Satiristas Read online

  They see the absurdity in everything, every where, all the time. They can’t help it; it’s a curse. And when you see enough of that, you start to get pretty skeptical about things.

  So, they are thinkers. And a lot of them only work nights, so their days are free. That’s a dangerous combination, there: a tendency to think and some time to do it.

  And to read. They read a lot. They have to write material all the time, and a lot of information has to keep going in for the jokes to keep coming out. I guarantee you that most of the people in this book read a lot more than you do, and you’re reading this, so I know you’re someone who reads. There’s a lot of time spent in airports and on planes for these people. Trust me, I know.

  Now, I know that all of the above would immediately disqualify someone from holding elected office in this country, because it’s “elitist,” and this country feels the most important quality for leading the most powerful military in history is that the leader is someone they could sit and have a beer with and relate to. Call me crazy, I prefer whoever’s running things to be way out of my league and to relate more to the president of China than to me, but apparently I’m not a core voter for anybody.

  But guess what? You can sit and have a beer with anybody in this book! Except the ones who went through rehab, but that’s okay, they’ll just have a soda or something. They are not power brokers or politicians, they’re regular people. Some of them are rich, but they got rich because America loved their comedy and, guess what, related to them. So don’t let their intelligence or the fact that they’re well-read and they think a lot stop you from listening to what they have to say. Try and look past all that.

  Comedians connect with audiences in a way that is revealing. The dark and very funny British comedian Jimmy Carr describes connecting with someone’s sense of humor as being like a sexual attraction: everybody’s got their own thing; if something turns you on, it turns you on and there’s no accounting for it, and when it’s right, it’s right, and when it’s not, it’s not.

  I take Jimmy’s analogy just a bit further: the laugh is the orgasm. And let’s be honest, when you can make someone come, you kinda know everything you really need to know about them. You know their most intimate, honest, unguarded self. You get who they are, what’s underneath their mask, and whatever their particular kink may be. Comedians travel around the country and meet people from all walks of life—every race, creed, and color, rich and poor, gay and straight—by the hundreds or thousands at a time, and give them all simultaneous multiple orgasms every night.

  Suffice it to say that the people in this book have learned a thing or two about the people in this country.

  And what is that now, two jizz jokes? Well, we’re talking to people who speak freely here, and that kinda thing comes with the territory.

  And that makes three. Comedy usually comes in threes.

  Shit, I blew it.

  Fuck, I said “blew.”

  That’s right; you’d better get used to it, ’cause we’re talking to comics here, so there’s a lot more where that…Well, you know.

  Comedians just might know more about the cross section of the American people and what’s going on “on the ground,” as they say, than anyone else possibly could. Because in order to survive, they must have an instinct and an understanding of all varieties of Americans. In order to make them laugh in groups, you have to know what they think and why they think it, all the time. A joke works because it’s a surprise. You have to know what they expect and what they don’t expect before you can surprise them with the unexpected. You’ve got to know what the perceived truth is before you can subvert it. You have to have a feel for what they believe, why they believe it, and what they don’t believe before you can question their beliefs.

  You can’t do your job if you don’t know all of that every time you get up on a stage. A comedian spends his or her entire career learning about every conceivable way that someone in their audience could be looking at the world. They develop an instinct for that kind of thing, and they know more about the tenor of this country than any president or pundit ever will.

  And I will make this absolute statement with 100 percent certainty: Not one single person who is in charge of any government, military, religious, or pseudo-religious organization or any power structure whatsoever—not one of them in the entire world—has the courage to get up on stage every night to learn as much about humankind as the people in this book understand.

  Mort Sahl

  It’s a big statement, I know, and I stand by it. Because to really learn what comedians intuitively and instinctively understand about people, you have to be truthful with them yourself. Audiences may not know that it matters to them, but we know it does. The laughs just aren’t as big when we’re faking it, and believe me, we pay close attention to the laughs. When the heart isn’t there, when the fearlessness that comes from honesty isn’t there, when you don’t really believe what you’re saying yourself, the audience isn’t falling for it. It’s a little frustrating, frankly, that we can’t get any damn slack on that, but it’s a frightening truth that half of this country will accept a lie that sends their loved ones to war quicker than they’ll take insincerity from a comedian. Comedians who work artfully—which includes all of them in this book—are held to a higher standard when it comes to being real.

  You have to say what you truly believe, you have to be able to be as wrong as you are right, and you have to be honest about what you feel and who you are. Night after night, with stranger after stranger, until you learn enough about each and every one of them to make them all laugh together at precisely the moment you want them to. There’s not a public opinion poll in the world with such a small margin of error or as great a degree of accuracy.

  And they play a lot of the same games as the powers they criticize do, so they know how the game works in politics and media. But they use their powers for good, not evil. They will trick you, but only into thinking about things you may not want to. They will surprise you, but with realizations. They may lure you into ideological territories you didn’t expect to be in, and trap you in conundrums. They may lie to their audience, but not to hide anything. If they lie, it is to reveal some greater truth about us all and the world we live in.

  Comedians, more than anybody except maybe George Orwell and Karl Rove, know all about groupthink. They can smell it. They feel it. They know how to create it, and they know how to destroy it. If you don’t think you’re susceptible to groupthink, well then you have never seen a really good comedian. From the moment they step on the stage, groupthink is their medium. Comedy is just one small, beautiful genre of groupthink. So when it comes to criticizing America, these people know what they’re talking about.

  And they have no hidden agenda. Their agenda is transparent at every moment: to make you laugh. That’s it. Making you laugh is how they consolidate control and grab power. And once they have it, they give it right back over to you to fight whatever power you may need to.

  So all the people in this book are worth listening to. They may not be right about everything, and even if they are, you may not agree with them. But they’re talking about things so many others are afraid to talk about, and they tell you the truth as they see it. That alone is a rare commodity, and maybe you should give it a listen, if only just to see what it’s like.

  And, of course, they’re funny. Damned funny. Every one of them was asked to be in this book because they are funny, first and foremost. But these particular comedy artists are all also social critics, and there’s something else that comes along with the funny. These are some people who supersize your laugh.

  Don’t think for a second that comedians who only serve up the funny are somehow lesser, or aren’t absolutely worth a possible second volume of this book. Anyone who makes you laugh is always doing more than just that, and we can’t wait to get into some of that, too. We hope that we can spend some time with a bunch of other comedy artists, who work differently, but no
less artfully, as well. If you buy another couple of copies of this one for some friends—it does make a great gift, doesn’t it?—you can help make our dreams come true. But I digress.

  In this book, we’ve chosen to present to you, even more intimately than they do in their own work, comedy artists who have things to say that resonate particularly in these times in which we live. This collection is not intended to be definitive, nor could it. But we have gathered some of the most important names in satire and socially critical comedy working today, and some of the most best-known ones as well. We’ve included some you’ve never heard of, and some who fall slightly outside the comedy fold but fit comfortably within it. There are some comedy veterans who’ve left a significant legacy, and some who are new to the game and picking up the legacy, showing great promise to become voices of a new generation in comedy. We’ve included some who work exclusively in the realm of stand-up comedy, and some who only write for others. There are some who are flourishing primarily on the Internet. There are a few Brits who’ve got an outsider’s perspective.

  And there is also George Carlin. He needs to be in a class of his own, and I interviewed him extensively only a week before he died.

  If you think maybe I should have said something more like “only a week before his passing,” one of his many great pieces was about just those kinds of euphemisms and how much he detested them. “Before he fuckin’ up and died” is how he would really prefer I said it.

  And that right there is one aspect of some of the work these artists do. They don’t always care about being polite; politeness is sometimes only obfuscation and manipulation. They’ve got stuff to say, and we’re all adults, and we all know what everyone really means when they’re being polite anyway, so let’s just cut to the chase and get real.

  They don’t care about offending you. They’d prefer it didn’t go down that way, but maybe the fact that it offended you is part of the point they’re trying to make. Maybe you’re offended because they’re right and you’re wrong and you know it but you really don’t want to admit it.

  They don’t care if you disagree. They’re doing it anyway, so just hang in there; it’ll be funny. They’re up for the fight if you wanna have it, but really, it’s all just in good fun, so sit down and enjoy it or get up and leave, it ain’t gonna make any difference either way.

  Jon Stewart

  Some of them use vulgar language. Big fuckin’ deal.

  Some of them work very gently and sweetly, too. And they may be the most subversive of all, as they seduce you into a comfort zone, make their point, and then on the way home you go, “Say…”

  Well, you wouldn’t go, “Say…” unless you were driving home to around 1935, but you get my point.

  Some of them make their points in song. Some of them make their points as characters.

  They opened up to me as a fellow comedian, speaking freely about many things, so each conversation follows its own path with no roadmap. There are some things lots of people talk about, and some things specific to one or another. Ideas carry through in agreement and disagreement; in concert and in contrast. Most are very funny; some bounce between very funny and very serious. Some are mostly personal; some dwell more on political issues and larger social concerns.

  They talk about themselves, each other, and the audiences they play. Some are high-profile enough to play to their fans, who will go with any idea they give them. Some are working club performers who say things some audiences don’t expect or particularly want to hear. Their experiences are the same, and they are vastly different.

  We wanted to balance out political ideologies, and began looking at the artists through a Right-wing/Left-wing perspective. We soon found that it was a waste of time. Very few of them have an outright political party affiliation. With a few exceptions, Right/Left is irrelevant. Most of them see politics in general as worthy of rage and mockery. I think they stole that from Mark Twain. Who stole it from Jonathan Swift. Who stole it from Aristophanes.

  What they are trying to do is speak “truth to power.” Whatever side of the political spectrum that may be gets taken to task. They are iconoclasts and they are individualists and they are humanists. What they care about is rarely the minutia of policy. They expose and fight against a lack of compassion toward those without the power. They care about class divisions, civil rights, and freedom.

  They care about fear mongering and the hysterical, irrational responses to it; they see the results of it in their audiences with every joke that defies it. They care about information and who is controlling it; they know what their audiences believe and what they need to know but is not quite getting to them. They care about the myths that are being created for us and how the narratives are being driven; they see the groupthink as they try to unravel it in their audiences. They care about what their audience is focused on and why they’re all focused in the same direction; they know how much great material they have to throw away because the audience has no idea what the hell they’re talking about. They care about the distractions and who is blowing them out of proportion and for what reason. They care about our wars, they care about the lies and deceit that got us there, and they care about the fact that the people who decided we needed these wars profit from them financially, politically, and otherwise.

  They care about people who are suffering and why, and the people and institutions that are responsible for it. They care about nationalism, and how perilously close it is to fascism. They care about who has the power, whom it is affecting, and to what end. They care about greed. They care about corporate influence over our government that is supposed to be of, by, and for all of us. They talk about our common humanity and how it is all too often lost; they see the audience struggling from it. They care about suffering, powerlessness, indignity, and perhaps, most of all, complacency. That really gets in the way of everyone having a good time, and they won’t stand for it.

  They’d like things to be different, but have few, if any, practical alternatives to offer. These people couldn’t run anything in the country, and except for a couple of them who actually considered giving it a shot, they wouldn’t want to if they could. But they can sure as hell tell you what’s wrong with whomever is running things and how it’s being run. They can’t tell you how to fix the leaks, but they have an uncanny ability to smell the gas and tell you where it’s coming from. It’s up to someone else to do the fixing. Hey, a person can only do so much, and there are a lot of leaks in the pipe.

  There’s also some discussion about just what the hell “satire” really is. It’s an art form, so there’s bound to be some fuzziness around the edges. When is modern art “post,” you know? And the meaning has changed a bit from its origins, so it depends on whom you ask anyway.

  In the strictest, ancient-Greek-rules-of-drama-and-poetry sense of the word, it’s defined as—and I’m paraphrasing here, because it’s all really ancient Greek to me—mocking a point of view by embracing it so fully as to allow its absurdity to become self-evident. The clearest modern examples of this, I think, are Stephen Colbert and Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat. A little further back, Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain are at the top of the list. Their writing and speaking come from a serious commitment to the very idea they want to mock. A little exaggeration later, and it’s hilarious.

  But the more generally accepted definition is broader than that:

  SATIRE (n):

  The use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.

  A literary work holding up human vices or follies to ridicule or scorn.

  Trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly.

  There’s a little dancing on the head of a pin about that kind of thing here or there, but, hey, that’s the kind of thing some comics like to do. Most really couldn’t be bothered, so it’s kept to a minimum. In fact, this book isn’t really about satire itse
lf at all. But we had a cool title, so we’re goin’ with it anyway.

  Really, though, talking with comedians about stuff like the accurate definition of “satire” is like talking about sound waves and frequencies with jazz cats. It’s just not very relevant to what they do.

  And it’s important to remember that what you read here is not their work. This is offstage and personal. They go into some heavy stuff here, but in their work, the last thing they want to do is preach. They know that no one stays awake in church, and they really want you to stay awake and alert. They have all the talent, skill, and craft it takes to communicate tough ideas in a way that’ll have you asking for more. They make you laugh when you hear them and the more you laugh, the more you will hear.

  So ultimately, no matter how passionate they are in these pages about the important things they care so deeply about, when they are doing comedy, none of it matters in the least.

  It’s ironic, I think, but because they want you to listen and pay attention, because they want you to relate, because they want you to think, because they want you to get angry, because they want you to know that you’re not alone, because they want you to wake up, because they want you to learn, because they want you to understand them, because they want you to understand yourself, because they want us to understand each other, because they want you to be skeptical, because they want you to feel passion, because they want you to be empowered, because they want you to be free, because the truth will set you free, because they want to tell the truth, because they want us to discover the truth, because truth is absolute, because everyone’s truth is different, because, as William Shakespeare said, “Jesters do oft prove prophets,” because as Dario Fo said, “With comedy I can search for the profound,” because as Molière said, “The duty of comedy is to correct men by amusing them,” because as Mark Twain said, “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand,” because as George Orwell said, “Whatever is funny is subversive,” because as Edmund Burke said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” and because we all know what happens if someone doesn’t stand up and say, “Stop drinking the Kool-Aid!,” the only thing that matters is the laugh.