Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (35 page)

Marc:
Were you freaking out inside, talking to Seinfeld? What were you really trying to do there?

Judd:
It happened right after my parents got divorced and I just thought,
I got to get something going in this life. I really need to take care of myself
. Because when your parents get divorced they just make terrible mistakes
and they fight and you see that adults have very real flaws. And I think my instinct was,
Oh my God, maybe they’re wrong about all sorts of stuff they keep telling me. And if my mom thinks my dad’s the devil and if my dad’s enraged at my mom, then maybe some of this advice they’ve been giving me is wrong. I mean, I don’t think he’s the devil. He’s very nice to me.
And it just completely threw me—like, it’s important that you believe your parents. So when you see them at a terrible moment, screaming at each other—my reaction was,
Nothing is true. I don’t believe anything. I can’t rely on these people because they can’t rely on each other and they’ve bailed on each other, and, like
,
“Our family isn’t important enough for you guys to just figure out how to get along?”
It was terrible. Now that I’m older I realize it was much more complicated than that.

Marc:
You were sort of in crisis mode.

Judd:
I was
totally
in crisis mode. I was losing my mind. I thought,
I need a job
, but I also had a sense that my parents were not going to be able to afford college because they were having financial problems. And so I thought,
Why don’t you jump right into your dream, just have the balls to do it.
Anyway, when my parents got divorced, my mom moved to Southampton and we—my parents used to own a restaurant, and the bartender there was Rick Messina.

Marc:
Oh my God.

Judd:
Rick Messina is the great manager who went on to represent Tim Allen. Back then he managed the East Side Comedy Club on Long Island, which was the first comedy club on the Island, and a bunch of other clubs. So when my parents got divorced, my mom got a job seating people at her former bartender’s comedy club. I mean, this was the dream situation for me. This was ninth grade, and it’s the summer, and my mom is seating people at a comedy club. Every weekend, I would go watch every show—Leno, Paul Provenza, first show I ever saw of a young comedian. And years later I thought,
That’s really kind of the worst job ever. What could Mom have gotten paid to do it?
I’d like to think that she did it because she knew I would like it. And my dad was great. He would drive me to comedy clubs a few times a week and was a big supporter.

Marc:
That’s sweet. So okay, you saw Leno, you saw Provenza. This was 1980…what?

Judd:
This was ’82 or ’83, and then I got a job at Rick Messina’s comedy club as a dishwasher so I could see the comedians. Then I realized that I can’t see the comedians, I’m in the fucking kitchen. So I switched to a busboy at East Side Comedy Club. Eddie Murphy used to come in, and Rosie O’Donnell was just starting at that time. I would watch the comedians, and I thought,
I don’t have the balls to tell these people that I want to do this.
It may have been obvious to them but I couldn’t even tell anyone, I was so scared. In my senior year in high school, I finally got up at open-mic nights and was awful, so awful.

Marc:
It’s terrifying.

Judd:
And John Mulrooney’s hosting the open-mic night. And he just, I mean, it was pandemonium. He would kill and insult the crowd—

Marc:
I remember him.

Judd:
And he was fantastic. But to go on after that, when you have no idea what you’re doing and you’re seventeen years old? There’d be twenty comedians who’d all get five minutes. And you never knew if Mulrooney was going to do twenty minutes between acts and so you might get on at eight-oh-five, or one in the morning.

Marc:
You are the real deal. You came from a real comedy background in a way that none of us did. Many of us who started on those open mics didn’t watch comedy until we were stuck in those rooms and we
had
to. But you were actually just compelled to be there as a busboy. What were you, sixteen?

Judd:
From the earliest time, I understood that people got onstage with mics. I never had any interest in doing anything that I’m doing right now. It was not part of the dream. If you listen to those early interviews I did, it’s all about joke writing. It’s not screenwriting. I’m not talking about how I love movies. I want to understand the mechanics of a dick joke. That’s my vision quest. When I interviewed Seinfeld the first time my brother was
with me and you can hear him laughing. He’s laughing in the background, and to us, it was like being in the room with Paul McCartney. It was. I think, to some extent, we had a vision for what Jerry Seinfeld was more than Jerry Seinfeld had a vision of what Jerry Seinfeld was. It was like being in a small club seeing R.E.M. in Athens, Georgia, in the early eighties and knowing what they would become.

Marc:
A really small club. Just you and your brother.

Judd:
Exactly. And the great thing about it was most of those people were very, very nice and so it also made me feel like,
Oh, this is a world of strange people who might accept me one day.

Marc:
In retrospect, have you brought it up to Leno and Seinfeld and Shandling that you interviewed them when you were sixteen?

Judd:
I’ve mentioned it and none of them remember it—and they don’t seem very interested in it, either.

Marc:
But these guys gave you a blueprint for your life.

Judd:
Yes, they did. And they don’t completely get the significance of it. Because they might be having that effect on a lot of people.

Marc:
I find that hard to believe, because if somebody writes me an email or even says that I’ve changed them in any way, not only does it make me feel good but I have to fight the urge to go, like,
How? What did I do?

Judd:
Maybe they do get it. Maybe it’s just something that—it’s hard to express or connect about because it is such a powerful thing. It’s weird to look someone in the eye and say, “You’ve changed my life.” You know, I treasure when Seinfeld sends me a note and says he likes
Funny People
or something. It means more to me than he could ever know because I literally thought about him as I made it. And I thought,
One day Seinfeld’s going to see this. I better not fuck it up.

Marc:
All right, so at some point you come out here. I met you briefly. The first time I met you was at a party at Stacey Nelson’s house. She was a publicist. I was dating her. I was being held hostage at her house. I think it was 1989. I met you at a party and you insisted that I was never going to leave L.A., and I left.

Judd:
Really? Why would I say that?

Marc:
It was one of those weird moments where everyone’s hanging around and you go, “So what are you doing here?” And I’m like, “I’m staying at her house, you know, I’ve got to go back to New York.” You said, “Oh you’ll be back. You’ll be back.” It was almost ominous. But I left. There was that whole crew there at that time. You know, it was Ben Stiller and—I imagine that’s around the time that you guys were working on
The Ben Stiller Show.
Was that ’88?

Judd:
The show was ’91. We probably started working on it in ’91 and it aired in ’92.

Marc:
And that was your first real TV job?

Judd:
I wrote stand-up for a few comedians and when they did specials I would be a co-producer or something. I wrote with Roseanne, I wrote for Tom Arnold. Then I met Ben at an Elvis Costello concert and we both knew that HBO was looking for a show—a sketch show—and we thought of something in two weeks and sold it. People thought we had been friends forever, but we had known each other for fourteen days.

Marc:
In
Funny People
, there was footage of you and Adam and Janeane Garofalo.

Judd:
Yes, and Ben.

Marc:
And you were all in—what year was that, ’89 or ’88?

Judd:
That was ’89 or ’90. And in the footage in the beginning of the movie, you see Adam making a phony phone call, which I actually shot in our apartment back then, and Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo are there laughing, so you see them very briefly in the opening credits. At the time, Adam was so funny but had no outlet so he would make funny phone calls for hours and hours. I thought it was so hilarious, it didn’t make sense
not
to record it. I felt bad that they would disappear and never be heard again, so first I would audio-record them and then video-record them.

Marc:
Do you have all that stuff, too?

Judd:
I have all of it. When we were doing
Funny People
, I found hours of Adam Sandler making phone calls. He was always calling Jerry’s Deli and complaining about the roast beef and saying that it made him sick. And they would always be so nice and then he would be, you know, an old lady and he would negotiate getting a free sandwich. It was always like, “Could I get a free sandwich for my trouble?” And they would say okay. And he would say, “Well, I had turkey but I don’t want to get hurt again, this time could I get the roast beef?” He would keep them on the line for twenty minutes, negotiating a sandwich. As a comedy nerd, I knew:
That’s the guy. Adam’s going to hit. There’s no way this doesn’t happen.
He just delighted us. He made us laugh so hard.

Marc:
You keep using that term,
comedy nerd
, but back then it didn’t exist. You were just a guy who loved comedy.

Judd:
I remember moving to L.A., and I started doing stand-up at this place called the L.A. Cabaret in the Valley, in Encino. And I started meeting comedians for the first time, personally, not just interviewing them. And I realized,
They’re all like me. They all like the same stuff. I finally can talk to people about Monty Python and the Marx Brothers.

Marc:
This is a recurring theme with you. These socially awkward, alienated guys that have to group with each other and sort of have this different type of strength to get through things.

Judd:
Cocky nerds. My wife and I always talk about it. It’s people who think they don’t think ill of themselves—they actually think that there’s something special about themselves but no one’s noticed it. And so the characters on
Freaks and Geeks
—the geeks look down on the people who beat on them, but they still are terrified of them. And that’s what makes them interesting. They have an air of superiority as they’re getting pummeled.

Marc:
You and Ben Stiller really created this community of comedy nerds in some ways. Do you feel that?

Judd:
I think that Ben in a lot of ways is the beginning of much of what’s happened in modern comedy. He did
The Ben Stiller Show
on MTV with Jeff Kahn, which was a
Larry Sanders
–esque show, where it was behind
the scenes of a sketch show where Ben played kind of a jerk. And I met Ben after he did that. So when we created
The Ben Stiller Show
[for Fox] together, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Ben knew how to make short films. I was just the guy trying to figure out how to not have Ben realize I didn’t know how to do anything but write stand-up jokes. So I’m just keeping my mouth shut and listening to Ben because he was already brilliant and had a vision for what this was, and slowly I figured out how to run a writing staff and edit, but I was faking it. I was faking it for a long time.

Marc:
Isn’t that what everyone does for the first couple of jobs?

Judd:
Yeah, but I was in charge of the writing and editing of the show. And so it was not like faking it as a staff writer. I was twenty-four or twenty-five years old with no background at all. And I hired people with Ben who were brilliant, like Dino Stamatopoulos and Bob Odenkirk and Brent Forrester and David Cross, and so in a lot of ways it was trying to manage these personalities who were bursting with energy. I mean, Bob was the funniest man in the world. The energy he had during
The Ben Stiller
Show—when he didn’t like someone else’s sketch, he would be like, “Oh my God, you can’t do that. Who
wrote
that? Your unfunny uncle?” I was so intimidated because I wasn’t anywhere near as strong as Bob but I also had to pick what sketches of Bob’s we would shoot on the show. And then David Cross came on for the last few and you felt like,
Oh, this guy is in a whole other world with Bob.

Marc:
Then you went on to do
Larry Sanders
, which is another defining show for comedy nerd-dom. I mean, that’s an amazing show.

Judd:
That’s where I learned how to write stories. Garry was nice enough to hire me on that show after
The Ben Stiller Show
, but I had never written a story before.

Marc:
You wrote sketches and jokes.

Judd:
I knew how to write “Legends of Bruce Springsteen” but I didn’t know how to write about
people
. I was there, on and off, for five years and Garry ultimately allowed me to direct an episode and that’s how I started directing. But it was an amazing place to be. And also scary because it’s
Rip Torn and Jeffrey Tambor and they’re brilliant and terrifying. Imagine having to walk up to Rip Torn and give him a note to change his performance. I mean…

Marc:
How did that go?

Judd:
It didn’t go well. It didn’t go well at all. I mean he, he was a blustery guy. But correct most of the time, and a wonderful person who would always wind up doing what you were trying to get him to do, but if you walked up to him and said, “Rip, I think you need to play it a little nervous here,” he’d say, “I’m not
nervous
! I’m in
charge
of the place!” “Okay, Rip, I’m sorry. We’ll just do it the way you want to do it.” Then, three takes later, he might give you one. And then he’d walk up to you: “Come on, did you like the one I did the way you wanted me to do it? That was all right.” I felt like I was watching some of the greatest actors of all time. Certainly some of the greatest comedic actors of all time. When they did the last scene of
The Larry Sanders Show
, where Jeffrey Tambor goes off on Rip and Larry and says, “There’s a book being written about Hank Kingsley and you are not in it, and you are not in it, and fuck you…” I forgot the exact words, but they did it in one take and wrapped the series. That’s ballsy. They were at the top of their game. It was fun to learn from them.