Will Sasso is a comedian, actor, and co-host of the Dudesy podcast. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:03 - Video games
7:10 - Bobby Lee
9:19 - Stand-up comedy
16:50 - Robin Williams
18:12 - Loneliness and depression
26:33 - John Candy
33:22 - Friendship
39:10 - Ten Minute Podcast
44:09 - Dudesy podcast
52:28 - Acting
1:03:47 - Impressions
1:09:15 - Artificial intelligence
1:40:43 - Anxiety
1:50:36 - Kindness
1:54:33 - Bad days
1:58:26 - Pro wrestling
2:02:02 - Advice for young people
2:16:07 - Meaning of life

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Once this whole thing falls apart and we are climbing the kudzu vines that spiral up the Sears Tower, like they say in Fight Club, Bobby will go back to his gatherer form and be happy as a pig in shit, just walking around in a loincloth with his bird hanging out, tracking jokes to people and climbing up on them for a stool lap dance or whatever he does.

You think some level of crazy is required for comedy?

The following is a conversation with Will Sasso, a comedian, actor, podcaster, and someone I've been a fan of for many years since Mad TV in the late 90s to recently with the 10 Minute Podcast and now the new podcast called Doodzy.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, Here's Will Sasso.

So let's call it the elephant in the room.

You wore a black suit in a recent episode of Doodsy.

Shakespeare, then Mark Twain said, clothes make the man.

Well, me in particular, it makes me a fellow who did not get this dry cleaned in between, because that episode of the show as we sit here now was around a week ago.

Well, the nice thing is you're wearing pants, I think.

I don't think you were wearing pants in the episode.

That's correct, I prefer to wear shorts, but this was a special occasion, so I'm wearing pants.

And I thought it fitting, obviously, to just wear the black tie.

And I would not consider myself to be a man of leisure, but I do enjoy shorts, because my legs get hot.

So that's what kind of man the shorts make me.

So what is this, a statement of, is it ironic?

Or are you honoring the gods of this particular podcast?

I'm honoring the gods of this particular podcast would be a good way to put it.

Yes, no, this is in reverence of and in dedication to you and our newfound friendship here, which we are making on the podcast.

Everything that we're saying here is the first things that we're saying to each other.

So I'm meeting you on common ground, dressed like… Well, I've been actually a one-way friend of yours for many, many years since Mad TV.

So I was a huge fan of yours and the cast was incredible.

It was 1 of the funniest shows ever created.

Your whole journey watching through that was incredible.

From Mad TV to 3 Stooges to the podcast, the 10-minute pod and then the new podcast is incredible.

My favorite role that you played was the mountain in the game of Thrones.

Well the dragons are usually tennis balls on the end of sea stands, but sometimes they hang out.

It's like, you know, it's like a little like the thing you got the camera on here.

I'm trying to impress you with my film lingo.

Yeah, when you walk like this, do it a banana.

And I'm, my name is Bjorn Hapthor Bjornsson, and I am 7 foot 4.

And yeah, so dragons don't scare me, even though they've been extinct for a while.

You're a scientist, right, is that checked out?

Yeah, I actually, I'm really into video games.

There's a Skyrim video game that's part of the Elder Scrolls series, and for the longest time, there's a legend that there's dragons.

And so I always, I grew up playing those video games and dreaming of 1 day meeting a dragon in a virtual world and eventually you did in Skyrim.

So it's, dragons represent, I don't know exactly what they represent, but they represent maybe this kind of mythical creature that is bigger than anything humans can possibly comprehend, maybe.

Because they show up so often in myth, from the religious stories of the snake and so on, the serpent, and I don't know what that is.

With this breathing fire, that's kind of weird.

It's interesting when I think about dragons, because now that you bring it up, these are people that probably wouldn't have access to the fact that there used to be dinosaurs.

If they didn't, they're drawing things that look like, you know, a dinosaur cousin, but cool.

They can breathe fire and has wacky wings and a spike tail.

Where the heck did they come up with that?

Because they're clearly, of course, represented in mythology all the way back to, no, not cave drawings.

Well, the Egyptians probably knew what the, and they could time travel, so they would have gone back to the caves.

Well, the aliens that placed living organisms on Earth could time travel and they could plant legends into the collective intelligence of the human species.

Yeah, and perhaps they were thinking of us to do something smart with it and we didn't.

I don't mean to offend you with your video game.

I'm more of a Burger Time Donkey Kong dude.

Burger Time was an arcade game that later showed up on the Intellivision.

I believe it was made by Texas Instruments.

Horrible first generation, video game console and Burger Time.

You just got to stay away from the eggs and the pickles and stuff.

And you just go, and the bun falls, and then you go down to the cheese and then the meat.

I'm not going to say it's as complicated as Skyrim, but it took me a while to finish it when I was 7.

That was a part of your life, a part of the source of happiness for you at all?

I played video games up until around, I think in 2010, I got the red ring of death on my Xbox 360.

I had, I was playing, I had finished the, the Grand Theft Auto that was out and it finished the Red Dead Redemption.

So I was doing that thing where you just drive around, you know, the streets of New York or just ride around on your horse shooting people, and throwing grenades into groups of people in Grand Theft.

And you're describing the same thing that happened a decade later, because it's now Red Dead Redemption 2, and there's still not a new Grand Theft Auto.

Another person, the 2 people I'm a huge fan of from that time in Mad TV is Bobby Lee.

So what Bobby Lee loves to do is to grind, do the boring task over and over, gather mushroom.

Like in Skyrim, you can fight dragons, you can fight all kinds of things, but you can also gather mushrooms and different ingredients and make potions and all that kind of stuff.

He's the, you know, in the hunter-gatherer world, he's the gatherer.

I've heard him described that way and he likes to describe himself that way.

He came and did a couple of days on this thing we were shooting.

And I was looking forward to catching up with my old pal.

And if you know anything about Bobby Lee, you'd probably be able to predict that he spent that entire time playing farming on his iPad.

Well, Humans are a source of anxiety and trouble, so sometimes it's good to escape human interaction through video games.

It's just all the times you've worked with him, the non-standard, non-sequitur way of his being.

Bobby Lee is 1 of the most raw people, raw performers, who lets it all hang out to the degree that he will even get naked in front of his audience, which is usually a metaphor for someone doing stand-up.

I'm bearing all, I'm showing you everything, and Bobby will just pull his bird out of his pants.

Yeah, I don't think he understands metaphor too much.

He's a metaphor for something else, for somebody else's life.

Someday he'll be in the dictionary representing some kind of concept, maybe the metaphor itself.

Yeah, once this whole thing falls apart and we are climbing the kudzu vines that spiral up the Sears Tower, like they say in Fight Club, Bobby will go back to his gatherer form and be happy as a pig and shit.

Just walking around in a loincloth with his bird hanging out, tracking jokes to people and climbing up on them for a stool lap dance or whatever he does.

You guys did a lot of great podcasts together.

He asked you in a very uncomfortable process of why you don't do stand-up.

I thought the Soviet Union, that is a nice thing to say.

There was an interesting tension in your voice and the way you talked about it, there's just not a source of happiness for you.

You respect the art form, but it was not something that you were connected to, you felt connected to.

I respect the art form a lot, and I grew up with all the albums and stuff.

I had an older brother and sister who, so I, you know, we had the, we had George Carlin, we had, you know, Richard Pryor, we had Robert Klein, we had Gilda Live, the Gilda Radner, concert.

We had, we had all sorts of stuff, but you know, I don't know.

There's a lot of, there's a lot of reasons.

I do feel like a career in show business is, you know, they, it never goes the way you plan, like most things.

And I was fortunate enough to get started outside of my native Vancouver or in my native Vancouver.

I grew up in the burbs outside and there was a lot of industry there.

So I was fortunate enough to get started as an actor when I was like 16.

There, there, yeah, there was, there were some times early on where I came up with some standup stuff and did it, but yeah, I quickly abandoned it.

And then, you know, you go through, you do Mad TV and stuff, and then, and that's where my, and this is gonna sound weird.

Do I sound as anxietal as I did when I was on Bobby's podcast, trying to avoid his questions.

Well, he was giving you this face this whole time that was making the whole just atmosphere feel full of anxiety, so I'm trying not to give you a face.

The whole time I was saying, play cool, play cool.

Play cool, You said it out loud a couple of times.

I think it's lame when someone who's done 1 thing for a while goes and starts doing stand-up out of nowhere because I think it's an art form that's under attack because it's not like anything else.

You need, although now you can of course, you know, make whatever you want, it's the era of self-publishing as far as making a product and putting it out there, which is getting easier, of course.

And I can't wait to talk to you about that with AI and how it's changing art.

But in stand-up, all you need is a microphone.

And perhaps it would be good to have some mental illness.

And then you can just run up there and talk forever.

And I say this to comedians, it's like, you guys have to deal with just an influx of people who aren't sure why they're doing comedy.

I would ask comedians, I mean, not good ones, good ones, you know what they're doing, but everyone else, like, what are you doing?

Having said that, I am allergic to money.

Do you think they have a good answer for that?

Cause I actually like when I'm in Austin, I like going to open mics, just listening.

Both the funny and the unfunny people, because they've been doing it for several years, sometimes over a decade, and they're still at it.

They're still right there, they're going for the punch, and then especially open mics that are really sad in that there is only like 5 other people in the audience and they're usually just other comedians and they're still going all out as if they're in front of a stadium.

But that to me sounds like someone who loves it.

I got questions for someone who goes sideways from here, I'm recognizable doing something, and then I'm doing standup because it's like, and truly look, I've been, I've been fortunate enough to be in the business for a long time.

And at this point, if I came up, I mean, doing live stuff is fun.

I have friends that are like, you know, some guys who are primarily sketch people, or you would look at them as sketch people and they can sell tickets for being sketch people.

And they're like, well, you know, I do a monologue and I do a little standup, then I do a song, then I do another monologue.

Then I play off the audience, do a little standup.

But stand up is, it's almost like playing music in that, you know, people are going up there playing music, but what band have you been listening to?

So it's really, I mean, of course, I'm speaking from 0 experience, but I've heard, it takes years, of course, to find your own voice.

Stand-ups that when they first go up, they're doing some sort of impersonation of so-and-so and so-and-so.

you gotta pop this audience that's paying and you're gonna get run over by the next person who's coming up and it's hard to follow the last person who went up before you.

And I mean, that is a really hard way to, it's a very, it's quite a gauntlet to be in to find your voice comedically.

But don't you have that same kind of thing with sketch?

You still have to find your own voice with like all the impressions you do, they're just terrible.

You know, there are different spins on different people.

They're not like perfect impressions, right?

So that's, I mean, that's a similar kind of challenging journey as standup.

You're just saying they're kind of distinct and you fell into this 1, you fell in love with it, which is like what Mad TV kind of opened you up to.

Yeah, as a kid, I literally wanted to be an actor.

I always wanted to be an actor from a very young age, as far back as I can remember, and I was a class clown and wanted to do comedy stuff and comedic acting and- So comedic acting.

Yeah, early on, my influences were a very predictable list of guys from SCTV, early Saturday Night Live, Monty Python, all of those performers really influenced me.

It was later that I saw people like Kevin Kline, who's an incredible actor.

I vividly remember being like 12, 13, seeing him get an Academy Award for Fish Called Wanda.

And it blew my mind, because I was like, he was hilarious.

I mean, it was 1 of my favorite movies back then and now.

And at that point I, I started thinking more about acting.

And then I was, like I said, really fortunate to fall in with, I mean, I always wanted to do it and I was trying to hustle this and that when I was a kid.

And then I ended up getting represented and then I ended up on a teen show.

I was on, I basically, the easiest way to pitch it is it's like a Canadian, my so-called life with these kids and their lives and stuff.

And I did that for like 5 years and I really love acting.

And I don't, I'm not someone who wants people to know my opinion.

Like I love the illusion of what I get to do in entertainment and podcasting is great for that.

But to stand up there and for, I don't know, just for me it's like, it would have to all be fantasy.

So Nietzsche said that every profound spirit needs a mask.

Like you say, you don't like to talk about, in your comedy, you don't like to talk about stuff that's personal to you.

If you were to psychoanalyze yourself, do you think it's just not something you find funny or are you running from something?

Speaking of another really great comedic actor who's also a serious actor, Robert Williams.

I mean, I, and you know, 1 of the funniest people of all time, but as great, as incredible as he was as a funny man, as a stand-up and a performer, I almost like his serious stuff better.

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Will Sasso: Comedy, MADtv, AI, Friendship, Madness, and Pro Wrestling | Lex Fridman Podcast #323