Episode 319 - Loren Bouchard

Episode 319 • Released September 27, 2012 • Speakers detected

00:00:00Marc:Lock the gates!

00:00:09Marc:Alright, let's do this.

00:00:10Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?

00:00:11Marc:What the fuck buddies?

00:00:12Marc:What the fuck nicks?

00:00:13Marc:What the fuckineers?

00:00:14Marc:What the fuck comedians?

00:00:16Marc:There it is again.

00:00:17Marc:That's twice with that one.

00:00:18Marc:They keep coming in.

00:00:20Marc:I can only do four or five or it gets ridiculous.

00:00:22Marc:I am Mark Maron.

00:00:23Marc:This is WTF.

00:00:24Marc:Yesterday was my birthday.

00:00:26Marc:I cannot thank you enough for all your wonderful emails and Twitter birthday well wishes.

00:00:33Marc:I appreciate it.

00:00:35Marc:Even Patton Oswalt tweeting happy 70th birthday.

00:00:38Marc:It's fine.

00:00:39Marc:I can take it.

00:00:40Marc:I'm a big boy.

00:00:41Marc:I said, thanks, pal.

00:00:43Marc:Go fuck yourself.

00:00:45Marc:That's nice, right?

00:00:46Marc:Look, I don't do a big thing for my birthday over at the office today.

00:00:50Marc:We're right in the show.

00:00:51Marc:They had two cakes and it wasn't a cheat day.

00:00:55Marc:I don't want to be a baby about it.

00:00:58Marc:So I ate two pieces of cake and then went into some sort of weird coma nap for an hour.

00:01:02Marc:It was ridiculous.

00:01:04Marc:And I woke up, I didn't know where I was.

00:01:05Marc:I hope I'm not getting diabetes.

00:01:07Marc:Is that what I should be thinking about on my 49th birthday?

00:01:10Marc:Might I get diabetes?

00:01:12Marc:Does one have to be heavy to get diabetes?

00:01:14Marc:I am sort of genetically predisposed on some level and a couple of generations back to some diabetes.

00:01:20Marc:This is not what I want to be talking about.

00:01:22Marc:The day after my birthday, there's a lot on my mind.

00:01:26Marc:My mother sent me two shirts, one of which was hideous.

00:01:30Marc:The two shirt thing has been going on my entire life.

00:01:33Marc:I can always count on my mother every year on my birthday to send me two shirts, one of which maybe I'll like.

00:01:42Marc:And then she'll send a gift card for Bloomingdale's or Macy's to compensate for the shirts.

00:01:49Marc:I called her up.

00:01:50Marc:I said, I got the shirt.

00:01:51Marc:She goes, did you like them?

00:01:53Marc:I said, I liked one of them.

00:01:54Marc:She goes, yeah.

00:01:55Marc:Which one?

00:01:56Marc:The long sleeve?

00:01:58Marc:I said, yeah.

00:01:59Marc:She goes, I thought so.

00:02:01Marc:And I go, what about that other one?

00:02:02Marc:I don't know.

00:02:02Marc:I thought, I don't know.

00:02:05Marc:So you sent me something you knew I wouldn't like.

00:02:07Marc:You know, I don't know.

00:02:09Marc:But you got the gift card, so you go get what you want.

00:02:12Marc:I think there's this charade that goes on between me and my mother every year around my birthday where she buys me shirts that she wishes I would wear.

00:02:21Marc:I think.

00:02:23Marc:And then sometimes when I go visit her in Florida, her boyfriend will offer to give me shirts.

00:02:29Marc:So she wants me to dress up like her boyfriend.

00:02:31Marc:And that's loaded, folks.

00:02:33Marc:It's loaded.

00:02:35Marc:But then we talked about I said I've been busy.

00:02:38Marc:I've been writing my my sitcom.

00:02:41Marc:And she said this was beautiful.

00:02:43Marc:My parents are spectacular.

00:02:45Marc:She goes, so is this are you the main guy in the show?

00:02:50Marc:I'm like, yeah, it's a show about me.

00:02:51Marc:It's a tentatively called Marin at this point.

00:02:53Marc:So you're like the main one.

00:02:56Marc:It's about you?

00:02:56Marc:And I go, yeah, it's my show.

00:02:58Marc:She goes, well, that's good.

00:03:00Marc:She says, you mean like Louie's show?

00:03:03Marc:Like he's, it's about Louie?

00:03:05Marc:Yes, it's me.

00:03:05Marc:It's about me.

00:03:06Marc:I'm the main guy in the show.

00:03:08Marc:Oh, I'm very proud of you, Mark.

00:03:10Marc:You don't have to wear that shirt, the one you don't like.

00:03:13Marc:Go to Macy's, get something nice.

00:03:16Marc:But again, thank you for the well wishes today on the show.

00:03:19Marc:Lauren Bouchard, the creator of Bob's Burgers, a co-creator of home movies.

00:03:27Marc:As some of you know, you listen to the show.

00:03:28Marc:I'm not really you're I'm not an animation guy.

00:03:30Marc:I condescend on animation.

00:03:33Marc:Because there's part of me that thinks like we're grownups.

00:03:35Marc:Do we really need to watch cartoons?

00:03:38Marc:And people say, you know, that's fucking ridiculous.

00:03:40Marc:Cartoons are great.

00:03:41Marc:So I watched a bunch of Bob's Burgers and I watched a bunch of home movies.

00:03:44Marc:I enjoyed them.

00:03:45Marc:I was never a Simpsons guy.

00:03:46Marc:I just I didn't great.

00:03:47Marc:I have nothing against the symptoms.

00:03:49Marc:I think it's a brilliant show.

00:03:50Marc:I just don't watch cartoons.

00:03:52Marc:I mean, I'm going to date myself, but I remember when Wizards came out and Ralph Bakshi, Bakshi was a big deal.

00:04:00Marc:We all went to see Wizards and I liked Wizards.

00:04:02Marc:I like reading comics.

00:04:04Marc:I've just never been a guy to lock into watching cartoons for some reason.

00:04:07Marc:I not that I think it's beneath me.

00:04:09Marc:I just I need visceral things.

00:04:11Marc:I need real things.

00:04:12Marc:I need raw things.

00:04:13Marc:I need human things.

00:04:14Marc:But then I watched Bob Berger's.

00:04:15Marc:I found it very moving and very funny.

00:04:17Marc:And Lauren Bouchard is a tremendous guy.

00:04:19Marc:We had a great conversation.

00:04:21Marc:A bit of business I'd like to get through here.

00:04:24Marc:The shelves.

00:04:26Marc:Again, I want to thank you all for volunteering to do my shelves.

00:04:30Marc:I think I explained to you what happened right before I made my choice.

00:04:34Marc:I got a sort of urgent email from a guy named Patrick.

00:04:37Marc:Said, I'm going to be in town for a week.

00:04:39Marc:I'll do your shelves.

00:04:40Marc:I'm a carpenter.

00:04:41Marc:Here's my website.

00:04:43Marc:So I went to his website and he came over.

00:04:45Marc:And I talked about this before, but then he listened to it.

00:04:47Marc:He was upset that I suggested that he didn't take measurements.

00:04:51Marc:Folks, he took measurements.

00:04:53Marc:He made me a beautiful piece of furniture.

00:04:55Marc:Love it.

00:04:56Marc:And I want to shoot some business's way if I could.

00:04:59Marc:He said, you know, when I get my website, I'm going to redo my website.

00:05:03Marc:And I said, all right, I'll shoot some business your way.

00:05:05Marc:I'll get some people to look at your website.

00:05:07Marc:And I'm sure now you'll go crash the website.

00:05:10Marc:But the website, Patrick's website is patbobmcgee, M-C-G-E-E, all one word, patbobmcgee.com.

00:05:19Marc:He made these shelves and I put my turntable on.

00:05:21Marc:I put my stereo on.

00:05:22Marc:Hey, you guys, anyone know...

00:05:24Marc:What kind of setup I need for a turntable.

00:05:26Marc:Turns out I have all this old equipment that I thought it would be great with my turntable to play my records on my old equipment.

00:05:32Marc:And it turns out my old equipment was always shit.

00:05:35Marc:So I wouldn't mind getting some old equipment if it wasn't shit.

00:05:38Marc:I need to get a new stereo.

00:05:39Marc:Maybe I should just buy a new one.

00:05:41Marc:I don't know.

00:05:41Marc:If any of you have this passion about what one plays vinyl through.

00:05:46Marc:And I'm not even trying to be some sort of hipster douchebag with the vinyl.

00:05:49Marc:I just happen to have about 300 records.

00:05:51Marc:Also, not all of them I'm proud of.

00:05:53Marc:All right.

00:05:54Marc:I will say that there's a couple of records that I've had since high school.

00:05:59Marc:Not sure why I have them still, but I do.

00:06:03Marc:I'll be in Michigan, Ferndale, Michigan, outside Detroit tomorrow night, September 29th for two shows at the Magic Bag Theater.

00:06:12Marc:But look, I don't consider myself an intellectual.

00:06:17Marc:I do my best.

00:06:18Marc:OK, I do what I can.

00:06:20Marc:I know what I know.

00:06:21Marc:I don't pretend to know things I don't know.

00:06:23Marc:I draw from my experience.

00:06:25Marc:I draw from things I've seen.

00:06:26Marc:Sometimes I make connections.

00:06:28Marc:Sometimes I don't.

00:06:29Marc:Intellectuals are a different breed of people.

00:06:31Marc:They are people that live lives of the mind.

00:06:34Marc:There are people that do cultural criticism, analytical business, true intellectuals, those in the Ivy Towers, those in the colleges.

00:06:43Marc:Well,

00:06:45Marc:The guy who changed my life more than almost anybody when I was in high school was a guy named Gus Blaisdell.

00:06:50Marc:Gus owned the Living Batch bookstore in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

00:06:54Marc:He was one of the funniest, most brilliant motherfuckers I'd ever met in my life.

00:06:57Marc:I used to go over to his bookstore.

00:06:59Marc:He took me under his wing, which means he let me talk to him.

00:07:02Marc:And we would talk about shit.

00:07:03Marc:And he would make jokes that were that blew my mind.

00:07:07Marc:His point of reference, his intelligence, his ability to cut through bullshit and find the truth in things.

00:07:13Marc:This guy was just a wizard.

00:07:15Marc:He was a teacher at the University of New Mexico.

00:07:17Marc:He owned the bookstore.

00:07:18Marc:He was sort of a jack of all trades, but he was also a critic, a cultural critic, a writer.

00:07:22Marc:And it's interesting because I blurbed a book that came out from the University of New Mexico Press, UNMPress.com, Gus Blaisdell, Collected.

00:07:33Marc:And I blurbed it on the back.

00:07:35Marc:And I said, quote, I met Gus when I was in high school, whether he knew it or not.

00:07:39Marc:He's one of the most important influences in my life.

00:07:41Marc:The combination of cutting wit and daunting intelligence he brought to every conversation was mind blowing.

00:07:47Marc:He showed me that humor had the power to cut through all layers of bullshit.

00:07:50Marc:Blaisdell was truth, unquote.

00:07:52Marc:Now, what I'm going to tell you now is that he didn't share a lot of his writing with me, but he was always writing.

00:07:57Marc:He wrote about painting.

00:07:58Marc:He wrote about photography.

00:07:59Marc:He wrote about film.

00:08:01Marc:He wrote poetry.

00:08:02Marc:He wrote some fiction.

00:08:03Marc:But anytime he would share something that he wrote with me, especially at the time when I was younger, I would open that.

00:08:09Marc:I would read it.

00:08:10Marc:And within a paragraph, I'd be like, what what is happening?

00:08:14Marc:Have you ever had that where you read a book and you're like, oh, my God, how can I be three sentences into this thing and not know what the fuck is going on?

00:08:22Marc:So now I'm older and I'm getting into his writing.

00:08:24Marc:I'm trying to read it because there's a depth to it that blows my mind.

00:08:29Marc:He writes a lot about Louis Baltz's photographs.

00:08:31Marc:He writes about Joel Witkin's photographs.

00:08:33Marc:He writes about films.

00:08:34Marc:He wrote about Paris, Texas.

00:08:35Marc:He wrote a piece about Full Metal Jacket, which I just watched the other night.

00:08:38Marc:And I'm going through Gus's book, and I'm thinking, like, maybe I could wrap my brain around the way Gus wrapped his brain around movies now.

00:08:45Marc:Maybe I can be that deep.

00:08:47Marc:Maybe I'm an intellectual.

00:08:49Marc:Can I still hang on to the hope?

00:08:52Marc:So this is a riff.

00:08:53Marc:This is the difference between me and a real intellectual.

00:08:59Marc:Right.

00:08:59Marc:He's talking about the opening scene in Full Metal Jacket where.

00:09:06Marc:You know, Joker, Matthew Modine's character.

00:09:11Marc:Right at the beginning, does that bit the John, the John Wayne bit.

00:09:15Marc:Is that you, John Wayne?

00:09:17Marc:Is this me?

00:09:17Marc:And then and then the drill sergeant drill instructor Hartman Lee Ermey punches him in the stomach.

00:09:25Marc:So this is where Gus Blaisdell in his book, in his essay, Mr. Death's Blue-Eyed Boy, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, he departs from this line.

00:09:35Marc:And a few paragraphs in, this is a paragraph.

00:09:38Marc:This is a paragraph from his book.

00:09:40Marc:And this is the difference between me and a real intellectual person.

00:09:46Marc:Quote, this line done in Duke's voice as rendered by Joker has become almost as haunting for me as who's there?

00:09:52Marc:The interrogative that opens Hamlet, another drama full of ghosts, the dead and retribution.

00:09:58Marc:And Francisco answers Bernardo's challenge critically.

00:10:02Marc:Nay, answer me.

00:10:03Marc:Stand and unfold yourself.

00:10:06Marc:Did the absence of John Wayne and all he stood for in America haunt American soldiers in Vietnam as the ghost of King Hamlet haunted Denmark?

00:10:14Marc:I think so.

00:10:15Marc:But what immediately interests me here, as critical as Francisco's reciprocal challenge to Bernardo's interrogation, is why Joker does it.

00:10:23Marc:Why at this moment?

00:10:24Marc:What does he hope to gain by impersonating John Wayne and while remaining in voice, subsequently questioning himself and disrupting Hartman?

00:10:34Marc:Unquote.

00:10:36Marc:Now that is some fucking deep shit.

00:10:38Marc:Do you wish you could reference Shakespeare so efficiently?

00:10:40Marc:I can't reference anything.

00:10:41Marc:I barely know what Hamlet's about.

00:10:44Marc:And he puts it into context, updates it, integrates it into the language of analysis.

00:10:50Marc:Shit is deep.

00:10:52Marc:If you're interested in the book, Gus Blaisdell, Gus Blaisdell, B-L-A-I-S-D-E-L-L, collected from the unmpress.com, University of New Mexico.

00:11:02Marc:a very important guy in my life, a mentor.

00:11:06Marc:Again, I'm not going to tell you I understand everything in the book, but the dude was genius, all right?

00:11:13Marc:I don't even know what interrogative means.

00:11:16Marc:I got to go look that up.

00:11:18Marc:I probably should.

00:11:19Marc:I'm no good with the words.

00:11:23Marc:I use the words I know really well.

00:11:26Marc:I guess that's the blues.

00:11:27Marc:That's the thing.

00:11:28Marc:If you just know a couple licks and you fucking get behind them, they resonate.

00:11:33Marc:If you got 10 words that you really use well, fucking get behind them.

00:11:37Marc:It's all you need.

00:11:38Marc:10 words.

00:11:46Guest:Lauren Bouchard?

00:11:48Guest:Yeah.

00:11:49Guest:Do you pronounce it like French?

00:11:50Guest:I don't put any, yeah, like, spin on it.

00:11:52Guest:Yeah, like you just did.

00:11:53Guest:Bouchard?

00:11:54Guest:Yeah, you don't have to lean into it.

00:11:56Guest:No, no, not really.

00:11:58Guest:Come on, in Canada?

00:12:00Guest:In Canada, it's like Smith.

00:12:01Guest:No one gets it, you know.

00:12:02Guest:Everything's Bouchard, yeah.

00:12:03Guest:Is that true?

00:12:04Marc:Oh, yeah, it's very common.

00:12:04Marc:Is that where your family's from?

00:12:07Guest:My dad's people are originally from there.

00:12:10Guest:He came from Nashville, New Hampshire, which was basically part of French Canada when he was in the 40s or whatever.

00:12:17Guest:Oh, is that true?

00:12:18Guest:Yeah.

00:12:18Guest:Nashville, New Hampshire, other parts of Maine, they spoke French.

00:12:21Guest:Really?

00:12:21Guest:Yeah.

00:12:22Marc:Was that like trapper culture up there?

00:12:24Guest:No, it was the mills.

00:12:25Guest:It was the mill towns.

00:12:26Guest:All these French-Canadian depressive alcoholics came down.

00:12:30Guest:Sure.

00:12:31Guest:The guys who didn't want to be trappers, I guess, came down to work in the shoe factories.

00:12:36Marc:Right.

00:12:36Marc:I think that's just me generalizing.

00:12:38Marc:Everyone can't be a trapper.

00:12:39Marc:I mean, there's a lot of French-Canadians.

00:12:41Marc:Whenever someone mentions that area in French, I'm like, oh, they're out there with pelts.

00:12:46Marc:They've got to be trapping.

00:12:48Marc:What else is there to do?

00:12:49Marc:Just trap and look at snow.

00:12:51Marc:Yeah.

00:12:51Marc:But it's not true.

00:12:52Marc:I guess that's right.

00:12:53Marc:I remember those mill towns in New Hampshire.

00:12:57Marc:They were all, and many of them have, obviously they're closed, but some of them have been sort of made into apartments and fun things.

00:13:05Guest:The lucky ones are now fun things.

00:13:07Guest:Yeah, you get your museum or something.

00:13:11Marc:I have an apartment where my grandfather worked himself to death.

00:13:14Marc:Yes.

00:13:15Marc:It's great.

00:13:15Marc:Yes.

00:13:16Marc:you know that one there's that one in boston it's not you know the did you live in boston that church that they made into condos downtown like years ago i can't remember where it is maybe on exeter street or something but it was just this that's got to be why would you want to live there or hospitals yeah i know i mean they're nice but it's a little weird right you have a big window which is good yeah but somebody died in your room

00:13:40Marc:Many people.

00:13:41Marc:God knows what's happened.

00:13:42Marc:People have cried and died.

00:13:43Marc:Last rights have been given.

00:13:45Marc:Where's that episode of something?

00:13:48Guest:They've made it.

00:13:49Guest:You have the capacity to do that.

00:13:51Guest:You work with cartoons.

00:13:53Guest:You can make them do whatever you want.

00:13:55Guest:We have total control.

00:13:56Guest:Is that what you're saying?

00:13:57Marc:It is what I'm saying.

00:13:58Marc:Yeah.

00:13:58Marc:But let's go back because, you know, I watch a lot of Bob's Burgers.

00:14:03Guest:Oh, good.

00:14:04Marc:I have the first season and I know everybody's in it.

00:14:06Marc:Yeah.

00:14:07Marc:But then, like, I didn't realize, like, home movies, I know everybody.

00:14:10Marc:Yeah.

00:14:10Marc:I knew everybody and Dr. Katz.

00:14:13Marc:Have you ever met me?

00:14:14Marc:Yeah.

00:14:14Marc:Okay, so now how'd that go?

00:14:16Guest:It was great.

00:14:18Guest:What was that?

00:14:19Guest:Well, the way I remember the 90s and you was that you were the host of the thing that Dr. Katz premiered on.

00:14:28Marc:Short Attention Span Theater.

00:14:29Guest:Yeah, I don't know if I had the opportunity to meet you at that time, but I just remember you from then because you were the guy who first put the things, you introduced the shorts.

00:14:36Guest:So I saw, you know... Really?

00:14:38Guest:Was that when it came out, when I was host of that show?

00:14:41Marc:Mm-hmm.

00:14:41Marc:No kidding.

00:14:42Marc:Yeah.

00:14:42Marc:Because I remember doing Dr. Katz.

00:14:44Marc:Obviously, I was on a couple episodes.

00:14:46Marc:But I... Oh, that's interesting.

00:14:47Marc:It wasn't the box set?

00:14:48Marc:It was actually the premiere of the series?

00:14:50Guest:Yeah.

00:14:51Marc:No kidding.

00:14:52Guest:Yeah, it wasn't even the premiere of the series.

00:14:53Guest:It was the shorts that the series... Became.

00:14:57Guest:Yeah, Comedy Central ordered seven one-minute shorts.

00:14:59Guest:This is right when I started working for my boss, Tom Snyder, at the time, and Jonathan Katz.

00:15:03Guest:And he had kind of... So this is like 92?

00:15:04Guest:Pitched this.

00:15:05Guest:93, 93.

00:15:06Guest:Oh, my God.

00:15:07Guest:I had no idea that I was part of it.

00:15:09Guest:Yeah.

00:15:10Guest:Yeah.

00:15:10Guest:I helped.

00:15:11Guest:You helped.

00:15:12Guest:And then you were one of our first guests in the first season.

00:15:15Guest:We had, I think, six.

00:15:16Guest:They ordered six episodes.

00:15:17Guest:And I think if you weren't in those first six, you were in the first 12.

00:15:20Guest:And I remember you came up from New York.

00:15:23Marc:I remember sitting in the studio.

00:15:24Marc:Yeah.

00:15:25Guest:And my job at the time was to watch, know your act.

00:15:30Guest:You were in there.

00:15:31Guest:Yeah.

00:15:31Guest:I remember.

00:15:32Guest:I was a kid.

00:15:33Guest:I had more hair.

00:15:33Marc:Right.

00:15:34Marc:Yeah.

00:15:35Marc:You were the guy.

00:15:36Marc:Snyder wasn't there.

00:15:37Marc:It was me and Jonathan and the guy.

00:15:40Marc:You were the guy?

00:15:40Marc:I pressed record.

00:15:41Marc:You were the guy.

00:15:42Guest:And then I stayed up late afterwards and cut it.

00:15:44Marc:Oh, my God.

00:15:45Marc:Yeah.

00:15:46Marc:I do remember you now.

00:15:47Marc:I'm seeing you in the room.

00:15:50Marc:Were you in a booth probably?

00:15:51Marc:For some reason, I feel like you were.

00:15:52Marc:You were in the booth.

00:15:53Marc:I was in the booth and you were in the room.

00:15:55Guest:You know how this works.

00:15:55Marc:Yeah, with Jonathan.

00:15:56Marc:Yeah.

00:15:57Marc:Okay.

00:15:58Marc:Oh, that's right.

00:15:59Marc:Holy shit, it's all coming together.

00:16:02Marc:No, it seems to be getting around again because that internet joke, do you like dogs?

00:16:07Marc:Like the irony of the fact that I basically in that joke was saying, the internet's like CB radios.

00:16:12Marc:They didn't last very long.

00:16:14Marc:I've been on the internet.

00:16:15Marc:It's just a couple of guys are, do you like dogs?

00:16:17Marc:Yes, I do like dogs.

00:16:19Marc:That's going around.

00:16:21Marc:Yeah, it was going around.

00:16:22Marc:They're like, how do you feel about that now?

00:16:24Marc:The guy who just made his mid-career success on the internet that you condescended.

00:16:31Marc:I must have been the only idiot at that time that really saw no future in it.

00:16:34Marc:I didn't.

00:16:35Marc:You didn't?

00:16:35Marc:I didn't.

00:16:36Guest:Before I worked on Dr. Katz, I was installing computer cable at various companies around the Boston area, like Digital Corporation.

00:16:44Guest:And I remember...

00:16:45Guest:pulling cable and networking all these computers.

00:16:48Guest:And I said to my boss at the time, I said, I don't get it.

00:16:51Guest:What is it for?

00:16:52Guest:And he said, so that people can talk to each other.

00:16:54Guest:And I said, what are they talking about?

00:16:56Guest:And he said, I don't know.

00:16:57Guest:I guess they're talking about the network.

00:16:59Marc:Yeah, the network.

00:17:00Guest:Yeah, the network.

00:17:01Guest:Is it up?

00:17:01Guest:Is it running?

00:17:02Guest:And I said, well, that's never going to last.

00:17:04Marc:How long is that conversation going?

00:17:06Marc:Seems to be working.

00:17:07Guest:OK, I guess we'll meet you in the hall.

00:17:09Marc:That was the whole thing.

00:17:11Marc:I just never saw the possibilities of it.

00:17:13Marc:Same.

00:17:14Marc:when you how did you get to involve with animation i mean we're how did that all happen i mean you grew up where new hampshire no i was in boston mostly i was born in new york and raised in the boston area what part what part of what boston oh i lived in medford and i went to school in cambridge medford yeah yeah and where did you go to school in cambridge where yeah i went to this grade school called shady hill where my dad was an art teacher for 35 years

00:17:38Marc:Your dad was our teacher.

00:17:40Guest:And this connects to your question.

00:17:43Guest:So at this school, it's a great private school.

00:17:46Guest:I'm lucky to go because my dad was a teacher there.

00:17:49Guest:And there's a science teacher that I have in, I believe, fifth, sixth, and seventh grade.

00:17:55Guest:He leaves, starts a software company.

00:17:59Guest:Educational software.

00:18:00Guest:As part of that, he's doing a little bit of animation.

00:18:03Guest:I bump into him in 1993.

00:18:05Guest:I'm 23.

00:18:06Guest:I've completely lost my way.

00:18:08Guest:I didn't go to college.

00:18:09Guest:I'm bartending.

00:18:10Guest:I'm worried that I have made a huge mistake.

00:18:13Guest:With everything.

00:18:14Guest:I was really aware of the possibility that I had screwed up, that I should have gone to college.

00:18:19Guest:I should have finished high school.

00:18:20Guest:I just had a little lost youth period, and I was at the nervous end of that.

00:18:25Guest:Yeah.

00:18:26Guest:and I bump into that guy, Tom Snyder, who had been my science teacher, and he said, I just started doing this animation thing on the side.

00:18:33Guest:I'm sure nothing will come of it, but we got these shorts on Comedy Central.

00:18:36Guest:Do you still draw?

00:18:37Guest:And I lied, and I said, yes.

00:18:39Guest:And he said, well, I don't even know if I have a job.

00:18:41Guest:I don't know what it would pay, but come by the office.

00:18:44Guest:So I knew, I knew at that second

00:18:47Guest:that I was getting lucky.

00:18:49Marc:Right.

00:18:50Guest:I knew that when I went to talk to him, and I understood immediately that this was the big chance, the sort of, like, winning the lottery type moment, and never, ever hesitated.

00:19:03Guest:From that moment on, I threw myself into it as if I had been given, like, a divine message, you are going to be in animation.

00:19:12Guest:Yeah.

00:19:12Guest:And I did, I started, I remember I had this memory too of like, I was, I never wore my seatbelt back then.

00:19:17Guest:I remember saying, you know, I'm going to wear my seatbelt.

00:19:20Marc:I want to live.

00:19:21Marc:Well, that's a, that's sort of a law thing.

00:19:24Guest:Yeah.

00:19:24Guest:At the time, they didn't make a big deal of it at the time.

00:19:26Guest:And also it's a twenties thing.

00:19:27Guest:I think when you're in your twenties, you start realizing those sorts of things.

00:19:30Guest:But it also happened to be that I just, you know, I connected.

00:19:34Marc:You were getting a lot of messages from God, you know, wear the seatbelt.

00:19:38Marc:Here's a guy.

00:19:38Marc:This is it.

00:19:40Marc:This is your doorway, my son.

00:19:41Marc:Yeah.

00:19:42Marc:Yeah.

00:19:42Marc:You will now use squiggle lines.

00:19:44Guest:Yes.

00:19:47Marc:I'm fascinated with the fact that your father was an art teacher because that means there's very little room to judge harshly a child's choices.

00:19:57Marc:Right.

00:19:58Marc:How so?

00:19:59Marc:Well, I mean, like if he's an art teacher, you know, he appreciates art.

00:20:02Marc:He obviously appreciates kids learning about things and expressing themselves.

00:20:06Marc:I don't see that as the kind of father that would say, don't ever do art.

00:20:11Marc:You know, go, you know, go to a school and learn a trade.

00:20:15Guest:No, that was never, those words were never spoken.

00:20:18Guest:He was an art teacher.

00:20:20Guest:He is and was, through the whole thing, an artist, a real artist, like bohemian, shaggy haired, you know, thinks all day and makes art.

00:20:33Guest:Still.

00:20:33Guest:Oh yeah, more than ever now because he's retired.

00:20:35Marc:Well, it's beautiful.

00:20:37Marc:I love hearing that.

00:20:39Marc:Was there a point, though, like, were you aware of the evolution?

00:20:43Marc:So how old are you?

00:20:44Marc:You're a little younger than me?

00:20:45Guest:Yeah, 42.

00:20:47Marc:So he was an art teacher for 35 years.

00:20:48Marc:Yeah.

00:20:49Marc:So you didn't know him at the point where he was like, you know, I'm just going to fucking do this.

00:20:53Guest:Yeah.

00:20:54Guest:I knew him as, my parents were always doing their thing.

00:21:01Guest:My mother was a writer.

00:21:03Guest:She died when I was a teenager, but my father and my mother, all I ever knew for a model of a parent and adult was an artist.

00:21:12Marc:I love that.

00:21:13Marc:Yeah.

00:21:14Marc:You're lucky.

00:21:15Marc:Yeah.

00:21:15Marc:So how'd you end up getting fucked up?

00:21:17Marc:My mother died.

00:21:18Marc:And that was that?

00:21:19Guest:Yeah, yeah.

00:21:20Guest:My dad was heroic and great in how he handled it, you know, raising me and my sister.

00:21:27Guest:I was 14.

00:21:28Guest:What happened?

00:21:29Guest:She got cancer.

00:21:30Guest:It was pretty fast.

00:21:31Guest:This is in, you know, 84 and I think...

00:21:35Guest:If she had the same diagnosis now, I think she would have been fine.

00:21:40Guest:I feel like people survive colon and liver cancer now, but then you'd die.

00:21:46Guest:If it got into your liver, there's nothing they could do.

00:21:49Guest:How old were you?

00:21:50Guest:I was 14.

00:21:51Guest:That's horrible.

00:21:52Guest:I was 13 when she was sick, and my sister was 10, and she was 11 when she died.

00:21:57Guest:It was bad.

00:21:57Guest:It was really bad.

00:21:58Guest:And what was bad about it was...

00:22:02Guest:the next few years, the reverberations, it takes a long time to, um, to actually, uh, absorb that.

00:22:11Guest:And so for some reason, you know, we, we could sort of be okay for a year and then I, you know, start slipping later.

00:22:17Guest:Right.

00:22:18Guest:And I started having this very distinct, um, feeling that, that homework was stupid.

00:22:23Guest:Right.

00:22:23Guest:And I know a lot of people have that feeling, but I acted on it.

00:22:26Guest:And I think that's one of those things that like, it's a sort of, uh, a dividing line, you know, because of who, uh,

00:22:32Guest:who my dad was and how he was dealing with it.

00:22:35Guest:He's just like, yeah, don't do your homework if you don't want to do your homework.

00:22:38Guest:Which is, again, fine.

00:22:39Guest:I think I actually like the choices he made, but he let me not do my homework, and so I started failing in school, and at a certain point, I just said, I also don't feel like going to school.

00:22:49Guest:And he said, yeah, do what you want to do.

00:22:51Marc:So do you, like, in retrospect, think that the grief was paralyzing?

00:22:56Marc:Like it just came later?

00:22:58Marc:Yeah.

00:22:58Marc:And you sort of repressed it, and you just got existentially depressed.

00:23:03Guest:Yeah, yeah, it was that.

00:23:06Guest:And it wasn't even like I was aware of being depressed.

00:23:09Guest:I was actually full of excitement.

00:23:10Guest:I was really into girls, and I had all this sort of sense of potential of my own romantic ideas about what my life would be like.

00:23:18Guest:I thought maybe I would, you know...

00:23:19Guest:get a bass and drive to new orleans and be in a band like i had a lot of ideas but it was ungrounded you wouldn't have met tom snyder no you'd been a bar in new orleans no exactly that would have been a whole different story yeah you ever think about that story all the time all the time

00:23:37Marc:just you're still sort of playing gigs around you know katrina benefits yeah yeah yeah washing dishes somewhere it's a good job watching treme saying like this doesn't seem like i'm what i'm living yeah did you ever get like um

00:23:54Marc:Like, I don't know what it's like to lose a parent, but I can imagine that, you know, that sort of like the void, the absence of somebody who was there all the time.

00:24:03Marc:And then just it's interesting to me that three years down the line that everything just it wasn't even a darkness.

00:24:09Marc:It was just sort of like, this is it.

00:24:11Marc:Yeah.

00:24:12Marc:Right.

00:24:12Marc:Like, this is life.

00:24:13Marc:Yeah.

00:24:13Marc:I'm going to do this.

00:24:14Guest:You don't know the wheels are coming off.

00:24:17Guest:And so, yeah, you think you're in the middle of making choices.

00:24:20Guest:But, you know, you're making bad choices.

00:24:21Guest:And, you know, my sister did the opposite.

00:24:23Guest:Or not the opposite.

00:24:24Guest:That's not true.

00:24:25Guest:She also kind of stopped doing her schoolwork.

00:24:27Guest:I guess that's just... Yeah, it's just hard to do because you sort of... What the...

00:24:31Guest:point it's hard to buy in i think when you get when you're in that proximity to uh to to loss i mean at that age i mean how else are you supposed to process that right because you don't want to know that people die especially your parents and yeah so she kind of stayed inside i remember she got on a subscription service to harlequin um romance novels and she was getting six of them a week and that that's what she was doing for a long time just sitting in a room reading harlequin romances yeah

00:24:59Marc:Yeah, I completely understand that.

00:25:01Marc:I made the mistake of tweeting something last night that I should have thought through.

00:25:06Marc:I just said, fuck zombies, fuck vampires, fuck werewolves.

00:25:15Marc:Why don't you all fucking grow up and be afraid of real things?

00:25:18Marc:Oh, boy.

00:25:19Marc:But that's the thing is that you forget is that we're all afraid of real things.

00:25:25Marc:These function as they disarm it.

00:25:29Marc:They manifest it in different ways, something we can handle.

00:25:33Marc:And okay, so okay, you drop out of high school.

00:25:37Marc:How do you do that?

00:25:39Marc:I'd always heard of people doing it.

00:25:40Marc:You just stop going.

00:25:42Guest:The way I did it, and this is what I would recommend if anybody wants to follow in this particular.

00:25:46Guest:Please, kids.

00:25:47Marc:Yeah, if you're listening.

00:25:48Marc:I get a lot of kids that don't know what they want to do emailing me.

00:25:51Marc:So Lauren Bouchard is going to help you with ruining your life and rolling the dice on meeting a Tom Snyder.

00:25:57Guest:Yeah, that's it.

00:25:58Guest:So yeah, you stop going to the classes you don't want to go to, and you go to the classes that you do want to go to, which in my case was like ceramics, and I forget what else.

00:26:07Guest:painting uh yeah yeah i did a lot of drawing classes yeah and um and they will notice yeah and they don't like that yeah um the headmaster this is a small private school again so this is still the school your father's teaching no no it's a private high school in boston i i got which one commonwealth school i'm embarrassed to say i got a scholarship there which was so nice of them it was partly as a result of my dad being a teacher and kind of you know these

00:26:34Guest:They were trying to take care of me.

00:26:36Guest:You know, there was a sense of like, this is a kid who, you know, his mother died and he needs to go to a good school and couldn't afford the tuition.

00:26:44Guest:And I'm embarrassed that I, you know, kind of didn't appreciate that at the time, what that meant to get a scholarship.

00:26:52Marc:So the other school only went through middle school?

00:26:54Guest:Yeah, it went up to ninth.

00:26:55Marc:Okay, yeah.

00:26:56Guest:So, yeah, I go to high school, I do okay for a year, and then things start kind of making less sense to me about why I should pay attention.

00:27:05Marc:Was there music involved?

00:27:06Guest:Yeah.

00:27:07Guest:Yeah, there was a lot of music involved.

00:27:09Guest:I was really excited about punk at the time, partly because the kids ahead of me were.

00:27:13Guest:The great ahead of me included Evan Dando and the original members of the Lemonheads.

00:27:19Marc:He went to your school.

00:27:20Guest:Yeah, and they were great guys.

00:27:21Guest:They were just fun, and they had sort of a lot of...

00:27:25Guest:They threw great parties.

00:27:27Guest:It was just a lot of... Hanging out with them felt like you were really hanging out with them.

00:27:31Marc:I've sort of heard stories about him.

00:27:33Marc:What have I heard?

00:27:34Marc:That he's a fun guy, but not a think tank.

00:27:37Guest:No, he's really smart.

00:27:38Guest:I actually think that's... I don't know.

00:27:41Guest:That's a shtick?

00:27:41Guest:Yeah, I think it might be.

00:27:44Guest:Here's how things were going for me in school.

00:27:46Guest:When he was a senior, I was a junior, and we were...

00:27:50Guest:hanging out a lot and and i i thought doing our best to kind of blow off school and at a certain point i realized he was going to graduate and he was doing fine yeah and i felt like hey you've been sneaking your work yeah i've been blowing it off i'm in trouble yeah i'm not barely gonna make it into the next grade and you're going to college he had he had like uh he told you man yeah

00:28:15Marc:Yeah, he's the guy that threw you under the bus.

00:28:19Guest:I felt that way, and I regret it because that's not right.

00:28:23Guest:You shouldn't accuse another kid of betraying you by doing his homework.

00:28:27Marc:Well, I hated those kids, though.

00:28:28Marc:The kids that were like, hey, rock and roll, and then they're like, I got A's.

00:28:31Marc:I graduated with honors.

00:28:32Marc:I'm putting all of my effort into fucking up my life, and you're lying.

00:28:38Guest:Yeah.

00:28:38Guest:I have to say, I think there are people who can do both.

00:28:42Guest:They can party all night and then somehow turn in a paper that is well-read.

00:28:47Marc:I don't think I could write a paper now.

00:28:49Marc:Yeah, same.

00:28:50Marc:I could never figure it out.

00:28:51Marc:It was like some code I couldn't crack.

00:28:53Guest:I think I could have if I had not decided that it was all bullshit.

00:29:01Marc:So you were into punk, but the Lemonheads weren't a band yet, were they?

00:29:05Guest:Yeah, they were.

00:29:06Guest:They released their first record in their senior year.

00:29:08Guest:In high school?

00:29:09Guest:Yeah.

00:29:09Guest:I was, I was very, I was proud of them and really excited.

00:29:12Guest:And it, and it also, it sort of, I think a lot of that potent, that feeling of potential sort of felt like it had a little halo around it.

00:29:18Guest:I was like, I'm friends with him.

00:29:19Guest:I'm in the inner circle.

00:29:21Guest:I could probably make a record too.

00:29:22Guest:I don't play any instruments, but I bet I can make a record.

00:29:24Guest:That's not important, man.

00:29:25Guest:I'm living the life.

00:29:28Yeah.

00:29:28Marc:All right.

00:29:29Marc:So, okay.

00:29:29Marc:So you stopped going to practical classes.

00:29:32Guest:Yeah.

00:29:32Guest:So, yeah.

00:29:33Guest:At a certain point in my senior year, the headmaster called me into his office and he said, I think you want me to kick you out.

00:29:39Guest:And I'm not going to do that.

00:29:43Guest:And that was the last day I went.

00:29:44Guest:Really?

00:29:45Guest:I thought, you know what?

00:29:46Guest:He's right.

00:29:46Guest:I've been waiting for somebody to make a move here.

00:29:49Guest:I've been like blowing off classical, you know, two classes a week or whatever I was doing.

00:29:54Guest:I'd sleep in every morning.

00:29:55Guest:And again, you know, my dad, God bless him.

00:29:57Guest:He was...

00:29:58Marc:okay do what you do what you feel you got to do but but you don't have any uh sort of not necessarily regrets about that like you know i know your dad's a great guy and my parents were okay when it came to letting me do things but one of the few regrets i have in retrospect was that somebody didn't say what the fuck is wrong with you right just you know lock in yeah you know

00:30:20Guest:I have two sons now, and so obviously I do see it through a different lens.

00:30:24Guest:And what I imagine I might say to them if they were going through something like I went through is, go to college.

00:30:34Guest:Do your work so you can go to college, and here's why.

00:30:36Guest:I think you're going to get incredibly laid.

00:30:40Guest:I think you're going to love the girls' situation in college.

00:30:45Guest:Because I, you know,

00:30:48Guest:I wasn't like completely without access to girls when I didn't go to college, but I became aware that all my friends went off to college and I became aware of the immense amount of partying that they were doing.

00:30:59Guest:And I, that was when the beginnings of regret kicked in.

00:31:03Guest:They just knew a lot more people.

00:31:04Guest:You know, I was working.

00:31:05Guest:I went into work in a nightclub.

00:31:06Guest:Right.

00:31:06Marc:And they didn't have that hanging over them.

00:31:08Marc:Yeah.

00:31:08Marc:Like I guess on some level you're going to work in a nightclub and you're realizing like,

00:31:12Marc:They got to party any time.

00:31:14Marc:They're in a structure that enables them to party any time.

00:31:20Guest:They're free.

00:31:21Guest:And I think that's great.

00:31:24Guest:I think kids, 20-year-olds should have that.

00:31:27Guest:And I kind of miss that.

00:31:29Guest:And so I think that's how I'll help my kids do their homework.

00:31:32Marc:Is the promise a pussy?

00:31:34Guest:Yeah.

00:31:35Guest:I mean, I'll say it in a nice way.

00:31:37Guest:That doesn't- Not going to show him pictures?

00:31:39Guest:No.

00:31:39Marc:Just waiting for you.

00:31:40Guest:Right.

00:31:40Guest:No pictures.

00:31:41Guest:But just I'll try to paint a picture of college as something that's worth working towards.

00:31:47Guest:And that's what it may be I wish my dad had done for me.

00:31:49Guest:But he didn't go to college either.

00:31:51Guest:So he didn't know either.

00:31:52Marc:But was there ever a sense when you talked to your father about knowing that he was an artist and that he was a, what was he, a painter or what was his meaning?

00:31:58Guest:Yeah, he was a painter.

00:31:59Marc:So he was a great painter.

00:32:01Guest:Yeah, he still is.

00:32:01Marc:Yeah.

00:32:02Marc:But was there ever a point in your life where you process the fact that there might be disappointment in his spirit about how his life went?

00:32:11Marc:I mean, painting's a tough racket.

00:32:12Marc:It is.

00:32:14Yeah.

00:32:14Guest:no he didn't play it that way he didn't play it that he didn't feel it i think only in the last few years because he reads a lot and he thinks a lot and i think he's aware of the extent to which the visual arts have been marginalized in the conversation uh the sort of broader cultural conversation i think when he in the 60s

00:32:37Guest:I think he felt like being a painter was being in the heart of what art could be.

00:32:43Guest:And so I think he felt like he was like there at ground zero.

00:32:46Guest:In New York.

00:32:47Guest:In New York at first and then in Boston.

00:32:49Guest:And I think he now sees like, oh, wow, that didn't last that long.

00:32:55Guest:Like the relevance of painting in the bigger cultural conversation kind of got pushed to the side.

00:33:01Marc:Well, yeah, well, even in the academic conversation, I mean, like, you start to realize when you read books about that type of artwork or, you know, the guys that do the painting.

00:33:13Marc:Like, you know, they're in there sacrificing their life and, you know, sweating over these canvases.

00:33:17Marc:And if they're good, it looks finished when it's done.

00:33:20Marc:He had a plan, and he seems to be expressing himself.

00:33:24Marc:But not unlike any other business structure, you need these patrons.

00:33:29Marc:You need the critics to deliver you to the rich people.

00:33:32Marc:And then once the rich people enjoy spending money on your paintings, then the critics return to it and say, we've got a star.

00:33:39Marc:And then a museum says, well, if that rich guy bought that, then maybe we should own one.

00:33:43Marc:That's a really tight, tight road to it.

00:33:46Marc:He traveled.

00:33:47Guest:It is.

00:33:47Guest:He became really disillusioned with that, and it's interesting because it's a conversation he and I have now as it pertains to my work, because I often think of what we're doing, making cartoons, as not even remotely approaching art, capital A. It's craft.

00:34:04Guest:I think of it as entertainment is a craft, and I think of the author, or in the case of something like this, obviously, the many authors, the big collaborative unit that makes the thing.

00:34:18Guest:There's the work, and then the last piece is the audience and the critical response.

00:34:23Guest:And he kind of like...

00:34:25Guest:was, I think, sort of raised on and kind of focused on a two-point system, where it's the artist and the work.

00:34:33Marc:Yes.

00:34:34Guest:And how that evolved.

00:34:35Marc:I bleed, you buy.

00:34:36Guest:Yeah, or just no one buys, but I continue to try and kind of hone my ability to say what I'm trying to say and make work that maybe someday someone will appreciate, maybe not.

00:34:47Marc:It's very interesting to me painting.

00:34:50Marc:Yeah.

00:34:50Marc:In the sense that... We're definitely going to talk about animation, but that...

00:34:54Marc:you know for all my life my mother was a a painter too and she was an artist and and kind of i watched her sort of lose her way she was a substitute art teacher and uh i used to remember she would go to classes with the little projects but you know she was a woman who in you know in her early 40s went back to get her masters in painting and just couldn't handle the the confidence she didn't have the confidence

00:35:17Marc:to be there with all these young people.

00:35:19Marc:And she sort of buckled and went on a search for meaning other places, real estate, travel agents.

00:35:27Guest:Where everyone goes.

00:35:28Marc:Yes, flattering blank sweat outfits with paint and selling them at a boutique.

00:35:36Marc:She became the Jackson Pollock of hoodies, basically.

00:35:39Marc:But, but the, you know, but for all my life, you know, I would go to museums and I would stand before canvases and I would read, you know, I tried to read the, like, you know, the Gombrich book and, you know, art and illusion.

00:35:50Marc:And, you know, I studied this stuff and I still couldn't quite wrap around, wrap my brain around the significance of it.

00:35:55Marc:Cause even by the time we were kids, it's relevance had drifted.

00:35:59Marc:Yeah.

00:36:00Marc:Okay, so enter animation.

00:36:02Marc:When you were doodling, when you were in high school, were you a compulsive drawer?

00:36:07Marc:Were you one of those guys where your notebooks covered?

00:36:11Guest:I wasn't quite that guy, but I have always...

00:36:15Guest:Basically dabbled in the... Here's how the animation thing worked, and here's why I knew when I met Tom Snyder in Harvard Square in 1993 that I was getting... What bar were you working at?

00:36:28Guest:The Roxy downtown Boston.

00:36:29Marc:I know that place.

00:36:30Marc:It was on that block with the rest of them, right?

00:36:32Guest:Yeah, yeah.

00:36:32Guest:It was in the theater district.

00:36:33Marc:Oh, man.

00:36:36Marc:It wasn't on Lansdowne Street.

00:36:37Guest:No, no, it wasn't on Lansdowne.

00:36:39Guest:The Roxy was kind of like the theater district version of some of those Lansdowne places.

00:36:42Guest:It was a little dressy-uppy when I worked there.

00:36:45Guest:It's still there.

00:36:46Guest:But at the time, they kind of made it into a dress-up date kind of place.

00:36:51Guest:They had a swing band.

00:36:52Marc:Oh, Sam Seager.

00:36:54Marc:Go ahead, yeah.

00:36:55Marc:They had a swing band.

00:36:56Guest:Yeah, it was a swing band.

00:36:58Guest:It was a great place to work.

00:36:59Guest:I got to say, it was five years there.

00:37:00Guest:I started on The Door, and then I worked my way up to the bar, and I'm glad I did it.

00:37:04Guest:What the hell was Tom Snyder doing there?

00:37:06Guest:No, I didn't meet him at the bar.

00:37:07Guest:I met him.

00:37:08Guest:He was going to a funeral in Harvard.

00:37:11Guest:He was passing through Harvard Square in a seersucker suit going to a funeral, and I was coming out of Charette's Art Supply or something like that.

00:37:18Guest:He was, it was just random.

00:37:21Guest:I, you know, I think I was bending over to pick something up in the street.

00:37:23Guest:And he's like, there's my wayward student.

00:37:25Marc:Yeah.

00:37:25Marc:I wonder what happened to him.

00:37:27Marc:Yeah.

00:37:27Marc:Hey, buddy.

00:37:28Marc:Yeah.

00:37:28Marc:All right.

00:37:28Marc:So, okay.

00:37:29Guest:So let's, let's get back to, uh, to where we were going, which was, uh, animation was on my radar because obviously the, the Simpsons had come out and was at the time just beginning to kind of be very, very exciting.

00:37:41Marc:Define.

00:37:41Marc:Yeah.

00:37:42Marc:Yeah.

00:37:42Marc:Define... The genre of modern animation.

00:37:44Guest:Yeah.

00:37:45Marc:Yeah.

00:37:45Guest:And I was definitely a fan.

00:37:47Guest:My memory is it was on Thursday nights originally, and this was back when we set our VCRs, you know, and I have this memory of just stacking up, you know, taping every Simpsons episode and watching with my girlfriend at the time.

00:37:57Guest:I also... Because I worked, so I had to tape them.

00:37:59Guest:Right.

00:38:00Guest:And I also... Were you like this?

00:38:02Guest:This is amazing.

00:38:03Yeah.

00:38:03Guest:I was.

00:38:04Guest:Yeah.

00:38:04Marc:And it wasn't something I thought I could do, but I was really, really excited at how much cultural ground they could cover comedically.

00:38:12Marc:I mean, what was it?

00:38:13Marc:Was it the art itself or was it just the freedom that, you know, when you work with characters and animation that you can say anything?

00:38:22Guest:I think it was that I knew it had been primarily a kid's medium, and I had grown up loving certain Disney movies and certain Saturday morning cartoons.

00:38:32Marc:Like which ones?

00:38:33Guest:Well, I had pretty specific ones.

00:38:37Guest:The original one for me was this little scene Disney movie called Robin Hood and then Jungle Book.

00:38:42Guest:Those were the ones that were considered almost in the doldrums for Disney, but I thought they were...

00:38:49Marc:the bear and the monkey were great right yeah the music's fantastic the voices were fantastic do you remember that that cover record that came out oh where everyone covered it when like los lobos and tom waits tom waits did i think like the the i can't remember which one but it was great record you could yes i i want to be like you and bear necessities i think anybody could cover them and sound good yeah right those are the two yeah one was the monkey and one was the bear right and and louis primo was the was the

00:39:15Guest:yeah orangutan yeah king louis yeah yeah so okay so i was raised on those and i think what happens when you see the simpsons in the you know early 90s the first thing you think is oh my god they're talking to me as a as a 20 something using the medium that i grew up on like there was something that was so exciting that the like that they could make such sophisticated jokes and dialogue sure they just dropped a needle into your mental groove yeah and you're like we're we can still do this yes

00:39:43Marc:Did you have Warner Brothers ones, too, that you liked?

00:39:45Guest:Yes, loved, loved Bugs Bunny.

00:39:48Guest:Loved it all through my life, and then sort of, you know, as a pot smoker, you sort of rediscover Looney Tunes, I feel like, you know, and all of a sudden, you know, Daffy Duck is also really, really funny.

00:39:57Marc:This is, again, another lecture for your kids.

00:39:59Marc:Yeah.

00:40:00Marc:All right.

00:40:02Marc:There's no reason.

00:40:04Marc:Have you thought about that stuff?

00:40:05Marc:No.

00:40:06Guest:I mean, again, four and two.

00:40:08Marc:All right.

00:40:08Marc:You have to have time.

00:40:09Marc:It's going to be new drugs by then.

00:40:10Marc:The pot's going to be so good.

00:40:11Marc:It's going to be, you know, they're going to pot breakfast cereal by the time they're old enough to take it in.

00:40:17Marc:that one's easy for me i think i'll just tell him like enjoy it but don't do it so much that you lose focus on your life yeah yeah don't live the life of the mind yeah that will uh cause eventually yeah where you do not get out of it yeah hey pretty soon i'm gonna do that thing then i'm working on i'm still working on yes so all right well that's amazing so then the simpsons you come from uh but how about comic books and do the comic book thing

00:40:43Guest:A little.

00:40:44Guest:A little.

00:40:44Guest:Not that much.

00:40:46Guest:I wasn't passionate, but I got it.

00:40:48Guest:I definitely got how drawing and writing went together.

00:40:52Guest:And I was interested in doing that myself.

00:40:54Guest:It was, again, part of my panic that I was going through.

00:40:56Guest:I was taking fiction classes at the Adult Ed Center in Cambridge, and I just was like, I've got to get back on some kind of track where I can do what I really want to do.

00:41:06Guest:Yeah.

00:41:06Guest:I knew that bartending wasn't going to be that fulfilling.

00:41:09Marc:But you weren't quite sure what you really wanted to do.

00:41:11Marc:Right.

00:41:11Marc:So it was either going to be writing or art.

00:41:13Marc:You were just following in your parents' footsteps.

00:41:14Guest:Yep.

00:41:15Guest:I was combining them and music and audio.

00:41:20Guest:I had always had a four-track recorder in my garage.

00:41:23Guest:I had always tried to kind of record myself and my sister and occasionally other people.

00:41:28Guest:not really in bands when I was a kid, but really interested in making these recordings.

00:41:33Marc:Of stuff.

00:41:34Guest:Of songs, yeah.

00:41:35Guest:And I started to sense that those three things did have a place together, which was animation.

00:41:41Guest:And that was like a few weeks before I ran into Tom Snyder.

00:41:44Marc:So everything just sort of converged.

00:41:46Marc:The gift was given.

00:41:47Marc:You read the leaves properly.

00:41:50Marc:This was not coincidence.

00:41:52Marc:This was not mere synchronicity.

00:41:54Marc:This is your white light moment.

00:41:56Guest:I knew it then and I knew it every day thereafter and have felt it every day thereafter since.

00:42:02Guest:That's a good story.

00:42:03Guest:I feel lucky all the time.

00:42:07Marc:Let's talk about this difference in entering the world that you did enter at the beginning, this idea of art and craft.

00:42:16Marc:Because it's hard to, like I always try, it's very difficult when people ask, is comedy an art?

00:42:22Marc:I mean, obviously film, and certainly what you're doing is called an art.

00:42:27Marc:It's called an art.

00:42:28Marc:And I think that there are defining texts that will justify that.

00:42:34Marc:But you've decided for yourself that animation and what you do is a craft.

00:42:38Guest:Yeah, it's helpful to me to invite in the audience.

00:42:43Guest:And I think that's, for me, the difference between art and craft.

00:42:46Guest:Art has to alienate you first?

00:42:48Guest:No, it's that art is... I think of art as being really internally creative.

00:42:54Guest:You have to go deep on yourself and then kind of...

00:42:59Guest:to bring out something that feels like it has great meaning and value.

00:43:04Guest:Whereas I think craft is you put something out there, you see people like it, you adjust.

00:43:08Guest:You put something more out there, you see people like it, you adjust.

00:43:10Guest:You acknowledge the interaction between the audience and the work as much as you acknowledge your own relationship to the work.

00:43:18Guest:So I always try to make something that I like and that I'm proud of.

00:43:20Guest:And if no one had seen it, I'd still make it.

00:43:23Guest:But...

00:43:24Guest:I do like a lot that people see it.

00:43:28Guest:I like that it goes on TV.

00:43:29Guest:I wouldn't want to do this if it wasn't hitting an audience and then if I wasn't hearing back from that audience.

00:43:34Guest:I like making people, you know, comedy, obviously, the critical component, I would think, or I don't know, maybe there's sort of comedy that transcends this, but I think the critical component is laughter.

00:43:47Guest:You're measuring your success by the laughs.

00:43:50Marc:Yeah.

00:43:50Marc:I'm just learning that.

00:43:53Yeah.

00:43:53Marc:After 25 years in the business, I'm starting to realize that maybe getting a few laughs might be the way it go.

00:44:02Marc:I'm not sure what the fuck I was doing for 20 years.

00:44:04Marc:I was angry, people were uncomfortable, but now the laugh component is really starting to resonate with me.

00:44:09Marc:It takes what it takes.

00:44:11Guest:Yeah, yeah.

00:44:13Guest:It's a process.

00:44:14Marc:But I mean, I think that when I think about craft and putting it into the context of what you're explaining, I mean, craft is, in my mind, practical art.

00:44:22Marc:Yes.

00:44:23Marc:Something that you can repeat by a skill set that functions a certain way.

00:44:28Marc:Yeah.

00:44:28Marc:Functional art.

00:44:29Guest:Yeah.

00:44:30Guest:I think often of guys making furniture.

00:44:32Marc:Yeah.

00:44:32Guest:I think it's like not unlike what we do.

00:44:35Marc:that's but that's a little bizarre because only in the sense that you know the simpsons you know i i would say that there's probably if you were to ask a simpsons freak which you may be like you know oddly i'm not i don't i'm not a big cartoon guy yeah but i i when i watch them i'm happy i but i'm finding that i'm not an anything guy you know i'm so wrapped up in my own bullshit that like i judge things and i'm like oh who's gonna watch cartoons and he sent me in front of him and i'm like

00:45:00Marc:that's so cute and i feel happy i'm crying now yeah uh but i would say that people would argue that there there were chunks of simpsons that were relevant enough to be considered to transcend the craft of animation and be art yeah why not i mean i don't take i but you're saying that wasn't the intention necessarily

00:45:17Guest:Yeah, or at least I find it helpful to me not to aspire to make art, rather to aspire to make a well-made piece of work that I call craft.

00:45:27Guest:It just helps me stay.

00:45:28Guest:I think the humility of the act is important in a way, too.

00:45:33Guest:You sort of say... Sure.

00:45:34Marc:You don't want to sit there going, I'm a genius.

00:45:36Marc:Yeah.

00:45:36Guest:they're good this is going to be so this is going to stand the test of time and no one's going to understand it for years yeah anything like that and and you know and that's that's how you make stuff when you're a little bit younger i think and it's and and some people are good enough uh my dad included to keep going and make that stuff it's real they're really making they're really having an important dialogue with their own development basically

00:45:59Marc:Well, I think some people it sounds like your dad has come to terms with that.

00:46:03Marc:You know, he finds joy and meaning in doing it.

00:46:06Marc:Yes.

00:46:06Marc:And that the idea of fame, which I think if it's not combined, you know, the drive for fame, if it's not combined with ambition is a lot of times childish.

00:46:18Marc:Oh, yeah.

00:46:19Guest:Fame is probably that's probably a toxic goal that would poison everything.

00:46:24Marc:Could you drive around the streets here and just yell that maybe get a megaphone and drive up and down every block in Hollywood through the valley going fame is toxic.

00:46:35Guest:there's no reason to want and not only is it going to cause you pain but everybody will pay for it yeah yeah i mean it's true i think i like you know we were at the creative arts emmys last night and i like the behind the scenes people because of course they're not striving for fame every hairdresser and every light director is doing it because they like the work they're never going to get famous they're never going to get famous they get to go like famous people

00:46:59Guest:They might like to go to bed with famous people.

00:47:02Guest:They might like to be around them.

00:47:04Guest:And who doesn't?

00:47:05Guest:But I think there's a great and important difference between wanting a bigger audience, which I think is perfectly reasonable.

00:47:16Guest:A great goal versus wanting fame.

00:47:21Marc:That's well, that's an interesting that's that's interesting because I don't know that I ever thought about it like that because, you know, I'm at a point with my own life where, you know, I'm starting to get an audience and I just like that.

00:47:30Marc:I have enough to to earn a living.

00:47:32Marc:Yeah.

00:47:32Marc:I mean, that's really what it's come down to.

00:47:34Marc:I'm not I'm not even sure that I could handle fame as people, you know, as people fantasize about.

00:47:41Marc:Right.

00:47:41Marc:You know, like, I want to be the most famous.

00:47:43Marc:I'm like, that's too much pressure.

00:47:45Marc:Whatever the next sentence is, I want to be the most famous anything.

00:47:49Marc:It's causing me anxiety.

00:47:52Marc:Yeah.

00:47:52Marc:Who the hell wants that response?

00:47:53Guest:Who wants that?

00:47:54Guest:Right.

00:47:54Marc:I don't know why people want that.

00:47:55Marc:I'd like to be famous to the people that like me.

00:47:57Marc:Yes.

00:47:57Marc:That's good.

00:47:58Marc:Yep.

00:47:59Marc:I'd like to find more of them.

00:48:00Guest:Yeah.

00:48:00Guest:How about, yeah, just represent something good to the people that watch the show.

00:48:05Guest:That enjoy what you do.

00:48:06Guest:Or that enjoy the work.

00:48:07Guest:Yeah, you don't have to be anything to them other than the embodiment of the thing that they like.

00:48:14Guest:I like that guy because I love that show.

00:48:17Marc:Right.

00:48:18Marc:Well, I think that's good.

00:48:19Marc:I think that's helpful.

00:48:20Marc:So let's go back to the first, let's move through the work.

00:48:25Marc:So Dr. Katz, who invented Squiggle Vision?

00:48:27Marc:Were you at the cutting edge of that?

00:48:29Guest:No, Tom Snyder really had the vision.

00:48:32Guest:Tom Snyder and Jonathan Katz, between them, had a lot of vision about what they wanted to do.

00:48:38Guest:The two most important things they understood instinctively, even though neither of them came from animation, was...

00:48:45Guest:Loose improvised dialogue that was going to be edited down.

00:48:50Guest:Yeah.

00:48:50Guest:And minimalistic animation.

00:48:52Guest:And those two things were very, very, very important at the time.

00:48:57Guest:Right.

00:48:57Guest:Since then, I've abandoned to some extent minimalistic animation, but the core of that idea of getting a lot of stuff on tape, having it be very, very loose, very performance-based, often insisting on actors being together in the same room and interacting...

00:49:13Guest:And then cutting that together, that's the core thing.

00:49:16Guest:And they were into that from the get-go.

00:49:19Guest:Jonathan wanted to get with comics, get their acts on tape, but also get a little, just a little bit of flavor, you know, a little him and Dom Herrera, you know, ad-libbing for a few minutes and then somebody who could go and cut it.

00:49:30Guest:And that was what my job was.

00:49:32Guest:When he first hired me, he let me cut the audio.

00:49:34Marc:He would do the, uh-huh, yeah.

00:49:36Marc:Yeah.

00:49:37Marc:Right, like you'd have a lot of those stocked up, like, oh, interesting.

00:49:41Marc:He'd drop those babies in.

00:49:42Guest:And then he'd say, oh, you know what the music means.

00:49:44Marc:Yeah, right.

00:49:46Marc:But what's also interesting is what you said about comics, about comic books particularly, is that having gone through a three- or four-year period with reading them and being into them and reading graphic novels is that...

00:49:59Marc:It takes very little imagery to propel the story with the text.

00:50:05Marc:I've noticed that when I'm looking, when I'm reading comics specifically, that you've got your dialogue, but your brain doesn't spend a lot of time.

00:50:13Marc:I'm sure there are plenty of nerds out there who are like, oh, you're missing the best party if you didn't see the way he handled that pocket.

00:50:19Marc:But it takes very little imagery to propel and create a universe.

00:50:24Marc:Yeah.

00:50:24Marc:And that happens when you're reading a comic.

00:50:26Marc:I'm not saying the art is bad or anything, but I was always fascinated with how little it really takes to get you into a world.

00:50:32Guest:There's a great book called Understanding Comics, and my memory of one of the big takeaways from the book was he said almost all of the important stuff actually happens between the panels in your mind.

00:50:45Marc:right there's this incredible magical thing that happens between one image and another it's all in that little tiny margin between the two drawings right because you can go back and it's not like you're missing anything it's it's it's it's bizarre yeah it's a real magic yeah so you you made a conscious decision to strip it down as much as possible because i mean the symptoms is not essentially stripped down is it i mean it's basic but you wouldn't call it

00:51:09Guest:no it's it's it's real full yeah full animation they they walk and they move wonderfully that's what you mean right yeah and they and you believe that they exist in space the backgrounds are rendered in such a way that is a you know homer's going to run back right in perspective and then run forward again and you really buy it the in the great tradition of whatever disney and all right they're great but but when you guys did it you were like that that's not necessary nobody moved

00:51:32Guest:Nobody moved.

00:51:33Guest:I kid you not.

00:51:34Guest:You can watch all seven seasons of Dr. Katz.

00:51:37Guest:You will rarely see anyone get up out of their chair and move at all.

00:51:41Guest:We moved arms for expression.

00:51:44Guest:We moved mouths, obviously, and eyes.

00:51:46Guest:That's the most important thing on television.

00:51:48Guest:Everything else seemed irrelevant to us.

00:51:49Guest:If Ben needed to get to the sink because that was some sort of point in dialogue, we would just cut to Dr. Katz and then Ben would be at the sink.

00:51:56Marc:Right.

00:51:57Marc:But this is not a budgetary thing.

00:51:59Marc:This was not this was an aesthetic thing.

00:52:01Marc:It was both.

00:52:02Guest:It was both.

00:52:02Guest:We knew we were making animation for incredibly cheap compared to The Simpsons or something like that.

00:52:08Guest:We knew we were.

00:52:09Guest:It was partly a price point thing.

00:52:11Guest:Again, part of the vision Tom Snyder had was we can if people want animation, we can give them animation.

00:52:17Marc:Yeah.

00:52:18Guest:It doesn't have to cost that much.

00:52:20Marc:Right.

00:52:20Marc:And I guess that you were sort of groundbreakers because, you know, now everybody can do animation that like once that once people realized that you can do this.

00:52:29Marc:Well, I can do that.

00:52:30Marc:Yeah.

00:52:30Marc:I mean, flash animation is sort of like that, right?

00:52:33Guest:There was the desktop computer revolution or whatever you want to call it that came along during that time and obviously accelerated across, you know, into the 2000s made it possible for everybody to do this.

00:52:45Marc:Now, like, okay, so Dr. Katz was driven by Jonathan and by Comedian's Axe.

00:52:49Marc:Yes.

00:52:50Marc:I'm familiar with that.

00:52:51Marc:I seem to be doing it in real life now.

00:52:53Marc:Yeah.

00:52:54Marc:But Home Movies was, you know, an arc.

00:52:56Marc:It was scripted.

00:52:57Marc:There were characters that built it.

00:52:58Marc:It's a sitcom, yeah.

00:52:59Marc:It's a sitcom.

00:52:59Marc:Yeah.

00:53:00Marc:So making the jump to that, I mean, the animation was a little more complex.

00:53:05Marc:Yep.

00:53:06Marc:and you were working with Brendan Spall.

00:53:08Marc:Yeah.

00:53:08Marc:But you seem to have, I don't know who had it or why, but, I mean, it's 1999, right?

00:53:13Marc:Yes.

00:53:15Marc:And, you know, you casted some of the biggest comics ever who none of them were that.

00:53:21Marc:So somebody had a pretty good fucking eye.

00:53:23Marc:I mean, John Benjamin is obviously a genius of comedy and voice.

00:53:29Marc:Yes.

00:53:29Marc:But I mean, in those original in-home movies, you had Kirkman, you had CK, Hedberg, Kindler, Jesus, Bamford, Merman, Todd Berry.

00:53:39Marc:And that was fucking, well, I mean, you also had some established people like Paula Poundstone and stuff, but that was 99.

00:53:44Marc:None of these people were necessarily relevant then.

00:53:48Marc:uh they were in sam cedar i apologize sam cedar and you've created it with brendan small a lot of them were the boston crew at that time there's the boston crew and obviously there's you know louis ck uh you know was all was a comics comic in at that time too he'd done a lot of work and he'd worked in television he was respected yeah

00:54:07Guest:So we were aware that they were, and Hedberg was a fantastic comic who was doing- He was just starting to get big then, right?

00:54:17Guest:Yeah.

00:54:17Marc:That was probably a year before or was it right after?

00:54:20Guest:No, I seem to remember, we did him on Dr. Katz first.

00:54:23Guest:And I remember then he did that joke about doing Letterman.

00:54:28Guest:He said, two million people watch that show.

00:54:31Guest:I cannot find one of them.

00:54:32Yeah.

00:54:32Marc:Yeah.

00:54:34Marc:Yeah.

00:54:35Marc:But yeah, you seem to have a great eye for comic talent.

00:54:39Guest:That, I like to think that's true.

00:54:41Guest:I don't...

00:54:43Guest:dr cats was formative in that we listened to a lot of comics i got uh in my ear a tremendous number of of people's uh acts and i think yeah we started to gravitate towards a certain type uh and a lot of those guys uh actually were you know kind of all in the same circle that you know that you're in as well as sort of the

00:55:08Guest:I think alternative comedy is mostly meaningless, but it was just sort of like guys who weren't necessarily doing jokey jokes and guys who were using a little bit more of their own sort of personality and voice, which of course is what I was listening for.

00:55:23Marc:And also guys who understood that animation was a real thing.

00:55:28Marc:You know what I mean?

00:55:29Marc:Like, I think that you were ahead of the curve, too, in movies as well.

00:55:34Marc:I mean, I think that if you're looking at Dr. Kazer 1999, it was the business of big screen animation for adults and children was not really there yet, was it?

00:55:45Guest:No, that's true.

00:55:45Guest:You're right.

00:55:46Marc:That now every animation movie is carefully designed so adults can enjoy it and children can enjoy it.

00:55:53Guest:That's right.

00:55:54Guest:And they cast great people now.

00:55:55Guest:You're more likely to find Will Ferrell being the lead.

00:55:58Guest:That's right.

00:55:58Marc:And there's people, I understand what you're saying, some of these people that you're talking, that you use, have a quality of voice that is rich enough to fuel an animated character.

00:56:09Marc:And then you also have people that are capable of other voices.

00:56:12Marc:That's right.

00:56:12Guest:Well, here's the secret.

00:56:13Guest:I think the secret sauce for a lot of what we've done in casting stand-ups, which we continue to do, is I think stand-ups use their voice.

00:56:24Guest:They only have a few things they can bring.

00:56:26Guest:You bring your jokes.

00:56:28Guest:You bring something of a physical performance, but it's really your voice.

00:56:33Guest:And timing.

00:56:34Marc:Right.

00:56:35Marc:That's included in the voice.

00:56:36Guest:Right.

00:56:37Guest:And I think what...

00:56:39Guest:Other actors rely on their face.

00:56:42Guest:People who don't do stand-up, who are just maybe comic actors who get cast and stuff, they often can use their face and their body in a way that I think a stand-up ultimately can't.

00:56:51Guest:They really have to deliver it right into the microphone, and they have to know what it is about their voice that's funny and compelling.

00:56:58Guest:And so they're honing a voice in a way that a quote-unquote voiceover actor really isn't.

00:57:06Guest:So we don't work with a lot of voiceover guys.

00:57:09Guest:Right.

00:57:09Marc:Well, right, because the impulse is always to get the laugh.

00:57:12Marc:Right.

00:57:13Marc:So you're talking about people that have spent 10 years or more on stage using their voice to extract laughter.

00:57:19Marc:Yes.

00:57:19Marc:That's their job.

00:57:20Marc:Yes.

00:57:20Marc:Right.

00:57:21Marc:Yeah.

00:57:21Marc:I understand.

00:57:21Guest:And so it's a really, really high percentage of those guys work really well in the context that we use them.

00:57:30Guest:It's just almost always a given that those guys will come in and be funny in the studio for us.

00:57:35Guest:And whereas some of these other actors, even actors that we love on any given TV show or whatever, might not because they don't quite realize when you take away their face and their body, they're left with just the voice and the microphone.

00:57:50Marc:Right, right.

00:57:51Marc:And there's no sort of built-in inner life that has learned to live on stage as themselves.

00:57:59Marc:That's right.

00:58:00Marc:So you just fill up a character with that.

00:58:02Marc:And that seems to be smart.

00:58:05Guest:In a perfect world, you write to it.

00:58:07Guest:You know who you're going to cast before you finish writing the script, so you write right to that voice.

00:58:11Marc:Well, you did how many seasons of Home Movies?

00:58:13Marc:Four.

00:58:14Marc:So, I mean, by the end of season one, you were writing for people, right?

00:58:18Guest:Yeah.

00:58:18Guest:I mean, Home Movies was the kind of, like...

00:58:26Guest:In a weird way, the last thing we did when we didn't know what we were doing, if that makes sense.

00:58:32Marc:Well, how did it come?

00:58:33Marc:Because Brendan Small, of course, the creator and voice behind many, but the creator of Metalocalypse, and he's been on my show, and I've done some voices.

00:58:43Marc:I did a voice on Metalocalypse the last season, but he's a Boston guy.

00:58:47Marc:So how did that partnership come?

00:58:49Guest:We were working on Dr. Katz, but we were getting a lot of interest from networks to do that kind of thing.

00:58:56Guest:And so much so that we had actually multiple opportunities at the same time.

00:59:01Guest:Ewing Snyder.

00:59:02Guest:Yeah.

00:59:03Guest:And I was coming up on, you know, probably 29, 28, 29 years old.

00:59:08Guest:And he said, you create something.

00:59:10Guest:I'm going to do this thing for FX.

00:59:12Guest:You do this thing for UPN.

00:59:14Guest:And I had... So I had a blank slate.

00:59:17Guest:So we started talking about what it might be, and I was sort of workshopping it with Snyder, and we'd been working with Paula Poundstone on this Saturday morning show, so I knew I wanted to make something around her as a single mom.

00:59:28Guest:She had these adopted kids in real life, and I just thought that would be a good place to start a family show with a single mom.

00:59:34Guest:And then I went out shopping for a son, for the comedic...

00:59:39Guest:Right.

00:59:40Guest:Part.

00:59:40Marc:The overly intelligent child.

00:59:42Guest:Yeah, the precocious eight year old.

00:59:44Guest:And there was this, I'm sure you know it, this on the third floor of the Hong Kong restaurant in Harvard Square.

00:59:51Marc:Yeah, yeah.

00:59:52Marc:The comedy studio.

00:59:53Marc:Yeah, exactly.

00:59:54Marc:And that was the closest.

00:59:55Marc:That opened after I left.

00:59:56Marc:But, you know, Rick Jenkins.

00:59:58Marc:Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:59:59Guest:so so he was rick jenkins was putting on these these lineups uh many nights a week and i could walk there from my apartment so i would go uh it was louis ck was headlining and brendan was warming up you know was was uh one of the first doing his characters yeah he did a character mustache guy no it was um a guy who had never done stand-up before and doing a bit about ham

01:00:24Marc:Was he a Boston guy, though?

01:00:25Marc:Was it the heavy Boston accent?

01:00:26Guest:Oh, no, he's not a Boston guy.

01:00:27Guest:He's from California.

01:00:28Guest:No, but was the character Boston?

01:00:30Guest:Oh, no, no, no.

01:00:31Guest:Wasn't that guy?

01:00:32Guest:No, it sounded like a child, which is why I was drawn to him.

01:00:35Guest:So I got in touch with him the next day or thereabouts and invited him to kind of come into this thing while it was still so unformed.

01:00:46Guest:Just as a voice.

01:00:47Guest:He was going to be the voice of the son of Paula Pounce.

01:00:50Guest:So we had two pieces.

01:00:52Guest:And we just started putting in pieces around that.

01:00:55Guest:And so much so that it felt fair and correct to share creator credit with him.

01:01:00Guest:He's a 23-year-old kid.

01:01:01Marc:Just out of Berklee.

01:01:02Guest:Yeah.

01:01:03Guest:He brought all that music to it.

01:01:05Guest:And he brought a lot of his just a very mature sense of the kind of... You were his Tom Snyder.

01:01:11Guest:Yeah.

01:01:12Yeah.

01:01:12Guest:Yeah.

01:01:14Guest:And importantly, we brought Benjamin in.

01:01:17Guest:And I often think about how that all went down because we were worried at the time we would have made a starring vehicle for John Benjamin again.

01:01:26Guest:You know, Dr. Katz had him as the son.

01:01:29Guest:Tom Snyder and I and Jonathan Katz all knew that we were really, really lucky to have him, that he lifted up, that Dr. Katz was a premise that was driven by the comics material, but that if the

01:01:39Guest:father-son relationship didn't work.

01:01:42Guest:If Laura Silverman and John Benjamin and Jonathan Katz didn't have this incredible kind of ability to make those little scenes around the therapy sessions work, then we wouldn't have gotten that many seasons.

01:01:53Guest:It would have played out much faster.

01:01:55Guest:You could have gotten one or two.

01:01:56Marc:But this made it much more.

01:01:58Marc:You had an evolving emotional relationship.

01:02:00Guest:Yeah, we were writing simple stories that sort of takes place over about 16th.

01:02:04Guest:Anyway, John Benjamin, we were worried we were going to lose him.

01:02:06Guest:He was so hot at the time.

01:02:08Guest:Oh, yeah?

01:02:08Guest:We thought we're never going to be able to build around him.

01:02:11Guest:He's in New York now.

01:02:12Guest:He's going to take off, and we're not going to be able to get him.

01:02:16Guest:But...

01:02:16Guest:At a critical point in the home movies, sort of gestation development period, we realized we really wanted him.

01:02:24Guest:And so we said, well, you play the soccer coach.

01:02:26Guest:You're going to come in and kind of be this like bad father figure to this kid.

01:02:32Guest:And in the pilot, he goes on a date with the mom and really just sets that up.

01:02:35Guest:And then we also had him play Jason, this kind of third wheel in this three-kid little sort of filmmaker's club.

01:02:45Guest:And I'm just, looking back, I've never done a show without John Benjamin.

01:02:51Guest:And I often say I never wanna.

01:02:53Guest:I don't wanna find out what that's like.

01:02:55Guest:Because I think it's gonna be really, really hard.

01:02:57Marc:He's such a funny guy.

01:03:01Marc:But what is it about, what is that quality?

01:03:03Marc:I mean, I don't want you to quantify it necessarily, but what- I think it's not, it seems like it should be easy.

01:03:10Guest:Everyone should be able to do what he does, but only he can.

01:03:12Guest:It's, I mean, obviously he has a great voice and it's fun to listen to him talk.

01:03:16Guest:Yeah.

01:03:17Guest:But I think he can be likable even when he's being grumpy.

01:03:20Marc:Yeah, right.

01:03:20Marc:That's rare.

01:03:21Marc:The crank.

01:03:22Guest:Yeah, the crank.

01:03:22Guest:And it's believable in both cases.

01:03:24Marc:Because he's really like that.

01:03:25Marc:Yes.

01:03:25Marc:Like, I talk about this a lot.

01:03:27Marc:That comedic character, a crank, whether it's a stand-up or what you're talking about, it has to be ingrained.

01:03:34Marc:Yeah.

01:03:35Marc:I mean, if you're just angry or you come into it or you don't realize the fine line between being a whining, angry person and just being cranky, it's just a rare comedic type.

01:03:49Marc:Yeah.

01:03:50Marc:There's only been a few.

01:03:51Marc:You can probably name them.

01:03:52Marc:Yeah.

01:03:52Guest:It's and it's a and once you hook into it, it's addictive.

01:03:55Guest:You want more and more of it because you want that somebody who can bring that kind of like cynicism and edge without it being ultimately threatening.

01:04:04Guest:He was doing that to me when I was a 20 something and he was a little bit older and I started to lose my hair or maybe he caught me drinking on a Wednesday night in the office or whatever.

01:04:12Guest:He always had a way of teasing me that made me feel happy to be teased.

01:04:17Guest:Oh, yeah.

01:04:17Marc:Yeah, him and Cedar together.

01:04:19Marc:That's dangerous because you don't want to be caught in that loop of horrible pranks.

01:04:25Marc:But that thing was hugely popular.

01:04:28Marc:But four seasons, did you want to do more?

01:04:30Marc:What happened?

01:04:30Marc:No, four was perfect.

01:04:31Marc:That was it?

01:04:32Guest:Yeah, it wasn't hugely popular.

01:04:34Guest:uh but in a cult way it is hugely popular it has survived uh very well it has it's it's the adult swim you know upn originally wanted it and they only aired five episodes and and uh i say canceled it with a vengeance i mean they extra canceled it it was a disaster for them it was it was but they turned out to be a disaster in general yes yes but we were the worst rated show on their network yeah

01:04:58Guest:I mean, I'm not saying that I fault us.

01:05:01Guest:We made a show that we were very proud of and very happy with, and we also were lucky because UPN at the time was offering, they said, you'll own your show.

01:05:09Marc:Yeah.

01:05:10Guest:You'll own it.

01:05:10Marc:Yeah.

01:05:11Marc:That was part of the deal.

01:05:12Guest:Yeah.

01:05:12Guest:So that made it very easy.

01:05:14Guest:When they canceled it and Adult Swim was starting their thing, the deal was easy.

01:05:19Guest:It was done.

01:05:20Marc:did they try to fight it who did they uh upn no they couldn't do anything they couldn't do anything and weren't interested they you know that's a gift it was great yeah they could they could have like in most deals would just that would have been it we own it you can't have it we're done with it fuck you yep oh that's good for you yep we were lucky again lucky guy yep upn uh you know goes away there's only a few months i feel like six months and then we get the call

01:05:45Marc:That's at the beginning of Adult Swim, too, right?

01:05:47Marc:Very beginning.

01:05:48Marc:Or was it just you and Tim and Eric?

01:05:49Marc:What was on there?

01:05:50Guest:It was before Tim and Eric.

01:05:51Guest:Or maybe Tom Goes to the Mayor, yeah.

01:05:53Guest:Yeah, it was very few things.

01:05:54Guest:We were the lead-off hitter, and then there was a few licensed things.

01:05:58Guest:I think we were a lead-off at 10 o'clock or whatever, and then there was things that they had picked up and repurposed.

01:06:03Marc:But you were doing full... I mean, were they... I'm sorry, and I don't know this, but they weren't 22-minute episodes?

01:06:10Marc:They weren't 22.

01:06:11Marc:Okay.

01:06:12Marc:So Adult Swim doesn't generally do that.

01:06:14Guest:They were moving more towards 11 minute, quarter hour things while we were doing home movies, but they were agnostic about that.

01:06:22Guest:They liked a good half hour if they could get one.

01:06:24Guest:11 minute chunks turned out to be smart and fit them.

01:06:29Guest:But yeah, they didn't mind having a half hour show.

01:06:31Marc:And that must be the way that Brendan Small developed his relationship with them.

01:06:35Marc:Yeah.

01:06:36Marc:And then that's how we get Metal Eclipse.

01:06:38Marc:Yeah.

01:06:38Guest:And that's how they do it with everybody.

01:06:41Guest:They love working with the same people.

01:06:42Guest:Again, they'll give you another shot, basically.

01:06:44Guest:They're very, very... It's a tight little family, in a way.

01:06:48Marc:Yeah.

01:06:49Guest:Adult Swim are great people.

01:06:50Marc:When I hear about this kind of stuff, it's like, if I had planned on doing anything other than just talking, it could have been further along.

01:06:57Yeah.

01:06:57Marc:Maybe if I've gotten along with other people, said yes to things that seemed fun.

01:07:02Guest:Yeah.

01:07:03Marc:All right.

01:07:04Marc:I'm learning a big lesson here about me, which that makes a good episode.

01:07:08Guest:That's why you do this.

01:07:09Marc:I guess so.

01:07:10Marc:I thought it was beyond it.

01:07:12Marc:I thought we'd hit another gear where I was doing okay finally.

01:07:17Marc:Guess not.

01:07:18Marc:But, all right, so Bob's Burgers, this is, what, several years later, what have you been doing?

01:07:24Marc:I mean, like, since Home Movies?

01:07:27Guest:Oh, did another show for Adult Swim.

01:07:29Guest:Which one?

01:07:29Guest:Lucy, Daughter of the Devil.

01:07:30Marc:Okay.

01:07:31Guest:Same thing.

01:07:31Guest:Did it with Benjamin and Eugene Merman and Sam Seder and Todd Berry and all those other... Why don't you just make a... Could you do a character... I'm just speaking as a friend of Sam's here.

01:07:47Marc:An aggravated, downtrodden political pundit who's just looking for his place in the world.

01:07:53Marc:Could you integrate that into... He's pitched that.

01:07:57Guest:yeah i bet in the how many versions now we've got him as the health inspector have you seen the episodes with sam in it on bob's burgers sam is the the nemesis health and i just saw that the true enemy of all i saw that i saw the first one he's victor that's not sam there were two health inspectors one that used to go out with uh yeah that's sam i didn't recognize hugo i did not oh yeah

01:08:23Guest:Oh, my God.

01:08:24Guest:I got to go listen again.

01:08:25Guest:Yeah, yeah.

01:08:26Guest:He does a fantastic job as that.

01:08:28Guest:And I love writing to that character.

01:08:29Guest:It's so good that I did that.

01:08:30Marc:Usually when I hear Sam's voice, I have flashbacks.

01:08:33Guest:And that didn't happen.

01:08:36Guest:You didn't get an Air America flashback?

01:08:38Guest:No, no.

01:08:39Guest:He really disguised it well.

01:08:41Guest:Yeah, he's great.

01:08:42Guest:He's fantastic as Hugo.

01:08:43Guest:And he's fantastic as other characters.

01:08:45Guest:Though his voice is so recognizable now as the health inspector, we just write to him and bring him back.

01:08:51Marc:That's good.

01:08:52Marc:I'm glad.

01:08:53Marc:All those people are so fucking funny.

01:08:55Marc:I was up in Montreal, and I went to the live reading that you couldn't go to.

01:09:00Guest:I couldn't go to it.

01:09:00Guest:Yeah, I didn't get out of the airport.

01:09:03Guest:What the fuck happened?

01:09:03Guest:I had an expired passport.

01:09:05Guest:Oh, my God.

01:09:06Guest:I didn't know.

01:09:07Guest:I didn't, I barely even brought it.

01:09:08Guest:I thought you could go with your license.

01:09:10Guest:I feel like I went to Montreal with my license, like, you know, in 99 or something.

01:09:14Guest:I don't know.

01:09:15Guest:I get there and I'm scanning it and I don't understand why it's not going through.

01:09:19Guest:And I asked a lady and she says, you know, it's expired.

01:09:22Guest:And I said, oh, well, you know, what do I do?

01:09:24Guest:And she says, nothing you can do.

01:09:26Guest:And I kept waiting for like her to finally break and be like, well, there's one thing you can do.

01:09:30Guest:It's very expensive, but here's, but there was nothing.

01:09:32Guest:She was like, it's horrendous.

01:09:34Guest:Yeah.

01:09:34Guest:I started like, I called the Fox publicity people.

01:09:36Guest:I got, I got to be there tomorrow morning.

01:09:38Guest:Powerful enough.

01:09:39Guest:Yeah.

01:09:39Guest:What do we do?

01:09:39Guest:Is there a secret thing I can do?

01:09:43Guest:You guys are powerful.

01:09:44Marc:You're fucked.

01:09:44Marc:Yeah.

01:09:45Marc:Call the guy.

01:09:46Marc:Yeah.

01:09:46Marc:Nothing.

01:09:47Marc:No, dude, I was flagged for years over nothing.

01:09:50Marc:I heard about that.

01:09:51Marc:Every fucking time I went in, I had to go through immigration.

01:09:55Marc:Because years ago, some comedy festival, I drove in from Seattle in Vancouver.

01:10:03Marc:And they didn't prep the drive-through customs.

01:10:05Marc:Like, you know, the airplane customs they were set with.

01:10:08Marc:But they all seemed to just do what they want.

01:10:09Marc:Yeah.

01:10:09Marc:But I didn't have the right paperwork.

01:10:11Marc:I couldn't explain certain things.

01:10:12Marc:They're like, well, you can go back to America and resolve this.

01:10:15Marc:And because of that, because I was denied entry, I was marked.

01:10:18Marc:And every time I went in, I would go to immigration and have to go through this rigmarole of some fucking customs agent looking at my paperwork going, so this place you're performing at, is that they serve liquor there?

01:10:29Marc:And I'm like, I don't know your weird blue laws.

01:10:33Yeah.

01:10:33Marc:Yeah, what is it?

01:10:34Marc:And some guy finally told me, it's like, yeah, every time you come, depending on the customs agent, they're just going to either keep you here.

01:10:43Marc:He literally said, some of us are bitter, and we're tired of this shit, and we don't like the way the structure of things is running now, so we're going to make your life miserable depending on our day.

01:10:52Marc:And I'm like, I appreciate your honesty.

01:10:54Marc:Can I go now?

01:10:55Marc:No, sit down.

01:10:56Marc:Jesus.

01:10:58Marc:He was all right.

01:10:59Marc:I'm glad I got him.

01:11:00Marc:It must have been a week before his retirement.

01:11:02Marc:But when you write these things, I've got a script up right now that I'm writing for my show.

01:11:06Marc:I mean, what's the process?

01:11:09Marc:I mean, obviously many people are involved on home movies.

01:11:13Marc:Yeah, Broadus.

01:11:13Marc:What's Broadus up to, Bill Broadus?

01:11:15Guest:You know, I don't know.

01:11:16Guest:He's in Boston.

01:11:16Guest:I know he's still there, and I don't know what he's working on.

01:11:18Marc:I started doing comedy with him when I was in college at Open Mikes in the 80s.

01:11:22Marc:He's really funny.

01:11:23Marc:Bill Broadus.

01:11:23Guest:Yeah, he was one of the first two guests on Dr. Katz, and then later we pulled him in as a writer.

01:11:29Marc:But he wrote a lot of the home movies.

01:11:31Marc:yeah he worked with brendan on almost every script yeah yeah he he was he's just a great funny guy a great boston comic but a lot of them yeah oh yeah definitely do you do that though do you have a staff and then you break story and then you sit there and you know assign scripts and then you put it back up on the lift and look at it as a group again and is that how it works it's a

01:11:51Guest:big staff we have a so so you know the basic turning point here is is going from cable and low budget to fox it's definitely a big change you have bob's burgers is you know on after the simpsons with all that implies we're a guild show we have a big staff we have a big operation there are people who have been doing this for a long time working on king of the hill uh primarily but also you know we get simpsons people we have

01:12:17Guest:professional animation primetime animation um people and i've never worked with those people how are you adjusting great it's great here's here's why they there's no culture clash the the people who do this professionally are intensely interested in efficiencies and um and sort of new creative ideas because of course

01:12:40Guest:They're really good at their jobs.

01:12:41Guest:That's how they got to be doing this for years in prime time.

01:12:44Marc:They've been doing it forever.

01:12:45Guest:Yeah.

01:12:45Guest:And so they're the they're very, very good.

01:12:47Guest:And the thing about people who are very, very good at their jobs is that they're not interested in stasis and inertia.

01:12:53Guest:Those people tend to get weeded out.

01:12:55Guest:I think you hear about the old timers who just do it their way or whatever.

01:12:58Guest:But actually, you know, where are my pens?

01:13:00Guest:Yeah, but you don't meet that many of them.

01:13:02Guest:They muster out.

01:13:03Guest:So what you're left with is people who've been doing it a long time, but who are intensely interested in new ways of working.

01:13:09Guest:So I'm the guy, you know, on some level I represent cable and the garage band mentality, just a very few people doing a lot of jobs and making these things for nothing.

01:13:18Guest:And so I bring that theoretically, and they bring the, we made King of the Hell for 12 years.

01:13:26Guest:We've worked on these shows.

01:13:27Guest:We know how to make a network show.

01:13:30Guest:And those two things actually integrate really well.

01:13:33Guest:So it's been great.

01:13:34Guest:And I actually feel like this happened, again, not just, you know...

01:13:37Guest:i'm just a lucky guy this happened at the right time in my life i think if i'd been a little younger i wouldn't necessarily have known how to do this at this point like do a show for fox do a show that has to you know play in front of that many more million people manage a staff manage a staff and and and and still bring right hopefully uh something to the table

01:13:59Guest:But now I feel like I do know how to do that.

01:14:02Guest:And so to answer your question, you have a big group of people making the show, including a big writing staff, but you have the same job, which is just listening really, really carefully to, I mean, I have the same job, to the tone of the show and to the tone and tenor of the dialogue.

01:14:19Guest:And then ultimately in the end, all I do for picture really is make the face fit the performance.

01:14:27Guest:That's the most important thing.

01:14:28Guest:Everything else is fun.

01:14:30Guest:You can talk to the directors about camera angles.

01:14:32Guest:You can work with the board artists about these action sequences.

01:14:35Guest:That's really, really fun.

01:14:37Guest:But what I think I still have to do most importantly before the lights are out at the end of any given day is make sure that the visuals are supporting the performance and I know those performers and I can sort of hopefully advocate for a pupil direction.

01:14:54Marc:Do you do the sketches?

01:14:57Guest:No.

01:14:57Marc:So you didn't ink any of the characters?

01:14:59Guest:No, no, no.

01:15:00Marc:Did you ink them from... Eugene seems to look a little like Eugene.

01:15:04Guest:Yeah, a little bit.

01:15:07Guest:Those actors were all cast, and then the show was created.

01:15:10Marc:Who decided on the bunny ears?

01:15:12Guest:We did.

01:15:13Marc:Is it a group decision?

01:15:14Guest:Yeah.

01:15:15Guest:Me and this other woman I was working with, Nora Smith, when we were developing it, and the character designer, Jay Howell, the bunny ears was a natural.

01:15:22Guest:We had been watching this anime, and there was a kid with a bear hat.

01:15:27Marc:They never took off.

01:15:28Guest:Yeah.

01:15:29Marc:Yeah.

01:15:30Marc:Yeah, because I think the characters are great.

01:15:32Marc:And also, casting certain men as women was very good.

01:15:37Guest:That was easy, too.

01:15:38Guest:We've been doing that a long time on home movies.

01:15:40Guest:You remember Sam Brown?

01:15:41Guest:Yeah.

01:15:41Guest:And we had him come in as a babysitter doing his voice, but he's a teenage girl.

01:15:45Guest:We've always been sort of interested in that, going back to the Boston days.

01:15:50Guest:And Eugene Merman played a nun on Lucy, Daughter to the Devil, doing this kind of Miss Piggy voice that I loved.

01:15:57Guest:I just loved it.

01:15:58Guest:It was a little bit of a hate it or love it kind of character, it turns out after the fact, but I just couldn't get enough of it.

01:16:03Marc:But John Roberts as the mother is great.

01:16:05Marc:Yeah.

01:16:05Guest:So that was easy.

01:16:06Guest:He's doing that character already on YouTube, right?

01:16:08Guest:All we got to do is reach out and say, will you loan us that voice?

01:16:12Guest:But Mintz was kind of a genius bit of business.

01:16:14Guest:Thank you.

01:16:15Guest:So Mintz, we develop it with Dan as a boy, Eugene as a boy, and Kristen as a girl.

01:16:21Guest:It's going to be three kids.

01:16:22Marc:It's Dan Mintz, Kristen Shaw, Eugene Merman.

01:16:24Guest:Yeah.

01:16:24Guest:Are the children on Bob's Burgers.

01:16:25Guest:Are the children on Bob's Burgers.

01:16:26Guest:And...

01:16:27Guest:In development, Fox said, we're a little worried that the boys aren't differentiated enough.

01:16:34Guest:You want your characters to really, really pop.

01:16:37Guest:What is this older boy?

01:16:40Guest:What can you say about him?

01:16:41Guest:And so we went away, we came back, and we said, it's a girl, and it sounds exactly like the character you've already heard.

01:16:48Guest:Yeah.

01:16:49Guest:and they loved it they were excited we did a little test we took Dan Mintz's stand up yeah and animated Tina as she looks now yeah just doing Dan Mintz's stand up and they bought it right there oh that's great yeah he's so funny he's fantastic is he writing too no but we would love to have him we haven't changed our staff at all basically we haven't hired new people who's who are the writers

01:17:10Guest:We have two people that I've been working with for years.

01:17:14Guest:Nora Smith, who worked with me on Lucy and came from San Francisco down to here.

01:17:18Guest:Holly Schlesinger, who you know well.

01:17:20Guest:I've been working with her since the Dr. Katz days.

01:17:23Guest:And I wrote Lucy with her, and she worked on home movies.

01:17:26Guest:So those two came with me.

01:17:29Guest:And then we hired John Schrader, who you might know.

01:17:32Guest:He's a UCB stallwarden who worked on Sarah Silverman's show.

01:17:36Guest:Dan Feibel, Rich Rinaldi, who worked on Sarah Silverman's show.

01:17:40Guest:Kit Boss.

01:17:41Marc:Kit Boss, didn't he work on the original Louie show on HBO?

01:17:46Guest:I don't know.

01:17:47Marc:He's been around a while.

01:17:48Marc:Yeah.

01:17:49Guest:These are King of the Hill guys.

01:17:50Guest:So Jim Dotreev, who is my co-show.

01:17:52Marc:My guys are King of the Hill guys.

01:17:54Marc:Really?

01:17:54Marc:Two of the guys who are working on my showrunners are King of the Hill guys.

01:17:59Guest:Who are they?

01:18:00Marc:Michael Jammin and Sivert Glarum.

01:18:02Guest:Oh, wow.

01:18:03Guest:The King of the Hill turns out to be kind of like this, the staff has spread far and wide in entertainment.

01:18:09Marc:I'm looking forward to being a live action cartoon character.

01:18:13Guest:Yeah, you feel that right?

01:18:14Marc:No.

01:18:15Guest:You know, I always say live action is just low-budget animation.

01:18:18Marc:Sitcom, certainly.

01:18:19Guest:You know, they hired an actor to play the drawings.

01:18:21Guest:That's right.

01:18:22Marc:Yeah.

01:18:22Marc:Well, I mean, sadly, and also I guess it is the success of the medium, but I mean, you know, sitcoms are all, you know, the successful ones are all due to the definition of the characters as being consistent and how they interact with each other.

01:18:38Guest:Character-driven comedy, I don't, like...

01:18:42Guest:I can't express it strongly enough when we're working.

01:18:46Guest:Like, if this isn't true to the character, we shouldn't do it.

01:18:48Guest:There can be really funny jokes that you have to leave behind because the character wouldn't say them.

01:18:54Guest:And I think in some ways it's like...

01:18:57Guest:upsetting for some of the writers to leave behind good jokes of course it should be they're they're sort of they're like it's in their dna the best joke should win but i think it's really important to have somebody else say no the character has to be yeah if it can't come out of his mouth yeah you know sometimes they really are not designed to come out of anyone's mouth right that's true

01:19:17Guest:Just a writer in a writer's room.

01:19:18Guest:Exactly.

01:19:19Marc:Yeah.

01:19:20Marc:But it's good that you're on top of that.

01:19:22Marc:And that's my job.

01:19:24Marc:Yeah.

01:19:24Guest:It's the only job I have is just to be this kind of sort of voice of kind of conservatism.

01:19:31Marc:But it's interesting that when you speak of animation, certainly, I mean, I imagine The Simpsons are like that, too.

01:19:36Marc:Yeah.

01:19:36Marc:uh you know you have these characters saying things that are so intelligent so funny and everything is so quick that that to know there is a filter because you could really have them do whatever you want but you you from experience i imagine you know that it's detrimental to the show have you put on things where you're like yeah that was no never yeah we won't do it it's it's painful you feel it yeah i can't i feel so protective of the characters and i and the actors do too yeah

01:19:59Guest:John Benjamin will let you know.

01:20:01Guest:Yeah.

01:20:02Guest:He will not read a line if it doesn't sound like something he would say.

01:20:05Guest:This doesn't come up on Bob's Burgers.

01:20:08Guest:I think the filter is in place before the scripts get to him, but we saw it plenty of times on home movies.

01:20:13Guest:Or he does a very clever thing, which I believe Sam Seder defined this way, he said, which is you buy it back in the voice of the character.

01:20:22Guest:So he used to, as Coach McGurk, he would say, you know, oh my God, I don't want to do that.

01:20:26Guest:And then he would say, why did I say that?

01:20:28Yeah.

01:20:29Guest:And we'd use it.

01:20:30Guest:So you make the not quite line work for the moment.

01:20:36Marc:Like some sort of brain fart.

01:20:37Marc:Yeah.

01:20:38Marc:I just said writer's line that wasn't written well for me.

01:20:41Guest:Yeah.

01:20:42Guest:Why did I say that?

01:20:44Yeah.

01:20:45Marc:Well, congratulations on your initial luck and riding it out so well.

01:20:52Marc:Thank you.

01:20:52Marc:Some people get lucky and then they don't harness it.

01:20:57Guest:The only downside is it creates this terrible sense of anxiety where you feel like you got a little bit more than...

01:21:02Marc:than most people and so you start feeling like it's going to be taken away or maybe this is because my mother died or I don't know but it makes you a little nervous I think that's just the the curse of succeeding in a creative field and maybe that's that you know there's some party that can't think that can't help but think like this isn't real work this is crazy yeah I mean it's like this is the other shoes got a drop this is nuts

01:21:24Marc:Some sort of weird extended prank.

01:21:27Marc:Yeah, yeah.

01:21:28Marc:Well, I don't think it doesn't seem to be happening because, like you said, your craft is in place.

01:21:32Marc:And I think despite the fact you're probably making art.

01:21:35Guest:Thanks.

01:21:36Marc:You're welcome.

01:21:37Marc:Thanks for coming.

01:21:37Guest:Pleasure.

01:21:38Pleasure.

01:21:41Marc:That's it.

01:21:44Marc:That's our show.

01:21:45Marc:I hope you enjoy that.

01:21:46Marc:What a pleasant man, Lauren Bouchard.

01:21:48Marc:What an interesting conversation.

01:21:50Marc:What a sweet guy.

01:21:51Marc:Worked out for him.

01:21:52Marc:Destiny stepped in.

01:21:54Marc:And he knew it.

01:21:57Marc:What do we got?

01:21:58Marc:Go to WTFPod.com.

01:22:00Marc:Get everything you need that's WTFPod related.

01:22:03Marc:Get some merch, new posters, get a mug, get a t-shirt, get a tote bag, get a button, kick in a few shekels.

01:22:09Marc:Get the app.

01:22:10Marc:See who's been on the show.

01:22:11Marc:Comment.

01:22:12Marc:Listen to some stuff.

01:22:13Marc:Look around.

01:22:15Marc:Have a good time.

01:22:17Marc:Get some JustCoffee.coop.

01:22:18Marc:Get the WTF blend.

01:22:19Marc:I get a little on the back end.

01:22:20Marc:You know what I'm saying?

01:22:24Marc:Ferndale, Michigan, tomorrow night, September 29th.

01:22:26Marc:Two shows.

01:22:28Marc:Sometime and another time.

01:22:32Marc:Yeah.

01:22:34Marc:Two shows, two different times.

01:22:36Marc:Not tomorrow.

01:22:36Marc:Yeah, tomorrow night.

01:22:39Marc:Oh, I hope Delta gets me there on time.

01:22:42Marc:Boomy.

01:22:43Marc:Boomy, come here, buddy.

01:22:46Marc:The whole house smells like fucking skunks.

01:22:48Marc:It's unbelievable.

01:22:49Marc:I don't even know where they live.

01:22:50Marc:Do you guys know where they live?

01:22:52Marc:They can't just live under the house.

01:22:53Marc:Don't they live in the ground?

01:22:54Marc:Is there a hole somewhere?

01:22:55Marc:They just crawl out of places.

01:22:57Marc:Full-grown fucking skunks.

01:22:59Marc:The entire house smells like skunk.

01:23:02Marc:Boomy!

01:23:04Marc:Well, again, thank you for the birthday wishes.

01:23:06Marc:I'm tired now.