“Happiness is wanting what you have.”
“Penguins are basically feathered sausages for polar bears.”
Bryan Callen (TW: @BRYANCALLEN, bryancallen.com) is a world-class comic and prolific actor. He travels the globe performing standup for sold-out audiences, and regularly appears on shows like Kingdom and The Goldbergs, as well as in films such as Warrior, The Hangover, and The Hangover 2. He hosts a top iTunes podcast called The Fighter and the Kid with former UFC fighter Brendan Schaub (TW: @brendanschaub).
Spirit animal: Forest hen
“There are three things you can’t really fake: one is fighting, the second is sex, and the third is comedy. It doesn’t matter who your publicist is or how famous you are, man—if you don’t bring the money, it gets quiet in that room fast.”
“I think the way to write standup, if you want longevity in this business, at least for me, is to start by asking yourself personal questions. I write from this. I ask myself what I’m afraid of, what I’m ashamed of, who I’m pretending to be, who I really am, where I am versus where I thought I’d be…. If you watched yourself from afar, if you met yourself, what would you say to yourself? What would you tell you?”
Bryan is one of the best-read humans I know. He is voracious, and I often ask him for book recommendations. Illusionist David Blaine credits Bryan with being the first person to get him to read extensively. They met when Blaine was in theater school, and Bryan told him: “The difference between the people you admire and everybody else [is that the former are] the people who read.” Here are a few of Bryan’s favorites:
“I remember reading Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. That’s good fodder for a young man. It sets these bold, stark characters—you could even call them Christ figures—and you think to yourself, ‘I want to be that.’ Of course, I read Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morality, etc., where the truths and truisms are really cut and dried in a lot of ways. It’s the equivalent of, I guess, intellectual red meat. But then I got into Joseph Campbell—The Power of Myth and The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Joseph Campbell was the first person to really open my eyes to [the] compassionate side of life, or of thought…. Campbell was the guy who really kind of put it all together for me, and not in a way I could put my finger on…. It made you just glad to be alive, [realizing] how vast this world is, and how similar and how different we are.”
“You’re going to think I’m plugging you, but I probably have recommended The Art of Learning [by Josh Waitzkin, here] and The 4-Hour Body, I’m not kidding, more than any other books.”
“Well, I would say that if you are searching for status, and if you are doing things because there’s an audience for it, you’re probably barking up the wrong tree.
“I would say, ‘Listen to yourself.’ Follow your bliss, and Joseph Campbell, to bring it back around, said, ‘There is great security in insecurity.’ We are wired and programmed to do what’s safe and what’s sensible. I don’t think that’s the way to go. I think you do things because they are just things you have to do, or because it’s a calling, or because you’re idealistic enough to think that you can make a difference in the world.
“I think you should try to slay dragons. I don’t care how big the opponent is. We read about and admire the people who did things that were basically considered to be impossible. That’s what makes the world a better place to live.”