Boulevard before he did. Of course, he starred in When Harry Met
Sally . . . a couple of years later and took off. Still, for that one moment, fuck him.
I had a ball making Outrageous Fortune; it was the kind of belonging I'd always longed for. Part of a group I wanted to be part of.
It's a cliche that's been used to death, but there is a family feeling
when you work with people on an artistic project for four, six, eight
weeks; my work wasn't even that long and I still felt it. Like being at
camp with good friends and there's this little ashtray you're all making together..,
I played—of course—a burned-out hippie who's an alcoholic and
lives on an Indian reservation and hustles tourists. The part's not
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huge but the impact is great because in a way he's the hero—he
saves the whole situation they get into. I played a fairly broad character and I had just a terrific experience, doing my homework, coming in prepared, working with the other actors, going for those little
shadings. It was everything I ' d hoped it would be, and it led to Bill
& Ted's Excellent Adventure a couple of years later, and then a good
role in The Prince of Tides and more recently Dogma and Jersey
Girl with Kevin Smith. I've always had that same feeling of belonging, working with friends, and enjoying the counterpunching with
them. A dream that in a nice little way actually came true. Even if I
never did become Jack Lemmon the Second.
My new direction was slowly making itself known to me—by the
reading I was choosing and the things I was tearing out and circling
in periodicals. I was beginning to keep what amounted to a journal
in another form: a record of my reactions to issues.
Every day I take a lot of notes. And the notes go into files in various categories. They can be a sentence, a word, an idea, two things
that connect or contrast, an afterthought, a neat phrase. Something
I can add to something in a given file; maybe these go together,
maybe it could start like this . . . or something that starts an entirely
new file. It's an incessant process.
What often happens with these notes is that there's a period of
months when they tend in a certain direction or they're about certain topics. I don't review them that often but I add to them all the
time, so when I finally take time to look them over, I get a kind of
objective view of what my mind really wants to produce.
In the mideighties the notes began to be almost exclusively about
issues: capital punishment, rich and poor, abortion, government
corruption, official euphemisms, the crimes of those business suits I
sat next to on planes. The number of notes about department stores
or dogs and cats or driving habits or airlines began to diminish.
(Those files were fairly fat anyway.) My mind and heart said, "This
is what we're doing now." And it would be new, a new direction, a
new sound.
There was a familiarity to these feelings of anticipation. It was
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I GET PISSED, GODDAMIT!
how I'd felt in the formative stages of Class Clown and Occupation:
Foole. I knew—just as I had then—that this new material would flow
easily and naturally. It had been stored up and was already halfway
formed or ready to start forming. It had a life of its own. My process
always works like that. I review a file and say, "There's a lot of good
stuff in here, but I don't feel this bursting out of my chest yet." I look
at another and I get excited: "This shit's going to be GOOD! Can't
wait till they hear THIS!"
But something else was happening that had never happened before. Previously my notes and ideas came together the way galaxies
do: they just naturally clumped. They clumped simply because they
were related—an extended family of ideas around a general topic.
Now they were parts that fit and functioned together, which I then
gradually formed into a whole. My writing was getting more disciplined, more consciously crafting language and structure. I had that
constant laboratory of performance to test things, to strip away what
wasn't needed or didn't work. I was taking the first tentative steps
toward comedy as art.
The 1986 HBO show, Playin with Your Head, has a piece called
"Hello-Goodbye," which is about the ways we say hello and goodbye
to one another. The mature voice hadn't evolved fully, but it had
pace and urgency and verbal fireworks.
The end of it is "Love and Regards," which in a way is an outgrowth of S t u f f , narrowly focusing on one word or phrase—treating
the trivial as a matter of great significance. The piece is about the
implications of trivial phrases like "Give my love to so-and-so," all in
the form of almost legalistic questions:
Think of the awesome responsibility of carrying one persons love
to another person. If you don't encounter that person, can you
unburden yourself of the love by giving it to someone else? Even
to someone who doesn't know the original person? Does the law
allow them to accept it? Does the law allow you to transport the
love? Especially across state lines? What form should the actual
delivery of the love take, whether or not the person is the intended
recipient? Can you tongue-kiss them? What if they're gay?
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It was more an exercise in form than a piece with a particular point,
but my mind was beginning to work differently. With my first transformation it was exciting just to speak to my audience one-on-one
instead of performing impersonally in front of them—to confide in
them who the internal me really was, share insights with them, be
their friend.
Now I was driven by a different need: to convey things about the
external world—or my version of it. Lead them logically or apparently logically to conclude that my version was correct. Take them
step-by-step to the place I wanted them to be.
There was a long piece called "Sports." Once again it had no
social or political aim—that would come—but it had a new tone and
approach: definitive, forceful and also reflecting a related theme
that was showing up more and more in my notes: violence.
It began with suggestions on how to improve major sports by
guaranteeing serious injury: in football, you'd have the entire fortyfive-man squad play all the time and leave the injured on the field.
In baseball, if the pitcher hit the batter with the ball he'd be out, and
the outfield would contain randomly placed landmines. In basketball, there'd be a two-second shot clock and you'd score twenty-five
points for any shot that went in the basket off another guy's head.
I set out to prove that most other sports weren't sports—another
exercise in logically proving the opposite of conventional wisdom.
For instance: Swimming is simply a way to keep from drowning,
so it can't be considered a sport. Having to rent the shoes prevents
bowling from being one. As for tennis, what is it really but Ping-Pong
played while standing on the table? And then there was g o l f . Here the
point was less that golf wasn't a sport than how inane it is to hit a ball
with a stick, then walk after it, then hit it again. Wa
tching flies fuck is
a lot more stimulating.
The noisier the culture becomes, the stronger your voice has to be
to be heard above the din. This was a conscious thought—that I'd
better raise the level of my voice and therefore the intensity of my
metaphors and images and words and topics to get and keep people's
attention.
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I GET PISSED, GODDAMIT!
There was another reason to turn up the volume. There was a
comedy boom in full swing during the eighties. I was always being
told about the hot new guy or the hot new woman. I'd sometimes
tense up internally, because you never know. It's like gunfighting, the Old West. New guy in town. Might be faster than you.
I'm the big guy on the block, or at least one of them. So they're
coming after me. I've always been very competitive about that. But
they also come and go. So I was always slow to rush out and catch
them; I didn't obsess about the competition as some guys do. But
when a stand-up starts breaking from the pack, you have to check
them out.
Then one of three things happens. Either: NO THREAT! NO
FUCKING THREAT AT ALL! Or: this guy is really good. But he's
not on my block. So NO THREAT either.
Or: WHOOOA!
Sam Kinison was a Whoooa!
When he started catching fire in the second half of the eighties I
remember saying to myself: I'm going to have to raise my voice. This
motherfucker's GOOD! He's got ideas. He's loud. And he's on my
block. Definitely on my block.
I loved Sam's mind and the way he went after people and ideas:
his piece about world hunger and the Ethiopians—"GO LIVE
WHERE THE FOOD IS!"-that was something I'd like to have
written. Without wanting to wipe him out, I had to raise my level to
where I wasn't lost in his dust.
Be smarter. Be louder. Be on my fucking toes. And though the
general proliferation of comedians presented no threat either, the
sheer numbers that were happening, the sheer fact that there was a
comedy boom, was a spur. You have to run a little faster, show 'em
why you're out in front. It's not the accumulated credits, George, not
the years you've put in. It's what did you do last week.
My overall reaction to the Reagan years was one of storing up
ammunition. Arming myself and storing the armaments away for
use later on. I knew this was happening, because I could see the
files taking shape, acquiring real structure, meaning and weight.
And they were getting fatter and fatter. Before long I was going
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to be able to back up the things I really wanted to say, the positions I wanted to take. I knew now what I was for and against and I
knew why.
The 1988 HBO show, What Am I Doing in New Jersey?, was the
first use of the stored armaments, the first time that this newfound
attention to structure met up with a heightened political sense:
I haven't seen this many people gathered in one place since they
took the group photo of all the criminals and lawbreakers in the
Reagan administration. 225 of them so far. 225 different people
in Ronald Reagan's administration have either been fired, ar-
rested, indicted or convicted... of either breaking the law or
violating the ethics code. Edwin Meese alone has been investi-
gated by three separate special prosecutors and there's a fourth
one waiting for him in Washington right now. Three separate
special prosecutors have had to look into the activities of the at-
torney general! And the attorney general is the nations leading
LAW-ENFORCEMENT OFFICER! This is what you gotta re-
member. This is the Ronald Reagan administration—these are
the LAW AND ORDER people. These are the people who are
against street crime. They want to put street criminals in jail
to make l i f e safer for business criminals. They're against street
crime so long as it isn't WALL Street.
The Supreme Court decided about a year ago that it's okay to
put people in jail if we just THINK they're going to commit a
crime. It's called preventive detention. All you gotta do is just
THINK they're gonna commit a crime. Well, if we'd known this
seven or eight years ago we coulda put a bunch of these Repub-
lican motherfuckers directly into PRISON! Put 'em in the joint
where they belong and we could've saved the cost of putting these
country-club, pinheaded assholes ON TRIAL! Another thing
you gotta remember is these were the people who were elected
with the help of the Moral Majority. And the Teamsters Union.
That's a good combination: organized religion and organized
crime working together to build a better America!
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I GET PISSED, GODDAMIT!
. . . I'm the first to say it's a great country, but it's a STRANGE
CULTURE. This has got to be the only country in the world
that could come up with a disease like BULIMIA. Where some
people have no food at all and some people eat a nourishing
meal and then PUKE IT UP INTENTIONALLY! Where to-
bacco kills 400,000 people a year but they ban artificial sweet-
eners! BECAUSE A RAT DIED! And now they're thinking of
banning toy guns-but they're KEEPING THE FUCKING
REAL ONES!
It's the old American double standard. And of course we're
founded on the double standard. That's our history. This country
was founded by slave owners WHO WANTED TO BE FREE!
So they killed a lot of English white people in order to continue
owning their black African people so they could kill the red In-
the brown Mexican people, giving them a place for their planes
to take o f f and drop nuclear weapons on the yellow Japanese
people. You know what the motto of this country oughtta be?
You give us a co/or-WE'LL WIPE IT OUT!
You've got to be evenhanded though. Nothing like road rage for
injecting a little populist class warfare:
. . . And then of course, the three most puke-inducing words that
man has yet come up with: BABY ON BOARD! I don't know
what yuppie cocksucker thought of that! BABY ON BOARD—
who gives A FUCK? I certainly don't! You know what these
morons are actually saying to you, don't you? We know you're
a shitty driver, but our baby is nearby and we expect you to
straighten up for a little while! You know what I do? I run 'em
into a goddam utility pole! Run 'em into a fucking tree! Bounce
that kid around a little bit!! Let him grow up with a sense of real-
ity, for Chrissakes!
I'm supposed to alter my driving habits because some woman
forgot to put her diaphragm in? Isn't that nice? Baby on Board!
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Child in Car! Don't tell me your troubles, ladyl Why don't you put
up an honest sign: ASSHOLE AT THE WHEEL! They don't
sell many of those, do they? Nah—they give them away free with
VOLVOS and AUDIS! And SAAAAABS! Some of these mo-
rons have SAAAAAAABS! "We bought a SAAAAAAAAAB!"
Well, what did you
buy a Swedish piece of shit like that for? "It's
a safe car." Some of these people think that by buying a safe
car it excuses them from the responsibility of actually having to
learn to DRIVE THE FUCKING THING! First you learn to
DRIVE! THEN you buy your safe car!
WELL, I GET PISSED, GOD-DAM-IT!!!!
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WORKING RAGEAHOLIC
The reason I prefer the sledgehammer to the rapier and the reason I believe in blunt, violent, confrontational forms for the
presentation of my ideas is because I see that what's happening to the lives of people is not rapierlike, it is not gentle, it is not
subtle. It is direct, hard and violent. The slow violence of poverty,
the slow violence of untreated disease. Of unemployment, hunger,
discrimination. This isn't the violence of some guy opening fire
with an Uzi in a McDonald's and forty people are dead. The real
violence that goes on every day, unheard, unreported, over and over,
multiplied a millionfold.
And it is not sufficient to have a "clever riposte"! A witty song by
the Capitol Steps, "Fa la la, oh dear, the killing, hey dilly dilly dilly!"
doesn't do it for me.
"FUCK YOU, COCKSUCKERS!" is my approach. To the world,
to the leadership. When are we going to start assassinating the right
people in this country? (Why is it, by the way, that the right-wing
guys assassins have tried to shoot survived? Like Wallace and Reagan? Don't we have any marksmen on our side?)
The 1990 and 1992 HBO shows were when things really gelled.
1990 was the first time that the improvement in my new strengths in
writing met up solidly with my heightened political sense. It wasn't a
Jammin' in New York, but it was a good step beyond what happened
in '88, as '88 had been beyond '86.
One reason may have been—don't laugh—that 1990 and '88
were both shot in New Jersey. Yeah, kiss-her-where-it-smells New
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Jersey. We'd finally discovered not to do HBO shows on the West
Coast. Californian audiences just sit there trying to decide whether
they're going to go to the beach tomorrow or Magic Mountain. Not
a lot of concentrated energy in a Los Angeles audience.