The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [67]
But I think there’s a certain thing in creative people—and I’m not a psychiatrist—but I have found that people who are in the creative end of entertainment are not normal by most standards, whatever “normal” means. That is, as Margaret Sullavan said, “It’s not normal to walk out and bare your soul to a bunch of strangers, that’s not a normal thing for someone to do.” Most people find that very awkward, and entertainers do it. I find that most comedians are a little cynical, as well they should be.
And I am cynical about certain things. And people sometimes mistake the cynicism for being abrupt or cold. I think it’s just the way you perceive things around you. You’ve seen the silliness, the absurdity, the craziness that goes on in the world and you jump on that and expand it. You look at things in a different light. That’s what makes comedy.
Comedians are highly competitive, many of them. I think it was Lenny Bruce who said, “Comedians hate to see other comedians get laughs.” There are certain guys who really suffer when they see other comedians really scoring. I don’t. But I know a lot of guys where the competition among them is just ferocious. They talk about friendship and so forth, but a lot of them would kill each other. There’s something bizarre about guys who do comedy.
I find an intensity there.
[Nodding] And a certain amount of hostility.
In a book called ‘The Human Comedy’ by William Saroyan, he writes about how people make transitions in their lives; you just presume everything is there and will take care of itself, and then there’s that transitional period in everyone’s life when they realize if they are going to be happy for the rest of their lives, if they’re going to enjoy life and fight off the boredom that’s probably the big enemy of life, they are going to have to make a conscious effort to make themselves happy. I’ve wondered if there was a certain point in your life, a certain moment of self-esteem and self-worth upon which you built every other experience.
I know what Saroyan’s saying. There comes a time or a moment, I don’t know whether you can say it precisely, when you know in which direction you’re going to go. Even when you’re young. But you don’t know why exactly. I know it happened to me when I was quite young.
You go through those phases—“I’ll be a doctor or I’ll be . . .”—the standard things. But I think it’s when you find out, at least for me, that you can get in front of an audience and be in control. I think that probably happened in grade school, fifth or sixth grade, where I could get attention by being different, by getting up in front of an audience or even a group of kids and calling the attention to myself by what I did or said or how I acted. And I said, “Hey, I like that feeling.”
When I was a kid, I was shy. And I think I did that because it was a device to get attention. And to get that reaction is a strange feeling, it is a high that I don’t think you can get from drugs. I don’t think you could get it from anything else. The mind starts to do things that you didn’t even realize it could do. It’s hard to explain.
And you walk off and you’re just, everything is such a high, and it’s a great feeling, and that’s why many performers have big highs and very big lows. Most of them that I know. I know I do.
People don’t understand that. They put you down as being standoffish or cool or so forth. It’s not that.
I suppose it’s the manipulation, I suppose it’s the sense of power, the center of attention and the me-ism. And performers have to have that. You see, that’s one of the things that goes against the grain of being brought up; you should be modest, you should be humble, you shouldn’t draw attention to yourself. Well, to be an entertainer, you must.
You gotta be a little gutsy, a little egotistical, so you have to pull back sometimes when people say, “Well, he’s stuck-up.” “Stuck-up” is only another word for self-conscious. You aren’t stuck-up. You are aloof, because you aren’t very comfortable so you put up this barrier.