INTERVIEW WITH ALAN THICKE:

RGP: Thank you very much for taking the time. I guess I just wanted to begin by asking you to tell us a little bit about what you’re doing now and where your career is going.

AT: I am writing my second humor book, a family book. My first one was called How Men Have Babies which is the pregnant father’s survival guide and this will be about the first time your kid does things. About 100 things that your kid will do that will surprise you and break your heart and it will be a combination of fact based therapy, medically advised kinds of passages accompanied by celebrity anecdotes and just some funny stuff to lighten the load. So I’m doing that and we have another "Growing Pains" movie and I am hosting three obscure little cable shows that are nevertheless fun and interesting for me to do. So, the usual.

RGP: I’m curious. What drew you to these books? Is this mostly written from experience?

AT: Well, I had had people offering publishing deals and I never quite had the handle on what I thought would be appropriate to write about and then when my son was born five years ago it occurred to me that maybe the niche that hadn’t been explored yet was a humorous approach to a man’s role in pregnancy and sure enough, that turned out to be a viable area. First of all, nobody has asked a lot of guys what they thought of pregnancy and so I wrote it in kind of ESPN language. You know, it’s a sort of a chauvinistic sports angle on the pregnancy experience although the book has been mostly bought by women for their guys and they highlight passages. To say you see where we’re going? You weren’t paying attention!

RGP: Well, it’s certainly a shock.

AT: It’s a woman’s aid.

RGP: That first child is certainly a shock and I’ve spoken to a lot of men about it too and I always felt somebody should warn somebody about this!

AT: In my case, all three were a bit of a shock, but by the third time I was at least prepared. I was more ready. I didn’t want to miss anything. It was a fun book to write and this will be kind of a follow-up.

RGP: That’s interesting that you’re really working on sort of the human side of pregnancy and these issues and treating it humorously which is, I think, very close to what we’re trying to do although we don’t use humor as much. But the idea is to tell about the human side of these issues, in our case illnesses, in a way that is entertaining. Before we get into that, I want to ask you one other question and that is you played a psychiatrist on television and you mentioned last time that obviously that gives you sort of an advantage when you’re talking about these issues and if you can elaborate a little on that I would appreciate it.

AT: Well, on "Growing Pains" I played a psychiatrist and the networks are very sensitive to make sure you’re not portraying any profession in a way that is not consistent or accurate with the way that profession wants to be perceived. Especially in the health care area they want to be accurate. So we had psychiatrists and counselors and therapists around the set regularly, especially for those scenes in which Jason would be dealing with a patient to make sure we were doing it all appropriately. An easy example was early on there was a patient in my office and the patient was upset and as an actor I reached out to hold her hand or to touch her on the shoulder and it was pointed out that that would not be appropriate conduct for a therapist. It’s a way to get a date but not exactly to make a point as a medical practitioner. So those are the kinds of things that we would be advised on and people during the run of that show would congratulate me on being such a fine parent and I would point out it’s easier to parent when you have eight writers following you around including a couple of consultants telling you what to do. So that was always a sensitive area and I feel I learned a lot from that. They were always there for me to ask questions related to the raising of my own two teenage sons and I have always felt that the psychology of disease and illness and affliction was an important and sometimes overlooked dimension. There are psychological repercussions to illness and we need a little more help to get through the effects not only on the afflicted but on the family. And I think there’s even a place for humor in that. If one tends to be a humorous person and you have a sense of humor the rest of your life then you can certainly lighten the load, I think, by bringing that to your trials and tribulations. It’s easy to have a sense of humor when everything is going well. What do you do when you’re challenged? It’s always been said that comedy comes mostly out of the dark side anyway. When people fall down on "America’s Funniest Home Videos" or they get hit in the crotch you laugh at them. There is some humor in those challenges in life. In quoting my deceased grandmother, for instance, who had a long health struggle after her stroke she made it clear that what she wanted on her gravestone was for it to say, "I told you I wasn’t feeling well". We didn’t put that on her gravestone, by the way, but I always admired that she at least had that philosophy and was carrying her dark sense of humor even to her grave. I think what it does is it takes some of the sadness out of the family’s experience losing somebody by knowing that the person being lost is kind of okay with it or has come to terms with it and it can lighten the load in some dark moments.

RGP: Well, the Irish certainly believe that. My wife is Irish and Irish wakes really are that way.

AT: My grandmother was Irish.

RGP: Now, using humor…Part of what I would like to accomplish with these interviews is getting some insight and some suggestions to people. You know, actors develop all kinds of tricks to get into a character, to change emotions rapidly, and these are very useful skills, I think, for life. If you can have a little control over your emotion and instead of sinking into that depression understand how to change the direction, that’s a useful skill. One thing I would like to ask you or a couple of questions along those lines. One is, can you think of any examples…you give your grandmother as an example…of ways in which people can try to change their attitude when they are having something happen? How do you introduce humor into a situation? You know, little tips about maybe feeling an emotion when you really don’t feel that way. Because I do that and I think as a physician I often have to get into an emotion with patients when I’m having a bad day. But I’ve noticed that once I do that I tend to actually begin to feel that way. It changes the way I feel.

AT: I think a trick is, and this is basically what any comedy writer does in their practice, one trick is to simply step aside, step away from who you are and what you’re doing and try to look at your situation objectively as a third person. You’re standing outside your door looking in. What is it that you’re seeing? What could possibly be amusing about it? For an example, my son, Brennan, is diabetic and has been taking needles since he was 4 and there came a time after we got through all of the trauma, etc. that we had sort of had fun with the exercise and we’d laugh at it and even make it a bit of a game and find ways to take the illness out of that daily torture. I think the basic underlying philosophy is to simply stop yourself once in a while and say, "What is silly about this situation". Here I am, I’m lying in bed. I can’t get out of bed. I have no energy. I have the flu. I have a disease. I have a broken foot. What is it that is a compromise of the human condition if you were looking at it from the outside? If David Letterman were watching you at this moment, what would he say? And introduce an element of cynicism and darkness into it and just realize that we’re all vulnerable. We are humans. There is a finite end to this life and we’re all going to face it and a little silliness can help. So if you can look at yourself like somebody through the window and say what is it that I’m doing that is silly. Is it my whining and the pressure I’m putting on all my relatives to take care of me and bring me this, bring me that, and what is funny about this character? If I were now projecting myself into a movie, what would I laugh at about myself? And that’s what we do as comedy writers. You remove yourself from these situations and look at it from the outside and say, "What is silly about this". There’s often nothing truly amusing. It’s life or death and there’s certainly a dark side, but that kind of training can help you for moments at a time.

RGP: You’re a writer and do you do standup at all?

AT: I do, yes. I wouldn’t call myself a standup in the presence of Jerry Seinfeld or Chris Rock, but I do my share of it and it has been and remains part of my activity and I like it. For me, it’s always a great challenge because I do a couple of events or shows a month and that means I’m always writing new stuff. I’m not able to go in with an act that I use month to month year to year all the time. It’s constantly evolving and changing and that keeps me on my toes but certainly adds to the challenge.

RGP: You were talking about your approach to comedy writing. As an actor, what is your approach to becoming a character? For example, the character you played on "Growing Pains"…you have to educate me because I’m not an actor. How were those characters developed? There was writing going on and you saw the script and then, of course, you add a lot of yourself to it. How do you develop a persona like that? Is it handed to you? Does it grow?

AT: You pretty much described it. They have something on paper. They think they know what they want and you fill that bill to some degree and then they’re always excited and anxious to see what you’re able to add to that, what part of your own reality or persona could be brought to it. In my case on "Growing Pains", I think we evolved from year to year by adding some dimensions to the character. One year we decided that the kids were growing up and everything was very expensive and so it would be funny if Jason were cheap and the next year it’s starting to experience the empty nest syndrome and what changes Jason’s going through and one of them was to revisit his college interest in rock and roll bands. He was in a band in university and this was a way in your middle-age crisis to feel young again. So there were elements like that that we able to add year to year that I was either experiencing or knew about or at least saw could be a logical extension of the character.

RGP: So you add to the character, but I’m curious. Does the character add to you? Did you make connections in playing that character that you found useful subsequently or that were new to you? That you learned something by being challenged by the character? Did that happen?

AT: Well, I think on "Growing Pains" especially there was always art imitating life and vice versa of raising kids. My two boys were the same ages as the kids in the show. In real life or in between the breaks I was raising two kids off camera who were not unlike the two kids who were being paid to be my kids. So there was a constant flow and a thin line there between reality and television and yes, much of what I was experiencing in my real life was also what was going on in the television show to the extent that I had to take writers’ advice and from the counselors around. There were definitely overlaps between what was real and television.

RGP: I’ll just take a few more minutes. The main purpose of this project is to create a resource for writers and actors to understand by both reading letters from people with various illnesses or in various situations and by providing direct anonymous contact basically because people will leave their e-mail addresses to help understand the human side of medicine basically and the human side of various diseases. Do you think this is a useful thing? Is this something you think the entertainment world pretty much has down or do you think that there is room for improvement in terms of being able to understand a little better what life is like with these illnesses if you were going to introduce them into a television show or a movie?

AT: Yeah. I think it’s an area that has been under-serviced by not only the entertainment media but primarily – and those should accept the responsibility for it – the medical community. I think that dealing with the head and the heart, ephemerally speaking, is as important as dealing with the organs. Because we are living longer. We live longer with chronic illness. We live longer after recovery and in rehab from various physical ailments and maladies and I think that it is an area that needs to be more attended to, this business of the psychological impact and ramifications of physical health, the mental health component of that and especially as it relates to the family and I think there are several avenues of solution for that. First of all, guidance from the medical community and especially as it enters into the counseling and therapy arena and we can certainly do better as part of our public responsibility in the entertainment business in how we communicate and show that we understand that. I’m a big proponent of having a mental health component go along with whatever the physical realities are.

RGP: Can you just comment briefly on the power of the media? I mean, I have a notion that the entertainment world and the newspapers and the media are very powerful in shaping attitudes and I agree with you that the medical community, and I think that’s getting worse actually with the medical community, is paying less and less attention because of the way medicine is going to the human side. I think that perhaps the most powerful revenue and which is why I chose this and I’d just like to have you comment on it is mass media because I think it is so powerful. You know, it’s always been.

AT: That’s true. I think what we could do best in addition to all of the "Dateline" and "Good Morning America" and newsmagazine shows that will discuss and keep us up to date with advances and discoveries in the evolution of health care. In addition to that, on the entertainment level in sitcoms and dramas the mantra has always been in health care that you’re not alone. In other words, whatever you’re going through, whatever you’re feeling, whether you’re stricken with cancer or with heart disease or with a stroke or you’re rehabbing or have been into alcoholism or domestic abuse – you name it – the mantra is you’re not alone. There are people to talk to. There are other people like you. You’re not unique in all the world. Your experience has a certain commonality. And I think that’s what the media can do is to help show that as strange or put upon or unusual or unique as you think you or your situation is, you are not alone. There are others, thousands, maybe millions of people suffering in similar ways and there is experience that has gone on before you that can help you understand and relate to and control your own environment better.

RGP: Okay. Well, thank you, Alan.

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