I love the walls here [there are classic comedy records along the brick], and it looks like you have a lot of inspirational people featured. Are there people who inspire you? Comics?
Sure. A lot of the seven on the window. But my biggest inspiration of all time is probably Bill Hicks. But some of the people who aren’t on the window [include] Jerry Seinfeld, Mitch Hedberg, and even some current guys [like] Eddie Izzard. I think he’s fantastic.
And there are other people who aren’t comics. People like Jackie Robinson. I absolutely love the Jackie Robinson story and I know every little detail of it, backwards and forwards.... My father was a huge Brooklyn Dodgers fan, so I was kind of raised to stories about [the team], but the amazing thing about Jackie was that he persevered by rising above. It wasn’t that he broke the color barrier. It was what he dealt with and what he was able to handle and really his character. And there are many times when one might get angry, and it’s not worth it. It’s never worth it. It never helps anything.
[Photo via]
Do you think the comedy world is changing?
It’s always changing. If it didn’t, it would die. I think that it’s a pendulum. And the pendulum swings in reaction to what’s going on in the world. The counterculture of George Carlin and Richard Pryor was met with the absurdity of Robin Williams and Albert Brooks. And that was met with people like Bill Hicks, and that counterculture, and then it was met with the observational humor of guys like [Jerry] Seinfeld. And it would swing back and forth. And ten years ago, you had the rise of the blue collar guys.... And now it’s swung towards more The Daily Show [and] Colbert [Report].... So, now it’s swinging more towards intellectual, which was a response to both the blue-collar comedy movement as well as what was happening in America. With George Bush and his anti-intellectualism and calling people “elitist” because they were smart and saying that an education is a bad thing in a president. And so now there’s that response to that, which is why The Daily Show
grew in popularity and that's why Colbert
came out, and that’s why smart comedy is thriving....
[And then] some things don’t have a mass market. Arrested Development was the greatest show ever made and it didn’t have enough of an audience. But then it found its audience on DVD. And now it’s coming back and it’s going to a movie, and it’s going to be wildly successful. Because it will find its audience. Now, its audience didn’t happen to be watching TV on a given night. But it eventually found [the show].
And that’s the amazing thing about the Internet. The Internet is truly democratic. And it allows people to find what they like. And it allows people to find new things that they might like. And that’s one of the reasons why I think the club is working. Because that’s our promotion. We’ve done no print ads. We’ve done no radio ads. It’s all web. And so it reaches people directly.
Anything you want to add?
Just that it’s a really fun place. Like yesterday, we did a show that was very different than we usually do [called] Devil Science Theater 3000. It’s Mystery Science Theater 3000
live. We basically show terrible movies and customers and comedians are welcome to just yell things out at the screen. And there were a bunch of comics [where] we said “hey, please come and participate,” and they just came. Because it was like, “hey, I get to drink beer and yell at a movie with my friends? Yeah, that sounds awesome!” And that’s what this is, it’s a club house. And everyone is welcome.
[Photo: Devil Science Theater 3000 via]
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