From the archives: Paula Pell

We’re revisiting some of Alec’s favorite episodes from the archives. In this episode, originally recorded in November 2012, Alec talks with writer and actress Paula Pell – who made people laugh at Saturday Night Live for 18 years. Pell landed her dream job as a writer at SNL after working at a Florida theme park. Her agent told her that Lorne Michaels wanted to meet her – “it is not an audition, but he wants to fly you up and talk to you.” Pell wasn’t sure what she was headed up for, but she got a job writing for the show. Because of her longevity on the show, Pell calls herself “Nanny SNL,” but she’s the first to admit, “If you have a good night there you feel like you’re 20 again.” Today, Pell can be found writing and producing movies and television, in addition to her starring role in Peacock's “Girls5eva.” See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:09Alec Baldwin?

  This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. Not long ago, there used to be two types of comedians: comedians and female comedians. Today, there are so many women making us laugh that the qualifier has been rendered obsolete. Saturday Night Live deserves a lot of the credit for this development. The show has introduced us to Gilda Radner, Jan Hooks, Maya Rudolph, Tina Fey, and Kristen Wiig, to name just a few. But there's been another woman at SNL, a woman who's been quietly working day after day for 17 years, often without sleeping, to usher in this reality.

• 1:53Speaker 04

  17 years I've been there, yep.

• 1:54Alec Baldwin?

  Paula Pell was working at a Florida theme park when she got her dream job as a writer at Saturday Night Live. Because the show has such a wide comedic range, it's the perfect challenge for Paula. You've got the hard-hitting news parodies, and then, on the other end...

• 2:11Speaker 04

  You know, it's got fart jokes, it's got everything in it of the low parts of comedy, mostly me being responsible for Tylenol BM of Alec Baldwin taking a shit in a bed while he's sleeping.

• 2:23Alec Baldwin?

  Talenol BM releases a gentle sleep aid into your system that allows deep restful sleep for up to 10 hours. So deep, it turns off your brains need to control the bodily functions most likely to wake you.

• 2:33Speaker 04

  Rachel was like, "Did you just shit yourself?"

• 2:35Speaker 01

  I've slept like a baby. Don, did you [bleep] in bed? You tell me.

• 2:42Speaker 04

  You tell me. Oh, you tell me. I said, "You tell me." You tell me.

• 2:46Alec Baldwin?

  In her memoir, Bossy Pants, Tina Fey writes that her proudest moment as head writer at SNL was fighting for one of Pell's sketches.

• 2:56Speaker 05

  Introducing Kotex Classic.

• 3:00Alec Baldwin?

  Classic Kotex is a commercial for the feminine protection of yesteryear, featuring sexy women proudly encumbered with bulky pads connected to belts peeking out of their clothes.

• 3:12Speaker 06

  I always know it's there. You can't beat the original.

• 3:17Alec Baldwin?

  Them girls are old school. Paula Pell, in person, is genuine, charming, and easy. The kind of person you might actually talk to if you sat next to her on a plane, which, for those of you not in the industry, is not a description of the typical comedy writer.

• 3:34Speaker 04

  I was always a bit of a class clown. I was a good Catholic girl, so I always wanted to be...I never wanted to get in trouble, but I really pushed the envelope because I would be funny in class. And I'd do things like, one of my teachers, I would do a bit where I would go by him and drag my hand along the chalk line, you know, the chalk shelf? And then I'd come over and I'd say, "You know, Mr. Gersh, you're just a really great teacher." And I'd pat him on the back and I'd leave like a handprint. He'd let me make him a little bit the fool for a moment, and then he'd do, you know, he looked like Rob Reiner in All in the Family, had the big bushy mustache and the long hair. He played along. He just kind of looked a camera three, you know, nonexistent. And the audience would, you know, the audience, the class would crack up. Or I'd pass notes and say, "When I sneeze," because I have a really good fake sneeze,

• 4:19Speaker 04

  and I would say, "When I sneeze, everybody fall off their chairs." And, you know, I'd always be doing something. But I grew up with an extremely funny dad, and my mom is... What did he do for a living? He worked for Illinois Bell. We grew up in Illinois and then moved to Orlando when I was a teenager. But my entire childhood, my grandpa was a watchmaker for West Clacks. So my dad always learned that from my grandpa. And then when he came to Florida, he worked for AT&T for many years. And then when he retired, he became a teacher of watch, repair, watchmaking, all of it.

• 4:55Alec Baldwin?

  So how does a guy who works for the phone company, and how does he, and he becomes a watch tinkerer, how was the funny in his life? Was he at home?

• 5:05Speaker 04

  Well, he's just ungodly witty. He's really...

• 5:08Alec Baldwin?

  But never wanted to be in the business himself? Or did he express to you that he did?

• 5:11Speaker 04

  I mean, he probably did. But you know, I look at all the people in my family and all the relatives of different generations, and they all had their thing. You know, my mom has a beautiful singing voice. They all had something that they wanted to do, but the way they grew up was you just, you know, you have kids early and you kind of figure out what you need to do to pay for that. And so they, you know, a lot of times didn't have the luxury that kids have now, even though it's hard to get a job, to say, you know, "Oh, I'm doing this. I'm getting a degree in this."

• 5:39Alec Baldwin?

  And what was wrong with you, Paula, that you didn't sign on to that program? What was wrong with you?

• 5:42Speaker 04

  Well, I...

• 5:43Alec Baldwin?

  That you wouldn't just do what you were supposed to do?

• 5:45Speaker 04

  They knew that I was pretty hopeless. I mean, at my confirmation, where you get the Holy Spirit, I came down the stairs at my party and had torn like 80 holes in my pantyhose and said I had the Holy Spirit, and just would do things like that all the time, you know? And this was before I drank or smoked anything.

• 6:01Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah.

• 6:02Speaker 04

  I was always a total ham, but my dad really taught me that. He's the king of like, I will tell you that one of the hardest times I laughed at him is my mom and I were watching Die Hard on television. My dad's cutting the yard, and he's outside cutting the yard. He's got his little jean shorts on and his tank top, and he keeps coming in and walking by and kind of half-listening. He's a really good, quiet, half-listener, but then he'll do something based on what he's been listening to. I, you know, was listening to my mom, and the terrorist had the long blond hair, you know, the big, like, kind of Nordic guy at the beginning.

• 6:34Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, the ballet dancer.

• 6:35Speaker 04

  Yeah. And my mom says, you know, "I don't know, but I don't like long hair, but that is pretty foxy." And she's like commenting on him. So we're laughing about it and everything. And then, I'm not kidding, like, an hour later, my dad just walked through. He had gone in my room and gotten a wig that I had of all my shit in my room, put a long wig on with just his... Grass cutting stuff and just walk through. He didn't stop. He didn't do a bit. He just walked through.

• 7:01Alec Baldwin?

  They also knew that rule, like you keep the ball in the air and play along. They were good.

• 7:06Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 7:06Alec Baldwin?

  Without the training, they were good improv people.

• 7:09Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:09Alec Baldwin?

  The answer's always yes.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  He's the king of like a prop. He'll just, and what I love about it is my parents are in their 70s now and, you know, and my mom was always like, you'd say, you know, you go, oh, God, Dad is so funny. And she goes, thank God. Thank God he's funny. We had so much laughter in our house, you know, despite any dysfunction as any family. We always laugh.

• 7:29Alec Baldwin?

  Where did you go to college?

• 7:31Speaker 04

  I went to college at University of Tennessee. I first went to a local college in Orlando, a community college, for two years.

• 7:37Alec Baldwin?

  So you moved to Florida?

• 7:39Speaker 04

  I moved to Florida. My dad went down for AT&T for that antitrust suit that they had.

• 7:44Alec Baldwin?

  When they broke up the phone system.

• 7:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was like late 70s. You know, we had gone a few times down to Disney World with our little pop-up camper and like that was a vacation place. That wasn't a place you move. And my parents sent us a little, brought back a little Polaroid of the house they bought. And it was, you know, about $70,000, but it had this gigantic pool because in Orlando, so many people have pools, even with, you know, inexpensive houses. And we just thought we won the lottery, you know, it was just insane. But we got there and it was really hard the first year.

• 8:14Alec Baldwin?

  How so?

• 8:15Speaker 04

  I just never liked to be, I mean, I think being new is a very important thing to do

• 8:20Alec Baldwin?

  As a teenager.

• 8:21Speaker 04

  For growth. I think it really galvanizes a lot of stuff inside you of who you are and everything. And I'm glad in hindsight, but I used to just wake up in the morning and just cry and, you know, just because I had so much familiarity and comfort with all the kids that I went to school with. It's just, I was always quiet at first, you know, and then by my senior year, I got really involved in school and the girls, you know, would go, because I remember when you'd come in, you know, you came in your junior year and I'd say, oh, really? Really? Because I came in my sophomore year and sat next to you for an entire class and you were, you know, a cold little asswipe to me, but, you know, it's all right now. We're friends and...

• 8:59Alec Baldwin?

  And what was the difference for you in terms of the people, if you can characterize?

• 9:03Speaker 04

  Well...

• 9:03Alec Baldwin?

  From Illinois to Florida, I mean, Florida, I'm sure is a lot different.

• 9:06Speaker 04

  Well, the biggest, I mean, one thing that really helped me was I was always, I always sang, so I went in immediately into a concert choir. And so that was wonderful because then I had a social group pretty quickly. But the one thing about Florida that was so different that freaked me out was... That, you know, I never thought I was growing up in Illinois in necessarily, I mean, a cold sort of atmosphere. It was emotionally warm. I had great friends. You know, my family warm. But when I got to Florida, everybody hugged constantly.

• 9:36Alec Baldwin?

  Really? I would have thought it was the other way around.

• 9:37Speaker 04

  Everyone was so affectionate in such a crazy way that I remember saying, it's

• 9:43Alec Baldwin?

  Take your hands off me.

• 9:44Speaker 04

  I remember coming home and going, "Stop cupping my nipples, Tenor. I don't know you," in the choir. No, but people would, I kept thinking it was our director's birthday or something. I was like, "What the hell's going on in here? Everyone is hugging our teacher, hugging each other." I realized it was just, that was just the way everyone did, you know? And then my girl, my, who eventually became my girlfriend of many years, was my best friend in high school, and we were very huggy, and that all worked out.

• 10:11Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah. So was it the right person? Not the teacher?

• 10:14Speaker 04

  Not until after we graduated, though.

• 10:16Alec Baldwin?

  Exactly. Then, then you went to the college down there?

• 10:19Speaker 04

  I went to the college for two years down there, and it was-

• 10:21Alec Baldwin?

  And studied what?

• 10:22Speaker 04

  Well, their theater department was amazing. Their art department was incredible, and I was also an artist-

• 10:28Alec Baldwin?

  Was it called Seminole State?

• 10:29Speaker 04

  Seminole Community College. But, I mean, the heads of those departments and the music department were so incredible that today, they still are some of my, you know, favorite people that I've ever-

• 10:39Alec Baldwin?

  Then why'd you go to Tennessee?

• 10:40Speaker 04

  Gotten taught. Because my art professor, Grady Kimsey, who I'm a really good friend with still, he had gone to UT years and years ago, just kept saying, "You gotta go check out UT." And then my girlfriend was going to North Carolina, so it kind of, you know, I'd go up and visit, and I'd never been up in those mountains, and I just fell in love with it up there.

• 11:00Alec Baldwin?

  Did you?

• 11:01Speaker 04

  Because I'm such a nature freak, and, yeah, I went crazy for it.

• 11:03Alec Baldwin?

  And when you left there, what happened?

• 11:04Speaker 04

  And then I, I finished college, and I came home, and I worked at the theme parks.

• 11:10Alec Baldwin?

  What's that like? How do you get the job at Disney? Like, who's, is there somebody who's like a casting person, a talent director?

• 11:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's talent people, and, you know, I had worked with an improv group called SAC Theater in Orlando. They, at the time, contracted out to Disney, so they did all the, like, in Akkot in Italy, the Commedia dell'Arte, you know, they would do all the comedy that's kind of the roaming atmospheric comedy. And then they built Pleasure Island, which was the nighttime Disney, you know, all the nightclubs.

• 11:41Alec Baldwin?

  Pleasure Island.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  Pleasure Island.

• 11:43Alec Baldwin?

  Welcome.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  Come. Mickey has no pants on.

• 11:48Speaker 04

  An entire island they built that had all these clubs. They had like a big discotheque. They had a country western sort of music club. It was just kind of like a strip of nighttime establishments, but all in Disney, but it was late night.

• 12:02Alec Baldwin?

  A kind of a downtown feel, like a cluster like South Street, Seaport.

• 12:06Speaker 04

  And they would have like New Year's Eve every night. So they'd have dancers come out and they'd dance. And it was really a fabulous place to work as a young actor because it felt cool and I could, and I did a lot of improvisation, but then we also did like radio shows and singing. We could be kind of dirty. I mean, it wasn't filthy. I didn't, I didn't go full tilt, my typical filth that you know of.

• 12:29Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, you didn't pal out.

• 12:30Speaker 04

  I didn't pal out. But you would interact with the guests. So they're, you know, you'd be sitting there with some old British dude who's getting drunk and just get into a conversation. And I played Pamela Perkins, the president of the Adventurers Club. And it was kind of a Teddy Roosevelt era sort of place. I had this big bouffant. And I could just be as bawdy as hell. I mean, I would get on guys' laps and, you know, have my legs up in the air because I was like a matron sort of character. And we used to have such a blast. But then also during that time, I went down Penis Avenue for about two years. I was dating men for a little while and I would hook up with people. I mean, just meeting like different people.

• 13:09Alec Baldwin?

  Teddy Roosevelt.

• 13:10Speaker 04

  Well, just guests. And, you know, you'd meet some super, super charismatic handsome person. You'd be sitting there laughing and you'd be in costume and then they'd be like, what are you guys doing after?

• 13:20Alec Baldwin?

  What do the characters, what do these characters do next?

• 13:22Speaker 04

  And there was a restaurant and there were bars down the street that they would let us after work go to. So you'd just take, change all your clothes and, you know, blow dry the shit out of your hair and go, now I'm 25 again. And I'd walk down there and, and.

• 13:35Alec Baldwin?

  And it was New Year's Eve every day.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  It was New Year's Eve.

• 13:38Alec Baldwin?

  Gotta bang the guests.

• 13:39Speaker 04

  You vomited every day and lost your virginity every day.

• 13:43Alec Baldwin?

  What was the character's name? Pamela?

• 13:44Speaker 04

  Pamela Perkins.

• 13:46Alec Baldwin?

  Pamela, Pamela Perkins, of course, is banging the guests two at a time.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  I mean, for an actor at that time, I was making really good money and had full insurance. Everything had a car, rented a little house, you know, it was kind of.

• 13:58Alec Baldwin?

  Having plenty of fun.

• 13:59Speaker 04

  It was, it was a beautiful life.

• 14:01Alec Baldwin?

  Blow drying your hair.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  It was a beautiful life. And then I got stir crazy with it. And that was just about when the SNL thing happened.

• 14:07Alec Baldwin?

  But how does, so how does that happen? How did they find you?

• 14:10Speaker 04

  It was, it was a beautifully random, amazing thing.

• 14:16Alec Baldwin?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by breakout singer-songwriter Alex Warren.

• 14:49Alec Baldwin?

  I'm like a kid when I play music and I make music and I'm constantly asking questions. You know, whether it's an instrument I haven't played, or it's a melody that seems foreign. You know, there's every night you play a show and it's the same set, but it's not the same show. At a certain point, your brain kind of goes on autopilot. When I'm in the studio, or if I'm making music, that's where that curiosity kind of comes back, you know? I haven't lost it yet, but I'm also on my sophomore album, so, and you, you obviously are an expert here.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 15:55Speaker 04

  I had worked with SecTheater. They had a theater downtown. They would call me every so often and I'd go do a set with them where I'd do a character that I had written. And so they said, you know, "We're gonna do this sketch comedy pilot called Chucklehead." And they said, "Will you be in it and do those characters?" And I said, "Sure." I mean, I was doing like, I got beat up in America's Most Wanted, you know, all the local, all the things that were shooting in Orlando I would do, you know? And I did this lottery character for years in about three states that was, played the World's Org. And, you know, sexy characters, Alec, you know? But, all from the matron handbook. I was born at 50, Alec. But, they called me, my agent called me one day and she said, "Are you sitting down?" I said, "Yes."

• 16:39Speaker 04

  She said, "Saturday Night Live saw that pilot. Lauren wants to meet you."

• 16:46Speaker 04

  And I'm like, okay.

• 16:47Alec Baldwin?

  You defecate.

• 16:48Speaker 04

  For what? And she goes, now, it is not an audition, but he wants to fly you up and talk to you. And I'm like, well, what is it? An orgy? Am I being summoned?

• 16:58Alec Baldwin?

  It's Mickey Mouse. It's Pleasure Island.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  What in the F? And I said, okay. And so I flew up there, you know, talk about defecating. I mean, it was like Imodium City, the entire two days of getting there. He was two hours, you know, or three hours late for the meeting. But he was super nice. And I sat with Marcy Klein and Ayala in the talent room. And I was so nervous that they ordered food and they said, we're ordering Zen pallet, you know, vegetarian, we're ordering Zen pallet. Do you want anything? And I said, just a, just like a cup of white rice would be good. Just like rice. And I just got a dry cup of white rice and sat and ate it. I went in and he said, we have just cleaned house. It was 95. It was when Will Ferrell and everybody came.

• 17:44Speaker 04

  He said, we've cleaned house. We're starting over, you know, it's going to rise again, we're hoping. And we're going to try to infuse it with new talent. And we would like to hire you to be a writer. And I was like, oh, well, I've never done that. I, you know, I don't even, I mean, I didn't even use a computer at that point. And I said, I can't, you know? And if you tell them you can't, then they will, he will keep saying, well. And he said, well, we'll show you.

• 18:08Alec Baldwin?

  No, we have people for that.

• 18:09Speaker 04

  But it was so quick that it made me worry that there was something wrong. Like there was a scam or something like this was all some kind of frigging joke. Because I, it was like, this can't be.

• 18:19Alec Baldwin?

  How soon after that were you moving to New York?

• 18:22Speaker 04

  I had five days to move. Packed up my whole life, gave my animals to my mom temporarily.

• 18:27Alec Baldwin?

  Said farewell to Pleasure Island.

• 18:29Speaker 04

  Went up to New York City and, you know, just was just ungodly miserable. And I mean, with fear. But Mike Shoemaker called me right before I left because I was starting to freak out to the point of going, I'm going to my dream place. I mean, I was obsessed with SNL when I was little. I used to audiotape it. I used to perform Roseanne, Roseanne Adana for my high school in the auditorium. And I thought, I'm just gonna be sitting around with like, you know, ten Harvard dudes looking at me going, who the fuck is Kathy? Eating white rice. Who hired Kathy Bates Light? And, you know, and why is she here? And I adore Kathy Bates, by the way, but they were just, you know, I thought I would

• 19:10Speaker 04

  be so not of their world, of these writerly sort of people, and I didn't realize how many writers there are performers. And so Shoemaker called me, and I still thank him for this, because he really is the reason that I ended up getting the balls to get there, but he called and he said, "Some people wanna say hi." And it was, you know, Cindy Caponeira and Laurie Ness, and all these people that were new, that were terrified. And they all got on the phone going, "We can't wait to meet you." And I hung up the phone and I just burst into tears. I said, "It's all gonna be okay, no matter what. It's gonna be okay." And it was. It's just a group of people, it's almost like, of all the years of doing plays, it's like, it's a new cast. And that's seventeen years ago. You're getting a cast. Seventeen years I've been there, yep. Seventeen. How's it changed?

• 19:52Speaker 04

  Well, I think in general comedy has gotten a little, you know, it's gone through its ebbs and flows in terms of things being more character-driven or, you know, more conceptual. I mean, I think that show always has a great amount of both. And I always loved the fact that that show had something for everybody. You know, I'd sit with a group of people that I'd love certain things and they'd love certain things, and so I... To me, always the weirder the better. Yeah, I love the balance, you know, I love the balance of it. But one of the biggest things that's changed in general to me is the internet, because when I was growing up and you were an actor, you had to create a body of work by really

• 20:33Speaker 04

  doing it and getting hired, and then they would give you access to tape of it. You know, you couldn't just go on machines and videotape yourself and make a beautifully edited, great comedy piece and put that on the internet. And float it out there. You just can't do it. I mean, my reel, I just remember, you know, I'd do a tiny role in something and just love that I was adding that to my reel, and you'd have to go to like, a video place and pay the guy to sit there and do it on the gigantic machine. The internet has changed things profoundly. Yeah, it just, and I think in a bad way, it gave people a sense of entitlement of there isn't as much awe of all of it because they do it themselves. So it's like, oh yeah, I have, you know, this.

• 21:17Alec Baldwin?

  Hire themselves.

• 21:17Speaker 04

  I've done my show, you know, they create it themselves, which is very empowering and wonderful. And it's also getting a lot more comedy out there of hilarious people that would never usually walk into a room nervous in an audition.

• 21:28Alec Baldwin?

  But that's rare.

• 21:29Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 21:29Alec Baldwin?

  But that's rare.

• 21:30Speaker 04

  Right.

• 21:30Alec Baldwin?

  That seems to me to have been the condition for me, which is I'd come to SNL and the signals that I picked up in 1990, Jan Hooks and all that crowd back then, was, you know, my career wasn't that iconic to send up me and my career. And so it's not like I'm Stallone or Schwarzenegger or something like that where we do that. So you come in and right away you pick up, I've got to become like everybody else and become a member of the company.

• 21:59Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 22:00Alec Baldwin?

  And as soon as I got that, as soon as I got to picked up that vibe from them, I was, you know, asked to come back and come back and come back. And what it does is, for me as a performer, it's killed everything else that's supposed to be funny. And I wonder what that's like for you, where you're in the world where you work with the funniest people. No matter what people say about SNL, you know, it's not always going to work, but when it works, I still think it's the best. What's it been like for you?

• 22:23Speaker 04

  Well, you get so, you get so isolated there in great ways and weird ways because it's, there's nothing like it. You cannot compare that experience with anything. But it really is so intense. And you, you know, I started writing movies two years ago and working into that, I realized how stretched out the time is to the point where, you know, I mean, we'll go between dress and air and Lauren will say, I don't like the whole top of that. Like add, you know, a couple new jokes. So you're coming up with new jokes at 11:15 and...

• 22:56Alec Baldwin?

  Let me just put a finer point on that for our radio audience, our podcast audience, because...

• 23:02Alec Baldwin?

  That SNL does a full dress rehearsal at eight o'clock on Saturday night with an audience with a lengthier show. And let's say normally they'd have seven sketches on the air show. They do like 11 sketches at eight and they're going to pick what worked best and then they're going to rewrite. So when that finishes at 10, maybe 10:15, maybe 10:30, who knows?

• 23:22Speaker 04

  It's a long show.

• 23:22Alec Baldwin?

  It's a long show. And then you've got an hour where you're sitting in a room. And in that hour between shows, that's when Lorne and the producers and the writers edit that show and choose what they're going to do and ask for rewrites.

• 23:32Speaker 04

  And they're getting rid of that audience. They're bringing in a new one. The band is warming up the new audience. And you'll walk through and have a task to change something and you're walking by these people that are walking in to their seats, looking like, I'm so excited I'm here. And you're like, I don't know what we're going to have for you, but we're going to do it right now, you know? I did a Bobby and Marty one time with Will and Anna and they found out that we were losing time quickly. And so they said, you have to take like two minutes out of this. I mean, it was between the commercial break. So I went downstairs and I was kneeling down with the cue card people. They were just putting tape over sections and we're like, okay, does that make sense? Does and go with?

• 24:17Alec Baldwin?

  Drowning your children.

• 24:18Speaker 04

  And I'm pretty sure that if like Dr. Oz did my actual age, you know how they test you when you're actually, I'm probably 180 now because of the stress of that. It's just such adrenaline and, you know, but, I mean, the beautiful thing about SNL is hosts will come in and, you know, never you, because you were always very approachable. Whenever anyone asks me about hosts, I always tell them that, you know, you are always one of my favorite hosts. I'm not blowing air up your

• 24:45Alec Baldwin?

  Culo.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  Your culo.

• 24:47Alec Baldwin?

  My wife is from Spain.

• 24:48Speaker 04

  I'm going to look at that. What is culo and ass?

• 24:51Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah. Well, yeah, if you're blowing smoke up, but it's obviously

• 24:54Speaker 04

  You have holes.

• 24:55Alec Baldwin?

  It's not my furnace.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  Men do have other holes.

• 24:58Alec Baldwin?

  Well.

• 24:59Speaker 04

  But like, you know, hosts will come in with their people and they're very nice and very scared.

• 25:04Alec Baldwin?

  Stand over there.

• 25:05Speaker 04

  But they have a little bit of that sometimes because they're fearful and they have people protecting them. And by the end of the week, they're just always at that after party, you know, they're sitting with everybody and laying across everybody because it feels like theater. It feels like

• 25:17Alec Baldwin?

  Camp.

• 25:18Speaker 04

  I'm in theater camp and this is what I miss doing.

• 25:27Alec Baldwin?

  More from Paula Pell in a moment. This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by my friend, John Legend. So you're helping Will.i.am write hooks. What made "Ordinary People" become the one song from those sound checks you knew you had to make your own? I was just writing for the Black Eyed Peas. I wasn't expecting to write something for myself in that session, but I wrote the hook for "Ordinary People," and I recorded a demo, and I'm like, I would rather keep "Ordinary People" for myself. This station in Chicago, WGCI, they start playing it before we're promoting it. The song spoke for itself.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  It became the defining song for my first album. I knew it was special, but you never know how special it's going to be and how much impact it's going to have in people's lives. And you never believe that you're going to actually change people's lives with a song. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A-plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star Trust Pilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 27:14Alec Baldwin?

  Paula Pell has been writing sketches at SNL for 17 years, but like any of us, sometimes she just gets tired of comedy.

• 27:23Speaker 04

  Oh, my God, yeah.

• 27:24Alec Baldwin?

  You just want to watch, you know, the sorrow and the pity.

• 27:26Speaker 04

  No, my gal of 14 years, she watches a lot of TV, and she watches shows that I wouldn't generally watch. Like Castle, or, you know, like Hawaii Five-O, or like Murder Show. And, I mean, you know, murder shows, CSI, NCIS. She'll watch all, she'll tape, she'll tape all these shows in like Elementary, all these new shows. And I'll, I'll get totally hooked on things and realize that I just love, I always loved having drama and comedy together. I mean, that's the fun thing about writing movies now is you can have a moment that's just a heart wrenching moment in a comedy that's, that's real, you know, that feels more three dimensional. Because after 17 years of sketches, you do get a little stir crazy with feeling like you're just writing something on, on the surface.

• 28:11Speaker 04

  I mean, it's great to make people laugh, but when I go home, I, I love to watch dramas or some reality things. I love to just not think about comedy too much.

• 28:21Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I do the show and I go out there and it's really, um, and I'll say, I'm never doing this again. This is ridiculous. I can't be bothered with this, hosting this ridiculous show.

• 28:30Speaker 04

  These people are too young.

• 28:31Alec Baldwin?

  These people are all young and they're all crazy and they're all puerile and all they talk about is farts and brassieres and so forth.

• 28:39Speaker 04

  It's beneath me.

• 28:40Alec Baldwin?

  It's beneath, I'm gonna go do as you like it in the park. Then, of course, you know, Lauren calls me, I'm like, nah, okay.

• 28:46Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:46Alec Baldwin?

  Or he'll call me, like, I get thrown off the plane on American Airlines for, for playing Words With Friends. The phone rings, like, uh, three, four days later, it's Lauren. And he literally, he literally, he literally goes, so perhaps we should do something.

• 29:04Alec Baldwin?

  And I was like, oh my God, I can't believe you people are insane.

• 29:07Speaker 04

  This would be the week.

• 29:08Alec Baldwin?

  He said, this, that's it.

• 29:10Speaker 04

  This would be the week.

• 29:10Alec Baldwin?

  This would be the week, you know, it's like that thing where we have to do it now, now. But you can't say no to them, you feel like you're family.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  You, you just forget how immediate it is, you know. Years ago, I did a sketch with, um, with a little young, little sweet faced, um, Justin Timberlake when he was in, in sync. I used to write a sketch called, um, Six Degrees Celsius, and it was like a boy group. And Will Ferrell was their manager and he had to stay 300 feet away from them because clearly he had done some inappropriate things. He had tinted glasses, of course. You know, it was Jimmy Fallon and Chris Catan and Horatio and they were, and they were, Chris Parnell, and they were a boy group. And then we'd have the host in it. Well, that week, NSYNC was there. We asked NSYNC to be another boy group in this competition on the show,

• 30:01Speaker 04

  playing a fake boy group. And so I wrote a song called "Hold the Pickle" and they were like McDonald's employees. And so NSYNC came out with like McDonald's outfits on and saying, "Hold the pickle." And they're so, they were so crazy talented. Like, they got there and looked at it for 10 minutes and had full harmonies and full choreography. I mean, they threw that shit together. I was just amazed. They came on, and then you remember, what was the MTV thing every Sunday, like the big, I can't think of the name of it, but the show, the like, show that they'd show all the videos and everything at that time. Do you remember what that was? No. Okay. Well, anyway, it was, it was a very, I do not. The big video show. You know, the big video show that the kids used to dance to. But the next morning,

• 30:45Speaker 04

  I'm in my little apartment, and you know, I probably ordered four entrees from some to-go things to eat my pain, because you're always done on Sundays. And I turned on the TV and Justin Timberlake was on TV on the show at noon in Times Square. And there were just hundreds of girls down there waving to him. And they had a banner with the words to the song "Hold the Pickle" on the banner that they had painted. And I was looking at it going, "That cannot be, because we just did this." Like, I just woke up and we just, and then I just remembered, like, I used to get obsessed. You know, I didn't have the internet. I didn't have videos. But back at the day, I mean, my God, if I would have grown up in the internet era, I would have been the queen of like, you know, just-

• 31:30Speaker 04

  You might not have made it to now. Having my own fan site. Yeah, because I just loved it and I wanted, and we were having a funny conversation the other day in my journals. When I was young, I would talk about Rocky, because I was obsessed with Rocky, Sylvester Stallone, and the very first Rocky movie. And I would talk about, like, in two weeks, People Magazine's going to have an article about him. And I would wait until we got that magazine and then I would take it home and I'd cut it out and put it in a script, you know, you, you had to wait to get information or a photo of someone, or if you really loved a singer, you had to wait for their album to come out. And now you just, you just absorb it.

• 32:09Alec Baldwin?

  I'm four years older than you. I remember when I was a kid, there was no cable, there was no DVD. The, the trailers for movies and the, and the buildup, the ramp up of a campaign to advertise a film was, or at least it seemed so far reaching back then. And I'll never forget, we went to The Godfather and I was underage and we, we snuck in, I forget how now, we stood in line and it was like three screenings, you know, like one o'clock, four o'clock, seven o'clock, and you'd go to the top of the line and didn't get in. So you waited another three hours, you know, reading Mad Magazine or some crap we read back then. And I always say-

• 32:44Speaker 04

  And now people wait to stream a movie and it's like, you know, four minutes to stream it and they're tapping their foot and going, "Come on!"

• 32:49Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And the other thing is that they'll watch 20 minutes of it, then they'll pause and they'll go talk on the phone and they'll go play-

• 32:55Speaker 04

  Right. They lose interest in it, yeah.

• 32:57Alec Baldwin?

  Now you are, you left to do a television show.

• 33:01Speaker 04

  I left, I left about six years ago to do, I wrote a pilot called Thick and Thin that was about two fat sisters that grew up fat and one gets really hot and thin and beautiful.

• 33:13Alec Baldwin?

  Who was it for?

• 33:14Speaker 04

  NBC.

• 33:15Alec Baldwin?

  For NBC.

• 33:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. We shot the pilot, it got picked up for like 13, but it was a bad year for multi-camera sitcoms. It was kind of when they were getting phased out. And it was also about a subject that was a little weird still back in that era of, you know, there wasn't a whole bunch of stuff with weight stuff. And I really wanted like real people that look fat, you know, that look fat, because I had struggled with my weight all my life and lost huge amounts of weight a couple times in my life. Sharon Glass and Martin Mull played the parents and they played my parents. So it was their names, they did all of my dad's shtick. I mean, it was really a special thing. My parents came to the pilot and they, you know, it was, it was very emotional and wonderful

• 33:57Speaker 04

  and fun, but the process of developing a, a network show like that is so hard. And I really, in hindsight, learned so, you know, learned so many things after the fact, you know.

• 34:08Alec Baldwin?

  What's one thing you learned that you can say? What'd you learn?

• 34:11Speaker 04

  Um, well, the biggest thing I learned was- I'm a people pleaser and I always like to get to know people and see the good sides of them and I wanted to have a lot of positive energy with them because I had known so many people that developed stuff that were like, "Welcome to hell!" You know, everyone just gets so negative about it. I thought, "You know what? I'm gonna go into this. I'm so lucky to be doing this. I'm so thrilled." But I befriended everyone so intensely, you know, especially like network people and everything. I befriended everyone. So then there was this sort of discomfort at telling them things they didn't want to hear, or me pushing back in bigger ways.

• 34:48Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 34:48Speaker 04

  Because I had already established that we're all just friends and we're all having fun and we're laughing. Then they would suggest things that were just show ruining and I would just be like, "Okay, well..." You know, and I just, at the time, didn't really have my voice as a creative person to lead something like that, you know. So I regret that and I regret not pushing more. I mean, casting was, you know, a little brutal just because of the weight thing is they would bring people in that were... I wanted real people that were, you know, I wanted the other sister to be a real heavy person. And when they'd audition heavy people, sometimes I'd watch their faces when they're auditioning them and they're kind of like looking at their bodies and I'm going, "This is not good."

• 35:30Speaker 04

  They don't get it that like, you know, Roseanne was friggin' huge hit show. It's like, "Come on." I don't even remember who said this to me, but one of the network people pulled me aside during one of the castings and she said, "Did you audition this other girl for that part, for the heavy sister?" And I said, "No, I auditioned her for the thin sister." And she said, "You couldn't pad her, could you?" And I just remember walking away going, "This is so dead in the water."

• 35:53Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah. Now, movies. You're doing a movie now.

• 35:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I did. I worked a little bit on Bridesmaids. I just came a couple different times and just pitched jokes on the set, did that kind of thing. Had never done anything movie-wise, ever. And I really, really had fun doing it. I really enjoyed it. And then Judd started hiring me to do some rewrites on different movies and punch-ups and stuff. And I started to see, you know, because I had tried to get into it before in other eras of my life. But at the same time, I had had an idea for a while about my journal, my childhood journal, of doing something with it. I wanted to do a little play based on it. I wanted to do something with it. And Tina had, you know, I'd read it to her

• 36:36Speaker 04

  many times at SNL. I'd read it to people before. I came up with an idea for a movie to do. To pitch, and I pitched it to Universal and they bought it with Tina attached to it as a producer and potentially to be in it. And so I wrote that, that's in the works, and we're waiting to find out all the finals on that, what's happening with that. It's been, gone through its rewrites and all that, so I'm excited about that, about Two Sisters. And then Judd and I just wrote a movie. And then last summer, I worked on my first full movie experience with This is 40. I was the executive producer on that. This sounds horrible, but do you ever wonder what it would be like if you and your wife were separated by something bigger? Like death, like her death?

• 37:21Speaker 01

  I have given it a fair amount of thought.

• 37:23Speaker 04

  Not in any painful way, but just like a gentle floating off.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  It's gotta be peaceful. I mean, this is the mother of your children.

• 37:30Speaker 04

  And then the new wife would be great.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  God, I can't wait to meet my second wife. I hope she likes me better than this one.

• 37:37Speaker 04

  I've finally kind of gotten my foothold in the movie thing now, and it's really fun. I really love it. It's a lot of waiting around for news on things. It's a lot of, you know, I can't plan anything because you don't know what your next year is gonna be. It's stressful in a different way. But so beautiful to be able to work at home with my animals and Dee and just like to be.

• 37:58Alec Baldwin?

  You are a home buddy, aren't you?

• 37:59Speaker 04

  Well.

• 38:00Alec Baldwin?

  You always come back to the same thing when I've spoken to you.

• 38:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:03Alec Baldwin?

  I was despondent when you left because, you know, you were such a great, you're such a great writer.

• 38:07Speaker 04

  Thank you, Alec.

• 38:08Alec Baldwin?

  You're one of my favorite writers of all time.

• 38:09Speaker 04

  That's real sweet.

• 38:10Alec Baldwin?

  You're so funny. No, but I really mean that. And you, and then when you left, and you said the same, you're like, I always wanna go home to Dee and my animals.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  My animals.

• 38:17Alec Baldwin?

  And my animals.

• 38:18Speaker 04

  I wanna go live the lesbian life.

• 38:19Alec Baldwin?

  I wanna be on a lesbian farm.

• 38:21Speaker 04

  I wanna wear my Dance Go clogs. I wanna get a Maglite and go under a dumpster and get some feral cats out of there. I have a horse up there. I have, you know, just, it's so beautiful and inexpensive up there, the Hudson Valley.

• 38:37Alec Baldwin?

  It's home.

• 38:38Speaker 04

  It's like the amazing place. But also, just, I'm realizing too, just the finite amount of time. You know, I've spent more time, since I've been doing the movie stuff, the last two years, I've spent more time with my family. I've been down in Florida a lot to visit them. It's just... Just feeling so much better for me. And also, I love, like Lauren, whenever I'm there, I did the Louis CK Show and I'm doing this next two here. And Lauren will say to me, "It's still fun, right? It's fun. You had fun." And I go, "Oh, my God. It's amazing." But if I did it all the time now, I would be like a bitter hag because I just feel like I wasn't having time or energy to do other things. And also, everyone is very young.

• 39:20Speaker 04

  I mean, my nieces and nephews, I saw delivered out of my sister's vagine and they are in their mid-20s and one's a physician's assistant. I mean, I've named myself at SNL nanny SNL because I'll sit at the rewrite table like, "What is the name of that? Who's that detective on television?" I'm like-

• 39:40Alec Baldwin?

  I call myself Grandpa.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 39:42Alec Baldwin?

  "Grandpa," they'll knock on the door and say, "We're ready." I'm like, "Grandpa will be right there. He'll be right there, goddammit."

• 39:48Speaker 04

  But if you have a good night there, you feel like you're 20 again. I mean, if you have a night where you feel like, I mean, last week, I had a really fun sketch I wrote with Kate McKinnon for her and Louis CK and it was funny and dirty and where they were at last call at a bar and they're just trying to find common ground because they know they're the only two people left. So they're like, "Wait, you're from Arizona? Oh, my God, I'm from Northern California. That's crazy." And they made out in the most disgusting face-eating way you could ever imagine. And I just went home on that old-school SNL high. Just a whole high, like the whole weekend, just bouncing off the walls. And then you start going, "Maybe I could do this all the time." It's like, "No, I'm gonna do it."

• 40:31Alec Baldwin?

  I would leave there after a good show, I'd leave there and say, "I'm gonna be a cast addition."

• 40:34Speaker 04

  I'll do even odd shows, like the gas rationing.

• 40:39Alec Baldwin?

  No, Twitter, you're on Twitter, I'm on Twitter. You're killing me on Twitter.

• 40:42Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 40:43Alec Baldwin?

  You talk about like I was laying on a bed and I was having a great time and I was eating snacks and I was really cozy and everything was just, I felt so great. And then a security guard came up and said, "Target is closed." It's like the Tony Bennett routine.

• 40:54Speaker 04

  People always really respond to my target tweets.

• 40:57Alec Baldwin?

  Twitter is just another forum for you.

• 40:58Speaker 04

  Twitter is really, I got very addicted to it just because it's so simple and it's like a video game for comedy writers to just do a one liner about something. And I started doing these, hey, young girl tweets.

• 41:10Alec Baldwin?

  I know, I know, yeah.

• 41:11Speaker 04

  And I might do a little book of them, maybe, and illustrate it. You know, my nieces, I just used to drive them insane when they were growing up because I was so protective.

• 41:20Alec Baldwin?

  Give it an example. You said the word was, hey, girls, I remember.

• 41:22Speaker 04

  Um, hey, young girls, keep your boobs in your shirt, your butt in your pants, your eyes on your dreams, your head in the cloud, you know, like that kind of thing.

• 41:30Alec Baldwin?

  But you also say the thing about, you know, if the guy does this.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:33Alec Baldwin?

  I remember.

• 41:34Speaker 04

  The, hey, young girls stuff just came out of my nieces because I would bring them to SNL and they were just these drop dead gorgeous girls and they would have people, I'm not talking about people just checking them out, but like at the, if I brought them backstage or whatever, there'd be some, some dude that would just end up coming up and saying, you know, really aggressive checking them out. And so they still imitate me, how I would grab them with my meaty Polish firm wife arm and go, she's 14, you want to talk about it? I mean, I would just become this raving, crazy woman looking at them like, you know, and so I've always, I'd always be like, are you sexually active? I would always want to know all their details and everything.

• 42:12Alec Baldwin?

  Like a character out of a Rock Hudson movie. You're the chaperone of the.

• 42:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm the chaperone that's, uh.

• 42:17Alec Baldwin?

  Get over here.

• 42:17Speaker 04

  Scurrying my son away from the hoochie, the hoochie dancers, you know?

• 42:22Alec Baldwin?

  Um, you're a woman and you're a woman in comedy and comedy has changed a lot over the last 40 years, but I, you know, I feel like it's changed a lot over the last 15 years. It's even more, you've got people who are much more, you know, they're just like the guys, I mean, Sarah Silverman and people who are much more in living color, if you will. I wanted to ask you, you know, your assessment of that, how that's changed for women over your career? And also, do you think that there's like certain glass ceilings still, like on late night comedy shows, like, do you think they'll ever replace Letterman or like, can a woman do that job? Because you have women hosting daytime shows.

• 42:59Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 42:59Alec Baldwin?

  And no one's on during the day, but the big three of the networks, they don't have a woman doing that show. Do you think that'll ever change?

• 43:05Speaker 04

  I don't know. I mean, it's, you know, I remember that era where a couple of them were doing it, Joan Rivers and different people were trying it and they were, you know, they were all stand-ups, but they had been around for a long time.

• 43:16Alec Baldwin?

  But not lately.

• 43:16Speaker 04

  But not lately. So I feel like now, a lot of those young, funny girls are either getting their own show, you know, doing a show, a television show, but not a talk show. You know, I mean, Jimmy, he's such a fan of everyone and so enthusiastic and joyful about music and everything that that was like a perfect fit for him and hilarious. So he worked out so great for that. But I think with women, it's also sometimes hard at SNL, like with auditions now, where you go, well, you see people and you go, where are a lot of the super funny, you know, super funny women? And you know they're around, you know they exist. But a lot of them do. They are young and they're aggressively getting

• 43:59Speaker 04

  their own shows and stuff like that. The second year I was at SNL, second or third, I remember having an agent say to me, yeah, we gotta get you, you know, we gotta get a game plan for you and get, you know, so you can get out of here and get a show going and all that. And I remember thinking, what the fuck are they talking about?

• 44:16Alec Baldwin?

  Don't be part of this ensemble.

• 44:17Speaker 04

  I'm like, what are you talking about? You know, this is like the dream job. So, but I think, I think for women, it's just, like I've always said about SNL, it's like the funny rises to the top with it. And if somebody's super funny and has abandon and joy and they're not trying, you know, I don't like ever with a comedy person, them acting like someone else or acting dirty just to be funny. I'm the filthiest person on earth. But if it's not funny dirty.

• 44:40Alec Baldwin?

  I can vouch for that.

• 44:41Speaker 04

  If I'm not being funny dirty, you know, then forget it. Because there's gotta be some class to my, to my vulva joke.

• 44:48Alec Baldwin?

  Blow without your culo.

• 44:48Speaker 04

  If a vulva joke does not have a class to it, then forget it. But, you know, for a while, there are some auditions I would watch where girls would come out and just try to just sex it up and be funny and dirty, you know, and it's like, that's not funny.

• 45:02Alec Baldwin?

  With women, you feel like, not all of them certainly, but enough of them, they go out in front of a camera, a lot of them in the comedy world, and they think, feel like, well, I don't want to go too far over the line because I don't want to lose this other thing.

• 45:11Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 45:11Alec Baldwin?

  I really would like to kiss Leo in a movie.

• 45:13Speaker 04

  Right.

• 45:13Alec Baldwin?

  I want to be, as much as I think that's-

• 45:15Speaker 04

  I see anyone thinking too hard while they're, you know, the greatest auditions at SNL were people that came in purely as themselves, came in, did a bunch of crazy ass characters, and you just went, this is a force of nature. What is this? What is this human? Like, they were making me laugh so hard and I don't even know what, where they're getting it from.

• 45:32Alec Baldwin?

  Women have that, the condition though, where it's like, they sit there and they, you know, I mean, I've seen women who they would make fun of actresses. I mean, I'm talking about comedy women. They would just tear apart, they would lacerate actresses who they thought were, you know, leaning too much on the sex button. And then those comedy actresses became stars, and they popped another button, and they put the makeup on their cleavage, and they were like, and they were just like, they were camera ready. I mean, they became the thing they made fun of. And you, and you realize for women, that's a tough angle.

• 46:03Speaker 04

  Comedy, and comedy girls tended to grow up being the goofy looking, you know, the goofy looking ones that weren't getting the attention that way. So when they become famous and have a lot of money and people putting beautiful dresses on them, I think they do go, they do go that way, you know? I mean, I've got a lot of pretty sparkly pantsuits I wear to the Emmys now, and I really get up my own ass on it because...

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Paula Pell will soon be stepping out in those pants for the release of This Is Forty, a film she helped produce, set to open December 21st. This is Alec Baldwin, Here's the Thing, comes from WNYC Radio.

• 47:02Speaker 02

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• 47:36Alec Baldwin?

  This is Jonas Knox from Two Pros and a Cup of Joe. Buy smart, drive for less and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability and it starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or half ton Tundra. Two of Toyota's longest lasting trucks combining power for work, tech for adventures and style in between. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. Whether

• 48:17Alec Baldwin?

  you're leading a big project, planning an elaborate trip, or trying to balance work and life, ChatGPT can help. Give it a goal, plus things like files, notes, or project plans,

• 48:27Speaker 00

  develop a trip itinerary with daily updates, or create a prioritize schedule. So you can spend less energy sorting out the details and more on bringing your biggest ideas to life. Get started at chatgpt.com. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.