Sick In The Head: Conversations About Life And Comedy Part 43

Steve: My dad was a Realtor, and my mom stayed home. She was fascinated with show business.

Judd: So you had one parent who was fascinated by show business, and the other who- Steve: Oh, my dad wanted to be in show business, too.

Judd: What did he want to do?

Steve: He wanted to be an actor, but he gave it up for the family. He had to. He couldn't earn money.

Judd: Did he actually attempt it?

Steve: Yeah. I have a photo somewhere of him in a play. He was very young. I also have a photo of him-a publicity photo-that I'm in with him. I was like four or five. I didn't understand it as a kid. In the photo, the police are taking him away and I am the forlorn child.

Judd: My dad quietly wished that he had pursued a career in comedy, but he never said that to me. He only told me decades later. But there were always a lot of comedy alb.u.ms around the house. I would put on one of your alb.u.ms when we were driving somewhere-like, we would drive to South Carolina on vacation-and he didn't mind if I kept playing it for five hours straight. He would laugh his a.s.s off. But he never told me he was interested in it. Did your dad resent your success at all?

Steve: I think there was an element of that. There was almost a condemnation of the type of material, the type of act it was, yeah.

Judd: Because it was the sixties and everything was changing?

Steve: Yeah, everything was changing out from under him.

Judd: Did he like any of the comedians that you were making fun of?

Steve: I don't think he perceived what I did as parody. I think he just-you know, he was critical. The first time I did Sat.u.r.day Night Live, he thought that was a bad move, you know.

Judd: That's terrible show business advice. My dad, when my parents got divorced-and I'm just saying this because I think it's so funny how men acted, pre-therapy and prethe days of people talking about their feelings. When my parents got divorced, I lived with my dad. My mom moved out. And one day, he left out a book on the coffee table called Growing Up Divorced. He just left it there. He never asked me to read it. He never checked to see if I did read it. He just hoped I would find it. That was his child-rearing approach.

Steve: I had the same. My dad said to me once-and this was after I'd grown up: "I didn't teach you about s.e.x because you learn about that on the school yard."

Judd: Oh, that's funny. But what I found fascinating in Born Standing Up is when you wrote that you made a conscious choice at some point to spend time with your parents, and then you did it every week for fifteen years.

Steve: Yeah.

Judd: I was struck by that kind of commitment to healing or connecting. It's difficult to do that.

Steve: Well, part of it is selfish. I didn't want my parents to die and then have all this guilt, you know.

Judd: Their guilt or your guilt?

Steve: My guilt. You know, they raised me. And now I'm raising them. That's what it is when they get older. You can't just strand somebody.

Judd: When you were starting out in the early seventies, did you feel like you were a part of the comedy scene?

Steve: There wasn't really a comedy scene.

Judd: What about when you were doing Sat.u.r.day Night Live? Did you feel like you were part of it then, or did you still feel like you were visiting?

Steve: I was always on the road, so I didn't have that opportunity to feel like a part of SNL, but I really liked the people. I liked Danny Aykroyd. I had a few moments with Belushi, who was very sweet. He had just done Neighbors and was excited about acting. He was calm and well-spoken, very intelligent about what he wanted to do-and then he was dead a few months later, you know. I had this moment with him. I remember one night, this was after an SNL show, and we were in this caravan of cars. At one point he got out-this was on Seventy-second Street-and just started directing traffic. It was one of those crazy moments. And I just had the feeling he didn't really want to direct traffic, but he felt that he had to for his persona. That he was doing something to fulfill others' expectations of him rather than it was coming from his heart. I felt he was a little caught in a vise. And then when I saw him many years later in California, he was expressing this other side of himself. He seemed sober. I felt he had overcome that need to be the party guy.

Judd: And then the other side won.

Steve: You can do that for a while, and then- Judd: It seems like everyone has a kind of transitional moment in life. Adam Sandler and I tried to put it in Funny People, actually. There was this line we cut, where he said something like, "I'm not a young guy anymore. I've got to switch to my Walter Matthau period." But for you, it feels like you've made an effortless transition across eras, from stand-up to- Steve: Did you ever do stand-up?

Judd: I did it from the time I was seventeen until I was twenty-three or twenty-four.

Steve: That's a long time.

Judd: But then I stopped because I was getting a lot of writing offers and not a lot of performing offers. I just thought, Oh, the universe is telling me not to perform live. But lately, I've been going out and performing again. Last summer, I went out and started performing a few times a week. And I just felt like, this is why I got into the business in the first place, for the fun part. I felt like I had lost sight of the fun part of working in comedy because, as a director, I spend all my time in small rooms with sweaty editors and everything's so stressful. The whole time you're thinking, Oh G.o.d, I hope it works. I don't get that much fun out of it. I just feel like I escape humiliation.

Steve: That's the way I feel, too. I found it really hard to make a funny movie. Plus, in movies, the strikeout ratio is so against you.

Judd: But your ratio, when you write, is like one hundred percent. You haven't written that many movies in the last ten years or so, but do you like the writing part of it?

Steve: It's excruciating.

Judd: Did you stop because it was exhausting, or because you had a bad experience?

Steve: It's just so frightening. The pain of it. And that first screening is so awful.

Judd: We just had a great screening of a movie, and the numbers were fantastic. And then someone at the studio called and sounded disappointed. That haunts you.

Steve: Yeah.

Judd: It's like, Oh my G.o.d, am I wrong?

Steve: It's like what Brian Grazer said to me once. He was giving me advice as an actor or as a deal maker or whatever. And he said, "Always be just a little bit disappointed."

Judd: Albert Brooks told me the reason he doesn't make more movies is not about the difficulty of writing the movie or making the movie, it's about the release. He said, It's so painful. The press, the response- Steve: It's hard.

Judd: But isn't that also why it's so fun, that uncertainty and pain? Is that what you feel when you're out making music now, touring with your band?

Steve: It has been a joy to get those chops back. Get a new joke. Get a new thing, you know.

Judd: How many years ago did you start performing live?

Steve: Five years ago.

Judd: Was that terrifying?

Steve: It was. But doing those shows made me sharper on the talk shows, gave me more material. And it made me sharper in my stand-up career because the last ten years have been nothing but award shows-giving them and receiving them.

Judd: But that's a lot of appearances. And don't you find that there's a moment when you go, How much can we all honor each other?

Steve: Absolutely.

Judd: On the other hand, Martin Short's speech about you at the Oscars for lifetime achievement was incredible.

Steve: He was great.

Judd: Was that as special a night as it seemed?

Steve: It was a big deal for me, yeah. First, I never thought I would get an Oscar. Although, you know, Nora Ephron said once, I don't care who you are, when you sit down to type the first page of your screenplay, in your head you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech. And when you're an actor and you're giving your performance you're also thinking, You know, I think I can win an Oscar. I'm going to win an Oscar for this. And comedy gets the short end of the stick at the Oscars because n.o.body understands it. So I was honored to be acknowledged for a body of work, I really was.

Judd: All those movies exist and they're on all the time.

Steve: Yeah. And, you know, I saved all the scripts. That's the only thing I saved. I never got them autographed or anything but I had them bound in leather. Sometimes I look at them, look at the t.i.tles, and think, It's all s.h.i.t.

Judd: All of them?

Steve: All of them. But then sometimes I think, Well, that was pretty good, and that was pretty good, and that was good, and so I can get like eight out of forty that are pretty good. All it takes is eight to make a good career. Because no one has twenty.

Judd: It's like baseball.

Steve: It's hard to hit a lot of good movies. Very hard. I didn't know that at the beginning. I thought every movie I did was going to be good. To me, there's like three levels of knowing if a movie is good. One is when it comes out. Is it a hit? Then after five years. Where is it? Is it gone? Then again after tenfifteen years if it's still around. Are people still watching it? Does it have an afterlife? Like, Three Amigos! was a flop.

Judd: But then it becomes the most beloved- Steve: Well, I don't know if it's beloved. They tell me it is, but I don't know.

Judd: When I was working for The Larry Sanders Show, Warren Beatty was on an episode and I had lunch with him. And he told me, "You don't know for ten years if a movie is truly good, so don't even think about it. At some point, you gradually realize, Oh, people are still amused by this."

Steve: Absolutely true. I find that the joke you put in that really shouldn't have been in the movie because it was a personal favorite or something is the joke that stands out ten years later.

Judd: Let's talk about The Jerk. It made a hundred and eighty million dollars in 1980. That's like the equivalent of making six hundred million today dollars or something. Did it feel that big when it came out?

Steve: I didn't have any way of comparing. It was my first movie. Everything I'd done had been a hit, so I just a.s.sumed that it'd be a hit, too. You know.

Judd: It's one of those movies that completely holds up.

Steve: It's held up for a long time, yeah.

Judd: Would it be painful to sit and watch it now?

Steve: Yeah. It would.

Judd: What is the high point of your career, then? What film or moment do you instantly go to in your mind?

Steve: You mean, in terms of movies that I've done? I can think of scenes that feel really funny to me, but I don't resee a lot of my movies. I actually avoid it. Unless it's by accident. In terms of movies, they are usually the ones done by somebody else-Planes, Trains and Automobiles; Father of the Bride; Parenthood.

Judd: You should watch Planes, Trains and Automobiles again.

Steve: I know that film pretty well. John Hughes was a special kind of genius.

Judd: It is a masterwork, and I refer to it when I'm working with people because I think that movie has a lot to teach people who are trying to do comedy. That scene where you and John Candy have a fight in the hotel room is as perfect as, you know, Albert Brooks and Holly Hunter's fight in Broadcast News.

Steve: Why do you think that was? Because it turns around or because I realize that I hurt him?

Judd: You go off on him so hard because you're so frustrated and you've lost your sense of his humanity and then he stands up for himself and just says, "Well, I like me." It goes from riotously funny to almost mean-spirited to truly sad. It can make you cry in an eighth of a second. It's just your chemistry with him. How vulnerable he instantly becomes, and how you react to that, how it stops you in your tracks. Like, Oh my G.o.d, what have I done? How am I behaving? I don't know if I've seen another movie with a sequence that works like that. Two actors in total sync.

Steve: We really got along, John and I. There's a scene in that movie that makes me laugh-we're in a car going the wrong way, and then we pull over. John and I are just sitting on a suitcase talking, but we're also scared, and we look at the car and it spontaneously bursts into flames. Poof. John Hughes was the master of those comic timing moments. That guy really knew something.

Judd: Did you become close with him?

Steve: It was funny. I did for a while, but then he just sort of stopped. He was a strange guy.

Judd: There comes a moment when your kids start asking to see your movies. For a while, my daughter would give me a hard time because she wasn't allowed to see my movies because they're all R-rated. It's hard to delay kids to fifteen, sixteen years old, especially when they have the movie on every gadget in the house. But I finally opened up the door. It was this big deal. I was like, "Okay, you can watch them now"-and then she had no interest in watching them. So now, anytime she watches a movie that's not one of mine it's an insult to me. "Why are you watching Schindler's List? You haven't seen Funny People! When are you going to watch it?" She's like, "I don't know, Dad."

Steve: I loved Funny People, by the way.

Judd: Thank you. It was fun writing about comedians. Adam Sandler and I thought a lot about Rodney Dangerfield when we were making that movie. Rodney was someone who just seemed unhappy with the ride.

Steve: I met him once in Vegas, in the seventies. And immediately, when we sat down, it was like, "So-and-so stole that joke from me." I remember thinking, Well, that was fast. I liked him, though. He was great. You know who used to love Rodney? David Brenner.

Judd: Brenner is so funny. I used to watch him on The Mike Douglas Show all the time.

Steve: He actually helped my career quite a bit.

Judd: How so?

Steve: It was '73 or '74, and I went to see him somewhere in Washington, D.C. He was really hot at the time, hosting The Tonight Show, with a beautiful girlfriend. I remember after the show, they came out and they were both wearing full-length mink coats. Anyway, I wrote to him. I was living in Santa Fe at the time. I said, "I can't make any money. I can get paid maybe three hundred dollars for a gig, but it costs me two hundred dollars to get there." And he writes back and says, "Here's what I do. I tell the club owner, 'I'll take the door, and you can have the bar, and I'll have a guy stand at the door with a clicker.'" I couldn't, you know, with my WASPy thing, I couldn't ever say that, but I did ask the club owner to give me the door. That's when I decided I would only be a headliner-and it changed my career. The opening act doesn't get any traction and a headliner does.

Judd: How did you arrive at the ideas in your act, early on? I mean, you were taking apart what it means to be a comedian. It was not observational comedy. The act itself was fascinating.

Steve: I was lucky to have come up in that era because today, every area is covered and there's so many good people. If I was starting now, I'd be lost.

Judd: But no one's doing the type of comedy you were doing. There are really smart comedians, but there's not a lot of conceptual comedy out there.

Steve: I think it's a dead end, you know.

Judd: Because it runs out of gas?

Steve: Yeah.

Judd: You can't keep doing it?

Steve: I mean, I'm still around, but I couldn't have kept doing that act, I don't think.

Judd: You've developed a different comic persona now, which feels distantly related to that. When you host the Oscars, I can sense that you've redefined your persona.

Steve: Yeah, I have. I didn't want to do the same old thing and I didn't want to look like I was doing the same old thing. That extreme physical thing has totally gone out of it. And I love playing the egotistical a.s.shole.

Judd: I'm always fascinated by people's comic journey-when they get bored and say, That's enough. There are people like you, who seem to find new things to keep them interested, and there are people who say, I'm just going to hang out at the house. It's a real challenge because success never satisfies whatever you thought it was going to do for you. You think, Oh, I thought success would heal me and it doesn't. So you have to look for new reasons to keep making things.

Steve: I read a book in college called Psychoa.n.a.lysis and the Arts. And it compared Pica.s.so and Chagall. Pica.s.so was a guy who just kept changing his whole life and Chagall essentially painted the same things, over and over. And it talked about there being two types of creative people and I think that applies.

Judd: When you got bored of doing stand-up, was there a part of you that thought, Okay, this next thing will bring me happiness?

Steve: No. I was just beaten down.

Judd: And you feel the joy again, now that you're out touring and making music?

Steve: I really enjoy doing the shows, but the wear and tear-I have a daughter at home. It gets a little painful.