She got me on two ringy-dingies.
When Lily Tomlin called a few weeks ago, I'd only known her from a smattering of movies: All of Me, Nashville, A Prairie Home Companion. But within five minutes, that famously nasal voice in my cell phone already felt like family.
We ran the gamut, discussing everything from her legendary turns on Laugh-In, Murphy Brown and The West Wing to her sudden infamy last year on YouTube. Weighing in with the frank intelligence for which she's known, the versatile actress-comedian-producer from Detroit was also happy to discuss the future of comedy — or at least how she's adapting characters like Ernestine and Edith Ann to the 21st century. No problem there — at 67, Tomlin is as funny as ever. You can confirm that for yourself on Saturday, when the nation's smoothest operator hits TBPAC's Carol Morsani Hall.
Will this performance be similar to shows you've brought to this area in the past?
I think it'll be somewhat similar, yes. I'll be bringing many of the same characters. … I'm sure I'll do Ernestine and Edith [Ann] and those popular television characters, as well as a few others.
Has the reception to your characters been different in the Southeast from elsewhere?
No, no, I never noticed any kind of regional difference. I try to talk about the city where I'm playing as much as I can and bring up other kinds of topical things. But people are pretty much the same everywhere. I might get one crowd that's more political than another crowd, but basically, I've always had a pretty broad-based audience. And I'm sure that wherever I play, the people who might be inclined to me are the ones who come. So they come, probably with an inclination toward a certain sensibility.
And yet, that sensibility can be so hard to pinpoint. A few days ago I tried polling a few different people about you — like my mother, who's been a fan since your Laugh-In days, and a Nashville-loving friend from college. What struck me from their comments was your seeming niche-lessness: It's almost like your appeal transcends the very idea of a target audience. Is your following always so diverse?
Well, it has been. Certainly as I get older, the audience gets older. While they used to be 15 to 75 before, now they're maybe 35 to 75 or something. I get some kids, but I certainly don't get the preponderance of kids that I used to get. Because if you're not on some young children's show, they might not know of you or be aware of you.
In the past I used to say [about my audience], "There are a couple thousand people out there who wouldn't be caught dead in the same room together," because I had such a broadly based audience — you know, very political, very apolitical. These days, I'm sure some conservative people show up.
But you're right: The characters are so diverse and I've done so many different things. Just like, you know, working with Altman several times. And being on Laugh-In, which was enormous at the time, being on [Murphy] Brown, being on West Wing. And now I have a part on this new HBO series that's gonna start next season [12 Miles of Bad Road, in which Tomlin plays the matriarch of a Dallas real-estate empire]. And I've never stopped touring; I've never stopped doing live shows.
Would you say you prefer the older age-range of your current audience? Careful, you're in Florida …
[Laughs.] Yeah, sure. My material's not unsophisticated, so … It's funny, because in the old days, when I was on Laugh-In, so many kids were fans. When I played the city, I used to do an afternoon show on the weekends for really young kids. Like 10 and under or something. I don't do that anymore, of course, because I don't need to do it. But in those days, I did, because the ones watching television were so young.
I was playing in Buffalo, N.Y., once — this was way back in the '70s. Laugh-In had just gone off the air, and this young couple came to the show. They had this 18-month-old daughter. And they never watched Laugh-In, but the kid's grandmother and their daughter used to watch it together. So the kid was going around at 18 months, like snorting and sticking her hand up her T-shirt. And they had no idea what it was all about. The grandmother explained to them that this was from a character on Laugh-In. Those characters struck a nerve with a broad bunch of people. Because there's so much vocal variation and so much content, blind people will come to the show — they'll even bring their dogs. And deaf people will also come because it's so visual. I've had the good fortune over the years to make that kind of connection with a lot of people.
You say you appeal to both the political and the apolitical — and yet you're known for being quite politically outspoken.
I've always felt that my material was political, whether it was topical or not. It's certainly socially relevant or related to some issue or, metaphorically, it had to do with some human dilemma, whether it's a fiction or a war or whatever. I'm one of the more social, "through the mouth of the culture" types. Because that's what I was always sort of in love with: different kinds of people that listen to culture. Back in the day, I even used to live in this old apartment house in Detroit with so many different kinds of people, and I had a kind of infatuation with all of them.
But have you ever had to tailor your politics to fit your audience?
No! I just sort of go with it. I don't plan to do stuff or not do stuff depending on the audience. I trust the audience so I just go for it.
I think that's pretty brave.
Hrm. [Pause.] Well, I don't know. Depends. Depends on how far you go; some people get mad and they leave, or they complain. That certainly has happened.
You know, it's ironic, because I never knew much about your comedy stuff when I was younger: I was first introduced to you through your politics — in college gender studies and film classes. You've come out in public as a lesbian and taken queer issues on as a cause in the past — like The Celluloid Closet, that 1995 documentary you narrated based on author Vito Russo's gay look at the movies. Do you have any memories of making that film?
Yeah, Vito was an old friend of mine for many, many years, even before he wrote Celluloid Closet. So [the filmmakers] Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman wanted me to narrate — and listen, I am so bad at narrating. That old Detroit voice comes out, just as flat as it can be. It's nasal, and it's ghastly. We had to tape it about six times. And finally, the only way I was able to do it was Jeffrey got down in the booth with me, and told me to pretend he was from another country, and I was trying to explain it to him. So I did it, and it turned out OK.
Many of your films have been hailed as great examples of collaboration, whether between comedians or between actor and director. In Nashville, for instance, you were working with a huge cast and a famous director, and a lot of people were impressed by the teamwork. Which is probably why I was so surprised when this whole YouTube scandal broke recently: Seeing you and I Huckabees director David Russell skirmishing on set just seemed so contrary to our old impression of you.
I mean, it happened almost four years ago, and yes, at the time, it was a very tense set. There was a lot of pressure on that movie. David is a very unusual guy. … but I would work with him again anytime he asked me. I did Flirting With Disaster with him, and he's one of the most original filmmakers. People just go a little nuts sometimes — I mean, I certainly did. And he goes nuts sometimes, too. And unfortunately, someone took the film.
When things happen on a set, most people are protective around the project. It's a lot of creative people working and something might go awry or people lose their temper or things get too tense. It's what happens. It's like a family. I never thought about [the fight] again until it was on YouTube. I knew the people at the agencies had seen it, but I'd never seen it before. I mostly regret it for the sake of David's career — or mine. But mostly David's, because he's a director. People will just say, "Oh, she's just a crazy actress" — which I'm not — but a director is not allowed to lose his cool.
I know David's already started his next project. But he's too gifted a guy to have to pay for somebody's lack of sensitivity and adolescence to put out the tape. Anyway, David and I are friends; we never were not friends, and after we had those blowups, we were friends in about 10 or 20 minutes.
I've always been a huge fan of your work with the late Robert Altman. Do you think you'd call him your favorite director?
Well, every director's a little different. Altman was extremely important to me because he gave me my first part in the movies, back in '74 when I was coming off of Laugh-In. I was hugely popular, but for rather eccentric characters. For a filmmaker to put me in his movie and play a very straight part was an unusual thing. But Altman was such a totally freewheeling person, so absolutely his own man, it never occurred to him, I don't think.
I just came along and was the right person for that part. I saw actors coming in for Nashville during the shoot and saw the script and thought, "Gee, I can play any number of these parts." And I thought, "I wonder why Bob gave me this part?" But then I saw how perfect they were. … And it's like what Bob always said, "Casting is about 80 percent of my job" or something. But just being part of the Altman family was a big gift to me, and it was for many, many years. Colin Higgins, who did Nine to Five, he was a darling guy; he's died now. But Altman was extraordinarily special. He's a man who had a long, long, incredibly prolific career. And he was as cool as he could possibly be.
I read somewhere that he was occasionally "salty" on set.
I mean, he was extraordinarily intelligent. No, no; to me, [salty] is like Don Rickles! I remember on Laugh-In, when Don was the guest one week. By five, everybody was in tears. Because he would cut so close to the bone: At first, everybody was like, "Ha-Ha." But soon everybody was in their dressing room, like tearing up.
Altman was nothing like that; I mean, he was very acerbic, but it would never be at anyone's expense. Garry Trudeau, who spoke at Bob's funeral in New York, said, "I'd write pages and pages and pages of script and then I'd watch them just sort of evaporate into improvisation." And he said, "I said to Bob, 'How come I'm writing all these pages of script if everybody's gonna just improvise?' And Bob says, 'You write a script so that the actors know who they are.'"
[Altman] was demanding of the script, but then he also gave a lot of latitude to his actors. If he liked an idea, he really liked it. There was no charge around anything, at least not in his professional relationships. On the set, he was completely unflappable, very paternal — I mean, he took care of everybody. I've heard him referenced as this benign patriarch; he was like Big Daddy.
You never felt intimidated?
Never. There was never any feeling that you didn't come up to his expectations; there was never any pressure. That was what made it so glorious. It was like you could not fail with Altman.
But have you ever felt intimidated before, with a director or an actor?
Yeah, sure I have. There are some directors who, even though they hired you, they sort of don't get you. It's not a horrible thing; it's just a difficult thing. It makes the shooting more difficult: An actor doesn't want to do anything so much as fulfill the role. We want so much to fulfill whatever the director's vision is. And if you feel out of sync with it, you just are in agony — absolute agony, absolute pain.
Can you think of a time when you felt a director didn't "get" you?
Yeah. … I don't know if I'd want to say it, because it sounds like a criticism or a complaint. It's not that; it's just how it went. Never in my life would I ever talk about what went on in the Huckabees set. It's done with; it's whatever we went through to make the project happen. When you come out the other side, you think, "Oh, God" — and I loved Huckabees, I loved the movie. I get a big kick out of it, and have seen it many, many times.
Every time I see it I can see the artist at work, I can see David at work. Dustin [Hoffman] even likened him to Pollock, throwing paint against a canvas. It was like David almost didn't even know what he wanted — it was so intuitive and so out of his gut. We'd be doing a scene and he would tell us to switch lines, or trade lines, or he'd call lines to us. It was just an absolute bam-bam-bam! It was many different kinds of experiences, and I don't think actors like anything better than going to the wall like that. I would never think to talk about it in any way except, God, I was grateful to have had that experience.
When I asked that question, I'm not sure I had David in mind.
Oh, no, I was just using David as an extreme example.
But in certain comedic movies, if they have a certain idea of what the movie's supposed to be, and they can't communicate that to you and the other actors …
I'm not gonna say what movie it was, but one director wanted us to show him everything we wanted to do [in advance, so he could OK it]. [Groans.] And I said, "You know, I don't know why you hired the two or three of us, because that's supposed to be what we do." I said, "We don't know what to do now!" In comedy, letting us do our thing is crucial. We got through that film, and it turned out OK, but it was sort of tough going — because you lose your instinct.
Do you follow a lot of comedy these days, any of the new headliners?
Well I don't go hang out at clubs or anything. But I know Chappelle, I know Chris Rock, and I think they're both awfully good. I like Lewis Black, too. I think he's quite funny.
In your own routines, I think it's safe to say that a lot of people know you mostly for your characters, how you literally become some other persona and let the characterization alone draw laughs.
Exactly. Even before I got famous, when I would try doing stand-up, I would try to slip in personas in some way. They're defined visually and verbally and vocally. Since I have no fear of the audience, I would always just get up and do an act, and that was all there was to it. And I just did it, no matter what the circumstance. I did characters in concerts, where people were not prepared for speaking monologues, but I was well-enough known that I could do business.
But aside from sketch comedy, like SNL and MADtv, I'm not sure that technique is as big in concert routines as it once was.
I'm no student of comedy, but it was probably a whole kind of era. And in that particular era, we were character-focused. I always worked on monologues, because that's what appealed to me: a shaped monologue with a particular point of view, a perspective or a metaphor.
Now [stand-up comedians] talk more out of their genuine self-hood, like Chappelle or Chris. It's attitudinal, it's just in that one context of being just them speaking. But even in their stand-up, they characterize — even if they don't do full-blown characters. I'm sure I had some influence on it. I'm 20 years older than most of these people. So a lot of these kids grew up on Laugh-In before they began doing comedy.
When you look back at these characters from the '70s, would you say it's harder to relate to some of them now?
Well, I mean, Ernestine has changed. She had to live with the divestiture and everything! So she had to reinvent herself in order to have employment. Otherwise, she just becomes an operator for one of their ancillary phone companies. She used to be a part of a monopoly! [Laughs.] She didn't have to smile or do anything; that just sticks in her throat, you know, that pleasant voice, that courtesy. She's not gonna do that if she can help it. Lately, I mostly do Ernestine with a reality-based Web chat show. So she can still call anybody and, theoretically, she can see them at the same time.
So you still love all your old characters?
Yeah. As long as they have something relevant to say to the audience, they're a lot of fun. If I can take you someplace, and the audience will go with me, that's really the fun of it.
This article appears in May 2-8, 2007.