The kid’s eyes widened.
“Do you know how hard I worked to be able to afford cigarettes when I want them? They’re not just something I feel like sprinkling all over town, like the friggin’ pied piper.”
With that, Lars angrily rose, grabbed the knapsack, and left the bar. I followed him and when he made it outside, he launched the knapsack deep into the sky. It flipped end over end until it landed across the street, right at the feet of a pretty young girl. The force of the books split the bag wide open and they scattered in different directions—through puddles, under cars, everywhere.
“F—k it!” Lars yelled. He then walked against a red light, through oncoming traffic at Sixth Avenue, climbing up on top of fenders, trunks, hoods, and windshields of moving cars. “F&^* it!” he yelled again. “Are we going to party, Breuer?! Are we?”
I waited until it was safe to cross the street and caught up with him. He led me to a super-tiny, dark, exclusive bar, where nearly every major movie star and musician was hanging out: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Dave Matthews, one of the Backstreet Boys, etc. By then, it was two A.M. He was raging, but I had to make it all the way back to the middle of New Jersey. I had a drink and then I tried to sneak out the door.
“Breuer,” Lars called out to me. “Where the hell are you going?”
“I’m pretty wiped out,” I said.
“Unbelievable,” he moaned. “You’re a complete pussy. Only a pussy goes home at this time.”
I nodded to him, as if to say, “You’re right.” There was no sense angering him any further. It was a long time before he’d call me again. I felt like shit about that destroyed backpack. Being a wild and crazy partier just wasn’t for me.
Chapter 20
Getting Sirius
In 2005, I started thinking a lot about establishing a sort of home base. Somewhere I could still tell funny stories but not have to make everything a bit, or hop on an airplane or bus every other day. More and more it seemed like radio was the place to do that.
One of the reasons I wanted to get into radio was because I didn’t want to be on the road a lot while my kids were little. Another big part of it was that I wanted the time and space to start presenting a different side of me. Since
Half Baked
I’d a had a lot of fun (too much fun maybe) doing tours, playing decent-sized venues with my friends Jimmy and Larry playing in a live band behind me. I felt like that pushed the boundaries of comedy. I’d also taken on something else I hadn’t done since community college—landing a variety of roles in some smaller movies. But on radio I felt like I could sprawl out and give some depth and context to the crazy tales that comprised my life. I could show off who I was beyond just doing punch lines. I knew that standard radio relied on a formula and was filled with ratings pressure. It was serendipity that satellite radio had just sprung up and was exploring all kinds of new formats. I put feelers out to the two providers, XM and Sirius, and a talent executive at Sirius got back to me right away.
“What kind of show do you want to do?” he asked enthusiastically.
“I want to put my friends and parents on the air,” I explained. “Like the ultimate backyard hangout. Beyond that I have no idea. I’ll tell you what I
don’t
want. I don’t want to talk about what everyone else is talking about. I don’t want to do anything involving news or politics or current events.”
“Sounds awesome,” he said. “Why don’t you come in and meet some producers, and we’ll make a demo. A mock show. You can see how you like doing it, and we can do the same.”
So I went in and just told them some Jefferson Avenue stories—bickering with the Catholic kids, stealing my bike back from the grubby hoodlum family down the street, and listening to another neighbor kid insult the Jews across the street, stuff like that. I also gave them a couple of
Saturday Night Live
behind-the-scenes stories. I just kind of winged it. I’d done Howard Stern’s show,
Opie and Anthony, Bob and Tom
, and local radio whenever I toured, so I had a bit of radio experience, although I’d never hosted anything. But I was comfortable with it right from the start.
They gave it a listen and liked it. And it was a go, and I could call the shots. I wanted to wade into radio and stay close to my wife and young daughters, so for the first couple of months we just did Friday nights. After that, the people at Sirius came back and said, “Let’s go five days a week.” It was working so well that I was inclined to agree, but then I got a phone call.
It was Opie, from
The Opie and Anthony Show.
I’d been on their show when they were on the air in New York City and syndicated pretty much everywhere else. They’d been bounced from their last gig, at WNEW, after their show encouraged people around New York City to have sex in public places and one couple got busted hooking up in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
“Don’t say anything to anyone, Jim,” Opie said. “But we’re about to sign a deal with XM, and we want you to be part of it.” I wasn’t exactly certain their MO aligned with the direction I wanted to go, but I knew that they’d have a huge following. Once again potential fame started pulling me away from my instincts. He gave me the number of a talent guy at XM who was putting their show together, so I called him and left a message. A few days went by and he never called me back. I called again, and still nothing. In the meantime, Sirius called, saying, “Hey, do you want to go every day or not?” They had no idea what the holdup was.
I took a couple of days and came back with, “Monday through Thursday, two hours a day, in the four-to-six drive time on the East Coast, and then repeated again from seven to nine, so it’s on during drive time on the West Coast.”
Again, the Sirius response was, “Okay. Great.” I even named a new dollar figure, and they didn’t balk for a second. And just when I was ready to sign, I got another call from Opie.
“I think I gotta do the Sirius thing,” I told him.
“C’mon, man,” he said. “Don’t you trust us? Just hang on and you’ll be part of our team here.” So, just to hedge my bets, I called the XM talent guy again. He still had never called me.
“Great to hear from you,” he said, like I’d been the one playing hard to get. “It would be nice to have you come on board, but I think we’re locked up budget-wise for the year. When we get up and running, then things will open up, and we can maybe bring you in.”
“If it’s about money,” I said, “I can take significantly less.” It was a boneheaded thing to toss out there, and it went against what I really wanted to do, which was cultivate my own audience. Instead I tried to hitch my star to Opie and Anthony. But the XM guy went into hiding again. It made me wonder how much (or how little) power Opie and Anthony were going to have at XM.
In the end, I called Sirius and said, “Let’s go for it.” I let Opie know and he said he understood. In fact, I do go on their show every once in a while to tell stories, even today. My show became
Breuer Unleashed,
a five-days-a-week gig (I relented on taking Fridays off—later I’d do them from home). And I quickly developed a following that showed up to hear me. It wasn’t long before Howard Stern came to Sirius and brought millions of listeners. That certainly didn’t hurt.
Breuer Unleashed
was a great place to be creative. We did comedy covers, where comedians performed their favorite comedians’ bits. We’d redo scenes from famous movies, using impressionists as all the stars. We had another bit called “Dysfunctional Family Poker,” where instead of cards, you played with people’s dysfunctional family stories. Pete Correale was an adept, funny sidekick, and my childhood friends Jimmy and Larry created original music every day in competition with each other, having listeners vote on songs they wrote. They loved to squabble like an old married couple—especially over who was stealing the other’s MySpace friends. We had musicians from Alice in Chains to Charlie Daniels to Metallica show up in the studio, and comedians like Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock.
In the spring of 2007, my situation at Sirius began to shift a bit. That was precipitated by an interview with Bill Cosby. He was going to be a guest on my show, and his people asked for a preinterview. I was given his home phone number and as I dialed it, I had major butterflies in my stomach. I was totally nervous. I hadn’t been this anxious since I met Joe Pesci. A Spanish-sounding lady answered. I explained who I was and she said she’d get him. I waited on the end of the line for a long time, there was a rustling, and the next thing I heard was his distinctive voice.
“Yuuussss, hullo. This is Bill Cosby.”
“Hi, Mr. Cosby, this is Jim Breuer.”
“Ya know,” he said, kick-starting the whole conversation without my even tossing him a question or offering up any chitchat about the weather, “I was in California, at an airport, and this little nine-year-old white boy came up to me and started reciting an old, old routine of mine—one he would not have known without a little digging. And I sat there, listened, and thought, ‘
Wow,
the writing!’ You see, I came from an era where none of us planned on being comedians. We were going to be scholars. We were all going off to write or study things. Take George Carlin, for instance. He’s not only one of the most brilliant writers of our time, he’s one of the most brilliant minds.”
“I agree,” I said. “I think writing is very important. Did you want me to know anything in particular for tomorrow?” I wasn’t trying to rush him, I just wanted to be accommodating.
“Yes,” he said, then paused for quite a while. “I want tomorrow to
not
be a situation where I come on the air and you say, ‘Hey, how the f—k are you doing, man!’ And ‘F—k this!’ and ‘F—k that!’ I want your audience and your listeners to be inspired.”
My mind was now blown. I had never heard Bill Cosby drop the F-bomb. It was really strange. I didn’t welcome a lot of my guests with profanity, but maybe this was a general rule he had, not one aimed specifically at me.
“That’s what I want, too,” I said.
“Have you read any of my books?”
“No, sir.” I hadn’t and I knew that being dishonest in an attempt to flatter the guy would only backfire.
“I’m going to give you the number of my guy,” he said, and then he broke into that classic, you’re-going-to-learn-a-lesson Cosby staccato. “And. He’s. Gonna. Send. You. A. Chapter. Out. Of. One. Of. Them. Called. ‘The. Day. I. Left. Show. Business.’”
So I got the chapter and read it. In it, Cosby wrote how when he first started doing stand-up comedy, he was offered a lot of money to play a certain club, and he did it, but then he realized he hated himself for it because he had to play to an audience that he didn’t feel at all connected to. And one day, he finally said, “I’m never going to do this again.” It was not worth the money to be something he was not. But I wondered why he wanted me to read that. Did he sense that I was feeling myself in a similar situation?
As soon as Cosby and I were on the radio together, he asked, “Did you read what I asked you to read?” I was freaked out.
“Oh yeah,” I said.
“And what did you get out of it?” he asked.
“Ohhh, my God,” I laughed. It was such a heavy situation. “I found it
perfect
for the time I’m at in my life.”
“Aha!” he said. He continued in the classic Cosby way, when he knows he’s right or has at least touched a nerve. “Ummmm-hmmmm!”
“And—”
“Mmmmm-hmmm!” he said in his
gotcha
tone.
“Ah—”
“Hmmmmmmm!” He continued on, playing with me. I’m not sure how he knew what an impact it had on me, but maybe the preinterview was really a preinterview of
me.
Who knows? When an icon comes and talks to you like that, you listen. Cosby and I talked for about an hour more, on the air, and that was really the first step of me accepting and going full-blown into the family comedy world. I knew it would be hard work. I knew it would mean distancing myself from what people expected of me, and I knew I’d have to go out on the road and reestablish myself, doing all-new material that was family friendly. And I knew I’d have to put it all out there in a real way, all my faults and my history, and be me and be honest so that no one could accuse me of being a hypocrite: “You’re Mr. Family Man now; what about when you used to talk about smoking marijuana? What about when you used to talk about getting drunk?”
My response to all that would simply be “You’ve got all sides of me now. I’m not hiding anything.”
There’s a big group of people who think I am Brian from
Half Baked.
There’s such a cult around that movie. When I toured, stoners would come up to me and say, “You’re my idol.” I’d be polite to them, but in my head I’d think, “I’m not your idol. That character’s your idol. If I was your idol, then you’d have kids and morals and be way into your family.”
My kids were also getting older, and they had started to ask, “Can I listen to your comedy? Can I watch your videos?” That made me think about what I was putting out there. Not that I ever did any material that was so offensive, but a bell went off and made me realize that I have eyes on me, and a bit of responsibility. I always did characters and goofed around for them and all the kids in the neighborhood. It would be cool if they could actually watch me work without censoring anything.
When I made my decision to scale back on
Breuer Unleashed
and just do Fridays, my cohost Pete was the most bummed out of anyone. There’s still some weirdness, I think, today. But I had to move on. And the real wake-up call for me came when I first went back on the road. I couldn’t sell many tickets. My radio show was doing great, but I wasn’t able to leverage my listener base into ticket sales for my show. That meant I’d have to get out on the road that much more. It was tough to reconcile busting my ass five days a week without seeing these people in the crowd when I went out to do shows.
But Sirius and my new family-friendly direction have rewarded me in all kinds of ways. One day my sister picked up a call at the office and said to me, “Kevin James is on the line.”