Episode 1140 - Jim Carrey
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How's it going with the drive?
Marc:All right.
Marc:Be careful.
Marc:Wear your fucking mask.
Marc:Wear your fucking mask.
Marc:Wear your fucking mask.
Marc:Hey, Google.
Marc:What is the definition of eschatology?
Guest:Here's the definition of eschatology.
Guest:The part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind.
Marc:The sole end of humankind.
Marc:She kind of sweared that.
Marc:Google sweared that a little bit, didn't it?
Marc:Hey, Google, what's the definition of a conspiracy?
Guest:Here's the definition of conspiracy.
Guest:A secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful.
Marc:Oh, but that's not a conspiracy theory.
Marc:That seems to be what dictates the behavior of stupid people.
Marc:The secret plan of a group.
Marc:Oh, those are the people that actually are generating the conspiracy theories for the stupid people, the creators.
Marc:of the stupid conspiracy theories are actually the conspiracy to make people more stupid activate their anger and to vote against their fucking personal interests and the interests of humanity so we get to get on with this eschaton today by the way i talked to a jim carrey hey google who is jim carrey
Guest:According to Wikipedia, James Eugene Carey is a Canadian-American actor, comedian, writer, producer, author, and artist.
Guest:Known for his energetic slapstick performances, Carey first gained recognition in 1990 after landing a recurring role in the American sketch comedy television series In Living Color.
Marc:Holy shit, I thought we were going to have a full conversation.
Marc:Yeah, Jim Carrey is here, and it was not easy to get him on the show.
Marc:I would have talked to him any time, but it just never happened.
Marc:And now, sometimes it's a little easier to get guests on with this new format.
Marc:He's got a book out.
Marc:It's an odd book.
Marc:It's an interesting book that he co-wrote with a guy.
Marc:I'll tell you about that in a minute.
Marc:But the thing about Jim...
Marc:Jim Carrey is at a I don't know.
Marc:He's one of those guys where, you know, I've watched him over the years and I always get this.
Marc:I have you know, I have a father who's prone towards depression and I have a sensitivity to it.
Marc:So when I when I see people, I talk to people who have that sensitivity to it.
Marc:It kind of gets you know, I have to have to put up some extra boundaries.
Marc:And it was an interesting conversation because he reminded me of something that I don't think about a lot, but it's a real thing.
Marc:He's a comedy store guy.
Marc:And there was this very conscious, for me...
Marc:When you start doing standup, I guess that some people, I don't know how they really think about standup when they start it.
Marc:You know, I'm going to tell some jokes.
Marc:I've written some jokes.
Marc:I'm going to tell them.
Marc:But, you know, for some of us, the idea of getting up on that stage and figuring out who you are up there and what part of you lives up there and how are you going to be defined up there is a real journey.
Marc:And that is the journey of the craft, the journey of the art, if you want to give it that.
Marc:And what was interesting to me in this interview, if it doesn't pop as much as I think it should, because I found myself thinking about it afterwards, is that after Jim is already a very successful entertainer, he was an impressionist, and that's how he kind of got started.
Marc:He goes back to the drawing board at the comedy store, and he decides he's not going to do impressions anymore so he can figure out who he is up there.
Marc:And that's fucking bold, man.
Marc:And that's what a lot of us did.
Marc:You know, it's just like you keep going up there.
Marc:It's not so much to to figure out how to be funny, but it's to figure out what are you on that stage?
Marc:Who lives up there?
Marc:Which part of you?
Marc:But by going up there with nothing and bombing and sometimes killing, but just having moments where you're not sure what's going to happen over and over again.
Marc:he got to the character that really sort of defined him as a comedic actor, the I don't give a shit about anything guy, the I don't care guy, which you see in a lot of the work that he did later.
Marc:And that happened on the stand-up stage.
Marc:And I just found that fascinating, really, that that's how he developed that.
Marc:It's also odd that, you know, having not done stand-up in months now, I wasn't really missing it, but I think there's some other part of me that is...
Marc:That is missing it.
Marc:You know, I feel like there's part of me that feels, you know, certainly.
Marc:But this was happening before Lynn passed away that like, you know, is there more to do?
Marc:Is there do I have to do more stand up work?
Marc:I feel like my last two specials to real and end times fun sort of sum up.
Marc:That's the big work, certainly for this period of history we're living in.
Marc:And there was this this feeling I have is like, am I done?
Marc:Do I need to do any more?
Marc:It's the same with acting.
Marc:It's like, do I need to do more?
Marc:Do I need to do more of other people's work?
Marc:Have I challenged myself enough?
Marc:And now, oh, my potatoes are ready.
Marc:My potatoes are ready.
Marc:Hey, Google, how long do you cook a baked potato?
Guest:Bake one hour or until skin feels crisp but flesh beneath feels soft.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So what I was saying is that even before Lynn passed away, I was sort of blank slating a little bit, which is some equivalent of creative flatlining.
Marc:And now, like, I just don't know, you know, but I'm starting to feel that the part of me that lives on a stand-up stage is starved.
Marc:And the other thing about, you know, being with Lynn for the time we were together, she was a great audience and I kept that muscle working because she loved to laugh and I loved making her laugh.
Marc:So it was always engaged and I don't even know, I'm not sure what that muscle is like right now.
Marc:I guess the point being is I do feel like I've done everything that I set out to do.
Marc:I would have liked to have won one award.
Marc:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:Just one award of some kind.
Marc:I know they don't mean anything, but like a big one, you know?
Marc:Like I would like to win a Grammy or a Peabody or an Emmy.
Marc:It doesn't really fucking matter.
Marc:It doesn't do anything, but I don't know.
Marc:That'd be nice.
Marc:But I don't think that's going to happen.
Marc:I don't think that's going to happen for me.
Marc:What's my big prize?
Marc:A new kitten.
Marc:Here's a new kitten.
Marc:So listen, people.
Marc:Jim Carrey.
Marc:Jim Carrey's a force.
Marc:You know him.
Marc:You all know him.
Marc:Everybody knows him.
Marc:He was it.
Marc:He was all of it.
Marc:But he's co-wrote this interesting book.
Marc:It's called Memoirs and Misinformation, a novel.
Marc:It's kind of a novel, but it has bits and pieces of real stuff in it.
Marc:And this guy, Dana Vachon, you can turn a phrase.
Marc:He's got some funny in him.
Marc:And there's parts of Jim's story and parts of it are fictionalized.
Marc:But you can get that wherever you get your books.
Marc:Again, memoirs and misinformation and novel.
Marc:And here's me and Jim coming right up.
So.
Marc:You know, it's a day-to-day fight against sadness and anger, but I'm fine.
Guest:Yeah, I could offer you some help, actually.
Guest:I think I could, actually.
Guest:Well, lay it on me.
Guest:We could talk about supplements.
Guest:We could talk about tyrosine.
Guest:Tyrosine.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't know that one.
Guest:Well, tyrosine is the chemical in your brain that's responsible for enthusiasm.
Guest:Oh, tyrosine.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Tyrosine hydroxy tryptophan as well, which is what people who do ecstasy take on a Sunday afternoon.
Guest:So they don't kill themselves on Tuesday.
Marc:Oh, I see.
Marc:So I get it.
Marc:Helps them ease out.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:It builds up the dopamine and serotonin again.
Marc:So those are well-prepared, well-prepared drug users.
Marc:It's a full-time job.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh no, there are, there are some people who are up and down medicating themselves through life completely.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, how about the micro dosing people that don't realize they're just fucking tripping?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Tripping all the time.
Guest:All the time.
Guest:Or the people that are on Adderall, you know, they crush up the Adderall and sort it and stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's how the doctor prescribes it.
Guest:They get a ton of work done, but it's all bad.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Nothing good.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Nothing good.
Marc:So these are the, so your supplements are, I'm on, I'm on a very small supplement intake diet.
Marc:I just take the liposomal vitamin C and a vitamin D right now.
Marc:I'm, I'm anti-tuméric and I'm.
Guest:You look good.
Guest:I feel all right.
Guest:I've heard your turmeric rant.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's wonderful.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I like your bits also about the, uh, shortening the distance there, the time between, uh, you and I'm sorry, blowing up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Fuck you.
Guest:And I'm sorry.
Guest:That's really funny.
Guest:Then taking the walk, winning the argument and then looping back to apologize.
Guest:It's beautiful.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Very real.
Marc:You know how that goes.
Marc:You know how that goes.
Guest:I do.
Guest:I do.
Guest:I have to apologize constantly.
Marc:Let's start with I can we can start with the book and then move backward from there.
Marc:It's like I mean, I've I've read about a third of it.
Marc:I'm trying.
Marc:You know, I've yeah, I got my own schedule, but I understand.
Marc:I understand.
Marc:I understand what's happening.
Marc:No, it's got nothing to do with the book.
Marc:It's just, you know, my brain's in a weird place, but I'm trying to do my homework.
Guest:It's an incredible kind of thing that we're facing these days.
Guest:Everybody is multitasking and I never stop.
Guest:It's just literally I took 10 minutes to take a breath before I got on the air here.
Marc:Well, yeah, but I'm just overwhelmed all the time.
Marc:And, you know, really, my ability to compartmentalize is limited.
Guest:So everything is changing so rapidly.
Guest:It's unbelievable.
Guest:We're in the midst of a convulsive historic moment.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:In so many ways at once.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:That it's just mind boggling.
Guest:Are any of them good, Jim?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Honestly, I honestly believe that we are, you know, it's the crowning of a new age.
Guest:It's the crowning of a birth.
Guest:Yeah, it's a birth.
Guest:It's a it's a painful labor.
Guest:And and I think, you know, it's it's going to be a great new world, you know.
Guest:OK, good.
Marc:Well, I'll hold on to that.
Marc:So.
Marc:With the partnership in the book.
Marc:Now, did you have an idea before to write a book?
Marc:I imagine people have been pestering you to write a memoir for probably three decades.
Guest:I have no idea.
Guest:I had no designs about it at all.
Guest:It really all came from a moment in time where I had stepped through the Truman door.
Guest:You know, which I've done several times in my life and try to kind of grow another branch that I could bring back to the tree.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I was spending time in New York in the West Village and becoming an artist, you know, and trying to breathe life back into the West Village scene.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I rented myself a space there.
Guest:And it was so much fun.
Guest:And I was just, you know, big bay door open.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:painting and going wild with music at four in the morning and dispatching drunks from the bar next door.
Guest:And it was an incredible experience.
Guest:And I was really deep into that and a really terrible winter.
Guest:And I wanted someone to give me kind of a perspective or like maybe do an essay around the work I was doing.
Guest:It was all fairly apocalyptic.
Marc:The paintings of popular, horrible people.
Guest:No, not that.
Guest:That came later.
Guest:The cartoons came.
Guest:That was a symptom of the the liar.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The cancer that we must remove.
Marc:The malignant pig man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The melanoma.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:That belies a deeper sickness.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's crazy.
Guest:Not an unfamiliar sickness, though, is it?
Guest:No, it isn't.
Guest:But it's it's reached epic proportions.
Guest:You know, since Gordon Gekko said greed is good.
Guest:Well, you know, it's interesting.
Marc:I was trying to do a joke, Jim, about about the how he's the envy of all narcissists because he actually succeeded in making it all about him.
Marc:Actually, everything.
Right.
Guest:Everything, everything.
Guest:Well, yeah, there's a big danger there.
Guest:So it's really tough not to concentrate on it.
Guest:So this is a lot of energy into trying to get that out of there.
Guest:But but before that, I was trying to meet a writer and maybe talk about an essay around the paintings and Dana Vachon.
Guest:uh, who had no interest in that whatsoever.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:It was a really serious writer and didn't want to do essays about paintings.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Uh, you know, he came in just, uh, uh, under that, uh, under that guise to just meet me and say hello.
Guest:Cause he had been watching me online and some of the ridiculous things I was doing were, were appealing to him.
Guest:Like something as simple as Boeing.
Guest:I just got up one day and I, I, uh, tweeted out Boeing cause I couldn't describe my joy in any other way.
Guest:Have you ever felt the Boeing man?
Guest:Sure.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:I sometimes I glimpses glimpses of the boy.
Marc:I usually fight the boy.
Marc:I innately fight the boy.
Guest:Fight the boy that be.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, that's is that because you have a need to keep the well full the pain well for your art?
Guest:I don't.
Guest:You know, a lot of people believe that.
Marc:I mean, I've heard that, but I've never had to work to keep that well full.
Guest:No, it's an easy thing.
Marc:Well, no, it never dawned on me that people would do that on purpose.
Guest:Yeah, the rain gathers and the well gets full.
Marc:Yeah, no, joy makes me nervous, Jim.
Marc:That's all.
Marc:It just makes me nervous.
Marc:I don't know what to do with it.
Marc:I don't know how to behave around it.
Marc:I end up crying.
Guest:I know, especially in this time.
Guest:But in this time, it's almost like you're afraid to step out and be joyful.
Guest:You're afraid to kind of affirm the positive and stuff.
Guest:But I'm telling you, it's a big moment in our history.
Guest:And it's a wonderful time to be barely alive.
Guest:yeah i i agree with you it's an exciting time fingertips and uh so okay so so dana says he doesn't want to write essays about your paintings but he enjoys your single word joy tweets and that's where the the romance he came to meet me he came to meet me and we just struck up a friendship right away and uh we kept talking and we had kind of a he's east coast i'm west coast so we we had this skype friendship happening and uh
Guest:And the conversations got so interesting.
Guest:I was doing a lot of viewing at a certain point.
Guest:I was kind of hiding out from the world.
Guest:I was going through a lot of deep currents in my life and surviving.
Guest:Like what?
Guest:Oh, like major traumatic relationships and things like that that happened.
Guest:So PTSD keeps me very selective at this point, you know, and the atmosphere.
Marc:Do you feel like that you actually had PTSD from it?
Guest:Yeah, I definitely do.
Guest:I've been through some things that made me jump at the slightest sound.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:Or the slightest hint of a relationship.
Guest:I get a little terrified.
Marc:Have you tried that EMDR?
Guest:Yes, yes.
Guest:I've done a little of that.
Marc:I did a little of that.
Marc:It was interesting.
Guest:It was interesting.
Guest:It's a long process, though, going through every detail of a traumatic situation, you know, it's to find the hotspot area.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it's but I recommend it.
Guest:It's pretty interesting.
Guest:Anything that lets you know yourself a little better, you know, and I think that's great.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Plus it's good material.
Guest:It's all good material.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:It, it, it can be.
Marc:So, all right.
Marc:So you're, you're, you're in that kind of, uh, you're running from the, the idea of, uh, of a relationship.
Guest:I wanted to, and, and I think what happened is Dana and I had the same desire and that was to, to study persona.
Guest:What, why, what we're doing, why we're building these scaffolding.
Guest:So, uh, you know, kind of, um, I'd call them, uh,
Guest:you know abstract scaffoldings of who we are you know i'm a canadian american and i'm this and i'm that and i'm a catholic and i'm that and it's all abstract stuff and when you drill down there's no you left if you get rid of the abstract stuff sure so okay that's kind of what tripped us into the uh veda vedanto which is the the ancient hindu uh
Guest:structure of believing there's no two things, you know?
Guest:And so I really seek freedom that way.
Guest:And the book kind of hints at that as the true identity is waiting for you when you claw your way out of the sarcophagus of the personality that you've created for yourself.
Marc:I used to say that most personalities are just a reaction from someone telling you you couldn't do something early on.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or reactions to fear.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Reactions to the ego saying you're not going to have.
Guest:It's like the book is about...
Guest:the fear of erasure, which we all have.
Guest:Right, of course, right.
Guest:And our obsession with relevance.
Guest:Not relevance that just makes you do all right in your life, the kind of relevance that lasts beyond your death to the end of the program.
Marc:But don't you think that this is something specifically relative to artists or people with power?
Guest:I don't think anymore.
Guest:I don't think anymore.
Guest:I think the internet, the social media...
Guest:Everybody's begging a billion strangers to touch their subscribe button and open their notifications.
Guest:And they're all trying to get to that place, which we got to.
Guest:But when we got there, we realized, OK, this isn't actually going to make me happy.
Guest:the transcendence of this at moments.
Guest:I don't purport to be able to transcend this stuff and stay there.
Guest:I don't believe anybody who does say that.
Guest:I'm just an enlightened being and I never feel anything but this enlightenment.
Guest:I get glimpses and man, I'm free when the grasping stops.
Marc:But but don't you find having you found that, you know, blowing yourself through those walls like, you know, even, you know, being able to become egoless or to rid yourself in whatever meditative state of all these manifestations of of persona and false self.
Marc:that you do land on something that is authentically you.
Marc:I mean, you don't come to the bottom of that.
Marc:But it's a bigger you.
Guest:It's not a relative you.
Guest:It's not a you that relates to other yous.
Guest:Freedom comes in there only being one you.
Guest:And it includes the table and the computer and the ocean and the trees.
Guest:And you try to breathe without them.
Guest:You can't.
Marc:That makes me a little tired to be that expansive.
Marc:I just, I found that very exhausting to be carrying it in every once in a while.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, yeah.
Guest:It's for me, it's just a moment of freedom whenever I remember it.
Guest:Good.
Guest:It's like just to remember that you're this, you're the space in which all of this is happening is just amazing.
Guest:Huh.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And ultimately, you're just part of the frequency.
Guest:And you can hang on to that for a minute.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then and then the illusion gets so compelling again and your individuality.
Marc:Or else you just have to, you know, make coffee.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, it's it doesn't.
Marc:I mean, it can be that simple.
Marc:The illusion.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Like I got to eat something.
Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's time to eat.
Guest:Time to feed the body and brain.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:But I feel like a fragment of myself, this body and brain.
Guest:I honestly think is a fragment of myself.
Guest:So I'm being affected by all this stuff socially with all the needs of people and the protests and all that stuff at the same time.
Guest:It's weird how this book has been kind of prophetic in ways.
Guest:It's turned out to kind of express some of the things that are going on, including the toppling of statues.
Guest:Only we did it in a silly way.
Guest:We went to Disney because it was the only place that we could topple a giant dwarf.
Guest:And that just appeals to me in so many ways.
Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:No, I think the whole book reads very like from what the part I'm in it and I do intend on finishing it.
Marc:It's been very funny and it's I like the I like a good fucking satire of of the business we're in and the culture we're in.
Marc:Like I've read I've read other ones.
Marc:I always enjoy them.
Marc:I liked, you know, I like Bruce Bruce Wagner stuff, Mark Lehner stuff like and but this stuff is like, you know, the fact that there is a
Marc:There is a true story within it or as true as a story of your life could be in these different manifestations of Jim Carrey is within it, I think, is an interesting added.
Guest:I definitely have the inside look.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:Well, I mean, what was the writing process with you and Dana?
Marc:I mean, did you pitch him chunks and then he wrote things?
Guest:Yeah, we did that.
Guest:We also toward the last few years, we got in a room and just jammed 12 hours a day.
Guest:And he's a magnificent prose writer.
Guest:So I learned a lot about that.
Guest:And we filled in each other's gaps.
Guest:And it was wonderful.
Guest:So I love telling stories and making up things that don't exist.
Guest:And I have a lot of experience to share and a well that's pretty deep.
Marc:You never lived in Hamilton, did you?
Guest:I lived in Burlington across the bay.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Before I came into comedy, I had put my applications in at Stelco and DeFasco.
Guest:I don't think it's not running anymore, that mill, is it?
Guest:I don't think so.
Guest:One of them went out of business, I believe.
Guest:It's the old thing, man.
Guest:It's the old thing.
Guest:Yeah, if the industry moves, you're Detroit, and you've got a deal.
Marc:Yeah, it was pretty heavy.
Marc:So Burlington's across the water from there?
Guest:Burlington's right across the water, across the Bay Bridge.
Guest:And that's where you grew up?
Guest:That's right.
Guest:That's where kind of my most mischievous years happened.
Guest:It was like from 11 to maybe 14.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:And then my father lost his job the second time.
Guest:And...
Guest:He was too old to get another job that was in a corporate structure.
Guest:We moved to Scarborough and we got a job as a family being security guards and janitors.
Guest:So I got thrown into the middle of this factory, this steel truck rim making factory, huge factory floor that I had to clean with sweepers and stuff like that and the bathrooms.
Guest:So I was in the middle of, you know,
Guest:A very interesting situation.
Guest:There were like two factions of people that kind of didn't get along.
Guest:And I was in the center of that.
Guest:And they used to defecate in the sinks and stuff like that.
Guest:What?
Guest:Which factions of people?
Guest:I don't want to say, but there was just like different religions clashing within the factory.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:And daggers and all kinds of things going on.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And I cleaned the place.
Guest:And so, you know, you really haven't developed your character until you've had to clean urinals from factory worker bag scratch.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, when they when they go in after a real hard shift and they stand there urinating and like scratching their bags and in in euphoria, you know, and and I'm the one that had to take the skin samples and collect them.
Guest:And the pubic hair.
Guest:Yeah, that was my job.
Guest:Master pubic hair.
Guest:But where did you start your early life?
Guest:I was born in Newmarket, Ontario, which is about, I don't know, 25 miles north of Toronto.
Marc:And you were like, how many kids?
Marc:How many were you?
Guest:I had two sisters and a brother.
Guest:Older?
Guest:All older?
Guest:Older, all older.
Guest:So you were the last one.
Guest:I was the baby and I was the gifted child, I guess you'd call it.
Guest:And it really was an imitation of my father, who was this insanely, I don't know, joyful, incredibly funny, animated character that just didn't tell a story.
Guest:He became the characters and he was horrible.
Guest:Oh, like this.
Guest:Everything I've done in my comedy career can be traced back to that origin.
Guest:You love that guy.
Guest:Love that guy.
Guest:Love that guy so much.
Guest:And I used to watch him as a little kid.
Guest:And we used to watch Ed Sullivan together in Rodney Dangerfield on Ed Sullivan.
Guest:I had no idea what the jokes meant.
Guest:I was just laughing because my father was laughing.
Guest:People were laughing in the studio.
Guest:And it was just magnificent.
Guest:And I ended up being with Rodney later on.
Guest:How great is Rodney?
Guest:So wonderful, man.
Guest:So wonderful.
Guest:And I got a beautiful email from Joan Dangerfield about the book because Rodney comes into the book and he's treated in a kind of a really avant-garde way.
Marc:We can get back to Rodney, but so you're growing up, your dad's the guy that gave you your faces and his charisma and his ability.
Guest:And my mom was the artist, so I got the artist from her.
Guest:She was a painter?
Guest:She was an artist.
Guest:She used to get up in the middle of the night and make these beautiful murals and stuff for our rooms.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:the only peaceful time she had so yeah she used to do that so it's weird the first 40 years of my life i was mining the the gold from the talent my father gave me and then suddenly like that like overnight i became an artist isn't that interesting like i was spending time with my mother suddenly isn't that wild how that stuff is carved into the neural pathway so young it's incredible yeah so when what now you say your dad lost his job twice so you had rough times a couple of times
Guest:Yeah, yeah, we had rough times.
Guest:And I went from being an A student to not being able to hear the teacher, Charlie Brown's teacher.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Like that.
Guest:And I was so angry.
Guest:I blamed the world for messing with my father.
Guest:So I was really kind of in a...
Guest:you know, really angry state of mind.
Guest:I just wanted to fight.
Marc:Did it break him?
Guest:It did.
Guest:It broke his heart.
Guest:Yeah, it definitely broke his heart.
Guest:But then, you know, as I say in the book, at a certain point, you know, I made him laugh so hard one time that his dentures fell out of his mouth.
Guest:Nice.
Guest:And from then on, he started dreaming through me and for me, you know?
Guest:So he gave up his dream.
Guest:He was such a funny guy.
Guest:Everybody said, you could have been.
Guest:And even Rodney said, Rodney was in love with Percy Carey.
Guest:And he just like, he would marvel at him and go, who the fuck is this guy?
Guest:Where the hell are you doing?
Guest:Why aren't you in the Catskills, man?
Guest:You know, kind of thing.
Marc:and uh he was just joke funny man joke that's so funny because i started that's my dad was uh is a bipolar guy and my mom used to say to me when i was in high school she used to say uh you know why don't you go upstairs and make your father laugh you're the only one who can and i get up there with my mother right and i get up there and my dad be like i don't want to live anymore i'm like oh tough crowd tough crowd
Guest:Run around the room and make it sound like a genocide.
Guest:Yeah, it's crazy.
Guest:Yeah, there's always a sick parent.
Guest:Your mom was there?
Guest:My mother was not well, and she was on a lot of prescription medications.
Guest:And in those days, it was just like, have some more candy.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:It was really funny.
Guest:One time my mother was smoking.
Guest:She smoked like a fiend.
Guest:And she had switched to menthol Benson and Hedges.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I said, that smells weird, mom.
Guest:What are you smoking?
Guest:And she was like, they're menthol.
Guest:The doctor said they're better for me when I have a cold.
Guest:What?
Guest:He probably did say that.
Guest:The doctor at that time said that she should smoke menthol.
Guest:That is so fucking nuts.
Yeah.
Guest:That is so nuts.
Guest:It's the dark ages.
Guest:We haven't, we're not long from the dark ages.
Marc:Well, we're not, I think we're reentering the actual middle ages.
Guest:Oh yeah.
Guest:They're trying to drag us back in there.
Marc:Oh my God.
Marc:You know, these like that sort of, I don't want, let's not digress into that, but yeah.
Marc:But OK, so so after the the second kind of when did you start doing the comedy, if you don't mind my asking?
Guest:Well, again, that was my father's urging.
Guest:He's he you know, I was ripping the house up every time company came over and I was known in school and everywhere else as the cut up and.
Guest:the guy who was just always doing outrageous stuff.
Guest:I used to do impressions of like Paul Lynn choking on a piece of meat and stuff like that.
Guest:They were all really out there things.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, uh, can you do that?
Guest:Uh, Paul Lynn here discussed.
Guest:The center square to block.
Guest:You people are.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I haven't done it for a while.
Guest:Got to get that one back up and running.
Guest:That was good.
Guest:And.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I used to do that.
Guest:And at a certain point, my father, and I think we were just at the end of our ropes because we, we walked away from that factory job because it was affecting us in terrible negative ways.
Guest:I mean, there was a lot of like, you know, uh,
Guest:bigoted talk at the table, stuff like that.
Guest:It was like we were just turning into people that we were not.
Guest:Monsters.
Guest:Monsters, hateful monsters.
Guest:And I was just trying to imagine how to fix people's breaks and stuff at night when I went to sleep.
Guest:And I had a baseball bat on my cleaning cart.
Guest:that was ready to go.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:It was ready to go.
Guest:And at a certain point, we looked at each other and we just said, we got to go.
Guest:And we had nothing to go to.
Guest:We literally went camping for about six months into the winter.
Guest:Was that nice, though?
Guest:It was better than the terrible job that was turning us into monsters.
Guest:It literally was a step up to have nothing.
Guest:What did you learn in the forest?
Guest:Well, my...
Guest:The guy that would become my brother-in-law taught me about sex.
Guest:Oh, that's good.
Guest:At night, he would talk to me about what to do to a lady.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And all of that.
Guest:So the first time I ever had it, I tried everything he talked about.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How'd that go?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was good.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:It was a surprise.
Guest:It was a party and I met somebody and she lived upstairs and I went up there and
Guest:I remember trying everything in the world and she really, I'm not sure if she noticed that I was a neophyte, but I remember it very well.
Guest:And Styx Grand Illusion album was playing.
Guest:Oh, lady.
Guest:It's a grand illusion.
Guest:Deep inside we're all the same.
Marc:Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun.
Guest:I'm standing away.
Guest:set an open course of emergency they were huge yeah yeah come to that it's fantastic oh great great so you did good oh i exploded i'm sorry
Guest:Yes, I did all right.
Guest:I think I did all right.
Guest:But but there was also just this thing.
Guest:We got to a point where my father said, I just heard about these places called comedy clubs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And would you like to go down to Yuck Yucks in Toronto?
Guest:And my mother suggested I wear my best polyester suit.
Guest:Nice.
Guest:And my dad and I.
Guest:It was a white polyester suit.
Guest:I was way ahead of the Steve Martin curve.
Guest:Nice.
Guest:And I went down with my dad.
Guest:And the big routine I did at that point was imitating the Carol Burnett show.
Guest:I was doing all Tim Conway's characters.
Marc:How funny was that guy?
Marc:Jesus.
Guest:No, he was so fast on his feet, man.
Guest:Right the last time I met him, he was getting up there.
Guest:And man, the guy was quick still.
Marc:Really quick.
Marc:Very funny.
Marc:So you're doing the Burnett riff.
Guest:Yeah, and at Yuck Yucks, they had this thing where if somebody wasn't going over well or wasn't at that certain level of hipness, they would start playing the theme to Jesus Christ Superstar.
Guest:To get you on stage?
Guest:Crucify him, crucify him, crucify him.
Guest:And Mark Breslin would get on the mic backstage and say, totally boring, totally boring.
Guest:totally boring that guy having that 15 years old oh my god and i didn't go back for two years i left there that night and i didn't go back for two years and then i went back and killed it you know it was good for me and it's good those those tanks you do are really good for you i guess but what'd you do for the two years prepared oh so you were doing open mics elsewhere
Guest:no i was just coming up with stuff no shit i was coming up with stuff and i watched the other comics and i and i watched the audience and what they're looking for and you know at first i guess you just uh try to fit in try to fill that let me ask you something though around this stuff around like you know the new realizations versus the life that you lived before the realizations
Marc:Is that, you know, how do you frame, you know, what you may have once viewed as mental illness?
Marc:You know, I'm assuming that currently you have a different take on it than you might have had a decade ago.
Marc:And I guess the deeper question is when you started doing comedy, like for those two years, were you were was your heart heavy?
Guest:No.
Guest:It was always, for me, I created out of a place of joy and out of a place of wanting to free people from concern, like my mother.
Guest:Oh, right, right.
Guest:It really was born out of that.
Guest:To make her feel better.
Guest:When she was in pain, I'd get up on her bed in my underwear and be the praying mantis and drive her crazy until she was laughing hysterically and holding her belly and going, it hurts!
Guest:Right, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And so at a certain point, I realized, oh, I could actually do this for the world.
Guest:I could actually do this for large groups of people.
Guest:What point was that?
Guest:Freedom from concern.
Marc:Oh, right.
Marc:OK.
Marc:OK.
Marc:So that's really where it came from.
Guest:It's a ministry.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Huh.
Marc:So it was never self-medicating.
Guest:I think it, it became partly that, you know, art always becomes a way to express those deeper feelings.
Guest:But I, but I honestly think it's born and it still is born out of trying to free people from concern, even if it's taking them, you know, head on into the concern so that it dissipates the intensity of it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So when you when you went back to Yuck Yucks and you killed, that was the beginning of the career then?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I became a featured player at Yuck Yucks, featured player in the theater of the absurd.
Guest:And when did you when did you come to L.A.?
Guest:Came to L.A.
Guest:and met a guy named David Holoff, who's managing Howie Mandel and Canadian guy.
Guest:Yeah, Canadian guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he was one of those few guys back then that could see the next level, that could see to the next stage.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And there were a lot of people that didn't really see where things could go.
Guest:And, you know, now you can you can stay in Toronto and do just fine, you know.
Marc:But I mean, I get that.
Marc:But I mean, you know, you're going to like some people can do all right.
Marc:And that just means, you know, you get to do all the yuck yucks twice a year.
Guest:Yeah, but I mean, there's SCTV.
Guest:There's Kids in the Hall.
Guest:There's some great stuff.
Guest:Oh, no, of course.
Marc:But I mean, as a stand-up, though, like at the beginning, were you really thinking that stand-up was the thing?
Guest:I didn't know.
Guest:I had a dream about being...
Guest:being an artist that could do a lot of things you know and not having boundaries you know and i've always i've always kind of believed that uh there's a there's no limit to the areas i could kind of sneak into well i mean it's clear like
Marc:The style I the way that you sort of did what you do early on, you know, was sort of like you definitely somehow push the envelope, even, you know, with familiar things, you know, even with impressions there.
Marc:Your approach to them was sort of, you know, kind of got pretty out there.
Guest:yeah i was the man of a thousand faces sure i was the rubber face yeah but you're always able to even when you did characters you'll create a different time zone for everybody sure yeah well that's you know that's the key it's the basis to one of my my most serious beliefs in my my strongest beliefs and that involvement and immersion in someone else yes and and in fact in your own work yes heaven
Guest:You know, I mean, I was I was in my studio painting in New York one time and I walked I took a walk for a couple of blocks and I found this wonderful little park where these guys were playing soccer.
Guest:And I felt so free from the painting because it involves your heart, your head and your hands.
Guest:It takes everything.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And and I always wondered why I was so free and felt so good for doing it.
Guest:And then I watched these guys play soccer.
Guest:I watched this guy chasing the ball.
Guest:And I went, that's it.
Guest:I was compelled by that guy who was so involved with getting the ball.
Guest:And that's why all sports work, all art works on the same level.
Guest:And that is presence.
Guest:Presence is addictive, man.
Guest:And when someone is fully present, like Michael Jordan, is in the zone, it's addictive, man.
Guest:You cannot...
Guest:Meisner, one of the tenets of his technique is that if you are actually interested in what you're doing, you'll be interesting to watch.
Guest:And that's why we watch babies, because they discover things for the first time.
Guest:And that's why we watch art.
Guest:That's why we watch everything.
Guest:When you look at da Vinci, you're seeing his presence on the canvas.
Guest:And it's addictive.
Guest:You can't not be compelled by it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I think that's also something about that's part of the addiction to live performance as well.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:In the moment.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:When you have the sense that somebody I mean, we all have plans, you know, but when you have the sense that somebody is like kind of discovering their own material as they speak.
Guest:That's the best.
Marc:I was just watching like, you know, I've been like I've been home, you know, and I can't go out and do the work.
Marc:You know, so I've been watching, you know, guys.
Marc:I watched this documentary, oddly, on Rodney the other night, which was great.
Marc:But I turned on that first prior special last night.
Marc:I haven't watched it in a year or two, live in concert.
Marc:It's so beautiful.
Marc:Oh, did you ever notice that...
Marc:He comes out on fantastic time capsule.
Marc:Yeah, but he comes out on stage and they're not even back from intermission yet.
Marc:Like he walks out on stage in Long Beach and there's like 100 people looking for their seats.
Marc:They don't even know he came out.
Marc:And I'm like, what doesn't care?
Guest:I know about that.
Guest:He wasn't about showbiz.
Guest:He wasn't about the glitz.
Guest:He was about let's connect.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm going to connect.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm going to connect with myself.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I'm going to play these characters like they're just, they're happening in front of you right now.
Guest:And the best actors do that.
Guest:You know, they have to rediscover the part every time they do it.
Guest:If you do 10 takes, you have to rediscover it every time.
Guest:That's the job.
Guest:In the moment.
Guest:In a way.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:The job.
Marc:So, all right.
Marc:So when do you come?
Marc:So the guy who manages Howie says, I'm going to make you a star kid or what?
Guest:He says, you know, we should go to LA and do that.
Guest:And there, I had been to LA once, uh, with, uh, Demi Thompson and Ron Scribner were a couple of guys that were managing me very early on.
Guest:And, uh,
Guest:And then I came back.
Guest:I had a bad experience in LA.
Guest:I was supposed to do The Tonight Show.
Guest:And they set up this huge showcase at the Improv one night.
Guest:And it was two days before I was supposed to do The Tonight Show.
Guest:And Jim McCauley was there.
Guest:Everybody was very excited about this new kid from Canada that had been talked about.
Guest:And I had a lukewarm night.
Guest:It was just there were too many industry people for it to be a good night.
Marc:I don't think that room was good.
Guest:I had some good times in that room.
Guest:But it was just one of those nights.
Guest:I get it.
Guest:Yeah, a little flat.
Guest:It was one of those nights where it was just a little flat.
Guest:And I walked away and I felt it all going away.
Guest:And everybody patted me on the back and said, you did good.
Guest:I remember Ruth Buzzy coming out and saying, that was great.
Guest:And I was like, oh, God, it was the kindness.
Guest:The kindness was killing me.
Marc:The compliments, they erase themselves as they're coming out of their mouths.
Yeah.
Guest:Oh, that was good.
Guest:That was no good.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:You really have something there.
Guest:You got the matins.
Marc:Yeah, that's the worst.
Guest:You got the recipe.
Guest:Just don't cook it so long.
Guest:Right.
Guest:As if they're answering you just saying, like, did I suck?
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And sure enough, like a day later, I got the call that...
Guest:Jim McCauley didn't think I was ready for the Tonight Show and that I lost the Tonight Show.
Guest:And, you know, I mean, that has created, you know, that's that's caused suicide before.
Guest:I mean, you know, people have killed themselves.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Libetkin didn't do it over that, though.
Guest:No, he couldn't get spots.
Guest:And but it wasn't that he lost the Tonight Show.
Guest:It was that without the Comedy Store, you couldn't get the Tonight Show.
Guest:You couldn't go to the next level.
Guest:When did you get to the store?
Guest:Uh, I got there, uh, to stay.
Guest:I went there in 1979, uh, and I auditioned for Mitzi and I stayed at the Saharan Motel, which is a character in the book.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I saw that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, uh, yeah.
Guest:And, uh, and I remember walking in and having a hooker come up to me and say, do you want a date?
Guest:And I thought, wow, it's Sadie Hawkins day.
Guest:I didn't know what was going on.
Guest:And, uh, you know, and, uh, and I, I walked in there.
Guest:I, I, I, uh,
Guest:this it looked like something from a cop show to me and uh like i had i had walking up the stairs to the the booth yeah i was in the rockford files i was in uh beretta you know or whatever yeah it was a new world for me and i was reading the late great planet earth by hal lindsey that it was purporting to uh to have absolute knowledge yeah
Guest:and surety that the world was going to end very soon.
Guest:And there were biblical references and everything in there.
Guest:So I wanted to check them.
Guest:I went and asked the manager who was wearing a Stetson and smoking a stogie by the pool, if he had any extra Bibles, because I wanted to check the Bible references.
Guest:At the hotel.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he started howling with laughter and he threw his hat down and he said, boy, they're in a Bible in a la Hollywood.
Yeah.
Guest:and i knew where i was and uh but i auditioned for mitzi uh went on that trip and she i never got to see her i never got to she was sitting at the back of the room and i again had a kind of a weird night where the mic fell apart and in my hands why can't they fucking get like oh good goddamn we need one thing to do our job one thing
Guest:Yeah, but I think it was just one of those nights where I wasn't in the right spot.
Guest:So I didn't wait.
Guest:I blew past her so fast and went back to Canada for two years.
Guest:That's what I do.
Guest:I screw up the first time, then I regroup.
Guest:I came back in 81 to stay in Los Angeles.
Guest:And she let you in?
Guest:She, yeah, right away it was, it was on and I was a regular and it was a fantastic moment, man.
Guest:What a, what a door to open.
Guest:And Bud was always cool with me too.
Guest:You know, spots at the improv for some reason, I never experienced that, uh,
Guest:you're not supposed to play one club or the other.
Guest:I just, it never happened for me that way.
Marc:Well, yeah, by the 80s, though, that, you know, that shit was, you know, if you were big enough, they weren't... They weren't burning each other's clubs down?
Marc:No, no, those days were over.
Marc:But who were your contemporaries at the store in that...
Marc:Robin.
Guest:Robin.
Guest:You know, it was me.
Guest:It was Kinison.
Guest:It was Robin.
Guest:It was Eddie Murphy was coming in to try stuff out.
Guest:Richard Pryor was there all the time.
Guest:Richard Pryor was going through a really weird period where...
Guest:I think he had done, you know, he had done the first thing and he had burnt up, you know, he was questioning his abilities because he was doing it straight and he went in and out.
Guest:I found myself in the parking lot one night, you know, 21 years old and standing, everybody else left.
Guest:And suddenly I found myself standing with Richard Pryor, which is enough to, you know, for any comic to just wet his pants, you know?
Guest:And yeah,
Guest:We passed a joint back and forth.
Guest:And he said, be careful with this stuff.
Guest:And he said, I don't remember 40 years of my life.
Guest:And I said, what?
Guest:And I was dumbfounded.
Guest:I said, what?
Guest:And he said, I'm not sure it was me.
Guest:And it was like a harpoon going through me, like the greatest of all time was having those kind of doubts.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You know, of course it was him.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Of course, it was everything he'd ever lived.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But at that moment, he was having real, real serious doubts about whether it was him who was inspired to do it or it was the drugs.
Guest:But you've had that feeling.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:I called my father a night after I smoked a joint and I went on stage.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I eviscerated the room.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Kinnison even was at the back of the room.
Guest:And he started messing with me just to see what I was made of.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I just annihilated him that night.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:And it was amazing.
Guest:And I was Lenny, man.
Guest:It was just coming.
Guest:It was just like, yeah, man, yeah, I needed the rim shots.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You know, and I was a comedy priest, man.
Guest:It's good, man.
Guest:It's good when you can nail the bully in the back of the room.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:But he was just he was just testing, testing me.
Guest:And and and I did fantastic.
Guest:And I came off stage and he came up and everybody came up and they said, holy crap, man, you were just off the hook.
Guest:You were you were transcendent, man.
Guest:And I went I was high.
Guest:You know, and I went home immediately and I called my father, who was a jazz musician.
Guest:And I said, because I started thinking, well, should I do it this way?
Marc:Right.
Guest:And I called him up and I said, you know, you must have run in, you know, being in the jazz game, you must have run into a lot of musicians that were using and heroin stuff and things like that.
Guest:And he said, yeah, I knew a lot of guys.
Guest:I knew a lot of guys that were getting there that way.
Guest:And I never did because I figured if I made it that way, I could never own it.
Marc:Right, right, right.
Guest:And that's exactly, in fact, what Richard was going through.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Wondering whether he could own this greatness that everybody gives to him.
Marc:So you chose against it.
Guest:I chose against it.
Guest:I can't do it.
Guest:If I can't take credit for it, what the hell is it worth, man?
Guest:You know what I mean?
Marc:But that's interesting that people would look at it like that.
Marc:I mean, there were so many dudes.
Marc:Like, I certainly did my share of drugs.
Guest:Yeah, me too, man.
Guest:I mean, I'm no choir boy.
Guest:But I never created and, you know, relied on it to create.
Marc:Well, yeah, there were cats that couldn't get on stage without it.
Marc:No.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like, you know, I knew a lot of those guys.
Guest:yeah yeah steve kravitz used to walk around the halls at the comedy store going was i on yet oh that's great so what's the kennison story oh well you know uh when we met uh he was working the door and he had started uh doing late night spots about you know the last one like you know 1 45 in the morning right and uh
Guest:That's all he could get at that time.
Guest:And he came up to me.
Guest:And at that point I was already a regular and I was in playing in the main room and I was getting standing ovations every night.
Guest:And he came up to me and he said, man, I'm just such a fan.
Guest:I love what you do.
Guest:And, uh,
Guest:I go on really late at night.
Guest:I go on the last spot in the, in the original room.
Guest:And, uh, would you hang out and watch me?
Guest:And I said, yeah, sure.
Guest:So I hung out that night and, uh, and I watched him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Makes me cry to think about it.
Guest:Uh, I sat at the back of the room, man, and I watched the world change.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know?
Guest:And, uh,
Guest:And I was crying with laughter.
Guest:And it's the first time I had ever seen somebody marry... Comics are usually intellectualizing things.
Guest:They go above the emotion to intellectualize something and say to the world, here's how you deal with it without having to come apart.
Guest:But he was the first one that was...
Guest:immersed in his emotions and his anger and expressing that at the same time as there were these brilliant routines that I'd never heard anything like.
Guest:And I felt like I was watching Bird.
Guest:I was watching Charlie Parker.
Guest:I was watching early Miles Davis.
Guest:I was seeing something really extraordinary.
Guest:And he came off stage and came up to me and said, what do you think?
Guest:And I said, what do I think?
Guest:I think you're it.
Guest:You know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And good luck to you.
Guest:Because that's going to be difficult.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Plus he picked, I knew that he had picked a character and a persona as we speak about the book.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the personas we create that sometimes we can't live up to.
Guest:uh the beast he created a persona that he couldn't get out of basically every yeah every time he got sober people came up and screamed in his face yeah and uh needed him to be the beast you know yeah so that was a very hard thing to get out of we used to we drove to tulsa together and uh he was he was going to train me how to preach and we were going to go on the road because he wasn't known yet we were going to go on the road as pentecostal preachers
Guest:And he was going to call me Lightning Boy Jim.
Guest:And I was going to do the thing.
Guest:We never got to do it.
Guest:But I got to listen to him preach in the garage with Brother Marnie and the family.
Guest:Some energy, right?
Guest:It was the energy.
Guest:Incredible, incredible energy.
Guest:And it was kind of wild to see because he hit so hard.
Guest:you know, at a certain point that he got kind of carried away and frozen in the image of himself.
Guest:And so you notice like the second album and the second or third Letterman isn't as tight and isn't as it's more about
Guest:who he's become instead of what he had to say.
Marc:It became sort of like, I can do this, this fucked up.
Guest:But it also became like a rock star.
Guest:He became a rock star.
Marc:Yeah, that was crazy.
Guest:And every rock star in the world was fawning all over him.
Guest:So it was tough.
Guest:It's a tough ego thing, man, when you're faced with that kind of
Guest:you know, reverence, you know, coming at you, you know, I didn't think he was able to handle it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But the guitar thing, I, you know, my feelings about him are complicated, you know, but, but it just seemed to me that, you know, the clarity of that first record or the night you saw him or the night that you were hanging out with vision.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And like, you know, a lot of people don't realize like when you walked into the room and he was doing that shit from that first record, the, you know, he changed this, you know, the energy in the fucking room.
Marc:It was crazy.
Marc:It was menacing, dude.
Guest:It was like menacing.
Guest:Woe to those who became offended enough to leave because then he was ripping you apart.
Guest:It was the guy had his dick in her purse and I hope you find a lump.
Guest:And I mean, my God, he would go to places that people were just, what did he say?
Marc:but you know, you also were able to create a sort of different energy because of the, the intensity you brought to it and you, you became a star before him.
Marc:So I'm imagining you're looking at him going through his paces and I don't know how close you guys remained, you know, during that time, or if you were at all, or you, or he used to hide himself from you at that point.
Guest:But I mean, there was a time when we got, when we got, when we split, you know, because he was going down that direction of the outlaw.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, uh,
Guest:I, you know, I hung for a long time with him and we got in some scraps and together and, you know, there was some, it got pretty hairy around Sam, you know, it was pretty hairy.
Guest:So I just know myself and I know that I wasn't meant to be, uh,
Guest:I have a rebellious streak, but I'm not an outlaw.
Guest:Yeah, me too.
Guest:There came a time where we had a sit down that did not turn out well because he wanted me to come on the road with him and I said, I just can't, Sam.
Guest:I'm sorry.
Guest:I'd like to live.
Guest:Yeah, I'm clinging to this thing called life.
Marc:That was always the feeling I got.
Guest:Someone's going to go down.
Guest:It's probably going to be me.
Marc:And it will be me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:I'm the guy that catches up with what it meant for him.
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:That's right.
Marc:But, you know, it seems like Rodney was equally as important in his life as he was in yours.
Guest:Rodney was important to so many young comics, man.
Guest:He just opened a door for a ton of people.
Guest:All these people that had personal experiences with Rodney.
Guest:I mean, the first time he ever hired me, he looked at me and he started laughing.
Guest:And he said...
Guest:kid, have you ever been in love?
Guest:And he just was tickled by the fact that I just had not had any human experience whatsoever.
Guest:It was just pure love coming at it.
Guest:And, uh, and, uh, we had just this wonderful, magical relationship and I still quote him to young comics and people that I know, you know, uh, there's a, there's a bit of it in the book, you know, uh,
Guest:Where, you know, he would say to me, you know, kid, you got to make the tank so strong.
Guest:No boneheaded motherfucker can fucking stop it.
Guest:You know, no bonehead can get in your way because the tank's too strong.
Guest:Yeah, he was a real warrior comic, that guy.
Guest:He was, man.
Guest:And a surgeon, a surgeon.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If you look at those old, old shows of Rodney Dangerfield with Johnny Carson.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I mean, Johnny was like, oh, yeah.
Guest:And then what happened?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, that must have been fun.
Yeah.
Guest:He's just literally just marking the space between the jokes with sounds.
Guest:The best thing that happens is when one of them doesn't work as well as he wanted.
Guest:You should just stay out of my way, man.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:But when a joke flops, I love when he's sort of like, oh, I should have tried that one again at the club or whatever.
Guest:You know, he's got those moments where I got to work on that one.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Guest:We had such a beautiful relationship and he was always my friend and he loved my father and he stuck with me when I was experimenting and the audience had no clue what I was doing.
Guest:Whereas other people jumped ship.
Guest:Which bits?
Guest:I was, I was in Vegas, you know, doing, I, I, I called it a performance art.
Guest:Cause it just wasn't funny.
Guest:And he, you know, right.
Guest:At that point, I was just exploring.
Guest:I would spend like 15 minutes being a cockroach escaping from a vacuum cleaner, you know, and that would be the substance of it.
Guest:Or I'd be the guy, this snake, the guy that wanted to deal right there on stage, you know, or whatever.
Guest:And yeah,
Guest:I was an alien from another planet.
Guest:And Rodney, what did he say?
Guest:He said, you're trying some stuff.
Guest:A kid?
Guest:And I go, yeah.
Guest:That's good.
Guest:That's good.
Guest:Keep it fresh.
Guest:Keep it fresh.
Guest:And yeah.
Guest:He was just a big supporter and a big fan.
Guest:And then when he passed, Joan gave me this lovely box that
Guest:with a leather bound box with Rodney's favorite shirt and his pot pipe.
Guest:So if you know Rodney, you know that that's pretty much the grail.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, the pot pipe.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Keeps me creative, man.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was that beautiful link to the past that was so important.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I got to meet Pryor and all these guys and Robin Williams, who was just,
Guest:You know, the fastest gun in the West.
Guest:Just absolutely incredible.
Guest:You know, so I just I can't even tell you how how lucky I feel.
Guest:I don't know how you feel about your era.
Guest:Did you feel that for your era at the comedy store?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, I got to when I was there, it was mostly Sam, you know, and I got kind of caught up with that.
Marc:And Dice was also breaking.
Marc:But I saw Richard come in a couple of times and he was beaten up again.
Marc:You know, he was trying to get back on the horse again.
Marc:He wasn't sick.
Guest:He would literally be at the microphone saying, I'm not funny.
Guest:And the audience would go, no, you are, you are.
Guest:And he'd go, no, I'm really not.
Guest:I don't feel funny right now.
Marc:And in terms of like guys, my generation who were there, like when I was at the store, it was a little dark period and people didn't really love to come around there.
Marc:Like even industry people were a little wary of the place.
Marc:But all those cats that you were there with were still around, like Joey Kamen.
Guest:It's like Saturday Night Live, isn't it?
Guest:It's like it goes through those phases where there's a kind of a down period where nothing.
Marc:Well, the Sam period was very dark because he would bring in, when he was running the play Sam, it was all the porn stars and the weirdos and the drug fiends and the Satanists.
Marc:It was a crazy dark time.
Marc:And then you got people like Joey Kamen and Jen Haber doing sets together.
Marc:And Karen Haber.
Guest:Sticking tennis balls in his mouth.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:You know, in the midst of this chaos.
Marc:And I was living up at Crest Hill and Sam would party up there.
Marc:Jugglers.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And Becker would say, Becker would call us the Manson family.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Because we were up there just to go.
Guest:Yeah, it was pretty decadent.
Marc:It was.
Marc:It was an important period in my life, but I had to run away being chased by things only I saw.
Marc:I got myself into a psychotic, drug-induced state.
Marc:Did you really?
Marc:Yeah, and I got into a fight with Sam, and I lost my mind on cocaine, and I had to go regroup, and it took a couple years.
Guest:After you called your second grade teacher and said, why did we never get together?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:What's happening?
Guest:Are you available?
Guest:How old are you now?
Guest:What are you doing at night?
Yeah, yeah.
Marc:I went back to New Mexico and I kind of pulled my brain back together and restarted my career in Boston.
Guest:Good for you, man.
Guest:I'm so happy for you, man.
Guest:Honestly, I think you're great.
Guest:Oh, thanks, man.
Guest:And I really love it because you're an honest guy and you share that in a really cool way.
Marc:It's always been about the stand-up, you know, at the beginning.
Guest:Yeah, it's great.
Guest:It's wonderful to watch.
Guest:I enjoy stand-up so much watching it.
Guest:You know, I don't know if I'll ever go back to do it.
Guest:It could happen, but I love it.
Marc:Was there a point where you were like, I, you know, I've got to go a different route here.
Marc:Like there's a mention in the book where you were like, it seemed like, you know, when you were in Vegas, you kind of saw that life and it didn't seem like that was the life you wanted.
Guest:I could not die there.
Guest:No, I don't.
Guest:But you knew it was a possibility.
Guest:I do not trust white tigers.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And and I cannot, you know, no, the whole atmosphere.
Guest:I can go to Vegas for a night.
Guest:but you know, the controlled atmospheres and the rooms and stuff like that.
Guest:And they trying to whatever, there's nothing on the television.
Guest:So that just compels you to go down and spend your money.
Guest:Last time I was playing at the comedy store at the dunes, uh, I was with dice actually.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, uh,
Guest:He was in the room going, don't let me blow this last hundred bucks, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like that.
Guest:I'm going, what do you mean?
Guest:And he goes like, I'm serious.
Guest:Like, I got a hundred bucks left.
Guest:I've lost everything.
Guest:You can't let me blow this last hundred bucks.
Guest:Like that.
Guest:And I go, okay, I'll try to keep an eye on you.
Guest:Like that.
Guest:And I went in the bathroom to go pee and I came out and he was gone.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the hundred bucks was gone.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:that was the dunes and i and she had the store there right i had the store there and i was playing there as a featured player at the store the the texts were impossible yeah can i have a stool stool get stool yourself man two-bit comic whatever and they were just brutal and uh i remember being in my room one night and uh i had i was going through a phase where i was listening to positive affirmation tapes and were you depressed
Guest:No, I was just trying to motivate myself and move the universe, the secret before the secret ever existed, right?
Guest:I was always doing that.
Guest:So I put those headphones on and I laid back on my bed and my tidy whities and I fell asleep while I was listening to You Are a Winner.
Guest:And everything comes easily to you.
Guest:Cue the seagulls.
Guest:And I was listening to that and I fell asleep.
Guest:And I was blissed out sleeping.
Guest:And suddenly I sensed something or heard something.
Guest:And I kind of like slowly blinked my eyes open.
Guest:I saw a light coming in from the hallway.
Guest:And I went, oh, I must have left a light on.
Guest:And then I looked to the other side of my bed right beside me at the nightstand.
Guest:I saw something moving.
Guest:And initially I thought, is that a cat on the table?
Guest:And then the depth perception kicked in.
Guest:And I realized I was staring at a human face about two feet away from mine.
Guest:It was a woman with long hair going through my wallet.
Guest:on the nightstand, going through my wallet.
Guest:And I leapt out of bed and grabbed her and she got up and she was about six foot four.
Guest:And she kept saying, she was acting like she was a prostitute saying, I thought you were Frank.
Guest:They sent me up for Frank, like that.
Guest:And I grabbed her and I threw her out into the hallway.
Guest:The door was fully open.
Guest:And apparently I hadn't put the bolt on.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And she came with the with the do not disturb sign and just flicked it open.
Guest:Get out of here.
Guest:And yeah.
Guest:And I then she ran to the elevator where there was a guy holding the elevator for her.
Guest:Uh huh.
Guest:Uh, and I was so freaked out and I called down the security and I went down to the security office, which was like, uh, you know, the police station in, uh, Beverly Hills cop.
Guest:I mean, it was huge.
Guest:This police station inside the casino where I looked at mug shots and I found her and they said, Oh yeah, her.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:She's, she works all the hotels.
Guest:Did you have your deadbolt on?
Yeah.
Guest:Were you listening to motivational tapes?
Guest:She saw you coming, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, she saw you coming, buddy.
Guest:So that was just bizarre.
Guest:That was Vegas.
Guest:You are a winner.
Guest:Yeah, nope.
Guest:So that was Vegas.
Guest:And when I saw the dunes go down, when I saw the demolition of the dunes, which is in Casino, by the way, it marked a moment in my life that I was very happy about.
Guest:I was glad to see that go.
Marc:I bet.
Marc:So like so how does the transition?
Marc:I mean, obviously, we don't have time to go through everything.
Marc:But I mean, was there like any when when I know you did a few movies and you're obviously a known quantity.
Marc:But when Living Color happens, was there any part of you that was sort of like, well, I'm a stand up.
Marc:I don't know if I'm going to.
Guest:No, I was always up for new directions and new experiences.
Marc:But Damon, you knew Damon and Keenan from... Damon was at the comedy store with me.
Guest:And we did Earth Girls Are Easy together.
Guest:How great was he to watch?
Guest:He was fantastic.
Guest:Right?
Guest:So funny, so edgy, man.
Guest:So incredibly dark.
Guest:And he can riff, dude.
Guest:Unbelievable and just courageous beyond belief.
Guest:Yeah, for sure.
Guest:He had the sickest routine, some of them.
Guest:I remember one in particular where I don't know if your listeners aren't going to see this, but his sister got beat up by her boyfriend and he went to visit her in the hospital and she was really messed up.
Guest:And he said, why are you going out with that dude?
Guest:What is it?
Guest:What is it?
Guest:Why are you doing that to yourself?
Guest:And she says, I don't know.
Guest:There's just something about him.
Guest:That sounds like him.
Guest:I fell out, man.
Guest:I fell out.
Guest:And he's the one that invited me to audition for In Living Color.
Guest:And God, it changed my life.
Marc:Did you guys have any idea what that was going to be like?
Marc:I mean, in conception or was it just a sketch show?
Marc:I mean, what was the pitch?
Marc:Because it was Keenan.
Marc:Because Keenan was doing stand-up too a bit, right?
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, nobody had done the sketch stuff, really.
Guest:I mean, you know, when I got on the show, Damon said to me, you're going to have to come up with some characters.
Guest:I'd never done characters before.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:So I just kind of opened up my perception and started looking for people and characters.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the first one was Vera DeMilo.
Guest:She presented herself to me at Gold's Gym in Santa Monica.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:I was getting a smoothie and she came up to the counter and said, can I have a protein smoothie, please?
Guest:And it was this wonderfully humunculus woman.
Guest:And I went, well, there's one.
Guest:And then started evolving into characters.
Guest:Fire Marshal Bill was born out of a sketch that Adam Smalls and Fax Barr and I created called the Death Wish Foundation.
Guest:And it was a sketch about, you know, kids who are passing away and their posthumous wish is what we were concentrating on.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So they would make posthumous wishes.
Guest:And my posthumous wish as this sick kid was to go to an amusement park after I die.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so it would be me on the rides, you know, flopping around in the seats on the roller coaster and stuff like Weekend at Bernie's.
Guest:And that didn't get on, but the character stuck and the character became Fire Marshal Bill.
Marc:Oh my God, that's a nice dark backstory.
Guest:Crazy, right?
Guest:We had...
Guest:That grouping of people, and I wrote a lot with Steve Odekirk, who was also responsible for a lot of my early success and just did incredible, incredible work.
Guest:And when people went to see Ace Ventura, they were going because of Fire Marshal Bill.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They were going to see what this lunatic is going to do next, basically.
Guest:And they were happy with what they saw.
Guest:So it was really wonderful.
Guest:But Steve Odekirk and I wrote that late night after we'd written sketches for In Living Color.
Guest:The first Ace Ventura?
Guest:First Ace Ventura, we rewrote the original script.
Guest:And I didn't know if I was actually going to do the movie or not.
Guest:I had a trap door.
Guest:I didn't have to do it if I didn't like it.
Guest:But we got so pregnant with it that we were just out of our minds with laughter over this thing.
Guest:And it was a freedom that everybody should operate under the idea that it's never going to get done.
Guest:So just go crazy.
Marc:But then it then it was like crazy because then like you basically defined the movie comedy business.
Marc:You know, for like years, dude.
Guest:I mean, that 94 is freedom and it's freedom.
Guest:It's the idea of freedom.
Guest:If you get out of the way of the zeitgeist, man, if you get out of the way of the of the inspiration, you have the courage to do what's in your head and what you think is funny.
Guest:You know, then then you hit a nerve.
Guest:Then you hit the back row after Ace Ventura.
Guest:You could do whatever you wanted.
Guest:Yeah, I was very fortunate with the mask and Dumb and Dumber right after that.
Guest:But each time I was going, okay, don't get safe, don't get safe, don't get safe.
Guest:So when Dumb and Dumber came along and I got my first big payday,
Guest:I knocked my feeling out of my tooth or my bonding out of my tooth out of rebellion against a mammon, you know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I didn't want to become a mammonite.
Guest:I wanted to be an artist always.
Marc:So you were, you were, you were against the greed monster.
Guest:So I showed up with the bowl cut and my tooth, you know, I was really knocked out.
Guest:Yeah, I have a bonding on my phone too.
Guest:So whenever I went back to do any Dumb and Dumb or anything, I have to, and the first time I just took a Bic lighter and I went, and I knocked it off.
Guest:And I showed up like that and Pete and Bobby were, oh yeah, yeah, yes.
Guest:Lloyd, hello Lloyd.
Guest:It was a reaction to becoming popular.
Guest:I wanted to fly in the face of it.
Guest:All the way along, the stand-up in Living Color sketch stuff, into the movies, and now into the book, and into the art, and the
Guest:the comics, the political cartoons, I think I have this disease that will not allow me to become really entrenched in people's minds in one place.
Marc:Well, yeah, I mean, I think as time will tell, you're entrenched in people's minds in a lot of different ways.
Marc:Everyone has got a different Jim Carrey in their mind, I would think most people.
Guest:Yeah, but that's because I take the chance and I challenge my audience a lot.
Guest:You know, I ask a lot from them, a lot of understanding from them.
Guest:I think I'm going to go off now and not do anything that you like.
Guest:And I'm going to develop a new thing and then I'm going to bring it back and, you know, glue it onto the thing you like.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And also you take you take chances and you talk about that in the book that, you know, part of that, you know, those chances are, you know, the battle of seeing yourself as a failure.
Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:This idea that, you know, that, you know, when you do take a chance and it doesn't pay off, even though you're artistically were were knew you were taking that chance, there still is, you know, the public's opinion of it or the critical opinion of it versus, you know, what you feel.
Marc:And that's a hard place to be sometimes.
Guest:Yeah, but you can't step in the direction of appeasing.
Guest:You can't pander.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You can't pander and create at the same time.
Guest:It's just not conducive.
Guest:It really isn't.
Guest:You can hope that they will like it, that it will hit a nerve, but you can't pander because even if they don't know it on the surface, they know it inside.
Guest:They instinctually know.
Right.
Guest:What do you think was the biggest risk you ever took, really, in films?
Guest:I mean, there's so many things.
Guest:But, you know, Philip Morris, I got a lot of resistance about.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Especially the...
Guest:sexy butt scene yeah yeah yeah i my people went mad and so did the film company and uh and they were just out of their minds over that thing and i said you know what you're the guys that would take the horse's head out of the godfather stop trying to file down the edges
Guest:And I fought and I fought and I fought and I threatened not to promote.
Guest:And I did everything that an artist can do to say, you fuck with this, I'm gone.
Guest:And that was an interesting day because that was that gentleman's first day as an actor.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:It was a very precarious position to be in on your first day.
Marc:But with these more serious movies, the ones that, you know, you really kind of, you know, you know, challenged, I guess you would consider challenging your fans expectations by doing, you know, roles in, you know, I don't know.
Marc:Eternal Sunshine, I think, you know, was your greatest dramatic role, really, for me.
Guest:And Truman Show, I think the magic of Truman Show was that the concept was so original and prophetic.
Guest:As it turns out, everybody has their bubble they're living in now.
Guest:Everybody's Truman now.
Marc:That's for sure.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I get asked a lot, what do you think happens to Truman when he leaves the stage and goes through the door?
Guest:And I say he has to watch everybody go back in to the stage and try to seek what he had.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, that fame and that focus.
Guest:And so he's alone again.
Marc:Yeah, I always pictured, you know, like there were periods where I'd hear about you.
Marc:Like, you know, we don't really have too many common friends.
Marc:I guess I just made assumptions that, you know, I'd see you publicly go through these different relationships and have these hard times.
Marc:And then I read an article about, you know, you had this.
Guest:Scared straight.
Guest:The Jim Carrey story.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:The butler that I thought was fascinating.
Marc:I just picture you and your butler there in the house.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Just you sitting there.
Guest:You really just can't call it a butler now.
Guest:It's like a house manager.
Guest:House manager, right.
Guest:It just keeps the house from falling apart, from becoming, you know, great expectations.
Marc:Like you sitting at a Citizen Kane-sized table, eating dinner by yourself.
Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was Bud.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:With some beautiful woman putting a puzzle together.
Guest:Angrily.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Wishing she would go out.
Marc:Feeling unrealized.
Marc:But did you study acting at some point?
Guest:Yeah, I did.
Guest:I went down, you know, when I quit the store and, uh, doing standup, you actively quit standup.
Guest:You just said, I quit standup.
Guest:I, I said, no, I, I went, I can't do this.
Guest:It's leading to Vegas, which is the impressionist act.
Guest:So I, I knew I couldn't pursue that any longer.
Guest:So I just walked away for a while and I studied Meisner and Stanislavski and I, I did acting classes and, uh,
Guest:started auditioning for acting roles and uh then two years later i got the bug again and i went okay now i think i think i can come back to it yeah with a different perspective and actually create my own persona you know and that's what i was after and i struggled man for a long time people yelling at me to do golden pond and do the crowd please yeah yeah
Guest:And, uh, even Mitzi at one point in Vegas said to me, you're a, you're the king of impressions.
Guest:What are you doing?
Guest:Like that.
Guest:And I said, you know, they freaked out when Bob Dylan went electric.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I need a grace period.
Guest:She went, okay, whatever like that.
Guest:And then she still supported me.
Guest:She still supported me.
Guest:And, uh, and then I slowly started to develop.
Guest:I did six months of,
Guest:where I challenged myself by not allowing myself to repeat a word that I said the night before.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So I would go up unarmed completely and bleed in front of the crowd.
Guest:And, uh, you know, whereas I saw Robin doing his thing and I knew he had bets and I knew he would branch off in the moment.
Um,
Guest:I figured if I trained, it's like training with weights on, if I didn't have anything to go to, and I just either sank or swam, I would come out the other side, a stronger artist, you know?
Guest:So I did that for six months, man.
Guest:And I bled before I went on stage every night, like I was starting off in showroom.
Guest:It was horrifying.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Sam came up to me at a certain point and he said, man, I see what you're doing, man.
Guest:You've got giant balls.
Guest:You've got giant balls.
Guest:And everybody's watching, you know.
Guest:And comics were back there.
Guest:If you're not going to use that bit, man.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:I heard what you're doing.
Guest:If you're not using that shit, I'm doing it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, whatever.
Guest:And a couple of entertainer-type comics gobbled up my old impressionist act and went to Vegas with it.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, I used to have people coming up to me and saying, like, your act is killing in Vegas.
Marc:Did you let them have it?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So you come out the other side?
Guest:I came out the other side one night in my bed.
Guest:I used to literally go to bed at night going, what do they need?
Guest:What do they need?
Guest:What do they need?
Guest:What is it?
Guest:What's my thing?
Guest:going to be.
Guest:And one night I just shot up in bed and said out loud, they need to be free from concern.
Guest:It's the old thing I've been doing my whole life.
Guest:They need to be free from concern.
Guest:And it was like a revelation that
Guest:that I would become the guy, my persona would be the guy that was free from concern.
Guest:And in doing so, they would, through osmosis, get that feeling for themselves.
Guest:And then the next night I went to the comedy store and I said, good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and how are you this evening?
Guest:All righty then.
Guest:And they realized, I don't give a damn how they are.
Guest:And I'm not concerned.
Guest:And I'm really not going to wait for an answer.
Guest:And that created my stage show and my persona.
Guest:It also created Ace Ventura, the attitude of Ace Ventura.
Marc:Wild, man.
Marc:And the end of your stand-up.
Guest:But it comes always from the belief that
Guest:The book touches on this a lot, that fear of erasure thing, man, that causes everything from egoic tyrants to racists.
Guest:People are afraid to be replaced.
Guest:And it's the weakest thing that you could put out into the universe.
Guest:I've always believed that I don't know how I'm going to find a place for myself, but...
Guest:You know, the front door has been blocked, but I can go through the basement window.
Guest:I know that there will be an opening.
Guest:There will be something presenting itself.
Guest:So I've had that undying belief my whole life.
Marc:Yeah, it's what drives you.
Marc:So after this tremendous expansion, both ego wise, fame wise, money wise, you know, you know, women wise and everything else.
Marc:Was there a point where you came up empty and that's where you crashed?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There were many crashes.
Guest:There's still crashes.
Marc:But what do you attribute that to?
Marc:How do you feel about your mental health?
Guest:I attribute to I believe that no one gets through this life.
Guest:It's too challenging and there's too much stuff coming at us.
Guest:We don't have the bandwidth to handle it.
Guest:We have to find ways to escape it.
Guest:We have to turn the gadgets off.
Guest:We have to find moments in nature.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Meditation is helpful, really helpful.
Guest:Breathing techniques, there's a lot of that.
Guest:I get up and I walk and I do cold plunges and I do give my body every chance it can get to be healthy.
Guest:I have very little supplementation in my life.
Guest:Just a little handful of pills or supplements that I take with dinner, and that's about it.
Guest:But no, I still get into spirals of thought and just eruptions of anger and disappointment in humanity, in the human species, in the narrowness of someone's perceptions.
Marc:But no existential sadness?
Guest:I don't think so.
Guest:That's good.
Guest:No.
Guest:Oh, good for you.
Guest:No, really not.
Guest:No, it's not just a general depression anymore at all.
Guest:Great.
Guest:It's been at times, but no, I don't have that.
Guest:I know when I'm not happy, I'm not in the place I should be.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm indulging in what I call time travel.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You know, the ego doesn't ever allow you to stay in this moment.
Guest:It tries to ruin this moment.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, you and I are the only thing in the world to me right now.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the trees outside that are kind of tickling my senses.
Guest:As soon as you lose that, you're caught in ego.
Guest:You're time traveling.
Guest:You're going back to regret or you're going forward to fear.
Marc:Yeah, or your brain's just making shit up for you.
Marc:To react.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And half the time it's stuff that has never happened.
Guest:You're having a fight and then some kind of crazy oration with somebody that you've never even.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:You're reacting to assuming that they're going to hate you.
Guest:They're not real.
Guest:It's not real.
Guest:Not real.
Guest:So much of what we go through is not real stuff.
Guest:So much of who we are is not real stuff.
Marc:I get that.
Guest:Well, that's where the book takes you.
Guest:And you get in touch with me and let me know if it takes you there, because that's what my intention was, is to do through this absurdism and this autofiction to get to a place where I can actually give people
Marc:a glimpse or a feeling of freedom from grasping.
Marc:Well, I'm excited about it.
Marc:I'm sorry that I didn't finish it before I talked to you.
Marc:Oh, that's okay, man.
Marc:But I will.
Marc:I'm the slowest reader in the world.
Marc:Yeah, because I'm enjoying it, and I didn't know if I would, but I like it, and I'm going to finish it, and I will.
Guest:Griffin Dunn called me yesterday and said that he had read it in two sittings, and he's dyslexic.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You guys have things in common, I feel.
Guest:I think so.
Marc:He's a heavy cat.
Guest:He's a heavy cat, man.
Guest:Incredible family.
Guest:What a family.
Guest:Just genius family.
Guest:I'm reading Joan Didion right now.
Marc:I just finished Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking.
Guest:A Year of Magical Thinking.
Guest:It's so heartbreakingly beautiful.
Guest:yeah it's incredible yeah well i love talking to you jim and i'm glad we're you too man we'll do it again we'll do it again i i'm sorry we haven't hung before this man it's just uh it's a great opportunity to to kind of connect with people i admire i love it anytime when we get when we're able to talk again you can come over is it still your garage it's a new garage yeah
Marc:new garage i mean yeah i'm in a new you've gone jay leno you have 20 cars no dude it's like 200 cars no but i had to make it into a little house i got no i got no i got one car and this garage is now like a little house next to my house i'm very low-fi myself man this stuff does not turn me on i don't i don't at one point i got the mercedes mclaren and i just got tired of getting flipped off by people
Marc:Yeah, I got what I thought was a nice car.
Marc:I got a Toyota Avalon.
Marc:I'm like, this is a little too nice for me.
Marc:It's fantastic talking to you, man.
Marc:Really lovely.
Marc:Great work with the book.
Marc:And let's talk again soon.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Okay, buddy.
Bye.
Marc:That was interesting.
Marc:I think I did all right.
Marc:He called me after and we had a nice chat.
Marc:Stand-up guy, that Jim Carrey.
Marc:And again, the book, co-written by Dana Vashon with Jim, is Memoirs and Misinformation, a novel.
Marc:You can get that wherever you get your books.
Marc:And that's what's happening, man.
Marc:That's what's happening.
Marc:Okay?
Marc:Congratulations, everybody.
Marc:You did it.
Marc:Another day.
Marc:Here's some dirty blues guitar.
Thank you.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:Boomer lives.