Comedy Central Founder Art Bell on Creativity, Business, and Leadership

Living a life in full is a conversation you always wanted to have with that person who gave an amazing TED Talk or the author of one of your favorite books, or that inspirational Olympian you always wanted to know more about. It's graduate level conversations with those making a difference in the world and in the lives of others. This show brings you new ideas and approaches so that you can live a life in full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout and I hope you enjoy this episode. This episode is brought to you by the new fellowship and certificate programs now being offered by the center for Global Initiatives. As you may know, the center is an all volunteer organization and the same is true for the faculty in these programs. So all the tuition goes to support the work of the Center. It has always been our ethos to open source humanitarian intervention and these programs use the same approach in that all the materials we use are freely available all the time to anyone, everywhere, even if you don't take a course. We have built a world class faculty and contracts with other universities, medical schools and partnered NGOs. There are two fellowship tracks, one for those wishing to start their own nonprofit or non governmental organization and one for those seeking mentorship for career development and advancement and humanitarian work. Our initial certificate programs include humanitarian intervention, social entrepreneurship and global health practice. Please consider taking a world class masterclass with us. Visit alifeinfull.org and click on the CourseWorks tab to learn more. Thanks. Welcome to another episode of Living a Life in Full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout. Art Bell is a writer and former media executive known for creating, building and managing successful cable television channels. He was educated at Swarthmore, the University of Michigan, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He started at HBO as director of the new Business development and in 1988 founded the Comedy Channel, which became Comedy Central. He then served as Vice President for Programming and Marketing for Comedy Central, which became the incubator for talents such as Martha B, Stephen Colbert, Steve Kra, Burrell, and where Art discovered Bill Maher and Jon Stewart. He worked with other notables such as Dennis Miller, all with various interesting and south park esque experiences that I know we'll be talking about today. He moved to Court TV as President and Chief Operating Officer and was, easy for me to say, responsible for the operation of all aspects of the channel during a turnaround period until its sale to Turner Networks in 2006, which was one of the most successful brand evolutions in cable television, Art was a founding partner of Scalar Media Partners and handled a range of talent and clients, including Panasonic, Epix, AARP A&E television, and UnitedHealth on media strategy and building corporate alliances. He's also founded Bell Media and currently authored his and recently authored Sorry, his memoir, Constant Comedy. How I Started Comedy Central and Lost My Sense of Humor, which we'll discuss in detail in this episode. Art, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me.

You bet. I know we'll talk a lot about your life and your career when we get to your book, but as for context, could you start by taking us back maybe to your early days as a. As a journalist and a publisher of your underground newspaper?

Okay. We're were jetting back to my high school career, and I entered high school with a great love of comedy and also satire. I had just read Jonathan Swift A Modest Proposal, and I thought, you know what? That guy was very powerful. He wrote a very funny essay and got people to really pay attention to a problem that was going on. Why don't I try and do something like that in high school? So I started with a couple of other guys, an underground paper called the Tongue. And the Tongue was really about a satirical look at what was going on at our high school. And we took apart whatever we had to things like in school suspension, which we thought was hilarious at the time because, you know, putting a jail in high school seemed redundant to us a little bit.

Very meta.

Yeah, exactly. And we had a good time. We. We did get in a little bit of trouble once in a while, but for the most part, the students in the administration embraced us as kind of like the, you know, the guys who were telling the real story.

That's great.

Wow.

Was it scary to do that? Or any calls to the parents or principal's office?

You know, I look back on it and wonder why I wasn't more scared. Yeah, we got called on the carpet a couple of times, a little bit for language, although our language wasn't. It wasn't foul language so much, but we did talk about sort of the adolescent sexual experience. Not in any glowing detail, but those days acknowledging that it existed on paper was, you know, like an eyebrow raising undertaking. Yeah, so there was that. My parents also didn't know whether to be incredibly proud or slightly embarrassed about the whole thing. But I will say this, it was my first real sort of writing experience where other people were reading. You know, we all write for. In school, for our teachers mostly, but this was a case where I was writing for my friends and for students and teachers and the administration and just anybody who was reading it, and that was a new and very exciting experience for me.

That's great. I think that's very brave. I've just actually submitted a journal article, which isn't anything, you know, close to submission to the tongue, I'm sure. But I joke with my wife that, you know, I never show her anything in advance until it's published, because she will just, you know, rip it to shreds and, you know, it'll come back, you know, just bleeding in red ink. So I think it's a very. I appreciate the. The fact of, you know, wanting to get your story out there and being able to do that. And I'm impressed with being able to, you know, have the moxie to do that. You know, even way back in high school, I would have been way too inhibited to do that. So from high school was Swarthmore, and then you went back and forth to U of M. Is that right? Why is that right? And why was that?

Yeah, that is right. Actually, at the end of my sophomore year, it's a little bit of a complicated story. I'll simplify it. I had fallen in love with economics, and I know that sounds kind of crazy, given that I started with a great love of English literature and. And satire and comedy in general. But along the way, I took economics courses, fell in love with economics, and decided to be an economics major at the end of my sophomore year. Now, Swarthmore College had two tracks. One was called Honors, and one was called Course. Honors was a seminar track, and you sort of had to be invited, and course was just like, you know, classes the way everybody else took classes. And so I got invited to honors Economics, and I said, you know what? No, thanks. I kind of like classroom learning. That works pretty well for me, and I don't particularly care to take it. So they said, well, you don't really have a choice. What do you mean, I don't have a choice? And so I signed up for course and listed all my courses, and I went to my mailbox the next day or something, and there it was that I was enrolled in all these honors seminars. And I'm like, okay, this is getting ridiculous. And so I went to talk to these people, and it turns out that the one thing I did want to take that was given only in honors was econometrics. And on top of that, the econometrics professor wasn't there that semester. I said, you know, this is just going in the wrong direction. So I took a look at the book that they used for econometrics in the seminar. And it was written by a guy named Jan Kamenta, and he was listed as someone affiliated with University of Michigan. So I went back and I got on the payphone, because, as you know, that was the only way to communicate in those days.

Right.

And I called University of Michigan, and I said, okay, look, is. Is Kamenta there? Yes. Is he in the economics department? Yes. Does he teach undergraduates? Yes. Can I come and take classes with him? And they said, who is this? And I said, look, I told them my name, and they said, what's your grade point average? And I told them, and we talked for one. They said, yeah, sounds like you'd probably be a fine transfer applicant. So I, you know, applied for transfer, and two weeks later, I was in.

Wow.

And I reported to my parents after that that I was going to University of Michigan, which, you know, they. Again, you know, it's not like now where you consult a lot. I mean, I have kids, and they consult a lot with their parents about almost everything. But here I was sort of making a relatively big move with lots of consequences, financial and otherwise, and I did not consult with my parents. I just kind of surprised them. But they were like, okay, anything you think is a good idea, we think is a good idea. So they said, fine. And I drove out to University of Michigan the next semester by myself in a car with no radio. Took me about 10 hours.

Oh, golly.

I know. We're back to your question about the tongue, which was like, weren't you a little bit scared? Yeah, I must have been, But I just don't recall being that anxious about it at the time. I think I was. I don't know. Are you full of yourself in college in a way that you never are again?

Right. Relatively invincible, I suppose. And this is what you wanted to do, so that's motivating.

I was definitely directed. Anyway, so I pull into the University of Michigan, and I didn't know where I was going. And I pulled up to some people who seemed to be having a barbecue, and I said, hey, I'm new here. Can you tell me where, you know, this dorm is? And they said, yeah, where'd you come from? I said, well, I just drove in from New Jersey. Oh, man, you must be tired. Come on up. Have a beer with us. And I thought to myself, okay. I just landed at the right university, and I had a terrific time, not only socially, but academically. It was a tremendous year.

Wow.

And I did take a class with Kimenta, and he was a terrific influence on me. Very, very, very important to what I did later, which was becoming an economist. He really. He really was a role model for me.

That was the kind of the germ of that seed, I suppose.

So, yeah.

And then did that. The trajectory of that then, you know, back to New Jersey and then to Penn. Did you go straight to graduate school or. Tell us. Tell us about that transition.

No, I went back to Swarthmore College and. And finished my degree there and got an offer right out of school to be an economist at a consulting firm in Washington, dc. And I just thought, man, how cool is that? Now remember, you know, what I have been doing in college was a lot of comedy. I did a lot of sketch comedy. I did some writing. You know, comedy was really kind of in the background. And my best friend at the end of our senior year said, look, I'm going out to la. I'm going to be a writer. And I said, are you kidding? You know, that's almost impossible. And the reason I say that is because I grew up with my parents telling me, you can never make a living in the arts or writing or television or film, because those are the things I was interested in. And I guess as worldly as I'd become, by the time I got to college, I still had that lingering feeling that they were right, that you couldn't actually make a living in the arts or television or film. So he went to la. His name is Michael Whitehorn. And I went to Washington, D.C. where I became a consultant. And that was a really exciting time for me, I have to say, Chris, because I got to work with the smartest people I've ever worked with in my life at this consulting firm. Yeah, I know. Crazy, right? And I was smart in those days, too. It's been kind of a downhill trajectory since then, but. And even though I didn't really know what I was doing the first, probably six months, I did find that I was relatively good at problem solving. And that's what consulting was, dealing with other people's thorny problems, including the federal governments. And we did, you know, we were making models of the economy, the energy economy, for the Department of Energy. And we were exploring things with the EPA regulations that they were doing, economic impacts of regulations and. And also working for the private sector. That was my first look at how companies worked, because we were working on a project where two companies were putting together the very first gas plant.

Wow.

In America. Yeah. And they were vying for federal money. And we wrote up the proposal, and I was responsible for the economic and financial part of that proposal.

Wow. And this is straight out of undergrad.

Yeah. It was a great opportunity.

It sounds very heady. Wow.

The idea that I was working with these guys and that was a very interesting project, and I got to actually deal with the president of these companies. And I remember being in the room with the president of one of the companies and the CEO, and. And he was talking about something and he says, okay, so what does the kid think? And I realized he was referencing me. I was the kid in the room. And they really wanted to know what I thought about something. And that was just. That was just a. You're right. It was a very heady moment, but I was having the time of my life.

Wow. So that's going well. But that didn't continue on. What caused the turn in the road?

Well, I guess it was really not so much my short attention span, but more like a desire to always try something else. Or I used to call it changing the channel, like, okay, let's do something completely different. And I came to that conclusion one day while I was reading a copy of Cold Weekly because I was working on, I don't know, some coal transportation problems or something.

A little different than the tongue, huh?

Yeah, exactly. A long way from. And I said to myself, you know what? I don't think I can do this for the next 30 or 40 years. Maybe I should try something else. And that's. That's why I changed the channel. And I decided the best way to do that was to go back to school and go to. Go to graduate school. So I applied to Wharton grad and got in, and that's what I did.

Wow. So is there a parallel? You were involved with the Wharton Follies? Was that like, versus the Harvard Lampoon or what was that experience like? Was that getting a little bit, you know, best of both worlds?

The Wharton Follies was a gift to me, I think, because I went to Wharton and on day one, I asked somebody, so what do people like me do? I mean, you know, I'm here. I don't know what I'm going to end up doing, but I'm interested in the arts and performance and comedy and all that kind of stuff. I had done that in college. It's sort of like a club or something. And they said, no, no, there's not really any clubs, but there is this thing called the Warden Follies that's put on by the students every year. It's a satirical musical comedy review, and it's pretty good. So why don't you go visit with them? So I did. And it turns out, you know, you mentioned Harvard. It turns out there were a lot of people from the Lampoon and the Harvard Hasty Pudding show, which is, you know, that's a very famous performance as well. And, and also a lot of people from Broadway and who were professional choreographers and dancers and artists and stuff. And they had come back to Warden, they had come to Wharton to get out of it. They wanted to get out of the entertainment business and find their way to Wall street. And I wanted to sort of go the other way.

Wow.

Very interesting. But the point is, I had the first year a terrific time. I was a performer. I wrote a little bit, but the second year, I wrote the entire show.

Wow.

Yeah. The lyrics to the music, you know, I had help, obviously I had some writers under me, but I was, I was a head writer.

Gosh.

And it was funny and it reminded my, it reminded me how much I enjoyed comedy. And it also showed me that once again I could write comedy and I could get lots of people to pay attention and laugh. And it was a big success. And that was real positive reinforcement for me to go into the television business.

I can imagine. I think the, like we were talking about, you know, to me the just putting yourself out there in the written word is such a potentially anxiety producing thing if it, you know, if it falls flat or, you know, you get more criticism than bouquets. But then to also to be funny, you know, I think it's just sort of like that aspect, you know, dialed up to 11. So, and that's really kind of how you and I got together was around your, your new book, Constant Comedy. And that the fact that it's a memoir, it's, it's also a little bit of a educational primer on kind of, you know, the, a circuitous route of the, you know, I love your, like, your next book should be called Changing Channels or something because it's so relevant to these kinds of things. But before we go into a deep dive of that, I want to say a little bit about what other people have said about it. You're friend Michael Whitehorn, who has gone on to become creator and executive producer of the King of Queens, said, as comedy writers know, the rarest of all creatures is the comedy exec who's actually funny. Art Bell is funny as hell. He understands comedy and that's why Comedy Central was born and why it thrived. Constant Comedy is a great fun read. Dan Lyons, who's a New York Times best selling author of Disrupted Said about it. Constant Comedy is the funniest behind the scenes memoir I've ever read. Full of crazy characters, plot twists and suspense, it's a story of how Art Bell built Comedy Central into One of cable TV's most successful channels, which meant dealing with insane comedians and even more insane executives in a rough and tumble workplace. Somehow he made it all work. And Jerry Zucker, co writer and director of Airplane, co writer of the Naked Gun and director of Ghost, said Constant Comedy is an incredibly fun read about the art of silliness struggling to survive in the corporate world. Or is it about a corporation struggling to survive in the world of silliness? Either way, it's a very funny book about an amazing piece of comedy history. So congratulations, Art. I mean, I have to agree. I really think it's a great book for people who haven't picked it up yet and I highly recommend it. It interweaves and you can tell the story better, but as a summary, it interweaves your personal as well as what you've already mentioned this morning about your love of comedy and the experiences that you had along the way. And I am oftentimes condemned to be corny. And this may sound corny, but I really did find it a page turner. There are some spots where it's sort of like these things are building up and it's like, wait a minute, this is kind of surprising. It's like I have to go and turn the page and get out to the next part and then would have this very pleasant sort of Easter egg of, you know, then it's like a laugh out loud, funny, you know, circumstance. I definitely want to get to Dennis Miller and things like that that you talk about. But I think that's a really rare combination for an author to pull off. I mean, I've, we were talking before we hit record about, you know, a lot of the guests are also authors. And you know, this is really the first book that I've been able to enjoy that that has these kind of the reality that it's a memoir, the twists and turns of oh my gosh, what's he going to do next? But then also kind of the, ah, you know, the payoff of the comic relief of and to know that it's not just, you know, made up, that it's actually what you experience. So bravo, first of all. And what was it that spurred you to write it? I'm so glad you did and others are too. But tell us about it and what spurred you to put pen to ink?

Well, truthfully I didn't set out to write a book or a memoir or even about Comedy Central. I had pretty much finished up with my corporate life, and I was closing out most of my consulting gigs and happy to do so. You know, again, we talked about the fact that I like to change channels, so I figured I was ready to change the channel again, and I decided to write. And my wife. You mentioned your wife and your relationship with her and your writing. My wife has been very supportive of me in almost everything I've done, I have to say. And she was instrumental. She said, look, if you're going to write, you might want to take some classes. She said, I know you're a good writer. You've written a lot of stuff in your life, but why don't you take a memoir class? Because that's a good place to start writing. And I thought, yeah, that's a good idea. So I went to Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute, which was a terrific place. Lots of published authors teaching, teaching classes. And I took a memoir course and started writing about my childhood, basically.

Wow.

And I have to say, Chris, I mean, I like saying this to people because teachers and professors in my life have been so influential and have made such a difference. I mean, right down to, like, you know, you take a tennis lesson with a great tennis teacher and suddenly w. I just learned so much stuff I didn't know, and I just got better in the course of an hour to writing, where I was amazed at how much I didn't know about how to write and how much you can learn about writing. It's like anything else. Yeah, there's talent involved, and yes, it's an art, but there's also craft, and you could learn craft. And the idea that you can get feedback on your writing from people who understand writing is invaluable if you want to write anything. I think that's my experience and I'm passing it along. But I started writing memoir, and I started writing stories about my childhood and found I really enjoyed it. One day I wrote a story about something that happened at Comedy Central, and everybody in the class kind of looked up and said, oh, we didn't know you did that you had anything to do with Comedy Central. And that was kind of a fun story. Yeah, why don't you write more of those?

Oh.

And I was instantly sort of taken aback and said, wait a second. I just wrote 150,000 words on my childhood. I didn't get that kind of reaction.

Now you tell me.

Yeah, not only now you tell me, but you Know, I was unclear about what the draw was. Was it just the idea that it was a comedy channel or was it really something special I'd written? But I did. I took their advice, I took the teacher's advice and I wrote some more stuff about Comedy Central and found out that I had lots of funny stories, lots of great stories to tell and also lots of important stories to tell. And I say important because I realized that as I was writing these stories that Comedy Central, that whole experience was probably the greatest business adventure of my life. Mostly because I was young and inexperienced and thrown into it, and mostly because it was really a crazy thing to do. Looking back, you know, you talk about my, my doing things. Wasn't I scared? Wasn't I concerned that I fail and wasn't. Yes, it was all those things. And I actually talk about those things a bit or a lot in the book, but I did it and I think it was an undertaking worth talking about. So that's why I ended up after several stories, I said, you know what? This could be a book.

I'm so glad because I think part of the draw is that Comedy Central is in the vocabulary of our culture and it's kind of become this bit of an icon. I mean, it was certainly a pioneering kind of effort. And you never stop to think, or I, as you know, John Q. Public never stopped to think about, you know. Well, didn't it just, you know, wasn't it just born this way? Didn't it just, you know, someone had an idea and 10 minutes later, you know, it was in production and, you know, on to the next thing and to be able to have that behind the curtain view of, you know, the ups and downs of it, you know, and being able to learn from that, just not only from a. Isn't this fascinating almost kind of like a, you know, documentarian kind of thing of, here's how this happened. But then also from the, you know, the light heartedness of how you turn a phrase in the book, it makes it just, you know, all the more, you know, engaging and wanting to learn more and I guess maybe let's start to deconstruct this a little bit. How do you go from coal forecasting to CBS and then on to hbo?

Well, that's an interesting story too. When I came out of business school, I applied to a number of places, number of film companies and television companies and didn't get a job right off the bat. In those days, they weren't looking to Wharton for television executives.

Sure. Yeah, right.

And all my friends Were going off to consulting firms and investment banks and saying, what the heck are you doing? And I said, look, I'm going to just hold out for a job in the television business. And I finally got an offer from CBS to go into their television stations division as a financial analyst, which was not really what I wanted to do. But you know what? I figured if I wanted to be in the television industry, I was going to have to start somewhere. And I took a job that paid roughly half of what I was making as an economist when I left the consulting firm in Washington. And I remember my father calling and saying, okay, now how's this going to work exactly? You just spent two years and lots of money to get a job that pays half as much. I said, it'll work out, dad. You know, just trust me. I won't be in this business and I gotta do it. So I spent about a year at cbs, and I found CBS was not really my kind of place. I mean, I did learn some stuff there, but it was the kind of place where I was working on a report for maybe 10 hours a week, a financial report. And one day I went around and I asked people who were on the distribution list what they got out of the report. And they said, well, we don't read it. We just basically throw it away.

Great.

It's funny now, but it wasn't very funny to me. And I went to my boss and she directed me to her boss, who was the head of the department. And I said. I told her the story, and she said, well, look, we've been doing the report that way for seven years, and we're going to continue to do the report that way.

Wow.

But thanks for dropping by. And I thought, you know, this is not going to be a place where I thrive because people don't really listen to what I have to say in any serious way. So, as luck would have it, somebody I had worked with at CBS at my level, went to hbo, got a job at hbo, and called me up and said, you know what? They're looking for somebody to do subscriber forecasting here. And you're the only guy in the whole business I ever met who knew anything about econometric forecasting. Maybe you should apply for this job. So I said, great. I went over, applied for the job and got the job. It was also about the last thing I wanted to do at hbo. However, HBO was a very small company by comparison to CBS. And also, you got to remember HBO. This is the mid-80s. HBO was the cool place to work HBO was like Netflix. HBO was changing the way people watch television. And that was what they said. That's what they were walking around the hall saying. We are changing television and very exciting place to work.

Yeah.

And I was glad to be there.

It must have been a heady time. Did you. Were there concerns, though, that you would then be kind of. Well, here we go again. I'm just, you know, doing econometrics, but, you know, at a different place. Even though it's, you know, got potential and Hetty, or how. Tell us about how you, you know, where did the kernel of the idea of doing comedy and what was currently going on at HBO at the time that you then were pitching your ideas?

Well, let's start with where the idea for the comedy network actually came from. When I was working on the Follies, I reminded myself how much I loved comedy. And when I was applying for a job, it was a time when there were new cable channels popping up. You know, all sports channel, ESPN had just started, and there was all news, ultimately. And I was watching these. Allmusic, mtv. I was watching these channels come along and saying, why is there no All Comedy Network? To me, that was the craziest thing I'd ever seen, that nobody had started it. And I really expected someone to start it any minute. But given that they didn't, I just took a job at CBS and then went over to hbo, all the while thinking about a comedy network and how much fun it would be and how much I'd enjoy working at it and how much I think it would have to offer the world. So getting to HBO was important because of two things. One was a small company. I was much closer to the product. The product being television. You know, I was working at cbs. There were thousands of people there. I never even saw anybody associated with programming.

Sure.

But at hbo, you know, you're in the. You're in the cafeteria eating with the people who are, you know, in charge of the comedy specials. To me, that was a better place to be right off the bat, regardless of what I was doing. And to a certain extent, I thanked my lucky stars that I got the job, because it was hard to get a job at hbo, as you can imagine.

Yeah.

But there I was relying on some skills and expertise that I developed elsewhere. And I thought, how cool is that? You know, I get to come in, and if I. If I do a good job and make an impression, maybe I can find my way to programming or convince somebody that comedy is a good idea, Comedy channel's a good idea. And that's how I went into it.

Wow. So the foot in the door then. And maybe even the headiness of quasi startup and the fact that you have that kind of, you know, not a huge org chart to be able to get your voice heard, so it seems. Art. I'm picking up a theme here of like all these different kinds of things that, you know, seem like they would be anxiety producing or, you know, I'm not worthy, you know, kind of thing, you know, what do I know? But how did you get the gumption up to pitch the idea, share that story and what that went to, how that played out?

Well, you know, I'll pause briefly to talk about the year or two I spent doing subscriber forecasting. I have to say that was the scariest job I ever had, really. And the reason it was the scariest job I ever had. Despite the fact that I knew about forecasting and econometrics and finance and all the other things, the entire company was looking at me. That's the way it felt in a way that I had never really experienced before. And the reason is because HBO had gotten into a little bit of Trouble. In the mid-80s, HBO had been doing extremely well. They were growing spectacularly. The number of subscribers was growing by leaps and bounds. And suddenly they hit what they called the wall. Their growth leveled off. And they didn't expect their growth to level off. They expected to grow exponentially for the next forever 10 years. I laugh because, you know, it's a common and obvious mistake that businesses can make.

Right?

But they made it. And when they hit the ball, they were really panicked. So when I say the entire company was looking at me to solve this problem like, what is going on? What, you know, tell us, tell us what the subscribers are going to be in the next few years and why it's not growing and what we should do about it. That sounded like a big ask, you know, for me.

Yeah.

And I didn't quite solve the problem. But I, I will say that I found out what was going on. It was very interesting. They were just sort of reading the data wrong. And what was happening was that they were growing every time they launched a new cable system. And in those days there were 5,000 individual cable systems, local systems. Every time they launched, their share of the market would immediately jump to 70% because everybody wanted to try HBO. And two months later it would fall back down to maybe 30%. But they didn't know that because they launched next door at the next cable channel and that went up to 70%. So their growth went through launching was really masking their decline in market share that was happening in the roller systems

because they weren't sustaining.

That's what was going on.

They weren't sustaining subscriber base. Yeah. Wow.

That's right. So they made some changes after that. But that's the insight I brought. It wasn't so much a brilliant econometric forecasting model as, hey, you guys, take a look at this. Anyway, I did a good job on that, as was the plan. And somebody noticed me and said, hey, we've got. We want you to come over to this new business development area because we're working on a new channel called Festival. And Festival was a channel that HBO decided to do that had no sex, violence or bad language on it. And the reason they wanted to do that is because they found that people not taking HBO didn't take it because, you know, HBO was putting uncut movies and uncut and uncensored comedy. And there were a lot of people who said, you know what? I have kids in the house. I don't want that in my home for religious reasons or whatever. And so HBO said, okay, problem solved. We'll just come up with a channel with no sex, violence and bad language, and we'll call it Festival. And they were in a test phase and they wanted me to be like, the market researcher. So I said, okay, that sounds great. Again, closer to the programming, because now I'm working with a couple of programmers who are trying to figure out what to put on this channel. And on the first day, I walked into my new boss's office and I said, you know what? We're selling entertainment here. How are we going to sell an entertainment channel based on no sex, violence and bad language? How is this going to work exactly? And she just said, shh, don't say that so loud. And that was. I didn't say it again. But let me tell you that the channel went. The channel did not work partly because it's hard to sell entertainment based on what? Or any product, for that matter, based on what it doesn't have. I mean, yeah, you know, we don't have sugar in our soda, but ultimately you have to say it tastes good.

Yeah.

And in the case of entertainment, you say, well, we don't have sex, violence and bad language, which is a lot of what people are looking for in their entertainment, but it really is good entertainment. And we just never made the point very well through our marketing. And the channel was not very successful, and it failed. And I think rightly so but along the way, I got to do market research all over the country, and I talked to hundreds and hundreds of people about how they watch television, what they use television for, what they got out of television. That was really a television education for me that I wouldn't have otherwise gotten.

And then was there the aspect of people looking like, on the one hand you were talking about, you know, why isn't there already like, you know, 247 comedy like there is for news in sports? Was that something also from doing that kind of public polling that people were looking for as well? Or how did that itch get scratched?

Well, you know what, I went rogue a little bit when I was doing the research. And whenever I got a chance, I talked to people about whether they thought a comedy network, an all comedy channel, was a good idea. And I learned a lot from them. And I wasn't supposed to be doing that, but I figured, hey, we're business development. And I didn't really tell anybody about it. I just kind of tucked that information in my back pocket for later use. When the festival went down, when the channel went down, I was without a job, essentially.

Oh, wow.

But they didn't fire me, you know, in those days, they didn't fire you so fast if they liked you. And they didn't fire me. They said, you know, stick around, we'll figure out something else to do. And it's funny because, you know, despite the fact that the department was called the new business development department, it really wasn't conceived or designed to develop new business. It was really just put together for this one purpose festival. And they were really going to disband the department.

Wow.

I know. And jumping ahead to the future, I saw many companies with new business development departments that just did not know what to do with, did not know how to use them to develop new businesses. But anyway, that's for later, maybe. But at that point I said, okay, well, I got this idea for a comedy network. I'm going to start. I'm going to try and see if anybody here is interested in, since I'm not doing anything else. So once again, I pulled myself together and I made an appointment with the head of programming at hbo, which was a little bit of a nutty thing to do given that I was not very high in the organization. And this woman, her name was Bridget, was one of the top executives. And she was considered a bit of a genius, you know, I mean, because programming, you know, she was putting together the great programming that was making HBO so successful. But she agreed to See me. Didn't know me, but she agreed to see me because it was a small company. And I walked into her office and I said, bridget, you know, I really think HBO should put together an all comedy channel, 24. 7 comedy. And she said, stop right there. That is the worst idea I've ever heard. And let me tell you why.

As long as it's the worst. Not the half worst. As long as it's the worst.

No, she said the worst. Well, you know, in her defense and in every. People in televisions, you know, are very. Can be very bombastic and opinionated. Sure.

Yeah.

For her to say the worst, I guess, you know, it sounds. It sounds strange, but, you know, she thought it was the worst at that moment.

Yeah.

And she said, look, here's why it's the worst idea. First of all, no comedian, no decent comedian would want to be on your channel. This channel. Number two, there's lots of comedy all over the dial. Number three, there's plenty of cable channels out there. What are there, 20 or 25? Who's gonna want more cable channels? Which, you know, looking back on it, is really the funniest part.

Right.

And she sent me packing. She just said, you know, thanks, but that's not a great idea. And. And I went back to my office pretty upset and crestfallen that she didn't jump at the chance. But I realized she was wrong. I pretty quickly came to the conclusion that she was wrong, that a comedy network was not a bad idea and somebody was going to do it. And that's when I went back to my office and said, okay, if HBO is going to reject this whole thing, I'm going to just try and get another job somewhere else.

Wow.

Maybe they'd like to. And I started putting my resume together, and along with my resume, I started writing up my idea for a comedy network, figuring I'd staple that to my resume and hopefully somebody would be interested in that and give me an interview. That's what I wanted at that point. And along the way, this was probably a few weeks later, as I'm working on this comedy network idea, my boss's boss happened by and said, what are you working on? And I showed because he knew I didn't have a job, so I wasn't supposed to be working on anything. So I showed him and he said, you know what? This is a really, really good idea. I think the chairman of HBO should see this.

Wow.

And I said, wow, that's great. I love the chairman to see this. He said, let's go we're gonna go to his office right now. And I said, right now? And he said, right now. And he walked me into the chairman's office. And let me tell you, the chairman of HBO at that point was named Michael Fuchs. He had just been named by the New York Times in a front page article in the New York Times Magazine as the most powerful man in Hollywood.

Oh, Art. Oh, my gosh.

He had a huge ego, a very scary guy. And he was the kind of guy, if I got in the elevator with Michael accidentally, I would break into a cold sweat because he, you know, he was the kind of guy who could, like, you know, wink at you, and your career was over. Meanwhile, I am being walked into his office. I don't have any presentation materials. I am completely unprepared. I don't have a pitch much more refined than I. Than I had tried with Bridget, which, of course, didn't go so well. And there I was, and I sat down and he listened. Michael listened. And after about 15 minutes, he asked some questions, and he said, okay, well, that sounds kind of interesting, actually. Why don't we do some research, do some financial analysis and. And come back to me with a presentation in a couple months and tell me if this is worth doing, and we'll make a decision.

Wow.

And that was it. That was how it's.

Wow, that is just incredible. So, again, it's just. It's being teed up and getting ready to go for the other. But I guess the thought process of saying, well, how would I pitch this if I'm packing my bags to go elsewhere? So you just have an amazing ability to kind of be grace under pressure and do these kinds of things, Art. So where does the story between you and Bill Maher being upset with you and you now having this idea for comedy, a comedy channel overlap, or what's the. What's the linear aspect of that in time?

Well, the first thing that happened, I mean, there was a. There was the meeting that Michael requested a couple months later, and the executives were all there, including Bridget, and they liked the presentation, and they said, okay, let's do this. And Michael said, I want it launched in six months. So we were faced with launching the channel in six months. Talk about a moment where you're both elated and terrified. Scared to death.

Yeah. Good news, bad news. Wow.

But we got down to work, and you mentioned earlier, Chris, the idea that people watching the channel now probably assume that it was always. That it was, you know, born fully formed, shot out of a cannon, brilliantly Successful, all these great comedians. That's so far from the truth. And that's one of the points I wanted to make with this book, that after we launched. First of all, launching was a process and a half. But after we launched and we called ourselves the Comedy Channel in those days, the first year was a disaster. There's no other way to put it. We came out of the gate, we were creamed by the press. They just said, it's not funny. The channel's a disaster. It's a mess. Michael Fuchs has laid an egg. What's HBO doing? I mean, we just got the whole thing. I think there was a little schadenfreude involved there because Michael had been so, you know, lauded as the most powerful man in Hollywood. And here he was after bragging about how great it was going to be, and here he was falling flat on his face. But we had. I went to work every day for the first year expecting that that was the day they were going to pull the plug.

Wow.

Yeah. And that was, that was a pretty tough way to live. And yeah, a lot of people ask me, you know, well, how'd you get through that? That sounded like a pretty tough period.

Right.

But I went back into my problem solving mode because every, every day I went to work and I said, okay, what can we do today? What can we do more of that's working and what can we do less of that's not working? How can we move this thing forward? And I really had to try and not ignore so much because I wanted the feedback, I wanted the input, but I had to really kind of push it ahead. And by that time, there's hundreds of people working on it, push it ahead by making the changes that I thought would make a difference and keep us in business. And that's what I did. And we found that stand up comedy was working a little bit better. So we started putting a little more stand up comedy on the network. We had basically a cult hit right from the beginning, and that was mystery science theater 3000, which has gone on for almost 30 years. That's.

Yeah, that's kind of a hallmark. That's. That's fantastic.

Yeah, and it's a great story. It came in the mail. We didn't, we didn't develop it. We were trying to develop a show like that. But as we were developing a show like that where comedians talked back to the television or the movies, it came in the mail. And I know we put the tape in and said, oh my gosh, this is so funny. And we got on a plane, went out to Minneapolis and signed those guys up immediately.

Wow. And that's become sort of a model for a lot of the very popular, you know, YouTube artists or comedians or whatever as well, too, with little, you know, dropped in excerpts or, you know, taking to task some. Something that somebody else has posted or done. So that's. That. That has had great longevity and just an evergreen kind of approach. So. But that's crazy. You just randomly got it in the mail from the folks doing it in Minneapolis. Huh? Were they doing it, like, on a local TV channel or what? What was going on with it was

the local UHF channel, and by their own telling was the worst television channel. Country. Perfect. And the guy who was the manager kind of said, like, well, you know, let's do whatever we want because nobody's watching. And they came up with this idea. Joel Hobson was the comedian who lived in Minneapolis, and he was a comedian of some note. You know, he had. He had been on Carson at that point, I think on the Johnny Carson show.

Okay.

And had done some writing, you know, on sitcom. So he wasn't a nobody. But the writing on that. He pulled some writers together. The writing on that was spectacular, even in the demo, even in the stuff they were doing for that channel. So by the time we saw it, it was pretty well developed. It was Joel and two puppets, Crow and Tom Servo, and they were a riot. But one important thing about that, Chris, is that that came to us with a note from Joel saying, hey, we hear you guys are starting a comedy channel. Is this something that would interest you? And to me, that was one of the first signs of success to me, even before we launched, because my vision of a comedy channel was that if it was successful, and I assumed it would be, then great, innovative comedy and comedians would find us, they'd come to us, they'd pitch us. We wouldn't have to go out there and look for everything.

That's great.

And here it was, example number one.

Wow.

Anyway, so the other thing that happened during the first year, which was very interesting, was that we got competition immediately after we announced that we were doing a comedy channel. This was six months before we launched. MTV Networks announced the next day, put out a press release.

Great.

Saying, yeah, we're gonna launch. We're gonna launch a comedy channel, too. And we're gonna call it, HA. The Comedy Network. Now, they hadn't really done any work on this. It's just that they figured if HBO was gonna start a comedy network, why should they let that Potential market. Go to hbo because, hey, nobody knew cable television as well as mtv. I mean, they had Nickelodeon, Nick at night, mtv. I mean, they knew what they were doing.

Yeah.

And had the resources to do more. So that was pretty scary. On the other hand, I thought, hey, you know, a year ago there were no comedy channels and everybody thought it was a stupid idea. Suddenly there's going to be two comedy channels and everybody thinks it's a great idea. So one year we've come a long way, but I didn't really want competition. And there it was.

So, so you have again, it's like this yin and yang kind of thing. You know, this, this, this Yahoo. We get to start the channel and we get it going and then, oh great, you know, now MTV's elbowing in, you know, into this area and that's, that's equally terrifying. So, so you, you've got really kind of a cachet of people that have become household names. I mean, we, I still want to circle back to the Bill Maher story. You know, you, you know, have some interesting experiences with Jon Stewart. So let's unpack some of those. Share, share what that was like back in the early days with these guys.

Jon Stewart started with Comedy Channel. From day one he was pretty much a baby comic. I mean, nobody knew he, who he was, although the HBO talent department had discovered him as somebody they thought was pretty good. So we started a show called Short Attention Span Theater that was hosted by Jon Stewart and another comedian, Patty Rossborough, very funny comedian. And the two of them hosted a show where they would, you know, do a little comedy. Just talking, you know, like a news team actually kind of, but you know, talking about comedy and then they throw the clips, funny clips that we were taking out of movies or stand up shows or funny television shows. And that was part of our, our secret to doing the channel cost effectively. We were getting clips out of shows for nothing because we were using them. And on a promotional basis we went to the studios, we went to the television companies and we said, hey, we want to put, we want to clip two or three minute pieces out of your shows or movies and we want to put them on in our shows and we will credit your movie or your television show and then people know to go watch it or rent it at the video store. In those days there were lots of video stores where you could rent, rent videos. That's so brilliant.

That is so brilliant. Thank you. You left off the part and we want to make fun of it.

Well, you know what, there was a Little bit of that. But, you know, again, some of these clips were funny.

They were on their own. Sure, yeah.

You know, think about your favorite comedy movie and then think about a funny moment from it or a funny scene. And there were just zillions of those. And we had the run of the movie and television world when we started.

That is brilliant.

We could do any movie, any television show, and they any stand up we wanted, because we had everybody's permission to do that, except I will throw in. Six weeks before we launched the Comedy Channel, the Directors Guild of America, who we had to have permission from, changed their mind. They said, we are not going to give you permission. Somebody on the board changed their mind where we are withdrawing our permission. So all those clips that we had done, we had produced and made ready for our launch. About 90% of them we couldn't use.

Oh, no. What did you do?

That was a terrifying moment for me. We went to plan B, and we didn't actually have a plan B, but I said at that moment, look, we're going to have to launch, we're going to have to figure this out. So we did the best we can with we could with the clips we had. We looked for more long form programming, movies and some television shows that we could license. And we scrambled is what we did.

Brilliant.

And that's ultimately, we got to where we wanted to go. But getting back to Jon Stewart, he was hosting the show with Patty Rosborough. And almost from the beginning, as I was watching Jon Stewart on television, I thought, this guy's good. You know, he's really funny, he's really good. You know, quick on his feet. He's. And he's also, he comes across as smart. But Patti Rosborough, who was also very funny, ended up not doing a lot of work other than laughing at what John was saying. So the decision was made and I sort of objected to it because I liked Patty. I thought they were good together, that Patty was going to go, that John was going to do this on his own because he was so good. Now, any other, any other performer, any other newscaster or anybody on television would have loved the idea that, okay, now I get to do this whole show by myself. That's great. Not John. When we fired Patty, he was incensed. He was indignant, and he threatened to quit.

Wow.

He said, you can't do that. Patty was my partner on the air. I am work. I was working with her. You can't just fire someone. Which was my favorite line of all time. Just fire someone. Just like that, you know, and somehow it came to me, art, you got to go down because Jon Stewart is threatening, but you got to go down the studio and talk to Jon and talk him off the ledge. And I did. I went down. I said, look, John, actually, you can fire someone like that. You're right. It's not a very nice thing to do. And you're also right that we probably should have done told you in advance or at least talked to you a little bit about it. So my apologies, but please stay. And essentially, that's what he did. He said, okay, I'll stay. But I recognized at that point that not only was he smart and funny, but he was, you know, he was truly empathic. You know, he truly cared about other people. And of course, that was the Jon Stewart who went on to do the Daily Show. And we all saw that empathy and brilliance that he brought to that show, which was the Daily Show.

Yeah. So that was genuine. That was a very authentic Jon Stewart then and continues today. That's great.

Yeah.

How about the authenticity of Bill Maher?

Well, what happened at the end of the year is we merged with ha, which was very disappointing to me. Another setback, I thought. I didn't even know if I was going to have a job.

Oh, boy.

But in fact, they took me and the. The other guy, my opposite number, the head programmer at HA and they put us in a room and they said, you guys figure out what the new channel is going to look like, and you have to rename it, because you can't call it ha, The Comedy Channel. So that's what we did. And the channel got off to a little bit of a rocky start. But we launched in April of 91, which, of course, makes this 30 years since the launch of Comedy Central. Victory. Yeah. It is a big anniversary. Yes. And we went on to do a number of shows, and one of the shows we did was with Bill Maher. Bill Maher pitched a show. He pitched it to me and my compatriot in programming, a guy named Mitch Semel, in a diner outside of la. And we didn't know Bill Maher. I certainly didn't know Bill Maher, although he had co hosted, he had substitute host on some shows for us. But he said, look, I want to do a show that's a talk show where people actually talk. Not when they talk about their books or their movies, but when we talk about real issues, real things. And I want it to be where people go up to the line and cross the line. We're going to get in trouble. I want to call it Politically Incorrect. And that's the show. And we said, great. Sounds great. Let's get in trouble. And we put the show on the air almost immediately with Bill Maher.

Wow.

And it got. It got some traction pretty quickly. It got some traction pretty quickly. I was very proud. But about six months into it, my boss, who was the president of the channel, called me, and he said, look, you know what? The guy who's running marketing is doing a terrible job. I want you to run marketing. I said, yeah, but I'm in programming. He said, I know, but you know what? That's stable for now. You're gonna run marketing. Now, I didn't know much about marketing, honestly, and I certainly had never run a marketing department, but there I was, thrown into it. I mean, I guess people. People said, hey, you could have quit, or you could have thrown a tantrum and said, you know, look, I started the channel. I'm not leaving programming. But that really didn't seem like one of the options. So I just said, okay, I'll take this on. And one of the first things I did is I did a campaign for Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect show with a new agency I'd hired. And I thought it was a great campaign. It was an outdoor campaign, and I showed the campaign to just about everybody except for Bill Maher. I showed it to producer. I showed it to the guys in programming. I showed it to my boss and the president. Everybody said, great campaign. So we ran the campaign. The reason I didn't show it to Bill Maher is because I knew Bill Maher by that time. And Bill would have said, whatever campaign you showed him, he would have said, that campaign stinks. You're not running that. So rather than making more of the head of programming, I said, all right. Everybody else likes a campaign. I'm running the campaign. So it's an actual campaign. And the day after it runs, I get a call, and my assistant says, bill Moore is on the phone. I said, okay. So I say, bill, how you doing? He said, art, I saw that campaign. It's embarrassing. It's the worst campaign I've ever seen. And you know what he said? If I did my job badly, you'd cancel my show, Right? So I think since you've done your job badly, I think you should be fired. So I have made some falls, and I am having you fired. And I was stunned. I had actually started to apologize before I got to the. Before he got to the I'm having you fired part, saying, you know, really, Bill, I probably should have showed it to you, but, you know, let's talk about it or something. But he basically said, you're, you know, I'm having you fired. And he hung up.

Wow.

Yeah, that was a bad moment for me.

So what. What does one do after you get that kind of a call?

Well, you call your boss and say, I just got a bad call from Bill Maher. You're probably going to get one, too. And he said, yeah, I did get a bad call from Bill Moore. He said, but don't worry, I'm not going to fire you. But he was, you know, remember, my boss was the only. Was not the only person who had control here. That was early days, and we had a very strong board. The board met four times a year, was made up of half MTV network guys from MTV networks and half from hbo. Michael Fuchs was on the board. Tom Freston, who was, you know, the head of MTV Networks, was on the board. These were very powerful people. You know, if Bill called them and said, I want this guy fired, things might have been. It might have been troublesome. And he may have, for all I know. But at the end of the day, I did not get fired.

Well, you also have. You're a very humble fellow, but you also have a even better into how that campaign went. Can you share that?

Yeah, that's. That's kind of like the ultimate revenge campaign story. Because what happened is I got a call from the agency, and the president of the agency said, hey, we got nominated for a really cool award, and we're invited to the dinner, and I'm inviting you to the dinner. I said, great. What are we nominated for? And he said, for the Bill Mark outdoor campaign. Best outdoor campaign. I said, you've got to be kidding me. Anything but that. Why couldn't we be nominated for something else? But anyway, I said, okay, so we're on the way to the award ceremony, and I'm sitting with the president. He says, guess who's hosting the awards show tonight? I said, who? He said, bill Maher. I said, oh, my God, don't even make this up. I said, if I wrote this in a book, I know. So there we are at the camp, you know, sitting at the dinner. Bill Maher is, you know, opening the envelopes and announcing the winners and everything, and we get the best outdoor campaign. Bill has no idea that our campaign's been nominated. And he starts reading off the list of nominees, and he says, and Comedy Central for Bill Maher as best outdoor camp. And he looks behind them because they were flashing behind him, you know, the campaign post, whatever. And he looks back and he looks at the audience. He said, now, that's advertising. Of course. He opens the envelope and we won. We won for Best outdoor.

That is.

And I just felt so good.

That is.

I just walked out. He walked out after, after, you know, and he walked past our table, and he didn't even say anything.

Oh, really? Oh, man. So crow on the menu for that evening. Wow.

Really?

So. So from that time at Comedy Central and then the merger with HA and MTV and all that, how did the. Because I also want to talk. I mean, this is ahead of time in the. In the point of your book, but I also. You've done a lot since then as well, too, and had some very interesting successes and leadership. Tell us about how Comedy Central kind of spun down for you and then how you made it over to Court tv.

Well, what happened to Comedy Central is something that happens in a lot of places, which is they brought in new management. My boss, as I said, was the president of the channel, and he'd been brought in right after the merger because he was a finance guy and he was not. The board did not love him. So when the channel started successful, they said, you know what? We need a programming guy as the head, not a finance guy. And they didn't want to promote any of us, obviously, so they brought in somebody else. The somebody else basically fired everybody and brought in his own team. And I was one of the people who was fired. So that's how I ended up leaving Comedy Central. And it was not a great day for me, I have to say, being fired from a company that I started. I remember saying to myself, what do you have to do to keep a job in the entertainment business? How about you start the channel? And the answer is no, that doesn't quite work either. And I felt very bad about it, but I left and I picked myself up, and luckily I had friends in the business, and somebody had made a call on my behalf to A and E and said, art just got fired. Do you have anything for them? And they hired me pretty quickly as a consultant working on some stuff. And that was a lifesaver. You know, that really was, because I was probably not going to be good at sitting around the house stewing for very long. Sure. But I did. I did also, along the way, talk to a lot of people, highly placed people in the industry, as was suggested by, you know, by. By some of my friends when I got fired. You know, go talk to Some people. And I ended up talking to somebody who was the head of a record company and had been in the entertainment industry a long time. Fairly young guy, though. And he said, you know, Art, if you don't get fired once in a while in this business, it means you're really not kind of doing anything interesting, important, or making noise and.

Good point.

It was the first thing that made me feel better about it. And looking back on it, it's kind of true. You know, I mean, I've gone. I've gone back to HBO years after I'd left, and I saw some of the people, same people there in the same jobs, and I scratched my head. I said, wow, how can it be? You know? And listen, with no offense to them, but how can you do that for 20 years, you know?

Yeah.

So, you know, again, it was nice to make my career exciting. But making your career exciting comes with ups and downs.

Right.

In a way that doesn't necessarily happen if you keep your head down and do your job.

Right. Well, I don't think it's the fabric. I don't think that's in your DNA, Art. I mean, my goodness, your history up to that point and doing things that you felt like you were following your heart and your creative instincts and your ability to back that up, I mean, that would not have been. In hindsight, I think it would have been a very unsatisfying way to spend the rest of your career there. And. And coming over to Court TV was also. Then you became a network president. Right. And you were then at the helm with a turnaround.

Right. I was brought in by the chairman, Henry Schleife, and he interviewed me for 20 minutes. I didn't know him and he didn't know me. I suspect Michael Fuchs suggested he talk to me. And Henry said to me, I don't know anything about cable television. You seem to know what you're doing, so you figure out how to make this channel a success, and I'll do everything else. And he hired me, and that was how it happened. Wow. So I know. And the channel was a failure at that point and had been started by a guy named Steve Brill, who was a journalist and a lawyer. And his vision of the channel was to put cameras in courtrooms and show trials 24 hours a day. Again, that was. That was in the old days of 24 hours a day of whatever you could think of.

Right.

But the 24 hours a day of trials wasn't working so well, partly because trials were held during the day. So at night, you were just repeating the trials, and you were competing at night against Prime Time Networking Fair, which, as you know, is very popular and got big audiences. So it was really creamed. And that's primetime is where you make your money.

Yeah.

So he didn't have any success. And the board, the owners, fired him. And they were gonna actually close the channel down, but they decided to give it one more shot, hired Henry Schleif. Henry hired me, and we had to figure out what to do with it. And the first thing I did was to say, we got to put a primetime schedule together. We can't show courtroom prime time, so we kept courtroom during the day. And by the way, this was my first introduction to journalism, and it was fascinating. Now, I didn't talk about the fact that when I got into comedy, I knew nothing about comedy. And I was constantly being told that by the comedy professionals who said, what do you know about comedy? It was a similar situation when I walked into Court tv, because I went down to the newsroom and there's, you know, 50 journalists sitting there, and these are guys and gals who had worked at the Times, the New York Times, and the Post, and, you know, and Time magazine and all these great organizations, and they were real hardcore journalists. And I walked in as a guy who had just been at Comedy Central for the last eight years.

Gosh, Art. Oh, man.

Looked like such a great match.

Yeah.

And I was the boss. So I really had to sort of work my way into their good graces. And I did. And I did learn a lot from them. I had to learn about journalism and. And news television and all of. All that that entailed. And it was a great experience. I mean, I loved learning about journalism. Remember, I did write for the Tongue in my high school years. Had that. That going for me.

But lean into that.

I really had a lot of regard for them. And also I learned a lot about what we ended up putting on the air, which was true crime documentaries, which are having a renaissance these days on HBO and Netflix and Amazon. But in those days, there was a little of that around, but mostly we were doing it. And it was fascinating. It was really fascinating to me. And I think one of the things that contributed to my being able to do all these kinds of different jobs is that I was able to get fascinated with whatever I was doing quickly and find the things I liked. And to a certain extent, it wasn't that hard because I said, we are going to turn core TV from a channel about courtroom to a channel about crime. And justice and so we can talk about crime. And I love, you know, like everybody else, I love the good mystery.

Yeah.

And that's what crime stories were. That's what these documentaries were. They were good mysteries. I got to know detectives. I got to know crime writers.

Wow.

I got to work with people who were absolutely fascinating. How fun and, and, and brilliant. So all in, when people said, well, how'd you go from comedy to Court tv? The answer was, well, it was kind of crazy the first couple of months, but I ended up loving it. I really did. I ended up loving it.

That's great. I think that's a great strategy, too, with being able to weigh in and compete with the primetime, too. You feel like that was maybe the turning point in terms of being able to get eyeballs on.

Yes. We had to listen. The way you make money in cable television in those days especially is either got paid by cable operators for carriage. They paid you 10 cents a sub, which they don't do very much now. And you got advertising money. I mean, that was the. And is still the model for cable television and for the networks. When I mentioned to the head of advertising at CORE TV that we were going to be a channel about crime and justice, the guy had a heart attack and fell off his chair. He said, you cannot say crime. You can't say the word crime to advertisers. They will not. They don't want to get anywhere near bad stuff. I said, you know what? We're going to make this work. We're going to figure out a way to make this work, because that's the way it's going to go. It's a great opportunity for us. Nobody else is doing this, and we know how to do this, and we will figure out how to do it. And what we did was we kind of dressed up crime a little bit by calling it forensic investigation. And that got followed by, as you know, by a lot of the networks.

Yeah.

We started. We started a show called Forensic Files, and all these forensic shows started showing up on the networks after that.

Right.

That's how we dressed up. We said, look, this is a science, the science of investigation. And we played up the science aspects. And we, you know, not. Not the fact that somebody was murdered. Right. But the fact that people had to. People had to get in there and make society safe again. And that's, That's. That's what mystery writers do. I mean, that's what crime writing is all about. Something goes wrong and the smart detectives and police, or whoever it is, have to Find out who did it to make it right, to make things right again.

That's great.

And that's what we did.

Yeah, that's great. I mean, it's like, you know, any kind of good story, you got to kind of start off with the corpse. You know, something, something bad has to happen in order to then have a story and have it be engaging and then to, you know, kind of contextualize it in the real world and with forensic sciences and investigation. That. I think that's very clever. And yeah, my gosh, it's ubiquitous now. I mean, in reruns and new things as well. So part of your story art, I mean, from the book and from the research that I've done about your career post book, even in the time with Comedy Central, you seem to have a knack. I mean, you're quite a good entrepreneur yourself, but you've also sort of had this intrapreneur aspect, aspect of being able to take creative ideas, learn how to package them, learn how to market them. Sometimes spontaneously, it sounds like, and other times, you know, with, with preparation or looking at, you know, how to repackage something. At Court tv, do you have any advice for listeners that would, you know, that maybe have, have that, you know, I know there's lots of people with, you know, the side gigs and stuff, side hustles, but for intrapreneurs, how, how does one get the, the gumption that you have to be able to like, what's it, What's a good way to pitch? How do they know when to. To time it? What suggestions would you have with understanding that, you know, listeners can be in a variety of different kinds of corporate settings or current situations. But do you have any takeaways that you might be able to offer from your experience?

Yes, yes, I do. I mentioned that starting new businesses, you know, and new business development areas and companies starting new businesses inside companies is a difficult thing to do, partly because companies sometimes have a hard time saying yes. They don't want to compete with themselves with a new product. They find it easier to say no because then they don't have to put any resources against something new and they don't have to take risks. So that's what people who are intrapreneurs or in new business development areas and companies are up against. Here's some suggestions. Number one, if you have an idea, talk to everybody about the idea. I'm not just talking about people at work. I'm talking about, you know, your friends, people you know at other, you know, in other companies, not Doing what you're doing. And that way you're going to get a lot of. That'll never work. You know, the first thing people always say is, well, yeah, it's a good idea and it's too expensive. Or it's, you know, you'll never get anybody to do that. Or. And what you do, what you get out of that whole process is you understand what the objections are. And when someone says it can't work because it's too expensive, first thing you do is you say, okay, now how can you do it more cheaply? And you start looking around for solutions to that problem. People often say, well, listen, if I talk about the project, everybody, you know, my idea to everybody, then somebody will steal it. That doesn't happen all that much, you know, I mean, again, people don't underestimate the competition. Somebody is going to show up and compete, but your idea is idiosyncratic to you. You know how you're going to do it, and you have to bank on that. Secondly, I always say that one of the missing ingredients is passion. Passion is very helpful when you're talking to anybody about anything. Sometimes it gets reduced to what's your elevator pitch? I don't like calling it an elevator pitch because unless you're able to jump up and down in the elevator and swing your arms wildly because you really have to convey the excitement that you feel. Feel. And the fact that you're willing to put everything on your law on the line for this project that you're. That you're pitching, including the possibility that you're going to fail, that it could be a failure personally. Remember, you know, you can pitch a great idea and then if it fails, that could be a big dent in your career, and you have to be okay with that. But I think passion is very important. And the third thing is vision. And you know, vision is another. Is another term that gets bandied about without people thinking too much about it. But you have to see what you have to pitch. Whatever you're pitching as something that is going to change the world. And if this changes the world, this is how it's going to change the world. So in 10 years, if this is successful, we will be X. And what I used to say is, when Comedy channel is successful, we will be the center of the comedy universe. Great comedy will find us. And that's really important to point that out. To point out that you are really talking about something big. You're not talking about a little side product here. You're talking about something big. What Happens whether, whether it becomes bigger or not, that's execution. But when you're pitching it, it's got to be big.

That's good. Well, Art, I think you also, I mean, you mentioned earlier that, you know, we're at the 30 year anniversary of the, you know, what is now Comedy Central. You have developed that. I mean, that's one of the things to say, like, you know, it did change the world. And I think also to a certain degree, you know, so obviously Court TV and as we've just been talking about has done that. I want to be cognizant of your generosity with your time, but there's a couple other things I want to kind of squeeze in real quick. Do you have a couple more moments for a few?

I have. I have time.

Great. Awesome. So is your. Is, you know, I've read your book. Is your book out or going to be coming out as an audiobook?

So many people have asked me that. Yes. The answer is yes, I am going to read it myself.

Excellent.

Just about to go into production on that. So I can't wait. I can't wait to read my book.

I know it's sort of like, I mean, in doing my research on you, you know, I've heard you speak other places. And in my head as I'm reading your book, I'm trying to make it in your voice. And I thought, you know, I'm going to get the audiobook afterwards too, just so I can hear you actually in your voice, tell these stories. I think that will be great fun. And you also, you. You very much are so involved in so many different, you know, cool things, Art. I mean, you're very much an inspiration that way, too. You've also launched your own podcast and you're a co host of a show called Constant Comedy. Tell us, tell us about that.

Yeah. You know, a friend of mine who's mentioned in the book, who was there at the beginning, Vinny Favale, called me and said, you know, it's 30th anniversary and comedy Central doesn't seem to be celebrating their own birthday. Which was odd to us because when we were in the business, you know, we took any anniversary we could as a way to show off.

Right.

So Vinny said, what can we do? And we decided we would do a podcast where we would talk to people who started in the old days, a comedy channel or Comedy Central, and find out what happened to them.

Wow.

Because we knew what happened. They became successful. They became really successful, and they're interesting people. And for a lot of them, Comedy Channel or Comedy Central, was their first job in television or their first job in comedy. So we started there. We talked. We've done about. I think we've got about 15 hours under our belt. We're starting to branch out a little bit. But we talked to, for example, Gail Berman, who started at Comedy Channel. That was her first job in television. She said she walked in, she didn't know what the camera was. And she went on to become, among other things, the head of Paramount Pictures, the head of Fox Broadcasting. I mean, she had just had a brilliant career, brilliant executive, and we had so much fun talking to her. We told her stories about her. She told us stories about us. I mean, it was just a riot.

That's great.

It was just so much fun. But we spent a lot of time talking about the state of comedy today. We also interviewed people like Kevin Murphy from Mystery Science Theater 3000, the guy who plays. He was one of the writers and still doing it. And he's Tom Servo, one of the. One of the performers. And again, a lot of laughs, a lot of fun, a lot of reminiscing, but also a lot about. So what's going on with comedy today? What's going on with Comedy Central today?

Yeah.

And we are having so much fun with this podcast. It's really fun to listen to. I encourage people to check it out.

That's great. So maybe to kind of take that point, too. Do you have any. What are your opinions about, like, you know, the future of cutting edge comedy with, you know, the context of political correctness or incorrectness and cancel culture and those kinds of things? Do you. Are you optimistic? Are you. What are your thoughts or feelings from your point of view?

Well, I'm optimistic from the point of view that whatever. Whatever setbacks happen can ultimately be overcome. And I think this is a little bit of a setback. I talk to a lot of comedians, some of whom say they're, you know, almost afraid to perform sometimes. It's been kind of a crazy year with. With the pandemic, but.

Right, right.

Even on top of that, you know, they find that they. They really have to tailor their acts a little more than they're used to doing. I mean, I always point out that Lenny Bruce, who got arrested on stage hundreds of times because he was doing what comedians should do, which is going up to the line and sometimes crossing the line. That's comedy's job. Because what comedy can do is comedy can make us look at a subject in a new way with a comedic coding. I Mean, that's what satire is all about, right? I mean, if we can talk about. Comedians can talk about something and get you to laugh about it and say, hey, I never thought about it that way. Now think about that from the point of view of the African American experience in this country and the contribution of black comedians and also even as important women comedians, what they've done over the last 30 years. And when I started, you know, at Comedy Central, there weren't very many women comedians. Now there's lots of women comedians and what they have done in terms of representing to audiences what the women. Women's experience in America has been in a way that is much more, well, certainly funny, funnier. It's much. But it's certainly much more interesting than an essay or something you read or something you hear from just a feminist. I mean, it's very important to have that outlet for comedians and to have comedians allowed to take their conversation into places that people would, you know, say in advance, no, I don't want to hear it. I don't want to talk about that. We can't go there. That's not subject matter we want to deal with. Because how else did society change?

Yeah, Yeah. I think it's a very tricky kind of issue. I mean, you know, seeing it from a point of comedic expression, you know, social commentary, you know, just thinking about all the historic examples of, you know, pushing the envelope and pushing the edge, you know, from, you know, the National Lampoon magazines and Mad comics to, you know, more provocative kinds of zines and whatnot. So it'll be an interesting, you know, and even the stuff still like Dave Chappelle or other people with their shows as well as then interviews and things that you hear from their perspective about their experiences from whence their content came from, or how they went to smaller places and tested their material and what their perspectives are in terms of engagement or acceptance or lack thereof with audiences. I think it is a fascinating kind of sociological perspective, too. So it's. I value your opinion from, you know, the experience you have and the people you know and the things that you've seen. So that's. That's very helpful. So, Art, again, I just. I want to thank you. You've been very generous with your time today. It's been a treat. I've been so looking forward to getting to know you better. For what are the best ways for listeners to get your print book, your upcoming audiobook in your. Your voice as well as your words to learn more about you, the podcast

or ways to connect well, certainly you can get my book on Amazon. It's available there in hardcover and the ebook. And to learn more about me and the book, you can go to my website, artbellwriter.com I have some other writing on there and some fun stuff and the audiobook, you know. Stay tuned for further information. Okay, My podcast is, you know, it's on all the places popular. Yeah, great. Any. Any place. We're on all the platforms. So look it up. It's. The podcast is called the Constant Comedy Podcast with Art Bell and Vinny Favale.

Great. I'll get all that in the show notes for people that can't make the notes right now, so they can come take a look at that. We'll put links in as well.

Thank you.

Well, Art, again, you're an inspiration. It's. It's fascinating to see. See the career and the evolution from, you know, the. The Tongue to Constant Comedy as a very popular and exciting and fun book to read. And it's just been, you know, I look forward to what comes next. I mean, the. The podcast, I think, is a great idea. And, you know, I know that your consulting and the work that you do will just, you know, be very additive to whatever you get involved with. So thank you. I feel like you're a bit of a national treasure with the things that you've done and the impact you've had on our culture, and just look forward to what comes next.

Thank you very much, Chris. I've really enjoyed talking to you.

Thank you. Living a Life in Full is a production of Stout Media, a subsidiary of Gordian Knot. Elf assistant producer Gracie Wong Music Dan O' Brien executive producer and host, Dr. Chris Stout. To learn more, stop by our website at lifeinfull for show notes and please recommend us to your friends and subscribe on your favorite platform. And as for the obligatory disclaimer, this podcast is for general information uses only and does not constitute the practice of psychology, medicine, nutrition or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical or psychological advice. No doctor patient relationship is formed. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I take conflicts of interest seriously. For all of my disclosures as well as show notes, please see livingalifeinfull.org podcast and my LinkedIn profile. Thanks. And until next time,