Name: Phil Donahue on Later with Bob Costas, Part 2: November 29, 1988
Uploaded: 2024-08-19T21:56:43.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Phil Donahue on Later with Bob Costas, Part 2: November 29, 1988' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-08-19. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Phil Donahue on Later with Bob Costas, Part 2: November 29, 1988' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-08-19. Transcript available.

we're in new york with phil donahue just down the hall here on the eighth floor
from where he does
his show andrea you are a man and you think you're you believe you're a man
well i'm going to come
down to the bad tactics i am actually a man when i was a guy i liked women uh i
was a woman i like
men when i watch a lot of your shows i begin to feel that i'm the abnormal one
that all these
weirdos you bring on are normal sometime in the near future some husband's
going to say to his wife
well do you want to tonight and she's going to say well i don't know do you
want to well okay
and you gotta go and put in the cassette undo this the ceiling mirror uh get
the oils and the herbs
and the spices and then and then when all that fails you plug in the good old
vibrator
isn't there a danger with some of the topics even though they may be
interesting and even though the
individuals you have on the show that day may in fact be representatives of
that particular topic
a danger of creating the idea that this is part of a larger syndrome when in
fact they may be freaks
you know you don't you know what i mean all right here's here are five nazis
and the impression is
created that there are five nazis in your town uh here are here are two interracial
lesbians looking to
adopt a chinese child and then try and become priests and they're barred from
doing that by their church
i mean this may be interesting but it's more like uh tales of the bizarre
rather than hey this is what's
happening in america and this is just the tip of the iceberg right um first of
all there are probably
five nazis in your town at least that's a problem um white supremacists have
been unusually successful in
recruiting on college campuses today america has a very large unresolved
problem uh and it's called
racism and it lives and i think we're running full bore away from it rather
than meeting it head on
we had a biracial lesbian couple who artificially inseminated the black woman
with the sperm of the
white woman's brother and they had a biracial baby incidentally the baby was
gorgeous
i think we have to presume a certain amount of common sense on the part of the
audience
i don't think people out there watching that program said oh my god we're going
to have a biracial couple
lesbian couple next door to us or that these people are everywhere but it did
it did get into uh
uh lesbian sexual sexuality what makes us who we are why are we this way when
did you first realize
you the boy and she's the girl and who decides uh what about artificial insemination
this is a
piece of reproductive biotechnology now that's now available to people so i
thought it was a
uh i watched the whole show and i i thought it was very interesting we did have
some general
managers who some of whom had no pulse at the end of that program but the uh
america's still standing
and i think television's problem is not controversy it's blandness and i think
anybody who can push
against if you can successfully push against those un uh those invisible
barriers that i think
we tend to draw around ourselves i think that the uh television and the viewer
are are the beneficiaries of it
how often has it happened through the years where affiliates have yanked the
show or uh station
managers incensed enough to fly to new york or chicago or dayton wherever you
were and personally
confront you now we've had our problems we've been cancelled for political
reasons uh more often than
not uh so it's much more likely they'll cancel you because you put on an interracial
couple and that
offends the political or sociological sensibilities rather than if you put on
something that they think is in bad
taste we had we had a station that wouldn't carry dick gregory 15 years ago uh-huh
um we've uh a lot our las vegas station cancelled a show we did on strippers
figuring rightly if they can get it for free they won't come to the casino and
pay for it uh i call
the guy because i always do i really get into it you know it's their incidentally
it's their call
there's nothing illegal about we give them the show they don't have to air it
and i think that
that's a pretty good way to do business it's the way it works uh and remember
it's working one at a
time so i don't have one vice president who can kill me all over the country i
got a guy maybe in
indianapolis who'll cancel me but i'm still on in peoria i don't want to be
canceled and we don't
get any joy in making people angry and getting canceled but i always get into
it at least i want
them to know that i'm watching i called the guy said how could you las vegas
you're telling me that
this is not i it and i walked right into his trap he said to me i want you to
know that last there are
more churches in las vegas than per square mile than you'll find and many of
the women who work here
tonight at night in the big shows where they might be topless are women who
take their children to
sunday school and he gave me this big speech about first baptist las vegas and
i shut up i mean you
know i i said okay i you know you did it's your station how often when the show
goes off the air and
the way the show most often ends is the conversation seems to still be in
progress and the credits are
rolling and and and we're left with that how often does the conversation
actually continue oh often
that's an effort on my part to you i always thought that the long applause and
the credits
and the people are starting to i always thought that was a waste of air time
this is a very valuable
asset you know and not a few out there might wonder if it's so valuable how is
it that this guy gets to
use it uh i think i want to do wall-to-wall show even if it means trying to get
a five-second
question on between yeah you know the true value spot in the end of the program
so that's what that's
about and i know it does frustrate some viewers because usually they're truncated
or half but has
it ever happened that for an hour after the light goes off that the people are
still standing they're
still fielding questions yes and then you and he developed a relationship yeah
a best friend
relationship and which matured into a uh sexual relationship when we all moved
to san francisco
everything all came up at once we were three best friends we lived together we
did everything together
and we decided to have a child together and when we decided to have a child
together we decided we'd get
married and have a child maybe in a year or so which the the pregnancy happened
within a month of the
time we decided this are you saying that the three of you went to bed together
so that neither one of
you would know yeah that's what they're saying yes oh yes
more on later right after this people talk at least they used to about donahue
as a political
figure donahue for senate was that ever something you seriously considered well
mike wallace asked me
that question once on a 60-minute interview and i said you know i'd like to be
in the senate i look
down there and see all those blue suits and they're spending all this money to
get here this must be some
kind of this must be a great job and ever since then i've been asked about this
i have no plans to be
to run for public office i am uh enjoying the donahue show we're even more
interested now in doing it
because we want to prove ourselves in this crowd of uh competing talk shows and
if i would uh run i i think
the house may be more fun than the senate gary here in the house you're in for
life 98 of them get reelected well that's also probably almost
uh you could almost say the same for the senate it's not quite as high but it
is true that 98 of the incumbents in the house get reelected
uh the senate is a place i think that appears to drone on and on there's an
awful lot of wind in the senate the house is because of its size the rules are
more strict and you you're obviously under more time constraints and i think
the debate moves a little more expeditiously in the house
uh but do i want to go from uh banquet to banquet begging for money i'm not
sure speaking of the house
wasn't it robert dornan who uh stepped up to the microphone uh and said that we
all know that phil
donahue is the leading anti-catholic bigot in america that's exactly what he
said and uh i mean uh mrs
donahue's little boy philly never thought he would get mentioned from the well
of the house
and i was rather flattered by it i i uh i think uh bobby darnan wants his own
talk show i think that's his
secret uh did he wind up on your show yes of course i worked i put him on
immediately and showed the
tape what made him say what he said what well he's a he's a very devout
conservative catholic and i have
had more than a few things of criticism to say about my own faith the catholic
faith i think much of what
we have in the catholic church today is not divinely inspired uh i think the
catholic church has a lot
of answering to do about divorce catholics to name just one group i think the
church is legitimizing
homophobia the way it treats gays women and clergy and women and uh so i merely
you know as
a i merely stood up uh 15 years ago and said wait a minute i went to notre dame
i'm not going to just
kneel down and pray i want you to know how i feel and i started popping off and
obviously i upset a lot
of people are you a practicing catholic you go to church i'm not i don't go to
church uh regularly but
i did have 16 years of catholic education and it's not anything you'll ever
walk away uh from and i i'm
honest enough to say that uh if something if i ever get hit by a car i'd want a
i'd want a priest there
and a busload of nuns too how about the most gratifying guests and again it's
it's hard to
to get the list down to just a few you know uh there's been been so many
moments in the in the
21 years we've been on the air i will never forget a program where we featured
everybody in the audience
the audience was made up entirely of married couples who had lost children
and i'm father five so you know after that show i started counting my blessings
and i remember
watching them hang on to each other and i learned a lot about what you know
this tragedy can can
destroy a marriage a lot of people think if you hit it if something like this
punches you in the nose
you hang on tighter and that often happens but not always and to see these
people hanging on to each
other one woman stood and she says they never talk about bobby they never talk
about him it's like
he never lived and we have a couple that has his picture on our tv on their tv
and we're very pleased
and the woman said i know what you mean you talk about bobby and if you cry you
cry i felt the show
just transcended the tube i'll never forget it that happens to be the first
show that comes to mind when
you ask me that kind of most or best or worst or most memorable that one pops
up you spent three or four
hours with albert speer now here's a man in the tightest of hitler's inner
circles and of course he
sat there and denied that he had knowledge of the specifics that were going on
in the death camps and
you challenged him repeatedly on that there's a great line about the the banality
of evil did you find
that looking into this man's eyes that you you you wanted to see something that
was demonstrably the
face of an ogre and you couldn't find it yes i felt uh i started to like him uh
and i felt very
conflicted about that uh here's a man who did tell the truth at nuremberg who
essentially said you got
me who served 20 years his wife waited for him at the gate as he came out i
think his books inside the
third reich he wrote couple in prison on toilet paper was i think his books
were an honest effort
to share with the world how could this happen i also think he was anti-semitic
without and to and
he was 70 when i interviewed him and i don't think he that's what makes racism
so insidious it's a lot
like cancer you don't always know you have it i think he was bobbing and
weaving and really convinced
himself that he didn't have it but i i i'm very proud of the 104 minutes we
taped with him he's now dead
and i think it i've told the museum of broadcasting look uh this is a little
self-indulgent of me to say
this but i think this ought to be in your library because i don't know of any
other interview with
speer that that's that is that extensive he was with eva brown and hitler the
night before they
committed suicide and didn't eva brown take him into a room separately and uh
well he he saw eva they
opened some champagne and eva said uh eva brown he's you know he was english as
a second language you
know and he she was she was not a beauty she was pretty but not a beauty and i
she said why are they
fighting it's over i said did she weep he should he said no i said did you say
goodbye to the fury he said
yes i did what i said what happened he said i shook his hand and his handshake
was very limp
and the next day eva adolph and the dog were dead
when you interviewed reagan i guess in 77. six did you have did you have the
feeling as you sat there
that this man could be president of the united states i i think ronald reagan
is as charming a human
being as ever walked the face of the earth ronald reagan could come to your
place for dinner tonight
and your father would feel welcome question i'm it's amazing he is he all they
say about him is true
he is the single most charming person you'd ever want to meet in your life and
he has spent more money
than any other single human being in the history of the universe and he will
leave office you know with
the helicopter and the you know and the waving and i think we're going to look
up and wonder how in the
world this happened uh that we could have actually used our credit card like
this without any thought to
how we're going to pay for it phil donahue back after this eva brown asked me
to come to her in her
small private room and she was very kind and she said you haven't eaten
anything i guess and she first of all
like a good housewife she gave me something to eat and then she ordered the
bottle of champagne and we
drank a bottle of champagne just the two of you me too together yes did she weep
no no she
uh um astonishing enough she was the only in this bunker who said to me why all
this nonsense with
fighting says this is over why do we fight eva said why all the fighting you
mean uh why all the fighting
now that the war is over yes she thought why they are fighting now she didn't
mean the war she meant
it's better to cope quickly to an end did she know she was going to die yes she
said that yeah she said it
you are really fascinating no but you are wonderful i said it when we were off
there and i want to
say you are loving and generous and you like women and it's a pleasure and
whoever is the woman in your
life is very lucky well thank you very much does it help or is it just
coincidence that you and marlo are
apparently like-minded politically is that an important part of a marriage well
i think so i uh we're very
blessed in that uh i've never had a relationship that featured this kind of
communication i mean it
really is fun to talk to her uh and she likes me best when i'm talking to her
uh so uh all these
things help it isn't certainly doesn't mean that we uh agree we have our uh uh
differences but i feel
very fortunate to be she's in the center of uh uh the politics of the women's
movement and those
folks are often in our company and i enjoy them they're very their indignation
is at a high level
they're outraged at what they perceive to be the injustices leveled against
women and other
minorities in the society and it's exciting thing to be surrounded by these
folks without asking you to
to pin a gold star on your chest do you think that through the years you've
helped the women's
movement i don't think i'm not yet that i don't take myself that seriously we
are proud of the fact
that the women's movement matured as the donahue show did and the platform that
we had with my name
on it was always there to reflect these changes um no we we didn't we didn't
change anybody i think we
have made a over the years uh reasonably small but significant contribution
toward apprising toward
introducing the audience at large in the daytime to the people who were making
all these headlines
i think it was irma bombeck who once said and i don't think anyone's going to
confuse irma bombeck
with a strident feminist like betty for dan or someone like that but it was irma
bombeck who once said
that donahue is so appealing to women because they watch him at home at three o'clock
in the afternoon
and they don't fantasize about him the way they might about tom sellick or
someone else but they
imagine that if he were their husband he would talk to them and so many of
their husbands do not talk to
them and it was also irma bombeck who said if a man watches three football
games in a row he should be
declared legally dead uh i i'll take whatever irma has to dish out for me as
you know we were neighbors
and in centerville ohio and i you know remember when she had like a once a week
column in the
dayton journal harrell and boy she is just uh you know she had i think of the
of the 10 top
best-selling books of the 70s she had two of them two of them i mean this woman
that's not bad and she
gives a speech boy i've seen some of her commencement stuff and oh she is so
good i'm green i wrote her
and i said you know here's my speech you will be impressed with its earnestness
uh if nothing else
if not the typing or the and i'm never going to give a commencement speech
again until i send it to
you i want you to edit it for me i admire her very much i think she's just very
very talented
and a great heart she's got a great heart you just watched phil donahue for a
half hour or so no phone
calls no audience just two guys talking we hope some of you are out there we'll
be right back
phil donahue your first show in 1967 was with the atheist madeline murray o'hare
if you knew you were
about to do your last show your valedictory who would you want to have as the
guest well i'd love
to interview the pope i think he's a very powerful figure who is not exposed to
the same checks and
balances i think the pope ought to hold a news conference once in a while he
doesn't have to
invite me but he's a world figure and i think he should be it'll help him find
out what the people
i'd love to have nixon uh nixon has been one of my biggest failures we've tried
consistently over many many years i i think he's i think that he may have some
anxiety about the
audience a lot of people do incidentally and i also think he thinks of it of a
daytime talk show
as a kind of a touchy-feely thing that he he doesn't have any he's afraid i'm
going to say did it bother
you that you didn't start for the whittier football team and he doesn't reveal
himself he doesn't want
any part of that stuff all right we've got to go we've enjoyed being with phil
donahue hope you enjoyed
it too see you later everybody join bob tomorrow night when his guest will be
jonathan winters
you

Phil Donahue on Later with Bob Costas, Part 2: November 29, 1988

we're in new york with phil donahue just down the hall here on the eighth floor
from where he does
his show andrea you are a man and you think you're you believe you're a man
well i'm going to come
down to the bad tactics i am actually a man when i was a guy i liked women uh i
was a woman i like
men when i watch a lot of your shows i begin to feel that i'm the abnormal one
that all these
weirdos you bring on are normal sometime in the near future some husband's
going to say to his wife
well do you want to tonight and she's going to say well i don't know do you
want to well okay
and you gotta go and put in the cassette undo this the ceiling mirror uh get
the oils and the herbs
and the spices and then and then when all that fails you plug in the good old
vibrator
isn't there a danger with some of the topics even though they may be
interesting and even though the
individuals you have on the show that day may in fact be representatives of
that particular topic
a danger of creating the idea that this is part of a larger syndrome when in
fact they may be freaks
you know you don't you know what i mean all right here's here are five nazis
and the impression is
created that there are five nazis in your town uh here are here are two interracial
lesbians looking to
adopt a chinese child and then try and become priests and they're barred from
doing that by their church
i mean this may be interesting but it's more like uh tales of the bizarre
rather than hey this is what's
happening in america and this is just the tip of the iceberg right um first of
all there are probably
five nazis in your town at least that's a problem um white supremacists have
been unusually successful in
recruiting on college campuses today america has a very large unresolved
problem uh and it's called
racism and it lives and i think we're running full bore away from it rather
than meeting it head on
we had a biracial lesbian couple who artificially inseminated the black woman
with the sperm of the
white woman's brother and they had a biracial baby incidentally the baby was
gorgeous
i think we have to presume a certain amount of common sense on the part of the
audience
i don't think people out there watching that program said oh my god we're going
to have a biracial couple
lesbian couple next door to us or that these people are everywhere but it did
it did get into uh
uh lesbian sexual sexuality what makes us who we are why are we this way when
did you first realize
you the boy and she's the girl and who decides uh what about artificial insemination
this is a
piece of reproductive biotechnology now that's now available to people so i
thought it was a
uh i watched the whole show and i i thought it was very interesting we did have
some general
managers who some of whom had no pulse at the end of that program but the uh
america's still standing
and i think television's problem is not controversy it's blandness and i think
anybody who can push
against if you can successfully push against those un uh those invisible
barriers that i think
we tend to draw around ourselves i think that the uh television and the viewer
are are the beneficiaries of it
how often has it happened through the years where affiliates have yanked the
show or uh station
managers incensed enough to fly to new york or chicago or dayton wherever you
were and personally
confront you now we've had our problems we've been cancelled for political
reasons uh more often than
not uh so it's much more likely they'll cancel you because you put on an interracial
couple and that
offends the political or sociological sensibilities rather than if you put on
something that they think is in bad
taste we had we had a station that wouldn't carry dick gregory 15 years ago uh-huh
um we've uh a lot our las vegas station cancelled a show we did on strippers
figuring rightly if they can get it for free they won't come to the casino and
pay for it uh i call
the guy because i always do i really get into it you know it's their incidentally
it's their call
there's nothing illegal about we give them the show they don't have to air it
and i think that
that's a pretty good way to do business it's the way it works uh and remember
it's working one at a
time so i don't have one vice president who can kill me all over the country i
got a guy maybe in
indianapolis who'll cancel me but i'm still on in peoria i don't want to be
canceled and we don't
get any joy in making people angry and getting canceled but i always get into
it at least i want
them to know that i'm watching i called the guy said how could you las vegas
you're telling me that
this is not i it and i walked right into his trap he said to me i want you to
know that last there are
more churches in las vegas than per square mile than you'll find and many of
the women who work here
tonight at night in the big shows where they might be topless are women who
take their children to
sunday school and he gave me this big speech about first baptist las vegas and
i shut up i mean you
know i i said okay i you know you did it's your station how often when the show
goes off the air and
the way the show most often ends is the conversation seems to still be in
progress and the credits are
rolling and and and we're left with that how often does the conversation
actually continue oh often
that's an effort on my part to you i always thought that the long applause and
the credits
and the people are starting to i always thought that was a waste of air time
this is a very valuable
asset you know and not a few out there might wonder if it's so valuable how is
it that this guy gets to
use it uh i think i want to do wall-to-wall show even if it means trying to get
a five-second
question on between yeah you know the true value spot in the end of the program
so that's what that's
about and i know it does frustrate some viewers because usually they're truncated
or half but has
it ever happened that for an hour after the light goes off that the people are
still standing they're
still fielding questions yes and then you and he developed a relationship yeah
a best friend
relationship and which matured into a uh sexual relationship when we all moved
to san francisco
everything all came up at once we were three best friends we lived together we
did everything together
and we decided to have a child together and when we decided to have a child
together we decided we'd get
married and have a child maybe in a year or so which the the pregnancy happened
within a month of the
time we decided this are you saying that the three of you went to bed together
so that neither one of
you would know yeah that's what they're saying yes oh yes
more on later right after this people talk at least they used to about donahue
as a political
figure donahue for senate was that ever something you seriously considered well
mike wallace asked me
that question once on a 60-minute interview and i said you know i'd like to be
in the senate i look
down there and see all those blue suits and they're spending all this money to
get here this must be some
kind of this must be a great job and ever since then i've been asked about this
i have no plans to be
to run for public office i am uh enjoying the donahue show we're even more
interested now in doing it
because we want to prove ourselves in this crowd of uh competing talk shows and
if i would uh run i i think
the house may be more fun than the senate gary here in the house you're in for
life 98 of them get reelected well that's also probably almost
uh you could almost say the same for the senate it's not quite as high but it
is true that 98 of the incumbents in the house get reelected
uh the senate is a place i think that appears to drone on and on there's an
awful lot of wind in the senate the house is because of its size the rules are
more strict and you you're obviously under more time constraints and i think
the debate moves a little more expeditiously in the house
uh but do i want to go from uh banquet to banquet begging for money i'm not
sure speaking of the house
wasn't it robert dornan who uh stepped up to the microphone uh and said that we
all know that phil
donahue is the leading anti-catholic bigot in america that's exactly what he
said and uh i mean uh mrs
donahue's little boy philly never thought he would get mentioned from the well
of the house
and i was rather flattered by it i i uh i think uh bobby darnan wants his own
talk show i think that's his
secret uh did he wind up on your show yes of course i worked i put him on
immediately and showed the
tape what made him say what he said what well he's a he's a very devout
conservative catholic and i have
had more than a few things of criticism to say about my own faith the catholic
faith i think much of what
we have in the catholic church today is not divinely inspired uh i think the
catholic church has a lot
of answering to do about divorce catholics to name just one group i think the
church is legitimizing
homophobia the way it treats gays women and clergy and women and uh so i merely
you know as
a i merely stood up uh 15 years ago and said wait a minute i went to notre dame
i'm not going to just
kneel down and pray i want you to know how i feel and i started popping off and
obviously i upset a lot
of people are you a practicing catholic you go to church i'm not i don't go to
church uh regularly but
i did have 16 years of catholic education and it's not anything you'll ever
walk away uh from and i i'm
honest enough to say that uh if something if i ever get hit by a car i'd want a
i'd want a priest there
and a busload of nuns too how about the most gratifying guests and again it's
it's hard to
to get the list down to just a few you know uh there's been been so many
moments in the in the
21 years we've been on the air i will never forget a program where we featured
everybody in the audience
the audience was made up entirely of married couples who had lost children
and i'm father five so you know after that show i started counting my blessings
and i remember
watching them hang on to each other and i learned a lot about what you know
this tragedy can can
destroy a marriage a lot of people think if you hit it if something like this
punches you in the nose
you hang on tighter and that often happens but not always and to see these
people hanging on to each
other one woman stood and she says they never talk about bobby they never talk
about him it's like
he never lived and we have a couple that has his picture on our tv on their tv
and we're very pleased
and the woman said i know what you mean you talk about bobby and if you cry you
cry i felt the show
just transcended the tube i'll never forget it that happens to be the first
show that comes to mind when
you ask me that kind of most or best or worst or most memorable that one pops
up you spent three or four
hours with albert speer now here's a man in the tightest of hitler's inner
circles and of course he
sat there and denied that he had knowledge of the specifics that were going on
in the death camps and
you challenged him repeatedly on that there's a great line about the the banality
of evil did you find
that looking into this man's eyes that you you you wanted to see something that
was demonstrably the
face of an ogre and you couldn't find it yes i felt uh i started to like him uh
and i felt very
conflicted about that uh here's a man who did tell the truth at nuremberg who
essentially said you got
me who served 20 years his wife waited for him at the gate as he came out i
think his books inside the
third reich he wrote couple in prison on toilet paper was i think his books
were an honest effort
to share with the world how could this happen i also think he was anti-semitic
without and to and
he was 70 when i interviewed him and i don't think he that's what makes racism
so insidious it's a lot
like cancer you don't always know you have it i think he was bobbing and
weaving and really convinced
himself that he didn't have it 