Bob Odenkirk Would Like to Remind You That Life Is a Meaningless Farce

“So almost four years ago, I had this heart incident. One of the tributaries to my widow-maker artery was shut down completely by a plaque buildup. I really went down on the set of Better Call Saul. It was really scary, especially for everyone around me, not for me because I don't have any memory of it. But I've talked about it many times and people have asked me many times how did that affect you? It was a blank for me for a week.”

“I’m reading this book, that novel that’s called On the Calculation of Volume, and I’m reading this book, and the character in this book is having a very unique experience of time, and she’s relating her experience of reliving the same day over and over. And I come to these passages, and I’m like, that’s how I felt. That’s exactly how I felt for weeks after having this heart attack. And I could, there’s like a couple passages in here that I marked because I’m like, I’ve never been able to express this to people.”

“I absolutely knew this was the best time I'll ever have in my life. No question. Also, I've got to add, it's not just a sense of feeling valued and feeling purposeful, it's entertainment. There's nothing more entertaining than a little kid. So I knew that this could be the best thing you could do. I feel like there's nothing I can do that is going to match the value that I felt for life of being a parent of kids between zero and usually around 14, 15, they're like, they're done with you.”

“I'm not super handsome, young, muscled up, any of that. You can relate to all these things. You're very grounded at moments. And then there comes this point in the movie where that guy, you, are living in a movie. And you can do things that you can only do in a movie. The same thing happens in Normal, true. But Normal is a little elevated from the get-go. I think we go through life, there are frustrations everywhere. In a movie, you can do it.”

“I think that ultimately there is nothing more profound about people than you can say in a sketch. They're fucking idiots. People are sadly limited, so limited that you can define them and you can share everything that's important about them in four minutes. I don't think any Kubrick movie or Freudian analysis or Shakespeare says as much about how humans operate and what is the ultimate problem with us as a species than sketch comedy.”

“If you’re on that comedy stage, that’s a show. You are not you. You are pretending to be a person named you. Everything you say is a construct, everything. If you don’t like that and you want to tell an audience something genuine, earnest and honest, then get off that stage, because that stage is only a show. It is not real and it is not genuine and it is not direct, no matter how much you act like it is.”

“I pretty much do think that's true, but I do think that, obviously, I think there's joy and reward in being alive and in the ways in which we look away. In whatever way in which you find to transform that horror, the horror, the horror, in whatever way you find to transform that into something good, entertaining, beautiful, comforting to another person, helpful, that's beautiful, and that's the joy of life, is turning shit into gold.”