Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (14 page)

Judd:
Were there audition nights?

Garry:
Yeah, I went to audition nights. I was working in discos and health food restaurants. It was bizarre.

Judd:
Jerry Seinfeld, when I interviewed him, said that he did a disco and no one even knew he was performing.

Garry:
I’m sure we’ve all had the same experiences. I worked a health food restaurant for about four months where people would just come
in—there would be six people, eating rice and vegetables, and I would do forty minutes.

Judd:
Only in Hollywood, I guess.

Garry:
When you’re first starting, it’s just important to be on the stage. It doesn’t matter if people respond, because you just have to get over your stage fright.

Judd:
Was
The Tonight Show
the big break, as far as stand-up goes?

Garry:
Yeah. They like me and they’re supportive of me and they know that I work hard at what I do. I try to get better all the time. And I still don’t think I’m near my potential.

Judd:
You feel you have a ways to go?

Garry:
Yeah, I don’t think the things I’m doing on the stage now are what I’ll be doing five years from now.

Judd:
What will you be doing?

Garry:
I hope it’ll be even more honest than it is now, more personal. Because it takes time for people to get to know you. I mean, Richard Pryor is the perfect example. If you look at what he was doing ten or fifteen years ago, it’s different than what he does now, because we
know
him. He can just get up and start talking about his life—and that’s the funniest stuff.

Judd:
What are your long-range goals?

Garry:
Well, first of all, my long-range goal is to be funnier. It really is. And to get better, and to keep digging inside myself. Number two, I guess, is to find the right vehicle, either on television or film, that’ll allow me to be funny in the way that I’m funny, you know.

Judd:
Well, thank you very much.

Garry:
I’m sorry I wasn’t funny this morning.

Judd:
This show is pretty serious.

Garry:
Okay.

Judd:
This is the comedy interview program that talks serious about comedy.

Most of the important breaks and rewarding experiences in my career can be directly traced to Garry Shandling. Let me run through it quickly here for you: One of the first jobs I got as a writer was writing jokes for the Grammys for Garry Shandling in 1990. After that, he agreed to do a cameo on the pilot of
The Ben Stiller Show
, and I’ve always believed that those celebrity cameos, in that first episode, were one of the main reasons the show eventually got picked up. Then, when the show was canceled, Garry hired me to be a writer at
The Larry Sanders Show.
Then, one day at
The Larry Sanders Show
, Garry walked into the writers’ room and, without even asking me, said, “Judd, you’re going to direct the next episode.” And I did.

There is no one who has taught me more or been kinder to me in this comedy world than Garry Shandling. As a kid, my only dream was to be a comedian. I never thought about being a writer. Garry was the first person who ever sat me down and said, “Look, this is what a story is about. This is how you write in this format.” He talked a lot about how the key was to try to get to the emotional core or the truth of each character, which I had never heard before. He taught me that comedy is about truth and revealing yourself, and these are all lessons I apply every day in my work. In fact, when we started
Freaks and Geeks
, I always thought of it like this:
Freaks and Geeks
is
The Larry Sanders Show
if
The Larry Sanders Show
was about a bunch of kids in high school.

Judd Apatow:
Who made you the man you are today?

Garry Shandling:
I can’t discuss that without having a shitload of coffee first.

Judd:
To get it all out? Oh, he’s spilling it. He spilled it already.

Garry:
See, this is why I don’t eat in therapy. Do you ever eat?

Judd:
The second you said, “That’s why I don’t eat in therapy,” I thought,
Wait. Can you? Because I would
definitely
do that.

Garry:
I know I’ve had sessions where I’ve said, “You should think about having at least a salad bar,” to the therapist. Seriously, though, I don’t know who made me the man I am except to say what I feel in my heart relative to Roy London.

Judd:
Yeah.

Garry:
Roy influenced me gigantically when I was about twenty-seven years old and I stumbled into his acting class. Instead of talking about acting, we ended up talking about the world and people. Those conversations are what gave me the confidence to move on. Up until then, I was a confused young man who was writing for
Sanford and Son.

Judd:
Who were you best at writing for? Which character?

Garry:
That’s a good question. Lamont. (
Laughs
) And Aunt Esther. The first script I ever wrote was Ah Chew opens up a Chinese restaurant with Fred. And then the health department closes it down.

Judd:
The Asian character’s name was Ah Chew?

Garry:
Well, this was when political correctness was required nowhere in the script.

Judd:
Do you think the world was better when you could name a character Ah Chew?

Garry:
I cannot judge that right now. Even just alone with you, I cannot judge that. But I will say, the two producers on that show, Saul Turteltaub and Bernie Orenstein, taught me a lot. When I used to turn in my script, they’d go, “You don’t have an ending,” and I realized, “Oh, the writer actually is supposed to do the
whole
script.” I was assigned to write one in
which Fred and Lamont went camping for the whole half hour, and then had to—

Judd:
There’s nothing
not
racist in that premise.

Garry:
Well, I didn’t know how to make it funny unless someone caught fire, and that certainly wasn’t an option. Nor was I equipped, as a younger man, to write the father-son emotionality that they were looking for at the end—so they had to help me. I remember I wrote three of those scripts in one season and then I went to the story editor Ted Bergman, who really helped me, and said, “How do you write fifteen more? Or
seasons
more?” And he looked at me and said, “Burnt out at twenty-six, huh?” When I told my therapist about this, he said, “No, you might be bored.” And it shocked me, because I never knew that that could be my own opinion. That’s when I turned to doing stand-up and looking at other types of television and what I could do that was different.

Judd:
So your shrink made you the man you are today.

Garry:
She really did help me. Because I didn’t think I had the right to be bored. You’re just so grateful to have this job. Who am I to be bored by writing for
Welcome Back, Kotter
and all these great shows?

Judd:
That’s what we do: We instantly go to guilt and shame.
I’m not allowed to have a feeling about this. I should just appreciate it and shut the fuck up.
Right?

Garry:
That’s totally right.

Judd:
In all situations, I go straight to that feeling.
Just shut up.

Garry:
Who were your early mentors?

Judd:
Well, my grandfather Bobby Shad was this guy who produced Sarah Vaughan and Lightnin’ Hopkins and Charlie Parker and Janis Joplin. He raised money when he was a kid—he was a poor kid—and would pay jazz musicians to let him record them and then he would make records and sell them in stores. Eventually, he started his own label, in the forties, and then—

Garry:
You kind of saw the whole creative process right there.

Judd:
Yeah, that’s what I thought. I remember feeling like,
Oh, you can just
do
it. You can just start.
But I had no musical abilities. I like music, but I just—I tried to play guitar as a kid and I couldn’t. What I liked was comedy. When I was a kid I said, “I want to know how they do it.” So I started this show for my high school radio station, interviewing comedians. I interviewed you, Garry, on the phone from Las Vegas and you had just hosted
The Tonight Show
for the first time—

Garry:
It was the only interview I could get.

Judd:
(
Laughs
) Here was this fifteen-year-old calling you on the phone, and you were very nice and funny. I asked you what your plans were for your career, and you basically laid out everything you would go on to do. You said, “I’d like to do a show, probably a sitcom, probably something personal, I’d like to play myself, I might play myself,” and this was in 1984.

Garry:
That’s right. You remind me of two or three things. One, for some reason, is that so many of the comedians and comedy writers I know all pretended like they had radio shows, talking into their tape recorders or whatever when they were kids—it seems to be a common theme. I used to do that, too, but I never actually called anyone and interviewed them. You’ve always had bigger balls than most kids in comedy. The second thing is, I was a late bloomer. I was confused until I was twenty-seven and, as I said, started to get into that Roy London mentality. That’s when I realized I wanted to take the self-discovery path. I figured that would fit naturally into whatever project I felt was right, where I could continue to search this human condition thing we always talk about—because the human condition is hilariously awful.

Judd:
I never thought about any of those things until I worked for you. I didn’t think in terms of the human story. You started thinking about it from Roy, and then I worked for you, and then you started talking to me about it, and—

Garry:
Yeah, this is the big bang of it. By the way, my own belief is that I know how the big bang started—everyone’s confused—which is simply that shit happens.

Judd:
Just random?

Garry:
It may not be random, but “shit happens” is what we end up writing.

Judd:
We’re getting into chaos theory right now.

Garry:
When we were doing
Larry Sanders
, it was all about life and the question of self and what you were bringing to it.

Judd:
You always used to say that
Sanders
was about people who love each other, but show business gets in the way.

Garry:
And what people are always covering up—the tension between what they’re covering emotionally in life and what’s really going on inside them. What you really want to write is what they’re covering; otherwise you end up writing the exposition—which is just words. That’s what the struggle was in the writers’ room, in a nutshell: getting people not to write just words.

Judd:
I remember you said once that it’s very rare that anyone says what they actually feel, that we’re always trying to project on to other people, hiding our true motivations and feelings, and when you finally tell someone how you feel about something, it’s a big deal. As a kid, watching TV, I think I was learning all those things without even realizing it. I watched
M*A*S*H, All in the Family, Taxi
—you know, all the James L. Brooks shows—and those are all human comedies. I didn’t understand that what I liked about them was seeing normal people with their daily struggles, trying to be good people in spite of all of the obstacles that are in their way, trying to find connection. That’s what I enjoyed the most, but I didn’t understand how it was made and I didn’t understand how I would get there, until I worked with you at
The Larry Sanders Show
.

Garry:
There’s a way I mentor that’s a bit on the Zen side, which is a little hard to understand because it happens in the writers’ room. Let’s just talk about you, Judd, okay? You, clearly, had youth and a point of view and energy and were really funny, and so what I wanted from you was whatever was pure that was coming out of you. The same pure thing will work
for
The Larry Sanders Show
, or it will work for
This Is
40
—it’s just got to be pure. What I’m doing in the writers’ room is trying to sense whether that’s organic or not, trying to help people find themselves. That’s the lab we were in. And it turned out that we were filming it. Is that fair?

Judd:
Yeah. I would notice things that were happening in your life, or things that you were thinking about, would make their way on the show. After
The Larry Sanders Show
, when I did
Freaks and Geeks
with Paul Feig, it was so personal to Paul. When we were making that show, I was always nervous about—what’s the tone of this show? And how can you do it really funny? And in my head I always thought,
You know what this is? It’s a spinoff of
The Larry Sanders Show.
If we did
Larry Sanders
in high school, it would be this.
That was always my secret thought.

Garry:
Whenever you turn to what the organic state of any given character is, the fears and the anger and the struggle, you’re going to get conflict and a lot of hilarious stuff.

Judd:
It also led me to realize that certain stories can be very small, but if you’re incredibly honest about them, there’s so much to do there. Take
Knocked Up
, for example. This is how we came up with that idea: Seth Rogen was pitching me a big science fiction movie, and I said, “Seth, you know, you could stand there and it would be interesting. In
40-Year-Old Virgin
, you’re just in a stockroom and you’re interesting. You can do a whole movie where you get a girl pregnant and I would watch to see how that works.”

Garry:
That’s right.

Judd:
We were all going, “Oh, maybe we should do that,” but we were just joking around and then we realized, “Wait, maybe that actually
is
enough.”

Garry:
You allow the actor to be, as opposed to do. People are fascinating. They don’t really need to do much.

Judd:
I’ve always thought that mentoring comes from being in a place where you want to learn. When you hired me at
The Larry Sanders Show
, you said, “Oh my God, you’re going to learn so much.” You didn’t say,
“You’re going to be so helpful to me.” You said, “You’re going to learn so much.” And I took that seriously. I’m here to make as much of a contribution as I can, but it’s just as important for me to take as much from it as I can. Some writers struggled with this because it was all ego, like,
What can I get on the show? Does Garry like me? Does Garry like my scripts?
They didn’t approach it like,
I’m going to get my own show by observing this process and learning from what Garry’s doing.
I had fun because I didn’t feel that pressure. It wasn’t ego-driven. It was,
Hopefully I can get some jokes in, but I just got to watch Garry re-outline that script.
I knew that watching was helping me.

Garry:
That’s the way I was when I was just starting out. I was really open to being taught. When I see talent, I want them to be all they can be. I really want to help—and by doing so, I am helped as well. Whenever I mentor, I notice I’m learning something myself. You are right that there were writers who were not willing to look deeper inside themselves to get the material we were talking about. It’s like being at a therapist and saying, “No. No more sessions.” Whereas you would keep going back in the room and rewriting until you just, I could see how successful you would be because that’s what it takes. It’s just, keep reworking and reworking—and man, you listened and you went back in and you ended up, of course, contributing enormously. I don’t know, I’m just interested in life and teaching. I care.

Judd:
The bar was so high on that show, it was fun just to try to meet it. But I think for some people—when you struggle to get there, your self-esteem collapses. If you write a bad script and someone calls you out on it, you either go, “How can I make it better?” or you get mad about it.