Judd: Yeah.
Stephen: And I went and saw people improvise one-act plays based on a single word, and I was immediately hooked. I went, “I don’t know what that is, but I have to do it. I have to get onstage and perform extemporaneously with other people.” I loved the ensemble feel of it. I continued to do straight theater, kind of avant-garde black box kind of theater, but I was getting paid to do comedy. And then realized I really like it actually. I really love these people. I met Amy Sedaris and Paul Dinello at Second City. They changed my life. If I hadn’t met Paul and Amy, I don’t think I would have gone into comedy. They became my family.
Judd: But before that, you didn’t think, I’m a comedy person in high school? That wasn’t—
Stephen: I didn’t know what it meant to do comedy in high school. I didn’t even perform until I was a senior.
Judd: Wow.
Stephen: On anything. I was just a kid in the back of the room, you know?
Judd: Let me just switch topics here. The one time I was a guest on your show, which I enjoyed a great deal—
Stephen: I’m glad to hear that. You came on pretty early, when we hadn’t had many entertainment figures on. I wasn’t sure how to adjust. I’m glad you had a good time, because I was very nervous to have you on.
Judd: The background of it is very strange, which is, I was in the car on the way to the show, and my mom, who has since passed away, called me right as I’m pulling up to the studio, to tell me that her chemotherapy didn’t work. It felt like I had just been told that she was going to die.
Stephen: Oh God.
Judd: Then I had to get out of the car and do The Colbert Report with you, and I was just white as a ghost—
Stephen: I’m so sorry.
Judd: It was an out-of-body experience.
Stephen: I have performed after someone I love died. Like finding out moments before and having to walk onstage. It’s possible.
Judd: Oh, it is. I actually felt I did much better as a result of it because it freed me up to not be nervous and roll with it. It was actually a great thing to do, and you were so nice and came into the dressing room beforehand and said, “Okay, I’m about to be really awful to you. Enjoy yourself!” It’s one of my strangest showbiz moments.
Stephen: I can imagine.
Judd: I need to look back and look at it.
Stephen: Twice I have performed having just found out that someone I loved passed away, and I had to go on immediately, and I can’t watch—I haven’t watched either one of them and it’s been many years. I just can’t bring myself to watch whoever that guy was that got through it.
Judd: And in the middle of all this—
Stephen: I just know that nobody knew. I also said to everybody, “It’s important that no one knows this happened. I don’t want to be a brave person, I just got to do my job.”
Judd: That’s why I didn’t tell you.
Stephen: I’m glad you didn’t. I probably would have burst into tears and threw my arms around you.
STEVE ALLEN (1983)
Steve Allen was the first interview I ever did. We met at the St. Regis hotel, in New York City. I had no idea what I was doing. He was someone I had seen on numerous talk shows, and I had a sense that he was somehow integral to the history of television and, more specifically, late-night comedy. He didn’t have to be kind to me, a pimply kid with a tape recorder, but he was. He sat there for an hour, in his suit and tie, answering all my questions in great detail and with total respect. I remember thinking, Oh, so this is how you’re supposed to behave in the world. He was a man of manners and generosity.
I was too young to know much about his show, beyond some clips I’d seen on TV, but I was aware that many of the things I loved about Late Night with David Letterman and The Tonight Show had been invented by, or influenced by, Steve Allen decades before. And this sweet old man was actually this subversive creator, the one guy who would have Lenny Bruce and Jack Kerouac on all the time. Who’s cooler than that?
Judd Apatow: So what is the point of rereleasing these old comedy albums?
Steve Allen: None of your business, Judd. I can’t go around telling every Jack, Tom, and Harry what I’m up to. It’s for me to know and you to find out. Ha, ha, ha. The point of rereleasing these records, Judd, is to make a bundle. I used to be in the laundry business and I miss all that bundle making. No, I’ll tell you why: It’s a public service. We did the albums originally—well, I did the calls on the air, back in ’62, ’63, ’64—and the albums were big hits at that point. Funny Fone-Calls and More Funny Fone Calls. And I have been annoyed to the point of tears ever since by whippersnappers like you coming up to me and saying, “Where can I get a copy of those albums?” I say remarkable things such as, “Ever try a record store?” And for the first year or two that worked. Because they were in record stores. But all albums go out of print eventually, so they were not available. And the Polygram people finally realized that since there was this untapped market, and if they got a market tapper, they could go around and rap a few knuckles.
Judd: Do you have a lot of other albums?
Steve: I haven’t done many comedy albums over the years. There was, besides Funny Fone-Calls and More Funny Fone Calls, there was one called Man on the Street, which consisted of tapes from another comedy show I was doing—a weekly prime-time sketch comedy series, in which I interviewed three supposed men on the street. They were, in fact, Louie Nye, Don Knotts, and Tom Poston. That was a funny album. And I’ve done a few individual comedy recordings, forty-fives and seventy-eights in the old days. We’ve recently been taking inventory of old tapes and films, videotapes and so forth that I have, and discovered there’s a lot of pure gold there.
Judd: One thing I noticed about the albums was, when I listened to them—I have to say that I went home one night and listened to both of them straight through and I was up till four in the morning because I was wide awake from laughing—
Steve: (Laughs)
Judd: I was up, hysterical. And the thing that I noticed was that the laughter in the background—I never hear laughter like that on TV, ever.
Steve: Yeah. That’s a very important thing you put your finger on. It has nothing to do with me, because on some of the calls I hardly make any contribution at all. Jerry Lewis was ninety-eight percent of the funniness there. But you’re absolutely right. There was something about television comedy in those days. The laughter was fresh and genuine and real and warm. Those shows were never sweetened. That started with Laugh-In. Laugh-In was all done with, you know, Scotch tape. They had to do seventeen minutes of this and two minutes of that and tape it all together. And for the most part, there was no audience, and therefore most of the laughter you heard was canned. That was unfortunate. It may have been the only way, technically, they could do that kind of a show, so as not to keep an audience there for fourteen hours. But it was unfortunate. Because, as you say, you don’t hear laughter like that very much now. There was nothing forced about it, and nobody even had to bother to warm the audience up. Some nights, we had to cool them down. They laughed so much, they covered up jokes.
Judd: The thing I noticed was that everything you did, you originated. And now everything that they do has been done already.