Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (53 page)

Judd:
How many years ago did you start performing live?

Steve:
Five years ago.

Judd:
Was that terrifying?

Steve:
It was. But doing those shows made me sharper on the talk shows, gave me more material. And it made me sharper in my stand-up career
because the last ten years have been nothing but award shows—giving them and receiving them.

Judd:
But that’s a lot of appearances. And don’t you find that there’s a moment when you go,
How much can we all honor each other?

Steve:
Absolutely.

Judd:
On the other hand, Martin Short’s speech about you at the Oscars for lifetime achievement was incredible.

Steve:
He was great.

Judd:
Was that as special a night as it seemed?

Steve:
It was a big deal for me, yeah. First, I never thought I would get an Oscar. Although, you know, Nora Ephron said once, I don’t care who you are, when you sit down to type the first page of your screenplay, in your head you’re also writing your Oscar acceptance speech. And when you’re an actor and you’re giving your performance you’re also thinking,
You know, I think I can win an Oscar. I’m going to win an Oscar for this.
And comedy gets the short end of the stick at the Oscars because nobody understands it. So I was honored to be acknowledged for a body of work, I really was.

Judd:
All those movies exist and they’re on all the time.

Steve:
Yeah. And, you know, I saved all the scripts. That’s the only thing I saved. I never got them autographed or anything but I had them bound in leather. Sometimes I look at them, look at the titles, and think,
It’s all shit.

Judd:
All of them?

Steve:
All of them. But then sometimes I think,
Well, that was pretty good, and that was pretty good, and that was good
, and so I can get like eight out of forty that are pretty good. All it takes is eight to make a good career. Because no one has twenty.

Judd:
It’s like baseball.

Steve:
It’s hard to hit a lot of good movies. Very hard. I didn’t know that at the beginning. I thought every movie I did was going to be good. To me,
there’s like three levels of knowing if a movie is good. One is when it comes out. Is it a hit? Then after five years. Where is it? Is it gone? Then again after ten–fifteen years if it’s still around. Are people still watching it? Does it have an afterlife? Like,
Three Amigos!
was a flop.

Judd:
But then it becomes the most beloved—

Steve:
Well, I don’t know if it’s beloved. They tell me it is, but I don’t know.

Judd:
When I was working for
The Larry Sanders Show
, Warren Beatty was on an episode and I had lunch with him. And he told me, “You don’t know for ten years if a movie is truly good, so don’t even think about it. At some point, you gradually realize,
Oh, people are still amused by this.
”

Steve:
Absolutely true. I find that the joke you put in that really shouldn’t have been in the movie because it was a personal favorite or something is the joke that stands out ten years later.

Judd:
Let’s talk about
The Jerk.
It made a hundred and eighty million dollars in 1980. That’s like the equivalent of making six hundred million today dollars or something. Did it feel that big when it came out?

Steve:
I didn’t have any way of comparing. It was my first movie. Everything I’d done had been a hit, so I just assumed that it’d be a hit, too. You know.

Judd:
It’s one of those movies that completely holds up.

Steve:
It’s held up for a long time, yeah.

Judd:
Would it be painful to sit and watch it now?

Steve:
Yeah. It would.

Judd:
What is the high point of your career, then? What film or moment do you instantly go to in your mind?

Steve:
You mean, in terms of movies that I’ve done? I can think of scenes that feel really funny to me, but I don’t resee a lot of my movies. I actually avoid it. Unless it’s by accident. In terms of movies, they are usually the ones done by somebody else—
Planes, Trains and Automobiles; Father of the Bride; Parenthood
.

Judd:
You should watch
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
again.

Steve:
I know that film pretty well. John Hughes was a special kind of genius.

Judd:
It is a masterwork, and I refer to it when I’m working with people because I think that movie has a lot to teach people who are trying to do comedy. That scene where you and John Candy have a fight in the hotel room is as perfect as, you know, Albert Brooks and Holly Hunter’s fight in
Broadcast News.

Steve:
Why do you think that was? Because it turns around or because I realize that I hurt him?

Judd:
You go off on him so hard because you’re so frustrated and you’ve lost your sense of his humanity and then he stands up for himself and just says, “Well, I like me.” It goes from riotously funny to almost mean-spirited to truly sad. It can make you cry in an eighth of a second. It’s just your chemistry with him. How vulnerable he instantly becomes, and how you react to that, how it stops you in your tracks. Like,
Oh my God, what have I done? How am I behaving?
I don’t know if I’ve seen another movie with a sequence that works like that. Two actors in total sync.

Steve:
We really got along, John and I. There’s a scene in that movie that makes me laugh—we’re in a car going the wrong way, and then we pull over. John and I are just sitting on a suitcase talking, but we’re also scared, and we look at the car and it spontaneously bursts into flames. Poof. John Hughes was the master of those comic timing moments. That guy really knew something.

Judd:
Did you become close with him?

Steve:
It was funny. I did for a while, but then he just sort of stopped. He was a strange guy.

Judd:
There comes a moment when your kids start asking to see your movies. For a while, my daughter would give me a hard time because she wasn’t allowed to see my movies because they’re all R-rated. It’s hard to delay kids to fifteen, sixteen years old, especially when they have the movie on every gadget in the house. But I finally opened up the door. It
was this big deal. I was like, “Okay, you can watch them now”—and then she had no interest in watching them. So now, anytime she watches a movie that’s not one of mine it’s an insult to me. “Why are you watching
Schindler’s List
? You haven’t seen
Funny People
! When are you going to watch it?” She’s like, “I don’t know, Dad.”

Steve:
I loved
Funny People
, by the way.

Judd:
Thank you. It was fun writing about comedians. Adam Sandler and I thought a lot about Rodney Dangerfield when we were making that movie. Rodney was someone who just seemed unhappy with the ride.

Steve:
I met him once in Vegas, in the seventies. And immediately, when we sat down, it was like, “So-and-so stole that joke from me.” I remember thinking,
Well, that was fast.
I liked him, though. He was great. You know who used to love Rodney? David Brenner.

Judd:
Brenner is so funny. I used to watch him on
The Mike Douglas Show
all the time.

Steve:
He actually helped my career quite a bit.

Judd:
How so?

Steve:
It was ’73 or ’74, and I went to see him somewhere in Washington, D.C. He was really hot at the time, hosting
The Tonight Show
, with a beautiful girlfriend. I remember after the show, they came out and they were both wearing full-length mink coats. Anyway, I wrote to him. I was living in Santa Fe at the time. I said, “I can’t make any money. I can get paid maybe three hundred dollars for a gig, but it costs me two hundred dollars to get there.” And he writes back and says, “Here’s what I do. I tell the club owner, ‘I’ll take the door, and you can have the bar, and I’ll have a guy stand at the door with a clicker.’ ” I couldn’t, you know, with my WASPy thing, I couldn’t ever say that, but I did ask the club owner to give me the door. That’s when I decided I would only be a headliner—and it changed my career. The opening act doesn’t get any traction and a headliner does.

Judd:
How did you arrive at the ideas in your act, early on? I mean, you were taking apart what it means to be a comedian. It was not observational comedy. The act itself was fascinating.

Steve:
I was lucky to have come up in that era because today, every area is covered and there’s so many good people. If I was starting now, I’d be lost.

Judd:
But no one’s doing the type of comedy you were doing. There are really smart comedians, but there’s not a lot of conceptual comedy out there.

Steve:
I think it’s a dead end, you know.

Judd:
Because it runs out of gas?

Steve:
Yeah.

Judd:
You can’t keep doing it?

Steve:
I mean, I’m still around, but I couldn’t have kept doing
that
act, I don’t think.

Judd:
You’ve developed a different comic persona now, which feels distantly related to that. When you host the Oscars, I can sense that you’ve redefined your persona.

Steve:
Yeah, I have. I didn’t want to do the same old thing and I didn’t want to look like I was doing the same old thing. That extreme physical thing has totally gone out of it. And I love playing the egotistical asshole.

Judd:
I’m always fascinated by people’s comic journey—when they get bored and say, That’s enough. There are people like you, who seem to find new things to keep them interested, and there are people who say, I’m just going to hang out at the house. It’s a real challenge because success never satisfies whatever you thought it was going to do for you. You think,
Oh, I thought success would heal me and it doesn’t.
So you have to look for new reasons to keep making things.

Steve:
I read a book in college called
Psychoanalysis and the Arts.
And it compared Picasso and Chagall. Picasso was a guy who just kept changing his whole life and Chagall essentially painted the same things, over and over. And it talked about there being two types of creative people and I think that applies.

Judd:
When you got bored of doing stand-up, was there a part of you that thought,
Okay, this next thing will bring me happiness?

Steve:
No. I was just beaten down.

Judd:
And you feel the joy again, now that you’re out touring and making music?

Steve:
I really enjoy doing the shows, but the wear and tear—I have a daughter at home. It gets a little painful.

Judd:
When did you start playing the banjo?

Steve:
I’ve been playing it for over fifty years now.

Judd:
The second I hear that instrument, it makes me feel that happy Disney feeling. I read something where you talked about how fun it was to be creative with something that’s completely nonverbal.

Steve:
I think playing the banjo has extended my brain life by another ten years.

Judd:
Because it just connects everything?

Steve:
Yeah, just thinking in another way.

Judd:
Do you feel like this is a common trait, among the people that you’ve chosen as intimate friends? This creative searching? Is this how your friends also deal with this ride?

Steve:
Yes.

Judd:
Everyone around you seems to have a sense of humor about it, but they’re also working really hard.

Steve:
Everybody I know—I’m talking about Tom Hanks, Mike Nichols—

Judd:
Lorne.

Steve:
Lorne, yeah. Marty. All of us, we know how lucky we are. Everybody says, Oh, God, we have such a nice life, you know. We’re lucky to have had this happen to us.

Judd:
Yeah.

Steve:
Everybody is grateful.