Steven Wright reveals his absurdist comedy style emerged naturally from influences like Carl Reiner and Woody Allen, refining it through live audience reactions—only 1 in 3 jokes stick. Rogan shares how his podcast, launched in 2009, evolved from a L.A. spare room to hosting figures like Graham Hancock (Younger Dryas Impact Theory) and Elon Musk (AI warnings), while Wright’s book Harold debuts May 16th. Both credit organic creative spaces—Rogan’s Austin club, Wright’s Boston roots—as rare incubators for stand-up’s raw, unpredictable magic. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, it's like, you know, right from the beginning, the same, no matter where you go, I mean, if it's a good place, I would have stayed longer, but...
That's where I... I went to see an open mic there, and then I thought...
What I was doing is I was, you know, into comedy from watching The Tonight Show.
That's when I really got, like, oh, these comedians, you know, Carl and Robert Klein, all these guys.
I had to watch The Tonight Show because my brother was older than me, and we had to watch what he wanted.
So, you know, I started watching, then I started to like it.
And then I heard that there was a club in town, and I thought...
I should go out, you know, I was 16 when I really was into it, but then when I was about 23, I heard of the club, and I thought, well, maybe I've got to go try it out.
I wouldn't have to move to Los Angeles or New York.
And my character then, I couldn't have...
23, I'm not going to move to Los Angeles.
It was like a...
That was too much for me.
So I went to the Comedy Connection and I watched a show and then I learned that there was a...
I remember the first joke was, but I don't remember the rest of it was, I said I went into a bookstore and I started talking to this very French looking girl.
No, see, I didn't even write anything until I went to the open, watched the show, and when I knew I was going back in two weeks, during that two weeks, I wrote things, but I had never written comedy at all.
It was a very unusual group of artists because they're these wild kind of partying guys, but they had real rigid rules about don't be a hack and don't be a thief and don't be a this and do good comedy.
And they all just wanted to kill.
And there was no real showbiz sort of like pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
It was really just being a headliner, just killing.
So I started, um, when the wave of, like, television comedy was just starting to sort of subside, I kind of caught the last wave, you know, of that kind of, like, the comedy boom was starting to settle down.
You know, and there was a lot of mediocre comedy out there.
There was a lot of people that were doing what sounded like an impression of what a comedian should sound like.
You know, and they were working all over the place.
I was driving home one night fairly recently, a few years back, and you know how sometimes like a Bluetooth on your phone just randomly plays a song when you plug it in?
It just randomly played this Jenny bit.
And I was laughing so hard driving home.
And while I was driving, I downloaded the whole album.
And I just listened to the album coming home from Orange County.
And it was like...
I just forgot.
I kind of forgot how good he was.
I forgot how funny he was and all the tags and bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
I was actually introduced to Kenison by a girl I worked with.
It was a very funny story.
She had seen Kenison on HBO and then she went and acted out The bit about the homosexual necrophiliacs paying money to have sex with the freshest male corpse.
So this girl who's a friend of mine is lying on her stomach in the parking lot, acting it out.
She's going, oh, oh!
Life keeps fucking in the ass even after you're dead!
Yeah, it was my friend Steve, who I'm still one of my best friends to this day.
We were hanging out, and he was just like, I think you should be a comedian.
It was like when I was teaching martial arts, actually.
So I was like...
Making them laugh.
I'd make my friends laugh when we'd go fight in tournaments, and I'd make everybody laugh before we're about to spar, because it was like everybody was real nervous, you know?
So for me, it was a nice opportunity to get attention and to cut the tension, you know?
But I think a lot of, you know, just because someone's funny hanging out doesn't mean they could do that.
I mean, you obviously have done it, but the big difference is, like, if you're in a bar with someone and the TV's on, there's a lot happening going by.
The waitress goes by, someone drops something, someone says something about that, something's on the TV, something goes by.
A truck goes by.
There's all these things.
But when you go on the stage, there's nothing happening.
So just because you can do that with your friends doesn't really mean then you could go do that.
And if you can be funny with your friends, it's just a matter of like, how can I figure out how to be funny in front of everybody else?
Yeah, that's where it's tricky.
And to me, the most interesting thing about the art form is that no one can tell you how to do it.
You do it very different than I do it, and we both do it very different than Seinfeld does it, and Seinfeld does it different than Louie Anderson did it.
It's like everybody's got their own little weird way to do stand-up, and you kind of have to figure that out on your own.
And what my mind did with that was I had this thing about living in an apartment building where they allowed pets and I had a pony.
I had a Shetland pony named Nicky.
And he was once involved in a bizarre electrolysis accident.
All the hair was removed except for the tail.
Now I rent him out to Hare Krishna family picnics.
And that whole thing came because I saw the word electrolysis.
So I would try to find things on purpose, but then after a while, I didn't, my mind was, I would just notice things, because I think comedy, all art is based on noticing what's around you.
And I would, my mind, like, I drew a lot.
I know that you used to draw, too.
I would draw realistically in high school and stuff, and like, if you were going to draw this cup and this There's the two shapes, and then you notice, if you're trying to draw it real, this shape, this shape, and then there's the shape that's in between.
That's also a shape, which helps you get it accurate.
So you don't really notice that shape unless you were trying to draw it.
So I think that that exercised my mind of noticing Then later on, doing the comedy, I was already noticing, I think was noticing just some people were very aware of what's around.
And you know, like in the tower at the airport where the radar goes like this, it goes like this.
And then there's the little beeps of the planes, like those are the planes.
So I think my mind got like...
Scanning like that, subconscious.
I don't walk down the street thinking I need another joke.
I'm going to go walk down that street.
I'm just going around my day just doing it.
But the thing is going...
And then it'll see a word.
It's like...
Oh, oh, okay.
And then, oh, and then, like, write it down.
And I think of the show, the wording comes pretty fast, like, in a minute.
It's like, because in my mind, it can only be one way it can be written.
And then I just would write it down and then go on with what I was doing.
But the noticing never stops.
Don't you think what you do is you're reacting, right?
You're talking about the world, but you have to really see the world.
You know, but people kind of know the process now, so people enjoy seeing that.
I've talked to people, like guests that have come back, and they said, you know, that bit, I saw that bit six months ago, and now it's like totally different.
It's amazing, like you figured out this and that, and yeah, yeah, it's like a process.
So the fact that fans can come and check out the process, Yes.
Gross.
I'll stare at my notes when I get home.
I'm just trying to think, like, am I missing something?
There's another angle?
Is there another way I could...
How would another person approach this?
A person who didn't have this structure already set up for this bit.
I've been to some of these crazy ranches that they have.
Like, Texas wildlife laws are very different than anywhere else I've ever been to.
And the people who own the property own all the animals.
It's different than, like, wildlife in any other...
Like, say if you live in Montana, and you own a ranch in Montana...
You can get landowner tags for that ranch.
That means like, so you, say if you own like 6,000 acres in Montana, you and your friends and some family members, you could get license to hunt on that property.
But you're only allowed to hunt a certain amount of animals.
There's a certain season.
It's like very specific.
It starts at one time.
It ends at one time.
And, you know, you go to jail if you violate those things.
In Texas, as long as the animal's not from Texas, you own it.
So, like, zebras, lions, tigers, there's fucking stray kangaroos.
It's so crazy that it doesn't even make sense because they're not even exotic animals.
Like, for instance, elk.
Elk hunting in most of the country is a difficult tag to acquire.
It's a very prized hunt because it's delicious meat.
So it's very specific with the regulations.
In Texas, you can hunt elk 365 days a year, and you own the elk, because the elk were brought into Texas, even though they used to be in Texas.
So they were in Texas, and then in the 1800s, they wiped them out, and then when they reintroduced them, they said, well, you ain't from around here, so we own you.
Unless there's some wild tycoon out there that's got a crazy setup where he lets a goat loose and the Tiger gets to chase the goat and eat it and kill it.
There is problems like bugs and things that come from other and even plants that come from other parts of the world that don't have natural predators and they just run over everybody else and take over an ecosystem.
But it's very interesting, like, the laws here when it comes to wildlife.
Also, most of the land here is private, which is interesting, too.
Like, you know, California has a lot of public land, and there's public land that people go hiking on, hunting on, fishing on, and same thing with, like, New York State and a lot of states.
Not Texas.
Texas is very little public land, like a tiny swath of it where we can go hunting on.
So, like, how many people even live there in the summertime?
It's like, maybe that'd be too weird.
But I really do love it up there.
It's so beautiful.
And again, I really love Montana, and I really love Colorado.
I just was like, LA is too much.
And the thing about the government, that was the big one for me.
It's like, you guys are morons.
You can't tell me what to do and what not to do, especially when it comes to health choices, and you're fat and disgusting, and you look like you don't take care of yourself at all, and you guys are giving out mandates on health.
Get the fuck out of here.
I was like, this is just, I gotta get out of here.
And that's when I realized how valuable freedom is.
And to not be suppressed by these people that are supposedly acting in the guise of your best interest.
That drives me crazy, and you know what drives me crazy?
Tolls.
When I go to New York, every time I go over those stupid fucking bridges, I get angry.
I'm like, you're making me pay again to drive over the bridge?
You paid for this bridge a thousand times over, you cunts.
Because, like, the whole idea in the beginning was, we gotta fund this bridge, so we need to charge people money to go across the bridge.
But then after a while, the funding's done, you paid for it, you fucks.
But now you're just addicted to charging people.
So you have this massive bottleneck where all these cars just stop dead, because everybody's gotta go to these stupid fucking booths.
And you're just raking in money and just staying incompetent, staying with your terrible money management so everybody's angry at you, and they still just keep paying it every day because there's no way around it.
You gotta go on the bridge, you gotta pay.
Put that stupid thing over your rearview mirror so it clocks you every time and dings your credit card.
Yeah, it's just, it's another creepy way that the city makes money off you.
It really is.
You're dead right.
It's like, why are you charging money for this little spot?
And if it's like the meter is a dollar or whatever it is, but if I don't pay it, it's like 50 bucks?
Like, what is that?
That doesn't make any sense.
You should charge me a dollar, you piece of shit.
It's like a dollar.
Is it a dollar?
Like, what's with the penalties?
What's with all these, like, crazy 50 times over penalties?
Like, you just get to say that you get to take my money?
If I'm gonna pay for the parking thing, and you know you're gonna make me pay because you give me a ticket, how about give me a ticket for what I should actually be paying?
That makes sense because if you look at those old videos of New York City at the turn of the century when people were first having cars and they were cars mixed in with horses, everyone's just kind of always walking across the street.
I got a ticket once in jaywalking in Los Angeles in the 80's and it caused me, the penalty was I couldn't, it was with my car, even though I was walking, the penalty went to my car somehow.
Like even though the crime was walking across the street and then the ticket went on to my registration, which had nothing to do with what I had done.
You gotta shut it off sometimes because you always got radio or phone or something and sometimes you have to have nothing because nothing isn't really nothing.
You gotta like...
It took me years to realize that doing nothing was really good.
It was really doing something, because your mind thinks differently when something's not going in.
You can really think more.
For a long time I thought, well, I'm not doing anything, and I like it, and I think of things sometimes.
Part of me thought, because of society, it's like, well, what do you mean you're doing nothing?
It has a negative, you know what I mean?
It has a negative thing, and then it took me years to think that, no, this is really something.
And then I started looking up nothing.
It sounds like a George Carlin.
I started looking it up, and it showed the benefit of silence and just, you know.
Yeah, especially early in my beginning days of stand-up.
I drove a lot, because I delivered newspapers, so I drive in the mornings and deliver my newspapers.
And I do it with no radio on a lot of the time.
And some of the best ideas that I had came from just doing this manual labor, chucking these newspapers out the window and just driving around, and your mind is free to think about other stuff.
Instead of constantly having entertainment and bombarding it, I'd listen to Charles Laquadera, the morning radio, but if I just shut it off and listen to nothing, then I got some of my best ideas.
Plus you're doing this mundane thing with the paper, which is almost like the gears in your head, it's doing something, but that allows another part of your brain to go on its own, because you're distracting enough I don't know, it's fascinating how it works.
It's focused, but you're not, you're focused on this boring thing, then your mind is playing, because creativity to me is playing.
It's like a child with finger paints, you know, just like, it's always been a very playful thing to me.
I've never like thought, oh my god, I need more, I need five more minutes.
It's just like, Because creating is thinking.
You can't stop thinking.
If someone said to you, you can't think of any more comedy or you'll be arrested.
They wouldn't know if you didn't say it, but you can't stop, right?
Yes, boredom has a negative thing where it's on a notion to it, too, because boredom, that's where the stuff comes.
Like, sometimes if I have to, everyone, everyone in there, every day, like, I have to go here, I've got to buy this, I've got to do this, I've got to call this guy, I've got to do this email, I've got to go, then I have to go there because the car needs this, and all of that, and then it's like, it's like, I can't wait to just sit there.
Yeah.
Without doing these tasks.
Because if you're doing all these tasks, you can't think of anything other than the tasks.
And so they have all the writing of the day done, like say if they commit to a certain amount of pages or a certain amount of letters that they write.
So they write all those words and then they go for a walk.
And then you think about what you wrote.
And then ideas will come to you as you're walking around just thinking about what you wrote.
Like a lot of guys, either they talk into their phone or they have like a little tape recorder and they just talk into it every now and again while they're walking.
You try not to you hear it cracking behind you And if you care about what you do, it's it's intense, you know, I'm glad Especially that live performance in front of many, many people that come to see you.
But the fun I'm having at the club is the most fun.
We were all talking about it last night.
We're all sitting around after the show.
Because we've all done, like a lot of the guys that come with me on the road, we've done arenas, we've done big theaters, but there's nothing like clubs.
It's the most fun thing ever.
It's like everyone's just sharing a moment.
We're all just having a good time together.
I got all these things to talk about, I prepared, I've been doing a lot of sets, so it's gonna be smooth.
Have a cocktail, let's have a laugh.
And it's fun!
It's the most fun thing to do.
Out of all the shit I do, that's the one thing that I don't think I'd ever stop doing that.
They also like the fact that sometimes, like, we'll bring up stuff in a podcast, and then I'll write it down, and then that'll become a bit.
Like, I'll have something pop into my head, and they'll go, ah, I remember when you first talked about that, and now it's, like, your closing bit, because you figured out how to turn it into this five-minute chunk, you know?
And then I would bring in comedians like Tom Segura and Joey Diaz and Duncan Trussell and Ari Shafir.
And then it just became all of a sudden I have guests and all of a sudden I have scientists and all of a sudden I have authors and psychologists and physicians.
And it was weird.
It just like slowly became this thing that it is now.
Because Graham Hancock is a journalist and he specializes in ancient civilizations and the demise of ancient civilizations and that there's evidence that shows That there is likely some sort of a natural catastrophe that took place around 11,800 to 12,000 years ago that wiped out civilization.
And all the civilization that we think about, like Babylonia and Mesopotamia, those were probably reboots of an old civilization that was destroyed by asteroid impacts.
There's like all this physical evidence.
It's called the Younger Dryas Impact Theory.
There's core samples they do where they find iridium at around 11,800 years, which is very common in space, very rare on Earth, but there's a large layer of it.
And micro-diamonds which indicate impacts from the asteroids.
So we probably went through an asteroid shower, and it probably destroyed civilization somewhere around 11,800 years ago.
Ended the Ice Age.
So Graham Hancock, he has Ancient Catastrophe, which is on Netflix.
This whole series on that, where you can follow the evidence, the physical evidence and the archaeological evidence of these ancient civilizations and these ancient construction methods that to this day we still don't understand, like how they move these enormous stones, how they place them, how they even cut them.
I was a giant fan of his, and I would always sing his praises when I would do radio shows and stuff.
I'd tell people about this book he wrote called Fingerprints of the Gods.
An amazing book.
It just shows all this evidence of these ancient cultures that just don't exist anymore, including sunken cities off the coast of Japan.
There wasn't water there, or there was ground there at one point in time thousands and thousands of years ago, and they think that there was actually a city there, and now it's covered by the ocean.
There's a bunch of those that they find out there in the water.
There's a lot of indications that there was like really advanced civilization like 12,000, 20,000 years ago.
Yeah, it's been, it's very, very, I feel super, super fortunate for that aspect of it because I've learned so much talking to so many different people.
And you get all these different perspectives, these heterodox perspectives and alternative perspectives and people that are like very rigid and their ideologies and then people that are like very open-minded and they're just like trying to find the truth.
And they're all like mixed in together in this world.
And if you can bring them together and have conversations with them, it expands your understanding of how the mind works so much.
Like I was only exposed to a certain kind of people before.
You know, I was exposed to us like comics.
And my martial arts friends.
And then, you know, other people that I knew from various walks of life, like whoever I ran into.
But I never got a chance to, like, how would you get a chance to sit down with a John Carmack?
So here he's involved in this thing that's illegal, and he's also involved in NASA. He's also involved in top-secret rocket programs, you know, because he's got SpaceX.
And they're like, hey, motherfucker, what are you doing over there?
So if we're having a couple of drinks, and I spark up a blunt, I look at Jamie, and I hand it over to him, and I hand it to Elon, and he's like, hmm, okay.
So he takes his head of it.
It was funny.
But it's like, how often do you get a chance to sit across from someone like that for three hours and just talk to them for three hours?
He scares the shit out of me.
He scares the shit out of me when he talks about AI. He's the one, like, out of all the people that have this, like, rosy view of AI, including Michio Kaku, who's brilliant, they have this rosy view of AI, artificial intelligence, and Elon does not.
He does not.
He's like, this is the biggest chance of being the demise of civilization, the demise of humans.
And he's done a bunch of these incredible Native American art pieces.
And this area in particular was rich with Native American history because it was a very, very fertile area because of all the lakes and all the rivers and all the wildlife.
So there's arrowheads everywhere out here, all over the place.
I have a friend who has a ranch, and he's pulled thousands of arrowheads from his ranch.
They do these excavations where they know the areas where they hunted a lot.
Where there's a lot of wildlife and they dig into the ground and they sift through it.
So the Comanches were the people that were in control of the plains, in control of Texas, and they were the most fierce tribe, and they were the most difficult to get past.
And they were the reason why people couldn't settle this area.
It wasn't until the Texas Rangers figured out how to combat them on their own terms.
They cold-camped, they never used fires, they dressed like normal civilians, and they kind of lived like Indians.
And they ran around, and that's Quanah Parker.
So, Quanah Parker, his mother, Cynthia Ann Parker, was kidnapped by the Comanche when she was really young.
She was nine years old.
Her family was murdered in front of her, and they took her in, and she eventually became the wife of the chief, and they had a baby.
So, she was white, and she had a half Native American baby, who was Quanah Parker, who was the last Comanche chief.
And he was big for a Comanche and just like very, very fierce guy.
That photograph of her sucking, having her kid sucking on her nipple is a very famous photo because she would do that in front of people and they thought that was like so uncivilized.
Well that's the nostalgia that everybody loves so much about Native American culture, the fact that they lived off the land, in the land.
And they did it at the same time where Europe had already experienced the Enlightenment and the Renaissance and there was all this Stuff and cities and all this culture all over the world.
It was like sophisticated and art and literature.
They didn't even really have art, the Comanches.
Their art was their arrows.
Their art was their clothing.
Their art was, you know, what they did to live off the land.
You know, they just followed the buffalo and lived off of them.
If you could go back in time and see what that must have been like, my God.
How incredible.
To be like one of the Lewis and Clark people, to take that trek across the country, and just experience what it was like before the white man came and fucking put his greasy little palms over everything and built cities.
It's one of those weird ones, where like some people think Eskimo is a bad term, but some Eskimos prefer that term, depending upon where they are in the country and where they are in the world.
It's like a lot of Native Americans, they actually want you to use the term Indian, American Indian.
It's about Cabeza de Vaca when they first came to America and how they made their way from Florida across the country and they're like, everybody died.
There's like a couple guys left at the end of the journey.
But the stuff that they encountered, the way they had to try to get by, and starving to death, and facing hostile enemies, and just crazy.
There's actually an even dumber one that's recent.
And the dumber one was there was some geologists in Italy, I believe.
And they failed to predict an earthquake.
So they were tried.
And I want to say they were convicted and then they had a win on appeal.
See if you can find that story.
But it was insane for all the scientists that actually understand seismology and how those...
You can't predict earthquakes.
You just...
You can't.
And so these morons had decided, hey, it's this fucking guy.
He should have told us.
They tried these guys like they're criminals.
And it was real bad for science.
It was real bad for seismology and the study of earthquakes because they had given – because of their own ignorance, they had decided these people could figure it out.
So they're exonerated.
Why Italian earthquake scientists were exonerated?
Judge who overturned conviction – yeah, so there was a conviction – say experts use the best available science.
Yeah, you can't fucking predict earthquakes, jackasses.
Six scientists convicted of manslaughter in 2012, so only 11 years ago, for advice they gave ahead of the deadly L'Aquila earthquake were victims of uncertain and fallacious reasoning.
To say the three judges who acquitted the experts and reduced the sentence of a seventh defendant last November in a 389-page document deposited in court on Friday since released to the public, Yeah, there's no way.
Other scientists, however, accused the judges of failing to understand modern seismology.
What does that mean?
Well, the judges definitely didn't understand it because they thought that these people could accurately predict when an earthquake is definitely going to come.
I think they convicted him of something else and I think he went to jail for a certain amount of time and then he got out.
I think I got convicted for some other kind of crime.
Wasn't it like a break in and entering thing or something like that?
But most of the evidence, at least as it's presented in the Netflix documentary and talking to her, seems to point to this one guy that they're pretty sure did it.
It was a horrific murder, too.
It's not like a normal thing that women do.
It was like a male thing, like a vicious knife murder.
And because that person been through hell, like her mind is just very unusual.
I mean, the amount of time that she had to sit and deal with the fact that she was wrongfully convicted in front of the whole world.
And then even when she got back home, how many people really knew the whole story and how many people thought she actually was a murderer?
Somehow or another, she got away with it because most people just read headlines.
You just read the propaganda.
You just read like, "Oh, Amanda Knox convicted of murder.
Oh my God, she's a murderer?" And so this poor lady who was 20 years old at the time.
She's a kid and she's just over there studying abroad and the next thing you know she's locked up in a jail for something she didn't do and it's in front of the whole fucking world.
And also then she gets to be embedded in prison with all these women who have had these horrific lives.
Horrific stories of abuse and this life of crime and their whole families filled with crime and chaos and And you get to realize that these are just people just people that just like went down the wrong road And just all of it just didn't line up Just a little tiny fork in the road.
Yep the wrong fork and it could happen to anybody wrong circumstances wrong time wrong place you're born in the wrong area and Wrong family, wrong this, wrong that, wrong friends.
There's just so many ways to process what's happening, because if it's all chaotic or maybe some of it isn't, there's just so many versions to look at it.
It can't be figured out, really.
It's a mixture.
I think it's a big mixture.
You're trying to figure out answers.
Like I said before, it's so chaotic, but your brain is trying to have a right way.
I lived in Burlington, then I went to Middlesex Community College in Bedford, then I went to Emerson College in Boston, then I started doing stand-up, and then I stayed, like, after I got out of...
I stayed like five years in Boston, then I went to Hollywood for two years.
Your mind's only so much involved, but your gut makes a lot of decisions.
Just like time is so precious, right?
So here I am in a place that I don't really care for, Los Angeles, and meanwhile the time is going, my life is going, and it's like, well, why not be in a place where I like where I am?
There's a thing the way a town embraces you when you came from there.
That's different than any other place.
And Boston is a...
It's a very proud city.
Very proud city.
Like, they love people from Boston.
So it was like, going back there was like, Like, look, I did it.
You know?
Like, it worked out.
Here I am.
I'm back.
You know, it's like, to start out at a place, and also when you start out at a place, you know, you're always kind of like, in the back of your mind, you remember how bad you sucked.
You know, you remember what it was like in the beginning.
And to be able to come back and sell out an arena is just weird.
But, you know, Boston has got this rich history of stand-up comedy that I think is unlike any other city in the country.
Because I think it was the only city where you could have these top talents that never left.
And so you're dealing with this incredible high level of comedy.
But it's all local.
And it's just a bunch of killers.
It was very, very unusual.
I think to this day, there's no other place like it.
Because everybody in New York was trying to get on TV and trying to do this and that.
There was no real show business there.
The show business was, when's your set?
You know?
Yeah.
Oh, I got an 8 o'clock at Nick's.
And you go down to Nick's and you see your friends and everyone's doing shows.
And there's shows down the street, The Connection, and shows over there at Dick Daugherty's Comedy Vault.
But there were comedians like Paula Poundstone and Dennis Leary and Kevin Meany.
But Boston, the people there, they loved the comedians.
You're talking about Boston going back, Bill Burr.
He was telling me before he did Fenway Park with Tony V, who was one of my favorite comedians.
Love Tony V. Tony V, one of that prolific...
Bill Burr, just amazing.
And he was telling me when he was walking around the city before that people knew he was going to do Fenway and they were saying, hey, I hope it goes great.
He felt like they were rooting for him, which is a really cool thing.
And then I thought, well, wait a minute, let me look at him as if I didn't know him.
Yes.
Yeah.
One time he was being heckled at the dingo and the lights on the stage, you know, they were track lighting and he just turned the light around to the guy in the audience and he started hammering him.
We should explain what he did because in the early days of AOL chat rooms and things along those lines, People were openly trading in child pornography and he found out about it and he exposed it.
He made it a big part of his life's work to shut that shit down.
And this was the very, very, very early days of the internet.
You remember that part of the movie where they show him in there in Congress arguing with the guy, and then the lawyer beside him for the other side says some lawyer thing, and then Barry shreds him with reality, and then the guy said another lawyer thing, and then Barry shreds him with the real point of the situation, and then the guy stopped talking.
Tony V. Everywhere you would go, there's like so many comics that were just top-notch, man.
I went into Nick's Comedy Stuff one night.
One of the things that Nick's used to do that was absolutely brutal, and this was when I was a beginning comic, they would take people, like say if like...
You know, Billy Crystal was in town.
Billy Crystal wanted to do stand-up.
Billy Crystal celebrated around the world.
He's Billy Crystal.
He's an amazing comedian.
Everybody's gonna go see Billy Crystal.
Let's go see Billy Crystal.
He's at the next Comedy Stop.
It would be Billy Crystal.
But before Billy Crystal would get on, it would be Kevin Knox, and then it would be Steve Sweeney, and Don Gavin, and Kenny Rogerson, and Lenny Clark.
By the time he got on, that audience was beat to shit.
I mean, it's hard now because you go back and watch it now.
It's like you got to realize it's a totally different time in the world.
It's not our culture.
It's a different culture.
It's the culture of 1980s.
Things were more risque.
They're more like when you said things, they were more shocking.
And a lot of that stuff's already been said so many times now that if you go back and listen to it, it's like some of it doesn't really hold up the same way.
But for the time, in those days, those guys were the cream of the crop.
And if you had to follow them in Boston, like, good fucking luck.
Like I told you, that's how I wrote it, and it came out like that.
It meshed with how I speak.
This is how I speak.
And for some reason, accidentally, the abstract jokes went good with my voice.
But the audience, they weren't thrown off from it.
People ask me, well, you know, it was different.
Would the audience take a while to come around?
And they didn't, because right from the first three minutes, they laughed at some of it, and they didn't laugh at other things.
So then I knew right then it wasn't how I was saying it or my voice or anything.
They don't care about anything.
I don't give a shit.
As long as it's funny.
So they thought some of it was funny, and some of it wasn't.
And Mike McDonald helped me a lot, because he saw me the first time, and I was naively disappointed, because I didn't laugh at everything, which is insane, but that was out of being naive.
And he said, Take that material.
He never did it before.
Take that set and take out the stuff that didn't work and put other stuff in that works.
I mean, to try out.
And when I left, from him telling me that, I thought it was a success because they laughed at some of it.
Here I am wanting to, I was 16, wanting to try it and then I, they left it a minute and a half, I, oh my god, they left it.
So then he made me leave, when I left I was like, oh my god, oh my god, I gotta keep changing and changing and changing.
But I didn't think of changing my style or anything because, like I was saying, fingerprint before.
It was just what it was.
It didn't even enter my mind to change it.
Some of it worked, some of it didn't.
Change it, try more, try more, try more.
And I'm glad there wasn't any show business there because someone might have said, you can't be mumbling over on the side.
Get a sport jacket and talk loud.
You know what I mean?
There was no one watching from that angle, I mean.
And all of those guys that we were just talking about, none of them are like the next guy.
It was like a factory that only made one car, and then they made a different car.
I knew later when I heard about it after I had gone.
But we all wanted to go on the TV. Everyone wasn't doing it just to be doing it in Boston.
I wanted to someday go on TV. I had no idea how I would get there.
And then I got a lucky break because Peter LaSalle came to Boston and he saw me in the club.
Because there was an article about the Ding Ho, and a freelance writer wrote about it and went into the LA Times, this weird comedy club, Chinese restaurant.
And then he read it, and then he went back east looking at colleges for his kids were getting out of high school.
They did a summer trip.
To Boston and New York to look at schools.
And he remembered the article and he called up the club.
I'm going to go in.
And then he saw me and then I went on there.
So I got a very lucky break.
But I know you're talking about, like, I mean, I was just insanely lucky.
But that Fran's movie, I mean, he never even made a movie before.
And for us, for guys from Boston, it's so fascinating because it does really do a fantastic job of capturing how unusual that scene was, how strange it was, and how it's really never happened again since.
When you do stand-up now, are you doing, like, the local clubs in Boston to fuck around to work on new stuff, or do you just take new stuff right to the stage?
If it gets nothing three times, I know it's never getting anything.
But if it works once, I don't even really count on it because it might have been a fluke, you know, the audience, how I said it, the mood of the audience.
But if it works three times, then I can trust it.
But if they don't laugh at it three times, then I get rid of it.
I don't even remember what it is.
I get rid of it.
But I don't think that I was wrong.
I still think it's funny.
If I wrote it down, I think it's funny.
Otherwise, I wouldn't write it down.
But they don't agree with me.
They're in charge.
They're the editors.
The audience is editors.
They don't think they're the editors, but they're going like this.
And they're in charge.
So I just throw everything out that they don't like.
I still cannot predict.
I don't know about you.
I cannot predict in all these years what they're going to laugh at.
I cannot write something down and think, this is going to be on a scale of 1 to 10. This is a 7. Nothing.
Nothing.
500 people of silence to create, manufacturing silence for other countries.
Well, what happened was I wrote an article for Rolling Stone magazine in like 1987. It was a fairy tale about how the beach was invented.
It was very interesting, weird.
And I would read it every five years.
I would read it and think, oh, I should write another story sometime.
So then one of the last times I read it, I should write another story.
And then right then, Michael O'Brien got me this Twitter thing, you know?
Oh, here, you should do something on here.
So then I thought, all right, I'm just going to try to write another story.
I'll just write it on here.
So I wrote two sentences, then two sentences, then the next day two sentences.
Because it didn't, like I said, it didn't enter my mind to write jokes.
I'll try to write something.
I did it for like four or five days and people were leaving messages saying, someone has to tell him what this is for.
This is really good for his jokes.
This is perfect.
And other people would be saying, he's writing a novel on Twitter.
This is insane.
So I did it on and off for a few weeks and then I stopped writing it for a while and then I thought, I should just keep writing this but not on Twitter.
Because there's never really big planning out, at least in what I do.
And then I just started doing it, and it went further and further.
I really liked doing it because, like we were saying before, the jokes from noticing, you know, like the sweep of the radar.
You're walking down the street, you see something.
But with this, I actually, after I started doing it, I started to sit down on purpose, like for a couple of hours a day, focusing right on this kid in this class.
And that was different than just random things coming into my mind.
So I was focusing it, and I couldn't stop doing it.
I mean, I would do it for a couple of hours a day, but it just...
It kept going and going and I was creating this weird world.
And I was fascinated what was in my head because I was sitting there on purpose.
Because it was like going into your own head with a flashlight.
You know in the caves when there's stuff written on?
It was like I was going in my own head with a flashlight because I was determined to try to write for two hours.
And that determination made me go deep in like...
And there was all this shit in there that I had no idea if I hadn't focused.
And then the stuff that I thought of that had nothing to do with the book, just life things, would come back to me and go, oh, this can go right in here.
You know, for what I do, a couple sentence joke, two sentences, and then have the audience laugh, hopefully.
It's like a narrow window.
Say, and then laugh.
But I had stuff in my head that wasn't going to go through that window.
It wasn't going to be good for stand-up.
I had other stuff.
I mean, I'm not complaining about that's how the jokes are.
That's just how it is.
And then when I started writing this thing, I thought, oh, I know what I'm going to do.
After it kept going, I thought, I'm going to put a funnel on this kid's head, and I'm going to pour everything I think about being alive into his head.
And it'll seem like he's thinking it.
I mean, he can't really be, a 70-year-old couldn't be thinking this.
So I got to express a lot of stuff in my mind that wouldn't ever be expressed in the way I do stand-up.
It's always interesting to me the different creative processes.
That everyone has their own different way to do it.
It's always interesting to hear how other people...
Your process is so different.
And also one of the things that's different is the thing that you're doing these shows and you're just sandwiching these new bits in between your other bits.
You're not really performing at clubs.
You're not dropping in and doing a lot of sets at regular places.
Open mic really should be in a nice theater in front of a full audience.
That should be the open mic.
You think so?
Just as an analogy.
Because when you start, you're starting at 11 at night and there's 10 drunk guys, you should start out in a nice theater and work your way to 10 drunk guys after you've been doing it for four years.
I had them for a long time, but then the show, I do like an 85-minute show, and I thought, I'm not going to bring a guy now anymore, because the audience would be too tired by the time I got to my 80 minutes.
Like, if you had a guy sitting there for 15 minutes, then the first guy comes on for like 12 minutes, then there's another break.
So all that energy is now gonna be felt when I get to 70 minutes.
It does help because it really makes you tighten your act up.
And then when you're on...
And someone's only on in front of you for like 20 minutes and just getting the crowd warmed up.
Oh my god, it's like so easy.
So different.
But if you could take the lessons that you learn from doing the crowd, like the late night spot, like when all these people are on before you and the show's really old, you could take that energy and bring it to a fresh audience.
And now, because of that and because of the pandemic and all the different things that happened where things just kind of fell into place, we have this spot and then there's like world-class comedians here.
Roseanne lives here.
Ron White lives here.
Tim Dilland.
Tony Hinchcliffe and fucking Tom Segura, Christina Pazitsky, Duncan Trussell.
The whole purpose of it for all of us to help us develop comedy, to write your shit, and then to also to have a place where people can come and have a good time.
That's the beautiful thing.
Like watching people leave and the show is over and they have these giant smiles on their face and they're leaving.
God damn, it's the best feeling in the world.
It's the best feeling in the world.
You made people feel good.
They came, they got babysitters, they did all the stuff, they got to the club, and then just fucking laughing and having fun.
And I could tell seeing you last night that you loved being in here.
You loved the whole club.
You know, me and my friend Dean, we have this term called a treehouse.
Treehouse is our term meaning when something is done, created just for fun, just like when you were a kid and you were 12 and you're building something and oh, oh, oh, oh, has no, like, outside.
And that's what you have.
You have like a giant treehouse for all this funness.
Like guys get off stage and like, do you see my new thing?
I'm doing this new thing.
And then we'll all talk about it.
Like, how did you set it up?
And like, oh, oh, what do you still do in that part?
No, I dropped that part.
And now I got this part.
Like, oh, that's way better.
Oh my god.
And when you see people do stuff like that and create right in front of you and you watch the sets and you watch their bits grow, it's all just like, it's so much fuel.
This was different because this is like everyone said, hey, let's move there.
And they moved here before I even had a club.
That was crazy.
Because the club, I had another place that I had bought.
And that deal fell apart because the place was kind of a mess and the whole story was a mess.
But that club, that setback, because I had bought this one place, then I had to get out of the deal, and then buy a new place, that was like a whole year plus of wasted time.
And that was when everybody was moving here, too.
And so then we were just doing local clubs, like little rock and roll clubs.
It plays the Vulcan Gas Company, which is basically like an EDM club.
And we were doing sets there.
And then the Creek in the Cave opened.
And so that was nice.
It's a nice little club.
And we do sets there.
So we did clubs in town.
But I didn't have the place yet.
People were still moving here just to do those shows.
When you're in it, it feels like it's been around forever.
It feels like The Shining, like the fucking Overlook Hotel, like it's always been there.
It really does.
Because that building is a 1927 building.
And that building has had Stevie Ray Vaughan on stage in the 1980s.
If you look in the green room, all those posters that are around the top of the walls, those are all concert posters from people that performed at the Ritz.
So it's like the Misfits, the Butthole Surfers, Black Flag, all these different bands that performed there.
So there's the memories of all of those things.
That happened in that place and they're kind of burned into the framework of the building.
You feel it in there.
I know it sounds like woo-woo bullshit, but when you're in that building, there's an added element.
In the ingredients of whatever the fuck that building is.
I always felt that about, like, Dangerfields in New York City.
There's, like, clubs you go into and you just go, whoa, this place is alive.
Like, this place, like, I feel this place.
Like, oof.
I felt that the moment I went into the Alamo, it was almost like it was asking me to do it.
Like when I was walking around when it was the Alamo Drafthouse, the Ritz Theater, they had leased it to the Alamo Drafthouse, but then the Alamo Drafthouse there went under during the pandemic.
So when I was walking around, it was just this empty theater.
But it was almost like it was telling me to do this.
It's like you're walking around like, this is what you can do.
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You can raise the floor up and you can lower the ceiling.