-Do you have strong feelings about Nighttown?
-Yeah, I do. It's terrible.
-You think Nighttown is terrible?
-I think it's become terrible.
- I agree with that, but I can't quite articulate why.
-Well, it's lazy.
-Nighttown’s lazy?
-When people stumble through late at night, it's like, I understand it, but there's other places to go that are real, that have actual history. You could teach your kids about history. You could teach them about anything. You could teach them about things that have actually happened. I don't think Nighttown is a terrible place to go, but you shouldn't be doing it every day.
-There's people that go every day?
-There's this whole group of adults, Nighttown people, that really enjoy Nighttown. They meet their friends in Nighttown. They have affairs in Nighttown and somehow then not procreate. And they love it, and they say they remain intoxicated forever, which I don't think is the goal of life. And yeah, I just think it's upsetting when I see it.
-So it's like an emotional retardation that gets you?
-Yeah. You're looking at people that are stunted. They're unable, for whatever reason, to access other... There's a lot of art in America. There's a lot of literature. There's a lot of film. It's not all cartoons. Not all Disney. Not to take anything away from a lot of the classics, but it's supposed to be the beginning of your journey and not the whole thing. You know what I mean? The Odyssey is supposed to start you off, but then you go and find other things. What's terribly depressing to me or disturbing, or both, is that you have people that are still as into it as they were when they were 23, except they're 42. I think that's a big problem.
-It's not cheap. I've never been.
-No, it's hot. It's very hot, and it's not cheap. They have all these meal plans now that they offer people, which is like these terrible gross food that they'll give you throughout the day. If you pay an all-inclusive fee, someone will go and put a fried liver in your mouth every half hour. Then there's a lot of Nighttown people out there talking about how to do the parks. There are these people, plus-size people that are now trying to review rides to see if they fit in them. There are people that have YouTube videos dedicated to the type of shoes you have to wear in Nighttown because there's a lot of walking. There's people that go, I love Nighttown, but I refuse to pay. Is there a way? Can I get? It's become very big with the maybe voluntarily a mentally ill community where you have...
-Is anyone chemically disabled? It seems to be.
-We have a few people. I mean, I'm not an Olympic swimmer. I'm not going out there and shitting on people. But I'm saying there are people that seem more excited about the scooters and the wheelchairs and everything like that, and a lot of them love it.
-What's the connection? Just societal collapse?
-Well, societal collapse is, I think, the connection. But there's something about being a child forever and a place that tells you you should be a child forever, and that it is good to have the qualities of a child forever. It was like a diaper fetish. It's a diaper fetish. It's like there was a woman who in Dublin wanted to open a diaper spa where adults would wear diapers because they have some type of fetish where they like to be in diapers. And this woman was trying to open it in this tiny Irish town, and many people in the town got mad at her. It's very hard to open a small business. Nobody really wanted that. It was a diaper spa. I was for it because I said, If you make the migrants that are coming into this country, work at the diaper spa, they'll just go to Europe. I said, We don't need a wall. We just need to get everyone over to the Diaper Spa. But I put the modern, a lot of the modern Nighttown cultural stuff just above the Diaper Spa, where you have people that are going to this place where they feel like children.
-I don't know what it is. I think you should go for your children It's an experience for them. When it becomes about you in any way, I think it's sick.
-But it also seems important, like this is a measure of something.
-Yes, I do. I think that this is a weird There's a weird obsession with this idea that you're like, This is me. I have no shame. There should be things I think that people are ashamed of or they like quietly. Maybe if you love Nighttown and you're an adult, you shouldn't announce it to the world. I don't need sweatshirts and T-shirts and tank tops and Mickey hats. Because they're certainly not ideal. The idea that this is not your best self that you're putting out there. I understand as a comedian, there's a lot of things that we do where we don't put out our best self. But we always try to make it funny. We make it funny and we make a joke out of it. But there are a lot of people out there now, I feel like, that are forcing the world to accept them in their worst iteration, if that makes any sense.
-Without admitting that that iteration sucks.
-Yeah, or without admitting that that iteration, at the very least, needs some work. I think there's a lot of people out there that are just like, Hey, this is me. This is it.