Who's your favorite working comedian?
The one I mention the most is Lewis Black, because he has a very coherent worldview, although it doesn't sound like it when he's doing it, and he has this wonderful controlled anger and frustration. I don't know how theatrical it is. I know him a little bit and he doesn't seem terribly screwed up or anything. But I just love his material. I love his work, the way he attacks things -- and by that I mean attack when you're playing the piano. His approach.
Have you ever seen a comedian on TV mention you as an influence, and you loved their work and you thought, "Yes!"
I've seen it sometimes, and it's just a nice, satisfying thing. It's nice to feel that you've added something to the thing that you do, in my case being a stand-up comic. It's a very ordinary kind of a vulgar art. The low art, a people's art. It's just nice that I've created my path myself. A lot of people have helped me along the way, but I set out the diagram for myself as a youngster, and I was able to follow it pretty faithfully and I hit on success that I never would've dreamed of or allowed myself to imagine.
Was your success a product of following your own impulses?
Yeah, you can't go wrong too much if you follow your impulses -- you know, if you inspect them and look at them and they're pure and on the money and you're not jerking yourself off. I knew from the time that I was 5 or 6 or 7 years old that I was funny, that I was a mimic, that I could get a laugh from people, and then slowly, that developed into using my brain to get a laugh instead of my body, instead of being physical I was being intellectual and I could get a laugh. I had a lot of good reason to say, "This is a sound decision I'm making" or "This is a sound direction I want to take, this makes sense, this is real."
How has your view of yourself changed or evolved as you've gotten older?
Well, I learned that all my little dabbling with movies and wanting to prove I could do that a little bit -- and I had a TV show in 1994 -- I realized it's all so much bullshit. What I do is I write, and I have two places for the writing to go, one is onstage as usual, and one is in books. And the stage stuff, HBO just takes pictures of it and sends it to your house, they make a DVD out of it, and I make a CD, which are just mechanical copies, so those are aspects and outgrowths of the art. But basically I sit down, I write something, I get up and I say it. And there's a simplicity to that that I really like, and all of the other things are so many sidetracks and diversions.
OK, time for a big, important question before you go: What's the meaning of life?
Ha. I don't know. The meaning of life is life itself. It has its own rationale. I think it [began] spontaneously from a number of chemical and electrical processes, coming together -- it seems that that's a fair theory that I've read, the other ones are harder to believe. It's just, here we are. And then, the age of the reptiles was in full swing when an asteroid -- that's another good theory -- an asteroid came along 65 million years ago, and wiped out the reptiles by blocking out the sun and killing the growing season and they ate greens so they couldn't get any meat and they disappeared, and the ferrets grew up into little mammals and the primate line developed and here we are. I don't think we're here on the divine order. I think we're here because a big rock hit the Earth, and I don't know what's next, maybe it'll be the cockroaches. It'd be nice if the insects had a chance.
But I think this is all happenstance, and the fact that we have consciousness and this thing we call a soul, this is also all part of the chemical and electrical process. I don't know that it has any real deeper meaning, but it sure feels different from ordinary physical life; I know that. There's something ineffable here. I don't know what it is or how to describe it or what to think about it.
Do you feel like you've accomplished what you want to accomplish during your time on Earth?
Yes, I have. There's a quote from Pablo Casals -- that probably shows up in research on my stuff, but -- Pablo Casals, he was a past master of the cello. He was the virtuoso in the 20th century. He was in his 90s and he was still practicing three hours a day, and one of his friends said to him, "Senor Casals, you are such a past master, a virtuoso of this instrument, everyone knows it and acknowledges it. Why do you practice three hours a day?" and he said, "Well, I'm beginning to notice some improvement." When I read that I said, "What a wonderful thing to file away as a kind of attitude to have." Yes, I've accomplished all the things I've wanted to and way more, I couldn't have really predicted some of the paths. But I know that there's a restlessness, you know, artists are never finished. There's this vague sense of being incomplete, of not having done it yet. You know they say a poem is never finished; it is abandoned. You just kind of move on. There's this restlessness. "OK, that's finished, what am I going to do next? Oh, here's a good thing, I'll do that."
And I have a couple of ideas for some writing I'd like to do that aren't in the usual mold of what I've done. I don't really want to talk a lot about them, but one of them is a comic novel, and one is a reminiscence, as opposed to an autobiography, a series of reminiscences. If I get the shot to do that, that'd be great. You've always got to have something next. You've always got to have something out there that's worth going for.
About the writer
Heather Havrilesky is Salon's TV critic. She also maintains the rabbit blog. You can find more of her columns in the I Like To Watch directory.
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