Satiristas Read online

  ¡Satiristas!

  Comedians, Contrarians, Raconteurs & Vulgarians

  Paul Provenza and Dan Dion

  For George Denis Patrick Carlin

  Contents

  Photographer's Preface

  Introduction

  Billy Connolly

  Robin Williams

  Lewis Black

  Paul Krassner

  Stephen Colbert

  Penn Jillette

  Randy Newman

  Paul Mooney

  Smothers Brothers

  Conan O'Brien

  Dave Attell

  Doug Stanhope

  Roseanne Barr

  Upright Citizens Brigade

  Lily Tomlin

  Judd Apatow

  Mike Nichols

  Craig Ferguson

  Photographic Insert 1

  Jay Leno

  Janeane Garofalo

  Trey Parker and Matt Stone

  Vernon Chatman and John Lee

  Don Novello

  Michael McKean

  Billy the Mime

  Patton Oswalt

  Lizz Winstead

  Rick Shapiro

  Sandra Bernhard

  Culture Clash

  David Feldman

  Tom Rhodes

  Eddie Ifft

  Robert Klein

  Terry Jones

  Tom Lehrer

  Jamie Kilstein

  Dana Gould and Marc Maron

  Colin Quinn

  Bill Burr

  Patrice Oneal

  Eddie Brill

  Richard Lewis

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Kids in the Hall

  Joy Behar

  Lee Camp

  Greg Giraldo

  Photographic Insert 2

  Greg Proops and Will Durst

  Andy Borowitz

  Todd Hanson

  Bob Odenkirk

  David Cross

  Bill Maher

  Henry Rollins

  Jello Biafra

  Cheech & Chong

  Randy Credico

  Margaret Cho

  Rick Overton

  George Carlin

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chase, Ackroyd, Belushi and Michaels in Elaine’s kitchen, NYC. © Jonathan Becker 1976—Saturday Night Live.

  Mike Meehan

  Bob Rubin

  PHOTOGRAPHER’S PREFACE

  I’ve always respected the disrespectful. When I was a child, the hilarious impudence of Bugs Bunny, Mad magazine, and Hawkeye Pierce whet my appetite for the greater blasphemies of George Carlin and Lenny Bruce. When San Francisco became the flashpoint of the comedy boom of the eighties, I dove into the local scene with a zeal that most of my teenage peers had for music. But I wasn’t interested in what was simply silly, derogatory, or observant. I wanted insight and bite, with savage wit and a scowl at authority and convention. Stand-up became my punk rock.

  Twenty-five years after I saw my first live stand-up show at thirteen, seventeen years after I joined the staff of the Holy City Zoo comedy club at twenty-one, and after I’ve been its most prolific portrait artist for about ten years, this book is my love-letter to comedy.

  A headshot differs from a portrait in that a good portrait captures the stature and spirit of its subject as a testament of who he or she is in the world. A headshot is a desperate cry for attention. It’s an image designed to mask the subject’s need for work and love with an attitude, gesture, or look that might be marketable.

  MARC MARON

  Many years after I started photographing comics, Marc Maron summed up the philosophy I’d never quite put into words. I came to recognize that my aesthetic was created in reaction against the world of hack headshots, and was forged by the ubiquitous black-and-white eight-by-tens of open-mouthed muggers that encircled most comedy clubs. Their banality made me all the more drawn to the engaged honesty of August Sander and the elegant composition of Arnold Newman.

  I began to wed my two passions, comedy and photography, while on staff at the Holy City Zoo comedy club. I took two photos that changed the course of my career, and neither were portraits: Mike Meehan onstage, and Bob Rubin off. In the supposedly jovial world of comedy, both revealed a dark and brutal vision. Meehan said it was his favorite photo of himself, and Rubin said his hungover, daylight agony during a morning radio broadcast said all that needed to be said about stand-up.

  I was inspired by their support, and recognized that there were other levels to these performers, which were rarely shown. I set out to create work that elevates the subject, and I think my portraits represent how I feel about comics: respectful, enamored, appreciative. I’m not asking the monkey to dance.

  Jonathan Becker’s portrait of young Lorne Michaels, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, and John Belushi from 1976, just as the country was hipping to their genius, served as a kind of high bar for me, and still does.

  I will admit to not being a very “conceptual” photographer. While working with comedians would seem to be fertile ground for that kind of thing, I don’t very often create gag photos, though there are some exceptions. I never want to make my subjects uncomfortable. Greg Proops told me that in his last shoot the photographer wanted to put him in giant shoes. I could feel his disdain, and knew that my smoky noir shot would certainly suit him better. Comics, by definition, need approval from the audience, but I want approval from them—the world’s greatest critics.

  In general, stand-up comics hate to do photo shoots, while sketch performers pose at the sound of the camera bag unzipping. Sometimes the challenge is to draw out their true character, or sometimes it’s to tame the spaz. I don’t think portraits necessarily need to have something happening in them. I’m more interested in showing who someone is than in a concept or joke. Famous comedians in particular are used to photographers wanting them to “just do something crazy!”—which is especially annoying to comics who view themselves as social commentators rather than clowns. When my subjects ask me, “What am I supposed to be doing?” I reply, “Nothing. Just be here.” It manifests a stillness and relaxation, and I get to feel all Zen and shit.

  I’ve often been told that I capture the “essence” of comics, which is a great compliment, and I’ve tried to break down why. My intimacy with the comedy world allows me to pick locations that are appropriate, but it is most influential in the edit, when I get to choose just one frame to encapsulate a comic mind. The great music photographer Jim Marshall taught me very early that the key to the guarded door of celebrity photography is trust. Without it, you don’t get in. Betray it, and the drawbridge is raised and you are thrown to the alligators. I can honestly state that I have never taken a celebrity or performer’s photo offstage without their cooperation (and I have a feverish contempt for paparazzi). The other main factor is my shooting style itself, which is built for both comfort and speed. By far the most common comment I get after a shoot is “That was painless,” which is something I’ve come to pride myself on.

  My luxury is that the portraits are the purpose. With this work, I’m not shooting for casting directors, magazine editors, or managers, but for exhibitions, this book, and the artists themselves.

  I met Paul Provenza on my first night at a comedy festival in Sydney. In a dodgy King’s Cross pub, over many pints and smokes, we bonded over our admiration of Dana Gould and Maria Bamford. Over the next week, I came to know the irreverent intersection of intellectual and scatological that is also known as Provenz. I’ve never met anyone who knows as much about comedy as Paul, who floats freely between the rarefied air of network late-night, down to the New York club scene, to the subterranean stages of Edinburgh. And he doesn’t
give a fuck if you like what he says or not.

  At the time I was on my seemingly continuous quest to find a publisher for a book of my comedian portraits. I soon realized that Paul, as comedy’s insider inquisitor, would be the perfect person to interview the people in the book. He was game, but we needed a bit more focus rather than just comedy in general.

  When we narrowed the scope to satirists, the preferred comic subset for both of us, we were able to quickly make a master wish-list of those we wanted to include; we got probably 90 percent of them, and many others along the way. While some of my favorite comics, like Stephen Wright, had to be excluded, the wide world of satirists is populated with a unique and dynamic sort.

  Over the years I’ve had some incredible privileges with comedy legends: drinking wine with Tommy Smothers on his vineyard; doing Cheech & Chong’s first portrait session in twenty-five years; exploring the multiple airport hangars of Jay Leno’s car collection; being invited to shoot inside the homes of Tom Lehrer, Fred Willard, and Jello Biafra; and shooting both Conan O’Brien and Stephen Colbert in their offices (on the same day). I’ve had the exalted rock awesomeness of hanging backstage with Spinal Tap and Tenacious D, and drank many after-show beers with reprobate geniuses like Dave Attell, Greg Giraldo, and Doug Stanhope. I had the bittersweet honor of having George Carlin say my photo was the one he wanted to be remembered by, three weeks before dying.

  Logistically, we unfortunately weren’t able to interview everyone pictured here, and some painful decisions were made to cut some interviews and portraits for space and design.

  While getting some of these people required hoops and a ridiculous number of phone calls, e-mails, and scratched appointments, the vast majority were incredibly cooperative and permissive. None of these portraits were done in a photo studio. There were only two people who asked for approval of the image before publishing. Only on about four of the shoots did I have an assistant, and a makeup artist only on three of the women (and one dude).

  These pages hold some of the world’s greatest comic minds for you to connect with, and I hope my images help.

  Thank you. Tip your wait staff.

  Dan Dion

  San Francisco, 2009

  Dick Gregory

  INTRODUCTION

  ¡SATIRISTAS!

  “Number 1 Moustache Brother Par Par Lay is taken away. He in the slammer. Up the river. In the clink. He jail bird!”

  That’s how Lu Maw starts the Moustache Brothers’ shows now. Five members of the Burmese special branch showed up at Par Par Lay’s house one day and led him away, because he told a joke. He said, “In the past, thieves were called thieves. Now they are known as government workers.”

  For that, they gave Par Par Lay seven years in prison, hard labor.

  Walid Hassan was famous for his comedy series on Iraqi TV, called Caricature. He mocked coalition forces and insurgents, and poked fun at the poor security, long gas lines, electricity blackouts, and the chaos of Iraqi government since the U.S.-led invasion.

  For that, someone gave Walid Hassan a bullet through the head.

  Stephen Colbert performed at a black-tie dinner in Washington, DC, before America’s press and media, five-star generals, senators, congressmen, members of the Supreme Court, and the most powerful government leader in the world.

  To the media, he said, “Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the president’s side and the vice president’s side.” And, “Over the past five years, you journalists were so good about tax cuts, about WMD intelligence, about the effects of global warming. We Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out.”

  Only feet away from the president, he said, “You always know where this president stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change, but this man’s beliefs never will.”

  For that, they gave Stephen Colbert a big, fat paycheck.

  That’s the kind of country America is. There always have been and always will be people who object and try to silence it, and people will write letters of complaint, boycott advertisers’ products, and cancel magazine and newspaper subscriptions over it, but overwhelmingly, America loves to criticize itself. If a nation can be said to have a DNA, that fact is in America’s.

  Our Founding Fathers impregnated this country with it, and it doesn’t take a paternity test to prove it. When it comes to criticizing America, some of us look more like the Founding Fathers than Prince Harry looks like Major James Hewitt.

  It’s no secret that one of the architects of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of these United States of America, Benjamin Franklin, was himself a satirist. And a damn good one, too. He created lots of biting satire and confrontational humor about the things he felt needed a good going-over in this country, and he printed up his own pamphlets loaded with the stuff, because newspapers couldn’t be bothered. Yes, even back then, on the still-blistered heels of founding a new nation and a “great experiment” in freedom and self-government, a lot of the press was pretty content to leave well enough alone and avoid controversy.

  To criticize America is to love it. It’s part of the eternal vigilance that freedom demands. To criticize America is as American as apple pie purchased at Walmart that you really shouldn’t eat ’cause you’re lookin’ like you could really stand to lose a few pounds there, my fellow American.

  You’d never know it from the shrill din of so many self-righteous moralists, religious charlatans, loud-mouthed pundits, and opportunistic, power-hungry politicians, but there was a time when it was taken for granted that criticizing what’s wrong with America was the most patriotic thing a person could do, short of taking to arms and overthrowing an oppressive, imperialistic government that violates the civil rights of its people. I’m just sayin’.

  Criticizing their government is what made this nation’s very first heroes heroes. For criticizing their country, they got big-ass monuments and had cities named after them. We put their pictures on our money, and we love those guys so much we just have to have as many pictures of them as we can get. Some of us have been collecting them all and not trading them with our friends.

  But as brilliant, visionary, and fearless as they were, with the notable exception of the aforementioned Dr. Franklin, our Founding Fathers weren’t nearly as funny as the people in this book. And those guys had all those goofy clothes and dopey wigs, so there’s really no excuse for that.

  But our Founding Fathers did sow their seeds of freedom, individual rights, and a government “of the people, by the people and for the people” with vigorous and determined promiscuity. Seeds of the ideas that all men are created equal and with inalienable rights, and that free speech is at the top of that list. Seeds of the ideas that privacy is a right, that a separation of church and state is crucial, that the government’s powers should be kept in check, and “that whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.”

  It is their direct descendants that are represented in this book, all of whom are demanding their rightful inheritance, the treasure that is each and every one of those ideas.

  And to many people in this country, some of whom are running it, that seems to be a revolutionary idea.

  We have called the artists in this book ¡Satiristas! first, because it’s kinda funny, but also because, like the theme of this book, it’s satire. Kinda, sorta. And as kinda, sorta satire goes, it’s not bad. It’s not great, but it’s not too shabby. It is self-mocking. I mean, we’re talking about people who want to have fun and make us all laugh, but ¡Satiristas! brings to mind Ché Guevara, back before he got into the T-shirt business. It conjures a scrappy band of freedom fighters gathered in the wooded hills overlooking La Palazio del Governmento Muy Malo or something, furtively exchanging information and strategically planning their revolution.

  But the ¡Satiristas! approach to revolution is no
thing like that. First of all, it’s decidedly nonviolent. It harms no one’s person or property. And these revolutionaries couldn’t agree on any strategy if their lives depended on it. There’s a reason there has never been a Comedians’ Union. They couldn’t agree on where the goddamn apostrophe goes in “Comedian’s.” I couldn’t even agree on it, and I’m writing this by myself.

  No, the ¡Satiristas! approach to revolution is pretty much just a whole lot of fun. They’re not throwing Molotov cocktails in some banana republic; they’re slinging jokes ’cause they’re going bananas over the state of our republic.

  “Why,” you may ask, “should we be interested in what a bunch of comedians have to say about anything? They’re comedians. Why should we take anything they have to say seriously?”

  Well, first of all, to a person, everyone in this book is brilliant. They just are. To be honest, most comedians are smarter than the average bear. It’s just a fact. They have to be, or they can’t be doing comedy. In comedy, you have to be at least a notch or two above your audience, and their audience is the average American. I rest my case.