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From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend.
I'm Tanya Mosley.
Today, what happens when a former federal government employee turns his lens on the psychology of panic?
You get hysterical.
A podcast series from Dan Taberski, winner of both the Apple and Ambie Award for Podcast of the Year.
In Hysterical Taberski investigates a mysterious illness that swept through a group of high school students in upstate New York.
It began with one girl, who woke up from a nap and suddenly couldn't stop stuttering.
Also, we'll hear from Larry Charles, who has been a writer, director and executive producer on a number of culturally impactful TV shows and films like Seinfeld.
Curb Your Enthusiasm, Entourage and Borat.
And book critic, Maureen Corrigan, recommends some mystery and suspense novels for your summer reading list.
That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.
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This is Fresh Air Weekend.
I'm Tanya Mosley.
My guest, Dan Taberski, is the creator of several award-winning audio documentaries, including Missing Richard Simmons, which explored the sudden disappearance of the late fitness icon, and Running from Cops, which was a look into the long-running reality show and its impact on law enforcement and public perception.
Taberski's latest project, Hysterical, was recently honored as Podcast of the Year at the Ambys.
It's a seven-part series that unpacks a strange and fascinating medical mystery a sudden outbreak in 2011 of tics and spasms among high school girls in Leroy, New York.
In December of 2011, a young woman posted a video on YouTube.
Hi, everyone.
My name's and this is my first video.
She's got shiny red hair with side bangs and she's wearing a white graphic hoodie.
A poster for the metal band Avenged Sevenfold is tacked to her bedroom wall behind her.
So I'll start off by telling you a little bit about myself.
I'm 16.
I'm in 11th grade and I play softball like all the time.
When she made this video, there was no TikTok.
There was barely an Instagram.
She's not looking to monetize, not trying to influence.
What this 16-year-old is looking for is a little help.
She's been having strange symptoms that so far no one can seem to explain.
Recently, last August, I had passed out at a concert.
I was headbanging.
And I thought, you know, I was just dehydrated and all that.
By now you've noticed that her speech is a bit halting and her nervous teenage energy is more than just fidgeting.
And about a month after, I pass out again at the homecoming dance.
That's awesome, right?
It has pattern and repetition.
Eyes twitching, hands in the air, fingers flying.
And a few days ago...
My twitching has progressed into noises like through my nose or in my throat.
And it's something that won't go away.
The series draws a line from the cases in Leroy to historical episodes like the Salem witch trials, when girls displaying odd speech and convulsive fits were accused of being witches.
And contemporary phenomena like Havana syndrome, when overseas diplomats and CIA agents suffered neurological symptoms that were suspected to be the result of foreign attacks.
These were all moments when real physical symptoms spread through communities with no clear biological cause.
Many of these are known as mass psychogenic illnesses.
Dan Terberski says he's drawn to puzzles that point to larger questions about who we are and how we live.
Before becoming a podcaster, he was a field producer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart from 1999 to 2006.
And before that, he worked on economic policy in the Clinton White House.
Dan Taberski, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thanks for having me.
Nice to be here.
You know, what a career you've carved out for yourself.
I can't wait to get into that.
But first, let's talk a little bit about Hysterical.
Can you describe what you saw in Leroy, how prevalent it was, and what was going on at its height?
Yeah.
I mean, it started with one girl who woke up from a nap with a stutter and she couldn't speak.
She just couldn't get her words out, which was not normal for her.
Those symptoms evolved into twitches and spasms and vocal outbursts.
A couple of weeks later, a friend on the cheerleading squad came down with similar symptoms.
Tics, verbal outbursts spasms, like really scary looking things when you don't know what's causing it.
Two became three, three became five, and they were off to the races.
Almost all of the cases were centered in Leroy Junior Senior High School in a town called Leroy, New York.
Something that you delve into so well in this podcast is really our understanding of what even a psychogenic illness or conversion disorder is.
Can you really break that down for us?
Yeah.
I mean.
Conversion disorder is basically psychological stress or trauma that exhibits itself as physical symptoms.
Sometimes it's very simple.
It could be like GI issues or you're nauseous.
Very often it's neurological and very often they can become bizarre and they can become long-lasting.
They can be lymphs, tics, spasms, outbursts, symptoms very similar to Tourette syndrome.
Syncope is one that happens a lot, which is passing out symptoms.
Or near syncope, which is the feeling of passing out.
Seizures.
So it can really run the gamut.
But the only thing is, is that these symptoms don't seem to have an organic cause.
So you might have a limp, but the x-rays are normal.
Or you're having seizures three times a day, but your MRIs don't show anything.
You were initially drawn to this story.
I read of the students in Leroy after reading reports about Havana syndrome, which is to remind people that mysterious illness that affected diplomats and CIA officers really around the world, not just in Cuba in 2016.
And some of the experts that you talked to made an argument that what was happening to these men possibly isn't so different from what the girls were experiencing.
So, so much, especially with the girls in Leroy, is tied up in whether or not they're believed.
They're told it's all in their heads, that they're being dramatic or hysterical.
But I'm curious how does that equation shift when the same unexplained symptoms or similar symptoms start happening to powerful men who are valued for their toughness and their composure and their physicality and mental strength?
I mean that was part of.
What was interesting about it in the first place was comparing Havana syndrome to what was happening in Leroy and how people were reacting to what happens when you're right.
It's like CIA agents.
It's like it's like people who, you know, like they do secret ops.
They, like I say in the podcast, they know how to neutralize things like these.
Are serious, potentially scary people who are trained to deal with the stress of, if not combat, close to it.
And so many people weren't willing to countenance the possibility that mass psychogenic illness could happen to people like that, or it could happen to men period.
And to watch how quickly the conversation became about quote, unquote it's all in your head for the girls compared to the diplomats and the CIA agents, I just thought was really interesting and really telling about women and girls and belief in terms of their medical conditions and their medical experiences, right or wrong.
And, you know, I'm not saying it wasn't.
They both could be mass psychogenic illness.
They both might not be.
But it was just interesting how hesitant people were to question the men and how quick they were to write off the girls.
And Leroy, a lot of folks thought it might be environmental.
What were some of the most compelling arguments in favor of that theory?
And really, what did you ultimately conclude?
And it reminded them of something that had happened in 1973 that might have something to do with what was going on now.
And in 1973, it turns out there was a train derailment about three miles away from the school.
And during the derailment, the train unloaded approximately 35000 gallons of trichloroethylene, which is an industrial solvent.
And it ended up in the ground in the water table and stayed there.
And many people believed that this could potentially explain why people were having these symptoms, thinking that the plume that was underground had gone to the high school and was starting to cause these symptoms.
And they investigated the area.
There were six fracking wells on the school property, which is just really shocking.
They were not able to show that it was causing the symptoms that were happening.
But it does go to show that –
It really can be anything at a time like this and that you can't just say oh, it's mass psychogenic illness.
It's all in your head and walk away because there really are things.
Part of knowing that it's mass psychogenic illness is really knowing as sure as you can be that it's not something else which requires an investigation, which requires all that footwork.
And then after a few years, mysteriously, the symptoms for many of these girls went away.
I mean, basically for all of them.
Yeah.
By the end of the school year, the symptoms were all but gone.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, one of the other things that you delve into is just how much stress the environment and also our interactions with each other kind of play a role in how we react to the environment and each other.
So in the case of the girls, it was an interesting point that you talked about how the media might actually perpetuate or even worsen this symptom.
So how deeply influenced we are by each other, because the more the story was reported, the the more cases seemed to emerge.
So was it that increasing media attention, simply shining a light on it, was already happening, or did the power of suggestion actually play a role?
Well, it's hard to know.
Like, you can't know for sure, right?
You have to report on it.
You have to report on this thing.
It's a medical mystery.
You need to find out the answer.
But the thing about mass psychogenic illness, especially one that was breaking out in Leroy where the symptoms were so bizarre, is that it's a line-of-sight illness.
It's not passed randomly.
It's usually passed in social groups, like kids at a high school or like a nunnery, or workers on a factory floor, even people in a town.
But by putting the girls with the tics on the news, they were basically showing the tics to everybody else in the town and then that would become a vector for spread.
That the constant looking at the symptoms and seeing them and talking about them actually contributes to it continuing.
We're listening to my conversation with documentary podcaster Dan Taberski.
His latest project Hysterical, is about a mysterious illness that swept through an upstate New York high school, and it was honored as Podcast of the Year at the Ambys.
More of our conversation after a short break.
This is Fresh Air Weekend.
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This is Fresh Air Weekend.
I'm Tanya Mosley.
Let's get back to my conversation with documentary podcaster Dan Taberski.
Dan, I want to talk with you about the podcast that came out of yours in 2021 to mark the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11th.
It's a seven-part series called 9-12.
And you're not only telling stories from people who are talking about where they were on 9-11, but you also really delve into how it changed us.
The clip I want to play is from the first episode, where you actually found people who were part of a reality show called The Ship, which was a recreation of Explorer Captain Cook's 18th century voyage to Australia and New Zealand.
And on 9-11, the crew was trapped on a ship in the middle of the ocean without access to TV or radio.
And this clip begins with Alan Block, who was part of that voyage.
Let's listen.
Nine or 10 o'clock is the morning change of watch, okay?
And usually the meeting is, thank you for gathering.
We've got some weather coming in today, but likely continued good sailing conditions.
For lunch is salted beef.
For dinner is salted pork.
That was the morning meeting.
No big deal, right?
Well, this day started differently.
We thought it was more of a public flogging.
Mario and a shipmate had broken a bunch of safety rules on camera the day before while trying to catch a 30-pound barracuda.
So when everyone was assembled on the quarterdeck, Mario thought that the captain was about to chew them out.
And we were, you know, sort of our heads were right down waiting for the whip to come down on us in front of everybody.
And then he just...
Then he just proceeded to tell us this strange story.
Sorry to wake you up so alarmingly.
What I'm gonna tell you now is gonna shock all of you.
This morning, American time 830, the 737 was flown into one of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center in New York.
It was full of passengers.
It was hijacked.
20 minutes later, another airplane flew into the other Twin Tower.
That one was hijacked as well.
That was a clip from the 2021 podcast 912 produced and hosted by my guest today, Dan Taberski.
Like anytime I hear anything like that, where not just people telling their stories about where they were in 9-11, but real sound, real video or audio of people hearing it in real time, it just like stops me in my tracks.
It takes me right back there.
I'm sure it's the same for you.
Oh, yeah.
It gives me chills.
I mean, 20 years after 9-11 is a long time.
And so we were just trying to figure out how we could bring people back to that shock.
The shock has been gone for so long.
And we were trying to figure out how to get people back to that without just sort of like dousing them in audio from the actual, you know planes hitting buildings and people screaming and all that terrible stuff which is super exploitative and it doesn't even do the trick anymore.
That's such a unique story and was able to really take us into it in the ways that you just talked about.
But you also went to several other really interesting places, like the staff of the publication of The Onion and lots of other places, to find out where they were when they heard it.
We wanted to be able to tell a story about how we digested it all.
And so going to those stories that are sort of on the side of 9-11, or people who had weird reactions or like The Onion is a perfect example of people who had to tell jokes about 9-11 like three days afterwards.
And how do you deal with that and how humor ended up actually being this sort of incredible bomb?
And we just wanted to do justice to what had happened to everybody afterwards.
Yeah.
And to be able to sort of mine all those stories and see how it changed us, which it so clearly did.
It just seemed like the thing that I really wanted to talk about it.
I mean, I was here in New York.
I lost a very good friend.
It was part of my life and I still live in New York, and so it was something that I was wrestling with as well, about seeing 9-11 memorials and sort of rolling your eyes sometimes, because you feel like they're sort of playing on certain feelings that aren't really there anymore and they're just sort of doing it to make money or –.
Just all these sorts of other icky side stories and other sort of weird things that happen after something – the conspiracy theories and trying to tell movies about it and actors that played Osama bin Laden and how weird that is.
Like it means so more than just the day.
And podcasting is just a great place to fish around like that.
Yeah.
And take your time getting to a larger point, as opposed to just sort of starting, you know, with like the here's what happened on that day and making people only feel that visceral thing.
There's so much more to do in conversation.
Did you get those answers that you were looking for by making this podcast?
That like by hearing other people's stories kind of making sense and moving forward?
I tend to not look for answers because I tend to not believe them.
I think there's – you know what I mean?
What do you mean by not believe?
Well, no, you believe it.
But the answer is always more complicated.
Everybody wants an answer.
And if there were an answer, then the podcast would be one word and it would be the answer, and then you'd be done.
But I think what it is and what podcasting is so good at is that because it's conversation mixed in with essay, mixed in with sort of audio, natural audio, like I'm not really looking for answers.
I'm more looking for wisdom, right?
I'm more looking for people who are involved in it to help me put it somewhere in my head where it makes sense.
Your career trajectory is pretty fascinating.
As I mentioned, you worked for the Clinton White House in economic policy right out of college.
I'm just curious your time in government at the White House did it inform at all your approach to storytelling?
Did you learn anything there?
You learned what you didn't want to be and do.
Yeah.
I learned what I didn't want to be and do.
My lesson from the White House is that the people there were sincere.
Yeah.
Despite the politics of it.
My boss used to say like Dan, if you stay late tonight, like you know, 22000 more people in Ohio are going to get the earned income tax credit if we get this passed.
And this is how it's going to change their lives.
And, like, it was real.
It wasn't – political.
It wasn't, I'm going to do this so I can make money.
It was a real passion for policy and understanding how it changes people's lives and doing sort of incremental work to move the ball forward.
And I was really inspired by that.
I mean, you transitioned into storytelling at a really interesting political time and moment.
I mean, you worked as a field producer then for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. from 99 to 2006.
And that's a really important window for the life of that show, in particular because I actually think that was one of the show's most influential eras.
It's like really when it was forming its identity.
I started when Jon Stewart started.
And so I was definitely part of as it evolved with him.
I mean when I started the idea of doing this sort of journalism thing about politics, that was also kind of a joke and involving actual politicians in that.
Like, was pretty out there and it was really exciting.
At the very beginning, like they didn't even have Comedy Central in Washington.
So you would call people up.
Where was it?
Yeah, you would call people up and you'd be like we're from The Daily Show and they would sort of think you were saying The Today Show.
Right, right.
Yeah, and so you wouldn't disabuse them of it, because it was sort of, and so it was wild to do that sort of reporting that, on the one hand, wasn't journalism but, on the other hand, had more truth in it than anything I'd ever done.
Because the subject matter – like truth through irony or truth through humor it just opened up a whole other sort of world of how to sort of describe what you're seeing around you.
Okay, so an interesting detail about you is that you're a quilt maker.
And I am so fascinated by this because, I mean, quilt making is storytelling.
There are personal histories interwoven into the fabric, the choices for the fabric, the colors, like all the things.
How did you get into it?
It feels a little on the nose, doesn't it?
Very.
But also, like, very fascinating.
I want to know more.
You know, I was always kind of interested in that.
My mother used to do stuff like crochet and knit.
And I was always, you know, I was a boy, so I was a little shy about expressing too much interest.
But I've learned how to crochet and I kind of, you know.
I used to sort of watch her doing those things.
But as an adult, I took a quilting class about 10, 12 years ago with a bunch of ladies.
I just kind of liked the idea of the machine and connecting things and then just exploring it.
And then I started rather than using store-bought fabric, I began going to Goodwill and buying clothes by the pound.
So now I cut up those clothes and I make quilts out of that.
But, like very often, I'll get.
Like you know, hospital scrubs are really great to make quilts out of.
Really?
Yeah, because they're just, like, a nice dusty rose color or, like, a nice blues.
And they sew together really well because they're just thin.
And so I get the sort of storytelling connection.
I don't know that I'm trying to tell a story when I'm making something, but I definitely like being around it.
I like being around the sort of stuff that people have left behind.
How much time do you devote to it?
I have a whole studio.
You know, I go back and forth.
Very often it's something I'm doing, like when I'm in the middle of writing, I'll end up doing a lot of quilting.
It's a very good...
It's a very good creative activity to focus on when you can't focus on the other thing you're doing anymore.
And very often the good ideas in writing come when you're only paying half attention, right?
When you're just sort of – when it's in the back and you're subconscious and you're just like watching a movie, and that's when you have all your ideas.
And so it's very good to take the pressure off the writing and then just go start to stitch together a few pieces of fabric and then, all of a sudden, you have a good idea for what you're writing and you go back to that.
So fascinating.
Dan Taberski, thank you so much for this conversation and for your work.
Oh, thanks so much.
Could not be more honored to be here.
Dan Taberski is an award-winning writer, producer, and podcaster.
This summer's poisonous mixed bouquet of mystery and suspense fiction contains stems of the gothic, the hard-boiled and a sprig of the cozy, in honor of Agatha Christie.
Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has a roundup.
The mystery and suspense novels coming out this month are some of the best this crew of mostly well-established writers has written.
So let's get to them.
El Dorado Drive is Megan Abbott's most doom-laden novel yet.
It's set in the year 2008 in Detroit, which happens to be Abbott's hometown.
The three middle-aged Bishop sisters our main characters here can recall their father driving them around town in a sapphire blue caddy when he was general counsel to GM.
But those days are mere rusty memories.
The trio is beset by money troubles until middle sister Pam invites her sibs into an all-female financial club she's joined, called The Wheel.
Here's a brief description of the club's Macbeth-like initiation rites.
There was a ritual to it.
The women forming a circle around the coffee table faces shiny, flyaway hair and lipstick, smudged heels off pedicured toes, dancing in the carpet plush.
A woman named Sue intoned the oath.
We pledge to commit to the secrecy of the wheel and trust in its promise.
All together now, women trust, women give, women protect.
What these women think of as female empowerment, the feds might consider a Ponzi scheme.
The spell of this smart, socially pointed suspense novel lingers long after.
The wheel's stash of cash and one of its members are no more.
The presence of the uncanny is even more potent in Dwyer Murphy's new novel, The House on Buzzard's Bay.
Gothic chill wafts like ocean mist throughout this tale of college friends reuniting at an old house.
One of them has inherited.
The house was built by a band of 19th century spiritualists and as the vacation gets underway, the friends are plagued by an uneasy sense that those spiritualists may not have vacated the premises.
Dwyer's restrained style heightens the ominous atmosphere.
In this scene, a stranger, a woman named Camille, has turned up at the house.
She says she was invited by one of the group, who's since disappeared.
It's nighttime, and the friends invite her to stay.
Here's how Jim, the man who's inherited the place, describes Camille's reaction.
She said how kind we all were, just as she'd known we would be.
She must have repeated that three or four times so that it sounded almost like she was making a joke.
Restraint is not a hallmark of S.A.
Cosby's crime fiction.
His writing is rough, raw, and violent.
King of Ashes.
Cosby's latest novel is set in the Virginia town of Jefferson Run which, like Abbott's Detroit, has seen better days.
Once a manufacturing hub where mason jars were made, the town is now ruled by a gang called the Black Baron Boys.
Restraint is not a hallmark of S.A.
Cosby's crime fiction.
Roman Carruthers, our anti-hero, left years ago for college and then moved to Atlanta to pursue a big career in money management.
Roman knows his rise is thanks in part to his father, known as the King of Ashes because his crematory made him one of the few prominent black businessmen in town.
When the novel opens, Roman is summoned back home by his sister with the news their father lies near death after a suspicious hit and run.
Turns out that Roman's younger brother Dante, has ripped off the Black Baron boys in a drug deal and they don't believe in repayment on the installment plan.
Cosby invests the classic noir plot of the ordinary man pulled into a nightmare with emotional depth.
Roman scrambles to save his family by using his financial know-how to make the gang a fortune, all the while plotting their annihilation.
I warn you, that crematory gets put to use a lot.
But King of Ashes is so ingenious that Neither grit nor gore could make me stop reading it.
Laura Lipman's latest novel resurrects a character from her beloved, Baltimore-based Tess Monaghan series.
Murder Takes a Vacation stars Tess's former assistant, Muriel Blossom.
The widowed, Mrs Blossom, as she's known, has won the lottery and she's treating herself to a river cruise starting in Paris.
But when the handsome man who flirted with her on the plane is found dead, Mrs Blossom's vacation literally becomes a getaway, as she tries to dodge both the police, who see her as a suspect, and the evildoers.
It would be easy to underestimate Death Takes a Vacation.
To assume it's just a Miss Marple-type romp.
That would be a mistake.
Where Christie, through Marple, investigated the invisibility of older women, Lipman perceptively explores how older women often collaborate in their own invisibility, muting their appearance and their desires.
Whatever your desires for summer mystery reading, at least one of these novels should fulfill them.
Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University.
Coming up, Larry Charles.
He's been a writer, director and executive producer on a number of shows, including Seinfeld.
Curb Your Enthusiasm Mad About You and Entourage.
I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.
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This is Fresh Air Weekend.
I'm Tanya Mosley.
Terry has our next interview.
I'll let her introduce it.
My guest, Larry Charles, has been an integral part of TV shows and films that both reflected and made an impact on American popular culture.
He was a writer on Seinfeld, showrunner on Mad About You, a writer and executive producer on HBO's Entourage and a director and executive producer on Curb Your Enthusiasm.
He directed Sacha Baron Cohen's films Borat and Bruno.
He also collaborated with Bob Dylan on the film Masked and Anonymous.
Larry Charles has a new memoir called Comedy Samurai, 40 Years of Blood, Guts and Laughter.
When he says blood and guts, he means it.
He and Sacha Baron Cohen took enormous risks with their films, in which Baron Cohen took his characters Borat and Bruno into the real world and shot scenes with people who thought Borat and Bruno were real people.
To expose anti-Semitism, racism and homophobia.
Baron Cohen's fictional characters pushed his targets to reveal their darker feelings and beliefs, and it sometimes ended in near violence, with Baron Cohen, Larry Charles and the crew fleeing.
Larry Charles also did a documentary series called Larry Charles' Dangerous World of Comedy, where he went to dangerous places run by authoritarian rulers or were controlled by militias to see what comedy was like there.
Larry Charles, welcome to Fresh Air.
Welcome back to Fresh Air.
Thank you.
It's great to be here again.
Thank you so much.
So the book starts with you having a heart attack and thinking this might be the end.
Did facing the prospect of death make you rethink parts of your life and lead you to think you should rewrite parts of the book?
Well, I think it gave me a little more perspective on my own mortality.
I have been obsessed with death since I'm a kid.
But the reality of death and the obsession with death are two very different things.
And so I think I wanted to go back and be a little more honest and take a little bit more responsibility for my behavior.
And I did add that layer to the book after all this happened.
Yeah, because as part of the book where you write, you realized you were the agent of your own misfortune.
Very much so, yes.
And that happened.
And I had some bad agents, believe me.
But I was the agent of my misfortune.
So you realized this after the heart attack or you already knew it?
Well, you know, I have been sort of contemplating all those things.
I've been through therapy.
I mean, I've done a lot of self-reflection.
When you're a writer and you're sitting alone in a room, you have a lot of time to think.
So I've thought about a lot of these things, but I don't think – I think that I've thought about them, but I hadn't really incorporated them or absorbed them or believed them completely until this event occurred.
Yeah.
So you joined on the second season of Seinfeld, and often shows have a so-called Bible that's supposed to lay out the tone and sensibility of the show and the shape of the episodes.
What kind of prep were you given when you joined Seinfeld?
None.
I mean, the only thing I had was Larry had given me a couple of the scripts before the show premiered.
And so I got to read The Chinese Restaurant and The Busboy and a couple of the other early episodes when the show was just beginning, before the show actually even was produced.
And that was it.
I'd never had any other exposure to the show until I went to work on it.
And I don't think that Jerry and Larry were quite sure themselves what the show should be.
There was no Seinfeld.
It's like it's funny.
When we look at it now in retrospect we go, oh well yes, it has these elements to it.
But none of those things actually existed at one time and they had to be constructed from scratch.
So one of your famous episodes is the library, where Jerry has a book that he took out of the library in high school and is accused of having never returned it, although he's sure that he did.
And in the scene I want to play the librarian investigations officer, in the tone of a hard-boiled police detective, warns Jerry about the gravity of this violation and what the consequences might be for the larger society.
And the librarian is played by the late and wonderful actor Philip Baker Hall.
You took this book out in 1971.
Yes, and I returned it in 1971.
Yeah, 71.
That was my first year on the job.
Bad year for libraries.
Bad year for America.
Hippies burning library cards.
Abby Huffman telling everybody to steal books.
I don't judge a man by the length of his hair or the kind of music he listens to.
Rock was never my bag.
But you put on a pair of shoes when you walk into the New York Public Library, fella.
Look, Mr. Bookman...
I returned that book.
I remember it very specifically.
You're a comedian.
You make people laugh.
I try.
You think this is all a big joke, don't you?
No, I don't.
I saw you on TV once.
I remembered your name from my list.
I looked it up.
Sure enough, it checked out.
You think, because you're a celebrity, that somehow the law doesn't apply to you, that you're above the law.
Certainly not.
Well, let me tell you something funny, boy.
You know that little stamp?
The one that says New York Public Library?
Well, that may not mean anything to you, but that means a lot to me.
One whole hell of a lot.
Sure, go ahead and laugh if you want to.
I've seen your type before.
Flashy, making the scene, flaunting convention.
Yeah, I know what you're thinking.
This guy making such a big stink about old library books.
Well, let me give you a hint, you know.
Maybe we can live without libraries, people like you and me, maybe.
Sure, we're too old to change the world.
But what about that kid sitting down opening a book right now in a branch of the local library and finding drawings of pee-pees and wee-wees and the cat in the hat and the five Chinese brothers?
Doesn't he deserve better?
Look, if you think this is about overdue fines and missing books, you better think again.
This is about that kid's right to read a book without getting his mind warped.
That is still so funny and seems so relevant.
It holds up so well.
What afterlife has it had?
Well, it's my favorite thing.
I mean, when I hear it, sitting here listening to it, I had a big grin on my face.
It's like it's joyous in some weird way, you know.
And it also kind of illustrates why Seinfeld was different than most other shows, because the influence of that particular scene really comes from a non-comedic source Dragnet.
And I loved Dragnet and I loved how funny Dragnet was, because the rhythms they created were so unique.
And that's what I tried to recreate in that scene.
And of course, Philip Baker Hall was so serious.
He played it so straight that it was hilarious.
And I could listen to that.
I have to say I don't like to watch my own work, or even listen to my own work, or even think about my past work.
But that particular scene really does bring me a lot of joy.
So what was the genesis of the idea of it being like?
All of this hard-boiled stuff was about a library book.
Well, I mean again one thing about Seinfeld and Larry went through this a lot as well.
It's like the desperation for stories.
And we were always seeking some kind of premise, some kind of funny conceit that you could build an episode around.
And I had read about somebody who had kept a book for for 20 years or something and the library didn't know what to do.
And I thought that was a funny idea.
And then I thought about this character who would be the library cop, who would have to go and sort of enforce the fine or the law.
And then that kind of like dovetailed with a Kramer romantic thing with the librarian.
All those things sort of started to weave together rather organically and an episode sort of emerged from it.
So it was very lucky that those elements sort of came together.
You describe yourself as a punk from Brooklyn.
In what sense did you think of yourself as a punk?
Well, I mean, there was a literal sense and a kind of a sensibility sense.
Again, I was attracted to underground literature.
Jean Genet, you know, Hubert Selby, Last Exit to Brooklyn.
I liked, again, outsider stuff. attracted me.
Why?
I don't know, but that's what I sort of gravitated towards.
In movies, I was a gigantic fan of John Waters.
I would go into the city at that time, and it was a fertile time in the city for that sort of stuff.
And you could see underground movies by Ken Jacobs or Jack Smith or all these interesting underground filmmakers.
And so there was this other thing going on.
There was this other art being made and music.
You could go to CBGB and for a couple of bucks you could see the Talking Heads and the Ramones and Blondie all on the same bill, you know.
And so for very little money, you could be exposed to really interesting and edgy and outsider culture.
And I really gravitated to that.
What made you love comedy?
Well, my father was a failed comedian.
He was?
Yeah.
He came out of World War II and used the GI Bill to go to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
And he tried stand-up comedy for quite a while.
His stage name was Psycho the Exotic Neurotic.
And he... he would have material like in a trunk in his closet.
And I would go in there and read that material on this onion skin paper typed up.
And he was always on.
My father was always on.
He was more concerned with me rather than learning math or science.
He wanted me to learn the dialogue from White Heat or he would be quoting Jerry Lewis, you know.
And so I was just exposed to that.
And even when he dropped out of show business he had a lot of friends who stayed in it, not necessarily as actors or comedians, but they became like lighting directors or the stage manager at the Ed Sullivan Show, a guy named Tony Jordan.
And then he would take me, my dad would take me to the Ed Sullivan rehearsals.
And I would see the rehearsals and I became fascinated.
He was very into the glitz and glam, but I became fascinated by the behind the scenes stuff.
Like this is how you do a TV show.
And I'd be really, really into that and questions about that.
And that kind of planted a bunch of seeds in my head as well.
Well, just the fact that you had some kind of connection to that world must have made that world seem more reachable than it seems to most people.
It still was far away.
I mean, we would be going back to Brooklyn.
I mean, I couldn't imagine how to break through.
It was really Woody Allen reading about Woody Allen at that time in the 60s and how he sold jokes to comedians.
From being from that neighborhood and selling jokes to comedians.
That seemed to be like something I might be able to do.
Is that how you ended up selling jokes in front of a comedy store?
Exactly.
I thought that's my one in.
I can sort of write jokes.
I didn't even have a typewriter.
I mean, they were handwritten.
And I would stand in front of the comedy store like a drug dealer and stop comedians that I recognized and go.
You want to buy a joke?
And comedians were pretty cool.
And it was a golden age of comedy at the comedy store.
You had Richard Pryor trying out material.
Robin Williams was there every night.
And the two big comedians were David Letterman and Jay Leno, ironically enough.
And Jay Leno was a guy that bought material.
And I stopped him, and he said, oh, yeah, this is a good joke.
I'll try it out on stage.
If it works, I'll give you $10.
And it worked, and I got $10.
Do you remember the joke?
It had something to do with Delta Airlines, the airline run by professionals.
What do they have on the other ones?
Amateurs?
You know, something like that.
So what would you do?
Say like, hey, buddy, want a joke?
I mean, how come they would take you seriously and not like just push you away and keep walking?
I had paper.
I had like legal pages with me.
You know, I would literally shove it at them.
I was, you know, at that time, things were much more open.
You know, there wasn't like security issues or fear.
Everybody was hanging out.
It was a very loose atmosphere.
And I
People needed material.
And here I was saying, I have it.
I have material.
And so, you know, not everybody responded, but quite a few really cool guys did respond.
And I wound up being able to write for them.
I want to get back to your heart attack in March of 2024 and your close call with death.
You're Jewish by birth and culture, but you don't practice Judaism and I don't think you believe in God per se.
You directed Bill Maher's documentary Religious and Maher really doesn't believe in God or religion and kind of scoffs at people who do.
Some non-believers become believers and start praying, just in case there's a God when they think they might be facing death.
What about you when you were afraid that you were really facing death?
Well, first of all, I can accept the idea that there may be some intelligence to the universe.
How that manifests itself, I think, is beyond our comprehension.
I didn't turn to God.
I didn't... That wasn't an option for me.
I just had... come to that belief system.
And it seemed too hypocritical for me to suddenly leap on that bandwagon.
So that was not an option for me.
But I think it did expand my compassion.
I think it did expand my understanding and my commitment to alleviating suffering.
These were things that were not a concern of mine for most of my life.
And so now that is something that infuses my daily life.
You write in your memoir that hugging and learning is anathema to comedy.
And one of the mottos that I don't know who came up with it about Seinfeld was no hugging, no learning.
And you go on to say coldness callousness uncaring, uncompassionate disdain skepticism, scoffing at seriousness.
These are the building blocks of comedy.
And there was no room for genuine emotion.
Do you still feel like those negative feelings are the drivers of comedy and there's no room for genuine emotion?
Yeah, I mean, I think the only genuine emotion that really seems to sort of fuel comedy is anger.
That is the emotion that I think does exist in comedy.
And I think a lot of comedians are working through that anger.
Whether it be Mel Brooks, one of the sweetest people in the world, or you know someone like Bill Burr or Louis CK, or whoever it might be, you will feel some sort of anger.
They have aggression. towards the world that they have been, towards the hand they have been dealt.
But yeah, I do still kind of believe that.
It feels like if you are crying or you're feeling love, you're not laughing.
It's funny because Jerry Seinfeld is often offered as the person who doesn't fit, all of that like anger being the driving engine of his comedy.
Right.
Well, that's true.
But I think there probably is more anger there than we see on the surface.
And something we brought out in the show was that Jerry has a very dark side and a very cold side that he kind of has a sadistic glee about and is part of his comedy.
And he just is able to project a kind of sweetness, which is also real momentarily.
But that sort of dichotomy in him is part of the driving force of his comedy.
He could be very impatient.
You know, he could be very intolerant of other people's point of view.
That's a lot of where his comedy comes from.
He's making fun of what other people believe.
And so there is a lot of aggression to that as well, even though he presents it in a very palatable way, you know.
You write that now, post-heart attack, you think about death and impermanence every day.
In addition to thinking more about trying to help people who are suffering and be more generous, where else has that led you thinking about death and impermanence?
I think I've come to some sort of acceptance of the finite quality of this life.
And that was something that was hard for me to really accept.
I really did not like the idea.
I still don't like the idea of all of this being over.
It seems ridiculous to me that you go through this whole thing and all these problems.
You cause pain.
You receive pain.
And then at the end, you die.
You know, when I see people talking about legacies, I kind of laugh in a way, because it's all so temporary and it's all so short.
So I know I can't change that.
So I've tried to come to some level of acceptance about it.
Larry Charles, it's been a pleasure to talk with you.
Thank you so much for coming back to Fresh Air.
Great to talk to you again, Terry.
Anytime.
Larry Charles's new memoir is titled Comedy Samurai.
He spoke with Terry Gross.
Fresh Air Weekend was produced this week by Susan Yakundi.
Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.
Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.
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Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner and Anna Bauman.
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