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Please enjoy my Keynote address from
this year’s Just For Laughs Festival.

http://www.laughspin.com/2015/07/23/dana-gould-just-for-laughs-keynote-address-full-audio/

YOU’RE DOING IT NOW
by
Dana Gould

I started doing stand up comedy eleven days after I graduated high school. And I remember, somewhere between my first and second open mikes, sitting on my friend John Condon’s front porch, and his father, Ed Condon, who looked like Santa if he shaved, said to me, “Gouldie, what you want to do is, learn a song and a little soft-shoe, you know? You don’t want to just go up there and blow your wad and then have nothing.”

What I took away from that was very significant if not what Mr. Condon intended. First of all, I realized that I don’t want to talk about my wad with anyone’s father. Blown or otherwise.

What I also took away from that is that there’s nothing worse than advice from someone who doesn’t really know what they’re talking about, well intentioned or otherwise, and it is my sincere hope that this little commentary doesn’t fall into that category.

This festival is the living definition of “show business,” artists and executives, show and business, warily eyeing each other, each member of each group desperately hoping they can find another member of the other group that has a creative spark, an interest, a dedication, a talent, an insight, an ability. Someone they can USE.

This is neither right nor wrong. It is nature’s way, and I don’t think I am being cynical when I say there is not a person in this room who wouldn’t pop out your eyeball if they thought they could use the empty socket as a toehold to climb up and get something they wanted.

I grew up in Massachusetts, the fifth of six kids, a Catholic man with a Jewish woman’s name. When you have eight people in a three bedroom house, the term “serenity” doesn’t come to mind much. There are very few things that everyone agrees on, and there are painfully few instances in which everyone is quiet. One of the few such instances that I can remember, for whatever reason, was when George Carlin was on television. For whatever reason, when that happened, everyone shut up. No one spoke. Everyone listened. And I grew up fascinated by that power. One person, with a microphone, did all that.

We had a two-screen movie theater in my home town. They were in separate auditoriums, it would have been painfully confusing otherwise, and when I was in high school, I saw the first Richard Pryor concert film, called Live In Concert. Now, the other film in the theater was Superman. More people went to see Richard Pryor Live In Concert. All the special effects in the world versus one person on a stage with a microphone. One person with a microphone did all that.

Not too surprisingly, I became a comedian. In fact, I never really wanted to do anything else. I certainly don’t know how to do anything else. And when I first came to this festival, some years ago, I was on fire. I had a manager and I had an agent and I was gonna come here and someone was gonna see me and I was gonna get a deal and I was gonna make it. And three fourths of that happened. I got a deal to make a pilot and all the agents and the managers and development executives lined up and told me what a genius I was – and I believed them – and we all went back to LA, and meetings were held and a pilot was written… and my last memory of that entire experience was that we were pitching the pilot at NBC and they passed on it in the room, which is not something they do often but they reserve the right for when they really hate something. The studio exec, who I met here at the festival, my last memory is of him running a football pattern to avoid being seen leaving the building with me.

So I just went back to doing what I do. I walked on stage and picked up a microphone. Next year I had another pilot, and the year after that another, and over the years, I’ve had my hand in more pilots than an air force proctologist. At one point during this annual cycle – see, there used to be a show called Life Goes On, and it starred an actor with Down’s Syndrome named Chris Burke, now, you’ll have to forgive my language, but I want to keep the quote accurate, at one point during this cycle of annual failed pilots, my mother said to me,” Honey, they gave that retarded boy a show, why won’t anyone out there give you a chance?”

I don’t know mom. Sure he’s retarded. Retarded like a fox!

But every year I would get a pilot, it wouldn’t go, I’d go back on stage and pick up a microphone and think, “Maybe next year. Maybe next year, I’ll make it.”

And over time, I to started become pretty good at walking onstage and picking up a microphone, to the point that, when I was finally summoned to audition for Lorne Michaels, for Sat Night Live, I was beyond ready. I was ripe. I was dripping. I was flown to Chicago with two other comedians and I walked onstage and I moved the building. You couldn’t touch me. I had one of those sets, you get about a half dozen of them in your life when everything clicks and the laughter sounds like a series of cluster bombs. Flying back to LA with the other two comedians, I remember looking at them and thinking, “Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, good luck. You’ll do fine. You’ll get your turn…”

I have dined out on that story more than once. And a couple years ago my wife – at the time – went to NY to see Chris Rock in a play and she went back after and was talking with him, and when she came home back to LA she says, “Hey, you now that story you tell about auditioning for Saturday Night Live with Chris Rock and Adam Sandler?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s true!”

The word I would use to describe how I felt, back at that time, was poleaxed. You couldn’t talk to me for a month after that. I’d meet a holocaust survivor and be like, “You should hear what happened to me!”

I would think at that time, “Maybe it’s not going to happen. Maybe I’m not going to make it.” And what I did not realize at that time, of course, was that it already did happen and I already had made it. It’s difficult when you are in it to be able to step back and objectively look at what success really is. That sense of awe that I held George Carlin and Richard Pryor in as a child, I already had my version of that. I could walk on stage and pick up a microphone and everybody shut up. And it wasn’t just this thing I did. It was my job, it was my career, and it still is. If you grew up wanting to be a comedian and you now are a comedian, you’ve made it. The rest of this is just measures of degree.

Now I’m not naïve, there are measures of success and levels of success, and it’s hard not to worry about that stuff or feel competitive. We are all in a business where everything has been reduced to a competition, because in competition there is drama, and drama is compelling and when something is compelling people watch it and then you can sell advertising! That’s why the news is no longer what happened but who won. They publish movie grosses on Monday se we know what movie won. Not what was good, what movie won.

That’s how you end up with something truly obscene, like Cupcake Wars. We live in a world where three people make cupcakes and two of them walk away losers. Ladies and gentleman, if I know anything about anything, it’s that when someone makes cupcakes, everybody wins.

Show business is simple: people in their sixties telling people in their fifties to get people in their forties to hire people in their thirties to entertain people in the twenties.

But as comedians it’s not your job to worry about it. No one in this room needs to waste another minute running a race that isn’t being held because they want to win a trophy that doesn’t exist. If you don’t fit into the spreadsheet projection of what a focus group company has told TV exec what their prospective audience finds desirable, who cares? It has no bearing on who you are as a person or your value as an artist and it won’t affect the grand arc of your career at all. Not at all. There are too many venues, there are too many outlets, no one has power over you. At the most, it’s work stuff. Work stuff.

What matters is what happens when you walk out on that stage and pick up that mic.

There was a time in my life when I really hated Robert Morton. Oh my God… For those of you who don’t know, Robert was the executive producer of Late Night with David Letterman and then the Late Show when it went to CBS and all I wanted to do was get on Godamned Late Night With David Letterman. So many auditions and tapes and tapes of tapes and I just could not gouge a set out of the stone face of that show.

After a certain period of time, Morty left the show and Rob Burnett stepped in and pretty soon after that I did the show. Couple years later, now I’m, you know, I’m engaged, my fiancé is a big agent in town, I’m writing for The Simpsons, I’m doing okay (and even though I was many people’s idea of a big success, I was still walking around wondering if I was ever going to “make it”). Anyway, through a weird set of circumstances, I find myself going to Tuscany with a group of people to stay at Robert Morton’s house. With Robert Morton.

Oh man, I would not want to be Robert Morton.

So we get there, and Robert Morton, for the record, is the nicest guy in the world. Could not have been a more gracious, congenial host. Two days, three days, four days. Everybody’s having the nicest time. I’m just waiting. I am a scorpion waiting to strike. One night, we’re sitting there, we’re talking about the show, and Morty says to me, “Dana, when did you first do the show?”

And I say, “1996.”

And he says, “You sure?”

“Oh, I’m sure, Morty. I’m real sure.”

“That was after I left.”

“You don’t say! You don’t say, Marty. You do not say! Funny, that! Not until after you left, you say?!?!? Amazing!!!”

And Marty says, “Huh. Sorry about that. Weird. I thought you did it. You certainly should have.”

Again, poleaxed.

And for all the stress and anxiety, when I finally did do Letterman, my performance was the definition of …fine! It was an orgasm of, “okey doke.” I had made doing the show into such a THING that when I finally did do it, I couldn’t enjoy myself (which is not to say they didn’t cherry pick my set into oblivion – which they did).

Enjoying yourself isn’t the only thing but it is a thing. For the longest time I walked around with the false belief that misery was its own reward. Not true. When I finished taping Letterman, there was a bunch of traffic, so instead of taking the car I just walked back to my hotel. My friends in NY were mostly out of town so I just went to the movies by myself. There you have it, fourteen years of obsessing and frustration and sets and tapes and punching my hand and grinding my teeth and dammit if I didn’t wake up the next morning the same exact human being I was the night before. Finally, finally, finally, I was on TV for five minutes at midnight.

But at least I was showed up Robert Morton, who thought I had done the show five years previous.

Which brings me to the last point that I want to make, regarding obsessing and fetishizing things like the Late Show or The Tonight Show or SNL. They’re great. But they’re not bigger than you are. They’re not as important as you. Those shows come and go, SNL casts come and go but you’re going to have your career for the rest of your life. All of the movers and shakers in the industry, you will still have your job loooooong after they’ve all moved on.

The people who held the keys to the kingdom when I fist came here, they have long since moved on, but I still have my job. I walk on stage and I pick up a microphone.

In Stephen King’s book, On Writing, he makes the brilliant point that your life is not a support system for your art, your art is a support system for your life. My view of what I thought my career was going to be, what I thought my life was going to be, what I thought would be important to me was so perfectly and thoroughly wrong it’s actually kind of brilliant. I somehow managed to not even be close on anything! The fact Chris and Adam were the ones to get SNL, it was so … unfair!

By the way, the next time you start thinking that life should be fair, try explaining to a homeless person how expensive it is to go camping.

But the fact is that, because I didn’t get it, the woman in LA that I had just sorta, kinda started dating, well, since I didn’t have to move to NY that became a relationship and we ended up getting married and we now have three children, and three dogs and two cats and a rabbit and a lot of other stuff that is a hell of a lot more important to than being stopped on the street by someone because they recognize me from being Cold Cuts Man or whatever the hell my character would have been. What I thought was my biggest setback was quite literally the rejection of a lifetime.

And yeah, we got divorced, but hey, Saturday Night Live ain’t what it used to be either. (I like to think we got cancelled because we were doing poorly in the overnights. Yes!)

My. Point. Is. This. I have a friend, believe it or not, who happens to be very, very, very good friends with Bob Dylan, and he told me this story, and it may be the best analogy I have ever heard about managing your life in show business.

Bob Dylan is playing at The Hollywood Bowl. And my friend says, “So I go. And I’m walking in, and I’m down front cause, you know, I got good seats, I know that guy. And as I’m walking towards my seat someone calls to me, “Andy! Andy! Over here.” And I look, and it’s someone I know that works for Bob, and she’s motioning my backstage. So I go backstage, and you know, it’s pretty nice. There are people hanging out, there are tables and chairs, there’s these big tubs of ice with beers in them, and I’m thinking, “Hey, okay. This is alright.”

And as I go to get a beer, my friend says, “No, Andy. Not here. Up here. You don’t want to be here. This is backstage, you want to be in The Lounge. Go up there.’

So I go up these stairs and now I’m in the lounge. There’s tables and chairs but they’re a little nicer. There’s an open bar. There’s Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgewick… Nice. S I walk up to the bar and my friend calls me and says, “No, No. Andy, up there. The VIP Lounge.”
So I go up another set of stars, go through this curtain and now I’m in the VIP Lounge. There’s tables and chairs and they’re realllly nice. There’s no bar, but there are waitresses walking around with trays of drinks, just handing them out. There’s Jack Nicholson talking to Warren Beatty… And I’m reaching for a drink and my friend says, “Andy, no. Andy, in here. Bob wants to see you.”

So I go down this corridor into this little room and there’s an old Jewish man with no shirt on smoking a cigarette.

Everybody’s killing themselves trying to get close to this thing that isn’t even real. Look, That thing that you want, you’re dong it now. Careers are a series of lounges and they’re there to be enjoyed. And along the way, you’d be wise to learn a song, pick up a little soft shoe, ‘cause you don’t want to go up there and blow your wad and then have nothing.