Name: Dr. Laura, no Waylon Jennings on Late Late Show w/Tom Snyder, September 23, 1998
Uploaded: 2018-12-11T00:30:36.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Dr. Laura, no Waylon Jennings on Late Late Show w/Tom Snyder, September 23, 1998' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-12-11. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Dr. Laura, no Waylon Jennings on Late Late Show w/Tom Snyder, September 23, 1998' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-12-11. Transcript available.

Dr. Laura, no Waylon Jennings on Late Late Show w/Tom Snyder, September 23, 1998

Good evening, my friends.
Welcome back, everybody.
I'm TS, and the ColorCast is on the air now.
It is Wednesday night, the 23rd of September, 1998.
Dr. Laura, the most popular person in all of radio in America, is here tonight,
and the great country music star Waylon Jennings and stories along the way,
and you on the toll-free.
It was nice to see the market up 257, 258 points today.
You know, as my run comes to an end here early in 1999,
this is not the time for the market to begin going down.
You know, my little screw you fund is fine, but...
If it turns into a bear market, it's screw me.
See, we don't want that to happen.
In any event, we're on only one minute late tonight here on CBS.
You know what's great about CBS?
Like last night, we were, what, 25, 26 minutes late?
Tonight we're a minute.
Yeah, 19 last night.
You never know when you're coming on here.
They have a guy out there with a megaphone in the hallway.
They say, two minutes, Tom.
I say, okay, be right in.
Anyway, what I thought we'd do tonight before we get to Dr. Laura and Waylon
Jennings' answer,
some viewer email that comes in via computer here to our office
and is handled by Joseph Ruggiero, my assistant here at CBS.
And here is, as they say, the first letter that we'll answer tonight.
These are just letters.
Now, this is not intended to be a laugh riot or, you know, anything like last
night, the laugh riot.
Zebra, 26 sizes larger than an Abra.
Hi, Tom.
Not that I want to sound like Jerry Seinfeld, but why do the local TV stations
carry the live traffic updates
on the 5 and 5.30 p.m. newscast and also in the morning?
Do that many people have TVs in their office to watch what their commute home
will be like?
Don't most people get their information on the radio once they're in the car?
Am I the only one who finds this strange?
Love your show.
Best wishes to your mom.
Sincerely, Linda.
P.S. I work at 30 Rock.
You know, Linda, I've often thought of this myself.
You know, I watch my favorite traffic caster, Paul Johnson, on KNBC here in the
morning, in the afternoon.
I thought, who's he talking to?
Because people get the information in their cars.
So why put it on TV?
And incidentally, if you're in the car, they're never talking about traffic
where you are.
It's always where somebody else is.
Here's the second letter.
Dear Tom, thought you might get a charge out of this.
I got this from a net newsletter.
Public media should not contain explicit or implied descriptions of sex acts.
Our society should be purged of the perverts who provide the media with pornographic
material
while pretending it has some redeeming social value under the public's right to
know.
That quote, apparently, is from Kenneth Starr, appearing in the 1987 interview
on 60 Minutes with Diane Sawyer.
Thank you for your work and your honesty, Susan, Cleveland, Ohio.
Susan, thank you for sending that to our attention.
Dear Mr. Snyder, this is email number three.
I enjoyed your show tonight.
I managed this.
She's referring now to last night's epic, which appeared late on the network.
She says, I managed to keep myself awake for the entire show.
You are definitely worth staying up for.
Well, thank you.
I enjoyed your opening banter tremendously.
It was abundantly clear that Mr. Kennedy enjoyed it also.
There was no sign of the Titanic sinking last night.
I just hope that Mr. Kennedy survive the opening without rupturing anything or
having a depends moment.
It sounded like he was having a hard time coming up for air.
Sincerely, Carol Brown.
Carol, we've become used to Mr. Kennedy's moments of all kinds on this program.
Last night, there was nothing untoward.
Finally, hi, Tom.
I hope you haven't heard this yet.
The Surgeon General has said that all cigar manufacturers must post the
following morning on all cigar packages.
Caution.
Cigars may cause cervical cancer.
I'm Tom.
You're watching CBS.
And thank you for catching our pictures as we fly them through the air.
Dr. Laura's radio program is heard by millions of people who tune in every day
to get her take on morality and how to establish quality in their lives.
Her blunt style and sharp answers have earned her some critics.
But if her huge radio audience is any indication, Dr. Laura has millions and
millions of fans.
Her newest book is The Ten Commandments, The Significance of God's Laws in
Everyday Life.
And it's a pleasure to welcome Dr. Laura back to our program here at CBS.
And thanks for coming on.
I always like to be here with you.
Thank you.
Now, you know, in reading about you this afternoon and in going through your
book,
your outlook on life has changed a great deal since you began broadcasting on
radio, hasn't it?
What's changed in Dr. Laura's life?
Well, I was in college in the 60s.
Yep.
So I was a secular feminist.
Had no concept of holy or sacred.
I was brought up with no religion in the family.
And, you know, ethics and, you know, appropriate behavior, decent behavior.
But the issue of holiness in areas was not my frame of reference.
And so getting the license and practicing psychotherapy and all of that had a
very secular viewpoint.
I mean, there would be times I can remember thinking back on my show where
somebody would call in
and part of the call would be that they'd start talking about religion or God.
Don't go there.
Don't go there.
You know, because I, at that time in my life, that was like Twilight Zone,
silly stuff.
I didn't want any part of it.
And when you say secular feminist, religion wasn't a part of your life.
But were you an active feminist?
And were you one of those who, you know, men were bad or men were somehow
keeping women down
and that men were not to be trusted?
Or was it that kind of feminism in which you believed at the time?
No, I never went over the edge.
Okay.
And I was a science major.
I didn't have time to go out and make a fuss about things.
But it was this, you know, power in your job is everything.
And getting married and having kids was sort of a cop-out.
Robbed too many women of the pleasure and joy of their own femininity
and an appreciation of the dualistic and very important synergistic
relationship with men.
To me, it was very anti-men, anti-family, anti-children.
And where along the way did religion find you or did you find religion or was
it a marriage of the two?
I think it came and got me when we got married and had Derek.
I mean, the miracle of having a person growing inside my body.
Creating life, right.
It was so astonishing to me.
I mean, I had taught it in biology classes, so I was intellectually aware.
But that's not the same thing as feeling little feet and arms inside of you.
And it just seemed too complex, too miraculous, too wonderful, too intricate to
be an accident of molecules.
So that was the beginning.
And then having Derek and realizing how overwhelming and dictatorial a baby is,
that your whole life is turned over.
It is sacrificed in a way to nurture and love and support and protect and take
care of this little person.
And that gave me a big notion of living for something more magnificent outside
of what I want, where I want to go, what I want to do, what I want to have.
And then as he got older, we were watching PBS together.
And up comes a Holocaust program with a voiceover of how it was Nazi filmage.
The horrible scenes of women and children and men being shot and put in a
shallow grave.
And Derek says, and my hand was frozen on the remote control, and Derek says,
what's going on?
And what do you tell a six-year-old?
And I explained the best I could.
And who are they?
They're Jews.
And who are Jews?
Those are our people.
Jews are us.
Yeah.
And he said, what's a Jew?
And I said, I don't know.
But I'm going to start finding out.
Because I was not brought up with any religion at all, but I identified
religiously.
My mother was a Catholic from Italy.
My father was a Jewish boy from Brooklyn.
But there was no religion in the family at all.
Yet, I identified that way.
And that began our journey, religiously, until the whole family.
So all of this, then, would change your outlook and your attitude when you get
on the air.
And how are you a different person on air now from when I first met you, God,
10, 15 years ago when you subbed for Sally Jesse Raphael on ABC Radio here in
Los Angeles?
Well, the perspective was very much on practicalities and I think egocentrism
to some point, because that was very supported by the culture, which said even
the bone I've had to pick with my own profession is instead of leading so often,
it follows the politically correct.
And that whole notion of you live for what satisfies and aggrandizes you, and
then when you're happy, there's some trickle-down theory, which is so obnoxious.
And more just the psychotherapy vantage point.
And the first book I wrote in this arena was How Could You Do That?
And that was after years and years and years on the air, growing and maturing,
and seeing that more often than not, the problems that people had in their
lives were not so much psychological as character and philosophy,
and not having a sense of what makes life purposeful, and how to decide what's
right and what's wrong, what framework do you use, your own, the gray areas,
the rationalizations, or something absolute?
We're seeing a great deal of discussion these days about character, obviously,
with what's in the news.
And we're seeing a great deal of discussion about, here's that commandment,
thou shalt not commit adultery, about exactly what that is.
I mean, we've seen the President of the United States, FUMFA, through a number
of definitions of what in his mind constitutes sexual intercourse.
What about this commandment, thou shalt not commit adultery?
What does that mean to you?
It's so profound a notion.
It's not just, listen, you got married, you shouldn't be having sex with
anybody.
It is more complex in terms of making the sex between two people something safe
and something sacred.
And not only that, it provides stability within the family, within the extended
family, and within the culture.
I mean, you see, we've talked before in this program, about the overwhelming
instability you see in kids' lives.
I mean, people call the show now, I'm married, I had that kid divorced, they
had kids, we got together, now we have his, hers, ours, these are visiting,
these actually live here.
This is chaos for kids.
And so the notion that certain things are special and should be confined, and
that always seems like a negative word, to something very special in a
committed relationship,
provides stability for both people to feel safe with each other and for
children to grow up without feeling, without being crass about sex and intimacy
and without being cynical.
What do young people think, based upon the feedback you get from the people who
listen to you on the radio and interact with you?
What kind of signals are coming out of the White House with this thing?
Well, you know, the teenagers are feeling vindicated.
You're telling them they're bad, they're wrong, they're this, they're that.
You can elevate yourself to President of the United States and do this for your
entire married life.
This is very sad.
I believe that people in positions of authority and responsibility, you and me
in our respective, much less a president, have a responsibility and we are
accountable to set a standard.
It isn't all about signing some treaty with a country.
That part is very important too, or a bill for something here.
But it is setting the tone for a nation which then lives within the confines of
those rules.
And if you think about it, and what struck me immediately, because I'm not very
big on the political things, is that this is the first father in the first
family.
We call this the first family.
That represents something.
And what devastates me emotionally is what this does to all the families out
there trying to explain to their kids,
be good, work hard, and you can grow up to be president.
Aside from that, my heart goes ou