Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (51 page)

Judd:
When you did the routine, were you registering the reaction from him or the first lady?

Stephen:
No, no. I know I’ve said this to some people before, but C-SPAN is not an entertainment company, and they don’t mic the room. So, what you didn’t know, if you watched at home, was that a lot of material was landing.

Judd:
Yeah.

Stephen:
It just wasn’t landing for the people on the dais, or the people in the front row, who were all from the news organizations who need to not piss off the people on the dais. But, you know, as a comedian, if a thousand people are laughing, that sounds like a lot of people. That sounds like bacon frying. It’s a big crowd. There were three thousand people in that room, so if a thousand of them laughed, it still felt like a great response.

Judd:
Yeah.

Stephen:
So, I did not feel like I was grinding my way through the indifference of a hostile audience. I didn’t think I was throwing Molotov cocktails. And that wasn’t my intention, either. I was there to do jokes, just like I did them on the show. I didn’t do anything different there than I did on the show.

Judd:
What’s fun is that now you’ll probably end up talking to the president about it at some point, because it’s inevitable he will be a guest on your new show.

Stephen:
I don’t know about that. Nothing’s inevitable. I would like it, though. I wrote him a letter afterwards saying I hope he enjoyed it, it was an honor. Maybe he burned it.

Judd:
What is your sense of how Republicans and Democrats feel about your show?

Stephen:
I mean, it has been hard to get Republican politicians to come on the show. But I saw this study once many years ago, from Ohio State University, the graduate program there. They did a study of self-identified conservatives and self-identified liberals, and they got a group that self-identified in those categories, and that also both sides identified as fans of the show, and they had them watch the same video, then they said, “What do you think his actual political position is here?” Democrats believed that I was a liberal or liberals believed I was a liberal pretending to be a conservative,
and conservatives who enjoyed the show tended to think that I was a conservative pretending to be a liberal pretending to be a conservative.

Judd:
(
Laughs
)

Stephen:
And I don’t really want to correct either side, because there are times I agree with my character. And I really don’t want the audience to know when I do. I love that, man. That’s the triple gainer. I purposefully jumped over the line a lot at the beginning of the show so people would be confused.

Judd:
Is it strange for you, as a comedy person and an improviser, to be tossed into the center of public political life, and to be surrounded by the players—

Stephen:
That was the point of it. The whole point of it was to do that. Jon Stewart used to say when we were over there, “We’re the kids in the back of the class shooting spitballs, you know?”

Judd:
Yeah.

Stephen:
And I wanted to be the spitball. I remember when I ran for president for the first time in South Carolina, people—people who have known me for years and really understand me—would call me up and say, “Listen, you got to help me out here. I am trying to deal with people who are freaking out about this. Is this real or is this a joke?”

Judd:
(
Laughs
)

Stephen:
And that’s the first time I realized what I really liked about this. If it wasn’t real, it wouldn’t be a joke. Or it wouldn’t be a joke I’d want to do.

Judd:
Yes.

Stephen:
I wanted to do it to see what it was really like, because when I really ran, I really had to deal with federal election law. I really had lawyers up my ass. I really had to find out, like, Wait, I can actually be sponsored by Doritos? Okay, my candidacy can be sponsored by Doritos, but I can’t actually talk about Doritos when I talk about my candidacy? Or I can eat Doritos that I bought myself, but I can’t eat Doritos that Doritos gave me? Or, like, when I actually formed a super PAC, or sponsored the Olympics, or testified before Congress, or held a rally with Jon on the
Mall, or…We always say here that we can make jokes about anything. Where do we point the gun?

Judd:
Yeah.

Stephen:
The hard part is deciding what’s worth shooting.

Judd:
How much money did you raise?

Stephen:
Over a million dollars. Significantly over.

Judd:
Why do you think people gave you money?

Stephen:
They wanted to play the game. We established this lovely relationship with our audience where—early on, we called them the Colbert Nation, okay? “I’ve got to watch where I point this thing, okay? You people are powerful, I’m your leader. We’re going to change things. We’re going to make the world a better place.” I said that on the first night, and I started calling them the Nation. Well, what we didn’t realize is our audience was accepting our initiation that they were a character in the show. And that super PAC was the ultimate game they played with us. We went and held rallies. We raised money. We ran commercials. We got in trouble. We said, “You give us the gun and we’ll go fuck shit up. We’ll start shooting it in ways that are both legal and unethical.”

Judd:
(
Laughs
)

Stephen:
And our audience enjoyed being in a little gang. That’s a fun thing. We all had a place. There was an intimacy that I would never want to lose again. I know that’s possible now, and I never want to lose it.

Judd:
Were you thinking about winding down the show before the offer to do the talk show came in?

Stephen:
Yes. As I said earlier, I was sick of the model. And I realized:
If I want a change, I’ve got to leave.

Judd:
What are your thoughts about switching to something that is just transparently your personality—and about, on some level, sincerity?

Stephen:
We shall see, Judd Apatow. We shall see.

Judd:
Were you a fanatical Letterman fan?

Stephen:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I am the ur-audience. His show started in ’82, the year I started college. Dave was it. Johnny was great, I loved Johnny. I’m the youngest of eleven children, and my elder sisters would wake me up to watch Carson with them because they didn’t want to watch it alone. I would be like a toddler watching Carson with them, but Dave—Dave was like us. Dave was stupid. And I loved it. His disrespect was to his own form.

Judd:
I was completely obsessed with Letterman, too. When I was in college, I—this is a terrible story. I haven’t told it in a long time, but I sent a letter to every single staff member at
Letterman
asking for an internship, and someone called me, and I flew to New York, on my own dime, for the interview. When I got there, the woman told me there was no job, it had already been filled. I flew home and wrote her the meanest letter, using words that could end my career right now.

Stephen:
Oh my God. You know, I was offered a
Letterman
internship.

Judd:
And you didn’t take it?

Stephen:
My girlfriend my senior year of college—she was coming out to New York and I came with her. She was interviewing for an internship at
Letterman.
I don’t know how she got it. I didn’t know internships existed. I didn’t know anything like that, didn’t know that was an option. I went with her to the interview. It was at 30 Rock, and she went in and she was having her interview and somebody opened the door next to that room and said, “Are you the next guy?” I said, “No, I’m just here with my friend who is in there talking.” He goes, “Well, do you want to come talk?” So I went in and we had a nice conversation, and then they called me and said, “You got the internship,” and she didn’t get it.

Judd:
Did the breakup soon follow?

Stephen:
We did not last the summer. But I turned the job down, because I was like, “What? You don’t pay? How can I go to New York and not—what? What do you mean I move to New York and you don’t pay me? What do I do, live in a trash barrel?”

Judd:
See, I would have lived in the trash barrel.

Stephen:
It would have been fun, but again, it wasn’t on my radar.

Judd:
And when did you—just so I understand the trajectory a little bit, you were attempting serious theater at this point?

Stephen:
Yeah, I was studying at Northwestern University’s theater program, and you know, I was doing Stanislavski and Meisner and I was sharing my pain with everyone around me—it was therapy as much as it was anything. I met a guy there who said, “Hey, have you ever seen comedy improv?” I said no. He said, “Well, I’m going down to see these guys in Chicago do something called
The Harold.
Do you want to go see it?” I said sure. So I went down to a place that doesn’t exist anymore called CrossCurrents, which was beneath the Belmont L in Chicago, right near Ann Sather’s. Best Swedish cinnamon rolls in the city.

Judd:
Yeah.

Stephen:
And I went and saw people improvise one-act plays based on a single word, and I was immediately hooked. I went, “I don’t know what that is, but I have to do it. I have to get onstage and perform extemporaneously with other people.” I loved the ensemble feel of it. I continued to do straight theater, kind of avant-garde black box kind of theater, but I was getting paid to do comedy. And then realized I really like it actually. I really love these people. I met Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello at Second City. They changed my life. If I hadn’t met Paul and Amy, I don’t think I would have gone into comedy. They became my family.

Judd:
But before that, you didn’t think,
I’m a comedy person in high school?
That wasn’t—

Stephen:
I didn’t know what it meant to do comedy in high school. I didn’t even perform until I was a senior.

Judd:
Wow.

Stephen:
On anything. I was just a kid in the back of the room, you know?

Judd:
Let me just switch topics here. The one time I was a guest on your show, which I enjoyed a great deal—

Stephen:
I’m glad to hear that. You came on pretty early, when we hadn’t had many entertainment figures on. I wasn’t sure how to adjust. I’m glad you had a good time, because I was very nervous to have you on.

Judd:
The background of it is very strange, which is, I was in the car on the way to the show, and my mom, who has since passed away, called me right as I’m pulling up to the studio, to tell me that her chemotherapy didn’t work. It felt like I had just been told that she was going to die.

Stephen:
Oh God.

Judd:
Then I had to get out of the car and do
The Colbert Report
with you, and I was just white as a ghost—

Stephen:
I’m so sorry.

Judd:
It was an out-of-body experience.

Stephen:
I have performed after someone I love died. Like finding out moments before and having to walk onstage. It’s possible.

Judd:
Oh, it is. I actually felt I did much better as a result of it because it freed me up to not be nervous and roll with it. It was actually a great thing to do, and you were so nice and came into the dressing room beforehand and said, “Okay, I’m about to be really awful to you. Enjoy yourself!” It’s one of my strangest showbiz moments.

Stephen:
I can imagine.

Judd:
I need to look back and look at it.

Stephen:
Twice I have performed having just found out that someone I loved passed away, and I had to go on immediately, and I can’t watch—I haven’t watched either one of them and it’s been many years. I just can’t bring myself to watch whoever that guy was that got through it.

Judd:
And in the middle of all this—

Stephen:
I just know that nobody knew. I also said to everybody, “It’s important that no one knows this happened. I don’t want to be a brave person, I just got to do my job.”

Judd:
That’s why I didn’t tell you.

Stephen:
I’m glad you didn’t. I probably would have burst into tears and threw my arms around you.

Steve Allen was the first interview I ever did. We met at the St. Regis hotel, in New York City. I had no idea what I was doing. He was someone I had seen on numerous talk shows, and I had a sense that he was somehow integral to the history of television and, more specifically, late-night comedy. He didn’t have to be kind to me, a pimply kid with a tape recorder, but he was. He sat there for an hour, in his suit and tie, answering all my questions in great detail and with total respect. I remember thinking,
Oh, so this is how you’re supposed to behave in the world.
He was a man of manners and generosity.

I was too young to know much about his show, beyond some clips I’d seen on TV, but I was aware that many of the things I loved about
Late Night with David Letterman
and
The Tonight Show
had been invented by, or influenced by, Steve Allen decades before. And this sweet old man was actually this subversive creator, the one guy who would have Lenny Bruce and Jack Kerouac on all the time. Who’s cooler than that?

Judd Apatow:
So what is the point of rereleasing these old comedy albums?

Steve Allen:
None of your business, Judd. I can’t go around telling every Jack, Tom, and Harry what I’m up to. It’s for me to know and you to find out. Ha, ha, ha. The point of rereleasing these records, Judd, is to make a bundle. I used to be in the laundry business and I miss all that bundle making. No, I’ll tell you why: It’s a public service. We did the albums originally—well, I did the calls on the air, back in ’62, ’63, ’64—and the
albums were big hits at that point.
Funny Fone-Calls
and
More Funny Fone Calls.
And I have been annoyed to the point of tears ever since by whippersnappers like you coming up to me and saying, “Where can I get a copy of those albums?” I say remarkable things such as, “Ever try a record store?” And for the first year or two that worked. Because they
were
in record stores. But all albums go out of print eventually, so they were not available. And the Polygram people finally realized that since there was this untapped market, and if they got a market tapper, they could go around and rap a few knuckles.

Judd:
Do you have a lot of other albums?

Steve:
I haven’t done many comedy albums over the years. There was, besides
Funny Fone-Calls
and
More Funny Fone Calls
, there was one called
Man on the Street
, which consisted of tapes from another comedy show I was doing—a weekly prime-time sketch comedy series, in which I interviewed three supposed men on the street. They were, in fact, Louie Nye, Don Knotts, and Tom Poston. That was a funny album. And I’ve done a few individual comedy recordings, forty-fives and seventy-eights in the old days. We’ve recently been taking inventory of old tapes and films, videotapes and so forth that I have, and discovered there’s a lot of pure gold there.

Judd:
One thing I noticed about the albums was, when I listened to them—I have to say that I went home one night and listened to both of them straight through and I was up till four in the morning because I was wide awake from laughing—

Steve:
(
Laughs
)

Judd:
I was up, hysterical. And the thing that I noticed was that the laughter in the background—I never hear laughter like that on TV, ever.

Steve:
Yeah. That’s a very important thing you put your finger on. It has nothing to do with me, because on some of the calls I hardly make any contribution at all. Jerry Lewis was ninety-eight percent of the funniness there. But you’re absolutely right. There was something about television comedy in those days. The laughter was fresh and genuine and real and warm. Those shows were never sweetened. That started with
Laugh-In.
Laugh-In
was all done with, you know, Scotch tape. They had to do seventeen minutes of this and two minutes of that and tape it all together. And for the most part, there was no audience, and therefore most of the laughter you heard was canned. That was unfortunate. It may have been the only way, technically, they could do that kind of a show, so as not to keep an audience there for fourteen hours. But it was unfortunate. Because, as you say, you don’t hear laughter like that very much now. There was nothing forced about it, and nobody even had to bother to warm the audience up. Some nights, we had to cool them down. They laughed so much, they covered up jokes.

Judd:
The thing I noticed was that everything you did,
you
originated. And now everything that they do has been done already.

Steve:
Yeah, that’s it. First of all, it was new to the audience. They hadn’t seen it fifty-seven times. Whereas now—in a talk show or a comedy talk show setting, it’s really quite difficult to do anything totally unlike stuff that’s been done before. It’s not that I’m so much more creative than any of the other guys. It’s just that I had the good fortune to do it first. But at the moment, I can’t think of any feature of those shows which was not originated on one of our early shows.

Judd:
Right now, most shows on TV are formulized. Johnny Carson comes on, does his monologue, does a skit or his little thing, and interviews three people. There’s nothing like what you were doing. Do you think they could reproduce what you did today?

Steve:
I don’t think most people could, no. I don’t say that in any conceited sense. It’s just that I prefer to work loose. In the case of Johnny, it’s hard to criticize him personally on this, because he’s been there for twenty years. Why should he bother to be inventive now? It’d be as pointless as Bob Hope suddenly doing inventive things. It could hurt them, you know. But it would drive me nuts to do the same thing every night. I’m not saying I’m better or worse than they are, it’s just that I don’t work that way. For my own piece of mind, I had to do new stuff every night, and I learned very early in my career, even before I was working in television, that the biggest laughs in show business, for me, came the same way the biggest laughs in reality do: out of whatever the reality of a given exchange of a
social situation is. One example that pops into my mind was back—oh, when was it? Forty-eight, let’s say. In addition to a regular late-night comedy and talk show I was doing in L.A., I was doing some evening network things for the CBS Radio Network. And right in the middle of a live show one evening, there was an ungodly noise, an annoying noise, just behind some closed doors at the back of the stage. And I knew it could be heard all around the country. I mean, what was this (
loud whisper voice
) “chuck-a-chuck-a-chuck-a-chuhhh…”? We had to stop everything and—you know, we were on the air live so we couldn’t say, “Stop tape.” So I just did what I think was the sensible thing. I didn’t do it because it was funny, I did it because it was sensible. I said, “Ladies and gentlemen, um, obviously those of you at home can hear this annoying distraction in the background here. I don’t know what it is and—” I said, “Do any of you know?” And nobody on the stage knew, so I said, “Well, let’s find out.” So I took the mike with the long wire on it. And we had somebody open the doors, and there was an old man, an old Italian gentleman—or with an Italian accent, I should say—who was using a cement mixer, a small portable cement mixer outside those doors. To this day, he does not know he was on the air for ten minutes. I went in and whistled and screamed at him to, you know, turn it off. So he finally got the point, and turned it off. And then I asked him, I said, “What are you doing here?” And he said, “I lay the cement, you know.” And we talked and had a lot of laughs and he—I don’t know if he could hear the people laughing in the other room or not, I don’t remember anything I said to him. But it was just funny, live on the air, with maybe nineteen million people listening all over America. That’s not one of the great moments in the history of comedy, but the point is it’s an example of looseness. I think everybody ought to do that.

Judd:
One of the things you originated was talking with the audience at the beginning of your show, which they do on other shows now. How did that come about?

Steve:
I didn’t originate taking a hand mic into the audience. There were noncomic fellows who did that before me. Notably Tom Breneman and a fellow named Don McNeill. They were very popular on the radio in the mid-1940s chiefly. They were sort of genial masters of ceremonies. And sometimes Art Linkletter would go into the audience with some specific
gimmick in mind. Like, let’s see who has the most outlandish thing in her purse. “All right, madam, will you stand up and open your purse? Oh, look here, it’s a dead mouse,” or whatever, you know. Except that’s a funny joke. They wouldn’t say that. They would just talk about whatever was really in the purse, and “Thank you, here’s fifty dollars” and sit down. So they had done that before. But I was the first comedian to do it.

Judd:
And you had regular audience members that were there all the time.

Steve:
I don’t know how that came about. I guess it was just that they were lonely people who had nothing much else in their lives and they could go to this party every night and have a few laughs and be given some recognition. I used to love to talk to the regulars, as they were called, on the old
Tonight Show.
The classic instance of this, which people over fifty still remember, was a woman named Mrs. Sterling. She was what we would call a bag lady. She usually had a couple of big paper bags with her, and she dressed quite poorly. She usually wore a man’s khaki army overcoat and tennis shoes. And she was in our audience every night. And I don’t think I ever saw her laugh at anything. It was all very serious for her. But you know, she would be given attention. Her motivation, chiefly, was greed. Because at the end of the interviews we used to give away prizes, toasters or a pair of silk stockings or salami or something. At the time one of my sponsors was Polaroid cameras. She never could get the name straight. I would interview her; the interviews were very much the same. She didn’t seem to hear my questions very well. But she knew that if she could get to talk to me at all, she was good for a toaster or a fan or a deep-fry pot or something. She must’ve had a room full of all these things. Probably sold them out on the street after the show. So she would resort to flattery. I’d say, “Good evening, Mrs. Sterling.” She’d say, “Mr. Allen, you’re wonderful.” I’d say, “Well, the degree of my wonderfulness is irrelevant, but how have you been?” And she’d say, “Oh, we love ya. Everybody loves you, you’re great, Mr. Allen. Give me one of them Palmeroid cameras.” She always called them Palmeroids. And she never knew why the audience was hysterical. I never even had to do jokes. I just turned around and it was funny. So, she was like a known quantity. I knew that I would get laughs if I talked to her, so I talked to her practically every time I went into the audience.

Judd:
Didn’t you turn one of your audience members into a movie reviewer?

Steve:
His name was John Fisher. He was—I guess now we would call him a hyperkinetic personality. He talked sort of uncontrollably fast and effusively. He was an upstate farmer type. And I asked him one question when I first met him one night. It was something like, “Hello, sir, what’s your name?” And most people say, you know, “Charlie Feldman,” and just hang there. Which is really more sensible, because I only ask that, I didn’t ask for their serial number, you know. And he gave me about a nine-minute answer. He just couldn’t stop his mouth. “I’m John Fisher, and I live up in Solo, New York, and I have a potato farm up there and I just come to talk, because I seen the movies, the one with Clark Gable and Myrna Loy.” And he sort of reviewed the whole movie for us. Obviously that’s hysterically funny and I have nothing to do with it. He’s the one that’s getting the screams, did not know why he was getting laughs. So when he finally shut up, I said, “Well, John, that was a very interesting movie review, would you like to come back and join us from time to time?” He said, “Yeah, sure,” and gave me another six-minute answer. So we signed him up and we would get tickets to the new movies and he would go see them and come in and give us these dumb reviews of them. You know—it’s funny. And he never knew why it was funny.

Judd:
And you used to do remotes from the street in the beginning of the show?

Steve:
I’ve always loved the idea of getting cameras right out into the street. Sometimes I was out there with them, but more often I was not. More often I was just onstage looking at a television screen. So I could see what the cameras were seeing, and just saying, I hoped, funny things about them. And there again, people would say, “Boy, you were funny.” It was nice of them to say that but what often was funny was the situation. My contribution may have accounted for only, you know, fourteen percent of the funniness. Some years back, when Dick Cavett was doing his talk show on ABC, he took a week’s vacation and asked me to fill in for him, so I did. And we did the camera on the street every night and had tremendous luck. First of all, you see different things on the streets of New York than you do in Hollywood. And you have the advantage in New York that
you’re generally right on some street. Whereas at NBC Burbank, if you open the back door, you just see part of the parking lot. In this case Dick was—I guess up at Forty-eighth Street. Anyway, one evening, we punched up the camera, just at random. And just in time to see one of those city trucks that hauls away illegally parked cars. It was a mystery thing and the whole audience went, Whoa boy, who’s going to get hauled away? So I was doing a play-by-play and the truck stopped right in front of the theater and the guy jumps out and, you know, does the thing with the hook and the chain, and suddenly from the balcony you see a guy say, “Oh no”—it was his car that they were hooking the bumper up. I said, “Is that your car, sir?” And he said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Well, come on, run down!” And the band played chase music, and we had a shot of this poor guy running down from the top level of the balcony. And he runs out into the street, now he’s on camera and it’s like a silent movie and he’s pleading, you know. And the guy says, “No, it’s just my job.” He flicked his cigar all over him, and took his car away. Well, that was sad for him, but hysteria for the audience.