Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (23 page)

Jerry:
They’re right.

Judd:
They actually have a problem with it sometimes. They don’t like what their friends talk about, or what interests them.

Jerry:
That’s a great contribution you’ve made.

Judd:
What was your family situation like, financially, growing up?

Jerry:
We were fine. I grew up straight middle class.

Judd:
I’m interested in how you approach having money and raising kids and making sure you instill some sense of values.

Jerry:
We talk about it a lot and we make a big deal about it and they have absorbed it. They understand the natural, obnoxious vibe that people are going to have of them—that they’d better watch it, you know, because they’re going to be hated for this.

Judd:
“Everybody knows what we have, so you’d better be cool.”

Jerry:
I have cars. And my son, when I pick him up at camp, says, “Dad, you better not come in a different car. No one’s impressed with your cars. Come in the same car every day so no one knows you have more than one car.”

Judd:
I find myself saying to my kid, “I earned this money, not you.” I’m allowed to enjoy it, but you go make your own money.

Jerry:
I say that, too. “You’re not getting any of it.”

Judd:
Do you subscribe to the Warren Buffett theory? Are you going to give your kids nothing?

Jerry:
No, I don’t. I wish I subscribed to that theory, but I don’t. I honestly don’t even know what to do about that. Let them fight over it.

Judd:
For me, I wanted to be a comedian and I wanted to work from a very early age because I was afraid of being broke. What was your core motivation?

Jerry:
To never have to do anything else. I learned very young in this business that you bust your ass or you get thrown out of the kingdom. My motivation was not wanting to leave the kingdom. Plus, I just love the life of it. I love my independence and the joy of hearing laughs and making jokes. It’s as simple as that.

Judd:
Does the TV show seem like this weird little dream that happened in the middle of your stand-up career?

Jerry:
That’s a very good description of it.

Judd:
Like this odd distraction for eight or nine years and then back to real life?

Jerry:
Obviously, after the show, I saw there were many other avenues available for me. I missed the solitude. I missed the griminess and the simplicity of the life. I remember working it out with a friend of mine, James Spader. I said, “What do I do with my life now?” And he said, “Well, what has been the best experience that you’ve had so far?” And I said, “For me, it has been performing for live audiences.” You kind of get to do that on TV, but TV is so much work and the pipeline is just too long. In stand-up, you get addicted to that intensity: You have an idea for something, and then you’re onstage that night and people are reacting to it. That’s very intense.

Judd:
How did you handle the grind of doing the show, with scripts coming in and not being good and having to deal with fixing them and everything? At
The Larry Sanders Show
, we did fewer episodes than you per year—you know, we would usually do thirteen. I think there were two seasons where we did eighteen. But by the end, everyone was decimated by it.

Jerry:
Decimated.

Judd:
And we didn’t do it anywhere near as many years as you did
Seinfeld.
How did it feel to be in the center of that storm?

Jerry:
We were killing ourselves and the reason why I stopped the show was I literally physically couldn’t go on. We were doing twenty-two episodes a season. And then once Larry [David] left, I was doing all the rewrites—to rehearse all day and then to do all those rewrites and all the editing and all the casting, it was just…I was lucky the show happened when I was young and healthy. You’re strong in those years and you’re pretty smart. I couldn’t have done it before or after.

Judd:
People don’t understand how it grinds you down. They don’t understand why people who have done it don’t ever want to do it again.

Jerry:
Right. “Why did you stop doing the show?” I don’t have a good answer for that. I can’t explain. You can’t explain what that is.

Judd:
There’s no way for people to understand what you give to a show like that.

Jerry:
Yeah, and when your name
is
the show—I mean, it was the best possible experience in that medium, but you can’t do it forever. And the thing is, are you willing to compromise quality to keep it going? Of course, the answer to that was no. And that’s why the show ended when it did.

Judd:
Sometimes, when I think about my career, I think of it in this weird way. I had this show that was a financial failure,
Freaks and Geeks
, which didn’t even last a full season. But in my head, I have tricked myself into believing it was a major accomplishment. I tell myself,
Well, at least I accomplished that.
And then I look at the rest of my life and career as post–
Freaks and Geeks
. Whatever I do, it doesn’t matter because I pulled it off once and that was enough. I look at the rest of my career as gravy. Do you look at like your career in a similar way, as post-
Seinfeld
? When something so enormous is accomplished, does it just reframe everything?

Jerry:
Mostly, it just frees me from having to do press. And I travel in comfort. That’s what it gave me. No, I mean, it gave me everything, and that was always my thought when I was doing it. If I sacrifice every cell of energy that I have doing this, the rest of my life will be pretty good. So I just died on the shield. I went to the point where I thought,
If I keep going, I could lose my sanity.
That was how far I took it mentally.

Judd:
I had that at the end of a season of
The Larry Sanders Show.
I took a job punching up
Happy Gilmore
right afterwards, and I stressed myself out so much trying to do a good job that I started having these crazy panic attacks. Which was my body telling me, you need to lay down.

Jerry:
This is one of the great perils of the job. You can work yourself to destruction. Because the work is interesting and exciting and all these opportunities are rare and wonderful and hard to resist.

Judd:
Two years ago, I took my first Transcendental Meditation class. Just to get centered.

Jerry:
Oh, really?

Judd:
You started doing TM in college, right?

Jerry:
I started doing it in college. While everyone was at lunch, I would go back to my room and do a TM. I did it once a day. But about a year ago, I was talking to a TM instructor, and he started telling me, “You know, if you do two a day, it’s a lot more powerful.” So I just recently started doing that and it has completely changed my life. I honestly will do four a day sometimes. I pop them like Tic Tacs.

Judd:
How is it possible that, in all those years, no one told you that most people do TM more than once a day?

Jerry:
All I think about now is what the experience of the show might have been like if I had applied this as the real antidote, which is what it is. It’s the antidote to that difficult life.

Judd:
Is there any part of you that thinks that a certain level of bad energy and exhaustion helps you reach some other comedic place?

Jerry:
No, I don’t believe in that.

Judd:
One of the funniest things I’ve seen is on a DVD extra of the
Larry Sanders Show
DVD, you and Garry Shandling debating whether or not you need pain to be funny. And you’re saying, “Well, what about talent? Some people just have a God-given talent.” And Garry says, “Why are you so angry, Jerry?” But I agree with you. I think the TM thing is very powerful.
Sometimes I actually have a phobia of feeling good. I resist it because I’m not used to feeling that way.

Jerry:
I don’t fall prey to that.

Judd:
Do you think your general disposition comes from a place of spirituality, or were you like this from the get-go?

Jerry:
That’s a tough question. I was drawn to a lot of Eastern thought, a lot of Zen stuff. I’ve always been drawn to Eastern philosophy and religion more than Western or Jewish, I guess. Which is why I took to TM so quickly. No question. But going back to our thing about emotions, I just don’t accept irrational emotion as part of my behavior. I’m not going to act on an irrational emotion. So I think that’s probably built in, but reading some of the Zen stuff I’ve read over the years and doing all the TM has definitely shored it up. Now I’m this guy, whoever that is.

Judd:
I read a lot of Zen but it ultimately makes me unhappy because I don’t want to be one drop in the ocean.

Jerry:
I do.

Judd:
How do you get over that hump?

Jerry:
You look at some pictures from the Hubble Telescope and you snap out of it. I used to keep pictures of the Hubble on the wall of the writing room at
Seinfeld.
It would calm me when I would start to think that what I was doing was important.

Judd:
See, I go the other way with that. That makes me depressed.

Jerry:
Most people would say that. People always say it makes them feel insignificant, but I don’t find being insignificant depressing. I find it uplifting.

Judd:
Insignificance is a hump I have trouble getting over, but maybe that’s because my parents were crazier than yours.

Jerry:
Maybe. Or maybe you think this is your only life, and this is the only stuff you’re ever going to do. Which, you know, I don’t subscribe to that.

Judd:
What do you subscribe to?

Jerry:
That this is just one chapter of thousands of chapters.

Judd:
My parents never mentioned spirituality or God or anything. The only thing they would say is “Nobody said life was fair.” That was my entire religious upbringing.

Jerry:
Nobody said life wasn’t fair, either. Nobody is in charge of saying what life is and that’s what it is.

Judd:
But generally, your parents were cool, right? You had a good relationship with them?

Jerry:
I wouldn’t use the word
cool.
I would say they were…highly independent. My father’s mother died giving birth to him, and my mother grew up in an orphanage. My father was out of school probably by sixth grade, on the street. And they didn’t marry until they were in their forties so they were very, very independent people, and I just folded right into that place where you won’t need anybody.

Judd:
That didn’t make you needy?

Jerry:
It made me feel free. You don’t need people. They’re unreliable.

Judd:
It’s such a different type of a comedy upbringing. I feel like most comedians have broken parents who don’t know how to mirror you; they want you to take care of them. So you spend your life trying to please other people and thinking that you are significant because you can change the world or change things, but you find out that you really can’t, and then you’re miserable.

Jerry:
Pleasing people is fun. It’s never been an emotional nutrient for me. It does make me happy when people like something I made and it makes me unhappy if they don’t like it, but that’s not my
nutrition.

Judd:
You’re a lucky man in that respect.

Jerry:
It’s allowed me to play the game for what it is. I look at everything as a game.

Judd:
I recently watched that speech you gave about advertising, at the Clio Awards, or whatever. I really enjoyed that.

Jerry:
Oh, thank you. Boy, you see everything. You know, I wrote that because I was so regretting that I agreed to accept this stupid award, I thought,
Let me at least give myself something to do there so it’s not just torture.
The premise of that speech was that it doesn’t matter if the product is good because I so enjoy that moment before I find out. I enjoy getting sold, and I enjoy thinking that I’m going to get this great thing. That’s all I need.

Judd:
That’s maybe the greatest lesson you can teach a child.

Jerry:
I’ve always loved getting sold. That’s true of all good salesmen. All good salesmen love to get taken in by a pitch.

Judd:
Are you just loving doing your show,
Comedians in Cars
?

Jerry:
Yeah. I love it because it’s a completely free canvas, like stand-up. Nobody cares what I make. As long as the audience likes it and I like doing it, that’s the end of it.

Judd:
Looking back at the shows you’ve done so far, what were the ones that had the biggest impact on you, or that surprised you the most? Because you have people on that show that we don’t see in that format, ever. You don’t see Howard Stern talking as he does in life, ever. You don’t see Letterman do that.

Jerry:
I think people enjoy that. I never know what the show is going to be. Somehow I get in there and I can make it into whatever I want. It’s a can of Play-Doh. You just make stuff. I don’t deal with any executives, on any level. It’s just me. It’s just like stand-up. I go, “Here’s something I made for you.” And that’s it. I wanted people to see what the life of a comedian is like: Ten percent of it is being onstage, and ninety percent is just like hanging out with these great people. And that’s really made my life.

Judd:
Just the joy of that.