Satiristas Read online

  I always remember a comic, who will remain nameless, coming on The Tonight Show once and opening with, “I’m a Democrat, so blah blah blah…” He proceeded to do his jokes, but he only had half the audience; he’d already alienated the half that wasn’t Democrat. I said, “Why don’t you just do your material? People will figure out that you’re a Democrat; or maybe they’ll think you’re some outraged Republican that’s pissed off—whatever. What difference does it make what party you belong to? Do your jokes.”

  I think what some comedians call “satire” is often just opinions mixed up with some comedy.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Did you not care at all about any point that you were making in The Tonight Show monologue? Was it always just about getting the laugh regardless of what you personally agreed or disagreed with?

  JAY LENO: Obviously you care about the point made, but my main responsibility is as a comedian and trying to get the laugh. If an audience gets something out of it afterward, fine, but I just write jokes and try not to hurt anybody. It’s like the Hippocratic oath to me: “Do no harm.” Other people have different agendas.

  The Michael Vick story is an example of perfect monologue fodder, because no one can defend abusing and killing puppies no matter what the details are, so you can do all these Michael Vick jokes and everybody’s always on the same side, all appreciating the jokes the same way.

  PAUL PROVENZA: What about those who call themselves comedians, as you do, but who feel the political point of view or what they’re committed to saying is more or equally as important as the laugh? Are they being less professional, somehow not doing the comedian’s “job” because it may not appeal to everyone?

  JAY LENO: You can do whatever you want, but don’t blame me if it’s not working.

  Here’s my thing: if you’re a police officer, an emergency room doctor, a nurse, whatever, you work your ass off all day long and see the worst side of life every day and you want to come home, turn on the TV, and just see somebody that makes you laugh. If your life is one of reflection—maybe you’re pretty well off or have enough money not to worry about it and can do whatever you want—maybe you prefer a little more introspection or stimulus, so you go there instead.

  PAUL PROVENZA: If, as you said, comedy doesn’t change people’s minds about anything, do you think comedy that challenges people’s opinions or beliefs is a worthwhile endeavor at all?

  JAY LENO: Yes, of course it is; it’s brilliant. But the tricky part to me is that you’re always preaching to the converted.

  I always liked Lenny Bruce, always thought he was a great, funny comedian, but when he was in jazz clubs doing material about sex and drugs or whatever, he was preaching to the converted.

  Whereas when Mort Sahl went on Ed Sullivan, the “Eisenhower jacket” was a popular trend at the time, and Sahl comes out and says, “They just came out with a Joseph McCarthy jacket: it’s got an extra flap that goes over your mouth.”

  That was, like, “Whoooa!” He really took a chance. He wasn’t saying stuff like that in some jazz club, it was on The Ed Sullivan Show. Prime-time on Sunday night, when all of America was watching, this Jewish, smart-alecky comic goes out and does sharp, pointed jokes against America’s biggest Commie hunter at the height of Commie-hunting paranoia. To me, that took a lot more guts.

  I don’t think Sahl quite got the credit he deserved. He was much more of a trailblazer, really. He reached people who didn’t want to hear that material, people who were completely unaware that this kind of comedy even existed.

  PAUL PROVENZA: So much has changed since Sahl was blazing a trail, and Lenny was thrown in jail for things you hear every night on HBO now. Is it even possible for comedy to cross lines anymore? Can anybody really challenge in comedy anymore?

  JAY LENO: Yes. I think Colbert does it on a nightly basis. Jon Stewart does it, too. People challenge all the time. It’s just how you go about it.

  I remember Mort Sahl came to Boston when I was a kid, and I always thought he was a terrific comic, a great humorist, so I went to see him. But at that point he was so immersed in the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission and all that, to the point of obsession. He came onstage with graphs and charts, he showed the trajectory of the bullet, and on and on and on. About five hundred people were in the club when he started, and by the time he finished there was maybe me and another guy.

  You gotta be funny first. Then slip in your opinion.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Did you ever consider The Tonight Show an opportunity to speak your mind and consciously hold back?

  JAY LENO: Personally, I do not care what anybody in show business has to say about anything, and I assume most people feel that way about me. My job is to go out and make people laugh; that’s what I do.

  We’re in a business, you know? What happens to a lot of comedians is that they start out as comedians, then become humorists, then become satirists, and then they’re out of the business. Just go out there and tell jokes—that’s my job; I don’t read into it any more than that. And sometimes I get picked on for that.

  JANEANE GAROFALO

  MOST SATIRISTS WILL tell you that the audience’s laugh always, always comes before one’s own political agenda. Ever the contrarian, Janeane Garofalo will tell you the exact opposite. A strident critic of Right-wing policy and ideology, she believes that a comic’s voice is an instrument to be wielded for a cause, and that to believe otherwise is simple cowardice. It’s a position that’s made her—both as a stand-up and as a radio and television pundit—the object of boycotts, partisan vitriol, parody at the hands of Team America: World Police, and even death threats. In this interview, Garofalo stands her ground and takes them all head-on.

  JANEANE GAROFALO: Leno choosing not to take any position is just fear of not being well-liked. It’s just fear, straight up, I don’t care how anyone wants to parse that.

  He’s a nice guy, Jay. He is really, genuinely, very, very nice. And he likes being nice, and he wants everybody to like him. But to say “I’m not taking a position” on anything is irresponsible.

  That’s why I don’t understand when people say, “I don’t want to talk about religion or politics.” Why? Like, what could be more important? What do you want to talk about then? American Idol? You don’t want to talk about politics, religion, or what-have-you? Then you’re a coward. If you don’t want to rock the boat, then you’re just as guilty as the person that rocks the boat in a negative way. You don’t get a free pass just because you don’t talk about it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Your activism is, I think, to a certain degree, separate from your comedy. They’re obviously woven from the same cloth, but it seems to me that you have a place as an activist and a pundit that is different from your place as a stand-up. I think there is a disconnect between them.

  JANEANE GAROFALO: I never got into punditry because I thought I was any good at it or articulate or anything. The problem at that time was CNN, ABC, NBC, FOX, all these alleged news outlets would only book people in entertainment for the antiwar side, for some reason.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Setting them up as straw men?

  JANEANE GAROFALO: Yeah, so they could mock and marginalize the antiwar position. I was asked to do it by MoveOn.org and a group called Win Without War. They said, “We’re so sorry, but they’ll only book people in entertainment, and we’re having a hard time finding people willing to go out there and do it, will you do this?”

  And I felt like, “Well…I can sit here and yell at my TV on my couch, or I can try to get involved and say something of value, if I possibly can.” And I knew I would be mocked for it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: So you believe they had you on precisely because you lacked real credibility?

  JANEANE GAROFALO: Yes. The networks knew the average American believes I lack credibility. That’s why I was on. I understood that. And that’s why I had explosive diarrhea 99 percent of the time I was doing it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Did you ever feel like you were playing into their hands?

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sp; JANEANE GAROFALO: Yeah, but I didn’t know what else to do. I could see this freight train headed toward a wall. And I don’t say that from a position of arrogance. Any thoughtful idiot could see the war was a bad idea, right?

  But again, I would stress that I didn’t do it because I thought I was good at it. And it doesn’t enhance your career, believe me. What does anybody gain from being the Right-wing’s punching bag du jour? I got so much hate mail; death threats that came right to my apartment. I had to hire a security person to go through all the mail, because some of these people had criminal records and histories of mental problems and stuff. But, you know, what are you gonna do?

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you believe that it cost you? That it hurt your career, for you to be so politically active?

  JANEANE GAROFALO: It didn’t cost me for stand-up. It may have cost me television-wise. As soon as one of those letter-writing campaigns started, my pilot died at ABC. But who gives a shit? It’s not like I was ever Drew Barrymore. I didn’t have very far to fall. When the South Park guys mocked me in Team America, they gave me far more status than I’ve ever had in real life. My puppet actually had a scene with George Clooney’s puppet, which is, like, the highest I’ve ever been in show business.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you say you co-starred with George Clooney?

  JANEANE GAROFALO: Well, technically, as a puppet, before I got my puppet head blown off.

  PAUL PROVENZA: How did you feel about that?

  JANEANE GAROFALO: I was angry. I was really angry. They had my character say things like, “I just repeat what I read in the newspaper as my own opinion.”

  First of all, that’s not at all what I did, and it infuriated me that that’s how Matt and Trey wanted to portray it. I was mocked for saying “I don’t believe there are weapons of mass destruction. We’re being lied to.” And then I had my head blown off to cheers in the audience.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Well, Matt and Trey suggest it’s not that you were mocked for that, but you were mocked for a certain stridency, a certain absolutism in the way you said things.

  JANEANE GAROFALO: Well, how else would I say it? Everything I said turned out to be exactly correct. Their point of origin was that we’re all dicks, you know? We’re just dicks, and because we are in the entertainment industry, we have no right to speak. Even though they are doing the exact same thing. They are in the entertainment industry positing their thoughts. There were tons of people—who were not women in the entertainment industry—saying the exact same thing I was saying. It’s just easy to marshal cultural hostility toward women and women who are in entertainment, whether it’s Natalie Maines, Susan Sarandon, or me, or whoever. I’ve run into Matt and Trey a couple of times since then. I told them the least they can do is send me a puppet, and they’ve declined to do so.

  PAUL PROVENZA: But in being satirized in Team America, you are in the same place as the victims of your satire, of your own comedy. How does that sit with you?

  JANEANE GAROFALO: If I was being satirized for something I thought was worthy of satire, that’s fine. Being mocked for that particular thing made me angry. When I’m mocked for other things about my personality, I think it’s funny.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Matt and Trey’s attitude is that they want to make fun of the stuff that they believe in, too, because it’s right to do that. If you’re going to call people on their bullshit, sometimes we have to call ourselves on our own bullshit.

  JANEANE GAROFALO: Yeah, that’s their interpretation of it. I’m going to have to disagree wholeheartedly. I love South Park; that’s not my problem. But what they are doing is not taking any position. In a way, they’re taking the coward’s way out: “We’re too cool for school.” In fact, the conservatives have taken South Park under their own wing. There is a book called South Park Conservatives where young campus conservatives have decided that Matt and Trey speak for them. That’s what bothers me.

  That’s what pisses me off about these alleged news shows. “We want to have somebody who opposes the war, and somebody who thinks it’s okay to destroy these videos of interrogation because we’re torturing people. Let’s get an opinion from both sides.” Torture is wrong, and it’s illegal. I don’t need another person to sit on the side of the pro-torture contingent.

  If a comedian is going to be fearful about stepping on any toes, or if they don’t want to piss anybody off, what’s the point? You can get that from any schmuck on TV. A person goes, buys a ticket, goes to a venue to see a comic, hopefully, to hear somebody with a distinct point of view. What is the point of going to see a comic that doesn’t believe in what they are saying or is just trying to please everybody or not to offend anyone?

  PAUL PROVENZA: That’s why guys like Jim Norton actually are interesting to me, because Jim Norton says the unthinkable. He’s rude, and he’s vile, and he’s like the turd in the punch bowl, and I think that’s really important. There needs to be a place for that.

  JANEANE GAROFALO: I would like to make a distinction about different types of turds in the punch bowl. Again, I don’t think it’s wrong for society to try and extend the courtesy of dignity to people of color, to women. There’s a difference between defending First Amendment rights to speak against the military-industrial complex and defending Don Imus’s “nappy-headed ho” comments. They’re not the same thing. So the turd-in-the–punch-bowl thing, if you’re talking about Bill Hicks as the turd in the punch bowl, amen. If you’re talking about Jim Norton as the turd in the punch bowl, no thank you. I want a new punch bowl.

  PAUL PROVENZA: How did being seen as an activist affect your stand-up shows?

  JANEANE GAROFALO: At the height of the pro-war fever, there would be people who deliberately came to the shows to heckle. They were even in cahoots with different morning-drive deejays in different towns to do it. It became like a fad, you know what I mean? It was like, “Burn the witch.” It was shocking to me.

  After September 11, certain people built their identity around hate. September 11 gave a lot of people someone to be. Dennis Miller is a great example of it. Dennis Miller is just an asshole. He’s a straight-up asshole, but what he gets to do is pretend to be a Republican. You can be an asshole but pretend it’s politics. I mean, there’s a reason why a lot of Right-wingers are assholes. You couldn’t be on the Right without being an asshole.

  PAUL PROVENZA: But the whole Right/Left, liberal/conservative thing is a bit misleading. I think it traps people like you in a lot of ways. The truth is that most people are in the middle and would like a reasonable combination. At the top of the bell curve, I think most people don’t really care about gays getting married, but at the same time they might want smaller government, certain conservative economic principles.

  JANEANE GAROFALO: No, when I say Left and liberal, I stick by that. Without liberals, we got nothing. Without liberals and liberal thinking, we would still own slaves and women wouldn’t vote. There’s a wonderful tradition in this country of liberals making great strides to bring society forward. Conservatives like the hierarchy the way it is, and they don’t want to change it. And when I say Right-wing, as it pertains to Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, I mean exactly that. They are Right-wing and their loyalists are extremists. They’re radicals. That word fits there. The GOP is a big-tent party: all manner of assholes are welcome in the tent.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Your dad is a Republican. Is your dad an asshole?

  JANEANE GAROFALO: Politically, yes. As a grandpa, not really. But he believes in a mythical guy in the sky, yet he doesn’t truly care about people suffering on Earth. He doesn’t want to pay taxes for social programs, like midnight basketball. A lot of Republicans, they get to be the good cop, but the way they vote outs them as the bad cop. You get to pretend to be a nice patriot, but you vote for these assholes. They do your dirty work for you, but you don’t get your hands dirty.

  PAUL PROVENZA: It’s like subcontracting it out?

  JANEANE GAROFALO: Yeah, you contract out your meanness, your morality, or lack thereof.
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  Look, you can’t divorce behavioral psychology from voting patterns and from political affiliation; you can’t. If you look up “liberal” in the dictionary, it means tolerant and open and progressive. “Conservative” means an adherence to tradition, and—I would add to that—fear of change. There is a reason that Roy Cohn was Roy Cohn. There is a reason that Dick Cheney is the way he is, that George Bush is the way he is, that Ann Coulter’s the way she is. It is not separate from their political affiliations. You have to be a certain type of person to be on the Right. The repression, the fear, the guilt, the shame, sex is bad and wrong, I’m a closet queen—whatever.

  So whenever someone on the Right tars me as “anti-American,” I know I’m not dealing with a serious person. I’m dealing with an infant.

  When somebody brings up the religion thing with me, same thing. This is how I feel about that: about a year ago, I went to a play on a quasi-date with this guy. We were sitting there waiting for the play to start, and he goes, “You know, I’ve seen you on TV, and I have a theory about why the country seems like it’s falling apart right now, but I don’t think you’re gonna like it.”

  And I go, “Uh-oh. What is it?”

  “I think it all started in the fall. The fall from grace in the Garden of Eden.”

  That’s what he said: “Garden of Eden.” This is not an exaggeration. This is not a joke.

  I literally climbed over the seat to leave. I climbed over the seat. I will not go on a date and sit next to a person who is forty years old and is talking about the fall from grace in the Garden with me, because then I have to question his judgment on everything. There are not always two sides to every story. Sometimes there is absolute truth, and if you’re a walking, talking adult, and you’re going to bring up Adam and Eve, a fictitious story, a fairy tale, to explain to me why 9/11 happened and why there’s terrorism, I’m going to have to climb over the seat to leave to get away from you.