Satiristas Read online

  And then, this is the point where they hate me when I say, “You probably think it’s easy sleeping in a high-rise apartment, but it’s not, because the prayers of homeless children keep coming up through the windows. I have to shout out the window, ‘Could you keep it down down there? Some people have a mortgage! Stop grumbling for food and methadone so I can get some sleep here!’”

  People don’t like that part at all. I guess people take it as I’m anti-homeless people.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I don’t get excited much by comedy that doesn’t fuck with my head a little. I think that comes from the notion that as comedians, we have a license to do things that can’t be done in any other form, so if you don’t take the opportunity to say something ballsy or challenge something, you’ve just squandered an amazing opportunity.

  DAVE ATTELL: I agree with you about that; those are always the most fun comics to watch. But they’re not for everybody. I think I’m setting myself up as an asshole to begin with, so I’m kind of baiting them to hate me. I actually like that part of it. I kind of like the negativity sometimes more than them going “Whoo!”—you know? Sometimes that’s just way better, because I hate myself.

  I come at my comedy with my very-low-self-esteem, verbal-abuse family background. That’s helped me in comedy more than anything else. Any negativity I get from a crowd almost, like, warms me. It’s like going home.

  Truth is, the best comedy comes from the losses, not the wins, in your life. “I just banged five strippers, and they’re all hot!” Where’s the comedy there? See, I’m the loser; the guy who went home alone and masturbated while the other guy was banging the hot strippers. I like that guy. Everything is about winning in our society, and it’s fucking boring. Dancing with the Stars. You want to win that? Really? “I’m a better dancer than Heather Mills, a one-legged whore!” Does that make you feel better at the end of the day?

  But America sure loves that shit, so it’s really hard to come at them from a different angle. People are so complacent with just buying what they’re sold, and it’s really hard to break that. I guess if I’m making any points with what I’m doing, it’s breaking up that whole through line of “I’ve been told this is what’s good; I’ll buy anything they tell me I should.”

  I always feel bad when I do a college. They’re at that age where anything goes, right? You’d figure these kids are like you were at that age, you know? But all they really have is this shopping-mall, consumer mentality. That really bothers me. Very conservative. Spoon-fed. And sneaky. There’s like a sneakiness. Now I sound like the old guy who lives down the block, “You’re sneaky! You kids are sneaky!” But they’re sneaky. You know they’re doing all the stuff that we all did at that age, but they’re pretending they’re not. Like they’ve learned how to gloss it over or hide it from their parents or something like that.

  And they seem very happy with their lives in the world. They’ve been taught that they’re all special. They’ve been taught through You-Tube, Dancing with the Whatevers, and all that crap that they should be famous. So it’s very hard for them to give you a moment and listen to what you or anyone else but them has to say. They suck! That’s what I’m saying. The kids are asses, goddammit. Sneaky asses.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Audiences in general seem to have that sense of entitlement. Rather than see what a performer has to offer, it’s more, like, “We want the show we want, and if you don’t give it to us we’re going to walk out or be pissed off and complain.”

  DAVE ATTELL: If everybody acted as prim and proper in their real lives as they do when they come see me then we’d live in this fucking fantasy world of just do-goodism. Everything would be just great and Jesus-on-Earth perfect. But they’ve been taught not to laugh at certain things.

  I have this joke about abortion—which I think is a different take from anyone else’s abortion joke, by the way: “Ladies, they could take away from you your right to have a safe, legal abortion at any moment. But they can never take away your right to get drunk and throw yourself down a flight of stairs. No one can arrest gravity, ladies.” And of course, that gets big groans.

  But you look out in the crowd, and it’s, like, girls in their twenties. If this was 1974, they would be picketing Washington singing the theme from Maude to keep their right to an abortion. And it’s not that they’re really religious, any of them, it’s that they’ve just been taught that abortion is something they shouldn’t laugh about no matter what.

  But if you say it through a hilarious puppet, people might get it, because ventriloquism is the best way to get bad news.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I wish you worked on Sesame Street.

  DAVE ATTELL: People think comedy’s not that important, but let me tell you something: if you go see a comedy show, and at some point after that show you’re molested by a priest, well, then you just weren’t listening. ’Cause priests are boy fuckers; every comic has a joke about it, so you can’t go, “How could this happen?? Oh, right, I remember. The comics were saying how the priests fucked a bunch of kids. Right.”

  I mean, come on! Does it have to be a ringtone before anybody takes it seriously?

  PAUL PROVENZA: Well, since you’re loath to call what you do satire, what are some things you like that are satire?

  DAVE ATTELL: I think of something like Blazing Saddles. If you really look at Blazing Saddles—a great movie, and still funny—Mel Brooks really did something very cool there. He confronted racism in that movie in a really funny, over-the-top way. Blazing Saddles is what I think of if you’re talking about satire.

  Spaceballs, not so much.

  South Park is another great example of really well-done satire. I don’t know how they turn it around so quickly, but whether it’s a celebrity issue or something political, what they do with it is just great. It’s super-funny—but what they do and how they do it is also important. It’s, like, meaningful.

  But for the rest of us who aren’t animated, we need things like food, you know? So sometimes we just gotta whore it out.

  DOUG STANHOPE

  MANY ARE FAMILIAR with Doug Stanhope from his brief tenure on Comedy Central’s The Man Show, but watching Stanhope on basic cable is like watching a snuff film edited to run as an in-flight movie—you’re just not getting the full effect. His fearlessly challenging Showtime special is a better example of just what it is he does, but the live stand-up arena is where Stanhope has few if any artistic peers. He offers up the boozy detritus of his own life, seeking out truth in the most depraved, shocking corners of human behavior and exposing numbness in the comfortable and cozy ones, all with dark, hilarious intensity. From his ultimate outsider vantage point, we see the forest, and the questions about where we stand among the trees can often be unsettling. Here, he sums up his worldview—or is it a nihilistic lack thereof? Ah, who gives a shit.

  DOUG STANHOPE: When you’re onstage, you’re just a fucking whore. No one ever complains about the blow job you get from a girl that sucks your dick because she wants to, but if you pay for a blow job, you’ll critique it, bitch about how it wasn’t worth the money, it wasn’t the way you like to get blown, and all of a sudden you’re some reviewer.

  I get onstage, and it just all seems like a fucking scam. What “funny” really is to me is hanging out with other comics around a table. Real, genuine “comedy” is making the guy stocking shelves at Walmart laugh when he’s having a shitty day. You just say shit no one else ever says and you break the social mold and make someone laugh or guffaw or gasp on the job when they don’t expect it. Then it means something, you know?

  The only time it’s truly rewarding is when you make someone laugh just ’cause you wanted to, then you leave. You don’t ask them to buy a CD in return, you know? That’s how it is when comedians are just hangin’ out: no commerce, no “job to do,” just some funny shit we’re giving away free to each other and laughing our asses off.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I know you spend time over in the U.K. where there’s a really cool comedy scene; nutty stuf
f can happen anywhere. Comedy seems more alive and vibrant there, and there’s more of an enthusiastic audience that supports and encourages that. There’s an audience there that comes out for comedy now the way it used to be in the early days of the comedy boom here when people came out specifically looking for something different. Now they mostly want the same sanitized, boring stuff they’re already familiar with.

  DOUG STANHOPE: Yeah, I remember when I started in ’ninety or ’ninety-one, you’d be in some fucking Red Lion Hotel lounge on a Tuesday, and the emcee would go, “Is everyone ready for comedy?”

  They’d all go, “Yeahhhhh!” And they would mean it. They were alive. They were excited to be there. Now they just come in, sit, and cross their arms.

  PAUL PROVENZA: The comedy club scene’s gotten so institutionalized and programmed to where everything’s so predictable. I think that happens to everything in this culture at some point. What are people excited by in the general culture, American Idol? Can they genuinely be passionate about that stuff?

  DOUG STANHOPE: I don’t know. American Idol—Jesus, do they hand out these fuckin’ I LOVE CLAY AIKEN signs? Are they making the studio audience do that shit so the public just assumes, “Everyone seems to love it, I must love it too?” I don’t know, man. Television is such bullshit.

  You know when you do stand-up for TV, they have “fluffers” doing fucking warm-up, making the crowd practice screaming like idiots, pretending to be excited about something? For the taping of my half-hour special, they rounded up fifteen hundred people for the audience and went through the paces with them to the point where when I was introduced, they fucking went ape shit, like I’m The Beatles or something. I thought, “You people don’t even know who I fucking am!”

  So I opened up with that. I walked out, “It sounds like all my fans are here!”

  They all screamed, “YEEEAHH!!!”

  I went, “Then what’s my name?”

  Fucking dead silence.

  Of course they cut that out of the show, because they don’t want any truth or reality to anything. When it aired, it went, “It sounds like all my fans are here”—CUT—“Wow old people complain a lot…” Some dumb, obvious edit; the fucking frauds.

  I don’t know. I don’t sit around analyzing this shit. I’m a drunk; I’m not one of those guys, “I see comedy as the satirical voice of blah, blah, blah…” Shit sucks, that’s all I know. I’m not the scientist of why everything melts into some bland flavor. I just usually go, “This sucks,” then head to the bar and bitch about it all.

  But America dulls down everything. Maybe everywhere does, but I live in America, and everything always seems to be dulled down. Music, cars, movies—everything. I guess it gets dull for a while until people get sick of it, go, “Fuck this,” then everything’s different and crazy with Mohawks and slam-dancing. It’s probably cyclical, I just don’t know if I’m gonna live through the cycle.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I always say that in live comedy, where we can say anything we want and there’s no FCC or advertisers to answer to, the only real censoring comes from the audience.

  DOUG STANHOPE: I’ve heard you say that, and you’re right. It’s like the populace has gotten in lockstep with the media or something and just recite, “Ooh, that’s bad.” Come on. And it’s like people have some sense of entitlement: “My dad died of cancer, so for you to say anything about cancer…” What??

  I had a whole fucking problem a few nights ago over mentioning Ecstasy in a positive light. That’s like the tamest thing you could pick out of my set, but that’s the thing some girl went into histrionics over, because, “My sister died from one hit and anyone can, blah blah blah…” You can get flak over everything. If I just did dick jokes, they’d get mad ’cause I said “titty fuck” or whatever.

  Everyone will find a reason to get mad at anything if they want to, and it’s all the same. At one gig recently, this Christian group sat through all the “kick-fucking a girl with cerebral palsy” jokes and every other horrible thing in my act, but then I got to some Jesus stuff, and as a group they all marched out, making a big show of getting upset. It said right on the fucking bill: “Triple-X Rated”—which I didn’t put there, but it’s the only buzz word they could think of to keep the weak out—so it was like, “Oh, I see; this isn’t the triple-X rated stuff your Christian group was looking for.”

  You can’t talk logic with those people. They need their Jesus. If your life was working in a chain factory outside Carbondale, Illinois, with bleak fucking winters, and you’ve married that girl you got pregnant when she was sixteen because that’s what you were told you’re supposed to do, and now you’re thirty-five—you’re not gonna start second-guessing those beliefs. It would fucking destroy everything your whole life’s been about. You need that Jesus and structure and those “family values” just to get you through the fucking day. You’re not gonna go, “I’ve lived my whole life wrong. Fuck my wife and kids, I’m gonna learn ballet like I always wanted.”

  I assume most of that comes from fear. And belonging. People join churches the same way some people join gangs, just to belong to something. Things like religion work because people are hopeless and want to believe in something. They don’t wanna end up like me, fuckin’ sitting in a basement all day with you.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I consider this a good day for me. Anyway, the flip side of all the people who walk out is all the people who are thrilled to hear that same stuff, and to find out they belong to something, too, even if it’s just you and them.

  DOUG STANHOPE: That’s the only good thing, and why it’s nice to play all the shitty towns I play instead of David Cross–ing it up and just playing among your own element, never taking gigs you just know are gonna be miserable. Occasionally that one kid comes up to you; a fat, loser Goth kid, alone, no one will fuck him, so he has no chicks or drugs, but he’ll come up and go, “I’ve always thought that, but no one’s ever said it.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: A couple of years ago, Steve Hughes was accused of anti-Semitism in the Edinburgh Fringe press over a joke he did, and then they came after you and a few others with similar accusations. What do you think that was really all about?

  DOUG STANHOPE: I don’t think those stories come from any real place. Writers are looking for an angle; I don’t think he really saw racism there but he saw an angle where he could push racism. He could push a fear button and justify it somehow to get attention for himself and his paper. On any genuine intellectual level, if you’re sitting with him drinking a beer, would that writer go, “Yeah, I believe Steve Hughes is a racist”? No, you saw an angle, you fucking scumbag.

  PAUL PROVENZA: But audience members do the same thing, twisting something someone’s crafted usually to make entirely the opposite point.

  DOUG STANHOPE: But they follow the lead of the guy that’s looking for an angle. Very few people in this world are actually conveying their own opinions. People parrot ideas from some media garbage they heard, or half-heard, or their friends heard somewhere. It’s all so media-driven, you wonder, “If there were no media, what would I worry about?” It sure as fuck wouldn’t be terrorism, you know?

  Really, when you think about it that way, all the comics doing Jerry Seinfeld kind of observational stuff are the real social commentators, because all that little stuff they talk about actually is the stuff that bothers you in your life: things like traffic and assholes on line at the overpriced coffee place. You don’t really worry about terrorism or wars for oil or pedophilia in the Church; they’re not real in most peoples’ lives. Most people are not in the military and don’t have kids that are being fingered by priests. What actually matters to all of us on any average day is the fast-food guy that forgot your fries and the fees they charge at the ATM, not immigration or gays getting married or any of that shit everyone’s always jackin’ off about all the time. So really, in those realistic terms, I’m bullshit, and Jay Leno’s the real deal. Jerry Seinfeld is the meaningful social commentator; he’s talking about things t
hat really do matter to us.

  PAUL PROVENZA: To be honest, that’s a perspective I never considered, and frankly, it scares me.

  DOUG STANHOPE: That’s why I try not to fucking think so much. I’m kind of a reluctant nihilist. I want to believe in something, it’s just that as much as I search the gray matter, I can’t find hope. So I just try to be the happiest miserable guy I can be; I’ll enjoy my misery. I keep rooting for the home team and hope for a small victory here and there, but there’s no fucking utopia in the mix that I can find. I keep stacking that puzzle and it keeps falling down.

  PAUL PROVENZA: And yet, you actually considered running for president. What?

  DOUG STANHOPE: Yeah, I figured I’d take a stab at that before I quit. Might as well take a shot at being the leader of the free world before I drop out of society and take a beachfront in Costa Rica, right?

  PAUL PROVENZA: But this wasn’t some joke, right? You were seriously going to run as a legitimate candidate.

  DOUG STANHOPE: Oh, it wasn’t a joke, I was going to run as the Libertarian Party presidential candidate. The party leaders were committed to me running as their guy in the 2008 election. I went through all the paperwork and legal crap you have to do just to be president of this fuckin’ country, but I would’ve had to stop making a living in order to do it. It turns out that doing my stand-up constitutes “campaigning,” so if I got paid for it, I’d be in breach of campaign finance laws, so I had to drop out of the race. Probably better for everybody.

  PAUL PROVENZA: What was your platform?

  DOUG STANHOPE: Individual freedom, and limiting government to a government so limited even I could run it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Oh, you mean like what it was meant to be?

  DOUG STANHOPE: Exactly.

  I think it’s time for entertainment to take over politics. They’ve used entertainment for so long to divert and distract people from what’s going on politically, it’s just ripe to backfire on them.