Episode 138 - Scott Carter

Episode 138 • Released January 5, 2011 • Speakers detected

00:00:00Guest:Lock the gates!

00:00:07Marc:Are we doing this?

00:00:08Marc:Really?

00:00:08Marc:Wait for it.

00:00:09Marc:Are we doing this?

00:00:10Marc:Wait for it.

00:00:12Marc:Pow!

00:00:12Marc:What the fuck?

00:00:14Marc:And it's also, eh, what the fuck?

00:00:16Marc:What's wrong with me?

00:00:17Marc:It's time for WTF!

00:00:19Guest:What the fuck?

00:00:20Guest:With Mark Marron.

00:00:24Marc:Okay, let's do this.

00:00:25Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?

00:00:26Marc:What the fuck buddies?

00:00:27Marc:What the fucking ears?

00:00:28Marc:What the fucking knots?

00:00:30Marc:What the fuck nicks?

00:00:32Marc:All of yous.

00:00:33Marc:How's it going?

00:00:34Marc:As you can tell, I'm a little under the weather.

00:00:36Marc:Maybe you can hear it in my voice.

00:00:37Marc:I'd like to think that you can't tell, but I know it is my voice, and it is what you know me with and as, and it's probably a little compromised because I got fucking sick.

00:00:48Marc:I got a little sick.

00:00:49Marc:I'm not happy about it.

00:00:51Marc:I tried to fight it off.

00:00:52Marc:I didn't use echinacea.

00:00:54Marc:I used my oregano oil.

00:00:56Marc:I used my other vitamins.

00:00:58Marc:I did some elderberry shit.

00:01:00Marc:I drank a lot of liquids, and I'm still sick.

00:01:04Marc:Happens.

00:01:05Marc:I'm not going to freak out about it because I'm prone to freak out about shit.

00:01:08Marc:Before I forget, let's do a couple of things here at the top of the show that we don't usually do.

00:01:13Marc:On today's show, the executive producer of Real Time with Bill Maher, Scott Carter, is on.

00:01:18Marc:And I'll explain to you a little bit why he's on.

00:01:22Marc:Obviously, he's got a tremendous job in show business.

00:01:25Marc:It's a smart show.

00:01:27Marc:It's a great show.

00:01:27Marc:It's one of the few shows that does what it does.

00:01:30Marc:Bill's great.

00:01:31Marc:But it's a weird sort of story.

00:01:33Marc:I have a little bit of history with him.

00:01:34Marc:Not a lot, but I've known him a bit over the last 20 years.

00:01:38Marc:Anyway, Scott Carter will be here in a second.

00:01:40Marc:Secondly, I will be at Helium Comedy Club in Philadelphia, PA, next week.

00:01:46Marc:That is January 12th through the 15th.

00:01:51Marc:Exactly.

00:01:53Marc:In Philly.

00:01:54Marc:That's heliumcomedy.com.

00:01:56Marc:Come out.

00:01:57Marc:I like that club.

00:01:58Marc:It's a nice place.

00:01:59Marc:It's a nice part of town.

00:02:00Marc:If you're anywhere near Philly, I encourage you to come.

00:02:03Marc:Now let's get on with some shit.

00:02:04Marc:God damn it.

00:02:06Marc:I hate fucking being sick.

00:02:07Marc:Look, I don't want to freak people out or go into the Sacramento shows.

00:02:11Marc:I'll be fine.

00:02:12Marc:I might be a little sweaty, but sometimes when I'm sick, it's a better show.

00:02:15Marc:Because when you're as panicky and as manic and as festering as I am, sometimes being sick is the only time you actually get to relax.

00:02:25Marc:Now, just had a plumber over.

00:02:26Marc:Not that you give a shit.

00:02:28Marc:Why is it that every time I have to have somebody come over, exterminator or plumber, the electrician, the Bulgarian guys...

00:02:34Marc:that I'm consumed with this horrendous distrust that I'm going to be fucked.

00:02:38Marc:I'm going to be raped.

00:02:39Marc:They're going to take all my money.

00:02:41Marc:It's never even really happened to me.

00:02:43Marc:I use a handyman, usually Ernie, who's great, reasonable.

00:02:48Marc:He's been working for me for years, but I've grown to believe because of what he tells me that plumbing scares him and that I got to get a professional.

00:02:54Marc:But then you always think you're going to get fucked.

00:02:56Marc:And I got to call three or four friends to ask for their plumbers.

00:02:59Marc:And then their guys couldn't come.

00:03:00Marc:So I had to go right to the web and just find a guy in the neighborhood.

00:03:04Marc:turned out to be a great guy jb plumbing right here in highland park jose came over got under the house wasn't a big deal and and i didn't feel ripped off why do we got to feel ripped off you know if we lived in a communist country it wouldn't be like that you know why because we'd all be plumbers it'd just be a bunch of plumbers or something like that but anyways he did a great job it was pleasant i know he's down the street no big deal i don't even get into the problem let's get into my problems or not even my problem scott carter's on

00:03:33Marc:Now, I don't know who you are sitting there listening to me.

00:03:37Marc:I don't know who you think you are.

00:03:40Marc:But there was a time in my life where, you know, I went to college.

00:03:44Marc:I did an English major.

00:03:45Marc:I studied film.

00:03:47Marc:I fancied myself an intellectual.

00:03:49Marc:I used to drop a lot of names, drop a lot of movie titles, drop a lot of things like mise-en-scene or semiotics or...

00:03:59Marc:Uh, montage, uh, you know, I did the reading, but it's, I realized after a certain point that I was full of shit.

00:04:09Marc:Cause if you ever meet a real intellectual, they're usually, you know, have a singular focus.

00:04:13Marc:There are broad spectrum intellectuals, Christopher Hitchens.

00:04:16Marc:uh sad about what's happening to him uh people like my friend uh chris hedges who's there are plenty of broad cultural uh critics and intellectuals but intellectuals are pretty focused and they really know their shit so in other words i was never a true intellectual though i decided that i was and it was very irritating it was irritating to people who knew me and it was irritating to me and then at some point i realized

00:04:42Marc:That the greatest gift a person has in this world, one of them, is really three words.

00:04:50Marc:And it's really easy to say.

00:04:52Marc:And you would be surprised at how much you learn when you say these magic three words.

00:04:58Marc:I'm going to share them with you.

00:04:59Marc:You might want to write them down.

00:05:01Marc:Okay?

00:05:01Marc:There's no shame in them.

00:05:03Marc:And it's the only way you will learn anything in this fucking lifetime.

00:05:06Marc:You ready?

00:05:07Okay.

00:05:07Marc:If someone asks you a question or brings something up and this is your honest response, don't hide it.

00:05:14Marc:Just say, I don't know.

00:05:17Marc:I don't know.

00:05:19Marc:And then maybe you'll be told.

00:05:21Marc:The worst that could happen is someone will go, you don't fucking know.

00:05:24Marc:What are you, a fucking idiot?

00:05:25Marc:Look at the idiot.

00:05:26Marc:He doesn't know.

00:05:27Marc:But fuck those people.

00:05:28Marc:You shouldn't be talking to them anyways.

00:05:29Marc:I don't know.

00:05:31Marc:When I learned how to say that, it was one of the greatest, most freeing moments in my life.

00:05:37Marc:There's no shame in it.

00:05:38Marc:I don't fucking know.

00:05:39Marc:You can say it like that.

00:05:41Marc:Or you can say, fuck you.

00:05:42Marc:I don't know.

00:05:43Marc:But I don't know is a perfectly reasonable place to be.

00:05:46Marc:And then you don't have to lie.

00:05:47Marc:You don't have to bullshit.

00:05:48Marc:You don't have to pretend you know.

00:05:50Marc:Now, why am I talking about this?

00:05:51Marc:Why?

00:05:52Marc:Because I used to prejudge my guest, Scott Carter, a bit because he sort of came across as a lofty guy, a thinker, an intellectual type.

00:06:00Marc:And I always felt that when I did the old politically incorrect show.

00:06:03Marc:And by the way, I haven't been on the new show.

00:06:05Marc:But, you know, that's something.

00:06:06Marc:You know what?

00:06:07Marc:Maybe I'll talk to him about it.

00:06:08Marc:But.

00:06:10Marc:I always thought that he was a little bit rary, a little bit the the rarefied air, a bit of an intellectual of sorts.

00:06:17Marc:And I found it kind of intimidating because I did the old politically incorrect and I would run into him.

00:06:21Marc:And then the miracle happened.

00:06:23Marc:And this happens a lot is that I was at the comic strip in New York City.

00:06:28Marc:And not unlike many comedy clubs in the country, they have all these pictures of all the comics that have come through there.

00:06:33Marc:And they're just they wall the place.

00:06:35Marc:It's actually sort of a gallery of neediness.

00:06:38Marc:Just if you walk into a comedy club and you see that wall of pictures, it's just a whole lot of, you know, broken relationships with parents, a lot of neediness, a lot of desperation, just thinly veiled by a smile or a goofy expression.

00:06:54Marc:It's a little draining sometimes, depending on how many pictures they have.

00:06:56Marc:But nonetheless, I was at the comic strip and I saw an old picture of Scott Carter as a comedian.

00:07:01Marc:And at that time, I'd not realized that Scott Carter had been a comedian.

00:07:05Marc:And my first thought was like, how the hell did he do comedy with with his angle with that sort of because I mean, this is going back probably to the late 70s.

00:07:14Marc:And that made me sort of like him better.

00:07:16Marc:I used to happen at the comedy store all the time.

00:07:18Marc:When I saw Craig T. Nelson's picture on the wall at the comedy store, I'm like that fucking guy.

00:07:22Marc:He was a comedian.

00:07:23Marc:It gives me more respect for people.

00:07:26Marc:Who knew?

00:07:26Marc:Is there more that I really want to talk about?

00:07:31Marc:I don't know.

00:07:34Marc:I would like to talk about this.

00:07:37Marc:I got an email.

00:07:38Marc:Now, I've never heard more about meditation in my life.

00:07:42Marc:I've never been told by more people to meditate in my life.

00:07:46Marc:It's coming at me from all directions.

00:07:47Marc:You heard the Bobby Lee episode.

00:07:49Marc:Everyone's telling me to meditate.

00:07:50Marc:The therapist is telling me to meditate.

00:07:53Marc:And my friend's wife is like, you got to meditate.

00:07:56Marc:Why the hell can't I just do it?

00:07:57Marc:What am I afraid of?

00:07:57Marc:I can't sit down for 10 minutes and shut my fucking hole and just breathe.

00:08:03Marc:But this guy sent me an email and I think he might have gotten through.

00:08:06Marc:I never received an email that was sort of tough loving me into something so supposedly serene.

00:08:13Marc:Subject line, disarming the bomb.

00:08:16Marc:Hey, Mark, I have understood a good bit on how to get happy.

00:08:20Marc:Real happiness comes from learning how to be down with the void.

00:08:23Marc:Does he know my dad?

00:08:26Marc:Real happiness, enjoyment that is not contingent upon some shit that you're going to find and claim in the world.

00:08:31Marc:You don't have to hunt a boar with a pocket knife to learn this, but removing yourself from the noise is necessary.

00:08:37Marc:Natural wind and water is the opposite of noise.

00:08:41Marc:You tried to get an agreement to meditate with Judd Apatow, but fuck him.

00:08:45Marc:Other people are totally useless when doing this.

00:08:47Marc:And fuck the word meditate.

00:08:49Marc:You can just say the word meditate and some zombies will have a visceral brain-eating reaction to it.

00:08:54Marc:Somehow the word got loaded with all kinds of baggage.

00:08:58Marc:Meditate, also known as sitting silently and observing yourself think, I like calling it stopping.

00:09:05Marc:Now do it or else be your dad.

00:09:08Marc:You still want out or are you resigned to that fate?

00:09:12Marc:Holy shit.

00:09:13Marc:Sounds like my first wife.

00:09:15Marc:The important thing in this mental exercise is not to have your awareness swept away by the thoughts that pop into your mind.

00:09:21Marc:You look in on them, the habitual impulses and words, things you should do soon, acknowledge them and let them be.

00:09:28Marc:When you catch the same thought twice, notice it.

00:09:30Marc:Keep count when you really can't keep some shit from your attention.

00:09:35Marc:If you catch yourself lost in a string of thoughts whose beginnings you have no memory of, use your anger.

00:09:40Marc:You come swinging chimp, shut the fuck up.

00:09:43Marc:That's all caps.

00:09:44Marc:Back to the breath.

00:09:46Marc:The sensation of deep diaphragm stretch.

00:09:49Marc:Someday, you may get extended periods of total silence in your mind's ear.

00:09:53Marc:If you can sit silently and observe your breath or some natural form for just five minutes without a single piece of the cheap, flawed language showing up in your head, you're some kind of Zen master.

00:10:02Marc:And then you may find yourself enjoying it.

00:10:04Marc:Instead of looking forward to nicotine and ice cream, you look forward to the ten minutes you get to stop.

00:10:09Marc:Like a nap, but you don't let the mind wander.

00:10:12Marc:Before and after sleep, it is an excellent time to stop.

00:10:15Marc:I love it when shit is known to be, at the very least, a number of eons old.

00:10:21Marc:Are you ready for more Zen?

00:10:23Marc:And then he put this fucking poem.

00:10:25Marc:These things always fuck me up.

00:10:27Marc:Buddhist poems, Zen poems.

00:10:28Marc:It's enlightenment just on the other side of, God damn it, I want to kill myself.

00:10:34Marc:Here's the Zen poem.

00:10:36Marc:You are already dead and you will forever be.

00:10:38Marc:To love something is to never tire of it.

00:10:42Marc:Act for the love of action itself and not its desired fruits.

00:10:45Marc:It is desire.

00:10:46Marc:It is wrath.

00:10:47Marc:Begotten by the quality of mobility.

00:10:49Marc:It is all consuming.

00:10:51Marc:It is all polluting.

00:10:52Marc:Know this as your enemy here on earth.

00:10:54Marc:It is desire.

00:10:55Marc:It is passion.

00:10:55Marc:Begotten by the quality of patience.

00:10:57Marc:It is all endearing.

00:10:59Marc:It is all enduring.

00:11:00Marc:Know this as your ally here on earth.

00:11:03Marc:And then he just wrote, good luck with the bomb.

00:11:05Marc:It's about time for me to get lost in the Andes.

00:11:07Marc:That's from Sam.

00:11:08Marc:Now, what the fuck is this line?

00:11:10Marc:It is desire.

00:11:11Marc:It is wrath begotten by the quality of mobility.

00:11:14Marc:It is all consuming.

00:11:15Marc:It is all polluting.

00:11:16Marc:Know this as your enemy here on earth.

00:11:19Marc:I have no fucking idea what that means.

00:11:21Marc:I do not feel at peace with anything right now.

00:11:24Marc:I have to meditate just to get that goddamn email out of my head, bullying me around to meditate.

00:11:31Marc:Jesus, breathe.

00:11:35Guest:Okay, breathe.

00:11:41Okay.

00:11:49Marc:So my guest in the Cat Ranch garage right now, Scott Carter, who is the, I guess you are the executive producer of Real Time with Bill Maher, was also the executive producer of Politically Incorrect.

00:12:02Marc:That's right.

00:12:03Marc:Also a monologist and stand-up comedian that people may not know that about you.

00:12:07Marc:I'm sure that people don't know you in general.

00:12:10Guest:I don't think so.

00:12:11Guest:Even my own family is completely unaware of me.

00:12:14Marc:I looked for a wiki page.

00:12:16Marc:I couldn't find a wiki page for Scott Carter.

00:12:18Guest:How can you not have a wiki page?

00:12:20Guest:I know.

00:12:20Guest:I'm only now thinking that I should do that.

00:12:23Guest:I only got active on Facebook very recently.

00:12:26Marc:But wiki page is something other people do.

00:12:28Marc:They should.

00:12:29Marc:Oh, I see.

00:12:30Guest:Yeah, you should have a wiki page.

00:12:31Guest:Yeah, you would have thought that someone who works on a staff for me might have done it as a way of ingratiating themselves to me.

00:12:38Guest:But no, that has not happened yet.

00:12:39Marc:Well, I'm sorry to hear that, Scott.

00:12:40Marc:Now, let me just tell you my personal history with you.

00:12:43Marc:Okay.

00:12:43Marc:And I actually want to.

00:12:45Marc:Okay.

00:12:45Marc:I want to hear what you have to say.

00:12:46Marc:And then I want to tag on to it.

00:12:48Marc:But go ahead.

00:12:49Marc:All right.

00:12:49Marc:Well, here's my experience.

00:12:51Marc:Back in the day when I was doing short attention span of theater, politically incorrect, shot in the same building, same production company.

00:12:58Marc:It took a while, but you put me on that show a few times.

00:13:01Marc:Yeah.

00:13:01Marc:And I had no real idea who you were.

00:13:03Marc:And then one day I was at the comic strip and I was looking at that gallery of hopes and dreams, all the photographs of comedians that were up at the comic strip.

00:13:10Marc:And I see Scott Carter.

00:13:11Marc:I'm like, holy fuck, that guy was a comedian?

00:13:14Marc:I had no idea at the time that you were a comedian.

00:13:15Marc:I just knew you worked with Bill Maher.

00:13:17Marc:And then I went to see the asthma show.

00:13:19Marc:Heavy breathing.

00:13:20Marc:Heavy breathing, which was one of the first one man shows I'd ever seen.

00:13:24Marc:And then I realized that you were this guy that actually was able to like it was one of the first time I really understood that you didn't have to stay a comedian.

00:13:33Yeah.

00:13:33Marc:That was a big breakthrough for me that, you know, that whatever had happened that did not make you be performing at the comic strip at the age you're at now to realize that I've got more to say.

00:13:43Marc:I've got other audiences to do.

00:13:44Marc:I don't know what your experience in that time was, but here you were doing a one person show and you were a producer of a show.

00:13:49Marc:And it really was you that made me realize, like, oh, you don't have to stay a comedian forever.

00:13:54Marc:And you were part of that generation, I guess, with Bill and Mark Schiff and Larry Miller and who else was there?

00:14:00Guest:Well, I was actually a little bit later than those people.

00:14:02Guest:They were actually there chronologically a couple years younger than I am, but they got into comedy a lot sooner than I did originally.

00:14:09Guest:And let me just back up, because what I want to say about my first memories of you were...

00:14:14Guest:you having that room where you'd be playing guitar when you were hosting Short Attention Spam Theater and playing the guitar.

00:14:21Marc:Yeah.

00:14:22Guest:And I remember the show, Billy Crystal was on one of the shows.

00:14:26Marc:We did a whole episode with Billy Crystal where I interviewed him.

00:14:28Marc:That was almost unbearable.

00:14:31Yeah.

00:14:31Guest:Well, nice guy, but very, very much full of Billy Crystal.

00:14:35Guest:You can say that, however.

00:14:36Guest:Yeah, but you know, you kind of want that in a guest.

00:14:38Guest:You kind of want that in, I mean, there are a lot of people who I used to watch and I used to think, oh, they're so full of themselves.

00:14:44Guest:And then when I was doing a show where people actually had to talk, I was grateful that they were full of themselves.

00:14:48Guest:I was grateful that they were bringing something to the party.

00:14:51Marc:But there was a context.

00:14:52Marc:I mean, this was really just a tribute to Billy and Nancy Geller, who was in charge of stuff.

00:14:57Marc:Yes.

00:14:57Marc:Love Billy.

00:14:58Marc:And I had no problem with him, but it was at a moment where I realized, like, if you just let somebody talk about themselves, they certainly will.

00:15:05Guest:Yeah.

00:15:06Guest:Well, I've actually spent a lot of time listening to others over the last 20, 25 years or so.

00:15:14Guest:And I often find that I learn so much more if I just take myself out of the discussion.

00:15:18Guest:I do not intend to do that here.

00:15:20Guest:But what I wanted to say was something that – so we go back to it would have been 1991 or so.

00:15:27Guest:91, 92.

00:15:28Guest:Okay.

00:15:29Guest:91, 92.

00:15:31Guest:think back it's almost that's almost 20 years oh my god and what i'm find myself when guests come on to real time now some of whom uh you know before politically incorrect there was night after night with alan havey that was right which i produced you produced that as well yeah which was 1980 that was the first show i produced that was the audience of one audience of one that was that was my idea you were there at the beginning of when it was ha and comedy no it was comedy channel comedy channel right ha and just to take everybody else back

00:16:01Guest:November 15th, 1989, HBO debuts a 24-hour comedy channel called The Comedy Channel.

00:16:07Guest:Mm-hmm.

00:16:07Guest:April 1st of 1990, Viacom debuts Ha!

00:16:12Guest:with an exclamation point.

00:16:14Guest:And so these two entities both have about 2 million viewers.

00:16:18Guest:They're in about 2 million homes.

00:16:20Guest:Yeah.

00:16:21Guest:Nobody wants to, none of the affiliates, none of the cable owners want to be in business with either one of them for fear of pissing off the other.

00:16:30Guest:And nobody needs two comedy channels.

00:16:32Guest:Right.

00:16:32Guest:So at the end of 1990, the two channels merge and become comedy central.

00:16:38Guest:Right.

00:16:39Guest:Right.

00:16:39Guest:half owned by HBO, half owned by Ha, and these people detest each other.

00:16:44Guest:Michael Fuchs, who then ran HBO, and Frank Biondi, who then ran Viacom, were mortal enemies.

00:16:48Guest:They had been best of friends.

00:16:50Guest:Frank Biondi had been at HBO.

00:16:52Guest:Michael Fuchs went past him.

00:16:54Marc:So that was the history of it, because my show was produced by HBO Downtown, as was Politically Incorrect.

00:16:59Marc:Correct.

00:17:00Marc:But then it seemed that when Viacom, when Eileen and Doug and Eileen came in, they pushed HBO out completely.

00:17:08Guest:Yes, and then eventually HBO sold out.

00:17:12Guest:Well, I'm sorry to hear about that.

00:17:14Guest:That's okay.

00:17:15Guest:And then they sold out.

00:17:16Guest:So now Comedy Central is solely owned by Viacom.

00:17:20Guest:But anyway, the point being is there's so many people who I will see and I will just realize how generous time has been in allowing people to stay in touch.

00:17:29Guest:It's like we've been in a kind of virtual community for about 20 years where every once in a while we will run into each other.

00:17:35Marc:Yeah.

00:17:36Marc:Do you remember you did the-

00:17:38Guest:Oh, and the gym is a completely different world of experience that we could maybe talk about.

00:17:45Guest:But remember you did The Conspiracy Zone with Kevin Nealon.

00:17:47Guest:I did do that for you, yes.

00:17:50Guest:And we've just run into each other at different times.

00:17:53Guest:Can I add?

00:17:53Guest:Steinway Hall.

00:17:54Guest:Janine Frank, remember I did a thing, monologue, and you were going to come on after me.

00:17:59Guest:That's right.

00:18:00Guest:But it's just this kind of loose, collegial sense that people have, and sometimes it goes on for decades, and it's incredible.

00:18:08Marc:It is, and I don't want to be rude, but I have not been on real time.

00:18:10Marc:I just want to remind you.

00:18:13Marc:kidding but you know what we have 35 episodes coming up this year which is the most we've ever had and so there will be more opportunities because you know i can do that but i but that's not what this is about scott this is about me and you and i want to i want to uh i appreciate your uh manners at the gym you uh you know we met we spoke in the locker room we were not naked

00:18:34Marc:You were on a treadmill just down from me, and when you got off the treadmill, you did not say goodbye because you didn't want to interrupt my workout.

00:18:41Marc:There was some serious gym etiquette going on.

00:18:42Marc:I appreciate that.

00:18:43Marc:Oh, you know what?

00:18:44Marc:We didn't stand naked together, but that's okay.

00:18:46Guest:That's all right.

00:18:47Guest:Maybe next time.

00:18:48Guest:There's a new year coming up.

00:18:50Guest:Maybe that'll happen then.

00:18:50Guest:Okay.

00:18:51Guest:But the deal is at the gym, I really don't.

00:18:54Guest:A couple of things.

00:18:55Guest:I feel like I'm offending people at the gym all the time.

00:18:57Guest:Number one, because very often if I will take my glasses off and I won't be able to recognize people because I'll just kind of be into my head or I'll be into listening to something on headphones.

00:19:07Guest:And also I have a very clear routine when I get in there.

00:19:11Guest:And generally what happens is if I do it right, by the time I'm leaving the gym, I start to get all sorts of ideas.

00:19:18Guest:Right.

00:19:18Guest:Really?

00:19:18Guest:Yeah.

00:19:19Guest:Yeah.

00:19:19Guest:Part of being in the gym is- Every time?

00:19:21Guest:Yeah.

00:19:21Guest:How often do you go?

00:19:23Guest:Well, I try to go.

00:19:24Guest:If I try to go every day, I wind up going four to five times a week.

00:19:27Guest:So you have new ideas four to five times a week?

00:19:29Guest:Yes.

00:19:29Guest:If it works.

00:19:30Guest:Yeah.

00:19:32Guest:But you're like that also.

00:19:33Guest:I mean, you are constantly- A lot of times I'm just on the treadmill going, what happened?

00:19:39Guest:No, but the last time I saw you actually was at Signway Hall.

00:19:42Guest:Last time I saw you do comedy, that was an incredible set.

00:19:45Guest:And I just remember thinking that you're one of those guys who just, no matter how long you live, you'll keep going through life being alive every day and every second.

00:19:53Marc:And fighting every minute of it.

00:19:55Guest:Well, yeah, but that's what's entertaining to an audience.

00:19:58Marc:All right, so you make the decision to do stand-up.

00:20:00Marc:What does that look like for you?

00:20:01Guest:Oh, well, here's the deal.

00:20:03Guest:I was working in a pornography factory in Los Angeles.

00:20:07Guest:I was out in Los Angeles.

00:20:08Guest:I'd come out to Los Angeles.

00:20:09Guest:Oh, you didn't go to New York first?

00:20:11Guest:I did go to New York first.

00:20:12Guest:It kicked my ass twice.

00:20:13Guest:So you didn't do stand-up there?

00:20:14Guest:I started in Los Angeles.

00:20:16Guest:Okay.

00:20:17Marc:So it kicked your ass as a playwright.

00:20:19Marc:You were a playwright and you were like, fuck it, I'm going to Los Angeles to do what?

00:20:23Marc:Not write plays.

00:20:24Guest:No, screenplays.

00:20:25Guest:But while I was going to do screenplays, I had to have a job.

00:20:28Guest:Well, my job was...

00:20:30Guest:A friend of mine from Arizona showed me an ad from the, now it's the Daily News, it was the Valley News, for adult and humor editors.

00:20:37Guest:And I went out to North Hollywood, to North Sherman Way, and I interviewed with this guy to write in a porno factory.

00:20:45Guest:This is the Boogie Nights era.

00:20:47Guest:Yeah.

00:20:47Guest:And I wrote, I mean, you've seen this.

00:20:49Guest:82, 83?

00:20:51Guest:No, it's 79 to 83 is during the time that I'm, or 79 to 81 is when I work in the porno place.

00:20:57Guest:I did like 14 months.

00:20:58Marc:Oh, so that was like, yeah, it was really kicking.

00:21:02Guest:But I knew that I didn't want to say that.

00:21:03Guest:It's a little bit like working in a porno place is a little bit like my friends in college who sold dope.

00:21:09Guest:They knew they weren't going to do it forever.

00:21:11Guest:Either they were going to make enough money and save enough money and get out and like, let's say, buy a house or do something with it.

00:21:19Guest:Or they were going to get caught.

00:21:20Guest:we had different friends okay well that that's that was my friends who did no i mean like the guys who i knew who stole who sold dope were usually doing it so they could smoke dope and i don't know where they ended up oh no my because tucson was that was a uh very uh convenient uh there was a close to mexico a traffic place yeah from get stuff from mexico and drive back let's say to boston

00:21:41Marc:I'm so amazed that you worked in porno.

00:21:42Marc:I'm having a whole new respect for Scott Carter, who I've known for 20 years and always thought, like, wow, he breathes rarefied air, that Scott Carter.

00:21:50Guest:Oh, no, no, no.

00:21:50Guest:He's an intellectual.

00:21:51Guest:No, no, no, no, no.

00:21:53Guest:Were you on porno sets?

00:21:54Guest:No, because mine was magazines.

00:21:56Guest:It wasn't movies.

00:21:58Guest:Oh, okay.

00:21:59Guest:Okay, so it was magazines.

00:22:00Guest:I couldn't see you on a porno set.

00:22:01Guest:It was one of those things where I could have done it and chose not to.

00:22:08Guest:Because there was a whole world.

00:22:09Guest:This group was a horizontal vertical, whatever, corporation whereby they did products, they did softcore, they did hardcore.

00:22:18Guest:They even did romance books.

00:22:20Guest:So there'd be these little old ladies who'd come in with manuscripts.

00:22:22Guest:And you would write what?

00:22:24Guest:I would be an entire staff.

00:22:26Guest:Like I'd be handed a magazine and I would become five different people.

00:22:30Guest:I was the editor.

00:22:30Guest:I would do the editorial under a very stern voice talking about First Amendment.

00:22:35Marc:And this was for what?

00:22:36Marc:For recording?

00:22:37Marc:No.

00:22:38Guest:No, no, no.

00:22:38Guest:These are for magazines.

00:22:39Guest:So you just have different names?

00:22:40Guest:Yeah.

00:22:41Guest:This group had.

00:22:42Guest:Oh, yeah.

00:22:42Guest:Everybody had 20 pen names.

00:22:43Guest:Okay.

00:22:44Guest:I got it.

00:22:45Guest:And I would take mine from Rhodes in Los Angeles.

00:22:53Guest:Right.

00:22:54Guest:Preston Crenshaw.

00:22:55Guest:I was Mr. Crenshaw.

00:22:56Guest:Yeah.

00:22:56Guest:Archibald Drive.

00:22:58Guest:I was Archibald Drive.

00:22:59Guest:I had a whole list.

00:23:00Guest:Sure.

00:23:00Guest:Anyway, and what was funny was you would get letters.

00:23:03Guest:addressed the pen name dear Mr. Drive how dear Mr. Crenshaw in your last issue of Mr. Drive talk to Mr. Crenshaw so but anyway so during the time you're there there were three of us in the editorial room on the softcore side I was in softcore and

00:23:21Guest:It was a little bit like being in prison that you know you couldn't stay there forever.

00:23:25Guest:So everyone had an escape idea.

00:23:26Guest:So one guy, he wanted to write sitcoms or whatever, so he was doing a spec script for, I don't know, whatever, Sanford and Son, whatever it was at the time.

00:23:35Guest:Another guy wanted to be a novelist, so he was working on a novel.

00:23:38Guest:And what I was working on was my first five minutes to do at the Improv on Melrose.

00:23:45Guest:And so every day I would just write over on one page.

00:23:48Guest:I figured, okay, it's five minutes.

00:23:50Guest:Mm-hmm.

00:23:50Guest:Now I can do 30 jokes.

00:23:52Guest:I can do like six jokes a minute.

00:23:55Guest:And then my goal was, because one of these things where I was so scared to do it.

00:23:58Guest:I just saw there was a show that Alan Havy did at the Comedy Central workspace called God's Camera, where he talks about starting to be, you know, class clown to wanting to come to New York, be an actor, then wanting to be a comic, then going up first time to be a comic.

00:24:13Guest:Then, you know, and so it's...

00:24:16Guest:This is recently?

00:24:17Guest:Yeah, just like three weeks ago.

00:24:18Guest:No kidding.

00:24:19Guest:And it's really fascinating.

00:24:22Guest:And there are some things because he is like you in that you guys both seem fearless to me.

00:24:28Guest:I was not that guy.

00:24:30Guest:I, in order to work the courage to audition for the first time at the Melrose Improv, my first thing was each week I'll get closer.

00:24:38Guest:So the first week I just got in my car and drove around and then went home.

00:24:43Guest:And I got in close.

00:24:45Guest:Second week, drive around, park the car, go up, touch the front door.

00:24:49Marc:So you were that guy, the people who worked there were going, there's that guy again.

00:24:53Marc:He looks like he might come in today.

00:24:55Guest:And then what happened was this whole sense of, because my thought was if I do it and completely fail, I'm never going to do it again.

00:25:01Guest:So the whole thing was I've got to put every possible egg into the basket and give myself the lowest possible success notion, which was out of 30 jokes, he had one laugh.

00:25:13Marc:But you were petrified, because to do that... Completely petrified.

00:25:16Marc:I remember that sort of weird period of approaching the first time on stage, just how consumed... Where was this?

00:25:23Marc:For me, the first time I got on stage, I was in college, and Catch a Rising Star was doing some sort of... It was Catch a Rising Star on campus, so they were auditioning acts to be in this thing for HBO or something, and I put together an act with another guy.

00:25:40Marc:uh a team well right away now you're not sharing you're not absorbing the entire burden the first time i went on stage solo was the summer of 84 at catcherizing at no i played against sam's in new in boston in a basement but it was just i was so paralyzed with fear and and and then i realized that like 90 of your energy 90 of the craft of comedy is pretending you're not afraid yeah

00:26:04Guest:Yeah.

00:26:05Guest:Well, and what happened with me, I was then thinking, what if I forget?

00:26:10Guest:So one of the things I had was I had on each knuckle, I had a code word for every joke.

00:26:16Guest:So I had the 30 on my hands in front of me.

00:26:21Guest:They thought that was your hook, holding your hands out in front of you?

00:26:24Marc:That's the guy that holds his hands out like this.

00:26:27Guest:Or that I had some weird muscular degenerative disease or something.

00:26:32Guest:And anyway, then what happened was a line that will have no meaning to anyone.

00:26:37Guest:But in the early 80s, there was a commercial out here where it was for a detox house.

00:26:43Guest:And it started off with some punch drunk old fighter.

00:26:46Guest:And the commercial started off with, I'm something like, let me see if I can remember it.

00:26:52Guest:I'm Joe Dolan.

00:26:54Guest:or you may remember me as Joey Dolan, the boxer.

00:26:57Guest:My name is Joe Dolan.

00:26:58Guest:You may remember me as Joey Dolan, the boxer.

00:27:01Guest:And then he takes a pause.

00:27:02Guest:Like, of course.

00:27:03Guest:Yeah, sure, Joey Dolan.

00:27:04Guest:And then he goes ahead with, you know, blah, blah, blah, drink, drugs.

00:27:07Guest:But then I cleaned up through the help of whatever it was.

00:27:10Guest:The same place that Gale Storm, I think, did commercials for.

00:27:12Guest:Anyway, so my opening line was, my name is Scott Carter, but you might know me as Joey Dolan, the boxer.

00:27:18Guest:That got a laugh.

00:27:19Guest:You're in.

00:27:20Guest:And so I thought, I have already surpassed.

00:27:23Guest:Your expectations.

00:27:24Guest:My expectations.

00:27:24Guest:Because my expectations for the first time out of the 30, one has to work.

00:27:28Guest:And then the second time, two were going to have to work out of the 30.

00:27:32Guest:But I would start weeding out ones that are obviously failures.

00:27:36Guest:And so I was going to... So that was how I get... Then what happened was I got off stage.

00:27:40Guest:And it was... Remember on those... Did you ever host those nights where the auditioners would come up?

00:27:46Guest:Open mic nights?

00:27:47Guest:Yeah.

00:27:47Guest:No.

00:27:48Guest:Because I did it a few times at the comic strip.

00:27:50Guest:because I used to do a lot of hosting at the comic strip, and I was always fascinated by the look when you'd announce some newcomers, somebody's doing it for the first time, you'd announce their name, and you would turn to the right to see them approaching the stage, and in their eyes was the look of, I'm the funniest guy all of my friends know.

00:28:11Guest:Yeah, yeah.

00:28:11Guest:At any party, I'm the life of the party.

00:28:14Guest:I got this.

00:28:14Guest:Wait until I got this, I'm going to nail it.

00:28:17Guest:Yeah.

00:28:17Guest:And then...

00:28:18Guest:When I would come up five minutes later to get them off stage, the look of utter defeat in their eyes.

00:28:26Guest:Yeah, why?

00:28:27Guest:What happened?

00:28:27Guest:Yeah, what happened?

00:28:28Guest:I've been hit.

00:28:28Guest:Why aren't these people like my friends?

00:28:31Marc:It's an interesting trick, that thing, to learn how to be funny in front of people.

00:28:34Marc:Yeah.

00:28:35Marc:It's a very weird thing.

00:28:36Guest:Well, I remember one time at Catch a Rising, I started seeing Sean Young.

00:28:39Guest:Go up and try and do stand-up.

00:28:41Guest:The actress?

00:28:42Guest:Yes.

00:28:42Guest:Go up and try and do stand-up.

00:28:43Guest:That would have been good.

00:28:44Guest:She's nuts.

00:28:45Guest:Well, but here's the deal.

00:28:46Guest:She went up on a night where just everybody was killing, and she gets up, and it's one of those things after about three or four minutes, she stops and she goes, why isn't anyone laughing anymore?

00:28:56Guest:Yeah, yeah.

00:28:56Guest:You know, well, see, it's you, not a professional, going up.

00:29:00Marc:Don't got the chops.

00:29:01Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:29:02Guest:It's not just a matter of the room is laughing.

00:29:05Guest:Now, when, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:29:07Marc:They were laughing.

00:29:08Guest:But anyway, let me just say one thing about this first time.

00:29:11Guest:So then I get off and the guy introduces whoever's after me.

00:29:14Marc:You remember the host?

00:29:15Marc:Yeah.

00:29:16Guest:A guy named Kenny Aubrey.

00:29:17Guest:Does that name ring a bell?

00:29:18Yeah.

00:29:18Guest:Okay, but here's the deal.

00:29:20Guest:He introduces the next act, and I sort of was on the thing of like, hey, I won.

00:29:24Guest:I got the first one, and then I think I probably got three or four more in the five minutes.

00:29:28Guest:Anyway, this guy comes out into the bar and finds me and says, your performing is six months behind your writing level.

00:29:38Guest:Keep going.

00:29:39Mm-hmm.

00:29:39Guest:And it's one of those things where early on, you keep that in your head forever.

00:29:44Guest:Right.

00:29:44Guest:I remember one of the first things that happened to me was one night, there was a comedy store in Westwood right by UCLA.

00:29:53Guest:Yeah, Kennison used to manage it.

00:29:55Guest:Well, that's how, and what they would do is Mitzi would allow whoever was like an A person at the club to run a week at a time.

00:30:03Guest:So you had Michael Keaton running the club, Sam Kinison running the club, Rich Hall, whoever, and you could get to know them.

00:30:12Guest:And it was just incredible.

00:30:13Guest:And that's how I got to know Sam Kinison, who then gave me my first paying out-of-town gig, which was his brother had a club in Madison, Wisconsin, and so Sam went the first week.

00:30:24Guest:And I was back in New York this time, and he was back in New York then.

00:30:29Guest:So it was after we'd gotten to know each other in L.A.

00:30:31Guest:And then he recommended to Bill, you know, book this guy.

00:30:35Guest:Yeah.

00:30:36Guest:I can't see you and Sam hanging out.

00:30:39Guest:You know what?

00:30:41Guest:But there are a lot of people who I kind of get along with who you wouldn't think I would have that much in common.

00:30:47Guest:And that's one of the things I've kind of liked over the years.

00:30:50Marc:It's a great community in a lot of ways.

00:30:53Guest:It's an incredible community.

00:30:54Marc:Yeah.

00:30:54Marc:I mean, that's the one thing that's interesting is like you said at the beginning that, you know, we all kind of know each other and we know like this whole show is driven by the fact.

00:31:01Marc:I mean, I've done 130, 140 of these episodes with guys that I kind of know.

00:31:06Marc:Some I know well, but it's almost like there's an understanding that's already in place.

00:31:10Marc:There's a familiarity that's already in place that it runs pretty deep.

00:31:14Marc:It's kind of interesting.

00:31:15Guest:Yeah.

00:31:15Marc:But I'm very surprised to know this history of you.

00:31:18Marc:But it's interesting, though, that you're one of these guys who always had this work ethic around like there was when I was coming up there, you know, we all had jobs that would get us by, but we were all sleeping and living out of boxes.

00:31:29Marc:But you actually had a certain skill set that enabled you.

00:31:32Marc:You could have worked in the publishing world.

00:31:34Marc:And you always sort of had that.

00:31:36Marc:When we were talking at the gym, you were like, you get nervous when you're not busy.

00:31:40Marc:So you're a worker.

00:31:42Marc:Whereas a lot of the guys I know that didn't leave stand-up, that always stayed in stand-up because they didn't see any other option, was because they didn't have any other option.

00:31:50Marc:You actually had other options.

00:31:51Marc:You were more responsible about your approach.

00:31:54Guest:In some ways, on the other hand,

00:31:58Guest:On the other hand, I would – whenever I would go out on the road and do like four weeks at punchlines or whatever.

00:32:04Guest:You did all that.

00:32:05Guest:Did all of it, but I didn't like it and wasn't great at it and didn't think that I was ever going to be great at it.

00:32:13Guest:And so guys who were – if I was middling and I watched the headliner and the headliner was making whatever the money was at the time, there were a lot of people for whom that became enough.

00:32:24Guest:Yeah.

00:32:24Guest:and the acts didn't change for a year, and you'd watch different people who I'm sure we could both name, where you saw them two or three years later, and they haven't changed a word of their act, and it's just enough, and what they're living for is the party afterwards, and I also always judged how old a comedy club was in the South,

00:32:41Guest:By the waitress's attitude towards a certain comedian who, when it was a new club, they loved the guy.

00:32:48Guest:Right.

00:32:49Guest:And a few years later, he'd gotten the waitress's pregnant.

00:32:52Guest:Sure.

00:32:53Guest:That was the life.

00:32:54Marc:Burned them on a drug deal.

00:32:56Marc:Right.

00:32:56Marc:Right, but that's why it's interesting to me, and that's why I assumed that you chose a different path.

00:33:03Marc:And I'm not defending anything, but there was a sense that there was a type of person who got into comedy.

00:33:09Marc:I knew comics that didn't want to be advertised because they were afraid the IRS would find them.

00:33:14Marc:You knew guys, and I knew guys that had done jail time.

00:33:17Marc:These were gypsies.

00:33:18Marc:These were social misfits that had figured out this racket, which was that they could get into this, stand in front of people, make them laugh, and get the fuck out of town.

00:33:25Marc:do you remember ollie joe prater sure yeah we were just talking about him yesterday someone was asking me he used to live in this weird shack that mitzi owned up on the hill at the top of the parking lot but i always see and this is something i talk a little bit about on the show is that the one regret i have in looking at some of the guys that i started with is that there was a type of person that realized their limitations that knew that they couldn't put all their eggs in this basket and that there was another option and you were like as i was saying at the beginning you

00:33:52Marc:there were guys that went on to be writers and had a tremendous amount of success.

00:33:55Marc:If a guy emails me now and says, you know, what should, I'm just starting out doing comedy.

00:34:00Marc:I write them back.

00:34:01Marc:I say, well, just realize here are the options.

00:34:03Marc:You know, either you can put all your eggs in one basket and, and, and gamble with your life that you're going to be one of the top 15 people that makes money doing comedy, or you can write, you can produce, you can pitch shows.

00:34:13Marc:You can, there's a whole number of things you can do.

00:34:15Marc:And I have a little bit of a, if I have any regret is that I never learned how to do that.

00:34:20Guest:Never learned how to do what?

00:34:21Guest:What do you think you needed to learn?

00:34:23Marc:I write for me, and I assume that the type of comedy that I do and the type of comedy you were doing were very different.

00:34:29Marc:I get the sense that you were into the language, you were into writing jokes, that the emotional risk was not the imperative.

00:34:35Guest:Which is interesting because when I did Heavy Breathing, there was a sequel called Suspension Bridge.

00:34:41Guest:They were very, very different because I was in this emotionally vulnerable place of feeling like I was going to die.

00:34:48Guest:And then my life had been spared.

00:34:50Guest:And so you're right.

00:34:51Guest:My standup was very sterile, very removed, very aloof.

00:34:54Marc:But the theater is where you're supposed to take those risks.

00:34:56Guest:Yeah.

00:34:56Guest:And then these monologues that I started doing, I got more comfortable expanding my ability to present myself or make myself vulnerable and saw that as being a good thing, not something to be shied away from.

00:35:09Marc:Right, because for most part, in a stand-up club, the risk you run doing that is you're going to get hurt.

00:35:16Guest:That's right.

00:35:17Guest:It's going to hurt your heart.

00:35:18Guest:Yeah, that's right.

00:35:19Guest:Well, but I would also always assume if there was a theater setting, if I was in a theater, the people who are coming in, who are paying full attention, they're not coming in drunk, there's no check being distributed.

00:35:29Guest:Theater's about being human.

00:35:31Guest:Yeah, exactly, that they're going to give me a little bit more leeway.

00:35:34Marc:Right.

00:35:35Marc:So now you're doing this show and you're taking those risks.

00:35:37Marc:And how does that, how did you and Bill get aligned?

00:35:40Marc:Because now this is a partnership that's been going on for 20 years now almost.

00:35:43Guest:Well, what happened was, well, first, Steve Scrovan said to me, Steve Scrovan got the show on MTV called Mouth to Mouth, and there was going to be an eight-person writer staff, and he was allowed to pick four people.

00:35:56Guest:He picks me, Michael Patrick King, Mike Rowe, and John Heyman are the four people he picks.

00:36:02Marc:How's Mike Rowe?

00:36:02Marc:Do you talk to him?

00:36:03Marc:Yeah.

00:36:04Guest:Is he all right?

00:36:04Guest:Yeah.

00:36:04Guest:He was so funny.

00:36:05Marc:Yeah, yeah.

00:36:06Marc:And John Heyman's so funny.

00:36:07Guest:Oh, I just saw John Heyman about a week ago.

00:36:10Guest:And so anyway, and Michael Patrick King, and remember- This was the crew.

00:36:15Marc:This was the New York crew at that time.

00:36:17Guest:Yeah, and remember Steve had said, I picked you and Michael because both of you guys have done your own show.

00:36:24Guest:You've done, you've done a one man show in theaters and Michael's written plays.

00:36:28Guest:So I want to have people who have a greater sense than I'm just writing a joke.

00:36:31Guest:Right.

00:36:31Guest:That they have a visual sense.

00:36:32Guest:Yeah.

00:36:33Guest:Whatever.

00:36:33Guest:And you can help produce the thing.

00:36:35Guest:And you come from theater.

00:36:36Guest:Yeah.

00:36:36Guest:So, so anyway, so, so, but that show lasted six weeks.

00:36:39Guest:Okay.

00:36:40Guest:Then Alan's show lasted, um, three years.

00:36:43Guest:It lasted from 89 until 92.

00:36:46Marc:I tell you that guy, he did something right with his money.

00:36:50Marc:Cause you know, I think he, you know, he, he made all right out.

00:36:52Marc:He made out all right on that.

00:36:53Guest:Well, the show now that he's doing, God's Camera, is just hilarious.

00:36:58Guest:That's great.

00:36:58Guest:I've always liked it.

00:36:59Guest:And it's really dramatic, and it's about his father.

00:37:02Guest:It's very, very interesting.

00:37:03Marc:I think there's also something to be said here, Scott, about the fact that you played well with others, that you guys had a certain amount of loyalty to each other.

00:37:10Marc:I mean, that happens now, too.

00:37:11Marc:A lot of people don't realize that when someone makes it in show business, that there's a lot of networking involved, and there's also a lot of coming up with people, and people find their way, and they bring your friends along.

00:37:21Guest:Well, that's what I will tell people.

00:37:23Guest:I thought that.

00:37:23Guest:Well, but that's what I'll tell people when I hear people, when somebody asks me, how do I, you know, and one of the things I will say is, like, I just remember the bar at the comic strip, the bar at the improv, not so much catch, because I didn't spend as much time there, because I started getting more work at the comic strip.

00:37:40Guest:But just Chris Rock and Adam Sandler and Colin Quinn and all these different people.

00:37:47Guest:Or Jerry Seinfeld's coming in.

00:37:49Guest:He lives in L.A.

00:37:50Guest:now, but he's coming back and he's going to do the whole week at the comic strip.

00:37:53Guest:And so I'm emceeing the show.

00:37:54Guest:So he and I are hanging out.

00:37:55Guest:But, you know, just access to people who know more than I do.

00:37:59Guest:Right.

00:38:00Guest:And, you know, Larry Miller, Paul Reiser.

00:38:02Guest:And not telling them to fuck off.

00:38:04Right.

00:38:04Guest:Not telling them to.

00:38:05Guest:Well, well, just I had a sense of I can learn.

00:38:08Guest:And so let me learn.

00:38:10Marc:And I had a sense of who the fuck are you?

00:38:12Marc:Who do you think you are now?

00:38:14Marc:I mean, that was like that.

00:38:15Marc:I'm just separating my experience because I isolated myself and you, on the other hand, you know, respected your peer group and you all grew together.

00:38:23Guest:Well, I also think that one thing I've noticed what happens is when someone gets tapped, like let's say you're Ray Romano, you're working at the improv, and all of a sudden you get a break to do a show, you kind of go back to people who you trust when nobody had money, nobody had stature.

00:38:42Guest:And you kind of go back to those people.

00:38:44Guest:And that's one thing I've found over a period of time.

00:38:46Guest:And so I kind of try and tell people that.

00:38:48Guest:figure out a way to bond with other people when none of you have any power, because when one of you does, the others of you will become valuable.

00:38:57Marc:Okay, so you worked with Scrovan, you had this crew, and now if we can get into Bill and how you helped shape that show, because I remember when you, I had seen the show a bit, and we were in the same house at HBO Downtown.

00:39:10Marc:And now Bill Maher, when when I don't know what he was like when you met him, but he was always a fairly straight up Carson style monologist.

00:39:18Marc:Right now, the idea of politically incorrect.

00:39:21Marc:Was that something you came up with him?

00:39:23Guest:No, no.

00:39:23Guest:What had happened was Bill did an election night special for Comedy Central co-hosting with Will Durst.

00:39:31Guest:Right.

00:39:33Guest:He did such a great job.

00:39:34Guest:At the end of it, Nancy Geller said to him, do you have any ideas for your own show?

00:39:39Guest:Well, he had been having this kind of informal salons in his own living room.

00:39:43Guest:So he said, I just want to do a show like how things are in my living room when I get three or four people together and we talk.

00:39:49Guest:And so he wrote a three-page summary of what he wanted this project to be.

00:39:54Guest:And then he was coming back.

00:39:55Guest:He was living in L.A.

00:39:56Guest:at the time.

00:39:56Guest:He came back to New York and he started interviewing.

00:39:59Guest:He was being set up with people to be the producer of the show.

00:40:02Guest:And I remember I was the only person who took the trouble to read his three-page description and further had written a two-page response to it, which I then gave him.

00:40:14Guest:And so he met, I don't know, four or five people.

00:40:16Guest:But out of that said, no, you're the guy I want to work with.

00:40:18Guest:And it was actually, for me as a producer, it was a great period of time because...

00:40:25Guest:Bill had reached that place in life, he was like late 30s, where he thought, am I going to make it or not?

00:40:33Guest:And I'd better really take care of this opportunity.

00:40:37Guest:I mean, he never got as much of an opportunity handed to me again if I do not do well here.

00:40:44Guest:So it was one of these things where...

00:40:46Guest:Well, you learn things when you start working with people, you learn things by which to make the thing work.

00:40:50Guest:So one of the things I first learned with him was number one, punctuality.

00:40:53Guest:Right.

00:40:54Guest:That he is always on time.

00:40:56Guest:Is that true?

00:40:56Guest:Yeah.

00:40:56Guest:Okay.

00:40:57Guest:Yeah.

00:40:58Guest:Never late.

00:40:59Guest:And time is, it's very important to him.

00:41:02Guest:And so I appreciate that because I've worked with people who don't care about time.

00:41:05Marc:Who don't care about their show either.

00:41:07Guest:Okay.

00:41:07Guest:Yes, that's true.

00:41:08Guest:And so that's number one.

00:41:09Guest:Number two, no matter how things were getting,

00:41:13Guest:Uh, if you said something funny, he would laugh and it would be like whatever the harshness or awkwardness was, it all disappeared.

00:41:22Guest:And he was as appreciative of other people being funny as he was proud of himself being funny.

00:41:28Marc:Right.

00:41:28Marc:Well, that's important.

00:41:29Marc:Exceedingly generous to others.

00:41:31Marc:And also willing, like, and also when you're the guy who's driving the thing, you know, it behooves you to take in other funny people and to use their brains.

00:41:40Marc:Because I have to assume he wasn't always the smartest guy in the room.

00:41:43Guest:He's the smartest guy.

00:41:45Guest:I mean, he's a very, very smart guy.

00:41:48Guest:He pretty much is always the smartest guy, I would say.

00:41:53Guest:But what I tremendously enjoyed working with him when we first started working together was that...

00:41:59Guest:You know how it is in TV where very often there's a sense, and I have a lot of friends who work on not very inspired sitcoms, let's say, as staff writers, who have a sense that they wake up in the morning and on the drive into the office, there's a sense I've got to get dumbed down.

00:42:13Guest:Yeah.

00:42:14Guest:Dread.

00:42:15Guest:Yeah, and there's that sense of dread.

00:42:17Guest:So we had an agreement with each other of we're going to make this the smartest show it can be.

00:42:23Guest:We are not going to second guess that basic instinct with each other.

00:42:28Guest:Between you two.

00:42:29Guest:Now, the project may fail, but it's going to fail as the best version of itself it can be.

00:42:35Guest:And we also had the fortuitousness that the new programming director at Comedy Central was a fellow named Mitch Semel.

00:42:45Guest:I knew Mitch.

00:42:46Guest:Mitch is great.

00:42:47Guest:And we didn't have a pilot.

00:42:49Guest:He gave us an order for 24 shows.

00:42:52Guest:That's rare.

00:42:53Guest:So we never did a pilot.

00:42:54Guest:We taped the first 24, first season.

00:42:58Guest:They all had to be evergreen topics because they were going to be taped in a bunch and then shown over a period of time.

00:43:04Guest:The very first day of taping, I remember it was Tom Arnold, Roger Ailes.

00:43:09Guest:Curtis Sliwa.

00:43:10Guest:He was on a lot.

00:43:11Guest:Yeah.

00:43:12Guest:And I can't remember who else was on the very first show, but I remember by the second day of taping, we got to pick up for a second season of 45 shows.

00:43:21Guest:So there was already a sense by day two, we're ahead.

00:43:24Marc:And they knew that the turnover in talent was going to be extraordinary, that there was no end to the number of people you could have on, to the types of people you could have on, and that it was grounded in a point of view.

00:43:35Guest:And then also what happened, those first 24 shows was the very first day of taping, Tom Arnold did two shows.

00:43:41Guest:Had such a great time.

00:43:42Guest:Bill gets a call that night or the next night from Roseanne, who's the biggest star in television at that moment, saying, I want to do it.

00:43:48Guest:So we then booked her for the last day of taping, and she was going to do two shows.

00:43:52Guest:Then...

00:43:53Guest:Jerry Seinfeld, another huge star on television at that moment.

00:43:57Guest:That show is still peaking.

00:44:00Guest:He and Larry Miller, we're going to do two shows.

00:44:02Guest:So we were able to show our first two shows, Jerry, Larry, Ed Rollins.

00:44:08Guest:Oh, and I forget the fourth.

00:44:13Guest:I'm blanking.

00:44:14Guest:And then the second show we had Roseanne and Roger Clinton, Bill Clinton's brother, the newly elected president's brother.

00:44:19Marc:on the second show so we had two very high profile shows with our first shows that we aired out of the gates we didn't show them and it's also a very unique approach to the talk show uh in the sense that you know there was a sort of an uh the nature was it was spontaneous that and that was rare it's rare on tv even when someone seems to be being spontaneous they're not really and there was real conversation happening and there was something there was something alive in that that you don't always see on tv

00:44:43Guest:Well, that's true.

00:44:44Guest:And also, even if you'd seen, let's say, just take an example of a name, let's say it's John Travolta.

00:44:50Guest:Well, John Travolta's got a movie out and you see him on The Tonight Show and you see him on Leonard.

00:44:54Guest:Same story.

00:44:54Guest:Yeah.

00:44:55Guest:Same stories.

00:44:55Guest:Well, that person comes into our, let's say, the example that actually was true was, let's say, John Malkovich comes in.

00:45:02Guest:He's going to do politically incorrect.

00:45:03Guest:I would say to him, we don't want to hear about your project.

00:45:06Guest:And they would have a sense of relief about it.

00:45:08Guest:I mean, I don't have to tell the same story about how we're like a family.

00:45:10Guest:Yeah.

00:45:11Marc:And you would do a topic sheet.

00:45:12Marc:I remember I did it maybe once or twice.

00:45:14Marc:And, you know, you as a performer, as a person with opinions, you'd be able to sort of think about it and figure out how you're going to approach the topic.

00:45:22Guest:Yeah.

00:45:23Guest:And and we so so the one of the gifts, a couple of gifts at that period of time was number one, we were the first group to start mismatching people, you know, in our example was always Bob Dole and Carrot Top, you know, mismatching people, having them sit next to each other.

00:45:39Guest:And and that was kind of new.

00:45:42Guest:And the other thing was, even if you've seen someone like Florence Henderson or Marion Ross, whoever it is, you haven't seen them like this.

00:45:50Guest:As people.

00:45:51Guest:Adam West or whoever.

00:45:53Guest:You haven't seen them.

00:45:54Guest:Charlton Heston.

00:45:54Guest:You haven't seen them like this.

00:45:56Guest:Engage with an opinion.

00:45:57Guest:Yeah.

00:45:58Guest:And you haven't seen Charlton Heston have to react to Ron, to RuPaul.

00:46:01Marc:Right.

00:46:02Marc:No, it was great.

00:46:03Marc:So that was it.

00:46:03Marc:You had a freak show element.

00:46:04Marc:You had an intelligent discussion element.

00:46:06Marc:You had an argumentative element that it sort of covered all the bases.

00:46:10Marc:And Bill was grounded in a type of style that, you know, the one thing you can say about Bill is that, you know, he's solid and he's always solid.

00:46:17Marc:His timing is on the money.

00:46:19Marc:His intelligence is on the money and he can ground the fucking show.

00:46:22Guest:I have more than once heard different staff writers on our various projects remark.

00:46:29Guest:It's incredible when Bill delivers a joke.

00:46:31Guest:A professional comic delivered my joke.

00:46:34Guest:Yeah.

00:46:34Guest:You know, there's that sense of it was done.

00:46:36Guest:The timing was perfect.

00:46:38Guest:Yeah.

00:46:38Guest:You got a huge response.

00:46:39Marc:Now, in terms of troubleshooting, I mean, just because I don't I don't have this opportunity much to talk to somebody who's who's had a close partnership as long as you guys have in producing a show.

00:46:48Marc:Because I know you're an intelligent guy.

00:46:49Marc:I know he's an intelligent guy.

00:46:51Marc:Now, when you're sitting around thinking about politically incorrect, you have your topics.

00:46:55Marc:He's got his jokes.

00:46:56Marc:You find the sort of gray area or where the juice is to begin the conversation.

00:47:03Marc:But as the show evolved,

00:47:05Marc:And as you two grow as television producers, you know, what were some of the arguments?

00:47:13Marc:What became a problem in defining, not arguments between you, but when you went from politically incorrect to real time, what was the agenda?

00:47:21Marc:Was there a mission statement in any way?

00:47:22Guest:Well, I left politically correct after I'd done 1100 episodes.

00:47:28Guest:So I was there from first show was aired on July 25th, 1993.

00:47:35Guest:And I left at the end of 1999.

00:47:37Guest:And I did a bunch of other shows, including Conspiracy Zone with Kevin Nealon, which you were on.

00:47:40Guest:Um, and during that period of time, politically incorrect had been canceled.

00:47:45Guest:And so Bill called me, I guess in 2003, whenever it was and said, um, HBO approached me, would you be interested?

00:47:54Guest:And what I wanted to do was I didn't want to do any more strip shows.

00:47:57Guest:I didn't want to do a five day a week or four day a week show because the deal is you have no life.

00:48:01Marc:Well, you rehearse, and then you shoot two on one day, two on the next day, or four on one day, or whatever the hell it was.

00:48:07Guest:Well, we couldn't, yeah.

00:48:08Guest:And we didn't have that luxury to do four on one day with Politically Incorrect, because it had to reflect the day's headlines.

00:48:15Guest:And when we started on ABC, when we moved to ABC from Comedy Central, because they couldn't tap into the Comedy Central backlog, they asked us originally to do 26 weeks in a row, five shows a week without a break.

00:48:26Guest:So at that point, what you are is... It's like doctor's hours.

00:48:29Guest:You don't sleep.

00:48:30Guest:Well, the only show that I could relate to when I would go home at night was ER.

00:48:33Guest:Right.

00:48:34Guest:You're walking in and emergencies are coming in your face that you have to solve.

00:48:40Guest:In other words, you listen to the problem and then you have to solve it immediately.

00:48:44Guest:And you have to live with the fact that out of every 20 problems you solve, two of them you will have completely made a mistake on.

00:48:49Guest:Right.

00:48:50Guest:And you just have to accept that that's the reality.

00:48:53Guest:Better a quick decision that's pretty good rather than the great decision that's late.

00:48:56Marc:Which now you have the opportunity to do.

00:48:58Marc:So he calls you and you say you don't want to do a strip show.

00:49:00Marc:HBO's approached us.

00:49:01Guest:So what was the creative process there?

00:49:04Guest:The development there, the notion was, how can we make this different from politically incorrect?

00:49:10Guest:How are all the ways we can make it different?

00:49:14Guest:And the first season, the first 10 shows, actually, we had kind of a co-host, Paul F. Tompkins.

00:49:20Marc:That was a little odd.

00:49:21Marc:It was almost a variety show.

00:49:22Guest:Yeah, it was almost a variety show.

00:49:24Guest:And then we also had an act at the end.

00:49:25Guest:Like we had Eric Idle sing one time.

00:49:28Guest:We had Bob Odenkirk do Robert Evans.

00:49:30Guest:We had all sorts of different things.

00:49:33Guest:Sketch elements.

00:49:34Guest:Yeah.

00:49:34Guest:And then that was the first 10 shows.

00:49:36Guest:And then the network did some focus groups.

00:49:38Guest:And those things were approved of.

00:49:42Guest:People liked those things.

00:49:43Guest:But the network just said, you know what?

00:49:44Guest:Let's hone this more just into Bill.

00:49:47Guest:So we got rid of everything else that didn't exactly relate to Bill.

00:49:49Guest:Now we've gotten rid of, we don't use many satellite guests anymore.

00:49:54Guest:We used to have a satellite at the top of the show.

00:49:55Guest:We used to have a satellite mid-show.

00:49:57Marc:But that also has to do with cloud too, doesn't it?

00:49:59Marc:I mean, people will come in for it now.

00:50:01Guest:Well, or what happens is just...

00:50:04Guest:Over a period of time, we only have to do one show a week, five guests.

00:50:09Guest:I remember when we were doing five shows a week for Political Incorrect, we moved out here and first for Comedy Central, then for ABC.

00:50:16Guest:The Dennis Miller Show was also shooting in our same studio.

00:50:18Guest:So we do two on Tuesday, two on Thursday.

00:50:20Guest:He'd do one half hour on Friday.

00:50:22Guest:And I remember thinking, oh, man, if I could ever get to that place.

00:50:26Guest:You're home four nights a week and on the fifth night, you know.

00:50:28Marc:And that actually is the slot you filled.

00:50:30Guest:And that's where we are.

00:50:32Guest:Yeah.

00:50:33Guest:Well, we do an hour.

00:50:33Guest:He did a half hour for HBO.

00:50:34Guest:We do an hour.

00:50:36Guest:And it's very cool.

00:50:39Guest:We're in Jack Benny.

00:50:40Guest:We're in the studio that was built for Jack Benny.

00:50:41Marc:Well, I guess what I'm curious about is that I know as somebody who drives a show, John Stewart and Bill Maher is another example, Colbert, guys who are doing commentary.

00:50:54Marc:Now, when you sit in a room with Bill, because I remember you've always been somewhat protective of him in the sense that even when I did Politically Incorrect on Comedy Central and I pointed at the sign once to get a laugh, you literally came up to me and said, don't point at the sign.

00:51:09Guest:Bill points at the sign.

00:51:10Guest:No.

00:51:12Marc:You know you did that.

00:51:14Guest:I'm sure that I did.

00:51:15Marc:I'm sure that I did.

00:51:18Marc:But what I want to know is like in the writer's room, because I know Bill's got to do his homework.

00:51:28Marc:He's got to do his reading because he is.

00:51:29Marc:He's actually gotten, I think, more in depth.

00:51:32Marc:I mean, since politically incorrect, you know, now with real time that, you know, his his commentary is deeper.

00:51:39Marc:And also he seems to know the issues in much more depth than he might have originally.

00:51:44Marc:Is that an evolution?

00:51:46Marc:Is that something that he preps for?

00:51:47Marc:How does he work and how do you work with him around shaping, you know, essentially what he's saying?

00:51:52Guest:Well, some of this is just because we just have to get the show ready on Friday.

00:51:57Guest:I mean, politically incorrect.

00:51:58Guest:I would come in the morning.

00:52:00Guest:I would have a new meeting every hour, pretty much from 8 o'clock in the morning until about 7 o'clock at night.

00:52:06Guest:At the beginning of every hour, there's going to be a new thing I'm doing.

00:52:09Guest:Editing, dealing with standards and practices, doing a writer's meeting, doing a booker's meeting, doing a producer's meeting, whatever.

00:52:14Right.

00:52:14Guest:And so in the morning, you'd be scanning the paper.

00:52:18Guest:Let's talk about this.

00:52:19Guest:And then you got about five minutes to think about it before that was a topic tonight.

00:52:23Guest:This thing we thought of for five minutes.

00:52:24Guest:Well, we have nothing like that now.

00:52:26Guest:We start talking about topics on Tuesday.

00:52:29Guest:And so we can refine them on Wednesday and refine them on Thursday and even refine them during the day on Friday.

00:52:33Marc:Now, what's that refining process looks like?

00:52:36Marc:When I did political talk radio, I had producers that I had to trust.

00:52:43Marc:Because I might not have known, like I can only come at it from my angle.

00:52:48Marc:Now, are there moments where Bill has a trajectory and you go, well, have you thought about this other thing?

00:52:53Marc:Is it that interactive with you and him?

00:52:55Guest:I would say that if people would come to a writer's meeting on a Monday of real time, you might think it's just a very funny think tank.

00:53:06Guest:Yeah.

00:53:07Guest:In other words, we have a sense of Friday's show, and maybe we'll talk about it, maybe we won't, but we'll have a sense of what happened on Saturday, what happened on Sunday, where did the news turn on Monday, and usually Monday is when new announcements are made by the administration.

00:53:20Marc:Right, who are the guys in the room?

00:53:21Marc:So you've got Billy Martin, who I knew in Boston as a comic.

00:53:25Marc:Do you still have Chris Kelly?

00:53:26Marc:Yep.

00:53:26Marc:He's a genius.

00:53:27Guest:Yep, Chris Kelly.

00:53:28Guest:It reminds me of there was a John Cleese once said of Peter Cook.

00:53:32Guest:Peter Cook can write a three-minute sketch in three minutes.

00:53:35Marc:Yeah.

00:53:35Guest:Chris Kelly is that good.

00:53:37Marc:No, I know.

00:53:37Marc:I worked with him.

00:53:37Marc:He was a showrunner on a pilot I did for HBO Downtown for a talk show.

00:53:41Marc:And he's just beyond brilliant.

00:53:43Guest:Incredible.

00:53:44Guest:And who are the other guys?

00:53:44Guest:But everybody is.

00:53:46Guest:Yeah.

00:53:47Guest:Adam Felber, Brian Jacobs, Jay Yarrow, and Billy Martin and Matt Gunn.

00:53:55Guest:And then, you know, our producers also.

00:53:57Guest:I mean, we have a group in a room, most of whom have been together at least 10 years.

00:54:05Guest:So, and some as many as 50.

00:54:06Guest:Well, Chris Kelly and I were first day politically incorrect.

00:54:09Marc:Okay, so now I have two questions.

00:54:11Marc:One, let's talk for a minute about the controversy around the comments relating to 9-11 that caused the cancellation on the network.

00:54:23Marc:Now, when that went down...

00:54:26Marc:I'm assuming that you and Bill had no idea that that would come back at you.

00:54:30Guest:Well, I wasn't on the show then.

00:54:32Guest:Oh, okay.

00:54:32Guest:I was doing the show with Kevin Nealon.

00:54:35Guest:Did he call you?

00:54:36Guest:Bill and I would talk.

00:54:39Guest:I remember calling him the next- What was the joke?

00:54:40Marc:Do you remember the joke?

00:54:41Guest:Yeah, no, no.

00:54:41Guest:I'll tell you exactly what it was.

00:54:43Guest:There were three people on the show.

00:54:47Guest:One seat was left empty for Barbara Olson, who was the wife of Solicitor General Ted Olson.

00:54:57Guest:Right.

00:54:58Guest:And she was on one of the planes coming.

00:55:00Guest:She was trying to come out to Los Angeles to be on the panel and was in one of the planes that went into the Pentagon.

00:55:08Guest:And so a chair was left empty for her for a week.

00:55:11Guest:Ariana, there was a minister from Hollywood Presbyterian and Dinesh D'Souza, who is a conservative commentator.

00:55:23Guest:And he made the comment something to the effect of, because I'll paraphrase this, say what you want about the terrorists.

00:55:31Guest:They're not cowards.

00:55:34Guest:Pause.

00:55:35Guest:No reaction in the studio.

00:55:36Guest:Bill then says something to the effect of, I probably won't get this right.

00:55:40Guest:If anything, we're the cowards for, you know, lobbying cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away, 3,000 miles away.

00:55:47Guest:You know, that's more cowardly.

00:55:49Guest:Right.

00:55:50Guest:You know.

00:55:51Guest:Now, no interaction in the studio.

00:55:54Yeah.

00:55:54Guest:No laugh.

00:55:55Guest:No, but I mean no reaction of any kind.

00:55:59Guest:This is segment two out of four segments.

00:56:01Guest:In other words, no one thinks a thing about it.

00:56:04Guest:All of the producers, all the network people from ABC, everybody's in the control room.

00:56:09Guest:No one thinks a thing of it.

00:56:11Marc:It's an intellectual idea.

00:56:14Guest:Yeah.

00:56:14Guest:I remember calling him the next day saying, you know, I thought you did a great job.

00:56:19Guest:And he said, oh, you know, you know, please maybe call, you know, people at ABC.

00:56:24Guest:Tell them, you know, that because they would still respect your, you know, they would respect your opinion.

00:56:28Guest:Well, so the shit hit the fan the next day.

00:56:29Guest:No, no, no, no, no.

00:56:30Guest:Nothing.

00:56:30Guest:No, it's slow.

00:56:31Guest:Okay.

00:56:31Guest:What happens is, and this is, this is, this world we're in now, which is one guy, one morning DJ guy, I think in...

00:56:41Guest:Texas, or I forget where, begins to say, I object to Bill Maher's comments.

00:56:48Guest:Let's start boycotting sponsors of the show.

00:56:52Guest:I think one was FedEx.

00:56:53Guest:I forget what the other one was.

00:56:55Guest:And he got like 50 people to write in.

00:56:59Guest:So you're talking about 100 letters maybe, 100 letters generated to these two people.

00:57:05Guest:But then it became news.

00:57:07Guest:Then it becomes news and it builds from that.

00:57:09Guest:So it's all about... And then, you know, the network had not had the... I mean, we were the first late night show since DeKalbitt, really.

00:57:19Guest:And so they hadn't been in the business of dealing with controversy.

00:57:24Guest:It's somewhere between entertainment, somewhere between news.

00:57:26Guest:We just know people are mad.

00:57:28Guest:And let's remember, it was a crazy period of time.

00:57:31Marc:Right.

00:57:32Marc:Now, I guess the other question I wanted to address is that, is there...

00:57:35Marc:But are there people that Bill is engaged with on the show that will not come back to the show?

00:57:40Marc:Or have there been times where you or Bill had issued an apology of any kind or censored yourselves in terms of how you handle certain guests or any of that?

00:57:51Guest:Well, we just finished the eighth season of Real Time, and I would say that almost never happens, however.

00:57:57Guest:Politically incorrect, you know, I was there for 1,100 shows.

00:58:01Guest:We did five shows a week.

00:58:03Guest:We had four guests per show.

00:58:04Guest:You know, that's thousands and thousands of guests.

00:58:06Guest:And generally, we'd have one person, at least one person a week, maybe three, one to three a week, who would leave angry.

00:58:15Guest:And some of that had to do with...

00:58:17Guest:A new show that's establishing itself, often people would show up for it, not only knowing that they're on a book tour or they're on a movie tour.

00:58:25Guest:Right.

00:58:26Marc:Just another stop on the junket.

00:58:27Guest:Yeah.

00:58:28Guest:Yeah.

00:58:28Guest:I'm here.

00:58:29Guest:I just did this.

00:58:30Guest:Now I'm going to do this.

00:58:31Guest:Right.

00:58:31Guest:And not knowing that their opinions were going to be solicited from it.

00:58:35Guest:They thought they were going to talk about their movie or their book, whatever, or their album.

00:58:41Guest:Yeah.

00:58:41Guest:Or, here's a frequent example, the actor or musician who is considered by their friends to be very political.

00:58:49Guest:Right.

00:58:49Guest:Meaning they have three sentence worth of political thoughts.

00:58:53Guest:Right.

00:58:54Guest:And they are in a circle which only says yes to them all the time and no one ever calls them on the superficiality of their observation.

00:59:02Guest:Right.

00:59:03Guest:Well, Bill's not going to let that go by.

00:59:04Guest:Right.

00:59:05Guest:So anyway, point being is that by now...

00:59:10Guest:Anybody who comes on real time, they know what they're getting into.

00:59:13Guest:And so we get the people who come on, they're sports.

00:59:16Guest:They know what they're getting into.

00:59:19Marc:And if they didn't want to do it, they wouldn't be there.

00:59:20Marc:But also politicos, on some level, it is a game to them sometimes.

00:59:25Marc:There is a sense that this is not... When you talk to wonks and some politicos, they are so jaded about the system.

00:59:35Marc:Either side they're on, they know how it goes, they know the cycles.

00:59:39Marc:So it's not like this life or death thing.

00:59:43Guest:But one of the things that Bill had to be applauded for, I think, that annoys me when I watch normal news programs and there'll be a roundtable...

00:59:50Guest:Somebody will say, I often find someone from the right, will say something that is patently not true.

00:59:56Guest:Right.

00:59:56Guest:The host will nod, turn to the counterpoint ideology person, the liberal.

01:00:02Guest:Yeah.

01:00:02Guest:And now ask for their comment.

01:00:04Guest:But no one ever stops and says, wait a minute, you just asserted a fact that is incorrect.

01:00:09Guest:Right.

01:00:09Guest:Or you've said something so patently absurd, we should stop and identify it as being absurd.

01:00:15Guest:Well, Bill won't let things go by like that.

01:00:16Marc:Right.

01:00:17Marc:Well, that's good.

01:00:18Marc:Stephanopoulos sometimes calls people on shit, but not that often.

01:00:21Guest:Well, you know, it's funny because...

01:00:25Guest:It's almost like a lot of them have a sense of ritual.

01:00:30Guest:In other words, I'll ask you one follow-up.

01:00:32Guest:I won't ask you two.

01:00:33Marc:That's right.

01:00:33Marc:Yeah.

01:00:34Marc:Right.

01:00:35Marc:Right.

01:00:36Marc:Well, that's what keeps the game going.

01:00:37Marc:Yeah.

01:00:37Marc:So Bill goes a little deeper.

01:00:39Guest:Right.

01:00:40Guest:Well, it's a side note of something that Mark Burnett said in the New York Times or thought was brilliant and no one's done it.

01:00:49Guest:At the time when Dan Rather was exited from the CBS Evening News, the New York Times did a full page where they asked 10 media people to say, who do you think should take over the CBS Evening News?

01:01:03Guest:Or how would you produce the Evening News?

01:01:06Guest:And Mark Burnett said the most interesting thing.

01:01:08Guest:He said, every time it's a presidential press conference, whoever the CBS person is who's in the room, that person...

01:01:17Guest:should ask the annoying question and let the president or whatever group it is ostracize that person.

01:01:27Guest:And then that person should subsequently report from outside the gates of the White House.

01:01:33Guest:Saying I'm not being called on anymore because I want to know this.

01:01:37Guest:Right.

01:01:37Guest:Make that into a story.

01:01:39Guest:Yeah.

01:01:40Guest:Too often what they do is I want to stay in the good graces of Robert Gibbs or whoever it is.

01:01:45Guest:Yeah.

01:01:46Guest:So I'm not going to ask the really tough question or I'll ask it, but I won't ask the follow up.

01:01:50Guest:Right.

01:01:51Guest:Because I want to keep being asked back to the party.

01:01:54Guest:I want to go to the correspondence dinner.

01:01:56Marc:Yeah.

01:01:57Marc:Right.

01:01:57Marc:So it's all part of the game.

01:01:59Yeah.

01:01:59Guest:It's more important that you and I maintain the relationship than the viewer be served.

01:02:05Marc:Right.

01:02:06Marc:Or the news be served.

01:02:08Guest:Yeah.

01:02:08Guest:Than the news be served or the truth be served.

01:02:09Marc:Yeah.

01:02:10Marc:Now, okay, so you guys just got picked up for a big new order?

01:02:14Guest:Yes, we got picked up for 35 shows, which is the most ever.

01:02:17Guest:We started off at 20.

01:02:18Guest:We started off at two semesters of 10 each in 2003.

01:02:23Guest:And it'll be 35 shows next year, which is...

01:02:27Guest:Once we start, there's almost really no break.

01:02:30Guest:There's a five-week break, I think, in August.

01:02:32Marc:Well, I congratulate you on that, and I also think it's interesting that even though you have this job, that you had a little time off, and yet you're still doing some theater.

01:02:42Marc:Now, what was it you were trying to explain to me?

01:02:43Guest:Okay, so this is the only plug I want to do.

01:02:47Guest:I want to do a plug for this thing I'm reading about.

01:02:48Guest:I want to tell you about it first.

01:02:50Guest:In 1988, this is part of the, after the near-death experience and the epiphany, I started the spiritual quest.

01:02:55Guest:Yeah.

01:02:55Guest:Okay.

01:02:56Guest:And I have two monologues about it.

01:02:57Guest:Heavy breathing you've seen.

01:02:58Marc:There's another one called... A true spiritual quest.

01:03:01Guest:Yeah.

01:03:01Marc:Another one's called suspension bridge.

01:03:03Marc:Where did that lead you, Scott?

01:03:04Marc:Your spiritual quest?

01:03:05Guest:I have done some of the weirdest things in the world.

01:03:09Marc:Like...

01:03:10Guest:in the middle of 500 acres in the north of new mexico doing um hallucinogens with shamans with um living in a teepee and having a giant bonfire and having uh ceremonies that begin at five o'clock at night and end at 10 o'clock in the morning the next day what was the quest for what was it that what drove you there i mean that outside the near-death experience but i mean did you were not a believer in god

01:03:35Guest:Right.

01:03:36Guest:And then I went, I went to being from not believer in God to, of course, there's a God.

01:03:41Guest:God is undeniable to me.

01:03:43Guest:And, but I have no religious background.

01:03:47Guest:My parents, whenever we would move, we go to whatever Protestant church was closest and the people were nice.

01:03:51Guest:There was no sense of, oh, we're Presbyterians, not Methodists.

01:03:54Guest:Or we believe, you know, in full immersion or talking in tongues.

01:03:59Guest:Therefore, we're Pentecostals.

01:04:00Guest:Therefore, we're Baptists.

01:04:01Guest:Therefore, we're, I had no, so when I had this epiphany, there was a sense

01:04:05Guest:I had no sense of God.

01:04:06Marc:I had no sense of Jesus.

01:04:07Marc:The epiphany when you almost died.

01:04:09Guest:Yeah.

01:04:09Marc:Okay.

01:04:09Guest:Well, and the epiphany comes after I almost die.

01:04:13Guest:I'm at Bellevue 1st and 26th in Manhattan for a week.

01:04:17Guest:I get released on a Saturday afternoon.

01:04:20Guest:I get out and the whole world seems completely different all of a sudden.

01:04:24Guest:In other words, I'm walking on the street and all of a sudden the world...

01:04:27Guest:it's like someone moved up your software.

01:04:30Guest:Crisp, clear, everything's hitting.

01:04:32Guest:Everything, and the way I've described it, it's like when you're watching an old documentary, and all of a sudden, everybody, all the cars seem different, all of the people's fashions, everything.

01:04:42Guest:Everything about it is different, and it's undeniable, and just this feeling of love for everyone in the world.

01:04:49Guest:Right.

01:04:49Guest:And it's a bliss state that lasts, and a lot of people have this, a bliss state lasts about 10 days,

01:04:55Guest:And what I compare it to is Flowers for Algernon, where you have a mentally retarded guy gets a truth, gets some sort of serum and he becomes a genius.

01:05:02Guest:But then after a few days, it's wearing off.

01:05:05Guest:And he realizes he's going from genius back to moron.

01:05:08Guest:And that's what happened to me.

01:05:09Guest:After 10 days, I'm going back to being annoyed by, you know, I'm running to the bus, the bus door closes and the bus pulls off.

01:05:17Guest:And there I am, fuck, and it's raining.

01:05:19Guest:Compassion door had closed.

01:05:20Guest:Yeah, and my heart, I felt my heart closing back up.

01:05:24Guest:Now, I didn't want that to happen.

01:05:25Guest:I wanted to keep the heart open.

01:05:26Guest:Yeah, yeah.

01:05:27Guest:So then I think for the next two years at least, anytime anyone suggests anything to me, I will have to do it.

01:05:32Guest:Like, do you remember Stu Trivax?

01:05:33Guest:Yeah.

01:05:34Guest:Okay, Stu Trivax.

01:05:35Guest:He was a Hasidic Jew, right?

01:05:36Guest:Yes, right.

01:05:37Guest:He wouldn't perform on Fridays in New York.

01:05:39Guest:Mark Wiener, yeah.

01:05:40Guest:Mark Wiener also.

01:05:41Guest:uh michael hampton kane um mark schiff mark schiff there were various people and there were also a lot of comics in the mid 80s who were into that nam yo renge kyo that chanting buddhism yeah yeah well i went i started going to those ceremonies uh mike royce uh didn't yeah i didn't know mike as well as i knew he was a guy angela scott rob weinstein yeah yeah there were other comics who got me you know to go to these so you were namio renge kyoing

01:06:08Guest:Well, it didn't take.

01:06:10Guest:I mean, I went a couple times, and it didn't take for me.

01:06:13Guest:Okay.

01:06:14Guest:In other words, my deal with the universe was, I'll try it.

01:06:18Guest:If I don't like it, I'll stop.

01:06:19Guest:Yeah.

01:06:19Guest:But for instance, I had a Jehovah's Witness, a guy named Kim Lawrence, came to my apartment every Wednesday afternoon at 1 o'clock for two years.

01:06:27Guest:Huh.

01:06:27Guest:trying to sell you i would listen to him yeah and at the end i would say you have come no closer to convincing me that you are right but i've enjoyed this time see you next i'll see you next week no shit okay so one of the things that i see in 1988 is a program a bill moyer show called world of ideas and he has on this guy named forrester church forrester church was the pastor of all saints unitarian on madison avenue

01:06:51Guest:And he's talking to Bill Moyers about this new project.

01:06:52Guest:That's a pretty open discipline there.

01:06:55Guest:Yes, exactly.

01:06:56Guest:So Forrester Church is talking to Bill Moyers.

01:06:58Guest:He tells him about this new project he's got of the Jefferson Bible, a new version of the Jefferson Bible.

01:07:02Guest:Now, for those of you who don't know about the Jefferson Bible, over a period of three nights during Jefferson's first administration, he got two copies of the King James Bible.

01:07:12Guest:And he goes through the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

01:07:15Guest:It's where the story of Jesus Christ is and the philosophy of Jesus.

01:07:19Guest:He goes through this and he needs two copies of the same volume because he's going to need both sides of the page.

01:07:25Guest:He takes a razor.

01:07:27Guest:He starts going through the Bible and taking out the little bites that he likes.

01:07:33Guest:And then in a blank book, he puts them down in order.

01:07:36Guest:So if you read through the Jefferson Bible, he'll have like four verses from John.

01:07:41Guest:Then he'll have three from Matthew.

01:07:42Guest:Then he'll have two from Luke.

01:07:43Guest:And then he'll have one from Mark.

01:07:45Guest:And then he'll, you know, whatever.

01:07:46Guest:And he's going back and forth.

01:07:47Guest:And you're realizing he's taking stuff out.

01:07:49Guest:And he's showing you what he likes and what he doesn't like.

01:07:52Guest:So I had just seen a production performance by Alec McCowan, the great British actor, did a one-man show called St.

01:08:00Guest:Mark's Gospel, where he comes out on stage and he just starts in

01:08:04Guest:The very first of St.

01:08:06Guest:Mark's Gospel.

01:08:06Guest:And he reads the whole thing.

01:08:07Guest:It's two hours long.

01:08:09Guest:And he just presents it.

01:08:09Guest:And he presents it from the point of view of someone who has observed something that he knows you may doubt, but he's so convinced of himself that he's going to tell you anyway.

01:08:19Mm-hmm.

01:08:19Guest:So anyway, so I thought, well, here's a play in this Jefferson play.

01:08:23Guest:There's a Jefferson play here in the Jefferson Bible, which is have four actors and have one of them do all the Matthew lines.

01:08:29Guest:One of them do all the Luke lines, you know, so that an audience is watching four people tell the story and teachings of Jesus.

01:08:36Guest:Yeah.

01:08:36Guest:But you're getting a sense of what the different emphasis is on the different gospels.

01:08:41Guest:So I started working on that.

01:08:43Guest:Then a few years later, and this is why I'm starting to work in TV.

01:08:45Guest:So I started to get busy.

01:08:47Guest:A few years later, I find I'm moved out to LA, politically incorrect, moved out here after four years.

01:08:52Guest:We're here.

01:08:53Guest:I'm living in Hancock Park.

01:08:54Guest:I go to Chevalier's bookstore on Larchmont Boulevard, see a book called The Life of Our Lord by Charles Dickens.

01:09:00Guest:And I thought, I know all the Dickens titles.

01:09:01Guest:I've never heard of this.

01:09:02Guest:I get it out.

01:09:03Guest:I realize Dickens did the same thing that Jefferson did, except the opposite.

01:09:07Guest:Jefferson, Dickens did a gospel for his children.

01:09:10Guest:But Jefferson, in his gospel, he takes out all the miracles.

01:09:15Guest:He doesn't believe them.

01:09:16Guest:So there's no resurrection.

01:09:17Guest:There's no virgin.

01:09:18Guest:He's a rationalist.

01:09:19Guest:Yes, he's a child of the Enlightenment.

01:09:22Guest:Dickens, on the other hand, his favorite word in the English language was fancy.

01:09:25Guest:And he loves the pageantry, the miracles.

01:09:29Guest:He loves the walking on water.

01:09:31Guest:He loves raising of Lazarus.

01:09:33Guest:He loves all that stuff.

01:09:35Guest:Makes sense considering the type of the England that he came from.

01:09:38Guest:And his own existence.

01:09:40Guest:In other words, he's taken out of school at 12, he's put into a factory.

01:09:44Guest:Sure, fantasy must have been a great relief.

01:09:46Guest:Well, the circumstance, which is in this play that I will get to in two seconds.

01:09:53Guest:Dickens is taken out of school at 12, put into a factory.

01:09:57Guest:His family is in a debtor's prison.

01:09:59Guest:He's forced to work and save as much money as he can and save enough money to get the family out of prison.

01:10:05Guest:He's staying in a little room with a cot, a single candle.

01:10:11Guest:And right before he's put in his little room, his father saves from a scrap heap a few books, which he reads over and over and over at night.

01:10:23Guest:And the books are Robinson Crusoe, Arabian Nights, Don Quixote, The Bible.

01:10:30Guest:And now he's 12.

01:10:31Guest:By the time he's 22, he's the most famous author in England.

01:10:35Guest:So you can see him thinking miracles are, my life is a miracle.

01:10:40Guest:Right.

01:10:41Guest:So I start to work on, here's a better play.

01:10:43Guest:Better play is Jefferson and Dickens arguing with each other about who's got the valid notion and telling the audience stories, but disagreeing with each other every two seconds.

01:10:49Guest:Yeah.

01:10:50Guest:Start to work on this.

01:10:51Guest:And during this time, I'm still doing research.

01:10:52Guest:And I come across this book by Stephen Mitchell, who's become a friend in the meantime.

01:10:55Guest:I'm reading this book of his, and there's a footnote.

01:10:57Guest:And the footnote mentions that the exercise done by Jefferson was also done by Tolstoy.

01:11:02Guest:And now I think, oh, I've got to add Tolstoy to my play.

01:11:06Guest:It's going to take another five years of research before I can work him in.

01:11:10Marc:Get him to hang out with Dickens and Jefferson.

01:11:13Guest:Well, and so that's what the play is.

01:11:14Guest:It's called The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, and Count Leo Tolstoy.

01:11:20Guest:And it's the three of them arguing about who has the more valid notion of the teachings and life of Christ.

01:11:27Marc:All right, so you read this in front of your friends.

01:11:30Guest:Yeah, so the first person I called was Gary Shandley and just said, we've been friends for a long time.

01:11:34Guest:We went to the same high school in Tucson, Arizona.

01:11:37Guest:I said, I've got this one project.

01:11:38Guest:I've been working for about 20 years now.

01:11:40Guest:I never told you about it.

01:11:41Guest:Can I just come over to your house and read it to you?

01:11:42Guest:Yeah.

01:11:43Guest:So I go over.

01:11:44Guest:We have dinner.

01:11:45Guest:Move the food away from the dining room table.

01:11:47Guest:And I take out my script and I have on sticks pictures of the three guys to hold up so he'll know exactly who's talking.

01:11:56Guest:And then I go through the script.

01:11:58Guest:He gets halfway done.

01:11:59Guest:He says, let's stop here.

01:12:00Guest:Let's just talk.

01:12:01Guest:And he gives me like 15 pages of notes.

01:12:04Guest:And then we start talking and then it gets to be too late.

01:12:06Guest:And so the next night, it's like Scheherazade, I come back the next night and do act two.

01:12:10Guest:Um, but a month later, I did it for Stephen Mitchell and Norman Lear and Norman Lear's house and my wife and Stephen's wife, and then started having people over to my, to my guest house.

01:12:21Guest:And like, if I could get like six or seven people and, um, and then do it, uh, have them talk about it, make notes, do a rewrite, and then do another reading.

01:12:29Guest:So I've now done, I think 25 of these.

01:12:33Guest:So on

01:12:35Guest:January 8th, I'm going to be doing it at this Unitarian Church in the Valley.

01:12:41Guest:If I could just mention this, it's Conejo Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.

01:12:47Guest:And it's going to be at 8 o'clock on the 8th.

01:12:49Marc:So this was, you know, sort of represented some of your own wrestling with the notion of God, you know, through the minds and hearts of these three intellectuals and these writers.

01:12:59Marc:And you believe...

01:13:03Guest:Definitely believe in God, undeniable to me.

01:13:08Guest:That has never wavered.

01:13:10Guest:Christ now for me is the head of the class.

01:13:17Guest:In other words, I think that the notion of him as being different from all other humans is...

01:13:25Guest:is a way of thinking that leads one down a wrong path.

01:13:28Guest:I think of him as being, however, I have had experiences with healers.

01:13:33Guest:Like there's a woman out in Sierra Madre, her name is Rosalind Bruyere.

01:13:38Guest:And if you look, and what I'm doing is I'm showing him my open palm and showing that the middle of the palm, if you look at her, the middle of the palm is pulsing.

01:13:47Guest:And when you feel her put her hand on your head, you feel like juice.

01:13:50Guest:You feel like she's jumper cables and you are a car and that energy is coming into you.

01:13:57Guest:Okay.

01:13:57Guest:And so once you have one of those experiences, you begin to think, well, if she can do that, why couldn't someone have 10 times more juice than she has?

01:14:05Guest:Sure.

01:14:06Guest:Supercharger.

01:14:07Guest:Supercharger.

01:14:07Guest:And maybe that's what Christ is.

01:14:09Guest:Now, how does this, do you talk to Bill about this?

01:14:13Guest:Yeah.

01:14:13Guest:He and I used to have much.

01:14:16Guest:It's funny because this last nine episodes, this last semester, we did all those clips of Christine O'Donnell.

01:14:23Guest:So she had been on Politically Incorrect 22 times.

01:14:25Guest:So I went back and watched.

01:14:28Guest:Most of them.

01:14:29Guest:I mean, some people, you know, watched all of them and I watched many of them.

01:14:33Guest:But when we talk about religion, he would be much closer to my way of thinking.

01:14:38Guest:And then he's progressed in a different way in the intervening time.

01:14:43Guest:And because the notion then was God good, Jesus admirable, religion suspect.

01:14:49Guest:Right.

01:14:50Guest:And very often now, I will more agree, let's say if Cornel West is on our panel, I'm closer to Cornel than I am to Bill.

01:15:00Guest:But that's part of the great thing about our show, which is the show is a, it's not just Bill, it's also a collection of shows.

01:15:08Guest:He's within a context of other points of view.

01:15:11Guest:But he's a very verbal atheist.

01:15:13Guest:Very verbal atheist and proudly atheistic, but also I enjoy, I mean, we've had Sam Harris on the show.

01:15:19Guest:We've had Richard Dawkins on a couple of times.

01:15:21Guest:I enjoy those guys.

01:15:23Guest:I, I, uh, I'm not, I do not call myself a Christian, nor do I believe, nor do I belong officially to a church, nor do I think, um, it's all about sacraments.

01:15:33Guest:Like you got to get baptized.

01:15:35Guest:You got to get confirmed.

01:15:36Guest:I don't think God is that petty.

01:15:38Guest:And so I think that there are worthy people who have never affirmed a belief in Jesus.

01:15:48Guest:And I think there are many people who affirm a belief in Jesus publicly who are very disreputable.

01:15:54Marc:Sure.

01:15:55Marc:But you're just willing to you.

01:15:57Marc:You have put the the individuals into perspective on as far as intelligence and also the possibility of having some special power, though human.

01:16:08Marc:But your general sense is that there has to be a God.

01:16:12Guest:Yeah.

01:16:13Guest:My general sense is everything that exists is a miracle.

01:16:15Guest:The microphone in front of us, the ceiling, the wall, everything's a miracle is miraculous.

01:16:20Marc:And Bill Maher doesn't ever go, Scott, come on.

01:16:24Guest:Well, if you know how, if you get together with your family or you get together people, you know, he and I have worked together on and off since February of 93.

01:16:32Guest:Yeah.

01:16:33Guest:Yeah.

01:16:34Guest:So there are just places you don't necessarily go.

01:16:38Guest:Plus, the other thing is, as I'm listening to him, I'm also thinking, particularly on Mondays and Tuesdays, we're looking, the whole room, because the writers are looking to what direction are we getting from him, clarify how you think.

01:16:52Guest:And what I'm often thinking is,

01:16:54Guest:Where's the guest going to come that's going to challenge that?

01:16:57Guest:So I'm thinking of an entire circle of opinions on an idea.

01:17:05Guest:Yeah.

01:17:06Guest:It's very important that he be clear on where he is because then it allows us, it allows the writers to feed that and allows the bookers to counterpoint it.

01:17:15Marc:But you guys get along fine.

01:17:16Marc:You just don't go into this shit very often.

01:17:20Guest:You know what?

01:17:21Guest:After 20, almost 20 years, you have gone into almost everything.

01:17:27Guest:Yeah.

01:17:27Yeah.

01:17:27Marc:Seen everybody.

01:17:28Marc:You've seen each other through some pretty bad stuff and some pretty great stuff.

01:17:32Guest:Yeah.

01:17:32Guest:No, it's been a great relationship.

01:17:35Guest:Well, this has been a good talk, Scott Carter.

01:17:37Guest:Well, it's great to talk to you, and then we'll see each other at the gym.

01:17:41Marc:Okay, you got it.

01:17:42Guest:All right.

01:17:42Guest:Okay, take care.

01:17:48Marc:There you go.

01:17:49Marc:You've got a head full of Scott Carter.

01:17:51Marc:It's a little inside information about Bill Maher.

01:17:53Marc:We'll talk about God.

01:17:54Marc:And if you would like to see Scott Carter's show and you're anywhere in the vicinity of Newberry Park, California, the gospel according to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, and Count Leo Tolstoy is on Saturday, January 8th at 8 o'clock p.m.

01:18:09Marc:at the Conejo Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.

01:18:14Marc:There you go.

01:18:14Marc:3327 Old Conejo Road, Newberry Park, California.

01:18:19Marc:The number is 805-492-8751.

01:18:23Marc:Sounds like a pretty smart show.

01:18:26Marc:Sounds like some big, big ideas.

01:18:28Marc:Well-researched.

01:18:29Marc:I mean, it's been 20 years researching it.

01:18:31Marc:So that's that.

01:18:32Marc:That's the show.

01:18:33Marc:I hope you're okay.

01:18:34Marc:We got some great shows coming up.

01:18:36Marc:I got Paul Krasner in the can.

01:18:38Marc:Gonna talk to Rollins, Henry Rollins.

01:18:40Marc:Got Patton Oswalt on the books.

01:18:42Marc:Greg Fitzsimmons on Monday.

01:18:44Marc:We're gonna bury another fucking hatchet.

01:18:46Marc:That annoying guy.

01:18:48Marc:That angry man.

01:18:50Marc:But I like him.

01:18:50Marc:He reminds me of my dad.

01:18:52Marc:We make each other laugh.

01:18:53Marc:So that'll be Monday.

01:18:54Marc:Go to WTFPod.com for all your WTF needs.

01:18:58Marc:Get yourself on the mailing list over there.

01:19:00Marc:I've been pretty diligent about that.

01:19:02Marc:Also, we've got new t-shirts.

01:19:04Marc:We're going to be making, I'll let you know, but we're going to have some women's sizes too.

01:19:07Marc:American Apparel t-shirts now available at WTFPod.com.

01:19:10Marc:Let's do this.

01:19:13Guest:Pow.

01:19:15Marc:See?

01:19:16Marc:I didn't even shit my pants.

01:19:17Marc:You know why?

01:19:17Marc:It's oolong tea.

01:19:19Marc:Yup.

01:19:20Marc:Oolong tea.

01:19:21Marc:Because I'm sick.

01:19:23Marc:I love you all.

01:19:24Marc:Talk to you Monday.