AVC: That joke turns up when people Google you, so obviously some people responded to it. Although it seems like you have enough of a following and you've been around long enough that people would cut you some slack.
SW: Yeah, but you know, the audience still won't laugh at a joke unless they think it's funny. I know that because I try out new jokes within my show, I slip some in here and there, and ever since the beginning, I've had a one-in-five, or one-in-four ratio. For every four or five I write, one will be good enough to stay in the act, and that's still true even now. So I just can't get away with saying anything because I've been around this long and they know me. I know that because sometimes I say those new ones, and a thousand people blankly look back at me.
AVC: Is that terrifying, after all these years?
SW: It's a little awkward, but the only way you can get the new stuff is to go through that. It's not horrifying, it's just awkward, and you're disappointed it didn't work. But then you go on to something that does work, and then maybe later on try another new one. I wouldn't try 10 new ones in a row, because that would probably create a huge silence. It would be too long.
AVC: Is there any place you particularly enjoy or dread playing?
SW: No. To me, it's relatively the same. I think television has made the whole country, in a sense, kind of like one big town. Everyone knows the same references, the same words. I talk about such basic stuff; it doesn't matter if I'm talking about lint in Miami or Seattle, or even in other countries. I don't have to change many things.
AVC: You don't have region-specific material. You don't do jokes about one pancake house in Alabama or anything.
SW: Yeah, I'm talking about electricity and gravity and birds.
AVC: What jobs did you have before you made a living as a stand-up comedian?
SW: I worked in the Houghton-Mifflin Publishing Company warehouse packing books and shipping them out to schools and stores. I painted apartments in Boston; I parked cars on and off for several years in Boston at some clubs and restaurants. MIT in Cambridge has its own department store, and I ran a cash register in there. I shoveled snow off rooftops in Aspen, Colorado so the buildings wouldn't cave in.
AVC: It seems like those jobs would give you a lot of time to think of jokes.
SW: Especially the painting ones, because I would paint with a couple of friends of mine, and painting is so boring. We'd be in some room painting, and the conversation was hilarious. I was painting apartments, painting the school I went to, actually, when I started doing comedy. Some of the stuff I thought of while painting, I'd go on stage and try that night.
AVC: What year did you start doing comedy professionally?
SW: In July of '79.
AVC: The '80s are viewed as a golden age of stand-up comedy. Did you feel like you were part of that rising tide?
SW: Yeah, I started out right before and during that explosion in the early '80s, so it was excellent, because there were so many clubs. Just in Boston, there were two or three. You could work so much. You could go back and forth. You could do three shows in one night in Boston if you started at one, did a second show at the other club, and then came back to the first one to do the last show. And the more you go on, the more you learn, so it really was great accidental timing.
AVC: It seems that everyone was starting out at that time. Did you enjoy talking about the craft of comedy? Would you finish a set and then talk to other comedians about how it went?
SW: Yeah, I'd talk to them, what they did and what I did, noticing little things, "If you'd do this," "If I'd do this," there was a lot of that during that time. Because so many guys were just starting out doing it, there were only a couple who had been doing it way before that, at least in the Boston area.
AVC: Did anybody mentor you, or teach you the craft of comedy?
SW: Mike McDonald helped me with the idea of focusing on what worked rather than being bummed out on what didn't work. That really helped me a lot. We were all learning at the same time. Other than him, I can't say a specific person.
AVC: It seems like, especially in the '80s, stand-up was a starting ground to bigger things. A lot of guys were like, "Well, I'll do comedy for a couple years, and then I'll get my own sitcom, and then I'll never have to worry about money ever again." Did anybody ever try to get you to do a sitcom?
SW: Yeah, I had people approach me to do that two or three times. When I went into this, I wasn't thinking "This might go onto a TV show," I was doing it for what it really was. And when they approached me, I didn't really see how my thing could be in a sitcom format, so I didn't want to do it.
AVC: Did they have ideas that you'd adopt a gaggle of multicultural children, or have a wacky neighbor, or a dog that's an alien?
SW: No, it never got that far. It was never in my sensibility of what I wanted to do. I'm such a loner guy, too, I wanted to go write my material and go on the road when I wanted to go, and just kind of do what I was doing.
AVC: You've appeared in a fair number of movies. Do you have to audition?
SW: Lots of times I do. Sometimes they just want me to be in it, but I would say for more than half, I have to go in and audition.
AVC: Do you feel like you have to show them that you've got chops or range? It seems like when you're in a movie, you're doing—
SW: I'm just doing me; I'm just acting like me.
AVC: Right. Do you get a lot of direction? Are there people trying to get you to push your range?
SW: Not push my range, but after different takes, they'll address the pacing, or "Say it a little bit more like this." So within what I do, even in that, they can make changes.
AVC: Where do you keep your Academy Award?
SW: In my living room. When I came back to New York, it was in a plastic bag inside my carry-on luggage, and when I went through security at the airport, they wanted to see what this metal thing was. This guy took it out, looked at me, and just put it back in, and I left. And I think he was completely bewildered, because I wasn't a big movie star. I always wondered what he was thinking.
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