Episode 111 - Louis CK - Part 1
Guest:Lock the gates!
Guest:Are we doing this?
Guest:Really?
Guest:Wait for it.
Guest:Are we doing this?
Guest:Wait for it.
Guest:Pow!
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:And it's also, eh, what the fuck?
Guest:What's wrong with me?
Guest:It's time for WTF!
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:With Mark Maron.
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuckineers?
Marc:What the fuck nicks?
Marc:It's Mark Maron.
Marc:I'm back from vacation.
Marc:Even though we gave you a couple episodes over the last two weeks, we were away.
Marc:Brendan was on vacation with his wife.
Marc:A much needed vacation for Brendan, given that he's got his head filled with his life and then...
Marc:Twice a week, he's got hours of me going through his head, and I can barely handle that.
Marc:I think I've mentioned that before.
Marc:It's not easy being Brendan in the sense that he's got to deal with my head, and I can barely deal with it, as you know.
Marc:So a lot has happened over the last couple weeks.
Marc:I eulogized my friends, Robert Schimmel.
Marc:and greg giraldo there was a lot of tragedy in the community i know some of you heard that i put it up the other day uh and i'm gonna miss those guys um and also i went to vancouver and you know me i believe you do know me you do i forgot to publicize vancouver i cannot get my timing right in terms of when we put episodes up and i completely forgot to tell people we were doing a live what the fuck in vancouver until the last minute and i gotta be honest with you we filled the place up
Marc:We had a small theater.
Marc:A lot of what the fuckers showed up.
Marc:We had a great show with Chris Porter, Dean Edwards, Jamie Kilstein.
Marc:Eddie Pepitone was there.
Marc:Forgetting somebody.
Marc:Tig, Tig Notaro.
Marc:What a great show that was.
Marc:We'll have that out for you in a little while.
Marc:And I want to thank the people of Vancouver for coming out.
Marc:We did some stand-up up there, too.
Marc:Had a great time.
Marc:Before I do this, why don't I get to some plugging so I don't forget it?
Marc:At least start to get this shit out there so you know when I'm coming.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Here's what's going on.
Marc:On October 15th, we've got a live show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Los Angeles.
Marc:Right now, I have booked Brendan Burns from Australia, Aaron Foley, a very funny comedian.
Marc:Jim Earl is going to be there.
Marc:Charles Fleischer.
Marc:That's right, the voice of Roger Rabbit, an old wizard of weirdness, will be at the UCB Theater on October 15th.
Marc:October 18th, Austin, Texas at the Parish.
Marc:We're doing a live WTF there with some stand-up and bringing some support acts.
Marc:We're going to do a panel.
Marc:Should be exciting.
Marc:It's the first attempt at touring this show idea.
Marc:Dallas, Texas on the 19th at Trees.
Marc:Same deal.
Marc:Some stand-up with some supporting acts and then a WTF panel.
Marc:And then October 20th at Comics.
Marc:In New York, two shows right now I have booked.
Marc:John Hodgman, Jonathan Glazer, John Benjamin, Sam Seder, Kristen Schaal, Mike D. Waiting to hear from some other acts.
Marc:I've reached out to some pretty big people.
Marc:I'm excited about that.
Marc:That's October 20th in New York.
Marc:That out of the way.
Marc:Hold on.
Marc:Wait for it.
Marc:Pow!
Marc:Oh, Jesus, I shit my pants.
Marc:JustCoffee.coop, still on board with the lifelong sponsorship.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com and link to JustCoffee.coop and get yourself some WTF blend because it kicked me a few shekels on that one, maybe 10%.
Marc:So let's get into this a little bit if we can.
Marc:While I was away, I had something happen.
Marc:Many of you saw it on Twitter.
Marc:I had an event.
Marc:It was an odd event.
Marc:It was odd in a lot of ways.
Marc:I'll explain to you what happens.
Marc:I upgrade to business class coming from New York to Los Angeles, okay?
Marc:I get an upgrade, which is rare.
Marc:I'm excited.
Marc:I get to sit.
Marc:I get to relax.
Marc:I get to recline.
Marc:I get to eat peanuts, and they feed me.
Marc:I don't have to pay for it.
Marc:It's wonderful.
Marc:So I get on the plane and I'm about to sit down and who's sitting there in the two seats that we have allotted to us.
Marc:Who's sitting next to me?
Marc:Ken Melman.
Marc:Now, the fact that I recognize Ken Melman and I imagine most of you wouldn't have recognized Ken Melman was in another life.
Marc:I did political talk radio from the left.
Marc:I did that for a while.
Marc:Ken Melman is was the former.
Marc:He was the chair of the Republican Party, the chair of the GOP.
Marc:He also ran Bush's campaign in 2004.
Marc:So needless to say, I talked a lot about this guy.
Marc:I knew who this guy was.
Marc:And the big thing about Ken Melman outside of being a fairly evil motherfucker without a conscience was that he was a closeted homosexual who came out about three weeks before I sat next to him on the plane.
Marc:Now, I didn't know what I was going to do, but I was about to explode.
Marc:Every cell in my body was like, holy shit, it's Ken Melman.
Marc:What am I going to do?
Marc:I got to do something.
Marc:And it turns out.
Marc:that you can get internet on this plane.
Marc:So I got online and I'm sitting next to Ken Melman and I introduced myself, Mark Maron.
Marc:He said, Ken Melman, nothing.
Marc:He didn't know me and I didn't jump up and down just yet.
Marc:So I started tweeting from the plane, sitting next to Ken Melman.
Marc:This is going to be good.
Marc:I didn't know what was going to happen.
Marc:I didn't know how to handle it, but I knew something had to happen.
Marc:Now I put it out there in the world that I'm flying and I tweeted I'm sitting next to Ken Melman.
Marc:So, of course, someone said, well, can we get a picture?
Marc:So Ken Melman at that time was sleeping.
Marc:He had his head tilted back.
Marc:His mouth was open.
Marc:So I tilted my computer and opened my shirt, exposed my nipple and got him in frame with my nipple.
Marc:And I took a picture.
Marc:I took several pictures of him sleeping with me sitting next to them, and I put them up on Twitter.
Marc:People started going crazy.
Marc:So I started talking to Ken Melman, him not knowing that I was online.
Marc:And we're talking about politics.
Marc:We talked about the U.S.
Marc:involvement in Iraq.
Marc:I talked about Dick Cheney being evil.
Marc:I asked him if Karl Rove was an evil genius.
Marc:He said, no, he's a friend of mine.
Marc:And then he called me cynical.
Marc:And then we started going back and forth.
Marc:And it just started to unfold as a conversation.
Marc:And unfortunately, he's just a person.
Marc:And also, unfortunately, he's a very evil, horrible person that did a lot of horrible things.
Marc:But of course, he doesn't see it that way.
Marc:Fine.
Marc:So we have this conversation.
Marc:Then I start tweeting the bits and pieces of the conversation.
Marc:But I was also being a little crass.
Marc:I was being, you know, some people, some of the right wingers said that I was being intolerant because I said things like when he was sweeping with his mouth open, I said, should I teabag Ken Melman?
Marc:I'll do it for America, that kind of stuff.
Marc:They serve me nuts.
Marc:I said, I just got my nuts.
Marc:I hope Ken Melman doesn't eat mine.
Marc:So, you know, the guys on the right and some of the blog said, look at this intolerance is gay bashing.
Marc:But of course, look, you guys know who I am.
Marc:The gay community knows who I was.
Marc:I certainly wasn't gay bashing anybody who didn't deserve it.
Marc:God bless him for coming out.
Marc:But for fuck's sake, he did more damage to the gay community with legislation during the Bush administration than anyone had in years.
Marc:Horrible person, but just a person sitting there next to me laughing at Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Marc:Then at some point he said, are you online?
Marc:And I'm like, oh, fuck.
Marc:Yeah, I am.
Marc:You can get online.
Marc:And then I started thinking he may be on to me, but he didn't get online.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So then something else happens.
Marc:Someone tweets to Gawker.
Marc:So Gawker breaks the story while I'm still in the air.
Marc:So I go to the Gawker website and there I am with my nipple out and the tweet portions of the tweet conversation are put up.
Marc:And then I'm like, fuck, this is great, but this is a real problem because if he gets online, that means it's going to be a very awkward flight because he's going to go right to that because given that he's still tied into that machine, that is politics, someone I'm sure has informed him or emailed him what is going on with the link on Gawker.
Marc:I was sure of that.
Marc:And then by some miracle of coincidence, he decided not to get online.
Marc:So it wasn't an awkward long flight where I would have to either explain or just sit there uncomfortably.
Marc:But I did know that once we landed, that he would get on his BlackBerry and bam, there it would be.
Marc:And he would go to it on his BlackBerry.
Marc:So to prepare for that, I emailed Brendan.
Marc:I said, look, this is what's going on.
Marc:I'm going to call you right when we land.
Marc:Just stay on the phone with me because I think it's going to get weird and fucked up.
Marc:Don't matter what I'm saying.
Marc:Just understand what the situation is and stay on the phone with me.
Marc:Sure enough, the plane hits the ground.
Marc:We both turn our BlackBerrys on.
Marc:I get on the phone with Brendan.
Marc:Dude, what's going on?
Marc:Yeah, I'm getting ready to go to Vancouver.
Marc:And then I look over at Kel Melman.
Marc:He's holding his BlackBerry.
Marc:And on the screen of the BlackBerry is me and my nipple with him sleeping with his mouth open.
Marc:So now, like, the adrenaline's going.
Marc:It's a fucking rush.
Marc:I don't know what the fuck is going to happen.
Marc:I'm talking to Brendan like nothing is going on, though he knows exactly what's going on.
Marc:And there's part of me that thinks I should just be able to go, come on, buddy, all in good fun, right?
Marc:You kind of deserve it for being a douchebag, right?
Marc:Come on, buddy.
Marc:But I didn't do that.
Marc:I really wish I had because I think what I did do was a little bit cowardly, but I just stayed on the phone with Brendan until Ken Melman got off the plane.
Marc:And that was the longest taxi ever, mind you.
Marc:And he handled it like a pro.
Marc:He's a politician.
Marc:He's taken worse shit.
Marc:He's been through this kind of thing before, maybe not specifically, but he has.
Marc:And he didn't do anything.
Marc:He didn't flinch.
Marc:I sat there.
Marc:He sat there.
Marc:He got off the plane.
Marc:I got off the plane.
Marc:And you know what?
Marc:I was happy about what I did, but I was pissed off.
Marc:I didn't ask him more relevant questions about whether or not he had any regrets about his alignment with the Bush administration and their treatment of the gay community laid on his conscience.
Marc:I'm a little sad that I didn't do some real reporting because I was caught up with being an infantile fucking prankster.
Marc:But nonetheless, that happened.
Marc:I hope you enjoyed that if you saw that.
Marc:Now, let's move on to what we're dealing with today.
Marc:You know, I'm starting to understand something about this show and about how you people listen to this show.
Marc:And I'm happy you do listen to it.
Marc:I get a lot of emails from...
Marc:From a lot of you, I'm beginning to get emails from people who are in the middle of some sort of personal crisis and they don't know who else to talk to or how to put it out there.
Marc:So they email me, you know, I'm in this situation right now.
Marc:I didn't know what the fuck to do about it.
Marc:So I emailed you.
Marc:You don't have to respond.
Marc:I just wanted you to know that this was happening, that they needed some sort of witness.
Marc:They needed to get out of it.
Marc:They needed to just let somebody know what they were going through, and it's very touching to me, and I appreciate it.
Marc:I'm grateful that the podcast is there for you guys in that way, and I'm certainly open to receiving these type of emails.
Marc:I can't always respond to them, and I don't always know what to do to help you, but I do know that the act of writing it down,
Marc:that the act of putting it out in the world, that the act of confiding in somebody, even if we're not buddies, somehow releases some of the anxiety or the anger or the fear or the sadness, whatever it is.
Marc:And I read this article today about friendship.
Marc:And about how we've become a culture, a world, communities of loners, of people that are isolated in their lives.
Marc:Even if they're surrounded by family, they're isolated.
Marc:They don't have true friends necessarily.
Marc:We spend a lot of time online.
Marc:We spend a lot of time in our heads.
Marc:And I've talked about this before.
Marc:And someone sent me this article, oddly, one of you guys did.
Marc:It's from the Wilson Quarterly.
Marc:I don't even know what that is.
Marc:Surveying the world of ideas.
Marc:It's called America, Land of Loners.
Marc:And I'm just talking about this because in relation to this podcast, what I've begun to realize about myself and about all of us is that I sit down and talk to people here.
Marc:I have real conversations with people I either know well or know kind of, but I do usually share some sort of conversation.
Marc:interests with the people or we're in the same business or we're creative people or there's an understanding there.
Marc:But the fact and the reality of having an hour long discussion with somebody, how the fuck often does that happen in our lives?
Marc:I mean, when do you sit down and just talk to somebody for an hour?
Marc:When do you show up?
Marc:You know, because when I'm sitting here, all I want to happen is to connect with somebody emotionally around things that are important to each of us and, you know, either be funny or be honest or be emotional.
Marc:Just as long as the conversation is authentic.
Marc:I don't really care.
Marc:you know, what's being discussed because that is a rare bit of business.
Marc:And it's sometimes exhausting to listen, to engage, to evolve a conversation.
Marc:It's something that I'm not incredibly used to.
Marc:And it made me a lot more sympathetic for therapists because it's a little bit much, but it is really what being human is about.
Marc:And it's an important part of being human.
Marc:I hope I'm not rambling here because I'm getting to something because on the show today is Louis C.K.,
Marc:Louis is a friend of mine, and a lot of you know that I've been trying to get him on the show for a long time.
Marc:And Louis is not just a comic I know.
Marc:Louis C.K.
Marc:is a guy who was my friend.
Marc:He was my friend, and he is my friend.
Marc:He was at both of my weddings.
Marc:He's been there for me in moments of crisis, and something went wrong along the way.
Marc:Something strained our friendship.
Marc:A lot of things.
Marc:Yeah, mostly me.
Marc:But, you know, he's he's who he is.
Marc:I'm who I am.
Marc:But I have specific problems that I can answer to.
Marc:But this is the this is the deal with me.
Marc:And I don't know who you are and I don't know who your parents are.
Marc:I don't know what your life is.
Marc:But I'm a guy.
Marc:If I have one good friend, you know, I lean on that person.
Marc:That person is important to me.
Marc:I expect a lot out of them.
Marc:And quite honestly, I expect too much out of them.
Marc:We all have friends, but friendship for me has been a little tainted by the fact that I'm emotionally needy person.
Marc:And that the fact that, you know, however I was parented, a lot of times I look to replace parents with friends and I expect them to make me feel better at any cost.
Marc:And then when they disappoint me, I resent them or I resent them for other reasons.
Marc:I'm a very demanding friend and it's unfair.
Marc:And I've tried to evolve out of that.
Marc:You know, some friendships are built on bonds of loyalty that are beyond anything I can understand, whether they're wartime friendships or whether, you know, you shared something like, you know, killing a person that you can't talk about to anybody else.
Marc:And you have to trust each other with that or whether you share other secrets that are completely entrusted to each other.
Marc:That's part of friendship.
Marc:Part of friendship is, you know, is being there for the other person if possible when you need them.
Marc:Part of friendship is having the kind of relationship that after years, even if you don't see each other, you're right back where you used to be.
Marc:And this incredible emotion comes over you that, you know, this is good for you.
Marc:It's good for the world.
Marc:And we're there for each other no matter what or how much we see each other.
Marc:So why am I bringing all this up?
Marc:Well, look.
Marc:Yeah, Louis and I, we go way back.
Marc:And I talked to him for two hours.
Marc:This is going to be a two-part thing.
Marc:And what happened, you know, involuntarily was over the course of our conversations, you know, this is a 20, 25 year friendship or, you know, over the course of our conversations, I think we were able to sort of, you know, rebuild our strained friendship.
Marc:And also I was able to remind him about things that we'd gone through together that I saw pivotal for both of us.
Marc:Or I sort of was able to, you know, to see his career in the light of some of these moments that I remembered from his life that he didn't necessarily remember.
Marc:And the truth of the matter is that I didn't really even take responsibility before in talking about Louis in the past and in talking about my own resentment of him.
Marc:I didn't realize that here I was feeling like he was blowing me off, but I didn't realize that that had gone both ways.
Marc:There were a lot of things I didn't realize.
Marc:So we had this very long conversation.
Marc:I'm not even sure I covered a lot of the things that might be important to you guys.
Marc:You know, Louis is a genius.
Marc:And one thing I've always said, for better or for worse, in the course of our friendship, is that I don't know anybody in my life, and this is at different points in my life, that is capable of actually true comedic genius more than Louie.
Marc:Yeah, he just has an application of will and creativity that is rare and a fairly very unique vision.
Marc:And I'm proud of the guy and I appreciate his work.
Marc:But because of my own fucking needy insanity, you know, I strained the friendship.
Marc:You know, we're both selfish people.
Marc:And, you know, and a lot of times in friendships, you tend to hold the person that you're friends with to the standard of what your friendship was originally.
Marc:And I didn't even bring this up.
Marc:But there's an interesting thing about me.
Marc:You know, as you know, after listening to this podcast, I've been a crazy motherfucker.
Marc:I've you know, I've been incredibly angry or resentful or cranky or self-involved mean.
Marc:I've been nuts.
Marc:I'm a lot less nuts.
Marc:But a lot of times when you don't maintain a friendship.
Marc:The person you're friends with still sees you as that guy.
Marc:So allowing each other to grow in a friendship is tricky because there's part of you that wants to be what you were when you were first friends.
Marc:There's part of you that wants that because that's an innocent place.
Marc:That's where it started.
Marc:That's where the emotions began.
Marc:And as you go through life and life beats you up,
Marc:If you don't stay in touch, you sort of lose track of people's growth.
Marc:And you tend to really, part of you just craves what you were, what those emotions were.
Marc:And you hold each other to this vision of what you were at another time.
Marc:And that's what stifles friendships and that's what makes them dissolve.
Marc:So what you're about to hear really...
Marc:is uh is me and louis uh you know outside of talking about comedy and talking about his work uh really rebuilding a friendship and i love the guy so let's let's let's uh let's do that let's uh let's go talk to louis
Marc:So, all right, so are we all right, me and you?
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:You mean personally?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, you know, we were under development, I think.
Guest:I don't know what the fuck is wrong with me.
Guest:Well, I mean, you're one of the people I've known longer than most anybody.
Marc:I know I was thinking about it, and I get real emotional about it because I realize I've been pestering you.
Marc:And, of course, you know me.
Marc:Because you didn't do the interview, there was some process in my mind that eventually became, all right, if he's not going to fucking answer my emails, I understand what he's doing to me.
Marc:So I've got to sit down and say, wait, he's more busy than anybody I know.
Marc:He doesn't have time to deal with me.
Guest:Well, there's a couple of things going on when I don't answer your emails.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't answer a lot of emails if I don't have something constructive to say.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, I just don't.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because I am busy.
Guest:I got the kids and work.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And also my mind is just clouded.
Guest:So there's a lot of emails I just ignore.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because I don't have a really good answer.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I'm ambivalent or I can't.
Guest:I just don't want to get into a dialogue of maybe.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I just don't, I can't, I can't make myself answer emails.
Guest:I also have a weird thing that I've noticed recently that if somebody emails me, I don't want to answer them right away because I don't want to start talking to them.
Marc:That's what I mean.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You don't want to get into a dialogue.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:So you know that if you answer right away, they know you just got it and they know you're alive.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So they start talking to you.
Guest:So I go, okay, I'll wait.
Guest:I'll answer this guy in like a couple hours and then I forget.
Guest:That happens more often than not.
Guest:Um, but also, you know, we had a, we had a, our friendship faded away at some point.
Guest:And, uh, I had time when I was writing you emails to connect with you personally.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you were ignored me.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:For a long time for, I don't know, over a year.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Longer than that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You just wouldn't answer me.
Guest:And I would write emails that said, I'm not sure why you're not writing me back, but I'm going to persist because our friendship goes back far enough.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I remember that saving.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You just wouldn't answer me.
Guest:What the fuck is my point?
Guest:I caught you on the phone and you said that.
Guest:You felt like when we talk, it's just about me and I don't really listen to you, that I'm very self-centered.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I took that to heart.
Guest:But I also thought, well,
Guest:I felt like it was unfair.
Guest:And after that, I tried still to pursue you.
Guest:You didn't want to talk to me.
Guest:So in this round, when you were trying to get me to be on your podcast, you were trying to connect with me, part of me was going, you know, fuck him.
Guest:If he doesn't want to be my friend, I'm not going to...
Guest:But we had the conversation.
Guest:We made up.
Marc:Yeah, but it didn't make us start connecting.
Guest:No, it didn't.
Marc:It didn't.
Marc:Was he a plan to start connecting?
Marc:But then you got very busy.
Marc:Yeah, I think so.
Marc:You got very busy.
Guest:Yeah, I would say that.
Guest:And look, this is yours to edit.
Guest:You put in what you want here, so I'm just saying.
Guest:No, I just... I don't care.
Marc:No, but I...
Marc:What happens to me is that my friendship with you, for some reason over the years, despite however much distance or whether or not we see each other, whatever our lives has happened, I feel very close to you as a friend.
Marc:Yeah, no, that's the way I've always felt.
Marc:And I get choked up about it.
Marc:And I remember even after... We don't talk that much, but for some reason we connect as friends pretty deeply.
Marc:And then...
Marc:And then when you were having trouble and your marriage was coming apart, there was this point where when I finally sort of said, well, what's going on?
Marc:I had this idea of your life in my head.
Marc:It was a lesson to be learned.
Marc:I know Louie from then, and I know her.
Marc:I was at their wedding, whatever.
Marc:So I had this whole idea of how your life had transpired and what was going on in your life.
Marc:And I hadn't really been in touch with you at all.
Marc:And then when he told me what was really going on, I was like, holy shit, how did I miss your entire life?
Marc:Yeah, sure.
Marc:And then I started to realize, because this happens a lot on the podcast,
Marc:That we all know each other in a very sort of intimate, deep way because of what we do and because we are of the common ilk.
Marc:A comic is a comic.
Marc:And there is a weird emotional understanding that we all have.
Marc:But we don't know each other's fucking life.
Marc:And then I got very saddened by the fact that I had been out of your life and there was no way for us to keep in touch.
Marc:And then, I don't know, something, resentment happened.
Marc:Who the fuck knows?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But I think that sometimes when we're, you know, when you just, when you don't see someone a lot, you just sort of hold them to who they were when you did know them really well.
Marc:Like, you know, that guy must be the same guy.
Marc:Yeah, I think that's true.
Marc:And I mean, we started out together, so.
Marc:We did in some, in a weird way, because I was thinking the first time I ever saw you, period, I was in Boston, probably 1986.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I was living in Los Angeles and doing all those drugs.
Marc:And I was sitting at Play It Again, Sam's with Kevin Knox.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:You know, upstairs.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And you were, like, darting around.
Marc:You just had all your hair, and it was red, and you were skinny.
Guest:I was about 18, 19 years old.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And I said to Kevin, I said, who's that guy?
Marc:And he goes, that's some kid.
Marc:Some kiddie hanging around.
Guest:Yeah, he didn't know I was a comic, even.
Guest:Yeah, just some kiddie.
Guest:I wasn't really.
Guest:But, no, the first time I saw you was a catch.
Guest:And, um...
Guest:In Boston.
Guest:In Boston, yeah.
Marc:But, like, you didn't know me.
Guest:I didn't know you then, but I remember... I didn't know you, and I didn't like you on stage the first time I saw you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You were very aggressive.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you were also very... You were in a lot of turmoil.
Guest:I think you were just coming out of all this sort of Sam Kinison coke business.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So you were very... You exuded a huge amount of insecurity and craziness.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:undisciplined though yeah like i didn't think i was you made me uncomfortable and then i met you and then david cross i think said um i'm going to hang out with this guy you want to come with me and he told me it was you and i was like oh that guy so then we went to the coffee connection where i worked you were working which is now starbucks like yeah yes and you were
Guest:washing dishes.
Guest:It was like a bad movie.
Guest:It was a pile of fucking cups and saucers and you were washing them with a big hang over the sink spigot.
Guest:And you had an apron on and you were miserable.
Guest:You were really working hard and it was a very humbling moment in your life.
Guest:And you were like, oh, you guys, I got a break in a few minutes so you want to hang out?
Guest:And I immediately liked you because that humbling moment made me like you a lot.
Guest:And it was interesting to watch you go from being this kind of
Guest:L.A.
Guest:long hair.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Kinison pack coked up guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You broke that.
Guest:I watched you break that down and I watched you start talking about who you were instead of doing your bits as that guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I started watching you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Humiliate yourself more on stage, which is a good thing.
Guest:I mean, in a good way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You had a huge humility wave that started coming in.
Guest:I think that's always been your progress.
Guest:It's been taking away more and more layers.
Guest:Taking away more of your defenses away from yourself.
Guest:Not without a fight.
Guest:No, but the fight is fun to watch.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I think when I met you, the first time I knew who you were, here's what I remember.
Marc:Because when I'm sitting there trying to think about how am I going to talk to you without getting emotional and also cover the great things you're doing now.
Marc:Without getting emotional or resentful or crazy, the first time I had any idea of really who you were, I went to pick up Grant Taylor at the house you were living in with him.
Marc:He was my roommate, yeah.
Marc:And I went to pick him up to go to a one-nighter.
Marc:I walked into the house, and he's getting ready to go, and there's a room.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And the door is open and there's just a light.
Marc:There's a mattress on the floor.
Marc:And there's just food and clothing and piles everywhere.
Marc:Disgusting.
Marc:I lived in a disgusting way.
Marc:That's all I saw there.
Marc:And I go, who lives in there?
Marc:He goes, oh, that's Louie.
Marc:And that was who you were in my head.
Marc:That's Louie.
Marc:And you sort of remained that guy for a while, no matter how nice the apartment was.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:There were certain things I remember very definitely.
Marc:I remember the apartment.
Marc:It all revolves around the apartments.
Marc:I remember the apartment over the village gate in the atrium.
Marc:Oh, God, yeah.
Marc:Going over to that apartment at some point, I think you had torn a hole in the wall.
Marc:There were things written.
Marc:You had a set list written on the wall.
Guest:I used a wall of my apartment as a phone book.
Guest:Like, I wrote all my phone numbers and stuff and dates.
Guest:But in big, like indelible ink.
Guest:Sharpie.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And then again, there were the clothes all over.
Guest:No, and also I remember there was one detail of that apartment on Bleecker Street was that I dropped a...
Guest:bottle of hot sauce one day, like a bottle of Tabasco, and it shattered on the floor, and it stayed there for the entire time I lived there.
Guest:I never cleaned it.
Guest:I never cleaned up the glass.
Guest:It was just an area of my apartment I didn't go near after a while.
Marc:But there's something weird about that whole thing that defined you.
Marc:Even when you got the nicer apartment in Chelsea.
Marc:Yeah, on 22nd Street.
Marc:Right.
Marc:There was a couple of, I think, defining moments outside of... And you had that Murphy bed in Bleecker Street.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That thing that flipped down.
Marc:Disgusting.
Marc:The whole thing was fucking disgusting.
Guest:Yeah, it was really gross.
Marc:I just remember that you were this guy that came from where you did.
Marc:You didn't go to college.
Marc:You're from Newton.
Marc:And you started out really young.
Marc:And you were like building your brain.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:yeah do you know what i mean yeah like that you had this weird like i remember like everything you don't know that i was i was with you in a couple of severely life-changing moments i was with you when we went to fucking blockbuster and you got that copy putney's a putney slope yeah it was in a bargain bin
Guest:That's really funny that you tell me that because I remember it.
Guest:Yeah, because I just bought a VCR for the first time.
Guest:And we were just going to rent a movie.
Guest:I can't rent movies because I didn't have a credit card at the time.
Guest:So you bought them.
Guest:I bought them.
Guest:It was the only thing that was for sale that wasn't like a Barney video or something.
Guest:And I remember you didn't know what it was.
Guest:No idea.
Guest:I didn't know what the fuck it was.
Marc:And it changed your entire perception of movie making.
Guest:Yeah, it did.
Guest:Putney Swope by Robert Downey.
Guest:It just made me think you can do anything you want even if it doesn't make any sense.
Guest:Right.
Guest:What I didn't understand was that just because Putney Swope existed in a shrink wrap box, it doesn't mean that you can go do that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, I just thought any movie that was got made and that has a package is like a lamp in the distance.
Guest:I can do that, too.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, you know, it's not.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:No, but I'm really glad that was my first big inspiration.
Guest:Isn't that weird, though?
Guest:Yeah, you were there.
Guest:It's funny because I was telling somebody this story recently about getting Putney Swope.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And I forgot you were there.
Marc:There's another thing I think you told that you forgot I was there that was another amazing day is when we found that computer on the street.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Do you remember that was me, too?
Guest:I told that story on stage in Nashville recently.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How did that end?
Guest:First time I ever...
Marc:Well, there were two things I learned about you that day.
Marc:We found this fucking computer on the street.
Marc:It was right by the Chelsea place.
Marc:It was an old, shitty computer.
Marc:And we took it into your apartment, and then all of a sudden, you became this computer wizard.
Marc:And I opened it up, and I fixed it.
Guest:How the fuck did you know that stuff?
Guest:Because I took AV repair in junior high school.
Guest:I took a class that seemed so dry and boring.
Guest:But you knew how to do DOS and shit, right?
Guest:Yeah, I knew how to do it.
Guest:My mother was a computer programmer.
Guest:She is a computer programmer.
Guest:My mother is a software engineer, and she's had computers in our house before anyone had computers in their house.
Guest:We had that kind of modem where you put the phone into this big rubber cradle thing, and she had computers that had punch cards.
Guest:I mean, that's how far she goes back.
Guest:So I've always known computers, but I've also always known how to repair electronics because of the class I took in junior high school.
Guest:And we hooked it up and we started getting information.
Guest:Started learning about this guy's life.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it was weird, right?
Guest:He was sexually confused.
Guest:He was a gay guy who had come from somewhere in the south, like one of these places where you can't live as a gay person.
Guest:Been ostracized from his family because he was gay.
Guest:But also when he hit New York, he started doing drugs and became a credit addict.
Guest:He started buying things at Saks with his parents' credit cards.
Guest:Right.
Guest:and then he went home and he stole his parents' retirement bonds.
Guest:And he was writing this in a diary?
Marc:How do we know all this?
Guest:Well, the thing is, I've never... This is the amazing thing about looking at somebody's computer, and I have some grief about it because it wasn't nice to do that to this person, but...
Guest:You know, at least I didn't tell anybody in his life.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I just carry his information in my head.
Guest:But we called him.
Guest:We saw his.
Guest:Did we call him?
Guest:Yeah, just to see if he was a real guy.
Guest:I don't remember doing that.
Guest:Yeah, no, we didn't say anything.
Guest:We just called him.
Guest:We heard his voice.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't remember that.
Guest:Well, no, the thing was that we found his lies because we saw what he wrote to different people.
Guest:There was an email then.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:There was an email then.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was letters.
Guest:That's how crazy.
Guest:We read letters that he wrote to different people and a play he had written.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That told we saw what his lies were.
Guest:But he went to a bunch of the story we pieced together because he wrote his family's lawyer, who was the only connection he had to his parents because they wouldn't speak to him.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He took all of his parents' money and spent it on crap.
Guest:And drugs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And his father had to come out of retirement.
Guest:His father had to stop being retired and go back to like a shit job because he destroyed his parents' elderly lives.
Guest:So you sat with the info.
Guest:I didn't know all of this.
Guest:He wrote to the family lawyer saying, please get my dad to speak to me because it was hard enough on him that I'm gay, but also now I've destroyed his life.
Guest:But he really, you know, he's kind of an asshole too or whatever.
Guest:And then he'd write somebody else mean things about his parents that didn't represent
Guest:How did you represent this as a story?
Guest:What was the arc?
Guest:Where did this go?
Guest:I started talking on stage at Nashville.
Guest:Well, because right now I'm trying to come up with a new material, so I'll talk about anything on stage.
Guest:I think it died in the middle of the story.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it was fascinating to people.
Guest:When you tell people something like that, I found a computer that was broken and I turned it on and started learning about the person.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:People start really fucking listening.
Guest:And that guy did have an interesting life from what I knew of it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I just remember that event and I remember that.
Guest:Well, the part of it that turned into a really interesting hook on stage was the idea that he was complaining about his father's homophobia to his friends.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And saying, my parents hate me because I'm homophobic, but I know the truth.
Guest:I think only I know the truth about this guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That he was... His parents hated him because he destroyed their lives because of his fucking credit problems and because of his drug addiction.
Guest:But he called it, oh, they're just homophobic from the South.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it was an interesting insight to me, and it made me wonder about other people...
Guest:Who like you ever watch The Sopranos?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There was some storyline where Meadow had a black boyfriend.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And her father was racist against him.
Guest:He didn't like her having a mixed couple.
Guest:And then the boyfriend turned out to just be a prick.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he left her.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because he's an asshole.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And her mother said whatever happened to him.
Guest:And she you see her wheels spin.
Guest:And then she goes, Daddy, Daddy chased him off.
Guest:And it's bullshit.
Guest:She lost him.
Guest:Well, she lost him partly because he's an asshole, but also because she was superficially didn't like her.
Guest:She wasn't going to let go of her right to say, my daddy's a racist piece of shit, even though it didn't have anything.
Guest:And I wonder how much that happens in people that complain about racism or homophobia in their lives or any discrimination.
Guest:A lack of taking responsibility for their own real feelings.
Guest:That they have something that they've done...
Guest:That they use it to cover stuff in their lives.
Marc:I talk about being in Scotland where I say, fuck the Scottish.
Marc:Yeah, no, that's what we all do.
Marc:Only because they didn't like me.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:And that enables me to generalize about an entire culture of people.
Marc:Those Scots didn't like me.
Marc:But I'm aware that it was that personal.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:And that I don't know anything about Scottish history.
Guest:Every time I go to England...
Guest:It's a challenge.
Guest:I love working there, and I often have some great shows there, but sometimes I don't.
Guest:It's, to me, the hardest place for me to work.
Guest:And I know it's all about me.
Guest:I go there with all kind of preconceived shit.
Guest:Whenever I come home from being in England, every show I do, I say, fuck the fucking dirty British, and I just say terrible things about them.
Guest:Because I know, first of all, the people here will just get excited.
Guest:I don't care what crowd, we're still America and they're still England.
Guest:Fuck anything is good here.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:As long as we don't acknowledge that we're in trouble.
Marc:No, no, no.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I think the other, I think, defining thing, and not so much that I was a defining thing, I'm just trying to remember when I was sitting there, I was surprised about how much I know about your career without actually researching it, just because I knew you.
Marc:There were times where I'd go to your house and you had all big wads of money because you came down here in probably, what, 1988?
Guest:88, 89, yeah.
Marc:And you and Nick DiPaolo, who you've known for years, and people see him on the show, you live together in that fucked up apartment that Barry Katz owned.
Guest:Barry Katz's apartment.
Guest:Barry Katz, who's, you know, he created Last Comic Standing, right?
Marc:He's Dane Cook's manager.
Marc:He's Whitney Comics manager.
Guest:I think he's still Jay Moore's manager.
Guest:Anthony Clark, all those people.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, he used to run a comedy operation out of a basement in Alston, Massachusetts.
Marc:And there was a period in time where he just said, I'm going to sign everybody.
Guest:Yeah, I was his first client.
Guest:And I was also the first person to fire him.
Guest:But anyway, Barry had an apartment.
Guest:on 82nd street in central park west a little tiny studio right with like one of those like a stove that looks like it's a dollhouse like it's a joke yeah and uh it had a loft yes i had a bed up up on this rickety loft and a bed underneath it and uh
Guest:he charged comedians from Boston $150 each per month to have a right to use this apartment.
Guest:How many were there?
Guest:There was like 15 guys.
Guest:And it was a terrible combination of guys.
Guest:Anthony Clark was one of them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Ed Regine, the guy from Providence.
Marc:The guy who was put in jail for turning back odometers.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And Wally Collins was one of them.
Guest:Anyway, Nick and I went down there a lot.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then Barry lost the... He was giving up... The lease came up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he didn't want to do it anymore.
Guest:I don't think he was making enough... He was trying to make a profit.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And he wasn't making enough, so he was giving it up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Nick and I...
Guest:contacted the landlord and we got the place.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And then like, you know, and you and Nick were working at Catch a Rising Star and I was wandering through the streets with Todd Berry wondering why we couldn't work at Catch a Rising Star.
Marc:I just remember you taking out of your pocket wads of cash after an evening at work.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I was just sort of like, ah, fuck.
Guest:But he's doing that to hate me.
Guest:Well, yeah, so that was a cash business then, and you'd get 50 bucks a show, and there was that one really heightened time in the late 80s.
Guest:Yeah, where it's just money.
Guest:You could do 10 sets a night.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:And they were 50 bucks each, and I had a motorcycle then.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:The fucking motorcycle.
Guest:I had a Honda Super Sport 750.
Guest:And that was that time we used to run up and down the FDR and he wrecked it.
Guest:I used to go on the FDR doing like literally 100 miles an hour so I could get to shows quicker.
Guest:And I do like, you know, two shows at the Boston Comedy Club.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:One at the cellar, one at the Village Gate or two at the Village Gate.
Guest:And then I run screaming uptown to do the catch and the comic strip.
Guest:Didn't you wreck that fucker?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:You laid it down.
Guest:It freaked you out.
Guest:You somehow walked away from it.
Guest:Yeah, it was a weird turning point in my life because that was, I remember one day, it's just funny because you mentioned the pockets full of cash.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I remember one night I had done like 10 shows.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was 23 years old, something like that.
Guest:Not even, yeah, like 22 years old.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I parked my bike at my garage in the village.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I had my pockets were bulging with cash that I had made.
Guest:And I mean, you know, 50 bucks a show, 10 shows.
Guest:So what's that?
Guest:That's $500.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:500 bucks for a night's work.
Guest:Right.
Guest:23 years old.
Guest:And then I'm walking to my Bleecker Street village apartment.
Marc:Yeah, I remember you had the parking space across the way.
Marc:It was a walk.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you also had cars there, too.
Marc:You bought these weird muscle cars.
Guest:I remember this one specific night that I was walking home with a ton of cash from my motorcycle to my village apartment, and I thought, I have the greatest life in the world.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't even care if I don't become famous or anything.
Guest:This is the balls.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I have the world by the fucking balls.
Guest:I had that thought that night.
Guest:And then the next night, I was going down 2nd Avenue doing about 70 miles an hour.
Guest:And a car went through a red light going perpendicular.
Guest:And I never even touched my brakes.
Guest:I just plowed right into this car.
Guest:And you flew over it.
Guest:I flew over the car.
Guest:I lost my sight, but I was still cognizant, I remember.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the bike was in peace.
Guest:I came sort of my sight came back and the bike was in pieces in front of me.
Guest:I heard a woman scream.
Guest:It was a nightmare.
Guest:And I got strapped to a board and taken to a hospital.
Guest:And after lots of CAT scans and tests and shit, this doctor came in my, you know, to me in the hallway of a room.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he said, you're fine.
Guest:You're stupid.
Guest:Don't ride motorcycles anymore, but you're fine.
Guest:And he said, take it easy for a while.
Guest:And so I hopped off of this table and I thought, I'm just going to go home.
Guest:But, you know, the threshold to which you need to be hospitalized is still pretty like you still pretty badly.
Guest:I really fucked myself up and I could barely walk.
Guest:I mean, I was in really bad, but I hadn't broken anything.
Guest:Everything was sore.
Guest:My whole body had bruises all over the side of it that grew as the weeks went by.
Guest:Like, for two weeks, I was, like, in bed.
Guest:Like, on your hip and shit?
Guest:Yeah, on my leg.
Guest:And I was a fucking wreck.
Guest:And my motorcycle was gone.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I slept that night.
Guest:And I just felt really terrible.
Guest:I think I peed myself.
Guest:It was just a really bad humiliating experience.
Guest:And then I looked in the mirror the next day, and I was balding.
Guest:I saw it for the first time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That I was losing my hair.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And like within that week, Catch Rising Star closed.
Guest:Remember, that was the first.
Guest:Catch and the improv went down like one, two.
Guest:They both closed.
Guest:And things started getting really bad.
Guest:Like things immediately started getting bad.
Guest:And then the 90s came and all the clubs started closing.
Guest:And I couldn't make a living anymore.
Guest:And I couldn't pay my rent.
Guest:Like that night was a huge instant turning point.
Guest:Everything from that night on in my life went badly.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:For like three, four years.
Marc:I've always believed that, you know, despite what you think, I think of you that, you know, out of anybody I know, and I've always said this, that if anybody, you know, has the capacity to create, you know, some genius in this fucking game, you know, you're the guy.
Marc:Oh, thanks.
Marc:Because your work ethic is unique and you very consciously let things get so fucking bad for yourself.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:In order to see if you can rise from it.
Marc:that that you know that that's always been this weird ethic you had that even when you were like I remember one time in that fucking Chelsea apartment that you were surrounded by garbage I mean real garbage there was garbage bags that were not being taken out and I said why don't you take this out and you just said I just can't do it I couldn't do it and there was dishes there was stink in there yep and then it was right around the same period where you shit yourself on purpose laughing
Marc:I don't think I ever really did that.
Guest:I used to do a joke about that, but I don't think I ever really did that.
Guest:I used to think about it like just shitting my pants and then cleaning it up and chalking it up to experience it.
Guest:I don't think I ever did that.
Guest:I don't think so.
Guest:I might have.
Guest:I don't know.
Marc:But when was the transition?
Marc:Now, I guess at that time when all the crap started hitting fan, you got your first writing job writing for Jon Stewart when he hosted with Caroline's.
Marc:Was that it?
Guest:Was that the first writing job?
Guest:Colin Quinn hosted Caroline's Comedy Hour.
Guest:Jon Stewart was the head writer.
Guest:And you were the writing for that?
Guest:Me and David Tell and Susie Espin were the writing staff.
Marc:And that started your writing career?
Guest:Yeah, that was the first writing job I had, yeah.
Marc:And then you went from there to Conan after a period of time.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:Because I think that's important, especially because a lot of comedians listen to this and a lot of people that are interested in comedy listen to it.
Marc:That the thing that makes you – that thing that evolved you into the great auteur that you are now and personal comedian was that you were one of these guys – like in my world, after a certain point, me being jealous of you –
Marc:It serves no purpose, because, and people don't realize this when they listen to this, is that your automatic feeling is like, I'm a comedian, that guy's a comedian, why the fuck does he get that?
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:That people don't realize it, and then at certain point, you're like, well, because I can't do what that guy does, or I'm not doing what that guy does.
Guest:He's playing a different instrument, that's all.
Marc:But because we're all comics, you think, who gave them that?
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:And the thing was, is that you could write and produce television and do stand-up, and you were making short films at the time,
Marc:all at the same time.
Marc:But what's happened now, and we can talk about it because it's interesting, because your evolution from what was basically an absurdist point of view, that when you started all the way up to probably
Marc:You know, not that long ago, you know, your jokes were really, you know, about ridiculous poetry.
Marc:You know, they were crass and they were in some of them were deep, but they were still not invested in your life.
Marc:Absolutely true.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And at some point that turned because I think your anger got to a level where you thought you were denying yourself.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:By not engaging in your life.
Marc:Yeah, definitely.
Yeah.
Marc:So you were one of the original crew on the first Conan.
Marc:You defined the original Conan O'Brien show with Dino and with Robert.
Guest:Yeah, Robert Smigel was the head writer.
Guest:And that was what stopped the slide for me because after that motorcycle accident, I just kept losing money and opportunities.
Guest:And I remember I called you.
Guest:It's funny when you're talking about things that you were there for.
Guest:Because you had moved to San Francisco.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You had this forward thinking of like, I want to actually live like a human being.
Guest:And I don't want to live in this place where if I can't get two shows in a week, I'm literally starving to death.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you moved to San Francisco and were living like a person.
Guest:And I had visited you out there and I loved the life you had.
Guest:And then I went back to New York and I was just... I was doing Tony Camacho gigs.
Guest:Wait, wait, wait.
Marc:Can I just put something in real quick?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You went to San Francisco, I think...
Marc:And this is who Louie is.
Marc:I think you bought a car off a comic.
Marc:Didn't you?
Marc:You bought a Trans Am.
Guest:No, I bought a... I went to LA and I bought... Because I was going to do LA and then I was going to do San Francisco.
Guest:I bought a 68 Mustang.
Guest:But this was just a road trip.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You bought a car.
Guest:I bought a car.
Guest:But you know what?
Guest:I don't regret that because...
Guest:It's not a matter of regret.
Guest:It's just who you are.
Guest:I couldn't rent cars because I couldn't get credit for years.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because I couldn't pull my life together to get credit.
Guest:So you bought a car with a – did you buy a car?
Guest:I bought a car.
Guest:It cost me $1,100.
Guest:It was a black 68 Mustang.
Guest:It was a beautiful car.
Guest:But didn't you lose your credit because you bought a car with your Amex?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:That's why I lost my credit because I bought a BMW with an American Express card.
Guest:And I had to give the car back, and everybody that was involved with it, the car dealer in Amex, were like, we're going to let you out of this, but you're never going to get a credit card again.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Well, I finally got a credit card by getting one of those credit cards that you just pay money for.
Guest:I remember that.
Guest:And it rehabilitated me.
Guest:It took me years to get a credit card.
Guest:And the other thing you did was you were locked out of your apartment once, so you got a room at the Ritz.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When I got an Amex card, I just became an idiot.
Guest:Yeah, I couldn't get into my apartment, so I got a room at the Ritz-Carlton in Central Park.
Guest:And I stayed there for like three nights.
Guest:And Amex isn't a credit card, you know?
Guest:You got to pay every month.
Guest:Yeah, I know.
Guest:So I just couldn't, yeah.
Guest:There was one month that I just went.
Guest:I bought a BMW.
Guest:I stayed at the Ritz and then...
Guest:That was it?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was also on an installment plan with Amex for years to pay that back.
Guest:I have an Amex card now.
Guest:I don't know how they don't remember.
Marc:You bought the Mustang for $1,100.
Guest:$1,100, and then I drove it from L.A.
Guest:to San Francisco.
Guest:I was with a girl who wasn't fucking me, but she wanted to go camping with me.
Guest:And she and I drove around and camped.
Guest:We bought two pup tents and we drove around in a Mustang and went camping in like the Great Grand Canyon in fucking Utah.
Guest:And it was a tremendous trip.
Guest:But you guys were at each other's throats, right?
Guest:We hated each other.
Guest:We got to Yosemite and she was being so awful to me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That I said, I'm taking you.
Guest:She had somebody she was staying with in San Francisco.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And we were supposed to be there like in five days.
Guest:I said, you're going to your friend's house today.
Guest:And we got in the car and we drove through Yosemite all the way to San Francisco without speaking to each other.
Guest:And we saw like fucking bears, you know, fighting and we couldn't talk to each other about it.
Guest:But it's she's now I actually got emails from her last year and I was really happy to hear from she was a cool person.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We all have kids now except for you.
Guest:But OK.
Guest:So sorry.
Guest:Anyway.
Guest:We're what the oh yeah.
Guest:This is your when I called you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:At Conan.
Guest:Yeah, I wasn't doing well, and I was doing gigs in, you know, like the Nanuet Holiday Inn.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Stuff like that.
Guest:What was that?
Guest:The Taunton Regency.
Guest:Taunton Regency.
Guest:Well, I'd have to go to Boston sometimes and did those.
Guest:Yeah, that's what we did.
Guest:But there was the New York equivalent, which is like the Connecticut fucking whatever.
Guest:One-nighters.
Guest:One-nighters.
Guest:And places like Ron Concoma Comedy Club.
Guest:I mean, just terrible, terrible.
Guest:When everyone was shitting on comedy, it wasn't.
Marc:Yeah, and you had to drive up to four or five hours to make $200, $250.
Guest:And I was working a lot for a guy named Tony Camacho.
Guest:One night, I worked Rascals Comedy Club in New Jersey, middling for some guy for $100.
Guest:a show yeah and at the end of the week he paid me like 150 light of what he owed me yeah and I said you owe me more and he just laughed at me and said yeah what are you gonna do about it come on you still you need the work what are you gonna do and I was like wow you're just gonna take you're just gonna take my money but he had he was right I worked for him several times after that
Guest:These guys are the gatekeepers.
Guest:No, they're amazing.
Guest:So that's where I was at.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then SNL had a huge turnover.
Guest:Saturday Night Live threw out a huge amount of their cast.
Guest:It was one of their biggest.
Guest:Was that when I went in?
Guest:Was it 95, 94?
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:No, no, this is 93.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Or summer of 93.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And everybody I knew got hired.
Guest:Every single person.
Guest:David Tell was a writer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Jay Moore was a writer performer.
Guest:Sarah Silverman writer performer.
Guest:Laura Keitlinger.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Janine Garofalo.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, my entire generation of comics got hired in SNL.
Guest:Everybody.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was at the same audition.
Guest:I auditioned the same night.
Guest:And I remember I was on first.
Guest:They put me on fucking first.
Guest:And Jon Stewart was hosting.
Guest:And Louis Feranda, who ran the club then, the SNL people hadn't shown up.
Guest:So I said, I just want to start.
Guest:Let's get going.
Guest:And he told me to go on without them being there.
Guest:And I said, but they're not going to see me.
Guest:And he said, we got to get going.
Guest:I don't care.
Guest:And I mean, I was crushed that I was just not going to get seen.
Guest:The gatekeepers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So Jon Stewart was my friend.
Guest:And he said, I'll do as long as I can.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he did like 20 minutes to open.
Guest:But then he kind of shrugged at me and said, I got to bring you up.
Guest:And I went on.
Guest:And the instant I went on, the SNL people came in.
Guest:And not only did they come in at a bad time, they also fucked up my set because they were huge.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was like 12 people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But saving grace was that David Spade was in the group.
Guest:And he knew me.
Guest:I didn't know him personally, but he liked my act.
Guest:So he told him, sit down and watch this guy.
Guest:And I saw him do it.
Guest:And I had a great set.
Guest:And then everybody else followed.
Guest:And the next day, everybody found out who was hired.
Guest:Everybody was hired.
Guest:And I wasn't.
Guest:And then I thought, this is it.
Guest:I mean, I don't know if I can keep doing this.
Guest:And that's when you called me?
Guest:I called you in the middle of the night to ask you about San Francisco.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And whether I should move there.
Guest:And I was questioning the whole career.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And did I say anything helpful?
Guest:We talked till dawn.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I just, I think I unloaded on you that I didn't think I had any shot at anything anymore and that I was really remorseful.
Guest:But it's like coming out of prison.
Guest:How do you back out of a comedy career?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was 25 years old and I had been doing stand-up since I was 18.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I had no way.
Guest:No skills.
Guest:Nothing.
Guest:Nothing to offer any other.
Guest:Except you could resurrect a dead computer.
Guest:Yeah, I could fix a computer or a car.
Guest:Or a car.
Guest:Or I could cover a football game for a cable station, you know.
Guest:And so we talked about it.
Guest:You told me about your life there.
Guest:And I just thought, I'm not going to make it there either.
Guest:And I hung up the phone intensely depressed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then my phone rang like two hours later.
Guest:Like I got two hours sleep and it was this guy.
Guest:Hi, my name is Robert Smigel.
Guest:I don't know if you've heard about the Letterman show going away and Conan...
Guest:is this guy, and I didn't know any idea who Conan was, and he said, Jim Downey saw you at Catch.
Guest:Jim Downey was running SNL then, and he said that you were funny, so I wanted to know if you had any writing samples.
Guest:Did you?
Guest:Well, I had short films I had made.
Marc:You had, oh, the ones with Shapiro and ice cream.
Guest:Yeah, all that kind of stuff.
Guest:That's available still on DVD, right?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:But you can see it on YouTube.
Guest:I just put it all on YouTube.
Guest:Oh, you don't sell that DVD of the short films?
Guest:No, because I had to just make that in my house, that DVD.
Marc:I have one of those.
Marc:Maybe I could actually hold on to it.
Marc:Sell it, yeah.
Marc:Or maybe, I think my ex-wife actually took that.
Marc:She's a big fan.
Marc:Oh, okay, good.
Guest:Well, she could sell it then.
Guest:Which ex-wife?
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:But anyway, yeah, he hired me.
Guest:Within a week, I was hired at Conan.
Guest:They saved my fucking life.
Marc:And I think it's important for people who are listening to realize that between you, Robert Smigel, Dino, Stamantopoulos, and Conan, you guys redefined what late night sketch comedy looked like in the context of that type of show.
Guest:Yeah, it was a pretty different show, yeah.
Marc:Well, you were pushing the elbow because your comedy being as absurd as it was and his sensibility and Dino's sensibility brought this type of almost childlike inventiveness to sketch comedy again, which was completely unique.
Marc:I think that's true, yeah.
Marc:And that it set the tone for that show for the next 12 years.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:And you remain friends with Smigel and Dino, I guess.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:To some degree.
Marc:But, I mean, it's just interesting that you were at these junctures where the one thing I also remember is that coming off of that, and this is still when your stand-up is primarily, you know, absurd, but inspired, but, you know, noise-based and a lot of...
Marc:Right?
Marc:I mean, I'm not being condescending.
Guest:No, not at all.
Guest:Of course not.
Marc:But the greatest moment of this type of style backfiring, which I thought was an important moment, was when Dana Carvey got the variety show.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And Smigel was the head writer, and he brought you guys in.
Guest:Yep.
Marc:And you wrote that sketch, that opening piece.
Guest:The nipples thing, yeah.
Marc:That really was a thing where it sort of resonates all the way through to Conan not functioning the way the network wanted to in the Tonight Show slot.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Was that here Dana Carvey had a primetime show, and he brought in you guys who were a late-night operation, and you guys struggled over that sketch.
Marc:And what was it again?
Guest:It was just this weird idea that I had on the way to work one morning that Bill Clinton...
Guest:would have had surgery so that he had nipples going down so that he could breastfeed.
Guest:The first idea was just that he could breastfeed.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then I thought then he would have nipples going down his belly and like a puppy, like a dog.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you got to work around Carvey, who was an impressionist.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's I think that's why I said Bill Clinton.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:But I also did like the idea of Bill Clinton breastfeeding a baby.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like on national TV to show that he was a nurturing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So it was a good hearted idea.
Guest:But it was an opening sketch for the first show, was it not?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it didn't.
Guest:It shouldn't have been.
Guest:I mean, it was I argued against it being the opening sketch because I thought.
Guest:It's going to kill us.
Guest:But the network really wanted Dana to do an in one.
Guest:It was like this thing where they wanted a thing where Dana in a character talks to a camera.
Guest:And it's the only option we gave them that had that.
Guest:The only option you gave him was that Bill Quinn opens his shirt.
Guest:He has puppy nipples.
Guest:He has dog nipples.
Guest:And there's milk spurting out of them onto live puppies and squirting them in the face and kittens.
Guest:On his desk.
Guest:And what was the blowback from that?
Guest:Really scared the shit out of people.
Guest:It really bummed people out.
Guest:Because we were on right after Tim Allen's show.
Guest:We were not a late night show.
Guest:We were on at fucking 8.30.
Guest:Or 8 o'clock.
Guest:I think we were on.
Guest:It was something crazy like, what are you doing?
Guest:And I learned a lot from that whole experience.
Guest:It was a terrible, terrible experience.
Guest:I hated it.
Guest:I hated it.
Marc:What did you learn?
Guest:I just learned that you can't force people to like something if they don't, if it's not what they want.
Guest:I mean, it's not, why were we trying to make these people, we would get these letters that were heartbreaking.
Guest:You know, that really hurt my feelings.
Guest:Like people that are really like, just were so upset by what we did.
Marc:But but but in that sense, so like you and Dino and Robert, the Robert is he's a little more cartoon thinking.
Marc:But I mean, wasn't that part of the agenda?
Marc:Was it the pushy envelope?
Guest:Well, when we did the show, ABC had NYPD Blue on the air.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they had created something new in television, which was a watershed hour that, you know, in British television, they have a watershed hour.
Guest:Right.
Guest:After a certain hour, you can do absolutely anything you want.
Guest:Nudity doesn't matter.
Guest:Right.
Guest:because they just figure kids have gone to sleep.
Guest:That's how they handle it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If you're dirty, you go after watershed.
Guest:Well, ABC started saying words like shit and asshole on NYPD blue.
Guest:That was brand new.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I think actually we were on like, honestly, I think we were on like nine o'clock because we were right before NYPD blue.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so that's what they said.
Guest:You're the first show before that time, so you can be really edgy.
Guest:We want you to get in trouble.
Guest:We want you to make waves.
Guest:That's what they told us.
Marc:The wrong group of guys to do that.
Guest:So we came on.
Guest:I was actually the head writer, and Robert was the executive producer.
Guest:He wanted to make me head writer because he was in the cast.
Guest:He wanted to be able to do both.
Guest:But then after we signed, during the summer that we developed the show, ABC was sold to Disney.
Guest:That's when that happened.
Guest:Right.
Guest:ABC was bought by Disney.
Guest:And so we all of a sudden, everything changed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they said, they didn't stop saying you're on before...
Guest:NYPD started saying you're on right after Tim Allen.
Guest:That became the focus of the show.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And they put Dana on a huge two page ad in TV Guide with his arm around Kermit the Frog.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Guest:A picture he never posed for.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And he was furious.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the expectation for the show was it's going to be very sweet.
Guest:And Dana's a sweet guy.
Guest:He's not a guy you think of as irreverent.
Marc:Well, when you were trying to sell him on the breastfeeding thing, what was that like?
Guest:He loved it.
Guest:I mean, Dana was a gamer.
Guest:I loved him.
Guest:Dana's a great guy.
Guest:And he's an enormously talented, just funny actor.
Guest:And he's got old chops.
Guest:He's a real traditional guy.
Guest:He's like Sid Caesar or something.
Guest:I thought the show had great potential because of what he could do and what he was willing to do.
Guest:He was willing to do anything.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I think, okay, so now if we move into the other stuff, I think one of the other turning points, you have this uncanny ability to really hold on to small bits of wisdom.
Marc:that sort of define your life for a while.
Marc:And I've noticed that people who, and this is for me included, but you also, that people whose fathers were primarily absent tend to try to put their life together on their own.
Guest:That's a really interesting observation.
Guest:I think that's true.
Marc:Where you're sort of scrambling for the right role models and the wisdom that's going to guide you through your creativity, through your life.
Marc:Things that you can, like sort of these mental marking posts of like, that thing means something to me and it can help me.
Marc:And I remember when Francis Ford Coppola was a guest.
Marc:On Conan.
Marc:And you guys were doing bad fruit theater.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Which was really just small puppetry with rotten fruit, you know, for movie scenes.
Marc:And you were like really obsessed with this.
Marc:You know, we're going to do Apocalypse Now.
Marc:You brought me in to do Dennis Hopper's voice.
Marc:Yeah, I remember.
Marc:And I think like the Dennis Hopper rotten peach, you know, fell off its thing, you know.
Marc:But but you were so you so wanted.
Marc:Francis Ford Coppola, you really wanted Coppola to acknowledge your genius for taking a scene from his movie and doing it with rotten bananas.
Guest:Yeah, that was the biggest deal in the world to me.
Marc:It was like, I remember, because you're like, this is a big opportunity, because you were a filmmaker, and I think outside of being a stand-up, once you started making films, you really saw yourself as a filmmaker.
Guest:That's what I wanted to do.
Guest:wanted to do you yeah because I was obsessed with Coppola because that movie heart of darkness had come out right documentary about apocalypse now and that was a massive inspiration that made me believe that I could be a filmmaker because his the way he how crazy he was and how he worked against the odds and made that happen he made that movie happen without it anyone really wanting him to
Marc:Yeah, and he had a large enough personality and enough talent to people where people would tolerate.
Guest:Yeah, and there was a moment, and when you talk about little things that have been guiding principles for me, that one has like eight of them in them.
Guest:And one of them was this guy in the movie saying, the way Francis operates is he wants to make a movie, just starts making the movie.
Guest:He doesn't wait for permission or for even the money.
Guest:He just starts making the movie.
Guest:And he figures, if I start making the movie, people start joining along.
Guest:And that's how I've done everything since then.
Guest:Just start making it and give it a life.
Marc:Well, that always amazed me about you, and we'll come around to that in a minute, is that, you know, you wrote an entire script.
Marc:You would write these scripts that were based on ideas that, like, you know, I would have the, if I had the idea, I'd be like, that's ridiculous.
Marc:And you would have this ridiculous idea.
Marc:Write a whole movie about it, yeah.
Marc:What was that fucking script, The Beard?
Guest:oh Annie's beard what was that about that was about a woman like a pretty young woman yeah who works in show business based on Lorne Michaels assistants he had all these blonde assistants back then like a mean a mean spirited pretty girl yeah who works for a big studio mogul yeah and drives a Jetta you know whatever and one day she's talking on the phone yeah she's driving and she plows into a kid and kills a kid yeah and the kid happens to be a girl who has a beard like a full man's beard
Guest:See, right there, I would stop the movie idea.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:So she has this beard and you just see it.
Guest:It's not made a big deal out of.
Guest:You just see when she sees you see the kid get hit.
Guest:The kid has a beard.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, uh, so she goes, she's vilified by the LA community, you know, it's press big sensational trial of the woman who killed it.
Guest:Gorgeous, rich woman on a phone killing a kid.
Guest:It would be, you know, so she's on trial and the kid has a little, uh, the dead girl has a brother who says, uh,
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:What happens is the family of the girl is so nice and they don't want to ruin this woman's life.
Guest:They don't want her to go to prison.
Guest:They go to the judge and say, please don't ruin her life.
Guest:We lost our little girl.
Guest:We don't want it.
Guest:And the judge is very moved by this.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the little boy says that he tells this story that their father had a beard.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he died.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that the girl willed herself to grow a beard.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:As a monument.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And said, as long as I wear this beard, he'll never die.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And now she's gone.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So could she grow a beard?
Guest:The little boy asks the judge.
Guest:I can't believe I wrote this.
Guest:And so the judge says you have to get a beard put like really not like a fake beard, but you have to really grow a beard, grow a beard and keep it for the 10 years you would have done in prison.
Guest:and so there's this scene where they graft a beard onto her like they do this whole crazy yeah fucking insane thing and she wears a beard and she has a like a probation officer who just makes sure like gives it a tug and makes sure it's there always yeah she's not allowed to obscure it you know there's a whole thing where she goes and tries to wear like a uh she goes to like a store where they sell burkas and other middle eastern yeah and learns about concealing beauty and what that means to muslims and stuff and
Guest:It destroys her life.
Guest:She can't work in television.
Guest:She can't.
Guest:It's a cosmetic industry.
Guest:So it's about her coming to terms with her life and her value as a person.
Guest:And her beard.
Guest:And her beard.
Guest:At one point she shaves it and runs off and there's like helicopters chasing her like the fugitive.
Guest:Fucking crazy.
Guest:But no, it was a mess.
Guest:But I was obsessed with it.
Guest:I tried to get it made for like three years.
Guest:And it broke my heart.
Marc:You didn't get it made?
Guest:Never made it, never will.
Marc:And then there was the whole, I guess we should talk quickly about the Poodie Tang debacle.
Marc:Because I think a lot of people that love you look at that movie as this cult movie.
Marc:And I remember when you were going through that, that you had a very specific vision for that movie, and it was the first time you had studio backing.
Marc:And then you had to go through that process where the studio gutted you, took your power away, and then stole your movie.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:It's terrible.
Marc:And I just remember that when you had your first cut, and you were ready to go, and they screened it.
Marc:And who was the big executive she was famous that sat there?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Well, Sherry Lansing was running Paramount at the time.
Marc:And they sat down with that movie that you were done with.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you were there.
Guest:And what happened?
Guest:Well, I went out to L.A.
Guest:for a screening.
Guest:Really, John Goldwyn was the main guy that we dealt with there.
Guest:He was Samuel Goldwyn's grandson, this guy.
Marc:So you, of course, attached a great legacy, knowing you, that's sort of like you're part of the history.
Guest:Yeah, that was a big deal to me.
Guest:And I still, to me, it's like... You remind me more of John Milius, actually, than Francis Ford Coppola.
Guest:Yeah, probably with, you know... But I loved that experience, even in the worst time.
Guest:I was very unhappy.
Guest:It was very stressful.
Guest:And there were times where I...
Guest:it's one of those things where your back gets put against the wall and then they somebody it feels like somebody's pushing on your chest but you don't have anywhere to go do you know what i mean yeah things got worse and worse and i started to wonder what my capacity was as a filmmaker as a human being i wasn't sure what my capacity was to take the stress i was taking on so you made this this cut fear that i was living right but your your vision as a filmmaker is is fairly specific and that was a fairly specific i made that movie exactly the
Guest:the way I wanted to.
Guest:And in cutting it, I found out, first of all, that I had made a flawed movie.
Guest:It wasn't good.
Guest:I didn't make a beautiful movie that Paramount destroyed.
Guest:I made a flawed movie that didn't really hang together as a feature.
Guest:With the wisdom I have now, I would have, if I were them, just let it be released the way I made it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And just see what happens.
Guest:It wasn't a big risk.
Guest:It was a three million dollar movie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Chris Rock was in it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It made its money back the first weekend.
Guest:It was fine.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I would have just let it go because they wasted an enormous amount of money.
Guest:They cut recut for almost a year and they just poured money into it trying to make it better.
Guest:And it never was going to be any better.
Guest:It just got worse.
Marc:But did you get that feeling during that time?
Marc:Because I remember the time where there's a story about Ken Kesey and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which was a stage play.
Marc:He agreed to letting them make the stage play from his book, but he did not sign off on the movie.
Marc:And there's that story where they figured out a legal loophole and they based the movie on the stage play.
Marc:And an interviewer asked Kesey, did you go see the movie?
Marc:And he said, look, if a couple of Hells Angels came to your door and knocked on your door and said, we're raping your daughter.
Marc:You want to come out and watch?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Would you go?
Guest:No, that's very, it's a good way to put it.
Guest:But I didn't think of that movie as my kid.
Guest:Also, I signed on to it.
Guest:When we first started talking about doing Pootie Tang, they were going to do it with Paramount Classics, which was like their little indie arm.
Guest:And they were going to make it for $2 million.
Guest:And I was so excited.
Guest:And then they said they wanted to make it for three and do it with Paramount proper and give it to John Goldwyn and make it as a real, even though it wasn't a lot of money, as a studio movie.
Guest:And I said I didn't want to do it because I thought that process would destroy it.
Guest:I didn't think I could work under that.
Guest:Not on Pootie Tang.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's a crazy idea.
Marc:But then the interesting thing about knowing how politics and show business work, which I think this was the big lesson for you, is that they then took the movie and they hired people you knew and had worked with on the Chris Rock show, which you also wrote for.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:And also movies on my little short movies.
Guest:I had a lot of people on it.
Guest:Rick Shapiro was in Pootie Tang.
Guest:All these guys I'd done this goofy stuff with.
Marc:Right, but in the sense that they were going to take your movie and then rewrite it and re-cut it.
Guest:Yes, when they went to redo it, they hired Ali Leroy, who was a writer.
Guest:He was one of my friends, one of the writers I worked with on Chris Rock.
Marc:Now, did that destroy relationships for you, or at some point did you just accept?
Guest:No, we're not friends now.
Guest:I hated what he did to the movie, but, you know, I don't know.
Guest:His job was different than what my job was, so I look at it very differently now.
Guest:But at the time, yeah, I was pissed off at him for taking the job and for hurting the movie.
Marc:So getting back to the Coppola episode of Conan, because I remember what he said to you.
Marc:That, you know, out of all this, I'm more interested in what do you remember?
Marc:Because I wonder what do you remember that happened?
Marc:Well, I remember that, you know, that you really wanted him to recognize.
Guest:Yeah, I wanted to get a big ups from him.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, you know, you'd done this thing with the bananas.
Marc:Took days to write this.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:It was a scene where you.
Marc:You're going to say he was a wise man.
Marc:He was a kind man.
Marc:He had plans.
Marc:He had wisdom.
Marc:Bullshit, man.
Marc:And that you really wanted Coppola to sort of tip his hat at you for this great puppet show that you put on from his thing.
Marc:And he sort of iced you a little bit.
Guest:I said, hey, somebody introduced us.
Guest:This is Louis C.K.
Guest:He's the one who created the fruit thing that you saw.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Coppola smiled tightly and went, it's very nice.
Guest:Thanks.
Guest:But then the thing that he said to you was, do you have kids?
Guest:No, I don't remember that.
Guest:Tell me what that is.
Guest:I don't remember that.
Marc:You know, he asked you if you had kids and you said you didn't.
Marc:And he says, well, you can't be a real man unless you you don't know what it's like to work.
Marc:Unless you have.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Marc:I don't remember that.
Guest:Well, that would say that to me.
Marc:Well, I believe that's my recollection because I thought like because I remember it because you you said it to me.
Marc:You know, it must add something to do with the fact that it was a puppet show.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And he basically said, you know, you don't know what it's like to have responsibility that what you extrapolated from it was that, you know, how can I, you know, you know, if you don't have a responsibility to other people, you know, how do you really know what it's like to be an adult?
Marc:Yeah, that's very true.
Guest:I think that's very true.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, that's what I remember.
Guest:I think I remember him saying something like that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I mean, I don't know why I would remember it.
Guest:It's funny.
Guest:Well, because sometimes you give people things in your life and they remember them and you don't.
Guest:Yeah, because I think it's very ridiculous.
Guest:There was a library that Alexander the Great built in Alexandria, sitting in Egypt.
Guest:And it had all the great works of Greek literature and philosophy and art, everything.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then when we became a Christian West world, they burned, you know, the Christians burned everything.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they burned that library down or whatever.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I'm.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I could be wrong about all this.
Guest:But we still have played a little bit of Plato and Socrates.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Very little.
Guest:There was a lot more.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because the Muslims kept it.
Guest:Because when the Muslims did their run of conquering the world, they kept stuff.
Guest:They didn't burn other people's work.
Guest:They would integrate it and save it.
Guest:So we have all Greek literature and philosophy and all that stuff exists because the Muslims held on to it while we were going through the dark ages and forgetting everything and letting this Jesus-y shit ruin everything.
Guest:And then when we came out of the haze, the Muslims were there saving it for us.
Marc:Yeah, and you used that to sort of exemplify.
Guest:You remember this Coppola thing and I don't.
Marc:Yeah, this is very great about the way you think because you have minor problems in your life.
Marc:And always, if it could be like, you know, I really have to stop eating ice cream.
Marc:And then you go off on like, because I was reading the autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You have this way of taking the global history of great movements to sort of like, you know, as wisdom, which I think goes back to this idea that, you know, when you have to parent yourself.
Marc:Well, it's like what the Jews do.
Guest:You know, the Jews, they keep their whole people's history together and it keeps guiding them, you know.
Guest:So, no, I definitely think, yeah, I definitely like stories.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And the one other thing I wanted to bring up before we go into the other great memory, there were two things that happened at the Chelsea apartment, I think, that were great was that at some point in the middle of that fucking mess, you decided you were going to play trumpet.
Marc:And you went out and bought a very expensive trumpet without any real plan in place to learn how to play trumpet.
Marc:And you brought the trumpet home and you put it on the mantle and you jerked off.
Marc:And after you jerked off, you realize that if you had just jerked off before, you wouldn't have bought the trumpet.
Guest:Yeah, no, it's worse than that.
Guest:What?
Guest:Because I went to Times Square to buy the trumpet.
Guest:That's what the music stores are.
Guest:I just wanted to buy a trumpet to learn how to play trumpet.
Guest:And I went into Sam Asher, one of those places.
Guest:And there's all these, you know, student trumpets.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:For like, you know, $100.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I started going up the door.
Guest:There's a really nice one.
Guest:And the guy started showing me, here's like a nickel plated, you know.
Guest:beautiful trumpet it's got a flawed bell because there was it was it was hurt but they repaired it yeah and it was like fourteen hundred dollars yeah i didn't have any of that kind of money yeah but i went to an atm and i took out like everything i had in the bank yeah and i bought this fucking fourteen hundred dollar trumpet without having any ability or even i'd never even blown into a trumpet yeah
Guest:And then I was walking through Times Square with this fucking thing in my hand.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just freaking out and feeling bad.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I went and ducked into what they used to have then, those fucking porn plays, the peep shows.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Next thing I know, I'm in a peep show booth, those little upright coffins.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Looking at a chick, a tired fucking Latvian girl probably.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Through the window of this peep show and jacking off.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's like a two by two foot by two foot room.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I jerk off and I came on the trumpet case, which was standing between my legs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And once I came and I looked at this come on the trumpet case on this beautiful, you know, brass buckled trumpet case.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I realized if I had come to this show first, I wouldn't have.
Guest:I could have saved fourteen hundred dollars.
Guest:I wouldn't have the fucking trumpet now.
Guest:Which I never really learned how to play.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was an important thing for me to realize that.
Guest:In what way?
Guest:Well, I, I, the only time I ever, I went to a therapist for a while and he started dragging me through my past and I couldn't do, it was exhausting.
Guest:I couldn't do it.
Guest:And I also didn't see an end to it.
Guest:And I started saying to him, I don't want to do this anymore.
Guest:Can you just give me some advice?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Can we just boil it down to how the fuck do I get out of my own way?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he told me, all right, well, when you do things that you regret all the time, like eating bad food or jacking off in a weird, shameful situation, you wish you hadn't, sexual compulsions, behavior, eating compulsions.
Guest:He said, you're not, the issue isn't the food or the sexual objects.
Guest:It's anxiety.
Guest:You're having anxiety.
Guest:and you're doing these things to try to feel better deal with your anxiety right and maybe if you tell yourself that in the moment it might help you and that was an enormous help i mean that's sort of what i told myself with the trumpet which is every time i'm starting to have like a a thing that i'm not in control of right like uh i want to buy i want to buy a motorcycle it's happened the other day
Guest:I want to buy a fucking Triumph Bonneville motorcycle.
Guest:I have no business buying a motorcycle.
Guest:But I went, I poured over the website, started reading reviews of Triumphs and trying to talk myself into it's okay to spend $8,000 on a motorcycle.
Guest:But I'm practiced now at stopping and going, why are you looking at, it's got nothing to do with motorcycles.
Guest:You're anxious.
Guest:Something's irritating you.
Guest:And in just the act of doing that,
Marc:uh cuts you off of the sometimes that helped me just now because that's what i realized that with myself that i'm not a depressive but when i get anxious i get overwhelmed and paralyzed yeah and and that like you know the only thing you can do is to feel better jacking off is a great way to get rid of anxiety
Marc:Oh, yeah, it is.
Guest:Yeah, it's built in.
Guest:So it's not sexual.
Guest:And knowing that... It's right.
Guest:It's not sexual.
Guest:It's very helpful.
Guest:It is.
Guest:It's very helpful to know this is just... I'm having a function of... There's something going on inside of me.
Guest:And it doesn't even have to be that it's deep-seated in my... Fuck it.
Guest:It's just anxiety.
Guest:You're feeling bad.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Take a fucking breath.
Marc:Okay, well, that's part one of my conversation with my friend Louis C.K.
Marc:We'll have part two on Thursday.
Marc:I hope you're enjoying it.
Marc:And there's a couple of things.
Marc:You know, I mentioned a lot of dates at the beginning.
Marc:They're all up at WTFPod.com, at MarkMarin.com.
Marc:But what I can't stress enough...
Marc:is get on the mailing list because I really am being diligent about that.
Marc:And you'll get information about when I'm performing near you and also all the dates that are coming up.
Marc:And there's links to, you know, I'll send you links to stuff.
Marc:You know, I do a little thing every week for you and try to tell you what's going on with me in a way that I might not do it here.
Marc:And I...
Marc:You know, I would just like to be in touch with you like that.
Marc:And please, if you can find it in your heart to donate a little money, we've got some nice new T-shirts.
Marc:I'm printing up some new WTF T-shirts with a new logo.
Marc:We got the cat T-shirts now.
Marc:We've got several packages.
Marc:If you do a $10 a month rolling donation, I'll send you a T-shirt and some stickers and a postcard.
Marc:If you do a $250 one-time premium package donation, I'll send you the cat t-shirt, the new WTF t-shirt, my three CDs, the special premium donor best of WTF CDs, some stickers.
Marc:I've got a few books if you'd rather have books than CDs.
Marc:And please support the show because we are living on your generosity.
Marc:And I appreciate you listening.
Marc:Look forward to Louie Part 2 on Thursday.
Marc:And I'm glad to be back.
you