Two lessons here. When your Gmail gets up toward 95% full you have to get in there and start culling the herd, but then you get all the way back to the hinterlands of messages 11,501-11,456 and you start seeing old emails that catch your eye, and instead of efficiently deleting the shit out of entire pages in a sort of email holocaust, you start picking and choosing and losing your trigger-finger confidence. It's like moving apartments and not being able to throw out boxes of old shit you don't even remember you have in the basement and haven't looked at in years, just in case. 

Lesson number two is that when you write for newspapers, the end product of an interview always ends up being like 10% of your conversation with the subject, no matter how interesting it was, and then you're stuck with these giant chunks of leftovers that you can never do anything with. 

Case in point. (Case in points?) I just uncovered this interview I did with Louis CK a couple years back. He was definitely well known as being one of the funniest stand ups in the biz at the time, but not quite the big timer he is now. If you had asked me five minutes ago if I had even spoken with him I would have said no. I have a really shitty memory. Now that I think of it though, making him laugh will probably be the highlight of my maudlin career as a mediocre humorist. That's like the comedy equivalent of regaling people with the time you scored 5 touchdowns in one high school football game. I'm the Al Bundy of blog humor. Less funny though.

 

Chances are you didn't catch comedian Louis CK's short lived, off-kilter HBO comedy series Lucky Louis. But you probably know his work all the same, whether it's from his blisteringly offensive and hilarious special "Louis C.K.: Shameless" or from appearances on Opie and Anthony, or his Emmy nominated writing for Late Night with Conan O'Brien. CK returns to his old stomping ground for two nights this weekend to tape another performance.


So you've been caught up with radio interviews all morning? 

I've been doing radio interviews for twenty years now and I'm still not totally used to it. It always depends on the people on the show. Sometimes they're a good flow of energy and you jump in with them, and other times it's just these weirdos who do these fake radio voices you can't really talk to them.

They say "HEY WE'RE TALKIN! TO LOUIS CK RIIIGHT NOW!!"

Right, and then they say "HEY! WHAT'S GOIN ON!?"  Like literally that loud. And I'm like "Not much." And there's this dead air cause they wanted me to go "NOTHING DUDE!!" I don't have a loud fakeness to match theirs. Today on WZLX he asked me two or three things then got the fuck off the phone with me fast because I wasn't matching his intensity.

Is it harder to do an interview when the guy is trying to do shtick?
 

To me it's about how real a person is. If they're being bizarrely fake I just don't know how to relate. But people trying to be funny, that's ok. You just laugh at their jokes and they feel better about themselves and you continue talking.

You grew up in Newton. Were you a fancy rich boy?

You know, if you look at the demographics of Newton, like Newton Center and Chestnut Hill is really rich, but then there's this whole part near the Mass Turnpike that's very working class people. They make their living by painting the houses of the people up on the hill. That's where I grew up. The Pike literally went through my back yard, and that purple commuter train -- I never found out where it goes -- rumbled through.

You made it to 98 on Comedy Central's greatest comedians of all time. Think your got robbed?

Oh, I don't care. It's not like they had an eminent think tank. Some intern at Comedy Central spit out this list. I never give a shit. I should probably be somewhere off the list. There's some clear choices at the beginning, then it just gets weird and murky. They've never been the arbiters of who the funniest people in the world are to me. Half the time you put on Comedy Central and it's like Weekend At Bernie's, so I don't really care what they think.

It seems comedians are the only ones who rehearse in front of audiences, unlike musicians who practice in private.

That's exactly right. With comedy the audience is almost the instrument you are playing. There's no second part to your sentence without them. There is no way to simulate performance. Which is what rehearsing is. It's beyond Interactive. You're doing it together. That's why you have to fail as a performer. No standup exists who hasn't had a huge amount of failure in their life. You can't prepare, you have to at some point show very raw, untested, poor material to an actual paying audience. And it never gets easier because as you get popular people come to see you and they're happy to see you and you think that's is going to get you some benefit of the doubt, but it actually lays a huge amount of pressure on you because they're expecting a lot and they're paying more. You have to surprise them.

Failure is funnier than success isn't it?

Certainly. What makes me laugh is failing on stage. When we talk about performing you might say in passing that someone had a killer set, but the thing that makes a room full of comedians laugh is talking about how a dude just bombed [laughs]. When I'm having a bad show I can't wait to tell my friends. While it's going on and I'm sweating and flailing I'm thinking at least I can get some of my friends to appreciate this.

I find myself doing that if I have a bad interview, if someone has nothing to say and I'm struggling and getting nervous. Immediately I have to tell my friends that dude sucked.

[Laughs.] Yeah of course. It's way more interesting. And on a more productive level, failed sets teach you a huge amount. You gather so much data. In a good show you don't. There's so much euphoria and drugs in a good show, that all it does is delude you that you're better than you are. When you have a bad show you get a really clear picture, and a forensics file that you will draw from for the rest of your life

You're like the CSI of comedy.

Exactly like CSI! Where you're kind of pointing at things on the floor with a pen with gloves on and going like "well clearly he tried to do some racial humor after some really smug self aggrandizing humor so he was coming off like an asshole. If he'd just switched these around no one would have gotten hurt."


You're working with Ricky Gervais soon.  I think to myself, wow that must be laughs all the time,  but is the reality a little more mundane?

We're gonna start shooting in April. The whole thing shoots out of Boston. It's called "This Side of the Truth" he plays a guy who lives in an alternate universe, and no one ever lies. He invents lying in a world where it doesn't exist. I play his loser asshole best friend who he hates.  I've hung out with Ricky once. He is a hilarious goof of a guy. He laughs a lot. There are times when comedians and funny people hang out together and it's really funny. [laughs] It does happen.


Anything you would have done differently with Lucky Louis in hindsight?

I don't think so. All that show needed was another season. There's no show that hit's the ground running perfectly. A show that's that different than what was going on at the time, people need time to adjust. And everybody I know that loved that show -- and people come up to me literally daily to say that they miss it -- they also say they didn't know what to make of it at first, then they grew to love it, because it was new. We intentionally made the sets very flat and under lit and theatrical so that it would feel like a live show and be more about the characters than the photography of the thing. Some people thought we fucked up and didn't spend enough time building the set. And those people if they kept watching would have caught on to what the intent of the show was. All I would say I would do differently is I would let us do more. And we also would have gotten better. Of course the show wasn't perfect.

It's weird, you think an HBO audience would be a little more sophisticated than a network audience.

Well I learned a lot about that. I think rather than being more sophisticated, they like to use words like eclectic, but I don't think they are eclectic. I think they want something shot on film, they like awkward comedy that's based on absurd cut to this guy being awkward things. People have a very specific palate that they enjoy, it's just different than other people's. It looks more educated , and I guess in some ways it is, but I don't think anyone's eclectic. People like what they like and that's it. They don't change easily. And to me comedy has always been about taking people out of what they expect to like and making them like something new. But through being generous with them and helping to get there. That was what we were trying to do with Lucky Louie, we just didn't have enough time.

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