WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 1135 - Alan Zweibel

Episode Date: June 29, 2020

One thing Alan Zweibel learned by being a writer for so many funny people is you have to set your ego aside. In doing so, Alan was able to have a career spanning decades and criss-crossing with multiple generations of comedy history. Alan tells Marc about his days selling jokes to comics in the Catskills, being part of Saturday Night Live in its first five years, finding a comic partner in Gilda Radner, creating a beloved sitcom with Garry Shandling, making his way to Broadway with Billy Crystal and more. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the

fucksters what's happening what is happening? What's happening? What is happening? I'm Mark Maron. This is my podcast. I don't feel well. How are you? I feel physically ill, so now I'm spiraling. Spiraling on top of everything else. I'm going to go get a COVID test tomorrow. Because I do, I guess I've gotten sloppy.

I don't know. I go shopping and stuff. Wear the mask. But I haven't felt well for the past few days. Maybe could it be that I'm overwhelmed emotionally

and maybe I could it be that i have post-traumatic sort of resonance going on in my being grief loss anxiety everything else i i'd like to stay in that zone as opposed to the uh I'd like to stay in that zone as opposed to the, what's the point of living and I don't want to die. That's the weird two feelings to straddle. What's the point?

I'm terrified of dying. I'll just ride those. Those are the two skis that I'm on. Alan Zweibel is here. He was one of the original writers on Saturday Night Live. He co-created's Gary Shandling show he's a novelist a screenwriter and he has a new memoir out now which I read Laugh Lines my life helping funny people be funnier so Zweibel he did a live one a while back so all right getting on with. I talked to you guys on Thursday, right? Well, was it Friday? Maybe it was Friday morning. I feel like it was Thursday though. I dropped the show

and then I went and I just got it in my head. I got it in my head and I've been talking about it. This is about good news. It's about good news or that feeling of good news or what a little good news can do. I know you can find good news or you can spin movements and cultural momentum into some hopeful zone sometimes. You can maybe find some schadenfreude-style good news with the president starting to become truly unglued publicly and poll numbers and all that. But there's this momentary good news, like in the midst of all this horror, you know, on the macro. And then in my micro life, you know, battling with this grief and now sort of freaking out about my health. I got it in my head that, you know, Monkey was at the beginning stages of... Because that's what his sister died of,

and that's what old cats get. And, you know, I just had to finally wrap my brain around the fact that, you know, I got to bring him in to the vet to get some sort of blood test to determine whether or not he was in the beginning stages of renal failure. So I could know, you know, and I knew leaving the house with him in the fucking cage that I probably wouldn't bring him back, that I probably would bring back an empty cage. And just like, you know, picturing myself walking through this fucking life right now is just the worst. It's just like a sad guy so i drive him to the vet and i text the my vet's very good dr modesto over at gateway

he always follows up he asked me what's going on so i'm waiting in the car for them to come get Monkey, and, you know, I'm just really, it's all crashing down on me, you know. It's all of it. You know, when I look at Monkey in the fucking cage in the back of the car, it's just, like, overwhelming, and I call Lipsight, and, you know, I'm just trying to talk through it. You know, I'm just trying to talk through it. You know, that this is going down that on top of the other loss and look I know many people have lost whole families I know

there's plenty of people that have lost more than me I know this but this is the life I'm living but you know I'm just working it through with Sam he's staying on the phone with me and then they they just they come out they take monkey they pull the cage out of the back of the car the vet person and he just starts meowing, terrified in that moment and then it just brought back

the ambulance guys, the paramedics taking it was just like I just fucking came unglued man just fucking tears and sadness and panic and everything else and fucking sam stayed on the phone with me you know for a while i pulled it together and i waited and uh so he you know after about an hour or more hour out there he texts me that the tests look okay. And now he's going to give him fluids and send them home. And for some reason, that news was so good. I can't even explain it. I think I'd forgotten

what good news felt like. And it's only good in the context of he's not dying that day. Right now, I just have to accept that it's not renal failurenal failure he's old he's got a death rattle so you know i brought him home and in the last few days he's been uh i just have to accept it man this is the this is this is how he's gonna be i don't know when yeah i got nothing to do here at the house sometimes and i just obsess about the cat about like like, when's that going to happen? Is he okay now? Is he now? Is he now?

Is he okay now? Do I got to bring him in again? Is it now? What should I do for the cat? And the fucking cat is 16 years old. He's sick, but he's not dying of kidney failure. And I don't know what happened. I brought him home.

And like I said, I tried to give him his medicine. He's, you know, he's not with it that well. He's not that together. He's a fucking cat, monkey. Spends a lot of time kind of hiding. But then he came out and then he comes out. He spends like the second half of the day downstairs on the couch. In the last few nights, he's been sleeping a good part of the night next to my head and he's acting like he did when he was

like a lot younger cat a lot more frail but i don't know i guess he's just showing up for me i don't know how to look at it yeah it's like i look at something you know i'm trying not to look at myself as some sort of victim and that this is just fucking life. And this is just the way this time's out. You know, lost my girlfriend, my cat's old and sick. Probably get COVID, get through that, maybe. That'd be the fucking worst ending of this story is if I fucking die of that shit. But who fucking knows? There's no rhyme or reason to it.

Not going to start putting things together. My brain wants to. What am I supposed to learn from this? What did I do? What is this payback for? This is fucking life and I'm not that special. You know, that's what's interesting about these religious fanatics and these fucking whack jobs who've decided this is all God's will or that, you know, God doesn't want them to wear masks. It's amazing how many of these people refer to their doctors who have told them not to wear masks. That seems to be a talking point delivered to the QAnon jerks.

Just say your doctor says it's dangerous for your health. How many of these people are going to their doctor asking them about their masks? And who the fuck are these doctors are going to? I'm assuming that's bullshit. And who the fuck are these doctors are going to? I'm assuming that's bullshit. But just as God's will, constitutional business. Just people are losing their fucking minds.

And as it goes on. This thing we're all living through. The more people that were detached or didn't care as much in the beginning or were into him to Trump or whatever. This is what's left. What's left of the people that can't see reality. It's people ranting and raving about the breath of God and that we must be able to breathe. My doctor told me I can't wear a mask. You guys are muzzling me. and raving about the breath of God and that we must be able to breathe. My doctor told me I can't wear a mask. You guys are muzzling me.

This is communist. What, do they wait for this to actually rise up? This is what they're rising up about? Not the planned and gradual corporate destruction of all their lives that they somehow twisted into something they have to live with and still be enamored by corporatists and fascists. No, it's the masks.

Like little doggies who don't want to wear the cone on their head so they don't gnaw at their own wound. We want to be able to gnaw at our own wounds don't muzzle us come on so monkey's okay that's where we're at the best thing that can happen is he dies you know in in his sleep you know in my house. But it was weird. That little bit of good news got me through a day anyways, a couple of days, just a feeling of it, even if it's not that great. But I do know he's old, and I do know he's had a good life.

I will tell you this. Tom Papa, the comedian, brought me a nice round homemade bread. And because I decided I was dying anyways, I've eaten most of it. Slathered it with butter, jam. Maybe it's called a peasant loaf. Maybe it's a, I don't think it's a sourdough. I don't know what it is, but it's a homemade bread. And it was perfectly done.

think it's a sourdough i don't know what it is but it's a homemade bread and it was perfectly done so tom i guess like some other comics is uh sort of finding their way into the future that uh if we can't ever do what we used to do the way we did it or the way we want to do it i think tom is gonna i told him i i texted him i said the bread is very good i fully support your future as a baker and he texted former comedian i said it's over for all of us you're thinking ahead and he said i'll need someone to sit at the entrance drinking espresso and cracking wise i said i'll do a shift i'll do three i'll do i'll do all the shifts at your bakery papa thank you for the bread, it's very nice People sending food is still very nice

So, Alan Zweibel I'm going to talk to Alan Zweibel He wrote a book, it's called Laugh Lines My Life, Helping Funny People Be Funnier It's available wherever you get books He also co-wrote a film with Billy Crystal, starring Billy and Tiffany Haddish, called Here Today. Hopefully, well, the hope is for that to come out sometime soon.

We talk about it a bit, so you'll hear me and Alan talking about that in SNL. He was one of the original SNL guys. We're going to do that in a second, just in a few minutes. And, well, maybe this might be a nice thing to do. Why don't we start with this? I wanted to play a bit of this song. This is from a group out of North Carolina called the Get Right Band. They just released an album called Itchy Soul.

And one of the tracks on it is called However Broken It Is. The lyrics on this track are actually all quotes I've said on this show. The band said that they spent so much time listening to WTF in the van that they wound up putting this song together. It's very flattering. So anyway, you can hear the track and the whole album on Spotify

or at thegetrightband.com. And here's a little bit of However Broken It Is, I guess written by me. They asked me about it. getrightband.com and here's a little bit of however broken it is, I guess written by me. They asked me about it. They asked me if they could do it. They asked me. I deal with sadness existential anger frustrations of being alive

Just trying to be compassionate people And know yourself in the world And know yourself in the world Self in the world Self in the world Try to Act from Your I'd like to act for you. However broken it is. We'll be right back. Availability may vary by region. See app for details. Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence.

Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising.

Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. I literally just, I finished the book. Like 10 minutes ago, I finished it. So I know everything. I'm not even sure I need to talk to you. No, no, no. But a lot has happened since you finished the book. Well, let's start at the end.

What's going on with the Tiffany Haddish Billy Crystal movie? It's done. We were lucky enough to have it finished production sometime last November. Billy's been, I've seen it with a temp track, a temp audio track. And boy, it played great. 400 people or so at a test screening at a theater in Pasadena. So it's ready to be seen. It may be a session or two away from being totally, totally locked.

Picture is locked. And now the producers will have to make that decision. picture is locked and now the producers will have to make that decision. And it's a tough one, Mark, because it runs the gamut of the emotions. So it's something that in a perfect world, which of course we don't live in right at this moment, you want 400 people to be laughing and then feeling sad, you know, a communal thing. I speak to the producer every so often, and I think they're still weighing it. So I'm anxious for people to see it. Tiffany Haddish is amazing in it. And her relationship with Billy in it is really magical. It's a love story without a romance.

You know, it's a love story without a romance. And as you read in the book, you know, Billy's character is an older writer and who's got the onset of dementia. And he's writing a book, which is an ode, an elegy to his deceased wife. And he wants to get the book finished before he loses all his words. And he's not doing well. And she comes along and have a very funny, wonderful relationship. I'm really happy with this. It's very like I'm reading a book and I, you know, you were just, you're just telling me the story of this movie and I'm, you know, I'm getting choked up because I'm so raw now because of my recent loss. And then, and then I start to realize, you know, that a lot of your your a lot of the stories in your book, I mean, you come to the end of this thing and you've had to deal with loss a lot in terms of close friends and certainly Gilda and then Gary. But I guess my question is, you know, just as somebody who's looking down the tunnel at this, because I all my my parents are still alive and, you know, I'm fortunate, all my, my parents are still alive and you, you know, I'm fortunate, I guess on most days, uh, because of that. How did you deal with it? I mean, I know you talk about, well, you wrote the book about Gilda, right? I wrote a book called bunny bunny, which was recounting our relationship. And that was at the suggestion of my wife, Robin. It was a few years later. Gilda died in 89.

So this was like 92, 93. And she suggested that I write something about the two of us. And I resisted it. And she said, listen, your best friend died. You haven't cried yet. So I think that writers are lucky in that they can access those parts of themselves where if they have to be expressed, they can be cathartic and they can be therapeutic at the same time. I did that with Gilda. And, you know, the last time you and I saw each other after Gary's memorial, Shanling's, I felt the same thing.

When Gary died, it was different than when Gilda died. Gilda had cancer. It was a wider turn, you know. And so it was expected, still a shock, still, you know, a lot of grief. still, you know, a lot of grief. But with Gary, there was, especially because he and I were somewhat estranged after we finished our show. And we were working our way back toward each other. And so when I would write to him and say, how you doing, man? It was just a greeting. Yeah. And when we'd write back and say, getting better every day, I didn't realize it, Mark, until later on that he was being literal. Oh, really?

The news that he passed, wait a second, there's still more to talk about. We're almost back. We're almost there. And I think it was Variety asked me to write a tribute to him, and that was therapeutic. to write a tribute to him, and that was therapeutic. And when Judd Apatow asked me to speak at his memorial, that also gave me the opportunity to revisit Gary, you know, and maybe fill in some of the blanks or complete some of the arcs that weren't completely closed yet. And that was a big reason for writing this book. It was when I saw you at the end of that memorial, I remember flying home to New York with my wife and I told her that we ran into each other. And I said, you know, I would really about Gary, but I need a little bit more. And that was part of the impetus of writing this book.

Oh, yeah. Good. But were you able to cry or was the writing enough? Writing's not enough. It's an exercise. Yeah, there's a catharsis there. But no, I think crying is important. At least it is for me. It's such a raw emotion. It's the kid in us. It's the helplessness of it. It's the, oh my God, there's something bigger and stronger out there that did

this and I can't do anything about it. And I think that that's in its own way, very, very healthy. And I was glad I was able to get to that part. Yeah. It's interesting as a comedian, that we have a million different ways in our brain to sort of rechannel those feelings of sadness, that it's actually, you know, sometimes I think with grief, you're not given much choice after a certain point. It's going to come out. I think it has to. And as much as we try to either keep it down or be objective about it or place it in a rational perspective, I think that there's something so primal. It's a good thing. It's a good thing. It's once again, it's just help me. I'm helpless right here. I miss someone. I just lost someone.

My mom died six weeks ago in the middle of the COVID. So we experienced similar things where, you know, there was no funeral service. There were three people allowed at the cemetery. There was no shiva. And I had a virtual Kaddish with friends who I grew up with. It was the older faces of the kids that come to the house. And I needed that. And it was only afterwards that I cried when everyone said goodnight. Thank you, everyone.

I just went and it's a good thing. It's a good thing. Yeah, I think also it turns out like the thing that's happening with me as I move through it is just that it's fundamentally human. I mean, it's like everyone's going to feel it at some to some degree at some point in their life and always have. Human beings have carved this channel in our brains and in our hearts since the beginning of realizing we're human. And it's just the way it is. It's as natural as being born or processing anything else. It's just horrendous when it's surprising. You know, once again, if it takes a wider turn, okay, rationally, you can go, okay,

I know this is going to happen. But sudden, you know, it's whiplash, you know, what the hell is that? It takes a little while. I think, and this is what it was with Gary, there was a suddenness to it. There's the shock. There's the disbelief. There's the trying to make sense of it.

There's the fact gathering. There's the phone calls to judge. What happened? Tell me. Fill me in. And once that sinks in and get down to the raw part of it, OK, you got all the knowledge and all the facts you need, then it's time for the human kid to take over. That's right. And it's interesting in the way you write about the whole

that you see this in some ways. It's of uh it's not just a a memoir but it is sort of an elegy for for the show business that you grew up in you know and that you came up in it's you know it's interesting one of the reasons that i wrote it aside from what we just discussed was i realized that and it was pointed out to me when I would give public speeches, you know, and starting in the Catskills, selling jokes for $7 a line to those comics who I used to see as a little kid when my parents took us up there on holiday weekends, and then SNL, and then some of the other things that I did like Shanley and Curb and some of the other things where, okay, how many people span that amount of time with those different amounts

of sensibilities? And I thought that, okay, this is an interesting thing to write about. And as far as the Catskill part is concerned, yeah. When I look back at it, when I was writing this, I'm going, okay, what jokes did I write for Freddie Roman? Oh, what jokes did I write for Mickey Marvin? What jokes did I write for Morty Gunty? Names that I didn't necessarily think of in a while, but there's a nostalgia to it. And there's something about, you know, in that particular case, there is no Catskill culture anymore. No. There used to be hotels and they'd tell these jokes.

And, yeah, they were corny and this and that. But they still made me laugh. Wasn't necessarily speaking to our generation. But at the same time, yeah, they were funny. And now that's not there. But also it seems that, like, you know, one of the things that I feel from you is that, you know, there is an emotional connection to all these guys. I mean, you know, you do there is the job of writing jokes and and coming up with, you know, stuff for these guys that you used to watch when you were a kid. But for me, like I I for some reason, I'm a bit younger than you.

I'm 56. But I grew up watching Jackie Vernon, you know, a buddy hack at these guys on television when I was very young and, and they, they, I still feel close to them. I don't, I never even met them. So I have to imagine that with all this stuff, there is some part of your emotional spectrum that is deeply attached to these guys. Yes. Yeah, it is. It's very much. So there's a connection to grandparents. There's a connection to grandparents. There's a connection to parents. There's an affection for people who look at the world the way that they did. And it was interesting. I tell that story in the book about Henny Youngman. Yeah. Which one? Well, Henny Youngman, I was about 32.

I had just joined the Friars Club because I had left SNL and I needed an office. So I joined the Friars Club because they had a lounge upstairs that I can use as an office. And I'm walking on 55th Street between Madison and Park, which is where the Friars Club is located. And this particular day or this particular time of day, there was no one on the street. So I make the turn onto 55th Street. And out of a doorway in front of me pops Henny Youngman. He doesn't see me. So he's concerned.

He's alone because there's no one on the street. And he crosses the street to go up to the Friars Club. And just as he reaches the curb, a pigeon flutters down, lands at his foot. He looks at the bird and goes, any mail for me? And he didn't know I was there. That was his knee-jerk reaction. And so there was a culture, there was a mindset, and there's something I find that's very, very romantic. It was not cerebral at all. It was just wanting to be funny. And the kid in me was always attracted to the fun of that.

The fun of that. There was a guy named Gene Balos. Yeah. We used to hang out at the Friars Club. Older man, sad sack kind of big droopy eyes like a beagle. And I was introduced to him by another comedian named Corbett Monica. He said, Gene, I want to introduce you to Alan. He's a very funny writer.

And Gene Palos looks at me and he goes, yeah, I hear you're funny. You know who else is funny? My dentist. And he opens his mouth and like 40 chiclets come out as if they're his teeth. And as I sit here today,

I don't know if he knew I was coming and he shoved the chiclets into his mouth or that he walked around with chiclets all day with the hopes that he was going to meet somebody so he could do that joke. And I don't know who replaces that. So yes, there is an affection and there is a connection to it. Yes. And I also like that you really sort of And there is a connection to it. Yes. And I also like that you really sort of appreciate these particular people because I've been a comic for years and there's always that. And you started out one. But there's always these guys whose brain you can't even wrap your brain around how quick they are, how clever they are, how consistently funny they are.

And all you know when you know those people is that you love them and that you're never going to be as fucking funny as they are. You're absolutely right. Look, you know, let's concede. Let's say we're all funny. Let's say we all are talented. Yeah. There are people, though, who are on a different plane than everyone. What do you mean?

So when I was with SNL, if Michael O'Donoghue wrote a sketch about a product called Shimmer, which was a combination floral wax dessert topping. I just threw up my hands and I enjoy the ride. Turd topping. I just throw up my hands and I enjoy the rye. Dacroid riding, basimatic, where you can ultimately drink a fish. You know, there's a, on Friday nights, we have a Zoom cocktail party. Robin and I, my wife and I, the only ones from New York,

and everybody else is LA. So it's a lot of fun during this pandemic. It started about six weeks ago. And so there's Billy Crystal and his wife and Barry Levinson, his wife, Rob Reiner and his wife, Marty Short and Albert Brooks and his wife. Albert is one of those people. He talks, everybody just sits back and goes, wow. There's a wow factor. Larry David, when I used to see him at the clubs when we were starting out in 74, I'd sit in the back and go, this guy thinks differently. Well, it's funny, though, because like you mentioned Michael O'Donohue and Dan Aykroyd in the first season of SNL. And like those two things, like particularly the shimmer, floor wax, dessert topping and basimatic.

Yet these are non-Semitic people. And that's true. And the logic of those type of jokes jokes we're never going to do that it's it's that's why that's exactly right they it's not only a different culture it's not only a different mindset there's a part of the brain that we semites have not i don't think it exists let alone developed okay no there's one outlier you know andy kaufman i mean it's the one outlier yeah who somehow like uh he was able to you know launch out of that orbit into what his own thing but i mean there's a logic to uh to jewish joke writing and

jewish humorous thoughts like for me my generation like like you know david tell there's nobody like david tell really in terms of writing jokes i mean he's the the natural i was just thinking about this the other day because i was watching i got i got into some rodney dangerfield rabbit hole and i really started to think about you know the sad sack the guy who embodies that type of misery who was truly miserable and needed to to sort of construct these jokes just to keep himself from falling into a pit of self that he might not get out of, you know. And I can just realizing the joke writing skills of a talent and just the nature of those, the rhythm of it and the Jewishness of it. And, you know, I guess it's I guess I have a sort of weird Jewish exceptionalism idea, you know, around humor and around the guys that used to make me laugh. But I think it's a real thing.

I mean, it's a Jewish thing. Comedy in America from vaudeville was a Jewish thing. Oh, absolutely. It harkens back. We want to go further, whether it's Shalom Aleichem or any of those stories that which gave way ultimately to Fiddler on the Roof. But if you go vaudeville with it, I love looking at those old posters to see what the lineup was for this vaudeville act, you know. Yeah, and there was a headliner, but the undercard were people like Milton Berle and the Marx Brothers. Yeah. And you go, Jew, Jew, Jew. It was, you know, Jack Benny.

I mean, it just keeps going. It's just funny because, like, it was such an effort of those, you know, that generation or the, you know, first or second generation immigrants to sort of, you know, somehow get into American society, to somehow figure out a way to integrate themselves. It's like that. We couldn't play football.

Right. Okay. With few exceptions. What was that? There's a lot of Jewish boxers I didn't know about. I was just going to say that. Barney Ross was a Jew. There's a couple of them.

Benny Leonard was a Jew. So there were Jewish boxers. We got in that way. Gangsters. Well got in that way. Gangsters. Well, Hyman Roth. Yeah.

Yamai Lansky. Right. So, yeah, we did find our way in, in different places, but comedy, it's sort of fascinating. And once again,

I think it's, I think without trying to, you know, be overly lofty about it, it was part of the survival instinct. I think so, yeah. Look, we got kicked out of every country in the world. We land here and go, all right, this is pretty much it. There's no place else to go. It was no Israel. All right, I'll try. It's like the new kid in school. I not an athlete oh i'll be funny that will make them like me yeah it's like that lenny bruce line i can't i paraphrase it a lot i should try to find it about the king of egypt it's like bring the jew in he's charming bring the

the jew but uh uh but yeah i i forgot i i didn't i kind of got away from you, but I'm sorry to hear about your mother, by the way. OK, thank you. I appreciate that. So so when you're growing up, it was just you and your sister. Is that what it was? It was it was four of us. It was me and two sisters and then a brother. Oh, really? The book is dedicated to my sister, Fran, who also passed away about three years ago. But my other sister and my brother are still with us. Yeah. And you know, what, what was the situation? I can't, what was your

father's business? My father was a manufactured jewelry. Oh, right. Um, he made fine jewelry that he sold to, uh, you know, Tiffany Cartier, places like that, Harry Winston. And as a little boy, like that. Harry Winston. And as a little boy, little boy, young boy, like 11, 12 years old, his shop was on 52nd between 5th and Madison. And I would run errands for him. And wherever the errand had to go, I would go by way of 30 Rock. It was then the RCA building because Johnny Carson had the Tonight Show upstairs. And in the mid-60s, there was a show called That Was the Week That Was. It had a guy named Buck Henry in it. It was produced by another guy named Herb Sargent. And there were people in that building doing what I wanted to do someday. So when I reported to work the very first day of SNL to that same building, this was,

I don't know, maybe 12, 13 years later. My God, you can't even imagine the thrill. But you knew them when you were 10. You knew about Herb Sargent. You knew about, well, Johnny, obviously, but you knew the people behind the scenes in the business. You were that obsessed? I was obsessed. Yeah, I was obsessed. I used to watch the credits. I saw who made me laugh. You know, look, when the old Dick Van Dyke show came on the air, right? Yeah. All right, here's this guy, Dick Van Dyke, nice looking guy, married to a very pretty Laura Petri.

And they had a kid, so there's a family. And they live in New Rochelle, nice house. And he spends his day lying on a couch, joking around with Buddy and Sally. I went, I'd like to do that. Yeah. Like a cool way to get a nice house and a nice, you know, life. But so, but you didn't, you know, you evolved through failing as a comedian, which I, I, I've always, you know, I've you know, I was never a writer for other people. And I used to, it just used to, I always used to have such respect for the guys who I started out with who knew enough about themselves and about the business to when they were standups

to realize that this, I'm not, this is not going to be. to realize that this is not going to be. Yeah. Unless you wanted to see a big Jew sweating and stammering, no, I was not your guy. But, you know, Mark, it was calculated also. Having written in the Catskills for all those guys for $7 a joke for a couple of years, and the Catskills were dying,

so it was no longer the breeding ground for young comedians. Did you work up there with, who else? I knew, I've talked to other people that wrote for those guys. Was it Richard Lewis? It was Richard Lewis and I both wrote for a comedian named Morty Gunty.

Right. Morty Gunty was the first guy who gave me $7 for a joke that I had written. How did that happen? My mother and father, I had graduated college. From where? University of Buffalo. I thought maybe I wanted to be a lawyer, but the law school said, no, you don't want to be a lawyer. And they, no, no, no, be a writer.

So I moved back in with my parents after college and my mother and father went to Lake Tahoe for a weekend, I guess. And they went to the nightclub and they saw a show. The headliner was Engelbert Humperdinck. And the opening act was a Catskill comic named Morty Gunty. My mother ran into him the next morning in the coffee shop of the hotel that her son wants to be a writer. He gave her contact info. I called him. I started writing for him. And then when the jokes I wrote for him worked, other Catskill comedians say, who wrote that pacemaker joke?

Oh, Alan. Oh, let me have his number. And so I had my own little, you know, bullpen filled with people that I wrote for. When I saw that the Catskills were dying, all the guys that were going to be big stars already were there. The Buddy Hackett, Steve Martin's, Jerry Lewis's, Toadie Fields, Alan King's, they had already graduated. And the Catskills were dying. They were hanging on because they were hoping that gambling would come there and resuscitate the place like it had done with Atlantic City. That never came. So I said,

and also this was like writing for my parents' friends. I was 22 and 23. They're 45. But it's also too interesting is that those guys, like the guys you mentioned that came out from the first wave of the Catskills or that post-Vaudeville, is that a lot of those guys like Freddie Roman, Morty Gunty, and a lot of them were always sort of like second stringers in a way, right? They were opening acts for singers. They were even opening acts for other comedians like Toadie Fields when she was a

headliner. The first half of the show would be a Morty Gunty and let's say a musician of some kind, then Nippy and Intermission, and then Toadie Fields would come out. So yeah, and they, those headliners, let's say it was Tom Jones or Engelbert Humperdinck or any of those singers, Steve Lawrence and Edie Gourmet, that was their ticket to Las Vegas. That was their ticket to theaters in the round and bigger rooms than existed up in the Catskills. And, but once again, when I was 22 and, you know, I didn't want to write jokes about paving the driveway. It wasn't in my life experience. There was Woodstock. You know, there was Vietnam. Nixon just resigned last, you know, the next year. So it was Watergate and all of that. So there's the two clubs in New York were Improvisation, Catch a Rising Star,

and the plan was to go on stage, tell the jokes that those guys wouldn't buy from me, and advertise material with the hopes that a manager or an agent would come in and want to represent me as a writer. Oh, so with you, it was never like, I'm going to be the next, I'm not going to be Robert Klein. Oh, no, there was no way I could be Robert Klein. It was not, it was not, I would sit in the back and watch Robert Klein and the, and the, and the group that came up around the time that I first went there

was Billy Crystal, Larry David, Elaine Boosler, Andy Kaufmanaufman was there um they were all starting to work 74 this is 74 so i i was introduced by richard belza who was usually the emc and he said now we have a very funny writer named alan's white belt right but it's but so you were hanging around to catch with those guys and you went running around to the improv but but where were you living? What was your day job? I was living with my parents on Long Island. I moved into my old bedroom after college and to supplement this great living I was making, writing jokes for $7, I got a job in a delicatessen on Hillside Avenue in Queens. You name it, I sliced it for about two years. So I would write jokes while I was slicing meat or serving a soup.

Yeah, the deli thing, that's another thing that is almost gone. I had a job at a real old school deli. It was actually in the Boston area. But there's something comforting. And again, I'm a little younger than you, but I got it through my grandparents or through, it's a generational thing, this Jewish tradition or these ways of life that are sadly sort of passing.

Because I could feel that there's a nostalgia, even in reading the book with the generation, you know, two before you that were still alive at some points in this book, that there was really this sort of of and how you talked about your ability to write for you know billy's family because the players were essentially even if you didn't know them they were all the same eastern european jewish thing these were not mart. You know, when we did 700 Sundays, when I collaborated with him on it. Yeah. I was writing for a cast of characters that I had met.

Yeah. I knew his brother. Yeah. I think I met his mom once. Never met his dad. Never met uncles. And certainly not grandparents. I wrote for my own family.

Yeah. You know, we all have the same family. They just jump from album to album. It's funny. You know, own family. Yeah. You know, we all have the same family. They just jump from album to album. That's funny. You know, same people. Yeah. There's always the one old aunt that only spoke Yiddish. That's right.

That's right. And then there was the uncle who pulled inappropriate jokes when you were four. Exactly. They're all the same. But could you, how good were you at uh slicing nova really i mean i'm not good too thick too thick and they go wait a second well i get cut away the gray it was a nightmare when i handed that that nova thing was tricky those that was the difference between like a guy who had other plans and a deli guy well that's absolutely right because the guy who wanted to be a deli guy knew to take the knife and put it at an angle and you'd sliced it, you know, sideways.

Right. Was thin. Sometimes you can see through it. But me, I'm just I'm giving them chunks. Yeah. Yeah. I'm giving them basically end cuts of locks. And then the deli guy says, you're ruining the whole fish because I got to start at an angle. That's exactly right. Yeah.

That's exactly right. Yep. So a catch-rising star at that time, Rick Newman running the place. And it must have been in the 74, it have been a very exciting uh place to be i would imagine right oh it was a hotbed because not only did you have all of the comics who were on their way up but you would have on any given night david brenner would come in and work uh try out his set for his next carson shot or robert klein would do um an hour trying out the material for his new upcoming album.

Yeah. You see that? See that? What you just said right there is why he annoys me is that he would go up, right? Probably on a weeknight, do an hour. And there were three guys that were looking to do their eight fucking minutes

who no one knew. Exactly right. Waiting around at the bar going, fuck. Now I'm going on. He's here. Two 30. I guess.

Exactly right. What should have been 10 o'clock is now two in the morning that's absolutely right you know and that doesn't change you know at the comedy cellar i hear that's going on today when somebody walks in you know and you go oh fuck so yeah the audience loves it but if you if you're waiting around no it's it's a night oh no i used to like i like if i'd be at the cellar even at the comedy store now like and i see like if chapelle's gonna walk in or whatever and i'm and i'll be like oh you gotta be fucking kidding me so now and i would usually just say you know i'm just gonna go home because i'm gonna go home i don't need this shit but you know most of the time you know i may not be a huge star but yeah most of the time those guys are like you know i, I'll go on after Mark.

Let him go and do his thing. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's very nice. It is nice. I guess I earned that. Not to be bumped. No, no, no, no, no.

No, that's to your credit. And let me accept the compliment. And it is. It is a compliment. Now, was Larry David. Was it fun watching him? Larry David, was it fun watching him? Mark, it was remarkable to watch him because Larry thought differently than anyone.

So it was remarkable to watch him because he would either kill in a way that nobody else could because he was saying things, talking about things, singing like nobody else did with total abandon. Or with the same material on the next night, he would go so far into the toilet, it wasn't funny. And so the few months that I was a stand-up, let's say he was on at nine. I'm making this time up, okay? And so the next act comes on at 9.20. If I knew I was following Larry, I'd also get there at nine, because within 30 seconds, if he looked at

he would get on stage, and in those days he had hair like Larry Fine from the Three Stooges, okay? Sort of brilliantly. And wire-rimmed glasses and an army fatigue, a green army fatigue that said L. David on it. And on a Friday night back then, those clubs,

it was suburbanites from Long Island or blue-haired ladies schlepping their husbands with the madras suit from Jersey. And Larry would get on stage and he'd look at them and goes, I feel very comfortable with you people tonight. In fact, I feel so comfortable, I'm thinking of using the two form of the verb instead of usted. Now, I'm sitting in the back laughing my ass off.

A, I think it's funny. B, the audience has no idea what to make of this guy they're a gate they're just like that so you know you know if a comic hits a roadblock especially right out of the gate you go a different way larry kept going he'd say i think a lot of people misuse the two form of the verb when brutus stabbed caesar ca, Caesar said, A2, Brutus? And Brutus says, Caesar, I just stabbed you. If there was ever a time for you to stab, it's now, right? I'm holding my stomach, laughing, and it's like tumbleweed going down the aisles

because everyone is just staring. They don't know what to make of this. Larry would look back and go, oh, fuck you. We'd walk off the stage and I'd get on at 901. That was the pleasure of watching Larry. Yeah. You don't see that anymore. You know, it used to be back in the day before cell phones, people would lose their shit more. That's exactly right. He would do things with abandon, total abandon. And that's where Lorne Michael saw you? Lorne saw me at Catch a Rising Star. He was underwhelmed with my talents as a performer, liked the material. So it was an audition night?

No, no. I was already part of the of the rotation. And they would either put me on very early or put me on like tomorrow. And Lorne was not impressed with me, but he liked the material and wanted to see more. And there was a William Morris agent named Leon Memoli

who submitted me to Lorne and I typed up what I thought were 1100 of my best jokes and I went back into the city two days later on the Long Island Railroad met with Lorne gave him this tome of 1100 jokes and he uh opened the um book He read the first joke. He went, uh-huh. And then he closed the book. And he said, how much money do you need to live on? And I said, well, I'm making $2.75 an hour at the deli.

Match it. You know, thank god he laughed you know and um he kept the book obviously i'm sure he went through all the jokes had to show it to the execs at nbc but it was the first joke he would do that i know of a couple of other instances because when i spoke to franken recently lauren had seen he and Tom Davis, their act. And it was one or two jokes that they did that told Lorne, OK, this is the sensibility of the guy. This is the way he thinks. That sensibility on my show. What do you think his unique talent was from the beginning?

You know, looking back over the arc of his continued success. In no special order. Okay. I think recognizing talent, I think, um, keeping that talent together, you know, especially when that show became a launching pad to keep people there to come back after they did the movie in the summer yeah after they whatever you know um back when i was there when the show was first starting to take shape lauren's creative abilities were fantastic. You know, my triumvirate were Lorne, Michael O'Donoghue, and Chevy. Chevy was very funny back then. But it was Lorne who created the palette where all these different sensibilities could be plugged in and be a part of the same 90 minutes. So you could have something outrageous and then

something softer. And it became a bit of a moving target. So his ability as an editor, because my background was jokes, he would call me into his office and he would say to me, listen, I have an idea. And I write about it in the book. Sid Bernstein had just offered the Beatles, I don't know, $250 million to reunite. Lorne called me into his office and say, I have an idea where I'm going to offer the Beatles $3,000 to come on the show. And I started laughing because it's 3,000 versus 250 million or whatever it was. And he started ad-libbing what he wanted to go on the air with the check made out for $3,000 paid to the order of the Beatles. And he basically, I'm telling you, Mark, I might've had one joke in there, but it was me taking dictation what he wanted the beats of it

to be. As a matter of fact, I don't think I wrote a joke. I think my only contribution was me saying, well, what about Ringo? He says, look, and and as himself as if he was on tv he said look if you want to saying to the Beatles look if you want to pay Ringo less that's your business but that was Lauren that was all Lauren so that was the guy that I worked for and with when I was there and that was for you were there straight through four seasons, five seasons, the first five seasons of the show. And when Lauren left at the end of the fifth season, so it was the spring of 1980, he left and we all left. And that was it. That was the defining greatest period of your life.

You know, something that's been a while since a lot of nice things have happened, but my God, it wasn't until I left that I learned that, boy, this was a haven. You know, if I write something now, I write a book, I write a play, this movie that's coming out with Tiffany Haddish and Billy, that took three years to write. Okay, so if I'm lucky, it seems like a day, two, three years from now. That show, you write something on Monday, it's on television Saturday. You write something, you know, after dress rehearsal, I'd go up to my office, watch the 11 o'clock news. It wasn't 24-hour news then, it was the 11 o'clock news it wasn't 24 hour news then it was the 11 o'clock news and if something struck me as funny i'd write a joke and it would be on weekend update a half hour later

where do you get that kind of immediate feedback well yeah and also it's like addictive it's uh yeah it's uh it's the gratification the sort of like the rush of it and it seems like you know from the beginning when you were there you it. And it seems like, you know, from the beginning, when you were there, you were there at the beginning, basically. So, you know, everybody came together and that relationship you built with Gilda seemed to be a model of how the show really began to work in terms of writers aligning themselves with, with a particular act, you know, talent and, and kind of, but it seems like you and Gilda had this, this thing where, you know talent and and kind of yeah but it seems like you and gilda had this this thing where you know this this writing dynamic that you know both of you really sort of learned from and grew from it was a you know i guess you characterize it as a not a kind of uh at least a you never

a non-actualized romance in a way well Well, yeah, the book that I wrote after she passed was Bunny Bunny, Gilda Radness, a sort of love story because from the very outset, from the very first day, when we realized that we had a similar sense of humor and could make each other laugh, she declared that we would be writing partners,

but we'd also be platonic friends forever. And that's what I was less thrilled about. I always felt that platonic, especially at that age, is usually one person who doesn't want it to be platonic, but all right, if these are the rules, I'll play by them. But one day you'll open your eyes and behold the glory that's in front of you. And that went on for a long time, even to the, when she got sick, she had her last TV appearance was on a show I co-created called it's Gary

Shanling show. She was on it. And then when she got sick again, I went to see the Sinai to give blood. And I was lying on the gurney and a nurse came up to me and gave me a pen and a pad. And I said, what's this? She said, well, Gilda likes to know whose blood she's getting, write her something nice. She's having a tough time. So I wrote, dear Gilda, I knew I'd get some fluid of mine into you one way or another, which pretty much sized up. to you one way or another, which pretty much sized up. But we did some nice things.

We created Roseanne, Roseanne and Dana. I wrote for everyone. I did the Samurais for Belushi. But Gilda was special. And she became Aunt Gilda to the kids. It became family. Yeah, it seems like you had a lot of nice relationships with people as time went on. And the Bernie Brillstein thing, it's like I didn't really know Bernie Brillstein.

After reading your book and after talking to as many people as I talked to, I realized that, you know, I've always been on sort of the periphery of show business. Because I never understood it to be a business. I really think I got into stand-up comedy to somehow become a whole person. The idea of there was a way to manufacture a life out of it, I just knew I wanted to be. I understand. Yeah. But I know a lot of the people that you talk about, and there's a generation of my guys who were with Bernie Brillstein as well, like Cross and Odenkirk and some of the other people that were more responsible with their careers. But I remember here's the funny thing.

You know, you say a lot of things about Brillstein. Everyone's got a lot of things to say about him. But the one thing you didn't say, which I noticed only because I think I've told this to Odenkirk, too, and it's a weird thing to notice. But I'd never really met the guy. But I was in Aspen at the comedy festival and I went to the men's room and he was in the men's room. And he was one of those guys that dropped his drawers all the way just to pee just to pee yeah Bernie he was you know I can honestly say he was the first guy I saw do that I would also go so far as saying he may be the last time I ever saw a dude that I didn't know that was a thing I think well he has a

zipper what's that for yeah I thought it's very funny that thing I got a really good laugh out of the things he told you to shove up your ass he told me when we got together to sign for me to sign with him I said

okay great you know, because he was Lauren's guy, Gilda had just gone with him, Belushi and Aykroyd. He had the Muppets. And I felt that if I'm going to stay in New York, he was LA. So there would be a presence. I would have an LA presence with him. So when he said, okay, I'll, I'll manage you. I said, okay, so what happens now? We get a lawyer. And he said, okay, I'll manage you, I said, okay, so what happens now? We get a lawyer.

And he said, he told me to shove my lawyer up my ass because it was just a handshake that he reached across the table. But 30 years of a handshake. But, yes, that was the first thing he told me to shove up my ass. But yes, that was the first thing he told me to shove up my ass. And at his memorial, I read a list of other things. Ovitz was up my ass. Sepulveda, the Internet somehow got up my ass. You wouldn't believe what was going on up there.

But you stayed with them the whole time, huh? Until he passed away. It was 30 years. And, you know, if you speak to Marty Short, who was almost managed by, also managed by Bernie, Lorne was with him the whole time, much longer than me. There was a comfort there. He was a New Yorker. He played with the big boys.

But at the same time, there was a soul. You know, I remember once my wife, Robin, and I, when we had our first child, Adam, we flew out to LA, we did whatever business, and now we were going to take a ride up the West Coast to meet with Belushi, who we hadn't seen in a while. So I would say this was February-ish of 82. John died a month later. And on our way up the coast, we drove up the coast. Bernie said, I said to Bernie, I think we're going to stop at San Simeon. And he said, at San Simeon, go into the big room there. There's a dining room table. That's the biggest dining room table you'll ever see in your life. But at the end of it,

where William Randolph Hearst sat is a bottle of ketchup. And that's what Bernie pointed out. And I realized, and I've spoken to others about this. That's who Bernie was on the outside. He played with the big boys. He did all those things. But inside,

if you cut them open, it was a pastrami sandwich, you know, lying sandwich lying around. So that was once again, the affection that you were talking about earlier about the Catskill guys or any of these other people. Bernie, there was that quality about him also. So you saw Belushi a month before he died. Were you concerned? This is how naive I was. Okay. John died, I want to say, beginning of March. The preceding November, Lorne produced a NBC special, a live special for Steve Martin. It was called Steve Martin's Best Show Ever. for Steve Martin. It was called Steve Martin's Best Show Ever. And I was a writer on it. And I think I was an extra. So all, and John and Danny were on it. Okay. We shared, it wasn't even a dressing room. It was a curtain. Behind that curtain, that's where we changed. And John was fat. And I'm going, and I'm saying to myself, oh, wow wow I'm happy that he's fat because I thought he

wasn't that meant he wasn't doing cocaine in February which is now two months after that when we went to see him he was writing a movie called Noble Rot with Don Novello we went to go see them so it was the six of us the three. John was behind the wheel of whatever car he had. And he was taking those San Francisco hills. Like, you know, remember the movie What's Up, Doc? Or any of those other movies that take place in San Francisco where the cars take the hills and they're flying. Like Bullet? Like Bullet.

It's the same exact thing. And it was a little scary and all of that. But still, John was fat. And I go, okay, John may be a little hot. But when the call came, I had not heard of speed bowling at that point. They put that term at that point. So it was then that I got that part of the education because i i remember seeing pictures of uh of of him and you know he was like morbidly obese wasn't

he uh he got he got really big mark yeah and he was um, his indulgences went from one extreme to another. They were like his comedy. So whatever vices he had, whatever naughty things he did, there were a couple of times I told you, I wrote the Samurais for him. It was one time in particular where I took the first draft and I went downtown, I think it was on 11th or 12th street here in New York and there was a sauna called the Schvitz. Sure down 10th Avenue Baths. Yeah that's exactly right and I went in there with the draft the two of us are there going over the script because he used to go there and he used to be very blunt about it that that place was the reason he was able to survive as long as he, cause he would sweat out whatever naughtiness he put into his body. Yeah. It's also, it's sad. I

mean, but you still like, uh, do you tell, how do you, do you maintain, I guess you do relationships with some of those people still like Frank and you seem to be friends with still, huh? Yeah. Frank and I speak to, I spoke to him for about two hours the other night we speak once every couple of months um and as he started to re-emerge this is before the pandemic yeah okay he started doing some um live appearances and uh he wanted to and we still may do it whenever this is all behind us, he wanted to be in conversation with me at a couple of venues. And I would jump all over that in a second. He seems very funny.

Really funny. I used to play squash with him. He would take me to the Harvard Club. He had gone to Harvard. And you'd take your life in your hands because he would bounce off of walls. It was his comedy. It was just cutthroat. It knew no limits. And he just went for it. He needed other people to say, no, no, back, back, back, back. Because left to his own devices, all hell broke loose. Well, that's sort of interesting that, you know, you mentioned

these guys from Harvard a few times, different guys, you know, you've got that weird thing that we all have is like these fucking Harvard guys, you know, either, you know, I mean, you know, you're framing it as a positive thing, but there's always this weird kind of working class Jew envy of these guys that, you know, somehow came out of that. And in my mind, maybe not yours, it afforded them a sort of access that not all of us had. mine, maybe not yours, it afforded them a sort of access that not all of us had. Well, I don't disagree with you at all, you know, because when we started the show, Franken was the Harvard guy and then Jim Downey came along and then Jim was so successful for so long with the show, it very much opened up the doors for whoever came afterwards.

And it became, Harvard Lampoon became, I won't say a breeding ground, but certainly, certainly, you know, if there was a list of the guys, not only for that show, but elsewhere, and it was an unlikely place at the time. Or seemingly so. Yeah, I mean, what do you think?

Because, like, I mean, just by you talking about, you know, that his, you know, cutthroat or, you know, playing squash, was it squash or racquetball? You know something? I want to say squash, but I could be wrong i could but either way he was always going for the juggler right so like because i try to figure out what exactly is it about harvard outside of uh of nepotism i guess there's something about the kind of kid who ends up going to harvard ends up getting through harvard that the the ambition needs to be serviced at all costs.

Absolutely. You're a thousand percent right. And on the surface, it's an unlikely thing to happen. You know, Harvard people were supposed to become professors. They were supposed to be scientists. They're not supposed to be comedy writers back then. Sure. You know, that wasn't synonymous, but they were supposed to run the world, Alan. They, they, yes, indeed. They're supposed to run the work.

We would all work for them or at least listen to them. Yes. Now the, the relationship with, um, like it's interesting. Cause I didn't realize that, uh, that, you know, you didn't come up with Gary Shandling. You didn't know Gary Shandling that didn't realize that, you know, you didn't come up with Gary Shandling. You didn't know Gary Shandling, that it was all this, you know, chance. It was a Bernie thing. Bernie called me. I was sitting at the Friars Club in New York. I want to say it was 86.

He called me. He had just joined forces, Bernie, with Brad Gray. did with Brad Gray. Brad Gray had a bunch of unknown comedians like Dennis Miller and Gary Shanley and John Lovitz and Dennis Miller and Bill Maher. Okay. And Bernie asked me if I had heard of Gary and I said, yeah, I'd seen him on Let Him In. And he was funny.

He was doing a Showtime special. And Bernie, in his typical Bernie parlance, he said, well, he's doing a special for Showtime that's headed right for the shit house. I read it. I thought it was funny. And I went out there. And, you know, I go into detail what it was like.

I had never met, just like I had. Look, once again, I was a joke writer. So when I met the Second City people at SNL, it was a new kind of comedy for me that I had to adapt to. And when I went sketchy, it was, well, he was this Jew from Tucson. I did that. That didn't make sense that those two words went together, Jew and Tucson. OK. And so when I went straight from the airport to meet Gary at a restaurant, and he's wearing dark glasses

throughout the whole dinner at night in a restaurant, so I couldn't get a sense of whether he liked my ideas for the script, whether he liked me. And we left and we said, okay, we'll be in touch. I didn't know if it was idle chatter. I had no idea. I checked into whatever hotel, 1 o'clock in the morning, which is 4 o'clock for my body because I flew out that day.

The phone rings. I pick it up. Hello, Alan, it's Gary. Alan, my dog's penis tastes bitter. You think it's his diet or what? Just like O'Donoghue or any of these other people I'm talking about. I called my wife and said, I think I found a writing partner. I could never, if I lived to be a thousand, I can't write that joke.

It's on a different level. I even told one that he did at the memorial. He would call 6 o'clock Sunday morning. And in those days, there was no caller ID. So if the phone rang 6 o'clock Sunday, it was one of two things. Either someone was dead or it was Shanley. And my wife used to debate which was worse which was the worst news yeah the phone would ring the phone's on our side of the bed

she'd just take it and hand it over to me hello Alan's Gary hey man what's doing Alan I had a date last night yeah he says yeah we were I said how did it go? He says, well, we were in bed and the girl said, no fingers in the ass. And I said to her, look, it's my finger and it's my ass. And if that's where I want to put it, you don't have a vote. How do you write that joke? I like that. I like that. These are the things that were like that. See, that's an indicator that someone is of another level of talent is the words in that order. I wouldn't have come up with that order for them. Yeah, I used to do that, like with jokes, particularly just like with Attell, you know, where he did the simplest jokes where he'd be like, do you remember when you realize your father is not a superhero, just a guy who wears a cape and drinks? Yeah, exactly. It's the same thing. Yeah.

Exactly. It's the same thing. The first time I ever went to Las Vegas was with Gary. I never went there when I was writing for those comics. I went with Gary, and we were just starting to put our show together, and he was speaking this particular night. The gig was a Toyota convention. There's 2,100 Toyota salesmen

and he comes out onto the stage. The first words out of his mouth is there's nothing I like more to do after I jerk off than to talk at a Toyota convention. Oh, wow. And these guys were laughing, you know? Yeah. Well, I mean, it was probably true, right? He's a comic. He was in his hotel room. I mean, oh yeah, no, no. He drew from real life. You're absolutely right. So that maybe that's a bad example because he was just recounting something. So you guys did that show for that.

I had no idea that lasted as long and you did as many as you did. It was four years, 72 shows. Yeah. And then but you and him eventually started to grade on each other. Is that what happened? Yeah. You know, something of this show is fun to do. And it got a lot of publicity and it broke some rules

and it was the first comedy show first cable comedy show ever nominated uh for an Emmy Award because before then it was the Cable Ace Awards we weren't allowed and but towards the end um what happened was I'm now married with three children. I'm the commissioner of our son's Little League. So we almost had to move because all the parents were pissed off at me because I rescheduled the rain out the day of, you know, Sheldon Finkelstein's bar mitzvah. That meant that little AB couldn't pitch because he was gone. And I wanted to write about that.

Gary was playing a single guy, a comic named Gary Shandling, and he couldn't relate to that. And I wanted to start flexing different muscles. So I grew a little frustrated that I couldn't express that stuff. He grew frustrated with me because I now had divided focus. And so by the time the show ended after four years, we were barely speaking. And it was my wife, Robin, who saw that he was playing in Atlantic City. We had a home in New Jersey

and she saw in the paper what hotel she called him. She says, I'm bringing down Alan. I'm throwing you in a room together and you're not coming out until you're friends again. You've been through too much together. And that was the beginning of the rapprochement. And then those basketball games that you alluded to, you know, on Sundays, everyone who was in town, whether it was Judd or Franken or Ben Stiller, do you play in any of those? No, I knew about them.

I wasn't really out here in that crew i was uh yeah i didn't i didn't ever went over there and played it was it was a fun thing uh because it was older guys now with diminished skills if they ever existed they were now diminished but it was a way of being together and was doing something. And as Franken says, I was the worst basketball player. It was like my arms and legs were never introduced to each other. And I remember once Gary, he was starting to make up, and he points out, he says, you guard her. And now I'm getting mad at him again.

I'm going, great, I got to guard the girl. That's what he thinks of me. And it's Sarah Silverman. And she's popping three pointers from out there and driving here and grabbing rebounds and stuff. And she was really, and that's how I became friendly with Sarah. That became a way for people to meet each other. And it was nice. Sarah, that became a way for people to meet each other. And it was nice. But when I broke Frank and when I broke his thumb, it was just me trying to swat the ball out of his hand. And Judd Apatow says that I broke his shoulder.

And he says to this day, whenever he puts a shirt on, which I imagine is a lot. He thinks of me. He doesn't stand right. There's something off yeah he's a little lopsided yeah it's really kind of amazing i guess to you as well in terms of some of the in in terms of the way you write about in the book that you know this that your career sort of evolved you know into other things and then you know you started getting into theater once the tv but

you're very you know i i guess maybe in retrospect, maybe when you're in it, I don't know that you realize that there is a changing of a guard. There is a change in tone and people's experience like younger guys are going to be more fit to do, you know, the younger guy things in terms of what's culturally relevant and what isn't and but you know you still keep plugging along and that you know in the stuff with that you did with billy the the theater stuff the 700 sundays i mean that you know that that was a big evolution it's it's sort of like your career has been kind of amazing don't you think as a writer well what i why i appreciate you saying that what i think has has been noteworthy about it is that there's a sixth sense that if you're writing with somebody for that person, at best, you're vice president. Okay. The subtitle of the book is, you know, my life helping funny people be funnier. So that's the gig. And the ego is set aside. As far as the different voices are concerned,

I think that what I've learned along the way is that, you know, I just turned 70 a couple of weeks ago. How the hell that happened, I don't know, okay? But Billy Crystal, with whom I just did this movie, is a couple of years older than me and the guys who came up Marty Short is 70 so we're all that age now and everyone has been able to sustain and I think part of the reason is okay what is our sensibility where is my strength? Let me stay with that. Let me do that. And with every hope that there's an audience still for that voice. You know, when we first moved to LA, this was,

oh my God, 35 years ago now, when the Shandling Show started, we lived in Brentwood and Brentwood Country Mart had a luncheonette there that I would go there on my way to the studio and stop by. And there was a table that had a few of the older writers who wrote for Jack Benny's show and Burns and Allen. And I sat at a table across the aisle from them, but eavesdropping, wanting to, my God, this is Mount Rushmore here. But what I heard was bitterness. These were guys who had trouble getting work. Now they were older and they were putting down the younger comics, the younger sensibility, the younger shows.

And I didn't want to then introduce myself and soak in all their wisdom because I didn't hear it and it stayed with me and the idols that I had and still have the guys like Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks and Norman Lear my friend Buck Henry died in December he was 89 and still writing a book so it was people okay, this is who I am right now. Let me be true to that. I think an audience can detect fraudulence from a mile away. You know, this movie that I just did with Billy that I described earlier, where there was somebody where he placed somebody with the onset of dementia. I couldn't have written that five years ago, certainly not 10. Then my dad started having it. He go, oh, wow. Okay. Billy's uncle had a wife. She started having it.

And so, you know, okay, I now live in this place. This is now my experience. Let me write about it and hopefully the baby boomer generation is still big enough that there are people who are experiencing the same things yeah and also like i i think there obviously are but it's a matter of getting them to see the thing it's become everything is so fragmented and uh and uh you know all over the place you used to just be you turn on one of three networks or you go to the fucking movies. When we started SNL, there was not even Fox. It was Able, ABC, NBC, CBS. That was television.

You're absolutely right. A couple of years ago, something I did, a documentary that I produced was nominated for an Emmy. So we went out there, my wife and I, and I'm sitting there at the Emmy awards, watching people who I never heard of go up and accept awards for shows I never heard of that were on networks I never heard of. The other thing that, you know, that, that is sort of amazing is that i i don't know like when you sit and think about i mean it must have been great to write this book because like just me you know reading your reflections i was getting a kick out of stuff and that you know you but to speak to our point that you know when you were at snl and they had milton burl host that you know that and you tell that nightmare of a story. But, you know, the sort of mythic, you know, the mythology around Milton's dick and how big it was that, you know, not only was he a horrible person, but you found out that he did actually have a huge dick.

You know, that's the beginning of television. But then, you know, and you understood why everybody didn't like Milton Berle. But then you go to that next generation of our show of shows and those guys and you got to know them and, you know, and respect them and their loyalty to each other. And then you get down to the next generation, which is, uh, probably, uh, you know, you, you guys. So, but, you know, so it's interesting that I think that your generation is the last to have that connection to the source. You know what I mean? Well, it may be. It may be. We grew up.

Look, if I'm 70, that means I was born in 1950. So when I became aware of television, I was 56, 57, 58. And the SNL group that I was with, we were all the same age, okay? Then it was the early 60s and we grew up on tv it was still early enough that our parents would be watching you know the genealogy was as such where Milton Berle was not respected but Ernie Kovacs was because he played

with the form he took this new medium and you, he would tilt the camera and then he would slide off the screen. You know, you go, wow, that's pretty cool. As opposed to wearing a dress and blackening your teeth. There was a difference between the broadness of something and the cleverness. When we were doing its Gary Shandling show, Edie Adams, who was Ernie Kovacs' wife, it was the biggest compliment in the world

that not only did she appear on the show, she would hang out at the studio because we did things that were reminiscent to her. But you're absolutely right, the broadness of some of it, whereas it's worth mentioning in the book, when Rob Reiner had a screening one night at his house, which was, I think about it often, he would have a screening of a movie and he would have somebody connected with the movie there. So afterwards afterwards would be like

a master class where we'd ask a thousand questions particular night he showed 10 from your show it shows and caesars hour and i purposely sat with my wife in the next to the last row of the screening room because the guests of honor who sat in the last row were Carl Reiner and his wife, Larry Gelbart and his wife, Sid Caesar and his wife, and Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft. So look at the bodies of work that were behind me. And we, the kids, are watching this. Billy Crystal and his wife, Larry David. Okay, Hanks was there. And we're watching this and laughing. It's still sustained. And I'm listening to them go, oh yeah, Doc Simon wrote that sketch. And then somebody else will say, yeah, but Woody came in and gave him the joke about the eyeglasses. They were footnoting it 40, 45 years later. It was astounding. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's just like, and I'm sure you could do that with the first two seasons of SNL.

Oh yeah. If I should watch a show, it's funny. only do i remember who wrote it the five seasons that i was there i can tell you how it didn't read through yeah the the the impressions that this made at that age are indelible you know the roots are deep one of the one of the funniest moments for me in the book like i underlined it was uh you know you you you're married you you it's you just get back from your honeymoon and you you realize that you know your wife doesn't really quite know what what she's getting into marrying a comedy writer and then uh and then the phone rings at 2 in the morning. I pick up the phone. We're not even unpacked. We were dead to the world.

The luggage is there. We're in bed. 2 o'clock in the morning, the phone rings, and I go, hello? Oh, Alan, it's Rodney. Hey, man. Alan, when we were growing up, we were real poor. How poor were you? We were so poor that come Christmas, we couldn't afford tinsel for the tree. We used to wait for my grandfather to sneeze. The joke made me laugh. The situation made me laugh. My poor wife, this is what she's in for.

And then Rodney says, what do you think? Funny? I go, yeah, really funny. He goes, yeah, that's what I thought. He hung up. I didn't hear from him for about two years. I don't know if I'm the only person he called or he got up to the Z's and got up to the Z's at two o'clock in the morning. My guess is that's what it was and yeah and so when shanling started doing it was like the torch was passed did you write for did you write for rodney yeah i wrote him a few jokes say um it was easy to have you know with that i don't get no respect you to have him say even as an infant my mother wouldn't breastfeed me she liked me as a friend. Okay. That was easy. During the Civil, no one in my family ever got any respect. During the Civil War, I had an uncle who fought for the West.

Those kinds of things were generous. And to be with Rodney was to be with a certain segment of history, because he used to hang out at Hanson's Drugstore, where all of the comics used to hang out because the agencies were upstairs. It was 1650 Broadway here in New York. So with the hopes that if the agents knew the comics were down there, you would hope one of them would come down and say, you've got poochers on Thursday night or whatever. So Lennyuce would hang out there there's a legendary guy named joe answers well i never met but i heard that he was the kind

of guy who was doing off stage what lenny bruce was doing on stage yeah it was yeah there's a there's that's the story is that lenny kind of copped it from him. Yeah, that's what I had heard. Yes. Well, it was great to finally do this. And hopefully I'll see you in person soon. Oh, you know something? Why don't we make a pact the next time, you know, we're on the same coast or whatever. Let's get a hold of each other. And when they allow us to have lunch or dinner, let's do that.

It would be really fun. It would be great, Alan. So nice to see you. Thanks a lot for having me. I really fun it would be great alan so nice to see you thanks a lot for having me i really appreciate it that was me and zybell alan zybell zybell alan his book laugh lines my life helping funny people be funnier is now available i'll play a little guitar here and uh let you know what's up in a couple of days. All right.

Be well, be safe. Wear your fucking mask. guitar solo Thank you. Boomer Lives I'm Terry O'Reilly. I'm Terry O'Reilly, host of Under the Influence. Recently, we created an episode on cannabis marketing. With cannabis legalization, it's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations, how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category,

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