March 29, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:06:07
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| If I was telling a kid right now, I'd say, Brother and Sister, unless there's a super serious thing you can get a degree in that you can exchange for your green rectangles, don't go! | ||
| Because half the people going in right now are getting degrees that mean nothing. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm Dave Rubin and this is the Rubin Report. | |
| Reminder, everybody, subscribe to RubinReport.com if you want to get all our videos early and totally ad-free. | ||
| And more importantly, joining me today is a stand-up comic and host of Dennis Miller Plus One on the RT network, as well as the Dennis Miller Option podcast. | ||
| Dennis Miller, I've already said your name three times. | ||
| What's up, Rubes? | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Beautiful pad in here, man. | ||
| I'm trying to read. | ||
| You can tell a man by his books and his- How am I doing? | ||
| His tchotchkes. | ||
| A Carlin fan, which I find in your little Steven Pinker, NBA. | ||
| I think your detractors would say this indicates you're moving rightwards where it's John Birch participation on the bottom. | ||
| Where do you have the map centered up? | ||
| And that odd confluence between South America and, or the globe I should say, South America and Africa where it's split up. | ||
| Now I have a theory. | ||
| It looks like they were together at one point. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| They've split apart and obviously the west coast of Africa with Ivory Coast, Liberia is the most contentious place on the planet, and I think that's a sudden hard drive tremble from way back when, where a guy went out into his yard in Liberia once and said, honey, what's this crack? | ||
| And then two weeks later, it was another cunt. | ||
| I've oft wondered how Pangea split. | ||
| Now I have a little... There you go. | ||
| I'm giving you a little something of everything here, because we got lefties, we got righties. | ||
| Look, I got an American flag in the control room over there. | ||
| And I love the map. | ||
| I always love to have a map in my studio to feel situated. | ||
| Yeah, so you got two shows, you've done a bajillion things. | ||
| I said to you right before, I'm not even going to use notes. | ||
| I try not to really look at my notes when I talk to most guests. | ||
| Anyway, I thought I'd just sit down and see what happens. | ||
| You kind of just need to be wound up and then you go, right? | ||
| Well, you know what, but I tell you as I get older, I need to be wound up and let go less. | ||
| I just, listen, it's contentious now. | ||
| I was more of a, I don't want to use the tired term, firebrand, but I was more willing to engage Lock Antlers when I was young. | ||
| I don't think people are going to change their minds anymore. | ||
| I don't want to be the carnival barker on some freak show. | ||
| We're split. | ||
| We'll find out where we go, which way at each election. | ||
| In between, it's going to be contentious. | ||
| At age 66, I don't want to wake up every day and fight with people about stuff they're not going to change their mind on anyway. | ||
| So when I get going, I like to put on a good show. | ||
| You're spanking our gang, let's put on a show, but I don't need to get going as much anymore. | ||
| So you're like an evolved political satirist or something. | ||
| I used to dig the game when you could budge somebody, an angster. | ||
| I didn't need them to come over. | ||
| I never thought that you're gonna talk to somebody and they were gonna desert their core beliefs and come over your way. | ||
| But at least you could see the mulling. | ||
| I think mulling's gone. | ||
| I could see hmm's gone. | ||
| It's just now, everybody's dug in. | ||
| I'm trying, man. | ||
| I'm trying over here. | ||
| No, I appreciate it, but like I said, I don't know, you're in your 40s, right? | ||
| I would have probably fought the plot more then, but I'm telling you what, you seem like, just the time we talked beforehand, you seem like a smart enough cat that somewhere down the road, I can't see you fighting it into the barn. | ||
| You seem to be in love. | ||
| You've got a beautiful family in the picture out here. | ||
| You've got a great place. | ||
| You're kicking ass and taking names career-wise. | ||
| Yeah, you should do it now. | ||
| But at some point, the harvest is What are you gonna do? | ||
| I'm into getting up and reading, taking a hike, having a good meal, appreciating the fact I married the most beautiful, witty, charming girl I ever met, adoring my sons, watching some baseball, and then reading as I fall out to sleep. | ||
| Is that a tough thing, though, for a comic to have to face? | ||
|
unidentified
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No? | |
| Not for me. | ||
| But do you think for most comics that's tough? | ||
| Like, you almost fear that? | ||
| You fear the okayness because you won't have the fuel? | ||
| It's a convenience. | ||
| It's a job. | ||
| Yeah, I was never very... | ||
| I don't view show business as some sort from the Stone Moment where you're anointed. | ||
| It's a job. | ||
| I grew up in Pittsburgh and my job, what I was good at, was I would think jokes up and then I tried to give those jokes to somebody else to do and then I found I didn't have the ego for that. | ||
| Once I saw somebody do a joke I thought, up on the Tonight Show and Carson laughing, I'm not built for this, I better become the unlikely conduit. | ||
| But I've never thought of myself as the silver surfer comedian. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, no, I don't have any mulled pangs where I think, oh, I wish I was in the fray. | ||
| It never was like that when I was in the fray. | ||
| Were you always political? | ||
| No, once you get that job on SNL, you have to become political. | ||
| Yeah, so you weren't political before that. | ||
| I used to be a prop comic. | ||
| I remember working with, you know, I was never quite Caratopian, but... Is that an actual word? | ||
| I think that's probably in the dictionary now. | ||
| That's depressing. | ||
| I did props when I first started because I thought visually that way, but then I remember I couldn't fit the props in the overhead. | ||
| I had slight props, and then I thought, you know, I'm not gonna wait a half an hour at a Right. | ||
| For a toilet seat I could put on my head and say, Alas, poor Turdick. | ||
| So I ditched out on that, started writing jokes, like I said, told a couple of other comedians, saw them do them and score with them and thought, I've got to be the guy. | ||
| So like I said, it was very I didn't have a whoosh, whoosh thing about stand-up. | ||
| I remember thinking, okay, this is a good career. | ||
| Kind of a decision. | ||
| So when you get the Weekend Update situation, the SNL situation, then it's sort of like, it was political. | ||
| What year did you start at SNL? | ||
| Somewhere in the 80s. | ||
| That's what I mean, though. | ||
| I'm not doing that deliberately. | ||
| I remember I was maybe like 89 or something, because I'm trying to remember, because you on SNL, that class was like my formative comedy year class. | ||
| So I was like 12, 13 around then. | ||
| And I think maybe like 89 or something like that. | ||
| Well, some people choose to think of themselves as comedic visionaries. | ||
| I choose to think of ourselves as ushering kids through puberty. | ||
| If you were 12 or 13. | ||
| That's all we were. | ||
| That was 15 minutes off from jerking off. | ||
| But you guys did it! | ||
|
unidentified
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See? | |
| I made it out okay! | ||
| But I remember I was in Baltimore and I had auditioned for SNL maybe a month before. | ||
| And then I remember They picked the cast. | ||
| USA Today had a picture of them. | ||
| I wasn't in it. | ||
| I was still in Baltimore. | ||
| And I was so tough at that point because on your way up you have to be tough. | ||
| You did stand up in New York 12 years. | ||
| I was a gladiator. | ||
| And I remember seeing that picture. | ||
| I didn't have a crestfallen thing. | ||
| I think I came close to that. | ||
| Alright, keep going. | ||
| Then, I was up doing Letterman, and somebody came into the Letterman dressing room and said, listen, Lorne Michaels wants to see you on 8, or no, 17, where his office was. | ||
| And I said, geez, I knew something was up. | ||
| He's not calling me down to revisit me to tell me why I didn't give it to him. | ||
| Yeah, you're really not getting it. | ||
| But I'm thinking maybe I get a shot on it as a comedian or something, like Stephen Wright would come on Sam once in a while. | ||
| I went down, I knew it was going to be something good, but then I walked in and I remember it's one of those moments that stick in your head. | ||
| Lorne sits at the end of the thing, he's got one of those green domed lights on his desk, you know, that gives it that Arthur Conan Doyle feel. | ||
| He's got the quarter glasses on, reading scripts or something, and over his shoulder is the Empire State Building, and I remember it being like red, white, and blue. | ||
| It wasn't Fourth of July or anything, but he looks up and he goes, Hey, Dennis Miller. | ||
| I go, Hey, Lorne. | ||
| He says, how would you like to do weekend update? | ||
| And I said, I'd like that a lot. | ||
| He said, I'll see you tomorrow at around 11. | ||
| I said, all right, sir. | ||
| I walked out and I remember thinking, I'm not a big drinker, but I remember saying, I'm going to go get four fingers of something brown on the rocks and knock this down, because this is pivotal. | ||
| And that was magical. | ||
| I don't want to act like I'm sitting over here playing Sputin. | ||
| I'm talking about stand-up. | ||
| I was kind of step-by-step, Maginot line, move it six inches, fall back four, move it four. | ||
| But when that happened, I remember thinking, all right, take some mental Polaroids here. | ||
| Don't be blase about this because that's its own defense mechanism. | ||
| This is a big deal. | ||
| Chevy Chase did this. | ||
| You're going to do it now. | ||
| Enjoy it until you either become a success or get whacked. | ||
| So I did enjoy it a long way. | ||
| I took all those moments and, you know, the first time you sit in that seat and they count you down, I just thought, All right, I might go out, but I'm going out on my shield here. | ||
| So even though you weren't purely political, they pegged you for that. | ||
| Is that what you wanted? | ||
| Did you want to do more? | ||
| I wanted any hook. | ||
| I'm not a character guy. | ||
| I used to try to stay out of the SNL sketches, because, you know, when you're with geniuses, Carvey's a comedic genius, Lovett's, sketch-wise, a genius, Phil, the ultimate clue guy. | ||
| I mean, the only guy, I never thought I'd see a guy like Danny, and Phil got in the realm with him, and I always thought, well, this is a serious play. | ||
| Mike Myers comes in. | ||
| See, you got four leads there who could kill the ball. | ||
| I'm the fifth guy in a sketch. | ||
| I'm the bartender saying, here's your gimlet. | ||
| And yet I gotta be there blocking it for three and a half hours. | ||
| So I used to go around and say to writers when they wrote me in, I'd say, I want to be like the D.H. | ||
| I want to pick a rock song, swing the weighted bat down the tunnel, come out and hit the ball for ten minutes. | ||
| And by the end you had that, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| It was a groovy job. | ||
| I'd probably been in around a dozen sketches over the years. | ||
| And they were ones where I thought, oh, this is good. | ||
| I should stay in this because I want to see this when I get older. | ||
| It's a Wonderful Life, the next chapter. | ||
| You know, you knew when something was going to be a big hit. | ||
| But by and large, I was really happy to have just Weekend Update. | ||
| I'm sure you've been asked this a million times, but what do you think it is about SNL or the ages or the collection or the level of talent of all the people that there's so much tragedy around the cast members? | ||
| I'd have to go back and study that. | ||
| Is there? | ||
| Well, I mean, deaths and drug use. | ||
| I mean, well, I guess drug use is just Hollywood, but yeah. | ||
| John, Chris. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'd like to see the actuary tables. | ||
| I always hear this thing. | ||
| Yeah, so you don't even think that there's anything there? | ||
| I met a lot of healthy people there. | ||
| There were a few guys who I could have met working in a hardware store where I'd know. | ||
| That had it rough too? | ||
| Alright, fair enough. | ||
| I didn't think you were going to say that. | ||
| Something about the pressure of live maybe? | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know. | |
| Something. | ||
| You know, all that stuff seems contrived to me. | ||
| You're working as an entertainer in some way, and all of a sudden you're on the best entertainment vehicle for young people in the world, quite frankly. | ||
| No, you can spend your days sitting in a room thinking, oh my stomach hurts, I'm spilky, I gotta go get loaded. | ||
| Or you can just get on with it and have a blast. | ||
| And it is scary. | ||
| And there are weeks where it felt horrible when you'd go badly. | ||
| That's any gig. | ||
| But that whole crash and burn thing, I'm so far from that. | ||
| If somebody would have said to me, you know, at the end of the day this is going to cause you to do yourself in, I said, I'm not taking the job. | ||
| It's not that magical kingdom to me. | ||
| What would you have done if it wasn't for comedy? | ||
| I would like to maybe be a shrink. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| I don't know, maybe not anymore because things that used to interest me about people, their psychological tells now have turned into blatant whining, so I don't think I'd be a good shrink for today. | ||
| People come in and say, you know, I got in a fight when I was in fourth grade and you used to be a fucking 70. | ||
| Wake up! | ||
| But at the time, I thought that might be interesting. | ||
| What else did I want to do? | ||
| I never even thought like that. | ||
| But if I said anything, I'd say a shrink. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So what do you make of the way everything's changing right now? | ||
| You're doing a show on RT. | ||
| You got a podcast. | ||
| Everyone's got a podcast. | ||
| So you've shifted around. | ||
| You were on cable news for years doing your thing with O'Reilly. | ||
| What do you make of the way just the media landscape is changing and how everyone gets everything in a different way? | ||
| Well, I'll tell you what, it might be my inner pragmatist, but I never even say everybody's got a podcast. | ||
| I'd say there's tens of thousands of people who have a podcast. | ||
| You probably winnow that down to a thousand, or even worse, getting into the business of seeing if you dig it. | ||
| You probably get down to a hundred that really are completely in sync with a Peter Principle. | ||
| They're maxing it out, whatever talent they have. | ||
| You get down to around two dozen that are killing it. | ||
| I think you're in that two dozen. | ||
| So I don't disparage it with that everybody has a podcast. | ||
| Until everybody has a podcast, No. | ||
| There's a bunch of people throwing scat up against the wall. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's a bunch of people trying it. | ||
| I would try it too if I was young and I didn't know if I was talented. | ||
| It's a great thing. | ||
| It's like you used to jump up at an open mic night. | ||
| Why not do a podcast? | ||
| But the simple fact is I view the attrition rate as much the same in any other aspect of show business. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, look at it, brother. | ||
| You're killing it. | ||
| And for me to just say everybody's got one. | ||
| No, you've got one. | ||
| Well, I guess, yeah. | ||
| I'll take the compliment. | ||
| It's math. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So the barrier to entry is low, but yeah, it doesn't mean you've got something that's really cooking. | ||
| Barrier to entry should always be low. | ||
| Anybody can jump in and try anything they want. | ||
| Show business is no magic, I've said magic kingdom, no exalted higher plane. | ||
| It's show business. | ||
| It's you going out to strangers and saying, let me either make you think, cry, or laugh. | ||
| That's all it is at the end of the day. | ||
| People have always been interested in that. | ||
| Town criers. | ||
| People, you know, Seventh Seal going around doing the puppet shows to the paupers. | ||
| It's, I don't know, to me it seems like a hard drive issue. | ||
| I'm sure there was somebody sitting around the mud pit way back when, you know, in Kubrick Town, where somebody came in with a femur and cracked the other. | ||
| And I'm sure there was some guy trying to do a rye rejoinder to the other ape having their head crushed in. | ||
| Folks, I want to tell you, it's been around since day one. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| To me, it should be an easy point of entry. | ||
| It shouldn't be that high a bar. | ||
| It's just you trying to entertain people. | ||
| So what really interests you these days? | ||
| I'm trying to read everything P.G. | ||
| Woodhouse ever read. | ||
| I hike. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| I'm trying to teach myself to not... | ||
| You know, active fame comes at you fast and furious. | ||
| Speaking of Kubrick, it reminds me of Keir Dullea at the end of 2001. | ||
| That's what the whole world feels like right now. | ||
| You're in a shoot, man, a wind tunnel test, and it's flying, so you can't always be lucid about it. | ||
| Uh, that, uh, if you're on the planet for 85 years, the front end of that, 20, there's guys like Eddie who beat it, but usually until 20 you're anonymous. | ||
| And the last 10 years, you've probably, so you're 30 of those out. | ||
| You got a half a century. | ||
| If you get any part of that where you're famous and you're actually seated at a nice table, where strangers come up to you and say, You've won. | ||
| And to try to think this is the way life should be, it isn't. | ||
| So when you say, what are you doing? | ||
| I'm trying to, what do they call it, mindfulness, but that's almost falling into its own cliche. | ||
| I'm trying to be aware of what a great run I had. | ||
| And I might be in the denouement of that. | ||
| And that's fine. | ||
| You know, but you can see when you even mention it to people, where you say, I don't think it was hot as it was. | ||
| I don't know if I'll ever be that hot again. | ||
| People kind of wincing. | ||
| Well, I think... | ||
| I mean it sincerely. | ||
| I think the examined life is everything, and I want to examine my life. | ||
| I want to feel legit here as I, hopefully another 30 years, get it into the barn. | ||
| I want to analyze what part of me, which was a shy kid, ends up getting braggadocious enough to try showbiz, hits the ball hard, and I think I inhabited that Yeah, I love the answer. | ||
| and now not as hot, I want to inhabit that plane just as well. It's equally valid. | ||
| Yeah, I love the answer. I mean that's as honest as it can get. | ||
| I like that. I never predicated on me riding into the sunset with the key light on me. | ||
| Listen, you have your moment. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know how far into it now. | ||
| You told me you did 12 years of stand-up, so I know you got some hard riding under your belt. | ||
| I stood on a lot of street corners. | ||
| And you're killing it now. | ||
| But, you know... | ||
| I don't know that humans are built to keep it up till they're, all of a sudden you're Larry Sanders doing the show at seven and going, I don't mean Gary. | ||
| Yeah, no, you mean Larry. | ||
| Larry Sanders going back and laying in bed watching the repeat. | ||
| That four hours between live show and watching it on the East Coast feed, there's no way. | ||
| Yeah, I think about it sometimes, even though I'm sort of right in the thick of it right now. | ||
| It's like, you know, when things change or I change or family expands or whatever it is that like, Will I want to do it at this level, or deal with a certain amount of hate, or any of those things, you know? | ||
| It's like... Well, you'll only find out. | ||
| There's only one way to find out. | ||
| I don't want to sound like I'm on a bachelor trip, but all I know is it was never my trip to take it all the way in. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And at some point I remember thinking, it's like base camps on Everest. | ||
| And, you know, all of a sudden you're planting the flag. | ||
| You think, how the hell did this happen? | ||
| And then all of a sudden when you're at six base camp and you're boiling water with the Sherpa, And they say, we're not going to let you make the climb tomorrow. | ||
| You go, okay, I'm going to get cozy in here with Tenzing Norgay IV. | ||
| I'm fine with that. | ||
| They started moving me down the mountain. | ||
| I had a big run. | ||
| Do you think most people are afraid of that, sort of? | ||
| And that is why everyone is kind of nuts? | ||
| Like, we're all sort of afraid of trying to figure out what would make us actually happy? | ||
| You know, so we get obsessed with whatever the news cycle is or whatever. | ||
| I give a pat answer, then I turn into the guy on the second row to tell him about all this thing. | ||
| I'm not as scared shitless of anonymity as some people. | ||
| If I fall back into that, I'm going to examine that the same way I examined being... | ||
| I remember the first two years of being famous. | ||
| Maybe this was a tell. | ||
| And when I say famous, folks, where's the camera? | ||
| I don't want to sound like an asshole. | ||
| I'm just saying you end up famous. | ||
| I remember spending two years up front, not even being able to focus on it because I would notice it. | ||
| I would be too pleased with it. | ||
| The pragmatic side of myself would castigate the side that was too pleased with it. | ||
| The other side would come in and defend me against the mean side, say, oh, come on, he's just got fame. | ||
| And I'd say, I'm spending 12 hours a day figuring this out. | ||
| And at some point, I remember, it's like an algebraic equation. | ||
| Cancel terms out. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| It doesn't mean anything in a weird way. | ||
| Are you a good dad? | ||
| Are you a good friend? | ||
| And I'm not saying I am. | ||
| As far as friends, I'm a little distant. | ||
| But I'm just saying there are so many ways to shoot your life through. | ||
| And when you're in it, it takes all your attention because you've got to stay laser focused. | ||
| I always view fame like it's a party. | ||
| All of a sudden you're outside and it's like those old Warner Brothers cartoons where the house has got notes coming out. | ||
| All of a sudden you get in the door and you like stay against the wall and it's a Sardis character. | ||
| It's like a Last Supper of Fame and you're pressed against the wall looking at it. | ||
| And you edge into the party and then all of a sudden the sweet spot is halfway into the party and then like you have two seconds there and then you realize half the party's happening behind you and you don't know who's going to A2 Brute in the sauna and eventually you get through to the other wall and go to the bathroom. | ||
| So at some point I always had that in my head from the first moment that I got it and so I'm not disappointed. | ||
| It always seemed to have a natural shelf life to me. | ||
| Yeah, so I don't want to do the greatest hits with you because I want to do sort of where you're at now, but so when you then start doing O'Reilly, and then suddenly people are going, wait a minute, this is SNL, Weekend Update guy, he's like this sort of like hip, cool, lib kind of, suddenly you're on O'Reilly. | ||
| I was as hip or cool, or as not hip and cool, I was the same. | ||
| Optics of it now suddenly, wait a minute, this doesn't make sense. | ||
| He was on SNL and now he's on Evil Fox News. | ||
| I'm just saying, you know, this is not my opinion. | ||
| This is just sort of like... Yeah, well people have to figure their own thing out. | ||
| Yeah, but did you fear that at all or even none of it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh? | |
| Interesting. | ||
| Listen man, I was on the number one rated show on cable, I think, Bill, for 20 years. | ||
| I was doing six minutes a week. | ||
| It was a beautiful gig. | ||
| We'd go out on the road once a week, or once a month. | ||
| We'd sell 10,000 seats. | ||
| Crazy! | ||
| Could you believe that? | ||
| Could he believe it? | ||
| We definitely were a one plus one equals three thing. | ||
| Because on my own, I'd probably, at that point, draw two. | ||
| I don't know what Billy was drawing, but probably two. | ||
| But you put us together in the mutton jeff of it. | ||
| It always reminded me of that scene in the Chaplin movie, not saying we were chaplinesque, where Charlie puts his foot behind his leg and kicks the guy who's working the border guard thing, the guy at Ellis Island, kicks him in the butt. | ||
| I was doing that to O'Reilly. | ||
| And the key moment in that relationship was when I told Bill, you're like a big Irish beat cop where you're spinning that stick, everybody's scared shitless of you, and I'm going to call you Billy instead of Bill. | ||
| That why. | ||
| It was a great move. | ||
| Because all of a sudden, the power, the monolith, is being poked fun at by the Mutt & Jeff guy. | ||
| And it was cool. | ||
| That's why it worked together, is because I could make him laugh, an unguarded laugh periodically, and I could poke fun at him. | ||
| I could call him Billy. | ||
| I could wear shorts on his show, which, you know, I'd put my leg up and he'd say, do you not have pants? | ||
| All that worked. | ||
| Were you doing a lot of those hits from home? | ||
| Did you have a home situation, or were you going into Fox affiliate or something? | ||
| I went over to this place called the Rubin Studios. | ||
| We did it up at Santa Barbara in another studio. | ||
| We were always on a split screen. | ||
| It was so funny, until we started going on the road, people would say, you and Bill, like we're Hope and Crosby. | ||
| I've met him twice! | ||
| We're always on a split screen. | ||
| But over the years, I'll tell you what, I'm relatively ill at ease. | ||
| Socially? | ||
| I don't know what that is. | ||
| I don't want to make it precious. | ||
| Bill, I think if you could watch him over the years. | ||
| Are you? | ||
| Because off camera you seem exactly the same to me. | ||
| No, but there's plenty of comics. | ||
| I know exactly what you're talking about. | ||
| There's a lot of comics that are weird, have eye contact stuff, don't want to touch anybody. | ||
| And then the second, you know, the camera goes on and bam, they're there. | ||
| But I don't, from the little bit we just did our thing, I didn't catch that. | ||
| Well, I do know that I don't go to a lot of social events and stuff like that when I'm working. | ||
| I like to say hi and be normal. | ||
| I'm in a cat's place. | ||
| But I'm not a real social guy, and he isn't either. | ||
| So when you put the two of us together, I was enamored of that part of our rally. | ||
| And I sometimes didn't understand his brusque manner, and I sometimes thought, why is he beating his drum to that degree when I'd watch him on the show? | ||
| And Bill, if you're seeing this, I'm not You know, I'm telling you, I saw that cat do stuff for soldiers, kids who'd been abused, Haitians after storms. | ||
| Yeah, sometimes in the way that doesn't matter, the topical stuff, I sometimes find him equally ill at ease as I am. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But walking the walk? | ||
| That cat gave a lot of money to a lot of people, and I don't know his personal life. | ||
| You know, people say, "What about..." I go, "Do you really think..." | ||
| Oh, okay. So that's my relationship with O'Reilly. | ||
| I'm going to call him and talk about dating or whatever the hell is going on. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's not my life with him. We went out on the road, and I saw him do a lot of good things for a lot of people, | ||
| and guess what? | ||
| I felt no need to know to probe the underbelly of Bill O'Reilly or find out what really makes him tick, and he felt no need to find out. | ||
| That being said, I did see him do enough things over the years that I find him an honorable man. | ||
| Yeah, what do you think about the way that we take out people these days? | ||
| You don't have to make it about him specifically, but just generally. | ||
| You know, now Chris Matthews went out, and it's just like this endless cascade of we're just gonna build people up and crush them. | ||
| It gets worse. | ||
| Listen, you know, imagine, like, Twitter during Dickensian England. | ||
| I don't know how cool it would be there. | ||
| Listen, the rules are clearly... You mean it's not worse than it's ever been? | ||
| That's what everyone says every day, it's worse than it's ever been? | ||
| I think the way that it'll turn this... Yeah, it might be, but I think the way that it'll turn this is everybody who's in the public eye should get up to a joke, A witticism, a pithy revelation, and stop it down themselves and look at the camera and say, I have something here, but I'm going to stay out because I understand the new rules. | ||
| And have that happen ad nauseum for a few years. | ||
| And relate to people how crazy and post-Orwellian it's gotten as far as jokes, dialogue, throwaways, cruelty. | ||
| Indeed, humans are cruel once in a while. | ||
| Uh, you know, the fact that that's all neutered down now, I think that people should be reminded that we're missing some of the texture of life walking around like we're in Logan's Run or something. | ||
| You know, it's, uh... | ||
| I don't think it will change for a while because to me it's the Lord of the Flies and right now the uptight people have the conch and they're the ones who are going to speak. | ||
| And therefore if I'm sitting there and I get to a point in a joke where I go, this puts me where I have to talk to people who I disagree with about how bad I am. | ||
| I just, I stop off at a joke. | ||
| No, I'm not going to say it. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| I've tackled myself here. | ||
| And if enough of that happens, people are going to start saying, hey, I'm sick of this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Do you have a bunch that you just wouldn't tell anymore? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, sure. | |
| Like an old favorite that you're just like... Yeah, it's easy. | ||
| Listen, when I used to be on network television, they told you not to swear. | ||
| I found it easy not to swear. | ||
| When I'm in Vegas, I found it easy to say fuck. | ||
| When I'm here, I don't know what the rules are here. | ||
| You'll bleep them. | ||
| No, we don't bleep. | ||
| Yeah, it's easy. | ||
| What do you want to say? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| No, I don't even want to. | ||
| Let's get you canceled right now, Miller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Come on. | |
| I don't even think about it, but I am saying that, uh... | ||
| Yes, and not so much this point. | ||
| I don't care about that. | ||
| I care about having to spend time reacting to nimrods who, quite frankly, think second-guessing is creativity. | ||
| It isn't. | ||
| I like being with creative people. | ||
| I like being with people who say things occasionally. | ||
| I can't believe you said that. | ||
| I don't think it's over then. | ||
| Listen, the human fray is cacophonous. | ||
| It's like, where was it written that you're never going to hear anything that falls on your ear and you disagree with? | ||
| I don't want to lead that life. | ||
| So therefore, I'll stop myself just because I think, Christ, who needs to bring down some whiny kid telling me how I've ruined his day? | ||
| Yeah, you know I used to do, there's some, my old stand-up tapes are right there, and I used to do a joke way back when that I used to say the N-word, and it was not to be racist in any way, it was actually a stupid, silly Transformers reference that I was imitating a Transformer, and I would say this, and it would always get a huge laugh, huge laugh. | ||
| I would close with it sometimes. | ||
| And then one night I was on stage at Gotham Comedy Club on 24th, These people want to do a Nantucket sleigh ride with a bit where they ride it to the bottom? | ||
| Doesn't interest me. | ||
| I'm out there to please people. | ||
| I remember thinking, I'm putting that one away and I never did it again. | ||
| I never liked that feeling, but I was just like, this is way before all this. - These people wanna do | ||
| a Nantucket sleigh ride with a bit where they ride it to the bottom? | ||
| Yeah. - Doesn't interest me. | ||
| Yeah. - I'm out there to please people. | ||
| I like to get laughs. | ||
| And at some point, if I have an opinion and I feel it's worth it, I'll push it in, | ||
| even if it draws ire. | ||
| But there are other times I think, this isn't good enough to let all this agita into my life. | ||
| The Sturm and Drang is tiresome. | ||
| You know, it's so precious to me that we sit down every day and ten times a day somebody has to Get themselves back and supine. | ||
| I remember when, years ago, there was a cat who was the general manager for the Los Angeles Dodgers, Al Campanis. | ||
| Do you remember him? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| He goes on Ted... It was before I was here, but yeah, I remember. | ||
| He goes on Ted Koppel one night, and he says something that's like from another generation, racially. | ||
| And he's dead. | ||
| He's got to go supplicate for Sharpton, you know, all that silly game. | ||
| Because Sharpton's so righteous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I remember thinking, you know, when Jackie Robinson first came up and he goes to Montreal in the Dodgers, he's playing minor league baseball and they've got to assign somebody to go out with the cat and ride wingman. | ||
| I think Campanus is right there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, when it came to real life, he was there. | |
| And then later, he says something brutish from a day gone by, and he's over. | ||
| And I remember thinking, oh, this is so tedious. | ||
| You know, that's the smartest thing Eric Holder ever said, although I think he back-ended into it. | ||
| I don't even think he meant it the way I took it, when he said, we're cowards. | ||
| We don't even have chats about things anymore, racial relations. | ||
| Indeed, we don't. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| You want to be the first guy in? | ||
| Really? | ||
| You want to be over this afternoon trying to make some sort of lucid, nuanced comment about interactions between human beings of different colors? | ||
| You don't want to be the first guy in. | ||
| You're done! | ||
| It's so funny because people think it's something new, but you remember what took out Howard Cosell? | ||
| Oh yeah, Alvin Garrett. | ||
| Alvin Garrett. | ||
| So I think there were two things. | ||
| Well, one was about his grandkids. | ||
| Remember he, oh, oh, yeah, right. | ||
| He was the guy that, and he called him a little monkey or something. | ||
| Yeah, number 46 for, and you know, when you-- | ||
| And that's what he called his grandkids, just 'cause he was jumping around. | ||
| He didn't mean it to be racist in any way, and no one felt he was racist in any way before then. | ||
| Well, listen, when you, I think Cosell was just shy of being an ACLU lawyer. | ||
| I used to read Cosell in Sport Magazine once a month, and he was always at the vanguard of these movements. | ||
| Who was tighter with Ali? | ||
| For God's sakes. | ||
| And you know, I saw a special on Ali the other night, and it was called I Am Ali. | ||
| And I was reminded, I did not appreciate what he did to Joe Frazier. | ||
| Indeed, he missed his own. | ||
| He buried his own lead at some point when he called Frazier names and stuff like that. | ||
| And they had Marvis Frazier on talking about how it hurt his father and hurt his family. | ||
| Ali wasn't perfect either, but I watched a guy operate between races so seamlessly in that thing. | ||
| I thought, there's what we should all be striving to get to. | ||
| Not being complete. | ||
| Ali was so beautiful. | ||
| He was so proud of being black and beautiful, and then he'd be with these old square white people teasing with him, then he'd be with the grannies, then he'd be with the children, and I thought, now here's a guy who gets it. | ||
| Gets the human condition. | ||
| But we're nowhere near that. | ||
| It's so uptight now, it's crazy. | ||
| This is a total offshoot, but the references. | ||
| Is your brain just designed that way? | ||
| Well, listen, I realize my liabilities and I would say one thing that I would say I'm okay at is I have a reasonably deep cultural drawer and a somewhat quick retrieval system. | ||
| When I see those Christmas stories every year where the kids are working in the Amazon disbursement centers and Minotaur or something and they got packages coming at it | ||
| with speed light. You asked me what I wanted to do for a living. | ||
| I think I could have stood at the Y on the road and said, okay, Emory boards, | ||
| headphones, boom, boom, boom. I think I could have been the, what do they call it on the kitchen shows? | ||
| I think I could have worked the pass on cultural referencing. | ||
| Yeah, but you see you just But that was just natural to you, that it was just sort of all there? | ||
| Was that something that you were going for? | ||
| That you were like, oh, that'll be my shtick? | ||
| Well, I think it's a bit of a monkey trick, so I don't know where you get that, nor do I think it's anything that you say where you get that. | ||
| But I do remember on Saturday Night Live, When I would get to write the news, and after a few weeks, they had so many holes in the dike they let me kind of, me and Herb Sargent were writing the news. | ||
| Other people would write jokes, but we predominantly wrote it. | ||
| And I noticed, you have to get actual about yourself, I couldn't, I needed adrenaline to be really creative, and adrenaline came from fear for me. | ||
| So I would notice I could not, occasionally a joke would pop into my head Monday through Thursday, but I could see life on the griddle is what perked me. | ||
| So Friday around 4.30 in the afternoon, it was really funny, I'd think about Whitney Brown, and he was so smart. | ||
| A little more malevolent than me, but a brilliant cat. | ||
| And we were kind of friends, but I always thought if we go to a two-anchor thing, it's Whitney. | ||
| So 4.30 in the afternoon on Friday, I'd think of Whitney and I'd think, brother, you better get this thing together. | ||
| You better quit this. | ||
| I can't write. | ||
| You do three bad ones of these in a row. | ||
| You're either out or you're co-hosted. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's one thing I'm proud of. | ||
| I've made it six years and never co-hosted. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So at 430... Now they all are, right? | ||
| For years now, I think. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There were guys who did it alone, but I always look back on that and think, well, that was a good thing. | ||
| When you were served your opportunity, you stepped up to it. | ||
| But I remember I had a big, three big sheets of paper about that size on my wall, three different ones. | ||
| And it would say, indignation. | ||
| And then the middle one said, what am I? | ||
| And then the third one said, arcane reference. | ||
| And it was like a haiku for update. | ||
| I'd get to a point where I'd think, oh, what's... And I'd just look at that and go, what pisses you off? | ||
| Put the seesaw in, the fulcrum, what am I? | ||
| The Jetsons robot me? | ||
| You know, I used to make it reductio absurdum. | ||
| I really got primal at that point. | ||
| I felt like I was like... | ||
| You know, like you're a great white. | ||
| You might as well have heard the theme from Jaws is you're just swimming, looking for the line, because I got scared that I would lose the gig. | ||
| But I did have that template in my head. | ||
| So maybe that's where the reference is. | ||
| Yeah, and now it just seems like it's just sort of built in or something, like it just became... Well, I must say that even before I became a comedian, goofy stuff would stick in my head. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, but I remember watching one of your... How many HBO specials have you done? | ||
| Well, I've got nine one-hour specials, Eight of them were on HBO. | ||
| Eight on HBO, so I'm thinking it must have been one of your first ones I remember watching. | ||
| Again, I'm young, I'm 15, something like that, thinking, I don't get all of this, but I like it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| There were things that you were saying that I was like, I don't know what that reference is, but I kind of liked it, because I was like, other people are laughing, so there must be something here. | ||
| It's not the Warren Commission, brother. | ||
| At some point, the rhythms of it are intoxicating. | ||
| I just remember thinking, lean into this. | ||
| If you're going to rat-a-tat-tat, you're working that speed bag, you can't miss it. | ||
| I got the words down, I delivered them, and I remember thinking, if they don't get the actual content of this, do the d'Artagnan, they will flourish. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| God, that's so funny to me now. | ||
| I'd like to go back and watch some of them now and sort of unpack a little of that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| and after have the blade twang. | ||
| I was always making sure the rapier twang. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ba-boom. | |
| God, that's so funny to me to now, I'd like to go back and watch some of them now | ||
| and sort of unpack a little of that. | ||
| Yeah, you can't half-step that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I always knew it was a bit of a scam. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Listen, I'm not, what I have on my board's like 10, 20, But I did have, like I said, I could remember things and get to them quickly. | ||
| And then I was smart enough to think, you can't half-ass this. | ||
| Sheepish is the death of this. | ||
| You've got to lean into it. | ||
| And then I used to always love Carson's moves. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Johnny Blue one, or it wasn't there. | ||
| I used to find that intoxicating. | ||
| I would think, look how debonair. | ||
| Just a little head movement, a little... I used to sit at home, I didn't even know what showbiz was, and I'd think, now there's a cool cat. | ||
| It's in the moments where you need to escape the bad one. | ||
| So I always, that was another thing I did on Weekend Update, I always remember thinking, some of these are dogs. | ||
| When it dies, a dog's death, you gotta be alert enough to say that in front of the people. | ||
| They'll find that intoxicating. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, you gotta look up and say, no, I'm not so needy that my self-esteem's in your hands right now. | ||
| But I, too, know that was a bad joke. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But a lot of guys since you have fallen into that trap. | ||
| What do you mean, tell me? | ||
| You mean guys looking for applause and stuff? | ||
| Yeah, when they know it's not working, where you would shake it, I mean, you would literally, you just did it, but you would sort of shake it off, kind of. | ||
| Where they're kind of like, ah, please. | ||
| Well. | ||
| It's just, just the nature of it. | ||
| I don't watch enough young, there's a few cats I watch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think Maniscalco's like a stone killer. | ||
| I love his rhythms. | ||
| And Brian's a great, Maria's a great comedian. | ||
| But I don't watch enough of the young guys. | ||
| I do know that at some point comedy almost turned into what impressionists used to get, where you get applause. | ||
| I almost feel like instead of you going, Al Pacino working in a Burger King, I think it would go something like this. | ||
| I feel like guys are doing that with their political opinions now, I think. | ||
| And then they present it, and you don't hear anybody laughing. | ||
| You just hear this, and I was never into that. | ||
| Yeah, so even though I can sense that Dennis Miller 2020 is slightly evolved out of maybe the full grind and fight thing, where are you sort of at politically? | ||
| I asked you right before we started and it's like you strike me as you're probably... I'm socially illegal. | ||
| Yeah, you strike me as mostly libertarian kind of something like that. | ||
| I come in, I meet your husband. | ||
| I can't believe there are people in the world who don't see people in love and just be happy for them. | ||
| I see the picture of all these... I don't want to talk about your life. | ||
| You have a beautiful big family Walton Mountain shot. | ||
| Everybody's smiling. | ||
| You two guys are at the center of it. | ||
| I don't know if it's your wedding day or whatever the hell it is. | ||
| Yeah, it's wedding day! | ||
| And I'm thinking, how do you get to the point in life where you're going up to strangers and say, here's what I think about that? | ||
| You know, that amazes me. | ||
| So that part of conservatism, and I'm not putting that, I know there's some Christian people who think they go to hell if they sanction it. | ||
| I'm not their shrink, I can't get into their life and figure all that out. | ||
| I just know I'm a believer and I've never had a chat with my God about homosexuality. | ||
| It never came up? | ||
| It never came up. | ||
| I've met enough fervent believers who are homosexual. | ||
| What does God say? | ||
| I can't talk to you today? | ||
| You're gay. | ||
| So that whole thing doesn't exist for me. | ||
| I don't trust radical Islam as far as I can throw it. | ||
| I'd like to keep half my money. | ||
| Some people think that's a piggish statement, but I always think... You greedy bastard. | ||
| Yeah, but I think, well, I'll keep one. | ||
| I give you one, I don't even know you. | ||
| And then people say, you know, and after I pay taxes on it, I'd like to keep it for my kids. | ||
| And then they go, why do you want to spoil your kids with a, you know, inheritance? | ||
| And I go, Hey, why the fuck do I want to spoil your kids? | ||
| I don't even know your kids! | ||
| At least I got joy out of my kids. | ||
| It's pretty simple stuff. | ||
| I feel like I'm a pragmatist, but in today's world, man, if you're not in lockstep, you're painted as... Christ, I've seen pictures of myself on the web with a Hitler's stash and all that, and I think, I can't spend time worrying about that. | ||
| Those people are so reactionary. | ||
| The only way I can let them into my life is if I let them ding me. | ||
| I don't give a shit. | ||
| I'm more than willing to seek the approbation of strangers. | ||
| It's the human condition. | ||
| But only if it's worth it. | ||
| And I get a pretty good Spidey sense. | ||
| I can tell early on, do I even need to know this person anymore? | ||
| You know, you meet some people within five minutes. | ||
| You go, too strident. | ||
| I'm still willing to make these calls for myself. | ||
| Sorry, I'm in my own control tower. | ||
| I can't accept every plane that wants to put it on the deck. | ||
| I gotta pick. | ||
| And I can tell pretty quickly. | ||
| And if somebody's amenable just to be open-minded, I don't even need to agree with them on politics, any of that shit. | ||
| Are they kind enough? | ||
| Are they a decent enough soul? | ||
| A good family person? | ||
| That's a big thing with me. | ||
| Funny? | ||
| Do they make me laugh? | ||
| So I got my criteria. | ||
| One of them's not being dovetailed with their political beliefs. | ||
| But I see one side of it. | ||
| I see it as the left. | ||
| I think you're making some journey or something. | ||
| I've always heard you're liberal. | ||
| I think I'm an old school liberal. | ||
| I think that's basically what you are. | ||
| You believe people should be free? | ||
| Even on the economic stuff, an old-school liberal didn't want high taxes. | ||
| You actually wanted low taxes. | ||
| Jack Kennedy would be decried today. | ||
| JFK, yeah. | ||
| Knots the top rate down from 70 to the high 30s. | ||
| Can you imagine Bernie Sanders wading into him? | ||
| I'm this Kennedy kid! | ||
| Shut up! | ||
| Is that crazy to you? | ||
| How some really bad ideas have started to become seemingly normal now? | ||
| Anytime you see kids looking up at Bernie Sanders in the same way you see those young girls at the Sullivan Show looking at the Beatles, the world's gone horribly askew. | ||
| I see those kids like... | ||
| And I think, are you kidding me? | ||
| This is the guy we used to avoid his lawn because nobody knew if he had buckshot loaded up. | ||
| All of a sudden, he's swoonable. | ||
| It makes me laugh. | ||
| Bernie Sanders can't believe he's pulled it off. | ||
| What do you think the obsession with politics is? | ||
| Like that kind of thing. | ||
| School loans. | ||
| You think that's it more than anything else? | ||
| Listen, when you get to a point, and for kids, I know they're gonna talk about healthcare, but I, by and large, I don't think kids in their 20s, and they're always so invincible, are thinking, man, I'm gonna have a goiter when I'm 70. | ||
| Is it gonna be covered? | ||
| I don't think they work that way. | ||
| I do think a lot of kids are getting out of college now with, North of a hundred or high tens? | ||
| School on! | ||
| They can't even get off the pad in their 80s. | ||
| It's almost like they're working with loan sharks. | ||
| They got to pay that off before they can get to their dreams. | ||
| Therefore, they think, fuck my dreams. | ||
| I'm not going to have a house. | ||
| I'm going to live in a small micro apartment. | ||
| I'm not going to get a car. | ||
| I'm going to bike around or pick up one of these jerk-off scooters on every corner. | ||
| And I'm going to go out once a week with my friends and film a Michelob commercial, where we're all sitting around and we're all putting our beer on top of the turntable. | ||
| And I'm going to pay for a great glass of wine because I don't have any options on getting a house or a car. | ||
| And I think all that's happened is if I was a kid and I was sitting there with a hundred grand worth of school loans, and it was for an environmental studies degree, where quite frankly I went out and they said, here's some dishwashing solution, go clean that dove up on the beach. | ||
| I'd be saying, who's the guy who wants to forgive my loan? | ||
| I'd probably be going there. | ||
| But I'm not anymore. | ||
| I'm the old guy who had minimal school loans, paid them off, and they can't expect me to go back and see it that way. | ||
| I don't want to give up everything for people who... | ||
| If I was telling a kid right now, I'd say, Brother and Sister, unless there's a super serious thing you can get a degree in that you can exchange for green rectangles, don't go! | ||
| Because half the people going in right now are getting degrees that mean nothing. | ||
| And you can have four years on the ground. | ||
| Find out what you want. | ||
| Get in there. | ||
| Get into whatever the equivalent of the mail room is. | ||
| Spend those four years, you know, Jesus, for God's sakes, 1,500 days while they're sitting in there, you know, holding seances and stuff like this, where you can be out there building a resume where the boss goes, that kid busts his ass. | ||
| So when the college kid gets out and comes in and goes, I've got a degree. | ||
| I was in student government. | ||
| And the guy has to pretend, well, that's good, because he doesn't want to end up in a lawsuit. | ||
| He's thinking, I got this kid busting his ass for four years. | ||
| I'm going to give him the gig. | ||
| So I think politics right now for young people comes down to school loans. | ||
| What do you think of the other guy? | ||
| We've spoke for 40 minutes or so. | ||
| We haven't said, no, the T word. | ||
| Oh, we could do Biden. | ||
| Let's do Biden. | ||
| Where are you at with Biden? | ||
| We didn't talk about Trump yet. | ||
| It's been 40 minutes. | ||
| Legally, we have to. | ||
| Let's do Biden first. | ||
| Yeah, let's do Biden. | ||
| Listen, I've always made fun of Biden. | ||
| You know, I think he's, anybody who gets in at 29 and is now 77 is inviting guys like me to make fun of him. | ||
| I know he's helping me. | ||
| Joe, you know, I don't need your help. | ||
| Live your life. | ||
| Is he helping you? | ||
| How's he helping you? | ||
| Oh, he always talks about how I've been in public service. | ||
| And you just want to say, oh, for Christ's sake. | ||
| Okay, yeah. | ||
| Thanks for helping. | ||
| But, you know, I don't dig guys who get off, who quite frankly get off their old man's nickel onto the public dime in their late 20s and ride it all the way. | ||
| It always bored me with Jerry Brown. | ||
| You know, he's pitching himself as, you know, an ethereal creature. | ||
| And I always think, brother, you've been on the teat for like more than six decades now, okay? | ||
| So don't tell me about what a free form you are. | ||
| But Biden has never been as smart as they told me he was, or he told you he was. | ||
| Anybody who knows their IQ is a big tell for me. | ||
| Two things. | ||
| When a guy you're golfing with goes into the woods and you get to the green, you go, what'd you get? | ||
| And he pulls his hand up. | ||
| I know he's fucking. | ||
| And whenever a guy says, I know my IQ, I go, Christ, I don't like that to begin with. | ||
| I go, why? | ||
| Why do you know your IQ? | ||
| Are you that insecure? | ||
| Are you faking it that much? | ||
| Biden's one of those guys who knows his own IQ. | ||
| And I never saw him as a genius. | ||
| I always think of Joe Biden as the third guy in a car on a Sonic commercial. | ||
| You know, just popping up in the backseat. | ||
| And I like the tater tots, too. | ||
| So he's no genius. | ||
| But now he looks adult. | ||
| I have more trouble. | ||
| Yeah, what do you think of that? | ||
| I mean, something is seriously wrong. | ||
| Well, he had some sort of subdural hematoma years ago, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's only in the last, he had that something like 20 years ago. | ||
| He's 77, he's off his feet. | ||
| They're gonna push him ahead. | ||
| He might get elected. | ||
| I'll tell you what, it'll never go on a debate stage with Trump. | ||
| He'll never do that. | ||
| And I can hear the whole thing. | ||
| They'll put it on prompter for him. | ||
| They'll go, I would not normalize this man by being on the same stage with him. | ||
| It would be beneath my dignity, but more importantly, more poignantly beneath the dignity of the American people. | ||
| And he'll get all tied up and poignantly and end up, you know. | ||
| Straightjacket. | ||
| They won't even know. | ||
| They'll have to come out and get him off stage. | ||
| But they'd vote him in, because they hate Trump that much. | ||
| I think he's by the boards. | ||
| I don't think he was all that much to begin with. | ||
| I don't like back-slappers. | ||
| I don't like glad-handers. | ||
| I don't like that corn-pum bullshit about, I walked through the diner today, and you find out the diner hasn't been there in 20 years. | ||
| You know, Biden's just never impressed me. | ||
| To me, he's always been more unhinged than a rescue dog at Phil Spector's house. | ||
| So before we get to the Trump guy, do you think a good person, like actually like sort of an enlightened, decent human being could ever be part of this thing? | ||
| It seems like the ship has pretty much sailed on that, although I think a great reckoning could be coming maybe to our whole political system. | ||
| Yeah, but it'll be so cataclysmic it remains to me unimaginable. | ||
| Yeah, no, I think it is unimaginable. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know if it'll be 29, Where all of a sudden the Dow, you know, it's happening now because of the virus, but I'm just saying, it'll either be 1929 or 1860, something like that. | ||
| Unimaginable. | ||
| You don't want to be the first guy in and say, I can see a civil war coming. | ||
| They'll make you out to be the bad guy. | ||
| But seriously, for the reset to happen now, I don't see it being incremental. | ||
| I see something Just the shy of cataclysmic happening. | ||
| Maybe Corona's it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But if anybody thinks the Dems are going to solve Corona after what I just saw in their own caucuses in Iowa, I don't know that I want to hand it off to them. | ||
| But I don't see it coming back around. | ||
| I see it getting very tribal. | ||
| And I can only hope at some point we divvy up the albums like a relationship that's gone. | ||
| It's like Woody Allen and Annie Hall. | ||
| We got a dead shark here. | ||
| Is that what he used to say? | ||
|
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|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| And what we got here is a dead shark, and divvying the albums up. | ||
| So what does that mean, though? | ||
| What does that actually mean? | ||
| Like, what does that look like? | ||
| We divvy up the albums, meaning what? | ||
| We should split up, in my mind. | ||
| I don't see it coming back around. | ||
| I don't know how to do that. | ||
| That doesn't work out very well for guys like me and you in California, you know? | ||
| You move. | ||
| I don't even know if it's geographic. | ||
| I don't know what I'm saying. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| I'm telling you, I think at this point we got a dead shark and I don't quite know how we figure it out but at some point we shouldn't try to go close together because that's only going to make it more rancorous. | ||
| We don't get along. | ||
| We don't even agree. | ||
| I tell you one thing I do notice is I find people, I've been on the right and I've been on the left as far as issues in my life. I've also been thought of as somebody | ||
| who's on the left and on the right mistakenly over my life. I find the left is really more | ||
| brutal than the right. | ||
| I mean I used to tear people in the conservative community a new asshole. | ||
| When I'd meet them they'd kind of make at least laugh about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The left, man. | ||
| It can get dangerous. | ||
| You know, you're gonna catch a D cell in a tube sock if you don't agree. | ||
| And so, that's why I zip it periodically. | ||
| Were you kind of shocked, though, when you first started seeing that? | ||
| Like, you first go on O'Reilly, maybe you have this... Nah, I wasn't. | ||
| Mort Sahl wrote a great book years ago called Heartland. | ||
| And I think when people think back on Mort Sahl, they always think of him as liberal. | ||
| Probably because he was... | ||
| Sancho Ponza. | ||
| Or Boswell to Kennedy's Jack... What am I thinking? | ||
| Boswell-Sam Johnson to Kennedy-Sam Johnson. | ||
| He was his chronicler and he liked being in the... with the cool kids. | ||
| But he started to see it, and he started talking about liberalism. | ||
| And he was a real hipster Mort. | ||
| I don't even know, Mort's still up there. | ||
| Maybe he's passed, but... No, no, he's still alive. | ||
| Unless something happened in the last week, I'm 99% sure he's still alive. | ||
| And I just started having that epiphany. | ||
| I remember it happened with Stockdale. | ||
| I remember everybody's making fun of Stockdale. | ||
| And I think McCain had told me once that Stockdale, when he was in the Hanoi Hilton, when kids had given up and they were gonna kill themselves, he would get on the pipe at night and tap it with a flint To pray with them in sign language to convince them not to die that night. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Like, something that maybe, what, a thousand men in the history of the planet have been consequential enough to do. | ||
| And then he's on cable and he goes, I don't even know why I'm here, and everybody makes him an asshole. | ||
| And I thought, this room's gotten too hip for me, man. | ||
| If we're gonna start, like, talking about Stockdale, like, he's an idiot, and Nancy Pelosi's a viable player, I just thought I can't be in the libs. | ||
| They ask too much of the lockstep. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You think the Republicans have any sort of more functional people? | ||
| I have found that, but I can only speak for myself. | ||
| Like I said, I've poked a lot of fun at conservatives, and I've met some who hated my guts, and I've met others who at least laughed about it a little. | ||
| That's just my experience. | ||
| People on the left do not take a joke as well. | ||
| I think that's kind of... I don't think I'm saying anything sacrilegious there. | ||
| I think a lot of people are noticing that. | ||
| Guess what nobody wants to say? | ||
| I hear you, Miller. | ||
| It's been my life. | ||
| You don't want to end up in the crosshairs of that. | ||
| It gets ugly, man. | ||
| So what do you think of that Trump guy? | ||
| Well, listen, I'll say this about Donald Trump. | ||
| I think his outer voice, as crazy as it can be, is an entirely accurate depiction of his inner voice. | ||
| Whereas I don't think somebody like Hillary Clinton's inner voice and outer voice have ever even had a cup of coffee together. | ||
| Listen, there are days I look at Trump and I'm mortified. | ||
| I think, God, can't you just shut up? | ||
| But I don't spend every day of my life because it's just this tedious thing. | ||
| I wish he'd quit tweeting. | ||
| I hear people, that's what they wake up in the morning with. | ||
| He's not going to quit tweeting. | ||
| He doesn't drink, so, you know, lighten up assholes is his cognac before bed. | ||
| That's what he does. | ||
| But do I think he's done some good things? | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| Do I think he's done some things that aren't panning out now? | ||
| The kids firing missiles again in North Korea? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He might have to smoke him at some point. | ||
| But do I think meeting with him is a bad idea? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| Do I see Obama when he's in there having a... | ||
| Leaning in and saying, tell Vladimir I'll have more leeway to talk to him. | ||
| This all goes on. | ||
| We should be talking. | ||
| It's just that Obama never got outed for it. | ||
| They even had the tape of him. | ||
| It's like DeLorean. | ||
| Sell him blow in the room and he somehow gets out. | ||
| The guy's on tape. | ||
| Joe Biden's on tape doing the thing they accused Trump of. | ||
| I can't do it anymore. | ||
| It's silly. | ||
| Do I think Donald Trump's pervy? | ||
| No, he's a boorish cat. | ||
| I like the way his kids are. | ||
| They seem loyal and they seem to be raised to be somewhat disciplined. | ||
| There are days he goes after people and I think, brother, that is so thin-skinned. | ||
| I can't believe it. | ||
| There are other days I think, wow, good for you. | ||
| When I see a union guy in the Oval Office with a hard hat on crying because his old man came here from Ireland. | ||
| And he would be proud? | ||
| Beautiful stuff. | ||
| I'm not going to play the game where I think he's Hitler. | ||
| You know, to me, when they do that Hitler thing, I always say, well, what do you mean he's Hitler? | ||
| You mean he gives you fear he's going to croak six million of his fellow humans? | ||
| And they always say, no, of course I don't mean that. | ||
| Act like you're an asshole. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Oh, what other Hitler peccadillo were you talking about? | ||
| The Bad Stache? | ||
| Bad artist? | ||
| The Angie's List reviews for house painting? | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| Yeah, well, I think you're basically right. | ||
| I mean, they say these things about him, but is there a piece of him that strikes you as very much like he has the mind of a comic? | ||
| Because I saw him live. | ||
| He's got good timing, yeah. | ||
| I saw him live in December, and he goes up there, and you know, he's got the prompter, but he's also winging it half the time, and he's ad-libbing and everything. | ||
| And he did this thing about, he was talking about windmills, and he goes, he goes, I've been studying windmills my whole life. | ||
| Nobody knows more about windmills than me. | ||
| And then he starts, you know, rifling off some stats about windmills that were obviously on the prompter. | ||
| And I turned to David and I was like, you know that the headline in Politico today is gonna be Donald Trump says he knows more about windmills than anyone, which he obviously meant as a joke. | ||
| And then lo and behold, we see all the headlines, BuzzFeed, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And it's like, I think that's his greatest gift. | ||
| He knows how to punk these guys every time, whether you like it or not. | ||
| But that's, I can't even do that with him anymore. | ||
| Everybody talks about Trump now. | ||
| Notice how many times the word whether you like him or not comes up. | ||
| That's all it's laying covering fire down. | ||
| I don't like him some days, but it's about more trivial shit than some of the stuff he's doing, which matters. | ||
| I think some of the things he's doing as far as the, you know, when somebody comes to me and say, Says that the black unemployment rate's down to its lowest ever and somebody immediately goes, Obama started it! | ||
| Okay, I'll give Obama credit for that. | ||
| I'm gonna give him credit for getting it down a little lower. | ||
| I just can't play this stupid game where he's the Antichrist. | ||
| For God's sakes, there are days I feel that he's super adept at his job. | ||
| There are other times I think he's super thin-skinned. | ||
| There are days I think his comedy chops are, you know, Beautiful. | ||
| There are other days I find it buffoonish that he would waste time punching down to somebody that's, you know, stupid on the other side. | ||
| He's the human condition to me. | ||
| All I know is this. | ||
| I don't see the country being over as they do. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| This coronavirus is yet another thing. | ||
| They're gonna say the country's over. | ||
| I guess I'm a half-fool guy. | ||
| Do I think that, occasionally, do I see Trump is half full of it or half empty? | ||
| Yeah, I guess I do. | ||
| There are other days I look at him and say, good for you, I wouldn't take that shit either. | ||
| Imagine the maelstrom this guy is in on a day-to-day basis, him and his wife. | ||
| And when people say, oh, he's mean in a tweet, I go, yeah, he's punching back. | ||
| What do you think about the way we just go from that crisis to crisis? | ||
| I won't do it anymore. | ||
| Yeah, you just, yeah. | ||
| I need a, I'm gonna ask for a week off between vaping A billion creatures killed in Australia and coronavirus. | ||
| Net neutrality killed half the people I know. | ||
| It's too hysterical! | ||
| I don't want to live that way. | ||
| And if people find that harsh, I don't know what to say. | ||
| I do know this. | ||
| I saw the coronavirus figure for today and people said, oh, you're so simple-minded. | ||
| It's obviously 10 times more. | ||
| I guess I am stupid when I read an article that says we've lost 10,000 people this flu season. | ||
| And we've lost 30 for coronavirus. | ||
| And then the end of that article is an expert saying, thus, the coronavirus is 10 times more lethal than the flu. | ||
|
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|
I go, okay, I guess I'm too stupid to follow that. | |
| It's like when they used to have the unemployment rate would go, when more people were employed and it would go up, you know what I mean? | ||
| And they'd say, well, there are less people. | ||
| There are less people. | ||
| I can't follow that either. | ||
| Yeah, more people have selected out of the workforce. | ||
| I'm more than willing to concede I'm not as smart as somebody like Behar. | ||
| They figure it out, I don't. | ||
| Wait, then who? | ||
| Behar. | ||
| Troy Behar? | ||
| Yes, I see her quoted a lot. | ||
| I wish I could keep up. | ||
| I used to love her. | ||
| She's a cool dame. | ||
| I'm sure she is. | ||
| I guarantee you, Joyce Hippenhoff, when she gets left to her own devices, she's been mused that she's treated like she's speaking in encyclical. | ||
| She's a great comic. | ||
| And she's found a great gig. | ||
| And I know she's liberal. | ||
| But I'm just saying, what I see people now as being the source material I just, like, sort of laughed. | ||
| I'm more than willing to concede on Iran. | ||
| Let me say, 60% of the world issues, I'm guessing, like most people are. | ||
| And the other 40 seem set in stone. | ||
| They just seem, you don't put 15 billion on a pallet and fly it into the Arabian desert. | ||
| If you can't see that, you're missing the point. | ||
| So bad move, you're saying. | ||
| Yeah, at least give them a check in the memo section to liquidate Israel. | ||
| Right, but instead we just- Cash, no, here, go users. | ||
| What are you guys gonna do? | ||
| You're canning this season? | ||
| Trust us, trust us. | ||
| Christ. | ||
| What else is kind of interesting to you these days? | ||
| Let me see. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What have I been doing? | |
| Well, as I said, I'm trying to read a lot, and I'm reading voraciously. | ||
| And I hike. | ||
| I go walking almost three times a week with my friend Jimmy Connors, the tennis guy. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| And he's a bit of a pisser, and he lives near me. | ||
| I saw him on a plane about a year ago. | ||
| We were waiting to get on. | ||
| I went up to him, and I mentioned, you know, that crazy year. | ||
| What was it, like, 94? | ||
| Yeah, where he went 102 and Yeah, and he kind of smiled at me and he nodded and I was like, ah, I was just that guy that I mentioned that one thing. | ||
| Well, let me tell you this. | ||
| Everybody talks about Federer and he's obviously, I think even Jimmy would probably say the greatest player ever because of the... | ||
| The majors. | ||
| But to this day, in the Open Tennis Tournament, Roger Federer's around 30 matches wins behind Jimmy, who's in the one slot, and he's around six tournaments behind Jimmy. | ||
| And Jimmy never beats that drum band. | ||
| And when I go, I go, I'll go, Jimmy, why do you ever tell me this? | ||
| I looked it up, and he'll go, ah, fuck that. | ||
| You know, and he'll right away start talking about other things. | ||
| But just the joy that that guy played with. | ||
| I mean, ugh. | ||
| There's a fine line there. | ||
| Jimmy was never a happy time out there. | ||
| He's a stone killer. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| In a world of tepid, in a world where everybody's figuring out how to explain somebody's missteps before you get to them, to have a guy who's an honest arbiter of his legacy, tells you where he screwed up, or he tells me at least, tells me where he did well, and lets the numbers speak, and doesn't beat the drum, he's a mensch. | ||
| You know, I like that stuff about people. | ||
| and there's too many altruistic people with publicists nowadays. | ||
| Imagine the selflessness being shepherded down a red carpet by, you know, Rogers and Cowan. | ||
| Hey, this guy did something that nobody's supposed to know about. | ||
| Can we get a team over here? | ||
| I don't think that. | ||
| Here's the wing he just named after himself. | ||
| (laughing) | ||
| I feel like we're there. | ||
| All right, brother. | ||
| I feel like I got like a full-on thing from you. | ||
| I wasn't exactly sure. | ||
| I got a little bit of a different thing than I was expecting, actually. | ||
| It's kind of cool. | ||
| Well, you're pretty easy, man. | ||
| Thanks for letting me talk. | ||
| And I'm glad you're doing so well. | ||
| I'm glad you're happy, man. | ||
| Things are all right. | ||
| You ever read the great Tom Wolfe book? | ||
| Well, I like that. | ||
| I don't know if a lot of people call it a man in full. | ||
| It was a book, well you'd have to read it, it's about a man reaches a point in his life where if he feels he's a man and fool, indeed he very well could be. | ||
| And that's not defined as you classically define when you're a kid. | ||
| It just has to come a moment where you just sit there and there's no static. | ||
| And you just say it's not even exultant, it's not triumphant, it's just kind of quiet. | ||
| And you think, wow, I feel like a man and fool right now. | ||
| The frabba jabba in my head's letting down a little. | ||
| You know what, I've never read the book, but I do love Frank Sinatra's My Way, and I think that's kind of... Exactly, although Frank didn't dig the song! | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Yeah, Paul Anker wrote it, and Frank, it wasn't his cup of tea. | ||
| Listen, when you're the chairman, you don't want to have to be, you know, regrets. | ||
| I don't know that Frank, except that you're selling millions of copies, I don't know that Frank's gonna go out and introspect in front of strangers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But did I ever tell you my Sinatra story? | ||
| No, tell me your Sinatra story. | ||
| End this with Sinatra. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This is a cool story. | ||
| I'm in Vegas one night. | ||
| Tom Dreesen calls me. | ||
| The Great Chicago Comedian. | ||
| He's open for Sinatra down at the Desert Inn, which isn't even there anymore. | ||
| That's how long ago this was. | ||
| I'm up at the MGM Grand. | ||
| He says, listen, I'm opening for Frank tonight, and you want to come down and see the show? | ||
| And I go, yeah. | ||
| I said, what if we're working at the same time? | ||
| He said, I checked. | ||
| We're offset. | ||
| Come down after your show. | ||
| I go down to see Sinatra. | ||
| Driesen says, I'll leave you as many tickets as you want. | ||
| Now, I'm in town with my wife, who's pregnant with our second child, and our baby, our Filipino nanny, Koi Koi. | ||
| And my mom's with me and me. | ||
| I do the show. | ||
| I go back to collect them. | ||
| My wife says, you know, I don't want to go. | ||
| I don't feel up to it. | ||
| I feel sick. | ||
| And I'm going to stay in. | ||
| I go, I got three tickets. | ||
| Why don't I take Koi Koi? | ||
| Because I hear her in her room at night listening to Sinatra once in a while. | ||
| She's a great idea. | ||
| Off we go. | ||
| Nanny, my mom, and I, we go down to see Sinatra. | ||
| He, you know, it's like, it's a revelation for me. | ||
| And he's not on top of his game, he hasn't been in it his day in a while, but it's still fab. | ||
| He's Sinatra, Frank Jarrett. | ||
| I'm thinking, I'm knee deep in it. | ||
| I go back to thank Driesen after the show, and he says, unbelievably, he says, hey Frank, Doug, you're on SNL, you want to have dinner? | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| We go to that old restaurant in the Desert Inn. | ||
| It was an Italian place. | ||
| It had a gold, cheap gold elevator, circular. | ||
| You'd go up, and you'd go in, and there'd be the bar, and then the main room, and then the VIP room, then the VVIP room, then the Pope room, and way in the Colonel, the Nucleus, the Sinatra room. | ||
| We go all the way back. | ||
| Treason opens the door. | ||
| There's a table. | ||
| It's pretty small. | ||
| There's like 10 people, and there sits Sinatra right across from me. | ||
| Barbara, his wife, sits here. | ||
| His attorney is here, his attorney's wife. | ||
| Over his shoulder, two huge Luca Brasi bodyguards. | ||
| Driesen sits here, and my mom sits here. | ||
| I sit across from Sinatra. | ||
| Koi Koi, the nanny, is sitting here. | ||
| And around ten minutes in, I realize they're being so nice to us. | ||
| They think Koi Koi is my wife. | ||
| And I don't want to shut it down. | ||
| I figure, I'll just roll with this. | ||
| So I start getting shit-faced. | ||
| I'm not a big drinker, but I'm thinking, I'm with Sinatra. | ||
| I'm putting something on cubes and I'm going to tinkle the glass. | ||
| He's talking about a fight he had at Mr. Kelly's in Chicago. | ||
| I'm thinking, Christ, I'm at Ocean's Eleven. | ||
| This is the greatest night of my life. | ||
| So I toss it, and then we're having fun. | ||
| And then Koi Koi nudges me under the table and I look down and she's got an autographed book on her lap. | ||
| And she's motioning and I panic. | ||
| I can't say anything because I have to go complete body language. | ||
| I look up and I'm locked eyes with Sinatra. | ||
| He's looking at me. | ||
| He thinks I'm having a grand mal seizure. | ||
| He thinks I'm a freak, so I have to flat knock the tabula rasa, so I'm just sitting there, but now it's hanging over my head like the autographed book of Damocles. | ||
| So, around an hour in, I go, see, we gotta blow, because I'm too nervous now. | ||
| Go around the table. | ||
| Now, here's how cool Frank is. | ||
| My mom goes up first. | ||
| She said, Mr. Sinatra, when I was a young girl, 1952, I saw you at the Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh and had dinner with you. | ||
| It was the biggest thrill of my life. | ||
| Sinatra looks at me and says, 1952, Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh. | ||
| I remember that show, baby. | ||
| You were on the left side of the stage. | ||
| You looked good then. | ||
| You looked really good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's good. | |
| My mom floats away like a fern gully fairy. | ||
| I'm all choked up. | ||
| I step in. | ||
| I go, Frank, geez, what you just did for my mother. | ||
| It gives me the Jilly Rizzo facelift. | ||
| Get out of here. | ||
| I turn. | ||
| Koi Koi steps up. | ||
| Whap! | ||
| She hits him with the autograph book. | ||
| I almost pass out. | ||
| I got that cold sweat. | ||
| And I hear Sinatra over my shoulder say, did you say soy soy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the bodyguard says, uh, koi koi, Frank. | |
| Koi koi. | ||
| And Sinatra actually says, K-C-Y. | ||
| I can't even listen anymore to Split. | ||
| They come out, they're flying in tandem like the Blue Angels now. | ||
| I can't get mad at her. | ||
| She just came from Manila. | ||
| We're at dinner with Sinatra. | ||
| She's in shock. | ||
| I go, geez, quick, well let me see it. | ||
| I open up to the page he signed. | ||
| It says, To Sopo. | ||
| It's like he went so far with it. | ||
| He said, fuck it, I'm trying. | ||
| Here, here's your Sinatra name. | ||
| You're Sopo. | ||
| Best night. | ||
| And you called her Sopo from that day forward. | ||
| Well, later on, I went up when she got married to her golf club, and people were coming up and going, so you know Sopo? | ||
| So the story lived on for, and she was the sweetest soul. | ||
| Miller, it's been an absolute pleasure. | ||
| Oh, you're walking out in the middle. | ||
| I'm going to say goodbye over here. | ||
| Oh, I'm sorry. | ||
| I've been talking for like four hours. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| My God. | ||
| It was a lot of talking. | ||
| Follow this guy at Dennis DMZ on Twitter. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about comedy, instead of the nonstop yelling you get everywhere else, check out our comedy playlist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | |
| They're both Right over here. |
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