Part 12 (1/2)

Harry: I've done that plenty. I haven't paid for a lot of drinks in my life. I've run some scams, yeah. But fewer and fewer as time goes on, which is good. I'm finding more legitimate ways.

Judd: Like acting?

Harry: Yeah. As I grow older and I don't run so fast, I'm not so eager to get myself in situations where I'm going to have to run.

Judd: How would you describe your act? Are you a magician who does comedy, or a comedian who does magic?

Harry: It's a character, it's a guy. It's a Harry, as opposed to Harry Anderson. He's a guy who knows magic but doesn't respect it much. I have an att.i.tude about people and it's very tough to a.n.a.lyze. I've tried several times. It's easier to do than to a.n.a.lyze. He's a little ill at ease up there. And he's a little ill that everybody's staring at him and he can't believe that people are buying this. I can't believe I'm thirty and I'm doing this. You know. One of the things I love to do onstage is insist that people talk and partic.i.p.ate. ”It's a live show, folks, come on, come on,” and as soon as they say something, I tell them to shut up. You know. Because it pokes fun at the whole theater situation. People are very ill at ease when a performer talks directly to them. Knowing that and then playing with it-he eventually doesn't feel ill at ease. You poke at him long enough then eventually it doesn't matter anymore and he's just laughing right along with everybody else and bringing him to that point where their egos kind of go away and the way to do that is, is I make myself look like a jerk. It's an old Elizabethan idea. The fool is the only one who is allowed to make fun of the king because he is a fool. I can say whatever I want about anybody else because I'm just an idiot talking-I'm not insisting that I'm any smarter than anyone else. It's satire.

Judd: A lot of the tricks that you do, sometimes people think they see what's going on and then you just like turn the whole trick around so it's, like, it looks like you did something but it's nothing.

Harry: It's bringing them to a false conclusion, and then pulling the rug from under them. Giving them the feeling that they know what's happening-and then telling them they've been manipulated. That's part of things like three-card monte, and the sh.e.l.l game. You give them the impression, with a bent corner on the card for example, when you're tossing the cards, the money card seems to have a bent corner so everybody's now betting because they see the bent corner, and how that bent corner is no longer on the money card, but another card altogether. Those are sucker gags. You let them think they've got you-and then you pull the rug from under them.

Judd: And that's the card you have the money riding on.

Harry: It's toying with them and doing what a swindler would do when he's taking their money, only there's no harm, there's nothing to be lost. You can poke somebody in the arm, and it can be affectionate. You know it could be a ”How ya doing?” A friendly gesture. Or you can hit them, and it hurts. Same gesture, different intent. This is tricking people but to no bad end-just to make them laugh. That's what I'm going for.

JAMES L. BROOKS.

(2014).

I interviewed James Brooks on the morning we all found out that our friend Mike Nichols had pa.s.sed away. When Jim walked into my office, I could see in his face that he was devastated-and I wasn't sure whether we should even bother doing the interview or not. But in this raw, grief-stricken state Jim became reflective about Mike's work and his decades-long friends.h.i.+p with this man we respected so much. Which then led to an interesting conversation about comedy and life-the man is truly wise in these ways-that could only have happened on a terrible day.

Judd Apatow: Awful day with Mike Nichols, huh?

James L. (Jim) Brooks: Awful f.u.c.king day. I got up at five this morning. I just happened to wake up and I saw the news of his death, and-I was alone, and I just went over and started reading this horrible New York Times obituary that I'm sure will be gone by tomorrow.

Judd: Really?

Jim: Horrible. Just a list of hits and misses.

Judd: Mm-hmm.

Jim: Have you ever seen the sketch he did with Elaine [May], ”The $65 Funeral”? You've seen that?

Judd: Not in a long time.

Jim: It's killer. You see him making fun of death and stuff like that, right there, and you laugh. And then you start reading some of the crazy, open, honest stuff he's been saying of late and-he's never to be equaled. It's literally impossible to beat him. Impossible. And, I've just been-I'm still in a fog, because of the enormity of it.

Judd: Yeah. I just knew him in the last few years, but he showed This Is 40 in New York before it came out. He presented it onstage.

Jim: Wow.

Judd: And he was so nice to me. Scott Rudin set up a screening of This Is 40 for twenty-five people during the day in New York, and Mike came up to me afterwards, and he was crying, in the most beautiful, connected way. Then he wrote letters to each of my children, talking to them in great detail about what they had accomplished in the movie. To my little daughter, he said, ”One day you're going to realize that you kind of captured life.” It was so kind, and he was always like that.

Jim: For a long, long time. Extraordinary generosity. He sent out love, he did. And the most acerbic wit. Don't ever be chopped up by Mike Nichols. You'll just never recover from it.

Judd: What do you think it is that he did for actors? Why did they love him so much?

Jim: I know what he did for them, because I've asked so many of them. The bottom line is, it was never put better than: When you do something wrong, he says it's his fault; when you do something right, it's the most glorious thing G.o.d ever created. Richard Burton, who-I mean, drunk, mean guy-once said, ”It's not like he's directing you. It's like he's conspiring to make you your best.” Mike was a great director of actors. I don't have that tenderness and generosity.

Judd: Did he read your scripts? Was he one of the people you would go to?

Jim: He was. I was talking to him a lot about the one I'm writing now. He was very there for it. I didn't want him to read it yet, but he had heard me talking about it and it was special, the way he told me he wanted to ”be there” for it. It's so important who your buddy is. He was like, Let me be your buddy on this.

Judd: There's very few people in life who you feel like you can talk about this type of work with.

Jim: Yeah. By the way, here's a question. Tell me who else holds up like Mike and Elaine, where the work is still so vital and vivid, and doesn't lose anything.

Judd: It's very different, but I think a lot of what George Carlin was talking about in the last five years of his life will hold up for a long time, when he got really angry and cut right to the heart of how he felt about everything. And I've been listening to the old Pryor stuff, and although it is of its time-I mean, if you listen to Pryor 1976, as the bicentennial is coming, talking about what's wrong with America? I forgot how militant he was. I don't think anyone talks about politics like that now. No one has the guts to do it that way anymore.

Jim: Yeah.

Judd: What do you think Mike's purpose was in his work, and how does it relate to yours?

Jim: Oh, I don't think like that. There really is a word for what he did: inspirational. It just is good for your internal ethos. Anyway. How did you get started interviewing comedians?

Judd: When I was a kid, a high school kid, I had a radio show and I just started talking to all these people. I interviewed fifty people. Leno and Seinfeld, but back when they were just guys on The Merv Griffin Show. Paul Reiser, Howard Stern, John Candy- Jim: (Whistles) Judd: I even interviewed Lorenzo Music and Jim Parker, writers from Mary Tyler Moore and The Bob Newhart Show.

Jim: (Laughs) It's funny because I did that with my student newspaper, too. Not with comedians, though.

Judd: You interviewed Louis Armstrong, right?

Jim: Yes. I talk about that all the time, Louis Armstrong, because I asked him a great question. I said, ”How do you keep your lips going?” And the answer was at least nineteen minutes long. And he showed me his lip ointments and the process for when they go in. It was great.

Judd: (Laughs) Who else did you interview?

Jim: Singers. Some of them were big names. I was n.o.body. But my picture was in the high school paper every week, standing there with the person I was interviewing.

Judd: (Laughs) Yeah, the kids at your high school hated you.

Jim: They loathed me.

Judd: (Laughs) They turned on you. That's funny. The funniest thing, to me, is when a kid thinks, I've got to get out of here. I had that sense.

Jim: You knew you would get out? Did you feel like you had the power to get out?

Judd: Well, yeah. I thought, These comedians are all from Long Island, and I'm from Long Island. I'm not that different from them. I'd just sit with Seinfeld and go, ”How do you write a joke?” And he'd walk me through a routine.

Jim: Wow. Wow. That was back when?

Judd: Nineteen eighty-four. Anyway, I think so much of why people get into comedy is out of some sense of feeling abandoned. When I was a kid, my parents got divorced. My mom left- Jim: Your mom left, not your father?

Judd: Yeah. She moved out, and that was the thing. As a kid I thought, No one's mom leaves. The dad always leaves. Why would she leave?