 Forget Tomahawk missiles. If Donald Trump wants to destroy a building in Syria, just have Eric and Don Jr. become the landlord. It's 3 a.m. Friday, April 7th, 2017. I'm David Feldman. We have a lot of show, so let's get right to it. Welcome to the broadcast. I'm David Feldman, DavidFeldmanShow.com. On today's program from the BBC comedian Rich Hall talks to us about his new series on American Politics. Rich is a terrific writer, comedian, as well as a musician who, after HBO's not necessarily the news, Saturday Night Live, he fell in love with a woman in England, where he now makes his home. And we talk about why he still loves America, which is pretty easy to do when you're not living here. I mean, you know, Trump shooting Tomahawks at Syria, that can't be a good thing. There's no such thing as a smart bomb if a moron is firing it. Donald Trump's solution to Assad killing his own people is to kill more of Assad's own people. I know, I know our smart bombs only hit buildings, right? And that last raid Trump did in Yemen, no innocent people were killed there either, because Trump knows exactly what he's doing, because before getting five deferments from Vietnam, his dad sent him off to military school. So he's smart. He's got a good brain. Also on the show is Dave Anthony, who is host of the wildly popular podcast, The Dollop, which explores some of the more curious stories of history. Dave is a comic from San Francisco, and he and I share a long history of bitter resentment and recriminations. Laura House is an actress, comedy writer and one of the world's leading practitioners of Vedic meditation. I'm not making that up. We all love Laura House. She used to host my show whenever I took a break when I was living in Los Angeles. Now that I'm in New York, we don't get to see her that much. Today she joins us via Skype later in the show. She is one of our most requested guests. So many people write in asking, where's Laura House? Well, folks, Ms. House is in the Laura. Ms. House is in the Laura today. Yeah. Well, yesterday, the wrong insult act named Don died. The wrong insult act, whose first name is Don died. We lost Don Rickles. Don Rickles died at the age of 90. His last words were, anyway, I love Don. Don died in his home with his family by his side. I met him twice. And he's one of the few comics I actually paid to see. I don't know if you've seen this. I'm posting it on my website. It's on YouTube. It's Don at Reagan's second inauguration. It's perfection. Don was part of the greatest generation. He enlisted in World War II, joined the Navy. He was afraid of nobody. Don Rickles embodied everything that was comedy. He was America's guilty pleasure. He was fearlessly incorrect. And you weren't expected to approve. Only laugh. I can't tell you the number of sleepless nights I have spent finding old clips on YouTube of Don Rickles. Great comedy is someone unraveling right before your eyes. And at the same time, knowing exactly what he or she is doing. I loved Don Rickles. We all loved Don Rickles because life is a constant struggle. And so is great comedy. Don never allowed himself to get on a roll because getting on a roll isn't funny. Having the audience and then pushing the audience away and then winning the audience back and then pushing the audience away again. That is real comedy. Because that's what life is. Life is not slick. It's not manufactured. It's desperate. If you're not desperate, you're not funny. Any comic who can offer an audience hatred and resentment and in return receive boundless love and adoration is nothing short of an artistic genius. Don was an artistic genius. With Don Rickles gone, the closest we have right now to a Don Rickles is Bobby Slaton. If you've not seen Bobby Slaton, I suggest you go out and see him. Bobby Slaton. Well, before we get to Rich Hall, Dave Anthony and Laura House, we remember Don Rickles. I talked earlier with Cliff Nesteroff, who might just be the world's leading authority on comedy. And then we talked briefly to my comedy buddy, Brian Kiley, about the time he met Don Rickles. For more on Don Rickles, we are joined by the author of The Comedians, Drunks, Thieves, Scanderals and the History of American Comedy, Cliff Nesteroff. He joins us in LA. Hello, Cliff Nesteroff. Hello, David Feldman. I want to talk about Don Rickles with you, but I guess I have to compliment your book first because it is really the definitive history of comedy. It really is. Every page has something on it where your jaw drops. For example, today, I was doing Sirius XM with John Fugelsang and Stephen Weber from Wings phones in. You're already ahead of me. Yeah, sure. I knew I had you on my show later in the day. Stephen Weber calls in as a surprise. Stephen Weber starts telling his Don Rickles connection, which is in your book. What is his connection? His grandfather was a guy named Willie Weber, who was Don Rickles first agent slash manager. Back in the days when Don Rickles had nothing going for him, this guy Willie Weber would handle any comedian. It didn't matter who they were. It didn't matter if they were good or bad. He would take you on when nobody else would. And that was Stephen Weber's grandfather. And his father was a guy named Stu Weber, who took over the family business when Willie Weber died. Apparently, they had a bit of a internal family feud and didn't get along. But Willie Weber handled guys. Don Rickles, by far, is the most well known today. But Jackie Gleason, before he was well known, a guy named Mickey Shaughnessy, who always played cops in old movies, who had been a stand-up comic. All kinds of sort of B level and C level and B level stand-ups in the early 50s were managed and handled by this guy Willie Weber, the grandfather of Stephen Weber. Steve said that his grandfather did time he was part of the Jewish mafia. I think you mentioned that in the book. Well, Willie Weber was not like a mafioso in the sense of having much clout or power. But of course, you were somewhat mob connected if you were booking any acts, whether it was a comedian or a singer or a dance team, into nightclubs in those days. It just didn't matter whether you wanted to be or not. You didn't have a choice because 9 out of 10 clubs were owned by the mob. And the one out of 10 that weren't owned by the mob were certainly shaken down by the mob. And there was always an attempt to take them over. Sometimes they wouldn't take them over if they felt it was just too much trouble. Don Rickles eventually left his relationship with Willie Weber in 1958 and signed with a guy who you probably are familiar with, named Joe Scandori. And Joe Scandori was in nightclub Kobe elegante in Ocean Park, Brooklyn, Ocean Parkway, Brooklyn, and took on Todie Field and Don Rickles. But they were very much a mafioso. And that's really when Don Rickles' career took off. And in Don Rickles' memoir he says, I left Willie Weber, but it was time to move on. No hard feeling. But digging a little bit deeper about that story, I discovered there were some hard feelings because Willie Weber sued Don Rickles for breach of contract. But then Joe Scandori sent his boys over to visit Willie Weber and suddenly the lawsuit was mysteriously dropped. So I don't know exactly what happened there, but our imaginations could certainly picture what may have happened. But once the powerful mob interest took over Don Rickles' career in 1958-59, that's when his career took off. He started to headline his own room in Miami Beach. They built a room for him in Miami Beach adjacent to a place called the Admiral v. Motel, called it the Riot Room. And then they placed him in Las Vegas at the Sahara Hotel, a guy named Stan Irwin, who himself had been a stand-up comedian and impressionist in the late 1940s, became the entertainment director for the Sahara Hotel. And he was the guy who had the idea of putting Don Rickles in the lounge so that he could insult people as they walked past him, headed towards either the showroom or to the casino. It was sort of like this pathway, the lounge, where people had to cross through it to get from one place to another. So you could sit there and have a drink, or you could just walk through. And with Don Rickles on stage, he would make fun of the people that were walking through the room. And sometimes that included large celebrities. So his whole shtick about insulting celebrities was kind of born there at the Sahara. And that's thanks to the mob taking over his career. And did he insult mobsters? Well, I mean, every comedian of the era seems to have a story about how they accidentally insulted a mobster. I'm sure he wouldn't have insulted a mob guy intentionally, but that kind of peril was always a possibility back then. Of course, Don Rickles was beloved by the mobsters. And it's that old cliché or phrase of breaking balls. They kind of like that from Don Rickles. So as long as it was on a surface level, it was about the guy's nose, as opposed to about the guy's actual connections, then they didn't seem to mind that much. They actually took care of him once they were taking care of him. And he was on their side. He could pretty much get away with anything. But if it was a different comedian who was not as well connected with the mob, then they would have to be much more careful. We're talking with Cliff Nesteroff. He is the author of comedians, drunks, thieves, scoundrels, and the history of American comedy. It's published by Grove Press. And I promise you, you'll be reading it a gape. What is the origin of the word stand up comic? Well, according to a comedian who I quote in the book, Guy named Dick Curtis. And with any etymology almost impossible to know the true, true origins, it's like trying to trace the origin of hip hop. There's always some guy laying claim to being the first rapper or doing the first rap song. But this elderly comedian, a guy named Dick Curtis, who performed with Don Rickles in the early days, in the early 50s playing roadhouses around Jersey, he told me that in the old days, of course, the mafia controlled the boxing racket. And a boxer could stand up in the ring, not fall down, take a lot of abuse. They called him a stand up fighter. And if a guy who worked for the mob was wise and knew how to keep his mouth shut and not niche and not talk about the things that he had witnessed that may have been illegal, he was considered a stand up guy. So a stand up comedian who played a mob run night club who could go up there night after night, be dependable, sell tickets, draw an audience and really deliver, he was considered a stand up comic. I've always heard the term stand up guy, it's a mafia term. I like the boxing connection because I've always felt stand up was boxing. There were little jabs. If you make a deal with the mafia, do you make a deal with the mafia if you're an entertainer or is it just a series of implicit favors and nobody ever says anything but you? Yeah, I think it was definitely more implicit. So the guy interviewed the kind of obscure comedian named Frankie Mann, who was an early 50s comic and a Brooklyn buddy of Buddy Hackett that he smoked dope together. He told me that he went into the office of Agva, which at the time had been the live stage performers union. So what actor is for film or TV? Agva was for guys that performed in night club or actors on the stage outside the Broadway. And he told me he went into the office of Agva and the head of the union was guy named Jackie Bright himself a former stand up comic. And he told Frankie Mann, you know, do you want to play Las Vegas? He said, sure, I'd love to play Las Vegas. He said, come here tomorrow with $5,000, you'll headline Vegas. He wanted him to pay him and then he would put him in those clubs. But if you had those kinds of connections, you could headline clubs, even without an act, even without experience, even without talent. And maybe the best example is this guy who I don't even know if I really mentioned him in my book guy named Alan Drake, very obscure stand up comic. And the reason he's very obscure is because his mom connections fell apart in 1958 when Frank Costello was assassinated because he was associated with Frank Costello's mom. And when there was a war within the family between Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, people had to pick sides. They didn't know who was going to come out on top. So if you sided with Frank Costello and then he was assassinated and Vito Genovese rose to the top, well, then you were out of luck because you had chosen the wrong guy and now been killed. So that's what happened with this guy, Alan Drake. He was connected to the Frank Costello's mom and they got him great gigs as an opening act for Tony Martin, the head of Tony Martin's singing career. And he would open at the Flamingo Hotel. He would play Bill Miller's Riviera in Fort Lee, New Jersey. These were the top clubs of the era. But then when Frank Costello was assassinated, Alan Drake, as the phrase goes, couldn't get arrested. He couldn't get a gig. He couldn't get a job. And his stand-up career just dried up completely. And the only person that kind of kept him alive was Red Fox for two reasons. In the 70s, Red Fox got Alan to take all kinds of bit parts on Sanford and Sun. But also in the 1960s to make ends meet, now that he didn't have stand-up gigs, Alan Drake became a cocaine dealer and Red Fox was one of his number one clients. Could Don have succeeded without the mafia, or was it impossible in that period to get ahead with some kind of mob connection? Well, it depends on your definition of success. I don't think he would have had the kind of nightclub success that he had so early if not for their assistance. It's unlikely that he would have been headlining Vegas in 1960, if not for those connections. However, you could see in comedy without mafia connections in film and in TV. Guy like Red Skelton, to my knowledge, was not mob connected. And he had a TV show that lasted 20 years and had a tremendous salary. But Don Rickles always wanted to be an actor. And he did. He appeared in I Dream of Genie, The Twilight Zone, Hennessy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show. He did movies like Run Silent, Run Deep with Clark Gable. He did The Rat Race with Debbie Reynolds. So he certainly just found a way to succeed in show business beyond nightclubs. But it was because of the mob connections. You can read the details in my book. Don never really commented on this. And I thought I might hear from his people when my book came out, but I never did. I guess they decided it would be better just not to talk about it at all, rather than call me on it or deny it or anything like that. Because when Don Rickles would talk about the mob, he always talked about Frank Sinatra and the mob. But of course, he and Sinatra were very tight. He never talked about his own mob connections. But when you dig deep and see who he is associated with, of course, these were mob connections. But that's not to defame Don Rickles, right? That was just the reality of the time. If you did stand up in nightclubs, you were connected to the mob by virtue of what you did. But it didn't matter, Shekki Green, Jack Carter, Buddy Hacks, Don Rickles, they were all connected to the mob because they all played the venues that were owned and owned by the mob. I want to ask you about Fat Jack Leonard in a second. But I'm kind of interested in this mob connection thing. If you were connected to the mob, could you keep your nose clean? Could you say, all right, I know in order to get these gigs, I have to deal with the mob. But if I have to show up and perform at a wedding, I'll do it because I have no choice. But I'm not going to call upon them for favors. And so it'll be a much cleaner relationship. I think that's what most comedians did do. They didn't really get involved in the violent aspect. Penny Youngman was heavily mob connected going back to the 1930s. And as the action indicates, it's surprising to hear that because he seems like a guy who kept his nose clean. And he did. But he said that as long as you ignored the fact that they were murderers and thieves, you were fine. So it was really about being a stand-up guy, shutting up and not talking about what you saw. And when you were working in Las Vegas in those days, you would see things and you would see violence. And there are stories like that of Gus Greenbaum, who had been an entertainment director in Las Vegas who spoke about something. And when he retired from Las Vegas, I think he went and lived in Scottsdale, Arizona with his wife. Three years after the fact, he was murdered in the desert with his wife. And it was because he had said something about mob activity three years previous. So comedians knew better than to mention any of the specifics of mob connected kind of stuff. And so did most people. So did the government. So did the governor of Nevada. You know, if you spoke up too much, there were too many examples through history of what had happened to people who had done just that. So people knew better than to really talk too much. So a guy like Joe Scandorio, I think passed away a couple of years ago, he wasn't giving career advice so much as he was protecting Don from the Don's. That's right. I mean, it was about who controlled the club. It's like, let's say you're a stand-up comic. Sometimes you probably in your career have done what we call a corporate gig. It doesn't mean you endorse Exxon. I mean, that's a bad example, Exxon. I don't know what any stand-ups are doing in Chopra. But let's say Exxon. Just because you're hired to do stand-up for an Exxon office party, maybe it pays you $10,000 for 45 minutes. It's well worth it for a comedian to do that in order to survive. It doesn't mean you endorse the policies of Exxon, whether it's dumping oil, starting taxes, putting taxes in a Swiss bank account, whatever the crime that Exxon is committing might be. But you know from your contract with Exxon that you can't say certain things, certain subject matter is off-down, but if you want to get paid. So it was very similar to doing a corporate gig back then. The pay was tremendous, but if you said the things they didn't want you to say, it would violate your contract and wouldn't get rehired. And who knows, something much worse might happen to you. Yeah. Fat Jack Leonard. When I was growing up, I was told that Don had kind of pilfered from Fat Jack Leonard. Who was Fat Jack Leonard? And if you go back and watch the Hollywood Palace on YouTube and look at Fat Jack Leonard, is there really a similarity between Don Rickles and Fat Jack Leonard? I don't see the similarities. Yeah. Jackie Leonard was the precursor to Don Rickles in terms of being the insult comic and show business. So he kind of had the whole thing wrapped up. There was no competition for Fat Jack. There were other insult comics around, but none with as much experience were getting as much work as Jackie Leonard. Jackie Leonard's greatest success came in the early 1950s. And by the time Don Rickles was coming in, in the late 1950s, Jackie Leonard was a little bit already on the out. He was doing nightclub, but in terms of making it big, he had made it as big as he was going to. He was very prominent in early TV in the early 50s. He guest-coasted for Broadway Open House, which was the original late night NBC program. He was a guest on a lot of the early TV shows. This is show business with George S. Kaufman. And he did an insult act, but he did not work very hard on his act. He was one of these guys, and there's still guys like this today, who they developed a half hour of material and they never add anything new to the act. And they toured that act for 20 years. Jackie Leonard was sort of like that. So when Don Rickles came along, he was a fresh face who kind of superseded him. And it's like Dave Chappelle complained of in his most recent special, not really, it's a facetious complaint, but he said, I had to come back to show business because Key and Peele were doing my show. Well, this is the kind of thing that happens. People get superseded in comedy by the new fresh thing. And people love the Chappelle show, but then Key and Peele kind of outpaces it in a way. And that's sort of what happened with Don Rickles while Jackie Leonard was still alive. And Jackie Leonard became bitter about it. But probably their best moment was in 1968. There was the very first Friars Club roast of Don Rickles. By that point, he'd become famous for Vegas and the Dean Martin show. And they had Jackie Leonard host the roast. And he opened the roast by saying, ladies and gentlemen, I'm here tonight to make a citizen's arrest. And I don't mind the son of a bitch stealing my act, but he stole my bald head too. It's all these jokes in reference to Don Rickles ripping him off. And initially, when Rickles came on the scene, people said, yeah, he's sort of doing the Jackie Leonard shit, but they had a different style and a different cadence. Jackie Leonard was not quite as biting as Don Rickles, but he was very bitter about it. Jackie Leonard also accused Martin and Lewis of stealing his act, which is a huge stretch. And it was only because Jerry Lewis was barely out of his teenage years and becoming the biggest success in comedy. So it was really more jealousy than anything else. However, one more thing, however, all the really early comedians who saw Don Rickles before he was famous in the early 50s, guys like Sammy Shore and Shecky Green, they all say that Don Rickles was doing Jackie Leonard style and Jackie Leonard back in those early days. But like any comedian who's influenced by somebody, once you come into your own, you shed the influence. Norm MacDonald was very influenced by David Letterman originally, but you can't really see that today because he shed the influence. So Don Rickles was no different than any comedian influenced by the comedians that came before. He was influenced by Jackie Leonard. He didn't really steal from Jackie Leonard. So when he was starting out, he was a Jackie Leonard knockoff. Everybody remembered him as a Jackie Leonard knockoff. When he made it, he was no longer doing Jackie Leonard, but the high priests of comedy wanted to punish him a little by reminding him that he was influenced by Jack Leonard. My understanding of Jack Leonard was he didn't have an act and either did Don Rickles really, that they kind of went up there and did what was off the top of their head? Well, supposedly, the same way that any comedian is supposedly doing something off the top of their head. I mean, our best knowledge of Don Rickles is from what we've seen on talk shows in recent history. And as you know, when you see him on Letterman, when you see him on Fallon, when you saw him on Kimmel, Rickles did the same, what do you want to drop your pants and fire a rocket? Hey, you want a cookie? You know, it was always the same line. There was no improv at all. But it was spontaneous when he said it. So he sort of had these stock lines that were funny. Apparently early when he was doing Vegas, that's when he really improvised. You know, it depended on who the celebrity was in the crowd. You know, so if Robert Mitchum was in the crowd, he'd say, Hey, shouldn't you be smoking grass with an underage girl? So that was sort of when he was in his most improvisational. There was a combination, but that's true of any stand-up comic. You do a set, it's a combination of your set routines and depending on what happens in the environment, you're going to you're going to split a little. So Don Rickles did less and less of that as he got older. And if you ever saw him in Vegas, he did the same shtick every time he'd call volunteers up from the audience. He would do Harry Carey routine, a Japanese samurai thing. Even if there wasn't a black guy in the audience, he would say, look at the black guy in the front row and there'd be no black guy there, but he would still be doing the same shtick that he had always done. So Don Rickles kind of got a pass in later years for doing the shtick that we were so familiar with. But he was a legend and he deserved to get a pass. So I never saw him in the early sixties, but apparently that's when much of the act was heavily improvised. But if you study his talk jokes appearances the last 20 years, it was always entertaining. But seldom do you hear anything new. I worked on Dennis Miller's HBO show and Don was on and he did the and the black guy over there is going funny, like that kind of thing. And Dennis goes and Dennis calls him on it. He says, come on, Don, there's no black guy over there. And Don and Don goes, he's either black or he just stuck his head in a bucket full of M&Ms. And and Dennis just rolled off the couch. And it was, you know, it was just amazing. I'm going to, I'm going to disagree with you and then ask you one last question and let you go. Yeah, I've seen Don Rickles live a couple of times and I agree with you that he had an act, but he really didn't do anything spontaneous. But if you go back and watch him on Carson and Merv, he was a lot like Jonathan Winters, unless it was a magic act, unless it was a magic act where he came out and had nothing. There was almost that you were going, he's got he really does have absolutely nothing. And he's flying by the seat of his pants. Don't you think that's how he I think he used to, I think he used to more so than in later years. I think he was very similar in Groucho Marx in the sense that we were conditioned to his rhythm. So no matter what he said, like Letterman's a good example, he would say something on Letterman that really, if you step back and listen to it, it didn't really make sense. Like he would say, well, you want a cookie? What does that even mean? What does that even mean? But he has a rhythm like Groucho had a rhythm. And we know it's supposed to be funny. If you ever go to a Marx brother screening in a theater with a crowd full of people, people laugh no matter what Groucho says, just based on the rhythm, based on the pattern. So Don Rickles kind of had that rhythm and pattern when he did a talk show. It was funny because of how fast it was. How immediately it came out of his mouth, regardless of what he was saying, he's not the kind of guy where you could transcribe his act and read it and laugh. It was about the quickness, about the speed of his recall. And especially as he got older, it was even all that more impressive that this old man could go up there and kind of say things off the cuff. If Letterman said, Don, did you do anything? If he started for a second, Rickles was on him like an animal. You got to get that checked out. You should go to a doctor, you know. And it was just brilliant. Jim Carrey did really capture the essence of Don Rickles. I mean, living color, he did a sketch in which it's Don Rickles with the United Nation. And it hit all of those sort of cliche marks. And Rickles was the best. I'm not trying to diminish his legacy in any way. But he was a unique talent in the sense that his rhythm and his style and his old demeanor was hilarious. If you transcribe it, it's not like reading Woody Allen routine. You can read a Woody Allen routine and laugh. You can't read a Don Rickles routine and laugh. You have to see Don Rickles. You have to be part of that energy, part of that rhythm to really appreciate it. And there'll never be another like him. He was the best. And I was always obsessed with him. About two years ago, I would and I put together a playlist. I'll send it to you. I went through YouTube and looked for every clip of Don Rickles. And I found some stuff that was pretty amazing from the 70s that downright offensive. It's just, you know, you go, wow, you cannot get away with that. Well, that's one of the reasons he's the last of an era, too, because we love him so much that, you know, all these stupid internet articles about there's comedy go too far and so and so cross the line. You never saw an article like that about Don Rickles. Thank God, because he's Don Rickles. You know, you understand the context of Don Rickles. He came up in an era where that was a very unique style of comedy and it endured and it almost became a novelty. He kind of outlived the era in which he developed and it just doesn't exist anymore, that style of comedy. If anybody attempted to do what he did, I guess Lisa Lampinelli attempted it a little bit and I don't want to slam her on your show, but her career already has not endured to the link that Don Rickles career did. It's already on a sort of downswing. So Rickles, like I say, one of a kind, there's nobody in stand-up comedy who didn't admire and respect him. Yeah. Lisa's career, is that because of the PC movement that Lisa's having trouble? I don't know. I don't know. I think it's that style of comedy is hard to accept for a lot of people. I guess you could call it the PC movement at the same time. I think that style of comedy, regardless, is just not as common. I don't know anything about Lisa Lampinelli's actual life from her going up on stage. I don't know anything about her actual point of view. All I know is the character of having sex with a lot of black guys or whatever. It's a shtick. So in these days in stand-up, shtick is much less common than it was once upon a time. Jack Benny did shtick as the cheap guy. He wasn't actually cheap in real life. These days, if a standard comic is on stage talking about cheap, being cheap, it's probably because they actually are cheap. You know what I mean? So that style is just kind of doesn't exist anymore. So Lisa Lampinelli does a style that is of the Rickles era. Let me take backtrack a little bit. I don't want to say that her career is on the downside, but I think she may have flourished greater in the 70s than today. In terms of style, I really don't think of Don Rickles as an insult comic. He was so much more than that. He was Don Rickles is what he was. There was no style. He was Don Rickles. But insult comedy. When did that start? Was that vaudeville? Did they have a guy who would work the crowd that way? Well, Milton Burl used to say that Ted Healy was the Rickles of his day. Ted Healy was the guy who invented the three Stooges. In those days, the phrase Stooges meant an assistant in a way that you berated. In The Muppet Show, Stattler and Waldorf, hecklers in the balcony, that's what involved those days was called the Stooges. They would be planted in the audience and they would kind of play off the other guy. It was sort of straight man comedian banter. Ted Healy and his three Stooges was sort of an insult comic. He would insult the three Stooges. He would insult people in the audience and then he would abuse them. According to Milton Burl, anyway, he called Ted Healy, who was an influence on him, the Don Rickles of his day. I don't know exactly when the phrase insult comedy came along, but in the early 1940s, actually starting in 1938, there was a place called the Club 18, which was the insult comedy club in New York. And this club was founded out of self-preservation, because if you did insult comedy in those days and the mafia was in the crowd, you'd be in real trouble if you insulted the wrong guy. So they built this club called Club 18 and the whole premise was that it was an insult club. You knew going in that you would get insulted by the comedians on the stage, a guy named Frankie Hyers worked there, a guy named Jack White worked there, a guy named Pat Harrington Sr., the father of the star of One Day at a Time, worked there as an insult comedian. And Jackie Gleason also, when he was being managed by this guy, Willie Webber, also worked there as an insult comedian. So that club existed so that you wouldn't insult the wrong person. So that was one of the early pre-rickles examples of insult comedy, but I'm not sure that that's the actual original basis for it. I don't know the actual origins. Joe Ansys. I was talking to David Tell about Joe Ansys. The first night I did stand-up comedy was at Danger Fields, and Joe Ansys was there. And Dave had no idea who Joe Ansys was. Who is Joe Ansys? Is he still around? No, Joe Ansys died, I think, about 15 years ago, but he was considered the muse of both Lenny Bruce and Robbie Dangerfield. The story goes, I don't know how accurate it is, but Lenny was rooming with Joe Ansys, and at the time Lenny Bruce was a square. He was a comedian who did Jimmy Cagney impressions, wore an all-white suit and a little mustache. He sort of looked like Warren William or William Powell in the old days, which now we consider hip and suave, but in the 50s, young people considered that square in the same way that hippies considered the rat pack square when the late 60s came along. But anyway, Joe Ansys was the hipster. He was the guy who talked in that jazz slang. He was the guy who used the phrase, seems so stupid and quaint now, but he used the guy who used the phrase, man, hey man, you know, man, oh man, Lenny Bruce didn't talk like that back then. But after rooming with Joe Ansys, he picked it up. And so Lenny Bruce's sort of combination of jazz, bebop, cadence, and Yiddish slang, which you can hear on his records, all kind of came from Joe Ansys, apparently, supposedly. And Rodney later years kept Joe Ansys alive. Supposedly, Joe Ansys contributed material to both of them because he was a nervous kind of literary guy who didn't like the idea of going up on stage, but it was funny in real life. Supposedly, I mean, that's the legend of Joe Ansys. Norm MacDonald tells a story about meeting him backstage at Saturday Night Live when Rodney did a cameo on a weekend update. And Norm was awestruck. He goes, oh, the legendary Joe Ansys. The legend is supposed to be the funniest guy ever. So he hung out with Joe Ansys for four hours, didn't hear him say a funny thing once. So, you know, who knows? It is a great kind of story, especially when it's a shadow figure like that. The mystery of it is kind of fascinating that this might be the guy responsible for the initial sort of comic structure of both Rodney Dangerfield and Lenny Bruce, who are both, inarguably, two of the most influential comedians in history. The Goldman book on Lenny Bruce talks about Joe Ansys. Yeah. I guess Jerry Lewis and somebody else wrote letters to the bookers in Vegas saying, this is the funniest guy in the world. You have to put him on stage. And I, as I remember it, Joe kind of chickened out. He didn't want to do stand-up. They all said, you're the funniest person in the world. Why aren't you doing stand-up? And they pushed him and pushed him and they got him a booking in Vegas and he flaked out. And as I remember, he was living with Rodney. Yeah. And the first night I did stand-up was at Dangerfields and Joe Ansys was there. And I went, oh my God, you're Joe Ansys. And it was identical to meeting Abby Hoffman, who was one of my heroes growing up. Both men were not interested in meeting me. They were more interested. They were more interested in getting laid. And I didn't understand that. Like, you know, but I love you. I want to talk to you. And all they wanted to do was get laid. I also remember Joe Ansys being smart. The brief conversation I had with him, he was very smart. I do remember that. But so he did die 15 years ago. The thing about the idea of the comic's comic, even if Joe Ansys wasn't a comedian, he sounds like that kind of mentality of the comic's comic. All the comedians love him. All the comedians find him funny. All the comedians respect him. You present him to the general public. They don't know what the f**k you're talking about. So he clearly had some kind of sensibility that spoke to the comic mind that comedians appreciate. Another guy that Jerry Lewis talks about being the funniest guy ever, which I don't understand. And anybody who doesn't know that error doesn't seem to understand is the Ritz brothers. Allen King, Mel Brooks, Sid Caesar, Jack Carter, Jerry Lewis, all say that Harry Ritz of the Ritz brothers was the funniest guy in the world. And that they were influenced by him exponentially and that everybody stole from Harry Ritz. But the only record we have of the Ritz brothers is a bunch of Fox musicals where they do comedy relief in the late 30s. And it's just Harry Ritz crossing his eyes. Now you can kind of see where Jerry Lewis gets the instep walk from, the spastic walk is sort of taken from Harry Ritz, but doesn't exactly seem to be the high mark of genius. Again, it might be a comics comic thing. It might be only in person or on the live stage where they're very effective. And without seeing them in the moment, maybe we can't truly appreciate whatever it is that these guys who are the giants of comedy appreciate it. You know, so there's a lot lost to history because of the moment guys that performed live on stage. And as you know, there are guys that we both know who are hilarious in a comedy club who have never succeeded on television. For whatever reason, something gets lost in translation. And either it's the wrong vehicle or they're too sanitized or it just doesn't translate. They're not as funny on TV or in movies as they are in a comedy club. And if there's no record of that live act, then they kind of get lost to history of the person who is maybe not that funny. So I think comedy is littered with those types of guys. Do you know who Len Ostervich is? No. You might call Paul Provenza and ask him about Len Ostervich. I suspect Len might be our generation's Joe Ansis. He's a pretty interesting guy. He was a club owner in Chicago, but he was so is so much more than that. If you ever want to do a story about a modern day Joe Ansis, I think Provenza could help you with that. The guy's name is Len Ostervich. Cliff Nesterhoff is the author of the comedians, drunks, thieves, scoundrels, and the history of American comedy. It's published by Grove Press. Get this book. Trust me on this. Vice magazine has called Cliff Nesterhoff the human encyclopedia of comedy. You are also a consulting producer on the CNN series, The History of Comedy. Thank you for coming on the show at the last moment. I've wanted you to come on for a long time, and I'm sorry I had to be under these circumstances. And I hope you come back to talk about comedy and a lot of other things. Thank you, Cliff. Thank you, David. For more on Don Rickles, we are joined by Emmy award-winning comedy writer Brian Kiley. You've seen him on Letterman and all the late night shows. And you've been writing for Conan O'Brien forever, since pretty much the beginning. What's your experience with Don Rickles? Well, I met him just one time. I don't want to be one of these people that, you know, someone dies and suddenly they've got a million best friends or whatever, you know? So I did live with him for two years. No, but when he came to do the Conan show, I literally, I have to say, for this day, I don't think that there was a guest. I don't think there's been a guest that Conan and the writers have been more excited about having on. You know, I've been there 23 years. There's no one that got this kind of excitement. You couldn't believe he was doing our show. So Don is doing Conan. So excited. And literally it was just one of these things where, you know, we grew up watching those roasts. Funny now that Comedy Central does roasts because roasts were gone for like 20 or 30 years or something. You know what I mean? When I was a kid, they would have these roasts from Las Vegas and they would do it. How often do you think they did them? Like twice a year or once a year or something? The Dean Martin roasts. The Dean Martin roast. Yeah. They were, I don't know. I think, yeah, twice a year, maybe a little more. Okay. Two or three times a year then, whatever it was. But I just remember it was just a big deal. It was like, there's a roast tonight, you know, if I remember being so excited. And Rickles was the guy that you looked forward to. You had all the funniest comedians performing on those shows. They're all up there on the dais and you couldn't wait for Rickles. He was the highlight every time. And I think they would often have him closed because nobody wanted to follow him, you know? Right. And I just remember it was, you know, we were all just very excited. And, you know, one by one, you know, we went to his dressing room and Conan introduced us and so on. So he got to me and he shook my hand and he said, I was like you when I came out of the Navy. True story. Wait a second. He said, I was like you when I came out of the Navy? Yep. True story. That's what he said to me. And I to this day, don't know what he meant. Uh-huh. Doesn't matter. I was like you when I came out of the Navy. Was he saying you were gay? I just, that wasn't how I took it, but I don't know what to tell you. Who was in the room? I don't know what he meant. Who was in the room? Who was in the room? Oh, I think, I think Mike Sweeney and Conan and whatever and we, you know, he had this thing like you at that point, he would just happy that Don Rickles was talking to you. It didn't matter if it made sense or not, you know? Right. My story with Don is kind of similar. He did Dennis Miller alive on HBO and Dennis said to me, Falda, I'm giving you a gift. Yes, Dennis. You're going to be Don Donnie Boy's minder. You make sure he's okay. So I was assigned to Don Rickles. I was in heaven. Wow. Yeah. So, you know, for about like 90 minutes, I would walk him to his dressing room and just and I kept wanting him to insult me and he wouldn't do it. He would not insult me. And I kept lobbing him softballs, would not do it. And he kept saying, Oh, you are a writer. I love writers. It's so important. I wish I could do that. I never got the education to write and my son is a writer and it's just the greatest way to make a living. And then some people came in from Buzz magazine and I am lobbing one softball after another. Oh my God. I would love to hear the softballs you're lobbing at him. Just bad puns and he is just looking at me and being really sweet to me and suddenly the room fills up and somebody says, Hi, we need your picture. We're with Buzz magazine. And Don turns to me and says, What's Buzz magazine? And I said, Don, Buzz magazine is a magazine for bees. And I did it like that. Come on now. And I did it so broad and loud and there was dead silence. And he looks at me and then turns to everybody else and says, Only Joe in the room and he ain't funny. The other time I met, I just remembered, I don't want to burst your bubble, but he said the same I remember I was playing Vancouver and going through customs and all of a sudden Don Rickles, Pat McCormick, Jan Murray, Norm Crosby, Red Buttons are in line with me at customs, getting their work permits. They were going up there to do something, some private event. And the week. Wow. Yeah. So I see Don Rickles and the week before Don had his Jaguar, his white Jaguar stolen at gunpoint. He was visiting his daughter, Mindy. I was in the paper and they held a gun to his head and stole his white Jaguar. Oh my God, that's terrible. And so I see Don Rickles and I walk up to him and his wife, I said, Don, I'm a comedian. I'm playing yuck yucks here. You have no idea what a great influence you've been. Oh, that's really sweet. That's really sweet. Listen, can I interest you in a white Jaguar and his wife? Yeah. You said that to him? Yeah. And his wife Barbara, his wife Barbara goes, that's not funny. That's not funny. They held a gun to his head. That's not funny. You know, I didn't even feel bad. I loved him so much and I just, I just remembered I said that and yeah, it was Vancouver was that was like a couple of years before I met him at the Dennis Miller show. Yeah. Anyway, buddy. Well, 90, 90 years. He was 90 years old. He was 90. Is that right? Yeah, he was something. He was something. Wow. As a writer, you are one of the best comedy writers in the business. Don didn't tell jokes, did he? Hmm. Right? Yeah. Yeah. You know, I never got to see him. I mean, I, I, I saw him. There's a Bob Newhart tribute at the academy that I went to and he was one of the people that came out and whatever. But in terms of seeing him, like I never went to get to see his Vegas show or something like that, you know. But when he went on Conan, when you saw him on the Tonight Show, he wasn't doing one liners. He was just in the moment flailing, right? He was. He was. And I think that's true. But I think, you know, I was a lot of those insults. I think of those as jokes. You know what I mean? Don't you? Or you know what I mean? But I don't think he had it in his pocket. I think he was, I think a lot of it was improv. Let's do longer next time. Can we? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And I'd love to catch up and and, uh, you know, hear how you're doing and all that stuff. You realize we're the new new heart and Rickle. I just remembered Don told me a story. God's stuff is coming back to me that he said he had just gotten back to LA. He had been in Vietnam with new heart and they were walking around and they I should know if I should repeat the story. Okay. And he sees a he sees some wounded. I'm not going to tell the story. Brian Kiley. It's not fair. It's not fair. Brian Kiley is a brilliant comedy writer and comedian. And I thank you for joining us. What's the name of your novel? Well, you know what? My publishing company went out of business so people can't even get my novel at the moment. So it's called the astounding misadventures of Rory Collins, but it's, um, I'm hoping to find a new publisher now that, uh, apparently I'm best luck. Thanks, buddy. All right, my friend. I'll talk to you soon. Right. Joining us from London, England. I think I'm getting that wrong, but it's Rich Hall that I got right. Where are you today, sir? And I am in London. I am in London, David. I'm in London and it's actually sunny. The sun is out and because it's England, people don't quite know what to do. So there's a lot of, you know, just hunkering down behind rocks, throwing rocks, throwing things at it, throwing the big orb. I have a lot of questions asked, Mr. Rich Hall. He is touring the big hoedown. Is the hoedown tour starts when or are you in the middle of it? Well, in the middle of it. Right now, as I'm speaking to you tonight, I'm at the Leicester Square Theater. We're doing four nights there. That's a very cool theater in London. Something you should check out any community. I think it's probably the best venue for comedians coming over from the US to play. That's the Leicester Square Theater. Just putting that out there if anyone's interested in coming over here. You're touring the round. Jim Gaffigan just did it. He loved it. So we're there for four nights, and then we're in the god, you know, the outer swamps. Are you bringing it to Australia, Canada, Ireland, Scotland? Next year we're going to Australia. Don't know about Canada. It's comedy, but it's music. It's very, very musical and involves a six-piece band. So it's very hard. Logistically, it's very hard to get all these people in one location. And you're doing improv up there, right? It's like musical improv? A lot of it is. A lot of it is. It's like a musical template that the band, that I'll play through and the band will pick it up. And then we just start kind of winging it, you know. But a lot of times what was once improv has now become pretty much a standard song because if you're talking to people in the audience, what it is, is it's a... I'm trying to explain the working-class ethic of country music to Brits. So, you know, because most Brits just look at country music as Kenny Rogers and Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton. They haven't taken it, Garth Brooks. They haven't taken... It hasn't gone beyond that, you know. The whole idea that there might be a whole tradition to it, you know, that sort of is about, you know, the country music ethos, you know, which is basically a rich guy singing about how he can't afford a six-pack of beer. But because of that, it's always about the listener. Obviously, he can afford a six-pack of beer because he's got a song on the radio. But, you know, so the listener, you know, it's identity music. It's culture music. And so what I try to do a lot is take something that somebody in the audience, like their occupation or where they're driving back to that night or anything like that and try to improvise a song around it. So, most times it works, you know. Do you like country music? Are you a fan? I love country music. I am a fan of well-written country music, you know. All the old classics and a lot of modern stuff, especially that comes out of Austin. I'm not a fan of that. The syrupy diabetes-inducing crap that comes out of national, the waxy shoulder, Keith Urban crap. It's just crap. They literally, they literally write in teams. They go into a, it's horrific. You can imagine this as a comedian. Being forced to go into a room and everybody sits around, they've been thrown together. Okay, well, let's write a bit. What are we going to write about? Oh, look, here's a copy of Newsweek. Safe Landing. It's about planes almost crashing. Let's write a song called Safe Landing. I'll be flying away for you and then you intercept me with, you know, with your grace and then I land safely. Okay, let's knock that out. Not a shit that happens in Nashville, you know. Whereas, I think in Austin you get more of a creative approach, you know, an artistic approach, a troubadour approach. Did you become a country fan because rock music just got so bad? You need- Oh, no, no, I grew up with country music because I grew up in Kentucky in North Carolina and this is stuff my dad was playing, you know. So it was all we had. You grew up in the South, you're going to hear country music, you know. You just learned to filter out, you know, I just learned to filter out the bad stuff. And I mean, originally, you know, I was a huge fan of Dylan and Springsteen and I still am. I mean, those guys, you know, are fantastic songwriters, but there's a lot of great songwriting in coming out of Texas and Tennessee. You've got to find it, you know. Steve Earl, John Prine, I mean, it goes on, you know, the old guys, the new guys, there's still plenty of good stuff out there. You just have to wade through a lot of crap to find it. You grew up in Kentucky. What is Kentucky bluegrass? What the music? Yeah, what is that? Bluegrass is fast country music. That's all it is. It's fast country music. Country music played very fast. And is there a reason it came out of Kentucky? It came out of Kentucky with Bill Monroe, I think was from Kentucky, he wasn't from Kentucky, he was from somewhere near there. But yeah, it kind of, it's kind of had its roots in Appalachia. And Bill Monroe was the guy who called it bluegrass. So they were playing the, you know, that movie, Oh Brother We're Art, though. That came out. And of course, Deliverance came out when we were kids, you know. And every time something like that comes out, there's a big revival in bluegrass music, banjo and fiddle music. And, you know, for then so the four or five years afterwards, everybody suddenly rediscovers bluegrass. And they all think that it's really old timey music from the 30s. As it was, you know, Oh Brother We're Art, they all were set in the 30s in Mississippi. And they're bluegrass singers. But it actually wasn't invented until the 50s. So that whole movie is kind of bullshit. Yeah, I read somewhere. I don't know if this is true, but I was told by someone I really trust that Bill Monroe invented Kentucky bluegrass in one night on a radio show. It's one of the few. Probably he, he was on the Grand Ole Opry. Yeah. And they, you know, they were starting to bring in like big instruments, you know, drums and electric instruments and people were plugging in amps. They had this no amp policy, but people were kind of getting around it. And it was driving, you know, the kids loved it. The kids loved that stuff. And but Monroe just said, well, we need to come up with some kind of music, something that will just get these people clapping and stomping. That's kind of old timey, but it's much, you know, much more energetic to youngsters. So he's, they started taking old traditional songs and just speeding them up. Right. I was told that it was, I was told that it was invented. It's the only musical form that can be identified in a specific time and place as being invented. Like this was the night this, I mean, nobody can say rock and roll was invented here, but they could actually say bluegrass was invented on this night on this radio show. It has its roots in Ireland, right? Doesn't, isn't there some kind of? Ireland and Norway, Ireland and Norway and Scotland, fiddle, you know, because of the fiddle and then the banjo. But, you know, fiddling came from basically Norway and Scotland. And all those people who converged in to America brought all these different styles, where the Irish fiddling is a lot different than Texas fiddling. It's a lot different than quadrille or I can get into it. I can get into some really specific talk here. But yeah, please do. I'm not that bad. So, Tarek, if you want, you know, the quadrilles and the reels and the German waltzes, they're all different styles of fiddle music. But when America, back in those days, you could tell where someone was from originally, by the way they fiddled. And, you know, the way that it moved was by boatmen, you know, both the banjo and the fiddle, because both of them would float if they fell off the boat, if they fell in the water. You could pluck them back out, you know. So, yeah, that's how I traveled by river down Mississippi and all those rivers. That's how it all got. That's, it's fairly easy to trace. It's not like, you know, jazz that just came out of this big tidal. Hey, listen to this, listen to this crazy, crazy music down this back alley somewhere in Harlem, you know, where Chicago. Now bluegrass is pretty identifiable. Can I process what you just said? Because I think it's really fascinating. And I didn't, I never knew this before. You're saying you could tell a person by their dialect, the way they talk. But if you ask them to pick up a fiddle before radio, before television, say play the fiddle for me. Yeah. And you could tell where that person is from. Yeah. Yeah, they could tell you. People who knew the music and had traveled, otherwise they just went, well, that doesn't sound like the fiddle we play around here. But if you know, if you were, if you knew, if you traveled around the South and someone started playing a fiddle, you could pretty much say, oh, that guy's from Northern Virginia. That guy's from Eastern Tennessee, you know, the styles were that specific. Can the same be said with rock? I mean, if you're very sophisticated, even with radio and records, would would Eric Clapton know where somebody is from just by listening to them play the guitar? No, no, because especially the electric guitar, because all that came out of, that was, that was a television phenomenon, you know, Bill Haley, and then Elvis Presley. So rock and roll went out everywhere at the same time. And everybody listening to a record, listening to the radio or watching TV just went, holy crap, you know, that happened in England. Obviously, the Beatles were, you know, the Beatles were just basically enamored with Chuck Berry, you know, they loved Chuck Berry, and all that stuff coming out. And then they sort of did it better and resold it to America, you know. But because, you know, that old bluegrass, that old timey country music, not the bluegrass, but, you know, the stuff they were playing with fiddles. And that was just what they did to entertain themselves after the, after the sun went down, you know. So when you're traveling, when you're traveling around Great Britain, are you hitting music clubs and listening? Are you a student, a curator of a certain type of music? Do you find connections? Can you not resist finding connections? No, not really, because I mean, there's other people who put on, you know, there are country music festivals and stuff here, especially in the summer. But basically, I'm just trying to be funny by, but by writing songs that are in a particular style and that style is country. So the musicians we have, they're all British, but they're all really, they, they all know their stuff, you know, a pedal steel guitar player who's one of the best, he's the best guy I've ever found in Britain, and he can hold his own in Nashville. And, you know, so, but what they really adapt that is, is, is make is, you know, coming up with stuff on the spot of being able to follow me, if I come up, well, I'll play this tune through once. This is how it's going to sound. They'll pick it up and start filling in, and then I have to start making up words. And that's, that's part of the show. The other part is just songs that we've written and worked on, you know. Are you funny with your music? It's very funny. It's very funny. And it's not, I'll tell you what I, you know, a lot of people go, oh, musical comedy. Oh yeah, okay, we hate it. It's crap. But I think that a lot of, that's changed a bit now because people have come, come along and, and like Flight of the Concords and Tim mentioned, and, and people like that who have sort of legitimized it. So, you know, it's not just going up there and doing a parody of smooth operator, you know, smoother vibrator. But we don't do that. We don't do that. But we follow the certain forms of certain styles of music, you know. So there's a trucking song. So I try to explain to the audience, for instance, that trucking songs are very, are pretty much a staple of country music. There's tons of songs about trucking, but there's no British trucking songs. And the reason for that is because it's not a glamorous profession in Britain because you have to get out and walk around and look for human cargo before you leave the terminal, you know, stowaways. So, so we've written a song called, we do a trucking song called Eritrean Trucking Buddy, which is just about the guy hanging onto the, hanging onto the axle while you're trucking across Britain. It's pretty, it's pretty dark. I pretend. But it's very jaunty, you know, so it's very happy to have a song. But then say, this is about human trafficking. So it's that, so there's, it's kind of like explaining these are, these are important things. This style of music is important to a lot of Americans. Why doesn't it work so much in this country? And then this kind of explains why, you know. What do you mean it doesn't, what do you mean trucking doesn't work? It's not a glamorous, what America is great at is taking, is mythologizing things. That's what America is great at. America can, you know, I'm not saying that being a trucker, I mean, in America, trucking is kind of a, you see truckers and you think, yeah, man, that kind of looks like fun. They're the modern day cowboys, you know. And they've sort of been mythologized. It's really probably a crap job. It's got to be, you know, sitting on your ass. You probably get thrombosis at 40. You know, the diet is, I mean, you've seen truckers, you know, but still to Americans are like, American country music can take trucking, you know, and turn it into like, oh man, I want to be a trucker. This song sounds great. Six days on the road. But you know, and it glamorizes everything and mythologizes everything. We've done that with history. We've done that with slavery. We've done, you know, for slavery was awful. But at the end of it, we got like, you know, a fucking Academy Award film out of it. You know, that's the subtle difference between American Britain. Britain is not interested in mythologizing its past. It's just interested in opening its wounds and bleeding for it, you know. So why do you think that is? It's just consumed with guilt. Why do you think England? Is it because you guys have a queen? So you have this built in? Don't say you guys. I'm American. That's right. I happen to be living over here with my English wife. Now I'm not, I'm stand out. So I think that's part of the reason I do well over here is I'm a bit of a novelty. Well, I'm American with a sense of irony. That's what a lot of people say. But which is fine. I'll take that as a compliment. But it's because they have a longer, I think Brits have such a long history of giants plucking their daughters out of villages, you know, wars and Hitler right on their door. And it's just, and in rain and monarchs and people, kings beheading people in crazy royalty. And I think they're just, they don't have that young kind of enthusiasm that America still has, you know, like, man, you can, you can do anything. Just work hard. You can make it. You can make it. Britain is like, eh, you're fucked. We're fucked. Everything's fucked. Nothing's going to work. We're fucked. So you can imagine that that's good for a sense of humor. These are Brits love to laugh. They love it when you make them laugh. They just throw themselves over here. They're like, you know, America, if you're funny, you get a high five. Hey, dude, that's really funny. In America, they're like, oh, thank you so much. Thanks. Please come to our village and live with my daughter. Because they do have a great sense of humor. They're just sort of dower the rest of the time. This is the problem with living in England is it's great being on stage. But then like the other 22 and a half hours of the day, wow, it's, it's, this is a country that just left Europe, just decided to leave Europe, but with no plan whatsoever. You know, even South Carolina had a plan. Except surely they sat around General Beauregard and, you know, Cephas and Cyril and they all said, well, here's what we're going to do. You know, we're going to, we're going to make a flag and we're going to get some ships. We're going to blockade the harbor. And, you know, we're going to print our own money, nothing, no plan. We're gone. Goodbye. And now they're just like sitting there going, what the hell do we do now? It's crazy. It's totally dysfunctional. But it's just kind of like, eh, you know, Belgium, I mean, the Europeans are, I mean, not the Britain is a European country, but it's kind of got a European sensibility. But their whole attitude is like, eh, well, we'll figure it out in a few years. Who needs the government? Belgium went like four years without a government, but with no simple government in Belgium. Really? They had a deadlocked presidency or whatever. And there was about four years where the government had to do nothing. And people didn't care. They're still having a good time. They just don't, they don't, they don't get that worked up about it. I mean, there's a bit, there's definitely this sort of populism versus elitist thing going on here as well as America. It's the same thing as people just fed up with the government, you know, and just going, well, screw them. But, but you can't get rid of one person in Britain the way you could conceivably in America, you know, because they don't elect, Britain doesn't elect, elect its prime minister. They elect the party in charge, and then the party appoints the prime minister. So it's a slightly different situation. You're not electing a, a, a, you know, a personality. You're electing a, a party, you know, a whole ideal. And I don't, it's, it's, it's boring. No, it's not, it's not, you know, there's a fucking smoking fireworks at Trump. He's hilarious. You can't write a joke fast enough that he doesn't, you know, he preempts it within two hours. That's, I find that exciting. I, you know, you can't make jokes about Trump the same way you could, you could with, you know, Clinton or Bush or anything. Trump is a whole different, it's a whole different ball game. What's the closest they've had to somebody like Trump in Europe or England? Um, probably Henry VIII. Yeah. He had a bunch of wives and is, you know, a bit full of himself. Uh-huh. But prime ministers, I don't think they're, no, there's never, no, prime ministers in this country are pretty dour people, you know. Nothing as colorful as Trump. Nothing as funny. Um, well, you know, there's Boris Johnson who's hilarious in his own way. But he's a comedian. A lot of people probably know who he is, right? If he was funny, he would be, but yeah, but he's just sort of blustery, kind of windswept, blowhard gas bag, probably wears a girdle. I don't know. He looks, you know, he looks like you, you just know there's something weird going on. He looks whipped cream off boys or something. But he's just got some, you know, they're all, people make fun of America. People go, oh Ivy League, but secretly Americans are all, you know, they're all pretty impressed if you're from an Ivy League school. And if you're not from an Ivy League school, and you've achieved something that's even more impressive, but this country is run entirely by people from Cambridge and Oxford. There's, there's really no other. That's it. Those are your, it's like, if you want to make it in politics, you go to Cambridge or Oxford, you know. And then you got lots of people saying, oh no, I'm a man of the people. I went to a regular school, but they're not going to get, they're not going to get in very far in office. It's always going to be Cambridge and Oxford. The old boys club. Yeah. And even in comedy, there's, there seems to be a bit of that too. Um, yeah, there's a lot of, yeah. Yeah, you got to put some of these comedians in their places. Is the class system still healthy in England? I would, I would never say call it healthy. It's just, I don't quite understand it. It's, it's kind of like what I said about the fiddle, you know, here, when you open your mouth, people can tell what's, you know, whether you're educated or not. Uh, and they are, and if you, if you're educated and you keep your accent, you grew up with, you know, whether that's an Eastern accent or a Northern accent, I mean, the accents change every five miles. You know, again, you can tell where people are from by the way they talk. And, um, so people make a lot of distinctions about you as soon as you open your mouth. Is that conscious that they keep their accents? Because in America, there was a time I'm living in New York now where I could tell the difference between somebody from the Bronx and somebody from Brooklyn. Those days have long passed because of mass media. Right. Is there a defiance in England where they hold on to their dialect? Because of, uh, yeah, well, see, that's part of that, that they do that to, to, to, um, reminiscrate the class that they are, you know, other people, hey, we're, we're, we're, I'm working class, we're always, we're working class, but that was working class. And you know, what are you, you just sound like a fucking idiot. Okay. You sound like something out of a caricature. Whereas the, what's it called? Received. It's called Received English or BBC. Basically, the BBC dictates how people are supposed to talk. Wow. And if you go on the BBC generally as a presenter or, you know, a newscaster or any of that stuff, they pretty much have to use what they call the BBC, um, accent, which sounds kind of educated, you know. Right. You don't get many people on who, they wash the accent out of you. Wow. So that's how the people who hold on to their accents do it out of a sense of defiance. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, I don't know if it's, you know, to, to, to exhibit that you're from working class roots or that you're from a specific part of the country. And you, you know, there's a North-South divide here, same as America. The North was always very industrial in the South, was kind of agrarian. And the South, you know, London is in the South. So every, you know, a lot of people think, you know, the same way about London that people think about New York. It's like, oh, oh, you're from the big city. Well, let me tell you, you don't know anything, you know? It's really what you don't have here is a redneck. There's no, thankfully, there is no, you know, Jeff Foxworthy here. There's nobody who's making a living just, you know, undermining, just basically making a living off the stupidity, the perceived stupidity of his people, you know? If you have more tires on your, there's none of that. There's no, there's no, if you have more brawlys, if you have more brawlys in your flat chair than you do in the bonnet of your car, you might be a wanker. I'm gonna, I'm gonna invent a new character. I'm gonna do. When we started talking today, you were saying that you could identify somebody by the way they play their fiddle. And now in England, people are holding on to their dialects to either make a point or be part of a tribe. We choose our identities in many ways, or at least we think we choose our identities. Yeah. And you must wrestle with that because you are an American, but now you're in England. You're wrestling with that. And how do you choose your inner narrative? What do you say to yourself? Do you say? Well, I don't have to because I'm a complete outsider. And I think that's, like I said, that's to my advantage. Nobody can make any class distinction, you know, and I open my mouth. The only distinction they make is yank America. And a lot, most Brits secretly love America. They, you know, they think the politics are ridiculous. They think that a lot of the crap that comes out, you know, movies and television shows and stuff is crap. But, but they, they love America. They love the optimism of it. They wish they could be that optimistic, you know. And so when I, when I talk, you know, it's nobody can make any distinction. I'm absolved of any class. They just figure, oh, this guy's American. He doesn't. But, you know, the guy beside me who might be, you know, a British friend of mine, they're, they're looking at him right away going, oh, I know where you're from. Or, you know, they figured him out right away. But I don't, it doesn't, I just can stand back and observe it. I don't have to, I don't, it doesn't affect me. I find it, I find it fascinating and hilarious and kind of just curious, you know, because it's a tribal, it's, it's like watching, it's like being in, it's like being in Africa. It's like, these people are just tribes. They're all British tribes. They're, you know, it's the town they're from and the football team they watch and they're incredibly viciously, viciously passionate about their football teams, you know. And they just don't get that it's, this is boring. This is a boring sport and you came, it was a tie. It was a tie. Nobody won. I was like, I know, but that's a result. No, that's not a result. I, yeah, but we got, we got one point for that. Oh, god. We got a point in the tables. So it's, it's, it's, you know, I, I went to a football match. I really had to see if it was as bad as I thought it was going to be 10 times worse, 10 times worse. People not even watching the game, just leading every, just they got their chance and they teach everyone the songs and the kids are singing along and it's, you know, just throwing bananas at black players. It's unbelievable. Unbelievable. Like guys, these guys are professionals. They're actually really good at what they're doing. It's an interest. It can be an interesting game. I don't, you know, it's, but the, the crowd is just like, you can't concentrate on the game because you're too worried that someone's going to throw something behind your head and, you know, a bottle, a rock, a hammer, I don't know, a banana, whatever. Is it fair to say that when you're in Great Britain, you're never going to get shot by a lunatic, but you have a very good chance of being cold cocked by a drunk or headbutted. Yeah, you got to watch out for that. It's never happened to me, but I have seen fights. I've seen guys headbutt. That's a, you know, I think that comes out of football. Could you say that because there's no fear that somebody's packing, you're more likely to get into a fistfight in England because it doesn't escalate. Kind of an open-handed slap fight. It's a bit, you know, the Brits don't know what to do with their hands. They've never touched a ball with their hands. So, you know, you get a lot of guys, you know, you get your hard men, they're called tough guys and hard guys, but basically they fight with their head, you know. Yeah, but the punch-ups I've seen are pretty much the same punch-ups you see anywhere. Somebody throws a couple punches and then, oh, I break it up, break it up fellas. And then the bobbies arrive and then everyone goes back to the bar and has another beer and an hour later they're fine, you know. Did you do that? Have you ever been in a fight? There's no fear of being shot. There's a lot of knife crime. There's a lot of violence in Britain. It just doesn't end up with someone being shot, you know. There's a lot of knife incidents. Yeah, I don't- You've got to watch out for it. You know, you don't want to get, you don't want to wander through the wrong. It's not, it's only a safer country in the sense that ultimately you probably won't die from an altercation, but that doesn't mean it's not a violence. Tons of, a lot of break-ins, a lot of crime, a lot of crime, particularly in London, you know. I guess I am speaking mostly for London. When did you fall in love? Are you in love? I'm not in love. I've never been in love with this country. That's why I, that's what makes my comedy funny over here. I could be critical of it because I don't love it. I, you know, it's like, it's like living in Philadelphia. Yeah. It's just kind of, wow, there's a lot of history here, but yeah, foot reminds me of Philadelphia in the winter. It's like Philadelphia in the winter. Well, Philadelphia, there's a distinct possibility you're just going to get cold cocked for no reason. I always felt that about Philadelphia that somebody's just going to punch you because they want to. Yeah. Yeah. And they, and they're evil, they're evil vicious sports fans in Philadelphia. They're horrible, horrible. I used to go to Philly's games and they throw stuff, throw stuff at the players in the outfield, just out of boredom. I bet I could hit that centerfielder. I bet I could hit Pete Rose. I mean, because Pete Rose was going up when he played at Cincinnati and moved to Philadelphia, so I'd go see him play. They just throw stuff at him. Well, they're yelling, hey, Pete, what are the odds on this game? It's an inside out. It's two over one. Now I got to get back to playing. Yeah, there you go. Britain like Philadelphia. Rich Hall, the hoedown tour and your BBC breakdown series on, it's on the BBC, is fantastic. One of the things I know is because you were kind enough to have me on the show and work with you. Twice. Yeah. Twice. You're the only guest we've had back twice. It was very weird because there's a live audience and we're doing it via Skype and it's bizarre. There's like this really hot crowd in England and I'm in New York talking into a microphone via Skype and I hear these, even for me, I'm hearing laughs and the timing is kind of weird. I think I know where the laughs are, but then that live audience, sometimes you're getting a laugh off a setup, so it's bizarre, but it's great. It's just fantastic. Yeah, it's interesting for them because they've been watching everything on stage and then they hear this thing on the screen, so they kind of reset. It's kind of got an interesting dynamic to it because, hey, where is this coming from? And nobody knows what you look like. They can't see the Skype. They're just hearing a distant but they're hearing you and they're forming their own. It's pure radio. They're making their own assumptions of what you look like and when you say I'm hunkered down in a basement in New Jersey, that's exactly what they're picturing, a frightened man hunkered down in a basement in New Jersey because Trump is taken over. So it creates an interesting scenario. I think that's why people like it. It's like hearing Anne Frank. It would be like if you were in a room and suddenly Anne Frank started talking from inside the cupboard. I think because you have a musical background, I was listening to the feed and the prep for the show was fascinating because you're very collaborative and you're very trusting of the people you work with. You're not a control freak. I hear you with me and the other people is you're bringing out the best in others and you trust that people are going to bring their A game and you don't try to micromanage. No. Is that a conscious decision or is that a musical background? No, I think that just comes from like let people improvise, let people just, right here's the script because the format of the show is people calling in. It's set in a fictional station in D.C. So the crowd obviously is live and they know we're not in D.C. Of course, but we're performing it as if people are calling in making phone calls or people coming on as guests. So they have to sort of go up and improvise these phone calls and they need to sound improvised. If you want to make it sound like any semblance of an actual call-in show like you hear on the radio, then you've got to have the pauses and then the way people act when they call in to a talk show and not just have this really tightly scripted thing because then you've got to give people that leeway and the best way to make them feel like that is to just say, look, throw something in. Let's wing it a bit, go off the script and make it sound more like a real conversation. There is a script and we'll get back to it, but something might happen in between. So that kind of makes it, gives it more of a facade of improvisation. The same with you. And when you come on, we also know that just do what you want to do and if it doesn't work, we're going to have to, the show is like only a half an hour and we're taping 45, 55 minutes of stuff. So don't put it together. Don't take stuff out that doesn't work and leave in what does work. So that's why I don't worry about it. That didn't work this will. It's something I worked on, you know, because I worked on Saturday night live and I learned then that man, wow, that first read through was like two and a half hours, you know, the read through is like four and a four hours. The first rehearsal, the tech rehearsal is, you know, like two, you know, and then, you know, let's get rid of this, let's get rid of it. We thought it was going to work, but it didn't work. But, you know, some stuff gets through, some doesn't, but you got to try it all. What I noticed with you both times I did the show, we're both turned on by something that doesn't work, right? It's kind of like, well, that's interesting. Let's live here for a few moments and see what that's about. Yeah. You don't gloss over, you don't gloss over something because it falls flat. You really want to poke the dead frog. Well, but you got to admit that's a way of acknowledging that it didn't work by commenting on it. You know, there's nothing worse than watching someone go up and do a joke and then it didn't work and they move right on to the next joke and both of you are, you're watching it going, hey, wait a minute, did you not notice that we didn't like that last joke? You know, I mean, when you've got the freedom to, when you've got the freedom to dissect what you've just done, you know, I can't imagine going on, you know, a late night talk show and doing that. I don't know that I've ever seen anybody do that where they just went. Well, Johnny. Johnny Carson. Oh, yeah, Johnny would, but any stand-up that they brought out, you had to do your set. And now, and then you, you know, you're doing a seven-minute set. You just have to go through it. You've rehearsed it. They've taken you around all the clubs and this is the seven-minute set you're going to do. You know, it was the letterman, you'd have to, if you were doing letterman, you'd have to go out four or five clubs a night, you know, and they would craft the set. So if you came out and one of the jokes didn't work, you just moved on. But there's got to be that fear that rattling around inside your brain that something didn't work and you have to recover. You have to recover or else it all goes downhill, you know, has happened. I used to do Conan back in, you know, when he was in New York and Frank Smiley and Paula Davis, great people. They really supported me. And my thing was that I'm going to be booed and they got that and Conan got it. And I did it scientifically. I knew there were 20 jokes I had to tell and I would just line them up and I would say, okay, on this one, I'm going to be booed. This one, they're going to laugh. Then they're going to really boo me here. This one is not going to get a laugh. But I have a saver that follows and they were totally into it. But here's the problem. I wasn't man enough before the show. When I got on and did it, I knew what I was doing. But I was not a man who had that confidence that it was going to go exactly the way I had outlined it. And I would have these massive panic attacks. But then I'd be on NBC and I got the boo and I go, oh, good, it's working. It's working. That's how crazy I was. I'd be going, oh, it's working. They're booing me. This is working. But it would be so emotionally draining because I wasn't famous. Right. You know, but even on your show, we got a nice boo. I did that joke. I love this. I don't know if you kept it in or not. There was a joke about and I came up with it while I was talking to you or you came up with it. I don't know that ICE is separating mothers from their children and the joke is really they're doing abortions and you lost it. You lost it and you said, put that in. And yeah. And we did the joke and they booed and I went, oh, okay, it worked. The joke worked because they booed. If they boo, if they boo a community, you're the, you're the comedy equivalent of pulling the, you know, the table in and out from underneath the stalkers. It's what? Did we just, the first time I ever saw you in Montreal, people, you know, people said, you got to see this guy because at the time it was kind of like it sees a right wing, total right wing sensibilities. And then, you know, you're going, where the hell is this guy talking? And then suddenly you just twist it, you know, and then you realize, oh, okay. And that was the beauty of, you know. Yeah. I had to stop doing the right wing persona because people actually believed that I was. Well, yeah. I mean, I could see where that was a built in problem. Yeah. That, that if you know, if you're not careful with that, then you end up with the wrong crowd backing you thinking it's like the Andrew Dice Clay thing, you know, not, not to say in any way you're like Andrew Dice Clay, but it's like, wait a minute, Andrew Dice, these people, these, this is a caricature. And then he suddenly had to really be that right character, you know, when Rush Limbaugh took off and I realized that there are consequences to what you say. I remember I was this pretend right winger and it was still when this country had liberals, then Rush Limbaugh took over and we went to war in the Gulf. I remember this vividly. We went to war in the Gulf in 91 and Rush Limbaugh didn't go on the air. And I thought, oh, you coward, you coward. It was freakish to go to war in 91. Back then, we were afraid of war. And I remember making a promise to myself saying, you know, words have consequences. And then I started doing Conan and I realized, okay, instead of being this faux right winger, I'm going to be a fake a-hole, like a fake, like a bad, the jokes will now be at my expense because I'm either stupid or immoral or a pervert or a deviant. I really, nobody would take that seriously and there aren't really consequences to an idiot saying things that he may or may not believe because that's really what politics is. It's guys like Trump saying things that they really don't believe and then they can say, well, I was joking. When I said, when I said Obama was tapping my phone, it was in quotation marks. I wasn't being serious. That's what Ann Coulter does. That's what Rush Limbaugh does. They say horrible things that they're not even sure whether or not they mean it. And when there's blowback, they just say, I'm joking around. It's reckless and dangerous. Or they say it and then they do believe that they mean it, you know. I mean, it could be either way. But Trump has also said things that I think he just pulled out of his ass at the moment and now suddenly has to back him up with actual, you know, he could very well just said, we'll build a wall. We'll build a wall. Yeah, we're going to build a wall. Thinking of, thinking, not having thought of it beforehand. It's like, oh, there's the answer. We'll build a wall. And now he's committed to building this wall because his words did have consequences. You and I could travel. I've done this with friends and comics, mostly comics. I would assume most people do this in the privacy of a car. You and I could have a conversation and take a stand that you're not sure whether or not you mean it. Yeah. And for 40 miles, you would hold on to this stand. The biggest mistake we ever made was giving women the right to vote. And I would go, uh-huh. And at the end of the conversation, I would know that you by talking to me and taking this ridiculous stand, you thought it out and obviously it doesn't hold any water and we move on. And I wouldn't say, hey, I just spent 40 minutes with Rich Hall and he thinks women shouldn't be allowed to vote. It's just you're working out either some comedy or an idea or you're just venting about your wife. These guys. Yeah. Or you're just, it's four guys. I mean, I used to, I actually used to say when he was running that everything Trump says is what drunk guys say on a trip back from the beach in a car, you know? Because with, he just says him out, he has no sense of personal boundaries, you know? Right. Uh, you, obviously the conversations you would have on a trip to the beach after a few beers with a bunch of guys or just suddenly you're, you just let loose, you know, you don't mean it. But when you're a politician, you can't, the things that come out of your mouth, people pretty much have for 240 years have learned to take as policy. Your word is policy, you know? I mean, countries in trouble when the president comes out and speaks, they're just listening to like, what's he going to say? Because whatever he's saying is important now. So you can't belittle that. And I think Trump just doesn't get that. So he just says, any old shit. And so now we have to figure it out. And then, you know, you see these Fox analysts come on and go, well, here's what you need to understand. I think it was Ann Coulter, someone like that came with it. What do you need to understand about Trump is when he, he doesn't always mean what he says. He says, you know, he means, and I'm sitting there thinking, Jesus Christ, this is the president. It's like, they're not trying to figure out Bob Dylan lyrics. It's not, it's not blonde on blonde, is it? It's like, whatever he says, people are taken at value, at face value. So you can't have, you can't spend four years trying to figure out what he meant, you know, when he said this. That's, that's, that's not what a politician does. It's what an artist does. You have kids, right? Yeah. I told my kids, you need to weigh your words based on where you are. They were able to go with me to, I've talked about this on the show. I took them to see Lisa Lampinelli. They saw, I don't even want to use the word foul because there's a time and a place, but I introduced my kids at an early age to Kenison, to Andrew Dice Clay. Once they started watching South Park and I had no control over that. I'm talking like seven years old and I come home and they're watching South Park and I, it was okay. I had no, I wasn't allowed to. And I said, okay, they need to know that there's context and a time and a place. They really are great because they're in their twenties now. And I would explain to them that you weigh your words based on where you are. Yeah. For example, the Wiltern Theatre in LA is where we went to see Lisa Lampinelli. It's also a church. They also use it as a church. So I said to them, you know, tomorrow they're going to have, this same place is going to have the cross and parishioners and it's not going to be Lisa Lampinelli. It's going to be a, the walls are going to be absorbing a completely different energy and sound. It would be inappropriate for you to talk like Lisa Lampinelli, you know, Sunday morning here. Yeah. And in England, you weigh your words, I would think very carefully when you're on the BBC versus when you're on stage versus when you're talking to your friends in a car or on a podcast, right? You can't be careless with your words. When you're on the BBC, they're much more important and you have to consider each word more carefully than you would right now. Yeah. Right? That. All right. Absolutely. Except, you know, the downside of that is it's almost, it's, it is getting to the point in certain environments though where the word, where your words are being weighed too much, way too much. Because, you know, where people take your words and then basically have formed a whole opinion that they disagree with. And so the next thing, you know, you're platformed, you know. I think it's, I find it scary to happen in both here and in America. This whole sort of no platforming thing, you know. I don't even know what that means. What is that? In colleges where they just, they don't allow someone to speak. They cancel their lecture or whatever because it offends somebody's sensibilities in school. You know, if somebody here said, you know, she was like an academic, I don't remember her name, but she basically just came out and said, if you're a transgender woman, if you're a man who's become a woman, you know, you call yourself a woman, but you're not a woman because you haven't lived as a woman. And then the next thing, you know, she's speaking at some university and they all just show up and say, oh, no, you have no right to speak for transgenders. That's her opinion. And she said it. But now they, you know, these are other people showing up who aren't transgender either, but they just feel like, well, we have to stand up for the transgenders. And who's to say they feel like women are men. And it just all becomes so consequently, you have people appropriating somebody else's you know, choice, sexual choice, you have tons of people appropriate that you also have people who are losing money because they were brought to come in and, you know, discuss an issue in a fairly open-minded environment, a university, which is supposed to be open to socratic discussion. That's what, you know, if you might as well enjoy it there because you're not going to hear it the rest of your life. And these people are being stopped now because somebody's feelings are hurt. Someone has deemed it offensive. Right. And that's, that could be really scary for, for comedians because, you know, up to this point, we've been pretty much absolved of all that. Comedians are pretty much allowed. We have more freedom of speech than anyone, which is why Lisa Lampinelli can go into a, a church because it's implied that everybody's coming to see her is there to, you know, to be entertained and to listen to what she has to say and probably assume that she doesn't really mean it. You know, there's all that they implied. It's a weird, it's a weird precept that, that comedians are, well, he sees comedians as a joke. And because we've, we've openly ex, we've openly stated that we make jokes. We're also implying that we're not serious. And therefore, nobody, it's very hard for comedian to get in trouble for almost anything he says, you know, but I don't know how much longer can that last, you know, why do we get that special dispensation to be able to say whatever we want. You can come out and say whatever you want, but you couldn't say that in, uh, you know, you probably can't tweet a lot of the things that you say in, in, in, in your shows. Because that's, that, that, which is just to go back to what you were saying, basically, it's the weight of those words. And then when they go out into the ether, ether sphere, the ether, you know, the tweet of Twitter sphere, whatever you call it, you got a whole lot of people who no longer realize that you're being funny. And then, you know, and then they start, then you get the death threats. That's why, that's why I'm not on Twitter. I've never been on Twitter or Facebook or any of that shit. Because I, I wouldn't have a career by now. With comedy, I actually tried an experiment recently to weaponize my sense of humor, where I consciously decided to hurt somebody with my words. Yeah. I, I'm, you know, I'm trying to wrap up this effing divorce. And I had, I had a bad experience with yet another divorce attorney. And there's nothing you can do with attorneys because this guy happened to be part of the bar association. And even if you report them to the bar association, they self police, right? So there's nothing you can do. And he knew I was a comedy writer. And I said, well, you know, comedy writers also self police. And when this stops being funny, I'll stop doing this to you. And I began to insult him. I got a list of everybody in his firm. I'm, I'm a very, so I just got the alphabetical. I'm going to roast this guy. He's a public figure. He was on entertainment tonight. You know, I'm free to insult him because he appears on entertainment tonight to talk about the divorces, you know. And I, and I got a list of about 20 associates and clerks who work at the law firm. I started roasting him, but mean. Like I just went, okay, I'm, I'm, I know what this guy is really self conscious about. And I'm going to roast him. I'm going to, it's going to be weaponized. And it's just going to be as mean as I possibly can go. I heard him. I know I heard him. What, do you mean financially? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I know that I hurt him emotionally. Yeah. Because he's a divorce attorney. He is a borderline personality. He's incapable of remorse. The only thing he fears is shame and being found out. That is, that's the, the type. That's, that's what a divorce attorney is. They're frauds. They're remorseless. The only experience they can have is shame and, and being exposed. And I decided as an experiment to just weaponize my comedy because what he did to me was so reprehensible and he did it knowing he could get away with it. Right. So, and I just kept going and I was relentless. I must have, I must have sent out 50 rose jokes over a one week. On Twitter or? No, no, just directed towards him. I created an email chain to everybody who works for him. All right. Ah, so I was humiliating him in front of all the people who work for him because it was an email chain. Right. And then I created these fake exchanges to undermine his confidence, right? Say, yeah, that one was funny. Thanks, Bob. So he's sitting there at the top of the firm going, who, somebody wrote back to him and said that was funny. Who, who did that to me? Who, um, anyway. Is it possible to do that to United Airlines because oh, they've ripped me off so bad. Can I? Yeah, what you do is, I don't know. What you do is you find, well, who are you mad at? United Airlines in general. They just basically screwed me over with my last, flying from London to Seattle last time. So I sat human on the plane, which never made it to Seattle. I had to go to Newark instead. It's a long, there's no point in getting into it, but, but I did write him letters saying, and I've never really used it. Do you know who I am? Angle before, but I basically said, listen, I'm a comedian. I'm above prosecution. And I am going to go out of my way to humiliate this airline every chance I get. And, uh, I never heard back from him, which I don't know if, if I, um, that's what I expect. I was half, I really wanted someone to write back and say, not, I just want to, I wanted a letter from a lawyer or something. I wanted somebody to acknowledge that, oh, okay, we're, somebody's taking this a bit, is taking this seriously on this end. I'm not going to get my money back. I know they're going to screw me over, but I just wanted someone to acknowledge that, oh, hey, look, don't try that or sue you. I didn't even get that. I didn't get anything. So I don't, you know, are you at your best when you're swimming in self-righteous indignation? No, not, not, not as far as being funny. No, that was clearly like, like you said, an attempt to, to weaponize my comedy and to use, use our, the one strength that we have, which is we, we are, we're above reproach, you know? I think it's very, very hard to be sued for, for making jokes. And I remember, in fact, I remember being a kid. I'll just say this. I remember being a kid and watching Ed Sullivan with my dad. And I liked most of the comedians who came on. And I, you know, I just thought that was like the best part of the show whenever, but when Alan King used to come out, my dad, everybody in the room just went, oh, he's going after, he's going after Piedmont Airlines. He was Piedmont at the time. He was jumping airline. Then it became Eastern and I don't know who they got absorbed by, but he said he's going to do Piedmont jokes. He's going to, and he would, he would just come, he would just rip into airlines. And that's, even as a young, I thought this guy's, this is a lot different than Red Skelton. This guy's actually vicious. I've been on Astro TV and making fun of an airline. Can you, I remember looking at my dad going, can he do that? My dad was just falling out of his chair. Go ahead and try their crap airline. And I was going, dad, is this, is this legal? Well, what was so great about Alan King was anybody can do political humor because we celebrate that. It's patriotic and it's all in good fun. You're not allowed to go after a corporation because they pay the bills. You can get sued. That's pretty daring to attack a corporation. And any person over the age of 30 who's experienced what Alan King went through with an airline or, you know, a car rental place, you know exactly where it's coming from. I'm going to get, I'm going to get these people, you know, the theme of this show seems to be, today, getting what you want. And I have this fantasy that you, Rich Hall, get what you want, that you do what you want and you get what you want. And it's not about compromising. You don't need to compromise. But for the most part, nobody really gets everything they want. But you have a lifestyle and a career that you then maybe consciously carve out, but your desire got you to where you currently are. Is that a fair statement? Yeah, I would say that's a fair statement. Yeah. Absolutely. In the sense that I probably sold out very early in my career and then never did it again in the sense I did some pizza hut commercials. That's the only time I ever feel like I sold out. But, you know, that's it. Other than that, that's the only huge mistake I've made. And I got paid a shitload of money to make that mistake. So nobody remembers them anyway. You know, other than that, I've always done exactly what I wanted to do. In fact, and I have to say I wanted to do that. I said, yeah, okay, I want to make some commercials. Let's see how it goes. I want to make these good. So at least I had a work ethic to it, you know. But looking back, that's the only time I ever feel like I did some, you know, I really did something for the money. I have a memory and I was drinking at the time so it may not be actual of you being on Letterman and he said, where do you live? And you said Montana. And he goes, really? Yeah, I have a place out there and I hang out there. That's when I'm my happiest there. And Letterman, this is how I remember it. Letterman didn't believe you. Yeah. And he thought you were messing with him. Yeah, he did at first. Yeah. They cut to commercial and Letterman thought you were playing with him and then cut to 15 years later. Doesn't he now own a place in Montana? Yeah, he does. He does. That's interesting. Next time I'm on, I'll tell you the greatest Letterman Montana story. It's a long story, but it describes Letterman perfectly what he was like, everything about him. But I'll tell you that when I next time I see you. Rich Hall, the hoedown tour. Thank you so much. I could talk to you. I could talk to you forever and I'm sure you felt it was. Please share this episode with all your friends. Copy and paste the link. Go to davidfeldmanshow.com. You'll see all the different platforms available to listen to this show. We have a YouTube channel. Not too many people subscribe to it, but it's a great way to share these episodes via YouTube or listen to the show via YouTube. Just go to YouTube type in David Feldman comedy. My channel comes up, hit the play button, then open up another browser and surf the web while you're listening to this show or go to davidfeldmanshow.com. All our old episodes there, the radio shows, the podcasts, they go back eight years. Please give us a good review on iTunes. That helps. Subscribe to us on iTunes. Subscribe to this show on Stitcher. Talk to your friends please about these episodes and share them. Share the laughs. Share the knowledge. Share the love. I'm working on a new album. It's called Pay What You Want. Go to davidfeldmanshow.com and pay what you want. Seriously, every month I'm posting a new 10 minutes of live stand-up and if you want to listen, download it. All you have to do to hear pay what you want is to pay a penny or a billion dollars. Pay what you want and you can hear the first 10 minutes. The entire album, Pay What You Want, is coming out November but like Larry King standing in front of a urinal, it's being released in bits and dribbles. 10 minutes here, 5 minutes there and if you want to listen to each track as it gets assembled and put into the album, pay what you want. Go to davidfeldmanshow.com. You'll see a banner for Pay What You Want. Click on it, then pay what you want to hear Pay What You Wanted. Pay a penny or a billion dollars. Go to davidfeldmanshow.com and pay what you want. I have a hook. Mark Marin talks to performers and devils deep into their psyche. Some douchebag does a show about history. I do my show alphabetically. This week on Tuesday we had David Tell, Dean Abedaya and now Dave Anthony is joining us from Los Angeles. Hello, Dave Anthony. Hi, I actually do a history podcast. You do? Yeah. Like the dollop, there's a show called Like the Dollop. These two douchebags tell stories about it. Yeah, that's good. I'm one of those guys, yeah. Right. And douchebags are good. They keep... Generally, it's not a term that people use as a good term. Well, you've never been around somebody who needed a douchebag and they're actually quite... They're good. They're healthy. I recommend some people need douchebags and it was a compliment. Welcome. Huh? No. Okay. I just think you need to work on your compliments, but okay. Well, let's move on. Okay. I didn't know that you hosted the dollop, which is a very... I do. Oh, okay. It's very popular. Congratulations on the success. Let me introduce you. And when I say douchebag, I mean, you're one of the clean comics who's out there. You're purifying is what I'm saying. I am purifying. I would agree with that. I cleanse people of their sadness. Yeah. And that when you go on before a headliner, there's... I feel like the audience has been washed clean and they're ready for something. I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but... Dave and... I would say... Oh, go ahead. I would say I set up. I would say I set up if they're... I don't open anymore, but if I did, I would say I would set up for the headliner very well by getting the crowd into comedy and laughing and focused. Well, we'll talk about this as the interview continues. Some comics might think you're disrespectful and don't honor what came before you by pissing on what's coming on after you. In other words, some would say that... And this is just what some people say. They say that Dave Anthony, when he opens for a headliner, doesn't respect the men who built the comedy scene and made it possible for them to be funny. And then they poison the well and make it impossible for the act that made it possible for Dave to be funny, for the act to be funny, who follows Dave. Do you understand what I'm talking about? Barely, barely, but I think what you're talking about is a general description of a weak headliner. Yeah. I mean, that is one way of looking at it. Another way would be a middle act who only cares about himself. A malignant narcissist who wants to blow the headliner off the stage so he can headline. I mean, that's how some people would view it. Well, I mean, I think you have to contend with sort of all things when you're out there. And sometimes you're going to get that. And sometimes it's not like the person's trying to destroy the room that hard. It's just innate within them and their abilities that that just happens. Well, I mean, some people who might have seen the show that we're talking about, and we're not talking about anything specific. We're just talking about a generic show that took place. I don't know. Let's just say the week of Christmas in Las Vegas. Some would see the middle act opening for his hero. And yeah, go ahead. I just I just feel like there's some words being used that maybe shouldn't. I think I think go ahead. Co co worker is a better word than hero. I wouldn't say hero. I think people who were in the audience and would look at the middle act in the headliner, they would certainly see that the middle act had unresolved at a poll issues and was trying to literally kill his father by taking out the headliner by working in a certain way that made it impossible for the headline to follow him so that the middle act could then go home and bed his mother. So if I understand what you're saying, the headliner couldn't follow them, the middle act. No, I'm saying that the marquis de queensberry rules of stand up insist that the middle act and the headliner obey certain. How do you put customs and so like a dual. So the way and I do enjoy a philosophical discussion about stand up the way that you're you're approaching this is that the feature act the middle act should sort of cater to the weakness of the headliner. No, he should try to absorb the strength of the headliner and learn from him is what I'm saying. So sometimes I think there's a I think sometimes with certain acts that come along their features and and they're moving up that they have a very they have a very natural style and they're very much themselves on stage and I think that that that throws off headliners who are very stilted and joke oriented and not themselves and it is sort of an awkward persona. So the the juxtaposition between those two things it's very hard for a headliner to follow someone who is very natural on stage and very much themselves. When you say natural on stage you mean unable to write a joke. Well I wouldn't I wouldn't say that that's a bit much I would say there's there's different types of comics and I think that some comics are storytellers and within their stories there's natural jokes whereas other people force jokes and you know it doesn't come across as a fluid sort of act. So I think the people who might have been to this show that we're just talking about in the abstract would look at the middle act and say well he tells stories because he can't get a laugh. He likes to hold the stage but he doesn't really listen to the audience the same way he doesn't listen to the headliner when the headliner makes a request this featured act doesn't listen to the headliner the same way he doesn't listen to the audience to hear whether or not he's getting laughs he just does what he wants. I would certainly say that the headliner had more time to listen because there was more quiet time when he was up there so he could certainly listen to the audience more than the feature act who there was much more laughter and activity happening but also the feature before the feature took this gig hypothetically speaking told the booker that he he had heard the reputation of the headliner and he was going to swear because that's how he is in real life and so he wasn't going to change his act for anyone hypothetically. Right and the headliner hypothetically this is just you know an abstract philosophical conversation you know can god make a middle act so crappy even he can't watch it that's basically this is the age old question that we're discussing can god make a middle act so reprehensible to both the headliner and the audience that even god would have to grow intestines so he could throw up that feels like first of all not a religious person so I can't really say but I feel like that's sort of been proven it can happen because there are headliners like that specifically who work at X caliber around Christmas so not only can that exist but it can move on to be a headliner for really no justifiable reason other than sticking around yeah so and this was the X caliber the week of Christmas when people who are god fearing might want to think about the fabric of the universe praise our lord and savior and honor those who came before and after them by you know doing what they're told so so what you're saying is is that people who believe in god yes now we're going to listen to should listen to a not very good sort of by default act ahead of them I'm saying that the week of Christmas the show that we're because because of our lord Jesus Christ yes and that transubstantiation insists that the middle act would be the sacrifice the body of Christ who the headliner offers up to die for the audience's sins invasion shouldn't shouldn't the headliner being the top in the situation be the one who makes the sacrifice no it's a opener middle headliner the headliner would be the father the middle act would be the son the sacrificial lamb who he sends out before the audience to die and the holy ghost introduces the the son of the of the father okay so so so the father would prefer that the son not do well as a comedian exactly and fail so that the headliner can look better because that because the headliner is is not that good no this is foretold in the comedic scriptures that in order for god the headliner to bring heaven on earth the middle act must die for to expiate all the sins of the audience so that the audience is then entitled to have the joy that god can give them god being the headliner they can sit at the feet of god but they have to earn but you know in in this specific case that joy never comes well if jesus had washed washed over with sadness yeah because that's almost like the audience is continually being hammered on the cross and and feeling the intense pain of nails being driven into their hands and feet because jesus is a bad son who doesn't listen to his father and doesn't do what he's told to do and god could have fired jesus god could have said look i'm sending you home from vegas you little prick because i've been doing this since before you were born but i know you need to make money jesus so i'll let you continue your rabbinical preachings but watch it jesus jesus was happy to walk because god was being a fucking asshole so jesus was like look i don't need this shit i don't need the money i can just go home i don't care so jesus didn't really care yeah that's the problem with jesus basically and jesus has pissed off a lot of people i mean you're not yeah i mean jesus this wasn't the first time jesus had pissed off another god i mean this headliner wasn't the first god to be pissed off by this hypothetical there were plenty of other gods zeus athena i can i have a whole laundry list of gods who've you've pissed off jesus is irritated there's a reputation of not doing what he's told jesus first of all jesus isn't there to be told by other gods what to do jesus is there to do what he wants to do and if you don't like it jesus can leave jesus doesn't give a shit why didn't jesus leave why didn't jesus leave because jesus offered to leave but then jesus got a call from his his agent that said please stay we can't have you leaving in the middle of the week we can't replace you and that made jesus yeah and that made god look bad that made god look like a vindictive prick who who was weak you know and yeah all right well maybe god needs to take a look at himself yeah well joining us from los angeles is dav anthony and uh we can't be in the same room together uh for reasons that i will explain later he and i love to talk theology and that was invigorating thank you for that dav yeah that was fun i enjoyed uh i always enjoyed it yeah it's good to talk about religion and dav anthony is a comedian a douchebag and i mean that in a positive way okay an ass wipe because with that now that's uh no go ahead no you're an ass wipe in other words you you make it possible for people to walk and sit without being in pain generally it's not considered a kind term dav is a comedy writer he's a podcaster he's written for a mc's talking dead maron i have c's maron for which he was nominated for uh writer's guild award he has appeared on jimmy kim alive as a comedian the late late show with craig kilbourne late friday as an actor he's appeared on the office men of a certain age entourage maron las vegas las vegas that reminds me of a story in las vegas i was headlining the x caliber and anyway and he has a new book out it's going to come out may 9th 2017 and i am going to buy it on amazon oh not because i like the book i just want to put mom and pop bookstores out of business i feel every time i use amazon i'm hurting main street absolutely and then also you the added benefit is that there's a poor worker in a hot hot warehouse running around putting books and boxes on a time limit this book is called it all seriousness i can't wait to buy this the united states of absurdity untold stories from american history it is written by dav anthony who's on with us today gareth reynolds with a forward by paton oswald yes he is a young upstart patona paton oswald what patent patent patent oswald patent oswald yeah and the book is based on the dollop a biweekly american history podcast every week dav anthony reads a story to his friend gareth reynolds about history and this is a very successful podcast it's uh won a lot of awards especially yes flappers podcast of the month i understand we got that we got that yeah that was a big one that's a feather in the cap it was uh it's listed as australia's seventh favorite podcast uh yeah hey congratulations in all seriousness on the book and on the podcast why did you pick history uh i've always been into just reading history uh it's always probably my favorite topic so i just always am online reading crazy history stories and i used to do a podcast where i talked about myself all the time and i just got tired of it and i thought oh maybe maybe it'd be cool to just do a history podcast and then it just kind of coincidentally happened that i read a story to garith and then we just after the first episode decided that was the podcast so this was the before you were doing it with greg barron this is after i'm saying is you read you read the history to garith i'm walking the room oh so it was right around the same time so yeah i had garith on an episode of walking the room then after that i was like hey i'm thinking about doing this other thing and we recorded two at the same time and uh and then that was you know the start of it yeah and and walking the room you're not doing that anymore no i there's only so much you can talk about yourself before it's tiring uh the rumor that i'm spreading is you greg couldn't stand you anymore you wouldn't listen to him he asked you not to do certain things and you got into a vicious fight that's the rumor that i'm starting are there any legs to this rumor that i can get going it's completely fine then and the true rumor and i would like to add that i gave him cancer you are uh but you know we bonded during the riders guild strike there was a little tension between us but then 10 years ago we were walking the picket line together and we kind of realized we have a lot in common yeah do you think that's why we didn't get along in las vegas do you think it's because it was like yin and yin and yet you know there were two two the same charges yeah i think we're both uh stubborn and uh want to do what we want to do and and what things do we want them and if anybody challenges us on it we we fight back but you're not a great combo but i was gonna say you're not as self-destructive as i am but i think you might be i think you might know i i used to be i'm not anymore but i used to be very self-destructive yeah and when when you when we had that fight i was that was totally in the middle of my self-destructive period right because i could have eased i could have easily picked up the phone and said yeah i'll work with felon and i don't have to swear i'll work it out but i was just like i'm doing what i do fuck him well i one of the reasons i thought of you and i wanted you on the show is i had uh david telon tuesday and i was talking about the f-word and how i have this thing where i just don't want the opening act to say the f-word of why well i just i bet my listeners are gonna hang themselves if i talk about this so i will talk about it because it will heighten their orgasms so get your bells out here we go it's time for david's lecture about the f-word turn on your porn and start stroking i just feel as a comedy as a comedy writer i i hear the f-word and i feel it poisons the room and i don't want to perform when i hear the f-word i just go i don't want to i don't want to do this no really yeah i don't want to do stand-up when i hear the f-word on stage now you understand that's a bizarre reaction right no i think i'm right i think if you i do i think if you were to ask the greats i think if you were to ask like steve martin or woody allen they would agree yeah that's my theory uh it's an interesting theory um yeah i mean i look i can see how people wouldn't want to have people swearing in front of them somewhat but i think that i think that your reaction is a bit over the top because it sounds like you're shutting down yeah yeah like almost like a almost like a child shuts down emotionally or something bad it draw if you really want to get to me if i walk into a club with a woman and you say i really want to sabotage david feldman go up on stage and say the f-word instead of effing my girlfriend or the woman i'm with say the i'll be more upset if you say the f-word on stage than i would if you were if you stole something that i was trying to bed seriously because at least that's an act of love sex now but the f-word it's just a can be um it can be anyway but i go ahead i i get that you don't want it said but you but you see how your reaction is over the top right but it's not um it's it's i'm not screaming i i'm kind of wormy about it actually like i never well like i do you yelled at me at x caliber did i yell i thought i went behind yeah yeah we oh no we were out and that we got we got into it out in front of the club i don't remember i remember hiring a prostitute uh and attaching a body cam and sending her up to your room and then taking the video and sending it to your fiance i remember doing that but i don't remember i don't remember confronting you well you did confront me and then afterwards you sent a prostitute to my room yeah and uh i didn't know what was happening a woman just walked in the door when i opened the door and she came in and started taking off her clothes and uh i said this isn't i haven't ordered this and she said well you did honey and you got to pay and uh i said well i didn't and then she got her whatever he is pimp dispatcher on the phone and the guy said uh well you got to pay up you ordered and i said like i didn't order and they said is this the number you called from no actually that's your number david so you knew that i did that after a little while yeah as the things weren't going well with my fiance and i as it was but that didn't help as i recall looking at the video 200 to 300 times you said okay and i quote i dav anthony will engage in sex with you misprostitute and then you took your hands and started squeezing her neck and you said let me know when it gets to 300 dollars i'm sorry that's you know what that's a that's a bit from that's ray james told me that i used to do that in my act and i went really i did that on stage wow that's a good one i'd go to you're surprised you did that on stage i've never seen your act i'm kind of surprised i did that that must have been the 80s when i was just finding my character i can't imagine what that's the thing about you being upset about swearing is you you would do jokes like that which are horrendous well and the ones that were really bad you would give to larry bubbles brown well i mean i i'm sensitive enough to know that you know i was with a prostitute i put my hands around her neck started squeezing and said let me know when i get to 300 dollars i mean theoretically that joke is funny because it's okay it's offensive to prostitutes and women but it's also you know i'm cheap it's in many ways the joke is at my expense i would i would say not at all but you know i stopped doing it anyway let's go back to your podcast okay by weekly does that mean twice a month or twice a week it means both it does if you look it up in the dictionary it means both things the definition is by yeah the definition it's a by definition so and i have had many even argument with a fan about it so does your podcast come out twice a month twice a week it comes out twice a week twice a week and what day of the week it comes out on a sunday nights and wednesday nights at midnight basically and how did you pick those days of the week i'm curious was it scientific no it was more uh convenience not scientific at all well the dollop is i figured people would want a podcast when they're going to work so sunday night well that's good yeah that's a good idea a dollop is a lot of work you actually have to do research and it's a ton of work how much time do you have to prep how much time do you have to put in depends on the story sometimes they can be 20 hours sometimes it can just be five 20 hours to do what a one of the stories to put it all together so for example the the story about the meat and the rain that one was a quick one that one didn't take long at all well it seems to me the stories that i've heard when i've listened to the podcast and then i get jealous and i turn it off yeah that's that i feel like that happens with you with a lot of stuff yeah the the crazy picture you were telling this great story about a crazy picture in baseball these are lighthearted stories right you're not sometimes a lot of them are pretty dark um we did one on the iraq war that was pretty dark we did one on ferguson i was really dark well african-american right that's we don't say dark i know you're from you're from san francisco aren't you yeah not oakland and and san francisco is a racist city so it is uh how do you put your definition of racist i think san francisco oh yeah there's oakland and san francisco and right oakland is where the african-americans live and right and then san francisco there is an african-american community but it was more ghettoized it's changed i'm talking about when i first moved there i noticed that there were the projects in san francisco and then there were the african-americans who were thriving in oakland is that okay that's true is that a fair statement yeah yes that's a fair statement ergo san francisco is racist okay and so that's it did i win the argument yeah i mean i'm using like insanely insanely general terms for yeah absolutely i mean if you can get the most base simplistic idea of what what racism is then i think you've nailed it you're a liberal i know that and you're a union guy yeah and your heart's in the right place it is but but but i think it gives you license to be a prick oh yeah i think a lot of us are liberals i think you and i have something in common i think you and i are basically rotting inside in our hateful individuals but we think if we vote for bernie sanders we can get away with how badly we treat everybody i mean i wish i denied that it's sort of it's sort of spot on how close are you to ray james uh i mean i haven't i haven't talked to him in ages were you best friends with him at one time we were pretty good friends in in san francisco yeah ray is a great comedy writer and he got me into the roasts he was used to oh yeah yeah and we shared and ray and i shared an office together it was people would knock on the door to ask if everything was okay because we would just get into these screaming matches they were like warm up exercises by the way he's somebody who i genuinely i mean i'm ashamed to say this he opened for me at the punchline in san francisco when i was first starting a headline and it was worse i just remembered this the experience yeah did you know about that experience yeah of course what do you remember from that i remember you guys got in a big fight right yeah but we're like brothers yeah but you guys are the same it's the same thing it's just this stubbornness and and the the absolute idea that you are correct and there's no other way well i there there are a couple of people david cross was one of the people i got into it with because what they do is they go up before the headliner and they're funnier than the headliner in a way that the headliner wishes he could be funny but this bourgeois middle-class headliner in a suit and hair transplants has a wife and kids he's trying to feed so he's now compromised his integrity and is doing like his cruise ship material so he can go home and feed his family and the the middle act who's out there on the edge daring and challenging the audience the headliner becomes jealous that he you know he feels old and irrelevant but but this just sounds like the headliner shouldn't be doing comedy which makes the headliner even angrier it's that which is you he becomes frightened and fearful and yeah and lashes out sure that's what yoda taught me it just feels like it just feels like other people shouldn't be punished for those poor choices when i'm frightened i lash out don't you uh yeah yeah for sure like you have kids right i'm gonna i'm about to just say the most horrible thing in the world god help me don't i don't want to do this joke but it's i can't help myself i'm honey i hit you because i was worried that you i won't do this just the kind of shit that you used to do in your act and then you'd talk about people swearing and yeah it's insanity no it isn't it isn't because it's harder to be up in front of an audience and justify not that i would ever do this and i apologize just speaking hypothetically defending hitting you know there's nothing funny about hitting a kid i mean that kicking a kid is hysterical but no there's nothing i'm sorry there's nothing funny about hitting kids kids are precious blah blah blah i mean that uh no i have a palsy shake i wasn't making the jerking off motion when i said i mean that uh i think it's kind it's difficult to be on stage and say horrible things and live in the audience's reaction and challenge them i think that's hard to do i think the f word though is easy is that a fair i think that's a fair statement right yeah i think that i think that's a fair statement but i also think it as you go on in common i think it's it gets it's easy to sort of offend the audience with those kind of dark jokes than it is to just be natural we're going back yeah we're going back to that oh i don't and i want to talk about the dollop because i'm genuinely impressed with it it's a great podcast and i want to talk about history i'm just saying i guess you know your show is about history and some people study history you rewrite it especially events and san francisco no i i confess i confess that i was threatened by you you made me feel uh like a sellout you made me feel like i was this this journeyman cruise ship comic who didn't take chances anymore but in my defense uh in my defense i have a narrative which is i'm gonna be as offensive on stage as i possibly can without using any of the language that would offend an audience in other words you can send me home from a gig and say i was offensive but you're never going to hear me say any words that are offensive the only thing you're going to find offensive about me are my ideas okay that's fair and that that's the game i play so i would talk about necrophilia and cannibalism i wouldn't do in all honesty i wouldn't touch the the child stuff but you know that that's out of bounds but i would always tackle difficult issues and i still do and the game is i'm going to offend you but i'm going to use the queen's english right which but then why did you why did you call your album uh the big cunt yeah well there you know fat was it that's gotta be the word you hate the most uh i feel like i just threw a nuclear bomb at you no in fact i do recall saying to you and i said this i said feel free to use the c word or the n word just don't i do i i don't have a problem i i think they're harder to say right well it's the case sound at least no i um because you're taking a chance by using the c word and the n word right especially if you're opening for whoopie goldberg feel free to go ahead and use but the f word is not it's faux to me it's faux edgy it's fake edge sure everybody uses the f word you know yeah i never you know i never uh used this i did this joke i'm i'm panicking i'm doing a joke that i did on kurt metzger's podcast they asked me have you ever done race wars no they asked me if i ever use the n word and uh i said not anymore and they go why'd you stop i said well i i'm i don't i don't stub my toe anymore i'm much more careful in the middle of the night when i get up to pee i i don't stub my toe so there's no need to say the n word well they thought that was the funniest you're the patent called me afterwards oh my god he said to me patent is so insightful about comedy he wrote yeah he said you were so great that was so funny i gave up on you in 2013 and he was right and i went how did this guy know is he the nsa is he monitoring me how does he consume so much information to know that i wasn't funny in 2013 that my marriage was falling apart and i was you know how did he know and there was like this period this two-year period where i kind of stopped doing stand-up and you know my family life but how did he know that i was i guess everybody knows that you're not funny are you always funny when do you know if you're funny uh what do you mean on stage or do you go through i mean you're not a kid anymore right are there seasons like you have seasons where you're not funny no i feel like i've hit a phase now where like i can take a lot of time off and just go back up on stage and and i feel like i don't miss a beat like i feel like i've been doing it long enough that when i when i do it now it's just it's kind of always at the same level and with the podcast people are coming out to see you now right you're a known commodity it's it's really crazy yeah it's really it's not really big tell me tell me what that's like i have no idea what that would be like seriously it's very weird because you know i i haven't had this until now you know later in life so i think i enjoy it more but it's um it's sort of shocking that all of a sudden now people act like i'm a celebrity and and afterwards they come to meet you and they're shaking and i'm like hey you guys it's just a podcast i'm just talking to a thing my audience my audience shakes too after a show but you can do the joke with there are many ways to go with that there's so many ways to go yeah i'm not gonna i i guess it's hilarious tremors would probably be kinder than the park go ahead go ahead sorry um so yeah yeah it's very strange it it it i don't think because it took me so long to have like you know we're doing thousand seat theaters and stuff and to to take this long to get there in my life it i just think it's it's sort of something i appreciate more you're doing a thousand seat theaters live versions of the podcast and stand-up what what is this i'm not doing i don't i'm not doing much stand-up um i do it around town but i don't go out on the road and do stand-up really so we're just i just mostly i just do the podcast so i'll i'll go down to australia every couple years and do a one-man show at a festival but that's about it a thousand seat theater to do your podcast it's crazy that i mean that has to be the greatest feeling in the world all kidding aside you know i'm teasing you congratulations because you really built something yeah on your own i mean it's so few people pull that off in in in show business it's uh it's a very i still drive around and i'll be like i actually made something that people really like like it it's still kind of sinking in the fact that i came up with an idea and it worked and you know i have the perfect co-host it just kind of all came together so it's a very strange thing to to have come up with an idea and it worked and now i'm doing these big theaters and all these people like it it's it's uh it still hasn't really sunk in i guess if the show i know it's video i know because i'm able to watch it on youtube but it's mostly audio is that a fair statement it's audio yeah if the show or video would it be as popular i i think that it being audio makes it more interesting right i think that i think that it's much more interesting because i think that with a story particularly when you're talking about maybe the 1800s and 1700s people are imagining it in their own minds and i think if they're watching something it's not the same thing i think it's but i also think theater of the vagina is what they call i think exact term it's just slightly off go ahead so and where do you think people are listening to to your show in the car at home it's it's funny yeah it's gonna there's a lot of people listen to the car a lot of people listen to work and strangely a lot of people listen to podcasts when they're going to sleep certainly mine hang on hang on i have to do something which reminds me send five dollars to david feldman post office box 1313 new york new york one double oh six five send five dollars to david feldman vote for donald trump vote for donald trump it already happened and it went great oh no this is a rerun oh yeah this is a repeat from uh october of 2016 sure that's how good the show was you were so good i'm rerunning just understandable and a huge trump fan and the fans like what cities do you go to uh this weekend we're doing new york and boston you're gonna be in new york yeah we're doing we're doing uh the highline ballroom we're doing two shows on friday this friday that's when the show drops oh shit there you go well plug please plug away well it's sold it's sold out boston uh is not sold out though so the next night okay still i think so saturday night the saturday tomorrow yep boston at the wilbur the wilbur still about a hundred hundred tickets left it's crazy right wow and if you mention the david feldman show it's an extra dollar we're doing a little promotion here or or they just don't sell you the ticket one or the other so you're gonna do the podcast at wilbur theater and where are you doing in in new york at the what the highline ballroom we're doing two um 639 it's a smaller theater but uh it's like 450 or something and you're taping it live and it'll air yeah so we just tape it and then and then we put it up you know as a regular podcast that week that must be so great it's kind of like better than stand-up because you can do exactly because you can do exactly what you want and stand-up we could never do exactly what we wanted when we were stand-ups because there was always some douchebag in front of us who oh no uh right it's no you can't you can't as a stand-up you you can't it's very hard to make that point you want to make particularly politically or socially without the audience getting offended or being somehow weird or you being preachy but when you do a podcast you can do that and the audience is there to hear it and they like it so i've never experienced this but i have experience is writing for television where the host has a built-in audience and they will go wherever the host wants him or her to go yeah so if you were famous which you are from this podcast if you were famous as a stand-up like lewis black then you can take the audience in directions that you couldn't go if you were a generic comic that's right and as comics the guys at our level when we go out most of the people there aren't there to see us right they're there to see comedy right so we have a harder time but if you're louis ck you can kind of do whatever you want and when you can do whatever you want it's a two-edged sword it can either be self-indulgent or art it's up to you right it's up to you to do it and to challenge your stuff self because you're not being really challenged anymore are you they'll they'll kind of eat up whatever you do so you're the one else to push yourself and how are you dealing with this on the podcast so people show up they know you they love you they're there to see you do you give them what they want or do you pull a Feldman and push them away what's the one thing i shouldn't say and then you keep saying it over and over again and no i would have done that 10 years ago but now we i try really hard to give them what they want and you prepare and each show is you're doing two shows is it the same show are they two different episodes like i'm a two different completely different yeah that's incorrect congratulations is the the guy the guy read it to he can't know what the story is so he if i did the same story it wouldn't have the same right and he is the audience yeah he's the audience yeah that's great congratulations if i didn't you know if i did happiness for others i would be happy for you it's just not part of my repertoire i i i know you know that about me uh no i i know that you're gonna after after we finish this you're gonna go into your bedroom and punch your genitals well those days are over if you know what i mean that ship is sailed she got them she got it all baby punching my genitals that's a good name for a podcast it's probably very successful punching my genitals i think that's a good a good a good uh well before you go tell me about writing the book did you have to sit and type did you no so we so we got a call from a publisher and they said we want you to take stories that you've done on the podcast and and and put them into a story form for the book and so i since i'm so busy with the podcast my partner who is also a writer so he just kind of took over and and he he's the one who did all the typing and and turned them into you know book form stories hmm and you're getting paid to do exactly what you want yeah that's the crazy thing i've never known that feeling i'm being serious i'm being serious until now i didn't until now you know we we we take these writing jobs and we take whatever we can get and it's it's you know you're like this is you know it's kind of fun but it's also bullshit but this is the first time i'm like i'm doing i'm doing something i like doing which is reading and and going through history and then i'm making it funny with a friend like it's it couldn't be better honestly can i ask you a an embarrassing question sure okay how many times a week do you and your wife no um um do you have a my prejudice prejudice with you is that you're a raw nerve you're funny you're angry and you're appealing but you're not savvy when it comes to business that it's just something i assume because i've just decided that about you i decided i okay so that's interesting so i wasn't but this podcast has made me become savvy about business like it's forced me to figure out how to do business and so and so i have become like people are like well you're really good at the business side of things which it just forced me to do because i you were right i was always very bad at the business side of things the difference i'm just thinking about me i am not a good businessman but i always thought i was because if you were to meet me in san francisco i was well shaven well spoken i dress nicely i i know i made enemies with the audience on stage but i never stood up to the power brokers right right i was i'm slicker than you right is that a fair statement yeah and that oh for sure because i always stood up to the power brokers and i was always causing problems with those people so i'm thinking that yeah i went down the well trotted path of do what you're told you know challenge the authority or give have the veneer of being a rebel but you know don't really rock the boat and i got to a certain level and you don't get any further doing that whereas you can you stuck to your guns right i did i yeah i did stick to my guns it's one thing that i looked back on and i go i i did what i wanted to do and i i even though i caused a lot of shit i also didn't take a lot of shit from people and i didn't if i wasn't being treated well then you know i i move on and i probably tell them to fuck off at the same time i want to can i i know we're out of time i'm gonna get into trouble with you and my producer but do you mind if i just go down this line of questioning for a second sure you don't take any shit ray james pretty much ray james doesn't take any shit right i always act like i don't take any shit but when there's money on the table like a job where i have to pay my rent and support my ungrateful family i take i'll eat shit well i think that's how most people are and i think that i think that with me it it almost isn't a conscious decision like it's just built in there and for whatever reason it it always worked out like i always i was always able to pay the bills and did okay um and i honestly think that's why i got hired on marron because marron was looking for a guy who had that attitude of he didn't take shit and and was going to be very honest in the writer's room and all that stuff i mean i i'd rather writers would get really pissed off of me when i would just be like nope this one sucks yeah yeah oh that's interesting because in a writing room you can't i mean conventional wisdom is you have to think of the team and yeah and compromise i mean being on a writing staff unless you're the head writer or the star you have to compromise your ideals and not speak up you can grimace a little but we're a team and everything gets a little watered down you won't do that no because i'm there to make something good and if it's not good then i don't that i'm going to say something and if people don't like that then i'll move on to the next thing like i don't need the job i can find another job i can do something else do you want to make good stuff do you get scared in a writing room when you take a stand because this has happened to me sometimes i'll take a stand and i'll win but i'm part of a team i'm not in charge and i'll i'll take a stand and i'm utterly convinced i'm right but then i'm worried that i'm wrong i don't get worried i'm wrong i i think i'm right sometimes i am wrong though but i i don't get worried that i'm wrong like i i generally just think like okay i know this is the wrong way to go and this is the right way to go but there's definitely been times the final product i've been like well i lost that battle and i was wrong i should have lost so you are willing to admit that you're wrong sure and you back down if you will you back down if i say to you i i don't think this joke is funny let's take it out of the script or the scene isn't working let's get rid of it and i'm it's it's the david feldman show hang on yeah my audience is laughing let's hold off there's a sitcom called the david feldman show let my audience laugh at that idea okay no youtube need youtube need shows it's fine uh but if there if i were the star of a sitcom and i hired you and i said we're getting rid of this act and you would fight for it how would you back down i mean at what point would you back down uh yeah at some point i would back down but i would make it known that i think it's a huge mistake hmm like i'll give an example would you would get would you root against it no no like we had a i wrote an episode of maren and i really didn't want a particular actor cast as the part um but the e p really wanted him and i fought him on it mark maren and you wanted maren yeah mark that's who we're talking about mark maren but uh i had someone totally different in mind and when the guy did it i was like oh that was great and i went up to a p and i apologized and i said you were right i was wrong growing up did you play team sports yes what sports soccer baseball well baseball you couldn't the baseball is an individual game where you're forced to think of the team you're forced to be a team player by virtue of the rules correct were you good at baseball no i was good i was a good pitcher i was very bad hitter okay so a pitcher so a pitcher is that's not a team that's just you working with the catcher that's interesting and soccer that's a team but there's showboating there where yeah where does that come from did your father used to say to you don't eat shit i'm serious yeah i do i do think it all comes from my father it's just are you putting me on are you putting me on no no it's all he's a lawyer and uh and yeah it all came from him your dad's a lawyer and he says don't take any shit now when i was growing up my father didn't like my father gave me mixed signals he would say it's good not to take any shit but be a team player you know don't be corporate be a rebel but don't be a lunatic and think of people other than yourself you have a wife you have kids hopefully this is before i got married you're gonna want to make a living and don't invest your entire ego into something because it's there's more to life than fighting for whatever is going on in your job so i learned to compromise i think i was yeah compromise well i never got any of that i just got win the battle hmm no matter what pretty much that's really interesting on the episode that on the episode i was nominated for um which was about race i had a very specific way i wanted to do it and i ended up yelling at the show runners either i do it this fucking way or i'm not writing it wow and what happened i they let me write it the way i wanted to and they respected that yeah i think they were worried that because it was about race you know it gets a little touching i think they were worried mark might come across wrong but i also think they're like well let them write it if he's that adamant about it and we'll see if it works when he's when the script comes in and this was the episode where mark sets fire to a black church correct yeah it's called happy days very interesting this kind of i don't do a mark maren type show by that i mean i'm not successful in podcast so no i don't really delve into the the psyche of my guests i like to rehash you know grudges yeah i don't delve in but but i am curious because looking back at my career i i kind of think i've compromised a lot you know that's normal you're you're supposed to compromise a lot but you haven't i haven't and i think you know look i didn't compromise i also you know did i get lucky did it just kind of work out because i didn't compromise and i sort of created a i don't know what like a uh persona or an idea of who i was that people responded to in certain situations came up maybe or maybe i just got lucky i don't think you got lucky i think he's stuck to your guns and you didn't care i'm being serious here i'm so concerned about being liked i you know i my okay that's something i've never had really i just don't care how could you live like that i wish i i wish i don't know that's a gift it's very uh my wife is always blown away by it because we'll get into situations where someone will say something and i will just say something very honest and blunt that makes the situation very awkward and then i just stand there and everyone feels weird and i'm like yeah this is fine wow i don't care if you don't like me and your marriage is going well right yeah my word marriage is good good Dave Anthony thank you for doing this and you and i'll see you on the picket line looks like there's gonna be another strike right i'll see you see out there you think there's gonna be a strike yeah i do too yeah i do too too much too too too big of a conglomerate you know they're gonna they're not gonna they're not gonna give us what we want which is basically healthcare yeah hmm you know i remember about the x caliber i i i know that i worked there at christmas before the show started we were trying to remember was it thanksgiving or christmas do you remember because i do remember the last time i played the x caliber in vegas it was christmas i might have been christmas it was definitely a holiday but i didn't have my kids with me and you would have brought them if it was christmas i think i brought them for christmas and they were young and it was the most grotesque thing i'd ever seen in my life because this was a time when vegas decided they were going to bring families attract families and the x caliber was designed to be like disneyland right yeah it was yeah so you literally saw kids running around and their fathers were losing their college education yeah it is funny it is funny it really was and but i was part of it i was complicit in that and whenever i attack corporate totes i always think about how i really felt uh dirty working there and then walking through the the you know the casino and seeing grown men whose sickness was gambling and their kids were running around being entertained and i remember what my my son and daughter did they were about eight and ten and i would say to them look at these people look at them they're they're they're gambling and their kids are here and they're wasting all this money that could be spent to cure disease or on their kids education this is this is so sinful this is just disgusting i would you know i'd go back and preach to my kids and they would say can we just sit by the pool daddy and have fun no this is wrong well why are you taking the money because i'm a hypocrite so this was a week at the x caliber and yeah they started getting into the elevator with me and saying daddy stop this would be in front of couples right and they'd start saying daddy stop gambling we're gonna lose the house and i would start laughing at it the first time like you know 10 and 7 my daddy this isn't fun we're losing the house and i played along with them the first night because we were doing it in front of other kids and their parents and i'd say just stick with me i i feel lucky tonight no daddy my and the problem with kids who are 10 and 7 when something's funny on a tuesday it stops being funny on saturday but they won't stop they will not stop because you laugh the first time uh-huh and you know it never occurred to me that i'm performing at the x caliber and anybody would recognize me from the show that was the other thing my face is plastered all over the x caliber and i walk through the casino nobody gives a damn was thunder from down under there the male strippers uh-oh i don't know i i don't know that's i had to share the dressing room with the guys from thunder from down under that's when i knew i better take a writing yeah when when you're sharing a dressing room with the guys from thunder from down under and that's i they're looking down on you i swear to you they would come in after my show and say wow you're pathetic that's how you make a living talking that way i have dignity i push my crotch in front of middle-aged divorces you're disgusting i'm serious they really did anyway dave anthony is it's the dollop and the name of your book is the united states of absurdity untold stories from american history it comes out may 9th it's written by dave anthony gareth reynolds with a forward by pat and oswald the dollop is available for download on itunes and you are at the wilbur theater in boston saturday night there are a hundred tickets left how do people buy those tickets uh you can go to the dollop podcast dot com and there's a link there thank you dave yeah thanks old before i moved to new york three years ago there were two people i asked to host the show whenever i couldn't make it and it was jerry stahl and laura house and everybody keeps saying to me where's laura house where's laura house and i said i'm in new york i don't see her that often joining us from los angeles via skype is laura house hello laura house hi david i've missed you i've missed you you know you're the only person who saw that jerry stahl and i belong together yeah it was magic it was magic it was a really special time and you guys were were hosting my show mm-hmm people loved it loved it they they said boy the david feldman show is so good these days why is it well what what is what is different and we were going to build our own little network we had just gotten the ralph nader radio hour up and out oh right and i thought well we could build a little radio network here but then i foolishly moved to new york to pursue something else and puppetry puppetry yes and the plans fell by the wayside there's an episode of my show of jerry stahl interviewing ben stiller that has been it's been sitting around for two or three years and we don't know what to do with it no way yeah i remember when he when he interviewed him it it never um it's not out in the world it's not out in the world i don't know why i guess where we were going to launch oh because jerry was going to have a show and that was his guest i see and then you didn't know what to do with that interesting right i had delegated the jerry stahl show to somebody else because i was going to build an empire yeah and it just fell by the i don't know why i think he got busy classic hollywood classic hollywood yes but zulander too came out anyway yes yes it is so i feel like i mean we don't need to hear that interview i think we do i think jerry is we just had him on the show uh he had done a tour of concentration camps oh right so fun that's fun i always wanted i always thought that would be a fun thing to do i guess it would be i i sent him a picture yesterday because we used to when we would meet and talk we would meet at sun cafe that raw food vegan place that was near the radio station and um i went there yesterday the other day to see a friend and um i'd send him like food porn from there he likes that sort of thing i miss those nights i still have the show on kpfk but i do it out of new york i just miss hanging out at that station it was a it's so weird yeah it's a great it's the great weird yeah it was uh like straight out of central cat like an art directed small independent radio station like like public radio station all the stickers all the other people on radio shows like like everything you would expect and more kpfk is the flagship station of pacifical radio pacifical radio was set up about 55 years ago in berkeley to promote peaceful resolution to conflict it is the most liberal the most liberal radio station in the history of radio yeah and it's a slice out of the 60s yes yeah right yeah i was gonna say if a benetton ad became a radio station but it's not even that fancy like it's like it's like if um a page out of angela davis's diary became a radio station you know i have a friend named andy breckman who's a great comedy writer he created monk and he's like me he has a radio show on w fmu and that's his thing he has a radio show and he does it because he needs to vent and he's a little so and then he's able to work in television because he's got the radio show yeah that's cool and they do it it's a actually w fmu is an amazing station it's a public radio station incredible and it's in jersey city and i went and did his show about a month ago and not to take anything away from w fmu they've done a documentary about it is the coolest place on earth when you walk into it it's it's like nancy mires the director wanted to invent a really cool radio station oh really yeah it's like it has that idyllic oh we're renegades and it and it's real but it's just too good it's just too like too fancy too retro too hip too it's too wonderful it's too wonderful and it's wonderful it's like disneyland for radio whereas whereas whereas kpfk is real they have yeah right yeah they they have the they have the transgender palestinian lesbian hour yes absolutely they go every everyone has dreadlocks um children dogs mm-hmm there's bongos yeah it's uh yeah it's amazing and and not fresh like nothing is fresh like the coffee was old but like everything was like brought in second recycled everything was recycled everything was like right great and i'm and i'm pledge break whenever i do pledge break i say folks let me assure you that every penny yeah you're giving is literally to keep the lights on literally i said i like i there is this coffee it's a perfilus here yeah i mean this coffee is has been made from stains of coffee on the rug it's like the coffee was initially served at church and then it was then it was passed on to an AA meeting and then then the radio station got it yeah it i don't mean to be pretentious but it's almost sacred that place and i right i miss it so much i'm i'm on there all the time but i'm not i'm not in LA so i don't get to go there it is a sacred place and i can remember we'd show up at you know 6 30 and tape and i look up and suddenly it's four in the morning oh really yeah we would just keep we would and we have sessions that we'd comedy sessions that we did improv and sketches and music oh yeah because you'd have jeremy kramer coming in and bob sagan yeah crazy thing we had that it was insane what we know that's really insane and i one of the things i remember i grew up because we had this half hour sketch comedy show on kpfk robin did it marty short did it andrea martin did it rott robert smigel terry gar i mean any we were we were able to get the funniest people in the world to come and do our sketch comedy show and we had lorraine newman and we had writers who just gave us sketches and it was on drive time on a friday in LA and i kept saying to everybody just you wait and see somebody's gonna call us somebody somebody's gonna pick up the phone and give us something and i waited and i waited and nobody ever called nobody as well have not had the microphones on what i mean is like we were going to get job offers off the radio that's what i mean yeah it's like it's the most amazing people were doing comedy in a closet yeah and then like it wow is how is this not how is this not like the cover of la weekly like the best show you're not listening to what i like how is this not like a known thing it's the story of my wife no it is that was probably the problem yeah because my name was attached to it is it was bill cosby a good guest he was great i don't remember anything other than when the show was over i was sore i came to and we had done a show and he said it was great and i just i take his word for it how is this trial going do you follow that i don't follow it because uh i mean what's just what's to say it was such a facade uh uh yeah no i don't i don't follow it um when did he go over par at what number was it excessive yeah yeah was it yeah i feel like 35 i feel like if it's if you'd stopped at 34 people would have been okay with it but yeah i feel like somewhere on 35 do women 17 somewhere in there do women make jokes about that you're not supposed to make jokes about that obviously which is what makes it so funny i don't hear many jokes i yes i don't hear many jokes about it from anybody because it's just such a disturbing you know like if you found out jonathan winters was a uh a serial killer or whatever you're just like what like this whole like this whole part of your brain is just like but i so everything i but like i'm not sure what's real like it's just such a bizarre and then so unfunny ultimately of like oh and then that's just sad for you know everybody so it's yeah it's it's i don't hear people talk about it much at all it is very much like and i'm not i'm not trying to be outrageous or or funny here in many ways it's like a priest molesting a child he did two things that were offensive wrong one was the you know the actual the drugging raping the drugging and the and the raping that's not a good thing the drugging and the raping and you know it's the david felden show where you're going to hear these kind of strong points of view these uh um you know a lot of people would not agree with you but that's what david it's your show all right so drugging drugging raping wrong all right it's wrong and i don't mean to get political on the show but i feel and i and you know very provocative advertisers be damned i'm gonna say what has to be said so the drugging and the raping was wrong all right but by the way that's david felden saying this laura house is not saying yes or no no i mean you can't possibly you know it it doesn't necessarily reflect the views of me or their station or anyone else because it is complicated because it's drugging and raping it is it's very it's it's a nuanced subject but if you just want to broad stroke say that it's wrong then i guess you know what it's your it's your show david i'm not going to argue with you but it's um you know just to make something black and white like that doesn't seem anyway whatever that you're right well let me let me say this drugging in and of itself is not necessarily bad right no not at all people pay for the privilege to be drugged yes people find drug dealers and they give them money so they can be drugged or sometimes you drug yourself and sometimes these drugs are legal nyquil exactly raping in and of it i could go on raping in and of itself yes go on yeah i'm not um but can i tell you something though i'm because obviously we're being um sarcastic but um i was on uh when i when i wrote for the rozio donnell show the jerry sandusky scandal broke and rozio donnell was really mad about about it and she went on the show and she talked about how what that it broke that the secret i noticed this comment no she was like i know this is comedy but i just have to talk about this this is unbelievable and victims of child abuse you know and and then she was like the next she was like you know what like i'm not a hero like i'm speaking out i you know if i'm the one person speaking out about this then fine you know that doesn't make me a hero and we were like literally everyone is speaking out about it like no one's going hey be cool it's jerry sandusky she was like i don't i don't think that makes me a hero i don't think i don't think it does like i'm just telling the truth like it's it's uh wrong it uh it triggers victims and now i'm gonna say something about it like i just damn i don't think that makes me a hero we're like it doesn't make you a hero literally no one is happy that jerry sandusky molested a bunch of kids you know what i you know i don't think it makes me brave i don't think it does but you know that's what people think i guess no no one thinks that so i guess if i have to be the one to denounce the child molested then i guess that's on me um it's on you and every other person in the world john stewart was like going hey hey hey football is important oh my god uh so what happened with cosby was he did the the drug in the raping which again i hate to harp you know beat a dead horse here you made it clear you think it's wrong i think it's right then the people at home were violated oh because they thought he was their father yeah the legacy his it was not just um someone we liked it was yeah he was a person who meant you know emotionally meant something to millions of people so yeah it was real super weird it was and the reaction that some of my friends had to it i found offensive oh really i had friends who were saying to me i i can't laugh about it it's just too i i i feel my whole world view has been shattered um i was going really that you it's that upsetting to you to find out that bill cosby's a rapist i mean it's bad to be a rapist i'm you know again i don't mean to be self-righteous okay hey it it's noted but should it really come as that biggest surprise i mean he's in show business he's a big entertainer yeah i mean if you if you had never heard anything like you had probably heard stuff about him or you had had other heroes unveiled um in a big way but if you had not had that i i would imagine it would be sure when i i had heard years ago like that he cheated on his wife constantly and had hookers and stuff so i was like oh i oh he's not well they came ill they had they had an arrangement it's not cheating if it's struggling and raping oh that i didn't know yeah i was there yeah yeah no i had met someone that was you know had seen him with other people whatever so i was like oh okay he's you know like so i didn't have him on a pedestal camille held her head up high she used to say when he's with me i'm awake i drug myself thank you very much do you think she knew oh my god i it didn't seem i mean it didn't seem like it but what nothing seems like anything it's it's all it seems like a bunch of storytelling um i think you can be in a big level of denial about that stuff i don't you know um or you know like surly she knew he my name isn't surly why do you keep calling me surly listen this isn't airplane but uh anyway virginia she had um she must have known he had extra marital something or other and just thought well you know he's a big famous guy but sure i there's no other word than surly i can't think of another word but certainly she not the actually raping like criminal you know i don't know hey man i don't know i don't know camille maybe he came home one night and there was drool on his collar from the woman who was passed out are you drugging and raping again you know who what my drool who's drool is this that's not my drool i told you i stopped it if i find out you're drugging and raping and not just sleeping around so i will be so cross with you do you do you have heroes i i used to have heroes no i grew out of heroes me too me too i wish i did it's too yeah it's a fun it's a fun thing to have and it's a fun um idea i guess i guess i or maybe they're just not as elevated and it's more like you know what i really enjoy the work of john goodman um i don't know how he is as a person i like to think he's a happy healthy adjusted guy but however he is as a person i know i like his work that's all i can really say like i um i i keep it i keep my heroes like um like if it used to be like on a scale of one to a hundred if they were a hundred if they're you know they're around six oh i like i like that person what would constitute a hero for you what realm do you have to be in oh and like an actor you mean yes an acting politics sports no i have a writer heroes i just people who something about them i i want to have that quality i guess is a hero i think of like just a quality i aspire to like um lauren uh ducca duke um the is she the teen vogue editor who's been speaking up and oh you know like that i saw her i saw her with tucker carlson like that's cool to me yeah she's great um yeah i see people on on uh tv or the news or another realms where you like go like oh i love that confidence or i i love you know i just have a quality i admire i guess do i have a quality you admire um i like that you're far away i like that you're always funny and you always get the joke mm-hmm there's like i know it's an interesting to note like i knew saying that that would be met with a laugh and not a like a a fake you know either a fake or a real like oh come on or whatever like we hit it off i was playing austin oh yeah yeah no we go away we go so far back yeah and early 90s did we go to the johnson library together we we did you you were headlining and either i was opening or i just sold tickets i'm not sure but you didn't like the comics would come in and they didn't have a car or whatever and um you were like i love you know i'm sure i was telling you you were funny and uh what not trying to borrow money i don't know what i was trying to do and um i think i was trying to lend you money at 50 a week exactly probably yeah no i think there was some some usury going on and um so yeah but then you were like you know what i enjoy presidential libraries and i was like what for one there's one two miles from here and also who says that and um we did we went to the lbj library um and it was really cool to go with you because you i remember we walked through like i've seen as a young as a young lady as a young girl i saw i was exposed to like a lot of art and and culture and stuff but i didn't necessarily understand it and here i was as a young adult lady and we would kind of walk through and you know make a comment like we like there was the letter that the smothers brothers like it was early for for political comedy to be televised and they had to like write a letter of apology to lbj or something because they were like hurting his feelings or there was some you know when we were like wow that's great like that's like just on the other side of this glass is this smothers brothers letter and um the lbj they had a little um model of the boat and a sign that said you know this is a model of the kind of boat he lied about that escalated vietnam and you're just like wow like this is crazy and i think they had like a a model him like a mannequin with actual recorded um his voice right but it was like behind a fake wooden fence like he was like a cowboy he was the neighbor on home improvement he was saying it was my kind of tall friend and then he and then later someone would misquote him uh to their wife just it was it was home maybe we were just talking about improvement i feel like we might have just maybe we saw all the president's men and then we watched home improvement and we just got confused yeah i the home is also amazing the ranch along the pernell is i think johnson's a very fascinating shakespearean character oh yeah yeah that's a great way to put it yeah he's interesting dude yeah on the tour of the ranch yeah you you get to be in the car that then turned into a boat and they tell you like he would when he wasn't getting his way he would invite people to the ranch and sort of glad hand them and then like let me take you on a tour and then look like he was driving them into the river and he was driving them into the lake but the car unbeknownst to them turned into a boat and you're like that's crazy but that's like what a what a perfect texan president like what a what a weird texan thing to do now you grew up in texas right i did yeah dallas dallas area before you move to la you were an mtv star yes i start on um now it's a bit of history because um it was their first scripted show it was their first half hour that like wasn't like a game show or whatever it's their first scripted comedy like half hour comedy what was the name of the show austin stories mm-hmm and did that change your life did you suddenly become famous it didn't that dramatically but it did it did change my life i was teaching seventh grade and then and then a year later i was starring on mtv on a show on mtv so certainly locally you know that was a big difference um and um and then it changed my life in that i had contacts and connections instantly that you can go your whole showbiz career and never get you know people who you know my one friend went on to become a partner at william morris endeavor and was my agent for a long time and one was like you know i like i happened to be the head of casting at fox and i think you're interesting and i you know and but you had you had fame because mtv i don't even know if it still is it may still be but there was a time when if you were on mtv there was a specific demographic if you went to a mall you would be mobbed by people between the ages let's say 14 and 32 is that a fair statement um um in theory it is like i know what you're saying of there were there were people who they were just glued to mtv um and if you were on tv one might think you might be mobbed at the mall but i i never had that kind of fame i was just sometimes sometimes people noticed in austin and then some people in the industry knew and still know i honestly still i feel like it has benefited me uh uh currently like i still sometimes meet people they're like oh i love that show you know i mean they're 70 75 80 but still um uh yeah so it's a real yeah so it it changed my life in that way but it wasn't like overnight and now i'm famous because already when they had um our show people were making the joke of like didn't they used to play music videos or or whatever because they had they had so many game shows or whatever so mtv wasn't the it wasn't like 1982 or something that i was on it i actually think when you were on it was i think the height of its popularity maybe because you were on it yeah you know what i'll take it sure fame you've set to me over and over and you will not rest until laura house as a household name yeah mm-hmm i won't rest i i don't rest did you ever want to be famous do you want to be famous did you like did you like being on mtv and getting a taste of it well this is interesting i did want to be famous i was very driven by wanting to be fame famous for a while and i was not a by my own i wasn't a very good or interesting person at that time when i wanted to be famous and um can you be a good person if you want to be famous isn't the pursuit of fame not a good thing i i i think possibly i think that might possibly be true i don't want to speak for other people who want to be famous they might be great but i um for me yeah it was very i was very like it's yeah it's real self obsession that drives you to be famous i mean obvious revanity and narcissism and self obsession all the great traits you like and people so i um yeah i was just um i remember i used to say i wanted to be so famous i could like put oprah on hold mm-hmm what a dumb goal but did you did you really want that no i did i wanted to like like if oprah called i wrote i you know tell her i'll get back to her whatever like i wanted to like bigger than oprah fame which now i know is um also ps this is what losers say but now i know that that's just you know wanting um validation and you know if only you could love yourself and et cetera again that's what you know that's what losers say i mean winners are actually famous when i look at somebody like bill o'reilly oh uh-huh i love him what were you gonna say he's just great because you know there's no spin it's all he's created a whole zone of that uh-huh it's a free zone there's no spin him or any in that whole zone there's no spin yeah this is somebody who is used to getting what he wants he feels he's entitled to get what he wants and he has gotten kind of what he wanted or he's gotten revenge he couldn't cut it on network news so he went to fox which is not really news and became a mega star in that world and kind of sort of got what he want but he can't get what he wants from women oh or roger ailes the guy who classic classic villain huh yeah that they get everything they want except women and uh you know men of that age of that generation were raised to believe that if you work hard and you get famous then women will do anything for you and are there women who would do anything for bill o'reilly or roger ailes because well that's that's what i was wondering is i was actually going to interrupt you and ask almost the same question like aren't there women i mean in my i have not been in their vicinity but every every every famous person seems to every famous man seems to have groupies mm-hmm so yes i would think there are women who are attracted to those guys and want and want to do stuff like i i would think so i have an interesting question and i don't know if i'm going to articulate it properly but i'll ask it anyway well all right so fame i became a comedian for many reasons one of the reasons was i needed to meet women and get the only way i was going to get any women was by being a stand-up comic and that turned out to be true now here's how i justified it i thought all right a woman sees you performing she thinks you're funny but she also feels sorry for you because you're you know performing comedy so she's kind of getting a full picture of who you really are as a stand-up comic in fact i don't like women who i'm interested in coming to see me perform because i find it too intimate it's too soon for you to see my act because it's i feel it's so three-dimensional oh wow yeah however if i were i don't know a weather man famous for being a weather man or a you know alex trebek famous for because you're not you're not talking about yourself and there's no vulnerability to it is that what you mean yeah and and suddenly a woman is interested in me because i'm alex trebek from jeopardy uh-huh that woman would be you should stay away from her right oh well uh if a woman what i'm saying is if a woman saw me on the tonight show doing a five-minute set and right she knows something about you and fell in love with me she'd be right okay because she because she essentially has met you like you've given some information about yourself right but but if you're just on tv um you should stay away i mean it's the part where you go you should stay away from that woman i don't know i mean if 10 women decide they're attractive they're attracted to a weather man let's say maybe a couple of those women are cool and maybe a couple of those women are garbage people and then the other are just somewhere in the middle on the spectrum like i don't know that you should inherently stay away from someone if they if they um just like you because you're famous i don't know i mean how would you because at that if you're famous for being because here's another way if you're truly famous for being a weather man and movies have been made like this if you're actually like no one you would never meet a woman who didn't know you were the weather man or whatever you would have to like do like a coming to america like oh i have to pretend i'm not that person to find real love let's write it let's write it yeah no we should do that of like i'm it's call it i call it i'm not the weather man i'm just a guy i love me well that is that is shakespearean where the king puts on a different outfit and yeah you know goes among the the regular folk and falls in love and find you know to find out what people are thinking i did you ever live in new york city i didn't i i i should have okay so this is a better person if i had you do it's impossible for you to be a better person the other night i was out to dinner and you have to know who ernie anastas is ernie anastas is an anchorman a good-looking anchorman he's rugged but sweet and he reads the teleprompter and he's been reading the teleprompter since i was a kid and growing up every pizzeria in new york city has ernie anastas is eight by ten if you want to make a if you want to make a new yorker laugh it's just this thing that i've noticed i go there though i'm going to this pizzeria and i go i only go to pizzerias that have an eight by ten of ernie anastas and they lose it because i go oh my god you're right wherever i go every pizzeria has an eight by ten of ernie anastas harmless guy just a you know a sweet good-looking guy who reads the teleprompter on the local news so i'm out at this restaurant the other night and ernie anastas is there out on a date and he's got the cufflinks and the coiffed hair and his nails were immaculate and i couldn't take my eyes off of him because he's famous just because he's famous he's just a guy who reads the teleprompter he's not hurting anybody he's a local news anchor and no and the person i was with she couldn't take her eyes off him and i'm saying why are we looking at him and she goes well i because he's famous i go but why is he famous because he's famous he reads the tell you know and it was riveting and then he got up this is not the point of what i'm saying but he got up he looked at us and said nice to see you again oh smooth yeah isn't that great that's very cool so he's never never wants you to feel like a stranger and then i realized oh my god kelly and conway is right the microwave and the tv he's what ernie anastas is watching me through my tv oh okay yeah you took it a different different way that he meant it i think well he said nice to see you again the only way he'd be seeing is when he's when he looks into the camera he sees me watching him well i mean okay fame for the sake of fame could you handle that i i've learned for me no i'm it does not um too much attention and sort of grandiosity sort of doesn't it uh spins me out real fast because i i get like yeah oh i was right this whole time i am better than everybody else is what my brain would do right right and then it would instantly go oh shit i'm not i wish people would quit looking at me i wish i were dead right so it would for me it would last about uh as long as it just took me to explain that i and then i'd be what i like trying to hurt myself or hide somehow it's yeah i i had a panic attack a month ago because it occurred to me that i could end up in on tmz and scandalized and it was this pair i had this moment of paranoia oh wow yeah i i i lost it with uh you know i'm getting a divorce right um i did not know that yeah and but i'm not married uh but i like i just like filing for divorce uh no i'm getting a divorce so i i see one of my divorce attorneys i get fired by my divorce attorneys uh because they don't like to be questioned or told that their borderline personalities uh i wrote a letter to my this attorney which was really really it was clean i didn't use any foul language but i eviscerated this guy and said some really mean things to him really really mean and then i took his face and photoshopped him oh david david so so like i put it i put his this i swear i got this is true so i believe you i took his face and put it on gregory peck's poster and it was to sue a mockingbird you know like and he's suing a mockingbird anyway i was just oh my god and that was the kindest thing i did i mean there there were other things like him on the phone hello he's my lawyer hello my wife is very sick i need two ambulances one for her and one for me to chase can you hurry up and send one nine so um it got worse it was really bad okay and it didn't stop because i'm really good at photoshop and i i did i must have done a hundred of them wow so you didn't stop i don't stop yeah because he's a divorce attorney mm-hmm and even my shrink said get him i love making my shrink go i know i know but you can't so it occurred to me that i'm not famous but if what i had done was really egregious this thing could spread on the internet and maybe end up on tmz and i could become famous for what i did so you know insane comedy writer losing it because of the divorce hurls invectives at divorce attorney and suddenly there are people outside my apartment with cameras and suddenly i'm famous for for something that i'm not really ashamed of but maybe something i shouldn't have done could you handle that kind of thing i i i think that must be how do you survive that how do you that would be really hard but also i think bigger than what you're just saying is that that is the world we're in right now like that's the beginning like that's that's where we're headed of everyone could know every anything about us if somebody just put it you know dumped it into the fishbowl and there's a movie coming out in a couple of weeks and i read the book and it's amazing the book by dav eggers i loved it the circle where this is what happens because it it goes from like you know as technology can put cameras everywhere and on everyone then somebody's like like there is the story you made me think of the i forget what she wrote but some girl wrote some tweet and then got on a plane i love that story i love that and was like the most hated woman in the world or whatever because she said something about aids or like hope i don't get aids or whatever and it's like she drops down and she has seven thousand facebook posts and she's on you know in news cycles i know i love that story i love it something insane and she's like what the like on a plane and but like that's the world we're in and like um uh on another personal is like uh i my ex i have an ex who he ended it in um uh last august so i was dealing with that but then i found out he who his girlfriend now is someone he talked about in our relationship and put her in works that he wrote and to the point where i mentioned it like it seems like you have a real thing for her no no no not a he told me she was a lesbian he told me like no no we're just friend there no there's nothing we're just in the same theater group and like that's his girlfriend now he cured her what he cured her yes he has been laying groundwork for this relationship even if he didn't technically have a body part in any of her he was nurturing his own crush on her for years for several years and i want i disabled my facebook account because it i it was too tempting to just type that because then i look bad but it's like i what if i what if i got to i love like i have a fantasy that i could disparage him and put that like if if i worded it right and then everybody would love me and hate him and she would see it and be like what are you kidding that's insane and then i would you know what whatever couldn't i bring this bit of information to the people and they would side with me and then he he would get some kind of punishment instead of the girl that he you know ignored me for your what you know whatever the girl he was you know whatever it was no did you so are you on facebook anymore i currently my account is disabled does it get special seating when it can park that's insane say that again please you broke up what that's insane yeah you know it can park real close to the mall no i just so like for me to get back on yes i could sign back in and it just takes a few steps more than me whatever did you disable it because you didn't want to write something or were you kind of stalking i i was not at all stalking like he had been wanting to be friends and i had unfriended him and then i was like you know in the past couple weeks like you know what all right let's be friends and then i that's when i saw this thing where i felt very betrayed i felt because i had asked him about it like so i it was really upsetting to me and then also upsetting when like they announced you know people announced their relationship or whatever 450 people were like oh great i was like 450 people like really and then i was just like i can't be part of this community i hear your sister i mean back in may or june but i'm like i can't i can't be in this building right now this is insane and i just i really just wanted to like post a thing you know like saying like my ex cheated and he had um i found gross texts on his phone at at a certain point and then he begged me to stay and we tried to work but like he's a cheater and like nobody thinks he is he just seems like a great guy and you know i'm only i'm saying it on your show but nobody's listening i'm sorry did you say something it's not i don't even i don't even listen to my show um yeah so but i but that is the world we're in where it could happen horribly or you know you because so you could become instant internet famous by you know bad behavior or oh my you know i i i saw a dog drowning and i went and grabbed it and i didn't know somebody was filming me and now i'm treated like a hero or whatever like that's the world right now like if the right thing is public you know catches fire and goes viral people are getting this fame for various reasons like literally every day so i like to me that's that's what's really happening so i have i have crazy i want to pursue this line of questioning your honor will you just tell me that you hate my ex and i'm great i i what did i tell you from from day one i don't know that you're too good for him oh thank you what i mean what i i honestly i don't remember him no i know but that's a great thing to say look what did i tell you from day one you're too good for him i didn't want to say anything the laura house that i know is besides being a funny comedy writer and actress you are also a world-class vedic is it pronounce vedic vedic vedic vedic which is you're you teach a form of meditation i do i i might have sounded angry just now but yes i do i do teach meditation but you are considered you know chris maguire the great comedy writer when he speaks of you he speaks of you like your the dalai lama well he doesn't get out much you do work with people and teach them how to focus life is a struggle the buddha says life is a struggle right yeah so did this help is it vedic meditations that was called oh yeah vedic has has helped a ton and um you know what i forgot when you were asking me a stuff i have a podcast called will you med with me where i teach comedians to meditate and it's not vedic because that's a whole course you take and there's um uh it's you undergo a bit of a thing um it's great but it it takes more time but i teach a mindful technique um and that's free um on the podcast will you med with me and you host it by yourself yeah it's me and then i teach i there's a comedian on usually sometimes it's just me but a comedian or a comedy writer and i teach them to meditate and then i leave it running so anyone listening can like meditate with us that's a great show what a great show and then learn to meditate and then you can you know meditate with us wow i'd love to write for that because it's just dead air right yeah yeah no that yeah that one part is um yeah you don't have to punch it up too much we started adding little comedy bits in the background the more i read do you know who tim ferris is oh yeah he's pretty amazing he's always exploring self-improvement and yeah i think the trait of all successful people now is meditation it's it's definitely um one of them yeah it is right now like a thing of like everybody's doing it and um and talking about doing it whereas like 10 years ago like tons of people were doing it um and but you could just name like well howard stern and david lynch and uh paul mccartney i guess and now it's like there's two meditation centers like yoga studios but just for meditation have popped up in la and one a woman was a high executive at cbs and then left and started a meditation studio um so yeah it's a huge huge people are it's becoming much more common now a cbs executive running her own studio but it's a meditation studio yeah totally does it have to be deep breathing no give me your own i'm i'm being the the cbs executive uh you're giving notes on what's your mantra oh it's been done i like it but doesn't have to be uh yeah hmm meditation you disabled your facebook account i suspect for me disabling facebook twitter instagram pinterest pornhub yes would probably i'm sorry i don't disable pornhub that's the category that i like on oh oh got it i see what you're saying i suspect that the easiest cheapest most efficient form of meditation would be disabling your twitter and facebook accounts yeah yeah i think that was part of it too like it was just this like oh this everything about this is very upsetting so i'm just gonna leave it can you because you can't change the world you can only make yourself feel better and be better able to handle what's happening explain that to me explain this to me about a month ago i i said okay this is my life there's no turning back and on friday nights i'm going to obey the sabbath and my sabbath is going to be turning off the effing phone and my computer and just use my kindle for you know be with people i'm fond of but i'm not going to check email i'm not going to check facebook and laura i'm telling you i was so happy i almost started a cry that i could i i know the sounds pretentious i could literally feel my vessel refilling by being away from facebook and twitter uh and then that then a week passes and i'm looking forward to couldn't do it couldn't do it so i know this would make me happy i know that it's friday night at nine o'clock there's nothing on facebook or twitter or in my email or or my messaging that is going to liven up my existence there's nothing i know that and yet i keep going there and it makes me unhappy it doesn't make me happy it makes me unhappy right and you want me to explain that i can yeah uh one stress is addictive so and it's familiar so even though we there's a part of us that's going i i don't want to feel stress we're still drawn to it because they're anytime we have a thought um when we have when we have thought patterns we're building their neural pathways in our brains and when we're when we have that thought pattern a lot it becomes a well-worn neural pathway the way like a path in the woods if you walk that same path it's it's worn down a lot right so if our pathway is like fuck that guy and he's writing the news and the i knew it and this is horrible or all the the thoughts that we think when we're looking at at these things um that's a well-worn groove and sort of feeling good is not as well-worn of a groove so our brain can actually be a little reluctant to do it in the beginning so that part of it is um familiarity part of it is stress is actually addictive when you're looking at stuff and it's making you mad you're getting um adrenaline and um i guess serotonin i guess dopamine is the you feel down so it's the or like the more calming so it's like you're getting you're getting cortisol you're also triggering i'll bet if they hooked you up to you know brain scanners it would be similar to like gambling or something like they say when people gamble they get a hit of like dopamine or serotonin or whatever like when you're right i think you're you're getting a neural hit of something that feels really good when you write when you write no you are correct oh i see when you when someone is wrong and you were right because i i really think that's part of what's happening politically we're like the left and the right we we don't even believe the same things are true anymore so like you know just some story comes across and we're like oh fuck that guy is the worst i know and then you come into contact with someone else and they're like he is the worst i can't believe it and now you're bonding over this terrible person and this thing that's happening and you're getting something out of it like you're getting a download of adrenaline and um serotonin and and such like you're getting chemicals that feel good so even though you're you're feeling bad because you're you're bad and upset and they're stressed i think you're also getting some chemistry of like something that feels good like i'm right the world is wrong this is crazy so it's a weird um pattern of like it feels good and bad interesting and um i'll link it to meditation real quick is meditation is you have thoughts when you meditate but you're not thinking so there you're just aware of them there's a part of you observing your thoughts and that part of you that is observing your thoughts isn't mad or upset it's just like the you that isn't invested in ego stuff or whatever so it's a calm state it's a calm place in you that is always there but we're just not paying attention to it that much necessarily so meditation is just like no letting like having an experience with that place where like you're not mad about stuff so the more you meditate like if you did it five you know if you did it two minutes a day every day for a month even that like you're building a pathway to a thing in your experience that feels good and not bad and then you would start to be more drawn to that wow but if you don't have that option you're like i like just having nothing is having no like if you're just off facebook or the news or whatever stressful you're just going to a neutral place and you're not getting that kind of hit that feels good even though you're also not getting that thing that feels bad but if you're not replacing it with something that's positive and feels good you're just going to go back to that old thing let me see if i'm hearing what you're saying there are neural pathways to happiness but they have to be the brush has to be cleared so the more you use the neural pathways to happiness the easier it is to walk down that path sure yeah that's a nice way to put it so the pathways are there you just have to use them well are you create you create the pathways like if you meditate you're creating that pathway and so another way of saying it is happiness can be a habit yes a practice which is why they say a practice you practice it you can practice yeah you practice meditation or you you practice yeah anything that you yeah you create this practice where it's like oh now my brain is familiar with this thing that feels good and is supporting me in a way that i like so i'm gonna keep doing it do you did you ever meet shadow stevens when he did my show yeah yes and are you friendly with him um i don't know him that much but he's we cross paths and he's like i don't think he would know me but i i know him and he's into meditation i would think i would think so he's like yeah i would i would imagine he is yeah he is totally i mean he he has talked about hitting levels in meditation that are that i couldn't even imagine well you know there's no need to brag about your meditation but okay don't they have a meditation competition every year to find out the but so he said to me really good he said to me and you've said to me that when you meditate you are tapping in to the power of the universe something so sublime that the day-to-day nonsense is put into perspective right you could you could say that i mean i i think that's a little esoteric like i like right now like even with your eyes open can you notice your breath can you just notice it yeah because i'm smoking oh yeah i see i actually i literally see the smoke the breath because it's it's so cold in here i've been noticing my breath the whole time because it's uh it is snowing in in here well we do the show in a meat locker and so if you if you like close your eyes for a moment i won't have you have them close very long but like you notice your breath okay and and can you notice that you're having thoughts uh yeah i'm having thoughts yeah so part of you can you tell if your attention is mostly on your if i say put your attention on your breath can you notice that you you had a slight um switch and and you put some attention on your but like were you able to do that and then yeah okay so there's part of you that can notice your breath and then notices that you have thoughts and you can open your eyes so when you meditate you're like i meditated for a while and then i was like whoa what's noticing how is there because normally i'm just my thoughts like if i if somebody goes hey do you want tacos i'm like yeah we should go out to eat and get tacos like i'm not necessarily noticing that i'm having a conversation about tacos i'm just talking about tacos does that talking tacos talking tacos is my other podcast oh i love talking tacos but normally we're not noticing these things but it's it's essentially our thoughts are essentially just ego like our thoughts are just stuff that like we're we want to look good and manage things and be controlling and all these things that are we can also identify as ego so essentially when we meditate we're we're like yes we can say power of the universe and all of this that sounds outside of us but it's really just there's a like there's a quiet place in our minds or in our hearts or however you want to think about it i try to keep it real simple like like there's a quiet part of us that can just notice these things and isn't involved for this amount of time when we're meditating and then when we're not meditating if it's a practice it becomes easier to not be involved in those things when we're when we're not meditating so is it fair to say that facebook is the complete opposite of meditation no i i think facebook is is like what you make it like there's all kinds of things on facebook that are you know there's all kinds of groups to join about feeling peaceful and happy and and whatever but it's for me it's it's more information than i feel good taking in at once and when i scroll through my thing i don't know what i'm gonna find i don't know like when you're just scrolling down into nothing and it might be some funny thing or observation or a cute video or it might be like a thing about animal cruelty that you're like uh or a horrible news story you weren't aware of and you're oh like you're just the same with commercials when you watch tv you don't know what they're gonna feed you between you know the acts of the show you're enjoying right but your brain is is just sort of your brain's just sort of an innocent victim to this whatever's entering it yeah i have to wrap it up it can take its toll yeah we have to wrap it up uh this didn't go well no no i didn't and i didn't like it yeah it wasn't uh i said we're gonna do 20 minutes yeah and it felt like an hour as my listeners say where the hell is laura house people have been asking me for you and i we have to do this more often yeah that would be great i've been i've missed you i've enjoyed talking to you yeah and people can hear me on on will you med with me it's i just use the letter u instead of spilling it out but it's on i i have like 25 of them now or something like that and um so you can meditate with some of your favorite or or non-favorite comedians i don't also taped a stand-up special up in portland i did where it's getting edited now and i don't know where it's gonna be distributed but yeah i taped an hour-long special so that'll i guess in a few months we'll roll it out there mm-hmm and you're i'm very talented you you know here here's uh you are incredibly funny i'm not just a beautiful sexy woman no you and you have your own distinct style and it's invigorating and and uh it's i i don't want to embarrass you but i i you know i forgot i apologize i forgot how funny you are oh come on that's well i haven't seen you i haven't seen you you know i don't watch tv and and you know you've you've been behind the scenes writing on sitcoms and i guess you're doing something over at nickel odion now and i have yeah i have a show there that we're developing um yeah no we haven't crossed paths um but um you're a friend you're um that's it the other day i'm gonna brag i'm gonna brag okay the other day i was reading frank conif's and eddie pepitone's twitter feeds yes and i'm thinking okay i love these two guys yeah is this objectively speaking do i love them or is this objectively brilliant and i'd say well no objectively these are brilliant comments that they're making and then i see oh retweets and likes like okay other people agree and but then i take them for granted i think well you know but i think i find people because they wrote and performed on my show in LA all the time i think i have a pretty good eye and ear for people who are genuinely funny i i feel like because i don't think of myself as genuinely funny i think i'm i'm a student of wit oh that's interesting but somebody like frank conif for eddie pepitone or laura house i don't think you're a student of comedy i don't think you ever bother to figure it out i think you just be funny and i know that sounds pompous or whatever i just i i i i but it's true you listening to you you're kind you're you just are you know like gilbert is like that gilbert godfried there's no method it's just it just is funny and and you're you're you're that you really are thank you and uh yeah all right laura house i am laura house is your twitter feed yeah i'm laura house letter i letter m laura house and how's your doggy she's so good and beautiful and i'm gonna go pick her up from daycare we're very happy together is she a bulldog she's a bulldog mix i think it's mixed with um cat what um mixed with boxer i think is she ugly oh gosh no she's beautiful she's brindle so she has that brown like the colorings of a squirrel almost it's a beautiful dog and is it comforting because you know with a breakup yeah it's it's great yeah it's it's very helpful i'm thinking getting a dog yeah um what about a robot dog sure yeah same thing that just feels like a dog but you don't have to walk it or yeah you can be away for three days probably just as comforting yeah you think so no no it's a terrible idea well they ever isolate the spirit the life spirit and and recreate it oh i hope not but suppose it could be a life spirit that doesn't cheat or or need a cat box um yeah i don't know let's talk about that next time okay thank you laura thanks david you're awesome great talking to you are awesome bye bye bye thanks for listening thanks for listening please go see rich hall coming to a city near you listen to the dollop it's a great podcast if you love history you'll love dav anthony's the dollop and his new book is coming out next month laura house listen to her podcast read cliff nesteroff's new book and go see brian kiley whenever he's performing in a city near you please share this episode with all your friends copy and paste the link go to david feldman show dot com you'll see all the different platforms this program is available on we're available on itunes please subscribe to us on itunes give us a good review on itunes you can subscribe to our show on stitcher we have a youtube channel you can listen to this show on youtube it's audio and it's on youtube and that's a great way to copy and paste and share the links to this show please share the knowledge share the laughs share the love i am putting out an album i'm getting an album ready for november it's called pay what you want and we're releasing bits and pieces of it and you can hear the bits and pieces of pay what you want by going to david feldman show dot com you'll see the banner for pay what you want click on it and then pay what you want pay a penny pay a billion dollars for all i care really that will not upset me if you commit a hostile gesture like paying a billion dollars to hear the first 10 minutes of pay what you want it i don't care i really don't care contact me go to david feldman show dot com we have a contact button i answer all my emails i'm a little behind this week on my emails this weekend i'm going to answer all my emails i have been uh dealing with life from the show brisk studios in downtown manhattan that'll do it for us medicare for all and for all a good night