OTHER TECH

In a recent interview about The Aristocrats, you said, "It's the singer and not the song." I see the Aristocrats joke as having a Grateful Dead/Phish kind of vibe where people start within the same framework, but then go off in their own directions. It's very much improvisational, though it's more bebop jazz than Phish. We shot 140 hours of footage for this thing, and the movie, CD, and DVD experiences are all different. When you've got to boil down 103 of the funniest people in the world into a 90-minute film, it's nice to get 3 or 4 minutes more from each of them on the DVD or hear a different, longer cut on the CD.

Will the DVD include a director's cut? Not at all. It's the hour-and-a-half movie followed by additional material. Most DVDs have deleted scenes - which are really scenes that weren't good enough to get in the movie in the first place - or alternate endings. On the DVD, you'll see more "individual" stuff, like George Carlin telling several more jokes.

Will Richard Jeni actually tell the Aristocrats joke "right" this time? [laughter] You'll get to see Richard Jeni really explore the different ways he wanted to do the "f--k-up" joke.

You're doing a show each weekday on Free FM. Are you facing new challenges because free radio has restrictions you don't have to deal with in other mediums? This show is not going to be about obscenity or the grade-school stuff the FCC worries about. I'm politically and philosophically opposed to any FCC regulation, but that doesn't mean every single sentence I say has to have "c--t" in it. The subjects I deal with are topical. I'll do shows with Gilbert [Gottfried], Sarah [Silverman], and Kinky Friedman.

Is Kinky going to tell listeners some of the jokes George Bush tells him? He certainly will. He tells them all the time. They're not good, but he tells them.

What's your take on satellite radio? I'd like to see all entertainment and art go outside the realm of the FCC, so I'm all for it. People are really willing to pay for content instead of commercials. And even though I'm on FM, I think that - not necessarily six months from now, but maybe years from now - the airwaves will have moved more and more that way. But I say this as someone who is getting rid of Sirius only because the iPod is so powerful and so great. [laughs]

Which model do you have? I'm not a very visual guy, so I have the 60-gig non-video version. And in my regular iTunes folder, I have a 400-gig music library. I have 40,028 songs.

What's in your library? I go through phases. I've always been a big Dylan fan and a big Velvet Underground fan. I'm nuts for Eminem. I also enjoy a lot of 20th century classical music, like Stravinsky. Then there's a lot of bebop, a lot of Mingus, Miles, and Coltrane. Lately, I've been in a heavy Sun Ra phase. What else? I'm just scrolling through here ... Allan Sherman, Allen Ginsberg, Astrid Gilberto. And a lot of Dean Martin. I think I have 840 Dean Martin songs.

Wow. Did you buy a lot of that music off of iTunes? I haven't bought anything from iTunes. And I never listen to CDs anymore, I rip them. I've ripped over 4,000 CDs. I don't like the iTunes restrictions, and I'm completely moral. I don't give songs to anybody and I never trade them.

I don't trade, but I don't like the restrictions either. It's not the fault of iTunes, it's the fault of the pirates.

Is there anything we can do at this point? Nobody has a good solution to the copyright problems. I'd prefer to be able to pay every time I play a song. I wouldn't actually "own" anything. There'd be a Web library with every song ever done, and every time I played Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue," I'd pay 2 cents, just like a jukebox. But some people still think that owning a song is important.

Culturally, we're still attached to buying physical goods. I guess so. Materialism is a great and wonderful thing. The funny thing is, that's such a glitch. The idea of a recording device is fairly new, after all. Before records, you had music performed by musicians who were there live. You didn't own them. [laughs]

The thing about technology is, it always gets better. But what I've learned as I've gotten older is that the only thing that really matters is parking.

A lot of things are now being shot in high-def. If, as the saying goes, the camera doesn't lie, is that something that you, as a practicing magician, welcome or don't welcome? If what you do is visual illusions or mirror gags - most TV magic is composed of camera tricks - then you'll welcome that. But for people who do magic live, you can't get better than the eyes. Some mirror tricks might look shittier on HDTV, but I don't do any of the mirror shit, so I don't care. Our magic is a little more intellectual and a little less visual.

You made an interesting comment on the impact of videogames on kids; you said, "Before you can read, you know the difference between story and reality." Do you play videogames yourself? I do not. And not because of videogames themselves; I've just never been a game player in general. I never played sports, I never seriously played chess. I certainly know the rules of poker and know a lot of card rules, but the idea of playing cards without cheating doesn't interest me much. [laughs]

I think, conceptually, I like the idea of videogames, but I never seem to have any free time that I'm trying to fill. I always want more time to write or practice, and I never say, "Well, I've got an hour to kill." I always want more time.

You're the magician; can't you conjure up the 48-hour day? Well, you're confusing a deity with a charlatan, a mistake that's been made for 2,000 years. [both laugh] Uh, no, I do tricks.