enough to not ask him to do our movie. He knew I wanted him, and he would certainly have done it if he wanted. I stayed in touch with him, writing e-mails about our movie and how it was going and about atheism. I was writing to fucking Johnny Carson. I told him our movie was going to open at Sundance, and he asked whether the movie’s director, Paul Provenza, and I would come to his house in Malibu after the festival and screen it for him. Holy fucking shit.
We did Sundance and we were a hit. A big fucking hit. There was only one thing more exciting than showing our movie for the crowds at Sundance, and that was the prospect of showing our comedy movie to Johnny Carson. It would be the end of this project. The morning after our debut at Sundance, Provenza and I were having a hot chocolate to celebrate our success. My cell phone rang. It was Randi telling me that Johnny Carson had died. Provenza and I sat and cried into our hot chocolate all morning. The joy was gone. We pulled back the print and added “For Johnny Carson” to the end of the movie. Okay, so fuck you, we made a great movie and people loved it, but we never got to show it to Johnny. Life speeds by and no matter how much joy there is, there is sadness.
If we had let Teller wave at the end of the “Water Tank,” I would have met Johnny Carson, but we talked on the phone and we wrote e-mails, and maybe that’s okay. It’ll have to be okay.
The first time we did “Water Tank” was on
Ten years later, we had done the bit thousands of times, and we were playing much bigger places. I was able to get the back row of a 5,000-seat theater to understand with less than I used to get a close-up on TV to be clear. With my style and my movement, one little move of the head could get a bigger reaction from the back row than a full body turn. And those people wouldn’t even know how they’d figured out what I was thinking. Thousands of times had taught me how to really communicate. It takes so little, but it takes time to get that little.
Electronic media had forced a lot of novelty down our throats at the expense of skill. Novelty at the expense of nuance. I thought Andy Warhol said something like if they were going to do pretty much the same situation comedies every week on TV, why didn’t they do the exact same situation comedy every week on TV and get good at it. Since electronic mass media, there’s this sense of “new” that really bugs me.
Lance Burton, Master Magician, has a dove routine in Vegas. He’s magically pulling birds out of his jacket. Everyone knows he’s pulling them out of his jacket; there’s no other way to do the trick. He comes out onstage looking twenty pounds heavier than he looks when all the birds have flown magnificently to the back of the theater. Lance did that show seven nights a week, two shows a night, for decades. Other stuff in his show changed, but that dove opener was the same every night. Exactly the same. Every move. Every smile. How could he stand that? Well, he could stand that because he was living Groundhog Day, and he loved it. Lance had a chance to get good at something.
John Belushi had that one chance to nail that
I can go out onstage and just try breathing in a different place to see if a line is smoother. I’m living my thousand years of Groundhog Day. That’s a rare thing in life, where you have something you want to say from your heart and you get to say it over and over again and get it better. Get it right. There are conversations with my wife I would like to have a thousand times so she understood me perfectly. These audiences get to hear me say for their first time something I’ve said a thousand times. I should be able to get them to feel what I want. There is the art. The art is Groundhog Day.
SICK DAYS
HOW MUCH WOULD YOU SPEND, right now, cash money, for five photographs of me getting a blow job? There are a lot of sex pictures in my collection, but only five of them are clearly me. It’s my fifty-year-old, 6?7?, 300-pound body standing there with an attractive, red-headed woman, a good friend of mine, and she has my proportionate-but-no-more penis in her mouth. I’m enjoying myself. She’s enjoying herself. She’s wearing a blindfold, so one of my personal sextortionists billboarded it as “Hardcore S&M.” At the time the pictures were taken, both of us were single, and so was the person taking the picture. I don’t remember her birthday, but she was just under thirty. There might have been a twenty-year age difference, but I’m so wicked old that she was still double the legal age in some farm states. Someone who used to work for me sold a laptop without wiping it really clean. Someone else got hold of it and went to a lawyer who specializes in extortion. That asshole lawyer got in touch with my groovy lawyer, who specializes, at least with me, on death threats against me for being an atheist. The asshole wondered whether I might be interested in keeping these pictures from going public. This is known as extortion. Or blackmail. The only unusual thing about it is that it was happening to me.
How can blackmail happen to me? What’s to blackmail me on? I wrote a bestselling book that included a chapter on my visit to a gay bathhouse, possibly with “Patient Zero” and trying to have gay sex. In the same book I wrote about group sex and having a fat Elvis impersonator piss on me in public. I’ve written about dropping my cock in a blow dryer and fucking a famous model underwater. I once had a CNN cameraman shoot my poisoned bleeding balls. There are pictures and stories of me wrestling naked with a little person, a man, both of us naked, in wet cornstarch. To use incorrect terms, there are pictures of me butt-naked wrestling a butt-assed-naked dwarf. We got rough, he was choking and he almost died. I came close to being the perp in naked homosexual dwarf murder. Isn’t that a little kinky? Even in the twenty-first century, that’s a little kinky, right? I’ve been to the Fetish and Fantasy Halloween Ball dressed as a leather daddy. I did a show called
