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Chapter 1: What inspired Eric Andre to pursue comedy instead of law?
Kings Network.
What do you want to talk about?
That you're the trickster god of American comedy. No. Accept the title. I insist that you accept the title.
You want me to accept it?
Okay. It's an unofficial title. I accept. This is Eric Andre. I admire him for a lot of reasons. Wildly creative. Loves his awkward and does comedy a little bit differently. Little Brother is coming out on Netflix. John Cena. He the star. You're the star. Who's the little brother? John Cena.
I don't know. We'll duke it out and let the world decide. Okay, so that is not... Star supremacy.
All right, so it's a tease. It comes out late in June. Thank you for being on with us. This is all meant to be biographical, and I'm going to make an assumption off the top. Were you a rambunctious kid? Were you a difficult kid?
I was hyperactive. I had a hyperactivity disorder. Did you get into a lot of trouble? I got into a ton of trouble. Very much so.
Any of it particularly memorable? We have some stories. I've got 11th grade putting your head through a window.
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Chapter 2: How did Eric's childhood experiences shape his comedic style?
Science teacher was like, what are you doing? You have to go to the nurse. You're like a mess. And I was like, oh, really? And then I went to the nurse. The nurse was like, you got to go to the ER. You have to get stitches. And the school cop knew I was like up to no good. And he's like, did you slip and fall or did you do that on purpose? I was like, I slipped and fell.
And then I had to get stitches. It was bad.
So are you just chasing the laugh? Do you need attention? What is happening here?
Some may say that. Some would say that. Seeking for validation. I don't think it's all pathological. I think some who doesn't like to laugh.
No, that's true.
Maybe Stephen Miller and Vladimir Putin. um yes everybody making them laugh fucking dead-eyed i don't think those guys have laughed once uh pranks though are universal you can make those i think you can make one of them i think you could lay i think you can make putin laugh with it'd be a strange goal um for me to pursue but uh Maybe. I think there's cold blood in his veins.
You like big challenges. The things that you make.
That's quite the challenge.
Take some risks, though.
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Chapter 3: What memorable prank did Eric recount from his school days?
I don't know if I want to meddle. He seems... You brought it up. He seems a bit intense, yeah.
You're the one who created the scenario, not me.
Yeah, that's right. I started digging the hole, but now we're in the middle of the earth.
How often do you get hurt?
What is your injury history in pursuit of— I mean, for a season of The Eric Andre Show, it's usually like one big trip to the hospital per season. But we got better as we—
went along and i kind of know what to do and what not to do uh but at first i didn't know i didn't even know we did stunts with no pads and no stunt coordinator i didn't even know what the term stunt coordinator i never even heard the term until like the third season of the show i was like wait you can hire a guy that that teaches you how to
like crash into things that's like amazing and you can like like crash into pads instead of concrete like that would have been convenient information for the past few years because i was like um in a lot of pain but you were also making it up as you went along and taking pride in making a bit of a you know guerrilla show right yeah yeah yeah well i i
I had to like harness my ADHD and put it to use. So it was kind of like the perfect outlet for my neurochemical cocktail.
You've arrived at different successes. Any part of you missed that kind of time, not knowing what you were doing, stumbling around? Obviously you didn't have the resources or necessarily maybe the support that you wanted, but you were free to do what you want.
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Chapter 4: How does Eric Andre cope with anxiety in his career?
He was like the pole pot of Haiti. So he had PTSD and anxiety from that. And my mom's, a Jew, so this kind of comes with the territory. So my dad, I think getting that batch of neurochemicals from both my parents set me on this journey of obsessive compulsive thought loops and anxiety and hyper activities. Yeah, it was a question. Wait, what was the question?
How do you how do you how do I cope with it?
Or how do you come about harnessing it? But I was asking you where the beginnings with the nature of the roots of it. And so you're saying it's sort of in the home, right?
It's like, yeah, it's nature. It's nature and nurture. It's it's it's like kind of what I inherited from my parents. You know, their brain chemistry and
But then also, you know, I picked a pretty nerve wracking career to want to do to have that much anxiety, but want to do pursue stand up comedy and hitting camera pranks in the streets where I'm facing actual physical violence and danger or legal, you know, criminal trouble also is like a very strange thing. thing to walk towards for somebody who has anxiety.
But you did it, I would say, I guess purposefully. You didn't dream of being funny, right? You didn't dream of a career necessarily in stand-up, right?
No, I went to music school. I went to Berklee College of Music and I studied jazz and I was an upright bass player and that was my major. And I majored in songwriting and music business. And even when I finished school, I interned at a record label in New York. And kind of towards the end of school, that's when I started experimenting with stand-up comedy. And I loved it because I felt like...
a career in jazz, a degree in jazz is like having a degree in Sanskrit, you know, like learning a dead language that you can't really do anything with. Um, so I was looking up at my future, like, uh, you know, and the music I was making is not, um, catchy or popular. It's problematic. It's niche, it's niche, annoying and absurd and problematic. So, so I was like, I felt like comedy had, uh,
more of a merit-based system where if I got good at it versus getting good at playing jazz, I would at least have a career doing something, writing for a show. I felt like there was value. I knew I wanted to be in...
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Eric face while making 'Bad Trip'?
he was working odd jobs and my mom was a public school teacher. They were like totally broke. And, uh, and then he was like, I think I want to go to med school. And my mom laughed in his face. You saw he was bullshitting. And my grandma, my mom's mom was like, I think he's serious. And you should like, we should encourage him if he wants to do that.
So he was, he was very, um, persistent and defiant himself. So I think he was like, well, what can I do? This is what he wants to do. And I, I felt like determined to show him I could, um,
do it so it was like you know defying him but also uh channeling his his spirit and his um persistence i don't know what to make of the fact that when you were telling the story your hands were shaking a little bit at that's just because i'm on five ounce of coffee because i'm zooted and i'll read the dictionary again brother
It seems like though, that's a fairly transformative story. And that reaction from your father seems shocking to me. It wasn't shocking to you.
It is shocking in hindsight, but it wasn't as supportive as my mom who always had like this Montessori approach to everything I did and would like, like let me follow my nose as a kid and was always there and very involved and supportive. He was very like absent and distant and like he was a workaholic in my childhood. So we kind of like,
switch dynamics in adulthood where we became closer in adulthood so i was i was still kind of flustered that he wasn't like clicking his heels um going rah rah six boom bah at any idea i came up with but he was genuinely worried and he knew i i always got straight a's and i had like you know I had a high GPA.
He knew I was really good at academics, and so was he, so he wanted the best for his kid. He escaped Haiti. He wanted safety for his kids. He was in New York in the 70s, and it was very dangerous. My mom got strangled in an elevator when they lived in Queens, and my sister was a baby. Then they moved to Miami in the 80s, and it was very dangerous, and their landlord was on cocaine, and they...
like our house got broken into several times. Then we realized it was like an inside job. Like the landlord would let like, like their family members know when we would leave the house and like they would break in and steal stuff. And so he's like going from like Haiti, you know, in the forties, fifties, sixties, where there's like, it's deteriorating into this.
You have the Tantamaku who were like the Camerouge and like one of his friends got murdered and they, They killed one of his family friends because they mistook him for some other guy that they wanted to kill. So they didn't even kill the right person. So they killed one of his friends.
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Chapter 6: How did Eric's family background influence his comedy?
life and the misery he had to go through i could see why he just wanted to live in a cul-de-sac yeah i mean you just described it all as trauma and then you started talking about the trauma and that's that's there's a lot under that umbrella of what it was that was in your house that would explain some anxieties yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean i experienced the landlord stuff i was like two three years old when that was happening so i don't really remember that stuff but
That's why we left Miami and moved to the suburbs because Miami in the 80s was a little bit sketchy.
Well, nothing feels safe.
Yeah, he has no foundation underneath him. Yeah, nothing feels safe. And now he's married and now he's a second kid. So he is like. He's like, where can I find fucking safety?
Why so theatrical on the breaking of the pen?
I was so frustrated. It was like this surge, this orgasm of resentment looking at this Scantron and having to go through this...
tedious miserable boring standardized test for law school and and law school is so brutal and I was meeting other people in law school telling me how much of a grind it is and I remember my friend Greg his father is a lawyer and he was like never do this he's like he would tell us not to do it he was like
just to sift through the minutia of contracts or whatever kind of lawyer and, you know, whatever depositions affidavit, just to seek through every paragraph, three line, six page, 75 all day, every day. My, um,
assistant's father's a lawyer and he said he goes I remember every night my dad would finally decompress from work we'd finally have dinner and then bing bong someone would show up with like a stack of papers and that was like he would just like kind of like doze off and realize your soul would turn to ash yeah it seems like hell unless you are um
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Chapter 7: What are the themes explored in 'Little Brother' featuring Eric and John Cena?
Your band Blarf was somewhere in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And you weren't good enough at that.
And I was like, I'd rather be broke and happy than rich and sad. I'd rather be, you know, like happiness and love are wealth. There's other types of wealth besides monetary wealth.
Were you broke and happy when you were starting in stand-up comedy?
I was every emotion, but I was much happier than the year I took to study for the LSATs and thinking about going back to school and going to law school, going from jazz school to law school. I was like... And I remember going to NYU, this NYU, like law school with my tutor, my LSAT tutor. I remember going to this like law school mixer. I don't know what it was.
It was like a hang session at NYU and all the people there were miserable and they seemed like kind of like cagey and mean and not sociable.
and i was like this doesn't like all everything in my gut was like this doesn't feel like a crowd i want to be around maybe they were just going through hell because they were in year one and two of law school and i was kind of picking their brain and those are you know laska's pretty brutal um
getting your jd and then it never ends then you got to pass the bar and that's miserable that's misery too i know people that have like they told me they got nosebleeds you know right at when they finished the bar massive migraine and they had to go to the er when they finished the bar exam so it seems like out of the frying pan into the fire i don't know so you really really really have to love and want law to law to be your journey and it was not mine
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Chapter 8: How did Eric react to the cultural impact of his work?
What's like worked yesterday and why is that joke that worked so well yesterday not working today? So, you want a little bit of that anxiety, but you don't want so much that you're disassociating from your body like you're on ketamine or something.
Well, you really just led us into your head there. That sounded like a bit of torment, and you're sort of enjoying dancing among all the landmines, but it's scary.
It's bungee jumping, you know? Yeah. It's a sport. I like that Seinfeld compared it to a sport because it feels, people are like, how high are you when you're writing stuff for Eric Andre show? I'm like, I think that's the only time I'm not high. I'm like, unless you count caffeine, you know, when I'm writing, that's the LSATs for me.
I'm like, I'm obsessing over, you know, I'm like recording my set. I'll send it to a transcription service and I'll read through it the next day and I'll like highlight it. what was good. And I'll try to bring it into the, the next set. And I'll try to put it in the teleprompter. I'll tape notes to the, the floor of the stage.
If they don't have a prompter, if it's a smaller venue and I'll kind of like every night, repeat the process where I'm like recording the set, trying to improvise within a written joke to find new life in it, transcribe, sending it to transcription service, reading the transcripts the next morning, uh, crossing out what doesn't work, reordering it.
That's me sifting through the minutia of paperwork that I enjoy.
The obsessive compulsive sculpting of something that is specifically yours, your voice, created by you and shown to the world confidently because you've had time to sculpt it.
Yeah, I love Chris Rock had a, he goes, He said, it's not a standup normal, it's a standup special. So you better make it special. He taught me a lot and to see his process and how obsessed and pinpointed and how he can like refine a joke over and over and over and over again. It's like, It was really impressive to do a few spots on the road with him years ago before my first special.
But he has a point. You better make it count. It's very hard to hold an audience's attention for 60 minutes live. And it's especially hard to hold an audience's attention for 60 minutes just talking live.
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