Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (19 page)

Jim:
No, we did an episode of
Mary
, and we made one of the characters gay, and it was a big deal. I had a thing where one of our jobs was, you know—we were doing this during the feminist revolution, which everything seemed to be centered on, and everybody wanted us to say this, or say that, and you’re just slapping hands off the wheel. I’m very much against proselytizing, unless it comes from the characters as an expression of who they are. I mean, Norman Lear did it—that’s who he is—but that’s not who I am. He broke down barriers. Things were so tightass then.

Judd:
Yeah.

Jim:
And we followed his show, which was the best thing that happened to us.

Judd:
You were on right after. So that night on TV was
All in the Family
and
Mary Tyler Moore, M*A*S*H, The Bob Newhart Show
, and then
Carol Burnett
?

Jim:
It was a great night.

Judd:
A perfect night.

Jim:
The last big Saturday night.

Judd:
It’s completely different now, because no one’s watching any show in those kinds of numbers. The biggest night of
Breaking Bad
is half of what
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
would get.

Jim:
I had a show canceled with a thirty-five share. (
Laughs
)

Judd:
How do you think that changes the culture, the fact that we’re not watching the same things together anymore?

Jim:
Well, it’s changed it enormously. Look at sports. Or
American Idol
, a few years ago. These are the only kinds of things that bring people to the watering hole now, you know? We all come and talk about it the next day. We’re all bound together. We all had a common experience. All of that is changing. There’s a price to that.

Judd:
Yeah.

Jim:
But television is still the greatest job. We agree on that, right? Television is the greatest job?

Judd:
Yes. Yes. So, was
Mary Tyler Moore
eight seasons?

Jim:
Seven.

Judd:
Seven seasons, and it went right into
Lou Grant.

Jim:
Yes.

Judd:
That was one of the great transitions of all time.

Jim:
Yeah. When is a spin-off not a spin-off?

Judd:
I used to love that show.

Jim:
You know what was so great about that? We got our stories from the newspapers, literally.

Judd:
And so after
Mary Tyler Moore
, you went into
Taxi
?

Jim:
Mm-hmm.

Judd:
What was that like, working with Andy Kaufman?

Jim:
He’d always be in character. He was great. I tell Andy stories all the time. How can you resist Andy stories? He invented performance art, just amazing, bizarre stuff. But when you gave him notes, he’d be in that character, and you’d give him notes and it would be like he was Latka with an American talking fast at him. And then he’d do the note. He’d always do the note.

Judd:
But he was in character the whole time he was on set?

Jim:
Yes.

Judd:
Did you have private moments with him when he
wasn’t
in character?

Jim:
My favorite private moment with him was when he was hospitalized after the wrestling match, and I found out it was all a fake.

Judd:
Who told you?

Jim:
We had been really scared. We were running the tape and then we froze up and we saw—he did a very difficult physical stunt, a brilliant physical stunt. There’s no way a stuntman could do that stunt better than he did. That’s how good Andy was. And I was pissed off because—

Judd:
Because he scared everyone?

Jim:
This was on front pages! Yeah. And I said, “Do you know what it’s like to think you were seriously injured?” And he says, “Do you know what it’s like to be in traction for a few days?” (
Laughs
)

Judd:
(
Laughs
) For no reason. Where were you when you had that conversation?

Jim:
I was in my office and I think he was still in the hospital. I don’t know.

Judd:
And so when he would make a joke like that, what was his tone like? Did he ever talk about what the purpose of it was?

Jim:
He’d talk like a guy who just came up with a good bit.

Judd:
To him the bit was just riling people up? There’s no point to it, really, other than isn’t it funny that you’re going to get upset about this?

Jim:
He was inventing an art form, for Christ sake. He was an original talent.

Judd:
You spent years around him, but there were very few moments when he would drop it and say, “The reason I’m doing this is because…”

Jim:
It was deeper than that. And it’s not even a question of dropping it. He was
in
it.

Judd:
Writer-wise,
Taxi
was like the all-star team of all time. Has there ever been more great writers in the same space at once?

Jim:
We had a great time. We really worked. It was great. The Charles brothers. David Lloyd. It just worked. And the cast was great, too. We had fun. We had a party every Friday night. And this was in the days when—

Judd:
When everyone was on that lot?

Jim:
Yes. And it was literally segregated. Television people used one entrance and movie people used another. At that time, nobody who ever worked in television got a movie job. But you know that.

Judd:
You couldn’t be a movie star
and
a television star.

Jim:
You couldn’t get a job. You couldn’t get a writing job. Nobody was interested. You did television. You were lower order.

Judd:
Even as a writer, you couldn’t cross over?

Jim:
There were a few people who made it over the fence in the early eighties. But the fence was still up—which was great, because you not only had a job you loved, and were making terrific money, but you also got to feel like an underdog. (
Laughs
)

Judd:
While you were getting rich.

Jim:
It was bliss. It was just bliss. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Judd:
And was that the great moment for you? I feel like, in my life, there was a brief moment where we were all together and then people started splitting off and doing different things, but still, there was that one moment where everyone is around each other for a while. Was
Taxi
your special moment, where everyone was at the perfect level of their career to bond and not be behind their gates and split off?

Jim:
Yes, it was perfect. It was a community, a real community. Everyone’s working. Everyone’s having fun, doing something. I mean, that’s it, you know?

Judd:
And that’s about when you started directing movies, right? With
Starting Over
?

Jim:
Yes.

Judd:
That was a big movie in our house. My dad and my mom really looked at that as one of the great, hilarious movies. They talked about it a lot.

Jim:
Jesus.

Judd:
Maybe because they were on the verge of breaking up, but they would talk about Candice Bergen singing that song, and it was one of their favorite moments of all time. But is that why you asked Burt Reynolds to do
Terms of Endearment
, because you had just worked with him in
Starting Over
?

Jim:
No, I wasn’t quite that foolish. (
Laughs
) I couldn’t get
Terms
made. I forget what the budget was, but it was modest, and I couldn’t come up with the money. But then Burt said he’d do it, and that made it happen. And then I’m revving up, doing the rest of the casting, and his publicity agent calls me and says, “Burt’s not doing your movie, but he wants you to know he loves you.” He’d taken another role.

Judd:
Did the whole thing kind of fall apart at that moment?

Jim:
Yeah.

Judd:
So who became the great supporter of
Terms of Endearment
?

Jim:
Grant Tinker, who had gone over to NBC, and pre-bought it for television.

Judd:
I’ve never even heard of that.

Jim:
That gave me the final million.

Judd:
That’s a good friend.

Jim:
Great boss. A great boss. My obsession with the movie was that it was a literal comedy.

Judd:
About cancer.

Jim:
I wanted to do a truthful movie, but—I went through arguments with the Golden Globes where the studio had to put a muzzle on me because
I classified my movie as a comedy and they classified it as a drama, and it was the whole point that I was doing a comedy. I lost that one and I won drama—but then, afterwards, when people didn’t see it in theaters, the solitary experience, I think, is, you know, it’s not a comedy. It’s in a completely different tone because you’re watching it alone, I think.

Judd:
Because in the theater, it murdered.

Jim:
Yeah, it did.

Judd:
Why do you think it has transcended? I think a lot about culture, how quickly things disappear now. There’s so much new stuff, but these shows and movies, they’re timeless, whether it’s
Mary Tyler Moore
or
Terms of Endearment
—they are surviving. What do you think they have in common?

Jim:
I don’t know. Humanity?

Judd:
What do you think you did right as a parent?

Jim:
Oh, God. It was an awful house my kids grew up in.

Judd:
Yeah?

Jim:
I don’t know. (
Laughs
) Would anybody ask what your parents did right to produce you?

Judd:
Well, I think it’s always a combination of your parents love you and you watch their mistakes and some kids take some things from the mistakes, and some kids are injured from the mistakes—

Jim:
That’s true. Jesus, why does everything you say sound so good? (
Laughs
)

Judd:
I’m just trying to calm myself down.

Jim:
Can you heal, do you think?

Judd:
I notice with my friends’ kids, some of them crash early, and then they pull out, and they’re kind of awesome and funny and interesting. Other kids seem kind of great, and they have trouble later, and it’s fascinating how parenting relates to this environment—you’ve written a lot
about it—in
Spanglish
, which is about how money and doing everything right doesn’t always make a great kid—

Jim:
My whole goal in
Spanglish
—I had this kind of thing in my mind. I wanted to show the father as the saving parent instead of the mother as the saving parent. It was a big deal for me, because I was so tired of those things where Dad learns to feel.

Judd:
Yeah. (
Laughs
) Yeah.

Jim:
I spent a lot of time as a parent thinking it was my duty to give my kids the lessons of being poor when they weren’t.

Judd:
Yeah.

Jim:
It took me so long to stop—you know?

Judd:
They’re never going to appreciate it like you did.

Jim:
It took me so long to get off it. I want them to be from New Jersey, and they’re from Brentwood.

Judd:
You think,
Can my kids do well if they’re not embarrassed that they didn’t grow up in pain and poverty?

Jim:
I think, in some ways, the worst thing I did as a parent is that I passed on the embarrassment of riches, as if they should be embarrassed.

Judd:
I have that, too. As a kid I always said, “I want to leave this town,” but there’s no moment where my kids are like, “We’ve got to get the fuck out of Brentwood.” Why would you leave? My daughter, it’s time for her to get a car, and I think,
My dad didn’t get me a car.
It wasn’t even discussed as a possibility. And you think,
How spoiled—am I teaching her a lesson by getting her a shitbox? But I want it to be safe.
And you’re terrified that somehow it’s going to ruin her.

Jim:
Yes, yes, yes. A shitbox with a five-star rating.

When I was a kid, Jay Leno was hands-down my favorite stand-up comedian. He wasn’t the host of anything yet, of course. He was a semiregular guest on
Late Night with David Letterman
and I went to see him several times at clubs in Long Island during high school. He was a master. He would tear down the house. His act worked so well because he was a pure workingman’s comic. He was real. He talked about the things that annoyed him, he had brilliant observations, and it was all just about as good as a stand-up act in a comedy club can possibly be.

I have gotten to know Jay a bit in the years since our interview, and he’s been nothing but nice to me, for reasons I still do not understand. He did this interview with me when I was in high school, first of all. Then, when I was in college, I sent him a whole list of jokes to see if he’d buy them for his
Tonight Show
monologues. And one night, not long after, my grandmother knocked on my door and said, “Jay Leno’s on the phone.” I didn’t believe her. But I went to the phone anyway, and this voice said, “Hi, Judd. I read your jokes. They’re not quite there yet. They’re close, but they’re not quite there,” and then he proceeded to explain to me what, exactly, was wrong with my jokes in the kindest possible terms. He was so generous and encouraging, I didn’t even realize that I was being rejected. That’s not easy to do, to call a kid and tell him that his jokes aren’t good, and the way he did it just made me want to work harder. It also made me want to treat people kindly, the way Jay treated me.

Then, much later, when I started directing my own movies, Jay would always book me as a guest on
The Tonight Show
. I never told him that one of the main reasons why I started making movies in the first place—why,
from as early as I can remember, I wanted to get into this business—was so that I could one day become successful enough to be a guest on
The Tonight Show.
For me,
The Tonight Show
was the endgame, period. Sometimes I think movies were just a way to get there.

Jay Leno:
Is there an interview, or am I just talking?

Judd Apatow:
Well, yeah, you’re talking to me. That kinda thing. Okay, um—I know it’s hard to get going, but once you get going—

Jay:
Okay.

Judd:
Where are you right now in your career, if you had to describe it?

Jay:
Ah, about twenty-five miles outside of New Jers—outside of New York. I guess I’m in Jersey right now. Where am I? I have no idea. I mean, the last two years or so I’ve been doing the Letterman show a lot and that seems to have helped an awful lot. You know, the clubs are kind of full on Wednesday now, instead of just the weekends, so that’s nice. But I don’t know, I’m too close to it. I can’t tell.

Judd:
You’re a draw, but you’re not pulling like Universal Amphitheatre or anything.

Jay:
(
Laughs
) No, but—I really can’t tell. I mean, I like this stage of my career. Because I’m at the point where I know if the stuff is still funny. The audience is still at the point where, unless it’s funny, they don’t laugh. They might like you going in, but if it’s not funny, they don’t laugh. Sometimes when you get real big, they laugh at stuff that’s really not that funny and you don’t know anymore.

Judd:
Are you happy doing the clubs or would you like to play the larger audiences?

Jay:
I like doing the clubs. Two hundred to four hundred seats is about the maximum for ideal comedy, where you play with the crowd and all. I mean, obviously the big rooms are nice because there’s more money. But performance-wise, the smaller rooms are more fun to do. I mean, it’s like anything else. I like this. I’m happy where I am now, and—you know, the
whole idea is if you keep coming up with new ideas and new material, everything else just falls into place.

Judd:
Who are the people that you’ve opened up for?

Jay:
Oh, everybody. Everybody from Stan Getz, Mose Allison, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Chick Corea, all the way to like John Denver, Tom Jones, Perry Como, Kris Kristofferson. All kinds of people.

Judd:
I thought I saw you once on
Laverne & Shirley.

Jay:
Oh!

Judd:
What is the point of doing that show at this stage in your career?

Jay:
Well, the point of doing that show is the same point of doing this show. Somebody asks you to do it, and you go,
Well, why not? I like Penny and Cindy and all those people, they’re good friends.
People ask you to do the show, and it’s nice. I mean, okay, the show is not exactly
King Lear
, but that’s all right.

Judd:
But it’s the kind of thing you make fun of in your act.

Jay:
It is. Sure it is. But I’m not above doing something I make fun of in my act. I also eat at McDonald’s and all those other things I make fun of. That’s all a part of the business, you know. I do
Hollywood Squares.
I do whatever people ask me to do. Unless it’s something which is just totally, oh, I don’t know, I mean, sexist or racist or something of that nature. But when you do those kinds of shows it just helps, you know. When I’m on TV, I’m either on
The Tonight Show
or the Letterman show, which is on after eleven-thirty at night in most parts of the country. Consequently, there’s a whole generation of people that never see you or know who you are. So when you do a show like
Laverne & Shirley
, it gives my relatives a chance to see me on television.

Judd:
Would you want more people knowing you? Is that something you want?

Jay:
That’s something every performer tries to get. It’s like anything else: You do your work and the more people you can please with it, the better it makes you feel.

Judd:
What prompted you to go into this?

Jay:
Oh, I don’t know, it seemed like a fun way to make money at the time. I was in college, and I used to do ah—all those college shows, you know, like in Boston there are two hundred or three hundred colleges. So consequently every Saturday the cafeteria would become the Two Toke Café or something like this. And there would be nineteen-year-old folksingers with guitars ODing on the stage, and I used to emcee some of this stuff. And I would ah—you know, I would say, “That was so-and-so.” Boo, get off the stage, man you stink, get outta here. The audience was terrible, I was terrible, the acts were terrible. But it was fun being onstage and screwing around and—I started going around other coffeehouses and things like that and getting onstage. I was making five bucks, six bucks a night, which is what friends of mine who were waiters and waitresses were making at the time.

Judd:
When you were in college?

Jay:
Yeah. Colleges. I used to work strip joints. All kinds of places like that.

Judd:
Strip joints? How did that work out?

Jay:
Oh, your eyes light up, huh? Well, there were no comedy clubs.

Judd:
What year is this?

Jay:
Seventy-three, ’74. Most of the comedy clubs didn’t come along until about ’77, so the only place you could work was strip joints. You know, I had read Lenny Bruce and Milton Berle and all those people, and they all seem to have gotten their start in strip joints. So I used to go in and do strip joints. They were terrible. I was like nineteen, with long hair. It was terrible. But I thought it was fun.

Judd:
What kind of reactions did you get?

Jay:
Terrible. “Get off the stage, you stink.” I had a guy jump me with a Heinz ketchup bottle once. Split my head open. I got eight stitches on that one.

Judd:
Why’d he do that?

Jay:
(
Laughs
) Why? Why did he do that? I don’t know. Why do people beat up grandmothers and rob their purses? You want a rational explanation for why a guy came onstage and hit me on the head, and knocked me out? I don’t know. If I knew why, I wouldn’t have done it.

Judd:
What did you study in college?

Jay:
I don’t know. My mom has the degree in the living room. Ah, speech therapy. I went to college and I said, “What requires the least amount of studying?” Speech courses had—at the end of the year you had to give a talk. I figured, well, I can do that. So I get up and give my talk and get a C and then get out of there.

Judd:
So you’re doing comedy at that point, at the end of college. You knew that was what you were going into?

Jay:
Well, I was also a Mercedes-Benz mechanic at the time. I didn’t have any expenses. I didn’t have any lifestyle to maintain. I liked doing it. I would drive hundreds and hundreds of miles to work for free for four or five minutes. I didn’t know if I would ever really make a living at it. It was just a fun way to screw around. I’d make thirty bucks a week or forty bucks a week at best. But that was enough to live on. I had a junky car, and it was fun, you know. But that’s the whole key. You gotta keep moving. You gotta work every kind of job there is. I used to do old people’s birthday parties for the state. Which is
real
depressing. I had a friend who worked in social services in Massachusetts, and I’d get like eight bucks to drive out to Duxbury, to an old folks’ home. And it would be like, (
quietly
) “Bessy, we have a comedian here, you know.” Oh, it was real. I mean they were nice old people. And they would kind of look at ya. It was sad. Real bizarre.

Judd:
You sound like you’ve played, like, any kind of place where people congregate anywhere.

Jay:
What do you mean, I still do.

Judd:
What are the other strange places?

Jay:
Everything. Indian reservations, any kind of job I could get. You know, that’s it. You learn from the bad jobs. You don’t learn anything from
the good jobs. When you go into a club and everybody’s happy to see you and you do your jokes, and the jokes that normally don’t work, work, you say, well, this is terrible. Give me a place that’s awful. Like I was in New Mexico a while ago at an Indian reservation, just a very strange setup. Nice people, but—and they laughed. So I said, Okay, this stuff is gonna work on the Letterman show.

Judd:
And how did you progress to better places?

Jay:
Well, what happens is you get better money after a while. The places don’t get any better. You know, it just depends how much respect you get.

Judd:
How did your comedy change over the years?

Jay:
How? Well, I don’t know. I mean, you just get better the more you do. The real trick is to listen to it and throw out everything that’s not funny. You’ve interviewed a lot of comedians, you’ve seen a lot of comedians. I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of new people, too. And I’m always amazed when I go to clubs and I see new comedians, and night after night they do the same jokes that don’t work. If a joke doesn’t work, you just get rid of it and do something else. Better you do eight minutes of really funny stuff than sixteen minutes of hit-and-miss, you know. That really seems to be the whole key to it. You bring a tape recorder, you tape it, you say,
Gee, every night, this kind of gets a laugh, but not really.
Well, get rid of it. It’s not etched in gold, you know.

Judd:
And when did you start doing talk shows like
Mike Douglas
or
Dinah Shore
?

Jay:
First show I ever did was
Merv Griffin.
Then about a year and a half went by where I didn’t do anything. Then I did
The Tonight Show
, and that’s where everything really started moving.
The Tonight Show
kind of officially puts you in show business, you know.

Judd:
Is acting something you want to do?

Jay:
I like doing this better. I mean, doing films is fun. I’m not as—when I do a scene in a film I have to stop and say to somebody, “Is that any good? How was that?” Whereas in comedy, I hear the laugh, great, I know it worked, thank you, goodbye, I’m outta there.

Judd:
Right now you’re doing
Letterman
every month. Is he someone you knew before?

Jay:
Yeah, I knew David years ago in L.A. We both used to write for Jimmie Walker.

Judd:
You wrote for Jimmie Walker?

Jay:
Yeah, yeah. We both used to write comedy. Jimmie was great. Any struggling comic, Jimmie would pay them a hundred bucks a week, and we’d meet once a week at his house, and throw jokes around and ideas, and—it worked out pretty good. He was real good to a lot of people that way.

Judd:
What about comedy albums? Have you ever wanted to do that?

Jay:
I don’t buy comedy albums myself, and I’m a comedian. So no, I don’t have any interest in them. I mean, if I was gonna take every joke I’ve ever done and never do it again, then I might put it on an album and sell it. I know, as a kid, I would get annoyed if I buy a comedy album and then go to a nightclub and see the guy and for an hour, I hear exactly what was on the album. I’d rather do it this way, kind of door-to-door comedy, and do my act.

Judd:
How would you describe your comedy if you had to? It’s a little sarcastic and observational—

Jay:
(
Laughs
) That about sums it up. Sarcastic and observational. I don’t know. I try not to—you know, I don’t even say I’m a comedian onstage. I just do it and let people form their own opinion about what it is. To sit and pontificate about the wonder of it all is a bit narcissistic. You just do it. As you move along with the business, you get a little bit more experienced. Like now I can go into
Letterman
, think of a joke that day, and do it on the show and there’s a ninety-nine percent chance it’ll work. Whereas the old days, you kind of had to go over the routine more and more. Working with an audience is like being an animal trainer. If you go in the ring and you’re a little bit nervous and your hand’s shaking, the animals sense it and they rip you apart. Same thing with audiences. If you get up there and go, “Well, hi, everybody…ah, how you doing…ah, ah, ah…,” people
go, “Get off the stage!” They’re not gonna laugh. But if you use a little bit of authority and kind of take charge…