WILL THEY LAUGH IN RUSSIA? How to Be Funny Anywhere with Comedy Expert John Vorhaus

Welcome to Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show. I'm Ted Bonnitt.

And by process of elimination.

Oh, not again.

No, I'm Phil Proctor, and no, I haven't eliminated.

Thank you.

Thank goodness.

Yeah.

And I'm just fresh back from visiting my cat in San Diego, so I.

Feel another interesting euphemism.

Yes.

All right.

Let our audience figure that one out for themselves.

Good to see you.

Yeah, it's good to be seen. One of the things we're gonna talk about today really, is humor.

I thought, Phil, that maybe it would be a good idea for us to get our material punched up a little bit. You know, little. Little help. See the doctor, a little comedy consultant.

Yeah, comedy consultant.

And I got a call from somebody who was on the freeway listening to the show last week.

Yeah.

Turns out he's a comedy consultant.

Oh, really?

Yeah, with K's.

Are you talking about this man who's.

Sitting over here at the other microphone, John Voorhouse? He actually had the temerity to write us and said, hey, that was. Can I be on. Who knew you'd be on the show six days later?

That's wonderful. It's a record.

Yeah. It's good to have you here, John.

Thank you. It's. It's an unspeakable pleasure to be here.

Oh, no, this is radio. This would be unspeakable.

It can be unsightly. Yes.

Yes.

It can't be unspeakable.

Pretty much everywhere I go, it can be noisome, really.

I'm so glad you called us because you are a fascinating guy. I have two pages of just book titles. I mean, my God, you wrote 15 books on poker.

Yeah, so?

So.

And you're not.

I'll raise you.

You're not a degenerate gambler, and I'm.

Not a very good poker player. I'm a poster boy for the concept of those who can't do teach.That's a little bit of a simplification, but I describe myself as extremely self absorbed. Like, I'm always looking at myself and thinking about how I problem solve, how I use my creativity. And.And we were talking earlier about your gift for languages. I think I have a gift for understanding my process and turning it into instructions for other people.

What would you call your course?

People who know me know me from my book, the Comic Toolbox, how to be funny even if you're not.

That's why we thought it would be a great idea to have John on the show, because I read the book. Lots of good pointers on Comedy.

Yeah.

Good.

And I thought he could maybe punch.

Us up a little bit.

Punch us up a little bit.

There is nothing I can teach you that you don't already know. At best I could say. Well, one guy in Australia once said, I feel like I've been a bird watcher all my life.And you've told me the names of the birds, but I learned from the best. Fireside Theater give you an example of that. I've heard of them. I'm sure you have. I've been thinking about this Beat the Reaper as an example.What do we have here? We have a game show mixed or conflated with a deadly disease. And so you've taken something that's comedy.Well, but it is comedy because deadly disease does not belong in a game show. It belongs in a hospital. Right.So the minute you take something out of the place it belongs and stick it into a place it doesn't belong, you're using a comic tool that I call clash of context. But mostly you're just giving yourself the opportunity to surf on the absurdity of that.

Yeah. The book is a really interesting analytical approach to how you structure comedy.

Yes. It was my goal to kill the frog slowly. No. You know, this expression, dissecting comedy is like. Or analyzing comedy is like dissecting a frog.You might learn a thing or two, but you're gonna kill the frog. So my whole approach is wholesale slaughter of frogs.

Tow it away.

One of the interesting jobs you had was to export comedy from the US and you were two other countries to other countries. You were brought in to do the Russian version of Married With Children.

That's true. In 2007 and 2008, I ran the writing staff of the Russian version of Married With Children. There's a lot to talk about here. It was a Sony project.Sony owned Married With Children. And they made a good living in those years selling their product to other countries for adaptation. Really?And then sending people like me around the world to guide writers through the adaptation. Wow. In a country or in a culture where there's not a lot of situation comedy, for example, and you showed nothing very funny. Nothing fun, really.

No.

In places like that, writers need to be trained.And it turns out if you give them the job of adapting existing shows based on scripts that have been well worked out and can be trusted, they can learn a lot that they can then apply to the creation of their own shows. So that was kind of the Sony model, and that's what I was doing.

Exporting comedy, particularly.I mean, comedy has always been regarded as one of the hardest cultural exports because the references to comedy in one culture just do not make any sense in another culture.

And wordplay as well.

And God knows, Russia's so famous for being a hilarious place.So how do you take the sensibilities of something like Married with Children, which is really kind of the underbelly of American culture, in a sense, and make it work in a Russian social scape?

The first thing you need to know is everywhere in the world where people know about Married With Children, they always identify with the show quite strongly. They always say that Al Bundy, he's just like us.So this tells us that the lovable loser is an archetype, and it's an archetype that transcends national borders.And especially in other countries where they have kind of a chip on their shoulder for one reason or another, this downtrodden feeling of Married with Children works quite well.Seinfeld, to give a contrary example, does not work well for adaptation because it's so idiomatic and so New York that it doesn't have the underlying emotion that makes it work universally. Now, as far as Russia's concerned, I don't even know where to begin with this. There are a lot of norms in Russia that are not my norms.And one of the things that challenged me when I was working there was they weren't afraid of slinging homophobic jokes, racist, sexist jokes. It was just the norm. I'm going to go for some Russian here. Feels so. So bear with me. One of my writers pitched a joke that was straight up homophobic.And I said, we can't do this joke. It's just. It's homophobic. What's the problem? Well, like, I'm Jewish. Would you make Jewish jokes to my face?And he said, as I'm sure you'll recognize, po che mun yet.

Why not?

Why not? Every culture has its own rules and its own norms. And my job is just.It's not to change the rules, but just to understand the rules and how to work within them.With the Russians, it was a particular challenge because the way that culture was built in the Communist times, there's no real reward for doing more than you have to do. And so I had writers who would come to me on a daily basis. They'd pitch me a joke, and I would say, I don't think that's a very funny joke.And they say, but it's funny in Russian. And at that point, I have three alternatives in front of me. One is, it's Legitimately funny in Russian.And I don't have the cultural context to get the joke. That's a possibility. The other is it's funny in Russian but it's lost in translation because this is all being done through translation.But the third possibility is it's not funny. The writer knows it's not funny and the writer is too lazy or scared to change it. And so then they hide behind what is funny in Russian.So my job as a consultant and a little bit of a psychologist is to figure out where is this writer at?

How did you do that?

Just got to know him. Drank a lot of vodka in Russia. I had more screaming arguments with writers than in any other place I've ever worked in the world.And always through translator. So that would be funny. My particular interpreter was maybe 21, 22 years old, charming young lady, just out of language school.And she got a look at my psyche that nobody else in the world has. As I just tried to get through to these Russians. You can do more than the least you can do there. Yeah, they're never going to pay you.There's no reward for it except the reward that comes within. So if you give this job more than this job requires, it's going to pay dividends to you as a creative person your whole life long.But it starts with being clear eyed enough to look down the barrel of a joke and say, this isn't funny, I can do better.

When you say they're not doing it for money, it's not like a Hollywood situation.

I mean the money that they're getting is not Hollywood money, let's put it that way.

But people in Hollywood aren't getting Hollywood money anymore.

That's true too. As my 17 cent residual checks.

Were there any Jewish writers?

Yeah, yeah.

Were they funny?

Oppressed people are always funny because humor is a defense mechanism. There you go, there you go. That's why the Jews and Irish are funny and Germans are not. Can I tell you, can I tell you a funny German?

Can you tell me a funny German joke? I don't think so.

This is German. Back to Swiss. I'm going to mock both of these. Okay.So the first time I went to teach comedy writing in Germany, I sat down around table with a group of writers and I said, hey, you know, my, my friends, I told all my friends in Hollywood I was coming to Germany to teach comedy writing. They all thought that was pretty funny. Kl Klaas got a good laugh out of it. But this one kid leans forward, he puts his hands on the table.He says, these friends of yours, tell us their names. No, but he got it. He got it because comedy is truth and pain. And the truth and pain of that kid in that moment was he is tarred with Germany's past.And so the joke is a nod to the. The truth. Germany has a bad past. And the pain. I'm responsible for it, even though I'm not responsible for it.

There's a classic story. They have a German magazine that came out after the war, and it's called Pardon, Pardon. The whole idea being, oh, excuse me, We Killed Some Jews.So really, it was that attitude toward comedy.

I did an adaptation of the Golden Girls in Israel, and they took the old. The grandmother character and made her a Holocaust survivor. Yeah, yeah. And I said, how are you going to make the Holocaust funny?And I said, read this. And the joke was, they say to this old lady, grandma, is it true that you killed Nazis during the war? And she says, what? They started it.

Do they have audience. Cannes laughter in each of these cultures? And does the Cannes laughter have accents?

Yeah.

Canned laughter is universally reviled around the world. They think it's forced and phony. Almost nobody likes it, but we know there's a physiological reason for it.People are more likely to laugh out loud if they hear other people laughing.

That's right.

That's right. I made a pilot in Romania like you do, and they didn't have a tradition of audiences.They went out on the street and just basically rounded up everyone they could find and said, we're going to pay you $5 to sit in a room, watch this, and then laugh at it. But the production scheme was so narrow, let's say that they couldn't put the audience in the same room as the sets.So they ran a long cable from the sets down the hall to a room to a TV monitor, and the audience watched there and they mic'd them there. Yeah.

Talk about separating people from the energy.

Exactly.

Wow. How'd that go?

I was fine. Yeah. Yeah, I was fine. They didn't know any better.I mean, it was bootstrap kind of thing the studio really wasn't equipped with for what we were trying to do, so we just had to make a workaround for it. And nor did the actors expect audience participation because they'd never encountered.

So what kind. These are interesting jobs. How long are you in for these gigs?

I spent two winters in Russia. Oh, how. Two winters in Moscow. You know the expression winter wonderland? Yeah. It's just like that, but without the wonderland. Right. Harsh. Yep.I Was in Romania for four or five months. I did a six months in Australia, back and forth to New Zealand a bunch of times.And I made two shows in Nicaragua, where I was back and forth to Nicaragua a lot over the years. It's not necessary for me to stay. I love to stay. I love going to place, being in a place because it's so enriching for me.But a lot of the work that I do, I like to go in there and kind of plant the seeds. And then I can go home and do a lot of distance consulting, you know, edit scripts or stories and send them fascinating.Then drop in again and give them another jolt of energy.

Did these separate cultures inform your comedic sensibilities so much?

Because I realized, first of all, I never wanted to teach the American method. I don't know what the American method is necessarily, but I never wanted to be that kind of cultural imperialist.And so I was always at pains to point out, I'm not here to teach you how to do it like I do it. I'm here to help you figure out how to do it the best way that's right for you in its own culture.

A comedic imperialist.

I am an anti imperialist.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm a comedic anarchist. Yeah. Punchline before the setup. Let's try that. Blow their minds.But I learned that you can get a lot of information about culture just by listening to the jokes. And I do this a lot with classes. I just say, what are your jokes? Who do you tell jokes about?A lot of the jokes that you encounter are what we used to call Polish jokes. Not because of Polish people necessarily. In front of someone who is someone who is other than you, here's a joke for you.I learned this one in Nicaragua. It turns out that all over South America they tell tell the following joke. How did the Argentinian commit suicide?He climbed to the top of his ego and jumped off. The fall. Did not kill him. He died of starvation on the way down. So what's the piece of cultural information we extract from this? Again? Comic rule.The fundamental rule of comedy is truth and pain. So for people all over South America, the truth is Argentinians think they're better than us. And the pain is.There's nothing we can do about it except tell jokes. So I hearing this joke, I get a lot of information about how Argentinians are regarded by themselves and by other people.Now when I say truth and pain, it's not objective truth. It's not like reality. It's a commonly held understanding. Those People are stupid and we suffer.

That's right.

So comedy is a cultural shorthand.

Sure. Yeah.

In South Africa. I know you did some work there.

Yeah, I was there last year.

Well, they have Van der Meuven jokes. Have you heard any jokes? I roomed with Birgit Roberts, a South African, when I was at Yale and Nicholas Van der Meuven was down the hallway.It's a very common name. And so there are. Obviously, there's so many of them, there's bound to be a lot of stupid Vandemervas. So they became the butt of the joke.Of course, Nicholas Van der Merven became an atomic scientist and helped to develop carbon dating. But that's another story.

Now that you've traveled the globe, so to speak, do you have a measurement of funnier and less funnier countries?

It correlates to power. If your country is a boss country, then it's less likely to be sharply funny. When you say boss, boss country, an invader, it correlates.It's inversely proportionate. If your country invades other countries, you're less funny.If your country is invaded by other countries, you're more funny again because it's a defense mechanism.

Interesting. Where did you find the funniest people?

Boy, that's a great question.

We're expecting a great answer.

Yeah. I'm not gonna keep good old US Of A. My friend, because we're both an invading country and an invading country.

Yeah, there you go.

Sorry. Next answer. Best answer right here in this room.

How can you be in two places at once?

Not anywhere at all?

That's us.

Yeah.

In your book Comedy Toolkit, this is how you break it down. Clash of context. Law of comic opposites. Telling the truth to comic effect. Telling a lie to comic effect. Center and eccentrics. Fish out of water.These are all situational setups.

Right. Let's focus on comic opposites and fish out of water as two examples.

Okay.

If you're in need of creating a situation comedy or a comic story in a hurry, these are tool strategies you can use to get there instantly. Comic opposites. You just create a character, assign a character, point of view.I'm sure that you guys have exaggerated versions of yourself where you have comic arguments reflecting your point of view or your comic filter.

You should see our mirrors at home.

So you take a character, you give them a point of view. Liberal, let's say. Then you take another character, give them the opposite point of view. Conservative. Lash them together by circumstance.You have comic conflict. They're gonna fight all day over who gets to be right about their point of view.And if you look at situation comedy in particular, you're going to discover it's not at all about people trying to get things to make their lives better. It's all about people trying to prove to themselves that outer reality agrees with their own cherished beliefs.

Well, that's a great understanding.

That's really interesting.

And when you know that, then you can go to Fish out of Water.

If you know that, you can see the downfall of democracy.

Yes, you can. Yes, you can. There's a successful novelist, he's written all of these novels. He decides to go to a small town and run a small town newspaper.This is a classic fish out of water type story because the character's normal state of being is famous writer in presumably urban areas. Now he's taking himself out of a place where he feels comfortable and putting himself in a place where he feels uncomfortable.

But he's a bigger fish in a small pond.

He's a bigger fish in a small pond. And he probably thinks it's going to be an easy win because he's a big fish in a small pond.He might even think, the only way I can make myself feel good about myself is to go there and win as the big fish in a small pond. Obviously, as the story unfolds, he discovers it's not as simple as that.Presumably at the end of the story, he is transformed, which is another key word in comic storytelling, and discovers that it's not about being a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in being a big pond. It's about being who you are and feeling comfortable with that.

You know, George Burns and Gracie Allen built an entire career on that basic idea that George is the smart guy and Gracie is, you know, his silly little wife, but she's speaking the truth all the time and knocking him off his pedestal.

Green Acres, the situational comedy show, is a good example of that. Right.

City people move to the country. Right.

And Eddie Albert maintained his pomposity.

That's right.

And his wife, Eva Gabor was one.

Of the guys, was more open, more willing, more open. Right. So you have open versus closed, high status versus low status. These are all common things.And by the way, Beverly Hillbillies, Yes, I always like to say that a joke or an idea is never only one. It's always at least two itself and its opposite. And Green Acres and Beverly Hillbillies, classic example of that.

So let's contemporize it a little bit. Let's say modern day setup Convicted felon, con man, sex offender, becomes president of the United States twice.

Well, first of all, that's completely unrealistic. I don't buy the premise. I mean, you're never gonna get people to believe that.

I know.

Yeah, true.

But it won't be renewed.

From your mouth to God's ears.

It's an interesting dilemma because it's a rich vein of comedy, and the Knightley guys are mining it very well and in many ways, offering mass therapeutic benefit.

True.

When the writers strike happened last year, I was really having a difficult time not having that comic relief every night. I really missed those guys.

Yeah.

What's going on right now is so extreme that you have this level of exhaustion. It's just not funny anymore. But then you just still need the humor to vent it. How do you size that up as a comedy professor?

Well, pulling the politics out of it. And this is the part that I'll look at. My latest book on comedy is called the Comedy Writer's Companion.And one of the things that I talk about there is comedy in broad strokes has two different kinds of power. The power to lift up or the power to knock down.

Right.

It uses the power to lift up when it makes people feel better about bad things. Death, politics, the world situation. It uses the power to knock down when it does the vital job of speaking truth to power.Being an iconoclast, destroying social structure for the sake of renewing social structure. And this is what Firesign did so well.

We consider it a form of deprogramming. Also because of the effect of media.I always thought of ourselves as being co mediaans because we were inspired by the media to contradict the vision that was being forced upon us, it still is, frankly.

So if you're coming up in comedy and you're engaging with this question, what's my voice? What am I allowed to say what I'm not allowed to say, which a lot of people are concerned with now?It has everything to do with knowing what your goal is for your power. I'm a lifter upper. I'm always using my comic power to make people feel better. That's just the way I am.So there are a lot of things that are allowed to me as a lifter upper, but there are a lot of things that are not allowed to me because it's not on brand for me to attack. On the other hand, there are plenty of comics for whom it is exactly on brand to attack.And by making it their brand, they give themselves much more freedom to say the things that the audience needs to hear that. The audience can't necessarily say for themselves.

It empowers the audience, doesn't it? Yes.

It's better if it's mixed with self effacement, so you don't come off as a judgmental egotist.

In the postmodern world of comedy, there's a lot of discussion about punching up and punching down, and it has to do with self effacement. My experience of this is you can get away with almost anything.You can mock almost anything if you treat it with respect, if you honor the subject that you're mocking, and if you make yourself the target of the joke. Now, I learned this indirectly by watching Phil Rosenthal. He created Everybody Loves Raymond.And when I was in Russia doing Married With Children, he was in Russia doing the Russian version of Everybody Loves Raymond and shooting a documentary about the.

Extreme, which is what Everybody Hates Raymond, you think?

Yeah. And all of my Russian colleagues were afraid that he was going to make fun of them in the documentary. But it quickly became clear.And this is so smart. It was never about, the Russians are ridiculous. It was always about, I do not understand what I'm looking at.And because he turned the joke back on himself, I'm baffled by my environment. He could poke fun at the environment without making the people he was poking fun at feel attacked.

Oh, that's smart.

That's a gift. Yeah.

Thinking about punching up, punching down. Examples of that. We talked about this earlier about Howard Stern as an example, at least in his prime, of punching down.And it was cruel at times, but people enjoyed it. And another good example of legit feel good, where it's actually very funny, which I've discovered recently, is Kim's Convenience.

Oh, I love that show.

I went to see the play, which was fantastic, and then I got into the TV show as a result. It's like when you have a rough day, not just personally, but just observing the world.Like, my wife and I would watch the news, and it's like, I need a Kim's Convenience. And you switch over to thank God. There's like 60 episodes.They're about 20 minutes long, and you just watch one and you feel good and you realize the power of comedy.

Jackie Gleason show. One of the root situations, maybe even the invention of a particular kind of situation comedy with a live audience.

Dom Calm.

Yeah.And he was, you know, a schlub and a loser, and yet he was crass and, you know, always punching down and everything, but he was sympathetic because everybody was stuck in the same boat.

Sympathetic Loser.

Yeah.

Sympathetic loser.

Well, it's that commonly held truth in pain. You know, it's 1950s America, where your aspiration is to be a bus driver and hope that your family doesn't drive you too crazy.

That's.

So Kim's convenience is comfort food. Howard Stern is definitely not comfort food.

Schitt's Creek.

Schitt's Creek. And also, fish out of water. Yeah.So the only thing that I would caution is it's easy to make a value judgment somehow to say Kim's convenience because it's uplifting is better than Howard Stern because it's a.

No, it's just a different flavor.

It's different flavor.

What is more effective right now in this environment? Again, going back to the therapeutic value of comedy, why people are attracted to.

It, I got some bad news for you, Ted. Comedy's not going to win this war. And by war, I'm not talking about that war. I'm talking about the cultural war. The cultural war. Yeah.

Well, you know, it's hard to be satirical in this age.

How do you parody something like that?

That is so outrageously.

Yeah, shine a light on it.

So where do you see the comic outcome of this episode?

I hope for a return to normal, but somebody pointed out, I can't remember who it was. So many demons have been let out of the bottle.

It's gonna be, how do you get them back in?

How do you put them back in? What is now normal is not what it was before.

Yeah, that's a very important point. And from a comedic sensibility, it makes it much harder to be funny.

Well, it's like when you bomb a city, it's really. You can do that in a matter of minutes.

If you bomb on the stage, you.

Can do that in a matter of seconds.

You're listening to Phil and Ted's Sexy Boomer Show. I'm Ted Bonnet.

And I'm Phil Proctor.

And our special lovely guest is John Voorhouse International's TV script doctor, teacher, author of the comedy writing classic the Comic Toolbox. How to be funny even if you're not. You have a more recent book out now.

I think you're speaking of the Book of Practice.

The Book of Practice. By the way, before I forget, I have to compliment you on one of the books you wrote on writing was like, how to write good.

How to write good. I discovered that when I wrote the Comic Toolbox, and I came up with the subtitle how to be funny even if you're not.I didn't realize when I Came up with it. But that's magic, because people who want to write comedy are afraid that they're not funny.So if you tell them right there in the title, this is you, they trust you more. They feel like, oh, this guy gets me, understands me.But with the book of practice, what I had in mind was I know a lot about comedy and I know about what makes comedy work. And so I know what it means to build an effective practice of comedy.But what does it mean to build an effective practice of music or economics or sales or sports or relationships or anything else? And so I started looking for these defining principles of good practice.Like for example, many people in our line of work and in related line of work, lines of work, acting, art, music, they're focused on outcomes.They invest their effort in the hope of a positive outcome, which is not a very effective way to work because while you're doing the work, you don't know what the outcome is going to be. And fearing a bad outcome or hoping for a good outcome will keep you from working effectively there in the moment.So if you change your focus from product to process or from outcome to practice, then you can put yourself in a situation where there's no possibility of failure. Because if you are engaged in your practice, writing words, playing music, doing acting, painting, whatever, you're getting better.Whether you're creating good outcomes or not, you're gaining experience points like in a video game.

You don't have to be perfect, you.

Don't have to be. You don't even have to be particularly good. You just have to put in time, over time in order to build your practice.Because what everybody wants is the same thing, a self sustaining practice. And I mean self sustaining in two senses. One sense is the thing should make money, which would be great.But the other is so many creative practitioners come from a should point of view. I should be writing, I should be doing art.But if you have a practice that fulfills you, makes you feel good about what you're doing, then you'd have to never have to bring should to the table because you are where you want to be in your practice.

Did you grow up in a funny family?

I think I was the funny one as the youngest child. And I was the entertainer.My family was funny, but they used to tell this joke about me and I didn't realize the nuance of the joke for a long, long time. When I was a kid, I would tell jokes and my family would say to one another these words exactly, don't laugh at him. It just Eggs him on.

Yeah, I've heard that before.

Right. Which is true, but I didn't realize. I thought it was a term of endearment.

Yes.

But years later, I discovered it was a warning.

Don't encourage them.

Don't encourage them. Definitely don't encourage.

I heard that.

Yeah. But smart, clever.

You know, nobody tells jokes anymore. My late wife's little sister Bonnie, she works as a bartender and one of the conversations we had was, do you hear any good jokes lately?Nobody tells jokes anymore. What happened?

Is it declining literacy?

I think it's declining oxygen levels. I think just people aren't getting enough oxygen in their brains anymore. I'm going for a joke and missing it by a mile.Rule of nine says the comic toolbox, for every 10 jokes you try, nine won't work. And that was one of the nine.

That was Groucho Marx's philosophy.

Society is changing drastically in terms of attention spans, information consumption. People are overwhelmed with information. It's hard to sit down with a book.

So hard to sit down with a book.

Sitting down with the newspaper every Sunday was a thing.

Yeah.

You didn't even intellectualize it. You would just do it.

Just do it. It was comfort food.

Right. And so much has changed in that respect.

Yeah. I try to say of most things, it's not a good thing, it's not a bad thing. It's just a thing that is. Change is inevitable.But to your question about jokes, I think there's a better answer, and that is this stand up comedy. Comedy in general in the olden times was very joke driven. The expectation was, you're gonna see Milton Berle type comics.You look at Richard Pryor and you can see that his career had two distinct parts with a very fiery dividing line between them. Before he set himself on fire, he told jokes, set up, punchline jokes. When he was a straight comedian, stand up comic.

That's right.

When he came back from that fire and did Live on Sunset Strip, he just revealed himself completely. There was not a setup and punchline in it.It was just him sharing his truth and pain, which was shocking, but it created a whole new way of looking at comedy. So now when people go to see comedians, they expect not just laughs, but also the dark underbelly, the real truth of the comedian.So expectations have changed. You saw it in situation comedy too. When I was coming up, sitcoms were all standalone episodes.You know, they could all get run over by a truck this week, but next week it'll all be normal. And Friends comes along and says, hey, you Know what? The modern sitcom is both a comedy and a soap opera.And now you can't even contemplate making a sitcom that doesn't include a lot of narrative through life.

Yeah.

Like the Conners, like the Connors and.

Our dear friend John Goodman.

Because the audience's expectation has changed.

You'd watch a sitcom again next week because it was funny.

Right.

And you wanted to see, oh, what's gonna, you know, what are we gonna laugh about next week? And now what you're saying is it's also. There's a cliffhanger element to it.

I don't ever remember any introspection from Curly.

And with the word introspection, you can really draw a line between what we might call smart comedies and dumb comedies or cartoons.

Yeah.

Characters in dumb comedies never doubt themselves. They never introspect. They don't have that level of inner conflict. And it doesn't have to be animation to be a cartoon.The early James Bond movies were like this. Bond never doubted his essential Bond ness. So essentially every Bond movie was just another standalone cartoon version of Bond being Bond superhero.But the minute the character starts to experience self doubt, the material gets much smarter and much more meaningful to the audience because they experience self doubt.

Right.

You asked earlier about culture in other countries and comedy.One of the things that I've experienced a lot is I'm working with writers who live in a country that's nothing like who they are because these are all sitcom freaks. That's why they're in classes with me, because they're comedy freaks. But people out there in their countries don't have the same comic vocabulary.So it often happens that the writers want to make sitcoms that are too advanced for the audience.And I tell them, you know, you're going to have to bring them along a little slowly, give them a straight up and down family sitcom, then give them a straight up and down office sitcom, and then you can start to take some chances. But you have to educate the audience to enjoy what they're seeing.And if you're too far out in front of them, you're never going to get them because they, they don't have anything to grab.

Then you're fireside theater and you have a niche audience that supports you, but it's not a whole country.

Well, let me ask you, if you had a choice between the lifelong devotion of your niche audience and broad popular appeal, which would you choose and why?

Yes, believe me, that that is exactly my life. Because I had many opportunities during my life and my career to Go into the broad comedy aspect of it.And frankly, I did turn it down and stayed with the niche comedy because it was brighter and more uplifting and more uplifting for me. And I could do everything.I could sing, I could direct, I could act, I could produce, I could play with sound, I could tour, I could, you know, be on the radio and all the different media forms. And at the same time, I could play a guest artist on all in the Family, which satisfied me as an actor in another way. I could do Shakespeare.But in terms of reaching the widest audience, I never. I didn't go that route.

It's an expensive choice to make.

Listen, it's very interesting. It would be. It's confining to be like a superstar. And yet that's the maximum of your ability to reach a wide audience.

Other than financially and the adulation, it's not much better. I do this from a deep, scientific perspective. I went to see MJ Michael Jackson at the Pantages this weekend, and it was fantastic, by the way.Music, dancing, the instrumentation.

Did you like the trial scene?

No, it ended just before that. But the through line they did get into was how he was trapped in his stardom. And he was always battling with his partners on Michael.We can't spend that kind of money for a toaster lift. It became a signature. He had this vision, but he had to always fight for it. But he was trapped in this.

What's all toaster lift.

Toaster lift is. I think it was Billie Jean or when he did the super bowl, there's a box, and all of a sudden he flies out of it like a toaster.

Oh, really?

It's a lift.

That's why he's called a pop star.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He just pops and lands.And that was a big thing, of course, to this story is like how he fought for that, because he always knew he had a vision to push it a step further, because his fears, according to this story, was that it just takes one slip to fall all the way down the mountain. So he was always looking at that behind him. This idealization of being on the very top of the pyramid is probably not as sweet as you stir up a.

Lot of thoughts within me because I had a brief flirtation with Stage, but it really wasn't my thing. And I always wonder, is it just because it wasn't good? I didn't have a taste for it. Didn't really like that buzz.

Did you sit calm or acting?

Stand up.

Stand up. Right.

But how can I put this? We are two People, we are our creative selves and our personal selves.And we're drawn, driven to creative expression, which will have consequences on our personal lives. Some which we control, some we can't control.If somebody had come along and said to me, at a certain point, you can now be famous, but if you're famous, you can't ever be unfamous, I'm not sure that I would be happy.

We know some people who are very famous who are not very, very accurate.

That's very true. But today, because of social media, you can be an influencer and attain, you know, your 15 minutes of fame and then do it what you will.And a lot of it is based on just your personality.

That's what I loved about radio. We would do these comedy sketches in New York for 10 years as cartoon characters, essentially, because radio, you can do that.And the beauty of it was I could walk out of that building and no one knew who I was. And I did do some television comedy for a while. Went to about three quarters of a million homes in the New York, New Jersey area.And I started getting recognized at the supermarket and stopped in the street and at a nightclub. And the whole thing, it was terribly intrusive and it was irksome. And I decided then and there I made it.Not that I had the choice to make, but I made the decision at that point that it was like, I'll take the praise of my peers over the adulation of the masses.

And that's one of the things that works for standup as well, because you are in a niche, a particular, and you can be very respected by all the other people who are doing standup. And of course, then you might be able to parlay it into a greater success, but it is a comfort food.

Yeah. Just to play that back to you, I turned my back on fame. Not that fame ever offered an invitation.

No, no.

Let's not neglect the moment that we're in here, at least from my point of view, there is. Fame is on the table. I'm here in this heightened state of excitement because you're here and you're famous.

Oh, I'm famous.

Well, you're famous to me and you're famous. Sure.

And I respect that and I love that.

And I reached out to a lot of people and I said, I'm going on this show. And when I dropped your name, you know, my inbox, I mean, that's really nice.

It's really comforting.

But it's.

I'll tell my banker.

There's fame, there's Fame. And there's impact.

Yes.

Whatever your level of fame is, it's not correlated to your level of impact. Your level of impact. I don't have to tell you this. It's manifest.It's existed for as long as, you know, since I was 15 years old, I telling this story. 15 Years old, I'm walking the halls in my high school. Girl in front of me falls down and I say, oh, she's no fun.She felt like kid walking the other way says, wait a minute, didn't I say that on the other side of the album? And we looked at each other and we just knew we're going to be friends forever. And Fire Sign fans in particular.And, you know, I'm here among you today not only to do a little star fornicating edited for radio. Thank you. But also to try to raise my profile by a tiny degree. So, you know, it's not that I'm not interested in.In more penetration into the public, especially as the years tick down. You know, we boomers, we're on the clock.

Yeah.

So I don't, I don't feel like I'm entirely blameless. That's not the right word. I don't feel like, I mean, we're.

All still social climbers.

Yeah. Even at this late date, which, you know, like why our climbing days are done, but not because.I don't know about you, but I'm struggling with retirement. I am doing a very bad job of being a retired person.

Oh, yeah, you should just rotate your tires and keep going.

I don't understand the concept. My parents went through it and I just didn't get it.

No, we're not a retirement generation.

No. But there's more to it than that. This is also from the book of practice.In my understanding, there's two kinds of people who define themselves as people of doing and people who define themselves as people of being. People of being are content just to be where they are. People of doing. Being cannot be content not doing.Because the only reason we ever feel good about ourselves is by measuring ourselves against our achievements.

Right.

You can see this distinction quite clearly in a supermarket checkout line. People of being, they're content to wait their turn. People of doing are falling behind in their existence, in the moment and going crazy.And my challenge as I stare down the barrel of retirement is I'm a person of doing a self described, self avowed and very happy. Now all of a sudden I'm supposed to change gears and do crossword puzzles or watch tv. But you're A writer so I can continue to write.So retirement isn't really.

It's just maybe a change of focus. Really?

Yes, but no. I mean, there is a mindset that. A change that takes place when, for example, your ambition or your desires write checks that your body can't cash.I don't know if you're familiar with the sport of Ultimate Frisbee.

Yes.

Shout out to my peeps at Slacker Wednesday. We play every Wednesday at noon, and our motto is it works because you don't.But I've been playing ultimate for as long as I've been enjoying Firestine Theater.

What a great way to stay in shape.

It's a great way to stay in shape, but two rotator cuff surgeries later.

And, well, you got to. You got to learn to catch them with your.

Yeah. In my mouth. Yes.

Yeah. Watch your dogs, you know?

Yeah.

So you're throwing hardball Frisbees.

Yeah.

Well, kind of a dumbass. But I'm determined not to let go of that, because to let go of it is to, I don't know, admit to something I'm not prepared to admit.

Well, jumping out of the stream, so to speak. I think about the bottom line of what I'm interested in maintaining other than my health, is relevance.

Sure.

I, of course, have a different challenge because of my eyesight. I have macular degeneration. It prevents me from doing Planet Proctor, which was something I would type up on the computer.And then I had a wonderful graphic artist who brought it to life. And I did it for over 20 years. But at a certain point, it's too difficult. I can't see it. I can't do it anymore.And yet I want to figure out a way to it to continue the spirit of it. And Ted was suggesting since we started doing a newsletter that perhaps I can do a version of the Planet is called Phil.

I'm glad you brought that up. Check this out.

Oh, my God, it's a shirt.

Look at that.

Huh?

It's. It says sexy.

Ladies and gentlemen. You can't see this, but I hold.

It up to the microphone.

Sexy Boomer T shirt.

Oh. Can people buy these if they.

I think so.

I had money.

What a wonderful gift.

We were just doing some tests and seeing what would look good, and I thought these would be great. And of course, I ordered the wrong shirt. These are the backs of the shirt. But this is.

Well, we can wear it backwards. Nobody would know.

And we have a bumper stickers, too. We have merch, Phil. Merch.

That means we must be Successful to get rich.

A dollar.

Pretend to be successful.

I. I wanted to look at the shirt because I was certain it was going to be 100% cotton. This is another thing that's different about our generation. We value cotton. Do you know how little kids of today value cotton?

No.

No.

And I haven't thought about it.

They never think about it.

Unless it's oxy cotton.

Oh. Unless.

Hey, John, Question. Are we safely beyond political correctness?

No. Thinking about myself as I'm old, it's okay for me to make jokes about not being woke. It's not okay for me not to be woke.In other words, it's okay for me to act like a clueless old man. It's not okay for me to be a clueless old man. And I think that that has a lot to do with what political correctness is all about.Political correctness is just a way of saying, do you respect your fellow man? Do you honor and love and care about the people around you, the differences?And if you don't, then people who have the power to be against you will try to be against you.

Maybe that will come back and be restored after this era passes. Because when you have it coming from the top, when you have really hateful, nasty dishonesty coming from the very top, it's a poor reflection.

Demonization.

Yeah, right. And it gives people the green light to relate to their lower selves. I hope it doesn't come back in the form of political correctness.

I would offer this. If you are politically incorrect in this day and age, you risk being canceled.If you're politically correct in 1963 and you're Lenny Bruce, you risk going to jail. So political correctness is. It's not new. It's just different.What was politically incorrect in the past was politically incorrect because it was too liberal. Now what's politically incorrect is politically incorrect because it's too reactionary. There are two sides of the same coin.The pendulum will always swing. I don't see people being thrown in jail for telling politically incorrect jokes in 20.

Ah, but they might be taken off the air.

They might be taken off the air, but would they be charged with obscenity like Lenny Bruce was?

Likely not.

So things change. Things are different. There's so much noise out there that it's hard to make enough noise to call any attention to yourself.You know, to be big enough to get politically incorrect and get canceled unless you already have a level of fame to begin with.

Cancel culture seems to be somewhat on the dying vine too, because a lot of people are doing some things that they're not getting canceled for.

Well, maybe. Yeah, maybe.We live in a post cancelled world where the understanding is you got an opinion, whatever your opinion is, it's not as outrageous as some of the other opinions.

That is exactly what has happened. You know, everybody is entitled to their opinions and everybody's opinion is as correct as everybody else's opinion.

But the through line here is that no matter what, comedy is always going to be a thing.

Yes, because comedy fulfills a need. It lets us process our pain in a way that feels good.You know, there's so many movies, what we call dark comedies or black comedies, weekend Bernie's, places like that, where people are dying and the whole death experience is gently wrapped in a cloak of comedy.

Why?

Because it's so hard to think about death without crying unless you are laughing. And it's not just death. It's a career opportunity. Sex. Haven't had sex in a year. Oh, celibate? No, Married. So what's the truth in pain there?Married people don't have as much sex as they thought they were gonna have or wanted to have. And it's hard to deal with. And thank God comedy is such a.

Great part of the human psyche.

It is.

I always thought it was funny that if you laughed hard enough you'd cry.

Okay.

I don't know what it means, but it's good.

It's true.

Well, anyway, we have, unfortunately, and I always hate to say this, run out of time.

That's no joke. John Voorhouse. Thank you so much. We can find all your books at,.

Of course on Amazon and also@johnvorhouse.com Voorhouse spelled V O R H A. I always tell people, if you want to find me, just think comic toolbox search that you'll find the correct spelling of.

My name, My comic tool. And you're a comic toolbox.

Thanks for joining us from the freeway. Enjoy your bumper sticker.

High point of my life, guys.

Yeah. I'm so glad to have you.

Oh, it's wonderful having you.

This is Sexy Boomer show. You can hear all our shows at SexyBoomerShow.com. Reach out to us like John, you could be on the show next week, for all you know.

That's right.

The bar has been set.

Low inch info@sexyboomershow.com if you go to sexyboomershow.com the website, you can also leave us a voicemail. We'd love to hear from you.

Or an advice mail. Yeah.

All right, tell us what we're doing wrong.

I'm Ted Bonnitt.

I'm Phil Proctor.

We'll see you next.