, so that makes me work my ass off. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I love it too. | ||
| That's so important. | ||
| We were talking about Shane Gillis. | ||
| Shane Gillis has this fucking bit last night about George Washington that's so good. | ||
| It's so good. | ||
| Like, I was watching and I was going, God damn, this is great. | ||
| Because it's like a perfect bit that combines his love of history with just like Shane, you know, because the way he acts things out. | ||
| I don't want to give up any of it up. | ||
| It's so fucking funny. | ||
| There's nothing worse than trying to paraphrase another comics bit that they're working on, and then they're like, why did you do that? | ||
| You made my bit unfunny? | ||
| I would ruin it, and I'd give it away, and on top of that, it's very physical. | ||
| You have to see it. | ||
| He's a rare combination of a great joke writer, but also a great performer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, when he did Trump speed dating in that sketch, that was like... | ||
| I was like, I don't like Trump impressions. | ||
| I think they're kind of an easy impression. | ||
| And I was like, that's a great Trump impression. | ||
| It's amazing, but with great lines. | ||
| That's what I mean. | ||
| Impressions, I don't like when people write off impressions, because impressions crack me up. | ||
| If they have good writing. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| It's like crowd work. | ||
| You get an extra bump off the fact that it's all happening live. | ||
| Of course, yeah. | ||
| Like, whoa, this is crazy. | ||
| But if someone's good with it, and they've got good lines, it's fun to watch. | ||
| Yeah, nothing is... | ||
| That's a mistake a lot of comics make, which are like, this is hack. | ||
| It's like, nothing is inherently hack. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Things can be... | ||
| I love Kyle Dunnigan's impressions. | ||
| I love his Bill Maher impression. | ||
| I love like... | ||
| I think if you nail it in a unique way that hasn't been nailed, that's what Shane did with Trump. | ||
| To have Trump win in the sketch is funny. | ||
| Because if you just had women being like, you suck, that's not funny. | ||
| But the fact that Trump in the sketch is just calling them, the way he turns on them, it's perfect. | ||
| As soon as they don't like him anymore. | ||
| But because it's Trump. | ||
| You nailed Trump. | ||
| That's what he does. | ||
| Yeah, that's what he does. | ||
| And also, Shane actually likes Trump. | ||
| Like, he gets a kick out of Trump, so it's like it makes it fun. | ||
| Well, it's hard to impersonate people that you don't like, right? | ||
| It's kind of like roasting someone you don't like. | ||
| It's just weird. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Yeah, the roasting thing is weird. | ||
| I mean, when I first went back to the Comedy Store in 2014, that was the first time I ever saw Roast Battle, and I was like, yikes! | ||
| Like, yikes! | ||
| These fucking people go hard in the paint at each other. | ||
| It used to be like, you look weird. | ||
| Now it's like, this guy got raped in seventh grade. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you're like, that's the joke? | ||
| Your wife and kids left you. | ||
| You're like, whoa, hey. | ||
| I saw one where the guy's like, his wife had a miscarriage. | ||
| And I'm like, she's here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Can you imagine being that wife? | ||
| She's like, I didn't sign up for this shit. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I had to tell this to a comic the other day. | ||
| He brought this girl as a date and he was talking about all the stuff they did. | ||
| I go, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude. | ||
| You just started dating her. | ||
| And you're talking about her blowing you on stage and then she has to see all these people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm like, don't do that. | ||
| Not the best intro. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| He just started dating her. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, this is terrible advice. | ||
| There's some people that, like, want to be a part of your act and there's other people that are like, can you not? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Can you give it a few months? | ||
| Yeah, most people don't want to be a part of your act. | ||
| There was a roast joke. | ||
| Dina Hashem, who's a really funny comic, great writer, and she opens for me a lot on the road, and she did a roast against this guy Dave Kinney, who's really funny, and they were roasting each other, and she had the most savage line I've ever heard in a roast. | ||
| His mom died in a car crash, in a motorcycle crash, and she goes, Dave lives the way his mom died, an unrecognizable road feature. | ||
| You can't knock the structure, though. | ||
| It's a great joke. | ||
| It's a great joke, but I'm like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
But that's fucking harsh. | |
| That's harsh. | ||
| That's what I mean. | ||
| Like, did you say... | ||
| I thought, like, I'm expecting people to tell me I have one eyebrow. | ||
| Not like, you know... | ||
| Well, it's like everything else, right? | ||
| Things just ramp up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, you know, they escalate. | ||
| You know, it's like everything else in the world. | ||
| It just keeps getting more complex and harder and more biting and cars get faster, phones work quicker, like everything. | ||
| What you jerked off to as a kid is different than what I jerked off to and then versus someone 10 years younger than me, what they jerked off to. | ||
| Everything ramps up to a point where you're like, is this good? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| Well, porn for kids is a real problem because they get access to it almost immediately. | ||
| Ten-year-olds get phones. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they're immediately watching people fuck. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's pretty intense. | ||
| I don't even go through my kids' phones to look at their history. | ||
| Why would you want to? | ||
| It's not going to be good. | ||
| They ask me questions sometimes, though, and I'm like, oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What kind of questions? | ||
| Well, they ask me questions about me, which is a problem, because kids from school talk to them about stuff. | ||
| So they ask me questions about drugs, which is interesting to talk to a 14-year-old about drugs. | ||
| But you're like a responsible drug user. | ||
| Well, I say, first of all, don't do anything that's dangerous and addictive. | ||
| They're not worth it. | ||
| There's all these different drugs that can literally ruin the rest of your life. | ||
| And then there's stuff like pot. | ||
| You know, it's like, it's not good for you because you have a growing mind. | ||
| Like, your mind is developing. | ||
| Like, you shouldn't do anything until you're like 25, really. | ||
| But that's unrealistic. | ||
| Isn't that weird that renting a car is 25 and everything, like, drinking alcohol, like, people say lower the drinking age. | ||
| Like, 21, first off, it's not hard to get drunk in this country if you're 18. You can figure it out. | ||
| Does anybody ever really get drunk at 21? | ||
| That's like, does anybody get married and they're virgins? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Some people. | ||
| Some people. | ||
| But it's probably the same amount that get drunk for the first time at 21. Those people are really prioritizing other shit. | ||
| I mean, to wait to get married, to fuck, is pretty bold. | ||
| I know a guy who did it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, he was like 26 or 27, too, and I'm pretty sure he's gay. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| That explains it. | ||
| Yeah, I'm pretty sure. | ||
| Because you want to take it for a test drive. | ||
| I just don't get it. | ||
| He's not a bad-looking guy, either. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe he's like fully religious and that's really what it is. | ||
| I know people like that who are fully religious and the amount of guilt associated with it. | ||
| I had a friend who had these insane fears where he would say things like, I'm scared I'm going to get me too'd. | ||
| And I was like, you're a virgin. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| You physically can't be metooed. | ||
| You've done nothing that's metooable. | ||
| You know what's funny to me is when someone else gets metooed, you see the fear in the tweets of the people that are coming out against that person. | ||
| Like what? | ||
| You know there's certain people when they virtue signal, you're like, bro, let me look in your closet. | ||
| You're going so hard against this person when you don't even know exactly what happened. | ||
| You'll see your virgin friend in there. | ||
| Just these skankins. | ||
| Yeah, no, there's a lot of... | ||
| It's true. | ||
| I mean, the people that are loudest... | ||
| I mean, Cosby, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| He was the guy yelling at everybody for doing dirty material about filth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Meanwhile, he was raping everybody. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like any time a comic's... | ||
| You judge a comic's character based on the content of their material. | ||
| It's like you're missing the big picture. | ||
| Well, it's like the only time when the material is supposed to actually truly represent how that person feels about a subject. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, you never see a Quentin Tarantino movie and go, oh, he supports murder. | ||
| But he got shit. | ||
| I mean, he definitely got shit for stuff. | ||
| I mean, I don't think deservedly so, but he's definitely... | ||
| Movies, there's always a slight difference because you're playing a character. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I do think it's hilarious that he cast himself to do the dead N-word storage character in the movie. | ||
| Oh yeah, in Pulp Fiction. | ||
| That would have been weird as hell if you had people reading for that part. | ||
| I have one C in a movie, what do you do? | ||
| I just say the N-word 400 times. | ||
| It didn't make sense why he was saying it the way he was saying it. | ||
| And to Samuel L. Jackson, I'm like, I wouldn't have the balls in any scenario. | ||
| There's no world where I could pull this off. | ||
| So, you know, but great movie. | ||
| I mean, Tarantino's body of work is insane. | ||
| It's as good as anybody ever. | ||
| Jackie Brown is the most underrated one, I always said. | ||
| I think it's such a great movie. | ||
| It's a great movie. | ||
| It's so... | ||
| Great soundtrack. | ||
| He doesn't have a bad one. | ||
| He doesn't have one movie where I didn't like it. | ||
| Yeah, he's one of the best. | ||
| It's like Tarantino, the Cone Brothers. | ||
| I mean, who can top? | ||
| Obviously, there's Scorsese a little older, but I grew up loving Woody Allen, and that's a tough, as a Jew from New York, that's a tough one to swallow right there. | ||
| It is now. | ||
| Try re-watching Manhattan, and if you're comfortable watching it, you're probably a pedophile. | ||
| I don't remember Manhattan. | ||
| It's incredible, but it's fucking weird. | ||
| What year was that? | ||
| It's in the 70s. | ||
| It's black and white. | ||
| My friend Ronan Hirshberg has a great line about that movie where he said it's basically a romantic comedy for pedophiles because the end of the movie is not like I fucked up, I dated a high school girl. | ||
| It's that he's sad that it didn't work out. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I might not have ever seen it. | ||
| Mariel Hemingway. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I definitely didn't see it. | ||
| So she's in high school? | ||
| Get this. | ||
| She's 18 at Dalton, which is where Jeffrey Epstein taught. | ||
| And this is the 70s. | ||
| That's when he taught there. | ||
| Alan and Epstein are... | ||
| This is my... | ||
| It's a little weird, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, here's the fucked up part, though. | ||
| The opening is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in a movie. | ||
| It's just his, like, love letter to New York. | ||
| It's gorgeous. | ||
| And I grew up, like, worshipping Woody Allen. | ||
| He's done some weird shit. | ||
| He definitely has. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, there's no doubt about it. | ||
| He married his stepdaughter. | ||
| I mean, that enough. | ||
| That alone is not good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, that's crazy. | ||
| And then there's allegations from the other kids. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Were they coach? | ||
| Were they not? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| The one kid, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But it's enough to go... | ||
| It's enough to be bummed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It really bummed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You ever listen to his stand-up, his old stand-up? | ||
| It's brilliant. | ||
| It's brilliant. | ||
| He was a great... | ||
| That's what's... | ||
| We were like, oh, you're a great short story writer. | ||
| You're a great stand-up. | ||
| You're a great filmmaker. | ||
| And then you do some weird jazz thing on the side that no one... | ||
| I have friends who are like, do you want to watch them? | ||
| I'm like, do I want to watch the thing he's fifth best at? | ||
| No. | ||
| Do you want to watch me play checkers? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Fuck that shit. | ||
| I don't want to watch Woody Allen at the Carlisle. | ||
| I could give a fuck. | ||
| I guess if I was like really a hardcore Woody Allen fan, I'd go watch it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Just to see him do something that he loves, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Eh. | |
| Maybe. | ||
| The Carlisle where you pay $26 for a Manhattan? | ||
| I would go see like Hunter S. Thompson play drums, you know? | ||
| Even if he sucked. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Just because I was such a Hunter fan. | ||
| I loved Woody Allen. | ||
| He loved New York in a way where we felt cool as New Yorkers to be like, fuck Woody Allen. | ||
| It's Woody Allen. | ||
| I used to see him on the street all the time and he was just... | ||
| Anytime he'd be like, Woody, he'd just run. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| He'd just run away from you. | ||
| What year was this? | ||
| Post all the accusations? | ||
| I was working at a summer camp in the summer or something and I was like a counselor and I saw him and I was like, Woody, and he just ran. | ||
| Weird to see him run away from kids. | ||
| But... | ||
| You know, Woody Allen, Annie Hall is like the, I mean, as comics, that's like the prototype right there, where you're like, whoa, you made, it's also the perfect rom-com because they don't end up together. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's such an un-Hollywood, at that time, especially rom-com. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Diane Keaton fucking rules. | ||
| Yeah, Diane Keaton's great. | ||
| What was the film that he made with, who was the guy with the fucked up nose? | ||
| Jeez, Owen Wilson. | ||
| Owen Wilson. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's too old. | |
| What a sad way that that's how you're identified. | ||
| He's a handsome guy. | ||
| He's a handsome guy. | ||
| But he's got a fucked up nose. | ||
| It is fucked up. | ||
| It kind of works with him, because he's so handsome, having that fucked up nose kind of balances it out where you like him more. | ||
| That's a great movie, Midnight in Paris. | ||
| It is very good. | ||
| But it's him. | ||
| He's playing Woody Allen. | ||
| Everyone is. | ||
| John Cusack in Bullets Over Broadway. | ||
| Another great movie. | ||
| Another great movie. | ||
| Woody Allen. | ||
| Are you playing Woody? | ||
| They all just feel real bad about working with him now, though. | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| They try to kind of defend him a little bit. | ||
| The only one who's ever defended him, like... | ||
| I mean, they all kind of... | ||
| Avoid it when they can, but it's one of those things. | ||
| It's like, what do you do? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's tough. | ||
| He's one of the greatest... | ||
| I mean, Polanski's another one, right? | ||
| You think of the greatest... | ||
| Chinatown's one of the greatest movies ever made. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fantastic movie. | |
| It's impossible to watch that and not... | ||
| See, I'm not enough of a film guy to notice great cinematography. | ||
| When you watch that movie, you're like, every frame looks beautiful. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| Yeah, sometimes creeps are really good at a thing. | ||
| Isn't that... | ||
| Creeps are good, too. | ||
| The problem is throughout history. | ||
| We were talking about this the other day, that Socrates and Plato, a lot of these guys that we associate with some of the most brilliant things that anybody ever wrote were pedophiles. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There was a lot of that going on back then. | ||
| Maybe that's where they got their powers or something. | ||
| Fucking kids just makes you really good at your art. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I don't think so either. | ||
| But what's his face? | ||
| Fucking Baldwin. | ||
| Alec Baldwin. | ||
| He's the only guy that defends him now. | ||
| Pretty openly. | ||
| That guy needs some allies. | ||
| He needs somebody on his team! | ||
| Did you see Tim Dillon did Alec Baldwin's podcast? | ||
| I thought that was, like, the most on-brand perfect thing. | ||
| I saw that I was like, good. | ||
| Thank God. | ||
| Hey, man. | ||
| It's another... | ||
| I love Alec Baldwin. | ||
| Like, I can't act like... | ||
| Great actor! | ||
| 30 Rock is one of the best comic performances of all time. | ||
| I mean, it's up there. | ||
| He's brilliant on that show. | ||
| Well, Glengarry Glen Ross, the fucking... | ||
| The Coffee's for Closers. | ||
| He's a fucking killer. | ||
| He's a straight up killer. | ||
| And he's also literally given that monologue to probably all his heroes. | ||
| It's like Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey. | ||
| It's probably all dudes he looked up to. | ||
| You know, Alan Arkin. | ||
| All heavyweight actors that he's just like, you've put that fucking coffee down. | ||
| How cool is that to do that to you? | ||
| It's like doing it to you. | ||
| You'd do that to like George Carlin or something. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's so cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Jack fucking Lemon? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That guy kicked ass. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The Apartment? | ||
| One of the greatest movies of all time. | ||
| Jack Lemon's awesome. | ||
| On that point, Billy Wilder, maybe the best American director of all time when you look at like the... | ||
| The variety of work he did. | ||
| You do a movie like The Apartment, then he also did Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot. | ||
| Who's making those different types of movies? | ||
| I don't think I've seen any of those. | ||
| Oh, dude. | ||
| Double Indemnity is the best film noir ever, maybe. | ||
| Oh, it's brilliant. | ||
| Edward G. Robinson and Fred McMurray. | ||
| You're a big film buff. | ||
| I like movies, yeah. | ||
| I'm on the road a lot. | ||
| You feel better if you watch something good on the road than if I just watch some Beat Bobby Flay horse shit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A lot of people feel like to be entertained is actually good for the creative process. | ||
| Yeah, it inspires you. | ||
| You feel like you want to make... | ||
| I'm not going to make a movie. | ||
| That's not my... | ||
| But I watch it. | ||
| I want to make something. | ||
| I want to make stuff. | ||
| Do you do any movie making stuff? | ||
| Do you write or anything? | ||
| No, I write. | ||
| Yeah, I wrote, you know, I've written a lot of stuff. | ||
| Screenplays? | ||
| Like show ideas and stuff. | ||
| I'll make them when I have time. | ||
| I'm all in on stand-up now. | ||
| I kind of give everything to stand-up because I feel like that's what it requires right now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I love stand-up so much. | ||
| Well, it shows. | ||
| It shows with how much you put out. | ||
| You put out so much. | ||
| And you're one of those guys, if someone follows you on Instagram, you're constantly uploading content, which I think is so smart. | ||
| I just have people film the shows because I figure some cool moment will happen. | ||
| I don't want to burn material until a special comes out, so I like to just post a topical bit or a crowd work moment because the special, that's the material. | ||
| That's when I'll give the material. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The special that you have out now that's coming out? | ||
| Is it out or is it coming out? | ||
| It's out September 1st. | ||
| And what's it on? | ||
| Netflix. | ||
| Same time tomorrow. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| On Netflix. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| It's tough to even... | ||
| People are like, this is cool. | ||
| It's on Netflix. | ||
| I'm like, I gotta write a new fucking hour, dude. | ||
| I know. | ||
| You don't even feel good. | ||
| I'm so terrified. | ||
| And then I talk to comics who are like, oh, you can't tour until you have a new act. | ||
| I'm like, well, that's not what I do. | ||
| I need a workshop on the road. | ||
| So I do the road every week to just... | ||
| I need an hour. | ||
| I can't write for 15 minutes... | ||
| At a chunk? | ||
| No, I can't. | ||
| Well, Louis was telling me the process that he did for his last special. | ||
| And he said he had to put together a whole new hour in two months. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| I know. | ||
| And he goes, I've never done that before. | ||
| He goes, it was really hard. | ||
| But what I did is it kind of had 20 minutes. | ||
| And so I went up with that 20 minutes and I got it to where it works. | ||
| And then he said, okay, now I can't do that 20 minutes anymore. | ||
| And then I started with a whole new 20 minutes and I did that till it worked. | ||
| And then I put that aside. | ||
| I didn't touch that. | ||
| And then I had another 20 minutes and I worked on that. | ||
| So he, in two months, put together a full hour of comedy. | ||
| He's ruining comedy for us because he did this with the year and a half model. | ||
| I'm like, oh fuck, Louie's doing an hour and a half. | ||
| Now we all have to work at that clip. | ||
| And now Louie's going to do the two-month turnaround for a special. | ||
| I don't... | ||
| Not really. | ||
| For me, I need more time. | ||
| You know, I was doing the two-year model and I did two years in 2014, 16, and 18. And I was scheduled to do one in 2020, but then the pandemic hit. | ||
| And so I didn't do stand-up for a bunch of months and then I started doing it again but I was mostly kind of doing my old stuff and then I started doing regular shows around here and writing and putting it together. | ||
| So when I filmed, I filmed a couple of weeks ago and it was like four years. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| So it was like so tight. | ||
| Everything was so tight. | ||
| And I was like, man, maybe I'd need a better model. | ||
| I was listening to Chris Rock talk about this, and he was saying that he thinks a special should be special. | ||
| And that he doesn't think it should come out every year or every two years. | ||
| He thinks he should wait more time. | ||
| Well, he does do that. | ||
| I mean, that's funny. | ||
| I remember Rock is so wise that whenever he says something, even if it doesn't make total sense, I'm like, let me listen. | ||
| You gotta listen a little. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| He's Chris Rock. | ||
| I remember hearing... | ||
| He said at the Cellar once, he was like, a new special should have a new feature. | ||
| It should be like an iPhone. | ||
| I'm like, hell yeah. | ||
| And then I thought about it. | ||
| I'm like, I don't think that you'd need to do that for every special. | ||
| What kind of feature? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe you do a new... | ||
| If you have a new thing, there's this comic Danny Jalas in LA, and he's a really funny guy. | ||
| And he is doing a special where it's like, choose your own adventure style. | ||
| So you click a button where he's like, I love this. | ||
| And then he's like, or do I hate it? | ||
| You decide, and you click which one you want him. | ||
| He has a bit for both angles. | ||
| Oh, nice. | ||
| So that's a new feature, right? | ||
| That's great. | ||
| I did a special during the pandemic in New York. | ||
| No clubs were open. | ||
| So I was like, I'll do a special on rooftops, you know? | ||
| And it was like, in my head, I'm like, well, this is a new feature. | ||
| But also I'm like, but the fucking bombs on rooftops. | ||
| You have never felt anything like it. | ||
| There's something about bombing in open air by the Hudson where you're like, this is... | ||
| This is like a cry for help. | ||
| This is mental illness that I'm here. | ||
| I was like, if you have beer and White Claw and a mic and amp and friends, I will come on your roof. | ||
| I was doing it like every fucking night for months because I was like, this is the only place to do. | ||
| And it was an amazing thing I never ever want to do again. | ||
| But it's a great moment in history. | ||
| Like when people look back and they see that special, they go, oh, that's a pandemic. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| It was, uh, my cameraman, the guy who directed that special, Matt Salick, he nearly fell off a roof trying to get a cool shot. | ||
| And I'm like, if you die while I'm doing a jack-off joke, it's the saddest. | ||
| What am I going to say at your funeral? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| He died doing what he loved. | ||
| He was, uh... | ||
| No, he did such a cool job with that. | ||
| He literally just showed up on a stranger's rooftop and his friend Dominic Mull shows up with a drone camera. | ||
| I'm like, are we really doing this? | ||
| This is insane. | ||
| Yeah, you have to address it. | ||
| It was that weird moment five minutes in where I had to be like, yeah, we're doing this, guys. | ||
| And they were like, all right, you know, it was crazy. | ||
| Yeah, but historically, it's going to be really cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It'll be cool in 10 years. | |
| When you look at your body of work. | ||
| I think the pandemic, it was great for comedy. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I think because it made people realize, first of all, how special this thing is that we get to do. | ||
| And how it can just go away. | ||
| It was horrible, yeah. | ||
| I mean, you're right. | ||
| I remember I put out a special right before it hit, and it was like, you know- There you are. | ||
| Look at that shot. | ||
| Up on the roof. | ||
| I bombed that roof so fucking hard. | ||
| I remember that one. | ||
| That one, I mean, that didn't make my- but look at that view. | ||
| There's not even seats. | ||
| You had these people sit on towels. | ||
| Colin Quinn gave me so much shit about the opening of this special. | ||
| He was just like, all I need is a mic and an amp. | ||
| Go fuck yourself. | ||
| He was just annoyed. | ||
| How many people were up there? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There'd be like 40 or 50 people a roof usually. | ||
| 40 or 50 people, a roof. | ||
| What are you climbing with a white claw? | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Well, that was the thing. | ||
| I was like, I'll show up and then we'll get drunk afterwards. | ||
| We'll make a night out of it. | ||
| That's Matt holding the camera up. | ||
| With a mask on outside. | ||
| That's fucking hilarious. | ||
| Well, we didn't know. | ||
| We didn't know anything at the time. | ||
| What month was this? | ||
| Jeez, it was the first year. | ||
| It was 2020. But, yeah, I mean, this was a weird as hell. | ||
| That was in the East Village. | ||
| We were all over. | ||
| Bushwick, Williamsburg, East Village, Lower East Side, West Village, Hell's Kitchen. | ||
| Like, we went everywhere. | ||
| I mean, it was great. | ||
| And there's a few rebels in the audience with no masks. | ||
| We're going to look back on those people. | ||
| Well, I'm like, am I going to get shit for that? | ||
| I didn't know. | ||
| Mask or no mask. | ||
| You didn't know, yeah. | ||
| At the time, outdoor, I didn't know if I was going to get shit for that. | ||
| So I was like, don't show the crowd too much because I was like, I don't know if people are going to get mad at me for this. | ||
| You know, it was a different... | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| Shit keeps changing, right? | ||
| Well, it was so different out here than it was anywhere else. | ||
| When I first came here, I was like, this is so crazy. | ||
| New York's the city of hypochondriacs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| We're a nervous city. | ||
| It's built into the whole idea of a city, like you're on top of each other. | ||
| Oh, New York, there's no city where you're more on top of each other. | ||
| I mean, like, you think about that, like, you have to be kind to your neighbor when you're this close at all times. | ||
| And there's also, like, New York has this kind of, like, complain-y... | ||
| Nervous energy to it. | ||
| Just say Jew. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not gonna say Jew. | |
| I'm not gonna say Jew. | ||
| But you know what I'm saying? | ||
| New York people complain. | ||
| Even if it's non-Jewish people. | ||
| What the fuck is this fucking place? | ||
| You're right. | ||
| It's cultural. | ||
| It's venting. | ||
| We don't call it complaining. | ||
| We call it venting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because there's constant stress and tension. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| When you're around that many people. | ||
| Venting is almost like a communal thing. | ||
| It's therapeutic. | ||
| It brings people together. | ||
| It's 20 minutes of like, can you believe this shit? | ||
| Followed by, but life is good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's how you vent. | ||
| That's venting. | ||
| And it feels good. | ||
| It feels good to get that out. | ||
| It keeps you sane. | ||
| It does. | ||
| I mean, you think of so many nights. | ||
| I remember so many nights being a young comic. | ||
| Mark Norman, he'd walk me to the subway. | ||
| He lived down there. | ||
| I lived uptown. | ||
| He'd walk me to the train. | ||
| And we would just shit talk about the business and everything for like 45 minutes, an hour, sometimes two hours. | ||
| And then we'd be like, all right, good talk. | ||
| And And that was like the therapy. | ||
| You get it out, you go home, and you're like, now I can be a person. | ||
| Right. | ||
| New York, you need a... | ||
| I can't defend the city. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I'll never not live there. | ||
| But it's indefensible in many ways. | ||
| Did you grow up there? | ||
| I grew up in New York City. | ||
| Were you born there? | ||
| I was born there. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| I can't drive. | ||
| Really at all? | ||
| I have a license, but I kind of charmed my way through the process. | ||
| I failed two, and then the third one, I was like, please don't fail me, and she laughed, and I was like, I'm in, you know? | ||
| I can't drive. | ||
| So I remember I did a road gig with Joe List in, like, 2011. We were co-headlining, and it was a terrible gig. | ||
| It was one of those gigs where... | ||
| We had to drive from one casino to the next. | ||
| It was a casino run. | ||
| And I was like, well, split the driving. | ||
| You know, I was very confident in the time. | ||
| And Joe's like, cool, cool. | ||
| And first off, we flew into the wrong state on the wrong day. | ||
| It was all my fault. | ||
| I was a total just mess. | ||
| I was an idiot. | ||
| So we fly into, like, Michigan. | ||
| They were like, no, the first gig's in Wisconsin. | ||
| And Lyft was like, I'm gonna fucking kill you. | ||
| We're here a day late. | ||
| We got docked in pay. | ||
| We're driving around. | ||
| And then Joe realizes I can't drive on top of that. | ||
| Because I started driving. | ||
| He was like, what the fuck are you doing? | ||
| And I was like, I'm driving. | ||
| He's like, this isn't driving. | ||
| You're gonna get us killed. | ||
| And then I say, well, I'm just not that good at turns. | ||
| He was like, you're not good at turning is part of driving, you idiot. | ||
| So we're complete idiots. | ||
| We're, you know, we're bombing these fucking horrible gigs. | ||
| I remember we show up to one casino in Milwaukee and, uh, This is like such a comedy moment where you're like, first off, List had been doing comedy longer than I had, and we were co-headlining. | ||
| For some reason, my picture was giant, and it was like a little tiny Joe List picture, so he was furious when we got there. | ||
| We're in this casino. | ||
| The band Cheap Trick, I guess the music room was under construction, so they put Cheap Trick in the comedy club. | ||
| Which means, yeah, I'm sure they're not thrilled. | ||
| They're in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. | ||
| They're playing like a shitty-ass comedy club because of this, which moves us to the bar. | ||
| So Joe and I are doing jokes during the Milwaukee Brewers playoffs in a bar. | ||
| We're like, can you at least put the game off the TV? | ||
| And they're like, no, it's the playoffs. | ||
| So we have to do a show while the Cardinals are kicking their fucking ass. | ||
| And List is on stage bombing, and he's one of the funniest dudes to watch bomb, because he's so self-deprecating already. | ||
| But he just turns to them, he goes, fuck the Brewers, go Cardinals, and they're booing him. | ||
| And then he goes, all right, guys, Sam Morrell. | ||
| I'm like, dude, what the fuck? | ||
| So I had to go into that. | ||
| You know, we would swap who would close. | ||
| And then, you know, we both bombed. | ||
| Horrible gig. | ||
| And I remember Joe, the next day, was like, how the fuck did we get home last night? | ||
| And I was like, you drove us. | ||
| What do you mean, how did we get home? | ||
| He's like, dude, I blacked out. | ||
| And I was like, you seem fine. | ||
| I didn't know. | ||
| He was sneaking drinks all night. | ||
| He was an alcoholic. | ||
| And then he was like, but in my defense, I'm a better blackout driver than you are a sober driver. | ||
| And I was like, I can't argue with that. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| That was one of those gigs where you're like, wow, that was a painful... | ||
| Weak, but fuck. | ||
| I'm in love with The Road for some reason. | ||
| Something about it, I romanticize The Road. | ||
| It is romantic. | ||
| Some of my best moments have been on The Road. | ||
| There's something about The Road. | ||
| It's like, you're doing it. | ||
| The thing that we always wanted to do when we were open micers was be a professional. | ||
| Be a professional comic on The Road. | ||
| Here I am, I'm in Tampa. | ||
| Here I am, I'm in Wichita. | ||
| Here I am. | ||
| Tampa's an underrated comedy city. | ||
| Tampa's a great fucking city to do comedy. | ||
| Tampa crowds... | ||
| My friends always say, like, you know, the best crowds are a blue city and a red state, because you get a good mix. | ||
| And there's something true about that. | ||
| It's Austin. | ||
| Austin, that's what it is. | ||
| Yeah, same thing. | ||
| Great crowds. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, Tampa, man, I used to play a club there, Sidesplitters, you ever play there? | ||
| I don't think I did. | ||
| It's a great club. | ||
| It's still a great club. | ||
| But it's now owned by a different guy. | ||
| When I started working there, it was run by this guy, Bobby Jewell, who was like a real character. | ||
| I don't know if you've ever heard of him. | ||
| Toupee, pinky ring, dresses like Charlie Sheen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bobby Jewell. | |
| Yeah, it's perfect. | ||
| Dresses like Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men. | ||
| You know those kind of polo shirts with the buttons? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Piss drunk. | ||
| He'd pick you up shit-faced in his convertible singing jersey, boys, wasted, shit-talking you the whole time you're there. | ||
| You fucking pussy. | ||
| You used to drink with me. | ||
| I was 23. I was 23, I would feature there, and we would just pound shots all night. | ||
| And then I'd come back a couple years later, headlining, and he'd be like, you fucking pussy. | ||
| He would be mad you wouldn't get blackout drunk with him. | ||
| He would insult his own personality. | ||
| Patrons, they'd be in there laughing at how drunk he was, and he'd be like, why don't you shut the fuck up? | ||
| And we'd be like, these are your customers. | ||
| Remember my friend Dina Hashem and I were doing a gig there. | ||
| She's featuring for me there, and he goes, why don't I cook you guys dinner at my place? | ||
| And we're like, oh, that's very nice of you. | ||
| So we show up, and he's cooking us steak, he's pouring us wine, he makes us a lovely dinner. | ||
| Couldn't be nicer. | ||
| Then he shows up at the club at like 11 p.m., just slurring his words, shit-faced. | ||
| Gets in my face, and he goes, I fucking cooked for you, you piece of shit. | ||
| And I was like, you offered it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| You invited me over. | ||
| He was like mad that I accepted. | ||
| I had a guy once there. | ||
| I played that club so many times. | ||
| It's one of my favorite clubs. | ||
| And I had this guy, Raul Sanchez, opening, and he's like a hilarious comic, served in Iraq, you know, like had a crazy life story, came from Mexico, saw action, like serious shit, and he had great bits about it, which you're like, how often do you hear someone do great bits about something this heavy? | ||
| And Bobby's just in his face, like, just pounding, apparently cost the club like 40 grand a year in whiskey sales and stuff, so they had to switch him on to like a lower label. | ||
| And he's just talking shit to Raul, and he's like, you fucking, you fucking, what tribe are you in, Raul? | ||
| And I'm like, dude, he's fucking Mexican. | ||
| You're not even being the right type of racist, you idiot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then, and Raul has the greatest comeback. | |
| He goes, airborne infantry, what tribe are you in? | ||
| And Bobby just goes, well played. | ||
| He took his L's, which I appreciated. | ||
| But the club was great. | ||
| I mean, it's still great. | ||
| It's a classic, old-school club. | ||
| I heard when Larry Miller walked in there, he just walked in and was like... | ||
| Do you smell it? | ||
| Like, it was like one of those, this is a classic club. | ||
| Right, like when Paul Newman in The Color of Money walks into a pool hall. | ||
| I smell action. | ||
| Hell yeah. | ||
| Oh, dude, Paul Newman fucking rules. | ||
| Oh my god, he's one of the greats. | ||
| Fucking, that guy. | ||
| I think I Cool Hand Luke, like, for some reason, like, once a week, it's just like the coolest movie. | ||
| Oh, he's been in so many cool movies, man. | ||
| Yeah, those old school club owners. | ||
| Did you ever do Kansas City? | ||
| I've done the newer room there. | ||
| I never did Sanford and Sons. | ||
| I heard that's like... | ||
| Craig used to run... | ||
| I don't know if he's still alive anymore. | ||
| But Craig also, like, promoted boxing or something like that. | ||
| He was involved in boxing DVDs. | ||
| A side hustle. | ||
| He was always, like, giving me DVDs of these boxing matches that he was a part of. | ||
| But he had, like, the worst toupee. | ||
| And he sounded like Beetlejuice. | ||
| So, everybody take it, Beetlejuice. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| We're gonna go to this place. | ||
| And, you know, he was always trying to bang his waitresses and shit. | ||
| He was hilarious. | ||
| Like, come here, sit on my lap. | ||
| He's like, what are those guys? | ||
| But it's like those old school guys that, like, completely inappropriate. | ||
| But they're doing, they're running a club the way you thought clubs were run if you saw them in a movie. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| When you were a kid... | ||
| It's exciting. | ||
| You feel like you're in a movie. | ||
| You're really there. | ||
| I love... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's why I told Dina, I was like, just appreciate this because this is like the last one of these dudes left. | ||
| And she was like, I love it. | ||
| She was into it. | ||
| She thought it was hilarious. | ||
| I mean, he really was funny as hell. | ||
| I remember he was like smoking a cigarette once. | ||
| He would just talk shit all day. | ||
| He'd be like, you know, you know what I want, Sam? | ||
| I want you, Joe List, and Nick DiPaolo in a room... | ||
| Tearing each other to shreds. | ||
| And I was like, why? | ||
| And he goes, just cause. | ||
| That was his energy. | ||
| He just wanted blood. | ||
| Well, he probably loved comedy. | ||
| He did love comedy. | ||
| I gotta be honest, I enjoyed the hell out of him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It was fun as hell. | ||
| Those guys, they're classics. | ||
| There's not that many of them, and it's hard to make a guy like that. | ||
| Those gigs starting out are like the best. | ||
| It's funny, you don't realize you're having the best time of your life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it's so hard to write an hour when those rooms are papered. | ||
| And those people, when it's like, those are free tickets, the whole crowd is like, what do you got? | ||
| They're expecting you to suck, so you're like, well, how do I slip new shit in if I gotta bring the heat the whole time? | ||
| I look back, I don't know how we did it, all of us, but... | ||
| Pressure. | ||
| Pressure. | ||
| You gotta rise. | ||
| I remember doing a club... | ||
| Fucking awful club in, yeah, Virginia Beach. | ||
| Awful room, and I'm bombing my dick off. | ||
| Like, one of those, like, where you're sweating. | ||
| I remember I showed up at the club, and the one behind the bar was, like... | ||
| Someone's gotta replace the urinal cakes in the bathroom. | ||
| She said it to me, and I was like, oh, okay. | ||
| I didn't realize she was asking me to do that. | ||
| And I was like, oh, yeah, someone should do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And she's like, well, you? | |
| And I was like, I'm headlining the weekend. | ||
| And she was like, so no? | ||
| And I was like, no, I don't want to do that. | ||
| And she goes, well, I'm a woman. | ||
| Replace means you have to take them out and put the new ones in. | ||
| Put the new ones in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was like, that's a bad look for your club, by the way. | |
| If I'm lurking behind the fucking customers holding urinal cakes. | ||
| You don't look good. | ||
| What is a urinal cake purpose? | ||
| What's the purpose? | ||
| To soak urine up? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Does it help the smell? | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Because they have a smell to them, right? | ||
| Probably. | ||
| So do they run bad? | ||
| Why were you replacing them? | ||
| Do they run bad? | ||
| That's a great one-liner. | ||
| Are they going to go bad? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| I remember bombing so fucking hard, and they had a giant poster. | ||
| You know the sweats? | ||
| You get those sweats where you're like, I'm in the movies sweating, bombing, and they're drinking Long Island iced teas. | ||
| I can't connect to Long Island iced tea drinkers, because you're not drinking for the pleasure of it. | ||
| You're drinking to escape life. | ||
| That's a bad drunk. | ||
| That's like five different lickers in one, you know? | ||
| So I'm bombing my dick off. | ||
| I get off stage, I see a giant poster of this magician. | ||
| It's like the classic magician headshot where he's like holding two doves. | ||
| And I was like, alright, this is crazy. | ||
| And then I look to my right, he's at the bar. | ||
| He was at the show. | ||
| So it felt like magic. | ||
| I was like, alright, let me talk to this guy. | ||
| And he's like, man, you fucking sucked. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, that was terrible. | |
| That was so bad. | ||
| He's like, I mean, you're funny, but that was not a good show. | ||
| And I was like, oh, yeah. | ||
| And he's like, I saw you on Conan once. | ||
| We should go out. | ||
| I'll show you the real Virginia Beach. | ||
| And I was like, what? | ||
| The real Virginia Beach? | ||
| All right. | ||
| He's like, I'm going to show you the Virginia Beach no one talks about. | ||
| So then he just takes me to a bar next door. | ||
| And I was like, all right. | ||
| We're in a bar. | ||
| By the way, I could have found this fucking bar. | ||
| This is not entertaining to me. | ||
| Long line. | ||
| I was like, I don't wait on line. | ||
| He's like, we're not waiting on line. | ||
| So we just start cutting the line. | ||
| He's giving everyone the finger. | ||
| And I was like, who the fuck is this guy? | ||
| You know? | ||
| And we end up in, the bouncer is like, he just says to the guy, the guy's name is Stu. | ||
| And he goes, not tonight, Stu. | ||
| First thing the bouncer says to him, so I'm like, this guy's a problem. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And then he goes, you better let us in or else. | ||
| And the guy just let us in. | ||
| We get fucking... | ||
| He's one of those drunks who's just buying... | ||
| You ever just out with someone where they're just buying every stranger a drink? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| My favorite type of drunk. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's just buying... | ||
| He's doing shots... | ||
| He starts doing magic at the bar. | ||
| And he's good, so people are applauding after every... | ||
| I'm like, this guy's fucking incredible. | ||
| It was like a fucking... | ||
| I mean, it was one of those nights where you're like, this dude... | ||
| So it's like a show. | ||
| It was a show. | ||
| He grabbed one of the women and starts making out with her out of nowhere. | ||
| And then he just let her go and he's like, we're going to a strip club. | ||
| I went to a fucking strip club with this guy. | ||
| That's not my scene, but I was like, fuck it, I'll go up. | ||
| We did it up. | ||
| I used to work at this club when I was coming up called Joker's Wild in New Haven, Connecticut. | ||
| Yeah, I think that was a front. | ||
| It was run by the mob. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you know about it? | ||
| I've been. | ||
| I played there. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Best pizza in the country. | ||
| The guy who was running it was a straight-up gangster. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| And one time, I don't remember what happened. | ||
| I think it was an audience member mouthed off to him or something. | ||
| He took off his shoe and beat the guy's face in with his shoe. | ||
| So splattering blood all over the place. | ||
| So he's got the heel of his shoe, and he's smacking this guy in the face, and there's fucking blood all over his collar and everything. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| And the show went on. | ||
| The show kept going. | ||
| He had to take off. | ||
| The cops came. | ||
| He fucking jetted out of there. | ||
| I never got paid. | ||
| And then I tried to come back. | ||
| I came back. | ||
| I was back there again in a few weeks. | ||
| And I was like, hey man, you still owe me money. | ||
| And he gave me a small percentage of the money. | ||
| Like 40-50% of the money. | ||
| And I go, where's the rest of it? | ||
| He goes, you should be happy you got that. | ||
| Isn't it funny that this is the only career where that happens? | ||
| I remember I did that gig once, and my brother was doing a clerkship in New Haven. | ||
| He's a lawyer, and he brought the judge with him. | ||
| And I was like, don't bring this classy woman to see me at Joker's Wild. | ||
| Please. | ||
| Please don't bring her. | ||
| And it was, of course, it was just me dealing with hecklers the whole fucking show. | ||
| Animals in that place. | ||
| Animals. | ||
| But I mean, that pizza in New Haven, I think, is the best pizza in the country. | ||
| Like Pepe's and all those spots. | ||
| Oh, they got great pizza. | ||
| It's next-level pizza. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| New Haven's a weird spot, too, because Yale's there. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Well, that's Connecticut, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's all Connecticut. | |
| But it doesn't seem to have any impact on the culture. | ||
| If you're around Harvard Square in Cambridge, it clearly influences... | ||
| Harvard has influenced the culture. | ||
| There's a lot of very brilliant people, and there's a lot of bookstores, and people are smarter. | ||
| Not New Haven. | ||
| There's something about New Haven itself is like a gritty, fucking down and grimy city when it comes to like stand up and the people that come. | ||
| Because they come from all the surrounding areas, too. | ||
| Well, it's Connecticut, right? | ||
| All of Connecticut is like, I mean, Bridgeport's one of the worst cities in the country. | ||
| I mean, have you been to Bridgeport, Connecticut? | ||
| One of my best friends lived there. | ||
| It's fucking crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Forever. | |
| He just moved recently. | ||
| Shout out to Tommy Jr. I did a gig there once, and I got chased off stage. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| I got chased off. | ||
| I remember these guys met me in New York, and I was young, so I was like, man, oh my God, the idea to make fucking whatever it was, like a grand on a Wednesday. | ||
| I was like, oh my God, of course, yeah. | ||
| So they come to see me. | ||
| They're like, we want to scout you out first. | ||
| So they saw me at Eastville Comedy Club on East 4th Street on a Saturday, and I couldn't have had a better set. | ||
| It was one of those where I'm like, when lightning strikes in that room... | ||
| And they were like, well, if you did this well here, you'll do even better in Bridgeport. | ||
| I'm like, that's not how it works, by the way. | ||
| So I get there, and this one guy, they're like, well, this guy's the muscle. | ||
| And I'm like, I don't know what the fuck that means. | ||
| The muscle? | ||
| I was like, all right, hey, muscle, whatever. | ||
| And we're getting drunk, and they're like, we can't wait to have you there. | ||
| And they kept calling this guy the muscle. | ||
| And I'm like, I don't know why he's called the muscle. | ||
| And then I do the gig in Bridgeport. | ||
| And we're having pizza before, and there's a basketball game, and we're watching basketball in the pizza shop, and he's like, I was telling some story, and he goes, yeah, it's just like when I did two and a half years in the clink for selling coke. | ||
| And I was like, what does that have to do with what I was talking about? | ||
| He's like, I don't know. | ||
| And I was like, is he fucking with me? | ||
| I can't tell if he's fucking with me. | ||
| So I remember doing the gig, And I'm kind of just doing okay. | ||
| There's like a guy in the front row. | ||
| He won't shut the fuck up. | ||
| It's one of those where I'm like, I've put him down every clever way possible. | ||
| It was a beautiful venue too. | ||
| It's called the Bijou Theater, which is like, they play like Casablanca in that place. | ||
| This is where I'm doing comedy, you know? | ||
| They put like old school movies in there. | ||
| And I'm just trying to survive. | ||
| I'm like 25 minutes in, like putting this guy down. | ||
| He keeps coming. | ||
| I'm just like... | ||
| I'm out of clever shit to say. | ||
| You're ruining the show. | ||
| And finally I'm like, you fucking Neanderthal dumb fuck. | ||
| Shut the fuck up. | ||
| And then he stood up and I was like, that's the biggest man I've ever seen. | ||
| He's like 6'6 and built like a linebacker. | ||
| And I'm like, I'm going to get the shit kicked out of me. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| So he starts rushing the stage and I'm like, well, someone's going to stop him. | ||
| No one stops him. | ||
| He gets on stage. | ||
| I was like, fuck this shit. | ||
| I run off stage. | ||
| And I'm in the back of the room, and people are booing. | ||
| I just hear booing. | ||
| I'm like, why are they fucking booing me? | ||
| And then I lock the door to the green room. | ||
| This woman runs in with me before I lock it, and she's like, what are you doing? | ||
| Like, you can't do that. | ||
| I'm like, what? | ||
| You want me to just get the shit kicked out of me? | ||
| And she's like, you can't. | ||
| That's very unprofessional. | ||
| I'm like, I'm professional. | ||
| There's no security here. | ||
| I'm actually going to get my ass kicked. | ||
| And she's like, fuck. | ||
| No, you got to get back out there. | ||
| And I was like, fuck you. | ||
| Fuck this city. | ||
| And they're booing so loud when I say that. | ||
| I'm holding a cordless mic. | ||
| They hear everything I'm saying to her. | ||
| I sound like the biggest coward. | ||
| I am hated in Bridgeport right now. | ||
| They're booing the shit out of me. | ||
| Eight minutes of the longest eight minutes of my life. | ||
| He finally leaves. | ||
| And I went back out and did the last 30 minutes to fucking silence. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Connecticut is rough, man, because there's no hope in Connecticut. | ||
| There's a thing, there's like really rich people. | ||
| That should be their state motto. | ||
| There is no hope, because it's not a real state. | ||
| It's a highway between New York and Boston. | ||
| True. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| And the cities there, like Hartford, come on. | ||
| It's barely a city. | ||
| It's a few insurance buildings, and it's weird. | ||
| That downtown area ain't pretty. | ||
| It's rough. | ||
| Chappelle bomb there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's how you know that. | |
| Well, that was like the infamous. | ||
| Yeah, the infamous bomb. | ||
| When I saw that, I go, oh, he's in Connecticut. | ||
| I tell everybody, it's the worst fucking place. | ||
| I haven't done stand-up in Connecticut in 15 years. | ||
| Really? | ||
| On purpose. | ||
| I do it every year because it's an easy drive from New York. | ||
| I'm sure I'll sell a lot of tickets there after what we just said about it. | ||
| Listen, the people there agree with you. | ||
| They don't want to be there. | ||
| They're like, ah, I can't. | ||
| Screen parts are good. | ||
| Fairfield, great crowds. | ||
| But as you said, people bleed in from all sides. | ||
| So you get good people, but you get people that just want to fuck. | ||
| They want blood. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Animals. | |
| They want blood. | ||
| And also, they're not doing great, so they don't want you to do great. | ||
| Life is... | ||
| There's not a lot of hope there. | ||
| There's not a lot going on. | ||
| It's a tough state. | ||
| It's not my favorite. | ||
| But then it's weird. | ||
| But then you go to other places. | ||
| Like, I'll tell you this. | ||
| Providence, Rhode Island. | ||
| Some of the best crowds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fucking great. | |
| Some of the best crowds you'll ever see. | ||
| Fucking great. | ||
| Yeah, Rhode Island's great. | ||
| I love doing stand-up in Rhode Island. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| It's small and it's a cool... | ||
| It's a great place. | ||
| Providence is cool. | ||
| But I bombed harder in Rhode Island than I ever have in my life. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I did a Jack and Jill strip club in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. | ||
| I can't imagine why this didn't go well. | ||
| Jack and Jill is... | ||
| Do you know what it is? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| It was a concept they tried for a while in the 80s. | ||
| It was Adam Sandler's All The Strippers? | ||
| He played both. | ||
| It was a guy stripper and a girl stripper. | ||
| So it was for couples. | ||
| So a male stripper would go out and strip, and then a female stripper. | ||
| And you can only imagine the quality of these people. | ||
| They all looked like they had fetal alcohol syndrome. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| And the audience, there's a lot of Portuguese sailors and fishermen that live in that village, in this town. | ||
| So half the people barely spoke English. | ||
| And there might have been 15, 20 people in the audience. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And it's not bombing, because it was total silence. | ||
| It was almost like I was just doing stand-up in my apartment. | ||
| It wasn't like real stand-up. | ||
| There was nothing going on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There was zero response. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| They were just waiting for me to bring up this next person who had a terrible life. | ||
| The guy had really bad tattoos that he had covered up with bandanas. | ||
| And you could see the shitty tattoo leaking out under the bandana. | ||
| And I'll never forget, the girl had a tattoo on her ass of a snake. | ||
| That looked like it was, like, tattooed, like, in prison. | ||
| You know, like, one of them, like, dot, dot, dot tattoo. | ||
| It was fucking horrible. | ||
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That is, yeah, that was some of those holidays. | ||
| That's the worst bombing I've ever, as good a, as, well, the worst bombing I ever had, I followed Jim Brewer one night. | ||
| He was a tough follow. | ||
| He was a tough follow. | ||
| And this was, like, three years in a comedy, I really shouldn't have been headlining. | ||
| We're both kind of in the same part of our career, but somehow or another my manager weaseled it so that I was headlining. | ||
| And so I did good every show except the last show Saturday night. | ||
| He was on fire! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And everything was bad. | ||
| Everything was bad. | ||
| I had just torn my ACL, so my knee was fucked up, so I couldn't move that good. | ||
| And I was dressed nice, because my manager had convinced me, you should dress nice. | ||
| So I'm dressed like I'm going out to a club. | ||
| So I had like Cavaricci pants on and a nice shirt, and I looked like such a douchebag. | ||
| And I was terrified. | ||
| Because I knew I was going to bomb. | ||
| Because I didn't know how to handle going on after someone who was really good back then. | ||
| Because it didn't happen that often. | ||
| When someone would kill so hard. | ||
| He had this bit about coming home drunk and running into his mother. | ||
| And it was so funny. | ||
| And he just was feeling it. | ||
| You know, he just caught that vibe. | ||
| You know, sometimes guys are just in the fucking zone. | ||
| And he was in the zone just crushing. | ||
| And I just ate shit. | ||
| He is like the total package where he could do impressions. | ||
| It's like Shane, where he can do voices and stuff, but then there's writing to defend it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And he's so physical. | ||
| He's so funny looking, too. | ||
| He's like a human cartoon. | ||
| He is. | ||
| And he's so likable. | ||
| It's like everything is going great for him. | ||
| Yeah, I remember he had a story on Ari's This Is Not Happening that was so freaking funny. | ||
| He's a great storyteller. | ||
| He's good at everything. | ||
| He's also a guy that got on Saturday Night Live and was like, fuck this. | ||
| Fuck all. | ||
| He talked to his wife about it. | ||
| His wife's like, why don't you quit? | ||
| He's like, quit Saturday Night Live? | ||
| Really? | ||
| And she was like, yeah, get out of there. | ||
| Fuck this. | ||
| That was the 90s. | ||
| That's when, like, you were like, I'll get a movie deal out of it. | ||
| Like, that was such a launching pad in the 90s. | ||
| But he walked away from all of it. | ||
| Like, on purpose. | ||
| Not because he didn't have prospects or talent. | ||
| And not because people weren't interested in him. | ||
| He's like, fuck that. | ||
| I'm gonna live in New Jersey. | ||
| I don't give a shit. | ||
| I just don't fucking care. | ||
| I really don't fucking care. | ||
| I'm just gonna do stand-up. | ||
| And that's what he did. | ||
| And he still does it. | ||
| He's still, like, one of the best ever. | ||
| A lot of great stand-ups don't get their shine on SNL, I feel like. | ||
| Even Chris Rock's a great example. | ||
| I'm like, he was funny on SNL, but then when he left, that's when it's like, oh, that's Chris Rock. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I feel like Colin Quinn's another one. | ||
| He's so great at stand-up. | ||
| So many great stand-ups. | ||
| It's a hard format for a great stand-up, I feel like. | ||
| It's a dead format. | ||
| It's still alive, but it's not the same thing. | ||
| To compare that to Belushi and Aykroyd, it's not... | ||
| It's not really Saturday. | ||
| They never get appreciated until 20 years later. | ||
| Everyone said that cast sucked. | ||
| I liked them a lot. | ||
| I was a kid watching that. | ||
| Who said that cast sucked? | ||
| At the time, people were always like, well, they're not Phil Hartman. | ||
| Whatever classes before. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| When I was a kid, I remember people being like, but I was like, holy shit, Will Ferrell. | ||
| I loved it. | ||
| I thought they were great. | ||
| Well, at one point in time, it was so much freer. | ||
| The subject matter and the material that you could do, they could get wild. | ||
| Jane, you ignorant slut. | ||
| Think about some of the shit that they said when Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase were word association. | ||
| Like, did you ever see that bit? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, dude. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| But that's TV now. | ||
| I remember, I was trying to get a, you know, for this special, I was trying to get a Tonight Show set cooking. | ||
| And if I told you the notes, you would never... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I would know. | |
| It's... | ||
| Because the set was approved by the booker. | ||
| It wasn't his fault. | ||
| It's standards and practices where I was like, first off, I had a trans joke. | ||
| And they were like, you can't do a trans joke. | ||
| And I said, well, it's pro-trans. | ||
| It's a very, you know, pro-trans joke. | ||
| And they were like, you can't acknowledge them. | ||
| I was like, that's more offensive than what I'm doing. | ||
| You can't acknowledge them? | ||
| And then... | ||
| I got a note. | ||
| You can't say the word hot chick. | ||
| I didn't even know I said that word. | ||
| I was like, I said that? | ||
| You can't say hot chick? | ||
| I was like, by the way, there was a Hitler joke in there. | ||
| I didn't get a note on that. | ||
| But hot chick is offensive, apparently. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Can I open this, by the way? | ||
| Yeah, open it. | ||
| I brought our whiskey here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is yours. | |
| This is me and Mark Norman's whiskey, Bodega Cat. | ||
| We had some of this the other day. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I'm very happy with it. | ||
| It's on bodegacatspirits.com if you want to get a bottle. | ||
| It's very good. | ||
| And this is you guys developed it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How did you do that? | |
| Well, this distillery... | ||
| Cheers, brother. | ||
| Cheers. | ||
| Thanks for having me again. | ||
| This is fun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pleasure. | |
| Thanks for being here. | ||
| Been wanting to have you on for a while. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Yeah, well, it was basically a whiskey. | ||
| It's rye. | ||
| They make it in Indianapolis. | ||
| He's based out of Houston, Chris Hart. | ||
| And it's just a really good rye. | ||
| We sampled... | ||
| We sampled, like, nine different ryes, and this was far and away our favorite, but I'll tell you, sampling nine ryes, like, we're not, we don't know, you're not supposed to swallow it, we're just getting fucked up trying it. | ||
| We're not classy enough to be like, oh, you spit it out, that's how you sample it. | ||
| We're just, Mark and I are just wasted, you know, but it's, yeah, this is the one we liked, and, uh. | ||
| Bodega Cat just felt very New York to us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We tried to do Fat Cat originally because of the double meaning. | ||
| You're like, oh, it's like upscale, classy, but also it's a fat cat. | ||
| Who doesn't like a fat cat? | ||
| They're fun. | ||
| I like Bodega Cat. | ||
| It's a good name. | ||
| It's a good name, and people are liking it. | ||
| I'm pumped. | ||
| I can't wait to get it served at the Comedy Cellar. | ||
| That, to me, is like, oh, my God. | ||
| Right, to see it on the shelf. | ||
| Yeah, Liz, the manager of the Cellar, who just gives me endless shit, is like, we're going to serve it here. | ||
| I was like... | ||
| Wow, you're gonna serve it? | ||
| She's like, it'll be our, like, Manhattan Old Fashioned. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| And I was like, that's fucking exciting. | ||
| That's nice. | ||
| So I'm pumped. | ||
| Yeah, I, uh, sampling alcohol, you ever see how they do wine tasting? | ||
| They have, like, a spittoon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They just spit it out into it. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It just seems so fucking weird. | ||
| It feels wasteful. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It doesn't feel right to do. | ||
| No, it's kind of strange. | ||
| Like, you're just wishing around your mouth and then spitting it out. | ||
| Yeah, I like getting wine drunk. | ||
| I feel like dudes will give wine a bad name sometimes, but like, wine is fun to get fucked up on. | ||
| You're like silly and, you know... | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a different drunk. | |
| It's a different drunk. | ||
| Whiskey's a different drunk from wine. | ||
| Tequila's a different drunk. | ||
| Is that your drink, tequila? | ||
| Well, I've been drinking it lately because you don't feel as bad the next day. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's something about tequila that doesn't give you the same hangover. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And, you know, Bert Kreischer, who's a notorious drunk, he's been wearing his whoop strap, and he switched over to tequila, and he sends me his, like, recovery from his whoop strap. | ||
| And it's, like, fucking 95%. | ||
| I'm like, how are you, what? | ||
| He goes, I tied one on, too. | ||
| And I'm like, how is that possible? | ||
| If he says that, it's bad. | ||
| If he says that, it's bad. | ||
| I remember, actually, I opened for him in Hartford, Connecticut, like, probably a decade ago or so, maybe more, and it was, like, his weekend off, and he was still out drinking us. | ||
| It was insane. | ||
| I was like, I'm pretty drunk. | ||
| And he was like, oh, I'm going to take the weekend off. | ||
| He's still going through pitchers of beer, ordering Taco Bell for everybody. | ||
| I was like, this guy fucking drinks. | ||
| He's an animal. | ||
| He also put gay porn in my merch bag. | ||
| I was selling t-shirts at the time to make extra money as a middle act. | ||
| You sell t-shirts. | ||
| And Bert put gay porno mags when I opened and he was like, ha ha! | ||
| And I was like, I like this guy. | ||
| That was all it took. | ||
| I was like, I like this guy. | ||
| I was at the Comedy Store once, and I called Bert up, and he answers the phone, and he's on a motorcycle in Vietnam. | ||
| And I go, what are you doing? | ||
| And he goes, I'm doing my Travel Channel show. | ||
| I'm on a motorcycle in Vietnam. | ||
| And I said, dude, you need to quit that fucking show. | ||
| I go, you really should quit, and you should really just be a stand-up. | ||
| And he's like, oh, I don't know. | ||
| It's like such a good gig. | ||
| I go, dude, you're such a funny guy. | ||
| You're so funny. | ||
| And you think they were stripping that from him on this show? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yes! | ||
| They were watering him down. | ||
| I mean, he was scared of, like, smoking pot on our show, on podcasts. | ||
| He couldn't smoke pot. | ||
| He would have Jamie turn the camera away when he would smoke pot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| He was scared that the Travel Channel would find out he's smoking pot. | ||
| Because the people that owned it were very religious. | ||
| Like, Bourdain had a real problem with them, too. | ||
| Went on this, like, notorious rant against them when he left them. | ||
| He kind of made them, too. | ||
| He did make them, yeah. | ||
| I mean, Bourdain is, like, how I live life on the road. | ||
| I'm like, I will make... | ||
| Kalamazoo, Michigan, great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, his philosophy of just making every city count, I fucking love that, dude. | ||
| Oh, he loved to travel and to go to these little small dives and talk to the owner and see how they made the fish and chips, and he loved it, yeah. | ||
| He was so cool. | ||
| And his narratives, like, his narration, his monologues were so fantastic. | ||
| He's a great writer. | ||
| He was such a good writer and a great orator, too. | ||
| So he was great at telling stories and, like, his real love for, like, what these people are doing and these cultures and these communities. | ||
| And he would just go out and, like, hey, show me. | ||
| Take me around. | ||
| I loved it. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| He could kick it with Michelin chefs. | ||
| He could kick it with a street chef. | ||
| I loved that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| And I loved that he... | ||
| Every once in a while, he would be like, hey man, Detroit's fucked up. | ||
| This is America. | ||
| I like that he would kind of take a stand every once in a while, too. | ||
| He was just cool. | ||
| He was a very moral and ethical guy. | ||
| He was a tough one. | ||
| He died. | ||
| I was fucked up for a while. | ||
| You guys were close. | ||
| He's just like a guy that I was so excited that he was my friend. | ||
| When I first met him, I said, my wife says you're my boyfriend. | ||
| And he was like, okay. | ||
| It was like, oh my god, fuck. | ||
| You're like, am I blowing it with Bourdain? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This sucks. | |
| I was like, no! | ||
| Don't fuck this up! | ||
| The only thing that saved me, I think, was that I met him at a UFC and he was a giant UFC fan. | ||
| And this was actually before he had gotten into jiu-jitsu. | ||
| His wife was into jiu-jitsu and then he started getting into the UFC and then he started coming to the shows. | ||
| And then he started coming to my stand-up and then we started hanging out and then, you know, went to dinner with him a bunch of times. | ||
| Going to dinner with Bourdain was fucking amazing. | ||
| That's the dream. | ||
| That's like the dream dinner guy. | ||
| It was like showing up at a rock show with Mick Jagger. | ||
| It's like you were with Bourdain. | ||
| The chefs would all come out and they would insist on just off the menu, let us cook for you. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, it was incredible. | ||
| I found a lot of restaurants through his show. | ||
| I remember I would go to a place in SF called Swan Oyster Depot. | ||
| And I was like, oh, Bourdain's. | ||
| And they were like, yeah, all the locals were furious because they were like, we used to be able to come here. | ||
| Now there's a line down the block, you know? | ||
| But he also was like, man, he's helping businesses too. | ||
| It's pretty cool. | ||
| Yeah, the locals have to let it go. | ||
| That's part of the beauty of it. | ||
| Great food too. | ||
| Other people found out about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He just had this fucking passion for things. | ||
| I used to be able to text him and say, like, hey, I'm going to Tokyo. | ||
| Where should I eat? | ||
| It was the best. | ||
| He would tell you, like, you've got to go to this sushi place. | ||
| You've got to go to this place. | ||
| And he would, like, give you a detailed rundown of all the places to go to. | ||
| That's an amazing friend to have. | ||
| I have an old phone that I have. | ||
| I change my number all the time. | ||
| And I keep this number because I have text messages from him. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I'm just like, I'm not getting rid of that number. | ||
| I'm just going to keep that number just for that. | ||
| Just to go over the text messages and see pictures and shit he would send me. | ||
| Damn, I'm sorry. | ||
| You know, there's a lot of photos of him and stuff around the studio to remind me. | ||
| It sucks when you think you could have helped. | ||
| That's what sucks the most. | ||
| You know, when a friend takes their own life and you're like, God damn it, I wish I was there. | ||
| I think if I was there, I could have helped. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's usually nothing you could do, though. | ||
| There's usually nothing. | ||
| And you can't blame yourself for that shit. | ||
| Well, he was in a fucking terrible relationship. | ||
| And it was also, that motherfucker would go hard. | ||
| We did this show once. | ||
| I did his show. | ||
| We went hunting in Montana. | ||
| We went pheasant hunting. | ||
| And he shot a bird. | ||
| And we cooked it, and we cooked a bunch of other birds that these guys had cooked, and we all just got drunk around a campfire. | ||
| It was fucking legendary. | ||
| But we were vaping, and he kept hitting off the vape pen, and it was pretty obvious. | ||
| He wasn't trying to get fucked up. | ||
| He was trying to get obliterated. | ||
| And it was like, bottles of whiskey, let's keep going. | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| Where's the whiskey? | ||
| What do we got? | ||
| He just wanted to keep going. | ||
| Everybody else is obliterated and he's still throwing them down. | ||
| He went harder than anybody that I've ever seen. | ||
| Once you're not enjoying the drug you're consuming and you're just trying to get fucking out of the world. | ||
| There was angst. | ||
| There was a fucking fire burning that he couldn't put out. | ||
| No matter how much he poured on it, it was always there. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you know, you know, you don't get to know, I mean, you get to know like little pieces of the tapestry. | ||
| You don't get to see the overall terrain with a guy like that. | ||
| You don't know like how much trouble really is in that mind. | ||
| Because he seemed like an old school guy in a sense who didn't like overshare either. | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, you know, he'd talk to you about stuff. | ||
| He'd talk to you about stuff, but it just was, you know, it's hard. | ||
| And it's also hard for him to open up around people because he was the man, you know, and everybody loved him. | ||
| And, like, he was like, you were aware that you were around him when you were around him. | ||
| It was kind of like everybody was, like, on their best behavior. | ||
| It was like, you know, he was just, he was a legendary cultural figure. | ||
| I saw him at a Knicks game once, and I used to have a show on the Knicks network, so we were in the special area, and Larry Johnson, who was one of my favorite players growing up, I'd just watch LJ see Anthony Bourdain and go, oh my god, Mr. Bourdain! | ||
| I was like, oh my god, LJ! You know, it's like all those things at once where you're like, holy shit, it's crazy that... | ||
| He had that impact everywhere he went. | ||
| I'm watching my favorite athletes growing up be starstruck. | ||
| Well, there's a thing about authenticity that comes through, and especially authenticity when a guy's created something like his narratives, like his writing, and the way he would love places. | ||
| You're like, fuck, that guy was cool. | ||
| You wanted to be around him. | ||
| As legit a person as I've ever met. | ||
| Like, what you wanted him to be, like, God, I hope he's like this. | ||
| That's who he was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But fucking tortured. | ||
| I think that comes... | ||
| It's like we were talking about, like, fucked up people make great art sometimes. | ||
| I mean, sometimes they're not pedophiles. | ||
| Sometimes they're just, you know, just suicidal drunks. | ||
| They're dark. | ||
| But also, like, you know, there's a great Leonard Cohen quote where he was being interviewed. | ||
| You know, one of the most depressing lyricists of all time. | ||
| Someone said, do you need to be depressed to create good stuff? | ||
| And he said, no, it's in spite of that that you create this stuff. | ||
| And that's important to remember, too. | ||
| I think people get, they romanticize the, you know, the miserable poet, in a sense. | ||
| And it's like, no, man, that's, like, it's like the starving artist. | ||
| You're better nourished. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But there's something about the fear that comes with being starving that it gives you this ambition just to move, just to do things. | ||
| And sometimes people don't have that. | ||
| And one of the things that happens to the starving artists when they get successful, they're not starving anymore and they don't want to move anymore because now they don't have to. | ||
| They don't have to go do something. | ||
| So sometimes they just hole up. | ||
| That gets really dark. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because then they've had, they got this thing now, which they were always trying to achieve, and it didn't help at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And in fact, it alienated people. | ||
| Because now it makes you weird. | ||
| And now when you go out, everybody wants to talk to you, and you're like, oh. | ||
| So now you're more fucked up than you were before you were successful. | ||
| But you're right that Bourdain kept that, like, everyman quality, where he felt like he could talk to everyone, and so often when people become that successful, they lose their connection to reality, and they just surround themselves with yes-men a lot of the time. | ||
| And he never lost that, it seemed. | ||
| Yeah, no, I don't think he did. | ||
| You know, he could talk to... | ||
| But he genuinely wanted to hear from everybody, too. | ||
| It wasn't just that he wanted to talk to them. | ||
| He wanted to hear from them. | ||
| You know, he wanted to, like... | ||
| He was absorbing. | ||
| And that was part of the brilliance of the way he would write those narrations, those monologues, is that he had seen the world through their eyes, whether he was in Libya or whether he was in fucking Greece. | ||
| Everywhere he went, he absorbed their culture and wanted to give it life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it was a huge loss. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was a bummer, man. | ||
| Heavy fucking bummer. | ||
| You know, and he was one of those guys that just, like, he would talk to other famous people. | ||
| I remember talking to him about this, like, you know, that he would talk to guys that had made it and guys that were his heroes, and he was like, does it ever get better? | ||
| And, you know, most of them were like, no. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| And does what get better? | ||
| Like, just life? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think one of the things that we have as comics that a lot of artists don't have is we have a community. | ||
| We have a group that we get together and we do the thing together. | ||
| You know, like last night I was saying at the show, we had Hans Kim, Bryan Simpson, David Lucas, Eddie Bravo, Tony Hinchcliffe, Shane Gillis, Ari Shafir, and me. | ||
| And we had the fucking best time. | ||
| We were all hammered, right? | ||
| Because we did the podcast. | ||
| We all got blacked out drunk. | ||
| And then we went and did Kill Tony that night. | ||
| And then the next night, we all did stand-up together. | ||
| And it was fucking magic. | ||
| And I was like, that is everything. | ||
| Because it's so hard sometimes to relate to other people. | ||
| Like, what you do. | ||
| You know, like, so, how do you come up with your jokes? | ||
| I'm like, you know, write, do stuff, I think of things. | ||
| But it was just like an instant connection with comics. | ||
| I mean, like, I've never met you. | ||
| You're easy to talk to, and it's, you know, it's the comic thing. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I know you're also, you know, you've done a lot of interviews in your day, you know, to do this, but also there's a thing past that where you're like, There is a comic connection where, like, you're in the green room. | ||
| You don't know the guy opening for you. | ||
| He sits down. | ||
| It's not weird, usually. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's like, hey, what's up? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like people know how to be. | ||
| Yeah, where'd you start? | ||
| Where are you from? | ||
| You know, what's your opening club? | ||
| Where'd you go? | ||
| I mean, the Comedy Cellar, I remember, like, at first I was so nervous to work there because I had so much reverence for that club as a young New York comic. | ||
| I wouldn't go there before I worked there. | ||
| I was too nervous. | ||
| I had too much respect for the club. | ||
| And then when I started working there... | ||
| You know, she books me on these, like, 11.30 shows every night, and then I'm going on at 1 a.m. | ||
| every night. | ||
| And you're like, oh, shit, my lifestyle's really changing. | ||
| And then I look around, I'm like, oh, I get to watch Dave Attell every night because I'm on the late show. | ||
| So you're like, holy shit. | ||
| And then you kind of become, you know, friendly with those guys. | ||
| And you kind of start to—I mean, I learn more from watching Dave Attell than anything— In comedy. | ||
| You can't learn more. | ||
| To me, he's the best comic I've ever seen. | ||
| He's one of the greatest of all time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Unquestionably. | ||
| And he's so fucking funny. | ||
| It's like the shortest swing you'll ever see. | ||
| It's like when you're watching Ichiro and you're like, he can't not get on base. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I mean, he was so funny. | ||
| I opened for him a bunch on the road, and you just learn so much. | ||
| From watching how this guy conducts himself. | ||
| He grabs the paper. | ||
| He's reading the paper. | ||
| He's making local references. | ||
| He's riffing on the crowd. | ||
| He gets bored on stage, so he brings me on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then I'm fucking like, I have to riff with you? | |
| I have to, like, you know? | ||
| It's terrifying, but I remember we were driving back from a gig once in Tarrytown, New York. | ||
| We did that musical, and then we were driving back, and he was like, man, I fucking suck. | ||
| I fucking suck. | ||
| And I was like, we all think you're great. | ||
| And he said, well, I'm better than you guys. | ||
|
unidentified
|
LAUGHTER I mean, he just never didn't make me laugh. | |
| And he was so... | ||
| He's such a great comedian that I was just... | ||
| I was always like... | ||
| I'm like, I'm not wasting a moment soaking this up. | ||
| I know how lucky I am to be near Dave Attell. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's also one of those guys that is the worst self promoter of all time. | ||
| He doesn't promote at all. | ||
| Like he's just... | ||
| As far as like, as good as he is as a comic... | ||
| Like he's so self-deprecating and so like not interested in promoting himself. | ||
| He's so focused on just doing stand-up and quietly is the best comic alive. | ||
| He's funny concentrate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like unfortunately a lot of the wrong people have self-esteem in this world. | ||
| And Dave is proof of that. | ||
| Because I'll see the worst comic I've ever fucking seen come off stage and be like, follow that. | ||
| And I'm like, that was bad. | ||
| And then you see Dave come off after murdering, and it's all new shit. | ||
| And he's like, oh, I'm a fucking hack. | ||
| And I'm like, dude, you're the best I've ever seen. | ||
| But don't you think that is important? | ||
| That disdain for your work? | ||
| A bit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
A little bit. | |
| Too much. | ||
| Yeah, you have to have a hint. | ||
| If you don't have a hint of self-loathing, then you're just walking around all day like, I'm fucking awesome. | ||
| That's not funny. | ||
| That's not good either. | ||
| Yeah, if you have a little bit of like, I suck. | ||
| And here's the thing. | ||
| If you're doing new material all the time, you're going to feel that way. | ||
| Because if you're going up and killing all the time, you're just playing the hits. | ||
| If you're going up and kind of having up and down sets, that means you're taking some risks. | ||
| And then you're going to get off and be like, this isn't as good as my old stuff. | ||
| I fucking suck. | ||
| Right, which is really great about producing a special. | ||
| It's because once that special's done, start from scratch. | ||
| Oh, don't I know it. | ||
| Now you're a person who's people coming to see... | ||
| And you have zero weapons. | ||
| And you're like, shit. | ||
| That's what it feels like, weapons. | ||
| It feels like you're going into battle and you're like, I have a twig right now for battle. | ||
| And the crowd, they all have machetes and shit. | ||
| And you're like, fuck, I'm going to get killed. | ||
| And then as time goes on, you're sharpening this twig. | ||
| Now all of a sudden it's like a bow and arrow. | ||
| It's getting better and better. | ||
| By the time you shoot a special, hopefully it's like a fucking Uzi or something. | ||
| What is your writing process like? | ||
| Do you sit in front of a computer? | ||
| I take walks. | ||
| I take notes all day. | ||
| Sometimes I do voice memos. | ||
| I take notes on my phone. | ||
| I have Word documents that are like Every week that are like, you know, jokes from this month, this year. | ||
| And when I'm writing a new hour, I revisit those documents and they're in my email because I'm always, I back up and I'm still scared I'm gonna lose them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And then I have like, you know, I have the classic comedy, like little notebooks, like fit in the back pocket of this shit. | ||
| I used to do that, but now I put everything on my phone. | ||
| I still have notebooks, but in my notebooks, it's never new stuff. | ||
| It just rewrite the things so that I know what I'm going to say exactly. | ||
| Memorization. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It looks like a crazy person. | ||
| It's like, all work, no play, it makes Johnny a dull boy. | ||
| That's all day. | ||
| I just write out all the stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The Joe books are useless. | ||
| If anybody, like, you're looking for good ideas, they're not... | ||
| Those are just... | ||
| It's just shit. | ||
| They're notes. | ||
| I'm just writing out my stuff. | ||
| And then, also, I'll take index cards. | ||
| Like, if I have a really big show, like, if Chappelle and I are doing an arena, I'll sit down and I'll write out bulletin points on all these index cards and I'll lay them out on the coffee table in the green room. | ||
| So I'll get there an hour early. | ||
| So that way, I have zero thought about, like, whether or not I know exactly where everything goes and then I could just be kind of free with it. | ||
| By the way, do you realize how cool a sentence that just was? | ||
| When Chappelle and I do an arena. | ||
| That's one of the coolest sentences ever said. | ||
| You know, we just roll into the fucking arenas, dude. | ||
| Arenas are weird. | ||
| They're really weird. | ||
| They're weird, but they're fun as shit, man. | ||
| Especially when you do them in the round. | ||
| They're really wild. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Because when you do them in a round, you're surrounded by people. | ||
| So it's like a really good seat for everyone in the house. | ||
| You know, it kind of sucks if you're up at the top, but then there's these giant fucking screens everywhere. | ||
| You get to see it. | ||
| Do you like arenas? | ||
| I love them. | ||
| Do you prefer it to, like, big theaters? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, I don't prefer anything. | ||
| I like clubs more than anything. | ||
| I like doing the Vulcan. | ||
| Like, you're gonna do it with me tonight? | ||
| I'm pumped. | ||
| 270 people. | ||
| That's the perfect amount of people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's perfect. | |
| And it's fucking dirty. | ||
| It's on 6th Street, and everyone's hammered. | ||
| And we sell that place out just word of mouth. | ||
| There's no advertising. | ||
| It's every Tuesday and Wednesday we're there, so it's always packed. | ||
| And that's where you workshop. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And that's where we fuck around. | ||
| And that's where Shane was there last night. | ||
| And, you know, Norman's done it a bunch of times. | ||
| And Ari. | ||
| And it's like Brian Simpson and David Lucas. | ||
| And those guys just moved here to Austin, too. | ||
| And we got a great crew that lives here in Austin. | ||
| I mean, Tim Dillon's here. | ||
| Tom Segura. | ||
| Christina Brzezinski. | ||
| Does Tim live here full-time now? | ||
| Tim has a house here, and he has a house in Beverly Hills. | ||
| But he shits all over Austin every time he's here. | ||
| It's like, it's the worst city. | ||
| Joe Rogan, I'm thinking of suing him. | ||
| You know, it's like... | ||
| He came early on, and I was supposed to have this one club. | ||
| I bought a club and in the process of going through all the stuff with the architect, the architect was like, hey, do you know that these guys are non-compliant on a serious environmental order? | ||
| And I'm like, what? | ||
| And so it turned out that this road that led up to the club, there's a driveway to get down to the parking lot and the driveway was above a creek. | ||
| And they were like, all the water that rushes down here is gonna catch all the stuff that leaks off of people's cars. | ||
| Like all the oil and shit. | ||
| It's gonna go right in the creek. | ||
| So you have to build a 1.2 million biocontainment pond at the base of this parking lot. | ||
| And even that doesn't guarantee you're not gonna get some seepage into the creek. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| And I was like, there's not a fucking chance in hell. | ||
| There's gonna be an article written, Joe Rogan's killing fish in the river with his shitty jokes. | ||
| I'm like, oh no. | ||
| I can see. | ||
| Because I would be mad. | ||
| I care about lakes and creeks and rivers. | ||
| I like fishing. | ||
| I'm like, fuck this. | ||
| I'm not doing this. | ||
| So we had to bail out of that spot. | ||
| And then we got this other spot. | ||
| See, the other spot is in a way better place. | ||
| What's it called? | ||
| The club? | ||
| It's called the Comedy Mothership. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| It's fucking dope. | ||
| When's it gonna open? | ||
| Probably somewhere around January, it looks like. | ||
| We were supposed to get the keys in December, but we changed a few things that are gonna tack on some time, but most of the hard work is already done, and you get to see the bones of the club, you get to see the structure, what it's gonna look like. | ||
| I'll take you over there. | ||
| I can't wait to see it. | ||
| It's fucking wild. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| It's really cool. | ||
| We're excited. | ||
| And it's also exciting to be able to do something where you're like, you know, there's no real, there's no executives in upper management, there's no corporate. | ||
| There's just me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's just like fun. | ||
| And it's just like, I want it to be like a haven for stand-up. | ||
| Like, all your phones go in the bags, everyone has a yonder bag. | ||
| Oh wow, you're doing it upright. | ||
| Yeah, and we're just letting everybody know, like, this is for fun. | ||
| Like, this is where we're going to develop comedy, and this is going to be a place that, it's in the middle of the country, so it's a nice hub. | ||
| You can go to anywhere you want to go from there. | ||
| So if you want to, if you got gigs somewhere on a Friday and Saturday night, you want to come into Austin and do Wednesday, Thursday, bam, we got you. | ||
| That's pretty cool. | ||
| Yeah, we're excited. | ||
| That's exciting, man. | ||
| Yeah, there's like, a lot of clubs just don't do it right. | ||
| I mean, there's the classics, obviously, like in New York, thank God for the cellar, but there's a lot of clubs where you're like, Man, it's just so basic. | ||
| Just get us a fucking mic, an amp, low ceilings. | ||
| And when you do the clubs where the food is too good, I'm always a little annoyed. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I don't like food during the show. | ||
| I don't want to smell a fucking ribeye when I'm mid-punchline. | ||
| I'm like, is that a chimichurri sauce? | ||
| Cool, I can't focus on my act. | ||
| Yeah, any club that doesn't put the comic first is like... | ||
| It's bound to fail. | ||
| I played so many fucking bad clubs. | ||
| I'm sure you did too. | ||
| I mean, it's like some of those clubs, you know, it's always got a Z in the title or something, like a strip club, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or comedy with a K. It's the comedy corner. | ||
| We did bonkers with a Z. That was fucking rough. | ||
| That was a bad one. | ||
| So many... | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| I remember I did one club in Toledo that's no longer here. | ||
| It was called Laughs Inc. | ||
| with two Fs. | ||
| And I remember getting to the airport and my manager at the time texted me, did you cash your check yet? | ||
| I said, of course not. | ||
| I'm at the airport. | ||
| And he goes, cash it immediately. | ||
| And I was like, what do you mean? | ||
| He goes, the club just closed. | ||
| I'm like, two hours ago? | ||
| He goes, yeah, it went under. | ||
| I was literally the last comic to sit on stage there and... | ||
| I text the driver at the airport. | ||
| I was like, hey man, I'm so sorry about the club. | ||
| And he goes, what are you talking about? | ||
| I'm like, I'm not fucking breaking this to this dude. | ||
| So I was like, shit, all right, that's gone. | ||
| All those comics in the calendar ain't coming. | ||
| It happened a lot. | ||
| I remember I did a club in AC and not a good weekend to begin with. | ||
| I'm in Atlantic City. | ||
| It's a fucking horrible place. | ||
| It's fun for like a night because of that board. | ||
| It can be okay, but it's sad Vegas. | ||
| And Vegas ain't that upbeat to begin with after a couple nights. | ||
| But, you know, a couple nights in Vegas is fun. | ||
| Yeah, at least Vegas people think they're going to have a good time when they get there. | ||
| Atlantic City, they're like, okay, let's just go. | ||
| The way people leave Vegas is the way they enter Atlantic City. | ||
| But, yeah, I mean, look, Reno is pretty sad, too. | ||
| I mean, whatever. | ||
| But AC was like fucking, you know... | ||
| And I remember I'm doing a gig. | ||
| It's like a three headliner show. | ||
| We keep switching. | ||
| It's early on in my career. | ||
| And one of the guys is like a degenerate gambler. | ||
| One of the comics, he keeps losing money on baseball. | ||
| He's like, ah, I can't catch a fucking break. | ||
| That's all day in the green room. | ||
| I'm making me laugh my ass up. | ||
| But then on top of that, we all get stiffed on the bill. | ||
| I was like, oh man. | ||
| It wasn't like a good weekend to begin with. | ||
| I remember walking into the hotel and like stomping a cockroach. | ||
| I'm like, it's gonna be a long fucking week, you know? | ||
| But those are the great ones when you look back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you look back, those are the ones that give you the great feelings. | ||
| And when you're in a nice place, you appreciate it now. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Yeah, I remember my friend Adam showed up. | ||
| He's a degenerate gambler. | ||
| You ever have that friend who's such a degenerate gambler? | ||
| He's just at the casino when you're there. | ||
| I'm like, I didn't tell him I was here. | ||
| He's just like, hey man. | ||
| I was like, you're here? | ||
| He's like, yeah. | ||
| I thought we'd make a weekend out of him. | ||
| I'm like, fuck. | ||
| I remember rolling out of the show and just passing him at a poker table, shit face, just poking at people going, you fucking fish. | ||
| He's winning a lot of money. | ||
| He's just trolling people. | ||
| He's a drunk. | ||
| I was like, I got Adam all week. | ||
| And I got stiff. | ||
| When I first came to New York in like 92, I played pool a lot. | ||
| And so I hung out mostly in pool halls. | ||
| So I would go to the pool hall during the day. | ||
| I'd work out, go to the pool hall, go to the comedy club at night, and then go back to the pool hall. | ||
| I stayed at the pool hall until 4 o'clock in the morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| That was my everyday thing. | ||
| And I was hanging out with all degenerate gamblers. | ||
| So it was the first time in my life that I was around like these kind of people that would bet on rainwater coming down a windowpane. | ||
| I'm not lying. | ||
| I saw that. | ||
| I'm sure, yeah. | ||
| They'd bet on everything. | ||
| They'd play cards, they'd play dice, they'd play everything. | ||
| And pool, of course, everybody was gambling on pool. | ||
| And I'd never been around people that their whole life revolved around chance. | ||
| It was so important to them. | ||
| It was like, to get that little rush, the fucking nine ball goes in, yes! | ||
| They lived for that. | ||
| They developed this sort of community where everybody fed off of The thrills of making or losing all your money. | ||
| I remember Artie Lang used to have that line where he'd say, you want to feel real rushed, bet $1,000 in the Giants when you have $500 in your bank account. | ||
| It's like, fuck, that sums it up right there. | ||
| I mean, yeah, I remember Adam, my friend, texted me once. | ||
| He's like, the fucking Minnesota Lynx loss. | ||
| I'm like, dude, you're betting on the WNBA. Get your shit together. | ||
| Get your fucking shit together. | ||
| And you're probably doing it through bookies, right? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| He's... | ||
| And now that they can do it online, it's pretty wild. | ||
| Like, now it's just kind of opened up for the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You can bet on most things. | ||
| And, like, with fights, you can bet on whether or not it happens in a round, a round and a half, decision. | ||
| You can bet on a draw, which is a crazy bet. | ||
| But you love it, so you don't feel the urge to ever bet on UFC, right? | ||
| I used to bet on UFC. Really? | ||
| Even when I was commentating, I bet on it early on. | ||
| And I'm like, this is probably not legal. | ||
| Like... | ||
| You're giving it away. | ||
| You're like, fuck, he's losing! | ||
| Well, there was some lines that were so bad that I had to gamble on him. | ||
| So my business partner for Onnit, Aubrey, he would come to a lot of the fights, and I would give him—he would gamble. | ||
| So when I stopped gambling, I would just say—and we were at like 84% success rate. | ||
| It was so crazy because I was always— There was these guys that were coming from Japan, and the matchmakers might have known about them, but the bookmakers didn't. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So they had lines totally off. | ||
| They had guys who were even money that were a fucking steal. | ||
| And so there was certain fights I would go, I don't know about that one, but that one, bet the fucking house on the Brazilian guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And we would do this, and it was a crazy success rate. | ||
| It was somewhere in the range of 84%, 85%. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's fucking insane. | ||
| Yeah, but I'm sure the lines are better now. | ||
| But every now and then, the lines are fucked. | ||
| Every now and then, I'm like, this doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Because to understand fighting and to understand the lines, you've got to watch this guy's whole fucking career. | ||
| You've got to watch 10, 15 fights. | ||
| You've got to watch him fight against wrestlers, fight against strikers. | ||
| What happens when he gets tired? | ||
| What happens if he gets into the third round? | ||
| Does he quit if he... | ||
| It starts getting dumb. | ||
| Some guys are very good as the hammer, but not so good as the nail. | ||
| Some guys don't bounce back. | ||
| They are just frontrunners. | ||
| And if they frontrun, they can steamroll over everybody. | ||
| But as soon as a fight gets rough, their confidence shatters and they fall off. | ||
| And so you've got to know what kind of scenarios this guy's been in. | ||
| And so it takes a lot of information. | ||
| And you have that information because you're a student of it. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Yeah, I never thought of it. | ||
| I mean, I don't know fighting in detail like you do, obviously. | ||
| The sport I really follow heavily is basketball, a little bit of football, baseball, you know, but basketball, if friends ask me to gamble, I'm like, I don't want to be told what to do with your money. | ||
| I can enjoy it without that. | ||
| I can watch two random teams, and I love the game, so I can enjoy it, but you have those friends who are like, just help me out. | ||
| I'm like... | ||
| I'm nervous taking your money and telling you what to do, but I do have a decent success rate with it. | ||
| What's your success rate about? | ||
| I mean, I'd say like 70%, 60%, 70%, which is not bad. | ||
| That's pretty fucking good. | ||
| If you were a gambler. | ||
| But I don't want to give my money to chance. | ||
| I'll do like $5 or $10 on FanDuel every once in a while because it's just fun, but I don't do it for money. | ||
| I don't like the idea of taking money that I worked for and then being like, Maybe. | ||
| Well, you know, I don't like that. | ||
| No, and for it to be something that really affects you, it's got to be a lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, so once you start making like five, ten grand a weekend, and then you put a grand on a game, you're like, ooh. | ||
| And then you're like, well, that was exciting. | ||
| What about $2,500? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, and then you lose a couple. | ||
| Now you're down five, and you're only making five this weekend. | ||
| You're like, oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| Like, what am I doing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If I'm at a casino, I'll do low stakes, blackjack, and I just tell myself, I'm okay losing this amount of money. | ||
| I just go in with that mentality. | ||
| Yeah, but you just lose it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Unless you're good at it. | ||
| I'm not good at gambling. | ||
| I'm terrible. | ||
| I went to Vegas. | ||
| I was with Whitney Cummings. | ||
| I went with my wife, and Whitney was doing a gig. | ||
| So I went to a private gig with Drew... | ||
| No, not... | ||
| Who the fuck was it? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Dana Carvey and Whitney Cummings were doing a gig in this lady's house. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They did a gig in this woman's house. | ||
| It's you, Dana, and Whitney. | ||
| I was just there with Whitney. | ||
| So I went on just to introduce Whitney. | ||
| Because I go, do you want me to bring you up? | ||
| And she's like, that'd be hilarious. | ||
| So I just brought her up at this lady's house. | ||
| I wasn't even supposed to be there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So I introduce her, and then she goes and does it. | ||
| And, you know, it was such a fucked up situation. | ||
| Like, she wound up just doing crowd work. | ||
| She was just, like, fucking around with these people. | ||
| And then we went and... | ||
| That's probably what they wanted, though. | ||
| That's probably the show they... | ||
| They were just happy to see Whitney and happy to see Dana Carvey in their house, you know, in the living room with all their friends at this weird party. | ||
| I did a gig like that once with my friend Rachel Feinstein and Ray Allen in an Orthodox Jewish home in Montclair, New Jersey. | ||
| Guy was worth a billion dollars. | ||
| Thirty-something-year-old guy. | ||
| Holy shit, man. | ||
| One of the worst gigs of my life. | ||
| Horrible. | ||
| I'm such trash. | ||
| They were like, take whatever liquor you want. | ||
| So I just took like a duffel bag. | ||
| I'm just like dumping liquor. | ||
| And Rachel was like, you're fucking garbage. | ||
| You're a garbage human being. | ||
| I was like, well, we hit the bomb for these people. | ||
| I may as well raid their liquor. | ||
| I'm taking like 24-year-old scotch. | ||
| I'm like, this is great. | ||
| And then as we're leaving, she's like, can I have a bottle? | ||
| I was like, no, you judged me for this. | ||
| And I gave her a bottle. | ||
| But, uh, terrible gig. | ||
| Was the gig, did they have restrictions on what you could talk about? | ||
| No, they just were fucking, like, they were, like, in this bubble. | ||
| You know those types of people where they're, like, they don't go out for entertainment. | ||
| So there's, like, a magician there. | ||
| He's just, like, handing out, like, he's doing tricks. | ||
| I'm like, dude, it's not... | ||
| We don't get it, whatever. | ||
| So then we're doing the gig. | ||
| We're all bombing. | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| They were nice enough, but one guy cornered us and they were like, let him sing to you. | ||
| So he's singing Hebrew songs to us. | ||
| I'm like, this guy's got a terrible voice. | ||
| No one's told him because they live in a bubble. | ||
| So he's like two inches from my face just singing. | ||
| And I'm trying so hard to keep a straight face, but I can't. | ||
| I'm just laughing. | ||
| I can't stop laughing. | ||
| And I turn to Rachel, who's trying to avoid eye contact with me, because she knows if she sees me, she's going to break out. | ||
| She sees it. | ||
| We're just laughing at these people because we can't help it. | ||
| They just tell me he's a great singer because they're in a bubble and they don't know what good sound sounds like. | ||
| And they're super rich. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, they were pouring. | ||
| They were like, do you want some fruity pebbles with goat milk? | ||
| And I'm like, sure. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's fantastic. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It's very high-end milk, I guess, and I was like, man. | ||
| High-end milk? | ||
| I'll try anything once. | ||
| As you get that rich, you start looking for high-end regular products. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Raw goat milk. | ||
| It was pretty good, but I'm also like, you know, I don't know if it was good or it was just good that I wasn't performing for them anymore. | ||
| You know, it was like a tough crowd. | ||
| Yeah, I'm glad I don't have to do those gigs, but those are the kind of gigs that you remember when you're later in life, when things are going well. | ||
| Oh, we were laughing the whole ride back. | ||
| It was one of those. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those are the good ones. | ||
| Those are fun. | ||
| My friend Steve Rinell always says there's two kinds of fun. | ||
| There's fun that you have while you're having it that you never remember afterwards, like roller coasters are fun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Nobody ever talks about roller coasters, like six months later. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But then you have horrible experiences, and six months later they're the best stories. | ||
| And you can sit around and laugh. | ||
| That's comedy. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| That's the jokes. | ||
| The jokes come from the bad things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The bad things that are now... | ||
| No one wants to hear, like, I did a great thing this time. | ||
| Who gives a shit? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I want to hear about you falling flat on your face and losing two teeth. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| That's the funny story. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's, like, the stories that come from bad experiences. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, dude. | ||
| I remember whenever something bad happens to me, I'm like, it's going to be a bit. | ||
| And that's, like... | ||
| It provides comfort. | ||
| I mean, it really is, like, nice when, like, something bad happens, like, I'll get five minutes out of this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's why you, like, sometimes when I need a new album, I'm like, I'll live recklessly for a few months, you know? | ||
| My friend Stavros did a whole thing about it. | ||
| He's like, my therapist is on vacation for all of August. | ||
| I'm about to make some toxic fucking life choices. | ||
| I was like, yeah, I feel the same way, you know? | ||
| When you write, do you write in essay form? | ||
| Do you write in joke form? | ||
| Like, how do you write? | ||
| I'll try to do, like, I'll write long form and then I'll try to make it funny. | ||
| I'm like, where's the... | ||
| I mean, I fall ass... | ||
| That's why I do long sets. | ||
| I fall ass backwards into a lot of jokes where I'm like, oh, I guess that's the punchline. | ||
| Like, a lot of it's like, I don't realize it all the time. | ||
| Like, that's the great thing about comedy is, like, the crowd is a part of the editing, which I love. | ||
| So I'm like, well, the longer and more sets I get, the better chance I'll have. | ||
| I always felt like, well, I'm not the funniest guy, so I gotta work my fucking ass off if I wanna have a career at this, you know? | ||
| And I do a lot of jokes, so it's like you gotta just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. | ||
| It's the only way. | ||
| It's the only art form that I think exists where it's a cooperative venture with you in the audience. | ||
| And I love that about it. | ||
| There's something cool about that. | ||
| Everything else, you're like, this is good, it's done. | ||
| I mean, I guess some movies focus tests, but at that point, it's almost dangerous, I think, because that's not what that art is. | ||
| Some people don't do it that way, which is interesting to me. | ||
| Cosby would just write out a monologue, and he didn't perform in front of anybody, and then he would go and do it on stage. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He didn't play by the rules, you could say. | ||
| I knew you were going somewhere. | ||
| I saw your eyes roll to the left. | ||
| Carlin would do that too. | ||
| He would develop a monologue. | ||
| But he was more of a monologuist. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| Carlin's style wouldn't have been embraced by Brooklyn hipsters. | ||
| They would have been like, no, you've got to act like you just thought of it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Carlin was like... | ||
| And they would have been like, this is so prepared. | ||
| Whereas I think it's cool as fuck that he put that much work into it. | ||
| Yeah, that Brooklyn hipster thing. | ||
| That's a trap. | ||
| It's good to do everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's a trap. | ||
| Cross-training. | ||
| But yeah, it's good to... | ||
| I want to hit every city I can because I'm like, oh, the jokes work here, they didn't work here as well, let's tweak this. | ||
| But yeah, it is a trap. | ||
| If you only play one place, it's always a trap. | ||
| Yeah, there's people that get captive by their community, and then when they do the road, they're fucked. | ||
| Because they have local references, and they do New York-style comedy or Boston-style comedy, and then they go on the road and they're doomed. | ||
| But in that one city, dude. | ||
| You don't want to follow that guy. | ||
| Oh my god, you never want to follow an old school Boston headliner in Boston. | ||
| So true. | ||
| You're dead. | ||
| I had a great Boston guy open for me once on New Year's. | ||
| He's so funny. | ||
| This guy, Dan Bolger. | ||
| And like, holy shit, did I have to work? | ||
| I was like, this dude is putting... | ||
| He's great. | ||
| I mean, it was just one of those where I'm like, he's witty, he's killing, and he's low energy, so he's earning it. | ||
| It's really like a fucking hard follow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it was on New Year's, so I'm like, dude, I wanted to fucking relax. | ||
| You're making me have to step my shit up. | ||
| Every time I do New Year's, I say I'm never doing New Year's again. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just too much of a thing. | ||
| Everybody's just so excited to be at New Year's. | ||
| It's like they're barely paying attention to the comedy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They can't wait for the 12, 11, 10, 9, yay! | |
| They're waiting for that moment where they can fucking make the noisemakers go off and let the balloons loose. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Any event is down to disappoint. | ||
| I mean, it's like anything you do on New Year's is disappointing. | ||
| That's why you may as well just stay in and do what you know will be good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just ignore it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just a day. | ||
| It's a stupid fucking tradition we have of deciding. | ||
| Any holiday is dangerous for comedy. | ||
| Because Valentine's Day, I'm like, ugh, so I'm going to have to not do breakup material. | ||
| Ugh. | ||
| I have to placate these fucking couples. | ||
| Halloween, I'm like, oh cool, there's a guy in a priest outfit. | ||
| Let me try to avoid a pedophile joke. | ||
| Psych, I'm doing all pedophile jokes. | ||
| I hate the costumes on Halloween, but I also am kind of weirdly excited for them. | ||
| Well, it's fun because people are being silly. | ||
| They've dropped a little bit of pretense, at least. | ||
| At least they've come out with a little bit of fun. | ||
| Yeah, I kind of hate the expectation of something that isn't the show. | ||
| Yeah, I know what you're saying. | ||
| Like, if it's the show and they're like, I want to go see a show I think will be good, great. | ||
| But if it's like, it's fucking, you know, it's Thanksgiving night. | ||
| That's a tough one, too. | ||
| That's like families and stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Geez, I remember doing Thanksgiving in St. Louis. | ||
| That's a fucking, sounds like a David Foster Wallace book or something, you know? | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| It was fucking terrible. | ||
| It was a terrible gig. | ||
| There's a lot of terrible gigs. | ||
| What club did you start at? | ||
| I started at the comic strip in New York City. | ||
| What year? | ||
| I started at 18, so that's the first place I went up, is a comic strip. | ||
| And I did the class there. | ||
| How old are you now? | ||
| I just turned 36 yesterday. | ||
| 18 years in? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a good time. | ||
| I wasn't really in, though, those first couple years. | ||
| You don't really know what you're doing. | ||
| When you're 18, you're not really into anything. | ||
| No. | ||
| I was like, I get to drink for free here. | ||
| They're not carding me. | ||
| They don't know I'm 18. So I was like, I get free alcohol? | ||
| I'm fucking in. | ||
| My parents were like, we feel like you're doing this for the wrong reasons. | ||
| I'm like, you nailed it. | ||
| 100% I'm doing this for the wrong reasons. | ||
| What did they think were the right reasons? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They were terrified that I was doing this. | ||
| And then, you know... | ||
| The comic strip was great to me, though, at first. | ||
| And then it got to a point where it was like, you can't keep going up where you started. | ||
| They'll always look at you as that. | ||
| Yeah, they always think of you as a beginner. | ||
| So that was pretty tough, because I was going up there for so long. | ||
| And the nepotism at that club was pretty painful. | ||
| I remember doing late night there every night. | ||
| And we'd be hanging out for three hours to go on, and they would let some dude who had a famous person's last name cut you. | ||
| And I'm like, dude, they just walked in five minutes ago. | ||
| And they weren't good. | ||
| They were at our level, you know, or worse. | ||
| So then that was a tough part, is every person that would go on before you would walk people, because it was like three hours into the show. | ||
| So I remember my audition there. | ||
| You draw numbers for your audition, and I got sixth out of six, and I was like, fuck, there's gonna be no one left. | ||
| 80 people in the crowd remained, and I'm like, please, just don't be that bad that you walk people. | ||
| And this guy had a fucking nervous breakdown right before me. | ||
| He was number five. | ||
| Everyone's still there. | ||
| This guy is a full-on meltdown. | ||
| He's like, what am I doing up here? | ||
| I can't do this. | ||
| And the crowd's like, what the fuck is happening? | ||
| So he just starts having a full-on panic attack, and I shit you not, 60 out of the 70 people walked out. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| I've been waiting for this shot for like a year. | ||
| God damn it, dude. | ||
| And I'm like, dude, just there's one table left. | ||
| Play to that one table. | ||
| And I went up and they passed me because they were like, the owner at the time, Richie, who just passed away was like, you didn't buckle. | ||
| So I'll give it to you. | ||
| And I was like, all right. | ||
| And then I was at the club for fucking years. | ||
| They just didn't... | ||
| They like to haze you, which I kind of look back and I respect. | ||
| Like, they like to fuck with you a little bit, which is like, eh, maybe a little bit of that's lost in today's comedy, where, like, it does build a little character to a degree. | ||
| But they would do it to a point where I was like, there's no reason to this. | ||
| You're just fucking with me at this point, you know? | ||
| Like, I remember I did the audition, because that was the audition to do, like, the late night there, and then I did the audition to do... | ||
| The regular show. | ||
| And they just fucking, they do an audition. | ||
| I kill. | ||
| And they were like, yeah, I've seen some of those jokes. | ||
| I don't want to pass you. | ||
| And the crowd was like booing. | ||
| They would do like an American Idol set up. | ||
| So they would just like trash you. | ||
| Like they had the one guy who's like, I'm the Simon. | ||
| He was the booker at the time. | ||
| And he just trashed me. | ||
| And the crowd was like, you're an asshole. | ||
| He killed. | ||
| And they were like, if you come back next week, and dude, next week? | ||
| I'm like, alright, new material, alright. | ||
| So I come back the next week, and I did a new set, and they finally passed me. | ||
| But it was one of the things where I'm like, man, I fucking, I gotta get out of here. | ||
| So that's when I started doing Caroline's, and you can't work where you started. | ||
| No, they don't, I didn't get any respect in Boston until I came back. | ||
| Isn't that weird? | ||
| Well, it's normal. | ||
| They remember when you were fucking terrible. | ||
| I know. | ||
| They remember you bombing and being an open-miker and fucking just sucking. | ||
| Yeah, and then you come back, I don't shine shoes no more. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Got that little fucking ego now, and you're like, no, I'm fucking, I'm not, I still don't work there, because they would always be mad at me when I would cancel there, and it's like, I'm sorry, man, a comedy seller gives me, like, 12 spots a week, you give me three a month, I gotta prioritize the place that books me, you know? | ||
| Well, that's how it always is. | ||
| The places where you start out, they remember. | ||
| So when you were 18, you started, and when did you get serious? | ||
| I was pretty serious. | ||
| I was in college in New York, and I was pretty serious. | ||
| I went away to Tulane for like a year and a half, but Hurricane Katrina hit. | ||
| So that hurt my plans a little bit. | ||
| I remember my parents dropped me off. | ||
| They're like, it'll be fine. | ||
| Then I'm like, I think a hurricane's coming, and we have to evacuate immediately. | ||
| I was there for a while, and I made some good friends there, but I ended up leaving. | ||
| I was barking in the summers for the clubs and stuff, and I was handing out flyers every few hours a night. | ||
| I was like, oh man, I love this. | ||
| I can't go back to New Orleans. | ||
| Those are the salad days. | ||
| I loved it, dude. | ||
| I was such a bad barker, though. | ||
| My energy is too morose. | ||
| I'm not convincing anyone to go see a show with this energy. | ||
| And those are the best when they come in, and then I go on, and they're like, you said it was a good show. | ||
| Like, you're on the fucking show, you know? | ||
| And I was like, I have to be like, sorry, but I gotta work on these, you know? | ||
| And that's when I got serious. | ||
| When I got really serious, I won a festival in Atlanta called Laughing Skull, and the prize was a year worth of road work. | ||
| So I was like, I'm almost like, yeah, I was like doing some, yeah, yeah. | ||
| How do they do that? | ||
| They followed up with all these clubs that were willing to participate and like the B and C rooms would headline me and the A rooms would feature me and I was working every week. | ||
| I was selling t-shirts and shit and I was really... | ||
| How many years in? | ||
| I was probably 23 or so. | ||
| So this is when you realize like, okay, I'm 100% all in on comedy. | ||
| I had enough material, because you had to do different material each round, and I ended up winning, and there was a guy who had a better set than me. | ||
| I think he should have won, but they chose me. | ||
| And yeah, it was really working. | ||
| And that's when I was very organized. | ||
| I didn't have managers or anything, but I had Google Docs filled with bookers, and I would reach out to all of them myself with subject heading booking, and then I would re-email them every 10 days until I got booked. | ||
| And... | ||
| And it was, I loved it. | ||
| I loved the road early on, although early on it made me a bad comic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How so? | |
| Because you need, I was on the road too much, and I was just doing shitholes, and you start playing to those bad, like when you do too many bad crowds, you're like a dog that someone just keeps beating with a fucking newspaper, and you're just like biting everything. | ||
| So then when you get a good crowd, you just, you bite them. | ||
| And they're like, what did we do? | ||
| And I'm like, I don't know, I'm fucking, I'm fucked up now, I'm sorry. | ||
| So I got really mad. | ||
| Too early, because I was just always doing bad crowds at these horribly run rooms. | ||
| And then you start doing good clubs, and you're like, oh my god, I can't believe I'm doing good clubs. | ||
| But yeah, early on, I was so fucking used to just people heckling the entire set. | ||
| So you get good at comebacks, but you're not writing thoughtful jokes when they're just screaming shit out, you know? | ||
| So, your parents were worried about you doing it because it's just so open-ended? | ||
| My brother and sister are lawyers. | ||
| My dad's a lawyer. | ||
| My mom's an artist, so she understands that stuff, but at the same time, you know, I think, yeah, I remember the night they... | ||
| My parents are very weird what impresses them. | ||
| You know, it's like classic New York shit where I do Conan, they'd be like, oh, whatever. | ||
| But then I would be on like... | ||
| My dad's like, you were written about in the New York Times. | ||
| And I'd be like, they said I was bad. | ||
| He's like, but still the Times, you know? | ||
| And I'd be like, all right, whatever. | ||
| And then my mom was terrified, I think, just because she just worries. | ||
| My mom's a worrier. | ||
| She's like, you know, she just worries. | ||
| And I remember the night they were like, oh, we get it now. | ||
| And it was... | ||
| I opened for Jim Jeffries. | ||
| It was called the Best Buy Theater. | ||
| I think it's a different theater now in New York. | ||
| But it was a pretty big theater, and it was when Jim was doing that gun material too, so it was such a good special. | ||
| And my parents were like, this funny guy wanted Sam to open. | ||
| I think that was the moment where they were like, oh, okay. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| So that was really cool. | ||
| I always give Jim a lot of credit for getting my parents on board. | ||
| I think my mom was like, he was very shocking, but he's very smart. | ||
| And I was like, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, for a parent to hear your kid wants to be a stand-up comic, I mean, think about the guys you started out with in Open Mic. | ||
| How many of them are actually doing comedy now? | ||
| Not a lot. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| That's the thing, is you start out and you don't realize what it takes, and now I'm like, wow, I didn't realize how hard you had to work at stand-up, but luckily I love it. | ||
| My ADD is so bad, it's really hard for me to focus at anything except for stand-up. | ||
| I'm very disciplined and organized with stand-up, but literally everything else, I'm a fucking idiot. | ||
| Yeah, because you care about it, though. | ||
| That whole ADD thing, I have a real problem with that. | ||
| I have a real problem with what it means. | ||
| First of all, I have a real problem with that people just medicate their kids. | ||
| Your kid's got ADD, he needs medication. | ||
| So then you put him on something that takes away this one thing that he has, which is this excess amount of energy. | ||
| And if they could just find something that they really enjoy, maybe there's a benefit to that. | ||
| You know, like, people, they think that there's some sort of evolutionary characteristic that saved people early on, is to hyper-focus on specific things. | ||
| And ADD is kind of like that. | ||
| Because, like, if you're trying to be a hunter, or you're trying to do, like, all these other things that are going on, I don't care. | ||
| Even though you're supposed to care. | ||
| But you should care about this one thing. | ||
| I need to find food. | ||
| You know, and that you can lock in on that and have this extraordinary amount of attention to the detriment of your other duties. | ||
| But that's because they're not as significant to you. | ||
| Like, what is significant to you is stand-up, this big thing. | ||
| So you do have, like, I thought the same thing about me when I was a kid. | ||
| I was like, I cannot pay attention in class. | ||
| I must be a moron. | ||
| I'm not interested in things. | ||
| And then I realized, oh, no, no, no, I'm very interested in some things. | ||
| But I'm only interested in what I'm interested in. | ||
| But I'm like, well, now I'm fucked because I'll never have a job because I'm not interested in jobs. | ||
| Like, what am I going to do? | ||
| I'm going to be a loser. | ||
| And until stand-up came along, I really didn't think that there was a thing that I could focus on that could be a living. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know? | ||
| Like, everything else that I was interested in was just... | ||
| It didn't matter. | ||
| It was pointless. | ||
| But you become almost... | ||
| Because of that, you become obsessed with the thing you're into. | ||
| That's a good thing. | ||
| I was like, oh yeah, maybe I'm not meant to know a shitload about pre-algebra or something, you know? | ||
| But I will say, those pills, holy shit. | ||
| I don't abuse them, but if I need a kickstart when I need a new hour, I pop a Concertan or something, and I'm like, boom, off to the races, performance enhanced. | ||
| What is Concertan? | ||
| It's like Adderall. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Like time release. | ||
| I've never done that. | ||
| I mean, shit, dude. | ||
| That's where I'm like, wow, I can... | ||
| I'm like, oh, this is how I'm supposed to be paying attention to shit, I think. | ||
| But I don't think that is... | ||
| I don't think that's normal. | ||
| Well, I don't abuse it, but sometimes you need a fucking... | ||
| I try to do a lot of topical jokes, and I'm like, I'm not reading the paper without this shit. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| How often do you take it? | ||
| Not a ton. | ||
| Like, you know, every other week or something. | ||
| Only once a week? | ||
| Yeah, maybe even less. | ||
| I don't want to ever abuse it, you know? | ||
| Is it prescribed? | ||
| Yeah, I have it. | ||
| They're old. | ||
| They're probably fucking expired, honestly. | ||
| Eh, still works. | ||
| I used to have a doctor who was really cool, and then he moved to the Philippines. | ||
| I was like, damn it, that was my hookup. | ||
| He's probably got an 18-year-old wife now. | ||
| There's a lot of those guys. | ||
| Yeah, they fucking rule. | ||
| That's what Art Bell did. | ||
| His wife died. | ||
| He went over to the Philippines. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Yeah, that's a normal thing. | ||
| I know my friend Jay, he was in his 60s and he got some girl pregnant in the Philippines. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Yeah, he had like a family in the Philippines. | ||
| That sounds like a lot. | ||
| I get anxiety just hearing that. | ||
| Yeah, right? | ||
| You have a child in a third world country that is over there and you send money and you hope they live. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Man. | ||
| Yeah, be careful who you nut inside. | ||
| Yeah, that's wise words. | ||
| Yeah, it should be a fortune cookie. | ||
| Yeah, that's wise words. | ||
| Just don't nut in anybody. | ||
| Or if you do, really know them. | ||
| Know them? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's where the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor intersect, is that they'll both nut in anyone. | ||
| I think the middle class is careful. | ||
| It's humans. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, there's a reason why there's 7.5 billion fucking people. | ||
| It's funny people. | ||
| It's fun to nut inside people. | ||
| I'm so careful about it. | ||
| What is that you're smoking there? | ||
| Is that weed? | ||
| Damn. | ||
| You're like a man who can- No, no, no. | ||
| I can't handle weed. | ||
| I panic. | ||
| You're amazing because you can do like everything. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| I mean, you got the gym here, you can have a whiskey, you have your coffee, you have the weed. | ||
| I mean, you're like a guy who can kind of handle everything. | ||
| Yeah, but I don't do stimulants. | ||
| Yeah, that makes sense. | ||
| I don't think I need them. | ||
| I don't need anything that gives me confidence. | ||
| I'm looking for something that destroys my confidence. | ||
| I'm looking for things that make me nervous. | ||
| Like, legitimately. | ||
| I like to get high before I go on stage. | ||
| I want to feel nervous. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I could never smoke weed before I do a set. | ||
| I could have a couple drinks. | ||
| Couple drinks is good. | ||
| Three drinks, not so good. | ||
| Four drinks, not so good. | ||
| No. | ||
| After the show. | ||
| Yeah, after the show. | ||
| But yeah, a drink or so before a show, but I like a little bit of weed. | ||
| Late show, I like a drink, because I'm like, let me get a little on their level. | ||
| They're fucked up. | ||
| They're fucked up. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| Yeah, you don't want to be a sober guy in front of a room full of drunks and just have disdain. | ||
| You feel like a substitute teacher. | ||
| I'm like, when did I become the fucking Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds all of a sudden on this late show? | ||
| This stinks. | ||
| You want to be like the fun substitute teacher. | ||
| You don't want to be the, you know, like, come on, you know? | ||
| Yeah, the amphetamines thing scares the shit out of me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because it seems like people, they can't stop doing that. | ||
| Once they start doing that stuff, they want to do it all the time. | ||
| I just know way too many people that have had a problem with Adderall. | ||
| Yeah, I would never get addicted to that stuff. | ||
| I think also the coke stuff. | ||
| I never have done coke, which shocks people. | ||
| Me neither. | ||
| But now you do coke, you're like, man, that's some Russian roulette you're playing with. | ||
| With fentanyl? | ||
| You're playing a dangerous game. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How many people die from that shit? | ||
| 100,000 every year. | ||
| It's the number one cause of death between people 18 to 49 years old right now. | ||
| That's fucking terrible. | ||
| It's fucking wild. | ||
| And it's up, way up, since the pill manufacturers started selling opiates and lying, the pharmaceutical companies lying to people about whether or not they're addictive. | ||
| And then people got addicted and then, you know, Florida had this thing they used to call the OxyContin Express. | ||
| Vanguard did this show with Mariana Van Zeller, who's this lady who's really wild. | ||
| She does this undercover, boots-on-the-ground investigative journalism where she goes to cocaine manufacturers in Colombia and she's with them in the jungle and packs out with them. | ||
| To see how they prepare it? | ||
| To see how they do it all, yeah. | ||
| The show's called Trafficked. | ||
| It's a wild fucking show. | ||
| And she started, she works with her husband, who films her too. | ||
| And she went down to Florida. | ||
| And Florida, what they were doing is they'd have these pain pill mills. | ||
| And what it is, is you go to a doctor and the doctor's in a pain management center. | ||
| So the doctor says, you need pain pills. | ||
| And you go right next door to the pharmacy, which only sells pain pills. | ||
| And they don't have a database. | ||
| So you would go to this pain management center and say, my back is killing me. | ||
| And they go, oh, wow, Sam, I got a cure for you. | ||
| And they give it to you, go next door. | ||
| They give you a fucking big fat bottle of pills. | ||
| And then you go a mile away to another pain management center. | ||
| And you say, my back hurts. | ||
| And they go, oh, Sam, we got something for you. | ||
| And you go right next to them. | ||
| And they had no fucking regulation on it. | ||
| And so people were stockpiling. | ||
| They would go to all these different places and then they'd sell it. | ||
| And then they'd put it in bags and drive it up through Kentucky. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Damn. | |
| They'd drive it out of Florida and they'd call it the OxyContin Express. | ||
| And they since have put some sort of regulation in place because, I mean, that was a blight on their state and that documentary was pretty powerful and a lot of people were aware of it and I think they changed some of the regulations. | ||
| But at one point in time, Florida had no database and it was the number one. | ||
| There was more pills prescribed in Florida per year than the entire country. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Florida, man. | ||
| Florida. | ||
| They really are a fucking... | ||
| That's a hell of a state. | ||
| It really is the cock of the country. | ||
| It really... | ||
| You know, it's also interesting... | ||
| Doctors in Florida prescribe 10 times more oxycodone pills than every other state in the country combined. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Ten times more. | ||
| Do you ever see that documentary? | ||
| People come from all over the southeast to visit the state's pain clinics. | ||
| Is that still going on? | ||
| This is from 2011. Jesus. | ||
| So this was like right around the time where that documentary came out. | ||
| Yeah, you know that doc, The Pharmacist? | ||
| No. | ||
| It was on Netflix. | ||
| It was about the guy, his son was like hooked on that shit and his son got killed in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans. | ||
| It's pretty well done. | ||
| It's a well done Netflix doc. | ||
| Yeah, that's a scary thing, man. | ||
| It's also scary that that's legal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because it's like, what is the solution? | ||
| You know, the solution used to be the war on drugs, legalize everything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, but what about that? | ||
| I know. | ||
| Because that's legal. | ||
| Like, these people are getting it legally, and it's ruining everyone's lives. | ||
| And kids are doing it, and kids don't know how to fucking handle this shit yet. | ||
| Adults don't, so why would kids? | ||
| I know a guy, he had his shit together, he's a construction worker, good guy. | ||
| Family, whole deal. | ||
| Hurts his back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They get him on pain pills. | ||
| And now he's fucked. | ||
| He's fucked. | ||
| He's still fucked. | ||
| All these years later. | ||
| It's two decades later. | ||
| His life's a mess. | ||
| He can't keep a job. | ||
| He's always, like, sleeping on people's couches. | ||
| And he's always, like, looking to do drugs. | ||
| That's all he wants to do. | ||
| And if you ask him about it, you know, it's like, you know, I'm happier when I do them. | ||
| Like, my life sucks. | ||
| And a lot of people feel that way. | ||
| Like, their life sucks. | ||
| It's not... | ||
| There's nothing to look forward to. | ||
| But if they get that high in them, they're like... | ||
| Everything's amazing. | ||
| And they just live for everything's amazing. | ||
| And then when you come down off of that, then your suck is even suckier. | ||
| Because now you feel like shit, and you're jonesing. | ||
| You're sick. | ||
| You need to get more heroin in you. | ||
| And then you have to figure out a way to make money, and you have to figure out a way to get it. | ||
| And then once you get it, you can't stop getting it. | ||
| And then someone puts you in rehab, and you're in rehab for a few months. | ||
| Like, okay, I'm going to get my life together. | ||
| But your life sucks. | ||
| And you know what doesn't suck? | ||
| Heroin. | ||
| Heroin doesn't suck. | ||
| And so you just try it again and, ah, life's amazing. | ||
| And you just keep going to that. | ||
| And that's your new source of happiness in life. | ||
| And you never develop the skills to figure out how to not do that and the skills to figure out how to make regular moments in life, which are actually even better than being on heroin. | ||
| To be connected is everything. | ||
| I mean, that's really... | ||
| I mean, I love alcohol. | ||
| I love drinking. | ||
| But, like, those moments where... | ||
| Sometimes I'll talk to my therapist and he'll be like, well, why do you have to drink on a date? | ||
| And I was like, because it loosens the ice. | ||
| You know, it breaks the ice easier. | ||
| And he goes, try being connected to a person. | ||
| You don't need that shit. | ||
| And I'm like, I could try that. | ||
| So, like, those moments where you are connected are... | ||
| There are human moments. | ||
| You can work on that shit. | ||
| I think all drugs are tools. | ||
| And the way I look at marijuana is the same way I look at alcohol. | ||
| It's the same way I look at everything. | ||
| It's the same way I look at tools. | ||
| Like, I had a joke about it in my act. | ||
| If you had a hammer, you can use that hammer and you could build a house. | ||
| Or you could hit yourself in the dick if you're fucking crazy. | ||
| So it's up to you. | ||
| What are you going to do with the tool? | ||
| If you're telling me that I can't have a glass or two of whiskey and have a lot of laughs at my friends and not ruin my life, well, you're incorrect because I've done that a lot. | ||
| So you're wrong. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| But if you're telling me that some people don't have self-control and they have one or two drinks and then they get gerbilized and they're gone. | ||
| If you're seeing people with their eyes look like shark eyes, there's no one there. | ||
| I spend time downtown here. | ||
| There's no one there. | ||
| It's fucking a lot. | ||
| The eyeballs are gone, and then they're just out, and they're blacked out drunk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| That's some people. | ||
| Some people get that. | ||
| I'm fortunate that I don't have that in my family, it's not my genes, and that I have discipline. | ||
| But I don't buy the argument that life is better without drugs. | ||
| How would we even know? | ||
| Most people are doing drugs. | ||
| Someone's smoking cigarettes that'll talk to you about don't do this. | ||
| Someone's drinking coffee every day. | ||
| They can't function without their coffee, but they're telling you you shouldn't drink. | ||
| Someone's smoking pot, but they think it's wrong to do other things. | ||
| Like, come on. | ||
| Oh, and I see, like, I'll see TikTok videos where guys are like, coffee is poison, you're taking, like, natural, like, it's not natural energy, and I'm like, you look like you got problems, too, though. | ||
| Like, I'll stick, I like coffee, I'm gonna stick with coffee. | ||
| Yeah, coffee's not bad. | ||
| What's bad is not taking care of your body. | ||
| Now, if you drink so much coffee that you're ruining your body, yeah, I'd say take some time off and try to figure out what the fuck's going on there. | ||
| How much is too much? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| How much do you drink? | ||
| I don't drink that much. | ||
| I drink a couple glasses during a podcast. | ||
| I'll have like two, maybe one in the morning. | ||
| That's probably it. | ||
| But Dave Foley, who was on news radio with me, drank so much coffee that he stopped putting cream in it because he realized he was drinking a quart of cream a day. | ||
| So like a quart of half and half. | ||
| This fucking dude's poor. | ||
| That's how much cream. | ||
| Because he was just drinking coffee all day long. | ||
| He would drink pots and pots of coffee. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You've had so many careers. | ||
| That's crazy, right? | ||
| It's pretty wild. | ||
| You've been around a long time. | ||
| Yeah, it's really strange. | ||
| It's strange for me because it's me. | ||
| It's hard to believe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Is it weird to see episodes? | ||
| I don't watch them. | ||
| My kids watch them. | ||
| It holds up. | ||
| It's a good show. | ||
| It's interesting, though. | ||
| It's weird to see a 27-year-old me on television going, Jesus Christ. | ||
| But it's cool. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's cool. | |
| It's just weird because your past is always weird, right? | ||
| You're thinking about, oh, yeah, I did that. | ||
| But to see it on video is even stranger because it feels like... | ||
| Even if I say I was on a sitcom, it sounds like a lie. | ||
| It was so long ago, it sounds like a lie. | ||
| Well, that's because there's so few left, too. | ||
| Well, it's also because it's like my life is so different than that. | ||
| It's like trying to relate to that time of my life is like, hmm... | ||
| The big one for me is martial arts. | ||
| When I talk about when I used to fight, that makes me feel like I'm lying. | ||
| Why? | ||
| It just feels like a lie. | ||
| If I didn't have video of me fighting and if I didn't know that I could still go do something, I could still go do it. | ||
| I know how to do it still. | ||
| I'll look at a heavy bag sometimes and my brain is like, what are you doing here? | ||
| Do you know what you're doing? | ||
| And then I just start doing it. | ||
| I'm like, oh yeah, I know how to do this. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's such a part of my life, but it was so long ago that it doesn't seem real. | ||
| I think about old sets and how I used to record them on VHS tapes. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| That's so crazy that you would mail a VHS to a club. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Now it's a link. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Life has become simpler. | ||
| With a password. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't want anybody stealing my fucking awesomeness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The past is a strange thing. | ||
| We're talking about these old clubs that you worked at and old sets that you worked at. | ||
| We have these ideas in our mind, these building blocks of character and life experiences. | ||
| And you hope to be and what you did hope to be and what you've become. | ||
| And you're like, oh, hopefully I don't turn into this. | ||
| Did you have aspirations? | ||
| Like when you first started doing stand-up and first started getting serious, did you say, I want to be on Netflix or I want to be on HBO? I want to be a world-renowned headliner. | ||
| Well, Netflix wasn't a thing at the time, but yeah, at the time I was like, yeah, I remember, I mean, the last special I did, The one that really helped me, the one, I got this, I self-produced, that is like 11 million views on YouTube right now, and that was one that everyone passed on. | ||
| So that was a pretty big thing for me that it succeeded online and really helped ticket sales on the road, because that's why I did this. | ||
| I was like, I've been doing the road a long time. | ||
| I want people to come out and pay to see me. | ||
| I think it's better for ticket sales. | ||
| I'm on the sinking ship here. | ||
| I feel like I just showed up to the Titanic as it hit the iceberg and I'm like, I'll take a lifeboat, sure, why not? | ||
| I don't think Netflix is, I'm not equating that with doing an HBO special or something. | ||
| Netflix is way better. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But it also gets online too now. | ||
| One of the good things about comedy is if you're a fan of comedy, you don't have that much to choose from. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| If you like hip-hop, do you know how many hip-hop artists there are? | ||
| Try keeping track. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| There's so many of them. | ||
| There's so many of them. | ||
| The barrier to entry is not as difficult. | ||
| There's a lot involved in becoming a comic that people want to go see at a club. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so once that happens, then you get locked into the group of people who love to go see live stand-up. | ||
| They know about you. | ||
| If they know about Tim Dillon, they know about Mark Norman, they know about you. | ||
| And that's the beautiful thing about putting out a special today. | ||
| It's like you're already in this network, like an organic network of comics. | ||
| So it's like what it used to be is you were just you were hoping and praying that someone would like shine a light and that light would be a Carson set, you know, and finally I get my shot. | ||
| This is my shot. | ||
| But now you get your shot all the time. | ||
| Like every time you put up an Instagram thing and it gets shared by a million people, that's a shot. | ||
| You're getting your shot with those people. | ||
| And then they find out, oh, Sam's coming to Chicago. | ||
| Let's go see him. | ||
| That's the beautiful thing about today. | ||
| And it's unprecedented. | ||
| There's never been a time like this. | ||
| It used to be you had to do these fucking morning radio shows and nobody gave a shit. | ||
| And you had to do interviews with newspapers. | ||
| They would take your words out of context. | ||
| And you had to do fucking morning TV, which was hot death. | ||
| Yeah, they're not fun. | ||
| I'd always try to run them off the rails because I was like, that's the only way anyone's going to watch it. | ||
| I saw you do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You said an uncle molested you and it made you funny. | |
| Which, by the way, people were like, you're so brave. | ||
| I'm like, well, it's not true. | ||
| I was just trying to upset them. | ||
| They asked me, have you always been funny? | ||
| And I said, no, but when I was young, an uncle touched me and he was funny. | ||
| So it was like a Spider-Man origin story. | ||
| And they were just like, I did it to derail the interview because I'm like, this is the only way anyone's ever going to see this. | ||
| And it did sell tickets. | ||
| I'll give credit to the improv book. | ||
| At the time, they were like, that was funny. | ||
| They weren't mad at me, although they don't have comics on that show anymore. | ||
| So if you play Pittsburgh, you're welcome. | ||
| Yeah, you're welcome. | ||
| You don't have to wake up early anymore. | ||
| It's not going to help. | ||
| I mean, you might get one or two people come to see you for that. | ||
| And it's not worth me putting on a worse show because I got two hours of sleep. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's the problem with morning radio. | ||
| It's like the worst time for a comic to be awake at 6 a.m. | ||
| And they always act like we're being divas. | ||
| I'm like, dude, we did a show at night. | ||
| That's our 9 to 5. That means I got off stage at like, what, 10? | ||
| Six hours ago, you were just leaving the club. | ||
| It's pretty tough. | ||
| And it's not like you go right to sleep. | ||
| You're hopped up on energy. | ||
| So that's a tough thing. | ||
| But, you know, it's a different time. | ||
| You said about Carson. | ||
| It's like, yeah, there's no one thing. | ||
| That's why, like, you do a late night set now. | ||
| It's kind of like, are you nervous? | ||
| No. | ||
| Because if I bomb, it doesn't really matter. | ||
| And if I kill, it's a fun little set to have out there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I know they don't move the needle anymore, but I'm old school. | ||
| I love late night sets. | ||
| I got into this because of Dangerfield and shit. | ||
| And those old school sets where he's just being... | ||
| Dude, there's no one funnier than Rodney Dangerfield. | ||
| He's the fucking man. | ||
| You ever see Meet Wally Sparks? | ||
| I think of that scene when he walks up to the... | ||
| He's the loud guy disrupting the high society party. | ||
| And he walks in and he goes... | ||
| There's a couple making out. | ||
| He goes, you two should get a room. | ||
| And then he walks past the fat couple making out. | ||
| You two should get a warehouse. | ||
| That's fucking gold. | ||
| Like, it's the simplest... | ||
| Rodney was the funniest dude. | ||
| He's got a great origin story, too. | ||
| You know the story? | ||
| Jacob Cohn, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, well, you know the story about him quitting and selling aluminum cider? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then he popped at, like, 50 or something. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| When you, like, back to school and watch those, he's in his 50s. | ||
| Back to School is probably my favorite comedy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Phenomenal movie. | |
| That's the best. | ||
| The whole scene with his wife leaving. | ||
| You're impossible. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| And you're easy. | ||
| You know, like, it's... | ||
| That's simple comedy. | ||
| When they're looking at the Klimt painting, he goes, your wife was just showing us your Klimt. | ||
| You too? | ||
| It's like, that's perfect. | ||
| My manager was a manager of Bob Nelson, who was on one of the earlier- I remember. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he got to hang out with Rodney a lot. | ||
| And he said Rodney would go to watch comedy. | ||
| He still loved comedy and really wanted to help comedians. | ||
| The Dangerfield specials were the best specials for a comic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The best. | |
| Because you got Rodney's seal of approval. | ||
| And then you're also sharing the stage with Bill Hicks, Dom Herrera, Dice Clay, Lenny Clark. | ||
| Robert Schimmel. | ||
| Robert Schimmel. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it was... | ||
| Seinfeld. | ||
| Seinfeld. | ||
| Kinnison. | ||
| Kinnison, that's right. | ||
| Heavyweights. | ||
| Yeah, Carol Leafer set on there is so good. | ||
| Carol Leafer. | ||
| So many great comics. | ||
| So many people got launched from the Dangerfield specials. | ||
| Dude, I remember those specials because I watched them so much. | ||
| The Hicks set was legendary, of course. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| But I remember Robert Schimmel opened... | ||
| This is his opening joke. | ||
| He goes, I saw a guy get arrested for animal necrophilia. | ||
| How do you plead for that? | ||
| Your Honor, I thought the cat was alive while I was fucking it. | ||
| That's your opener. | ||
| What a fucking balls opener. | ||
| Like, whoa. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love him. | |
| He's a guy, too. | ||
| He didn't start stand-up until he was 36. And he was great. | ||
| He was amazing. | ||
| He was like a high-art dirty comic. | ||
| I even hate saying dirty, but it was like the best dirty jokes you've ever... | ||
| They were like supremely well-crafted dick jokes. | ||
| Oh man, he had some jokes that I was like, this is like brilliant. | ||
| He had a joke about having a heart attack and his wife's in the car with him and she goes, please don't die. | ||
| And he goes, don't say that I'm scared it's gonna have the same effect as don't cum. | ||
| That's a fucking insane joke. | ||
| Something that bad happened to you, and you turned it into, like, damn. | ||
| No, I was a big Robert Schimmel fan. | ||
| He was a great guy, too. | ||
| I never met him. | ||
| I was such a big fan. | ||
| Yeah, I met him a bunch. | ||
| He was a great guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I remember he'd gotten sick, and I ran into him. | ||
| He was doing better. | ||
| I ran into him in the commons in Calabasas. | ||
| It was like this movie theater area. | ||
| He was just so warm and so friendly. | ||
| It was so nice. | ||
| You know, sometimes you run into a comic and you don't expect to see him, and it's like, dude, what's up? | ||
| It's like when we see one of us out there. | ||
| In the wild. | ||
| In the wild, you know? | ||
| Doing normal shit, like at Barnes& Noble. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's fun. | ||
| And that's my last memory of him. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| He died in that car accident. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Too many comics have died. | ||
| It's really a bummer, man. | ||
| Did you ever get a chance to see Jenny live? | ||
| Richard Jennings, no, but I was a fan of his specials. | ||
| Dude, you gotta see him live. | ||
| Seeing him live was magic. | ||
| That motherfucker. | ||
| So underrated, I think. | ||
| Super underrated. | ||
| I blow his horn as often as I can, but when I was a kid, I'd been doing comedy maybe three years, I think, and I first came out to Long Island, and I was at Eastside Comedy Club, and the guys who were there, Rich and Jenny had been there all weekend, and they were all despondent. | ||
| They were like, dude, he did four different hours. | ||
| I hate hearing that when I show up to a club. | ||
| Two different hours Friday night, two different hours Saturday night. | ||
| They said he never repeated a joke, and he fucking murdered every show. | ||
| I hate hearing that. | ||
| But they also said he was miserable. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| He was miserable. | ||
| He hated it. | ||
| He hated it, and he wished he was a movie star. | ||
| It's like a Billy Joel song. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's the tough thing, is that when you're not... | ||
| You can't get your happiness from this. | ||
| You need other... | ||
| I mean, look, I get it. | ||
| You get fulfillment from your work, and we're very fortunate to have this, and you can get some from this. | ||
| But when you get all your happiness from this, and you're like, I should be bigger... | ||
| That's poison, man. | ||
| He just wanted to be a different thing. | ||
| Like back then, the goal was to have a sitcom or to have a movie. | ||
| Movie career was number one. | ||
| If you could be Jim Carrey, that's number one. | ||
| If you couldn't be that, you wanted to be Jerry Seinfeld. | ||
| And that's what everybody wanted to do. | ||
| And that was the golden ring that everybody went towards. | ||
| And so when we were club comics and we were coming up, Jenny was doing the clubs. | ||
| So you had this guy that was like one of the best comics ever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And hated the fact that he had to, like, work in Houston. | ||
| And he's doing, like, the Laugh Stop. | ||
| Yeah, well, he was in The Mask with Jim Carrey. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| And he's grading it. | ||
| That's what he wanted. | ||
| I guess that's what he wanted. | ||
| But it's not really. | ||
| What you want is it to be better. | ||
| You want to not feel this thing, this constant state of need, right? | ||
| This constant desire to have adulation and attention and to... | ||
| To be a constant confirmation that you're worthy, that you're worthwhile. | ||
| And you feel like, if I just get this movie career, that'll be it. | ||
| Well, that's outside your control, that stuff. | ||
| If you can keep it to at least inside your control, like, I need a new act. | ||
| Like, at least I can work on that. | ||
| I can't work on a fucking casting guy being like, you're the guy. | ||
| That's not in your hands. | ||
| And it fucks with your head. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, him killing himself was tragic. | ||
| I didn't know him, obviously, but Attell used to open for him. | ||
| So he spoke so highly of him, always. | ||
| I mean, I remember watching his HBO specials, like... | ||
| Dude, you got HBO specials and you're miserable? | ||
| He didn't want to be a road comic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| He wanted to be in Los Angeles, be the movie star with the big house, and he'd show up at the red carpet and everybody'd cheers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's not even that. | ||
| It's like whatever he... | ||
| I think that's part of the problem is like think about how great he was. | ||
| Like do you ever get that great if you're happy? | ||
| Like do you ever get that or do you have to have this fucking bottomless pit that you're always trying to fill up with laughter and killer bits so people like you for that brief moment. | ||
| So in that brief moment when you're on stage, that moment when you kill is the only thing that feels good. | ||
| It's also such a comic moment to crush in a room and then you walk off and you're like fuck my Literally, he probably was getting standing ovations and he goes to the green room like, fucking kill me. | ||
| And we were all like, god damn, he's just doing something. | ||
| He had a whole bit that he did about buying a Corvette. | ||
| If that's a premise that people don't want to hear, like, you're telling me about your Corvette that you're buying? | ||
| Like, ew. | ||
| And it murdered. | ||
| I remember thinking, this motherfucker can extract comedy from anything. | ||
| I was at the Comedy Works in Montreal, that little room. | ||
| You ever go to that little room? | ||
| I'd done it once, yeah. | ||
| It's a tiny room upstairs, seats like a hundred people. | ||
| Love Montreal. | ||
| It's a fucking great room. | ||
| Don't love comedy in Montreal, but I love the city. | ||
| I love that town. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| I mean, that club. | ||
| I used to go back and do that club, even after I had done television. | ||
| I'd go back and do that club in Montreal and lose money. | ||
| Just to get a good Montreal bagel. | ||
| Just to fucking hang out at that place. | ||
| This guy Jimbo used to run it, was the best. | ||
| Such a nice guy. | ||
| Everybody loved him. | ||
| We just had fun there. | ||
| It was just a fun little small place. | ||
| The good clubs are important. | ||
| I saw Jenny go up and do that Corvette bit there, and I was like, this is the craziest show. | ||
| How is he getting a premise out of buying a Corvette? | ||
| Like a guy trying to up-sale him on various aspects of the car and under-coating and all this shit. | ||
| But it was so good. | ||
| It was just... | ||
| That guy could just... | ||
| He was so fucking prolific. | ||
| He always had new material. | ||
| He always had better shit. | ||
| Yeah, and it's interesting. | ||
| That kept him going, but when you want to be a movie star, I'm like, dude, there's like five of those guys. | ||
| Yeah, but he wanted to be... | ||
| They want to not feel bad, and they think that that's the thing that's going to make them not feel bad. | ||
| Life is a fantastic, weird, magical experience. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's hard to keep that in perspective because everybody wants their life to be this thing that's quantifiable. | ||
| Like, you could show the world, look what I did. | ||
| Which is really kind of crazy because it's temporary. | ||
| Like, it's not like you get to a spot and then it lasts forever. | ||
| Like, it doesn't last forever for anybody. | ||
| There's no checklist. | ||
| There's nothing that you're going to hit that's going to quench that thirst. | ||
| When you're on your deathbed, it doesn't matter if you have a billion dollars in your bank. | ||
| You're not going to feel better. | ||
| You're gonna be like, oh my god, I'm about to go into blackness. | ||
| I'm about to go into the next dimension. | ||
| I'm about to escape the light of life and go into the great beyond. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And maybe nothing. | ||
| Maybe this is just sleep. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe it's just like, close my eyes and that's a wrap. | ||
| But sleep's not bad. | ||
| Everybody loves to go to sleep and everyone's afraid to die. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's permanent sleep. | ||
| Yeah, but that's what's weird. | ||
| It's like, when you go to sleep, you know, the comfort of the fact that you're going to get up in eight hours is what keeps you going? | ||
| Is that really what it is? | ||
| That's why you look forward to it? | ||
| I hate going to sleep. | ||
| I hate the moment where I have to go to sleep. | ||
| It's horrible for me. | ||
| I hate it. | ||
| It's weird for me because everybody in my house goes to bed early because I have kids and I have a wife and she goes to bed early and I write all my best stuff at night. | ||
| So like while they're asleep, sometimes I'm high as Jesus on the space shuttle and I'm wandering around the house. | ||
| To like 2, 3 in the morning. | ||
| And I feel guilty. | ||
| I feel guilty. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because everyone's asleep. | ||
| And I'm high as fuck watching movies at 3 o'clock in the morning in my house. | ||
| What movies are you watching? | ||
| Whatever's on. | ||
| Whatever I'm interested in. | ||
| I watch bad movies. | ||
| I watch good movies. | ||
| I love watching a bad movie. | ||
| I like bad horror movies. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Like a bad werewolf movie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| I was watching Werewolf Hunter the other night. | ||
| It's so dumb. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like with a bunch of people, like semi-famous people from like the 90s that are now doing these awful B-grade horror movies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know there's those actors that were like kind of character actors, like maybe they had a pretty good co-starring role in one movie a long time ago, but it never really panned out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they'll do these fucking horrible horror movies. | ||
| Gotta make a book, man. | ||
| That's a tough... | ||
| I always feel for actors because it's like, you gotta wait for someone to be like, you're in. | ||
| Whereas we get to be like, I'm working this weekend, I'm working this weekend, I'm working this weekend, I'll do a podcast. | ||
| It is tough to be... | ||
| Same with musicians. | ||
| It's tough to wait for someone to kind of give you the green light. | ||
| But musicians at least can tour and they can go to clubs and they have a network like comics do where musicians work for each other and they open for each other and they work together on the road. | ||
| That all makes sense to me. | ||
| But the actor thing is the crazy one because someone has to choose you. | ||
| You could be the best actor ever, but they don't like you at the audition and you never get the part. | ||
| And then you never get this part. | ||
| And then now you're 40. And they don't want you anymore because you're 40. They're looking for a 30-year-old guy. | ||
| They're not looking for a 40-year-old guy. | ||
| We have our 40-year-old guys. | ||
| The 40-year-old guys have millions of dollars that they sell in the box office. | ||
| And a track record. | ||
| I mean, that's the thing. | ||
| That's why I love seeing a career like J.K. Simmons where you're like, oh, hell yeah, that could still happen. | ||
| You know, that guy kind of pops later in his career, and he fucking rules in every movie he's in. | ||
| What is he in again? | ||
| Oh, he's Whiplash. | ||
| He's the teacher, you know? | ||
| You ever see Whiplash? | ||
| I didn't see Whiplash. | ||
| Oh, dude, it's fucking great. | ||
| I've heard it's great. | ||
| I mean, you gotta get past it as two... | ||
| There he is, yeah. | ||
| He was in Oz. | ||
| Remember, he was the bad guy in Oz. | ||
| Look at him, he's all jacked. | ||
| Well, I mean, you gotta get past the fact that it's two white guys who are amazing jazz musicians being the stars of the movie, but once you get past that, the movie fucking rocks. | ||
| And then he's Jonah Jameson in Spider-Man. | ||
| He's on Law& Order. | ||
| Oh, yeah, that's right. | ||
| Jonah Jameson in Spider-Man. | ||
| He's awesome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How did they not go to Dennis Farina? | ||
| That guy just looked like that dude in the comics, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a few of those guys, right? | ||
| They pop later in their life. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| Character actors. | ||
| Love a good character actor. | ||
| Fuck yeah, man. | ||
| It's such a brutal business and the business promotes conformity, which is one of the worst things for an artist. | ||
| It promotes conforming to a very progressive liberal ideology that he has to espouse publicly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anybody that is conservative that's in that or religious is in that, they have to hide it. | ||
| Unless they're Rob Schneider. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, he's not really in it anymore. | ||
| Like Chris Pratt is a better example. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| This religious guy has to kind of like not talk about it. | ||
| And anytime he brings up anything, like anything, even positive stuff, like, you know, saying he's happy, his child is healthy, people are attacking him in the comments. | ||
| Well, if they know your politics, they will hurt you. | ||
| If they know you and they don't like you, they will attack a character that you then play who's nothing like you in the reviews. | ||
| Critics, there was a time when critics had a lot of sway, and now the audience, I think, has gotten too smart, where they've become more sophisticated. | ||
| But there was a time where those old movies, like The Sweet Smell of Success, where they're like, I'll destroy you in my column. | ||
| And I'm like, that's fucking over. | ||
| That's over. | ||
| That's over. | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| It's just one person's opinion now. | ||
| Even if you're writing it in the New York Post or the New York Times, it's just a human. | ||
| It's a human's opinion. | ||
| It used to be, oh my God, the Times says you suck. | ||
| And you'd be like, oh my God, I suck. | ||
| I must suck. | ||
| But now, you know, Kurt Metzger says the Times is like a fat girl's Tumblr blog. | ||
| It's gotten to this weird place where society and word of mouth and people tweeting about stuff and Facebooking about stuff and then telling their friends at work. | ||
| That's how stuff gets popular. | ||
| And then, you know, promos and you see it looks awesome in the preview. | ||
| The preview's hilarious or the preview's... | ||
| Not very much anymore. | ||
| Previews are hilarious. | ||
| You don't see a lot of fucking really hardcore comedy movies anymore. | ||
| They don't make them anymore. | ||
| Like think about Superbad. | ||
| I watched The Hangover recently. | ||
| That's a great movie. | ||
| It's probably the last one. | ||
| It's very hard to make a big budget comedy because no one wants to put money in it. | ||
| But I'm like, man, I think the public is starving for like a Todd Phillips type of comedy. | ||
| Yeah, but the problem is, like, those movies get attacked so hard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those guys don't want to do them anymore. | ||
| Did they really get attacked, though? | ||
| If Superbad came out today, it would get eviscerated. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Why? | ||
| What about it? | ||
| It's bad. | ||
| There's so much about it, man. | ||
| They went for it. | ||
| They went for all the funny shit. | ||
| They had ridiculous characters in it. | ||
| But that's the beauty of that movie, is that it's kids making insane decisions. | ||
| That's why South Park is great. | ||
| They're fucking kids. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| I don't understand why you can't make that. | ||
| I don't know what happened. | ||
| You could, but you would have to have the right people with the right amount of balls, and I bet it would be hugely successful. | ||
| I think of movies that were like big comedy movies and it's been a minute. | ||
| Do you know what would have to happen? | ||
| You would have to do one on like a right-wing streaming platform like the Daily Wire. | ||
| They would let you do it. | ||
| They're probably the only ones that would let you be uncensored. | ||
| Would they make a funny movie, though, on the Daily Wire? | ||
| I bet they would let you make a funny movie. | ||
| I mean, jeez. | ||
| See, people have to take chances now. | ||
| And they have to show that they're for freedom of speech. | ||
| We're for the First Amendment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So they'll let you get away with some wild shit now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| In certain places that are trying to make a point. | ||
| Whereas in other places, they're trying to back off. | ||
| And they're scared. | ||
| Like, we just want family-friendly stuff. | ||
| We just want this. | ||
| We just want that. | ||
| You know, there's a lot of, like, weirdness in that. | ||
| And they get pushback from the people that work in the organizations, right? | ||
| So you get kids that are coming right out of college, fully indoctrinated into the world of woke. | ||
| And then they start entering into these tech companies. | ||
| And they're fully indoctrinated. | ||
| And they're the majority of the people there. | ||
| And so a lot of them feel like they're activists. | ||
| So they have to have their voice. | ||
| And so they speak up. | ||
| And, like, this is what happened during the Dave Chappelle thing at Netflix. | ||
| Like, people walked into meetings. | ||
| And demanded to be heard in the middle of Netflix. | ||
| They weren't just an employee anymore. | ||
| Now they were an activist. | ||
| There is a self-esteem movement that's interesting where it's like... | ||
| I don't understand that entirely. | ||
| It's entitlement. | ||
| I do think... | ||
| They have to adapt or they'll die. | ||
| Companies like Netflix, Amazon... | ||
| I mean, Amazon won't die, let's be real. | ||
| They have other irons in the fire. | ||
| But I mean, Netflix, HBO, Hulu, all these streamers. | ||
| You need to make shit that people want to see. | ||
| And I think you're right that comedy is... | ||
| With stand-up, I guess, it's weird that... | ||
| We talked about Tarantino earlier. | ||
| It's weird that you can get away with it as a stand-up as yourself, but in a movie with characters, for some reason, it doesn't fly anymore. | ||
| Because in everything else, it's the opposite, right? | ||
| Well, stand-up is only one person. | ||
| It's hard to... | ||
| You could find the people that distributed it, but it's only one person. | ||
| If it's a movie, like a comedy movie, all the actors in it are fucked. | ||
| Everyone's fucked. | ||
| But to me, that's why it should be... | ||
| Not as bad. | ||
| There's so many people on board with this. | ||
| Like, when people are like, you know, Kevin Spacey's canceled, I'm like, cool, I'm still watching L.A. Confidential. | ||
| A shitload of people were involved in that movie. | ||
| You don't get to take away a fucking movie. | ||
| You can't take away House of Cards. | ||
| He's so good in House of Cards. | ||
| So good, man. | ||
| He's a great actor. | ||
| He's fucking great. | ||
| He's crazy as fuck. | ||
| I do feel like he is the dude in Swimming with Sharks he played. | ||
| Yeah, probably. | ||
| He is that dude. | ||
| It sounds like he's a dick grabber. | ||
| You know, it probably works a lot. | ||
| That's probably part of the problem. | ||
| You know, like, oh my god, Kevin Spacey grabbed my dick. | ||
| I think I'm gonna go blow him. | ||
| And then all of a sudden it's on and popping, you know? | ||
| You need to make, you need to get people on board with like a great, I think once it's, because these companies at the end of the day stand for nothing. | ||
| So, except for money. | ||
| So when you do show that it's profitable, I think they're all going to be back on board. | ||
| You just need one back on board. | ||
| I mean, you can tell that it's all what's good for business when you see HBO, Netflix, whatever group is most marginalized that month. | ||
| They'll do like, oh, please enjoy our selection of hashtag end Asian hate. | ||
| And it's like, we have Harold and Kumar too. | ||
| I'm like, that's it? | ||
| You got one fucking movie, and I'm supposed to be impressed? | ||
| So, I mean, I do think it's all, like, what's good for business, and they think this is good for business, so make one good comedy that is a success, and it's back. | ||
| Well, I bet Netflix is a place that could do it, if anybody could do it, because Netflix did release that memo saying, like, look, if you work here and you don't enjoy what the content of the people that put out, that work with us, make and put on our network, then you don't have to work here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We offer your severance package, you can take off. | ||
| Which is a pretty, I think, fair statement. | ||
| Very reasonable. | ||
| If you don't like this, then, you know, I think it's good when people side with the artist. | ||
| I also think, like, you know, with stand-up, I think we're alright. | ||
| I do think, like, enough comics will support you. | ||
| Look, it's... | ||
| We've circumvented the industry enough of us as comics to be like, we don't really need them. | ||
| I wasn't expecting Netflix to buy this special and I was totally fine if they didn't. | ||
| I was kind of like, yeah, I'll put it on YouTube. | ||
| Great. | ||
| And then my agent was like, Netflix wants your special. | ||
| And I was like, all right, it'll be a different audience that will see it. | ||
| That'll be great. | ||
| They'll see it too, though. | ||
| Everyone will see it. | ||
| That's the thing of today. | ||
| People see it, they'll tell other people it's great, and then other people see it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hopefully. | |
| It almost doesn't matter where it goes now. | ||
| Look what Louis CK's doing. | ||
| He just puts it up on his website. | ||
| Well, Louis, it's a different thing, because he asked for money. | ||
| I remember when I put out my YouTube special, I told Louis, and he said, that's a terrible idea. | ||
| Because Louie is from a different school where it was like, you pay for it. | ||
| And I was like, but Louie, you had like multiple HBO specials before you did this. | ||
| So you had a huge audience. | ||
| For me, this is to get the audience for The Road. | ||
| I think that was the difference. | ||
| I had done multiple Comedy Central specials. | ||
| No one fucking watched them. | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| No one knows that it's a terrible idea. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| It's like, to say it's a terrible idea is to say, well, I don't do it that way, and I don't agree with... | ||
| I wouldn't do that. | ||
| But it doesn't mean it's not a good idea. | ||
| Objectively, it's a great idea. | ||
| But in his defense, he was like, I don't get why you wouldn't get paid for it. | ||
| And it's understandable, like, for a guy who did it his way. | ||
| It's an understandable... | ||
| Yeah, but he's got to recognize that that wasn't an available option for him at that stage of his career. | ||
| And if it was, he would be wise to take it. | ||
| Because if something goes viral on YouTube, that's invaluable. | ||
| Whatever they give you, Netflix gives you X amount of dollars, but only 100,000 people see it. | ||
| Versus you put it on YouTube and 4 million people see it. | ||
| You'll make way more in touring. | ||
| That's what I think is interesting. | ||
| I did Letterman's show on Netflix and he was kind of like, he's of that generation where he was like, I don't understand how you make money. | ||
| I was like, well, there's money. | ||
| Because he came up when it was like sitcom or bust. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And now I'm like, no, live touring is kind of where you make the money. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Everybody... | ||
| Back in that era, one of the sitcom. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, this is a different time, man. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| It's a way better time for us. | ||
| It's way better. | ||
| And if he was coming up, he would put his stuff on YouTube, too. | ||
| I mean, you'd be silly. | ||
| Late Night with David Letterman on YouTube? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It would be fucking awesome. | ||
| It'd be amazing. | ||
| That was the same argument about podcasts. | ||
| Like, Howard Stern famously used to shit all over podcasts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| Why are you wasting your time with that? | ||
| But he got paid $500 million by Sirius, so he was kind of like, I'm right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So it's like, you go with kind of, like, a lot of people bestow wisdom, but it's like, this is my life. | ||
| That's what they're saying. | ||
| Well, he's right for him. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But he's not even right for him. | ||
| Because if he, look, he's still Howard Stern. | ||
| If he decided to just go do a show somewhere else and just put it online and sell ads for it, it would be fucking massive. | ||
| Have you had him on here ever? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Would you ever? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That'd be a great interview. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it would be back and forth. | ||
| It'd be like tennis, you guys trying to interview each other. | ||
| I would just talk to him. | ||
| I would want to talk to him. | ||
| I don't like interviews. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wouldn't even want to have a specific thing to talk to him about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's a great interviewer. | |
| Yeah, I was on the show a bunch of times. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a thing, though, where he's a part of this... | ||
| I mean, he's the greatest radio broadcaster of all time. | ||
| You should say that. | ||
| That's what I believe. | ||
| I believe that all of us are walking in his footsteps. | ||
| Everybody who does podcasts, we're doing like wild, uncensored conversations because he opened the door. | ||
| Because there was no wild, uncensored conversations. | ||
| That's patient zero. | ||
| In the podcast world, it's Howard Stern. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| And then all the other people came from... | ||
| I mean, I know there was Don Imus, and he was controversial and all this stuff, but it's Howard Stern. | ||
| And then it was Opie and Anthony, because Opie and Anthony opened up the door for just a hang. | ||
| They're the real seed of podcasts. | ||
| Because the Howard Stern show was, you were being interviewed by the great Howard Stern, and he was behind this thing where he had all the fucking levers, and he would mix the sound and shit himself. | ||
| He works all the buttons himself. | ||
| He was a real, trained guy. | ||
| DJ, you know, before he became this... | ||
| I mean, he figured out a thing that no one had figured out. | ||
| It's like, people talk like this privately. | ||
| Why shouldn't you talk like this publicly in morning radio when people are stuck in traffic and they're fucking bored? | ||
| Give them something fun and go crazy and go for it and get wild. | ||
| And he was the first guy to do it. | ||
| But what Opie and Anthony did was they just let us come on and hang out like this. | ||
| So we would just be hanging. | ||
| And it would be Rich Voss and Jim Norton and Patrice. | ||
| I love Rich Voss. | ||
| I mean, those guys are classics. | ||
| Yeah, it was Nick DiPaolo and fucking Bill Burr and Ari Shaffir. | ||
| We would just go and hang out. | ||
| And that's what we did. | ||
| It was like, that was the birth of podcasting. | ||
| It was really the Opie and Anthony show. | ||
| That's a great point. | ||
| A lot of the guys were really, that's where they broke. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I will say a lot of those listeners, I'm like, holy shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Animals. | |
| Take a break from the comments for a day, maybe. | ||
| Maybe hug your kids, you know? | ||
| Well, I think they encouraged that. | ||
| You know, there was like an encouragement of that sort of... | ||
| That's what you're worried about with your audience. | ||
| Like, what are you encouraging from your audience? | ||
| Like, are they mimicking the way you interface with other people? | ||
| Because Open Anthony were brutal in how they trashed everything. | ||
| I know, but... | ||
| Norton, when he trashes you, it's with love. | ||
| Right, but that's you while you're there. | ||
| But if there was someone else that they're trashing that wasn't there, they would be fucking ruthless. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so they put that energy, that attacking energy out there. | ||
| And those fans are like, that's what I was looking for. | ||
| They're savages. | ||
| And you find these savages. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| I mean, Voss is another one where, like, when he trashes you, it feels good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's great. | |
| Because I love Rich. | ||
| I remember I did the Jokers, the Impractical Jokers cruise years ago with Rich. | ||
| And, like, dude... | ||
| It was like Rich, Ari, Tim Dillon. | ||
| It was like a great crew, Yamanika, a great crew of people. | ||
| And I remember after one show, a woman came up to me in front of Rich and goes, you were our favorite. | ||
| And Rich overhears it. | ||
| And I just see him walk over and he goes, oh yeah? | ||
| Well, your friend is prettier than you. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus Christ. | |
| He didn't miss a moment. | ||
| And this isn't even, like, during the show? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| It's after the show. | ||
| We're in the fucking, like, we're on, like, a deck, and I'm like... | ||
| Bro. | ||
| I couldn't stop laughing. | ||
| I was like, I cannot believe... | ||
| 35 plus years of that shit locked and loaded. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just like, boom, boom. | |
| Just counter-punching. | ||
| Just Rich Voss. | ||
| A fucking classic. | ||
| Yeah, I met Rich Voss back in the Jerry Curl days. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Was he wearing gold chains on stage? | ||
| That was crazy. | ||
| He's hilarious. | ||
| He's always been hilarious. | ||
| He's a classic. | ||
| Yeah, but that whole environment of the Opie and Anthony Hanks. | ||
| I missed it. | ||
| I was at the cellar later. | ||
| When I was there, the only remnants of that were Keith Robinson, who I love, and... | ||
| Love Keith. | ||
| And, you know, Colin and all these, like, classic. | ||
| I remember when I auditioned at the Comedy Cellar, I was so nervous, and Keith is just torturing me. | ||
| He's just fucking with me. | ||
| And it's making me laugh. | ||
| But in front of everyone, he's like, look how nervous this guy is. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| And everyone's just laughing at me. | ||
| And that was my intro to the Cellar. | ||
| I did a gig in Miami, and it was at a theater. | ||
| And before me, I had, like, a 10 o'clock show, and before me was Wanda Sykes and Keith. | ||
| And they both waved to me as I was coming in. | ||
| They were like, hey, what's up? | ||
| What's up? | ||
| And they both left me notes. | ||
| And Wanda's note was like, hey, Joe, great to see you. | ||
| Kick ass tonight. | ||
| I hope you have a great show. | ||
| And like a little heart. | ||
| And then Keith Robbins says, I hope you die the most miserable death you've ever died on stage. | ||
| Keith is such a great ball buster because there's so much love. | ||
| He knows how to make you fucking laugh. | ||
| He has some new material that kills me, man. | ||
| He had a second stroke, unfortunately, but he goes up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He had a second one? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| What happened in the second one? | ||
| He's not doing great physically, I mean, but he goes up and he fucking murders. | ||
| He's slurring his speech and he's limping and he's lost use of his arm and he still goes on stage and it takes the audience like a second and then they're like, holy shit, this guy's hilarious. | ||
| He had a bit about how he finds himself laughing at disabled people forgetting that he's disabled. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pfft! | |
| I was dying. | ||
| I was like, dude, that's fucking gold. | ||
| Oh, that's amazing. | ||
| He's a great, great hang, and he's so fucking funny. | ||
| Very funny. | ||
| And, you know, those guys in that scene, like that New York scene, was like the perfect place for podcasts to start, because everybody likes to just talk shit. | ||
| So there was never a dull moment. | ||
| There was never a moment where it was dead air. | ||
| There was never a moment where everybody's like, so what else? | ||
| There was no what else. | ||
| It was just constantly going and we're all drinking coffee and it was like one of the few radio shows that I would like genuinely look forward to. | ||
| I couldn't wait to get in there. | ||
| Yeah, it's intimidating. | ||
| I was on at the end. | ||
| I was on when it was Opie and Jim. | ||
| I was never on when it was Opie and Anthony. | ||
| Anthony was a big part of it, man. | ||
| He's so funny, man. | ||
| He's a comic that never did comedy. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| He's a comic. | ||
| When you talk to him, he's got a comics mindset. | ||
| He'll bring up a subject. | ||
| Yeah, why is it? | ||
| And then he'll have this brilliant take on things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's great, man. | ||
| That's where a lot of us heard Patrice really shine. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| His philosophies. | ||
| The way he would break things down was funny, but he had thought this shit through. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There was a rock-solid philosophy behind his point. | ||
| And you had to go, oh... | ||
| He really shined. | ||
| I mean, Elephant in the Room was, to me, like one of the iconic comedy specials because it was hard to capture what was so funny about him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, because he was so unique and the material felt so off the cuff, even though, you know, of course, he was working that out. | ||
| But, I mean, that was like a classic special. | ||
| He would have been the best podcaster alive. | ||
| If he was alive today, Patrice, if he had a podcaster, he would be number one. | ||
| He had the gift of gab, for sure. | ||
| I think of Patrice and Greg Giraldo as well. | ||
| I love Greg Giraldo's comedy so much. | ||
| Did you ever see the one with Greg Giraldo when he was on Tough Crowd with Dennis Leary? | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| That's brilliant. | ||
| That was Greg in a nutshell, where it was like... | ||
| You beat him up with jokes. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| You beat up... | ||
| And it felt like Dennis was a bully. | ||
| I mean, it just felt like... | ||
| We had sunglasses on. | ||
| The sunglasses, the leather jacket. | ||
| I'm like, are you like Cobra Kai? | ||
| Like, what the fuck is this shit? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And Greg was just so... | |
| It just felt like justice with Greg always. | ||
| He was never a dick, it seemed like. | ||
| His son was... | ||
| He could have been way meaner. | ||
| Oh, he was so cool. | ||
| I mean, with that particular one, he could have been way meaner. | ||
| But it was one of those things where Dennis was huge right then. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Like, he had just taken off. | ||
| He had no cure for cancer, and he was like... | ||
| His career was taken off. | ||
| So it was like... | ||
| It was like a class struggle thing. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know, which I don't like at all. | ||
| I don't like when comics treat other comics as if they're not the same thing. | ||
| It's fucking weird. | ||
| I don't like it. | ||
| Well, it's also like you're not really a comic anymore if you're doing that, right? | ||
| You're kind of like a movie star. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| And the sunglasses, it's like... | ||
| Is that what you always wanted, too? | ||
| Did you always want to be the man? | ||
| Is that what you wanted? | ||
| It's like you think you're being an alpha, but you just seem out of touch. | ||
| You know, it's like the type of thing that if you showed up like, dude, if I take any fashion risk and I roll in the comedy cellar, I'm going to get my ass kicked. | ||
| Like if I roll in, I remember I had a mustache once and Colin Quinn's like, you know what pisses me off is I think you like that fucking mustache. | ||
| I just got tortured for it for like a whole night and I was like, I just went home and went... | ||
| You know, it's like, there's something about you that keeps you on your shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm like, that's a dude that, like, showing up in sunglasses, that dude's- Yeah, right away. | ||
| Someone's not keeping that dude honest, you know? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Showing up in sunglasses, unless you're a rapper. | ||
| Yeah, and belittling your peers. | ||
| Like, guess what, man? | ||
| You're maybe bigger than Greg. | ||
| Greg's fucking ten times funnier than you, dude. | ||
| I mean, like, Greg was a great comic. | ||
| Yeah, a real comic. | ||
| It's, you know, it's one of those things, man. | ||
| It's like that era, those people. | ||
| They wanted to all be a star. | ||
| They all wanted to be the man who gets to bump everybody. | ||
| But what does that even fucking mean? | ||
| And also, like, the guy who bumps everyone? | ||
| Comics don't fucking like you. | ||
| It's not nice. | ||
| You know who doesn't do that shit? | ||
| Like, Ray Romano shows the seller and he's like... | ||
| I'll go on after you. | ||
| I'm like, you're Ray Romano. | ||
| You could fucking bump us. | ||
| We don't give a shit. | ||
| But it's always the guy like that where you're like, that's the nice, cool guy. | ||
| And then you get the comic who shows up and is doing 45 in the middle of the show. | ||
| And now you're not letting the young comics go up. | ||
| And I will always say, Louis is always cool about that shit. | ||
| Always. | ||
| Even when he was at the height of... | ||
| Yeah, he's always cool about that shit. | ||
| He'll go on last. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Attell, like, look, Attell could do whatever he wants to the seller. | ||
| He's going on at, like, 1.15 a.m. | ||
| Isn't that wild? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that's also why his act is so tight and it's so good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, he gets the people with, like, the least amount of attention span and murders to them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like he's running with weights on, you know? | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's like that scene in Star Wars where Yoda just takes out the lightsaber and you're like, oh shit, Yoda fucked shit up, you know? | ||
| Louie's happy to go up in front of a shitty crowd, which is amazing. | ||
| He wants small crowds sometimes. | ||
| He wants weird shows where people don't know he's there, and then he shows up. | ||
| He has a real process, man. | ||
| He romanticizes the struggle, for sure. | ||
| I remember him saying, he's like, I wish I was a comic in Bushwick right now. | ||
| I'm like, that's hilarious to hear. | ||
| I'm like, you do maybe for like five minutes a day. | ||
| I'm sure the rest of your life you're happier in a fucking massive apartment. | ||
| You can create plenty of fucking struggle in your life. | ||
| The bad gigs will come at every level. | ||
| You don't need to create bad gigs for yourself. | ||
| They're gonna come unexpected, like a surprise party. | ||
| They'll be there. | ||
| I think it's just, you know, people have a certain amount of angst inside of them, no matter what they do. | ||
| And there's a certain amount of desire for struggle. | ||
| Because they realize that the human mind is wired to overcome resistance and struggle and problems. | ||
| And if you don't have any problems at all, You create them. | ||
| You're gonna make your own problems. | ||
| Like, just find stuff to do. | ||
| Find stuff to do that's difficult, and that should be your struggle, and then, yeah, well, you don't have to worry about your rent anymore, because now you're wealthy, but don't wish you were fucking poor. | ||
| Don't wish things were bad, because bad things are going to happen regardless. | ||
| Like, be grateful for health, be grateful for things in your life not being horrible. | ||
| But I get the sentiment behind it. | ||
| The sentiment behind it is that there's something noble in that fucking pure struggle, the artist who wants to succeed and achieve. | ||
| And that's a magic thing, man. | ||
| When you see a comic that's, you know, maybe three years in, four years in, it's just starting to really crack. | ||
| And you see them on stage, and they're fucking killing it. | ||
| And you find out that six months ago they were living in their car, or they get by waiting tables or delivering food for DoorDash, and you go, wow, there's something wild about that. | ||
| There's something badass. | ||
| Knowing that that person's going to crack. | ||
| They have the skills. | ||
| They're already really funny. | ||
| They've got great points. | ||
| All they need to do is just put in the time. | ||
| That's a real fucking killer right there. | ||
| It's exciting to see people break through, for sure. | ||
| And it's exciting when you know they're really close. | ||
| And when they have a great special in them, and they're like, the world's gonna see that, and now they have to fucking go back and eat shit and write a new act. | ||
| You're gonna see this guy, Hans Kim, tonight. | ||
| This kid, six months ago, was living in his van. | ||
| And now he opens up for me in arenas. | ||
| He was living in his van. | ||
| He was basically homeless. | ||
| Started doing Kill Tony. | ||
| He's on Kill Tony. | ||
| He does one minute every week. | ||
| One new minute every week in front of the internet. | ||
| And kills. | ||
| The guy writes constantly. | ||
| What kind of stand-up is it? | ||
| I don't want to say. | ||
| I mean, very offensive. | ||
| But very funny. | ||
| Like, just real stand-up. | ||
| Real comedy. | ||
| Jokes. | ||
| But really funny. | ||
| And it's watching this guy navigate through this thing. | ||
| It's so exciting for me to see. | ||
| To see this kid who was basically homeless six months ago, and he worked so fucking hard. | ||
| He's got fucking spreadsheets with all his jokes on him, and he's writing shit out. | ||
| He's always got his laptop out. | ||
| He's always writing. | ||
| He's always got new premises. | ||
| I love autistic joke people. | ||
| He's out there. | ||
| Some of my favorite people is the ones who are obsessively weird joke people. | ||
| Yeah, that's him. | ||
| But it's also, he's at that really romantic moment where the career is just starting to pop. | ||
| Everything is coming alive for him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He lives with Bryan Simpson now. | ||
| Yeah, he's funny as hell. | ||
| I like him a lot. | ||
| He's on the show tonight, too. | ||
| He just moved here. | ||
| Everyone just followed you here. | ||
| Well, it's a good spot. | ||
| It's a good spot. | ||
| It's not like they're following me to the fucking desert. | ||
| I'm telling them, this is the best fucking place. | ||
| And they go there, and they go, holy shit, this is the best place. | ||
| And I'm like, it's the best place. | ||
| What do you love about Austin? | ||
| First of all, it's only a million people. | ||
| Which is really good. | ||
| Like, you think it's like, wow, it's kind of a small town. | ||
| Yeah, and everyone's nice. | ||
| They're nice. | ||
| They're friendly. | ||
| You get a small town way of people interacting with each other. | ||
| People wave when you drive by. | ||
| There's a guy in my neighborhood, this old dude. | ||
| And he's always working on his lawn. | ||
| So every time I drive by, me and this guy wave to each other. | ||
| And I look forward to it. | ||
| I could go to work another way. | ||
| There's other ways to go. | ||
| But I go that way every time, hoping that I'm going to see my neighbor so I could wave at him. | ||
| I have fucking neighbors in California. | ||
| I was next to you for 10 years. | ||
| I don't even know their name. | ||
| We didn't even talk to each other. | ||
| There's something nice about a... | ||
| About like a neighbor who, and also like Texas, like there's some sort of like weird small town warmth here. | ||
| I do feel it a little bit. | ||
| People are friendly. | ||
| People are friendly and they're smart. | ||
| And they appreciate live music. | ||
| They appreciate live comedy. | ||
| And they're not, I mean, as far as like city attitudes go, they don't really have it. | ||
| They have like a, it's like a small town and everyone's kind of happy that they're in this cool place. | ||
| And then you do live comedy here and the comics come and they feel free. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because now instead of being connected to Hollywood, now you're connected to podcasts. | ||
| So now you're connected to something that's got a bigger footprint. | ||
| It's bigger in terms of more people watch it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And then you also don't ever have to worry about being kicked off NBC because you said a cunt joke and someone filmed it. | ||
| It's a different world. | ||
| They're gonna have to adapt or they're gonna die. | ||
| I mean, that's really the truth of it. | ||
| They'll be able to do family-friendly, family-oriented shit if they want to do that. | ||
| But that's all they're gonna be able to do is the problem. | ||
| I mean, I get it. | ||
| Look, I love New York. | ||
| I can't defend it. | ||
| I'm a New York City kid through and through. | ||
| I'll always live there. | ||
| But it's insane, dude. | ||
| My neighborhood right now, Upper West Side, it dies down early. | ||
| It's a lot of old people. | ||
| It's all old people in my building. | ||
| I mean, there's no bodegas open late. | ||
| There's like two around me late. | ||
| Very few, so there's like no people. | ||
| You go down to the West Village, Lower East Side. | ||
| It's hopping. | ||
| Holy shit, dude. | ||
| It's hopping. | ||
| You better fucking have your martial arts ready because dudes are going to be in your fucking face. | ||
| It's like a video game. | ||
| You feel like you're playing GTA 5 or something. | ||
| It's kind of fun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, you're kind of dodging people. | ||
| It keeps you alert. | ||
| So there's a lot more aggressive people? | ||
| It's aggressive, dude. | ||
| It's fucking weird. | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| It feels like a whole city that just won't behave. | ||
| Because you're on top of each other. | ||
| They all feel like your roommates a little bit. | ||
| But is it worse post-pandemic? | ||
| Oh my god, yeah. | ||
| Much worse? | ||
| Yeah, dude. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Every downtown in the country is worse. | ||
| Like, I was just in Pittsburgh. | ||
| I was in Salt Lake. | ||
| All these downtowns. | ||
| I'm like, this is a fucking disaster. | ||
| Because they don't... | ||
| That's where the offices were. | ||
| And no one goes into their office anymore. | ||
| So downtown is just bad now throughout the country. | ||
| Every downtown is not good. | ||
| So, I mean, but then again, like, I go on the road. | ||
| I don't want to stay off some fucking highway. | ||
| I'm staying downtown because I want to take walks. | ||
| I'm a city kid. | ||
| I like walking. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, it's a vibe, for sure. | ||
| Like, New York City... | ||
| I love it, but yeah, if I'm a woman late at night, you better walk that woman to the door. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That's some shit. | ||
| Oof. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's also like, hey man, good art comes out of bad shit. | ||
| Taxi Driver, right? | ||
| A lot of good movies. | ||
| Yeah, there's probably going to be a lot of great comedy out of people getting robbed. | ||
| Just get that iPhone ready, dude. | ||
| Yeah, it's tricky. | ||
| The other thing I like about this place is that, we were talking about before, that it's a blue city surrounded by a red state. | ||
| I love that, yeah. | ||
| It keeps it in check. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know, there's something about that. | ||
| And it's just, this whole town, it's like, Texas itself is a very rebellious place. | ||
| And this is where Kinnison started, and this is where Bill Hicks started. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And there's something about that that's baked into their appreciation for comedy. | ||
| I mean, those guys put Texas on the map as far as comedy because people thought about comedy. | ||
| They thought of New York, thought of L.A., maybe San Francisco, maybe Chicago. | ||
| Boston, for sure. | ||
| But they didn't think of Houston. | ||
| And two of the best of all time came out of Houston, Texas. | ||
| Houston's a great comedy city. | ||
| Great comedy city. | ||
| And also, you can tell they're Texas comics because religion is such a big part of both their acts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you feel that. | ||
| That's like the Texan in them. | ||
| I mean, Bill Hicks is... | ||
| He's like the Biggie Smalls of comedy. | ||
| Because the amount of work he did, it's gold. | ||
| And he died so fucking young. | ||
| He had like five albums, dude. | ||
| I think he died at like 34 or something like that. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| Pancreatic cancer. | ||
| And you re-listen to those albums, dude. | ||
| Those albums, whenever comics call Bill Hicks overrated, I'm like, you're a fucking idiot. | ||
| Bill Hicks is great. | ||
| And you know what's great about Bill Hicks? | ||
| So many comics now, with his ideology, would only perform in like SF and Portland and Burlington, Vermont. | ||
| That dude, he's taking that act to Alabama. | ||
| That's fucking cool. | ||
| That's why he's bombing. | ||
| He did the road constantly. | ||
| Oh, dude, the Flying Saucer tour. | ||
| Those albums, I'm dying laughing to you. | ||
| You're listening to one of the greatest comics of all time, bombing, and he released this for us. | ||
| He's fucking bombing. | ||
| He's calling the crowd dumb. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's not like just some comic who... | ||
| It's a great comic calling crowds dumb. | ||
| There's something beautiful about that. | ||
| He's so fucking angry on stage, but it was like beautiful anger. | ||
| It was earned anger. | ||
| Well, everything was interesting. | ||
| Even if he was bombing, what he was saying was interesting. | ||
| Brilliant. | ||
| Yeah, it was just... | ||
| That was like one of his tenets of comedy, is even if you're not going to be funny, be interesting. | ||
| He was Lenny Bruce for us. | ||
| I listen to Lenny Bruce and I'm like, it's a little, it doesn't resonate for me. | ||
| I understand that he's brilliant, I understand that we need him, but like, Bill Hicks was like that for guys like us who were like, we, he made it, he made it cool, you know? | ||
| He made you feel like a hack. | ||
| You were just telling jokes, and he was up there talking about a young man on acid, thought he could fly. | ||
| What about positive drug stories? | ||
| That's a brilliant bit. | ||
| It's a brilliant bit. | ||
| It's a pro-drug bit from a guy who was clean and sober at the time. | ||
| He was talking about the great times that he had when he was doing drugs. | ||
| I mean, it was also, everything was so well-worded. | ||
| It was so smart. | ||
| You know, it was just a completely interesting kind of comedy, and it changed so many people's way of comedy to the point where the punchline in Atlanta, when you had performed there in the green room, somebody wrote in the green room, quit trying to be Hicks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| He had his rules of comedy. | ||
| And he also, some of them I'm like, alright, he was like, never ask the crowd how they're doing. | ||
| I'm like, that one's alright. | ||
| We can do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's fine. | |
| So many people imitated him was what the point of quit trying to be Hicks was. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| They were all trying to do that. | ||
| They were all trying to be him. | ||
| You know, and they would go on stage with some fucking half-baked point. | ||
| About the government or taxes or something? | ||
| It's like so often with great comics, you miss what the beauty of them was, is that Hicks at his core was silly and funny. | ||
| And when he got self-righteous, that's kind of when he lost me sometimes. | ||
| When he was kind of condescending to the crowd, I was kind of like, I don't love this as much as when you're just doing great jokes. | ||
| I love the bit he does. | ||
| It's in his half hour on HBO when he's like, I hate when... | ||
| I love watching people in Aspen smoke cigarettes not knowing they're done inhaling and he does the act out and he just keeps blowing because of the smoke and it's like that's a great fucking bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a silly observational joke and you're like oh that dude was great at political stuff, social commentary, religious stuff but then he could just do a fucking observational bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's one of the all-time greats. | ||
| So when people write him off as being overrated... | ||
| It's all in the context of time. | ||
| You have to think about it that way. | ||
| If you go and listen to Lenny Bruce, it doesn't make any sense to us because everything has already been understood and covered. | ||
| Like all the things that he's talking about that are groundbreaking, back then people were like, what is, oh my God, what is happening? | ||
| Like this guy's breaking down society. | ||
| No one can do this. | ||
| No one had done that before, but now everybody does it. | ||
| So when you hear him do it, and then the things he's saying, the world has moved on so much from 1963 to today that it's impossible to... | ||
| He still had some jokes that work today. | ||
| He had one joke. | ||
| He goes, you know, it's against the law to be homosexual. | ||
| So what do they do? | ||
| They put you in jail with a bunch of men who want to have sex with you. | ||
| It's a great bit. | ||
| It's a great bit. | ||
| And that's a bit from, like, what, 65 or something like that? | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| It's like watching basketball in the 60s, and you're, like, seeing Chamberlain, and you're like, well, there's no Jordan without this shit. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And, you know, who's Jordan? | ||
| Carlin Pryor, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So, you gotta take Pryor. | ||
| Also, I love that he was, like, a cool Jew. | ||
| Like, so often, like, Jews are like, Oh, boy, I'm fucking nervous. | ||
| I love when... | ||
| How often did cool Jews pop up in a show? | ||
| He's one of the coolest. | ||
| One of the coolest. | ||
| Elliot Gould. | ||
| I was, like, grateful for Elliot Gould. | ||
| I'm like, guys like that. | ||
| I'm like, well, you're not just doing the, oh, shucks, my fucking... | ||
| I'm so nervous and I have allergies. | ||
| I'm like, no, be fucking... | ||
| Be yourself. | ||
| Be cool. | ||
| Is Jeff Goldblum Jewish? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| His name is Jewish as fuck. | ||
| That's a Jewish name. | ||
| He's a cool guy. | ||
| He's a very cool guy. | ||
| That's what I was going to get to. | ||
| Great fucking actor. | ||
| He's a smart science guy. | ||
| I've been re-watching Larry Sanders and he's so fucking funny. | ||
| Oh, he's great in everything, man. | ||
| That's a great show. | ||
| He's great as the scientist in Jurassic Park. | ||
| Yes, he's Jewish. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Cool Jewish guy. | ||
| Cool Jew. | ||
| Thank God. | ||
| Yeah, but Lenny Bruce was like... | ||
| He was a real pioneer. | ||
| Like, there was no other... | ||
| I mean, there was Mort Sahl who was doing political... | ||
| But he doesn't get his shine. | ||
| No. | ||
| He just passed away. | ||
| I mean, he's like... | ||
| Mort Sahl. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, Mort Sahl didn't get his shine. | ||
| Because he was so of his time, like the guy holding the newspaper. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And, like, Lenny Bruce broke through, whereas Mort Sahl, I guess... | ||
| You know what the problem is? | ||
| Sometimes you live too long. | ||
| You ain't Che Guevara if you live till fucking 78. Right. | ||
| You're Che Guevara when you die in your prime. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And your young picture is shown everywhere. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But when you live too long sometimes, it ain't as cool. | ||
| Yeah, it's not as cool. | ||
| So a guy like Lenny Bruce died in the most romantic way possible. | ||
| Heroin overdose on the bathroom floor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's what you want from that kind of hero. | ||
| You want to go out like Hendrix or Janis Joplin. | ||
| That's when you become fucking this shit. | ||
| I mean, Bill Hicks, too. | ||
| Like, who knows? | ||
| Maybe he would have had a shitty podcast. | ||
| Maybe he would have been great. | ||
| Who the fuck knows how people age, right? | ||
| I think he would have been great. | ||
| He would have been great. | ||
| He was never not. | ||
| I don't think... | ||
| Damn, imagine if he had an HBO show where he just did almost like Bill Maher style, where he just did that. | ||
| You're like, whoa, that'd be fucking cool, huh? | ||
| Do you know who had a great story about him? | ||
| Carrot Top. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Because Bill used to make fun of him in Carrot Top's act. | ||
| Or in Bill Hicks' act, he'd make fun of Carrot Top, rather. | ||
| And he had this bit about... | ||
| He goes, yeah, Carrot Top is for people who think... | ||
| He goes, Gallagher's too heady. | ||
|
unidentified
|
LAUGHTER It was just a prop joke. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And Scott Carrot Top is the fucking sweetheart of a guy. | ||
| I heard he's the man. | ||
| He's so cool. | ||
| And I always felt like he got fucked with for no reason. | ||
| Like his act is funny. | ||
| It's funny shit. | ||
| But he was always like a punchline to comedians. | ||
| Like that he was not one of us, not a real comic, fuck him. | ||
| And it was always like people would shit all over Carrot Top. | ||
| I don't think Norm did him any favors in that interview when he just kept trashing him. | ||
| Because Norm was so cool that I think, like, when you see a guy as cool as Norm doing that shit, I think it hurts. | ||
| Well, it hurts if you're sensitive, right? | ||
| Like, if you're a comic and someone's trashing you, it should be funny. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There should be some humor to it, you know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But sometimes guys get isolated, and Scott's very isolated. | ||
| You know, he's out there. | ||
| In the world on his own, not really connected to comics in the same way. | ||
| So Hicks, before he died, was really sick. | ||
| And he came to one of Scott's shows. | ||
| So Carrot Top's doing a show. | ||
| And Hicks came to the show and hung... | ||
| He wanted those last few months to last forever. | ||
| He said, I thought you hated me. | ||
| He goes, no, man, I don't fucking hate you. | ||
| It's just jokes. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| That's a big thing that people miss, too, is that most of the time we're fucking around. | ||
| Do we really hate anyone, any of us? | ||
| I'm too old to fucking hate anyone, dude. | ||
| I'm not interested. | ||
| I don't want that real estate in my body. | ||
| I would rather not even think about the person than hate them. | ||
| Hate is too strong a feeling. | ||
| You don't want to carry that around, man. | ||
| I've carried that around in my life. | ||
| It's not fun. | ||
| It's all-consuming. | ||
| It's bad for you. | ||
| And also, like, hey man, like, most people aren't evil. | ||
| Most people you, like, spend some time with, like, you get to know them and you're like, they got their own shit. | ||
| I don't want beef with people. | ||
| I'm too fucking old. | ||
| It's not necessary. | ||
| It's not necessary. | ||
| And you should avoid it whenever possible. | ||
| And the people that don't avoid it, I'm like, okay, well, that's you. | ||
| That's the game you're playing. | ||
| It's the life you're living. | ||
| You're just gonna get mad at stuff all the time. | ||
| Mad at people all the time. | ||
| Constantly in conflict. | ||
| Like, good luck. | ||
| I'm not interested in that. | ||
| I see what it is. | ||
| Like, we could all go that way. | ||
| Anyone can go that way. | ||
| You make choices. | ||
| And if you want to be that fucking person that's always in beef with people, Take care. | ||
| It's going to take years off your life. | ||
| It's a giant distraction. | ||
| It's a resource hog. | ||
| It takes away from things that you really want to do. | ||
| It takes away from things that are actually meaningful and important to you. | ||
| There's certain people that are fighting things that are just fights. | ||
| If you're trying to take out Marine Land, I get it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I have a friend who's been involved in a lawsuit with Marine Land for... | ||
| How many years now? | ||
| At least 10 years. | ||
| At least 10 years. | ||
| He was a trainer at Marineland, and he exposed the horrific treatment of the dolphins and the walruses and shit like that, and he's still involved in it right now. | ||
| Walrus whisperer. | ||
| He's a great dude. | ||
| That's a different kind of hate. | ||
| That's the kind of hate you gotta carry around with you. | ||
| Like, you gotta task. | ||
| Trying to take out an evil organization that's torturing intelligent marine life. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Not good to do that. | ||
| That's different. | ||
| You shouldn't torture animals. | ||
| Yeah, that's what you're doing. | ||
| If you have a fucking killer whale in a swimming pool, you're torturing it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's probably smarter than you. | ||
| Although it's kind of the equivalent of like a studio apartment in New York. | ||
| Let's be real. | ||
| Yeah, but you can get out of your studio apartment if you so choose. | ||
| If the whale only slept in that little pond, fine. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a fucking shitty existence, man. | ||
| They're so smart, too. | ||
| No, elephants, too, in those cages in the zoos. | ||
| You're like, yeah, it is cruelty to animals. | ||
| They need their exercise. | ||
| Pull up his thing, man, because something's happening with his case right now. | ||
| I think he's been involved in this lawsuit for 10 years. | ||
| I do have to say this is good fucking whiskey. | ||
| I know it's my whiskey, but I fucking like it. | ||
| I'm into it. | ||
| I got into scotch for a while. | ||
| What's your scotch? | ||
| I don't have a kind I like, but I like the old stuff. | ||
| So Phil Demers, that's my homie, and it says I can confirm that my trial, it's Walrus Whisperer on Twitter and also on Instagram, I think. | ||
| I can confirm that my trial versus Marineland will be open to the public. | ||
| It's been a long decade, but I have Marineland exactly where I want them. | ||
| I'm the captain now. | ||
| Hell yeah. | ||
| Yeah, see that's some hate. | ||
| I don't think it's a bad thing to keep that hate. | ||
| It's hate for a greater good. | ||
| I think people know now because of Blackfish. | ||
| The Cove is another one? | ||
| Well, the Cove is actually wild dolphins that they slaughter. | ||
| In Taiji, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's a different situation, but also horrific. | ||
| But it's still horrible. | ||
| Horrific, but it's not captive. | ||
| The captive whale and dolphin industry is creepy as fuck. | ||
| Those things are really goddamn smart. | ||
| They just can't manipulate their environment the way we do. | ||
| They have dialects. | ||
| They have a language we don't understand. | ||
| They have some sort of complex social structure. | ||
| They travel and they communicate with sound. | ||
| They move through 3D space underwater. | ||
| They just don't need thumbs, so they don't have houses. | ||
| They go where the water's warm. | ||
| They're smart as fuck. | ||
| They just didn't need to evolve all the things that we needed to evolve to survive in the above-water world. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So they are the dominators of their world. | ||
| The killer whales have been running shit in the ocean forever until we started scooping them up and putting them in fishing tanks. | ||
| I mean, imagine what that's like. | ||
| Imagine what that's like. | ||
| It's fucked up. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| I think of it, too, sometimes when I even eat, like, veal. | ||
| I'm like, did I need to get veal? | ||
| That wasn't prepared in a nice way. | ||
| It was not prepared in a nice way. | ||
| It's a tortured soul. | ||
| You're dealing with a baby that's tied up in a pin. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A little pin, like, so it can't move its body. | ||
| Not good. | ||
| So it has no muscle tissue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But, then again, you know... | ||
| Is it better to live until you're a cow if someone kills you? | ||
| Or is it better if they kill you when you're a baby? | ||
| I think more life is better. | ||
| More real life? | ||
| More life being tortured in a pen is not real life. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| It's just the food industry is what's fucked. | ||
| You know, if you buy sustainable beef from a grass-fed rancher who takes care of his cows and treats them well, and then they have one bad moment in their whole life, and this is the sort of agreement that you... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They go out like Pesci in Goodfellas. | ||
| Quick. | ||
| They barely see it coming. | ||
| Well, they don't even see it coming at all. | ||
| They put that bolt to their head. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And they just instantly brain them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The one that No Country for Old Men, Javier... | ||
| Javier Bardem. | ||
| Oh, my God, that guy's a monster. | ||
| Great fucking movie. | ||
| He's the best. | ||
| He's one of the best serial killers in a movie ever. | ||
| The Cone brothers just fucking rule. | ||
| They rule. | ||
| They fucking... | ||
| They fucking rule. | ||
| We're like, we don't deserve them. | ||
| I mean, dude, I... Oh, brother, where art thou? | ||
| Fuck, that's a good movie. | ||
| Do you ever hear the story that Clooney, like, that scene where he sings, he thought he nailed it? | ||
| And they're so polite. | ||
| They're like, we're going to go with an audio thing where, like, you don't... | ||
| And he's like, oh, man. | ||
| But I was like, man, Clooney is like... | ||
| He's like R. Cary Grant, where he can be, like, silly, but he's also, like, kind of like a hot guy. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Clooney just fucking... | ||
| Oh, that's a great fucking movie. | ||
| Fargo is one of my all-time... | ||
| John Turturro. | ||
| Goddamn. | ||
| And that dude... | ||
| Tim Blake Nelson. | ||
| Tim Blake Nelson is this new movie, Old Henry. | ||
| Have you seen Old Henry? | ||
| I heard it's incredible. | ||
| It's fucking great. | ||
| There's a new movement for Western-type movies. | ||
| They're bringing the Western back, which I think is cool. | ||
| That one's legit. | ||
| I'm gonna watch it. | ||
| Norman actually was raving about that one. | ||
| I gotta watch it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's really good. | |
| Dude, the Coen Brothers... | ||
| Fargo is like one of the best movies of all time, I think. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| That's a masterpiece. | ||
| It's a masterpiece. | ||
| That's like a modern... | ||
| I mean, fucking Steve Boucher. | ||
| That's old Henry. | ||
| Oh, damn. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| It's fucking good, dude. | ||
| It's a good movie. | ||
| A good Western's tough to beat. | ||
| Oh, I love them. | ||
| They're so American. | ||
| Yeah, it's so American. | ||
| It's such a brief moment in history, too. | ||
| If you think about the time period that people, like, traveled to the West and all that lawlessness was going on, you're not dealing with more than 100 years. | ||
| I know, but that's, like, that was, like, their Marvel movies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Of, like, the 60s and 70s, or, like, I guess 40s through whatever, like, my darling Clementine through, like, fucking Unforgiven, I guess, you know, like. | ||
| If you want to read about it in this state, there's a fucking amazing book called Empire of the Summer Moon. | ||
| It's all about the Comanches. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've heard of this. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| The Comanches were the—that was the big border to penetrating to the rest of the West. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It was getting through the Comanches in Texas. | ||
| Nobody wanted to do it. | ||
| So what they started doing was giving people land. | ||
| They'd give people land in Oklahoma. | ||
| Like, hey, have all this land. | ||
| And what they were basically doing was putting bait out. | ||
| And then the Comanches would attack those people and kill them. | ||
| And then they would get the soldiers to come in and attack the Comanches. | ||
| And they would make war. | ||
| And they were trying to control this one tribe that they couldn't control. | ||
| And for fucking 200 years, they dominated. | ||
| All of the Southwest. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| They were just the first ones to really figure out horseback riding. | ||
| And horseback riding and raising horses. | ||
| They knew how to geld their stallions. | ||
| They knew how to raise horses correctly and ride them. | ||
| And so they figured out how to do archery from horseback. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| The balance. | ||
| Imagine the balance alone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They would carry their arrows in between their fingers and just go one, two, three, four. | |
| And these other people had muskets. | ||
| And so they're trying to like pack these muskets. | ||
| So they were murdering everybody. | ||
| So no one can cross. | ||
| They couldn't get through this part of the world. | ||
| So they ran, especially like right here where we are. | ||
| They find arrowheads all over the place out here. | ||
| All these people that have ranches out here, they all find arrowheads. | ||
| It's so funny what it was and what it became. | ||
| I think about the Alamo. | ||
| The madness that went down here and now it's just like a fat dude in a fanny pack. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| New balance is on. | ||
| Walking around the Alamo. | ||
| It is crazy. | ||
| It's crazy because you'd think this was not that long ago. | ||
| I know. | ||
| If you go to Europe, you can go to a bar that's a thousand years old. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So cool. | |
| People were drinking here a thousand years ago. | ||
| If you're here... | ||
| A couple hundred years ago, there was a wild tribe on horseback running shit right here while Paris is being built and while London is this beautiful city of splendor. | ||
| Right here, Comanches. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, we're not that old a country. | ||
| I mean, people don't think... | ||
| It's pretty crazy. | ||
| We're so young, dude. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're so young. | ||
| And this particular area is just, like, soaked with this weird, wild history of chaos. | ||
| Of violent history. | ||
| Violence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So much violence in this part of the world. | ||
| This was, like, to get across this country and to establish cities everywhere, it had to be violence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This is like so much violence involved in the creation of this country. | ||
| But now we get Taco Truck, so it's kind of worth it, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I guess. | |
| It's kind of cool. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| I mean, I wouldn't want to go back to that. | ||
| No. | ||
| What, do you want to be in a wagon? | ||
| Fucking hoping that you get through the trail before they find you? | ||
| I know I'm one of, if it's a movie, I'm one of the first to go. | ||
| No question. | ||
| I'm one of the dudes who's like, yeah, I'm that dude. | ||
| I feel like you'd survive for a while. | ||
| Scene one, I'm the dude that's fucking out. | ||
| They're gonna get you. | ||
| You know what the Comanches would do? | ||
| They would, in the middle of the night, they would cut your horses loose. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shit. | |
| And they would scare them off, and they'd start yeeping and hollering and shooting guns off, and the horses would run away, and then you'd be stuck in the desert with no horses. | ||
| And they would follow you for days and watch you just die slowly. | ||
| They would just follow you, like, just far enough so they could watch. | ||
| And they just follow you for days where you wandered around trying to find something to eat, trying to get water. | ||
| You can't even get like a Luna bar or nothing. | ||
| You can't get shit. | ||
| Just fucking dying. | ||
| There's nothing out here, bro. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Just planes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're dead. | |
| If you go to like some parts of Texas, it's just flat and dry forever. | ||
| Imagine you're walking that and there's the Comanches from like six or seven hundred yards away. | ||
| You see them on the top of a ridge watching you die slowly. | ||
| Not good. | ||
| They tortured people too. | ||
| Nobody would ever surrender because they... | ||
| Assumed that you would torture them. | ||
| So like they didn't have surrender. | ||
| It wasn't like the British like okay you got us. | ||
| There's none of that. | ||
| You fought to the death because if you lived they did the most horrific shit possible. | ||
| And the guy who wrote that book did a fantastic job of explaining some of the methods of torture that they used to use. | ||
| They used to cut people's arms and legs off and then throw them on the fire while they were still alive. | ||
| So they'd just hack their arms off, hack their legs off, and then throw them on the fire. | ||
| And watch them wiggle around there, and they would laugh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck. | |
| They would eat them. | ||
| They'd eat pieces of them. | ||
| Lower bar for entertainment back then. | ||
| Man, some wild shit happened with Native American tribes. | ||
| And they did it to each other, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It wasn't just like they all got along until we came. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| They were constantly raiding. | ||
| It's so common to hate your neighbor. | ||
| Isn't it? | ||
| You're just like, I'm from New York, you're in Boston. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Boo! | |
| Yeah, boo, fuck you. | ||
| I took an Amtrak. | ||
| It's not that far. | ||
| You know, like, you hate me? | ||
| Tribalism. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| It's one of the worst aspects of a community. | ||
| Tribalism. | ||
| Texas versus Texas A&M? Yeah. | ||
| It's everywhere. | ||
| Texas versus the world here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's t-shirts that says Texas versus all y'all. | ||
| It's a little mush. | ||
| I was in Nashville and there was a shirt I saw that was a flag. | ||
| I said, if this flag pisses you off, then get the fuck out. | ||
| And I'm like, are you running into a lot of pushback in Nashville with that shirt? | ||
| You might be alright. | ||
| Yeah, you're preaching to the choir there, bro. | ||
| I don't think anyone's really pissed off. | ||
| That's just like a right wing virtue signal. | ||
| That's all that is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Same thing. | |
| It's a virtue signal. | ||
| They virtue signal on both sides, I would say. | ||
| Yeah, but I mean like... | ||
| Everyone's annoying at the end of the day. | ||
| But wearing that, like if this flag pisses you off, like are you trying to find people that are pissed off at you? | ||
| Yes, you're trying to fight people. | ||
| That is literally, that is like a mating call for let me kick your ass. | ||
| That is being like, and like literally everyone's like, I like the country. | ||
| It's a weird thing with some people that the flag became bad. | ||
| The flag represents evil. | ||
| The American flag represents the evil empire of the military industrial complex and unchecked capitalism and cruelty and greed and fuck you. | ||
| Fuck you if you support America. | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
| I support America, but it does feel aggressive when someone just texts me an American flag emoji. | ||
| I'm like, what is that? | ||
| That's what you're getting from me from now on. | ||
| Every fucking text I send for you from now on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm excited. | |
| I'm excited to get it. | ||
| It is weird, right? | ||
| Because it's one of the things that, like, there's that really gullible, like, narrow-minded right-wing caricature. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know, that we all, like, the people with the fucking Trump flags and, get the fuck out of my country! | ||
| Those type of people, right? | ||
| Those are real humans. | ||
| They really do exist. | ||
| And if you give them a thing, like a flag, and they use that flag all the time, then everybody else wants to use the flag. | ||
| No, I think the flag is like, look at all these fucking cool, creative people that came out of this one place that was an experiment in self-government, and yeah, it's not perfect, but it's better than anywhere else. | ||
| And we're a community here, and we should think about each other as a community here. | ||
| No. | ||
| But you're attached to this guy. | ||
| And this guy's like, if you ain't white, you ain't right. | ||
| I'm like, you might have taken it too far. | ||
| But he's also got American flags and he likes Confederate flags. | ||
| It's a sign of respect for the South. | ||
| Those guys, they're connected with that American flag too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Unfortunately. | ||
| Let go of the Confederate flag. | ||
| Look, I'm a Knicks fan. | ||
| I also stubbornly support losers, but let's take it back a notch. | ||
| I do think it's like, you know, the Trump stuff. | ||
| I was just reading a thing about how he's a malignant narcissist, which is that he- No way. | ||
| Trump is not- You think so? | ||
| Trump is not a narcissist? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| You fucking believe me. | ||
| I've heard it. | ||
| I know for a second. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You believe me. | |
| I can't tell. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| I know. | ||
| You're a good actor. | ||
| Dude, NewsRadio, you're a good actor. | ||
| It's been a while. | ||
| Dude, but I was like, I don't even know what a malignant narcissist is. | ||
| And I was reading about it and I was like, oh, you only like people who like you. | ||
| And I was like, yeah, that sounds like every entertainer I've ever met. | ||
| We're all malignant narcissists. | ||
| Yeah, what do you, like people who don't like you? | ||
| That sounds weird. | ||
| I mean, like, in relationships, sure, but not in my friendships, you know? | ||
| Who was it that explained to us the different types of narcissists? | ||
| There was some, one of our guests, explained that there's two different kinds of narcissists, and they were trying to classify it. | ||
| Was it Sergura? | ||
| Was it Tom? | ||
| But they were trying to explain, like, the kind of narcissism. | ||
| There's different kinds of narcissism. | ||
| There's even... | ||
| Keith Campbell breaks down the different... | ||
| Oh, it's Keith Campbell. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| Oh, that was... | ||
| This was one, and then there was another one that was more recently. | ||
| What's he saying? | ||
| Give him a run. | ||
| Let's hear what he says. | ||
| Killing stuff or steals extra food. | ||
| People don't like that. | ||
| They'll just kill them. | ||
| I mean, they'll just go have a hunting accident. | ||
| If you're kind of the dick in the hunter-gatherer society, they'll take you out and you just won't come back because they just don't want you. | ||
| So narcissism gets weeded out in those places. | ||
| But when things get unstable and things are uncertain, people who are narcissistic can get a lot of resources and do really well. | ||
| So sometimes they do well, which keeps it around. | ||
| And obviously in big societies, you can become powerful enough to hire henchmen and hire a PR agent, and you can kind of build your own status and do a lot more than you can in the hunter-gatherer group where everyone knows you. | ||
| What is narcissism when you define it? | ||
| What is your definition of narcissism? | ||
| So it gets a little more complicated. | ||
| When we're talking like this, I'm talking about grandiose narcissism, and that's a basic trait. | ||
| There's more than one kind of narcissism. | ||
| I'll step back. | ||
| So when we talk about narcissism in the psychological literature, we're talking about three different things that are related. | ||
| The first of these is narcissistic personality, and this is a trait, meaning that people go from a high level to a low level. | ||
| It's not a clinical disorder. | ||
| And then this trait when it's grandiose, we say grandiose narcissism, it's this combination of sense of entitlement and the sense of superiority, but also you get extroversion and drive and ambition, call it agentic extroversion. | ||
| So somebody who is driven And extroverted, but also a little bit self-centered and antagonistic and entitled. | ||
| So that combination of traits, kind of a prima donna or overconfident or cocky or whatever you want to call it, that's what we talk about is grandiose narcissism. | ||
| And that's just, like I said, a normal trait. | ||
| There's another form of narcissism which we don't talk about as much in the normal world, but that's vulnerable narcissism. | ||
| And these are the folks that kind of think they're really important, think they should be getting a lot of attention, think they're the smartest people in the room, but no one really looks at them, no one pays attention to them. | ||
| So they get insecure, they get depressed, their self-esteem drops, they think, you know, why aren't I getting the attention I deserved? | ||
| I'm kind of a legend. | ||
| You know, it's a legend in their own minds. | ||
| You know, it's like basement narcissists, you know, living in their mom's basement thinking how great they are and fantasizing about it. | ||
| And those more vulnerable folks, you don't see at the bars as much because they're in the basement, but you see them clinically because they're depressed and they go see a clinician and say, help me out, I'm anxious. | ||
| So those are the two normal forms of narcissism, their traits. | ||
| And then there's this clinical form, or psychiatric form, called narcissistic personality disorder, NPD. And that personality disorder form of narcissism is an extreme form of narcissism. | ||
| You have a high level of it, you know, like Trump or, you know, a lot of pale celebrities or, you know, academics. | ||
| But you also, to make it a clinical disorder, you have to have that impairment we're talking about. | ||
| So it has to be clinically significant impairment. | ||
| And that's usually the narcissism is so bad, your marriage or your relationships are falling apart. | ||
| Your work life could be falling apart. | ||
| So sometimes you find narcissistic, really successful people in offices who are narcissists, but they kind of destroy the office culture. | ||
| They're just bad workers. | ||
| And so you can destroy that. | ||
| You can make really poor decisions because your ego is so big. | ||
| You just over-invest in something and it just doesn't work out for you. | ||
| So you start dysregulating your financial decisions so you can make those kind of mistakes. | ||
| The big ones are usually interpersonal. | ||
| But when you have that kind of impairment, it can be a disorder and then you get treated for it. | ||
| The vulnerable personality disorder is fascinating. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's a fascinating one. | ||
| This is weird. | ||
| I'm hearing me doing... | ||
| I think we got it. | ||
| Yeah, well, that was very well spoken. | ||
| He's a real doctor. | ||
| I mean, that's like most people we know. | ||
| I mean, clinical, that's maybe a little far for most people we know. | ||
| The vulnerable one's the one that irks me the most. | ||
| Oh my God, the incels. | ||
| The dudes who are jacking off too much, who are living in their mom's basement, who are calling people ugly on Twitter. | ||
| I'm like, chill out, dude. | ||
| Take a fucking break. | ||
| Love yourself. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| What do you do if you're an incel? | ||
| Imagine you're a counselor. | ||
| You shave the middle of your eyebrow like I did. | ||
| That's all you have to do. | ||
| That's what you do. | ||
| And you're out. | ||
| Just laser it so you don't have to shave it anymore. | ||
| That way you don't forget. | ||
| I should, yeah. | ||
| If you're an incel, what kind of advice would anyone give to an incel that would work? | ||
| Like if you have terrible genetics and fucked up life experience. | ||
| Join a dodgeball league or some fucking... | ||
| Even if you suck, you'll make friends. | ||
| Just get out of the fucking house. | ||
| Yeah, but incel is involuntary celibate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Just getting out of the house is not going to get you laid. | ||
| That's true, but you make friends and you're cool enough, you'll get laid based on your personality. | ||
| If you have a good enough personality, women will fuck you at a certain point. | ||
| Women can look past shit that we can't. | ||
| What about, but dudes have terrible personalities that are incels? | ||
| That's part of the problem. | ||
| Work on it. | ||
| You can work on your personality. | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| What kind of advice would you give an incel? | ||
| Just fucking put your dick down for a second. | ||
| Read the book Joe said about the West. | ||
| Bring it up at cocktail parties. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| No, just fucking get out there. | ||
| You can do it. | ||
| I think you can do it. | ||
| I think it's tough, but you can do it. | ||
| Don't you think? | ||
| You think you're just destined to a life of jacking off in a basement? | ||
| I think there's more out there for them. | ||
| I think become good at something. | ||
| I think you have to deal with each individual case on an individual basis. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| I think some people are kind of doomed. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| You know, they just got the worst case of all the bad luck, you know, and a lot of bad life experiences, and they don't have the tools to get out of it, and then they're stuck in an environment where everyone around them is also negative and fucked up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they don't have any examples of anybody around them that they could follow that sort of... | ||
| Yeah, that's a big part of being a person. | ||
| Who the fuck are you around? | ||
| It's very hard to be positive if everyone around you is negative. | ||
| It's very hard to be ambitious. | ||
| But you also might be attracting those people with your personality if you're so negative. | ||
| Sure, but you might have grew up that way. | ||
| The problem is the people that are stuck. | ||
| They're in the same town where they grew up and they grew up in this negative way. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| I mean, that's why, like, good role models, man. | ||
| You need them. | ||
| Be a good role model to someone. | ||
| You see someone flailing a little bit, you could help them out, so. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| You saw me with my neck earlier, and you fucking helped me out, so I appreciate it. | ||
| I wish I helped you out before you got it operated on. | ||
| I know, I stink. | ||
| There's stem cell clinics that can really help you. | ||
| I'm fucking stupid, yeah. | ||
| Tony Hinchcliffe was ready to get an operation. | ||
| Really? | ||
| He got stem cells injected in his neck, and now it's 100%. | ||
| It doesn't bother him at all anymore. | ||
| It would be so bad with him that he couldn't sit down when he was doing Kill Tony. | ||
| He would have to, like, lean up on one leg because he had to kind of keep his neck straight. | ||
| Like, if he just hung there like that, it would just be excruciating pain. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| And he was thinking, fuck, I'm going to have to get it operated on. | ||
| Got stem cells? | ||
| I just don't want to ever get an operation because I don't want to take time off the road. | ||
| I like that lifestyle. | ||
| How much time did you have to take off? | ||
| I didn't take any off. | ||
| I was just in horrible pain on the road every week. | ||
| It's been a while, but you just learn to live with the pain. | ||
| Did you take any anti-inflammatories or anything for it? | ||
| I was, you know, muscle relaxers here and there, but the problem is I like to drink and that shit stays in your system, so I don't, I would, you know, I've had a few drinks and I feel pretty good right now, and you learn to just kind of live with it, I think. | ||
| Just deal with it. | ||
| Yeah, you just kind of learn to live with a little bit of pain. | ||
| How did it get hurt initially? | ||
| I would play a lot of basketball. | ||
| I'm sure that jerked it out. | ||
| I also probably didn't do enough weights, and I just would always play ball in the park. | ||
| And I think at a certain point, 6'3", my weight, you're going to jerk something out. | ||
| But I love basketball. | ||
| It's just the best. | ||
| Do you play a lot now? | ||
| I'll get back to it at a certain point. | ||
| I just started a podcast with Julian Edelman from the Patriots, and it's so humiliating changing next to him when we're doing episodes. | ||
| We're literally changing next to each other. | ||
| I'm like, this dude's triceps have triceps, and I'm in my underwear next to him. | ||
| Like, wow, that's a real wake-up call about your body when you're next to, like, a patriot legend. | ||
| Yeah, no kidding. | ||
| That's a fucking huge human. | ||
| Oh, dude, he's such a bad... | ||
| He's only Jewish Super Bowl MVP, by the way. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Badass. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he's a fucking beast, and he's the best dude. | ||
| I mean, just, like, the nicest guy. | ||
| How many podcasts are you doing now? | ||
| I do one with Mark Norman. | ||
| We might be drunk. | ||
| Well, we get drunk a lot. | ||
| And then I do this one with Julian. | ||
| This is brand new called Games With Names. | ||
| And we recap the greatest sports games in history. | ||
| And the first episode is Eli Manning and Teddy Bruschi from the Giants versus Patriots. | ||
| He's getting a lot of shit for doing the Patriot loss is the first episode But then we had like Adrian Peterson and Jared Zebranski for the second one Fiesta Bowl like the guests are fucking insane. | ||
| Oh, that's awesome. | ||
| Yeah, it's so fun It's just like if you're a sports fan, you'll love it. | ||
| It's got Paul Pierce I think episode for a lot of great athletes like I love I love sports. | ||
| So, you know, that's awesome So you do just those two? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Did you have another one before? | ||
| I had a basketball one with Stavros, who's like one of my best friends. | ||
| Still one of my best friends. | ||
| Stavros is the funniest human being maybe I know, like insanely funny. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| His new YouTube special is incredible. | ||
| I haven't seen it. | ||
| I've heard good things about him, but I haven't seen any of his acts. | ||
| He's a beast. | ||
| I keep hearing good things, though. | ||
| He makes me laugh so fucking hard. | ||
| He's a character. | ||
| He's one of one, man. | ||
| I went to his apartment recently. | ||
| He's just on his terrace cooking me up like calamari. | ||
| He's such a Greek man. | ||
| He's just the best, dude. | ||
| I love him. | ||
| We were both overworking ourselves. | ||
| We need a break, but we'll start up again at some point, maybe. | ||
| I just love that guy. | ||
| Yeah, it's hard when you start doing a lot of them, too, and then you have to coordinate with other people's schedules. | ||
| So hard. | ||
| Yeah, like Theo does three or four different podcasts, and he's just always moving around, and it's like, man, it's a lot. | ||
| Well, the one with Julian, we can do 12 in two weeks, and then I'm out for a while, so that's why it's perfect for me. | ||
| But yeah, the other ones where you're like, hey, we need two this week, I'm like... | ||
| Oh, fuck. | ||
| I got a thing. | ||
| I'm on the road. | ||
| I'm in Cleveland or whatever. | ||
| Mark Norman's in Pittsburgh. | ||
| We're like trying to court and we're like, fuck. | ||
| Those are hard for sure. | ||
| And when you guys do it, do you do audio and video? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We only do episodes in studio, but occasionally on the road we'll do a Patreon or something. | ||
| We'll just shoot the shit from our weird hotel rooms, and I'm like, I can see where Mark is. | ||
| I see his L-shaped couch on the road, and we're just shooting the shit. | ||
| But our studio is awesome. | ||
| We do... | ||
| We have a full bar, so we have bartenders. | ||
| We have a bartender in studio. | ||
| We call him the Beer Jew. | ||
| He looks like Eli Roth in Glorious Bastards. | ||
| He just makes us cocktails we've never heard of. | ||
| It'll be like Corpse Reviver No. | ||
| 4, some weird prohibition, so we learn about a drink we've never had. | ||
| And we get fucked up. | ||
| It's fun as hell. | ||
| We just had Bill Burr on. | ||
| He was so good. | ||
| The guests are amazing, man. | ||
| If you're ever in New York City and you want to have a drink with us, it's fun. | ||
| That sounds like fun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll do it. | |
| It's a good time. | ||
| All right, man. | ||
| Well, thanks for being here. | ||
| It was a lot of fucking fun. | ||
| It was really great to finally meet you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's great talking to you, man. | |
| Yeah, great talking to you, too. | ||
| And I love what you're doing. | ||
| I love how much content you put out there. | ||
| I love that you're so into stand-up. | ||
| It's just great. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| You too, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Funny motherfucker. | ||
| I appreciate you. | ||
| And tell everybody what's your Instagram handles and all that stuff. | ||
| My Instagram is just Sam Morrell, S-A-M-M-O-R-R-I-L, and the special Same Time Tomorrow. | ||
| It's on Netflix right now, and thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. |
Export Selection