Laugh Lines: Conversations With Comedians (20 page)

Corey: When you visited them, did the monkeys seem to be happy?

David: Um, yeah. I’m not the best judge, but they weren’t being tormented in any way. They were in school, learning, and they had dorms. Everyone had their own little room. They could watch TV anytime they wanted; it didn’t seem like a bad life.

Corey: Any perks that come along with doing a benefit reading for the monkey organization?

David: Probably if I got paralyzed in a car accident, I might cut ahead a few places in line. I know there’s a long waiting list for the monkeys.

Corey: The tour you’re planning now, do you already have your pieces chosen?

David: I always make a list of what I read in every particular city, because I don’t want to repeat myself. Sometimes people want to hear something they heard a couple times before, like on the radio or whatever. I understand wanting to hear something you already heard, like if I were to go to a concert or whatever. I would want them to do things on the album, and I would want it to sound exactly like it sounded on the album. That’s why I don’t go to concerts.

Corey: Do you ever go back and look at the stories, from the first draft to the last and see what was changed?

David: I often make marks while I’m reading, little, in the margin. I already proved I can get a laugh; see what happens.

(Sirens in background)

Corey: Is there an emergency going on?

David: (calmly) Oh, yeah. There has been for two weeks. The French government passed this law which says if you’re 26 years or under, your boss can fire you.

Corey: For no reason?

David: They don’t have to give you a reason. After two years, if you’re under the age of 26, then your boss can let you go. It’s really hard to fire people here. Let’s say a small business would be apt to hire somebody. If they thought, ‘Well, if I make a mistake here, it’s not going to cost me 10s of thousands of dollars to get rid of them.’ It seems like a little thing. Protests have been going on for weeks. A week ago there were overturned cars on my street, windows broken. It’s hard to understand. It’s Ground Zero for a lot of the area. All these big trucks are filled with riot police when you hear those sirens.

Corey: Do you avoid being on the street?

David: There’s nothing to be afraid of.

Corey: After your readings you also do signings. Have you gotten any strange requests from fans?

David: Some people will say, ‘I don’t have your book on me, but will you sign this copy of “War and Peace?” Ha ha ha.’ They think it’s so original and you don’t want to hurt their feelings. I say I won’t sign a book I didn’t write, so I got out of it that way. You sort of want to say to people, ‘What gave you the idea to think that was original?’ That would just hurt or embarrass them.

Corey: Is this your first book to be released in French?

David: No, it is the fourth.

Corey: Does anything get lost in translation?

David: I just changed publishing houses and my last translator was African. And so the book sounded like it was written by an African. This translator is French, and I read with her. I did two readings with her. One thing she really did a great job at was capturing the rhythms of my sentences, which is usually one of the first things to go in another language. Like when you’re translated into German, every word is like 35 letters long. There’s more syllables in that word than there were in the entire paragraph before it was translated.

This was a really good translation. I don’t speak any German, but I’ve been told the fellow who translated my first three books into German what a good translation it was. Because so many people in Germany also speak English, they can go one way or the other. They could read the English book or the German book; makes no difference to them, that’s how good they are. Other countries, like the Korean translation, I just can’t say. And the book just came out in Greece and the same thing, I have no idea what the translation is like.

Corey: Are you starting to become better known in Europe?

David: It’s always hard when your book is translated because you’re basically starting over again. In America, I’m lucky because I’m on the radio. If I do a reading and people show up, I owe everything to Ira Glass. I’m conscious of that, and I think of that all the time. If you’re going to owe everything to a specific person, he’s a pretty good person to owe it to because he could lord it over you all the time, and he never does. I’m not on the radio in Europe, but I’m on the BBC sometimes. It’s basically starting over.

In Germany, my books do very well. ‘Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim’ was the first book to come out in Italy, and it was on the bestseller list in Italy for a while. It’s not doing gangbusters here in France. And other countries, I figure if it was doing really well, they’d tell me. In Australia, the books do very well, better than in England.

Corey: Have there been talks of doing a European tour and sending you on the road with a translator for different countries?

David: I’ve gone to Germany about…golly, I’ve taken 12 separate trips. I’ll go to Germany and go to seven, eight towns. The Germans go to book readings. It’s not a thing in France. It’s not a thing in England either. Even Martin Amos doesn’t go on a book tour in England. He’ll do publicity, but he won’t do a reading. In Italy, people show up for readings. I’ve gone to Spain and done readings. I’ve gone to the Netherlands and done readings, Austria, Germany, like I said. Uh, Australia, Ireland, some countries invite you, and others don’t. Like the Israelis didn’t invite me. Or the Koreans or the Chinese. I’d be happy to go to any of those places.

Corey: I’ve had friends say they enjoy your stories, but they like them even better when they hear you read them aloud. How would you describe your reading voice?

David: A challenge, I think. My voice isn’t pleasant to listen to. It always ceases to amaze me that I’m on the radio. I was always a big radio listener. Not music so much but talk radio, and there was a station in Raleigh, (N.C.), where I grew up that would play old radio programs. I guess I always thought how wonderful it would be to be on the radio, but it’s sort of like not having legs and thinking about how great it would be to be a quarterback. You think I can’t possibly—like with the voice I have—I could not possibly be on the radio.

So it never ceases to amaze me that I am. That makes sense to me, because there’s an English guy named Alan Bennett who does a lot on the BBC, and I’m crazy about him. I don’t want to read his books; I want him to read them to me. The same with Garrison Keillor; I want him to read to me. I don’t want to read it myself. I understand that perfectly. A lot of people, they’ll feel like that’s insulting, but I understand it perfectly.

Corey: How did you think you sounded the first time you heard yourself on the radio?

David: I’ll tell you (laughs), whenever I hear myself on the radio, I can’t listen to my voice. I caught myself on the answering machine about 15 years ago, and that was it for me.

Corey: Are you going to do anything special for the Princeton speaking engagement?

David: The graduation speech? I am so Ivy League. I really am. If someone tells me they went to Harvard or Princeton or Stanford or Yale, I feel like I do if I’m in the presence of a star. Whenever I go to schools like that to give a talk, I say, ‘You must be so proud of yourself.’

If it wasn’t hard to get into, I would have gone here. It’s really hard to get in here, and it’s OK for you to say, yeah, and you’re really smart. It’s fun being smart. I did a graduation speech at the Art Institute, which is where I went to college, and that was easy because I went to school there so I knew how to speak to those students. I know why I agreed. It’s the kind of thing my dad would really appreciate. I called my dad and said, ‘If you’ll go with me, then I’ll do this.’ And he said, ‘Do you think you could get them to give you an honorary degree?’

I was too embarrassed to admit I’d already asked. I asked my agent to ask, and they said it has to kind of be their idea.

I already have a little speech. It only has to be 15 minutes long. It’s me begging for an honorary degree. That might not be the approach to take after people were just working hard for four years.

Corey: Has anyone ever pitched you ideas of adding illustrations to your stories?

David: There’s a book I’m kind of working on now, and they’re stories about animals. They’re not fables really because fables have a moral. There’s a tradition of illustration for books like this so that’s the kind of thing I wouldn’t mind having a couple illustrations, just because it could be funny.

Corey: Are you under a lot of deadline pressure?

David: I make my own deadline pressure. I enjoy it. I usually go on these tours every fall and spring, but I took the fall off. I had big plans. I was gonna do so much. I didn’t do shit. I worked every day, I did. But I didn’t have a tour coming up, so I sort of indulged myself working on things that don’t work—which can be helpful. You give yourself some time, and you think, ‘I really need like a month to work on something that’s a complete waste of time.’ Get it out of my system. If I had a tour in the fall, I think I would have been under more pressure.

From July until December, I worked every day, and nothing worked out. Since then, I’ve written four New Yorker stories, three for the radio and four other things I haven’t done anything with. It’s all because I had this tour coming up, and I think I’m going to be in front of an audience three months from now, and I really, really better have something.

I think it’s so boring when people talk about dreams. But last night I dreamt that I got up onstage, and I started off with question and answer, which you never do. It’s always a mistake. I’ve never done it in the past, but in this dream I did. That was a stupid thing to do, and then I opened up my folder and it was all letters I had written to people and haven’t sent—tax forms—and my papers weren’t there. It was so bad, I woke up.

I get onstage, and I say, ‘Thank you very much for coming,’ and then I start reading. Then you can run your mouth later, but it’s always a mistake to get out there and start running your mouth.

Corey: Did the dream inspire you to write anything today?

David: The dream inspired me to get up this morning and get all my papers, all the things I would be reading, and not put that off for another second—get all that stuff together.

Corey: You don’t typically keep your tax forms and the letters you’ve written to people in the same folder, do you?

David: No, I always have my tax appointment when I go to America for my spring tour. My tax appointment is on Saturday. I need to make extra sure to keep those folders separate. I guess that’s an equally bad dream is to go to my tax accountant and open my folder and have a story about a leech who lives in hippo’s asshole instead of all the receipts I’ve spent forever going through and tabulating.

Corey: You’ve lived in different places over the years. Are there certain places you feel you write better?

David: One thing I think—and I need to find something to break this—London doesn’t work. I love going there. I can only think of one story I’ve ever written there. Paris is OK. Part of it is I’ve just got it in my mind that London is bad luck that way. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Corey: You’re turning 50 later this year.

David: Yes, the day after Christmas.

Corey: Any special plans?

David: I plan to be old. I had my mid-life crisis. I had it in January. When I turned 40, I said ‘I’m old now. I can’t wear jeans anymore.’ And I thought I needed to do something else, so I decided I would never again eat dip. I don’t care about jeans and dip one way or the other, but I thought I needed to do something.

At 50, you see people like humiliate themselves and ruin their marriages by getting a girlfriend or something. And I bought a painting of a monkey eating a peach. It was crazy how much this painting cost. That was my mid-life crisis.

Corey: Have you thought about what you’re going to give up at 50?