New author Larry Charles opens up about ‘Seinfeld,’ ‘Borat,’ & more

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0:31It's The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can also hear the show at kcow.com slash the treatment. It's thrilling to see in the book Comedy Samurai, 40 Years of Blood, Guts, and Laughter, that my guest Larry Charles, who we know from so many things, going back to the show Fridays, which is not going to get a 40th anniversary special, unlike Saturday Night Live, where he's the writer on the show. He met Larry David, where they then worked together on Seinfeld and Kirby Enthusiasm. He's done a bunch of incredible movies, including one you should see on his YouTube channel. The director's cut of Army of One.

1:01First of all, Larry Charles, thanks so much for being here. My pleasure, man. Thank you for having me. And I was sort of thrilled to sort of see that lines from all along the watchtower keep coming up in the book. Well, at one point, the book was going to be called Life is But a Joke. Which you talk about as the description of the book. Yeah, I love that line. And I thought it really kind of defined me to a large degree. But that was when the book was 1 ,000 pages long. The original draft was 1 ,000 pages and included my very surreal, very Lord of the Flies-like childhood, which will be a separate book now.

1:36Because we basically decided rather than cutting each chapter, we would just cut it in half and start with Fridays and go forward and save that part of the book as a separate book. Because they don't want to publish a 1 ,000-page book these days. Because this is a really dense book. And what I was saying to you before we started, it's a book about as much as anything, the collateral damage of a life in comedy. And by the last chapter of the book, which is you come to realize things about what comedy is. And we were talking about this before. You've been involved in a particularly ruthless kind of comedy.

2:08And each chapter of the book is about the sort of the wounds you take on. And by that last chapter, you've earned that kind of exegesis. You quote a line that we've heard Larry David use before. His shows are basically about no hugging and no lessons. But in fact, the person who does that is a person who is not self-aware. There are a number of Zen cons in this book. You really earn where you are in the last chapter. And I told you, I cried when I read that because it's what you come to understand. I think not only what comedy has done to you, but maybe what comedy has done to other people, the people who've grown up watching this stuff.

2:45Well, I think there is that sort of dichotomy between being ruthless in your comedy philosophy and your life. At a certain point, those things sort of diverge. Your life cannot be practiced in the same way that you practice comedy. And in a way, you must do that. I mean, we did Borat. There were so many ethical issues that we would argue and discuss and debate. it was like very Talmudic trying to figure out what hurts and what's fair and what's not fair and trying to get a laugh and trying to figure out what a laugh is itself. It becomes a very treacherous journey. And if you treat your life the same way, you are going to put blinders on to so many of the emotional realities that you should be facing.

3:30And a lot of people in comedy just cut those things out of their lives. And in order to remain successful as comedians. Even like an early job on Fridays, we get to work with, by then, the legendary Jack Burns, who had been a comedy writer, and as a performer, worked with George Carlin, who reminded us, and Avery Shriver. And there was always a kind of an anger, sort of a common working man anger to his stuff. But in reading the book, we can see he was barely holding on to reality even then. Yeah, yeah. He was a very intense guy. Very intense. It was very interesting. You know, this very kind of commercial career.

4:07He took over for Don Knotts when he left Andy Griffith, and he had that comedy team with Avery Schreiber, as you mentioned. But he wanted to disrupt. He wanted to have a revolution on television, even though he loved, you know, his hair was neat, and he was wearing the jacket. And then when drugs were introduced into the mix, he really embraced the cocaine. And it kind of took him to this other level of intensity where He became almost a scary guy in a lot of ways. As much as I loved him and as much as a paternal force as he was in my life, he became somebody that was scaring people around him because he was losing control.

4:46And we can see emotional casualties and physical casualties even starting in Fridays with him, the original producer of the show. Yeah. It's interesting. You leave this sort of cast of characters who don't make it to the end of the book with you. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of death. That's one of the things I think is such a breakthrough about Seinfeld was that we sort of face death as an everyday reality rather than a special episode. People were just dying. And I always found death when I was younger extremely funny. Now I have a little bit more of a kind of a measured response to it. But at one time, death was the funniest subject I could possibly deal with.

5:23Each of those sections you write about this frisson you get from risking your life, A, we can sort of feel it's like people know that you're off your life, but also we can see why you're driven to it. Because in this way, it's not unlike comedy. You're living in that moment and watching people react in real time, aren't you? Well, there's nothing like doing stand-up and putting yourself at risk on a stage with an audience ready to reject you if you don't give them what they want. I couldn't handle that when I was younger. And I see people who can, and I used to really admire that quality. I used to read a lot of books about war correspondents, and they would have this kind of adrenaline rush.

5:59And then when they came back from the war, they were like in withdrawal. And I had a similar thing like when I did Borat and Bruno and those movies, I would be like on this adrenaline rush through the whole movie. Like we were robbing banks every day and getting away with it. And then when I got home, I was like empty. I was like empty and didn't know how to fill it, you know, and I realized that I had not really dealt with my life, you know. And so by the time I got to Larry Charles Dangerous World of Comedy, it was like I need to fill this need again. And I went to Somalia and places like that, which were the most I pledged to myself to go to the most dangerous places in the world to find comedy.

6:39I didn't want to go to places that were safe. I didn't want people to go, oh, well, he went to Hawaii or he went to France. You know, I want to go to places that no one else would go. And sure enough, I found comedians there who live there every day and risk their lives and often give up their lives for their comedy. Your best work from Fridays to working religious with Bill Maher to doing Borat and Bruno to Curb is about sort of getting people to sort of understand something about themselves. else, which is so dichotomous when you're saying what Larry David says, there's no lessons to be learned because people have to sort of learn what they can and will accept.

7:21Yeah. I mean, we used to say no hugging, no learning. But the truth was, although there was no hugging for sure, there was a lot of learning to do. And it just wasn't the moralistic kind of learning that sitcoms had really trafficked in for so long. The false morality that sitcoms lived with, where there had to be a happy ending. Our show is about reality. Even though it was very farcical, even though it was very broad, it was about reality. There sometimes aren't happy endings. These people don't learn anything at the end of their journey. They are who they are. And those are kind of hard lessons to learn.

7:56And we sort of trafficked in that in our comedy. The book is as philosophical as it is funny, Comedy Samurai. I guess it's its author and comedy legend himself, Larry Charles. It's The Treatment, which you can also hear at KCRW.com slash The Treatment. But I was really struck by the section on Dangerous World, which used to say it was a show you were working on about finding comedy in places where people wouldn't expect there to be comedy because people do need that release, especially in the most intense places. And I just found you're chronicling that people who were unafraid to look for comedy in these places where fear is trafficked was extraordinary stuff.

8:34So much of comedy is sort of, even in America, is based on fear and anger. And then you go to places in the world where fear and anger are really much more on the surface, and you find the comedy to be much more intense in places like that, where people are really kind of feeling that fear and anger so palpably that one of the few expressions they have is comedy. If you don't vent, if you don't find a way to sort of express it, then it goes into violence and other places that are much more destructive. I was really sort of struck by a section you write about a woman, a Muslim comedian, who went out in traditional Muslim guard, including having her face covered.

9:16And she said she found that to be liberating. Yes. Talk about that. Well, I thought that was fascinating. That was in Saudi Arabia. That's a woman named Amy Rocco. And she was saying how what she embraced about wearing the veil and the loose garments was that she was not judged. Who was more liberated? A woman in a situation where she's not judged by her body, by her face, by her beauty or lack of it. Or in America where women are supposedly liberated, but women are nude, women are still objectified. And she was making that argument that she has to be treated like another person because nobody knows what she looks like.

9:58So she becomes more human to a lot of people under those conditions, despite the restrictions that they have in their society. See, this is fascinating to me about, again, you could call the book Masked and Anonymous, because so much of the book is about people putting on things to get reactions from people. Her or what Sasha Baron Cohen does with Borat or even what Larry David does. But, I mean, I was interested in that because the accoutrement of, like, sort of getting into character becomes this thing that it's almost the line disappears between where you're capturing it in fiction and in documentary.

10:33Because even I had to sort of adhere to a certain persona in order to project a certain image to get certain things from people, for instance, during Borat. So you directed Borat and several films to Sasha. Right. And one of the first things, when I met him, I had a really long beard down to my stomach and my hair was down on my back. And I was wearing ragged clothes. I used to look like a homeless person. And at one time when I was doing curb, I was at the craft service in Venice and the security guard came along and made me leave. And they had to come and find me because I was saying I'm the director.

11:06The ADN, they come over and walk you over there to the table. I'm like, I'm the director. The security guard's going, yeah, right. And he was like throwing me away. So when I met Sasha, his first thing was, would you cut your beard? Will you cut your hair? Will you wear nice clothes? And I said, sure. I had no real attachment to it. But what he was looking for was the power of the image. And so when I walked into rooms with a kind of a nice trim beard and a suit, people respected me. They didn't know who I was. They didn't know what I was. But there was a kind of a shorthand of respect that I would then take advantage of.

11:38And so we all are sort of projecting something. And in those cases, I was using it to sort of further the agenda of the movie. It's also for you so much about where authority lies and your sort of encounters with authority and the way you deal with it. Because even though they act like they aren't, Sacha Baron Cohen and Larry David and Bob Dylan are all authority figures who don't want to pursue their authority in the most conventional ways, right? Well, in a sense that you could say they're anti-authority figures also, because we're constantly what all of those people taught me was the question why.

12:14You know, people say, well, it has to be this way. And suddenly, like Sasha would go, well, why? Why does it have to be that way? And you realize these people don't have an answer to that question. It's because it's always been that way. That's usually the answer. That's the status quo. And those three people are very committed to skewering the status quo, lampooning it, breaking it apart, deconstructing the status quo. So that was a big lesson that I learned from them. Well, I think so much what you've done as a creative person is about asking questions about people's relationship to power and authority and playing it for laughs, certainly.

12:49But I mean, what is religious about the search for authority? I mean, what is what you want the dictator to be but a search for authority? Yeah. Even on Fridays, I mean, doing the sketches that we did, the political sketches that we did where we were taking off on Reagan and any of those authority figures, the moral majority hour at that time. And so all the way through it, Borat was always a truth to power sort of dynamic, which is what made him such a powerful figure. And so that's another thing. They derive power from attacking power. in a sense. They would take that energy from the powerful and they would use it on the powerful, you know, and turn it back on them, which is an interesting dynamic in comedy.

13:33We're going to take a break and talk more about power and perception with my guest, who's the author of the very funny book, Comedy Samurai, 40 Years of Blood, Guts and Laughter. My guest is the writer and director, Larry Charles. It's The Treatment. There's more to come. Stay with us.

13:54He's still here. I haven't chased him away yet. Larry Charles. It's The Treatment. You can go through at kcrw.com slash The Treatment. The book is Comedy Samurai, his new book. And we were saying before he got started, I mean, it's interesting to see you sitting here across from me with no hat and no sunglasses. But even for you, that idea of sort of keeping people guessing about who and what you are and keeping people off guard, that depends to your own life as well, doesn't it? Well, even when I was a teenager and I would go into the city to go to CBGBs and places like that, when I would come back on the train back to Brooklyn at three o 'clock in the morning, you know, it was pretty hairy on the train sometimes.

14:35And I found that wearing sunglasses, people would often just leave me alone. And so I saw like that it had some impact even at that time. And then also I was kind of afraid of intimacy. You know, I didn't like the idea of intimacy. So wearing a mask, having a big beard, having glasses. I mean, my kids, most people put on a beard as a disguise. When I wanted to have a disguise, I shaved off my beard, you know. So it's like I learned the effect of appearance in terms of perception. We should say before we go too far into this, you got your start with a person I thought was the most talented cast member of that group who, because of being a person of color that day, never got a chance to do the kinds of things he should have done.

15:18That was the actor Daryl Igas, who, easily to identify, the black cast member of the show, who was incredibly talented and had this incredible physical presence that the show never seemed to use enough. It was all white writers. And he didn't have anybody representing his point of view at all. And like the women often on the show as well, he wound up being a supporting player in a lot of the sketches. And nobody really took advantage of his power. You had Michael Richards. You had Larry David. You had Mark Blackfield. You had very talented people, but you're right. Darrow was right up there with them, but nobody really focused on him, except maybe in the most cliched ways, you know, and that was unfortunate for him.

15:56And then after that, of course, it was very difficult for him to find work that really was in keeping with the vast array of talents. I mean, he could sing, he could dance, he could do impressions. He was like he was an amazingly versatile performer, actually. But I also learned a lot from working on Arsenio in terms of perception of a black person on TV, a perception of a black star. He really suffered tremendously from just being a black star on TV. The audience was so hateful and so vengeful. The hate mail that he received was so violent. And that was just because he had to pull back in order for him to be a more mild version of himself to be safe.

16:39You know, we had the metal screeners up at the studio. So when people came in, you would hear the metal screeners going off and weapons would be taken off of people coming into the studio. So he had to really adjust his persona to be acceptable to a mainstream audience. That to me is, again, you come and understand what power was and how power vests itself in comedy and perception versus reality and image and how one has to make oneself two dimensional. because getting this in the book, but also here too, Arsenio was a quantum shift in talk shows that has never gotten the respect that these do.

17:16Absolutely. I mean, he had on guests that the other talk shows would never have on in a million years and musical guests like NWA, like Public Enemy, like Two Live Crew. These were groups that were on his show constantly, even white groups. He would have on radical white groups as well. He had on Radical People. He had on Louis Farrakhan, you know, as a guest on a talk show. And it was fascinating, you know. And he, because of that, paid a big price and never got the respect that he deserved. And people have also a skewed image of who he was, you know. They don't think he was radical enough. Well, they don't understand.

17:55He was probably more radical than anybody on television before or since. Oh, 100%, because his comedy before that was very much radical. Yeah. And he couldn't do any of that stuff from his stand-up on television. But I remember he was the first talk show host ever to acknowledge Martin Luther King's birthday on TV. You talk about a moment of subversion. I remember gasping when that was. It was, I thought, a manifest destiny hit that, as you said, changed the way music was booked on shows, that changed the way the hosts conversed with the audience. Because the thing that that show had that was unusual for talk shows was excitement from the audience.

18:33Usually, everything was about TV being a cool medium. I want to ask you about that, too, because you're attracted to heat, clearly, and what that does to your adrenaline. Yeah, yeah. That was in Arsenio. Yeah, that was a truly live show. Most live things are so controlled. The questions are written. The answers have been rehearsed. Everything's been talked about backstage before people come on. there was a kind of a spontaneity and an unpredictability to the Arsenio show. You didn't know what was going to happen if you had on the two live crew. You know, you didn't know what was going to happen if you had Andrew Dice Clay on.

19:11So something unpredictable was always possible every day. It was going to be different. And you couldn't afford to miss it. And there was that kind of element to it as opposed to the other talk shows, which were very staid, very controlled, very unspontaneous. And also very white. Very white. completely almost except for a couple of guests that would be allowed to come on if they were promoting something you know but his general he was opening up a whole world that had never been used in talk shows it's the treatment we're talking about what the roxy music called the thrill of it all with my guest larry charles his book is comedy samurai 40 years of blood guts and laughter also the show kcow.com slash attribute but again this gets me larry into this question of you're liking to be where there's heat.

19:58Didn't mean this sort of connects to our city hall in a dangerous world of comedy, but that moment... No, I think there is a connection there. But there definitely is that. And it runs through the show. I mean, you're writing about these moments of kind of spontaneity and wildness in Fridays. I mean, so much of what you are writing about of being close to these moments and how it changed the way you thought about yourself. Because again, like I said, in each of these chapters, there's this emotional sort of evolution that we don't really register until finally that last chapter. I want to ask you about picking those moments to write about that were about you sort of like feeling the goosebumps in the back of your neck.

20:33Yeah, I mean, I would never be a war correspondent. I couldn't, I wasn't a war correspondent, but I wanted to cover comedy like it was a war because that was the elements that I saw in comedy. And going to a place like Nigeria, for instance, we're talking about Arsenio, I became the minority. And I thought I plunged into that world. And I really, I was an epiphany for me. You know, it's like I thought every person should be in a situation where they're the only one like them, where they are the minority. It was so enlightening to me to be that way and learn and just absorb that experience. You know, it was fascinating.

21:14So I was, I'm always looking for that intense experience that hasn't been chronicled before. It's clearly started with Religious, which is about going to places where power and discord are. But also in Religious, it's about asking people about why they get comfort from authority. In Dangerous World of Comedy, in Borat, in Bruno, in Curb Your Enthusiasm, you're asking people to ask why they want to have comedy be disruptive in their lives. Yes, yes. I think there is so much anxiety. Even a religious, we would often be talking to people like Ken Ham at the Creation Museum, who had never really had their assumptions questioned before and found themselves on their heels.

22:00And Bill was such a skilled interviewer with these people, with a person who plays Jesus at Holy Land in Orlando, that people were on their heels constantly. And because of that, there was always the possibility of getting thrown out, which is similar to Borat. And that anxiety kind of, that's when the scenes really start to take off. When the anxiety kicks in, when the fear starts to kick in, when the anger starts to kick in, when things start to unravel, that's when these scenes start to take off. And you realize, wow, you're now tapping into something that hasn't been seen before. See, I thought in reading the book, but also following your career, too, that your sense of authorship as a director is to sort of be inside the moment rather than trying to contrive the moment.

22:45Right. As much as there was a contrivance at the heart of Borat, he's playing a character. At the same time, he was so committed to that character that it blurred the line between reality and fiction. And I never wanted to do anything to contrive those moments. I didn't want to trick it up. I wanted things to sort of happen naturally as much as possible. And I think because of that, because of that dynamic of the movie, it rings true. There's an honesty to that movie rather than trickery, you know, rather than some sort of like a skullduggery going on. It's funny you think about this, but you know, Sasha's career, if you go back to L.A.G., has been almost 30 years now.

23:24Yeah. And going back to Larry and doing stand-up, you can say it's sort of like coalesced around Seinfeld. That's been up 40 years. Yes. People who have careers that long live at a certain point do just have a kind of arrested development because they can't have contact with the world the way they use it. Well, exactly. That's one of the things that I've really committed myself to is to try to keep staying outside the bubble, be an outsider, constantly be searching for the unknown instead of settling for the known. The known is a complacent place. The known is the status quo. The known doesn't produce radical work.

24:00You have to go beyond that place. You have to be an outsider to sort of feel what it's like to be in the real world and draw from that. Draw your art from that. I have to ask you how people have been reacting to reading that last chapter because, again, sitting across you right now, seeing you as exposed as you are, seeing the twinkling in your eye when you smile. there's never been anything you've done as a director or as a performer that you've let all the light into the room like this before. What was it like writing that and how people reacted to it? Well, my first pass at this was to sort of, you know, avoid it.

24:40I wasn't comfortable. And I wasn't comfortable talking about myself or being this honest about myself. And then I realized that I couldn't talk about anything else that I experienced without balancing it in some way by being honest about myself. And that was a real hard journey. And at the same time, as I've been talking about, stepping into that, immersing myself in that, I knew that's where the heart of this book would be. By going into places where I wouldn't normally go forcing myself to examine things that I really would prefer not to examine. But I felt like by examining it, I would learn about myself and the audience for the book would also see something that they weren't expecting.