Jonathan Katz

See you can’t say the word Queens and make it sound like you won the lottery.

That’s unbelievable. Who’s we?

I’ll never forget the first time I lived in an apartment in New York where I could actually make a turn, because I’d always lived in railroad flats in Chelsea, Lower East Side, Upper West Side. But my wife and I finally moved to an apartment on 72nd and York, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, under $400 a month.

It was in the early 80’s. It was rent stabilized because it was formerly my dad’s apartment. The landlord gave me $40,000 in cash to leave. He showed up one day with a paper bag with $40,000 in it which was money we needed in those days. I wouldn’t throw away $40,000 even now. I think he wanted to sell the apartment. This was when the wonderful world of condominiums appeared. I do a great impression of the guy. His name is Frank Honig. I’d say, “Mr. Honig, how are you?” “Bad.” “How’s Mrs. Honig?” “Worse.” When I asked him to paint the apartment he said, “Jonathan can’t we just plant a tree in Israel?”

I’m a guy who’s never really accepted the fact that Dr. Katz is not on the air. So it’s not like I wasn’t familiar with them to begin with. Of course, I have every episode in my home. I sound exactly like the guy; I look vaguely like him, though he’s built like a yam.

They’re burnt into my memory and for me it was more of listening to them than watching them. Despite the fact that the animation was so cool, I always thought of Dr. Katz as a radio show with pictures.

I’m not trying to sell DVDs but one of the cool things about the DVD is that you get to see the gestation period that the show went through. You get to see how it evolved through doing it with my friend Tom Snyder, who really is the brains of the outfit. He’s the guy who invented Squigglevision and is the guy that taught me about editing audio.

No…oh, that’s a joke, I’m sorry.

Comedians never get anyone else’s jokes.

I did a joke on Tuesday night at Gotham Comedy Club because we did a DVD release party there. I said to the audience, “I’m really so happy to be here, I’m loving this, but I actually mean it.” My theory about comedians is that you can take any comedian, you can put a burlap bag over his head, you can beat him senseless, you can drop him down to the bottom of a well and if he survives the fall, you remove the burlap bag and if anyone else is there, he’ll say “it’s great to be here.” It’s like Tourette Syndrome. That’s what we say, “It’s great to be here.” But that was a really fun party. We did an episode of Dr. Katz live with David Cross and Susie Essman.

Oh, when she lived on 78th Street?

She did and I used to live in that building when I was a kid. At that time you could enter from 78th Street. Right across from Stand Up New York. The weird thing about me is that I’ve lived on every even numbered street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, starting at 72nd and going all the way up to 96th. Then I even lived on 100th Street briefly with a girlfriend.

We drove by it on our way out of town recently.

It’s become gentrified.

Have you ever been the victim of violent crime in New York?

I got mugged once when I was 13 years old. I should have been Bar Mitzvahed but instead I got mugged on Lexington Avenue and 96th.

Well it wasn’t, I’m using the word mugged because I was a kid. Two kids pulled me over to the building while I was waiting for the bus. One kid put a knife to my neck and said, “It’s small, but it hurts.”

I gave them my bus fare and I started crying so the bus driver let me on for free.

If it was Mamet, he’d be talking about his cock.

Tom is a guy who uses the phrase “proof of concept” a lot because he’s in the world of educational software. If you have kids someday they’re going to learn about science or math with the software he created and that’ll be the first time they really enjoy learning. That is because he is an educator who really believes learning should be fun, which I never quite got, but he did. He developed a show called Science Court for ABC based on the software he created. They used a lot of the talent that we used on Dr. Katz, with the exception of Paula Poundstone who never did Dr. Katz. She was the judge on Science Court.

I thought it was cool because it looked homemade. I think that’s one of my favorite things about Dr. Katz. It looks like a show that was made in someone’s home and ironically it was. The entire first season was made in Tom’s home in Cambridge. It was in a pantry in his home and when Steven Wright finished he said, “Someday everybody in Hollywood is going to have a pantry.”

Jon Benjamin was working with David Cross in a sketch group called Cross Comedy in Cambridge and I would do standup there. Jon and a guy named Chuck Sklar made a movie which nobody ever saw called On the Road with Jack Shakespeare. I wrote a song for that movie called Caffeine, which is possibly the best song I’ve ever written.

Tell me about Gothic girls. Are you a freelancer?

Well because I’m 59 years old, I go looking for pictures of my daughters, to make sure they’re not there. But I’m guessing there’s a whole subculture I don’t know about which maybe I don’t need to know anything about. What kind of girls are Gothic girls?

So it’s like a less violent version of Columbine but with girls and it’s kinky.

When I was a kid I actually was suicidal. What saved me was when I was in third grade and a depressed girl and I would pass each other suicide notes. I’m sorry, that’s such a bad joke. I’m just force feeding my act into the conversation.

Yeah he was. In fact, I just saw that episode the other day. He was on the show with a guy named Sam Brown who really was a guy that could have used actual therapy. In fact, he brought his mother to the recording session. You always hope that comedians never show up with their mother.

Yeah because he does his act when he’s performing. Also with interviews I think it’s a chance for a comedian to mine for new material. We’re always on duty as comedians. That’s one of the downsides of the job. I’ll be talking to my wife and part of me is listening to what she’s saying and part of me realizes she’s my straight man. The whole world is your straight man if you’re a comedian.

No, I think conversational comedy is much more popular now partially because of the success of Curb Your Enthusiasm; loosely based on Dr. Katz’s Professional Therapist by the way.

Yeah, Larry David said to me one day, “Jonathan, how do you do that show?” I gave him a copy of the outline and that became the template for Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Yeah. It was almost entirely improvised but there was a script for every episode. Then the script and the improvisation would fight it out and whichever was stronger would go on the air. Usually it was the improvisation because of guys like Jon Benjamin. When he speaks I giggle.

The comedians were repurposing their act to be used as fodder for therapy. Dom Irrera is my favorite patient just because he was so inappropriate even in cartoon therapy. He could not behave even in make-believe therapy. Ray Romano is just a superb comedian and a superb actor. Being a patient on Dr. Katz was ultimately an acting job.

Dom Irrera is somebody I’ve known for 20 years or more since we started standup together. He’d just show up and we would start talking to each other because we were friends and from there I would go into the therapeutic mode and he would just go and keep trying to make me laugh. But Ray Romano is a different kind of story because we tried pretending we were in therapy but it didn’t work. I think it was Loren Bouchard, who was one of the audio editors, who said, “What really works with Ray is when he does his act.” So they would edit his performance and I would just add my voice to his material.

Some people think that Dr. Katz is a show about a therapist who has patients that are comedians and some people think that Dr. Katz is a show about a father and son. I’ve been saying that the second set of people are right, but in fact they’re both right. It’s just whatever works for you. In my mind the show was really about Dr. Katz being a very loving and overindulgent father and a kid who was just not interested in growing up who could manipulate his father.

I don’t really like cartoons that much. The only ones I like a like a lot are Dr. Katz and Home Movies. I like The Simpsons. I get to experience The Simpsons the best possible way, by hearing about it from Tom Snyder. He would tell me the best line of the night.

I’m sure it’s going to be great because of the cast and I am an ass man. But if you try to create fiction for a living, which is what I’ve been doing for the last 20 years or so, and then there is a show purely based on the notion that it was about an ass, that’s a little discouraging because usually there are much more elaborate conceits.

I met David at Goddard College in Vermont and we did do theater together. I played a role in a play he’d written called Camel, it wasn’t a play as much as a series of sketches. What was so unique back then was that the audience liked it, which never happens in college and David charged people 50 cents to get in, which was totally unheard of. He did it because he wanted to pay the actors. So even in college he knew that there was an integrity involved in being an actor. In fact when he got out of college, he went to Chicago and later said, “John you got to come out here, the guy will just cast you. It’s just a formality.” So I flew to Chicago from New York. I auditioned for the play and they hated me. So I gave up acting for 20 years until David cast me in Things Change.

That’s good to hear. In Things Change I did a combination of my material and David’s material and that was really so much fun. Also I got to hang out in Lake Tahoe with showgirls.

No, in fact it’s the opposite. People were amazed when I said, “David, do you mind if I say, Hey, I just walked out of my life instead of I just walked out on my life.” I used the word hey like it was some kind of royal treatment to be permitted to add a word because he wants you to use the punctuation he writes. As I said recently, “I don’t like to put words in people’s mouths, but he does” and he’s so good at it.

I would say the day I met Jon Benjamin.

When I was a standup I did the same fucking jokes every day for 15 years. I wouldn’t change a beat and I would never smile on stage. I was a deadpan standup comic. At that DVD release show I sat down next to Jon Benjamin on the stage in front of 300 people. He spoke and I started giggling, which is not exactly in character. But as a result of Jon Benjamin I learned that I too knew how to improvise.

Not much but I do a lot of stuff with Tom [Snyder]. We formed a company called Pathetic Men. Tom and I work with a guy named Tom Leopold, who you may know his name from the Seinfeld show as a writer. He’s what they call in Hollywood, a show runner, which means that a network can hire him to be in charge of a show. He’s an approved show runner. I do stuff with Tom Snyder directing, occasionally using his voice, Tom Leopold and occasionally Jon Benjamin as part of Pathetic Men. He’s not quite pathetic yet, he’s too young. We’ve created a full length animated feature called The Traveling Talent Show, which is our longest exploration of that particular world. There’s very short pieces which have appeared on public radio and soon will show up on my website under the heading of Pathetic Men. One of them is about two guys roughly my age who open up a venison only restaurant in Manhattan. Another one is about the same two guys who open up a home for re-enactors. In the words of Tom Leopold, “anybody can act, but not everybody can re-enact.”

We’re trying. I think the next time that you’ll see the work of me and Tom together, it’s going to be on HBO.

We have a love affair, which is different than a deal. They want us to make a show; we want to make a show. We have a concept which I can’t mention. Hopefully it’ll show up there soon.

Yeah, I think that would be fair to say.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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