Satiristas Read online

  PAUL PROVENZA: You actually do some pointed political satire on your show, so it seems surprising that you claim to not care about it much.

  CONAN O’BRIEN: A lot of comedy has an edge to it and has to be pointed, but I remember someone from Fox News was on my shows a few years ago, maybe Bill O’Reilly, and he said, “You really go after President Bush. You’re such a Left-wing show.”

  I said, “We did a show for eight years while Clinton was president, and we went after him then.”

  Comedians bounce off the structure that exists in their lives, and that includes things like who is the president? Who is doing what within the structure we live in?

  I remember reading an interview with Groucho Marx, and the interviewer said, “I love Duck Soup because you attack fascism and show how totalitarian societies are misguided and insane and that the democratic process is the way to go.”

  Groucho said, “What are you talking about? We were five Jews trying to get a laugh.”

  That resonates with me. Of course Duck Soup was inspired by what was going on then in Europe, but that’s just what they were working off of. I always felt Charlie Chaplin was really making an overtly political point with The Great Dictator, whereas the Marx Brothers were using what happened to exist in their world just to be funny. And I gravitate toward the Marx Brothers.

  Do you remember the original Batman series from the 1960s with Adam West? That was actually very influential to me. As a kid, I watched it on one level, which was that it’s just plain fun—it’s Batman and Robin fighting The Joker, it’s all colorful, there’s “ZAP! POW! BANG!” and all that fun stuff. But suddenly you’re fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, watching reruns and there’s this whole other level, which is the absurdity of it. And there are jokes in there about the Vietnam War, and about things like unions and class struggle. All that stuff is in there, but it all goes down easier because of the silliness of it. Throughout my life, on any of the shows I’ve worked on, whether Saturday Night Live or especially The Simpsons, I always wrote things with a silliness and almost childlike appeal to them.

  I know these are serious and scary times we’re living in, and I’ll hear people say comedy needs to be more relevant or tackle issues, but it’s always been rough times, it’s always been scary, and I think comedy needs to be natural. It needs to come from the desire to just make people laugh. The biggest danger in comedy is trying to inflate it or give it an importance of any kind.

  I’m very wary of the analysis of comedy. Doing comedy is like being a chef who sprinkles a pinch of salt, sprinkles some oregano, throws in a dash of this and a bit of that. He doesn’t measure everything or think about it and work out the chemical formula. For all of us it’s ultimately just what makes you laugh. At rehearsal, that’s still what I go off of. “Gee, this doesn’t feel very funny to me.” Or, “Wow, this really makes me laugh.” If the interns on the sidelines are giggling about it, then we’ve probably got something. I never stop and think, “What was the relevance or satirical impact of it?” I just think, “Good. I see some people laughing. It feels funny to me, let’s go.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: Your show is one of the most permissive in terms of material that comedians can do; I did a piece on your show that no other talk show would let me do. It’s not just because you’re on at a late hour, there’s a feeling of more freedom than on other talk shows.

  CONAN O’BRIEN: That’s ’cause at one point in the early days of Late Night I realized that nobody was really in charge. We were being watched by eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-olds, but executives weren’t really minding the store. So we started pushing it and doing weirder and weirder and stranger things almost from the beginning. Then another dynamic kicked in, which is that when a show becomes profitable and the network is making lots of money off it, they just figure, “These guys seem to know what they’re doing, so let’s just not rock the boat.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: Is wanting to affect change or add to the discourse through comedy just wasting time? Is it ultimately pointless?

  CONAN O’BRIEN: No, it’s not pointless. I read a lot of American history, and I’m always coming away with, “This person was great and did a lot, but how did this person move things forward? How did they really change things?” Even when I look at people who had a huge impact on and in their time, like Napoleon, for example, I always come away thinking, “All these battles, what did that really mean? Did any of it move the chess piece of humanity forward? Did it really accomplish anything? Did it change anything?”

  I can get very cynical about things like that, but in the most abstract sense, people using their talent is never wasted. People using their talent in good faith will always be good for mankind in some way. I just can’t tell you how.

  Here’s the thing, really: whatever fuels someone’s need to be funny, their need to express themselves, they need to follow that direction. It pleased Richard Pryor and George Carlin to be funny the way they were funny; that was their fuel. Whether that fuel is something you read in the New York Times, what you saw in the street, what you saw when you were walking through Afghanistan, or what happened to you in the third grade—it’s all valid; it’s all good. We’re all just looking for our fuel.

  I don’t know what the Marx Brothers’ fuel was; maybe it was growing up in New York at the turn of the century, being Jewish immigrants and being stereotyped. When you think about it, who are the funny people? The Jews are funny, the Irish are funny, black people are funny—if you’re making huge blanket statements, you’d say those are groups that historically have been thought of as very funny. Well, you’re looking at three groups with huge amounts of fuel, like repression and cultural insecurity and all of that. I’m certainly mining my experience growing up Irish Catholic just outside Boston.

  All of us are grabbing on to our insecurities, whatever they are. In my life, I’m the middle of six kids in my family, and it was always, “What’s my place here? How do I fit into this pecking order?” It’s the most primal thing, you know? “Do I belong with all these smart people at this school? Am I the mistake?” It goes all the way through to “Do I belong here on television?” That’s the constant. That’s the stuff I mine a lot and get a lot of my humor from. That’s some of my fuel.

  I always tell the young people who come to work for our show, “If you learn one thing here, learn that we don’t really know what we’re doing.” And I don’t mean it as a joke. I’ve spent tens, hundreds, thousands of hours thinking about what’s funny, trying to be funny, and it’s still a struggle. It’s always a struggle.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Does that sort of become insurance that you don’t fall into pomposity or self-importance?

  CONAN O’BRIEN: That’s almost a religious belief for me. I really don’t think I’m better than other people, and my comedy should reflect that. One of the beauties of doing shows like ours is that you can never get too pompous, because of the sheer volume of comedy you have to do. You do five hours a week in front of an audience, you’re simply going to fail a certain percentage of the time. If it’s going really well, you’re going to fail, say, 20 percent of the time—and that’s if it’s going really well. There is no 100 percent. It just can’t happen at that volume.

  Comedians are constantly reminded that they’re mortal in ways like that. I always envy musicians, because I think they’re judged differently. Once a musician has his thirty songs everyone loves to hear, they come out, play their songs, and everyone applauds. It always looks to me like it’s very nonjudgmental. Whereas for a comedian, the crowd will tell you from joke to joke exactly how you’re doing and what they think about it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Comedy is the only performing-art form where the crowd gets to determine its existence. People can sit back and go, “That didn’t make me laugh, it’s not comedy.” With the cheesiest music, stupidest book, or crappiest painting, nobody argues that it’s not music or a novel or a painting. Comedy is the only art form where the recipient of it gets to decide if it even exists. I
f it doesn’t make them laugh, they don’t think “It’s not good comedy,” they think it’s not even comedy at all.

  CONAN O’BRIEN: I’ve always thought of laughter as coming from our reptile brains somewhere, because it’s actually some weird bodily process. It’s an art form where we’re dealing with ideas and language but the response you’re looking to create is like trying to get people to sneeze or hiccup. You’re looking for them to react by an involuntary physical process. And if they’re not sneezing and hic-cupping, it means you’ve failed. It’s not enough that they’re happy or entertained or amused or thinking about something, it has to achieve that weird, involuntary, physical response. I always find that very strange.

  A sense of humor is very democratic, really. With many kinds of art, people can feel, “I’m not qualified to tell you if that Jackson Pollock painting is good or not.” Or, “I don’t really know if this wine is good or not, because I don’t have the training.” But nobody says that about comedy. Nobody thinks they might not know enough about what’s funny. It’s an absolute—they laughed or they didn’t.

  If someone doesn’t think something is funny, no one can ever really say, “Well actually it’s very funny, you just don’t have the refined palate for it. You don’t know enough about it.” There’s no such thing. They’ll punch you in the throat if you say that.

  Early on, when I thought something was really funny but the audience just stared at it—which still happens, too—your first inner reaction is anger: “How dare you people not laugh at that?” But you’ve got to let that go. You just have to get to that place where there’s no right or wrong to it. I thought it was funny, but I can’t be mad at them because they didn’t think it was funny.

  And if you are mad about it, then just go home and bitch to your wife about it, but never let them know you’re angry.

  DAVE ATTELL

  ON COMEDY CENTRAL’S Insomniac, Dave Attell traveled from state to state, lingering in bars and all-night diners, poking at the pale, fetid, after-hours underbelly of America. Those travels only seemed to reinforce the perverse and often disturbing sense of humor on display in his shockingly funny stand-up. Attell talks about the importance of saying things that shouldn’t be said as he finds an ever-increasing audience rabid to hear a voice that doesn’t care what anyone thinks—he’s saying it anyway, ’cause it’s funny.

  DAVE ATTELL: If the crowd doesn’t get a joke, I will attack them.

  I’m coming up there with jokes I worked on or things I’m thinking about, and if they don’t get it, then I just start attacking. I have a “three strikes” rule with audiences. I’ve never really told anyone this until now, so this is a big scoop from me here, Jimmy Olsen: I always go up there with new stuff and try it. The audience doesn’t get it, I’ll try the next audience. That audience doesn’t get it, I’ll try the next one. After that one I’ll just get angry. And that’s usually when the funny stuff comes out. I guess that’s not very professional, but you just gotta keep working it until you find the funny angle on it. Some people just aren’t going to get it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you think what you do is satire?

  DAVE ATTELL: That’s a little Marcel Marceau of you to put me in a box like that.

  I don’t know. Satire doesn’t exactly fill up seats. No one’s, like, “Let’s go down there and hear that great satarian.” Is that even a word? Fuck it, let me try that again: no one’s going, “Hey, there’s some great satire going on down there! Let’s go!” It sounds a little fruity.

  It sounds like some chick on Flava Flav’s show. If I was a stripper, that’s what I’d call myself. I’d dance around the pole and the announcer would go, “Give it up for…Satire!”

  As I’ve just illustrated, I’m more sarcastic then I am a satirist. I like to think of myself as “the thinking man’s hack.” I like to do the dick joke and pussy joke and all that, you know? I don’t like middle-of-the-road stuff. I’m not a fan of jokes about going to the Walmart and having problems with the wife. I think you have to pick a side, and I pick the side that’s more shocking.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I’d say your material is satirical, because everything you do is subversive of the accepted way of looking at things. The point of view in all your jokes is from a perspective that, by any decent standard, is just plain wrong.

  DAVE ATTELL: I always thought of satire as having more of a political element to it, and I do some of that, because I have to; no one has that exciting a life that they can just talk about themselves over and over. But I’m not really a “change the world” kind of guy. A lot of people try to be political, because with The Daily Show and Colbert it’s a trendy thing now. As long as it’s funny you can say anything you want, but if you’re just up there preaching your agenda, then I turn tail. I’m sick of all that.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Well, colloquially, we put political commentary in the realm of satire, but you’re actually satirizing social conventions and norms in a dictionary definition of what satire is.

  DAVE ATTELL: Hello! Someone reads over here.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Your onstage character has a perspective that we laugh at, not with. Which is why some people get you, and others don’t. And some people not only don’t get you, they have to leave the room.

  DAVE ATTELL: Well, we live in a very conservative country with heavy religious overtones to it. What used to be considered just funny—like Sam Kinison, balls-to-the-wall, crazy stuff—is now seen as, “Whoa!”

  America’s different now. It’s taken a step back from how cool things were in the eighties and nineties. It seems now if you talk about drinking and smoking and sex and drugs or that kind of stuff, sometimes the crowd gets uncomfortable. For a lot of the younger comics, clubs want them to work clean and mainstream all the way now.

  A friend told me he did a joke about abortion, and some people in the crowd were of course offended, but the club owner took the side of the crowd instead of the comic. I think that’s wrong, you know? Manny, who used to run the Comedy Cellar and passed away not long ago, always took the side of the comics. You come to the show, you’re going to hear the word “cunt.” You’re going to hear all these things. It’s a comic show. Let it go! It’s nothing. It’s not real. This is not like at your job; it’s not office-speak here, you know?

  PAUL PROVENZA: Would Manny have taken Michael Richards’s side?

  DAVE ATTELL: Yeah, he definitely would have—even though what Michael Richards did was wrong and incredibly unfunny. That was the problem: he didn’t make it funny. If you say those kinds of things, you’d better back it up with the funny. And that was a crowd-work situation, so he should’ve been able to handle crowd work if he’s gonna do crowd work. You’re supposed to size up the scene, see what’s going on. There’s craft and skill involved.

  It’s a great YouTube moment, but I think it was blown way out of proportion. The fact that the guy was banned over it is ridiculous. This isn’t Survivor, where you get kicked off the island.

  Since then I’ve been saying: “I remember when saying the N-word would help your job. When it meant a raise or a week off.” And that’s the point, really.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Satire again, by the way.

  DAVE ATTELL: You don’t let up, do you?

  But yeah…There’s Michael Richards, and then there’s real racism. People get upset over the words instead of the deeds. The Jena Six, that is real. Real, serious, old-fashioned, cracker, “You ain’t from ’round here, boy” racism, and that’s what people really should be getting upset about. That shit happens for real. But everyone focused on Michael Richards—because he’s a celebrity.

  That whole thing really showed once again how audiences only lock onto people they’ve seen on TV. People who know me from TV will come to see me and I’ll do an hour of new, original material and they’ll go, “The TV show this, the TV show that…” I just did an hour of original material, but it’s still all about the TV thing. That bothers me.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Quit whining. At least people a
re coming to see you. You’re way ahead of Michael Richards there.

  DAVE ATTELL: Well, I’ve been taught to keep my racial opinions to the confines of my trailer park.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you find that people often turn off to just a single word before they even hear what the rest of a bit is about? That they can’t hear any irony whatsoever once you’ve pushed their hot button?

  DAVE ATTELL: Oh, yeah. I was doing a joke about the tsunami—as it was happening, that’s how cool I am—and it took people a long time to get that I was just using it as a reference. I wasn’t even talking about the tsunami itself, but just the word got them all, “Whoa, ease up.”

  The word is just a word. It means “an overwhelming thing.” What if it was a “tsunami of blow jobs”? They ruined it for themselves.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you find when that happens you amp it up and push them even further?

  DAVE ATTELL: Yeah, you always attack it more. Because you’re really fighting for the most precious thing in your life: your ego.

  Here’s another one that people hate, although it worked here at the Comedy Cellar one time. See, that’s the problem, it’s worked one time, but no one else ever gets it: “I live in a high-rise building, and I realized that I’m closer to God than I am to the ground. So here I am, high in the air making a sandwich and masturbating—much like an angel would…”

  And the audience kind of titters a little, “We get it, you live up high. Angels masturbating. That’s cute.”