Joe Rogan Experience #692 - Jay Leno

Good morning everybody. Jay Leno, thank you very much for doing this man. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Your place is the most impressive thing that I've ever seen someone own. Your garage. I shouldn't say garage because everybody thinks it's a garage. Well, it's a garage. You have 12 garages. 12 giant warehouse buildings filled with the most amazing cars I've ever seen in my entire life. Well, there are a couple of amazing. A lot of them are just old cars that I like that are kind of fun. I mean, I have a good story. If cars got a good story, I'd buy it. I like how you're trying to downplay it, but I'm just telling you. All right. Well, I appreciate it. As a fellow car nut, not nearly of your proportion, but I was blown away. That place is insane. Well, yeah, your video is up right now. People love it. It's almost a 200,000 hit. Well, thank you very much for having me on. I really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun. It was really cool. It was cool to be a passenger in my car and have you drive it around today. Have somebody else beat the crap out of your car. What's more fun than that? How did you get started with such an insane collection? What did you start out with? I used to work at car dealerships when I was a kid. I worked at a Ford dealership. I was in charge of odometer recalibrations. That was my area. Really? Well, you know, back in the old days, a guy would bring a car in and then the boss would say, I take the used car back and just turn back to the speedometer. Okay. I remember one guy came in with like a 64 Chevy and it had like 92,000 miles. So he's making his deal for his new Ford, and went back there with the drills, spinning it back. You know, he spun it with a drill. Yeah. So the guy comes out, he goes, no, no, give me my car back. Good. Now, well, now his car is going to have 50,000 miles on it. And he drove away and he went around the block and he came back with a big smile on his face because he knew he had the dealership because he said, and they gave him what he wanted because we had already turned the clock back. So you could have caught him and busted him. Like, no, no, he's not like a federal crime. No, no. Now it is not caught him. I mean, he could have caught you. Yeah. But back in the day, that's used car dealers. It was horrible. It was terrible. I was like, I was a kid. I was like, really? This is what they do. Okay. What is the worst thing you ever saw them do? Worst thing. Well, I, well, you know, you used to have stuff, you want the undercoating? Okay. That's $120 undercoating. And they put the car in the rack and he takes some black paint. Just spray underneath, you know, with like cheap black rust-oleum paint and then tell people it's undercoating. Oh, yeah. The car business really been cleaned up. Like the scene from Fargo. Remember what the undercoat and they charged him with it? Yeah. That's my favorite. See where he's buying the car. To the old couple and they're just yelling at him. Hilarious. So you started off just working on cars, working in dealerships, and then somewhere along the line, you start collecting them? Well, I realize I'm never going to have any nice cars working at a car dealership. So you became a comedian? Yeah. So I became a comedian. So I thought that seems like a good way to make money at the time. And it was. So yeah. You're so in your element when you're around cars and when you do that show. It's so different. And, you know, and I said this with all due respect, you were a great host of The Tonight Show. You're a great comic. You know, talking to like dopey celebrities. Yeah. I mean, there are some really interesting ones, but then they're just like, yeah, yeah. But then they're like just really like reality stars and people like that. You probably never saw that coming either. When you first started hosting The Tonight Show, there weren't reality stars. They didn't exist. Yeah, that's true. But, you know, I really enjoy it because I like people. I like talking to people. But a lot of times you don't really talk to the person. You talk to the publicist. I remember one time we had this ice skater on. Oh, she's famous. She was in the Olympics. And then like 10 years later, she was in Playboy magazine. Like she hadn't done anything for 10 years. And she's in Playboy. So we got a call from Playboy. Would you put so and so in, you know? Okay. Yeah. She was America's sweetheart. Now she's naked. Okay. That could be an interesting second guess. Okay. Fine. So she comes in and her manager takes her. Mr. Lonn, can I speak to you? We are not mentioning the Playboy article. I go, really? Why don't you take your client and go home? Okay. I can get a comic here in four minutes. This is why your client is here. You called us because you're naked in Playboy. Okay. Hilarious. We are not mentioning what you're here for. Right. Exactly. Wow. Exactly. I mean, that would happen all the time. Just publicists would get mad because you, yeah. Well, the manipulation of the image, it's really not that possible anymore because the internet kind of all comes out, you know? It doesn't. You know, in the old days, when you watch old shows with Johnny, you see stars come out and they would just make these horrible fashion mistakes or whatever, because they dress themselves or they, now everybody has handlers. You don't do this. You don't do that. Don't talk about the, oh, no, don't talk about that. You know, so it gets a little, it's not quite as loose as it used to be. So you think that somehow, because of handlers and publicists and things along those lines. Yeah. Everybody is handled by somebody now. Don't do this. No, don't give her actual opinion. It's just say, we love everyone, you know, whatever it might be. Did you ever think about going back to do a talk show on another network? No. It never even occurred to me. You know, you can't make Lightning Strike twice. When we did the Tonight Show, we had a good crew. I had a lot of stuff left over from Johnny in terms of editing facilities, all this kind of stuff. And when you try and recreate that again, it costs you twice as much with half the budget. I mean, Arsenio Hall is a good buddy of mine. And when Arsenio went to do his show again, his hands were tied. They gave him no budget. You know, I mean, God bless him. He made it work as best he could. But like, for example, when a guest would come out from a TV show, the band couldn't even play the theme song to the TV show because they didn't have money for music rights. So you just had to play like porn music. You know, I mean, just little things like that you don't even think about. You know, those are, that's where the cost comes, getting the music rights, getting this, getting that. So no, I never thought about going to do it again. I did it for 22 years. You know, it was number one when I got it was number one when I left. That was perfect for me. How many you know this year in the fight came, how many fighters their champ, their champ, their champ, they come out of retirement, they get their ass kicked. You know, you can't make it strike twice. Well, with boxing, it ends really bad with, you know, fighting. A lot of times it ends really bad for a lot of the great ones. It's the saddest thing in the world. Boxing always ends bad. Did you ever see Requiem for a Heavyweight? Yeah, we talked about it in the video. My all-time favorite movie, Anthony Quinn, just the greatest actor. And he goes in, if you haven't seen this movie, you got to get it because it's got Cassius Clay in it. Now Muhammad Ali, Cassius Clay, and he plays Mountain Rivera and he was ranked fifth heavyweight in the world, you know, back in the 50s and movie takes place in the early 60s. And he's still fighting and he goes for a job that unemployment, like it's a dishwasher. And it's this heartbreaking week. How was number five? How was number five in the world? And the woman looks at him like, wow, what? Oh, it's just a gut wrenching scene. And you realize it must be awful to be in a profession where there's only one number one. Like some people think you're funny, some people think I'm funny, some people think you suck, some people think I suck. It's all subjective. There's not one comedian and everybody else is ranked below. It's whatever you like, you know. But to be in a game like fighting where it's so... What a wonderful ringtone. There we go. Oh, hell, I'll call you back later. I'm doing a podcast. Sorry. Oh, sorry about that. I love to eat live TV. It must be tough to be in a field with... That's it. You're the only guy. Yeah. And the whole purpose of it is to dish out destruction. Someone's going to dish it out to you. And along the way, you're taking some. And before you know it, your body just doesn't function the same way anymore. My dad was a prize fighter. That's what he did. How did he retire? Well, I mean, he eventually sold and moved into an insurance company. My dad grew up in New York during the Depression. And I never knew how far my dad got in school. He'd never actually tell us. But I know he quit and he became a prize fighter for a while. And then he became a salesman because he's pretty good with kids. So we would always watch the fights together. That was something my dad and I always did. Wow. Did he ever try to get you to do it? Well, yeah, we played around a little bit with it, but it was just not my, I don't have that, I don't have that killer instinct. I don't want to hit the guy in the face. And then I get in the face. You know, it just, it was not me. It was not me. I had a couple of fights when I was a teenager and it was like, oh man, you know, there's nothing like getting your ass kicked to put things in perspective. You know, most people have never had the crap beat out of them. And when you've had that happen to you a couple of times, you begin to appreciate the art of negotiation. You know, you know what I mean? I, a number of people I meet in this town, they go, let me tell you something. If I ever see that guy, I'm going to kick it. No, you're not. You're not going to kick his ass because look at you and look at him. Okay. He's a street guy. You went to Lottie Dock College. He just knows stuff you don't know. It's not going to happen. But they have this, they've never had the crap kicked at them. So they just have this attitude that just makes me laugh. Yeah. I think it's healthy for every man to get punched in the face at least once in his life, just to get humiliated a little bit. I think puts it in perspective. Yeah. You need to get knocked out. I got knocked out a couple of times and I would see the cartoons where they see stars and I go, well, that's kind of silly. No, you actually see stars. I saw twinkling. I saw twinkling things. It's just like the cartoon. I remember going down and I was going, oh man, this is just like the cartoon when I hit the floor. Yeah. There's a lot of people, especially in Hollywood that think that fighting is like a movie. Like you could just pistol whip somebody. Yeah. That always drove me crazy. We just whack a guy over the head and they just, they go out and they wake up. Oh, you got a little whop on their head. But other than that, fine. Well, the funny thing about movies is whether you're the good guy, the bad guy, the punch is always thrown from the perspective of the person throwing the punch. I've never seen a movie where the punch is coming at you. You know what I mean? Right. So it's always over the shoulder. So as the viewer, you're always throwing the punch. That always makes, I want to see a movie where the punch is coming and hitting you in the face while you're sitting there in the theater. You don't really get that, but yeah. Where you can see the sparks and what happens when the punches hit your face and get the light show. That's my favorite thing about these superhero movies. You see the superhero, he punches a car and the car folds up like an accordion. And then he punches the other superhero and the guy goes, oh man. Now why didn't his face get crushed like the car just did? I don't quite understand. Because it's a movie, Jay Leno. It's not real life. Exactly. Just a little escape. Sort of like the Tonight Show. You left on top. That is rare that someone leaves number one. Usually they want to keep you around. Everybody left the Tonight Show with number one. Steve Allen left one with number one. Jack Parr left when I was number one. Johnny Leffin was number one. I left when I was number one. Do you miss it at all? No. No. You had your time, you enjoyed it. I love doing it. There's a point in your life where at my age I shouldn't have to know all of Jay Z's music. Okay. You know what I mean? I'm sorry. I can't pretend to know common and everybody's music. I just don't. Notice how you brought up a lot of black guys there. I'm saying it. But I grew up in the era of Paul Simon and Marvin Gaye and all those. That's more my era. You know, when you're 42 and you're talking to the 25-year-old supermodel, oh, it's sexy. When you're 64, you're like the creepy old guy. Right, right. No, thank you. I'm sorry. I mean, it's true. So, what are you going to say to you? Okay. I'm like 40 years older than you are. What am I going to say to you? You know, so you just have to know when it's time to step aside. But your demeanor, what your excitement level, how natural it is when you're doing your car show, is very different. And I think people would, I think there's two Jay Lenos. There's the Jay Leno that hosted Tonight Show, which is a great entertainer. You're a great interviewer. But then there's you in your element when you're hosting Jay's garage. I'll tell you something. I enjoy being around show business as opposed to being immersed in it. Like to me, Charlie Sheen's a friend of mine. I enjoy every time another hooker pushes one of Charlie's Mercedes off Mulholland Drive, I get a kick out of it like everybody else. I don't want to be Charlie. I don't want to live that life by enjoying hearing about it and observing Charlie when he comes to the show. Charlie, how you doing, man? Whatever it might be. So, the Tonight Show is great that way. I didn't have to actually be there. I could be a part of it without being a part of it. Because it's not really, I'm not really a party guy. I'm not a drug guy. I'm not an alcohol guy. It's just not what I do. I enjoy observing it. Whereas with cars, it's what I really do. Cars, motorcycles, I really enjoy. So I am immersed in that. Whereas with show business, I enjoy being around it. That's probably the difference. But you still do stand up. So you're still... Oh yeah, I'm on the road all the time. I love doing stand up. That's the greatest. But so you're still in show business. Oh yeah, I'm still in show business. Yeah. But you're not in that show business. See, it's like comics will think of stand up as being very different than all the other aspects of show business. Well, it is different than all the other aspects of show business. Because it's the only one where you don't need any other aspects of show business. I mean, I got started when I was in Boston, I would go into bars with a $50 bill. And I would say, I'm a comedian. We don't hire comedians. I go, look, it's 50 bucks. Let me go on the stage and tell some jokes. If people leave, you keep my 50. If I do okay, I get some laughs. Give me my money back. All right, it cost me about $300. So the long run. But for the most part, it was either, yeah, kid, you're funny, here's your money back, but we don't really do it. Or, oh, that was okay. Yeah, come back Wednesday. Come back Wednesday, we got a... Back then they had Hoot Nanny Nights. It was folk singers. Stop your war machine. You know, all those kinds of songs. And they put a comic on in between. And that's the one thing about comedy. You can take it and do it anywhere. I mean, we both know actors that are great, that are funny. But if their TV show gets canceled, or the movie's no good, or the director, yeah, it's like, they're out of work. They can't go down to a bar and pass the hat and tell jokes, or even negotiate a salary. It's, you know, so comedy is different because it's self-sustaining. Hoot Nanny Night. Yeah, that's what we used to call them, boss. Really? Hoot Nanny Night. Yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah. So you really did that. You would go, is that your idea to put a $50 bill on the bar? Yeah, because that's... You know, I was lucky when I started, I'd never met another comic. I didn't know anything about show business. You know, I grew up in New England. You know, you're from Boston. You're from Boston, rather. And I remember the neighbor lady saying to me, you know, you can't be a comedian unless your father was a comedian. That's the way it is out there. Unless your father was a comedian, you can't be one. They won't let you do it. You know, and I thought, well, it doesn't make any sense. So I used to just go around bars and places like that in Boston, and I thought I was doing pretty good. You know, I really wasn't, but to me, I thought it was pretty good. I got my start at a place called Lenny's on the Turnpike up in Route 1 near Saugus. I know where that is. Yeah, I used to play Lenny's all the time. And Lenny made me kind of the house comic, and I got to work with Miles Davis, Mo Zallison, all the great jazz artists. Wow. Yeah, it's pretty cool. That's where giggles is in Saugus. There's a comic club out there in a pizza place, Princess Pizza. Yeah, I mean, that's... Mike Clark's joint. Makes me laugh. Lenny Clark's brother. Oh, is that Lenny's... I love Lenny Clark. I love him too. The funniest guy, he really... And a true Boston comedian, you know. I never could send myself a Boston comedian, because I was born in New York, and I moved to Boston when I was like 10. Like, my family moved there in 59, and we're still the new people. The new people, the Lenos, they came here in 59. You know, the other people have been there since 1641. Right, exactly. You know, so they're the relatively new people. Did you... Did they have open mic nights back then? No, there was no such thing as open mic. This is before comedy clubs. Comedy clubs didn't exist. What year did you start? I started in 1969. Wow. And I used to work strip joints. I used to work... You know, you remember the Combat Zone in Boston? Sure, yeah. I used to work all those strip joints. I worked... I remember I teamed up with two strippers, Lily Pagan and Aneeda Mann. That was her name. And they were like 40 years old, and they were like... They weren't prostitutes. They were working class women, big Boston women with short hair that would wear wigs. And like, we would drive out to Fort Devens to do a show with the soldiers. They'd be there with drills and... You know, power tools. And she'd put together this... What do you call that? Clear plastic. They have... Plexiglass? Plexiglass bathtub. And she would take a bath, like a stripper. And they were tough women. And I was like 19, and they were like 40. And one day we're out there doing a show, and she's in the bathtub, you know, doing those kind of stuff. And I'm on stage just telling jokes and so and so. And some guy just starts heckling me. And I remember she gets out of the bathtub, walks over, grabs a guy by the neck, punches him in the face, breaks the guy's nose. The guy goes down. The crowd is cheering. She goes, you need to get along. And then she gets back in the tub and starts doing all the I mean, it was hilarious. It was hilarious. Wow. It was a great time. And they were really nice women. They weren't hookers. You know, these are women that back then, being a typist or secretary, that's really what was available to you as a woman, if you were not a college educated woman, you know, or a waitress or something like that. So that's what they did. They had the car with their stripper and signet on the side. I need a man. And, you know, kind of a dolled up picture of themselves painted on the fender. And we just drive around and I would emcee and introduce the girls and they would come out and do their act, you know, but they were very protective of me because I was like a kid. Wow. Yeah, it was it was really fun. That's gotta be a cool memory. Oh, yeah. Starting out like that. It's so much more difficult than the standard. Signed up at the open mic night. I started in 88. It was just they had to have stitches would have an open mic night. You go there, you sign up and you know, you'd get on three or four weeks. But see, the comedy boom is fairly new. Fairly new. I mean, when I started, I used to go to the I went to the improv in New York in 69. And the improv then, Bud Blower say, okay, four singers, then you. Because it was all Broadway singers. That's all the way. There really wasn't a lot of people who wanted to be comedians because most comedians in the mid to late 60s were middle aged Jewish guys like Rodney, Alan King. The first new young comics were like Robert Klein, Richie Pryor, George Carlin. Don't forget Richie Pryor. Yeah, I used to call him Richie. I know Richie. Yeah. Wow. Richie. I've never heard him say Richie Pryor. You got to remember in New York City up to about 66, 67, you got what they call a cabaret card, which was a license. You had a license to be an entertainer. And if you used a four letter word on stage, a cop could come in, pull your license, tear it up. You didn't work. You could not work. Lenny Bruce really helped break that because Lenny went to trial for, you know, for that. That's what he arrested for. He's just doing his act. You know, he used to do a bit about, if you don't like black women, who would you rather have sex with Lena Horne or Kate Smith? Well, Kate Smith was an enormous woman at the time. And it was a funny joke. And oh, that's racist. Oh, that's whatever. You can't do that. And I remember a cop pulled his license and he went to court. He eventually won and they did away with the whole cabaret license thing. So most comedians were middle aged Jewish guys that talked about the kids today with the long, you know, what I have so long to patch it to a damn title. Tell you that these kids, they look like a jack, they act like a Jill. They smell like a john. These hippies. And that was what that's what guys did. Nobody talked stream of consciousness. Nobody did what Richie and George Carlin. I remember George when George was just a straight standup. And then he became the hippie dippy weatherman. And then he had this radical change to the George Carlin we know now. But he was the judge used to be in a comedy team, actually. Really? With who? With, um, I, it's named just as gay as me, but I forgot. But yeah, I've seen some of his early, early stuff. Yeah. It's fascinating to look at him because he was such a different guy. Yeah. The fascinating one is also Rodney. Because before Rodney had the no respect hook. Because Rodney was Jack Roy for years. Jack Roy. He was that's his real name. Rodney worked. And he couldn't make it. And then he became an aluminum siding salesman. And then he came back at age 44 as Rodney Dangerfield. Wow. He Rodney had a muse by the name of Joe Ansis. Joe Ansis was one of those guys who was not a comedian himself, because he was too shy. But was really funny. He was a guy all the comedians love to hang out with, because he would do table comedy. You know, you'd sit with four or five comics at Cantor's type place or a deli at two in the morning. And he would just riff. And oh, all the comics would just sit there with pens and pencils coming down with one. Because he was so funny. But he couldn't, he couldn't physically bring himself to get on stage. He just couldn't do it. And he he was a guy that helped. I remember Rodney used to do bits. And when you hear one of his earlier, he's got a funny one about being an airline pilot where he says, this is Rodney's joke, not mine, obviously. But he says, Hey, folks, you look at the left side of the plane, you can see the Empire State Building. Look out the right side of the plane in New Jersey there, you can see the remains of Flight 418, which crashed into fiery ball in that field over there. Bob, you were with me on that one, weren't you? You know, I remember that. It always used to make me laugh when he did that. And then suddenly, Rodney became the whole with the one-liner guy. But before that, he was like a traditional comedian. So how much time did he take off in between coming back? It was like 10 years, right? Oh, easy. Yeah, he raised the family. Rodney was a good guy. I don't know if he ever really quit. I mean, he quit hitting it hard. He was selling the aluminum siding and doing all that kind of stuff. What a great story he is, though. Have a regular job. That's why everybody uses aluminum siding as sort of the bad job, because it's the job Rodney had, you know. Yeah, Rodney was a great story. And I mean, truly funny guy. And the fact that he came back at 44 and just became an icon, it's really an amazing story. Well, sometimes you have to grow into your act. You know, when you're 19 or 20, and you're a fresh-faced kid, you don't look like the no-respect guy. You know, Rodney needed to grow into that. You know, look, I tell you, you know what the hang dog look and the tie that's too tight and the cheap shirt with button, it looked like he'd been choked to death. I mean, it was a great, one of the great comedy persona. I used to work at Great Woods in Mansfield. Do you know where that is? Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah. I was a security guard out there and I got to see a lot of acts. I can see Cosby out there and Kinison. And when I was working, I got to see Rodney. And this is when Rodney was in his complete not give a fuck stage, where he wore a bathrobe. Yeah, that's what he would go on stage with, a bathrobe. So Rodney was backstage and, you know, I'm working in the backstage area. And you get to see Rodney, like there's a door was open to his dressing room. Rodney's hanging out back there, walking around pacing slippers on bathrobe, nothing on underneath the bathrobe. And the bathrobe's open. Yeah. Yeah. He can give a fuck. He's got a dick like a horse. Yeah. Right. And he's just allegedly, I didn't see it. Yeah. But it was like, I was like, look at this guy. Like this guy really does it. Like some people will pretend to not give a fuck. This guy really didn't give a fuck. His hair was all crazy. And he would go on stage with the bathrobe. And I couldn't believe it. Yeah. I was 19 at the time. Rodney let me live in his Dangerfields, a nightclub. There was a storage closet in the back. And I lived in there for a couple of weeks. Really? Yeah. There's just a cot in there and you, you know, with piles of sangria, whatever they got, they're just all the liquor. And that's where I stayed. You lived in Dangerfields. Wow. That's where I slept. Just for a couple of weeks. Just wander the streets during the day. But yeah. Wow. I worked that club a lot when I first moved to New York. New York was an interesting, you know, it's funny that when I was just getting started, those were the last days of the old mob clubs. They don't really have mob run joints anymore. But those were really, really scary. I remember I worked the club once and the guy come up stage and I said, oh, you're a funny kid. And he put a hundred dollar bill in my pocket, you know. And I said, oh, thank you. So now, no, I appreciate it. There's no, please, you know, give it to the church or donation or something like that. He goes, no, no, you take it. I said, no, no, no, I can't do that. I really didn't earn it. Thank you. But please give it to maybe a waitress. And then he said to me, you know, you're pretty smart. You don't take money from people like me. That's very smart. Nobody's going to bother you. I said, okay, thank you. And I realized early on, the guys that got in trouble were the guys that wanted to hang with the mob guys and then mob guys, hey, do us a favor. Deliver this package to the hotel. Yeah, sure. Okay. Now they're screwed. Now they're in. Right. I mean, once years ago, my wife, when I went to New York, and I was working the Westchester Premiere Theater, and there was a guy named Jimmy the Weasel, Fratiani, you ever hear that name? Jimmy the Weasel is a great name. Yeah. Anyway, so these two guys, Mr. Linos, Mr. Linos is on the, you know, this is rock-o-d, as well. Okay. And my wife is like, oh, these guys are scary. So we're in the back seat of this Cadillac, you know. So I'm teasing my wife and I just kind of whispered her. I didn't think the guys could hear me. I said, you know, if I go into the city tonight, I think I'm going to need a piece. And this guy goes, oh, Mr. Linos, please. He takes a gun out and he throws it in the bag. He goes, please, take that one. I said, no, I was like, no, no, please. There's no numbers on it. Just, you don't need to do nothing with it. When you're through, just throw it in the trash. You know, you don't use it, you know, you just throw it away. I said, I don't, no, please. I insist. Okay, thank you. Now I got this gun and my wife was just like sweating bullets. She's like, where, what have you got me into? Where are we here? I thought it worked out okay. But it was just, just funny, you know, just odd. Well, they ran Vegas. They ran nightclubs in New York. Oh yeah. How did all that die? What happened? Corporations, corporations are meaner and nastier. To the new mob. Oh, then the, then the mob. Oh, wait, wait, wait, where at least the mob, you got to free drink once in a while. You got to, you lose a grand. Okay. Yeah. Let me meet at the restaurant. Go whatever. No, what's the corporation's command? That was the end of that. That had to be a bizarre time to come up. It was really scary. You know, it's really funny. It's like you always see gangsters on TV, but when you're confronted by true psychopaths, it is unbelievable. You know, I, well, I told the story with Jerry once on his comedian coffee, but I didn't hear it. Okay. I got a call, I got a call one day from Sinatra. He says, AJ, this is the sons of Italy dinner in Italy. Can you do it? When is it? He gives me the date. And I said, Oh, Mr. Sinatra, I'm at the holiday house in Pennsylvania with the sons of the pioneers. That's with the old, I said, I'm opening for them on that day. I'd love to do it for everybody. Can't do it. Oh, okay. Then I said, please, any of. Okay. A couple of hours later, get a call from Sinatra's agent. Hey, we call the holiday house. They said they don't need you. What? They don't need you. All right. Guess I'm going to Chicago. So I go to Chicago and it's just Italian. I'm not going to use any of the real names because the people are still around. So we're doing this thing instead of golf course. And they say to me, listen, there's a priest here. So, okay. So keep your act clean. I said, yeah, okay. Fine. So I got up and I do my little act to find, thank you. Plus, plus, I sit down. So this gangster guy gets up, you know, he goes on to welcome you all to this, you know, this place. And I wasn't going to say, oh, shit. I forgot what I was going to say. And when he said shit, the priest went like this. That guy goes, what? Hey, father, you got your 10 grand in the fucking bag. Shut the fuck up. He just goes crazy in his gun. You shut the fuck up. And the place is just, look, everybody's just, just frozen with fear. This guy is just like crazy. And the priest is like, he's holding his bag with the 10 grand in it, you know, and then he sits down. Okay. So now I'm sitting there and the guy goes, hey, Jake, come here. He goes, let me ask you something. You're no stolen, right? I said, well, I don't know him. Rocky had just come out. This is 1976. I said, I don't know him. I mean, I met him. You know, we asked him to do this dinner, this benefit today. And he said, no, he said, no. And I said, well, I mean, maybe he was busy. And he's screaming at me. I go, you're right. I'm sure I'm fine. He goes, he goes, this is, come on, let's play some golf. I don't really play golf. You play golf. I don't play golf. So now we're in golf cart and we're in this golf cart. We drive out to about the 12th hole and we get to the 12th hole and there are these kind of 50, 60 year old prostitutes, topless with leopard skin, print, mini skirts, handing out drinks. It was like the craziest day of my life. But this guy was like a true psycho criminal. I mean, just one of those guys, like a scene from Good Follows, they just kill you. You know, I always love movies where somebody threatens someone and they go, you're not going to kill me, Bob. Cause I know you're not the kind of guy. No, no, they will kill you. They will kill you. And they just really made me laugh. Is that guy still alive? I, he may still be alive. Really? Nah, this is a while ago. He's probably dead by now. Cause he was an old guy then. Yeah. It seems like a guy like that. It's not going to make it. I'll tell you. I'll tell you his name. No, he made it through with it. He made it. Wow. It's just hilarious. You know, so you don't really have those. I'm sure you have still have those guys, but very, very rarely. They're not Italians anymore. They moved on to other ethnic groups. It's Russian. Yeah. That's how the ethnic groups, I'm not going to say anything. Well, there's always one, one organized crime group that sort of dominates the market. Yeah. Yeah. It's yeah. It's, it's, it's just, it's just really odd. It was a fun time to be a comedian cause you had to weave your way through. For example, you know, Moray Amsterdam, the comic. I heard his name. Yeah. He used to be on the, on the Dick Van Dyke show. Remember the show? Yes. Yeah. Well, he got famous because he was Al Capone's favorite comedian. Al Capone would always come in to see him. Wow. So Al would put him in, Al, like I know him. Al Capone would put him in his clubs and that's how Moray, Moray really got famous because Al Capone loved him and thought he was hilarious. You know, but imagine if you don't make Al Capone laugh. What happened now? Jesus Christ. Yeah. Yeah. That's a lot of pressure. Yeah. Yeah. Hilarious. But see like, we got, we started on this cause of comedy clubs. There weren't comedy clubs. There were just either jazz clubs. See jazz clubs were great for comedians because jazz audiences listen, rock clubs were bad. And during the late sixties, comedy was kind of, it wasn't, it was a Vietnam war. College kids were very serious. You know, everybody do those little plays where the stage is dark and then you'd like to flashlight it under your chin, stop your war machine, click, and then turn it off. And then the guy would run to another part of the stage, click, stop your war machine, click and turn. You know, it was all this conceptual kind of, so comedy was really on the back burner. It really took Pryor and Carlin and Robert Klein and those guys to make it really pop again for young people. What was it before that? I mean, when, when were the first, they say that Mark Twain was probably the first recognized standup comedian because he used to do these monologues and readings of his work. Oh, sure. Sure. And he would do them in front of a live audience. People would laugh. Well, you know, standup is like jazz. It's a uniquely American art form. Like when you go to England, standups over there, maybe come out in a dress and they sing a song and do a skit or they do a little dance. I mean, now they have American style standup, but the idea of, I always liked comics who looked like normal people, but were funny. I was never a fan of the wacky props or the crazy hats like Johnny Carson, Pryor, Cosby, Klein, Carlin. These guys look like regular guys you see in the street. And then when they talked, oh my God, they were really, really funny. Those, that something that really came later because most standup came out of vaudeville. We had to, that's what my mother used to say to me all the time when I got sad. No one wants someone that's funny all the time. Why don't you sing a little song? Then you do a little dance and then you tell a joke. I go, okay, mom, that's great advice. Thanks. I really appreciate that. Well, that's what they used to do, right? Yeah, that's what they used to do. That's so bizarre. It's so crazy that it happened in your lifetime. I mean, you went from doing those original clubs to being around, I mean, you regularly work at the comedy and magic club, which is like one of the biggest clubs in the country. I've been there every Sunday since 78. And when you're not there, I've been there. Yeah, yeah. I like that club because it's the best mainstream audience club. The Hollywood clubs are great, but it winds up being clicky. You're doing 20 minutes on a little shop on Melrose that maybe half a dozen people know about. The audience is hysterical. The rest of the world's going, what? You've got to have a broader appeal. And when you go to the comedy magic club, a lot of that audience is overnighters from the airport, they miss the plane, whatever, they stay in a local hotel. Oh, let's go see what this is. So you get people from all over the country. Yeah, it's a great place anyway. Just Mike Lacy is just such an awesome guy. Yeah, he's a great guy. He's probably the best club one of the really. One of the best of all time. He's such a sweetheart. It's like it trickles down from the top to the bottom, all the people that work there. It's an amazing spot. But you were there for like, you've seen the movie Lenny with Dustin Hoffman, when they show the early days of Lenny's comedy, where he used to work with strippers and all these different acts and tell a few jokes and be like an emcee. Honey Harlow, I think that he married a stripper. You know, it's interesting. Dustin Hoffman is one of the greatest actors, but I never bought that he was a standup. You know, standup is so uniquely different from acting. When people act like a standup, you know, I'm anxious to see Mike Epps now, I heard, is going to play Richie Pryor. It's going to be interesting to see because he's a comic. So he understands how that works. Actors tend to watch themselves when they're on stage. By that, I mean, how do I look? Am I here? Where's comics just performed. They don't really care if their face looks funny or whatever it is. You're a comic. You're just performing, you know. So when actors play comedians, it never quite works for me as well as a comedian playing a comedian. Well, the worst example is the punch line with Tom Hanks and Sally Fields. I didn't see that one, but I heard about it. Don't save yourself. It's one of those movies where you're watching, you go, what the fuck am I looking at? I'm looking at an optical illusion. There's something behind the scenes here. It's not really, it's not, they're not really doing standup, but the people are laughing hard. Yeah, because it's hard to write jokes. There's nothing harder than writing jokes. That's what I hate about, because whenever you watch a movie as a standup, any like a TV show does. So I said to him on Thursday and then the audience goes hilarious. No, no, write the whole joke. Okay. They always do that because it's hard. It's hard writing jokes. Well, not only that, but a real comic is not going to want to write jokes for an actor. Like if you have a good joke, you're writing a good joke. You're like, I don't keep this one for me. Exactly. Fucking shitty one of the Tom Hanks over here. Exactly. So you, you saw the boom though in the eighties, because there was a big boom in the eighties. I came along, like I caught the crest. I was, I was there when, when I started out, people were like, wow, you should have started out in 84. 84, it was amazing. I started in 88 and it was just like, right in Boston in particular, it was a pretty magical time. It was a magical time. It was also you know, to me, you have a lot of people now that rush to the middle and then stay there for 20 years and never quite get, because, you know, I sound like an old guy here, but when I started, you had to work clean. I mean, it's really easy to take a clean joke and make it dirty. It's almost impossible to take a really funny, dirty joke and make it clean. It just, it doesn't work. And when the punch line is some four letter word, what do you do with that? Where do you go with it? You can't take it past a certain point. If you're trying to get on television. Well, if you're trying to get on television, you're trying to get any corporate work, you know, there's two Americas. There really are. There's one over here and one over here. And if you can have a foot in both of them, you can do really well. For example, most corporate dates will pay you 10 weeks worth of comedy club salaries in one night, if you can just work clean. And by working clean, I just mean no four letter words. You can talk politics, you can do whatever you want. But the number of comics that can't get past a certain point because they hit that wall, you know, they rush right up to it. And it's like horsepower. It's like being an athlete. Plenty of guys can play football. How many can get it past that certain, you know, the average athlete is what one in 10,000. And the average superstar is what one in two or 300,000. And if you want to be that superstar, you've got to work you've got to appeal to a more of a mass audience. That's an interesting way of looking at it. A lot of people disagree. And they would say that all they want to do is do the best comedy or the best art that they can come up with. And it's not necessarily something that a corporation is going to want to hire. Well, I'm not saying, but no, I think you're missing my point. What I'm saying is what most people do is they want to play the audience where they get the best laugh. Okay, I just go, I just do colleges. I just do hip little cool places. You know, I, a couple of times, I booked myself into Oral Roberts University once just to see if I could play the gig. Just as a challenge? Just as a challenge. Like signing up for a triathlon. It is. It is. And you know, a perfect example of that was when Richie Pryor was getting ready to do his Live in the Sunset Strip movie, movie of his stand up. I asked them, could I follow Richie every single night? And Richie would go up for 90 minutes, just blow the room out at the comedy store. I mean, people falling down. I mean, it was the greatest stand we've ever seen. And then I would go on. And I realized at that point, instead of having an hour's worth of funny material, I had about 18 minutes because I was following the greatest comic in the world. And my good stuff was okay. My okay stuff was, and my stuff was terrible. But if you just play rooms where everybody laughs at everything you say, you never get any better. You know, I remember Robin Williams once said to me, he said, I'm going to do some stuff tonight. You watch it. And okay. And they played, this was the height of Morgan Mindy. Ladies and gentlemen, Robin Williams. The crowd. And no matter what Robin said, hilarious. And Robin came off and he said, I mean, that new stuff funny. I said, not really. Well, it wasn't. It wasn't because they were reacting to Robin the phenomenon. I mean, obviously Robin could put a twist on it. I'm not putting down Robin's material. I'm just saying. But he knew after listening to it, which part of it really was funny and what wasn't. So the idea of, I've always been one of those people, if you're a comic, you should be able to play any type of audience. If you're a fighter, you should be able to fight anybody. All right. No, I only fight tall, skinny black guys. No, no, no, you know, no. You should be able to play any kind of room. So whatever here comics say, well, I don't do that. You know, people are people, you know, that's pretty much what it is. Yeah. There's definitely like clicks in LA. There's people that only like to do alternative rooms and, you know, which are much more accepting of very bland. And that's fine. Yeah. Hey, I'm not putting it down. There's nothing wrong with that. But when you don't make it, you can't blame it on, well, I always have people go, well, this audience was really stupid. No, they're not. They're not stupid. You just didn't get your point across. You know, a lot of comedians want to impress an audience with how much they know. They'll say the anthropomorphic tendency, you know, why don't you just say, you haven't lost how dogs are like people act like humans. Okay. Now I know what you're talking about. Okay. If you don't know what anthropomorphic means, the joke's not going to work, but you want to impress everybody how smart you are by throwing out anthropomorph. You know, comedians sometimes always have an underlying thing. They want to get some point across. I remember a comedian was on the tightro once and his opening line was, you know, I'm a liberal Democrat. And I said to him, don't open. Why don't you just do the material. We will figure out your politics within a minute and a half of your set. But when you say to yourself, here's what I am, you've already lost half the crowd. I mean, I don't think most people could figure out my politics from the monologue because I tried to humiliate and degrade everybody equally. So one night, oh, Leno, you and your Republican friend. Oh, Leno, you and your Democratic buddies. I hope you're happy with what you said about Mr. Bush. You know, so that was the perfect thing when I got complaints on both sides. Well, what you were doing back then too, by going to these different bars, you kind of had to have a bulletproof act. You kind of had to have an act that would work on virtually any kind of a club. Yeah. That's what you tried to do. I mean, it didn't always work. I'm not saying this always worked, but you kind of had to formulate something. And the real trick was when you get famous somewhere, get the hell out of there. I mean, I knew so many great comics in Boston that were really funny, but their material was all about what happens in Boston. Then they go to Connecticut or New York and didn't work. They don't, it doesn't work. So to me, once I realized, oh, I'm getting kind of a name for me here. I've got to go someplace where nobody knows who I am. And then I would go to the next place and start all over again. That's amazing that you knew that though at the time. But you could feel it. How old were you? 2021, 2021. And you'd already figured that out when you were 2021? You know this. Comics are inherently lazy. They go to where the laughs are. I just got to play that room. I do better there. They know me. They like my stuff there. But why don't you go to the room where you suck? Because if you can get big laughs in the room where you suck, now you have two rooms you can go to. Now you've got three. I mean, I sort of pride myself in being able to play any kind of gig. What's the gig? This, the only one that was really bad was I did Christian Farmers. And I realized, oh my God, things I wouldn't even thought the least bit objectionable would just horrible. I mean, okay. Like what? Do you remember? Oh, yeah. What was I talking to? Just Christian Farmer. Yeah. That was the audience. You know, it was just, I can't remember what the jokes were, but just, you know, any, you couldn't do a joke about masturbation, anything, you know, just things that were normal every day. No, that was horrible. Yeah. That, that one I misread. I noticed in Boston when I started doing road gigs that I had all this great material that I could use in town that was local stuff about like, say, girls from Revere with their crazy hair. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Girls from Revere were known for having these, what we call bulletproof hair. They would have fucking sprayed hair that was like a mile high. It was like this crazy time in the eighties where they had these giant hairdos. Yeah. And I would, it was a great bit in town and Boston, I would do that bit. It would kill. Right. I would go to Connecticut. It would just die a vicious horrible. It was my best bit. You ever worked at Beach Comber in Revere? No, I never, I don't think. The Beach Comber just closed. I worked that place back in the early seventies. And I remember the guys, says to me, hey, when you come in, don't wear your best clothes. What? It just don't wear your best clothes. I go, why? I couldn't figure out. So I, I, I wore my best clothes. All right. So I sit and I'm on stage and I realized the people in the front row, they'd smoke the cigarettes down to the butt and then they flicking at you, you know? So I'm on stage once and one lands on my shoulder, you know? And I don't see it, but I hear, as I'm setting the joke up, I hear people laughing. I go, oh, I'm doing pretty good. And then I look up and I look at my jackets on fire because this guy had flicked a cigarette and it caught fire. And then the guy said to me afterwards, I told you not to wear your good clothes. I said, all right, I'll do that next time. It just made me laugh. Jesus Christ. Oh, it was funny. Joey Cole had told me he was doing pips in Brooklyn once. And there was a guy that was sitting in the front row that kept telling him, fuck you. Fuck. I fucking hate you. You're not funny. And then he would show him his gun, lift up his shirt and show him his gun. And then, you know, you know, Joey Cole, you know, Joey, he's a sweetheart. So he's like, hey, how are you? You know, he's like real, like high energy, real happy guy. And this guy's just showing him his gun and saying, fuck you. Oh yeah. There's just things that you don't. I had so many night. I had so many nightmare gigs. One of my worst was opening for Tom Jones for two weeks every night in Vegas. Two weeks. So I get there the only night and I walk out and there are 300 women or maybe 350 women in the Tom Jones fan club. And they bought tickets to every show and they had assigned seats. So I walk out the first night and I see these 300 women in the first 10 or 15 rows. There's a dinner show then. So it wasn't theater deceiving like now. Okay. I do my act and I do okay. Terrible. Real good. Okay. I go out the second night and the same women are in the same seats. And I'm doing the same act. I get nothing. Okay. By show nine, it's like, hey, Mary. Hey, Sue, how you doing? Hi, girls. It's the same 300 women every single night. And in their mind, you see, me being on stage is less time than Tom's doing. Right. Now they don't get the concept there's an opening act. But the most humiliating part was I come off stage. Oh my gosh, this is awful. And I walk out through the front and this girl goes, hey, great show. I said, oh, thank you. And she looks at me like, I said, thank you. Thank you very much. I said, how are you? Good. I see. Want to get a bite? Sure. Okay. I'm talking to this girl for a few minutes and she's, I see she's getting impatient. You know, she goes, look, we've gone upstairs or what and not what I realized she was a hooker working the room. But when she said good show, I thought she'd seen the show. She just said good show to anybody that walked out. I said, oh, you didn't see the show? No. Who you? I said, Oh, I'm the guy. Oh, you know, like, well, look, I don't want to buy a hooker. I just, oh, well you're wasting my time and she stomps out and the whole, then the whole car shop. Look, a little guy couldn't, how bad is that guy? The hooker walked out on him. So it's horrible. What year was this? Oh, 76. I would love to go back in time to those days. God, I would love to go back just to see what it was like. Well, it wasn't really any different than now. I mean, you're on stage with a microphone. It really wasn't a whole lot different. I mean, But the culture must have been so different. The culture was different. You know, Freddie Prince was a good friend of mine. Do you remember Freddie? Yes. Freddie used to stay with me when he worked the Playboy Club. Chico and the Man. Chico and the Man played the Playboy Club in Boston. And there the Playboy Club, you had to do six shows a night. You had the pet house in the playroom. And I remember I had to, there was a singer and I had, I would open and then she would take her band to come up and say that I would pass her in the hallway and she'd be carrying these drum sets because the musicians, they don't have to move around drums. Singer has to move the drums. And big sweat stains under her arms and she'd be in tears by the fourth show. She just looked like she would be beat up. But anyway, Freddie's on stage and he's talking about Nixon. And he said, I think the joke he said, President Nixon, whatever, blah, blah, blah. And this guy and he went and says, hey, you watch your mouth. You know, it's the President of the United States. And Fred, he said, Nixon doesn't do something. He sucks. Well, this guy takes out a gun, starts firing it over Freddie's head, you know, shoots it into the car and the whole club just hits the ground. You know, just crazy stuff that really doesn't happen a whole lot anymore. Where was this? What club was this? Is that the Playboy Club in Boston? Wow. Yeah. Jesus Christ. Playboy clubs are actually great. You know, people- Do they exist anymore? They still do. But Hugh Hefner, I give him credit. He was the first guy, no, he was the first guy to let blacks walk through the front door of that club and play in the club. Dick Gregory, Louis Armstrong, all these acts, he treated them as equals, which today you think was, no, in the old days, black performers had to go in through the kitchen. Half always, you came in through the front door and you were treated with respect. If anybody said anything racial, anything of that nature, you got thrown out of the club. So he was really sort of a pioneer in being, you know, equality for a performer. And so I always, I mean, I've done a million Hugh Hefner jokes, as everybody has, but I always give him credit for that. He was really great that way. Well, he certainly has always been on sort of the cutting edge socially, you know? Certainly. I mean, now it just seems like it's kind of silly. But yeah, but back in the day, Well, it's a hard gig to hold on to, you know, he was at the Disneyland recently. And I was, you know, Disneyland, they give you that VIP pass if you're a famous person, right? Okay, you had to go through the exits. I didn't know about that back then. And so he had gotten into the ride before, you know, he hadn't gotten the line, it sort of walked him into the back door. All of a sudden, he was there with like this captain's hat on with these two girls that just had their faces spray painted on. And I was like, this is the oddest thing that this guy does. It's just so odd. Yeah, it just it does seem funny. Because he's so old. And yet he's still hanging around. I'm like trying to piece it together for like the next hour. Like does he enjoy this still? Or is this just like a publicity angle? I'll tell you funny story, back in 76, Schwarzenegger and I get invited to half 25th anniversary party. Come up to the mansion, Jerry. And you know, so Arnold like, well, I knew Arnold then. Arnold was enormous then. He's like twice as icy as that. Yeah. So we're hanging around and have sis to me. Jerry, would you like to have lunch with the girls? Lunch with the girls? I said, sure, that'd be great, Mr. Half-Nash. So I go into this dining room and it's a beautiful mansion. But it looks like a frat house, you know, all the wood is chipped and dented from the parties. There's a big long table, no chairs, about half a dozen of the Playboy bunnies hanging around, you know, in street clothes. And this Butler guy walks in with the biggest bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken I'd ever seen. It looked like a trash can. He just puts it down and all the girls dive in and grab a piece of chicken. I said, really? This is the Playboy lifestyle? This is pretty cool. Yeah, just odd. A bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Like a garbage can full of stuff. So he feeds them like the way you would feed chickens. Right. Exactly. That's how I feed my own chickens. Hilarious. Hilarious. I just put the food out and they all just fucking attack it. There you go. That's a weird place. If you go by the grotto, they still have the old phones, like the old phones. Have you been there? Yeah. Yeah. A buddy of mine went there. This is like, it sounds like an old joke, but it's a funny story. So he goes, he's never been before and he's like really nervous. So he's walking down by the grotto and he sees a couple of girls naked in the pool. So he hides behind a tree and he's watching them. He don't have to hide. I know what they'll say. And he's watching them and he's so nervous. He takes out a cigarette and he's smoking and security walks up and grabs and goes, hey, no smoking. He just thought he'd get busted. No, he got busted for smoking. It just made me laugh. That is pretty funny. Just so stupid. Yeah, I was there for, I hosted him. It was either marijuana policy project or normal. I can't remember who had it, but I hosted this, this event that they had there, a fundraising event. And it was just very strange to be around the grotto and just to, to be in this place, just to think of all the things that have happened in that place. It seems sort of odd. You know, you got a lot of old guys, guys my age now and girls are going, oh, look what James Francisco's gave me. Oh, it's a beautiful ring, you know, whatever. It's just some old movie star from the eighties, you know, hilarious. Just hanging on, trying their best. Yeah. Well, if you're still in the game, every now and then a pitch comes your way. That's right. That's right. Low hanging fruit. So when you're in your day, when you, when you started out doing these strange clubs and, you know, hootenannies and all that jazz, how long was it before the comedy club came around? How was that? How was that received? Comedy club came around the beginning of the eighties, probably. So like right when I, I started in 88. So when they were talking about like 84, that was really when it kind of really started. That was sort of the, the peak. And then it, then, cause you know, the comedy clubs in the eighties probably paid more money than they do now. Really? Yeah. Oh yeah. And then they realized, they realized, oh, there's a million comics. We don't have to pay these guys anything. And then the price went way down by about 50% drop way, way off. Because in the early days, there weren't that many comedians. There really weren't. When I was, when I went to New York, go to the improv, there may be three comedians and like 10 singers on audition night. Now everybody wants to be a comedian, but by then, back then, it really was not what it is now. What was it about comedy that just drew you to it? Because it seems like that is not an easy path back then. It seemed like there's no direct route. Like now you can go to the comedy store, you sign up for potluck night and you know, if you go enough nights in a row, you're eventually going to get on stage. Yeah. You know, for me, I was dyslexic as a kid, so I really wasn't good at anything except just talking and sort of bullshitting, whatever it might be. And I, you know, I used to like to watch comedians on TV and I thought, well, this might be a fun thing to try and do. And that's pretty much what I did. I mean, when I got started, I went to Emerson College and I took a course and I took speech courses because I had to give a talk at the end. And what I used to do was I would memorize like a George Carlin routine. I would never say it out loud. I would memorize it in my head. I would say, okay, I'm going to go on a few minutes. And I would do his routine. And then as soon as I hit the stage, I would slip into my own experiences. Like I remember he had the class clown album, so I would recite his jokes. And then when I hit the stage, I would say, you know, I was a kid, I was also a class clown. And then I would tell funny stories or whatever it was about mine, but I used his rhythm as the impetus to get me into it. I mean, I never did any of George's material, but it just worked for me as a way to, it's kind of a, you know. It kind of gets you started. Yeah. It's like we've been married a long time. You watch porn first, you know, same thing. When I was working at Boston Globe, I used to deliver the globe. And I would go to the places where I would pick up the papers. And there was a bunch of guys, there was a guy named, God, I forget his name. He's an Indian gentleman who was actually a pharmacologist in India, but he couldn't get a license for it in America. So he's working as a paper guy at the Boston Globe, a really bright guy. And, you know, he would talk to me about American culture and stuff like that. And I asked him, you ever heard of Sam Kinison? I was obsessed with Kinison back then. Yeah. This is like 86 before I ever started doing comedy. And I would do like a Kinison bit for him. Yeah. And he was, I was doing a bit about, Sam Kinison had a bit about dog psychologists. Oh yeah. Yeah. He goes, he goes, I'd like to get in on some of that money. He goes, yeah, well, are you having a problem with Sparky? Yeah. Sparky's not, he's not acting himself. Oh, I'll take care of it. He takes him to the, first of all, you're a fucking dog. Oh yeah. You shit in the yard. You know, he was a funny person, horrible guy. Yeah. Mean, nasty guy. Yeah. You know, seems like it. And near the end, he was pulling guns on people. And well, there was a, used to be a bullet hole at the comic store in the belly room sign that for whatever reason, some asshole decided to repair. I was so fucking mad when I hadn't been there in seven years and I came back and the, the, the sign was fixed. I go, what did you do? What did you do? That wasn't bad. It was, it was history. I can't remember if I was, I'm not sure if I put him on the Tonight Show first. He was, I was guest hosting and I had Sam on one time. He might've been on before that. I'm not, I can't, I saw, I'm not going to try and take credit for that, but, you know, he was truly funny, but just really dark. I mean, just nasty. I mean, we're just. Like how so? Young comic in the hall back, just rip them. I mean, way crueler than it needed to be. I mean, it was, and he was brilliant, you know, but it's like when Sam died, it was like, that's almost how he had to go out because he was so, like he had that hilarious bit about necrophilia. Remember that one? Yeah. Nothing funnier. Yeah. Okay. So what's your next bit? Okay. You have a thing about screwing dead people. What is, what's more outrageous than this? You know, he kept trying to top himself and he's able to do it, you know, but it just got so crazy. And then it's that thing where you start believing your own publicity. Instead of just showing up as a comic, you now have an entourage and everything you say is funny. You can't, you know, as a comic. You lose your perspective. Yeah. You've got to be able to say to people, is this really funny or not? You know, no, it's not that good. Okay. Thanks. Like what I was saying about Robin, you had to be able to, to ask people that question. That's why Steve Martin quit. Steve Martin quit. He talked about it in his book that he's just got to a point where just everything he said was funny and it just, he knew it was wrong. He was a great guy. Steve is the one that brought Johnny in to see me at the time. Really? Yeah. And I was always very grateful for that, you know, I love Steve Martin. Oh, he's a great guy. He's a great guy and, and, uh, intelligent guy, thoughtful guy, um, really looks at it analytically from an artist perspective. He's really, you know, he's one of those guys, like I said, like Johnny, who looks like a normal person, but they just think unusual and think funny. And Kinison is my favorite example that I use to young comics when I talk about like, you got to stay the course. Like you can't, like once you make it, it's even more hard because once you make it, then people require things of you and you have to look at yourself as objectively and as analytically as you, you look at the whole world. Kinison was brilliant. In my opinion, he was like one of the best ever, if not the best ever in 1986. Yeah. And then by 1989, he was a fucking shell of himself and was barely acceptable. It was that case of all comics like to have some sort of open wound, alcoholic, drug addict, too straight, too gay, too something. So they have an excuse when it doesn't get a laugh. Hey, I did pretty good, Kinison, I was stoned. It was pretty funny because I was drinking all day before I went out to say, they always need a reason why it didn't work if it didn't work. And so consequently, you get to that point where that crutch gets bigger and bigger and bigger, you know, so the idea is to try and put that stuff aside. It's a lot of discipline being a comic. You really have to, you can't believe your own publicity. See, I'm a huge believer in low self-esteem. I think it's because when you have low self-esteem, you don't imagine automatically think you're the smartest one in the room. Right. You know, you just shut up and maybe listen and take some advice and whatever and work harder. But you know, actors and criminals, there's high self-esteem. Actors and criminals. That's so true. Every criminal will tell you, you know, something, the cops hadn't come. That would have been the greatest robbery. You know, they all have a reason why. It's always somebody else's fault, you know, and that's the thing. Sam had that. Sam worked at, the crutch got bigger and bigger and he got funnier and funnier. You needed more drugs and more whatever to because, oh, that's why the third show didn't work, man, because I was so high. Oh, okay. It wasn't Sam's fault. He was too high. You know, does that make any sense to you? No, it does. I also think he was so caught up in partying that he never really sat down and wrote anymore. Well, again, that's the same. We're saying the same. Call it partying. Call it whatever you want, you know. The real trick to being a comedian is it's focus. You know, it's a genetic flaw that makes you a comedian. It's not, there's nothing, it's not a plus, it's a negative. I mean, if you happen to live in the time of the crusades, who's a soldier making all the men laugh? Kill him. All right. You know, we just happen to live in a time when comedy is advantageous, but if you're a soldier and this guy's hysterical, the men are all laughing and then a pig, kill that guy. Boom, kill him. There you go. Simple as that. Or you'd be the jester for the king until he decided to cut your head off in front of everybody. There's a pressure gig right there. You think? Yeah. No, but see that, that was, you know, I remember years ago when I started the Tonight Show, there were other guest hosts on opposite me, not guests, other shows. And I remember, and I'd go home every night and I'd write, and I remember one time I turned on the news and I saw one of the hosts at a Laker game. And I go, you're not going to have a monologue tomorrow night. I know he's not because I'm writing jokes and he's been at the Laker game all night. And when I watched his monologue the next night, the person didn't have any material. I mean, he got through it, but it wasn't crisp, it wasn't sharp, you know? Right. You have to focus. That discipline is really, it's ironic in a way, because what makes you a comic in the first place, usually because you're f**ked off in school and you were the class clown, you didn't have any discipline. That was me. I was me too. Jay has the ability, but does not apply himself. Exactly. That's verbatim. I bet you can go across the board, Richard, Jenny, you know, Dave Shabat, every f**king comic that would have the same thing. Yeah. I mean, I remember my mother was called into school once with the guidance counselor, and I'm sitting there, the guidance counselor says to my mother, have you ever thought of taking Jay out of school? My mother said, why? And he said, well, you know, education is not for everyone. I'm going, hello, I'm in the room. He goes, well, Jay, you work at McDonald's after school, right? Well, they have an excellent program with that McDonald University. You learn to make change and run the riches. I go, you know, I'm not, I'm not that bad. You know, Jesus Christ. Oh yeah, hilarious. Teachers don't, I don't know if they understand or they don't understand, but when you set an example like that for a kid, you put it in front of them like that. They're not gonna, they should drop off and take a trade or something like that. Actually, I credit one of my teachers, Mrs. Hawks. I had this teacher and she pulled me aside one day and she said, you know, you're not a very good student, but I see you in class, I see you in the hallway and you seem to be telling jokes and people. She says, why don't you write some of these stories down and I'll give you credit in English class and you can read them to the class. And I said, oh, it was the first time in my life I really enjoyed doing a homework. I went out and I wrote the story out and that's a, and I changed the line and rewrote it. And I realized I'd spent like two hours working on a homework assignment I normally would just spend 10 minutes on. And when I went to school the next day and I read it, oh, and it got laughs. She said, okay, I'll give you credit. I'll give you an A for that. And I went, oh, thanks. I mean, this is a teacher taking something that I could use in the real world. You know, I'm not, I'm dyslexic. I'm not going to use algebra. I'm never going to use algebra. But this teacher saw something where she said, okay. And you know, I set up a scholarship for her and she passed away fairly young breast cancer, but it was just great because I had never really thought about, you know, you grew up in Andover, Massachusetts. I don't think about being a comedian. You think about working in the factory or something. And I thought, oh, it was the first time in my life I had used comedy and it got me something. I got an A. I never got an A, but I got an A on this paper, you know. And oh, okay. So then that's how I started. That's really what got me going. I used to draw cartoons. That's how I got into it. I used to draw cartoons and my teachers like doing sex acts with other students, like a teacher's pet or- Well, see now you'd be sent to prison. It's all- Like visual. I didn't show like genitals, but you know, I showed like- You have to think about that people. Like when I was a boy, we went to Boy Scout camp when I was a kid. And I think it was Camp Onway in New Hampshire. I went to camp in New Hampshire as a Boy Scout. Okay. Okay. Well, we had a camp counselor, Mr. Butler, I think his name was. And this is like Cub Scouts. This is like nine, 10, 11. And if you did something wrong for punishment, you had to stack rocks and build a wall in front of Mr. Butler's cabin. Nude. Okay. Oh, Jesus. So we go by and we'd laugh. Look at Billy. Hey, you know, when you're nine and 10, you just- You don't realize Billy's getting raped. Well, I don't think that ever happened, but it was mostly, and Mr. Butler would sit there with his pipe and just kind of sit in the rocking chair. And you know, it was probably- Jesus Christ. It was probably eight years later, I'm on like Route 495 going through Worcester. Hey, wait a minute. I mean, it never occurred to me because you know when you're a kid, it's just skinny dipping, Ollie. You're not thinking anything like that. It just, yeah. So- Never occurred to you that Mr. Butler's probably a pervert. No, no, never. But once you got older, you realized. Oh yeah. You meet a few perverts. You go, this is not a normal punishment, sir. I rest my case. What was about Kinison that was so mean? Like, what was it when you're saying he's just a nasty person? I know, you know, Carl LeBeau is a friend of mine. Well, he must have some stories. Well, he's got a horrible story. Okay. Well, there you go. His child turned out to be Kinison's child. So Kinison was banging his best friend's wife behind his back. And it's terrible. I mean, and I don't know what his relationship is like with the child. Do you need any other stories? Is that what you mean? I mean, you know, I mean, it's not the child's fault. I would like to think that I would be man enough to recognize it's not the child's fault and not punish the child for it and just still treat the child like it's my child, especially since Kinison's dead. But he had been paying alimony and child support for this for the longest time. And it's just what a betrayal to this friend. Okay. Well, there you answered your own question. What's the next question? Yeah, that's not good. Yeah. But I heard that they did some wife swapping and shit back then too. I don't know about that. Complicated. I just knew it was just kind of nasty, just mean. It's interesting because that guy just sort of changed what comedy was for a little bit. Oh, he was very good. It was a truly unique style. Nobody else had worked like that ever. I mean, just as Rodney had a style and Robin had a style, Kinison had a style. No one has had come along before or since really with that energy. That strangeness to it too. It was an anger obviously that came from, I don't know whether abuse or religious intolerance, whatever it was when he was a kid. Did you ever read his brother's book, My Brother Sam? No, I didn't read the book. His brother Bill wrote a book and it's a really good book and it's really objective. It's not like a fluff piece. And he said that Sam got hit by, I think it was a car or a truck when he was a young boy and it was never the same again. And head injuries oftentimes lead to very impulsive, radically different behavior. Well, that would certainly be the case there. I mean, he was impulsive and radical. But like you say, it's a bit like that animal where the horn grows out and eventually curves and grows back into its own head and it goes crazy. I mean, that's kind of like what Sam was. I mean, like 84, 85, 86, nothing bigger. By the early 90s, it was pretty... Well, I got to see him live after his HBO special, like almost immediately after. And he didn't really have material. He had all that HBO stuff that he couldn't really do anymore. Because everybody had seen it. So now it was like one of the first realizations that like, wow, wrote this whole act for 10 years, worked for 10 years, honed my act, developed this killer hour. That's why you don't do HBO specials. You don't do any specials. No. Why is that? Because I like to know where my act is all the time. What does that mean? But by that, I mean, if you want to see it, I will come to where you are and do it. There's nothing more annoying than when people say, hey, I just saw someone so special. It didn't seem that funny. I said, where'd you watch it? On my iPhone. Okay. You know something, watching it on your iPhone by yourself is not going to make you laugh. Okay. It's not the same. You know, the difference between looking in the window of a nightclub and hearing it and being on the other side of the window and being in the room, that energy engulfs you. I mean, it's part of it. If you're willing to pay attention, I'll come to where you are and I'll do it. Okay. I like piecemeal work. Write joke, tell joke, get checked. That's pretty much the way my life is. The idea, I mean, I remember we had a comic on the Tonight Show once. He said, oh, my HBO specials, this week, can you plug it? I said, yeah. Okay. He says, and I'm going on the road. I said, what material are you doing on the road? Well, they all do a lot of stuff in the special. I said, you know, it's going to be the next time he came back like eight months later, he was like, oh my God, you were right. People, I just heard that. I heard that crap last night because people watch the special before they come see you. They like you. Let's watch a special and go see them. And then they are so pissed that they spent 50 bucks or whatever it is for a ticket that now they now they hate you. You know, you. So to me, when you do one of those specials, you get probably a nickel of you, maybe a penny of you. But when you do a live audience, you're making 20 bucks, 50 bucks. But for a lot of comics, that's how they build an audience. They build an audience by putting together an HBO special that somebody likes, and then they write a whole new act. And then when someone comes out to see them, they'll see a new act. That works for somebody. But you know, to me, I always meet people say, I'm writing a new hour. And then I watch it and I go, it's not an hour. That's about 16 minutes, really. Because there's a lot of uh-huh. And, oh, what else, man? How y'all doing? Everybody good? You all good tonight? Hey, how's that been? Hey, man, how you doing? You know, that's, that's not, it's boom, boom. It's like, it's like throwing punches. I mean, especially old Boston style. Boston style is very attack, like Lenny Clark. That's what I mean. I mean, when you get something that works, you. But you got to build that, right? Yeah, but you can build it. You can go, you can do TV appearances. You can do five minute bits. You can do, when people do something for a whole hour and they watch it, boy, that's a lot. I mean, you give them a taste and then you come do it in person. I mean, I can only say what's worked for me. Right. I mean, it works for me because I have jokes I wrote yesterday. I have jokes I wrote 20 years ago and they both still work because, A, I know the last time I did this routine about this was 12 years ago when I was in this town. The idea of any of those people being in the audience tonight, probably minimal. You know, if I walk on a stage just on, like I hate when I do a talk show appearance, the next night I'm in a club, I make sure not to do that material because they just heard it yesterday. Right. So the idea that anybody can call up stuff that I did at any time, unless you have new material every single day, it doesn't make sense. I had this conversation with Ari Chafir, who's a good buddy of mine, a great comedian, and we were talking about it and he said that when you work on old stuff, if you keep old stuff, or you tighten it up, or you keep, it keeps you from expanding as an artist and making stuff that's more relevant to how you think right now. There might be something to that, but it also keeps you famous. It also gets to the point where people go, boy, I walked in and it was a tough room and the crowd was talking, and boy, he got them. Again, we're talking about, I'm talking about playing hard ticket rooms where people go, who is this guy? I never seen him. When you play Jersey, when you play the Jersey Shore, you got 70 year old guys, you got teenagers, you got grandmothers, you got longshoremen, you got sale, you got every conceivable type of crowd. When you go to a comedy club, you're playing essentially to the same person. They all think alike and feel alike. I mean, to me, I like when I do, I always gear my jokes, some jokes about men, some about women, so to me, I love playing a racially and gender diverse crowd. I hate, it's all guys, that's the worst. I hate, oh, it's all women. I like it because it keeps everybody honest. The audience, the police is itself. You do a joke about a man, do a joke about a woman, do a joke about it. That's what works for me. So to me, I think what he's saying is probably true. I'm just talking about making a living. When you have to go somewhere and do the job, the down and dirty part of it, okay, there's the fun part of show business, and then there's a part where you got to go to work. Listen, it's the Benet-Bryth Society. They're hiring you next Wednesday. They're giving you a thousand bucks. Okay, you got to go there and knock that crowd out. I mean, that's what you got to do. And you think that doing specials somehow or another takes away from that? No, I don't think specials takes away from that. I mean, look, I'm just talking about me. No, no, I know. That's why I'm curious because you're one of the few guys, I can see you're a great comic and you've been doing it for, everybody does, you've been doing it forever, but there's very little of your work out there. I think there's a Showtime special that I watched from, you did a Showtime special. Long time. And way back in the day. Yeah, and I got that and I burned the master, but somehow there's a copy of it. But that's the opposite of what most people do. Most people constantly want to put out new stuff. Carlin put out a new hour basically every year. Well, don't forget, see, I was fortunate. I had a platform every night on The Tonight Show. I had to do 14 minutes every single night. Okay, so you write 14 and then it's probably 11 or 12 by the time it hits the air. So I didn't need to do special because I had a little tiny bit of something out every single day. A little bit of an advertisement for people to come see you. So that's what worked for me. And before I had that, I made sure I did Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, and every four to six weeks I would do Letterman. And that's how I kept it out there. Just give them a little bit of a taste so when they come to your town, they're not sick of you. That is interesting because you are definitely seeing a lot of people today that are watching stand up from a YouTube clip, that they're watching it on their phone. And it's just not going to be the same. Yeah, it's not. It's not the same. You need to experience it. Live. Yeah, it's frustrating to me when people say they didn't think something was funny or they didn't think something was... Oh, I watched Avatar on my iPhone. I think it was that great. Well, first of all, it's a 3D movie. You can't watch it on your iPhone. Stop it. It's not supposed to be convenient. Comedy is supposed to be in a room that's a little uncomfortable. It's just a little too cold. All the elements that make them really... Dark, low ceiling. Yeah, come. You ever try to do comedy in Hawaii? You're standing on stage and guys and sail fishes are going by and the sun's out at midnight. What are you doing? Did you ever do stand up in a really, really big place, like a giant arena? Oh, sure. I did the amphitheater. I did all that stuff back in the 80s. What do you think about that? That seems to me like they do this oddball comedy tour now and they're doing 20,000 seat places. I thought about it and I was like, man, that seems like a lot of goddamn people to do stand up for. It seems very strange. It depends what you like. For example, I like doing stand up, so I'd rather do 10,000, 2,000 seat rooms than one 20,000 seat room. I mean, because I like doing it. It's fun to do. It's fun to tell jokes. It's fun to see the person right there. When you do those 20,000 seat things, there's a light in your eye and you can hear laughs, but you're not really experiencing it the same. I know comics that just... Letterman was never comfortable in front of a live audience. Dave was not funny as he is. He just didn't like doing stand up. He didn't like it. Me, I like it. I like reaching out and having the audience. That's when the Tonight Show really came alive for me when I redid the studio and brought the audience right up close to me so I could touch hands with people or go, when I have something pal, whatever it might be. I like it. I like the human contact. Stand up is probably the most basic form of human communication. With the exception of the microphone, that's it. There's no trick. There's no gimmick. It's just humans interacting. The other reason I like stand up is people don't gather anymore. When I grew up in Andover, once a month, they would have the town meeting at the Grange Hall, which is dumb as that sound in North Andover, and the whole town would show up. Nothing ever got done, but people gathered in a room and it was fun to experience a room full of people laughing or reacting to something. Now, everybody texts or sits. There's a social awkwardness to the iPhone, but when you put people in a little room, it's a little uncomfortable, and you get on stage and you talk to them, and that room is rolling with laughs. It's really the greatest thing in the world. It's unbelievable. Yeah, I agree. I think it's an amazing art form, and it's the most fun for me to watch as well as to do. I love watching it. I still love sitting in the back of the... Saw Tom Papa last night. He was hilarious. Tom is really good, isn't he? He's very good. So funny. And I got to sit in the back of the room after I got off stage and watch him at the back of the comedy store. I just still love it as an art form. To me, it's like listening to music. I remember when I first met Letterman, I didn't really know Dave, and I saw him at the comedy store. And Dave had a great way to turn a phrase. I remember he had a... I don't do the joke justice. He said, I had a joke about... He was talking about editorials on small town TV stations, and we at W, whatever, are diametrically opposed to the practice of using orphans as yardage markers on public golf courses, something like that. And I thought, I just like the way he phrased it. To me, that's like listening to a James Taylor song, just the way all those words come together. You know, in Seinfeld, we used to have a bit about going to the Dodgum Cars and the Hopeless Father and Son team. And I like Hopeless Father and Son. So I just like the way they phrasing. So to me, listening to good comedy, I can listen to it over and over. Yeah, no, I agree. I love listening to the way certain people phrase things. And like you were saying about how you going on stage after listening and reciting Carlin in your head, how it sort of helped you get that rhythm and cadence. You know, Hunter Thompson used to do that. He used to write the Great Gatsby. He used to write it out, copy the Great Gatsby to sort of learn the rhythm of the words. Yeah. I think a lot of us have experienced going on stage and sort of feeling like you're doing someone else's cadence and rhythm. I caught myself one time on stage at the comedy connection. And I felt like I was in the middle of doing Richard Jenny. I was like I was being Richard Jenny while I was on stage. I was like, Ooh, like I'm kind of stealing this guy's. Oh, he was a hilarious comic. He was a terrific comic, Richard. He was one of the best that people don't talk about. He was one of those guys that sort of the guys of today maybe don't realize how great that guy was. Yeah, no, he really was. Yeah, he was one of the best at taking a bit and stretching it out too. I love his bit on gay marriage. You know, this is before gay marriage is legal, obviously. And he used to do a bit about how great it was for gay guys. Bob, I'd love to marry you, but it's against the law. I mean, I used to love when he did that. It used to really make me laugh. Look, Steve, I'd love to, but it's against the law. You know, it was the perfect guy excuse not to get married. It's against the law. Hilarious. And he would take a bit and stretch it out over seven, 10 minutes. I mean, he would find every single nook and cranny that that could be explored. Very funny guy, but sort of insecure, but very funny guy. He was troubled. Yeah, he was troubled. Like Manny, but so disciplined. Yeah. Constantly working, constantly writing new material. Seinfeld is like that, very disciplined, really writes and comes up with new stuff. And you can see the difference too. You can see the jokes come every six to nine seconds versus every 30 seconds or something. Hey, y'all, good mood. How y'all doing? Yeah. I tell you, get to the joke. Right, right, right. Yeah. That's that old school attitude too. The people don't have a lot of attention. They just don't have much time for this. Right. Go, go, go, go, go. Seinfeld is one of the few guys that rivals you as a car collector too. Not quite. But he's a Porsche guy. He just says Porsche. Only Porsche. Yeah, he just says Porsche. But anything else? He's an expert. Now he's got some German stuff, Mercedes, but he's a real expert. He knows his stuff. Yeah. That comedians in cars getting coffee is a very interesting show. Oh, it's a great show. It's really fun. Everybody tells you you can't do. Jerry's a perfect example. The Seinfeld show about nothing. No, no one's going to watch that. Biggest show I've ever, when he had this idea, I would just drive around. We just talk about whatever we want. No, no, you got to have it all laid out first. No, you don't. And he proved that you didn't need to. Well, that's what's going on with the internet is that you don't, the idea that these producers and executives and directors have always had that run networks, that this is the only way to be entertaining. They're wrong. And it's just another way to be entertaining, but you watch, it'll come full circle again. And people go, I'm sick of this freeform stuff. I want something a little more, you know, so it's just the age you live in. Most people do this show and they make it about an hour, maybe an hour and 20 before they have to take a leak. Yeah. You look like you're about right there. No, I didn't take a leak. I thought the show was an hour. It's as long as you want it to be. Oh, we could end it right now. If you like. Well, I got a meeting at one, but let's, let's wrap it up then. Okay. We'll wrap it up. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Anytime you ever want to come back again, I would be more than honored to have you on. You call me and I'm here. It was an honor to do your show. I love your show. Jay Leno's garage. My episode is on this week with my 1965 Corvette and it was an honor to come and tour your facilities. Come back with the Chevelle and the, and the, absolutely. Absolutely. Love you, buddy. Thank you. Appreciate it. All right.