Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (32 page)

Empire:
Was the decision to move to writing a conscious one or driven by circumstance?

Leslie:
It was a decision made by Jim Henson.

Judd:
I auditioned for him for this reality show where he gave cameras to a couple of comedians who traveled round the country. I auditioned with Adam Sandler and David Spade and Rob Schneider. Jim Henson said he wanted to buy all my ideas but didn’t want to cast me because I lacked warmth.

Leslie:
From the guy who created the Muppets.

Judd:
From the guy who taught you how to
read.
It hit me hard….But the fact he wanted my ideas was important. I realized Adam Sandler was really fun to watch and be around and I knew I wasn’t like him. I was just a normal guy with some good lines.

Empire:
You’ve now worked together many times, but
This Is 40
was the first time Leslie was the lead. How was that different?

Leslie:
It was just more tiring, but he protected me from all the stresses from the outside world. I don’t know what the budget is or what the politics were. It was just a safe world for all the actors. I was so grateful for that. Thank you, honey. I kind of like you a little bit more again.

Judd:
See, we’ve gone full circle. She hated me and then she likes me again. This is my day. This is my life.

This interview was conducted by Olly Richards and originally appeared in the March 2013 edition of
Empire
magazine.

Louis C.K. is one of those people who are so brilliant and funny and uncompromising that sometimes I need to avoid their work. When I was writing
This Is 40
, I made a point to never watch his TV show because I was aware that it was, on one level, about a middle-aged guy with two daughters, and if I watched it, and loved it, I would probably feel like there was no need for me to make my movie. (Only after I locked my film did I go and binge-watch it. I couldn’t love it more.) I also make a point of not watching too much of his stand-up, because he’s so prolific and covers so much ground. Watching him makes me feel like there’s nothing left to talk about, and that everything has already been done, as well as it can be done, by Louis. He has raised the bar for all of us.

It is worth noting that we conducted this interview in Louis’s kitchen in New York City and, as we spoke, he made me a delicious dinner of steak and beans. For a moment, I felt like I was one of his kids, and I came away thinking,
They have a pretty good situation there.

Judd Apatow:
I was reading an article about you recently and I saw that you had an experience a little like mine—as a kid, I worked at a radio station, and you, somebody got you a job at a TV station?

Louis C.K.:
Yeah.

Judd:
I had a guy like that, too. He ran the high school radio station and treated us like adults. He was the cool guy. He would curse and he went to NYU with Martin Scorsese and taught film at the high school and he made me think that you could do anything, even as a little kid. So I had a radio show and interviewed all these comics. And I’m wondering what
that was like for you to have this teacher who said, I’m going to hook this kid up.

Louis:
In junior high school, I did nothing but drugs. I got in trouble all the time. I was a messed-up kid. And then in my first year of high school, I stopped all that and became a good student, but the problem was, by then, all my friends from junior high school had dropped out—like, every one of them. Five of my friends dropped out of high school after one year. And there was this kid Neil who lived a block from the high school and everybody would be there, at his house, partying every day—from nine in the morning, when his parents left for work.

Judd:
Where did Neil’s parents think the kids were?

Louis:
They couldn’t control it. Both parents worked. I mean, everybody I knew was getting high and nobody could do anything about it.

Judd:
Did they assume the kids were going to get jobs when they were that young?

Louis:
Everybody had jobs. I had a job. Sophomore year of high school, I worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken. Everybody worked at fast-food places. So all these kids were told by their parents—the parents got together and said, Just get out of school and work. The idea was that they were all going to come back to school a year later and try again. Anyway, all of a sudden all of my friends were getting high every day and I couldn’t resist, so I just stopped going to school.

Judd:
What grade is that? Tenth?

Louis:
Tenth grade. And before that, I was a great student. I was getting A’s. So there’s this meeting with all my teachers and my mom came and they told her: “Your son’s not coming to school.” And my mom, who thought we were out of the woods, was like, “God damn it.” It was a great meeting because I felt like I was able to be honest with it all. My mom and I had been through a lot together, and I said, “I’m having a hard time staying here. I get depressed in school and it’s hard.” And one of my teachers—he was my homeroom teacher—he just said, “Well, you can’t do
nothing.
” He said, “You don’t have to go to school if it’s not for you, but you can’t do nothing. What do you want to do?” And I said, “Well, geez. I’d like to
make TV shows and movies.” And he said, “If I can get you a job in that area, will you do that?” I said sure. And he came up to me the next day with a card and he said, “This is the number for Continental Cablevision, the local cable company.” They had a TV station. He said they hire interns and it doesn’t pay anything but you can go there and you can learn about television. And so I went to this place and there were these people making television and it was pretty good equipment and they had a news show and sports and little art shows and stuff. So they explained, If you come here, we’ll teach you how to use all this equipment and you can do whatever you want. And I couldn’t fucking believe it. I stopped going to Neil’s house immediately and I thought,
I want to get back into school.
I had a direction in my life. So I started going to the station and it was all grown-up people. I was the only kid there.

Judd:
Would you edit? Did you work the cameras?

Louis:
I just started doing everything. I sucked in the learning. I would sit and watch the news editor. I learned how editing worked, and I was very good with machines. I could fix cameras when they broke and stuff. So I became the kid everybody trusted. They let me take the equipment home. If you could fix it, nobody cared. So I became a pet there, and everyone treated me like a grown-up.

Judd:
I did the same thing at Comic Relief. When I was in college, I saw on TV that they were planning to do Live Aid but with comedians. It was called Comic Relief. I called up and said, “I will do anything.” I was eighteen. “I’ll do anything, just let me help.” They said, “Well, we don’t have anything,” but then three months later they called back and said, “Come in and help us.” I started putting on benefits around the country at all the clubs. But it was the same attitude: I am going to be your go-to guy. And that’s what you want your kids to have. It’s hard, I think. I talk about this all the time with my kids. The reason why you do that is because you can see your demise if you
don’t
do it. Our kids, though—they don’t have that fire on their ass because when I was a kid both my parents went bankrupt. It was very chaotic for a while and so, when those opportunities came up, I was an animal because I was afraid that I would be homeless at some point. I used to think that all the time. Jim Carrey always used to say that when he saw homeless people he would have this image of the guy patting
the ground going, “Here, this spot’s for you”—and that’s what drove him. And he was homeless as a kid. His dad was an accountant who lost his job and never got an accounting job ever again and they became janitors at a factory. The whole family had dropped out of school. They would all clean together.

Louis:
Wow, yeah, I don’t know. Who knows what’s in store for our kids. It might not stay like this forever. I always say that to my kids. I probably lay it on them a little too much. Someday they might be saying to their friends, “My dad used to have a house on Shelter Island, and he had a boat.” I mean, for Jim Carrey’s climb and everything that happened for him—the massive success—he’s looking for work. You
always
end up looking for work.

Judd:
When things started going really well for you, were you able to enjoy it?

Louis:
Oh yeah. I remember the first time I did
Letterman.
I had all these thoughts reeling in my head that I had to do this or that, and then when I got on, right before I got onstage, I thought,
Don’t forget to enjoy this because you’re going to fucking kill yourself if you don’t enjoy this.
And I’ve always remembered that. It’s all very fleeting, you know.

Judd:
That’s the big thing about it hitting a little later in life. You’re wise enough to realize:
Oh, this is a big moment.

Louis:
I’ve never had all-at-once successes. I’ve never had any big leaps, the rags-to-riches thing. Everything has been one foot in front of the other, one step at a time. So many times I heard, You’re up for this thing, this is the one, and it’s going to be huge. And it never happens and then it’s back to coming down to earth. You get blue balls from that, you know—like,
This is going to be it!
And you start thinking about how you’re going to change your life.

Judd:
What was the big one of those for you?

Louis:
I met with these people at Good Machine, which was an indie film group. They were making some great stuff, and they repped this movie I wrote called
Delicious Baby.
It was this fucked-up movie about a woman who moves to a small town and everybody worships her and meanwhile
she’s been eating all the kids. And, uh, nobody wants to believe it because they love her and a robot ends up choking her to death. So they read it and they took me to lunch. They sat me down and they said, “We have some big news. We’re making
Delicious Baby.
We have a green light.” And that feeling was incredible. What an amazing feeling. Anyway, we made the movie and it won an Oscar.

Judd:
End of story.

Louis:
Yeah, no—so it didn’t get made, obviously. And I had to come down from that. Oh, that fucking hurt. That was brutal. There were a few of those kinds of things. I thought I was going to be on
The Tonight Show
with Carson. I got a call saying I was going to be on
Letterman
when I was nothing, a club comic. At the time, Frank Gannon booked the Letterman show and he told me he was going to put me on—and then he retired. I was really young then. A shot at
Letterman
could have totally changed everything.

Judd:
In a good way or bad, do you think?

Louis:
I’m glad I didn’t get it. I’m glad for every single thing I didn’t get.

Judd:
I always felt the reason why I was interested in comedy was that I was on some level hostile and looking for answers. When you look back, what do you think was the fuel for your work?

Louis:
I think comedy is a freeing thing. It’s not even an escape. It just feels good. You know what I mean? My parents were divorced around the same time as yours—I was in fifth grade, ten years old. Those were formative years. I was awkward and I couldn’t quite score the way everybody else did. I didn’t feel like I was succeeding as a kid. I was bad academically, always behind, always in trouble. I had friends and stuff, but I didn’t feel like I was winning in school. And comedy was this amazing thing because comedy is like saying the wrong things—when you see a grown-up do it and they succeed at it and get applause…

Judd:
When did you tune in to what comedy was?

Louis:
My first love was Bill Cosby. My friend Jeff had a whole stack of his records; we would just sit and laugh. I loved the sound of it. I loved the
sound of his voice and hearing the audience and the nightclub feeling and how it sometimes felt like a concert. I used to listen to how the record
sounded.
Oh my God, I just like—it put a real lust in me.

Judd:
What’s the thing that Cosby did that you wish you could do?

Louis:
I wish I could control myself like he did. I wish that I could…talk…like…this…on…stage. Respect the negative space. Respect the silence, let it alone. I wish I had that kind of control. I came up in the Boston clubs scene where—

Judd:
It’s combat. You learn it as combat.

Louis:
And I still—whenever I’m watching my opening act on the road or if I’m in a club, I’m like,
They’re all gonna leave. They’re not going to be there when I get out there.
Like,
I need to get on right now.
I always closed the show because I was too dirty and too loud. No one wanted to follow me.

Judd:
It all changes when the crowd is there to see you. How many years has it been for you where they’re really there to see you in a big way?

Louis:
I had done
Lucky Louie
and it got canceled, and then I did this special called
Shameless.
It went on the air and I got a call from the guy at HBO: It’s good, it’s good. Anyway, I had built some shows, booked some touring clubs, and one of them was in Philadelphia. I had a week booked there—you know, you do Tuesday through Sunday. You have two on Friday, three on Saturday. Any other week I go and nobody is there on Tuesday. Fifty people Wednesday, a hundred Thursday. Friday and Saturday are packed if the show’s any good. That was for years, you know. For like twenty years I had done things like that. But anyway, I got a call one day. This was in January and I had Philly booked in April, and they say, “We want to add a show on Thursday in Philadelphia.” And I said, “Why? Why the fuck do they want to make me do another show?” And he said, “Because they’re all sold out.”

Judd:
Three months in advance.

Louis:
And I was like, “What the fuck did you say to me? They want to start
adding
shows?” It had never happened to me. That’s a big fucking deal. That was a big thing, to suddenly go to clubs that were sold out well in
advance—they’re all there to see you, and you’re taking the door, and the club that you’ve been working for and has abused you is suddenly, you know, “sir” and “please” and “thank you.” It’s a weird thing. I started doing theaters in 2007 to 2008, seven hundred and fifty to fifteen hundred seats.

Judd:
Does it change your act?

Louis:
It’s a huge amount of pressure. ’Cause you have to be really great. When you’re the headliner at some club, you’re just the last guy. You do forty-five to an hour, close strong, and make people feel like they had a complete eat. When you do well as a headliner in a club, people are like, “That guy was good, that guy was good.” But in a theater, there is an enormous amount of pressure because this is their choice for the night. So you want to deliver. And I get anxious about that. Once you’re doing twenty-five hundred seats, five thousand seats—there’s a whole other thing there. It has to be phenomenal.

Judd:
And you’re turning the whole act over, too. Carlin would turn it over, but he did it over a few years….