Episode 1339 - Greg Proops
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fuck nicks what's happening i'm mark maron this is my podcast welcome to it if you haven't been here before it's nice to uh nice to have you just hang out sit down with the rest of them
Marc:Try not to be too chatty until you get the hang of things.
Marc:Just listen for things that you relate to.
Marc:Don't have expectations.
Marc:Don't read into much.
Marc:Just hang out, man.
Marc:We're going to hang out.
Marc:Greg Proops is here today.
Marc:We're going to hang out with Greg Proops.
Marc:Does that mean anything to you?
Marc:It should.
Marc:He's a smart fella.
Marc:I've known him for years, have not seen him in a long time.
Marc:When I moved to San Francisco back in the day, fuck, when was that?
Marc:92 or something?
Marc:there was this crew of us that somehow ended up in San Francisco at the same time as me and Patton Oswalt, Blaine Kapatch, and a lot of their scene had sort of gone to L.A., but Proops was around.
Marc:Proops was a... He was a solid dug-in up there in the Bay Area.
Marc:I'd met him once before, and I didn't even bring this up to him because I was kind of dickish to him the first time I met him.
Marc:It was actually...
Marc:It was in New York City.
Marc:It must have been in the late 80s.
Marc:Could have been early, early 90s.
Marc:All I know is that the old Improv up on 44th Street, I was at the Westway Diner where we used to hang out, me and Vitaly, maybe Attell, whoever was around.
Marc:But I remember it was me and Vitaly.
Marc:who just passed away, rest in peace.
Marc:And Proops was in town and somehow ended up there and somehow ended up at our table at our booth.
Marc:And this was before I'd gone to San Francisco's, before I knew anything about him other than I believed that he was dressing like Tom Kenny.
Marc:Like that would fucking matter to anybody with the Buddy Holly glasses and the pompadour.
Marc:And I was just such a dick.
Marc:I was just sort of like, yeah, you know, you know, Tom Kenny, because I knew Tom Kenny was in in San Francisco and he moved out there.
Marc:Bobcat, Tomcat were buddies from upstate New York.
Marc:Tom Kenny, of course, went on to be the voice of SpongeBob.
Marc:But he was just a comic, but he had that look.
Marc:He had that kind of pompadour, horn-rimmed look, and I was like, so basically, I was like, you're doing the Tom Kenny thing, huh?
Marc:Is that what you're up to?
Marc:No idea what kind of comedy, did nothing.
Marc:Just looked at him and busted his balls over the way he looked because I was a cock.
Marc:How you guys doing?
Marc:But Proops is here.
Marc:Me and Proops talk about, we talk about some shit.
Marc:There was a coyote in my yard yesterday, sleeping.
Marc:What does that mean?
Marc:It's weird how people think about stuff like that.
Marc:Coyote in my yard, just hanging out.
Marc:Was here a couple days ago.
Marc:I think he's eyeballing Buster and Sammy in the catio.
Marc:Trying to figure out whether or not he can get in there.
Marc:Maybe.
Marc:But then yesterday, he was just sleeping on my yard.
Marc:Cleaned up his shit day before yesterday.
Marc:I think it's a female coyote just hanging out.
Marc:I posted an Instagram video of it.
Marc:Hundreds of people with big ideas.
Marc:Everyone's a goddamn detective.
Marc:Everyone's a goddamn...
Marc:animal biologist everybody's a veterinarian everybody understands what's going on everybody knows it's sick man it has to be sick watch out there's a distemper going around up here in northern california don't touch it you'll you'll you'll fucking give it to your cats very contagious there's something wrong with it it's a sign man it could be a good sign it could be a bad sign usually it's good means it's there's going to be big change in your life watch out it's the trickster
Marc:You may not know what wisdom it imparts or what it means because the coyote is the trickster, but it does mean something.
Marc:Dude, that's so cool.
Marc:You got a coyote in your yard.
Marc:Be careful.
Marc:It shouldn't be there.
Marc:Jesus Christ.
Marc:Everyone's got the answers.
Marc:It's a fucking big problem, isn't it?
Marc:So me and Proops get into it.
Marc:Get into it on a few levels.
Marc:We talk about what I've been talking about here a lot.
Marc:Just what is happening to comedy.
Marc:And, you know, Greg and I deal with it personally, politically, implications of societal implications on the culture.
Marc:A lot of what I've been talking about, this sort of tribalization of comedy.
Marc:This idea, the co-opting of the philosopher king comedian model or the rebel truth telling comedian model that was once only applied to maybe four comics.
Marc:You know who they are.
Marc:There was a generation of comics in the 50s and some in the 60s.
Marc:You can count them on one hand.
Marc:You know, you're talking Lenny Bruce.
Marc:You're talking, you know, Pryor in a different way.
Marc:You're talking people like Godfrey Cambridge, Dick Gregory, talking people like Carlin later.
Marc:But still, Hicks, handful.
Marc:But the right and the, you know, quote unquote, free thinker crowd,
Marc:The people with dumpster fires in their brains with all the answers and a lot of labels.
Marc:Woke, commie, socialist, big pharma, a lot of labels for people.
Marc:Minimizers.
Marc:Free thinkers will all think the same thing and have leaders, and some of them are comics.
Marc:And some comics present themselves as revolutionary voices, but they're truly hack cowards.
Marc:There's no vulnerability in it.
Marc:Lack of respect for marginalized voices, for people already under the pressure.
Marc:The goal should be to bring us all together.
Marc:I can't say that I can do it, and I can't say that I necessarily even joke in that way.
Marc:But the world is on fire.
Marc:Things are at risk while we running around hurting people.
Marc:And I don't know, the more I think about it, like, you know, what happened to alternative comedy?
Marc:Was there a point of view there?
Marc:Was there some sort of momentum that, I use that word momentum a lot.
Marc:Was there some sort of collective community that was obviously more embracing in a way, but did it have a point of view?
Marc:But I just wanted to engage somebody who's thinking about things.
Marc:in the area that I am.
Marc:Not in the area of people that collect bullshit that justifies their own victimization through their deep well of grievances that probably are attached to something that they refuse to resolve or see in themselves and then join forces with other people with similar backpacks full of bullshit, sometimes ammunition,
Marc:sometimes they are 15s and sort of justify themselves as victims, cultural victims, political victims, based on nothing but the need to feel aggrieved.
Marc:But make no mistake, that way of thinking, once somebody decides or once it's enabled,
Marc:can lead to genocidal movements.
Marc:It's happened before.
Marc:So how are some comedians getting those people focused?
Marc:Anyway, this is me and Greg talking.
Marc:He's got a new album out, Greg Proops in the City.
Marc:You can get it at gregproops.com or wherever you get music.
Marc:And it was great to see him.
Marc:What do you mean you're off everything?
Marc:No weed?
Guest:Come on.
Guest:No, for real.
Guest:What is this?
Guest:I know, right?
Guest:Yeah, I quit drinking in July last year because during the plague I was really getting it on.
Guest:Really?
Marc:That's how you went?
Guest:Well, yeah, I was frustrated and sad and, you know- Scared?
Guest:The scared come into it?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And no gigs, you know, so no outlet for my shallowness and worried that no one would ever like me every 30 seconds again.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Yeah, it comes that quickly, huh?
Guest:Oh, dude.
Guest:And so-
Guest:I was doing a podcast at the crib.
Guest:You know, we're doing Zoom shows and shit.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Which is like watching sex through a glass.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:It's just horrible.
Guest:Just worst.
Guest:And I put away a good amount.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I got up the next day to clean the house with Jennifer.
Guest:And I just said to her, you know, I think I'm done.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But the weed was like, you know, that was just sort of like vegetables.
Guest:Oh, no, right.
Guest:It's how I lived.
Guest:You know, it's not...
Guest:That's... I can't really... I don't know.
Marc:I just... Yeah.
Marc:Once it was legalized, you lost interest?
Guest:No, right?
Guest:Like, it's like gay marriage from my old... from the old gay people from San Francisco.
Guest:Like, once it became un-clandestine, it wasn't cool anymore.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, I just, you know, I don't know.
Marc:How did it feel for the... Was there a fog lifted or did it change?
Guest:Not really.
Guest:I mean, you know, I function fairly well on weed.
Guest:I know.
Marc:You're always one of those guys that never quite understood it.
Marc:Like, if there's any example, you're like the Keith Richards of weed.
Guest:Yeah, right?
Guest:I mean, I still smoke it sometimes.
Guest:I didn't, like, cut it out altogether.
Guest:Yeah, I'm on the road with the Hoosland guys.
Guest:And, you know, before the plague... Yeah.
Guest:I was getting high pretty much before every show.
Guest:And then when we came back from the play, I didn't.
Guest:And I felt like a lot, you know, cool.
Guest:I didn't know if I felt funnier, but it reminds me of a story that, who was it?
Guest:Artie Shaw, the old band leader.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He said there's a couple of horn players in his band and they were always smoking weed or what do they call it in those days?
Guest:Gage or whatever, muggles.
Guest:And he says, why you guys are getting high before the show, you know?
Guest:And they go, well, we really like to blow, you know, Artie, like a creative, it frees us up.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And he goes, all right, all right.
Guest:Like, tonight at the break, I want to get high with you, you know?
Guest:And they're like, what?
Guest:And he's like, no, come on.
Guest:So he goes, we go outside, and this is the 40s.
Guest:We smoke a couple bombs.
Guest:And he goes, we go on stage after the break.
Guest:And he goes, I'm blowing my brains out, right?
Guest:And they come up to me after the show, the two horn players, and they go, you were right.
Guest:It didn't make you any better.
Guest:So, not that that story resonated with me, but I just thought, I'm having a lot more fun now on stage because of it.
Marc:More present, maybe?
Marc:Huh?
Marc:More present?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:I mean, I remember before I quit, it was just sort of a daily thing.
Marc:Mm.
Marc:I went to visit a dying aunt, an old aunt who was like, you know, near death and had that sort of strange fragility and, you know, almost mind reedy type of perception.
Marc:And she said, what's wrong with Mark?
Marc:He looks haunted.
Marc:And I'm like, not trying to pull back on the weed.
Marc:Things had crawled in.
Marc:I was wide open and, you know, you get detached.
Marc:I would just get, you don't know if you're high or not.
Marc:And I don't guess that matters to some people, but it kind of matters.
Guest:Yeah, you know, I found myself like someone's a doctor said to me once it's like an old friend Yeah, you can't cut it loose, you know, and then now I found like that I've mostly cut at least that I don't I don't miss it all the time I do miss it sometimes but also
Guest:as the older I get, like the less I want to be high when I'm driving or something like that.
Guest:Whereas in my teens and 20s, I didn't care.
Guest:Yeah, because you were like, you know, I could pull it off.
Guest:Right, I'm immortal.
Guest:And it's not so much that mortality is looming as much as a, I don't know,
Guest:I don't go to meetings or anything like that, and I wouldn't proselytize, but everybody knows me as someone who is an inebriate, so I might as well come clean and say that I'm not inebriating as much.
Marc:Yeah, and you seem chipper.
Marc:Do you find, let's see, were you getting angry?
Guest:You know, the frustration and the pain and trying to booze it away wasn't really happening for me.
Guest:I was much more concerned about the booze because the drink does nothing for your personality.
Guest:Like, you think you're, what was the Townes Van Zandt line?
Guest:I went to the party and I bubbled, you know, like...
Guest:I'm not actually as charming as I thought I was.
Marc:Whose line is that?
Marc:Is it like when you do cocaine, you do it off a mirror so you can see what an asshole you are?
Guest:Yeah, no kidding.
Marc:Or was it Jimmy Tingle?
Guest:I can't remember.
Guest:Fortunately for me, I was never very cokie, as you know.
Guest:It was always booze and pot for me.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:The rudiments of the Bay Area, you know.
Guest:I mean, because booze and pot were everything and where I grew up in San Carlos and...
Guest:Where is that?
Guest:It's about 30 miles south of San Francisco.
Guest:Turn left at 1990.
Guest:And it's the widest place on earth.
Guest:It's in between San Mateo and River City, if that helps orient you at all, which it doesn't.
Guest:And I grew up there and then the peninsula.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And by the time you came to high school there, it was really a thing to... This is the 70s, you know.
Guest:We're reasonably close to the same age.
Guest:You're a little older.
Guest:I'm 58.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Were you?
Guest:62.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so, yeah, like I graduated in 77.
Guest:So the class before me was the bicentennial class and they had horrible red, white, and blue tassels on their... Yeah.
Guest:Which even then I thought was lame.
Guest:Like, the what?
Guest:The bicentennial?
Guest:Buying into it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it was a big deal to get high and...
Guest:And in those days, you know, beer.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Booze.
Marc:And there was some speed around.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:No.
Guest:Well, right.
Guest:Obviously, there was methamphetamine in those days was we called.
Guest:Crank.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:That yellow crumbly biker crank.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And it smelled like produce from the bottom of a, you know, like one of those.
Guest:When you'd open up a lettuce crate when you worked in a restaurant, that's what it always smelled like.
Guest:And it made your eyes burn and your head explode and your nose run.
Yeah.
Marc:But have you been to San Francisco lately?
Guest:New Year's was the last time I was there.
Marc:It looks like the bottom fell out.
Marc:Oh, I know, right?
Marc:Dude, it's crazy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, it really feels like an anchorless, chaotic shit show up there.
Guest:It's pretty wild.
Guest:I mean, like, you know...
Guest:The amount of poverty in a place that wealthy really goes to that medieval thing where you know that, oh my God, they're building these giant stadiums and they're doing this and there's Apple and Facebook and blah, blah, blah.
Guest:And then there's like literally block after block of...
Guest:calcutta like hideous i mean i guess it's scary but it definitely feels like new york must have felt in the 70s just sort of right almost like bombed out what is a what is alexander was it william blake the dog starved at the master's gate predicts the ruin of the state that's all i can think of like you let you let people starve in the street and you're saying that you don't care anymore as a society
Guest:you've thrown in the towel.
Guest:And then all these people who give money to these giant charities, which I am always suspicious of giant charities, because to me they seem like money laundering operations.
Marc:Or at least their operating budgets can be, there's a lot of wiggle room.
Guest:To be generous, I mean, you know, I've been to charities, and I'm sure you have too, where you're flown on like a jet or something, where you're put up at a big hotel, or you're given all this treatment, and you're like, this money could have gone to the thing that we're doing, and you could have put me in a wagon.
Guest:Yeah, but this is Mr. Rideoff's jet.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Guest:I'm going to start coughing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So that part is dastardly.
Guest:I still love the Bay Area and I love San Francisco.
Guest:And, you know, Jennifer and I have a soft spot for white people heaven, Marin, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:West Marin especially.
Guest:It's so beautiful and it's like a fantasy land.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I really, I love that.
Guest:I haven't been up there in a long time.
Guest:I'm fixing to go up again.
Guest:But I've been on holiday because...
Guest:Since we've been able to go on the road again, like in the autumn, I've been on the road.
Marc:Yeah, me too.
Marc:I've just been hammering since I got the second shot.
Marc:I think that's when it was like, let's go.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:And then everyone got COVID.
Marc:Yeah, and then everyone got COVID.
Marc:Have you had it?
Marc:I haven't had it.
Guest:I'm not supposed to knock wood.
Guest:My friend told me not to knock wood.
Marc:Oh, I got it.
Marc:Yeah, I got it after my third shot.
Guest:And I got COVID.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I had the fourth one in Minneapolis while I was on the road.
Guest:Is it better there?
Marc:Huh?
Marc:Is it better there?
Guest:I thought so.
Guest:I thought it was funkier and there was kind of a million lakes.
Guest:How many lakes do they have?
Marc:A lot.
Marc:Are you doing solo stand-up or is this with the crew?
Guest:No, it's with the group.
Guest:I haven't done stand-up in ages.
Guest:And not because I don't want to.
Guest:It's because... When was this album recorded?
Guest:New Year's.
Guest:I did the punchline at New Year's and it's still the same, you know, the air conditioning's sporadic.
Guest:But I think, you know, like with you, I mean, we like to think at this late ass point, I think I get mostly people who want to see me, particularly on New Year's Eve because it's an occasion
Marc:But isn't it interesting?
Marc:I found myself leveling off now, fortunately, that my audience is primarily kind of aggravated middle-aged women and people that are roughly in my age group.
Marc:And the young people that like me are the exact same kind of young people that I would have liked me.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, like the kind of like, you know, a little smart, a little sensitive, a little aggravated, probably creative and don't really fit in.
Marc:There's a few of them, but I'm grateful for all of them.
Marc:Oh, sure.
Marc:But I mean, I don't know.
Marc:Like, there's part of me that I know I'm still discoverable, but I don't know who I got to reach.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Who goes out and does this shit anymore.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And where?
Guest:Where do you go?
Guest:You've covered social media.
Guest:You've had a giant successful podcast.
Guest:Podcasts for a hundred years.
Guest:I mean, there's what other ways are you supposed to?
Guest:Well, since 2009.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But like what, like over the pandemic, here's what I'm trying to figure out.
Marc:And maybe, you know, maybe you can help me figure it out on some level is that did, did whatever we represented in comedy, like, cause I, I consider this on the same spectrum.
Marc:I do too.
Marc:Our generation.
Marc:But also point of view wise.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Did we lose?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I think so.
Guest:I think there's a certain... Maybe we lost a lot of yardage.
Guest:Let me put it that way.
Guest:We're not in the red.
Guest:We're not in the 10-yard line.
Marc:But can you track it back?
Marc:Because right now...
Marc:You know, I understand comics and it seems like that a lot of the spirit of the people that we respected has been co-opted by, you know, dumb dumbs who stand for very little that that is progressive.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So like the entire sort of like, you know, against cancel culture and pro freedom of speech thing is very limited.
Marc:And it's not it is has been taken seriously.
Marc:from the progressive agenda and sort of reframed by a bunch of comics who have a fan base that are not necessarily comedy fans, but they need to know what to do with their hands and they need a leader.
Marc:So now you have this weird momentum of a group of comedy fans, in quotes, comics who are easily co-opted by right-wing momentum.
Marc:Then they may not know that, but that's what's happening.
Guest:So what happened to us?
Guest:That's a good question.
Guest:I'd like to think that we're still fighting the good fight and that there's lots of people who still respond to us.
Guest:And it takes me back to something that when I first started going out with my wife in 1948, she said to me, it's hard for me to get anyone cool to come see you because of the way they think of stand-up comedy.
Guest:And this is when the early 80s, when we were getting going.
Guest:And because if you remember, when we started in the early 80s, there was a lot of douchebag male.
Marc:I started legit in the later 80s.
Marc:So like, because when I started, I would say, you know, I won that contest in 88.
Marc:That's when I started working in comedy.
Marc:You know, I probably started doing it in 86 and a little bit in college here and there.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So you're talking about the beginning of that boom.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Or even the middle of it that you always heard about.
Marc:By the time I started, it was over.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You mean when there was a thousand rooms every night and you could play everywhere?
Marc:Right.
Marc:But there was nobody in the rooms.
Marc:It was just a club owner going like, yeah, it's not what it used to be.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:We're going to talk about the 80s boom and maybe what that did to culture and the culture of comedy.
Marc:But I think that in thinking about it, there was a failure of what became known as alternative comedy.
Marc:In that the point of view was shallow, the agenda was shallow, and Obama created sort of an umbrella for people to sort of be like, we can just do what we want.
Marc:And then we lost the ball.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:But go back to your point about culture and comedy.
Guest:I don't think I could have put it any better.
Guest:The culture of comedy was always this male, horrible, racist, sexist, my girlfriend's so fat, Asian drivers suck, don't leave a dollar on the table when black people in the front row.
Guest:That 80s thing that was really prevalent when I started.
Guest:Then it started to get hipper.
Guest:And then, of course, like you say, the alternative boom that was, what, 20 years ago?
Marc:late 90s back in the 80s we had people and you knew people yeah that you know we're doing something different and doing fine yeah you know like you know like jake johansson i don't know what he does now but he was like the biggest act in the world yeah and said very little uh uh degenerous kevin meanie uh there and like san francisco was sort of a hotbed where people went i remember when bob cap moved
Marc:from boston and brought the whole group and kenny and and dana and kevin meanie right they all eventually ended up in san francisco where you could embrace you know whatever it is but still there was and i this is the other problem is there's very there were very few people who were doing point of view comedy like political comedy you're taking any real chances i agree in in all that in the male dominate thing there was still guys we liked
Guest:No, I think you're right.
Guest:It was a haven in those days.
Guest:And we were considered, and of course we, I think, lorded it over everybody.
Guest:Everybody was a transplant from somewhere else, mostly.
Guest:I was from the Bay Area, but you came, and Patton came, and Dana came, Gould.
Guest:He came earlier.
Marc:Patton, Blaine, and me showed up within weeks of each other.
Marc:No, no, dude.
Marc:Oh, no.
Marc:No, dude, that was like 92 or 90.
Guest:Was it really?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Oh, golly.
Marc:By the time, you know, me and Blaine and Patton got there, you know, the... Dana was already gigantic.
Marc:Yeah, he had already arced.
Marc:I mean, he was already in Los Angeles.
Marc:Oh, wow.
Marc:They'd all left.
Marc:And the scene in San Francisco was, you know, had been vacated because everyone moved to L.A.
Marc:So, you know, it was you were around.
Marc:Johnny Steele was around.
Marc:Riot Steele.
Marc:You know, Carlos Alzaraki was around.
Marc:But that generation of old timers was gone.
Marc:The live audience at the Bennett Show was three guys.
Marc:You know, one of them wearing like a Star Trek T-shirt.
Marc:You know, we were operating in the sort of fumes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, but I still think, like you say, we had a point of view.
Guest:And I think the big deal in San Francisco in those days was that you had to have some kind of point of view or some sort of intellect or challenge the audience in some way, whether it was intellectually, maybe not politically, but at least intellectually.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:They indulged it.
Guest:right and a lot of san francisco comics go on the road not do as well on the road because comics weren't ready for concept audience weren't ready for concepts elsewhere they were used to joke joke joke and the la thing we used to that was a big complaint for san francisco comics that la crowds were shallow and wanted less than that yeah and then i tended to go to england a lot more and then i found that going to england i was considered slick and and professional which was looked down upon because i did joke joke joke set up set up punchline tag
Marc:You need to tell stories that go nowhere.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:You needed to be shambly and say things were shite a lot.
Guest:But like you say about losing the ball, I really feel like the giant thrust of comedy right now with the really, really popular guys, mostly, that are embracing this, I'm being canceled, I'm a victim thing, is completely reactive and completely reactionary.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:And I don't find it amusing, and I don't think it's very instructive comedically.
Guest:The comics that I always worshipped growing up were Carlin Pryor, Lily Tomlin, Robin, the people who literally were trying to give voice to other people's concerns, maybe actually understand the world a little bit.
Guest:And when you start to say that you're a victim, when you've got six million listeners and you're making all this money and you're doing Netflix specials and everything's pouring in on you, but somehow you're being silenced,
Guest:To me, that sounds exactly like a right-wing Republican saying that the woke culture is what's wrong with the world.
Guest:Woke culture is nothing.
Guest:To me, it was always a matter of manners.
Guest:Like, are you going to be a bully and stomp on homeless people and gay people?
Guest:Or are you going to try to understand that maybe with your white privilege center, you should kind of try to...
Guest:give a little bit of lift to the other voices.
Marc:But the age of sort of doubling down on bullshit and standing for nothing, what I usually say is that once tolerance is removed from the equation, democracy doesn't have a chance.
Marc:Because if you don't buy into the idea that like, well, most people want this, I guess we got to suck it up.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's how the progress is made in a democracy.
Marc:If it's most people want this, well, fuck them.
Marc:I'm not gonna put up with that shit.
Marc:So then the fight is on for the heart of the nation.
Guest:Which is what it is, and amplified by, we're talking about 30, 40 years ago in our lives.
Guest:There wasn't the kind of constant flow of misinformation and the grinding, screaming noise machine.
Marc:Brain fucking.
Marc:It's not even just misinformation or a noise machine.
Marc:It's literally reconfiguring people's perception.
Marc:Because who the fuck said that the brain can handle this?
Marc:No, nobody.
Marc:You pick up your phone in the morning.
Marc:Within 10 minutes, you've dumped more shit into your brain that was ever designed to deal with.
Marc:And you've got to fight for the difference between that and your perception of the world.
Marc:And what is really your point of view?
Marc:It's very easy to erase any sense of identity with this fucking thing.
Guest:I agree.
Guest:It's a vortex.
Guest:And also, I find myself getting angry.
Guest:I get on the phone and then I'm all mad because I saw somebody said something I didn't like.
Guest:And it's like, well, how come that opinion is so important to me all of a sudden when I wouldn't have known about it if I hadn't have looked at my phone?
Marc:Yeah, but that's the problem.
Marc:It's like we're all kind of insecure, ego-driven fuckers.
Marc:And it's sort of the idea that as soon as you get away from that, you're sort of like, do I even exist?
Marc:Am I relevant?
Marc:Am I in the conversation?
Marc:Yeah, right.
Marc:Because if you don't and you aren't or you take a break.
Marc:Yeah, it just goes away.
Marc:It drives away.
Marc:You miss the bus.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But I think what I'm trying to understand as well, and I think I do understand it, is that in conversations I've had with people that give a shit about whatever the fuck I'm talking about, primarily me and my producer, Brendan, around trying to assess
Marc:It seems that what became known as alternative comedy was built on the back of a few guys, right?
Marc:You're one of them.
Marc:I think Dana's one of them.
Marc:I think Patton is of a generation.
Marc:I think Patton invented himself out of part of you.
Marc:He scraped some of your skin and grew it and then put it on his ear.
Marc:And that's part of his head now.
Marc:But the sort of...
Marc:The culture of alternative comedy was really built by a few club comics, and it was happening in L.A., and it was happening a little later in New York.
Marc:But most of us had paid our dues in comedy clubs.
Marc:But then after that, this sort of comic-produced mics and alternate comedy kind of morphed into what seemed to be a fairly significant cultural movement in Los Angeles around... Chris Hardwick was sort of the leader.
Marc:But nonetheless, there's nothing to show for it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Why did that happen?
Marc:Did they stand for nothing?
Marc:Do you ever think about that or am I introducing this idea to you right now?
Guest:The alternative comedy scene tanked.
Guest:Well, I think it was a time and a place and things move on and hideously or maybe reflectively of what's going on in the larger world.
Guest:Comedy doesn't stand alone any more than sports do or show business or anything like that.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Obama cast, like you say, a fairy tale Paul on a lot of white people and particularly the comedy world.
Guest:And I had people say to me things like, I thought, I swear to you, I thought prejudice went away because he was president.
Guest:And, you know, kind of oblique statements like that, that look in the face of 400 years of American history and absolutely deny it because you liked someone that got elected twice.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That also, while we were being elected twice, you didn't notice that the rising tide of fascism was being fomented harder than it had.
Guest:This reminds me of when I was a little, little kid in the 60s, how ugly America was.
Guest:The America that assassinated Malcolm X and Luther King and RFK and the insane racism and white backlash that there was.
Guest:And the revolution that happened in the 60s when I was little.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Between young people and old people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Between World War II people and Vietnam people.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Between black and white people.
Guest:And then we were promised in the early 70s there was going to be gay rights, black rights, Native American rights, La Raza.
Guest:Everything came to the fore.
Guest:Everybody was being heard.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That Reagan thing of, oh, no, we didn't need any of that.
Guest:What we needed was to think about ourselves a little more, old boy.
Guest:Think about yourself a little more.
Guest:And then I feel like that happened again after the alternative revolution with Janine and David and everybody that was so- Dana.
Guest:and Dana that was such a light, and I would go do all these sets everywhere in New York and in Los Angeles and Chicago, San Francisco.
Guest:That was the first wave, not the Kumail, Jonah Ray.
Guest:Well, then there was the, after the Comedy Bang Bang wave, then there was the whole Kumail wave and the Nerd Melt over here in Los Angeles and all that, which I participated in.
Guest:Yeah, me too, but it never felt right.
Guest:It wasn't my, you know, I was a guest in their awesome generation or whatever.
Marc:I felt that too, but that's weird.
Marc:But, like, it wasn't generational.
Marc:It was really a very specific audience, you know, that, you know, because if I think about, like, the groove of, you know, but I get off on this history, you know, like, you know, Robin, Pearl, and, you know, Warren Thomas, he's, you know, forgotten, you know, several forgotten heroes of riff style, you know, Winehold.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Natty.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But by the time that Nerd Melt happens, I was like, I resented that that audience was so homogenous.
Marc:Yep.
Guest:It was weird.
Guest:It is weird.
Guest:And I think I don't disagree at all.
Guest:It's like, I felt like the narrowness of their point of view kind of rubbed me the wrong way.
Guest:And also, like you say, like for instance, and this is just completely anecdotal and shallow, but I have really no other, you know, redoubt.
Guest:Um,
Guest:I did a show at the Nerd Mount where I used to do the podcast.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Smartest man in the world?
Guest:Right.
Guest:I did it live for years and years and years.
Guest:Now Jennifer and I do it at the crib because of the plague sort of forced that hand.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:The last live one I did was in San Francisco.
Guest:I loved doing it all over America and Europe and literally all over the world.
Guest:And then I would do it at the Nerd Melt and it was my least favorite audience.
Guest:And I'm not just blaming the Nerd Melt.
Guest:I'm saying like a cat named Rod Temperton died and Rod Temperton wrote Thriller and Off the Wall and all these great disco songs.
Guest:He was in a group called Heat Wave.
Guest:He was a white guy from England and he wrote all this disco.
Guest:And it happened to be the night he passed away.
Guest:And I often play a lot of records on my show.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I start records, music and vinyl.
Guest:No.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Anyway, I was playing a bunch of disco songs and the crowd literally didn't know any of them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I started to become furious with myself and the crowd.
Guest:Like, you really don't know any of these dance records from the last 30 years that this guy wrote, who is a giant of dance music.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And everything is built on this that we do now.
Guest:And I thought, so what?
Guest:Your phone and your computer and that's what's important to you.
Guest:And this weird advantage that you see happening to you in this crappy life you built for yourself.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Like you say, it was difficult to find something to say that you didn't feel like you were, one, shooting over their head, or two, just saying shit they didn't understand at all because you were some... I'm Uncle Grandpa on the mountain.
Marc:Right, so you're the old guy.
Marc:But now they're all old and none of them do it anymore.
Marc:That's the thing is that their entire context was manufactured in this kind of little... I mean, I guess it was a bubble, but...
Marc:But what I was talking to Brendan about today was that, you know, for as long as this fascism has been percolating in America, you know, like when in the 60s, you can marginalize it a bit because it was the Birchers or whoever the fuck it was, the king of the Klan.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But they were really held off.
Marc:Yeah, they were.
Marc:At the margins.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because most people were like, you know, we're all sort of, you know, kind of...
Marc:hovering around the same information oasis, and we could all sort of like look across the water and go like, I know we don't agree, but this is what's happening, and we've agreed that we don't want this.
Marc:But now, alongside of that, they were furious that they had no broader cultural identity, that the culture belonged to us.
Marc:The Jews, the progressives, the gay people, the blacks.
Marc:It really did.
Marc:Now, obviously, there are other ethnicities that were pushed aside by the ethnicities and had a small part of it.
Marc:And now that sort of opened up a bit.
Marc:But it seems that there is a big push, along with the push to disregard truth in general, to sort of hijack the culture.
Marc:That the right is spearheading this movement with people who have really sunk their teeth into this anti-woke position, which is hackneyed, and to this fear of cancellation.
Marc:And that's how they're riding into taking over the cultural, the arts, in a way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's super male, too.
Guest:Like, I don't get that that's some sort of big across-the-board message that everyone embraces.
Marc:No, it's just everybody's like, I know.
Marc:Right?
Marc:No one's sort of like, yeah, but it's sort of like, that's happening.
Marc:It's all over the place.
Marc:You go to comedy clubs, but the one thing that bothers me is that we need to make sure we know the difference between a comedy show and a comedy rally.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:And I guess, in a way, we took a lot for granted, and a lot of us weren't
Marc:You know, a lot of the generation above us.
Marc:I also think that, you know, the Jews gave up the mantle a long time ago.
Marc:I don't know if it was voluntary.
Marc:It might have been.
Marc:It might be for a good reason.
Marc:I always thought that once, you know, they introduced antidepressants, you know, any anyone on stage complaining in a certain way, sort of like you can't.
Guest:Right?
Guest:That's over.
Guest:Yeah, maybe you ought to get help.
Guest:The neuroses got kicked out of comedy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:There's medicine now.
Guest:But it did.
Guest:It did.
Guest:It did.
Guest:And neuroses is driving comedy.
Guest:No, I think in a lot of ways, things are so much better than they could ever be.
Guest:And I remember saying this years ago to some in video in Montreal.
Guest:And the Montreal, the person I was saying to was really reactionary.
Guest:He got mad at me.
Guest:They said, what's the biggest difference between comedy when you started and the biggest difference now?
Guest:And I said, there's women stars, there's Asian stars, there's black stars, and there's people from the Middle East that are stars.
Guest:And that was not happening in 1982, I assure you.
Guest:And they were like, oh, this is the kind of bullshit we have to stand for from liberal comics like San Francisco, like Greg Proops.
Guest:And I was like, I'm not making it up.
Guest:You can look at the books.
Guest:I mean, Comedy Central got so desperate to have viewers at one point that they put two Jewish women on in a comedy show.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Then they put a black guy on.
Guest:Like, I mean, you know, Comedy Central is like frat city.
Guest:I mean, the idea that they would even break down and do that after which looks in the eye of their college demo of dudes who are drinking Coronas and wearing baseball hats or whatever the fuck they're
Marc:demo was but they seem to be around here's the weird thing is that like all that you're saying is true but but it's it's and and the way show business operates now is that you know none of that matters you know people are building their own you know show business you know oh no that's it hasn't mattered in ages segura who's one of the good ones has built his own show business yeah and and then that all these uh these people women women of color people of color gay people if you can just
Marc:Get your people.
Marc:Then you go and you deal with your people.
Marc:Now, I think that's good.
Marc:I guess we're up against this idea that as any sort of precedent or barometer of actual truth starts to be dismantled, how is that not leaving the entire culture vulnerable to authoritarianism?
Marc:I mean, that's the plan, isn't it?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:The plan is to make objective reality and not a shared thing anymore, that the reality that you're fed is the reality that you believe.
Guest:Like, for instance, you know, to go back to being political, there was some idiotic thing I saw on Twitter today, of course, on ABC News that said a lot of people don't believe as much as they used to that Trump put January 6th together and that it was a seditious coup.
Guest:And it's like, well, what does that mean that a lot of people don't believe as much as they did a few months ago?
Guest:Or yesterday.
Guest:What measure are we using here?
Marc:Whether there's any measure at all, that fucking piece of clickbait will go into the head and then reconfigure out whatever synapses were built around it.
Marc:Nobody knows what happened yesterday.
Marc:Jesus Christ, when Will slapped Chris, they were talking about it like it was the towers falling.
Marc:Like, will we ever recover?
Marc:Yeah, we will.
Marc:The worst that could happen is we'll never have to sit through another Oscars.
Ha ha ha!
Guest:Which I've never understood anyway.
Guest:And the idea that you're supposed to hip up the Oscars and do all these weird things to it.
Marc:Well, if they're going to make it look like a nightclub, get better bouncers.
Right?
Guest:Also, I loved all the dancing and singing.
Guest:But then when they did the tribute to the poor people who passed away.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there was a bunch of people that really deserved a tribute, including Ed Asner, who was skipped over completely, who was actually one of the most decent, wonderful, kind human beings that was ever in show business.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:Got a little dicey with the inside job thing, but outside of that.
Guest:Sometimes, yeah.
Guest:But I mean, they had the dancing and the singing over that.
Guest:And it was like, see...
Guest:This is a moment when you might take just two seconds to calm down and let it be quiet.
Guest:Yeah, or stop trying to get people excited.
Guest:That's the thing.
Guest:It's like, I went to a ball game the other week in Canada.
Marc:You're a big ball game guy.
Guest:Yeah, and I went to the ball game in Canada just to see a game, and it was fun.
Guest:And the music was so loud between every batter that I was with our tour manager.
Guest:I couldn't talk to him.
Guest:I had to wait till the music stopped and then go blah, blah, blah, blah.
Guest:So you're supposed to be talking about stuff at a ballgame, whether it's baseball or your life or whatever you're talking about.
Marc:It's a relaxing afternoon.
Marc:Right?
Guest:And it's just... Like, I didn't come to a baseball game to get hyped out of my mind.
Guest:If I wanted to take crank and get wild, I would do that on my own.
Guest:Like, baseball's supposed to be, at its best, boring, punctuated by moments of excitement.
Guest:It's not a video game.
Guest:The whole world isn't a fucking...
Guest:Like, as much as I love Keanu Reeves or whatever, and I think he's a nice person and a fun star, the John Wick movies to me are like watching one of those video games where people keep getting shot in the eye and stabbed in the face.
Guest:It's amusement park.
Guest:A thousand times in a minute and a thousand times in a minute.
Guest:So then they tart it up by having Laurence Fishburne and Ian McShane and Halle Berry, whatever.
Guest:They throw in every character actor in the world and give it a little bit of gravity and a little bit of art direction and whatnot.
Guest:And then they go right back to shooting people in the eye every two seconds.
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:And you're like, well, this movie could have plot and character, and you could actually... And I feel like that's what they've done with everything, with comedy, with politics, with news.
Guest:There's no... If we don't agree that there's an objective reality, January 6th happened.
Guest:The man who led a violent coup, and he did everything he could to organize it, including getting to the point where they were going to try to order armed troops to gather up the ballots and stop the count.
Guest:And all of this happened.
Guest:It really did not happen.
Guest:I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
Guest:I don't live in a van.
Guest:I don't think John Lennon ordered Bigfoot.
Marc:This is actually the truth, which is fundamentally and spectacularly more interesting than a conspiracy theory.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And whether you believe it or not, or whether ABC News wants to report that less people believe it than they did, alters the facts of it, not one jot.
Guest:He threatened to kill his vice president and have him hung.
Guest:We know that because we know it was reported that he said it.
Guest:There were people there that were going to kill Pelosi.
Guest:Yep.
Guest:And killed Pence.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And Mark Short, who's Pence's chief of staff, said on the day, the day before, that they were ready for action.
Guest:And you know that Pence said on the day when they hustled him into the car that he was worried about the actual Secret Service agents that hustled him into the car.
Guest:And he was like, which ones are you?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Are you the ones who are going to give me the ride, the mafia ride?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Or are you actually going to protect me and do your job?
Guest:Because we know the Secret Service was completely infiltrated by right-wing lunatics.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This isn't Seven Days in May with Kirk... And I went back for a reference that's so fucking old, no one will even get it.
Guest:It's a movie about the government being taken over by the military.
Marc:But so what we're saying is that in retrospect, even with the January 6th commission, the panel investigating this thoroughly, that most of the country has moved on.
Marc:The apathetic people have moved on.
Marc:The people that didn't give a shit to begin with have moved on.
Marc:The right has been spinning this every way they can to sort of take away any teeth out of it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But the truth is the truth.
Marc:But now that is such a small piece of the pie that it'll just become yesterday's news rather quickly.
Marc:It doesn't matter to anybody.
Marc:And all politics, political discourse has just been wrestling promos and trolling.
Marc:An entire...
Marc:Political party that is what they are now.
Guest:They are nothing but the Republican Party It exists to be an autocratic party that will take over the government and do whatever they like with it at the behest of all of their crappy masters Whether they're billionaires or Russia or whoever you want to think is calling the shots on this and they really don't have another goal I mean people like
Guest:Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Bieber and Paul goes are in that gates and all them.
Guest:Yeah, they don't exist as politicians.
Guest:Yeah, they're Trolls.
Guest:Yeah, they're they're not there to enact legislation But then having said that neither are Mitch McConnell and all the big lights of the party the leading leaders of partners.
Guest:Yeah, Kevin McCarthy them kept grass
Guest:Lastly, whoever you want to say, Graham, Cruz, whatnot, they're not there to enact policy either.
Guest:They're there to obstruct policy.
Guest:It's horrible to come back and think that the book that I read in eighth grade, 1984, contained so many profound truths and that Orwell knew everything about fascism.
Guest:having fought against the fascists in Spain and then watched England go from what he perceived at the beginning of the war as an anti-fascist nation to a nation that completely embraced fascism and had identity cards and were stopping people on the street by the late 40s.
Marc:And now there is sort of an element of actual horrible fear to it in that somebody in a militia
Marc:You know, you know, you know, hogtied a fucking judge.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:In what, Wisconsin was it?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And and and executed him.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And he had a list.
Marc:And with all this, you know, the sort of gun violence is that, you know, I had somebody, you know, I'm doing this new joke that like I sort of showcase for everybody to make sure no one else was doing it, even though there was only a handful of people that would even really consider doing it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it's just a bit that, you know, I'm referring, I'm trying to rebrand the pro-choice approach to sort of, you know, to maybe get Christians to look at it differently.
Marc:And I think abortion clinic is, you know, it's medical and it's scary.
Marc:But if we called them angel factories.
Guest:And I...
Marc:And I brought that up on the podcast because I want to make sure that I have it and I'll burn it out because I'm so excited about saying it right But some woman just tweets is sort of I wouldn't do that you remember what happened to Kathy Griffin So now there's this you're supposed to be afraid to write man If you're of you saying your truth is gonna get you banned or put on a no-fly list or someone's gonna physically threaten you
Marc:Well, yeah, but the right specifically, you can get in trouble any way if you do something inappropriate.
Marc:And if you use language that offends people, there will be consequences.
Marc:You can use it.
Marc:Most of the people that get canceled, it's usually for sexual impropriety.
Marc:It's not because they said something.
Guest:Oh, no, it's never because they said something.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, they might get some flack.
Marc:Yeah, and that passes.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Or it makes you more famous.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:And most of us are just sort of like, we just want to do our little thing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:And I think that a lot of what we were talking about in that alt-comedy world, in that alt-comedy space, which is just sort of elevating goofiness and pushing the limits of sketch, you know, it represents some sort of creative freedom, but it is not this idea of comedy speaking truth to anything.
Marc:No.
Marc:And that was always only a few people.
Marc:But the problem is...
Guest:the the other comics the guy they've co-opted that entire model as as you know you got to look to the comics to guide us through no you you do yeah no they never have even the ones that you're referring to didn't guide anyone anywhere no i always think of peter cook's line when someone said can comedy change people's thoughts politically and he said yeah look what the weimar cabaret did in stopping nazi germany well that's the other thing that
Marc:It scares me about how, you know, when you get the truth untethered in that so much of how they're characterizing trans culture and a lapse in morals is how the Nazis characterized what was happening in Germany.
Guest:No question.
Guest:It's absolutely analogous.
Guest:I was saying to Jennifer today, you know, they're starting to demonize, starting.
Guest:They're as bad as they were at any point in American history.
Guest:And that's the other thing that...
Guest:I think our little progressive friends need to understand.
Guest:It's not worse now than it ever was.
Guest:It's the same as it was.
Guest:It's out.
Guest:Yes, it's out.
Guest:It's the same as it was in the 30s.
Guest:It's the same as it was in the late 50s and early 60s.
Guest:It's the same as it was in the late 40s and early 50s when they were chasing people down for being communist.
Guest:It's just the obverse of that.
Guest:Instead of, oh my God, you're on Russia's side, now Russia's the side that's calling those shots, that's pointing fingers at everyone.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You're a groomer because you're a liberal.
Guest:You're a pedophile because you're a liberal.
Guest:You want to, what is it, transfer blood to children and you have a chip in your head and you don't believe that China invented a virus to make everyone, you know, all these.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:They've mainstreamed crazy conspiracy theories, but America has always been a crazy conspiracy theory.
Guest:If you were alive in any other century than this and you weren't a white guy,
Guest:And I think it's a real return to like that awesome 19th century robber baron.
Guest:Like we get to sexually assault anyone we want.
Guest:We get to enslave anyone we want.
Guest:We get to own everything we want.
Guest:We get to threaten everyone with guns all the time and limit everyone else's use of guns.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Which is what the 19th century was and had how many slave owner presidents who absolutely were staunch advocates of that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This is who we are.
Guest:The whole thing about saying.
Guest:It's what it was built on.
Guest:Yeah, this isn't who we are.
Guest:It is who we are.
Guest:It's realizing that objective truth is an important thing and that comics who push the whole, I'm being pushed to the side, how come I can't get my opinion thing, seem to me to be ludicrous.
Guest:I always say on stage, when will white guys be heard from?
Guest:That's what I want to know.
Guest:When finally in America will white guys be given a voice to say what we believe?
Guest:How come we're always shunted to the side?
Guest:The idea that white guys haven't had the mic
Guest:for 450 years is ludicrous and that's why when you're talking about all these guys who you're supposed to bring that libertarian thing and that's supposed to be the cause that we're all supposed to rally behind because they're getting down with the truth and they're really letting you know what's what is absolute and complete complete fucking nonsense but also but challenging everything with with nothing
Marc:Yes.
Marc:So and that to me is the bigger crime of it is that if your point of view when somebody tells you something is like, no, no, dude.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like that.
Marc:All that does is create this pervasive doubt.
Marc:And when you do have valid sort of information, you're like, that sounds crazy to me.
Marc:And so you've got a bunch of guys that couldn't think that well anyways, who think that now they're on the pulse of the secret information and that they're... Look, there's a lot of bullshit out there and there always has been.
Marc:But I think, I guess what I'm coming around to right now is that the one thing we did have was some sort of common sense of country, which is like, that's completely broken.
Marc:I feel like that the tribalization of standup, which is sort of happening...
Marc:Obviously, all of us can get our little audiences and we can do what we want to do.
Marc:We all have our little kingdoms and duchies.
Marc:Something very weird and servicing of this current authoritarian momentum is happening.
Guest:Well, and this will also make me sound like the most parochial, self-absorbed comic that I've always been.
Guest:But you said things.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I've always tried to have some content in my act.
Guest:And the thing is, I found, like, I thought after two years of being trapped in a home, like everyone else, and all the comics were too, mostly, although as pointed out to me by several people, COVID really only existed on the West Coast.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And in New York.
Guest:COVID didn't exist in the Midwest or in Texas or anywhere else because they didn't allow it to exist.
Guest:Florida, definitely not in Florida.
Guest:Like I was in Winnipeg of all places a couple of days ago and it's on the Prairie and it's a lovely place and the people are really nice.
Guest:a little bit it's a little that weather's a little rough fun when they told us that last winter there were six foot tall snow banks on the side of the road and that it was the worst winter they'd ever had yeah well never mind keep on electing conservatives because they're gonna really help you out here yeah the last premier they had in Manitoba had to resign and
Guest:He took off and they put in another conservative PM.
Guest:His name was Pallister.
Guest:He resigned and he... Manitoba, which has no people, had the second highest COVID rate in all of Canada.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The people that they did have.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so...
Guest:And he said the biggest moment of his life, I'm only using this illustratively, that put him on the road to politics and his point of view, was that he met a guy and the guy didn't have a job and was on government assistance.
Guest:And the guy said, well, what are you going to do for me?
Guest:And he went, I'm going to kick your ass and make you go to work.
Guest:And it's like, that is the oldest, saddest, most bullshit story.
Guest:One, it never happened.
Guest:Two, if it did happen, who cares?
Guest:And three, stop using that.
Guest:It's like saying the good guy with the gun.
Guest:We have all these...
Guest:lies that keep floating around that people will not stop giving air time to.
Guest:And, you know, the general media that we're not on, and this is why I always loved the freedom of podcasts and having our own Dutchie, is like what you said years ago with Montreal, I don't need you anymore.
Guest:The mainstream media, whatever.
Guest:Show business.
Guest:And it is, yeah.
Guest:They're not run by people who are thinking, I really need to serve the public good.
Guest:As much as an oil company or an arms company or anything, profit and growth.
Guest:Profit and growth are driving the narrative.
Marc:Even the ones that were there to serve the public good, like PBS or better yet, like local access.
Marc:That's what it looks like when you give the...
Guest:It totally does.
Guest:There's a guy with a fruit basket on his head.
Marc:It's beautiful, but, you know, yeah.
Guest:Well, you know, after two years of watching the George Floyd case and watching police for what they are, which is an extension of the slave patrols of the 19th century, and I've been doing a joke for years that's never got a laugh, but I keep doing it because I like it.
Guest:And I'll go, about guns.
Guest:And I've been talking about guns since the 90s.
Guest:I've been talking about abortions.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:All these topics since I didn't really need to talk about them.
Guest:And then now, of course, oh my God, they're so salient.
Guest:And the joke was men invented guns to shoot people they're afraid of and to have the police shoot the poor at the behest of the rich.
Guest:And crowds always go, oh.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's like, I know it's not a particularly funny joke.
Guest:I could have rephrased it.
Guest:Or as Jennifer always says, when you're trying to sell that kind of fucking crank, do a funny voice.
Marc:Yeah, do a funny voice or give one more tag.
Guest:Yeah, one more tag.
Guest:But it's the truth.
Guest:The police exist kind of to keep everybody down.
Guest:And now we've seen what they really want, which is to be an independent entity that doesn't answer to anyone at any point.
Guest:And not just do they don't answer to people, they specifically don't answer to the public that they're entrusted to serve.
Guest:That is really in their craw right now.
Guest:They don't want to help the public because
Guest:They don't perceive the public as someone that needs helping.
Guest:They perceive them as someone who's trying to keep them from doing what they need to do.
Guest:Whatever that is.
Guest:Which is whatever that is, right?
Guest:And, you know, like people are going to get on me and go like, oh, my God, you're blaming the police for everything.
Guest:I'm not blaming the police for everything.
Guest:The police are another cog in the gigantic wheel that's been rolling for a million years.
Guest:The country was built this way.
Guest:The country was never built to be a fair democracy.
Guest:The country was determined to not be.
Guest:But what has happened, as you said, was after Obama.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The idea of a black president.
Guest:And then literally after Biden, who, by the way, got more votes than anyone ever got, except maybe Obama.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then Hillary got the second most votes.
Guest:So the idea that we're all Nazis is ludicrous.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And this is, by the way, the only the third of the people that vote.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it was 80 million.
Guest:Everybody.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That really didn't want a Nazi in the White House.
Guest:So a black president followed by a black woman vice president.
Guest:That.
Guest:is progress.
Guest:That is identifiable, quantitative, measurable progress.
Guest:The people that are like, how come they're not doing more for me?
Guest:How come my student loan isn't?
Guest:Why is he so sleepy?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How come everything in the world didn't get fixed in two seconds?
Guest:Well, you're talking about
Guest:A quarter of the presidents of the United States owned other human beings.
Guest:So to shake that takes a little bit longer than one black president who was really articulate, who I'm almost certain was threatened.
Guest:His life was threatened every single day, maybe 20 times a day of his administration.
Guest:Why didn't Michelle Obama want to run for office?
Guest:I don't get it.
Guest:Maybe she didn't want to be threatened every second of the goddamn day.
Marc:They probably had to have an entire office just fielding the validity of threats.
Guest:Had to.
Guest:The validity of threats, meaning the overwhelming wash of threats.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:10% of them maybe were or whatever percentage.
Marc:We got to be worried about this one.
Marc:Look into this one.
Marc:But that's the other obstacle to what we're talking about as well is the fear of being terrorized.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Which is also an authoritarian tool that seems to be happening reflexively because so many of these young men who have nothing to show for themselves and are furious but really good at computers have been co-opted.
Marc:to sort of troll ideologically and misogynistically and keep the terror fucking going.
Guest:Yep.
Guest:And terror is a giant tool.
Guest:It's not a group of guys who are Muslims plotting in a room somewhere.
Guest:We've managed to cast terror 20 years ago as this very specific item.
Guest:And, you know, not to go through all the seven million states of terror, but state-sponsored terror is a giant thing, but also white supremacist terror.
Guest:is probably the biggest threat and has been ever always in this history of the country.
Guest:There really wasn't another threat that was ever bigger than white supremacist terror.
Guest:And if you can go to Weaver Ridge, whatever, I think you'll find the Civil War was basically white supremacist terror.
Guest:They didn't want the country to have
Guest:You know, any kind of quality whatsoever.
Guest:And they were willing to burn the place to the ground.
Guest:And then after Reconstruction, when they went back to it, willing to burn it to the ground again, again.
Guest:And like I say, by the 60s, when I was little and Lyndon Johnson, who I think and Biden and Obama, of course, the most significant presidents of our lifetime, Obama was hamstrung.
Guest:because he couldn't do everything that he wanted to do.
Guest:And if he had done, the media would have shit on it immediately and the Republicans would have stuffed him.
Guest:For instance, when we knew that Trump was being supported by the Russians, Obama went to McConnell and said, I'd like to talk about this to the public.
Guest:And McConnell said, if you do, I'll politicize this and make it seem like you're being mean to me.
Guest:Whatever civil rights gains there were in the mid-60s, which took forever to get to, and required...
Guest:an asshole strongman like Johnson to ram through, let's be honest.
Guest:He had the Senate, he had the Congress, he had the courts at that point.
Guest:For a brief shining moment, the court was actually thinking about everybody.
Guest:So when everybody goes, oh my God, I can't believe the court's so right-wing, the court was never not right-wing.
Guest:The idea that there are three women on it and that there's going to be a black woman, a Jew, and a Latin woman on the court is...
Guest:It's unbelievably cool.
Guest:I don't want people to look at the dark side of everything.
Guest:I refuse to be completely gloomy about everything all the time.
Marc:You're, unlike Obama, an incrementalist.
Guest:I'm absolutely an incrementalist, and I never sell gloom.
Guest:On my podcast, I've never sold it.
Guest:Things are as shit as they can be, obviously.
Guest:I don't sell gloom.
Guest:I sell dread.
Guest:Well, obviously, Mark, I have known you for far too long.
Guest:Dread and the fear of what could be going on.
Guest:But again, that's a Jewish point of view.
Guest:It's not so much a matter of everything that's going right.
Guest:It's what could fucking happen.
Guest:Yeah, the big but.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I like to look at the they put a black woman on the Supreme Court.
Guest:That wasn't going to happen when I was little.
Guest:There's a black woman vice president.
Guest:That wasn't going to happen when I was little.
Guest:We've had a black president for eight years who not only was articulate, intelligent, won a Nobel Prize and was wildly popular.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Won two overwhelming victories.
Guest:Doesn't that mean anything to anyone?
Guest:Everybody stop with the fucking look at the backlash.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The backlash was what happened after, you know, the 60s when all of a sudden the absolute selfishness and centering.
Guest:Well, I was watching the Beatles movie on the plane the other day, Hard Day's Night.
Guest:And there's a hilarious scene.
Guest:If you've seen, I don't know if you're younger listeners.
Guest:hard days night is hilarious right when the beatles were beetle mania yeah so now they're gigantic yeah and so it's literally almost a it's a comedy movie and it was written but it's a literally kind of a mockumentary about what their lives were like over the course of a couple days they're being chased from gig to gig they don't have a moment of themselves the media misconstrues everything they say yeah they're misunderstood by everybody in the movie all they want to do is have fun and be themselves yeah and they can't because
Guest:Oh, my God, they've got everyone's all over.
Guest:There's a deadline and there's a thing and a thing and a thing.
Guest:And George wanders into an advertising thing in the TV studio.
Guest:And there's a sexy girl there and they mistake him for a teenager and they bring him into the room.
Guest:And the ad guy goes, I'd like your opinion on some things.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he doesn't know he's a beetle.
Guest:And the guy behind him actually says, which I'd never noticed in the movie before mouths to him.
Guest:That's George Harrison.
Guest:Like that.
Guest:And the guy ignores that completely.
Guest:Shows him a bunch of shirts, talks about this girl they've got on TV.
Guest:And she goes, he's a trendsetter.
Guest:And George goes, she's a drag.
Guest:She's a well-known drag.
Guest:And he goes, listen, Ducky, I'll tell you what's what.
Guest:The new thing is to care passionately and be right wing.
Guest:And that's a joke from 1964.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Now, is it not the thing is to be passionate, care passionately and be right-wing?
Guest:They would never characterize it that way.
Guest:But like right-wing people think they're really fighting the power.
Guest:Like somehow there's this ultimate other power that's keeping them down.
Guest:The government power.
Guest:Again, another code word for Jews, George Soros.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:Who I've met, who escaped the Nazis, by the way.
Guest:Not that I met him and were buddies or anything.
Guest:He didn't write me after or anything.
Guest:I sent him a mezuzah.
Guest:Did he?
Guest:No.
Guest:But it's never not been there.
Guest:No, yeah, obviously.
Guest:And I just feel like everything goes in a big cycle.
Guest:Obama being elected was- Not the environment.
Guest:No, the environment is headed for absolute screeching.
Guest:But as Jennifer said to me last night, if you remember that awesome Carlin routine,
Guest:Where he talked about plastic bags and he goes, maybe we're a little ego mad as I'm paraphrasing.
Guest:We're we as humans have this gigantic focus on ourselves.
Guest:Maybe we were sent here to create plastic bags.
Guest:So the paradigm wasn't people.
Guest:The paradigm was people with plastic bags.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the plastic bags are meant to be part of this whole... And she's like, maybe the whole global warming thing was like, the Earth and the universe didn't give a shit whether we were here or not.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:The dinosaurs were here way longer than we were, and they got wiped out repeatedly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And no one goes, oh, shit.
Guest:Yeah, how'd that happen?
Guest:I feel bad.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And no one's going to mourn us when we're gone.
Guest:I mean, maybe there'll be a movie about it on planet Xantar or whatever.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:On planet Bezos.
Yeah.
Guest:Our egos.
Guest:But I mean, you know, Biden got elected and kind of a landslide.
Guest:Let's be honest.
Guest:The media would never call it that.
Guest:Having a black woman vice president is the biggest thing in American history.
Guest:It really is.
Guest:I mean, objectively.
Marc:And it's like it's completely marginalized by the media, by everybody.
Guest:And everybody, oh, she does this, she does that.
Guest:She smiles too much.
Guest:She laughs too much.
Guest:She's too smart.
Guest:She's too pretty.
Guest:Whatever the problem is, it literally is the biggest moment you could possibly think of.
Guest:No woman's ever been in the executive office ever in 250 years.
Guest:And there's never been a woman there.
Guest:And for it to be a black woman from San Francisco, who was the...
Marc:Should be nothing but celebrated in a way, but it's been completely just sort of shot upon by both sides.
Guest:Yeah, by both.
Guest:And that to me, like, so there's some of the objective reality that and I know everyone's going to come in like, well, Greg, you like her, but I don't like her because she was a cop.
Guest:She wasn't a cop.
Marc:She was an attorney, a district attorney and all of a sudden these people that were, you know, once placated by by ceremony are obsessed with nuance and none of it's positive.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:And if you are upset with police, which I am, look at the law breaking that went on for four years before.
Guest:If there was anything you really required of the government now, it would be maybe to enforce some laws to keep, oh, I don't know, Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon.
Marc:Turns out norms, handshakes don't hold.
Guest:Yeah, right?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:We built the government so that it was a gentleman's agreement that they wouldn't do these things.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:So anyways, I think what we have figured out is that- I was really glad you brought up the comedy because I was afraid it was going to go that way, thinking about before I came over, and then you did go that way, and I'm really appreciative that you did, Mark, because I know we both have a really strong opinion about the state of comedy because it really does-
Guest:You and I care about comedy.
Guest:And we care about having a voice in comedy.
Guest:And to see it get co-opted and to be this reactive thing that's a male thing and the victimization that comes with being a man, which is disgusting to me,
Guest:and doesn't promote comedy at all.
Guest:And I'm not saying that all the comics of the past were better or any of that bullshit.
Guest:I think that there's been massive improvement.
Guest:You go to a club now, like I tried to not work with anyone but women for the last three or four years in clubs.
Guest:And I said to my management, I don't want two guys on the bill with me talking about pornography for half an hour before I get up.
Guest:I want women.
Guest:And it almost always worked.
Guest:And then still clubs, still clubs would go in a big city.
Guest:We couldn't find two women for the bill this week.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like there's not any women in every big city.
Marc:Well, yeah.
Marc:And I also think what we're talking about, too, and in some ways is positive, is that, you know, with a multitude of voices, you know, it creates.
Marc:you know, so many different points of view.
Marc:What I'm taking from this is that there is amazing things happening and that, you know, not that they're going to save us, but let's not disregard that.
Guest:I wouldn't at all.
Guest:I would say the thing to do is fight, fight, fight.
Guest:Not every moment you have to take a breath and obviously I get depressed as anyone else.
Guest:I have enough Semitic heritage to understand that the depression is the normal state of mankind.
Guest:But unless you're going to get up and do something, whining about shit
Guest:on social media is not really the most constructive.
Marc:This is the culture of yammering and grievance.
Guest:And I do it as much as anyone else, but I also try to organize like, I take my little who's lying group and we're all right guys and gals for the most part.
Guest:And we do little benefits for different states.
Guest:We're doing one on the 12th for Michigan, the Democratic Party.
Guest:And we did one a month ago for Wisconsin.
Guest:And then I do like sister district, which is the down ballot things with a bunch of comics.
Guest:I did one a couple months ago with Hofstadter and Glebe.
Guest:And like,
Guest:As a comic, what can you do?
Guest:I can't... It's annoying for comics to get up and proselytize, but to do a comedy benefit, it seems to me a constructive way to kind of stem the tide of fascism and also get people who are like, we're not going to talk about politics for an hour.
Guest:We're going to jerk around and sometimes talk about it.
Guest:There'll be politicians on the show, and then they'll have to be fun too, and we can talk about... But I mean...
Guest:You've got to kind of feed people, you know, candy syrup.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And also do that.
Marc:And just raise some sort of interest.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Everyone gets sort of, you know, there's a tsunami of fucking bullshit that comes out of the thing in your hand that kind of annihilates anyone's sense of what taking real action is.
Marc:You know, myself.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:voting is real action it really is i did i did it yeah and i do it but uh but so funny the difference between me and you during the pandemic is when when when during the downtime like i felt a sort of uh relaxation like you know no one was doing comedy and and i realized like you know like i don't miss it and then there's the next thought was like maybe i'm all better
Guest:Yeah, that's true.
Guest:I mean, the thing I loved was spending a load of time with my wife.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because, I mean, we do anyway, but I mean, I've been on the road for 125 years and that's the nature of a relationship.
Guest:She knew it going in.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How is she?
Guest:She's quite well, thank you.
Guest:She says hi, by the way.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:I didn't want her to sit outside, so I would have brought her back.
Guest:And I said, I bet Mark wouldn't have made you sit outside.
Marc:He would have let you be in the studio.
Marc:You say hi back.
Guest:Yeah, I will.
Guest:No, Jennifer asked for you, and by the way, so did Lee, my manager.
Guest:Oh, how's that guy doing?
Guest:Yeah, he's quite well.
Guest:One of the real mensches in- Old school Brillstein Grey.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:What was his company called?
Guest:I can't remember.
Guest:Now his new one is- Wasn't he at Brillstein Grey?
Guest:Yeah, he was at Brillstein for ages and ages.
Guest:And then he was someplace before that.
Guest:I can't remember where he was before.
Guest:I hooked up with him like, oh my God, like 2006.
Guest:So we've been together a long time.
Guest:But he's an honest guy, which is really like Diogenes.
Guest:You can search the world with a lamp looking for a manager in show business that literally won't lie to you.
Guest:I mean, not that he hasn't, of course, to save my feelings, but that's just politics, isn't it?
Guest:And yeah, like I didn't,
Guest:I enjoyed spending time with my wife during it, and I did a bunch of Zoom shows.
Guest:Wow, I didn't do any of those.
Guest:Yeah, and then, but of course, once we got back on the road, then like... Feels good, right?
Guest:One, and two, you know,
Guest:You know when you're in your 30s, you're like, it's all gonna last forever and all this.
Guest:And I'm not getting into a philosophical thing here, but I really try to slow time down a little bit when I'm on stage now.
Guest:At least when the show's over and they're applauding, and now I'm in a group, so we sing and we dance.
Guest:There's no politics.
Guest:There's some light-ass politics.
Guest:In the riffs.
Guest:Yeah, because it's improv.
Guest:You can't stop the show and go,
Guest:Fascism needs to be destroyed because that's not funny in an improv show.
Guest:Instead, you're going to go, my knob is going inside you like a donut or whatever.
Guest:And those are the hilarious.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Because you know how improv is.
Guest:It's so lifting and eliminating.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:As British people say, why not prepare for something funny?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so at the end of the show, we sing and we dance and we lay on top of each other.
Guest:We literally lay on top of each other and do vaudeville.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And there's something freeing in that, kind of like playing for kids.
Guest:Like when I was on a kid's show for a couple years, people were like, didn't it feel like weird to be in a kid's show?
Guest:No, because we performed in front of a live audience for kids, and five-year-olds don't bullshit you.
Guest:Five-year-olds don't go, listen, Greg, that was really terrific, really great point of view, really interesting stuff.
Guest:Kids go, boo, you suck.
Guest:And then I remember we'd do like a physical gag on the show and kids would go, oh my God!
Guest:And you'd be like, I got you.
Guest:You're six and I got you.
Guest:I made you laugh by falling over.
Guest:And I feel like that's a, like when we were little and you'd see the Stooges are.
Marc:And you can do that with grownups, I'm sure.
Marc:Yes!
Guest:So when we do the improv show, when we take our bow at the end and sometimes they stand and it's really nice, I try to be in the moment and think, this is what we're doing.
Guest:Everything in comedy isn't to elevate discourse to the highest level.
Guest:Clowning is really important too because people, and having said that, the horrible point I was gonna make about during the preg, all these people went through the greatest social upheaval of our lifetime.
Guest:Mass death and a complete reckoning about race again for the billionth time in America.
Guest:And they came out of it talking about their careers.
Guest:People came back to stand-up, went right back to the same crappy shit that they were doing two years before.
Guest:And to me, I was like, really?
Guest:That was where we got with this?
Guest:Then, of course, I made an album, and there's an epic bit about ZZ Top on it, which I played for my producer and Jennifer, and they laughed at it.
Guest:And then I'm like, all right, it can go on the album, because I thought I'm being the most self-indulgent piece of shit that ever walked the face of the earth.
Marc:But I think there was a trauma pocket, too, that there still is this...
Marc:sense culturally i don't think anyone it's going to take a long time to reckon with that that there is a ptsd to it all oh and that that you know to be you're terrified that you're going to die from an airborne thing that there's no cure for for over a year day to day i mean it's you know but anyways it was good talking to you yeah it was really nice to be on thank you for having me on man i really appreciate it we haven't talked in a long time i know i love you buddy me too buddy i love you
Marc:Here's a little guitar, just another take on the same old shit.
Marc:Enjoy!
guitar solo
Guest:guitar solo
Guest:guitar solo
Marc:Boomer lives.
Marc:Monkey and La Fonda.
Marc:Cat angels everywhere.