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September 7, 2024 • 14 mins
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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Michael Berry Show.

Speaker 2 (00:02):
Our archive podcast. If you notice that in the title
means this is something we've done in the past that
usually comes back to our attention because a listener has
requested a link to it, or when it came out,
or something happened on a this day in history, or
that person has popped back up in the news or

(00:24):
has died or is running for office or whatever else.
That's when we go back into the vault, pull something out,
and we figure if we go to the trouble to
go find it, then why not share it with folks?
And so that's where the archive podcasts come from on
this particular exciting edition. Greg Fitzimmons is an American stand

(00:49):
up comedian, writer, producer, podcast host celebrated for his sharp wit,
observational humor, and often self deprecating style. He's also he
made notable contributions as a writer and producer. He was
a writer for The Ellen DeGeneres Show, where he earned
four Daytime Emmys. He's also been involved with Louis and

(01:11):
Crashing on HBO. He posts. He hosts a very popular
podcast called Fitzdog Radio. He interviews fellow comedians and covers
a lot of topics. Comedians like to talk about comedy,
you know. Movie actors like to talk about the movie industry.
Singers like to talk about singing, and he does a
lot of that. He also co hosts the podcast Sunday

(01:32):
Papers with comedian Mike Gibbons. We had him on this
is how far back it was. This was before Ramone
was even running the board. Ramone was not our producer yet.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
Chad was.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
How do we remember that? Because Chad is a huge
fan of Greg Fitzimmons, and he reminded Jim Mudd when
Jim Mudd went into the vault to find this. Chad said, oh, yeah,
I set that up because I think he's very funny.

Speaker 1 (02:02):
Greg fit Simmons is our guest.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
I'm gonna play a quick bit. I'm gonna burn a
minute and a half of our time because I want
him to comment on it. Yeah we uh, wasn't too loud, Yeah,
because I want him to comment on this.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
Welcome everyone to comedy Night at University College.

Speaker 2 (02:22):
Let's be very considerate to our first comedian, Jason Berkleman.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
All Right, what a good looking crowd we have tonight.

Speaker 4 (02:32):
Don't judge us based on any prevailing oppressive beauty norms.

Speaker 5 (02:36):
Oh, okay, sorry for that anyway, I just broke up
with my girlfriend. Your reteronormative relationship is exclusionary, a bridget did.

Speaker 4 (02:46):
Okay, So I just flew in, guys and the snacks
on airplane?

Speaker 1 (02:53):
What are you allergic to?

Speaker 6 (02:54):
Pedos fere a flying was on a list of trigger
warnings we sent you.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
Who are these people? You're the victims of your hate speech, Jill,
need to secure a safe place for our protesters.

Speaker 5 (03:05):
They seem angry, and here we go with the tone policing, acknowledge.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
Your white privilege. I was going to with some of
my jokes like this one.

Speaker 5 (03:13):
I went on vacation in Jamaica, racist with my dad, patriarchist.

Speaker 1 (03:19):
He smoked pot. Guys, it's funny, man, explained the Big Jason.
There's at least eight different genders in the audience right now.
They're not all guys. Well, now I feel like I
can't say anything.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
Of course you can, Jason.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
This is a free speech zone. Okay, huh all right?
So uh what else is going on here?

Speaker 2 (03:46):
Recently, Chris Rock came out greg and said he doesn't
perform on college campuses anymore because of this political correctness moved.
Jerry Seinfeld has said the same Amy Schumer's being attacked
by these types of folks as a comedian. Is it
harder to be a comic these days for fear of
offending people?

Speaker 1 (04:06):
Well, I think that.

Speaker 5 (04:09):
There's the first wave of people you can offend, which
is the ones in the crowd, and that's pretty rare.
I find that, you know, the people that are in
the audience, get the context of what you're doing. You've
already you've already told some jokes, maybe you've sort of
defined your voice a little bit. People get that you're
being a little bit ironic, you know, like you might
say something that you don't mean, but it's in a

(04:30):
character of what you're doing on stage. The problem is
when it then gets lifted and put on the internet
and then people judge it based on just that one
bit standalone. It's like when they when you quote somebody
in the newspaper and you grab, you know, one sentence.
That's so I think it's it's worrisome, and I think
comics are to try to really keep an eye out
that you don't see a red light on somebody's phone

(04:53):
while you're performing, because you look what happened to Kramer,
you know.

Speaker 1 (04:57):
And I know I used to watch Kramer in LA.

Speaker 5 (04:59):
And he to do these things and he would go
screaming about Jews and the Holocaust and all this stuff.

Speaker 3 (05:05):
But he was.

Speaker 5 (05:06):
Clearly doing a character. He was doing a guy who
was outrageous.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
Did he go too far that night? Yeah?

Speaker 5 (05:13):
But you know, comedy's experimental, you know, and you've got
to give it some room to cross the line. Otherwise,
how are you ever gonna find the line? You can
just always come up short of the line.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
Yeah, taking leaving a side by the way. Greg Fitzsimmons
will be at the Houston Improv two shows tonight eight
and ten thirty two shows tomorrow night Saturday night, seven
and nine to thirty pm. Improv Houston dot com. It's
a great place to watch.

Speaker 1 (05:37):
It's gonna be really f in offensive, very.

Speaker 2 (05:39):
Offensive, and you're gonna scream the in word at people
who heck will you?

Speaker 5 (05:42):
I don't have to scream it. I find when I
whisper it, I get even more of a reaction.

Speaker 2 (05:46):
It's creepier that way.

Speaker 3 (05:47):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (05:48):
Now, I do a lot of jokes about race, you know.

Speaker 5 (05:51):
I do stuff where we talk about you know, I say,
you know, the Irish, we get offended on Saint Patrick's
Day because everybody, everybody's got to get drunk and row
up so they can be Irish. I say, we don't
do that to you guys in your holidays like on Russia, Shana.
I don't like, go, hey, let's go down to the
bank and check our balances, or you.

Speaker 1 (06:08):
Know, hey, how was your Chinese New Year? It was awesome.

Speaker 5 (06:11):
I got into a senseless automobile accident. How was your
Black History Month? I showed up late, missed the whole
goddamn thing, and people laugh. But if you were to
put that on paper and you put it out there,
then you don't know how people are going to react
to that.

Speaker 2 (06:25):
Well, to me, and you understand what you're doing better
than I do to me. If we can laugh about something,
we can conquer it. You're the best. Comedy is about
the things that make us most awkward, right, sex, race, growing, old, dying.
I mean, that's what comedy's supposed to be.

Speaker 5 (06:43):
About, right And you know there, Look, there are examples
of comedy that I would call racist. You know that's
just because I think that you can start to draw
your own crowd and the crowd you draw may not
be in on the irony of what you're doing. Sometimes,
like like with Dice Clay, I don't think he was
being racist, but I think he started to draw a

(07:04):
crowd of people that really were misogynistic and start and
we're really cheering some of the stuff that he was
saying that was woman bashing. I didn't find it to
be woman bashing, but there is a line, Like you know,
with Jeff Dunham, some people would argue that some of
the stuff he does really doesn't encourage intolerance towards Muslims.
Is that his intention? No, I think the guy's doing

(07:25):
a character. But then you can start to judge the crowd.

Speaker 2 (07:28):
A little bit. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I kind
of feel like art is art and people will do
with it what they want exactly right. But I do
miss the Hickory dickery doc intro. Can you know there
was a time when I wasn't sure if I was
laughing at with him or at him right, but his
stick was it wasn't long.

Speaker 1 (07:49):
Well Kennison, who was the greatest.

Speaker 5 (07:51):
I mean, he was screaming crazy stuff and to me,
it's like I don't have to agree with what a
comedian says like Nick Depolo, I think is one of
the greatest comics in the country. I don't agree with
most most of what he says.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
I don't have to. I have to just think that
here's a.

Speaker 5 (08:05):
Guy who's got an opinion, and he's and he's passionate
about it, and that's funny.

Speaker 2 (08:10):
Yeah, I uh yes, And I believe in the marketplace
of every different kind of type of comic, from Chappelle
to a Kinnison to an Amy Schumer. I think it's important.
The important thing being it doesn't matter if you like
him or not.

Speaker 5 (08:25):
Comedy, right, right, That's that's the whole Yeah, I mean,
do we like Archie Bunker.

Speaker 1 (08:30):
I mean the guy.

Speaker 5 (08:31):
The guy was obviously a racist, but you got the character.
You got that he was a guy who was a
working classman from a place who wasn't exposed to race
and it was at a certain time period where things
weren't is evolved and it's and he was funny.

Speaker 2 (08:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (08:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
It's interesting to go back and see how that stuff
doesn't hold up very well. Right, It's it's almost a
parody or a caricature of a time. When you go
back and look at it. Greg fitz Simmons, host of
the Fitzdog podcast, also heard on Sirius XM on Twitter,
Greg Fits Show. He'll be at the Improv tonight two

(09:07):
shows eight and ten thirty Tomorrow night seven and nine thirty.
You can find out more at improvuston dot com. I'll
play you more of his stuff come up the next
hour from our archives. Big fan, glad to have you
in town, buddy, Thank you. Greg fitz Simmons. Chad's not
a fan boy of very many things, but he's a
huge Greg Fitzsimmons fan. He loves anything in the kind

(09:30):
of Joe Rogan world. Here is more Greg Fitzimmons.

Speaker 1 (09:35):
I wish I was a black guy. If you're a
black guy, I just shave your head.

Speaker 2 (09:38):
All right.

Speaker 6 (09:38):
Hey, this guy, any black guy, he'll be the ugliest
black guy in California.

Speaker 1 (09:42):
You shave your head. Every woman's like.

Speaker 6 (09:44):
Mm yeah, he ever see a white guy shave his head.

Speaker 1 (09:52):
Everybody's like leukemia. Black guy's getting laid. I'm getting chemotherapy.

Speaker 2 (10:07):
It's not fair, all right. This is inside baseball for you,
Andy Kaufman, folks. So I'll make this quick. But several
months ago on Greg Fitzsimmons' podcast. He had Bob Zamuda,
who was supposedly Andy Kaufman's best friend and his behind
the scenes partner in crime. Zimuda's promoting a new book

(10:29):
that otherwise nobody would buy. So he's claiming that Kaufman
faked his own death and is going to reappear so
that he can get people to buy his book. And
there is some doubt even as to whether this was

(10:49):
this was staged, but I'm told it wasn't. It's just
fun to watch Bob's MOODA blow up here.

Speaker 3 (10:55):
You want to stop the sale of this book tomorrow,
take a damn hoe and go over to Bethel Cemetery
where Andy is supposedly in a coffin, and in twenty
minutes with a backo, pop that open with a certified corner.
Take some blood, take some hair samples.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
And.

Speaker 4 (11:17):
Seriously, I have all this respect for you, and I'm
glad you come over, but you get into the and
it's just like it's it.

Speaker 3 (11:24):
Because I'm sick of idiots like you, And well, you
walk me in here, excuse me, you walk me in
here and say, oh, I'm a big fan of yours,
and build me up and all this stuff, and underneath
your waiting to say you're making this up.

Speaker 4 (11:39):
No, I'm just saying I listened to it the entire
and everything's normal, and you get into this I got
high blood sound. You think it's stupid and you're better
than that, And where are you in here?

Speaker 3 (11:53):
Why don't you just listen to what I am saying.
Go to John Mara, go to Universal Studio and I'll
dig up the video you okay, Yeah, my attitude is
I walked up.

Speaker 2 (12:02):
God, it don't give you that. Yeah, that's how it ends.

Speaker 1 (12:06):
That's great.

Speaker 5 (12:09):
Thanks?

Speaker 3 (12:09):
Great? Right?

Speaker 4 (12:12):
I don't.

Speaker 2 (12:20):
You have no release to use an interview that I
just sat down for. Yeah? Yeah, actually you do. You don't.
You don't need a release for that. If you like
The Michael Berry Show and Podcast, please tell one friend,
and if you're so inclined, write a nice review of
our podcast. Comments, suggestions, questions, and interest in being a

(12:42):
corporate sponsor and partner can be communicated directly to the
show at our email address, Michael at Michael Berryshow dot com,
or simply by clicking on our website, Michael Berryshow dot com.
The Michael Berry Show and Podcast is produced by Ramon Roeblis,
the King of Ding. Executive producer is Chad Nakanishi. Jim

(13:12):
Mudd is the creative director. Voices Jingles, Tomfoolery, and Shenanigans
are provided by Chance McLean. Director of Research is Sandy Peterson.
Emily Bull is our assistant listener and superfan. Contributions are
appreciated and often incorporated into our production. Where possible, we

(13:36):
give credit, Where not, we take all the credit for ourselves.
God bless the memory of Rush Limbaugh. Long live Elvis,
be a simple man like Leonard Skinnard told you, and
God bless America. Finally, if you know a veteran suffering
from PTSD, call Camp Hope at eight seven seven seven

(14:00):
one seven PTSD and a combat veteran will answer the
phone to provide free counseling.
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