This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies, Infra Terry Gross.

Comic and actor Louis Anderson died last week due to complications from non-Hodgkin's limb phoma.

He was 68. Raised in a Minnesota family with 10 siblings and alcoholic father and a mother who

used food as comfort, he turned family and food, or really his weight, into fodder for his comedy.

After winning a Midwest comedy competition in 1981, he began writing for the King of One Liner's

handy young man, then he went on to his own stand-up career. Here's one of Anderson's early

stand-up routines from 1987 when he was on the tonight show with Johnny Carson. He's talking about

Thanksgiving dinner. And my mom makes too much. She's always overcooking like seven or eight hundred

pounds of sweet potatoes. So she's got to push it during the meal. They're sweet potatoes.

They're hot.

There's more in the oven. Some in the ground. Did you ever finish the meal you're eating the

dessert? All of a sudden your mom stands up in a panic. The cranberries!

Get them. They're on the bottom shelf. Mom, we're eating pie. Put some cranberries.

Years later, Louis Anderson modeled his character in the FX series Baskets on his mother.

He played Christine Baskets, the mother of Chip, a depressive rodeo clown played by Zach

Gallifinakis. It earned him an Emmy award. Following Anderson's death last week,

Shane O'Neill, a fellow Midwesterner, wrote in the New York Times of Anderson's

portrayal of Christine, it was a portrait of a woman I know and love who has never been

presented with such affection and skill on television before or since. We're going to listen to

Terry's 2016 interview with Louis Anderson in which they talked about that role,

growing up in Minnesota and about taking comedy to a darker place. Let's begin with a clip from

Baskets. Christine, the mother of Chip Baskets, can be very critical of her son, but she can also

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