Were you truly a "class clown" when you were a child?

Yeah, I was kind of a mimic as a kid. I had some skills for mimicking, making funny faces and noises and physical stuff and voices and as I got a little older in my childhood I found out I had the ability to make jokes, more of an intellectual than a physical thing, so that skill was there and that developed. Sure, like a lot of youngsters, I wanted to draw attention to myself, attract attention to get the approval of the others, disrupt classes and just be a general bother to the establishment. Anything I could do to disrupt order was useful I felt.

So as an adult, why did you choose to enter into comedy as a career?

Well I didn’t. I decided that as a child. I mean that was the way it was looking to me. It was something that came naturally, came easily, and gained approval and attention. Children, it seems to me, are drawn in directions that attract attention. In this case it was positive. Although disrupting class wasn’t seen that way by the others, in general, being a performer and amusing other people, getting people to laugh is seen as positive. So as a child I had a plan to follow that. Plans take different paths sometimes. So you know, the path wasn’t quite the way I predicted it, but it was very close.

What was your childhood plan?

Well I didn’t know much except for what I had seen around me, because I was funny and I liked comedians. My so-called idol- I wouldn’t call him my idol but people use these terms; some language is useful even though it’s not accurate- was Danny Kaye. He was my model. Danny Kaye was funny physically and did faces, and physical stuff, and voices and accents. And I thought, "Well I can do that. I’d like that." And Danny Kaye was in the movies. I saw him as an actor- I thought of him as an actor rather than a comedian. And I thought, "Well I’d like to be an actor. And first I’ll be a disc jockey, and then I’ll be a comedian, and then I’ll become an actor." So that was my little plan and I nurtured that plan along, but I stuck with that plan long beyond its usefulness. I didn’t know at the time that I was still pursuing acting as a possible next step, which lasted quite a while. I didn’t know when I was pursuing it as a next step that I really had something at hand, that is my stand-up and writing ability, that could serve me well in the long run and that I could develop and bring to a higher level. So, I kept looking around for these movie parts because that was going to get me somewhere else where I wanted to be. That pattern of looking for a dream was a habit that had outlived its usefulness. So, even with the sitcom, I thought well, you know they’ve often made tons of these sitcoms over the years and I’ve always said, "No, I don’t want to do that, I can’t really be myself." But the offers got better, and this was a good offer with a lot of creative control, and I thought well maybe before I die it’d be nice to know whether or not I really do fit there and if I can wedge my way into that. So, I tried knowing underneath I really didn’t think I could. And I was right. And I was really happy the day they called and cancelled it. I was so happy. And since then I’ve done two HBO [specials] and two books.

Specifically about your role as Mister Conductor -- I think it would surprise a lot of people. It definitely contrasts the profane nature of much of your comedy. Why did you choose to do that?

The practical surface reason was that it was another acting part that would show another side of me. I had played a couple of different things that were different from that and I wanted to show a little bit more flavor, a little color, a little extra shaving. But, underneath that, I also have an interest in throwing people off the trail. I like surprising them in a way. So this was very subversive, I thought, to raise these children on this benign figure and then have them discover the albums later on at age eleven, twelve, fourteen, or whatever and let the parents explain that.

So was it all part of some secret plan?

All of that thing I just told you was kind of subconscious. But I can see that it appealed to me. Whatever parts of it were on the surface, it appealed to me to through them off the trail and to let parents have to explain to children that people have different aspects -- that there are other facets to most people who we see one way.

I’ve read that you are considered a successor to Lenny Bruce and that apparently he even chose you as his successor. To what extent do you feel he has influenced your work?

Well, first of all, over time, people who write about you, write about things, look for pegs and hooks that are convenient. But Lenny was instrumental in getting Jack Burns [my original comedy partner] and I started, getting us an agent at the time when we were brand new, really new. I did an impression of him at that time in our act, and our manager had known him in the Navy. So he brought Lenny in. Lenny got us our agency contact, which was very important. Lenny was someone who a lot of performers looked up to because of his honesty and his brilliance in pursuing the kind of comedy he did at a time when it was really a danger to do so. He opened a lot of doors. The story of Lenny seeing me at an early stage came indirectly from the manager of a club I worked in where Lenny sneaked in to see me in Chicago. The club was called The Gate of Horn. And he said something to the manager, something to the effect of, "If I’m like Jack Benny, this guy is like my George Burns." So he made some kind of comparison that was favorable. He meant that I had promise and probably some skills that he liked. It was really less formalized than the way you stated it. That’s part of the myth -- I don’t call it legend.

Are there any more traditional comics whom you admired?

Oh many many many. A lot of young people like comedy because it has a sense of freedom in it when you hear it. I had a lot of influences and just favorites. I was just a kid and I had no exposure to quote unquote stand-up nightclub comics, and vaudeville was gone and burlesque was gone. Radio was big for me as a child. I was lucky to live in the golden age of radio and the golden age of television. And radio had a lot of comedy shows and comedians whom I was drawn to. Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen I loved, and Amos and Andy, and Fibber McGee and Molly, the Bob Hope Show. There were more that I’m not recalling at the moment. Bob Hope in the movies was someone I liked a lot. I didn’t care anything for his television stuff later. I think I outgrew him more; it got old or something. Red Skelton in the movies. The Marx Brothers because of the anarchy. The first wave of Marx Brothers revivals occurred in the forties when I was a kid. There had been 1930’s movies that were brought back in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I saw them in the Midtown Theatre in the Carleton. So the Marx Brothers and the Ritz Brothers and then Martin and Lewis came along and then Ernie Kovacs. Then there was a big revolution in comedy in the fifties: more sophistication, more personal expression came into comedy. It wasn’t sort of a cookie cutter borscht belt or vaudeville style. People were individuals. Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, Nichols and May, Bob Newhart, Dick Gregory, each of them quite different from the others and each of them with a personal story or message. The improv people began around that time in the fifties. So all of that fed into the early Steve Allen, Bob and Ray, Redd Foxx, Jonathan Winters. All of those people as I was forming through my late teens and early twenties stimulated my comedy thinking and gave me a lot of incentive to continue what I was doing.

Do you think changes in your material for comedy are a result of changing times or your changing maturity?

Well what it really amounted to is figuring out that I had a world view that was pretty much a permanent part of me, and that is this detachment: the feeling of not belonging or being a part of anything. I never was a joiner. I was kicked out of or quit most of the things that required order, rules, regulation, conforming, uniformity never appealed to me. And I never really kind of codified that as a way of life and thinking. But it occurred to me at the same time that this writer voice was emerging, that I really had a point of view that dominated a lot of my writing and a lot of my thinking and behavior. So I thought well if just strengthen that and formalize that and adopt that as a part of a conscious central theme of mine, that gives me a certain freedom.

I’m an entertainer first, I recognize that- I’m a stand-up comic- that’s not a very lofty sounding thing- but there’s art at work here too because it’s writing and it’s interpreting the world so that is art. And an artist I think has an obligation to be going somewhere, there’s a journey involved. You don’t really know where it is, but you’re always exploring yourself and going to the next level, the next place and trying to get something off your chest.

So then I realized that I didn’t care much about anything. I knew I never cared about God or religion. And then I realized I didn’t really care about this country. I didn’t really have a stake in it. I don’t give a shit if this country explodes tomorrow. It doesn’t bother me and I don’t really care about it. There’s nothing I care about except family and friends and when I’m involved directly with a person. But in the abstract, it doesn’t mean anything to me. So when I realized I had that, I thought, "This is wonderful. I have no stakes in any of these subjects I talk about. I can divorce myself from them and be over here as the artist liberated on an island pointing my finger and saying what I want about things and I don’t have to feel I have some stake in the outcome." So that was the biggest thing, the most important thing, the best answer I could be giving you about my process.

How do you come up with your material?

I just have a lot of files. It started when I was eighteen years old recording, that is to say in handwriting at that time, every thought that I thought was appropriate and useful and looked like inventory to me, looked like something promising, or something I wanted to retain. And over time, because my left brain, if you want to oversimplify that brain hemisphere stuff, my left brain organizes everything. My right brain dreams it up. My left brain says, "Let’s get this stuff indexed and categorized and let’s keep track of it." And every time you have a thought, there’s a neural path established in your brain. Then the second time you think it, the path gets deeper. The time you write it down, it deepens further. You read back the note, it deepens further. Networks begin because the brain is essentially a goal seeking and a problem seeking mechanism and it does its own networking. It branches out and it finds appropriately similar thoughts and material that feed the central thought. So you do it physically that way in the file and the brain does a lot of this without bothering you. It doesn’t need to get in touch with you. So every time you look at in the file, it gets better, it gets richer. And you might even decide, "Okay, I’ll write a little paragraph." You know you just put up a first draft paragraph about something and you can go on. You do the rest of all your work that day and you don’t see it for six months. Each time I go in a file and I find something that really appeals to me, I work on it a little. And those things have built up over forty years. Now that there are computers in the game it makes it all not only quantitatively better, but qualitatively.

You tend to avoid topical material, current events in your routines. Why is that?

I never touch topical material. There’s a timeliness overall. Like abortion is something that is timely in the sense of these last twenty years and the immediate future. But I don’t do day-to-day stuff. I don’t do things that have a shelf life. I don’t like that because first of all, you sound like everybody else. It’s a very easy thing to do- to make fun of the news. I like talking about things that are present in the news as larger issues that will always be there- genocide, war, love, sex, science, nature.

Do you ever get nervous before stage performances, even with your experience?

No, the only time I get nervous or get some feelings of apprehension and anticipation are in the situations where they’re not the normal setting. Or some element is beyond your control. Those are the ones where, you know, it’s an aspect of a fight or flight syndrome that you anticipate circumstances that you might want to think what you’ll do if such and such happens and so forth. That’s kind of a form of apprehension, not real fear. For the most part, I know what I’m doing, I’m confident in what I do, and I know the audience is there because they’re already predisposed to like me. It’s when you do something like a specialized event like a dinner or a luncheon where you have people who normally wouldn’t be in your audience, and the sexes are mixed, there are husbands and wives, sometimes clients. I don’t do much of this at all, but there are occasions. And those are places where you know they’re not there because they bought tickets weeks in advance to see your show. They’re there because the Ford dealers are having a luncheon or whatever the moronic business gathering is about. And for whatever godforsaken reason I’m there, but it’s something I’ve justified [to myself]. Those are the things that make me nervous.

You’ve performed for college audiences many times. Has your opinion of college students changed over the years?

Oh yeah. I don’t like to play colleges. They’re not yet fully formed. And it’s an inhibiting factor. Now this varies obviously. State schools -- the intellect isn’t as high as in private schools. In rural and conservative and removed areas there is a lesser sophistication than in Eastern and Western urban areas. So there’s a variety in this answer implied. But for the most part, to generalize, colleges in the late sixties and seventies were hotbeds of risk-taking and thought, well thought of course, but risk-taking and challenging of authority and questioning values and in some case there were some mild changes that came about because of that. Some seem important to others, not to me. But there were changes. That is no longer true. The society has changed and except for hard sciences and people who want to pursue scholastic careers, it’s largely about getting a good job. It’s largely about succeeding in the economy. When mothers are playing Beethoven to their fetuses and enrolling them in grade schools at their first birthday, something is wrong. So there’s a different tenor and tone in what I feel and hear and sense from college, from the body of college personalities, experiences, thoughts, people, the stuff you get. And in the audiences, there’s a thing I don’t like. I don’t like homogeneity. I like an audience where everybody is with us. There’s variety, a heterogeneous audience. I like the fact that in a theatre there’s everything in there. But when you go to a college, they all have one thing in common. This one great thing in common. So there’s kind of a flock mentality, kind of a hive mentality. And if you go to the left on something, I don’t mean politically- if you make a turn and they’re not there for you, they’re all not there for you, you know? In a regular audience, you take them somewhere, half of them might wonder... eh? What’s that? The other half -- oh yeah! So often it’s black or white.

So they’re all of one mind?

And they’re in their own turf. It’s their place and you’re the stranger, whereas in the theatre everybody’s sort of stranger, and each person in a chair is a separate entity and you’re playing to all individuals in a manner. So all those things go into it. I have found it very hard to do the thing I love to do on a stage, more recently, the last ten years, in a college than I used to. I don’t know how much of that I bring to it myself, you know. But as I say, you get a good private school in a big city and it’s fine- there’s no problem.

Do you think you have affected other comics, the newest generation perhaps?

Well, some of them say that. And third parties tell me that, so to some extent. I think it’s indirect. You mentioned Lenny Bruce, and Lenny was vilified and persecuted by the Catholic Church and the Irish police departments of the north for his candor and he lived in a time when that’s the only reaction one could expect. He opened the doors for Richard Pryor, people like me, and many others, but Richard and I probably became the most visible of those who were able to follow in some of those footsteps in, you know, in a manner of speaking. If there’s been some indirect influence on other comics, it is that Richard Pryor and I were able to be both very outside the proscribed circle of, you know, proper speech and still succeed commercially. To be a part of the culture and yet be people who chose to criticize the culture in very harsh terms. So, the fact that that happened, I think, it kind of encouraged some comedians to go ahead and feel there’s a little more freedom in the field than they had expected. Lenny didn’t have the freedom. He was the pioneer. Richard and I gave kind of a creative freedom in spite of our chosen language. So that, I think, encouraged some others to maybe step into the field who otherwise may not have.

How would you define political correctness? To what extent should we be sensitive to other people’s ethnicities and beliefs?

I think you should be sensitive one on one. I think overall in the abstract it inhibits human behavior. I don’t like orthodoxy of the left any more than I like orthodoxy of the right. I think political correctness is a guilt response by privileged white campus elitist liberal paternalistic people. I don’t think whites should be telling us, trying to protect minorities, speaking for them, and acting paternalistically. I think they can handle that very well by themselves. Most of these campus liberals who promulgated this political correctness were failed radicals who didn’t succeed in their revolution and who were probably in the library when every one else was out in the street out really getting clubbed. So I have very little respect for them. I think political correctness is an inhibiting value, and I think it is worth ignoring. I had some very interesting things in the first book [0Brain Droppings] that I said about it including all the terminology that is suggested by these left-wingers. And I, by the way, am probably farther left than any of them in my overall philosophy.

Recently there has been some comedy that has been of a more profane nature like South Park. Do you have an opinion on that?

Well, the culture gets what it asks for. I like it because it bothers some people. I like bothering people. I think it’s important to keep, to keep the, I’ll call it- I don’t have a good word for it without sounding like everyone else: the system, the establishment, whatever you want to call it- off stride. What’s wonderful is these conservatives who rail against this sort of thing are slaves to the marketplace. These are the people who say, "The unfettered market, the unfettered market, leave it alone!" You know, it will right things. And it’s the market that produces all of this because the American psyche is a rather embarrassing one. The American public body of thought, information, and values is terribly low, primitive, unsophisticated and willing to tolerate an awful lot. Everything is done in the interest of gaining material advantage. Whether everyone’s got to have a Jet-Ski or everyone’s got to have this thing. There’s a new dildo that plays the Hallelujah Chorus, they got to have one of those. Everyone’s got to have a, you know. It’s just embarrassing that this wonderful species has reduced itself to this pursuit of material goods. And the example of course, the model is the business community, the corporate community, the owners of everything. That’s the reason I kind of gave up on the species.

There are two things they did that were terribly destructive. The belief in a supreme being. The belief that there’s an invisible man in the sky who watches you and keeps score is so primitive. We used to make fun of people in the jungle because they admired the Sun or they worshiped a tree, which is there. It’s alive and you see. Here are people telling you there’s a man in the sky deciding things. There’s more proof for UFOs. Yet you’re considered a kook, outside the mainstream because... but God, whoa that’s different, so I see this as a deliberate act on the part of humankind to inhibit itself, to inhibit its own potential. Here’s a wonderful instrument, the mind that we have. And we have two things that we’re interested in: a man that keeps score that we never see and secondly, the pursuit of salad-shooters, snot candy, and a tequila lollypop with a worm inside of it made of artificial sweetener. You know it’s just really embarrassing to be a member of this species. So that’s what liberated means.

So you would call yourself an empiricist? You have to see evidence to believe something?

Oh, of course. I understand belief and I understand its place. And I understand the need to control people by having these invisible authority figures. If you can get a person at seven years of age to believe that there’s an invisible man watching you, you can pretty much add almost anything you want after that point. So, I think it serves a great purpose. It’s a political act. I have a thing I’m doing in my show now about the Ten Commandments. I refer to it as a political document. I try to show how you don’t need ten. Ten is a marketing number. It’s a convenient number. If you said you there were eleven commandments, people would have told you to go get fucked. But ten commandments, like the top ten, the ten best dressed, the ten most wanted- it’s an important official sounding number so that people respect it. But I take them apart- I kind of analyze them and I show you how you can combine them. There’s duplication. Stealing and lying are both dishonesty. So all you need to say is ‘Thou shalt not be dishonest.’ Adultery and coveting the neighbor’s wife- relatively the same thing- fidelity, infidelity- and they are also dishonesty. Infidelity and dishonesty are really in the same family. So you know. So I think this all a game being perpetrated. And it’s very, very effective.

Some would argue that the repetition in the Ten Commandments is to stress the importance of them.

If it’s just important you’re looking for then you underline and say THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. This one is really important. This is dishonesty, this is very important. But I understand why they do that.

Albert Einstein once said, "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school." What should people remember after they’ve heard you? Or what do you hope that they’ll take away?

I don’t wish anyone to take something away. Laughter is therapeutic, you know, there are aspects of it you know that are actually shown I guess scientifically to be very useful psychologically and physiologically. So I know that that effect is there. I just want people to laugh and see my stuff. I’m a show off. That’s basically what this is about. The fact that I like to look into ideas as part as what I do is more for me than for them obviously. When you quit school in ninth grade, you live with a certain, I won’t call it inferiority complex because that’s dramatic, it’s not that. But you live with a certain need to show your smarts. To prove kind of to yourself mostly and the world that hey I’m a pretty good thinker here, I’ve got some thoughts I’d like to share with you. So, part of it has to do with that.

So, your comedy is more an outlet for expression, rather than a means to affect people?