Bobby Lee Was Not Invited to the Wedding

Lex Fridman has been a fan of Bobby Lee since the *Mad TV* years, and he opens with a question that is not a compliment. Given that status, how did it feel that Bobby was not invited to Andrew Schulz's wedding, while Lex was? Lex was there, by his own account the least funny person in the room, and he spent the night thinking it was not funny that Bobby Lee was missing. Bobby does not dodge it. "All my life I always felt like people didn't like me and didn't want to invite me to things," he says. That feeling, he adds, is fundamentally why he does what he does.

The snub hurt, and he built revenge fantasies aimed at Schulz specifically: throw a huge wedding, invite everyone except him, then write a letter that says see, that is how it feels. He knows Schulz well. They met at the Montreal Comedy Festival, felt like kindred souls, did each other's podcasts, talked on the phone. Then Schulz invited Whitney Cummings, a friend of Bobby's, and not him. Bobby's theory is gender optics. Schulz already had alpha males on the list, had one seat left, and a woman was better for the photograph. He calls it a diversity hire for the wedding, then laughs, then admits the wedding was actually small.

Instead of acting on the fantasy he is in therapy, trying to let it go. He still feels like an outsider, even while doing a Netflix show with Andrew Santino at the Comedy Store. On stage he will say Netflix does not like him, knowing it is not true. He wants to correct an internal dialogue built on the past. Ninety-nine percent of the things that go on in his mind, he says, are not true, and he has reached an age where he does not want to live that way anymore.

Lex recognizes the illness. He is deeply self-critical all the time and uses it as an engine, because without the whip he is afraid he would become ultra-lazy. He loves comfort, needs very little, and recently bought the first couch of his life only because podcast guests complained there was nowhere to sit. Bobby is the opposite: not a hoarder, he says, but a man with a shopping addiction, "100 percent lazy," who handles the critical voice by stuffing it in a compartment. He calls himself a good avoider. One man uses self-criticism as fuel. The other treats it as an enemy and walks around it.

Avoidance, for Bobby, currently looks like *Stardew Valley*, a farming sim he plays on Switch and Xbox. He likes games you can grind. He played a little *Morrowind* and bounced off the graphics, then burned through *Oblivion* and *Skyrim* with eight characters each, all the way through, every quest. The pleasure is collecting. In *Skyrim* there is a mushroom called Blisterwort that you pick for potions. He once spent twelve real-world hours going cave to cave, taking as much as he could. That kind of grinding, he says, is the fun. He does not get bored.

Linear games, the kind that force you down one path, he cannot stand. He wants an open world where he can make choices, grind if he wants, stop if he wants. Lex has done a quieter version of the same thing: there is a console command to turn enemies off, and he has walked around *Skyrim* listening to music, looking at the scenery. Bobby grabs the picture and starts planning their cohabitation. Lex would hunt bandits. Bobby would gather Blisterwort, white caps, all the food, then run the side quests in Whiterun or Winterhold that have nothing to do with the main story. No dragons. They would throw a banquet for the Dark Brotherhood, the Fighters Guild, the Mages Guild. He is a thief for life. And he still would not invite Andrew Schulz.

Twelve hours picking mushrooms sounds like wasted time until you remember the mind that is doing it. A man whose inner monologue is 99 percent untrue needs a world with clear rules, instant feedback, and no social verdict. Pick the mushroom, and it is in the bag. Level up, and the number stays. There is no wedding list. Bobby admits the games are avoidance, a way not to think about what is really going on. Lex does not scold him. An open world where you decide where to walk and when to stop is itself a rehearsal for freedom. Bobby's next sentence is the lonely one under the joke: if the two of them could live in *Skyrim* together, would they make love?

Lex mentions that Bobby has said he was on the high school wrestling team, and the claim sounds, to Lex, like a lie. Bobby does not argue. He tells a story. Years ago in Los Angeles, Joe Rogan looked at him and said he had never grappled. Bobby said he had. Rogan called him a liar. At the time Bobby had no photos. Now Instagram does: him and his brother in singlets, on the high school team, Bobby in the 105-pound class. He was on the tennis team too. People do not realize he is athletic, he says, because he is doughy, and he resents that. He hands Lex the phone. "This is my brother and me." A famous comedian still producing evidence that he made the team.

Lex has been on Rogan's show. Rogan is a fan of Bobby's. Bobby loves Joe. It has never happened, and the reason is not scheduling. Bobby will not ask, because he does not want the rejection. If he says hey, can I do it, and Joe says he is busy, maybe later, Bobby does not want to hear that sentence. If Joe said, are you free Thursday, fly out, he would go 100 percent. For years the appearance did not exist because he never requested it. He would rather not go than risk a polite no.

Then he offers a stranger analogy. He learned to read an analog clock six months ago. At train stations he used to stare at the old faces and guess. He filed the skill as obsolete information, because digital displays already existed, so the hands were surplus. Lex maps it onto Rogan: this is not inability, it is a refusal to learn. Bobby agrees. An adult in the digital age declared a still-working symbol system obsolete. That move has the same shape as I will not ask, because if I ask I might be refused. Close the door first. Tell yourself it was never important.

Bobby wants to know when machines will have consciousness, and whether he should be afraid of robots. Lex is not afraid unless they go Terminator, and even then the nearer fact is autonomous weapons. A lot of cutting-edge robotics, he says, is funded by the military, the Department of Defense, DARPA. Consumer robots will mostly go into homes; the war versions are already on the way. Consciousness, Lex believes, could be engineered in a machine, or at least we will build machines so human-like that we believe they have it. Bobby's follow-up is not about souls. Will the skin be smooth? Will they look realistic?

Lex says visual appearance is not the magic. Blind people connect. People fall in love through letters. Then he names what Bobby is actually asking about: sex bots. "Most people that get sex robots they don't get it for the sex," Lex says. They get them for intimacy, not sexual intimacy, just somebody being there, an emotional connection. Bobby does not argue. He remembers a documentary about RealDolls and the people who marry them. What stayed with him was not the spectacle. It was the cuddling, and watching television together. He adds that he has been able to find human girlfriends, so the whole subject is, for him, impressive. The joke admits the other half: if he could not find a person, he would fill the seat on the couch.

Lex asks how Whitney Cummings's robot made him feel. Bobby is blunt. Whitney is a beautiful woman; he does not find her attractive. Given the choice, he would take the robot. Lex is surprised. He had expected Bobby to obsess over realism the way he obsessed over smooth skin. The robot, Bobby grants, is well made, but when it is animated the life is not quite there. You can tell. Sitting still, though, it has human-like texture, something he cannot name. "They're getting there," he says. The man who spent twelve hours picking mushrooms, who will not ask Rogan, who just learned analog time, makes the most precise technical call of the hour: static, almost; motion, not yet.

Lex says Bobby and Khalyla have a real connection, obvious even while they co-host *TigerBelly*. Bobby has never really gone down this path on tape. The first time he met her, it was as if he had known her all his life. The trust was already there. He can look in the mirror and see every character defect, the parts he usually hides so he will not be judged or ridiculed. With her he could show those things, and he thinks she feels the same. Second, she is funny. One night in a Long Beach apartment she made him cackle, the kind of laugh he usually gets from comics, not from women he is dating. Third, she is partly Asian. He warns that he is about to be a little racist. Asian girls, he says, eat first and ask what it was; white girls ask first. Khalyla would eat the eyeball, then ask what she just ate. It reminds him of his mother, who used to eat the fish eye to make the boys squirm. As a kid it was gross. When Khalyla does it, he feels at home. He calls it a little act of fearlessness.

On day one, sitting on a couch, he adjusted his body and accidentally farted. She laughed. It was not embarrassing. He is a fart machine, he says, with loose cheeks, then winks at Lex and adds, not in a gay way. He also has a small penis. Relative to an elephant everyone does, but he is not an elephant, he is a human, and by human standards it is very small. He thought she would balk. Instead "she looked at it as if it was like an orphan," a lost child she wanted to cradle. Lex's reply is dry: you have not met anybody like that. I have never seen one of them. I hear they are nice.

Among all his girlfriends, she is the only one who saw him when his career was in the shit box. He could not get anything going. Ken Jeong, a talented friend, was getting everything. Bobby could not get an audition. On the road he filled half the room. He started to think maybe this was not going to work, maybe he should find love and open his world that way. She looked at him and said no, this does not feel right, you are so funny, you are so relevant to me, this is what we are going to do. She started *TigerBelly*. He had the skill set, but without that show the later work does not happen. Then Santino said let's do *Bad Friends*. Now he is almost too busy.

Before her, even when he got an audition he would not go. In his head he had already lost. He had gone on a thousand of them and they never hired him, so for years he simply did not show up. She was the first girlfriend who said she did not care if he got it. She did not want him to be a coward. She wanted him to walk through fear. She dragged him to those rooms, and for some reason he booked them. Lex's summary is the one that has to stay in two pieces at once: she saw the potential of what he could be, and she loved him for who he already was. Only seeing potential turns a person into a project. Only loving the present lets both of you rot. She did a third thing. When he said I cannot, she said you can, and you have to go now.

They do not know if they are getting married. They are in couples counseling, working through issues, the way his friendships have issues. When they get to the end of that, they will figure it out. He would like to be a father. For a long time he was childlike, playing video games, irresponsible, lazy. In the last six months, he says, he has had breakthroughs. He is in therapy, analyzing his behavior and his desires. The block was fear. He does not want to scar a child the way his parents scarred him. They never did this kind of work on themselves. They were immigrants. They wanted to put food on the table, and after that they went about their business. He is not like that. He would never be violent toward his kids the way his father was.

His dad died in August 2019. The fondest childhood memory is not a game of catch. His mother made his father take him out one day. There was no baseball glove. They sat on a park bench for hours and barely talked, because his father did not know English well and Bobby did not know Korean. Then the day turned. Bobby forgot his jacket, and his father yelled. Later, when Bobby booked *The Tonight Show* with Jay Leno and got *Mad TV* in 2000, his parents finally went huh. There is nepotism in Hollywood, Bobby says, but not in his case. Straight-up immigrants, no connections, poor, and he booked those rooms on his own. Before that they told him he was not funny, that he would never make it, that he would be poor all his life.

On Saturday nights they watched the weekly show. He played characters they understood, including Kim Jong-il. They could not believe it. For Korean immigrants who did not know the language, a child on television was not an option in their minds. After *The Tonight Show*, his father called the next day and asked how much Bobby had paid them to let him on, as if Tom Cruise handed over cash at the desk. The producers put his dad in two or three sketches. He was in a Comedy Central pilot that did not get picked up. He got residual checks. Nepotism, Bobby says, in reverse. By then his father had softened. He was no longer that violent guy. When he died, the old issues came back like a freight train. Bobby thinks about him every day, a lot of it regret, not for conversations that could have happened, but for a kind of communication his father's culture made impossible.

A couple of months before this taping he sat at a Starbucks with his mother, tears in his eyes, and told her he was sorry she had lived in that house, that his dad had hit her, that she had stayed in the marriage because of the kids. Her response was, let's go to Buca di Beppo. She wanted Italian food. There was nothing there. Lex knows the callus. His grandmother lived through the Holodomor, the starvation in 1930s Ukraine, and through World War II. You do not talk with people who survived that. Bobby's mother, at twelve, walked her little sister to school, forgot a book, ran back, and found a military truck had run the girl over. The family picked up the body with rice bags. His mother still believes that if she had not forgotten the book, her sister would be alive. They did not have EMDR or therapists. They had to survive. That is who she is. It is sad to him that she will forever live in that torment.

Lex asks for the darkest place Bobby has gone in his mind, and whether he has considered suicide. Bobby has thought about it in the distance. About four months before the conversation he was in a very bad place: naked in a hotel room in Arizona, almost a week without food, more than a week without sleep, coughing up blood, waiting to get into an outpatient psychology program. He thought he was dying. Lex asks how much of it was losing his father, how much was rehab, alcohol, drugs. "It's all the same thing," Bobby says. It is all from childhood. Stand-up is childhood. The self-hatred is childhood. The drugs and drinking are childhood. It is survival, and protecting the heart. Humor was a defense. Avoidance of emotion was another. Comedy let him survive because he can absorb a lot of physical, emotional, and spiritual pain. Later in life he is unwilling to carry that weight. It will kill him. He is doing everything he can to put the baggage down.

The relapse started with an edible. He was flying to Hawaii to shoot *Magnum P.I.*, looked at Khalyla, and told her he was going to relapse. He knew. He got on the plane, took it, and the next three months were a blur. He had not been going to meetings. He had drifted from his sobriety people. The pain was too much. Two and a half, three months in, he was coughing up chunks of blood. He had smoked since he was seventeen, and the mix of weed and cigarettes was wrecking him. That same week Bob Saget and Louie Anderson died. He knew them both. He believes things happen in threes, and he convinced himself he was next, on the precipice of death. He begged to be put in a rigorous program in Arizona.

While he waited in Los Angeles for a bed to open, he had already been a week without a drink, a cigarette, or a drug. He was sober and still in a prison in his mind. He slept naked by the door of the hotel room "because I thought it would be easier for the maid to discover my body." Getting sober was important and not sufficient. The Arizona place was twelve hours a day of psychotherapy, like a twelve-hour podcast with professionals who call you on your stories and tell you what is real. Back in L.A. he got his lungs, his heart, an EKG, a full physical. He was completely fine. He had not smoked in almost four months, and he had not drunk or used since. This time, he says, is different. He feels better than he has ever felt, even when hard things happen, because he no longer wants to be in that place. He has too much to lose, and too many people who love him.

Lex wears a suit for the podcast and sometimes in private, but not always, because he gets recognized. The people who recognize him tend to be kind, which creates two problems. He falls in love with people, and then he has to say goodbye, and he hates goodbyes. He is also an introvert with social anxiety, so he walks around a little afraid an interaction will start, even though the middle of it is beautiful. Bobby is an isolator. Even when he was using, he did it privately, in a garage, not with people. After a screening of *The Northman*, a kid in the next seat told Bobby he was his hero, that he was trying comedy and it was hard. Bobby gave him encouragement. The specifics the kid knew made it real. Even if he became Joe Rogan famous, Bobby says, he would still say hi and take photos. It makes him feel he belongs. Before comedy he felt invisible. Recognition puts him in the game of life.

What he does not like is being recognized incorrectly. Loved you in *The Hangover* is the opposite of being seen. Worse is the stranger who watches someone take a photo, decides Bobby must be somebody, and walks up wanting a picture without knowing why. Lex likes a different triangle: a fan and a girlfriend who has no idea, the information transferring in real time while she tries to figure out why her boyfriend is excited about a stranger. Men, they agree, approach more aggressively. Women do a double take and try not to invade the space.

Lex tells a 7-Eleven story from Austin at three or four in the morning, sugar-free slushie run, sweatpants, hiding from the world. A man did a double take, walked past, came back, and after Lex came out with the drink asked, gently, if he could give him a blowjob. The wording was not grabby. It was offered as if the goal were to make Lex happy. Lex said no thank you and moved on, then kept going back to that store looking for the guy, because now he would say yes, or at least he jokes that he would. Bobby has a steam-room story from Beverly Boulevard: a man jerking off with both hands who just said what's up, not aggressive, minding his business. Maybe, Bobby says, that was the same feeling Lex clocked. Not a threat. Almost like a hug. Next time, take it. Then, because this is Bobby Lee, he adds that it is not in a gay way.

Lex wants to go back to Carlos Mencia. He was a fan who thought Carlos was funny, then watched the joke-stealing controversy, then listened to Bobby's tense podcast with him. It made Lex think of Bobby and his father on that park bench: some of it not getting through. Bobby calls the whole thing Shakespearean, full of betrayal and drama. He is a loyal guy. He has had the same manager since the late 1990s, even though giant firms have wanted to sign him and a bigger company might have changed his career. He will never leave her. He will never leave his agent Matt; the only reason he is at CAA is Matt. He mostly plays the Comedy Store because his loyalties are there. He does not know if that is a good trade. It is just who he is.

He met Carlos in the mid-90s as a doorman at the Comedy Store. Carlos took him on the road, introduced him to his agent, bought him a car, and was there with money when Bobby could not pay rent. Bobby has always appreciated that. On the road, though, he found it odd that Carlos never had a notebook. Comics riff and write things down. Bobby will do a new-joke night because he is too scared to try material in front of a packed room. Carlos never did that, and he had hours of material, a lot of it derivative. He would hear a bit, change it to Mexican, keep the premise too similar. If Paul Mooney had a joke about Black people, the rewritten version was still too close. There are examples on the internet that are hard to deny.

When the scandal hit, it was the Titanic. Bobby was going to sink with Carlos or survive. He made the hard call and cut ties. Over the years he has felt guilty. He still wanted to help Carlos find another route, so he had him on the podcast. It did not go the way Bobby wanted. He has always believed the healthy move was a broad apology: I stole, I am sorry, here is why, I am a different guy now. It never happened that way. Bobby thinks ego is in the way. There are probably jokes Carlos knows in his heart that he wrote, so he fights every point instead of apologizing for all of it. He will always make money. He will never be what he should have been. He is a crusher, a powerful performer, he can act, he has the skill set. He went about it the wrong way, and that is sad. Bobby still loves him, and will always thank him. Asked if there is still room in his heart, he says he has room in his heart for a lot of people. Then, because the air has gotten heavy, he adds Hitler.

The origin is almost accidental. Bobby's friend David Choe had a podcast, *dvdasa*, and used to have Bobby on. Khalyla started appearing too. When that show ended she said let's start our own. He said nah, it is not going to work. She said fine, she would do it on her own, bought the equipment, and recorded in their Hollywood condo. She did about three episodes alone. One day the door to the podcast room was open. He looked over and she was slumped at the table with the mic. He walked in and said all right, let's just do one. The chemistry was immediate. He already knew she could do it from *dvdasa*. What she has, he says, is the old improv rule: add information. Fill the dead space with something, even if you do not know where it goes. Mid-conversation he had asked whether Lex grew up in Russia or Ukraine for exactly that reason, a toss into the gap to see where it went.

Lex has had guests who do not add information. Jocko Willink answered long meandering questions with viking yes-or-no, and Lex kept filling the space Bobby-style instead of taking the gift of silence. The missing piece is not data. It is chemistry, the first-date work of actually listening, yes-anding, having fun. Ego kills it: I am too important for this. A lot of Lex's interviews are technical, physics or robotics or biology, where you can still dump information with no spark. He has learned that if he is excited, they get excited, and that he is not allowed a bored face even though his face naturally looks bored. Bobby looks at the crow's feet and says that is why Lex is not boring. Crow's feet mean you smile. He does not trust white dudes without them. Women talk to him about Botox and hating wrinkles. That, he says, is the magic.

Lex says *TigerBelly* has a Wes Anderson quality, something like *The Life Aquatic*, not just good but specific. Bobby had never thought about it. It is just who he is. His houses have always looked like that. He collects designer toys and weird artwork. Instead of store-bought wallpaper he will get an artist's permission and turn the art into wallpaper. He would put Lex's face on a gigantic wall if Lex said yes, which Lex does. He does not overthink segments. He shows up, keeps his mind open, adds information, tries to be himself. He was so nervous before this taping that he farted in Lex's bathroom. He had watched the Mark Normand episode and the Giannis episode to get the tone. The night before, Khalyla looked at him and said just show up.

Oliver Stone, Lex mentions, asked how many listeners the show gets. Lex tries not to look. He uses browser extensions that hide view counts, because he has seen numbers destroy people. They stop thinking creatively. They feel bad when something they love does not get the attention they thought it should. Great work can be ignored and still be great. Bobby quotes the old saying: never live in the results. For the first couple of years *TigerBelly* made no real money, side money, enough for shoes once a month. His career was still in the box. The show was just something to do with his girlfriend, creatively, and it happened to change his life. He still does not do it for the numbers. He does it because it is fun.

Lex asks what Bobby loves about George Kimmel, his producer. Bobby has not said this in public. When it comes to money and responsibility, he trusts George completely, finances, tech, merch, all of it, which is rare. He also knows George's heart. The other day Bobby had a wooden piece made by a Native artist and could not hang it; George said he had it. There is a part of Bobby, probably wrong, that feels he kind of made him. They met at Maker Studios, where George was a producer. When George left, he came to them. He was not a podcast producer then. Now he has a company, a roster, employees, a real business, and Bobby feels he had a lot to do with it. Competence and a good heart, both.

Gilbert is a godsend too. Bobby asks whether the universe gives you certain things at the right moment, or whether it is chaos. Lex believes in a kind of karma: if you put love out, doors open, waiting. Not everything is billiard balls you have to fight for. Be decent, and some opportunities arrive on time. Gilbert showed up at a fight-night at Bobby's house, brought by a friend, right as *TigerBelly* was starting. They did not have an engineer. That night Gilbert said he knew how to do it. If they had not met him then, the show would be different. Bobby believes they met for a reason. Lex buys that for love more than for hiring. Artists thrive in that chaos, diving in without a rigorous search. Startups and engineering, he says, need more selection. Then he notes the other famous version: Jamie Vernon just walked up to Joe Rogan.

It is not that cool people automatically stick. Before Andrew Santino, twelve people had asked Bobby to do a podcast with them. He did not want to. With Andrew it happened organically, as if it were meant to. They are polar opposites in energy. Santino is more aggressive; Bobby responds well to alpha males, more of a follower, more sensitive, though in some areas of his life he is the alpha. They knew instinctively that the chemistry worked. Style, too, felt like a given. Lex then hands him absolute power. Dictator of Earth, violence and sex included. Bobby would not take it. Even now there are things he has the power to do and does not, because of morals he is uncomfortable violating. No wars, he says, then admits an uprising would have to be quelled, which is how it starts. He would give people food and shelter and still could not please everyone. On abortion he thinks men should not have a voice, the way white men should not write laws for Koreans, so as dictator he would make it legal everywhere, and the people who disagree would rise up. He does not want the job.

Lex would not take it either. He does not trust his own mind under power. Control is freedom and burden. Ego flares. The less pleasant parts of your nature come up. Both men have tempers, and both feel shame and regret, sometimes during the blowup. Underneath, Lex tries to keep love and respect audible, but absolute power distorts your sense of right and wrong and makes you distrust the inner circle, even a spouse, even lifelong friends. Often you are right to suspect them, because they change too. A bunch of people in Hitler's inner circle, Lex says, betrayed him at the end in search of their own power. Bobby does not want to live like that.

Lex fires the ridiculous questions. If Bobby could be someone else for a day, someone alive he has not met, he would be a pop star, Harry Styles, just to walk the Beverly Center or Coachella and feel that specific kind of attention. Not a restaurant table. He can get that as Bobby Lee. He wants to know how easy it would be to walk up to the hottest person at Coachella and start making out. As Bobby Lee, no. If he were the last person on Earth, with no predators, he would find a place near grocery stores, then go to San Marcos or Vista, where the RealDoll factory is, take about six dolls plus the accessories because he would get lonely and would not be monogamous with one, and then wait for the electricity to run out. He does not know how to turn the grid back on. He never learned.

Would he rather lose all old memories or never make new ones? He cannot lose the memories. They make him who he is. But never making new ones is a nightmare Lex has just invented. Either way it is a kind of death. Lex is afraid to die. He thinks about it every day, meditates on mortality. The unknown is terrifying, and his best guess is something like nothingness, the infinity of nothingness. Bobby brings up Ram Dass: death is like removing a tight shoe, a release. Lex thinks that may be the feeling of dying. The existential part is different. Your career will be forgotten. All you have is a few moments of joy and a few of trauma. You are wasting one of them today, talking to me, Lex says, then a couple hundred more podcasts, then you will be dead. Bobby does not buy the waste. He walked through a little fear today. He is talking to a science guy, the first scientist he has ever talked to. There was a connection, he says, not in a gay way, except in certain circumstances, last two people on Earth, or if someone put a gun to his head.

Last question: the meaning of life. Why are we here? Does any of it make sense? What Bobby likes about life is the same thing they said about death. There is mystery. There is wonderment. He walks outside, looks at trees, at buildings people made, at the sky, and he does not completely comprehend what is going on. He is in awe of all of it. He does not have answers. That, he thinks, is the meaning: to be in awe of it, and of the wonder of it all. Open your eyes to it while we are still here. Lex calls it a huge honor to meet him, and an honor that Bobby would even consider blowing him under the correct circumstances. Bobby says Lex would do the same, and that this is the definition of love. Then he thanks him, and Lex leaves the listener with Kurt Vonnegut: laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, and Vonnegut prefers to laugh, since there is less cleaning up afterward.