There's long been a certain stigma attached to an AOL.com email account, and those of us obsessed with keeping up with the times have cycled through Hotmail, Earthlink, Yahoo!, and any number of corporate domains before ending with the current standard of email modernity, the Gmail account. 
  
 But despite Google's best efforts to stigmatize those unfashionable old domains, I've started to notice a certain prestige attached to the AOL.com survivors. Now that my mother has switched to Gmail, virtually the only people I email at AOL accounts are bigshots -- people who were already so important by the time the various new fads (and technical advantages) arrived that they couldn't be bothered to switch, and had nothing to prove to anyone. 
  
 This is not, to say the least, a crowd of technophobes. Some, like Joe Trippi and Arianna Huffington, are seen as techno-sages. Rather, it's a generation of the political and media elite. It occurs to me that part of the reason some never switched is that they were early adaptors of mobile devices, which don't care which service you're using. And if they've held on this long, there's really no reason to give up now on something that's cycled back to being a status symbol. 
  
 With the help of some friends on Twitter, here's a list of people who have fairly recently been reachable, often with quirky handles, on their old AOL accounts: 
  
 POLITICS: David Axelrod, Jim Messina, John Weaver, Joe Trippi, Mandy Grunwald, Dick Morris (a recent defector to gmail), Frank Luntz, Ed Rollins, Guy Cecil, Tad Devine, Al Franken, Aaron Schock MEDIA: Matt Drudge, Arianna Huffington (who was holding onto an AOL account long before AOL bought her company), David Brooks, David Corn, Robert Draper, Rick Perlstein, Ann Coulter, Tina Brown, Lawrence O'Donnell 
  
 Most of them, it should be noted, also have other accounts. "I have newfangled email addresses too but I'm fond of the original," emailed Grunwald. 
  
 The next item in this series will address political figures who retain Earthlink accounts, and really don't care what you think about it. ||||| Last week, Ben Smith at Politico made the argument that clinging to a seemingly outdated AOL e-mail address might have somehow become a weird sort of status symbol, to judge by the Washington power brokers and high-profile media people who still use theirs. In the new issue of Playboy, Paul Rudd gives Smith's theory further credence: Not only do he and Judd Apatow still have AOL e-mail addresses, but so do Tina Fey, Steve Carell, and Sarah Silverman. (Vulture knows from experience that Tilda Swinton and David Arquette do, too, but then, those two have so much in common already.) "I like AOL because it's so embarrassing," Rudd explains. "People look at you as if you're a fossil. Which you are. But I enjoy that embarrassment. I like being on the outside. Having an AOL address is like wearing Ocean Pacific shorts. It's so uncool that it's cool." [Playboy] ||||| Playboy Interview: Paul Rudd 
  
 …Continued from page one 
  
 PLAYBOY: You seriously have to gain weight for a movie role? 
  
 RUDD: I know, it’s weird. It’s the opposite of what the studios normally want or what other directors want. But it’s different with Judd. He always says, every time we work together, that he wants me to gain weight. He says, “I like a fat Rudd.” 
  
 PLAYBOY: Is that because it makes you look more human? 
  
 RUDD: I don’t know. Maybe. I just like the excuse to eat bacon. I don’t have far to go anyway. My gut just needs that little extra bit. 
  
 PLAYBOY: And this is a typical request from Apatow? 
  
 RUDD: Oh absolutely. There’s a line in The 40-Year-Old Virgin when my character tells Steve Carell what it’s like to have your heart broken and how you’re constantly gaining and losing weight. I improvised that line because, before we started shooting the movie, I took Judd’s request to put on weight maybe a little too far. And the studio said, “You’re a fat ass. Lose some weight.” So during the course of the movie I tried to drop a few pounds. 
  
 PLAYBOY: That could cause a continuity problem. 
  
 RUDD: A huge problem. And I figured my weight is going to fluctuate anyway. If I mention it in a scene, maybe that’ll cover my bases and justify why I’m 10 pounds heavier in some scenes and 10 pounds lighter in others. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Is the new film you’re doing with Apatow, currently called This Is Forty, a sequel to Knocked Up? 
  
 RUDD: It’s not really a sequel. It’s more like a spin-off. It’s about Pete and Debbie, the couple Leslie Mann and I play in the first movie, with the same kids. We’ve been in rehearsals for about six months, reading through scenes and improvising some ideas. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Does it ever feel as though you’re doing therapy for Apatow? 
  
 RUDD: How do you mean? 
  
 PLAYBOY: Your fictional wife is played by Judd’s actual wife, Leslie Mann, and your fictional kids are played by his actual daughters, Iris and Maude. It’s as though he’s making these movies to examine his own marriage under a microscope. 
  
 RUDD: There’s a reason it seems as though he’s doing that. And that’s because he absolutely is. We’re both doing it. It was the same thing in Knocked Up. A lot of stuff in that movie was right out of my life and right out of Judd’s life. Judd asked me to write down things from my marriage, and we’d use that in improvisations. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Such as? 
  
 RUDD: Well, when my wife was pregnant, she got upset with me because I didn’t read the baby books. She looked at that, understandably, as a hostile gesture. But I had an argument in my defense. What did the cavemen do without What to Expect When You’re Expecting? You know what I mean? It’s all bullshit. I was like, “It’ll be fine. We don’t need to go to birthing classes or any of that nonsense.” What’s the worst that can happen? It’s not as though if I didn’t read the books and go to the classes our son wouldn’t have been born. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Is it true you became friends with Apatow because of a mutual love of Steve Martin? 
  
 RUDD: Here’s what happened: I was at a dinner party with a group of people, and we were talking about fake names—you know, how it’s difficult to come up with a really great fake name. It’s a specific type of gift. You don’t want to go too far into the silly, and you don’t want to go too far into the banal. I always thought one of the funniest names ever was Gern Blanston, which came from a Steve Martin routine on one of his early records. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Comedy Is Not Pretty! 
  
 RUDD: Yeah, that’s the one. So I brought up Gern Blanston, and a woman at the table said, “Oh my God, that’s what Judd Apatow’s e-mail address means.” It turned out his address was GernBlanston@aol .com. I thought, Wow, that’s a very cool, arcane reference. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Before you finish that story, a quick side question: Why do so many comics have AOL addresses? Steve Carell has an AOL address, as do Tina Fey and Sarah Silverman. What about you? 
  
 RUDD: I’m AOL. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Why is that? Is it a coincidence that almost everybody in comedy is still on AOL? 
  
 RUDD: That’s a good question. I never thought about it. I finally got a Gmail account, but I never use it. I like AOL because it’s so embarrassing. People look at you as if you’re a fossil. Which you are. But I enjoy that embarrassment. I like being on the outside. Having an AOL address is like wearing Ocean Pacific shorts. It’s so uncool that it’s cool. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Anyway, sorry—you were saying about Apatow? 
  
 RUDD: So I have his e-mail address, and I don’t know him, but I’m a fan of Freaks and Geeks. When I got home from the dinner party that night, I wrote him a short note congratulating him on a great choice in e-mail names. And he wrote back right away because he was impressed I knew who Gern Blanston was. Actually, the first thing he said to me was “Cool, now maybe I can get some free tickets to Neil LaBute plays.” Because at the time that was the main thing I’d been doing. 
  
 PLAYBOY: How long did it take before you met him in person? 
  
 RUDD: About a year. We e-mailed each other for a long time. I wasn’t actually in the same room with him until I auditioned for Anchorman. And walking in there and seeing him was weird. It felt as though I was meeting my Asian pen pal. I really wanted to make a great first impression. 
  
 PLAYBOY: It probably didn’t help that you’d grown some muttonchops and a mustache. 
  
 RUDD: [Laughs] Yeah, that was pretty great. I wanted to do something special for the role. I was working on Friends that week, so I was able to raid the show’s wardrobe department. I don’t normally dress up for an audition to try to impress the director unless it’s something I really want and I think dressing up might help. The wardrobe supervisor on Friends helped me find this horrible polyester suit, and I had enough time before the audition to grow a mustache and the chops. It wasn’t fully grown in, but it was enough to give them the general idea. 
  
 PLAYBOY: You’ve never been afraid to use your own body for a joke, whether it’s growing a mustache or getting naked. 
  
 RUDD: I have been naked in a lot of my movies. There’s something inherently funny about the naked male body, particularly mine. Ryan Reynolds, sure, it makes sense why he’d strip down. But not me. I shouldn’t be allowed to. 
  
 PLAYBOY: But you keep your clothes on in Wanderlust. 
  
 RUDD: Is that surprising? 
  
 PLAYBOY: Well, the movie does take place at a hippie commune, and there is male nudity. 
  
 RUDD: I was actually pretty thankful I got to keep my pants on for this one. I’m a big fan of movie nudity. A male ass shot is the cheapest and best laugh ever. But it’s mortifying to do. When I showed my butt in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, all I could think was, This is going to be up on all those big screens. I was very self-­conscious about doing it. But I also have a desperate and deep-seated need to be accepted and liked to make up for my massive insecurities. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Aside from worrying about the finished product, you don’t mind getting naked for a film crew? 
  
 RUDD: I don’t mind it, but I do feel bad for them. There’s that scene in Our Idiot Brother where I’m naked and getting painted from the side, and because of the angle of the shot, our soundman—who was a guest soundman, by the way, and not even our regular guy—had an unfortunate view. He was holding up the boom mike and standing right in front of me. My legs were spread, and he was pretty much staring at my hairy taint. 
  
 PLAYBOY: The poor guy. 
  
 RUDD: I felt so bad for him. I could tell by his expression that he was pretty bummed out. Afterward I was like, “Sorry about that, man.” I don’t think he forgave me. 
  
 PLAYBOY: You mentioned having massive insecurities. Are you being coy, or do you actually have insecurities? 
  
 RUDD: Are you kidding me? I’m riddled with insecurity. My entire career exists because of insecurity. 
  
 PLAYBOY: You honestly believe that? 
  
 RUDD: Of course I do. Why would anyone be an actor if he or she weren’t insecure? That’s why anybody pursues this kind of work. I remember when my sister was born and I was insecure because I wasn’t getting all the attention anymore. I think you can draw a straight line from that to my entire acting career. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Some actors claim they do it for the love of the craft. 
  
 RUDD: I hear that all the time, and it’s such horseshit. That’s such a lie. There’s nothing I find more revolting than when I’m watching American Idol and some 22-year-old singer thanks the fans and says he’s doing it for them. “I’m doing it for you guys!” Fucking liar. You’re not doing this for your fans. You’re doing this because you want to put food on the table for your family, and you want to be loved by strangers so your self-loathing isn’t as rampant. 
  
 PLAYBOY: You seem very neurotic for someone who grew up in Kansas. 
  
 RUDD: I’ve lived all over the place. My dad worked for TWA, so we were constantly moving. We moved to Kansas the first time when I was five, then left when I was six and a half or seven and moved to Anaheim. We were in California for three years and then moved back to Kansas. My parents have been there ever since. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Did Kansas feel like home? 
  
 RUDD: Not at the time. I was Jewish in a not very Jewish part of town, going to a not very Jewish school. My parents were European—my dad and mom were both born in London, and my dad grew up in New York. I always felt a little out of place. I didn’t have a lot in common with the other kids. I’d ask them, “Where are you from?” And they’d say, “Here. What do you mean? I’m from here.” [laughs] It was very much a high school football, ­Friday Night Lights scene, which I think it is in a lot of the country. I was not the Friday Night Lights kind of athlete, though I loved football, and I loved the Steelers. 
  
 PLAYBOY: The Pittsburgh Steelers? But you lived in Kansas. 
  
 RUDD: I started following them when I lived in California. My dad never gave a shit about sports. Once the Dodgers left Brooklyn he was like, “Fuck sports.” But he worked with a guy who was from Pittsburgh, and he loved the Steelers. He took me to a game when the Steelers played the Los Angeles Rams, and I got caught up in the excitement of it. All of a sudden rooting for the Steelers became my thing. To this day, if I need to remember a number, I’ll associate it with a 1970s Steelers player. It’s my mnemonic system. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Is that a joke, or have you actually done that? 
  
 RUDD: That’s entirely true. On the day I met my wife, I asked her for her phone number, and I’ll never forget this: The last four digits were 1764. I was like, “Oh, that’s easy. Brian Sipe, Steve Furness.” Brian Sipe was a quarterback for the Cleveland Browns, but his number was 17. And Furness, of course, was number 64. 
  
 PLAYBOY: In a way, you were letting her know in advance exactly what kind of guy she was getting involved with. 
  
 RUDD: Exactly. She was like, “What the fuck are you talking about?” The fact that she went out with me anyway says a lot about her. She knew I was a big Steelers fan and a big nerd. In fact, you want to know how much of a Steelers nerd I am? I once made a player entirely out of Legos. I made a Lego version of Craig Colquitt, the Steelers punter. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Was he your favorite player? 
  
 RUDD: No, John Stallworth was my favorite. But Colquitt was number five, and I had only enough black pieces to do a five. It was pretty good, if I may say so myself. I made a lot of things out of Legos when I was a kid, but this was my pièce de résistance. I did it when I was 10, and when I left home after high school, my mom kept it. When people would come over, she’d show it to them. It survived for 30 years. Just a few years ago I was in Kansas City after my dad passed away, and I found out the punter for the Kansas City Chiefs, Dustin Colquitt, lives across the street. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Any relation to Craig Colquitt? 
  
 RUDD: Dustin is Craig’s son. So my mom invited him over, and I brought out the Lego statue to show him. I was like, “Hey, look what I made when I was 10. I was really into your dad.” I think he was a little freaked out at first, but then he was like, “My dad’s coming to town in a few weeks. He’s got to see this.” I had to fly back to New York, but I was like, “Sure, bring him over. I’d be honored.” But a few days later my mother was moving some things around and accidentally bumped the Lego Craig Colquitt, and it shattered all over the floor. So Craig never got a chance to see it. 
  
 PLAYBOY: You must have been devastated. 
  
 RUDD: No, I thought it was hilarious. My mother was destroyed. She still feels guilty about it. She’ll probably burst into tears when she reads this. But I had no emotional attachment to it at all. I just enjoyed the irony that it survived for so many years, all those moves around the country, and just when Craig Colquitt was going to come over and see it, crash, it’s all over. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Were you the class clown in high school? 
  
 RUDD: I wanted to be, but I wasn’t always good at it. I was definitely into telling jokes and trying to make people laugh as a way of dealing with my insecurities. Once I was driving in my Jeep with somebody, and I thought it’d be hilarious if I jumped out of the car in the middle of our conversation and then ran next to it, continuing to talk as if nothing was wrong. But it didn’t work out so well. [laughs] I ended up slicing my hands open pretty badly. I almost killed myself, and I didn’t even get a laugh. The girl in the car with me was just horrified. 
  
 PLAYBOY: When you’re playing a character who’s less than socially graceful, do you ever draw on a painful memory from your youth, a specific time or place when you felt uncomfortable in your own skin? 
  
 RUDD: Sure, yeah, I’ve done that. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Can you give us an example? 
  
 RUDD: Oh God, there were so many. Before you even finished that question, some memory just became unlocked in my brain. I was at a football game—this may have been in junior high or my freshman year of high school. I had the great fortune of having puberty hit me like a Mack truck, where overnight my hair curled up like Hall and Oates’s. My skin went bananas and I had acne all over the place. My mom told me not to pick at my zits because if I did they’d scar over. So I didn’t touch them, and I was very self-conscious about it. One night I was at a party, and there was this girl I had a major crush on. She was part of a social clique I couldn’t get anywhere near because I was so unpopular. I knew people had been making jokes about my zit, so I started joking about it too. I wanted them to think I didn’t care, that this huge megazit on my face was no big deal to me. And this other girl, one of the leaders of the clique, said, “Oh, Paul is just looking for attention, like he always does.” She just belittled me in front of everybody, including the girl I liked. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Did you say anything in your defense? 
  
 RUDD: Not at all. I just laughed. But inside, of course, I was distraught. I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror and was like, “Fuck it!” I just squooshed the zit and pus squirted everywhere. The way I felt in that moment is the same feeling I’ve had in varying degrees throughout my life. It’s helplessness and shame and anger. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Does it go away? 
  
 RUDD: It doesn’t. And in some cases I’m really glad it doesn’t go away, because, at least for me, I’ve learned to capitalize on that feeling. I’ve devoted my entire acting career to reproducing and dwelling on that feeling. Every character I’ve played is just a variation of that kid with a zit he’s terrified of popping. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Did you feel like that awkward kid when you visited President Obama at the White House a few years ago? 
  
 RUDD: Oh man, completely. I sweated through a sports coat, which I’m pretty sure is the first time I’ve ever done that. Nothing about that was planned. I was in Washington, D.C. to shoot How Do You Know, and Reese Witherspoon and I were taking a tour of the White House. All of a sudden we were taken into some room, and then a door opened and there was Obama. I’d never seen Reese get flustered, but when he asked her who else was in the movie, she was like, “Jack Nicholson and me and Owen…Owen…Owen.…” And I shouted, “Wilson!” Like it was a party game or something. She forgot his name for a second. And then he made a joke to me, which I completely missed. 
  
 PLAYBOY: What was the joke? 
  
 RUDD: He asked about my character in How Do You Know, and I told him I’m a guy who gets into some hot water, and though his intentions are good he gets indicted by the government for possible violations. And Obama says, “Oh, so you’re playing a congressman.” And I was like, “No, actually I work for my dad in this corporation.” I’m trying to explain, and Obama interrupts me and says, “It was a joke.” I just felt so stupid. Of course it was a joke, and it’s actually a pretty good one. I’m normally pretty good at catching them. If you’re not the fucking president of the United States, I can usually identify when you’re joking. 
  
 PLAYBOY: You didn’t set out to be a comic actor. Wasn’t your original goal to be a Shakespearean actor? 
  
 RUDD: That was the plan. Maybe not exclusively Shakespeare, but definitely serious theater. I was pretty focused. One of my first acting roles in college was in an experimental version of Macbeth. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Experimental how? 
  
 RUDD: There were two Macbeths. Some other guy played the bad Macbeth and I played the good Macbeth. [laughs] 
  
 PLAYBOY: That seems unnecessarily confusing. 
  
 RUDD: Oh, confusing was the least of it. It was incredibly stupid and pretentious and awful, and I loved it. The director was one of those guys who didn’t wear shoes, and he wanted to do something fascinating and explosive. At the time, it seemed so cool to me. I was 18, maybe 19, that age when everything seems incredible. “Holy shit, you’re telling me you can set Hamlet in Vietnam?” It’s that moment in your life when you realize the world is so much bigger than you imagined. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Was it around this time that you started working as a DJ? 
  
 RUDD: Yeah, I think so. I did it only occasionally, at this 1950s-themed bar in Kansas City. I had long hair like Michael Hutchence, the guy from INXS, and I refused to cut it. So my bosses made me wear an Elvis pompadour wig every time I worked. It was jet-black and cheap, and over time it got frizzy and didn’t look like a pompadour at all. When I moved to Los Angeles, one of the guys who also deejayed at the Kansas City bar was working for a company called You Should Be Dancing, and he got me a job. I spent my weekends doing bar mitzvahs and keeping 16-year-olds psyched about MC Hammer. 
  
 PLAYBOY: You became famous on the bar mitzvah circuit for something called the Donnie the Dweeb dance. 
  
 RUDD: Oh Jesus. That happened after an oppressively long day. I had two bar mitzvahs in one day, the first in Santa Barbara and the other in Thousand Oaks. With all the traveling involved, it was like an 18-hour day. Somewhere around the middle of the second bar mitzvah, I was on the dance floor with these kids, and I guess I just cracked. I couldn’t take it anymore. I got so slaphappy that I started dancing spastically, kind of mocking the whole thing just to entertain myself. But the kids thought it was funny, and the following week I was at another bar mitzvah and some kids came up to me and said, “Hey, you’re the guy who does the dork dance.” And I was like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And they said, “Last week at so-and-so’s bar mitzvah, you did this dance.” They went to my boss and begged him to make me do it. And my boss was like, “Look, man, you have to do it.” So I went out there and he got on the microphone and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Donnie the Dweeb!” He gave me a name. 
  
 PLAYBOY: What exactly happened during this dance? 
  
 RUDD: I don’t know how to describe it without offending many groups of people. It was a combination of…let’s just say some mental disabilities and physical ailments. The full front of negative stereotypes. With socks pulled up. It’s pretty much a metaphor for how I felt about the zit in high school. I was putting on a show for everyone while inside I felt like Coco in Fame, taking my shirt off and showing my breasts for a director. That’s how I felt about it. It became kind of a recurring theme for me. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Why did you give up being a bar mitzvah DJ? Did it happen only when your acting career finally took off? 
  
 RUDD: No, it was long before that. I had some friends coming to town, and we were going out to the Magic Castle. I told my boss a month in advance, “I need Saturday night off.” But then the weekend came, and I ended up getting requested for this girl’s party. She really wanted Donnie the Dweeb. So my boss said to me, “Can you just stop by and do the dance? I’ll give you $25 and you can get out of there.” 
  
 PLAYBOY: Did you do it? 
  
 RUDD: I did. And I brought along my friends. One of them was Joe Buck, who went on to become a play-by-play announcer for Fox Sports. And the other was Jon Hamm. 
  
 PLAYBOY: From Mad Men? 
  
 RUDD: Yeah, both these guys I’ve known since I was a teenager. They came into town, and I said, “Before we go to the Magic Castle, we need to swing by this party. I just have to do this one quick thing.” So we went, and they had no idea what I was doing. They knew I was a DJ for parties, but they had no clue how bad it had gotten. My boss saw my friends, and he said, “I’ll introduce Paul, and you guys can come in as his henchmen”—I guess because they were wearing suits. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Wait, hold on. You, Jon Hamm and Joe Buck were all in suits? 
  
 RUDD: We had to be, because there’s a dress code at the Magic Castle. So Jon and Joe came out and they were standing to the side, and I pulled the bat mitzvah girl from the audience and put her in a chair in the center of an empty dance floor. And in front of hundreds of guests and family members, I essentially gave this teenage girl a retarded lap dance. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Wow. That sounds—— 
  
 RUDD: Disturbing? 
  
 PLAYBOY: That’s one word to describe it. 
  
 RUDD: It’s the only word! But at this point, I’d become numb to it. After it was all over I walked over to my friends and said, “Okay, guys, let’s go.” Very casual. We went out to the lobby and—I’ll never forget this—Joe Buck looked at me with the most confused expression on his face. He said with utter earnestness and sincerity, “What the fuck just happened in there?” And at that moment, the reality of what I’d been doing with my life came crashing down. I answered him the only way I could. I said, “I honestly don’t know.” The next day I gave my notice. I quit. I never deejayed again. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Even without the DJ job you weren’t particularly happy in Los Angeles. 
  
 RUDD: I wasn’t. 
  
 PLAYBOY: You once claimed you had a meltdown in the mid-1990s. What happened? 
  
 RUDD: It was a series of things coming down on me all at once. I got a job on this TV show called Wild Oats, and it made me skittish. I kept asking myself, “What if it’s a hit? I’ll have to keep doing it for seven years.” The audition was fun, because we got to improvise and goof around, and it felt as though it could be okay. But I got cold feet. My hand was literally shaking as I signed the contract. Even though I needed the money and I was lucky to be a working actor, I was 24 and precious. This is where acting and youth really screw with you. I wanted to do theater. I wanted to do cool indie movies. 
  
 PLAYBOY: It got so frustrating that you painted obscenities on the walls of your apartment. 
  
 RUDD: Yeah, but that was just a product of age. It seems so romantic to paint on your walls and feel like a tortured artist when really you’re just a whiner. I’d write things like “Fuck this, fuck that.” I wrote about all the things that were getting to me. This was around the time of the Northridge earthquake, in 1994, I think, which was traumatic for me. It happened in the middle of the night, and it spooked me so much that for the next few months I was constantly feeling earthquakes. I’d be in the middle of a conversation with somebody and I’d say, “Did you feel that?” And they would say, “No. What are you talking about?” It was a weird thing. I just didn’t feel sure-footed anymore. A bunch of traumas happened to me in a short time. A friend of mine was killed in an awful car accident, and then I got mugged. It was right around the time we were shooting Clueless. I was in the parking lot of Jerry’s Deli, and the guy was like, “You don’t think it’s a real gun?” He shot it at me, and I could feel the breeze from the bullet next to my head. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Did it seem Los Angeles was telling you to get out? 
  
 RUDD: Wait, it gets better. I got into five car accidents in just one week. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Five car accidents? How is that possible? 
  
 RUDD: Two of them happened when my car was parked. I wasn’t even driving at the time. It really did seem like a weird cosmic message from the universe. I’m not somebody who lives my life based on cosmic anything, but it did feel like, “Oh yeah, I get it. Message received, universe.” 
  
 PLAYBOY: Why move to New York? 
  
 RUDD: Because in New York you don’t need a car. [laughs] 
  
 PLAYBOY: That can’t be the only reason. 
  
 RUDD: I lived there as a kid. I was born just across the bridge, so it was familiar to me. I’ve always felt safer in New York than in Los Angeles, as weird as that sounds. I don’t want to be surrounded by the industry all the time, and that’s what you get in Los Angeles. Not long after I moved to New York I was cast in this play called The Last Night of Ballyhoo, and I remember walking to rehearsal, holding my script and some coffee, and I just felt so…sane. 
  
 PLAYBOY: You have a son, Jack, who is six, and a daughter, who’s one and a half. Have they seen your movies? 
  
 RUDD: Oh God no. Not yet. But honestly, they’re just not curious. Jack doesn’t have any interest. I think because of home videos and YouTube, it just doesn’t seem that special. He hasn’t figured out the distinction between seeing himself in a video and what I do. He’s starting to now. Before, if somebody approached me on the street, it was confusing to him. He’d say, “Do you know that person?” And I’d tell him no, and he’d say, “Well, how do they know your name?” Now he gets it. He’s like, “Oh, they know you from the movies.” 
  
 PLAYBOY: Your movies are not exactly family friendly. There’s lots of cursing and sexual scenarios. When your kids are old enough to watch what their dad does for a living, will you be tolerant when they start swearing? 
  
 RUDD: I don’t know. I definitely make an effort not to use profanity when I’m around them, but sometimes I do. And when it happens, I just tell them not to do it. I think my job as a parent is to confuse my kids as much as possible. [laughs] It’s hard, though. When Jack swears, I laugh every time. And I know it’s the wrong reaction to have. 
  
 PLAYBOY: It’s certainly not going to discourage him. 
  
 RUDD: I know, I know. It blurs the line between father and son. I’ve had many moments when I’m laughing with him at the most puerile stuff. Yesterday I was picking him up and then throwing him onto his bed, and he kept kicking me in the nuts. One time he hit me so hard that I said, “Dude, you just totally nailed me in the penis. Right on the tip.” He laughed and was like, “In the triangle?” I started laughing and said, “Yeah, that’s it.” And then he was like, “Right in the roof of the house?” I just died. 
  
 PLAYBOY: So your son’s become a guy friend? 
  
 RUDD: That’s it exactly! He’s a dude I want to hang out with. There’s no parenting book I can refer to when my kid just starts making hilarious jokes about the tip of a dick being like the roof of a house. All I can do is laugh and give him a high five and say, “Nice one.” My son’s always been bizarre and funny. For a year he was obsessed with sprinkler heads. And between the ages of three and five he would dress only in a suit. He wouldn’t leave the house without wearing a coat and tie and dress pants. I remember thinking, This is my dream kid. 
  
 PLAYBOY: How did Jack come to have an Irish pub named after him? 
  
 RUDD: [Laughs] He actually has two. The first one was built by his grandfather. Around the time Jack was born, my parents moved into a new house in suburban Kansas City. And my father was a very handy man. He could build homes. He could do anything. He had this unfinished basement, and he said, “I’m going to build an Irish pub down there, and I’m going to call it Sullivan’s.” Which is Jack’s middle name. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Is that a family name? 
  
 RUDD: Not at all. Nobody in my family is Irish. But my father was a huge lover of Ireland. He used to travel over there all the time. Thus the Irish pub. He had all these rules about it. It was going to have Guinness and good beers and no Coors Light. There would be single malts and high-end whiskeys and nothing with an umbrella in it. On the shelf behind the bar he’d have Jameson and Glenlivet and [the baby formula] Similac. He always said, “Jack is the proprietor. He’s the owner.” The only thing he asked of me was a picture of Jack that he could have sepia toned and made to look like an old photograph to put above the bar. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Did you help him build it? 
  
 RUDD: No, it was a complete secret. He never sent me pictures, never gave me updates. I just knew he was working on it, putting in plumbing and electricity and everything. And after a year he said, “It’s done. Come back to Kansas and bring Jack. I want you to see it.” 
  
 PLAYBOY: Was it as amazing as you imagined? 
  
 RUDD: It was better. My dad was really good at building stuff, but this was his masterpiece. I went down to the basement and…I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s like there was an old Irish pub already there that somebody had built a home on top of. He had Guinness on draft and incredible historical paraphernalia on the walls. My dad was a history fanatic and collected all sorts of weird things. There was a framed invitation to FAO Schwarz to attend the grand opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. An old New York City police uniform from the late 1800s. A 1936 Olympics document signed by Hitler. Being Jews, we’re all obsessed with Hitler. No Irish pub is complete without some Nazi paraphernalia on the walls. 
  
 PLAYBOY: When did the second pub happen? 
  
 RUDD: Well, I told my dad that if I ever bought a house, now that I’d seen what he’d done, I’d need to have a pub in it. So when Julie and I decided to buy a place in upstate New York, the first thing I looked for was whether it had a basement with enough room to build a pub. We found one in Rhinebeck, and right away I started working on my own basement pub. My father was going to come out and we were going to do it together, but then he was diagnosed with cancer. Over the course of a year I hired somebody and built another version of Sullivan’s, which I called Sullivan’s East. 
  
 PLAYBOY: How does it compare with the original? 
  
 RUDD: I must say, I improved on it. It’s a little bigger, and I learned a lot of things from my father. He told me, “If I had it to do over again, I’d make sure to do this and this.” The only thing I feel was a lost opportunity was that I didn’t put in a urinal. But it’s still got some great things I’m really proud of. There are markers in the bathroom so people can write horrible things all over the walls. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Did your dad live long enough to see it? 
  
 RUDD: [Pauses] He didn’t, no. [pauses] It’s funny, the original Sullivan’s was a tribute to my son, and Sullivan’s East has become a shrine to my father. My sister had a son, and his full name is Henry Sullivan Arnold. She gave him the middle name Sullivan so he could be co-owner of the pub. [laughs] She and her husband didn’t want Henry to grow up not feeling a part of the family business. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Have your friends and co-­workers seen the pub? 
  
 RUDD: Oh yeah, everybody I’ve worked with has been there. There have been a few live fantasy football drafts, a few poker weekends, a few karaoke parties. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Karaoke is especially popular among comics, isn’t it? 
  
 RUDD: Wildly popular. [Wanderlust director] David Wain is a big fan of karaoke. As are Joe Truglio, Ken Marino, all those guys from Wet Hot American Summer. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Why is that? Is it like AOL e-mail addresses—it’s so uncool that it’s cool? 
  
 RUDD: [Laughs] That may be part of it. When comics get together to do karaoke, it’s not like anybody is trying to be funny. At the same time, nobody is taking it too seriously. It’s hard to explain. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Do you have a favorite karaoke song? 
  
 RUDD: Not at all. That’s a rookie move. I had a karaoke song 10 years ago. Now I like to do ones I’ve never done before. 
  
 PLAYBOY: So what do you look for in a karaoke song? Does it need to be in your vocal range or something more challenging? 
  
 RUDD: A lot of these decisions are made based on who I’m ’raoking with. And please spell ’raoking correctly: without the k and a and with an apostrophe. Everyone I know refers to it as ’raoking. And yes, I do realize how pathetic that sounds. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Don’t apologize. 
  
 RUDD: Oh, I’m not. Not at all. That’s just the way it is. If I’m in Los Angeles for a day or two, I’ll call Joe Trigly , and we’ll go ’raoking. That’s just my social scene now. A few weeks ago I was out in L.A., and Joe and his girlfriend, Beth, and I got a private room. Joe and I like to give each other some surprises. You’ve got to go deep in the book and find something the other person hasn’t heard. 
  
 PLAYBOY: Like what? 
  
 RUDD: The last time I went ’raoking, Joe did “The Worst That Could Happen” by Johnny Maestro and the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s an impossible song to sing, but it’s incredible. It’s kind of unintentionally sexist, but it’s just incredible. When you find a song like that, it’s like hitting oil. The first question we always ask before going to a new ’raoking place is “How’s the book?” We don’t want a standard book. [laughs] You want to talk about socially awkward? Come to a ’raoking session with a bunch of comics. That’s where you’re going to see the magic happen. |||||
What is a one-paragraph summary of the above article?
– AOL.com email addresses are so nineties, right? But apparently they're also a sort of weird status symbol amongst a certain set. Ben Smith first made the argument last week on Politico, noting that despite the "stigma" long associated with the AOL.com domain, there's also "a certain prestige" attached to those who have held on nonetheless. He offers up a long list of politics and media bigshots, including David Axelrod, Matt Drudge, Arianna Huffington, and Ann Coulter, who still have their accounts. And it turns out celebrities, too, often hang onto AOL.com addresses, a trend observed by Playboy and brought up in a recent interview with Paul Rudd (who, yes, has an AOL.com address). "I like AOL because it’s so embarrassing. People look at you as if you’re a fossil. Which you are. But I enjoy that embarrassment," he says. "I like being on the outside. Having an AOL address is like wearing Ocean Pacific shorts. It’s so uncool that it’s cool." Other celebs who can be reached at AOL.com include Judd Apatow, Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman—and, as noted by New York, Tilda Swinton and David Arquette.
Det har länge funnits en viss stigmatisering knuten till en AOL.com e-postkonto, och de av oss besatta av att hålla jämna steg med tiden har cyklat genom Hotmail, Earthlink, Yahoo!, och något antal företagsdomäner innan slutar med den nuvarande standarden för e-post modernitet, Gmail-kontot. Men trots Googles bästa ansträngningar för att stigmatisera de omoderna gamla domänerna, har jag börjat märka en viss prestige knuten till AOL.com överlevande. Nu när min mamma har bytt till Gmail, är praktiskt taget de enda människor jag mejlar på AOL konton höjdare -- människor som redan var så viktiga när de olika nya modeflugorna (och tekniska fördelar) kom att de inte kunde bry sig om att byta, och hade inget att bevisa för någon. Detta är inte, minst sagt, en skara teknofober. Vissa, som Joe Trippi och Arianna Huffington, ses som techno-sages. Snarare är det en generation av den politiska och mediala eliten. Det verkar som om en del aldrig bytte är att de var tidiga adaptrar av mobila enheter, som inte bryr sig om vilken tjänst du använder. Och om de har hållit ut så här länge, finns det egentligen ingen anledning att ge upp nu om något som har cyklats tillbaka till att vara en statussymbol. Med hjälp av några vänner på Twitter, här är en lista över människor som ganska nyligen har varit nåbara, ofta med konstiga handtag, på deras gamla AOL-konton: POLITICS: David Axelrod, Jim Messina, John Weaver, Joe Trippi, Mandy Grunwald, Dick Morris (en nyligen avhoppare till gmail), Frank Luntz, Ed Rollins, Guy Cecil, Tad Devine, Al Franken, Aaron Schock Media: Matt Drudge, Arianna Huffington (som höll på en AOL konto långt innan AOL köpte hennes företag), David Brooks, David Corn, Robert Draper, Rick Perlstein, Ann Coulter, Tina Brown, Lawrence O'Donnell De flesta, det bör noteras, har också andra konton. "Jag har också nya e-postadresser, men jag är förtjust i originalet", mejlade Grunwald. Nästa punkt i denna serie kommer att ta upp politiska personer som behåller Earthlink konton, och verkligen bryr sig inte vad du tycker om det. Förra veckan framförde Ben Smith på Politico argumentet att fasthållandet vid en till synes föråldrad AOL-e-postadress på något sätt kunde ha blivit en konstig sorts statussymbol, att döma av Washingtons maktmäklare och uppmärksammade mediafolk som fortfarande använder sina. I det nya numret av Playboy ger Paul Rudd Smiths teori ytterligare trovärdighet: Inte bara har han och Judd Apatow fortfarande AOL:s e-postadresser, utan det har även Tina Fey, Steve Carell, och Sarah Silverman. (Vulture vet av erfarenhet att Tilda Swinton och David Arquette också gör det, men då har de två så mycket gemensamt redan.) "Jag gillar AOL för att det är så pinsamt", förklarar Rudd. "Folk ser på dig som om du är ett fossil. Vilket du är. Men jag njuter av den pinsamheten. Jag gillar att vara på utsidan. Att ha en AOL-adress är som att ha Ocean Pacific-shorts. Det är så ocoolt att det är coolt." [Playboy] ♪ Playboy Intervju: Paul Rudd ...Fortsätts från sidan ett PLAYBOY: Du måste verkligen gå upp i vikt för en filmroll? RUDD: Jag vet, det är konstigt. Det är motsatsen till vad studiorna normalt vill ha eller vad andra regissörer vill. Men det är annorlunda med Judd. Han säger alltid, varje gång vi jobbar tillsammans, att han vill att jag ska gå upp i vikt. Han säger: “Jag gillar en fet Rudd.” PLAYBOY: Är det för att det får dig att se mer mänsklig ut? RUDD: Jag vet inte. Kanske. Jag gillar bara ursäkten för att äta bacon. Jag har inte långt kvar att gå i alla fall. Min magkänsla behöver bara lite extra. Och det här är en typisk förfrågan från Apatow? - Ja, absolut. Det finns en linje i The 40-Year-Old Virgin när min karaktär berättar Steve Carell hur det är att ha ditt hjärta krossat och hur du ständigt går upp och gå ner i vikt. Jag improviserade den linjen eftersom jag, innan vi började filma, tog Judds begäran att gå upp i vikt kanske lite för långt. Och studion sade: ” Du är en fet röv. Förlora lite vikt.” Så under filmens gång försökte jag gå ner några kilo. Det kan orsaka ett kontinuitetsproblem. Ett stort problem. Och jag tänkte att min vikt skulle variera ändå. Om jag nämner det i en scen, kanske det kommer att täcka mina baser och motivera varför jag är 10 pounds tyngre i vissa scener och 10 pounds lättare i andra. PLAYBOY: Är den nya filmen du gör med Apatow, som för närvarande heter This Is Forty, en uppföljare till Knocked Up? RUDD: Det är egentligen inte en uppföljare. Det är mer som en spin-off. Det handlar om Pete och Debbie, paret Leslie Mann och jag spelar i den första filmen, med samma barn. Vi har varit på repetitioner i ungefär sex månader, läst igenom scener och improviserat några idéer. PLAYBOY: Känns det någonsin som om du gör terapi för Apatow? Hur menar du? PLAYBOY: Din fiktiva fru spelas av Judds riktiga fru, Leslie Mann, och dina fiktiva barn spelas av hans egentliga döttrar, Iris och Maude. Det är som om han gör dessa filmer för att undersöka sitt eget äktenskap under mikroskop. RUDD: Det finns en anledning till att det verkar som om han gör det. Och det beror på att han absolut är det. Vi gör det båda två. Det var samma sak i Knocked Up. En hel del saker i den filmen var direkt ur mitt liv och direkt ur Judds liv. Judd bad mig skriva ner saker från mitt äktenskap, och vi använde det i improvisationer. - Som till exempel? När min fru var gravid blev hon arg på mig för att jag inte läste barnböckerna. Hon betraktade det, förståeligt nog, som en fientlig gest. Men jag hade ett gräl till mitt försvar. Vad gjorde grottmännen utan att förvänta sig? Förstår du vad jag menar? Det är bara skitsnack. Jag tänkte: ” Det kommer att gå bra. Vi behöver inte gå på förlossningskurser eller något av det nonsens.” Vad är det värsta som kan hända? Det är inte som om jag inte läste böckerna och gick till de klasser som vår son inte skulle ha fötts. Är det sant att du blev vän med Apatow på grund av en ömsesidig kärlek till Steve Martin? RUDD: Så här gick det till: Jag var på en middagsbjudning med en grupp människor, och vi pratade om falska namn – du vet, hur det är svårt att komma på ett riktigt bra falskt namn. Det är en specifik typ av gåva. Du vill inte gå för långt in i det fåniga, och du vill inte gå för långt in i banalen. Jag har alltid tyckt att ett av de roligaste namnen någonsin var Gern Blanston, som kom från en Steve Martin rutin på en av hans tidiga skivor. Komedi är inte vacker! Ja, det är den. Så jag tog upp Gern Blanston, och en kvinna vid bordet sade, "Herregud, det är vad Judd Apatows e-postadress betyder." Det visade sig att hans adress var GernBlanston@aol .com. Jag tänkte, Wow, det är en mycket cool, svårbegriplig referens. Innan du avslutar den historien, en snabb sidofråga: Varför har så många serier AOL-adresser? Steve Carell har en AOL-adress, liksom Tina Fey och Sarah Silverman. Du då? RUDD: Jag är borta. - Varför det? Är det en slump att nästan alla i komedi fortfarande är på AOL? RUDD: Det är en bra fråga. Jag har aldrig tänkt på det. Jag fick äntligen ett Gmail-konto, men jag använder det aldrig. Jag gillar AOL eftersom det är så pinsamt. Folk ser på dig som om du är ett fossil. Vilket du är. Men jag njuter av den pinsamheten. Jag gillar att vara på utsidan. Att ha en AOL-adress är som att ha Ocean Pacific-shorts. Det är så ocoolt att det är coolt. Hur som helst, förlåt, du sa om Apatow? RUDD: Så jag har hans e-postadress, och jag känner honom inte, men jag är ett fan av Freaks och Geeks. När jag kom hem från middagsbjudningen den kvällen skrev jag en kort lapp till honom och gratulerade honom till ett bra val i e-postnamn. Han skrev tillbaka direkt för att han var imponerad av att jag visste vem Gern Blanston var. Egentligen, det första han sade till mig var "Cool, nu kanske jag kan få några gratis biljetter till Neil LaButhe spelar." För på den tiden var det huvudsaken jag hade gjort. Hur lång tid tog det innan du träffade honom personligen? Ungefär ett år. Vi mejlade varandra länge. Jag var faktiskt inte i samma rum med honom förrän jag provspelade för Anchorman. Och att gå in dit och se honom var konstigt. Det kändes som om jag skulle träffa min asiatiska brevvän. Jag ville verkligen göra ett stort första intryck. PLAYBOY: Det hjälpte förmodligen inte att du hade odlat några får-och mustasch. Ja, det var ganska bra. Jag ville göra något speciellt för rollen. Jag arbetade på Friends den veckan, så jag kunde plundra showens garderobsavdelning. Jag klär normalt inte upp mig för en audition för att försöka imponera på regissören om det inte är något jag verkligen vill och jag tror att klä upp kan hjälpa. Garderobens chef på Friends hjälpte mig att hitta den här hemska polyesterdräkten, och jag hade tillräckligt med tid innan provspelningen för att odla mustasch och kotletter. Den var inte fullvuxen, men det räckte för att ge dem den allmänna idén. PLAYBOY: Du har aldrig varit rädd för att använda din egen kropp för ett skämt, oavsett om det är att odla mustasch eller att klä av sig naken. Jag har varit naken i många filmer. Det är något medfött roligt med den nakna manliga kroppen, särskilt min. Ryan Reynolds, visst, det är vettigt varför han skulle ta av sig. Men inte jag. Jag borde inte få det. Men du har kläderna på dig i Wanderlust. - Är det förvånande? Filmen utspelar sig på en hippiekommun, och det finns manlig nakenhet. Jag var faktiskt ganska tacksam att jag fick behålla byxorna på för den här. Jag är ett stort fan av film nakenhet. Ett manligt skott är det billigaste och bästa skrattet någonsin. Men det är förödmjukande att göra det. När jag visade rumpan i 40-åriga jungfrun tänkte jag bara: "Det här kommer att stå på alla stora skärmar." Jag var väldigt självmedveten om att göra det. Men jag har också ett desperat och djupt rotat behov av att bli accepterad och tyckte om att kompensera för min massiva osäkerhet. PLAYBOY: Förutom att oroa dig för den färdiga produkten, har du inget emot att klä av dig naken för ett filmteam? RUDD: Jag har inget emot det, men jag tycker synd om dem. Det finns den scenen i Vår Idiot Brother där jag är naken och blir målad från sidan, och på grund av vinkeln på skottet, vår ljudman-som var en gäst ljudman, förresten, och inte ens vår vanliga kille-hade en olycklig utsikt. Han höll upp boom micken och stod mitt framför mig. Mina ben var brutna och han stirrade på min håriga fläck. Stackars kille. Jag tyckte så synd om honom. Jag kunde se på hans uttryck att han var ganska sur. Efteråt var jag som, "Förlåt för det, mannen." Jag tror inte att han förlät mig. Du nämnde att du hade stora osäkerheter. Är du blyg, eller har du verkligen osäkerhet? Skämtar du? Jag är full av otrygghet. Hela min karriär existerar på grund av osäkerhet. Tror du verkligen på det? - Det är klart jag gör. Varför skulle någon vara skådespelare om han eller hon inte var osäker? Det är därför som vem som helst arbetar med den här typen av arbete. Jag minns när min syster föddes och jag var osäker, eftersom jag inte fick all uppmärksamhet längre. Jag tror att du kan dra en rak linje från det till hela min skådespelarkarriär. Vissa skådespelare hävdar att de gör det för hantverkets skull. RUDD: Jag hör det hela tiden, och det är en sådan hästskit. Det är en sådan lögn. Det finns inget jag tycker är mer revolterande än när jag tittar på American Idol och några 22-åriga sångerska tackar fansen och säger att han gör det för dem. "Jag gör det för er skull!" Jävla lögnare. Du gör inte detta för dina fans. Du gör detta eftersom du vill lägga mat på bordet för din familj, och du vill bli älskad av främlingar så din självförakt är inte lika grasserande. Du verkar väldigt neurotisk för någon som växte upp i Kansas. Jag har bott överallt. Pappa jobbade för TWA, så vi flyttade hela tiden. Vi flyttade till Kansas första gången när jag var fem år, sedan gick jag när jag var sex och en halv eller sju år och flyttade till Anaheim. Vi var i Kalifornien i tre år och flyttade sedan tillbaka till Kansas. Mina föräldrar har varit där sedan dess. Kände Kansas sig som hemma? - Inte just då. Jag var jude i en inte särskilt judisk del av staden, och gick i en inte särskilt judisk skola. Mina föräldrar var européer – min pappa och mamma föddes båda i London, och min pappa växte upp i New York. Jag har alltid känt mig lite malplacerad. Jag hade inte mycket gemensamt med de andra barnen. Jag frågade dem: ”Var kommer du ifrån?” Och de frågade: ”Här. Vad menar du? Jag är härifrån.” [skrattar] Det var väldigt mycket en high school fotboll, -Fredag Night Lights scen, som jag tror att det är i en hel del av landet. Jag var inte Friday Night Lights typ av idrottsman, även om jag älskade fotboll, och jag älskade Steelers. Pittsburgh Steelers? Men du bodde i Kansas. Jag började följa efter dem när jag bodde i Kalifornien. Min pappa brydde sig inte ett skit om sport. När Dodgers lämnade Brooklyn var han som, "Fuck sport." Men han arbetade med en kille som var från Pittsburgh, och han älskade Steelers. Han tog mig till en match när Steelers spelade Los Angeles Rams, och jag blev indragen i spänningen. Plötsligt blev det min grej att heja på Steelers. Än i dag, om jag behöver komma ihåg ett nummer, kommer jag att associera det med en 1970-tals Steelers spelare. Det är mitt mnemoniska system. Är det ett skämt, eller har du verkligen gjort det? RUDD: Det är helt sant. Den dag jag träffade min fru bad jag henne om hennes telefonnummer, och jag kommer aldrig att glömma detta: De sista fyra siffrorna var 1764. Jag tänkte: ” Åh, det är lätt. Brian Sipe, Steve Furness.” Brian Sipe var quarterback för Cleveland Browns, men hans nummer var 17. Och Furness var förstås nummer 64. På sätt och vis lät du henne veta i förväg exakt vilken typ av kille hon blev inblandad med. Exakt. Hon sa: "Vad fan pratar du om?" Det faktum att hon gick ut med mig säger ändå mycket om henne. Hon visste att jag var ett stort Steelers-fan och en stor nörd. Vill du veta hur mycket Steelers-nörd jag är? En gång gjorde jag en spelare av Legos. Jag gjorde en Lego-version av Craig Colquitt, Steelers Punter. Var han din favoritspelare? Nej, John Stallworth var min favorit. Men Colquitt var nummer fem, och jag hade bara tillräckligt med svarta bitar för att göra en femma. Det var ganska bra, om jag får säga det själv. Jag gjorde mycket av Legos när jag var liten, men det här var min pièce de résistance. Jag gjorde det när jag var tio och när jag åkte hemifrån efter high school, behöll mamma det. När folk kom över, visade hon det för dem. Den överlevde i 30 år. För några år sen var jag i Kansas City efter pappas bortgång och fick reda på att Kansas City Chiefs, Dustin Colquitt, bor på andra sidan gatan. Har du nåt med Craig Colquitt att göra? Dustin är Craigs son. Mamma bjöd hit honom, och jag tog fram Legostatyn för att visa honom. Jag tänkte: "Titta vad jag gjorde när jag var tio. Jag var verkligen in i din pappa. "Jag tror att han var lite skrämd i början, men sedan han var som, "Min pappa kommer till stan om några veckor. Han måste se detta. "Jag var tvungen att flyga tillbaka till New York, men jag var som, "Visst, ta honom över. Jag skulle bli hedrad. "Men några dagar senare min mamma var flytta några saker runt och av misstag stötte Lego Craig Colquitt, och det krossade över hela golvet. Craig fick alltså aldrig en chans att se det. Du måste ha blivit förkrossad. Nej, jag tyckte det var kul. Min mor blev förintad. Hon känner sig fortfarande skyldig. Hon kommer förmodligen att brista i gråt när hon läser detta. Men jag var inte alls känslomässigt fäst vid den. Jag bara njöt av ironin att det överlevde i så många år, alla dessa flyttar runt i landet, och precis när Craig Colquitt skulle komma över och se det, krascha, det är över. Var du klassens clown i high school? RUDD: Jag ville vara det, men jag var inte alltid bra på det. Jag var definitivt inne på att dra skämt och försöka få folk att skratta som ett sätt att hantera min osäkerhet. En gång körde jag i min Jeep med någon, och jag tyckte det skulle vara roligt om jag hoppade ur bilen mitt i vårt samtal och sprang sedan bredvid den, fortsätter att prata som om ingenting var fel. Men det gick inte så bra. Det slutade med att jag skar upp händerna ganska dåligt. Jag tog nästan livet av mig, och jag fick inte ens ett skratt. Flickan i bilen med mig blev bara förskräckt. PLAYBOY: När du spelar en karaktär som är mindre än socialt graciös, drar du någonsin på ett smärtsamt minne från din ungdom, en specifik tid eller plats när du kände dig obekväm i din egen hud? Visst, ja, det har jag gjort. Kan du ge oss ett exempel? Herregud, det var så många. Innan du ens var klar med den frågan, blev ett visst minne olåst i min hjärna. Jag var på en fotbollsmatch – detta kan ha varit i högstadiet eller mitt första år i high school. Jag hade den stora lyckan att ha puberteten slog mig som en Mack-bil, där mitt hår över en natt krökte ihop sig som Hall och Oates. Min hud blev galen och jag hade akne överallt. Min mamma sade åt mig att inte hacka på mina finnar, för om jag gjorde det skulle de bli ärr över. Så jag rörde dem inte, och jag var mycket självmedveten om det. En kväll var jag på en fest, och det var en tjej jag var kär i. Hon var en del av en umgängeskrets som jag inte kunde komma i närheten av, eftersom jag var så impopulär. Jag visste att folk hade skämtat om min finne, så jag började skämta om det också. Jag ville att de skulle tro att jag inte brydde mig, att denna enorma megazit i mitt ansikte var ingen stor sak för mig. Och den andra flickan, en av ledarna för klicken, sade: ”Åh, Paul söker bara uppmärksamhet, som han alltid gör.” Hon förringade mig bara inför alla, inklusive flickan jag gillade. Sa du nåt till ditt försvar? - Inte alls. Jag bara skrattade. Men inuti var jag förstås utom sig. Jag gick in i badrummet och tittade i spegeln och sa, "Fan heller!" Jag bara squished finch och pus sprutade överallt. Hur jag kände det i det ögonblicket är samma känsla som jag har haft i olika grad under hela mitt liv. Det är hjälplöshet och skam och ilska. - Går det över? RUDD: Det gör det inte. Och i vissa fall är jag verkligen glad att det inte försvinner, för, åtminstone för mig, har jag lärt mig att dra nytta av den känslan. Jag har ägnat hela min skådespelarkarriär åt att reproducera och uppehålla mig vid den känslan. Varje karaktär jag har spelat är bara en variant av det barnet med en finne han är livrädd för att popping. Kände du dig som den där pinsamma killen när du besökte president Obama i Vita huset för några år sedan? Åh, helt klart. Jag svettades genom en sportrock, vilket jag är ganska säker på är första gången jag någonsin har gjort det. Inget om det var planerat. Jag var i Washington, D.C. för att filma How Do You Know, och Reese Witherspoon och jag var på en rundtur i Vita huset. Plötsligt togs vi in i ett rum, och sedan öppnades en dörr och det var Obama. Jag hade aldrig sett Reese bli flåsig, men när han frågade henne vem som var med i filmen, hon var som, "Jack Nicholson och jag och Owen ... Owen ... Owen ...." Och jag skrek, "Wilson!" Som om det var en festmatch eller något. Hon glömde hans namn för en sekund. Sen skämtade han med mig, vilket jag missade. Vad var det för skämt? RUDD: Han frågade om min karaktär i How Do You Know, och jag berättade för honom att jag är en kille som hamnar i lite varmvatten, och även om hans avsikter är bra blir han åtalad av regeringen för eventuella överträdelser. Och Obama säger, "Åh, så du spelar en kongressledamot." Och jag var som, "Nej, faktiskt arbetar jag för min pappa i detta företag." Jag försöker förklara, och Obama avbryter mig och säger, "Det var ett skämt." Jag kände mig bara så dum. Naturligtvis var det ett skämt, och det är faktiskt ganska bra. Jag är normalt ganska bra på att fånga dem. Om du inte är den jävla presidenten i USA, Jag kan vanligtvis identifiera när du skämtar. PLAYBOY: Du gav dig inte ut på att vara en komisk skådespelare. Var inte ditt ursprungliga mål att bli en Shakespeareskådespelare? Det var planen. Kanske inte enbart Shakespeare, men definitivt seriös teater. Jag var ganska fokuserad. En av mina första skådespelarroller på college var i en experimentell version av Macbeth. Experimentellt hur? Det var två Macbeths. En annan kille spelade den dåliga Macbeth och jag spelade den goda Macbeth. Det verkar onödigt förvirrande. - Det var det minsta förvirrande. Det var otroligt dumt och pretentiöst och hemskt, och jag älskade det. Regissören var en av de killar som inte hade skor, och han ville göra något fascinerande och explosivt. Då verkade det så coolt. Jag var 18, kanske 19 år när allt verkar otroligt. “Heliga skit, du säger mig att du kan sätta Hamlet i Vietnam?” Det är den stunden i ditt liv när du inser att världen är så mycket större än du trodde. Var det vid den här tiden som du började jobba som DJ? Ja, jag tror det. Jag gjorde det bara då och då, på en 1950-tals bar i Kansas City. Jag hade långt hår som Michael Hutchence, killen från INXS, och jag vägrade klippa det. Så mina chefer tvingade mig att bära en Elvis pompadour peruk varje gång jag jobbade. Det var jetsvart och billigt, och med tiden blev det frissigt och såg inte alls ut som en pompadour. När jag flyttade till Los Angeles jobbade en av killarna som också DJ på Kansas City-baren på ett företag som hette You Should Be Dancing, och han skaffade mig ett jobb. Jag ägnade helgerna åt bar mitzvahs och åt att hålla 16-åringar glada över MC Hammer. Du blev känd på bar mitzvah-banan för nåt som kallas Donnie Dweeb-dansen. Åh, herregud. Detta skedde efter en förtryckande lång dag. Jag hade två bar mitzvah på en dag, den första i Santa Barbara och den andra i Thousand Oaks. Med alla resande inblandade, var det som en 18-timmars dag. Någonstans runt mitten av den andra bar mitzvah, var jag på dansgolvet med dessa barn, och jag antar att jag bara knäckte. Jag stod inte ut längre. Jag blev så örfilsglad att jag började dansa spastiskt, liksom håna hela saken bara för att roa mig. Men barnen tyckte att det var roligt, och veckan därpå var jag på en annan bar mitzvah och några barn kom fram till mig och sa, "Hej, du är killen som gör töntdansen." Och jag tänkte, "Jag vet inte vad du pratar om." Och de sa, "Förra veckan på så-och-så bar mitzvah, du gjorde den här dansen." De gick till min chef och bad honom att få mig att göra det. Och min chef sa: "Du måste göra det." Så jag gick ut och han satte sig på mikrofonen och sa: "Mina damer och herrar, välkomna Donnie Dweeb!" Han gav mig ett namn. Vad hände under den här dansen? RUDD: Jag vet inte hur jag ska beskriva det utan att förolämpa många grupper av människor. Det var en kombination av ... låt oss bara säga några psykiska funktionshinder och fysiska sjukdomar. Hela fronten av negativa stereotyper. Med strumporna uppdragna. Det är ganska mycket en metafor för hur jag kände om finkan i high school. Jag gjorde en show för alla medan jag kände mig som Coco i Fame, tog av mig skjortan och visade brösten för en regissör. Det var så jag kände det. Det blev ett slags återkommande tema för mig. Varför slutade du vara bar mitzvah-dj? Hände det bara när din skådespelarkarriär äntligen tog fart? Nej, det var långt innan det. Jag hade några vänner som kom till stan, och vi skulle ut till Magic Castle. Jag sa till min chef en månad i förväg, "Jag behöver lördag kväll ledig." Men sedan helgen kom, och jag slutade bli ombedd för denna flickas fest. Hon ville verkligen ha Donnie Dweeb. Så min chef sa till mig: ” Kan du bara titta in och dansa? Jag ger dig $ 25 och du kan komma därifrån. " PLAYBOY: Gjorde du det? Det gjorde jag. Och jag tog med mig mina vänner. En av dem var Joe Buck, som gick vidare till att bli en play-by-play-annonsör för Fox Sports. Och den andre var Jon Hamm. Från galna män? Ja, båda dessa killar jag har känt sedan jag var tonåring. De kom in till stan, och jag sade, "Innan vi går till Magic Castle, måste vi svänga förbi denna fest. Jag behöver bara göra det här en snabb sak.” Så vi gick, och de hade ingen aning om vad jag gjorde. De visste att jag var DJ för fester, men de hade ingen aning om hur illa det hade blivit. Min chef såg mina vänner, och han sa, "Jag ska presentera Paul, och ni kan komma in som hans hejdukar" – jag antar för att de hade kostymer. Vänta, vänta. Du, Jon Hamm och Joe Buck var alla i kostym? RUDD: Vi var tvungna att vara, eftersom det finns en klädkod på Magic Castle. Så Jon och Joe kom ut och de stod åt sidan, och jag drog fladdermusmitzvah-flickan från publiken och satte henne i en stol i mitten av ett tomt dansgolv. Och inför hundratals gäster och familjemedlemmar gav jag den här tonårstjejen en efterbliven lapdance. Wow. Det låter... PLAYBOY: Det är ett ord för att beskriva det. Det är det enda ordet! Men just nu hade jag blivit förlamad av det. Efter att det var över gick jag över till mina vänner och sa, "Okej, killar, låt oss gå." Mycket avslappnad. Vi gingo ut till lobbyn och — det skall jag aldrig glömma — Joe Buck såg på mig med det mest förvirrade uttryck i ansiktet. Han sade med fullständig uppriktighet och uppriktighet: “Vad fan hände där inne?” Och i det ögonblicket, verkligheten av vad jag hade gjort med mitt liv kom att rasa ner. Jag svarade honom på det enda sättet jag kunde. Jag sa: “Jag vet ärligt talat inte.” Nästa dag sa jag upp mig. Jag slutar. Jag har aldrig sagt nej igen. PLAYBOY: Även utan DJ-jobbet var du inte särskilt glad i Los Angeles. RUDD: Det var jag inte. Du påstod att du hade en härdsmälta i mitten av 1990-talet. Vad hände? Det var en rad saker som hände mig på en gång. Jag fick ett jobb i en TV-serie som hette Wild Havre, och det gjorde mig nervös. Jag frågade mig själv: ” Tänk om det är en hit? Jag måste fortsätta att göra det i sju år.” Provspelningen var rolig, eftersom vi fick improvisera och skoja runt, och det kändes som om det kunde vara okej. Men jag har kalla fötter. Min hand skakade bokstavligen när jag skrev på kontraktet. Även om jag behövde pengarna och hade tur som var en arbetande skådespelare, var jag 24 och värdefull. Det är här skådespeleri och ungdom verkligen jävlas med dig. Jag ville göra teater. Jag ville göra coola indiefilmer. Det blev så frustrerande att du målade oanständigheter på väggarna i din lägenhet. Ja, men det var bara en produkt av ålder. Det verkar så romantiskt att måla på väggarna och känna sig som en torterad konstnär när man egentligen bara gnäller. Jag skulle skriva saker som “Fan, fan det.” Jag skrev om alla de saker som kom till mig. Detta var vid tiden för jordbävningen i Northridge 1994, tror jag, vilket var traumatiskt för mig. Det hände mitt i natten, och det skrämde mig så mycket att jag under de närmaste månaderna ständigt kände jordbävningar. Jag skulle vara mitt uppe i ett samtal med någon och jag skulle säga, "Kände du det?" Och de skulle säga, "Nej. Vad pratar du om?" Det var konstigt. Jag kände mig helt enkelt inte säker på foten längre. En massa trauman hände mig på kort tid. En vän till mig omkom i en hemsk bilolycka, och sen blev jag rånad. Det var ungefär när vi sköt Clueless. Jag var på parkeringen av Jerrys Deli, och killen var som, "Du tror inte att det är en riktig pistol?" Han sköt den på mig, och jag kunde känna vinden från kulan bredvid mitt huvud. Verkade det som om Los Angeles sa åt dig att komma ut? Vänta, det blir bättre. Jag råkade ut för fem bilolyckor på bara en vecka. Fem bilolyckor? Hur är det möjligt? Två av dem hände när min bil stod parkerad. Jag körde inte ens då. Det verkade verkligen som ett konstigt kosmiskt budskap från universum. Jag är inte någon som lever mitt liv baserat på kosmiska någonting, men det kändes som: ” Ja, jag förstår. Meddelande mottaget, universum.” PLAYBOY: Varför flytta till New York? RUDD: För i New York behöver du ingen bil. [skrattar] PLAYBOY: Det kan inte vara den enda anledningen. Jag bodde där som barn. Jag föddes på andra sidan bron, så det var bekant för mig. Jag har alltid känt mig säkrare i New York än i Los Angeles, hur konstigt det än låter. Jag vill inte vara omgiven av branschen hela tiden, och det är vad du får i Los Angeles. Inte långt efter jag flyttade till New York blev jag med i pjäsen The Last Night of Ballyhoo, och jag minns att jag gick till repetitionen, höll i manuset och kaffet, och jag kände mig så...sane. PLAYBOY: Du har en son, Jack, som är sex, och en dotter, som är en och en halv. Har de sett dina filmer? - Nej, nej, nej, nej. Inte än. Men ärligt talat, de är helt enkelt inte nyfikna. Jack har inget intresse. Jag tror på grund av hemvideor och YouTube, det verkar bara inte så speciellt. Han har inte räknat ut skillnaden mellan att se sig själv i en video och vad jag gör. Han börjar nu. Tidigare, om någon kom fram till mig på gatan, var det förvirrande för honom. Han skulle säga: ”Känner du den personen?” Och jag skulle säga nej, och han skulle säga: ”Nå, hur vet de ditt namn?” Nu får han det. Han är som, "Åh, de känner dig från filmerna." PLAYBOY: Dina filmer är inte precis familjevänlig. Det finns massor av svordomar och sexuella scenarier. När dina barn är gamla nog att se vad deras pappa gör för att försörja sig, kommer du att vara tolerant när de börjar svära? RUDD: Jag vet inte. Jag gör definitivt en ansträngning att inte använda svordomar när jag är runt dem, men ibland gör jag det. Och när det händer, säger jag bara åt dem att inte göra det. Jag tror att mitt jobb som förälder är att förvirra mina barn så mycket som möjligt. Men det är svårt. När Jack svär, skrattar jag varje gång. Och jag vet att det är fel reaktion att ha. PLAYBOY: Det kommer verkligen inte att avskräcka honom. Jag vet, jag vet. Det suddar ut gränsen mellan far och son. Jag har haft många stunder när jag skrattar med honom på de mest barnsliga saker. Igår hämtade jag honom och kastade honom på sängen, och han sparkade mig i kulorna. En gång slog han mig så hårt att jag sa: "Du, du satte mig helt i penisen. Rätt på spetsen.” Han skrattade och sa: ”I triangeln?” Jag började skratta och sa: ”Ja, det var allt.” Och då sa han: ”Rakt in i taket på huset?” Jag dog precis. PLAYBOY: Så din son har blivit en vän? RUDD: Det är precis det! Han är en kille jag vill umgås med. Det finns ingen föräldrabok jag kan referera till när min unge bara börjar göra roliga skämt om spetsen på en kuk vara som taket på ett hus. Allt jag kan göra är att skratta och ge honom en high five och säga: “Snygg en.” Min son har alltid varit bisarr och rolig. I ett år var han besatt av sprinklerhuvuden. Och mellan tre och fem års ålder klädde han sig bara i kostym. Han ville inte lämna huset utan att ha kappa och slips och byxor på sig. Jag minns att jag tänkte: Det här är mitt drömbarn. Hur fick Jack en irländsk pub uppkallad efter sig? Han har faktiskt två. Den första byggdes av hans farfar. När Jack föddes flyttade mina föräldrar in i ett nytt hus i Kansas City. Och min far var en mycket händig man. Han kunde bygga hem. Han kunde göra vad som helst. Han hade denna ofullbordade källare, och han sade, "Jag kommer att bygga en irländsk pub där nere, och jag kommer att kalla det Sullivan s." Vilket är Jacks mellannamn. Är det ett familjenamn? - Inte alls. Ingen i min familj är irländsk. Men min far var en stor älskare av Irland. Han brukade resa dit hela tiden. Därmed den irländska puben. Han hade alla regler om det. Den skulle ha Guinness och goda öl och inget Coors Light. Det skulle finnas single malt och high-end whisky och ingenting med ett paraply i. På hyllan bakom baren skulle han ha Jameson och Glenlivet och [bebisformeln] Similac. Han sade alltid: "Jack är ägaren. Han är ägaren.” Det enda han bad mig om var en bild på Jack som han kunde ha sepia tonsatt och gjort för att se ut som ett gammalt fotografi att sätta ovanför baren. Hjälpte du honom att bygga den? Nej, det var en fullständig hemlighet. Han skickade aldrig bilder, gav mig aldrig uppdateringar. Jag visste bara att han jobbade på det, satte i rörsystem och elektricitet och allt. Och efter ett år sade han: ” Det är gjort. Kom tillbaka till Kansas och hämta Jack. Jag vill att du ska se det.” PLAYBOY: Var det så fantastiskt som du föreställde dig? Det var bättre. Pappa var bra på att bygga saker, men det här var hans mästerverk. Jag gick ner i källaren och...jag vet inte ens hur jag ska beskriva det. Det är som om det fanns en gammal irländsk pub redan där som någon hade byggt ett hem ovanpå. Han hade Guinness på utkast och otroliga historiska förskingringar på väggarna. Min pappa var historiefanatiker och samlade på alla möjliga konstiga saker. Det fanns en inramad inbjudan till FAO Schwarz att vara med vid den stora invigningen av Brooklyn Bridge. En gammal polisuniform i New York från slutet av 1800-talet. Ett OS-dokument från 1936 undertecknat av Hitler. Eftersom vi är judar, är vi alla besatta av Hitler. Ingen irländsk pub är komplett utan nazityska tillbehör på väggarna. När hände den andra puben? RUDD: Ja, jag sade till min pappa att om jag någonsin hade köpt ett hus, nu när jag hade sett vad han hade gjort, skulle jag behöva ha en pub på den. Så när Julie och jag bestämde oss för att köpa ett ställe i norra New York, det första jag letade efter var om det hade en källare med tillräckligt med plats för att bygga en pub. Vi hittade en i Rhinebeck, och direkt började jag arbeta på min egen källarpub. Min far skulle komma ut och vi skulle göra det tillsammans, men sen fick han diagnosen cancer. Under loppet av ett år anställde jag någon och byggde en annan version av Sullivans, som jag kallade Sullivans öst. Hur ser det ut i jämförelse med originalet? Jag måste säga att jag förbättrade det. Den är lite större, och jag lärde mig mycket av min far. Han sa till mig, "Om jag hade det att göra om igen, jag skulle se till att göra detta och detta." Det enda jag känner var en förlorad möjlighet var att jag inte satte i en urinoar. Men det har fortfarande några bra saker jag är riktigt stolt över. Det finns markörer i badrummet så att folk kan skriva hemska saker över hela väggarna. Levde din pappa länge nog för att se det? Nej, det gjorde han inte. [pauser] Det är lustigt, den ursprungliga Sullivans var en hyllning till min son, och Sullivans öst har blivit en helgedom för min far. Min syster hade en son, och hans fullständiga namn är Henry Sullivan Arnold. Hon gav honom mellannamnet Sullivan så han kunde vara delägare i puben. [skrattar] Hon och hennes man ville inte att Henry skulle växa upp utan att känna en del av familjeföretaget. Har dina vänner och kollegor sett puben? RUDD: Oh ja, alla jag har arbetat med har varit där. Det har varit några levande fantasy fotbollsdrafter, några pokerhelger, några karaokefester. PLAYBOY: Karaoke är särskilt populär bland serier, eller hur? Vildt populär. David Wain är ett stort fan av karaoke. Joe Truglio, Ken Marino, alla killarna från Wet Hot American Summer. - Varför det? Är det som AOL e-postadresser – det är så ocoolt att det är coolt? Det kan vara en del av det. När serier träffas för att göra karaoke, är det inte som om någon försöker vara rolig. Samtidigt tar ingen det på alltför stort allvar. Det är svårt att förklara. Har du en favoritkaraokelåt? - Inte alls. Det är ett nybörjardrag. Jag hade en karaokesång för tio år sen. Nu tycker jag om att göra sådana som jag aldrig har gjort förut. Vad letar du efter i en karaokelåt? Behöver det vara i ditt röstomfång eller något mer utmanande? RUDD: Många av dessa beslut fattas baserat på vem jag umgås med. Och var snäll och stava ’raoking korrekt: utan k och a och med en apostrof. Alla jag känner talar om det som att det är ’raoking. Och ja, jag inser hur patetiskt det låter. PLAYBOY: Be inte om ursäkt. Det är jag inte. Inte alls. Det är precis så det är. Om jag är i Los Angeles för en dag eller två, jag ringer Joe Trigly, och vi ska gå 'raoking. Det är bara min sociala scen nu. För några veckor sen var jag i L.A. och Joe och hans flickvän, Beth, och jag fick ett privat rum. Joe och jag gillar att ge varandra några överraskningar. Du måste gå djupt in i boken och hitta något som den andra personen inte har hört. - Som vad då? RUDD: Sista gången jag gick 'raoking, Joe gjorde "The Worst That Could Happen" av Johnny Maestro och Brooklyn Bridge. Det är en omöjlig sång att sjunga, men den är otrolig. Det är lite oavsiktligt sexistiskt, men det är helt otroligt. När man hittar en sådan låt är det som att slå på olja. Den första frågan vi alltid ställer innan vi går till en ny ’raoking plats är “Hur är boken?” Vi vill inte ha en standardbok. Vill du prata om socialt obekvämt? Kom till en raoking session med ett gäng serier. Det är där du kommer att se magin hända. Vad är en sammanfattning av ovanstående artikel?
There has long been a certain stigma attached to an AOL.com email account, and those of us obsessed with keeping up with time have cycled through Hotmail, Earthlink, Yahoo!, and some number of business domains before ending with the current standard of email modernity, the Gmail account. But despite Google's best efforts to stigmatize the outdated old domains, I've begun to notice a certain prestige attached to AOL.com survivors. Now that my mother has switched to Gmail, practically the only people I email on AOL accounts are big shots -- people who were already so important when the various new fads (and technical benefits) came that they couldn't bother to change, and had nothing to prove to anyone. This is not, to say the least, a bunch of technophobics. Some, such as Joe Trippi and Arianna Huffington, are seen as techno-sages. Rather, it is a generation of the political and media elite. It seems that some never switched is that they were early adaptors of mobile devices, who don't care what service you use. And if they have endured this long, there is really no reason to give up now on something that has been cycled back to being a status symbol. Using some friends on Twitter, here is a list of people who have been quite recently reachable, often with strange handles, on their old AOL accounts: POLITICS: David Axelrod, Jim Messina, John Weaver, Joe Trippi, Mandy Grunwald, Dick Morris (a recent defector to gmail), Frank Luntz, Ed Rollins, Guy Cecil, Tad Devine, Al Franken, Aaron Schock Media: Matt Drudge, Arianna Huffington (who held an AOL account long before AOL bought her company), David Brooks, David Corn, Robert Draper, Rick Perlstein, Ann Coulter, Tina Brown, Lawrence O'Donnell Most, it should be noted, also have other accounts. "I also have new email addresses, but I'm fond of the original," emailed Grunwald. The next item in this series will address political people who keep Earthlink accounts, and really don't care what you think about it. Last week, Ben Smith at Politico put forward the argument that the attachment to a seemingly outdated AOL email address could somehow have become a strange kind of status symbol, judging by Washington's power brokers and noted media people who still use theirs. In the new issue of Playboy, Paul Rudd Smith's theory gives further credibility: Not only does he and Judd Apatow still have AOL's email addresses, but so do Tina Fey, Steve Carell, and Sarah Silverman. (Vulture knows from experience that Tilda Swinton and David Arquette also do, but then the two have so much in common already.) "I like AOL because it's so embarrassing," Rudd explains. "People look at you like you're a fossil. Which you are. But I'm enjoying that embarrassment. I like being on the outside. Having an AOL address is like having Ocean Pacific shorts. It's so uncool it's cool." [Playboy] ♪ Playboy Interview: Paul Rudd ...Continued from side a PLAYBOY: You really have to gain weight for a movie role? I know, it's weird. It's the opposite of what the studios normally want or what other directors want. But it's different with Judd. He always says, every time we work together, he wants me to gain weight. He says: “I like a fat Rudd.” PLAYBOY: Is it because it makes you look more human? I don't know. Maybe. I just like the excuse for eating bacon. I don't have much left to go anyway. My gut just needs a little extra. And this is a typical request from Apatow? - Yes, absolutely. There's a line in The 40-Year-Old Virgin when my character tells Steve Carell what it's like to have your heart broken and how you constantly get up and lose weight. I improvised that line because, before we started filming, I took Judd's request to gain weight perhaps a little too far. And the studio said: “You’re a fat ass. Lose some weight.” So during the film I tried to lose a few kilos. It can cause a continuity problem. A big problem. And I thought my weight would vary anyway. If I mention it in one scene, maybe it will cover my bases and motivate why I'm 10 pounds heavier in some scenes and 10 pounds lighter in others. PLAYBOY: Is the new film you make with Apatow, currently named This Is Forty, a sequel to Knocked Up? RUDD: It's not really a sequel. It's more like a spin-off. It's about Pete and Debbie, the Leslie Manns and I play in the first movie, with the same kids. We've been at rehearsals for about six months, reading through scenes and improvising some ideas. PLAYBOY: Do you ever feel like you're doing therapy for Apatow? How do you mean? PLAYBOY: Your fictional wife is played by Judd's real wife, Leslie Mann, and your fictional children are played by his actual daughters, Iris and Maude. It's like he's making these movies to investigate his own marriage under a microscope. RUDD: There's a reason it seems like he's doing it. And that's because he absolutely is. We both do it. It was the same thing in Knocked Up. A lot of things in that movie were right out of my life and right out of Judd's life. Judd asked me to write things down from my marriage, and we used it in improvisations. - Like, for example? When my wife was pregnant, she got mad at me because I didn't read the children's books. Understandably, she viewed it as a hostile gesture. But I had an argument in my defense. What did the cavemen do without expecting? You know what I mean? It's just bullshit. I thought: “It’s going to be fine. We don’t have to attend delivery classes or any of that nonsense.” What’s the worst that can happen? It's not like I didn't read the books and go to the classes that our son wouldn't have been born. Is it true that you became friends with Apatow because of a mutual love for Steve Martin? RUDD: Here's how it happened: I was at a dinner party with a group of people, and we were talking about fake names—you know, how it's hard to come up with a really good fake name. It's a specific kind of gift. You don't want to go too far into the silly, and you don't want to go too far into the banal. I always thought one of the most fun names ever was Gern Blanston, who came from a Steve Martin routine on one of his early records. Comedy isn't beautiful! Yes, it is. So I brought up Gern Blanston, and a woman at the table said, "Oh, my God, that's what Judd Apatow's email address means." It turned out his address was GernBlanston@aol .com. I thought, Wow, that's a very cool, hard to understand reference. Before you finish that story, a quick side question: Why do so many comics have AOL addresses? Steve Carell has an AOL address, as well as Tina Fey and Sarah Silverman. What about you? I'm gone. - Why? Is it a coincidence that almost everyone in comedy is still on AOL? That's a good question. I've never thought about it. I finally got a Gmail account, but I never use it. I like AOL because it's so embarrassing. People look at you like you're a fossil. Which you are. But I'm enjoying that embarrassment. I like being on the outside. Having an AOL address is like having Ocean Pacific shorts. It's so uncool, it's cool. Anyway, sorry, you said about Apatow? RUDD: So I have his email address, and I don't know him, but I'm a fan of Freaks and Geeks. When I came home from the dinner party that night, I wrote him a short note and congratulated him on a good choice in e-mail names. He wrote back directly because he was impressed that I knew who Gern Blanston was. Actually, the first thing he said to me was "Cool, now maybe I can get some free tickets to Neil LaBute playing." Because at the time it was the main thing I had done. How long did it take you to meet him personally? About a year. We e-mailed each other for a long time. Actually, I wasn't in the same room with him until I auditioned for Anchorman. And going in there and seeing him was weird. I felt like I was meeting my Asian pen pal. I really wanted to make a big first impression. PLAYBOY: It probably didn't help that you had grown some sheep and mustaches. Yeah, that's pretty good. I wanted to do something special for the role. I worked at Friends that week, so I could raid the show's closet department. I don't normally dress up for an audition to try to impress the director if it's not something I really want and I think dressing up can help. Garderoben’s boss at Friends helped me find this horrible polyester suit, and I had enough time before audition to grow mustaches and chops. It was not fully grown, but it was enough to give them the general idea. PLAYBOY: You've never been afraid to use your own body for a joke, whether it's growing mustache or undressing. I've been naked in a lot of movies. There's something inborn funny about the naked male body, especially mine. Ryan Reynolds, sure, it makes sense why he should take off. But not me. I shouldn't have it. But you're wearing your clothes in Wanderlust. - Is that surprising? The film takes place in a hippie municipality, and there is male nudity. Actually, I was pretty grateful I had to keep my pants on for this. I'm a huge fan of film nudity. A male shot is the cheapest and best laugh ever. But it's humiliating to do it. When I showed my butt in the 40-year-old maiden, I just thought, "This is going to be on all the big screens." I was very self-aware of doing that. But I also have a desperate and deeply rooted need to be accepted and enjoyed compensating for my massive uncertainty. PLAYBOY: In addition to worrying about the finished product, do you mind undressing yourself naked for a film crew? I don't mind, but I feel sorry for them. There's that scene in Our Idiot Brother where I'm naked and getting painted from the side, and because of the angle of the shot, our soundman—who was a guest soundman, by the way, and not even our regular guy—had an unfortunate view. He held up the boom mic and stood right in front of me. My legs were broken and he was staring at my hairy spot. Poor guy. I felt so sorry for him. I could tell from his expression that he was pretty pissed off. Afterwards, I was like, "Sorry about that, man." I don't think he forgave me. You mentioned that you had a lot of uncertainties. Are you shy, or are you really insecure? Are you kidding me? I'm full of insecurity. My entire career exists because of uncertainty. Do you really believe that? Of course I do. Why would anyone be an actor if he or she wasn't insecure? That is why anyone is working on this type of work. I remember when my sister was born and I was insecure because I didn’t get all the attention anymore. I think you can draw a straight line from that to my entire acting career. Some actors claim to be doing it for the sake of craftsmanship. I hear it all the time, and it's such a horseshit. It's such a lie. There's nothing I think is more revolting than when I look at American Idol and some 22-year-old singers thank the fans and say he does it for them. "I'm doing it for you!" Fucking liar. You're not doing this for your fans. You do this because you want to put food on the table for your family, and you want to be loved by strangers so your self-loathing is not as rampant. You seem very neurotic to someone who grew up in Kansas. I've lived everywhere. Dad worked for TWA, so we moved all the time. We moved to Kansas for the first time when I was five years old, then I left when I was six and a half or seven years old and moved to Anaheim. We were in California for three years and then moved back to Kansas. My parents have been there ever since. Did Kansas feel at home? - Not at the time. I was a Jew in a not very Jewish part of the city, and attended a not very Jewish school. My parents were Europeans — my father and mother were both born in London, and my father grew up in New York City. I've always felt a little out of place. I didn't have much in common with the other kids. I asked them, ‘Where are you from?’ and they asked, ‘Here. What do you mean? I’m from here.” [laughs] It was very much a high school football, -Friday Night Lights scene, as I think it’s in a lot of the country. I wasn't Friday Night Light's type of athlete, although I loved football, and I loved the Steelers. Pittsburgh Steelers? But you lived in Kansas. I started following them when I was living in California. My dad didn't give a shit about sports. When the Dodgers left Brooklyn, he was like, "Fuck sport." But he worked with a guy who was from Pittsburgh, and he loved the Steelers. He took me to a game when the Steelers played the Los Angeles Rams, and I got caught up in the excitement. Suddenly it became my thing to cheer on the Steelers. To this day, if I need to remember a number, I will associate it with a 1970s Steelers player. It's my mnemonic system. Is this a joke, or have you really done it? RUDD: That's absolutely true. On the day I met my wife, I asked her for her phone number, and I will never forget this: The last four digits were 1764. I thought, ‘ Oh, it’s easy. Brian Sipe, Steve Furness.” Brian Sipe was quarterback for the Cleveland Browns, but his number was 17. And Furness, of course, was number 64. In a way, you let her know in advance exactly what kind of guy she got involved with. Exactly. She said, "What the hell are you talking about?" The fact that she went out with me still says a lot about her. She knew I was a big Steelers fan and a big nerd. You want to know how much Steelers nerd I am? Once I made a player out of Legos. I did a Lego version of Craig Colquitt, Steelers Punter. Was he your favorite player? No, John Stallworth was my favorite. But Colquitt was number five, and I only had enough black pieces to make a five. It was pretty good, if I may say so myself. I did a lot of Legos when I was a kid, but this was my piece de résistance. I did it when I was 10 and when I left home after high school, my mom kept it. When people came over, she showed it to them. It survived for 30 years. A few years ago, I was in Kansas City after Dad passed away and found out that the Kansas City Chiefs, Dustin Colquitt, live across the street. Do you have anything to do with Craig Colquitt? Dustin is Craig's son. My mom invited him here, and I brought out the Lego statue to show him. I thought, "Look what I did when I was ten. I was really into your dad. "I think he was a little freaked out at first, but then he was like, "My dad's coming to town in a few weeks. He had to see this. "I had to fly back to New York, but I was like, "Sure, take him over. I would be honored."But a few days later my mother was moving a few things around and accidentally bumped Lego Craig Colquitt, and it crushed all over the floor. So Craig never got a chance to see it. You must have been devastated. No, I thought it was fun. My mother was destroyed. She still feels guilty. She will probably burst into tears as she reads this. But I wasn't emotionally attached to it at all. I just enjoyed the irony that it survived for so many years, all these moving around the country, and just when Craig Colquitt would come over and see it, crash, it's over. You were the class clown in high school? RUDD: I wanted to be, but I wasn't always good at it. I was definitely into telling jokes and trying to make people laugh as a way to deal with my uncertainty. Once I drove in my Jeep with someone, and I thought it would be fun if I jumped out of the car in the middle of our conversation and then ran next to it, continuing to talk as if nothing was wrong. But it didn't go so well. I ended up cutting my hands pretty bad. I almost killed myself, and I didn't even get a laugh. The girl in the car with me was just horrified. PLAYBOY: When you play a character that is less than socially graceful, do you ever draw a painful memory from your youth, a specific time or place when you felt uncomfortable in your own skin? Oh, yeah, I did. Can you give us an example? Oh, my God, there were so many. Before you even finished that question, a certain memory was unlocked in my brain. I was at a football game – this may have been in high school or my first year in high school. I had the great happiness of having puberty beat me like a Mack car, where my hair Overnight curved together like Hall and Oates. My skin went crazy and I had acne everywhere. My mother told me not to pick on my pimples, because if I did, they would be scarred. So I didn't touch them, and I was very self-aware of it. One night I was at a party, and there was this girl I was in love with. She was part of a social circle that I couldn’t get near because I was so unpopular. I knew people had been joking about my pimple, so I started joking about it too. I wanted them to think I didn't care, that this huge megazit on my face was no big deal to me. And the other girl, one of the leaders of the click, said: ‘Oh, Paul is just looking for attention, as he always does.' She just belittled me in front of everyone, including the girl I liked. Did you say anything in your defense? - No, not at all. I just laughed. But inside, of course, I was distraught. I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror and said, "Fuck no!" I just squished finch and pus sprayed everywhere. The way I felt at that moment is the same feeling that I have had to different degrees throughout my life. It's helplessness and shame and anger. - Is it gonna pass? RUDD: It doesn't. And in some cases I'm really glad it doesn't go away, because, at least for me, I've learned to take advantage of that feeling. I have devoted my entire acting career to reproducing and dwelling on that feeling. Every character I've played is just a variation of that child with a pimple he's terrified of popping. Did you feel like that embarrassing guy when you visited President Obama at the White House a few years ago? Oh, of course. I was sweating through a sports coat, which I'm pretty sure is the first time I've ever done that. Nothing if it was planned. I was in Washington, D.C., filming How Do You Know, and Reese Witherspoon and I were on a tour of the White House. Suddenly we were taken into a room, and then a door opened and it was Obama. I'd never seen Reese get windy, but when he asked her who was in the movie, she was like, "Jack Nicholson and me and Owen... Owen... Owen..." and I screamed, "Wilson!" like it was a party game or something. She forgot his name for a second. Then he joked with me, which I missed. What was that joke? RUDD: He asked about my character in How Do You Know, and I told him that I am a guy who gets into some hot water, and although his intentions are good, he is charged by the government with any violations. And Obama says, "Oh, so you're playing a congressman." And I was like, "No, actually I work for my dad in this company." I try to explain, and Obama interrupts me and says, "It was a joke." I just felt so stupid. Of course it was a joke, and it's actually pretty good. I'm normally pretty good at catching them. If you're not the fucking president of the United States, I can usually identify when you're joking. PLAYBOY: You didn't embark on being a comic actor. Wasn't your original goal to become a Shakespeare actor? That was the plan. Maybe not just Shakespeare, but definitely serious theater. I was pretty focused. One of my first acting roles in college was in an experimental version of Macbeth. Experimental how? There were two Macbeths. Another guy played the bad Macbeth and I played the good Macbeth. It seems unnecessarily confusing. - That's the least of the confusion. It was incredibly stupid and pretentious and horrible, and I loved it. The director was one of the guys who didn't have shoes, and he wanted to do something fascinating and explosive. It seemed so cool then. I was 18, maybe 19 years old when everything seems incredible. “Holy shit, you tell me you can put Hamlet in Vietnam?” That’s the moment in your life when you realize the world is so much bigger than you thought. Was it at this time that you started working as a DJ? Yeah, I think so. I only did it once in a while, at a 1950s bar in Kansas City. I had long hair like Michael Hutchence, the guy from INXS, and I refused to cut it. So my bosses forced me to wear an Elvis pompadour wig every time I worked. It was jet black and cheap, and in time it became frizzy and did not look at all like a pompadour. When I moved to Los Angeles, one of the guys who also worked as a DJ at the Kansas City bar at a company called You Should Be Dancing, and he got me a job. I spent the weekends at bar mitzvahs and at keeping 16-year-olds happy about MC Hammer. You became famous on the bar mitzvah track for something called the Donnie Dweeb dance. Oh, my God. This happened after an oppressive long day. I had two bar mitzvahs in one day, the first in Santa Barbara and the second in Thousand Oaks. With all the travelers involved, it was like an 18-hour day. Somewhere around the middle of the other bar mitzvah, I was on the dance floor with these kids, and I guess I just cracked. I couldn't take it anymore. I was so slapped that I started dancing spastically, as well as mocking the whole thing just to amuse myself. But the kids thought it was funny, and the following week I was at another bar mitzvah and some kids came up to me and said, "Hey, you're the guy doing the dork dance." And I thought, "I don't know what you're talking about." And they said, "Last week at the so-and-so bar mitzvah, you did this dance." They went to my boss and asked him to make me do it. And my boss said, "You have to do it." So I went out and he sat on the microphone and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Donnie Dweeb!" He gave me a name. What happened during this dance? RUDD: I don't know how to describe it without insulting many groups of people. It was a combination of... let's just say some mental disabilities and physical diseases. The whole front of negative stereotypes. With the socks pulled. It's pretty much a metaphor for how I felt about the prison in high school. I did a show for everyone while I felt like Coco in Fame, took my shirt off and showed my breasts to a director. That's how I felt. It became a kind of recurring theme for me. Why did you stop being bar mitzvah-dj? Did it just happen when your acting career finally took off? No, it was long before that. I had some friends who came to town, and we were going out to Magic Castle. I told my boss a month in advance, "I need Saturday night off." But since the weekend came, and I stopped being asked for this girl's party. She really wanted Donnie Dweeb. So my boss told me: “Can you just stop by and dance? I'll give you $25 and you can get out of there." PLAYBOY: Did you? I did. And I brought my friends. One of them was Joe Buck, who went on to become a play-by-play announcer for Fox Sports. And the other one was Jon Hamm. From crazy men? Yeah, both of these guys I've known since I was a teenager. They came into town, and I said, "Before we go to Magic Castle, we have to swing by this party. I just need to do this a quick thing.” So we went, and they had no idea what I was doing. They knew I was a DJ for parties, but they had no idea how bad it had gotten. My boss saw my friends, and he said, "I'll introduce Paul, and you can come in as his henchmen"—I guess because they had costumes. Wait, wait, wait. You and Jon Hamm and Joe Buck were all in suits? RUDD: We had to be, because there is a dress code at Magic Castle. So Jon and Joe came out and they stood aside, and I pulled the batmitzvah girl from the audience and put her in a chair in the middle of an empty dance floor. And in front of hundreds of guests and family members, I gave this teenage girl a retarded lap dance. Wow. That sounds... PLAYBOY: It's a word to describe it. It's the only word! But right now, I had been paralyzed by it. After it was over, I went over to my friends and said, "Okay, guys, let's go." Very relaxed. We went out to the lobby and — I will never forget — Joe Buck looked at me with the most confused expression on his face. He said with complete sincerity and sincerity: “What the hell happened in there?” And at that moment, the reality of what I had done with my life came to collapse. I answered him the only way I could. I said: “I honestly don’t know.” The next day I quit. I quit. I've never said no again. PLAYBOY: Even without the DJ job, you weren't very happy in Los Angeles. I wasn't. You claimed you had a meltdown in the mid-1990s. What happened? There were a series of things that happened to me right away. I got a job on a TV show called Wild Havre, and it made me nervous. I asked myself, ‘ What if it’s a hit? I had to keep doing it for seven years.” The audition was fun, because we had to improvise and joke around, and it felt like it could be okay. But I have cold feet. My hand literally shook when I signed the contract. Although I needed the money and was lucky to be a working actor, I was 24 and valuable. This is where acting and youth really fuck with you. I wanted to do theater. I wanted to make cool indie movies. It was so frustrating that you painted obscenities on the walls of your apartment. Yeah, but it was just a product of age. It seems so romantic to paint on the walls and feel like a tortured artist when you really just whine. I would write things like “Fuck it, damn it.” I wrote about all the things that came to me. This was at the time of the 1994 Northridge earthquake, I think, which was traumatic to me. It happened in the middle of the night, and it scared me so much that over the next few months I constantly felt earthquakes. I'd be in the middle of a conversation with someone and I'd say, "Did you feel it?" And they'd say, "No. What are you talking about?" That's weird. I just didn't feel sure about my foot anymore. A lot of trauma happened to me in a short time. A friend of mine was killed in a terrible car accident, and then I was robbed. It was about the time we shot Clueless. I was in the parking lot of Jerry's Deli, and the guy was like, "You don't think it's a real gun?" He shot it at me, and I could feel the wind from the bullet next to my head. Did it seem like Los Angeles told you to get out? Wait, it's getting better. I had five car accidents in just a week. Five car accidents? How is that possible? Two of them happened when my car was parked. I didn't even drive back then. It really seemed like a strange cosmic message from the universe. I’m not someone who lives my life based on cosmic something, but it felt like: “Yes, I understand. Message received, universe.” PLAYBOY: Why move to New York? Because in New York, you don't need a car. [laughs] PLAYBOY: That can't be the only reason. I lived there when I was a kid. I was born on the other side of the bridge, so it was familiar to me. I've always felt safer in New York than in Los Angeles, no matter how strange that sounds. I don't want to be surrounded by the business all the time, and that's what you get in Los Angeles. Not long after I moved to New York, I joined the play The Last Night of Ballyhoo, and I remember going to rehearsal, holding the script and coffee, and I felt so...sane. PLAYBOY: You have a son, Jack, who is six, and a daughter, who is one and a half. Have they seen your movies? - No, no, no, no. Not yet. But honestly, they're just not curious. Jack has no interest. I think because of home videos and YouTube, it just doesn't seem that special. He hasn't figured out the difference between seeing himself in a video and what I'm doing. He starts now. Earlier, if anyone came up to me on the street, it was confusing for him. He would say, “Do you know that person?” And I would say no, and he would say, “Well, how do they know your name?” Now he gets it. He's like, "Oh, they know you from the movies." PLAYBOY: Your movies aren't exactly family friendly. There are lots of profanity and sexual scenarios. When your children are old enough to see what their father does to make a living, will you be tolerant when they start swearing? I don't know. I definitely make an effort not to use profanity when I'm around them, but sometimes I do. And when that happens, I just tell them not to. I think my job as a parent is to confuse my children as much as possible. But it's hard. When Jack swears, I laugh every time. And I know it's the wrong reaction to have. PLAYBOY: It certainly won't deter him. I know, I know. It blurs the line between father and son. I've had many moments laughing with him at the most childish things. Yesterday I picked him up and threw him on the bed, and he kicked me in the balls. Once he hit me so hard, I said, "Hey, you put me all in the penis. Right on the tip.” He laughed and said, “In the triangle?” I started laughing and said, “Yes, that’s all.” And then he said, “Right into the roof of the house?” I just died. So your son has become a friend? That's exactly it! He's a guy I want to hang out with. There's no parent book I can refer to when my kid just starts making funny jokes about the tip of a dick being like the roof of a house. All I can do is laugh and give him a high five and say: “Nice one.” My son has always been bizarre and funny. For a year, he was obsessed with sprinkler heads. And between the ages of three and five, he only dressed in a suit. He didn't want to leave the house without wearing a coat and tie and pants. I remember thinking, this is my dream child. How did Jack get an Irish pub named after him? He actually has two. The first was built by his grandfather. When Jack was born, my parents moved into a new house in Kansas City. And my father was a very handy man. He could build home. He could do anything. He had this unfinished basement, and he said, "I'm going to build an Irish pub down there, and I'm going to call it Sullivan's." Which is Jack's middle name. Is that a family name? - No, not at all. No one in my family is Irish. But my father was a great lover of Ireland. He used to go there all the time. Thus the Irish pub. He had all the rules about it. It would have Guinness and good beer and no Coors Light. There would be single malt and high-end whisky and nothing with an umbrella in it. On the shelf behind the bar he would have Jameson and Glenlivet and [the baby spell] Similac. He always said, "Jack is the owner. He is the owner.” The only thing he asked me for was a picture of Jack that he could have sepia composed and made to look like an old photograph to put above the bar. Did you help him build it? No, it was a complete secret. He never sent me pictures, never gave me updates. All I knew was that he was working on it, putting in plumbing and electricity and everything. And after a year he said: “It’s done. Come back to Kansas and get Jack. I want you to see it.” PLAYBOY: Was it as amazing as you imagined? That's better. Dad was good at building things, but this was his masterpiece. I went down to the basement and... I don't even know how to describe it. It's like there was an old Irish pub already there that someone had built a home on top of it. He had Guinness on drafts and incredible historical embezzlements on the walls. My father was a history fanatic and collected all sorts of strange things. There was a framed invitation to FAO Schwarz to attend the grand opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. An old New York police uniform from the late 19th century. A 1936 Olympic document signed by Hitler. Since we're Jews, we're all obsessed with Hitler. No Irish pub is complete without Nazisc accessories on the walls. When did the other pub happen? RUDD: Yeah, I told my dad that if I had ever bought a house, now that I had seen what he had done, I would need to have a pub on it. So when Julie and I decided to buy a place in northern New York, the first thing I was looking for was if it had a basement with enough room to build a pub. We found one in Rhinebeck, and right away I started working on my own basement pub. My father would come out and we would do it together, but then he was diagnosed with cancer. Over the course of a year, I hired someone and built another version of Sullivan's, which I called Sullivan's East. How does it look compared to the original? I have to say, I improved it. It's a little bigger, and I learned a lot from my father. He said to me, "If I had it to do again, I'd make sure to do this and this." The only thing I feel was a lost opportunity was that I didn't put in a urinal. But there are still some good things I'm really proud of. There are markers in the bathroom so people can write terrible things all over the walls. Did your father live long enough to see it? No, he didn't. [pauses] It's funny, the original Sullivans was a tribute to my son, and Sullivan's east has become a shrine to my father. My sister had a son, and his full name is Henry Sullivan Arnold. She gave him the middle name Sullivan so he could be a partner in the pub. [laughs] She and her husband didn't want Henry to grow up without knowing part of the family business. Have your friends and colleagues seen the pub? RUDD: Oh yeah, everyone I've worked with has been there. There have been some live fantasy football drafts, some poker weekends, some karaoke vests. PLAYBOY: Karaoke is particularly popular with comics, isn't it? Wildly popular. David Wain is a big fan of karaoke. Joe Truglio, Ken Marino, all the guys from Wet Hot American Summer. - Why? Is it like AOL email addresses – it's so uncool that it's cool? It could be part of it. When comics meet to make karaoke, it's not like someone is trying to be funny. At the same time, nobody takes it too seriously. It's hard to explain. Do you have a favorite karaoke song? - No, not at all. It's a rookie move. I had a karaoke song ten years ago. Now I enjoy doing things I have never done before. What are you looking for in a karaoke song? Does it need to be in your voice range or something more challenging? RUDD: Many of these decisions are made based on who I associate with. And please spell ‘raoking correctly: without k and a and with an apostrophe. Everyone I know talks about it as being ‘raoking. And yes, I realize how pathetic that sounds. PLAYBOY: Don't apologize. I'm not. Not at all. That's exactly how it is. If I'm in Los Angeles for a day or two, I'll call Joe Trigly, and we're going to go 'raoking. It's just my social scene now. A few weeks ago, I was in L.A. and Joe and his girlfriend, Beth, and I got a private room. Joe and I like to give each other a few surprises. You need to go deep into the book and find something that the other person hasn't heard. Like what? RUDD: Last time I went 'raoking, Joe did "The Worst That Could Happen" by Johnny Maestro and Brooklyn Bridge. It's an impossible song to sing, but it's incredible. It's kind of unintentionally sexist, but it's unbelievable. When you find such a song, it's like turning on oil. The first question we always ask before going to a new ‘raoking place is “How is the book?” We don’t want a standard book. Do you want to talk about socially uncomfortable? Come to a raoking session with a bunch of comics. That's where you'll see the magic happen. What is a summary of the above article?
- AOL.com e-postadresser är så nittiotal, eller hur? Men tydligen är de också en sorts konstig statussymbol bland en viss uppsättning. Ben Smith framförde argumentet förra veckan om Politico, och noterade att trots att "stigma" länge förknippas med AOL.com domänen, finns det också "en viss prestige" knuten till dem som har hållit på ändå. Han erbjuder upp en lång lista över politiker och mediabigshots, däribland David Axelrod, Matt Drudge, Arianna Huffington, och Ann Coulter, som fortfarande har sina konton. Och det visar sig kändisar också, ofta hänga på AOL.com adresser, en trend som observerats av Playboy och tas upp i en nyligen intervju med Paul Rudd (som, ja, har en AOL.com adress). "Jag gillar AOL eftersom det är så pinsamt. Folk ser på dig som om du är ett fossil. Vilket du är. Men jag njuter av den förlägenheten, säger han. "Jag gillar att vara på utsidan. Att ha en AOL-adress är som att ha Ocean Pacific-shorts. Det är så ocoolt att det är coolt." Andra kändisar som kan nås på AOL.com är bland andra Judd Apatow, Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman—och, som noterats av New York, Tilda Swinton och David Arquette.
- AOL.com e-mail addresses are so nineties, right? But apparently they are also a kind of strange status symbol among a certain set. Ben Smith made the argument last week about Politico, noting that despite the fact that "stigma" is long associated with the AOL.com domain, there is also "a certain prestige" attached to those who have been at it anyway. He offers up a long list of politicians and media big shots, including David Axelrod, Matt Drudge, Arianna Huffington, and Ann Coulter, who still have their accounts. And it turns out celebrities too, often hanging on to AOL.com addresses, a trend observed by Playboy and taken up in a recent interview with Paul Rudd (who, yes, has an AOL.com address). "I like AOL because it's so embarrassing. People look at you like you're a fossil. Which you are. But I enjoy that embarrassment, he says. "I like being on the outside. Having an AOL address is like having Ocean Pacific shorts. It's so uncool it's cool." Other celebrities that can be reached at AOL.com include Judd Apatow, Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman—and, as noted by New York City, Tilda Swinton and David Arquette.