Where does Tina Fey get her humor? Where does she get it from? Is it from her wholesome, conservative upbringing in the Midwest? Or is it from being a good kid in a good school? And why does she hate America so much? And how did she end up writing for Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock? And what does she think about the new season of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt that's coming to Netflix next season? All that and more on this week's episode of Thick & Thin with Matt and Matt, where we discuss it all. Also, Matt talks about how insane the gentrification of East New York is, and how bad the projects are, and why you can't leave the projects without getting ripped off the welfare checks at the PJs because everyone's not allowed to leave the checks because you can t get into the lobby without leaving somewhere to leave somewhere to smoke pot? You can't crawl to the lobby to smoke somewhere that's not dense with pot. You have to crawl to get somewhere that s not dense so you can get there to get there and then you have to get off the checks? And then you can crawl to a place where you can do something that s NOT allowed to drop them off the mailboxes? It's like there's not enough money to drop it at the drop-off boxes at the pick-up truck? You don't have to go to the drop off the check to pick up the checks at The PJs to get a bag to pick it up at The P? So you can just drop them at the lobby? ? it's like, like, there's going to pick them up on the lobby, right? I don't know what you're not to drop the checks, you can go to The P.S. to get them at The White House? That's not even allowed to smoke in the lobby so there's no pot to leave it at The Bodega? How bad is it's not supposed to be? What do you can you do with it? that's like you can not leave the money you're allowed to go off the bills at The Union Square? Is it like that? Can you have a pot pick up in the mailman? We don't even smoke on the mail boxes at The Cuff and leave it on the sidewalk? Do you have any idea how bad?
Transcript
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00:00:00.000Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday.
00:00:48.000Comes from a solid family background from the Midwest, wholesome Republican parents with good values who gave her a beautiful life and she had a cute childhood.
00:01:22.000And I think she's, and by the way, Tina Fey's one of the greatest writers in the history of comedy, no one can deny that.
00:01:27.000As someone who's written a few pilots for TV and failed miserably, I watch that show with my daughter sometimes, and the way the A-plot and the B-plot combine at the end, she is, she's Amadeus Mozart.
00:01:40.000She's remarkably gifted as a writer, and same with 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live.
00:01:53.000But here's the thing I'm coming up with.
00:01:56.000Where does she get all that greatness from?
00:01:57.000That wholesome humor and her incredible understanding of high school and Mean Girls and all that stuff and being an outcast and the way that the in crowd isn't all they're cracked up to be.
00:02:09.000She got that from having a conservative upbringing.
00:02:24.000Like, she becomes this anti-American, anti-Trump person, but she's using our background, our family values, and our stable environments, and our strong schools to crap on America.
00:02:38.000It's like you train someone in the military and then they become a mass murderer and you go, no, no, that's not what I set you up for.
00:02:48.000Because she's saying America sucks and the whole reason she's good at her job is because of her great education and her wholesome upbringing.
00:02:56.000It's sort of like baby boomers in general.
00:02:59.000You know, they didn't go to PC school.
00:03:18.000You don't have to do it, but at least you'd have that stable background.
00:03:22.000Today, art school is you put a tampon in a teacup and you get an A+.
00:03:28.000And so, they get all this awesome education, and this strong background, and then they use it to crap on us.
00:03:35.000Like, you ever see Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces?
00:03:38.000He's this reluctant boomer who hates his rich parents and stuff, and he's also a master pianist.
00:03:44.000And you think, how'd you get so good at pianisting?
00:03:47.000Well, you got that way with an uptight right-wing Republican dad who made you take piano lessons, gave you a good education, taught you mathematics in school.
00:03:57.000Isn't that... what a bunch of ingrates, huh?
00:04:02.000They get all the good stuff and then they use it to crap on us.
00:04:05.000And we're just sitting here saying, uh, New York public schools have fistfights every day.
00:04:11.000I don't think the bourgeoisie has any idea.
00:04:14.000I don't want to make this podcast political.
00:04:16.000I want to talk about this dude, Matt, but I just had to get that off my chest.
00:04:19.000I don't think the bourgeoisie knows how insane
00:04:24.000East New York is, how bad the ghetto is, how bad the projects are, like you talk to a mailman who goes to deliver welfare checks at the PJs, the projects, you can't get into the lobby, you can't see it's so dense with pot smoke.
00:05:09.000I was talking to a prosecutor here in New York, and boy those guys are a wealth of juicy goss.
00:05:15.000One guy showed me this legal document where these Hasidic Jews were making a motion to remove this case from the courts and settle it in whatever the Jewish version of Sharia is, like Haratz Court.
00:07:13.000But speaking of people, so there's two Americas in many ways, but speaking of the bourgeoisie, the middle classes, taking advantage of a right-wing stable background, I was remembering this dude, Matt, I wanted to get more into stories on this podcast and less into politics, because you got the show, Get Off My Lawn, on CRTV.com, that you can sign up for to watch, and also my hit show, CRTV Tonight, which is every second Friday, and it's a lot of fun.
00:07:40.000It's like Red Eye, we sit around and talk.
00:09:31.000There's so many things about this dude, and that's kind of what I liked about New York back when I was in the scene was It was the island of misfit toys.
00:09:40.000It was an amalgam of the biggest freaks and again This is why I always forget like when I go to my kids soccer game baseball games I forget who the parents are because they all look the same and they all dress the same no offense suburban parents, but in New York City
00:09:55.000Everyone is as different as the different members of the Sex Pistols.
00:09:59.000So, it's very easy to tell people apart.
00:10:02.000And Matt was one of those freakazoids, who seemed like a cool, kind of a mod dude.
00:10:08.000I didn't know what he did for a living.
00:10:09.000That was another thing about New York.
00:10:10.000I had no idea where anyone made their money.
00:10:12.000I obviously made my money with Vice, that was clear.
00:10:14.000And I think a lot of Jewish girls had their dads pay their rent.
00:10:43.000And New York's expensive, like guys that I, Trevor Simser or Brian Duran of Leg Up Management, he's called, he calls his management company Leg Up Management because his nickname is Baby Leg because his dick is as big as a baby's leg.
00:11:46.000That's why Glaswegians are so hideous.
00:11:48.000My mom was the only hot one and she's gone.
00:11:51.000I don't mean she's dead, I mean she left the country.
00:11:55.000But I remember reading a review of Andrew W.K.
00:11:58.000and it was, uh, his runway model looks, his mile-high cheekbones, and his piercing blue eyes, and you're like, what a thing to think of when you see Andrew W.K.
00:14:12.000And I think it's because he put his mom to sleep forever.
00:14:16.000But, um, yeah, so I couldn't get over that.
00:14:19.000And I think I even called him Patricide Matt after that.
00:14:23.000And then, I think my girlfriend, yeah, she's my wife now, but my girlfriend was at his house once, and he had a bunch of roommates, and she saw a letter, and she's a snoopy little bitch, and she opened it and read it, and it said, Matthew, hello, oh, we understand that you want to go to New York to find yourself, you're in some sort of strange artistic phase,
00:14:49.000And we don't mind the money and paying the rent and supporting you while you're there, but we do miss you and we do long for you to come back home and get serious about your life, Matthew.
00:15:00.000There comes a time in a man's life when he has to buckle down and start to pursue a career.
00:15:10.000Your father, my father, your grandfather,
00:15:53.000I don't even get guys who have affairs because you must have like seen in the movie Upgrade with your mistress and then you forget and you say to your wife, remember that scene in Upgrade when the guy fights the guy?
00:16:06.000And she goes, I've never seen Upgrade.
00:16:33.000Yeah, he made himself into dead dad guy, and his doctor was paying the bills, but that's not even the crazy story about Matt.
00:16:39.000We were, uh... I was shit-faced one night, uh, for a change, and it was that sort of weekend at Bernie's drunk where you... You're sort of, your brain is okay.
00:18:31.000You go to the Five Points now or Bill the Butcher's from, that's all Chinese.
00:18:36.000Chinatown, like Little Italy is shrunk.
00:18:39.000Little Italy is just a couple streets now in New York and no one can afford to live there except the guys who have been there for three generations and they pay 800 bucks a month.
00:18:47.000But there, that's become like a Disneyland kind of Italian area.
00:19:34.000But he had a fake badge on him that he flops down in his wallet, and then he goes, show me your ID.
00:19:40.000So I just show them my- I pull down my wallet and do the same thing, and I have a driver's license, that's it.
00:19:45.000And the guy goes, shit, he's freaking out.
00:19:48.000And so, we start going down the stairs.
00:19:52.000Now, I don't know if you watch a lot of Kung Fu, but there is a series that Jet Li did at the beginning of his career when he was still known as Li Lianjie.
00:20:00.000And he plays a character named Wong Fei-Hung.
00:20:07.000He's like a real person that existed, like Jesse James.
00:20:09.000He was a doctor who learned martial arts to help protect from the government and tyranny.
00:20:15.000And he ended up training all these people in Kung Fu and saving their lives.
00:20:19.000Folk hero, the movies are awesome, but they're from a hundred years ago.
00:20:23.000So, you know, when they have a restaurant scene, everything's made of bamboo and there's, you know, sort of cheap and beautiful and, and peasant-y rural architecture.
00:21:51.000That's actually, that's pretty normal because I remember having a restaurant and the health inspectors would come and they were totally corrupt.
00:21:55.000They were all from Guyana, by the way.
00:21:59.000I had a restaurant, a southern fried restaurant with a black guy named Curtis Brown and uh...
00:22:06.000We kept getting dinged with these stupid fucking health inspectors, me, and they were all from Guyana, and we would, I admittedly, get kind of abusive with them because they would, you know, you get a few fines and you lose your A, it becomes a B, that's tens of thousands of dollars down the drain.
00:22:23.000You need to maintain that A. And we'd get fined for dinged cans, like a can of beans has a dent in it,
00:22:31.000Tins are aluminum, fuckhead from Guyana, and they also are plastic lined.
00:23:05.000So it's just a racket, New York's corrupt, and obviously these guys, who were totally illegal, were dealing with corrupt health officials, who coincidentally were not.
00:23:13.000They were two drunk guys pretending to be health officials.
00:24:09.000And these guys are just sitting there in bunks, all illegal aliens, I 100% guarantee that, and just working in the tofu factory and then sleeping.
00:24:18.000Working, probably eating tofu as they work.
00:24:21.000I worked with a guy at a bagel shop in Montreal once when I was, like, 18.
00:24:26.000And, uh, guess how many hours this Chinaman worked?
00:24:28.000Now, he was there legally, so... No, I. Legally.
00:24:32.000So, this is a different scenario, but it also just shows you that Chinese people can really work their asses off.
00:25:43.000And in China, the attitude is, let's work ourselves nearly to death, and then take two months off for Chinese New Year.
00:25:50.000And we'll go, we'll live like dogs, packed like sardines, and make suits.
00:25:55.000Like, I went to a tailor's, David Cross and I actually went in Shanghai,
00:25:59.000And there was tailors, like, stacked on top of each other.
00:26:02.000It was only an eight-foot ceiling, but they had built a sort of shelf for another tailor to go up there, and they were just... sewing suits all day.
00:26:12.000And those people were not slaves, and they're obviously not in China illegally, but they would just... I think it's just their culture.
00:26:18.000You work your ass off, and then you don't work, and you go up to the country, and you have a big house there, and all your family's there, and you get to relax.
00:26:34.000So it's possible that these guys culturally are predisposed to this kind of abuse.
00:26:42.000Oh my god, that's a horrible thing to say, but you know, I don't see Scotsman being crammed into bunks like that and making tofu in a humid dungeon for several years at a time, just for the honor of maybe having your friend or your relative come over later on.
00:27:02.000But I was just amazed that there was this, and I think Matt and I, we were bluffing pretty well up to the point of the body count, but when we saw these bunks, and there was probably like 50 people crammed into this tiny room that's the size of my studio I'm in right now, 50 people in this little studio, just ba-da-ba-da-ba-da, ba-da-ba-da-ba-da, ba-da-ba-da-ba-da, ba-da-ba-da-ba-da, ba-da-ba-da-ba-da, just stacked.
00:28:42.000It's funny, too, because you kind of see the white guys doing better than other people, like getting organized, and they have pit bulls that they raise there, and they guard their garbage in their cardboard mansion.
00:28:55.000There's the white part of town, there's the black part of town.
00:28:59.000But it's an incredible film, and New York is an incredible city, because there's just, like, people say, oh, it's a melting pot, and there's that stupid Beastie Boys song where they're like,
00:29:07.000Black Puerto Rican, we all get together on the subway.
00:29:11.000Rich guys, white guys, yeah, we're all chillin' on the subway, yeah.
00:29:14.000We're on the 9 and the B and the J and the Z and we're all buddies and we're all friends and I have a Puerto Rican friend.
00:30:06.000And then, there's several underground New Yorks, and I'm not speaking figuratively.
00:30:11.000There is a literal underground Chinese New York, where there's tofu factories and illegal aliens stacked up in bamboo bunk beds like it's a Wong Fei Hung movie.
00:30:23.000And there's underground villages of homeless people, several different types, including the ones who live in the subways.
00:30:31.000I kind of like that about New York, is that it's so unbelievably weird, and every time you peel a layer of the onion back, you go, what the fuck?
00:30:40.000And it is so corrupt, it's still build-a-butcher Tammany Hall.
00:30:45.000You wouldn't believe the kind of laziness and bullshit.
00:30:48.000Even like that thing I told you about the Chinese guy who worked 24 hours a day, union electricians do that too.
00:30:55.000They'll work 48 hours in a weekend, because it goes time, then time and a half, then double time and a half.
00:31:02.000And they save up their breaks, and they sleep on lawn chairs on Friday night and Saturday night, and just go.
00:31:26.000And I noticed, I know some union dudes and some cops and, you know, once you get into the established, not in crowd, but like traditional crowd,
00:31:37.000You know, cops will give you a mini badge, you get a concealed carry permit easier.
00:31:42.000Not in Manhattan, those days are gone.
00:31:44.000That whole thing, that was all pay to play and that got blown up.
00:32:26.000Just a short, fat, bald guy with a beard.
00:32:28.000He looks like the short, fat guy from American Pickers.
00:32:32.000Exactly like that guy like there's nothing you know how with a lot of trans you can sort of tell when you've been taking those pills for 30 years Like I got a buddy Todd Seavey.
00:32:41.000I think is his name, and he he's he's been taking pills He's bald and he has a vagina and his boyfriend.
00:32:46.000Just fucks him in his vagina and Eats him out, and he looks like the guy who repairs your transmission.
00:32:54.000He's a hoser like in a lumberjack jacket and bald
00:34:12.000I actually don't know how much, how many years in prison you got, but... You got in big trouble, and that was the end of the Manhattan Gravy Chain, but there's still the burbs!
00:34:19.000There's still Long Island, there's still Westchester, there's still plenty of places to have a gun.
00:40:32.000Anyway, so these guys at Metro North, you know, your brother will set you up, your dad sets you up, it's a thing.
00:40:38.000Or another way you can get one of these jobs is just to clean shit.
00:40:42.000If you go there and you work on the trains for minimum wage and clean up all the barf and the shit for, say, three years,
00:40:49.000It's like being a prospect in a biker gang.
00:40:52.000And it is a criminal enterprise, basically.
00:40:55.000So, they go in, in the morning, and I'm telling you this as an anecdotal example of how corrupt New York City is.
00:41:04.000They go in and then they have these secret rooms in Grand Central.
00:41:09.000There's a whole secret world in that building and you can see them when you're at the station.
00:41:14.000Look up next time you're at Grand Central and you'll see these strange glass floors that you'll see blue-collar dudes walking along like it's something out of Hunger Games.
00:41:26.000And they're going to their secret room.
00:41:43.000where you sit on these 1950s couches because they haven't updated anything and it's all like Art Deco kind of, no Art Deco's 20th, what do you call it, mid-century modern uh... you know Frank Lloyd Wright couches and an old TV and you watch movies, they got a bunch of DVDs, a bunch of VHS tapes, you can go watch Home Alone you sit there with your buddies, shoot the shit uh... make a sandwich, got a little, just like the fire department and
00:42:14.000And in these little tiny rooms, it's not like the Chinese were stacked up, you got a little cot and, um, you got a little cot, a little side table, sit there, set your alarm for when you have to finish.
00:47:08.000A friend of mine is going through it right now actually.
00:47:10.000It's a pretty horrific story and I'll just take a tangent with it.
00:47:16.000His wife is a fucking mental patient and she threatens to kill herself.
00:47:24.000Um, so he won't let her leave, because as much as he hates her guts, it's his ex-wife, it's the mother of his children, and he wants them to have a mom.
00:47:34.000A crazy mom is better than a dead mom.
00:47:36.000So he won't let her leave, because she's harmed herself.
00:47:38.000Now, meanwhile, he's calling 911, and almost crying on the phone, saying, my wife is suicidal, I don't know what to do, and she's here in the house, I don't want her to leave, I'm not gonna let her leave.
00:51:22.000I think he emailed me once or twice, but... Fuck, what a fucking weirdo, man.
00:51:28.000The second he showed me that fake swastika handkerchief, I should have known this guy is a fucking freak, but... I did have some good times.
00:51:35.000I got to see an underground Chinese slave tofu factory.
00:53:23.000Fatty McGee's have a little bit more trouble carrying their concealed carry because they don't have that nice little surfer thing that you have in your pelvis.
00:53:32.000You know, sexy guys like to wear their surf shorts low and they have those little dips that make the ladies moist.
00:54:05.000With, like, Anthony does, where he's got his gun on his ribcage, just sitting there underneath a Hawaiian shirt, and just knowing that if any shit goes down, I can shoot the bad guy in the head.
00:54:17.000And I've noticed, by the way, liberals often criticize conservatives and gun lovers for that.
00:54:21.000They go, these guys have fantasies about a home invasion, or shooting someone in the face, shooting some criminal.
00:55:18.000The point of this show was to just choose a random weirdo I knew 17 years ago and talk about how going out and meeting people and seeing all the weird shit in New York makes me so happy I'm alive.
00:56:22.000Should be called Weird Places in America.
00:56:24.000But what this guy did was, and it's sort of the theme of this...
00:56:28.000This podcast, you really gotta get this book.
00:56:31.000He's a good writer, Martin Fletcher, and he really, he does what I call immersionism, like when Barbara Ehrenreich became poor for that book Nickel and Dimed.
00:56:40.000He just travels around America and finds these weird little scenes, like a town where they speak German all the time, or a town that's just basically Brazilian.
00:56:48.000They play lacrosse, they speak Brazilian, all the signs are in Brazilian.
00:56:51.000He finds some little island in the Northeast that's booze-free.
00:56:56.000All the fishermen, they go there and they drink Coca-Cola in these bars, and they all have a weird fucking English accent, because it's so sort of frozen in time.
00:57:05.000He goes all across America finding these weird scenes that you can't believe are in America.