Story – Robert McKee's Creative Storytelling Magazine Issue 005 – Drew Carey | Page 31

MCKEE
INTERVIEWS
MARK WHITNEY
ble reading, but he’s such a good
writer that nobody cared. That
was an epiphany for me because
I saw what he did, and I stopped
wanting to be a stand-up comedian. I wanted to be Rick Cleveland
standing up without a binder.
The show that you saw—the movie
of my show that you saw—that’s the
result of five years’ work of touring.
RM: I didn’t look at the cassette,
but how long is that show?
MW: The show was 90 minutes.
RM: Ninety minutes? That’s
three times what he did. That’s
a feature length.
MW: It’s a feature length and my
goal over the five years was to
have, not just ninety minutes, but
to write so much that I was actually hopefully throwing out ninety minutes or three hours’ worth
of really good stuff. Just being left
with ninety minutes of premium
wine, you know where the whole
thing is just—
RM: Do you give them an intermission?
MW: No.

minutes. They can do it obviously. They do it all the time.
MW: Yup. My friend Mike Daisy—I’ve seen him do three hours.
He does a show on Steve Jobs for
three hours and it feels like five
minutes, and he’s sitting down
working from a set list.
RM: Once you decided you’re
going to do the one man show
format, how did you find the
material? As I said, it’s based
upon your own life experience
to begin with, but it’s much
bigger than that.
MW: It is. The chief theater critic of the Washington Post, Peter
Marks, who was one of the first
major critics to review my show
when it was in the 4-5 star time
of its evolution, he said that the
trick of the one person show is to
deceive the audience into thinking you’re telling them something
that’s going to help them, when
in fact you really just want to get
up there and run your mouth. My
wife says I’m narcissistic. I’m like,
“Why? Because I stand on stage
for ninety minutes and say ‘look
at me’?” [laughter]
RM: I stand on stage for 32
hours.

RM: Great.
MW: You just rip.

MW: Exactly, well there you go.
[laughter]

RM: You just ripped for ninety

RM: And I’m not a narcissist.

Story Magazine // Issue 005

MW: Of course not. Just ask him.
He’ll tell ya’. [laughter] When I
would work out a lot at the San
Francisco Comedy College, my
friend Curtis Matthews would do
these round robin classes where
people come up with five minutes of material. We’d perform for
each other and everyone would
comment. Early on, Curtis would
always comment about what a
fearless performer I was—not funny, but fearless.
I think that’s the most important
thing—being willing to commit. A
lot of people are scared to look
back at their mistakes. We don’t
want to do that. To me, a mistake
is just an opportunity. It’s all part
of the process.
RM: This is the wonderful thing,
I think, about stand-up comedy.
You say when you first started
you sucked. Right? When everybody first starts, they suck.
Right? The difference is a standup comic knows he sucks because they don’t laugh.
MW: Exactly.
RM: If they laugh, it works. If they
don’t laugh, it doesn’t work. So
you immediately understand
“I suck.” How many people sit
in a study somewhere writing
page after page after page for
years, not realizing that they
suck because there is no audience; there is no response.