Where he gets his ideas from I wander through the desert and don't eat for five days. and then, boy do the ideas come. Philosophy of stand-up comedy The most common question I see here on Twitter is if I have any advice on being a comedian. I have never given any but I will. It is said that you must write what you have experienced, that great comedy comes from truth, or from tragedy. All of this is nonsense. I am crushed by the time, gone and irrevocable, that these 300 pages have cost me. But here are a couple of stand-up tips. I am not sure if this can be done by the novice, but if I could go back and do stand-up differently, I would. The big problem, oddly enough, when a comedian performs, are the laughs. Stand-up comedy, as it is customarily produced, is a craft and not an art. Here is the reason. The stand-up comedian must create a noise among his audience. The same noise at the same time by as many people possible. There is no room for interpretation. All In attendance must agree with the stand-up's notion of where the laugh comes. Anything short: failure. But an art can be part of stand-up. In can be the central part. But it must be carefully hidden beneath perfected craft. Here is the biggest problem with stand-up as art. The laughs. Laughs are something all people like to get. Laughs that you create make you feel good, make you happy. Laughs cannot be seen as that. There is a point when some comedians understand that getting laughs is something they must not become addicted to. Because the stand-up comedian does not earn laughs. He must divorce himself from this pernicious idea. At its highest form, which is all that interests me, Stand-up must exist beyond both audience and performer. During a show, there are three participants. The Stand-up Comedian, the audience, and the comedy itself. Stand-up begins with hard hard work. It should be worked and re-worked until structurally unbreakable. If you try to avoid any and all tricks, you are on the right path. So you have a bit that has been sharpened to the best of your ability. This is the end of the process. No. It is the beginning. You have done all that you can do and now you show the audience and it does what it strikes them to do And that is the beginning. There is a third player. But it takes time to understand it is the only real player. It is the comedy. I am not speaking metaphorically if I assert that the comedy is a live thing, that neither you nor the audience is responsible for. Knowing this,you can quickly intuit that there is a different way to create comedy and the first step is to understand it cannot be created. I know this must sound like a riddle of no practical use, but I urge you, if you are interested in stand-up, to consider it. Comedy has a voice, of course, which is laughter. And there is nothing cynical in looking at what make people laugh and replicating it. It is good to make people laugh, even if the goal may not be that, may be something more cynical. May be money. More likely is the way it makes you feel to make people laugh. Until you understand you cannot make people laugh, you cannot move on. In the comedy club, there are 3 things. the comedian, the audience, and the laughter. Only one matters. And the laughter was not created by the comedian or by the audience. It cannot be created. It has always been and always shall. As my book became worse and worse with each page, my stand-up has not. I don't know what I will release next. I'm a coward so I have hours. But the new stuff is a radical departure from any stand-up I've ever done. It is not written. It is not created. It already exists. I have found a process that allows me access to this endless library. But it metes itself out very slowly. I have about four minutes. The way to find it is to make sure you are not involved. That you are just an observer. It is so impossible to describe. I think the key to writing a book exists within this same exterior place. With creating stand-up (and perhaps anything) they key is to understand it cannot be created. It was, I, and always will be. There is nothing metaphysical in what I am doing an awful job in explaining. You se, it has all come to me just tonight, after scrapping the hundreds of book pages, and looked for solace at a few minutes of stand-up. And I looked up (a habit)with wonder at what I always thought I created but had created me just to get out and about itself. It was a day of crushing disappointment, a day I understood I had been fooling myself for a long period of time. Gone time. Gone time. I will rest now. Rest for a week and then buy new pencils to replace the pile of broken ones surrounding me. I'm on to something. I'll share it with you guys. Peace. Love. And apples too. Favorite date horror story When I took the beautiful lady home and got the shock of my life. It was an elderly gentleman. Book recommendation My recommendation for a book is "Masters of Atlantis" by Charles Portis School and books I hated everything in school. I think it kills people for books. My kid was having trouble with this book, and oh my God, it was a great book. So I said, "Why don't you try to read it once just for pleasure because you're reading it knowing that you'll be asked questions. You can't enjoy anything then." It's like if you went to a movie and they said, "Oh, there's going to be a giant quiz the next day," it'd be very hard to enjoy that movie because you'll be trying to figure out what questions they'll be asking. Of course the books weren't written for that purpose. They weren't written to be taught in school or analyzed in a literary way or anything like that. School killed me for books. I really believed that school stops people from reading books later in life. Modern books vs. classic literature Most books back then were awful and most books now are awful. The classics stayed on. Reading modern books is like you went panning for gold and had to go through a bunch of rocks to find one single lump of coal. Or, the way I do it, you just go into the store and they give you big bars of gold from the old days and you read those. How much of his book is true Oh, zero. I wanted to write a novel, but they wouldn’t let me. But there are facts in the book that are true, [like] 'a river is made of water.' What's on his bookshelf The Nixon Tapes: 1973 Ed. by Douglas Brinkley & Luke Nichter Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren Books in his library The Nixon Tapes: 1973 Ed. by Douglas Brinkley & Luke Nichter I watched the Watergate hearings while I was a boy in Canada. They said Nixon was the ultimate politician, but no: He was stiff, he’d sweat, he was human, a tragic figure who got caught up in his own insecurities. My favorite part [in these tapes] is the banality: Nixon talks about his mother-in-law making this pie he f—–g hates, and all these guys going, “Yessir!” Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell I love oral histories. Mitchell was a New Yorker writer who’d go around a city and write about interesting people he’d met, from the mayor to the lowest bum. He was probably the first to do New Journalism, [before] Gay Talese. His character stuff is like the best stuff you’d ever read. You wonder, why didn’t he ever write a novel? In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust There are seven volumes, and I’m in the third one now. It’s insanely good. Proust writes it at the speed of time. There’ll be like 30 pages explaining how he wakes up, his eyes open, and a dream comes back and goes away again. Sometimes I’ll read it out loud, because he’s put so much into it. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren If you have a deeper understanding of Christianity than is stylish nowadays, you’ll see that the Huey Long character believes in original sin, and the Calvinist view that everything’s bad and you can only make something good from using bad. The narrator learns you can’t remain neutral. People might want to read this now during this election season. There are only 5 funny comics When I started there were 5 funny comics out of 1 then there was 5 out of 5 now there's 5k & only 5 are funny. It's going to be worse as audience doesn't know the diff as long as the structure is there which you can learn easily & trick the audience. You can't create art. Fascination with Larry King He kind of fascinates me. He’s seen everything, so he’ll out of the blue be like, [impersonating Larry King] "Your son died when he was six. Paul Newman told me you never got over it." He can be just so passionless. This insane corpse talking to people. Also, he looks like a million-year-old. He’s 72 or something. [He's 76. —ed.] And also he prides himself on knowing nothing about the guests, which is kind of cool because sometimes he’ll ask very innocent questions that are interesting, but more often than not, it'll be like how he had [Jerry] Seinfeld on and he asked, "How did it feel when you were canceled?" Why late night hosts love having him on Well, I don’t go on shows to promote anything, for one thing. When I was young, I’d watch guys on The Tonight Show, Buddy Hackett, guys like that, where all they’d be is funny. Later, I remember, on Late Night with Letterman, I remember he’d have Jay Leno and Richard Lewis as first guests and the entire point was to entertain and be funny, and I think talk shows have kind of lost that. It’s mostly about super famous people telling long, dull stories about their swimming pools or something. Criticism of post-modern comedy I guess there came a time, and I missed it, when revealing everything started to be considered art. I’d always learned that concealing everything was art. And I still believe that, because comedy is a vulgar art; it’s an art that’s just beginning to take form because it’s so young. But I can look at other art forms and see how postmodernism has destroyed them, and now threatens to destroy stand-up. It’s the height of narcissism to write meta-comedy, because people aren’t interested in comedy. They’re interested in going home after shoveling shit all day and then seeing some fool perform. That’s not to say that comedy can’t make a greater point, because it can. But it can’t make a greater point by screeching to a stop in the middle of the comedy show, making a point, and then going back to the jokes. You’ve got to craft the point into the joke. I always bristle when people say, “The comedian is the modern-day philosopher.” There are modern-day philosophers. Having an agenda as a stand-up comedian A lot of it is bragging. It used to drive me crazy when I knew that a stand-up’s agenda was about showing how smart they were. The last character you want to be is a guy who’s smarter than the audience. But there’s some hole inside that these stand-ups have to fill. It has nothing to do with making people laugh. On comics who "subvert" stand-up comedy Stand-up is a form and to subvert something, you have to do it perfectly first. I remember somebody showed me a talk show with “subversion” in it — the guy chainsawed his desk. It was so stupid. Why did you build a desk in the first place if you were only going to chainsaw it? Don’t have a fucking desk! You just want little drops of subversion. Letterman in the ‘8s would be 9 percent a great talk show and then 1 percent subversion. If you get to 3 percent subversion, you’re in Andy Kaufman land. If you get to 7 percent, you’re a guy on the streets screaming at people. What are you trying to subvert anyway? Entertaining people? It’s absurd. If he enjoyed making Stephen Merchant on Live I was told later that Stephen was uncomfortable but I didn't mean to. The conversation just flowed to British children's entertainers being largely pedophiles and I don't know why Stephen Merchant was tiptoeing around it. Favorite movie I guess my favorite movie ever is Planes, Trains and Automobiles, because it always makes me cry at the end.
