Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast - Larry Charles Encore

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

GGACP celebrates the birthday (December 1st) of writer-director Larry Charles (“Borat,” “Seinfeld,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm”) with this ENCORE of an interview from 2019. In this episode, Larry joins the boys for an engrossing conversation about humor as a survival tactic, the hazards of guerrilla filmmaking, the persuasive powers of Sacha Baron Cohen and the Netflix show, “Larry Charles’ Dangerous World of Comedy.” Also, Mel Brooks sends up Bill Cullen, Jerry Lewis inspires Bob Dylan, Gilbert guest stars on “Mad About You” and Larry remembers the late, great Bob Einstein. PLUS: “Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp”! The Zen of Jack Nicholson! The influence of Jackie Mason! Larry hangs with Huntz Hall! And the “Seinfeld” episode that never aired! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This Giving Tuesday, Cam H is counting on your support. Together, we can forge a better path for mental health by creating a future where Canadians can get the help they need, when they need it, no matter who or where they are. From November 25th to December 2nd, your donation will be doubled. That means every dollar goes twice as far to help build a future where no one's seeking help is left behind.

Donate today at camh.cage.ca. I'm George Shapiro, and I love, I'm listening to, and I'm dedicated to Gilbert Gotthrie amazing colossal podcast. Don't miss it. Don't miss it. Perfect. I thought that was good. Perfect.

Did you feel my passion? I did. Very much so. I got a tear in my eye. Okay. I'm going to go because they're going to tell my power away. Hello, this is Gilbert Gottfried, and this is Gilbert Gottfried's amazing colossal podcast with my co-hosts, with my co-host, Frank Santo Padre, and our engineer, Frank Verde Rosa.

Our guest this week is a former stand-up comedian, an occasional actor, a producer, a documentarian, a mockumentarian, an Emmy-winning writer and director of some of the most successful and audacious comedy features in the history of the medium. He's written for popular TV shows like, Entourage Fridays, Mad About You, Dilbert, The Tick, and, of course, Seinfeld. Writing or co-writing some of the show's most memorable and most bizarre episodes,

including the opera, the bris, the bubble boy, the outing, and also helped coin the phrase, No, that there's anything wrong with that. As a director, he's helmed classic episodes of his friend Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm, as well as the feature films Masked and Anonymous, Army of One, Bruno, Religilist, The Dictator, and one of the most original and most profitable movies of old time, Borat. His newest project coming to Netflix on February 15th is Larry Charles' dangerous world of comedy, in which he travels to some of the world's most perilous destinations in search of humor.

Frank and I saw the first episode and our jaws are still on the floor. Well, I saw the whole thing. Frank only saw the first. Yeah, he's such a, he's not a professional. Please welcome to the podcast, one of the great comic minds of his generation, a man who shares our love of classic comedy teams, and a man who once had the life-altering experience when Jack Nicholson smiled at him from a passing car.

The brilliantly talented Larry Charles. Oh, my God. Thank you so much. I'm humbled by that introduction, and I'm actually exhausted by it as well. That's our goal, Larry. I'd like to wear the guest out early. And you could use it for your obituary too when needed.

It's perfect. Now, the first thing I wanted to ask you is I'm not a sports fan and I never watch the Super Bowl. But now there's some Jewish hero football player. Julian Edelman. Julian Edelman, of course. I mean, I think this, you know, I don't remember if you remember when we were kids, there was a player on the Mets named Al Weiss.

Sure. Second baseman. All the Jewish kids in Brooklyn wanted to, you know, take credit for him as a Jew in baseball. But of course, he was German and just had a name that was kind of sounded Jewish. I don't even believe, if you ever watch Aedelman, he looks like a white supremacist.

He acts like a white supremacist. His girlfriend is a white supremacist. I know he identifies as a Jew, but I just, I'm skeptical. That's all. So we should proceed with caution. Absolutely. Starting the show with an Al Weiss reference.

Don't let him into the minion without really checking his penis. That's all I'm saying. And then there's those other celebrities who have been called Jews but were never were. Like, well, oh, Joe Namath, a lot of people thought was a Jew. Michael Oh, Michael Cain Not a Jew Who thought Michael Cain was a Jew?

A couple of people Because his name is Morris. Morris, yes. Morris, there you are. I have two Uncle Morris's. I would believe that. And people thought Ringo was a Jew.

This is all about the nose, isn't it, Gilbert? All these guys you mentioned have very prominent proboscis. so so i i i i was watching the dangerous world of comedy uh frank watched like five minutes no i watched the whole first one i was busy doing the research you won't do he was waiting for a commercial it never came so now and and this this deals with one of those subjects that I always like to talk about like the connection between, you know, tragedy and horror with comedy and how the two just go together.

Well, part of my thing always in my life in terms of comedy has been to look for things that really aren't funny and then move it like 10 degrees and suddenly it's, it becomes comedy. And I thought to myself at this point in my life, What could I do that kind of is my honest, authentic version of that now? That's not fictional. It's not artificial. It's not contrived.

What could I do? What can I do? And I thought, you know, I've been to a lot of these crazy foreign countries, sometimes in the midst of great turmoil. And I always meet comedians in all these places. Uruguay and all you're strange Argentina, strange countries, Romania, Morocco. There's always comedians. In fact, Morocco has a stand-up comedy festival.

So I thought, wow, these people, I get to go home and I get all these accolades, but these people have to stay in sometimes very oppressive regimes. And how do they do their comedy? How do they survive? And that was my initial kind of challenge to myself to figure that out. Well, it always gets me when I'll hear people say like, oh, you know, it's really tough now, you know, because Trump has a dictatorship. And when you go to a real dictatorship,

yes. He's doing his best, Gilbert. Yeah. Give him a chance. But you're absolutely right. I mean, the stakes are very different in American comedy than they are in a lot of other countries, especially these war-torn countries. I mean, I was in Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

I was in Liberia, as you mentioned, in Somalia, which is one of the most dangerous places on Earth. A place that I probably should not have gone to, quite frankly, was that dangerous and that absurd to be there for me. But there are comedians there, and there are comedians who have been assassinated there. And most comedians in Somalia who insist, and it's kind of like their mission, their calling to continue doing their comedy, they live with that risk of being gunned down by some assassins. and many of them have had the experience of being kidnapped or tortured and they go back and they do their comedy

and that to me is very courageous and I was bowled over by that kind of it felt like the opposite of what American comedians would do under those conditions, you know? Wasn't there one in Iraq too? Was it in Hassan, the one that was assassinated in 2006? Yes, there was a very famous comedian

assassinated in Iraq also. And if you start to look deeply, I mean, look at Saudi Arabia right now It's very, there's a comedian in Saudi Arabia who I interviewed who's not in the show, actually, who's known as the Seinfeld of Saudi Arabia. And he has currently been arrested and detained and is in prison and kind of out of contact with people. So life changes very quickly there. So yes, here we have Trump. We have some oppression.

We have some fear of what the future might hold. But right now, as it stands, you and I can say anything we want right now on this show. and nothing's going to happen to us. And that's one of the advantages of being here. Yeah, it's like they talk a lot about, you know, Kathy Griffin with the photo holding Trump's head. And you go, look, look, she's in loads of trouble. And it's like she's still working.

Yes, exactly. She's got a nice house, whatever. She's free. Being free is not an assumption that a lot of these comedians can make. They're often just like sort of imprisoned for no reason for periods of time and then let go. It's a very arbitrary existence. Their families are under threat at all times.

It's a very different life. However, as you discovered, I hope, in the show, their needs, their wants, their desires are exactly the same as Americans. You know, they want safety, they want security, they want a job, they want food on the table, they want their kids to be safe. You know, they want those basic things

and that connects them very much to our experience. The courage of these people, is what you come away with too like al-Bashir is that his name the guy the guy of the sort of the john steward of iraq yes and what he's what he's gone through and was he was imprisoned and joked with his torturers so that they wouldn't kill him the joke about don't put the bottle up my ass exactly and it worked it worked for him now he has he's witnessed he's been involved he was involved in a suicide bombing uh his uh his brother was killed his many members of his family were wiped out or injured very very badly. He's been imprisoned, as you mentioned, and tortured more than once. And here he is. He's the most

important voice in Iraq, really, at this point. He's the only person doing what he's doing, you know. And there was such a strange part of the movie that looked like it was stremed up. I thought this can't be real. There was a general. Oh, the warlord, the ex-warlord. Yes. named butt naked. Yes. And you're thinking how, you know, how fierce and how scary this guy is that he can have proudly call himself butt naked and nobody laughs at that. You know, he's that scary.

He's that, he's that dangerous. Well, did he go into bad old naked because he somehow thought it made him invulnerable? Absolutely. That was how it got started. The media sort of dubbed him butt naked because he would fight naked. He would have all his soldiers fight naked because he believed that the bullets would not penetrate them

if they were naked, yeah. And in his case, it worked, you know. I mean, he's alive. Not only is he alive, he was a cannibal. He slaughtered children while they were alive. He would take them and sacrifice them and then feed their hearts to the other child soldiers

to get them in the mindset to fight the battles, you know, and that's who he was, and he survived it, and even though he killed so many people, they have forgiven him. He's like a preacher now in Liberia, in Monrovia.

So a very surreal story. I was very interested in meeting him. It was the first night we got to Liberia. It was very scary. You're on the street where the war took place where he did his fighting, you know, and he's telling me the story. A very darkened street.

And the funniest part of that that I thought, oh, come on, somebody wrote this for him. It can't be real. You asked him what makes him laugh. Yes. And tell us the answer. He said, I love Bill Cosby and I love his show. Kids Say the Darnest Thing. Just too great.

After confessing to murdering children, that was his favorite show. And again, like, even though I'm scared and that, that situation and I'm nervous and I'm anxious. I knew what he said that I was like, yeah. I had a great piece. I had a great piece for the film, you know. I mean, he's a cannibal and a bloodthirsty killer, but he loves cause being kids. He loves to laugh. Yeah. Also Sanford and son, too. Sanford's son too. Yes. Yeah. You're a brave man, Larry. I mean, you say it in that episode. What am I doing? At some point, you have a moment of realization. What the hell am I doing on this darkened street in Liberia

talking to this guy with 20,000 kills to his credit. And you're asking him provocative questions. Well, the first question I asked him was what does human flesh taste like? And he told me like pork ribs. I mean, he didn't hesitate even to answer the question.

All I could think of was George Costanza's porn name, buck naked. Buck naked, yeah, yeah, exactly. That is, that is, and boy, too, the women, the female comedians, too, in Liberia, the super, what was their name, Supermama? Supermama and Mamie. The bravery and what they've been through. Unbelievable. I mean, child, you know, child, as children, they are being raped by soldiers.

They're having children. They're on the run constantly. They're watching. They're standing there while people are being killed all around them. And they wind up finding some humor, some way of using humor. not so much to criticize but to heal. And that, again, was kind of an epiphany for me is like, oh, wow, these people are not coming out of this bitter

and angry, really, or wanting to really critique or satirize what's going on. People do that also. Al Bashir certainly does. But a lot of people, their motivation after experiencing that is to help others heal. And that I found very moving, surprisingly moving, and I wasn't really anticipating that.

Of course. And I found it really interesting, too, they showed a comedy club in, I don't know, Saudi Arabia, wherever. And of course, they're on stage in front of a brick wall. Yes. Was that the LOL club? No, it wasn't. The LOL club is closed now, but they also had a brick wall.

But the place you're talking about was in Saudi Arabia, and it had the brick wall. It was all set up like a regular comedy club. Only men, only men are allowed, which is kind of interesting also. and but completely sort of imitating the American Comedy Club. Absolutely, yes. And all of them are,

this is the thing, although there's a lot of original cultural humor that comes out of these different societies, the foundation for all modern humor like this everywhere. All modern humor is Western humor.

So people are watching videos and seeing you and other great comedians on stage in a brick wall in front of a brick wall and they want to recreate that experience that to those people to those cultures

is what comedy is it's amazing yeah it's amazing I mean at one point you were talking about how they didn't really even know what stand-up was they thought that the jokes were it's very cruel things at somebody else's expense

they were insults which of course as we know from some of our favorite comedians like Jackie Leonard or Don Rickles that is kind of like a raise on debt for their humor as well but here people didn't realize that there was a joke involved. They didn't know what a joke was essentially.

They didn't understand set up punchline. No, not at all. Right, right, right. Exactly. Those ideas were brought from watching videos of American comedy. American comedy is imperialistic just like American culture is

and it's spread everywhere and everyone from Nigeria to Saudi Arabia is basically influenced deep by American comedy. Wow. I wonder what they think of you in Saudi Arabia. If they're watching clips. I mean, how much American comedy are they seeing? What are they getting?

Well, I mean, that's a good question. But I found, for instance, Seinfeld is massively popular, like in the Arab nations. My God. And even in Africa. So we would go, when I was in Jordan, when we was shooting Bruno, we would walk down the street in Amman, which is a Muslim country, very highly anti-Semitic Muslim country at times. There's no Jews. Most of these countries I was in, by the way, I'm the only

Jew. I'm the only Jew in this country. I'm a brave man. So when we were shooting Bruno in Jordan, we were the coterie was the, we're the only Jews there, Sasha and a few other people. But you'd walk down the street and it'd be all these street sellers selling bootleg

DVDs and invariably you'd walk down the street and you would see Borat, you would see curbed your enthusiasm, you would see Seinfeld, and then you would see a copy of Mind Kampf. It was always...

Unbelievable. Those four... Those are the four big bestsellers. And Norman's Corner, Gilbert. Yes. The DVD of Norman's Corner. Did you write that with Larry David? Was that something you do with Larry David?

Yes, yes. In fact, my favorite story that I love telling is yeah you know he he wrote Norman's Corner and I starred in it and then when they were pitching Seinfeld to the network and they said well who's creating this show and they said Larry David and one of the high execs at NBC said isn't he the guy that wrote that piece of shit for Gilbert Coffrey? That's so great. Arnold Stang was good in it, though, Gilbert. Yes, he did credit us for casting Arnold Stang. Larry, when did you guys met a couple of times over the years?

Gilbert was unsure how many times or where? I'm going to tell you what I think is the first time we met. And then you tell me if I'm wrong about that. We met in the early, in the mid-80s, I would say, like 84, through Richard Belser. Yeah. Richard Belser had a show on Cinemax, and you were a guest on that show. And I think that's the first time I met you and saw you perform live.

also. Wow. Yeah. I just remember you're one of those people I always kind of ran into. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Well, you're both from the same neighborhood. Where are you from in Brooklyn? Okay. I was born in Coney Island. Okay. And then Borough Park and then, no, no. Born in Coney Island, then Crown Heights, and then Borough Park. Yeah, so you moved to the other side of Brooklyn after Coney Island pretty quickly. Yeah. I stayed in Coney Island, Brighton Beach. I was in Trump Village, which was on the, like, split the difference between Brighton Beach on the one side and Coney Island on the other. And that's pretty much where I grew up until my parents got divorced.

And then my mother moved us to Florida. Of course, that's where you have to go. And, but that part of Brooklyn, that Coney Island part of Brooklyn, that's where I grew up as well. And that's where Larry's from Brighton Beach as well. Yeah. As is Mel Brooks. And, you know, like that is kind of a comedy golden triangle. for some bizarre reason.

Yeah, and tell us a little bit about your upbringing, because I'm not sure people know too much about this, and I was surprised to find that your father was a stand-up? He did comedy? My father was a failed stand-up. My father went after World War II. He went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts on the GI Bill. He wanted to be an actor,

and he tried out for the actor studio, whatever didn't pass the auditions, did stand-up for a while, had the stage name, and this is no joke. this is the truth, Sycoe, the exotic neurotic. Cyco. Psycho.

That was his name. And, you know, those things didn't work. It didn't really stick with it. But he had a guy, I don't know if you remember this name, Gilbert. There was a great TV writer when we were kids named Stan Burns. And he wrote for the Tonight Show, and he wrote for Get Smart. And he had a show of his own called Lancelot Link, Secret Chip. Remember that?

Sure, with Bernie Coppell. Yeah, he was a great comedy writer, and he in the Army wrote material from my father. So when I came out to California, he said, my father said, go see Stan Burns, you know, and I came out to California in the late 70s, and in those days, you'd pick up the phone book, right? There's no internet or computers or cell phones or anything, but people are still in the phone book. So I look up Stan Burns in the phone book. He's in Woodland Hills.

I call him up. He's so nice to me. He invites me out to breakfast. I start hanging out with Stan Burns. Wow. I'm seeing him weekly at DuPars for breakfast, and he's having me write jokes for him for this gold diggers roast that he's doing, speaking of roasts.

And I started ghost writing jokes for him for the Gold Diggers Roast, the Dean Martin Celebrity Roast. And a few of those jokes got on. He was really sweet, really generous to me, and about six months went by. And one day at DuPars, he said, kid, I got to tell you something. And I was like, what? He said, I'm going to tell you the truth.

And I'm like, okay. He's like, I have no idea who your father is. I've been racking my brain since the day we talked. I can't remember him. You're a good kid. I like you. But I have no idea who you dad was. But he got the goods out of you first.

He did. He was a great guy, actually. Now, your father being both a failed actor and failed comedian, how do you think that affected him, his personality, his whole? I think he was lost after that, frankly. I think he was so consumed by show business. I think he was, he so wanted to be a part of it. Even when I was a kid, he remained friends with, like Jason Robards had been his drama teacher. Or he was friends with the lighting guy at the craft music hall.

or the associate director of the Ed Sullivan Show, and he would take me on the weekend or whatever, and he would take me and see those people and I would go behind the scenes at all these shows all the time, you know? For me, I think it planted the seeds, but for him, he never found anything that quite captured his passion like showbusist did.

So he was obsessed with it. Instead of, you know, math and science and whatever, he would be asking me trivia questions about movies, about Jimmy Cagney and about Humphrey Bogart. You know, that's what he was mostly interested in, and that's what I was filled with, you know. And now I've been spewing it out my entire adult life. Yeah, of course.

So did your father see your success? My father's actually still alive. Oh, wow. He's in a, he just was put into an assisted living facility. He's 91. He's pretty out of it now, unfortunately. Yes, he saw my success, but if I was going to be completely honest with you, I think he had issues with it. I think he never was fully able to embrace it and be supportive of it.

Even though inadvertently he was by inspiration, I don't think he ever really was able to enjoy it the way he should have. You know, I think that was something that he was not able to give himself, you know. That's interesting. Well, Ted, I've heard you describe the neighborhood, and you guys come from similar backgrounds, and you described it as being like a Soviet block and something out of Lord of the Flies. Very much so. Everybody moved into Trump Village at the same time.

And there were these other housing projects there, too, like Luna Park. And there were these buildings of 23-story buildings. All the kids moved in around the same time, like 63, 64. So you had like a prison kind of number of boys growing up at the same time and everyone is jostling for power

and for dominance and for status. and a lot of people fell by the wayside. There was the bullying. When you talk about bullying in today's society, there were hundreds of bullies in my neighborhood. Everywhere you turned, if you were waiting at the bus stop, if you were getting on the train, if you were trying to play basketball,

if you were going to school, there were people all the time besieging you, threatening you, intimidating you, taking your stuff, stealing your books, spitting in your hat and making you wear it. I mean, that was growing up in my neighborhood. But that was pretty adorable stuff. It is funny now that bullying is such a big topic

because it was just a way of life growing up. Exactly. Did you experience these things, Gilbert? You're sort of from the same neck of the woods? I'm a tough guy. I know that. I know you kick their asses. So people always back off when I walk down.

I'm just curious from a sociological standpoint if that kind of hard-scrabble life, that environment, as you say, navigate these kind of tough personalities, if that molded you guys in the same way to be funny. I think you taught you, I know for me, and I wouldn't be surprised this was true for Gilbert and a lot of these guys who grew up this way, I found instinctively that I was able to talk my way out of a lot of violent situations and kind of spare myself by kind of verbalizing and kind of almost tricking them with verbal dexterity. And I think I've absolutely used that sort of learned trait, like it's perfect. It was perfect in Borat. I'm very good at talking people into things. I'm very good at having people listen if I want them to.

I can kind of like put that trance state. I can kind of do that for some reason just because I learned it from surviving on the streets of Brighton Beach, basically. So talent. You mean things like persuading the Pentecostal minister, the preacher in Borat that tricking them. I don't want to use the word tricking them, but somehow convincing them that Borat was a guy in need of saving. Well, when I talk to someone like that in that situation, I mean, it's kind of an acting exercise for me also because I have to fully believe it. If I'm

going to sell you on something, I have to kind of commit to it fully, the way a great comedian like Gilbert commits to his premise and never gives up on it and isn't afraid of what the consequences might be. But it's what produces the gold, really. And the same thing is true in this situation. By setting that up properly, by having that man believe that Borat was lost and needed help, he fully committed to healing Borat. And we got a chance to witness that, which is one of the most amazing things I've personally ever seen, you know, was this healing process. I watched it again last night.

It's magnificent. And how did you work out that scene with Borat? and the big fat guy naked in the elevator. Well, you know, it's funny. He came in first for the audition, and we had seen a lot of guys for this part. Azamat. For Azamat.

And guys would come in who were American actors, and they would put on, like, Russian accents, and it was very fake sounding. And again, remember, these guys, Sasha has to be close up with real people all day long, so it can't feel fake. it's got to seem real. So we couldn't find anybody

who had that kind of authenticity. He came in, Ken DeViscian came in and he was in character and he seemed like a kind of a guy who just stumbled in from a Russian grocery

on Santa Monica Boulevard or something and I felt sorry for him. We felt bad for him. We were like trying to help him get through this audition. He didn't understand anything and we were feeling really sorry for him

and when it was over in his regular voice he said, do you need anything else? and he tricked us and so he immediately he immediately got the part but when we came time to do

and he was great and he was really cooperative he would do anything we asked but when we started talking about the naked fight he was like I don't get it I don't see what's so funny about me naked we would just say trust us just trust us on this was Sasha tapping out at one point

the mattress and you were ignoring him? Do I have to do I have this, right? I'm very ruthless. I'm very ruthless when it comes to shooting this stuff. You know, I don't know how many times we could do it. So I know we have to get it that one time or we may never get it again. So with that, he had understandable reticence about spending a long period of time underneath Ken DeViscian's ass.

And he didn't want to be one wood. He didn't want to be trapped in that crack, like a minor, you know, a minor gets trapped and there's no air pocket. He was very concerned about that. So we devised a plan where we got like a surgical mask. And as he slid under his ass, we would put the surgical mask on Sasha's mouth and then he'd be under. And then Ken DeVisci could rock on him and do all the kind of stuff. But we had a safe, you know, a safe gesture, which was a tap out.

And this last time, it was going so well. And I'm, there's audio of me like just screaming. I can't keep going, keep going. And you see Sasha's farhead, because that's all you can see, is turning beat red. And he's slamming the thing. But I'm still shooting and I'm still shooting. And then finally we ended. And, of course, he's like suffocating.

And we realized, wait a minute, where's the mask? The mask disappeared. And we looked all around, and it had kind of gone up into Ken's folds and finally emerged a couple of takes later. Oh, my God. So the life-saving device for Sasha Cohen was in this guy's asshole? Exactly, exactly, yes. It had to be very carefully extracted, as you could imagine. What are you talking about when you guys went to the screening and you were watching people watch that scene?

and you said they were reacting like they were watching a horror movie. Yeah, I mean, I think that Gilbert can really relate to this. Gilbert does this to a live audience sometimes, and I'm just, I'm bold over when he does it. I mean, you could get an audience just going completely insane. When you're building on that laugh, and it's building like a wave until people are out of control, I've seen you do that on stage many, many times,

and that's what that scene was like. It was like it built so much that people lost control, And I love that horror film aspect of comedy when people are having this visceral, uncontrollable, involuntary reaction to what they're watching. That, to me, is you've tapped into some kind of gold there. Yeah, because it's really that kind of thing, watching that scene in particular, you go on, you know,

oh, no, I don't want to watch this, but I don't want to look away. I saw it with an audience. What a treat to see. I mean, we were talking about, you know, we lament on this fact, you know, on this topic, the death of movie theaters and how you don't get to, you know, this is an experience that's basically endangered,

seeing movies with other people. And I saw that in a packed house. I have never seen people react. I mean, it was screaming. Yes, it was. Something other than laughter, it was. Yeah. Otherworldly.

Again, it humbles me. I mean, you know, when you, when you were in, the first couple of screenings that we had, we did not anticipate people freaking out. I mean, from the time that the titles come up, at the beginning, the logo for the fake company that made the movie, people were laughing. And I remember Sasha and I looking at each other at one of these screenings, like, wow, we can't believe it. And it was just like a roller coaster ride.

So it's just, it worked out. It just kind of clicked, you know. And there was something Sasha Cohen did that was like almost like an experiment, almost like so revealing when he was that character singing, he went into a honky thing. bar. You want to talk about this? Yeah. Now, I didn't shoot that. Oh, that's on the series. Yeah, that's not from the movie, but that is one of the, his famous routines was he goes into an Arizona bar and gets the entire crowd inside the bar to sing, throw the Jew in the well. And he, again, is an expert at, again, manipulating audiences, manipulating crowds, manipulating

masses into doing his bidding. I mean, it's really, it's unsettling sometimes to watch how easily people can be manipulated if they want to be, not against their will. Everyone in all these situations that we're in with the Sasha movies has the opportunity to say no all along the way. But the social dynamic is there's so much pressure to cooperate with a camera on you and a microphone on you. It's very hard for people to not go along with the program at that point. They're in too deep, you know.

It's more than just comedy in a way, Larry. I hate to break it down or dissect the frog. But you remember Alan Abel, the hoaxer? Of course. I was a big fan of Alan Abel. I remember his movie, is there sex after death? Yeah, yeah. Buck Henry was involved with him too early on it.

But it's a little bit of that too. You guys are making a comedy, but you're also, it's all a sociological experiment. Well, when it does its job. It's fascinating on another level. Yeah. When it does its job, it is hopefully exposing hypocrisy and shining some kind of light on the truth of these particular situations, you know, and that, that, but that's sort of inadvertent. You hope that happens along the way with the comedy, and you have to have the

comedy in balance with that. Otherwise, it's just very, very serious, that's the where the seriousness is. If you move it 10 degrees the other way, it's a very serious look at white supremacy and anti-Semitism. And we interviewed a lot of very violent people, a guy in Kansas who wound up being convicted of murders and is on death row. You know, so there are some very serious people out there. And as it turned out, those

people, we thought exposing those people would sort of show the folly and the absurdity of their positions. Instead, we're in a situation now where it's become almost societally acceptable to adopt those positions in life. So things have changed a lot. Yeah, because when I, watching,

when he did that, throw the Jews down the well, It was so, it's funny and frightening at the same time. Yeah. Well, so is when he's singing the, when he does the national anthem, the Kazakh National Anthem at the rodeo in the feature. It's terrifying. Yeah, there are a lot of terrifying moments.

But in truth, Borat was a very, was perceived by the people that encountered him as an innocent character and thus were much more patient with him and willing to accept his so-called ignorance. With Bruno, Bruno's a much darker film, and the reason Bruno's a darker film is because the main character is kind of a, is a homosexual, but he's also not an innocent. Yes.

And people had absolutely no, in the same way they had incredible tolerance for Borat, they had absolutely no tolerance for Bruno. People would see Bruno walk down the street and they wanted to hit him. They wanted to jostle him. They wanted to call him out. And we had so much higher level of violence and tension and darkness on that movie.

That really was the lesson for us as well. Because it was a very, wow there being a very dark version of America, which we really did not anticipate at all. Were there 50 cops called in or something like that, or 40 cops to get you guys out of the, was it the ultimate fighting scene? Yeah, there was a, well, it's a, it's a, Those were very complicated scenes. There's a lot of police involved. We also had police chasing us most of the time. Really, it was...

We rarely had the police on our side. They were usually coming after us. Bruno we're talking about now. On both Bruno and Borat. Yeah, we always had... Borat, one of the best scenes that is not in the movie is we went to Washington, D.C., and we would take the ice cream truck,

and we would just drive around near these national monuments and stuff. and we realized Borat looks, you know, he's got the black mustache. Sure. And all of us are in the back of the ice cream truck with our cameras and black bags. And suddenly we look like we could be terrorists in an ice cream truck. What the hell are we doing in an ice cream truck in the Washington Monument? So suddenly the Secret Service would be on us or the FBI would come up to us, you know, and we were constantly being sort of approached and confronted and detained,

quite often by the authorities. In that particular case that you're talking about at the cage fight, the police had to help us get out, yeah. Well, Dan Mazur, one of the writers on Borat, I was reading an interview with him, and he said every day was like actually preparing for a bank robbery.

Exactly. Such high stress. High stress, high stakes. Right. But by the same token, when we were done and we got away with it, there was nothing more exhilarating than the feeling of having gotten away with it.

And we would get back in the van, and we would be like giddy with laughter because we had actually got it. We went into a bank. We did a scene in a bank where it was just us and the bank president in Oklahoma after hours.

You know, and I'm thinking, man, if we just pull out guns right now, we could rob this bank as well as make the movie. Why not? You know? We will return to Gilbert Gottfried's

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enjoying a good night's rest in your lie flat seat, you'll see that your vacation isn't really over until your flight is over. Fly Emirates, fly better. And there was something in the dangerous world of comedy that were, that kind of thing. You know, you're watching a lot of people cross the line. But there was that one guy, he was just spewing anti-Semitic, it's just, you know, hatred of the Jews. Yes, weave, his name was, weave, yeah.

He and Baked Alaska were both kind of these white nationally. social media comedians. And I wanted to get that perspective. It was much harder to get. I chased after a lot of alt-right comedians. And I could not get too many to sit down and actually talk to me. Those two guys were willing to talk to their credit. But in the case of Weave, he almost doesn't have control, it seemed to me.

It's almost like one of these kind of Touret-like things with him when he went off on his anti-Semitic rants. And it didn't even seem, it seemed like it was a kind of just a spewing rather than even thoughtful, like something that he just does like a Tourette's person curses, you know? Do you ever, maybe this is a naive question, Larry, do you, do you recall feeling, fearing for your life while making this new series? Standing on that darken street, for instance, talking to butt naked? There was two or three times when I thought, I may have made a mistake. in too deep. One was in Iraq. We were going to Kerkuk, which had been besieged by ISIS, and we were going there to an Iraqi prison where an ISIS prisoner was. I was going to interview

the ISIS prisoner. And when we got to, we got stuck in like kind of a checkpoint. Mosul was falling the same day that we had to do this. So we could see the smoke from the battle of Mosul going on while we were trying to get to kukuk, and there was kind of chaos on the road. And I thought, boy, what are we, you know, we're trapped, really, in this situation. And so it worked out, okay, we went to the prison and talked to the ISIS prisoner, which was fascinating. But I was nervous that day. The next time it happened was with butt naked, because we had just gotten to Liberia, I knew nothing about anything, and they told us he would meet us at night on the street.

and I jumped into it and realized, wow, we're totally vulnerable here. I haven't checked anything out. We haven't, you know, done anything. And it's dark, and I don't know what's going to happen. The third time, which was the most intense time, was in Mogadishu. In Mogadishu, there were a number of times where we would get caught in a checkpoint situation, and there would just be dozens of men with machine guns, and they'd be all wearing camo, but slightly different color camo.

and you had all these different groups with arms, and you didn't know whose side, who was who, whose side you were on, whose side was going to open fire. There was a lot of that tension the entire time we were in Somalia. And as soon as we left, there was like a bomb blast and a bus in Mogadish that killed like 550 people.

So I felt very lucky to have walked away from that one because it was a, that is a, I would not advise going as a tourist to Somalia. However, it's a beautiful country, and hopefully someday they'll figure it out. And there was that the ISIS prisoner, it was so weird to look at him because you say, this is a guy who he looks like he works the cash register at 7-Eleven. Yes. That's what that's, I think that was one of the things I was glad to be able to illuminate

was we tend to demonize these people. We don't know anything about them. We paint them as villains, and we have a kind of a one-dimensional mindset about what they are. But this guy was saying he was a farmer. You know, he had been recruited. He had been threatened.

You know, it's like the makeup of the actual people who are in ISIS is actually much more human. They live under these incredible conditions where they have to respond either to join ISIS, or to fight against it, you know, they can't just go on with their lives like we get a chance to do. So they have to make these hard decisions and a lot of them wound up fighting and getting caught. And, you know, now they're in prison and like at Guantanamo, all the people that are not charged there. So it's a very, it's a bad cycle that there's no, in Somalia, you have al-Shabaab, which is another sort of version of that terrorist group.

We met a defector from al-Shabaab, and I asked him also what they've. found funny. He had some interesting answers. When they dragged, when they dragged the bodies of the enemies behind the truck, that's what used to make them laugh. Well, we're going to tell our listeners to check this out. And we'll come back to it at the end, but February 15th, right? February 15th on Netflix. It is utterly fascinating. Thank you. And now let's get to how you started working in TV with, like, well, Seinfeld, let's go. Okay. Well, Seinfeld, I knew Larry Day it from Fridays. And we had become immediate friends. He's a little older than me. We're from the same neighborhood. He immediately became like a big brother and mentor type of figure to me and really

showed me a lot about writing and discipline and things like that at Fridays. We collaborated in a lot of stuff. We remain friends after Fridays. If I would hear of a job, I would recommend him for it and vice versa. Eventually, sometime after Norman's corner, he... I'd have to bring that up against. Which I was not asked to work on.

He, uh, he, he did this, he, he hooked up with Jerry and, uh, they started to do this thing and it became obviously the show

Seinfeld, Sinfell Chronicles at that time originally developed. I mean, the whole mythology and the legend is all well known. It was developed for late night. and all this. He showed me, he came out, Larry, to the Belage Hotel at that time, to show the three of four scripts that he had written to Castle Rock, who were going to produce the show. And he invited me over to his hotel, and I read those four scripts in the lobby. And they were like the

robbery, the ex-girlfriend, the Chinese restaurant. You know, there was another one, too. I can't remember. The phone message, maybe. And I was laughing in the lobby. I'd never read anything that funny. They were just so unique and so original and he asked me to work on the show and I said yes and but Castle Rock said no and they said

that Larry had no experience except for Norman's Corner which of course worked against him nice work Gil and almost killed Seinfeld Norman's Corner just think about that but but they said that he had never

done a sitcom before and um and i had never done a sitcom before so they would not they larry of course was the creator of the show but they refused to hire me so i was cast adrift for a while and i got a job on the arsino hall show which i think i again saw you at the orsini o'clock show at some point i became like kind of a regular for a short period of time and i was a writer i was a writer that year and so i would see you i don't know if i'd even talk to you but i saw you all the time And you were great, obviously, always great. But I was working on that show, and he had, Arsenio, to his credit, had wanted to do kind of edgy monologues.

And, but when he actually got to be the host of the show, he was a black man in a very white medium, and he started to get hate mail that was out of control. And if a white woman came on the show and he just shook her hand, they would be hate mail. Switchboard would light up, you know? That's what you had done, a switchboard, you know. It was kind of a little bit of fashion.

So my jokes, he wouldn't use my jokes because they were just too radical, really. He liked them. He told me he thought they were funny, but he couldn't use them. And I knew I was going to get fired eventually. And that's when I met Jack Nicholson when I had that encounter with Texas. I was just going to get to that. That was the magical Jack Nicholson encounter. Yeah, I walked out of the trailer where we did the writing on Arsenio, knowing that my contract was up.

I was about to have a baby, and it was like, things were really pretty bad. I was looking for some kind of sign, and Jack Nicholson was on the lot on Paramount doing the two Jakes. And he was, suddenly I see in the distance this beautiful red Mercedes convertible, and I see the Laker hat. And it's like, wow, Jack Nicholson is cruising right past me. And as we cruise past, he looked at me, and I looked at him. And he just started laughing and just went, yeah, it's funny. And I just kept going. And I thought, wow.

I just, I just had a Zen moment with Jack Nicholson, and sure enough, I was fired immediately right after that. And I got, I actually got an interview, amazingly enough, with Keenan Ivory Wayans on in Living Color. Oh, in Living Color. And I went to that interview, and Keenan stood me up. And I was the kind of person at that time who really had a short temper with that kind of stuff and I stormed out of the meeting. I stormed out of the waiting room. And when I got home,

Larry was calling me because now they had done like the first four episodes and they were getting picked up for the 13th. And he's like, hey man, you want to come work on the show? You can come work on the show now. And I was like, yeah, I'm free, you know. And I took the job on the show. Keenan Ivory Wayans called me back after that and said, hey man, I'm so sorry. There was a scheduling mix up. Please come in. We really want to work with you. And I was like, I took this other job already. And that's how I wound up working. So having a short temper got you to work on Seinfeld. And because Jack Nicholson intervened.

Yes. Divine intervention. It's interesting, like how I, Castle Rock, they didn't want you because you didn't have that much experience. And didn't Larry David go out of his way to hire people who didn't have experience writing sitcoms? Absolutely. Well, you know that the second or third season, we didn't have a traditional writing staff

ever that I was there. Later on, after I left, I think things got a little bit, the formula, the code had been cracked, and they were able to kind of create a culture that they could kind of replicate the show. But in those first couple of years, we didn't know what the hell we were doing. We didn't even know how to write a sitcom. We didn't know the format for the sitcom. We didn't know how many scenes or anything.

We didn't know how to tell the story. We just did what we thought was funny. We thought the show would get canceled. It liberated us. And we would just kind of figure it out as we went along. And so Larry thought comedians would be good people to draw stories from, you know. So we had a whole staff of road comedians at one point who contributed stories to the show because, again, they were not writers in the traditional sense, but they were people that had very,

Seinfeldian kind of adventures. People like Bob Shaw and people like... Exactly. Bob Shaw, Bill Masters, John Heyman. Right. I know Hayman. Steve Scrovan. Funny guys. All of them. Yeah. All great guys. All great guys. I mean, I remember

what was fun around that time is the times I would talk to Larry David and he just told me some horror story that happened in his life. Usually having to do it trying to get laid. Yes. And then I, you know,

know, I would see a few weeks later it pop up on the show. Yes. And I thought, wow, I know where this came from. Oh, yeah. Well, first of all, you know, part of it is the pressure of coming up with 22 or 24 episodes in a season. That's almost crazy. So he was very courageous and brave, as he always has been, in drawing directly from his autobiography, you know, drawing from his life.

So he would literally have bad dates or awkward. encounters or I'd be with him like in an arts deli and we would come out and the woman at the cashier didn't have any change and she had to run backstage to get change came back and gave us the change and we went outside on Ventura Boulevard we bumped into somebody that we've been avoiding for 20 years so it's like those kind of stories if she had just had the change you know like a crazy Joe DeVola character all all those things were like happening at even either had happened or were happening, and we were constantly pulling on those things to make stories out of them and figure out how to structure them into what became a Seinfeld episode.

And the story about George Costanza being in a girl's apartment and having to take a shift and having to excuse himself had happened to Larry. That's a completely true story. and he that's that when he said that he had told me that story before thinking about it

for Seinfeld and I always thought that is the funniest thing I've ever heard I cannot believe it he actually for he would forego sex because he wanted to go

back to his apartment to have a bowel movement and that's Larry though you know as we know but he was brave enough to think that's a great idea for an episode as a matter of fact

one of the episodes I used to he Larry and Jerry used to share an office at Radford, and then I had an office like adjacent to them. Their office had a private bathroom, and if you didn't have that private bathroom, you had to go out to the hallway, to that crappy bathroom in the hallway. So I just completely obliviously would use their bathroom for everything, and they'd be working, they'd be writing, and I would stroll in with a magazine, literally, and I'd go, hey, how you doing it?

And I would go into their bathroom and go sit there for 15 minutes or whatever. And I didn't realize they were getting pissed off at me, you know. But the brilliance of the show is that we wound up using that as an episode. You know, that's the episode which also combines a number of other Larry incidents, the episode where he gets fired and then comes back to work, pretends it doesn't happen. That's a true story from S&L. Oh, S&L, yes. Yeah.

And it's funny that he went out. out of his way to hire people who hadn't worked on sitcoms, because had he hired people with those experiences, it would have been a situation comedy like a billion others. Exactly. And the stories would, yeah. I was just going to say, not to interrupt, I apologize. He would fight, and I would back him up always. He would fight with the Castle Rock executives and the NBC executives because they wanted

something more traditional. The Chinese restaurant was literally about the four of them waiting for a table. Nothing else happened initially. And they fought and fought about some kind of storyline. And we finally added, while they're waiting for a movie, you know, and they're going to be late for the movie. But really, Larry wanted to deconstruct the form. Even without thinking about it, his instinct was to deconstruct the form, you know.

And it's true if we had followed the Castle Rock advice or the NBC advice, the show would not have been what it became. It would have been a much more traditional, rote, uh, predictable type of, uh, sitcom. And instead you're breaking new ground. I mean, was it the first episode you wrote or the second one where Jerry's shot in his own apartment? He's gunned down because he's stealing cable. Well, I love the idea of being able, that's what's so great about Jerry and Larry and why I love them and and revere them really, because they allowed me to do stuff like that. They encouraged me to do things like that. And we were all thinking of ways of breaking the form and changing the form and expanding the form and expanding

the language of what's funny and what's a sitcom. And they really encouraged me to sort of follow my path on that show. Yeah. It's great, too. Let's ask you about the, and you've been asked about this a million times, but about the episode, the gun episode, the one that never made it to air. Right. Well, that was my, I look at that now as my failure as a writer. I think Larry was, he would inspire me because he would take subjects that, you know, like masturbation and he would find a way of writing an episode about it that was compelling and funny and didn't even get any notes from standards and practices. Yeah, it was able to be done in network television. Exactly. And I was always looking to push that envelope, push that envelope. But I had this idea about Elaine buying a gun.

I had met a number of women during that time who were contemplating buying guns. And I thought this is an interesting thing. And I put together an episode. But the episode, although it had funny moments in it and it was it had some very startling moments in it it was not successful as a coherent episode and once there's no

laughter in a story like that it became very very grim and I could not Larry and Jerry would often let my episodes be whatever they were and it usually worked out okay I mean they didn't have to do a lot of work on my episodes they seemed to be cool with it or they would

do a kind of a quick pass at it. This they didn't know what to do with and I didn't know what to do with. And I think that the starkness of the story under those conditions made it hard to sell to the actors and to the network. And so even though we had cast it and we were sort of along the way of that episode, we had to pull the plug on it. The same. What other plots and stories had you written that couldn't make it on the air? Do you remember any of the others? I wrote one earlier. on about George, like with Mario Joyner, and they're at the diner, and Mario Joyner orders a salad, and George said, wow, I never saw a black person order a salad before.

And that was just like a no-go. I wrote the episode. It was actually funny. That one actually was funny, but it was very, very sensitive. But also, what's interesting is, like, the contest, the masturbation episode and the outing, which I wrote, were both episodes that had been conceived of the season before, and NBC and Castle Rock were just not ready at that time to go for it. By the time the show started to kind of settle in, they were okay with us doing episodes like that also. So some of those

episodes could have fallen by the wayside very easily. You wouldn't have the contest or the outing or that whole season, really, which is a really great season, I think. I love that you guys are bringing your own little passions to the show, too, like Dragnet, in your case. Exactly, or Abin and Costello and Superman. Yes, yes. Abna Costello was a very important part of the show. There's a character named Sidney Fields for Christend.

That's right. That's right. That's right. We were constantly doing little illusions and references to things like that. We love doing that. Or that Newman is basically Joe Besser, that Newman is stinking. Exactly, exactly. Because the Abin and Costello show, that was

you know, like they're movies who are like, you know, very hit and miss. They'd have funny parts. The show is fascinating. It's dark. Yes.

It's strangely dark and surreal. I've said it's almost like a Beckett play. It really is. They live in this weird rooming house. You know, they've got the weird landlord. They don't really have jobs. They're waiting for something. You don't know what.

They're also much older in the TV show. It's changed. The changes the perspective so much. When they're young and Buck Privates, they got their whole lives ahead of them. Now they're broken down bums and suits. Living in a boarding house with one bedroom. And Abbott has a pot belly. They're also victimized by sudden outburst of violence.

Constantly by strangers. Erratic behavior by strangers. Pounding on them and beating them. And I love that stuff. I mean, when the woman comes up to Luke and hits them because she says how dare you remind me of somebody I hate you know that's gold those kind of moments we tried to have those non-sequent type of moments in Seinfeld as well for our own amusement but people seem to get a kick out of it as well and I remember Jerry at one point and one of the shows going boys boys yes yes yes well there's some stooges too Jerry would get between Kramer and and George and do it and do it and do a Mo thing. Yeah, absolutely. We did a whole, the fodder's a mutter. We did that bit actually in one of the episodes. We did a lot of, a lot of references to Abner Costello and to Superman

and to Dragnet. I would say that was the big three. The three of us all grew up on the same television. Absolutely. Of like the Bowery boys, Abbott and Costello, the Stooges. Yes. Yeah, old Mac and Meyer for hire. Yes. I mean like, absolutely. Cheap knockoffs in that, Costello. Well, you know, when I first moved to Hollywood, I lived off of Hollywood. I lived behind the Chinese theater, and I used to kind of wander around, and I used to bump into Hunts Hall. Now, for me, Hunt's Hall was a gigantic star. So I was starstruck, but he lived in some apartment on Hollywood Boulevard, and I bump into him, and I get a chance to talk to him and hang out with him and take a walk with him.

And I got to be friendly with Hunt's Hall for a while, which, again, as a Bowery boy, Freak was incredibly exciting to me. I remember he did a TV show late in life with Gabriel Dell. It was like they were both gangsters. I can't remember the name of the show now. Was it the Chicago Teddy Bears? The Chicago Teddy Bears, thank you very much. And I remember being so excited that show was coming out.

Oh, my God. Armitrato, right. We had him on this podcast. Yeah, yeah. Now, was he thrilled that you recognized him? Yes, yes, always. Anybody that I bumped into like that? Because I was like, because of my father, you know, kind of inculcating me with all that trivia,

I recognized everybody when I would go, because at that time, even Schwabbs was still open when I first moved here. And you go to Schwabbs and Chuck McCann was there and Timothy Carey and all kinds of great characters were still hanging out. And so I got a chance to talk to all those guys. I would go up to them and actually say hello because I was, I thought, I have to do that. You know, I have to take that leap. Now, when Seinfeld was at its peak, you know, much like I always say with airplane and

naked gun, there were a million movies coming out that would watch the success of those movies and go, okay, we'll base it on other movies and throw Leslie Mielsen into it. Yeah, we'll throw in Leslie Nielsen. We think we have the formula, but they never did. and there were a million Seinfeld knockoffs that it's like you could tell were watched by people to watch Seinfeld and thought, oh, okay, I get it, I get it. Yes, I think that's right. I think that what happened was Seinfeld was kind of an accident. You know, I think that if the network executives, if it had been brought through the process the way most normal sitcoms do, it never would have made it through.

I think that network executives loved the success of Seinfeld, but were very afraid of the content and the themes and the darkness, no morals, no hugging, you know, and I think those things went very much against the grain for network executives. So when they would try to replicate the success, they would remove the very things that made it funny in the first place. They also didn't have Larry David. That made a difference as well. They didn't have a singular comic mind. There is only one Larry David. That's true. Here's something jumping in another direction, but still concentrating on Seinfeld, which, now, you obviously knew Michael Richards. Yes.

Now, what do you think of everything that happened with him? I feel, well, so much has happened since then in terms of that subject matter. Like, that was the first time, really, somebody had been kind of caught on. a video camera or a phone camera, sort of doing something that was considered inappropriate and it kind of took off on its own and caught fire on its own. I felt a couple of things. I felt that he was, as I think you'll sympathize and recognize or relate to, he was bombing. It was like late at night.

He was bombing. He was desperate. He is not the most, you know, he's not the easiest person to just be himself. So as he's bombing, I think he's retreating into character. looking for some way out and wound up stumbling into this angry redneck character and spewing the N-word, which was a mistake. But I think if he had said, man, I was bombing and I spewed this word out in desperation and it was a total mistake and I regret it.

I think that would have probably been the end of it. But he kind of did this apology tour which almost exacerbated the issue more than it needed to be. and I think that wound up hurting him almost as much as the incident himself. Because I remember that Seinfeld had him call up, I guess, Letterman, while Seinfeld was on. And he apologized. And his apology, the audience was laughing. Yes. They thought, oh, this is Kramer doing a crazy thing.

Exactly. People don't know that Michael is not Kramer, that Kramer is a manifestation of an aspect of Michael. and Michael himself is a very introverted, you know, reflect, self-reflective type of person. And I think it was very awkward for him to be on David Letterman. It was very awkward for him to have to like even talk as himself. And then he got sort of caught up in the, in the verbiage that sort of made things even worse. If Jerry had done something like that and had gone on David Letterman, he could have handled it because he knows how to handle that situation in public.

I don't think Michael was equipped to do that, and I think that's what you saw as somebody who really was not prepared to handle the onslaught. Today, there would be PR people. There would be a whole, you know, there would be a whole plan in place before he would even make a public appearance. But in those days, he tried to be honest and, you know, be very forthright about it and wound up backfiring on him. He's a very good person. He's a very nice person. On the subject of Larry, David, before we jump off, Larry, and we're going all over the place. Curb Your Enthusiasm, another show that you've been intimately involved with, and we could

ask you anything about this, but we do want to make sure that we get to our friend, Bob Einstein. Yes, yes. And maybe you can say a couple of things about him. Before I get to Bob, which I'm happy to do, and he was an amazing person, I felt very lucky to get a chance to work with him because, again, I was a fan of his from Officer Judy on the Smith Brothers. So really, he was one of the greats to me. But just another word about Larry and Curb Your Enthusiasm, you was saying,

how he had the instinct to hire non-sickcom writers to do Seinfeld. Well, in the same way, he came to me after doing the pilot of Curb, which I appeared in, and he said, you know, once it was picked up for series, he said, you know, you should direct one of these. And I had never directed anything at that point. So even there, he had the instinct to say to me, I know you could do a good job with this. And he actually made me a director. Oh, we should point that out.

Yeah, that's important. Yes. I think that's a, yeah, very important. It also goes to this thing you referred to, his instinct for unusual people that he thinks are going to actually make the thing special. And I really appreciated that, both on Seinfeld and on curb. He did two things for me that probably had the biggest impact on my adult life, really. And you directed some of the best ones too, the nanny with Sherry O'Terry and thank you for your service and so many good ones. And I, thank you. Another thing that breaks a rule with curb is that I remember hearing people talk saying, well, if we've got this character who's like very abrasive and mean, we've got to show something that justifies it.

Like the other people are mean to him and it's he's getting back so we can root for him. With Kirby's enthusiasm, Larry David's basically he's a petty prick. A misanthrope. Yeah, yeah. You know, you don't go, gee, I really like this guy. You go, no, he's a neurotic fog, you know. Yes, yes, it's true. I think that he did something also, though, both Seinfeld and in Curb, he tapped into this dark undercurrent, this id that we have that we don't like to really admit to.

these sort of petty thoughts, these small-minded, vengeance-filled, you know, dark thoughts, these, this is what sort of drives him. He's able to sort of separate that and make them into stories, but that's tapped into something that the audience had never really had a chance to experience or react to in television comedy. You've seen that, kind of, we've talked about it on this show, for lack of a better term, neurotic Jewish humor. I mean, the humor of Woody Allen, Philip Roth, Bruce J. You hadn't really seen it in primetime television. Yes, that's true. To that point. It was still a fresh thing.

But he found a way in both of those series to make it palatable. Yeah. I was just going to say, the last thing I was going to say about that is just that what I found so shocking was, I think one of the big complaints about Seinfeld initially was it's going to be about these Jewish single New Yorkers and who's going to relate to it. But that was one of the mistaken assumptions about the show. The more specific it was about their circumstances, the more people related to it. And the more people would come up to me and go, they'd be from Kansas or Iowa. And they go, hey, my best friend is just like George. Or I know a Kramer, you know, and it turned out that people, and then when I went overseas

and I'd be like in Israel or, you know, wherever these countries, there would be somebody, you've got to meet this guy, he's just like George. So everybody had, around the world, has those archetypal people in their life. And that was something you could not possibly predict. And now they're selling the DVDs in Baghdad. Exactly. Exactly. Next to Mind Comfort.

We will return to Gilbert Gottfried's amazing colossal podcast after this. What I always found fascinating about Seinfeld was that on the show, I mean, it's got such a Jewish sensibility about it, such a Jewish identity, and yet the only Jewish character is Jerry Seinfeld.

Correct. That's correct. I mean, the Costanzas are the Jewish group of Italians. Played by Jews. Yes. All three of them. Yes. Yes, that's very true. Right. And you go, okay, we're supposed to believe these are

Italians. Yeah, there was a buy there. Well, you know, again, in the New York sort of ethnic world, those things very much overlap. So, again, for the rest of the country, it struck a chord somehow, you know, and it made it seem very real and relatable. So they transcended their Judaism almost immediately, you know.

We want to ask you about two great Jews. One is Robert Zimmerman, which we'll get to. But tell us something about Bob. Oh, about Bob Iceland. He did this show. We've done 200 of these, Larry. He did this one, one of our favorite episodes. He basically came in here and tore us apart.

Yeah. He hit the ground running. And just, I mean, we barely had enough time to ask him a question. We'll send you a link. It's fun. Yeah, please do. I don't know that he is, you know, God rest of soul. I don't think that he was ever not on.

As soon as he hit the ground, he was running. He would like walk on, he would walk on to the set, he'd be, like, grabbing you to tell you some long, long, and he was like, you only not on stage, he would, like, commit to, like, a long, dirty joke, and he wouldn't let you leave until it was done. They're waiting for you on the set. They're ready to shoot, but he had to get to the punchline.

He was one of a kind. He really, I mean, that family is, of course, comedy royalty, no question about it. They are. Between Albert Brooks and Bob and their father as well. Right. But I enjoyed, like I said, Officer Juven. I was a gigantic Super Dave fan.

Us too. He was a kind of a real comedy otore. He was one of those people. So I admired his work, and I had a great time. One of the great things about Kerb is I got to work with a lot of classic comedy people like Mel Brooks and Paul Mazurski and Bob Einstein. I got to direct them. I mean, that stuff is a dream come true stuff. The kid from Brighton Beach who worship Mel Brooks is now directing Mel Brooks.

Incredible. Surreal, right? Yeah. Incredible experience. Now, Gilbert got a kick out of, we talk a little bit about Masked and Anonymous, but again, a fascinating person for you to have collaborated with

is Bob Dylan. Oh, yeah. Another old Jew. Another old Jew. Yes. If you think of him that way, then you get them. Well, Gilbert really loved the fact

that I found this in my research that he went through a Jerry Lewis face, which is mind-blowing. That's where I come in. that's where I come in during, I got a call from his manager that, you know, he used to, he's still on this, what they call the never-ending tour. And back in the 80s, in the 90s, and I guess the early 2000s, when VHS was the medium on his tour bus, he had a VHS machine and a TV. And at one point, you know, in the early 2000s, he got obsessed with Jerry Lewis. And he would, he would like, go do a

concert, get back in the bus, and watch a Jerry Lewis movie until they got to the next town. And he suddenly realized he wanted to do, and this is how Bob is, he decided he wanted to do a slapstick comedy like Jerry Lewis. There's a whole new bit for you, Gilbert. Hey, lady. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, Mr. Mishnik.

I'll watch the gas station for you. So he became a completely consumed with this idea. His manager called and said, do you want to talk to Bob? And I was like, for me, I thought, well, I'll have a meeting with Bob Dylan. That'll be really exciting. I can go brag to all my friends that I met Bob Dylan. And I said, sure, I went to the meeting. And he had a boxing ring in Santa Monica, a boxing gym.

And he had a little cubicle there. And I met with him in the cubicle. And he had a box. and he opened the box it was filled with scrap paper and he opened it up and all the scrap paper came out and it all had like different little expressions and lines and names and he's like I don't know what to do with all this

and I was like you know again I picked up a piece of paper I said well this could be the name of a character and this could be a line that the character says and then he's like you could do that and it's like yeah yeah So we started working on this thing, this kind of slapstick TV series that he was going to star in. Unbelievable.

And while I was trying to envision it in my mind, like, what was this going to be like, you know? But we wrote it. We wrote an actual version of it. It was very surreal. I don't know how funny it was. But we wrote it and we were told that HBO might be interested. So we went to HBO. And in those days, I wore only projection.

I used to wear pajamas. Like when I was on mad about you, which is another time that we worked together, Gilbert, you were on mad about you in the dog park. Yes, yes. It's all coming back to you. I was a showrunner of mad about you at that time. And I used to wear pajamas.

I wore them all the time because I'm mad about you. I was working like seven days a week, 18 hours a day. It was absurd. So I was like, the hell with it. I was like Vincent Giganti. I was walking around. The chin.

Yes, yes. Pajamas. And so we decided we'd go to HBO and I said, Bob, if you were to come to the meeting, they would never say no to you. They'll buy the pitch right in the office there. And so he agreed to that. So I showed up in pajamas. He at that time was very into the Western wear. So he showed up at a beautiful cowboy hat and a floor-length black duster like something at a duel in the sun.

That's what he looked like. And we strode across the courtyard at HBO at that time in Century City and went into the meeting and he immediately walked past everybody in the meeting in Chris in Chris Albrecht's office and went to the picture window at the end of the office and just stared out at the skyline, the entire meeting, never said a word. So I was like left pitching going, well, Bob will do this, Bob with that, right Bob? And he would turn around and go, yeah. And he might answer, maybe. And despite the awkwardness of that meeting, they bought the show. And we went out to the elevator, and we were all ecstatic except for Bob. He seemed very forlorn.

And it's like, what's the matter? He's like, I don't want to do this anymore. It's too slapsticky. So that ended that iteration of that project. but the idea of working with Bob Dylan, I would have done it for the rest of my life, frankly, to tell you the truth. And so, go ahead.

No, I just say, I wish to God that had been made, a slapstick comedy starring Bob Dylan. The world needs it. By the way, that's the way he is in a meeting, too. Yes, he is. Stairs out the window and grunts. Darrow, am I right about that?

Yes. Yeah. But we wound up, we wound up working on it. continuing to work on it and evolving and evolved into this other thing that became Master Anonymous. Which is fascinating, which I have to tell our listeners to watch. I remember the man about you I was

on. I was a guy who goes up to Paul Reiser at the dog park and I'm asking to feel his dog's testicles. And when it went into syndication, that was cut out. Really?

Yeah. That's funny. That's hilarious. actually. I did not know that. I remember you doing that. I didn't remember the dog's testicles, but now that you mentioned it, actually. We had some rough weeks there. We were trying to get some laughs. It was hard sometimes. Larry, can I ask you a question from a fan?

Certainly. This is something we do called Grill the Guest, which people can do on Patreon. Sean Liu. He says, hey, I got a question for Larry. Bob Sacramento is one of the great unseen characters in the history of television. Was there ever a temptation or a push by execs to hire an actor to actually bring him to life or portray him. Well, first of all, as most of the people on Seinfeld, as it's true of most of the

people on Seinfeld, most of the characters, most of the characters' names, he's a real person. Right. So Robert Sackamano actually exists. He's a friend of mine from Trump Village. I know him since third grade. So he's a real person. He was not happy actually to become Bob Sacramento, this kind of cult figure. Oh, really?

Yeah, he was uncomfortable. But I'm sure that. there was talk of it, maybe at one point or another, but it was one of those things that really worked. Newman originally was an unseen character, but we needed, we needed for story, we needed to see him, and Wayne came in and did this a great audition that Newman became a character on the show very organically. There was no real plan, but with Bob Sacramento, nothing really came up that seemed like it was funnier to have him be the unseen friend than to actually visualize him. Well, it's kind of like, you know, when they start bringing

imaginary characters to life. And it's like when they had Mrs. Colombo, you know, you always loved Peter Falk saying, oh, you know, my wife, she spilled something on it. And that was funny. This person you heard Colombo talk about, but then when she became real, it's like, you know, what the fuck is it? Part of the culture of Seinfeld after a while, figuring out Lloyd Braun was a real person,

and Joe DeVolo was a real person, and Bob Sacramento was a real person, and so many. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Though the writer's names would turn up sometimes? Absolutely. Most of those people are very happy to be name-checked, even if they were playing a psychotic character with their name, they were usually pretty thrilled about it.

And they found a guy, I think he was a friend of Larry's, named George Costanza. I think he was a friend of Jerry's, actually. Oh, and a Kenny Kramer, too. Well, you must have known, Gilbert. I'm sure you knew Kenny Kramer. Oh, yes, yes. Is he still around?

Kenny Kramer? He's around. Yeah. That was a weird. When I was a teenager and I would go up to the Catskills, he, and I think Gilbert, you could probably confirm this, he was one of the biggest comedians at that time. He was actually kind of an up-and-coming, very popular comedian and actually very arrogant in those days in the Catskills because he was kind of the big star, you know.

He would do all those showcases, and he was getting a name for himself, and I remember him very well from that period. That's when Marvin Braverman and... Oh, yeah, I know that name. They were all doing the stand-up at that time. It was kind of fun in the Catskills at that point. Well, was it the other guy around, too? The guy with Barbara Felden, your friend?

Oh, Buddy Mantia. Buddy Mantia. Yeah, well, Marvin... The Untouchables. Yeah, yeah, the Untouchables. Yes, yes. I saw them at the Brickman Showcase. You know, I was a Bell Hall.

hop at the Brickman, and I saw them perform at the Brickman showcase. And Mousie Lawrence used to host the Pines Showcase. There's a funny man. Yeah. Watch this segue. Speaking of comedy teams, since we just talked about the untouchables.

And by the way, this is also on behalf of our engineer, Frank Verde Rosa. We love the comedians. Oh, thank you. Thank you. There was some very funny stuff in there. And... Really funny. It just did not click

for whatever reason. I don't know why. I know there was funny stuff. Those two guys were great together. It just did not appeal to anybody. I can't explain it really. I thought that it would be satisfying to an audience, but it never really coincided with the audience. The fun idea

of the mismatch comedy duo. You know? Yeah. Sunshine Boys kind of idea. Both of those guys willing to be very dark about their personas also. Yeah. And our friend Steve Weber does a nice turn on that show as well. Steve Weber is great. Yes.

But we do want to ask you since Abbott and Costello came up, and this one's for you, Gil. Yeah. Have you seen the Bud and Lou TV movie with Buddy Hackett and Harvey Corby? Yes. Of course I have. My favorite topic. We would be remiss if we didn't ask Larry the expert on comedy. I haven't seen Stan and Ollie.

Have you seen Stan and Ollie Gilbert? No, I haven't seen it yet. I want to. It's good. They take a lot of liberties with the facts, which troubles me a little bit. bit, but, and purists. Ollie is black. Yeah.

And Stan is a woman now. A transgender woman. It's sweet and sentimental and the performances are great. It obviously has great affection for them. So it's worth, worth seeing. Stan Laurel was another person. You know, a lot of these people like Larry Fine and Stan Laurel, they were living out here in Los Angeles when I first came out here.

And they were in the, I think Larry Fye was in the old, the actors home. Yeah. They were around. Laurel was in Santa Monica. Other comedians, other comedy writers would tell me that I went to visit Larry Feiner. He sent me a letter. You could really connect with those people. Now, Joe Bolton, some of those guys, back in New York, the WPIX guys, that was a different story.

I was on a lot of those. My mother used to take me to be in the audience in the peanut gallery, like Fobozo. This is great. And Sonny Fox. We had Sunny Fox here. We had them on the show. We had them on the podcast. And we had Chuck.

Yeah. Chuck McCann. It was great. Tom Bergeron, Tom Bergeron, was on the show and he told us that when he was a little kid, he looked up both Larry and Moe and visited them. Yeah. Yes. They were accessible. They were accessible. And it's, I think back to, I remember, you know, on Hollywood Boulevard, like I said, you'd see Hans Hall. You'd also see Aldo Ray waiting for a bus. And believe me, he wanted somebody to recognize him, and he was thrilled, you know. We used him on Fridays. We would sometimes find these guys pretty down and out on Hollywood Boulevard and put them in a sketch on Fridays. I lived in L.A. for a decade, and it was one of the great sports when you had days to kill, when you had nothing to do, is you'd go to the farmer's market and run into the guys like Louis Gus. Remember Louis Gus?

Yes, of course. You just see these people and feel compelled to run up to them. And it was like currency that you knew who they were. Well, I was thinking on the way over here about comedians that, like, we know all the great comedians and we could all probably give the same four or five great comedians. But I started thinking about comedians that only we might know at this point, guys like Morty Gunty, you know, who are, who are like kind of popular. You know who's a very influential comedian? I think on you, certainly on me as well. And I think on most modern comedy doesn't get the credit, really, is Jackie Mason.

He was a very important comedian for a very long time And there's a lot of those Catskill guys Who were really sharp and funny and original Who are kind of we remember And we've kind of used their influences To sort of grow it a little bit further But some of those guys, Jackie Vernon Oh yes, yes

We talk about Jackie Vernon on this show Those Ed Sullivan comedians who would be on like Timmy Brown Oh yeah Do you remember him? Yes Timmy Rod, Timmy. Timmy Rogers. Timmy Rogers, yes, thank you, thank you.

Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. And then he would, and with each punchline was, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, that was his punchline. That was his catchphrase. London Lee. London Lee was great, saw him many times. The rich kid, the poor little rich kid, that was his hook. How about his parents were wealthy?

How about Morty's Storm? Oh, that's right. And Morty Storm. Yeah, that's what this show is dedicated to. too, more than anything, Larry. We had Billy Saluga here. Gene Bealos? Gene Bealos.

Oh, my God, yes. Very funny, man. Yeah, yeah. Those old friars. Love them all. Malsey Lawrence is brilliant. Mousy Lawrence was almost like he was too hip for the room in those days, really. Dick Capri is another one?

Dick Capri was great. Oh, my God, yes. Now, Fridty Roman. All funny. All funny people. All funny people. Dick Capri is a case of an Italian who grew up, you know, in the whole Jew thing.

Yeah. And he knew more Yiddish and it was more Jewish than I could ever be. Yeah, yeah, he was. He was like an Italian, but he grew up in the Catskills. There was actually one, it was interesting because the Catskills when we were kids was obviously a Jewish enclave, but there would be like one Italian hotel. And it was known that that was the Italian Hotel. I can't remember the name of it right now, but it was the one Italian hotel that was up there.

But, yeah, there was also like Myron Cone. Sure. Oh, my God, yes. You know, those guys are kind of forgotten now. Pat Cooper? Henny Youngman, I love. Pat Henry. He was on Fridays, actually, which was a great thrill to be able to work with him.

Yeah. He was fun. You tell me one other podcasts in the world, Larry, where they're talking about Morty Gunty and Officer Joe Bolton. It's a shame. It's a shame there isn't more. This is the one. Westy civilization is built on these things.

What scares us is we'll say to people, grouch your marks, and they'll have no fucking idea who grouch your marks was. So they definitely don't know who Jackie Gale was. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Jackie Gale, who I had lunch with, I wrote material for Jackie Gale. I wrote material for a lot of these guys also, by the way. But you're absolutely right, Gilbert, and Frank.

I mean, that world is disappearing very rapidly. I often, as a kind of an informal thing, I will take a poll on the show. that I'm working on. And I'll ask some of the younger people, not even that young, but I'll ask them about Jack Benny or Bob Hope or George Burns. And invariably, they have no idea who they are or they might have some vague sense of who they were. So here were these guys who were world celebrities, the biggest stars in the world, completely forgotten by this time. So it's a good perspective to keep about fame. You know, it's very fleeting. And even for someone like those guys, you know. And you know, it was interesting. There

was an episode of that anthology series amazing stories that had to do with creatures from outer space gathering up forgotten celebrities and they bring them to out of space where their stars you know what gives me hope what gives me hope is that general butt naked knows who Vic Morrow is. Also a great show, by the way. A comeback. Fantastic. He's got great taste.

Maybe he's a warlord, but he's got great taste. He does. He really does. You got to tip your hat. You've got to tip your hat to him. Larry, we could do six hours with you easily. We didn't get to religious or the dictator or hardly got it to Bruno. I'll come back.

This was great fun. I really enjoyed it. Please do. It's great to see Gilbert again. It's great to meet you, Frank. And I thank you both so much. Susie Esmond sends her love, by the way. I wrote to her and I said,

hey, you got a question that we can throw out to Larry. It'll surprise him. And she said, I don't, but tell him I love him and I miss him and he's a genius. Thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, this is one of those interviews that's too easy and it spoils you brothers. Gilbert would be happy to just talk about Officer Joe Bolton and Captain Jack McCarthy for three hours. I could discuss them for hours and hours, absolutely.

Sandy Becker. I didn't know. I didn't even believe that. weren't, I always figured he was a real cop. I mean, that really threw me, you know, when Officer Joe Bolton was not really a cop. And he would warn you about not doing the stuff that the Three Stooges did.

But they were also the behind this, like Jack McCarthy was also like the voice of the Thanksgiving Day parade. Or he would be the announcer on the, for the news, you know, the voiceover announcer. So those guys were like doing like 14 different jobs also while they were also the on-screen hosts for the kids shows.

Well, you're a. Superman guy. You must have loved that Bud Collier, the voice of Superman, was also the host of To Tell the Truth. And they had only one leg. That fascinated me. Freaked me out as a kid. Freaked me out. If you got to see him walk, you go, oh my God, what's wrong with him? And that stuff used to

really flip me out, actually, about Bud Collins. Oh, Bill Cullen. Bill Cullen. Bill Cullen. Mel Brooks does a whole bit about Bill Collins, one leg. Where he says Bill Cullins is walking over to him, limping and he thought that Bill Collins was doing a Jerry Lewis imitation. So he started walking like that. Oh, Larry, this was great fun. I'm going to tell our listeners, find the comedians with Josh Gad and Billy Crystal, which is great and fun. And they have to

see religiousists, which my wife and I just watch. And we get you back. We'll ask you a lot of questions about that stuff. Anything at all, man. It was great. Really fun. And yeah, we could do this anytime you want. And I'd like to do to New York and so I can see you guys in person. Please, please come. Dangerous world of comedy. Yeah, which is wild

and must be seen. Thank you so much. On Netflix, February 15th. Did I see a woman in a fight in the background? You know what I'm talking about? When you're in the car, when you're in the limo with

Duke Murphy? There's some fighting going on. That was in Liberia. In the background while you're shooting this thing. Yes. Unbelievable. I kept on trying to get

my DP to shoot out the window. We kept on, we had like a little extra, like a little battle there. And finally he looked out the window and sure enough right at that moment, there was that fight going on. You're a brave man. And it's incredible television that has to be seen. So thank you. We'll do it in New York next time. Absolutely. Great to see you both. Thank you again. He's going to sign off. Thank you, Larry. So this has been Gilbert Gottfried's amazing colossal podcast with my co-host Frank Santo Padre and the guy who's

written everything Larry Charles thank you Larry thank you Larry thank you soon you soon Gilbert Godfrey Godfreyed's amazing Calaisal Podcast is produced by Dara Godfried and Frank Santepadre, with audio, with audio production by

Dara Godfried and Frank Santepadre With audio production by Frank Verde Rosa Web and social media is handled by Mike McPadden Greg Pair and John Bradley Seals Special audio contributions by John Beach Special thanks to John Fodiades John Murray and Paul Rayburn I beg me always pizzerra

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