Story – Robert McKee's Creative Storytelling Magazine Issue 005 – Drew Carey | Page 61

MCKEE
INTERVIEWS
DREW CAREY
RM: One of the great principles
of comedy I would love to talk
about is, if I ever write a book on
comedy, it’s going to be called
Comedy: The Angry Art.

DC: I had a United flight on
Wednesday night—a redeye. You’ve
taken redeye flights yourself, right?

on my face—the trunk lid on my
face while I was packing the car to
go to the airport.

RM: Yes, I have.

DC: Yeah.

DC: It leaves LA at 11:00 and gets
into DC at 6:00 in the morning or
something like that. You figure everybody’s going to snooze on the
plane. So they got the lights up,
they got the TVs on, they do full
service–full food service. I couldn’t
sleep a wink. If I get up and complain—I’m on this first-class and
United wouldn’t let me sleep—I’d
sound like a putz.

RM: So one of the things we can
be angry about and hate are
kids?

RM: The root of comedy is anger. To get started, I’m wondering, what pisses you off?
DC: You know, I’m having a problem with that lately, because I’m
so satisfied with my life. I was writing my theory. If you notice, once
comedians get to be rich and get
their own shows, people say, “Oh,
they lost their edge,” or, “They’re
not as funny as they used to be.”
That’s because they quit waiting in
line at the grocery store, they get
chauffeured places, and they’re
not sweating the rent.
All of a sudden, everything is
okay. All of the best jokes, all the
best routines, are always the little guy against something big. It’s
the small against the big. It’s the
control against the uncontrollable, and it doesn’t have to be an
institution. It could be an institution, it could be traffic, weather, God—something that controls
you that you can’t do anything
about that you just want to yell
at. So I’m pretty satisfied with my
life lately.

To combat that, as often as I can, I
buy my own groceries, pump my
own gas, and do all that stuff as
much as I can just so I don’t lose
touch, because otherwise, I will.
My kid bums me out. My fiancée
has a four-year-old. I love him, for
the record, because I know he’s going to see this one day. I love him
like crazy, he’s