Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (33 page)

Louis:
He did a gradual thing. But for me, it was more interesting to do it this way, to think of each year’s act like a different book that I wrote.

Judd:
Are you aware of how much that’s changed comedy? How everyone else is looking at their acts because of you?

Louis:
I’m not aware of that. I know that some people don’t like it that I say…Look, when I started doing a yearlong tour and a stand-up special, the next time I would tour, it seemed natural for me to let my audience know it’s a different show. You’re seeing a different show. I never was bragging to other comedians. Some comedians got pissed off because they thought I was bragging. I don’t give a fuck what they think.

Judd:
I do feel a sea change from it. It seems to have inspired people to work harder, to evolve who they are on a daily basis. I used to work with Larry Miller at the Improv, and he was incredible, and he had this polished act. He was the one who urged me to write more. To treat it like a job. He’d do his Thanksgiving bit, and it could be one of the best bits of all time, but now I feel—in the best possible way—that comics feel the pressure to be in the moment with what their life is, with their act.

Louis:
I think it’s better. Chris Rock taught me a lot about this kind of stuff, but I really learned it from Carlin. I remember I was in the parking lot of the Yang—what’s that Chinese restaurant in Boston that does comedy?

Judd:
The one that Steven Wright was discovered at?

Louis:
No, not the Ding Ho. The Ding Ho was gone. I can’t believe I’m blanking on it, ’cause I did so many gigs…I opened for Jerry Seinfeld there. But anyway, I was sitting in the parking lot and feeling like shit and listening to this interview with Carlin. And he said that he gets done with his jokes and moves on. And I thought,
God, if I only had the fuckin’ courage to get rid of these jokes. I’ve been doing them all my life. And I hate all of them. I hate every joke I tell.

Judd:
But you stuck with them.

Louis:
Yeah, you stick with them. Because you don’t need anything else. I got all these tools, I know how this bit works, I know how this bit works. So I started thinking about that and then, years later, I was talking to Chris Rock and he said, “If you do
Letterman
or you get the big shot, don’t go back and do your classic five minutes. Do what’s exciting you
today.
Do what’s really turning you on in the moment.” And that was a great piece of advice. Chris said, “If your audience sees you’re special and they think you’re funny, and they go see you live and it’s a totally different show from last time and it’s great, they will never let go of you. You will never lose that audience. They will never let you go.” That’s how he put it. What an interesting way to think of an audience—and that’s Chris’s audience—they just hold on to him. So that became my endeavor. I thought,
I’ll go out, do another hour. Creatively, I’ve got an empty vessel, nothing in it. How do things cluster together?
I thought about these things scientifically, like this documentary I saw, when you snap your Achilles’ tendon they put like a fiber on there and your body starts to coat it with tendon material….

Judd:
And it grows around it?

Louis:
Yeah, it grows around it. Because something’s there, when there’s nothing there. So I thought,
How does that apply to my act? How do I build an hour when there’s nothing there?
And so I would go onstage with
five minutes of improv, ten minutes, now I’ve got a really strong twenty. So stop doing it and start at five again and build another twenty, and I’ve got forty minutes now. I can do forty minutes. I’m not doing the L.A. clubs anymore, I’m going to Horatio Hornblower’s in Ventura, or the Wolf or whatever it is. Those clubs, you know, people are eating steak, there’s a little more pressure. And try to turn that forty—it’s like the way they make yogurt, they take a lump and put it in milk and it fills it up, fills it up. Go onstage with not quite enough time and with the pressure of headlining, and forty turns into an hour just out of necessity. I’ve got an hour now, I can do an hour. Make it great. And then decide that that hour is shit and I need twice the material. Do a second hour, fold it in. I worked so hard on that stuff. I don’t know if I have the balls to do it that way anymore.

Judd:
That’s not how you do it now?

Louis:
I do. I mean, the last hour I did, I feel like it’s my last one for a little while. But it’s like, how many of these things do you need to do? Also, I love club comedy. I miss it. I miss fucking around on the club stage.

Judd:
Is that what you want to do now?

Louis:
Well, my TV show has me in the clubs. Sometimes when I’m filming my show, the Comedy Cellar is a location, so if I have extras hanging around, I bring them downstairs and do a set and they’ll kind of chuckle and I’ll use it on the show because I’m able to do weird little bits that don’t quite make any sense. But I’m getting into different-sized things these days. Like, I just did
SNL
, and I got obsessed with the monologue. I thought,
Geez, if I can do a great SNL monologue
—

Judd:
It was a dark monologue, the one you did.

Louis:
That was a fun thing because I got into it as its own project. I thought,
I want to do the stuff that I do at
SNL—and luckily I had done the show before. The great thing about doing something twice is—you know, when I came out to host
SNL
, the rehearsal audience is cool. They’re cool people and they feel like they’re in on something so there’s a cool feeling. And then you come out for the live show and you’re like,
Wait, these people are fucking tourists and a lot of them are kids. There are families. People are here with their parents and they’re not cool
. And so, the
second time I thought,
I want to do a really interesting monologue that’s like its own piece of performance
, and I thought,
They’re not going to like it.

Judd:
I mean, you don’t usually hear people talk about religion and death—

Louis:
No, not at all. That’s the stuff that I’ve been doing, and I was saving it for the series but I thought,
Let’s take my best right-now material and use it. The audience is not going to like it but it doesn’t matter on television because if you don’t let it get to you, nobody can hear.

Judd:
It played really well. I mean, watching it on TV. It sounded like it was all going well.

Louis:
I trained for it by going to really shitty places. I never worked so hard on a set in my life, certainly not a four-to-eight-minute set. I did a lot of bad places with open mics where it’s all, you know, bitter comedians and no audience. I remember one place there was literally water leaking on the floor next to me and there’s a guy in the front row on the phone and I was like,
This is perfect.
I just played. I thought,
I need to be able to play this without any support
, and I got really good at it and I got a great fucking crowd. The
SNL
crowd loved it. It was totally unexpected.

Judd:
Is dress rehearsal the first time Lorne sees the monologue?

Louis:
Yeah, Lorne really helped me because I did the first show—you know, the worst thing that can happen in an important show is when the rehearsal goes well. It just hurts you. You need caution and an alert mind to do this kind of thing. And I came out for dress and I did twelve minutes and I fucking killed. And nobody had seen it. Nobody had seen the material because I had been running out at nights to do it. So we have the between-show meeting and Lorne—my manager had said to me, “Don’t let Lorne cut a single minute. Do twelve minutes like you did in the room,” and I was like, yeah. After all this work I did do to humble myself, I was really jacked up. So I go into the meeting and I’m like in this big, leather chair and Lorne says, “Have you had any experience at
SNL
?”

Judd:
I haven’t worked there but I know the moment you’re talking about.

Louis:
Everybody’s there. It’s like meeting the president. It’s, like, very important. And he says, “So you did twelve minutes in the monologue. How
much do you want to do on-air?” I said, “I want to do all twelve.” And he goes, “You’re not doing twelve.” He goes, “It was good but there was a lot of air in it, a lot of stopping and starting. I know there are cuts in there.” My faced turned red. I was angry. I was like, “Well, I don’t know. I thought it was pretty good. And fuck you.” I was really mad. And then later this woman comes in and says, “Uh, we’re one minute under.” And so I go, “Then I’m doing twelve.” And Lorne turns to me and goes, “Calm down.” I was really insulted. He said, “I’ll give you seven and nobody’s ever done seven.” And I said, “What if it goes long? What if I go over and I end up doing ten or more?” And he goes, “Then we’ll know that you’re very undisciplined and that you’re unprofessional.” And everybody laughed. So I said, “I want to see the monologue from rehearsal.” And he goes, “Show it to him.” My point was to prove how great it was. And I watched it and I was like,
God damn, it’s not that good.
Tons of air. And a lot of stopping and starting. I had a whole fart thing. A whole thing about farting on a baby that fucking killed, and he was like, “You’re winning without it. I wouldn’t do it.” So I realized the farting on the babies was stupid and it’s going to ruin the monologue. So I got Michael Che, who writes for the show, and asked him to sit with me. It’s the most vulnerable thing you can do is ask a comedian to help you cut your material, but I was like, “What do you think?” And he was nervous, he was like, “I don’t know.” He didn’t want to make a wrong decision. But I cut it down. I cut four minutes out as we’re ticking off time to get on the air.

Judd:
And you have to act and work the other sketches, too.

Louis:
Yes, it was high pressure. Very high pressure.

Judd:
How do you remember it all?

Louis:
Well, because you fucking better know it. You fucking better know it. I mean, I had to switch the order. I had to change stuff. I just told myself,
Don’t try to remember this. Make these decisions and they’ll be there for you when you hit the moment.
I loved it. This kind of thing to me is the most worthwhile life experience. I’m standing at the door to
SNL
after all that shit, and Gina the stage manager is counting off and my hands are on the door, and I just started chuckling. I was like,
This is fucked up. This is live television. This is fucked up.
And I went out and it just—it was all there
for me and I was able to sail. The audience was at the right place. They looked a little critical but I felt like,
It’s going to be okay. I’m going to bring this material and you’re going to like it.
Fuck, did that feel good.

Judd:
And that was the day that you realized Lorne knows what he’s doing.

Louis:
He knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s so smart, but he scared me. And I needed to go in scared.

Judd:
You
like
being scared?

Louis:
I remember when I was a kid, Billie Jean King was doing that Battle of the Sexes thing—I don’t remember if it was happening when I was a kid or if I saw a show about it. But I was so impressed with her. She reminded me of my mom and I just thought she was the coolest person and I hated Bobby Riggs because my mom was a single, working mother. They toured together and did these interviews together, and he was always going, like, women should just go back, put on a tight shirt, and make me a steak. He said this amazing shit and she’s just sitting there with a smile on her face. And they turned to her and they say, “How do you feel about all this?” And she says, “Well, all this does is put pressure on me. Everything he says just means that I have to beat him.” She gets this big smile on her face and says, “I love pressure.”

Judd:
Wow.

Louis:
And I never forgot it. I was like, fuck that. That was such an interesting notion—that pressure, give me, give me, give me, because all that’s going to do is make me better. Like, eating pressure. Having it be fuel. I like that. Whenever I realize,
Uh-oh, this is fucked up, I don’t feel ready, this is going to look bad if this doesn’t go well
, I get that physical feeling. I don’t like that feeling, but I like the whole arc of it. You need the whole arc for it to be good. When you win and you do well, it feels great.

Judd:
Was that an historic moment for you, hosting
SNL?
Was that one of your dreams?

Louis:
When I worked at
Conan, SNL
was right next door and I used to go through
SNL
to get to the commissary, just walk through the studio so that I could smell it. I loved the fucking
smell
of the place. I didn’t want
to be a sketch performer or anything, but the idea of hosting it? I never thought that I would be that guy. I was very happy to get the shot, terrified to get the shot.

Judd:
I can’t imagine how scary that is.

Louis:
I was really scared.

Judd:
Like,
How am I going to learn how to talk off of these cue cards?

Louis:
Yeah, everything. Everything.
How am I going to do any of this?
I thought,
I’ve got to get a writer to help me. I’ve got to bring a guy in. Everybody does that.
But then I was hanging out with Amy Poehler a lot and she said to me, “Don’t bring somebody in. Just give yourself to the process.” So I just showed up and said, “What do you guys want me to do?” And I let them lead me through it. But the second time I did it was the best because I had the benefit of experience and I was so excited to do it again and I knew a lot more about it and all the people were junior. There were all these young kids and I found myself teaching some of them, and that was a nice feeling. Anyway, it is fun to be part of old hallowed things.