Satiristas Page 21

  We had a president that thinks God chose him, like in some bad Highlander movie. He’s James Bond, Superman, all those things—but anyone who’s studied religion or knows anything about true faith knows it’s that you search for God. God never answers you, you never find him, there are no actual answers, and it’s that search that makes you a better person. The truly religious live in nothing but the gray area.

  The truly faithful embrace the mystery and wonder and have no answers. George Bush is not that. He’s dogmatic, but I think he has zero faith. Bush and Osama think their gods were searching for them and singled them out—that’s how sociopaths and serial killers and dictators and people in mental asylums think. Basically, we watched two very wealthy mental patients fighting over the fate of the world.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I’ve always said the difference between Bush or Osama and Son of Sam is really just one of scale.

  PATTON OSWALT: It really is. Ask Son of Sam why he did what he did: “This demon searched me out because I’m special. I was sent on this ‘holy’ mission because I have superhuman powers other people don’t have. I hear dogs talking.”

  He says it was some weird “test of faith.” It’s a rough draft of Bush’s thinking: “I was a wayward drunk, and went through all that because God was testing me. I was Luke Skywalker, this superhero in disguise, and now I shall reveal myself.”

  That’s a dangerous way for the shift manager at Wendy’s to think, but for a guy that’s basically running the planet? Bad times.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I loved the bit you did about how it was completely inappropriate to compare Bush to Hitler, because Hitler was democratically elected. It’s an important point about how fragile democracy really is.

  PATTON OSWALT: And Hitler did it by championing family values and religious purity, too. I actually look back on the days when I’d compare Bush to Hitler as being more hopeful, because being in a pre-fascist state would actually be better at this point; I think we’ve been in a pre-inferno state.

  Neocons want to see what happens if the world just burns to the ground. They were told that when everything burns to the ground, super-beings will come out of the sky and fix it. It’s been this deadly combination of like-minded crazy believers and mediocre opportunists—like Karl Rove, who couldn’t give a fuck about religion; I think he’s a closet atheist. Those people figure, “This sociopath may just go all the way. I’ll attach myself to him for my own agenda.”

  It’s been this perfect storm of all the worst people all coming into power at the same time. And not just here, all over the planet, and on every level—politics, business, entertainment, religion—the worst people won, all got power at the same time, and, in a weird way, all support each other.

  I don’t wanna get too paranoid, but a lot of these awful TV shows like Keeping Up with the Kardashians, the Britney Spears stuff, all the stuff that just celebrates dumb consumerism…that’s just another way of supporting this overall structure. Shows like Keeping Up with the Kardashians are victory gardens for neocons: it grows the lettuce and the cabbage that’ll keep our nation going the way it is. “Help the neocons—Keep people dumb and buying shit.”

  One advantage I have over some political comedians is that I’m way susceptible to stuff like gossip magazines, TMZ, Paris Hilton—all the distractions, all that shit. But instead of saying, “This is bullshit!” and extricating myself from it, I go deeper into it and try to show what happens when you indulge it. I’m as damaged by the entertainment system and the TV monster as everyone else—maybe more so—so a lot of my comedy says, “See what this has done to my thinking?” I love big, loud, clangy movies and bright, tasty junk food. Because I love it, I also find out what’s wrong with it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: “Hey kids, don’t do drugs. I do them, and look what happened to me.”

  PATTON OSWALT: Yeah, “Stop watching everything on VH1. Look what it did to me.”

  And I wouldn’t be outraged if I didn’t think this country was awesome. It’s an awesome thing in the hands of numb-nuts who are ruining it. It’s like seeing P. Diddy take over the Pixies and “take them in a new direction.” You’d be, “What the fuck? Goddammit, no!”

  When I see those ads for the Arby’s sandwich that’s a Reuben sandwich in the middle of a burger, and the Pizza Hut pizza that’s just two pizzas stacked on top of one another—I wanna destroy the country. Maybe we need a zombie attack; then we’d see, can you grow your own food? What can you do without?

  It’s an easy, knee-jerk thing to say, I know. I’m trying hard not to be smug and dismissive, because that’s as worthless as everything I just named. It’s just standing around going, “See? I’m right!” while you watch everything burn to the ground. So I change the way I say things; I want to really try and change people’s minds, not just show how smart and hip and cool I am. That just gets people angrier and gets you nowhere; you seal yourself in your own little bubble of coolness, and nothing happens.

  PAUL PROVENZA: As a comedian, where’s your place in that equation?

  PATTON OSWALT: As a comedian, I have no place in that equation. I can point things out all I want to, change my tone all I want, but it really comes down to things I do privately. I do fund-raisers, I work with a couple of charities—I won’t name them, because I’m always suspect when people say, “Here’s the amazing charitable work I do”—but I do some things quietly that I hope will show progress down the road.

  I’d prefer for people individually to say, “I’m gonna help some independent journalism organization uncover stories,” or “I’m gonna help out at a veterans home,” rather than everyone getting together in a room going, “Bernie Madoff sucks! Fuck that guy!” and then going home and making fun of Paris Hilton and nothing gets done. We’re at the point where we need small, individual actions rather than a big, group hate.

  I want people to go, “We can all change this; we can all benefit, rather than just keep fighting and nothing happens and we’re all miserable.” That goes back to tone and line of attack. The antiwar effort and the Left wing’s lines of attack were archaic. They didn’t embrace this media climate and how you get things through—especially satirically. If you’re out there wearing body makeup and banging a drum, everyone’s going to ignore you. The Bill O’Reillys and Ann Coulters know how to get complete lies through as if they’re truth. But then the other side gets angry, starts waving their hands and screaming, and it’s, “Ah, those liberal moon bats.” We’re in a war. Why lose it for yourself by coming to a rally wearing fucking bunting with firecrackers up your ass? All anyone’s gonna see is the nuttiness. Just calm the fuck down!

  I have no patience for people who are unsavvy about how to comport yourself in the media.

  LIZZ WINSTEAD

  LIZZ WINSTEAD SPENT her youth beating her independent head against the walls of a conservative, Catholic childhood, a trend she’s continued as a creator of The Daily Show and cofounder and on-air host of the Left-leaning radio network Air America. Particularly intrigued by media and its effect on how we process the world, Lizz, along with an array of other brilliant talents, currently writes and performs a weekly live show in New York, called Wake Up World—an ongoing, relentless, subtly audacious skewering of bland, anodyne morning television and how it seeps into our consciousness, trivializing everything that matters. Taking a break from that monumental task, Winstead explains how an inquisitive mind is born and the challenges it must face.

  LIZZ WINSTEAD: My goal in creating The Daily Show was that it wasn’t just about newsmakers; it was about who presents the news and decides what’s important. The indignity of what happened to journalism is that people stopped being journalists.

  I’d hear friends who worked in mainstream media say, “When I worked at CBS News there were no Native American stories, no stories about the environment…It’s boring.” Journalists would prioritize things that’d keep people tuned in rather than make things that really matter gripping enough to keep us tuned in. During the first Gulf War, whe
n cable news had just sort of started coming into its own, the build-up to the war felt like a mini-series. I felt like I was watching something that was not real. It felt like the graphics department was CNN’s highest-funded department, like, “Let’s take that research money and put it into graphics and music!” You felt like you were watching some kind of docudrama that wasn’t really going on.

  PAUL PROVENZA: It seems real confrontational journalism is actually mostly happening through comedy now.

  LIZZ WINSTEAD: There’s a very valuable place in comedy for people who are flamethrowers. In the world of sound bites and stump-speeching we live in now, none of it is very inspiring, and a satirist’s job can be to break through. We have a freedom that politicians and journalists don’t have; we have no agenda other than to speak our minds.

  It’s a fair question whether Al Franken will be able to make as big an impact as a senator as he has as a satirist. His books and radio show mobilized people in a really powerful way. I’ve never seen a comic writer with more researchers and fact-checkers; any news network should take a page from Al. I think he was responsible for getting people on board through his work, mobilizing them to join the fight in a way that I don’t know a senator can.

  I myself try to present my thinking through asking questions, like, “If you’re Mitt Romney and want to appeal to mainstream evangelicals, is denying Mormonism and saying your favorite book is written by a Scientologist really the best way to go?” I present facts and ask questions, because I don’t have the answers. To write political satire you have to have information, and once you spend your time getting the information, you’re left with nothing but questions. That’s the whole point of information: so you can ask questions to try to get to the bottom of it, to the truth—to the comedy. Satirists are the ones putting it out there, because they’re the ones asking questions.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Did you always have an interest in satire?

  LIZZ WINSTEAD: I was always interested in why powerful entities did what they did.

  I never liked babysitting as a young girl. I loved Barbie, because she didn’t have any kids; she had a house and a boyfriend and a car and cool clothes and was fucking awesome. It was the opposite of feminist thinking, where they see Barbie as this oppressed woman with a fucked-up body, but…whatever. So when it came to making money as a kid around twelve years old, my mom wouldn’t let me have a paper route, because it was too dangerous for a little girl to be out in the Minnesota early morning; it’s dark there until fucking whenever—and there’s wolves. So I thought, “Altar boy! That’s good; that’s easy enough.” I thought it was a job where you could make some money, but the priest said, “You can’t be an altar boy, you’re a girl. It’s called altar boy.”

  That sounded easily fixable; just start calling them “altar kids,” or whatever. I started a petition, went to the archdiocese…and started this whole thing. My mother was completely mortified, but I simply didn’t understand why the boys who ate their boogers got to stand on the altar.

  Then the first time I ever had sex, in high school, I got pregnant. I knew I wasn’t having a baby, but the way to get an abortion was so insane. Being brought up Catholic, I didn’t know where to go, but one day I saw a sign on the bus for a place that said, “abortion options.” I thought, “Oh. There are many options.”

  So I go to this place, and it was run by some group called The Lambs of Christ. This woman comes out wearing a lab coat, so I’m thinking she’s some kind of doctor. Then I realized the women at the Clinique and Lancôme counters wear lab coats; she’s not really a doctor, lab coats are pretty much available anywhere. She shows me blow-ups of mangled fetuses and a picture of a kid on a bike. I’m, like, “A bike?” It was insane. I left completely confused. As I walked out the door, she was yelling after me, “Just remember, the choice you make is mommy or murder.”

  I thought, “I’m sixteen and here’s an adult, a ‘person of God,’ impersonating a physician, just scaring the shit out of me.” Even as a kid, I was, like, “That’s fucking weird.”

  From that point forward, I just thought, “There’s something really fucking wrong here.” I couldn’t wrap my head around it. So my activism really grew out of self-interest more than anything else. Those events propelled me into looking into other stuff.

  PAUL PROVENZA: What’s your take-away from your experience with Air America?

  LIZZ WINSTEAD: The weirdest thing was that since there was no progressive radio, you could never satisfy everyone. Ninety percent of talk radio is Right-wing—and not moderate; it’s rabid—so people were so starved to finally have any kind of political viewpoint that wasn’t from the Right that you couldn’t give them enough. So the clean-coal assholes would call and go, “You’re not talking enough about clean coal!”

  It gets confusing trying to please everybody. People have a tendency—and I used to, too, and try not to—for their thing, their issue, to be the driving issue, when, in fact, there are many important issues. Like biofuels may be the thing that gets you going about the environment, where my thing might be dependence on foreign oil. There’s no number one priority, so you get all this infighting for attention even though we have the same broader goals.

  And guess what? Progressives are assholes, too! That was fun; to find out you can work for a progressive organization and have just as much corruption and weirdness and megalomania and assholery as anywhere else. I’ve always said I’m glad I’m not a lesbian because once you’re sleeping with women you can’t blame men for being the fucked-up assholes in relationships. It’s kinda the same thing.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I assume some of it has to do with the fact that progressives have money issues like everyone else.

  LIZZ WINSTEAD: Money issues, and power struggles. At Air America, lines were blurred about shareholders who were big Democratic Party donors. There were agendas, like, “Careful what you say about the Clintons, or about this, that, and the other thing.”

  I was, like, “Careful what I say?” I thought we were a media consortium that threw the words “careful what you say” out the window. Instead, people would say to me, “Don’t be so hard on John Kerry in the 2004 election, ’cause he’s our guy.”

  I was, like, “I don’t have any guy. I want to talk about injustice and hypocrisy and whoever walks through my path.” If John Kerry’s letting himself be Swift-Boated into some abyss, I’m not going to say he’s the right guy for the job.

  PAUL PROVENZA: How much of that was about advertisers’ demands?

  LIZZ WINSTEAD: There weren’t a lot of advertisers we worried about pissing off, because we didn’t have a whole lot of advertisers. I felt it was more about which powerful people on the board had connections with Washington politicos.

  PAUL PROVENZA: That’s exactly what happened to the Smothers Brothers, where the head of CBS happened to be Lyndon Johnson’s friend, and Johnson would call and say, “Make them stop.” Nothing’s changed, on the Left as well as on the Right.

  LIZZ WINSTEAD: On the other hand, we did get people motivated. People would call and say, “I live in rural Oklahoma, and the only signal I ever got on my radio was Rush Limbaugh, but now that I can listen to you on the Internet and hear your point of view, I’ve completely changed my mind.”

  You hear that and you think, “Wow, that’s pretty unbelievable.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: That surprises me, because I always felt that people who listen to Rush Limbaugh already agree with Rush Limbaugh, and those that listen to Air America already agree with Air America, and it’s all just cheerleading.

  LIZZ WINSTEAD: Sometimes people listen to these giant AM or FM stations because it’s the only thing they get or that comes in clearly, so it must be the truth.

  That was a whole narrative during Katrina: the veil hiding the poorest of the poor was ripped down. Who knew those people existed? We’re shocked that young girls get pregnant because they don’t know any better, but it’s because we ignore this sub-sect of people who have zero information
to work with. They’re really out there; a lot of people can’t even get cable let alone afford it. School systems in oppressed, impoverished areas don’t even have buildings that can accommodate wiring computers.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Some argue that censorship doesn’t really matter, because there are so many outlets, so while you can’t say some things on broadcast TV, there’s hundreds of cable channels and the Internet where people say whatever they want. Is that argument hollow?

  LIZZ WINSTEAD: I think it’s completely hollow. People who are trying to survive don’t have time to scour the Internet to find the truth every fucking day. If giant broadcasting conglomerates are just allowed to manipulate regions, people trying to raise their kids, pay for healthcare, and work two jobs just to scrape shit together just aren’t going to have the time to sit at the computer going, “I wonder if what I’m hearing on the news is the truth.”

  And why should people have to dig for the truth? That’s the part I find incredibly upsetting. People say, “With the Internet people can find out whatever they want,” but lots of people can’t afford computers, and, again, that’s no reason not to demand truth of the media.

  People that need the most representation often don’t have a lot of the stuff we assume them to have. “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps?” What about the people who don’t have boots? People who have boots are not the bottom; the real starting point, the real bottom, is the people without boots. Until we get them boots, everybody else is fucked.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you think your work as a satirist makes a difference?

  LIZZ WINSTEAD: I think it does. If you can unsettle someone who may think they’re gonna disagree with you, if all of a sudden they’re laughing at something you say, you find a common ground in a weird way. It’s a great way to say, “Look, we’re laughing at something together, maybe there’s something here we can talk about in a real way, too.”