by Apatow, Judd
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 negati
ve 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….
Louis: He did a gradual thing. But for me, it was more interesting to do it this way, to think of each year’s act like a different book that I wrote.
Judd: Are you aware of how much that’s changed comedy? How everyone else is looking at their acts because of you?
Louis: I’m not aware of that. I know that some people don’t like it that I say…Look, when I started doing a yearlong tour and a stand-up special, the next time I would tour, it seemed natural for me to let my audience know it’s a different show. You’re seeing a different show. I never was bragging to other comedians. Some comedians got pissed off because they thought I was bragging. I don’t give a fuck what they think.
Judd: I do feel a sea change from it. It seems to have inspired people to work harder, to evolve who they are on a daily basis. I used to work with Larry Miller at the Improv, and he was incredible, and he had this polished act. He was the one who urged me to write more. To treat it like a job. He’d do his Thanksgiving bit, and it could be one of the best bits of all time, but now I feel—in the best possible way—that comics feel the pressure to be in the moment with what their life is, with their act.
Louis: I think it’s better. Chris Rock taught me a lot about this kind of stuff, but I really learned it from Carlin. I remember I was in the parking lot of the Yang—what’s that Chinese restaurant in Boston that does comedy?
Judd: The one that Steven Wright was discovered at?
Louis: No, not the Ding Ho. The Ding Ho was gone. I can’t believe I’m blanking on it, ’cause I did so many gigs…I opened for Jerry Seinfeld there. But anyway, I was sitting in the parking lot and feeling like shit and listening to this interview with Carlin. And he said that he gets done with his jokes and moves on. And I thought, God, if I only had the fuckin’ courage to get rid of these jokes. I’ve been doing them all my life. And I hate all of them. I hate every joke I tell.
Judd: But you stuck with them.
Louis: Yeah, you stick with them. Because you don’t need anything else. I got all these tools, I know how this bit works, I know how this bit works. So I started thinking about that and then, years later, I was talking to Chris Rock and he said, “If you do Letterman or you get the big shot, don’t go back and do your classic five minutes. Do what’s exciting you today. Do what’s really turning you on in the moment.” And that was a great piece of advice. Chris said, “If your audience sees you’re special and they think you’re funny, and they go see you live and it’s a totally different show from last time and it’s great, they will never let go of you. You will never lose that audience. They will never let you go.” That’s how he put it. What an interesting way to think of an audience—and that’s Chris’s audience—they just hold on to him. So that became my endeavor. I thought, I’ll go out, do another hour. Creatively, I’ve got an empty vessel, nothing in it. How do things cluster together? I thought about these things scientifically, like this documentary I saw, when you snap your Achilles’ tendon they put like a fiber on there and your body starts to coat it with tendon material….
Judd: And it grows around it?
Louis: Yeah, it grows around it. Because something’s there, when there’s nothing there. So I thought, How does that apply to my act? How do I build an hour when there’s nothing there? And so I would go onstage with five minutes of improv, ten minutes, now I’ve got a really strong twenty. So stop doing it and start at five again and build another twenty, and I’ve got forty minutes now. I can do forty minutes. I’m not doing the L.A. clubs anymore, I’m going to Horatio Hornblower’s in Ventura, or the Wolf or whatever it is. Those clubs, you know, people are eating steak, there’s a little more pressure. And try to turn that forty—it’s like the way they make yogurt, they take a lump and put it in milk and it fills it up, fills it up. Go onstage with not quite enough time and with the pressure of headlining, and forty turns into an hour just out of necessity. I’ve got an hour now, I can do an hour. Make it great. And then decide that that hour is shit and I need twice the material. Do a second hour, fold it in. I worked so hard on that stuff. I don’t know if I have the balls to do it that way anymore.
Judd: That’s not how you do it now?
Louis: I do. I mean, the last hour I did, I feel like it’s my last one for a little while. But it’s like, how many of these things do you need to do? Also, I love club comedy. I miss it. I miss fucking around on the club stage.
Judd: Is that what you want to do now?
Louis: Well, my TV show has me in the clubs. Sometimes when I’m filming my show, the Comedy Cellar is a location, so if I have extras hanging around, I bring them downstairs and do a set and they’ll kind of chuckle and I’ll use it on the show because I’m able to do weird little bits that don’t quite make any sense. But I’m getting into different-sized things these days. Like, I just did SNL, and I got obsessed with the monologue. I thought, Geez, if I can do a great SNL monologue—
Judd: It was a dark monologue, the one you did.
Louis: That was a fun thing because I got into it as its own project. I thought, I want to do the stuff that I do at SNL—and luckily I had done the show before. The great thing about doing something twice is—you know, when I came out to host SNL, the rehearsal audience is cool. They’re cool people and they feel like
they’re in on something so there’s a cool feeling. And then you come out for the live show and you’re like, Wait, these people are fucking tourists and a lot of them are kids. There are families. People are here with their parents and they’re not cool. And so, the second time I thought, I want to do a really interesting monologue that’s like its own piece of performance, and I thought, They’re not going to like it.
Judd: I mean, you don’t usually hear people talk about religion and death—
Louis: No, not at all. That’s the stuff that I’ve been doing, and I was saving it for the series but I thought, Let’s take my best right-now material and use it. The audience is not going to like it but it doesn’t matter on television because if you don’t let it get to you, nobody can hear.
Judd: It played really well. I mean, watching it on TV. It sounded like it was all going well.
Louis: I trained for it by going to really shitty places. I never worked so hard on a set in my life, certainly not a four-to-eight-minute set. I did a lot of bad places with open mics where it’s all, you know, bitter comedians and no audience. I remember one place there was literally water leaking on the floor next to me and there’s a guy in the front row on the phone and I was like, This is perfect. I just played. I thought, I need to be able to play this without any support, and I got really good at it and I got a great fucking crowd. The SNL crowd loved it. It was totally unexpected.
Judd: Is dress rehearsal the first time Lorne sees the monologue?
Louis: Yeah, Lorne really helped me because I did the first show—you know, the worst thing that can happen in an important show is when the rehearsal goes well. It just hurts you. You need caution and an alert mind to do this kind of thing. And I came out for dress and I did twelve minutes and I fucking killed. And nobody had seen it. Nobody had seen the material because I had been running out at nights to do it. So we have the between-show meeting and Lorne—my manager had said to me, “Don’t let Lorne cut a single minute. Do twelve minutes like you did in the room,” and I was like, yeah. After all this work I did do to humble myself, I was really jacked up. So I go into the meeting and I’m like in this big, leather chair and Lorne says, “Have you had any experience at SNL?”
