Name: Jason Zinoman Interviews Merrill Markoe, April 13, 2018
Uploaded: 2018-04-14T18:03:43.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jason Zinoman Interviews Merrill Markoe, April 13, 2018' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-04-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jason Zinoman Interviews Merrill Markoe, April 13, 2018' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-04-14. Transcript available.

Jason Zinoman Interviews Merrill Markoe, April 13, 2018

Thank you for coming out tonight. We're so excited to be hosting Jason Zinneman
and Meryl Marko tonight for the paperback release of Jason's New York Times
bestselling and New York Times notable book of 2017, Letterman, as they talk
about the life and legacy of David Letterman.
I have little bios about them, just like a line or two. Jason's the first
comedy critic in the history of the New York Times and also writes about
theater and pop culture for Vanity Fair, Slate, Time Out New York, and many
others.
And here to chat with him is a very special guest, Emmy Award winning writer,
producer, and comedian, Meryl Marko, who is the co-creator and original Righthead
writer.
Yeah, I'm very excited. Let's welcome you two wonderful writers.
Thank you everyone for coming out.
When I started working on this book, I had one goal, one simple goal, was to
never be at a place where I was asking friends and family to come see me read
books in a bookstore.
So, and I've succeeded so far. For a hardback release, we showed Cap'n Boy,
Chris Elliott's movie, and this, for the paperback release, even better, we
have a real titan of comedy, Meryl Marko, who came over to Los Angeles.
I'm going to embarrass Meryl for a second, but Meryl Marko had a huge impact on
my sensibility in a way that I didn't understand until writing this book.
And through kind of getting to know her and talking to her as a source, it's
been a pleasure to sort of hear that voice from my childhood, the voice of late
night, which, and it's an argument of my book that a lot of the things that
made that show so innovative and so important come from her.
And talking to her sort of gave that up. Now, her career is huge and varied,
and she's a comedian, a writer, and author. She's written for places like, you
know, Moonlight, Sex and the City, New Art, and I didn't realize she was in the
second episode of Friends, more recently, and she has a stack of books, and
there will be many more, all of which you should get.
Novels, Psycho X-Game, Welcome in Circles, collection of essays. I'm going to
cover a lot of territory and show a few clips that zero in on what I mean by
her being important to what made Late Night different.
But I want to start with something in the paper today, where Mitzi Shore, who
was the founder of the Comedy Store, died.
And the Comedy Store is where Merrill did stand-up in the 70s, where he met
Letterman, and which is also just one of these real fundamental key training
grounds of comedy.
And I know you're, I wonder if you could say a little bit about what Mitzi was
like.
Well, for me, Mitzi, Mitzi had a varied effects on whoever, it depends on who
you talk to. With me, and with Gary Shandling, she didn't think that anybody
who was also a writer should perform.
She thought those were separate things, and if you were a writer, she didn't
book you as a stand-up.
So that, to me, didn't really endear her to me, particularly.
It was some old vaudevillian idea that stand-ups hired writers, and that
writers couldn't be stand-ups.
And, so I'm not that crazy found.
And now she's gone.
So, that was excellent.
Good start.
Good start.
So, when I talked to you, when I asked you about your stand-up in the 70s, you
said to me, "My persona was not particularly gelled.
I was having a hard time figuring out who I was allowed to be."
Yeah, there was a thing, I think all women lately have been reassessing what
your life has been based on what we now know we're allowed to be angry about.
And we're all real angry.
But, there weren't a lot of women in stand-up, and there wasn't really any
models, per se.
The person I liked most in stand-up was Lily Tomlin, and she wasn't really a
stand-up, she was a monologist.
And she did characters, and I knew I couldn't do that.
Then there was Joan Rivers, of course, but she didn't really remind me of me or
anybody I knew.
And I, so they were just sort of, what, Phyllis Diller didn't look like anybody.
It was, there wasn't, it wasn't the female equivalence, particularly, of the
male guys at the time, you know.
And there was just a lot of weird stuff about a woman on stage.
You wondered whether or not you were being off-put, and you realized that they
didn't.
Well, here's a good example.
For instance, the one who was the most accomplished of all of the women that I
knew at the time was Elaine Boosler.
And she couldn't get on a Tonight Show because they kept saying she was
threatening.
Threatening!
She's like 5'1", she would really put on a lot of makeup and do her hair, and
she'd buy a special dress, and they'd call her threatening.
No longer threatening, and you just, and it was because she had too much of a
real specific point of view.
So.
Well, Elaine Boosler, people talk about Elaine Boosler being like, you know, at
the time, the fact that she should have become as big as Leno and other people.
She was very big at the time.
What was she like to see her in the late '70s?
She was, she was really good.
She was working very hard to not, um, how do you, how do you, she, we, she and
I both, we were very good friends at the time, and, um, we didn't like self-deprecating
comedy.
We didn't want to hear women go, I'm so slap-chested that everyone throws up
when they see me.
That, there was a lot of that kind of thing, you know.
So, uh, we were, we were both, she, she was the first woman, I think, who was
doing gender neutral, kind of just political material.
And, and, and I, I was doing sort of more weird, abstract, kind of, more kind
of Stephen Wright-y, kind of, odd thoughts and stuff, and.
So, Elaine, you were also, you were, at that time, you were friends with Andy
Kaufman, or you worked with Andy Kaufman.
One thing I, you told me is, you know, this was the period where Andy Kaufman
was, was wrestling, or, I believe, a little before that.
No, it was right at the very beginning.
It was the very beginning, it's the weirdest thing, when I moved to L.A., I
fell into the middle of a pile of the most neurotic stand-up comedians in the
world.
Like Andy, and then Robin Williams, and then Gary Shandling, this, all these,
and then eventually Letterman, you know, just all the, the primo neurotic.
You, you wrestled Andy once, no?
I, I didn't wrestle Andy, no, what he was doing was, he was doing this show at
midnight, and he was calling me his writer.
And I, I was not his writer, because nobody wrote for Andy Kaufman, no matter
what anyone tells you, he was coming up with all of it on his own.
He was just a one-man band for, for weirdness of his own sort.
And he, he knew what he wanted to do, and he was doing it.
But, um, he was doing this show called Midnight Snacks, and Midnight at the Improv,
and it had this most hilarious talk show set up, which was, it had a desk that
was about two and a half or three feet above the guests.
Some of the guests were like this, and he'd go, oh, so I hear you have a new
book out.
Well, um, it was kind of brilliant, actually.
And, um, I wrestled, uh, I wrestled a woman, he had me on as a feminist, and
then he had her on as somebody who was the opposite of a feminist, and he said,
well, I don't know how it can be solved this unless you wrestled.
The women really wrestled.
Did he choreograph it, or did you?
No, I, we just wrestled.
I, I took that, in the middle of the night, I think of that, I think, did that
really happen?
Did you wear a wrestling getup, or was it?
No, I was, you know, I don't even know what I wore, I know it happened.
I think there's video of it somewhere, but I, I...
By the way, before Meryl went on, we were talking up front, she was, someone
mentioned, uh, Hell's Angels, and she mentioned that she was at Altamont.
So clearly, she's lived an incredible life.
The, uh...
I went to everything of that era, I went to all of them, and left them all
early.
I'm kidding.
Come on, but you worked with Andy then on The Morning Show.
Now, the legend has grown up without Andy.
Andy's, you know, there's, there's 20-year-old comedians who are trying to do
Andy Kaufman all over the city.
Uh, and there's a sense that what he did was sort of incredibly calculated.
He knew exactly what he was doing.
He was the strangest human being.
I mean, I was kind of fond of him, but he used to phone me at night and talk
and talk and talk and talk.
And then the next day I'd run into him, I'd be like, "Does he recognize me?"
Sure.
Sure.
I think he did.
I mean, he did, but he was really odd and nobody ever really, I couldn't, maybe
it was Spectrum that we now refer to it as.
Um, you know, before you wrote comedy, you taught, you were a painter, you are
a painter, you were a painter, and you taught art.
Uh, and, uh, I'm, I'm curious if your work in fine arts informed your comedy.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of, when we, yeah, I think so.
It was, it, the early show looks very art school to me.
It's got a lot of art school touches to it.
It's full of ideas just for their own sake and visuals for their own sake.
It's the kind of thing that you learn to love when you're in art school.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
So, so one of the things is that the show is often playing with point of view
and perspective.
Yeah.
Which leads to sort of the, to the first clip I want to show.
Um, the, uh, so let's see if I should set this up.
This is actually, all the clips I picked are obscure clips that you, that you
might, hopefully, haven't seen before.
That, uh, and this one is from the second episode of Late Night.
Um, and it's a new, uh, it's a segment called limited perspectives that Penel
came up with.
And the, to the, I think the set up I need is that it's essentially like a
smooth, a movie review.
And the movie review is of Reds for, uh, people who are too young for that.
It was this epic, sweeping Warren Beatty movie about the Russian Revolution.
But the way they do it here, there's a bit of a twist.
So let's see the first book.
I'm proud this evening to introduce a new feature on our show that we are
calling limited perspective.
In it, we are featuring discussions of popular media events from particular
points of view.
Tonight, I'd like you to meet a dentist from here in New York City, Dr. Norman
Hoffman.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
From the dentist point of view.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
In the making of the motion picture Reds, the producers have gone to a great
expense to create
the illusion of authenticity with respect to architectural details, style of
dress, means of transportation,
and so on.
But one cannot help but notice a notable failure in the attempt to produce
realism in the movie.
The story takes place at the beginning of the century, when dental methods were
relatively
crude.
Yet the stars of the film, Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, and so
on, are seen displaying
near-perfect dentition, with respect to color and shape and occlusion and gingival
health
and general aesthetics.
And this would have required the use of acrylic veneered gold, porcelain fused
to gold, porcelain
alone, implants, and a host of other methods that were historically not
available at that time.
Thank you, Dr. Hoffman.
How was Jack Nicholson in the film?
Well, in this picture he doesn't show any teeth, but in the picture, from a
subjective point
of view, just an impression, his teeth were much too even.
They look like a picket fence, no undulations to them.
Undulations to them.
Nothing's natural.
I think they should have lengthened some of them to give them more naturalness.
How about Diane Keaton?
Diane Keaton has a high lip line, and she's showing a lot of teeth and gingiva.
Her two front central teeth are slightly elongated.
Pretty much ruined the film for you.
Of course, here is the writer, producer, director, scholar Warren Beatty.
Warren Beatty appeared slightly toothy, but better than the others.
Better than Diane Keaton's or Nicholson's.
I would say that Warren Beatty's teeth were the best 