Episode 242 - Russell Brand
Guest:Lock the gates!
Guest:Are we doing this?
Guest:Really?
Guest:Wait for it.
Guest:Are we doing this?
Guest:Wait for it.
Guest:Pow!
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:And it's also, eh, what the fuck?
Guest:What's wrong with me?
Guest:It's time for WTF!
Guest: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 fucknicks?
Marc:What the fuckstables?
Marc:What the fuckericans?
Marc:What the fuckamalans?
Marc:What the fucking... Oh, fuck.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Happy New Year.
Marc:I'm back.
Marc:I'm back in the garage.
Marc:For good, for reals.
Marc:I'm back from Florida.
Marc:This isn't the new year.
Marc:I am Marc Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:I know it's January 5th.
Marc:I know I put a show up on January 1st, but I, to be honest with you, was elsewhere.
Marc:Some of you who follow Twitter know I was elsewhere.
Marc:I was in Florida.
Marc:I was at my mother's.
Marc:I've got no resolutions for you other than to keep on not fucking up if possible.
Marc:That's the big resolution for me.
Marc:And I guess this is old news since it's already January 5th.
Marc:You don't want to hear me reflecting on the New Year's because I should have done that a few days ago.
Marc:But I'm back.
Marc:Look, first, Russell Brand is on the show today.
Marc:I talked to Russell Brand on December 13th.
Marc:So that's a couple weeks ago before all the events of his current existence went down with his wife and the divorce and this situation.
Marc:This causing some some press and whatnot.
Marc:But Russell and I had a very candid conversation about a lot of things.
Marc:I think you'll be able to appreciate him outside of of whatever is happening in the tabloids and the press.
Marc:And I had never talked to him before and I was fairly new to his comedy.
Marc:And I have to say it's a lovely conversation.
Marc:As a lot of you know, I will be at Wise Guys in Salt Lake City, Utah, January 13th and 14th.
Marc:I will be at the Laughing Skull Lounge.
Marc:I want to make sure that this gets out there because I don't know that I've announced it enough.
Marc:The Laughing Skull Lounge in Atlanta, Georgia, one of my favorite clubs, January 19th through 22nd, if you're down in that area.
Marc:Come on out and see me.
Marc:Boston at the Magnus Comedy Festival.
Marc:That will be January 27th for a live stand-up show followed by a live WTF
Marc:performers guys that i started out with but they were already big guys i these are guys i i open for uh we've got uh frank sanarelli who i worked with on short attention span theater kenny rogers and tony v mike donovan jimmy tingle also if you're a political comedy fan and you're in the new hampshire area you're up there for the primaries i want to uh but sometimes i'll plug my buddies who you know jimmy tingle is going to be on the live wtf in boston on january 27th but he will be in concord new hampshire
Marc:at the Concord City Auditorium, January 8th.
Marc:That's Sunday, January 8th, doing Jimmy Tingle's American Dream, live on stage and on screen.
Marc:That's at 4 p.m., January 8th, at the Concord City Auditorium in Concord, New Hampshire.
Marc:Jimmy Tingle.
Marc:Go to jimmytingle.com to get information on that.
Marc:He's an everyman political comic and a wonderful guy to watch.
Marc:I recommend that.
Marc:Let's get to Florida because Florida is a unique place.
Marc:I was in Key West for three days just before the people really started to come in.
Marc:It's a freak show.
Marc:It's quaint.
Marc:It's a little played out, but it still is charming.
Marc:I would have been much better off if it was about 90% less populated.
Marc:It was kind of peculiar.
Marc:We stayed at a small hotel.
Marc:And there was a weird thing going on at the hotel.
Marc:It was about maybe a 10-room hotel.
Marc:It was an old-style hotel that had been renovated.
Marc:But there was like one dude there.
Marc:There was a dude that was there by himself, just a heavyset guy with a weird haircut.
Marc:Almost looked like he had his head shaved except for a ponytail, large beard.
Marc:He kind of drooped around in shorts a bit.
Marc:And he was making me uncomfortable.
Marc:I don't know what was going on with him, but it was one of those situations where Jessica and I were walking back to the hotel and we walked down this corridor of rooms and he just had his window open and he was just sort of lounging on his bed, looked like he was waiting for something.
Marc:But you ever focus in on somebody in a situation where you're at a hotel or you're at some place where you have to stay for a few days and there's one person in the entire landscape of where you're at that is making you uncomfortable and yet you have no idea?
Marc:who it is or why or who he is.
Marc:He's just always there, sort of sitting there by the pool, by himself.
Marc:You build a life around this guy.
Marc:For all I know, he could have been a millionaire, but I doubt it, making me very uncomfortable.
Marc:But that's neither here nor there.
Marc:Key West was fine, ate a lot of good food.
Marc:But I'll tell you, I went to the Hemingway house and I'll be honest with you.
Marc:I know some of you think I'm a very well read guy.
Marc:I'm very I'm a specifically read guy.
Marc:I read things that, you know, that I've liked over the years, but I never really plowed through Ernest Hemingway.
Marc:I've read some short stories.
Marc:I know he's a genius.
Marc:I know he sort of defined a certain simple but heroic masculine literature.
Marc:I know that he fished for big fish and he fought big fights and he killed big animals and he was in a big war and he had manic depression and he blew his head off and he was in and then he was out in terms of the
Marc:how much of a genius he was.
Marc:I read a couple of short stories.
Marc:I know William Burroughs liked him.
Marc:I liked William Burroughs, but I never dug into the Hemingway pile.
Marc:I'd sort of dismissed him because he seemed like the kind of guy that, you know, I'm not a Hemingway guy.
Marc:Yeah, I'm not.
Marc:I'm never going to be that guy.
Marc:And I know that's ridiculous to compare myself to him.
Marc:I'm not talking about in style.
Marc:I'm talking about in he's a man's man.
Marc:He kills animals.
Marc:He eats meat.
Marc:He goes to war.
Marc:You know, he fishes for the big fish.
Marc:I went to his house in Key West, Florida.
Marc:And when he lived in Key West, he did most of his big books.
Marc:Of course, if I had done my research, I would tell you exactly what books those are, but I'm not that kind of guy.
Marc:He did a lot of big work there, all right?
Marc:He did big work at the house in Key West, and you can go tour this house.
Marc:Now, I had no idea what I was expecting.
Marc:It was a beautiful house.
Marc:Apparently, his wife or one of his wives at the time did not like ceiling fans and put in a lot of fancy chandeliers.
Marc:It's definitely a high-end house.
Marc:Some of the original furniture is there.
Marc:But what I did not realize is that Ernest Hemingway
Marc:At the house right now, there are 44 cats living on the premises, all being taken care of.
Marc:About half of those cats have six toes.
Marc:Is that called polydactyl?
Marc:Six-toed cats everywhere on the Hemingway Estate, the Hemingway Museum.
Marc:And the reason they're there is because Hemingway's cats, one of his original cats, had six toes.
Marc:And these are all descendants of the original Hemingway cats.
Marc:What's the point I'm trying to make here?
Marc:I thought that I had nothing in common with Ernest Hemingway.
Marc:I thought that him and I were different, fundamentally different people, which we are different eras, different ages.
Marc:Obviously, he's a genius and I'm just me.
Marc:He's Ernest Hemingway for fuck's sake.
Marc:But did you know he was a cat guy?
Marc:I did not know that.
Marc:Did you know that Ernest Hemingway has his own cat ranch or had his own cat ranch and actually had a special watering sink fountain on his property to take care of his cats on his cat ranch?
Marc:I did not know that.
Marc:So I go up to his studio, his writing room, which I swear to you is built over a garage.
Marc:Maybe that's just my memory of it.
Marc:I know it was just last week, but I know it was out back.
Marc:It was out back.
Marc:You had to walk up a flight of stairs.
Marc:You could only go into it at a time.
Marc:So in my mind, Ernest Hemingway's studio was in his garage behind his house.
Marc:Okay?
Marc:I'm not saying anything about me.
Marc:I'm just saying these are things I didn't know about Ernest Hemingway.
Marc:So you go up there, and you can only two people at a time, and you look into the room.
Marc:They left it all set up.
Marc:You know, Smith Corona's there, his typewriter.
Marc:Everything is set up just as it was when he was writing.
Okay?
Marc:Obviously, there's no Wi-Fi.
Marc:That's the difference between him and I. I have Wi-Fi.
Marc:He did not.
Marc:I have a computer.
Marc:He did not.
Marc:He worked with a typewriter.
Marc:That amazes me.
Marc:How the fuck did people work with typewriters?
Marc:Could you imagine writing anything without the ability to cut and paste or to cut in general or to move things around in chunks?
Marc:How did these guys, how did their brains work?
Marc:It's phenomenal.
Marc:It's phenomenal to not edit to literally you had to keep writing on a piece of typing paper and you couldn't stop writing and you had to be very thoughtful about what you wrote.
Marc:Obviously, there were drafts, but unless you wanted to get it all messy with liquid paper, that was it.
Marc:Or do a bunch of X's through a bunch of chunks.
Marc:You had to have a stream of thought focused.
Marc:There's no going over it and cutting and pasting and removing words and spell check and all that shit.
Marc:You had to be you had to use your own inner computer getting off topic here.
Marc:Stood there looking into the study that Ernest Hemingway wrote his greatest novels in Key West, Florida.
Marc:At his cat ranch.
Marc:Out in back of his house.
Marc:Above what I believe was a garage.
Marc:In my memory of last week.
Marc:Standing there looking into this room.
Marc:And do you know what I was overcome with?
Marc:Can I tell you what I was overwhelmed with?
Marc:Standing there alone looking in.
Marc:to the room that Ernest Hemingway wrote in, looking at the chair and the table and the typewriter that Ernest Hemingway wrote on and within and sitting on.
Marc:Do you know what I was overwhelmed with in that moment?
Marc:I'll tell you what.
Marc:The smell of cat pee
Marc:Ernest Hemingway's entire writing room smelled like cat pee.
Marc:And I was moved.
Marc:I felt connected in a way that I don't think a lot of people felt connected.
Marc:I am now going to read Ernest Hemingway because we share cat pee.
Marc:That's what brought me to it.
Marc:I'm finally going to read Ernest Hemingway because I know that we have this common bond with
Marc:of having a cat ranch, of living among cat pee, and accepting that.
Marc:My work will transcend.
Marc:I will read him and be enriched knowing this.
Marc:All right, moving on.
Marc:I get a text from the woman who's watching my house.
Marc:I'm down in Florida.
Marc:All it says is something's wrong.
Marc:Look, if you're going to communicate a problem, I didn't yell at her.
Marc:I wasn't upset about it.
Marc:I just called her, but just...
Marc:Say what's going on.
Marc:The possibilities of getting a text like that from somebody who's watching your house.
Marc:Something's wrong.
Marc:And like in that moment, I'm like, is there a cat issue?
Marc:Is there a cat sick?
Marc:Is there a cat dead?
Marc:Is the house burning down?
Marc:Did the sewage back up?
Marc:Is my entire house filled with poop water?
Marc:Did the defense fall over?
Marc:Was there an earthquake?
Marc:Did someone did a giant step on my car?
Marc:Is something dead?
Marc:She said someone broke the windshield.
Marc:New Year's Day, she came back to the house and the rear windshield was broken.
Marc:She took pictures of it.
Marc:It was shattered.
Marc:There was a hole in it and it had done that like that cracked thing.
Marc:So immediately I'm like, who did that?
Marc:Someone clearly shot out my windshield.
Marc:This is a message.
Marc:So I go check my emails.
Marc:I check any indication that perhaps someone is after me.
Marc:Someone shot my windshield.
Marc:That was a fucking bullet.
Marc:Now I'm paranoid.
Marc:Now I'm scared.
Marc:I try not to get her scared.
Marc:I don't text her back saying, no, something's really wrong now.
Marc:So I call my insurance.
Marc:They send a guy over.
Marc:And this is all before I came in.
Marc:Apparently, it was a bullet.
Marc:It was a bullet.
Marc:A bullet went through my rear windshield New Year's Eve.
Marc:But here's the catch.
Marc:It was a bullet.
Marc:that some partying Mexicans had shot into the air.
Marc:That happens in my neighborhood.
Marc:Mexicans enjoy shooting guns.
Marc:I'm not saying this in a general way, and I'm not saying all Mexicans, but there are Mexicans in my neighborhood that when there is a call for fireworks, there will be guns shot into the air.
Marc:So a bullet went up into the air and then came plummeting down and hit my windshield.
Marc:I don't know where it was shot from.
Marc:It was not shot at my car.
Marc:It was shot...
Marc:at god it was shot into the air and just by coincidence fell down came came hurling down can something that small hurl shattered my back windshield what are the odds i have to go dig the bullet out it went through the windshield and into the back dashboard thing i really want that bullet it's not as interesting as someone actually shooting the car is it it's really just bad luck or good luck it could have gone through someone's skull or on my roof
Marc:But then the guy said that there's probably other holes other places because they probably shot a few because you really got to... So now I got to wonder if my roof is riddled with holes.
Marc:I guess I'll know when water starts leaking into the house.
Marc:God damn it, I digressed.
Marc:Happy New Year.
Marc:Let's talk to Russell Brand.
Marc:Bill I knew in New York.
Marc:He lived in New York briefly.
Marc:And...
Marc:He was very aggravated with New York.
Marc:It was like a strange window of time.
Marc:It was probably 1989 or 90.
Marc:It was long before he got sick.
Marc:And he was... I remember, you know, hanging out a bit.
Marc:We hung out and played guitar a bit and talked a bit.
Marc:But the great Bill Hicks story that I have is just... There used to be a show...
Marc:where uh it was at the village gate before it closed which was a classic new york performance space from back in the day and the the show was it was a host uh two comics and an improv group and the comics did the same amount of time you know it was a showcase 15 minutes each and the comics were me and bill
Marc:And I get there, and Bill's supposed to go first, and I'm like, fuck, even if you suck, it's going to be horrendous.
Marc:It's going to be impossible to follow whatever you do to this room.
Marc:I don't think I said that, but I said, is there any way we could switch?
Guest:He was regarded as great at this point.
Marc:No, I don't think so.
Marc:I think it was pre...
Marc:whatever happened with him in in the uk it was not you know he was he was still you know banging his head against the wall here as he always did so it was not uh he was definitely regarded as great by comics uh and i don't know what he was thinking he was expecting out of new york new york didn't really connect with him uh because new yorkers i don't know it's not a political thing or anything else it's just if you get up there and you're already angry their initial reaction is like what's he so mad about
Marc:They don't, they're not listening.
Marc:They're just like, I thought we were mad.
Marc:Why is he mad?
Marc:But I remember I said, can we switch?
Marc:He goes, no, I got to meet a guy.
Marc:I got to play chess.
Marc:I don't know, something ridiculous.
Marc:So he goes on stage and I go to the bathroom and I swear to God, I come out of the bathroom and it must've been four minutes that he'd been on stage in front of 400 people.
Marc:And when I come out,
Marc:He's crouching, you know, as he did, and he's yelling at a woman in the front row.
Marc:I walk into him saying, I'm a fucking poet.
Marc:I'm a fucking poet.
Marc:And he stands up and you just hear this woman go, well, then tell us a poem.
Marc:and then he says aren't you glad you didn't go first maren that was uh but he was a sweet guy you know he you know he's an intense guy i ran into him in san francisco too did you ever meet him no no did you ever go see him i was i was 18 when he died oh really yeah like so like uh yeah so had you started doing stand-up yet no what were you doing at 18
Guest:smoking pot and waiting to see bill hicks like still um still i left home when i was 16. yeah lost my way came back home like for like intermittently would stay at my grandmother's or my mother's yeah they put on like i think that i think the performance that
Guest:was transitional for the perception of Bill Hicks, now in retrospect, although I wouldn't have known this at the time, was his Revelations performance at the Dominion Theatre London, which was accompanied... That's right, where he came out to fire and he was wearing the hat?
Guest:Yes, yes.
Guest:Yeah, like the lone, the dark silhouetted figure.
Marc:Sure, if you're in advertising, kill yourself, that one?
Guest:Yes, precisely.
Guest:And accompanied by It's Just Arrive documentary, which Channel 4 commissioned in May.
Guest:um that was like that was i saw that and it was but it was shown posthumously as a tribute to him so it's like i learned of his life after his death yeah yeah and i just oh my god you know so he was already because he was already presented with the angelic glow of this man has passed and behold yeah yeah and yeah like it was
Guest:yeah the martyr the the myth and bill hicks so when better to get him because that's a whole different perspective because i would never have like i was at that age when i'm highly susceptible to mythologized martyred figures yes and like that so yeah hit me yeah original because like well you feel like you're getting you're getting jimmy dean second hand sure you know you're kendrick's yeah jim morrison all of those that they've all they're prescribed to
Guest:yeah here you go here we're heroes here's your are you a rebel here's your list oh thank god right now i know how to rebel correctly yeah exactly i was rebelling in a way that was very unstructured prior to this now you need to structure your rebellion this is a sort of a template then yeah yeah if you want to do the art rebellion you've got to have these heroes if you just want to kill yourself then don't bother with this list yeah this is just go straight to the suicide yeah exactly
Guest:Here's an avant-garde Gigi Allen Guy DeBoer.
Guest:Proper subculture.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:I don't know if I want to shit on stage, but I like playing with words.
Guest:I'll do that.
Guest:I have trouble defecating anyway due to some substance issues that I've picked up.
Guest:I don't know if I'm going to be able to do that on command.
Marc:I can't do the Gigi Allen unless I change my diet and stop shooting dope.
Marc:I get it.
Guest:It's going to be difficult.
Guest:I don't know how he did it, as a matter of fact, because his heroin problem wasn't light, was it?
Marc:But also the myth of Gigi Allen is significantly smaller than any of the other people we mentioned.
Guest:That's true.
Guest:I mean, it is a myth primarily based on, he did the shit on stage.
Guest:That's pretty cool.
Marc:Yeah, it's okay.
Marc:I don't know if you want to repeat that, actor, how many people you're going to draw in the big picture.
Guest:It's almost like it was a self-fulfilling revolution.
Guest:It's not like, and this inspired many other people to themselves shit on stage.
Marc:I wonder how many people really cite Gigi Allen as a reference.
Marc:I don't hear that much.
Marc:I hear J.G.
Marc:Ballard, but not J.G.
Marc:Allen, no.
Guest:Of the initial geniuses, we focus on J.G.
Guest:rather than J.G.
Marc:Yeah, I would say that's better.
Guest:He's becoming repetitive even with his own initials, let alone with his act when he shits over everything at night.
Marc:Well, I remember he was alive when I was in New York and I didn't go see him.
Marc:When I heard what he did, I'm like, I get it.
Marc:Is it something I really need to put myself through?
Guest:What does this guy do?
Guest:Oh, like he does a shit on stage and cuts himself a bit.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Okay, yeah, now I've got it.
Guest:I got it, yeah.
Marc:I can go.
Marc:I don't need it.
Guest:I think I'd like to smell that shit and potentially get a bit of it near my drink that I'm having.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Do they sell it after the show?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Little pieces.
Marc:So now I went to the show the other night and I'm familiar with your movie work.
Marc:And I'm sober myself for about 12 years.
Marc:I'm nine today.
Marc:Holy shit.
Marc:Congratulations.
Marc:Today.
Marc:Congratulations.
Marc:Thanks, mate.
Marc:How's it feel?
Guest:Like really mad.
Guest:Actual birthdays, I don't like much.
Guest:Oh my God, death, it looms.
Guest:The icy hand.
Guest:But like sober birthdays, I feel like it's cause for a rather more optimistic reflection.
Marc:It's pretty amazing.
Guest:Yeah, because you sort of, like, your own birthday, like, your mum will go, well, I remember then I went to the hospital.
Guest:But with this, I go, fuck me.
Guest:So that was, I got the train to go to Bury St Edmunds.
Guest:I arrived there the night before.
Guest:I'd, like, smoked my last rocks, done my last little bit of gear, gone around a few friends' houses sentimentally, saying goodbye to themselves aggrandizingly, went home, fell asleep on the couch in front of the telly, woke up, and it was too late to get to the treatment centre, and I had to make phone calls and sort my life out again, you know.
Marc:You had to start over again.
Marc:I got one more day.
Guest:Yeah, all right.
Guest:I only need the money now.
Guest:Oh, shit.
Guest:Why did I make this pact?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, yeah.
Guest:So, you're 12, huh?
Marc:Yeah, 12.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, you know, I heard you talking about meditation on stage the other night because I don't...
Marc:You know, I play a little guitar and I'm still like hopelessly strung out on nicotine lozenges.
Marc:And, you know, I've got my own.
Marc:It seems that you've run the big buffet of whole filling activities.
Marc:And you do you have a recovery and sex addiction, too?
Guest:I feel that your recovery with a 12-step program will apply to any addiction if you use it correctly.
Guest:So that's how I've been working it sort of around anything, like food or codependency or anything.
Guest:I sort of like, you know, sort of...
Guest:Really, for someone who was clearly out to become a prescriptive rebel, in my recovery, it's an area where I really am like a little swat, like a little square.
Guest:This is what you're supposed to do.
Guest:Because I suppose...
Guest:After like a few years, I've really tried doing different things, you know, like the easier, softer way.
Guest:Right.
Guest:How better exemplified than by sort of like just trying to fall into women.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, like the thing, the disillusionment that for me that came, Mark, with addiction is like, it's not like it's the fact that it stops working.
Guest:It's like, oh, right, it doesn't work.
Guest:It's not going to even work anymore.
Marc:I know, but if you give it a couple of weeks.
Guest:Just try.
Guest:If I just push through this, I'm just going to try one more dose.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So now I sort of like what I've learned is that 12 step things, you know, particularly like, you know, spiritual and altruistic elements in the 11 and 12.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So work for me.
Guest:Meditation really works for me.
Guest:And like, hard as it is and chore that it seems, when I do things that help others, and it's like the most begrudging and sometimes shallow altruism you'll encounter, someone self-centeredly helping others, like, you know, it sort of works for me.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:Well, yeah, because I think what's weird for me is that the idea of service or the idea of getting out of yourself to help other people.
Marc:A lot of times, because I saw you talk about it on stage a little bit, it's not as self-serving as you think in the sense that if you're just making coffee or sweeping a floor, I mean, even if it's in a meeting situation, you do want a little credit.
Marc:You know, I did the floor.
Marc:How do you like that chair set up?
Marc:You know, but it's still it's very small.
Marc:But my curiosity, just from my own experience, because I've been experiencing this way lately, is that, you know, I my selfishness and my self-centeredness did not enable me to appreciate almost anything that anyone else would do because I resented them.
Marc:Did you, were you ever that, like, what is your specific background?
Marc:What is your particular form of emotional starvation?
Marc:Have you put that together?
Guest:I think that I am so endlessly infatuated with my own impression of things that it's made me lack compassion and empathy, which is sort of counterintuitive to my nature.
Guest:Because I think...
Guest:Like, one of my mates said that I'm a sort of like almost a mythical composition of my parents.
Guest:He said almost like a minotaur or something.
Guest:Because my mum is like this ridiculously gentle, compassionate, oh, hello, sweet.
Guest:sweet and loving and giving and my father was sort of absent he's like a lovely bloke and he's you know he's not someone I want a bad mouth but he wasn't really around and he's kind of intense so I sort of feel like I've got like sort of in me like this incredible self-centeredness and pursuit acquisitional I just want things I want credibility credit love sex anything give it give it but like sort of sort of
Guest:Sometimes inconveniently balanced with, ah, people, beautiful people struggling to get through.
Marc:Isn't it amazing how quickly that can change?
Marc:There's that empathy thing that can really happen.
Marc:And then there's your need thing that can really happen.
Marc:But then there's also that other thing where you're like, oh, fuck all of them.
Guest:Yeah, sort of a nihilistic hatred.
Guest:That can happen in five minutes, all three of those.
Guest:What about the Hemingway quote of his father?
Guest:He said, my father was a very sentimental man.
Guest:And like all sentimental people, he was also very cruel.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I sort of toyed with that idea.
Guest:And I sort of thought it's like, you know, if you're looking at a little cat, oh, oh, you're so beautiful.
Guest:You're so perfect.
Guest:You fucking cunt.
Guest:I'll kill you.
Guest:Because you're so aware of the sweetness of life, of the beauty, that you can sort of like just one psychopathic chromosomic twitch.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it can turn you into evil.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And also, but that's the way kind of the universe works.
Marc:I mean, it's our responsibility to try to behave properly, I guess, in the face of things.
Marc:I mean, some things wouldn't even think twice to snap a cat's neck.
Guest:No.
Marc:It's lunch.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There's a time when that would just be normalized.
Guest:Agricultural.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You're getting rid of a nuisance.
Marc:I know some people that look at cats the same way they look at rats or rodents.
Marc:And I don't like those people.
Marc:I have a lot of cats.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I like them.
Marc:But, you know, they are just animals.
Marc:So when you grew up.
Marc:um what what was what was the situation because it seems like you struggle with just about everything that somebody who's trying to uh to get a handle on shit i mean if you you if you have experience with with food eating sex drugs and alcohol i mean that's it gambler are you actually no oh good me neither that's interesting that was the one that i think it's because there's no object
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And it seems crazy to lose money, doesn't it?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Without any real payoff.
Marc:Maybe a payoff.
Guest:I think apparently from what I understand with gambling addicts is they like the moment of... Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:They're into that.
Marc:Everything's on the line.
Marc:It's gone just because a guy didn't catch a ball.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's too out of control for me.
Guest:And abstract.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:For me, it's very difficult to ritualize as well.
Guest:I like the addiction and the ritual that comes with it and the certainty as well.
Guest:I've got that.
Guest:Now I'm going to close the door.
Guest:Good night.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:This, I'm going to put this in here or put that in there and I'm going to feel better.
Guest:Yeah, there we go.
Guest:Thank you very much.
Marc:So when you were growing up, what was the situation?
Marc:Because I always try to track this in my own self.
Marc:Like I've got a pretty good chart over, you know, what, what, you know, why I am like I am.
Marc:But if there are some, some signposts in your background, I mean, did you grow up with both parents in the house?
Guest:No, just like my, it's pretty bloody obvious actually mine.
Guest:It's like, it's like I grew up with just my mom till I was seven and my mom got sick a lot.
Guest:She had cancer three times while I was growing up.
Guest:During those times I had to go and stay with other people and that didn't work out well.
Guest:It was sort of like varying degrees of neglect and abuse, not severe.
Guest:You know, particularly if you've spent time around people when you hear their life stories and you go,
Guest:Oh, the horror!
Guest:Dickensian stuff.
Guest:But pretty kind of not good.
Guest:My dad was in and out of my life and glamorous and interesting.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:What did he do?
Guest:Every time we'd see him, he had a different business and a different woman.
Marc:Oh, that guy?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But then they'd be living back at my grandmother's house again.
Guest:Fuck!
Guest:angry about it all yeah but still had this allure and was good at sport when he was younger and charismatic and yeah yeah yeah and in fact uh milos foreman who was when he was originally going to cast burt reynolds in the role of rp mcmurphy said that the attribute that in cuckoo's nest said that the attribute that reynolds had that he thought made him great for the part of rp mcmurphy was cheap charisma oh interesting yeah and my dad had that
Marc:He had the cheap charisma?
Guest:Cheap charisma.
Guest:Just sort of like something about him.
Guest:It's kind of cool.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But it's not got class.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But like when I look at my father now, my father is a bipolar kind of all about himself kind of guy.
Marc:And very intense and prone to rage as well.
Marc:I mean, did you ever see through the facade?
Marc:What did you see in there?
Marc:When you really sort of break your father down as an intelligent person whose father was absent emotionally and maybe physically, I mean, how do you kind of package him?
Guest:Well, now I think once you've passed through, once you've spent a bit of time in recovery, it's difficult not to think, ah, right, this is a person that probably could have benefited from a program of some kind.
Marc:Oh, so you've taken the empathetic way.
Marc:That's good.
Marc:You don't see him like…
Marc:Deep down, he's just a needy monster who needs to rage to feel like he's alive.
Guest:He must be destroyed.
Guest:Like all monsters, we must go to the heart of the maze.
Guest:We must kill him.
Guest:I'll return with my father's head drinking the blood.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:I think that all father-son relationships are on some level a battle to the death.
Marc:Which mostly we're going to win.
Marc:I hope so.
Marc:Yeah, if biology serves itself properly, we will win.
Guest:But you left me with those genes.
Guest:Damn you.
Guest:He had one final laugh.
Ah!
Ah!
Marc:A coronary from beyond the grave, son.
Marc:There's your gift.
Marc:Your legacy.
Marc:My legacy there.
Guest:Clogging an artery.
Guest:You left a legacy in my artery.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:What's this food thing?
Marc:You've got a food thing?
Guest:I think anything I could put somewhere.
Guest:That's sort of under control now.
Guest:But I just think that's why I'm grateful to have a way of living my life that's...
Guest:routine ritual in a way because if i like yeah if i leave food alone i'll start to think yeah food is the answer if i leave sex alone yeah sex is the answer love is the answer there's always something calling your name there's always some yes i'm sort of like that what about the like actually unacknowledged poetry of the name of call of duty that game yeah which i've not played i don't either
Guest:No, well, apparently they shouldn't even, none of us should be allowed to because apparently they use it to desensitize troops to killing people.
Guest:That was the inception of that technology was fucking hell, troops don't like killing people when they're out in these wars.
Marc:Let's make it a game.
Guest:Make it fun for them and then they'll kill those people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it's called call of duty.
Guest:Duty is forever summonsing you.
Guest:I think perhaps that call could be found through food or sex or anything.
Guest:There's just some relentless command of biology.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, what about this meditation thing?
Marc:Because I've not got a handle on that.
Guest:How do you do it, Mark?
Guest:Because I think what it is, is it creates sort of a space in you within which...
Guest:look for temporarily for those like two 20 minute periods a day i'm you know imagine for you you're like forever firing synaptically you don't get much freedom from the old thinking but for me with the meditation what the process usually is is like you sort of you know you're given a mantra you sit down you breathe a little bit you sort of go into it with a little intention right i'm meditating we um i just want to be now i just want to be in this moment and and sort of and have some gratitude and grace about you stay in this start with the mantra and then your mind will go i'm worried about this thing fuck i want to do that thing shit i've
Guest:fucking anger will kick off or something, and then you go, oh yeah, just return to the mantra, just return to the mantra.
Guest:Normally for me, I think there's 10 minutes where I'm at war with my mind trying to impose some narrative, trying to compose some shopping list of requirements, but eventually it relents.
Guest:There's this sort of space opens up in your mind where you were neither thinking, you had no desire or fear, and you think, oh my God, I existed then, but not in relation to anything else.
Guest:So there is some part of me that is not my desire, that is not my fear, that is not my love.
Guest:Yeah, it can just sort of be.
Guest:I can just be on some level I can.
Guest:And that's my natural state.
Guest:And someone said to me recently that enlightenment is not attained.
Guest:Enlightenment is present.
Guest:How could it be otherwise?
Guest:What is enlightenment?
Guest:It's at the top of a hill somewhere.
Guest:Of course it isn't.
Guest:It's not a product or an object.
Guest:Enlightenment is present.
Guest:Remove the obstacles.
Guest:And enlightenment is all that remains.
Guest:Nirvana is relentless, is incessant, is already present.
Guest:And I sort of feel that through meditation.
Guest:That's why I think it's a worthy pursuit.
Guest:Because if that's not something that's empirical, then it's nothing.
Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And then there's also the manufactured enlightenment of all the other stuff, which is like drugs, alcohol, sex, that you want to create that same synaptic buzz.
Marc:But you're saying that you can just tap into it.
Marc:It's there.
Marc:Take a few deep breaths and quiet your mind.
Marc:It's all juiced.
Guest:Yeah, it's juiced anyway.
Guest:You're sitting in the middle of it.
Guest:You're sitting in the middle of bliss.
Guest:We're diverted because we live in an illusion.
Guest:We allow ourselves to live in a construct.
Guest:We've got no choice.
Guest:That's the context we've been given.
Guest:And of course, that's a massive distraction from enlightenment.
Guest:When you see that now, that flash of orgasm or the gouching out or nodding out on smack.
Guest:really what you're doing is it's like I'm increasingly thinking of the you know I've realized Radiohead is a good name for a band in that there are frequencies of consciousness and you can tune into whatever frequency of consciousness you choose but the frequencies are always present it's not like and the idea of the Jungian unconscious is these things are just there they're there tune into them you can tune into if you want anger and desire and craving and lust and selfishness if you want and I think we live in a culture that encourages those ideas capitalism has got to be fed
Guest:We must feed the beast.
Marc:Absolutely.
Guest:And it's getting hungrier and weaker somehow.
Marc:Everything falls apart if we don't feed that beast.
Marc:People might have to get to know each other and build some communities out of caring.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Marc:We can't have that.
Guest:We'd need a whole other template based on love.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:It's a horrible thing.
Marc:Yeah, it goes against everything this world has been hip and thighs to believe.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:If we break that spell, Mark, what on earth is going to happen?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:It might be peace and kindness and people will all get along and we can make our own shirts and barter.
Guest:We can't let that happen.
Guest:I don't want to live in a world of bad shirts swapping eggs for other things.
Marc:Oh, really?
Marc:Oh, yeah, I guess that's it.
Marc:That's what we're fighting against.
Marc:Well, I certainly it's weird when you mentioned the word bliss and, you know, even the simple idea of sitting down and being quiet for a while.
Marc:Part of me is like, oh, how can you not just cry?
Guest:Well, that's always the first impulse to cry and masturbate simultaneously to lubricate my own penis with tears.
Guest:But eventually you tire of that after three or four orgasms.
Marc:But when you first started meditating, was there that moment?
Marc:Because I would think that given what you come from and given the emotional needs, I mean, I find that like, I don't know if it's sobriety or if it's where I'm at right now, but for me to experience feelings like empathy and joy, it's unusual.
Marc:And it feels peculiar to me.
Marc:And my heart doesn't quite identify them properly.
Marc:Like when I actually have a moment where I feel good about somebody else or I'm proud of somebody else, I literally feel like I want to cry because it's not about me.
Guest:Like Elephant Man.
Guest:Maybe.
Guest:You're super sensitive, I think, Mark.
Guest:Like, you know, like in Elephant Man, because everyone's been so mean to him all the time.
Guest:As soon as someone's nice, it sort of fucks him up.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like, oh.
Guest:kind you're so attuned now to even your own malevolence which in a sense cynicism I've often thought that cynicism is in a way a protective device that people that are cynical perhaps have the capacity to be more optimistic than anybody well they're hypersensitive
Guest:I'm not going to even entertain that.
Guest:I couldn't put the air right.
Guest:Because behind that can only be, I love you.
Guest:I love you.
Guest:And that is, you know, as witnessed when you do have these moments of empathy, that it's like sort of a Gandhi empathy.
Marc:Do you have that feeling ever?
Guest:Yes, I do.
Guest:And I know what you mean about the thing with the tears, mate, is that, yeah, that is my first impact.
Guest:But there's something beyond that.
Guest:I'll stop and I'll go, oh, God, it's a bit sad, isn't it?
Guest:I can't do whatever I want.
Guest:Why can't I fuck everybody?
Guest:And then I'll go through that.
Guest:And it was a bit hard when I was a little kid.
Guest:And, oh, is it really going to matter if I'm famous and if I get whatever I want?
Guest:What does it all mean?
Guest:But then beyond that, layer after layer of coruscating self-examination reveals blissful nothingness.
Guest:And I don't think you can get there through the intellect or the rationale or the overemphasized force of logic that we allow to govern our culture.
Guest:You're right.
Marc:You can only emulate plants.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If you just try and pretend for a while that you're sort of a zucchini, you will cheer up.
Marc:Yeah, why not?
Marc:So now what about this struggle now that I sense?
Marc:I don't know if I can verify.
Marc:I like what you said at the beginning about the way I understood it was that you hold on to your perception itself.
Marc:despite the fact it may be wrong.
Marc:And I imagine that applies to people and everything else.
Marc:Maybe I misunderstood you, but you said one of your primary difficulties with self-centeredness is that you see the things the way you see them, and that may not be open for interpretation.
Guest:It's bloody difficult because, like, don't you sometimes think that you can't even tell?
Guest:Don't you?
Guest:I figure you would get this.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But sometimes, like, there's no, for me, sometimes I have a singular vision.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And people go, no, Russell, we can't do that.
Guest:It's insane.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I sort of go, no, this is because I am brilliant.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I uniquely and alone can see over the mountain.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm right.
Guest:I'm right.
Guest:And then I force everyone to listen and they come with me and it's okay.
Guest:But other times I say, no, we must do this.
Guest:And it's the exact same feeling for me.
Guest:And I'm completely wrong.
Guest:And it's like, you idiot, Russell, you've destroyed this.
Guest:All these people are hurt now.
Guest:And for me, I can't distinguish between those things.
Guest:So it's a useless intuition.
Guest:I have this useless perspicacity, this useless ability, this useless visions of an unlivable future because it's indistinguishable from my most horrible flaws.
Marc:Right.
Marc:They're both your survival mechanisms.
Marc:I mean, they're both, you know, they clearly make you comfortable that these things that you make up or these things that you put all your energy into, they serve a purpose.
Marc:It's a control thing, right?
Guest:They are kinds of strategies, ultimately, aren't they?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:even the most of painful and reluctantly held thoughts but i get that about people i think i know people i don't know you i never met you but i i've had a taste of your public persona you know i i've passed judgment on you in the past so you know even even for that you know in my mind i'm like he must be that way so i enter a conversation with people saying now you have to struggle against my interpretation of you i defy you to be what i don't think you are
Guest:Here is the object which I have you down as.
Guest:It is a broken hammer.
Guest:There was a moment of climax when this hammer was perfect.
Guest:Then it was, where's the other part?
Marc:Yeah, there is some pain there.
Marc:So yeah, absolutely.
Guest:And there's nothing like a, that is an obelisk of impotence.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Yes, it is.
Guest:I don't know how they hammered it.
Marc:Because I, you know, I need a hammer sometimes and there's one in the shed and then there's that thing that, you know, if I just, if it's a little job, I can use it.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:It's good if you're just tapping in something.
Marc:It's a sad hammer.
Marc:Yeah, you don't want to do any big work with that hammer.
Guest:No, don't go into war like Thor with a busted hammer.
Marc:No, well, I mean, isn't that all we all are?
Marc:I mean, that's why Thor had a good hammer.
Marc:We can only judge ourselves against the Thor of the myth.
Marc:We all have broken hammers.
Guest:He was the platonic ideal.
Guest:He's up there with his perfect hammer.
Guest:We've got to deal with this splintered bullshit.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:Cutting our hands when we're trying to just bang an attack.
Guest:We're all just broken hammers.
Guest:We're just broken hammers.
Guest:The nickname of the football team I support is the Hammers, as a matter of fact, and they are broken.
Marc:We should add broken to it because I think that would make them a scrappy bunch of underdogs.
Guest:The broken hammers.
Guest:Go on, boys.
Marc:Let's prove everybody wrong.
Marc:What about this struggle between you as Russell and you as onstage Russell?
Marc:That seems to be...
Guest:Aren't you increasingly finding that you prefer your performance persona to your actual self?
Guest:I'm starting to realize that I was sort of thinking, I want to work on my actual self and get actual me better.
Guest:I'm starting to think, fuck actual me.
Guest:That guy's a broken hammer.
Guest:Performance me, he's got a chance.
Guest:I might just stay on a stage and do interpretive dance, occasionally sleep, and commit to that guy.
Marc:Well, I mean, you've had this tremendous success because I saw you wrestling with this a little bit.
Marc:I mean, the whole...
Marc:conceit of the performance the other night was that uh you know you did a charity performance for a series of charities that would somehow uh cleanse your karma as in relation to your transgressions relative to what these charities sought to to uh to fix yeah uh one of them you know being a homeless shelter and i thought your points about animals and people who like animals were kind of uh
Marc:Kind of spot on, as I guess British people say, with the idea that it's a lot easier to care about animals than it is to deal with the complexities and surprises of broken people.
Guest:Yeah, we never know if the cat hates us.
Guest:We can only assume that it's being near to us is some sort of affection.
Marc:Yeah, no, you can only project that.
Marc:Cats, you know, within a couple of weeks, if you're gone, they'll do fine.
Guest:They'd be fine, weren't they?
Guest:That's why I never take my cat on holiday anymore.
Marc:Did you used to travel with your cat for no reason?
Guest:That's nuts.
Guest:That's not the question I expected or prepared for.
Guest:Yeah, because I love the cat, but the cat cares more about its environment than you, doesn't it?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:The cat would stay in the house.
Guest:Some people, when they move, they leave the cat, don't they?
Guest:They go, yeah, by the way, this is the cabinets, these are the drapes, and you can have that cat.
Marc:Yeah, you have to keep the cat here.
Marc:That's the only condition I'll sell you the house.
Marc:Cat stays with the house.
Guest:Meow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because the cat's not going, hey, hold on, I want to come with you guys.
Marc:That's why they'd rather be in the box than be out.
Marc:Like if you take them somewhere, they're like, oh, God, I don't have any idea.
Marc:New shapes.
Marc:Where's my path?
Marc:Smells funny in here.
Marc:That's all you're doing to a cat.
Marc:It's torture to travel.
Marc:You used to drag your cat along.
Guest:I thought that it might like it, but it didn't.
Guest:I've learned the same is true of hats, tiny waistcoats.
Guest:Nothing you put on a cat it likes.
Guest:It doesn't like holidays.
Guest:It doesn't like hats.
Guest:It doesn't like its mouth moved like it's talking to you.
Guest:It doesn't want to play a little piano.
Guest:It just wants you to give it its food.
Marc:And rub against you when it needs to.
Guest:Yeah, on those rare occasions.
Guest:Don't mistake that for love.
Guest:A human being is going to hit you with all sorts of diverse and confusing demands.
Marc:You have no control over it.
Guest:A cat's hatred looks the same as a cat's indifference and the same as a cat's love, if it feels anything that complex.
Marc:Yeah, if it's a good actor.
Marc:If that cat's a good cat, you're not going to be able to tell any of those things.
Guest:My cat commits, really.
Guest:My cat is in the moment.
Marc:But when I was watching, it seems to me, now I don't know if it's true, because I know that when you started doing stand-up, were you part of a crew?
Marc:Because I don't know a lot of UK guys.
Marc:I have interviewed Stuart Lee.
Marc:I have interviewed Simon Munnery.
Marc:I've interviewed Tim Keats.
Marc:I've been over there a couple of times.
Guest:They're three of the best stand-ups in the UK currently, I would say.
Marc:Well, Stuart is like a fairly profound dude.
Marc:And, you know, and he and I, it was like he actually, during our interview, there was something he talked about that, you know, really changed my perception of things around, you know, because he quit for a while.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it was because, you know, he couldn't deal with the audience's resistance.
Marc:and at some point when he returned he realized you know very rightfully so that he's not for everybody and as opposed to get angry at an audience member for not getting him he feels empathy in the sense of like well it's not this is what i do if you don't like it now it's not going to get any better for you and i'm sorry that this was not the show you expected that's you know in his mind as opposed to fuck you how could you not get me and i thought that was a good way to look at people like frank zapper uh quote of like yeah i'm tired of trying to impress everybody if you get it or you don't just
Marc:That's the best way to do it.
Marc:It's hard, though, when you're on stage because we have that part of us that's sort of like, but I'm part of all of you.
Marc:You've paid your money.
Guest:You're entitled to laugh.
Guest:Come on, just tell me what would make you laugh, and I'll say that.
Guest:I can say it differently.
Marc:I'll do it my way, but you'll get it.
Marc:It'll still be for you.
Marc:Yeah, but now you've become this – how did you start in stand-up?
Guest:I mean, did you come up through a – What happened was is actually I feel sort of –
Guest:What do I feel like?
Guest:Don't you think that most comedians must to some degree feel that they don't belong to any particular culture or group or movement?
Marc:Yeah, we're gypsies and we're selfish gypsies.
Marc:We live out of boxes and we take advantage of people.
Guest:We're slippery, unreliable gypsies.
Guest:Well, I feel the same way.
Guest:First of all, I did a thing when I did a school play at my regular comprehensive school.
Guest:Oh my God, being on this stage is amazing.
Guest:But even thinking then, it was Bugsie Malone.
Guest:I was playing Fat Sam.
Guest:Were you fat?
Guest:Yeah, I was a chubby kid.
Marc:Yeah, me too.
Marc:It's horrible, right?
Guest:Isn't it horrible?
Guest:Because your adolescence is blighted by that layer of blubber preventing you from expressing your semen.
Marc:Yeah, from feeling like you can even.
Guest:Yeah, I didn't feel like I could.
Guest:No, I didn't either.
Guest:Certainly not with anyone else there.
Marc:Well, it sounds like you got your payback.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:Yeah, I owe that 15-year-old kid.
Guest:I'm not letting him down.
Guest:You're getting this.
Guest:I'm doing this for you.
Guest:I've been toiling for him.
Guest:He's like a plantation owner.
Guest:Yeah, that's right.
Guest:I'm toiling endlessly for that 15-year-old boy.
Marc:Yeah, and at some point, you've just got to say, we're done.
Marc:Listen.
Marc:I've made up for whatever happened.
Guest:I'm sorry about that.
Guest:You've got to let this go.
Guest:I'm tired.
Guest:I'm in my mid-30s now.
Guest:I'm married.
Guest:I'm exhausted.
Guest:This isn't working for I, Rafael, so you're not even real anymore.
Marc:Get out.
Marc:You're on your own.
Marc:Go lose some weight.
Yeah.
Guest:yeah couldn't it be just that have you ever considered that it might not be about sex yeah you shouldn't have been so fat yeah yeah oh yeah your mummy's boy now get out yeah you need a little spell in the army is what you need that's what you do enlist that kid get them out of your life yeah straighten them up yeah that's great yeah enlisting your fat inner child my fat inner child's gonna bug his idea he don't need love yeah he needs discipline
Guest:Yeah, God, imagine that I become sort of authoritative and conservative, not only to my own children, but to my own inner child.
Marc:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Marc:You've got to shape those guys.
Marc:Those are the ones that are dragging you through your shit.
Marc:Those expectations, those unmet needs that our parents gypped us out of.
Marc:They've wired our brains into adulthood.
Guest:Could you go out and sleep with some more women, please?
Guest:No!
Marc:Grow up!
Marc:God damn it, I'm tired.
Guest:So you started in... Did a school play, which is a normal thing, but it hit me like an epiphany.
Guest:It was an epiphany, I suppose, if it feels that similar to me.
Marc:Being in front of a crowd?
Guest:Religiously, like, oh my God, that's probably the first reliable rush of my life.
Guest:really oh they like me yeah i'd never let go of it yeah sort of yeah i'd like it was like i grabbed something that night and have still have it in my laugh yeah was it the laugh because that's a light-hearted laugh i think it was the laugh because it was when we came off books like me and this kid improvised this thing i got to spray a soda like one of those yeah yeah yeah in his face and like but the laughter of the audience first of all caught me off guard and i thought oh my god they'll keep doing it and then sort of like oh sure like
Guest:Like a delirium, bacchanalian sort of wildness and was then birthed as a little chubby 15-year-old shaman.
Guest:There and then on that stage, suddenly it was an altar.
Guest:And then after the show, girls from another school fancied me.
Guest:I was like that day, like I was in Essex, suburban Essex.
Guest:I knew nothing.
Guest:I was show business.
Guest:I want to do that all the time now.
Guest:That's my life now.
Guest:Oh, you have to get this magazine.
Guest:Look, there's extra work.
Guest:You're going to start doing extra work straight away.
Guest:Went to a stage school.
Guest:Got a grant going to a stage school.
Guest:Went to a stage school.
Guest:More women.
Guest:Women that didn't know about my past.
Marc:They didn't know you were fat.
Guest:I don't know about fat kid me.
Guest:He was trying to tell them.
Guest:He used to be fat, you know.
Guest:No, he didn't.
Guest:I'm this now.
Guest:I know about George Bernard Shaw.
Guest:My knowledge of him ends at Pygmalion.
Guest:And the thing that he said about a homeless person asked George Bernard Shaw and his companion for some money.
Guest:Oh, George, you're ridiculous to give money to that gentleman.
Guest:He probably has more money than you do.
Guest:Then let it be on his conscience and not mine.
Guest:As the altruistic bit of George Bernard Shaw.
Guest:Another bit of George Bernard Shaw is at that moment, the theatre, the trepidation of being in the audience of a theatre, the moment that the house lights dim.
Guest:His friend goes...
Guest:oh, this is always my favorite part of the performance, George.
Guest:And George goes, mine too.
Guest:Shall we leave?
Marc:This is interesting.
Marc:You might be able to intellectually hang on this one because I have this concept that, because my father was emotionally absent, your father was both emotionally absent and physically absent, because it seems like you hang, you pick things from different people that you respect and little moments.
Marc:Do you feel like you had to sort of construct yourself because of a lack of guidance?
Marc:You know, that, you know, it's sort of interesting that you sort of like, it's like, oh, that'll work.
Marc:That'll help me get by.
Guest:And look at how you come to counterculture, particularly like, you know, if you're sort of not brought up by hippies or potheads or something, where are you going to get?
Guest:My mum's like a sort of a normal, beautiful, incredible, modest sort of person.
Guest:And like, you know, she's...
Guest:liked the beatles but she's like you know she's like you know not gonna she's not a person who's gonna go and here look check out wb8 yeah like you sort of got to come to those things via like eventually like i always think it's what happens is some pop cultural phenomena will drag you in like for me like the smiths and morrissey and oh yeah morrissey yeah oscar wilde and jimmy dean and then you're off interesting that so that was your trajectory yeah it was morrissey to oscar wilde jimmy dean yeah
Marc:That's a good path.
Marc:It's interesting.
Marc:You have a lot of options with paths.
Marc:I think I entered through Keith Richards and then went through Kerouac to William Burroughs and then to Hunter S. Thompson and then Ginsburg a bit.
Marc:But I went way back and went to the Beatniks, but I didn't go to Oscar Wilde.
Marc:But I think that might be a cultural thing.
Guest:yeah i think i guess sam shepherd i did a little bit present yeah if you went straight in there we've got into them i got into the beats and that sort of stuff later and their significant i got into iggy pop much later right that was a mistake i wish i'd gotten into that earlier but i don't know what would have i think if you'd yeah you don't need to know about iggy pop when you're at an age where you could take those kind of drugs because he had look at the man's body he's obviously got a unique constitution where it's like vitamin c to him no kidding so okay so you get this state grant you go to a art school
Guest:I went to I went initially to a sort of a stage school that sort of is primed to churn out the most glistening, shimmering, white teeth, innocuous kids.
Guest:You know, sort of people that populate daytime soap operas and chorus line dancers.
Marc:And were they directly connected with the BBC in some way?
Marc:I mean, because it seems like there's a much more intimate media landscape there that if you if you make the grade, you're going to be on TV.
Guest:There is a bit, but that's not if you fancy yourself or a beginning at least have some nascent idea of yourself as an anti-hero.
Guest:It's okay if you want to be in a chorus line or if you're pretty enough to be in a soap opera.
Guest:But it's not good for people that are peculiar.
Guest:You've got to grow into it then.
Guest:So I was at that place and just so enamored.
Guest:It was full of incredibly beautiful girls who didn't know how fat I used to be.
Marc:And you were an iconoclast, a self-decided iconoclast.
Marc:I'm an iconoclast.
Guest:Right.
Guest:They don't know what iconoclasts are yet.
Guest:They just know that it ain't everyone else is gay and I'm not.
Guest:So that was like, I was off.
Guest:And then from that place, I also became a drug addict.
Marc:How did that start?
Marc:What was the moment?
Marc:Who were you trying to be?
Guest:I was trying to be this lad, Danny Green's friend.
Guest:There was this group of lads that were a couple of years older than me, cooler than infinite.
Guest:More rebellious.
Guest:Far more.
Guest:Yeah, they'd done the advanced course.
Guest:They had the secret books.
Guest:Very much.
Guest:Oh my God, what is all this?
Guest:The first time I sat down to smoke a spliff with Danny Green, he said these things.
Guest:He sat down like, I bought the weed.
Guest:I'd gone and got the weed somewhere else.
Guest:That's part of it.
Guest:That's part of your initiation.
Guest:I've got this thing for you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He took it.
Guest:smell it right come with me from the north we sat down together he rolled a spliff effortlessly on his lap we sat in the barbican in london which is where this school was near yeah he looked around he said you see these buildings mate yeah before these buildings were here there was a drawing on a piece of paper and before that there was a fort in someone's head that means any fort you have you can make real yeah oh my god that was it are you jesus are you
Guest:I was just, that's it.
Guest:I was signed up that day.
Guest:I never stopped.
Guest:Like that was my first joint.
Guest:And then like I never, I took drugs every single day from then till I stopped like 11 years later.
Marc:Well, how did you evolve into dope?
Guest:In a cliched way.
Marc:Which is?
Guest:Through recreational drug use in a way that if you was to receive a pamphlet from Fox News.
Marc:So there was another Danny Green?
Guest:There's a different heroin denigree?
Guest:No, actually.
Guest:What happened was I smoked really into weed, then really into acid.
Guest:Loved acid so much.
Guest:Like, oh, my God, even my own mind is nonsense.
Guest:You could just toss that all in the air.
Guest:Look, I'm invisible.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:I can fly.
Guest:Incredible.
Guest:Yeah, all of that stuff.
Guest:Went through that in a very cliched way.
Guest:And then started to, I think, return to my ultimate need of drugs as an anesthetic.
Guest:It was never going to be fun for me.
Guest:It was always there really as a sort of antidote to pain.
Guest:The first time I took heroin, it almost pains me to recount because of the sort of sad lack of call.
Guest:Smoked it.
Guest:Much more common in the United Kingdom.
Guest:Like...
Guest:It was really sad the way that I first encountered it.
Guest:I was living by then in Hackney.
Guest:I was a student at a cool drama school by now.
Guest:I'd gone to one where it's like, oh, this is about sort of crying and being naked and stuff, not all that showbiz bullshit.
Guest:So I was at that one now and I was traveling home through Hackney, kind of a rough area, got off of the train and they were like children, 14-year-old Turkish boys making a joint with smack.
Guest:And I was really curious.
Guest:What are those kids up to?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What are you doing?
Guest:What is that?
Guest:Is that heroin?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They went, yeah, yeah, it is.
Guest:They go, sell me some.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And like one of them, and I hate this when this happens.
Guest:They were five years younger than me, but so much cooler than me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:One of them goes, I goes, you know what?
Guest:They go, what have you got?
Guest:And I go, I've got 10 quid.
Guest:And they probably sold me like five pounds for 10 quid.
Guest:And just as I hand over the money, one of them looked at me like with a Clint Eastwood eye and went, you ain't done this before, have you?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I went, like flustered like Mrs. Doubtfire.
Guest:I popped it all into my purse.
Guest:I might as well put it into my little- I've done other stuff.
Guest:I had to fight once.
Guest:You should have seen me.
Guest:Brilliant to behold.
Guest:And I just went home and didn't really know, had the admin, but sorted out the foil, had a made idea that I needed a funnel.
Guest:Improvised.
Guest:Improvised.
Guest:I had that.
Guest:I've always had that.
Guest:Did you throw up immediately?
Marc:no the first time no i like in how and like i couldn't believe how profoundly beautiful it felt like sort of a way that's the the best and the worst thing to happen yeah yeah you didn't even have to throw up and go like well you maybe this isn't for me or i can get a handle on this no right away you're like this is it oh my god and
Guest:Like my girlfriend, it was her apartment and she was upstairs and I sort of smoked it in the bathroom downstairs.
Guest:I just thought, oh my God.
Guest:And like sort of beyond orgasm, like the precipice of a beautiful defecation.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Just warm and all encompassing and absolutely.
Marc:And it wasn't fleeting.
Marc:It held for a little while.
Guest:It holds you, doesn't it?
Guest:It holds you.
Guest:I'm not like crack five seconds.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:I'm back.
Guest:oh no i'm worse i'm more nervous than ever before i'm sweating jesus christ let's try it again perhaps if i keep doing this forever that's the solution but like yeah it held me it held me it was beautiful and then like you know and then like didn't do it for a while like you know sort of had a mate that did it occasionally dabble with it so you didn't do it you didn't develop the habit until you did not that day no yeah yeah and then i did when i when i had i got a job on him when i got uh i got sort of thrown out of that drama school because the addiction stuff with the booze was getting silly and i was getting
Guest:They really lionized my behavior.
Guest:This drama school had us.
Guest:If you were kind of from like a modest background and were kind of talented and a bit naughty, they really lionized.
Guest:They had very much a Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole tradition.
Guest:This kid's drunk at school.
Guest:He's got no shirt on.
Guest:He's good.
Guest:We like him.
Guest:And he can remember to be or not to be.
Guest:That was it.
Marc:If you could remember your lines and be fucked up, you're going to be the star.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:This kid's got it.
Guest:They loved it for a while, but then eventually there was a race between the talent and the addiction, and the addiction won in the end.
Marc:You stopped showing up for shit.
Guest:Stopped showing up.
Guest:I got arrested a couple of times for shoplifting and stupid things.
Guest:I was playing Volponi in the final year, and I stole white mascara to white out a beard.
Guest:I got arrested for that in a pharmacy.
Guest:It was a silly and humiliating thing to get arrested for and put in jail for it.
Marc:Not drug butt.
Marc:Just ripping off makeup.
Guest:Yeah, it's not an impressive crime by any level to play an old man.
Guest:So they threw you out?
Guest:They threw me out with like really near the conclusion, but just before the final performance of the final year, which is the one that's meant to be the carpet that rolls you out into.
Guest:And now you'll be represented by this agent.
Guest:And now you'll get this contract for this.
Guest:And I was thrown out at that point.
Guest:And that's when I thought, oh, fuck this comedy.
Guest:i'm not gonna be i'm through with this because everyone like while i'd been at that drama school people said you should be doing that thing where you talk really quickly and tell people how you feel if only there was some way that you could do that as a job yeah and i was like yeah well you know you can't can you and then sort of like me and a mate of mine who was also at the school he he graduated from the school and then as soon as he left we started to do a double act thing my addiction thing yeah drove that apart but then like the stand-up went the thing the way there's a real good machine in the uk is for stand-up yeah talented at stand-up in the uk they'll get you quick
Guest:Cause it's like there's talent shows.
Guest:There's real, there's agencies that have affiliations with broadcasters and like, you know, and own clubs.
Guest:So it's a machine.
Marc:Jonglers.
Marc:Is that what it's called?
Guest:Jonglers.
Guest:And the comedy store.
Guest:Is there a comedy store?
Guest:That's right.
Guest:There's a comedy store in London.
Guest:And then there's like Avalon, which is like a sort of an agency that has a TV company.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And everything changes.
Guest:The good thing about having that show on MTV is one of the first times in my life where I felt really sort of embraced creatively actually was at MTV.
Guest:I did this show where the idea for the show was you used to turn up at a nightclub where people were off their faces on pills.
Guest:And I just go and talk nonsense to them.
Guest:That was the show?
Marc:This was British MTV?
Guest:British MTV.
Guest:It was just used as interstitials between videos.
Guest:Me in a nightclub talking to people that peeled up.
Guest:And I'd go, like, just bring up some ludicrous, hypothetical, moral situation using pop cultural and surreal and bizarre references.
Guest:People loved it.
Guest:Like on MTV.
Marc:And they were interstitials so it wasn't all hanging on you.
Marc:You just popped in occasionally.
Marc:And people were like, who's that guy?
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:That happened.
Guest:And I was at that time really nurturing my crack and heroin habit.
Guest:And then they gave me like 500 pounds a show and commissioned me a run of like 20.
Guest:They go, right, we'll make 26 of these shows.
Guest:You get like 500 pounds a show.
Guest:I was like, oh, fucking hell.
Guest:I'm going to be happy forever.
Guest:This is it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Also, this is the thing that was beautiful, Mark, is that he goes, right, so at MTV, you're a presenter now, so we'll give you this account for taxi cabs if you need to come to work.
Guest:For when you come to work, this is your code for taxi cabs.
Guest:Just say that when you come to work.
Guest:I go, what?
Guest:So hold on, this is like the account for a taxi.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, for when you come to work.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, but...
Guest:I mean, I've got the number now.
Guest:Yeah, but it's for when you can't work.
Guest:I never went on public transport ever again.
Guest:I went everywhere in those cabs.
Guest:I had food delivered to my house.
Guest:I had drugs delivered to my house.
Guest:I had prostitutes delivered to my house.
Guest:I had my mum picked up from the airport.
Guest:I used that thing.
Guest:It was like someone gave me a Pandora's box.
Guest:It was a Faustian pack.
Guest:I had no control over using that thing.
Guest:I drained it.
Guest:I rinsed it out.
Marc:Look what MTV did to you.
Guest:LAUGHTER
Guest:They made a monster of me, Mark.
Marc:In a unique way, at least.
Guest:Very much.
Marc:It doesn't sound like you had to compromise your disposition much, but they certainly aided in your demise.
Guest:It wasn't a mutation.
Guest:It was just it expediated what was happening.
Marc:Did you get to the point where you were doing work that you didn't want to do for drug money?
Guest:No, because I capsized it so quickly.
Guest:I capsized it so quickly.
Guest:Because I had money.
Guest:I'd never had the money to support a proper habit.
Guest:Once I had the money to support a proper habit, it fell away quick.
Guest:I had a radio show on a cool radio station, XFM.
Guest:I had that cool show on MTV.
Guest:Everything just fell off me like a leprosy.
Marc:Once you were able to feed the monkey, the monkey just was like, yeah, I got you.
Guest:Now look at you.
Guest:Do show some restraint, monkey.
Guest:I don't mind feeding you.
Guest:There's no restraint.
Guest:Me and the fat kid want payback.
Guest:You're teaming up with the fat kid?
Guest:No, don't trust him.
Guest:Hey, I'm not sure that fat kid's got our best intentions.
Guest:Monkey!
Guest:Monkey!
Marc:Nope, him and the fat kid are laughing and skipping.
Marc:yeah yeah so that then it was like that was a massive rapid descent i think i like i was only able to sustain that level of addiction for like a couple of years it might have even been this when did you hit your when was the big stride i mean were you were you sober for a time when you became the phenomenon the stand-up phenomenon that you became because i remember how many years ago was it that you did the shows with the roxy what were your first stateside gigs
Guest:that was like four years ago i think five so you were sober already absolutely when you broke here nothing like oh i just went downward from that point got forced to go into rehab by a person like someone took over as my manager and just forced me to go into rehabilitation right and then i had a year of being like came out of rehab with no intention of staying clean at all actually i just thought i'll just do this long enough to get some more money
Guest:And then I was a little brittle eggshell man on a bicycle, all thin, only eating sort of fruit and nuts and terrified and just no idea of where to go because I didn't only lose the drugs, but lost my entire identity that I'd been prescribed.
Guest:Oh, that's a good place.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:You scrapped it.
Marc:So is that when you became vegetarian or no?
Guest:I was already vegetarian.
Guest:I became vegetarian at 14, Morris Seedersmith.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:That was it?
Guest:Okay, yes.
Guest:And maintained that even through heroin addiction.
Guest:But, yeah, I had nothing.
Guest:I had to completely cull with it.
Marc:Isn't that weird?
Marc:When you picture it in your mind, can you feel it again?
Marc:That weird shakiness of everything, the vulnerability of that?
Guest:In retrospect, though, it never made sense at the time.
Guest:In retrospect, I...
Guest:developed this ludicrous manner of dress i started to wear like sort of eye makeup of my hair in this preposterous bouffant loads of jewelry like sort of a glam rock so it was a sort of a cure-ish morrissey thing yeah cure kind of uh mark bolan yeah yeah sort of like became this glam glam i became glam i suppose because of the reaction to mundanity and a sort of a feeling of tedium and fear i
Guest:armoured myself in this ridiculous outfit yeah but by then everything sort of i had the lexicon by then i had this vocabulary i had the references i'd listen to the music so like when i got a show on the most low rent low fire low cultural thing it was like big brother was the hit reality show in the uk you know you watch before we stole it
Guest:Before you stole it.
Guest:And I don't think it ever became the phenomenon here in the US that it was in the UK.
Guest:In the UK, people were fixated on it.
Guest:There was a spin-off show where you discuss the events of the house with a live audience.
Guest:I did that show and it blew up.
Guest:It was just like this thing on a digital TV channel where I talked to the audience about events within the house.
Guest:I treated this show with sort of a combination of
Guest:undue reverence and complete disregard.
Guest:I sort of applied bizarre analysis to the characters in the house.
Guest:They were just ordinary people.
Guest:But I was loving to them and loving to the people in the audience.
Guest:I wasn't cynical and biting about it, but I recognised that it was utterly futile and meaningless.
Guest:So I came at this low medium from the perspective of this is all completely futile, of course, but that's fine.
Guest:And people dug it?
Guest:People dug it and it sort of really blew up and I got radio show offers.
Guest:I'd been doing stand-up.
Guest:That's why I love the stand-up.
Guest:And you were staying sober.
Guest:Staying sober, yeah, but like in a really lazy sort of way, doing the bare minimum.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And, you know, women thing, because that was no longer the brutal exit.
Guest:That's when it blew up, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was a flood, a deluge.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:You had the hair.
Guest:I've got the hair now.
Guest:I've got these references.
Guest:They've got the jewels.
Guest:I'm skinny.
Guest:There's literally no skin.
Guest:There's no reason not to.
Guest:And I'm not going to stop here.
Guest:It was an unbelievable resources met desire in a hurricane of decadence.
Guest:Because I don't think normally someone that looked how I looked then would have had a background that would have given them some sort of self-assurance.
Guest:I had no self-assurance.
Guest:No, that's why you needed the women.
Guest:I'll take them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:I wasn't good at football at school or anything like that.
Guest:So I'm like, you know, I need this now.
Guest:I'm the 15 year old kid tapping his watch.
Marc:My time to shine.
Marc:This is our sport.
Guest:Let's go, fatty.
Guest:We found something we're good at.
Guest:And then I was good at it, actually.
Guest:That was a great blessing for someone who was never good at football or anything.
Guest:To find this physical thing.
Guest:Oh my God, I'm good at this.
Guest:There were times, there were times in that, before the sexual addiction, as all addiction must, became bleak.
Guest:There were times where I thought, I'm like fucking Jagger, man.
Guest:I was like, literally, I'd had this big house in Hampstead, all full of beautiful carpets and ornate Turkish rock and stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The cat purring around me, seemingly loving me, though we'll never truly know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, like, sort of, like, I'd do a gig and four or five women would come back.
Guest:And, like, there were times when it wasn't all desperate and ugly.
Guest:There were times when I was, like, this representation of pure libertinism and sexuality.
Guest:Hey, let's do this.
Marc:The Happy Manson.
Guest:I'm Happy Manson!
Guest:Before Helter Skelter.
Guest:Before...
Guest:Kill all pigs.
Guest:I'm happy, Manson.
Guest:And it was so brilliant.
Guest:Those nights, it's so hard not to cherish those and crave them.
Guest:But I know where they ended up.
Guest:I know where they went.
Guest:But there were times people, I became this thing, women meeting across me, that one would leave, another one would come.
Guest:All the time, women in the bed and me, but there'd be crossovers.
Guest:And they had no problem with each other.
Guest:It was blissful.
Guest:I created this union.
Guest:It was like this revolution from nothing.
Marc:When did you know that was over?
Guest:too many for like too much like people with running mascara people like you know that the crying crying and it was my mascara mark oh my god yeah people in half fueled baths weeping too low for the jacuzzi jets to fire another crying woman takes the place of the old crying woman in the bed it's time for your stint pass the baton which i'm sure you know is my penis
Guest:weepily taking it in hand and then like a desperate awful situation actually like you know sort of
Guest:Yeah, like anything that you're treating in that way, there are risks.
Guest:We make a mess.
Guest:The chaos will come if I'm unchecked.
Marc:I imagine that once emotions get invested on the people that you're treating like objects, it gets a little tedious.
Guest:Hey, hey, I thought you were just sort of like a facilitator for that vagina.
Guest:I didn't realize you had your own agenda, needs, emotions, reactions.
Marc:This is crazy.
Guest:It's completely out of the plan.
Guest:You and the vagina and breasts are going to have to leave because this is becoming a conflict.
Marc:But if you could leave the breast and the vagina somehow, that'd be fun.
Guest:Is there some way of doing that?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And now we're in Angry Manson.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:The tide has turned.
Marc:Well, it seems that like, you know, the movies, like everything, like when I watched it the other night,
Marc:And I don't know how genuine that struggle is, but, you know, the commentary about the corporatization of media and the commentary about, you know, what it manufactures, you know, whether it's MTV or whatever, you know, you're part of it and you're conscious of that.
Marc:But there is this sort of thing like, well, this is fucked, but I know I'm part of it.
Marc:So how do you reconcile that?
Marc:Is that part of the project now?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I feel that I have to be patient around that, Mark, because I'm not ready.
Guest:I have to accept that I still live in it.
Marc:You don't want to stop living in it, do you?
Guest:I do.
Guest:But I don't have the resources or the resolve currently.
Marc:You mean the money to afford what you're living in?
Guest:Not the money, the spiritual strength.
Guest:I would be probably more happy if I was able to walk away from all this.
Guest:I don't... Yeah, I ain't got that in the bank yet.
Guest:I haven't got the... Like, you know, because I know one day, if you keep saying this sort of stuff, like I was saying the other night, someone goes, hold a minute, but you're like, aren't you a multimillionaire and live in a Hollywood mansion?
Guest:Right, people will eventually start saying that.
Guest:And then the next thing I have to be like, okay, I'll leave the Hollywood mansion.
Guest:And at the moment, I don't have that kind of result.
Guest:But I feel that it is possible to get to a point where I go...
Guest:oh yeah, I don't need to live in the Hollywood mansion if you want.
Guest:I can just live anywhere.
Marc:Yeah, I think you could do it in two more movies.
Guest:Two more movies.
Guest:Couple, if one really hits, if we get over $100 million with my name above the title, I think I'm essentially Jesus.
Marc:Yeah, I'm spiritual.
Marc:That'll deliver me.
Guest:That's,
Guest:It had lost.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Because I noticed that it's interesting when somebody goes through the struggles that you're going through and you have, and obviously they're not debilitating struggles.
Marc:You've won some struggles.
Marc:You're sober.
Marc:You have a certain amount of clarity and you have self-awareness and you know this particular one.
Marc:But it's interesting.
Marc:When I watched you performing, there were moments where you were improvising and talking about things that seemed relatively new to you in terms of how you were talking about it.
Marc:But I don't know your whole oeuvre.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But, you know, when you were addressing Fox News or addressing politics or addressing addressing injustice or Occupy Wall Street, you know, these are these are topics that are not innately funny.
Marc:And when you attack them satirically, they come off as statements.
Marc:And then you get this sort of.
Marc:But there's a moment where, you know, I saw it happen because it's happened to me where you do the you do the attack and then you're uncomfortable with the fact that you just delivered an applause line.
Marc:That was really just a righteous applause line, but not necessarily a funny applause line.
Marc:Many of you go there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But.
Marc:And they're like, no, no, no.
Guest:I'm not interested.
Guest:Please don't give me the righteous applause.
Guest:I don't want that.
Guest:You've also ruined my rhythm for a legitimate applause that was coming up for a genuine joke.
Marc:But there was that moment there where you'd be talking about something that was new and real to you, but then you felt the compulsion to go back to old Russell.
Marc:Do you find that happens?
Guest:I feel that that's a much more crafted comedic persona.
Guest:And again, this is what I mean about not rushing myself because that's in a way, if not duplicitous entirely, it's disingenuous for me to say, I live a spiritual life now.
Guest:I meditate.
Guest:I'm still as much defined by my craving for attention as I am for my craving for enlightenment.
Guest:That's a tricky one, isn't it?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I've got to present that in a kind of balanced way.
Guest:Now, the fact is I've been thinking and reading and encountering those kind of experiences.
Guest:I was first arrested at a sort of a capitalist, anti-capitalist march, not a capitalist march.
Guest:We need a bit more capitalism.
Guest:Just leave those guys alone.
Marc:Let them work.
Marc:Everyone go to work.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Concentrate.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Anti-capitalist demonstration like sort of 11 years ago.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, when I was younger in the first flushes of mad drug awareness because of through counterculture.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But like it's taken and I imagine takes a long while to learn about that and even longer to be able to incorporate it into a set that people are going to find appealing aren't just going to turn off from.
Guest:So you're right.
Guest:It is difficult when people when you get what you brilliantly described as the righteous applause because
Guest:I don't want that.
Guest:It's weird to take in.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't feel qualified to deliver that.
Guest:All I feel that I can have is an interesting and honest comedic voice around those subjects.
Guest:But I can't get to that.
Guest:That's why I think that room was too big for that kind of material is what I feel ultimately happened.
Guest:And there was so much goodwill because of the nature of the event that people have given that time and stuff.
Guest:right you know it was very very very beautiful in many ways but in terms of like as a comedic performance it was in it was prohibitive because what there's a big room yeah and you have expectations yeah yeah big room expectations i've been doing things lately like we're doing that sort of like big like sort of gigs at casinos like it's like 5 000 people and like sort of student gigs 5 000 and i'm like doing things off of bits of paper you know like about minutiae you know and like
Guest:Like, it's, again, the same thing, like, there's a, you know, in Steve Martin's book, when he goes, there's a point where he realized he was just there to host a party.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And all that people really want to do, go, yeah, whoa, everything's brilliant.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And, like, it sort of became frustrating to him.
Marc:So you kind of have to fight, yeah, fight against that.
Marc:So you're in this active fight against that.
Guest:That's why, I don't know if you noticed, I started to lean into the paedophilia stuff, because I was like, this may calm things down a bit if I start really endorsing paedophilia.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Provoke them and then see what they'll take.
Guest:Yeah, I like that.
Guest:Perhaps I can get you back to a more manageable level.
Marc:Sure, sure.
Marc:Hate me a little bit and then let's start over.
Guest:We'll start fresh.
Guest:Now that's a reasonable level of applause and laughter.
Marc:That's right, right.
Marc:I push you away and I'll charm you back to where I want you.
Yeah.
Guest:too much here yeah yeah no it's great i mean i i understand the struggle of course and uh so what do you um what now this documentary we're doing here yes this documentary is it and so the content of this interview has been incredibly helpful obviously because it's about i suppose that process of becoming like of like i always was caught between two things like i really you know i wanted success attention affection and i was only that was only salvaged i was only saved from being the most sort of a
Guest:worthless, glistening reality star myself by the fact that somehow, inherently, I've got this religious regard for stand-up comedy and love of art.
Guest:I did it for nothing for a long while.
Guest:I performed for nothing for ages and ages and ages and ages and would have carried on doing it forever.
Guest:And that has provided a neat counterbalance to this kind of this sort of animalistic craving for success and triumph and trinkets.
Guest:Thank God I was born with that because who knows what I would have become.
Marc:Well, yeah, you also had the beautiful complete self-sabotaging mechanism.
Guest:That was so handy.
Marc:It's an interesting thing when you get big opportunities and you make what in retrospect might have been compromises, yet you have, as you get older, you get more self-aware and more aware of what you want to do in the world.
Marc:It's how do you navigate not only how you judge yourself but how other people see you.
Marc:It becomes very tricky to detach from that shit.
Guest:yes it really does in fact that's you know that's something I've really I've only really developed recently so now I don't engage with like I used to really be interested in Google and reviews and news yeah I don't look at it anymore oh and I'm so much better for it I have no awareness so when people go oh did you see that thing about you I go oh no yeah it's better it's better it's a tremendous relief I wish I'd done it before but I'm so self obsessed all that shit's like a speedball you know it's like oh a good one a good one oh that sucked
Marc:But that's really the true one, because I feel that way about myself.
Marc:How the fuck did that guy know?
Marc:Oh, here's a good one.
Guest:That chimes very neatly with my self-loathing.
Guest:He's in there somewhere.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:He's working for the fat kid.
Marc:Oh, Christ.
Marc:Well, I mean, so it was funny, because the crew came earlier, and I'm like, now is this a self-produced documentary?
Marc:Because I'm curious about the objectivity of something like that.
Yeah.
Guest:Let's get to the heart of me.
Guest:What do I really mean?
Guest:And what do I mean to others?
Guest:Not just what do I think?
Guest:What does everyone else think about how great I am?
Guest:You.
Guest:This documentary started with Albert Maisels.
Marc:Who I have a poster of Gimme Shelter right here.
Guest:And Oliver Stone.
Guest:So I thought, this is going to be amazing.
Guest:And they just said, firstly, I met Oliver.
Guest:And he said, do you want to make this documentary?
Guest:And I thought, yeah, I'll do anything for you.
Guest:You're the man that bought me the doors.
Guest:I knew Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison before real Jim Morrison.
Guest:Then like, you know, and this is Albert Maisel.
Guest:Oh my God, what broke the Beatles over here and give me shelter and food.
Guest:Like, yeah, Jesus, I'm there.
Guest:And like, and then sort of goes off in the case in these situations, you realize there's a little more distance with those kind of executive producer figures.
Guest:You know, and like, I was given much, much, much.
Marc:Aren't you going to be my father's?
Guest:I look to you as elders.
Guest:Where are you?
Marc:I don't know how to cope.
Marc:I need parenting in the form of a documentary.
Guest:I thought we had an agreement.
Guest:Look, somewhere I've misunderstood this.
Marc:This is terrible.
Marc:I thought we were going to go out to eat.
Marc:We were going to hang out.
Marc:You were going to introduce me to people.
Guest:Oliver, I want to sit on your lap, but I want you to tell me that I remind you of Jim Morrison.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Go.
Guest:Yeah, now.
Guest:Yeah, so like when those things didn't happen, also they gave me like, well, what do you want it to be about?
Guest:So like I was given far too much rope.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then eventually, so we just said, well, let's just make it about my general disillusionment of fame.
Guest:And then we started working with new people and it's become much more refined.
Guest:And we said, well, let's put on a gig and the process of putting on that gig and the content of that gig.
Guest:And we'll use some of this to have a footage because we've been filming like four or five years during which time.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:I've been to Africa and done charity work and felt incredibly like the agonizing futility of that to stand in these wastelands in Kibera and sort of recount a number for a telephone.
Guest:And when your actual feeling is, we might as well just give up on humanity.
Guest:If this is happening now in the same place where it's Paris Fashion Week, we might as well just hang ourselves.
Guest:I don't see how many donations.
Marc:Or go to a runway show.
Guest:Yeah, actually, that sounds quite cheerful.
Guest:There'll be models there.
Guest:Oh, yeah, no, I'll go to that.
Guest:I was going to hang myself.
Guest:Why don't you tell me about bloody hell?
Marc:Well, I hope it all works out, because usually there's only one way to end this, and that's relapse, but I don't want you to do that.
Marc:Relapse, of course.
Marc:Yeah, there's your ending.
Marc:After all this great work, and he's transcendental, he's spiritual, he's helping people around the world.
Marc:Where's Russell?
Guest:Uh-oh.
Marc:Oh, no.
Guest:Are those his shoes?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:He's dead.
Marc:It was great talking to you, man.
Guest:You too, Mark.
Guest:Thanks, mate.
Thank you.
Marc:That's it.
Marc:That's our show.
Marc:I thought that was a wonderful chat.
Marc:I had a good time with Russell Brand, and I hope you enjoyed that.
Marc:Please go to WTFPod.com and get some merchandise, kick in a few shekels, find out what episodes are there, where they are, get an app, do whatever you want.
Marc:Get some buttons, Busy Beaver buttons, posters.
Marc:Oh, you can get my schedule and see where I'm going to be.
Marc:You can get on the mailing list.
Marc:I email every week I write a thing for you people.
Marc:And I don't mean that in a condescending way.
Marc:JustCoffee.coop, of course, also available at WTFPod.com.
Marc:Pow!
Marc:Look out!
Marc:I shit my pants.
Marc:Boomer, come here and look at this.
Marc:January 13th and 14th, Wise Guys, Salt Lake City.
Marc:January 19th through 22nd, Laughing Skull Lounge in Atlanta.
Marc:January 27th, live WTF and a live stand-up show at the Magnus Comedy Festival in Boston, Massachusetts.
Marc:Thank you for hanging out.
Marc:Jesus.
Marc:I can talk.
Marc:God damn it.
you