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By Root 692 0

get to go out for three hours, and it turned out that the dancers were like the kind of people I was telling you about who were misfits in that school. They were slightly nuts and had different tastes in all areas. We had just incredible times. Sometimes, the dance teacher would say, “I have to leave early,” and we’d go, “Oh, that’s too bad; that means we just have another hour to drink gin out of Coke bottles and jive around with these girls; that’s just too damn bad.” And I’d come home half snookered on gin and Coke, and my mom would say, “How was it?” and I’d say, “Uh, I hurt my foot.” She was thinking I was Baryshnikov or something, since I was so dedicated. I had the greatest time of my high school career doing that show, so I got hooked on show business.

What was your next step?

Well, I took one acting class in college, ’cause I thought it’d be a piece of cake and there were a lot of girls in it. I knew I could act as good as these girls could, just by seeing them around the coffee shop. And I figured if you were a man and went into a course that was mostly women, you couldn’t get a worse grade than your costar. And all these girls were getting good grades because the teacher was kind of working the ropes. He was running “the artist one” by them—you know, “Oh, yes, I am an artist.” But when class was over, he was lonely and so on. So long as you never looked funny at him while he was staring at a girl, you got a good grade. But I only hung in there for one semester. That was that.

So still there was no star that you were following.

Still no star I was following. And it really only happened because my brother Brian started acting, and I went and started seeing him. Brian is five years older than I am. After high school—when I was still a grade school punk—he vanished. He went to school out in California for a while and then quit and became a railroad switchman. He put a couple cars into San Francisco Bay once, but I guess all railroad men do something like that. He did a lot of weird things.

When my father died, Brian came back and was supposed to support the family. He got a good job, and if he’d stayed in it, he’d have ended up a very wealthy man. But after six months, he quit the job and went to work at Second City. He had started by taking workshops there, and then he went to work there full-time. That drove my mother completely around the bend. She couldn’t believe it.

Brian lived in Old Town, where all the hippies were, and I started hanging out at his place. That’s where I met Harold Ramis and John Belushi and Joe Flaherty and Del Close, who directed the show, and Bernie Sahlins, who ran Second City. They thought I was a riot—weekend hippie, you know, going back to my straight life in the ’burbs every night.

I had good friends at Northwestern, and I would drag them down there, and we would all weasel our way into the show for free and watch. After you’d seen the show a hundred times, they couldn’t really expect you to pay.

Were you and Brian the family cutups?

No, everybody was a cutup. Everybody was funny.

Was your father funny?

He was real funny, and he was a very tough laugh. He was very tough to make laugh. He was very dry, very dry. He sure as hell wasn’t going to laugh unless it was really funny.

My father’s father was the real nut. He was crazy till the day he died. He lived to be ninety. He was the kind of guy who had the light-up bow tie. But you’d really have to beat on him to get that bow tie out there. He would do it only at the most tastefully tasteless occasions.

He was a real good man, my grandfather. He always had licorice in his pocket, and he always had a Budweiser and a Camel. He had false teeth. There was always a baby in our family, and he’d always say, “Come here, little baby.” And then he’d pop out his teeth exactly like the ghost in Ghostbusters and just scare the hell out of the baby. My mother’d get really pissed at him. “Grandpa! How could you scare him like that?” He wouldn’t say anything; he’d just drink his beer.

Is your mother funny?