Sick In The Head: Conversations About Life And Comedy Part 29

Judd: Those moments between midnight and one-thirty in the morning at the Improv-that's where a lot of the great things happened.

Marc: How many of that generation have sort of disappeared, or no one knows anymore? Are you ever saddened by that?

Judd: I did go into Best Buy once and a comic who was hilarious was a salesman there. That was rough. That made me sad because I thought, I was never as funny as that guy. That guy used to kill. But at some point you can't go on the road anymore. If you want to have a life and kids, you can't be on the road thirty-five weeks a year.

Marc: But is it that that same sort of wound that you're talking about can also swallow people? And the fact is that you were able to manage your talent and be political and ambitious enough to get what you wanted to get done, done.

Judd: I was very lucky that part of my dysfunction as a person is a terror of bankruptcy-financial bankruptcy, not emotional bankruptcy. So as a young person, I thought ten years ahead. I had a show in high school where I interviewed comedians like Leno and Seinfeld and John Candy.

Marc: How did you manage to get hold of them?

Judd: I used to call their publicists and say I was from a radio station in New York, and they were too lazy to look it up and figure out that it was a high school radio station. I was afraid that I was going to not be able to take care of myself in my life, so in my head I always thought, Well, what do I need to do? Okay, I'll interview comedians and they'll tell me how to be a comedian. They'll tell me how to write.

Marc: Were you freaking out inside, talking to Seinfeld? What were you really trying to do there?

Judd: It happened right after my parents got divorced and I just thought, I got to get something going in this life. I really need to take care of myself. Because when your parents get divorced they just make terrible mistakes and they fight and you see that adults have very real flaws. And I think my instinct was, Oh my G.o.d, maybe they're wrong about all sorts of stuff they keep telling me. And if my mom thinks my dad's the devil and if my dad's enraged at my mom, then maybe some of this advice they've been giving me is wrong. I mean, I don't think he's the devil. He's very nice to me. And it just completely threw me-like, it's important that you believe your parents. So when you see them at a terrible moment, screaming at each other-my reaction was, Nothing is true. I don't believe anything. I can't rely on these people because they can't rely on each other and they've bailed on each other, and, like, "Our family isn't important enough for you guys to just figure out how to get along?" It was terrible. Now that I'm older I realize it was much more complicated than that.

Marc: You were sort of in crisis mode.

Judd: I was totally in crisis mode. I was losing my mind. I thought, I need a job, but I also had a sense that my parents were not going to be able to afford college because they were having financial problems. And so I thought, Why don't you jump right into your dream, just have the b.a.l.l.s to do it. Anyway, when my parents got divorced, my mom moved to Southampton and we-my parents used to own a restaurant, and the bartender there was Rick Messina.

Marc: Oh my G.o.d.

Judd: Rick Messina is the great manager who went on to represent Tim Allen. Back then he managed the East Side Comedy Club on Long Island, which was the first comedy club on the Island, and a bunch of other clubs. So when my parents got divorced, my mom got a job seating people at her former bartender's comedy club. I mean, this was the dream situation for me. This was ninth grade, and it's the summer, and my mom is seating people at a comedy club. Every weekend, I would go watch every show-Leno, Paul Provenza, first show I ever saw of a young comedian. And years later I thought, That's really kind of the worst job ever. What could Mom have gotten paid to do it? I'd like to think that she did it because she knew I would like it. And my dad was great. He would drive me to comedy clubs a few times a week and was a big supporter.

Marc: That's sweet. So okay, you saw Leno, you saw Provenza. This was 1980...what?

Judd: This was '82 or '83, and then I got a job at Rick Messina's comedy club as a dishwasher so I could see the comedians. Then I realized that I can't see the comedians, I'm in the f.u.c.king kitchen. So I switched to a busboy at East Side Comedy Club. Eddie Murphy used to come in, and Rosie O'Donnell was just starting at that time. I would watch the comedians, and I thought, I don't have the b.a.l.l.s to tell these people that I want to do this. It may have been obvious to them but I couldn't even tell anyone, I was so scared. In my senior year in high school, I finally got up at open-mic nights and was awful, so awful.

Marc: It's terrifying.

Judd: And John Mulrooney's hosting the open-mic night. And he just, I mean, it was pandemonium. He would kill and insult the crowd- Marc: I remember him.

Judd: And he was fantastic. But to go on after that, when you have no idea what you're doing and you're seventeen years old? There'd be twenty comedians who'd all get five minutes. And you never knew if Mulrooney was going to do twenty minutes between acts and so you might get on at eight-oh-five, or one in the morning.

Marc: You are the real deal. You came from a real comedy background in a way that none of us did. Many of us who started on those open mics didn't watch comedy until we were stuck in those rooms and we had to. But you were actually just compelled to be there as a busboy. What were you, sixteen?

Judd: From the earliest time, I understood that people got onstage with mics. I never had any interest in doing anything that I'm doing right now. It was not part of the dream. If you listen to those early interviews I did, it's all about joke writing. It's not screenwriting. I'm not talking about how I love movies. I want to understand the mechanics of a d.i.c.k joke. That's my vision quest. When I interviewed Seinfeld the first time my brother was with me and you can hear him laughing. He's laughing in the background, and to us, it was like being in the room with Paul McCartney. It was. I think, to some extent, we had a vision for what Jerry Seinfeld was more than Jerry Seinfeld had a vision of what Jerry Seinfeld was. It was like being in a small club seeing R.E.M. in Athens, Georgia, in the early eighties and knowing what they would become.

Marc: A really small club. Just you and your brother.

Judd: Exactly. And the great thing about it was most of those people were very, very nice and so it also made me feel like, Oh, this is a world of strange people who might accept me one day.

Marc: In retrospect, have you brought it up to Leno and Seinfeld and Shandling that you interviewed them when you were sixteen?

Judd: I've mentioned it and none of them remember it-and they don't seem very interested in it, either.

Marc: But these guys gave you a blueprint for your life.

Judd: Yes, they did. And they don't completely get the significance of it. Because they might be having that effect on a lot of people.

Marc: I find that hard to believe, because if somebody writes me an email or even says that I've changed them in any way, not only does it make me feel good but I have to fight the urge to go, like, How? What did I do?

Judd: Maybe they do get it. Maybe it's just something that-it's hard to express or connect about because it is such a powerful thing. It's weird to look someone in the eye and say, "You've changed my life." You know, I treasure when Seinfeld sends me a note and says he likes Funny People or something. It means more to me than he could ever know because I literally thought about him as I made it. And I thought, One day Seinfeld's going to see this. I better not f.u.c.k it up.

Marc: All right, so at some point you come out here. I met you briefly. The first time I met you was at a party at Stacey Nelson's house. She was a publicist. I was dating her. I was being held hostage at her house. I think it was 1989. I met you at a party and you insisted that I was never going to leave L.A., and I left.

Judd: Really? Why would I say that?

Marc: It was one of those weird moments where everyone's hanging around and you go, "So what are you doing here?" And I'm like, "I'm staying at her house, you know, I've got to go back to New York." You said, "Oh you'll be back. You'll be back." It was almost ominous. But I left. There was that whole crew there at that time. You know, it was Ben Stiller and-I imagine that's around the time that you guys were working on The Ben Stiller Show. Was that '88?

Judd: The show was '91. We probably started working on it in '91 and it aired in '92.

Marc: And that was your first real TV job?

Judd: I wrote stand-up for a few comedians and when they did specials I would be a co-producer or something. I wrote with Roseanne, I wrote for Tom Arnold. Then I met Ben at an Elvis Costello concert and we both knew that HBO was looking for a show-a sketch show-and we thought of something in two weeks and sold it. People thought we had been friends forever, but we had known each other for fourteen days.

Marc: In Funny People, there was footage of you and Adam and Janeane Garofalo.

Judd: Yes, and Ben.

Marc: And you were all in-what year was that, '89 or '88?

Judd: That was '89 or '90. And in the footage in the beginning of the movie, you see Adam making a phony phone call, which I actually shot in our apartment back then, and Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo are there laughing, so you see them very briefly in the opening credits. At the time, Adam was so funny but had no outlet so he would make funny phone calls for hours and hours. I thought it was so hilarious, it didn't make sense not to record it. I felt bad that they would disappear and never be heard again, so first I would audio-record them and then video-record them.

Marc: Do you have all that stuff, too?

Judd: I have all of it. When we were doing Funny People, I found hours of Adam Sandler making phone calls. He was always calling Jerry's Deli and complaining about the roast beef and saying that it made him sick. And they would always be so nice and then he would be, you know, an old lady and he would negotiate getting a free sandwich. It was always like, "Could I get a free sandwich for my trouble?" And they would say okay. And he would say, "Well, I had turkey but I don't want to get hurt again, this time could I get the roast beef?" He would keep them on the line for twenty minutes, negotiating a sandwich. As a comedy nerd, I knew: That's the guy. Adam's going to hit. There's no way this doesn't happen. He just delighted us. He made us laugh so hard.

Marc: You keep using that term, comedy nerd, but back then it didn't exist. You were just a guy who loved comedy.

Judd: I remember moving to L.A., and I started doing stand-up at this place called the L.A. Cabaret in the Valley, in Encino. And I started meeting comedians for the first time, personally, not just interviewing them. And I realized, They're all like me. They all like the same stuff. I finally can talk to people about Monty Python and the Marx Brothers.

Marc: This is a recurring theme with you. These socially awkward, alienated guys that have to group with each other and sort of have this different type of strength to get through things.

Judd: c.o.c.ky nerds. My wife and I always talk about it. It's people who think they don't think ill of themselves-they actually think that there's something special about themselves but no one's noticed it. And so the characters on Freaks and Geeks-the geeks look down on the people who beat on them, but they still are terrified of them. And that's what makes them interesting. They have an air of superiority as they're getting pummeled.

Marc: You and Ben Stiller really created this community of comedy nerds in some ways. Do you feel that?

Judd: I think that Ben in a lot of ways is the beginning of much of what's happened in modern comedy. He did The Ben Stiller Show on MTV with Jeff Kahn, which was a Larry Sandersesque show, where it was behind the scenes of a sketch show where Ben played kind of a jerk. And I met Ben after he did that. So when we created The Ben Stiller Show [for Fox] together, I didn't know what the h.e.l.l I was doing. Ben knew how to make short films. I was just the guy trying to figure out how to not have Ben realize I didn't know how to do anything but write stand-up jokes. So I'm just keeping my mouth shut and listening to Ben because he was already brilliant and had a vision for what this was, and slowly I figured out how to run a writing staff and edit, but I was faking it. I was faking it for a long time.

Marc: Isn't that what everyone does for the first couple of jobs?

Judd: Yeah, but I was in charge of the writing and editing of the show. And so it was not like faking it as a staff writer. I was twenty-four or twenty-five years old with no background at all. And I hired people with Ben who were brilliant, like Dino Stamatopoulos and Bob Odenkirk and Brent Forrester and David Cross, and so in a lot of ways it was trying to manage these personalities who were bursting with energy. I mean, Bob was the funniest man in the world. The energy he had during The Ben Stiller Show-when he didn't like someone else's sketch, he would be like, "Oh my G.o.d, you can't do that. Who wrote that? Your unfunny uncle?" I was so intimidated because I wasn't anywhere near as strong as Bob but I also had to pick what sketches of Bob's we would shoot on the show. And then David Cross came on for the last few and you felt like, Oh, this guy is in a whole other world with Bob.

Marc: Then you went on to do Larry Sanders, which is another defining show for comedy nerd-dom. I mean, that's an amazing show.

Judd: That's where I learned how to write stories. Garry was nice enough to hire me on that show after The Ben Stiller Show, but I had never written a story before.

Marc: You wrote sketches and jokes.

Judd: I knew how to write "Legends of Bruce Springsteen" but I didn't know how to write about people. I was there, on and off, for five years and Garry ultimately allowed me to direct an episode and that's how I started directing. But it was an amazing place to be. And also scary because it's Rip Torn and Jeffrey Tambor and they're brilliant and terrifying. Imagine having to walk up to Rip Torn and give him a note to change his performance. I mean...

Marc: How did that go?

Judd: It didn't go well. It didn't go well at all. I mean he, he was a bl.u.s.tery guy. But correct most of the time, and a wonderful person who would always wind up doing what you were trying to get him to do, but if you walked up to him and said, "Rip, I think you need to play it a little nervous here," he'd say, "I'm not nervous! I'm in charge of the place!" "Okay, Rip, I'm sorry. We'll just do it the way you want to do it." Then, three takes later, he might give you one. And then he'd walk up to you: "Come on, did you like the one I did the way you wanted me to do it? That was all right." I felt like I was watching some of the greatest actors of all time. Certainly some of the greatest comedic actors of all time. When they did the last scene of The Larry Sanders Show, where Jeffrey Tambor goes off on Rip and Larry and says, "There's a book being written about Hank Kingsley and you are not in it, and you are not in it, and f.u.c.k you..." I forgot the exact words, but they did it in one take and wrapped the series. That's b.a.l.l.sy. They were at the top of their game. It was fun to learn from them.

Marc: Do you think Garry is an underappreciated comic?

Judd: He's the best. I mean, what he did with The Larry Sanders Show is an achievement that's impossible to even explain. Imagine having to write a show. He's the head writer. And then you have to rehea.r.s.e it for three days and then shoot the entire show in two days. So seventeen pages a day while punching up next week's script and editing two shows.

Marc: But also the idea that it's not just the work ethic. All guys who do well work hard. But to create a cast of characters who work within show business that are pathologically selfish and narcissistic and not great people is, uh, difficult. It's challenging to find heart there. And Garry clearly did-on that show, he did. You find heart through the weaknesses of all these extreme narcissists and lunatics. And I think that in some ways, in Funny People, that was your quest as well. It's hard to sell show business as being a reasonable place for human beings to work.

Judd: That's true, and Garry used to always say, "The Larry Sanders Show is about people who love each other but show business gets in the way." I've always thought that's true of any story. With Funny People, I thought what gets in the way for George Simmons is that he's so funny and people love him so much on a grand scale that it allows him to never grow up. Only when life is about to end does he realize, I'm alone here. I paid a ma.s.sive price to be this guy. We all know people like that.

Marc: When you look at the comedy movies that come out now, I admire the direction you're going because I like-I like to feel things. Because I don't do it in real life. I watched Butch Ca.s.sidy and the Sundance Kid the other day because it was on a British Airlines flight. I was coming back from London and they had it in the collection part. And it was great! I laughed and I cried and it's Butch Ca.s.sidy and the Sundance Kid. You know, it's not supposed to make that happen. But it was this weird moment where I realized that I don't experience much joy in life and that there are things like movies-and like what you're talking about comedy when you were a kid-that's part of experiencing joy in life. I admire your angle on it, but I have a harder time. It seems like there's a trend in comedy movies now that you might start with a pretty good story that seems kind of human, but out of some weird fear or overcompensation it just goes into f.u.c.king ridiculous-land.

Judd: Yes.

Marc: You've produced movies like that, no?

Judd: I've produced some movies that are better than others.

Marc: I'm not putting a judgment on them.

Judd: There are movies that are a little more premisey and there's movies where you're sticking very close to the truth, and sometimes when you reach for a joke-I always call it sweaty. It's brutal when things aren't organic and also sometimes you see movies that you could tell that n.o.body is pa.s.sionate about. It's just a project. It's a way for people to get paid. You know what those movies are. When you see a movie that Sean Penn directed, you realize he's not f.u.c.king around. It's like listening to a Nirvana record or something. This is not a job. They have something to say. And in comedy, the people that we like the most, when they score they have something to say that's important to them. And to me, that's what I'm always looking for.

Marc: In your mind, what is the perfect comedy that you judge all others against?

Judd: There are a few movies I always go back to. I always go back to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It pulls off a couple of things at the same time. One is that it has this really hilarious, broad humor with Sean Penn, as Spicoli. But Jennifer Jason Leigh gets pregnant and has an abortion in it and it's played straight and he's able to be incredibly truthful. That has always been one of the main models.

Marc: Because of the emotional variation?

Judd: When you can do that well, it's a big deal. Terms of Endearment I always go back to as a movie about something very serious that's hysterically funny. All the cla.s.sics like Annie Hall and Dr. Strangelove.

Marc: How about The In-Laws?

Judd: Oh yeah, The In-Laws-all the old Albert Brooks movies. Anytime you talk lists, you feel terrible because there's ten more behind every one you could mention.

Marc: But it's interesting to me that for the most part, outside of appreciating it as a cla.s.sic, Woody Allen is not an inspiration for you particularly?

Judd: Well, I never mention Woody Allen because some of his stuff is so great you feel like a fool even mentioning that you're even in the same business as him. It just feels awkward to say I do what he does. But also, I think probably when all that stuff happened to him, and his family and the stuff with his kids, there was a part of me that disconnected. Maybe after I read the Mia Farrow book I just was like, I got a little creeped out. And my incredible wors.h.i.+p and affection got dented. I don't know where I stand on any of it. He's stranger than I thought he was. And darker than I thought he was. So I don't connect to it in the exact same way as when I was a kid watching Take the Money and Run. I know too much now.

Marc: When I read Please Kill Me, about the punk rock scene in New York, about Lou Reed, as s.h.i.+tty as those-I knew they were all drug addicts and everything else, but you know, Lou Reed was such an a.s.shole, it just f.u.c.ked it up for me. I don't read much about comics because I know how filthy we all are.

Judd: You don't want to know too much about anybody. I mean, if you read a Groucho biography, you'll be like, Oh G.o.d, sometimes Groucho was a p.r.i.c.k.

Marc: Yeah. Now, do you do Marx Brothers?

Judd: I'm obsessed with the Marx Brothers. They were on TV all the time, and I have to say they were the first comedy act that I connected to. I think it was because it was so rebellious. Groucho was basically saying, "This is all bulls.h.i.+t," and for some reason I couldn't have taken to it more.

Marc: Did you feel that because you're not that aggressively, you know, "f.u.c.k you"? Do you feel- Judd: I never felt that way enough to be super-funny, quite frankly. There were comedians when I first started out who were working, like Kinison and Bill Hicks, and those were the guys that were the best guys when I first started. They were hilarious because there was such rage and self-righteousness and they thought they had the answers for everything. I never felt that way about myself. I never thought I had any answers for anything and I wasn't as mad as them. I was just trying to meet a girl and to get to second base. As I've gotten older I really do believe that life is about finding ways to connect to other people, and I'm more attracted to a James Brooks sensibility, where all of these stories are about how people finally come together.

Marc: I think that's where the joy is. That's where humanity is. I think there's sort of the "f.u.c.k you, I'm better than you" or "I know more than you" or "Life is f.u.c.ked." I come from that mold and now that's all melting away.

Judd: That's why I made Funny People. I mean, it's exactly that. He has a moment where it melts away, and then suddenly he's better, and What do I do? I swing back and forth all the time. I think, Well I've done a lot of what I wanted to do, so why am I even doing it now? What's left to say that I haven't said? You don't want to be working just to work. And so I don't know. I just want to go deeper and more personal every time to the point where you start writing and you think, Can I even say this? Who will I hurt if I express these ideas? Am I giving up too much of my experience? But there's no way to dig it out without going to the places you would normally hide from everybody. So it's just about going deeper.

Marc: To push it a little further.

Judd: I've listened to your show a lot and you talk a lot about your family and what makes you feel separate from other people, and that's what interests me now: Why do I feel separate? Why am I still in my room watching TV? In my mind, I'm still in that room and I'm not as connected to other people as I want to be, so I'm trying to do that. But even when I'm doing it, if I'm at a party or I'm at school, there's a part of me that wishes I could run out and sit in my room and watch The Merv Griffin Show alone.

Marc: Why are we so afraid of joy?

Judd: That's the question. And I've thought about it a lot, and I think it's because we think right behind joy is a knife that will cut our throat if we really feel it. It's almost like a laugh-your chin goes up and your throat is exposed. If I laugh too loud, someone will slit my throat. That's the terror of joy.

This interview originally appeared on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast.

MARTIN SHORT.

(1984).

I spent a fair number of my teenage years sitting alone in front of the TV late at night, watching SCTV, which came on after Sat.u.r.day Night Live. SCTV was a sketch show from Canada. It was not done in front of a live audience; everything was shot on tape. (The Ben Stiller Show was heavily influenced by SCTV. Ben and I used to say, "We're like SCTV if they'd had money to work with.") The cast was epic-John Candy, Harold Ramis, Rick Moranis, Catherine O'Hara-but the person who made me laugh the most was Martin Short, with his impressions of Jerry Lewis and Katharine Hepburn and the epic characters he invented, such as Jackie Rogers Jr. and Ed Grimley.

I showed up at his hotel in New York, where he was promoting a new season of SCTV, to conduct our interview. Of all the people I interviewed in high school, he was probably the nicest. G.o.d, did he indulge me. I've gotten to know him a little bit since then, and it all makes sense now: This kindness and warmth is just the way he lives his life.

On the night that Steve Martin won his lifetime achievement Oscar in 2013, I was lucky enough to wrangle an invitation to go back to Steve's house for a celebration. There weren't many people there. For a while, it was just Steve Martin, his wife, Anne, Martin Short, Tom Hanks, Bill Hader, and me, and as a group, they were as funny as anyone I have ever been around in my life. Just a shocking level of intelligence and humor. That night, I went home and thought: Martin Short was the funniest person in that room; ergo, Martin Short is the funniest person in every room.

Judd Apatow: When did your comedy career begin?

Martin Short: In 1972, I did a show called G.o.dspell in Toronto, and it was my first professional show. It was an interesting cast, because there were a lot of talented people in it who were doing their first professional show, too. Gilda Radner, Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy, Victor Garber. Paul Shaffer was the piano player. Everyone became good friends and it was great. We were just out of school, glad to not be in school. We did it for a year.

Judd: And what did that lead to?

Martin: It led to just kind of continually working in Toronto. Canada is a great place to work, because you're not pigeonholed. There's no star system. You're not put in a kind of "He does that and that's all we'll ever ask him to do" role. So, you can do commercials and Shakespeare for radio and musicals-you can do anything, if you get the job. I did all that for about six years, until '78 or so, when I joined Second City. Then I did that for a couple of years and then did it in the States and did a series called The a.s.sociates and then- Judd: The a.s.sociates was highly acclaimed, but that also got canceled.

Martin: The story of my life.