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"  Published in the April 2012 issue, on sale soon SCOTT RAAB: I just saw Jeff, Who Lives at Home this morning. It was a very symphonic movie. ED HELMS: That&amp;#039;s a nice word. It&amp;#039;s not the funniest movie I&amp;#039;ve ever done. SR: It&amp;#039;s pretty funny. EH: It has a more complex goal than just getting laughs, and yet it was one of the most fun productions I&amp;#039;ve ever been on. Partly because Jason Segel&amp;#039;s such a world-champion good guy, and we were in New Orleans, which is home turf for the Duplass brothers [directors Mark and Jay]. And it was a new process for me, because the Duplass brothers want you to improvise \u2014 not just comedy, but everything. [Looks at recording device.] That looks like a Taser. SR: The New York City police commissioner said the same thing. A lot of stand-ups use it to record their acts. EH: It was a big deal when I got a minidisc recorder when I was doing stand-up. This was in my 20s. SR: You&amp;#039;re about 57, 58 now? EH: Thanks. Yeah, I&amp;#039;m 38. Everybody thinks I&amp;#039;m 50. SR: You&amp;#039;ve compared your stand-up style to Bill Cosby&amp;#039;s. EH: I told personal stories the way Cosby would spin a yarn for ten minutes. My monologue on Saturday Night Live last year was a condensed version of one of those long tales. I think in hindsight it works better as a long story than as a condensed monologue. SR: Do you read reviews? EH: Yeah, because no one&amp;#039;s going to tell me what they really think of something. SR: I will. EH: I appreciate it. Not a lot of people do. It&amp;#039;s important to me to have a realistic assessment of where I stand. By the way, if I come across as nauseous, it&amp;#039;s because I got a little carsick on the way over. But I&amp;#039;m recovering. SR: You look fresh. EH: I just had a photo shoot, so I&amp;#039;ve got some makeup on. I did not feel fresh this morning. My best friend lives in Hell&amp;#039;s Kitchen. We had a great dinner, and then we went out to a whiskey bar and drank moonshine. Like fancy bottled moonshine. SR: The car sickness and the moonshine may be related. EH: Yeah, I know. We had a great night, busted out the instruments. He plays mandolin in this bar all the time. SR: And you had your banjo? EH: I usually travel with it, but I played guitar. We drank moonshine and sang bluegrass all night. It made for a rough morning, but it was a good night. SR: These were jugs of moonshine? EH: I&amp;#039;ll show you one. I took a picture. [Scrolls through pictures on his iPhone.] SR: Was that your own goatee in Jeff, Who Lives at Home? EH: Yeah. When I was on The Daily Show, I wanted badly to have a mustache because I wanted to do a John Stossel parody and I never could. I just don&amp;#039;t have a very good mustache. But I&amp;#039;ve gotten hairier in my 30s and I can pull off a mustache. And since I wear glasses most of the time when I&amp;#039;m not working, I look exactly like Ned Flanders. SR: It&amp;#039;s a good comedy look. But goatees are like tattoos. If you get one now, you look like every other schmuck. Which your character is \u2014 not at the end, but at the beginning. EH: He&amp;#039;s desperate to be cool. SR: And he thinks the car will do it. EH: The Porsche, yeah. SR: The inspection sticker on his Boxster in the film said &amp;quot;4/2010.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;m thinking the brother&amp;#039;s got an old Boxster, you know? EH: We had a couple of Boxsters. But this movie did not have a big budget. They came from another movie. And they were pieces of shit. These Boxsters had been wrecked a few times. You&amp;#039;ve got Teamsters who can make rattletraps look brand new \u2014 they had to cut a sunroof in so Jason could pop out the top. We had four Mercedes on The Hangover set \u2014 they kept getting more and more fucked up as the movie goes. One day in production, we show up to work, one of the beat-up Mercedes had been stolen. Then, on that very day, our beat-up Mercedes drives right by production and our security guys pull him right over. It was like some crack addict. He had drugs in the car. It was hilarious serendipity. SR: Life is a series of choices. EH: This guy was not making good choices. SR: Your Civil Warriors project seems like a can&amp;#039;t-miss idea. EH: We&amp;#039;re still working on it. I&amp;#039;m a producer on it, so I&amp;#039;m very much in the trenches, no pun intended. There actually were no trenches in the Civil War \u2014 that didn&amp;#039;t come until World War II. SR: Whoa. EH: Excuse me. World War I. SR: I was going to say. Because in a previous life I fought at the Marne. EH: The hope was to take this venerated piece of cultural history and make it silly the way that Monty Python did with The Holy Grail, but it&amp;#039;s a tough task. SR: Every place in the South has a Civil War monument. You don&amp;#039;t see that in the North. EH: I was raised in Atlanta, and there are monuments there to various battles. It&amp;#039;s a footnote in the North. In the South, it&amp;#039;s woven into the identity. SR: I recently saw Stephen Colbert speak about growing up in the South. The talent that has passed through The Daily Show is incredible. EH: That&amp;#039;s where I first started to appreciate the discipline it takes to generate comedy on deadlines. It&amp;#039;s terrifying. SR: You&amp;#039;ve talked about the discomfort of being the cruel Daily Show correspondent. EH: I found myself often asking the question, &amp;quot;Who deserves to be made fun of?&amp;quot; Depending on your mood, the answer can be no one or everyone. It took me a while to understand the math of how those field pieces came together. I don&amp;#039;t think that ridicule is ever funny, but there are times when that gets the biggest response. Identity questions come up, like Can I do this and be a good person? I have profound respect for Sacha Baron Cohen, but Borat is not a particularly comfortable movie for me to sit through. I think Steve Carell was really genius about making himself the joke in a lot of his segments.  SR: No one talks about your personal life. It&amp;#039;s amazing. You&amp;#039;re in a long-term relationship? EH: I have a serious girlfriend, yeah. SR: Maybe it&amp;#039;s because people find you so lovable, they leave you alone. EH: I think if I ever get to the point where I actually think I&amp;#039;m beloved, I might just stop working. SR: People like Ed Helms. I don&amp;#039;t know if it includes everyone in the Apatow stable, or all The Daily Show alums, but there&amp;#039;s a sense of &amp;quot;These guys are great.&amp;quot; EH: Maybe it&amp;#039;s because of this new approach to comedy. There&amp;#039;s Something About Mary was transformative because it was really about a loser. And then 40-Year-Old Virgin came out, and then suddenly the idiot could be a hero. In the &amp;#039;80s you had a lot of aggressive comedy: Beverly Hills Cop and even Vacation. Chevy Chase is very flawed, but he&amp;#039;s still got an alpha energy. Now it&amp;#039;s these guys that are struggling with fitting in. I think Ben Stiller is just a world champion at that. SR: Robert Downey Jr. calls him &amp;quot;our Chaplin.&amp;quot; EH: But Downey was our Chaplin. SR: Do you have hobbies? Are you a sports fan? Do you prefer crack or powder cocaine? EH: I like to play with radio-controlled toys. Helicopters, airplanes, and cars, and I like to toil over them and work on them and modify them. I like crafty stuff. I have a little shop in my garage at my house in Silver Lake [California]. SR: I thought everybody lived in the Palisades or the Valley or Laurel Canyon. EH: I like feeling close to downtown. When I moved to L.A., I moved into Zach Galifianakis&amp;#039;s house in Venice, and I hated it. I was really lonely over there. This is not particularly fair to the Venice population, but it was like people didn&amp;#039;t really care about stuff \u2014 the beach mind-set. I need an environment that I can pull energy from. I think downtown L.A. is a really special, weird, unique place. [Shows a picture on his iPhone.] This was something I made \u2014 cigar-box guitars for my nieces and nephews for Christmas this year. I&amp;#039;ve got a nice little shop. This is a little snapshot of the shop. SR: That&amp;#039;s a clean shop. EH: That&amp;#039;s why I took a picture. I read in some woodworking manual that you should always spend the first 20 minutes of your day cleaning your shop. Start by cleaning it, then you just mess it up. Don&amp;#039;t clean it up when you&amp;#039;re done. Clean it up when you get there. I gotta show you the finished product. Each guitar is unique. And they sound pretty good. That&amp;#039;s number three of the seven. I added a little inlay on the back. I had a ton of fun. SR: I&amp;#039;m no evangelist for fatherhood, but should it happen, you&amp;#039;re gonna love it. You&amp;#039;re the kind of guy it&amp;#039;s made for. EH: I&amp;#039;m excited about it. SR: I read that you had heart surgery when you were 14. EH: I was diagnosed at birth with a murmur, so it wasn&amp;#039;t something that crashed in on us. And when you&amp;#039;re 14, you&amp;#039;re more worried about what the kids at school think than whether or not you&amp;#039;re in a life-threatening situation. It doesn&amp;#039;t feel like a defining thing. It may have been in ways I don&amp;#039;t know. I did write my college application essay about it. Dead Poets Society was a big movie during my adolescence, so it was &amp;quot;I had heart surgery and I&amp;#039;ve learned to seize the day! If you put me into your college, I will seize the day!&amp;quot; I went back to Oberlin and they showed me my application, and there&amp;#039;s a question on it that says, &amp;quot;What are your career goals?&amp;quot; And I wrote: &amp;quot;TV/film actor/producer.&amp;quot; I was 17 years old. SR: You nailed it. EH: I&amp;#039;m grateful to have had that clarity. I think it&amp;#039;s elusive for a lot of people. This is a boring trope among comedians, but it was Saturday Night Live that made me want to do it. My buddy Nick Chew and I would just stay up late every Saturday night. This was the Ebersol era. We were eight years old. SR: Not the glory years. EH: But it was Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo and Martin Short, and they did some extraordinary work. If I had to pinpoint one thing, it was those early Eddie Murphy sketches. And the film segments that they did, like the prison poet. Do you remember that one? &amp;quot;Kill my landlord. Kill my landlord. Watch-dog barkin&amp;#039;? Do he bite? Kill my landlord. Kill my landlord... C-I-L-L...&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;m really grateful that I had the opportunity to tell Eddie Murphy what he meant to me. The other guy was Phil Hartman. I get misty when I talk about him because he&amp;#039;s someone I just assumed I would meet. I assumed I would be able to share with him what he meant to me. I was surprised by how personally I took that loss. SR: I have a note here: &amp;quot;Gandhi was a pussy.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s my favorite line from Jeff, Who Lives at Home. EH: That was the first day Jason and I worked together. We were feeling each other out. There were a lot of riffs in that scene. Man, how sweet is Jason in that movie? SR: Hey, if I hadn&amp;#039;t loved that movie so much, this would have been a smoother interview. EH: I&amp;#039;ll be bummed if people don&amp;#039;t see it. SR: Thanks for taking the time today. EH: It&amp;#039;s been a pleasure. And stay tuned. More to come. 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