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When you’ve done stand-up yourself, you can really appreciate what goes into getting laughs. Audiences can be hellish or heavenly. But only two comics consistently make me laugh aloud: the genius thinker Steven (“Why don’t they make the whole plane out of that black box stuff?”) Wright, and Garry (Larry Sanders) Shandling.

At long last, Sony is releasing DVDs of HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show, the 90′s satirical take on talk shows. The Larry Sanders Show gives us hilarious, insightful revelations of just how late-night talk shows are put together, with true renditions of temperamental outbursts of the guest stars and the paranoia extant in the green room and the hallways. Especially those hallways.

Not only did I ghostwrite for two writers on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, but I also worked on another show that taped across the hall from Carson at NBC’s Burbank studio. My biggest claim to fame, other than being Five Degrees of Kevin Bacon, is that my marked parking space was only 17 spaces from Johnny’s. If you don’t count the aisles in between.

The Larry Sanders Show stars Garry Shandling as a Carsonlike late-night talk show host, Jeffrey Tambor as Ed McMahon-like sidekick Hank Kingsley, Rip Torn in a blindingly funny, dead-on turn as Freddie de Cordova-like producer Artie, with Jeremy Piven (currently having arrogance-management problems in real life and starring in HBO’s Entourage, and Wallace Langham of CSI, as the two writers, Jerry and Phil. Penny Johnson as Larry’s assistant Beverly Barnes (later seen as the deviously plotting First Lady Sherrie Palmer on “24″), Mary Lynn Rajskub as Mary Lou Collins in Seasons 1996-1998 (divinely screwy computer techie Chloe O’Brien of “24″) and Janeane Garofolo as Paula, a production assistant, fill out the regulars and semi-regulars.

Everything about this brilliant satire is as real as being actually backstage at a late night talk show (anybody’s), or appearing as a guest. The sucking up to your face, the backstabbing the moment you’re out of earshot, and the celebrity insecurities are bitingly satirized.

On The Larry Sanders Show, real stars appear as themselves, from Richard Lewis, Kevin Nealon and Bobcat Goldthwaite to Sharon Stone, Carol Burnett and Jon Stewart. Dana Carvey, Ellen Degeneres, Bruno Kirby, Letterman, Roseanne, Jon Lovitz, Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, and Sarah Bernhard are just some of the comics who recur up to half a dozen times as themselves doing guest spots on The Larry Sanders Show (various seasons), or in the green room or make-up or hallway.

In the ep where Sharon Stone is guesting and Larry has a date with her after the show, Artie warns him “In a relationship with a woman who’s a bigger star than you are, she’s the one with the dick.”

Alec Baldwin guests in one episode of this show within a show, back when he weighed considerably less and the gluey stuff on his hair managed to hold in place the single lock strategically positioned in the center of his forehead in an attempt to look as if it had accidentally fallen there.

In another show, producer Artie is taking a group of UCLA students on a tour backstage and says, “This is the real thing. Everything you learned in school is shit.”

Entertainment Weekly calls the collection of 23 episodes from the show’s second through fifth seasons “one of the most remarkable DVD sets ever released,” and notes that in the era preceding The Office and reality television, Shandling’s show “made an artistic virtue of playing off what we knew about celebrities on and off camera—how plugged-in we’d become about how the television industry works.” In the Boston Globe, Mark Feeney considers the program’s lasting impact: “In a sense, Larry Sanders never really went off HBO.”

Slate repeats The Philadelphia Inquirer’s praise of the DVD extras, “in which Shandling chats at length, awkwardly and revealingly, with some of the stars who appeared as slightly skewed versions of themselves on the fake talk show within the show, and as truly skewed versions of themselves in the fake behind-the-scenes comedy.”

If you like satire, comics, and celebs and want to know what goes on behind the scenes (“Does my ass look too big?” “Was I funny?” “He paid more attention to you than he did to me.”), you’ve got to get this DVD.

Eventually, all the seasons will be released but for now, get Not Just The Larry Sanders Show. It will hold you. For awhile.