Name: Jack Black Talks Tenacious D
Uploaded: 2024-08-08T15:08:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jack Black Talks Tenacious D' from Bad Friends Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-08-08. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jack Black Talks Tenacious D' from Bad Friends Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-08-08. Transcript available.

You probably are one of the best Scream singers, too.
You're very good.
Thank you.
You know that.
I'm no Jim Morrison, but I can get up there.
When did you kind of discover this love of music and performing that you had?
Like beyond the acting stuff, the music thing, was that your first love?
I loved getting up on a stage and getting attention and ham and cheese and
doing theatrics when I was a little kid.
Loved putting on a show from as far back as I can remember.
Music, I liked it, like listening to it, but I didn't really get into singing
until later, until like high school when I got into the musical theater because
those were the good opportunities to get up on stage.
And I was singing in a little show called Pippin.
You ever hear about Pippin?
Pippin.
1970s musical.
And I remember auditioning to get into Pippin and singing, and I had to really
like scrape the pan is what they called.
When you get up to the top of your voice and you kind of got to, yeah, get up
there and like, there's a little bit of distortion in your vocal pipes.
And I remember there was a girl who was auditioning right after me and she, the
way she looked at me when I scraped the pan, no one had ever looked at me like
that before.
And I was like, I think I like this music.
Oh, she looked at you in a ooh la la.
It was a different, yes.
I love ooh la la.
Don't you love ooh la la?
Everybody likes ooh la la.
Dude, that's one of my favorite vibes.
You're Mr. Ooh la la.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, that wasn't the only reason.
I do love music and I love doing it, but there was something about that
audition that changed things.
But you realized that you had, you had the thing.
That I had, maybe I had a little something.
Maybe I had something I could work with.
It's surprising you never did stand up.
Yeah, no stand up for me.
Probably better than it.
What?
He's better than it.
I know he's better than it, but I'm just saying.
It's a low rent art.
It's a low bar.
It's a low, it's a low, it's hanging fruit.
It's low rent art.
You know what it is?
It's writing.
And I do like to improvise.
I've done a lot of improv classes and some improv in some of the sketches I've
done.
But the best improvisers are like really good writers.
And those stand up comedians, you got to be a real writer.
And I don't really think of myself that way.
I do.
I do too.
I think you.
I mean, you never thought about trying it?
I have thought about it because I've been around it a lot.
When me and Kyle were doing Tenacious D, we would go and play these clubs and
all these brilliant standups would go up there.
But it takes a kind of courage.
And I always liked having that security blanket of being a part of a team.
And if it went sideways, I could always say it was his fault.
And having the guitars and the music was also, it was our thing that set us
apart from the other comedy acts.
But also maybe secretly a little bit of a crutch.
It's like, oh, we'll get the music here.
I don't know.
We all have a crutch though.
We all have our crutches.
Yeah, we all.
I do the same things.
I think sometimes the things that you think, these are like little devices that
I've created to save a set.
When I was, I just did a show with Bert at, not Savannah, Georgia.
I forgot where we were.
I don't remember.
I know because you weren't there.
You were in the South.
I was in the South.
You called me.
Right.
And so Big Jay, I told you I bombed, right?
Yeah.
So Big Jay Oakerson, and it's about 10,000 people in the audience.
Yeah.
Big Jay Oakerson has the set of the night.
Destruction.
Mm-hmm.
And also we're in the South, and that's his people.
What does that even mean?
He's from Baltimore or something.
I know.
He speaks their language.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's like a kind of like a filthy white.
Can I say filthy white?
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
He's not a clean white.
He's not John Mulaney.
Yeah, he's a filthy white.
He's a filthy white.
Sure.
Right?
I don't think he'd be offended if I said that, right?
I'm a filthy yellow.
He's a great white.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's a great white.
Killing it, and I'm literally, I turned to Leanne, Bert's wife.
Yeah.
And I go, I'm going to struggle.
And she goes, no, you're fine, sweetie.
They love you.
It's all about love, these audiences.
I go, I'm going to struggle.
And I hear my name come up.
And I go up there, and dude, I struggle.
Oh, shit.
And then I started doing, I go, you know, I go, you know, I have a bag of
tricks.
Bag of tricks.
Right?
So this is one of my, I don't want to reveal it, but I'm going to do it.
Do it.
One of my bag of tricks is I'll do three minutes, and then if somebody sits
down,
like when they went to the bathroom, I'll go, fuck, where were you?
And they're like, I went to the bathroom.
I go, I'm going to start over.
So I'll leave the stage.
I'll run out and then restart my set doing the same jokes.
And that usually kills.
It did worse than the original true joke.
They were like, we see through it.
That's almost as if they said that.
We see through your little antics, your little tricks.
Right?
I did it all.
What could you have done?
Nothing.
Yeah.
I bombed.
What do you do when you're in a situation when you guys aren't being well
received?
No, they're always well received.
No, there have been a couple times, but especially if you're going and playing
festivals
where there's 100,000 people there that really came to see Metallica or whoever,
you got to
win some people over.
And what I do is, the mantra is, don't forget to pretend to have a good time.
Why?
Because if you just stay in that, just keep on pretending like you're loving it
and enjoying
it, eventually you will start to.
And then that's the hope and the dream.
And then they'll pick up on that energy and they'll start to enjoy it too.
Because if you're suffering and you're, what did you say?
Struggling?
Struggling, yeah.
It's like, yeah, there's blood in the water.
There's blood in the water.
They can sense it.
They're like an animal.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They can see your fear.
Yeah.
I tell people when they're doing The Tonight Show, I go, because I saw, I'm not
going to
name the name.
Can I just whisper it?
Yeah, do that.
Back in the day, I think before I did stand up, I saw who we love do The
Tonight Show.
And he didn't do well.
Even as a non-stand-up at the time, I went, oh shit, this guy's a legend.
He's not doing well.
Live TV is so hard.
Right?
So when I'm, when I'm, so what I tell you, I can do this.
Yeah, you're done.
Yeah, yeah, it's crazy.
So anyway, but when I saw a young comic, I go, just, you're on TV, they can
sweeten
it, you know what I mean?
Just pretend you're killing.
Smile.
You know what I mean?
If you're eating, and you know, we know that at clubs, if you're bombing, you
know what
I mean?
Just kind of, it's the same thing as much.
Yeah.
I shouldn't even said any of that, right?
Because it's just like, you already said it.
No, it's good.
Now I feel like a fool.
Now I look like a fool.
You do not.
I was just, I wasn't listening at all.
Because I was thinking the next thing I was going to say.
I can see it.
Because the truth is, no matter what, like your, your approach is, if you have
a technique
of what to do, mantras don't really work because you go, okay, don't forget the
thing.
To always do the thing.
The thing is always going to be different every show.
Yeah.
Not the same.
But what I've noticed is like, we'll have a great show and then we'll have a
bad show.
And after the bad show, I usually have a good one, the next one, because I'll
usually be
like, you know what?
I was trying too hard.
It's always, it's my number one problem is trying too hard.
And I go, this next time, I'm not going to try too hard.
I'm going to kind of act.
This sounds horrible.
I'm going to kind of phone it in a little bit.
Yeah.
If you phone it, you throw it away, you don't care as much.
That's when the magic happens.
That's when the magic happens.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's when the magic happens.