Steve Neaves

Published in the April 2013 issue

Breakfast, Olives restaurant at the W Hotel, downtown New York City.

PATTON OSWALT [To waiter]: I'll get a black tea. Thank you.

SCOTT RAAB: Relax. Take a few minutes.

PO: I landed at six yesterday, and then it took me two hours to get into the city. I was able to drop off my bags and get into another car to take me to a show. I did a benefit for Stand Up for Heroes. The lineup was Roger Waters, Bruce Springsteen, Jon Stewart, Ricky Gervais, Robin Williams, and me. I'll show you the lineup. [Shows Raab a photo on his iPhone.] That's the show order.

SR: You're following Robin Williams.

PO: I'm at the end of all that. Crawling out of my skin. I went onstage and said, "I know what you're thinking... Finally, a celebrity." Meth has nothing on the combination of time change and terror.

SR: I'm not sure about that.

PO: There's your extra season of Breaking Bad right there. He finds out how to combine jet lag and terror.

SR: I've never made a commitment to that show. Or The Wire.

PO: I'm genuinely envious of you, because someday you're going to get to sit down and watch this giant crime epic that is better than The Godfather films in terms of scope.

SR: Better than The Godfather?

PO: TV is so much better than movies these days because TV shows aren't TV shows anymore. Because now we live in this DVD, iTunes, Hulu age, and show creators and networks are realizing that and letting shows develop on those terms rather than "We gotta just punch it week to week, man." Now they're like, "What will happen if someone watches the entire show?" If Twin Peaks had come out two years ago, it would still be on the air. It would be this massive tapestry.

[Waiter comes.]

Stand Up for Heroes, 2012

SR: Will you eat some breakfast?

PO: Are you kidding?

SR: Good.

PO: I'll get the fruits and berries.

SR: I meant eat.

PO: And then I'll get poached eggs, dry rye toast. And bacon. And burn it. Well-done.

SR: When people ask you what you do, do you say stand-up or acting?

PO: I identify as a stand-up first. Even though lately there's been an explosion of acting on my schedule.

SR: You're getting better, I think.

PO: Objectively, I must be getting better.

SR: Not that you sucked.

PO: Hanging around actors, I feel like I won a contest. Last night, I was hanging out with Robin Williams, who I've kind of become friends with. As a stand-up, I'm totally comfortable with him. But then when I'd go do Justified, and I'd work with this actor named Jere Burns, a solid character actor who is in no way a star yet, I got so nervous around him. I just did a table read for The Newsroom. Jane Fonda is across from me. That's Bree from Klute; that's Barbarella! And she's just going through her script! And then next to her's Sam Waterston. And Olivia Munn! I'm as excited by seeing Olivia Munn as I am by Sam Waterston, because Olivia Munn is brilliant on that show. I feel like more of a buff of these people's work than a colleague.

Justified, 2013

SR: You've worked with some great actors.

PO: Doing Young Adult was really reassuring to me in a lot of ways. It confirmed a lot of suspicions I had about great actors. The truly great actors, like Charlize Theron, are just like, "I'm an actor. For hire. I show up, I do my job." There's no "I'm just waiting for the inspiration." They just do their jobs. They say, "Let's go over the scene a few times and get it."

SR: Same with stand-up?

PO: All the truly great stand-ups say, "I go onstage, and I work on jokes. The inspiration will happen while I'm doing my work." To me, in the end, the surest thing is work.

SR: The bacon is unacceptable?

PO: I just needed a taste of it.

SR: Good for you.

PO: I'm trying to do a thing where I just get a taste and then see if that's enough. Louis C. K. said, "People say you should stop eating when you're full." Then he said, "Meal isn't over when I'm full. Meal's over when I hate myself."

SR: You can feel he's a good guy.

PO: He's a genuinely good person. And when he's not good, he's trying to be good.

SR: He's huge right now. Famewise.

PO: I get jealous when certain people get really big, but this was one of the few times I'm genuinely happy, because what I do is in such good hands right now. The way he's doing it is making people excited about what I do. And not, like, "Oh, I just wanna see Louis and that's it." They're asking, "Well, what else is out there?" And it's in-spiring all these other comedians to up their game. And he's a young guy. There's gonna be more. We're just seeing the beginning. It must be the way that Ebert felt when he saw Who's That Knocking at My Door. "Holy shit. This Scorsese kid's in his 20s. And I'm young, too! I'm gonna get to watch decades of this guy's work!" It's just so good when you discover that early on. Though sometimes I wonder if the acknowledgment of that happening can negatively affect a career. If you observe something...

Young Adult, 2011

SR: The Heisenberg Principle.

PO: Yeah. There was a kid, Kyle Kinane, who was opening for me, and now he headlines because he's so good. I told my manager, who also signed him, "Could you please make sure people leave him alone for just a couple years so they don't fuck up what he's doing right now? Because what he's doing is so perfect." It's like when Zach Galifianakis first popped on the scene. VH1 immediately grabbed him and gave him a talk show. And it fucked him up for a decade.

SR: How was it for you coming up?

PO: I wasn't great to begin with, and there wasn't the Internet, so I was allowed to develop.

SR: But you can learn so much from an early failure.

PO: It's weirdly important. I was talking with [director] Brad Bird one time, and he said it's like the beginning of Return of the Jedi. Luke shows up and he's a badass. He said they should've opened it with Luke in the swamp saying to Yoda, "You said 'Don't go.' I said 'Fuck you, I'm gonna go help my friends.' I went and got my hand cut off and my friends are in even worse trouble because of what I did. I fucked up everything." And then Yoda should have gone, "Now you're a Jedi. Now you're beyond the fear of failure. Now you're ready." That would have made it even cooler.

SR: And more congruent with reality.

PO: You had your ass kicked, and now you're okay. One of the reasons Michael Jordan is so great is because of all the things he fucked up.

SR: I'm looking forward to seeing [The Secret Life of] Walter Mitty. So you got a chance to work with Sean Penn.

PO: I was in Iceland with Sean Penn for three days on that movie. He's an interesting guy to hang out with.

SR: He's such a man of the world.

PO: He's trying to become this international superhero. I love what he does. He says, "I got a gun, I got a jar of Ambien, I'm running a village in Haiti. And I'm trying to save people." And he did it! He's the Jimmy Carter of intense indie actors. He's actually saving the world. You know there's guys who talk about doing stuff, and then Jimmy's out there with a hammer and nail, saying, "I'm gonna go build a house."

SR: When did you know comedy was the path you were committed to?

PO: Before doing my first open mic, I was sitting in the back watching all these comedians banter back and forth and fire jokes and up each other, and I thought, This is where I wanna be. Because it's all coming out of this room. Even if they're not the best comedians, it starts here. When I was working in offices, they were repeating something funny they'd heard on SNL or The Simpsons, but these guys were inventing it. I wanted to be upriver at the source, not downriver where they're collecting it.

SR: What was your best joke that night?

PO: I said, "I think they should change the conjunction of to o'. Because it would just make things less grim. You'd come home and be like, 'What's wrong, sweetie?' 'Doctor says that I have cancer o' the cervix.' Doesn't sound too bad!"

SR: Good joke.

PO: It's a grammar joke. And one comedian laughed at it. And I went, "Oh! A guy that I like likes me! Okay, this is my world."

SR: I heard a great joke the other day.

PO: Let's hear it.

SR: A guy goes bear hunting.

PO: Uh-huh.

The King of Queens, 1998 to 2007

SR: And he sights the bear and fires, and the bear disappears. So he walks up and there's no bear. The guy gets a tap on the shoulder, and the bear says, "Listen. You got a choice. You can blow me, or I'm just gonna maul you to death right here." So he blows the bear.

PO: Uh-huh.

SR: You know this joke, don't you?

PO: "You're not here for the hunting, are you?"

SR: Comedians know every joke. It's like going, "Hey, Alex Rodriguez, can I show you this swing?"

PO: We know all jokes.

SR: I was wondering: Since you were named for George Patton, were your siblings also named after generals?

PO: My brother, Rommel, and my sister, MacArthur? No.

SR: Your dad was in the military?

PO: A marine colonel. Test pilot, three tours in Vietnam. Shot in the leg. He was a Phantom flyer. But he was the anti-Santini. He had gone through so much god-awful shit that he said, "You are never joining the military." Every artist has these weird issues with their dad, but as I get older, the more I find out about him, all I find out is cooler and cooler shit.

SR: Did he support your becoming a comedian?

PO: He was always a fan of comedy. He never said, "You are not doing comedy." But he was also very pragmatic. He taught me early not to spend the money I made. If I had $500, I didn't have $500. I had $200.

SR: Rainy day.

PO: Every day is a rainy day in this business. It's raining, dude. It's raining.

SR: Are your siblings funny?

PO: I have a younger brother named Matthew who's in L.A. now. He was a frustrated writer and filmmaker and kind of directionless for a long time. And then a couple years ago, just out of sheer frustration, he started shooting these Web shorts called Puddin' with this guy named Eddie Pepitone.

SR: I know that name, Eddie Pepitone.

PO: Pepitone looks like a human headache. There's a documentary out about him right now called The Bitter Buddha. He's the Johnny Cash of the alt-comedy scene. Anyway, he does these shorts with my brother. They're literally eight seconds long each and have my brother sitting in a break room eating pudding from a pudding cup. And then Eddie comes in and says something like, "I watched Mr. Holland's Opus last night and cried. Fuck you." They're single-panel comic strips in video. Robin Williams did three of them. Michael McKean did some. Weird Al Yankovic. It's getting this weird following.

Big Fan, 2009

SR: Your brother must be happy.

PO: He is now. He's not answering to anyone. Comedy Central was thinking about buying it as a show, and he was like, "If I can just deliver it to you South Park–style, and just give it to you." And they're like, "Well, see, we were thinking..." He goes, "Thanks. I don't give a shit."

SR: Good for him.

PO: There's a lot of people now doing stuff online who are saying to networks, "Well, here's my hit count. Can you get me more viewers? 'Cause if you can't, why should I talk to you?"

SR: It's a new world and what's going to become of it is exciting.

PO: We are so happy to be on TV, and we're not trying to tear the networks down, but you have to work with us. No one's coming to you hat in hand anymore, and you need to be excited about that. So instead of some guy going, "Yeah, give me a show and we'll both work on it," you're like, "I already did my own thing. I'm willing to do this, but you have to leave me alone."

SR: That's Louis's deal with FX.

PO: And that's South Park's deal.

SR: You still enjoy stand-up?

PO: Here's what I'm afraid of. I know a lot of comedians, friends of mine, who just got into the "Doesn't matter what I say. It doesn't matter. They're just gonna laugh anyway."

SR: That's why Steve Martin quit.

PO: I was always so resentful of him, because he was the greatest modern stand-up that we had. On every level. I love Carlin and Pryor, but Steve Martin was making fun of the act of doing comedy and making that universal. It was like a guy on the street selling the best heroin for two years and then saying, "Yeah, I'm done." And we're like, "Wait, so that shit's gone?" You listen to Steve Martin's stuff, the Let's Get Small stuff, and he's as excited as the audience! And then you get to A Wild and Crazy Guy, and he's just shrieking at nothing. If I'm not careful, I could slip into that. I'm about to go on this — I hate to call it a journey. At tonight's show, you'll see me addressing the problem for the first time.

SR: Sounds grim.

PO: I'll only do it if I can find a way to make it funny. No one gives a shit about "Man, I'm just having this crazy artistic journey." "Yeah, we don't give a shit. You want depression and emotional pain? Come to my job at Jiffy Lube."

SR: You're entitled to kvetch, but only to other people in the same line of work.

PO: I've gotten very cynical and kind of anhedonic about all the things I have to do to get to do comedy: all the travel, hotels, and airports. Louis C.K. has that great bit about how everything's amazing and no one's happy. Two hundred people are in a metal tube in the sky, and there's the Internet. I agree with that, but why can't we have that level of miracle with checking in? When I'm checking in, suddenly I'm in Istanbul in 1930. And this is me being paranoid, but it's like the infrastructure of travel seems to be coming apart. Anytime I'm on a plane, something doesn't work. Doors don't quite close. A light doesn't work. Seats don't work. If the movie isn't working, what else isn't? I wanna get away from travel for a while. And I cannot tolerate being away from my daughter.

SR: How old is she?

PO: Three. I just... It really...

SR: I get that.

PO: Drives me crazy.

SR: You can't buy back a day.

PO: She's gonna have plenty of time to think life sucks, so I want her to think life is great. I get so bummed out when I see a lot of these archconservatives saying, "They give these kids trophies just for playing. Those are loser trophies! You gotta teach 'em!" If it makes you feel any better, they will end up an asshole, hard and cynical like you, trust me. Just give 'em a few years. I'm sorry that no one gave you a childhood, but can't they have a childhood? I don't want more people like me. I want happier people that are more optimistic.

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