Laugh Lines: Conversations With Comedians

by Corey Andrew

  Corey: Are there talks of a ‘Suddenly Susan’ reunion or will that be your season finale?

  Kathy: That would be great for the cameras because that would go over like a lead balloon. I’m still really good friends with Nestor Carbonell, who played Luis. I See Brooke occasionally, not as much as I’d like to, but she’s afraid if she so much as says ‘Hi’ to me it will be in my act. I see Currie Graham who was on the final season of the show and I see Judd once in a blue moon. He usually comes to the Christmas party. I’m surprised he didn’t come this year.

  Corey: So a full reunion’s gonna be tough.

  Kathy: Also there’s absolutely no desire for one. That would be a tough sell. We could do it in my living room or something and someone could tape with a camcorder.

  Corey: Saying ‘allegedly,’ does that protect you or is what you do considered enough of a spoof or satire that you’re safe?

  Kathy: I’m totally safe. I have an amazing First Amendment attorney. He’s the guy Ed Norton played in ‘Larry Flynt.’ The real guy. Alan Isaacman. He’s quite brilliant. What’s good for me is the longer I do it the more I have a precedent. I haven’t been sued yet. This whole religious right environment I’m in, are single handedly the ones who do. My entertainment attorney–I’m pretty lawyered up–was saying how it really doesn’t come from anywhere else; the religious right and that’s it.

  Corey: A lot of those rights are Clay Aiken fans.

  Kathy: I have had the Claymates crash my Web site once, and also I’ve gotten some Michael Jackson fan hate mail, because I like to say, ‘Michael Jackson is a big, old white lady who fucks kids.’

  Corey: Those people must be busy.

  Kathy: I comment on behavior. I guess Whitney Houston sent me a letter saying, ‘How dare you say I’m on crack?’ But she did just go to rehab for like the fourth time. I would never make something up out of the blue.

  Corey: People are probably on their guard when you’re in the room.

  Kathy: Yeah.

  Corey: You’re in between publicists right now; what do you look for?

  Kathy: I like when they do their job. It would be nice.

  Corey: What are some specific things you like them to do for you?

  Kathy: I just need someone to do the footwork. It’s not brain surgery. I need a publicist who’s proactive, not reactive. I had this woman—I got her from Brooke and she does Britney Spears and Debra Messing—and mostly what she does is she says no to things and tries to keep bad things out of the press. I need the opposite. I need someone to get me out there. I don’t care if it’s celebs with their makeup off. I don’t want someone to say, ‘Oh no, Miss Griffin would never want to be on that list.’ Yeah I do. I want to be on the list. I want to be on Stars not Normal.

  Corey: Speaking of no makeup, you admit you’ve had work done. Is there anything you wouldn’t let them air on your show?

  Kathy: I’m such a purist and such a diehard fan of reality, I thought, ‘You really roll the dice. What if I come off as the Omarosa of my own show?’ If they wanted to they could put in shots of my cellulite. I think I was edited totally fairly. So many moments I cringe. I like the shows where you feel like a fly on the wall.

  Corey: Did you watch them all in a row?

  Kathy: I didn’t want to see dailies or anything. The worst thing for me would be if I saw something and I changed my behavior. I’ll never work out again unless I’m in full hair and makeup. They would send me the rough cuts. They would send the hour-long versions that would be cut down to 50 minutes. The only notes I would give is that if it would really hurt someone. If I thought it would bother my mom and dad, I’d say cut that. By and large, I was not into cutting anything. I think it stands on its own. I’ve taken a lot of heat for being cheap and taking free stuff.

  Mitch Hedberg

  “I remixed a remix. It was back to normal.”

  A simple thought. But you didn’t think of it and neither did I. It was Mitch Hedberg, a one-of-a-kind comic whose style is so hard to describe. Just calling them “one-liners” do not do his genius justice.

  Mitch was a true original and I was so pleased to discover him by accident, opening for headliners Lewis Black and Dave Attell. I never laughed so hard at a live show—and that includes performances from legends like George Carlin, Don Rickles and Chris Rock.

  When it was announced on the Howard Stern show that Mitch was dead from an apparent overdose, it was a shame if not quite a shock—leaving many of us wanting one more, well, one-liner.

  “He made me laugh, which is no small feat. We will miss his extraordinarily askew vision of the world, but more importantly we will miss his presence,” Lewis Black told me after Mitch’s passing.

  Spending a little time with the guy and getting to peek behind his ever-present sunglasses is something I’ll always treasure.

  Corey: I saw you on the Lewis Black and Dave Attell tour, and I laughed harder at you.

  Mitch: That’s nice of you to say. I just saw Attell the other night in D.C. He’s one of my favorites, but I appreciate you saying that.

  Corey: I’ve had a difficult time today trying to describe how someone is funny. Trying to describe your style is very difficult.

  Mitch: That’s true. When people ask me what kind of comedy I do … A radio deejay asked me the other day, ‘What do you do?’ I just had to hang up the phone, because I don’t know. It’s hard to describe. You can take some common terms from the comic description book like, observational. I think I write jokes. I think I tell jokes, basically. They’re not just made up out of the blue. Most of my jokes, like 25 percent autobiographical. But yeah, man, it’s hard to describe. That’s one of the worst things to do; that’s why you let the music do the talking, right?

  Corey: I find it interesting that you have a different approach than many. You come off as kind of shy and wear the sunglasses and everything. How do you feel about the audience when you’re on stage?

  Mitch: I like that they’re there and that they’re having a good time. I like that. Making eye contact with the audience is very hard for me. I’ve been trying it a lot more. I don’t want to close off to the point where people think that I don’t give a shit about the fact that they drove 20 miles and paid 35 bucks to see me. I want them to know that I care about them, because I do, but looking in the eye of the audience is always hard for me. I don’t know what that’s from, man. I think I’m gonna train myself back to doing it. Slowly cut my bangs and take one side of the eyeglasses out first, then the other side and then I’ll look in everyone’s eyes, man. It’s gonna be hard, boy.

  Corey: Do you think it would easier if they were naked?

  Mitch: Yeah, that’s the thing. That’s what that comes from, because if they were in their underwear, I’d think they were ridiculous so I’d have no problem looking at them.

  Corey: If people listen to your CDs, they can definitely tell you pay attention, because you comment on the laughs and how (the jokes) are doing.

  Mitch: That’s how I try to do it. That’s how I try to show it, man. You hit the nail on the head. To show I’m actually there, I do as much as I can to commentate on where I’m at, so they don’t think this guy is in his own book and doing his jokes and not thinking about it.

  Corey: I love your material, and I would imagine it’s hard to write and also hard to memorize. How do you do that?

  Mitch: Ever since I’ve had enough jokes to not have to do them in order … Up to the point where you had enough jokes, you had to do them in order usually, just so you remember them and know you’re doing them all. But now I have enough jokes where I have an overflow. If I’m doing an hour, I have some left over. I just go on there. A lot of times I just start with something I usually start with. But usually I just like to feel it out and go with what’s going on. Sometimes, you can tell.

  I don’t have a lot of drug jokes, but this is most obvious representation of what I’m about to say. You do a drug joke, and you can tell the crowd isn’t gonna laugh that
hard at a dumb-ass drug joke, so you say, ‘I’m not gonna do that anymore,’ and you go on to something else. I don’t have anything controversial so that’s never a problem. I just bob and weave through my act. It’s pretty scientific, yet it’s natural, too. Every now and then you can be stuck at the end, and like, ‘Shit, I did all my big laugh jokes already, and all I’ve got left are these fucking semi-obscure ones. Can you hang on one second?’

  Corey: Can you talk about your writing process?

  Mitch: I write my jokes in a short format. Usually I’ll come up with an idea. It’s pretty much a whole joke, but I don’t sit there and try and figure out exactly how I’m going to try and say it. I used to do that, but now I just come up with the concept, and then I write that down. Then onstage, I just try and say it. That feels much more natural. Usually the right words come out onstage, much more so than sitting in your hotel room and trying to come up with the right words.

  For some reason, the stage makes the right words come out. What I do is, go onstage and I’ll do as much new material up front as possible. As soon as I get too many jokes in a row that don’t work, I’ll go back to the older stuff. If they’re on my side and things are going good, I’ll try more new stuff. It’s pretty simple. That’s it. I just like to do as much new stuff as possible. If I go onstage and do all old stuff, I’ll get too into the rut of that and be afraid to try the new shit.

  Corey: What inspires your jokes?

  Mitch: It’s more about just going in my head and thinking. I don’t go back too far. I’ll go back to the last 24 to 48 hours or maybe a week at the most and think about what’s happened to me and conjure up the silly moments of how things have been going. If something’s happening that’s really amazing, I’ll make sure I write it down at that moment. It’s usually more mental than visual. It’s visual at first, and then later on I just try and remember things. If you pull out a notebook while you’re out on the town with people, all they want to know is if what you’re writing down is about them. I try not to write about people too much.

  Corey: What would we see if we went inside Mitch’s head?

  Mitch: You’d probably see an anti-HBO sign, a big circle with a cross through it because they won’t give me a special. Other than that, I don’t know, man. I think everyone has got great jokes in their head. When I see a comedian who’s obviously emulating some other comedian, I’m like, ‘You’re fucked, man, because I know inside that head of yours you have a bunch of individual situations you can do and be funny.’ I’m scared that people will find out they can be comedians, too. If everyone’s a comic, I’m gonna have a hard time getting work. I try not to tell everyone that fact.

  Corey: The show I saw, the crowd was very enthusiastic. Do you try to avoid hanging out with them after, when they try to buy you drinks or get you to smoke a joint with them?

  Mitch: I do like it as long as the people are cool. I just don’t want to be put on the spot to have to be the funny guy. If I go out with people, I just want everyone to be laughing, having a good time, just like any other hang. For the most part, you’ll find they are hanging on your every word trying to fish some more jokes out of you. Some comics are good just going into a bar with some fans and making them laugh all night. I get quieter off stage, I think. As long as they’re laid back and shit. You get a lot of offers to do shit, and sometimes it’s impossible to do everything. For a couple years, I pretty much went back to my hotel room every night. Lately, I’ve been going out; it’s fun. It’s good to meet the people that come up to see you. Sometimes talking about this makes it sound like ego. They just seem like they’re grateful to talk to you and stuff. That’s cool.

  Getting stoned is another story. If I got stoned with everyone who wanted to get high with me, I would die from marijuana poisoning.

  Corey: You’re definitely popular with the college crowd. And since a lot of your material is shorter, I’ve seen your lines end up as e-mail tags. Do you worry about not getting credit for your jokes?

  Mitch: That’s all right with me. I don’t go on the Internet much, but if I do and I look up my name—which I guess I do occasionally—I’ll see my tag lines on stuff. That’s cool to me. It’s just cool to see some things get out there. You always hope that 100 years from now, when you’re dead, that there’s a quote, and your name is below it in some book. When people say a line from me, usually they credit it. Sometimes when people talk about me and they say, ‘Who is he?,’ they tell a joke and they say, ‘That’s not funny.’ I’ve heard that a million times, too.

  Corey: Kind of a slippery slope. Your official Web site is Mitch Hedberg dot net. Why not dot com?

  Mitch: I had dot com for a while. I made the bad choice of having a fan up in Canada run it, and he accidentally forgot to renew it and I guess the traffic to the site was enough that someone stole the name. I don’t know how that works. They just put up some soft porn stuff. I tried to get it back, and he wanted $2,500, and I balked at that. Six months later after my profile had increased, he wanted like $15,000 for it. I guess if I go to court, they say I can get it back. I guess dot net is working now; when you type in my name, I guess dot net comes up. I do miss the dot com, boy. At least it ain’t dot org, or dot ‘ed-you.’

  Corey: You mention on there something that happened at a show in Phoenix. Can you talk about that at all?

  Mitch: I had a tour; this was like the second week. When this tour got started, I got so excited about it, I really did. Sometimes when I get excited, I like to party, and I drink a lot. We were at the show in Phoenix, and I was supposed to go on first this night. About 15 minutes before show time, I found out I was going on second. I got to the theatre, and I had like an hour and a half to hang out. I wanted to party. I was hanging out, drinking vodka—a lot of vodka.

  Then I went onstage, and I was really hammered already. I was doing OK for a half-hour; the last 20 minutes I blacked out, and it went ugly, and I guess a lot of people got mad. Someone threw a pill onstage, and I swallowed it. That pissed a lot of people off. I think it was just a Vicodin or something. Blacked out. Only in the sense that I don’t remember much of the very end. I was still standing and telling jokes, and I do remember people laughing. I guess there’s a certain contingent there that didn’t like it. I try to keep stuff like that down to a minimum. That’s what I said on the Web site once. I hope you don’t hold that against me because that’s not how I’m going to be, but every once in a while, I’m gonna slip up, just like anyone.

  Corey: I read you’re getting into some voiceover work. You did ‘Home Movies,’ and you’re doing some Jimmy John sandwich shop commercials.

  Mitch: Yeah, that’s always weird. It’s not like doing a voiceover for animation, where it’s pure funny. It’s also selling a product. That always feels weird for a little bit. The jokes are in there. I did a bunch of spots that I didn’t write. Now Jimmy John’s wants me to write the spots. That feels more natural. I never enjoy telling other people’s jokes too much. Most of the animation stuff I’ve done, it’s been improv stuff—you get to come up with your own shit. ‘Home Movies,’ a lot of that is improv. ‘Dr. Katz’ is improv. If I do voiceover work, and it’s for commercials, hopefully I can put some of my say in there. Once you start talking about how fresh the cheese is and how crisp the lettuce is, you start to feel like an idiot a little bit.

  Corey: Remembering back to when you were a kid, did you always tell jokes this way, like when you were trick or treating?

  Mitch: I was really bad at telling jokes. I was horrible. I tried to be funny. I don’t know what I was doing. My dad was good at telling jokes. When I was telling them, I know halfway through, people were turning their heads and shit. I tried not to do that.

  Corey: I was wondering if the movie you made, ‘Los Enchiladas!’, really existed, because I couldn’t find it on eBay, and you can find everything on eBay.

  Mitch: I know. You can’t get ‘Los Enchiladas!’ I tell you, man, this is the hardest thing for me. This movie does exist,
but they cannot find it. My management company had it and somehow or another, they cannot find it. And this is scaring the shit out of me, because it’s a great movie and I really like it and want to get it on DVD. They told me it’s out there. I’m gonna call them today. I’m glad you brought it up. I’ve been asking them for six months. If they lost it, man, I don’t know how much I can sue them for, because that’s a lot of pain and suffering—a lot of lost revenue. That’s crazy, man. It is out there, and I think it will come to the surface eventually. It’s just being held underwater by my management company.

  Corey: Was that a good experience, making a movie? Would you do that again?

  Mitch: Oh, yeah. I just read today that in the newspaper, a little excerpt on Sundance, that’s the first thing you want to do. I gotta write a script. I want to do another one. You got to have a hell of a script. I will definitely make another one, if not a few. That movie by Zach Braff, ‘Garden State,’ that’s another one that inspired me to write. Hopefully an idea like that comes along that’s good and solid.