An edited version of this interview first appeared in Time Out New York on August 15th, 2007
When it comes to Dana Gould, you get nothing but the best. He even punched up his own jokes during our interview. It comes as no surprise, then, that after he left his post of seven years as a writer and producer on The Simpsons, Gould became a highly sought after commodity. Within months he’d been pegged to adapt Neal Pollack’s Alternadad, a memoir about balancing parenting and staying hip, is writing The Last Larry, a pilot for Comedy Central, and made a return to performing at clubs nationwide, including a 2 day run at Comix starting August 17th.
Have you managed to stay hip while raising your kids?
No, it’s nearly impossible. You quickly realize that hipness is just something to take up your time when you don’t have kids. You literally don’t have the physical time to do anything or the mental space to care because they’re always six seconds from killing themselves.
Do you often find yourself rushing your kids to the emergency room?
It’s happened. Just recently I was putting my daughter to bed and she said she needed a band-aid for her nose. Turns out, there were two necklace beads up each of her nostrils. I guess they’d be called nasal beads- no relation to anal beads, I hope. She didn’t seem to care that she couldn’t breath out her nose, but I freaked because I couldn’t get them out. I tried getting her to blow her nose, but they wouldn’t budge, so I took her to the ER. She couldn’t have been more delighted to go on a car ride at 10 PM.
What was your dad’s day job?
He worked for the phone company. He spent his days helping people communicate and his nights drowning his feelings.
And what’d your mother do?
She drank at home.
How would you describe the Gould Family?
I compare my family to the Manson family and think, “At least the Manson family had a ranch.” It was very Malcolm in the Middle. We were totally broke- a large family on a single working class salary. For fun, our dad would take us down to the dump and let us shoot rats with his rifle. Occasionally, we’d hit a bucket that had a rat in it and we’d think, “What are the poor people doing today?” I remember me and my brothers were watching Thunderball and James Bond snuck into the villain’s lair and he knocks a guard off into this shark infested pool and all we could think of was, “That guy has a pool!” But I think one of the reasons everyone in my family is funny and clever is that we had to make our own fun.
Like what?
We’d go down to the cemetery and play dark shadows. We spent more time there than at the local park. The local newspaper even ran an article on it, “Hopedale Village Cemetery: Place Where Children Play?!”
Did you keep in touch with any of your friends?
I’m friends with the people I want to keep in touch with.
How are your kids with making friends?
They’re very adept and verbal kids, which is good because it forces me to make friends with people who aren’t in show business.
I hear comedians have a hard time talking with non-show biz types.
It’s true. We’re not known for our great listening, but once you break yourself off that habit it gets a lot easier. The idea that other people were interesting didn’t hit me until I was in my early 30′s. I want to issue a blanket apology to anyone who knew me before then.
Are you working on Alternadad and The Last Larry at the same time?
I’m not only working on it simultaneously, I’m working on it as I talk to you.
Since your working on The Last Larry and Alterndad at the same time, do you ever get the two confused?
I hope that if I do I catch myself before I watch it onscreen. If you’re watching Alternadad and he’s at the baby furniture store and there’s a zombie, then you know I cross-referenced my two projects.
How long have you had the idea?
A while. I even made a short film with a similar story called The Last Man on Earth in 1991. You can see it on my website, Danagould.com. The show’s a mixture of The Omega Man and Battlestar Galactica, where, basically, the war is over, the heroes have lost, and now they just have to survive. It’s a traditional sitcom set in the untraditional setting of the aftermath of a zombie holocaust. The minute you’ve got three people alive, one person’s going to feel left out.
Why’d you hold off on that idea for so long?
I made the movie and was happy with it. I toyed with the idea of turning it into a feature for a while, but in more of a Lord of the Flies situation similar to the aftermath of Katrina where people would be jarred out of their original situation for a short amount of time and then quickly revert to being jerks. The idea had different lives and then, in a casual conversation with a friend, I’d mentioned how people wanted to do a show about zombies. It was the rage at the time. I’d said that the only way to do it was my idea, and they told me to pitch it. I took them on their word and did.
When you say people, you mean “The Industry”?
Yeah, it was one of those ideas whose time had come.
Have you ever been in a Lord of the Flies type of situation, like being trapped in an elevator?
No, but my biggest fear in life is being trapped in an elevator. That exceeds any fear that I could possibly had. Once, in college, I was stranded with a friend of mine on a subzero night in Massachusetts. We’d pretty much come to terms with the fact that we were going to freeze to death, but we still didn’t cuddle. We were just shy of a forced panic cuddle.
Did you at all discuss if one of you were to die before the other if you’d eat him?
We weren’t going to wait until one of us went first. It was going to be the winner of an arm wrestling match.
When you pitched The Last Larry to Comedy Central, were you still with The Simpsons?
I had just left. The whole thing looked terrible planned, although it wasn’t.
How does being in charge of a project compare to being a part of a project like you were on The Simpsons?
It’s always nice to be the boss and I liked the fact that it’s for Comedy Central, which has a history of letting people’s visions not be so mass market. They’re willing to go beyond Ted Danson as a single dad, on the other hand the Ted Danson money is pretty sweet.
What are some of the things that you miss about working about The Simpsons?
At the Simpsons, they get you lunch. And every day I just sit here and no one ever comes.
How’d you feel about The Simpsons movie?
I haven’t seen it yet, but everyone I know who worked on it said that it was a long process, but that they were all very happy on it. I know that it was a lot harder than they thought.
Why haven’t you seen it?
I’d seen it in several stages throughout production, so I’m not running to throw down 20 bucks and hire a baby-sitter. I only like one type of movie, and that’s where Matt Damon runs and makes a lot of telephone calls. Luckily, this summer there is one.
What was so difficult about making the movie?
The re-writes and getting the arc of the movie. The shows are 22 minutes and they move along at a great clip and it’s difficult to adjust the rhythm of the show over a longer period of time because you can’t maintain that level of intensity for 80 minutes. It has to cycle. You start of strong, relax, get into the second act, then there’s a bit of a re-grouping, and then you chug along into the third act and I think it took them a while to re-calibrate their expectations of the movie to a longer format.
What were some difficulties that you personally experienced working on The Simpson’s?
When you’re a comic and a freelancer, you can kind of roam around, but on The Simpsons and other shows you come in the morning, sit in that room, and you sit, and sit, and sit, and go home at night, wake up the next day, and then go back and sit some more. I’d say it’s the best job you could ever have on a submarine.
What’d you find most satisfying?
It’s great to go home at night and feel like you actually did something that you can hold your head up about. It beats going home after a hard day of re-writing Tin Full of Biscuits.
If someone pitches a joke in the writing room and it doesn’t match up with a character’s past, would someone say, “Well, that’s not something Homer would do with his track record.”?
It’s not that polite. They’ll just stare at you. If it’s not funny they don’t laugh politely. They know that everyone is there because they’re good, so they’re not going to kiss your ass.
Did they use any comedy jargon in the writing room?
They made fun of comedy jargon a lot, which I appreciated being a stand up. George Meyer started a thing where whenever you put a hobo in the script, you’d have to add in a parenthesis afterward if he had a bindle or not. Often, it would be, “Hobo (With Bindle).” If you left it out, you’d be called on it. I remember him saying once, “You know, I’m looking at a hobo on the screen and I have no fucking idea whether or not he has a bindle.”
There’s a rumor that whenever the writers in the room have a hard time coming up with a joke, they consult a script George Meyer wrote for a Letterman movie. Is this true?
That might have been true, but it certainly wasn’t while I was there. I’m not saying it’s not true, but that script had gone away by the time I showed up, but I’d showed up ins season twelve. But I can attest to George being pretty daunting to work with.
What brought you back to stand up?
I never stopped performing and continued to do it through out my tenure on the show, I just couldn’t leave town. Once I had that freedom back, I was very eager to go back out. I was never a road animal, going out for 4 to 6 weeks in a stretch, but I like to go out at least once a month. It’s like running. I don’t want to go to long without doing it.
Do you run?
I don’t have to. I do stand up.
Has your act has changed at all?
It’s always been autobiographical; some would say excessively so. It’s changed as I have been very fortunate enough to have my life change. If I were still living alone in my apartment it would be a dire show indeed.
How do you feel about stand up compared to the other mediums you’ve worked in?
The freedom and immediacy of stand up is unparalleled. Unfortunately, it’s the other mediums that have better pay and health insurance. For some reason I’ve chosen to make my living by going into bars and begging strangers to love me, but I don’t think that’s unhealthy.
Having done it for so long, do you still need that sort of approval from strangers?
No one becomes a comedian because they’ve got their shit together. If you do it longer, you start to do it for different reasons. When you first start doing comedy, you never walk away from conversations going, “Boy, that guy’s got it all going on.”
What are those different reasons for you?
It comes naturally to me now. It’s a skill set I’ve had for a long time and I enjoy doing it. Some people are musicians and some people are comedians. Even if a musician is doing something else, they’ve got a guitar around and I think I’m the same way with a notebook.
A lot of comedians want to be musicians. Is that true for you as well?
A lot of comedians want to be musicians because they’re cool and there’s one thing that comedians shouldn’t be and it’s cool. Some comedians try to be cool and it just doesn’t work. It’s like a clown in a well-tailored suit; it just doesn’t work.
How would you describe your first year of doing stand up regularly?
This first year of getting back on the road has been really superlative. I’ve been having a great time, and I’m going to keep doing it until I stop being funny.
