Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast - 236. Alan Alda

Episode Date: December 3, 2018

Gilbert and Frank welcome a sought-after guest, writer-director-actor Alan Alda, who discusses (among other topics) growing up in Burlesque theaters, working with his father Robert Alda, coping with the pressures of sudden fame and learning to live life "in the moment." Also, Buster Keaton does a backflip, Mickey Rooney "hails a cab," Sarah Silverman forms an unlikely friendship and Alan remembers M*A*S*H colleagues Harry Morgan, Wayne Rogers and McLean Stevenson. PLUS: The Great Blackstone! "The Beast with Five Fingers"! Revisiting "Crimes and Misdemeanors"! Beetlepuss rescues Bela Lugosi! And Alan shares the stage with Red Buttons, Phil Silvers and Mae West!   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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With Golden Globe and Emmy wins, the show starring Jeremy Allen White, Io Debrey, and Maddie Matheson is ready to heat up screens once again. All new episodes of FX's The Bear are streaming June 27, only on Disney+. Hi, this is Gilbert Gottfried, and this is Gilbert Gottfried's amazing, colossal podcast with my co-host, Frank Santopadre, and our engineer our engineer Frank Furtarosa here at Earwolf. Our guest this week really needs no introduction, but we wrote one and damn it, he's gonna get one. He's a writer, producer, director, TV host, New York Times bestselling author, podcaster, and one of the

most recognized and admired actors of the 20th and 21st centuries. You've seen his work in films like Same Time Next Year, The Seduction of Joe Tynan, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Bridges, Bridge of Spies, The Aviator, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He's also written and directed several pictures of his own, including Sweet Liberty, Betsy's Wedding, and The Four Seasons. Memoral TV appearances include ER, The West Wing, 30 Rock, The Blacklist, Scientific American Frontiers, and of course, as Captain Benjamin Franklin Hawkeye Pierce on one of the most revered programs in the history of the medium, MASH. More you want from the guy? Okay. six Emmys, six Golden Globe Awards, two Directors Guild Awards, and two Writers Guild Awards, and in early 2019, he'll receive the Screen Actors Guild Award for Life Achievement.

He also inspired the creation of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. Public Welfare Medal for his extraordinary application of the skills honed as an actor to communicating science on TV and stage. His new book is called If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on my face. And his brand new hit podcast about the art and science of communication is called Clear and Vivid. Frank and I are excited to welcome this podcast. Frank and I are excited to welcome to this podcast a person of many talents and interests and a man who spent part of his childhood being jealous of a pig, Alan Holder. I was wondering what that was going to turn out to be. Yeah, I was jealous of a pig.

That's true. So can you explain that maybe? Yeah, don't leave us hanging, Alan. The pig fell in love with a horse, and I just was devastated. My father was in Burlesque, and my mother and my father traveled from town to town for the first three or four years of my life. So did I. But then one summer, my father and his partner, his acting partner, Hank Henry. Hank was the comic.

My father was the straight man. Hank was the comic. My father was the straight man. And they wrote a sketch that apparently got big laughs in those days. But you have to understand, this was 80 years ago. They had a slightly different sense of humor then. In this sketch, Hank says to my father, get out of here and don't come back until you can bring home the bacon. And that's, by the way, the way they talked in sketches then.

So my father leaves the stage and at the end of the sketch, he comes back holding a live pig under his arm and he says, well, I brought home the bacon. And that got a laugh in those days. Incredible. And that was the blackout of the sketch. That's it. But now they didn't travel by train anymore. They were doing really well on the circuit. They had a car.

So they would go from town to town with the car. My father, my mother, Hank Henry, and the pig. No room for me. That's one of my favorite stories in the book. So I was parked in Wilmington, Delaware with two kind of offbeat aunts. Aunts, you know, not that. And I really didn't like living there with them. And every time they came with the pig, they'd say, look, Allie, look at the pig in the back of the car.

Isn't he cute? And I hated that pig. Because the pig was now going up to the chorus girl's dressing room instead of me. I was the star. But, you know, the old days, you know, they made me a mascot. I loved it. You were three when they put you on stage for the first time in the high chair? No, I was six months old.

Six months old. And then at three, they locked me in a safe on stage. Oh, that's right. And Hank Henry was breaking open the safe in a drunk act. And I stepped out of the safe. And they told me, when you step out of the safe, say, Father. So I did. I didn't think that was funny either.

They had a strange sense of humor in those days i can't believe they had to schlep the pig from town to town for one joke for one joke and it was meanwhile abuse my emotions in the process now one thing going back to my childhood i used to like on tv watch all old movies and i used i loved horror films and one film they used to show a lot beast with five yes oh look at yes yeah my father was in that with peter lorry and and it was all about it was about a hand that didn't have a body attached to it. And Peter Lorre, I think by the end of the movie, got strangled by the hand. And I forget what my father's part was. I think he said, well, I brought home the bacon.

Yeah, it was Peter Lorre and J. Carol Nash. Yeah. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It wasn't a very scary movie, but you saw it a lot, I guess. Yeah, they used to show that a lot.

To bring our listeners up to speed, too, because we're just assuming people know this, and most of our listeners do know, your dad was the great Robert Alda. Yeah, he was a very famous actor. Young people don't know him today. His first movie was playing George Gershwin in the film biography of Gershwin, which was an extraordinary, and he became immediately famous around the world because

it was shown to soldiers during the Second World War and all the theaters of war. And then seven years later, he played the Sky Masters in Guys and Dolls on Broadway, originated the part. So he was really it for a while. And interesting, like a lot of actors' careers, they were the two notable things he did in his whole career. Sky Masterson and Gershwin. Yeah. Yeah. But you would think it would lead to other things, but it didn't.

He's good in Imitation of Life. He plays the talent agent. I didn't realize you were saying a title then. I thought you said he was good at imitating life. No, the Lana Turner picture. He was actually a real person. And he was one of those real old school performers who did everything. He did.

He sang. He danced did everything. He did. He sang. He danced a little. He acted. And in Guys and Dolls, I was very competitive with him as a boy. I thought I was a better actor from the time I was about nine. But boy, when he played Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls, nobody has ever matched that performance. It just was perfect for him, and he was Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls, nobody has ever matched that performance. It just was perfect for him, and he was perfect for the part.

I stood in the wings and watched it every week, sometimes two shows on Saturday, for the whole run of the play. I saw it dozens of times. Our friend Craig Bierko says you came backstage to visit him when he was playing the part, when he was playing Sky. Wait, who came back? Craig Bierko. He was playing Sky. Sky Masterson, the guys and dolls. Yeah, he said you and Arlene came back and said hello to him.

Yeah, and I was very touched by that performance. Was he good? Yeah. Live up to expectations? I mean, as you can imagine, I would be touched when it hit some of the same notes that my father's performance did. But it just, I got more out of watching him and other actors from the wings than I did from any other kind of attempt to learn how to act. It's a very important thing to watch from the wings. You see how the illusion is created.

it's a very important thing to watch from the wings. You see how the illusion is created. Whereas if you're in the audience, you're seeing the illusion and you don't always know how it happens. But when you're standing beside them, sometimes just a couple of feet from them, Sam Levine, who had up until then just played tough guys in movies,

was this incredible comic actor. I learned so much from watching him, more than watching anybody, I think. He was the original Nathan. Yeah, Nathan Detroit. And so most of your real acting training, I guess, was from the wings of observing. was from the wings of observing. I would say all of it, with the exception of studying improvisation for about six months with Paul Sills

on the stage of Second City, but we didn't do Second City kind of improv. We did Viola Spolin's work, which is a much purer improv. It's not intense. No, you've done that, right? Yeah. You've done, have you worked with, did you ever work with Viola?

No. But Paul, did you work with him? I'm like one of those, I've done, I've improvised, but I'm like one of those as a comedian. If I'm with a bunch of people doing improv, I'll go like, okay, here I can get a laugh. Right, right. Well, that's how improv is known to most people. And that's the kind of improv I first did in a company that was called Compass. It wasn't the original Compass Company, but it was an offshoot.

It was called Compass. It wasn't the original Compass Company, but it was an offshoot. And we did what I called guts improvising. It consisted of being thrown out on stage and having to entertain an audience for two hours without knowing what you were going to do. Sounds terrifying. Yeah, it was a little terrifying. And a year later or so, Paul asked me if I wanted to be part of this group that studied Viola's version of it, which is there's no attempt to be funny. And yet there's constant laughter because of the pleasure of spontaneity. And things come out that you don't expect that are truly funny, but sometimes at a psychological level,

not at a joke level. And it was, aside from standing in the wings, to me it was the most important training for the theater because it involved connection. If you didn't connect to the other person, you couldn't improvise with them. If you didn't read them, read their body language and their tone of voice and really be in sync with them, you couldn't have a scene. And that's how you mentioned in your kind and

endless introduction. They double as obituaries, by the way. Those intros, as Gilbert likes to say. It should always end with, found dead in his Los Angeles apartment. That's funny. Well, you mentioned that, what the hell did you mention? I lost my own train of thought.

That I did something or other. Anyway, you mentioned improv. And you mentioned, oh, you mentioned Scientific American Frontiers. Right. Which was a show I did for 11 years on PBS interviewing hundreds of scientists. And the reason that worked, and it really worked well, was because I used my training in improvisation. I connected with the scientists. I didn't come in with a list of questions and say, give me your

little mini lecture on quantum mechanics, and then not even have to listen. Most interviewers don't have to listen because it's not an exchange. It's not a conversation. It's just asking them to bat it out of the park with their little mini lecture, which is usually not easy to understand, but it's not in human terms. But I would engage them the way I would in an improv exercise of the kind Viola invented, and it was alive. And from that I realized I could probably train scientists to be human and speak language that we all can understand by training them in improv. You know, this is because you were saying like getting scientists to speak

so other people can understand them. And I was thinking of all the movies, particularly science fiction films that I saw, where you have the army sergeant talking to the scientist, and the scientist would go, it's a galactic paradoxical interplanetary something or other, and he'd go, say it in layman's terms, doc. And then he'd say, well, it's like this pencil. That's right.

Well, in a way, we all do need that. And it turns out some scientists need that from other scientists if they're not exactly in the same field. They're like intelligent laypeople, and they need to hear it in plain terms. Otherwise, they'll misunderstand it. And that's happened time and time again. And we rely on scientists to collaborate. And that's happened time and time again. And we rely on scientists to collaborate. If they can't collaborate, we're going to miss out on some really important discoveries and breakthroughs, that kind of thing. Yeah, I know the picture you're talking about.

That's the picture where somebody would eventually say, don't touch that fish, you swole. You'll kill us all. Yeah. Gilbert used to have a bit in his act about the lever that's in the doctor's castle. They always have a lever. And under it would be a sign that said, don't pull this lever. Right. Yes.

Because it blew up the castle. Yeah. And now getting back to vaudeville. Yeah, let's get back to vaudeville. But vaudeville, as I'm sure you know, vaudeville was different from burlesque. People today kind of don't know that. Vaudeville was already an elevated form of entertainment. It was like the metropolitan opera.

It was highfalutin compared to burlesque. Compared to burlesque. Yeah. In burlesque, everybody walked around with their shirt off unless you were a guy. And in vaudeville, they had tap dancers and singers and very cultural events. And that's where I got another view from the wings. I would watch the magician who I think was Blackstone, the famous magician. Harry Blackstone, wow.

And I saw him take apart a card table, a poker table, and then put it back together again. And then pigeons came out of it. But from the wings, I could see where he kept the pigeons. That's great. And that's what I did when I would watch from the wings, regular actors, I would see where they kept their pigeons. Your dad was the tit singer. He was, that's right. That's a technical term, burlesque. Yeah, interesting. I heard in vaudeville, a lot of those vaudeville houses, they say, were complete dives, like rat infested. The burlesque houses were like that.

When my father was in vaudeville, he was already a movie star, so he played nice theaters. Maybe vaudeville theaters were shabby too i don't know were you on stage with red buttons and and rags ragland and and phil silvers and rags ragland and phil silvers were in burlesque and i'm told they were in the schoolroom scene where i was brought on stage at the age of six months red buttons carried me on stage in his stand-up act in the Catskills and claimed that I peed all over him. I was six months old at the time. And people would tell you things about your early life. He says I ruined a really expensive suit.

And I found this fascinating, too, that the performers who work with your pop would come over the house on weekends, and you guys would do routines. You would do the classical Pflugelstreet. Pflugelstreet and... Slowly I Turn. Handful of nickels, Slowly I Turn. And there was a pile of scripts left over from Burlesque that I would read through at the age of eight, nine. burlesque that I would read through at the age of eight, nine. And I would say to my father, can I be in this sketch on Sunday? And he'd say, uh, that's a little rough for you.

And I wouldn't know what the point of it was because they hadn't, I knew about burlesque and naked ladies, but I didn't know about sex. I found out about that a little later. Yeah. That was, that was Joy's question, by the way. I asked Joy before I came over here, I said, one question for Alan, and she said, yes, ask him about how burlesque affected his sex life. Well, this is Joy Behar I'm talking about. Yeah, it's only affected our life in the sense that

the budget for G-strings is enormous in our house and i don't know what to do about it because you know you you go to amazon you buy them by the gross and but that's still there's you know sequins and everything you're exposed to a lot at a very young age they were the ones who were exposed yes but you say you hardly had a childhood because you were you well i skipped past uh that freudian thing where you're supposed to be uh unaware of the other sex i was aware of sex all the time they the the chorus girls would have me turn my back and they'd say uh and they'd say we've got to change our clothes now turn your back alley and i was i remember thinking they think this has no effect on me. I didn't use those exact words, but that's what I was being.

They think this is, but it does, you know? So I suppose that explains a lot. A little bit. That sounds like a great childhood for me. You know, mostly guys say that. And mostly women go, oh. Mostly guys say that. And mostly women go, oh.

Gilbert, you found fascinating that Alan did Who's On First with his dad. Yes. Yeah, that was the first time I was conscious of performing in front of an audience. The war was on, the Second World War. And they had a place in Hollywood called the Hollywood Canteen where they would bring every night and they'd have hundreds of soldiers and sailors who were on their way to the Pacific and parked in Hollywood for a few days. They would entertain them. All the movie actors would come. The women would dance with the soldiers and sailors, the actresses, and people who could

entertain and get up on stage and do something entertaining would be at the microphone. And my father, as you said, he could do all kinds of things. So he knew that I was really in love with performing. So he taught me who's on first. And I was the Costello character. And I remember so clearly standing in the wings. It was sort of like wings. It was a little ante room I was in waiting to go on. And I was hearing my father's act up until the point where I'm brought on. And the closer it got to the time where I was going to walk out on stage, the more my hands would shake. I was holding a little baseball bat, and the bat was like shivering. And as soon as I walked out on stage and I got hit with the spotlight, it was like a warm glow I was enveloped in, and I felt comfortable immediately. And then

I said the first line that got a laugh, and this huge laugh came rolling over the footlights, and I thought, this is it. You're home. I can control people, a thousand people at a time, who previously today were carrying guns, and I'm in charge now. I was nine years old. It was a tremendous feeling of power. I'm sure. So as opposed to a lot of celebrities who have kids who are against their kids following in their footsteps, you were born into it. I was, and yet my father tried to discourage me. Wow.

But he was always of two minds about it. He knew how much he loved it. He knew how much I loved it. And he would say, don't do it. But then he would try to get me a job, you know, when it came time to work. I was married very young. I was married at the age of 21. And within two or three years, we had three daughters. There's a pall over the conversation. Have I said something to offend your sensibility?

No, I was looking for my next card and my next thought. Oh, in other words, this is a case of not listening. No. I heard every word of it. You got married very young at 21 and you had three daughters. Yeah, being able to repeat it doesn't mean you listen. By the way, in the first book, all the odd jobs you took,

the clown outside of the car, the car dealership, and all of the different things you did. Not even a dealership, just an ordinary gas station. Is that what it was, a gas station? Clown. All my job was was to wave cars into the gas station,

but I was conscientious. I was a performer. I would dance comically for six hours a day in the hot sun on Gun Hill Road. And the asphalt would stick to my shoes. It was about 100 degrees in the summertime. And one time I got chased up a telephone pole by kids who wanted my balloons. Is that true? Yeah.

That's wild. I threw the balloons as far as I could. And as soon as they went for them, I climbed down and went home, and I didn't go back. It's touching, that part of the book, how you and, you know, the hungry years, as it were, for you and Arlene, where you were putting— Most actors go through. I only know one actor who didn't go through that. Meryl Streep was working from the time she left school. Interesting.

And never stopped. But most actors go through that, and it's good for you. It's good. You learn about people. When I drove a cab, I really learned about people in the back seat. You know, it's amazing what they do in the back seat. It was worse than burlesque. I'm sure.

What are some of the things you caught them doing in the back seat? Well, first of all, I mean, seriously, they talk as though you're not there. They say the most intimate things, and they think that nobody's listening. And you're getting the details of their lives, sometimes even famous people. It's weird. People, it's an interesting idea that you live through where you realize for some people, some other people don't exist. And it's kind of a strange thing.

It is. I want to ask you one more thing about your dad before we move on, and that was just the two episodes of MASH that he did with you, Dr. Borelli. Right. I wrote one of them. The second one. Yes. Yeah.

Went back and watched them this week. Oh, you really prepare. I try, Alan. See, all I do is listen. As you see, sometimes I get caught up in my preparation and lose the moment. But that was a lot of fun because he said, in this show you're writing, wouldn't it be a good idea if we're marooned at an aid station away from the mass unit and it gets bombed and we have to operate on this guy, but my right arm is injured

and your left arm is injured and we have to operate on them together. And together we make one surgeon. And I thought to myself, that's the worst damn idea I ever heard. And it turned out that I thought, next, he's my father and he loves to write. And maybe this is a good idea. If it appeals to him, maybe it'll appeal to other people. Maybe there's a way we can do it that won't be so corny.

And we did. I wrote it into the script and it was a little corny. But what was fun for me was after having had this competitive relationship with him, that really came from me. It didn't come from him. I was competitive, not him.

Here we were, a father and son acting the part of two people who had to act like people who had been at one another's throats before, but now we're one person doing a delicate operation. And it was a father-son moment that I didn't expect. And I really loved it. And I wouldn't have had it if I hadn't been a little generous to him and thought, let him have his idea. It's,

it's a, it's a sweet moment. The first episode, too. Yeah. Where he's too drunk to operate. He's too drunk to do the nerve replacement.

You know, I can't remember most of the shows. Now I can hardly remember the ones I wrote. Yeah. Both of them are special.

There's the way you... I hear it's good. I ought to look at it. Yeah. Go back and watch the first one. One was season three and one was from season eight. We will return to Gilbert Gottfried's amazing, colossal podcast

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please go to connexontario.ca. Hi, this is Ed Begley Jr. And you're listening to Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast. It's Gilbert and Frank's Amazing Colossal Podcast. And now we return to the show. Gil wanted to ask you about Bela Lugosi, I think. Yes. Yes. Yeah.

We only dated for a while. Your father did a stage show with Bela Lugosi? Well, almost. It was in vaudeville. And one week, Bela Lugosi, who had been younger members of the audience, would probably not know his name. He was in a lot of horror movies. I think he played a vampire a lot.

And my father's partner in the act he did in vaudeville at that time, his name was Beetlepuss Lewis. Very nice guy, friend of the family. And he's called Beetlepuss because he had a face that if you looked at it a certain way, it looked a little like a beetle. And they together wrote their act, which was full of hilarious lines on the order of, well, I brought home the bacon. and there was Bela Lugosi in the show, and all he did was read a monologue in a green spotlight, I think, just from a book, from a scary book. And so, Beetlepuss Lewis got sympathetic.

He felt bad for him, and he gave him some material. He said, how about this? When the girl singer comes out, let her introduce you, and you come out, and you say this thing to the girl singer. I forget what it was. It was something that could be misunderstood, and it was sort of funny. Something about drinking blood or something vampire related. And she says to him, oh, Bella, you kill me. And then you, Bella, you say to her, in due time, my dear. And this got a much bigger laugh than the pig.

So he kept that in and they would give him lines to do. And he had been to start with a very respected Shakespearean actor. Yeah, people don't know that. Yeah. And then he came to America and he settled into a string of horror movies. And then when that ran out of steam, he had to make a living in Burlesque. No, in vaudeville. But he didn't have an act.

So Beetlepuss came to the rescue. It's a great story. But it's the life that everybody, we're traveling performers, you know? It's like that song in Kiss Me, Kate, which I can't remember at the moment. Did you ever meet Lugosi? Sure I did, but I don't remember the meeting. All I remember of him was standing in the green light, reading his poem, and saying, in due time my dear

you talk about in the book too how you saw may west and some other people i acted with may west it was in summer stock wow and uh not mock chunk pennsylvania but nearby okay i love that town and uh uh each I was an apprentice, but they kept giving me long parts to play. So I got a lot of good experience there. In one show, I was in a play with Mae West, who was a very interesting woman. She was about 60 or 63, had this reputation as being a comic femme fatale, did yoga every day. She did. Watched what she ate.

You know, I think she was a vegetarian maybe. But completely different from her public persona. Very nice, nice lady. And Buster Keaton, I didn't realize at the time, I was 16, I didn't know I was watching From the Wings again, one of the great geniuses of the movies. But I don't know he was watching From the Wings again, one of the great geniuses of the movies. But I don't know how old he was. He was at least in his 60s.

He must have been. Maybe older. He did a backflip. And every night at every show, did a backflip and landed on the stage in a seated position. How did he do that at any age? Unbelievable. on the stage in a seated position. How did he do that at any age?

Unbelievable. I know you said you're not really a nostalgic person by nature, but that you are nostalgic for those days. You miss the smell of backstage of those theaters, those burlesque houses. Have you been in enough theaters backstage to notice this? Probably not. Maybe Gilbert has. Theaters have a peculiar odor. It must be some bacterium that kind of settles in theaters backstage. Maybe they like to eat the glue on the scenery or something.

But there's a really pungent smell that brings me back to my childhood when I'm backstage in a theater. I said that once to the crew of a play I was doing in London because that London theater smelled just like the American theaters, and they got offended. You think our theaters smell? They said that with a British accent. I think it was Sid Melton, the old comic actor.

I don't know that name. Oh, we show you his picture, you'd recognize him. Oh, yeah. Oh, he was on the Danny Thomas show. He's on a million. Yeah, one of those guys you go, oh, him. He, one time when he was older, because he had done so much TV and movies, he one time said, I miss the smell of the soundstage.

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I think they have a special smell too maybe it's the same one i never paid it the comedy clubs have a smell oh yeah you don't want to know about it yeah from the kitchen and i think smell don't they say you probably spoke to a scientist one time isn't smell like the most direct form of memory when you smell something i don't know but i've heard that i don't know i haven't heard it from a scientist but it's it does make sense because it's so so divorced from words or anything else i mean it's such a powerful experience we bounce around here a lot as you can see and there's your show has a structure else. I mean, it's such a powerful experience. We bounce around here a lot, as you can see. Your show has a structure. No, not at all. I just have a conversation

in which I listen to what's being said. Our show is a little chaotic, as you can see. This is an interesting story. You made a movie called The Extraordinary Seaman with David Niven. Yes. I hastened to add spelled S-E-A. Yes. Yes. S-E-A. You beat me to that joke.

This movie was so bad. It was played in one airplane flight over Toledo and three people parachuted. I think the story that Gilbert and I found interesting was that there were sharks in the water. Yes, and the director. Tell me the director. John Frankenheimer.

John Frankenheimer, who I liked. He was a very competitive guy. We stayed up all night playing darts one night until 5 o'clock in the morning, and he gave me a 50-point lead, and I beat him just by accident. I don't know how to play darts. So he said, I'd really like to play again. I said, it's five o'clock. We have to shoot at six o'clock. Shouldn't we get an hour of sleep? He said, I'd really like to play again.

He played until he won. But he also was not too concerned that we had seen sharks in the water. And he said, now here comes the scene where you fall off the boat into the water. I said, are we sure about that? Because we've all been seeing sharks. He said, no, no, they're porpoises. I love that. Porpoises circling with their fins above the water, you know. Mickey Rooney was with you too?

Mickey Rooney, yeah. We were, Frankenheimer left us in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico in a rowboat, four actors, with waves that were rising. It looked like they were rising 10 feet. rising. It looked like they were rising 10 feet. And he, in his helicopter, was 10 miles away, and he was going to come in on this long opening shot that finally sees this speck in the water, and then he gets closer, and it's these four guys in a rowboat. So he leaves us alone while he goes off to get the beginning of the shot. And now there's this big discussion among the four people in the boat. What do we do if we get thrown out of the boat and there's a shark in the water? And there was a prince from a Polynesian prince playing one of the characters,

and he said, what we do is, and this is in Polynesia, we just punch him in the nose. The shark. You punch the shark in the nose. The shark. You punch the shark in the nose. First of all, I imagine you have to be pretty good about aiming and hitting his nose and not his teeth. And secondly, wouldn't you think he'd get a little upset at that? And meanwhile, he had a way.

We were going to all punch the shark in the nose. It's the same. But Mickey Rooney kept saying, taxi. He didn't want any part of the whole thing. But meanwhile, Frank and I didn't see anything wrong with leaving four actors in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico with nothing around them but sharks. Unbelievable. You took your life into your own hands a couple of times as an actor. I tend to do it. That's why I'm glad that the Screen Actors Guild takes care of actors and

has rules now. You can't put people through certain things, even if they want to. We'll make people buy the book, but in the first book, never have your dog stuffed, it's called. And there's a couple of stories of you almost buying the farm on stage. Oh, three times I almost died on stage. In there. Yeah. One time I set fire to myself. That's what I was referring to.

Wearing a cheap robe. And this was opening night, too. And it was in those days when the critics were there on opening night. So it was kind of an important performance. And I lit a cigarette, which I didn't really know how to do because I didn't smoke. And I put out the match. And the match wasn't fully out. It was still glowing.

And it set fire to my cheap acetate robe. And within a second, I was a sheet of flames. And my first thought was, oh, this is going to get a big laugh. Isn't that crazy? And, of course, the theater went totally silent. They were going to see this guy immolate himself. But I managed to get the fire out. Another time I was on, it wasn't opening night, but it was in the musical The Apple Tree.

in the musical The Apple Tree, and a huge light from the, what do you call the thing above the stage? Not the wings, the other one. Oh, there's a good word for it. Prothenium. No, well, you're close. That's good. Yeah, anyway.

You're asking the wrong guy. The place where they keep the lights. Help, anybody. The light fell on the stage within six inches of my head, right in front of me. So I was wearing a big cape and it hit the cape and I was supposed to leave the stage, but this 200 pound light was on the cape and I started pulling on the cape. Again, I'm thinking this is going to get a big laugh. A slave for the laugh, Alan.

It's all I care about. So then the third time was prior to both of those times. I had written a play based on the book of Job. And I was playing Job and I was only 24, way too young to play Job. But to make myself look older and like I had these sores all over my head, I had pasted crepe hair on my face and my head, and I had a bald pate. The thing is, at the age of 24, I didn't really know how to use glue to hold false hair down. So in one of my long monologues where I'm complaining to God that he's made my life miserable, a hair comes loose from my face, and I can see it floating in front of my mouth.

And now I've got to launch into the second half of this long monologue, and I can see it floating in front of my mouth. And now I've got to launch into the second half of this long monologue and I take a big, deep breath and the hair goes right into my windpipe. My God. And I start coughing and I'm coughing and I'm coughing and I went on for like almost a minute. It was excruciating. Finally, they brought the curtain down.

And then the manager of the theater came out and said, as you all know, crepe hair is an invention of the devil. And we'll start again in a minute after I stop coughing. But I didn't think they would laugh, but I was a very serious actor. And I thought, this looks really realistic that's what matters the way I'm coughing now it's not make-believe just more suffering for Job right yeah it was in character yeah it just went on forever and you had a rough time or a strange time when you did you have any idea when MASH started that it would be anywhere near as big? No, nobody did. I said to my wife, I got this offer to do this script.

They had sent me the script, and I said, it's the best writing I've seen for television ever. And I said, but obviously I can't do it because it's liable to run a year, and I'd have to be in California for a year. And she called me back the next day and said, you know, if it's that good, maybe we can solve that problem by travel. So on months, about four months out of the year, I would go back every weekend. But I wasn't going to do it because I thought it would last a year.

It lasted 11 years. Amazing. Changed my life and that of all of us connected with the show. And wasn't it, you were not prepared for what a big star you would become after that. Well, is that great story about how your face was more recognized to those students than Lincoln's? Isn't that weird? Bizarre. And Lincoln, you know, they tried my face and Lincoln's face,

and they showed it to schoolchildren. And during those years, they recognized me more easily than Lincoln. And that's hard to believe because he had his own penny. I know. I know. There was something wrong with education at that point. I know....to each other. I know. We were alive. I don't... It was... There was something wrong with education at that point.

It was clear. But did it scare you? Well, what scared me was I wasn't prepared for people pulling at me and grabbing me and that kind of thing. I mean, there's a certain kind of sudden fame that disorients the people who are seeing somebody famous who they don't expect to see. I mean, these are adults I'm talking about, but it's sort of embodied in the experience

I had once when a six-year-old kid saw me and looked at me for a long time and said, how did you get out of the TV? And that's what people are feeling when they, even adults, it's like, what's going on here? And they get disoriented. Oh, you talk about it. Their syntax is off. The syntax is off. The motor control is off.

Many, many people have said to me, you're my biggest fan. Oh, yes. They say that to you? Yes. Yeah, isn't that weird? By the way, it's not that they're stupid and we're not. We all are capable of this. You know, when I met Lee Woolman, the great Norwegian actress,

I had the same reaction to her. She was talking to me. I couldn't hear what she was saying. I was just seeing her in the movies. All the cliches are true, I found out. Like, you're my biggest fan. Another thing is, didn't you used to be? Yeah.

Yeah, or sometimes, do you do anything now? Oh, yes, yes. No, I just do this. I'm actually talking in the book about how it's interesting how you talk about celebrity. And at one point, it got to the point where people were sending you letters, personal letters, asking you for life advice. Well, I got a lot of suicide notes. And suicides. Yeah, and I didn't know what to do.

I sincerely wanted to be of help, but I didn't want to say the wrong thing. And sometimes I'd hang on to the letter for two or three weeks trying to figure out what to say. And I realized that wasn't a good policy because I might be too late. So I then figured out with the help of a friend who was a psychologist the best answer I could. And I would use that over and over again and personalize it as much as I could and give them the phone number of a hotline they could call. I tried to be as helpful as I could. But then I realized this is one of the strange outcomes of being famous. People write you a suicide note and you send them a form letter to be more personal.

Very strange. Those things don't go together. Did they think, were some of them delusional enough to think you were the character, that you were Hawkeye or were they writing to Alan Alda? No, I don't think it was delusion. I think they had a connection, they felt, that was emotional with somebody they thought might respond. I mean, I suppose there's this thought, if you can be that empathic in the character you play,

you must have some element of it in your own life, something like that. But the most intelligent and grown-up people are susceptible of misinterpreting that. In a moment of crisis, especially, I had a friend whose husband fell down in the bathroom and knocked himself unconscious and his head was bleeding. And she found him in there and she said, I got to call somebody. Who should I? And I was the first person she thought of calling. It's strangely flattering.

Well, what was I going to do? Go tell them a couple of good jokes? Call Alan. I just want to talk quickly, Alan, and we move around a lot, as I said, but quickly back to those old days. What do you remember about doing JFK in the cabaret? Yeah, in the improvisation. In Hyannis Port?

Yeah, we were in Hyannis Port in the same hotel. I found that fascinating. It really was interesting. He would give his press conferences in the morning upstairs in the hotel, and at night I would do an impersonation of him doing a press conference in the morning upstairs in the hotel. And at night, I would do an impersonation of him doing a press conference in the cabaret in the basement of that hotel. And the reporters who had interviewed him during the day at his press conference would come to the show at night and ask me some of the same questions. But it hadn't been in the paper yet because it was the same day.

I didn't know what they were talking about half the time. So I would do a savor, you know, like, well, we have a committee studying that. How was your JFK? Was it one meter good? Well, I thought it was better than one meter. Really? Wow. Wow. That is.

Well, but that's me. I was competitive with my own father. Yes, of course. Can we hear some of your character? No, I would have to work myself into it. But you know what was funny? Later on, I did an impersonation of William Buckley. Oh, yes.

And, of course, the sound of the voice was different, but a lot of the same jokes were the same. I did some of the same jokes because you make an effort to cartoonify the person you're making fun of, and it can apply to a lot of people. Yeah, the king of the William Buckley impersonators was David Frye. I don't remember that. Frye, he was the guy that did the Dead on Nixon. Oh, yeah, yeah. The little short guy, and he had kind of a natural five o'clock shout out.

Robin Williams did a pretty damn good William F. Buckley. Yeah. Have you heard Bill Hader's Alan Alda? Do you have an opinion about that? I think it's uncanny. He sounds like all the people who sound like me. Have you discussed this with him? No.

I met him once. He's a very nice guy. It's pretty good. He's a very nice guy. I don't hear it. You don't hear him? No. I met him once. He's a very nice guy. He's a very nice guy. I don't hear it. You don't hear it. No. But I'm half deaf, so I don't hear my voice the way – truly, I don't hear my voice the way other people do.

When you first started to realize how famous you were, did it affect you in any way, your ego? Well, not my ego. It kept me from sleeping at night. Well, not my ego. It kept me from sleeping at night. For about six months, I had night terrors where you actually see something that's not there. It's like a hallucination. There was a guy in the bedroom, a big hulking guy who was glowering at me and wanted to strangle me. One night, he was on the bed strangling me. This was a hallucination. Gilbert has them all the time. You have these stricken faces. I feel so sorry for you talking to this guy. Now I'll probably have this nightmare tonight.

That's funny. People would do strange things. They would shake your hand violently and pull you down on a table. That happened once. I actually fell all over this guy's roast beef because they don't – and this is a they. We're all capable of this. Lose motor control because you get disoriented. And suddenly I was reaching across the table to shake hands with him. And when he grabbed my hand, his arm involuntarily pulled back and pulled me across the table.

So you got to – it's a very interesting, strange phenomenon, this fame thing. That story too, how you were at the opening night of your theater and they held the curtain because you had a line of people. Wasn't that amazing? Crazy. I told Gilbert that last night. I'm waiting for the play to start. This was right after MASH hit. And there was a line of people all up the aisle asking me for my autograph. And I was thinking, well, this will be over in a minute because the play has to start. And the play, they held the curtain for like 10 minutes.

And finally somebody came to me and said, is it okay if we start the play now? I said, oh God, I'm waiting for you to rescue me. Crazy. And you stopped giving autographs at a certain point. I didn't, I did. I did it. First of all, it was mechanical and it wasn't, I would, I changed it to shaking hands and looking them in the eye. But some people didn't go for that. Some people would say, I don't want to shake hands with you. Well, I sure as hell don't want to sign an autograph for you. You have those scary experiences with fans? You're pretty famous. And what's funny about it is, with what you just said, is that, you know, they'll ask you for an autograph.

You'll say, no, but I'll shake your hand. You'll smile. You'll shake their hand. And then they'll walk away going, boy, that Alan Alda, what a scumbag. I suppose that winds up on social media too, but it really is. You have three books in front of you that I wrote. If I signed all those autographs, that would be more than another fourth book. You were nice enough to sign this one for my wife.

Oh, I want it back. Back in the day you got it we will return to gilbert godfrey's amazing colossal podcast after this and there was there was one part in um king of comedy that jerry lewis told scorsese about that actually happened, that they put in the movie. What was that? Someone was on the phone, a woman was on the phone, and she said, oh, can you say hello to my brother or my cousin, whatever? And he said, I'm kind of in a hurry. And she screams out, you should get cancer and die.

Almost that same thing happened to me one night. I had spent a whole day scouting locations, but I mean like 18 hours. And the car was out of gas. So I pulled up to a gas station. I filled the tank and I got back in the car. And the window was still open. And this guy comes over and says he wants my autograph and I said,

and I tried to smile and say, I'm sorry, I don't give autographs. I was really exhausted. I said, I can shake hands. He says,

I don't want to shake hands with you. Unbelievable. You think you're a good actor. You're not such a good actor. You just play the same character over and over. And he says to his friend, come on over,

let's beat this guy up. Oh, jeez. Isn't that amazing? Unbelievable. Maybe there was something wrong with my smile. I was really tired. It might have looked like

I was sneering or something. I just want to ask you one question about Gilbert before we move off of MASH. Because Gilbert thought, as a lot of people did, that you were doing some Groucho rhythms in your delivery with Hawkeye. I just would do that for fun, usually at the table read. And then they started to write it into the show. They started to write it that way.

Because I asked you once about a run where the Officer of the Day episode. When you do, I won't carry a gun. I'll carry a tune. I'll carry your books. I'll carry Grant. I don't remember that having a groucho little, did it? The sound of the words. It sounds like one of those groucho rants.

And the puns. And you said to me that was Gelbart. That was all Gelbart. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And the puns. And you said to me puns that have such a twist on a known expression that it goes deeper into your head than just the other two categories. And Larry was capable of really great puns. And it bothered me sometimes when the scripts written by other people would have the more ordinary kind of pun that didn't really get you anywhere.

It wasn't funny. It just was kind of annoying that it sounded like another word. You know what I mean? Well, Gilbert likes it. You like a shameless pun. Yeah. He tweets them. I tweet out the worst puns in the world.

But that's the point. You're spoofing. Yes. You know. Yeah, you know they are. Yeah. You're taking distance from them. What would be an example?

Can you remember one? Oh, geez. Oh, okay. Here's a groaner. Why did the alphabet take a laxative so it could have a vowel movement. That's one of my more intelligent ones. He's working high

brow. I really object to, I have an old friend who anytime something sounds like a pun, he goes, ooh. I don't like that because some puns are worth laughing at. And if they're not, you just go, okay, good. Then you move on.

I saw an interview with Gil Barton. He said that you guys didn't disagree often, but when you did, what he admired about you is that you always had a solution. Oh, he never told me that. That's nice to hear. Thank you. It was with an interview with the TV Academy. Oh, isn't that nice?

Yeah. Well, we worked together really well. told me that. That's nice to hear. Thank you. It was with an interview with the TV Academy. Oh, isn't that nice? Yeah. Well, we worked together really well. It was thrilling to work with him because he was a genius and he let me collaborate with him. There was one show where he called me about two days before we were going to shoot it

and he said the writer brought in a really good idea, but the script he delivered doesn't work. So Larry said, why don't I write the first half of it and you write the second half of it, and we should have it done by Monday when we start shooting. And it was really exciting to know we were both working like on a tightrope together. And it turned out to be a really good show. It was fun.

He was so brilliant. What a body of work. Yeah. And an amazing ability to relate to another person. He was coming home one night to his house in Beverly Hills. Fancy house. And a guy stepped out of the bushes with a gun and said, open the door, I want to come inside, and I want your money.

So Larry led him into the house, and the conversation went longer than this, but essentially it was, you know, you're too smart to do this. Why don't you let me help you get a job? Then you won't have to rob people. The guy agreed. The next day, Larry got him a job. And I think it changed his life. Isn't that an amazing, the guy's holding a gun on you, and you think about what you can say that will be in his interest. Right. Well, you use that in your new book as a prime example of improvisation in the moment.

Yeah, improvisation. And it's a great example of what is all through the book, which is the importance of empathy. What's the other person going through? If you can really pay attention to what's happening in the other person's head, or what you have a good estimate of what's happening in their head, the chances of communicating and getting some wisdom is really much greater. And Larry, in a way, saved his life by really reading the other guy well. I mean, that might not have worked with another guy. He had to really estimate if he was on the right path with this guy. Yeah, I think there was probably some luck involved, too.

I would imagine. Yeah. And you worked with Phil Silvers. Yes, yeah, on his show, Sergeant Bilko. How was that? How was Phil Silvers? Well, he had known me when I was an infant, you know, so he was very fatherly toward me and I was only about 21. And he was just great.

But I had worked on the stage, only on the stage, by the time I was working with Phil Silvers. I hadn't done anything in front of a camera. And I was used to rehearsing for sometimes weeks before you get up and do it. So I would learn it as I rehearsed it, while I rehearsed it. I couldn't learn off a piece of paper.

I still have trouble learning off a piece of paper. I have to do it. I have to hear it. I have to hear the other person. I have to find out what the emotional life is, not just the words. So I go to the set the first day with Phil, and they say, okay, Alan, you're up. It's a phone conversation. It's a monologue.

Take one. And I thought, I don't know this. How am I supposed to do this? The camera's rolling. how am I supposed to do this? The camera's rolling. So I quickly, by the time they were ready for the next scene, I went to the script clerk and I said,

can you hold the book for me while I try to learn this? I didn't know you were supposed to know it before you came in. Can you go back and watch those? I'm sure some of those performances are on YouTube and things like that. Are you the kind of actor that can watch yourself? I know you're not particularly nostalgic, as we said. Yeah, no, I'm not. I'm not really interested. You don't want to go back and look at those performances.

I mean, I'm certainly willing to give that young kid the permission to not be as good as I am now. Yeah, I mean, just as a curio. Yeah, but I don't really think I would gain anything from it. Do you cringe sometimes when you watch yourself? I don't cringe, but I see the mistakes I've made. But I let them go. If you don't let them go, you'll keep making them or you'll make other mistakes, I think. Anyway, my life has been changed by improvisation.

I'm really more in the present moment than I am in the past or the future. I don't worry about past failures. I don't revel in past successes. And I don't think about where my life ought to be going in the future. I just see whatever's in front of me. I try to do the best I can with it. I try to find something that's fun and useful about it. And that usually leads to something else. I wouldn't be teaching scientists and doctors to communicate if I had a plan. How would I know when I was 21 and learning acting and learning improvisation that one day I'd be teaching scientists to improvise. That doesn't make sense. And I'm not the only one who teaches them.

We have 30 people training thousands of scientists and doctors around the world. But I had no idea it was going to lead to that, and it was really just improv-ing my way through. There's a lot of that that runs through all three of the books, where you kind of decide you're going to accept things as they come. Yeah. Give yourself over to it, not try to micromanage it. I really think reality is our friend.

And denying reality, although it's the option of first choice often, because the joke I used to do, as William Buckley was, we don't recognize red China because as long as they don't exist, they can't attack us. And that's the essence of denial. You know, if I deny that I have this disease, then I'm not going to suffer from it. But in fact, the reality that you accepting the reality is the best thing you can do because if there's anything to be done, you can do it.

So I've always been that way, and that's one reason why I don't dwell on the past because that's memories and why I don't think about the future because that's fantasies. I mean, I do make plans. I decide how long I need to get dressed in the morning and that kind of thing. What made you want to do a podcast?

I don't remember, but somebody suggested it. Did you know what a podcast was? Because we sure didn't. Is that true? Yeah, we had no idea. We interviewed one guest. We still don't. Yeah.

And he was 100. He still don't. Yeah. And he was 100. He was actually 100, our first guest. Yeah, he was 100. That's great. And he wasn't a good 100. It's not like – He wasn't a spry 100. Did he last throughout the whole interview?

Yeah, that's about it. We knew he was breathing. We sort of thought he was breathing. And then afterwards, we went and had a slice of pizza and i remember i was saying okay well we tried this that's he was ready to abandon it after one episode and here we are 230 in oh wow that's good i'm only about 15 in right sarah how many have we done about 20 and i love I love it. The reason I did it, started it to help out the Center for Communicating Science, to spread the word. And if we bring in revenue from the ads, that all goes to the Center for Communicating Science.

So that was the real motivation. But I didn't know how much I'd enjoy it. I really, really love it because it's just conversation. I just talk with these amazing people who have, you know, a hostage negotiator, Renee Fleming, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Ruth. Tina Fey. Tina Fey. People you don't expect to be on the same show and all talking generally about the same subject

is how can we relate to one another so that the wheels of community get greased. I was going to say when you were talking before is I spend so much of my life having continuing arguments with people who for all know, have been dead for 40 years. Yeah, right. By the way, by the way, so do I. Okay.

I'm not such a saint. Usually it occurs in the shower. I'm usually in the shower with somebody who's not really there. Somebody from 40 years ago, and I'm saying, you son of a bitch. How dare you? I find myself angry at people, and then I remember I found out

that they actually did die, and I knew that, but I'm still arguing with them. Well, they live in our heads. That's the weird thing about having a brain. There's so much going on in there. We can't understand. What about that guy trying to strangle me after I got famous?

Oh, yes. That was all happening in my head. Wow. What is the part of the podcast? Is it the interviewing people that you're enjoying as well? That's it. So you might have been suited as a talk show host back in the day. If I hadn't wanted to just be an actor, I could have had a lot of fun doing that.

Something like Cavett. Yeah. But it would have been different because what we do is just have a conversation where I join in with my own experiences and feelings related to this. And something comes out of the conversation that wouldn't come out if I had a list of questions. I really get it all from them and join them in the we have a conversation. It's not an interview there. I've noticed with interviewers where it's this thing of like, you know, a guest will say something. They'll go like, you know, I once murdered a man. And then they'll go, and you did your film in Paris, right?

It's like, well, did you hear what he just said? I know. That's what I wanted to avoid above all. I learned how to do that on the science program, and it really makes a difference, I think. But you guys have a conversation too. I mean, I hear things coming out of you that's from your own experience. We try to make it part of an interview and part of a conversation. Yeah. You have all these notes spread out on blue cards. It's the only way I can work.

What's interesting about you in films so often and the character parts, you play really slimy characters. Yeah, I love that. It's just great. Have you played slimy people? That's all I can do.

He hasn't seen The adventures of Ford Fairlane. But it's nice. They let you do things in the slimy character part that they don't let you do in real life. You know, you get to string people up and torture them and stuff. I'll tell you, Uncle Pete. Oh, I love that. You've got a whole new audience of people who couldn't imagine these things coming out of the mouth of Alan Alda. Well, that's the guy. Yeah. It's great. And it's just words. That's the way I talk often in my private life, too.

So naughty words don't bother me. But he was a racist and claimed he wasn't. Yeah. He was a racist and claimed he wasn't. Yeah. And a really obnoxious guy to- To our listeners, we're referring to Horace and Pete, Louis C.K.'s show. Yeah, Louis C.K.'s Horace and Pete. Like in The Aviator, it's a really slimy character, but you play it with like the scrin on your face.

Well, because you know these slimy guys, think of all the slimy guys we've been exposed to in our lives, public and private. They don't know they're slimy. They think they're doing a great job. And they're often very successful at what they do. So why should they act like they think they're slimy? There's empathy again. Well, yeah. An actor has got to have empathy for the character that he or she is playing.

And when I read sometimes somebody questioning whether or not you really can get a realistic picture of what's going on inside somebody's head. I think if you can't do that, then if it's not possible to do that, then there wouldn't be actors and there wouldn't be novelists because that can't exist without getting some feeling for what's going on inside this character's head emotionally and rationally, cognitively. And if you just play them as a monster, then they don't come across as three-dimensional. No, not at all. It's not like real monsters. Real monsters are, you know, the cliche, Hitler loved his dog.

That's not stupid. That's real. It's probably not a lie. Lester's one of those characters in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Yeah. Which I just watched again with my wife, which holds up beautifully. I think that's one of the best movies made in this country. I'm very glad that I had a chance to be in it. It's a wonderful movie. And there's dimensions. He's a

bit of a villain, Lester. He's certainly an a-hole, but he's charming. There's dimension to him. You really kind of like him in spite of himself. A lot of people who do very bad things wouldn't get away with it if they weren't charming or in some way able to make you let them continue to do it. And in that movie, it was showing that evil people can be very successful and have a good life, and good people can be punished. Yes, and what I love about that theme is that I don't think I've seen that theme written about anywhere else except in the book of Job in the Bible, in the Bible where he complains that, you know, women are crying, widows crying in the desert with no help from anybody.

And the bad guy who put them there dies with a big farm and animals and children and everybody's doing well, and he has no regrets. It's so important to us, I think, to believe that if you do bad things, you'll be punished at least by your own conscience. And that doesn't always happen. Yeah, there's that part where someone's talking to Martin Landau and he says, but you know, eventually you'll be haunted by this and you'll have to turn you.

And he said, no, that's in fiction. I forget that. Yeah. You know what I remember is a scene in the original script that I don't know if he ever shot, but he didn't have it in the movie where Landau does go through a period where he's feverish. go through a period where he's feverish. Now, either he had a flu or it was a flu plus the guilt he felt. But then there was a shot in the original script where daylight broke and the morning light comes over him and he feels refreshed. He's over the fever. And life goes on. And to me, that was interesting because it acknowledged that there might be a hint of guilt. But at a certain point, you get over it.

Yeah, he does. If you've got a nice house and you make some good money every week. So you killed somebody. You know? People do bad things. It's a special kind of cynical point of view that you really don't see and i don't think it's cynical i think it's real i think it's realistic that too if we don't acknowledge the fact that we can't count on their conscience being their guide then we have to

figure out some other way to deal with these folks it's just like how people believe in religion or karma they want to make some sense that you'll go to hell or you'll come back as a beetle or something or beetle puss yeah one of the beetles yeah what was it like working with woody Well, he didn't talk. You worked with him twice. I worked with him three times. Oh, three times. And we've talked more than we talked in those three movies. Oh, Everyone Says I Love You is the third one, right? Yeah, the musical.

Right. And I had a great time, and I really enjoyed working with him as a director. And he never said – he had a system where, at least when I worked with him, he may talk more now, I don't know, but when I worked with him, if you didn't, if he didn't like the way you said

the lines in the scene, he wouldn't give you a direction about it. He wouldn't say, do it more like this or like that. He'd stop at the end of the day and he'd call you back to shoot the scene again a month later. And he still wouldn't tell you. And if he didn't like that, he'd call you back a month later.

And then after that, you're fired. So at least that's the impression I got. But he claimed he didn't want to interfere with the actor's process. He figured if the actor is a good enough actor, they should be able to take care of that. But finally, at one point in the third movie, there were eight people in a scene. And it's hard with an eight-person scene. It was all in one take. And it's hard when an eight-person scene is all in one take.

And at the end of about the third take, he finally spoke. He said, that stunk. Wow. And I thought, I'd like it better if he went back to not talking. Wow. But eventually, you know, he got us to – it's hard to get eight people to be in sync. Of course. So every director works differently.

Some talk a lot. Some don't say anything. Of course, as he talks a lot. Oh, that was great. I love the way you did that. That was just terrific. You do the same thing, you know. Maybe the next time you do it a little, put a little bit more of this.

I don't know. You know, the way you do it is great. But try it maybe a little bit like this. And by the time he walks away, you realize he hated what I did. But he brings out the best in you because it's so positive. Yeah. Like Gilbert says, there's something about Senator Brewster. He's very creepy, but he's very real.

They said to me, somebody said to me from the company, I don't know who it was, a casting director, somebody said, you're perfect in this part. This is going to be so perfect. Then they sent me a picture of the guy. He was the ugliest person I'd ever seen in my life. And you also work with Spielberg. Yeah, that was great.

Bridge of Spies. Yeah, that was great. Bridge of Spies. Yeah. What was he like? So much in command of what he does. I had seen documentaries where he had a book of pictures of every shot in the movie, especially the action sequences, all planned out in advance. So I was surprised to see him figure out the shot on the spot. Maybe he had some advance idea that he then refined, but often I'd see him decide at the moment where to put the camera or cameras, and then he'd adjust it. He'd keep, go through a few rehearsals and he'd change the shot this

way and that way, and it was really fun to see. Again, I was standing in the wings watching from the side, and it was just wonderful to watch him work. Speaking of empathy and villains, Alan, how's that for an awkward segue? I want you to tell Gilbert that wonderful story that Sarah Silverman told on the podcast. When she... When she had the Twitter troll. Yeah. Because it's a great example of... It was amazing. Of improvisation and empathy. I realized I wanted to have... I didn't know Sarah, but I realized I wanted to have her on the podcast. When I read an account online of what happened to her, she has an enormous number of followers on Twitter, millions.

And somebody tweeted, a guy tweeted one word to her, the worst thing you can say to a woman, the most offensive. And instead of blocking him or arguing with him or calling him a name back, she looked up his profile and found out that he was in a lot of physical pain from a back problem. And she wrote back to him and sympathized with him and said, I have a back problem too, and you don't have to be so angry. Why don't you speak from a point of love? I'm paraphrasing now, but she said, you're capable of love instead of this kind of insult. And he said, I don't have any love left in me that was ripped out of me by a guy when I was a child. And she realized he was in pain, and psychic pain as well as physical pain. She found him a place where he could get therapy for people who had been abused, therapy for

free. She directed him to where to go. He went, changed his life. Now they're friends and they communicate all the time by text. Wild. Is that amazing? She could have ended it with anger right off the bat. She took a risk.

Yes, of course. But she, in the same way Larry Gelbart did with the guy with the gun. Yeah, they're similar. To reach out to the other person, to see something behind the pistol, behind the insulting word, to see what that person might actually be going through and how you can establish some kind of relationship that isn't obvious when they're holding the gun on you. I think you'll find this interesting too because a lot of what's in the new book and also with Renee Fleming, you talked about stage fright. Oh, yeah. You said you still get anxiety from performing. Did I say that?

You said a little bit. I don't know. See, I'm always in the moment. I don't know what I said. You said, too, when you're doing something that you have those little dialogues in your head. Do I know the next line? Oh, no. That doesn't routinely happen. That happened to me once.

Oh, I see. And it was really horrifying. I was doing a play in London. I was doing Our Town and playing the part of the stage manager, which is essentially a monologue during the whole play. So you don't get cues. You have to give yourself your cues. You have to be listening to what you're saying. And at one point, I'm out there talking to the audience, directly to the audience, and I hear this voice that says, well, you got that line right. What makes you think you'll get the next one right? And it's frightening to hear that voice in the back of your head. And the right line came to me. And then I heard, yeah, well, you got that one. What about the next one? And this went on for about a minute and I immediately felt sweat

dripping down my body. And I realized that I was an anxious person. I hadn't been aware of that up until then. That never happened at any other time. But I started to work on the anxiety. And now I'm fine. No, really, I am. It doesn't. No, I swear. Gilbert, I've asked you this. When you're doing stand-up, do you forget the next joke?

Do you lose your place? find that i've i've said this a few times waiting to go on stage is kind of like standing by the water and tipping your toe and going that no that's freezing i can't go in there and i still get that you do oh god that's an awful feeling and and after 50 years of performing yeah and i still have the dream that the manager's gonna come back and say that there was a fire or a flood in the theater here's your check you can go home oh i have such compassion that's interesting when i'm on stage the amount of talking that your brain does do it is like can be we're in the middle of a bit i'll be going you, you know, this next line I do, it's like I should have had a funnier line there. This one never works.

Oh, God. Well, I have that monologue going where I give talks a lot to help support the Center for Communicating Science. But what I do is an hour talk that's more like a one-act play. And it's through improvisation. It's built a series of funny moments that are also intended to be insightful. So I'm doing something that is always in the process of getting better. So my internal monologue is, well, that's the third time i tried that lousy thing and it's not working yes i'm never going to do that again i i also find sometimes when

when you're up there and i wonder if this happens to you when you're doing that or when you're acting where all of a sudden a light goes on in your head and goes, what the fuck am I doing right now? Yeah, well, I found when I was in a long-running play, after three months or four months, I'd be in danger of forgetting my line. But I'd know what the scene was about so I could improvise my way back into the scene. But after eight or nine months, I wouldn't remember what the scene was about. But at least I knew what the play was about.

How interesting. With more repetition, you remember less. It gets, you know, you become a machine. You come out. I don't think I'd go through this now because I'm more integrated. It's on autopilot. But in the old days, I got on autopilot. So I remember one night, I forgot the line.

I not only didn't know what the scene or the play was about, I said, I see an exit light. I must be in a theater. I didn't know. Holy God. That was the worst. But, you know, one night when I was having this conversation with Renee Fleming, it occurred to me that, and I think that she thought this was a helpful thing to think about. a helpful thing to think about.

I noticed that when I was getting ready to go out and talk to a big crowd of people giving a talk, which was a performance, at a certain point, I would sit by myself, by the way, for about an hour before each time I went out, just to focus and make sure I knew the general outline of what I was going to do. But at a certain point, I'd think of the people I was going to be talking to,

and the anticipation of a good experience would make me smile, and then I'd know I was ready to go out. And there's something about that smile that I welcome now, and I look for it, I wait for it to happen, and it makes me delighted. I can't wait to get out there to be with them, and when I get out there, I'm looking them right in the eye. I make sure that the place isn't dark,

but when they shine that light on you and you can't see who you're talking to, then all the attention's on you. I want the attention to be on them or both of us. And it's fascinating because you're talking to, then all the attention's on you. I want the attention to be on them or both of us. And it's fascinating because you're talking to a performer that does not make any eye contact with his audience. You don't? You make a point to that?

Yeah. Well, sometimes I'll make eye contact. You know, we ought to talk. Sometimes I'll make eye contact. I would be fascinated for Alan to see your act and see your way. I've never seen your act. Well, you should see him live because it's fascinating, especially what I was reading in the book. And you're talking about the difference between performing at an audience and relating.

Well, yeah. To me, there's a difference between acting and performing. And some people have both. I never cared for Zero Mostel's acting except in Rhinoceros where everything he did was really appropriate to the play. But most of the time I thought he gave into his ability to perform more than he did his ability to play a part in a play and act. It's not that one is better than the other. It's that in a play, if all you are is a performer, you're leaving a lot of the stuff at home that you ought to bring to it. Do you find yourself ever in a scene where you're going,

I just don't know what this character is. I don't know. I'm just not feeling anything. This character is, I don't know, I'm just not feeling anything. I have that feeling when I read a script sometimes, and I think, how can I possibly play this character? And that makes me want to play it, usually, because it seems like such a challenge.

If it's in my range, I mean, I wouldn't probably have that feeling and want to play Queen Victoria. I think you'd be an excellent Queen Victoria. Slightly out of my range. You have a little bit of that with Hawkeye. I'm not a carouser. I'm not a drinker. I don't know if I can be this guy. I thought to myself, I don't know how to be this guy. He's a skirt chaser.

He drinks too much. He's a smart aleck, more than I am anyway. And after 10 days of rehearsal, I still didn't believe I could convincingly be him. And right before the first shot on the first day. I'm standing in that metal building waiting to come out. We were on location, so I was going to come out of the building and walk across the compound.

And I'm standing there. I'm in costume. I'm in my boots. Usually actors, when they get into the costume, they think, oh, now I'm the person. So I'm looking at the boots, and I'm saying, where are you? I'm not the person yet.

Who is this? And I hear outside, quiet on the set, take one, scene one, and the clapper. And I think, this is it. And the director says, action. So I open the door, walk out. I still am not sure. Wow. And a nurse is walking toward me and I reach out and grab her and give her a hug.

And all of a sudden I'm Hawkeye. And I think, that wasn't so hard. Wow. But that doesn't happen. Usually I believe I'm the guy before the first shot. That's interesting. A part you would become identified with as a part that you were uncertain that you could be. And people would think that that was surely me, that I was playing myself.

But I think you have to find spare parts in yourself that you can put together to make the character you're playing. I still watch that scene. And I'm sure people talk to you about this and have asked you about it a million times, but Abyssinia Henry. You were the only actor that Gelbart gave the last page of script to that knew that Henry was going to be killed off on the show. Yeah. And yet, you know, I watch it today and it's still, it's very effective. You know, that scene that you were talking about where we're in the operating room and all the characters in the scene hear that Henry's plane went down and he's dead.

it was very emotional for everybody because nobody knew what the lines were that were going to come out until the camera was rolling. And it was very powerful. And then we found out that the shot wasn't going to work. There was something wrong with the camera or something like that. We had to do it again.

Unbelievable. And it was just as powerful. But the whole story is about how nobody knew until they were on camera. But by the time you see it on the air, you're seeing it after everybody does know. Oh, wow. How disillusioning. Talk about some people gone from MASH like Wayne Rogers. Yeah, Wayne and I were very close.

It's funny. When he left the show, he was replaced by Mike Farrell, and we became very close. I think there was something about the character relationship that drew all of us together. But, yes, people have left. Harry Morgan. Harry Morgan.

We just loved Harry. McLean Stevenson, who played that similar position of the colonel, had us laughing all day long because he would improvise crazy, crazy monologues, and you'd just fall down at them. Harry Morgan had us laughing all day long because he just had the ability to look at you in a funny way. It didn't have anything to do with words. David Ogden Stiers.

Yeah, Stiers. That's how he used to say it. Stiers, never got his name right. Yeah. He was so good and so, such a good, everybody was a good companion. You know, we were together sometimes 16 hours a day, maybe more. And we were like a family in the sense that you know how close you are and you also yell at each other.

You know, I mean were we were very very close are you talking the book about how you guys would all form a circle and make each other laugh between takes as opposed to some movies some shows where people retire to their trailer most of my experience on a movie set is all the actors breaking after every shot and going to their dressing room unless you're out on location and there's no place to go but a circle of chairs. But we chose to sit in the circle of chairs most of the time and just made fun of one another, made each other laugh, play games together. And that kept us connected.

It's what we've been talking about on and off all during the conversation, this connection that actors can have, which is really the basis of people relating to one another in a positive way, whether it's a family or a company, people you work for, people who work for you. Is this an obvious question, but did the closeness of the cast factor into making the show better? I think it's one of the elements that made it successful

because that's one element. Another very important element. You believe the relationships. The relationships that we had off camera, that we carried a few feet from the chairs we were sitting in to the set where we played the scene. We kept the relationship going. We kept the contact going.

Only now we were using the words of the play. I learned from that, and whenever I can, when I'm on the stage in a play, I see if I can interest the other actors in sitting together for an hour before every show to do the same thing. We did it in art. Oh, with Ewan Garber and...

Victor Garber and Fred Molina. Right. An hour before every show, we sat and kidded one another. That's fun. Right until five seconds before the curtain went up. It was a thrill every night because we were at play. As each one of them came out on stage, we had just been kidding around together. So we were really in sync, tuned into one another.

That connection is, to me, and that's why I had no idea my life would lead to this, but all the elements of my life, starting with watching offstage, watching in the wings in burlesque in vaudeville, and watching my father on the stage, watching and learning what the value of the connection is, and learning it from improvisation, learning it on the mash set. I had no idea that would lead to saying to scientists and physicians, if you learn to do this, your work will be better.

That's great. You've remained open to the element of surprise your whole life, and you've been surprised. I have been, yeah. One last thing I want to say to our element of surprise your whole life, and you've been surprised. I have been. Yeah. One last thing I want to say to our listeners about your dad, too, is I will direct them to YouTube for a fun moment, which was your dad as the mystery guest on What's My Line.

Oh, that was fun. You not guessing him. I couldn't guess him. My own father I couldn't guess. Oh, jeez. It's a really sweet little clip. But if you remember, he did a very show business-y thing. He did a funny voice.

He talked in a funny voice, but he also closed off one nostril while he did it. That's right. I don't know how that helped him talk in a funny voice. Yeah. I don't think it makes any difference at all, but visually you could see he was impersonating somebody. You didn't know who he was. You had the blindfold on, and yet you were mocking him. I was.

I was making fun of him. Yeah. But I told you I had a competitive relationship, even if I didn't know who he was. You had the blindfold on, and yet you were mocking him. I was. I was making fun of him. Yeah. But I told you I had a competitive relationship, even if I didn't know who he was. Gilbert. Yes. That's the new book. Okay. We'll plug the podcast again, which you record right in this room.

Right here in this room. I sit in your seat. Amazing. I'm intimidated. Is, if I understood you, would I have this look on my face? My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating. It's a New York Times bestseller, and it's written by our guest tonight, Alan Alda. A lot of good stuff in the book, too, about storytelling. Yeah.

To which we should direct, which was one of our goals with this show, too, about storytelling. Yeah. Which we should direct. Which was one of our goals with this show was to let people come on and tell their stories. Yeah, I hear that you do that. We try. Yeah, and that's good because when people reflect back on stories that they've thought about and have lived through, you get something that's not just ordinary. It's not just an idea because we relate to stories so much better than we do to ideas. Oh, there's the example in the book of what you're talking about with the glass, the water glass and walking across the stage.

But I'll tell you something about this show. We really thought we were going to do a show about show business, about show business history, and we've been surprised by at least two guests, Sonny Fox with his Holocaust stories. We had two. Oh, he told me that story, yeah. You know Sonny? I know Sonny.

Yeah, about how he's a POW and how the camp was liberated. I mean, we set out to do this kind of lightweight show. They were held in like a train car, of lightweight they they were held in like a train car and they were told like you know tomorrow we let you out and all the jews have to fall out of line these were american soldiers yeah yeah oh oh these were pow yeah yeah and that's right and he was in that group of POWs. Yeah, and the sergeant said, all of us fall out. Right. And the sergeant said to the Nazi officer, all of us are Jews. So, you know, we set out with –

Amazing story. We were going down one path with this show, and we've been surprised. So you did the improv thing. Absolutely. Because it is, it's like – Go with it. The improv thing. Absolutely.

Because it is. It's like. Go with it. Sonny Fox told stories about being a POW. Al Jaffe told us that story about seeing his mother for the last time when the gates closed. Just heartbreaking. Yeah. That one was.

So we're surprised all the time by people coming in and sharing things that we don't expect them to share. And from Sandler and Young. Oh, Tony Sandler told us some stories about the war. Nazis used to use his house as their headquarters, and they just had to go about their business. And occupied Belgium. Isn't it interesting how that experience, maybe for people who were children or whose parents could relate to them what happened, after all this time, it still ranks as an almost unbelievable moment in our history that they could do that. So I think we should end on that sorrowful note.

So I think we should end on that sorrowful note. So to take something from your book, did this hour and a half make life just a little bit less meaningless? No, but I'm surprised to hear it was an hour and a half. I thought it was more like eight. I know. We can go on. Well, I have to run home, take a shower, and scream at people who have been dead since 1968. Yeah, you know, give me your address. I'd like some of mine to go to your house.

Okay. Alan, thanks for schlepping. Thank you. We know you're busy. It was a lot of fun. Thank you. my sight if you center all of it on me. Looking at you, I'm filled with the essence of the quintessence of joy. Looking at you, I hear poets' of lovely Helen of Troy

Darling, life seems so great I've wanted to end it till that wonderful day You started to mend it and if you'll only stay Then I'll spend it looking at you sweet Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast is produced by

Dara Gottfried and Frank Santapadre, with audio production by Frank Verderosa. Web and social media is handled by Mike McPadden, Greg Pair, and John Bradley-Seals. Special audio contributions by John Beach. Special thanks to John Fodiatis, John Murray, and Paul Rayburn