PLAYBOY: Which comics influenced you?
LEARY: Once I saw Richard Pryor's concert, I thought, I didn't know you could say whatever the fuck is in your head and use those words. I knew George Carlin had just started doing that too, so to me they were the first two guys in that generation. I didn't really know about Lenny Bruce, who came before them. Carlin has to be considered the Babe Ruth of comedy. Even in his most recent special, there may be things I don't like, but while I'm laughing a part of me is going, Goddamn, why didn't I think of that? He talks about his view of the world, but you don't know anything about his private life. On the other hand, you knew everything that was going on in Richard Pryor's life because he acted it out onstage. For me, Pryor was the fucking be-all and end-all.

PLAYBOY: What are some of Hollywood's most inexplicable comedy careers?
LEARY: Some people get lucky. I mean, it's not a lack of talent; it's like they've found this one thing they know how to make work. I've known Adam Sandler for years and never really understood his career. I've seen some of his movies because my kids watch them, but he does the $20 million gorilla jobs where you kind of do the same thing over and over because that's how much money you get and that's what the audience expects. I would get so fucking bored, but some people seem to thrive on that shit, so who am I to say? It's like when my brother and I watched Jerry Lewis on TV, acting like a retard in the Martin and Lewis films and his first solo movies. He used to make us laugh our balls off, but we watched Hook, Line & Sinker and said, "He looks too old to do this." When some of these guys end up playing the retard-goofball crazy guy at 40, people all of a sudden say, "This is weird."

PLAYBOY:How much drugging did you get into on the comedy circuit?
LEARY: Oh, I did shitloads and shitloads. I tried everything. You know, it was the time. But almost none of it worked for me. Weed was never a good thing, because it kept me up all night. Coke was the opposite. It kind of made me like, "I'm going to bed soon." The one time I tried quaaludes, I just literally fell asleep. I was never big on speed. I never did a lot of psychedelics. I had a couple of friends who were like, "We're going to trip. Do you want to come over and make sure nobody goes out the window?" and I was like, "What the hell are they doing this for?" It just wasn't my thing, though I tried mushrooms once and that was okay. A bunch of us went out to see a friend playing straight-ahead rock and roll, and it was really great, but we were over on the side, laughing our balls off during every song and getting dirty looks, which just made us laugh even more.

PLAYBOY: Did you get static for using so much profanity?
LEARY: The fucking assholes who ran the clubs were like, "Why are you talking like that?" It was that way for me and the guys of my generation--Chris Rock, Jon Stewart, Colin Quinn. All the owners wanted was someone like Seinfeld and Leno, the two clean comics working the clubs at the time. Everybody admired their ability to work a room--they did it much better than I could--but that wasn't our style. I wouldn't do it. Leno was a really good club comedian and wasn't as slick and homogenized as you have to be in the circumstances he's in now. Seinfeld was a fucking killer club comedian. A lot of guys wearing skinny ties were doing Seinfeld and Leno junior acts, doing what those guys did but nowhere near as well--like cover bands. They made shitloads of money in the comedy boom, but if a bunch of us are sitting around shooting the shit backstage at one of these charity gigs and somebody asks, "Whatever happened to blah blah blah?" it's "He went back to being a teacher."

PLAYBOY: Much has been written about you and comedian Bill Hicks, who died in 1994. People have accused you of appropriating his persona and material.
LEARY: That's a great story that people like to latch onto. When I came to New York from Boston, Bill was part of the Sam Kinison group, and I was part of the Lenny Clarke group. Kinison and Lenny exchanged the notion that Bill and I should see each other because we were going to love each other's act. Very quickly we got New York club owners saying, "You guys are too alike," while Bill and I were saying, "What are they fucking talking about?" It's the same approach to the subject maybe, but it's not the same act. Caroline Hirsch of Carolines comedy club in New York started booking us to co-headline, so one guy would open one show and the other guy would close, then vice versa for the next show. We had audiences laughing at both acts, as a lot of witnesses at those big New Year's Eve gigs we did can tell you. But as I've said many times, a fable is sometimes better than the truth.

PLAYBOY: You were the second of four kids in working-class Worcester, Massachusetts. What were you ranting about at an early age?
LEARY: The Catholic Church, for one thing. By the time I was 12 or 13, I was like, "Fuck these guys and the organization." These fucking priests had maids and butlers, and after Sunday mass they would put their golf clubs in their Lincoln Continentals and go golfing. We're living in a three-decker apartment, my brother and I are sleeping in the attic, and the priests are walking around our school hallways wearing those rings and shit. I mean, Catholic Church bling is outrageous. Today, with the Italian Mafia disappearing, it's more evident than ever how much bigger the church is than the Mafia in terms of real estate. It has enough money to throw around to settle molestation suits. Don't get me started on those guys. Anyway, most of my anger as a kid was directed at my older brother because we shared a room the entire time we were growing up.

PLAYBOY: What is he like?
LEARY: Three years older and much bigger, a football player. Nobody in the neighborhood would fight me, because they were afraid they would have to fight him. We almost drove my mother off planet Earth, we were so fucking out of our minds growing up, doing such crazy shit to each other that I was always in the hospital, getting stitches all over my body. Our apartment had a screened-in back porch with three wooden fire escapes down to the first floor, and one time my brother goes, "Get off the porch or I'm gonna throw you out the door and down the stairs." And then he did. He couldn't skate and never really played hockey like I did, so one way I could get back at him was to shoot right at his fucking head when he was playing goalie and wearing boots, because I knew he couldn't chase me. That was great public humiliation.

PLAYBOY:Did he wise you up about sex?
LEARY: No, that was Eddie Correlli, who was on my street-hockey team. He was in my class, but he'd been kept back a couple of times. He had a girlfriend before we did and passed the word along. There were always lots of girls around, mostly Irish girls from the neighborhood--easy access. From two to four P.M., during Sunday mass, a gang of guys would go down to the railroad tracks nearest the church, with a six-pack, cigarettes and Playboy. When the priest came down the aisle to say good-bye to the people, all we had to do was check to see who it was. That way when we went home, if we were asked who said the mass, we could say, "Oh, Father McGraw." One time we were just about to go and see who the priest was, when my old man pulled up. That put a fucking end to that.

PLAYBOY: What were your early sex experiences like?
LEARY: This girl and I would go into the first-floor vestibule of her parents' threedecker and pretty much do everything. Her parents were always in bed, supposedly. Years later I went back to take my nieces to a St. Patrick's Day event, and one of the ladies organizing it walked by and said, "Denis Leary." And I went into a complete panic. It was the girl's mother, and I still had that what-if-she-finds-out thing. She goes, "You remember me, right? I remember you because you used to feel my daughter up." And I was like, My God, she heard everything. Of course she was awake and waiting for her daughter to come home. I spent the rest of the night avoiding her.

PLAYBOY: Who starred in your first erotic fantasies about celebrities?
LEARY: They were always triple-headers with Karen Valentine from Room 222, Susan Dey from The Partridge Family and Peggy Lipton from The Mod Squad. To make matters worse, a couple of years ago Peggy Lipton, who still looks fantastic, did the play The Guys, about post-9/11 firefighters, here in New York. Terry Quinn calls me one night and says, "You have to come to this restaurant." I do and he's sitting there with Peggy Lipton, who he was dating. He was living the dream. Cindy Crawford is a beautiful, sexy chick, just naturally sexy. She doesn't have to do anything. I have a long list: Julie Christie in those movies from the 1970s--beautiful, very natural. That's what I always find sexy. I don't like anything fake.

PLAYBOY:Including implants?
LEARY: Don't like them. Never did. It automatically opens a can of worms because the woman obviously didn't like herself to begin with or chose to be with somebody who didn't like her to begin with. To me that's just a red flag.

PLAYBOY: What's your take on contemporary sexpots such as Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton?
LEARY: Maybe we're all just laughing at the idiocy of what Paris Hilton is doing. She did a homemade porn movie that actually increased interest in her--and, by the way, not very good homemade porn. And I'm not talking about the way it was filmed; I'm talking about the actual sex. Britney Spears is not my kind of music at all, but I went to a Jessica Simpson concert and she was really nice to my kids backstage, taking pictures and the whole nine yards. She does have a voice, so I give her credit for that at least. I don't think Madonna's ever had much of a voice or songwriting ability or anything, so she never even made my radar.

PLAYBOY: Did you have erotic fantasies about nuns who taught you in school?
LEARY: Oh fuck, yeah. We had one nun who was hot-looking even in those old habits. She wasn't stern like the other nuns and talked to us about sex when she discovered us passing around a copy of The Godfather so we could read the scene of Sonny having sex with the bridesmaid. By Vatican II the nuns didn't have to wear habits anymore if they didn't want to, so this nun showed up wearing a skirt, a top and a crucifix but nothing on her head--fucking beautiful. After I graduated and went back to visit my mom, my brother and I were in the supermarket parking lot when I see this really hot-looking blonde get out of a pickup, wearing hot pants and sneakers. My brother goes, "That's the hot-looking nun. She had an affair with one of the other teachers, left the convent and now they're getting married." I was like, "Hell, she was obviously waiting for it. All we had to do was ask."

PLAYBOY: Your mother is still living, but your father died young. How did he die?
LEARY: He had gone back to Ireland on vacation. His favorite brother had just walked in, they had just shared a laugh about something, and he went just like that. He was really young, only 60. He had a funeral in the village he was born and raised in, then he was brought home and had a massive funeral here. People came to his wake and nobody knew who the fuck they were--college girls coming up and saying, "My car broke down on the expressway, and nobody would stop and help but your father." A couple of old ladies told us that when they couldn't afford to pay their gas bill, he paid it for the month. He loved the Beatles and so did my mother, but she really loved Dean Martin. To this day he is the person she's most impressed that I've met.