Jim Norton will be replacing Christian Bale as the next Batman. (Via myspace.com/jimnorton)

Jim Norton has a nasty habit of being on underappreciated TV shows that meet an early demise. See Lucky Louie an Tough Crowd. It’s a good thing he’s multimedia, then, as a co-host on the Opie & Anthony radio show; with an HBO special (Monster Rain) and show (Down and Dirty); and his second book, I Hate Your Guts reaching No. 13 on the New York Times Best-Seller List.

Norton hits the stage tomorrow night at 7 p.m. as part of The Comedy Festival at Caesars Palace. We caught up with him while he was on a train bound for New Hampshire.

Coming out and doing a big festival like this, with an act like yours, do you find you have to tailor any of it?

No, I don’t care. I don’t care what they think. Vegas is a great city. Let’s be honest. It’s the gambling capital of the world. The hottest hookers on earth are there. I don’t think they’re going to be afraid of my language. If they are, they can just get up and fucking walk out. But I don’t tailor my act like when you’re on television and you know you have to.

So you have the book, and you’re on O&A like five days a week –

I just found out that I’m on the bestseller list too. I hit No. 13. Look, four books on Obama are out. It’s a very tough time. O’Reilly has a book. There’s a lot of very big books out. I’m happy I made the list at all.

How do you juggle all the different projects you have?

I have no faith in anything staying around. I’m terrified of losing everything. I’m afraid of all of it going away, so I can’t be comfortable in any area. Honest to God, I feel like a monumental flop in all areas of my career. I have to write another book because people are going to stop buying the other one, or I have to keep doing stand-up, because I’ve done some stuff on HBO and this and that, but nobody gives a shit after a year. I’m terrified the radio show is going to get canceled. Low self-esteem keeps me motivated.

Is there ever a point where you think you would be comfortable?

Yeah, man. When you look at like Seinfeld or guys like Dane (Cook), who are making that kind of money. When common sense dictates you have enough money to tell the rest of the world to go fuck itself, but even then you’re probably not going to be comfortable, so I don’t know. I would have thought by this point I’d be comfortable. I draw really well in certain markets. In certain markets I don’t. I have a nice career. But it’s not even close to being enough. I don’t know whether you get to that point or not.

Can good comedy come out of a comfortable place?

It’s a great point. I think it’s got to be a lot harder. Maybe that’s part of it too. Part of me is afraid of being comfortable because I won’t be good creatively. Most of my good, good stuff comes out of depression or self-loathing. You can’t manufacture that stuff. It has to be genuine for the jokes to work.

Then again, a lot of my act right now is about the election, and McCain and Obama and Rudy and Hillary and all these people. I guess it can come out of being comfortable, but I think when you’re comfortable you’re less likely to shit on everything else, which is kind of the linchpin of what I do.

When you were on Tough Crowd, it seemed like it had kind of a right-wing angle to what was going on. Where did you come down on this year’s election?

I wanted Obama, even though I tend to be more conservative about a lot of stuff. I’m very socially liberal, like as far as gay marriage and all this stuff that most liberals want, I’m very much in favor of. Where they lost me – and they lost me – is the big push on political correctness, and how so much censorship comes from the left. I dealt with what you could say and couldn’t say. It just began to annoy me so much. Anything they don’t like, they deem hate speech. That type of crap. But I actually like Obama. I think it’s good for the country.

So you’re more of a libertarian kind of guy?

That might be the right way to say it, I just don’t know. I wanted a black president though. It had to happen, and I think he’s a good guy for it. Let’s be honest, whenever you talk about race, it’s black people and white people. We’re the ones. I think it’s good we have a black president.

Is it good for comedy?

I think so. Most people won’t take shots at him. You watch all these late-night shows – this is another thing I hate about fucking entertainers – most of them will only attack the conservatives. They beat up on McCain, the beat up on Palin, which, fine, they’re perfectly legitimate targets. They wouldn’t take shots at Obama, they certainly wouldn’t make fun of his race, but yet they’ll make fun of McCain’s age, or they’d make fun of Palin’s gender. It’s amazing what a bunch of phonys people are when it comes to race. They’re so afraid of being offensive. At least white people are. Black people are still very funny about it.

Is the shock value of talking about race still there?

It shouldn’t be. There shouldn’t be shock value at all. To me, comedy should never have shock value. I don’t comprehend it. I’ve never been shocked by humor. Certain things, you’ll go, “Oh, that was a little racy.” I can’t comprehend being shocked by humor. Race isn’t shock value, race is a real thing we deal with. We see it every day on the news. We all have our own private feelings about it. Most of us are not honest with each other about it. I think it’s a very, very prevalent thing. It’s a very important thing we all deal with on a daily basis. You know, if you walk out in black face, you’re trying to be shocking. Or if you walk out there and you’re a black comedian and you’re wearing a bow-tie and you’re pretty much just talking about exterminating white people like Khalid Mohammed, you’re trying to be shocking. But if you’re a comedian and you’re doing racial material or honest racial observations, some will be right and some will be wrong, there’s nothing shocking about that. There shouldn’t be.

Going back to the book for a second, when you sit down to write, how different for that for you, how much of an adjustment is that going from writing jokes to writing a book?

Comedians are such quick-fix junkies. You get so used to an immediacy from an audience in a response, and a book doesn’t have that. The good thing about a book is you can meander a little bit and you can make a more serious point and get to a great joke after it. There’s not the immediacy of get to the punchline, get to the punchline. And you can go over it many times before anybody sees it, as opposed to jokes which every time you try it, people are listening. But I love to write. It’s a totally different process. I typically won’t take from the stage and write about it, but a lot of times what I write in the book will write up on stage.

Is that what happened with the Heather Mills stuff?

Heather Mills I’ve been attacking for a while. I just really hate her. She just represents everything I don’t like about divorces … Heather Mills I think I started attacking on stage first. It’s the exception to the rule. I know it’s a particularly brutal chapter, but that’s how my humor is. That’s the way I’ve always phrased things. Those are the things that have always made me laugh are things that are phrased that way.

It’s amazing how people will judge comedy. “Oh, why do you have to say that kind of stuff,” yet nobody asks Stephen King, “How come you wrote a book about a clown that murdered children?” This whole country is a bunch of fruits when it comes to humor, man. I’ve had enough of people coming after comedians. It’s a phony sense of empowerment that Americans get.

Dave Attell said he thought stand-up was in a really good place right now. Do you feel the same way? If you look at the top comedy albums on iTunes and Jeff Dunham has two albums on there, and he’s a goddamn puppet show.

Yeah, if you hear a noise, it was me just throwing myself off the train. That’s not a knock on Jeff Dunham. I guess stand-up is in a good place. Although the economy makes it a little bit tougher to sell tickets. The concert business in general is kind of down. But that’s just a financial thing.

What about the overall quality though?

Quality is so subjective. I really don’t watch other comedians, or I try not to. Attell is so brilliant, I don’t want to know what he’s doing, because it’s just going to bum me out to listen to how great his mind works. … It’s in a good place maybe in certain ways, but how soft a lot of has gotten? How afraid people are of being offensive? That I find to be kind of depressing.

Now that the book is wrapped up, what’s the next project for you?

Man, I don’t know. I’d love to write another one. I’ve got to do an extra – on the first one I did 40 more pages for the epilogue – hopefully on this one I’ll do some more when the paperback comes out. I have to see if the HBO show gets picked up. I was hosting a show on HBO called Down and Dirty, so I’d love for that to get picked up again. By the time the Festival happens, I may or may not have an answer on that. But I just don’t know. I’m going to continue to do stand-up, obviously.

Monster Rain didn’t come out that long ago, and you’ve said you retire your special material. How long does it take you to pull together enough new stuff?

I’m on stage every night at like the Comedy Cellar in New York. It could be a year, it could be six months. It all depends on what’s happening. I go in hunks. I go on stage pretty naked in terms of material. I’ll try a few new ideas, and all of a sudden you’ve got something. I try to work in 20-minute pieces. Again, it could take six months to a year before you’ve got an hour, hour-fifteen. But then you take a lot of it out because it’s crap or you trim it. I’d say at least a year before you have a quality hour.

By Jason Scavone

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