 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. Are we rolling? Oh, hello. Many of you may not recognize this voice. It's David Feldman with his cold going into its fourth week. It's been held over. Yes. See that? I've got good news for my listeners. I have the worst laugh and I can't do anything about it. I've worked on different laughs. I have a horsey loud laugh and it's just getting worse. The good news today is my cold makes it impossible for me to laugh because I'll start coughing. So the listeners will not hear me laughing. Well, we have a great show. Let me just thank Kevin Bartini for interviewing Richie from the Sopranos. We're going to try to get all the Sopranos on the show. I just watched the Sopranos over and over again and we had David. How do you pronounce it? Proval? Proval. Proval on the show. He played Richie. Richie April. I don't know how many people watched the Sopranos, but that was one of the creepiest performances in the history of television. I remember Dennis Miller met him at an HBO party. We were doing the show at HBO at the time. Dennis met David and he goes, listen, I can't talk to you because if you end up being a nice guy, you're going to ruin the Sopranos for me. He walked away from David Proval, who I didn't get to meet because I've been sick, but the great Kevin Bartini filled in for me. So thank you for that. DavidFelmenschow.com, please go to our website and if you shop on Amazon via our website, you can help support the show. We get a small percentage of everything you make. It doesn't cost you more. You're actually taking money out of Jeff Bezos' pocket. He has to pay me, and that's saving Main Street in many ways. I'm making that up. You're not saving Main Street. Good old Main Street Feldman. I speak for the common man. That's what I'm about. Well, one of the books you can buy via the David Feldman show website, if you click on the Amazon banner, is a book called Everything Is Coming Up Profits, The Golden Age of Industrial Musicals written by my guest Steve Young and his friend. My co-author, Sport Murphy, a marvelously talented and funny man who together we tackled the basically unknown show business universe of musical theater productions created for company sales meetings and conventions. Right. And if I were feeling better, I'd be giggling already. You've been on the show before, and I wish you were here every week. We have a new friend of the show, David Cyrus. Yes, hello. You are a multiple Emmy loser? Well, no, technically one loss. My new job just was recently nominated and lost also. I lost the SNL Emmy. Right. You wrote for SNL for several years. You've written on one year. It felt like several years. You wrote for the Comedy Central roast recently? Yeah. You wrote on the Ann Coulter one? Yeah, the Rob Lowe and the Justin Bieber. Ann Coulter roast? Yeah, the roast of Ann Coulter. I was very proud of Justin. And you are Brick Stone. Yeah. You're a YouTube sensation. A little bit. We'll talk about that in a little while when we get to politics, because I have not seen Brick Stone, but you go and interview hate groups, Westboro Baptist Church, the street preachers, sometimes conspiracy people, basically anyone I think deserves to get. My second wife's family. Anyone who deserves ridicule in public, so yes. Okay, that we'll get to in a second. You're going to hell. That's what they tell me. I think he just arrived. He's on my show. Steve Young. Let me introduce Steve Young to our listeners. He has written for the David Letterman show since 1842. That's right. Prior to the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill. So that tells you just how far back we're talking about. You were there from, I think you were the longest running writer for David Letterman, right? I did not quite outrank Dave himself, but yes, 1990 to the end in 2015. Did you beat Gerald Mulligan's record? Gerard Mulligan's record? Jerry, let me think. Well, it gets murky because he worked on the morning show with Dave in 1980 and then after that, 82 to 2004. So pretty, pretty similar runs, I guess. I keep hearing stories about you. Okay. Great stories about you. You're also, you've written for the Simpsons and you've written for Maya and Marty and you have a new documentary. Well, I'm not the filmmaker. I'm not producing it, but I am. The subject. You're charming on-screen character who leads you into the mysterious and surreal world of corporate musicals. And that is the industrial musicals movie. And I'm proud to say my old boss, Dave Letterman, is an executive producer on it. And like many documentaries that have a long road to follow. I can't tell you right now when it'll be done or when it'll be out, but it's coming along great. I saw the sizzle reel and you're featured. It's about you to some degree. I'm the person that you enter this world with and through and hopefully my enthusiasm and amazement is catching. And Dave is in it and they talk about you. And I've heard stories because I didn't know, I knew of you, but until I got to work with you, I didn't. I mean, you're the real deal and I've heard many great stories about you. Two things I'll bring up. One is I was told by several people that they would not start the morning meeting until you showed up and you always spoke first. Well, that seems a little bit revisionist to me. I tried to be there on time and I was usually there within a minute or two of when it was supposed to start. And then I think many days different people spoke first, but I got so I was pretty confident that I was going to show up and open my mouth and have something worth pitching or at least some amusing self-deprecating comment about why I didn't have something to pitch. And I've heard from several people that if Steve Young laughed at something you said that meant a lot. That's what I've been hearing. Okay. Well, I do have a very severe and advanced case of comedy damage. We probably talked about this before after all these years of thinking of bits and jokes and rewriting them and working with the monologue and just scanning pages of material desperately looking for the right thing to fill a need. It became more mathematical than joyous in certain realms of comedy. There are certain things that I will still laugh joyously at, especially in the moment in conversation spontaneously with people, stuff that's produced and written. I now kind of look at with a more calculating eye and I'm scanning all the schematic diagrams behind it as I listen. I've also heard from three other writers that you once strangled a man with just your left hand even though you're a writing. Yes, but you know I'd let my fingernails grow for quite a while so I had more grip and reach because you know they curve and if you let them go they kind of spiral and you can leverage that. Yes, also the guy was asking for it. Another classic story and then I'm going to stop sucking up to Steve Young is that when the big announcement came down that Dave was leaving. There was this big meeting and they were breaking it to the right. I'm not violating any confidentiality. This is common knowledge among writers in New York. The news came down. There was a big meeting and they announced that Dave is not renewing his contract. He's going to announce his retirement this evening on the show. And there was sadness and bleakness and it was the writer's room and if you were going to say something it had to be spot on because if you blow it you know this is and I'm not going to ruin it because I want to ask you a question about it. I had forgotten this story until one of my colleagues reminded me of it within the past few months. So the head writer gathered us all together in the early afternoon one day in April and said Dave is going to announce his retirement on this evening's show. And then there was a pause of I don't know how long it was 15 20 25 seconds and I said but Paul's not leaving is he. I can't laugh. I had completely forgotten about that. I mean that was just every day in that room that was the kind of energy and vibe that I heard it brought the entire room to a halt. The idea that Paul would be taking over the show and we'll have jobs. So there was a 20 second pause and I was talking to RJ about this two days ago. He's the one who reminded me of this. And we were trying like RJ said you had to nail it. Like if it didn't get a laugh it would have been really. So what was going through your mind? Did you feel pressure or did you just not care? I think at that point I'd been so comfortable in that room for enough years that I didn't run mental calculations about how this will play. I just one thing I do miss about that room was the sense that I was the most full confident unstudied version of myself and I would just open my mouth and say things that were my sensibility and not worry about it. So the best one that I've ever heard, there was a funeral and there was a wake and John Lovitz was there. I'm not going to mention anybody else's name but there were a group of actors, comedians, writers. This was about 20 years ago and it was a very depressing, sad wake. There were kids involved and somebody got up and said this is so terrible. The man we love has passed away. His significant other has passed away. His children now don't have an aunt and an uncle and parents. And John Lovitz says in the back, you're making it sound a lot worse than it really is. And the place just shook because it was obviously a very sad way where the kids were orphaned by this tragedy. I like that. You really have to roll the dice at that time. The best version of that that I ever heard and we may have talked about this at some point. Like two days after the Kennedy assassination in 63, Lenny Bruce goes up on stage and I don't know where it was, whether it was in New York or wherever it was and how do you get up on stage as a comedian and even begin to think how is our way into anything other than tragedy at this moment. And the story is that he stood there for a long minute and then he said three words, which I don't know if people will understand now, but they were poor Vaughn Meader. Vaughn Meader was a impressionist comedian who had built up a career with a Kennedy impersonation that he had parlayed into an album called The First Family with all the Kennedy clan and he was doing all these voices and this was clearly exactly true because his entire livelihood had just disappeared in a flash of an assassin's bullet and it was right and it was the wrong thing and it was the right wrong thing to get on that horse with. So I'm always looking for the right wrong thing to say or do or whatever. There was a time when you couldn't joke about anything and were you writing for Letterman during the OJ Simpson trial? Yeah, like 95. So I have this theory that may or may not be true. How old were you, Mr. Cyrus? Oh, at OJ? Yeah. I was like 14. Okay, so you were watching late night television? Yeah, I was aware. Okay. My theory and it's just an observation that may not be true, that you didn't, late night comedians didn't joke about tragedy. If it had a whiff of sadness to it in the setup, you stayed away from it. And then OJ hit and you had the Dancing Edo's and on Leno. Is it my imagination or did Leno break the taboo of telling jokes where the setup was tangentially related to an absolute tragedy? I do remember there being a great uncertainty about how do we approach this story and I believe Howard Stern came on to talk to Dave one time as a guest and said, how come you're not doing jokes about the OJ trial? I mean this is huge. Everyone's, this is the big reference. And Dave said, I'm not really comfortable doing comedy about a double murder. And that seemed principled and yet I don't think we could stay on that stance forever because it was such a huge cultural thing. And after a while you were one or two degrees of separation removed from the grisly bloody horror of it. You had this world of a courtroom drama with characters and details and references that in the same way after 9-11 it took a while to get the Letterman show and any show I think in some sort of comedic footing about the new world we found ourselves in. And for a few weeks we did completely non-topical humor. We did top ten lists that were akin to the very earliest ones that had ever existed which were things like words that almost rined with peas, things that had no topicality at all. But eventually we found ways to start talking about Osama bin Laden and taking clips of him and re-editing them or redumbing them or some way to just get our teeth into this form of evil needs to be discussed and hopefully through comedy exposed as ridiculous and foolish. I would assume during World War II they did Hitler jokes and Mussolini jokes and Charlie Chaplin and the little dictator or whatever that was. And Bob Hope would make fun of Adolf Hitler. Warner Brothers cartoons with the racist Japanese characters. Of course didn't Chaplin apologize for the Hitler impersonation after the Holocaust became public knowledge. He didn't even say he wouldn't have done it if he knew about it. Did he really? I remember hearing that. Yeah, that he did it because this was just a president or a prime minister or whatever that we were against or dictator. Chancellor. Thank you. But yeah, after the Holocaust. Did you notice I just corrected him and did it in a very supercilious way? Yeah, I think that's just the cold medicine. But yeah, no he later said he was sorry. Now who knows if he really wouldn't have done it if he was just saying sorry he felt like the thing he was supposed to do. But yeah, there was that. I mean, he was still killing millions of people. But how he was doing it, that was the line. Interesting. But it's a constant shifting line case by case basis sort of thing. But I was recently reading about Hogan's Heroes. I'm teaching a course at NYU this fall about TV history. And I'm just reading up on things and watching things I hadn't seen before. So by the mid-60s TV executives decided. Alex our producer just I think he just creamed himself. Oh yeah? He's in heaven now. At the mention of NYU or Nazis. Nazis. Okay. So by the mid-60s apparently TV executives and networks had decided, all right, we've had a good period of 20 or so years to think about this. It's time we hit World War II as a comedy area. So you had McHale's Navy bumbling slackers in the South Pacific. Right. And you had Hogan's Heroes allied prisoners of war in a German camp with Colonel Clink and what's his name, Schultz. But what I didn't know about this until recently was all the German characters were played by Jewish actors very specifically. They apparently felt like this is our do now. We get to do this. We get to make them the foot. This is the last thumb in the eye to that regime. And a name prominently displayed. The executive producer of that show, do you remember? No. Edward Feldman. Really? Yeah. No relation. But the name Feldman, it was like saying we got a Feldman approval. This has the stamp of approval from a Jew. So that show holds up. It's shot. The acting is really good and I'm a sucker for good lighting. And it's really well lit. There's an authenticity to it or not an authenticity. It's just almost cinematic. Well, I'm tempted to laugh at your thing about good lighting, but I've seen enough old TV now that doesn't look good that I sympathize with that. No, no, but Hogan's Heroes is well lit. Okay. And bad lighting, if a show is poorly lit, I find it really distracting. So that's why you're doing an audio-only podcast. And even on an audio-only podcast, the lighting is bad on me and I look aged. Yeah, the rule of making fun of Bin Laden Letterman is a tradition. He's the enemy. I'm talking about the coarsening of American culture, taste. It is stuff that we could joke about 20 years ago and 30 years ago. The line has significantly moved. I remember, well, maybe it hasn't. I don't know. Well, things have gone in different directions in different streams. Like, what was that show came on recently, an alternate history present-day thing where the Nazis did win World War II? What was that called? I don't know the name, but I know they're the reason there were tons of swastikas on the subway. And then there weren't. Yeah, people got upset at all. All right, it's going to be an eagle logo. People said, no, it's too upsetting and horrible to even in this alternate historical universe show to show swastikas. And yet, I believe, Hogan's Heroes, they were marching around with them on their I was watching an old Carol Burnett sketch from the 70s in which an allied prisoner of war was being interrogated by two Nazis. And there's a giant swastika hanging there. And it just, like, that's prop number seven when you do Nazis. You have to have all these. And now we say, this is so virulent and powerful, an emblem of what is unacceptable that even that reminder of it is unacceptable. It's always the SS now. Whenever they have that Nazis on a sketch or something, they'll always have the SS logo where the swastika would go. Oh, that's interesting. That's interesting. I think at one time, the Jews didn't own the swastika. I think after World War II, their most men and women who went off to fight Hitler were not Jewish and they were entitled. They owned the swastika. They could laugh at it. But then they used it as leverage for a loan. Now we're doing springtime for Hitler. He was in the Battle of the Bulge. But he's also Jewish. I'm just saying that as the years go on and more the greatest generation dies off, and they were entitled to make fun of the swastika. But now what's left is it's really the Jews and the Gypsies and the gays who should be more than, well, not more, but you know that there were homosexuals in prison 30 years after the Holocaust that Hitler had locked up homosexuals, sent them to Auschwitz. When they were liberated, the British looked at their crimes and just transferred them to another prison. They let the Jews and the Gypsies go, but the gays stayed in prison up until about 1968-72. There were still gay Germans in prison for Nazi-era crimes of sodomy. That is disgusting. The Gypsies should have been there, too. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, kind of interesting. So you were a fat kid. A little bit, yeah. I'm a naturally chubby person. I have to do a lot of cardio to maintain my just average American physique. Growing up, did you think of yourself as a fat kid? Yeah, I wasn't like a big fat. I was, you know, a portly child. But yeah, I mean, I don't think it was a major factor in why kids didn't like me. I think it was just more what to cling on to when you want to make fun of someone. Not the reason. Did they make fun of you for being heavy? Not especially. They made fun of me for a lot of other things. Like what? Just being weird. Just being weird. You're an artist, too. Yeah. Because being a great comedy. Yeah, I used to draw a lot. I mean, I still do. I went to college for illustration. I was always a kid who drew. And actually that was like the one thing that a girl I knew in like middle school once said that's the only safe thing you can say about Dave. He's a good artist. Because it was one of those things where they would tell me like, you know, it's not personal. It's just that there's certain people you have to not be nice to. And I used to blame people like that. Now I realize it was just all a jungle and everyone was trying to survive. And are you stronger because of that? Had you been protected? The myth now is Donald Trump's influence on kids notwithstanding. Our kids now are being protected from being called out for being fat or ugly. Had you been protected? Would you have wanted to be protected from being called fat? You know, being called fat. Wasn't the real problem. Watch, I get them to cry. Well, the truth is the bullying was never the problem for me. Were you bullied? A little bit, but not what like people when they really talk about bullying. I wasn't getting beaten up. I wasn't getting assaulted. I wasn't afraid to walk home. The being made fun of was not the big problem for me. The thing that people are against really was the problem was just not having friends. That was a much bigger deal than kids not like it. And was it because you were heavy? No, no, it wasn't at all. That was just something that occasionally would be the thing to make fun of. They're popular fat kids. It was just because of what I was like because in my opinion, I was undiagnosed autistic, you know, mildly. And when you're weird. I don't pick that up from you. I think I've sort of at least adapted to it. I feel it. I feel my like where I feel like in general social terms, I feel like I'm always just sort of trying to mimic what a person acts like. Yeah, I do that. You know what I mean? Yeah. I think a lot of comics. Yeah, you've got a ways to go on that. All right. Hang on. Let me take my hands off my penis. I always maintain that if you mimic good behavior, eventually you become a good person. Fake it till you make it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I can see that. I mean different moods like if I say, well, kind of glum feeling today. But you know what? I'm just going to snap a switch over and just walk around and be a little more cheerful and see if that sticks. And I can see that it usually does. Yeah. I do think it made me a better person though. I think being what I thought of as being, you know, not victimized, but you know, feeling like like a victim in certain ways. I do think that I don't know if it made me stronger. I guess it very well could have, but I do feel like it's the reason I care more about people who have real problems. Didn't Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock say that bullying is good? Yeah, probably. And you know, for some people it is like, you know, like, like steel. Battle-hardened you? Yeah. And I'm sure all the closeted gay kids who committed suicide because they were being bullied were grateful because it takes a lot of courage to kill yourself. I don't see how I'm being sarcastic. I don't see how any bullying works. I just don't... To make kids better? Yeah. I think for some people... How did it make you better? I don't know. And I'm not saying the bullying is good. I think that it probably overall is negative. Did you bully? No. Yeah, you're not a bully, are you? I didn't. And I... But who knows? I might have been okay with that if I didn't feel it myself. If I didn't identify with kids who got bullied, maybe I would have been that way. But if you are bullied, you tend to bully, right? But you don't do that. I think so. I think, I mean, I certainly... Well, I didn't bully anyone. I certainly did the exact same thing to other kids who were less popular than me when that eventually happened because for years there was no less popular than me. So when did you lose your weight and become a guy who... High school. And what prompted the weight loss? I just, I mean, once I hit puberty and it was sort of like a possibility that you can work out and... Oh, yeah. Actually, no. Let me back up. I was 12 and so I started going to the gym. My dad wanted me to go to the gym. He wanted me to go to a boxing gym and my mom would let me. How badly were you beaten up? Not bad. How many guys? Oh, just one kid. One bigger kid. You know... I am sorry about that, by the way. I think about that often. But he was heavy. Yeah. You know, I was beaten up. Yeah, it wasn't like a savage beating or anything. You know, it was just more emotionally humiliating and it made me want to work out more and, you know, just... I was shallow. I wanted to be pretty and I wanted to get girls and I wanted to earn, you know, respect from people somehow. And I think the fact that I didn't have any made me want to work harder at it. What about if you're just a fat kid? I'm being serious. If you're a fat kid who doesn't dress well and you're 18 and you're a so-so student, shouldn't there be a woman who just loves you for what's inside? Or should there will be? Or do you have to dress properly and shower and have some kind of success in order to make yourself attractive to another woman? And does that make women shallow? What? I'm sorry. Well, it just seems so hard to get past first impressions of people and you can become wiser and, over time, think that person has a soul that might be the most beautiful soul in the world. But how will I know? I'm surrounded by a hundred million people in all directions and where do you even start? I mean, you just got to see, I mean, you might have a wonderful random interaction with somebody and think, oh, that person seems interesting. And that can get you past your first impression of how well they dress. Is a woman being superficial if she comes to my apartment and I'm wearing mom jeans and I've smeared my feces all over the place and there are flies and rats and mice and... No, it's not superficial. Well, it is superficial. I'm lying around and I'm saying, but you should love, you should get past all the smell and the ugliness and see what's inside my soul. Isn't she beautiful? A beautiful soul clearly is glowing through all these clouds of flies. Yeah. Well, I think that... I'm being serious. I don't think it's more men or women that I can tell that are more or less superficial on this. I think that's just a bedrock human thing. Right. I think guys actually believe, I'm speaking for all men, that they should be loved based on the way they are right now without shaving, showering, dressing properly, cleaning up the apartment. Don't you think that there's a certain age where guys think that a woman should just love me for who I am as opposed to this macaroni and cheese that's petrified on my bed? Is that an early age that would think that or is that later in life? Well, I have arrested development. I think that the question is really that if you want to be a slob, if you want to be out of shape, if you don't dress well, you can find love. But you better not be a hypocrite. You better settle for someone who also is in bad shape, who doesn't take care of themselves. There's always someone who... What about the phenomenon of very attractive women who are attracted to slobs? They're just broken inside. They're an exception. I think that... They're not aware of these people. Well, it's because women's instincts are just sort of... They're just much less predictable than men's. Men want a woman who looks like she can give birth to a bunch of your kids. Whereas women want... On an instinctual level, women want a man who can protect them. And there's so many ways you can interpret that. And I think that's where you end up with we're a beautiful woman liking a slob. But the thing that you're saying, the point you're making is a very good one because a lot of people are slobs. And they say, well, I want someone to love someone for me. And it's like, no, no, you want someone pretty to love someone for you. Why don't you just settle for someone who's also a three? And if you think they should settle for you, why shouldn't you settle for them? That's only fair. I think of every right to be a slob, you just have no right to expect someone to forgive that. There's slobs out there for you too. You can be happy together. Yeah, but it seems like you have to say, I want to make the effort to meet someone halfway and as a mark of respect for myself as well as for whoever I might meet. And if you're not bothering to do that, then you're going to end up with somebody else who has very little respect for themselves or anyone else. You know, my shrink said to me, why wouldn't women find you attractive? You're working, you know, you're, you know, blah, blah, blah. Did you get new glasses, by the way? No, these are old Warby Parkers. Oh, marvelous. And I can see that women would find those appealing. Warby, they're one of our sponsors. These are Warby Parkers. I have not had time to get my contact lenses. So these, I do feel as beautiful as these are. They're a little too horn-rimmy for me and they make me come across as pedantic. I think that's a good look for you. I don't like being pedantic. Who names their kid Warby? I know. But I said, well, if you're going to judge me on what I do for a living and if I'm somewhat steady, whatever, you know, I don't, that's not an attractive trait in a man. Shouldn't you be attracted to kindness? And I'm being serious. Well, people always say that they're so dazzled by the sense of humor and that I think, and David, you're a stand-up, do you find that you were saying even as an adolescent you were trying to figure out a way to be appealing to women and it seemed like comedy was a way to do that? It's not why I think deep down I was being funny just for friends more than women because it was before that was even considered a possibility for me. I didn't think I was going to lose my virginity. How old were you when you lost your virginity? Twenty. Ah! You built me. I was 21. Oh, wow. I was waiting for some reason. I wanted to have it to be the right situation, but I realized now was just an excuse I was making for myself and I didn't lose it to the right person anyway, so it was a waste of time. But I mean, there's no question being funny helps. No joke about the sister or the dad or nothing. We just let that one go. But I mean, yeah, let's face it. Comics get laid for being funny and we're mostly funny as a replacement for other things that could have gotten us attention, I feel. And people become musicians because women like rock stars and so you can be funny, you can be a rock star, you can be rich, you can be a powerfully built, classically handsome dude, all different ways to approach this. Me, I was lucky. I was born with all these. Well, we've gone five minutes. I think this is a record on any podcast without talking about the orange elephant in the room, Donald Trump, but I think it behooves us now to talk a little bit about Mr. Trump and Michelle Obama's speech last week. Did you see Michelle Obama's speech? Oh, yeah. No. Tell us about Michelle Obama's speech. It was, and I saw it because Rachel Maddow acted like she was about to reveal that aliens had landed on Earth. I thought that she put, and I like Rachel Maddow. I love Rachel Maddow. I like her a lot. I thought that I was like, when I found out that's what she was teasing the speech that we'd already seen, I was like, oh, come on, Rachel. But it was good. She put out more motion in that speech than I can ever remember her having almost, aside from the convention. And it was a full-on Europe pig without saying his name, doing it in as classy a way as possible, talking about women and growing up in women's rights. And it was just the most perfect trap you could try to set for Trump to pick a fight with her, the person who he has the worst person in America that he could start attacking. Oh, I didn't even think about that. I thought of it all the time as... That's a brilliant observation. The whole team must have been on their hands and knees begging him not to go back at her about this. Wow, it never even occurred to me that he would do that. Has he had...? No, no. Pence has been pushing a little bit because he can do it a little more classily, I guess. But no, Trump hasn't really attacked Michelle. I think that's the one... You know what? He knows... I'm on cold medicine. I don't want to overreact, but that is such a brilliant... I didn't even... You're so right. It never occurred to me that it was genius to have Michelle deliver that speech because you're right. She was saying, okay, come at me. I watched it. I thought, well, here's an African-American woman, mother of two girls, women. There was nothing patronizing about that speech. When you hear, you know, I have a mother, I have a sister, I have a daughter, screw you. It's wrong, you know. Don't be, you know... Big human beings, right? Yes. But when it came from Michelle, it was pure. I hope it was pure. You know, I don't think she's that much of a political animal. I think she... I think there's no reason to believe she doesn't actually think Donald Trump is as disgusting as she purports. And for me, and I'm not ashamed to admit this, this is why the speech is so powerful. Coming from her, I understood the crime that Billy Bush committed. That she didn't mention Billy Bush, but, you know... It sounds like a joke, but you're right. I'm being serious. In that, you know, I go through the motions of being offended because I know right from wrong. I know... You know, I'm 58, and I've gone through my past, and I start thinking, well, what did I do? What did I do? I didn't do it. I never did that. I made really bad taste jokes that were so over-the-top, but I never talked that way. I mean, there was something... I mean, I think there were a couple of things I've, you know, probably shouldn't have said that could have been taken the wrong way, like, keep your mouth shut and you won't get hurt. And, you know, end the gun. I shouldn't have done that. But other than that, you know, it was the 90s. It's a different time. But I went through the motions of the outrage with Billy Bush and Trump when I heard that. I remember my friend Fancy Fred showed me the tape of Trump, and I went, that's not going to hurt him. The thing about grabbing a woman's and the Billy Bush... The first time I saw it, I said, not so what, but I go, well, what? This isn't... This is nothing. Compared to what he said. Yeah. Like, why would this... And I kind of said, well, we're choosing to be outraged by this now because it's so close to the election. We had to find something to nail him on. But it wasn't until Michelle Obama spoke that I really grasped how horrible it was, how truly horrific it is what he said. I mean, I know, in theory, I knew in theory that it was wrong what he said, and people shouldn't talk that way. But it wasn't until Michelle gave that speech where I went, oh, this is like a seminal moment in American history. This is where now women... This is an issue that... It happened to happen at a time when America was blowing up over the idea that we're finally learning how much sexual assault is happening. Right. Which I think men like us were blissfully unaware of. Right. I think that's... And didn't care. That's the thing about Billy Bush. Billy Bush is the real criminal in all this. Because it would have been almost nothing for him to say, okay, Donald, come on. Right. But he encouraged it. Yeah. I mean, Donald Trump's a sociopath. Billy Bush is a nice young man from a good family who should have said something. Because you can't expect a sociopath just needs to be arrested. But to encourage it and laugh, and then his lawyer, Billy Bush's lawyer, who's negotiating a $10 million exit from NBC says, well, if Billy Bush had said, go eff yourself, he would have been fired. Yeah. You don't have to say... He immediately went to go eff yourself to, hey, you're out of line. All he had to do was not laugh. Mm-hmm. And that would have... And he would have kept his job. If he was silent, you could have implied, oh, he must be really uncomfortable. Right. He's not given him a moment of grief over it. You know, for the past two years I've been saying on this show, since the midterms of 2014, I said something's happening in this country with women vis-a-vis men. There's something is bubbling to the surface. There's something... The world is changing for men. That women have always thought this way and have always known something. But something happened after the 2014 midterms where women woke up and realized guys just don't get it. When you had the guy saying... I think it was the 2014 where you had the... Yeah, that's around when this all started happening. When you had them talking about the guy saying that rape victims produce a fluid that kills the sperm and ways of shutting that down. I think that was 2012. Was that 2012? Okay. That was the congressional race out in, I don't know where it was, Arizona. And then you had Sandra Fluke? When was that? That was maybe a little bit before that. Was that 2012? Was that during the Obamacare... She definitely spoke at a presidential convention. So it had to be 08 or 012. No, I think it was either 2012 or 2014. And Rush Limbaugh was attacking her, calling her a whore. She said, you know... Because she takes birth control every single day is one of his points. Right. He didn't understand how birth control works. Yeah. He said, you know, he thinks you just take it when you... Yeah. And I think a lot of women woke up, I think, and said, forget it, men just don't understand it. They just... My daughter... You know, anyway, we've had a lot of women. Micah Fox looks at me and, you know, I'm a show and talks about the patriarchy and how it just has to be destroyed. And I think she's joking. And I realize, no, she means this. Can I tell a very short story? Sure. Because this is years ago. This is when I was maybe just finished college and my little brother is two years younger than me. And I've had many opportunities. Like, I've never felt like such a great person as when I've hung out with his friends and tried to stop them because they're so... Not my brother, but some of his friends were so cartoonishly horrible that I had to be that guy. And one of the cases was they're sitting around and they're having a serious conversation about getting one of those mail order brides and tricking her into coming to the country only to find out that she was going to be shared by all these different dudes. And I said to them in the moment, and they could not tell I was joking, I was like, well, I stopped there. You know, you don't have much money. You can get harvesting organs. I mean, you're going to get bored with her soon enough anyway. You don't have much money. We can make a profit off this. And they're like, well, that's going too far. And I'm just like, oh my God, you don't realize what the point of my... of what I'm saying here is? Right. And that was, you know, early 2000s. You know, before that became a popular thing. And these are the same groups, not the same group, but, you know, my brother's other friends. I was with... I was at their frat on 9-11. And I had the, to this day, what I can say, the esteemed honor of getting to be the one to say the words, no, we're not going to go out and find a towel head at this frat on 9-11. Like, you know, that were whipping themselves up into a frenzy. And, but that attitude that where the guy didn't get I was joking and was like, no, no, no, no. I'm just talking about us, you know, tricking her into this country and then having to be a sex slave. I'm not talking about doing anything wrong. Like you, you crazy person, wanted to harvest your kidneys. And yeah, it's, he thought that was the line of evil. Mm-hmm. Yeah, you have to control the way people think. There's a reason we have schools and colleges and religion and laws. And when libertarians start talking about freedom, it's really the laziness of not having to think the right way. I, I should be able to think any way I want. No, you can't think a certain way. And you can legislate behavior. You can change how people think about homosexuals and black people and Muslims and the idea that you know, the mind police. Yeah, we need mind police. To some degree. But I don't think you can make governments change things like that. I mean, maybe to some extent in schools, but I think the most you can hope for is that people learn through peer pressure or actual penalties that there are some things you cannot do or say without severe ostracism or if you're doing something that you can't do, then you're in trouble and you go to jail or whatever. But teaching people how to think as a government project is going to be a tricky area. It's got to be done subtly and I'm kind of being painting with a broad brush stroke to make a point. But you teach when the Supreme Court rules that gay marriage is okay even though most Americans I think a majority of Americans are still against gay marriage. Are they? I think so. I thought that we had, I was even going to say, what is it that made so many Americans change their minds on gay marriage in the last 10 years? What happened was it got legalized in more and more states. So people started going, oh, okay. You know, have you seen this new map, electoral map, if only men voted? Yeah. I heard about it. I don't think I've seen it. So, Well, they put out, 538 put out two different maps. One, if only women could vote, one, if only men could vote. And it's exactly, you might imagine, if only women could vote, landslide Hillary, if only men could vote, landslide Trump. And Eric Trump actually posted the men one because he thought it was a regular, he just thought the new polls were out. And he posted, look how great we're doing. But, Didn't that, that surprised me. I don't think most men. Yeah. That surprises me also. Oh, I thought that white men, but this is all men. Well, because most men are white in this country. Just as it's 51% makes it turn a certain color. Oh, that's true. Yeah. Well, about almost two thirds of this country's white and half of those are men. And the men, white men, and as white men, this is depressing to know that, because to me, white men. But all men, this is all men. Trump would win among all men. But he loses among black men. It's just, he loses, he loses among white men by so much that it makes up for all the minorities that he's losing with. And to me, and I don't mean this like in a, it sounds wrong way, I'm saying it, but I mean it literally, white men are the most objective people in this election because they're the only ones that Trump hasn't offended. And when I say, I don't mean that they're more objective. I mean, they're the only ones who don't have a very specific on paper reason for why they should be opposing Trump. And they're going for Trump, which is depressing. Well, certain slivers of white men get peeled off by him, whether it's Jews, or I'm sure like academics, or economists, or any sort of professional chunk that you want to look at, it must be whittled down pretty severe. You're saying that he's getting rid of Jews? I'm saying that, all right, white Jewish men are white men, but I don't think a majority of them are on board with Trump now. Although he's done a pretty good job of co-opting them by playing the Israel card. Oh, yeah. Jews always disappoint me with how much, how one issue they can be. And I live in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. And my grandmother tells me... But 80% of American Jews tend to vote... Democrat. Properly. But not the Orthodox ones. Those are often... Which is pretty good. It says a lot about Jews that only 20% of a religion are horrible, disgusting human beings. I mean, that's a pretty good... That makes me proud to be Jewish that only one out of five of us should be... But I mean, look, I see a lot of Trump stickers in the Hasidic neighborhoods. And I think because they are people who just have... You see them, but you didn't believe them. They have a ton of fear. They're very... Sorry. Yeah, you should be sorry. But yeah, I mean, the things that I hear them saying for the last eight years that my grandmother would go over, and she's the only non-Orthodox person on this block, but she would hear things about Obama that only exist on early morning radio. They would have no problem believing the absolute worst about Obama. And these are the same people for some reason who thought Hillary was fine in 08, and now she's the worst human being alive. Right. Steve Young. Oh, hi. What did you major in college? English. No particular reason. I just had to do something, and I guess that's what I thought I was doing. Is it fair to say that you believe that politics is just a bunch of noise? No. God bless you if you care to hear that. A bunch of noise. I find it so distressing that I have a low tolerance for immersing myself in it, and I think a bunch of noise seems to indicate that it's trivial, and I don't find it trivial at all, and I found people have asked me in the past year, oh, you must be so sad. Dave's off the air. Don't you wish you were on the air writing Trump jokes? Dave Letterman? I said, no. I think all the political humor that I see is preaching to the choir, and you're only reaching the people who already agree with you, and as brilliant as a piece of satire might be, it's not going to change one vote. No it isn't. And I find that very depressing, and I don't like comedy that just tries to reach people who already agree with you somehow. I don't know. Isn't there something to be said about a great argument getting through to people in that comedy, sort of when you laugh at something, you're almost acknowledging that you believe in it? Yeah, I mean, I may be exaggerating when I say that political humor in the past year has changed no one's mind. I agree. I bet that there are outliers on the bell curve in either direction. I think the Colbert report, he doesn't do it anymore really, I think that might have changed a couple of minds because so many conservatives thought he was real, so that when they find out that it's a put on, then it becomes Swiftian, a modest proposal. Yeah, I was thinking of Swift. I mean, that is a piece of writing that's endured, but at the time, did it change anyone's philosophy? No, the famine, I always say, what happened after a modest, he talks about eating Irish babies, which is insane because there was very little meat on their bones. Welsh babies were more delicious at the time, but if you look at a modest proposal, and people say, political satire is so important, what did it accomplish? I mean, when was the Irish famine in 1840? Well, the potato famine, are we talking about? Yeah, that was the 1840s. When was the modest restoration literature? I thought Swift was before that. Like the late 1600s, early 1700s? Yeah, let me pull up a... Nah, that's cheating. So what did he accomplish? Yeah, I don't know. That's never mentioned in the Norton anthology of English literature that I recall. You know, all the praise that Stuart and Bill Maher got, well, George Bush got re-elected. So, yeah. Alan Sherman. Yes. We're going to play a clip. Here's something that's amazing. How is this possible that Dave Cyrus... You know Dave Cyrus? A little bit. Brilliant comedy writer. Steve Young, brilliant comedy writer. Very funny, very smart, reads a lot. He's a Jew. Yeah. Yeah, this is a Jew. Okay. Oh yeah, hi. How is it possible that he doesn't know who Alan Sherman is? Do not answer this question. I want to discuss this in front of... How old are you? 38. 38 years old. You are Steve Young. Look at this man. Brilliant. Well read. When you sit around with him, he can talk for 45 minutes straight. I hang on every word. How is it possible that he does not know who Alan Sherman is? Explain that to Steve Young. A couple of thoughts, first of all. Generational. I'm 51. I barely know who Alan Sherman is and I'm only talking about him here today because of a couple of songs I brought out. Alan Sherman was the coach of the New York Giants. Is that right? The football team. The football team. Allie Sherman. Allie Sherman. I think we're drifting away from our point. And you used to be the quarterback for the 49ers, Steve Young. That's right. Okay, I see how you tie it together. I'm just the worst human being. Definitely in the top of that. By the way, I've been doing this podcast and radio show for seven years and there's a cycle that goes in. Our numbers are way up. Every, I'd say every six months we get this surge where the numbers shoot, like, oh my God. And then they go right back down and that little run that I just did explains why they go right back down. That's right. Go ahead, I'm sorry. Oh. So Alan Sherman really was only quite popular from about, I don't know, 62 to 65. After that he was somebody that you heard of, or if you were a certain age you remembered, but there's no reason for someone in their 30s really to know who Alan Sherman is. You probably faintly know like, hello, mother. Oh, that guy. See? Oh, I know that song. Yeah. So you know, you have this sort of imprinted faint memory slash knowledge, but you don't really know who Alan Sherman is and there's no real reason you should. He was a TV producer in the 50s into the 60s who had this knack for humorous song parodies and a friend of his out in Hollywood somehow convinced Warner Brothers records or something, oh yeah, you should have him do an album. And they said, fine, as long as it's all public domain material. So they put out this album, I think it was My Son the Folk Singer. Right. And it took off like a rocket. He couldn't really sing. He could carry a tune, but he had this terrible strangled voice, which was somehow perfect for comedic songs and very clever, twisty, lyrical, rhyming lyrics and had quite a run for a few years. He was on game shows. He was on talk shows. He put out like four or five albums and then he inevitably, well, maybe not inevitably, but he did have a long, slow, sad decline, which I've read some about. He died in 1973. He was only like 50 or something. And I read a grim phrase about him once. Toward the end, he was too fat to drive. Sounds like Artie Lang who was too fat to fish. That's right. There is precedent, yes. So the greatest joke I wrote this year, this is the best joke I wrote and nobody, what's the joke? Tell him. I forgot. You have to tell him. The Bernie Sanders joke. Yeah, but you tell her. You know, Bernie Sanders is Jewish and I'm worried if he gets elected president. Does he have a dual loyalty as a Jew? What if America, God forbid, ever went to war with an Alan Sherman record? Now, that's the best joke I wrote all year, but you have to know what dual loyalty means and would we go to the Israel thing? 45 aren't going to get the reference. But there are like three people, your uncle loved that joke. Maybe it's not that funny. Maybe it's just because nobody's going to get it, they laugh really hard. How much of that has to do with comedy? How much of a laughter comes from, I'm the only one who really gets this, so I have to laugh really hard. You know, a lot of Letterman was... Sometimes he threw in a monologue joke that depended on knowing some reference from 1961 and the audience would sort of chuckle and confuse puzzlement and then Dave would bashfully say, well, that one was really just for me. Right. Well, there are some people who want to be the only person laughing at a joke to show that they're smarter than everyone else and there's most people who are terrified of being the only person to laugh at a joke. I mean, we know that audiences, there's a certain percentage of people who are willing to laugh first and if they don't laugh first, even people who thought that was a brilliant joke are going to stay quiet. Wow, right. And that infuriates you as a stand-up because you know this is a good joke and you know these people are just too timid to let themselves go without that one percentage of person who's just like me, I love it when I'm the only one laughing because I feel like I'm better than the rest of you now. I'm going to confess to a horrible, horrible transgression that I committed. Christopher Plummer played Yago in Othello on Broadway and it was my freshman year in college and the professor said that Yago, the evil Yago who arranges for Desdemona gets skellied by Othello. Pillow. I always say, isn't it ironic that the most homophobic Supreme Court justice died by the pillow? So I knew because my professor had said so that Yago was funny. You know, at the time he was a comic figure. So I laughed really hard. I went in going, well I'm going to laugh at Yago. I was 18, drinking, smoking dope and I just made a complete asshole out of it. This is just detestable. What a horrible human being I am. So you didn't really think it was funny? No, I wanted to show off I know that this is really funny. I'm enjoying this on a different level that you guys can't access. Really, I'm just an asshole. And thank God I moved to San Francisco and got the shit kicked out of me. I don't believe in bullying. We'll get to it, Alex, in a second. I do believe I don't believe in bullying but I do believe that somebody at the age of 18 who goes to see a fellow and laughs at Yago to show how smart he is I think he deserves to just get his ass kicked. Everyone needs some humiliation. Because we need humility. Absolutely, I think you can call it bullying but people call the term bullying changes so much. There are people who think it's bullying just to not want to be friends with someone. But, yeah, I would definitely say that I feel like I'm a better person because of some of the most embarrassing things that have ever happened to me. Yeah, sometimes you need to be set straight. Yeah. Not if you're gay, though. Okay, what do we have? Oh, well, let's talk about Alan Sherman and I'm sorry. I'm rambling and I'm having a good time, by the way. I can tell. Even though you're detestable. I am grotesque. Everything is coming up profits. The golden age of industrial musicals. The sizzle reel is phenomenal. For the documentary. For the documentary. You've been on the show before, but I love hearing this story. Tell us how you discovered these industrial musicals, what they were, who they employed. So I grew up knowing nothing about Broadway musicals or anything like that. You're married, you have kids. Jesus, this homophobia is just getting worse with this guy. Well, thanks for setting me straight. Don't make me laugh. At the Letterman Show they used to do a bit called Dave's Record Collection, which was a found comedy piece, actual unintentionally funny record albums that Dave would hold up. We'd hear a clip, he'd have a joke. It fell to me at one point to be the captain of this piece and to go out and find record albums that we could use on the show. So back in the early to mid 90s there were still places you could go around Manhattan. Thrift shops, of course, had lots of records. Used record stores. And I was coming back from my hunting trips with all sorts of different instructional records and bizarre records of all sorts. But I started finding these. I'm curious. Was that a chore for you? Did you like doing it? Did you say to yourself, well, this isn't writing. Yeah, well, it was fun to go out and have a little afternoon out of the office. But I had joined the show when the early years of record collection had kind of scooped up all the low-hanging fruit, all the William Shatner records and Leonard Nimoy and other celebrities who shouldn't have been singing. So we'd kind of reached the end of that easy first phase of it. And it was harder and harder to get good stuff together. And I think just because I took an interest in it and tried really hard, I kept the piece going longer than it might have. Before we get to the industrial musicals, was there an album that was so funny but you couldn't put it on TV? Was there one that just cracked you guys up but you realized, you know what, this would just be... No, I think anything that we found that was really awful and even problematic, we put some weird things on the air. Some of them were very harmless like learn to take dictation and listen to these letters and there were funny things about I am making out my will and I am cutting my daughter out of the will. And you'd have to, oh, better write that. There were a few lesbian themed albums at some particular little niche label put out and there was some song called Any Woman Can Be A Lesbian. Really? I think this was even before I joined the show but they kept playing that song for days and weeks afterwards. But I started finding these corporate bent souvenir records and I thought they would have to be speeches but no, they were full-fledged musicals about selling insurance or tires or tractors or Coca-Cola or whatever and some of them were miserable and wrongheaded and some of them were shockingly high quality and compelling and that's kind of where I fell down this trap door into this alternate universe of show business because it was vast and it was incredibly well-funded and it was pervasive for many decades and it was almost entirely off the radar screen of everybody in America except if you went to one of these conventions you would see it but you didn't know what was happening at the thousand other conventions that were happening the same year and nobody had ever really tried to collect it or understand it before. So among the records in my collection is an Alan Sherman record. This was from 1966 when he had just started to slide down off his peak and got this corporate gig. This was never a live stage show, most of what I collect is actual live stage musicals but this one is so charming that I had to include it in the book. Well this has to be because he did song parodies. Yes. So is this copy written material? Well I don't entirely know about the origin of the music on this. It does not parody songs that I know but I think at least one of them must be a parody and maybe some of your listeners will understand what it is and will fill me in but he was hired by the Scott Paper Company's container division to do an album of specialty songs about Scott Paper Cups and vending machines which would be then distributed only to vending industry VIP's. Didn't you and I write a sketch like this? I think you had something about a vending machine going down the hall. A big musical number we wrote later we'll talk about it. I can't remember but this one-sided album of songs some of which are definitely parodies about Paper Cups and vending machines vending industry VIP's I don't know how many vending industry VIP's there were but enough so that the album does turn up, it's pretty scarce but the songs are just ridiculous and charming and very well done and even most Alan Sherman fans don't really know this stuff. Before we play I just want to mention that Shobra Studios now has playback ability so we can listen to it in real time I've always wanted to hold a pen and just flick the pen at it to play it. We've got two songs here one is called There Are Cups and one is called Scott Cups and either one will be fine. To inaugurate our new playback feature here in Shobra Studios the people at home have to imagine me holding a pen and I'm going to shake it at the engineer and then it's going to magically play like you see in real professional studios. He really is holding a pen. And it's not working. Scott Cups any cola taste so much colier holy water is somewhat holier you can't lose when you use a cups manufactured by the people at Scott you pour some metricalin to a cup by Scott before you're finished drinking you have lost your pot a little bit of prune juice works a whole lot faster not to mention oil of caster frank and dino use Scott Cups drink their vino from Scott Cups moonshines served in Scott Cups in Georgia and history tells us Lucretia Borgia served her drinks to those finks in cups manufactured by the people at Scott Tana's champion told them he'd rather have a Scott cup than the Davis cup and glue that's in a Scott cup is a lot more gluish chicken soup taste twice as Jewish bees make honey in Scott Cups Scott makes money from Scott Cups so keep ordering and eventually Scott will come out okay financially yes by come order some cups from Scott and not from Lily not from Dixie don't be silly not from Sweetheart or Monsanto or Conex or the continental canco join the cause and buy a lot of cups manufactured by the people at what the heck was that name he was that right that really is good but he didn't write the music for that the music is good the lyrics I mean it's like it's good it's beyond I don't want to sound pompous and start dissecting the frog this was a cash run for Alan Sherman and it couldn't have been any more perfect the glee is palpable I think for whatever reason he's offered this and he decided to do it and then I think a lot of times in these corporate gigs people said yeah I'll do it and then they get drawn into it and think wow you know if I'm gonna do this I'm gonna really try to have fun with it and oh suddenly it's 18 hours later I'm sweating over making this even better and even better and perfect and yeah I think he had a great deal of talent that he had focused in a narrow wedge of of show biz but I mean it's almost I hate to it's almost like a primer in how to do is that one of the best examples it definitely is very accessible to a lot of people what else did you the guys who wrote Fiddler on the Roof did this Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bach and Sheldon Harnick's in your documentary yes he's 92 now and I interviewed him last summer and he said when he got to New York in the 50s and he was trying to become a songwriter and make ends meet these corporate shows were a great lifeline for him and he actually found himself enjoying the craftsmanship of it so much that when he started to get real work he was sad about leaving industrials behind to some extent well it's about something it's a it's not fluff it's about something very specific it is about something extremely specific which is both a curse and a blessing I guess well it's not about love now you have another song for us from the Scott Paper Cups album there's more than one album no there's one other song is this Alan Sherman there are cups with leaky bottoms there are cups with tacky tops there are cups with different dappy defects so your drink drains out in drippy drops there are cups that look so misty gotten cause the way they're made is not so hot all those cups inadequate and rotten they ain't cups that were made by Scott there are cups that bend when vending there are cups that tip and tilt there are cups so clumsy when descending that their contents frequently gets built there are cups whose seams are slightly fractured so they break or bulge or fender warp we deny those cups were manufactured by the good old Scott Paper Corp there are cups with sexy bottoms there are cups with shapely tops cups so swell you'd think they ought to sell them in the finest kind of china shops gorgeous cups so slim and sleek and upright cutly cups designed exclusively by the folks who always make a cup right that's the Scott Paper company wow so is this an entire album of Alan Sherman singing yes it's a one-sided album how many songs six or seven you know when you come back I want to say something about that song and I want to ask you guys a question so this is how you become a producer I couldn't write that I couldn't sing it I couldn't play the music I cannot do anything that Alan Sherman does in that song which he just played me but I can criticize it I'm being serious I'm listening to it because this is how you become a producer when you have no talent you can judge the food I felt it was overpowered by the music the band was just so incredible and I would assume Alan Sherman wanted it that way because I don't think the lyrics were that funny was he using the band to overpower him was that extra seasoning because the meat might not have been fresh I don't think so I think the Scott Paper thought oh yeah we should have some funny songs and Alan Sherman should do them and I'm sure the lyrics were supposed to be the main attraction here but that was all about the musicianship yeah that was a very good studio people of some sort and I do suspect that that melody is lifted from some other song I've heard something very similar to it on I think it was an orthopharmaceutical well you'll come back I want to play you something we found we were looking to hire a voiceover artist and I found some work that Mark Thompson who is a friend of the show did for us six years ago Ned Rice and I the great comedy writer Ned Rice and I wrote this for Mark Mark is doing all the voices and the idea is that voiceover artists who do attack ads attack each other Chad Perkins is a voiceover artist who lives in New York City you heard his voice on commercials for John McCain, Barack Obama and the Olive Garden sounds like Chad Perkins will say nice things about anybody if the money is right I guess that's just how they do things in New York City I'm Bill Jenkins and I approve this message paid for by the Bill Jenkins committee for responsible voice work Chad Perkins responded with this voiceover artist Bill Jenkins has a problem Bill Jenkins said in a series of commercials blanketed throughout all of California that teachers unions are too powerful at the same time Bill Jenkins voice was all over the airwaves in Texas saying teachers unions were just fine which one is it Bill flip flop I'm Chad Perkins and I approve this ad paid for by Citizens United for voiceover reform Chad Perkins chairman so of course Bill Jenkins was outraged and he responded with this attack on Chad Perkins it's easier to face the day feeling fresh and feel your best there he goes again reading an endorsement for a product he doesn't even use turns out voiceover artist Chad Perkins will read just about anything that's been driving things it's his job the cyberbullying isn't cool and it hurts for more information go to stopcyberbullying.org what are you selling today Chad? do we need voiceover artists who are in the pocket of big advertising? is that good for America? Bill Jenkins doesn't think so I'm Bill Jenkins and I approve of this ad paid for by the committee that thinks Chad Perkins is a douchebag okay now it started to get really really ugly here take a listen to Chad Perkins response this one I think really crossed the line Bill Jenkins was all over the airwaves last night telling the good people of Kansas that marriage is a union between a man and a woman how would he know? isn't Bill Jenkins still living on that farm with his mother? kind of strange for a man in his fifties hmm I'm Chad Perkins and I approve this ad paid for by the committee to preserve traditional voiceover work so Bill Jenkins with his manhood and morality now on the line fired back with this Chad Perkins and his wife Jenny have three boys Dylan, Kyle and Henry but hold on a second Chad and Jenny have had sex hundreds if not thousands of times what happened to all those other babies Jenny conceived they all just disappeared Chad the next time you're recording a radio spot for focus on the family why don't you ask Dr. James Dobson what happened to all those innocent unborn babies I'm Bill Jenkins and I'm not gay paid for by Charlie Chris for Senate 2010 a little long I know we're out of time thank you for laughing we wrote that six years ago and I does that hold up is it too long I mean if you were to critique that I liked it going back and forth if you were to critique that what would you it was too long I don't know I suppose you could we learned at Letterman you can always cut something we're always trying to make things shorter but I don't know I like something that's allowed to breathe we go ahead I mean I think that things like that can go on much longer if you want they can go shorter I have no problem with you know really building a bit actually when you said about holding up it reminded me so much when the Havana Gila kicks in it made me think of and never acknowledging the Judaism of just happening to have Jewish music while talking about someone who would do anything for money and obviously that's the joke but it reminds me so much of when Trump puts out an image of Hillary buying my money and then says what I didn't say anything about her being Jewish I just said she loves money and it's yeah that felt especially fresh to me we did a lot you know sketches on the radio show from 2010 to about 2013 and I did all the engineering and the sound effects and all that stuff I just couldn't afford it anymore we had to stop but that's Mark Thompson it took me I would say four hours to just edit and get it done but it was written by Ned Rice I think I wrote that with him I'm not sure but Ned Rice brilliant brilliant comedy writer and Mark Thompson there's some stuff I want to play of Robert Smigel doing Trump which we've played not today we're going to wrap it up the hardest Robert and I left was during the debates this is four or five years ago he used to do me interviewing Donald Trump and the whole purpose of the interview was for him to call Rosie O'Donnell a pig so no matter what he did punchline was always getting back to the fact that Rosie O'Donnell is a fat pig and then three years later pass and suddenly or two years later pass and suddenly there's the first debate and Trump like right out of the gate he calls Rosie O'Donnell a pig and like we started we were laughing you're talking about the general not even the primary where he also brought her up right that was right out the gate the first debate and it was like we were joking that he's going to run for office for the sole purpose of making fun of Rosie O'Donnell and the first it was just bizarre we must have I don't know how there's so many sketches written Robin Williams Martin Short, Nathan Lane Andrea Martin Paul Dooley Patton Oswald Paul F. Tompkins who's Melissa Villesignore who's now on I have to go through all this stuff and find it and start playing it the Charlie Christ in 2010 is a little dated but I was kind of pleasantly surprised that that held up that was funny certain election things are just universal it's interesting because we go through the same process every year except for this one where a monkey wrench was thrown into it but it's still familiar we know how it works and that's what's been so great about this election the thing you never thought would break have to deal with the ultimate bull in a china shop which is a big reason why people are willing to forgive what Trump is like they just want to see people uncomfortable the hardest thing Alex Brazil ever had to deal with and we're going to wrap it up about six months ago it came out that Donald Trump had been calling people up pretending to be somebody else as his own publicist so Robert why don't you call into my pretend we're taking calls and you call in as Trump pretending to be black pretending to be a woman pretending to be a Mexican talking about how much you love Donald Trump well Robert did it from his house so he did Donald Trump imitating a black person you know Donald I like and the imitated Trump trying to pretend to be Mexican and I would try to trap him into saying huge he didn't want to say huge anyway it's half hour of it and it's absolute genius Robert it's like one of the funniest things and I played it for Robert he didn't like it he said alright forget it I'll play it for you it's one of the funniest things I'm going to ask him to listen to it again to try to get permission to play he didn't think it was funny it was one of the funniest things I've ever heard anyway alright so let me plug some stuff here Steve Young how do people contact you Steve Young oh boy well I've got my website mom I think there's something on there you can click if you're of a mind too okay and what is Celebregum oh that's another old project from a few years ago I know you're trying to wrap it up so I won't make it right we'll talk about that and the industrial musical movie will hopefully you'll be on all the time bringing clips like this Morale and Sherman you take this show I have a pretty good pile of vintage film from these sorts of things now from the 60s and 70s and I have about a 90 minute show that I do where I explain to people what the genre is and how I found the record albums and worked on the book with my friend Sport and then now the new wave is films coming in from either film collectors or people who did this sort of work and have things lingering in their attics and basements so that is wonderfully surreal you've reunited people and you do a tour and you'll come back and plug your tour dates you did the Northwest right in July I was in the Pacific Northwest and then I did some in Texas and Arizona I was in Pennsylvania last week and I don't have anything else scheduled at the moment but I think it will keep going good well you'll come back I hope and thank you for doing this it was serendipitous I haven't been feeling well and this really cheered me up Dave Cyrus how do people reach you? Twitter I guess Dave Cyrus SIRUS is my Twitter you can just go say hi to me there that's the only thing I really check and you know if you want to see Brickstone videos just go that we forgot to talk Sidney Blumenthal's son did something similar four years ago oh really? yeah I'll talk to you about it next time hey do all your Amazon shopping via the David Feldman show website we get a small percentage it doesn't cost more you're taking money out of Amazon's pocket you can listen to the show now on YouTube it'll be interesting to see if we get a copyright mark because of the Alan Sherman song that will be interesting yeah it'll be great because they have a program that determines whether or not the music is copyrightable and since those tracks I don't think were ever commercially released I'm optimistic but whenever there's music they kind of get upset we're going to wrap it up we're on YouTube and David Feldman's show on iTunes and Stitcher pass it along to your friends from the Showbiz Studios in downtown Manhattan that'll do it for us