April 29, 2024 • 39 mins
I may not know what makes a good comedian, but I do know what makes a good father.
When Judd and I met in London — where his daughter Maude was playing the lead role of Sally Bowles in Cabaret — he told me this was the eighth time he'd seen it in three weeks.
While I don’t know what makes a good comedian, Judd certainly does. His advice to kickstart your writing: think of a topic and write down as many jokes and one liners as you can. Don't be scared if your first draft doesn't make you laugh out loud — keep going.
There are definite parallels between cooking and comedy. And paraphrasing his words, an aspiring chef should never panic if the first attempt doesn't taste quite right.
Eating and laughing; children and acting; movies and restaurants. We're here today in The River Cafe, and Judd and I will tackle them all.
Life is a cabaret.
Listen to Ruthie's Table 4: Judd Apatow out now - made in partnership with Moncler.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to Ruthy's Table four in partnership with Montclair.
I may not know what makes a good comedian, but
I do know what makes a good father. And last night,
when I met Judd Apatow in the West End production
of Cabaret in London, where his daughter Maude is playing
the lead role of Sally Bowles, he told me this
was the eighth time he'd seen it in three weeks.
(00:23):
And if I may not know what makes a good comedian,
Judd certainly does. His advice to kickstart your writing process,
come up with a topic and write down as many
jokes or one liners as you can think of. Don't
be scared if your first draft doesn't want to make
you laugh out loud, or if you don't find your
own writing funny. I think they are definite parallels in
(00:43):
comedy and cooking, and I can imagine paraphrasing the second
sentence telling an aspiring chef not to be scared if
the first attempt doesn't taste right. Comedy and cooking children
and acting, laughing and eating movies and restaurants. Today we're
here in the River Cafe, and Jed and I will
cover them more for after all I said and done.
(01:03):
Life is a cabaret.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
I agree with that eight times more times this weekend too.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
So lovely, yeah, why not? So I want to talk
to you about cabaret. But for the moment you've just
come from the pastry kitchen or the recipe you chairs,
pistachio ice cream is being made.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
I'm Bellatups, I'm the head pastry chef at the River Cafe,
and these are our ice cream machines and they've actually
got quite a small drum make like roughly two liters
of ice cream. Here is our lovely pistachio base, which
is essentially plain custard that has had the pistashia paste
stirred through it. We do churn. It makes a delightful
(01:54):
noise probably, I mean for this amount, it will take
like four or five minutes, like nothing crazy. So you
can have a look on the topic. You can see
it's sort of lightly creasing. We know that it's nearly there,
but I'll turn it to churn. Then this will just
go into the freezer until it's frozen fully. And in
(02:16):
the restaurant, what we'd do is just before service, we'd
get the ice creams out to temper you mean like
you would do at home so that you can get
a lovely scoop from it, but that it only takes
like five minutes. But just make sure you're using a
cupful of hot water and dipping your scoop in every
time so you get a perfect scoop. Thank you very much,
(02:39):
pleasure enjoy first, lovely to meet you too. I hope
you have a lovely meta.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
What did you think?
Speaker 4 (02:48):
I'm always impressed by people who know how to cook,
because as much as I like food, I don't have
enough interest in making it because I always feel like
there's someone who makes it better, fair enough. So why
would I make myself mediocre food? I can go to
you and get great food. Like it's been eight hours
doing the bad version of what you do.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Well, would you like to start by reading the recipe
for the pistachio ice cream?
Speaker 4 (03:10):
Okay, this is the pistachio ice cream recipe from the
River Cafe. It serves ten or me alone. One thing
I learned during the pandemic is it is possible to
eat a pint of ice cream, finish it, and then
start another one and finish it. Okay, here's what you need.
(03:31):
You need two hundred grams of unsalted, shelled pistachios, four
hundred grams of castor sugar, plus an extra eighty grams,
seven hundred milli liters of full fat milk, no oat milk,
the real stuff, three hundred milliliters double cream, and ten
(03:52):
large egg yolks. You know, in every performance of Cabaret,
it's a scene where Mode has a crack open an
in a cup and eat it on stage every night.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
That's acting for you, that is disciplined. Its to do that.
Speaker 4 (04:08):
It's like that movie with a Nick cage where he
I think it was vampire's kiss and he ate a
bug in it like a cockroach in a scene that's
Mod's equivalent.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Yeah, i'd ag a day is quite a lot.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
It's a very method. Okay, here we go.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
Roast the pistachios in a dry frying pan over medium heat.
Blend roasted pistachos in a food processor with eighty grams
of sugar and mix to a fine paste. Heat the
milk and cream to just below boiling.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
In a bowl. Beat together egg.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
Yolks and four hundred grams of sugar. Add warm milk
and cream into the egg and sugar. Return this custard
mixture to a thick bottomed pan and cook slowly over
heated and low heat until it reaches eighty two degrees.
Remove from the heat, stir in the pistachio paste and
then or through a fine sieve.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Or what do we call it in our country? We
call it a strainer.
Speaker 4 (05:06):
A strainer into a bowl and leave to cool. Cool,
then churn in an ice cream machine. You gotta get
an ice cream machine.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Oh yeah, I do have one.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
No, I don't dangerous so to be for me to
own my own ice cream machine and.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Making pints and pipes. So when you are making a movie, okay,
you're on the set of forty year Old Virgin, one
of my favorites, or Knocked Up? What do you do
about food for your.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Crew on a movie?
Speaker 4 (05:34):
Every day lunch is basically a buffet, and I have
trouble not taking too much from any buffet. Yeah, Like,
that's one of my issues is like this, you know,
fried chicken there, I'm not going to get like one wing.
I mean, I'm gonna like it's hard for me not
to take full advantage. So when I make movies, for
(05:54):
the most part, I don't I can't.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Go to where the food is, like there's usually a tent.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
I have to just have someone tell me what's there
and have them bring it back. And because I'll just
go to like the cheap lemon cake, you know, like
I'll have ice cream Sundays, and then I fall asleep
in the afternoon and I get.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Really tired.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
And you like eating because it makes you feel such up,
but you have to go back to work, right, So
then so you are careful, I mean, well you don't
go to thee But then I mean.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
I get weak.
Speaker 4 (06:27):
So usually about like two thirds through a movie, I
lose my will and then by the end I'm just
gaining weight and binging. But but for a while, I'll
try to control myself. Although when we shot The King
of Staten Island, we were shooting in Staten Island. We
were there for months, and they got good pizza and
Staten Island, so it was pretty hard not to flip
(06:48):
out for pizza. But if I could like lose weight
before a shoot starts, then by the end of the
shoot I am overweight, but not insanely overweight.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
I have to like get a lower baseline to.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
Start, so I have to pretend I'm like Christian Bale
playing a skinny person, and I like lose Weight to
begin and then.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
It falls apart.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
What are you writing at the moment?
Speaker 4 (07:09):
I'm trying to write a movie right now to shoot
next year, which is you know, it's a little bit
about like what's happening in the world of comedy at
this moment where everyone doesn't know what they can say.
So I'm trying to write about people not knowing where
the line is.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Do do you know where the line is?
Speaker 4 (07:28):
Well, for me, the line is never that complicated, because
I think if your heart's in the right place, people know,
and if your point is reasonable and kind, you can
get away with all sorts of things. I think people
can tell when you're being outrageous with no real point
to it, and some people love that, and I think
that's fine. I think it's fine for anyone to enjoy
(07:50):
anything like It's like music. You might like heavy metal,
you might like country music. Everyone picks their flavor. I
think it's hard when people feel like they're getting force
fed the flavor they don't want and then suddenly like
why you have to say, well, you don't have to
listen to.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
That or watch that. But it's definitely a tricky time.
So I'm trying to.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Find it be a movie about a comedian.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
Not a comedian about a writer. And so I just
finished the draft of that. Hopefully I'll get to do
that next year.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
One of my favorite movies of a long, long time
ago was King of Comedy.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
Yeah you like that Jerry Lewis and Robert de Niro
and Sandra Bernhard one of my favorite movies. Loved it
when it came out, wasn't a big hit. It came
out after the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, so the
whole plot line of kidnapping a celebrity freaked people out
a bit and also obsessed fans freak people out at
(08:47):
the time. But as the decades have passed, I think
people realize it's one of Martin Scorcey's best movies.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
I haven't seen it again, I have so many times
I'd like to see it.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
In fact, it's one of the movies I watch to
pay attention to the cinematography and the shot selection because
it's very alive, but it's covered in a way that
really works for comedy. So seeing how Scorsese shoots humor
is really helpful. So I always watch.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
It for me. What was interesting about that was the
movie was the idea that comedians had to be funny,
And you know, is Steve Martin funny? Is Meilbrooks funny?
As I think when I did my talk about Mailbrooks,
I said something that people we always think about as
a man who makes us laugh, but I also think
about the man who talks about Bankroft and what happened
(09:37):
when she died. There is the pressure, as someone who
writes about funniness or humor to be funny. Do you
feel that people expect you to?
Speaker 4 (09:46):
I mean, it is a weird pressure to try to
be funny in your work all day. It's kind of
an unnatural state.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
You know.
Speaker 4 (09:51):
Most people don't try to be funny that often. So
imagine sitting in office and trying to be funny for
ten straight first. I mean, it's you're kind of a
weird person to like just be in that gear all
the time and looking for it all the time. So
it does get a little exhausting to be in that
headspace looking at life through that lens. Ye, what's weird
(10:12):
about this? What's funny about this? The good part about
it is that when you're in comedy. When bad things happen,
you don't go oh, no, a bad thing happened, you go, oh,
this would be a great story.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
And so sometimes when things go.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
Really bad, like I threw out the first pitch at
a Mets baseball game, and I thought, well, if it
goes bad, it's a good story, and if it goes good,
it's just good.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
And so there is a way of looking at life.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
How did it go.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
It wasn't in the middle.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
It wasn't bad enough to be a good story, and
it wasn't good enough to not be a triumph.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
It was just like, that's a big deal.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
That's a big deal getting to to I mean again
for the listeners who may live in some other country.
That's where was it.
Speaker 4 (10:51):
It was a city field in New York and it
was the Mets versus Yankees, so it was sold out.
There were fifty two thousand people there. Yeah, and was terrifying.
And I always joke that the worst part was when
they announced me throwing out the first pitch. I didn't
really get more than a very small smatter of applause,
(11:12):
and I thought, I think I'm more famous than this.
I mean, I'm from New York. Aren't I a beloved
son of New York? And I realized that no one
cares about me.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
It was they just wanted the game to start.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
It was like a politician was doing it.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Yeah, maybe they don't do it for anyone. Absolutely, did
you grow up in New York?
Speaker 2 (11:28):
We lived on Long Island where siast would bury. Area
of Long Island.
Speaker 4 (11:33):
A lot of bagels being eaten there. Yeah, it's a
big bagel town. At midnight, you'd go to the bagel
place while they were cooking him and get them right
out of the oven.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
There's nothing like a bagel that's Also, West Coast isn't
as good? Is it that New Yorkers always say it's
Some people have said it's the water that makes it good.
Then we heard that theory that they say the reason
you can't have a good bagel outside of New York
is the water in New York?
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Is that true? You understand how the bread works?
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Because also I think that maybe i've had bagels. It's
really hard to insult a country's bagels.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
When someone has a good bagel.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
But we know. But they took me once to the
East End to what's that street? Do you know Bricklay
Brickday bagels, and they're bagels and the British are really
really proud of them. So I have got a podcast
that I would like to go on and on, So
I won't say I think that, but when you have
a New York bagel, it makes all the difference, you know,
I think that. But I don't know about La bagels.
Speaker 5 (12:28):
How are they?
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Theyre pretty much the same.
Speaker 4 (12:30):
There's some people who seem to have cracked the code.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
I don't know. They're bringing some water from New York
or maybe the whole water thing is a mess.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
That the whole thing is a mess. Yeah, rightctly and everybody.
So you grew up in Long Island eating bagels and
smelling bagels, and what was the food like in your house?
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Uh?
Speaker 4 (12:46):
Not impressive. I can't say my late mother was a
master chef. We had a very small rotation of chicken, chicken, cutlet, salmon,
sometimes like.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
A pot roast. Our.
Speaker 4 (13:01):
Vegetable was usually peas and corn. I don't think broccoli
got cooked in my house. Yeah. I think I refused
to eat a salad till mid twenties.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Yeah, maybe you didn't know, but we didn't grow up
on salads.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
There wasn't a lot of salads, a lot of Chinese
food happening.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
There was going out for it.
Speaker 4 (13:17):
Going out fair amount of McDonald's happening. But then my
parents opened a restaurant.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Oh yeah, so just going back one step. Your mother
would cook the pot roast of the chicken.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Did she work well? They owned a restaurant.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
And then when she was doing the restaurant, you'd come
home and have supper. How many in the family there
was five, five of us children.
Speaker 4 (13:37):
And at some point I think my mom made all
the cakes for the restaurant. She started cooking the desserts
for it. And I was a dishwasher.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
What was a restaurant.
Speaker 4 (13:46):
It was called Raisins and it was like, I don't
know what you would call it, American continental. It was
like steak, lobster, chicken, parmesan. It was it seemed like
some Italian some hamburgers. And I, you know, they bring.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
In a big bag of muscles, Give me a brush.
Speaker 4 (14:02):
I'd have to clean the muscles and pull the hair
out of the muscles.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
What a nightmare.
Speaker 4 (14:08):
No one, No one's paid enough money to rip hairs
off a mussel. I have nightmares about someone going, can
you do the muscles today?
Speaker 1 (14:15):
We'll go check it the way we could have set
a pistachio ice cream. We could, Well, we don't do muscles.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Actually, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
I don't like muscles that much. I like clams, but
I'm not a big muscle.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
I'm not.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
I didn't mind peeling the potatoes and give me a
fifty pound bag of potatoes. I'm happy to feel them
cut them into French fries myself. I got no issue
with that.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
So let's go back to raisins. Your father, he wasn't
a chef, so they just did it as a business
as a business. So before that he was he was
working in the record business.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
And well, my grandfather was a jazz producer who produced
Charlie Parker and the first Janis Joplin record.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
His name was Bobby Shadd.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
What was the first Janis jopord?
Speaker 4 (14:50):
It was called Big Brother in the Holding Company, which
is her first album My generation.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Yeah, and that I can remember the cover of the
the Big Brother. Yeah, hold on take a little piece of.
Speaker 4 (15:02):
My Heart right, that's right, that was on that record
that dad produced, that my grandfather did.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Your grandfather, it had that song down on me a
song of hers.
Speaker 4 (15:12):
And so my father worked for him when I was
a kid for a while, and they had some friends
and owned a tennis equipment store, and then they all
went into business with this.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
Restaurant in your local town.
Speaker 4 (15:25):
My local town. I remember, well, I was getting four
bucks an hour. I was so excited. I started working
there at fifteen, and then I became the salad man.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Oh I see, so you were actually right in there.
Speaker 4 (15:38):
And then my friend Ron Garner started. He was on
the grill making the steaks and the burghers.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
How old was he He.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
Was probably seventeen. And then at the end of the night,
you know, we'd steal a lobster and head home.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Wow. And this went on. But then you'd go to
school the next day.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
I hope we went to school.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
But we loved making money, is the truth. You know,
to be sixteen seventeen and have a little pocket money
was was fun. And we put in a lot of hours,
like we really worked there, you know, three or five
nights a week, and.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
They so you can go to school, come home, eat,
do your homework, and then go to the restaurant or
not do your.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Homework maybe sometimes sometimes no homework.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Yeah, And did they do that because it was hard
to get stuff, or was it that they wanted you there,
or was the incentive of having your kid just kept
me out of the house and they were out of
that Your mom was what did sheep.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Me out of trouble?
Speaker 1 (16:27):
What did she do there?
Speaker 2 (16:29):
My mom?
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Did she cook in the kitchen? Uh?
Speaker 4 (16:32):
No, just just at some point she started doing the cakes.
I don't know if anyone wanted her to do the cakes.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
It's also the key.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Was it a good Maybe she was.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Forcing the cakes on everyone. I'm not saying she was
good at it. I'm just saying she did it well.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Did The question is did the restaurant carry on? Did
it have a.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
Good lasted a little while, and then they sold it
to someone Those people couldn't pay the money that they owed,
and then they got it back, and then they owned
it for a few more years and then they sold it.
But it was a really fun part of our childhood.
And rumor has it Billy Joel ate there once. I
know you have a lot of celebrities here and all
the doctor Dre's eating here, but we had one Billy
(17:09):
Joel sighting in our whole history of the restaurant.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
I used to have seen him.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Do you know I have met Billy Joel a few times?
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Did you ever come to my harou?
Speaker 2 (17:20):
I may have?
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Might say that was the best cake I've ever had.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
That's a big thing on Long Island is a Billy Joel.
Speaker 4 (17:27):
You know you had that song scenes from Italian restaurant,
and so every Italian restaurant claimed it was written about
their place, I see.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
But not yours because wasn't Italian, So it wasn't Italian.
Speaker 4 (17:39):
Yeah, we thought that our local pizzeria, Christiano's was.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
What he was writing about.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Did you know The River Cafe has a shop. It's
full of our favorite foods and designs. We have cookbooks, linen, napkins,
kitchen ware, toad bags with our signatures. Class is from Venice,
chocolates from Turin. You can find us right next door
to the River Cafe in London or online at shopth
Rivercafe dot co dot uk. Did you ever sit down
(18:18):
for dinner with your parents around the table? Yes, for
the restaurant or during the restaurant.
Speaker 4 (18:23):
Well, my parents got divorced when I was in middle school,
and then I would do a fair amount of cooking
for myself, like I was very excited to learn how
to use a walk. Okay, that was a big thing.
To cut up steak and broccoli and just pour an
enormous amount of Kikuman's soy sauce. And then I thought
that was cooking. It was a three ingredients meal.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Yeah, how did you come upon that? I wonder, But
I think there was a period when everybody did walks,
but for a teenage.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Kid to do that, we thought that was fun.
Speaker 4 (18:51):
And also I remember on my kitchen island at home
as a kid, it was a grill on the kitchen island.
So I used to make hamburgers, and I really felt
like a chef, just like taking my hamburgers every day
and then my comfort food.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
I would come home.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
All my friends played sports and I didn't, so I
would come home by myself and I'd watch like talk
shows and I would cook a grilled cheese sandwich. I
would get a vanilla and chocolate Inimin's cake and I
would eat a bite of grilled cheese, bite of the cake,
little milk, cheese cake, milk, and I would do that
(19:31):
for years.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
You didn't understand the concept of dessert.
Speaker 4 (19:34):
I enjoyed the interaction between the grilled cheese and the
chocolate cake. And so we did a show called Freaks
and Geeks, and as a sequence of that.
Speaker 5 (19:43):
I was going to ask about this. So Bill was
one of my favorite characters. I'm not sure. So that's
true that that is based on your upbringing.
Speaker 4 (19:50):
That was based on me sitting home watching comedians cooking
myself grilled cheese. And then then much later in life,
people were like, that's really bad for you to eat
because there was so much butter involved, so much or
margarine whatever.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
I was using the.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Grilled cheese sandwich, more in the cake.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
In the grilled cheese, and that was your recipe.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
How did you make a grilled cheese so much?
Speaker 4 (20:09):
It was it was not fancy, it was wonderbread. It
was pure wonderbread, Fleischmann's margarine, American cheese, but American like
but like Kraft.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
America already slice that right then.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Even right now, I'm like, is that the best food
in the world?
Speaker 4 (20:25):
Like, I don't know if any food tops it. I'm
going to eat at your restaurant today and I could.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Try and make your grilled cheese sandwich. Right I have
challenging finding the craft cheese and the wonder because Wonderbread
still exists.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
It does still exist.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
It's amazing that they called you know what it is.
We used to take a package of Wonderbread, which was
sliced white bread, and if you put, like put your
weight and squeezed it, it would squeeze it too. You know,
something that was about a foot tall to would go
into about half an inch because it was all air.
It was just air. You could just kind of squeeze it, right.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
Only My wife pointed out when I met her in
my mid to late twenties, that everything I ate was
unhealthy and disgusting. She also pointed that out, like why
are you eating wonderbread? You know, there's like good bread
out there, there's good cheese out there, there's good butter
out there. But first, on my first date with Leslie,
(21:18):
I made her chicken parmesan and spaghetti with rag goo
sauce and wonderbread with the bargarin and.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
She still married you.
Speaker 4 (21:28):
Yeah, the fact that there was a second date is incredible.
After that meal, she always talks about the madness of
that meal.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
It's funny because I talked to bob Byker and he
can remember exactly what he cooked. I thank you for
the first date with his wife Willow. I did think
about maybe doing a guide to emotional eating. You know,
so what do you eat or cook when you're depressed?
When you want us to do? Somebody what you read
her cook you? Because eating is not just hunger. It's emotion,
(21:57):
isn't it.
Speaker 4 (21:57):
Yeah, there's a Deepak Chopra book. I think it's called
What's Eating You? Or Why are You Eating? And it's
about emotional eating because way too much of my eating
is reward eating or sedating myself because I love to
(22:18):
be stuffed. I love to be stuffed, so all the
blood goes to my stomach and I am half conscious.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
I enjoy that.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
What do you do about that? Just that makes you
sort of wanted to It's just.
Speaker 4 (22:27):
Like it's like being stoned, but on eight pieces of pizza.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
What's better than that? Well?
Speaker 4 (22:34):
I'm not that fit thin. I'm riding two hundred right now.
Two hundred is my line. If I go above two hundred,
I know we're in trouble. I should be at like
one e eight.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Will you ever overweight?
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Like?
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Really? Over what?
Speaker 4 (22:48):
I think the worst I got I almost got to
two ten in the early pandemic era, and then I
started walking several hours every day, and then I went
vegetarian for a couple of years. And do you think
that it helped a bit? Because I think I eat
bad things with the meat. Is that just the meat,
it's what you put on it? Or shame eating? A
lot of shame eating. When I was a kid, we
(23:09):
used to hide things, right, So my parents would buy
like a box of like yodels or ding dongs or
something like that, and as soon as they brought it home,
I would hide like half the box around the house,
you know, So there was a lot of secretive eating halfens.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Did your mother noticed that she was.
Speaker 4 (23:26):
Busy eating an entire box of chip wich ice cream
sandwiches alone?
Speaker 1 (23:31):
When you then started? You went out to us sate
And so what was the food like? There was that
different from I got it?
Speaker 4 (23:39):
Well, I had no money, so I got a job
making burritos in the cafeteria of US.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
That's how I paid for my beer.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
And when I look back at what I ate, it's amazing.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
I'm alive.
Speaker 4 (23:52):
Why because I think we just went and had like
Tommy's cheeseburgers at night. And I don't even think I
thought then, I don't even think I understood what nutrition was.
I never once thought you would eat for energy for health.
Food was always for fun. When I was a kid,
(24:12):
we were like, let's go to beefsteak Charlie's. There's an
all you can eat ribs. I mean, it was always
food for fun. It was never like, oh, that'll really
keep your head clear.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
So USC and making burritos and eating badly and studying what.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Studying cinema and writing? You know, then that was the
I didn't want to do that.
Speaker 4 (24:33):
I wanted to be a stand up comedian, but I
couldn't think of a major at college.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
I don't teach that with college.
Speaker 4 (24:39):
Well they do now, my friend Wayne Vetterman teaches it
at USC, but they didn't then. So I just thought, well,
what's kind of like comedy? I guess movies and writing.
But I wasn't dreaming of making movies. I just wanted
to be like Jane Lenno or Jerry Seinfeld. I didn't
care about movies, and so I was great at school.
(25:01):
Then later when I got some opportunities to write movies,
I realized, wait a second, I think I learned how
to do this at school.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Did you learn at school?
Speaker 2 (25:09):
I think I know how to do this.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Education does have a point.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Yeah, maybe they bubbles.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
Back up, and it doesn't mean I knew how to
do it well. But I think maybe I had some
irrational belief that I could. So I had some confidence
from going to school, but it was completely unearned. But
it did get me to sit my ass in a
chair and write, yeah, because I thought, oh, I guess
I could maybe do this solitary.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Or did you go to the famous writer's rooms? Where
did you start?
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Where did I start writing?
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Well I did stand up, and then slowly.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
My friends started getting work. So Adam Sandler was on
Saturday Night Live, so we don't try to help him
write sketches. And then as he did better, you know,
we would help out on movies and different capacities. And
I was writing sketches with Jim Carrey for a Living Color.
I wasn't a writer on the show, but I would
just help him.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
See what I once said, I told all the stuff.
I was really really excited because Foreign Secretary John Kerrey
was coming in to dinner at the River Cafe and I,
this is going to be a really important night. At
the end of the night, I said, what's up? You
don't seem really excited, and they said, well, we thought
it was Jim Cary.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
They preferred Jim carry to John Carey.
Speaker 4 (26:20):
I think we all still do you all still do
There's no moment where someone's like, oh, man, I preferred
John Carey to Jim.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Carrey, but to Jim Carrey.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Did you work on SNL?
Speaker 4 (26:35):
I never could get a job there, So I was
helping out comedians with their act. They used to write
jokes for Roseanne bar and people like that. And then
I met Ben Still and we created a sketch show
called The Ben Stiller Show, and that was my first
TV job.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
And then that you stayed in LA. I just stayed
in LA and you were in your twenties. Was in
my twenties doing stand up at night?
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Were you earning the money for that just by the work?
Speaker 2 (27:05):
My rent was very low.
Speaker 4 (27:06):
I got a very crappy apartment with Adam Sandler, and
I mean the rent was so low it was like
we weren't stressed to pay the rent because it was
just a few hundred dollars. And so I was writing
jokes for people and working at the American version of
Comic Relief.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Oh really, what was it. What was the version?
Speaker 2 (27:24):
It was for the homeless in the United States.
Speaker 4 (27:27):
Robin Williams and Billy Crystal and Whoopie Goldberg hosted it
every year for a long time, and that was my
first job. So between writing some jokes, doing stand up,
and working in comic really those three things was enough
for me to pay my rent. Oh my god, I
found a receipt the other day. So when Adam Sandler
(27:49):
got Saturday Night Live, he just left and he left
everything at the apartment, including his wallet and driver's license.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
He literally just left. I don't know how he was
able to get.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
On the plane to go to New York, because I
still have his wallet from then.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
So then the other day I went through.
Speaker 4 (28:06):
And I went through it the other day as I
was going through some stuff and there was like a
receipt from a supermarket, and so I took it out
to read, like, well, what is this receipt? And it
was like what Adam would want to eat, which was
frosted flakes cupcakes.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Maybe it's like milk and.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
Spaghetti, but it was just so funny, like that was
our life and what we ate. And I took a
picture of it and sent it to Adam.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
Would you still make pilcheese sandwiches?
Speaker 4 (28:34):
Yes, I was still heavy in the rotation, but for
the most part, I mean, you know, there was a
real Hamburger World.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
There was a place called Jerry's Deli.
Speaker 4 (28:42):
In the valley and we would eat there all the
time and have their Matza ball soup. And that place was,
you know, right on Ventura Boulevard by Cold Water Canyon.
It's not there anymore, sadly, but a lot of our
life was based out of there. And then night we
would go to the improv and do stand up and
try to get our career is going after very heavy after,
(29:04):
not before, never before. But at midnight I would have
fetichini alfredo, like four nights a week.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
If you like listening to Ruthie's Table four, would you
please make sure to rate and review the podcast on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get
your podcasts. Thank you. So where'd you live?
Speaker 4 (29:40):
We live in Los Angeles, Yeah, and we spend some
time in New York as well and in LA kind
of hard to find the great restaurants in LA. I
can't say I'm happy about because where we live in Brentwood.
There's so much traffic at two o'clock you can't go
east where all the good restaurants, and so you're just
(30:02):
stuck in your house because there's like an hour traffic
to move a mile.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
And I went to a place called I was in
LA last week and I went to place called The Grill.
Speaker 4 (30:10):
The Grill is I really liked it in Beverly Hills.
Excellent show business lunch spots.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
For the girl coming from England and being in LA
because people always want to take you to the best
French restaurant or Italian restaurant. Actually we want to eat
American food. Yeah, And that was the kind of I
don't want If they had a grilled cheese sandwich there
Where can you get a really good grilled cheese sandwich
in a restaurant.
Speaker 4 (30:34):
I've rarely gotten a great grilled cheese sandwich in a restaurant,
but that could be because they don't have the wonderbread and.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
The craft cheese. Is there any place you can walk to?
Speaker 2 (30:45):
No, it's not walking.
Speaker 4 (30:46):
We like it here because we could walk everywhere and
there's an amazing restaurant every like eighty feet. And people
don't like when you pop by in La. If you
just show up at their house, they're like, why are
you in my house?
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Here?
Speaker 4 (30:58):
You know, in New York it's a a little easy.
Although I did get to spend time with our friend
mel Brooks.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
Recently, I know.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Tell me about that.
Speaker 4 (31:04):
Well, I like to visit my friend Norman Lear, who
just turned one.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Hundred and one, one hundred and one.
Speaker 4 (31:11):
So I said to Norman, let's let's hang out with
mel because I'm always looking for any excuse to just
be around mel Brooks. And then he said, Mel's gonna
come over next week. And then I came over and
it was mel Brooks and Dick Van Dyke were there.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Did it make you feel incredibly young?
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Like, well, sometimes when you hang out with people, they
treat you like years old as them. Oh I see,
you know, so just by hanging out with them, they
assume you're one hundred.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
So let's just go through that. Mel's ninety seven, Mell's.
Speaker 4 (31:38):
Ninety seven, Dick Van Dyke is ninety seven, Okay, then
Norman's one on one that's two hundred ninety five years,
and then you add mine in three point fifty.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
It was just a hangout session for fun. It was
you know a lot of talk of World War Two.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
Let me just say, when you sit with three gentlemen
who fought in World War two, the Battle of they're
going to tell you about it, whether you like it
or not, you're going to get deep into World War
two talk. But I also thought that's amazing because how
many people can you speak with that?
Speaker 1 (32:09):
So normally it was in World War Two he went
on bombing missions.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
He did fifty missions.
Speaker 4 (32:17):
Norman Lair and he said, no one lives past twenty
five missions. So he did a lot of He survived
a lot of a lot of missions. And mel Brooks
said that he part of his job was he was
in the Army Corps of Engineers, so they would build
little bridges so that the vehicles could get over bodies
of water and stuff like that. But he also had
(32:38):
to defuse bombs. If you can imagine mel Brooks defusing
your bomb, maybe Dick and Dick van Dyke.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
I forgot exactly what he did.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
But he also got pulled into performing because I think
when people showed they were good performers, they really need
people to entertain the troops so that they wouldn't get crazy,
because without entertainment, they're in trouble.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Yeah, did they glamorize war? Did you?
Speaker 2 (33:03):
No? No, not at all. I asked mel Brooks in
my interview.
Speaker 4 (33:06):
I said, when you were diffusing bombs, did you think
you were going to blow up? And he said every day,
every day. But I interviewed him for the Atlantic magazine
and I wanted to do an interview where we just
talked more about life and not so much about work
and comedy and just what he had learned over his
many years because he's the greatest.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
What did you glean from it?
Speaker 4 (33:26):
Well? You know, his philosophies are very simple. It's just
like be nice and I could I like that? You know,
that's you know, my religion is you know, very dolly
Lama ask It's just.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Kindness. My religion is.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Kindness, and I think it shows in your work. So
we haven't talked about is your family and cooking and
what happens in your household. I assume you're not going
out for McDonald's and.
Speaker 4 (33:52):
No, McDonald's killed all fast food.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Fast food, So yeah, that's your secret. But what about
food in your house? How do you feed you? How
many children do you have?
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (34:02):
Well, two daughters. Iris is twenty and mad is twenty five.
And how do we feed them?
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Is the question?
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Growing up? Did you sit down for dinner most nights?
Were you away most nights?
Speaker 3 (34:15):
No?
Speaker 4 (34:15):
We sat down and ate and went out to eat
and in la in la, and I think, I think
you know they've grown up. They they're healthy. I think
we did okay. We didn't feed them the way I
would have fed them. I would have fed them badly.
Leslie was like, let's not do that, and so there
was the house is pretty healthy. He was in a
(34:36):
house field of like cookies and stuff, although we were
eating our fine ice cream at night. But other than that,
I think it was it was pretty good. And Leslie
is a very good shot.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
What does she cook?
Speaker 4 (34:47):
Well, she can kind of cook anything from a cookbook
if she wants to. And so it's just she gets
in little jags where like she's cooking for a period
and then other jags where that's slows down.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
Do you have friends over, do you entertain or do
you go when you entertain?
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Well? Will we cook for other people? Occasionally?
Speaker 4 (35:08):
Not that office, but you go out and then we
do go out. We go out to eat too much,
and there's not that many great restaurants.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
You're saying you have to dry.
Speaker 4 (35:16):
But every once in a while I'll try to cook
and I'll go, wow, that worked. Yeah, but I always
think i'd rather lay down than put.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
The time in.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Okay, that's fair enough. I have respect for people who
don't cook.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
It requires patience. Fine, it's meditative.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
Not to cook.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
To cook, Oh, I think.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
So, I think there is something that whenever I used
to come back from work and people say, I'll just
sit down and relax, and actually I found it more
relaxing to kind of make a result of just see
the process and to go silly and all that kind of.
Speaker 4 (35:44):
It shows good mental health because most people they don't
like being alone or alone in their head. You know,
you'll go, oh, I want to take a walk for
two hours, like, but then I'm with me, And I
think cooking is like that. So I feel like, when
I like myself more than I'm going to go, I
want a cooking binge. And then because I'll be comfortable
in the quiet.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
Yeah, and then when you want you're feeling fine, you
can go for a walk exactly. Yeah, what's Iris doing? Now?
Speaker 2 (36:12):
What is Iris doing?
Speaker 3 (36:13):
Now?
Speaker 4 (36:13):
She was going to also screenwriting and directing school at USC.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
So all four of you in this family.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
Are She's been working.
Speaker 4 (36:24):
She just worked on a film acting and you know,
we shot a movie out here called The Bubble during
the pandemic. So in the middle of the pandemic, no
one was really making anything because it all seemed kind
of dangerous, and so he said to Netflix, like, I
think I could find a way to make something safely.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
So we made a movie.
Speaker 4 (36:42):
Called The Bubble about a group of actors in a
hotel trying to complete a dinosaur action movie during the pandemic.
And it was a little bit like a mel Brooks
or Christopher Guest movie about all the actors having a
nervous breakdown because they're stuck in the hotel and the
studio won't let them leave till they finished their dinosaur movie.
And uh, Pedro Pascal was in it, and Leslie and Keegan,
(37:06):
Michael Key and Karen Gillan and Fred Armison and a
lot of it's on Netflix. And so we were here
during the pandemic when everything was closed other than grocery
stores and pharmacies. The whole time we were here like
nothing was open.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
So have you moved to England? Is going to be
going to be.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
With us for a long I like to spent a
lot more time here. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Are you here now just to stay or.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
No return ticket?
Speaker 1 (37:35):
Just good? You know that's good.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
I'm just hanging out here and joy.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
So if we're going to wind up, I will ask
you one more time now that we've talked about the
girl cheese and the ice cream and the pop tarts.
But you mentioned comfort food for but is there one
special food?
Speaker 4 (37:51):
Well, I mean I'm a sucker for a good eight
ounce burger, okay for sure. When you find the place,
it's got the fresh French fries and the great burger.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
There's a place called.
Speaker 4 (38:04):
Lunetta all day in West Hollywood near my office, and
I think it's the best burger I've ever had. I
have to I have to try to trick myself in
into not remembering it's there.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
Oh okay, or I'll just do it all the time.
Speaker 4 (38:19):
So in my head, I just like lied to myself,
like I place closed just what I'm ordered every day.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
Well, maybe if I come to LA we'll go and
have a burger. Yes, Thanks about Jed, Thank you, Thanks,
thank you for listening to Ruthie's table for in partnership
with Montclair.
Speaker 5 (38:48):
Ruthie's Table four is produced by Otomi Studios for iHeartRadio.
It's hosted by Ruthie Rogers and it's produced by William Lensky.
This episode was edited by Julia Johnson a mixed by
Nigel Appleton. Our executive producers are Fay Stewart and Zad Rogers.
Our production manager is Caitlin Paramore, and our production coordinator
(39:09):
is Bella Selini. Thank you to everyone at The River
Cafe for your help in making this episode
You're listening to Ruthy's Table four in partnership with Montclair.
I may not know what makes a good comedian, but
I do know what makes a good father. And last night,
when I met Judd Apatow in the West End production
of Cabaret in London, where his daughter Maude is playing
the lead role of Sally Bowles, he told me this
was the eighth time he'd seen it in three weeks.
(00:23):
And if I may not know what makes a good comedian,
Judd certainly does. His advice to kickstart your writing process,
come up with a topic and write down as many
jokes or one liners as you can think of. Don't
be scared if your first draft doesn't want to make
you laugh out loud, or if you don't find your
own writing funny. I think they are definite parallels in
(00:43):
comedy and cooking, and I can imagine paraphrasing the second
sentence telling an aspiring chef not to be scared if
the first attempt doesn't taste right. Comedy and cooking children
and acting, laughing and eating movies and restaurants. Today we're
here in the River Cafe, and Jed and I will
cover them more for after all I said and done.
(01:03):
Life is a cabaret.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
I agree with that eight times more times this weekend too.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
So lovely, yeah, why not? So I want to talk
to you about cabaret. But for the moment you've just
come from the pastry kitchen or the recipe you chairs,
pistachio ice cream is being made.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
I'm Bellatups, I'm the head pastry chef at the River Cafe,
and these are our ice cream machines and they've actually
got quite a small drum make like roughly two liters
of ice cream. Here is our lovely pistachio base, which
is essentially plain custard that has had the pistashia paste
stirred through it. We do churn. It makes a delightful
(01:54):
noise probably, I mean for this amount, it will take
like four or five minutes, like nothing crazy. So you
can have a look on the topic. You can see
it's sort of lightly creasing. We know that it's nearly there,
but I'll turn it to churn. Then this will just
go into the freezer until it's frozen fully. And in
(02:16):
the restaurant, what we'd do is just before service, we'd
get the ice creams out to temper you mean like
you would do at home so that you can get
a lovely scoop from it, but that it only takes
like five minutes. But just make sure you're using a
cupful of hot water and dipping your scoop in every
time so you get a perfect scoop. Thank you very much,
(02:39):
pleasure enjoy first, lovely to meet you too. I hope
you have a lovely meta.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
What did you think?
Speaker 4 (02:48):
I'm always impressed by people who know how to cook,
because as much as I like food, I don't have
enough interest in making it because I always feel like
there's someone who makes it better, fair enough. So why
would I make myself mediocre food? I can go to
you and get great food. Like it's been eight hours
doing the bad version of what you do.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Well, would you like to start by reading the recipe
for the pistachio ice cream?
Speaker 4 (03:10):
Okay, this is the pistachio ice cream recipe from the
River Cafe. It serves ten or me alone. One thing
I learned during the pandemic is it is possible to
eat a pint of ice cream, finish it, and then
start another one and finish it. Okay, here's what you need.
(03:31):
You need two hundred grams of unsalted, shelled pistachios, four
hundred grams of castor sugar, plus an extra eighty grams,
seven hundred milli liters of full fat milk, no oat milk,
the real stuff, three hundred milliliters double cream, and ten
(03:52):
large egg yolks. You know, in every performance of Cabaret,
it's a scene where Mode has a crack open an
in a cup and eat it on stage every night.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
That's acting for you, that is disciplined. Its to do that.
Speaker 4 (04:08):
It's like that movie with a Nick cage where he
I think it was vampire's kiss and he ate a
bug in it like a cockroach in a scene that's
Mod's equivalent.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Yeah, i'd ag a day is quite a lot.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
It's a very method. Okay, here we go.
Speaker 4 (04:22):
Roast the pistachios in a dry frying pan over medium heat.
Blend roasted pistachos in a food processor with eighty grams
of sugar and mix to a fine paste. Heat the
milk and cream to just below boiling.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
In a bowl. Beat together egg.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
Yolks and four hundred grams of sugar. Add warm milk
and cream into the egg and sugar. Return this custard
mixture to a thick bottomed pan and cook slowly over
heated and low heat until it reaches eighty two degrees.
Remove from the heat, stir in the pistachio paste and
then or through a fine sieve.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Or what do we call it in our country? We
call it a strainer.
Speaker 4 (05:06):
A strainer into a bowl and leave to cool. Cool,
then churn in an ice cream machine. You gotta get
an ice cream machine.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Oh yeah, I do have one.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
No, I don't dangerous so to be for me to
own my own ice cream machine and.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Making pints and pipes. So when you are making a movie, okay,
you're on the set of forty year Old Virgin, one
of my favorites, or Knocked Up? What do you do
about food for your.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Crew on a movie?
Speaker 4 (05:34):
Every day lunch is basically a buffet, and I have
trouble not taking too much from any buffet. Yeah, Like,
that's one of my issues is like this, you know,
fried chicken there, I'm not going to get like one wing.
I mean, I'm gonna like it's hard for me not
to take full advantage. So when I make movies, for
(05:54):
the most part, I don't I can't.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Go to where the food is, like there's usually a tent.
Speaker 4 (06:00):
I have to just have someone tell me what's there
and have them bring it back. And because I'll just
go to like the cheap lemon cake, you know, like
I'll have ice cream Sundays, and then I fall asleep
in the afternoon and I get.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Really tired.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
And you like eating because it makes you feel such up,
but you have to go back to work, right, So
then so you are careful, I mean, well you don't
go to thee But then I mean.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
I get weak.
Speaker 4 (06:27):
So usually about like two thirds through a movie, I
lose my will and then by the end I'm just
gaining weight and binging. But but for a while, I'll
try to control myself. Although when we shot The King
of Staten Island, we were shooting in Staten Island. We
were there for months, and they got good pizza and
Staten Island, so it was pretty hard not to flip
(06:48):
out for pizza. But if I could like lose weight
before a shoot starts, then by the end of the
shoot I am overweight, but not insanely overweight.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
I have to like get a lower baseline to.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
Start, so I have to pretend I'm like Christian Bale
playing a skinny person, and I like lose Weight to
begin and then.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
It falls apart.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
What are you writing at the moment?
Speaker 4 (07:09):
I'm trying to write a movie right now to shoot
next year, which is you know, it's a little bit
about like what's happening in the world of comedy at
this moment where everyone doesn't know what they can say.
So I'm trying to write about people not knowing where
the line is.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Do do you know where the line is?
Speaker 4 (07:28):
Well, for me, the line is never that complicated, because
I think if your heart's in the right place, people know,
and if your point is reasonable and kind, you can
get away with all sorts of things. I think people
can tell when you're being outrageous with no real point
to it, and some people love that, and I think
that's fine. I think it's fine for anyone to enjoy
(07:50):
anything like It's like music. You might like heavy metal,
you might like country music. Everyone picks their flavor. I
think it's hard when people feel like they're getting force
fed the flavor they don't want and then suddenly like
why you have to say, well, you don't have to
listen to.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
That or watch that. But it's definitely a tricky time.
So I'm trying to.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Find it be a movie about a comedian.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
Not a comedian about a writer. And so I just
finished the draft of that. Hopefully I'll get to do
that next year.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
One of my favorite movies of a long, long time
ago was King of Comedy.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
Yeah you like that Jerry Lewis and Robert de Niro
and Sandra Bernhard one of my favorite movies. Loved it
when it came out, wasn't a big hit. It came
out after the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, so the
whole plot line of kidnapping a celebrity freaked people out
a bit and also obsessed fans freak people out at
(08:47):
the time. But as the decades have passed, I think
people realize it's one of Martin Scorcey's best movies.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
I haven't seen it again, I have so many times
I'd like to see it.
Speaker 4 (08:56):
In fact, it's one of the movies I watch to
pay attention to the cinematography and the shot selection because
it's very alive, but it's covered in a way that
really works for comedy. So seeing how Scorsese shoots humor
is really helpful. So I always watch.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
It for me. What was interesting about that was the
movie was the idea that comedians had to be funny,
And you know, is Steve Martin funny? Is Meilbrooks funny?
As I think when I did my talk about Mailbrooks,
I said something that people we always think about as
a man who makes us laugh, but I also think
about the man who talks about Bankroft and what happened
(09:37):
when she died. There is the pressure, as someone who
writes about funniness or humor to be funny. Do you
feel that people expect you to?
Speaker 4 (09:46):
I mean, it is a weird pressure to try to
be funny in your work all day. It's kind of
an unnatural state.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
You know.
Speaker 4 (09:51):
Most people don't try to be funny that often. So
imagine sitting in office and trying to be funny for
ten straight first. I mean, it's you're kind of a
weird person to like just be in that gear all
the time and looking for it all the time. So
it does get a little exhausting to be in that
headspace looking at life through that lens. Ye, what's weird
(10:12):
about this? What's funny about this? The good part about
it is that when you're in comedy. When bad things happen,
you don't go oh, no, a bad thing happened, you go, oh,
this would be a great story.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
And so sometimes when things go.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
Really bad, like I threw out the first pitch at
a Mets baseball game, and I thought, well, if it
goes bad, it's a good story, and if it goes good,
it's just good.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
And so there is a way of looking at life.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
How did it go.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
It wasn't in the middle.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
It wasn't bad enough to be a good story, and
it wasn't good enough to not be a triumph.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
It was just like, that's a big deal.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
That's a big deal getting to to I mean again
for the listeners who may live in some other country.
That's where was it.
Speaker 4 (10:51):
It was a city field in New York and it
was the Mets versus Yankees, so it was sold out.
There were fifty two thousand people there. Yeah, and was terrifying.
And I always joke that the worst part was when
they announced me throwing out the first pitch. I didn't
really get more than a very small smatter of applause,
(11:12):
and I thought, I think I'm more famous than this.
I mean, I'm from New York. Aren't I a beloved
son of New York? And I realized that no one
cares about me.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
It was they just wanted the game to start.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
It was like a politician was doing it.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Yeah, maybe they don't do it for anyone. Absolutely, did
you grow up in New York?
Speaker 2 (11:28):
We lived on Long Island where siast would bury. Area
of Long Island.
Speaker 4 (11:33):
A lot of bagels being eaten there. Yeah, it's a
big bagel town. At midnight, you'd go to the bagel
place while they were cooking him and get them right
out of the oven.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
There's nothing like a bagel that's Also, West Coast isn't
as good? Is it that New Yorkers always say it's
Some people have said it's the water that makes it good.
Then we heard that theory that they say the reason
you can't have a good bagel outside of New York
is the water in New York?
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Is that true? You understand how the bread works?
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Because also I think that maybe i've had bagels. It's
really hard to insult a country's bagels.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
When someone has a good bagel.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
But we know. But they took me once to the
East End to what's that street? Do you know Bricklay
Brickday bagels, and they're bagels and the British are really
really proud of them. So I have got a podcast
that I would like to go on and on, So
I won't say I think that, but when you have
a New York bagel, it makes all the difference, you know,
I think that. But I don't know about La bagels.
Speaker 5 (12:28):
How are they?
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Theyre pretty much the same.
Speaker 4 (12:30):
There's some people who seem to have cracked the code.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
I don't know. They're bringing some water from New York
or maybe the whole water thing is a mess.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
That the whole thing is a mess. Yeah, rightctly and everybody.
So you grew up in Long Island eating bagels and
smelling bagels, and what was the food like in your house?
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Uh?
Speaker 4 (12:46):
Not impressive. I can't say my late mother was a
master chef. We had a very small rotation of chicken, chicken, cutlet, salmon,
sometimes like.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
A pot roast. Our.
Speaker 4 (13:01):
Vegetable was usually peas and corn. I don't think broccoli
got cooked in my house. Yeah. I think I refused
to eat a salad till mid twenties.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Yeah, maybe you didn't know, but we didn't grow up
on salads.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
There wasn't a lot of salads, a lot of Chinese
food happening.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
There was going out for it.
Speaker 4 (13:17):
Going out fair amount of McDonald's happening. But then my
parents opened a restaurant.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
Oh yeah, so just going back one step. Your mother
would cook the pot roast of the chicken.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
Did she work well? They owned a restaurant.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
And then when she was doing the restaurant, you'd come
home and have supper. How many in the family there
was five, five of us children.
Speaker 4 (13:37):
And at some point I think my mom made all
the cakes for the restaurant. She started cooking the desserts
for it. And I was a dishwasher.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
What was a restaurant.
Speaker 4 (13:46):
It was called Raisins and it was like, I don't
know what you would call it, American continental. It was
like steak, lobster, chicken, parmesan. It was it seemed like
some Italian some hamburgers. And I, you know, they bring.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
In a big bag of muscles, Give me a brush.
Speaker 4 (14:02):
I'd have to clean the muscles and pull the hair
out of the muscles.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
What a nightmare.
Speaker 4 (14:08):
No one, No one's paid enough money to rip hairs
off a mussel. I have nightmares about someone going, can
you do the muscles today?
Speaker 1 (14:15):
We'll go check it the way we could have set
a pistachio ice cream. We could, Well, we don't do muscles.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Actually, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
I don't like muscles that much. I like clams, but
I'm not a big muscle.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
I'm not.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
I didn't mind peeling the potatoes and give me a
fifty pound bag of potatoes. I'm happy to feel them
cut them into French fries myself. I got no issue
with that.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
So let's go back to raisins. Your father, he wasn't
a chef, so they just did it as a business
as a business. So before that he was he was
working in the record business.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
And well, my grandfather was a jazz producer who produced
Charlie Parker and the first Janis Joplin record.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
His name was Bobby Shadd.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
What was the first Janis jopord?
Speaker 4 (14:50):
It was called Big Brother in the Holding Company, which
is her first album My generation.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Yeah, and that I can remember the cover of the
the Big Brother. Yeah, hold on take a little piece of.
Speaker 4 (15:02):
My Heart right, that's right, that was on that record
that dad produced, that my grandfather did.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
Your grandfather, it had that song down on me a
song of hers.
Speaker 4 (15:12):
And so my father worked for him when I was
a kid for a while, and they had some friends
and owned a tennis equipment store, and then they all
went into business with this.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
Restaurant in your local town.
Speaker 4 (15:25):
My local town. I remember, well, I was getting four
bucks an hour. I was so excited. I started working
there at fifteen, and then I became the salad man.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Oh I see, so you were actually right in there.
Speaker 4 (15:38):
And then my friend Ron Garner started. He was on
the grill making the steaks and the burghers.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
How old was he He.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
Was probably seventeen. And then at the end of the night,
you know, we'd steal a lobster and head home.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Wow. And this went on. But then you'd go to
school the next day.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
I hope we went to school.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
But we loved making money, is the truth. You know,
to be sixteen seventeen and have a little pocket money
was was fun. And we put in a lot of hours,
like we really worked there, you know, three or five
nights a week, and.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
They so you can go to school, come home, eat,
do your homework, and then go to the restaurant or
not do your.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Homework maybe sometimes sometimes no homework.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Yeah, And did they do that because it was hard
to get stuff, or was it that they wanted you there,
or was the incentive of having your kid just kept
me out of the house and they were out of
that Your mom was what did sheep.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Me out of trouble?
Speaker 1 (16:27):
What did she do there?
Speaker 2 (16:29):
My mom?
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Did she cook in the kitchen? Uh?
Speaker 4 (16:32):
No, just just at some point she started doing the cakes.
I don't know if anyone wanted her to do the cakes.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
It's also the key.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
Was it a good Maybe she was.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Forcing the cakes on everyone. I'm not saying she was
good at it. I'm just saying she did it well.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Did The question is did the restaurant carry on? Did
it have a.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
Good lasted a little while, and then they sold it
to someone Those people couldn't pay the money that they owed,
and then they got it back, and then they owned
it for a few more years and then they sold it.
But it was a really fun part of our childhood.
And rumor has it Billy Joel ate there once. I
know you have a lot of celebrities here and all
the doctor Dre's eating here, but we had one Billy
(17:09):
Joel sighting in our whole history of the restaurant.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
I used to have seen him.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
Do you know I have met Billy Joel a few times?
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Did you ever come to my harou?
Speaker 2 (17:20):
I may have?
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Might say that was the best cake I've ever had.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
That's a big thing on Long Island is a Billy Joel.
Speaker 4 (17:27):
You know you had that song scenes from Italian restaurant,
and so every Italian restaurant claimed it was written about
their place, I see.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
But not yours because wasn't Italian, So it wasn't Italian.
Speaker 4 (17:39):
Yeah, we thought that our local pizzeria, Christiano's was.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
What he was writing about.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Did you know The River Cafe has a shop. It's
full of our favorite foods and designs. We have cookbooks, linen, napkins,
kitchen ware, toad bags with our signatures. Class is from Venice,
chocolates from Turin. You can find us right next door
to the River Cafe in London or online at shopth
Rivercafe dot co dot uk. Did you ever sit down
(18:18):
for dinner with your parents around the table? Yes, for
the restaurant or during the restaurant.
Speaker 4 (18:23):
Well, my parents got divorced when I was in middle school,
and then I would do a fair amount of cooking
for myself, like I was very excited to learn how
to use a walk. Okay, that was a big thing.
To cut up steak and broccoli and just pour an
enormous amount of Kikuman's soy sauce. And then I thought
that was cooking. It was a three ingredients meal.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Yeah, how did you come upon that? I wonder, But
I think there was a period when everybody did walks,
but for a teenage.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Kid to do that, we thought that was fun.
Speaker 4 (18:51):
And also I remember on my kitchen island at home
as a kid, it was a grill on the kitchen island.
So I used to make hamburgers, and I really felt
like a chef, just like taking my hamburgers every day
and then my comfort food.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
I would come home.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
All my friends played sports and I didn't, so I
would come home by myself and I'd watch like talk
shows and I would cook a grilled cheese sandwich. I
would get a vanilla and chocolate Inimin's cake and I
would eat a bite of grilled cheese, bite of the cake,
little milk, cheese cake, milk, and I would do that
(19:31):
for years.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
You didn't understand the concept of dessert.
Speaker 4 (19:34):
I enjoyed the interaction between the grilled cheese and the
chocolate cake. And so we did a show called Freaks
and Geeks, and as a sequence of that.
Speaker 5 (19:43):
I was going to ask about this. So Bill was
one of my favorite characters. I'm not sure. So that's
true that that is based on your upbringing.
Speaker 4 (19:50):
That was based on me sitting home watching comedians cooking
myself grilled cheese. And then then much later in life,
people were like, that's really bad for you to eat
because there was so much butter involved, so much or
margarine whatever.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
I was using the.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Grilled cheese sandwich, more in the cake.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
In the grilled cheese, and that was your recipe.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
How did you make a grilled cheese so much?
Speaker 4 (20:09):
It was it was not fancy, it was wonderbread. It
was pure wonderbread, Fleischmann's margarine, American cheese, but American like
but like Kraft.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
America already slice that right then.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Even right now, I'm like, is that the best food
in the world?
Speaker 4 (20:25):
Like, I don't know if any food tops it. I'm
going to eat at your restaurant today and I could.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Try and make your grilled cheese sandwich. Right I have
challenging finding the craft cheese and the wonder because Wonderbread
still exists.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
It does still exist.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
It's amazing that they called you know what it is.
We used to take a package of Wonderbread, which was
sliced white bread, and if you put, like put your
weight and squeezed it, it would squeeze it too. You know,
something that was about a foot tall to would go
into about half an inch because it was all air.
It was just air. You could just kind of squeeze it, right.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
Only My wife pointed out when I met her in
my mid to late twenties, that everything I ate was
unhealthy and disgusting. She also pointed that out, like why
are you eating wonderbread? You know, there's like good bread
out there, there's good cheese out there, there's good butter
out there. But first, on my first date with Leslie,
(21:18):
I made her chicken parmesan and spaghetti with rag goo
sauce and wonderbread with the bargarin and.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
She still married you.
Speaker 4 (21:28):
Yeah, the fact that there was a second date is incredible.
After that meal, she always talks about the madness of
that meal.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
It's funny because I talked to bob Byker and he
can remember exactly what he cooked. I thank you for
the first date with his wife Willow. I did think
about maybe doing a guide to emotional eating. You know,
so what do you eat or cook when you're depressed?
When you want us to do? Somebody what you read
her cook you? Because eating is not just hunger. It's emotion,
(21:57):
isn't it.
Speaker 4 (21:57):
Yeah, there's a Deepak Chopra book. I think it's called
What's Eating You? Or Why are You Eating? And it's
about emotional eating because way too much of my eating
is reward eating or sedating myself because I love to
(22:18):
be stuffed. I love to be stuffed, so all the
blood goes to my stomach and I am half conscious.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
I enjoy that.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
What do you do about that? Just that makes you
sort of wanted to It's just.
Speaker 4 (22:27):
Like it's like being stoned, but on eight pieces of pizza.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
What's better than that? Well?
Speaker 4 (22:34):
I'm not that fit thin. I'm riding two hundred right now.
Two hundred is my line. If I go above two hundred,
I know we're in trouble. I should be at like
one e eight.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Will you ever overweight?
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Like?
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Really? Over what?
Speaker 4 (22:48):
I think the worst I got I almost got to
two ten in the early pandemic era, and then I
started walking several hours every day, and then I went
vegetarian for a couple of years. And do you think
that it helped a bit? Because I think I eat
bad things with the meat. Is that just the meat,
it's what you put on it? Or shame eating? A
lot of shame eating. When I was a kid, we
(23:09):
used to hide things, right, So my parents would buy
like a box of like yodels or ding dongs or
something like that, and as soon as they brought it home,
I would hide like half the box around the house,
you know, So there was a lot of secretive eating halfens.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Did your mother noticed that she was.
Speaker 4 (23:26):
Busy eating an entire box of chip wich ice cream
sandwiches alone?
Speaker 1 (23:31):
When you then started? You went out to us sate
And so what was the food like? There was that
different from I got it?
Speaker 4 (23:39):
Well, I had no money, so I got a job
making burritos in the cafeteria of US.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
That's how I paid for my beer.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
And when I look back at what I ate, it's amazing.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
I'm alive.
Speaker 4 (23:52):
Why because I think we just went and had like
Tommy's cheeseburgers at night. And I don't even think I
thought then, I don't even think I understood what nutrition was.
I never once thought you would eat for energy for health.
Food was always for fun. When I was a kid,
(24:12):
we were like, let's go to beefsteak Charlie's. There's an
all you can eat ribs. I mean, it was always
food for fun. It was never like, oh, that'll really
keep your head clear.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
So USC and making burritos and eating badly and studying what.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Studying cinema and writing? You know, then that was the
I didn't want to do that.
Speaker 4 (24:33):
I wanted to be a stand up comedian, but I
couldn't think of a major at college.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
I don't teach that with college.
Speaker 4 (24:39):
Well they do now, my friend Wayne Vetterman teaches it
at USC, but they didn't then. So I just thought, well,
what's kind of like comedy? I guess movies and writing.
But I wasn't dreaming of making movies. I just wanted
to be like Jane Lenno or Jerry Seinfeld. I didn't
care about movies, and so I was great at school.
(25:01):
Then later when I got some opportunities to write movies,
I realized, wait a second, I think I learned how
to do this at school.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Did you learn at school?
Speaker 2 (25:09):
I think I know how to do this.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Education does have a point.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Yeah, maybe they bubbles.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
Back up, and it doesn't mean I knew how to
do it well. But I think maybe I had some
irrational belief that I could. So I had some confidence
from going to school, but it was completely unearned. But
it did get me to sit my ass in a
chair and write, yeah, because I thought, oh, I guess
I could maybe do this solitary.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Or did you go to the famous writer's rooms? Where
did you start?
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Where did I start writing?
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Well I did stand up, and then slowly.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
My friends started getting work. So Adam Sandler was on
Saturday Night Live, so we don't try to help him
write sketches. And then as he did better, you know,
we would help out on movies and different capacities. And
I was writing sketches with Jim Carrey for a Living Color.
I wasn't a writer on the show, but I would
just help him.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
See what I once said, I told all the stuff.
I was really really excited because Foreign Secretary John Kerrey
was coming in to dinner at the River Cafe and I,
this is going to be a really important night. At
the end of the night, I said, what's up? You
don't seem really excited, and they said, well, we thought
it was Jim Cary.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
They preferred Jim carry to John Carey.
Speaker 4 (26:20):
I think we all still do you all still do
There's no moment where someone's like, oh, man, I preferred
John Carey to Jim.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Carrey, but to Jim Carrey.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Did you work on SNL?
Speaker 4 (26:35):
I never could get a job there, So I was
helping out comedians with their act. They used to write
jokes for Roseanne bar and people like that. And then
I met Ben Still and we created a sketch show
called The Ben Stiller Show, and that was my first
TV job.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
And then that you stayed in LA. I just stayed
in LA and you were in your twenties. Was in
my twenties doing stand up at night?
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Were you earning the money for that just by the work?
Speaker 2 (27:05):
My rent was very low.
Speaker 4 (27:06):
I got a very crappy apartment with Adam Sandler, and
I mean the rent was so low it was like
we weren't stressed to pay the rent because it was
just a few hundred dollars. And so I was writing
jokes for people and working at the American version of
Comic Relief.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Oh really, what was it. What was the version?
Speaker 2 (27:24):
It was for the homeless in the United States.
Speaker 4 (27:27):
Robin Williams and Billy Crystal and Whoopie Goldberg hosted it
every year for a long time, and that was my
first job. So between writing some jokes, doing stand up,
and working in comic really those three things was enough
for me to pay my rent. Oh my god, I
found a receipt the other day. So when Adam Sandler
(27:49):
got Saturday Night Live, he just left and he left
everything at the apartment, including his wallet and driver's license.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
He literally just left. I don't know how he was
able to get.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
On the plane to go to New York, because I
still have his wallet from then.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
So then the other day I went through.
Speaker 4 (28:06):
And I went through it the other day as I
was going through some stuff and there was like a
receipt from a supermarket, and so I took it out
to read, like, well, what is this receipt? And it
was like what Adam would want to eat, which was
frosted flakes cupcakes.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Maybe it's like milk and.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
Spaghetti, but it was just so funny, like that was
our life and what we ate. And I took a
picture of it and sent it to Adam.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
Would you still make pilcheese sandwiches?
Speaker 4 (28:34):
Yes, I was still heavy in the rotation, but for
the most part, I mean, you know, there was a
real Hamburger World.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
There was a place called Jerry's Deli.
Speaker 4 (28:42):
In the valley and we would eat there all the
time and have their Matza ball soup. And that place was,
you know, right on Ventura Boulevard by Cold Water Canyon.
It's not there anymore, sadly, but a lot of our
life was based out of there. And then night we
would go to the improv and do stand up and
try to get our career is going after very heavy after,
(29:04):
not before, never before. But at midnight I would have
fetichini alfredo, like four nights a week.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
If you like listening to Ruthie's Table four, would you
please make sure to rate and review the podcast on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get
your podcasts. Thank you. So where'd you live?
Speaker 4 (29:40):
We live in Los Angeles, Yeah, and we spend some
time in New York as well and in LA kind
of hard to find the great restaurants in LA. I
can't say I'm happy about because where we live in Brentwood.
There's so much traffic at two o'clock you can't go
east where all the good restaurants, and so you're just
(30:02):
stuck in your house because there's like an hour traffic
to move a mile.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
And I went to a place called I was in
LA last week and I went to place called The Grill.
Speaker 4 (30:10):
The Grill is I really liked it in Beverly Hills.
Excellent show business lunch spots.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
For the girl coming from England and being in LA
because people always want to take you to the best
French restaurant or Italian restaurant. Actually we want to eat
American food. Yeah, And that was the kind of I
don't want If they had a grilled cheese sandwich there
Where can you get a really good grilled cheese sandwich
in a restaurant.
Speaker 4 (30:34):
I've rarely gotten a great grilled cheese sandwich in a restaurant,
but that could be because they don't have the wonderbread and.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
The craft cheese. Is there any place you can walk to?
Speaker 2 (30:45):
No, it's not walking.
Speaker 4 (30:46):
We like it here because we could walk everywhere and
there's an amazing restaurant every like eighty feet. And people
don't like when you pop by in La. If you
just show up at their house, they're like, why are
you in my house?
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Here?
Speaker 4 (30:58):
You know, in New York it's a a little easy.
Although I did get to spend time with our friend
mel Brooks.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
Recently, I know.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Tell me about that.
Speaker 4 (31:04):
Well, I like to visit my friend Norman Lear, who
just turned one.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Hundred and one, one hundred and one.
Speaker 4 (31:11):
So I said to Norman, let's let's hang out with
mel because I'm always looking for any excuse to just
be around mel Brooks. And then he said, Mel's gonna
come over next week. And then I came over and
it was mel Brooks and Dick Van Dyke were there.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Did it make you feel incredibly young?
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Like, well, sometimes when you hang out with people, they
treat you like years old as them. Oh I see,
you know, so just by hanging out with them, they
assume you're one hundred.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
So let's just go through that. Mel's ninety seven, Mell's.
Speaker 4 (31:38):
Ninety seven, Dick Van Dyke is ninety seven, Okay, then
Norman's one on one that's two hundred ninety five years,
and then you add mine in three point fifty.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
It was just a hangout session for fun. It was
you know a lot of talk of World War Two.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
Let me just say, when you sit with three gentlemen
who fought in World War two, the Battle of they're
going to tell you about it, whether you like it
or not, you're going to get deep into World War
two talk. But I also thought that's amazing because how
many people can you speak with that?
Speaker 1 (32:09):
So normally it was in World War Two he went
on bombing missions.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
He did fifty missions.
Speaker 4 (32:17):
Norman Lair and he said, no one lives past twenty
five missions. So he did a lot of He survived
a lot of a lot of missions. And mel Brooks
said that he part of his job was he was
in the Army Corps of Engineers, so they would build
little bridges so that the vehicles could get over bodies
of water and stuff like that. But he also had
(32:38):
to defuse bombs. If you can imagine mel Brooks defusing
your bomb, maybe Dick and Dick van Dyke.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
I forgot exactly what he did.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
But he also got pulled into performing because I think
when people showed they were good performers, they really need
people to entertain the troops so that they wouldn't get crazy,
because without entertainment, they're in trouble.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Yeah, did they glamorize war? Did you?
Speaker 2 (33:03):
No? No, not at all. I asked mel Brooks in
my interview.
Speaker 4 (33:06):
I said, when you were diffusing bombs, did you think
you were going to blow up? And he said every day,
every day. But I interviewed him for the Atlantic magazine
and I wanted to do an interview where we just
talked more about life and not so much about work
and comedy and just what he had learned over his
many years because he's the greatest.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
What did you glean from it?
Speaker 4 (33:26):
Well? You know, his philosophies are very simple. It's just
like be nice and I could I like that? You know,
that's you know, my religion is you know, very dolly
Lama ask It's just.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Kindness. My religion is.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Kindness, and I think it shows in your work. So
we haven't talked about is your family and cooking and
what happens in your household. I assume you're not going
out for McDonald's and.
Speaker 4 (33:52):
No, McDonald's killed all fast food.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
Fast food, So yeah, that's your secret. But what about
food in your house? How do you feed you? How
many children do you have?
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (34:02):
Well, two daughters. Iris is twenty and mad is twenty five.
And how do we feed them?
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Is the question?
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Growing up? Did you sit down for dinner most nights?
Were you away most nights?
Speaker 3 (34:15):
No?
Speaker 4 (34:15):
We sat down and ate and went out to eat
and in la in la, and I think, I think
you know they've grown up. They they're healthy. I think
we did okay. We didn't feed them the way I
would have fed them. I would have fed them badly.
Leslie was like, let's not do that, and so there
was the house is pretty healthy. He was in a
(34:36):
house field of like cookies and stuff, although we were
eating our fine ice cream at night. But other than that,
I think it was it was pretty good. And Leslie
is a very good shot.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
What does she cook?
Speaker 4 (34:47):
Well, she can kind of cook anything from a cookbook
if she wants to. And so it's just she gets
in little jags where like she's cooking for a period
and then other jags where that's slows down.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
Do you have friends over, do you entertain or do
you go when you entertain?
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Well? Will we cook for other people? Occasionally?
Speaker 4 (35:08):
Not that office, but you go out and then we
do go out. We go out to eat too much,
and there's not that many great restaurants.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
You're saying you have to dry.
Speaker 4 (35:16):
But every once in a while I'll try to cook
and I'll go, wow, that worked. Yeah, but I always
think i'd rather lay down than put.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
The time in.
Speaker 1 (35:22):
Okay, that's fair enough. I have respect for people who
don't cook.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
It requires patience. Fine, it's meditative.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
Not to cook.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
To cook, Oh, I think.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
So, I think there is something that whenever I used
to come back from work and people say, I'll just
sit down and relax, and actually I found it more
relaxing to kind of make a result of just see
the process and to go silly and all that kind of.
Speaker 4 (35:44):
It shows good mental health because most people they don't
like being alone or alone in their head. You know,
you'll go, oh, I want to take a walk for
two hours, like, but then I'm with me, And I
think cooking is like that. So I feel like, when
I like myself more than I'm going to go, I
want a cooking binge. And then because I'll be comfortable
in the quiet.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
Yeah, and then when you want you're feeling fine, you
can go for a walk exactly. Yeah, what's Iris doing? Now?
Speaker 2 (36:12):
What is Iris doing?
Speaker 3 (36:13):
Now?
Speaker 4 (36:13):
She was going to also screenwriting and directing school at USC.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
So all four of you in this family.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
Are She's been working.
Speaker 4 (36:24):
She just worked on a film acting and you know,
we shot a movie out here called The Bubble during
the pandemic. So in the middle of the pandemic, no
one was really making anything because it all seemed kind
of dangerous, and so he said to Netflix, like, I
think I could find a way to make something safely.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
So we made a movie.
Speaker 4 (36:42):
Called The Bubble about a group of actors in a
hotel trying to complete a dinosaur action movie during the pandemic.
And it was a little bit like a mel Brooks
or Christopher Guest movie about all the actors having a
nervous breakdown because they're stuck in the hotel and the
studio won't let them leave till they finished their dinosaur movie.
And uh, Pedro Pascal was in it, and Leslie and Keegan,
(37:06):
Michael Key and Karen Gillan and Fred Armison and a
lot of it's on Netflix. And so we were here
during the pandemic when everything was closed other than grocery
stores and pharmacies. The whole time we were here like
nothing was open.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
So have you moved to England? Is going to be
going to be.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
With us for a long I like to spent a
lot more time here. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Are you here now just to stay or.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
No return ticket?
Speaker 1 (37:35):
Just good? You know that's good.
Speaker 2 (37:37):
I'm just hanging out here and joy.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
So if we're going to wind up, I will ask
you one more time now that we've talked about the
girl cheese and the ice cream and the pop tarts.
But you mentioned comfort food for but is there one
special food?
Speaker 4 (37:51):
Well, I mean I'm a sucker for a good eight
ounce burger, okay for sure. When you find the place,
it's got the fresh French fries and the great burger.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
There's a place called.
Speaker 4 (38:04):
Lunetta all day in West Hollywood near my office, and
I think it's the best burger I've ever had. I
have to I have to try to trick myself in
into not remembering it's there.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
Oh okay, or I'll just do it all the time.
Speaker 4 (38:19):
So in my head, I just like lied to myself,
like I place closed just what I'm ordered every day.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
Well, maybe if I come to LA we'll go and
have a burger. Yes, Thanks about Jed, Thank you, Thanks,
thank you for listening to Ruthie's table for in partnership
with Montclair.
Speaker 5 (38:48):
Ruthie's Table four is produced by Otomi Studios for iHeartRadio.
It's hosted by Ruthie Rogers and it's produced by William Lensky.
This episode was edited by Julia Johnson a mixed by
Nigel Appleton. Our executive producers are Fay Stewart and Zad Rogers.
Our production manager is Caitlin Paramore, and our production coordinator
(39:09):
is Bella Selini. Thank you to everyone at The River
Cafe for your help in making this episode
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