Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy

I always felt confident that my family was better than other people’s families. It wasn’t money or class or anything like that. I just knew that theirs laughed at the wrong things.

Judd: It’s existential angst, it’s worrying. I’m the result of a broken home, so I always have some sort of hypervigilance.

David: I’m not terribly talented. But I am disciplined. And if you’re disciplined and you just put your nose to the grindstone—sometimes you might look at what you’ve done and think, All right, well, this sucks. But if I keep doing it and I do it every single day for fifteen years, it has to be better, and that’s all I ever did, really, I did not e

But if you think too hard about all that stuff, you won’t be able to do anything. It’s important to remain intuitive on some level.

David: Yeah. In my diary, I guess I just try to look at the day before and think, Okay, what was the defining moment of that day? What was the most interesting thing that happened? What was worth remembering?

So I’m fine with having parents who don’t understand what I do. My mom was generally supportive of whatever artistic endeavors my siblings and I were interested in. I really consider myself so lucky to have had the parents I did, but my entire career is based on taking whatever advice my father has ever given me and doing exactly the opposite. It h

David: It means everything to me. When I’ve gone to other people’s readings and—I’ll go see a poet or I’ll go to a bookstore because a friend’s novel is out. And I hear them get up there and read something serious, and I think, Oh, how can you do that? How do you know people are listening if they’re not laughing? You can feel people drifting away f

His material is his life—his family, his walks around the neighborhood, his French lessons—and the most amazing thing about him is that he never fails to make it fresh or meaningful. I can think of very few writers—in comedy or elsewhere—with better timing or sense of the absurd.

Judd: Hill Street Blues is probably the most important show in all of TV history.