Bobby Slayton
April 2, 2015
"I do have women come up to me occasionally: 'You're horrible, you're not funny, you're an awful person, I feel sorry for your wife.' Then again, I get dozens and dozens of people going, 'I've been to this club a thousand times and you're the best comic I've ever seen.' So you gotta take both with a grain of salt."
– Bobby Slayton
Bobby Slayton: Okay, can you hear me? Test 1-2, come in, Guy. It's
either that or the maid calling, and I don't think the maid is calling.
Guy MacPherson:
Crystal clear.
BS: Look at that. I even put down I was at the Hampton Inn. I
didn't want to impress you with these great accommodations that I have here in
Pittsburgh.
GM: It's a lovely hotel.
BS: You know what, it's
funny, the Hampton Inn Suites is great. You know, people always ask me what my
favourite club is to play. And I don't really have a favourite club. It's not
necessarily the club. A lot of it has to do with location, the proximity of the
hotel to the club. I'm not even in Pittsburgh. I'm in the suburbs of
Pittsburgh. And downtown Pittsburgh is really cool. They used to put us up in
downtown Pittsburgh. Not a lot to do, but it's really cool architecture. They
have the Andy Warhol Museum. But then they gotta pick you up, you gotta drive
to the club and they gotta get somebody to take you back. This place is right
next door to the mall and a great burger joint, a Macy's and a movie theatre.
I'm very happy and it's a good club. So Pittsburgh's not necessarily one of my
favourite towns, but the club and the situation is great. Columbus, Ohio, is
the same way. The Funny Bone has been there for years. It's not downtown, but it's
an amazing club and it's got a great mall. It's like I can walk out my door and
I can eat. You don't have to rent a car and fuck with going anywhere, you know?
GM: Do you know where you're
staying in Vancouver?
BS: Yeah, right downtown.
I'm staying in the hotel that the club's in. The whole idea of playing
Vancouver, and I'm not just saying this so I can blow smoke up Vancouver's ass
right now, but Vancouver's a town I've not been to in years. And the only thing
that I care about any more at my age is great restaurants. I go out to eat when
I'm on the road. It's even hard to do it on the Friday/Saturday because I've
got two shows and if I eat, I gotta have wine and by the late show I'm
exhausted. But I'm coming in a day early to do radio, Thursday's there's only
one show, so I can go out to a couple of great places to eat. And the fact that
the club and the hotel and everything is right downtown... Vancouver's such a
great city.
GM: Did you perform here before?
BS: No. The two times I was
in Vancouver, one was to do a movie and one was to do a TV show. The first time
I came there – oh my God, I'm thinking back now... My daughter's 26. She was
about 5 or 6 or 7 years old. Yeah, it'd be close to 20 years ago the first time
I was there. Does Steve Cannell, or whatever his name is, still have the
studios outside of Vancouver?
GM: I don't know.
BS: I don't know. I haven't
heard his name for a long time. But they were his studios. And you know how
much stuff they shoot up there. So I was up there about 20 years ago and it was
great because it was my first major role. It was a show on NBC called Nightmare Café. It only lasted one season. It was a cross between The Twilight Zone and One
Step Beyond. But the coolest thing was every week they had a guest star. So I
was the guest star. Kinda the star of the show that week. But it was written,
created and directed by Wes Craven, who I love because I've always loved horror
movies. And Nightmare on Elm Street was always one of my
favourite horror films from that time. And Robert Englund was the star of the
show. So I got to work with Wes and Robert. They put me up in some beautiful
hotel downtown for ten days. I don't remember the hotel but I remember running
into Dick Van Dyke in the elevator and Jimmy Page at the bar. And I'm going,
wow, this is a microcosm of show biz. I don't know what they were doing there.
I imagine it was something to do with music or TV. But all these actors staying
there. All I remember was it being great and feeling like I was really in show
biz now. I remember when I got in, they gave me like four- or five-hundred
bucks in cash. I was like, What is this for? They were like, That's your per
diem to eat every day. So now I got a pocket full of cash. I was only shooting
five or six days but they had me up there for two weeks in a suite overlooking
what is it, the ocean? The river? I know it's a coastal town.
GM: The ocean.
BS: And it was just great.
And the second week, my wife and daughter come up. My daughter's like five or
six years old, and she got such a kick out of the fact that the other guest
stars on the show were these three what we used to call midgets. I guess
they're called little people now. But she was so enamoured. They were so nice
to her, but she was so shocked that there were grownups her size she's hanging
out with. She couldn't quite grasp the concept of that. So that was my first
time up there. Then about five years ago, maybe a little bit more – you can
look it up [editor's note: It was 2000, ie
15 years ago] – I was up there with Steven Wright. We both were in this Amy
Heckerling movie. Some Jason Biggs movie called Loser. It was great. It was only a few days but Steven was a patron of
a strip club and I ran the strip club.
GM: I can see that.
BS: He's a patron, a real
wacky guy, kind of an oddball, and I was a fast-talking, loud mouth who tried
to make out with Mena Suvari but she kept pushing me away. So that was my two
times I was in Vancouver and they were both great.
GM: I'm excited that you're
finally going to do what you do best here.
BS: I love doing standup.
That's what I do. I mean, those two shows, I pretty much played myself.
Everything I do when I act, I just play me. Every part I get is a fast-talking,
New York Jew. And people are like, 'Hey, you were really great as Joey Bishop
in The Rat Pack.' I go, 'Joey Bishop was
5-foot-9, he was a fast-talking Jew from the East Coast. It wasn't a big
stretch for me here.' It's not like Robert De Niro where I had to gain 200
pounds and learn how to box, you know what I mean?
GM: Did you know Vancouver
audiences tend to be quite PC? It's going to be fascinating to see them react
to you.
BS: I've heard that. I was
just thinking about this this morning. I don't know why this occurred to me
because I do so much radio now: People always say to me, Do you think audiences
are more PC now? When I was growing up in the '70s and started doing standup
comedy, you had Archie Bunker. I'm just using him as an example. Him and maybe
Pryor around that time. It was shocking people. There's a toilet flushing and
Pryor's using the n-word and Cheech & Chong were talking about pot. So
everything seemed to ease up a little. Through the 70s and 80s, before Bill
Maher had his show Politically Incorrect, people used to say that about
me all the time. What happened was, I think it was refreshing that people
weren't so uptight. I'm from New York but I started out doing standup in San
Francisco. And I used to do a lot of gay jokes. They weren't faggot jokes, they
weren't AIDS jokes; I wasn't like Sam Kinison. But they were just jokes about
gay people. I think the reason I started doing it at the time was because they
were having a gay comedy night. And in Oakland they were having a black comedy
night. And the black comics would go, 'You ever notice white people do this?'
And gay comics would go, 'You know what I hate about straight people?' And it's
fine. I have no problem with that. But if they're going to make fun of me, I
can make fun of them. And there was a backlash to my standup by the gay
newspaper and the liberal media back then. I remember people giving me shit but
at the same time, I was getting more of a following. It wasn't anything that
mean spirited. I'm not saying I didn't have nights where I crossed the line a
little. And then things started to mellow out. And now you'd think that after
legalizing pot, and gay marriage, and you read about these fucking assholes in
Indiana... I don't know if it's getting worse or better. But I think, getting
back to what you were saying about Vancouver being PC, I had that problem in
Portland and in England when I played London. It wasn't really a problem. What
I found out in London – I only played there a couple of times – that 80 to 90
percent of the people not only loved it, they came to see me, but there were that
10 percent of the English that were kind of uptight. I don't know how to
compare them. I don't know the English society that much but here you get the
PC, liberal, vegetarian, lesbian, hippy... whatever you want to call them. So
they have their own version of it over there. But I think while they lashed out
and gave me shit, the rest of the people in the audience seemed to love it that
much more when I ripped them a new asshole. And I'm not going up there to do
that; I'm going onstage to make people laugh. It's like going on Yelp. I kinda
never want to go on Yelp to look up restaurants when I go to a town but it
gives you an idea of how the restaurant is. But there's always one fucking
asshole or maybe that one time you didn't have good service. You can't please
everybody. I know people that don't like the show Seinfeld and I know people that don't like The Rolling Stones who
would rather see Journey. I could go on and on – people that think Roger Moore
is a better James Bond that Sean Connery. So you can't please all these fucking
assholes. And when you get them in the audience, sometimes it actually makes
for a bit more of a colourful show.
GM: Do you ever get in
confrontations off stage?
BS: You mean fights?
GM: Anything with someone who
takes offence at what you say or gets in your face.
BS: Oh yeah. Not that often.
It used to happen more. Because most people that really hate my show – and
again, it's one percent of one percent usually – they usually walk out before
it's over. It's like people who used to hate Howard Stern. Well then turn the
channel, you jackass! People are like, 'My kids are in the car.' You have other
channels! So don't stay if you don't like it. But I used to sign CDs and DVDs
after the show and people that don't like it generally walk out. I do have
women come up to me occasionally: 'You're horrible, you're not funny, you're an
awful person, I feel sorry for your wife.' Then again, I get dozens and dozens
of people going, 'I've been to this club a thousand times and you're the best
comic I've ever seen.' So you gotta take both with a grain of salt.
GM: When you have the tag, The
Pitbull of Comedy, people know what to expect.
BS: You know what a lot of
clubs do? They don't do it so much anymore, but the Improvs and Funny Bones
used to do it – they put up a warning at the box office window that if you're
faint of heart or you're squeamish, you might want to consider attending
another show. And all that would really do is bring in more people. And then I
get people who are pissed at me because I wasn't dirty enough. My act's not
really dirty. 'You weren't offensive at all! You never picked on me.' Okay.
Well, damned if I do, damned if I don't.
"The Pitbull thing kinda stuck. I don't know why I've never let go of it. Probably because I still don't have that many TV credits after 40 years doing this shit."
– Bobby Slayton
GM: Do you find that the tag
Pitbull can be limiting at all?
BS: I don't like it and I
don't know why I've never dropped it. It started back in the early 80s. There
was a guy, who's still in radio, named Alex Bennett. Alex was this
ground-breaking radio guy when I was growing up in New York. Back in the 60s
and early 70s. He'd have John Lennon on the show and talk about the
legalization of marijuana, and he'd have Jerry Rubin and Abby Hoffman.
Groundbreaking shit. Eldridge Cleaver, the head of the Black Panthers, who was
in exile in Algeria, he got him on the phone. When you're 14 or 15 and you hear
a guy talking about legalizing marijuana... So he moved to San Francisco in the
mid-70s and I was already starting to do standup. I went down to see Alex and I
told him how much I loved him and he put me on the radio. He said, 'Do you know
any other comics?' And I said yeah and brought in Dana Carvey, Kevin Pollack,
we eventually got Robin Williams to come in. And every morning, Alex would have
a four-hour show and it slowly evolved from being music to being talk with
comedians. There were a few songs. I'm not saying he was the first guy to have
comics on. So one day I'm on the show and I did a joke about McDonald's. Every
comic had a joke about McDonald's back then and airline travel, and my
girlfriend, and my girlfriend's cat. And McDonald's pulled a $50,000 ad
campaign from this station that morning when I did the McDonald's joke. Alex
said, 'You're like a pitbull. You bit the hand that feeds you. We put you on
the radio.' So the Pitbull of Comedy thing kinda stuck. And back then, I didn't
have any TV credits. Now you have every two-bit comic has either got a comedy
special or a Comedy Central special, been on Craig Ferguson, been on The Tonight Show. Now you can say, 'From The Tonight Show, from Comedy Central, from VH1.' But back
then I didn't have any credits so that Pitbull thing kinda stuck. I don't know
why I've never let go of it. Probably because I still don't have that many TV
credits after 40 years doing this shit.
GM: It paints a nice picture.
BS: Yeah, but now that this
other guy, Pitbull, is around. Coincidentally, my daughter, Natasha, who is a
Pussycat Doll and now is in a group called G.R.L. – I don't know if you've ever
heard of them – but they were on Pitbull's last big hit, Wild, Wild Love. They toured with him. So my daughter's
cheating on me with another Pitbull.
GM: That's inexcusable.
BS: That's inexcusable.
That's fine, as long as she got paid.
GM: Do you find it easier to
attack certain groups when the audience is mixed?
BS: Totally. Absolutely. If
there's no black people, I hate doing black jokes. I don't do a lot of them.
And if I point out two guys and call them gay, it's usually not the real gay
guys. You know, my gay material has always been pro-gay. I was in San Francisco
about five years ago and this little fucking queen – I don't like to use the
word 'faggot', but this faggoty little queen, one of the guys that even gay
people don't like, a real limp-wristed, whiny... It's like Fran Drescher –
everything you hate about Jews. So I was on stage and I was talking to them and
I don't remember the exact jokes but they were all pro-gay. It was when gay
marriage was first starting and I said, 'Why would you want to? You're with
your friends, you're getting great blow jobs. Why would you want to throw that
away? You have such a great lifestyle.' They were jokes. I'm not saying they
were uplifting jokes but this guy just kept getting more pissed and more pissed
so I went after him a little bit more. The audience is dying. I think his
boyfriend might have been laughing, I don't even remember. But he went to the
gay newspaper and he went on the radio. He was idiotic. It bothered me only in
the sense where I was getting all this press from it but it wasn't like I was
the German pilot that drove the plane into the side of the fucking mountain.
Holy shit. You know what I found out? You know who laughs a lot? Lesbians. When
I first started out, the whole dyke scene in San Francisco, I think because gay
people have come out more – first people like Anne Heche and Ellen DeGeneres
and gay football players and gay TV shows and gay characters – so now that
they're more accepted, they've lightened up a little. I have lesbians come to
my show and generally they're great. A lot of times they don't go see a
straight white man. In of all places, I was in Knoxville, Tennessee, last year
and people told me what a horrible redneck club this was and I had no problem.
And these two lesbians came to my show and the next night they brought a whole
table full of their gay friends and they had a great time. They were great.
GM: People can sense when it's
coming from a good place. Or at least not a bad place.
BS: They're jokes. Sometimes
I feel bad about picking on people that have already had enough shit going on,
but at the same time if I'm all of a sudden doing jokes about Jews or about
Mexicans or about Arabs, I'll get people who go, 'How come you didn't talk
about us?' Because I don't know anything about Lithuanians, I'm sorry. 'How
come you don't talk about Afghanistan?' I really don't. But that's not my whole
act. I also talk about other things. But people say, 'Why do you keep talking
about the same stuff?' It's the stuff I find funny. The same reason a comic's
always talking about their marriage or their baby or airline travel or
whatever. You talk about what you know about, what affects your life.
GM: Vancouver's audiences may be
more homogenous than you're used to.
BS: I know. I've only heard
great things about the club.
GM: We don't really have a
Mexican community.
BS: Canada's a little bit
different than the States because in the States when I started out, I'd say to
somebody, 'Do you have Macy's here? Do you have Woolworths here? Do you have a
Chinatown?' And a lot of people never heard of some of these things. Now across
the country, because of the malls and Showtime and HBO and television,
everything's everywhere now. And in Canada, you guys are absolutely different
than Montréal. The poutine jokes are not going to fly like they're going to fly
in Montréal. Québec is a whole different world. Right after you guys, I go to
Calgary and then Winnipeg. Winnipeg's got a big Jewish population. Calgary, I'm
still not sure what the hell's going on there.
GM: Cowboys. Here there are a lot
of Asians.
BS: Well I have a lot of
Asian jokes. Well, I wouldn't say a lot. I mean five or ten minutes. Those are
always great. I'm sure the fact that Asian people can't drive, has that
stereotype reached Vancouver?
GM: Oh yeah.
BS: I used to do Asian
driver jokes when I first moved to San Francisco. I guarantee you I was the first
comic to do them and only because nobody had a problem with Asian drivers
anywhere else. There were no Asian drivers anywhere else. Not enough where you
can say Asians can't drive. The only Asian population was really in New York
and they just walked around.
GM: How long had you been doing
standup before you moved to San Francisco?
BS: I hadn't. I'm writing a
book right now. I don't know if I'm ever going to finish it. But I moved out to
San Francisco when I was 20 years old. I drove across country with a psychotic
friend of mine. It was like Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas. We'd take mescaline and peyote driving into Vegas with this
lunatic. But I came out when I was 20. I never, ever gave a thought to doing
standup comedy. I'm sure you've interviewed a lot of comics but if you read
interviews with comics, at least guys I know, it was, 'I always wanted to do
comedy and I watched Jay Leno when I was a kid or Eddie Murphy.' But I watched
all the comics and I loved Robert Klein and I loved George Carlin and I loved
the old Jewish Borscht Belt guys. I never thought about doing it until I got to
San Francisco and was at a little party and somebody said, 'You should do
comedy.' I was telling jokes, I guess. I just saw Henny Youngman perform and I
was reciting all his jokes. They told me about a club called the Holy City Zoo.
I went there and I got on stage and THE REST IS HISTORY, GUY!
GM: You think of San Francisco
comics and all the great names that came out of there, and you don't really fit
the bill.
BS: Now what comics came out
of there?
GM: Dana Carvey, Margaret Cho,
Marc Maron, Patton Oswalt...
BS: San Francisco was always
a great comedy town. In the 60s there was Lenny Bruce, who was from New York
but he played San Francisco a lot. You had Jonathan Winters, the Smothers
Brothers, Mort Sahl, Woody Allen even though he was from New York, and Phyllis
Diller. So there was that group. When I started out, none of those guys were
doing standup. When I started out, there were names you probably won't know, like
Bob Sarlatte, Bill Rafferty, who was on ABC's Real People and I think The New Laugh-In. And there was Robin, who'd only been
doing it for a year or two. So there was those guys. A guy named Jim
Giovanni, who went on to do The
New Laugh-In, who was a 7-Up truck driver. So the guys like Marc Maron, I came
along before him and he opened up for me. Kevin Pollack came a couple years
after me and Carvey. Me and Carvey got onstage the same week together. Margaret
Cho used to open up for me.
GM: Paula Poundstone?
BS: Poundstone opened up for
me. And Carvey. The guys that I still talk to, the core of the group was A.
Whitney Brown, who started around the same time who went on to SNL, Dana Carvey, who started the same week, Pollack. A couple years
later was Paula Poundstone and then Bob Goldthwaite, who was headlining but he
had moved out from Boston. Kevin Meaney, who was a Boston guy who came out to
San Francisco who used to open up for all of us. Jake Johannson used to open up
for us. They all became headliners but they were all opening acts. When I
started out, I was opening for all these guys from LA and New York. I was like
the house emcee at the Punchline in San Francisco. So I worked three weeks out
of the month, opening up for Michael Keaton, Jerry Seinfeld, George Miller,
Elaine Boosler, Kip Adotta, Bruce Baum. So I got a lot of stage time. And I
would open up for rock and roll bands because nobody else wanted to do it.
Everybody was scared to do it. You know, Pollack would open up for like The
Beach Boys or Pablo Cruz. Cub scouts. And I would open up for Blue Oyster Cult
and Warren Zevon. That's where I really cut my teeth doing this. You didn't get
paid a lot of money but it was a challenge opening for rock and roll bands. The
Tubes had me open up for them a lot. The shows generally went okay. Ray Charles
was fine and Warren Zevon was fine but then when you start opening for some
punk bands, it wasn't a matter of doing well; it was a matter of staying on the
mechanical bull long enough to collect your $25 paycheque.
"I still have my first time on stage. I taped it. My style wasn't really a style. It was really pretty horrendous. It was really just jokes. And my voice didn't sound like this. It was kind of a high, prepubescent Leno. It was pretty lame and tame material."
– Bobby Slayton
GM: Was your style starting out
pretty much defined? Or did it take you a while before you developed into it?
BS: It took a while. I still have
my first time on stage. I taped it. My style wasn't really a style. It was
really pretty horrendous. It was really just jokes. And my voice didn't sound
like this. It was kind of a high, prepubescent Leno. It was pretty lame and
tame material. But I think every comic in their first year has mostly lame and
tame material. Now every comic that gets on stage has this blueprint. You can
see how it's done. There were plenty of comics that I would watch and open up
for but now more than ever if you just turn on the TV or you turn on Netflix,
you can almost pick the kind of comic you want to be. I see a lot of guys
trying to be Louis C.K. I see a lot of guys trying to be me. Look at Pryor for
black comics. Then Eddie Murphy came along and then Chris Rock and then Dave
Chappelle. And I'm sure when they started out the first month, they would look
at Eddie Murphy or their heroes, but they evolved into personalities. My act
was very much like Jay Leno, subconsciously. But you look at me and I'm cocking
my head like Leno. I just think it takes a month, six months, a year or
sometimes two years before you really develop into the kind of character or
stage persona, until you find yourself comfortable on stage. It takes time.
GM: There are too many comics
these days.
BS: Too many comics. Way too
many. Way too many. The cream doesn't always rise to the top, which is a shame.
If there were as many painters, I don't think the shitty painters would sell
that many paintings, but there's a lot of shitty comics making a living. And
it's fine. There's guys who've been doing this longer than I have who are
better than I am probably who aren't making nearly what I’m making and there
are a lot of idiots... You know, I was just watching – and I never liked him, I
never thought he was that funny – this Aziz Ansari. But I'm watching his
Netflix special from Madison Square Gardens and I realized, God, this kid is
great. Not only is he great, but he's only 30 years old. I've only seen people
in bits and pieces and it's not fair because people have done that to me. It's
great, but what sucks about YouTube, and it doesn't matter how good you are or
how successful you are or how funny you are, you're going to get these haters.
People would go, 'I was going to see Bobby Slayton but I looked him up on
YouTube and he's doing these old jokes from the 70s about airplanes.' And then
I go on YouTube and I go, well, that is from the 70s! So you look
at somebody in a 2-minute clip – and like I said I'd do the same thing – I'd
look at Aziz Ansari or I'd look at this guy on Letterman and he's only on for
four or five minutes. But when you watch somebody do an hour, you go, 'wow,
that's a great performance.' You can't really judge somebody by two or three
minutes. So there are a lot of great comics out there, but there are so many
bad ones.
GM: I always have to see a comic
live before I make my final decision.
BS: That's a great way to do it.
And you don't always know if that was a great show or not. There's a famous
joke among comedians and it doesn't really resonate with anybody else. I'm sure
you'll get it. A woman comes up to a comic the next day after a show and says,
'I saw your show last night. You're the greatest comic I've ever seen. I wanna
sleep with you. You're brilliant. You're a genius.' And the comic says, 'Were
you at the first show or the second show?' Because there really can be a
tremendous difference. Especially if you work like I work. If they're not a
great crowd, I'll just give them an hour of my material. But the fun of doing
it is to talk to the people a little and try new stuff. And every night is
different. I think I've been doing this long enough where I know how to mix it
up together so it comes out fine. But you get those nights where you get the
fucking hecklers and the drunks and the idiots and they can just fuck up a
whole show. It can be one table. Sometimes I can't even hear them; they're at
the back of the room. I talk so fast and sometimes the acoustics in a club are
not great. It happened last week in New Jersey. A fucking drunken cunt is in
the back and I don't know what's going on. All of a sudden I hear this big
commotion. She storms out of the club with her boyfriend. I figured it was
something I said. But it wasn't. And people came up to me after the show and
said they couldn't hear half my act because she was so loud and wouldn't shut
up. So you never know, Guy.
GM: Even with this comedy boom,
it seems people take more offence. The latest is Trevor Noah.
BS: Oh, that's so stupid. I did a
radio show with him. He seemed like a really great guy. You know what? It's
exactly what you're talking about. It's so stupid. I don't know, maybe he had
other anti-Semitic jokes. I heard he had one: The South Africans like Apartheid
like Israel loves peace. So what? He sends out a million tweets and one of
them's not that funny. But I don't find it that offensive. But a black guy
mentions Israel or a Jew mentions a black and all of a sudden it's racist. Were
there other tweets, too? I didn't even bother to look to see what the fuck
people are so pissed off about.
GM: Yeah, there were a bunch of
Jewish ones and some that were characterized as misogynist, where a guy gets
down on one knee to propose because he's in a better position to give her an
uppercut if she says no, or something.
BS: Oh, that's fine. Good for
him. Good for him. It's not that funny but it's not that offensive. He's a young
guy. They don't all hit home.
GM: Are stereotypes underrated?
BS: They sure are. But you talk
about this new comedy boom. There are a lot of great new comics. The problem
with a guy like me, who's almost 60 years old, is that I am not on Comedy
Central. Comedy Central will not put on guys. The Canadian Comedy Central put
me on a lot more. You guys in Canada have used me a lot. I think I have a
bigger following in Canada than I do in the States by now. But Comedy Central
has a thing where they won't put on people, for the most part, over 40, 45
years old. I mean Jon Stewart – no pun intended – has been grandfathered into
that. I don't think they'd ever hire him now. They'd never hire Lewis Black
now. Comedy Central gives specials to young guys. A lot of them are good. But
they hand out specials like candy on Halloween. I'm not sure they nurture
comedy or if they're really just mining it for everything they can suck out of
it. But there's a new comedy boom. There are some really good comics. But I see
guys kinda doing what a lot of guys my age used to do – the same recycled
material. Because there's a new generation of kids that have never seen this.
I'll give you a perfect example of what I'm talking about. About five years
ago, John Landis, the director, did a great Don Rickles documentary. He
interviewed a lot of comics and I'm in it for a couple of minutes talking about
Don Rickles and how much I love him. And I was working in Vegas when it came
out on HBO and I had cocktail waitresses – and this is more than once – two or
three of them coming up to me saying, 'I saw you on that special last night. I
didn't know who that guy was.' You don't know who who was? 'Don Rickles. Never
heard of him.' So if you've never heard of Rickles and you can't name the four
Beatles, there are certainly a lot of people who have no idea who I am. And a
lot of people my age aren't going to comedy clubs anymore because you don't
want to deal with all these young assholes and people texting and the drunks
and the parking. When you're in your fifties – I've done this – I don't need to
go to the movies; I have a BluRay player with a big screen, I have NetFlix. I
can wait a month for this movie to come out. I don't need to go to the movies
and sit with Mexicans and babies and talking black people and teenagers
throwing popcorn. Plus the fact I gotta pee twice during the movie and I can't
stop it! So people aren't going out as much when they reach a certain age. They
go to the theatre. They're going to see Lewis Black, they're going to see Book
of Mormon. So it's a whole different generation out there and it's tougher and
tougher and tougher for guys like me to sell tickets because I'm not on TV
right now.
GM: In the 70s, the people on TV
were all old.
BS: They were all old, yeah. And this
whole thing happened with comedy writers. I see it happening now. It's why
there's so much garbage on television. Not on cable and not on NetFlix. People
say there's nothing on. You got fifty great shows between Weeds and The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire and House of Cards. There's a thousand amazing, fucking brilliant shows on
television. But network TV, when you look at these lame-ass sitcoms – and I
don't really follow this so much anymore – but in the 80s and 90s when you
said, What happened to All in the Family and Taxi and The Odd Couple? There was a whole big thing
in the 70s and 80s, that when you wrote on M*A*S*H and you wrote on All
in the Family and you were 50 years old, you were washed up as a comedy
writer. 'What are you talking about? I just wrote All in the Family! I wrote The Odd Couple! I created Star
Trek!'
So they'd hire all these new young writers in their twenties who worked on
shitty, stupid fucking shows who are now developing more stupid fucking shitty
shows. I know about four writers on Seinfeld couldn't get any work
after Seinfeld went off the air. Really?
Arguably the greatest show in the history of sitcoms and they couldn't get
work? So when you get old, you kinda get pushed down. It's funny, I still see
assholes online every time the Rolling Stones go on tour, who I would never
miss, ever, for any reason, under any circumstances, going, 'They're old. They
should retire.' Why should they retire? Because they're 72 and they're better
than anybody doing music today? They're better than every fucking rap piece of
shit. They're better than any rock and roll band today. And even though they
don't have a lot of new songs, it doesn't matter. You pick five of their
greatest songs and if that's all they do, they're better than anybody working
today. You don't see BB King retiring. You didn't see Marlon Brando retiring.
You retire as a football player because your knees go out, you have arthritis
and you can't run. But there's no reason for a musician to retire or a comic.
GM: In the 70s, there were guys
like Buddy Ebson and William Conrad and... Mannix.
BS: Mannix! I just thought about
him the other day. I heard he lives in my neighbourhood, Mike Connors, and he's
like 90. I read something about him, it might have been in some tabloid at the
airport. They had a picture of him, looked like he's 90. He said, 'Yeah, I'm
just waiting to die.' It was really sad. He doesn't work anymore.
GM: Nobody minded watching old or
out of shape people back then but these days everyone's young and hot.
BS: Gilligan's Island or you had Hogan's Heroes. The fat Nazis were all played by Jews, by the
way. You know that, right?
GM: No, I didn't.
BS: Werner Klemperer, who played
Klink. Sgt. Schultz was a Jew, John Banner. General Burkhalter... all Jews.
Pretty funny.
GM: That could never get on the
air now.
BS: Of course it couldn't get on
the air now. It's mind-boggling. If Mel Brooks did The Producers today, the movie would be big everywhere except for Portland
and Vancouver – everybody would be picketing. But you know what, it frustrates
me. If I had a lot of money right now, I would probably be like Mike Connors. I
would just sit in my home, not necessarily waiting to die, but I would stop
doing standup now. I would do it once a month in LA because every time I write
a new joke, I want to try it out. Maybe once a year I'd come to a town like
Vancouver or Chicago to perform. Towns I like to be in. But I'm so tired of the
travelling. I have, I don't know, 7 million frequent flier miles. I remember
reading an interview with Ellen DeGeneres before she got this show. I think
when she had her sitcom. The first big gay sitcom, right? Ellen, who opened up
for me when she was a young comic, opened up for me in her home town of Baton
Rouge. I remember reading this interview with her saying, 'I've been on the
road for seven years. I'm exhausted. I'm burned out.' And at the time, I'd been
doing it for 20, 25 years. What a lightweight! You got up to seven years?
Really? Well try 40 years. It's still tough. I still gotta do the morning
radio... I was going to go to the gym and work out in the hotel but now that
I've talked to you, I'm exhausted. I'll do a hundred situps, call it a day,
take a nap and do my show tonight.
GM: Janeane Garofalo opened for
you, too.
BS: How do you know she opened up
for me?
GM: I do my research.
BS: Oh, you did. She opened up
for me years ago. She was really good. She was really funny and I remember the
audience not getting her. It was really smart stuff. I'm not sure how much she
liked my act because I had a lot of everything that she probably hates. But we
got along fine. She was a young comic. Off stage she might have thought, 'I
really hate this guy's act' but she was very nice to me. I remember Ben Stiller
coming by to see the show because he was friends with her. Jon Stewart opened
up for me at that same club. Jon Stewart opened up for me. God, how many years
ago? Twenty? Twenty-five? He opened up for me, obviously way before he was Jon
Stewart, and he's wearing jeans on stage and an old T-shirt. I said, 'Look, I
don't want to sound like your father, but your act is really, really smart. You
should just dress a little nicer.' And next thing you know, he's on Comedy
Central in a jacket and tie! Hey, did I do that?!... No, I don't think so. But
he was too smart to dress like that. And he was a young kid. But he was always
great. Always great.
GM: That's what I thought. I
thought he was a great standup and just whip smart. I'm not sure Trevor Noah is
as whip smart.
BS: We'll find out, won't we? That
Larry Wilmore, I love his show. Larry was a writer for The Daily Show. He's great. I just started watching that
and The Daily Show again. I come off the
road and I have 40 things taped. It's hard to watch all this shit.
GM: I know, you can't get to it all.
BS: You can't get to it.
GM: Since you're not going to the
gym, maybe you can watch something.
BS: You know what? I might just
sit here and watch the rest of the Aziz Ansari special at Madison Square
Garden. I don't know what I'm going to do. Not much to do. Either go back to
the mall or take a nap. Not a lot to do here in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. But
I'm looking forward to coming to Vancouver. Are you going to come down?
GM: I definitely will be there. I
wouldn't miss it.
BS: Do you go down there a lot?
GM: Probably more than the
average person.
BS: So the audiences are pretty
good?
GM: Yeah, they're good. It's a
hot club.
BS: That's what everybody tells
me. They say it's packed no matter who's there. It doesn't really matter. This
is going to be great. I'm looking foward to playing up there because like you
said, I've never been there and I'm pretty much ready for anything. I usually
start off trying to get them laughing before I start going into my other stuff.
The thing with the PC people, they don't want to laugh, but they do. Like,
'You're such an asshole but you're so funny.' That's fine. We're not going out
on a date. If you're laughing, that's what you came there for and that's what I
did. You want nice? Go talk to somebody about unicorns and rainbows and panda
bears. Get a little butterfly tattoo. But if you want funny, that's all I can
deliver, I hope. Have you written any of this shit down?
GM: I've got it in my tape
recorder.
BS: My God, you get to listen
back to this. I'm even more brilliant the second time. I'm like a great bottle
of wine. Once you crack it open and let it sit for a while, you realize how
good it is.
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