Alex Borstein

Good Lord.

She drives me a little nuts, I can’t help it.

It’s fun to make fun of everyone, that’s our motto.

I think that her voice and “I’m going to gain five pounds to play a fat lady,” annoyed everybody. Then watching her chew the scenery in Cold Mountain. My husband said that the way she gained the weight for Bridget Jones was by chewing the scenery in Cold Mountain.

Yeah. I always say some of the best impersonations come from people that somehow permeate your head. For some reason you get stuck on them whether you like them or hate them. There’s just something about them that’s very listenable or watchable and then you start emulating it and all of a sudden you’ve got an impersonation.

I didn’t. A lot of the time on Madtv we were relegated to doing people that they thought we visually most looked like. That was probably one of the weaknesses. They were very in love with the makeup and hair department. They would sometimes prefer to spend five hours with prosthetics and have someone look exactly like someone as opposed to, “Is this the best possible sketch we could do for this?”

Right we’re not trying to cash one of their checks at the bank. We just want to make some comedy. Sometimes I wouldn’t get to do a lot of those people. Being short and pudgy, they would never think of me first to play someone like Renée Zellweger.

Yeah, it’s definitely a filthy little show. I can’t help it, I have a bit of a potty mouth.

The first time I ever did standup I was 16 at a little club in southern California. My parents had to be there because I was under 21. I did standup there for the first time and then a couple more times. Then I abandoned it. In college at San Francisco State I revisited it a few times and I did this little comedy competition and Certs breath mints sponsored it. The people who were the celebrity sponsors were The Kids in the Hall so I was very excited.

That was really cool. I did not win but Margaret Cho did. But what’s funny is that she didn’t really go to our school. I think she signed up for an extension class just so she could be a ringer in the competition.

Yeah, then I abandoned it and got more into sketch with some people in college. Standup is just very lonely particularly if you’re a woman. If you go to those clubs, none of those guys really want to talk to you or hang out with you or think you’re funny.

I think so. That’s part of it. Most women see it as, either you’re going to be beautiful and attractive and have the male gaze upon you and attract lots of men or you’re going to be funny and be one of the guys. The world doesn’t like to allow for both. There are some people that cross over. Look at Lucille Ball. She was such a huge phenomenon because she was wildly attractive, really funny and accessible at all angles. Somehow she was able to make it work.

Oh no, it’s absolutely true. I often wonder that if I was a guy and had done the same amount of work that I’ve done could I be at the level of a Will Ferrell or Jack Black or Dane Cook. It could be the fact that I’m a woman has kept me back or maybe I’m just not funny.

I think my career would be really different if I was a guy, but then again maybe I would blend into the crowd too much because there are so many men. Maybe I stand out more being a woman. We’ll never know because I don’t have a cock.

Yes. I was in Montreal hosting the comedy festival there and you definitely get guys going, “Hey, you’re really funny.” I think it really still surprises people and all of a sudden they look at you with new eyes like, “Wait a minute, she’s not just a woman, she’s a funny woman.”

Yeah, we did. It was really a fun thing to do together. We’ve always tried to work together. We both were members of Acme Comedy Theater in Los Angeles.

That’s right. Also Adam Carolla and Will Ferrell did some stuff occasionally with Scott Wainio who was a writer on SNL. Then my husband and I tried writing together and we almost stabbed each other in the fucking face with pencils. It was not a good thing for us to write together. So this seemed like a really cool opportunity where we could work together and do something creative and have fun. He’s a director so he knows a lot about cinematography so it was a neat opportunity for him to shoot it. We just wanted to see if it’s possible to move outside of the system because most of your options are to sell your special to HBO or Comedy Central. Then they own it and that’s the end of it. They have the right to edit it how they want and even to air it or not. I just didn’t want to do that. I was at the point in my career where I had visibility from Madtv, movies and Family Guy so I didn’t need to get my name out there, which most comics do when they do a special like that. I don’t really need to have my name bandied about Comedy Central every five minutes. I don’t need the money up front. It’s been a really fun experiment and so far, knock on wood, very successful.

It’s been slow, but it’s been steady. There has been zero publicity. FOX figured, and they’re probably right, that all we really need to do is put something Family Guy related on this and have it on the shelves next to Family Guy and put a flier in the Family Guy DVD and that should take care of all the sales. So far the DVD has been very successful. It hasn’t had the normal decay of sales after the first week. The first week of a DVD’s release is usually pretty much all it’s going to sell but this DVD is different. It’s one of those titles where it’s been slow, steady and growing.

But also we’re doing this tour to Apple stores all over the country doing something called Made on a Mac Presentation since the special was edited on Final Cut Pro. We basically tell the story of how we made it. I started touring this in 2002 and then we shot it in 2004 and it has taken this long for it to hit the streets. So it’s a fun and interesting story and it’s also really informative for people who are trying to take back some control from Hollywood and make their own projects and be very self-sufficient. A lot of people are doing that now like that sitcom on FX called It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

To be honest I’ve only seen a couple. But those people got together and made their own pilot presentation. They just were like, “Fuck it. We’re sick of waiting for a break and waiting for this giant machine to notice us.” So they just went ahead and did it. Another friend of ours did it with a show called Sons and Daughters that was on ABC.

Made on a Mac Presentation is like a take back the night thing to show how you can take control of your own career.

No, I was going to distribute it on my own last year. I was going to release it in February as a birthday present to myself [laughs]. I was spending some time with the people from FOX in Montreal. One of the people at home entertainment was like, “Oh my God, you should bring that in. You should talk to us about it. Maybe we can release it. Maybe we can do it as something that goes along with Family Guy.” I thought, “That’s not a bad idea.” So I pitched them in January and they said yes pretty quickly. I do have all the ownership of the whole piece. They get a percentage for distributing it but this way I managed to really hold onto a lot of it, which is rare. The downside is that maybe if they had a bigger chunk of it they would work harder at publicizing it. But I prefer a slow and steady tortoise to a hare that may not finish the race.

Not really. I’ve never really had any negative response from anyone about my standup because most people coming to see me know what they’re in for. Also I’m pretty careful about where I perform. For instance, we have a house right near downtown Seattle. They had the Seattle International Comedy Competition recently and they asked me to be a judge at one of the finals and my husband to be a judge at one of the other finals. They had five nights of finals and they asked me to perform. I knew it wasn’t going to work in this small community where there are only 10,000 people and I have to see all of them at the market the next day. I think it is important to know your venue and know your audience.

For the most part I get 98 percent less auditions than someone that could fit any of those descriptions. A lot of the times I hear nothing about it because they don’t call if it’s something that I’m not right for. But sometimes you’ll lose faith and you’ll be like “Let me see. Let me take a look at the breakdowns” and it is so dismal. But I’m developing some TV stuff for myself and writing a feature and you find yourself falling into the same traps. You find yourself saying, “Oh maybe they’ll have this girlfriend,” and then you’ll find yourself not really developing the girlfriend character so much. You just know she’s going to be cute and that’s all that matters. It’s like, “Wait a minute, now I’m just as bad as the enemy.” It’s easy to see why it happens because it’s shorthand, laziness and it’s easier than spending the time developing a real human person.

Yeah, it is. But Seth’s pop culture knowledge is very retro. Seth doesn’t own a computer and he doesn’t really watch television. Everything that Seth knows has already happened.

He has one at work but he doesn’t have one at home and he doesn’t want one. He doesn’t understand MySpace and he despises most new music.

He’s in his early 30’s but he’s just got an old soul. He’s got that Rat Pack soul but the great thing about that writer’s room is that we have 15 writers and everyone brings something different. We’ve got ages ranging from like 27 to 55 so you’ve got all these different references. There is such a cool mixed bag of people bringing in bizarro references. I certainly don’t have my hands on the pulse in terms of the pop culture. My husband and I just went to the Billboard Music Awards in Vegas a couple days ago and half of the people nominated we were like, “Who? What?” Someone named Chris Brown won everything. Never heard of him.

But you certainly can’t help but know about Paris Hilton or Britney Spears or Gwen Stefani or Fergie.

We all sit around a big table together and people bark pitches. It is as though you’re at a party with cocktails and frankly sometimes cocktails are involved. I remember one of the episodes that I wrote was called Deep Throat. Peter and Lois created a folk group and Brian is going after Mayor West in a Watergate parody. In the script we had Mayor West sitting in a hotel room watching TV. I wrote that he was just watching cartoons. Then the only other female writer, Cherry [Chevapravatdumrong], had him commenting that he was watching a cartoon called Jem. I didn’t know what Jem was but everyone else cracked up and I was like, “Ok, put that in. It’s weird and interesting.” That’s pretty much how it goes. If a lot of the people in the room respond or even if it’s just one person responding in a huge way, they’ll go for it.

When I first started I started just doing voices. I was doing Lois and everything grew. I would start doing more voices and then I would ad-lib a lot. When Seth created the show he was 25 years old. I don’t think he ever had a girlfriend and the only women he knew were his mom and his sister. So he had absolutely no idea what he was doing and he will admit that in a heartbeat, like, “Ok what do girls wear? They wear hats. Ok, Meg will have a hat.” That’s pretty much how he decided things so it was freeing for them when I’d come in to do voices and I would change things to make it a little more like something a female character might say. One of the executive producers, Chris Sheridan, said, “Would you ever write for us?” At that time I was writing for myself on Madtv and before that I had written for cartoons like Casper and Pinky and the Brain. I told them that I would love to do it but that it is just a matter of schedule because I was working for Madtv at the same time. So what we did is that I started working at Family Guy on the summer hiatus from Madtv. Then when Madtv went back to shooting, I would just come into Family Guy as a writer on the days we didn’t shoot. I was getting to split my time all over the place and I learned so much. Madtv and Family Guy together really was comedy boot camp.

He thinks he is. I don’t want to crush any dreams, he usually does wear glasses but when he goes out for events he takes them off to be cool. But he’s still wildly insecure and has absolutely no idea who he is and he doesn’t understand even an iota of the opposite sex like most of the writers on television. But he started at 25 and now he’s edging on 35 so he’s a very different person.

Exactly and he has people to tell him what to wear now. People that can say, “You know what? What if you could wear this vintage t-shirt and your button down shirt open?”

Oh nothing, really. See, that’s what happens. All of a sudden when people have kids they change their tune about what offends them. It’s very interesting.

It’s very interesting how it will change a person but I don’t think it’s definitive. They have a kid and for the first two years of the kid’s life they’re not cool with any of those jokes anymore then maybe after a few years they start to mellow.

But not much offends me. I’ve always been heavy and I’ve always thought that a lot of fat jokes were hilarious. I’m a Jew and I think Jew jokes are hilarious. I laugh the hardest at a lot of our Holocaust stuff on the show. I was just raised with laughing in the face of everything.

I find him to be an idiot. He clearly is anti-Semitic to some degree but I think a lot of people forget that one of the things about living in this country is that you’re allowed to be anti-Semitic, you’re allowed to hate Jews, you’re allowed to hate white people and you’re allowed to hate black people. It may not be politically correct and cool but if the Nazis can march in Skokie then Mel Gibson has every right to say Jews are whatever. We don’t have to like it, I certainly won’t go to his movies and I don’t want to support him as an artist. Not that I was that interested in his work anyway. But I think people forget that there’s a difference between being like-minded and having the freedom to say what you want.

Yeah, everyone forgets that just because you shouldn’t say something doesn’t mean you can’t. I think he’s a moron especially if you’re a public figure and you want to sell tickets so because of that I think he’s an idiot. But for me it only solidifies the fact that anyone would have to be stupid to be anti-Semitic or racist.

We have an episode that is coming up that I wrote called; It Takes a Village Idiot and I Married One. Lois runs for mayor of Quahog and wins. It stemmed from another one woman show I was working on called Women and Jews: Why We'll Never Be President. I was in this headspace where I felt that a woman will never be president. So this storyline came out of that. I had these fantasies about a woman president that would be fair and there’d be no corruption. That’s a bunch of bullshit fantasy. In the episode Lois gets just as bitten by the corruption bug as anyone. We liked what happened so much in the episode that we wrote a book that’s going to come out in April to coincide with the episode.

Yeah, Cherry and I wrote it together. We always laugh at these memoirs people release. It always makes us laugh when anybody assumes the rest of the world cares to read about their lives. We took a look at It Takes a Village, My Living History, Ann Coulter’s Godless and blah, blah, blah. We had this idea to write a book that looks at Lois’s time in office and the book has Lois pontificating her views and telling her story. What’s fun about it is that it has chapters by all the characters in the show where they chime in on her time in office and how they think she did. Of course it has a lot of rambling tangents with a lot of poop jokes.

I don’t know. I’m not sure where everyone is on that. I just know that none of us really cared; we were just excited to be mentioned [laughs]. It is that excitement of, “I murdered a person, now I’m famous.” I think Seth was annoyed but I think Seth just gets that way. It’s almost like someone took a swipe at his child. I think we have made some slams back but I don’t know if they made it into the final draft of any of the scripts. We are able to do that because in the nine month process that it takes to make an episode, when we get right toward the end where it’s going to air we do last minute rewrites so we have the opportunity to change things. For instance if we have a Britney and K-Fed marriage joke, when that comes up now it will no longer going to be appropriate so we’ll have a last minute opportunity to alter it or to replace it completely but we would have to use the existing animation. Sometimes that’s how we can slip things in that are very timely because we have that last minute pull cord where we can slip something in.

I worked on Angry Little Girls for a little while but not anymore. There was just too much going on. I’m doing some other live action TV development so I helped develop Angry Little Girls and even did an outline. Then at that stage, unfortunately I was like, “Uh-oh, I’m not going to be able to do all of this.”

I think so. I think someone else is picking up where I left off and going to be developing it through completion.

My husband told me that he knows what SuicideGirls is but I know very little.

But that reminds me I would really like to have Lois do a totally nude layout for Playboy.

She did? Well I think Seth enjoys Playboy more than Penthouse.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck