Sick In The Head: Conversations About Life And Comedy Part 32

Michael: And it's so pa.s.sionate on Twitter. But if someone recognizes you on the street, it's like, "I'm your biggest fan." Everybody I've ever met is my biggest fan and everybody on Twitter thinks I suck and shouldn't have a job. Obviously these people are not my biggest fans and obviously these people don't hate me. But it's a strange thing that people do.

Judd: Twitter's just this place where the twenty percent who hate what you do will just let you know, and then it feels like eighty percent hate it. I don't love Spanish rock and roll, but I'm not on the Internet trashing it all day long.

Michael: Right.

Judd: But somebody is.

Michael: The funny thing about "Update" is that people have these irrational expectations. Every week, people yell at me, like, You should be fired, they never should have given you the job. But it's not like they picked me over any of the old hosts. They're gone and they're not getting this job again. I'm not Amy and Tina. You're not going to get Chevy Chase back just because you miss him.

Judd: People love to debate what works on SNL. In every era of the show, people love to trash it while loving it and watching it. But the audience never seems to understand that the whole show is written in a week and the fun of it is trying to see how many good ones they can uncork.

Michael: I always say that, too, when people compare the show to other sketch shows. We do a completely different thing. If we were a taped show that was condensed to a half hour, if we were able to get every perfect shot that we needed with directors, it would be the best comedy show on TV. But we can't do that. If we had the talents of Will Ferrell and Tracy Morgan and Adam Sandler and we could just focus on making a half hour of perfect comedy, it would be insane. If our star each week wasn't a person who has never done comedy before and we didn't have to write every sketch about them and their ability and skill set, it would be amazing. But that's not the way the show works-and that's what makes it so special.

Judd: Are you enjoying focusing on "Update" and not writing sketches as much anymore?

Michael: "Update" is such a specific thing. With two people, it has this strange kind of momentum-you know, you never quite get on a roll. In stand-up, you get on a roll. There's a flow to it. With two people, as soon as you're on a roll, the camera's on someone else. And then, when it's back to you, you've got to restart. So they're very different things. I was comfortable writing sketches. With sketches, I know what works-and if something doesn't work, I don't get suicidal over it. So at this point, sketches are more fun, but "Update" is new and I want to get better at it.

Judd: In the last year, you've had all these big experiences: writing for SNL, being on The Daily Show, then straight to "Update." That must have been a real head spinner.

Michael: It was a lot. Especially during that time when I knew I was coming back to SNL but I was still working at The Daily Show. That was awkward. It was like being a product of divorced parents, which I am, so I can say that.

Judd: How did you get out of The Daily Show when you just got there?

Michael: Jon was really cool about it all. He understood the opportunity and he was like, "I'm not going to hold anybody back." It was a lot like when I left SNL for The Daily Show, actually. Lorne said, "You know, I'm not going to hold you back. You'll be great at The Daily Show. We believe in that." So I just got lucky. Both Lorne and Jon could have easily been like, "Oh, f.u.c.k it. And f.u.c.k you for even wanting to go. Now you get the small office."

Judd: You didn't realize Lorne had a master plan to get you back.

Michael: I don't know that he did. I'm still not sure.

Judd: Lorne Michaels outplays everybody again.

Michael: Who knows. But that guy's smart, man.

Judd: His success rate is ridiculous.

Michael: Yeah, he knows what he's doing. What other show, what other producer, can lose Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Will Ferrell, Phil Hartman, Chris Farley-who can lose all of those people and still have a relevant show? If Cheers lost Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson, would they be able to reload and still be relevant? In Living Color was one of the greatest sketch shows I've ever seen, maybe number two after SNL. I loved that show. I was raised on that show. It had like a five-year window. But once the Wayanses left, it was like, "Okay, well, this is over," you know what I mean? Lorne has had all these guys leave over the years, and he's been able to restock. It's amazing.

Judd: What is your relationship like with him?

Michael: I'm friendly with him in a strange way. I mean it's obviously a boss relationship-we're not getting coffee and talking about girls-but he's been super-supportive. Anytime I've had an issue I could talk to him about it and I never felt disappointed walking out of his office afterwards. He could be Darth Vader if he wanted and we'd all be okay with it and thankful to have the job. But he's not. He has helped me believe I can do this job. To get his blessing is a pretty cool feeling.

Judd: I'm considerably older than you, so I remember when SNL first came on. I was eight. I can't imagine that I watched the first season, but I was definitely watching it in 1976 and 1977, when I was nine and ten years old, just trying so hard to stay up. I think the whole reason I got into comedy was because of Sat.u.r.day Night Live.

Michael: It's amazing that it's still important to people. We still have fans who are fourteen and fifteen. It's like Looney Tunes. My father grew up on Looney Tunes and I grew up on Looney Tunes. It's a thing you can share.

Judd: I would always sneak over to the show when Sandler was there. It's just fun being around it. All the musicians hanging around, the incredible collection of people. Do you enjoy that part of it?

Michael: Oh, yes. I've seen Eminem, I've seen Jay-Z, I've seen Justin. But I don't think anyone has generated as much buzz since I've been there as Prince. It was crazy. Everyone wants to be next to Prince.

Judd: Did you get any alone time with him?

Michael: h.e.l.l no.

Judd: Who have you gotten to meet who is meaningful to you? Was there anyone who blew your mind?

Michael: Steve Martin. It was at an after party. I got to talk to Steve Martin about comedy and that was just like, what the f.u.c.k. This is the biggest comedian in the world. Like, he was the guy. This was a stadium comic, you know. And I'm saying that to him. And he's like, "Yeah, yeah, but that was nothing. That was a long time ago." He's talking to me about comedy as if he's never done it before. He's like, "What do you do? Do you prepare? How do you prepare? Do you write it down first?" And I'm like, What the f.u.c.k? You're Steve Martin, man.

Judd: How many years had you been doing stand-up at this point?

Michael: Four.

Judd: Wow, your rise has been so fast.

Michael: It has been insane. If you had told me five years ago that I'd get to do all these things in the next thirty years, I would have been like, "Sign me up."

Judd: What do you think accounts for the fact that you haven't lost your mind?

Michael: Probably because I love doing this more than anything. Comedy isn't boring to me. That's where my sanity is. It's all the outside stuff that's exhausting and stressful. The onstage stuff, the crowd, the performing-that never gets old.

Judd: How closely were you following comedy as a kid?

Michael: See, I came from a funny family. You know how some families are super-athletic or whatever? In a lot of families, sports are the most important thing-who's the best football player or who's the best ball player in the family? Well, comedy was the hierarchy in my family. We'd all get together and just snap on each other and make fun of each other. The level of respect that you got in my family came from being funny. I looked up to the funny people and I wanted to hold my own against the older kids and the adults. We always watched Raw and Delirious and Damon Wayans's One Night Stand, Hollywood Shuffle, Sucka, The Jerk, Bill Cosby Himself. My brothers and sisters are a lot older than me, and they had these comedy tapes and I would just watch them all and recite them and perform them, but with the curses taken out. I would perform edited versions of Delirious and everyone would trip out because I was so young and I was doing it.

Judd: Your brothers and sisters were much older than you?

Michael: Much older. My closest brother is eight years older than me and my oldest brother is like fifteen years older than me. I'm the youngest of seven. And when you're around kids that much older than you, you have to be quiet and find something to entertain yourself. A lot of times, I would be put in front of the TV.

Judd: What was the vibe in your family in terms of career? For me, I saw comedy as a way to escape. What was going on in your family?

Michael: We came from a poor family. Everybody had regular jobs. No one did anything that was super-successful in our family. It was more like, "Don't be a b.u.m. If you've got to be a carpet man or whatever, that's fine; we don't care what you do as long as you're not a b.u.m." And I started comedy late. I started when I was twenty-six. As arrogant as this may sound, I knew I wasn't going to be in some cubicle and wasn't going to be a fireman. I knew I would do something creative. I was always the creative type. I worked as an artist for a while. I used to paint portraits and do graphic design and stuff. I would make a little bit of money and then lose a bunch of money, and by the time I was twenty-six, I was just really down on myself. I felt old. Twenty-six is a weird age because that's when all your friends are starting to do well-you know, they're out of college, they've gotten their careers started. And I felt like I was nowhere. I was twenty-six, but I felt like I was forty-six. That's when I decided to try comedy. And once I did, it just clicked. It was like love at first sight.

Judd: Within the year, you were working the clubs in New York, getting real gigs.

Michael: It started to roll quickly. But that's also the benefit of doing it in New York City, where you can get up five times a day if you hustle. You could go to five different open mics a night, and really get a handle on a joke. It was like I was charging a battery-every single day, just relentless. I would get certain jokes so good that they almost couldn't not work.

Judd: Who did you want to be, as a comedian?

Michael: Eddie Murphy made me want to be funny. But the Chris Rock and George Carlin specials, when they were saying controversial things and had points-I was like, Man, I want to have points, too. That was the important thing to me. That was my direction.

Judd: Now you're in a place where you can say those things and a lot of people will listen to it every week.

Michael: Nothing is more exciting than being able to say an opinion into camera and wait for a reaction. That's the ultimate goal. That's the high. You want to write something that people hear and go, "Oh f.u.c.k. How does he come up with that and he's absolutely correct? I can't believe they put that on TV."

Judd: It feels like we're in the middle of a great moment in comedy. It feels like Comedy Central and UCB [Upright Citizens Brigade] and the Internet have just turbocharged everything. And I think all this compet.i.tion has made comedians better.

Michael: There's such a need for comedy now. Everything has to be funny now. A car insurance commercial might be the funniest thing you see all day. Sports announcers are funny. Everybody's funny. There's a comedy writer for every single thing. You get comedy from everywhere now, and it's breeding a society that wants to laugh. There's so much compet.i.tion, but there's also so much room for more voices. It's inspiring a lot of good comedy. A lot of different comedy.

Judd: Do you love working at a place like the Comedy Cellar?

Michael: It's insane. It's like our Apollo.

Judd: Yeah, just to go in there every night and see, like, Dave Attell and then Dave Chappelle and then Chris Rock-there's just an enormous group of talented people there every night. They kill so hard. Are there particularly special moments that come to mind when you think about that place?

Michael: Yeah, my first night there. I show up and the guy at the door is like, "Yo, man, you might not be able to go on tonight because Chappelle is about to get up and we don't know when he's coming off." And I was like, "d.a.m.n." But there was another slot later on and the guy said maybe I could get on that. And I was like, "All right, cool, whatever." So you know, Chappelle's onstage. He's killing for like forty-five minutes. Uncharacteristically gets offstage after like forty or forty-five minutes; everyone a.s.sumed he was going to be up there all night. So the next comedian to get onstage is Chris Rock. He gets onstage, and does like forty minutes. And the next comedian that gets onstage is me. I'm like, f.u.c.k you. But you know what? It was good. And you know why? Because that crowd had seen ninety minutes of the best comedians in the world. I could not ruin their night. There was nothing I could say that was ever going to wipe that smile off those faces, man.

MICHAEL O'DONOGHUE

(1983).

Growing up, I was completely obsessed with Sat.u.r.day Night Live. Scarily obsessed. How deep did the nerd-dom go? I knew who all the writers were. (I also used to record the show with a ca.s.sette recorder, and then transcribe it by hand, and then study the transcription to try to understand how it all worked-but that's a story for another day.) I wanted to know who was responsible for making this show that meant so much to me.

There was one writer I admired above all others-he also performed on the show occasionally-named Michael O'Donoghue. He had what we used to call a sick sense of humor. He was one of those preternaturally gifted, big-brained National Lampoon guys, who went on to become one of the original writers of Sat.u.r.day Night Live-and was in the first sketch ever performed on Sat.u.r.day Night Live-and later wrote the movie Scrooged. When I interviewed him, he had just been fired from the show and was ready to unload. He was f.u.c.king furious, actually. It was the first time I'd heard somebody-an adult, I mean-let loose like this and insult everybody he had just worked with, and the ferocity of his rage, and the righteousness of it, definitely left an impression. Michael O'Donoghue didn't suffer fools. He didn't need to.

Judd Apatow: How would you describe your type of humor?

Michael O'Donoghue: I don't know. Everybody else calls it sick or something, but I find it healthy. I think humor should deal with the tensions that are going on in society. And our society's really different now than The Lucy Show or d.i.c.k Van d.y.k.e, or Mary Tyler Moore. I try to deal with the tensions of 1983-and some of them are really dark. The psycho rings your doorbell, you know. So I reflect that in my humor. Some people say that's funny. Some think it's sick. I think it's healthy.

Judd: What would be an example of that tension?

Michael: I recently flew with Eastern Airlines, which is-as I was flying, I wrote a thing called "TransEastern Airlines." It was like flying in a cattle car with wings. It's a line like, "You'll feel like you've never left the ground because we treat you like dirt." It was entirely based on flying Eastern, where they treated you like garbage. And so I wrote a sketch about it.

Judd: What is Mondo?

Michael: Mondo is so many things. Mondo Video just came out in ca.s.sette form. It just sold five thousand copies, which is very good for something that's not a movie. Just coming out cold, it's doing real well.

Judd: They're going to release it as a movie in a limited- Michael: It was careless, the movie, because it was s.p.a.ced for commercials. It was really strange. And also they have not perfected that tape-to-film process, so it looks real mushy when you watch it.

Judd: What happened? You wrote it, and they okayed it, and then once it was made, they didn't want it?

Michael: That was exactly what happened, odd as it may sound. They invested a lot of money in it-three hundred thousand dollars-which I think is a lot of money. And they didn't even bother to look at it at NBC.

Judd: They didn't even screen it?

Michael: A couple of the censors looked at it, but none of the bra.s.s looked at it. A lot of television critics really liked it. It's very strange to me, the whole history of that thing.

Judd: And how did it do in the theaters when it came out?

Michael: Terrible. It looked bad. It was made for television, not for movies. When you write for late-night television, you're fighting sleep. So the way that you program is you put your best thing first, and your second-best thing second, and your third-because you're just trying to fight sleep. So the junk is at the end. That's not the way to make a movie. The way you make a movie is you build to a climax-it's a cla.s.sic stage thing. Mondo was never meant to be a movie, and it didn't do very well as a movie.

Judd: How do you write a movie like that, because it's very peculiar. I mean, the skits- Michael: Well, it was written very quickly. It was written in a couple of weeks. It was written off of a sort of video theory that it's more fun-if you can't be funny, be weird. It's just as good, maybe even better. That was the comedic theory behind it. Sometimes we would just be strange for no good reason. It keeps me amused.

Judd: What kind of reaction did you expect people to have when they watched it?

Michael: Well, some would laugh, which happens. Some would be annoyed. Ah, more were annoyed than laughed. Whatever Sat.u.r.day Night Live was when it came out, I expected Mondo Video to be, five years later. You know what I mean? It would be a different kind of comedy. I got tired of working in sketch comedy. Live television is very limiting, what you can do in it.

Judd: You've had enough of TV comedy?

Michael: I've had enough. It's frustrating, live TV. Actually, there's a different way to do live television, but- Judd: How would you like to do it?

Michael: Shoot it all with creepers.

Judd: With what?

Michael: Shoot it all with creepers-handheld cameras. Put the cameras on the stage with the actors. Can I use obscenities in this-where is this broadcast, because I'm watching my language as I talk.

Judd: We'll bleep it out.

Michael: Ah, okay. Well, then. I don't think anybody gives a flying f.u.c.k if they see a cameraman on a stage, okay? I don't think anybody cares. It's the liveness of it that they like. Not how technically perfect everything is. So that frustrated me. It frustrated me when I went back to Sat.u.r.day Night Live and they wanted to shoot it the same old way.

Judd: Do you think when they did the "new" Sat.u.r.day Night Live they should have changed it, and tried new things instead of the same things?

Michael: Jesus, yes. All TV knows is winning combinations. Of course they should have been trying something new, something interesting. Something that made us, in the first two or three years, look like fools-like Red Skelton or something, you know what I mean? It's stupid.

Judd: What kind of humor don't you like?

Michael: Almost everything. Aside from the stuff I write, there's not much that appeals to me. I'll watch-I like individual performances of people like Michael Keaton, who was wonderful in Night Shift. I'll watch Sh.e.l.ley Long forever. Or somebody like Carol Kane, who's a brilliant comedic actress. I like Andy Kaufman quite a bit. Richard Pryor's great.

Judd: You don't like the normal comedy-you like a different element in it.

Michael: Well, I think Erik Estrada is the funniest man in America. I will say that. I watch CHiPs. I suffer for CHiPs. It's so stupid, those big yo-yos on motorcycles. Just kills me. You know, like most people, I like The Jetsons. Who doesn't? But there's not too much out there for me.

Judd: Are there any topics you think shouldn't be discussed in comedy? I guess that's silly to ask.

Michael: No, no, I've never found anything that's- Judd: Even like topics like cancer?

Michael: Especially cancer. I've always found cancer an amusing weapon-I've always found, ah, anything that creates tension, tension and release, and cancer creates major tension.

Judd: When did you first start working in comedy?

Michael: That's hard to say. I was a serious literary writer writing for the Evergreen Review, doing poetry and stuff like that. And then I slid off into a comic strip called The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist, which I did in the late sixties, middle sixties, and then somehow I ended up at the National Lampoon. Then I slid into show business. It sort of shocks me to realize that I'm in the same profession as Charo and Sonny Bono. But I am-I slid into that at the National Lampoon radio office. Which I started in about '73, and I quit later and John Belushi took it over.

Judd: Now, what kind of comedy did you do on the radio hour?

Michael: Essentially the sort of the thing that they're doing on Sat.u.r.day Night Live. I had very much the same cast-John and Chevy and Gilda and Bill Murray, odd people like Steve Collins, who's now been in Tales of the Gold Monkey. I had a great group of people, plus a lot of the writers for Sat.u.r.day Night Live. It was very much like Sat.u.r.day Night Live, but it was a little freer because radio's a little freer. But it's not quite as powerful. We did most of the scenes-John had some great characters, which he never created on Sat.u.r.day Night Live- Judd: Such as?

Michael: He did a guy called Craig Baker, the Perfect Master-the eighteen-year-old perfect master-and it was just funny. It's the concept of-instead of this guy living in India, he was just like this a.s.shole kid who lived out in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Which is where John is from. And Indians would come to seek guidance from this dumb kid. It was funny. He just said, "Well, drink a lot of beer and go to Fort Lauderdale, and you need to mellow out, man."