10 Minutes with Paul Reiser

There are few entertainers with a resume as rich as Paul Reiser’s. A beloved fixture of television, film, and stand-up comedy for more than four decades, Reiser has become a presence across generations. His most memorable roles range from the neurotic romantic in the hit sitcom Mad About You to the corporate villain in Aliens to the sweetly conflicted Dr. Owens in Netflix’s blockbuster series Stranger Things. On July 25, Reiser returns to his stand-up roots with a one-night-only performance at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington. It’s part of a national tour that follows the release of his comedy special Life, Death & Rice Pudding. The special and live tour both capture what Reiser does best: turning the small stuff into something memorable and entertaining. Stand-up is just one piece of a remarkably versatile career. In recent years, Reiser has co-written the bestselling memoir What a Fool Believes with music legend Michael McDonald and starred in the Irish indie film The Problem with People. Whether he’s riffing onstage about relationships or duking it out with Demogorgons on the small screen, Reiser remains a master of timing—both comedic and creative. We sat down with Reiser to talk about his return to the road, his unlikely relationship with raisins, and what it really means to live—and laugh—on your own terms.

Let’s talk about Life, Death & Rice Pudding. What made you decide to return to the stage for the tour and taped special at this time? I always intended to do stand-up. And everything else in my career was, sort of, an accident. In the ’90s, I just got busy with Mad About You. And then afterwards, I was exhausted, and we had young kids. I was happy to stay home. Inadvertently, I ended up not being on stage for 20 years. In terms of the special, I was avoiding it for a while, because once you film it, you burn the material. I’d rather just go town to town and do it. But I had been out of the limelight as a stand-up for so long that I had to reestablish my credentials. I would hear all the time, especially from younger people, “Oh … I didn’t know he does stand-up.” And I’d go, “No, no, no, that’s what I do!” So, I felt I had to sort of create some sort of public record and go, “Hey, this is what I do, and here’s where I am today.”

What’s your filtering process for turning personal anecdotes into comedy gold? Have your friends or family ever been upset with you for turning real-life mishaps into something on stage? There’s this old adage that the most personal is always the most universal. So, when you talk about the minutiae of a marriage or a relationship, or parenting, or aging, or technical ignorance—all these things—people go, “Oh, yeah, that’s me, too.” So, it is coming from me, but it’s not biographical. And it’s certainly not mine alone. One of the things we learned on Mad About You was that we knew we were firing on all cylinders when people would come up to us all the time and go, “Oh, man! You must have cameras in our bedroom, because we just had that EXACT fight yesterday!” And I went, “Okay, so it’s not just us.” 

You mentioned that young people today might not know that you started in stand-up. My parents’ generation know you from Diner. I first watched you on My Two Dads. An entire generation knows you from Mad About You. And now there’s a younger wave, discovering you through The Boys and Stranger Things. Do you find people treat you differently based on how and when they first encountered you? I think people my generation, or roughly my age, who watched Mad About You—we’ve sort of grown up together. We got married at the same time, we had kids at the same time, the kids grew up and left at the same time. So, there’s a sort of familiarity that is lovely, and there’s a certain intimacy and kinship with those kinds of people. Younger people who just know Stranger Things or The Boys—they don’t come up to me in public necessarily to engage. It’s like, “Hey, you’re the guy from that show. Sorry, that’s it. I just wanted to point at you and tell you I know who you are.” You can see it in my live shows. When I see people in their mid-20s or younger, they clearly came with their parents because I’m the guy from Stranger Things, or they point and say, “Oh, that’s the guy from The Boys.” And it’s kind of nice, because it is cumulative.

Let’s talk about The Boys. You’re returning for its final season. Are you allowed to tell us anything about The Legend’s arc, or are you sworn to absolute superhero secrecy? Well, two things: One, I’m sworn to secrecy. Two, I don’t really know anything. It’s funny, when I got offered to join the cast of The Boys, I hadn’t heard of it. I didn’t know it. And I asked my son, who’s, like, my cultural canary in the coal mine, “Have you heard of this show, The Boys?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “They want me to be on it.” He said, “Dad, it’s great ... and you’ll hate it.” I said, “Why would I hate it?” He said, “Well ... you’ll see.” So, I watched a little and said, “Oh, my God, this is so over the top!” But then I came to really respect it. It’s graphic, violent, and darkly funny—and it’s really so well done. And I had a great time. I just did one episode a couple of months ago, and it’s great fun. And the character feels like a character that I know. It’s an old-time, Hollywood-ish producer type, and I just feel connected. Especially when everybody on the set is half my age, it’s pretty easy to get into.

You joined the cast of Stranger Things during Season Two, after it was already a huge hit. What was it like stepping into something already so big? I really do love and enjoy creating my own things. That’s what stand-up is—you think of it, you write it, you perform it. And Mad About You was “Okay, what if I had to create something for myself? How would I design that character?” I’ve written films and been in films that I was creating for myself. That’s a great joy. But it’s also a great, contrasting joy to say, “I’m just going to go play in somebody else’s sandbox. They’ve got it figured out. I’m just going to show up. I’ll be the hired help and let them worry about all the other stuff.” With Stranger Things, I’d seen the first season, and I thought, “Wow, these guys are really on their game. They’re doing what they intended to do.” But the crazy thing is, they called me right after the first season dropped. I got a call to meet with the Duffer Brothers. They said they had written this character. They didn’t write it for me, but they were picturing me. In the first draft, the character was actually called, “Dr. Reiser.” Then they said, “Well, we should probably call Reiser because it would be silly if it was someone else playing Dr. Paul Reiser.” So, that was a really lovely compliment. I knew how good it was, and it was instantly a global phenomenon. So when they asked, “Do you want to come join this?” It was the easiest “Yes.” It was “Yes, thank you.” I remember talking to some of the cast who worked on Season One—they didn’t know it was going to be a hit. They didn’t even know it would be good. They said, “This might really miss.” It was very specific and nostalgic and had a certain tone. The contrast between doing the table reads at the beginning of Season One and Season Two was like a whole other beast. And I had the really luxurious position of jumping into this thing that was already sailing. I remember thinking, “Don’t bring the show to a halt—just keep up and swim alongside them.”

You’ve written three bestselling books and co-written a fourth with Michael McDonald. You’ve also penned multiple screenplays. When you're writing for yourself—specifically stand-up—you have the benefit of controlling a line’s delivery and timing. But when you’re putting it to the page, it’s a little different. Do you change your process at all based on the medium? Oh, you’ve got to. I remember that exact transition when I worked on the first book. I went, “Oh, I’m not going to be there to say this.” They’re going to have to read it in their bedroom or in the bathroom. So, how do I change the wording? How do I change punctuation? Is there a dash? And what I really appreciate is when people say, “Oh, I could really hear you as I was reading it.” I thought, “Oh, good. So, it worked.” The first book was really about taking a lot of what my stand-up was and changing it to be reader friendly. I likened it to when you change currency in a foreign country—you lose a little bit each time. Then I did the audiobook. I thought, “Well, now it’s just going to be 30 percent less funny.” By the time I did the third one, Familyhood, it was very different—almost like essays. They were standalones. Some of them were very funny, but some of them were not funny at all, by design. They were just truthful. And it was also a more reflective period of my life. I was a parent and married for a long time, and so it was an interesting process to try and write that and not aim for funny. Working with Michael McDonald was a great experience. It was very informative for me, because it was the first time that I’d ever written something that I wasn’t involved in. I mean, I’ve written things that I wasn’t starring in, but I was still producing them. This was, like—this is your story. I’m just helping you. Whatever I can do to help you get your story out, I’ll throw you my two cents. But every decision is yours. So, it was really an education in collaborating. And he’s collaborated with so many artists, so he has this very open-hearted, “say yes” mentality about collaborating, which I had to absorb. It took me a while to realize don’t fight for that joke. If it doesn’t feel right to him, take it out—because it’s his book. It’s got to be him. It’s his life story.

You’re a musician, as well; a trained pianist, and you studied composition at SUNY Binghamton. You even co-wrote the Mad About You theme song. Let’s talk about music. How does it still factor into your life? It’s always been hugely important to me, but it’s never been a big part of my career, or even artistically. It’s just very separate. I’ve been playing piano since I was a kid, and I’ve been playing more and more over the last couple of years. I’ve been going back—sometimes picking up classical pieces that I always wanted to study. There’s no test. There’s no teacher. There’s no curriculum. You can do what you want. Sometimes I only want to learn a specific 32 bars of a piece. The pretty part. In our old house, I had a little studio with padded walls, and I could play at any time. We moved recently, and we don’t have that anymore. So, when I play, other people are forced to listen. One day, my wife said, “Why is everything you play sad?” And I said, “It’s not sad—it’s evocative. It’s emotional.” I just lean toward that stuff. I did an album with this wonderful singer, Julia Fordham, who I was a fan of. We became friends,  and I don’t remember how it came up, but we decided to write a song together. And then we said, “Well, that was fun.” So, we wrote another. Basically, I would come up with a melody and play, and she would take it and really rearrange it and come up with lyrics. And I’d go, “That’s a song!” Then I’d say, “Let’s do another.” We ended up doing ten. She has this beautiful, sultry voice. It sounds like a cello at the bottom and like heaven at the top. Most of the songs—almost all of them—were really slow and heart-wrenching. We couldn’t come up with a title, and we thought, “Why so sad?” Nobody’s going to buy that. We ended up calling it Unusual Suspects, as in: “Why are these two people together?” But to me, it was like, “Why so sad? You’re both happy, well-off people. Why is the music so sad?” I don’t know. I’ve always been drawn to melancholy. It’s part of why I loved Ireland so much. It’s really beautiful, and the people are really funny, but there’s a history and a literary heritage of people enduring misery. Not miserable people, but people who carry suffering with grace. And I don’t know why that speaks to me. I have to figure it out someday.

You make a lot of people laugh. Who makes you laugh? If I really needed a laugh—I’d put on something really old. I’d put on the Marx Brothers or Mel Brooks. I don’t really seek out and watch a lot of comics today. Sometimes I feel like I need to, just so I know what’s going on out there. But there are people who really make me laugh. Nate Bargatze is really funny. So is Sebastian Maniscalco—I knew him from the clubs a bit. John Mulaney, Kathleen Madigan, and Taylor Tomlinson are really funny. But, as with anybody, it’s like an album with three great tracks. If you watch an hour of anybody, you go, “Love that. Love that. That, no so much.” Myself included! It’s not an hour and a half of punchlines. But there are so many people out there doing great work.

You’ve had a long and successful career. If you could go back and give advice to your younger self, what would it be? You know, I think, in general—and you hear this from most people when they get to a certain age—they wish they could go back and tell their 20-year-old self not to worry so much, because most of those things don’t matter. And you don’t know that until you hit your 50s and 60s and go, “That was wasted energy.” There’s a couple of projects I probably wouldn’t have done. There’s probably a couple of things I wish I had said. Very few things I wish I didn’t say. A few years ago, I was planning a trip with my wife. We were going to Italy, meeting up with some friends. We were both really looking forward to it. And at the last minute, something came up—I was offered this film. It was a very small indie. It wasn’t even great, but there were some people involved that were great. And I thought, “Well, it’ll be fun.” But I had this trip. And I got persuaded to do the movie—and I canceled the trip. And I regretted it. I went, “I’m never doing that again.” Never postpone joy. 

Circling back to your TV special, you describe this concept of unwanted raisins in rice pudding as a metaphor for understanding life. And my question is—what have you got against raisins? Nothing. (Laughing) I enjoy a raisin, but the symbolism and the metaphor is that as much as you may try to get your life pure and contain only the things you like, you most likely will not succeed. There will be some things you don’t like creeping into the mix. And that’s just the cost of doing business. And I remind myself of that all the time. It’s like, “Yeah, all right—you want to sell a show? Well, you’ve got to take that meeting.” I don’t like those meetings, but that’s how it goes. I don’t enjoy notes from people, but that’s their job. Sometimes, I’ve got to get notes. There’s no end to that list of things that we tolerate in the name of trying to live the best life we can.

—Dr. Joshua Sherman

Paul Reiser will perform on Friday, July 25, at 8 p.m. at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, located at 14 Castle Street in Great Barrington. mahaiwe.org