 Today's podcast is brought to you by WarbyParker.com. Get a free five-day home try-on at WarbyParkerTrial.com forward slash David Feldman show. Five pairs, five days, 100% free. The David Feldman radio program is made possible by listeners like you. You sad pathetic humps. J. Elvis Weinstein is one of the founding members of Mystery Science Theater 3000 or 2000. Who's 3000? 3000 and was a writer, producer on Freaks and Geeks and he is a documentarian besides being a great comedian and comedy writer. He's a director. His new movie is I Need You to Kill. Welcome to our show J. Elvis Weinstein. I'm very happy to be here. You're joining us from the valley. From beautiful Sherwin-Oaks, California. Yes, and we're in beautiful New York City. I saw you last week while I was in LA and tell me about I Need You to Kill. What is this documentary about? It sounds fascinating. This documentary is about the burgeoning stand-up scene in Asia. Um, sort of told through the eyes of three American headliners who are brought over there by a club owner named Louis Lee who runs a club called Acme Comedy Company in Minneapolis, which is a great stand-up club. Oh, yeah. I love it. One of the great clubs. Oh, it's, and he is one of the great human beings. Go ahead. Absolutely. And he says hello because I just talked to him. Tell him I said hello. Tell him I love him. Yeah. He's a beloved guy. And I've known him literally since I was a 16-year-old middle at a club called the Comedy Gallery and he was the bar manager. So I've known him for almost 30 years and watched him grow his club from a bad place to one of the best, you know. He had a fascination with political satirists because he came from Hong Kong where to this day, freedom of speech is, some would say, non-existent. Well, it exists in the stand-up world and I don't know if that's because of the lack of it being on the radar yet, you know, flexing the last vestiges of British Hong Kong. Right. I mean, speech in China is being restricted. Yes. And our internet companies here in America are complicit in that in order to do business with China. They'll censor. The myth that capitalism would bring freedom to China is, it's a myth. So the movies, you directed this movie and it follows comedians performing in Asia. Which specific countries were they again? They went to Hong Kong, Singapore and Macau. So Macau is an island off mainland China, correct? Yes. It's a gambling place, right? It's basically China's Vegas now. But it's bigger than Vegas. It's bigger, yeah. It was a Portuguese colony for about 200 years and it was handed back to China much like Hong Kong was around the same time. So it's still under that same 50-year, you know, separate but, you know, the two system, one country, two system thing. So you have comics. Who are the comics who made this journey? Tom Segura, Chad Daniels, and Pete Lee. I don't know Pete Lee. Is he Asian? He's not. Which he got mileage out of on the trip. Chad and Pete are both, Pete is in New York. He's been out there for several years. Chad and Pete were both ACME sort of homegrown from open-stager, now headliner guys. And Tom Segura is just a funny dude. Okay, so now you have three, four funny guys traveling in China. How long did it take before this conversation sprouted? We better make sure they only serve Pepsi if there's a Chinese comic opening for us. I didn't get it on camera if it happened. No, seriously. At what point did you see a glass of Coke and make the joke? I don't even know the joke. Oh, come on, J.L. I don't. You're making me feel like an amateur now. Are you kidding? I cannot believe. You guys traveled throughout China telling jokes. And the subject of a glass of Coke never came up. Is this the something PP in my Coke? Yeah. Okay. No, I'm not saying that the jokes weren't equally juvenile and or racist throughout the trip. But we just didn't get to that one. How could you not get? Oh, my God. So, okay. Now I can talk because I was hanging on to that for so long. I'm sorry. Yeah, so now I can actually focus. We can excise that from your show. No, no, no, I want to keep it in. It was like a popcorn kernel stuck in my back molar and it's been flossed out. And let's get back to the documentary. When did you shoot the documentary? In the fall of 14. And how long is it? How long is the doc? Yeah. It's 97 minutes, I think. It was shot on what? Not iPhones, right? No, we shot with Canon C100 digital high-def cameras. And you directed this. I did. I took two camera guys and a fully dedicated sound guy, so crew of three and me. I need you to kill. It's playing where? How can we see this? You can't yet. We're just sort of entering the world of commerce with it now. It's like it's a month that's finished. And what is the message to this movie? That comedy is a universal language or that English is a universal language. Do they do stand-up comedy in Chinese or is it all done in England? England, in English? There are separate scenes. The movie, I'm covering the movie with the English scene. And a lot of the message of it is sort of through Lewis Lee's voice, which is twofold, which is his advice to sort of comics is be true to yourself. The only good comedy comes from you personally. And he's also sort of better trying to shepherd and help the club owners there because it feels like the 1980s over there right now. It's all one-nighters and bars and very few full-time clubs, but there's crowds coming out for it. And there's, you know, comics that can do 10 minutes, you know, but it feels, you know, it has a very distinct feel that 80s, you know, mid-80s comedy boom here. You're talking about Mainland China? Even on Mainland China. There are several rooms that are now on Mainland China too. I didn't get to them, but they're happening in Shanghai and Beijing. And are they modeled after, you know, stand-up comedy was invented in America? Yeah, and all these English-speaking rooms, for the most part, have been started by expats from America or Great Britain or Australia. And most of the comics doing it are expats or people who were Hong Kong natives who went and studied overseas and came back. Do you have any idea of the number of English-speaking people living in China? I don't in China. In Hong Kong it's, you know, it's probably 15 or 20 percent who fully speak English. Yeah, my son lives in Germany. You know, and the deal with the German government is if you learn German, we'll educate you for free. And he says, you know, he's learning German, but you can live in Germany and not speak a lick of German and people will speak English with you. English has become the lingua franca. Absolutely, and in Hong Kong you totally can get by with English. When I was in Tokyo shooting my previous documentary, it was much more pantomime throughout the day. And what was your previous documentary? My previous documentary was called Michael B. Barr, Who Do You Want Me To Be? And it's about this rock singer and actor who's had this Zellig-like career from, you know, being one of the kids and to serve with love, to singing in live aid, to, from WKRP, to, you know, to being on Zeppelin's label and, you know, to just create any married panel at Daybar who wrote, I'm with the band. And he's living, where does he live now? He lives in the valley, here in Los Angeles. And what is the name of the documentary? It's called Michael Daybar, Who Do You Want Me To Be. Also, on the verge of a low distribution right now, but working on music issues like that. Okay, with, with the Chinese, it is my understanding that the Chinese, or the ancient Chinese, viewed laughter and smiling, the showing of teeth as submissive. Much the same way my dog, when he smiles, I'm being serious, my dog Cody would show his teeth, not as an act of aggression, but as a signal that he was being submissive. In the United States, laughter is aggression. We show our teeth to snarl, to exhibit hostility. So is there a different sensibility with the Chinese audience? When they laugh, are they being hostile? Are they, or are they being submissive? Do they, do they respond to aggression, comics who are aggressive or more of like a Maria Bamford type? Well, in this case, we, I have three pretty aggressive comics. It's hard to say they were Chinese audiences. You know, in, in Hong Kong, it was mostly expats from elsewhere. In Singapore, which is, which is an actual English speaking country, which has, you know, Indian, Chinese and Malay are their three major ethnicities there, but they all are English speaking. It's a, it's a, it played very much like a Western country. You know, it felt like very, it was a young comedy scene, definitely very open-stagey, but the open-stage acts were... And what are the Chinese comics talking about? Do they criticize Xi? Is that, how do you pronounce the Prime Minister? There's very few, there's only a couple of actual political comics. In Singapore, it's weird because that's a very authoritarian country, and most entertainment is censored. You have to submit scripts to get rated by the editorial board. Standup is somehow under the radar still. So, you know, I talked to comics who were going, yeah, there's stuff I'll definitely say on stage that I won't put on my Facebook page, you know. And so they're taking, you know, not, not Bill Hicksian stands, but, you know, but, you know, they're taking, they're taking, they're doing naughty jokes about the government, I would say. So, most of them, I would assume, play it safe and talk about sex and going to the bathroom, right? Yeah, and local stuff, a lot of local stuff, like, you know, like new comics in the United States, you start off with, you know, the stuff that works, you know, the expats in Hong Kong are doing a lot of stuff about Hong Kong and what it's like to live in Hong Kong, and white guys with Chinese women jokes, you know. In Singapore, they talk, you know, about Singapore a lot. And they do a lot of racial stuff, a lot of racial stuff. A lot of crowd rap. Where are you from? Here's a joke about that place. So, is that, that's interesting. So you make fun of where somebody's from. I do remember W.C. Fields saying, I read a book about W.C. Fields while I was just starting out to do stand-up, and he said he never got over the fact that when he was in vaudeville, no matter where he played, there was always one city that if you mentioned it, the audience would laugh at it. Absolutely, and those universals are completely intact over there. Wow. In Hong Kong, they make fun of the mainlanders. Because the mainlanders, with their massive newfound amount of cash, you know, streaming to Hong Kong to come shop, you know, and are just, you know, so newbie rich that, you know, their representation of riches, like, you know, that's where three Rolexes, you know. Is there anything like our politically correct movement? Is there a line that you can cross where the audience self-censors? Not the government where the audience thinks you've crossed the line and they're offended? It's pretty much not funny still, you know. It's pretty much, you know, like Chad Daniels does some pretty edgy stuff in this thing, and because it's funny, he gets away with it, but lesser comics wouldn't. Right, and you're talking about playing to expats, but did you see Chinese speaking comics playing to Chinese audiences, correct? I saw, yeah, I saw, well, no, I didn't, I didn't film any actual Chinese stand-up. Chinese stand-up is a separate scene, and it really is a different form of comedy. It's a much longer storytelling sort of thing, and there are comics there who do both scenes, but they say for the most part they're acting. You can't just translate your English act into Chinese and have it work. And these, are they modeled at, the Chinese clubs, are they modeled after yuck-yucks in the punchline? Do they look and sound like American comedy clubs, or are they? For the most part, or at least, you know, American one-nighters, you know, and good, you know, decent one-nighters. There's one full-time club that we went to in Hong Kong, it's called Take Out Comedy, and it started by a guy named Jamie Gong, who was actually a Chinese American guy who grew up in Chinatown in New York, and went over there and opened this club and started teaching people how to do stand-up, and just, you know, doing bad shows and bad shows and bad shows until they got enough comics who could do good sets, you know. But he built his room up that way. He basically went and started a comedy scene there. And who are the influences? You know, these days, it's guys like Bill Burr and Louis C.K. and, you know, it's such a global, you know, thing now, Dave Chappelle. Obviously, I can't think of his name right now, I just blanked on it, but the guy in the end comic who's just huge right now. Yes, Russell Peters. You know, he's a big influence over there for sure. So I guess it's YouTube, they're in the internet and the whole... Yeah, exactly. Wow, we're talking with J. Elvis Weinstein, you know him from Mystery Science Theater 3000, and The Edge with Mark Thompson. He's also been a writer, producer on Freaks and Geeks, and the new movie is I Need You to Kill, which will be released shortly once we get a distributor, is that what the plan is? That's how it's gonna happen, yeah. Yeah. And of course, Amazon, iTunes and all that kind of stuff. Freaks and Geeks, Judd Apatow. Yes. James Franco, right? And so many others, Seth Rogen, Jason Fiegel, Linda Cardellini, Martin Starr. Why does that show still resonate with people? Is it because of the stars who came out of it, or was it because of the writing and the producing? I say it's because of the writing and the producing. I think the stars that came out of it are what keeps drawing people to it now, but I think that, I mean, I think once you're there, it's, you know, it's a pretty well-made piece of TV. Did you know it was a well-made piece of TV while you were making it? Yeah, we all knew, everyone, because everyone cared. You know, every department on the show, you know, was clearly, everyone was doing their best, you know, and everyone was excited to be doing it. Hmm. Mystery Science 3000. I'm a good friend of Frank Conn if he does the show all the time. It's his birthday, in fact. Is it really? It is. Oh. I will have to call him. Why does that still resonate? When I saw you in L.A., you said that you had just the right amount of fame from that show. What did you mean by that? You know, it was when we toured. I got together with Frank and then Joel Hodson and Trace Blea and Mary Jo Peo, you know, three of us were the originals, and then Frank came on when I left the show. But we toured as a thing called Cinematic Titanic, and we did like 1200 seat theaters around the country for a few years, and it was really fun. But it was like, we were talking the other day, and it was like the perfect amount of fame because you go and you do this show, and you're totally famous in that theater. And you sign autographs, and then you walk out the door, and you are totally anonymous again. Mm-hmm. And so you get to turn it on and off like a faucet, which is, you know, pretty ideal. Unless you need it, you know. Right. Well. Then you want the faucet on at all times. Jay Elvis Weinstein is the director of I Need You to Kill. I don't know where it will be playing, but I can assure you you'll be able to catch it on Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes. You can see his work on Mystery Science Theater 3000, Freaks and Geeks. You can listen to him once a week on The Edge. Give us the podcast ID so people can find that. Go to edge-show.com. And you can either play them there or go to iTunes or Sketchers. Sketchers? Sketchers. Stitchers. Yeah. Is it Stitcher? Stitcher. And the I Heart Radio network as well. Before we go, Gene Wilder passed away. Heartbreaking. Yeah. Any thoughts? Any thoughts? Besides Heartbreak. You know, he was, there was just like no one more hilariously riveting than him as a comic actor. I mean, it's just like every role he ever played, you couldn't imagine anyone else playing the role. Yeah. You know, he brought, he just brought such, first of all such, you know, actual acting chops to every comedy role, you know, that, you know, he stood out just as an actor himself, but just as a person and as a sort of riveting presence. You know, I remember just being sort of, as a kid, my parents took me to the young Frankenstein when I was like four years old, which was a huge mistake because I was terrified by it. But I was, and my mom had to keep taking me out to the lobby and I, but I kept wanting to go back in because I knew it was funny. Everyone else was laughing. I was terrified. So, but it was Gene Wilder that like, that I kept wanting to go back and watch more, you know. Yeah. And ever since then, like, you know, including one of my favorite underrated movies, The Frisco Kid. Oh, I'll have to see that. Where he plays, yeah, a rabbi on the old West with Harrison Ford. Oh my God. I never, how did I not know about this? It's like 1979 and it was on heavy cable rotation when I was like 11. It became a huge man of it. Well, I posted on Facebook, I'll post it to my website. Mel Brooks in 1969, accepting the Academy Award for the producers. Did you ever see his acceptance speech? I have, yeah. Do you remember how he wrapped it up? I don't have hands. Mel Brooks, he beat out 2001. This is back when, I guess, there were, there weren't separate screenplay, you know, best screenplay was best screenplay. And he said, I'd like to thank Sarah Mostel, the people from, you know, the studio. And I'd also like to thank Gene Wilder, Gene Wilder, Gene Wilder, Gene Wilder, Gene Wilder. That's how we, that's how Mel accepted his Academy Award. Hey, Elvis Weinstein, come back real soon. What's up, dude? I'll be funny next time. You were hysterical. I need you to kill coming to a theater or streaming. Or your phone or functions. Yeah. Thank you, buddy. Thank you.