Tom Arnold knows what you’re thinking—or rather, who you’re thinking—when you hear that his latest comedy tour is titled My Crazy X-Wife. But, he says, Roseanne Barr is “not even close to my crazy ex-wife, because we didn’t have kids together.” As he makes his way to the Comedy Vault in Batavia on October 26, we spoke with Tom for a candid conversation about his love for Chicago (a city that doesn’t make him feel fat), working with Rick Moranis, and championing a young Norm MacDonald.
How has the tour been going so far?
People are coming out this tour. I am so grateful because, as I tell them, I really need the money. I have four ex-wives and two little kids, and my son is like, “Daddy, why don't you have a Lambo?” I'm like, “Son, I could have a Lambo, but eight years ago, I got you guys.” I don't get to be around many adults because of the kids. This tour is really my adult time.
I know that the Comedy Vault is in the suburbs, but I would love to know what you think it is that makes Chicago such a vibrant city for comedy.
Well, I think Chicago is the best city in America. There's a lot going on there. You know, I just was watching something on TV and a senator said Chicago was a war zone. I wanted to reach through the TV and punch him in the face. These people that criticize Chicago, if they've ever been to Chicago—Chicago has everything. I mean, you have a wide swath of everything there. You know, one thing I like is any time I go to Chicago, I don't feel fat (laughs). Out here in LA, I feel like, ‘Oh God, I gotta get it together.’ As soon as I get to Chicago, I look around and go, ‘I am not fat. I'm like medium at best.’
I'm a lifelong Cubs fan. That's very helpful. And there’s so much great comedy: Second City, the comedy clubs, it's always been one of the probably three or four meccas of comedy since I started in 1983. It's produced a lot of great comedians, a lot of great writers, a lot of talent that moves there to do this stuff, and the best part is that people come out and support it. They support comedy. There are cities that—clubs will close because people forgot there was a comedy club there. They're like, ‘Oh, yeah, I wish I would have went.’ But it's a regular thing for people in Chicago. A lot of super-successful, great people come out of Chicago.
You have opportunities to go on stage. I mean, that's everything. I always think my whole goal about being a comedian was, the only time I ever heard my dad laugh was when there was a Bob Hope special on. I'm a single dad. My kids are 12 and 9. My dad was a single dad, so I know it can be done, but he worked a lot. He came home and there'd be a Bob Hope special on. Bob Hope would go around and entertain the troops in Vietnam or Korea or wherever and he would take beautiful women, which my dad loved, and do double entendre jokes, which my dad loved. I remember thinking whatever it is that Bob Hope does, I'm gonna do that because I'm gonna I want to hear my dad laugh like that. So one of the first things I did in Hollywood was a Bob Hope special. And Bob Hope called my dad, signed all this stuff for my dad, couldn't have been nicer. And my dad back home in Ottumwa, Iowa, small town, in the same living room, same TV that he used to watch Bob Hope when I was three feet tall, now sees Bob Hope standing next to his son on TV. So that's kind of a—I mean, once that happened, I go, “I guess I’ve got no more goals.”
But you know, also my thinking growing up in Ottumwa, Iowa, was ‘Nobody does this. Nobody's a comedian,’ but I just knew I was gonna do it. It's crazy. My first thing I thought, was ‘If I get on TV one time, the people in my hometown will love me.’ And that's just not how it works. I had to work for three years on the kill floor of a meat packing plant after high school to get to the University of Iowa, because I knew they had a stage. And my thinking was, ‘I get on that stage, I'll be famous in two weeks.’ Again, that's not how it works. But I was so crazy. And I loved doing it so much that I would travel around and sleep on couches, do it for nobody.
Minneapolis became my home base at first, from ‘83 to ‘88, because they had five comedy clubs. We had real comedians from Chicago, Minneapolis, wherever, they would come down to Iowa City to the student union to perform. I would open up for them, and what would happen is, all 50 of my buddies, we drink Everclear Punch, which is Everclear and powdered Gatorade, very strong, and get drunk. And then I'd go on and do my 10 minutes, and then all my friends would get up and leave with me to go out partying. And a club owner in Minneapolis said, “Hey, if you get your friends to stay next show, I'll give you a job up in Minneapolis.” We stayed, I got a trash bag with all my clothes, I got on a bus—I had no car driver's license—I got up to Minneapolis, I went to the Comedy Cabaret, I went to the door and said, “Hey, I'm here, I gotta live close to here, because I don't have a car. I've only got a hundred bucks. So do you know anybody who's looking for a roommate?” They're like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, you don't have to live close to here, because the job was only one weekend for $20.”
I'm like, “Well, I'm here.” So I went to the nearest bar, I got a job as a bouncer, and one of the waitresses was looking for a roommate for a hundred bucks, and I ended up just staying. And I had to work other jobs for the first couple years. I think about how uncomfortable I would be now, traveling around in the back vans, sleeping on people's couches, working. But I loved it. And if you love it, you gotta stay out of all the results. You love doing it, you’ve gotta figure out a way to love bombing, to love being disrespected, to love whatever, because it does get you towards your goal.
How exactly did you stay driven through all of that?
People will think, ‘Here's what has to happen. I have to be the star of a show, or I have to be this thing, or that.’ And that makes it pretty impossible to do it, because you have to love all the rejection, just the whole process, and getting better. Because as comics, we think we're great from day one, and we're not. And I can tell you, the first time I was on stage in Iowa City, my uncle came down and filmed it. And I thought I freaking killed.
But recently, I started watching it like, ‘Oh my God, this is brutal. Oh my God.’ And I think that as a comic, that happens a lot. As you get better, you get your voice better, you get better material, you stay on it, and then you look back and say, ‘Man, I'm glad I've taken the time to get good.’ Because everybody does get a chance. And when you get that chance—maybe you're in a movie, you're on set, they say action, you better be ready. You better not panic. You better know what's going on.
When I hosted Saturday Night Live, they do a countdown—a guy named Don Pardo, famous announcer—in the back, you're behind the door, and he's like, “Six, five, four, three, two.” And I realize when that door opens, it's live, and I could just fall down and ruin everything. Because things don't always go great, you’ve just got to not panic and kind of be used to what's going on here and why.
You brought up SNL, so I have to ask about how you brought Norm MacDonald onto the writing staff of Roseanne in its fifth season.
I was a writer and I was executive producer, and when I first came, I had never worked on a Hollywood show. I went from zero to a hundred, this awesome responsibility. Roseanne knew that I knew her character and I'd been writing for her for years, jokes and stuff that she would do on Johnny Carson, which is very satisfying, but what I did is, I thought of the best comedians I knew, and I would hire 12 of them. I would show them the form of a sitcom script. You can learn the form, but you can't learn to be funny.
Norm MacDonald specifically came one day and said, “Listen, I don't have a contract, but I got my dream job offer to host Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live.” And I'm like, “Well, of course.” And the big names upstairs, they said, “We're not letting you out of the contract.” And so I went up there like, ‘Listen, fuckers, everybody gets out of the contract for their dream job.' It's not like he's going to work on Two and a Half Men or whatever was on the air then. He gets to do his dream job.
You've written for sitcoms, you've done stand-up, you've been in movies, you mentioned sketch comedy when you hosted SNL. Which medium do you find most engaging as a performer?
Whatever one hires me (laughs). I had a sports show for a few years on Fox Sports. It was so great, because I would be sitting there—first of all, I got paid to talk about sports, and I'd be sitting there with two of my childhood idols; I'd be in between Ernie Banks and Willie Mays on the set, like, ‘How did I get here?’ Because sports are a real visceral thing to people, and I was the comedian, I wasn't an expert on sports. I can't be objective if it's about the Cubs, the Iowa Hawkeyes, or anybody else. I'm not going to ask these guys hard questions. I'm not going to ask Lance Armstrong if he doped, but I will ride a giant tricycle race with him.
I’d also love to ask you about your memories of working with Rick Moranis on Big Bully, which was his last theatrical on-screen role before he makes his long-overdue return to the big screen in Spaceballs 2 in 2027.
I love Rick Moranis. He's played some amazing characters and he's a Second City icon, but in that movie I was a bully to Rick Moranis's character, so I hope I didn't scare him, because people are like, ‘He stopped working after he worked with you?’ (laughs). I believe his wife passed away and he had to raise his kids, which, of course he's gonna do that. He's a great guy and a very sweet guy. I'm really grateful he's doing more stuff because he's a very uniquely talented guy.
I remember watching that movie along with The Stupids as a kid, which I remember fondly. Which projects of yours do you feel deserve more love?
Well, people used to say, “What's the worst thing you ever did?” I've been in 150 movies, and I used to answer, but I don't now because whatever it was, there's 100 people who worked on it, and it may be the best thing they've ever done. There's a movie called Fred 3: Camp Fred that, while we're filming it, I said, “Oh, this is the worst piece of…why are we here? This is humiliating,” and I never saw it again. Then my daughter, when she was about two, a friend of hers had it, and she watched it, and she loved it, and I'm like, I gotta revisit Camp Fred. Maybe it is—through her eyes, I'm like, maybe there is something there.
I can't think of anything that I think, ‘Oh, if they'd only seen this or that.’ You know, a lot of movies in the 90s, when people are growing up, they're watching those movies, McHale’s Navy or whatever, they thought it was a good thing. The Stupids, you either hated it or loved it, and a lot of people fucking hated it, but people that loved it, it's become a cult thing. Maybe six months ago, the kids and I watched it, and I hadn’t seen it for many years—I'm like, there's some good shit. There's all these great people in it, because the director, John Landis, from Animal House, Trading Places, An American Werewolf in London, he loves making movies, and he had seven famous directors in it to work, to do one line or one scene because that gave them their SAG health insurance.
And so, when I was watching it back, I'm like, ‘Oh, fuck, that's David Cronenberg, that's Norman Jewison.’ The guy that lived next door to Stanley Stupid, there's a guy named Robert Weiss who directed The Sound of Music and won an Oscar for it. There's all these different nuggets of stuff. I definitely stayed in character, and my kids, once in a while, they won't go to sleep until I sing “I'm My Own Grandpa,” which, there's a lot of words to that, and I have to pull up the words on the internet, but it's a fun song, and I'm happy I did that movie.
What should audiences expect when they come out to see this new tour?
It's going to be probably different than they think. I think that so far, people have been all in, and they'll bring their dad or their girlfriend or whatever, it'll be a big planned night. It's not like they're walking by the Comedy Vault like, ‘Hey, there's something going on here,’ and so I really appreciate and respect that, so it's up to me to make sure that they have a good time. There's a lot of shit going on in the world right now, a lot of just awful, awful stuff, and it makes comedy and comedians more important. You saw with Jimmy Kimmel, some people don't like to be made fun of, powerful people, and they try to get rid of comedians, which is horrible. That’s why I think comedy clubs are really important right now.
Tom Arnold appears at the Comedy Vault (18 E Wilson, Batavia) on Sunday, October 26, at 7:30pm and Saturday, October 4, at 7 and 9:30 pm. Tickets (starting at $36.99) are on sale now.
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