Satiristas Page 23

  And then there was the content of what I was doing. Every night was one comic after another, mostly all white males doing their thing, with the occasional female doing something pretty familiar. I was getting onstage after all that every night, and I wasn’t in that rhythm. It was hard for people to make the adjustment.

  If you can make it through the comedy circuit and still be committed to your point of view, it must be a really strong point of view, because at any moment you just want to run home and write fifteen minutes of easy jokes and scatological stuff just to get through the night. At the end of the night you’re, like, “I can’t believe I put myself through that again.”

  At The Improv one night, Paul Mooney walked in and sat next to me and I started crying. He said, “Never let them see you cry, Bernhard. They want to destroy you.”

  There is that schadenfreude of that scene. They want to crush your spirit. Ten years later, that trial by fire makes you the kind of great performer you could never be if you hadn’t gone through it, but it’s brutal.

  PAUL PROVENZA: In the notoriously desexualized arena of stand-up, you’re one of the few who are sexualized onstage. Lots of comics talk about sex, but you were being sexual as an organic element of your character. And your sexuality has always been proudly mysterious and ambiguous.

  SANDRA BERNHARD: I was revealing the fluidity of sexuality. The idea that nobody has to commit to anything in that “gay/straight/what-am-I?” way people grasp onto an identity and hold on for dear life. You might be somewhere today, you could be somewhere else tomorrow, you know?

  It’s about the interaction of people, what turns you on from unexpected places, about the adventure of sexuality. The excitement, the fun, the sophistication of sexuality. It’s not about what gets done in dark rooms, or guilt and shame and remorse. If you’re connected with and turned on by somebody, that’s a groovy thing.

  I always brought that to my performances, because I was just barreling through it all myself. I don’t know that I was savvy or sophisticated enough to really understand and disseminate all these things I was thinking about, but I knew instinctively that there are roadblocks for all of us sexually, so I just barreled through them and came through the other side. Now, all these things I talked about are part of the lexicon.

  PAUL PROVENZA: If you believe, as I do, that the personal is political, all those very personal things you dealt with make yours a very political act.

  SANDRA BERNHARD: Fashion, beauty, and concepts of beauty had always informed my life, and all of that is inherently political, too. I’m from that postfeminist era where we were trying to question or break down what was perceived as beauty, and I was expressing all of that, too. I wasn’t explicitly saying it, I was doing it. That’s what I’ve always tried to do: be it, not just talk about it. I am the result of that era and those influences.

  PAUL PROVENZA: You create the same kind of fluidity with race as you do with sexuality. You deal with the black/white divide as if it doesn’t even exist, and challenge assumptions about how we perceive it all. It’s pretty risky.

  SANDRA BERNHARD: One of my biggest core audiences is the black audience. They know me from television; they love me. Wherever I go—in airports, on the street—they hug me and give it up to me.

  PAUL PROVENZA: That doesn’t surprise me. You’re a white “sassy black woman.”

  SANDRA BERNHARD: Exactly! I think I also have a certain leverage from being a white, Jewish woman who hangs out with Paul Mooney. I already have that stamp of approval, so to speak. I can say the N-word onstage if I want to. If I say, “Nigger, please!,” they know I’m coming from a place of having been practically anointed as a black artist myself.

  Any time you put yourself on the periphery and stand on your own saying what you believe, you automatically become part of the “other.” Nobody’s ever questioned my feelings about race or sexuality or feminism. If you’re coming from the right place in your heart and have that connection to your soul, nobody’s ever going to take you down for it. With me, black people are never offended. They love my ass. My black, Jewish, white, mixed-up, crazy fuckin’ ass. Whatever I am.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Comedians and musicians are probably two of the least racist subgroups on Earth. I’ve never met a racist musician in my entire life, and I can’t think of any comedians I’ve met who are racist. That comedians are taken to task so heavily for ideas that are seen as racist is truly ironic.

  SANDRA BERNHARD: Well, we’re being watched by people who are racist. Studios and networks are racist institutions comprised of many racist and afraid people who project their own limitations onto artists who say things. They don’t have the ability to be ironic or get underneath something or understand any art of it.

  They don’t want it to get out that that’s actually how they feel. People like Richard Pryor, Dave Chappelle, Paul Mooney, and a few others have broken through, been honest and challenging, and that terrifies them. Believe me, I’ve seen it firsthand, and I know it still exists. I was approached by a high-profile management company, and one of them said to me, “You’ve got to stop hanging out with Paul Mooney. He’s no good for you.”

  I was, like, “Excuse me? I’m never going to stop hanging out with Paul Mooney.” He was influencing my take on the world of comedy, and it freaked them out. They thought “guilt by association,” and that he would rub off on me. Or, worse yet, maybe they thought I was having an affair with a black man, and that was a problem for them.

  PAUL PROVENZA: It seems like any comedians wanting to deal with issues of race in any intelligent, positive ways are hamstrung, because we’re afraid of a knee-jerk response, or we’re not sure irony will be appreciated, so it’s just too risky to even “go there.” And audiences are on eggshells; they get uncomfortable if they think something could be seen as offensive, justified or not. In truth, we could learn a lot from comedy that goes out on that limb. There are white comedians who have things as interesting and thoughtful to say about black/white relations as Dave Chappelle does, but they’re certainly not going to get on TV doing it.

  SANDRA BERNHARD: That is another problem. But if you don’t have layers and layers of understanding about the issues between the races historically, you’re just jumping on some bandwagon—and that happens a lot. If you haven’t done your homework, haven’t really dug down deep to reveal something new or important to bring to that very complex situation, then you have no business talking about it.

  CULTURE CLASH

  SINCE THE LATE eighties, Culture Clash has been widely regarded as America’s preeminent Latino performance troupe and a major comedic voice of the Latino experience. Through sketches, plays, screenplays, and a short-lived Fox TV series, their unique blend of satire, vaudeville, spoken-word, and performance art digs deep into America’s racial consciousness, challenging assumptions and bringing fresh perspective to all-too-often cliché-ridden Latino comedy. Earning innumerable awards, commissions, and grants as well as an ever-widening theater audience, Culture Clash continues challenging themselves and audiences with bravery and fearlessness, finding unique insight and outrageous comedy in territory where few dare to tread—and fewer survive.

  RICK SALINAS: More and more, we’re exploring the multi-and intercultural stuff going on in America now. Dealing with just some of that could be a lifetime’s work, so we’ve moved away from only focusing on the Latino and Chicano experience. That’s in our DNA, so it influences all our work, but looking into what’s happening between different people now really justifies our name, “Culture Clash.” We’re doing things now about Latino racism against blacks, Asian kids assimilating black culture, white people confused by different cultures rubbing up against one another…And being three brown guys portraying different races and ethnicities, it’s yet another variation of that theme.

  RICHARD MONTOYA: Our new work’s about cultures merging now, in surprising ways. Like about how Sephardics fled the Inquisition and settled in Texas and that whole area, so there’s, like, s
ixty thousand kids there who’ve been Latino or Caucasian their whole lives and are now finding out they may actually be Jewish: “Umm…Why is there a menorah in our New Mexico farm shack?”

  How delicious would it be to mix the movie Crash up with Jackass, you know? To take the lid off Crash and find more truthful, fun moments when races, classes, and cultures clash in these unexpected ways?

  Like, you know these “car gangs,” with their party crews and all that? They’re on a cutting edge in a way, merging so many different cultures together. It’s part hip-hop, part techno, car culture, gangsta…all at once. It’s still mostly unknown, but we do this “Asian Car Gang guy” character.

  We think of the Asian kid in the research library or doing extra-credit reading on Saturday nights. He’s not; he’s skateboarding on a wall somewhere, or out in parks trying to be dangerous, like other kids do. That’s a new idea to most people in the audience, because of the preconceived notion that Asian kids are all working on computers and advancing when our own kids aren’t. No, actually, lots of them are outside behaving very badly or just being typical American kids. In Orange County, a “hate crime” is just as likely to be a Latino student sending hate e-mails to an Asian student, and that’s news to many people.

  All kids co-opt lots of different cultures at once, so I play the Asian Car Gang guy just like the rest of them: “Wassup my nigga? Where yo’ other nigga at?” It’s so wrong and they so shouldn’t be doing that shit, but to observe it without a filter is quite something, and to report it back to our audience is great fun—and we feel to do that is a kind of responsibility we have. We don’t understand exactly why, but “Asian Car Gang guy” is not just comedy, it’s “information sharing.”

  And we really owe a lot to Mel Brooks, by the way. With things like Blazing Saddles, he didn’t just pave the way for stuff about ethnicity and mixing cultures, he went, “Fuck it; this shit is on.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: How’d you end up playing arts centers and having places like The Mark Taper Forum commission you to create comedy/theater for them? I’m guessing not through comedy clubs.

  HERBERT SIGUENZA: We intended to not be theater; we wanted to hit in comedy clubs.

  RICHARD MONTOYA: Before Culture Clash, we’d each done eight to ten years of hard-core political theater in the San Francisco area, and that had gotten kind of stagnant. By eighty-four, comedy clubs proliferated all over the Bay Area and we felt maybe we could blaze some kind of trail there.

  HERBERT SIGUENZA: We did Comedy Tonight with Alex Bennett, a local San Francisco TV stand-up show, and thought, “Great! This is our road. We’re on our way.” But we quickly discovered it was hard, being a group doing sketches in comedy clubs.

  RICHARD MONTOYA: We realized that stand-ups have very specific points of view and personae and whole worldviews right from the start. Playwrights develop all of that, in a roundabout way, so it never quite worked for us. It was a weird, odd fit.

  Performance art was also becoming big around then, so a lot of weirdo, artsy-fartsy things were going on around us too, and there was this uneasy tension for us between comedy clubs and all these other possible kinds of performance. Not wanting to go back to that old, stale political theater of El Teatro Campesino or the San Francisco Mime Troupe, we took the best of what we learned in the stand-up world into theater, and kinda made a new kind of theater for ourselves.

  RICK SALINAS: Herbert did impersonations, I was rapping in Spanish and English, Richard’s comedy had a more “suburban” identity…so we began connecting all these different performance elements and sketches with through-lines of our politics and ideas into a three-act form, kind of like a play. We just pieced it all together, and ended up with something different from what others were doing.

  RICHARD MONTOYA: It was more a combination of characters, stand-up, and performance art than it was either political theater or standup, and satire and social comment fit perfectly into it.

  HERBERT SIGUENZA: We’re a product of the politics you get from just being in San Francisco, so our material had that point of view and sensibility, but we were more irreverent than the didactic kind of theater people had seen before. And we weren’t talking about the plight of farm workers or Latino immigration, we talked about being bilingual, bicultural, urban Latinos; about personal neuroses being Latinos in the United States.

  We found a huge audience, because no one was doing that. Paul Rodriguez was already a star, but he just played into the stereotypical way mainstream America saw Latinos, with all those jokes like, “Why do I wear pointy shoes? To crush cucarachas in corners.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: I remember him in his early days, flinging tortillas to the audience like Frisbees.

  RICK SALINAS: And he’d pull out a knife, “This is my Mexican Express card.”

  HERBERT SIGUENZA: But we were just being true; being totally honest about girlfriends, about going to college, about just being. It wasn’t any stereotype; it was our real experiences.

  RICK SALINAS: We made fun of ourselves and Latinos, too, but in a very different way. Before us, everyone treated Latino icons reverentially, but along with white icons we’d slam sacred Latino images too, from Che Guevara to Frida Kahlo.

  RICHARD MONTOYA: We got flak from conservative Hispanics who felt we should be constantly projecting a positive image, but we’re not going to. We’ll portray a Latino cop going down the wrong way, we’ll do corrupt Latino politicians. We’re not gonna say Latinos are all criminals or drug traffickers, but we want to do stuff about that, too. That’s part of what makes it more universal. That’s how we play a 99 percent Anglo theater audience and an all-Chicano university crowd and get the same laugh. We balance it.

  We’re not gonna change who we are, we’re not gonna sugarcoat anything, and we’re gonna have to talk about how there are just too, too many Mexicans hanging around the Home Depot in Orange County, ’cause that’s hilarious to us.

  Our humor is what makes us laugh. Like during some primary debate, CNN interviewed locals at some “Carlos and Charlies”–type bar nearby, but it just so happened it was “Wetback Wednesday! Dollar Coronas and dollar tacos!” For real, man! Big banners everywhere, on live TV! The reporter even confronted the guy running the place, and he was, just, “What’s the problem? I gotta move some Coronas.”

  That was so funny to me. “‘What’s the problem?’ Dude…Seriously? You think it’s okay to have ‘Mick Mondays! Half-price Guinness and potato skins?’ Like Italian-Americans wouldn’t have any problem with ‘Wop Wednesdays’? Hey, wanna move some chicken wings? Any day of the week could be ‘Nigger Night.’ Try that one.”

  RICK SALINAS: We did a show in Berkeley with some “politically incorrect” jokes like that, and they fucking freaked out. They were so condescending; the kind of crowd where you can’t make any joke involving someone disabled without, “You can’t say that about the disabled!”

  You want to go, “Are you disabled? No? But you know what disabled people feel, is that right? If you were disabled, would you like being singled out even more than you are already in life by now being the one person in the entire theater who can never have any joke made about you?”

  PAUL PROVENZA: People rarely get that about disabled people—or is it “differently abled” now? I’m never sure. Is there some crippled Al Sharpton I can get a ruling from?

  Comedians know from lots of experience that unless you’re actually a cruel scumbag or such a shitty comic that no one knows it’s all in good fun, dis-differently-abled people are almost always thrilled by jokes about themselves. Most are so sick of condescension, of being treated like babies, that treating them no differently from anyone else and making fun of them, too, makes them want to get out of the wheelchair to hug you for including them in something for a change.

  A friend of mine had some dis-differently-abled guys in a crowd and did some joke about them being vegetables or something. They laughed their wobbly heads off, but some people in the audience were outraged. They don’t know t
hat the next night, those guys came back with about a dozen friends in wheelchairs wearing T-shirts with pictures of different vegetables. They had a blast and told their friends, and they couldn’t wait for him to see them wearing those T-shirts, hoping they could get made fun of, too.

  Most people can’t get their heads around that, but comics know it.

  RICHARD MONTOYA: That’s why Asian kids love “Asian Car Gang guy.” They’re, “Thanks for including us.”

  We once worked with an out gay director, and were tiptoeing around doing any gay jokes. We went after everybody else, as usual, but respectfully felt self-conscious about any gay jokes we had, even though they’re not malicious; we don’t do anything malicious. One night he said, “You’re being very condescending not including gay people in the fun. Let us play, too. Do a fag joke. Just make it a good one.”

  That was a good lesson. We left out a whole group that should be included in good-spirited, equal-opportunity offense.

  PAUL PROVENZA: As soon as some people sense “un-PC,” they’ll shut down before even hearing it.

  HERBERT SIGUENZA: Certain words shock that way.

  RICHARD MONTOYA: There’s a lot to be said for that shock, though. In our Home Depot sketch, this guy says to an undocumented worker, “Are you an illegal alien?”

  Someone says, “How dare you call him an illegal alien?”

  And the guy goes, “Oh. Excuse me. Are you a wetback?”

  We want that to be shocking—both to the ear and that the guy thinks that’s better.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I can’t think of any high-profile Latino stand-up who’s not reinforcing stereotypes rather than subverting them. They claim to, but if you deconstruct it, the jokes ultimately rest on accepting clichés, not challenging them.

  RICK SALINAS: That easy stuff is what audiences want, in a sense. At more “bonehead” comedy clubs, Latinos will play into what they think the audience wants to hear. It’s what gets the quickest, easiest laughs, and what crowds are used to.