Episode 112 - Louis CK - Part 2
Marc: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 Marc Maron.
Marc:Okay, 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:Whatever the fuck you want to call yourself.
Marc:It's Mark Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:I am in my garage at the Cat Ranch.
Marc:It is raining and chilly in Los Angeles.
Marc:Thank fucking God.
Marc:Stop complaining about the weather.
Marc:For God's sakes, it was baking here.
Marc:The ground was crying for moisture for months.
Marc:And a day into this weather, I'm hearing people go, ah, it's shitty.
Marc:Shut up.
Marc:Shut up.
Marc:It's time.
Marc:The earth needs water.
Marc:The entire city will burn down again.
Marc:Whatever.
Marc:Not a big deal.
Marc:Hey, look, I'm glad you liked that first Louis episode.
Marc:I'm going to do the second episode today.
Marc:The second part of my interview with my buddy, Louis CK.
Marc:I want to get a couple of plugs in here before we get into that.
Marc:As you know, I'm doing a live WTF here in Los Angeles at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater on Franklin on Friday, October 15th.
Marc:And that's going to feature Charles Fleischer.
Marc:I don't know if you know him, but he's one of the weird, original weird wizards of comedy.
Marc:He was the voice of Roger Rabbit.
Marc:I'm a little nervous to talk to him, to be honest with you.
Marc:I'm also going to have Brendan Burns.
Marc:who's going to be there from Australia.
Marc:You heard me interview him here a while back.
Marc:I'm going to have Aaron Foley, who I haven't talked to in a long time, a very funny comedian.
Marc:Jim Earl will be there.
Marc:I think that should be about the show.
Marc:I think Eddie Pepitone has paid work that he's told me he can't do.
Marc:October 18th, Austin, Texas at the Parish.
Marc:My feature acts on that WTF in Texas.
Marc:That's going to be on the 18th at the Parish in Austin and the 19th at Trees in Dallas.
Marc:In Austin, I'll be featuring Lucas Melandes, Brian Gutman, Eric Krug, and Martha Kelly.
Marc:and bryson turner in dallas it will be lucas malandes brian gutman eric krug bryson turner and paul varghese i hope i'm pronouncing his last name right so we're going to see how that goes this is going to be a new format we're going to do a little stand-up we're going to do a little panel we're going to see how it goes i've never really toured with wtf in this way
Marc:featuring local comedians from the regions I'm going to be doing the shows.
Marc:But we'll see how it goes.
Marc:I'm looking forward to it.
Marc:It'll be a fun night either way.
Marc:I hope to bring some T-shirts and some stickers.
Marc:If I can remember, you know how that goes.
Marc:And then, of course, October 20th, the Wednesday, we'll be in New York at Comics doing two shows.
Marc:And those are turning into pretty big shows.
Marc:We're going to have John Hodgman.
Marc:We're going to have Kristen Schaal.
Marc:We're going to have John Glazer, John Benjamin, Sam Seder.
Marc:On one show, on another show, we're going to have Mike DiStefano, Louis Black, Rich Voss, and Bonnie McFarlane on the late show.
Marc:So those are pretty big shows.
Marc:So come do that.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.
Marc:Get on the email list so I can mail you stuff.
Marc:And then you can see all that stuff.
Marc:It's right on the side of the email so you know where I'm going to be because I'm fairly irresponsible in promoting myself, which is ridiculous.
Marc:I'm trying to get better.
Marc:Okay?
Marc:But I am seemingly pretty good at...
Marc:wait for it pow holy christ did i shit my pants that time i might have to take a break fuck it look i want to say a couple things before we get into louis uh so i don't forget because i get things backed up here as you know and we don't have a lot of time here i we actually have all the time i want but but i got some emails and i want to thank uh paul
Marc:Paul, a few podcasts ago, you asked us to send you some shekels for the old Jew or words to that effect.
Marc:I'm an already a podcast subscriber, but your comment got me curious about whether shekels even existed these days.
Marc:It turns out they do.
Marc:So I found some on eBay.
Marc:As you write this, I'm sadly realizing you visited Israel.
Marc:And so you probably know this and probably already have some souvenirs.
Marc:So my impulsive little gift now feels a bit awkward.
Marc:But like many things, I feel it would be even dumber to give up on the idea at this point.
Marc:Thank you for the internal monologue, Paul.
Marc:I appreciate that.
Marc:I'm certainly familiar with those.
Marc:So intended in the spirit of both literal and symbolic appreciation of your work and your show, here are some shekels.
Marc:It probably would have seemed a lot more clever if I had an opportunity to give them to you in person while the comment was still fresh in your mind.
Marc:But, oh, well, maybe you can hang them on the wall in your garage to remind yourself of the support from your fans or make them into an uncomfortable piece of jewelry.
Marc:Oops, accidental pun.
Marc:Did I mention my wife is Jewish, but she doesn't wear any jewelry to speak of?
Marc:Yours in awkwardness, Paul.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:And he said, and cool stamp as well.
Marc:So he ordered me some shekels from Israel.
Marc:Thank you, Paul.
Marc:Thank you for the wrestling within the email.
Marc:I appreciate it.
Marc:Also, Melissa Jane and David Joseph, I want to wish you a...
Marc:Hold on, I dropped it.
Marc:I want to wish you an amazing marriage.
Marc:Can I do that?
Marc:I was sent a wedding invitation by a fan, which is really so nice.
Marc:He just said, so why do I start this, dear Mr. Maron?
Marc:Because I want to show you the respect I feel you truly deserve.
Marc:And oh, how about the sanitary, dear sir, maybe, hey, Mark, like I've known you for years, even though we've never met.
Marc:Had the chance at your last visit in Bloomington, Indiana, where I chickened out like a teenage girl.
Marc:Got to be right up front, nervous who grabbed my drink every time you made eye contact, which I could have seen the second show that night where you made the lady cry.
Marc:All I got was four people walked out, but you were great and I got turned on to Ryan Singer.
Marc:Anyway, I'm obviously a fan.
Marc:You unknowingly helped me through a rough patch in my life.
Marc:That is why I sent you an invitation to my upcoming wedding.
Marc:No, I do not expect you to come or even respond to this.
Marc:I just want you to know that I think you are great.
Marc:What the fuck is an amazing thing and your standup is truly awesome.
Marc:My job allows me to listen to my iPod all day.
Marc:So I get to empty parking meters and listen to whatever is on your mind at the time.
Marc:Well, listen, David.
Marc:Have a wonderful wedding.
Marc:I appreciate the invitation.
Marc:I would actually like to come, depending on what kind of food you're serving.
Marc:But I certainly wish you the best of luck.
Marc:And I had no luck in it.
Marc:But I'm sure you're going to do better.
Marc:And finally, I want to get to this, and then we'll get into Louie.
Marc:This was an interesting letter.
Marc:It came with a check for $50, which I found to be very nice, a donation.
Marc:But the letter is handwritten, and so is the letter about the shekels.
Marc:I like handwritten letters because I'm so impressed with people that can write in a way that I can read because I cannot.
Marc:So this guy talks about delaying his donation.
Marc:His name's David.
Marc:But then he gets to this.
Marc:which I thought was a pretty good story.
Marc:On the upside, the delay in donating affords me the opportunity to relay to you a pretty great WTF moment that happened not two days ago.
Marc:I'm gay, you understand, and I've been out to my friends for a while, but I finally got up the nerve to tell my family.
Marc:They're on the conservative side, so I've been none too eager to hasten the conversation.
Marc:At my birthday dinner, no less.
Marc:So we went to this great little Mediterranean place called Petra downtown.
Marc:It's more South North.
Marc:It's more North African.
Marc:So if you're into that sort of thing, I highly recommend it next time you're in town at Seattle.
Marc:I was super nervous.
Marc:So as soon as we sat down, it was me, my mom and my dad, my younger sister and my idiot younger brother.
Marc:I came out with it.
Marc:All right, let's get this over with.
Marc:I'm gay.
Marc:And actually, it went over pretty well.
Marc:My sister came over and gave me a hug.
Marc:I'm so happy to hear it, she said.
Marc:My dad leaned over and hugged me too, saying he'd wanted to ask me for a while but didn't quite know how to bring it up.
Marc:I heard my mom say something along the lines of, but it's your birthday.
Marc:which I found a bit cryptic.
Marc:My idiot brother just kind of sat there dumbstruck.
Marc:As well as they took the news, clearly they were better prepared than I gave them credit for, I could tell they weren't eager to talk about it, and neither was I, so I quickly moved on to other points of conversation.
Marc:And the rest of dinner went fine.
Marc:I was deeply relieved, as you might imagine.
Marc:Fast forward an hour or so to the end of the dinner, my brother was outside smoking, and my dad, who was sitting between my mom and I, was in the bathroom.
Marc:Our server brings the check and, since I'm in the corner closest to him, hands me the check.
Marc:So then my mom leans over to me and asks, did you want me to pay the tip?
Marc:I was confused.
Marc:What?
Marc:Did you want me to pay the tip?
Marc:You mean as opposed to paying the... I don't understand the question.
Marc:Well, didn't you say you were going to pay...
Marc:And then I realized she had totally misheard my earlier pronouncement.
Marc:And when she said, but it's your birthday, it was cause she thought I was trying to pay for my own birthday dinner.
Marc:My sister realized what happened too.
Marc:And we shared an amazed glance.
Marc:I was so astounded by the improbability of the situation.
Marc:I didn't even hesitate the second time.
Marc:No mother, I'm not paying.
Marc:I'm gay.
Marc:Oh, then with a touch of disappointment,
Marc:Really?
Marc:We talked a little more and it was okay and I think it'll be fine going forward, but what the fuck?
Marc:So that's the story.
Marc:I hope you enjoyed it.
Marc:Here's some money as well.
Marc:Pay down your deck debt a bit and keep on doing what you're doing best, David.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:That was a great story.
Marc:Oh, moms, huh?
Marc:What are you going to do?
Marc:I'm going to see mine this weekend, but that's neither here nor there.
Marc:I'm going to the bat mitzvah of my niece and my father has already dispatched many insane emails and the levels of family drama possible at this time.
Marc:event is astounding astounding because there's my brother and his new wife and her four kids and her family my brother and his ex-wife and their three kids and their other family and then the fact that my brother's ex is married to his new wife's ex and then my first wife's parents will be at the service anyways i'll let you know how that goes and you know and i'm rambling a bit look i know you want to hear louie
Marc:And I had a great conversation with him.
Marc:We're halfway into it.
Marc:So let's get back into that.
Marc:This is part two of my conversation with my friend, Louis C.K.
Marc:Let's talk about the moment where... Because I don't know when it happened because of whatever our relationship is.
Marc:But at some point, creatively, you were making these absurdist films and you were respected for that.
Marc:And they were great.
Marc:All of them are very great.
Marc:But your stand-up was still at this place where you're like, I have a peach.
Marc:And then at some point... And some people in the community were surprised by the transition because you were really...
Marc:A uniquely poetic, absurdist comic.
Marc:And you got a lot of respect for that.
Marc:But then all of a sudden, something broke in you.
Marc:And you were all of a sudden doing personal revelation comedy.
Marc:I mean, you were a guy that if an audience member interrupted you, you were like, I don't even know what to do with that.
Marc:You didn't even know how to do crowd work because it was beyond you.
Guest:Yeah, the act I was doing was kind of meta.
Guest:It was kind of absurdist comedy.
Guest:I wasn't really functioning as a stand-up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How you guys doing?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I wasn't that kind of guy.
Marc:Right.
Marc:If anyone interrupts this process, it's going to... I'm thrown off.
Guest:Right.
Guest:This is fake.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So what was the moment or a series of moments that made you snap and get angry and realize that life is pummeling me and this has to be relevant?
Guest:Well, I think it was... I guess it was having children.
Guest:I guess having kids was a big revelation for me because...
Guest:everything in my life that meant anything to me was work and stuff, you know, and, and jerking off and ice cream.
Guest:And yeah, I mean, that was, that was like in this muddled outskirts of my life, this thing that I had to do because it was me patching together a personal life.
Marc:Yeah, but you're also, but you're, but you're a warrior in the sense that, you know, like there was a time where, you know, you want to tell and depot, like you want to tell we're, we're, we're battling for superiority, you know, in a, in a fairly, he won that he won.
Guest:That round, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, he became the biggest comic in New York and I just felt like I kept shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.
Marc:But it was a very conscious thing that you guys were friends and there's nothing wrong with healthy competition and the way that you both saw each other.
Marc:I had him on the show last night and he was manic and brilliant.
Marc:And, you know, but he's a very different animal than you.
Marc:Totally different.
Marc:And the thing was, is that there was this real sort of like, you know, leader of the pack shit going on.
Marc:And you've always had that, that the struggle to be recognized for being the best fucking comic, that all of a sudden now, you know, you have kids and your life is no longer just about, you know, executing your will as a comedic talent and being recognized.
Marc:You're responsible for other people.
Marc:Yeah, definitely.
Marc:And that sort of must have imposed on your sense of narcissism to have that responsibility.
Marc:And I think the struggle of that first special, which I think redefined you, was you struggling with the fact that you might have a problem, a competitive problem with your children.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:They were an imposition on your life.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, you love them.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Well, they were in a position because I love them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If I didn't care about them, there wouldn't have been an issue.
Guest:You'd just be one of those dads.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I got kids.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I can't really spend much time with them, but they're there somewhere.
Guest:I mean, like when you read about people, famous, great guys from the past and their kids just were completely and utterly ignored by them.
Guest:And fucked up now.
Guest:Yeah, and everybody just thinks that was a byproduct of how great that person was, and we all give them a pass for it.
Guest:That's the way a lot of people think of that.
Marc:But I also remember a lot of this impetus about how you were going to handle kids and how you were going to break a pattern was that your father split.
Guest:Yeah, I wasn't going to do what my dad did.
Guest:I also just...
Guest:It was a huge thing for me, yeah, because I always thought that every second of my life should be poured into work and doing what I want to do.
Guest:And winning.
Guest:Yeah, and yet, well, I never looked at it that way.
Guest:I've always been obsessed with the things that I, the projects that I'm doing.
Guest:I always get obsessed with them as work.
Guest:I never really had this thought of, like, I want to be the best, or I want to be seen, or I want to be recognized.
Guest:I just...
Guest:really wanted to keep being able to do what i do i love the work yeah and i and part of the work is showing it to an audience i never would want to exist in a vacuum and not to me the whole point is bringing this shit to crowds and making them laugh right but anyway uh you know i had seen a lot of like 60 minutes episodes where they talk about a guy like bill parcells or whoever yeah and they he just look at how he he's so manic and yeah he's so amazing and then they talk to his wife and she always has this kind of
Guest:smile and says, we just know that we don't see Bill from, you know, September 1st to February 15th.
Guest:And that's, you know, you make a deal with yourself that that's okay and I love him.
Guest:And they always say, and then at the end of the episode, Morley Safer says, they're divorced now.
Guest:So...
Guest:I always remember that and seeing the kids going, Dad loves football, you know, and not much else.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I always thought that's really not okay.
Guest:If you're going to have kids, you should – you know, don't have kids if you're going to do that.
Guest:But anyway, I didn't – when I had my daughter, when her mother had her in front of me, everything changed.
Guest:I just fell in love with this kid.
Guest:I just felt –
Guest:I remember she was screaming in the delivery room, really upset.
Guest:She seemed particularly upset.
Guest:I mean, kids are supposed to cry when they're born, but she seemed angry to me and upset.
Guest:Like, I expected just, oh, you know, when a kid's crying in the delivery room, everybody's smiling.
Guest:Oh, look at her cry.
Guest:But I was really upset for her.
Guest:And...
Guest:They put her on this little table and they're putting stuff around her.
Guest:Sorry.
Guest:It's all right.
Guest:Unexpectedly emotional.
Guest:It's not a story that I tell a lot, so it's all right, man.
Guest:Let me have some water.
Guest:Water is good.
Guest:It washes away your love for your children.
Guest:You can talk without a shaking voice.
Guest:Yeah, they put her on this little table and they're fucking jabbing shit into her and they're just rough with her and she's screaming and her mother, it was a C-section, so her mom was being sewn up.
Guest:Her mom was just taken away.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I'm like in the middle of this.
Guest:I'm between her mother, like do I care for also, her mother is who I'd been caring for.
Guest:She'd been pregnant for nine months and I'd been caring for her.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it all had been about the mother.
Guest:The thing that happens when you have a baby is for the better part of a year you live with pregnancy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it's all about that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then you sort of feel when the woman's in labor, you just think this is about getting this woman through this.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And when it's done, we're going to go that she and I are going to go home.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You really don't.
Guest:As much as you think you understand, you don't really understand that someone else.
Guest:You just know you've got to go to the hospital.
Guest:You've got to go to the hospital and get through this thing that we've been taking classes about.
Guest:We've been reading books about it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I've been coping with her emotional instability and her volatile, you know, suddenly we're going to build a new kitchen.
Guest:I got to go buy wood, you know, I mean, stuff like that.
Guest:And she was really into her pregnancy and I got, I was there with her and, um,
Guest:And then you just don't know until you see the kid's face that there's somebody who's now going to be with you for the rest of your fucking life.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I didn't know how that would feel.
Guest:But when she came out, it wasn't about my feelings.
Guest:It was this kid is scared shitless and she's really angry at being taken out of her mom.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was pulled for one second.
Guest:There's this woman that's been the center of all this.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She just got cut in fucking half in front of me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They just made a hole in her belly and took this kid out.
Guest:And she's being sewn up and she's alone.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And this kid's over there and she's alone and I'm in the middle.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I went to the kid.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I got my head next to hers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I said, she's screaming purple face.
Guest:I said, it's OK.
Guest:It's OK.
Guest:You're going to be OK.
Guest:It's all right.
Guest:I'm here.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And she stopped screaming on a dime, turned and looked right at me.
Guest:And, you know, kids can't see an inch in front of them until they're like a couple of weeks old.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But she turned her head and opened her eyes and looked at me and stopped crying.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:And everybody, all these practiced people said, oh, my God, she heard you.
Guest:One person said she heard you.
Guest:And one woman who I didn't know was, I just heard a voice say, she knows who you are.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then somebody at that moment stuck a fucking pin in her foot or something and had blood and just screamed again.
Guest:But I didn't understand that I had a role in this kid's life until that moment.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And...
Guest:So it became about this kid.
Guest:And she changed everything.
Guest:And one way that she changed it was I expected her to be unhappy.
Guest:I figured my whole... In general?
Guest:Yeah, just because she lived in someone's belly and she was living this perfect life.
Guest:And then you're taken out to where your skin is raw and being hit by the atmosphere and your cough all the time.
Guest:And you just... What an awful life.
Guest:That's the way I always looked at it.
Guest:It's just terrible.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The moment you're born, you're coping.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right out of the gate.
Guest:You must just be awful.
Guest:This is it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Shit and piss.
Guest:Diapers and just what an awful life.
Guest:But after that bout of crying, she was, you know, within an hour, she was breastfeeding and she was happy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I watched her eat her first meal.
Guest:And I watched her shit, her first shit.
Guest:I saw the system start working right in front of me.
Guest:And she dealt with it beautifully.
Guest:And I was inspired by her.
Guest:It's interesting that... Having a positive attitude about life.
Marc:Well, that moment where... I think that happens when you primarily want to have control of your life and the people in your life, and to a certain degree, and that you were there for your wife.
Marc:And that moment of concern where you realize there is this raw life in front of you.
Marc:And on some level, outside of you being the father...
Guest:You really have no control.
Guest:No, I just had huge sympathy for this kid.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That was the main feeling that I had.
Guest:And everything started to flow from that.
Guest:And I also found out, I mean, I don't like babies as a human.
Guest:I'm not wired for that.
Guest:and before i had kids i was really worried about having kids because i don't like being around babies i didn't like them i didn't feel sympathy for babies right in the past yeah and i didn't know how i would get i thought it would just be taxing to be uh have someone screaming or crying to not be allowed to things on paper that you know about being a parent you don't sleep very much they get you up in the middle of the night i was like you knew all that yeah and i was like i can't do that it
Guest:Pregnancy gives you some training for that because your wife gets up in the middle of the night.
Guest:She has to pee.
Guest:She needs help.
Guest:Pregnancy is like a perfect training program for having a kid.
Guest:It's the closest you can get anyway.
Guest:But anyway, what I learned was that I could do it all.
Guest:I didn't mind getting up.
Guest:I didn't mind being bleary and unsleepy.
Guest:I didn't mind her screaming and crying.
Guest:Because I just had sympathy for her because I wanted her to be okay.
Guest:So I found out that I'm a patient person.
Guest:I didn't know any of this about myself.
Guest:I'm a patient person that I had capacity for love, for giving love and affection that I didn't know that I had and receiving it.
Guest:And that I was really interested in teaching her.
Guest:talking to her and interacting with her all this stuff that I never knew I had so it made me and and all this stuff about my own anxiety but my life just went away because I didn't give a shit I said I instantly knew that I'm gonna get old and die and I wasn't afraid of it anymore because it's about her now it's about giving her a chance to be happy and have her own confidence in her own life
Guest:that's what it became about but it was a struggle that i didn't give up without a fight like you said in the special and it's i laugh at that special for different other reasons and other people i laugh at it because i was such a young dad i didn't that shit's old school to me now your kid gets you up at night you know so what it's
Marc:But I also think it represents the conflict of it.
Marc:It sounds to me what happened was, you know, you've got to accept that, as I do, that we were we are and can be extraordinarily narcissistic.
Marc:And we have those feelings that like, you know, we create our world and, you know, we you know, we comment on our own brains.
Marc:And you were primarily commenting on on things that you imagined.
Marc:And that at that moment, it seems where where you became emotional and in the moment where it really happened.
Marc:was that it shattered your narcissism.
Guest:Yeah, it also taught me to be a man.
Guest:It did what Coppola said it would.
Guest:It taught me to be a man because you can't fuck around when you have kids.
Guest:You can't afford to go into a depression.
Guest:You can't afford to go eat yourself into a stupor and lay on the floor.
Guest:You can't do it.
Guest:The kid needs to be taken care of and the kid needs to be supported.
Guest:I suddenly had a reason to raise to earn money that was real.
Marc:And this whole thing is what really defined the next phase of your creativity.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Because all these struggles are still real to you.
Marc:You still eat ice cream.
Guest:Yeah, I still do that stuff, but I've learned.
Guest:And also, I started to look at shit as a real man does.
Guest:In other words, instead of going like, I'll have an idea when I have it.
Guest:And fuck the fucking system.
Guest:And the studios are assholes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And...
Guest:You know, who, why isn't my getting the gigs, all that kind of stuff waiting around, expecting shit to just happen.
Guest:I couldn't do it anymore.
Guest:I had to start going like, okay, what do you want to do?
Guest:Make plans, make actual plans and execute them.
Guest:Have an idea of how you're going to do it.
Guest:Approach it as a very important thing that you do and it's your job.
Guest:Take it really seriously and be dedicated to it, not just in how you feel, but in how you live your life.
Guest:You can't live like a child anymore.
Guest:Can't do it anymore.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Can't do it.
Guest:So that's when I started doing that.
Guest:And I looked at guys like Carlin and Chris Rock and building a thing from a whole hour from the ground up.
Guest:How do you do it?
Guest:There has to be a way.
Guest:These other people did it.
Guest:Maybe I can do it.
Guest:I've been doing the same fucking absurd 40 minutes.
Guest:I could never get above 40.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was doing the same absurdist silly 40 minutes of stand up for a good 15 fucking years.
Marc:Give or take 20, 25 minutes.
Guest:Yeah, but no, I mean like give or take 20, 25 minutes.
Guest:I would kind of switch in and out, but it's the same heart, the same backbone.
Guest:And I hated, I hated it.
Guest:I hated what I was doing.
Guest:I'd outgrown, but I didn't know how to do anything.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And then the gift of real life hits you in the head and you realize... Yeah, I really have to actually try.
Guest:I actually have to go up on stage and not be afraid of bombing.
Guest:Not because I'm so cool, but because it's my fucking job.
Guest:It's my responsibility.
Guest:And I need a future as a stand-up.
Marc:I have a child.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And also I think you're probably not giving yourself credit for the fact that the evolution of your creativity, because I think you've always been a poet in the sense that you struggle to understand large...
Marc:you know um large uh uh struggles that people live in their life and that you have a way of of focusing down and and capturing moments that are very specific like i brought up to you after i saw your tonight show thing and this is one you know our relationship was a little strained but but there there are moments to me that the moments i appreciate about your stand-up you are not necessarily the end of the joke or the flow of the joke right
Marc:But it was just that one moment where, you know, on the airplane where the guy's crouched into the smile like, you know, like, go ahead.
Marc:And he's crouched in that horrible smile.
Marc:And he said, that's the last smile left in America.
Guest:Is that the right?
Guest:That's the last smile left in America.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I said, that's fucking great.
Marc:And you were like, yeah, I didn't even do the whole bit.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And I didn't.
Marc:It didn't matter.
Marc:that you were able to take what was fundamentally an absurd understanding of things and the way you created imaginary scenarios to sort of do your observational comedy and apply that same sense of poetry to real life struggles and conflicts.
Marc:And it's always there.
Guest:So it's just an evolution of your creativity.
Guest:No, and I learned through this shit I did early on how to build jokes and how to make stuff work.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I still use the same fundamental skills that I had then, but I'm just applying them to something that people actually want to hear about for the first time, I think.
Marc:And I think that comics should know, if you're listening and regular people, that the way you work now is that you literally let your old material die.
Marc:Yeah, I kill it every year.
Guest:About every year.
Marc:Literally.
Marc:Like you force yourself.
Guest:You never do it again.
Marc:And you hold to that.
Guest:Yeah, for the most part, I do.
Guest:I've had a few shows where I've crossed myself and said sorry to whoever I'm supposed to say sorry to and did an old bit.
Guest:But it's rare.
Guest:This is the hardest time I've had so far doing that.
Guest:What's this, your fifth hour?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, the number four went into the series.
Guest:i did uh shameless was the first time i did that the first that was the first uh the first special was shameless shameless was i did a half hour for hbo before that right i remember from the ground up that was that was years ago 30 minutes no no not that one from back then oh uh when i did lucky louis right the deal i made was a pilot and a half hour oh okay
Guest:So I did a half-hour one-night stand about the kids and stuff.
Guest:That was my first time doing it.
Marc:Oh, that was the kids' one.
Marc:But that broke you in the second wave of the Louis career.
Guest:That and Lucky Louis came out exactly at the same time.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And so that was the first time, and I'd done a half-hour.
Guest:It was about 40 minutes, but it was boiled down a half-hour that I hadn't had material I hadn't had a year before.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That was the first time I'd done that.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then Lucky Louie, we shot the series.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we wrapped in March of 2005 or six.
Guest:I can't fucking remember.
Guest:And we didn't go on the air till June.
Guest:We had a huge chunk of year where I just was waiting to see if the show was a success.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I went on the road because I wanted to do an hour.
Guest:I had this big thing in my head about getting one hour done.
Guest:And it's the smartest thing in the world I ever did because my thought was if I get canceled, I'll have something to build on to keep my life going.
Guest:If I get renewed...
Guest:I'm probably on the air for years.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I do believe if Lucky Louie had gone season two, it would have gone season 10, whatever I wanted.
Guest:It just needed to get over that one hump.
Guest:So I thought if I got the show, I'm going to retire as a comedian.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So this is my last chance to do an hour.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Or the show's going downhill.
Guest:I got to be a standup.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so I started from scratch and built an hour of standup on the road.
Guest:And that was the first hour special?
Guest:First time I did it.
Guest:And what was that special called?
Guest:Shameless.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I did it.
Guest:And Lucky Louie got canceled in September while I was in the middle of that.
Guest:It's the smartest thing in the world I did because I became obsessed with that hour.
Guest:And I actually started thinking, I don't know if I want to go back to work.
Guest:Because I was loving stand-up like I hadn't for years and years.
Guest:Because every show was high stakes.
Guest:Every show meant something because it was building that thing.
Guest:And every show was new material.
Guest:So it was scary.
Guest:And to watch this stuff actually work.
Guest:And I learned all this shit about developing stand-up and developing an hour.
Guest:And then in September, they canceled the show.
Guest:And I said, can I please have a fucking hour?
Guest:And they felt bad, the people that I worked for at HBO.
Guest:And they said they said, yeah, they gave me an hour.
Guest:And then how many and then I shot that in November.
Guest:And then then and then after that came all chewed up.
Guest:So, yeah.
Guest:So after Shameless, I thought, I know how to do this now.
Guest:I want to do it immediately again.
Guest:And I immediately started.
Guest:I threw away every minute of it.
Guest:That was the first time I thought of that idea, which is don't ever do the shit again.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so when I finished shooting Shameless, I decided I'm never telling those jokes again.
Guest:Never.
Guest:And I'm going to start a new hour.
Guest:So I started.
Guest:I went on tour.
Guest:And now I was doing theaters and starting to make little because Shameless did very well for me.
Guest:I started selling real tickets.
Guest:So I was doing some clubs, some theaters, and I spent a year building Chewed Up and got that on film for Showtime.
Marc:And you premiered the film, right?
Marc:Was that Chewed Up?
Marc:Was that the film?
Guest:No, Chewed Up was just on Showtime.
Guest:It was just a Showtime special.
Guest:And now, what's the movie?
Guest:The movie is then the next, after Chewed Up was done, I started working right away again on another, a new special.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:that one fucking got huge.
Guest:That one became like, I was doing two hour shows and big theaters around the country without any material from shameless or chewed up.
Guest:And I had been doing nothing but standup since lucky, lucky Louie.
Guest:Like I'd been living as a professional comedian without any other TV job, nothing else for the first time in my life.
Guest:I've always had some other gig since Conan.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And, uh, I was just so into stay.
Guest:I just breathing and living standup.
Guest:And it was great because I, I had divorced and,
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was able to be with my kids for the early part of every week and then go do stand up.
Guest:It was like a perfect career companion to my home life.
Marc:And then you shot that as a film.
Guest:And then I had so much material and also Shameless and Shoot Up were still on TV.
Guest:So nobody wanted a new one from me.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And so I had this idea to do it as a feature film.
Guest:And I went and shot it in Milwaukee.
Guest:And shot it.
Marc:A stand-up concert movie, which hasn't happened in years.
Guest:No one's done it.
Guest:There's no need for it because there's HBO.
Guest:But it's still an experience that I wanted to try to do.
Marc:And what's going on with that film?
Guest:It showed at Sundance.
Guest:Did really well there.
Guest:And then we had one night where we showed it in eight cities in theaters.
Guest:And how did it go?
Guest:It sold out every show.
Guest:And then we showed it again in New York City for two shows last night or the night before.
Guest:It's showing in Philadelphia, I think.
Marc:And you think you're going to get big distribution on it?
Guest:Well, no, we won't.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, Epix is going to show it starting this weekend, starting Saturday.
Guest:How do you get Epix?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I don't have it.
Guest:I don't have it.
Guest:All I know is that they were willing to throw it on TV and they were willing to throw it on without.
Guest:Because Comedy Central owns it.
Guest:Comedy Central paid for it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But Comedy Central is going to cut it down to 60 minutes from 90.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And they're going to bleep it.
Guest:which I knew going in.
Guest:And Epix paid you some money?
Guest:Epix paid me some money.
Guest:They gave a little to Comedy Central and some to me, and they threw it on.
Guest:They're going to put it on, and people will be able to see it on Epix, on a cut.
Guest:And they can also go to epixhd.com, I think, and they can download it as a whole piece.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So it's going to be available as its own thing for a long time.
Guest:But so that was that hour.
Guest:But that hour was so that was number three.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then after I did that, I got I quickly got to number four.
Guest:I got to my fourth hour really quickly.
Guest:And then I got the series.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the series has stand up in it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So that fourth hour is cut in pieces.
Guest:It's in the 13 episodes of Louie.
Marc:So now you're doing you're working on your fifth hour.
Guest:I got my fifth hour, which start this Friday in San Francisco, and I've got the hour ready, but through the fall, it'll get refined, and I'm taking that on tour, and it's going to be the next series.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:It's going to be next season.
Guest:I wish I could do more specials, but I can't do it.
Guest:I can't do a special and have the same material in the show.
Guest:I think that's ripping people off.
Guest:I don't want to do that.
Marc:OK, well, see, that's a work ethic that no one has.
Marc:And you do it without writers.
Marc:No, no, no.
Marc:I mean, a lot of people work to the point like, you know, there's a lot of guys and I don't need to mention names who everybody knows that really haven't written their own jokes in 15 years.
Marc:Yeah, sure.
Marc:You know, they become a personality.
Marc:They hire writers.
Guest:They become a refillable.
Guest:They become a sort of just a rhythm that you can refill with any subject.
Marc:People can write for you and you choose not to do that.
Guest:Yeah, it doesn't seem fun to me to do that.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And that's an amazing feat.
Marc:And I think any comic would know that.
Marc:Now, I don't want to just rush over Lucky Louie, but I think that what happened there, and we don't have to go into the politics of it, but I remember you dragging me.
Marc:Not dragging me.
Marc:I was always happy to see what you made.
Marc:No, I'm serious.
Marc:You said, I want you to watch this pilot.
Marc:So you had the show at CBS, which wasn't right.
Marc:That was Louie.
Guest:St.
Guest:Louie was the first pilot I did, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, and that didn't go, but that made sense that it didn't go on some level.
Marc:It wasn't going to honor you anyways.
Marc:And then you did Lucky Louie.
Marc:And then I remember you showed me the pilot, and the conceit of it was, once again, it was very brilliant in the sense that you showed me this pilot, you explained to me.
Marc:You know what it was.
Marc:He said, look, what we're doing is we're doing the Honeymooners.
Marc:That's what we're doing.
Marc:And the set is the Honeymooners set.
Marc:It is stripped down.
Marc:We're doing, you know, straight out, you know, 1950s, 1960s television where, you know, the action takes place and almost it was almost like television, like post vaudeville where you're dealing with almost play sets.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And that that was your idea is that we're going to infuse a modern sensibility into a classic context.
Marc:And that was the intellectual conceit of it.
Marc:And it was like nothing anybody had ever seen.
Marc:And the rawness was like nothing anyone had ever seen.
Marc:And the conceit, I think ultimately, what happened was the conceit was lost.
Marc:That the idea that we were doing the honeymooners and that there was something, an intellectual approach to taking something classic and updating it, I think some people were like, why didn't they make better sets?
Guest:Yeah, that's what some people said.
Guest:And I remember being on the phone with Chris Albrecht, who ran HBO at the time, and gave me the show.
Guest:And he was laughing about reviews that said, the sets are so poorly constructed.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he said, why would we let that happen unless it was on purpose?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like, do they really think that I'm reading... This is Chris Albrecht.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Does this reviewer really think I'm reading this and going, oh God, we really should have put more money...
Guest:I mean, look at what we do.
Guest:Look at fucking The Sopranos and this heavy production they put into everything.
Guest:Why would we do that unless it was deliberate?
Guest:Right.
Guest:The reason I did it that way, I wasn't trying to go back to Honeymooners so much as I was trying to scale back what had happened to sitcoms that hadn't helped them.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because I hated every sitcom on the air.
Guest:Right.
Guest:uh even the good ones uh whatever seinfeld friends right fraser right i hated them because i didn't feel like i was watching anything that was really happening or even being they were all shot on film and they were all i i can't i don't want to spend too much time on this because i could go on a long time um
Guest:But I felt like the audience was being cheated by these shows.
Guest:And it wasn't only The Honeymooners.
Guest:It was also All in the Family.
Guest:For me, the thing was that it used to be guys like performers like Jackie Gleason and... What's his name?
Guest:Fucking... Carol O'Connor.
Guest:Yeah, Carol O'Connor.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:were aware of their audience they were i remember seeing an interview with jackie gleason with a big long cigarette where he said you don't you know you can't do comedy without an audience because the audience tells you what to do the audience tells you if it's funny the audience tells you how long to sit with it the audience tells you how to say it yeah and it's true when you watch the honeymooners that he was totally measured by the crowd as far as his rhythm and yeah
Guest:When he got his laughs, he would live inside those laughs by walking around.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Yeah, of course.
Guest:Milking it.
Guest:He would milk like you would hear a laugh dying.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then he'd shoot a glance at the wife and the laugh would explode upward.
Guest:And I love that kind of work.
Guest:To me, that is a beauty in playing an audience like an instrument.
Marc:Now, I don't know what the demise was, and you can tell me, and I'm going to be honest with you.
Marc:Do you think, because you're evolving into a very effective actor, do you think at the time that you did Lucky Louie that you were stifled by your acting ability?
Guest:Well, I wish I'd done what Gleason did.
Guest:You hear these stories that he never came to rehearsals.
Guest:Every cast member of that show that was ever interviewed tells that story.
Guest:He didn't come to rehearsals.
Guest:Every actor, every real TV actor really needs rehearsals in order to know what they're doing.
Guest:And everybody rehearsed without him.
Guest:And then he would just come in and go, all right, what are we doing?
Guest:And he'd know half his lines.
Guest:And he wouldn't know the blocking.
Guest:And they just learned how to work around that.
Guest:i mean they really were brilliant that they could do that yeah uh they also recognized his that he was the whole show yeah and that even if he stumbled through a scene he would save it yeah and actually that stumbling yeah is what made the scenes great because he knew he'd have to save it yeah when you're given a script and a week of blocking and rehearsal and repetitive and over and over again yeah you just all you got to do is do it yeah it's okay it kills the comedy
Guest:Yeah, but when you put yourself on a high wire, I'm on a TV show.
Guest:And back then, everybody on the planet Earth watched The Honeymooners.
Guest:It wasn't like those who like HBO.
Guest:It was like 50 million people.
Guest:So in front of all those people, he'd be like, okay, you could see him in some scenes.
Guest:Like, I'm not sure where I am or what's supposed to happen in this scene.
Guest:I'm just going to do this.
Guest:And he would just be hilarious.
Guest:I wish I'd done that because I have better instincts as a comedian than I do as an actor.
Guest:And we rehearsed like a motherfucker.
Guest:We rewrote.
Guest:We did everything I didn't want to do.
Guest:When we started doing that show, I said,
Guest:to Mike Royce, who is my partner, we're not going to have a writer's room full of writers who are perfecting the scripts and rewriting every little line and pouring over it on a big screen where everybody chimes in.
Guest:We're not going to punch up everything and change out the fucking punch lines every take.
Guest:And we're not going to have this thing where we block and all this stuff.
Guest:But we did it.
Guest:It just eased towards that because we had a staff of writers and because that's how people know how to do it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:If I could go back, I would have done it differently.
Guest:I would have centralized the writing more and I would have not rehearsed.
Guest:Honestly, I would have let them rehearse.
Guest:The thing that changed it, though, was Pamela, who played my wife.
Guest:She was like a comedy team with me.
Guest:That was a huge revelation for me to get laughs with a partner.
Guest:I had never, never done that before.
Guest:That was a massive thing.
Guest:So and Pamela came from traditional television and she also said, you know, trust some of these people, let them let them help you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I think that was smart.
Guest:But what was Lucky Louie was harder than this series I'm doing now.
Guest:It's just a huge amount of work.
Guest:And you also have the ultimate demise of it.
Guest:Well, a few things.
Guest:I think the reason some people didn't like it is because what they had been fed in television didn't prepare them well for it.
Guest:Everyone thought it was a laugh track.
Guest:Everyone thought we put in fake laughs, and some people were really turned off by that.
Guest:So in the same way they didn't understand the context of the set, they made assumptions.
Guest:The set was the set because I just didn't give a shit what the set looked like.
Guest:The idea was we're going to go back to when these shows were funny because they hadn't been to me funny in a long time.
Marc:And that meant doing it in front of a real audience without amplifying the laughter.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Putting an audience in front of the stage and letting their laughs be in the show.
Guest:And people didn't know better.
Guest:No.
Guest:So it was lost on them.
Guest:Yes, they just thought it was fake laughs and shitty sets and bad acting.
Guest:Whereas it was we were holding for laughs, which TV sitcoms are written by Harvard graduates who don't like audiences.
Guest:They don't like people.
Guest:They're not popular people.
Guest:And so they hate the idea that audiences can tell them whether something's funny or not.
Guest:So they've built a system where they shoot on a stage in front of an audience, but they ignore the audience.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And they feed them pizza.
Guest:There's only 10 of them left when they finish shooting.
Guest:Most big sitcoms don't have an audience now.
Guest:And they have a man called the Laugh Man, and he puts in the laughs.
Guest:And the laughs are short enough that the clippy dialogue can continue.
Guest:Jennifer Aniston never looks aware of the audience when she's supposed to be performing in front of an audience on Friends.
Guest:That's how old I am.
Guest:But...
Guest:We had to hold for laughs, and it was a mess, but it was supposed to be.
Guest:But most people thought, and we even had a thing like in Happy Days, Lucky Louie was taped before a live audience.
Guest:We said that before every show.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And everyone would still say it's canned laughter.
Guest:I even read something on a website where somebody said they should have told people that it was taped before a live audience.
Guest:That was a big mistake.
Guest:We did.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But people remember what they... Anyway, that's why people didn't like it, I think.
Guest:Other people just didn't like it because nothing's perfect.
Guest:A lot of people hate everything.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But we went off the air because HBO was changing.
Guest:I mean, everybody that's there now that wasn't there when I was there.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was just one of those.
Guest:We got great ratings.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:We got great ratings.
Marc:It was a great show.
Marc:But now this is the miracle.
Marc:This is the perfect storm is where we're at now.
Marc:And you've got a deal now that comics are now telling their managers.
Guest:I want the Louis CK deal.
Guest:Give me the Louis CK deal.
Marc:Yeah, that's what everybody says, yeah.
Marc:Because you got all these different cable outlets.
Marc:You aligned yourself with effects who basically said, like, here's some money.
Marc:You said, look, don't pay me a salary.
Marc:Just give me this money and I'll make these things.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And they trusted you enough.
Marc:You had a big enough track record.
Marc:You're a capable director.
Marc:You're a capable comedy writer.
Marc:You're a capable showrunner.
Marc:You're a capable performer and you're a stand up.
Marc:And they trusted you with that.
Marc:You're like, it's like fucking, you know, it's like Orson Welles.
Marc:And the money was nothing, right?
Marc:Very little.
Marc:Not in the sense that it was obviously money, but in the context of what money they throw away.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Way more money.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And so you took this all on.
Marc:And the amazing thing about what's happening now with this show, and I watch it.
Marc:And I love it, and I love you, but sometimes my resentment gets in the way.
Marc:But I do a joke on stage now.
Marc:I actually say, I don't know when my friend's success is going to seem like anything but an attack on me.
Marc:And I say, I don't know why Louis had to call his show, Fuck You, Marc Maron, but that's what comes up on my television.
Marc:But the thing is, what I know about you is people are like, it's confusing to them sometimes because there's not a singular narrative.
Marc:It's got a feeling, a raw feeling that people are like, I don't know how to react to the show.
Marc:But what I know is that this is Louis C.K.
Marc:investing all his talents of everything he's done and all his life experience doing exactly what he wants to do.
Guest:Yes, that is what it is, yeah.
Marc:And the amazing thing is that you're making short films, you're doing stand-up, you're constructing narratives as they occur to you from your life experience.
Marc:Sometimes, yeah.
Marc:And also the amazing thing is your loyalty to the crew that you have worked with on your films throughout your entire career.
Marc:That's more than the writers or anything else because you're writing all these yourself.
Marc:that your loyalty was to your cinematographer, to your set deck, and even to the point of the way you're lettering the credit letter.
Marc:My old Cooper Black lettering, yeah.
Marc:Right, so this is you being a filmmaker more than anything else, and I don't know if people really understand that.
Guest:Yeah, some of them do, some of them don't, and it doesn't really matter.
Guest:I mean...
Guest:You know, yeah, this has been a crazy dream, this thing.
Guest:It's been amazing.
Guest:And it's successful.
Guest:They're going to do another... Doing another season, yeah.
Guest:How many episodes?
Guest:13.
Marc:Now, how the fuck are you going to do that yourself?
Guest:Keep doing it?
Guest:Well, I did it once.
Guest:And I do ask myself that every day right now.
Guest:And I'm already working on the writing.
Guest:I'm trying to get the ideas.
Guest:I don't want to take a step down from what I just did.
Guest:I want to develop.
Guest:I want to get better.
Guest:I think anything you do should be better than anything you did before.
Guest:I mean, that to me is a guiding principle.
Guest:Fine, but how are you going to do it physically?
Guest:Well, I just did it.
Guest:I mean, I learned from just doing it.
Guest:In other words... Because a guy in your position now, like, why wouldn't you bring in writers?
Guest:Because that's not how it worked the first time.
Guest:That would change everything.
Guest:If I brought in a writing staff, it would change everything.
Guest:The show wouldn't be good anymore.
Guest:I mean, it wouldn't be what it is.
Guest:Good or bad, whatever.
Guest:But it wouldn't be what it is.
Guest:So, I mean, I did it.
Guest:I did one season.
Guest:It was hard.
Guest:It was really hard.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But you did it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I could only get better at it.
Guest:Also, I had to do it without knowing how I was going to do it.
Guest:Now I know how I pulled it off the first time.
Guest:A system is a place.
Guest:Out of necessity.
Guest:I have a company that we made.
Guest:We had to do a huge amount of stuff that we never have to do again.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:we had to find offices, find, I mean, some shit that's just simple, but we had to get, you know, the fucking decide what system we were shooting on.
Guest:We had to, uh, uh, build a crew.
Guest:We had to, you know, hire a bunch of people, find a, a good, um, workflow.
Guest:Um, we had to do, you know, get fucking permits and, and, um, you know, a relationship with the state of New York and the city of New York.
Guest:And, uh,
Guest:all that we had to bang out a union contract all this stuff we had to do all those things and that was an enormous amount of work on top of because i'm i'm the head of the show and everything comes back to me even the union contracts and shit like that so all that shit's done now and now and we had to you know it started with a pilot not knowing what the show was going to be about yeah so all that's done now and i know how to do it i mean i edit the whole show i write
Guest:and edit the whole show on my MacBook Pro on a 13-inch.
Guest:I didn't even use a 15-inch, let alone a 17, because I just like the intimacy of the little machine.
Guest:I edited every episode on my little MacBook Pro.
Marc:Do you remember when you were editing Tomorrow Night on an Avid?
Marc:Yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Like, you know, the process it took to transmit, to put it from film.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:To go to an Avid.
Guest:It's huge.
Guest:And then like there was one Avid in the city.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:No, Doug Abel, who's editing this show.
Guest:I edit some episodes.
Guest:He edited some episodes.
Guest:But because I love editing.
Guest:But Doug is my guy, and he edited all my little films.
Guest:And your cinematographer is Paul?
Guest:Paul Kessner, who I've been working with since I was fucking 22 years old.
Guest:And your set deck is Amy Silver.
Guest:My production designer is Amy Silver.
Guest:Yeah, who you've been working with forever.
Guest:Forever.
Guest:Since Caesar Salad, my first short film that you were in, that you got cut out of.
Guest:I got cut out of everything.
Guest:I played guitar on the soundtrack.
Guest:Yeah, that's right.
Guest:You did.
Guest:Was that tomorrow night or Caesar Salad?
Guest:Caesar Salad.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:But yeah, I've been working with these people forever.
Guest:And that's why I knew I could do it.
Guest:I mean, when I went to FX, I had...
Guest:You know, everybody wants the Louis C.K.
Guest:deal, but it's not going to be so easy for everybody.
Marc:Well, no, because this is what I'm saying is it's that same thing.
Marc:You've got a comic.
Marc:It's like, let me do that.
Marc:Who the fuck can do that?
Marc:I'm exhausted listening to your process.
Guest:A lot of it is because of technical knowledge.
Guest:You're right.
Guest:It's because I took the fucking AV class in junior high school and learned how to fix computers.
Guest:That's why.
Guest:It's because I learned how to fix a fucking overhead projector, and I learned how to rewire shit and fix it.
Guest:That's why I know how to do this stuff.
Guest:Because when I was in high school, I got an internship at a local access cable TV station.
Guest:And they had remote deck and camera setups.
Guest:And they had editing base.
Guest:And the only reason they don't let you use shit...
Guest:in those places is because you might break it.
Guest:They're just worried that you'll break it.
Guest:It costs money.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I fixed that shit.
Guest:Like, I became this techie kid.
Guest:I was, like, this little nerdy kid who would fix the fucking cameras.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, certainly, they trusted me with it.
Guest:Like, I had the keys to every room in that fucking station.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I wouldn't even tell anybody.
Guest:I would just take the shit out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I would shoot my own little videos.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I'd edit them when nobody was using the editing.
Guest:But I taught myself how to do everything.
Guest:Yeah, that's true.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:No problem.
Guest:So...
Guest:That's what always gave me the license to do this stuff.
Guest:I know everything about filmmaking.
Guest:We shoot on the RED, which is a high-tech, really difficult camera to use.
Guest:It breaks a lot.
Guest:It fucks up.
Guest:We use these huge master prime lenses, which are the kind of lenses they shoot movies on.
Guest:They're enormously expensive.
Guest:It's one of the biggest line items in our...
Guest:We spend more on lenses than we do on anything else.
Marc:And it's interesting because your vision as a filmmaker and Paul's vision with you as a cinematographer, when you watch it, there's some parts of it where you're thinking like, you know, it doesn't look, you know, the way you shoot is not unlike Lucky Louie, that it's pretty stripped down.
Marc:You're not using a lot of effects.
Guest:Sometimes, sometimes.
Guest:I mean, some shows, some of the episodes are shot like handheld.
Guest:Let's just grab this moment.
Guest:And some of them are shot like, no, we're using a, you know, we're opening the lens all the way up.
Guest:We have to measure everything.
Guest:You know, like the religion episode is shot very carefully.
Marc:But the tone of it is still pretty raw.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:On purpose.
Marc:Yeah, definitely.
Marc:And the great thing about it is like, you know, there's a signature moment that is, you know, completely your, you know, comedic vision.
Marc:All of it to me is that, you know, the scene where you're having the troubled date with Chelsea Peretti and she gets into a helicopter.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:This is Louis at his best.
Marc:This is Louis, you know, as Francis Ford Coppola and Heart of Darkness were like, I need a helicopter for this one punchline.
Marc:This punchline requires we rent a helicopter and clear airspace.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:And you committed to that.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:No, we had people working on walkie talkies and all kinds of stuff.
Guest:Yes, we had to clear east side Manhattan airspace to take a helicopter off a bunch of times.
Guest:For a punchline.
Guest:Yeah, for a punchline that a huge amount of people I knew wouldn't like because it's so absurd.
Guest:But that's you.
Guest:A lot of people say it took me out of it.
Guest:I don't care.
Guest:I liked it.
Guest:Those things like the helicopter exist for two reasons.
Guest:One is because I like it.
Guest:And also, I get off on squeezing a lot out of very little money.
Guest:And the budget for this show was tiny.
Guest:And I wanted to show FX that I could do a lot with money.
Guest:And there's a helicopter that has 20 limousines, which was a huge expense.
Guest:There's no company in New York that has 20 limousines.
Guest:We had to pull together and harmonize...
Guest:like five limo companies cause they all had to be beautiful limousines.
Guest:We didn't want any like Carmel car cracked windows.
Guest:This is for the bus scene.
Guest:This is the scene where I school bus.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I get all the kids in the school bus and we had a fucking school bus that hit the fucking that, you know, we had to create this moment where it gets a fucking flat tire and a school bus is a huge production undertaking.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Um, but so I wanted them to really see that Jesus Christ, this is really a show.
Guest:It's not just a bunch of, you know, alt comedy kids be acting awkward on a street corner.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Um,
Guest:And the show continues to do stuff like that, throwing the bottle out the window and destroying a car.
Guest:I love doing stuff like that.
Marc:That moment, that's one of those moments where not unlike The Last Mile in America, where I'm like, that comes out of nowhere but makes complete sense.
Guest:Yes, it's exactly what needed to happen.
Guest:And it's hard to defend moments like that when you're producing them.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because Blair Briard, she's the executive producer of the show, and she's the person who makes everything happen.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She's the most enabling and incredible producer I've ever known.
Guest:She produced Pudi Tang.
Guest:That's where we met.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She was like, do we have to?
Guest:I mean, it's such a stupid, silly thing.
Guest:But she kept saying to me, I just want you to be aware that the bottle on the window thing, you can do it, but it's causing huge problems.
Guest:The building doesn't want us to throw it out the window.
Guest:It's a permit problem.
Guest:It may be a safety issue.
Guest:And the cost is enormous.
Guest:And the effects people said it can't be done the way you want it to be seen.
Guest:They said you're going to have to get a zip line and a bunch of squibs and blow up the car.
Guest:And
Guest:and i just kept saying it has to be that she said does it have to be that can you come up with something because it's barely it's not a important plot point it's the most important thing to me it was that's the thing is to defend absurdity in production yeah when it's expensive is you just have to go you have to you have to have the credibility to say i'm very sorry but and also because i know production and i know technical shit yeah i solved all those problems because i i know how to do it so i come up with ways but
Marc:But the absurdity injected in like in those moments where a guy makes a decision like that, where he hasn't done drugs a lot and he's in this situation that's clearly chaotic.
Marc:It's outside of his life experience that.
Marc:How is that scene going to culminate in any other way other than a moment where you're like, this is beyond anything I understand.
Guest:It had to be.
Guest:It had to be.
Guest:It was really important.
Guest:No, and one way that we do that stuff, it's all brass tacks logistics.
Guest:After the vision.
Guest:You have a vision, then it's like, how do you make the vision?
Guest:Blair needs to believe me that it's important.
Guest:And then it starts happening.
Guest:And like the helicopter.
Guest:I said to her, can you get me a helicopter?
Guest:That was one of the first things I said to her when I got the pilot.
Guest:I said, I got a pilot.
Guest:I want you to produce it.
Guest:Start working on a helicopter right now, an affordable helicopter.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and we shot all this stuff and she would once in a while report to me i'm not finding a helicopter yet start thinking of an alternate and i'd say to her there isn't an alternate get a helicopter and she'd keep working on it and working on it and then she found this dude who uh was doing he's new he's a new helicopter guy yeah he's the new guy in town there used to be one helicopter picture helicopter guy this guy's new he's competitive he wants to get in the business yeah
Guest:And he had one day, she kept trying to drive his price down.
Guest:It's fucking tens of thousands of dollars for helicopters.
Guest:She kept driving his price down.
Guest:She couldn't get it low enough.
Guest:And then one day, but because she bothered him enough and kept being tenacious, one day he said, look, I'm doing something for Comedy Central for some other show.
Guest:I got to gas up and go anyway.
Guest:I can give you an hour.
Guest:So on his way to something else, he shot our thing.
Guest:And we got it for fucking dirt cheap because she has relationships with all these people.
Guest:That's why I knew I could do this show because I had Blair because I had Paul because Paul can pull together natural light a few other lights and he can work with really, really.
Guest:I don't I do everything the hardest possible way.
Guest:There's no zoom lenses on my show.
Guest:They're all fixed focal lenses, which means you have to change the lens at almost every shot.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's an enormous amount of work.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I knew that Paul could do it.
Guest:I knew that Amy can take a restaurant and make it into four restaurants.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That kind of shit.
Marc:Well, the amazing thing is that you do these things that are founded in your absurd vision and reveal your personal life.
Marc:And then also sometimes you choose to do a narrative about bullies, which is very heartfelt.
Marc:And the relationship with your kids and even with Pamela, who you've worked with before in the park, that...
Marc:What you're creating is a real human struggle and real deep comedy, and it's completely honest to your vision, and you can do whatever you want with it.
Marc:And I think that people are really taking to it, and it's successful, and the people that get it and are willing to write it, I think you're changing the tone of how television can be made, and I'm very proud of you, and I'm excited for your success.
Guest:Thank you, man.
Marc:And it's great to see you.
Guest:Yeah, you too.
Guest:And I'm glad we had this talk.
Guest:Yeah, you know, when you know somebody for a long time, it's a very valuable thing.
Guest:Yeah, it's beautiful.
Guest:I mean, we were best friends for a long time.
Guest:I know.
Guest:A long, long time.
Guest:I know.
Guest:It's hard.
Marc:There's times where it's hard to be your friend's friend.
Marc:I know, but I don't have them.
Marc:It's not like I have new friends.
Guest:It's not like I was replaced by anybody.
Guest:No.
Guest:That would feel worse.
Marc:No, I'm still the same guy in a lot of ways.
Guest:Well, look, here's, I can give you, and you don't have to put this in the podcast if you don't want to, but what I would say as far as trying to stay friends with somebody that you have a hard time thinking about what they're doing against what you're doing is focus on them needing a friend.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It takes a good friend to stay with you in hard times.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It takes a good friend to stay with you in good times.
Guest:Everybody needs support.
Guest:Everybody does.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So you're letting me down.
Guest:If you see me doing something and you have a hard time coming in terms with it because you're feeling about your own life, what's really happening is you're letting me down as a friend.
Guest:You're being a shitty friend by being jealous.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So think about the other person.
Guest:Think about what they might need.
Guest:I could have used you.
Guest:I could have used you.
Guest:I got divorced.
Guest:I got a show canceled.
Guest:I had some tough times.
Guest:I could have used a friend during those times that were making you jealous.
Guest:I was struggling.
Guest:I was having a hard time.
Guest:Doing the Louis show was really hard.
Guest:Trying to keep my family together was hard.
Marc:But the thing is, in the way our friendship always operated, it was not that I was kept up to date in the day-to-day things.
Marc:It wasn't a day-to-day call that we had.
Marc:But it seemed that most of the time, the thing that made our friendship so deep and so strong was that when we did talk, we made each other feel better.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, it's true, but you shut me out.
Guest:You shut me out because you were having a hard time.
Guest:Okay, well, I apologize again.
Guest:Well, I apologize to you because then I did it to you probably out of resentment.
Guest:Ignored your emails because you ignored my phone calls back when there was no email.
Marc:Well, can we get back on track or what?
Guest:Yeah, I think we can.
Marc:Because, you know, I mean, you understand me.
Marc:You know, I mean, not a lot of people do.
Marc:And the one thing that, even when I tell stories about it, you know, it's just that, like...
Marc:You always are able to, even in your weird way, and even if I thought you weren't listening, even when you did pick up what I was saying, that you were able to give me a great deal of relief fairly quickly, and I miss that.
Guest:Well, we understand each other's flaws very well.
Guest:We share some, and we've known each other long enough to understand them, so that's why we're able to tell each other about moments that we don't want to tell anybody else.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And to be able to say, have the other person go, yeah, I get it.
Guest:Instead of going, oh my God, why did you do that?
Guest:Or yeah, the only time I did it, well, don't, don't, don't be stupid.
Guest:Do this instead or whatever that happens.
Marc:And the only time I said, oh my God was when I realized that I had missed, you know, so much of your life and I felt horrible about it.
Guest:You know, it's funny is I did the same thing when you got divorced the first time I got mad at you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I know now why, because I was married and I didn't want you to, I didn't want you to get out.
Guest:It's hard.
Guest:I mean, because being divorced, it has changed my relationship to a lot of people that are married that I knew before.
Guest:It just changes things.
Guest:People look at you differently.
Marc:I love you, man.
Marc:Let's just try to fucking be better friends.
Guest:Okay.
Marc:Well, that's it.
Marc:I'm glad that Louie and I are friends.
Marc:I will have you know that I have emailed him a few times since we had the conversation.
Marc:I've not heard back.
Marc:But I did call him once late at night, and he answered.
Marc:And I didn't have a lot to say, but I was happy he answered.
Marc:So that's where that is.
Marc:I had a great time talking to him.
Marc:Hey, folks, if you didn't get this news before, there's a phone app available, a WTF iPhone app.
Marc:You can get it if you search iTunes, WTF, Mark Maron.
Marc:I hear it's fun.
Marc:I don't have an iPhone, but I hear it's fun.
Marc:And please go to WTFPod.com and donate a few shekels.
Marc:American Shekels will be fine.
Marc:Get on the mailing list because I'm doing that.
Marc:You can see what else is going on over there.
Marc:We've got the new T-shirts.
Marc:I've got a new design coming up too, a new WTF shirt along with the cat shirt.
Marc:So that's all happening.
Marc:Oh, yeah, great shows coming up on the horizon.
Marc:I've been doing a lot of interviewing, talking to a lot of people.
Marc:Looking forward to sharing with you my conversations with people like Ira Glass, Sarah Silverman.
Marc:Aziz Ansari.
Marc:Paul Scheer.
Marc:Man, Janine Garofalo was here.
Marc:Whew.
Marc:There's more.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Talk to you next week.