But I said to myself, in a very conscious way, I need to get up every day and try to make the world better. And so it’s not that my head and my heart don’t go in that direction occasionally. And getting up every day and wallowing in those feelings wasn’t going to get the job done. This is going to sound really stupid and sappy, but a long time ago, in the midst of feeling guilt and shame and sadness, and wishing I never drank, I realized I had children to raise. How did you want to use that second chance? I think you certainly did get a second chance and you’ve managed to continue having a really successful comedy career in a lot of ways. And if they use that “second chance” to continue that trajectory, well that’s a big problem. There are times where I feel like there are people that are doing things that sort of bring us all down. And I always say to people, that would require several things for that to have been set up, and probably the most off-putting to me is the “e-word,” effort. People had this idea, because that ended up being such a funny and odd pillar of the show, that it was pre-planned. Yeah, because that’s the other thing, people sometimes come up to me after shows and wonder if the people that I talked to were some sort of a setup. And people come up to me all the time and say, “Are you gonna do the lube rack thing tonight?” And I go, I don’t think, no. There was something about my response and what that woman said that just struck us all as so funny in that moment. And somehow, there’s something about that chemistry, that magic that I am not in control of, that I couldn’t repeat, I couldn’t set up again, I couldn’t make it happen with all the genius engineers in the world. She didn’t say my mother got injured, she said, “My mother ripped her face off on a lube rack.” And I’m picturing the HBO people sitting out in the truck where they have the screens of the different camera angles being so pissed at me. And when I heard those words, all I could think of-my response was totally based on the fact that I had made HBO make it so that I could do this, and now I have uncovered a story that it’s very possible the show will never recover from. She didn’t want to say it and eventually she blurts out that her mother fell in a service garage and ripped her face off on a lube rack. And a lady further to my left goes like, “Ahhh!” And everybody turned towards her-and now I think I forgot about the boom mic guy entirely-and I turned to that lady and I go, “What is it about lawyers that you don’t like?” And she was cagey, she wasn’t going to say, and I pushed her and pushed her. So I go on stage the night of the show and I think the way it unfolded was somebody made some sort of a response to something that I had said, and I turned in that direction and I said, “You sir, what do you do for a living?” And he says he’s an attorney. So we’ve done all this prep and expense in order to allow me to have my way and do this thing that I really enjoy doing. It was! And apparently, I’m assuming from the response of the HBO people in my management at the time, it really hadn’t been done that way before. You really have to be aware and present to make that work. I would indicate who I was going to talk to, but not begin getting them talking until the boom mic was over there. And they had a guy with a boom mic who would haul ass over to the person I was talking to. So I went to the mat on it, and said, “It doesn’t make sense for me to do this if I can’t do what I do.” So they hung microphones from the ceiling all over this room. And it’s not just a matter of the other people in the room hearing them, it’s a matter of the television audience hearing them. Now you have to keep in mind, this is a long time ago, and so the technology has changed. And they said, the reason you can’t is we can’t hear the audience when they talk. And then they said, “They don’t want you to talk to the audience.” And I actually said-and I have to give my younger self credit for this-“Then why are they hiring me?” Because Hollywood has a long history of, “We’re gonna hire this person, and we’re gonna ask them not to do what they do.” So I was just like, well, that doesn’t sound like a good idea. And they come to me and they say, “HBO wants to give you an hour special.” That’s fantastic, that’s very exciting. When we went to make that, I was with this management firm at the time that had a relationship with HBO. Did you feel at the time how special it was? Your 1990 HBO special Cats, Cops and Stuff is the pinnacle of this type of “crowd work.” It’s still among the all-time great stand-up specials I’ve ever seen. You can listen to the whole thing by subscribing to The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Tuesday. Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation.
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