Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (39 page)

Judd:
Your brothers and sisters were much older than you?

Michael:
Much older. My closest brother is eight years older than me and my oldest brother is like fifteen years older than me. I’m the youngest of seven. And when you’re around kids that much older than you, you have to be quiet and find something to entertain yourself. A lot of times, I would be put in front of the TV.

Judd:
What was the vibe in your family in terms of career? For me, I saw comedy as a way to escape. What was going on in your family?

Michael:
We came from a poor family. Everybody had regular jobs. No one did anything that was super-successful in our family. It was more like, “Don’t be a bum. If you’ve got to be a carpet man or whatever, that’s fine; we don’t care what you do as long as you’re not a bum.” And I started comedy late. I started when I was twenty-six. As arrogant as this may sound, I knew I wasn’t going to be in some cubicle and wasn’t going to be a fireman. I knew I would do something creative. I was always the creative type. I worked as an artist for a while. I used to paint portraits and do graphic design and stuff. I would make a little bit of money and then lose a bunch of money, and by the time I was twenty-six, I was just really down on myself. I felt old. Twenty-six is a weird age because that’s when all your friends are starting to do well—you know, they’re out of college, they’ve gotten their careers started. And I felt like I was nowhere. I was twenty-six, but I felt like I was forty-six. That’s when I decided to try comedy. And once I did, it just clicked. It was like love at first sight.

Judd:
Within the year, you were working the clubs in New York, getting real gigs.

Michael:
It started to roll quickly. But that’s also the benefit of doing it in New York City, where you can get up five times a day if you hustle. You could go to five different open mics a night, and really get a handle on a joke. It was like I was charging a battery—every single day, just relentless. I would get certain jokes so good that they almost couldn’t
not
work.

Judd:
Who did you want to be, as a comedian?

Michael:
Eddie Murphy made me want to be funny. But the Chris Rock and George Carlin specials, when they were saying controversial things and had points—I was like,
Man, I want to have points, too.
That was the important thing to me. That was my direction.

Judd:
Now you’re in a place where you can say those things and a lot of people will listen to it every week.

Michael:
Nothing is more exciting than being able to say an opinion into camera and wait for a reaction. That’s the ultimate goal. That’s the high. You want to write something that people hear and go, “Oh fuck. How
does he come up with that and he’s absolutely correct? I can’t believe they put that on TV.”

Judd:
It feels like we’re in the middle of a great moment in comedy. It feels like Comedy Central and UCB [Upright Citizens Brigade] and the Internet have just turbocharged everything. And I think all this competition has made comedians better.

Michael:
There’s such a need for comedy now. Everything has to be funny now. A car insurance commercial might be the funniest thing you see all day. Sports announcers are funny. Everybody’s funny. There’s a comedy writer for every single thing. You get comedy from everywhere now, and it’s breeding a society that wants to laugh. There’s so much competition, but there’s also so much room for more voices. It’s inspiring a lot of good comedy. A lot of different comedy.

Judd:
Do you love working at a place like the Comedy Cellar?

Michael:
It’s insane. It’s like our Apollo.

Judd:
Yeah, just to go in there every night and see, like, Dave Attell and then Dave Chappelle and then Chris Rock—there’s just an enormous group of talented people there every night. They kill so hard. Are there particularly special moments that come to mind when you think about that place?

Michael:
Yeah, my first night there. I show up and the guy at the door is like, “Yo, man, you might not be able to go on tonight because Chappelle is about to get up and we don’t know when he’s coming off.” And I was like, “Damn.” But there was another slot later on and the guy said maybe I could get on that. And I was like, “All right, cool, whatever.” So you know, Chappelle’s onstage. He’s killing for like forty-five minutes. Uncharacteristically gets offstage after like forty or forty-five minutes; everyone assumed he was going to be up there all night. So the next comedian to get onstage is Chris Rock. He gets onstage, and does like forty minutes. And the next comedian that gets onstage is me. I’m like, Fuck you. But you know what? It was good. And you know why? Because that crowd had seen ninety minutes of the best comedians in the world. I could not ruin their night. There was nothing I could say that was ever going to wipe that smile off those faces, man.

Growing up, I was completely obsessed with
Saturday Night Live.
Scarily obsessed. How deep did the nerd-dom go? I knew who all the writers were. (I also used to record the show with a cassette recorder, and then transcribe it by hand, and then study the transcription to try to understand how it all worked—but that’s a story for another day.) I wanted to know who was responsible for making this show that meant so much to me.

There was one writer I admired above all others—he also performed on the show occasionally—named Michael O’Donoghue. He had what we used to call a sick sense of humor. He was one of those preternaturally gifted, big-brained
National Lampoon
guys, who went on to become one of the original writers of
Saturday Night Live
—and was in the first sketch ever performed on
Saturday Night Live
—and later wrote the movie
Scrooged.
When I interviewed him, he had just been fired from the show and was ready to unload. He was fucking furious, actually. It was the first time I’d heard somebody—an adult, I mean—let loose like this and insult everybody he had just worked with, and the ferocity of his rage, and the righteousness of it, definitely left an impression. Michael O’Donoghue didn’t suffer fools. He didn’t need to.

Judd Apatow:
How would you describe your type of humor?

Michael O’Donoghue:
I don’t know. Everybody else calls it sick or something, but I find it healthy. I think humor should deal with the tensions that are going on in society. And our society’s really different now than
The Lucy Show
or
Dick Van Dyke
, or
Mary Tyler Moore.
I try to deal with the tensions of 1983—and some of them are really dark. The psycho rings
your doorbell, you know. So I reflect that in my humor. Some people say that’s funny. Some think it’s sick. I think it’s healthy.

Judd:
What would be an example of that tension?

Michael:
I recently flew with Eastern Airlines, which is—as I was flying, I wrote a thing called “TransEastern Airlines.” It was like flying in a cattle car with wings. It’s a line like, “You’ll feel like you’ve never left the ground because we treat you like dirt.” It was entirely based on flying Eastern, where they treated you like garbage. And so I wrote a sketch about it.

Judd:
What is
Mondo
?

Michael:
Mondo
is so many things.
Mondo Video
just came out in cassette form. It just sold five thousand copies, which is very good for something that’s not a movie. Just coming out cold, it’s doing real well.

Judd:
They’re going to release it as a movie in a limited—

Michael:
It was careless, the movie, because it was spaced for commercials. It was really strange. And also they have not perfected that tape-to-film process, so it looks real mushy when you watch it.

Judd:
What happened? You wrote it, and they okayed it, and then once it was made, they didn’t want it?

Michael:
That was exactly what happened, odd as it may sound. They invested a lot of money in it—three hundred thousand dollars—which I think is a lot of money. And they didn’t even bother to look at it at NBC.

Judd:
They didn’t even screen it?

Michael:
A couple of the censors looked at it, but none of the brass looked at it. A lot of television critics really liked it. It’s very strange to me, the whole history of that thing.

Judd:
And how did it do in the theaters when it came out?

Michael:
Terrible. It looked bad. It was made for television, not for movies. When you write for late-night television, you’re fighting sleep. So the way that you program is you put your best thing first, and your second-best thing second, and your third—because you’re just trying to fight sleep. So
the junk is at the end. That’s
not
the way to make a movie. The way you make a movie is you build to a climax—it’s a classic stage thing.
Mondo
was never meant to be a movie, and it didn’t do very well as a movie.

Judd:
How do you write a movie like that, because it’s very peculiar. I mean, the skits—

Michael:
Well, it was written very quickly. It was written in a couple of weeks. It was written off of a sort of video theory that it’s more fun—if you can’t be funny, be weird. It’s just as good, maybe even better. That was the comedic theory behind it. Sometimes we would just be strange for no good reason. It keeps me amused.

Judd:
What kind of reaction did you expect people to have when they watched it?

Michael:
Well, some would laugh, which happens. Some would be annoyed. Ah, more were annoyed than laughed. Whatever
Saturday Night Live
was when it came out, I expected
Mondo Video
to be, five years later. You know what I mean? It would be a different kind of comedy. I got tired of working in sketch comedy. Live television is very limiting, what you can do in it.

Judd:
You’ve had enough of TV comedy?

Michael:
I’ve had enough. It’s frustrating, live TV. Actually, there’s a different way to do live television, but—

Judd:
How would you like to do it?

Michael:
Shoot it all with creepers.

Judd:
With what?

Michael:
Shoot it all with creepers—handheld cameras. Put the cameras on the stage with the actors. Can I use obscenities in this—where is this broadcast, because I’m watching my language as I talk.

Judd:
We’ll bleep it out.

Michael:
Ah, okay. Well, then. I don’t think anybody gives a flying
fuck
if they see a cameraman on a stage, okay? I don’t think anybody cares. It’s the liveness of it that they like. Not how technically perfect everything is.
So that frustrated me. It frustrated me when I went back to
Saturday Night Live
and they wanted to shoot it the same old way.

Judd:
Do you think when they did the “new”
Saturday Night Live
they should have changed it, and tried new things instead of the same things?

Michael:
Jesus, yes. All TV knows is winning combinations. Of course they should have been trying something new, something interesting. Something that made us, in the first two or three years, look like fools—like
Red Skelton
or something, you know what I mean? It’s stupid.

Judd:
What kind of humor don’t you like?

Michael:
Almost everything. Aside from the stuff I write, there’s not much that appeals to me. I’ll watch—I like individual performances of people like Michael Keaton, who was wonderful in
Night Shift.
I’ll watch Shelley Long forever. Or somebody like Carol Kane, who’s a brilliant comedic actress. I like Andy Kaufman quite a bit. Richard Pryor’s great.

Judd:
You don’t like the normal comedy—you like a different element in it.

Michael:
Well, I think Erik Estrada is the funniest man in America. I will say that. I watch
CHiPs.
I suffer for
CHiPs.
It’s so stupid, those big yo-yos on motorcycles. Just kills me. You know, like most people, I like
The Jetsons.
Who doesn’t? But there’s not too much out there for me.

Judd:
Are there any topics you think
shouldn’t
be discussed in comedy? I guess that’s silly to ask.

Michael:
No, no, I’ve never found anything that’s—

Judd:
Even like topics like cancer?

Michael:
Especially
cancer. I’ve always found cancer an amusing weapon—I’ve always found, ah, anything that creates tension, tension and release, and cancer creates major tension.

Judd:
When did you first start working in comedy?

Michael:
That’s hard to say. I was a serious literary writer writing for the
Evergreen Review
, doing poetry and stuff like that. And then I slid off into a comic strip called
The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist
, which I did in
the late sixties, middle sixties, and then somehow I ended up at the
National Lampoon.
Then I slid into show business. It sort of shocks me to realize that I’m in the same profession as Charo and Sonny Bono. But I am—I slid into that at the
National Lampoon
radio office. Which I started in about ’73, and I quit later and John Belushi took it over.

Judd:
Now, what kind of comedy did you do on the radio hour?

Michael:
Essentially the sort of the thing that they’re doing on
Saturday Night Live.
I had very much the same cast—John and Chevy and Gilda and Bill Murray, odd people like Steve Collins, who’s now been in
Tales of the Gold Monkey.
I had a great group of people, plus a lot of the writers for
Saturday Night Live
. It was very much like
Saturday Night Live
, but it was a little freer because radio’s a little freer. But it’s not quite as powerful. We did most of the scenes—John had some great characters, which he never created on
Saturday Night Live
—

Judd:
Such as?

Michael:
He did a guy called Craig Baker, the Perfect Master—the eighteen-year-old perfect master—and it was just funny. It’s the concept of—instead of this guy living in India, he was just like this asshole kid who lived out in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Which is where John is from. And Indians would come to seek guidance from this dumb kid. It was funny. He just said, “Well, drink a lot of beer and go to Fort Lauderdale, and you need to mellow out, man.”

Judd:
How did this all lead into
Saturday Night Live
?

Michael:
Lorne Michaels, the producer of
Saturday Night Live
, heard the show. And Chevy had let it be known that Marilyn Miller, who had been writing for
Mary Tyler Moore
, was a big
Lampoon
fan, and she recommended me to Ed Bluestone, who used to write for the
National Lampoon.
A very good writer. So Lorne had heard of me in a variety of ways. I was in the middle of starting a new humor magazine at that time, and I went in to sign a contract on this, with Stan Lee—

Judd:
Then at Marvel Comics.

Michael:
Yes, exactly. And the wing of that company went bankrupt and Lorne had kept offering me a television show and I didn’t want to do television.
Then I had no choice but to do television or magazine—I had no way to earn money, so I said, “Okay, I’ll do your television show.” I was sort of backed into it.

Judd:
How did they decide what kind of show they wanted?

Michael:
Well, they didn’t—this got decided by getting a bunch of smart people in a room. The results were that show.

Judd:
Now, when
Saturday Night Live
started, weren’t you a prime-time player?

Michael:
I was for the first show, as a matter of fact. And then, I don’t know why I was eliminated from that slot—I think it was because Lorne was having some problems with Chevy. But I’m not a particularly good actor.

Judd:
But you starred in the first sketch of the series?

Michael:
I did. I did the first sketch. The Wolverine sketch. God, that was scary.

Judd:
Why is that?

Michael:
Because nobody’d ever done live television. Twenty million people are watching you. My little heart goes thump, thump, thump, thump. I thought I was going to pass out from fear.

Judd:
So it was only for the first show that you were a prime-time player?

Michael:
I think I was in the second show as a prime-time player, too. And then I was dumped somehow. I don’t know.

Judd:
Why weren’t you on the show more often?

Michael:
Lorne didn’t like me in the show that much.

Judd:
Really?

Michael:
Yeah. I wish I had been on the show more. It was always a problem about writing and acting for that show at the same time. All this crap about—

Judd:
Isn’t there a lot of competition being on the show?

Michael:
You bet.

Judd:
Were you on the show straight through for the entire original run?

Michael:
No, I quit after three years.

Judd:
Why?

Michael:
People were giving me shit. At a certain point, I didn’t want to go through these comic meetings where my work was discussed. I figured I’d proven that I could write stuff. I just wanted to do what I wanted to do. I got fed up with the whole process.

Judd:
Because I can see how they would question putting some of your stuff on the air.

Michael:
Yeah, me, too.

Judd:
I can see how somebody could question, you know, the Mike Douglas sketch. [
Michael would come out and do an impression of Mike Douglas if giant knitting needles were driven into his eyes.
]

Michael:
Well, you know, they actually went for that one easy. I don’t know why. I used to do it at parties with my friends. I originally did it on
National Lampoon Radio Hour.
And then I would do it to entertain the people at
Saturday Night Live
, and finally somebody said, “Let’s put that on the air if it gives us laughs.” That was always our standard. If it makes us laugh, it should make them laugh. And it did, in a way.

Judd:
The other night, I saw—do you ever watch the repeats?

Michael:
No.