Peter Funt, Candid Camera, and Laugh Therapy

We can all use a good laugh every once, and a while, some days more than others. Today we are joined by a guy that has been putting smiles on the faces of unsuspecting people his entire life. We are joined by Peter Funt as we learn more about Candid Camera and Laugh Therapy.

Show Links:

This is Today

Peter's Book, Self Amused

Candid Camera Website

Candid Camera Classic on YouTube

Automated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Russ: With the world today, you know what? We can all use a laugh, right? And sometimes, maybe some of us may just even want to hear...

[00:00:19] Peter Funt: smile. You're on Candid Camera

[00:00:22] Russ: Today, we learned more with Peter Funt about Candid Camera and laughter therapy.

Thanks for listening and subscribing to learning more where each episode, we bring you a new story about people, inventions, pop culture, and life. I'm your host, Russ. And this week, we're going to discuss laughing. Yeah. Yeah, we, okay. So w well, we've had a pretty heavy couple of episodes over the last, uh, couple of weeks here.

We've talked about climate change, global warming, all of these crazy things. You know, what. We've all been dealt some pretty heavy topics lately. So I figured, you know what, let's talk a little laugh therapy. Let's have a little fun today. And they say that laughter's the best medicine, right?

And I am a strong believer, and I think making a joke at a tough situation can actually. Make it a little easier to handle. And one of the reasons for that is because I grew up watching Candid Camera and I think one of the best laugh lines ever is smile. You're on Candid Camera. I find it impossible not to smile after hearing that.

So we're going to talk about Candid Camera laugh therapy and a new book to do. So I'm joined by Peter Funt. Peter. Thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:01:45] Peter Funt: Thank you, Russ. Great to be with you.

[00:01:49] Russ: Peter has hosted the TV show, Candid Camera, which his dad, Allen Funt, invented. Uh, he's also written for the wall street journal USA today.

Too many places to mention it. As far as where you mentioned ABC news, uh, you've hosted other shows specials and you've authored several books, including his newest one self amused a tell some memoir. Uh, so Peter it's a tell some, not a tell-all did you, did you bring in some of the juicy stuff?

[00:02:17] Peter Funt: I did. I thought tell some was appropriate just in case I want to write a second book.

You know, I don't want to waste all my best material now. I'm just trying to be. There's a smart Alec there; it's a pretty, uh, insightful book about my little corner of the world and the experiences I've had. And there's plenty in there about Candid Camera. You know, I found already the book has only been out a few weeks and I've already heard from people that, you know, those who only want to know about Candid Camera wish it was entirely that way in the book, those who are fascinated by some of the.

Quirky and strange experiences I've had off-camera wish. I did a little bit more than that. So as like a 50 50 balance and I gave it my best shot. And, uh, there's plenty in there about Candid Camera for the Candid Camera fans. You know, you mentioned the value of laughter and I know we'll get into that more, but certainly if people needed a good laugh or, uh, the endorphins that come with, uh, laughing out loud, there couldn't be a better time for it than right now.

We're all feeling stressed. We're all shut-in. We're all worried. So many things going on and I am not suggesting that laughter is a cure for all of our problems. I'm simply saying it helps to feel better. If you can at least smile or maybe just segregate the things in your life. You've got the serious stuff, and you've got the other stuff.

So let's start by at least getting a laugh at the other stuff. Which is to say, let's not sweat the small stuff. Right. Okay. So I

[00:04:07] Russ: saw a quote and I'll, I'll, I'll get right into that here with, uh, with your dad. He said, when a tragedy occurs, people often feel the presence of humor is suddenly inappropriate.

Their attitude seems to say, this is no laughing. Matter, but I feel the opposite. I believe that laughing matters, and it's more essential for me in tough times than ever. I feel like that's a great quote for right now for all the, all the stuff that we're

[00:04:34] Peter Funt: dealing with in the world. Yeah. My dad was a very smart guy.

I think what he was saying was an extension of what I just tried to say, which is he, he's not suggesting that in terrible times, you laugh at the terrible things. He's saying that during bad times, you find little things within your world that you can laugh about. I know for a fact, uh, as you know, that some of the funniest things believe it or not are said by emergency service workers, cops, surgeons in the emergency room of hospitals, uh, people on the front lines, my goodness.

Battle humor from the world wars and Vietnam is, is legendary. And this is not because people were laughing at the risks they were facing, but rather they were trying to get some sort of comfort and release by finding a tiny little thing to smile about and laughing.

[00:05:46] Russ: It's so important in life to do that.

Why you though? I mean, basically you've been trained your entire life to look at the funny, I mean, so I, okay. So correct me if I'm wrong here, but you were born the same year that Candid Camera

came

[00:05:59] Peter Funt: out, right? Yes. And a Candid Camera just celebrated its 73rd anniversary this month, August. And, um, so it's been around a long time.

It's been on and off and on and back off and on right now, we're working on a new deal to get it back and new production on TV. But meanwhile, I'm encouraged by the fact that our YouTube channel during this stressful. COVID period is really booming. I mean, people are going to YouTube for a lot of things, not just Candid Camera, but on our site, which is called Candid Camera classics on YouTube.

Boy, it's just growing and growing. And what I'm most interested in are the comments that people are leaving because they really appreciate a laugh. Right now, I'll tell you, though, something that I noticed about those comments for us. And in fact, I wrote about it this week in the wall street journal.

People get very confused about nostalgia. We all, especially in tough times, yearn for the good old days. Well, here's the problem with that? When you look at YouTube clips of Candid Camera, you're seeing a mixture of things that were shot as long ago as 50, 60 years ago. And as recently as two or three years ago, and many stops in between the YouTube viewers seem to be confused about that.

And they view it all as in the past and almost equally. So, so I find, and I kind of chuckle when somebody watches a sequence that we shot three or four years ago. They don't realize that. So the comment, oh boy, those were the good old days. I'd never do that today. And wasn't it wonderful back then.

You're just confused about that. Right? Somebody smarter than me once noted that is relative. Yeah, things tend to look either much better or sometimes much worse in the rearview mirror. So I ended my wall street journal piece by quoting a Carly Simon from 1971. When she's saying these are the good old days.

And that's what I think where we're, this is pretty good right now, despite all of our stress and problems for me, these are the good old days.

[00:08:45] Russ: Yeah. That actually, that's a great way to look at life. If you can, it live in the now and just enjoy what's going on. I mean, there's always something funny.

There's always something good. Despite all the bad there's there's always something good going. And okay. So we gotta, we gotta go way back to the beginning here. Uh, talk about growing up on the set of Candid Camera.

[00:09:09] Peter Funt: So just to be clear, there was never a set before for our show. It's true,

[00:09:15] Russ: right? Yeah. Cause you're, you're out and about, which makes it even

[00:09:18] Peter Funt: more difficult.

I wish there had been a set because then you'd have a craft service table and a makeup lady and all that stuff. And we were usually shooting in gas stations or, you know, very cramped and unappealing conditions, but. It is true that my dad gave me my first taste of this when I was three years old. And he put me out on the street corner in New York City with a shoeshine box and told me to try to charge $10 per shoe.

I don't know. I don't know if it was funny. And in fact, we'll never really know because back then they never thought to save the footage. Not only the unused footage, they didn't even save the finished shows once was on me. Tape was expensive. Yeah. We dreamed that we'd be sitting here so many decades later wondering about it.

So I don't know how I did that day, but I moved on and by the time I was 15, I, uh, managed to do something. Uh, led to the cover of my book. The book that I just put out is called self amused, but the cover image is a black and white picture from when I was 15. And my dad decided that he could make an upside down room and this would be a windowless room and an office building where everything that should have been on the floor was connected upside down and hanging from the ceiling.

And in order to complete the effect, he needed someone young enough, nimble enough. There I say, stupid enough, hang upside down and talk to unsuspecting people as they came into this room. And that was me. Well, all we learned right away was you can only hang that way for a minute, minute and a half. And then all the blood rushes to your head.

And you guys rushed out to bring me down and, you know, get me straightened out and then back up. And we did this all day long and it made a good picture. Good enough for the cover of my book, but it did not make a particularly good Candid Camera sequence. The people who came into the room were just too shocked to react.

There is a point of diminishing returns in our title. Comedy and, uh, experimentation, if you go too far, you get no reaction. And so these folks just bolted out of the room, and we didn't get much out of it, but for me, that was quite a baptism. And so it went right.

[00:12:12] Russ: That's fine. So you basically got to travel all around, cause you mentioned you didn't really have a set.

I would think that shooting on the road would be very difficult, especially for something like this. You're walking into situations where you've got to do the lighting, hide the cameras. Uh, I, I read in the book, uh, about a time in, uh, a small hotel. I believe it was in Albuquerque and there was an incident with a cactus

[00:12:36] Peter Funt: happened.

You know, I cited because mercifully for all that I've done on the show. And I think it's several thousand sequences that I've been in personally. We've really been pretty lucky. I've never been physically assaulted. Uh, I've never gotten injured, and I was only sued once, and that's a whole chapter in the book and not the point right at this moment.

Right. In that little hotel-motel set up in New Mexico. Uh, I was talking well, well, I'll tell you what the gag was. I was the clerk and I was telling the customers that the rates are very low, but of course, to make up for it, we do charge a little bit extra for each thing that you might need. So for example, hangars, uh, metal hangers are 50 cents each and, uh, wood is a dollar.

Towels are a buck and a half for the big ones and yada yada. So I'm talking to this one woman, and there's a guy who I guess was with her in the back of the room in the back of the shot. Could barely see him, but at one point he backed up and, uh, became impaled on a big cactus that was there. And it stuck to his fag, just like a cartoon.

And the guy is running around the room with this cactus hanging off his back. And I don't believe I've ever seen anything quite like that. We finally got it off him and then needed pliers to pull out the remaining prongs back in back. I guess if we were going to be sued, he could have sued us, but he did.

It wasn't an accident, but it happens, you know, go out doing our kind of work and we love to catch people and we love to not know who we're going to catch next. But with that comes the fact that maybe they're having a hard day, maybe they got things on their mind. So what my dad and I. Sorta tried to perfect in the course of our respective careers was not just trying to be funny in some respects.

That's the easiest part. The more difficult part was to take people's temperature. To figure it out as quickly as we could, how much they wanted to play along, how far we could push what their mood was, et cetera, because we don't want to push people too far. Uh, and Candid Camera has always been a people loving program.

It sounds so fundamental, but if you compare our work with other so-called reality or hidden camera shows. You find that many of them seem at least to be trying to prove that people are stupid, and that's not our mission at all. We think people are great and we think they're good sports the way they smile.

When we tell them they're on Candid Camera. And for many of the people we photograph being caught by our show. Could very well be the single most exciting moment of their life. I'm not exaggerating when I say so it's a big responsibility and we we've always taken a very seriously.

[00:16:12] Russ: Yeah. Well, you know, it's, uh, it's one of those things.

I remember growing up watching this, and I don't know how many times in my life. Life. I said, smile. You're on Candid Camera to people just because, you know, it was a F it's a funny laugh line. It's it's there. And, um,

[00:16:28] Peter Funt: you can mail your check for that to my PO box. Yeah. Well,

[00:16:33] Russ: there you go.

I got to pay you for each time. I say it all right. And you know what, what I like about Candid Camera though? It's so lighthearted, like you said, it's like, you're not trying to hurt people. Like you see these natural reactions. I watched a couple of clips on your YouTube channel, which by the way, I'll put a link in the description.

So anybody listening can go check it out. I strongly suggest that you do. I watched some old clips from the fifties where you had like, uh, attractive teachers coming in. And introducing themselves to a pair of kids, the reactions to the kids. It was just so funny. And so like, they didn't even have to say anything.

You just watch it on their faces. I mean, it's. It's feel good humor, and yeah, we do need that right now. Um, okay. So we talked a little about laugh therapy. We will talk a little bit more about that. We'll take a short break here. When we come back, we'll have more.

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More I'm Russ with you. And yet we're talking about having a good laugh here. I, as I've mentioned before, we're happy. We've had some pretty heavy topics on the show, and we're all going through a lot these days. So I figure, you know, let's talk, laugh therapy. Let's talk, just smiling, laughing in the moment.

Uh, I have to tell you, Peter. When I walked into the interview today, I was a little nervous. I actually, I looked for cameras in the, in the studio here. I wasn't sure that, you know, maybe I would be on the show. I didn't think

[00:18:54] Peter Funt: we were nervous. My father and I have been nervous almost our entire respective lives because we fear that we would go someplace and somebody would try to trick us.

And the fear wasn't that we would be triggered. The fear was that we wouldn't react graciously. That's a lot of pressure. We used to go visit affiliates, TV, affiliates around the country. And invariably, we get off the plane or come out of the car and, you know, we got, we got pretty good at spotting it, cause they'd have a fake cop trying to arrest us or something going on.

But yeah, we were, we were kind of worried about how would we stand up to the test that we put so many other people, right.

[00:19:46] Russ: Have you ever been actually tricked.

[00:19:50] Peter Funt: No simple answer. No. Wow.

[00:19:54] Russ: I guess you've, you've been trained

[00:19:55] Peter Funt: to spot it. Yeah, I guess you could say that, you know, the truth is my dad and I were never particularly inclined toward practical jokes.

I didn't grow up in a house that had dribbled glasses or whoopee cushions or something like that. My dad really fancied himself, a student of human nature and the best parts of Candid Camera as he saw it or observing people and how they handle situations. Sometimes that could be a little bit of stress and how they handle that.

And I mean, very mild stress. Other times it was really just a fly on the wall. He did terrific sequences about such simple things as how people chew gum, how people either shoot. How people walk up and downstairs. I did one just a few years ago about how women try to put on false eyelashes. And, you know, you could have gimmick that up.

You could have made, I don't know, played with the glue or made them too long or bony, didn't we, it was just what you saw was what life presented. And we just thought it was fascinating. And it was so candid. Camera has always edits best, been or rich blend of little bit of joke. And a little bit of studying human nature and a little bit of laughter therapy.

You're

[00:21:36] Russ: you're recognized from Candid Camera. You've got the last name. How do you walk into a bank and ask for a loan, or there are people just looking for cameras? I mean, is it, is it

[00:21:47] Peter Funt: tough to the extent that people recognize me or, or did my dad were just flattered by that? You know, the only thing worse than the burden of being recognized in public.

Is the horror of not being recognized. So, so if that's the price of admission, I don't mind it. And I'm, I'm glad if people think, uh, where's the camera, uh, when they see me, you know, for all the people we've photographed over now, eight different decades going on nine, uh, For all those people. I hear tell there's a vastly larger number of people who have thought at one time or another, they were on Candid Camera, and they really weren't.

We weren't there at all, but they write us letters and emails saying that the darndest thing happened. I had to write to you because. My dog did this, or my husband did this and I could have sworn I was on candid.

[00:22:58] Russ: That's funny. Well, I mean, you guys have had such a, an impact on everyone's life. Uh, so, okay. So before the interview here, we were talking about, uh, you're out in the Monterrey, which is famous for, uh, clinics would, uh, be in being mayor at one point of view, have you run into a Clint?

[00:23:14] Peter Funt: He lives here in pebble beach where I live. And of course his former wife no longer, but at the time Dina was my co-host for three years on Candid Camera. When we did a cable version of this show, just a wonderful lady, Dina, Eastwood, and Clint. Yeah. I, I I've played golf with Clint. I've uh, I write in the book that I, he is such a quirky man.

He was kind enough to give my family. And I arrived on the Warner brothers jet to go back and forth from Monterey to Burbank. And the first time we took that flight, we're on the plane waiting for Clint. And here comes this guy down the aisle to take us. And he is carrying a baby pig. Let me, let me just pause while you process that this is the Clint Eastwood and he's cuddling a baby pig.

I'm told it was a Vietnamese Potbelly pig. And it turns out that he and his family just love various animals, and they're way beyond dogs and cats, they're into pigs and all sorts of stuff. But what a juxtaposition, you know, this is one of the most powerful guys in Hollywood. One of the toughest guys you'd ever want to meet.

And here he is just sorta fawning over this little pig. I write in the book any time. I think I've seen it all. I just remember that, that moment.

[00:24:59] Russ: Yeah, I was, I was, uh, trying to try to get you to tell that story. So now I read that and I'm like, really, this is crazy. There's plenty of more like that in this book.

And I feel like, yeah, uh, this book was sort of laugh therapy for me, but let's talk a little about the laugh therapy foundation.

[00:25:17] Peter Funt: That's a nonprofit that my dad began back in. I guess the late seventies, early eighties, and we still operate that today. It just basically involves us sending specially selected Candid Camera videos to critically ill people at no charge whatsoever.

If you know someone who you think could benefit from that, you can go to our website, Candid Camera.com, and then you can find your way to laughter therapy. We'll take it from there, but my father learned back then principally from the author, Norman Cousins. Way back in the seventies, Norman cousins, who was a writer-editor of the Saturday review smart guy, he was sick, and he wrote a very successful book called anatomy of an illness.

And in that book, he mentioned that when he was feeling his word. He called. My dad asked if he could borrow some Candid Camera film, and back then he even needed a projector in his hospital room to look at the stuff, but they set it up and he reported that if he could get maybe 15 or 30 minutes of laughter watching this stuff, he could be pain-free for three or four hours.

And he did it over and over and found that it really worked. Now. I'm no doctor, I'm no scientist. I'm not making any medical claims. I simply point out that laughter is good. It can make you feel better. It might even increase healing. And, and as Mr. Cousins found out a little bit can go a long way, but most importantly, what he wrote was it was something about the reality of it because he tried Marx brothers and he tried, you know, sitcoms and stuff and laugh is good.

No matter how you get it. But Candid Camera in particular, just struck such a responsive chord that it worked well. And my dad decided to call that laughter therapy. It's so

[00:27:39] Russ: real, it's real emotion that you're witnessing from these people. It's kind of like, I guess the, you know, the, the, the comparison that I would make is I've watched so many of these, like, uh, uh, you know, soldiers coming home.

Uh, reunion type videos. I just, those always get to me. And it's because of the real emotion it's not staged. It's not fake. It's, it's real. And it's funny to say with, with Candid Camera, I mean, so many of the situations are fake, but the emotions are so real.

[00:28:07] Peter Funt: It's the relate-ability as well. When we pick our topics properly, we're keying in on things that people experienced themselves.

So if they see something happening in one of our sequences, I like it when they're saying in the living room there. Oh yeah. I hate it when that happens or, oh right. That I went through something like that the other day. I don't mean an elaborate joke. I mean the little things in life that drive us all crazy, whether it's the yogurt machine that turns on, but won't turn off one of my favorites that I think everyone can relate to.

We just exaggerated. Have you ever left a parking lot? That has one of those wooden bars that is down. And then once you put in your money or your ticket, the bar goes up and you go through. But sometimes it seems that's going too fast, especially if you can't quite reach the machine. So you've got to get out, do your thing.

And then by the time you get back in the bars back down again, so we rigged it so we could control the bar with us at the controls. No one could get out. All right. And it was just up and down, up and down, back and forth. And yet, even though we exaggerated the situation, the basic premise was right out of everyday life.

Everyone who's ever parked a car in that type of lot can relate. And that's what makes it what I called relatable. And as you said, Funny because it's real. Yeah. And you

[00:29:50] Russ: know, actually you bring up too, and I, some of the inventions that you guys came up with the tanning machines or whatever, it was like these, these funny inventions that were out there, you do, how much work did you guys put into R and D the

[00:30:06] Peter Funt: R and D usually takes place in our private lives.

I mean, I'm always on the lookout for little things that drive me crazy, or, you know, I like to. Well, you know, the phrase don't, don't get mad. Get, even in my case, it's, don't get med, do a Candid Camera sequence. That's how I like it when things play out. But look, there are formulas, and we follow them. One of them.

And I outline a bunch of these in the book. Uh, one of them is reversal. So you in a shorthand reference said a tanning machine. But there are tanning machines. So the one we made reversed that and we produced and on tanning machine. So the customer thinks you can go in. Maybe you're just a little too dark today.

You got to be, you go into this marvelous machine, push a few buttons and voila you're come out. Two shades lighter. Now the secret to that machine, like so many of the props I've built identical twins. That's a magician's favorite tool, and we've used it for years on Candid Camera. If I hired two twin actresses, and then I sort of put a lot of makeup on one, so they looked darkly, tanned, and then white type stuff on the other.

So they look very pale. And they switched places inside the machine. You would swear that this one person went from darker to lighter in the tanning machine

[00:31:52] Russ: and it worked great. Yeah. Some of these it's, it is, it's like magic. You guys had a study, uh, all the magicians and learn all those tricks as well to do this.

Uh, okay. So. Are people like now we've got technology, we've got all these advancements are our people do these things. There may be harder to full now or are they

[00:32:13] Peter Funt: easier to full I'm so glad you asked. I am a hundred percent certain that people are easier to fool than ever before. And I know that runs against your intuition, but I believe it's true.

Yeah, these are more high tech times and complicated times, but here's the thing. People my dad used to have to work at distracting people so that he could do his little trick. Now, a days people are self distracted. Right. They're multitasking. They're on the phone. They're texting heaven forbid while driving, but I mean, they're, they're doing all sorts of things.

They got multiple things on their mind. We step in and do a little trick, and it's easier than ever to fool them as too high tech. So you say that untangling machine, would people be more or less likely to believe that today? Then in my father's day, easier to believe because there's so much technology in our lives.

Why not? That. I mean, think about, you know, we've got self-driving cars, and we've got drones. And so why can't we have, uh, I'm making myself emotional here. Why can't we have tanning machine

[00:33:42] Russ: you're right. We would be easier for those reasons. What about the changing of like kind of standards of comedy? What people think are funny, people are, are, are way more sensitive now, I guess, to some comedy.

Do you think that that would have any issues as far as like, you know, censorship or what you guys could do now versus

[00:34:02] Peter Funt: what you could do before? Censorship has always been a problem on Candid Camera? Not because people said bad words very often, that always surprised me. Real life conversation is nowhere near as salty, as you might assume.

Yeah, sure. You go to certain places at certain times or certain to hear some colorful language, but the average person on the street when encountering a stranger does not use four letter words. It just doesn't often happen. But the sensors have networks, and they don't even use the word sensor. They like to call themselves standards and practices.

And they are very troubled for decades by Candid Camera, because it was too real. They were happy with double entendre in sitcoms, but if a real person said something. Then, the standards and practices, people got very nervous. Now there were subjects that my dad and I, I say subject, I don't mean the unsuspecting people.

I mean, topics that my dad dealt with that I don't think I'd want to touch today. For example, he endured Kirby once went out in the, on the street in bar Harbor, Maine in the sixties. And stopped strangers and said, do you have any idea where we could go to buy a bomb? Now? You know, the thing is in 19 62 63, that was actually funny.

We looked at them like, well, what do you mean dynamite? You want to, you know, uh, something in construction, but nobody thought terrorism or anything like that. It was just an innocent surprise. I would not do that today. So of course change and people's sensitivities change, and that's as it should be. And my job as I see it, especially when we get back into new production short.

Yeah. It is to stay one step ahead or at least keep pace in an episode.

[00:36:21] Russ: How, how much actually ends up on the, on the cutting room floor? Are we seeing, you know, 10% or 1%, it's trying to get a feel of how much

[00:36:29] Peter Funt: work this is? Yeah, it's a lot of work, but, and it's like fishing, you know, you put your line in the water and on a good day, you might catch a nice fish in 10 minutes.

But another time you're there all day and nothing's biting. And it's no different in our work. I would say that the percentage of stuff that we wind up on the air is, is fairly high. And when it's cut out, it's really not because people said the wrong thing on our show. There is no wrong thing as far as I'm concerned, but it's perhaps because it was redundant or we had a technical problem and, and things like that, uh, I'm all a related question, of course is how many people give us permission or to turn that around?

How many people refuse to give us permission? Yeah, you're,

[00:37:24] Russ: you're reading my mind

[00:37:25] Peter Funt: there on the next one. I'm not changed since my dad's day. The answer is most people are happy to sign this little release form unless. Unless we happen to have caught them at the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong other person, because I'm here to report.

If you photograph a guy who's out with someone else's wife. Yeah,

[00:37:57] Russ: I can see that. That's funny. So, okay. You've done so much in your life. As I mentioned, kind of in the credits early on, you know, you've, you've written for wall street journal, you worked for ABC news. Of course, all the work with Candid Camera. What would you say is your proudest.

[00:38:14] Peter Funt: Oh, my, uh, I, I know, I wish I could say I had one, you know, you mentioned these various things I've done.

And I do recount some of the crazier ones in the book, but, uh, it's kinda like how I talk about sports. I play a lot of baseball, and I play a lot of guts. When I'm on the golf course, I like to make an excuse by saying baseball is my sport. And when I'm playing, I point to how good I can be at golf. Let's just same thing in my career.

When I'm writing, I say, well, I'm not a good writer, but I can do television. But when I'm trying, struggling on TV, I say, well, I'm basically a writer. So I guess my pride Russ is. I'm staying one step ahead of my own game and trying as many different things as I can. And hoping to smile while I'm doing it.

[00:39:12] Russ: Uh, okay. Can you, you you've said smile every time you say it. I think you're going to say the line. Can you give me that would be

[00:39:17] Peter Funt: surprised if sometimes somewhere someplace when you least expect it, someone steps up to you and say, Smile. You're on Candid Camera

[00:39:31] Russ: theater. Thank you so much for

[00:39:32] Peter Funt: joining me a real pleasure us.

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