Episode 1558 - Shalom Auslander
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fuck nicks what's happening i'm mark maron this is my podcast welcome to it how is everybody today
Marc:Seriously, how are you?
Marc:Nervous, excited, relieved, I would imagine, if you're listening to this show and to me.
Marc:Wow, what a fucking weekend.
Marc:I don't know about you, but I, as you know...
Marc:on this show was getting pretty, not despairing, but just accepting of something that seemed more awful than I could ever imagine.
Marc:And now there's some other thing happening.
Marc:I don't know if I'd call it hope, but I'm definitely excited.
Marc:I'm definitely excited.
Marc:And I'll be honest with you.
Marc:I mean, I knew, as did many of you going into 2020, that this wasn't the best thing ever, but we needed to stabilize the country, which I believe we did in a lot of ways, those of us who were part of that.
Marc:And now that Biden has dropped out, I'll be straight with you.
Marc:I don't talk about this stuff a lot, but I'm fucking thrilled.
Marc:I'm excited.
Marc:I like Kamala.
Marc:I always have.
Marc:And I can I don't know.
Marc:I'm I'm on board 100 percent.
Marc:But not just because like Biden was was going to blow it or that he was too old.
Marc:Those things turned out to be true.
Marc:Heading into this thing, but I like Kamala and I think it's going to be a pretty exciting fucking election.
Marc:So we'll see what happens.
Marc:Never a dull moment, never a dull day in this particular climate of our history on all levels.
Marc:But now it's like, fuck, what's going to happen now?
Marc:Here we go.
Marc:Yeah, pretty excited about that.
Marc:Today on the show, I talked to Shalom Oslander.
Marc:He's an author, essayist.
Marc:He's been a contributor to This American Life.
Marc:Also received a lot of attention and acclaim for his memoir, Fourskin's Lament.
Marc:And after writing some novels and creating the TV series Happy-ish, he has another memoir coming out.
Marc:This one is called Theh.
Marc:I think I'll clear that all up with him.
Marc:I'll be in Tucson, Arizona at the Rialto Theater on Friday, September 20th.
Marc:Then I'm in Phoenix at the Orpheum Theater on Saturday, September 21st.
Marc:My Oklahoma and Texas dates needed to be rescheduled because I'm going to be shooting a little movie.
Marc:And it'll be a big role for me.
Marc:And I hope that your aggravation with me is tempered by the fact that I might be doing something funny and good, which this script really is.
Marc:Small movie.
Marc:Going to probably knock it out in five or six weeks.
Marc:But it will be my movie.
Marc:So there's that.
Marc:But here are the dates that I've switched.
Marc:Oklahoma City was at the Tower Theater.
Marc:That was on October 3rd.
Marc:That's moved to March 6th.
Marc:And it will be a different world then.
Marc:So it'll be, who knows?
Marc:Dallas at the Majestic Theater, that's moving from October 4th to March 7th.
Marc:Houston at the White Oak Music Hall, that was October 5th, now March 8th.
Marc:And San Antonio at the Empire Theater, that was October 6th, now March 9th.
Marc:You can go to wtfpod.com slash tour for tickets and all the latest updates to the tour.
Marc:I apologize, but...
Marc:I got to do this.
Marc:All right?
Marc:There are some things I got to get done in my life.
Marc:Stand-up, obviously, is the most important thing to me, to my heart, to my voice.
Marc:This Apple show is a sort of experiment in terms of, like, how I feel about acting.
Marc:It's going well.
Marc:Had a nice thing happen the other day.
Marc:Me and Owen did a pretty intense little scene emotionally, and we knocked it out pretty quickly, and the director was very happy.
Marc:But, I mean, look...
Marc:It's this thing that I'm moving the dates for.
Marc:It's a real movie.
Marc:It's an indie movie.
Marc:And it's a very funny script.
Marc:And it will be challenging.
Marc:But also in my wheelhouse.
Marc:But I got to do it.
Marc:You know?
Marc:You can be mad at me for a couple days.
Marc:But don't hold on to it.
Marc:All right?
Marc:Is that okay?
Marc:Holy shit.
Marc:I didn't know what the hell Biden was going to do.
Marc:But I do understand.
Marc:You start to wonder what drives a person that age or older even.
Yeah.
Marc:to be so stubborn.
Marc:And I'm finding that with my father, who's actually got dementia of some sort, you know, what stays is the anger and a certain amount of pride, right?
Marc:A lot of other things fall to the wayside.
Marc:I don't know how capable he was always of being too emotionally attentive, but things remain.
Marc:There's that stubbornness that comes from pride and probably a bit of delusion.
Marc:I also just watched that HBO documentary series called Ren Faire.
Marc:The main guy in that is in his 80s.
Marc:And it's a fairly astute examination of the type of stubbornness that comes from that pride that comes from being near the end of it.
Marc:I mean, what else can you really hold on to if you're not going to surrender?
Marc:And it's a rare person that can and just sort of take in the idea of passing with a certain amount of of dignity or resolve, which I think is nearly impossible for everyone.
Marc:I mean, what you're left with is a lot of fuck you, a lot of I'm fine and a lot of fuck that guy.
Marc:Uh, so, and I, and I find it with my dad, like even today, his wife got into a fender bender and, uh, you know, the guy, she was rear ended by a guy that may or may not have been compromised.
Marc:And it was kind of a, a bit of an ordeal, but she's okay.
Marc:Thank God for a lot of reasons.
Marc:And, uh, you know, she gets home and the car is bashed up and, you know, I called to check in, make sure she was all right.
Marc:See how my dad was handling it.
Marc:And he gets on the phone and... Look, my dad's in his 80s.
Marc:He's hobbled.
Marc:He's mentally compromised.
Marc:And, you know, I said...
Marc:It's good that she's all right.
Marc:And my dad, who still has most of his marbles together, at least when he's talking to me, he says, yeah, she's lucky I wasn't there.
Marc:And I'm like, why is that, dad?
Marc:And he said, because I would have fucking killed the guy.
Marc:I said, oh, yeah.
Marc:He's like, yep, I would have fucking killed him.
Marc:I would have stuck a knife.
Marc:right into them so deep that they wouldn't even be able to find it.
Marc:Now, let's unpack that for a minute.
Marc:My dad can't walk that well.
Marc:He certainly doesn't have all his thoughts together.
Marc:But in that moment, you know, that's what he would have done.
Marc:He would have gotten out of that car as opposed to exchange insurance papers, just, you know, stabbed that guy with a knife so deep they wouldn't have been able to find it.
Marc:A knife.
Marc:One thing he never says, he never says, I would have killed him with my bare hands.
Marc:But I don't know where he's going to get the knife, what kind of knife.
Marc:But not a gun, a knife.
Marc:So the active fantasizing of spite and revenge that my dad has, it's just like, it's crazy.
Marc:Where does that come from?
Marc:And like, you know, he's always been like that.
Marc:He's, you know, he's not a violent guy, but his brain works that way.
Marc:Now it's just all this stuff just comes out of his mouth.
Marc:It doesn't stay in his brain.
Marc:It's not these dumb little, like, violent fantasies he has.
Marc:He's like, he's going to get out of the car.
Marc:Why don't you just exchange your insurance pay?
Marc:They're not going to stab him with a knife.
Marc:So deep.
Marc:They wouldn't be able to find it, my demented hobbled dad says.
Marc:I told Kit the story.
Marc:He goes, well, yeah, I guess that happens with the dementia, you know, these violent, impulsive fantasies.
Marc:I'm like, no, no, no, no.
Marc:That's been going on my whole life.
Marc:So...
Marc:Shalom Oslander, who I wasn't that familiar with, but I knew his name.
Marc:I knew a bit of his work.
Marc:I read most of this new book.
Marc:I knew that he was kind of a funny fucker and a bit of a fucker.
Marc:But, you know, as am I. The new memoir, Fe, comes out tomorrow.
Marc:You can buy it now wherever books are sold.
Marc:And this is me talking to Shalom Oslander, a little Jew on Jew action here on WTF.
Marc:Enjoy it.
Marc:Did you see Black Mass with Johnny Depp?
Marc:Did you see Mayor of Whatever with Kate Winslet?
Guest:Did you see... I try and stay very... On purpose?
Guest:Yeah, on purpose.
Guest:Why?
Guest:Why?
Guest:um because i find that it i just found like 20 years ago so 20 years it was it was affecting my writing and every i just wanted to be able to hear my own so really so your your brain's that uh vulnerable to being uh totally taken away and misguided completely and so like you can't read anything you can't watch anything if i if i read uh
Guest:Vonnegut, I start writing like Vonnegut.
Guest:That's always the example.
Guest:If I read Heller, I write like Heller.
Marc:But those are so very imitatable.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But if you read Faulkner, you're probably not going to write like Faulkner.
Guest:No, but I start to think, oh, you know, it would be cool if I wrote like a whole little world.
Marc:That's Faulkner-esque?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I'm going to create a little town with all these people.
Guest:And a few idiots, halfwits, and hillbillies.
Guest:Yeah, and then it just comes out like the Simpsons.
Marc:Well, fortunately, there is sort of, not to use this, I'm going to miscorrectly, a fairly strong hillbilly component to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.
Yeah.
Guest:There is.
Guest:It all comes back around.
Guest:They don't think so, but it is.
Guest:I call them Polish hillbillies all the time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's like, what's with the outfits and the homeschooling?
Guest:Do you want to put on?
Guest:And no COVID.
Guest:No vaccines, no anything.
Guest:Well, they got COVID.
Guest:Oh, I know.
Guest:I remember getting someone sending me a link to the New York Post after COVID started.
Guest:They were like, isn't this the town you grew up in?
Guest:And it was like the cover was...
Guest:All these ultra-Orthodox holding up signs saying, we have a different law or something.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever that means.
Guest:I don't know what that means.
Guest:It means you're dying.
Marc:But where's the respect for the Jews that made medicine good?
Marc:Where's the celebrating of Jonas Salk, for fuck's sake?
Guest:I actually had that experience when I went to...
Guest:I was asked to go to do a reading, and they're like, oh, come do it at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.
Guest:I'm like, oh, that sounds interesting.
Guest:I'll go there.
Guest:And I go there, and it's a fucking Holocaust museum.
Guest:Time for funny.
Guest:And I was like, you fucking assholes.
Guest:First of all, you lied.
Guest:You tricked me.
Guest:But then like, oh, okay, so where's the Groucho Marx wing?
Guest:Sure.
Marc:Yeah, nothing.
Guest:Where's the Jonas Salk?
Guest:Where's the Ramones?
Marc:Yeah, here's the entertainers of Auschwitz room.
Guest:It's just death.
Guest:It's just death and suffering.
Marc:Well, you know, it's a it's a weird thing.
Marc:I had this moment with Hitler the other day where and it was kind of profound to me because I was watching that the documentary.
Marc:There's a six part documentary series on Hitler on Netflix.
Marc:And sadly, a lot of its reenactment, like 80 percent of it is some guy, mediocre actor they hired to gesticulate wildly with a haircut.
Marc:But but.
Marc:But there was this moment where I realized that, you know, I've heard a lot of this stuff before, obviously, the numbers, the idea of the horror of the Holocaust.
Marc:I know that stuff.
Marc:As a Jew, you know, you're kind of brought up with it.
Marc:I think it's even in this book, the films.
Marc:We saw those in Hebrew school, right?
Marc:But but I realized there's a numbness to it, too, that there's a kind of mythological acceptance of the idea of ultimate evil being this person, this Hitler.
Marc:And I knew that watching it.
Marc:And, you know, my empathy is engaged to a degree, but it felt very familiar.
Marc:And there was not not like an apathy, but a numbness to the reality of it.
Marc:And then towards the end, you know, he kills his dog.
Marc:Before he commits suicide, he tests cyanide on his dog and watches his dog die.
Marc:And it was at that moment I go like, this guy's a dick.
Marc:After watching the entire arc of 10 million people killed, I'm like, what a fucking monster.
Marc:Just kill a dog.
Marc:What kind of fucking animal does that?
Marc:It's a weird moment that my emotions are engaged on a different level.
Guest:Yeah, it's like an old joke.
Guest:There's this joke about that, like where Hitler's talking about his plans.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And he's like, we're going to do this, we're going to do that, and then I'm going to kill all the kittens.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And people are like, what?
Guest:How can you kill the kittens?
Guest:Is there a joke?
Guest:And it's something like, yeah, see, people don't even give a shit about Jews more than the kittens.
Yeah.
Guest:I think I kind of heard that joke.
Guest:Yeah, something like that.
Guest:They do it with puppies.
Guest:They do it with everything.
Guest:Like, and then I'm going to kill the puppies.
Guest:What?
Guest:What?
Guest:How can you kill the puppies?
Guest:See, no one cares about Jews.
Guest:See, no one cares about Jews.
Guest:Yeah, that's the line.
Marc:There was stuff in there that I really didn't know.
Marc:There's little moments where I don't think I knew the arc of
Marc:the unfolding of it at all.
Marc:You know, like I, I know that, you know, the concentration camps, I know he tried to kill Jews, but the sort of evolving of the policy.
Guest:I think it meant the show like, Oh, I didn't see him dying.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I don't want to spoil anything, but he, he kills himself in the bunker, but God damn it.
Marc:I was five episodes in spoiler alert.
Marc:I used to do a joke years ago where because of the internet, I thought that eventually people will, you know, history will be untethered from any sort of context.
Marc:And there'll be a whole generation who will say things like, wait, Hitler's the guy with the mustache?
Marc:And that's all they'll know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, that's funny because I have a Groucho tattoo.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And I got it years ago.
Guest:But as I get older, he's slowly starting to become Hitler.
Marc:He's Hitlerizing the skin shrinkage.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Something's going on here.
Marc:What's your what's your relationship with Groucho Marx?
Guest:Oh, he's just always he's a good reminder for me to not take anything seriously.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you are you you find you have success at that?
Guest:Um, well, I tried to, I mean, I wouldn't, if I had complete success, I wouldn't need it.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But, uh, I, no, I think I, I, I veered toward that way sometimes.
Marc:Do you remember him as a kid?
Marc:Did you see repeats?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And then I started to read him.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, as I got older.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If you ever read the letters of Groucho Marx.
Marc:I have it.
Marc:And I've poked through it.
Marc:You just, you laid, you just went through it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was just like, he just doesn't give a fuck.
Guest:It's fucking awesome.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, that sort of comes into this idea of the entire framing of this new book.
Marc:Because I want to feel the weight of fear.
Marc:That you're giving it.
Marc:And I want to know, you know, what was the kernel of thought on that for you?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because I know the word, and I didn't grow up as Jewish as you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But why that word as an organizing idea?
Guest:Yeah, it's just that's the word.
Guest:That was the word that, you know, you hear when—
Guest:You know, you step in shit and you wipe it off, you go, oh, fat.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or something's rotten or something's awful.
Guest:Disappointing.
Guest:Disappointing.
Guest:Yeah, or, you know, someone finds porn under your mattress.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, and so it's this word that, for me, was just so much more dismissive than any other word in my world.
Right.
Guest:Even today.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Like, there's no word, there's nothing you could say.
Marc:Like, because it immediately diminishes almost anything.
Guest:To just vileness.
Marc:Just, yeah, or just, right, or just nothing.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Like, you know, any kind of accomplishment.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Any sort of moment of pride.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's all destructive.
Marc:Self-realization.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:There's nothing in English.
Guest:Like, ew.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But that's not quite right.
Guest:No.
Guest:Ew doesn't do anything.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:It's like, oh, a bug.
Guest:Ew.
Guest:Right.
Guest:There's nothing.
Guest:Fe is just like, fe just takes away your soul.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:If you're wired for fat.
Marc:I don't assume that the general public without explanation is going to have the same visceral reaction to fat as a Jew who grew up with the, you know, my, my, like, let's talk about Jews.
Guest:All right, but only Jews in this country.
Marc:Deal.
Marc:Well, yeah.
Marc:Well, I mean, what's interesting right now is that all these ultra-Orthodox are like, we're not fighting.
Marc:I really wonder how that's going to pan out.
Marc:They've always said that.
Marc:I know, but now they've just passed the law.
Marc:You don't think they're going to do it?
Guest:No, they're not going to do it.
Marc:Why, they don't want to change their outfit?
Marc:I don't think they're very good fighters.
Yeah.
Marc:Well, that's probably why they're asking them.
Guest:You can put them all up front.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, it's funny because it's so fractured, right, that world.
Guest:When I was a kid, we were very, very religious, but we weren't Hasidic.
Marc:Yeah, that's interesting.
Guest:And one time we had a day off.
Guest:We had, like, Thanksgiving off or something.
Guest:And we just decided to cut across the Hasidic school to get to, like, a candy store or something.
Guest:And they started shouting at us in Yiddish.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And it was, like, me and four friends.
Guest:And...
Guest:Like the whole thing was always growing up, you don't fuck with the SIDS.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Because they're crazy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And they just, and so my friends just yelled back, bleh, like fake Yiddish.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they just start pouring out the windows, throwing rocks, like just coming at us.
Guest:Really?
Guest:And we had to, we had to book it.
Guest:We just ran.
Guest:And I remember thinking at some point, where are the fucking rabbis?
Guest:And I turn around and the rabbis are chasing us.
Yeah.
Guest:Frauds!
Guest:Yeah, and then I get back home and they're telling me, oh, these people hate you, those people hate you.
Guest:I just got chased by SIDS.
Guest:These guys are crazy.
Marc:What are the nuances and the differences?
Marc:What crazy person you follow.
Marc:Oh, that's really it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And what was he?
Marc:Was it Menachem?
Marc:Who was the big guy?
Marc:Oh, Schneerson.
Marc:Schneerson.
Guest:Was he around then?
Guest:Yeah, we're still waiting for him to come back.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:But was he just starting out?
Marc:Was he a young messiah at that time?
Guest:He worked at CAA.
Marc:He couldn't cut it.
Marc:He couldn't cut it.
Marc:He had a couple of failed movies.
Marc:I've only talked to one lapsed ultra-orthodox before, and it was kind of disturbing.
Marc:But I think he might have been Hasidic.
Marc:His name's Loser Twersky.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:You know him?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:He's an actor.
Marc:We were in the camps together.
Marc:The Jewish day camps?
Guest:Jewish death camps.
Marc:But what I want to know, because I've read most of the book, I understand the language of self-judgment.
Marc:And oddly, the one thing I relate the most to is this sort of thing that pops up occasionally throughout the book.
Marc:Does she think I'm fat?
Marc:Does he think I'm fat?
Marc:What the fuck is that?
Marc:I mean, where does that come from?
Marc:Because it's plagued my entire fucking life.
Marc:Fear of fat.
Marc:Yeah, we were told it.
Marc:Were we?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Well, my mother was anorexic.
Marc:That's all I know.
Marc:So I know directly psychologically, but I didn't think it was fundamentally a Jewish thing.
Marc:No, I don't think it's fundamentally Jewish.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I think, but I don't, we're not born hating ourselves.
Guest:We don't sit there.
Guest:For whatever reason.
Guest:Shit.
Guest:turn off the lights because I don't like my reflection like if I for me like all I have to do I could be in a great mood yeah and I just pass like a storefront window and catch a glimpse of myself and I'm like it's fucking over fuck yeah I have a real hard time with photographs now because I or mirrors that I feel are broken somehow like that mirror does not work for me yeah yeah but this mirror works for me see but I have the opposite where now it's so far the other way that if I look good in a mirror I'm like yeah something's wrong with it
Marc:Yeah, I don't know if I ever feel that I look good, but it usually hinges on how gaunt my face is.
Guest:Yeah, so how un-terrible.
Marc:Yeah, or just sort of like, I'm okay.
Marc:I have some self-acceptance.
Marc:Well, that's sort of a question I have after reading the book, is that I used to feel this about Richard Lewis as he got older, and his material was still coming from the same place.
Marc:And there was part of me that's sort of like, nothing's better, nothing has changed.
Marc:Right, no.
Guest:No, there are additions.
Guest:My family, like my kids and my wife, I can look at all of that and go, wow, good job.
Guest:You didn't pass it on.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I broke the cycle.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:So you did successfully.
Marc:Yeah, for sure.
Marc:Consciously.
Guest:Yes, consciously.
Guest:And part of that was I haven't spoken to anyone in my family in 30 years.
Guest:It had to be a hard break.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It just had to be a hard break.
Guest:I couldn't be around it.
Marc:And they're all still out there?
Marc:Cousins?
Marc:What not?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Are your parents alive?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:What the fuck?
Marc:Really?
Guest:Yeah, that's the happy ending, buddy.
Guest:By the way, for real.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah, because it was not good.
Guest:It was very painful.
Guest:When I was around them, any of those feelings of Fed just got worse.
Guest:Oh, that's what happens at the end of the book?
Marc:No.
Guest:You break with them?
Guest:Well, no.
Guest:No, that's the end of my previous book.
Marc:Of Foreskins Wilmette, yeah.
Guest:But this was just...
Guest:what this was was realizing oh there's still shrapnel do you know what I mean like I get the bomb was religion but this story is just something I can't shake and I feel like I see it everywhere in the world now like you go online and it's just people shouting fat at each other
Guest:Constantly.
Guest:Everyone's awful.
Guest:You've got to fix this about yourself.
Guest:You've got to fix, even in like the self-improvement shit.
Marc:Well, isn't that the sort of one of the engines of capitalism?
Marc:You suck.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:It's not a great system.
Guest:It's not a great system.
Guest:It's not good.
Guest:It's, it's, it's, it starts from you suck.
Marc:But, but, but so, but like if, if I'm intellectually there, that's, that's a quality of God.
Guest:the you suckness yeah yeah exactly well that's what it is that's what if you read the old testament that's where it starts it starts with a guy make creates a creature the guy is perfect i know it's like this is the beginning of the book it's great yeah yeah and then he makes him out of dirt yeah he names him dirt yeah that's what adam means yeah and then like chapter two the guy steals for his shit and lies to him yeah
Guest:It's the story of a shoplifter.
Guest:Day one.
Guest:And then it's like, okay, you know what?
Guest:Get the fuck out.
Guest:I don't want to ever see you again.
Guest:So they leave.
Guest:He has two kids and one tries to kill the other.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then it's like, oh, well, I'm flooding the world.
Guest:Fuck it.
Guest:It's so fat.
Guest:I'm just sick of all this shit.
Guest:I'm going to let one guy live.
Guest:One family.
Guest:So he lets one family live.
Guest:And then what happens?
Guest:He gets drunk and tries to rape his daughter.
Guest:His daughter.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:It's just one thing after the next.
Guest:We're like...
Guest:wait a minute why are we telling ourselves this story why have we been telling ourselves this story for so long that it's like it's like our ur story it's like in our genetics jews no everybody everybody you look at the world around and it's just like yeah it's just it's it's not even it's i don't even think it's jewish it's actually closer to calvinist you suck and you're always gonna suck
Marc:Yeah, but doesn't Calvinism posit that if you work hard, you might unsuck yourself?
Marc:I don't think so.
Guest:I think it starts—you either roll the dice or you don't.
Guest:You either get it or you don't get it.
Marc:But as somebody like—because this is what I'm curious about in terms of what Jewish identity means in that—because, like, I'm a guy, you know, my—
Marc:My grandparents were middle-class Jews.
Marc:They're not very religious.
Marc:Some Yiddish in the house when they didn't want us to understand something.
Marc:My parents were very self-centered, conservative Jews, but didn't mean anything.
Marc:And the idea, because I feel that when I read the book, outside of whatever research you had to do around Old Testament stories and sort of coming at them from the point of view that you do in the book, that at some point,
Marc:During your upbringing that I always say that I was never taught how to use God, that like the idea of God was just like, well, this God, but I never was really the fear of God was never put into me.
Marc:I was never that curious.
Marc:I don't seek God now.
Marc:But I do realize that, you know, somebody was brought up like you in some sort of Talmudic tradition that there must have been some more expansive understanding of what God is and what his place is in your life.
Guest:Yeah, although it's just variations on a theme.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the theme is he's perfect and we suck.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But when you're young, what was the schooling?
Guest:It was pretty much that.
Guest:I mean, it was pretty much like, you know, here's all the things.
Guest:Here's 613 rules.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Don't fuck them up.
Guest:It's a lot of rules.
Guest:It's a lot of rules.
Guest:And when you break them, even a little bit, there is no breaking them a little bit.
Guest:I remember I...
Guest:When my mother found a McDonald's bag in my car when I was like 17 or 18 or something, she said, you're finishing what Hitler started.
Guest:And I was like, he started a Happy Meal?
Guest:So unpack that.
Guest:Because I'm killing Jews by not being a Jew.
Marc:Really?
Marc:That's what it is?
Marc:That's the math.
Marc:Not that it's not kosher.
Marc:Oh, well, that's it.
Marc:That's why.
Marc:That's why.
Marc:Because I'm eating meat and milk and not kosher meat.
Marc:And so you're killing Jews by not being a Jew.
Marc:So I'm killing Jews, yeah.
Marc:And that was said with belief.
Guest:Oh, that was a condemnation.
Guest:That was said with fe.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, how could you?
Marc:When do you start to first realize this?
Marc:I mean, like, how insulated was that community?
Marc:Where was it, Monzi?
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, it's pretty... I mean, if you're in the Hasidic part of it, it's completely... For me, I ended up... I started out in an ultra-Orthodox school, and then middle school moved to slightly less, which meant there were girls.
Guest:It was all boys before that.
Marc:Oh, you're right, in the book, you could do two classes with girls.
Guest:Yeah, math and science.
Guest:And...
Guest:But that was it.
Guest:And you can hang out and talk to them, but it wasn't very... And then I went to high school, again, all boys, but it was in New York City.
Guest:And that was where the sort of awakening started.
Guest:I would start to skip Tomlin class and go down to Times Square and go to porn theaters.
Guest:Did you see the live sex show?
Guest:I did.
Guest:It was very disturbing.
Marc:It's very disturbing.
Marc:I remember I was in high school.
Marc:I tried that, too.
Marc:You just see there's a revolving table, that one place, and there's just two people on it.
Guest:Yeah, and you can see all the other people across the way.
Marc:Yeah, you can see the other guy.
Guest:It's pathetic, and you hate yourself even more.
Guest:Well, that's the other component of this whole thing.
Guest:This is a fucking self-hatred.
Guest:Yeah, because everything ends up getting reflected back on yourself.
Guest:But I remember...
Marc:How is that Talmudic?
Marc:Because God is perfect and you know you've broken a rule?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:There's no way to release that into the ether like with a Jesus?
Marc:You just got to sit with it?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:You can pray and you can say, I'm never going to do it again.
Yeah.
Guest:But it doesn't take away... I remember being told that you start with a white slate when you're born.
Guest:So you're wired for shame.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's a certain wired for self-reproach, for seeing yourself in the ways that they've told you to see yourself.
Guest:And so for me, what was a bit staggering was when I started to leave...
Guest:And I started to read mostly.
Guest:I would go to porn shops and whatever money was left over, I would go to a used bookstore.
Guest:And they were really helpful people.
Guest:It was kind of eye-opening.
Guest:Now you dressed in the outfit?
Guest:no no when he went into the city got into my porn clothes some city clothes yeah your porn shirt yeah I just wanted to fit in so I just wore a shirt that said fuck Jews yeah but you start I started reading like Kafka and Beckett and these people were all
Guest:had the same feeling, but they were laughing at it in a way.
Guest:They were trying to deal with it in a way.
Guest:Which to me was just a lifesaver.
Guest:I was just like, oh.
Guest:I remember reading someone, I read the first Vonnegut book I read.
Guest:I think it was Breakfast of Champions, I think.
Guest:It was the one with, you know, he divides his whole religion or something.
Guest:And I remember looking at the back and they were like, one of the reviews was, Vonnegut is our laughing prophet of doom.
Guest:And I was like, I could do that.
Guest:Good job.
Guest:You can get it.
Guest:That could be the laughing prophet of doom.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But what was sort of disturbing was to see that story still told elsewhere, outside of the world.
Guest:Which one?
Guest:The Adam story?
Guest:The You Suck.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:The You Suck.
Guest:Because originally I was like, oh, this is just like a...
Guest:an old testament problem um you know yeah there's not there's not a whole lot of us and so what maybe it'll go away but then you start to see it on a bigger scale um how does that first reveal itself um meeting people who aren't from who aren't from my background yeah um
Guest:Uh, in the first case, I wrote, um, a memoir of it, uh, called four skins men and went and did all these book tours and just met hundreds and hundreds of people who are not Jews who are like, yeah, that's what I was told.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I hate, I, I, I, I feel this way about myself.
Guest:I was told God is going to come and get me from every religion in the world.
Guest:The fear of God is that the fear of God and the underneath it, you're afraid of God because you're shit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:If you're perfect, you have nothing to worry about.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But you're not perfect.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Moses wasn't perfect.
Marc:None of them seem to be perfect.
Guest:No.
Guest:And that's and, you know, perfectionism is a motherfucker.
Guest:Like you don't you don't want to grow up with that and have to achieve that just to like yourself at all, especially when there's a context.
Marc:That perfectionism looks like honoring scripture, which you can't be perfect at because that's part of the clause, right?
Marc:Right.
Marc:You can only practice.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So there is no perfect.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But that's pretty honest.
Guest:But it's trying to...
Guest:There's something about emulating God that's fucked up.
Guest:Because he's, in my view, he's the antagonist of that book.
Guest:If you look at it from a sort of literary standpoint, he's the bad guy.
Guest:He's stumbling around drunk.
Guest:He's like my father.
Guest:He's like, fucking assholes.
Guest:God damn.
Guest:I will not, you know, I'll get rid of you right now.
Guest:You touch that light switch and I'll break your hand.
Guest:Like typical angry father shit.
Guest:But we pretend that he's the good guy and we're the bad guy.
Guest:But it doesn't actually line up that way.
Guest:It's actually kind of more interesting if you go, I do this thing called Ungodly, this little series I'm doing of videos where I take chapter and verse through the Old Testament and read it through that passage.
Guest:prism of what if god is the bad guy here what are the lessons we learning isn't like okay so adam sucked and he stole never steal and tree of life and all that yeah what if the lesson of that story is god's an asshole don't freak out
Guest:Calm the fuck down.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So if someone took an apple, chill out.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:It's not the biggest deal in the world.
Guest:You're God.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You have a lot of fucking apples.
Guest:So the lesson is, guys, don't turn people into salt.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just get help.
Marc:It is sort of interesting that even if you're not religious or you don't feel like you absorb it, that it is sort of a pillar of thought.
Guest:Of Western sort of thought of...
Guest:Yeah, we're wrong and we destroy things.
Guest:And I'm not suggesting we're great.
Guest:No, I get it.
Marc:But you're starting from a place.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, you don't even have a chance.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's sort of like, I remember when COVID came out, I was like, oh, it's like anti-natalism stuff.
Guest:And, you know, yeah, the environment's fucked, but everything was the environment's fucked because of you and it's unsavable, the end.
Guest:Great.
Guest:All right.
Marc:So what do you want me to do?
Guest:I'm just going to go take a shit in the ocean because it's fucked anyway.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Or else just, you know, I guess the more spiritual approach would be to accept your powerlessness and try to live a fucking life.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Good luck with that.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But, I mean, it doesn't necessarily imply immediate nihilism.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But for a lot of people, it does.
Guest:It does.
Guest:It does.
Guest:It just becomes...
Guest:Let's burn it down.
Guest:Let's burn it down.
Guest:And you go on, you know, for me, like.
Guest:And God does that.
Guest:That's what God does.
Guest:That's what he does.
Guest:And it's never worked.
Guest:No.
Guest:There's always a few people.
Marc:It's never been helpful.
Guest:It's never been helpful.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:Even when he leaves one, he fucks his kids.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's like, maybe that's the lesson that you can't ever burn it all down.
Guest:And you'd be better off trying to find a positive answer to this.
Marc:I always wonder about that with like these people that are preparing for, you know, these survivalists that are, that are, you know, storing food that are preppers, the preppers.
Marc:I'm like, in my mind, it's like, why do you want to live there?
Marc:Right.
Marc:What are you preparing for?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, do you have that much kind of,
Marc:biological incentive that you feel it's your responsibility to repopulate the world?
Marc:Because if you don't have that, why the fuck would you want to live through it?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah, I know.
Guest:It doesn't make any sense.
Guest:You'd want to be out of here.
Guest:Yeah, for sure.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I always thought that when I was reading the things about... Remember the Left Behind series?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's like, who the fuck wants to get left behind?
Guest:Get me out of here.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Let's go.
Guest:No, burn me up.
Guest:Burn me up day one.
Marc:I just... And now, I don't know how...
Marc:And I guess because you've done the research, but just like, you know, there's a real weird thing that I don't think I've ever experienced is that, you know, being a Jew in this country is now like viscerally frightening.
Marc:And I don't know that I ever experienced that before.
Marc:Am I using the word wrong?
Guest:No.
Guest:No.
Guest:I just – do you read a lot of news?
Marc:I read a lot of news, but I also – it's not so much the information.
Marc:But, you know, culturally, I see, you know, because so many of the –
Marc:The norms of civilized behavior around tolerance are breaking down.
Marc:So there's this like a very kind of like, to me, tangible undercurrent of sort of strange, glib, acceptable anti-Semitism.
Guest:And for me, I feel like the biggest purveyor now that there's no church or religion anymore of the you suck story is the news.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And if I go and look for 10 fucking minutes at the news, I want to kill myself.
Guest:Drown my kids in the bathtub.
Guest:Sorry I ever gave birth to them.
Guest:It's all over.
Guest:Got no answers for you.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I close my laptop and I go outside.
Guest:Yeah, I know.
Guest:And there's someone helping someone across the street.
Guest:I get that.
Guest:And you're just like, what the fuck are we doing?
Guest:Like in my head...
Guest:World War III or Civil War II.
Marc:Is what you're holding in your hand.
Guest:It's going to be about ghosts.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:After it's over, we're going to realize we all kind of agreed on the same things.
Guest:Like this is created.
Guest:By technological mindfucking.
Guest:And the people who want money behind that technological mindfucking.
Marc:For whatever reason.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:For whatever reason.
Marc:No, I totally agree with that.
Guest:Because I remember we moved to L.A.
Guest:and my neighbor here, and I talk about this in the book, she's like,
Guest:We get here, and it's like, it's palm trees.
Guest:It's pretty.
Guest:It's homeless.
Guest:And we sit down.
Guest:Our neighbor invites us over, and I'm like, we're like, oh, it's so nice to be here.
Guest:She's like, yeah, if you like rape.
Guest:I'm like, what?
Guest:Yeah, if you like crime.
Guest:She says, you got to go on Next Door.
Guest:I've never seen it before.
Guest:I didn't know what it was.
Guest:Oh, it's the worst.
Guest:I go on Next Door, and it's just, it's an apocalypse.
Guest:For your neighborhood.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, every neighborhood.
Guest:Yeah, it's the worst.
Guest:And there's a funniness about it because it's like, everything's going to shit and have you seen my dog?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I used to joke that it should be called found black man, lost white dog.
Guest:Because that's all that goes on over there.
Guest:Well, it's seen black man on my porch.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I saw a black guy.
Marc:Where's my labradoodle?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, it's true.
Marc:But then you start to break it down with any of that stuff.
Marc:And a lot of times it's like five people who are constantly posting.
Marc:Because they're full of fear and panic and weirdness.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But because it comes through the internet, you're like, it's the whole god damn it.
Marc:It's all of it.
Guest:It's got to be everybody.
Guest:We haven't adjusted to those numbers.
Guest:That's true.
Guest:I remember when I, ages ago, at the very beginning of all this fucking nightmare.
Guest:Which one?
Marc:Life?
Guest:The internet.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:I was writing something for NPR, for their site.
Guest:And I was like, okay, but I've seen some of this stuff.
Guest:I don't want comments turned on.
Guest:for this because it just ruins the piece.
Guest:Like no one reads the piece.
Guest:They just go down.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And Joe Bigcock 11 says, this was stupid.
Guest:And now I think it's stupid and I don't read it.
Guest:So just turn them off.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they said, no, we never turn off comments.
Guest:It's part of our social plan, our social, whatever media plan.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then a few years ago, I don't remember how many, I remember hearing this story that NPR was turning off all their comments because lo and behold, it's exactly what you said.
Yeah.
Guest:They have 20,000 comments, 19,000 from the same five cranks under different names.
Guest:And we're letting, you know, it's sort of like there's, as a kid.
Guest:That is the model for minority rule.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But like extreme, for Taliban rule, for lunatics.
Guest:And that's what's going on.
Guest:Like, it just doesn't make any sense.
Guest:Like, when I was a kid, we had this thing of the village idiot, right?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Every town had a village idiot.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And you knew they were idiots and you just, whatever, you live your life out of mine, but you don't pay too much attention to it.
Guest:To me, it feels like what the internet did was take all the village idiots and give them a village.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:So there's a village of village idiots and
Guest:And the media have decided, well, that's 10,000 people.
Guest:We can't ignore it.
Guest:But it's out of 8 billion.
Guest:Yes, you can.
Marc:And it might not be 10,000.
Guest:And it may not even be.
Guest:It's probably two.
Marc:Well, that's sort of like the interesting thing about vigilante justice on social media platforms.
Marc:It's like, what are the real numbers?
Marc:And what is corporate reaction to these numbers?
Guest:I don't know, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:All I know is that everybody I know, and I go through this myself, I'm very sensitive to that story.
Guest:That story of you suck.
Guest:And we're storytelling creatures.
Guest:We live by story.
Guest:We teach by story.
Guest:We educate our young by story.
Guest:It's our operating system.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And once you start to go, okay, let me see where I'm seeing this story, you start to see it everywhere.
Guest:And it's staggering and fucked up.
Guest:And so I know if I get together with a friend and they're in a really foul mood, I'm pretty sure...
Guest:they were reading whatever beforehand.
Guest:Something.
Guest:The Hill, Drudge, CNN, whatever.
Guest:And they're just feeling shitty.
Guest:Because the day was kind of okay.
Guest:It really fucks your heads up.
Marc:It fucks kids up.
Marc:I've been doing material about it.
Marc:I talk about that.
Marc:It's impossible to have a good day anymore.
Marc:Because as soon as you look at your phone, you're like, oh, fuck.
Marc:Fuck.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But then I said, but I didn't realize you could change the settings on your newsfeed.
Marc:I had mine set to panic.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:If you set it to, you know, like celebrities and health, it's a little easier.
Guest:Even then it makes me want to kill myself.
Guest:Even then I can't, I don't want to know what Paul Rudd's doing.
Guest:I don't give a fuck.
Marc:I don't, I don't give a fuck, but it's a little lighter.
Guest:It is until they start talking, and then they mention a political thing, and now it's like, oh, I should go find out what that political thing is, and now I'm fucking in it, and I give up.
Marc:Well, I've kind of gotten that monster under control.
Marc:Now the scrolling thing is a little problematic.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Watching reels.
Marc:Because it's endless.
Marc:But it's also, it can become your primary emotional partner in that you don't know how much time is going by.
Marc:And because of the nature of how these technologies design this stuff, it's kind of like crack.
Marc:They know the buttons.
Marc:So like before you even get out of bed, you know, you've cried twice and you're exhausted.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it's a good exercise to like, you don't have to be an artist to do this, but just draw what that partner looks like.
Guest:Because it's not going to be, you know, Gail Godot.
Guest:It's going to be waiting for Godot.
Guest:It's going to be something awful.
Guest:It's a monster.
Guest:A monster.
Guest:A monster.
Guest:And you're just like, you know, I know, like, my kids are pretty well-adjusted.
Guest:And if they're suddenly in a shitty mood...
Guest:It's because my oldest son who plays bass saw some kid who is seven and has a connected father and he's going on a world tour.
Guest:So now he feels shitty about everything he's done.
Guest:Or my younger son's a painter and, oh, well, this guy had a showing at a gallery and now he sucks.
Guest:And it's all this stuff that's just, I know there's good in it.
Guest:Again, both of them learned a lot of their skills off of YouTube.
Guest:There's some positive stuff to this.
Guest:But I'm not sure how.
Guest:It's like the Bible.
Guest:There's some good stuff.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Right?
Guest:It's not all evil.
Guest:There's some good.
Guest:Which parts do you like?
Guest:The menu.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's occasionally, if you dig deep enough, you find a good life point.
Guest:For everything, there's a season.
Marc:Okay, great.
Marc:Yeah, that makes sense.
Guest:Let's write a song.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:There's some decent stuff.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:But I can't...
Guest:I can't separate it from all the awful shit.
Marc:But also, once the wiring is in, before the internet, I resented people more successful than me.
Marc:I didn't need the internet to reconfirm that.
Marc:I just needed to know that that person's doing whatever.
Marc:It's all based on information, but you're not pummeled with it.
Marc:You're not pummeled with it.
Marc:When you see enough 12-year-olds doing Van Halen riffs, you're sort of like, what's the point of even...
Guest:I got out here and I stopped to put gas in my car and there's a screen on the pump with Wolf Blitzer on it telling me about who got bombed.
Guest:I'm like, can you just shut the fuck up for one fucking minute, you ghoul?
Guest:And by the way, you live in like some fucking mansion.
Guest:This has paid off extremely well for you.
Guest:I add this line in the book that it's the best of times for people telling us it's the worst of times.
Marc:Well, that thing you said about going outside reminds me of an old Bill Hicks bit where he's watching CNN.
Marc:It's just war, famine, destruction.
Marc:And that was the only thing on.
Marc:At that time, it was the only 24 minutes.
Marc:And then he'd open the door and you're like, crickets.
Guest:Now here's Bill with the weather.
Marc:But that's true.
Marc:But I think what I feel in myself is...
Marc:If you even wrangle it in your mind and you understand it the way you understand it, that the impact is real, even if you can detach from it, what I think if you're self-aware, what you're left with despite detaching from it is what's the point?
Marc:Mm hmm.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I think that I guess that is to a degree.
Marc:But that that's the weird thing.
Marc:When I talk to, you know, you've written this book, you do all right as a writer.
Marc:I talk to, you know, artists, you know, who make films, you know, that are beautiful and creative and interesting storytelling.
Marc:But there's part of my brain that's like, who's going to fucking watch that?
Guest:Right.
Marc:You know, what impact is it going to have?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What is the fucking point?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And to me, the point is, well, all you need is a drop.
Guest:A little, you know... I tell myself that these things matter because...
Guest:You know, a tsunami just starts out as a little tremble way under the ocean somewhere.
Guest:I think that's correct.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And when it gets to shore, it's got incredible power.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I'm sure that, you know, people have read, you know, Foreskins of Gloment or any of the stories that, you know, you go to events and they're like, that thing changed my life.
Marc:That helped.
Marc:And that, you know, and that's enough.
Guest:You're already better than Wolf Blitzer.
Yeah.
Guest:We don't even know what Wolf Blitzer thinks.
Guest:No, we don't.
Guest:We just know how he scowls and that wherever bad things happen, he seems to be around.
Guest:Maybe there's a conspiracy.
Guest:Maybe it's all Wolf pulling all this stuff.
Guest:He's Satan.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Wolf Blitzer is Satan.
Guest:Yeah, I knew it wasn't the Jews behind 9-11.
Guest:It was Wolf.
Guest:How did he get there so fast?
Guest:The Jews are behind everything.
Guest:And he's a Jew, I think.
Guest:He's always there.
Guest:He's always there when things go wrong.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Ready to go.
Guest:Ready to go.
Marc:He's got something to report.
Marc:Something's going on.
Marc:It's not kosher.
Marc:But that's an interesting thing because the other side of that, and I know that you wrestle with it because I can see it in the book, is that there's always part of you that's like, you know, why isn't this getting a bigger audience?
Yeah.
Marc:Like, you know, like I've come to.
Marc:What's wrong with me?
Marc:Right.
Marc:Because I'm doing comedy.
Marc:I got friends who do arenas.
Marc:And I'm like, and I do what I do.
Marc:And I know it's dark.
Marc:Dick jokes.
Marc:Dick jokes are just, you know, very limited, you know, intellectual.
Marc:I got to write about boy wizards.
Marc:But there's part of me that, like, I cannot understand how, like, the jokes I do aren't arena jokes.
Right.
Guest:I had this thing and it's in the book where I go to airports and I walk in, because I'm a schmuck, I go into the airport bookstore and it's all shit.
Guest:You can't avoid it.
Guest:It's not a screen.
Guest:And it's all shit.
Guest:And I call my wife and I'm like, she's like, what's wrong?
Guest:I'm like, well, my book isn't in there.
Guest:And she's like, well, why would you want it to be in there?
Guest:You told me it's all shit.
Guest:I'm like, yeah, well, I want it to be in there and be the only thing that's not shit.
Guest:And I'm the only one that knows that.
Guest:She's like, but I don't understand.
Guest:If it was in there, it would be shit.
Guest:Would you rather it be shit?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, but I want it to be in the shit store.
Guest:Well, I'm glad you have these philosophical arguments with your wife.
Yeah.
Guest:She's just sitting there hoping the plane goes down.
Guest:Oh, for God's sake, let it be over.
Guest:But that is the fucking thing, man.
Guest:And it's just like, how old are you?
Marc:I'm 54.
Marc:All right.
Marc:I'm 60.
Marc:But it is a weird thing that these things, and earlier when I said that to you about nothing's gotten better, you haven't resolved any of these issues, you don't have some sort of psychological proactive context to stop the fucking way you think.
Marc:It just doesn't go away.
Marc:Even if I know.
Marc:I don't want to fucking do an arena.
Marc:Who the fuck wants to do an arena?
Guest:I would just collapse into myself.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:And the price you'd have to pay with the material would be awful.
Marc:Yeah, well, it's never going to happen because I don't know how to do that.
Marc:That's the other thing.
Marc:When you start asking yourself these questions, what are the books that people are writing that everybody likes?
Marc:And I couldn't even fake it.
Marc:Right, no.
Guest:There's no way.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So, like, for me, it's like, oh, people like disaster novels.
Guest:So I'm going to write a disaster novel.
Guest:And within five pages, there's, like, there's a dog jerking off and somebody's angry.
Guest:It just doesn't – my brain just doesn't work that way.
Guest:I can't – you know, I'm going to write – so I was like, oh, I'm going to write a –
Guest:I'm going to write a horror movie, a horror story about a guy who goes in a house and it's haunted.
Guest:And it turns out the book that came out of that is a guy buys a house in the woods and finds Anne Frank in the attic.
Guest:Pretty horrible.
Guest:And she's like 83 and a total bitch.
Guest:And it's like, what?
Guest:That's not coming to a theater near you any fucking time.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:No one optioned that book.
Guest:Well, actually, we're working on it as a play now.
Guest:I think it might have life as a play.
Guest:Actually, Phil Hoffman wanted to do it as a film.
Marc:Was that the original thing?
Marc:Because you write about the Phil meetings.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:That was the original one?
Guest:That was the original thing.
Guest:He was like, I want to do this as a film.
Guest:And you need somebody like that with that level of skill and also that level of power to push something like that through.
Guest:But yeah, I can't play that game even if I want to.
Marc:But didn't you almost get, didn't it get on one way, didn't something happen with it?
Marc:Didn't something get developed?
Guest:Oh, a TV series.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then, and it was really good.
Guest:And then God killed him.
Marc:God killed him.
Guest:Killed Phil.
Guest:I'm like, dude, that is fucking dirty.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:With Phil's help, God killed him.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:This guy is not fucking around.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:See, when it comes right down to it, no matter what you think, you still can go to God when the bad things happen.
Marc:Oh, for sure.
Guest:For sure.
Guest:They're like, oh, go out, drive out and go do Marin's show on Monday.
Guest:I'm like, he's dead on Sunday.
Guest:There's no way this is happening.
Marc:I don't know.
Guest:Sadly.
Marc:Sadly, I'm still plugging along.
Marc:It's a tough break from Aaron.
Marc:I got booked.
Marc:Thank God that your relationship with God had zero effect on me.
Guest:Well, it's not edited yet.
Guest:Your God didn't kill me.
Guest:You shut up.
Guest:He's a motherfucker.
Guest:He doesn't get around.
Guest:But do you do the same when you have good things happen?
Guest:It just feels like a setup.
Marc:Oh, so the good thing is just sort of like, I know it's coming.
Marc:I know.
Guest:Yeah, because it's like, oh, that's the story of the Bible, right?
Guest:Like, hey, you got out of Egypt.
Guest:Yeah, guess what?
Guest:Go to the promised land.
Guest:Guess what?
Guest:There's giants who are raping people there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, other groups.
Marc:But this is really the structure of your magical thinking.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it is biblical.
Marc:It's biblical.
Marc:And so this gets to sort of the root of what I wanted to talk about initially, which is that is the fundamental sort of like Jewish neurotic problem is sort of biblical.
Guest:Yeah, but I like, okay, so what I wish it were, I wish it were only Jews.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:But like, but, but Phil's not Jewish and Phil had more fed than anybody ever.
Marc:No, but I mean, but you can track it.
Marc:Like, you know, his sense of the Old Testament and, you know, your education as, you know, Orthodox Jew being educated in a certain way.
Marc:Yeah, there's plenty of people with that.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But you have there's a template that you can refer to.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And that is.
Marc:A source.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:A very definite source as opposed to like, but a lot of people do have that.
Guest:If you look back, I think that's what a lot of psychotherapy is.
Guest:It's like trying to go back and find out where the feck came from in your life.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If you're not Jewish, if you're not this, if you didn't have Bible operating, but the feck came from somewhere, from a mother, from a father, from somebody at some point made you feel really, really shitty.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:about who you are.
Guest:And now there are people making gazillions of dollars doing that.
Guest:And that's the sort of aggravating thing.
Guest:That's the part where I get really pissed off.
Marc:But I think it's interesting that, you know, just by talking to you now...
Marc:Like in reading, like even just knowing that, that, that, okay, so whatever, you know, God's going to fuck me one way or the other.
Marc:And if, if I feel good, it's just a setup that, you know, and that, that, that is a very specific thing.
Marc:because you don't have to look at it as a setup.
Marc:It can be passing.
Marc:It can be totally disconnected.
Marc:Yeah, of course.
Marc:But it isn't.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But what I'm saying, that key to what I'm going to say as a Jewish education, a biblical education, all of a sudden makes me want to reread the Hasidic tales.
Right.
Marc:You know those stories that go nowhere?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you're sort of like, what does that even fucking mean?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's like, well, wait.
Marc:Just think it through.
Guest:They're like the Zen tales.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't get them.
Guest:I went up to the mountain and he said, why did you come up the mountain?
Guest:Where's the rest of it?
Guest:What a brilliant insight.
Guest:What the fuck are you talking about?
Guest:I just came up the mountain.
Guest:What do you make of that?
Guest:In real life, that story ends with the master getting the shit kicked out of him.
Marc:But like I've got fucking books up there.
Marc:I've got the Martin Buber's translations of the Hasidic tales.
Marc:And I'm like, I'm finally going to just do it.
Marc:And I read two of them and I'm like, I can't.
Marc:I can't even get to a third one.
Marc:What the fuck do they even mean, dude?
Marc:Did you grow up with that shit?
Marc:Yeah, I mean, all of that stuff is just... Because I know you do some of them in the book, and even the ones that you kind of retell, I'm like, what are you supposed to do with that?
Marc:What is it doing?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:And usually there's a negative aspect to it.
Marc:Or this weird kind of existential question that's unanswerable, but it's not uplifting.
Marc:Right.
Guest:So one of the things I was talking about in the book is like being a little kid and being told the story of Purim, right?
Guest:that god punished the evil queen and you're like oh and this is a room full of little boys you know hair's just starting to grow down there yeah and you go uh how did he punish her he punished her by giving her a cock and balls right um okay what does that mean for me because i got hit with that day one yeah like i came out with that shit yeah and i'm not loving it either yeah so what did i do
Guest:What did I do to have this shit stuck on me?
Marc:That was a very interesting turn in the book, actually, that, you know, you decide that, you know, women got the break.
Marc:Yeah, because they're beautiful.
Marc:Men are disgusting.
Marc:Fucking cock and balls.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:It's gross.
Guest:Everything they do is gorgeous.
Marc:And those names that you named all the rabbis, what was it like?
Marc:They're not the real names.
Guest:No, it's Chagrin.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Although there were like Rabbi Stern and it's like, yeah, I know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But yeah, it was this thing of like, I know what the Bible says about women, but you look at them and they're like, wow.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I found a Victoria's Secret catalog.
Marc:Yeah, that changed it.
Marc:That was the game changer.
Guest:I was like, wow, that's the secret.
Guest:The secret is men are gross.
Marc:Man, I just remember finding those first things, like seeing that stuff.
Marc:You know, it's amazing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:How it can fuck your head.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because it is that that's unnatural.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And that's not I don't know if that's fair, but it's certainly like it.
Marc:I think it's got to happen to 80 percent of men that, you know, the information they get that they begin to jerk off to is not going to help them in the long run.
Guest:This may or may not be connected, but it's funny.
Guest:I once interviewed some porn directors for a story on this loathsome individual who died recently, Max Hardcore.
Guest:And one of the porn producers was telling me that it's so hard today to shoot porn.
Guest:I'm like, oh, more than ever.
Guest:And he's like, yeah, because, you know,
Guest:There are certain things I'm not allowed to do that amateurs can do.
Guest:Like the feds are watching me.
Guest:So I have a girl come in and I tell her to suck this guy's dick and she just starts gagging and choking.
Guest:And he's like, I can't do gagging and choking.
Guest:I'll get shut down.
Guest:And he's like, honey, what are you doing?
Guest:And she's like, well, that's what a blowjob is.
Guest:No, it isn't.
Guest:Where'd you learn that?
Guest:Well, from your films, asshole.
Guest:But yeah, but like that's what she thought she was supposed to do.
Guest:Well, that's like things, you know.
Marc:Asphyxiate yourself.
Marc:Well, that's the new way.
Marc:You know, the classics don't play like they used to.
Marc:There's a lot of gagging and choking.
Marc:Asphyxiation versus... Well, that poor guy, he's just stuck in the old model.
Marc:He can't... He can't break himself out of it.
Marc:He's stuck.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But your father seemed like... You really kind of color that guy as quite a character.
Marc:He's kind of a god character.
Guest:He is a god character.
Guest:So he's not really quite like that?
Guest:No, he is.
Guest:I mean, I think that was...
Guest:probably why it hit me so hard because it's if you if you're like told that there's this prick in the sky yeah uh and then and they scare the shit out of you and don't touch your dick and don't eat cheeseburgers and you go home and your dad's kind of like a nice loving guy and you just kind of stand around the table friday night singing songs yeah well that's my dad that's great i'll worry about the prick later
Marc:Right.
Marc:There's balance.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But when they tell you that's your father in heaven and your father in the living room... Is a monster.
Guest:Is a monster.
Guest:You're like, oh, fuck.
Marc:I know exactly what this is.
Guest:I know what this is.
Guest:And they're all like that.
Marc:Well, you talk about going to someone's house and it's not there.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:My friend was just like, yeah, he's a really loving dad.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And it was just like, wow, you won the fucking lottery.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I don't even know how to...
Guest:I don't even know how to understand that.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And how'd that guy turn out?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I think he stayed in that community.
Marc:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because, you know, he'll do without the cheeseburger, but for him it was a close family, right?
Marc:Right.
Marc:He can be a decent guy, maybe.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He has good memories of it.
Marc:Within the parameters of that.
Marc:Well, that's the other interesting question.
Marc:I mean, you were there long enough to to see transgression in the community to at least that must have sort of supported your reason for leaving.
Marc:You must have seen at some point that it was bullshit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I remember I had a rabbi principal or assistant principal in high school who was like who ran away to Israel because he was diddling boys or wrestling with them.
Guest:And I'd already been writing for a little while.
Guest:So a Jewish place asked me to write what my experience was.
Guest:And he wrote that.
Guest:I think it was genuinely like I heard about it and I was like, oh, why didn't he try it with me?
Guest:What was wrong with me?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:You know, I wasn't gorgeous, but I totally molested myself.
Guest:I felt really horrible.
Guest:Did they publish that?
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:What's wrong with me?
Guest:See, I really am shit.
Guest:The one teacher I had.
Guest:He's going after everybody.
Guest:But me.
Guest:Yeah, so it's bad enough in high school I can't get girls.
Guest:I can't even get rabbi.
Marc:So the decision to shut them out, I got a friend who hasn't spoken to his dad in 30 years.
Marc:And there is a liability to that, isn't there?
Guest:Well, it's not easy, but it's just an acknowledgment of the reality.
Marc:Of taking care of yourself.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, it came down to... The reality is that it came down to me or my wife.
Guest:I met her... We're coming up on 33 years anniversary.
Guest:And it was just... It wasn't all roses.
Guest:It was very difficult in the beginning, but it was always much more difficult when I was seeing them.
Guest:And at a certain point, it became very obvious.
Marc:Because it opened a wound?
Guest:Yeah, because if I knew I was going there...
Guest:I was an asshole for two weeks before and I was an asshole for two weeks after.
Guest:And then there's always another Jewish holiday around the corner.
Guest:So it was just one long run of being an asshole.
Guest:And it was like, well, make a choice.
Guest:It's her or them.
Guest:It's the past or the future.
Guest:Your sister too?
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Is there a heartache around that?
Guest:Um, to be honest, the heartache was that they didn't seem to give a shit.
Guest:Not, not that I walked away, but that it was impossible that what I was saying was true.
Guest:Oh, so they were, uh, brain fucked.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was like, it wasn't so bad.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Uh, you know, I think, I think one of the last things I've ever said to my mother is I just wanted, just acknowledge that it sucked.
Guest:That's all I need to hear.
Guest:I don't,
Guest:I don't need to hear you're sorry.
Guest:I don't need you to pay my shrink bills.
Guest:I got Prozac up my ass right now.
Guest:Don't worry about it.
Guest:Just say that kind of sucked.
Marc:And she wouldn't.
Marc:Well, that's like a narcissist admitting they're a narcissist, right?
Marc:The whole thing collapses.
Guest:The whole thing collapses, yeah.
Guest:And she's like, well, all families fight.
Guest:I'm like, this is WWF.
Yeah.
Guest:This is a mixed martial arts.
Guest:We had a cage in the living room.
Guest:What are you talking about?
Marc:I've gone through periods where you don't communicate with them.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:It just...
Marc:But I guess because you did that, it offered you the ability to not carry it on.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or just to honestly like to be born 25 years after being born.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Just to sort of go, okay, so then who am I?
Guest:What do I want to do here?
Marc:Is that what drove Foreskin to lament?
Yeah.
Guest:That's what drove that and Fe to big.
Marc:So you went back to this.
Guest:Because Fe was sort of like, okay, well, I've kind of gotten God mostly out of my head.
Guest:I can laugh at him.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Because writing, you know, comedy, it's not, it's therapeutic.
Guest:It's not curative, but it's therapeutic.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And you realize, oh, I can laugh at that.
Marc:And there is sort of the act of writing.
Marc:There is a lot of discovery there.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:So what happened then was, um, um, part of it was meeting fell.
Guest:Part of it was, you know, moving to LA and COVID and the internet.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And it was a lot of like, Oh, um, uh,
Guest:to self-destructiveness, despite having moved on from the God thing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And going, okay, so where does this come from?
Guest:What happened with your pancreas?
Guest:What did happen with it?
Guest:Well, you know, I...
Guest:For my whole life, I would try either diets or pills, whatever I can find in the sleaziest supplement stores in New York City.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Like total gray market.
Guest:Before Zambic, before... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:This was like... Before Fen-Fen.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And most of it was just crap.
Guest:Some of it...
Guest:I found out later had like a little bit of meth in it to make you feel something.
Guest:And then they stopped putting it in once they got you hooked.
Guest:And so, you know, whenever I heard of something new, I tried it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Illicit or not.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But you're not fat.
Guest:Well, but you're not gaunt.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Yeah, I get it.
Guest:I am kind of.
Guest:So there was some new thing, some pills you could take that showed promise in rats.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:And since I'm a rat, hey, that works.
Guest:Svelte rats.
Guest:Yeah, rats get all the good shit.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:They don't have to work out.
Yeah.
Guest:especially those lab rats yeah they got it made so what a life all the pills they want yeah uh and so i took these things and uh about a week later was in the er um wow and they were like yeah whatever you were taking i couldn't admit to them what i was taking because or your wife or anybody anybody
Guest:And they were like, yeah, your pancreas is shut down.
Guest:It's eating itself.
Guest:And I'm like, that doesn't sound good.
Guest:No.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How many calories is that?
Guest:Is it burning off fat?
Guest:Because if it's burning off fat, the shit is working.
Guest:How much does the pancreas weigh?
Guest:Because that's like five pounds off my total.
Guest:I'm going to make it.
Guest:And they had to sort of shut me down for a week.
Guest:No food, no water, no nothing to just shut everything down.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they were like, it may work, it may not work.
Guest:And it did.
Guest:Well, that's deadly, right?
Guest:Yeah, pancreatitis.
Guest:And there was that moment where I was like, okay, what the fuck are you doing?
Guest:Because there have already been very positive things in my life, you know, in my family.
Guest:But there was this nagging thing always.
Guest:And, you know, it's like, you know, you feel good, everything's fine, and then you just have a cookie and you're like beating the shit out of yourself.
Guest:Oh, God.
Guest:Or a shirt suddenly doesn't fit the way it did and now I'm a fat fuck.
Guest:You call that a penis?
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:What's that thing?
Marc:No one can convince you otherwise.
Marc:No, no.
Marc:That's been my girlfriend's job, all of them.
Marc:It's a team effort.
Marc:Through my entire life.
Marc:At some point it just becomes, you're not.
Marc:No, it's good size.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I like one that I can carry in my pocket.
Guest:It's like a wallet-sized penis.
Guest:But it wouldn't make a difference.
Guest:It wouldn't make a difference.
Guest:It could be four feet long, and then I'd feel like I was too long.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:What am I going to do with this?
Guest:Got too much cock.
Guest:I'm a freak.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there was that moment of like, oh, wow, okay, because this was close.
Guest:You know, this was skating—
Guest:Really close to the edge.
Guest:In a very kind of unique and ridiculous way.
Guest:Uniquely ridiculous way.
Guest:It wasn't heroin.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I think my shrink at the time even said something like, even your vices are lame.
Guest:Ridiculous.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I'm a hypochondriac on top of it, so I can't really do lots of bad things.
Guest:My hypochondria keeps me very healthy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Are you still pretty active in that?
Guest:Yeah, because if I'm at a party or something and I have a cigarette, I'm pretty sure I spend the next day, I'm pretty sure I've got cancer.
Guest:That was the one.
Marc:No, I mean, I used to tell a story that, I mean, it sounds like something you would write where my dad was a doc, you know?
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:And so I have sort of decided that like my hypochondria was an effort to connect with him because that's how I could get that kind of attention.
Marc:Oh, right.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And it's just a story about I frame it as how I cured my hypochondria.
Marc:It's like I was away at college, maybe my second year of college, and I decided that I had prostate cancer.
Marc:So I kept calling my dad.
Marc:I'm like, I'm pretty sure I got prostate cancer.
Marc:And he's like, you don't.
Marc:And I'm like, I do.
Marc:And I just kept pushing it.
Marc:And I get off the plane for fucking Christmas break.
Marc:And because docs all know each other, it's the evening.
Marc:We're going to Bob Rosen's house.
Marc:He's a urologist.
Marc:I'm going to take you over there right now.
Marc:We'll get you checked out.
Marc:We go to this guy's house.
Marc:He's eating dinner with his family.
Marc:And my dad's like, my kid thinks he has prostate cancer.
Marc:You take a look at him?
Marc:Which is a very specific thing.
Marc:And Bob's wiping his mouth from the dinner table and takes me into the bedroom with my dad.
Marc:And thank God he goes, maybe he should come to the office.
Marc:So I go to the office, right?
Marc:Was he just trying to scare you?
Marc:No, I think my dad was like, let's just get this dealt with.
Marc:And it wasn't his fear.
Marc:Because I went to see Rosen.
Marc:He gives me the whole exam.
Marc:I have prostatitis for whatever reason.
Marc:And he gives me antibiotics.
Marc:And a couple weeks later, I'm still on vacation.
Marc:I don't think it went away.
Marc:So I go back.
Marc:I'm like, I'm pretty sure I still have it.
Marc:So he gives me the exam again and he says, you don't have it.
Marc:And then like literally days before I'm going back to school, I decide I have herpes because I jerked off too much.
Marc:And I, you know, I like rub myself raw somehow.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I go into his office and he's like, you know, literally he's on his knees and he's holding my dick.
Marc:And he's like, there's nothing wrong with you.
Marc:Do you like coming here?
Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I think there's something else going on here.
Marc:But that put a lid on it somehow.
Marc:I was like, all right, work this shit out.
Marc:So my hypochondria is very limited to, if I get it, it's rarely and it's real panic.
Marc:Like if I think I have cancer, I'm in bed with cancer.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And it's too much to end.
Guest:I hadn't spoken to my brother in a very long time as well.
Guest:And then out of the blue, I got an email and it was like,
Guest:More or less, it was like, hey, I know it's been a long time.
Guest:Dad's got polyps in his ass, and I have polyps in my ass.
Guest:You might want to get your ass checked.
Guest:Love to Orly and the boys.
Guest:And I was like, okay.
Guest:It's the best email ever.
Guest:So I go to my doctor.
Guest:I'm in a panic.
Guest:And she's like, what is it?
Guest:I'm like, well, my dad's got polyps in his ass, and they're precancerous.
Guest:And she says, well, everything's precancerous.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm trying to, okay, okay, that was helpful.
Guest:That was helpful.
Guest:I'm going to write that down.
Guest:I'm going to hold on to that.
Guest:And then she's like, we're going to get you a colonoscopy.
Guest:And I was like, oh, fuck.
Guest:She really thinks something's wrong.
Guest:And she's like, no, I just know you, and you're going to be a lot more stressed out if we don't do a colonoscopy than if we do.
Guest:So I had to go through that whole colonoscopy experience where they shove a tube up.
Guest:Yeah, no, I've done it twice when I try to get them.
Guest:And they're putting me under...
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Proctologists don't have like a big sense of humor.
Guest:But they all think they do.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:This guy didn't.
Guest:And he was like, he was putting me under.
Guest:He's like, is there anything else?
Guest:You know, you have any other questions?
Guest:Anything else you want to ask me?
Guest:And I'm like already high as fuck.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And naked from the waist down and there's nurses all over.
Guest:And I just said, yeah, if I come, don't tell me.
Guest:And it was just blank.
Guest:Nothing?
Guest:Just blank.
Marc:I thought that story was going to go more of the way of a Jewish joke.
Marc:Like, bad news is I might have precancerous follow-ups.
Marc:Good news, my brother's talking to me again.
Marc:Yeah, he's coming over for Shabbos.
Marc:So, okay, so that's where this starts.
Marc:Now, after you've written this book,
Marc:Is anything different?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, like I said, I think all writing, all art is great because you take yourself and you kind of tear a piece of yourself out and you hold it up and you look at it on different sides and it's not what you expected.
Guest:And maybe it's kind of silly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And maybe it's funny.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And maybe it's touching.
Guest:Maybe it's noble.
Guest:Things you didn't even know.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So whereas when you don't do that and it's dark and kept inside, it's true.
Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's like we were saying about the Internet.
Guest:That's interesting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Then that's reality.
Guest:But when you take it out, you go, oh, that's kind of funny.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, or, hey, I'm not so bad.
Guest:Like, I learned a lesson.
Marc:Right.
Guest:More than most people do in their whole lives.
Guest:I learned one lesson.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And also, just stay in the theme.
Marc:Like, if you take it out, then somebody can go, fae.
Marc:And you're like, thank God.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you get to laugh at it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So that's the sort of magic of of all writing.
Guest:I mean, the hardest thing for me the past like five years was to watch comedy become a target.
Guest:that was really hard for me.
Marc:The people, because they don't, now you put a joke out in the world and people are like, no, I don't agree.
Marc:I'm like, it's a fucking joke.
Marc:It's not a debate.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's like there's no other side to this.
Right.
Guest:I didn't ask you to agree.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, but to me, laughter was always the saving everything.
Guest:And so I remember hearing a college kid or something say, oh, laughter is a tool of the oppressor.
Guest:I'm like, what in the fuck?
Guest:That's the complete opposite of laughter.
Guest:of comedy's role in history.
Marc:Totally.
Marc:And also it's a, it's a miscontextualization of like, you know, you know, I see everyone's kind of like ideologically confused or misinformed.
Marc:So if one idiot says that, that, you know, someone's making you laugh to make you ignore the fascism or whatever, I'm not, I've no doubt that that's happening, but it's not a general statement.
Right.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, and by the way, fascists tend to kill comedians first.
Marc:Yeah, up against the wall, clown.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Is that true?
Guest:The wits are always like, yeah, shut the fuck up.
Guest:There were actually, I was just reading about, this is fucking wild, the Nazis had comedy courts.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Yeah, where the court decided whether a joke was okay or not.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And one of their famous things was someone had named their horse Adolf.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And they arrested him.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And they put him in front of a joke trial and said, that's not funny.
Guest:And they banned naming animals Adolf or Hitler.
Guest:And you're like, that's hilarious.
Guest:That's the best story I ever heard.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I want to go pitch that to somebody.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:yeah hey hey netflix i got something for you yeah well there are joke courts of public opinion that's for sure and now there are now now people are and it's so absurd but then you have the absurdity reaches a new level and people are doing it themselves willingly you know and what censoring themselves no putting jokes on trial yeah like i
Guest:Look, I get it.
Guest:I get the whole don't punch down.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, sure.
Guest:But for me, the best comedy is never punching up or down.
Guest:It's punching right at myself.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:That's right, yeah.
Marc:I've punched myself in the face plenty of times.
Guest:Yeah, and comedians who do that crack me up.
Marc:Yeah, I think I actually thought of that when people say punch up or punch down.
Marc:I'm like, I'm punching myself.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That's the way, you know, I mean, that's the safest thing.
Guest:And it's also the hardest.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That takes the most courage.
Guest:Because it doesn't take a lot to punch up.
Guest:Like, ah, fuck the government.
Guest:And it takes no courage to punch down.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But to actually, like, get up and laugh at yourself.
Guest:And it's so rare.
Marc:The vulnerabilities of it.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:So few people do that.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Because, yeah.
Guest:Because you're like...
Guest:I'm just out there.
Marc:There's a lot to risk.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But I have to do that at practicality because there's so many comics.
Marc:So if you're going to talk about things outside of you, i.e.
Marc:the news or events, there's a thousand other guys working that angle.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And I'm not going to punch down anymore.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But if I can stay in a zone of my heart and mind and take shots at that, no one can take that from me.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And I used to really dig comedians who were... Because writers and comedians were my teachers.
Guest:And I used to really like certain comedians that I don't like anymore.
Guest:I used to really love Hicks.
Guest:But Hicks wasn't particularly honest about himself.
Guest:That's interesting.
Guest:And I remember a line of his, and I mentioned it in Fe, which was...
Guest:He had a joke that made me laugh for years, which was, human beings wear a virus with shoes.
Guest:And now, at this point in my life, I think, no, we're not.
Guest:And maybe the virus is the story that tells us we're a virus.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Well, that's also like a riff on a Burroughs idea, really, you know, that humans are a virus.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But yeah, I get it.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:But it's still, it's over the top and it's not.
Guest:No, no, he's obviously a genius, but like there are people that just don't hit the same notes because life happened, right?
Guest:But I can go sit at...
Guest:Pepitone show and laugh my ass off.
Guest:Because he's just the most honest person ever.
Guest:Even when he's trying to be political, he's making fun of himself.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:And he's like a true genius for me because it's like he's doing the high wire act.
Guest:There's like the little diving board, then the middle diving board, and there's the crazy motherfucker diving board.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But he's one of those guys that like, you know, it's a rare thing to have
Marc:A profound anger that is constantly tempered by your clown nature.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, and it's a rare thing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But it's a very funny disposition.
Guest:Because the self-awareness never can even break through the rage.
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:That's so charming.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:It's becoming ridiculous the more intense it gets.
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, the louder he yells.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:It's like the more he believes in something, the stupider it is.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:He's beautiful.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Funny guy.
Guest:And that's like, I find a lot in the literature that I like.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I always hate, like, I didn't go to college, so I dodged a bullet because no one turned Kafka and Beckett and all those people into assholes.
Guest:Right.
Guest:For me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:For me, they were just fucking hilarious.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:About the darkest things in the world.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I couldn't believe people were taking them seriously.
Right.
Guest:Yeah, I read this book about a guy who turns into a bug, and I'm like, oh, that's funny.
Guest:Like, ooh, you're reading Kafka?
Guest:I'm like, what?
Guest:Yeah, why?
Guest:Does he have a stand-up bit?
Guest:Does he have a Netflix special?
Guest:Because it's funny.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I was like, no, no, no, no.
Guest:He's talking about jurisprudence and the justice system and bureaucracy.
Guest:I'm like, no, he fucking isn't.
Guest:His family tries to kill him.
Yeah.
Guest:They don't even care that he's a bug, and when he dies, they're happy.
Guest:That's funny.
Guest:Like, stop being a dick about it.
Marc:That's good.
Marc:So you just stuck with the brain fuck that you were fighting your whole life, and you didn't get a second helping the brain fucking in college.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And it saved you.
Guest:It saved me.
Guest:It did.
Guest:It did.
Guest:And it's difficult because my kids are all in college or going to college and they have a similar thing.
Guest:They're very like, don't fuck this thing I love up for me.
Marc:Oh, so you've given them that?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:That awareness.
Guest:One's in music school, one's an artist, and it's like, when someone starts to creep in with that, well, let me tell you what music really is.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:It's just like, oh, go fuck yourself.
Marc:Those who can't do, teach.
Guest:Yeah, and what's the Woody Allen thing?
Guest:Those who can't teach, teach Jim.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Well, it was good talking to you, man.
Guest:You too.
Marc:You too, very much.
Marc:All right, there you go.
Marc:That was good.
Marc:That was engaged.
Marc:That was kind of lit up.
Marc:His new book, A Memoir, comes out tomorrow.
Marc:Hang out for a minute, folks.
Marc:So, people, seven years ago tomorrow, we posted my talk with the great Randy Newman.
Marc:That's episode 831, and you can listen to it for free on all podcast platforms.
Marc:One of the persons I recently got into in sort of a compulsive way a couple years ago was Harry Nelson.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And he did that amazing record.
Guest:He did.
Guest:Of your songs.
Guest:It's quite a thing, you know, to do a...
Guest:For someone who wrote as well as he did to do an album of... Nilsson plays Newman.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And were you guys friends?
Marc:Yeah, we were.
Marc:He was kind of an amazing guy, right?
Marc:He was.
Guest:He's one of those guys that had his problems, but... He had a low opinion of himself.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We all did to some extent, but he really did.
Guest:Hell of a voice, though, huh?
Guest:Hell of a voice.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:And he...
Guest:He really could sing.
Guest:All of a sudden, we were close.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then all of a sudden, I never saw him again.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I don't know what it was.
Guest:Booze.
Guest:Yeah, I could do it.
Guest:You know, your brain twists up.
Guest:He's thinking about that.
Guest:You know, there's a reason why alcohol came down through the years rather than something else.
Guest:I think it's like a powerful, powerful thing.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:It's a bigger deal than maybe the other stuff is.
Marc:Well, yeah, it's like it's a real Jekyll and Hyde shit, man.
Marc:It's a real kind of personality changer.
Marc:And I don't know why, but it's the most accessible thing ever.
Marc:You would think weed now, but there's something about alcohol.
Guest:It always, it's, when Coke was in big.
Guest:That couldn't last.
Guest:I knew, yeah, people don't want to be sped up.
Guest:They want, you knew either heroin or alcohol was coming, both probably.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:Well, those are the ones, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, it's fucking, well, you're lucky you have dodged that, and that was not something that compelled you.
Guest:I didn't like Coke in that much.
Marc:No?
Marc:No.
Marc:Yeah, because eventually it's just you alone wondering if you're going to die.
Yeah.
Guest:It's always going to end up there.
Guest:And wondering why is it you're seeing someone from 14 years ago?
Guest:Hi, mind if I come over?
Guest:Right, exactly.
Guest:Or hanging out with a guy you don't know for three days.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:Who's that guy?
Guest:How do I get him out of my house?
Guest:In Long Beach.
Yeah.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:That's episode 831 with Randy Newman to get all WTF episodes ad free plus bonus episodes twice a week.
Marc:Sign up by going to the link in the episode description or go to WTF pod dot com and click on WTF plus.
Marc:And just a reminder before we go, this podcast is hosted by a cast.
Marc:Here's some guitar.
Marc:Fresh stuff.
.
.
Thank you.
Marc:Boomer lives.
Marc:Monkey and La Fonda.
Marc:Cat angels everywhere.