Talking Comedy with Jason Zinoman of the New York Times (Part 2)
Mulaney Late Night, The Rise of Nikki Glaser, and Comedy Snobbery
This is Part 2 of my interview with Jason Zinoman, critic at large for the Culture section of The New York Times who writes a column about comedy. Part 1 is here.
We spoke for around an hour, which you can listen to here.
As I mentioned last week, the below is what I call Transcript-ish. I have run the audio through Descript which provides a pretty good transcript. I then ran it through Claude AI and asked it to clean up the work. Then from there I gave it a once over while I sat under the umbrella poolside on a very hot Saturday afternoon.
JOHN: When I recently watched Mulaney, I went for a whole ride here. So just to catch you up on my resume a big chunk of it, I worked in talk radio WOR in New York and did a lot of phone screening, which is relevant to what I'm setting up here.
As I was watching Mulaney. My initial reaction was, Oh my goodness, 12:30 Dave is back. This is so loose and goofy. And I loved it. And then I started screaming and this is arrogant. Somebody needs to produce this thing. And my sticking point was when they went to callers because as a call screener, I can tell you, civilians cannot take this. Tell a story. And I'm screaming at my TV saying Jerry Seinfeld is sitting there. I could have hosted that one. Hey, Jerry, how's that movie going? And then shut up for 10 minutes. And I would, did you enjoy Mulaney? I really think something's there. I'd like to see more of it just, and maybe this is counter to my whole 12:30 Letterman argument, a little more focused.
JASON: No, I'm with you. I really enjoyed it. Because it, I like novelty and I like experimentation and I like things that are different. So I was tickled by it. And just like you, it felt oh, there are bits of cable access. There are bits of, we just was super famous people. There are bits of old letterman. There's but it was interesting. The incongruity between the critics reaction, which was pretty glowing. And normal people's reaction which almost most people who I talked to loathed it or found it unwatchable. Including, I should say, I'm not going to name it, but it was on my Facebook page people who worked for the first Letterman show. That, and I think the reason for that is one is what you're saying is that like he, he indulged a lot. There was a lot of dead air. There was like having the call and go on while you have these other people on the show. It was the thing that made it exciting, which is it's like anything could happen here, which is also what made it can make it tedious. And if it was on for a month or a year, I think that would have been more clear. That would become, people are now saying, Oh, we should do it full time. And I saw he did an interview where he was like, I'm intrigued, but I think that this was great for a week during a Netflix festival where they could get every star in the world on it. And it was a lark. If they, if it was a permanent thing, I think it's flaws that you've enumerated would be more clear.
JOHN: Yeah. I wear many hats and in my career as a podcasting executive and back as a programmer at Sirius, I would explain to people, talk to me about show 23, because even I can call on some celebrity favors and I can book a great week of shows just for myself. What happens when it's week 47 and, to your point, Jerry Seinfeld's not in town? Who are you talking to? Who's the guest? Now it's back on the host. They'll sample for the guest, they will come back for the host, is the way I teach that.
JASON: What, let me ask you, what, how, the call in aspect what works in that? What do you have to do to make that, because obviously that was a huge part of popular culture. For a long time that you know, that was one of the things about that Mulaney show that I was like, oh, I it's interesting that he's doing this. It's not quite working. But not only was that on talk radio, but Larry King used to do it. It's so what's the secret of that? And how come there's not more of it?
JOHN: Callers are diminishing returns. So the call screener needs to so if I'm interviewing, Hey, Jason, what do you want to talk to John about? And I have to get it out of you. And then I have to really try and coach you and go, okay, when you get on, don't bother saying, hi, don't say, thanks for taking my call. He knows we really appreciate it. I want you to open up. And I just want your first sentence to be, Hey da, da, da, da, da, da. da. Now I'm still on a tightrope because you might get on the air and be like, Hey, thanks for taking my call. And it just drags everything to a halt. Unless you have a really good caller. You just want to take their initial point and fade them out. And you don't need them other than to facilitate a discussion point that said, back in the day, there were regulars who knew how to do it. But most civilians can't tell a story.
JASON: Interesting. Interesting. Okay. No, that makes sense.
JOHN: Saturday Night Live turning 50, will Lorne Michaels stick around? I'm looking at this and going take the victory lap. You're 80, 81 years old. It's not going to get any better. I don't see anyone going season 52 was great Lorne. I think you got to get out here. People who know him like Seth seem to think he's going to stick around. What do you think?
JASON: The short answer is I don't know, but as you say, the people who are closer to it than me think he's sticking around and the people who know him better than I do think he's sticking around until he can't do it anymore. And I, it's such a hard thing to replace him. I think much harder than people realize that I don't think, and God knows no one's going to push him out. I don't know. So I could, I guess we'll still be, but who knows? We'll see. Look, we're all going to have to be thinking and writing and talking about SNL next year, a lot more let's not do it now. Cause we're all going to have to do it next year. A lot. Get ready for all, there's people who've got, are going to have to watch every episode of all 50 years. We're going to have to write lists. There's going to be, there's a book, the Lorne bio is finally going to come out next year by Susan Morrison from the New Yorker. That's probably like the most anticipated comedy book of next year. And I think I imagine that will be a big doorstop with all sorts of, comedy dirt in it. Even if it wasn't the 50th anniversary, that would be. We, a big source of conversation.
JOHN: Did you see this thing, I'm sure you did, with Kimmel and Letterman developing a talk show for Luenell? I just saw that before I jumped on with you. That's like a real life Hacks episode. I looked it up, she's 65. And when I watched Hacks, my initial reaction and they addressed it was like, they're not going to give Debra Vance a show at her age. And here we are living a Hacks episode.
JASON: Yes I did see that. We'll, I'll believe when I see it and I and but I think why not, I feel like I, she's one of these people who've been around for a long time I think I, I saw her open for Katt Williams at Barclays a little while ago. I think I just saw her pop up in a movie from like the nineties. Anyways, I think she so yeah she's paid her dues. She's she deserves a show just like Debra Vance does.
JOHN: All right. Three hours ago, I asked you if Nikki Glaser has stepped up in class.
JASON: I think, yeah, I think that she was probably the big winner of the Netflix weekend. I think. Although, it's funny. I think there's one, what was interesting about her week is she was the star of the roast on Netflix. And then she released a special on HBO max on max. And which raises the question, why didn't Netflix have that special? And I do think that look, that points to another issue, Which looking to the future, which is, isn't that isn't, are these other streamers going to start to eat into Netflix is territory. And the fact that they didn't have Nikki Glaser, which they did have, her previous special and she clearly is still. Figure on their streamer was interesting to me. Did she raise a class? Yeah, I think so. But she, she's been steadily building for a while. You could, her reality show is doing what she's she has an incredible, first of all, I think I find her very incredibly consistent, amazing work ethic, talented in a lot of different ways. She's somebody who I think could go in a different direction with a special could be more, she's so on talk shows, she's so good and so revealing and so introspective and on, on specials she is sometimes, but she's usually just like a killer joke, just incredible joke teller. I feel like if you could sort of merge those two things she'd have a real blockbuster.
JOHN: It was a weird week of press. She crushed so hard on the roast. There was no buzz on the special. It was very strange the special kind of came and went and people are still talking about the roast.
JASON: I think that's partly has to do with just Netflix and also roasts. That roast got so although I don't like maybe you can know more than I but I felt like I saw conflicting reports about the ratings. That's another example of something that was like an hour too long that if it was not live, there's no question it would have been edited down an hour and would have been better and probably, and I would assume it would get higher ratings, but I saw some reports that it got crazy ratings. I saw some others that Katt Williams got better ratings. So who knows, but the but I I don't I think her special didn't do worse because of that roast, I think, because it's like you're saying before, there's still a ton of people who don't know Nikki Glaser, right? He's a tremendously successful standup comedian, but that that roast still raised her profile because it was a thing that everyone was talking about and it was trending for days.
JOHN: So ratings wise, I think I saw what you saw the first weekend that more people watched Katt quote unquote live than the roast. But I saw something last night that... vague numbers here, 239 million views, eyeballs, whatever the Netflix metric is on day one, but it held that number all week. So it seemed like it had legs off the buzz. Uh, I think part of Nikki and you brought up Netflix versus HBO max, HBO max, they've goofed up the brand. So this week, Hannah Einbinder has a new special normally HBO specials come out Saturday at 10 PM and Hannah's is out on a Thursday. And then I started wondering, so is this not an HBO special? Did she get a Max special? And what the heck does that even mean? And does it matter? And it's just, it's confusing. Most civilians aren't going to care, but I just looked at it and I'm like, so is this special somehow, I don't mean this is dig, but like lesser, it's not the equivalent of a Saturday night HBO special from back in the day. It's a Thursday Max special. I don't know. They've confused me.
JASON: Yes. No, I think they, that I think they've given up a lot of the prestige of their brand that said, or that's set and clearly like they're, that the company is not doing well, they're going to lose Charles Barkley and inside the NBA , they're in debt, right? That, that said, all right let's try to defend them a little bit, which is that what I think they're trying to do, which is the smart move that they can't compete with Netflix in terms of money and in terms of scale. And now you've got Hulu coming in, which is going to have a big special every month. And they've already signed up people like Gaffigan and Sebastian Maniscalco. What H what Max is doing is I think is trying to get the kind of Slightly artier draw Carmichael Julio Torres, Hannah Einbinder. They're not going for the biggest mass appeal. So in a way that I think is consistent with their traditional brand writ large but it doesn't mean the same thing that it did in the seventies when they had the whole market to themselves or the nineties when they had Chris rock. And it was like a major event that's those days are gone. So now they, now, the big events tend to be on Netflix. So what do you do if you're a secondary streamer? And I think they have a decent strategy and that’s, Certainly, I'll continue cleaning up the transcript to the end:
JASON: I think what I like. I agree with your point that it's a mess and confusing to be a consumer of comedy these days and to find where everything is. And I think in a couple of years, it's going to look different. And what I hope it looks like is that each of these platforms has a personality has a style and people who want that can go there, right? What it will probably be will not be that will be a mess so that's why I liked the fact that H that max, even though it's not Friday, seems curated in a specific, with a specific.
JOHN: Well, They had even this century, maybe not for comedy, but for drama shows, they could have thrown this conversation on Sunday night at 9 p.m. and people would have sampled it and assumed it was prestige. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. But we would have gotten the goodwill off the first episode. People would have tuned in.
JASON: That's true. That's true. No I, it's interesting. I didn't realize about the, that hers was coming out on Thursday. That's I wonder why.
JOHN: Maybe you can help me sort my feelings here. I've been struggling with this one. As close as I've gotten is special versus hour. So every comedian tweets out, Hey, check out my new special on YouTube. And if we graph everything out, at one end, I don't know, there's Carlin at Carnegie, and at the other end, there's, I happen to have a still camera at the Chuckle Hut Tuesday night at 10 p.m., and everyone's using the word special, and I have got a new special, I don't even know what I want from you, but help me, not everything is a special.
JASON: That it's very fuzzy these days, right? Here's my glass half full version. I feel like it's the best of times, the worst of times. There's more specials than ever now or more releases than ever. And the good part of that is the funniest comedy out there doesn't tend to be the most famous people. The for totally boring reasons. They have other things to do than work on their jokes, right? They have they're busy, right? So the people who tend to be have the most worked out jokes are the kind of mid career comedians who have trouble getting a Netflix deal, right? And now. They have a place and an outlet to release their stuff, YouTube, right?
JASON: So you see, people like Nathan MacIntosh who, or the next one I saw is Raanan Hirschberg or who has one coming up soon. Liz Miele, these, we're in a time where these people now you can see their stuff, not only as easy as you can see the stuff on HBO, but easier, right? And I think that's a good thing. And I don't want to say oh, they're not, it's not special. And this is special because not only is it not true that they're worse, they're there in many cases, they're often better. But too, it's like, who, what's the point in policing these genres? I do think we'll look back and we'll say man, there was more bad comedy then than ever, but there's also more good comedy. Great comedy than ever. It's harder to find the good stuff now because there's so much of it. And that's part of our job is to be like, Hey, like, all right, everybody knows Joe Rogan and the roast and all this, but that's not really the best comedy. Nobody who knows comedy thinks that's the best comedy. The that's increasing to the point that we started with it, which is like, all right. How have our jobs shifted? We've got to cover the big stuff because that's what people want to read. And that's important. But I think we have an increasing responsibility to be like, okay, let's look at what's going on in these on YouTube, on TikTok, et cetera, and find the good stuff.
JOHN: You've been incredibly generous with your time. Let me pick your brain, and I'll let you go about comedy snobbery. When I ran Sirius comedy, so I'm sitting at a desk five days a week, got the radio on from, eight to six. All I'm hearing is the best stand up comedians performing their best material that they've pressed. And it fried my brain, and I call it the Emperor of Rome Syndrome. So if I go see a show, I'm like, oh. I don't laugh. I'm now a psychopath, but my brain is analyzing and going, Oh, that's hilarious. And I'm thinking it just in the manner I did. Oh, that's really funny. Oh, great callback. Oh, wow. This is an awesome set. Has doing what you do, has it fried your brain?
JASON: It's a really good question. The short answer is yes. That when it becomes your job, first of all, if you see comedians in the back of comedy clubs, they don't laugh the way regular people do. And it's no different than people like you and I who who often you're not the best audience member. In fact, one weird phenomenon of my job is I feel bad. I sometimes, I think something's funny, but I don't laugh and I know what makes me a bad audience member. Sometimes I fake laugh. If I'm in a small room where the laugh really matters or having someone's stone faced is like going to disrupt the proceedings, like I'll fake laugh, which I'm not as convincing as a fake, which comes off ridiculous.
JASON: You do what you do. But so I do think that it's a danger of the job, which is you, and it's something you have to be aware of and you have to factor in, cause you don't want, you want to be in touch with both your honest reaction to something. And also what how the ordinary consumer receives this stuff, I like it's self justifying, but I tend to think that the advantages of being experienced and well versed in comedy and knowing, the vast sweep of the history of the form and seeing enough to know what's good versus bad, what's ambitious versus not, what's predictable, what's cliche, all that stuff outweighs the negative of becoming of not laughing quite as much. And I also will say this, that like the moment when you aren't excited about seeing something, the moment when you get cynical or jaded about comedy is when you when I'll quit, so that's something you gotta always be kicking the tires on or I have to be kicking the tires on which I do
JOHN: Have you ever run into I ran into this early in my career not so much lately But hey, you're not a comedian. How come you're doing this and all this and I was just explained like I don't play guitar, but I can recognize that Eddie Van Halen's pretty good at it. Like I'm not claiming to be a comedian. I'm a dude in a basement or I was a radio programmer. I don't know.
JASON: Yeah. That doesn't bother me. The if anything, I consider it a benefit, a plus because I, in fact, you'll never find me doing the gimmick piece of Oh, and then I went and tried standup and, and I bombed and I learned how much I respected that to me, respecting the artist, whether it's a comedian or whether it's a theater artist or a film artist is becoming, as good as I can be at my job, which is fundamentally different. Like comedians couldn't. Comedians are good at what they do. And what I do is quite hard as well. And it also looks easy, right? Just doing comedy is easy or looks easy, but is actually incredibly hard being a critic covering an incredibly diverse, complicated field is and then translating that into prose that both the expert and the casual fan can understand without limiting the complexity of it and nuance. That's very tricky. And that's enough of a challenge for me. And I actually tend to think that not being a comedian helps me in that job. It, besides the fact it reduces the conflict of interest and keeps your independence, et cetera. But I think that um, it's a fundamentally different skillset. And so when people say, oh, you're not a comedian, I said, that's right. I'm not a comedian. Yeah, 100%.
JOHN: When I was programming the stations and I still program for Live One, I wanted to make sure I was coming in at civilian eye level and the civilians are listening to Jim Gaffigan. You and I can go to a club and be too cool for school and deep dive, but it's the same thing I brought up nine times, but play the hits. Thanks.
JASON: No, you gotta look I don't understand people who do with my job. I know there's some of them who say this and I, I respect a lot of them. Or I expect all of them who it's hard. It's a hard job. But my audience, my primary audience is the reader. And I, there, I don't see the comedy world is not my community. I'm a journalist who's working in my, my and my audience is the reader. I, my, I have obligation to be fair to the artists and I, No, I hear from them and I know like I want, I want their respect as I want anybody else's respect, but I do think it's important for people just as I think it's important for Comedians to see their audience their primary audience not their only audience their primary audience as their people sitting in front of them or watching their special that I have to think about what the reader wants first And when I get away from that, I think I could, I run into problems.
JASON: So yeah, I think, and there, there's room, people have different points of view on this. But but yeah I, it's funny because, uh, I'm a critic, but I'm also a reporter. So I talk to comedians, interview them. I learn a lot from that. That helps me understand what they're trying to do. There's value in that, but there's also value in independence. Yeah. And you sometimes can see, and you know, comedians, frankly, understand this better than other artists because they're often critics of whatever social conditions, politics, whatever, and they can often diagnose something. More perceptively than people in the news can because they have, or journalists can because they have a little more distance. So distance can be an advantage as well.
JOHN: And it keeps you out of the fights, there were, I don't have to name particular names. There are comedians who do really well and aren't respected by the brick wall cigarette smoking crowd in the village. And I will name names. I worked with the blue collar guys. Larry, the cable guy, Dan is the nicest guy you'll ever meet. Unless Jeff Foxworthy is in the room. They are awesome people. And you know, I've been backstage with them and Larry would write Jeff a joke that just didn't work for Larry's act. And Jeff would write something a little naughty and pass it back and forth. And they're not, they're just trying to make people laugh. They're not going, Oh, Larry, the cable guy, this is, high art, like it's just jokes. And some of that, especially in New York that bitterness about somebody else's success would get fatiguing.
JASON: You know what else? Larry, the cable guy is good at what he does. I've when I wrote about them, I made a point of, I went to Beaumont, Texas to see the that tour I didn't, I wanted to go to like there and I watched all of them and, Larry, I believe came last. And I think that was the right move because he's a, he's a killer and he has an incredibly dense punchline rich set. Not every joke is great but if you don't like it, and no one's coming down the pike fast you know, it's not like the hippest obviously brand of comedy and it's a character driven comedy, which used, it feels There's, it's, you don't see it quite as much in the clubs as you used to. But anyways, the yeah, I think it's the kind of journalism that I do and not everyone has to be like this, but I try to have Catholic tastes. I try to meet artists where they are. That doesn't mean that everything is equally good, but I think that's part of the fun of the job is seeing people of artists of wildly different genres. Aesthetics ambitions that, that's what makes this fun to, to follow.
JOHN: I love that you went to Beaumont. When I first put together Blue Collar Radio, the first time I met them, I went to see a show. The show was in Nashville, and I specifically asked them, please don't VIP me. Put me in the upper deck with the civilians and I sat there and I paid attention and I was just trying to take the vibe in and I always remembered the two things that got big applause were, y'all ever been to the Walmart? A mention of Jimmy Buffett and a mention of Elvis. And I factored that into my programming, whereas the raw dog channel was, if it were a person, maybe it would be Bill Burr and it had a real, you know, FU and a rock and roll kind of vibe and blue collar radio was God flag, country veterans, straight apple pie, cracker barrel, straight down the middle, and it did tremendously well.
JASON: Yep. Yep. No, it's true. And that's one of the great things about standup is that you've got all these like regional forms that are, that do well. Sometimes I worry that the Internet's sort of flattening that out. And I wrote a story last year about how the internet is the internet hurting distinct local scenes. Because there used to be like Boston had a specific aesthetic that you could associate San Francisco, which was different than San Francisco, which was different than DC which was different than Nashville. But now since everyone is in the same room together online this idea of oh the comedians in my scene are the only ones I know coming up is obsolete. And is that gonna sand off the edges of local difference? And I don't know. Some people, I've talked to some people in various local scenes who suggest that's happening.
JOHN: And there's so much out there, we're nearly an hour in, and we've really only talked big comedians. We haven't talked alt. We didn't talk improv. We didn't talk sketch. We didn't talk one person shows like somebody like Natalie Palamides is just doing amazing work. There's just so much out there.
JASON: I just saw her new show, which I'll be honest with you. I was like, How can she top Nate? But I saw her new show at the Netflix festival in LA. And it was the best thing I saw there. It wasn't finished, but it was thrilling. And I can't wait to see it when it's done. It's basically like a rom com where she plays both. She plays both parts of this romance and the physicality of it is just incredibly inventive. I've noticed anything like it's, yeah, we get that the whole clowning scene is booming.