Y'know, Billy Wilder said, if you're gonna tell people the truth, make it funny or they'll kill you. And that's sort of, you know, why I think people do trust comedians more than they trust journalists or politicians.
...
I actually voted for Jesus in the 2008 election, I did... I did a write in ballot -- well, the GOP acts like he's their mascot anyway, right? They think he's on the sidelines with pom-poms for them, and I thought, wouldn't the Republican party love to have Jesus Christ as a candidate for president? Wouldn't today's GOP love to vote for a guy who is a peaceful, radical, non-violent, revolutionary, hung around with lepers, hookers and criminals who never spoke English, who was not an American citizen, who was anti-capitalism, anti-wealth, anti-public prayer (yes he was, motherfucker, Matthew 6:5, anti-public prayer)... [audience laughter, applause] 100% anti-death penalty, but never even slightly anti-gay, never mentioned abortion, never mentioned pre-marital sex, never fought for tax cuts for the wealthiest Nazarenes, never called the poor lazy, never justified torture once and was a long-haired, brown-skinned - it's in Revelations, "Left-Behinders" - brown-skinned, homeless Middle Eastern Jew. ~ John Fugelsang (from his standup routine)
Katie Goodman's podcast "Un-F It Up" interviews people she believes are working successfully to UnF**ck things up in our world: activists, comedians, writers, celebrities, politicians, and general unf**kers. This is the interview she did with John Fugelsang in May 2012 on a very hip Village stoop in New York City. Some of the text has been edited and moved around a bit to make it easier to read. To listen to the full podcast, go here.
KATIE GOODMAN: I'm joined today by the very funny, very smart, and very f**king busy John Fugelsang. I met John on Laughing Liberally which is an off-Broadway comedy show we did together, and I was immediately intrigued by his mix of politics, and religion, and theater, and basic unFuckery. One thing we have in common is that John's a trained actor as well as a comedian. He's referred constantly to as a pundit by others, which he takes issue with, and as a good theater person prefers to think of himself as a clown. He appears every morning on CNN Starting Point with Soledad O'Brien, and has appeared many, many times on Politically Correct with Bill Maher, is a regular on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, HLN, and CurrentTV where he is presently developing a primetime show on which he'll be the host.
He has won a ridiculous number of awards for his comedy. Right now he's touring with Stephanie Miller's Sexy Liberal Comedy Tour as well as his one man show called Guilt, that you'll hear us talk about, that was nominated for the Comedy League's Distinguished Performance Award. He has several movies coming out and is writing a book called Separation of Church and Hate. You can see his videos of his standup and find where he's playing at www.johnfugelsang.com. And now he's added to the mix a baby, which as we all know, doesn't change things at all. I got to meet his fantastic wife and ridiculously photogenic baby as we headed out for this interview in New York City.
Alright, well here we are. I'm here with John Fugelsang, a satirical comic - we'll not call you a pundit, we'll get to that later. I'm on the corner of Bedford and Barrow feeling extremely cool. Our first outside podcast ever!
JOHN: Yeah, thanks for taking the risk on me. It's... it's a pretty edgy thing to do, and I hope we sound like a really pretentious NPR piece. If you want, we can walk two blocks east and we can get the transgendered, cross-dressing hookers. If you want that, I can provide.
KATIE: Good! Good! No, wait, I've already had them on my show....
JOHN: Well, you let me know.... get some local flavor.
KATIE: [laughs] So, I've just been getting the lowdown from John on his extremely busy life with a newborn in tow, and do you want to just give us a little, sort of hint of "a month in the life of?..."
JOHN: I'm touring right now with an off-Broadway show that I did called Guilt, A Love Story. My mom's an ex-nun and my dad's an ex-Franciscan brother, so this is a show I did at New York Theatre Workshop about their love story and about being the adult child of this union.
KATIE: So you wrote this.
JOHN: Yeah. And this was nominated for the Drama League's Distinguished Performance Award, and my director Pam MacKinnon just got a Tony nomination last week for Clybourne Park.
KATIE: So you are an actor in comedian clothing, like me somewhat.
JOHN: Yeah, yeah, I'm a geek of many colors, you know? I like people who do more than one thing. I like artists who do more than one thing, so I do standup, and I do shows for all these filthy Liberals and I do military shows. I go on CNN and Fox and talk politics, and I'm writing a book, and I've got three movies coming out and I'm licensed in Shiatsu and available for private corporate functions.
KATIE: Excellent, that's my payment for this. So are you...just to start somewhere completely not linearly...you have a book you're working on?
JOHN: I am working on a book about Christianity and politics in America, sort of how to use the Bible when you're arguing with a right wing Fundamentalist. Which is sort of what my show is about. And it's amazing because I'll get along really well with the right wing guys one on one. One on one I will go to the bone with these guys and get real with them because I'm not into the bullshit fighting and I find that the troops are really a fine aspect of that. You know the US Military is the leading proponent of Affirmative Action in the country, I mean the US Military is progressive in so many areas and I was there before Don't Ask Don't Tell was repealed. These guys were embarrassed by Don't Ask Don't Tell, they're like, we already know who's gay, we already know which of our CO's are lesbian. It was not a big deal to any of these guys.
KATIE: So not wanting to fight... you have this book you are writing about how to argue the Bible with right wing fundamentalists. Now this is a real unFucker thing I think. I really want you to unFuck this up.
JOHN: Oh yeah. I think only a comedian can. I read a lot of theologians and academic books on the subject and they're just unreadable.
JOHN: it's for liberals and progressives and atheists and cool sane conservatives because they have to deal with the right wing fundamentalist extreme fake Christian asshole in their life as well and I've known plenty of conservative Christians, look at Westboro Baptist Church and their anti-gay funeral picketing is doing so much to move conservative Americans towards accepting gay people 'cause they don't want to be on the same team as these cretins. They go after me all the time, they threatened to picket me in Phoenix 10 days ago and I was like "Please come picket me Westboro, please come picket outside my show."
KATIE: I only get the pro-life people picketing my show. But we get pictures, you don't get pictures.
JOHN: You know the pro-life people, there's an interesting thing there...
KATIE: Maybe gay porn people would picket that would be great.
JOHN: I have no problem if you're against abortion...abortion rights, because you think all life is sacred then I think that's great, and I respect your right to fight for that and you have a lot of good points. But don't go bringing the whole Christian thing into it because Jesus never said a thing about abortion. But he was quite specifically against the death penalty. When I see someone who says they're pro-life and they have no problem with torture or drone warfare or pre-emptive war or landmines or the death penalty, you're pro- some life, and I respect someone like Nat Hentoff, The Village Voice writer, and the Jazz writer, he's a pro-life Jewish atheist and he's against it for civil rights reasons, he's against the death penalty and euthanasia, so he's consistent. That's a pro-lifer I can respect. America's pro-life people it's a lot of... you know all the rap on them. They love you until you're born.
KATIE: And some of it is emotional too. I mean, nobody likes abortion.
JOHN: I've never met a pro-abortion person in my life.
KATIE: Exactly. I think a lot of the problem is people are looking at their emotions that zip out of them for saving a baby and then killing the guy who was bad. It has to do with them. It has nothing to do with politics.
JOHN: I agree.
KATIE: But when you legislate it, that's the problem.
JOHN: And that's the question I would ask to every politician who wants to ban abortion. I would say, "If a woman is raped, and decides to terminate the pregnancy, who deserves the longer jail term, the rapist, the woman or the doctor? Tell me in order." And that's a question that no conservative politician can answer.
KF : Yeah. So do you bring up these things in your comedy?
JOHN: In stand-up? Very rarely. I've done some material about abortion but generally I don't, I don't think it's that funny a subject. I mean you can don't get me wrong, you can make it very funny, I actually heard Dane Cook did a really darkly funny bit on it. Dane Cook of all people not too long ago at the Laugh Factory, and he horrified the audience with this bit on abortion, but generally
KATIE: No, a mandatory vaginal ultrasound is much funnier.
JOHN: (Laughs.) It's much funnier. You know that's like a really good first date for a doctor.
KATIE: (Laughs.)
JOHN: Anything's funny. You can make anything funny, I just haven't gotten around to abortion yet. I talk about it a lot, I get in a lot of debates about it on silly TV shows but I respect the pro-lifer's argument, I don't really think they're very consistent and I don't really take them that seriously because again Jesus was quite specific about not killing the sinner and most of these pro-lifers in America love the death penalty, they love it.
KF: So tell me about the Etch-a-Sketch thing because I don't know your part in it.
JOHN: It was very slight. I was on Starting Point with Soledad O'Brien on CNN one morning and Soledad was interviewing Eric Fehrnstrom, Mitt Romney's Communications Director, seems like a nice enough guy even though he's trying to make Mitt Romney President, and at some point she nodded to me if I wanted to ask a question, and I thought "My God, you're letting the clown ask this guy a question?" So Mitt Romney is a guy who's always trying to prove how conservative he is, in every interview "Governor are you really conservative?" "Oh I'm severely conservative" And it's like "I just supported abortion rights in the last decade but listen to what I'm saying now and ignore my entire history. " And so I thought well, no journalist can ask "are you too conservative?" because it's not professional, but I did. I said very nicely "Isn't there a concern that the Governor's tacked so far to the right it's gonna hurt him with Independents and Moderates in the general election?" Fair question. And he gave an honest answer. He said, "Oh, it's like a reset button, you just shake the Etch-a-Sketch."
KF: So you got it out of him.
JOHN: Yeah. I was so shocked he admitted it and I thought "no one's gonna cover this at all"
KATIE: Right.
JOHN: Because Mitt Romney -- let's be honest -- is a guy who has a problem with truth. This guy lies about the Affordable Care Act he lies about the Unemployment Rate he lies about women he lies about his own history he lies about not remembering pinning down a gay kid and cutting off his hair in high school and no one ever gets on his case for it and by the time I got home on CNN it was the number one trending topic on Twitter.
KATIE: Right.
JOHN: I couldn't believe the media picked up on it. And I thought "Oh, finally there's a scandal because someone in Romney's campaign told the truth about something." So since then I've been asked to sign Etch-a-Sketches at every show.
KATIE: Damn! I didn't bring mine!
JOHN: It's kind of hilarious.
KATIE: That's an excellent claim to fame. I love it. Okay, so how do you think comedy UnFucks things up? This is something I'm always thinking about, how we're out there trying to maybe inform, entertain, inspire people to go back into their lives -- but we're not handing out rice in the Sudan.
JOHN: I like that you asked that question because I think in your work you're definitely chasing something. You're not just out there to tell a funny dick joke and count the money and I have nothing against comedians who aren't really trying to have any social awareness. I think some of my favorite comedians are guys who just come out and make it funny and get offstage. They're great. I think that that's a really great kind of comedy but it doesn't inspire people. Audiences go see a comic like that, laugh really hard, go home and remember nothing. Because they don't feel anything.
KATIE: It's like Chinese food.
JOHN: Well, Chinese food makes you feel a lot of things.
KATIE: (Laughs) Yes... in New York.
JOHN: A nice little MSG Smoothie in downtown Manhattan...What I like about your stuff is you are doing what my mother calls a ministry. My mom is an ex-nun, she's 78 and she considers political comedians, or socially aware comedians or artists, to have what she calls a real ministry. And not to be too ecclesiastical about it but it really is a calling. It really is a path. It's the path that George Carlin and Richard Prior and Bill Hicks did. They could have just come out and told dick jokes the whole time and been rich. They didn't. They weren't satisfied with it. It's that sort of restlessness and the artistic nature that makes you want to push the envelope and make people think and feel in different ways.
KATIE: And otherwise it's boring. For me it is. But I do also love to see people who are just doing dick jokes.
JOHN: Me too and it inspires me to do better dick jokes ...and vagina jokes. But you know Billy Wilder said "if you're gonna tell people the truth, make it funny or they'll kill you." That's why people trust comedians more than they trust journalists or politicians. People trust Bill Maher or John Stewart or Colbert or Lewis Black because if it's not true it can't be funny. There has to be an element of truth for it to work.
KATIE: On some level.
JOHN: Yes, and by the end of the play the only guy King Lear trusts is the fool.
KATIE: But is that why when I go see a conservative comedian I'm like "This isn't funny"? Because I don't believe it's true?
JOHN: Well you know there aren't a lot of conservative comedians. And Miller still can make me laugh. It's painful to watch O'Reilly stepping on his punch lines. Fox News doesn't know how to use Dennis Miller well at all. But the problem with conservative comedy is that you're attacking down.
KATIE: To victims?
JOHN: You're attacking people who are trying to change things for everyone else and you're defending the aristocracy. You're ultimately defending the most powerful members of society. If you've chosen to be on the side of Mitt Romney, you're choosing to further deregulate Wall Street, to further cut funds to education, to take money away from We the People and give a bigger tax cut to the aristocracy.
KATIE: Right so it's like the King doing the jokes rather than the clown doing the jokes.
JOHN: Exactly. It's not liberal v. conservative, it's democracy v. aristocracy. If you're gonna go up there and make fun of the guys who want to have 3% tax on millionaires to save the public schools and our crumbling roads, you're gonna be that guy? You're attacking down. It's no different than when you go to a comedy club and someone's doing homeless person jokes or retarded person jokes. You'll laugh really hard for 3 or 4 minutes if they're funny, and then you'll start to feel kind of bad and dirty about it. It's the same thing with conservative comedy: you can't attack down and be funny for more than 5 minutes at a time.
KATIE: There's definitely a conservative audience showing up at comedy clubs. I've seen that where they hate some of our friends.
JOHN: You can do that. If you're playing to largely conservative houses be sure to make fun of Democrats first. I was touring with Darrell Hammond after 9/11 he asked me to go out with him for like two years, we toured all over, and he wanted me to go out there and be as political as possible, be as controversial as possible, and this was just after 9/11 and he was saying "Bash Bush! Go ahead!" Because then he would go out and win them over with the impressions.
KATIE: That's generous of him...
JOHN: I actually liked it. It was sort of like the reverse of what George Carlin did. George would have Dennis Blair go out and do impressions and song parodies up top and the audience would love the mainstream-ness of it and then George would go out and totally tear that to ribbons. So I liked it but one thing I really learned back then was conservative people are cool. They want to laugh, they just don't want to feel like you're some liberal elite academic making fun of them. So you come out and you make some Clinton jokes, you make some Obama jokes, you make some Biden jokes. It's pretty easy to do, get them laughing. And then they'll listen to all the "Mitt Romney is stiff, George Bush is a moron and Dick Cheney is evil" jokes. They'll listen to all of them but they just don't want to feel like they're being singled out for scorn. And that makes it more fun.
KATIE: I'll probably cut this from the interview, but I have this song called "I Drunk-Dialed Obama" that I've just started doing and updating --fucking endlessly updating that thing -- but there was a period of time about a month ago where I just started feeling like "I don't want to do this song" because I fucking don't want to give any ammunition to the other side at all, and it's just been like I'm on the fence a little bit.
JOHN: Well there's two sides to that. I think it's possible. I get this all the time on the road. With the Stephanie Miller tour, we've been doing the Sexy Liberal Tour since last year and we raise money for different progressive causes, but the big thing when you're doing a show for all liberal audiences is how much can you get away with digging on the President? Because the liberal point of view is to come out and say this guy's not a liberal. Because he's a liberal at heart but the only people who hate Obama more than the ones who call him a Socialist are the real Socialists. And so you walk a line in criticizing the President because you don't want to give them ammo, but at the same time you want to be true to your own morality. Barack Obama himself sent a video greeting to Netroots Nation [a progressive conference] a few years ago, and he said, "Hold my feet to the fire, keep on my case about things." So a lot of us criticize the guy because we want him to be reelected. Criticizing him on gay marriage? I don't think anyone flipped to Mitt Romney, so there's nothing wrong with that.
KATIE: I'm just so ecstatic that he even did this although everybody is also pissed that it took so long. It started a train that's not going to stop. It's not like 10 years after the Civil Rights movement we decided to take away the black vote, so I love that this is something that can't be undone.
JOHN: Here's what I think about that. When this first happened you had a lot of Romney fans criticizing Obama saying "Oh now you've lost the election." And it's like "No he hasn't you idiot, he's mobilized the youth vote that checked out after Will.I.Am stopped writing jingles for him. All the youth vote that did not show up in 2010. And we can thank young people who are fickle for the shittiness of the economy because they made the Republican party that much more powerful."
KATIE: Yeah! In your face! Now you don't have a job! Ha!
JOHN: Exactly. So it was smart of him to do it. But even if he does lose the election, he just won the history books.
KATIE: Right, exactly. And I want to say it's sooooooo worth it, although I won't be saying that in January.
JOHN: Well, the guys on the left are all criticizing him with all this "welcome to the party already pal," which I think is seriously misplaced. We know this President has always been in favor of Marriage Equality, he said so in print in 1996, and it was political expediency that made him, and it's not because he was a coward or selfish. Look in 1996 Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which was completely bigoted, completely unnecessary.
KATIE: And he totally apologized and felt horrible for that.
JOHN: But you know why he did it.
KATIE: To get reelected.
JOHN: There was a chance that Bob Dole could have become President. So if Bill Clinton hadn't signed that, there was a chance that Bob Dole could have become President.
KATIE: And I think we all -- including the gays -- were, if not down with it exactly, know it's the lesser of two evils. I mean this is what it is to be a grownup.
JOHN: Gay folks are always going to be the first people the Democrats throw under the parade float every year.
KATIE: (Laughs)
JOHN: But all these people who are saying "Okay Obama you should have done this years ago" here's what I say. Shut up. Shut up. Yeah he should have come out years ago. It would have been brave. Sure he should have. But it's brave to do it now. And any liberal who wants to criticize Obama for waiting this long they need to shut up and realize that the fact that he just did it means that there are gay teenagers who will not kill themselves because the most powerful man in the world just validated their love.
KATIE: And speaking of that, I just interviewed Dan Savage of the It Gets Better Project before Obama came out with this last week and he was saying "Oh he is so pro-Gay. He just can't say it." It just made me feel better having Dan Savage say it.
JOHN: He is. That's what we all said about Bill Clinton in the 90's too, we knew Bill Clinton wasn't a homophone.
KATIE: Yeah. Okay, so onto your life and your play, Guilt. Can you just tell us a little bit more about some of the things you're doing?
JOHN: Sure. I'm touring with Stephanie Miller's Sexy Liberal Comedy Tour where I play the role of Tour.
KATIE: (Laughs) And that's three people?
JOHN: Yeah that's me, Stephanie and Aisha Tyler or Hal Sparks.
KATIE: So is that a voluntary gig or ... I don't have to record this, but are you paid?
JOHN: Quite well. No, we can talk about it because we wanted to show liberals doing capitalism right.
KATIE: (Laughs)
JOHN: So we do this tour in union houses so it's really expensive. We don't do comedy clubs, we do huge theaters. We use union houses and we donate money in every state to progressive causes.
KATIE: Great.
JOHN: And we put out our album and our album is Stephanie, Hal Sparks and me and it ended up becoming the first political comedy album to ever reach number 1 on the iTunes, Amazon and Billboard comedy charts.
KATIE: Nice!
JOHN: And it was completely independently released, no label support no nothing. So the audience is out there, and that was sort of my experiment with it. I wanted to see if there was a market for this.
KATIE: So about your acting work... Did you ever do improv?
JOHN: I think every actor and every stand-up should do improv classes, seriously. I think improv is the square root of everything. If you want to be a serious dramatic actor or if you want to do comedy in clubs it will, or just audition for things, it will make you better at everything.
KATIE: I've had an improv troupe for 14 years with the same guys, it's all guys and me. So I always end up being the nun and the prostitute.
JOHN: As a Catholic I respond very strongly to that.
KATIE: (Laughs) But as a feminist I'm always like, "Okay I'm going to try to make this the executive prostitute. You know the Madam." What the hell was I asking? Oh Improv I think you're absolutely right, and as a writer too because as a writer, anything you're starting from scratch. For me, because I do theater, for a number of years, I didn't have heckling until the last year and I didn't know how to handle it.
JOHN: Oh it's great, you can handle it great.
KATIE: Mostly I just do a quickie to avoid it and move on. With a song it's really really hard cuz of the timing.
JOHN: Heckling is how you get the entire audience on your side.
KATIE: Yes. I've seen this. I've done it a little bit but people are much more polite in my show because I think they see a big giant fancy piano...
JOHN: You know when like, you're out at a party or something, and there's some sexy person that you want to impress, and then someone else is such a douche bag they make you look really good and you're grateful that they're such a douche bag?
KATIE: (Laughs) That's hecklers?
JOHN: That's what hecklers are. Hecklers are an asshole who's drunk and trying to impress his friends because he doesn't have the guts to be a standup himself. And once you realize that everything he's doing is born of insecurity, because a confident man would sit there and enjoy the show he's paid to see.
KATIE: For me it's not even being about worried about saying the funny thing, it's that I'm going to forget where I was in the fucking song!
JOHN: Well, but in a way you have an advantage because in doing songs you know where the endpoint is, and you have a rhythm and you have music supporting you.
KATIE: I have a terrible memory...
JOHN: What do you mean?
KATIE: I'm like "Did I just sing this verse?" I guess that's when I'm not being present. (Laughs)
JOHN: I guess so. Yes, my child. That's for our new age podcast. That's true but that's the risk you face and you get thrown off and what are you gonna do? And the thing is, that's what I learned through improv, say you do the same verse twice, well, you gotta make that funny. You fucked up.
KATIE: Right well for me I just say "I Fucked it Up" which is the title song of my show called "I Didn't Fuck It Up", so that works. But I do do it. I'm actually whining. But I do it. I get heckled and I improvise and I use it absolutely. I see it as an opportunity.
JOHN: Yeah but when you fuck up like that with the lyrics there are no mistakes. It's like jazz, if one guy in the jazz quartet screws up the other guys make it right. So there are no mistakes.
KATIE: I did write a book on this!
And I do know it, but the thing is that I don't love it. So... you're a dad.
JOHN: I'm a dad.
KATIE: So how's touring then?
JOHN: It's interesting. The show Guilt is about my father dying and about how my parents made a vow to never get married for religious reasons and about how I made a vow to never get married for bohemian reasons and how we all came to break our vows. The show begins with when they first told my dad he was gonna die and my mother, the ex-nun, took me aside and said "will you please get married just to give your father something to stay alive for? Set a date." Greatest act of parental guilt in history. This is an ex-nun pulling this on me. So I wind up having all of these stories of like the time I was busted bringing medical cannabis to a friend with HIV and I ended up getting busted in the Orlando airport after 9/11.
KATIE: Did you get arrested?
JOHN: You gotta see the show! But I worked all of these stories into the framework of not getting married and how my parents came to get married and how I came to get married. And what's weird is we set the tour up and then the baby was born two weeks before the tour began and so I had to incorporate the baby into it. So it's a show about my father dying and the child was conceived on the first Father's Day after he died, so it's really emotional. It's hard to make that funny and be flippant about it, you just gotta go and be sincere, and having a baby is actually amazing creatively because I've realized after all these years of being political, I realized "Oh my God, here's my chance to be a non-edgy commercial hack, and I'm so thrilled, I'm going to be on every cruise ship, I'm just going to write diaper jokes and lose my edge and sell out and be such a whore, I can't wait. I am finally gonna get on Leno." Cause if you do political comedy you're never gonna get on TV. As a pundit you can, but no one's gonna book you to talk about politics, so I'm anxious to see what it will bring about creatively. And it's also funny professionally because I'm getting up at 4:00 in the morning for Soledad O'Brien every day and I tend to now be up at 4.30 in the morning when my alarm goes off I'm already up with the little crib lizard. So creatively, professionally, it's great. I never thought I'd have a kid, I never thought it would happen.
KATIE: And you're also further into your career... that's my nice way of saying you're over 25, and me too. I had a kid late. I have a 9 year old though but relatively late, and so for me actually it came at the absolute worst time in my career. So we went on tour and he was three months old and I was hiring little babysitters I didn't know at random colleges, and these college students, I was like, "Oh my God I'm giving you my fucking child and a bottle." they're going off to the green room. Gah!
JOHN: Yeah.
KATIE: It's horrible.
JOHN: Or it's wonderful. Why is it horrible?
KATIE: At the time it was.
JOHN: Buster Keaton slept in a trunk and grew up in vaudeville. Don't apply middle class values to an artist/gypsy life.
KATIE: Oh no, I mean, it was stressful.
JOHN: Okay stressful yeah. Yeah.
KATIE: No, it was also very cool. I was nursing in green rooms! All kinds of material there!
JOHN: Awesome. I tried that myself but he wouldn't latch...
KATIE: (Laughs.) So, are you an adrenaline junkie in terms of performing? Are you just miserable when you're not performing?
JOHN: Oh yeah, it's unfortunate but it's true.
KATIE: Me, too.
JOHN: It's the nice thing about being on the road. I had to do a photo shoot in Madison on Friday night before the show and I just had nothing and I said, "Look I'll do it but I've got no energy so don't ask me to be cute or anything" and I just stood there looking like a mug shot 'cause I thought, I have to save it all up, I've got to be onstage for 90 minutes and I had no energy 'til about half an hour before show time and then "bsssshht" you have it. Neil Young I heard him say that what he always did before a show was about an hour before he went on stage he would eat a big bowl of pasta and then when the show began the adrenaline would kick in for the first hour and after that the carbs would carry him through. So I tried this for about two years of performing. And I got Neil Young's body.
KATIE: Yeah, um, I'm not gonna do that.
JOHN: Yeah, don't do that...
KATIE: So, John, thank you so much for joining me today! You can find out more about John at www.johnfugelsgang.com, you can subscribe to the Broad Comedy Channel on YouTube so you can get all of my music videos as they come out every month and follow me on Twitter @KatieGoodman, my CD is on iTunes and I'll be performing at the infamous Joe's Pub on August 11 and September 22nd.
You can find out more on www.katiegoodman.com.