If you’ve been reading Emdashes the last few weeks, then you’re probably aware that the centerpiece of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book is the “10,000-Hour Rule,” which is Gladwell’s way of highlighting the importance of dedicated practice, or more properly the capacity for dedicated practice, in permitting a person to become one of the dominant figures in a chosen field. Gladwell has stated that ten thousand hours is about the equivalent of ten years of dedicated practice.

My favorite standup comedian is Patton Oswalt, and I’ve had this mp3 file kicking around my hard drive for a couple years now. It’s a “Hammer conversation” between Oswalt and Jeff Garlin, who plays Larry David’s manager on Curb Your Enthusiasm. It was held in Los Angeles at the Redcat Theater and hosted by KCET (I know nothing about Los Angeles, so I don’t know anything about that venue or KCET or much else). The date is listed as August 2006.

I played it recently and—lo and behold!—they start talking about the need for ten years of practice in order to become really good at something. That part is around the 50-minute mark. Here’s a rough transcript of that part:

Patton Oswalt: This is what’s always painful, when I go to like, Montreal, and they have like a sitcom actor or a film actor who they have host stuff, and they’re thinking, “I’ve succeeded as an actor, how hard can it be to be a standup, these guys are clowns.” and they go up and they suck so bad, it’s so painful, and then they look at you, if you get any kind of laughter, they look at you like, “Did you pay the audience off? … What the hell is going on?”

Jeff Garlin: A lot of the young comedians, they want to be famous like that. [snaps fingers] But to me it was never about being famous, it was about being good. If I’m good, everything else will take care of itself, hopefully.

Oswalt: All the great comedians, too, if they go up, and no-one knows who they are, in five minutes they can win a crowd of strangers over, that’s the power of a good standup, is, you go up and they don’t know who you are, and when you’re done they’re like, “Wow, that was funny,” rather than [infantile voice] “That’s the guy from the movie! With the thing on his head!”

Garlin: But most young comedians, when I tell them that it takes a minimum of ten years before you’re decent, they don’t want to hear that.

Oswalt: Because they don’t want to be “decent.”

Garlin: Because they’ve been doing it two years, and they’re sort of like, “No, I want to have a show!” and it’s all about everything but being good, being a good comedian… I always even jump into, like, a violinist, telling a young violinist, “Well you’re twelve years old, you’ve been playing for a couple years, it’s going to take you about ten, twelve years before you get decent.” They’re probably going to be disappointed, but that sounds realistic, doesn’t it?

Oswalt: Right, exactly.

Garlin: And I’m sorry, but doing standup the right way is as hard as playing the violin, if not harder, because you can play the violin to silence, and nobody knows if you suck…except on the inside.

Oswalt: And at the same time, you can do standup for twenty years the wrong way, and just … I remember all these guys, these headliners that I worked with, and they would go, “I’ve been doing this for twenty years, so by default I’m great,” and then you go, “Well, you’ve actually, you’ve done it a year, and you’ve repeated that year nineteen times,” and that’s the twenty years you have under your belt.

Here’s another thing: I remember after Rob Corddry became a regular on The Daily Show, I read an interview with him in which he said something like, “They say that as a young out-of-work actor, you have to keep at it for ten years, before it starts paying off, and I got the gig on The Daily Show after I’d been at it for ten years.” Does anyone remember this? I thought it was in the A/V Club section of The Onion, but I checked that one and it wasn’t in there. Is this a showbiz saying, “ten years before you start getting traction”? Anyone know?

By the way, I don’t regard any of this as “catching Gladwell out”; if anything, it’s corroboration.

The rest of that mp3 file is very good too; you’ll hear about the most disastrous Hollywood pitch meeting ever and the time that Patton Oswalt started a modest riot in Pittsburgh in 2003, for criticizing George W. Bush at the start of a war. It’s really funny to hear them talk about how amazing the movie Borat is but not be able to mention any of the details about it because it’s a few months away from coming out.