I notice you have a joke about school shootings on the album.

And I continue to do that material. On the night of Littleton I did that, too. It was great. I wasn't in Denver, unfortunately, that would have been terrific. I was somewhere else and I said, "I didn't worry about guns in school when I was a kid. We were tough. When kids got killed, we did the arithmetic: 35 minus three -- we got 32 kids in the class now." I had been doing that for some time so I prefaced it on that night by saying, "We've been hearing this stuff a long time about how these kids need counseling for their trauma, but you're hearing it even more these days." So I rubbed it in about Littleton. The first few times they were more silent because they thought reverence was expected of them. People are so trained in this country.

How can you still do that joke?

Boy, you need that joke more than ever now. The artificial weeping in this country, this nationwide mourning for dead people is just embarrassing, and these ribbons and these teddy bears and these little places where they put notes to dead people and all this shit. This is embarrassing and unnecessary, and it just shows how immature, how emotionally immature the American people as a class are.

Is stand-up comedy art?

It's not a fine art. but there's an artistic process at work with stand-up comics who write their own material. It's a process of reinterpreting the world so that people are seeing the world your way, through your prism. It's your vision, your way of seeing things. And I am very careful about my writing so I am technically a writer, which technically is an art form.

You know, Arthur Koestler, in the book "The Act of Creation," suggested there was a triptych and a three-part identity to certain artists. And one of them was the jester. And he said, the jester tells jokes and the jester is funny. If there is a bit of a serious idea or a philosophical underpinning to his jokes, then he is also the sage. But if he takes jokes that have ideas underneath them and puts them into what we call marvelous language, then he is a poet as well. There's some combination of these things at work in stand-up comedy.

I want to read you a letter sent to Mother Jones magazine a couple years ago. The writer calls you "a man who doesn't vote, doesn't seem to be politically involved in any way, rails against private property yet owns a BMW and flotation tank, and seems to be as whiny, sarcastic, narcissistic, self-indulgent, cold and bloodless as the baby-boomers in his jokes."

If a person does not want to participate in this culture to the degree that it's expected of him, he has a choice. I could have chosen to live in the woods and made my own clothing out of bark. That's one way of not participating. But once you decide that you're going to have an address, you have now joined the system and then it's only a matter of degree as to how much more you do. So when I drive I want to get around these cocksuckers. So I have a BMW 850. I also think it really looks nice.

It happens that I treat myself to a good car and a nice house. I don't have other extravagances. I have chosen my level of participation in this culture, and it's too bad that we have to do it that way. But things are on a sliding scale. It's not either/or. Aristotle's wrong. It's not black or white, there's a lot of gray and I'm guilty of whatever part of the gray I've chosen to use.

You're 62 now and you've had three heart attacks.

I haven't had one for about six years now.

Well, you don't seem to have quieted down. Do you ever contemplate life with a little more of "Shining Time Station's" Mister Conductor, a little less cocksucker.

No, because my nature is to stand up and be heard. My impulse is, "Listen to me, will you." I used to do it on the stoop when I was a kid in my neighborhood. I had about a 20- or 30-minute comedy routine that I worked up when I was about 12 years old and I would stand on the stoop and I would do it. The idea was, as I said earlier, to get their attention. That comes from not having a father in the home at all and my mother being at work all day. You're alone and you invent your own world but you're missing something and that's attention, approval. So you get it somewhere else. And I would not get it the other way. Something in me needs to do it the way I do it.

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