A Comedian Who Knows No Routine

In spite of having worked in other areas, are you resigned to "comedian" always being listed first in biographical references?

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I guess so, yeah. I call myself a comedian. But I think "comedian" means more today than just doing stand-up. Jerry Seinfeld acted on a television show, but he's still a comedian. I think of my own interests as being developed along the way. Life is long. You could make movies for 10 years and still have 10 years left over for writing. I think it's all intertwined in a kind of nice way because I was writing material for my stand-up act, then I started writing movies or co-writing movies, then I started writing movies alone and that led to theater and that led to prose. They seem like they're all different but linked.

You seem like someone who was not so much "born to comedy" as someone who picked comedy as a profession and worked at it until you were a success.

I think I was born to be in show business, and becoming a comedian was the easiest way in. . . . Actually, I knew I wanted to stay up in front of people and do stuff, probably around the age of 8. I was debating whether to be a magician or an electrician. For some reason, electricity fascinated me.

Chapter 4 of your book, "The Bird Cage Theatre," about acting on a ramshackle stage at Knott's Berry Farm, was excerpted in the New Yorker, and the excerpt ends with you looking back nostalgically at the moment just before, for you, comedy became "serious."

I actually had a different ending for that piece. I talk about why the Bird Cage was so potent nostalgically for me -- because it was before comedy turned serious, or something like that. When I first wrote it, I wrote: "It was the last time I was happy." But that sounded like I haven't been happy since then, which is not true. What I meant was there was no pressure then, you know. You're young, you're not thinking of the future at all. Your first time in love, your first time onstage, your first learning to do things -- that is a very exciting time.

How did you get from Knott's Berry Farm -- and making funny animal balloons at Disneyland -- to the writing staff of "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" on CBS?

I was dating a girl who was a dancer on the show. I met her at college. She told me they were looking for young writers, so I gathered up some of my material -- some stories and crazy things I'd written -- and she sent it over, got it to them, and I went in and actually auditioned with my comedy act, and they hired me as a writer.

I really wanted to be on the show and I couldn't quite make that happen. I liked the job. It was tremendous fun. We were laughing a lot. It was also a high-stress job. You're 22 years old and you're writing for network television and you've never done anything in your life. Comedy can be stressful. When it misses, it misses. I wish you had the book in front of you, because this is all discussed.

Were you affected by all the political turmoil on the "Smothers Brothers" show -- the CBS censorship over the Vietnam protests and other controversies?

Absolutely. We all were. First, we lost our job. We were "young campus lefties." My partner Bob Einstein and I [he played Super Dave Osborne for years and now plays Marty Funkhouser on Larry David's "Curb Your Enthusiasm"] were writing a lot of that, with that bent, although I think Mason Williams was the most ardent political person on the show -- and Tommy [Smothers], of course. Dickie didn't care, but he went along with it, he was fine. He just wasn't as motivated as Tommy was.

Did you have any ambitions, even before "Seinfeld," to do a sitcom?