Id always learned that concealing everything was art.
And I still believe that.
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Note: This interview was originally published on September 13, 2018.
We have republished it following the news ofMacdonalds deathon September 14, 2021.
Macdonald and I had spoken at the Vultureoffice the day before hisTHRinterview was published.
Instead we talked about, well, just about everything else.
Youve been vocal for a long time about wanting a talk show.
Now that you have one, what does it mean to you?IthoughtI wanted one.
Its fun, but once I got it I realized how difficult it is.
Its some alchemy that he [Letterman] knows how to do.
My fear was that I dont know how to interview people who Im not interested in.
I dont want to do all this research.
And [Netflixs Ted Sarandos] was like, Just do people youre interested in.
I go, Theres not that many.
And hes like, Youre interested in ten people.
So that was a great relief.
The show is very conventional in its way.Its conventional for old shows.
I dont know about for new shows though.
It was important to me that we not do anything political.
[Johnny] Carson went through Vietnam and Watergate and I dont think he ever addressed either thing.
And thats all right.
Im sorry, you were going to say that Dylan spawned a bunch of bad shit.
Do you know what I mean?Mm-hmm.
So isnt that a sign that it can be good when things change?But comedy I dont know.
Comedy has a specific thing about it.
I dont really like satire.
I think its very minor; I think parody is very major comedy.
Like, Nabokov to me is the highest form of parody.
But that stupid Jonathan Swift thing that everybody talks about I read that.
Gullivers Travels?Yeah, its horrible.
I know people have different thoughts.
I keep hearing how great Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks and Mort Sahl are.
People have their own taste, but to me, all three of those people are just shit.
Theyre not comedians in my mind.
Im thinking of how people responded to Hannah Gadsbys or Drew Michaels work.What does Drew Michael do?
Theres no audience in his special.
Its him performing against a black …Theres no audience?
No audience.Shit, I was going to do that, but it was going to be funny.
I wont do that anymore.
A guy did a fucking special with no crowd.
Who are you calling?A guy did a special with no audience in the fucking I dont know!
[To me:] Whats his name?
Can you fucking believe that?
Ill talk to you later.
Who were you calling?Someone at Netflix.
I probably wouldnt have done it anyway.
I remember somebody showed me a talk show with subversion in it the guy chainsawed his desk.
It was so stupid.
Why did you build a desk in the first place if you were only going to chainsaw it?
Dont have a fucking desk!
You just want little drops of subversion.
Letterman in the 80s would be 90 percent a great talk show and then 10 percent subversion.
If you get to 30 percent subversion, youre in Andy Kaufman land.
If you get to 70 percent, youre a guy on the streets screaming at people.
What are you trying to subvert anyway?
And you see the kind of subversion were talking about as a form of intellectual grandstanding?Certainly.
And for stand-up, a lot of it is bragging.
The last character you want to be is a guy whos smarter than the audience.
But theres some hole inside that these stand-ups have to fill.
It has nothing to do with making people laugh.
Does comedy have any special relationship to the truth?I wouldnt pretend to ever know the truth.
But comedy in its highest form always reveals something.
Maybe you could call that a truth.
Maybe thats the case.
So thats the key distinction for you?Of course.
Id always learned that concealing everything was art.
Its the height of narcissism to write meta-comedy, because people arent interested in comedy.
Theyre interested in going home after shoveling shit all day and then seeing some fool perform.
Thats not to say that comedy cant make a greater point, because it can.
Youve got to craft the point into the joke.
I always bristle when people say, The comedian is the modern-day philosopher.
Im not allowed to.
But Iamallowed if Im trans.
So Ill be trans.
The whole point of everything nowadays is that you’re free to be anything you want to be.
Someone thats born male and identifies as male, we used to call that male.
Now we call it cis-male.
I have two thoughts in response to what youre saying.
I think thats relevant here.
Why wouldnt I do that?No skin off your back.
And yeah, my son said, Why do you have to understand stuff?
I believe I dont have to anymore.
Just as the other person thinks things are the way they see them.
But I know trans people.
I love trans people.
You cant even say they were men back when they were.
These changes just dont seem like a big deal to me.
If some guy said to you, My name used to be Rick and I changed it to John.
Why in Gods name should I change my whole worldview to call you John?
So whats really the problem?
He was a bad guy, this Billy guy, so he changed his name to Monty.
He thought doing that was going to change who he was.
Anyway, one time we were playing softball and he was in the on-deck circle.
So Im yelling at him, using his new name: Monty!
But he doesnt hear it because hes not used to that name.
So I go, Monty!
And then I go, Billy!
and he goes, Im Monty!
That could be in a movie or something.
But God bless trans people.
They should be given every right in the world, and anybody who wants to hurt them is bad.
Ive talked to Louis all through this.
Hes been haunted by this for a decade, looking over his shoulder.
I think his behavior and his lying about it may have had something to do with that.Thats true.
I also think a lot of the anti-Louis stuff was the ugliness of the sexual situation in itself.
Sex, consensual or nonconsensual, is a shameful thing.
But the consensual/nonconsensual aspect of this isthekey part of it.Of course.
Nonconsensual is the worst thing that sex can be.
Do you really think sex is a shameful thing?Yeah, I do.
I read that youre working ona dating app?I am.
Thats like somebody whos afraid of heights writing a manual for pilots.I have this friend, Vivek.
Hes a tech guy.
Hes divorced and he went on all these dating apps.
He was telling me all the problems about these things.
I understood immediately: The problem was all the first dates he had to go on.
I said, Have the first date be on Skype.
Just do 15 minutes where it’s possible for you to see each other.
Cut away all the other stuff.
Its not an idea Im especially proud of.
I mean in the regard that we dont talk about it over dinner.
I have a question on a different subject.Sure.
But he [Farley] died very young.
Their whole identity is the absence of what they used to be.
Its not like theyve found anything else.
But Artie takes pride in this.
I talk to Artie, now and again, but I refuse to abet his misadventures.
I always loved him.
Burt had the timing of a stand-up.
He was a fascinating guy.
He would tell me all these great stories on the phone.
He told me some fucking wild shit.
Can you remember a story that he told you?Im trying to think of a PG one.
It doesnt have to be PG.Ill stay away from the one topic that he was obsessed with.
The most gorgeous girl comes up to him and says, Come up to my room right now.
So he goes with her up to the room, and hes necking with her on the bed.
Eventually she whispers in his ear all seductively, Ill be right back.
I have to take a dump.
So she went to the bathroom, and then hes like, What?!
Im like, You ran away on a girl?
Hes like, Dont worry about it.
There was another girl on the 12th floor.
On the elevator ride down, he met another girl.
Theres nothing wrong with that unless youre not gay.
Then its not that fun.
You had that night a few weeks ago where you replied to something like50 of Lena Dunhams tweets.
What the hell was that about?
Were you just bored?I dont know who people are.
Someone said, You know whos great?
I didnt know who she was, and they didnt tell me she had a program on TV.
I thought she was some philosopher or something.
And I would answer the tweets as if I was talking to someone.
But then people were like, Yeah, fuck her!
And Im like, What?
Im not trying to hurt her.
But I dont dislike you or anything and I erased them all.She wrote back.
She was very nice.
She said she had thick skin because I guess a whole bunch of people hate her or something.
I didnt know she was a big person.
Its even weirder if you didnt know who she was.
They told me what a writer she [Dunham] was.
Whenever somebody tells me that someones a great writer and the first thing you see is literal used incorrectly… How so?Its another way of wasting time and I dont need that.
I dont have alcohol.
I dont have cigarettes.
I dont have drugs.
I dont have that much gambling anymore.
But I do have YouTube, sports, and Twitter and I only got so much time.
When I get sad its when I see how little time I have left and how Im wasting it.
Gambling was always like that.
It wasnt the money I lost, it was the time.
You know what makes me feel that way?What makes you feel it?
You know, I think about my deathbed a lot.
Do you go to church?No, no.
I dont like organized religion so much.
I was raised Protestant and they dont know anything.
If youre in a Protestant household and you bring up Jesus, everybodys like, What?!
The last thing they want to hear the last thing anybody wants to hear is Jesus.
Im just asking you, do you like Jesus?
I have to admit that I can never quite follow that line of argument.
Arent Christians in this country doing okay?Yeah, they have done pretty good.
And you see the power of Jesus when atheists like him.
Atheists will go, Well, thats not what Jesus wouldve done.
I agree with them!
But the two themes Im interested in now are God and love.
Thats the hardest stuff to write about in a comedic way.
Its so easy to write about the pain or the ordinariness of man.
With specials?With comedy entirely.
I dont have that much to say.
You shouldnt be doing too many specials.
When I started, all I wanted to do was stand-up but you had to do other things.
Like try and get a movie or a sitcom?Yeah, because you were afraid.
So I think its good what Netflix is paying.
They wouldnt have to chase anything.
Pure comedy would be enough.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
