Satiristas Page 19

  PAUL PROVENZA: Are we just hiding cruelty because it’s funny enough on the surface?

  JOHN LEE: We just can’t think about it. People ask us, “Should you really have little kids saying stuff like that?” And we’re, like, “Yeah, it’s fine; they know about it.” But really, ultimately, probably not.

  There is something cruel to it, but the larger point of it being funny and somewhat interesting makes it okay in our world. I feel fine with it because I do think it’s funny and it was interesting to show that contrast.

  VERNON CHATMAN: We put our Clarence puppet on the street to provoke people, just to get people mad at a puppet. It is a shitty thing to do, that if they get angry, you’ve got a good shot. And I see people I fucked with walking down the street, too. I saw this crazy hippie we had harassed, and he recognized me and punched me two years later. He’s like a gnome with a blanket and he flipped it on me. I inhaled all of those germs.

  JOHN LEE: Ewww, hippie dust.

  PAUL PROVENZA: In his defense, when Clarence provoked, it was from a heady place. Harassing joggers in the park with “What are you running from, your fears?” and “You can’t run away from the truth.” Pretty big ideas for a puppet.

  VERNON CHATMAN: That’s inevitable with a show that’s “cute” on the surface. For the contrast, you go to the darkest place possible and put the brightest colors on it. That’s sort of our personality. Thematically, we don’t really talk about the big things. We just focus on the joke.

  People who are thinking about “the grand statement” are probably working at Kinko’s right now.

  JOHN LEE: How’s that going, by the way?

  VERNON CHATMAN: Pretty good. $5.75 an hour.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Have you had much resistance?

  VERNON CHATMAN: Yeah, we got canceled. And it took six years to even get Wonder Showzen on the air.

  PAUL PROVENZA: On your “Beat Kids” segment, this cute little kid was obviously being fed lines, but the adults he was screwing with never seemed to register that. It’s amazing.

  VERNON CHATMAN: We’d go right up to him and whisper stuff right in his ear! Everyone always saw it.

  JOHN LEE: They’d be arguing with the kid, we’d whisper right into the kid’s ear, the kid would say it and they’d literally go, “Where’d you get this kid? It’s incredible what this kid says!”

  VERNON CHATMAN: Weird psychological trick. Very strange. We’d have the kid say something offensive and then we’d go, “Trevor! How could you?!” clearly acknowledging the obvious charade, but people seemed to still buy it. They don’t seem to notice the camera, the whispering, anything.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Have you had any dealings with—

  VERNON CHATMAN: Death threats? Have I had dealings with death threats? I’ve had a death threat. White supremacists, wasn’t it?

  JOHN LEE: Yeah. But it seemed like some kind of a prank.

  VERNON CHATMAN: I hope it was real. That’d be comedy cred, right?

  JOHN LEE: That’s cool. Like getting raped in prison.

  VERNON CHATMAN: We did this thing celebrating white culture: “This episode of Wonder Showzen is brought to you by…white people.” And we guess someone saw that and said, “You’re making fun of white people? That’s not right.”

  JOHN LEE: There were online debates where people liked certain points of the racism. “I like that racism, but are they making fun of white people in this bit?” I guess people like that get easily duped.

  VERNON CHATMAN: We’d have a joke that’s ironically racist, but then you’d see people who are…

  JOHN LEE:…really racist.

  VERNON CHATMAN: Happy there’s racism there. There’s a lot of paranoia that we have the wrong people with us sometimes.

  JOHN LEE: But you can’t let stupid people stop you from doing stuff.

  VERNON CHATMAN: People who misinterpret your jokes, that’s their problem.

  PAUL PROVENZA: It’s usually all bullshit. Somebody who is part of some organization with some agenda.

  JOHN LEE: We wanted some kind of controversy.

  VERNON CHATMAN: We wanted press. We did a bit at Ground Zero—a little kid asking people, “Is it okay to laugh again at Ground Zero?” The network almost pulled it, but they said, “We’ll air it if you write an apology beforehand.”

  JOHN LEE: A pre-apology!

  VERNON CHATMAN: “We pre-gret this.”

  JOHN LEE: It was great; just pure total nonsense.

  VERNON CHATMAN: “We take back what we haven’t yet done.”

  JOHN LEE: “In advance, we’re telling you we’re sorry.” That’s a great way to approach any relationship, right? It’s like a comedy prenup.

  VERNON CHATMAN: We wanted to do something there because of the comedic challenge. The show was about doing the darkest stuff, so could we take the most horrific thing and somehow be funny with it?

  JOHN LEE: We wrestled with it for a long time.

  VERNON CHATMAN: The premise was the answer for us: “Can you laugh at this?” We were struggling with it. It was one of the only times that we did a bit about something we ourselves were actually, literally struggling with. We both live really close to there—

  JOHN LEE: We experienced the whole thing firsthand.

  PAUL PROVENZA: That’s not necessarily—

  VERNON CHATMAN: Funny? Exactly. What happened was something we truly related to and respected. This was not like making fun of cutesy Care Bears cartoons. This was real stuff.

  JOHN LEE: I think people understood the bit right away, too. They understood the question really was, “Can humor help us deal with this crazy, abstract emotional thing?”

  VERNON CHATMAN: If we took it to the point where people described how they felt when they saw the towers fall while wearing Groucho glasses, that might’ve been a little fucked-up.

  JOHN LEE: And put fart noises over them.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Sounds like you actually considered that.

  VERNON CHATMAN: Just for a second. But we were trying to raise—or lower—the bar, depending on your limbo.

  We had a little kid dressed up like Hitler asking people, “What’s wrong with the youth of today?” And that only came up because we wrote another bit we thought would never get through, so we thought what’s the craziest, stupidest thing we could come up with?

  JOHN LEE: We’ll put that in the script, and they’ll say, “You can’t do this and that,” and we’d go, “Okay, we won’t do that, we’ll just do this.”

  VERNON CHATMAN: But they went, “Oh. Okay.”

  JOHN LEE: “Can’t wait to see the kid in the Hitler outfit.”

  VERNON CHATMAN: We were, like, “Holy shit.” We were legitimately, like, “Is this right?”

  JOHN LEE: We went back and forth on it for, like,…a minute. Ha! No, overnight.

  VERNON CHATMAN: Then it was a matter of convincing a kid’s parent to let us do it with him, and can we convince ourselves that there’s any actual legitimacy to the whole thing?

  JOHN LEE: It at least has a legitimate question: What is wrong with the youth of today?

  VERNON CHATMAN: There’s nothing I regret in that bit, but I think some people were hurt or offended.

  JOHN LEE: The saddest thing was that some people saw the kid and said, “Is that little kid dressed up as somebody? Who’s he supposed to be?” One guy asked, “Is he that Korean guy?”

  VERNON CHATMAN: He’s got the moustache, the hair, armbands, swastika—everything. Marching around, arm stuck up…

  JOHN LEE: Some people had no idea, that was the most disturbing thing about it.

  VERNON CHATMAN: The kid’s going, “What’s wrong with the youth of today?” and I’m thinking, “What the fuck is wrong with EVERYBODY??”

  JOHN LEE: We were, like, “He’s dressed like Hitler! That’s, like, THE number one bad guy, isn’t it?”

  PAUL PROVENZA: I can’t help wondering what the network didn’t let you do.

  JOHN LEE: The censors never saw us, never met us, and we did some
black satire and they asked us over the phone—

  VERNON CHATMAN: “Is one of you black? Maybe if it was a black person…” And I’m half-black, so I said, “Yeah.” And then they had nothing more to say to us!

  JOHN LEE: Crazy, right? That’s completely nonsensical.

  VERNON CHATMAN: That’s the scary thing about network standards people: if somebody’s white, they don’t feel comfortable judging what’s acceptable to blacks, whether it’s okay to say “nigger” here or there, so they just don’t touch it. So…Hey! How about you hire a black person? There’s an idea!

  PAUL PROVENZA: So you guys get to say a horrible word on TV, and in return a major network finally hires a black executive. That’s an interesting conundrum.

  VERNON CHATMAN: Right. Of course, throwing it back in their face like that doesn’t usually help.

  JOHN LEE: I’m a quarter-Asian. That’s why we hooked up; we thought we could cover a lot of racial territory.

  VERNON CHATMAN: My favorite example of that is in South Park. The Mr. Garrison character can say “faggot,” because he’s gay, but another character—with the same guy doing both voices—couldn’t.

  JOHN LEE: So they really believe the character’s a real person and acknowledge him as a citizen.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Should everybody have the right to say things or nobody have the right?

  JOHN LEE: Are we contributing to the moral demise of the country? Yes.

  VERNON CHATMAN: Only nigger faggots should get to do it.

  JOHN LEE: They’re the only ones who can say “chink.”

  VERNON CHATMAN: Nigger faggots get to say “chink.”

  JOHN LEE: Chinky Jews get to say “kike.”

  VERNON CHATMAN: We’re working on a chart for this.

  JOHN LEE: They were always sensitive about religious stuff, too. That was kind of the biggest thing. We had a little puppet on the cross, and they said, “You can do God, you just can’t do Jesus. God is just an abstract idea, but Jesus? People will get offended.”

  VERNON CHATMAN: MTV actually told us, “You can make fun of God because he doesn’t exist—

  JOHN LEE:—But you can’t make fun of Jesus, because he’s God’s son.”

  VERNON CHATMAN: Someone actually said this to us. Please print that; I want it on the record. I’ll say it again so you get it right, and you promise you’ll print it. Someone at the network said: “You can make fun of God because he doesn’t exist, but you can’t make fun of Jesus, because he’s God’s son.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: I will print that you told me both times that the network said, “You can make fun of God because he doesn’t exist, but you can’t make fun of Jesus, because he’s God’s son.”

  VERNON CHATMAN: Of course, the big thing now is Mohammed. That’s the big thing.

  JOHN LEE: That’s the crazy big thing.

  VERNON CHATMAN: But the reason that Muslims get upset if you show Mohammed’s face is because he’s got a cock for a nose.

  JOHN LEE: And it’s not very big.

  DON NOVELLO

  WITH BRILLIANTLY CONCEIVED characters like Father Guido Sarducci, Don Novello has satirized, skewered, and stood up to authority for decades. As Lazlo Toth, he authored the infamous Lazlo Letters, a seminal piece of what came to be postmodern satire and a direct line to Sacha Baron Cohen. As a performer and writer, Novello has been in the foreground and background of everything satirical, including The Smothers Brothers, SCTV, and Saturday Night Live as well as his own books and published collaborations. Looking back, he offers insight on what he feels comedy can and cannot accomplish, and how, with enough rope, authority will always hang itself.

  DON NOVELLO: I first did Father Guido Sarducci in 1972 during Watergate, Nixon, and hippies. I started doing the character because I thought, “I’m this thirty-year-old guy from Ohio. Who am I to talk politics?” I thought doing it as a foreigner would give me a perspective, and to do it as a priest gives you authority, kinda.

  Funny, first they said, “He can’t smoke. Priests don’t smoke.”

  I said, “I’m playing a Jesuit priest, they all smoke.” It’s true. I don’t know if it’s a Philip Morris sponsorship or what, but they all smoke. Ask anybody.

  PAUL PROVENZA: When I look back at some of that Sarducci material, I think it couldn’t be more relevant today. What do you think when you see how religion has become such a political force now?

  DON NOVELLO: It doesn’t have a lot to do with religion at all, really. It doesn’t matter what religion you belong to, the Sunnis or Shiites or whatever, it’s all the same: “We’re right, the rest are wrong.” I don’t know if anything will ever change that.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you think comedy can ever change anything?

  DON NOVELLO: I think the Smothers Brothers helped to end the Vietnam War. They were clean-cut guys, their father was a West Pointer who was a POW and died in the war, so they weren’t Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, you know? They could get on prime time and have an impact there.

  But I don’t think comedy changes minds. If it does anything, it makes people less afraid.

  I don’t know a lot about Judaism, but they believe questioning God brings you closer to God, whereas Catholics think if you question God you’ll get hit by lightning. So I think comedy says, “People, don’t be afraid!” I’m not afraid to question religion in my humor, and I think when you do that it helps people become a little freer, I guess.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Because if you haven’t been struck by lightning…

  DON NOVELLO: Exactly. I never got called on it, either. When I was doing Father Guido on Saturday Night Live, NBC never got a mean letter from the Church. Not one. And we were a block away from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where the cardinal lives.

  I always thought they kinda liked it. I was criticizing the bullshit of it, not Jesus or anything it’s supposed to be about. It’s like criticizing the war, but not being anti-American. I wouldn’t make fun of Jesus; he’s the last person I’d want to make fun of, after Frank Zappa, maybe.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Did your early advertising career influence your comedy?

  DON NOVELLO: Advertising teaches you to write really tight, because ads are only thirty seconds. I learned that that works for all writing. Everything I write is short, because I learned how to edit myself.

  At one point, I wrote an ad for Lavoris mouthwash—and, by the way, I wrote it for Cassius Clay, as Muhammad Ali was known then, but they wouldn’t put him in a commercial because of his political stance at the time, so we got the football star Bernie Casey to do it. Lavoris got three letters complaining about the spot. They were all from the South and all blatantly racist, but they took the ad off the air because of those three letters! So I saw the influence a letter could have at the time: if a network received ten letters from different parts of the country, then they were right and you were wrong. It’s just ridiculous. I mean they’re just letters, they’re not bullets. But they were so afraid, a letter could have that kind of effect.

  That experience is what inspired me to do The Lazlo Letters.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Lazlo Letters is a great example of a kind of satire where the target of the joke actually writes the punch line for you. It was an inventive idea, and presages things like Borat and Bruno. How’d it come about?

  DON NOVELLO: Starting out, I thought it’d be a magazine article, and I decided to use the name “Lazlo Toth,” the name of the guy who attacked Michelangelo’s Pieta. He went to mass every day and then to the Vatican library to read the Bible in Hungarian, and one day he just decided to put on a tuxedo and attack the Pieta with a hammer and chisel nineteen times. I thought that would be a great name to be receiving all these letters from Spiro Agnew and all these fascists.

  What’s interesting was that I pretty much just parroted back to all these Right-wingers what they were telling us; all that “stand by our flag,” and “stand by our president because he’s the only one we got” stuff. I think that’s why they wrote back. I wrote to them as someone suppo
rting them or who cared about them.

  Like after Nixon resigned, he’d gotten a buzz cut, but then grew his hair out, kinda long for Richard Nixon, so I wrote to him, “You shouldn’t let your appearance go just because you lost your job.”

  He wrote back, “I can assure you my new haircut isn’t because I lost my job, and I will continue to stand by my flag as you urge.”

  Even with corporations, you could write, “I like your soup. I also like Adolf Hitler.”

  And they’d write back, “Thank you for your kind words about our soup.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: The early years of SNL were really bold. You got away with so much I don’t think you’d ever get away with today.

  DON NOVELLO: Saturday Night Live got away with stuff because it was so hot. I’ve thought about this and always thought it was weird, but they would bargain, “You can’t say this and this. Pick one, but not both,” so people would put more and more in to see what they could bargain and get away with.

  We did a nativity scene with Gilda Radner as the Virgin Mary and Bill Murray gives her noogies. We got a note saying, “You can’t give the Virgin Mary noogies.” It was always so arbitrary and ridiculous. Like, you could say “penis,” but no slang word for a penis. Of course then they’d just overdo it with putting “penis” into everything.

  I wrote a bit about getting the bill for the Last Supper. I don’t know why, but they said we couldn’t say there was a bill for the Last Supper. This guy from standards and practices tells me this, and I say, “How ’bout it’s the Last Brunch?” Which is much funnier than the bill for the Last Supper, anyway. They’re eating eggs, one guy gets soft-boiled, one guy orders waffles…It’s much funnier as a brunch than as dinner, really.

  And they said, “As long as there’s no bill for it.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: Your work pretty much always avoided taking sides, but in the best of ways. It’s apolitically political, like the through line is just “Question authority,” no matter who or what it is. Keep asking questions, keep making them squirm, and eventually they’ll reveal their own bullshit.