AVC: When you're taping in front of a live studio audience, do you find you're playing to them as much or more as the people at home?
LCK: It's not so much that you're playing to them, it's just that they tell you what's working. It's like doing stand-up. You would never do stand-up without an audience. I mean, no one would even consider it. It's like they're the instrument you're playing. It's that intimate of a relationship, and they're that essential to each other. Performing comedy, you develop a rhythm of ideas and laughs. I live for it. It's the greatest thing, and when I realized there's this other way of doing it that's been done, I was excited. [Jackie] Gleason wouldn't rehearse. Other actors had to be great because they had to work around his improvising, but also just not knowing his lines. He would find these great moments. It didn't matter that some shit wasn't done in focus. When I watch shows like Friends, where every shot is framed perfectly and manicured, you don't have a sense that the audience is there. They're just talking to each other, even when they're not. The last few seasons of Friends, they didn't have an audience. They put in a laugh track. There is a man. His name is The Laugh Man, and he puts canned laughter in every show in Hollywood.
AVC: That's got to be the most soul-crushing job.
LCK: It would be if you cared. Everybody in Hollywood does it this way. They take a show and they want to compress it as much as possible so that it has that Just Shoot Me kind of clever-clever-clever-clever little laughs. Because most TV writers have disdain for audiences. There's this snobbery that regular people are just not good enough to laugh at your show. If comedy writers put their stuff before audiences and they don't get laughs, their faces turn red and they go "Fuck these people," and they fake the laughs. The energy comes from somewhere else. The show moves along quickly, and they put in these tiny little ha-ha laughs that you just know are fake, because they're all precisely the same size. A show like Lucky Louie, the laughs are coming through my microphone because the audience is right on top of us. There's no separation. Sometimes they laugh for too long or make weird noises or cough. Fuck it. It's a show.
AVC: The last time you spoke to us, you were taping a pilot called Saint Louie. What happened with that?
LCK: It went through the paces. It was tested. It did okay. It didn't destroy. We were considered a contender to go on the air. The day of the upfronts, they told us, "Don't come down."
AVC: How was that show different from Lucky Louie?
LCK: Well, it was shot on film. We were supposed to be a couple just barely making it in Brooklyn, so we had an enormous apartment that would have cost literally $12,000 a month. The script was re-worked and re-worked and re-worked and punched up and punched up and over, over, overwritten to the point where there was no real life to it. I'm really glad it didn't go on the air.
AVC: So it was more of a conventional sitcom.
LCK: Yeah. There were times on Lucky Louie where we overwrote. There's a kind of religion people have of how you do sitcoms. I ran into that on my own show, because I wasn't doing it on my own. It was hard. Saint Louie was a real learning process for me.
AVC: What character did you play on Saint Louie? Was it basically yourself?
LCK: It was me, a couple of years before Lucky Louie. There was one baby, a 2-year-old. There was definitely a lot more hand-wringing, a lot more "C'mon, honey!" But it was me. I was just playing myself.
AVC: Judging from your audio commentary, it seems like you read a lot of the negative reviews and online chatter regarding Lucky Louie. Why subject yourself to that? Isn't that like pouring salt into wounds?
LCK: I usually don't, but I wasn't doing anything. I was going crazy. Because we stopped taping the show in February, but we didn't go on the air until June. Then we had to wait week after week for a pick-up and news. So you start going nuts. We were desperate to know if we'd be back on the air, and the sum of these blogs does have an influence. So I ended up taking the temperature of the show every few days. Some pieces, I didn't make it past the first two sentences. One woman wrote that I was ugly. Some people were just petty and gross about it. One guy wrote "Lucky Louie? F that guy!" Like, fuck you too! Those were the meanest, because they had no basis in what the show was. People used words like "revolting." There was one guy who hated it and wrote that it was disgusting to show sex the way we did, and it was overly vulgar, and he complained that the sex wasn't sexy enough, that we didn't have a girl with nice tits sitting on my dick.
AVC: Were any of these reviews constructive? Did they make any valid points?
LCK: One place where I think some reviewers were right was that some of the scripts were common. The show set a standard for itself for being different. It didn't help that HBO's ads said "The end of the sitcom as we know it." I really didn't want that out there, but you can't tell people how to promote your show. It's a losing battle. They're going to do what they do. Some people said that we were trying to be subversive and interesting, but they'd already seen some of the writing. I think that's true. I think there are lots of places in the episodes where we did great stuff, and I think "That's a beautiful show." I love the episodes. But there are some deeper into the production where I wasn't able to keep an eye on all the scripts, where they got sitcom-y, where they got boring, mediocre. I do think that happens, and we got bit for it. Some people who worked on the show felt "We're already groundbreaking, so now it's okay to get safe."
AVC: It's tricky, because you're going for simplicity, but you don't want to be overly simplistic.
LCK: I think it takes a certain approach to watching the show to really get what we did. First of all, the idea "I want to be innovative" is just stupid. I just wanted to tell these fucking stories. The conventions I wanted to do away with were ones that were getting in the way of communicating these ideas, and being as funny as we could be. What I do onstage as a comedian isn't groundbreaking. Every year, the sitcom-writing Emmy goes to some episode that's like, "This one was done backwards." So fucking what? I don't get off on that. I think that's what a lot of people hoped for, that we'd do a sitcom that'd be subversive because it wasn't real, like I'm going to look at the camera or walk off the set.
AVC: You have a co-writing credit on I Thing I Love My Wife. Whose idea was it to remake an Eric Rohmer film as a Chris Rock movie?
LCK: Chris sent me the DVD [of Rohmer's Chloe In The Afternoon] and asked, "Can I do this movie?" I thought it was really interesting. I said, "You'd have to do it entirely differently from any movie you've done before. You can't fall prey to needing a laugh every two minutes. Embrace it for what it is. Let it build slowly and open small, like at Sundance. That's how to do this movie if you really want to." Eh, he didn't do that. I wrote a draft with him, it got re-written, and then I started doing Lucky Louie, frankly. He took it from there. Then I went to the première and was pleasantly surprised. I thought he directed it pretty well, and acted it much better than he's acted in anything else. I think the script was kind of a hatchet job with a few good moments in it.
AVC: Did much of what you wrote make it into the film?
LCK: Not really. I had the idea of things getting worse and worse, and going to Washington D.C. was my idea. But then he took it to the guy getting shot and beaten up by the cops, which seemed a little much for me. Chris is really bright, and I love working with him. He's one of my best friends in comedy, but that's something that kind of got away from me because I wasn't on hand to work on it much. But I think it's one of the better things he's done on film. He's learning how to make movies right in front of everybody. He's making movies himself rather than accepting the shitty roles offered him. And they are really bad. But he also made it with Fox Searchlight, and they opened it on thousands of screens.
AVC: Because of your experiences with The Dana Carvey Show, Pootie Tang, and Saint Louie, did you go into Lucky Louie with lowered expectations?
LCK: Commercial success, I can't think about when I'm doing a show. You have to do a show as honestly as you can. But you also can't afford skepticism, because it's preparing for failure, which is useless. You don't need any preparation: Failure's just gonna suck. When you do another show, you gather up steam and use what you've learned from prior projects. You get ready for a network that says it loves the show, and then suddenly I get a call that they're recasting me or whatever. You have to expect the worst from anybody, not because they're evil, but because I'm unproven. It's amazing to me how young TV artists around me expect a huge amount of multi-million-dollar benefit of the doubt with no proven track record. You have to make people some dollars before they trust you. Why wouldn't they? They've seen a million young punks waste their money. It happens all the time. I learned all kinds of shit from Saint Louie.
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