Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (36 page)

Marc:
Do you think Garry is an underappreciated comic?

Judd:
He’s the best. I mean, what he did with
The Larry Sanders Show
is an achievement that’s impossible to even explain. Imagine having to write a show. He’s the head writer. And then you have to rehearse it for three days and then shoot the entire show in two days. So seventeen pages a day while punching up next week’s script and editing two shows.

Marc:
But also the idea that it’s not just the work ethic. All guys who do well work hard. But to create a cast of characters who work within show business that are pathologically selfish and narcissistic and not great people is, uh, difficult. It’s challenging to find heart there. And Garry clearly did—on that show, he did. You find heart through the weaknesses of all these extreme narcissists and lunatics. And I think that in some ways, in
Funny People
, that was your quest as well. It’s hard to sell show business as being a reasonable place for human beings to work.

Judd:
That’s true, and Garry used to always say, “
The Larry Sanders Show
is about people who love each other but show business gets in the way.” I’ve always thought that’s true of any story. With
Funny People
, I thought what gets in the way for George Simmons is that he’s so funny and people love him so much on a grand scale that it allows him to never grow up. Only when life is about to end does he realize,
I’m alone here. I paid a massive price to be this guy.
We all know people like that.

Marc:
When you look at the comedy movies that come out now, I admire the direction you’re going because I like—I like to
feel
things. Because I don’t do it in real life. I watched
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
the other day because it was on a British Airlines flight. I was coming back from London and they had it in the collection part. And it was great! I laughed and I cried and it’s
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
You know, it’s not supposed to make that happen. But it was this weird moment where I realized that I don’t experience much joy in life and that there are things like movies—and like what you’re talking about comedy when you were a kid—that’s part of experiencing joy in life. I admire your angle on it, but I have a harder time. It seems like there’s a trend in comedy movies now that you might start with a pretty good story that seems kind of human, but out of some weird fear or overcompensation it just goes into fucking ridiculous-land.

Judd:
Yes.

Marc:
You’ve produced movies like that, no?

Judd:
I’ve produced some movies that are better than others.

Marc:
I’m not putting a judgment on them.

Judd:
There are movies that are a little more premisey and there’s movies where you’re sticking very close to the truth, and sometimes when you reach for a joke—I always call it
sweaty.
It’s brutal when things aren’t organic and also sometimes you see movies that you could tell that nobody is passionate about. It’s just a project. It’s a way for people to get paid. You know what those movies are. When you see a movie that Sean Penn directed, you realize he’s not fucking around. It’s like listening to a Nirvana record or something. This is not a job. They have something to say. And
in comedy, the people that we like the most, when they score they have something to say that’s important to them. And to me, that’s what I’m always looking for.

Marc:
In your mind, what is the perfect comedy that you judge all others against?

Judd:
There are a few movies I always go back to. I always go back to
Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
It pulls off a couple of things at the same time. One is that it has this really hilarious, broad humor with Sean Penn, as Spicoli. But Jennifer Jason Leigh gets pregnant and has an abortion in it and it’s played straight and he’s able to be incredibly truthful. That has always been one of the main models.

Marc:
Because of the emotional variation?

Judd:
When you can do that well, it’s a big deal.
Terms of Endearment
I always go back to as a movie about something very serious that’s hysterically funny. All the classics like
Annie Hall
and
Dr. Strangelove.

Marc:
How about
The In-Laws?

Judd:
Oh yeah,
The In-Laws
—all the old Albert Brooks movies. Anytime you talk lists, you feel terrible because there’s ten more behind every one you could mention.

Marc:
But it’s interesting to me that for the most part, outside of appreciating it as a classic, Woody Allen is not an inspiration for you particularly?

Judd:
Well, I never mention Woody Allen because some of his stuff is so great you feel like a fool even mentioning that you’re even in the same business as him. It just feels awkward to say I do what he does. But also, I think probably when all that stuff happened to him, and his family and the stuff with his kids, there was a part of me that disconnected. Maybe after I read the Mia Farrow book I just was like, I got a little creeped out. And my incredible worship and affection got dented. I don’t know where I stand on any of it. He’s stranger than I thought he was. And darker than I thought he was. So I don’t connect to it in the exact same way as when I was a kid watching
Take the Money and Run
. I know too much now.

Marc:
When I read
Please Kill Me
, about the punk rock scene in New York, about Lou Reed, as shitty as those—I knew they were all drug addicts and everything else, but you know, Lou Reed was such an asshole, it just fucked it up for me. I don’t read much about comics because I know how filthy we all are.

Judd:
You don’t want to know too much about anybody. I mean, if you read a Groucho biography, you’ll be like,
Oh God, sometimes Groucho was a prick.

Marc:
Yeah. Now, do you do Marx Brothers?

Judd:
I’m obsessed with the Marx Brothers. They were on TV all the time, and I have to say they were the first comedy act that I connected to. I think it was because it was so rebellious. Groucho was basically saying, “This is all bullshit,” and for some reason I couldn’t have taken to it more.

Marc:
Did you feel that because you’re not that aggressively, you know, “Fuck you”? Do you feel—

Judd:
I never felt that way enough to be super-funny, quite frankly. There were comedians when I first started out who were working, like Kinison and Bill Hicks, and those were the guys that were the best guys when I first started. They were hilarious because there was such rage and self-righteousness and they thought they had the answers for everything. I never felt that way about myself. I never thought I had any answers for anything and I wasn’t as mad as them. I was just trying to meet a girl and to get to second base. As I’ve gotten older I really do believe that life is about finding ways to connect to other people, and I’m more attracted to a James Brooks sensibility, where all of these stories are about how people finally come together.

Marc:
I think that’s where the joy is. That’s where humanity is. I think there’s sort of the “Fuck you, I’m better than you” or “I know more than you” or “Life is fucked.” I come from that mold and now that’s all melting away.

Judd:
That’s why I made
Funny People.
I mean, it’s exactly that. He has a moment where it melts away, and then suddenly he’s better, and
What do
I do?
I swing back and forth all the time. I think,
Well I’ve done a lot of what I wanted to do, so why am I even doing it now? What’s left to say that I haven’t said?
You don’t want to be working just to work. And so I don’t know. I just want to go deeper and more personal every time to the point where you start writing and you think,
Can I even say this? Who will I hurt if I express these ideas? Am I giving up too much of my experience?
But there’s no way to dig it out without going to the places you would normally hide from everybody. So it’s just about going deeper.

Marc:
To push it a little further.

Judd:
I’ve listened to your show a lot and you talk a lot about your family and what makes you feel separate from other people, and that’s what interests me now: Why do I feel separate? Why am I still in my room watching TV? In my mind, I’m still in that room and I’m not as connected to other people as I want to be, so I’m trying to do that. But even when I’m doing it, if I’m at a party or I’m at school, there’s a part of me that wishes I could run out and sit in my room and watch
The Merv Griffin Show
alone.

Marc:
Why are we so afraid of joy?

Judd:
That’s the question. And I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think it’s because we think right behind joy is a knife that will cut our throat if we really feel it. It’s almost like a laugh—your chin goes up and your throat is exposed.
If I laugh too loud, someone will slit my throat.
That’s the terror of joy.

This interview originally appeared on the
WTF with Marc Maron
podcast.

I spent a fair number of my teenage years sitting alone in front of the TV late at night, watching
SCTV
, which came on after
Saturday Night Live. SCTV
was a sketch show from Canada. It was not done in front of a live audience; everything was shot on tape. (
The Ben Stiller Show
was heavily influenced by
SCTV.
Ben and I used to say, “We’re like
SCTV
if they’d had money to work with.”) The cast was epic—John Candy, Harold Ramis, Rick Moranis, Catherine O’Hara—but the person who made me laugh the most was Martin Short, with his impressions of Jerry Lewis and Katharine Hepburn and the epic characters he invented, such as Jackie Rogers Jr. and Ed Grimley.

I showed up at his hotel in New York, where he was promoting a new season of
SCTV
, to conduct our interview. Of all the people I interviewed in high school, he was probably the nicest. God, did he indulge me. I’ve gotten to know him a little bit since then, and it all makes sense now: This kindness and warmth is just the way he lives his life.

On the night that Steve Martin won his lifetime achievement Oscar in 2013, I was lucky enough to wrangle an invitation to go back to Steve’s house for a celebration. There weren’t many people there. For a while, it was just Steve Martin, his wife, Anne, Martin Short, Tom Hanks, Bill Hader, and me, and as a group, they were as funny as anyone I have ever been around in my life. Just a shocking level of intelligence and humor. That night, I went home and thought:
Martin Short was the funniest person in that room; ergo, Martin Short is the funniest person in every room.

Judd Apatow:
When did your comedy career begin?

Martin Short:
In 1972, I did a show called
Godspell
in Toronto, and it was my first professional show. It was an interesting cast, because there were a lot of talented people in it who were doing their first professional show, too. Gilda Radner, Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy, Victor Garber. Paul Shaffer was the piano player. Everyone became good friends and it was great. We were just out of school, glad to not be in school. We did it for a year.

Judd:
And what did that lead to?

Martin:
It led to just kind of continually working in Toronto. Canada is a great place to work, because you’re not pigeonholed. There’s no star system. You’re not put in a kind of “He does that and that’s all we’ll ever ask him to do” role. So, you can do commercials and Shakespeare for radio and musicals—you can do anything, if you get the job. I did all that for about six years, until ’78 or so, when I joined Second City. Then I did that for a couple of years and then did it in the States and did a series called
The Associates
and then—

Judd:
The Associates
was highly acclaimed, but that also got canceled.

Martin:
The story of my life.

Judd:
How does Second City work?

Martin:
It works in a—it’s very organized. The set show is from nine until ten-thirty and then there’s a break and there are improvisations. They are free, so if you’re arriving at eleven you can watch them, and they are based on suggestions from the audience—they fall under different categories of places or current events. Then you go backstage and you put up this piece of paper with all the suggestions and you have about ten minutes to come up with a scene. You might give the lighting guy a cue, like, “Okay when I reach this line, cut it” or “We’re going to go in this direction.” Sometimes the lighting guy is very important—he might look at a scene and take it out earlier, let it go. The scenes are taped, so four minutes later when it’s time to write another show, the main bulk of the show, the part that people pay for, you sit around saying, “Wait a second. There was a scene I did one night, an improvisation—what was that scene about a cabdriver?” And then they pull out the tape—when I was there, they were
audiotapes, but now they’re audiovisual tapes—and you look at it and you remember what you said. Then you start rewriting and building it.

Judd:
You have ten minutes to do fifteen different pieces. How do you handle that? Does it always work or—

Martin:
No, often you bomb. You bomb bad. But it doesn’t matter because the audience knows you’re improvising, and so they’re kind of with you. I mean, it’s fun.

Judd:
How does it work [on
SCTV
]? Is it all cast writers? Do you have additional writers other than the cast?

Martin:
Yes, we do. The cast writes but there are five additional writers. You come up with an idea, you write it out, and you take it into weekly or biweekly meetings where everyone sits around in a circle over a big desk and reads the material. The material is voted on, whether they wanted it in the show, and sometimes, very few times, a sketch is totally thrown out. Usually what happens is suggestions are offered from everyone in the room about how it could be better, and that sketch is taken away and improved, and read again, and passed, and put up on a bulletin board, and through that a show is assembled.

Judd:
Do you have an audience?

Martin:
No.

Judd:
Does that help the show, you think?

Martin:
For the kind of show
SCTV
is, yes. You know,
Saturday Night Live
has the advantage of that energy that it gets from being live, but it has the disadvantage, too, of only being able to do a take once.

Judd:
Do you have a laugh track?

Martin:
Yes.

Judd:
And do you think that hurts the feel of the show? Because sometimes those are not so good.

Martin:
It’s like anything: If it’s done well, it doesn’t. If it’s done badly, it does.

Judd:
Anybody that we would know who you worked with on Second City?

Martin:
You mean, onstage?

Judd:
Yeah.

Martin:
Well, Catherine O’Hara and Andrea Martin, John Candy, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas…

Judd:
They were all doing that at the same time they were doing
SCTV?

Martin:
Some had left and some would come back for a month. That’s what was great about Second City. You could go back if you wanted.

Judd:
How do you become part of Second City? Isn’t there an audition where they make you do characters?

Martin:
There is a system. There’s an audition where you have to do five characters coming in a door and then you leave and you come through the door again as another character. If you’re good at that, you usually get into the touring company, and you do resorts up north, like any touring company. From there, you go to the main company.

Judd:
Did you ever do stand-up comedy, like in a club?

Martin:
Yeah, I played with that a little bit in California, but it’s just not as much fun. When I was doing
The Associates
, I would go down—Robin Williams was a friend of mine, and he was doing
Mork & Mindy
in the next studio and he would go down every Monday and join the Comedy Store players at the Comedy Store, and so I started doing that. It wasn’t the greatest improvisational atmosphere, because the Comedy Store is primarily for stand-up comics, so I would watch, and tried it a couple of times, but it was just not as much fun.

Judd:
You like the challenge of bombing?

Martin:
No, I don’t like bombing.

Judd:
Or the challenge of knowing it could go down the tubes?

Martin:
I’m not crazy about risking it, except it does feel great when it succeeds.

Judd:
Were you funny as a kid? Class clown?

Martin:
If you call this funny, I guess. I fooled around a lot, yeah. Some teachers thought I was a saint, others a nightmare.

Judd:
The ones that thought you a nightmare: Why would that be?

Martin:
I would just constantly fool around.

Judd:
Did you go to college?

Martin:
Yes. I graduated as a social worker. I was—I originally went into premed and then I realized I hated science. I did two years of premed. So, I switched to social work, and that’s where I met Eugene Levy and Dave Thomas—I went to school with them.

Judd:
What do you think about Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas making—I guess they just finished their movie
Strange Brew.
What do you think about, like, all of a sudden, two characters from
SCTV
becoming national characters?

Martin:
Oh, it’s great. It’s great.

Judd:
Is that strange, when a little skit turns into a big hit?

Martin:
Yeah. Dave is a good friend of mine and he is constantly amazed, too.

Judd:
Okay, so when you’re doing impressions in the show, do they write sketches for you and then say, “You’re going to have to do an impression of so-and-so,” and then you have to develop it?

Martin:
Well, a lot of the impersonations, you write yourself. I’m trying to think. There’s a few instances where someone will say, Will you play this person? And you’ll try to figure it out.

Judd:
How do you develop the impression itself? Do you just wing it?

Martin:
I look at tapes. Makeup can take three or four hours, so I sit with a Walkman on and listen to the voice, and sometimes I’ll get certain phrases that the actual person—when I was doing Huntz Hall, there were phrases he would use and I would lift those phrases out and put—even if
it was just a word or two words together, a certain sound, you know—I’d put them into the script. You can mimic that.

Judd:
You also did a Robin Williams impression. You did all the different little characters that he does, and it was amazing. How did you develop that?

Martin:
Well, I know Robin, so there’s all different things—there’s his “ha ha,” a laugh which he rarely does on television, and I—that was from seeing him on
The Tonight Show
and he just never sat still, so I came up with the premise for Tang, the guy trying to get the answer out of him, and Robin wouldn’t do it. You just get into the voice, you know? I did Paul Anka one week and I could not get him at all. I was sitting in that makeup chair and I was trying—I kept staring at the makeup job they were doing and listening to Anka with my Walkman in my ears, and the longer they did my makeup, the more I become like him or sound like him. Sometimes it just evolves.

Judd:
Do you have any idea what you want to do after
SCTV?

Martin:
My dream is to do a Broadway show. I’ve always wanted to do a Broadway musical. I like doing television. I get terribly unhappy if I’m not doing something comfortable, and if I don’t think it’s particularly good.

Judd:
Are there any skits from
SCTV
that you’re particularly proud of?

Martin:
Um, I guess the one—there are two sketches that—there are three sketches—no, there’s four, eight, twelve sketches that I feel strongly…No, I guess like a sketch called “Oh That Rusty,” which was about a child star who had been playing an eight-year-old for thirty-one years, and now he’s real old and fat; but he would wear a wig, and they would have to build the set real big to make him look young and to make the show relevant in the seventies, they fired his mother and hired a seven-foot-two black guy to play his father so he would look short in size.

Judd:
I liked “The Boy Who Couldn’t Wait for Christmas.”

Martin:
That’s a strange one. That’s just a short little piece about a guy who can’t get to sleep before Christmas, and that’s the kind of piece that you write and you kind of—it’s real personal, so you write it alone in your office
and you hand it in and go home because you’re assuming that people are going to say, “How does this happen?” “Well, look, he’s tired.” You know? Then you get a phone call that says, “We like it.” Oh, good. Okay.

Judd:
How much rehearsal time goes into something like that?

Martin:
Not a great deal. But there’s a Sunday rehearsal, where we’ll sit and discuss with the director how we like things done, and he’ll say to us, “No, it’d be better this way,” and you work out the scene. Then you rehearse a couple times on the floor, two, three, four times. I like to do lots of takes.

Judd:
What do you find funny?

Martin:
There are not many things that I
don’t
find funny. I think the Three Stooges are great, but if they’re not on top of it, they’re not funny. Woody Allen is fabulous, but if he’s not on top of it, he’s not so fabulous. There’s no one kind of comedy that is synonymous with my comedy. I like physical comedy. And comedy that comes out of nowhere—unexpected twists are the most interesting to me. It gets boring if it becomes predictable.