Name: Gahan Wilson on Letterman, March 30, 1982
Uploaded: 2016-11-30T03:10:43.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Gahan Wilson on Letterman, March 30, 1982' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-11-30. Transcript available. Cartoonist Gahan Wilson promotes his book _Is Nothing Sacred._.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Gahan Wilson on Letterman, March 30, 1982' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-11-30. Transcript available. Cartoonist Gahan Wilson promotes his book _Is Nothing Sacred._.

My first guest. Critics have called this gentleman, Gay and Wilson, the Michelangelo
of the macabre, the wizard of the weird, the guru on gruesome.
His drawings have appeared in New Yorker, The National Lampoon, Gourmet, Punch,
Paris Match, and of course, Playboy.
His newest collection is entitled, Is Nothing Sacred, of which I have a copy
here. Please welcome now, Mr. Gay and Wilson.
Gay and Harold, have a seat.
Well, I've been a big fan of yours for many, many years, as have, I guess, the
entire nation and folks overseas as well.
And I was looking over articles about your life this morning, and something
caught my eye that said you had been born...
Dead. Dead.
You're born dead.
Yeah. It's true, David. I was. I was born dead. I think it had a lot to do with
my career.
I came out blue and unbreathing, and the doctors were advising my parents to
forget it and start over again and put me to dispose all.
But, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, the old family doctor came by, dear old guy, played by
Lionel Barrymore.
He rushed into the operating room and grabbed me, and from somewhere he got a
pot of hot water and a pot of iced water,
and he would dunk me in the one and then the other, and then he'd hit me, and
then he'd do the thing all over again.
And eventually, I started to complain, and I've done it ever since.
Yeah. Now, is there anything to, uh, you have, I guess, a peculiar view...
By the way, I'm sorry I didn't bring along, if I'd know as Animal Knight, my
man-eating Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Does he do anything with a bowling ball?
No. He might chew it a little bit.
Uh, you're also, uh, you have some interesting ancestors.
I do. I do. The one I'm proudest of is P.T. Barnum.
And, uh, I think P.T. Barnum is sort of like Hugh M. Hefner.
It's, uh, America, having run into him, was never the same afterwards.
Uh-huh.
Uh, he really single-handedly created advertising, as we know it today.
Uh, a sensational guy. Terrific fellow. Very proud of him.
The other one is William Jennings Bryan,
uh, who is perhaps the greatest folk hero of the, uh, sort of bucolic set that
there ever was.
I'm not so proud of him. I, I much prefer P.T. Barnum.
Yeah, go after him.
Do you find yourself being attracted to, to circuses and carnivals and so forth?
Uh, the sideshow.
Yeah.
Yeah, usually. I like my sideshow much better. I like the freaks.
Uh, they're fun. They're, they're nice people.
And, uh, I used to drag my poor father to the sideshow time after time.
He hated sideshows.
Uh-huh.
Uh, but I loved them.
Uh, they smelled great. You know, you could smell the fire eaters.
He's sweating away.
Uh-huh.
And the tattooed man. And, uh, it was terrific. I just loved them.
Do you, uh, use any of these, uh, exhibits or memories or people?
All the time.
As far as...
All the time. The whole world is grist to a macabre cartoonist's bill.
Uh, there's, uh, you just, there's, I used, I used to rely on, uh, the classic,
uh, monsters.
You know, Frank Sandracula, the gothic novels.
Uh-huh.
I found out that the daily papers and the television news are a much better
source of grotesque, uh, subjects of humor.
So, the, the, uh, cartoons we see are actually from real life.
They are.
Yeah.
Let me, uh, do you want to take a look at, uh, some of the cartoons now or
shall we wait?
Oh, do the commercial now, then we'll come back and take a look at some
examples of Mr. Wilson's work.
And, uh, you folks will stay with us.
Uh, we'll be right back.
Welcome back to the show.
Again, Wilson is with us, uh, Swoosie Kurtz from, uh, Love, Sydney, and later
in the program, Andy Kaufman.
We were, uh, let's take a look at some of the cartoons.
I guess most of these are from the new publication game, is that correct?
Yeah, most of them are from, uh, there's nothing sacred.
I'll hold them up, and you tell us what we're looking at.
Uh, this one, uh, uh, has a doctor, and he's looking at a patient, and, uh,
there's something in the back of the patient, uh, clutching it.
And he says, I think I've found the trouble, Mr. Nadler.
Quick and, uh, exact diagnosis.
That's right. Sometimes just a simple checkup like that will put it in here.
Something green on your back, David, you'll always want to go to the doctor and
have it looked at.
Not always that serious, either.
Uh, this is a touching thing.
This is about a painter who has painted, the painter's no longer there, you
wonder why.
And then you see that he's painted something else, which he took for a rock.
It wasn't a rock, folks.
It was something hungry.
Later attached itself to his back and dragged him down.
And dragged him down.
Oh, this is wonderful.
This one is a great favorite with eye doctors.
Um, it shows a fiendish eye doctor with a knife at the ready, and a, uh,
patient was beginning to get the idea.
And on the wall chart, it says, in ever-shrinking letters, "I am an insane eye
doctor, and I am going to kill you now," as you sit there, grinning.
And then it sort of fades out.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I like the way that guy looks.
Now, there is a guy, you see, that's a stoop.
This guy...
Well, David, if you're just about to be destroyed, people tend to look stupid,
you know?
Yeah, I would guess so.
Yes.
Especially by an optometrist.
Especially by an optometrist.
You're just not ready for it with an optometrist.
This is a very nice one, sort of sociological.
There's this fellow being strapped into the electric chair, and the hood's
about to be put over.
The doctor's looking sad.
The priest is reading from the book, and the guy is happy, and he's saying, "Gee!
It's just like in the movies."
He's realized a part of the American dream, David.
What a simpleton.
Simpleton, that's...
I think the simplicity of this one, I'm proud of that.
There's a men's washroom in a restaurant, and you've often seen this science as
employees must wash hands by order of the Board of Health.
You wondered about it.
Well, here's the explanation.
You see, the fellow's got these hands, and he's washing them one after the
other.
There's logic to everything.
Washing the hands.
Yeah, this is a little thing about legality.
Here we have a court composed entirely of lobsters.
A lobster judge, lobster secretary, lobster jury.
And unfortunately, the client here has got a little napkin which you wear to a
seafood restaurant when you're eating lobster.
And the caption says, the lawyer's saying, "Your Honor, the defense contends
its client could never get a fair trial in his court."
And there's a touching one here.
I don't know if you can get in the TV monitor, but here, there's this nice
little gentleman, and he's in the pediatric ward, and there's all these little
babies.
He's waving a green web tan, and way over there, waving back, there's a little
tiny green web.
There's a little bit of applause.
Those are wonderful.
Thank you very much.
You mentioned you were influenced by sideshow freak shows, and so on and so
forth.
Absolutely, yeah.
Are you also a monster movie fan?
Oh, I'm a nut for it.
I've dragged my wife into these.
They always show these monster movies in the most despicable possible theaters.
I don't know why, but you go and it's usually much more appalling than the show.
I mean, many of the time I've heard worse sounds coming from the auditorium,
that sort of thing, you know.
That kind of stuff, you know.
You tend to look away from the werewolf and the guy next to you, you know,
because he's a little more menacing, a little more scary.
But yes, I watch them all the time.
I'm an absolute buff.
You also went to, visited a monster capital of the world.
I did, yes.
My wife is a travel, Nancy Winters, a novelist and journalist.
She got a thing where we were going on a very lovely, healthy cruise in the
Mediterranean.
And it turned out that we were going to pass nearby Yugoslavia.
And it occurred to both of us that Romania was nearby and therein lay Transylvania,
the home of Count Dracula.
So I called Playboy magazine and asked if they would be interested if I did an
article on Count Dracula in his home country.
And they said yes.
So the government of Romania made us their guest.
And I was shown through the place and it was an incredible experience.
I must confess that I was a little worried because I thought I'll turn up and
it'll look like Skokie, Illinois.
But it didn't.
It looked just like Transylvania.
And I will never forget.
You see, you've got things divided into various areas.
And the approach to get into Transylvania, you have to go over the Carpathian
Mountains,
which are those mountains that you see in the Bela Lugosi movies.
You know, these terrifying looking things.
So we went up and the government had a chauffeur.
It was a sort of an Eon Fleming persuasion.
He'd go as fast as he possibly could without killing you, you know, on any
given road.
And so we were going up the mountain.
And the Romanians have got this sort of mess of ecological sympathy and mysticism.
And when they do a road for the first time, they do not actually, they sort of
sketch it.
You know, they kind of roughly bulldoze it and let them stand back and see what
the mountain's going to do.
And if the mountain rejects part of the road, well, okay, they try it over this
way instead.
And this road had been essentially rejected.
It was a flop as far as the mountain was concerned.
And we kept turning like this, avoiding crevices and things.
And it got higher and higher.
And the sheep were standing like this.
And finally, at the very top, the clouds kept pouring in from all sides.
It was really like, you know, some speed-up action things, special effects.
And then we were to go through a tunnel, which was just, just then had been
carved to the very top of the Vagarish Pass.
And we're just about to the entrance when I heard this noise.
And I looked back and there was this lightning bolt, not coming down, but this
way, you know, at us.
Big, fat, yellow thing.
Just like that.
And I went like that, right by the entrance to the cave.
And little chips of rock hit the, then we went in the tunnel.
And there was an old lady in a shawl with a lantern underneath.
And she was going, I don't know what, you know, some kind of thing.
And we went, we entered, we came out, and we were in a storm.
A storm, a terrific flashing light, and so he could not see out of the window
because there was just water, you know, just currents of water.
And then a lightning bolt, like that, and you see a jagged rock.
And the driver, of course, did not slow down.
He kept on going as fast as he could, and into this blinding thing.
And Nancy, my wife, was sitting there, and she was doing a repertorial thing of
writing things down.
I thought she was taking notes, but she handed me this bit of paper saying, "Why
am I here?"
And I wrote, with the burst of male chauvinism, I wrote, "Because you love me."
And that did not work.
That didn't work.
And then we ran into a landslide.
The car suddenly went down, and rocks hit the top of it, and it was really
something else.
But this guy recovered us, and then as we approached this lovely little inn
down the other side of the hill,
like, again, special effects, the rain stops, and there's sort of drippy, wet
air,
and we emerged to have a vodka, please, at this charming little inn.
And there's this huge, white butterfly flopping through the air like this.
And our guide from the Romanian tourist thing looked at her, and he says,
"Aha, I see Dracula has taken the form of a gigantic, white butterfly to
welcome you to Toronto."
It actually happened.
This sounds more like Disney World.
Gay and Wilson, thank you very much for being here, sir. I appreciate it.
We'll be right back.
Swooshy Kirch will be joining us.