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Q: Norm you've talked about the perfect joke being where the setup and punchline are identical. Have you ever come up with one?
A: Yes, the joke is "Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts were divorced today. The reason: he's Lyle Lovett and she's Julia Roberts." That's the closest one.
...About ten years ago when the bankers tanked the economy I was living here in L.A., and I started thinking, What if the whole economy collapsed and this city went crazy. How would I get out of here? You can’t get out of this city even when it works. Up and out was the only way. So I learned how to fly a helicopter. Now of course I know how to fly one, but I don’t own one.
But you took the first step.
I did. I took a major step. But the funny thing is when you watch those zombie movies and they start a helicopter up and they fly away — that’s not how a helicopter works. At least the ones I fly. There’s a whole process of starting the fucking thing up. Those zombies are going to be eating y...
I’ve always enjoyed the challenge of getting out of my comfort zone. I think that’s what you should do. I understand the temptation if you’re an alternative comic to just do alternative rooms. Or if you were a club comic to just do club rooms. Or if you’re a white comic just to do white rooms. It’s because bombing is so humiliating that you want to avoid it. But humiliation is where the growth is. This is also like why I enjoy drinking and I don’t like pot. I feel like with drinking you have to earn it. You gotta get those drinks down.
I was mortified after that Philly thing happened. I was riding home with Bobby Kelly after and thought everyone was going to make fun of me for getting booed. And Bobby was just going, “Do you realize you just told that whole city to go fuck themselves?” I was so relieved when other comedians saw a positive side in it. And you know, at the next stop on the tour we went to Cleveland, and I walked onstage and the crowd started booing me. And I was just like, “Guys, insulting your city isn’t going to be my thing now.”
Getting heckled. I remember one time feeling down that I got booed. And it wasn’t that I got booed, it was that I didn’t put up a fight. I was going back to the hotel room thinking, Jesus, you could’ve at least made fun of that guy in his stupid fucking jacket instead of just standing there.
Comedy is the weirdest thing in the world. You can’t practice it in your bedroom. You can’t explain timing. You can’t explain any of it. But it was the late, great Patrice O’Neal who said to me back then, “Dude, that’s not you up there.” I was like, “I know, I know.” Then all of the sudden I started telling my real stories and talking the way I really talked and people were saying, “What is he doing? He’s blowing it.” Twenty-six years later …
I didn’t want to offend people in the crowd because I was afraid to get heckled. Also I wanted to make sure that I knew how to make a joke before I started talking the way I really talked.
I stopped blaming the world for my problems. You can only walk around so long being like, “Chicks, man. They’re psychos.” At some point you realize that you’re the common factor. I wasn’t exactly the easiest person to be around. I’m not the most sane person. But until you sit down and talk to somebody about your issues, they’re foreign to you. I realized I was pretty fucked-up.
But I also had this thing where, when I was growing up, I got picked on a lot and I also beat some kids up. [Laughs.] I had a nice balance. I also felt like a freak because of how I looked. And I thought that if I became a comedian, people would see me on stage and go, “Oh, he’s a great, funny guy,” and then everyone would stop fucking with me. I thought that becoming a comic was going to fix these other problems. Of course, it didn’t. I just believed that it would for 15 years.
I remember making fun of myself for being a commuter and having no friends and being alone all the time.
[And] I didn’t bomb. I did okay, and I remember it was just like, This is what I’m doing now. Comedy is the only thing in my life I never had any doubt about. I obviously learned from a bunch of masters, but it always flowed into me. When you find what you’re supposed to do there’s not a lot of thinking. It just is. And if you love what you do, you transcend so much bullshit. My life was really unbalanced before.
[How so?]
I had found love in my job and I didn’t know how to do it in my personal life. I got to a pretty advanced age and comedy was a thousand miles down the road and every...
I was at Emerson College and in ’92 I made a New Year’s resolution: I gave myself a whole year to, at some point, try stand-up comedy. Then the school newspaper had an ad about how Nick’s Comedy Stop was having a find Boston’s funniest college student competition. I went home, took a deep breath, called the number and signed up before I could chicken out.
This is how much I wanted to be a comedian and didn’t realize it: I had a paper route for years when I was a kid, and when I was on my route I used to recite George Carlin bits, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy — I used to recite his “Hit by a Car” bit word-for-word. I would fantasize about doing it in front of my entire grade in the school auditorium. But I still wasn’t able to make the connection of maybe that means you want to be a comedian. It didn’t seem possible. But I know the exact moment when it seemed possible. I was working in a warehouse with this guy and he was into comedy — first time I’d ever met somebody who was into comedy the way I was. And I used to go over to his house to drin...
I would let that bad feeling drag me down to the bottom of the lake and I’d lay down there. The only thing that would pull me out of it would be getting a new chunk of material. And to get a new chunk of material you have to go out into the world. But when you’re in that funk you don’t want to go out and then you get writer’s block. When I was younger I even used to think all that clichéd sad-clown shit. Now I don’t want to fucking be that guy. I want to be the happy guy, which believe it or not, I am.
People say, “You’re going to get married, and you’re going to have a kid, and then you’re going to be happy and you’re not going to have any material.” I’ve been telling guys that what really happens is, once you get that happiness there’s this whole new fear that you’re going to lose it. Stephen King cannot fuck with the things that you think could happen to your kids. I’ve learned how to deal with those thoughts, and I know the tricks to get me out of depression: playing drums, working out, playing with my daughter, trying something new.
That whole punching-down thing — I absolutely cannot stand people who say that. “Punch up. Punch up.” That has got to be the most boring thing you could ever do onstage. It’s yelling into an echo chamber. What’s so fucking funny to me is that what’s really going on is never brought up. Who donates to the president and who pays for the advertising on all these big news networks? That’s shit people should be upset about. But instead, if you do a fucking feminist joke in a strip mall you make the news. So that’s just a load of shit.
Smarmy people who aren’t funny say that. Comedy is a pastime. The pastime is making fun of something you’re not supposed to make fun of because that gives you a me...
I guess there came a time, and I missed it, when revealing everything started to be considered art. I’d always learned that concealing everything was art. And I still believe that, because comedy is a vulgar art; it’s an art that’s just beginning to take form because it’s so young. But I can look at other art forms and see how postmodernism has destroyed them, and now threatens to destroy stand-up. It’s the height of narcissism to write meta-comedy, because people aren’t interested in comedy. They’re interested in going home after shoveling shit all day and then seeing some fool perform. That’s not to say that comedy can’t make a greater point, because it can. But it can’t make a greater poi...
A lot of it is bragging. It used to drive me crazy when I knew that a stand-up’s agenda was about showing how smart they were. The last character you want to be is a guy who’s smarter than the audience. But there’s some hole inside that these stand-ups have to fill. It has nothing to do with making people laugh.
Stand-up is a form and to subvert something, you have to do it perfectly first. I remember somebody showed me a talk show with “subversion” in it — the guy chainsawed his desk. It was so stupid. Why did you build a desk in the first place if you were only going to chainsaw it? Don’t have a fucking desk! You just want little drops of subversion. Letterman in the ‘80s would be 90 percent a great talk show and then 10 percent subversion. If you get to 30 percent subversion, you’re in Andy Kaufman land. If you get to 70 percent, you’re a guy on the streets screaming at people. What are you trying to subvert anyway? Entertaining people? It’s absurd.
- Do as good a job as Trent Reznor scoring “The Social Network”
- Play against the Lakers and juke NBA point guard Steve Blake
- Hit an NBA 3-pointer
- Play right field in a Major League Baseball game, and catch a pop-up, and easily throw it back to the infield
- Act as well as any actor
- Every girl has, at minimum, a 20% crush on him
[Traveling Mercies.] The autobiographical essays in this collection cover faith and family, booze, men, and self-love. They’re full of the small moments in [Anne] Lamott’s life, the observations that make you laugh really hard and make you bawl really fast — two of my favorite activities. She talks about how the most popular prayers are “Help me, help me, help me” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” I’ve read all her work, and she continually surprises me and speaks to me. One of the lines from this book that I love is: “All you can do is show up for someone in crisis. Your there-ness… can be life giving, because often everyone else is in hiding.” That’s just killer.
Lamott is so open an...
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Norm Macdonald