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The first adult novel I read, and this is a favorite memory of mine, resulted from my grandfather — who was a voracious reader — taking me to Novel Idea in Tulsa, Okla., to pick up a book for school. As we headed to the checkout line he said, ‘Why don’t you pick out something to read for pleasure?’ I went to the Young Adult section, and he stopped me: ‘No, no. Go to the Fiction section.’ I was 12, and this was a big deal. The Fiction section is where all the books with sex and bad language lived. I self-consciously browsed the aisles, careful to avoid unwittingly picking up Fear of Flying or something, until I came to a paperback with a spooky cover. The title: Salem’s Lot. Description: Vamp...
I have an obsession with books about kids with Asperger’s syndrome. I like the way they think — it suits me. The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time by Mark Haddon is great. That and [Jonathan Safran Foer’s] Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close — they’re on a separate bookshelf. They don’t understand what the other books are saying by their facial expressions, but they’re perfectly lined-up.
Well, my favorite author is Mark Twain. He’s smart, and funny. Huckleberry Finn, especially the chapter all the purists hate, in which Tom Sawyer stages an elaborate rescue of Jim, is a writer having as much fun as possible. But my favorite book is a two-parter by Laurens Van Der Post, A Story Like The Wind and A Far Off Place. My favorite book used to be The Plague by Albert Camus.
Every character on that show fulfills a different part of what’s fun to write for comedy for. Writing for Tom gets to fulfill the douchier quotient, and writing for Andy, you get that dumb, big Labrador retriever, and Ron is the weird libertarian… I mean, he’s Ron. Oh, my favorite character to write for is Kyle at the shoeshine stand.
After three years of reading youtube comments, I found one that didn't make me want to puke and kill myself. Some kid, talking to another kid underneath a music video: "first things first buddy, no matter how hard you try i guarantee you wont change the way anyone thinks or acts." If I could put that thought in everyone's head on a loop, I could save the world. But, like the kid says, I can't.
That's why I wrote to you, not to tell you to change anything about the way you do things, but just to tell you to take it easy. Nothing you do matters as much as you think. Your greatest achievements aren't yours at all, they're accidents and jokes. You're a puppet, the universe does the work, and it gets the most done when you're moving the least. Surrender, flow, relax. Don't be hard on yourself, don't put pressure on yourself, life is just a chain of experiments and results, and you'll be perfect when you're dead.
I think there’s something wonderful about capturing somebody as talented and as insightful and even ultimately struggling as Harris. That’s one of the human things that makes technology not just Candy Crush while you’re waiting for your coffee. It’s different than reading an interview because you’re not feeling the pauses. People listen to podcasts in their bed or their car or at work - it’s very intimate to have earbuds in and have this voice running through your head. There’s something that can be human and even soulful about it - we start to get a very intimate and complete picture of a person. Memory can’t really be trusted and autobiographies have glaring omissions. It’s nice to be like...
He kind of fascinates me. He’s seen everything, so he’ll out of the blue be like, [impersonating Larry King] "Your son died when he was six. Paul Newman told me you never got over it." He can be just so passionless. This insane corpse talking to people. Also, he looks like a million-year-old. He’s 72 or something. [He's 76. —ed.] And also he prides himself on knowing nothing about the guests, which is kind of cool because sometimes he’ll ask very innocent questions that are interesting, but more often than not, it'll be like how he had [Jerry] Seinfeld on and he asked, "How did it feel when you were canceled?"
Well, I don’t go on shows to promote anything, for one thing. When I was young, I’d watch guys on The Tonight Show, Buddy Hackett, guys like that, where all they’d be is funny. Later, I remember, on Late Night with Letterman, I remember he’d have Jay Leno and Richard Lewis as first guests and the entire point was to entertain and be funny, and I think talk shows have kind of lost that. It’s mostly about super famous people telling long, dull stories about their swimming pools or something.
On the other hand, if you have someone like Bill Hicks who's just this fraud that screams at the top of his lungs and tells you that multi-national oil companies are not a good thing, then that will attract a wide, wide audience of half-smart college kids.
When I started there were 5 funny comics out of 100 then there was 5 out of 500 now there's 50k & only 5 are funny. It's going to be worse as audience doesn't know the diff as long as the structure is there which you can learn easily & trick the audience. You can't create art.
I saw a movie once where Spencer Tracy catches this woman about to kill herself — it's a pretty dark movie for the time — but I forget the name of the movie ["I Take This Woman"], but Spencer Tracy is on a boat and sees a rich, young girl about to throw herself off the boat because her fiance left her for another woman and he's trying to talk her out of suicide and he says to her, "Do you have a job? Do you have anything that you do in your life?" which was a funny thing to ask because she's, like, a 1920s socialite and she said, "No," and he said, "I think you should get a job, because it's very hard to be sad and useful at the same time."
Ever since I saw that I keep that in my head. If y...
These are movies that, after seeing them, inspired me to go make…something, anything! Since I don’t know how old you are, you should know there’s some titles that are incredibly adult (Clockwork Orange, Enter the Void, Chopper, Come and See, Blue Velvet come to mind) so beware. But enjoy and be open; that’s how I like to approach a movie. And turn off you phone and don’t check your email, it affects the experience.
8 ½
Abigail’s Party
Ace in the Hole
Act of Killing
Aguirre, The Wrath of God
Airplane
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
Alien (Scott)
All About My Mother
All that Jazz
All the Presidents Men
American Friend
Amores Parros
Apocalypto
Apollo 13
Ashes and Diamonds
Asphalt Jungle
Awful Truth, T...
...You can Stop reading this email anytime, and I will assume I have lost about 75% of you by now. For those of you still reading I’d like to offer you some recommendations for some great movies you could watch with your free time.
First, three films by a great director from back in the 30s and 40s named Frank Borzage. This guy was way ahead of his time. He had a sense of rare sense of human dialogue especially for the era and he picked terrific stories to tell.
Three Comrades
Flight Command (Amazing air combat sequences considering the time they were filmed)
Strange Cargo (There does not exist a bad movie with Joan Crawford In it. She was a great judge of scripts and used her star ...
The Nixon Tapes: 1973 Ed. by Douglas Brinkley & Luke Nichter
I watched the Watergate hearings while I was a boy in Canada. They said Nixon was the ultimate politician, but no: He was stiff, he’d sweat, he was human, a tragic figure who got caught up in his own insecurities. My favorite part [in these tapes] is the banality: Nixon talks about his mother-in-law making this pie he f—–g hates, and all these guys going, “Yessir!”
Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell
I love oral histories. Mitchell was a New Yorker writer who’d go around a city and write about interesting people he’d met, from the mayor to the lowest bum. He was probably the first to do New Journalism, [before] Gay Talese. Hi...
When I got my first writing job I couldn’t talk in the writing room. I was working on a sitcom and I could not talk. It wasn’t like I chose not to talk, or I didn’t talk, I couldn’t open my mouth. No words would come out. And that went on for six weeks. I thought I was going to get fired, and I probably should have been but they didn’t. But I was so terrified in this room of six guys, you know? That’s who I was.
Being well known doesn’t solve any of your problems, and I didn’t know that. I thought that it would and I had fantasies about having that. It solved certain problems practically, like I have a better chance of getting a movie made than somebody who doesn’t have a reputation, that kind of thing. Not a great chance now, but better.
My own personal problems, the things that make me me, I’ve still got them. It’s a good thing to know, and I don’t know if you can know that without having it happen and realizing it. I’m so insecure; I’m such an insecure person. I’ve always been, and I am. I’ll tell you this, ten years ago, what I’m doing tonight, no way in Hell could I have done this. No way in H...
I like the idea of the job a lot. I get to think about things I want to think about, I get to write jokes that sometimes make people laugh. I mean, it’s a great job, but it’s very hard for me. I don’t sit at my desk and laugh. That’s very, very rare. Mostly I sit at my desk and look at stuff online. That’s mostly what I do, because I can’t think. I don’t recommend that because it’s a terrible thing, and I’d like to fight against it in my life and in my offering tonight. It’s not a good thing.
No, it’s not. There are so many pitfalls when a movie comes out that it’s hard to enjoy it when it comes out. Obviously if a movie does well and is critically well received I like it, but I’m so needful of it, that kind of response that it doesn’t feel good. It just feels less bad, you know? Because it feels really bad when people say mean things. Really, it feels bad. And I kind of wish that it didn’t, but it does for me.
I always try to write from what it is that I’m thinking about at the time that I’m writing. I always try to centre it on that, because that’s the sort of lack of perspective thing that I was trying to talk about before. There are too many safeguards when you put yourself out of it, and say you’re going to write about this.
The best way for me to find that place where I’ve got a lot of emotion and a lot of agitation and a lot of fear or whatever, is to make that what the story is or what the movie is. And not try to hide it.
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