Judd: You’d never done it live, on the road.
Albert: My first couple of months was taking television bits and trying to make them fit into a live act. Eventually I felt comfortable onstage, but I went back to doing primarily television. In the early 1970s, Dick Cavett was very hot. And I hadn’t done Johnny Carson. I’d done everything but, and I said to my agent, “I’d like to do Dick Cavett. I think that’s a cool show.” And they didn’t want me, and I went to The Tonight Show. By default. And that was one of the lucky breaks I had. I did, like, forty of those shows. Half of them don’t exist, because it was during those years in the seventies where they erased over the tape. It breaks my heart. I would do a new bit every time for Johnny, and that was a hell of an experience. Just once every five, six weeks. Make something up in the bathroom and go do it on The Tonight Show.
Judd: That’s a lot of bits.
Albert: A lot of bits, but you had Johnny’s confidence, and it didn’t matter if the audience laughed. Johnny laughed, and that’s all that ever mattered. But eventually they laugh. When Johnny laughs, they laugh.
Judd: Did you develop a friendship with him?
Albert: I would pay my respects and go to Las Vegas and see his stand-up, and he wasn’t an easy guy to be a friend with. He came into my dressing room one night before the show out of the blue and he sat me down and said, “You need to be married.” And this is a guy that’s been married three times.
Judd: How old were you when he said that?
Albert: I was twenty-eight. And I said, “How come?” And he said, “This is too hard to do alone.” Now, by the way, he’s right on that account. But I didn’t want to go through four wives just to accomplish that.
Judd: How old were you when you got married?
Albert: My forties. And I was very fortunate when I met Kimberly—things gelled. There weren’t all these problems, everybody who has these relationships. I was an expert at it. I made Modern Romance. People used to stop me on the street. I get this a lot, where they honk their horn and roll down the window and a couple says, “We got married because of Modern Romance.” I don’t know what to do. I feel so bad.
Judd: What does that mean?
Albert: I don’t know.
Judd: That means, “We both like it.”
Albert: That means they’re both screwed up. I had a very wise person tell me that he thinks marriage, when you’re younger, you keep thinking you can fix things. That’s what people do. And you can’t really fix anything. It shouldn’t be a massive difficult thing every day. Life’s difficult enough. You can fix little teeny things. If a person likes to eat their peas off a plate, and you like to eat them in a bowl, you might win at that. But that’s about it.
Judd: Were you a difficult person to date?
Albert: I wasn’t a bad boyfriend. I had relationships with some of the women who were in the movies. And I wasn’t a cheater. I was a pretty loyal guy.
Judd: You weren’t like the guy in Modern Romance.
Albert: Very early on I was. I had a relationship that was immensely physical without the other components. And when you’re young, that’s confusing, because you’re being told, Well, what do you think relationships are? They are physical. But you need a little bit of everything. I tried my hand at the most funny women, but I’m not a person who believes you want a person like yourself. You want key things in common, but you don’t want the nutsiness to be the same, because that’s too much.
Judd: What kind of dad are you? What are the TV rules?
Albert: TV isn’t an issue. It’s more the screens. It’s the games, and there’s rules about that, and there’s nothing before homework. They are not big TV watchers during the day. They are at night. When I was a kid, that’s all we had, and I watched a lot of it. We could trick our parents and say it was good for us.
Judd: What are your kids into?
Albert: My daughter, Claire, is an amazing singer and writes songs. And is a good writer. And very creative, and can draw. Jake is the funniest kid I know. He’s got a real sense of humor. He’s become a reasonable magician. I take him to these places on the weekend where they have what’s called Magic: The Gathering. And there’s like forty people who look like they work for Microsoft and my son. And he wins most nights. But the most important thing is that they’ve got good souls. They’ve got good hearts. They know what kid to befriend when that kid needs it….I don’t see the kind of cynicism that you see in other people.
Judd: In us.
Albert: Yeah, well, I don’t think I was a person who made fun of other kids. That wasn’t my style of comedy….I’ve never talked this much about myself.
Judd: Do you like the idea of your kids going into show business?
Albert: If I can’t talk them out of it, yes. My mother kept trying to talk me out of everything. “Honey, fall back on business.” I never knew what it meant, and that’s the way it should be. I sum up all of show business in three words: Frank Sinatra Junior. People think there’s nepotism in show business. There’s no nepotism on the performing side, especially in comedy. I don’t know of any famous person that can tell an audience to laugh at their son.
Judd: You once said you got such a kick out of making people laugh on the phone that it slowed down how much you would write for yourself.
Albert: That was a big problem for me and still is. I have to be careful. I’m going to go do Letterman for This Is 40, and I told my wife and a couple of friends of mine what I’m going to do, and it makes them laugh. We were having dinner, and my wife goes, “Tell them what you’re going to do on Letterman.” I said, “No, no, no.” Because my problem was always that when I thought of something funny, if I called up a buddy, and I did it, the ship had sailed. I didn’t need seven thousand people. One person worked. The chromosome had clicked and I had an orgasm. I was done.
Judd: And so you didn’t need to write a movie.
Albert: It’s terrible. It’s not a commercial gene.
Judd: At some point it’s like: How much need is there to—how much is too much?
Albert: Let’s ask you that. You work a lot. I mean, if you enjoy it, it’s good. If you wake up and it feels like it’s destroying you, then you need to think about it.
Judd: True.
Albert: There are many aspects of work that are amazingly rewarding. The actual doing of it. The writing, when it goes well, there’s no better creative high. A day on the set where you assemble a bunch of great actors and you brought this to life. That’s a wonderful thing. There are other aspects where I’ve fought for things in movies. The movies that I’ve directed, for the most part, I’ve been able to win at the cost of alienating people.
Judd: Such as?
Albert: I wrote this movie with Monica Johnson called The Scout, that Michael Ritchie directed. I can’t stand the way it ends, and it was a fight that I lost. I yelled so loud at Peter Chernin, I never worked at Fox again. I lost my temper. I went crazy, and I said, “Look, you’re not the one in the paper getting…” And, sure enough, The New York Times, it was like the reviewer was listening. She said, “I’m so surprised that Albert Brooks would end a movie this way.” And I’m going, “Albert Brooks didn’t end a movie this way!”