Eddie Brill
speaker
90 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Eddie Brill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
When I was very little, we didn't have any money. And parents eventually got divorced. And we were living very poorly. But love, love, love all through the house. Love, laughter, a lot of laughter. And that really carried us. Once a week, we'd get ice cream. And it was the greatest night of our lives. And my stepfather, who was incredibly great, Got very sick and died of cancer.
You know, I was 15 and we were five of us and I raised the kids and I got such a joy in being, you know, the like the leader, the teacher, the. It just gave me such a joy. And I think I've carried that all the way through in my life. Not to everyone's happiness, but I love doing that.
That's why, like, if you book comedians for television or you book comedians for anything, you have to say no to 99% of the people who audition. And you're not loved because of it, because people want you think you're a jerk for not doing that. But you learn to live with what you can do. And my purpose has been just be the best. There's a great book called The Four Agreements.
I don't know if you're familiar with it. my Bible. And one of the things is to just, you know, be impeccable with your word. Don't make assumptions. Don't take things personally and do the best you possibly can. And that's how I live my life. I follow that pattern. I don't know if I answered the question or just, you know.
That's happened to me. You know, I've gone just before I went on stage, you know, I get some really horrible news. It was one of the biggest comedy nights of my life where I ended up performing at Carnegie Hall and Caroline's and at the Letterman Show and one other venue. And I it was a misdiagnosis. But I heard that my one of my brothers had pancreatic cancer.
And knowing that Bill Hicks, the great genius comedian, had just recently died of that very quickly. I had to go on stage and do these shows and I took all the energy that I had and put it together and had some of the best shows of my life and then collapsed when it was over only to find out a couple of days later it was pancreatitis and it was misdiagnosed and he lived and
But, you know, you find out this news, you got to go, you got to do the work. And it's actually beautiful. My sister had a lot of loss and, and I'm gulping because I have, you know, my sister died in 1997 and it just hurt so bad that she did. And it was, it was very interesting because when she had, you know, when she had passed away and, It's it, you know, took a lot out of me.
So I learned after a while to celebrate the life as instead of mourning the loss. I, you know, it's it's funny because in this conversation about this, I was actually going somewhere else, but my brain took me over here. Yeah, it's an interesting life because you never know what's around the corner. You can't really plan. I mean, you can, but it's not always going to work out.
So to be able to ad-lib, to be able to play in the moment, and to never take things so seriously... You know, like some jokes that I write are not politically correct, not mean, not mean spirited. It's just funny. And I can't spend my life trying to please everybody. Like people say to me, hey, you know, I saw Chappelle's special and I didn't like it.
And I say to them, he's not here to please you. If you don't like Chappelle, who is one of the most talented comedians on the planet, if you don't like him, change the channel or go watch somebody else or complain about something else. Life's too short. Right. Boy, did I go all over the place on that one. I'll watch this later and go, what did I mean? Why did I bring my sister up to you?
You know, it's the, weirdly enough, it's as simple as it's who you know. When I was in, I lived in LA and New York for a while, and one of the guys I went to college with contacted me out there. I was broke. And he said, I'm working at this show called Saved by the Bell, and they need a warm-up comedian. And you'll make a thousand bucks or something. And I had like 35 cents in my pocket.
And I said, yes, I'm a warm-up comedian. I never had done it before. And I had done it, and it was babysitting. It was just babysitting. The only the great thing about it was the money, of course, but so I can afford to live. But across the hall, literally, you know, a couple of feet across all was The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. That was great.
But anyway, I did the warm up and it was a very hard job to do, but I did it and it was OK. And then I moved to New York and I got an offer to work at the Dana Carvey show to warm up the audience. Now, the Dana Carvey show was a really smart and funny show. And the it was too smart for American television. It was taken off after only a couple episodes.
You know, Steve Carell and Robert Smigel and Louis C.K. And, you know, it was just all the best of the best. And the show only lasted a few episodes. So now Louis C.K. went over to the Letterman show to do some writing. Everyone dispersed into different shows. And Letterman approached the writers and said, do you know a comedian who we need a warm up comic?
So Louis said, yeah, I worked with Eddie Brill at the Dana Carvey show. And and so I met Letterman at a six week trial period and it lasted 17 years. You know, you have to be able to do the job when you get there and you have to work hard. Like I would average between five and six hundred stand up shows a year just running around working sets.
And because you got to love it, you got to marry it, you got to love it and you got to hold it and you got to squeeze it and you got to nurture it. And that's what I did. And I still love it. I love it more. I'm now doing it 40 plus years and I just I can't get enough of that funky stuff.
Right.
I had to get that off my chest. I'm sorry. No, it's okay. And it's understandable. The comics, we talk about it all the time. You know, the whole idea of writing comedy and performing it and trying it out You know, there was very few people who are amazing at it. You know, like Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Lily Tomlin, Jonathan Winters from that era. And then before them, Jack Benny.
And then before that, Charlie Chaplin. And it's Mark Twain before that. And comedy consistently goes through time. What's happening now, the pandemic hit and you're at home and you can't really do stand up in front of a crowd, which is the way it's supposed to be done. So what someone does is they they use their brains to create this Internet comedy.
And it's different from standup comedy because you're just using the internet. So it's nothing for me to be jealous of, but what a smart person would do who has popularity, who has 2 million followers or whatever, they take five of their friends who are good standups and go on the road. And the MC who's popular and brings in the crowd goes up on stage and just chats.
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