![]() ![]() Well, we all go to the area of strength in school, so we can be liked by girls. ![]() There’s still a lot of good jokes in there. My dad died right after performing at the Friars’ roast for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. And the show was called Meet Me at Parky’s. The character was a Greek immigrant who couldn’t speak very well, so there was a lot of dialect humor. But he wrote his own shows with other writers.Ī.B. He did Friars’ roasts and wrote material and made people laugh that way. My dad played a character on the radio called “Parkyakarkus.” A Greek-dialect comedian. Even though my father was a radio comedian, it wasn’t cool to say, at a young age, “I want to be a comedian.”Ī.B. Was it almost a combination of a modern style of stand-up comedy and the previous style? This idea of doing characters and creating situations, but in a new way?Ī.B. I was fleshing out 15 characters, with different voices, and it would have been better if I had hired 14 people. I would bring props and chairs and tape recorders. Instead of hosting, which I didn’t want to do, I was able to sort of dictate what I wanted to do, because they wanted my name. Then Lorne Michaels wanted you as permanent host for S.N.L., which was just starting.Ī.B. “Oh, it’s a joke? Why would it be a joke? There’s pictures of the school!” So Bob Shanks, a lovely man, was a producer at The Great American Dream Machine, and he said, “Why don’t you make this into a commercial?” That was the first time I ever picked up a camera and found out that, well, if I aim it here, and this person says that, and I think it’s funny, hey, you think it’s funny, too. I had written this fictitious article in Esquire, with a test, and they got like 3,000 real responses, because mockumentary things weren’t really there yet. Well, the first thing I ever did was “The Famous School for Comedians,” for PBS. And so Real Life and even the Saturday Night Live sketches were-Ī.B. You can be right smack-dab in the middle of the herd. ![]() Now you don’t have to be that, to be an artist. My friend Harry Nilsson used to say the definition of an artist was someone who rode way ahead of the herd and was sort of the lookout. I realized I should at least take it as a compliment, because that’s all it was good for. “He’s ahead of his time.” Then I learned that would in no way be a plus in this business. In a weird way, you’ve always been a bit of a futurist.Ī.B. You get the list of the nine people who run everything. That’s the two-week period where you go from thinking you can change the world to being scared out of your mind. I always think when someone’s elected president they take them into a room and say, “Here’s what really goes on on this planet.”Ī.B. Break up with her now, so it doesn’t ruin your experience of the movie.” I should have listened. I remember I was about to shoot a movie, and I told him I wasn’t getting along with my girlfriend, and he said, “Break up with her. It was such a momentous thing to me that when I got home I wrote down everything he said in my journal. I had dinner with him and Garry Shandling. And don’t forget the acting, which is Albert’s secret weapon: Taxi Driver. And then came his own films, which are like the Torah to me: Real Life. But then he made the mockumentary “The Famous Comedians School,” which is great, and the six innovative comedy shorts for Saturday Night Live, which inspired a lot of what Ben Stiller and I did when we were putting together The Ben Stiller Show. His stand-up work alone, some of which you can hear on the albums Comedy Minus One (1973) and A Star Is Bought (1975), guarantees him a place in my personal comedy pantheon. Even after working with him, on This Is 40, I’m still in awe. He’s the original smart, sensitive Jewish neurotic guy, with huge flaws and a heart of gold. ![]()
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