Episode 179 - Dan Harmon
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:Are we doing this?
Marc:Really?
Marc:Wait for it.
Marc:Are we doing this?
Marc:Wait for it.
Marc:Pow!
Marc:What the fuck?
Marc:And it's also, eh, what the fuck?
Marc:What's wrong with me?
Marc:It's time for WTF!
Marc:What the fuck?
Guest:With Marc Maron.
Marc:Okay, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuckineers?
Marc:What the fuckapinos?
Marc:What the fuckanucks?
Marc:What the fuckanucks?
Marc:All right, let's stop this.
Marc:I am Marc Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:Thank you for listening.
Marc:Today on the show, the creator and executive producer of Community, Mr. Dan Harmon, will be in the garage.
Marc:A very intense, very smart man.
Marc:Very exciting to talk to him.
Marc:What else is going on?
Marc:I should tell you about some gigs.
Marc:I neglected to plug my own goddamn shows on this show, and you would think that I would think to do that, because you would think that would be part of it.
Marc:Hey, isn't Marin or aren't podcasters just doing podcasts to promote their live shows?
Marc:Apparently, for me, it's an afterthought, but I will be this week at the Foxwoods Casino at Comics,
Marc:That is June.
Marc:That's this week, June 2nd, 3rd, and 4th.
Marc:So if you're in that area, that's somewhere in Connecticut.
Marc:I think that's the name of the town.
Marc:Somewhere in the middle of Connecticut, take a bus, get on a train, drive your car, come out and see me and Ryan Singer out there at Foxwoods.
Marc:We could use the company.
Marc:I never know what to expect when I do a casino gig.
Marc:I don't do them often.
Marc:I try not to gamble because I don't like it.
Marc:I don't.
Marc:It does not make me happy.
Marc:I've never had a successful role.
Marc:where I got the bug.
Marc:I'm grateful that I don't have the gambling bug, but I've never had that one experience where I'm like, holy shit, I just made $50,000 at a craps table.
Marc:Well, of course, if you're making, you know,
Marc:$10 to $25 bets at a blackjack table, there's really no way to win $50,000 at a craps table.
Marc:So that never happened.
Marc:And blackjack, the most I've ever won is $800, and then you've got to walk away with it.
Marc:If you're actually in the casino for three days doing gigs, how the fuck are you going to walk away with any money?
Marc:Even if you win some money, why am I ruining my trip?
Marc:I'm taking Sanchez with me, so we're going to have a good time.
Marc:I'm looking forward to it.
Marc:Maybe Singer will have his car.
Marc:And we can go to the Mystic Connecticut Aquarium.
Marc:All right, enough of that.
Marc:Okay, also Denver at the Comedy Works, June 16th through 19th.
Marc:This is the first time I've ever been to Denver to perform comedy my entire career.
Marc:That club has been around forever.
Marc:I've wanted to play that club forever, but this is the first time I've been there.
Marc:This is where my career is.
Marc:I'm like a new guy.
Marc:Also, if I could just say this, is it okay for me to be proud of myself?
Marc:Would you guys mind terribly if I had a moment of pride?
Marc:I don't know if you guys heard about this, but I got together with Jesse Thorne, who you guys may know from the Sound of Young America, Jordan Jesse Goh, his guy Nick White, and we produced a 10-part series of WTF for public radio, for public radio consumption.
Marc:They are the very interviews that we did here in the garage, but they've been re-edited.
Marc:Some of them have been grouped together in a 10-part series, like the Conan interview, the Robin Williams interview, the Louis C.K.
Marc:interview, the Judd Apatow interview is all on there.
Marc:Mike DiStefano, Margaret Cho, Janine Garofalo, Dane Cook, Ben Stiller.
Marc:to name a few, Bob Odenkirk, Maria Bamford.
Marc:And we made a deal with the Public Radio Exchange to make it available for public radio stations.
Marc:And it looks like WBEZ is going to start running WTF on June 5th.
Marc:So if you live in the Chicago area, you can listen to that.
Marc:KCRW here in LA is going to be running them beginning in July.
Marc:And I heard that WNYC picked them up as well, though we don't know when they're going to run.
Marc:This is an exciting thing.
Marc:I never thought...
Marc:That when I started doing this, that this this could possibly happen.
Marc:I mean, it's NPR.
Marc:I listen to NPR.
Marc:Quite honestly, it's really the only thing I listen to when I'm in the car or when I'm not listening to music.
Marc:I have NPR going on in the house.
Marc:I always saw it as sort of an elite world.
Marc:And the fact that we are coming up from the side, we're coming up.
Marc:We are coming up into.
Marc:NPR into that world.
Marc:Look, plenty of radio shows have their podcasts and then you get them that way.
Marc:But I believe this may be the first time that a podcast has entered the realm of NPR from the ground up.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:This is my garage.
Marc:This is like fucking punk rock on NPR.
Marc:And I don't see myself as punk rock, but I do.
Marc:I have a certain amount of awareness that this is a new medium.
Marc:It's an exciting medium.
Marc:It's a medium that provides us a lot of creative freedom.
Marc:Nobody can really tell me what to do, which I like.
Marc:And now all of a sudden we're going to be on NPR with the show that we produce.
Marc:here in the garage it's it's exciting and i hope people like it in that format i i i'm uh i just don't know what it's gonna i just never would see i never could would have thought that my tone and my type of expression would be accepted or embraced by npr it's exciting i thought i'd tell you about it also
Marc:I finished the Keith Richards book.
Marc:But before I get into that, because now I have it marked, I have post-its in there.
Marc:I have chapters that I think are important.
Marc:I've underlined some stuff and I didn't realize what I was underlining until after I was going back through it.
Marc:It's interesting when if you're an underliner, if you ever go back into your old books and see just what the fuck did I underline and what was I thinking at that moment?
Marc:I have so many books in here, many of which I haven't really read all the way through, but I've certainly done some underlying and underlining and I've talked about that before.
Marc:But it's interesting why why you underline something and trying to recapture that moment where that resonated so deeply with you that it was important to underline.
Marc:Sometimes I look at books, I can't figure out what the fuck I was thinking.
Marc:But before I get into reading from the from the scriptures of life by Keith Richards, I'd like to address my mother.
Marc:My mother called me yesterday.
Marc:I made her feel guilty for not reaching out more.
Marc:And then she said, well, why don't you call me?
Marc:I said, I do call you.
Marc:But then like a day after I called her, she called me.
Marc:She had sort of a serious tone in her voice.
Marc:And she said, Mark.
Marc:Why do you have a picture of me in your garage?
Marc:Now, I didn't quite remember what she was talking about, but I think that Gary Shanley noticed the picture that I do have of my mother, which was taken in 1963.
Marc:I'm about maybe a couple of months old.
Marc:She's sitting on this large sort of vinyl lazy boy holding me.
Marc:And it's 1963.
Marc:So I'm not allowed to say how old this picture is.
Marc:She put it at at 30 years.
Marc:So you do the math.
Marc:Is that possible?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:But she looks adorable.
Marc:My mom's got she's got a beehive hairdo here.
Marc:She's got those big painted on eyebrows and she's holding me like she has no idea how I came out of her.
Marc:What she is supposed to do.
Marc:And is this going to be OK?
Marc:So really, on some level, this picture documents the beginning of whatever the fuck I am, whether that's a good thing or not.
Marc:It's starting to be a good thing.
Marc:But I'd say for most of my life, you know, not so much.
Marc:But she asked me.
Marc:Why is that in there?
Marc:I said, because people have pictures of their family.
Marc:You put them up on your wall.
Marc:A lot of people have pictures of the entire history of their family.
Marc:And she says, well, why don't you have other pictures in your garage, like pictures of us when we lived in Albuquerque or pictures of when you come down to Florida?
Marc:I think I have the only mother in the world that could possibly think,
Marc:that she didn't look her best when she was however old she was here.
Marc:Very young, by the way.
Marc:So now I'm in this weird position.
Marc:I think she was concerned that Gary Shandling would judge her based on this picture of me and her from 1963, and she just didn't want that out there.
Marc:She wanted to make sure that if I'm going to have pictures of her, that I show her now because she likes herself better now.
Marc:So now I've got to find other pictures of my mother.
Marc:Is that amazing?
Marc:Isn't it even more amazing when you look at pictures of yourself when you were a baby?
Marc:Like how the hell did I get from there to this?
Marc:And what have I gone through?
Marc:Oh my fucking God.
Marc:Like that guy, that kid, that little fucking confused kid that may be about to fart or need something to eat or just is trying to deal with shapes is now me.
Marc:And then I started to think about Keith Richards and and he said something.
Marc:If we could go to the scriptures, please.
Marc:I believe the chapter.
Marc:Let's see where we are.
Marc:Chapter seven was really compelling to me because it talked a lot about music, about his sound, about where it came from.
Marc:But what I'd like to do is address this.
Marc:In talking about who he is and what he became, I'm reading from Keith Richards, Life, page 364.
Marc:I can't untie the threads of how much I played up to the part that was written for me.
Marc:I mean the skull ring and the broken tooth and the coal.
Marc:Is it half and half?
Marc:I think in a way, your persona, your image, as it used to be known, as like a ball and chain.
Marc:People think I'm still a goddamn junkie.
Marc:It's 30 years since I gave up the dope.
Marc:Image is a long shadow.
Marc:Even when the sun goes down, you can see it.
Marc:I think some of it is that there is so much pressure to be that person that you become it, maybe to a certain point that you can bear.
Marc:It's impossible not to end up being a parody of what you thought you were.
Marc:There is something inside of me that just wants to excite that thing in other people because I know it's there in everybody.
Marc:There's a demon in me and there's a demon in everybody.
Marc:I get a uniquely ridiculous response.
Marc:The skulls flow in by the truckload sent by well-wishers.
Marc:People love that image.
Marc:They imagined me.
Marc:They made me.
Marc:The folks out there created this folk hero.
Marc:Bless their hearts, and I'll do the best I can to fulfill their needs.
Marc:They're wishing me to do things that they can't.
Marc:They've got to do this job.
Marc:They've got this life.
Marc:They're an insurance salesman.
Marc:But at the same time, inside of them is a raging Keith Richards.
Marc:When you talk of a folk hero, they've written the script for you and you better fulfill it.
Marc:And I did my best.
Marc:It's no exaggeration that I was basically living like an outlaw and I got into it.
Marc:I knew that I was on everybody's list.
Marc:All I had to do was recant and I'd be all right.
Marc:But that was something I just couldn't do.
Marc:That's from the book Life by Keith Richards.
Marc:And why does that resonate with me?
Marc:Because there was a period I bought my first guitar because of the guitar that Keith Richards had.
Marc:I had a picture of him with a cream colored Telecaster or blonde colored Telecaster.
Marc:I'm like, that's got to be the first guitar that I purchase the hair.
Marc:the way he held himself on stage, everything about him.
Marc:I was like, that's what I want.
Marc:I believe that folk hero.
Marc:I believe that there was a Keith Richards inside of me.
Marc:Now, mind you, I went through different periods.
Marc:I mean, there was a period where I believe there was a Tom Waits inside of me.
Marc:I believe there was a Bowie inside of me.
Marc:That was a confusing period.
Marc:I believe there was a John Lennon inside of me.
Marc:Later in life, I believe that there was a Woody Allen inside of me, which obviously there still is.
Marc:I believe that there was, who else?
Marc:A Hunter S. Thompson inside of me.
Marc:I believed...
Marc:That this scrambling for identity when you have people like this.
Marc:I mean, and then he addresses what I thought was really the most telling part of this.
Marc:And I think it's important if I could read again from the scriptures about the scriptures of life by Keith Richards about being a junkie.
Marc:And this is from page 261.
Marc:If you want to follow along, the life of being a junkie is not recommended to anybody.
Marc:I was on the top end and that was pretty low.
Marc:It's certainly not the road to musical genius or anything else.
Marc:It was a balancing act.
Marc:I've got loads of things to do.
Marc:This song's interesting and I want to make copies of all this stuff and I'd be doing it for five days.
Marc:Perfectly balanced on this equilibrium of cocaine and heroin.
Marc:But the thing is that after about six or seven days, I'd forget what the balance was or I'd run out of one side of the balance or the other because I was always having to think about supplies.
Marc:The key to my survival was that I paced myself.
Marc:I never really overdid it.
Marc:And I'd like to just interject here.
Marc:Really, Keith?
Marc:Seriously?
Marc:Really?
Marc:Well, I shouldn't say never.
Marc:Oh, okay, okay.
Marc:Sometimes I was absolutely fucking comatose.
Marc:But I think it really became to me like a tool.
Marc:I realized I'm running on fuel and everybody else isn't.
Marc:They're trying to keep up with me and I'm just burning.
Marc:I can keep going because I'm on pure cocaine.
Marc:None of that shit crap.
Marc:I'm running on high octane.
Marc:And if I feel like I'm pushing it a little bit, need to relax it, have a little bump of smack.
Marc:It sounds ridiculous now in a way, but the truth is that was my fuel.
Marc:That speedball.
Marc:But I have to impress on anyone who reads this that this was the finest, finest cocaine and the purest, purest heroin.
Marc:This was no crap off the street, no Mexican shoe scrapings.
Marc:This was the real shit.
Marc:In order to deal with one's morbidity or in order to deal with one's levity, it was like a balancing act.
Marc:And it could keep me going for days and days without realizing that, in fact, I was wearing guys ragged.
Marc:All right, that's from page 261 of the Scriptures of Life by Keith Richards.
Marc:And I think that the important thing for me there was to realize that there was this idea, you know, for every Keith Richards, which there is only one, there's got to be at least 10,000 dead junkies who couldn't play guitar.
Marc:You got to bring the craft to it first.
Marc:And then if you need the drugs or if you choose to use the drugs, once the craft is in place, maybe they'll help, but that's not even guaranteed.
Marc:I think that's amazing.
Marc:I wonder how many people have died in the name of Keith Richards thinking that
Marc:that you needed to do the heroin first.
Marc:And I know I've talked about that before, but I guess it all comes around to being comfortable with yourself.
Marc:And the thing that I learned from the Keith Richards book is that not only is he much smarter than anyone thought, but he seems to be really himself.
Marc:And I think when you talk about folk heroes or you talk about hero worship or you talk about, you know, look, I look at tapes of me over the years, different haircuts, different facial hair, different pants, different images, that there was this scrambling.
Marc:I mean, I have pictures from a photo booth where I had shaved my head and I was wearing a punk rock shirt.
Marc:I remember I'd bought a skateboard and I went down.
Marc:to Washington Square Park with this brand new skateboard and sat on it and watched people who knew how to be on a skateboard skate.
Marc:And I had no idea.
Marc:And I was already like close to 30 years old and there was no way I was gonna learn it, but I was lost enough to pick an identity for myself that I thought would work.
Marc:It didn't last.
Marc:None of them lasted.
Marc:And quite honestly, it's taken me 47 years.
Marc:I mean, maybe 45, 45 years for me to finally be comfortable in my own fucking body after thinking and wanting and comparing and trying to to to integrate and be somebody else or to take what they had in terms of an identity.
Marc:When I was younger.
Marc:That's what happens with hero stuff.
Marc:That's what happens when you worship people.
Marc:Or you want to be like them.
Marc:It's a way for you to have a template.
Marc:For yourself.
Marc:Until yourself fills up your own self.
Marc:And there's no reason you can't be influenced by other people.
Marc:But man.
Marc:It's taken me this long to finally land in my fucking body.
Marc:All the way from this picture.
Marc:Of my mother.
Marc:with her painted on eyebrows and this cute beehive hairdo, and me, just this little infant, two or three months old.
Marc:Shit, man.
Marc:It took me like 45 years from there, pure self, pure self, in that moment where I'm sitting there on my mother's lap.
Marc:It's taken me 45 years to get to myself again.
Marc:Okay, folks, as you know, Men of a Certain Age, the wonderful show with Ray Romano and Scott Bakula and Andre Brower is premiering on June 1st.
Marc:That's Wednesday.
Marc:That's this week, June 1st.
Marc:Check your local listings.
Marc:The Onions AV Club calls Wednesday's premiere the best episode of the whole series.
Marc:It's a great show.
Marc:Brower was nominated for an Emmy.
Marc:It won a Peabody Award.
Marc:You can go to tnt.tv and learn more about it.
Marc:But, you know, I've been calling Ray, and I think it's been going pretty well.
Marc:And I think, you know, since this is the last plug,
Marc:I think that it's only right that I give him a call again just to maybe get a little closure and just talk to him.
Marc:Maybe not one last time, but just one more time for this series of calls.
Marc:So let's call Ray one more time.
Marc:Again, Men of a Certain Age airs June 1st.
Marc:That's Wednesday, this Wednesday.
Marc:So check those listings for time.
Marc:It's a great show.
Marc:It's a great season.
Marc:I enjoyed it.
Marc:And I'm going to call Ray again.
Guest:Hello?
Marc:Ray, sorry, Mark Maron.
Marc:It's Mark again.
Marc:Hey.
Guest:What's up, man?
Guest:What's going on?
Marc:Yeah, see, I know you well enough to know that you're just being nice now.
Guest:But look, I am not going to... No, no, no, I'm just surprised.
Guest:I'm just, you know, we just...
Guest:Kind of just talk to each other.
Guest:That's cool, that's cool.
Marc:Well, look, I'm actually calling just to apologize for something.
Marc:It's a little weird.
Marc:I know you guys trusted me with this DVD, the, what do you call it, the advanced DVDs, and I know that, like, obviously I'm not going to sell them or anything or put them online, right?
Marc:But, you know, I was with my girlfriend, and I got nothing to do at night sometimes, and I let her...
Marc:I watched them with her, and this is before they've even been on television, and I just wanted to admit to it.
Marc:I wanted to... All right.
Guest:Well, I appreciate the confession, but it's, you know... You're not mad about it?
Guest:It's not that big a deal.
Guest:Just, you know, as long as, you know, you keep it in the family.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:No, no, no.
Marc:I'm not even giving them to friends.
Guest:I just... No, listen, listen.
Guest:Let me just say this.
Guest:What?
Guest:You know, I've been a fan of yours, so for you to be a fan of ours, you know, that's very flattering.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And for you to be worried about, you know, you're showing your girlfriend that's cool.
Guest:I mean, I'm sure she's not going to take them and put them anywhere.
Guest:That's cool.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, you've been calling a couple times.
Guest:And I appreciate it.
Guest:I get it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it really does mean a lot to me and Mike that you like our show.
Guest:And, you know, let's just...
Guest:We're cool.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Well, that's good.
Guest:You know, we're busy now getting back into production.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:You know, could...
Guest:I mean, we're done with the calls, right?
Guest:We're done with the phone calls.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:No, no, Ray.
Guest:Yeah, no.
Guest:I'm sorry.
Guest:Yeah, no.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:Because I like what you're saying.
Guest:No, I understand.
Guest:I understand.
Guest:We were busy.
Guest:All right.
Guest:I understand.
Guest:No, I want you to... We said it all, right?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:We're good.
Guest:We're good.
Guest:And I won't call you for a little while.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's cool.
Guest:It's cool.
Guest:Let's just let the show play out, and then we'll see...
Marc:Okay, good.
Marc:Okay, that's a deal.
Marc:So I'll call you after the show plays.
Guest:If you have to.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:No, no, I understand.
Guest:I understand.
Guest:I mean... No, no, I understand.
Guest:If I have to call, I'll call.
Guest:Okay, man.
Guest:Good.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, it's all good.
Guest:It's all good.
Guest:Yeah, no, good.
Marc:I appreciate it because I think that these conversations have brought us closer and I won't abuse that.
Guest:Yeah, you know what?
Guest:Breaking Bad's starting up again.
Guest:You should... That's a good show.
Guest:Do you have his number, Cranston's?
Guest:I think his agent is probably listed.
Guest:Oh, I get it.
Guest:Yeah, okay.
Guest:All right, good, good.
Guest:Well, Ray, again, great job.
Guest:All right, man.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:Thanks, buddy.
Guest:All right.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Well, I think that went okay.
Marc:Maybe I should pull back.
Marc:Maybe I should pull back, but it's good to talk to him.
Marc:Again, new episodes of Men of a Certain Age begin Wednesday, June 1st on TNT.
Marc:Check your local listings for time, or you can go to tnt.tv to learn more about the show.
Marc:I should probably just lose that number for a little while.
Marc:How old are you?
Marc:38.
Marc:All right, so I'm older.
Marc:Well, I feel like I got on late on the Mad Magazine thing.
Marc:I'm 47.
Guest:I did two.
Guest:I mean, all that stuff was just, I would find that laying around.
Guest:I never went and bought it.
Guest:It was always big brother stuff.
Marc:You have a big brother?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How old was he?
Guest:He's five years older than me.
Marc:Oh, see, that's a gift.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I got, you know, that's how you get Led Zeppelin.
Guest:That's how you get.
Marc:Oh, absolutely.
Marc:All of it.
Marc:The entire 60s and early 70s are delivered to your doorstep.
Guest:Well, for some reason, Led Zeppelin transcends everything.
Guest:Like it doesn't matter when your brother was born.
Guest:If you have an older brother, then he had Led Zeppelin tapes.
Marc:That's true.
Marc:I am an older brother, but I think I had friends who had that.
Marc:But then also when I was in high school, that was around.
Marc:So you had Led Zeppelin.
Marc:What else did you get?
Guest:Well, courtesy of my brother, like Jane's Addiction as the night he started, like Sinead O'Connor.
Guest:It was always nice because I was listening to Phil Collins and dancing in the mirror with my sweater.
Guest:Oh, no.
Marc:He saved you.
Guest:Yeah, kind of.
Guest:You did.
Guest:You really did.
Guest:Because, yeah, you hear when you listen to Jane's Addiction at the age of 14, you're, again, it's like... Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, it's probably better for your soul than Phil Collins.
Marc:The first album?
Marc:The Jane's Addiction album with On the Beach on it?
Guest:Yeah, Benton Caught Stealing and, yeah.
Marc:Well, that's a later one, but the first one that almost feels like a concept album.
Marc:I can't remember what it's called now.
Marc:Damn, do I have to look it up?
Marc:Dan Harmon's in my garage, by the way.
Marc:I can just picture the first album in my head.
Marc:And I think there was a song on there called... Along lines with Zeppelin, too, those are definitely big brain-changing rock and roll.
Guest:Yeah, and Pink Floyd.
Guest:I don't even know how I forgot about that.
Marc:That's the ultimate... Yeah, were you a Pink Floyd guy?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I was just talking to Brian Poussaint about that.
Marc:Yeah, nothing shocking.
Marc:that's the album right right right what jane says on it and summertime rolls oh right so ritual del habitual but that was the second that was yeah it's like follow-up yeah nothing shocking was actually right there the big album yeah yeah yeah you remember that one yeah okay we're good yeah yeah i'm glad we got past that that was rough so how do i mean i've run into you several times like now that i see you in the flesh i feel like we've crossed paths a lot
Guest:Yeah, two times stick out in my memory.
Guest:One, in order of proximity to the present, in other words, looking backward, the last time I think I saw you was in New York.
Guest:It was 2006, and I only remember the year because I was writing on the 2006 Video Music Awards.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And we were, for some reason, both at Jack Black's apartment.
Marc:That was, yes.
Yes.
Marc:and uh uh i mean for me the reason was that i was writing for jack it was his birthday oh and i got cajoled into that by uh morgan murphy right it was one of those things where she's like oh i'm going to joke books i'm like you know i don't know everybody that well i'm not gonna i mean i know jack and kyle and i know tim robbins kind of but i didn't know it's one of those situations where like it's a party and she's like yeah and you walk in there's like nine people yeah and it was yeah and they couldn't have been weirder mix of people
Guest:It was a very swanky apartment.
Guest:It's not like anybody there was, but it was like, yeah.
Guest:And I remember it was my second time being in New York and I was having some weird actual vertigo, even in the subways.
Guest:And I remember asking Tim Robbins about it because I was like, you're bi-coastal.
Guest:Is there a word for what's happening to me?
Guest:I was getting physically dizzy.
Guest:on subway platforms, and he said, I think you're just freaked out to be in New York, and I didn't want that to be true, but it really was the case.
Guest:I'm like the opposite of Woody Allen.
Guest:I couldn't survive in that city.
Guest:Where are you from?
Guest:You grew up here?
Guest:I grew up in Milwaukee, and then I came here about 15 years ago.
Marc:So you grew up your whole life in Milwaukee, Wisconsin?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I don't even know what that means, Dan.
Guest:It means a lot of really fantastic things because there's a lot of... I don't want to use the word simplicity because that's a word you use for stupid people.
Guest:No, it's also a Zen word.
Guest:Yeah, it's a smaller scale, obviously, city, which means... For those of us who are not prodigies...
Guest:who are not blowing minds by 15, you know?
Guest:I think it's better to grow up in a smaller town where you can just, you have this sandbox where if you decide at 22 that you want to do stand-up, you want to be a writer, you want to do, in Milwaukee,
Guest:if you stood on a street corner and said, I'm a welder and you did that three days in a row, sooner or later, someone's going to give you a job welding.
Guest:Like it's just, it was, and that same went for writers.
Guest:I mean, you didn't get paid anything.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But, but, but in the five years from when I declared myself a writer to when I was leaving for LA, I was like working for the mayor.
Guest:I was doing like radio shows.
Guest:It was like, like within Milwaukee, I was, I was given every opportunity that I, that I,
Guest:thought that i wanted you know what i mean you made it to the top if i wanted to write a play i could write a play if i wanted to if i wanted to do a radio commercial for bacardi there was always you know some ad campaign would come through and they wanted a cheap writer yeah it was um it was a nice place to cut your teeth that's interesting that there was enough of a uh i guess advertising related or there was some market for a comedy writer in milwaukee yeah you figured it out somehow
Guest:Yeah, I mean, it starts with one of the 20 people that does improv in Milwaukee.
Guest:Okay, okay.
Guest:And so then Dick Chudnow, who worked with the Zucker Brothers pre-airplane, like Kentucky Fried Theater.
Marc:Kentucky Fried Movie, did he do that?
Guest:No.
Guest:He did Kentucky Fried Theater with them.
Guest:I don't know if he was involved in the movie.
Marc:I don't remember who did that.
Guest:But at some point, he came back to Milwaukee and he started comedy sports, which is sort of a profiteering bastardization of theater sports.
Marc:Comedy sports is from Milwaukee?
Guest:Yeah, it started there.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:Theater sports started with Keith Johnstone in Canada or something like that.
Guest:That's non-profit.
Marc:So you're an improv sketch guy.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Started as doing improv.
Guest:And then went from improv to written sketch, went from sketch to stand-up.
Guest:It's all, if you graph that, it's me trying to figure out how little work I can do.
Guest:And I keep finding out that it's harder and harder.
Guest:You know, it's like, stand-up's harder than sketch.
Guest:Sketch is harder than improv.
Guest:But I was, like, looking for, like, very, very little work for maximum profit.
Marc:Were you doing stand-up for long?
Guest:No, I'm happy to admit that... It's not your bag.
Guest:Yeah, I don't think I never... In LA, where are you from?
Guest:You're from New Jersey, aren't you?
Marc:I was born in Jersey.
Marc:I grew up in New Mexico.
Marc:So I didn't have any writing jobs.
Guest:But if you've ever done stand-up in a smaller town and then come to LA, you'll notice that it's a little softer here.
Guest:People get up and they...
Guest:I guess it's because your audience doesn't have work in the morning and they'll probably have stand-up gigs too.
Guest:So everyone sort of defaults to that kind of like, well, my stand-up's not working two, three, four.
Guest:And everyone laughs at you saying two, three, four.
Marc:Well, I think that dichotomy is doing it for a living and doing it because you can do it.
Marc:I mean, it seems to me that if you're out there doing the job of stand-up, you don't do much of that.
Marc:But if you're here and it's a Tuesday night at Tiger Lily or at the Gower Gulch, whatever that bar is over there, you're not going to bust your – not a lot of pressure.
Guest:It's also like you know – I think there's a lot of crutches available.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:The rooms are more interested in savviness than they are – like in Milwaukee or Chicago, that would kill you.
Guest:Nobody's going to sit there and – Indulge your day.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:They're not going to like, they're, they, you, you, you're going to need to be a certain distance from a punchline that someone can recognize.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:In a, in a, in a, in a more industrial.
Marc:We need closure.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, that's interesting because, you know, as you kind of progress as a comedy writer, it seems and producer, I mean, you're, you're at the top of your game now, but it would seem that in relation to middle America or in relation to the Midwest that programs that you created like the Sarah Silverman program and community, um,
Marc:would also be sort of confrontational to them in terms of their sensibility of what is funny.
Guest:Yeah, it's all about making your mom mad, not cleaning your room, I think.
Guest:How's that working out?
Guest:Are you making your mom mad?
Guest:I think she's mad.
Guest:I got to call her after this.
Marc:Did you go to, when you, like, getting back to the Midwest thing, we can talk about the shows in a minute.
Marc:I mean, what kind of background do you come from?
Marc:I mean, was it a working class background?
Marc:Because when I think of Milwaukee, you always think of the beer.
Marc:You always think, like, I've never been there.
Marc:It's not far from Chicago, correct?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:I was just in Madison.
Marc:They're lovely people.
Marc:The Midwesterners, very repressed.
Guest:Yeah, Madison's, like, pretty cool, yeah.
Marc:It's very cool, but there's a politeness in the Midwest that I find creepy.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I find it in the South as well that I wish that people would just yell at me.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, what kind of background did you have and what was the situation?
Guest:I grew up in a lower middle class suburb in Milwaukee.
Guest:My dad was, he went to a technical college and he sort of worked his way up from basically mopping floors at a film lab to being like sort of a,
Guest:upper level kind of sales executive sort of my mom had had gone from going to some school to you know raising the kids we were we were pretty poor but not I mean it depends on the fucking context yeah yeah if someone from Lebanon is listening we were rich but working class
Guest:Yeah, we were, yeah, it was, don't drink milk if you're thirsty, drink water, and why do you need Jif when you can have generic peanut butter?
Guest:And everything in the closet, everything in the cupboard was generic.
Marc:Oh, really?
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Back in the day when it was just the black and white boxes?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, and it literally said cereal.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And, yeah, they were hands-on parents.
Guest:They were... Hands-on?
Guest:Yeah, there was... Belts?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And so there's different strategies of coping with that, and apparently mine was the bubble thing.
Guest:I kind of drew inward.
Guest:Right.
Marc:You were a superhero with the bubble powers?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Did a lot of reading, and... Because I learned that impressing people...
Guest:Like I think my brother, if he was – hopefully he would agree with this and wouldn't feel insulted by my diagnosis of this.
Guest:But I think my brother who came five years before me adapted to the hands-on aspect almost by like getting into it.
Guest:Like he became a more sort of self-destructive, antagonistic, like oppositional, defiant kind of guy.
Guest:To your dad?
Guest:To everybody, to the world.
Guest:It's DiCaprio in Marvin's room.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:It's that whole thing.
Marc:Is he still like that?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:He's put the sword down?
Guest:Yeah, well, for him, according to him, it was having a kid.
Guest:Went away.
Guest:Now there's this opportunity to... He's just got unconditional love for his daughter.
Marc:To do it differently.
Guest:Yeah, and he doesn't talk to my family anymore, but he...
Guest:It seems like a healthy choice for him.
Guest:He's very happy and loves his daughter.
Marc:So it was that gnarly, huh?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And whereas I just sort of like, I moved in and started playing hard to get emotionally.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So all my therapists tell me there's wires cut in there that were cut in an emergency.
Guest:And it has to do with whatever – not one of those childhoods affect your – I don't think that stuff's unchangeable, but I do think that that coupled with whatever congenital –
Guest:die rolls in my head is basically like I grew up kind of like sitting in the corner wanting to get people to say I was special by being quiet and then I learned to talk and then I was trying to get people to say I was special by using big words and stuff it went good everybody was constantly saying I was special yeah I went to Marquette but then I dropped out
Marc:Before you finish?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Freshman year.
Guest:I couldn't.
Guest:I was going down the street and doing stand-up at this place.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The safe house.
Guest:And I was up until 3 in the morning with the stand-ups.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:It was, you know, I was experiencing two things for the first time at that time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:One was...
Guest:performing for people, and the other was this college thing that had been the goal for 20 years, but the college thing was, like, it wasn't making any sense at all.
Guest:Really?
Guest:I was getting Fs in English, and I was a good writer, you know, but I just, it was...
Guest:I was not making classes and I was not... Boozing and shit?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was not able to... I was not a disciplined student.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I acquired any work ethic at all.
Guest:So I dropped out and focused on my comedy.
Marc:And then you moved out here?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, do you talk to your parents?
Marc:Uh, yeah.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So it's just your brother who's like, nope.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:The irony is I probably talk to them less.
Guest:I certainly talk about them less.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because, you know, it's like, I'm, I'm the, it's the cat in the cradle.
Guest:Like I'm the, I was the mama's boy and the, the, the good example, but that's because I, so I, I, they don't, they don't, they don't, I don't call them on their birthday.
Guest:I don't call them at Christmas.
Guest:It's like, Oh, good job.
Guest:You're back to the right horse there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I know.
Marc:They, they, they, uh, you're just cause you're emotionally detached that they thought you were a sweet kid.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Right.
Guest:They don't realize that they crippled you.
Guest:Well, I think that's what they were training us for.
Guest:I think they were saying to my brother, why can't you be more like this?
Guest:Meaning, be more like a potato.
Guest:So that we can get back to our business.
Guest:And the potato is 38 now.
Marc:I'm a shitty son.
Marc:And he's growing those weird sprouts.
Marc:There's roots coming out of the potato.
Yeah.
Marc:Well, that's I mean, it's interesting what we do to protect ourselves in the emotional situation.
Marc:I like that analogy that your therapist made.
Marc:Was that hers that you cut wires in an emergency?
Marc:I've heard that.
Guest:I mean, I've been to so many therapists.
Guest:I think I heard that somewhere along the way.
Marc:What's your fundamental sort of like what do you go for?
Marc:Because I find as I get older, I went to a therapist like, you know what you're going for now.
Marc:I mean, like usually what is the predicament that sends you?
Guest:Oh, well, yeah, it's always about girlfriends.
Guest:I'm living with my final girlfriend now.
Marc:You've decided it's final?
Guest:Yeah, I'm certain that it's either this or they'll have to freeze me in a block of ice.
Guest:saw me when women can be with someone like me.
Guest:But she's as close as I'm going to get to somebody being able to love me unconditionally.
Guest:And I...
Guest:It's always this way.
Guest:Whenever I'm going back to therapy, I'm going because I'm in danger of fucking up with somebody that deserves better.
Marc:Yeah, I know that one.
Marc:How do you do it?
Marc:Do you do it through anger or shutting down?
Marc:What's your style?
Guest:it's shutting down.
Guest:It's just, it's all, it's all negative space.
Guest:It's all, it's all what's not there.
Guest:It's like, I never, I don't do, I don't do anything bad.
Guest:I never cheat.
Guest:I never, I don't even flirt.
Guest:I don't, I don't, I don't compete.
Guest:I don't, you know, there's a lot, there's a ton of stuff I don't do, but that's my list of dues.
Yeah.
Guest:I also don't, you know, I don't make a lot of eye contact.
Guest:I don't, I forget, I go into a domestic kind of cocoon.
Guest:Stop having sex.
Guest:I stop taking showers.
Guest:I focus on my work.
Guest:No showers.
Marc:Yeah, I'm weird.
Marc:So the work though, I mean, Jesus, I mean, like I watch Community,
Marc:And it's so smart on so many levels.
Marc:And there seems to... Like, I always wonder with this, because I'm not a TV writer.
Marc:I don't know what it's like.
Marc:I know it's a tremendous amount of work.
Marc:And I also know that you have to man the ship and you have a lot of people that you're working with.
Marc:But it seems that the intelligence of the show...
Marc:is running along the same lines as The Simpsons or something that is reflecting back on the culture and taking opportunities to satirize clearly things that you dug, you know, films and other things that you're doing in the Claymation episode.
Marc:I mean, you're doing things with what was a fairly mundane format, a sitcom, and you're just busting it open.
Marc:I mean, are you aware?
Marc:Is that an agenda?
Marc:I mean, or I'm being too heady.
Marc:Am I deconstructing too much?
Guest:No.
Guest:I mean, those are all accurate observations.
Guest:The reason behind them is that, and I'm not being overly glib or humble or whatever you would call this.
Guest:I'm really 100% sincere when I say I do that because I would not be good at doing it.
Guest:There are better people, obviously, you can see from the Nielsens, there are better people at writing the more straight shot at the bullseye kind of fair.
Guest:So I've got to play in my strong corner, which is being sort of, you know, existing within a frame that I can kind of grab a hold of and rattle it and go like, look at this frame.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That's good.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Sort of like if I'm not if I'm not if I'm not doing it a little bit differently than why am I doing it?
Guest:Because there's got to be 10 guys in line behind me who would be getting a three rating at 8 p.m.
Guest:if you know by like just
Marc:Doing two-and-a-half you would but you would never think to do that.
Marc:I mean I I mean I can't except so I don't you know that yeah, but is it something you want to do?
Marc:I mean was it ever desire me?
Marc:It sounds like as a rebel as somebody who who you know saw themselves You know initially as being special that you're doing something special and it honors your voice I mean was there a period where because I I mean I looked at your your credits I mean it doesn't seem like there are plenty of guys your age or who want to do what you do that hacked it out for a few years and shitty shows I
Marc:I mean, you don't seem to have that.
Guest:This is so close to a conversation when I was 16 with my parents.
Guest:You know, there's a lot of people out there with a summer job.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, you're absolutely right.
Guest:That's what it is.
Guest:It's behavior and then there's cognition.
Guest:In my head...
Guest:If I could push a button and be mainstream... I mean, I don't know.
Guest:Flowers for Algernon, the Homer Simpson crayon episode, whatever.
Guest:We all ask ourselves that question sometimes.
Guest:That might be a very presumptuous analogy.
Guest:But, I mean, we all ask ourselves, I think, if I could push a button and just do this kind of, quote-unquote, whatever you call it, sell-out, dumber, mainstream...
Guest:there's got to be a positive word for it successful if I could do that stuff would I do it and I guess it's the answer is yes as long as I could unpush the button or else not know that the button was there I think that the real issue with that kind of stuff is and the horror of it is I think there are plenty of guys that do push that button but still know what they're doing so that's the curse of it you don't want that gift
Guest:Yeah, the gift of... Mediocrity.
Marc:Of betraying your own children.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:Betraying yourself at the very least.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, emotionally, I can't do that.
Guest:For better or for worse, my work ethic is absolutely tied to the same part of my brain that generates adrenaline and love.
Guest:When I'm in the edit bay...
Guest:And a cut's not working.
Guest:Whereas somebody else goes, yeah, well, do you want to try that a different way?
Guest:I just tend to go like.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I try to control it because I have to work with other people.
Guest:And this show is a bit, you know.
Marc:You try to control the control freak.
Guest:I try to control the emotional quotient to my emotional investment in what I do because I'm operating in a medium right now where that is very often a liability for everybody around you.
Marc:In the sense that you could create a negative workplace?
Guest:Yeah, you're a crazy person.
Marc:No one wants to work with you.
Guest:Have you been that guy?
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:I've yelled.
Guest:I get...
Guest:When I'm in the middle of... It's like in your middle of taking a shit, when you're in the middle of peeing, when you're in the middle of coming, giving birth.
Guest:Name any process where something is coming out of you.
Guest:I've done three out of four of those.
Guest:People coming up to you and tapping you on the shoulder, it freaks you out.
Marc:Yeah, because you got to start over or you got to get back to your flow.
Marc:All the...
Guest:And also something inside you on the base of your cortex is saying, this is a saber-toothed tiger.
Guest:He's trying to eat your eggs.
Guest:Like something feels rapey about someone questioning something that I'm in the process of completing.
Guest:Interesting.
Guest:When you're drawing in sixth grade and you're trying to draw Inspector Gadget and
Guest:And somebody comes over your shoulder and says, where is his hair?
Guest:That's not Inspector Gadget yet.
Guest:I don't see his hair.
Guest:And you haven't gotten to it yet.
Guest:Like, I, you know.
Marc:Oh, yeah, you just want to crumple it up.
Guest:Well, you just go like, I'm getting there.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Or I'm doing Garfield now.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:You just, I just tend to like, inside, there's a little kid going, how fucking, get away from my eggs.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And so I'm 38 now.
Guest:The good news is we get slower and older.
Guest:So I think that maybe I finally... I can do these sort of secondary things.
Guest:My emotional reactions, I let them go.
Guest:And the more I do that, the more I end up surrounded by people that are so good that they're starting to actually be... Now it's more like...
Guest:Going into the third season, I have worked with so many writers now that have made me realize that all of that was, like... It was probably not necessary.
Marc:But it was also fear, and it was also, you know, this is your thing, and it's hard to trust people.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Until they prove themselves, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But anyways, yeah, the answer to your question, it's always, it's like, there's no such thing as a...
Guest:hero that's just doing like i i i just can't that's just the way i i operate so what do you mean a hero that what a hero that just does the only thing he can do like there is no moment when like if a if a network is saying you know this would be more mainstream if you did it this way like if they were right yeah and i thought that they were and i like i would go
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But the truth is that they're never no one's ever actually people are saying, well, you know what two and a half men did last week.
Guest:If you did that, then what happens to their show will happen to your show.
Guest:And that's never true.
Guest:What's true is that an audience wants to feel comfortable.
Guest:That part I get.
Guest:And then I understand how I often am flying in the face of the audience's comfort.
Guest:And so there's a ceiling, perhaps, on the mainstream appeal of whatever I do.
Guest:But the important thing is, if making people comfortable was the only thing you had to do in order to get ratings...
Guest:Like, that's what you have to do after you get their attention.
Guest:That's what you have to do after you engage them.
Marc:But isn't that just a comfort relative to context?
Marc:It's not like you've got people on there peeing.
Marc:You know, it's not like they're only uncomfortable in that, like, I'm not sure what this is.
Guest:Yeah, they're only uncomfortable in that there's not a laugh track.
Guest:there's not a that's and not only is there not a laugh track but even getting used to um like just the fact that it's a single camera thing and there's you can't even get used to that because the camera might decide from week to week that that it's uh it wants to show you things this way or that way um but also what's interesting is that from the beginning you know when i watched even the first even the pilot
Marc:You know, it's a show that you have to grow with like any other show.
Marc:And I think that the performers and you must have grown as well that there was an element of in the first few episodes where I literally thought you were just turning TV in on itself.
Marc:Like, you know, look what we are.
Marc:We're joke machines.
Marc:Fuck you.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But then all of a sudden, you know, all the characters began to evolve organically and develop relationships with each other, which I have to assume is not something you can really plan.
Right.
Guest:Uh, no, you certainly can't schedule it.
Guest:You can, you can have it as a goal because it's TV, but you can't, I remember thinking that it would take 12 episodes in the first season for the show to become, uh, less about Joel McHale, not wanting to hang out with these knuckleheads.
Guest:And it happened so fast.
Guest:Like as soon as these people were on screen together, um,
Guest:and the audience was seeing them on screen together, they were six episodes behind what we had already done.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so there had to be all this correction, even in the first season, because the chemistry between these people, it made it perfectly believable that they would all just be hanging out all the time and helping each other solve problems.
Guest:By Halloween of first season, it was an ensemble comedy.
Guest:It was a family comedy.
Guest:And yes, you're right.
Guest:It was like, it's...
Guest:There's this I'm always trying to gain and keep the audience's respect.
Guest:I always want them to know that the show doesn't think they're stupid for watching.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And there's a fine line between that and making them feel stupid for watching.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because the other thing that you want to convince them of is that you're not going to hurt them.
Guest:You're not going to.
Guest:You're not going to get bored with your own show.
Guest:You're not going to... You can do this every week for five years, seven years, and everything's going to be fine and comfortable, and yet it's never going to lapse into... Mundane habits like that.
Marc:Well, I think that the opportunity you have, given that your backdrop is this community college, is that you're not tied to...
Marc:to a traditional family situation where the obstacles are just going to be familial and work-related.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That you seem to have created a venue to where you can run just about anything you want through it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, and you could even, like, if you really wanted to, it seems that...
Marc:Like, if you wanted to do an episode where half the episodes was like a sitcom within a sitcom of a family episode revolving around one of your character's families, you could do that.
Guest:Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Marc:And it would work.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, people think that there's a shelf life to the fact that it's community college, but the show's not called Community College.
Guest:And I was urged to call it Community College.
Marc:Oh, really?
Guest:They did testing, and the word community is not...
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:It's never going to trend on Twitter and it's never going.
Guest:People aren't going to remember it.
Guest:It means nothing.
Guest:It's like calling your show the.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I said, well, it's also like calling it cheers or, you know, it's it's it'll get there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But and if it doesn't, then what are we doing?
Guest:But more importantly, what if we last beyond four years?
Guest:Are they all going to grow beards and start teaching each other?
Guest:You know, wouldn't it be nice four years from now to have no, you know, the word blackboard isn't in the title.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:Because you never know.
Guest:And I've been demonstrating, you know, with increasing frequencies sort of strategically that although the show...
Guest:you know, exists there and is currently dancing around that tree, that it's the dance that you're watching and the characters that are alive and stuff.
Guest:And we have very much so, like, done entire episodes where they're not even on campus.
Guest:I very purposely, like, first season, the camera never left the campus.
Guest:Why?
Guest:Because I thought that if we got a second season, that instead of trying to come up with a way to make things better, why not constrict yourself and simplify your world, sort of create a little Milwaukee movie?
Guest:Yeah, first season and then the illusion will be that if you just stop doing that in the in the second season people will will scratch their heads and go how did the show get so much bigger and better and the answer is oh we stopped wearing that collar that we purposely staked ourselves to and it's it's like you know you're playing basketball weights in your ankles right take them off we just
Guest:The camera started leaving the campus.
Guest:So now you see people's apartments, you see restaurants, you see them driving in cars, going out drinking.
Guest:And the sensation that you get is the same one you would get if you were in your second year of knowing a new group of friends.
Guest:Your world is getting bigger and there's all these tunnels connecting.
Marc:And you're in each other's lives more, both on campus and off campus.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Was there also any sort of thought about, well, if we can establish this thing in a solid way at the budget we have, that we'll be able to spend more money and take this thing a little further?
Guest:No, no, never.
Marc:No.
Marc:Because it does cost more money to do what you're doing now, doesn't it?
Guest:Uh, yeah, kind of.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:The thing that... I could cut my budget in half if I... It would have to do with scheduling.
Guest:Like getting my shit together sooner.
Guest:Like...
Guest:it's a story driven show.
Guest:So a lot of times the thing that's really costing the most money is the fact that we're a little behind, like it's a less predictable show.
Guest:It's less templated.
Guest:So week to week, it's like making a little movie.
Guest:And sometimes it's not as quick to write those things in a week.
Guest:But yes, if we only ever shot, um,
Guest:a on campus it would always be cheaper than if we ever left but at the same time second season when I started doing is you know some episodes don't leave one room yet I'll they play Dungeons and Dragons for an entire episode before that before they did that we know we did we did a just a bottle episode that was like a generic bottle up sober they call it a bottle episode I but I and we we've done we've done a few of those
Guest:and uh a bottle episode yeah that was a term that was invented by the star trek crew i think what does it mean it means uh for them that was the episodes that they would shoot on star trek where you would never leave the bridge so it's just you're you're a ship in a bottle you're you're trapped yeah yeah um and uh they're they can be cheap and they can be disastrous but they can also be great and
Marc:Now, you make all these references, Dungeons & Dragons, Star Trek, comic books.
Marc:Was that who you were?
Guest:Kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I mean, I would lose any contest with any genuine bona fide Marvel or DC nerd that was sitting here, but I loved Spider-Man when I was in high school.
Guest:I wrote for my friend Rob Schraub's comic book in Milwaukee,
Guest:He had an independent comic book, and that comic book getting its film rights optioned is why we moved to L.A.
Guest:Because we thought that... Which comic?
Guest:It was called Scud the Disposable Assassin.
Marc:And that's what got you here?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He had like 10,000 readers at his peak.
Guest:It was a black and white comic about a robot that shoots people.
Marc:And how does it network...
Marc:In terms of this idea that, you know, if you did this, you could be like Two and a Half Men or any other of these mainstream sitcoms that and I think that Conan came up against the same stark reality that that, you know, they still hold on to this number that is a large number of people with relatively low expectations that can't be shaken somehow.
Marc:And now I think what Conan has found and what you're finding with this show and certainly the audience The Simpsons created, among other things, is that there is this evolving and growing up of this culture of kids that are incredibly smart, very focused, have a great sense of genuine irony and also a great sense of these cultural artifacts that are not mainstream at all.
Marc:And they seem to unite around certain things.
Marc:But this is a real audience.
Marc:And is there in your mind... And they're a real upscale audience.
Guest:And that's something that does appeal to even their crassest sensibilities because the upscale demographic means they have money.
Guest:The IQs and money and parents that can pay for college and stuff like that.
Guest:These things all relate to buying the toothpaste that's being advertised while you're watching the show.
Guest:We may be low rated, but when you graph it by that scale of like... 18 to 25 people with money kind of deal.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And even just across the board demographically, we have half of the young audience that our biggest competitor, Big Bang Theory, has.
Guest:When you divide these numbers in certain ways.
Marc:Why is that?
Marc:Yours is a smarter show.
Guest:Well, it's just – strangely enough, there's a lot of like – there's probably an overlap of Big Bang Theory's audience and our audience of like 30%.
Marc:But my mom likes Big Bang Theory.
Marc:So there must be – not that she's stupid, but there's something that –
Marc:simpler there and more understandable there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think that people who have... If you're a nurse and you work 14 hours a day and you come home, I think that sometimes maybe coming home to an HBO show that asks the question, what is life and death and stuff, maybe is what you're looking for.
Guest:But I think that more often than not, for the 45 minutes before you pass out,
Guest:Your research indicates that what we do is we flip through channels and we look for the least objectionable companion.
Guest:We look for something that we're not looking for our Citizen Kane.
Guest:We're not looking for our new favorite TV show because we know that we would keep flipping and then we would spend that 45 minutes frustrated.
Guest:Because we're looking for something.
Guest:Instead, we drift to a sort of like middle of the aquarium and we keep it on while we play with our shoes or take off our work clothes or make a sandwich.
Guest:And that's how sort of like... The shows, all shows are like cigarettes.
Guest:You watch two, you have a higher chance of watching three, higher chance of... They all...
Guest:They're all addicted.
Marc:Well, the interesting thing about your show about community is you can come in the middle and something will be happening that is going to be intrinsically interesting and funny without even knowing what the narrative is.
Marc:I mean, it's happened to me.
Marc:So I have to assume it happens to other people.
Guest:I always try to make sure that's the case.
Guest:Is that true?
Marc:You're conscious of that.
Guest:Oh, absolutely.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Everybody thinks people.
Guest:The funny thing is people who watch every single episode three times in a row, they they think that there's all of these things.
Guest:They're right to see all of these things that are connected, that are important, that pay off.
Guest:But they make the mistake of thinking that that means that it's a that you have to.
Guest:Experience a show that way.
Guest:Absolutely not.
Guest:I mean, I look at this thing always through the lens of modularity.
Guest:It's got to be crack.
Guest:One rock has to do the same job.
Guest:You can't tell somebody when you have an audience this small, oh, give it a chance, or you should have been here last week, then this would be even funnier.
Guest:I try to minimize that stuff.
Marc:So that's a practical thing, not a creative thing?
Guest:It's both.
Guest:I pride myself on that craftsmanship.
Guest:That's like, is it a practical thing or a creative thing to have certain kind of like, you know, if you're building a deck on your house, like, you know, the fact that your foot doesn't go through it.
Guest:Like, it's both.
Guest:It's like, you know, you're a proud carpenter.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But I think on a creative level, I mean, it seems to sort of fit into the practical model in terms of network expectations and protecting your show.
Marc:But on a creative level, it's very inspired in terms of pacing a show and also loading it up with comedy content and with content that is intrinsically interesting.
Marc:Because did you have any idea that Glover and Pudi would become such an effective comedy team?
Guest:No, there's no way.
Guest:Who could anticipate?
Guest:Because you look at other shows, almost everybody on this show, if you take any of them and put them on another show, they would be the one carrying the show.
Guest:And there's so many of them under one roof.
Guest:It was...
Guest:Partly the Russo brothers, they've done a lot of casting and they had a different approach to casting that was very... How is that?
Guest:It's patient.
Guest:They said, look, everyone's going to try to pressure you into closing the bird in the hand and mixing the metaphor.
Guest:Everyone's going to try to pressure you
Guest:that's going to always feel like that parking space close to the, close to the right aid, but not quite close enough.
Guest:And that fear is that you, you don't settle for that one and look for a closer one and you come back and that one's taken.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Cause all these, all the good actors, they get snatched up in pilot season, but yeah,
Guest:it's never really there's no they they this is them talking to me and they're like there's so few stories about um you know oh the one that got away right so many more stories about um thank god we waited right um there's there's a and so we like with donald glover's character we just
Guest:We just kept looking and looking and looking and looking.
Guest:And we just had this policy and casting of until we're blown away by each of these people as individuals, then what's the point?
Guest:What are we going to do?
Guest:Go to pilot with three of them being meh and then we'll change it?
Guest:It's like...
Marc:How long did that take?
Guest:It took the full time.
Guest:I mean, it took so long that the last character we cast was Jim Rash, who plays the dean.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The bald guy?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He's an oddball.
Marc:Very funny.
Guest:He's amazing.
Guest:Yeah, he really is.
Guest:He's great because he's a writer, the writer said.
Guest:He's a groundling, and not only is he a writer, but he's a good writer.
Guest:He's actually successful.
Guest:He has his own writing career.
Guest:He writes movies and stuff.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He's a comedy writer, so you give him a joke and you just never have a conversation with him.
Guest:I mean, that goes for Donald, too.
Guest:Donald was a writer on 30 Rock, and everybody's got a really high comedic IQ on that show.
Guest:Anyways, we cast Jim Rash.
Guest:On the like second day of shooting the pilot, like we were shooting, we were almost done shooting the show and we were downstairs from the building where we were shooting.
Guest:We there were people wanting to play the dean lining up because I still hadn't found somebody.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:Well, I mean, it just seems that everybody seems to be interfacing and interacting with each other.
Marc:And it seems the characters are so set now that they can really have fun within those characters and how they interact with the other ones.
Marc:Now, does that stuff, is there any improvs or no?
No.
Guest:Oh, yeah, tons.
Guest:More as we go along.
Guest:I think the writers and the actors, even though we barely see each other, there's this important back and forth that happens where the writers try to learn how it is that the actors are funny.
Guest:Instead of working against them, you go, well, who is this person?
Guest:We thought originally that maybe she was going to be the new Jennifer Aniston, but it turns out she's the new blah, blah, blah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And you play to strengths.
Guest:You go, like, this was so funny in the way she moves her head and she does this, she does one of these.
Guest:And then it's also the actors, like, seeing their lines and doing them and making them their own and just being willing to do anything and sort of trust us.
Guest:The characters, they just sort of...
Guest:I imagine this has to happen on any TV show.
Guest:The actors kind of like they become they become kind of owners of their characters.
Guest:They know what they're doing after a while.
Marc:Well, it's great because it seems that out of your insanely compulsive, perfectionist, never quite happy nature.
Marc:And your intelligence that you're not going to let any of this shit sit.
Marc:I mean, I think one of the reasons why you probably are intrinsically opposed to to the predictability of mainstream sitcoms is that it would not satisfy your need to just keep growing.
Guest:Yeah, I do think – I think it's our responsibility as people who strive to entertain to admit to ourselves that we're doing this because we are hoping that other people out there are like us.
Guest:And if they're not, to find the things that are similar so that we can start – to connect.
Guest:And so if you admit that, then your responsibility, yes, is to entertain yourself.
Guest:It's like if you're a cop on the street.
Guest:you know, your responsibility should probably be no matter how stressful the job gets and no matter how many excuses you have.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like, you know, in theory, if you're going to a domestic disturbance call, like you should be asking yourself, like, well, how would I feel if this was my house and I was coming in the door?
Guest:Right.
Guest:I'm not suggesting that that's how law enforcement should work.
Guest:I'm just saying like there's the human accountability there when you're in a position of power over someone else as an entertainer is with an audience.
Guest:You're standing in front of 30 people.
Guest:You have the microphone.
Guest:They don't.
Guest:you you can abuse them you can make them suffer through watching someone i know yeah uh or phone it in or like or beat them up for liking you yeah yeah that's true too yeah all kind yeah there's a million so it's it has to be constant growth because and that's a really good point um the the
Guest:it it your your shit has to get old to you because if you're just the guy who gets up there and says oh i'm doing bad stand-up again um you couldn't no matter how hard they laughed at that the first time like you have to you have to move on don't you i mean well yeah you have to like well i work that way too you know you kind of sort of bore yourself into a corner until you have to literally like cut out of your body
Marc:And, you know, reemerge with something new.
Marc:Something has to feed it.
Marc:And, you know, usually frustration and anger will feed my creativity, my impulse that, you know, I need to have something else has to happen or I'm going to die inside.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But like that, but it's interesting you bring up that complacency because when you see something that's definitely off that path and there's people driving it, you feel like something new is happening.
Marc:It's the same with 30 Rock as well.
Marc:I hope you're not offended by it.
Marc:I'm not really making a comparison.
Marc:Just that you have comedy happening for comedy's sake.
Marc:And because of the performers and the characters that you've created, even though they don't exist in the family atmosphere or anything we've expected, they are definitely well-grounded characters.
Marc:And it seems like there's humanity just coming out of them.
Guest:Yeah, well, 30 Rock's definitely... I mean, I watched that show with a notepad out because what's for sale there is comedy.
Guest:I don't know what show is on the air right now that has to be beholden to a half-hour narrative and be funny that is nailing it in the column of setups and punchlines quite the way those writers are.
Guest:And you can tell...
Guest:uh that those are a caliber of comedy writers that are so dedicated to the laugh that there's something inside them that forbids them from indulging in the sap yeah and when you when you're when you're 20 less funny than your average 30 rock writer like i am in a setup punchline way like it's easier to go to do the thing that i
Guest:I want to do anyway, which is appeal to the heartstrings.
Guest:Just add that much and make sure that the people think that the people are living down the street somewhere.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Because to me, that's like, what's the funniest thing that happened to you last year?
Guest:It's some story you have about a friend of yours.
Guest:And if you put it on TV the time Gary's pants fell down at the banquet...
Guest:yeah okay I've seen better uh you know Jerry Lewis did a thing where his pants went up over his head um but the story you had to be there because Gary and oh my god and it was the banquet and his pants fall down it's a relationship you have with Gary and it made it made you laugh until tears are streaming down your face so I just yeah the 30 Rock you can't quite like I mean they're being so funny right you can't even believe they
Guest:They're over there somewhere.
Marc:That's a good observation.
Marc:I can definitely see the difference, that there's a little more heart, and your characters are more sympathetic in a different way.
Guest:But you better believe that those guys sit over there.
Guest:I think this is a pretty educated guess.
Guest:I think those guys justifiably sit there, and if our show ever comes up, they go, yeah, well...
Guest:pretty easy to kind of just play a music cue and make people think your show is sad when it's supposed to be funny you know what I mean I would shudder to hear the kinds of things and I guess I do walk around obviously with that in my head which is a good thing I keep this ghost of Tina Fey in my brain when I'm writing and I keep a ghost of my mom and I keep a ghost of all of my friends in Silver Lake and I try to I gotta please them all at the same time
Marc:So you're a haunted house of expectations that you can never live up to.
Guest:Yeah, I am an eight track of voices.
Marc:You've got a bunch of ghosts beating you up on a daily basis.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Making you feel guilty that you're not good enough.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Good, I think that works for you.
Marc:Have you told your therapist about the ghosts?
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:Why not?
Guest:I can't go to therapists anymore.
Guest:I gave up on them.
Guest:You did?
Guest:I just decided to, as long as I can keep doing shows like this.
Guest:Work.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's insane.
Guest:What am I saying?
Guest:Of course I can't keep doing it.
Guest:I have to go back to therapy.
Marc:Well, you know, I mean, sometimes you got to take a break.
Marc:You know, there's that old issue of like, you know, hey, you know, what I'm doing is working.
Marc:Maybe I don't want to strip away all the layers of the onion to find a crying child that I don't know how to parent.
Guest:Yeah, what's your opinion about that?
Guest:Do you think that that's true?
Guest:That's always the comics first.
Marc:I have never been... I've not articulated that.
Marc:I do not commit to my problems as a means to be creative.
Marc:I never thought of it that way.
Marc:I didn't think that...
Marc:you know not for very long did i think that if i quit drinking i wouldn't be funny anymore i do on a deeper level i think there's a real question of look here is the prognosis for you now like you seem to be extraordinarily self-aware of your you know creative abilities and and also of the world you live in and and and of yourself to a certain degree i mean what it really comes down to is am i ready and willing
Marc:to let go of these things?
Marc:Do I want to put the work in to get to this place where I could have a functioning relationship, where I could be intimate?
Marc:And recently I have found that when it was laid out to me, it's like, look, you have these problems and I think they're dealable, but this is what we got to do.
Marc:And then there's part of you that's like, oh, but I'm having a pretty good time.
Marc:Uh, you know, I'm doing okay.
Marc:You know, life isn't that long.
Marc:I mean, is, is trust that important?
Marc:Right, right, right, right.
Marc:So those are really the negotiations.
Marc:I don't really ever think like, you know, I got to stay this way to be funny.
Guest:I think what you're saying is that like the, you know, the old, the old wives tale among comics is if I stop being crazy, I'll stop being funny.
Guest:But the truth is if you stop being honest, you'll stop being funny.
Guest:And it's easier to be honest about how crazy you are than it is to be – like I think if you – That's right.
Marc:That's right.
Guest:You have to be yourself and you have to like be quote unquote happy, whatever that means, actualized, whatever, like sort of –
Guest:uh functionally relaying what it's like to be you to an audience right and if you're if you're just for instance sober because uh you know you have to be and you're secretly resenting the world but you're not sharing that like i i don't it's in some way like you're not at peace with that or or you know then you're just it's not that you needed to be drunk to be funny it's that you need to you need to have your
Marc:outlet yeah you need to know who you are that's right well I think really what it comes down to also is I've had moments right now where you know I feel okay with myself you know I'm not that much different but I'm not actively dreading everything I'm not consumed with panic most of the time I'm not assuming that everybody you know thinks some shit or hates me and so I've got a little freedom to experience what it's like to be relatively comfortable but then like what you were talking about we were wired a certain way whether wires are cut or they're just there and
Guest:i find my biggest fear is not that i won't be funny but it's that like i actually get to a point where i'm like you know i feel pretty good i think i'm done with this all right i'm tearing when you say you describing that out loud like i i just got like uh chills like i i i have so much work to do like like uh
Guest:on that part of my... I still don't believe in my heart of hearts that if I become comfortable with my acceptability in the world... Right.
Guest:...that I think it'll all fall apart.
Guest:I think that... Because I sit on Twitter.
Guest:I just live through Twitter.
Guest:There are episodes of the show that...
Guest:I wasn't all the way there for.
Guest:I was focused on the one before or after it more so than I wished, as much as I wished I could have been for that one.
Guest:So it's sort of a, it's an okay episode.
Guest:It's like, you know, Neil Gould.
Marc:This is in your head.
Guest:This is in my head that I'm making all these judgments of the content, yes.
Marc:But on some level then, aren't you doing what you said?
Marc:You've got to be careful not to assume that your audience thinks what you think.
Marc:Or you're going to take shit away from them.
Guest:Well, yeah.
Marc:Do you express that stuff on Twitter?
Marc:Do you say, you know, I didn't really like that.
Marc:No, no, no, no.
Guest:God, no, no, no.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I learned that a while ago.
Guest:Like deflecting compliments used to be my specialty.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:Someone pointed out that that's offensive.
Marc:Well, you've got to make sure unless I'm not talking at you, I'm talking at myself.
Marc:But like all those ghosts that you have in your head are your own egos, manifestations of those individuals.
Marc:You know, I'm sure Tina Fey has a tremendous amount of respect for what you do and probably genuinely.
Marc:So you've constructed these these archetypes for yourself to provide a service for you.
Marc:But it doesn't mean that's what's happening.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true.
Guest:I mean, I would never get on Twitter and go like, oh, this episode sucks.
Guest:Sorry, I wanted to work on it more.
Guest:Because I want... Because that's just a fact.
Guest:That's like me putting my thumb on the scale and that the whole point is...
Guest:how am I driving?
Guest:And I can't, how did this work?
Guest:Did it work or not?
Guest:And you can only know that by unveiling it and having them react organically.
Guest:Now, when they do react positively, like to the recent one that we did, it was like a My Dinner with Andre Omos.
Guest:I thought that was good.
Guest:That I thought was going to be the end of my career.
Guest:Like when they started saying that they liked it, I started weeping and I was like, I did say something to the effect of like,
Guest:I said, I don't know what to say about an audience that likes an episode like this, except maybe we're stuck with each other forever.
Guest:Meaning that I thought you were going to hate this.
Guest:So I will say stuff like that.
Guest:I really thought you guys were going to think this episode sucked.
Guest:I'm so glad you liked it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:What's interesting...
Marc:because I have all these same feelings, and I'm constantly on Twitter fishing for not just validation, but to be, because it's very hard for me not to engage in that dialogue, like the sort of like, well, I wasn't that good.
Marc:It's not even fishing.
Marc:You brought up unconditional love probably three times during this conversation, and there's this idea, because when I went to therapy,
Marc:And the therapist had a profound effect on me, talked about this notion of primal union, which is that there's a period where the child is connected to their mother in such a way that there is no distinction between the two bodies, that there is this type of love that is organic and biological.
Marc:And, you know, either there you know, there there's an active break from that, that your mother is responsible and says and starts letting you function as a self without her or else you never break that thing.
Marc:And there's always something craving something that is not not attainable anymore.
Marc:And I think that unconditional unconditional love is not it's not it's not a human capacity.
Guest:Right, it's not a real thing.
Marc:Well, that's why there's Jesus.
Guest:Right, it's like the Christ mythology.
Guest:I was just going to say, it's a target that makes a good, it's like a tracking.
Marc:Right, but there is something inside of us that, and when you sort of have that image of yourself, it's never quite good enough that you're really looking for, because I look for it too, that kind of like, no, it is.
Marc:Everything you do is good.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But you would fight that as well.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And people who, I mean, people who had closer to that than we had, they're not funny, right?
Guest:They can't.
Guest:Like, have you ever met somebody who grew up, like, with swell parents?
Guest:Like, I just, I'm really, really suspicious of them.
Marc:Yeah, I am too, man.
Marc:And I've talked to a lot of people that say they had okay parents, but all these problems that we're having are common to almost anybody.
Marc:I don't trust anybody that seems to exude genuine confidence, especially if they're uninspired.
Marc:And I think it's all manifestations of how hard we have to be on ourselves to continue doing what we're doing.
Marc:But getting back to that idea that I am baffled and overwhelmed with anything that comes over me like joy, right?
Marc:Like, I literally do not know how to handle it.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Marc:Like, it makes me weep, which is really not supposed to happen.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You're supposed to go like, this is what it's about.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Not me.
Marc:I'm like, I can't.
Marc:Just stop it.
Guest:Well, did you hear?
Guest:I was sitting in my house.
Guest:I was crying, looking at Twitter because people didn't hate an episode.
Marc:That's great.
Guest:That's me experiencing life.
Guest:I'm going to go to heaven, and Abe Lincoln's going to go, I ended slavery.
Guest:What did you do?
Guest:And I'm going to go, I...
Guest:When I wasn't jerking off, I was sitting in the same chair doing a different kind of jerking off, but it was weeping.
Guest:My girlfriend was in the other room, and she was watching the same Twitter feed, and she was yelling out, going like, they like it, they like it.
Guest:She wants to experience my shitty life with me.
Guest:That's good enough for her, and I couldn't go in there with her.
Guest:until I was done until my tears were dry what am I crying for like watching a twitter feed that's so but I mean the answer is I don't mean I shouldn't have I just mean like that's how like yeah I'm not feeling proud of yourself and feeling you know joy is weird
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because to me, it immediately becomes the third act of some movie where a guy's got cancer.
Guest:As soon as somebody likes something that I did.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Because in my head, the first two acts are... I get that too.
Marc:I'm always waiting for the other fucking shoe to drop.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So...
Marc:Well, we seem to have arced out.
Marc:I mean, I would like to talk about, you know, the Sarah Silverman thing and stuff, but it doesn't really happen in a timeline.
Marc:But around that being canceled and that kind of stuff, I mean, it seemed like a natural evolution for you that it was a growing experience.
Marc:And, you know, what happened around that show?
Marc:What was the fight there?
Guest:That was a different growing experience for me because I left that show before they even started airing the first season's episodes.
Marc:Oh, so you were out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Sarah and I had kind of a... We had sort of... It wasn't even creative differences.
Guest:It was like... It was personality sort of conflict, and it was...
Guest:The buck stops with me.
Guest:I think I'm bad to write with.
Guest:We did this amazing pilot, and it was easy.
Guest:What brought you together?
Marc:Was it an executive that brought you together, or did she seek you out?
Guest:was a comedy central had our names on some less the of guys that were possible you know get possibly okay writing a pilot I guess I don't know how we ended up on that list but I know that when she saw our names she recognized Rob's name because she had been circulating this video tape that Steve Agee had given her which was Rob's
Guest:Rob reenacting Jaws 4 with his penis as the shark.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And Michael Caine as an orange.
Guest:And he just attacks the orange with his penis.
Guest:His penis has a little duct tape fin on it.
Guest:And it's just a video of his dick.
Guest:And so that's how we got to sit down with this person who was doing a Comedy Central show.
Guest:And I was at an all-time low at that point, so I really needed this thing.
Guest:What do you mean?
Guest:You broke it?
Guest:Yeah, broke, but also broke...
Guest:yeah, like, like, like running out of my nest egg and also like, where is the next meeting going to come from?
Guest:Uh, what am I going to do?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, uh, and, and also on top of that huge fan of Sarah's like for, for a long time, like really admired her, uh, her voice and her, her, her craftsmanship.
Guest:Like she's a very meticulous standup.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Um, and I, I, I really felt like if I don't write the show, uh,
Guest:It doesn't matter if the one that they do without me is good or bad, I'll kill myself.
Guest:Because if it's better, blah, blah, blah.
Guest:I don't have to expound on that because you know exactly what I mean.
Guest:But we did the pilot and the pilot was great.
Guest:Then trying to do a show together, like me as head writer and her for the first time finally getting her props and having a... I kept thinking to myself, oh, I get it.
Guest:I'm Larry David and she's Jerry Seinfeld, so let's do this.
Guest:And I think that she was thinking, why is this...
Guest:asshole that I pulled out of a gutter and gave this opportunity.
Guest:Why does he think he's Larry David?
Guest:Which I look back at and I go like, oh my God.
Guest:This perspective comes over and I go, Jesus Christ, no wonder.
Guest:It must have been so grating for her.
Marc:Were you able to validate that or is that something you're making up?
Guest:That she thought that?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:No, I never asked her, hey, you thought I was an asshole, right?
Guest:What kind of answer are you going to get?
Guest:I mean, we're cool with each other, and we've never said anything bad about each other creatively.
Guest:She hit the nail on the head when we parted ways, and she said, I need to be the only crazy person in the room, which I think is the perfect way to say it.
Marc:Oh, that makes sense.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, what is this?
Marc:Before I go, let's talk about Channel 101 and what it serves and what it does and where it came from.
Guest:Yeah, Channel 101, I'm glad you brought that up because I was loathe in not bringing it up when we were talking about...
Guest:community and it's sort of the modularity thing, the idea that it needs to be appealing to anyone walking by, but also this really satisfying to people who are longtime viewers, because a lot of those muscles come from Channel 101.
Marc:What is Channel 101?
Guest:Channel 101 is a video film festival that Rob Schraub and I started in 2003.
Guest:it was back when there was no YouTube, there was just digital video festivals.
Guest:And people were starting to organize those into themes and things like, oh, hey, come to the Knitting Factory and show us your video about Valentine's Day and stuff like that.
Guest:We were doing that too.
Guest:It was all sort of a movement because there were these hand cams now with digital videotape.
Guest:And so this thing was happening sort of in the LA underground naturally.
Guest:Um, but we, we wanted to separate ourselves out and also didn't want to have to tell people they sucked, um, too, too bad to be in it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So Rob came up with the concept of what if we made the audience, uh, in charge, uh, of whether these people sucked or not.
Guest:In other words, what if, what if you, what if when you came to our show, if half of the stuff was shitty, uh, that was the point.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That it was like American Idol or something.
Guest:That it was your job to distinguish.
Guest:And I said, oh, God, that's great.
Guest:Now we don't have to be the assholes that chased us into the underground.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Who said no to us.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because who are we?
Guest:So we put the audience in charge, had them vote.
Guest:And we also patterned it after TV.
Guest:So when you submit to Channel 101, you're submitting a five-minute TV pilot.
Guest:Right.
Guest:which is different from cinema in an emotional context because the artist is beholden to the audience even if they're not voting.
Guest:In TV, you have to admit to yourself when you get out of bed in the morning that the whole reason you're doing this is because you want everybody to be happy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You can make a movie about a tea kettle whistling while you cut your dick with a razor, and you can bring it to Sundance, and if everyone boos, you can say that's the point.
Guest:And you could be right, and you could win an Oscar.
Marc:And that would be the only Oscar that Dino would win.
Guest:Yeah, I shouldn't have given away his big idea for the movie.
Guest:But yeah, in TV, it's like it's advertiser driven.
Guest:It's audience driven.
Guest:It's numbers driven.
Guest:And so there's good, healthy things that come out of that getting over yourself.
Guest:And so we I think that's the reason it really took off, because it was appealing to this sort of very specific, very resourceful, no bullshit sort of the equivalent of a of a
Guest:The equivalent filmmaker to like the kind of the guys that go join car clubs who really, really want to wrench on the engines and pride themselves on how these things run.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:We love to talk to each other about what they do and team up and stuff.
Marc:But figure out ways to solve problems.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Narrative problems, gear problems, shooting problems.
Guest:Yeah, and relish the abuse of a potential crash or a defeat and want to get better, kind of drawn to that like a moth of the flames.
Guest:So the guys that do the SNL digital shorts, the Lonely Island guys, they were doing Channel 101 in the beginning.
Guest:The guys that ended up creating Blue Mountain State were doing it in the beginning days.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So it actually functions as a way for young filmmakers and TV writers and directors or anybody, actors, to try this shit out and get stuff out there and get a reaction to it.
Guest:Yeah, I think so, at the very least.
Guest:I mean, because for a while there...
Guest:It very much was just almost a crass kind of poaching ground.
Guest:There were people in suits stalking around in the background because that was the place where you were going to find maybe a client or something.
Guest:And I wouldn't encourage that as an incentive because if you're coming for that, then there's a good chance you suck.
Guest:But I do think that that's an awesome benefit.
Guest:But more importantly, until that happens, what a great place to get your shit together.
Marc:And how do they get there?
Marc:Is it still up and running?
Guest:It's at the Downtown Independent on the last Saturday of every month.
Guest:How do you submit?
Guest:If you go to the website, if you go to channel101.com, there's an address you can send a tape to.
Guest:We don't have an online submission system yet.
Marc:How do you have time to fucking deal with that?
Guest:I don't.
Guest:We've long since sort of like, Rob and I show up for every show and we introduce it and I write a check to keep the web server running and we do an award show every year and I sort of, it's my Ronald McDonald house for wayward.
Marc:Buildmakers and TV writers.
Marc:Now how did this impact modularity in your thinking?
Guest:Because the audience is never a guarantee at those things.
Guest:The only people that excel at those things are the people that strike a balance between entertaining everyone who's new that night and everyone who voted for your show last month.
Guest:So you do have both people there.
Guest:Because the whole point is, you get renewed on a month-to-month basis.
Guest:So there's no six-episode order.
Guest:You can't just rest on your laurels and say, whoa.
Marc:Oh, so it's actually, okay, I get it.
Marc:So it's episodic.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So you want people to get in there and keep winning.
Guest:Yeah, the day you're off your game, you're canceled, period.
Guest:I mean, if it worked that way in TV... Oh, that's great.
Marc:So there isn't a competition element to it, too.
Marc:Well, that's awesome, man.
Marc:And that had influence on you creatively directly because you saw how much energy was going into these five-minute pieces and whether or not they could string a narrative through and they would also stand on their own as well.
Guest:Yeah, and another thing that we all adapted to doing in order to strike that balance is genre and medium became...
Guest:a variable you know how like everybody was wondering before Einstein whether or not there was some ether that light traveled through and stuff and he was the first guy to say well what if time and space were variables and people said oh that's crazy look at your hair but what if genre was variable in television and not just in a I mean I guess the answer is moonlighting yeah
Guest:But there's sometimes, I mean, Channel 101, we sort of, it became the common thing to do, to have your, I mean, my first show was called Computer Man.
Guest:It was Jack Black was my computer.
Guest:I spilled blood on my keyboard, and it became Jack Black with a monitor on his head.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and in his underwear.
Guest:And it was like this sort of buddy show about me with my living computer.
Guest:And three episodes in, it was getting stale.
Guest:So I remember the fourth episode, they got launched into space and it became like the sci-fi show.
Guest:They were on space.
Guest:And that became a commonplace thing in the latter days.
Guest:Like 2005, 2006, somebody would launch a show
Guest:I remember these guys, Ryan Ridley and Abed Gaith did a show called Phone Sexers.
Guest:It was about two guys that do a phone sex line.
Guest:Every episode was kind of like that.
Guest:They did a Phone Sexers episode that was like Die Hard.
Guest:They did a Phone Sexers episode that was like Hellraiser.
Guest:And that was like...
Guest:peak form though that was going on before that and since that but I just I remember that sticking out and going like isn't it great that those characters that that that's the only thing that's consistent and the sort of premise but the camera can can just decide that this week it's a thriller right okay I get it so that though so that actually had a profound effect on your sensibility yeah I think we all toned those muscles simultaneously
Marc:Well, right on.
Marc:Dan, it was great talking to you.
Marc:You're a very fucking smart guy.
Guest:Well, I hope you'll understand, given the content of the interview, when I say that I don't think I did a very good job on your show.
Marc:Well, you know, I would first tell the committee in the head that it was great, and I'll tell you to your face that it was one of the most intellectually engaging episodes I've done.
Guest:Oh, well, fantastic.
Marc:All right, man.
Guest:So Conan was dumber?
Guest:Is that what you're saying?
Guest:I gotta go.
...
Marc:We're having a good time.
Marc:You can get anywhere from there.
Marc:You can get the premium episodes if you want.
Marc:You can get the apps.
Marc:You can also go to iTunes, WTF Premium.
Marc:We're uploading more of the classic episodes, the older episodes.
Marc:Slowly but surely, you can do that.
Marc:JustCoffee.coop, of course, always.
Marc:Where is mine?
Marc:I iced it.
Marc:Cold-brewed, iced, JustCoffee.coop.com.
Marc:Pow!
Marc:I just shit my pants.
Marc:But it's chilled.
Marc:It's chilled.
Marc:Again, Foxwoods Casinos.
Marc:That's this week.
Marc:June 2nd, 3rd, and 4th.
Marc:Denver Comedy Works.
Marc:June 16th through 19th.
Marc:Why can't I write so I can read my fucking writing?
Marc:Alright, I gotta go find some pictures of my mother.
Marc:I'll talk to you later.
you