By my fifteenth birthday, my obsession was full-blown. I needed to become one of them. The question was, how to do that? And the answer seemed clear:
Meet them. Talk to them. Get to know them. Learn their secrets.
But who was going to sit down with some junior high school kid and talk about comedy?
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In the tenth grade, I started to work at my high school’s radio station, WKWZ 88.5 FM, in Syosset! Headquarters was a nerd’s paradise located in the basement of our high school. The station was supervised by Syosset High’s film teacher, Jack DeMasi, a fiery, hilarious Italian guy who went to film school with Martin Scorsese. We all loved him because he talked to us and treated us, a sea of weirdos, like we were adults.
At WKWZ, the sports geeks produced sports shows, the news geeks produced news shows, and there was even room for jazz and classical. My friend Josh Rosenthal was a DJ at the station, and he loved music as much as I loved comedy. Occasionally he would take the train to the city and interview new bands like R.E.M. and Siouxsie and the Banshees. This blew my mind. Wait, so we could actually interview people we admired? They would talk to you if you asked nicely? It suddenly occurred to me that maybe I could do this with comedians. I asked Jack if I could start a show of my own, and he said yes.
In your life you come across people who encourage your voice and originality. For me, that person is Jack DeMasi. In fact, in an episode of Freaks and Geeks Paul Feig wrote many years later, there is a cool teacher who runs the AV squad, played by Steve Higgins (the announcer on The Tonight Show and the producer of SNL), who gives an inspiring speech about why the jocks won’t get anywhere in life. “They are peaking now,” he said, “but the geeks will rule the future.” In my mind that was Jack, and this moment changed my life.
How did I get people to talk to me? Well, I would call their agents or PR people and say I was Judd Apatow from WKWZ radio on Long Island and I was interested in interviewing their client. I would neglect to mention that I was fifteen years old. Since most of those representatives were based in Los Angeles, they didn’t realize that the signal to our station barely made it out of the parking lot. Then I would show up for the interview and they would realize they had been had. But they never turned me away, and every single one was gracious and generous with their time. (Except for one, who asked to see my dick. I won’t mention his name but I said no. I didn’t even realize this was probably just stage one of his plan. He told me he’d made “a bet with another comic” that he could get me to show it to him. I now realize the bet was probably a little more complicated than that.)
Over the next two years, I interviewed more than forty of my comedic heroes—club comics, TV stars, writers, directors, and a few movie stars. It was a magical time. I remember walking into Jerry Seinfeld’s unfurnished apartment in West Hollywood, in 1983, and asking him directly, “How do you write a joke?” And meeting with Paul Reiser at the Improv and asking him what it was like shooting Diner. I took a three-hour train ride to Poughkeepsie, New York, to meet Weird Al Yankovic, and hung out with John Candy on the set of The New Show, Lorne Michaels’s short-lived follow-up to SNL. Harold Ramis met me in his office as he prepared to shoot National Lampoon’s Vacation, and I sat down with Jay Leno in the tiny office in the back of Rascals Comedy Club in West Orange, New Jersey. By the end of those two years I had interviewed Henny Youngman, Howard Stern, Steve Allen, Michael O’Donoghue, Father Guido Sarducci (Don Novello), Harry Anderson, Willie Tyler (not Lester), Al Franken, Sandra Bernhard, the Unknown Comic (Murray Langston), and so many others. Some went above and beyond the call of duty. The legendary comedy writer Alan Zweibel took out his phone book and hooked me up with a bunch of his famous friends. “Hey, here’s Rodney Dangerfield’s number. You should call him! Tell him I sent you!”
This was my college education. I grilled these people until they kicked me and my enormous green AV squad tape recorder out of their homes. I asked them how to get stage time, how long it takes to find yourself as an artist, and what childhood trauma led them to want to be in comedy. I asked them about their dreams for the future and made them my dreams, too. Did I mention I never even aired most of the interviews? I put a few out there, but even then I knew this information was mainly for me—and that the broadcast part was a bit of a ruse.
One thing I took from these interviews was that these people were part of a tribe—the tribe of comedians. My whole life I’d wanted friends who had similar interests and a similar worldview, people I could talk with about Monty Python and SCTV. People who could recite every line on the Let’s Get Small album and who knew who George Carlin’s original comedy team partner was (Jack Burns). It was lonely having this interest that no one shared. Even my best friends thought I was a little weird. In fact, just last year, my high school friend Ron Garner said to me, “I finally get what you were doing in your room watching TV all those years.”
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These interviews would inform the rest of my life. They contained the advice that would help me attain my dreams. Jerry Seinfeld talked about treating comedy like a job and writing every day. (I have never done that, but I certainly have written more than I would have since speaking to him.) More than one told me that it takes seven years to find yourself and become a great comedian. (Mystical-sounding, but kind of true.) From that piece of advice I learned patience. In my mind I thought, If I start working hard now, in seven years I will be Eddie Murphy. Well, that hasn’t happened—yet. Harold Ramis talked about how when he started, he wrote jokes for comics like Rodney Dangerfield to pay his rent, so when I was green and behind on my rent, I wrote jokes for people like Tom Arnold, Roseanne, Garry Shandling, and Jim Carrey, and when they got TV specials or movies sometimes they would ask me to help. Harold’s advice set me on the path.
When I moved to Los Angeles in 1985 to study screenwriting at the University of Southern California, a whole new world opened up to me. The comedy scene was booming back then. Suddenly I was able to go to clubs and make friends with fellow aspiring comedians. Many of those people, like Adam Sandler, Wayne Federman, Andy Kindler, David Spade, Jim Carrey, Doug Benson, and Todd Glass, are still my friends today. I felt like the bee girl in the Blind Melon video, running onto the field and looking around and…finding all the other bees I didn’t know existed. I was so happy to no longer be alone. Later, when I pursued stand-up comedy for real, I would sit and talk all night with the future comedy legends who were performing at clubs like the Improv or the Laugh Factory, asking them questions while eating fettuccini Alfredo and hoping Budd Friedman would notice us and give us more stage time.
Even after my career took off, the interviews never stopped. Sometimes I would get interviewed while promoting a project, and other times I would be on panels, or doing commentary recordings for a movie, interviewing my funny friends just like the old days. I would always save the articles or ask for DVDs or audiotapes, knowing that one day I would need them for something (my wife calls it hoarding).