Speaker 1: This is the meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
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Speaker 1: got I got mega huge news. Me Eater Live is
Speaker 1: heading back out on the road. That's right, Join me
Speaker 1: and the crew talking Clay newcom cal Yannie, Spencer's gonna
Speaker 1: be there, Phil, Phil the engineer is gonna be there.
Speaker 1: Meet it or Live headed back out now. When you
Speaker 1: get every ticket, Okay, every ticket you buy, you get
Speaker 1: a signed copy of our new me Eater Outdoor Cookbook.
Speaker 1: This tour is celebrating the release of the book. Buy
Speaker 1: a ticket, get a signed copy Memeter Outdoor Cookbook. Wild
Speaker 1: Game recipes for the grill smoker, campstoven campfire, which I'll
Speaker 1: point out is a thirty eight dollars value. Here's where
Speaker 1: we're gonna go. April twenty third, the Masa Arts Center
Speaker 1: in Mesa, Arizona, April twenty four, The Balboa Theater in
Speaker 1: San Diego April twenty five, The Grove in Anaheim, California,
Speaker 1: April twenty seven, The Crest Theater and Sacramento April twenty nine,
Speaker 1: The Union in Salt Lake City April thirty, The Egyptian
Speaker 1: in Boise May one, The Wilma Theater in Missoula, May two,
Speaker 1: The Bing Crosby Theater in Spokane, Washington. May four, Revolution
Speaker 1: Hall in Portland, Oregon, and May five, the last day
Speaker 1: of the tour, Pantagious Theater in Tacoma, Washington. For ticket
Speaker 1: some more information, visit the events page at themeeater dot com.
Speaker 1: We're not coming to your neck of the woods, and
Speaker 1: you still want to get your hands on a signed
Speaker 1: copy of our new Me Eater Outdoor Cookbook, go to
Speaker 1: Signed Outdoor Cookbook dot com or check out Barnes and
Speaker 1: Noble Online. Hope to see you at the showy everybody,
Speaker 1: joined today by Jeff Foxworthy, who I've wanted to have
Speaker 1: you on for forever. We talked about it years ago,
Speaker 1: but you don't I had to come to you. Look.
Speaker 2: I have spent my entire life on the road. It's
Speaker 2: like it was kind of a race between you and Rogan. No,
Speaker 2: you won't even travel to go on Joe, Oh, I
Speaker 2: won't travel. Joe's like, come, I really want to talk
Speaker 2: to you, Come do the show. I want to talk
Speaker 2: about hunting, and I'm like, dude, I don't want to
Speaker 2: fly to Austin.
Speaker 1: All the way over to off. Well, but.
Speaker 2: I've spent four decades on airplanes and hotel rooms.
Speaker 1: I got you. Yeah, comedy, you can't finish farm No,
Speaker 1: I didn't. I want to finish my intro. Then I
Speaker 1: want to get into what you were talking about. I
Speaker 1: hope it's good. Well, here here's the problem. Problem is
Speaker 1: Krinn wrote the intro okay, but on the subject to Krinn,
Speaker 1: our producer Krinn, as everyone knows is Chinese and Jewish,
Speaker 1: and Jeff's already got half act. That's just such a
Speaker 1: weird combination. I'm not gonna tell anybody the jokes. I
Speaker 1: don't want to ruin him. He's got half act. What
Speaker 1: was the last one?
Speaker 2: The only place that you can go to somebody's house
Speaker 2: and eat Moushu matzabo.
Speaker 1: There you see, You see where it's going. Comedian actor, author,
Speaker 1: television hosts and writer. The reason I was criticizing Kren's introduction,
Speaker 1: she said last night, do you think we should have
Speaker 1: an introduction for Jeff? And yeah, I make one, but
Speaker 1: she only put she put perhaps your greatest work last,
Speaker 1: and you probably don't realize it was your greatest work,
Speaker 1: which is The Incomplete Deer Hunter. Oh my god. So
Speaker 1: i'd like to say. Jeff Foxworthy is the creative of
Speaker 1: The Incomplete Deer Hunter and a comedian, actor, author, television
Speaker 1: hosting writer. He's been nominated for a Grammy. Has a
Speaker 1: book of poems for kids New York Times bestseller. Is
Speaker 1: a member of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour with Larry
Speaker 1: the Cable Guy, who I had no idea his name
Speaker 1: Wasn't Larry, did you not?
Speaker 2: No, you need to get out more. You've spent way
Speaker 2: too much time in the woods.
Speaker 1: You were talking today about how he's played golf for
Speaker 1: thirty years and never got one struck better never, it's
Speaker 1: not even humanly possible. Comedy specialist on Netflix, the good
Speaker 1: old days. And then of course what she has at
Speaker 1: the end, The Incomplete Deer Hunter. And I want to
Speaker 1: add just another thing of your many funny jokes. One
Speaker 1: of my favorites is in one of your records. I
Speaker 1: can't remember which one. You're talking about the impulse too.
Speaker 1: I thought of this being in here, people's impulse to
Speaker 1: dress taxider me up. Yeah, well that's what you don't do.
Speaker 1: And and you were commenting that sometimes people put so
Speaker 1: much stuff on their deer mounths that it looks like
Speaker 1: they got killed at Marty Groun. Yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 2: They have like beads around them and sunglasses and you know,
Speaker 2: Christmas time you put a little Santa hat on them.
Speaker 1: But they yell a lot of them.
Speaker 2: They stick a cigarette in their mouth and beads on them,
Speaker 2: and dude, I laughed a.
Speaker 1: Lot of shot them at Marty. Yeah. Uh man, let
Speaker 1: me do here. Here's the thing I don't know, Like,
Speaker 1: I got one thing I want to talk about, all right,
Speaker 1: because we do listener feedback, okay, which I'm cutting it
Speaker 1: all all right, So I want to get to your
Speaker 1: story that you're just talking about about how musicians got
Speaker 1: it made and comedians don't. Yeah, but I want to
Speaker 1: tell you one thing because you might have made this mistake.
Speaker 1: This is just one I hate to exclude the audience.
Speaker 1: I want to do one listener feedback, and we like
Speaker 1: to focus on criticisms. Okay, excuse my pedantry. This is
Speaker 1: from a guy named Alex. What's a pedantry? Uh like teachy? Okay, preachy? Right, pedantry.
Speaker 1: Anytime someone starts out a letter with excuse my pedantry,
Speaker 1: you know you're in trouble. Excuse my pedantry. But I
Speaker 1: have noticed Steve committing a pet peeve of mine that
Speaker 1: seems common to most writer types, and it pains me
Speaker 1: not to point it out. He has on multiple occasions,
Speaker 1: most recently, in episode five fourteen, used the phrase reached
Speaker 1: a crescendo to describe an apex or climax. You follow the.
Speaker 2: Look, I'm so glad the criticism is against you. I
Speaker 2: just breathed a sigh of relief. So go so be
Speaker 2: like around midnight. Yeah, it reached a crescendo of noise.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what should it be? Well, However, a crescendo is
Speaker 1: a rising action. It means to increase volume. Crescendo from
Speaker 1: piano quiet to forte loud. It's a musical term. Sure,
Speaker 1: in this example, the forte volume would be the peak
Speaker 1: of intensity. It's not the crescendo. He's right, Yeah, the
Speaker 1: inverse of crescendo would be to d crescendo. My realm
Speaker 1: of expertise is only musical, but my understanding is that
Speaker 1: the same holds true of the word and non musically
Speaker 1: related Italian as well. Italian. I appreciate that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, that's what I say about me aging is
Speaker 2: I have eclipsed the apex of my splendor God, which means.
Speaker 1: You know that you're on the now. I want to
Speaker 1: get I want to get back to think you were
Speaker 1: talking about a minute ago and saying that you were
Speaker 1: telling me before alterned the machine on. The musicians got
Speaker 1: it made because the musician can have four hits, yeah,
Speaker 1: and then spend the rest of his life playing those
Speaker 1: four songs, and people are gonna come out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you'd be ninety years old. They're gonna come to
Speaker 2: hear those four songs. They might like your other stuff,
Speaker 2: but they're there for songs.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: A comedian, it's the opposite is you know, back in
Speaker 2: the day, you did a record or you did a
Speaker 2: CD and you record a special and people go, oh,
Speaker 2: that was funny. What have you got that's new? Yeah,
Speaker 2: so is a comic. It would be like a musician
Speaker 2: going I'm never playing the hits again. I'm going to
Speaker 2: go write a new album, and once I release that album,
Speaker 2: I'll never play that again. And that's what a comic does,
Speaker 2: which is one of the most agonized. After forty one
Speaker 2: years of doing stand up. It's like I did that
Speaker 2: last special and I'm like, okay, yeah, starting over from camprest.
Speaker 2: Now I'm back to the club with thirty people in
Speaker 2: and no cards in my hand, going is this funny?
Speaker 1: Is this funny? Is this funny? And that's how a
Speaker 1: comic works. The writer David Remnick once observed he was
Speaker 1: profiling Bruce Springsteen, but he observed that he was talking
Speaker 1: about the Rolling Stones. How a band can eventually become
Speaker 1: its own cover band. Yeah, you know, but you're right.
Speaker 1: Your comic can't do that now Springsteen. He can't be
Speaker 1: like I just want to wait till he does the
Speaker 1: one bit and then we'll go home. Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, they don't want to get they've heard that now.
Speaker 2: But I got to meet Bruce one time, and my
Speaker 2: question for him was, I said, how is a twenty
Speaker 2: year old could you write lyrics like young girls sitting
Speaker 2: on the hood of a dodge drinking warm beer in
Speaker 2: the soft summer rain. I said, nobody twenty should be
Speaker 2: able to write that, and he goes, you know, I just.
Speaker 1: Wanted to be writing stuff. I wasn't going to be
Speaker 1: embarrassed singing thirty years later. I'm like mission a conference.
Speaker 1: That's a good that's a good approach.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: Tell everywhere we're at right now, we're at my farm
Speaker 2: about an hour south of Atlanta. Uh, this is my
Speaker 2: if I'm not working, this is my sanctuary, this is
Speaker 2: this is my happy place. I always say when I
Speaker 2: go through the gate, I'm no longer Jeff Foxworthy. I'm
Speaker 2: just Jeff cheapest labor on the farm. I will work
Speaker 2: all day long with a bag of jerky in three
Speaker 2: waters and get on a tractor and happy as a clown.
Speaker 1: You were telling me earlier how people are surprised. Some
Speaker 1: people were surprised that that you wanted land and not
Speaker 1: like Jerry Seinfeld wanted cars. Well, you observe the attractor
Speaker 1: costs more than a lot of his cars. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, like when when I did my sitcom, it was
Speaker 2: we film right next to Seinfeld, and so Jerry and
Speaker 2: I had parking places next to each other. He had
Speaker 2: like an aircraft hanger full of Porsches, so every day
Speaker 2: he'd come in with a different Porsche. I had a
Speaker 2: pickup truck. I literally went to Beverly Hills Dodge and
Speaker 2: I said, I want one of the new Ram trucks.
Speaker 2: And the guy goes to drive. He goes to, we
Speaker 2: don't sell those here. I had to go out somewhere
Speaker 2: from so I would pull into it with my pickup
Speaker 2: truck in the spot, and Jerry would wheel in with
Speaker 2: his porch and get out and go, good morning, loser,
Speaker 2: you know, the dude in the pickup truck. But yeah,
Speaker 2: I didn't. I mean, that wasn't my thing. I didn't
Speaker 2: care about car. I want a car, guy. I wanted
Speaker 2: a farm. I wanted to land, and so that's where
Speaker 2: my car money. But I did tell Jerry, I said,
Speaker 2: you really need to come film an episode of comedians
Speaker 2: drinking coffee and tractors, because some of my tractors cost
Speaker 2: more than your porsches.
Speaker 1: Yeah, have you comedians getting beer and tracks? Right?
Speaker 2: I think he would love a tractor or a bulldozer
Speaker 2: and just fill the joy of pushing a tree over
Speaker 2: or something.
Speaker 1: You know, how did uh you have a property because
Speaker 1: you like the hunt? Yeah, it's beautifully managed. You managed
Speaker 1: as a wildlife. It's like you manage for wildlife, deer
Speaker 1: in particular, but you managed for wildlife when you were
Speaker 1: growing up. What was your what was your understanding of
Speaker 1: deer hunting spots? Like what kind of ground did you
Speaker 1: guys hunt as a kid.
Speaker 2: Well, it's funny like growing up in Georgia, we didn't
Speaker 2: have deer when I was a kid. We but you
Speaker 2: squirrel hunted, You quail hunted, your rabbit hunted, and it
Speaker 2: was usually on some relatives farm. Everybody had small farms
Speaker 2: back then, so and my dad didn't have a bird dog,
Speaker 2: so he would buy me briar bridges and then go, hey,
Speaker 2: get down there and walk through there, and I was
Speaker 2: the dog.
Speaker 1: I flushed. What'd your dad do for a living?
Speaker 2: My dad grew up on a farm, but he worked
Speaker 2: at IBM. He did, yeah, he had he was a
Speaker 2: smart dude. But we'd go back to these little farms
Speaker 2: and that's how I learned to hunt. Was like I
Speaker 2: remember being four or five years old and going squirrel
Speaker 2: hunt and learn it. And you got to sit still,
Speaker 2: you can't talk, you can't move, and then it was
Speaker 2: quail hunting. Then it was dove hunting, and then it
Speaker 2: became deer hunting. I hunted by the time I was
Speaker 2: a teenager in Georgia. I hunted two years before I
Speaker 2: saw a deer. Now that was Jeddicart deer two years
Speaker 2: before he saw a deer. Yeah, getting up every weekend,
Speaker 2: going through the motions, getting up Saturday morning, Saturday evening,
Speaker 2: Sunday morning, never saw a deer. And it took me,
Speaker 2: I think, three years, and I finally shot a little
Speaker 2: five point buck, which I thought.
Speaker 1: That's the one he showed me. Well, no, that was
Speaker 1: the second one.
Speaker 2: That was the eight point buck, which had a basket
Speaker 2: wrack like this that I literally I think I didn't
Speaker 2: clean it for three days. I kept driving it through
Speaker 2: town because I was pretty sure it was the state record,
Speaker 2: and I wanted everybody to say I saw it. I
Speaker 2: saw it on the tail gate of his truck.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: But you only know what you know. I knew nothing
Speaker 2: about deer hunting. I would I would go like behind
Speaker 2: grocery stores and get palettes, and go to construction sites
Speaker 2: and get two by fours and I would make my
Speaker 2: own stands. I'd get like railroad spikes and go up
Speaker 2: a tree with two by fours and put a palette
Speaker 2: up there, and never thought about the wind, never thought
Speaker 2: about is there a food source or a bedding probably,
Speaker 2: never thought about the safety was no safety, harness, no,
Speaker 2: but never thought about any of that stuff, and climb
Speaker 2: up and you know, after three years one of the
Speaker 2: steps would rote and you'd drop. I mean, it's a
Speaker 2: wonder we're still here. But I knew I loved it.
Speaker 2: I knew I loved being out in the woods by myself,
Speaker 2: which is kind of crazy because like on my dad's farm,
Speaker 2: me and two friends would leave in the morning with
Speaker 2: a twenty two and a twelve game shotgun and take
Speaker 2: off through the woods. We had no cel phone, nobody knew.
Speaker 1: Where we were. We didn't know where we were were.
Speaker 2: You know, we just go explore the woods and ended
Speaker 2: up on a road and walked back home. And it
Speaker 2: was just a totally different time.
Speaker 1: I've told you a couple of times today that I
Speaker 1: had no idea that here in Georgia, you guys, deer
Speaker 1: numbers were so bad that they actually brought in deer
Speaker 1: they had to restop. Yeah, I mean there's a lot
Speaker 1: of areas where it got bad. But I just was
Speaker 1: not aware that they had to do like that, they
Speaker 1: had to do a white tailed deer reintroduction in Georgia.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and did it during the fifties. It's like
Speaker 2: I told you as a kid, Yeah, never saw a deer.
Speaker 2: And we're lucky here at the farm because most of
Speaker 2: the deer they brought into Georgia they brought from Texas.
Speaker 2: In our particular area, they came down from Wisconsin, so
Speaker 2: our deer were kind of bigger horned and bigger bodied,
Speaker 2: and it's just a real good portion of the state.
Speaker 1: To hont end. When you were little, what kind of
Speaker 1: you've done a lot of comedy about hunting and sort
Speaker 1: of like parodies on hunting. When you were little, you
Speaker 1: were you aware of any kind of like hunting videos
Speaker 1: and stuff like were you going out and buying VHS
Speaker 1: tapes the instructional hunting content?
Speaker 2: Dude, I had no idea. So when I was a kid,
Speaker 2: I would save my allowance and I would buy comedy
Speaker 2: records Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson, Jerry Klower, you know, and
Speaker 2: I'd memorize them and I'd go to school and I
Speaker 2: could do the whole album, and so, you know, I
Speaker 2: was the funny kid. But I never, you know, hunting
Speaker 2: was hunting. And I remember the first time I was
Speaker 2: probably thirty, that I saw a real tree hunting video,
Speaker 2: a deer hunting video, and I'm like, oh my gosh,
Speaker 2: people other people can experience deer hunting. Of course, it
Speaker 2: was way bigger deer than I ever had seen, you know,
Speaker 2: But but it kind of led to in you mentioned
Speaker 2: this in the intro part of hunting. There's that solitary
Speaker 2: part that's really good, but there's also that communal part
Speaker 2: that you get in a deer camp, not when you're
Speaker 2: out actually hunting, but in the camp where it's a
Speaker 2: very social thing and there's a lot of laughter going on.
Speaker 2: And so I thought, well, if guys are watching videos
Speaker 2: of hunts, why wouldn't they watch funny videos too, And
Speaker 2: so I came up with the Incomplete Deer Hunter. Somebody
Speaker 2: asked me a while back, they said, who did you
Speaker 2: write those? I went, right, yeah, No, we were in
Speaker 2: the woods with deer suits. We had made going what
Speaker 2: if we do this, this and this? But I thought
Speaker 2: and it was it was a crazy idea. We sold
Speaker 2: millions of those.
Speaker 1: But it's like, maybe you didn't write them, but there's
Speaker 1: a lot of you know, this is the thing I
Speaker 1: want to ask about. Anyways, this is the there's like
Speaker 1: laughing at your culture from the inside and laughing from
Speaker 1: the outside. And this is something you know intimately. Well, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: your whole expertise is laughing from the inside.
Speaker 2: Well, I'll give you a great example. Like, so you
Speaker 2: grew up in Michigan, right, And so I was the
Speaker 2: kid when I started comedy. I wore jeans, I wore boots,
Speaker 2: I drove a truck, and I was I was just
Speaker 2: the outdoor kid. But I'm the comedian now in the
Speaker 2: clubs and I'm up in Michigan and it was like
Speaker 2: November and I'm like, man, I ought to be sitting
Speaker 2: in a tree in the morning. You know, it's the
Speaker 2: middle of the road. I need to be in a tree.
Speaker 2: And they were kidding me. I was playing right outside Detroit,
Speaker 2: little town called Lavonia.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 2: We were sitting around and they were going fox for
Speaker 2: of you nothing but an old redneck from Georgia. Well,
Speaker 2: the club that we were playing in was attached to
Speaker 2: a bowling alley that had parking. And I said, if
Speaker 2: you don't think you have read Nicks in Michigan. Go
Speaker 2: look out the window. People are valet parking at the
Speaker 2: Bowling Alley. And I went back to the hotel that night,
Speaker 2: and I didn't think it was going to be a hook.
Speaker 2: I didn't think it was going to be a book
Speaker 2: or t shirts. I just thought, maybe this is funny material.
Speaker 2: And I wrote ten ways how to tell how you
Speaker 2: might be a Redneck? And I went back the next
Speaker 2: night and just try to stand up. And not only
Speaker 2: were people laughing, they were pointing at each other. Well,
Speaker 2: every one of them was things my family had done.
Speaker 2: You know, if your front porch collapses and kills more
Speaker 2: than three dogs, that was my uncle Bob's house. When
Speaker 2: you pulled up in the driveway, the whole bottom of
Speaker 2: the house just erupted with dogs. If you have a
Speaker 2: complete set of salad bowls and they all say cool
Speaker 2: whip off the side, that's my sister. It's nothing but buttertubs,
Speaker 2: cool whip dubs, and jelly glasses. So I wasn't laughing
Speaker 2: at somebody, I'm laughing with, you know, And that's kind
Speaker 2: of always spend my comedy. My My template is is
Speaker 2: I feel like if if I think something or my
Speaker 2: wife says something, or my family does something. I'm gonna
Speaker 2: trust other people are thinking you're saying and doing the
Speaker 2: same thing.
Speaker 1: That that that that the one it works is because
Speaker 1: there's an expertise of the subject matter, you know. And
Speaker 1: I'm like laugh about your incomplete deer hunter thing is
Speaker 1: when you guys have the deer suits on and the
Speaker 1: deer kind of like coaching all the other deer about
Speaker 1: coach fucking coaching. Yeah, like this year's game plan, and
Speaker 1: there's like very sort of like specific references the coach
Speaker 1: is telling the other deer. He's like when all you
Speaker 1: does and little bucks come out in the field, don't
Speaker 1: look back when I come out in the field.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just tell them I'm coming.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but that was all experienced. Oh yeah, that's what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. It's like you're like you're watching it, like, no,
Speaker 1: these dudes actually hunt, because no one would ever, like ever,
Speaker 1: if I the outsider was goofing on redneggs, a goofing
Speaker 1: on deer hunters, they would never know that little bit
Speaker 1: of body language. Yeah, where a hunter's like there's something
Speaker 1: in the wood still because those deer keep looking back
Speaker 1: in there.
Speaker 2: And that's what I tell young comics, I said, talk
Speaker 2: about what you know about uh huh uh. It's like
Speaker 2: when I wrote ten redneck jokes, I thought, well, if
Speaker 2: I write ten, kind of write fifty. And then we
Speaker 2: wrote fifty, I might kind of write a hundred. And
Speaker 2: I got like three hundred of them. I sent them
Speaker 2: to fourteen different publishers and got rejected, Well you did, yeah,
Speaker 2: rejected by the first fourteen. And I sent it to
Speaker 2: the fifteen and he called me and he said, come in,
Speaker 2: let's talk. And he said, he said, I think this
Speaker 2: is funny. He said, how does fifteen hundred dollars set Steve?
Speaker 2: I thought he was asking me for fifteen hundred bucks,
Speaker 2: and so I'm like, uh, because I didn't have fifteen
Speaker 2: hundred bucks. And he goes, no, no, no, we'll pay you.
Speaker 2: I'm like, hell, yeah, let's do it, you know. And
Speaker 2: I remember asking him, I said, how many of these
Speaker 2: you think we'll sell? How many books? And he said, oh,
Speaker 2: I bet we sell five thousand of them. I think
Speaker 2: we sold four million of them. You know, because who
Speaker 2: was the publisher Longstreet Press, but small publisher in Atlanta.
Speaker 2: But but from doing comedy, I'd been to all fifty states.
Speaker 2: I didn't hang in LA in New York. I was
Speaker 2: going everywhere in between, and I knew LA and New
Speaker 2: York were the media centers, but I also came to
Speaker 2: know the people living in the country, and from what
Speaker 2: I observed, I'm like, you know, thirty minutes outside of
Speaker 2: any major city, we're all the same, and we may
Speaker 2: have a little different accent, but we're all hunting, and
Speaker 2: we're all fishing, and we're all growing gardens, and we're
Speaker 2: all you know, got that My definition of redneck is
Speaker 2: glorious absence of sophistication.
Speaker 1: You know, That's all it is.
Speaker 2: And I knew there was a market there, which is
Speaker 2: why we did the Blue Collar Comedy Tour. When they
Speaker 2: did the Kings of Comedy, Atlanta was one of the
Speaker 2: first stops, and in the paper, in an article about it,
Speaker 2: it said that it was a show for the urban
Speaker 2: hip audience. And I thought, I've been to every stake.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of people that aren't irving, and they're
Speaker 2: not hip. And I called building Ball and I said,
Speaker 2: we need to do a show for everybody that this
Speaker 2: doesn't apply to. And he laughed and said, what would
Speaker 2: you call it? And I'm like, hell, I don't know,
Speaker 2: call it the blue collar, blue Collar Comedy Tour, and
Speaker 2: we were going to do it for three weeks, and
Speaker 2: we did it the first one for three years.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was just it just hit an irve.
Speaker 1: Have you always planned? Have you always when you're touring
Speaker 1: and doing all those shows and all that, were you
Speaker 1: always trying to schedule around being able to hunt and
Speaker 1: fish and stuff? Well? Did you sometimes just have to
Speaker 1: eat it and be like, I'm not going to do
Speaker 1: anything outdoors because I'm going to like, while the fire's
Speaker 1: burning hot, I'm just going to go do my business.
Speaker 2: Well, back in the club day, because most clubs were
Speaker 2: like Tuesday through Sunday, I had eight years in a row.
Speaker 2: I did five hundred shows a year at least. And
Speaker 2: you're going, whether there's only three hundred and sixty five nuts,
Speaker 2: but you're doing two shows on Friday night, three shows
Speaker 2: on Saturday night. If you were in a you might
Speaker 2: be bouncing from club to club, and I would just
Speaker 2: keep note because I wanted I wanted to be on
Speaker 2: Johnny Carson, and I thought, the only way I'm going
Speaker 2: to do this is kind of the Malcolm Gladwell theory.
Speaker 2: I've got to do it ten thousand times to become
Speaker 2: an expert at it. And my goal was everybody said,
Speaker 2: it takes you ten years to be a good enough
Speaker 2: comedian to be on Carson, and I thought, I'll do
Speaker 2: it in half. I'm going to work so hard night. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it actually took me five years and two months,
Speaker 2: but I did it, And so then I didn't I
Speaker 2: didn't do anything but do comedy. But then once I
Speaker 2: started moving from cl to like theaters and things like that.
Speaker 1: When you say a club, that's one hundred people, two
Speaker 1: hundred people, hundred people, two hundred people, and when you
Speaker 1: say a theater, it's one thousand and three thousand, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Up to four or five thousand. But the great thing
Speaker 2: about theaters and that kind of happened because of the albums.
Speaker 2: People became aware of you, and then they would they
Speaker 2: would come. Well, theaters were more Friday and Saturday, which
Speaker 2: was great because it was about the time I had kids,
Speaker 2: so I could be home during the week and I
Speaker 2: was just going on the weekend doing shows. Then I
Speaker 2: could start to get back into hunting and fishing. Fact,
Speaker 2: when I did are You Smarter than the fifth Grader?
Speaker 2: I had it in my contract that I could film
Speaker 2: eleven months of the year, but I couldn't film the
Speaker 2: month of November. And I had an LA attorney come
Speaker 2: up to me and say why, I don't understand. Why
Speaker 2: can't you film in November? And I said because it's
Speaker 2: the rut? And he was like, the what the what?
Speaker 2: I'm like, dude, it's the rut.
Speaker 1: I'm not hunting.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm not filming during the rut. I'm going
Speaker 2: to be home. And so I may be the only
Speaker 2: idiot in LA that had that in there?
Speaker 1: Has that in there? Do you ever try to go hit?
Speaker 1: Do you ever try to go somewhere and to be
Speaker 1: trying to get out in the morning with people you
Speaker 1: know and hit little things like hit the morning Turkey
Speaker 1: Hunt and then make it too ye show.
Speaker 2: It was just always hard because you couldn't travel with
Speaker 2: guns and you know, and like back in the day,
Speaker 2: you do a show on Friday night, Well you walk
Speaker 2: off stage, say you were in Michigan. Where you're the
Speaker 2: next night you may be in Kansas City. So you're
Speaker 2: up at five am to catch the first flight to
Speaker 2: fly to Kansas City, which you get there at ten
Speaker 2: or eleven.
Speaker 1: Well, your day's kind of shot. So it was just hard.
Speaker 1: I know that feeling. You know how you would do
Speaker 1: five hundred shows a year, yeah, do you maybe six
Speaker 1: to eight? Yeah, And so I have a level of
Speaker 1: expertise here, bute, And I know that even then, you
Speaker 1: always like, as you're planning it, you're thinking about, man,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna hunt turkeys and every one of the locations.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you just never have the time to do it.
Speaker 2: And yours were different. Like when I watch your shows,
Speaker 2: Like for me, I told my wife, I said, you
Speaker 2: love to travel because when you get somewhere, you open
Speaker 2: your suitcase and you open it for a week. I said,
Speaker 2: I'm opening my suitcase every day and packing it back
Speaker 2: up because you're in a different city every night. And
Speaker 2: but like with your shows, when you're going to these
Speaker 2: remote places, Hell, you're going to sheep Hunch, You're going
Speaker 2: two weeks.
Speaker 1: Oh that kind of show. Yeah, I was referring to
Speaker 1: doing like doing live shows, which are a very small
Speaker 1: handful of Oh no, it's uh, your trips were long,
Speaker 1: drong trips. Yeah, you really get like a doing that
Speaker 1: kind of doing that kind of lifestyle, especially when were
Speaker 1: making a lot of shows. Man, you get like a
Speaker 1: really deep immersion into a lot of different spots, which
Speaker 1: is just completely like not at all similar to what
Speaker 1: you're talking about with like the turn and burn and
Speaker 1: cans of Yeah, did you did you start to formulate
Speaker 1: an idea of at what point in your life did
Speaker 1: you start thinking that at some point I'm going to
Speaker 1: slow down and enjoy myself more and what will that
Speaker 1: look like? Like? When did you indulge yourself with that,
Speaker 1: you know, with that vision? Because I look now, I
Speaker 1: feel like you got I think when I'm here like
Speaker 1: mens Guy's got it meet, I know.
Speaker 2: But I'm like last weekend in the woods, and last
Speaker 2: weekend I was in Michigan on Friday night, Minnesota on
Speaker 2: Saturday night. So I still I still enjoy what I do,
Speaker 2: but I've slowed down. I mean I probably do forty
Speaker 2: or fifty concerts a year now as opposed to hundreds
Speaker 2: because I want to enjoy my grandkids. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: yesterday I'm riding around on tractors and skit steers with
Speaker 2: my two and a half year old grandson. That's that's
Speaker 2: my joy in life. That's why I always said I
Speaker 2: didn't want to live to work and wanted to work
Speaker 2: to live Unfortunately, I was born with a work with
Speaker 2: a work ethic.
Speaker 1: You know. I uh, I don't want to sit around.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: My mom's like, you need to slow down. I said,
Speaker 2: I just wasn't born with that brain. I can't just
Speaker 2: sit on the couch. I want to go do something.
Speaker 2: I want to go see something, learn something.
Speaker 1: Did your uh did your folks think you were crazy
Speaker 1: for what you wanted to do? Yeah, well they did.
Speaker 1: They try to discourage you, like, he'll never do that.
Speaker 1: You know, well, I blew up.
Speaker 2: My folks divorced early, so my dad had a really
Speaker 2: good job working at IBM. But my granddad was a fireman.
Speaker 1: When you say early, how old are you like eight
Speaker 1: or nine? H oh, well did you understand what was
Speaker 1: going on? Well? Back I was the only kid I
Speaker 1: knew that had divorced parents. It was.
Speaker 2: You know that it sucked because you know, I wanted
Speaker 2: my dad there. But I love my grandparents and my granddad,
Speaker 2: bless his heart, was a fireman. So he worked one
Speaker 2: day and had too often he was fishing the two
Speaker 2: he was off and he would take me got you know,
Speaker 2: great granddad, which was one of my goals in life.
Speaker 2: I'm like, I want to be a really good granddad.
Speaker 2: But everybody I knew they were blue collar, they worked
Speaker 2: for a living. So even though I was attracted to comedy,
Speaker 2: it never occurred to me that that was a possibility. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you probably hadn't met a comic. No, they were just
Speaker 2: on TV. But I was the funny guy. I actually
Speaker 2: I worked in a grocery store, and I worked at
Speaker 2: a hotel, and then I got a job I think
Speaker 2: my dad, because I flunked out of college after three years.
Speaker 2: I think my dad thought I was going to end
Speaker 2: up being a near do well, so I think he
Speaker 2: got one of his friends to call and give me
Speaker 2: a job at IBM entry level. I was working dispatch,
Speaker 2: and then later on I was I carried a toolbag
Speaker 2: and fixed machines. But I was the funny guy work.
Speaker 2: I was the guy that was in the break room
Speaker 2: doing impersonations of the boss, and then you would turn around,
Speaker 2: the boss would be in the doorway.
Speaker 1: I was that guy.
Speaker 2: So I wasn't on the crescendo to be to the top.
Speaker 2: And a bunch of guys I worked with entered me
Speaker 2: in a comedy competition, not an amateur night, a competition
Speaker 2: for working comedians called the Great Southeastern laugh Off. They
Speaker 2: entered me in and I'm like, oh crap, I got
Speaker 2: to write material. So I wrote five minutes about my family.
Speaker 2: I went down. I won the contest. The first time
Speaker 2: was the material. It was why I lived in Sarasota, Florida,
Speaker 2: and I talked about it being it was God's waiting
Speaker 2: room because everybody there was like ninety years old. Then
Speaker 2: I did a bit about dads when everybody else cuts
Speaker 2: their toenails. They put him in the trash dad's sleeve.
Speaker 2: Theres in the ashtray in the den for the whole
Speaker 2: family to come observe and admire. And the crazy thing
Speaker 2: is my wife used to act, and she had just
Speaker 2: done a TV show with a comedian and she was
Speaker 2: there that night rooting for him in the competition. So
Speaker 2: I met my career and I met my wife five
Speaker 2: minutes apart.
Speaker 1: He stole his fan. Yeah, were they romantically involved now? Now?
Speaker 2: In fact, he's He and his wife are two of
Speaker 2: our best friends to this day. But what's the odds
Speaker 2: of finding your career and your wife five minutes apart,
Speaker 2: same night? I guess low, Yeah, low, And but I knew, Oh,
Speaker 2: I take that back.
Speaker 1: A little bit because when I sold my first book,
Speaker 1: I went I had never been to New York. Sold
Speaker 1: my first book, went to have a meeting. I sold
Speaker 1: to Miermax prior to those fellas Bob and Harvey Einstein,
Speaker 1: I have sold their company. Flew to New York to
Speaker 1: meet the people that bought my book, and in that
Speaker 1: meeting met my wife. Did you not from New York?
Speaker 1: Did you know when you met her? Did you? Did you?
Speaker 2: Because I know so. I met my wife on a
Speaker 2: Tuesday night. We went out on a Saturday, and an
Speaker 2: hour into the date, I went, oh, crap, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: marry this girl.
Speaker 1: Oh really? An hour into the first.
Speaker 2: Date and she was the only one that was saying
Speaker 2: to me, you could do this. She said to me,
Speaker 2: she said, you are so creative. If you sit in
Speaker 2: a cubicle the rest of your life, you're going to
Speaker 2: have a miserable life. You're going to explode. You need
Speaker 2: to do something creative. Is your wife rednick?
Speaker 1: No, she's from New Orleans. Does that make you out
Speaker 1: a redneck? I understand.
Speaker 2: No, They've got a lot of them down there, But like,
Speaker 2: instead of.
Speaker 1: Because in my mind, I think I don't think of
Speaker 1: that as incompatiby.
Speaker 2: No, they're very compatible because she has family in other
Speaker 2: parts of the Louisiana that will eat things the FBI
Speaker 2: can't identify. I mean, it's just but I think she
Speaker 2: really thought she was going to pull me up to
Speaker 2: her level and instead I.
Speaker 1: Just drown drug her down to the middle.
Speaker 2: But but she it was like the first person that
Speaker 2: got me, you know what I mean, She's just like
Speaker 2: And so I thought how I could do this? And
Speaker 2: so I quit my job and I tell my kids,
Speaker 2: I'm like that. At that point, well I went. I
Speaker 2: did Amateur Night for like six months and little gigs
Speaker 2: around town, but I knew by then I loved it.
Speaker 1: And what was the first money you were making at it?
Speaker 1: I mean, not like, I mean, what was the first
Speaker 1: like helpful, usable amount of money.
Speaker 2: So December the fourth, nineteen eighty four, they had Amateur
Speaker 2: Knight before the regular show. Steven Wright, it's the headliner,
Speaker 2: and he found me in the club. He had watched
Speaker 2: Hammate Night and he came up and he told me,
Speaker 2: he said, you need to be doing this. You should
Speaker 2: be a comic, and which kind of reinforced what my
Speaker 2: wife said. And so I went in the next day,
Speaker 2: and I told my boss, I'm like, I'm quitting IBM.
Speaker 2: And my mother when I told my mother I had quit.
Speaker 1: That's our first question was asked about your parents' perception.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I got there eventually. My mom's first question was,
Speaker 2: are you on the dope. I'm not sure what thud
Speaker 2: dope was. Are you on the dope? We can get
Speaker 2: you help? And I'm like no, I said, but I
Speaker 2: think I can do this, and I don't want to
Speaker 2: be sitting around when I'm sixty going what if I'd
Speaker 2: try that? And I tell my kids, I said, you
Speaker 2: need some hold your nose and jump moments in your life.
Speaker 2: And so my first real gig was New Year's Eve
Speaker 2: of eighty four with Sindbad and so I think I
Speaker 2: was making it out. That was what year eighty four,
Speaker 2: So I think I was making like thirty two grand
Speaker 2: a year at IBM, and I had health and dental insurance.
Speaker 2: My first year of comedy eighty five, first full year,
Speaker 2: I did four hundred and six shows and I made
Speaker 2: eight three hundred dollars for the year, which is like
Speaker 2: twenty bucks a show.
Speaker 1: So at that point, man, you've given Like at that point,
Speaker 1: at that volume, you've really given up a lot of
Speaker 1: normal life.
Speaker 2: Oh god, yeah, yeah, you're not doing anything. When I
Speaker 2: would go out to do the week at the comedy club,
Speaker 2: my wife would give me thirty bucks to live on
Speaker 2: for the week, and that was gas money and food money,
Speaker 2: and you were hoping the club gave you a free meal.
Speaker 1: If a club served food.
Speaker 2: A lot of times the comics could eat. We used
Speaker 2: to roll pennies and when we had enough, we'd go.
Speaker 1: To the movies. That was our dates.
Speaker 2: Really you lived like that, Oh yeah, dude, with no money,
Speaker 2: so broke. I left Atlanta. One time I had a
Speaker 2: gig at a comedy club that was in a holiday
Speaker 2: inn in Sarasota, Florida. I drove down there, and when
Speaker 2: I got there, the guy said.
Speaker 1: Well did you say that? Where was the gig?
Speaker 2: Sarasota, Florida, But in a holiday in. They're a little
Speaker 2: nightclub there, and but the deal was they gave you
Speaker 2: a hotel room for the week while you did this.
Speaker 2: And when I got there, the guy said, dude, he said,
Speaker 2: last night was our last night. We're not making money.
Speaker 2: We closed And I'm like, so you're out of business?
Speaker 2: Why just driven nine hours? I went in the lobby
Speaker 2: bathroom and pee and bought a coke and got back
Speaker 2: in the car. So I've driven nine hours and now
Speaker 2: I'm turning around driving back home. But I haven't got paid.
Speaker 2: I don't have a credit card, and I'm like, God,
Speaker 2: I hope I got enough money to get home for gas.
Speaker 2: And I stopped making Georgia at about three in the morning,
Speaker 2: and I'm digging for change underneath the car seat. You know, Oh,
Speaker 2: we got forty cents. Let me put that in gas
Speaker 2: in the car. And I got to South Atlanta, where
Speaker 2: I grew up. In the red lights on I'm like,
Speaker 2: I'm not going to make it home. So I pull
Speaker 2: off the interstate into a gas station and I'm trying
Speaker 2: to figure out I don't even have a quarter to
Speaker 2: call my wife. And a guy I went to high
Speaker 2: school with pulled up to get gas and I went
Speaker 2: over to him and I said, dude, I'm so embarrassed,
Speaker 2: but I left home this morning without my wallet. I
Speaker 2: didn't want to tell him I was that broke. I said,
Speaker 2: can I borrow five bucks? He's like, yeah, oh, hell yeah.
Speaker 2: So I got home. Years later, he came to my
Speaker 2: concert and he goes I remember loading you and I said, dude,
Speaker 2: I was so broke.
Speaker 1: I had no money to get home. I said, let
Speaker 1: me pay you back.
Speaker 2: And he's like, nope, I want you to owe it
Speaker 2: to me because it's a much better story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and some of it still hasn't. It still hasn't
Speaker 1: paid me back. That's that's that's incredible though, that you
Speaker 1: went through all that. I mean, it's great that but
Speaker 1: looking back, yeah, it's it was good. It made oh
Speaker 1: I think it made me important man better. I had
Speaker 1: a hunger to get better at it, you know. You
Speaker 1: know people say that comics have like a there's like
Speaker 1: a lot of the more chase and a it's got
Speaker 1: to be fueled somewhere, right. Yeah. I always there's like
Speaker 1: a there's like some sort of demon that needs to
Speaker 1: be slay, you know, or else you're not funny, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, Like like if everything's just gravy
Speaker 1: all the time, you don't get a chance to be funny. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I always heard there they're laughing on the outside, crying
Speaker 2: on the ends. Sure, but I think it's like human beings,
Speaker 2: we're we're all different. I think I was probably affected
Speaker 2: by my dad leaving because I could make my dad
Speaker 2: laugh when I saw him. Well, that was approval God.
Speaker 2: So it probably made me work at being funnier. But
Speaker 2: I was wired this way. I came from a funny family.
Speaker 2: I was wired creative. Part of the reason that I
Speaker 2: flunked out of college was I was going to Georgia Tech,
Speaker 2: which was an engineering school, and that wasn't my strength.
Speaker 2: I remember taking an English class there and writing a
Speaker 2: story about deer hunting, and the English teacher goes, have
Speaker 2: you ever thought about being a writer. Maybe you're not
Speaker 2: an engineer, Maybe you should be a writer. I remember
Speaker 2: being in high school and I had no money to
Speaker 2: buy my girlfriend a birthday present. I saw there was
Speaker 2: a speech contest at the Elks Lodge that paid fifty bucks.
Speaker 1: I wrote a.
Speaker 2: Speech, went down there and won. You know, I had
Speaker 2: taken my girlfriend the red lobster. Maybe here we go.
Speaker 1: So what happened with flunking out of college.
Speaker 2: I was at the wrong place. It wasn't my gift,
Speaker 2: you know, And I didn't know what my gift was.
Speaker 2: But from where I stand now, like God made me
Speaker 2: this way, I see the funny in things. It doesn't
Speaker 2: mean that I don't get mad or I don't get sad,
Speaker 2: but I always look for the funny in it, and
Speaker 2: I do believe it's a gift. And I think I'm
Speaker 2: a writer. In any great comic is a writer. You
Speaker 2: just have to have that brain and you're a writer.
Speaker 2: We don't do it necessarily because it's fun. It ain't fun.
Speaker 1: No, I don't enjoy it. I don't enjoy the act.
Speaker 1: If you have a hard time with that, doing it
Speaker 1: is not like doing It's not fun. There's a writer,
Speaker 1: Ian Frasier, and he said, when he was little, he
Speaker 1: pictured being a writer. He pictured writers sitting there and
Speaker 1: they're typing and they're kind of chuckling to themselves, you know.
Speaker 1: And then only later do you realize that it's just
Speaker 1: like it's just doing it is not enjoyable.
Speaker 2: It's not enjoy the menu. You stand up the men,
Speaker 2: you stand up finished product. When you look back and
Speaker 2: you go, yeah, man, now all right. Let me ask
Speaker 2: you a question, because I actually asked Bruce Springsteen this,
Speaker 2: Like I have a pad next to my bed. I've
Speaker 2: had it for thirty years with a pen on it,
Speaker 2: and I can write in the dark. But so because
Speaker 2: you always think you're going to remember it, and you
Speaker 2: never do so I've learned, like, rite something about as
Speaker 2: your body's relaxing to go to sleep, ideas start coming.
Speaker 2: And I've learned to just write a sentence where I
Speaker 2: can remember it in the morning. But I also have
Speaker 2: a pad next on my bathroom counter. I bet sixty
Speaker 2: percent of the things I think of are in the shower.
Speaker 2: Oh and so I get out of the shower, and
Speaker 2: I actually asked, springstand and so where do you write
Speaker 2: the most?
Speaker 1: Oh? No, I write a lot of stuff in the shower. Man.
Speaker 1: Oh really?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, so there must be when I'm driving in
Speaker 2: the shower and right before I'm going to bed.
Speaker 1: Is usually those times. There's a there's a band I
Speaker 1: like a bit trampled by turtles. Now great name the singers.
Speaker 1: This guy Dave Simonett. He's really good lyrically. And the
Speaker 1: other night he left his uh, he accidentally left his
Speaker 1: little notebook at my house. It's sitting on my counter
Speaker 1: right now, and I keep wanting looking that little notebook,
Speaker 1: but I can't bring myself to looking there. I feel
Speaker 1: like it could be like a betrayal kind of is.
Speaker 1: But I'm real curious about it. For a writer, I
Speaker 1: have cracked it. I look at it, and I think, man,
Speaker 1: whan I look in at that notebook? Yeah, but then
Speaker 1: I feel like I'd be violating some kind of guest
Speaker 1: host bond, you know, if I found it on the street, sure,
Speaker 1: but he left it my house. See that's why we
Speaker 1: don't crack it open. We just look at it.
Speaker 2: I was interested in doing this with you because you're
Speaker 2: a weird combo in that you're very capable, but you're creative,
Speaker 2: which are not usually like most really creatives I know
Speaker 2: can't tie their sh u, can't fill up their gas tank,
Speaker 2: and that's kind of normal.
Speaker 1: I had a dad that pounded all that India.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he didn't give a lick about the creative No,
Speaker 2: mine didn't either, But it was like.
Speaker 1: He wrote something. It was on a it was on
Speaker 1: graph paper, yeah, or on a two by four. You know.
Speaker 1: That's uh.
Speaker 2: But I think you and I are have that in common,
Speaker 2: is we're capable, but we're creative as well. Rogan's like that,
Speaker 2: So it's a weird mix, uh, which because I'm kind
Speaker 2: of fascinated by the writer side of you. I saw
Speaker 2: where Steve Martin won a writing award and he said,
Speaker 2: this means more to me than anything goes.
Speaker 1: Writing's hard, yeah, And I'm like, dude, I get it.
Speaker 1: You know it's well yeah, because you guys get like
Speaker 1: like comics, you get known for the performative part, but
Speaker 1: prior to the performative parts, the writing part. Do you
Speaker 1: know what a writer's minds? It's kind of the end
Speaker 1: of it. You're a writer.
Speaker 2: It's funny because I'm kind of a physical comic and
Speaker 2: people will ask me, do you practice in front of
Speaker 2: a mirror?
Speaker 1: No? I never think about the performance. Do you ever
Speaker 1: have to watch yourself? I hate to watch myself. You
Speaker 1: don't know what you look like. I cringe.
Speaker 2: Like when I used to do Johnny Carson and you'd
Speaker 2: film it like at four or five in the afternoon,
Speaker 2: and you'd come home and it would come on. I'd
Speaker 2: watch the whole show until I came home. Then I'd
Speaker 2: get up and leave the room because I hate the
Speaker 2: way I talk, I hate the way I look. I did,
Speaker 2: and my wife would be in the other room, going,
Speaker 2: it's really good, come watch it, and I'm like, no,
Speaker 2: I can't.
Speaker 1: I can't. You hate the way you look? What do
Speaker 1: you wish you look like? Now? I don't know? Something different?
Speaker 2: Yeah, but uh, with comedy. It was always the writing,
Speaker 2: and you know, and it's kind of like, I know,
Speaker 2: when you do it well that the audience thinks, oh
Speaker 2: he just walked out here and.
Speaker 1: Just thought of this.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, but I know, I remember when I was
Speaker 2: still doing amateur nights. Lena was always so nice to
Speaker 2: young comics.
Speaker 1: Was he very patient.
Speaker 2: And we're sitting at the waffle house and he said,
Speaker 2: your goal should be to write one new minute a week. Now,
Speaker 2: think about that. Your goal should be to write one
Speaker 2: new minute a week because you're special every year, And
Speaker 2: well it does. And in my mind, I'm thinking, are
Speaker 2: you out of your mind? I can write twenty or
Speaker 2: thirty minutes a week.
Speaker 1: No, he was right.
Speaker 2: If you can write one minute that a room full
Speaker 2: of strangers are going to laugh at every time you
Speaker 2: say it. Over the course of a year, you've got
Speaker 2: a new you've got a new album, you've got a
Speaker 2: new special, you know, whatever it is. And but that
Speaker 2: wasn't easy. I mean, you had to be working to
Speaker 2: get sixty new minutes a year, which was always so
Speaker 2: sad because you do a special on crap. All that
Speaker 2: work now got to start all.
Speaker 1: Over, walk me through and the flow of the flow
Speaker 1: of an idea if you don't practice front of a mirror,
Speaker 1: so you get like an observation that like your wife's
Speaker 1: butts cold when she climbs in bed, Yeah, how her
Speaker 1: bucket cold? Yeah. You drive around and your tract or whatever,
Speaker 1: and you think about that and you think that's funny.
Speaker 1: You never going in the gate like that. It just
Speaker 1: lives in your head. Then you try it out like
Speaker 1: you never do, like, hey, film me talking about this.
Speaker 2: It's like it starts with a with a thought, and
Speaker 2: then I'm like, like if I thought of something when
Speaker 2: maybe I think this is funny, like and you and
Speaker 2: I were having a conversation, I'd figure out a way
Speaker 2: to work it into the conversation and to see and
Speaker 2: if you laughed, I went, Okay, that's a valid thought.
Speaker 1: And then so you try it out like you try
Speaker 1: it out in your buddies on them knowing it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And then so in the early days, I always envisioned
Speaker 2: it like Clay. I would go out there and throw
Speaker 2: an idea out, say it's five sentences and three of
Speaker 2: them worked, So I'd keep the three that worked, get
Speaker 2: rid of the two that didn't, and then the next
Speaker 2: night I'd try two or three more, and so it
Speaker 2: was like adding a little piece of clay every night,
Speaker 2: and there, over a course of a month, you've got
Speaker 2: a new ten minute bit. As I've gotten older, I
Speaker 2: kind of did the opposite is I would start with
Speaker 2: a big glob and just go out there and try it,
Speaker 2: which I don't know why, but everything that didn't work,
Speaker 2: I'd cut it off and cut it off and just
Speaker 2: kept and so in the early days, my bits were
Speaker 2: two and three minutes long. Now they tend to be
Speaker 2: twenty and thirty minutes long, right, really long pieces.
Speaker 1: When you say a bit, you mean like you'll do that,
Speaker 1: You'll spend that time on a subject. Yeah, like having
Speaker 1: a kidney stone, you know. So, but you're not going
Speaker 1: to get done with that in two minutes. No.
Speaker 2: Well, and here's my thought. If you go to all
Speaker 2: the trouble to set it up, which is the part
Speaker 2: you're not getting a laugh. Once you get it set up,
Speaker 2: why not go you got a harvest, big deep and
Speaker 2: get like Jim Gaffigan talking about bacon. You know, I'm
Speaker 2: a comic, and I'm like, how long can you talk
Speaker 2: about bacon for two or three minutes? At minute twenty
Speaker 2: of gafficking. I've got my hands in my head going,
Speaker 2: how can you talk about bacon for twenty minutes?
Speaker 1: This is hilarious. Yeah, that's a good observation. You gotta
Speaker 1: set you gotta set the story up. Yeah, but if
Speaker 1: you've gotten to start spinning off and then it needs
Speaker 1: to spin off jokes? Yeah, yeah? What uh? When you were?
Speaker 1: Not when you were? Because as you meet comics, are
Speaker 1: you guys always bound? Like do you feel that you're
Speaker 1: bound to other comics through the comedy or do you
Speaker 1: feel like the sort of political and social differences do?
Speaker 1: I mean, like, do you run into you when you're
Speaker 1: doing running another comics and like, is it like you're
Speaker 1: sort of like the redneck guy from the south and
Speaker 1: so you're ostracized or is it just the that comedy
Speaker 1: brings your whole circle of professional colleagues together.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think when you're starting out, it's so
Speaker 2: competitive and everybody's trying to get a hand on the
Speaker 2: ledge that you're really cut throat with each other. And
Speaker 2: you know the thing about the redneck jokes? They were
Speaker 2: one liners, and so we live in an age where
Speaker 2: nobody does one liners. But they were easy to remember.
Speaker 2: They were easy to retell you know what I mean,
Speaker 2: And so I could do them on the radio, and
Speaker 2: I could do ten of them, so there's ten laughs
Speaker 2: and people could remember them, they could repeat them. But
Speaker 2: it was a way for people to remember my name.
Speaker 2: But at the height of it, it was three minutes
Speaker 2: out of an hour and a half show.
Speaker 1: And so for.
Speaker 2: People that thought that was all I did, I'm like, no,
Speaker 2: you haven't watched me. Mostly what I do is material
Speaker 2: about my wife and my family and my kids. And
Speaker 2: but it was a way for them to remember their name.
Speaker 2: I find the longer you do it, you realize it's
Speaker 2: a wonderful job.
Speaker 1: But it's hard.
Speaker 2: You you don't last unless you work hard at it.
Speaker 2: It's like, you know, I love to look for arrowheads.
Speaker 2: If I walk into guy's house and he's got a
Speaker 2: display case full of unbroken arrowheads, I knew that took
Speaker 2: a long time. That took a long long time to
Speaker 2: find that many unbroken era heads. The same way with
Speaker 2: a comic, and so you can can I have a
Speaker 2: respect for each other.
Speaker 1: I want to get return this. If I want to
Speaker 1: tell you another metric. Okay, you consider how many mountain
Speaker 1: lions have you seen? That's a metric for time spent
Speaker 1: time spent messing around out How many of you seen
Speaker 1: Not many? I spent a lot of time messing around
Speaker 1: on outside. Yeah, I think I've had I've seen six
Speaker 1: that weren't being chased by dogs. Well that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: Well I got a Boddy who spends a lot of
Speaker 1: time outside. Last time I talked to him, he was
Speaker 1: on like thirty five or something. Oh my gosh. I
Speaker 1: didn't mean interrupt the chain of thought. I I'm know
Speaker 1: what you're saying. Like, I had to get back to
Speaker 1: a bow.
Speaker 2: One time and I was trailing them and h Glenn,
Speaker 2: my farm manager who you met, went back to get
Speaker 2: us some water and all, and so I just sat
Speaker 2: down and when he came back, he goes, dude, there's
Speaker 2: mountain lion tracks in your footprints. Oh yeah, and my
Speaker 2: dumb ass is sitting at the bottom of a tree
Speaker 2: with my bow.
Speaker 1: You know, it's a wonder. I wasn't lunch. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't want to bring the chain of thought, but I
Speaker 1: was just thinking about your awareness of that collection and
Speaker 1: being like that is a lot a lot, it's a
Speaker 1: lot of work. Like you're dedicated, you're good at it.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, you know, out of every thing I've done professionally,
Speaker 2: the thing that I'm proud of, Stob is I've sold
Speaker 2: more comedy records than anybody that's ever lived.
Speaker 1: Is that right? Yep? Crin should put that in the
Speaker 1: damn bio. I know, nice job, Corrin.
Speaker 2: So go eat some more Moushoe Manza balls.
Speaker 1: You had to write along?
Speaker 2: You sold more comedy records and Cosby Carlon and Eddie
Speaker 2: Murphy delirious. Yes, yeah, My first comedy records sold almost
Speaker 2: four million copies. The second one did almost the same.
Speaker 2: The physical salities, yeah physical, these are album But what
Speaker 2: that tells me is, I'll tell you what it tells me.
Speaker 2: Somebody most popular ass comedian, Well, it means you were working,
Speaker 2: you were writing, Yeah, you know, And I mean I've
Speaker 2: written like twenty seven books and invented games. I've been
Speaker 2: very lucky to do a lot of things creatively. But
Speaker 2: out of everything, that tells me you worked at it,
Speaker 2: you worked, which is you know, It's part of me
Speaker 2: with hunting. I want to do it. I want to
Speaker 2: do things that aren't easy. Like when I was a kid,
Speaker 2: I just wanted to shoot a deer that had antlers.
Speaker 2: I just wanted to kill a deer, any antler, It
Speaker 2: didn't matter. You know, that's enough, you know, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: And there's cycles hunters go through. Then you want to
Speaker 2: shoot a bigger one. You want to shoot a bigger one.
Speaker 2: But you get to a point like because I was
Speaker 2: doing a lot of hunting shows. I was doing hunting
Speaker 2: shows for real tree and bucks of Takamani, and I
Speaker 2: was getting to go places and hunt really cool things
Speaker 2: and shoot really big deer. And I had a year
Speaker 2: where I shot a thirteen point deer. He's out there
Speaker 2: in the in manland, out there, huge deer. Shot him
Speaker 2: with a gun and three hundred and fifty yards. And
Speaker 2: then I came back to my farm, and my farm
Speaker 2: enginer only bow hunted, and I was starting to play
Speaker 2: around with it. That's your buddy here, Glenn. And the
Speaker 2: next weekend I shot one hundred and thirty eight inch deer,
Speaker 2: but he was poping young with a bow and arrow,
Speaker 2: and I sat up there and I just shook, and
Speaker 2: I could remember being fifteen years old, and the deer
Speaker 2: I shot at three hundred and fifty yards had no
Speaker 2: idea that I was there. I didn't really have to
Speaker 2: be that stealth. I was a long way away, but
Speaker 2: the one I shot at thirty yards that was close
Speaker 2: and personal. And I remember I called my wife. I
Speaker 2: never called my wife when she's cooking dinner back at home,
Speaker 2: and I'm.
Speaker 1: Like, oh my god, I just I shot a fuck
Speaker 1: with my boat.
Speaker 2: And I thought, this is what I want to feel like,
Speaker 2: this is what I want hunting to feel like. And
Speaker 2: so I'm like, I'm not doing a gun anymore. I'm
Speaker 2: gonna hunt with a bow.
Speaker 1: I was horrible at it.
Speaker 2: I mean, it took me two or three year years
Speaker 2: to even get I messed up. I kept drawing at
Speaker 2: the wrong time, you know, so you sat there for
Speaker 2: two hours waiting on a dough to come up, and
Speaker 2: now you draw at the wrong time, spooker and she
Speaker 2: runs off, and You're like, okay, I gotta wait till
Speaker 2: her head's behind a tree. But there was something about
Speaker 2: wanting to do it the hard way. And once I
Speaker 2: had started being pretty good at shooting deer with it,
Speaker 2: I'm like, I want to go hunt an elk.
Speaker 1: I want to, but not with a gun. I want to.
Speaker 1: And then it was a moose, and then it was
Speaker 1: I want to.
Speaker 2: Hunt it like I'd always kind of been fascinated with bears,
Speaker 2: but I had zero interest in nothing wrong with somebody
Speaker 2: doing this. I didn't want to shoot one over a
Speaker 2: barrel of doughnuts. I wanted to go find a bear
Speaker 2: and shoot them with my bow. Well it ended up
Speaker 2: doing that because and I don't know if you ever
Speaker 2: feel like this, but like I would watch videos of
Speaker 2: people hunting moose with a bow and I kept going,
Speaker 2: holy crap, that is so scary. I mean, like, roll
Speaker 2: up in a ball, go oh my dude, they're so close,
Speaker 2: They're so so big, so big. There's part of me
Speaker 2: that goes, do you have enough balls to do this?
Speaker 2: And I wanted to find out. I'm like, I wanted
Speaker 2: to push myself to go, do you have enough courage
Speaker 2: to go stand there with a stick and a string
Speaker 2: fifteen yards from this two thousand pounds animal. And it's
Speaker 2: funny like after doing it, because my wife's first question was,
Speaker 2: were you scared because I shoot this big bullet fifteen yards?
Speaker 2: And I said, in and of the moment, no, did.
Speaker 1: You guys call that bullet? Yeah? So he was.
Speaker 2: That's a timidating mane Oh yeah, I mean he's got
Speaker 2: his eyes rolled back. Well, here was the worst part.
Speaker 2: So we're going up. We're in a john boating up
Speaker 2: a river and I'm in the front of the boat
Speaker 2: looking for tracks or looking for sign and we've been
Speaker 2: in the boat for four or five hours and then
Speaker 2: I finally saw tracks coming out and hey, he got tracked.
Speaker 2: He went over and looked, said, it's a big bull beach.
Speaker 2: The boat go up into some kind of vegetation. It
Speaker 2: was about this high, kind of little red berries in there.
Speaker 2: And as we're just kind of standing there listening for
Speaker 2: the bull, I look down and at my feet there
Speaker 2: is a pile of poop with steam coming up off
Speaker 2: of it. I mean steam is coming off. And I
Speaker 2: look at the guide and I go moose, and he
Speaker 2: goes grizzly, and I'm like, okay, So there's grizzly with
Speaker 2: steam coming off of it, which means he ain't far away.
Speaker 2: And then and then the w and now we're now
Speaker 2: we've got a moose coming, and I forget about the grizzly,
Speaker 2: but and the and he's coming in to fight. He
Speaker 2: destroys a ten foot tree, I mean down to nothing.
Speaker 2: He wants to fight, and and but he's kind of
Speaker 2: hanging up at like fifteen yards because he can't see us,
Speaker 2: and and in and of the moment, I was not scared,
Speaker 2: and I thought, oh, I'd be petrified. My only thought
Speaker 2: was turn so I can get a stick in you.
Speaker 1: I need.
Speaker 2: I need an ethical I mean, I need a shot.
Speaker 1: I need.
Speaker 2: And it was so hyper focused on what do I
Speaker 2: have to do to get an arrow in this? And
Speaker 2: he finally turned to walk off, and I look, and
Speaker 2: there's a there's a hole, and I'm so I go
Speaker 2: to full draw and I wait till he fills the hole,
Speaker 2: and I shoo to me, goes thirty yards and folds up.
Speaker 2: As soon as that happens. Now I've got the dreddline
Speaker 2: and I'm doing the stinky leg and shaking it and all.
Speaker 2: But in the moment, I wasn't scared, and I didn't
Speaker 2: know that about myself. I got you, and I'm like, oh,
Speaker 2: that's cool. You didn't freeze up, you didn't turn around
Speaker 2: and run away. You held it together. I didn't know
Speaker 2: that about myself. Do you uh are you into bows?
Speaker 2: Do you just go to the bow shop and be like,
Speaker 2: get me set up?
Speaker 1: And I want to show.
Speaker 2: I'm like, dude, I'm like, so, I was hunting with
Speaker 2: a Matthews for a while and I liked it, and
Speaker 2: but then I got a psc bow that just seemed
Speaker 2: to fit me. Like when I go in to full draw,
Speaker 2: I wasn't it wasn't jumping on me. I could hold it,
Speaker 2: I could draw it straight back. I've hunted with the
Speaker 2: same boat for eight years.
Speaker 1: You didn't. Oh, yeah, I'm not.
Speaker 2: A junkie on anything. If I get a truck, I like,
Speaker 2: I'm like, I don't need a new truck. It's Look
Speaker 2: at the watch I'm wearing. I mean, I've I've done
Speaker 2: okay in life. I'm wearing a hundred dollars watch with
Speaker 2: a broken band, you know, because it tells time. Well,
Speaker 2: I'm not a latest and greatest thing kind of guy. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I just found a bow that I liked. I'm like,
Speaker 2: I like this one. I'm gonna stick with this.
Speaker 1: You mentioned you mentioned hunt arrowheads. What was your introduction
Speaker 1: to that.
Speaker 2: I had found one or two, I think as a kid.
Speaker 2: But Glenn, my farm manager, had looked for him his
Speaker 2: whole life, and I'd go to his house and look
Speaker 2: at his collection. I'm like, that's pretty cool. Well, and
Speaker 2: I think becoming a bow hunter, as you start to go, damn,
Speaker 2: these people, Oh these people were pretty gas.
Speaker 1: You were looking at it too from a hunting perspective. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know a lot of guys that are into arrowheads
Speaker 1: that don't look at it from a hunting perspective, which
Speaker 1: always can comprised me.
Speaker 2: I'm fascinated by everything they do. Like they took rocks
Speaker 2: and they learned to make a knife. They learned to
Speaker 2: make a projectile point, they learned to make a grinder.
Speaker 2: A bowl and a grinder, let's mash up acorns or
Speaker 2: corn or whatever. They were such capable people. So when
Speaker 2: I look at artifacts, I'm thinking, ay, if I pick
Speaker 2: it up and go, all right, I'm the first human
Speaker 2: being in seven thousand years to hold this. But mostly
Speaker 2: I think about there were some woman or some man
Speaker 2: sitting here making this, not thinking oh this is pretty
Speaker 2: or this is artistic. They're thinking I need to carve
Speaker 2: up that squirrel tonight for dinner. They were making it
Speaker 2: to live, and I think that's what got me kind
Speaker 2: of fascinated with it. And the first trip I ever
Speaker 2: went on, Glenn took me on a trip up to
Speaker 2: North Carolina. He had a buddy that was planting strawberries, and.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you guys, we'll go. Every day you'll travel,
Speaker 1: you'll go like on a hunting trip, but to go
Speaker 1: if you get an opportunity to go. Look something like
Speaker 1: I just.
Speaker 2: Did a thing for wounded warriors out in Texas. Well,
Speaker 2: I knew it was going to be out there, and
Speaker 2: I called a friend that was close by. I go, hey,
Speaker 2: you got any buddies of the arrowhead hunt? And he goes, yeah,
Speaker 2: I got a friend that loves it. And I'm like,
Speaker 2: find out if we can go with him. So I
Speaker 2: fly out there and do something good, do the Wounded
Speaker 2: Warrior show.
Speaker 1: They raise like a million bucks. It was cool.
Speaker 2: But then the next morning we're out looking for arrowheads,
Speaker 2: so try to combine them together now, and.
Speaker 1: Then you have a lot of stuff from this property
Speaker 1: you were showing me. Yeah, but I don't mean to
Speaker 1: criticize it, but you even said it too. It's like
Speaker 1: it's ugly. It's ugly, but it's ugly because of.
Speaker 2: They didn't have They didn't have rock to work, they
Speaker 2: didn't have flint. They had courts, which is very hard
Speaker 2: to make thin and pretty. It was functional, but they
Speaker 2: just don't make pretty arrowheads. But like, I made friends
Speaker 2: in Arkansas that have beautiful flint. I made friends in
Speaker 2: Texas that have beautiful flint. I have friends in Kentucky.
Speaker 2: So hell, we'll get in the car and drive to Kentucky.
Speaker 2: If somebody says, I've got a plowfield and it's rained.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what were you mentioned? You're going where someone was
Speaker 1: putting in strawberries.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so they had plowed this field and it
Speaker 2: was going to rain, and they're fixing the planet. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they're fixing, but they hadn't planted it yet, but they
Speaker 2: plowed it. But when you plow it, it's kind of
Speaker 2: dusty and you can't really see anything. So you need
Speaker 2: it to rain in a time or two. But the
Speaker 2: guy said, he said, y'all better be up here in
Speaker 2: the morning or the meth heads will kill it, cause
Speaker 2: the meth heads will go out there and look for
Speaker 2: airheads and sell them. That's my kind of meth head man. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I never heard of that before.
Speaker 1: Dude.
Speaker 2: You can go up there. It can rain that night,
Speaker 2: and you can be there at sunrise and the field
Speaker 2: is covered in footprints and you're like, how is this
Speaker 2: humanly possible? How do you do this? And so the
Speaker 2: first place I ever went with him, i'd walked thirty
Speaker 2: feet from the truck and I saw some thought it
Speaker 2: was a.
Speaker 1: Piece off attractor, like a spark plug. Picked it up.
Speaker 2: I'm looking around. They had and pottery and things, and
Speaker 2: as I'm doing it, I'm like, I don't feel like
Speaker 2: plastic and it's a.
Speaker 1: Pipe, you know. Yeah, so fine, it's because you were
Speaker 1: you were when you're doing that. Like how when you're
Speaker 1: looking on the ground you'll sometimes hold something in you
Speaker 1: just kind of worry it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I worry it. That's great because I'm always got
Speaker 2: something in my hand whatever, the most interesting things. Yeah,
Speaker 2: oh that's a cool rock. You'll walk around with it
Speaker 2: in your hand. It's whirl it in your thumb.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So uh.
Speaker 2: And I'm like, crap, that's not a tractor part. That's
Speaker 2: a pipe. It was a stone pipe. And I go
Speaker 2: over to Glenn, who's been looking for thirty years, and
Speaker 2: I go, dude, look what I found. He was so
Speaker 2: pissed he turned around and walked straight away from me,
Speaker 2: didn't talk to me the rest of the day.
Speaker 1: Mmm. But then I was hooked. If you ever do
Speaker 1: go do Rogan show, you should bring that pipe. Let him, uh,
Speaker 1: let him pull a rip, Let him pull a rip
Speaker 1: off that pipe. Man, he probably get a real kick
Speaker 1: out of it. Yeah, Native American. Yeah, why not, right,
Speaker 1: he'd probably love that. So.
Speaker 2: Uh how much time he's spend hunting though, Like you
Speaker 2: get some time out now, Yeah, I get some time out.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I'm kind of weird. Like I just had a friend
Speaker 2: that went to Africa, because I've been to Africa, but
Speaker 2: not to hunt. Been to Africa like six times. I'd
Speaker 2: like to do it, but I'm kind of weird. Like
Speaker 2: he wanted to go hunt a leopard. I have no desire.
Speaker 2: I don't want to shoot something I'm not going to eat.
Speaker 2: And there's nothing wrong with that. I'm just this is me.
Speaker 2: This is the way I'm weird. There's some guys that
Speaker 2: have foot fetishes, right, and I'm and I look at
Speaker 2: them and go, have you seen boobs? Because they're they're
Speaker 2: not bad either, you know, but uh, I mean but
Speaker 2: to each is, well, here's the thing about the foot
Speaker 2: fetish too. What he views as gerie I call a
Speaker 2: flip flop, right, I mean, but so when I say that,
Speaker 2: I'm not being critical of somebody that wants to hunt
Speaker 2: a leopard. And that's just the way I'm wired is
Speaker 2: if I shoot something, I want to eat it. So
Speaker 2: but I would like to go I'd like to go
Speaker 2: to Africa and bow hunt, and I still hunt with
Speaker 2: a gun, Like I just go, Yeah, Well.
Speaker 1: I thought, maybe you gave it all up for your
Speaker 1: bowl big game. I hunt with a bow. But like, like,
Speaker 1: I just got turned onto duck hunting. I had my
Speaker 1: neck fhews ten years ago and the doctor said two things.
Speaker 1: Don't look up and don't shoot a shotgun. That rules
Speaker 1: I'll duck hunt.
Speaker 2: Well apparently not, because I tried it and I like it.
Speaker 2: And now I'm like, I'll I'll deal with the pain
Speaker 2: because this is a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: Well, what's in your head? Is there? Like a like
Speaker 1: how do you how do you tell when you've scratched
Speaker 1: the itch for a year? Right? Like for me, I'll
Speaker 1: if there's I like the hunt turkeys a lot, okay,
Speaker 1: so late May whatever, I'll be in my head. I
Speaker 1: don't think of how many turkeys I got. I don't
Speaker 1: think of how many days I hunted turkeys. I think
Speaker 1: of like, well, how many successful hunts was I in on? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Meaning my kid got one my buddy got one like
Speaker 1: that I was trying to shoot. I could shoot none
Speaker 1: of them, wouldn't matter. And if I finished the spring
Speaker 1: and I was like, man, I was in on six
Speaker 1: turkey kills. That's pretty good, then I'll be like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's pretty good spring. Yeah. You know, when the big
Speaker 1: game season ends, when it's all said and done, I'll
Speaker 1: kind of look at was there one particular Did I
Speaker 1: get some particular animal that I was real excited about?
Speaker 1: And do I have a whole mountain of stuff started
Speaker 1: up in freezers? Yeah? And if it's checked, I'm good.
Speaker 1: You know, how do you how do you know? How
Speaker 1: do you know that your hunting life as well?
Speaker 2: I think we go through stages as a hunter. First
Speaker 2: it's I want to shoot a deer. Now I want
Speaker 2: to shoot a deer with horns. Now I want to
Speaker 2: shoot a deer with bigger horns.
Speaker 1: Now I want to.
Speaker 2: Shoot a really big deer. And so I've been through
Speaker 2: all those stages. Now I'm like you, if I can
Speaker 2: take a kid who's never done it and introduce it
Speaker 2: to him, that's every bit of rewarding, is shooting a.
Speaker 1: Deer like that.
Speaker 2: I think that's the thing I loved about bow hunting. Uh,
Speaker 2: And kind of that conversion on big game stuff was
Speaker 2: I'd shot a lot.
Speaker 1: Of big deer with it.
Speaker 2: Shotting, there's your might be a redneck word shotting shotting,
Speaker 2: I'd shotten a lot of.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The guy that didn't like crescendo, he's got real problems
Speaker 2: with shot He's don't even know where to start when
Speaker 2: he writes that letter. But but like when you were
Speaker 2: gun hunting and you'd go, hey, there's a deer, there's
Speaker 2: oh crap, it's a doe. When you're bow hunting, you're like, oh, hell,
Speaker 2: here comes a dough. You know, everything's in play, Everything
Speaker 2: is in play. And I like that about it because
Speaker 2: it's hard. Man, it's hard to get a stick. You
Speaker 2: got to let him get. And a friend of mine
Speaker 2: who loves big bucks, he said, well, what do you
Speaker 2: do if you're bow hunting and the buck comes out
Speaker 2: of one hundred yards across the field? And I said,
Speaker 2: he wins today, But now I know a way that
Speaker 2: he where he likes to cross, and I'm going to
Speaker 2: move my stand closer. But he wins today.
Speaker 1: And you're excited about having a grandkit.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Oh, the greatest joy of my life. Honest
Speaker 2: to God, you get to the point where you think
Speaker 2: you've kind of got life figured out.
Speaker 1: I had no idea I was going to love a
Speaker 1: grandkid this much. I got a body that's got in
Speaker 1: your grandkid. He told me he likes that grandkid better,
Speaker 1: and he ever liked any of his kids.
Speaker 2: Oh, I told you, I help my kids. I hold
Speaker 2: my grandson and I go. I love you, and I
Speaker 2: would lay down my life for you. I would die
Speaker 2: for you. But I do not love you as much
Speaker 2: as I love him. I don't love my wife as
Speaker 2: much as I love you. He is my favorite human
Speaker 2: being of all time. Well, and I had all girls,
Speaker 2: and I love being girls. I love being a girl. Dad,
Speaker 2: what was that track record? Everybody in my family had girls.
Speaker 2: We had eleven girls in a roow. He's the first
Speaker 2: boy in fifty eight years, like you and your you
Speaker 2: have you two siblings and you.
Speaker 1: Guys run off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and no boys. So he's the first boy. And
Speaker 2: like yesterday morning, he comes out in his pajamas, he's
Speaker 2: pulling on his green ruber boots, he's got a stumb
Speaker 2: in his mouth. He goes, checks, let's go ride a tractor.
Speaker 2: And I'm like hell, yeah, let's go ride a tractor.
Speaker 2: I let him drive the truck. I let him sit
Speaker 2: my light, laugh and drive.
Speaker 1: He's two and a half. That's fun.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but god he's whatever bat I ever did, he
Speaker 2: makes up for. I've got a great life, you know.
Speaker 2: I've made a fabulous live in doing something that would
Speaker 2: have done for free, because I love what I do.
Speaker 1: Love.
Speaker 2: I love that comedy. It's it's very rewarding. You're making
Speaker 2: people laugh. It's it's like the release five that keeps
Speaker 2: people spoiler from exploding you. But it's not easy. I
Speaker 2: love the fact that you never get you never get
Speaker 2: it figured out. After forty years, you would think I
Speaker 2: would know what people are going to laugh at and
Speaker 2: what they're not going to I still don't know. She's like,
Speaker 2: it's like the woman you can't figure out. But that's
Speaker 2: what keeps her interesting is I can't figure out. Because
Speaker 2: after forty years, I can go up there and go,
Speaker 2: hey is this funny and it's crickets nothing.
Speaker 1: And you're like, wow, really it's not funny. So I
Speaker 1: have that as a career. I have a fun which
Speaker 1: I love. Man, I don't need I don't need shiny cars.
Speaker 2: I don't need. I love this. I love I love
Speaker 2: being able to grow my own food. I love being
Speaker 2: able to hunt my own food. I love being able
Speaker 2: to share a sunrise, you know, with friends of mine.
Speaker 2: And I've never spent one day in the woods where
Speaker 2: I went crap that wasn't worth it mm hmm, because
Speaker 2: you always see something, see a hall, catch a squirrel,
Speaker 2: or you know, like today you and I stopped and
Speaker 2: there's two otters chasing fish man. Yeah, you're like, that
Speaker 2: was cool. Yeah, there's always something like that. So I've
Speaker 2: got a farm, I've got a great job. I've got
Speaker 2: a wife that I adore, been married for forty years,
Speaker 2: got grandkids, I got kids out of door. I'm like,
Speaker 2: I don't know what I did, but thank you. I
Speaker 2: have got a great life. Well, thank you for coming
Speaker 2: on the show.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 2: Dude, I'm fascinated by you. I like what you do,
Speaker 2: and I like that you humanize hunters.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It's like I was doing something in La and they
Speaker 2: were you know, you you guys just shoot everything you see.
Speaker 2: I said, are you kidding me? I said, During the
Speaker 2: course of a deer season, I will see four hundred deer.
Speaker 2: I might shoot four dos in a buck. I said,
Speaker 2: and you tell me you love them, you don't love
Speaker 2: them more than I do, because I'm out on a
Speaker 2: bulldozer creating habitat for them. I'm out burning to give
Speaker 2: them more native food.
Speaker 1: I'm out. Don't tell me you love them more. Night. No,
Speaker 1: you could say to them and said, if you don't
Speaker 1: think I love deer, I'd like to take you for
Speaker 1: a little drive. Yeah.
Speaker 2: But what I want is as many as my land
Speaker 2: can hold with them being healthy. I want it right
Speaker 2: there to the top. But it's it's not an infinite
Speaker 2: number of deer. So and I've seen chronic wasting disease.
Speaker 2: I've seen it's when nature takes care of it. It's ugly,
Speaker 2: much more humane. And I don't and I'm not shooting them.
Speaker 2: It's not the killing. It's every one of them somebody eats.
Speaker 2: It's it's a food source, you know. So, and if
Speaker 2: you don't like it, that's okay. I don't have to
Speaker 2: like everything you do, but I like the fact that
Speaker 2: you show that you know you just you don't have
Speaker 2: to like it, but I do. And it's legal, and
Speaker 2: it's it's good, it's fascinating. It's the biggest classroom in
Speaker 2: the world is the outdoors.
Speaker 1: Yep, well man, thanks for thanks for being a hunter,
Speaker 1: Thanks for making everybody laugh and making everyone laugh without
Speaker 1: capitalizing on hate and discord, but just laughing at yourself. Man, Yeah,
Speaker 1: laughing at ourselves. And I think we've.
Speaker 2: Kind of forgotten how to do this is right now
Speaker 2: in society people are people have to be right, which
Speaker 2: means you have to be wrong, which means we're not
Speaker 2: going to have conversation because I'm not going to engage
Speaker 2: in a conversation where I have.
Speaker 1: To be wrong.
Speaker 2: And we need to give up our need to be right.
Speaker 2: Because what you find as you age is things that
Speaker 2: you argued vehemently for as you were twenty. Now I
Speaker 2: find myself argued vehemently against. I'm like you, learn and
Speaker 2: you know, we're all wrong about something. We're The truth is,
Speaker 2: we're all wrong about a lot of things. But we
Speaker 2: have to engage in those conversations. So, like with you,
Speaker 2: I want to know what you know that I don't know.
Speaker 2: Those are the conversations I.
Speaker 1: Like to have. I think a way to describe aging.
Speaker 1: One way to describe aging would be it's a process
Speaker 1: by which you become less and less interested in your
Speaker 1: own opinion. Agreed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I told my kids, I said, I miss my
Speaker 2: thirty year old body, but I wouldn't trade my sixty
Speaker 2: year old mind and soul.
Speaker 1: To get it back. Because you realize so.
Speaker 2: Many things you wanted to fight about when you're young,
Speaker 2: you get old, it ain't worth it. It'll sort itself out.
Speaker 2: Half the things you worry about more than half. Ninety
Speaker 2: percent of the things you worry about, they never happen,
Speaker 2: and so you kind of there is a wisdom that comes,
Speaker 2: and that wisdom comes with Everything's not a confrontation you
Speaker 2: and I. Here's the thing I think politically, you can
Speaker 2: have two people on total opposite ends of the spectrum.
Speaker 2: But if you sat them down and you said, what
Speaker 2: do you want out of lie? What do you care about?
Speaker 2: What you we would agree on eighty five percent of
Speaker 2: the same things. We all want to be able to
Speaker 2: take care of our family. We want to be able
Speaker 2: to take care of our kids, We want them to
Speaker 2: live in a safe place. We want to have food
Speaker 2: in our stomach. Fifteen percent would be different. What we
Speaker 2: should celebrate is that eighty five percent that we're alike.
Speaker 2: You and I grew up in different parts of the
Speaker 2: country different ways. But as we sit here and talk,
Speaker 2: we realize, oh, Steve and I are a lot alike
Speaker 2: on this and the parts that are different. That's what
Speaker 2: makes you Steve and what makes me Jeff. But what
Speaker 2: we want to do right now is we want to
Speaker 2: fight and scream and yell at each other about the
Speaker 2: fifteen percent instead of going crap, eighty five percent You
Speaker 2: and I want the same thing. Why why aren't we
Speaker 2: based in that we can talk about the other. But
Speaker 2: how boring would it be if we all want it
Speaker 2: and thought alike, you know, crap?
Speaker 1: That would be.
Speaker 2: That's one of the things I love about nature is
Speaker 2: And if you don't have faith, I don't care. I do,
Speaker 2: but I sit there and go God's infinitely creative. Like
Speaker 2: there's thousands of different kinds of trees. If you ask
Speaker 2: me to come up with trees after four.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I'm out of idea. Like I'm gonna do
Speaker 1: a little one, a medium. Yeah, I'm done.
Speaker 2: I'm done. Or you know, types of things in the ocean. Man,
Speaker 2: there's a fish, you know, and you go, crap, how
Speaker 2: many different kinds of fish are there? Well, for people
Speaker 2: that love the outdoors, it's always That's what I mean.
Speaker 2: It's kind of a it's a classroom.
Speaker 1: You're like, all of this works together.
Speaker 2: You know, as the squirrels sitting there chewing on the
Speaker 2: pine combe, some of those kernels are going down and
Speaker 2: into the soil and becoming pine trees. Well, there's you know,
Speaker 2: within a square foot of dirt, there's forty thousand organisms
Speaker 2: living in that and they all do something. These these
Speaker 2: leaves above it that are decaying or feeding something that
Speaker 2: feeds something else, and it's all tied together, and it's
Speaker 2: way more brilliant and smarter than I have the compet
Speaker 2: the ability to understand. So I'm just going to sit
Speaker 2: here and soak it all in and go, wow, isn't
Speaker 2: that cool.
Speaker 1: It's a great place to do that and experience that.
Speaker 1: And the thing that you were getting at a mintical
Speaker 1: about that eighty five fifteen percent eighty five percent of
Speaker 1: stuff brings us together, fifteen percent is different. There's been
Speaker 1: a like this idea I've been toying around in my
Speaker 1: head about when I and I've talked about this a
Speaker 1: number of times, is I compare sometimes my lived experience, right,
Speaker 1: like what happens me going about my day, going to
Speaker 1: a gas station down the road from here, whatever what happens,
Speaker 1: going about my day, and then me reading about what
Speaker 1: my American life is supposed to be like, yeah, and
Speaker 1: in reading about what my American life, life is supposed
Speaker 1: to be like, it's supposed to be defined by polarization,
Speaker 1: political violence, right, yeah, whatever, all of this economic strain,
Speaker 1: social economic upheaval, you know. And I'm like, go, Okay,
Speaker 1: I got it, that's what life's like. But why is
Speaker 1: that not line up at all with what your experience
Speaker 1: with what happens when I'm like talking to my neighbors,
Speaker 1: who I don't know the first thing about where they
Speaker 1: are at politically, or why does that not happen when
Speaker 1: I go into a gas station? Why are people cool
Speaker 1: when I get into an uber? Why am I able
Speaker 1: to you know what I mean? Like, how am I
Speaker 1: supposed to be having this but instead I'm having this? Well?
Speaker 1: In which one's those things? Which of those do you believe?
Speaker 1: Which is the truth? I'm leaning toward thinking that the
Speaker 1: lived one is the truth. It is the truth. You
Speaker 1: follow me.
Speaker 2: I've gotten to the point I say when I walk
Speaker 2: on stage, and I do I said, I'm standing on
Speaker 2: the sides of the stage. I remind myself that everybody
Speaker 2: that I'm going to look at is going through some
Speaker 2: kind of a struggle. And now it might be a
Speaker 2: physical struggle, it might be emotional, it might be financial,
Speaker 2: but they're going through something. And that's why, really my
Speaker 2: whole life, I'm like, just have grace with people because
Speaker 2: you don't know their backstory, you don't know what they're
Speaker 2: going through, So have a little grace with them. And
Speaker 2: I think that's the cool thing about laughter is you know,
Speaker 2: we're all in a struggle. That's why I love what
Speaker 2: I do is I can go visit kids in the
Speaker 2: hospital and they might have my book, or they might
Speaker 2: have my game, or they might have my DVD, and
Speaker 2: they didn't know I was coming. So there's something that
Speaker 2: I've created that has given them an escape from the
Speaker 2: struggle that they're going through. And I went, oh, that's
Speaker 2: kind of a cool benefit to this. But yeah, we
Speaker 2: don't give each other much grace. You know, you don't know,
Speaker 2: Like I worked it a totally under the radar, didn't
Speaker 2: want anybody to know but get up every week and
Speaker 2: I worked down at a homeless shelter in downtown Line
Speaker 2: for twelve years get up on Tuesday morning five o'clock
Speaker 2: and go down there and work. And my opinion of
Speaker 2: homeless used to be like, oh, you're too lazy to work.
Speaker 1: Or you're well.
Speaker 2: Most of them were in some kind of addiction. But
Speaker 2: if you learn their story, if you come to learn
Speaker 2: their story, something bad happened. They were molested, they were abused,
Speaker 2: they were and so the addiction wasn't really the problem
Speaker 2: that that was the symptom. That was I got to
Speaker 2: numb this painful feeling and then you start having grace
Speaker 2: with them going crap, dude, I would have numbed too.
Speaker 2: We need to get back as a as a society,
Speaker 2: just start doing that with each other. Uh happened some grace,
Speaker 2: So quit yelling life's too short.
Speaker 1: Mm hmmm. Crack some jokes instead. Yeah, fry up some venison.
Speaker 2: Pry up some venison. Crack some jokes. If you don't
Speaker 2: want to eat the venison, fine hand it to me.
Speaker 1: I'll eat it. Well, man, I want to thank you
Speaker 1: again for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. Well,
Speaker 1: I thanks for the tour of the place.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've always been such an admirer of what you do.
Speaker 2: So it's I'm honored that you would be here, that
Speaker 2: you would take the time to be here.
Speaker 1: Oh no, Once I realized you weren't going to come
Speaker 1: to me, I decided to come to you. So so
Speaker 1: suck it, Rogan. Not really.
Speaker 2: I love what he does too. Thanks a lot, man,
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me. Yeah, for sure, come back and
Speaker 2: hunt and fish.
Speaker 1: I will. I'll bring my kids.
Speaker 2: Yeah, please bring your kids. That'd be the number one
Speaker 2: reason you guys could stay here and break everything in here.
Speaker 1: Great. Thank you.
Speaker 3: Rack coon pecker, old man in my mountains, keep his
Speaker 3: hat together, Rack coon pecker. Use this tooth thick. It'll
Speaker 3: last forever. Rack coon pecker, best toothpick in town. Well,
Speaker 3: you see, now, I was driving down the road and
Speaker 3: I uh stumbled upon this sheer raccoon there, and I
Speaker 3: ran him over, hit him with my car. Looked at
Speaker 3: this old son of a gun and seeing that he
Speaker 3: has a pecker, not just any kind of pecker, a
Speaker 3: rack coon pecker. Put him in your hat. It holds
Speaker 3: it together, Rack coon pecker. I'm in my tooth. Raccoon pecker,
Speaker 3: gonna pick it out, raccoon pecker.
Speaker 1: Leave it on a tree.
Speaker 3: It for dicks.
Speaker 1: The weather.
Speaker 3: Rain falling off.
Speaker 1: You know it's rain.
Speaker 3: It as dry as a bone.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's right stiff as hell.
Speaker 3: It's old ice cold. Old lady gonna give you the
Speaker 3: bone because it's a racon pecker. Can I put it
Speaker 3: in my hand to keep my hat together?
Speaker 1: Peanut it, and my tooth is gonna pick it on,
Speaker 1: or raccoon picker. There ain't no doubt