Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast - GGACP Rewind: Episode #42: Dan Harmon

Episode Date: May 28, 2026

Outspoken and controversial writer-producer Dan Harmon went from performing improv in his hometown of Milwaukee to creating hit television shows like “Community” and Adult Swim’s “Rick and Morty.” Dan joined Gilbert and Frank for a candid and revealing conversation about the perils of celebrity, how his various neuroses fuel his creativity and why he chose to launch his own podcast (the popular “Harmontown”) instead of going to therapy. Also: Dan pays “homage” to Bill Cosby, gets canned by Sarah Silverman, creates the cult show “Heat Vision and Jack” and locks horns with comedy hero-turned-antagonist Chevy Chase. PLUS: “Manimal”! “Misfits of Science”! “The Streisand Effect”! Gilbert hangs with Charlie Sheen! And Dan receives a VERY special delivery! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is Gilbert Godfrey. Gilbert Godfrey's Amazing Colossal Podcast. I'm here with my co-host, Frank Santo Padre. And we have a new subscriber, and his name is either Michael Arnie or Michael Arnais. I don't know which one he was, but he wants me to call him a miserable son of a bitch. So, whether it's Arnie or Arnae, Michael, you are a miserable son of a bitch. What an honor.

I get that honor every weekend. I don't even have to pay for it. So if you guys, poor Michael, if you guys want a similar shout out on the show or you'd like us to say something flattering, go to patreon.com, p-at-r-e-on-com, slash Gilbert Godfried. And you can get the same kind of respectful treatment. And now I have to go to the...

doctor because I've just been diagnosed with Arnigh. Arne. Or Arne. Or it's Arne. I had Arne that was a football injury. I had, I still, when it rains, I really feel it. Because I once hurt myself. So I still have Arne. Thank you, Michael. In France, it's called Arnais. This is Gilbert Godfrey. This is Gilbert Gottfried's amazing colossal podcast. I'm here with my co-host, Frank Santo Padre. And our guest today is a writer and producer, the creator of hit shows like Community and Rick and Morty and the star of one of the most popular podcasts on the internet,

the funny and talented Dan Harmon. Woo! All right. That's an intro. Yeah. No, that's an obituary. See, I want my guest to feel like they're dead and buried. That's fantastic.

Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you for doing my show in New York, by the way. People who are fans of yours will, if they wanted to listen to my podcast, they should definitely listen to the episode where you guest co-hosted in New York. Yes, that was a wild time. Yeah, you were fantastic. And I remember, okay, I'm proud to say I know very little about Dungeons and Drag. It makes me feel cool.

Like I don't know about that game. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, I guess you should feel cool to not know about it. You handled it as most people do. You kind of sat there and said, I have no idea what's going on. And I remember we were lucky enough where we brought up a blind guy on stage. There was a blind guy and a black gay guy.

That's right. And yeah, we pitted them against each other. How do your guests normally react, Dan, to you suddenly playing Dungeons and Dragons in the middle of the of the show. Oh, they're actually quite addicted to it. I mean, it's because, you know, Spencer, our dungeon master, he's been part of the show.

He was, he sort of represents the audience in a lot of ways because he came up out of the audience. I asked one night, is there a dungeon master in the audience? And he raised his hand, and he's been a part of the show ever since. Aside from people who have never gotten late in their lives, I would imagine that people who like Dungeons and Dragons, there must be a lot of like autistic and people with Asperger syndrome. It kind of strikes me as one of those. Yeah, I would say so. Yeah. I think that's a

healthy guess. I think my show's audience probably has a disproportionate amount of people on the spectrum in the audience. I get that impression. I feel a little spectrum of me myself. You know, I'm more of a verbal thinker and kind of like not that intimately, emotionally connected by default with people. But I'm very, very emotionally affected by them, if that makes any sense. Oh, yeah. It's very easy for me to just talk into a microphone to a bunch of strangers and reveal very

personal things about myself than it is for me to actually just recognize when I'm being mean to somebody face to face, you know, and be. sensitive to their needs in the moment. Yeah, I think Sarah Silverman said you would say stuff to her that would depress her. But she was your biggest fan.

She was your biggest fan and liked you and fired you. Yes, yes, yeah. She kind of steals the movie with that line. Like she makes the trailer for the movie about me with that line. I'm his biggest fan and I fired him.

Now, I think of all the things you've done, what you're probably best known for, is shoving a Sharpie in your asshole while you were jerking off. Yeah, I think that's, hopefully that's tombstone worthy because I think it's, I think it's what I've contributed. Could you, can you explain to me in detail how this came about? It started with me, like, it started with my friend Rob Schrobb telling me when we were, when we were still pretty young, he said, you know, you know about stimulating the prostate, right? Like, you know, if a girl loves the area between the thing and the thing, you know, while you're orgasming, like it'll be a more intense thing. And I was like, oh, that's, okay, that's, I didn't know that. And then I remember reading about that in like a playboy or a penthouse subsequent to that. Or somebody wrote in and said, hey, I was having sex and my girlfriend rubbed me in that area.

And the orgasm was crazy. What is that? And the person responded with, well, she's stimulating your prostate. Some people do it internally. And I was like, oh, so that's the same. So that's why people shove stuff up their butts when they're having sex and stuff. That kind of makes sense. I wonder if that's, like, way better.

And then I, so it's kind of, you know, it was a rainy afternoon, and I, you know, I didn't have to be anywhere for a few hours. So I looked around the house for, you know, it was like I wanted, I wanted to play it on the cautious side. It was the really first thing I stuck up my butt. So I looked at, like, you know, a regular Sharpie pen, you know, like the white end of it, like, not the cap end, but the...

Yeah, the cap end, you don't want to... It's got the clip on it. Yeah, that could be dangerous. Yeah. Like a bat grapple. Like, it would hook in there. So, yeah, you know, it was a smooth, narrow thing. It's like a good beginner's butt thing.

And I just tried it. and I came and I was like, ah, that feels good. But now I have a pen up my ass and now I have to pull it out. You know, I'm sure you're familiar with the fact that a man's orgasm is followed by a instant, like, disinterest in sex. You're kind of like, sick. Like the old Kevin Neal and bit. Shit you've done to get there. Like, if you've done something elaborate, like after your orgasm now, you're dressed as Batman.

and now you're just a regular guy again. You're not like a horn dog. You're just like sitting there with a pen up your ass. And so I guess that's why I never did it again because it's like, well, it's just. So you only shout to Sharpie in your asshole once. Yeah, I think so, yeah. And hopefully you threw it away after. Yeah, I do.

I mean, I put it in the cup of pens that only I am allowed to use. Good decision. Now, now if I, and it's funny, because I'll be bringing up a, a word that is, was just used in a podcast of mine yesterday. And that's taint. Yes. Now, is that the area that you'd be rubbing? Yeah, yeah. The taint, when you're rubbing your taint, if you're, if you're masturbating, I don't know how gross your podcast gets.

I don't know. Go ahead. There's nothing intellectual. this podcast. It's not the McNeil-Lair report. But you have like, you have like producers from the Jack Benny show

on your show and stuff, don't you? Some of them. But they can hear, so it doesn't matter. So you're saying like, then according to your friend, if you're having sex with the girl and the girl is rubbing your taint, it would be a more intense orgasm.

Yeah, in theory. I think, yeah. Yeah, like you're pressing on it because I think the muscle underneath there is what's like, that's what's spasming when you're orgasming. So I think you're like, I think if you hold it down, I don't know. I don't know why that would feel good, but I learned so much on this show. You know, we had the same discussion with Sir Ben Kingsley. Dan, how did you meet your writing partner, Rob Shrop?

Fuck that. I wouldn't know about rubbing the taint. Well, it's the same answer. I met Rob we did comedy sports in Milwaukee. It's an improv franchise, kind of a working man's Improv Olympic, where people come to these short-form improv shows that are structured like their fake athletic events. like two teams competing against each other for comedy points. I used to have something here like that, Comedy Olympics. Yeah, I think there's a couple variations out of it.

Comedy sports is a direct derivation of theater sports, which was started by Keith Johnstone in Canada, I think, for those improv people listening. But it was, you know, the emphasis was not on the art. It was on the comedy and the laughs and stuff. And so it was very intense short form improv training. And it was the only thing like it going on in Milwaukee. And so if you were like an attention hog and interested in the creative field,

you kind of gravitated to comedy sports in Milwaukee. So that's where I met Shrob. And he was a comic book. He was making his own comic books. Wasn't he? Yeah. Shortly after I met him, he had gone to, he had just graduated from art school in Milwaukee and was not really doing anything with his degree.

And then one day he just revealed that for the previous few months he had been drawing his own comic book on his kitchen table and very cautiously started showing it to people in a three ring binder. And everyone was really into it. And he partnered up to publish it independently with our friend Peter. And at a certain point, it was published as a comic book and then it found its way into the hands of Oliver Stone's production. company, and they optioned the film rights to it for like 10 grand or something. And we, you know, it was 1993 or so in Milwaukee, and we thought, this is it. We're going to Hollywood to help make this movie about our comic book. Then we got out here, and, you know, it turns out that's not quite how the business works,

but it got us out here. Now, one person I've worked with, and I met a few times over the years, and I think, can use that classic cliche, well, he was always nice to me. And that's Chevy Chase. Because he was always nice to me. Yeah. I never had anything bad to say about him. But obviously, you didn't feel the same way. Well, I mean, yes and no. I mean, I think there was a lot of, sadly, there was a lot of the same blood in our veins. I mean, Chevy and I think we would both admit we're kind of narcissistic. And, I mean, I had created this show.

He was a huge star acting in it. And, you know, he and I both kind of like, I don't know, we take our shit really seriously. And I wanted to make it work that way. I was like, go ahead and take your part on the screen super seriously. Let me inform the character with that, you know, that angst and that darkness. because I think that could be a really cool character. I think if you watch, if you're a community fan and you watch like season one and two of community,

and you can see, I think Chevy's at his height in playing that character in the Dungeons and Dragons episode of Community where he's like, he's a villain. The heroic part of him as an actor is the part of him that doesn't want to say die. It doesn't want to go gentle into that good night. And I guess, you know, like, we, we got along as much as we could.

I worked with him longer than anybody's ever worked with him. And he created a great character on the show that we loved a lot. The feud that got so well publicized was just a result of pretty typical razzing between us. Like, it just somehow kind of went viral. Well, not somehow. It went viral because like a dipshit, I played a voicemail that he left me into a microphone. And someone in the audience was recording it and they put it on the internet. So it was pretty fun to listen to.

So it went viral. I didn't, if I could go back in time, I definitely wouldn't play that voicemail into the mic. But at the time, it was like you could cry out into the darkness. Ah, Chevy Chases a dick. I don't like working with him. And he hates me. and like no one cared, no one was listening. It was just like something you would share with 50 people in a, in a cabaret theater.

Oh, I know that feeling. Exactly. It used to be you could just crack a joke and it was a joke and the world kept spinning. Now it's. Yeah. Yeah, the medium was different. You know, if you were in a stand-up club, then it was it was understood that you were performing for 80 to 100 people there. and your thoughts about 9-11 were not meant to represent the planet's zeitgeist about it.

We're not meant to be consumed in the cold light of day on Good Morning America. And we've exited that time. It worries me a little bit because I do think that there's an importance to context, in particular the dark cloisters, smoky clubs, where people can be vile and explore the crevices of, of their thoughts, you know, and not, if we all have to speak to each other as if we're speaking to the planet, things are going to get real boring real fast. And I think the public, a lot of the public, still want something that's going to shock and offend them.

And they, they kind of enjoy it. It's a thrill, knowing that that could happen. Well, of course, yeah. I mean, we love, you know, we've, we're here. human beings, where primates were, we're like weird animals that are half God, half,

half, a monster. And we, like, we, we, we, we're terrified that we're going to get kicked out of

the species. So we try to button up and, and, but we are fascinated with the idea that the guy next to us might make a mistake or, you know, what he might have to say. And our heroes and our villains are both people who,

you know, say shit they're not supposed to say. Um, Yeah, I mean, I guess we could segue into the Cosby thing now if you wanted. Well, we were going to ask you a Cosby-related question because... Oh, and can I interject here, too? Cosby is another one on that list of, well, he was always nice to me. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I, yeah, I am... I think that says it all. But one of your Channel 101 shows, Dan, was... House of Cosby's. Right, yes, it was, yes. And which people can find on the internet, and it's very, very funny. And what happened to it? It was short

lifed. Yeah, it was Cosby's lawyers sent a cease and desist to Channel 101, and we weren't making any money off of it, but they sent a cease and desist to us and then we kind of ignored that because it was like, well, this isn't how

society works. This isn't like, we're allowed to put a cartoon on the internet based on your fame, you know. And then their lawyers contacted the internet provider and threatened to shut them down for letting us have a website on their internet service that was in their mind interfering with Bill Cosby's right to sell his own likeness and stuff. And that's the argument against like, that's that's the other side of the, of the parody argument when you're doing stuff like that is like,

if my parody of Gilbert Godfrey is me just doing his act and sounding like him, then Gilbert, you know, it's like, well, that's not parody. You're like, you're calling yourself Gilbert Godfrey and you're like doing my act. But I don't, that's obviously not what we were doing with Cosby, but they, the internet provider kowtowed to it. It was a bummer at the time because it was like the creator, Justin Royland really did it out of love. He loved Bill Cosby. You don't do that kind of thing without being fascinated with somebody and doing it.

But we did have to take it down at a certain point, but you can find it with a cursory Googling. That's one gets me about the Internet. It's like everyone will get shocked and offended and they go, okay, we've taken that down. Taking it down means it'll take you another minute to find it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, and they call, I think that's what they call the strides end effect now in Internet culture. is that actually the attempt to mitigate access to the content creates big road flares leading to it now. The story becomes the story becomes the story.

And that gets back to people wanting stuff that they shouldn't hear. Once you tell them, oh, you're not supposed to hear this, then they want to hear it. Right, of course. And it's crazy the disparity between the things that we allow to exist inside our heads and the things that we allow to exist inside other people's heads. It's really, it's kind of admirable and kind of sad and often angering and sometimes uplifting, just like the weird standard we hold ourselves and each other too. And it's so clearly out of just loneliness, we're just so scared that we're going to

make each other mad or get kicked out of the tribe. And we need to give ourselves so much more credit as a species than we give ourselves. I mean, we have terrible, dark, horrible thoughts and not sharing them and not talking about them is history shows is the sure, surefire way to reach horrible behavior. Well, it's like funny. I worked recently with Charlie Sheen, and he's a famous character that the knee-jerk reaction, you have to say, oh, I condemn him. Right. It's awful. And then you go, and I think every single guy is going, wow, he parties and gets laid.

And they really want to admire it, but they're scared. Right. Well, you want to know for sure. I mean, we adopt celebrities as like these tarot cards, these archetypes. So you go, you know, well, this person is the promiscuous person. This person is the drug user. This person is the, we have a lot of these roles that we reserve for people. And we tragically, even though, you know, they give us release and fantasy, we want to punish them for that.

Otherwise, we feel like we shouldn't be with our wife. You know, we, we feel dishonest about being a normal people. So we want, we want the people that we initially reward for their debauchery to then be punished for it. And it's a little sad. It's a crucifixion that plays out over and over again with these tabloid celebrities. You know, we pump them up and we fill their heads and we put them up on our shoulders, essentially, and we drag them up to Golgatha and we nail them to a cross and watch them bleed to death and spin on them. And, you know, everyone gets to pretend at any given time because it was all this big Ouija board, this big collective movement.

Nobody in particular, like, dragged Charlie Sheen up that hill by the, themselves. We all get to like hang back and participate in the whole cycle with just a pinky finger. And you know, I've been I've been on that side of it, the business side of that. Of course, with the Chevy thing, it was like I suddenly became overnight. It's like way more famous than a writer should ever be. And for way different reasons than a writer should ever be known as like having people tweet, tweet me just because they read my name in a TMZ article and just like getting their shit out of off of their chest. I'm not completely. I'm not completely. complaining about any of this. I'm not entitled to anything, but I'm just saying emotionally,

the experience is like when you see it from the barrel end, it's like, wow, we are fucked up to each other. Like, we really, and I think it's all, it's all because it's when we cease to see each other as people, like when we become symbolic and people think that celebrities are, they're like the moon, you know, you could throw a rock at it as hard as you want because it's impossible to hit it. But, you know, what if you found out the moon was like, They're kind of sitting up there going, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow. Well, in Chevy's case, was it, was it just a matter, Dan, of onset razzing or was, I mean, I was reading your, your AMA on Reddit, supposedly he refused to do certain things, he refused to do a tag? Yeah, he didn't do a, there was a, there was a bit, it was like, it was, it was magnified his, his refusing to do it.

Like, he'd walked off set before, he gets tired, he gets cranky, he leaves, whatever. he was a three amigo he can he can get tired and cranky um but um it was the end of the season and i was at dinner with my parents who were out of from out of town and uh and i got a text message that he had walked off this last thing this very last thing that he needed to shoot to wrap up the season before all of the sets got torn down and put into storage um so there was never going to be a chance to pick it up or fix it or anything like that i i did get i got a little upset But I did what I always do with my anger, which is I try to turn it into entertainment for other people. So at the rap party, at the rap party, which is a celebration of people that work really hard on the show who suffer all year long.

And I made a joke out of it. And I said, you know, this is the rap party. I'm your boss. You can't get fired if you say, fuck you Chevy right now. And everyone said, fuck you, Chevy. because he's a little bit of a pill on the set, you know. And I, and that, you know, he, he heard that and he left. And, and then I, I think I exacerbated it because he was like, I was still mad at him.

So he was like texting me, you know, telling me, you know, that was that was fucked up in front of my wife and kids. And I was like, you know, your kids are 40. And, uh, and like I you know I was still I was I think if looking back on it I could have been a bigger man and like you know I could have said at that point okay well it really made me upset that you walked off the set for that one thing so let's now let's reset and hope we get a fourth season and et cetera but I I was I was a passive aggressive dick I was like not responding to his texts and kind of like torturing him a little bit that way and and it's it's it's funny when you were talking before because I've certainly have been in front of the barrel of the gun a few times.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, the aristocrats documentary. And the tsunami got me fired. And it's like all these people like I feel like people, once they get outraged and offended,

they feel good about themselves. Right. It's weird. That is really a weird trait we have. I understand outrage, but like when you feel like if what you're doing is easy, if you risk nothing by condemning someone, that doesn't mean you shouldn't condemn them, but it definitely means you don't have to be proud of yourself for doing it. It's like, oh, you know, that guy, that guy said that horrible thing. And I disapprove it's like, well, that's.

not heroic to disapprove I always kind of felt like when it was going on with me like are you flying to Japan and helping with the rescue effort or are you just getting mad at a joke?

Right. Yeah, it's if what you're saying or doing you know, if you just run it through this acid test of like is it, do I risk anything by saying or doing what I'm about to say or do? If the answer is no, I absolutely risk nothing by saying or doing this thing.

It might still be okay to say or do it. It's just, but, you know, try to remember. Like, it's a good dose of perspective to have. Like, I'm not doing anything risky at all. So maybe I don't need to take such a high road about it. I could lend my voice to, like, you know, crowds love to boo somebody. Oh, yes. You know, you go, like, somebody says something inappropriate.

and you go, boo, boo, boo, boo. Okay, that's a healthy function of society. But you're just, that's the same as applause. I mean, it's just, it's just a fun group activity. And your part in it is not heroic by any means. We will return to Gilbert Gottfried's amazing colossal podcast after this. Staples' preferred business membership built for busy business owners, because you've got bigger things.

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That was easy. You're no longer young people. You're just people. And people are either productive or dead weight. It's my first day of work and I need to. make a big impression. Were you just checking me out? No.

It's too bad. I see at least 15 ladies I need to talk to you before my beta block wears off. My co-workers don't take me seriously. It's not a human. It's just a piece of meat. Someone bring a gurney. Hey y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair.

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And now another thing that I guess you're very famous for is fucking a blowup doll. Same question for Ben Kingsley. It's a real doll. So it wasn't the cheap blowup one? No, God, no. What am I, some kind of creep? So this is one of those real advanced. I've seen photos of.

those advanced ones. Yeah. That looked like you're actually fucking, uh, well, a dead girl. We're talking about like the one of the Ryan Gosling movie? The Lars of the real girl? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, they're fully articulated, uh, yeah, terminator skeletons with, uh, silicon like, like skin over them. Like, like it's a whole deal.

And they feel like real skin and everything? They feel more like real skin than a balloon or it's not a it's definitely not I mean my thought was I was in my early 20s and I was like you know what I keep having these relationships I they keep failing I keep I keep thinking I'm in love and then hurting people I keep getting hurt by other people like maybe this is a modern convenience for people like me like maybe maybe all I want is just like you know this creature comfort and I can if I can take myself off the marketplace Maybe that's actually a responsibility I should do instead of like going out every six months and going, okay, I'm lonely again. So I love you.

I love you. I love you. Now, how much did this cost you this? They were like at the time when I got. Like you don't know, Gilbert. Well, I'm still using the Jeep ball once. They are the price of a of a segue. They're like six or seven grand.

Wow. Yeah. And they come to your house in a crate. It's incredible. Now, just when they deliver this giant crate, do all of your neighbors know what's in this crate pretty much? I hope not. I allowed myself to think that wasn't the case back then. But then again, back then I was probably thinking, because before you click submit on the order form for this thing, I think you have to go. to a place of self acceptance.

Kind of like the Sharpie. Yeah, you're kind of like, you know what? I'm clicking this button because I have had it. And so I guess... It's kind of like right before you pull a trigger against your skull. Yeah. I mean, I guess

if my neighbors, if I thought my neighbors knew that there was a rubber woman in the crate that was being called up to my apartment, I would have I would have, I guess at that time I was in a state of mind where I was like, yeah, exactly. This is what you've done to me. Oh, so you pretty much were at that level where you said, uh, yeah, everybody, I'm, I'm

fucking something made out of rubber. Yeah, be nicer to me at the laundromat, if you want. Now, did this with you so much? And this had only, uh, same openings? Uh, It's limited to the number of openings. Well, it had a mouth, obviously, with teeth. Yeah.

They're like rubber teeth. Soft rubber teeth. Yeah, they're soft teeth. Oh, that's an improvement though for a real girl. Yeah, it is. And obviously a vagina. Yep. And it had an an an anus, I imagine.

have a little butt, a little tucas. Now, did you ever fuck this rubber tukas? I tried the tukas. I mean, it's there. It's not Mount Everest. It was, you know, I've, yeah, I would, it was like actually this may be, this may be the right time to try the tucas before I take it on the road, you know. It's all the same.

I mean, the took us being a smaller rubber hole than the vagina hole on this thing. So basically, you didn't really notice a difference between the rubber vagina or rubber asshole. Well, it was smaller. The butt was smaller. Oh, okay. So it was a tighter. It was more realistic. Well, I mean, I've only tried anal sex once in real life.

And I guess, I guess relative to the human body, it's the same thing. It's like a smaller hole. That's the idea. I mean, it's basically the sale there, right? So I like the idea that so much science was put into this stall where they said, well, the rubber asshole will have to be tighter. Yeah, yeah. Because that's the way an asshole feels. Dan.

I hate to change the topic. This is very important. He's going to be talking about this on 60 minutes. Going back to your childhood in Milwaukee and before you hooked up with Rob, this is something I'm curious and it didn't turn up in my research. Was there any point that you knew you wanted to be a writer, that you wanted to be in comedy?

Was there, were there shows you watch that you sparked to, something that inspires you to know this was going to be your life? Oh, yeah. I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was old enough to, you know, even to talk. Yeah, I always, always wanted to write little stories and show them to people. And that's what I did. That's what I got praised for. And that's, I never really had any other phase.

I never was like, oh, I'm going to be an astronaut. I just always wanted to write stuff. I wasted a long period of my life thinking that I wanted to just be like Stephen King, you know, like I was going to be a novelist, I was going to write books. I didn't, it never, it didn't occur to me until relatively late in my life that people wrote the movies and TV shows that I, that I loved. I just sort of thought of them as movies and TV shows and thought of myself as someone that wanted to be a writer.

What kind of stuff did you watch back then? I mean, I grew up with my parents watching, watching, you know, cheers, and I loved taxi and reruns of the original Bob Newhart show and all in the family. Sure. The classics. I also love, I really loved sci-fi shows. Those don't tend to last as long. I would love, like, the NBC shows that would fail after six episodes like Manimal and Misfits of Science. I'm a corkendale.

Manimal. Oh, that was one of those infamous, horrible shows. Which one? Yeah. Manimal? Yeah. He was a guy who, I guess he solved crimes by turning into any animal. Sure.

Yeah. And what was the other one you said? Misfits of Science? Misfits of Science. Whiz Kids. Yeah. Yeah, Courtney Cox was in that. Yeah.

I love those conceptual shows. I mean, when I was a kid, the Incredible Hulk won an Emmy for Best Dramatic Series. I mean, we were living in a great time back then. But, yeah, so I was, you know, Night Rider was one of my favorites. I was like, this is the perfect show. But comedy just kind of came as a result of like going where the heat was, you know. Like people like to laugh. There's a big demand for it.

So it's a better place to cut your teeth. I mean, it's harder to, without a classical education, I think, blow people's minds with your drama than it is to just like be funny. and get better at being funny. I was doing stand-up from an early age and just anything I could do to get attention and get rewarded for it. Speaking of Night Rider, we have to ask you about Heat Vision and Jack,

which I asked you backstage the night we met at the Y, which is a little bit, and correct me if I'm wrong, a little bit of Knight Rider meets the $6 million man? For sure, yeah. Yeah, Ben Stiller saw a lot of $6 million man in it, so he brought that to it. I mean, there's also a lot of elements of Star Trek.

series in it, but definitely primarily Buck Rogers and Knight Rider most of all. Buck Rogers in the 25th century. That was another one. And now in Buck Rogers was Mel Blank, the voice of the robot? Yeah. Yes, I believe he was. That's it.

Very good. Yes. And who's the, I forget her name. I met her recently. Aaron Gray? What? Was it Aaron Gray? Yes.

Yes. She was really hot back. Yeah, I worked with her. She was really hot back then. And I heard she had a rubber anus. Oh, really? Yeah, it was a tight rubber anus. Well, Heat Vision and Jack was one of those shows that I told you when I met you, Dan,

that Beth L.A. that Beth L.A. at Uncaburray, and it just became this cult thing that everybody had to see. Yeah, it was amazing the extent to which back then, it's so hard to, even for me, let alone for I'm sure young people to grasp the idea that before a certain point in the Internet's evolution, if you had a TV pilot and it didn't get picked up, you just, that was the end of the story. You didn't know if it was good or bad or if anyone ever liked it. And Beth Lapidus back then in L.A. was she was one of the only people that was making it possible for people in L.A. to show their surplus work, you know, and get some back on it.

Now, were you telling me that story that you had a copy? They did a pilot. You had a copy of it. And you were in your Los Angeles apartment by yourself? Yes. Yes. And tell us what you were doing. I tried to fit the tape up my butt.

I mean, when I describe this to people, I am as a, amazed by it as anyone listening. Like, I just report the facts. I don't know what I was thinking, but this is the emotional state I was in. I had a VHS copy of Heat Vision and Jack. I had just found out it wasn't, Fox wasn't going to turn it into a TV show. And I remember taking the VHS tape over to my next door neighbor's apartment door. This was a young lady who I never spoke to.

I'd never spoken to her. I had only ever heard her boyfriend come to her door because the walls were so thin. He would come to her door, and he always did this gag where he'd knock on her door and she'd say, who is it? And he'd say, it's the milkman of human kindness.

That's the extreme extent I knew them. There were just these voices. And I walked over to that door with this VHS tape and knocked on the door and this, you know those peep holes that are like little windows, little doors? Oh, yes.

So he opened that thing up and like I could see his little eyes. And he peered out and he said, yes. And I said, hey, is the young lady that lives here? And he said, why?

And I said, I'm the neighbor and I, I made this TV pilot and they didn't pick it up but I was just wondering if she wanted to watch it or and he turns his face away from the people to

to an off-screen person and says do you want to watch a pilot? That's hilarious. And he just hear this murmuring like, no, why are you? No. It's like, no thanks, buddy. No. And I'm like, okay, all right, thank you. What massive deuce jills do you get every time you

think of that story. I mean, I can't even, it's beyond deuce chills. Like I, I don't even know what, it's just like, like, like, watching an alien species, like, what was I? And then the idea that I would ever make fun of anyone, you know, ever for anything is like a preposterous

to me, but I still managed to do it. It was a smart show. We should point out to our listeners who aren't familiar with it, is that it was Jack Black was the star, and the motorcycle was, voiced by Owen Wilson. And my favorite part was that Ron Silver play the bad guy named Ron Silver. Yeah.

But he was actually playing himself. In the show, he's an actor who is also an astronaut. Who's pursuing Jack Black. Yeah. So in other words, if you made it, you too would accost your neighbors with it at their door. What was the reason that Fox gave you guys at the time for not going forward with it? I heard it was expensive to do. Yeah, they said they said they found.

felt it was more of a sketch than a show. They couldn't see the longevity of it. I, you know, we had anticipated that and given them a hundred log lines for future episodes, but I guess they didn't believe. But, I mean, I think they looked at it as like, you know, in the tradition of sledgehammer or naked gun, kind of like, I think they saw the, they saw a shelf life in it because it was, in their view it was mocking TV, making commentary on TV, and not actually just doing what TV is supposed to do,

which is give the nice, poor people, a reason not to burn down the White House. I saw it at Betts show with Lookwell, with Robert Smygel and Conan's pilot, which you could put in the same category, a show that was making fun of TV. Yeah, but it's like the thing is, now that's all TV,

and I don't think that, I think that Lookwell and these shows were like, you know, it's not like we were making fun of TV because we wanted you to stop watching it. We were making fun of TV because we had grown up on it. And so it's like... It was affection. Yeah, ancient Greek myths are all making fun of ancient Greek myths.

I mean, they're all a bunch of people running around going like, I know how this is going to go. I'm an ancient Greek person. And then the Oracle is like, yeah, but you can't, You can't get out of being an ancient Greek character just because you know that a guy with one red shoe is going to kill you. No, I'm going to kill all the people with one red shoe, and then you do that. And then a guy with blood on his shoe says, you killed my mother and kills you. It's all commentary.

It's all meta. But I think back then it was just sort of like, well, if you're making fun of TV, then you're not making TV. It was a smart show. I wish it had – And there was talk about doing it as a feat. Reviving it? Yeah, there's always been talk of doing it as a feature. Now doing it as an animated show they've been trying to do for a while.

I think it's only hope would be, I think it could be a nice companion to maybe like Eagleheart on Adult Swim. I really like Eagle Heart. I think that the guys that make Eagle Heart, who I know, like, that's the modern incarnation of that sensibility is like, yeah, this show still tells stories and it's, it's winking at the camera. These are archetypes, and you're still being told a story, and it commits to the genre that it's in.

I can see, like, doing a live-action version of Heat Vision on Adult Swim. You know, when you were saying about keeping poor people from burning down the White House, do you find, I find this a lot in TV shows and movies, the message is don't want something that sounds better than what you have. Correct. Don't experiment with change. Like rich people made a mistake being rich, you'll be miserable. Guys that get laid a lot are pathetic. Right. It's mostly about mitigating ambition.

And I don't think it's necessarily, I don't really believe in conspiracies to the point where I don't think there's a room full of guys with cigars going like, make sure the show's about this. It has this effect on people. I think what it is is that capitalism by its nature, if you make TV for money, then that means that you have to use the same set week to week. And it means that the actors are under contract. So if you make a Star Wars TV show, then they can't blow up the Death Star at the end of the pilot. They have to just talk about how much they want to blow up the Death Star for the rest of the TV shows length. So it's about reducing overhead. So typically in the stories that we watch on TV, the characters have to, they have to be

reset at the end of the story. So the stories end up being about futility. They end up being about people going, I wish that I worked at a chocolate factory instead of a greeting card company. Well, guess what? He's going to find out that he shouldn't have ever wished that. So it has that nice effect of like telling poor people like, you know what, we're all in the same boat, like life is hard.

Keep your head down. Show up to work the next morning. Isn't Rob Schneider funny? Just stop complaining and get back to work. What was that Nicholas Cage movie that gets on my nerves? I think the married man. Which one? With him and...

Talyoni? Yes, yes. The one that's kind of like a... So there he meets like a black genie. Oh, right. Yeah. Don Chiehl. Right.

And he goes from being this rich playboy in a luxurious apartment building to having a broken down house in Jersey. And he works in a tire store. And he finds out at the end that being rich and fucking a lot of models is a bad thing. And it's a good thing to live in Jersey and work in a tire store. Well, don't you think, I mean, I kind of, I think you could get pretty sick, pretty fast of, of a lot of the things that we're told are supposed to fulfill you. I mean, like, how much floor space do you need and how, how, how attractive is, is a sexual partner going to stay if, if you don't love them? I don't know. I guess I'm on the side of that sappiness.

Like, I believe that, I think that in the. those shows that like that we're talking about where they train you not to aspire to too much. I think they're keeping you on a treadmill and they want you to think that if you stay on the treadmill, you're going to get rich. And that's why when people riot in cities and they're setting fire to shit, like we, there's this streak in us that tends to side with the people in the tanks and the riot gear. And it's like it, because we have this sense in us that's like, well, don't rock the boat. Like, like, you're being unfair by complaining. Like we can't all have everything. And then the unspoken part of that is, I'm going to be rich one day.

I'm going to be rich, not these other poor slabs next to me. I believe in this system. I'm going to get rewarded for this with my scratch-off ticket or my retirement plan. I'm going to have supermodels stuck in my dick, six different directions, and it's going to, it's all, something's going to happen. Something's going to happen, and I'm going to be happy. I'm going to be made happy by all of these things I'm going to attain. And I'll sell out the poor person next to me in order to get there. and I have these rich people's back because they're playing,

I believe in this system because I'm going to be rich. And I sympathize with that because it's like who wants to live in a world where we all just throw up our hands and go, there's so many of us. There's not enough food. Line up. Here's a piece of bread. We will return to Gilbert Gottfried's amazing colossal podcast, but first a word from our sponsor. Now, of stuff you've done that maybe if you went back in time you shouldn't have,

you called Steven Spielberg a moron. So much for the warm and fuzzy side of Dan Harmon. Well, I was talking to a little kid, you know. Yeah, you were writing, just to clarify, you were writing a letter to the daughter of a friend. Yeah, she was scared. of the movie I wrote called Monster House and she she didn't she didn't like the movie she it was scary to her and there were things that didn't make any sense

about it and I in my letter back to her which I didn't think was going to be on the internet I ground some axes that we all feel free to grind in our in our apartments but not so much on the internet yeah call it Steven Spielberg a moron I don't think that's you a hit in the business Yeah, well, I'm doing fine. Okay. You mentioned adult swim, Dan, so we have to talk a little bit about Rick and Morty.

Right. Which is Gilbert and I were just watching an episode. That's the episode where Morty asks Rick to basically help him get laid. Right. And he gives him the, what is it, it's like a pheromone of voles who made for life. People into praying antics. It's really elaborate. I mean, we were watching it,

just for an animated show, the levels of it. And they wind up burying their own dead bodies. Yeah, yeah. It just turns surreal on so many levels. It's such an ambitious show. Yeah, I'm very proud of it. It's something else. I wish we could make more than 10 a year.

I mean, it's, it takes a long time to make animation. I wish we could churn those things out. I'd love to just do that show. And you and Justin created that, and it was, if I have my facts right, it was based on a webisode. Yeah, it was kind of based on these characters that Justin would do to blow off steam that were sort of bastardizations of Doc and Marty from back to the future. Kind of his punk rock way of saying like, I don't know, just blowing off a lot of steam. Justin was working in animation for other people at the time and he felt kind of constrained and he just wanted to, I think, as the character says in Fight Club, he wanted to destroy something beautiful.

And so he, you know, he made these characters who were just talking about licking each other's balls and just kind of, it felt very, very, very, very juvenile, very liberating, you know. And so when Adult Swim was expressing interest in working with me, I, you know, I called Justin and said, what are you most excited about? And he said, I love doing these characters. And I said, well, let's figure out how to make that into a show then. let's do that. And we did. I'm very, very proud of it.

It turned out to be a great show. And you, I guess, have a lot of, like, neuroses and depression and whatnot. Do you think that made you more creative? Yeah, sure.

I mean, I think honesty is the important thing. I think if you're super confident and healthy and love your kids and have no problems internally, um, and you're honest about it, I think that the people, want to hear from you because we'll be fascinated that that person exists.

But I think that in lieu of that, you know, you should be honest about what you're afraid of and what what makes you sad and what, you know, what makes you feel petty and triumphant and victorious. And so, you know, you don't have to. Young people always want to know, like, oh, do I need to drink? Do I need to go to a dark place? Do I need to hate people? No, I don't think you need to do anything bad.

I don't think you need to think or be anything other than what you are, but the important thing is you need to have transparency, I think. Now, I think what a lot of people are wondering right now is, did you ever shove a Sharpie up your sex dolls asshole? No, I don't think so. I mean, I... How many people are wondering that? Speaking of...

I'm trying to make a transition out of that now, Dan. You know, penetration of the literary community. Just talking about the psychological process or what we were talking about a moment before. And I've heard you say that Harmontown, that the podcast happened, do I have this right? Because you didn't want to go to therapy? Yeah, that's right, yeah. Yeah, I feel like I have thoughts that rattle around in my head and they cause damage up there if I don't get them out. And I don't, when I've gone to therapy in the past, it's like you're sharing these thoughts with somebody who's being.

paid to be an agent of compromise. I mean, if you have a problem with the way society works and you're like behaving irrationally because of your problem with society, a therapist is never going to tell you, oh, you better go out and fix society that they're going to tell you, well, here's what you need to do to calm the fuck down. Whereas if you tell an audience that you're pissed about the way the world was run and you wish it was run differently, they will either sit there quietly and nod their heads or they'll laugh or they'll boo.

they'll engage you in some way. And in either case, you'll be heard and it'll be over with. It'll be out there in the world instead of bouncing around your skull. And I always found that very therapeutic. I've since come to appreciate the merits of a professional mental health person, like listening to you because the good ones can then take that stuff and go, okay, thank you for sharing that with me. Now let's talk about, like, you know, how you can, I don't know,

kind of structure your life and your behavior so that you're not, putting yourself in situations where you're getting upset. And what was the catalyst? I mean, do I have the information right? Was that the catalyst for creating the podcast? Was it being let go at Community? No, I was fired from Community after I created the podcast. The impetus for creating the podcast,

not to overcomplicate and make it boring, but the podcast wasn't really a podcast until the Chevy voicemail leaked, because it was at that point that I was like, well, if people are going to record the show, which I thought was sort of confidential, if they're going to broadcast this on the internet when I say stuff, and then I want them to hear the whole insufferable two hours of me babbling, you know? So before that, it was just me talking in the back of a comic book store. And the reason I started doing that is because I was starting to get really stressed out

by the third season of community. And I was feeling like, you know, I need a place to be able to talk about my anxieties. So the therapy you received on stage was much more useful than professional therapist to you? I mean, at the time it was, yes. At the time, absolutely. I probably tried like nine therapists up until that point, and none of them worked the way that just talking into a microphone did. Recently, and I think the key is because she's a couples therapist, so it's easier to go

into somebody's office and say, I want to be happy with my girlfriend. I want to be happy with my wife than it is to say, I want to be sane. One thing is achievable and practical and one the other one is not. And so I think like couples therapy, like going in to talk to somebody about my relationship with my partner, that opened me up to the fact that people who become psychologists, they're not, they're not necessarily. agents of compromise, they might be actually like kind of on your side and your side alone. And you, although you're very honest with your podcast, tell us about the one time you went back and actually wanted to edit out.

Well, I mean, in the documentary, Harmington, you can see this. Like, when we were on tour, I did a show in Nashville. and I got so drunk on moonshine. I was, to me, it was insulting to the audience how drunk I got. Like, I'm always drunk on stage when I do the podcast. It's sort of part of the gimmick, but I guess there's gradations, you know. Like, I think that a little bit of lubricant lowering my inhibitions and making me able to be honest and forthcoming, it's a good thing.

But I'm not John Belushi, so like it's not, to me it's not worth the ticket price to watch me be unconscious. You know, I felt like I was like running around stage, just like slurring into a microphone. I guess the line for me is when I start slurring. Like, because if I can't speak and finish complete sentences, then I'm like, I'm wasting the audience's time in my mind a little bit. What happened? Somebody in the audience just handed you like a mayonnaise jar filled with homemade booze? We were watching, Gill and I were watching the dock.

What the hell is that? You're just going to drink it. Yeah, it said somebody, so yeah, this is moonshine. I mean, it had a barcode on it. Oh, okay. It was legitimate. It wasn't from a bathtub. So that made it safe.

It has a barcode, then drink it. Yes. Yeah, it was, it's tough. And I had Moonshine again at a show in, I can't even remember what city it was, but I again, like, it's, the thing with Moonshine is it's so potent that you, you drink a little bit and you don't, there's too much, there's a little bit of delay between, you know, it fully affecting you and you determining whether or not you should take another sip. And if you take two sips, that's twice as much.

and it's twice it's just I don't know it fucks you up I meant to ask you this that night Dan when you did the show with Gilbert at the Y is the entire show improvised I mean do you do like a bullet point thing like a curb your enthusiasm episode

no not at all no you just fly by the seat of your pants definitely yeah because I think you gotta you gotta be open to things happening so like Gilbert said like you know like we you know all of a sudden we got a blind up on stage and a gay black guy.

And it's like, dude, what if we had bullet points for some other topic that we'd wanted to discuss? We'd be asking the blind guy about, you know, Texaco or something. Like, are you like, are you blind to what's going on in the Middle East right now? Or, you know, it's like you want to, you want to dig into that guy and ask him, ask him blind questions. You don't want to, you don't want to have shit on your to do list. They'll be distracting. Well, as I recall, between the blind guy and the black gay guy, there was a, there was a, you took a woman out of the audience who was, maybe she'd had a little too much to drink and she wasn't quite playing right. She wasn't quite playing by the rules, which I guess you have to do sometimes.

You have to dispatch people. I can't remember, yeah, specific. I think that, you know, and, you know, if she's listening, I don't want her to be shamed. But I think that if the only problem I've ever had with people are the only thing I, the only reason I've ever said to somebody like, okay, well, that's enough of you. you can sit down now. It was when those people openly admit when they come up on stage that they had no reason to come up on stage other than wanting to be up on stage. So they come up and they go like, oh, I'm God, I can't believe I'm up here.

I'm up here. I'm up here. And it's like, okay, all right. Well, then you're done, right? You're up here. You don't want to talk about anything other than being up here. Like, that's why I like to say things like, well, who's in pain right now? You know, who's, because then you have to be honest about it and go like, well, I'm not going to, I'm

afraid my pain won't be as much pain as somebody next to me. So I better bring my A game. It's kind of like those people who call up radio shows just so they can hear their voice on the radio. Yeah. And there's surprisingly little of that at the Harmontown shows. I mean, I think that there's a longstanding culture in stand-up. Like, I mean, Gilbert, you come from a world where it's eat or be eaten up there. you have a microphone, you come out, and you have to have an incredibly tight set,

and you have to exercise control over an audience that's like, if things start to loosen up too much, they might storm the stage and take over the show and it might be a disaster. It took me a while to realize that if what's for sale when you buy the ticket isn't necessarily that, then people will behave themselves a little bit and that things can be loose. Like there's not a lot of people that come to the shows and just go, oh, I hear that there's no control here. So I'm going to come here and make an ass of myself. Like most people just show up loving it. Like, and they're really respectful and it's kind of cool.

We were watching the dock, Dan, and there's a moment where you say you want it, you want it written on your tombstone. And I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember your exact wording, that you reached people, that you actually made contact. Yeah. Could you talk about that a little bit because it's kind of inspiring. Most writers are shut-ins and here you are going out and hugging your fans in the lobby and really meeting the people. Well, I think it comes back full circle to that Asperger's thing. I mean, I don't know that I have anything diagnosable, but I know that I spend a lot of my life kind of not understanding people and feeling like I don't really like that no matter how hard I I tried, I don't think there's like, there's a certain amount of feeling from other people that I wouldn't be able to get. So I think a lot of writers, like, they shut themselves into a cabin and they blow their brains out because they, they just, they're like regular people plus genius and they feel too much and they can't stand how stupid everybody is. And they eventually just go, okay, my knee hurts. I'm going to kill myself.

But I, I, you know, I have some of those elements, but above and beyond everything. else. It's like I just, you know, I just don't get people. And if I can, if I can spend a little bit of time, like, feeling a little bit normal, which is how the show makes me feel. It's like, makes me feel like maybe the version of me that maybe would have been popular in high school or had a, had a skill that other people could appreciate. Like, I don't know, it's, it's unique enough to me that I, that I'm able to reach out for it. It's just, it's just like, I don't know, if you could, if you had less nerve endings in your, hands you might touch people more. It wouldn't make you a more sensitive person. It's just like you'd be like, what do you feel like? I don't know. Well, all right. We have been talking to the man best known

for spending $7,000 on a blowup doll and he fucked it in its mouth that had rubber teeth that wouldn't scrape his dick and a rubber pussy and a rubber asshole that scientifically was made tighter to feel like we're talking to the man who fucked a rubber girl in her rubber asshole and shoved he shoved a sharpie in his own asshole while jerking off this does not go on the tombstone

It'll have to be a bigger tombstone. I will pay for your tombstone to have all this put on it. That's not what... I... Yeah, I wish you were at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I love this journalism. This is yellow journalism at its best. We've been talking to a man who's done all these things and more.

Before we run off, get it. Anything you want to plug. A new season of community. Yeah, it's coming on to Yahoo. I think February 3rd. I think I have that date right. Just keep watching the skies for a Yahoo version of community season 6. And I'm reading that Rick and Morty might become a comic book?

Yeah, I think that's in the works. Yep. And a book of essays. Yep, I signed a book deal to write some funny essays about putting stuff in my butt. You're busy. You can call Stephen Spielberg anything you want. And to wrap up further, you and your friend believe if a girl pounds you in the area

between your prostate and dick that you'll have better orgasm. That's correct. So the man who knows all this and more the great Dan Harmon. Thank you, sir.

Who has in fact fucked a rubber girl in the ass? Yes. Thanks for doing. Thank you so much, Dan. Thanks guys. Talk to you soon. Dan Harmon.