“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog,” said E.B. White. “Few people are interested and the frog dies.” Sure enough, humor, that most ineffable of human art forms, has long eluded the efforts of psychologists to describe it. So we turned to the real experts—comedians, actors, and satirists. Our round table consisted of Todd Todd Hanson, a writer and editor for The Onion; Bob Bob Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker; The Daily Show‘s Kristen Schaal; MADtv’s Arden Arden Myrin; Sam Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land; comedian Eugene Eugene Mirman (who, along with Schaal, appears on Flight of the Conchords); and comedian Heather Lawless. Since they’re the ones on the front lines making people laugh, we knew they’d be able to shed light on when jokes go too far, whether men like funny women, and that great existential stumper, the knock knock joke.

Jay Dixit: We want to keep this informal…

Bob Mankoff: Can we keep it totally formal?

Eugene Mirman: We should probably use Robert’s Rules of Order.

Todd Hanson: I don’t believe any scholarly conversation can reasonably be held if it’s not in Latin. I mean it’s for Psychology Today, let’s try to keep it classy.

Eugene Mirman: Alright, the psychology of humor! We’re about to talk about power, struggle, our childhoods—with comedy, or what I like to call “the power of the tease.”

Jay Dixit: Let’s start with something that’s not funny at all but quite sad: the death of George Carlin. How did he influence you?

Eugene Mirman: Never heard of him. (Laughter.) He influenced the canon of standup and shaped what it became and what was acceptable. He took it from vaudeville, Bob Hopey jokey jokes and made it personal and important and an art.

Bob Mankoff: Like New Yorker cartoons, Carlin’s whole point was to use humor to communicate something besides making the person laugh. The things we’ve laughed at hardest in our lives are not the jokes at all. He was a thinking comedian.

Todd Hanson: Carlin was part of a giant shift in the culture. He was 30 when he started dropping acid and turning into the Hippy Dippy Weatherman. Before that, he was a straight comic. There isn’t really a counterculture now. But on the other hand, in the mainstream, there is nothing that’s considered out of bounds.

Arden Myrin: We have such a crazy censor on MADtv that it’s very arbitrary what you can or can’t say. So the writers write entire sketches with made-up names for penis and vagina, like “gooch hole” and “twazzer.” But the censors still won’t let them use them because of the context, so they get in battles.

Jay Dixit: What is it about vulgarity that’s funny?

Todd Hanson: George Carlin says there’s no such thing as shock humor. Shock is just another word for surprise, and all humor is based on surprise, or having the person off-guard.

Schaal: I think it’s a matter of taste: Maybe you love Andrew Dice Clay, or maybe you don’t.

Todd Hanson: I do love Andrew Dice Clay, but only because I hate women.

Bob Mankoff: I think what you’re getting to is what psychologists call script opposition. So if there’s a doctor saying, “You’ll be awake during the entire operation; the anesthesiologist is on vacation.” The script opposition is that we expect the doctor to be solicitous. The weird thing is it’s a surprise you expect. When they do experiments, they find the more predictable jokes are the ones that are funny.

Sam Lipsyte: I once heard someone describe it as a rubber band being stretched.

Arden Myrin: I like seeing what you can get away with with a smile. The sweeter, more pleasant you can be—and then say something horrifying.

Todd Hanson: You don’t have to be a primatologist to figure out there’s a connection between the startle reaction and making people laugh. For me, the funniest things are always the most horrifying, and then figuring out a way to process that in your mind so you can laugh.

Schaal: And also playing it real and sincerely and not at all winking.

Bob Mankoff: It all occurs in the context of play. When we’re playing, we enjoy things that are normally offensive and repulsive to us. Say I can have a cartoon where it’s a gallows and there’s steps—and then there’s a ramp for the handicapped. It’s play. You can have a guy getting executed with a guillotine and the guy has the two baskets and he’s saying, “Paper or plastic?” That actual scene wouldn’t be funny.

Eugene Mirman: I think it actually would be funny.

Schaal: I want plastic.

Jay Dixit: We’re talking about humor coming from surprise, but isn’t it also the recognition of the familiar?

Schaal: But you start with recognition.

Lawless: There’s a degree of precariousness.

Bob Mankoff: There’s a degree of unexpectedness and conjoining two things that people haven’t expected. If I do a cartoon and say to you, “OK, here’s heaven. Make something up about it—conjoin it with an airport.” You’ll start to come up with jokes. What are the parallels? You go into heaven, maybe there’s security. Maybe it’s a nightclub—there’s a guy out front, guarding the ropes. Maybe it’s the U.S. and there are illegal angels crawling over. If I say it’s like a highway, maybe there’s an EasyPass. Conjoining these two things is what you’re supposed to do as a comic.

Lawless: It also depends on who your audience is. You don’t set yourself up to be completely misunderstood. If you do a show in New York City downtown, you know you’ll have to be listening to the darker corners of your imagination. If you’re doing the road or a college, you don’t want to make yourself so vulnerable that they’re not going to get on board with your premise.

Eugene Mirman: People have to trust you.

Lawless: You have to start with something that gets their ears open. Let’s talk about when humor crosses the line.

Todd Hanson: When the towers came down, there was a joke that was well constructed, funny, and sad. But it was too cavalier and we didn’t feel like being cavalier at the time. It was “America Stronger than Ever, Say Quadragon Officials.” It’s funny, but it was inappropriate because that fifth of the building that was missing had dead people in it. We decided it was not right for the time. It’s not the subject matter, it’s not the language. It had to do with the target of the joke.

Bob Mankoff: It’s difficult to make jokes about things people care about. After 9/11, we got some very funny anti-terrorist jokes. The best one showed the prophet Muhammad in heaven, and the terrorist all in pieces. Muhammad says, “You’ll get the virgins when we find your penis.” Which points to the real insanity of the thing. We didn’t run that cartoon. The New Yorker is a serious magazine. If you’ve just read 50,000 words by Seymour Hirsch on terrorism, that joke would seem inappropriate.

Jay Dixit: Is there anyone you can’t make laugh?

Todd Hanson: The less is wrong in your life, the less you need humor. There’s this great Mark Twain quote where he said there’s no humor in heaven. I thought that was very sad and funny and a good dig at all the humorless Presbyterians he was raised by.

Bob Mankoff: Humor’s for things that go wrong. If you have a good vacation and the luggage gets there on time, there are no jokes in that.

Schaal: Only stupid people don’t have senses of humor.

Bob Mankoff: People who are funny have something uneven, some grit, some damage. Anyone who does things just for fun is going to laugh and if you do a lot of things just because you enjoy them, not to achieve something, not for some greater purpose, I think you’ll have a sense of humor.

What about when people are offended by a joke?

Bob Mankoff: There was a cartoon in The New Yorker of two surgeons cutting open a baby on the operating table and the caption says, “There’s gotta be an easier way to get candy from a baby.” I had this psychotherapist calling to complain. And I’m saying, “It’s a fantasy! Like a children’s fairy tale or Grimm’s.” Let’s understand that the baby getting killed is not real. “We use anesthetic ink,” I say. “There is no baby here.” He was a psychotherapist who treated abused children. And he somehow thought this related to that! That this joke related to abused children!

Jay Dixit: What do you think it was about the joke that he didn’t get?

Todd Hanson: That it’s funny because it’s wrong.

Bob Mankoff: And that it’s not real! It has nothing to do with babies! It’s also his narcissism. Abused children are the most important topic in the world to this guy. Anything that bears on that, he is the monitor. He’s the watchdog against this cartoon being the trigger for someone taking some kid on an operating table.

Todd Hanson: At The Onion we get so many emails that start: “Normally I’m a fan, but the blah blah blah you did recently went too far when you took on the subject of…” And then it’s, “Insert anything that has to do with their specific life.” If it’s whatever happened to you, then it’s wrong, but if it’s one of the many things that didn’t happen to you, it’s OK. So finally we just ran an op-ed called, “That’s Not Funny, My Brother Died That Way.” But the thing the guy is taking offense at is the scene in Police Academy where he goes flying off the edge of his motorcycle and his head goes up the horse’s rectum. And he’s like, “I don’t know how they could make a joke about that, because that’s exactly the way my brother died.”

Bob Mankoff: But that’s such a slippery slope. You have anybody being held up in a cartoon—then you say, “Well, some people get held up and get killed!” So there’s almost nothing you can do.

Sam Lipsyte: Mark Maron got tackled on stage. He did a suicide joke, and some guy’s brother had just attempted suicide and jumped up and tackled him.

Eugene Mirman: You can make a joke that does hit too close to some people, it’s true. I mean, some books make people cry! It’s upsetting, it’s life.

Jay Dixit: How did you become funny?

Eugene Mirman: I was the most hated child in my school system for 10 years. And sort of vaguely started joking around. Somewhere, it went from, “He’s super weird,” to “Oh, he’s funny.” And then it was OK—except for the fact that I was then driven to become a comedian and prove myself to the people I knew in eighth grade.

Todd Hanson: It’s a weird combination of a deeply ingrained sense of self-hatred and a grandiose self-absorbed narcissism.

Arden Myrin: Being an oddball when you were little. I looked like a boy until I was 12. Literally, people would say to me, “What a nice young man!”

Jay Dixit: Do you think there are different motivators for women than men?

Bob Mankoff: Guys want women who laugh at their jokes and women want guys who are funny.

Schaal: Yeah, but I don’t think guys want women who are funnier than them.

Todd Hanson: I don’t like women who are sexier than me. I’m threatened by it. But really, I love women who are funnier than me.

Arden Myrin: I think some guys like it at first, but then get competitive about it. Do you use sex in your act? Either trying to be sexy or making fun of the expectation that you be sexy?

Arden Myrin: There’s a braveness, a certain fearlessness. You can’t be worried about how you look—you just have to leap off. It bothers me in movies when the funny character is just a super hot girl who does a pratfall or something. It’s a bummer because there are so many super funny girls and it would make the movie so much funnier.

Schaal: We had something on The Daily Show called “News I’d Like To F***,” because it’s so obvious networks prefer hot women. Not like they’re going to change.

Todd Hanson: I once wrote a headline for The Onion that didn’t get picked. I was hanging out in the lobby at 30 Rock waiting to do a part on Conan, talking to all the PAs there who all look like models. It was, “Intern Just Happens To Be Beautiful 22-Year-Old Woman.” Like through sheer coincidence, she just happened to be the most qualified one for the job.

Jay Dixit: Tell me one of your favorite bits or jokes in your own genre.

Bob Mankoff: A wonderful cartoon called “January 3 at Rockefeller Center.” It shows that entire huge tree upside down in a tiny little basket. No matter what, Christmas is going to be over.

Arden Myrin: I love Molly Shannon. I love that her characters start out kind of still, and that they’re all at some point going to explode, but you don’t know where or how.

Eugene Mirman: Andy Kindler was talking about a TV show and said, “Not only is that not my cup of tea, it makes me hate tea.”

Todd Hanson: We haven’t talked about anti-humor. Somebody once at The Onion did an anti-joke where they said, “Phrase?! More like slightly different phrase!” Things like that get me—that deconstruction.

Sam Lipsyte: In terms of anti-jokes: A playwright, a friend of mine, Will Eno, had a joke in one his plays, Thom Pain. A horse walks into a bar. Bartender says, “Why the long face?” Horse says, “I have AIDS.”

Bob Mankoff: I like jokes with very long narratives. But there’s one short joke I like where a guy says, “Pretentious? Moi?”

How have your personalities influenced your humor?

Eugene Mirman: Whatever you grew up with is what you become. If you were treated a certain way as a kid, you eventually see yourself that way.

Bob Mankoff: Going back many years, the guys at The New Yorker didn’t go to Harvard, and it wasn’t a training ground for The Simpsons. Now I deal with a lot of kids who were president of the Harvard Lampoon, 800 on their SATs. I don’t see that type of damage. Why would they feel inferior? There doesn’t seem to be that hurt. But they are very clever.

Jay Dixit: What’s their humor like?

Bob Mankoff: I see a lot of incongruity, slapping things together. They’re clever but there’s nothing to say because they haven’t experienced anything. It could just be that they’re young. They see the forms, the tropes, they look at the Lego set and extend and twist it and make something really nice.

Todd Hanson: I think jokes have to say something or there is no point. There has to be a sort of underdog element.

Jay Dixit: Anyone else? How has your personality influenced your humor?

Arden Myrin: I just think I’m super retarded. I got married and my friend’s toast was, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re the most retarded person I’ve ever met.” It was such a compliment! I just think I’m a super goofy girl. I don’t have a lot of other skills, so I’m grateful I can pay my rent doing this.

Sam Lipsyte: Today my 3-year-old son was trying to tell me jokes, or what he considers jokes, but they weren’t funny, I hate to say. My wife and I laughed. “Ha ha, that’s a great joke!” Well, if he was saying 2 and 2 is 5, we wouldn’t say, “Oh, you’re great at math!” We would say, “No, it’s 4.” But we discussed the importance of encouraging, and he’ll get there. “Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “Orange.” “Orange who?” “Building.”

Schaal: Is that his joke? I like that joke.

Bob Mankoff: Experiments on kids show that up until age 3, incongruity is perfectly fine. It doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to be unexpected.

Sam Lipsyte: I think of humor as an activity with my friends. We’re not going bowling, we’re just going to sit around and laugh. They’re not professionals but they can produce laughter in other people.

Todd Hanson: I’m going to have to disagree. I say leave humor to the professionals.

Greg Giraldo

Photo: Dan Dion

In May 2009, I had the privilege of interviewing Greg Giraldo, the dark and brilliant stand-up comedian who, sadly, died yesterday at the age of 44. I owe that honor to my friend Joey Gay, who persuaded the normally reclusive Giraldo to speak to me for a series of celebrity interviews I was doing for Psychology Today.

Giraldo’s intelligence and wit were on display throughout our conversation, but what struck me most was his depression. “I feel like I’m ‘the piece of shit at the center of the universe,’ he told me. “The reality is I’m not a ‘get knocked down and come back harder’ kind of guy.” It saddened me that someone so talented could be so hard on himself. In remembering him, part of our task will be to celebrate the remarkable achievements he himself had difficulty acknowledging.

In trying to fathom Giraldo’s death yesterday from an overdose of prescription drugs, it’s hard not to look for clues in the things he said when I spoke to him. One answer in particular stayed with me.

“I’m a total fuckup, honestly. And I’ve fucked up a lot of things in my life. I’m constantly tortured by a sense of failure. I feel like hiding in drugs or alcohol. I feel like quitting all the time.”

This is the second time I’ve interviewed a great comedian who’s passed away soon afterward. In 2008, I spoke to George Carlin just nine days before he died in what turned out to be George Carlin’s last interview. Like Carlin, Greg Giraldo was a genius and an iconoclast. He will be missed. —Jay Dixit

The Interview

What have been your greatest failures?

It’s hard to distinguish when I was actually struggling from when I only felt like I was struggling—which was pretty much always.

You went to Harvard Law School then dropped out. Tell me about the decision to quit.

It was scary. I had a lot of student debt and I didn’t know where the career was going. I started doing comedy for the hell of it and I thought, “I’ll pursue that somehow until I figure out what I’m actually going to do for a living to pay my loans.” I didn’t think comedy was a viable career option.

But before I quit, I was dying. I mean, I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t like I was a functioning professional and I just made the choice to throw it all away to pursue this crazy dream. I was incapable of being a lawyer. It wasn’t an option. I was going to stop being a lawyer whether I wanted to or not.

How did you feel?

My family was disappointed. But I always wanted to do something creative. I’ve always had real trouble knowing what my actual desires and goals are. I’ve just been dragged along by fate. I can’t even tell you why I thought to go to law school.

What do you think it is about your personality that gives you your sense of purpose?

I’m a total fuckup, honestly. The reality is I’m not this person with this driving “get it done” attitude. I’m a complete fuckup and I’ve fucked up a lot of things in my life. I’m constantly tortured by a sense of failure. I feel like quitting all the time. I feel like hiding in drugs or alcohol. I feel like I’ve failed in terms of what my potential is. I don’t think I’ve achieved my potential because I haven’t worked that hard and I haven’t found the right angles. The reality is, I’m not a “get knocked down and just pull myself back up by my bootstraps and come back harder” kind of guy.

What’s that like, that feeling of being tortured by failure?

It’s a lot of self-hatred. That I should have gone to L.A. for pilot season. That I should have drank a lot less.

There’s all these things I’ve fucked up. If I had only stayed focused, I would have been further along. It’s this constant feeling of not having achieved enough.

What do you do about it? Is it always there? Does it go away if you work harder?

If I’m working on something and I feel like I did a good job, it goes away for a little while. If I write a new chunk of material I love, it goes away for a little bit. If I feel like I have a lot of shows with new material, it goes away for a bit. Then there’s all the other unrelated-to-comedy shit—the therapy, trying to feel like I’m OK where I am.

What effect does it have on you? Does it give you some fire in a way that helps you?

It definitely drives me. That at least is good. The desire to feel like you’re not a loser drives me. I don’t know if that’s the healthiest thing—to be motivated by a fear of hating yourself. But it definitely helps. In a perfect world I would overcome the sense that I suck constantly.

If you did overcome that feeling could you still do comedy?

I used to think maybe not. But I think I have to. For a while I thought dwelling in that darkness and that self-hatred worked, but eventually it becomes more crippling than good. I could definitely still be funny. Some people do better when they’re in a bitter, angry place. I don’t. I think I’m funniest when I’m feeling more optimistic, hopeful about everything.

What about mistakes?

Emotionally I dwell on things forever. I’m an obsessive thinker. I obsess on things I’ve done wrong. Even worse than mistakes, I’ll dwell on what I’m not doing at the moment and what my limitations are.

Give me an example.

What I’m not doing is writing more. Each day that goes by, I think, “I meant to write, but I didn’t.” And the days go by.

Rather than sitting at the computer and writing, actually finishing things and fleshing out thoughts, I just rely on going on stage and dicking around until the funny parts occur to me. I’m constantly tormented by the fact that if I could get organized enough to just sit down and write, I would be 50 times further than I am today, creatively.

Professionally, there are a million things I could do. I’m always asked if I have any ideas for sitcoms or dramas or anything I’d like to pitch. I have a lot of opportunities to come in and have meetings with people who can make decisions on these things… and I don’t.

I’ve had people over the years approach me and say, “Come in any time with movie ideas!” These are people who could make these things happen. I get excited about it, I think about it, I come up with a few ideas, and then I get all fucking ADD and the opportunity slips away. Maybe I should have eaten some protein before we had this conversation. I could have been more upbeat.

What advice would you give to yourself from the outside—or to someone in a similar situation?

On days when I’m feeling positive, I say, “Look. Wait a second. I started doing standup just 17 years ago, just for the hell of it really, and I thought ‘I’ll do this until I figure out what I can really earn a living doing.’ And now all of a sudden I’m really proud of what I can do with standup comedy, I’m a much better standup comic than I ever imagined I would be, and I’ve made a decent living doing it. And it seems like I’m poised to do better.” I’m living the life I’ve always wanted, in a lot of ways. I try to be as appreciative of what I’ve been given as possible. When I’m feeling upbeat that helps.

Staying grateful and even sometimes being so fucking corny as making a mental list of what I have to be grateful for. That definitely helps, when I’m feeling positive. I don’t know if it’s the chicken or egg. When I’m feeling in a darker place, my perception is that everything sucks and even though I’ve done this, it seems I should have done more. Trying to stay grateful helps.

And a lot of times, I’ll think, “I’m not really that talented, and I have maximized what I’ve gotten.” And that I should stop kicking the shit out of myself.

It’s a paradoxical way to look at it—positive and negative at the same time. Who the fuck am I to think I was entitled to this great career? That I should have done more? That I deserved more? I’ve done more than I deserved. Things are going fine.

It’s easy to dwell on how I fucked things up with myself and others, but really, given where I thought this was going to end up when I started, I’m pretty happy with how it’s played out.

But you are successful. So is it that you just think you should be more successful? Or that somehow you’re a fraud because you don’t work that hard and you’ve achieved this success?

You’re coming up with angles that are true that I haven’t thought of!

I’m just wondering what it’s like for you.

A lot of it is fear of the future. Do I want to be a 55-year-old man, working the clubs, traveling around the country, not doing theaters, not being enough of a name? If I didn’t have this family to support, if I wasn’t living in the city, if we weren’t in the greatest fucking economic downturn ever, I would probably feel I was fine.

Yes, I feel, not like a fraud, but frustrated with myself and my limitations. They don’t feel like they’re creative limitations. I just get too distracted by life and don’t focus on what matters to me.

What question should I have asked you that I didn’t ask?

How I feel about Jesus? Gay porn, yea or nay?

As I talk to you, some things are crystallizing in my head. It’s actually very helpful. I hadn’t thought about it this way. Trying to focus on what really it is that matters to me.

When I start to feel like a failure, I realize, it’s really that I haven’t worked harder on my standup. And I can do that. Focusing on things that are manageable, that can be done, things I have control over. Right now I’m feeling like shit. I have two shows tonight. Now’s the time, I’ll definitely crank out some new shit before then. And that gives me a sense of optimism and hope I’m not being crushed by this broader system.

What is it that distracts you?

It’s a lot of things. I have three kids, and I love them more than anything. It’s easy to obsess, not even in a healthy way, distracted by worries about them and their future and how they’re doing. How they feel and how they’re coping. Thoughts that are not productive.

When I’m actually with them, doing things with them, I feel great, fueled by that. But it’s so easy to wallow in self-hatred, like, “Shit, I fucked up. I let my relationship fall apart. Now they’re living with their mom and I don’t see them.” Instead of letting that fuel me creatively, it becomes a sinkhole.

Other things are just general bullshit. I’m easily distracted—I start watching television. I start searching the Web.
For years I’d go on the road and I’d finish the shows and instead of going back to the hotel room and reading, I’d stay out all night and get in all sorts of trouble—trying to escape that sense of fear by ripping it up out there. Getting done with the shows and riding that high, thinking, “I am good, and what better way to keep that going than partying?” That’s been an enormous distraction from my work.

You mentioned letting worry about your kids fuel you creatively versus getting caught in a sinkhole. What’s the trick to letting it fuel you creatively? How do you direct that negative energy to something positive?

I’ve tried to on occasion just write about it and feel being fueled by it creatively is very difficult. Standup in particular is a very specific thing. There’s things you want to talk about, to express—but you have to be funny. And you have to funny to a mass audience. It’s a constant frustrating thing. I might write something I think resonates with me and would with other people in my situation, but it just doesn’t get the laughs you need because you’re performing it for 20-year-olds in the Comedy Cellar.

There’s enormous frustration there. The way it has fueled me recently is this sense that I want my kids to be proud of me, and if I’m not good at what I do, and if I’m not trying my hardest at what I do, then all this shit I’m putting them through because of my demons has been a waste. The very least I can do for them is to be the best I can. That does help me feel like, “OK, take your shit more seriously. Don’t just throw away stage time. Don’t let the days go by without having done any work.” That’s been working. Then sometimes I feel what they need from me is to be relatively content and to be there for them, so I can’t torture myself over this stuff. But I do anyway.

Do you think part of it is that you blame yourself for things that are out of your control?

It could be. I tend to blame myself for everything. There’s an expression I’ve heard used for people in my shoes, people who see themselves like I see myself. I feel like I’m “the piece of shit at the center of the universe.” It’s a paradox. You feel like you’re so shitty you ruin everything, but you’re so important and powerful that you caused it, that you actually are to blame for everything. I’m doing the best I can, and maybe that’s enough. It depends on how much sugar I’ve had that day.

Commando-for-hire John Geddes

What draws you to this? The adventure? The money?
Both. It’s the camaraderie you miss from that military background. It’s mainly the adrenaline and the high adventure.

What’s the transition to civilian life like?
Civilians don’t understand what I’ve seen and done.

What is it that people don’t understand?
Why you risk your life in the military in the first place, and once you get away with it, at least physically, why go do it again and possibly become even more psychologically damaged than you already are.

Psychologically damaged?
Friends of mine have committed suicide from post-traumatic stress. I used to dream—between dreams and nightmares. Teeth grinding. Strangely, what balances you is more trauma and more adrenaline; working in a dangerous place again has more of a calming effect then anything else. It’s a bit of a fix. It’s like Apocalypse Now. When you’re in the jungle all you can think of is home, and when you’re home all you can think of is getting back in the jungle.

Have you dealt with depression too?
I’ve suffered more from survivor’s guilt. I’ve been to over 50 funerals.

What’s it like for your wife?
My wife is a stroke specialist. She sees a lot of death on a daily basis herself. Soldiers, nurses, firefighters, policemen, they share a bond of being on the front lines, that camaraderie. She gets my gallows humor.

Are you afraid of dying?
When I was in Iraq my nightmare was not getting killed but getting captured. I worry about my reputation. How’s it going to look if I lose my client? If I’m captured and wind up on national TV in an orange boiler suit, how embarrassing would that be? So you have to fight to the death. There’s no way I would have been captured alive.

Ever been in a situation you didn’t know how to get out of?
Getting divorced after my first marriage. I’ve never felt so lost in all my life. I was fortunate to find another woman who took the brunt of the rehabilitation.

Can you sense when danger is imminent?
You develop a sixth sense. You pick up on combat indicators—changes of atmosphere. On the road from Jordan to Baghdad, I saw this vehicle in the rearview mirror and immediately knew something was going to happen. They fired a volley of AK rounds in an attempt to pull us over. So I fired from the inside the car, straight through my own door to preserve the element of surprise. From three feet, a burst of automatic fire, armor-piercing rounds, someone’s going to get hurt.

What did you feel at that moment?
A slight pressure on my trigger finger. Sorry, gallows humor.

How did it feel to kill someone?
It’s adrenaline, a little bit of shame. It’s not a natural thing to kill somebody. You never get used to it. But mostly it’s being thankful it wasn’t you and exhilaration that you got away with it again.

A longer version of this interview is available here.

On Friday, June 13th, 2008, I had the extraordinary privilege of talking to George Carlin. As far as I know it was the last in-depth interview he gave before he passed away yesterday at age 71. Originally it was slated to run as a 350-word Q&A on the back page of Psychology Today. But I was so excited to talk to him—and he was so generous with his time—that I just kept on going. By the end I had over 14,000 words.

On stage, George Carlin came across as a grouch, often vulgar and sometimes misanthropic. But with me he was patient and warm, happy to talk through the minutiae of his creative process and eager to share stories about his childhood, his evolution as a comic, and his influence. What struck me most was the joy in his voice as he talked about the wonderful feeling he got in his gut while writing. I was also moved by the gratitude he expressed for his mother, who he said “saved” him and his brother—leaving her bullying, alcoholic husband when George was just two months old, getting a job during the worst years of the Depression, and raising two boys on her own.

He spoke about the pride he took in his work. As a ninth-grade dropout, he said, it was gratifying to see his words quoted in textbooks, classrooms, and courtrooms. And he was proud to have inspired other comedy greats, who routinely called him to say, “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be doing this.” As he looked back on his astonishingly prolific 50-year career—which includes 130 Tonight Show appearances, 23 albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, and one Supreme Court case—the interview became a sort of retrospective of his life.

Finally, after two hours, he gently mentioned that his arm was getting tired from holding the phone. “I really appreciate all the thought you’ve put into all these questions. Really, it’s the most complete interview I’ve ever done,” he said. “Is it tomorrow yet? I think it is.”

“It feels like it is,” I said, struggling to keep up with his wit.

“All this is for a quote unquote back page?” he said.

“This is for the back page, but, I don’t know, I just love you and your work so much!” I gushed. “I just had so much I wanted to ask.”

At the time, I was embarrassed by what I’d said. But when I heard the sad news this morning, my feelings changed instantly. I’m honored that I got to speak to him, and I’m grateful that I got to tell him how much I admired him before he died.

It would be impossible to overstate George Carlin’s contribution to standup comedy. Along with Richard Pryor and a few others, he essentially created the genre as we know it today. But he was more than just a comedy pioneer. He was a freethinker who never backed down, and he truly changed the course of American culture. He will be missed. —Jay Dixit

The Interview

What follows are edited highlights. They represent a little over half of the interview.

How do you think about comedy and self-expression? Expressing what’s within vs. looking at the outside world and making observations?

Self-expression is a hallmark of an artist, of art, to get something off one’s chest, to sing one’s song. So that element is present in all art. And comedy, although it is not one of the fine arts—it’s a vulgar art, it’s one of the people’s arts, it’s the spoken word, the writing that goes into it is an art form—it’s certainly artistry. So self-expression is the key to even standing up and saying, “Hey, listen to me.” Self-expression can be based on looking at the world and making observations about it or not. Comedy can also be based on describing one’s inner self—doing anecdotes, talking about your own fears. Woody Allen taps into a lot of self-analysis in his comedy. But I don’t think these things are mutually exclusive. I think self-expression is present at all times, and whether or not you’re talking about the outside world or your responses to it depends on the moment and the subject.

Do you go around observing and trying to collect funny things? Or do you just live your life and then say how you feel about what you happen to have seen?

I’m 71, and I’ve been doing this for a little over 50 years, doing it at a fairly visible level for 40. By this time it’s all second nature. It’s all a machine that works a certain way: the observations, the immediate evaluation of the observation, and then the mental filing of it, or writing it down on a piece of paper. I’ve often described the way a 20-year-old versus, say, a 60- or a 70-year-old, the way it works. A 20-year-old has a limited amount of data they’ve experienced, either seeing or listening to the world. At 70 it’s a much richer storage area, the matrix inside is more textured, and has more contours to it. So, observations made by a 20-year-old are compared against a data set that is incomplete. Observations made by a 60-year-old are compared against a much richer data set. And the observations have more resonance, they’re richer.

So if I write something down, some observation—I see something on television that reminds me of something I wanted to say already—the first time I write it, the first time I hear it, it makes an impression. The first time I write it down, it makes a second impression, a deeper path. Every time I look at that piece of paper, until I file it in my file, each time, the path gets a little richer and deeper so that these things are all in there.

Now at this age, I have a network of knowledge and data and observations and feelings and values and evaluations I have in me that do things automatically. And then when I sit down to consciously write, that’s when I bring the craftsmanship. That’s when I pull everything together and say, how I can best express that? And then as you write, you find more, ’cause the mind is looking for further connections. And these things just flow into your head and you write them. And the writing is the really wonderful part. A lot of this is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and that’s our job is to just notice them and bring them to life.

Do you think that the richness you described comes from just being able to access more experiences, having information on file? Or is it judgment?

Well, that’s true, too. The machine that does all this learns what it is you want—it learns what it is that serves your purpose and it begins to tailor the synthesis. It synthesizes these observations and these comparisons. Comedy’s all about comparisons and contrasts and congruities and incongruities and heightenings and understatement and exaggeration. The mind has all of that stuff built in, and it learns which ones pay off the best for you. It’s probably related to the pleasure center. You get so much pleasure finding good observations and finding which things are the richest things you can say, that probably the brain remembers how that happened and learns to provide the best stuff. Maybe you have a little silent editor in there.

You talked about how comedy’s all about incongruities, contrasts, exaggeration. Do you think about those techniques or those principles of humor consciously?

It happens automatically. Sometimes there’s a conscious heightening, you’ll recognize you’ve just chosen an image to make a point. Then your mind will just suddenly throw something at you that’s stronger—a heightening, to raise the stakes, a stronger word, a more visceral image, something that lights up the imagination, much better than the original thought. So you’re aware that you’re heightening and exaggerating further but you don’t use the word exaggeration or anything like that. All that stuff is just happening. And sometimes, afterward, I’ll look at something and say, “If I were giving a comedy lecture, that would be a good example.” I often think in those terms.

Do you think there are any downsides to having gotten to the point where you are, where all of this is happening automatically? Or are there some advantages a 20-year-old would have?

Well, I would imagine there are some that I can’t put my finger on because I don’t remember what it was like. I was a different man. I don’t know—the advantage that a 20 year old would have would be more longevity to look forward to.

You talked about how wonderful it is, this feeling of writing. So what is your process like?

I take a lot of single-page notes, little memo pad notes. I make a lot of notes on those things. For when I’m not near a little memo pad, I have a digital recorder. Most of the note-taking happens while I’m watching television.

Because the world is undifferentiated on the television set. You may be watching the news channel, but it’s going to cover the breadth of American life and the human experience. It’s gonna go from suicide bombings to frivolous consumer goods. It’s a broad window on the world, and a lot of things are already established in my mind as things I say, things that I’m interested in, things that are fodder for my machine. And when I see something that relates to one of them, I know it instantly and if it’s a further exaggeration and a further addition, or an exception—if it plays into furthering my purpose, I jot it down.

When I harvest the pieces of paper and I go through them and sort them, the one lucky thing I got in my genetic package was a great methodical left brain. I have a very orderly mind that wants to classify and index things and label them and store them according to that. I had a boss in radio when I was 18 years old, and my boss told me to write down every idea I get even if I can’t use it at the time, and then file it away and have a system for filing it away—because a good idea is of no use to you unless you can find it. And that stuck with me.

And what’s your filing system?

There’s a large segment of it devoted to language, which is a love of mine. And a rich area for my work talking about how we talk. One of the files is called “The Way We Talk.” And it’s about certain voguish words that come into style and remain there. But then there are subfiles. Everything has subfiles. There’s one that says “Crime.” There’s “Crime” and there’s “Law,” there’s “Sex” and there’s “Race.” And there’s “Humans”—that’s obviously a big folder with a lot of smaller folders in it, it’s about the human race and the human species and experiences and observations I have about that, or data that I’ve found about it. You know, 6 million people stepped on land mines this year. Those things interest me.

And there’s “America,” and America is a major category, of course. It breaks down into the culture, and the culture breaks down into further things. It’s like nested boxes, like the Russian dolls—it’s just folders within folders within folders. But I know how to navigate it very well, and I’m a Macintosh a guy and so Spotlight helps me a lot. I just get on Spotlight and say, let’s see, if I say “asshole” and “minister,” I then can find what I want find.

What’s the process of going from something that’s true about the world—observing it—to actually making people laugh?

I begin with the knowledge that my audience knows me thoroughly. I know the things they will trust coming from me, and I know they’ll allow me to do exposition that’s necessary to set the stage for the piece of material. The funny—that’s part of the genetic package. The genetic marker for language came through my family. My grandfather, whom I didn’t know, was a New York City policeman. I did not know him. During his adult life, he wrote out Shakespeare’s tragedies longhand just for the joy it gave him. And he asked questions about language at his dinner table, my mother told me. My mother had a great love of language, and a great gift for language. The Irish have a genetic tradition, it seems, an affinity for language and expression. And so I got that. The Irish say: “You don’t lick it off the rocks, kid.” It comes in the blood. So, I have that and I don’t have to do anything about it.

As Noel Coward said, “All I ever had was a talent to amuse.” I have a talent to amuse and I have a way of finding the joke, a way of expressing things through exaggeration, interesting images, whatever goes in, whatever the parts are that go into making these things work.

I try to come in through the side door. One of the voguish terms, which is so repellant to me, “thinking outside the box.” To settle for that kind of language is embarrassing. But that’s a very useful picture. I try to come in through the side door, the side window, to come in from a direction they’re not expecting, to see something in a different way. That’s the job that I give myself. So, how can I talk about something eminently familiar to them, on my terms, in a new way, that engages their imagination?

The jokes come. You don’t look for them. It’s all automatic, and, I think, genetic. My father was an after dinner speaker, was a great raconteur. He was an ad salesman for space in newspapers during the 1930s, when that was the primary medium of advertising, and my mother was in advertising her whole life. They both were very funny, and they both were very gifted verbally. So, those things come to you automatically. It’s like being a child prodigy with the violin or the piano. It’s not something you try for or you have to do too much about except work at it. And that’s what I try to do.

How is it that you find things that are unexpected?

I don’t know. But I want to add an element I overlooked. Psychology. We’re talking about a magazine called Psychology Today.

As a child, my father was gone. I had no grandparents; they were all dead. Had no real cousins to play with, and I didn’t give a shit, frankly. I experienced my life in a very happy way, but, what I want to say to you is, I was alone as a child. My father was dead. My mother left him when I was 2 months old and he died when I was 8 years old. He drank too much and he was a bully and she had the courage to take two boys, one of them two months old and one of them 5 years old and to leave him in 1937 and get back into the business world and get a job and raise us through the end of the Depression and through the Second World War. She did a great job, but she was at work until 7 or 7:30 at night many nights.

So I spent a lot of time on my own. In the house or out around the neighborhood or sneaking in the subway, going down to 42nd street, traveling around Manhattan Island, learning it as a youngster. And I experienced that—because psychologists ask you not if something’s good or bad, but how do you experience it—I experienced that as freedom, independence, autonomy. And I was brought up on that feeling. That’s what made me, I think, able to quit school, and go out and try to start my life and career early, because I had that strength.

And my mother had that strength. I witnessed it. I mean, what she did was she took us away from him and saved us. So, those qualities of being alone like that fostered in me a need for adult approval and attention. Now they say that it’s kind of a common cliché that comedians just want attention. But it’s an element that’s very important. The job is called “look at me.” That’s the name of this job. “Look at me. Ain’t I smart? Ain’t I cute? Ain’t I clever?”

I needed to be—not the center of attention—but I needed to be able to attract attention when I wanted it, through my stunts and my fooling around physically with faces or postures or voices I would do. Then it became funny the things I would say, and I became more of a wit than simply a mimic and a clown. And so, those things were all important in this. The fact that I didn’t finish school left me with a lifelong need to prove that I’m smart, prove it to myself, maybe to the world. “Ain’t I smart, ain’t I cute, ain’t I clever.” “Listen to me, listen to what I got to say.” So, those things are important elements in the drive behind all of this.

You made an analogy to playing the violin. I wanted to ask you about mastery. You’ve been doing this for, as you said, over 50 years, and it seems like you’ve only gotten better with time. So I’m wondering what you think has enabled you to do that. Is it like playing the violin? Is it just practice? Is it getting good feedback? Is it—you know, what is it that allows you to hone your craft?

The feedback that I’ve gotten has been through the success of the career. That’s a reinforcing factor. I say: Oh, that works, oh that’s what I do, I see. I think with anything you do over a long period of time, you should be getting better at it. I’m talking about craft, art, or drive that comes from inside.

What is your philosophy about physical performance? You walk around a lot, you make a lot of gestures.

It’s just second nature, you don’t think about it at all. And I don’t pace as much on stage as I used to, maybe it’s my age, I don’t know. I don’t feel limited physically, in that respect, but it’s just something I’ve grown into.

Were you always making people laugh, sort of automatically, just because of your personality?

Yeah. As I was describing, this is a job for a showoff. In those 8 years of grammar school that I had—the 9th year was kind of a it was a Irish catholic Christian brothers, and it was a much more brutal setting than these lovely nuns we had. So I think of those 8 years as my education. I got the work very easily, I didn’t have any trouble grasping the work, and so I had time to clown, time to signal to my buddy, make a face, make a fart under the arm, I was a bit of a class clown, I was a neighborhood cut-up.

I eventually started doing routines when I was about 14, 15 16. I would do routines on the street corner for my buddies on the stoop. My mother wanted me to finish high school, go to college, be an advertising man, be a businessman like the men at her office whom she admired. But she couldn’t stop this other machine that was revving up.

I had an 8th grade graduation from the grammar school—it was the only graduation I ever had. And in 9th grade, while I was at that school, I had a Brother, one of the brothers who taught, his name was Brother Conrad. My mother had said to me, now George, I didn’t get you a graduation present, and this was June 1951, this was now the fall of 1951, when I’m in first year of high school. She said, “I didn’t get you a graduation present, so you be thinking about what you might want.”

Brother Conrad was telling the class one day that because he had a clergyman’s discount rate, he could get cameras for people. Then he mentioned tape recorders and man, the bell went off in my head! Tape recorders at that time were virtually unknown to the average person. They may have heard about them here or there. They were not consumer items.

She bought me a tape recorder, a Webcor. And that became a tool for me to put some of these verbal impulses to work. I began to produce little radio shows on it at home by using the phonograph. Playing a record on the phonograph, like playing the Dragnet theme. Dun da dun dun. Dun da dun dun duuun.

Then I would fade the phonograph down and I would come in and I would do my make-believe announcer. I did newscasts, I did sports. A lot of the things that I ventured into professionally in my first stage of comedy I was doing on that tape recorder. I recorded a whole half hour of story—it was like a vignette, like a series of vignettes, a drama, about my neighborhood. And guess what: I made fun of authority figures.

So my mother—in spite what she wanted me to do for her, to be a great reflection on her, go to college and be a businessman—she knew this was something I needed. And she got that for me, and it helped accelerate the beginnings of my putting this dream together that I had. I was 14 when I got that tape recorder. They were the size of a Buick. They were not little handy things. And she was smart enough to get me one. That’s an important part of my development.

Can you remember the first joke you ever told?

No. But I do remember the first time I ever made my mother laugh. And unfortunately, it’s lost on me what it was I said. But I noticed the moment, I knew something had happened, this was when I was very young. My mother laughed fairly frequently. But I knew the difference between her social laugh and her really spontaneous laugh when she was caught off guard—which is the key to laugher, being off guard. And I said something to her, and I saw that in her and it registered with me. And it made the point. I wouldn’t have remembered it as well as I do if it hadn’t meant a lot to me. It was a kind of a little mark along the way, a little badge of honor. It meant I had said something witty. I didn’t clown, I wasn’t making a face or standing in a funny angle. I had said something witty. I had probably turned some situation around, exaggerated one element, and made a joke.

I want to talk about the transformation that you did in the 60s when you went from what you once termed the “middle-American comic” to this different persona—it was much more subversive. How did that happen and why did that happen?

I was always swimming against the tide. I was always out of step. Not only did I quit school, but I got kicked out of three schools along the way. I eventually got asked to leave the air force a year early—it wasn’t dishonorable, but it was a general discharge, which is a step down—because I did not shape up, I didn’t like authority, I had three court-martials. I was kicked off the alter boys, I was kicked off the choirboys, I was kicked out of the boy scouts, I was kicked out of summer camp. I never fit and I didn’t like conforming. And sometimes it just broke through the membrane, and I was out.

By the end of the 60s, all of my friends, the musician friends of mine, had gone through a transition in their dress, and especially in their music, and what I noticed was that all of these great artists—Bob Dylan, Buffalo Springfield, Joan Baez—all of these people were using their art to express themselves politically and socially. And I was not. I was still doing people-pleasing.

I was 30, and I resonated much more truly with the 20-year-olds. I was more in line with them than I was with these people I was entertaining in nightclubs. I began to notice that. I began to be affected by it, and along the way, the judicious use of some mescaline and some LSD managed to accelerate the process. It gave me more of an insight into how false the world was I was settling for, and to see that there was something much richer and better and more authentic. And those changes happened, they just—they happened naturally and organically. It took about 2 years for the total changeover to occur.

My beard got a little longer, the hair got a little longer, the clothing changed, and then I suddenly found myself being as—the best combination of both, this person I really was who was kind of out of step, antiauthoritarian, who also had these skills and talents that he was honing to express himself. And so I started expressing those feelings.

In what way did the mescaline and LSD give you the insight and the confidence to make this transformation? What role did the drugs play?

Well, It was just passive, I don’t know. See, I had always been a marijuana smoker, a pretty heavy user of marijuana, all these years I’m talking about when I was in this other world of mainstream television, nightclubs. So marijuana is a hallucinogen and it is also a value-changing drug, as are acid and mescaline. They are hallucinogens and they are value-changing drugs. They alter, assist in shifting one’s perspective on the world which usually is informed by your values. And so I had already, my body, my mind, and myself—I already had a kind of a thick layer of this out-of-stepness.

And so I was already across that street. And I just hadn’t, you know, bought a house on that side yet. So, the LSD was a much stronger experience, and the mescaline, and I don’t know what they did or how they did it, I just know that going through that gave me the confidence in these changes I was feeling, in this direction, this metamorphosis, I was in the middle of. I gained confidence in it and I took strength from it, feeling that I was right that I was really on the right path, that I was being true to myself. And that was what counted to me, to be true to myself—my mother had always said that. To thine—Shakespeare—“To thine own self be true.” She loved quoting the classics, and she quoted Emerson or Shakespeare or whoever it was she thought was appropriate for her lesson. And to thine own self be true. And I just—I just had to be who I felt like I was, not who I had led them to believe I was.

So after that transformation, to what extent is the persona that you have on stage—to what extent is it your real personality? I know you’re making jokes and some of that involves exaggeration, but do you feel that you’re acting angrier, more bitter, more caustic on stage? Or are you just being yourself as accurately as possible?

I’ve addressed this before when the question is asked more bluntly: Are you an angry man? What are you angry about; what are you so angry about? I don’t live an angry life, not an angry person. I rarely lose my temper, can’t remember the last time, never had a physical fight in my life, don’t carry grudges, don’t carry resentment either. Very very lucky in those respects. But I feel a very strong alienation and dissatisfaction from my groups.

Abraham Maslow said the fully realized man does not identify with the local group. When I saw that, it rang another bell. I thought: bingo! I do not identify with the local group, I do not feel a part of it. I really have never felt like a participant, I’ve always felt like an observer. Always. I only identified this in retrospect, way after the fact, that I have been on the outside, and I don’t like being on the inside. I don’t like being in their world. I’ve never felt comfortable there; I don’t belong to that. So, when he says the “local group,” I take that as meaning a lot of things: the local social clubs or fraternal orders, or lodges or associations or clubs of any kind, things where you sacrifice your individual identity for the sake of a group, for the sake of the group mind. I’ve always felt different and outside. Now, I also extended that, once again in retrospect, as I examined my feelings.

I don’t really identify with America, I don’t really feel like an American or part of the American experience, and I don’t really feel like a member of the human race, to tell you the truth. I know I am, but I really don’t. All the definitions are there, but I don’t really feel a part of it. I think I have found a detached point of view, an ideal emotional detachment from the American experience and culture and the human experience and culture and human choices.

But even if I am a cynic, they say if you scratch a cynic, you find a disappointed idealist—that’s what’s underneath. That’s the little flicker of flame, has a little life in it, the idealist: I would love to be able to entertain that side of me, but it doesn’t work like that. I don’t see what’s in it yet, I mean I just like it out here.

I’m not an angry person, just very disappointed and contemptuous of my fellow humans’ choices—and on stage those feelings sometimes are exaggerated for a theatric stage—you’re on a stage you have an audience of 2500 or 3000 people: you need to project the feelings, the emotions it’s heightened, and people mistake it for a personal anger but it’s more dissatisfaction, disappointment and contempt for these things we’ve settled for.

So it sounds like it is your true personality, but it’s heightened for the stage.

It is my true personality, but it’s not an angry personality. Anger is a handy term and boy words are tricky, as we know. What one man perceives as anger, another person—in my case the deliverer of material—is, “Don’t you see it, don’t you see how badly you’re doing?” It’s like shaking a child—which you’re not supposed to do.

So let me latch onto that feeling. You’re grabbing somebody and you’re saying, “Don’t you see it?” But if you really don’t care about America, then why are you doing it? Why are you on stage? Is it just because you want to express yourself? Do you hope you can influence people in some way?

You’ve hit on the contradiction, and it’s one I don’t understand the resolution to, if there is one. Sometimes people say, do I try to make audiences think? I say: No no no, because that really would be the kiss of death. But what I want them to know is that I’m thinking. It’s part of that showoff and dropout syndrome. I think I need to show them that I have brought myself to a cleverer, smarter spot than they have. In doing so, “Can’t you see this? can’t you see?” And a lot of them do. I get amazing things said to me. And they’re frequent enough that I know these things are multiplied by those who have never encountered you. One person who says, “You really changed my outlook on things or the way I view X Y or Z,” for everyone who says that to you, there are a thousand, ten thousand who’ll never get to tell you that. There are people who take something away form what I do, and I know that and it pleases me and I am proud of that. And it means the student is a bit of a teacher.

But yeah, of course I care. Of course I care. My daughter has pinned me on that. She says of course you care, can’t you hear it? And I say yeah yeah yeah, but they gotta prove it to me first. Show me you care people and then I’ll let some of it out; right now I just want to scold you a little bit.

So how would you say that you feel towards people? You say on the one hand you are sort of contemptuous but on the other hand you want their approval in some way? Is that not a contradiction?

Yeah, it sounds like it has the makings of a contradiction; I guess by definition it does. I am contemptuous of the mass. That’s the thing I need to explain. One on one with people, I have great capacity and great compassion. I don’t like standing around 20 minutes talking to somebody, but when I see individuals, I see their individual beauty. I’m aware of the potential—and I don’t mean this happened every time I meet someone—but when I see people, I sort of see the potential for the whole species. When you look in their eyes, you can see a hologram of the human species and you kind of know what we could have been. It’s the group behavior that I’m talking about on stage.

Let’s switch gears a little bit and let me ask you about religion. I mean you were talking about it decades ago. Now, atheism and religion bashing have gone mainstream: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris. You were way ahead of the curve. What’s it like hearing them saying many of the things you said in the 1970s?

I’ve read some of the books you’ve mentioned and some of the reasons of existence and God and what a bad name religion has given God. I just kind of do this, I just keep moving along. I don’t really judge it… I reserve my evaluations and judgments for the parts that I do, the lines I add. I don’t think about myself in the larger world very much.

Richard Dawkins did use an excerpt of mine for a chapter heading. I noticed that. It’s nice. Not to overdo this thing, but when you’re a dropout and the culture accepts you and begins to quote and they teach some of your stuff in communications class and communications law and I hear this all the time and professors ask to use things in their textbooks, this is kind of my honorary baccalaureate. When these things happen I think good, well, there’s a little thumb on my chest, feather in my cap. I notice those things, and I feel good about what I’ve chosen and how I do it. As Lily Tomlin once said, and I am going to get this wrong so it’s a paraphrase, she said to be considered a success in a mediocre culture doesn’t say a lot for you.

You were central in the Supreme Court case in which justices affirmed the government’s right to regulate your “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” act on the public airwaves. How do you think about the role of vulgarity in your humor?

I used to point out that when I was a little boy in the 40s, I was told to look up to and admire solders and sailors, policemen, firemen, and athletes, were objects of childhood hero worship. We all know how they talk. So apparently these words do not corrupt morally. This was the thing I couldn’t put together.

I use the words because I’m from that ethos. I’m from the street in New York, hung around in a tough neighborhood. It was common to curse, you make your point. It’s a very effective language. I try not to overdo it. It’s never to shock. I know where it fits, it’s never to shock. There’s no shock value left in words. Humor is base on surprise, and surprise is a milder way of saying shock. It’s surprise that makes the joke.

What’s the funniest bit you’ve ever heard?

Sometimes jokes have a wonderful logic to them. I’ll give you one that, even to people that don’t mind mild cursing, bothers some people—especially women. Short joke. The wonderful thing about it is the logic of the joke, the ingenuity.

Father and son, little son are out on the back porch, passing the day, father says to son, “Do you have perhaps any questions for me about sex?” And he says, “Well, yeah Dad, what is that hairy area on Mommy?” And the father says, “Well, that’s her vulva.” And the boy says, “Well then what’s a cunt?” And the father says, “That’s rest of Mommy.”

And that joke strikes a nerve, hits a chord—men who’ve been divorced more than twice really like that. It makes beautiful use of that man’s thought. To arrive at that distinction—to take it from the real to the figurative. From cunt as a sexual part to cunt as a term of derision for women, just as men are called assholes by certain women—and they deserve it. It’s funny how we use words. The fact that a mean woman is called a cunt and a mean man is called a prick. I have a long thing I’d like to write someday about language and the way we address each other.

How has your comedy changed over the years?

You know for a guy who didn’t do homework, the thing that’s happened is this: that 6th grade showoff that kid who had to sing a song at meetings, who won the medal at camp for being funniest guy at amateur night 5 years in a row. He didn’t do his homework then. I didn’t do book reports, but now what’s happened is that showoff has a partner who does his homework and the left/right brain are allied, united, now in a way they weren’t. I’m using my organizational ability, and my writing ability which is careful process, informed by art, but still a craft of putting things together, I’ve somehow become more integrated. I do my homework now but I stand up and show off. So I got both, I got the best of both sixth grade worlds.

You asked me to remind you to tell me about Arthur Koestler.

That was another impact. I was doing nightclub comedy down in the Village. I was down there in ’63, ’64, and my friend told me about Arthur Koestler’s book about the act of creation and it had a section on humor.

He was talking about the creative process. There was an illustration on the panel that showed a triptych. On the left panel, there were these names of artistic pursuits. There were poets, painter, composer. And one of them was jester. I was only interested in the jester. What he said about each of these, he said these individuals on the left hand side can transcend the panels of the triptych by creative growth.

The jester makes jokes, he’s funny, he makes fun, he ridicules. But if his ridicules are based on sound ideas and thinking, then he can proceed to the second panel, which is the thinker—he called it the philosopher. The jester becomes the philosopher, and if he does these things with dazzling language that we marvel at, then he becomes a poet too. Then the jester can be a thinking jester who thinks poetically.

I didn’t see that and say, “That’s what I am going to do,” but I guess it made an impression on me. I was never afraid to grow and change. I never was afraid of reversing my field on people, and I just think I’ve become a touch of each of those second and third descriptions and I definitely have a gift for language that is rhythmic and attractive to the ear, and I have interesting imagery which I guess is a poetic touch. And I like the fact that most of my things are based on solid ideas, things I’ve thought about in a new way for me, things for which I have said “Well, what about this? Suppose you look at it this way? How about that?” And then you heighten and exaggerate that, because comedy’s all about heightening and exaggerating. And anyways I guess I was impressed that there was another thing from my early life that probably at least influenced me to some level.

It sounds like you think of yourself much more as a writer than a performer—is that true? How do you think about performing?

It’s my primary delivery system. I used to, in my early years, when I would do an interview I was always proud to tell the writer that I wrote my own material, if they asked me or even if they didn’t. I wanted to be distinguished from the ones who didn’t do that, and I was proud of it, so I would say I am a comedian who writes his own material. And then at some point, I discovered what I really had become was a writer who performs his own material.

This was a really important distinction for me to notice—it happened way after the fact. I’m a writer. I think of myself as a writer. First of all, I’m an entertainer; I’m in the vulgar arts. I travel around talking and saying things and entertaining, but it’s in service of my art and it’s informed by that. So I get to write for two destinations. The writing is what gives me the joy, especially editing myself for the page, and getting something ready to show to the editors, and then to have a first draft and get it back and work to fix it, I love reworking, I love editing, love love love revision, revision, revision, revision.

And computers changed my life, the fact that you can move text as easily as you can move text, and say, “Wait a minute, these two things belong together, these two things go together, page 2 and page 5: similar ideas, put ’em together!” But the person who is most a part of me is the performer, is the standup, the guy who says, “Hey look at me, listen to this!” I do that because that’s what I do, I love doing it.

And I love the feeling I get in my gut when I’m watching on the computer screen that is close to being realized the way I would like it to be. the feeling I get in my gut is “Wait’ll they hear this, wait’ll I tell them this, I can’t wait to tell them!” It’s like the guy on the end of the bench: “Put me in coach, put me in!” They call to me, I can tell which ones are pregnant, which ones need to be moved up to a higher level of readiness, and it’s because I can’t wait to say them, I can’t wait to share them with people.

You know, you get 2500 people, acting as a single organism: the audience is a single organism and it’s you and it. And to have that feeling of mastery up there—it’s an assertion of power: here I am, I have the microphone, you came here for this express purpose. You’re sitting not in tables at nightclubs with waiters and glasses, you’re seated all facing forward in order to enjoy this and here I am, and wait till you hear this! There’s nothing like it in my experience that I could aspire to. It has as much a payoff as writing, which has a big payoff.

So, sitting in front of a computer, “Wait till they hear this, this is great material.” What’s the difference between that and actually standing on stage hearing the audience roaring with laughter?

The difference is, at the computer you can stop, think back, think forward, look around, turn the page as it were, you can see the whole world all at once. On stage you’re only in a single moment ever—your mind can hear what you just said. This is a funny thing that happens for me: when I’m up there doing something I’ve memorized perfectly, and it has pauses in it—and of course the laughs are all the pauses. As you’re going along, you’re thinking of what you’re saying, you want to give it the proper vocal values, so you are kind of thinking about it, not reaching for the words, but kind of thinking about them. You’re also aware of the echo of what you just said, and whether it worked or not, and what that might mean. It’s all part of the trigonometry, I guess. And then there is the faint anticipation of what comes next.

It’s like the feeling of conducting an orchestra. It’s like conducting an orchestra, this group of people who already like you, predisposed to appreciate you, at your service, at you’re command, and you’re just waving the baton and bringing them in, leading them forward and it’s just a nice kind of feeling.

Let me ask you about your influence—how do you feel that you have influenced other comedians?

I hear that from some of them, who say, “I wouldn’t be doing this were it not for you.” I talked to a very prominent name in comedy today who wanted to pay me some kind compliments about the recent HBO show, he hasn’t been able to catch up with me, I won’t mention him, but everybody would know his name. He said also in passing, “You know, I wouldn’t be doing this without you.” There have been people, who, I don’t know, because I came along at a certain time. Richard Pryor and I went through our changes at the same time, he became prominent at the same time. I had this kind of reemergence. I’m sure Richard Pryor would hear those things. I’m sure Woody Allen hears those things. I don’t take them as singular to me. But I know they’re true when I’m told, I realized I could be myself, could talk about this and that and not be afraid; I’m sure all artists hear similar things, especially ones who have lasted a while.

[Note: Jerry Seinfeld has since identified himself as the prominent comedian who spoke to George Carlin just before I did. "I called him to compliment him on his most recent special on HBO," writes Seinfeld in a New York Times op-ed. "Seventy years old and he cranks out another hour of great new stuff. He was in a hotel room in Las Vegas getting ready for his show. He was a monster." —JD]

Do you mentor other comedians?

No. I’m not collegial, I don’t hang out. I’m soloist, I like my solitude, I don’t really hang around with comedians—this person I talked to today, I now have his phone number. I have maybe five phone numbers. I’m not in show business because I don’t have to go to the meetings, I’m just not a part of it, I don’t belong to it. When you “belong” to something. You want to think about that word, “belong.” People should think about that: it means they own you. If you belong to something it owns you, and I just don’t care for that. I like spinning out here like one of those subatomic particles that they can’t quite pin down.

Has your sense of humor helped you in other areas of your life, besides your career as a professional comedian? Meeting people? Making friends? Dealing with loss?

I don’t know about any of those aspects. But I know that the art of not taking things seriously often bleeds over into the self, to not take yourself too seriously. You can tell from my answers that I take what I do very seriously, and I think about it. But I don’t really take myself that seriously.

I know that I’ve accomplished a good deal. I was just nominated for this year’s Mark Twain prize at the Kennedy Center, so these things over the years mean, “Yeah, good job, George.” I don’t take myself very seriously, though, at least I don’t think so. I try to see the reality and not get carried away with the emotion. What’s the reality? What’s going on here? What’s the ground floor? What’s the reality? Let’s look at the situation: “So he’s dead, she’s hurt, and you don’t feel good.” OK, so let’s figure this out.

I like to say two things in life that mean the most: genetics and luck. When you look at it realistically, genetics is luck too. Because you could have been born in some really terrible situation and never had a chance to realize yourself or see who you were. And so the luck of genetics and then after that, circumstances, those are the two guiding things. Knowing what to do about it, taking advantage of it, that’s fine, that’s good, good for you. But still, those two elements mean everything.

My arm is getting tired here. The crook of my arm.

I guess I’m pretty much done. We’ve been talking for a long time and I really appreciate your taking all this time. Was there a good question you thought people should ask that never got asked?

No, because you covered some of the ones, as they came along. As I looked at the list yesterday, I thought the list gave me an opportunity for several places where I want, need to be heard—such as the anger thing, development, and the changes I went through in the late 60s. They were all in there so I feel good.

So the last question is: What are you working on now?

I have a piece of material that I’m doing on stage these days. I’m in Las Vegas now. I do weekends here, I do four nights on weekends as part of my year of touring. I go mostly to concert halls and theaters, around 80 or 90 of ‘em a year. But I come down here around three or four. So I’m down here. This piece of material called, “There’s Too Much Fucking Music,” which is my way of looking at… how much music there is, I guess. It’s just my way of looking at the world and saying something that people don’t notice and figuring out a new way. And it’s filled with exaggeration and stuff. I’m doing that on stage a little bit. I’m not giving myself any pressure.

The lady in my life Sally Wade and I are waiting for our house to be finished remodeling. We’re in temporary quarters. It’s kind of onerous. We’re lucky we found a place right down the street but the price we pay for being right down the street is that it’s not really suitable in terms of space and structure for our needs. So we’re really in combat duty. It’s been a tough time. Not so tough you can’t work it out, you know, but just enough so it’s broken some of my work habits. And I’m enjoying my break from them and I know where I have to go on the next book, I have a book that I’m going to start organizing the files, reorganizing, renaming, reclassifying, putting things together, taking things apart. And there’ll be another HBO show as these pieces on stage begin to take form.

Is there anything else you want to add?

No! And I really appreciate all the thought you’ve put into all these questions. Really, it’s the most complete interview I’ve ever done. Is it tomorrow yet? I think it is.

Nastia Liukin

What are you most proud of?

Winning the All-Around Gold at the Olympic Games this past summer.

What were you feeling after you won?

A big sigh of relief, because I did have some difficult times. I had an injury and so many people started doubting me and questioning whether I would even be on the Olympic Team. Those tough times made me even stronger. They got me to where I was last summer. Without my injury I wouldn’t have been as strong, just because I tried so hard to get back into it.

When did you feel most hopeless or discouraged?

In 2006, I did have that injury. I had to get surgery on my ankle. The recovery just took so long. I’d never had a serious injury like that. I wasn’t aware of what was going to come. It took longer than we planned for. That was frustrating, trying to get ready for the Olympics when I was still hurting really bad, and doing minimal training and just trying to avoid pain. Competitively, the year before the Olympics, 2007, was my worst year. Not too good to have that the year before the Olympics. But like I said, it made me stronger.

Why was that year your worst competitively? Was it because you were still not fully recovered? Or because you hadn’t had time to practice after you were recovered?

I wasn’t able to put in the necessary training because I was still hurt. I was in so much pain I wasn’t able to train. So when I went to competitions, I wasn’t physically prepared.

Was there ever a time when you had a setback and you felt like it was your own fault or you blamed yourself?

Of course the injury. The only person you can blame the injury on is yourself. That was frustrating. It was a mistake.

Did you feel like it was just chance-everyone gets injured sooner or later? Or do you feel like there was something you could have done differently and you were kicking yourself?

When I got injured, it was because of a fluke mistake. I rolled my ankle. And I guess that can be changed if you pay more attention to every single detail, but it was just one of those fluke things and it happened. At the time there was nothing I could do to prevent it.

What was going through your mind? Were you thinking, “I’ll never compete again”?

No. I never had those thoughts in my head. It was the week before we left for the 2006 World Championships and I wanted to do the All-Around but I wasn’t able to do it because I was injured. I wasn’t able to walk for a few weeks. I was on crutches and in a boot and I was only training bars, but I was still put on the World Championship team and I competed for my country at the World Championship only on bars and helped win a silver medal. I would have loved to compete All-Around there.

What allowed you to get through those tough times and get your mental state-your confidence and assurance-back to the point where they needed to be so you could compete and win?

Surrounding myself with really great people. My dad is my coach. My mom is the support side of the team. And teammates that helped me all the time. You can’t listen to the negative talk. There’s always going to be some positive and some negative when you’re a well-known athlete or just a person. When I first started hearing these things-that I’d never make the Olympic team because I was injured, that I wouldn’t get to where I was before the injury-it really upset me. Then I thought, “Why am I even letting this get to me?” If I know I can do it and my friends and family and coaches believe in me, it doesn’t matter what people on the outside are saying. They don’t know my personality. They don’t know I’m going to work even harder to get back to where I was.

Who was saying those things?

The media. I learned to not let the media affect you. That’s their job-to criticize and talk and have opinions. At first it got to me. Then I thought, “They’re not the ones doing gymnastics.” I’m the one that’s in it.

What is it about your personality that gives you that mindset?

That I never give up. I showed people that personality at the Olympics. I didn’t give up until it was completely over. A lot of people thought it wasn’t possible for me to win that All-Around Gold but I always believed in myself and I always believed it was possible. It takes a lot of different character traits. But most importantly, never to give up. That’s something I learned from a very early age.

What do you think it was that taught you that?

Definitely my parents. My dad was an Olympic champion and my mom was a world champion, both in gymnastics. Just from their experiences and teaching me to continue that path and to always believe in yourself and set big dreams and goals.

When you’re actually competing, are there moments when feel like you want to give up?

There are definitely some times when it does get hard, especially in competitions if you make a mistake. But that’s something I learned also. There were two times in competition when I had a mistake and I had a fall and I honestly wanted to give up because I thought it would be over. And my dad, who’s always on the floor with me, just kept telling me, “Don’t give this up. It’s still possible. Fight your way through it.” I won the competition both times.

Some people, when they make a mistake, dwell on it and get discouraged. But you’re able to put it behind you-you have a fall and you put it out of your mind. What’s the trick?

It takes practice. To master anything, whether it’s a sport or believing in yourself, doesn’t come overnight. That’s just the way you have to set your mind, focus, and believe that it is possible.

When you’re competing, what do you think you have in your mind? Are you thinking, “I’m going to win”? “I’m not going to give up”? Or is your mind blank?

I don’t think about winning going into a competition. I go in trying to do the best performance, the best routines I can. I never think about the outcome, if I’m going to win a medal or what color. That’s also something I was taught from a young age-to focus on only myself. Of course you are going to have competitors, and people could be better than you or stronger than you, but as long as you’re focused on yourself and you give your best performance that day, that’s really all you can control.

I imagine that when you’re competing it must be really important to stay present in the moment. Do you have a technique for doing that?

I use a lot of visualizations. Before I go and salute, I replay my routine over and over again in my head in the most perfect scenario, just trying to hit every skill and trying to make it right. That always helps me.

How were you able to train through pain? Was it thinking ahead to the future, like, “If I can get through this moment now, even if its painful, I can win later”?

I’ve always had those big goals and dreams in my head and the 2008 Olympics were always in the back of my mind. Going through difficult times, I told myself, “I’ve been in gymnastics 15 years, and there’s only a year left until the Olympics. I might be going through a struggle now, or an injury, but I can’t give this up now. I came a long way, and put so much effort and time and commitment to it already, and I’ve had those goals for so long.” With it so close, I didn’t ever really feel a need to give up. But going through the injury, you always have to take it one day at time. You can’t think too far ahead of yourself.

When you talk about those goals and dreams, did those come from your parents originally or were they something you wanted for yourself?

It was definitely something for myself. Well, I guess both. My dad competed in the ’88 Olympics and he won the silver medal in the All-Around by less than 1/10th of a point, so when I won the gold medal in the All Around, it definitely made him proud. It was a redemption that exactly 20 years prior, he had missed it by less than 1/10th, so to be able to coach your athlete-especially because I’m his daughter-definitely made a big difference.

Did you have your father on your mind when you were competing?

You have to be a little selfish when you compete because especially in gymnastics, it requires so much focus and concentration. So you can’t be thinking about too many other things. After the competition was when I felt it most.

What did he say when you won?

He said he was really proud of me. We couldn’t believe it. There’s still times now when I think about it and I’m like, “Did that actually come true?” I wouldn’t say we were shock, because we knew it was within reach and we knew we were able to do it. But when you dream about something for so long, and it finally comes true, it takes you a while to process it.

One-tenth of a point and his teammate won. Was it because of a mistake he made?

It was not really a mistake. If you make a mistake, it’s going to cost you 5/10 to 8/10. 1/10 of a point in gymnastics is pretty much nothing.

How does it feel to be the best in the world at something?

To know that I am the best in the world at my favorite thing in life is such an incredible feeling. Knowing that 16 years of hard work has paid off means so much to me.

You not only recovered from your injury, but you actually came back stronger than before. What was it that enabled you to do that?

I did so much physical strengthening while I was injured. I did a lot of strength exercises for my legs, upper body and cardio. This all helped me tremendously when it was time to go back to routines and the events.

But did you also come back stronger mentally? Do you think you were sharper, more confident, more focused, more driven? If so, how was it that your injury facilitated this?

I did come back stronger mentally because being away from the gym and not being able to compete at top shape made my desire so much greater. The media wrote me off and said I would never be an All-Around gymnast again because of my injury. At first it really got to me and upset me. But my friends and family encouraged me and told me that if you believe in yourself, your dreams, and your goals, “Impossible is nothing.” This is the quote I lived by for the last year. No matter what people say, if I believe, that’s all that matters.

Greg Giraldo

Photo: Dan Dion

In May 2009, I had the privilege of interviewing Greg Giraldo, the dark and brilliant stand-up comedian who, sadly, died yesterday at the age of 44. I owe that honor to my friend Joey Gay, who persuaded the normally reclusive Giraldo to speak to me for a series of celebrity interviews I was doing for Psychology Today.

Giraldo’s intelligence and wit were on display throughout our conversation, but what struck me most was his depression. “I feel like I’m ‘the piece of shit at the center of the universe,’ he told me. “The reality is I’m not a ‘get knocked down and come back harder’ kind of guy.” It saddened me that someone so talented could be so hard on himself. In remembering him, part of our task will be to celebrate the remarkable achievements he himself had difficulty acknowledging.

In trying to fathom Giraldo’s death yesterday from an overdose of prescription drugs, it’s hard not to look for clues in the things he said when I spoke to him. One answer in particular stayed with me.

“I’m a total fuckup, honestly. And I’ve fucked up a lot of things in my life. I’m constantly tortured by a sense of failure. I feel like hiding in drugs or alcohol. I feel like quitting all the time.”

This is the second time I’ve interviewed a great comedian who’s passed away soon afterward. In 2008, I spoke to George Carlin just nine days before he died in what turned out to be George Carlin’s last interview. Like Carlin, Greg Giraldo was a genius and an iconoclast. He will be missed. —Jay Dixit

The Interview

What have been your greatest failures?

It’s hard to distinguish when I was actually struggling from when I only felt like I was struggling—which was pretty much always.

You went to Harvard Law School then dropped out. Tell me about the decision to quit.

It was scary. I had a lot of student debt and I didn’t know where the career was going. I started doing comedy for the hell of it and I thought, “I’ll pursue that somehow until I figure out what I’m actually going to do for a living to pay my loans.” I didn’t think comedy was a viable career option.

But before I quit, I was dying. I mean, I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t like I was a functioning professional and I just made the choice to throw it all away to pursue this crazy dream. I was incapable of being a lawyer. It wasn’t an option. I was going to stop being a lawyer whether I wanted to or not.

How did you feel?

My family was disappointed. But I always wanted to do something creative. I’ve always had real trouble knowing what my actual desires and goals are. I’ve just been dragged along by fate. I can’t even tell you why I thought to go to law school.

What do you think it is about your personality that gives you your sense of purpose?

I’m a total fuckup, honestly. The reality is I’m not this person with this driving “get it done” attitude. I’m a complete fuckup and I’ve fucked up a lot of things in my life. I’m constantly tortured by a sense of failure. I feel like quitting all the time. I feel like hiding in drugs or alcohol. I feel like I’ve failed in terms of what my potential is. I don’t think I’ve achieved my potential because I haven’t worked that hard and I haven’t found the right angles. The reality is, I’m not a “get knocked down and just pull myself back up by my bootstraps and come back harder” kind of guy.

What’s that like, that feeling of being tortured by failure?

It’s a lot of self-hatred. That I should have gone to L.A. for pilot season. That I should have drank a lot less.

There’s all these things I’ve fucked up. If I had only stayed focused, I would have been further along. It’s this constant feeling of not having achieved enough.

What do you do about it? Is it always there? Does it go away if you work harder?

If I’m working on something and I feel like I did a good job, it goes away for a little while. If I write a new chunk of material I love, it goes away for a little bit. If I feel like I have a lot of shows with new material, it goes away for a bit. Then there’s all the other unrelated-to-comedy shit—the therapy, trying to feel like I’m OK where I am.

What effect does it have on you? Does it give you some fire in a way that helps you?

It definitely drives me. That at least is good. The desire to feel like you’re not a loser drives me. I don’t know if that’s the healthiest thing—to be motivated by a fear of hating yourself. But it definitely helps. In a perfect world I would overcome the sense that I suck constantly.

If you did overcome that feeling could you still do comedy?

I used to think maybe not. But I think I have to. For a while I thought dwelling in that darkness and that self-hatred worked, but eventually it becomes more crippling than good. I could definitely still be funny. Some people do better when they’re in a bitter, angry place. I don’t. I think I’m funniest when I’m feeling more optimistic, hopeful about everything.

What about mistakes?

Emotionally I dwell on things forever. I’m an obsessive thinker. I obsess on things I’ve done wrong. Even worse than mistakes, I’ll dwell on what I’m not doing at the moment and what my limitations are.

Give me an example.

What I’m not doing is writing more. Each day that goes by, I think, “I meant to write, but I didn’t.” And the days go by.

Rather than sitting at the computer and writing, actually finishing things and fleshing out thoughts, I just rely on going on stage and dicking around until the funny parts occur to me. I’m constantly tormented by the fact that if I could get organized enough to just sit down and write, I would be 50 times further than I am today, creatively.

Professionally, there are a million things I could do. I’m always asked if I have any ideas for sitcoms or dramas or anything I’d like to pitch. I have a lot of opportunities to come in and have meetings with people who can make decisions on these things… and I don’t.

I’ve had people over the years approach me and say, “Come in any time with movie ideas!” These are people who could make these things happen. I get excited about it, I think about it, I come up with a few ideas, and then I get all fucking ADD and the opportunity slips away. Maybe I should have eaten some protein before we had this conversation. I could have been more upbeat.

What advice would you give to yourself from the outside—or to someone in a similar situation?

On days when I’m feeling positive, I say, “Look. Wait a second. I started doing standup just 17 years ago, just for the hell of it really, and I thought ‘I’ll do this until I figure out what I can really earn a living doing.’ And now all of a sudden I’m really proud of what I can do with standup comedy, I’m a much better standup comic than I ever imagined I would be, and I’ve made a decent living doing it. And it seems like I’m poised to do better.” I’m living the life I’ve always wanted, in a lot of ways. I try to be as appreciative of what I’ve been given as possible. When I’m feeling upbeat that helps.

Staying grateful and even sometimes being so fucking corny as making a mental list of what I have to be grateful for. That definitely helps, when I’m feeling positive. I don’t know if it’s the chicken or egg. When I’m feeling in a darker place, my perception is that everything sucks and even though I’ve done this, it seems I should have done more. Trying to stay grateful helps.

And a lot of times, I’ll think, “I’m not really that talented, and I have maximized what I’ve gotten.” And that I should stop kicking the shit out of myself.

It’s a paradoxical way to look at it—positive and negative at the same time. Who the fuck am I to think I was entitled to this great career? That I should have done more? That I deserved more? I’ve done more than I deserved. Things are going fine.

It’s easy to dwell on how I fucked things up with myself and others, but really, given where I thought this was going to end up when I started, I’m pretty happy with how it’s played out.

But you are successful. So is it that you just think you should be more successful? Or that somehow you’re a fraud because you don’t work that hard and you’ve achieved this success?

You’re coming up with angles that are true that I haven’t thought of!

I’m just wondering what it’s like for you.

A lot of it is fear of the future. Do I want to be a 55-year-old man, working the clubs, traveling around the country, not doing theaters, not being enough of a name? If I didn’t have this family to support, if I wasn’t living in the city, if we weren’t in the greatest fucking economic downturn ever, I would probably feel I was fine.

Yes, I feel, not like a fraud, but frustrated with myself and my limitations. They don’t feel like they’re creative limitations. I just get too distracted by life and don’t focus on what matters to me.

What question should I have asked you that I didn’t ask?

How I feel about Jesus? Gay porn, yea or nay?

As I talk to you, some things are crystallizing in my head. It’s actually very helpful. I hadn’t thought about it this way. Trying to focus on what really it is that matters to me.

When I start to feel like a failure, I realize, it’s really that I haven’t worked harder on my standup. And I can do that. Focusing on things that are manageable, that can be done, things I have control over. Right now I’m feeling like shit. I have two shows tonight. Now’s the time, I’ll definitely crank out some new shit before then. And that gives me a sense of optimism and hope I’m not being crushed by this broader system.

What is it that distracts you?

It’s a lot of things. I have three kids, and I love them more than anything. It’s easy to obsess, not even in a healthy way, distracted by worries about them and their future and how they’re doing. How they feel and how they’re coping. Thoughts that are not productive.

When I’m actually with them, doing things with them, I feel great, fueled by that. But it’s so easy to wallow in self-hatred, like, “Shit, I fucked up. I let my relationship fall apart. Now they’re living with their mom and I don’t see them.” Instead of letting that fuel me creatively, it becomes a sinkhole.

Other things are just general bullshit. I’m easily distracted—I start watching television. I start searching the Web.
For years I’d go on the road and I’d finish the shows and instead of going back to the hotel room and reading, I’d stay out all night and get in all sorts of trouble—trying to escape that sense of fear by ripping it up out there. Getting done with the shows and riding that high, thinking, “I am good, and what better way to keep that going than partying?” That’s been an enormous distraction from my work.

You mentioned letting worry about your kids fuel you creatively versus getting caught in a sinkhole. What’s the trick to letting it fuel you creatively? How do you direct that negative energy to something positive?

I’ve tried to on occasion just write about it and feel being fueled by it creatively is very difficult. Standup in particular is a very specific thing. There’s things you want to talk about, to express—but you have to be funny. And you have to funny to a mass audience. It’s a constant frustrating thing. I might write something I think resonates with me and would with other people in my situation, but it just doesn’t get the laughs you need because you’re performing it for 20-year-olds in the Comedy Cellar.

There’s enormous frustration there. The way it has fueled me recently is this sense that I want my kids to be proud of me, and if I’m not good at what I do, and if I’m not trying my hardest at what I do, then all this shit I’m putting them through because of my demons has been a waste. The very least I can do for them is to be the best I can. That does help me feel like, “OK, take your shit more seriously. Don’t just throw away stage time. Don’t let the days go by without having done any work.” That’s been working. Then sometimes I feel what they need from me is to be relatively content and to be there for them, so I can’t torture myself over this stuff. But I do anyway.

Do you think part of it is that you blame yourself for things that are out of your control?

It could be. I tend to blame myself for everything. There’s an expression I’ve heard used for people in my shoes, people who see themselves like I see myself. I feel like I’m “the piece of shit at the center of the universe.” It’s a paradox. You feel like you’re so shitty you ruin everything, but you’re so important and powerful that you caused it, that you actually are to blame for everything. I’m doing the best I can, and maybe that’s enough. It depends on how much sugar I’ve had that day.