Starting Standup in Maine with David Walton

#32 Louis CK Inspiration

• David Walton • Season 1 • Episode 32

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David runs a creative restraint exercise after stumbling on a Louis CK quote and finds a lot of potential standup material he's now excited about.

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Speaker 1:

Hey, welcome to Starting Stand-Up. My name is David Walton. I'm so happy you're here. If you're new here and I suspect some of you are because my friend, jake Johnson from New Girl Fame has a wonderful, very popular, very popular podcast. If you haven't checked it out, it's called here to Help, where they get calls from people who are having some pretty comical problems and then two extremely unqualified human beings try to help him. And Jake had me on. You'll have to listen to see, but it was. He needed a bathrobe guy and he has a bathrobe guy and that guy is me, and so we sent a couple bathrobes to the man who's having the problem with some nudist neighbors. And so if you listened to that and now you're here, I thank you.

Speaker 1:

This is a podcast that is fairly unhinged. I am just tracking. It's like an audio journal and I track my quest to become good at stand-up in this weird, weird world. I'm learning along with you and I'm not good yet, but I am getting better. If you want to learn about stand-up and you want to just track a very confused man in a creative process, you're in the right place. So today's episode is I have no clue. Yeah, we just pressed record. I'm doing some limitations. The creative process supposedly gets better with limitations, so I'm giving myself two hours soup to nuts to do this entire episode. So what do you hear? The following all happened within two hours. Okay, let's rubbish, that's rubbish.

Speaker 1:

I just discovered Louis CK talking about something I've spoken about on this podcast, but of course, because he's a master, he just articulates it so well and ultimately, this is what I want my stand-up to be. I want it to be honest and he says this quote I like to do stand-up. That's very honest. I don't think it's the only way to be a comedian. Some people, the whole point of their act is that they're lying or being fantastic or really silly or absurd. I think Stephen Wright is a great comedian. Nobody says God, he's so honest. He's not one of those guys. He's just a whole different thing that makes him funny and makes him great.

Speaker 1:

But for me, what guides what I decide to say or do on stage or not is is this shit really true? Is this really shit you're thinking? If it's not, you're going to feel phony and stupid. I don't like phony. I don't like it. For me, there's times I've been getting huge laughs with a bit and then I look up, I look at it and I go but it ain't real, I don't really mean it, I just knew where to go to find laughs. So sometimes I throw that kind of material away after I kill with it a few times.

Speaker 1:

To me it's not important on an integrity level. It's just that it's so much more fun to say shit that's really inside you, that really gnaws at your brain, and to share those thoughts with other people, and especially if they're thoughts that people aren't used to sharing in a humorous way, things that people aren't even used to saying out loud. I mean, beyond saying fuck and talking about sex, the really embarrassing unsaid truths those are really fun to tell an audience and have them laugh, something that I really enjoy. That's why I'm doing standup this way. It's because I like it. End quote, quote, end, end quote. I always like doing those feel so good, okay, so that's just such inspiration for me.

Speaker 1:

It's like what am I doing? And if? If you've been listening, you know that whenever I do come up with a joke or I do I did a whole thing about my dad. I was trying to make my dad's dementia funny and then afterwards I was like everything I just said in this set, some of which got laughs, wasn't true. I wasn't messing with my dad, I was just saying stupid shit and I, I was upset with myself. And here I am and I look and I see this kind of obscure interview with Louis CK and I find it and he says it it's just like a dagger to the heart and I just want that. So, in the spirit of just stating real things, true things, stating real things, true things. Now, these are, of course, things that I'm sure aren't that special, but they're special to me. No, here we go, ready, this is a segment called facts about the things I beat myself up for, and then it just devolved. I kind of just jotted some things down.

Speaker 1:

So I've been on every diet known to man and I want to tell you what I just ate today. I ate an entire softball size mozzarella cheese. I've been 195 my entire life. I am an actor, I'm supposed to be fit, and now I'm going full Will Ferrell mode. I ate the oh they're so good the Costco chicken pita with American cheese wraps. You throw them in the microwave in a paper towel for about a minute and a half and then they just have this designed flavor that just makes you feel like you're stoned in college, but it's a little bit better. So I had three of those. I had a Mexican Coke, I had some almonds, two Corona beers about an hour and a half ago, own of beers. About an hour and a half ago I had a pretty sizable amount of Gouda. Gouda is a funny word. I'm going to try to get Gouda into the set, into the little Gouda.

Speaker 1:

And then I started the morning with three strips of bacon, couple shots of espresso. I'm off, completely off the rails. You know, the weird thing about diets is I had tremendous energy all day. I'm off, completely off the rails. You know, the weird thing about diets is I had tremendous energy all day. I'm not fucking like. That diet gave me more. I felt better and had better energy than when I'm eating like a, a niçoise salad and then having like a sensible chicken, whatever, like there's something. It's almost like I am. It's almost like I'm doing drugs and feeling dangerous as I just hammer cheese, coke and beer. But I will loathe Tomorrow morning I will wake up and those will be the first thoughts in my head what on earth did you just do yesterday? And that won't be fun. But then I'll just watch those thoughts pass, because of course, that's what meditation teachers do.

Speaker 1:

Speaking of, I led a meditation today. This is another thing I'll beat myself up for. I led a meditation at nine today. I sat down to write, but then I got a call from an old friend that I hadn't talked to forever and we got to gabbing and this is why I don't take a lot of calls, because it's sometimes a real gab fest. I went an hour and a half Then I had to take my son to the doctor and then I had to rest because I did crash after the Mexican Coke, I believe, or the Gouda, and then it was 20 minute.

Speaker 1:

I did a yoga Nidra yoga Nidra If you haven't heard of that excellent way to recharge, it worked. Just look it up, watch it. Do a 20 minute yoga Nidra, n I, d R a on YouTube. Excellent recharge. Then my daughter, who's sick, had it was like begging me to go with her to look for sea glass. So I had to go and do that. I mean, pretend that it was meaningful. No, it was, it was. It was a little bit sweet, a little bit Um. And then I sat down to do this, so I didn't even write and now we had to come up with this bullshit. Two-hour thing, okay, but actually I kind of like the two-hour thing. I think there's going to be a lot of energy that gets infused into this podcast by creating constraints.

Speaker 1:

Another thing I'm self-loathing about, and this is I'm just not having the venery that I require. There's a lot, I don't I'm not Myself or anyone else. There's a lot of forces out there, but I am just not having as much sex as I need. And it's hard for me as someone who believes that skin-on-skin sex with people you love is the meaning of life. So I don't feel like a man. So I don't feel like a man, you know.

Speaker 1:

And and however, I did just go. I'm back in the sort of nice strength training regimen and I did some squats, I went pretty hard on the final set and I, I, I woke up today full mast. I mean, just I couldn't get it down. It was like you know, rotting old woman in the shining, rotting old woman in the shining, rotting old woman in the shining bathtub, and it wouldn't go down. I think it was an instant testosterone boost and that's pretty cool. That's going to get me in the gym squatting a tremendous amount. It felt really great.

Speaker 1:

I went to the neurology office today for my son, who has a mild form of epilepsy and hasn't had a seizure in a long time because of some meds. But he had to get hooked up to an EEG and there were people in there all sorts of neurological conditions kids in wheelchairs, grown men like alone, checking in clearly something wrong neurologically and it just made me feel like life is so hardcore. It's just and I think and now we're going to put on some weird hat I think we have to just really trust life people. We have to just really trust life people. We have to just trust it like you got, to just trust the horrible shit, like it's like you, just to trust that it's exactly what your soul needs. All your pain and hurt and all your bad luck, all your misery and frustration and regret, all of it, all your delusion and self-deception it's all leading somewhere. Maybe there's a new way of looking at life. Maybe it's fucking. Every single person's life is perfect, even if you're a victim of some horror. What if it's actually perfect and that as a soul level, you are right now exactly where you are supposed to be, and that the past in so many profound ways doesn't matter.

Speaker 1:

So one thing that popped, a fact about my childhood that popped in was I was young for my grade at this private school in boston and so kids were hitting puberty. This I, this came to my mind because one of my son's friends is his age and rolled in after a year at age 11 and was like deep voice and I was like Whoa, that is young, 11. And he's a great kid. But then I remembered it flashed back me to my pubescent years, which is so hard as a boy in the 80s. Now I'm pretty sure my son is never going to see another penis Maybe ever just because of the privacy and the fear For those younger audience members.

Speaker 1:

In the 1980s in Boston there was no private showers at school. You had a huge communal shower and you showered with your teachers and there was never funny business that I know of. I mean it was so normal. But in hindsight you cannot believe that this was going down. I mean I would have to just muscle it with just a button, a button, hairless thing and Dick in like seventh and even eighth grade. I still hadn't hit puberty Because I was only 12.

Speaker 1:

But there were kids like there were fully grown eighth graders, just fully muscled out, full, full length, like grown units. So then you had, let's call him, sam Roach. He was like an eighth grader and you'd just be like, oh man, like I got to be his friend and be on the football team with him and he looks like he has a wife and kids, and so you're already feeling a shame about that. And then your teacher would roll in multiple teachers, be like good tackle in practice today as his monster. I mean I'm not exaggerating, gk had a monster, seven inches limp, just a beast, and you weren't like, you didn't want to stare, but you were just like, wow, I hope so much that something happens and we get to there, but it doesn't only for a lucky few. I mean, it's got to be top 95, 99 percentile.

Speaker 1:

And I think nowadays if you enrolled in a private school and there were third graders in there, fourth, fifth, sixth, if you enrolled in a private school and parents didn't know that this was a communal shower situation and their boys would be showering with their teachers, I mean I think the FBI would burst through the doors, take down the teacher fully nude. It would be snuffed out immediately. But again, there was no funny business. There was no molesto at my school. It was totally cool to shower. The teachers have conversations and just comment on whatever happened. They would continue coaching you after football practice, as he was just soaping his python. It was just completely normal.

Speaker 1:

I miss the 80s. Thank you, louis CK, for the inspiration. Let's see if something opened up there. Okay, that's it for the episode. Thank you so much for being here. If you enjoyed this, you think someone a friend of yours might like it. Go ahead and text it to them. You can subscribe as well. That's a great way to support me and if you're feeling particularly generous, particularly full of love, give me a little comment somewhere. It's very helpful and this is growing and it's exciting that it's growing and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for listening. Have an incredible week full of love and peace and adventure and fun, and I'll see you next week. Bye.