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TVG: You like making people laugh.
MJF: I love making people laugh. But I don’t think of myself as a particularly funny person. Sure, I can be witty — but I’m not a laugh riot. If you’ve got good writing, there’s just a rhythm you get into. And I can’t explain the rhythm, but it’s just a joy. And when I started to have this physical situation and then I started to do Spin City and I’m [thinking], "I’d like to do that, but [if] my pill’s not working the next time I do it, am I boxing myself into a corner?" So what the legacy is, I don’t know. I hope people watch the show in reruns and laugh. I know that I worked real hard at it and I never took it for granted.
TVG: Do you worry about your kids in all of this?
MJF: Oh, no, it can be a drama for everybody else. It’s not a drama for me. I don’t know whether it’s a proverb or Confucius or the Bible — but there’s this story about God or some deity getting a group of people together and saying, "Everybody take their worst problem and put it in the middle of the circle. Step back. Now step forward and take a problem out." And everybody takes their own back. And I would take this one back because I know it. And I’m completely confident that in my fifties this will be gone. Which means I’m going to take a little bit of an ass kicking for a few years. You’re 5-foot-4 and you played hockey all your life — I’m used to ass kickings. What’s a unique privilege and a unique gift — it may be with full acknowledgement of the fact that researchers and scientists and doctors and other people are going to do the work here — but maybe my being in this position can, in a small way, influence the outcome of [the battle against Parkinson’s]. I mean, God, who wouldn’t give the world for that?