JCS: You said you have a few stock responses at the ready, so when you’re planning a set do you budget for a heckler, do you plan on that confrontation?

NH: No. I mean, if I was doing, as I did a few years ago, dozens of shows with one act, Tenacious D, at every show, you’re talking about several thousand people, when you’ve got those sorts of quantities of people, unfortunately, and I hate to say this because it doesn’t reflect well on humanity in general, but when you have those quantities of people, you do tend to get pretty much the same response night after night to specific jokes and specific situations. So on a tour like that, I would probably fall back on certain responses, because it’s just the same thing every goddamn night. But when you’re playing in smaller sorts of venues, where a specific show might reflect the character of the town or the particular nightclub, there’s no reason to budget for that because you’re just going to have to assume that you’ll be able to complete your show in a reasonable amount of time, and that stuff won’t get in the way. Sometimes it does, we’ve had to go right off the track with a set and devote ten solid minutes to a person before when they were causing that sort of trouble. In that case, you either do an extra long show or you end up jettisoning some of the material later on in the set and the people don’t get the full show they paid for because it was eaten up by one of these blabbermouths.

JCS: You’ve been a bit more experimental than most of your peers. You’ve branched out from just doing recorded sets, you had a country and western album and collaborated with the punk band The Hard-Ons. Both projects stay true to the voice you have a comedian, so how do you know if something is the beginning of a joke or the beginning a song?

NH: We had planned to do those records of songs. So you get together to try to write these songs or try to find appropriate songs. I would not say that writing songs or thinking about songs is something that I do very often. I’m more geared toward the jokes. Of course, if you are putting together or selecting a song for a release, and I want to say right off the bat, I’m no Pavarotti, but it is possible to make an enjoyable, personality-based record, and that’s what we were trying to do. But that’s something that was strictly a sideline. Generally, if I’m trying to come up with something funny, which is usually something I’m doing while I’m driving down the road, usually, I’m thinking more in terms of jokes and not so much songs.