Satiristas Page 13

  MATT WALSH: We told someone their car was blocking the entrance and an ambulance couldn’t get to the place so somebody just died as a result of them not moving their car. We just, like, bummed the audience out.

  AMY POEHLER: I’m totally the least brave of the group, I have to say. I’m probably the one that feels the most nervous about doing that kind of stuff.

  IAN ROBERTS: You know, Amy, I’d have a hard time explaining what you just said without using the word “pussy.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: What is it about provoking audiences that is as appealing as getting laughs?

  IAN ROBERTS: It gets you excited. It’s that same kind of fun you had making prank calls and throwing eggs at houses.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I think a lot of what we do is really just a fundamental life-long commitment to being bad boys and girls, doing and saying stuff we’re not supposed to.

  MATT WALSH: Or not being afraid to say the wrong thing.

  MATT BESSER: Or actually even being effective, too, by pissing off the people who are in the way. The enemy, you know? That’s how our pranks were. We would always take them out into the street so we could really pull off a prank, because in a theater you always know something’s fake, but once it’s taken out into the street, who knows what’s happening. That became the prank element of our Comedy Central show. We just talked our premises to people and had them react to them, and sometimes they were really uptight people, and that’s always funny.

  But even beyond the pranks, even just doing the “ASSSSCAT” show really is outrageous to some people. Unless you’re a comedian and you’re used to that freedom of language or the kinds of topics we get into, it’s really outrageous to some people. It’s surprising.

  MATT WALSH: Often in “ASSSSCAT” we’ll take on the opinion of an ignorant, terrible human being and play that to the nth degree. Sometimes people don’t think it’s funny, because we’re assuming they understand that we’re not endorsing what any character might be saying.

  MATT BESSER: People don’t always get that level, but the people who don’t get that level, I don’t think we really care about. We kind of laugh at the fact that they don’t get it.

  MATT WALSH: Unless they’re the majority.

  PAUL PROVENZA: To me that’s sort of the whole point of subversion in this context. I believe complacency and conformity are really the biggest parts of the world’s problems. Politicians and governments get away with war crimes because we the people have become complacent. Anything that challenges complacency I think has tremendous value. Saying and doing the “wrong” thing may be exactly what’s needed.

  MATT BESSER: Have you read The End of Faith, by Sam Harris? His whole thing is that sometimes, like in response to 9/11, the people who are moderate are more to blame than the fundamentalists, because they don’t allow there to be any discussion about religion. It’s not PC; it’s considered intolerant to question religion, so people don’t feel comfortable talking about the Koran and Islam or the Bible and what’s fucked up about any of it and no one talks about it.

  MATT WALSH: Just lay off the Catholics, that’s all I say.

  MATT BESSER: I’ll shut up then.

  MATT WALSH: I’m kidding. I was just being satirical.

  MATT BESSER: Oh. I didn’t recognize it. Sorry.

  IAN ROBERTS: Surprisingly, though, I do have a cutoff point for some stuff. I remember a guy at our theater who did jokes about fucking babies and killing women, and I just didn’t like it. I thought, “This guy shouldn’t be performing at our place.”

  MATT BESSER: That guy was just being shocking; there was no comedy to it. There can be, but there wasn’t.

  IAN ROBERTS: That’s the thing, you can do any topic, but you gotta be on the right side and you gotta have something to say.

  MATT BESSER: We’ve been asked by people in the audience to ban concepts. Like, “Don’t do anything about the Holocaust,” or whatever. We wouldn’t make fun of the Holocaust but we might make fun of someone’s perception of the Holocaust, and some people just don’t get that level. We’ll apologize, like, “Well, I’m sorry that offended you but it wasn’t offensive and we’re not gonna stop.” We are not gonna ban all references to the Holocaust or 9/11 or the N-word.

  IAN ROBERTS: We might be making fun of idiots that are really out there who say that word. How else are we supposed to do that without being that kind of person and using the word to show them to be the idiots they are?

  MATT BESSER: We would never ban a word from UCB. It’s not any word, it’s the hate behind the word. Lenny Bruce had a famous bit about exactly that. I could be really hateful against black people without ever saying the N-word, so does that make it okay as long as I don’t use that word? Of course not.

  And look at how gays are treated in comedy. I hope people will someday look back on this era the way we look back on humor against black people in the past. I hope someday it’ll be, “I can’t believe people openly ridiculed gays so much.” Just saying the word “gay” or “homo” is a punch line for so many jokes and no one blinks an eye at that. “Faggot” is said freely; no one gives a shit about that. So, how can you ban one word? You gotta start banning words all across the spectrum.

  AMY POEHLER: I would like to ban the word “panties.” I really don’t like that word. It makes me feel weird.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I’d like to ban the word “butthead,” because it’s the lamest replacement in sitcoms for “dickhead.” I cringe when they use that.

  AMY POEHLER: I’d also like to ban “bumfuck.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: The word or the action?

  AMY POEHLER: Just the word. Like when people say, “I was out in Bumfuck, New Jersey.” It’s just…arrrrgh.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Back in the day, when I was doing Comics Only on Comedy Central, standards and practices went through all the stuff we submitted and sent a formal letter with specific guidelines for what we could and couldn’t say. It was hilarious to read a formal document clarifying things like, “The phrase ‘ball sack’ is acceptable; however, it is not acceptable if preceded by the modifier ‘sweaty.’”

  So we could talk about a ball sack, but it had to be a clean, dry ball sack.

  MATT BESSER: On our TV show, I was smoking pot in one scene, and they specified the number of bong hits we could take. It wasn’t that I couldn’t take any, but I couldn’t take too many. They said, “You can take up to three,” or something like that. I guess, you know, “We don’t want you to be enjoying pot too much.”

  MATT WALSH: Anyway, here’s my thing about what people say and what they do: nobody thinks they’re a bad person or thinks they’re making terrible choices. No one wakes up and says, “I’m gonna figure out how to go to hell today. I’m gonna be an awful person and say and do horrible things.” What people do is try to accomplish what they believe are good things: “I’m going to improve the economy and make the country safe. To do that, I’ll get rid of all the Jews.”

  That’s how people think. They do what’s right to them. So if you wanna make fun of it, you’ve gotta support their point of view. You have to commit to it in order to see how all this horrible stuff follows from their simple intent to do the right thing. That’s how you show how fucked up and idiotic the logic is. You can’t just say, “These people are wrong!” That’s just polemic. That’s for politicians.

  IAN ROBERTS: I always ask my students to accept the principle that all people pursue pleasure and avoid pain. People have car accidents, get in fights and get their ass kicked, break up with the girl they should have married—and at each of those moments, nobody was thinking, “Let me wreck my life right now. Let me become paralyzed.” They were thinking, “Let me get there quickly,” or, “Let me get with that other girl, I don’t know about this one.”

  You’ve got to play it like the person really believes what they’re doing makes sense and is a good choice. That’s what’s really hysterical: people, all of us, we’re idiots. That’s what’s funny.

  I think that’s so
mething in the way we perform that maybe adds to it having a feeling of satire. We try to play things completely straight and real in our sketches. We’ve talked among ourselves about how some of the sketch now for younger kids is real goofy; talking in a voice you’d never use, playing it really broad. That just makes it less real. Instead, we play it like it matters. We make the guy in the scene who’s getting fucked with really be affected. We try to really feel what he would feel—right or wrong, good or bad.

  LILY TOMLIN

  FROM LAUGH-IN TO Saturday Night Live, and from feature films to her own award-winning one-woman Broadway shows, Lily Tomlin has created an unforgettable array of characters that capture all elements of the human condition. In her performance, she threw pointed barbs at the establishment. In her uncompromising personal life, she thumbed her nose quietly at convention as well. Tomlin reflects on the origins of her characters, what we might learn from them, and how similar even the most disparate of them—and us—truly are.

  LILY TOMLIN: I guess I was really trying to depict another human or culture type that I was either just enamored of—or, in some cases, appalled by.

  Growing up in an old apartment house in Detroit in a black neighborhood, with so many different kinds of people, with parents who were Southern and had come north to work in the factories, every apartment was like a microcosm of life. Their foods, their furnishing, the way they spoke, their prejudices, their advances, their failures—they were all so different, yet so similar, and I was just mad for all of them. In some ways, I wanted to just communicate something about humans in general. Perhaps I wanted people to see them as affectionately and as sympathetically as I did.

  By the way, I think I’m actually articulating all of this to you right now perhaps for the first time ever.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I’m honored, thank you. What you do is very much about looking at those ordinary lives that are overlooked or unrecognized. They’re human beings, not clichés or archetypes, and you give voice to their unique perspectives. To me, giving voice to those otherwise invisible individuals and ideas is really a political act.

  LILY TOMLIN: Well, I like that you say that. I couldn’t say it myself, but I like to think that’s absolutely so. If that’s what you get from it—it sounds like a much better thing than just wanting to get famous and get laughs.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Was your motivation just to get famous and get laughs?

  LILY TOMLIN: I used to put shows on all the time when I was a kid, but to me that was all “play” I didn’t know people made a living doing it.

  I was pre-med in college—believe me, it was a pretense of the highest order—but thank God I got into a college show. It was The Madwoman of Chaillot, and I was one of the “capitalist women,” who was banned to the cellar. I had to improvise my entrance, and I was just a big hit. I felt totally comfortable on the stage. I thought, “I wish I could make a living doing this.”

  Then I got into another college show, this time a sketch show—very collegiate kind of stuff. A takeoff on Gunsmoke, a takeoff on the Academy Awards…And I thought, “Gee, this material is void of any content. It’s sort of cute, but that’s about it.” Before the first performance, the kid who was the producer was pacing up and down going, “Man, if I just had one more sketch or monologue…”

  Now, we had “society pages” in the paper back then, and Charlotte Ford was making her “debut” that year; it was a $250,000 event—a huge amount back then. The lid has just been blown off the fact that Grosse Pointe, the rich suburb, was a covertly segregated community; if you were anything other than white, if you were even swarthy, you would get demerits and couldn’t buy property there. They did their best to keep anybody ethnic, anybody the wrong race out of Grosse Pointe.

  So I improvised a woman being interviewed on a show called Distinguished Guest, and adlibbed all this stuff about my daughter’s debut party, and all that topical stuff. And at the end, after the character was so elegant, so careful in her language and so proper, as she gets up out of her chair, she puts a hand on each knee and spreads her legs. I was just a sensation doing that monologue because it was so topical and so relevant—

  PAUL PROVENZA: Was that the genesis of your “Tasteful Lady” character??

  LILY TOMLIN: Yes! It was! I did it on Laugh-In because I’d shown her to George Schlatter, the producer. Everything she did was “tasteful” she’d say things like, “I’m appealing now to the tasteful people in the audience…” Of course, we all know what “tasteful” requires or implies, so it was about breaking all that pretension with her crude kind of rise out of the chair.

  Then after doing that sketch show, I started working in the coffee houses in Detroit, where I started consciously developing monologues.

  PAUL PROVENZA: It’s interesting that you first found yourself being funny improvising in The Madwoman of Chaillot, a play that focuses so much on class struggle.

  LILY TOMLIN: Yeah, that is interesting…Because I was class-conscious. I lived in what might be thought of as a “ghetto,” and in concentric circles spreading out from my neighborhood—which was my whole world—with each block the houses got progressively bigger. I went to school with kids who lived in some of the big houses. And in Detroit in those days, rich gentiles moved out to Palmer Park and rich Jews moved to Sherwood Forest, leaving the rest of us behind with a diminishing tax base, and I knew people in both of those communities too, because I was always hypermobile, socially.

  All through my life, I was eager to somehow be with all these different kinds of people—but I knew the difference; I knew what it meant to people. My mother was a nurse’s aide and my father was a factory worker—and a big gambler, too, and I probably shouldn’t have, but I used to go to the track with him so I was hip to all that, too. I knew what money was and what it meant. And I knew what sex was, too—when you live in a tiny apartment, you just know everything that goes on with people.

  All of that creates a compassion for, and understanding of, people. You see them at their highest and lowest; you know that for people who put up a good front or are high and mighty all the time, they’re not. They’re all pretty fragile. I got very early that everybody had been a baby once, you know? It’s a leveling realization; suddenly nobody had any authority. I got that my mother had been a baby, my teachers had all been babies; they all had been a kid like I was, and I knew they didn’t really know a whole lot either.

  It may be a cliché, but it’s true that all people can do the most noble, elevated things when you least expect it, and they can all also do the most base things.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Having been raised Southern Baptist, how did you process that very particular experience and how do you think it manifests itself in what you do?

  LILY TOMLIN: I so often meet “born again” people who think God singled them out. Like if they survived an accident, God particularly saved them—because they were Christians or whatever. That God has something in mind for them to do; “Their work here is not finished,” in the parlance of that subculture—which is really a major culture. There seems to be an arrogance in all of that.

  Until I was about ten years old and had any consciousness about it at all, I lived in terror that I would not be “saved” before I died. The preacher would call for people to “come forward,” you’d go to the front of the church where there were people for you to confess your sins to and to accept Christ as your savior to get “saved.” The adults all just acted so out of control, weeping and wailing, beating their breasts and carrying on…and I just thought, “Oh, this is so absolutely embarrassing.”

  I said, “I’ll never be able to do that.” It didn’t feel genuine; I couldn’t transcend that. I knew if I did it, I’d be playing a part. But it puts a lot of terror in a kid’s heart. Every time you’d step out of the church after services, somebody’d say something like, “Oh, the sky looks funny. The end of the world could be coming.”

  And you’d think, “Holy mackerel! I don’t get another chance to go forward till n
ext Sunday and what if the end of the world comes before then??” For a seven-or eight-year-old to be thinking this all the time is a bit…oppressive.

  What opened my eyes was Faye Mathis, a girl I knew in grade school. Her parents were a bit intellectual, and Jewish as well, so they had a whole ’nother perspective. One day Fay said to me, “Do you think God made man, or did man make God?”

  That had never occurred to me. It was so revelatory, I never worried too much again.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Well, you went on to lead a life that is completely antithetical, by fundamentalist standards.

  LILY TOMLIN: You mean because I’m gay?

  PAUL PROVENZA: No, because you’re in show business. And also gay.

  LILY TOMLIN: Yeah, well, that’s true. But that doesn’t seem to be too much of a factor. Maybe the older relatives would have been more shocked or dismayed about my being gay, but you know what? Fame supersedes everything. They probably excused me because I was famous and I could get them tickets to Jay Leno.

  PAUL PROVENZA: When you became a star in the seventies, it was pretty risky to be “out,” and you handled it in such a way that was pretty fearless and really honest. I particularly remember a moment on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson that to me was so bold and disarmingly honest.

  LILY TOMLIN: You mean when he asked me about not having children? Well, that was very much of that time. “You don’t want to have children?” was something they could broach in public rather than whether or not you were gay. So I remember Johnny asking, “You’re not married, are you?”

  I said, “No, I’m not.”

  Then he said, “Don’t you ever want to have children?”

  And I said, “You mean biologically bear children? No, I don’t have any desire to do that.” Remember, this was 1973—and the audience just stopped dead. They went totally silent. Even just that short time ago, for a female to say in public that she didn’t want to be a mother was really divisive. It’s hard to believe, but it was a very strong thing to say publicly. It was, “Well, what’s wrong with you that you don’t want to be a mother?” It was un-American, you know?