Satiristas Page 15

  And I meant it. Buck Henry and I bullshitted about it for a year, and meant it all.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you feel you’ve lived that way over the course of your own career?

  MIKE NICHOLS: It’s very hard to be proud of yourself for anything, but I’m “not displeased” with myself for having tried to do a lot of different stuff. I don’t want to be the master of everything. Once you are, then you’re sort of an eminence instead of what I get, which is “veteran.” And that’s fine—but what I don’t believe in is “icon.” Nobody becomes an icon without working on it, and it’s not worth it.

  You do, in fact, have to take chances. But only you know what they are.

  PAUL PROVENZA: In terms of what each of our own challenges may be?

  MIKE NICHOLS: Nobody else can tell. First of all, we’re very lucky in a way, because “selling out” is an idea of the past; there’s no such thing. If you’re lucky enough to get two million bucks for a commercial in Japan, more power to you, man; wish I could. There’s no selling out, there’s only selling. But I’ve always thought about disassembling the whole thing, and have enormously enjoyed putting that into effect.

  I always suspected that moving toward invisible would be good. Because you then get to have what happens to you every day, and it’s yours, and it’s life. And I’m loving it more and more. You have nothing left to prove to yourself; you’re the only one you ever pay any attention to. And you can look and listen and love and have your actual life.

  So much of our work—a comic’s work, writer’s work, actor’s work—is instead of life. It’s great, it’s like a constant orgasm, it has great joys and depression in it—it’s living—but it’s not exactly life.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Some people do comedy—specifically stand-up—that’s aggressive and confrontational and harsh. But I really feel the root of any anger they demonstrate comes from a place of beauty. Theirs is anger at a lack of kindness, at a lack of compassion, at injustice and pain people suffer or perpetuate upon one another. That’s all really life-affirming, I think, despite any harshness in their approach.

  MIKE NICHOLS: That’s a tough, complicated one, because kindness is one of the last things you’d look for in stand-up, capital-letter “COMEDY.” Because comedy’s sort of the opposite. It’s a place to vent our rage by making as much fun as possible of those who’ve made us mad.

  If you go all the way back to Aristotle, comedy is like tragedy in its concern with the fall of someone in a higher station than us. In comedy, though, nobody gets hurt.

  PAUL PROVENZA: It goes through some sort of alchemy, where rage somehow becomes joyful.

  MIKE NICHOLS: How smart you are. It turns a corner—and it happens to be my favorite corner—from rage to kindness. And that connection is right before our eyes, which is the hardest thing in the world to do with farce. We tried to do it with The Birdcage; you try to do it here and there. It is a beautiful thing.

  There’s something about revenge, too. Revenge drives most of the plots we love. Cinderella is the ur-plot, made over and over in a thousand different ways, whether it’s a maid at the Plaza, a working girl, you name it—it’s Cinderella, and what drives it is revenge. I think that’s what drives comedy, and a lot of theater and movies too. And that revenge is sweet, because it’s laughing at that prick that beat you up in school.

  You find that more in America than other places, for obvious reasons: high school is the central American experience. And popularity is the central aspect of high school. In fact, a friend of mine has a kid who, when asked, “How are you doing in high school?” said, “I’m the most popular of the unpopular kids.”

  What we do in life is always, I think, based on revenge for humiliations suffered in high school. Even if it was mild, or invisible to others, there are humiliations. And I think the joy of comedy for comedians—and laughers; we’re all both—is revenge. Talk to anybody smart, anyone beautiful, anybody who manages well and succeeds, and invariably they were miserable in high school; they were outcasts.

  When Elaine May and I were on Broadway, this guy came up to me afterward and started, “You don’t remember me, but—”

  And I said, “I remember you very well. You’re Eddie Pompadour. You’re a prick.” When I was ten years old, he had pushed me under water in the lake and stood on my head and kept me under. He looked dumbfounded. I said, “So, what are you doing now?”

  “I’m selling used cars.”

  “I’m so glad.”

  And that was it! It wasn’t like I’ve dwelled on this person since the age of ten, but it felt as if I’d lived all those years just for that moment, and now I had it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: It is, ultimately, revenge, but unlike most of our tormentors, we don’t need to make them smaller to feel bigger ourselves. We’re really just trying to even the playing field.

  MIKE NICHOLS: And if the revenge shows, it’s not funny. The minute you see a flash of revenge, it’s out of the question; it doesn’t work. You’ve revealed that you’re really just still that high school kid going after whoever made you miserable.

  PAUL PROVENZA: How does that relate to satire or social commentary, where it’s not revenge against an individual or a specific incident, but against a mindset or culture or some injustice?

  MIKE NICHOLS: In order to stay funny when going after people in politics, one has to remember to some extent the idea of democracy and justice for all. You can’t be all the way to the Left or the Right. You can’t be Ann Coulter and be funny. It’s pseudo-funny because it’s very shocking; it’s almost like a parody of an actual position. But it’s not funny. It has nothing to do with comedy. Comedy is vastly more diplomatic.

  Now, when you take it to its outermost edges, you have Lenny Bruce—or, more recently, Sarah Silverman, who clearly in some way is going for the Lenny bar; it’s one of the reasons she’s so interesting. And all those clichés about funny girls aren’t there—she’s very hot; very pretty. She’s hot and pretty and she’s going for the Lenny Bruce bar? I’m interested.

  But in order to do that, you have to live with going too far all the time, because that’s what you’ve set before yourself. And everybody has a different temperature of “Well, now you’ve gone too far.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: I find Sarah one of the most interesting comedians working today. In many ways, there’s no difference between what she’s doing and what Stephen Colbert’s doing. She’s embracing an absurd point of view. And when she makes fun of somebody or something that might be in bad taste to make fun of, she’s really commenting on our relationship to that.

  MIKE NICHOLS: That’s a brilliant description, and it’s accurate. It takes both intelligence and a certain amount of training to understand that she’s representing a viewpoint and that she’s not the person espousing it. That’s already pretty sophisticated. She does it pretty clearly and well.

  Stephen Colbert is somewhat to the right of that, because he’s on night after night, and each night has an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage is that you can educate people as to your tone and where you stand over time. The disadvantage is that you can’t appall them night after night; you can only delight them. And in order to delight them, you have to move back a little. You can’t go to the extremes every night.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Right, whereas Sarah’s stand-up is more of a concentrated nugget that we consume once in a while. And I believe that she does it in a way that’s not always immediately apparent. It sneaks up on you.

  MIKE NICHOLS: Exactly. Whoopi Goldberg ran into that trouble now and then. The problem with what you could call “intellectual comedy” is that you are either talking to the anointed few, or you’re confusing people.

  PAUL PROVENZA: My instinct would be that you’re confronting people, but confusing them is a much more subtle and interesting thing to do.

  MIKE NICHOLS: I say “confusing” because, in general, we’re no longer accustomed to somebody who goes too far. We don’t see a lot of that.

  Contrast
that with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. I watch them a lot, and it seems to me that they’re possessed by a kind of joy of getting it right. “Making a difference” is such a hideous, used-up idea, but they have a joy in making the difference of saying something so clearly that everybody can hear it and see it.

  Watching Jon Stewart is how I know I’m living in a free country. If you take him and Colbert away, I worry a lot more about things like Guantanamo—coming, as I did, from Nazi Germany, that subject really pushes a button for me.

  And like every good satirist, I think they’re beyond not only politics, but also beyond revenge. I think Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have gotten to a point where they really make everyone happy. Which changes your life.

  It’s funny…I’ve thought a lot about comics like Jack Benny and Steve Martin, for example, who are, or who seem to be, immune to “the comic’s disease” the way some people are immune to certain viruses.

  PAUL PROVENZA: The comic’s disease?

  MIKE NICHOLS: It’s an absolutely consuming self-obsession: the inability to consider anything but whether they got the laugh. And it’s the corruption of spirit that comes from the reward—the work and the reward being at the same moment.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Is that where people begin to compromise their integrity?

  MIKE NICHOLS: Well, they begin to not develop their integrity. Or, if they had integrity, they begin to dismantle it. Because for them there’s only that one God: the laugh. And there’s no arguing with the laugh.

  To live that way for any length of time, to have only the work and the instantaneous reward, to have the laugh and only the laugh as a God, is to not do good things to the spirit. If not to the spirit, then to the personality. You have to spend that six months or a year just being with your love. Just being with your kids, just living—or else what is it for? The work just becomes a recording.

  Without even thinking for a minute, we could both name a dozen people who are unbearable everywhere else except onstage, where they’re hilarious or lovable or whatever is useful to get the laugh. But imagine you’re stuck with this person for any length of time at all. That is a hell that makes the old-fashioned, narcissistic movie star look like Mother Theresa. Those comedians are incapable of considering anything but themselves, after a certain point.

  PAUL PROVENZA: And Jack Benny and Steve Martin are examples of comedians who are somehow immune to that?

  MIKE NICHOLS: I believe so. Both technically and emotionally, Jack Benny, as I’m sure you know, didn’t care who had the laugh line. He would find another one after the laugh. He wanted to time the laugh. He didn’t care who got it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: People these days think of Jack Benny as old-school or sort of retro; he was actually postmodern. His comedy was about the space between the lines. It was all about when he wasn’t speaking; that’s where he found comedy that only he could’ve found.

  MIKE NICHOLS: Precisely! The biggest laugh anybody ever got on radio, one he built toward for twenty years of defining his character as a miser, was where a guy held him up and said, “Your money or your life.” It’s the most famous pause in comedy history, and the biggest laugh ever on radio. From not a line, but a pause.

  Then, of course, the most brilliant line after the pause: “I’m thinking it over!”

  He was also the exemplar of comedy that is sweetness. If there was a joke on somebody, it was always on himself. Never in his working life did he go after anybody else. That’s not so easy to do. I knew him a bit and he was, in fact, a saintly man. He and George Burns are my memories of a kind of happiness that can only be achieved through love. Love of their wives, love of each other, love of their work, their world, their golf club, lunches together…

  It was real. And nobody paid for their laughs. Ever.

  Steve Martin is certainly like that. Steve’s figuring something out. He’s trying something; building something; making something. He’s much more like a mathematician.

  PAUL PROVENZA: There’s something very intellectual about his approach, yet as a stand-up he was completely childlike. Silly, goofy—all those things that belied the intelligence behind it.

  MIKE NICHOLS: I once sat at a table of Nobel Prize–winning scientists—it doesn’t matter how I got there—and the thing that struck me, forcefully and constantly, was that they were like little kids. They were extremely innocent. They were geniuses.

  They didn’t develop all these defenses and vices, because numbers were what concerned them and fascinated them. And they couldn’t develop numbers to do for people. Steve has a touch of that, as if he’s moving forward with the sense that he’s from another planet and has just learned our ways perfectly. I think it has to do with something not unlike those mathematicians. He’s someplace in his head that’s not exactly earth, but he’s adapted beautifully. And never, in almost a lifetime of knowing him, a moment of unkindness.

  CRAIG FERGUSON

  FIRST DRUMMING FOR Scottish punk band The Bastards from Hell, and later performing monologues as the provocatively named Bing Hitler, Craig Ferguson is a performer not afraid to zig when others are zagging. Out of the crucible of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Ferguson emerged white-hot in the vanguard of “alternative” comedy in the U.K. He survived his decade-long bad-boy bacchanalia to emerge sober but still sharp as Mr. Wick on The Drew Carey Show, and now, as a global comic conscience, is able to simultaneously embrace and embarrass America five nights a week as the host of the Late Late Show.

  CRAIG FERGUSON: That weekend when Britney Spears shaved her head and got a tattoo? I’ve had weekends like that. I know that thing. I know how it feels—and it don’t fucking feel good. And when I went through my own shit like that, I didn’t have all those fucking cameras around me everywhere all the time. Well, I thought I did but it turned out I was just hallucinating.

  I did that monologue about how I was not going to do any more Britney Spears jokes, because she was having one of her meltdowns at the time, and I just felt so strongly that this poor, very young girl is clearly a fucking mental patient, and you just don’t laugh at mental patients. You try to help them. You laugh at fucking Donald Trump and all that kind of shit. So I just didn’t wanna join in with the gang on that one.

  What got my goat that day was the glee with which everybody expected me to slice and dice the poor woman. I got to work that day, and everybody was all geared up to do it. And I just felt, “Fuck you. Watch this.” Because the minute you expect me to do something and I do it for you, I’m your fucking puppy. I’m your hooker. So whenever you expect me to do that, I’m not gonna do it; I’m gonna do something else. That’s born from punk rock. That’s born from “No, fuck you!”

  PAUL PROVENZA: That decision and your openness about it on the show demonstrated a certain humanity, which in the arena of late-night television talk shows is perhaps professionally…questionable?

  CRAIG FERGUSON: I don’t care! I’m not a latenight talk show host, I’m a guy who’s hosting a late-night talk show. That’s what I do, not who I am. Not for a fucking second. There are guys who do this and it’s what they’ve always wanted to do, but I don’t care. I do this ’cause I have fun doing it, and when I’m done I’ll do something else. I don’t do this because it was my life’s goal.

  And I was very careful that night when I said all that to make sure I wasn’t projecting a manifesto for comedians. I’m not at all. This is for me, not for anybody else.

  Jay Leno, Conan, David Letterman…I admire their work, and they do it their way, but that’s not how I do it. And I don’t fucking have to do it that way.

  You have to attack something, I know, but my feeling is you have to attack power. Power is what I attack. I don’t attack weakness, because it doesn’t feel satisfying to me.

  It’s always an ongoing process for me; I don’t even have a manifesto for myself about all that. I just know that iconoclasm is what this thing—comedy—is meant to be. For me, at least. That’s why I chose to become an American citizen, f
or Christ’s sake! The whole idea of this country is that those in power must be told the fucking truth. They must be. And that’s a really good idea for a country.

  PAUL PROVENZA: It’s counterintuitive, but at that point it was more iconoclastic for you not to go down that path, because going after Britney Spears had already become not only easy as comedy, but institutionalized and mainstream.

  Having said that, your motivation came from a very personal place. It was quite the opposite of satire; it was sincerity.

  CRAIG FERGUSON: It came from my own personal experiences with alcoholism, which is not her issue, but I certainly had gotten to a similar point in my own life to where she was at.

  I would go after Mel Gibson for his drunken, anti-Semitic rant, but then at a certain point, I’d think, “Oh God…Can I? Really? The guy is alcoholic and troubled…Can I feel okay about going after him like that?” But then I’d think, “Yeah, of course you can,” because the things he said were so horrible! Case-by-case, you know? Now, you might ask yourself about some joke: “Is this against my own personal philosophy? Is this violating my own principles?” But then you may end up thinking, “Yeah…But it’s so funny, I’m gonna fucking do it anyway.” That happens every now and again: “This is against what I stand for, but it’s so funny that I’m just gonna have to let the audience know that I know it’s wrong, and I’m going to say it anyway. Just because it’s too funny not to do.”

  Sometimes I listen to guys like Dave Attell, who just pushes the edges so far, and I’m like, “Dave! Too much, Dave!” Then I think, “No, no. It’s too funny to not do. You’re right, Dave. You have to do it.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: The Ferguson stories over in the U.K. comedy scene are the stuff of legend.

  CRAIG FERGUSON: Well, I was drinking then.

  PAUL PROVENZA: And you were hard-core punk—very different from who you seem to be now. Your early comedy was very in-your-face, very…Glaswegian. I mean, you went by the name “Bing Hitler,” and you’d say things that would get somebody glassed real quick.