Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (34 page)

Judd:
How long do you think you can do your show for?

Louis:
I don’t know. I feel like I have to take it year by year. This year was a totally different experience than last season. I didn’t do it like a job. I decided I don’t need to go and try to make movies or anything. This show was a good job. It’s a good thing to be doing creatively. I had this thing that I was going to make a movie. And I’d been saving it and I said,
Fuck it. I’ll make an episode out of it.
So I cut it into two pieces and I made it an episode and it’s a whole flashback thing.

Judd:
There’s a type of storytelling, and movies are not hospitable to it. It’s a miracle when shows fall together and you feel like,
Oh, this is the right idea for the right person and shit’s about to go down.

Louis:
TV shows are about getting the right tuning. It’s like trying to crack a safe. Once you get it, it starts paying off like a slot machine creatively—like, I created a machine that makes paper cups, you know. I just sit there and stack them. And it keeps running as long as people want paper cups.

Judd:
Whose voice is in your head that’s wise?

Louis:
A collection of people. My mom is a big part of that for me. She’s got a calm and thoughtful approach to things and, yeah, it’s her, it’s me—I feel like I’ve invented a lot of that for myself. Sometimes it’s friends like Chris Rock, who is one of the smartest people I know. It’s different people who have said stuff to me and then things I’ve learned.

Judd:
My mom was very manic and up and down—you know, super nice but also super screaming and crazy. You get that implanted in your head. Like, if you have the solid mom implanted, moments come up like
SNL
—like,
Here we go, you’re walking out onstage.
And that’s the voice that takes you out there.

Louis:
That’s right. I mean, it’s funny. Chris Rock is a lot of those for me. I remember when I did
Lucky Louie
, I was really scared. That was my first series, my first real job. And right before I went out I thought,
This might not go good.
And I called him and said, “I have a feeling this might go badly,” and he said, “You’re damn right it might. It’s very likely to go badly and all those people are working hard and you better fucking step up. You better do something to not let that happen.” And I was like,
Shit, that’s right.
There’s a few people like that. Paul is another. Paul Kozlowski, this comedian that was in Boston when I was coming up. And I had a kind of doldrums moment once, on the steps of a comedy club, and I said, “This is really hard. This is hard. I hardly ever get on the stage and when I do the crowds suck.” And he said, “So get out, then. There’s too many comedians. Get the fuck out. Quit.”

Judd:
“We don’t need you.”

Louis:
“Quit.” I had a few moments like that. But once I had a kid, I remember thinking, you know,
I want to show up for this
, and I remember thinking that stuff of like not being able to sit alone with myself. That’s not a good thing about me. I wanted to change and this was a good reason to do it, and I remember sitting alone with my daughter a lot and breathing and going,
Just cool it, you know, be here for her.
She was a great target for my better intentions. I remember telling myself, keep being part of it and change as many diapers as I can and also try to get the kid away from my wife so I can have my own set of parenting skills. So I wasn’t just her assistant.
I put a lot of thought into that. It was a big deal for me. Uh, I don’t know how we got here.

Judd:
What are the things that you’re trying to say on the show about being a parent?

Louis:
I always try to show that I don’t have any control as a parent, you know what I mean? I did this thing with the little one on the show and I’m telling her this thing about don’t look into your neighbor’s bowl unless it’s to check if they have enough. I try to teach my kids this kind of thing. The reason why we cut sandwiches in half is so you can offer somebody a piece of your sandwich. You don’t need the whole sandwich. Everybody in your line of sight, you offer it to them and if nobody wants it, then hey, you get a whole sandwich but you’re only supposed to eat half. I tell them these things.

Judd:
Do they believe you?

Louis:
Sometimes.

Judd:
And you don’t know what sticks or how it sticks, because I’ll say something to my daughters and I’ll think they don’t care at all, and then a year later, in conversation somehow it comes up that they remembered that.

Louis:
Yes, that’s right.

Judd:
It’s interesting to me because I have two daughters. And it really does change your reality when you spend an enormous amount of time only with women and little girls. It’s a very sweet, intimate relationship. Like my daughter—I know you hate all the cellphone stuff, but she’ll text me all day during school and tell me, like, “I just cried during Spanish class because the teacher asked me a question and I didn’t know the answer and I cried and I’m in the bathroom right now.”

Louis:
Isn’t that nice that she’s reaching out to you that way? I don’t hate the cellphone stuff, by the way. I think you have to—

Judd:
No, I agree with everything you say about it. It’s a battle to figure out how to manage technology with kids.

Louis:
Yeah, it is, but it will be a battle for them for their whole lives, too. I mean, when I’m at my best, I leave my phone around without looking at it and I only use my computers to write or edit or whatever. My favorite part of the year is when I’m editing my show because I can’t touch the Internet; I’m using my computer to edit. Because it’s a sickness. Like right now, because the show is on the air, I’m reading shit about it and about myself and I’m tweeting because I never tweet. I don’t partake in that back-and-forth thing, but when I do because I’m tweeting to promote and then I’m like,
Did anybody respond, why didn’t anybody respond?
And
Oh, fuck that guy. Should I say something, fuck, maybe I’ll direct-message him. Fuck you.
It’s a sickness. I can’t handle it. So the thought occurred to me:
I need to help my daughter figure out how to do this.
I think I’ve done a good thing already, which is that she’ll be the last one of her friends to get a smartphone. And because she’s watched all her friends change since getting them, and I’ve watched them change, too. I know all of these kids. I know the parents and I know the kids. I’ve known them since they were little. And I see these kids who suddenly are seized by this thing. When they come over—like, my daughter had a sleepover party recently and I made her friends check their phones at the door.

Judd:
They start shaking.

Louis:
They itch, they shake, they can’t listen to each other—it hurts them to not have their phones. And she’s observing this because she’s not one of them. It’s a big caution for her. So when she does get one, she’ll have a better shot than I have and that her friends have had.

Judd:
What’s hard is that they are afraid to drop out of this mass communication. But like I’ve said to my daughter, “Maybe you should be known as the kid who is hard to reach.”

Louis:
That’s right. That’s the coolest possible thing you can be. But it’s pollution. It’s pollution. You need time by yourself. I was watching
Rocky
with a friend of mine. And there’s all these scenes of him sitting on this dirty mattress, alone—the guy is so alone, it’s beautiful how alone he is. Nobody’s alone like that anymore. Nobody. You know, cops on the beat in New York are staring at their fucking phones. Airline pilots are on iPads. Fucking hell. It’s crazy.

Judd:
When I’m working sometimes, I have this book of Cassavetes interviews at hand. He just has so many quotes about doing things differently—one of the quotes is something about, I don’t care if people like the movie, I just hope, in ten years, it’s still stuck in your craw somewhere. Like, they’re still thinking about it.

Louis:
You want it to be compelling, that’s all. The likable thing is not really worth much. It’s a low-wattage bulb, you know. I remember when I did
Pootie Tang
, it was such a fucking disaster and John Goldwyn was the head of Paramount at the time. And he was so mad. He watched the cut and brought us in. Me and David Gale, who ran MTV Films, Sean Daniel, who had been the head of Universal who was now running the company [Alphaville, a production company on
Pootie
Tang]. All these people, and I was the director, and I remember they all walked in and I stood back a little and John Goldwyn was holding the door, and he went, “Come on.” He told me to come in and his voice was shaking, he was so upset.

Judd:
Had he read it?

Louis:
I don’t know. Somebody actually brought that up: Did you read the script? “Because,” the editor said, “we kept to the script pretty much. Did you approve this movie?” And David Gale said, “I think something’s lost on you. I think you’re not getting something.” “What am I not getting? What am I not getting about you taking four, by the way,
million dollars
of our money? This is an irresponsible, wasted effort.” He hated it so much. He said, “Why would Pootie Tang make that beautiful woman drink milk from a saucer on the floor, and yet he throws himself at this whore?” And I remember when he said that I was like,
This is fucking great. This means I did something right because he’s so upset.

Judd:
Oddly, those are the ones that people keep watching and talking about.

Louis:
No, that’s right. And I think I’m able to do that on the show because the show doesn’t have an obligation to tell a whole story. Sometimes we tell two in one episode. I had an instinct that I should try to be as bold as I can about how I play with the format because I’ll chase away everybody who doesn’t like it and then I’ll get fans who do like it. If the net number is high enough, I’ll keep the job. And if I keep the job this way it’s a great
fucking job. I never cared if I got canceled. That’s the only thing that makes me do this stuff well, is I was willing to let the job go any day.

Judd:
I always heard that from Larry David. That was his big inspiration. He was willing to walk away from
Seinfeld
when they would give him bad notes.

Louis:
You have to be willing to say, “Let’s not do this show. Let’s not do it.”

Judd:
Do you notice a common theme when you look at the show, or is it too soon to tell? For a lot of people, when you see their body of work, you realize there are certain things that concern them. They make mirrors of their lives. Do you notice that for yourself?

Louis:
I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s a common theme. I guess I’m always trying to figure something out on the show.

Judd:
Is it self-discovery?

Louis:
I like to put myself into fucked-up situations and make mistakes and deal with it. I like to do that over and over again on the show, and maybe I like to do that in my life also. I read in some places that the women on my show were all crazy. They didn’t say that for the first couple of seasons, but people started to go, “These women are all fucking nuts.” For me, it’s because that’s an interesting problem, that’s all. It’s an interesting story.

Judd:
I’ve gotten in trouble for having strong women or angry women or dealing with those types of problems that people would say, Oh, you’re being a misogynist. Even Katherine Heigl said, “Oh, you’re making the women out to be shrews.”

Louis:
Knocked Up
is the best thing she ever did. The best thing she ever did. The fact that she was unhappy is amazing, but for a man, a woman is a problem. She’s a mystery and she’s a choice. The women in our lives are a list of choices that we’ve made and decisions that we’ve made. And it’s the same for them.

Judd:
Are you a therapy person?

Louis:
I used to go to therapy, but I can’t do it now because it’s been too long. It’s like not going to the gym for a long time. I don’t want to start all over again.

I’ve done a fair amount of interviews in my life, but the one that people mention to me the most is the one I did for Marc Maron’s
WTF
podcast. In addition to being an incredible comic, Marc is an insightful interviewer and empathizer and therapist of sorts, and we connected in a deep way about so many aspects of our journey. At one point, as I was talking about my pain as a kid and how some of those issues have persisted into adulthood, his eyes welled up with tears—and it made me extremely uncomfortable. I thought he was going to start crying right in front of me, so I changed the subject slightly, because I wasn’t sure I could bear to see him lose control. Looking back, I regret having done this. I probably should have kept going just to see what happened. I could have destroyed him. For those of you interested in hearing my story, this would be it.

Judd Apatow:
All right, I’m holding the mic. Is it happening now?

Marc Maron:
Yeah, sure.

Judd:
This is it.

Marc:
I am in Judd Apatow’s war room. Is this the war room?

Judd:
This is the situation room.

Marc:
Ah, the situation room. So this is your office? A lot of boards, things being outlined. It’s like—I can’t read your fucking writing.

Judd:
Well, part of the reason why I have bad handwriting is when I used to do stand-up comedy, I would write jokes on planes and I was always
embarrassed that the person next to me would see what I was writing about.

Marc:
Is that true?

Judd:
Yes. And so I found a way to have terrible handwriting that only I could read, so if I was writing some joke about impotency or something, it would be unreadable.

Marc:
You did it by design?

Judd:
I did. And I still do it now, so if my wife sees any weird notes or joke ideas or things that might be offensive, there’s no way she can read it.

Marc:
Because I’m sitting here thinking, like,
Man, I got the scoop.
There’s a whole Apatow movie outline on that board but all I can make out is—I think down on the lower left, does it say “sperm issues”?

Judd:
It says “sperm issues.” Yes, it does. But that would be in all of my movies.

Marc:
And then it just, the rest is undecipherable.

Judd:
Exactly. And it shall be until America gets to see this.

Marc:
So I just watched
Freaks and Geeks
for the first time.

Judd:
Oh, wow.

Marc:
It’s nothing personal. I miss a lot of things. And the interesting thing to me is—the scene that resonates almost more than the rest to me is when Bill is watching Garry Shandling after school. It’s one scene, but, for some reason, I was like,
That was beautiful.

Judd:
There’s a scene in the show where Bill Haverchuck, played by Martin Starr, comes home after school and you can tell he’s a latchkey kid and no one’s around and his mom’s a former stripper. And he looks really sad and he watches Garry Shandling on
The Dinah Shore Show
while making a grilled cheese sandwich and eating chocolate cake. And he goes from being really sad to laughing his ass off. After we made it Jake Kasdan said to me, “That’s the most personal thing you’ve ever done in your career. And it’s the best thing you’ve ever done, too.”

Marc:
That scene?

Judd:
That scene. And that was probably the turning point for my whole career, realizing that the little moments that I thought were boring or just not interesting to other people are actually the things that people would be most interested in. I always thought I was a bore. That’s why I quit stand-up comedy.

Marc:
Was your mom not around?

Judd:
I lived with my dad after my parents got divorced. And I just didn’t do any after-school activities. I just went in my room and closed the door and I was in my fantasy world, watching, you know, Michael Keaton do stand-up on
The Mike Douglas Show
, and I couldn’t have been happier. I look back on it as a great time.

Marc:
I had that same experience. Because one of them—like I still remember one of the moments I decided to be a comic was watching Jay Leno. I don’t know if it was on
Mike Douglas
but I remember the joke—they were cutting away to a commercial and he was on that ridiculous set and he said, “What happens now, does the chair fold up into the wall like we’re on a game show? Am I going to disappear?” And it was just a moment. It was a beat. But I remember thinking it was the most hilarious thing I had ever heard in my life.

Judd:
I remember going to see
The Merv Griffin Show
being taped. That’s how into it I was.

Marc:
In New York?

Judd:
In Los Angeles, when I was in high school. Dr. Ruth was the other guest, and she’s taking calls, giving sex advice, and Jay Leno realizes that this makes no sense because the show doesn’t air for a month and where are the calls coming from? Like, is there someone backstage doing this? He calls her on it, like, “These are not real calls. Where are these people coming from?” And I thought,
That is the coolest guy in the world. I want to be that guy.
I couldn’t get enough of it. I’ve looked back on it and wondered,
Why did I like it so much? What was it that I was attracted to?
I was obsessed to the point of highlighting the
TV Guide
so I knew when the comics were on.

Marc:
Did you read “My Favorite Jokes” in
Parade
magazine? Maybe you’re a little younger than me. But in
Parade
magazine, on the last page, there used to be a thing called “My Favorite Jokes” where they just had comedians’ jokes written there.

Judd:
I used to transcribe
Saturday Night Live.
I would record it on an audiocassette.

Marc:
How old were you?

Judd:
Ten. I have the transcriptions of Bill Murray’s Oscar picks bit from “Weekend Update” in notebooks.

Marc:
Why did you do that?

Judd:
I don’t know. I think that I was in some way trying to figure out how to get into that world—how does it work? I wanted to break it down somehow. It wasn’t conscious.

Marc:
Did you used to do that with stand-up as well?

Judd:
I didn’t. I did it with
Saturday Night Live
sketches and some
Twilight Zones.
And then Steve Martin hit in ’76, ’77, ’78. Richard Pryor, Monty Python—I was losing my mind with comedy nerdness.

Marc:
You were an original. Comedy nerds didn’t exist yet. You were just a kid who was precocious in a sense. I was the same way in that I related to these comics. They made me feel better. They had a certain amount of control, it seemed. They could handle shit.

Judd:
They had a stance on why the world didn’t make sense, and they would call everyone on their shit. I couldn’t get enough of those people.

Marc:
I’ll tell you something Harry Shearer said to me, and I want to get your opinion on it. He said the reason why people are comedians is to have control over why people laugh at you.

Judd:
I look at it this way: When someone is laughing, I know they don’t dislike me. I don’t know if they
like
me, but I know that in that moment they don’t
dis
like me. And that’s why I get the need for constant approval, because if you’re smiling I know you don’t hate me. You know,
Why do I
need that much approval? Is there any point where I get enough approval and I’m full?
And I’ve realized that there is no point.

Marc:
Really?

Judd:
I once received a call from Steven Spielberg. Steven Spielberg, who I used to work for at DreamWorks, was trying to reach me to say that he liked
Knocked Up
. And I so wanted a letter from him. Paul Feig got one when we made
Freaks and Geeks
and I was so jealous that he got a letter from Steven saying that he loved
Freaks and Geeks.
So I didn’t return the call and I told my assistant, “Can you say Judd’s out of town and is it possible that he could write a note just so I can have the letter?” He sent me the dream letter, the beautiful letter with nothing but kindness. You know, a great guy. It’s just what you want. And I have it. But what happened afterwards is I thought to myself,
This is the best you can do. Who else do I want to compliment me? How many of these do I need to feel good about myself?
And,
Why doesn’t it last?
The wound is still there.

Marc:
What is the wound? Because I know I have it.

Judd:
You know, I’m not sure exactly. I’ve had therapists who say everything that happened to you happened in the first three years of your life—

Marc:
Yeah, let it go.

Judd:
It may have just been the way your mom looked at you. I mean, who knows?

Marc:
You believe that?

Judd:
I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s true. I do know that in every situation that I walk into I feel like the weirdo. I feel like that awkward guy picking up my kids from school. I feel that way on the sets of my own movies.

Marc:
Uncomfortable in your own skin?

Judd:
I never feel like I own the moment, you know.

Marc:
You feel like you’re a
victim
of the moment?

Judd:
I just feel like a punch could come from any direction even if I’m everyone’s boss. And the thing is, no one ever punches me. What I’m realizing
is,
Okay, that’s how I’m wired, and if I just acknowledge it, some of it will disappear.
That’s a little bit of what
Funny People
was about—he gets sick and says, you know, What was the point of all this? I’m here in this house and I’m all alone and everyone outside likes me and I don’t have any strong relationships. Why did I do this?

Marc:
A lot of that movie was drawn from your early career with, you know, I mean in the sense that Garry Shandling was your mentor, right?

Judd:
I had a bunch of mentors. People were very nice to me when I was young. Shandling hired me to write the Grammys for him in 1990.

Marc:
How old were you?

Judd:
I was twenty-three. And then he hired me on
The Larry Sanders Show
and, and has been helpful to me on everything I’ve ever done. I used to write jokes for Jim Carrey and I worked on some of his movies. So I had to fabricate a character that was an amalgam of a lot of people but slowly you realize,
Oh, it’s just me. It’s the worst part of me.
And then suddenly it all makes sense: Here’s me at my worst. Here’s me at my angriest.

Marc:
Here’s me as a pregnant woman.

Judd:
Exactly. Here’s me at my neediest. Here’s me screaming at the crowd. I mean, your thoughts are coming out in different ways. And some of it is observations of other people. Some of the rants in
Funny People
were based on me watching Rodney Dangerfield yell at the crowd at one in the morning, you know. One night he was in his bathrobe or something. He gets onstage at the Improv and he just didn’t do his act and it was fantastic. He said to the crowd, “Yeah, sometimes life makes perfect sense, and then you cum.” There was a woman there and he says, “Oh yeah, yeah, you’re beautiful. You’re beautiful. You’d be different. You’d love me for me.” It was brutal. It was brutal to watch. And it was fantastic to watch. I’ve just seen a bunch of people have that meltdown, where it’s one in the morning and they drop the act and they tell you what they’re going through. That’s my favorite part of comedy, when you go to that next place.

Marc:
You don’t see it as much as you used to. I mean, in the clubs. I don’t know how often you go out there anymore, but there was a time when that
generation—there seemed to be a little more freedom and a little less eyes on everybody. There was a time in the eighties where the meltdown was fairly commonplace.

Judd:
Those moments between midnight and one-thirty in the morning at the Improv—that’s where a lot of the great things happened.

Marc:
How many of that generation have sort of disappeared, or no one knows anymore? Are you ever saddened by that?

Judd:
I did go into Best Buy once and a comic who was hilarious was a salesman there. That was rough. That made me sad because I thought,
I was never as funny as that guy. That guy used to kill.
But at some point you can’t go on the road anymore. If you want to have a life and kids, you can’t be on the road thirty-five weeks a year.

Marc:
But is it that that same sort of wound that you’re talking about can also swallow people? And the fact is that you were able to manage your talent and be political and ambitious enough to get what you wanted to get done, done.

Judd:
I was very lucky that part of my dysfunction as a person is a terror of bankruptcy—financial bankruptcy, not emotional bankruptcy. So as a young person, I thought ten years ahead. I had a show in high school where I interviewed comedians like Leno and Seinfeld and John Candy.

Marc:
How did you manage to get hold of them?

Judd:
I used to call their publicists and say I was from a radio station in New York, and they were too lazy to look it up and figure out that it was a high school radio station. I was afraid that I was going to not be able to take care of myself in my life, so in my head I always thought,
Well, what do I need to do? Okay, I’ll interview comedians and they’ll tell me how to be a comedian. They’ll tell me how to write.