This article originally appeared in the January 2006 issue of Esquire. You can find every Esquire story ever published at Esquire Classic.
I love anybody funny—even people who are bastards, who are evil people, the meanest people you can imagine, even if they treat me horrifically or they treat people like shit—just because they’re funny. Being funny is a jewel in the crown of life.
I’m going to be fifty this year. Soon I’m going to meet somebody around my own age, and she’s going to be smart and beautiful, and I’m going to date her daughter.
My dad's eighty-eight. He had four brothers. They all died of heart attacks. They were forty, forty-one, forty-two, and forty-seven. One was chasing some kids who stole his tire. One was playing tennis. One was lying on the couch, chain-smoking. And the last one died in a hospital. My father himself had two heart attacks when I was growing up. He almost died, too. My mom basically kept him alive. She refused to let him die.
According to my mother, you can freeze anything.
My parents had five children. Four of them died. Before me, they had a set of twin boys. How’s this for weird: They were born on the exact same day as I was, two years before me, in 1954. One of them was named Robert, same as me. The other one, my mother says, was born the same exact minute I was born. And they had my two sisters, who also died. One sister was ten years older than me. She died of scleroderma. My other sister was six years older than me. She died of an aneurism. I’m their only surviving kid.
I never expected to live this long.
Full House was a show that was done for ten-year-olds. The critics hated it. They said terrible, terrible things about it. But it should have been reviewed by ten-year-olds. That’s who it was made for. They loved it. And if they loved it, great. Why the hell does a fifty-year-old guy working at a big newspaper have to tell me I’m a piece of crap?
At this point in my life, I’m physically revolted by things that don’t ring true to me. I can’t do another network sitcom. I just can’t. I can’t go back.
I love watching people get hit in the crotch. But only if they get back up. If their teeth are bleeding, if they’re really hurt, if an ambulance has to come, I’m not laughing.
People do what they do to each other and they feed on it.
I was in this movie with Richard Pryor called Critical Condition. One day we were shooting in a hospital. He picked up one of those scrub brushes they have and he said, “See this side with the hard bristles? That’s what they used to take my skin off after the fire.”
What I’ve learned about comedy people is that they’re defined by the harshest level they’ve been to, their personal Auschwitz.
When you're famous, you’re always famous. It doesn’t go away.
Oil is sixty dollars a barrel. There are terrorists everywhere. We have a catastrophe in our world every ten minutes. I don’t know how anybody’s getting through anything. Right now, people just need to be entertained.
One time I was with John Stamos and we were at Jeanne Biegger’s house, Dean Martin’s ex-wife. We were sitting with Dean’s daughter and Don Rickles and his wife, Newhart— Rickles and his wife, Newhart, that’s my Freudian slip of the day!—Rickles and his wife, Barbara, and Newhart and his wife. So it was Stamos, me, and them. And I’m happy as a pig in shit. I’m listening to their traveling stories. They’re doing what they can’t do anywhere anymore because Johnny Carson is no longer alive. They’re telling their stories, and Stamos has a glass of wine. Rickles takes it from him and drinks from it, and then Barbara, his wife, takes it from him, and then Newhart takes it from her, and he drinks from it—because, see, neither of their wives wants them to drink anymore. It was just the cutest . . . I’m in love with all of them. That’s my name-dropping story.
I went to synagogue for the High Holidays and the rabbi made a speech about Hurricane Katrina. He said, “Everybody’s got a hurricane in their life. Some of you people have lost all your money this year; some of you have had cancer this year. There are people who lost their babies, people who had a kid diagnosed.” There’s all this shit that happens to people. You have to be happy with the time you’ve got.
Shivah translated means deli.
The other day my twelve-year-old says to me, “I don’t feel like I’m with you right now. You’re in the car with me, you’re checking your e-mail, you’re not listening to me, I don’t feel like I’m with you.” And I say, ‘You know what? That was your mother’s gripe, too. And she was right. And you’re also correct.” When you cop to something, you get to the next level. In this case, the next level is: I just learned something from my twelve-year-old.
I’m a lucky bastard. You know it and I know it.
