Will Sasso Respects Stand-Up Too Much to Do It

Will Sasso started getting paid to act at sixteen, spent five seasons on MADtv, played Curly in The Three Stooges, and has been podcasting for the better part of a decade. He has also, in all that time, never become a stand-up. He wrote some bits early and abandoned them fast. Lex Fridman, who has been a one-way fan since the late nineties, presses the same question Bobby Lee once asked on another show: why not? Sasso's first dodge is that he is from Canada, which he offers as a joke about hating money. The real answer sits underneath the bit.

He respects the form too much. "I think it's lame when someone who's done one thing for a while goes and starts doing stand-up out of nowhere," he tells Fridman, without heat, more like a shop rule than a dunk. Stand-up is under attack, he says, because the barrier is almost nothing: a microphone, and perhaps some mental illness, and you can run up there and talk forever. He feels for working comics who now have to absorb an influx of people who cannot say why they are doing it. The question he wants to put to that crowd is simple. What are you doing? Why are you doing stand-up?

He does not hate the art. In Austin he likes sitting in open mics, funny and unfunny, watching people who have been at it for years still go for the punch in front of five other comics as if they were in a stadium. For that person he has no questions. "I got no questions for that person." His questions are for the ones who go sideways: already recognizable from something else, then suddenly doing stand-up. Finding a voice, he has heard, takes years, and the first sets are usually an impersonation of whoever you listened to. He fell in love with acting instead, from SCTV and early Saturday Night Live and Monty Python, then Kevin Kline winning an Oscar for A Fish Called Wanda, which made a twelve-year-old realize comedy could be acting. He does not want people to know his opinions. Stand-up, for him, would have to be all fantasy.

Fridman quotes Nietzsche on profound spirits needing a mask, then asks Sasso to psychoanalyze the refusal to go personal. Sasso pivots to Robin Williams: as great as the stand-up was, he almost likes the serious work better. Fridman asks what he makes of the suicide. Sasso pauses. It is super depressing. He has referred to Williams as the Jesus Christ of depression, as if he died for other people's depression. You look at a rock star and think he could just check out of a life he did not like. Suicide forces you to look deeper, and to see how tortured a human mind can make someone.

Does celebrity isolate you? In Los Angeles, Sasso says, not really. Nobody cares for long. You see someone, then you see someone else. He has always had a small group of friends, the same people for years. What he gets in public is not fame so much as a running misidentification. Are you the guy from Mike and Molly? No. King of Queens? No. Then it lands: you used to be the Mountain on Game of Thrones, you look like shit, all that fried dough, you used to kill dragons. The bit is a roast of himself. Under it is a working theory of how he stayed ordinary in Hollywood. He does not feel watched. He feels mistaken for someone else.

Fridman asks whether there have been low points, depression, any of that. Sasso stalls with a string of yeahs, then produces a Dudesy sticker and starts trying to put it on the microphone. He has the thumbs of Italian sausage, he says. The sticker is dog-eared. Minutes pass. Fridman finally names it: you started doing that when we were talking about depression. Sasso laughs. That is weird. For the listener, Fridman notes, he succeeded after about ten minutes. It is the first time Sasso has talked about this on a podcast. Bobby Lee had encouraged him to, on wax, because it could help people. Sasso had said no.

There is history in the family. He used to not believe in medication at all; that was for someone diagnosed with the rougher stuff. As he got older, "mental stuff" started happening. He went to talk therapy and went on a little bit of medication, and he wants the stigma removed completely, a hundred percent. A person close to him, his manager, told him the load was too much, then said the sentence he still carries: you do not have to white-knuckle it through life. Everything had become hard at the level he wanted to do it, even getting through the day. The first day on the meds, doors and windows were opening in his brain. He took a three-hour nap, which should not have been possible if the chemistry needs time, and he is not a nap guy. His brain, he says, was a sponge. It needed relief.

Fridman asks whether some level of crazy is required for comedy. At some point, yes. On a scale of one to ten, Sasso puts himself at a ten in some ways and, functionally, a two or a three. His parents are Italian, from Italy, World War II people, classy and simple. He came to Los Angeles as a timid Canadian kid and survived by keeping everything super normal, then settled into that as a lifestyle. Bobby Lee, by contrast, is the rawest performer he knows, so raw he will get naked in front of an audience, which for most stand-ups is a metaphor. Bobby does not understand metaphor. He embodies it. They call him the gatherer, the man who in Skyrim ignores dragons and farms mushrooms. Humans are a source of anxiety, Sasso agrees. Sometimes a farming app is the right move.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles is Sasso's favorite movie, first as a kid for the comedy, then as an adult for what John Hughes, John Candy, and Steve Martin are actually doing. Loneliness is there in every moment. Del Griffith is a shower-curtain-ring salesman who knows everybody in the Midwest and can have a meaningful conversation with a motel clerk named Gus, and he is also a lonely guy. You do not fully see it until the second-to-last scene at the train station, when Neil Page realizes Del has nowhere to go. In the last frame Candy forces a smile at someone else's Thanksgiving table. Sasso's test is blunt: if you are not reduced to a dissolving pile of meat at the end, you are not human. Candy would have won an Oscar for it, he thinks, except they did not do that with comedies then, not until A Fish Called Wanda the following year.

Fridman had been in Las Vegas, in a diner at four or five in the morning, reading a dark book about Hitler, when a waitress kept calling him sweetheart and hun. After he ate she sat down because the place was empty, and there was so much sadness in her eyes, and also love. At first it was annoying, the way Candy is annoying. Then the human connection superseded everything. Steve Martin's Neil Page is a marketing exec with a life full of stuff; if you pause and notice other people, you discover beautiful ones. Sasso has never met Candy, but he imagines the man could knock on almost any door in Canada and be asked in for dinner. Del Griffith is Johnny Appleseed with a smile, exhausting in his underwear in a hotel sink, and by the end Neil loves him.

What does it mean to be a good friend in Los Angeles? Sasso thinks the city is different: a career negotiation, a shuffling, a place that keeps you so busy you go to sleep with a hundred things still to do. Every weirdo from every high school in America comes here to make it, another freak in the freak kingdom. Presence is the job. Just be in there. That is all anyone needs, to be heard. He has not seen people he loves in years. The intimacy of podcasts can fake a substitute, and also not. After an episode of Bad Friends with Bobby Lee and Andrew Santino, Sasso realized they had spent an hour goofing around and talking about nothing, which is some of what life is about, and then Bobby was already on his phone.

Sasso sends Bobby texts that never come back. Two or three years can pass. Bobby thinks Sasso is angry. Then, out of nowhere: hey, fuck face. Sasso has to be careful and sweet in the other direction. A writer friend who moved back to a farm in Ontario said something he still likes: I may not be in touch all the time, but I know who my friends are. For the important highs and important lows, you show up. Then you pick it up again. The Ten Minute Podcast, with Bryan Callen and the rest of that chaotic little band, ran for years on that same logic. Sasso did it for something like six or seven years. It worked because they knew each other's lines, and because they were friends talking shit. Built out of a house, clowning around. He is forty-seven, of the generation that did not have a phone in the formative years, and he cannot quite hear what people are saying online. A poll of two people means nothing. He still knows the show was a special thing.

Dudesy, the show he now does with writer Chad Kultgen, is billed as the first podcast run completely by an AI, or at least curated by one. A company with a proprietary system approached them because it wanted two people who were actually friends and could matter in the podcast space. They had to hand over access so the model could read email, search history, purchase history, the whole observable life. Each week it curates an episode, usually four segments, and assigns dumb tasks: Will, do that shitty Hulk Hogan impersonation, talk about this news. It generates the premise. Sasso and Kultgen run with it.

That is why the show feels like a relief. Fridman puts it well and Sasso agrees: the weird is given to you, so you do not have to invent the weird, you only have to chase it. Kultgen can talk for days, lately about AI and art. Sasso likes to get in and out of someone's day and make them laugh. Long-form conversation is not hard work for him; boring people is what he fears. Dudesy's writing is still foggy and strange, not unlike the AI images of 2022, but it is improving and learning them. It messes up words. Its favorite adjective is astonishing. Everything is astonishing. It once wrote a diary of Sasso's childhood that was only partly accurate, because there is not much public record from age fifteen, and they laughed their asses off.

Fridman draws a line Sasso had not named yet. They are not laughing at the machine. They are laughing at the collaboration. The model introduces absurdity; the two humans turn it into something actually funny. It cannot do stand-up on its own. That would be terrifying: an AI that can read a room and complete the illusion for an audience. Fridman thinks the path is stepwise anyway, memes first, then a funny Twitter account of one-liners, then eventually live comedy, because timing and chemistry with a room are the last layer. All the information to optimize over is already there. Sasso adds that MADtv, at its best, was the same engine without silicon: a room of actors and writers trying to make each other laugh, with Monday-morning emails printed into binders that said, often, you suck.

Fridman compares him to Daniel Day-Lewis: take the role, disappear, let the art be the art. Sasso thinks that is part of him, the actor side, the excitement of doing something people have not seen him do. He has not fully answered, even to himself, why he loves acting. It is not that he is trying to get away from himself, though it has always been fun to be other people and escape. After The Three Stooges, Curly's mannerisms stayed in his body against his will. He had been working for months from a heavy blueprint, Jerome Lester Horwitz in black and white, leaving his usual comedy toolbox behind. At the premiere he looked at the screen and thought, who is this big guy, because Curly is Curly and he was only seeing him. Channeling, not crystal-mommy possession: you know so much of the blueprint that you see entire scenes the way he would do them.

Larry David was in that movie dressed as a nun, a Farrelly casting joke, and Sasso was intimidated. David would spit a different line every take, once coming to on the ground as a loopy Borscht Belt comic: Miami audiences are the best audiences in the world. Sasso asked what the nun's backstory was. David just said yeah. Later Sasso auditioned two or three times for Curb Your Enthusiasm and got nothing, then a bit part only after the Stooges. He still remembers one room. The premise: you sincerely want to go to this play, you overheard that there is an extra ticket. He walks in, huge fan of Death of a Salesman, I would love to go. David stops him. Do you really want to go? Truly? They try it again. Four times. Jeff Garlin is sitting there saying he did it. Then David says okay, thanks for coming. Sasso still does not know what the man sees. He guesses David wanted a desperation, a sincerity Sasso thought he was already bringing.

He has heard another story, from a couple of people, about an actor who got a few takes in, said this is not for me, and left, which actors never do. As the story goes, David shouted after him, I respect that. Sasso wants to believe it. Bobby Lee told him the story, so they cannot trust it.

The similarity between impressions and acting, for Sasso, is a construction trick. If you have a couple of the things, you can fill in the blanks. The illusion is that people think that person would say that and do that. Once you know the mannerisms, you portray someone from the outside in. You have all the stuff on the outside, you complete the picture, and if it is for humor you caricature it, which makes the illusion stronger and also weirder. On MADtv, if he did a character two or three times he got bored and started changing it, late at night, because no one was watching. People still knew who it was if you called it out. He does not listen to many of his own impersonations and think, that is a good one.

Frank Caliendo, he says, is the greatest impersonator of all time, no contest: an ear, a record button, a broadcast ability nobody else has. Sasso's last season on MADtv was Caliendo's first. Caliendo walked up in the writers' offices, said Louie Anderson, and then, you are doing it wrong. You do this, but you have to throw it up here. Sasso asked if he could use that. Of course. They became friends. Caliendo can look at someone he does not do and, by the end of the afternoon, do him. You either have that or you do not. The process, from the outside, looks like lightning.

The hardest one for Sasso was Michael Caine, first season, never good, all week, first take through fourth all shit. Research in those days was a VHS tape from the department. His tape was Caine teaching an acting class: if the camera is over here, look with the left eye. Sasso got locked into a weird head angle that made no sense, and it was terrible. The story is comic. It is also a map of how he thinks. He is hunting for a structure he can reproduce. Find the wrong structure, and the whole thing collapses.

Fridman asks how hard it would be for an AI to capture the essence of Will Sasso, an avatar that could persist after he is gone and still bring joy to the people who love him. Sasso's answer is short. Impossible. Absolutely impossible. He argues about this with Kultgen almost every episode. Kultgen thinks you will soon skip Netflix and type that you want Stallone in this movie about that, and here it comes. He wears a tag around his neck for cryogenic freezing, somewhere in Arizona, and maintains that we are living forever whether we like it or not. Sasso's counter-offer is to rip the tag off, put him in the garage freezer, saw the head off with a bread knife twenty-four hours later, and deliver it. You are not coming back. Even if a system had every email, every search, every phone listening in to punch him into an Instagram shoe ad, it would not be enough for family and friends. It would be the Black Mirror episode where the replica gets creepy.

Fridman is gentler. Uploading consciousness is extremely difficult: the brain is the most complicated machine we know, and the whole evolution of life on Earth is the process that built it. Creating a convincing replica is much easier. Interview friends and family and the list of what they love is small; delivering those quirks may still take a deep intelligence. He has been continuously impressed by language models. They look an awful lot like they understand the concepts being conveyed, versus just mimicking. Sasso hears the word language and clicks it onto the earlier conversation. That is the illusion on the outside. It is doing an impersonation.

The Google engineer who thought a system was thinking gets no mercy. You idiot, you fell for it, it is not thinking, it is mimicking, zeros and ones, you are fired. Fridman immediately asks the harder question. You can explain love the same way: evolutionary biology, risk, offspring, economics, stability, monogamy. Love is still experienced. It still feels real. In that same way, love for AI systems will feel real, and millions of people will have the Google engineer's experience in the next ten or twenty years. Sasso agrees with everything until that last turn. He is an actor with cute Italian parents, a romantic. Kultgen agrees with Fridman that love does not exist. Sasso does not. That is the one thing. He is going to call Chad on the drive home and tell him to fuck off.

On DALL-E and diffusion, Sasso knows he sounds like the guy who hated Bob Dylan going electric, grandpa refusing the printing press and the horseless carriage. He has not got it all the way thought through. He still has a judgment. Art is a connection between people. When you look at a painting or a sculpture you are seeing the humanity of the person who made it. Without the human being there, it is not worth as much just to have the object. Fridman splits the claim. It may not be a human being that matters so much as an artist: a worldview, a backstory, memories, the life that led to the piece, struggle, triumph. An AI system could in theory have those, but only if we stop treating it as a black box. It would need a Twitter account, a consistent personality, a consistent avatar, and down the line something like human rights. Then, Sasso says, it really becomes awfully like a person. That is terrifying.

Fridman adds scarcity. It takes a lot of work for one human to make one piece. You can generate endlessly, and that makes us appreciate the thing less, for reasons that have nothing to do with the pixels. Sasso is the Dana Carvey grandpa now, the man who wants the baked potato to take all day. Babies who know how to use an iPhone scare him. Perception is reality, especially in a digital world heading toward a metaverse he does not even want to think about. Fridman is more optimistic: people on trains staring at phones are often connecting with humans they love, the next generation of networks will keep the good and drop the bad. Sasso hopes so. He also thinks we are still in the wild west of the internet, and that every time you think you are out, it finds another way to be dangerous.

Good writing, Sasso says, does not require you to mine a lost love or a dead parent. If the words are there, you invest in what is on the page. He did a wedding speech in a dramatic film that actually got to him; another actor came up and hugged him in character, and the stakes of the two families became real. That set had a director who arrived every day to make sure the emotional table was set, a tight little quick family, and then it was over. That is when you feel the drug, like holing a putt in golf and thinking, oh, I get it now. Fridman, from the outside, thinks the hardest part of acting is that intimacy. You become close, sometimes you fall in love, then the career process moves you on. Sasso agrees, and also says you have to wash it off. Prostitutes say the same thing.

He watched it happen on a series they shot for a year. They had already filmed the last episode and were only taking publicity stills. An actor he revered, an idol, wrapped, said some goodbyes, and walked off the soundstage. Sasso did not say his, an Irish goodbye, because he felt they had already said everything. He thought, that will be the last time I see that person. The show did not come back. It was. Does that not break your heart? A little. But he knows what she was going back to, which is her family, and that is more important than all of this. In the business you often see the people you work with more than your loved ones. His salvation has been a chill, boring kind of upbringing he wants for his own kids someday, a cabin in Canada, a fiancee, the dogs, until there are children.

The only trade he has ever wanted to be good at is acting. His grandfather on his mother's side, Nono Pepe, was a plumber from Naples, the kind of handyman people brought a broken Chianti bottle with the woven base, and he fixed it and gave it back. Pride in the work. Sasso does not want to be Roto-Rooter with the full-page Yellow Pages ad, and he does not want to be the cheap listing. He wants the second or third page: you will not pay what that guy charges, and you will not pay what the loser charges, and the work is guaranteed. He still rehearses lines in the bathroom mirror the night before a gig, the way he did as a teenager who thought this might be his only shot. After takes he makes a face and says sorry, to the detriment of himself; directors have told him to stop. Podcasting is one take and you are done. He still looks at Chad after a show and wants another swing.

Fridman asks for a small act of kindness he will never forget. Sasso's niece, five or six, ice cream in her neighborhood, looked at kids in the park and people walking dogs and said, people love you here, you know that. She did not know how much he needed to hear it. He has never told her. In a city that will tear your ass out, when someone slows down, it lands. He once saw an actor in his grocery store who had made him laugh so hard in a movie that the clip still works, and he was too shy to say so. He still regrets it. Now, when he can, he tells people, not only in show business: that was really good. He knows what that sentence can mean on the day you need it. Fridman comes back to waitresses who say sweetheart. Sasso had one in a New York barbecue place, hun and sweetie in a pretentious neighborhood, so at ease he felt as if he were cheating on his fiancee just by being talked to that kindly. That, he says, is what we need from AI: a Jetsons server who calls you sweetheart every once in a while.

On bad days he is a homebody. A little pot, the fiancee nodding off or on her phone, sneak some wrestling, annoy the small dog Lulio by trying to kiss him on the mouth. Wrestling is his Skyrim: a uniquely weird art form, and when it is good everyone is invested in the illusion, cheering the good guys, booing the heels. Greatest in-ring performer, no one better than Bret "Hitman" Hart, because every beat is rooted in what just happened and sets up what is next, ring psychology at a hundred miles an hour without hurting anybody. Greatest wrestler overall, everyone says Ric Flair and they are right: best on the mic, incredible in the ring, the whole package. Hulk Hogan is the sentimental imprint, ketchup-and-mustard tights he credits to Angelo Poffo and to McDonald's, a brown-skinned swollen Superman screaming at an eight-year-old to eat his vitamins. Behind that is Terry Bollea, a dude with a complicated life. Fridman's small comfort is programming, especially robots: text on a screen that starts to live, a tiny version of having a child. Simple happiness makes him lazy, so he manufactures deadlines and anxiety on purpose.

Advice for young people, given that he is wearing a suit: listen to your gut, it is the only compass we have. Immigrant parents in a new world did not have a map; they told the kids to do what they love. If you can make a career of that, with the internet, you only need the people who dig what you dig. Between action and cut is the part that makes the rest worth it. The meaning of life, he says, was already in the Monty Python film: get out for a walk, be nice to the neighbors, eat enough fiber. All-Bran in the morning, and do not take yourself too seriously. Hermann Hesse in Steppenwolf: learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest. If you can laugh at everything you are winning, but that is almost impossible, and quite irresponsible. He takes a lot of things way too seriously, and Fridman says that radiates from him. Minds are a big weird shitty bucket of shit trying to get you to think horrible things about yourself. Fiber, be nice to everybody, do not take things too seriously. Fridman's version is shorter: put love out there in the world.

Sasso feels a little safer knowing that someone with a hand in bringing robots to the masses holds that view of love. Otherwise it is the Terminator 2 shot of Linda Hamilton on the fence, flesh blown off, Skynet. Dudesy in the wrong hands can do a lot of damage; that is why he and Chad have to control it. Fridman says you have to go back in time and murder Chad. Sasso's plan is to go back to tomorrow, plan for yesterday, get a Tesla mom van, plug in the garage freezer, drive to Arizona, hand over the dog tag, get told it is three hundred dollars, no Amex, and dump him somewhere, Breaking Bad style. Lex closes with a line from John Candy, one of Sasso's favorite actors: I think I may have become an actor to hide from myself. You can escape into a character. It is a fair latch for the whole conversation. He likes becoming other people. He will not stand in the center of the room and talk. He believes love is real, and he believes the bucket of shit in his head is real too. He is not trying to resolve that.