Okay, everyone, we are ready to shoot first position.

All right, let's shoot this picture, so and action.

Whenever you're reading as.

From Leisure, you know it's interesting if you watch the first commercial.

I'm pretty normal, right, I'm going like, Hi, this is a car, and I'm a guy talking about the car.

And if you come in tomorrow you'll get a free house.

You get my word on it.

So I'm just talking like i'm talking right now.

And as we went along, I got a little bit more animated, and my voice got a little more different, and then I got a little bit bigger.

And now I'm talking like this, you can have a new car.

Yes, So the character got kind of bigger as I went along.

You know, if you recognize that voice, then right about now you're probably smiling thinking back to the man whose voice that is.

You may know his name, you may not, but you most likely recognize that voice.

For a half decade, he was one of the most famous faces on TV, a beloved figure who made folks actually want to watch the commercials.

His name is David Leisure, but you probably know him better as Joe Isuzu.

It just sort of happened one day we're shooting a commercial, and as a joke, the director put my name on a name tag and stuck it on me.

As we're shooting the commercial, I said joe So he said, call yourself Joe Zuzu.

I said, okay.

In one commercial I said Hi, I'm Joey Suzu, and then I was that guy for the rest of my life.

We thought it would be fun to take a look back at a more innocent time in American culture, to check in with a beloved liar from that bygone era of the nineteen eighties.

We also wanted to find out what does Joey zuz think about the state of our modern world.

But also, and most importantly, David Leisure is just fun to talk to.

Plus, thanks to his wild ride through American culture, he actually walked away with some rare wisdom.

Welcome to very special episodes and iHeart original podcast.

I'm your host, Zaren Burnett and this is being Joe Izuzu, a conversation with David Leisure.

Welcome back, everybody.

She's Danis Schwartz.

Hey, he's Aaron Burnett, one of I'm Jason English, Dana.

I know all of this happened before you were born.

In this episode, but I was wondering if you'd ever heard of Joe Isuzu.

I have not.

Unfortunately I had not, Now I have.

Have you ever heard the expression where's the beef?

Yeah?

Yeah, okay, so that one.

But here's the thing.

I had like heard where's the beef as a meme, but it wasn't attached to anything in my head.

I didn't know.

If you had asked me what it was like an ad for I would have had no idea.

Well, I'm hoping that this episode opens up the opportunity for us to interview other advertising icons, even you know, people from your generation data.

If this does happen and we are able to bring on more ad characters, anyone have anyone for the wish list?

The Geico Gecko.

Ooh, the horny people from the Maxwell coffee commercial.

Yes, do you know what I'm talking about?

The siblings absolutely.

Because you're my present this year.

I want to know if they know the legacy of that commercial.

Yeah, that's good, brother.

Saren.

I was gonna say crazy Eddie.

I know you've covered him on Ridiculous Crime.

Heck.

Yeah, they have a lot of crazy Eddie type characters, Like there's the used car salesman who would be like mad, MIC's come down.

There's a lot of guys who are like out there with a hammer or whatever saying I'm knocking down prices.

I think it's a very in regional form of advertising.

So maybe we could do a round up with some of those guys.

Well, my hope with this is also that we get David Leisure and Joey Suzu back introduced him to a whole new generation because this was a truly delightful interview and I learned a lot.

And why do we get to it?

First things first?

What a name that is David Leisure.

It sounds like it was created in a Hollywood laboratory where stage names are carefully constructed from the folks who came up with Kerry Grant, Rock Hudson and Marilyn Monroe.

Now comes David Leisure.

But if you can believe it, David Leisure is not his stage name.

Yes, it's my room name.

There's a bunch of leisures in Indiana and that's where my dad came from.

We're not really sure what the origin is.

It's a strange name, but there it is.

Life growing up in the Leisure household was about as all American as any mid century advertisement would have portrayed.

Gosh Gowie.

Okay, talking about the fifties, you know, it looked like seen out of you know, some sort of fifties movies.

You know, it was all pajamas and Christmas trees and dogs and cats and mom making pies in the kitchen.

It was Norman Rockwell all the way.

Given that strong foundation, young David Leisure decided to throw it all away and run off to California to go to college and really experience all that life had to offer in the nineteen sixties.

Okay, that's not exactly true.

By nineteen sixty eight, the Leisure family had already picked up and relocated to San Diego.

And so there he is, fresh out of high school, and David Leisure enrolls in San Diego State for college.

I loved college.

College was great.

So graduate high school nineteen sixty eight.

Everything's been really really conservative growing up in San Diego.

And you know, my dad would put a bowl on my head and count my hair.

In nineteen sixty eight, I graduate high school and there's a hardy going on.

I mean it's like long hair, hippies, music, free love, get it on, and you know, I just had the best time in college.

College was super cool.

In an interesting twist of fate, one of his college roommates would later be his co star, or rather the star of the first big Hollywood movie David Leisure would appear in.

In the nineteen eighties, at the height of his fame, David Leiser told People magazine about that old friend, Bob Hayes, saying, how quote, I wanted to be Bob Hayes.

I used to dress like him, and walk like him and talk like him.

And he was great looking.

Every woman on earth wanted him.

That's how I praise But what was it like for him as a young man to have this future Hollywood star as his college roommate.

We had a great time.

He was a leading man.

I'm a character actor.

So we get along fine, and we've been best friends ever since.

We still talk, you know, like once a month or something like that.

He's in Hawaii now, but you know, to check each other out, like how we do it, Like we're a barometer now for where we are now in our lives.

After David Leisure graduated college with a fine art degree, he headed off to Hollywood.

His old college roommate Bob Hayes found success far faster than David Leisure did, but after six years of auditions, finally he landed his first big part.

The film was Airplane, and coincidentally, the star of the movie was Bob Hayes, but it should be said the newly minted star had nothing to do with David Leisure getting the part.

Instead, the role required him to do four separate auditions, and he also had to shave his head.

That was so he could play a Hari Krishna who was harassing people at the airport, which was apparently a very seventies occurrence.

The busy airports of America were rife with Hary Krishna's trying to spread the word.

David Leisure played the hell out of that Harry Krishna believer.

He was perfectly annoying in the role.

However, for David Leisure, sitting in the theater watching himself in that first big role, it was like sitting through dental surgery.

But was zero novacamp.

I hated it.

I had the worst time.

I was watching myself through my fingers.

I had a lot of lines that they cut because I'm sure they thought I I sucked, and so it was a horrible experience watching myself for the first time in a major botion picture.

It was terrible.

I had a horrible time.

The experience of shooting the movie wasn't so horrible.

In fact, it was like attending a comedy camp, but with some of the best minds in Hollywood at the time.

It was a really interesting movie.

I mean, they really set a tone, They changed what comedy was.

It was an innovative film, and I think the best part about that movie was the fact that the networks wanted to use comedians and they said, no, you're not understanding the concept.

We want the real guys, the real actors who were in those movies, to be in this movie and play it as straight as they can and just deliver the dialogue.

And it was brilliant.

It was absolutely.

Brilliant when it comes to delivering dialogue.

That is certainly something that David Leisure has established.

He is a rare expert at he can even make the bad dialogue work.

My strong suit is making really dialogue work.

I'm very good at it.

So when I was on empty nest for seven years that writers would always come home, Man, we're so sorry, I say, I don't worry about it, man, I'll make it work.

I got this, I got this.

Yeah, I'll make your job easier.

I'll make this work.

So I was pretty good at making bad dialogue work, but.

That was all to come later.

After Airplane, which went on to be a smash hit of nineteen eighty.

However, David Leisure didn't exactly book work off of its success.

He went to auditions, he did his thing, but he just couldn't land that second big part.

Things went from iffy to dodgy to finally down bad.

David Leisure had to give up his apartment and he moved into his car.

Lucky for him, it was roomy.

It was a nineteen sixty four VW bus.

Yet having to move into his new hippie home on wheels was not the great moment for the young actor.

Oh god, man, that was okay.

So my marriage broke up.

I moved into my van.

I bummed around la I would park in front of friends' houses and then try to find work as a waiter or a bartender or something.

I was just bouncing around, and then finally got an apartment and I started waiting tables and nothing was happening.

Now.

I'm in my mid thirties, divorced and going like, man, this is not working out like I thought it was going to work out.

This is not an uncommon story for those who run off to find fame and fortune in Hollywood.

It can be a tough town.

That's always been true.

They don't call it the dream Factory because people there deeply committed to reality.

It's a town that makes sells and runs on illusions, which can be disorienting for young Hollywood hopefuls.

That's how David Leisure found himself living out of his VW parked in front of his friend's places, hoping to get any work he could while still holding on to his Hollywood dream.

But he knew something needed to change, or, more specifically, his girlfriend at the time saw something in him, something that set him apart.

Specifically, he was really good at being charming, and most importantly, he was charming on camera.

He was also really good at smarmy, and both are perfect for advertising.

My girlfriend at the time, she says, why don't you take a commercial workshop, you know, so you could do commercials?

And I said, ah, you know, there was a sort of a stigma about being in commercials back then.

But I said, okay, well I give it a shot.

So I got in there and I just sort of basically owned the room because you know, it was a bunch of people.

There were housewives and student and stuff, and they weren't really actors, and so I just got in there and I owned it.

So I got an agent right away.

Being in commercials was fun.

It was you know, took up thirty seconds of your time too, that's all I take.

I immediately started working right away.

And so instead of earning like nine thousand dollars a year waiting tables all night long, every day of the week, I made twenty five thousand dollars that year.

I worked four whole days.

I said, I'm in.

I want to do commercials.

I'm in.

I'm your guy.

Finally, David Leisure had found his lane.

After a year or so, I was making one hundred thousand dollars a year being invisible in commercials.

It was cool.

I had some great commercial gigs that nobody knows about.

They were so cool.

I would go to New York for a week and they would shoot a bunch of commercials.

They were regional, but I made a ton of money, and I used to get to go to New York and go see plays, see my friends, see my actor buddies, And this is a great gig.

I love that gig.

During his early run as a commercial pitch man, he hawked products for a range of familiar companies.

He played a sleazy pizza parlor owner for Roundtable Pizza.

He sold burgers and shakes for Bob's Big Boy.

He did ads for the Canadian beer company Molson.

Then David Leisure had his biggest break yet.

He did a series of ads for The Yellow Pages.

He played a no nonsense knockoff of Detective Joe Friday from the radio and TV show Dragnet.

And during the run of all these various commercials, David Leisure found a little secret to his success.

One he kept to himself, but he shared it with us.

I got a lot of jobs pretending to be Steve Martin at the time, because Steve Martin had just hit really big in seventy nine seventy eight, and I saw him on Saturday Night Live.

I said, this is the funniest guy in the world.

So that Bob's Big Boy commercial and that Roundtable Pizza a commercial you just spoke about that was me doing Steve Martin.

Doing his street level impression of the rising young star.

Steve Martin worked well, like really well, and it showed David Leisure aside of himself, one that he could turn into his own brand of fame.

I always say my acting range, you know, I played a lying, sleazy Carl salesman and obnoxious mooching neighbors.

So my acting range is sleazy, obnoxious, mooching, slimy guy.

That's a pretty narrow parameter, but I'm pretty good at it.

Enter joe Azuzu In nineteen eighty six, David Leizer beat out roughly eighty other young, hopeful commercial actors, but there was just something that stood out about his take on the car salesman character.

He had it.

Jean Marie Obuji, the art director from the ad agency de la Femina, Travisano and Partners, said at the time about his audition quote, when we saw him, we knew he was Joey Zuzu.

He could lie like a pro.

That's hysterical, but.

Honestly, that was the thing.

It was crystal clear here was a guy who could make lying seemed fun and even charming.

You liked that Joe Azuzu was lying to you, which flies in the face of what other advertisers were doing at the time.

However, lying was already having a moment in the culture.

John Lovett's had been on Saturday Night Live and he had this liar character, Johnny Flanagan or something like that, and so he had this great bit where he would like you catch him thinking about his lie.

I was on vacation at the time with my mistress, Jeanne Kirkpatrick.

Yeah, and then my wife find out about it is the Morgan Fairchild.

Yeah.

While she was so jealous she cut off my allowance.

So he goes like my wife, yeah, and he's thinking Morgan Fairchild.

He comes up with this lie.

Right.

Well, I said, that's not gonna work.

They have twenty one seconds, they have information they want to give out, and if you sit there and you stop talking for three seconds to think and act like John LOVETTZ did, it's not going to work.

So David Leisure thought about what the role called for.

How to bring the lyre to life and make it work, not as a skit on SNL, but as a quick hit car commercial.

He worked out the answer.

He would be irretrievably mendacious.

He transformed lying into a medium for his rare art form.

So I just went in there and did what I did, which was smile and talk as smarmy as I could possibly be, and I got the gig.

It worked out really well, and I just thought it was going to be like one commercial, so it was fine.

And then they said they wanted to do a whole bit out of it, which I couldn't have been happier.

It turned out really really well.

Okay, let's take a pause for some samples from the modern milieu of advertising.

We'll be back after these ads with more from the Pitchman, an actor extraordinaire David Leisure, and will unveil the secrets of his greatest creation, Joe Azuzu.

In the nineteen eighties, advertising wasn't like how it is now.

That should go without saying, times change, taste change.

What once worked becomes old hat, it falls out of fashion.

But in the nineteen eighties advertising environment you can find the planted seeds of our modern marketing.

Think of Burger King and their custom focused tagline have it Your Way, or Ronald McDonald and his cast of characters the Hamburglar, Mayor mccheese and Grimace entertaining the kids in Saturday morning commercials.

Also don't overlook Wendy's battling its way into the burger wars.

Wendy's had possibly the most famous of all the advertising catchphrases when a little old lady asked, Where's the beef?

And also let's not sleep on New Coke, Coca Cola classic, and the Pepsi Challenge.

It was a heady time for advertising as it was being born into our modern era, and standing there above it all was the most famous man and commercials, Joe Azuzu.

How did the iconic pitchman come to be?

Beyond the audition when David Leisure first nabbed the part like how did Joe Azuzu go from a marketing pitch meeting to America's TV screens.

The whole idea of the character came from Daryla Femina Jerry Dela Femina.

Specifically, he actually wrote a book about dealing with Japanese car companies.

It's called From the People Who Brought You World War Two.

It's a very funny book and so everybody knows car dealers are not the most honest people in the world.

That's what everybody's image of car dealers are.

They hate that image, but that's the way it is.

So they were feeding on the fact that car dealers just they just lie to get you in there to buy cars.

So they made that part of an opera and I the of the commercial, and it worked really, really well because they were really, really funny.

The dynamic of the Joe Azuzu ads was simple enough.

It relied on the simple site gag.

Joezuzu would say some outrageous lies about Azuzu cars or trucks, like maybe about the new model and early Suv.

The beloved Isuzu Trooper.

Joe Azuzu would promise that the Azuzu Trooper could seek more people than the astrodome, while on screen there'd be subtitles which told the truth he's lying.

It was a simple concept, yet fun and funny, and it was a next level way for a second tier car company to boast about the truth of its product.

So what they could do with that is say what the car is good in juxtaposition to what I said, which was ridiculous.

So then they said, no, what it really does?

It gets this many miles break Gallant.

Oh, what it really does is this much money.

And no, we won't give you a house, but we'll give you a better deal on your financing.

So it worked out.

It was a brilliant, brilliantly well constructed spot that they came up with.

Of course, just as David Leiser was sipping from the car of success, the bottom dropped out like the cup was paper.

In this case, what happened was David Leisure broke his leg and he was scheduled to shoot a whole run of new azuzu Ads, so the creative team had to make it work.

For the second Joe Azuzu Ad, they had him lied to the viewers about how he was racing at Monaco and he broke his leg, which explains why he's on crutches and wearing a racetrack suit.

Van Jerno, I'm the world's greatest race car driver.

Recently, I had a little problem here at Monte Carlo, so I switched to this two hundred thousand.

Dollars Formula E's Suzu.

It comes with driving gloves and the pit crew all standard.

It's so fast it will go from Paris to Rome in two minutes.

The ad worked perfectly, but at first there was well a small panic.

They freaked out, man, So I shot the first commercial.

They wanted to go in to do this whole series of commercials, and I come in on crutches, in a broken angle and a cast on my and now they're freaked out because they have all these things planned out for me.

The race car driver thing was one of my favorite bits.

You know, I got in like silver lamey racing suit, but I'm actually at a go card center and so it's pretty silly.

Those are all fun for.

That first series of ads, as Joey Zuzu, David Leisure and the creative team made the broken leg work.

But the creative team didn't want to come up with a different reason for crutches in every single ad, so they found some workarounds, like the time when David Leisure was chained atop a giant rock in the Utah Desert like he was modern day Prometheus, only in his case he didn't dare defy the gods.

Instead, he just wanted to sell the people.

Some of Zuzu Troopers be amazing.

Isuzu Trooper too.

It's four wheel drive can take you anywhere.

In fact, I drove it up here myself.

It has more seats than the astronom, plus enough cargo space to carry texas and Isuzu will accept marbles and sea shows's payment.

They're selling fast, so you have to come in in five minutes.

You have mine work on it.

They took an idea from Chevy commercial which was shot back in the sixties.

They had this beautiful woman in a Chevy convertible in a chiffon dress up on this rock in the middle of nowhere.

So they said, well, let's do that, so we shot this commercial up there.

It turned out to be kind of a logistics nightmare because you know, even when I was up on that rock and Moab, I had a cast on my leg.

If you look at the commercial, you'll notice down by my feet there's a big pile of rocks to hide the fact that I'm not wearing a shoe.

I got to cast.

Murmur when he says, up on this rock.

If you haven't seen the ad, that phrase wildly under sells the size and the scope of this giant rock.

You're up at eighteen hundred feet up in the air.

I'm chained to have a metal diaper on that you know, they have chains on it, and so I'm hooked up in case, you know besta wind comes up, and there was always something that was happening because it was like, oh, there's a storm coming in.

We got to get you within the next ten minutes.

Otherwise you're the highest thing in the world and you got a car, so lightning's hitting you first.

You're at TAG.

So it was a really cool shoot though.

I mean we're out there for at least a week, and then I had to dub everything in anyway, and they had trouble because there was red dust on the camber lands.

I mean, everything you could possibly think go run it went wrong.

It was just but it turned out to be very very cool, pretty cool commercial.

At this point in the American timeline, Joeyzuzuo fully entered the zeitgeist.

He was suddenly everywhere.

He was one of the biggest pop sensations of the late eighties.

When it came to commercials, it was pretty much Joey Zuzu and that little old lady from the Wendy's ads aka Clara Peller, the one who got famous for.

Saying where's the beef?

The where's the Beef Lady and Joe Azuzu in the late eighties.

That was it.

That was the mountaintop of marketing, and for Joe Azuzu that stayed true for years.

But if you ask him, why do you think America loved Joe Azuzu so much?

David Leisure thinks the appeal of his beloved character was actually rather simple and straightforward.

You know, just because I was goofy looking, funny guy.

You know, I lied really well and they thought it was funny, I guess.

I mean, let's face it, pretty adorable.

The height of his fame as a pitch man spanned from nineteen eighty six to nineteen ninety.

The high water mark had to be when joe'zuza got his own Super Bowl ad, not bad for a scrappy Japanese car maker not named Honda or Toyota.

I love the fact that I was in the Super Bowl ad.

Thing I thought that was that was one of the coolest things.

I'm on the stand.

I'm in the Super Bowl as an ad man.

That's so cool.

I don't remember which one it was, but I remember I was there.

The strangest thing was how during his run as Joe Azuzu.

David Leisure became super famous, like really really famous, the kind of fame where talk shows want to have you on as a guest.

After a while, yeah, we realized we had a big deal going on because it got to be pretty famous.

I got more famous as being Joe as the character, but more than me David.

Right, so I got invited to be on shows, but they didn't want David.

It took me a while to figure this out.

What they wanted was Joe, and so they would ask me the stupidest questions.

I'd be on like our Senior Hall Show or Joan Rivers or somebody, or you know, the Tonight Show, and they would be asking me questions.

And I went in there thinking, oh, they want to talk to David Leisure the act.

They didn't.

They didn't care anything about David Lee the actor.

They wanted to talk to Joey Suzu.

And so they would ask me incredibly stupid questions.

And I didn't know it at the time, but on a TV screen would be those little disclaimers, those cry ons that would go ross and I would like, I came off looking pretty stupid a lot of the times, but.

It wasn't just that he faced frustration on talk shows.

David Leiser was now so famous he couldn't leave the house without having to face the same folks who loved his Joe Azuzu ads only when he wasn't on their TV screens.

David Leiser didn't think of himself as Joe Azuzu.

So what do you do when everyone you meet wherever you go want you to lie to them?

I lost my anonymity really really quickly.

People would hear my voice, they'd recognize me, and then they would come up to me and they would say this gibberish and I wouldn't.

I would like go, like, what are they talking about?

What are you?

What are you trying to say to me?

And then I would go, oh, they see I'm the liar guy.

They want me.

They're lying to me.

They're telling me these ridiculous little things that are lies.

And I'm like, oh, okay, okay, thank you, I get it, very clever, thank you.

And I'd have to excuse myself because I was like, I had no idea what they're doing.

As an actor, he knew exactly what he was doing.

He could almost effortlessly conjure up a compelling reality, he could turn it on and become that guy Joe Azuzu.

But that was when he was working.

That was his job.

However, now his job bled into everything, into every aspect of his life.

Like David Leisure found he couldn't even stop to get gas without having to do some freelance emotional labor.

Like say, you go to put gas in your car, right and you're just a regular person putting gas in your car.

But if you're recognizable and you're putting gas in your car and somebody wants to tell you and to say, hey, I appreciate what you do, but they get a little nervous and that what comes out is very awkward.

And then now you have this awkward situation where you're like you want to go home and take a shower because you're all grubby and you're pumping gas, and now you have to like communicate with another human being and you're not really in the mood for it, but you kind of have to be nice about it and kind of go with whatever it was they were saying.

Then kind of like, you know, make it okay.

So you have to make it okay for them, otherwise they get pissed at you.

They really do.

They get pissed at you if you don't like go along with it, so you have to kind of do that.

It's part of the deal.

This calls to mind his gift for making a screenwriter's bad dialogue work.

David Lesuer found he could also make this emotional moment work for a stranger where they'd kind of written him into this impromptu scene for themselves, and so there he is not getting paid but having to work as Joe Azuzu and David Lesuer found that with patients he was able to go along with it and do so rather gracefully and artfully, which is why we had to ask him did he learn about life and grow as a person when he was constantly having to do this spontaneous emotional labor just because he was trying to get some gas.

Oh man, that's a very good question.

Did I grow as a person?

I'd like to think I have.

It wasn't easy.

I wasn't the most congenial person to get along with at the beginning because I didn't realize what was going on.

It was like, it's very disconcerting to lose your anonymity, you know, when people know who you are all the time.

It's like it's a weird thing, so it takes a while to get used to.

But I think I matured a little bit.

Let's get this straight.

Though I'm turning seventy five, I'm still as mature as any twelve year old boy you'll ever meet.

Okay, it's time we scratch that itch and run some ads.

Enjoy these, and hey, do it for Joe.

Perhaps the funniest thing about the run of Joey Zuzu is how he made the car company a well known and beloved brand in America's marketplace.

But really it was more like the car company made Joey Zuzu a beloved brand in America's marketplace.

In fact, so much so that his name entered the murky world of American politics.

In the presidential election of nineteen eighty eight, the Democratic candidate for president, Michael Dacaucus, referenced Joe Azuzu as a shorthand and as an insult to his opponent, George H.

W.

Bush.

Governor Ducaccus said of the elder Bush that if the vice president keeps it up, he's going to be the Joe Azuzu of American politics.

At that point, Joe Azuzu had become code.

He was America's idea of what a liar looked like and sounded like.

He was the new era Pinocchio.

But what was that moment like for David Leisure to suddenly become part of American presidential history.

Everything that ever happened to me is Joe Zuzu.

I was flattered because I thought it was, like, it's just, it's so insane that this character would be in the lexicon of certain aspects of America, you know, So for a politician to invoke the Joey Zuzu mystique against somebody else as a threat or as a warning, I thought it was pretty funny.

But ironically, as much as people loved Joe Azuzu, he wasn't selling cars.

At first, the Joe Azuzu car commercials did translate into increased car sales.

There was an initial eighteen percent spike in year over year car sales, but then the next year, in nineteen eighty seven, the sales numbers started to fall back to their normal range.

In fact, in nineteen eighty seven, the Zuzu sold fewer cars.

They sold fifty fewer cars in eighty seven than they did the year before, and so naturally, the Japanese car maker and the ad agency both saw the same obvious problem with this downward sales trend.

But the actor, David Leiser knew little about sales trends and marketing forecasts.

He kept things simple.

Yeah, I wasn't.

I wasn't part of that scenario.

I was just like trying to make the job work and keep working.

I was more concerned about me, mostly me, and just about everything.

Me was fine with me, But I wasn't too concerned about where the whole trend was going.

I love doing the gig.

I didn't want to lose the gig.

By nineteen ninety, the run was done, the eighties were over, his era had passed.

All that was left to do now was to tell David Leisure the good times as Joe Azuzu had come to the end of the road.

What was that moment like when he received that registered letter and he read the bad news.

I sat on the floor with the letter and a balla vodka, and I'd take a ship and I'd read the whole letter, and I'd take another pull on it.

I read the letter again, and I took another pull on it, and I read the letter again and then I put it down and I said, okay, that was that.

It was a pretty good run.

Let it go, Liege, let it go.

But the world, and specifically the car maker Isuzu, wasn't ready to let their lying pitchman go.

A decade later, the car maker brought back Joe Azuzu for a new ad campaign after taking the nineties off from ads.

Joe Azuzu returned in two thousand.

However, there was a little secret about why the car maker resurrected Joe Azuzu.

I didn't realize why they brought me back is because the company was going down, and so they thought this was sort of a last ditch effort to save Isuzu in America.

In a strange turn of fate, returning to Joe Azuzu also returned David Leisure to his home state of Indiana, back to America's heartland.

So they actually took me to the factory where they built the Azuzus, which is in lafay At, Indiana, and they were so happy to see me.

They had these little placards with my face on it, and I mean that was flattered.

However, the secret reason for the return of Joe Azuzu Soon enough bubbled up to the surface and David Leisure saw why he was there in Indiana at the Azuzu factory.

Well, the reason they were so happy to see me is because they were thinking I was going to save their job.

And these people, I mean, these are real people with a real job, building a real product, and worried about their job.

Some of them drove four hours to go to work every day.

So it was that was the first time actually felt the burden of what the company goes through when it tries to make itself successful.

Here he was the actor, the lying pitch man, the nostalgia play, and in reality he was the last best hope for the autoworkers in Indiana.

That was when David Leisure fully realized what he'd meant as the face of the company, the image of these folks hopes.

They felt that placing their fate in the hands of this world famous liar was their honest, best hope for their future.

But as an actor, David Leiser knew how impossible it was to catch lightning in a bottle twice.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

Because it was such a later time period, it went you know, it was like fifteen years later.

It was the year two thousand and then, of course, the trade towers things hit, and that pretty much killed any momentum that we might have had.

They took me to the Chicago Car Show and I think it was two thousand and one, and this is back when they finally let planes back in the air, and I was one of two people on the plane because there was nobody traveling anywhere.

So I got to the Chicago Car Show and I can tell you I literally shook the hand of every single person at the car show because there was only about fifty people.

It's a weird time period.

And speaking of weird time periods, how about the twenty twelve presidential campaign of Mitt Romney and perhaps the strangest chapter in the history of Joeyzuzu.

In twenty twelve, the car Salesman returned to the world of American politics.

It was a commercial mocking Mitt Romney.

The ad featured Mitt Romney giving a speech and then morphed into Joeyzuzu giving the speech, and the subtext was clear, He's lying.

Ah man, that was I mean, I actually kind of regret doing that.

It was sort of a political stance that I took against somebody who at this moment in time, I'd kill to have that person back, Mid Romney.

I was chiding Mitt Romney and his political opinions and viewpoints in the world.

I don't know.

I kind of regret ever doing that, but it was It was kind of tough because I had to mimic his cadence and his words and just sort of fake it.

And it was a weird.

It was just a weird thing.

I just, I just I wish I hadn't done.

It, which calls to mind our current modern moment in American politics.

Well, Joey Zuzu sat out the recent political cycle.

The actor David Leisure sees some parallels with his work as a professional liar, so we asked what he thinks about the joe izuzuification of American politics.

I think we're in the middle of this is just my opinion.

I think, you know, everybody talks about civil war.

I think we're in a civil war right now.

I mean that we are so polarized as a nation.

There's one camp in the other camp, nobody likes anybody in either camp, and the stuff that's going on now is a little scary.

I'm a little frightened for the state of the nation.

When he gazes out at the current zeitgeist and considers the impact and importance of truth and honest conversations, David Leisure has more to say than one might expect.

See.

The problem with the conversation is I don't think people have a conversation to suss out the truth and then say, Okay, there's the truth and put a frame around it and enjoy it.

I think what they do is they try to have a conversation to justify their own opinions and not have it changed.

They're not willing to change their opinion with a conversation.

They're just trying to imbue their opinion into the conversation and say this is the way you should think.

I mean, if you're going to change your mind about something, that means you have to be open to what is formally known as the truth.

But people, I don't think care about the truth anymore.

They just to care about their own opinions.

David Leisure finds that the emotional power of the certainty that is born of one's opinion, as opposed to the objective truth, which requires effort and a process of discovery remains a seductive option, but as with all lies, it leaves a person vulnerable to exploitation by placing their trust in the wrong things and in the wrong people.

There's a certain amount of comfort that comes from having an opinion about something, and there's a certain amount of comfort that you give yourself for having an opinion and saying, Okay, this is the way it's supposed to be.

And that's what puts the parameters around the life that you want to live.

And it's really hard.

People hate change, which is so ironic because nothing stays the same.

You're born, you change the second you're born.

You're changing until the day you've died.

Everything in the universe is moving.

There's nothing stagnant, there's nothing staying the same.

Ever, we're moving around the sun.

The sun's moving around the center of the galaxy.

The galaxy is moving around all the other galaxies.

Nothing stays the same, but we try to make it the same just to make us feel better about ourselves.

It's not going to be the same.

You have to be able to adjust every day of your life.

If you're wondering, did David Lezier make out alright?

Playing Joe Azuzu all those years.

The actor would like you to know it was all fun and games.

But if we're being real about it.

Well let's let down play the money.

That was always a major motivator for why he endured his street level fame and played a liar so happily and for so many years.

Jozuzu gave me money.

I was making money, but this was better money, and then because of that, I got even better money.

So Jozuzu, Yep, money was a big part of it.

Profile.

I got a really high profile with Josuzu.

Longevity.

Here, Look it's twenty twenty five and we're talking about something I did in the mid late eighties and another millennium.

I go, so longevity, money, longevity, what else?

I guess the reason to get up in the morning you were gonna call me.

So I got up this morning to get ready for this conversation.

So I mean, yeah, I got a bunch of cool stuff from Joe, nothing too esoterical, which.

Brings us to the final question to consider.

After all these years, would the man who made Joe Azuzu famous actually recommend an Azuzu?

Of course, being who he is, to answer that, David Leiser has a funny story about that.

Ah, So I have a long answer to that question.

Yes, I got it Azuzu the second year, and my manager at the time said, I got them to give you a car.

So I went, oh, so I got a gift, because that's what the word give means.

Right.

So but after I got the car, which I drove around, I got a Trooper two, which was very cool.

After I drove it around, she sent me a bill for ten percent of the car for her fee because she got me that car, which is like money.

So you owe me ten percent of the car.

So I went out.

So they didn't give me a car.

It's part of my salary now because you want ten percent of it.

Okay, fine, So I sent her ten percent in a check.

The next year, I got you another car, okay.

So now I got two troop or two's and she sent me a bill for a certain amount.

So I took that bill and I went to the parks department at the Zuzu and I said, give me this much money worth a car and send it to this address.

So I sent her ten percent of a car to her office.

Like there was a hood and there were some wheels and there was like, you know, like ashtray holder thing, you know, and it just came sign here I go, there you go, payton full.

That's what you call a true Hollywood story.

Nasty little.

But back to the question at hand, would he actually really recommend than Azuzu?

Driving the car was kind of cool?

I mean it was really early urban suv.

It was there was only Jeep as like a four wheel drive vehicle that was it only ge and so before the suv thing took off, Azuzu was the first considered suv along with Jeep that was in the country.

But it was more popular than Jeep because it was like, you know, more of a vehicle than a Jeep.

They were pretty inexpensive and they were very simple for cylinders, it wasn't a big deal.

So I had a few of them and they were pretty cool.

So is that a recommendation, Well, they don't.

Make it anymore.

So yeah, this is not where the story of Joe Azuzu ends.

Because the folks who still love a Zuzu troops have adopted the Pitchman as our patron saint.

I've been adopted by these guys who take Azuzu Troopers and there's like ten thousand of these people across the country.

So they adopted me as their mascot.

They take a Zuzu Troopers, they fix him up, and they take him off roading.

Now they beat the shit out of them, but they fix them up.

So they trade parts.

Everybody trades how do you fix this?

What's this thing?

How do you fix that?

And so they just all of a sudden, I kind of, hey, hi, guys, what's going on.

I chripped in on this Facebook page, and all of a sudden, every like, now I'm a celebrity for sure, and they sort of adopted me and made me their mascot.

So it's kind of cool.

So there it is.

That's his story these days.

That's how Joe Azuzu became the patron saint, an unofficial mascot of those folks who's still rocking a Zuzu Trooper.

And as for the reasons for his prolonged fame some decades later, hopefully by now, that should be obvious.

We Americans love a liar.

No really, well maybe some of us.

Look at that Joezuzu was just ahead of his time.

Okay, this was genuinely a delightful rabbit hole.

This is one of those very special episodes on a topic that it's not just that I didn't know about it, it's that I didn't even know that I didn't know about it.

Yeah, it's weird looking back because of how much Joeyzuzu had a lock on the culture.

I mean, he did Super Bowl ats.

This guy was like the go to.

The presidential campaigns are citing him.

I think it's because he was a liar, and back then America was really charmed by a liar.

So do you guys have a very special moment from this one.

Early on when that director as a joke puts a Joe Isuzu name tag on him and then boom, it changes the course of the rest of his life.

Like that is wild little thing.

Yeah, maybe the name tag itself can be the very special character.

I hope that name tag is in some advertising museum or the Smithsonian.

What are you talking about?

It just says Joe, Hi, my name is Joe.

I liked the moment when David Leisure is up on that rock in Utah, the helicopters circling around him.

He's wearing the metal diaper chain to the rock and He's like just hoping he doesn't become some living lightning magnet.

How do you as a performer deal with that terror?

Right the lifelong friendship between Bob Hayes of Airplanes and David Leisure, I love how we put it, like they're barometers for each other and they check in with each other, and like, that's awesome.

I love that.

I like the quote he's talking about his acting career not going well and he's living in his van and parking in front of friend's houses and says, this is not working out like I thought it was going to work out.

And just like how real that feeling is.

And someone who made a fortune and was a very prominent force in the culture for some time.

I say that to anyone going through some version of that right now, you two could wind up in a car commercial that runs for several decades.

You just never know.

You never know, Zaren.

This was perhaps not our most cinematic episode.

I mean, it sounds great.

Chris Childs doesn't miss with these, but I don't know.

I was able to cast it.

You were, oh wow, look at you.

I was able to cast it, but I only have really the two guys.

It's just basically Joey Zuzu and Bob Hayes.

So for Joey Zuzu, I thought, there's a guy who looks a lot like him.

I'm not sure if you know him by name, John Michael Higgins.

He's in all the Christopher Guest documentaries.

He played Save by the Bell.

Yeah, yeah, and one more, one more Great News.

Has anyone watched the show Great News?

Loved Great News?

Let's get that out.

It's you in the culture too.

If there are no fans left of Great News.

I'm dead.

For Bob Hayes was a little more difficult, But uh, I thought I was looking at faces and trying to get somebody who has the same charisma.

And this is kind of like a little bit out on a limb here.

But Jacob Olordi from Euphoria and the New Friend Kenstein movie.

He's like a very handsome guy and he seems to have the same kind of quiet charm.

So there you go.

There's my Bob Hayes.

I love it.

Get Jacob b Lordi in Anything You Can Do, Anything.

That kids got legs.

Get a role for our guy David in that.

Because the other version of this is in the IP world let's ad some screenwriter to talk to the a Zuzu Motors company and say we got to do our Joey's Zuzu biopic.

Now, it could be actually a good movie and it has a lot of Americana to it.

Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.

The show is hosted by Zaren Burnett, Danish Schwartz, and Jason English.

Today's episode was written by Zaren Burnett.

Our senior producer is Josh Fisher.

Editing and sound design by Chris Childs, Mixing and mastering by Beiheed Fraser.

Original music by Alice McCoy.

Show logo by Lucy Kintinia.

I'm your executive producer.

We will see you back here next Wednesday.

You'd like to email the show, you can reach us at Very Special Episodes at gmail dot com.

Very Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.