#2575 - Sam Tallent

Man, you’re a hell of a writer. You’re already a talented comic, but it’s always a surprise when somebody steps outside comedy and makes something this good. You made a beautiful book about an assassin.

I’m basically a filthy club comic who can move chicken tenders, and then I wrote something kind of beautiful. I love taking the elegant killer and dropping him into the actual world: violent, sexy, Parisian, fucked-up.

Where did the hitman idea come from? When you start a novel, do you begin with a thought, or sit there until one shows up?

Random House reissued my first novel and asked for another. I pitched a quiet story about a hometown loser walking highways, risking his neck for three hundred bucks to fix a truck. They asked if I had anything less boring. So I showed them thirty pages about a killer whose gun jams and who loses his cool. It began as the best guy in the world failing like everybody else; then I hid a love story, pulp, Paris, and male friendship inside it.

I can write love between men naturally because I’ve loved more men. If heterosexuality weren’t holding me hostage, male friendship might just be paintball, Frisbee, and everybody admitting they love each other too much.

Drugs will hand you deranged logic and make it feel bulletproof.

Most of my worst calls happened very high. In Denver, my friends and I bought red mystery stuff from a guy called Snake because he said it was opium. We smoked it, and I started hauling huge work lights from a construction site. Cops asked what I was doing; I said I thought I was setting up for work. They let me leave, so I concluded the drugs had made me persuasive.

Burroughs got me through Queer and Junky; Naked Lunch never worked because I still want a story. Rage can get your engine screaming, but it’ll cook the car too.

People comment on my body whether I’m fat or thinner, so there’s no winning. Trying to make art for comments makes terrible art. I’ll say, Hartford, I’m glad to be there, but I can’t fake a love letter to a room of strangers.

Just post the dates. Comedy crowds can get anything, from music to weirdness to a completely alien perspective. We built markets slowly: forty people, then eighty, then more shows.

That was the goal: get people with free tickets to return with friends. Now somebody’s seen me seven times, and I’m grateful but praying I brought enough new material. Then young people hit merch saying it was their first comedy show, and I’m like, bro, I set a pretty irresponsible standard.

My first O Two London Kill Tony was the worst artistic experience I’ve had. People were tailgating, fighting, doing cocaine in seats; inexperienced bucket pulls faced an arena screaming regional insults. Somebody mentioned Israel, the room exploded, and somebody tried to climb the barricade. I thought, maybe I should become a teacher.

Sixteen thousand drunk, coked-up people are difficult to manage. But Kill Tony creates real opportunity: one minute, a break, a return, and suddenly people buy tickets. You can’t have only perfect outcomes; chaos is part of the engine.

Stand-up is still the best. I’m a nightclub comic who got to sign the Royal Albert Hall book beneath somebody from the Who. I sell beer and chicken tenders; my job is making a room stop thinking for a minute. Make different people feel their thirty-five bucks mattered—that’s alchemy.

You don’t owe anybody political commentary. Pressure is valuable, though; I did my last special live because it scared me. Success can make you soft.

I love being onstage and meeting people, but airport weekends, emails, and self-promotion hollow you out. Sometimes I’m killing in a sold-out room while mentally arranging grids in City Skylines. I need to find what made me give my life to this.

Don’t let praise or hate become your identity. Focus on material, recordings, rewrites, and bits that worked but don’t belong yet. Attention spent on admirers or critics is attention taken from work, family, curiosity, and what you love.

With the book, praise can’t count more than somebody saying I’m terrible. If strangers saying it’s great feeds me, strangers saying it sucks gets to poison me. I’m trying to make ugly, funny, violent, vulnerable fiction that feels alive—books with some blood in them.

Good books still find people. Read a thriller, McCarthy, something that pulls you from the phone. The page gives your imagination work no movie can match.

A book is more nutritious than the phone. Gardening helps too. I grew a pumpkin dangling from a trellis like a weird sky ornament. It was actual magic—not content, not engagement, just a bizarre pumpkin.

Social media feeds division because fear sells. Get your brain back from the apps and algorithms.

I’ve got friends who voted differently than me. I can still ask whether they’re good husbands, uncles, sons, brothers. Disagreement gets mistaken for evil.

Hard things keep fame and money from insulating you. Maintain the body too: lift, pushups, squats, hang from a bar. You’re not trying to get huge; you’re trying not to fall apart.

I quit drinking because alcohol wasn’t my drug. I used Mounjaro with my doctor wife watching the health side, then biked, gardened, swam, and did Hindu squats because I’m terrified my knees will become decorative. My altitude chamber is locking myself in a room and writing.

Write a list and check it off: vitamins, writing, training. A professional does the job. And don’t miss the life you actually built.

I came up chasing long road sets, not showcase perfection. I could do an hour in Wyoming, come home with five hundred dollars, and think I worked harder than everybody. I still know where I’m weak, and that’s healthier than believing I’m the best.

AI is what we’re underestimating. It may erase jobs quickly and become intelligence beyond our control. We need to stop tearing each other apart long enough to see what’s coming.

That’s terrifying. Still, I’m trying to stay hopeful. Earth is sick—beautiful, strange, worth saving from what we’ve done to it.

The world isn’t perfect, but the larger trend can bend toward less violence and more knowledge. We’re messy animals in something far bigger than our monkey brains can hold.

If we avoid discomfort, hurt, embarrassment, and vulnerability, we lose the victories too. Stay awake, get off the phone sometimes, make something human, and don’t waste this weird beautiful place.

I love you, man. The book is called Brute—no e—and it’s excellent. Read it.

Please read the book, come see me live, and thanks for having me, Joe. I needed this conversation. Bye, everybody.