Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (19 page)

But a decade or so after we burst onto the scene with
Clerks
, all Mos and I ever did together was work. Sure, we’d crack wise and bullshit through commentary tracks of our flicks whenever we put the laser discs or DVDs together, but long gone were the awesome hours of musing about nothing while trying to make each other laugh. We’d become boring ol’ grown-ups, ever entrenched in conversations about work.

I suggested to Scott that we sit down once a week to record one of those podcasts I’d started hearing about on the Internet. It sounded like homegrown radio and was described to me in myriad ways before I understood it was my future.

“These podcasts are like doing a commentary track without a movie,” I told Mos.

The idea was to record once a week and then post the conversations online. The public availability of the show was an integral part of the equation because it encouraged accountability from lazy motherfuckers; if we knew an audience was going to be listening, there was a much better chance we’d make an effort to sit down and record every week, thus improving the overall health and fun of our friendship. Otherwise, it’d decline into catch-as-catch-can non-existence, ultimately taking a backseat to almost anything else in our lives, thus defeating the purpose of its creation.

So on February 5, 2007, Scott and I sat down to record the very first
SModcast
—the name a rudimentary combination of
S
for
Smith
and
M
for
Mosier
, spliced with the word
podcast.
The format was simple: dopey free-associative conversations that sounded like the same ones you have
with your friends. We kept a fairly regular weekly schedule, taking weeks off only when we went into production. The show was out there years before the great pod rush, so we were able to build up a dedicated following: First, five thousand weekly listeners, then twenty thousand, then one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand.

Part of the appeal of the show became the periodic tastes of the East Coast flavor. Whenever I was back in Jersey without Scott, I’d have Bry and Walt join me as guests on
SModcast
. Their shows always received huge feedback, so I started encouraging them to record their own weekly podcast. But while those guys are both true originals, they’re both shit at self-starting as well. Neither Bry nor Walt are cursed with the amount of unreasonable self-esteem that’s required to initiate something outside the box—that reasonable amount of unreasonability.

But I always knew they had it buried somewhere deep within them because we all grew up in New Jersey, you see—the state that resides squarely in the shadow of its far sexier sister, New York. Jersey was the butt of toxic-waste jokes—the armpit state. It wasn’t a destination, it was a conduit to Philly or the shit hole you visited only when you wanted to watch Giants games and maybe play the slots. The state least likely to amount to much. Dismissed as inferior, folks from Jersey tend to try harder. We know we’ve got a perceived deficit, and in the same way that a fat man eats pussy, we overproduce to make up for it. Jersey makes you cum twice
before
it even pulls its dick out. We have to; we’re New Jersey.

Bryan says he had one foot on a chair and a noose
around his neck when he finally recorded the first episode of
Tell ’Em, Steve-Dave
—the award-winning weekly podcast he records back in Jersey with Walt and Brian Quinn. Named for a line from
Mallrats
that Walt says to Bry, the show was something of a medical marvel: It was the talking cure for Bry’s blues. Each week, he’d spill his head out to Dr. Flanagan—whose no-nonsense, tough-love approach to therapy makes Dr. Phil look like Dr. Seuss. And each week, the feedback was incredible. The audience built rapidly and Bryan could no longer deny that his thoughts and opinions—his
life
—mattered.

It didn’t take long to transition
Tell ’Em
to a live show, and suddenly, two guys who never expressed interest in being on a stage were free-associating and conversing in the same way I always loved listening to back at the Highlands Recreation Center, but doing it in front of hundreds of appreciative people who were paying money to see them talk. But the best magic trick was yet to come.

Elyse Seiden wasn’t just an executive producer on
Red State
, she was really the lynchpin of the flick. Elyse was the first person to find actual money to make
Red State
, and when we were in postproduction, she asked if I’d meet with her friend Charlie Corwin, who ran a small production company called Original Media. At our meeting, Charlie asked if I had any geeky ideas for AMC—the home of the best television on television right now:
Mad Men
,
Breaking Bad
,
The Walking Dead.
He said AMC was looking for a show that the
Dead
audience might also enjoy, and Charlie thought I might have an idea. I said a comic book store reality show would be fun for that audience, not to mention inexpensive to produce. You could scour America for the
most erudite, colorful comic shop cast you could find, and after rolling cameras for two months there’d be an entire season of episodes. Charlie said he’d take it back to AMC.

A few days later, Charlie said AMC responded well to the notion. The next step would be shooting a pilot presentation. In an effort to keep the cost down, I suggested using my comic book store in Red Bank, New Jersey—Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash.

“The guys that work there will be fine for the presentation,” I told Charlie. “If you wanna hear what they sound like, spin a few episodes of
Tell ’Em, Steve-Dave
.”

The next week, Charlie called back and said, “We don’t have to scour the earth. These guys
are
the show.”

Elyse and Charlie brought the AMC execs down to Red Bank to meet Bry and Walt, and suddenly, we were shooting an AMC-financed pilot at my comic book store, starring two of my best friends in the world—solely because their podcast was funny and interesting. Bry didn’t merely talk himself off a ledge; he talked himself into a TV show called
Comic Book Men
. On AMC, no less—the 1984 Edmonton Oilers of cable! The mid-’90s Miramax of current-day television!
Tell ’Em, Steve-Dave
turned out to be a hysterical fountain of eternal youth, but it also saved Bryan Johnson’s life.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, the talking cure was saving the life of another Jersey best friend as well—a best friend who was also the sharpest tool in my garage-band world, gifted to me decades past by those twin suns Bry and Walt, the great givers of life.

There are likely more pictures of me standing next to Jason Mewes in existence than there are pictures of me standing next to either my wife or child. That’s because
Mewes has always been
both
to me: wife
and
child. As Jay and Silent Bob, we’ve been professionally married for years; privately, he’s been the son I never had or wanted.

About two years ago, Jason Mewes was on a one-way trip to Shitsville, courtesy of his old Lex Luthor: drugs. Sure, Mewes had danced with Mr. Brownstone and friends before and come out the victor—but that was when he was single. It’s much easier to fuck up your own life and try to rebuild than it is to fuck up your
wife’s
life and hope she’s still around so you can tell her you’re sorry once you’ve spanked the monkey off your back again.

As human beings, we govern our actions with our deepest fears. But if you name that shit, you claim that shit: Let enough people into your closet and you’ll find there’s no more room for skeletons. Leave yourself nowhere to hide and you can live life unguarded.

For years, I’d been telling Mewes, “You have to start talking about the drugs, sir. Tell the stories, warts and all.” But as fearless as Jay normally was in his approach to life, he was terrified to confess he’d used needles. “I’ll never get another job if I tell people I’ve shot heroin,” he’d say. I’d list actors who’d junked out and come back from their addiction, but Jason was resolute: The public discussion of his private shames was all acceptable fun and games—
except
when it came to heroin.

Ironically, it was telling people all the dirty details of doing dope that finally set Jason Mewes free. In the fall of 2010, roughly six months after the start of
Tell ’Em, Steve-Dave
, Mewes and I started recording a podcast called
Jay and Silent Bob Get Old
, appropriating the names of the characters that made us famous and using them as an
umbrella under which Jay could tell
his
stories and lay out his troubled (albeit hysterical) past every week in what’s basically a weekly intervention, or one of Bill W.’s
meetings
, if you will: Every Wednesday, you get to see or hear Jason save his own life. You’d be shocked by how inspiring it is to watch a man battle substance abuse with the only weapons he’s got left: his sense of humor and his lack of self-consciousness.

The beauty of conversation is that you don’t need talent or a set of special performance skills to engage in one:
Anybody
can hold a convo. I started to wonder: If I had a really interesting or funny conversation with my friends and we relocated that conversation to a proscenium, would an audience pay just to watch us speak?

Even though Scott is not a stage-oriented, limelight-seeking kinda cat like me, two years after we started
SModcast
, I got him to do the show live up on a stage for charity, in front of over a thousand people at the Sanderson Centre in Brantford, Ontario, the hometown of Wayne Gretzky, during Walter Gretzky’s annual street hockey tournament. In front of a sold-out house, quite like Frampton, Mosier came alive. Fueled by the appreciative crowd, Mos crushed onstage, leaping nimbly from topic to topic, slinging jokes and voices, bringing the house down. A few months later, we did another live show, this time at the Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, to help promote
Shootin’ the Shit with Kevin Smith
—a book of transcribed episodes of
SModcast.
Attendance was good but not great, so after the show, there was little talk of ever doing
SModcast
live again.

The economic downturn would prove to be my good
fortune, however. Months later, Scott was between jobs and in need of some income. I told him an easy way to make ten or twenty grand would be to tour
SModcast
across the country at little indie rock and comedy clubs. We’d had enough practice talking to each other in a room alone; transitioning that to a stage seemed the next logical step. Mos said yes, so I rented a bus, and we hit the road on April 26, 2010, for the sold-out
Live Nude SMod
tour: York, Pennsylvania; Cleveland, Ohio; Duluth, Minnesota; Fargo, North Dakota; Billings, Montana; and San Francisco, California. A month later, we rented another bus and sold out shows in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Columbus, Ohio; and Madison, Wisconsin.

When I got home from the second tour in June, I was musing on Twitter about how much I loved doing
SModcast
live and wished we could do it more often. I tweeted a dream of a black-box theater in Los Angeles, where we could do live podcasts whenever we wanted. My friend Matt Cohen picked up that ball and
ran
with it! He was a creature of improv classes and a student of live comedy, so the idea of a performance space where we could put on our own shows sent the normally sedate stoner slacker into passionate overdrive, and within a day, he found the perfect location on Santa Monica Boulevard: a forty-four-seat black-box theater.

Matt and I partnered up and opened the portcullis on SModcastle—the world’s first and only podcast theater—on July 25, 2010. The sold-out prima nocta event featured
SModcast 3D
;
Highlands: A Peephole History
;
Tell ’Em, Steve-Dave
; and
Having Sex, with Katie Morgan.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I felt like I was in
The Little Rascals
, mounting miniature epics in our parents’ backyards.
SModcastle gave birth to
Blow Hard
,
SMovieMakers
,
Red State of the Union Q&A
,
Crimson Mystical Mages
,
Starfucking
,
SMarriage
, and more—all the children of the atom that are the SModcast Network.

But while SModcastle was born of
SModcast
, it quickly became the house that
Babble
built, as well as the Mewes-eum of unnatural history.

After our family moved to Los Angeles permanently in 2002, I became a semiregular visitor to the
Kevin and Bean
morning show on the World Famous KROQ. The highlight for me was always “Showbiz Beat”—“walked” on the airwaves by actor/comic Ralph Garman. Not only did Ralph love geek news, he could also do amazing impressions of folks like TV Batman Adam West—which would then
really
bring the geek news to life. “Showbiz Beat” is a five-minute segment, but whenever I was in the studio with Ralph, it would go ten minutes or more—because as much as we love showbiz, we love to make fun of it and deconstruct it as well. Forget what you’ve heard about baseball; making fun of your betters is the
real
American pastime.

After years of sitting in on “Showbiz Beat,” Ralph suggested we hit up KROQ about doing a Saturday morning show of sorts that’d be like an hour of entertainment news. We recorded a pilot, presented it, and were told nobody wants to hear people talk on the radio anymore—which was cool by me, as I was talking up a storm on the Internet. The Internet was where lots of folks thought talk radio, spoken comedy, and nonpolitical chitchat went to die; in reality, it’s where they went to
live
. Podcasting gave on-air talkers one more platform. And unlike radio, users could
choose
what they wanted to listen to at any given moment. And the
Internet got
very
portable over the past ten years—meaning you can carry around thousands of hours of podcasting from
SModcast
in your back pocket and listen whenever you’ve got time or the notion: while driving, while working, while cleaning the house, while at the gym.