Satiristas Page 20
DON NOVELLO: That’s right. It’s all a mind game, and you’ll see that both sides are the same. Democrat or Republican, they’re all the same with all that money and the PR and the private planes and scandals and deal-making…It’s just two rocks that look different. Turn ’em over, and they’ve got the same things underneath ’em, man.
MICHAEL MCKEAN
THOUGH BEST KNOWN for his epic role as David St. Hubbins in This Is Spinal Tap and as one of the core of improvisational actors in Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries, McKean has crafted a richly textured career as both a serious and comedic actor on Broadway, in television, and in film. Less recognized now is the groundbreaking work he did, along with Harry Shearer, among others, long before their Saturday Night Live days, as part of The Credibility Gap, a now-legendary radio show of the late sixties that spawned albums and countless imitators and shook up comedy and talk radio on the West Coast. McKean explains how satire, commonly seen as a cold and mocking art, can, in fact, come from kindness, thoughtfulness, and even love.
PAUL PROVENZA: My greatest recollection of The Credibility Gap was fearlessness. Like National Lampoon Radio Hour, it seemed ballsy and often shocking. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like you guys influenced a movement in comedy.
MICHAEL McKEAN: “Movements” become more attractive when one feels they might yield a profit. Nobody was doing political satire for the money. That really didn’t happen until Saturday Night Live in 1975.
The Credibility Gap really started in the wake of the RFK assassination in 1968. Everybody was pretty on edge in those days. There was the Democratic Convention in Chicago, Woodstock, and by 1970, when I got there, everybody was pretty politicized, and there was something every day. We’d wake up one day to find out we’d just invaded Cambodia, so we’d do a sketch about that. We were all pretty political, and we did little stuff and big stuff. It was fairly radical for AM radio in the sixties and early seventies. In 1971, we moved to KPPC FM in Pasadena—the other English-language station in Pasadena then—and we got a little bolder. I think we broke the word “asshole” on FM radio. That was ours. A true legacy.
PAUL PROVENZA: Did you find an audience that was looking for that, craving that?
MICHAEL McKEAN: Not enough to get upset and write in when we were canned. The famous line we were fired from KRLA with was from the station manager, who told newspapers: “We’re letting The Credibility Gap go because the times are too serious for humor.”
If that was the case then, it’s just too apocalyptic for humor now, I guess.
PAUL PROVENZA: Just the show’s name, The Credibility Gap, is a dictionary definition of satire.
MICHAEL McKEAN: That’s what satire deals with: that lag between what they’re telling you is the truth and what you perceive the truth to be.
PAUL PROVENZA: I’m not so clear on David Lander’s later work, but it seems like that sensibility’s maintained itself through almost all of your work, and much of Harry Shearer’s since then.
MICHAEL McKEAN: I’m fairly active politically, and certainly get the red ass about things happening in the world. My politics haven’t changed all that much, but a lot’s changed around us. Harry Shearer and I were talking the other day—and by “the other day” I mean five years ago; that’s what happens when you get older, every year is a smaller percentage of your life—but anyway, we were talking about how we used to use the N-word all the time in sketches, if we had, say, a Klansman character.
And there was a news story that some trade commission okayed some clothing manufacturer to use the word “Jap” as the name of their clothing line. So, in response, we did a series of extremely racist TV commercials for things like “Jigaboo’s Carwash,” “Mr. Spic’s Taco Tavern,” “Dago Men’s Wear.”
You play that stuff for people now and they’re, like, “Where did this come from??”
“From FM radio—in 1971.” And nobody shot us! The only time we were really threatened with action of any kind was when we did a parody of Scientology with “Alientology,” which was actually invented by a Martian. The very next day, that weird Easter Seals–looking letterhead showed up on our desk and we had to apologize.
PAUL PROVENZA: In the days of The Credibility Gap, there was a groundswell of people doing really risky things. Today, so many things get “Dixie Chicked.” The Dixie Chicks would’ve been way too tame to be martyrs for free speech back then. Do you think satire or confrontation like that is more dangerous now?
MICHAEL McKEAN: I think the goal post gets moved. There are certain things you can say now with impunity, but if you wanted to do a sketch, just to grab one out of thin air, about a member of the “Greatest Generation,” and wanted to do, say, a World War II scene where GIs committed atrocities, you couldn’t do that anywhere, not even on Comedy Central. The reason is because we haven’t touched that yet.
Of course, there were no atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers during World War II. Being bad to the enemy was invented later, by William Calley at My Lai in Vietnam.
PAUL PROVENZA: Which, of course, is a myth.
MICHAEL McKEAN: And a myth we’re not ready to blast yet. I can’t think of anything terribly funny to say about it, but even if you had a great idea for it, you couldn’t do that sketch. So, things do change in that way.
The main thing with satire is you gotta be fucking fast. Sixty years ago, you could’ve done a pretty funny satire about a bad science-fiction writer inventing a religion but instead of being laughed out of the marketplace, becoming a millionaire; a billionaire, probably. You can’t do that satire now, because it’s been done in real life. And don’t get me started on a pope who used to be in the Hitler Youth. Terry Southern would’ve invented that, but nope, too late; it’s been done. Every day you see something in the paper that could’ve been pretty funny if only it weren’t real.
PAUL PROVENZA: Spinal Tap satirizes specific cultural elements, but it seems to resonate in a way that’s political to me. It’s an indictment of the music industry, of people who make rock and roll their “religion” and put faith in it while it’s really just a big charade, which seems metaphoric. Am I just full of shit about that?
MICHAEL McKEAN: It’s certainly a parody of the rock documentary form; that hand-held, fan-driven mania to capture a band, like Martin Scorsese’s following The Band, except Rob Reiner’s character got the wrong band, which was the gold. In particular, it’s about Marty DiBergi, Rob Reiner’s filmmaker character, too; that guy who probably always wanted to be in a band and probably stood in front of his mirror with a tennis racket pretending he was John Lennon. He wishes he was in the band, but instead he’ll film the band. I’ve always felt that was the hidden lead.
But the other thing it’s about, which is also true for Chris Guest’s other films, is the bubbles that people live in. It’s now a cliché, seeing the lines for a new Star Wars movie, but the world of hard-core fandom is an amazing thing. Those people really do live in a bubble. And it’s fine; I understand it, because the world outside the bubble is full of police sirens and all kinds of shit. But anyone living within a constant bath of self-assurance like that is very much like a political party. Political parties are groups of people who live inside political bubbles. I gravitate toward one more than the other, but you still wouldn’t catch me there, because I live in the real world.
In that sense, it’s political: it’s about choosing a side very early in your life and not budging. That’s an invitation to be slapped anyway, because you gotta be a little fluid.
PAUL PROVENZA: Doesn’t it seem like comedians just have to constantly “poke” at things like that? It seems we’re not even happy for people to like us unless they like us after we’ve been annoying.
MICHAEL McKEAN: Like the British expression, “taking the piss.” You take the piss out of somebody because they’re droning on and on about something and you have to puncture them. I know this woman who’s this astrology maven, with her big book of concordance and all that stuff. She�
�d show me all this, going, “When’s your birthday? What time of day were you born?”
I’m sitting there, thinking, “Jesus…When can we go home?”
She said, “You look like you don’t believe this.”
I said, “I believe astrology’s nonsense.”
She said, “Well, I’m not saying it isn’t, but it’s a tool. For getting to know people.”
I said, “Well, it’s not the right tool. You can wipe your ass with a hammer if you want, too, but it’s the wrong tool.” There are better tools for getting to know people: talking to them, telling them about yourself, and all that.
I think that’s part of what it is for us: the more self-assured people are, the more fun it is to kick the ladder out from under them.
PAUL PROVENZA: Satire usually takes down a target that’s an object of scorn, but in movies like Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind, you guys deftly satirize things you love. Your targets are things you have affection for and embrace rather than scorn. That’s a huge, fundamental distinction as satire.
MICHAEL McKEAN: It’s because I don’t think satire has to be thoughtless. In fact, it works better if it’s not. It works better if it’s thoughtful and learned on its subject. Spinal Tap was obviously created by four rock ’n’ roll fans. I don’t think anyone comes away from it thinking, “That rock ’n’ roll stuff really stinks. I’m gonna stay away. It’s opera or nothing from now on!”
Nobody has that reaction, because we have great affection for the subject. The same thing with A Mighty Wind. Satire can come from a place of kindness, though I don’t think that comes naturally. Satire has a point to it: it’s meant to wound or to correct. It’s the work of the muckraker, to a certain extent. “Burlesque” is something different, “parody” has some specific set of rules, “pastiche” is a form of parody; there’s all this stuff that defines things like that, and I think ridicule to make you feel better than what you’re ridiculing is not really satire.
PAUL PROVENZA: Another sorta rule of thumb is, “Are you ridiculing the individual or the point they’re making?”
MICHAEL McKEAN: Exactly. There’s a Mark Twain quote for everything in life, and there’s one to the effect of “laughter is the one thing no idiocy or tyranny can stand up to.” Once you’ve become a laughingstock, you’d best just crawl off and die. How many times did Nixon crawl off and die in his career? If a joke tells the truth and the truth cannot be denied, then that’s a powerful joke.
PAUL PROVENZA: There are people who say that Ford’s defeat had to do with the fact that Chevy Chase made him a laughingstock.
MICHAEL McKEAN: The only person I ever heard say that publicly was—
PAUL PROVENZA:—Chevy Chase?
MICHAEL McKEAN: No, actually, Gerald Ford’s press secretary Ron Nessen wrote an op-ed piece saying, “It’s not funny if a decent man doesn’t get reelected president because of Chevy Chase.”
PAUL PROVENZA: It’s an interesting case study, if you will, because a lot of people who do this kind of work doubt that it actually has any impact. They feel it’s important to do only because someone’s got to keep doing it, and every drop in the ocean adds up.
MICHAEL McKEAN: Yes. But not mimes so much. They can all die.
BILLY THE MIME
SINGLE-HANDEDLY REJUVENATING A justly ridiculed art form, Billy the Mime accomplishes the unthinkable for a mime—and for many in the audience. Best known for his scene-stealing turn in The Aristocrats, the self-proclaimed “mime for people who hate mimes” studied in master classes with Marcel Marceau and at Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Clown College before turning his skills toward the most difficult, daring subjects any artist could possibly attempt to make funny. As disturbing as they are moving and funny, his routines cover such topics as 9/11, abortion, Christopher Reeve, JFK Jr., Kurt Cobain, AIDS, rape, Karen Carpenter, Terry Schiavo, the Columbine shootings, David Carradine, slavery, and the entire second World War. More than just for shock or mime derringdo, Billy finds deep humanity, sincere emotion, and meaningful comment in his unlikely subjects, revealing mimes’ unexpected abilities to amuse, shock, and profoundly move an audience.
PAUL PROVENZA: Which is more meaningful for you, the comic moments you physically create in your pieces, or the meta-joke of a mime performing such subject matter?
BILLY THE MIME:
PAUL PROVENZA: Are you accepted by the mime community, or are you regarded as some aberration and treated as an outcast?
BILLY THE MIME:
PAUL PROVENZA: Audiences often don’t really know if they should even be laughing at some of your routines. Is that frustrating?
BILLY THE MIME: PAUL PROVENZA: The sign you hold up announcing your next piece can get a huge laugh, but then as the piece unfolds, it may evoke deep sadness instead. Do you consciously try to keep the audience off balance like that?
BILLY THE MIME:
PAUL PROVENZA: You seem to find sympathy toward, and the humanity behind, even your ugliest of characters. As you explore their truly inhumane behavior by committing to such characters, do you worry that your point of view may be missed because you embrace rather than criticize their evil?
BILLY THE MIME:
PATTON OSWALT
ALONG WITH COUNTLESS roles in film and television and giving voice to the charming rodent of Pixar’s Ratatouille, Patton Oswalt has also emerged as one of stand-up’s funniest, most biting cultural critics. A major force in The Comedians of Comedy, Oswalt helped reclaim stand-up from the stifling strip malls to which it’s been relegated since the comedy boom of the eighties, bringing it back to its gritty, iconoclastic roots in alternative venues and rock clubs and reinvigorating it for an audience that turned its back on the institutionalized, predictable stand-up that had become all too common. In the process, Oswalt spread his wings more expansively, spoke his hilarious mind more freely, and has come to learn that the proper tone is everything—and that the Left’s oft-heard, well-practiced condescension can only get you so far.
PATTON OSWALT: I don’t like the kind of satire that points to things and says, “See how stupid this is? See how much smarter I am by pointing out how dumb this is?”
I like it better when you embrace what you can’t stand to the point where you strangle it: “Let’s let this horrible thing flourish. Let’s see what would happen if this grew with no boundaries and no restrictions, and see where this takes us.” That’s what the best satire does.
PAUL PROVENZA: Isn’t that precisely what Colbert does?
PATTON OSWALT: Exactly. And it’s never improved since episode one—because it hatched fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. They were right on the money right out of the gate. And he knew it was a perfect thing—particularly how it taps into this thing that was evident but nobody could see because it’s too much a part of us: this undercurrent, especially in cable news, of “You’re welcome. I know I’m doing something amazing.” It’s that tone of the Bill O’Reillys and Sean Hannitys; like that guy who never left his small town but kinda rules the sports bar he hangs out at. He’s the loudest, most violent, psychotic one all the time so everyone just goes, “I don’t wanna argue,” but he thinks he’s won the argument. He doesn’t see that people go, “He’s just loud and crazy. He’s not even worth talking to.”
PAUL PROVENZA: More and more people are seeing those pundits as just bullies.
PATTON OSWALT: But it’s not your classic bullying, it’s more like they’re pitying you, looking down on you for not being able to grasp the great truth that they understand. Colbert tapped into that thing. A lot of those guys have this phony “I’m just a humble journalist, just a truth-teller” attitude, whereas Colbert comes at you, like, “You’re lucky I’m a pedagogue and that I’m telling you what to think. You can thank me later.”
On the Left and Right, there’s usually the subtext: “The truth just showed up.” That’s such a poisonous attitude. You’re shut off from the danger of actually being wrong. It’s how a smug fundamentalist Christian or smug
atheist acts if you say, “I have doubts.”
They’re, “Of course; someone of your intellect would. I can deal with bigger concepts.” They preemptively dismiss any disagreement.
PAUL PROVENZA: So, is it “smug” to hold absolutely, firmly to the belief that an administration is corrupt and dishonest and have manipulated the press and people? To me, there are no shades of gray there.
PATTON OSWALT: Right, except a smug attitude stops any forward movement. I think that’s one factor that lost Kerry the 2004 election. A lot of people had this smug attitude that said to Republicans, “You fucking idiots who voted for Bush, here’s your chance to correct your big mistake, asshole.”
So people got defensive and said, “I’ll vote for him again, goddammit!”
I used to come at comedy from a very smug attitude, because I was so disgusted and disappointed with the government. I’m not the most politically astute person on the planet, so I look at myself as a bellwether: if someone as dumb as me can see how blatantly awful something is, everyone else must’ve seen it before me. But when I’d start talking about it, people would react so violently. I was getting booed off stage and confronted after shows.
My attitude now is that I’m trying really, really hard to find out the truth, and say it in a way that will make people laugh. I don’t want to say, “Hey, stupid fuckers, let me tell you what the hell’s going on.” I don’t think that gets anything done.
PAUL PROVENZA: I think one of the things Judeo-Christianity has done to us is to demand dualities on everything. We tend to have no place for any middle.
PATTON OSWALT: Unfortunately, there’s also no voice for the mass of Christians out there who actually treat Christianity like a spiritual journey rather than, “I just got born again! Now I have superpowers. I’m right all the time!” There’s nothing scarier.