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And jokes grow, too; they travel through lives. You’re performing to people who hear those thoughts, and because they laughed at them and maybe felt the truth of them, they’ll relate those thoughts to other people. So you’re perpetuating thoughts, and in some way actually have a little power against the powers that be.
It’s amazing how many times I hear Chris Rock quoted, and not as a comedian, not, like, “Chris Rock said the funniest thing…” It’s more that he said something insightful. He’s quoted like a president or a scholar. Ultimately, even though he’s trying to make people laugh, people use those jokes as a guide to their thoughts. If you say something so profound that it actually causes the laugh, then it can actually change the way people think.
If you go back in history, the court jester was the only one allowed to make fun of the king. And he was allowed to make fun of him as long as it was funny. The second it crossed the line and it wasn’t funny, that’s when he got his head cut off.
PAUL PROVENZA: A lot like a suburban New Jersey gig.
EDDIE IFFT: A lot. But it’s any gig, really: you can get away with murder up there, say anything you want, be as offensive as you want, cross all kinds of lines—as long as you’re making them laugh, you’ll get away with it. It’s when you cross some line where for some reason it’s not funny that you can’t get away with it anymore. “Not funny” is the really offensive thing.
PAUL PROVENZA: You’re producing a documentary called America the Punchline, where you’re compiling comedy by non-American comedians about America. From my own experiences performing around the world, it’s pretty disturbing to hear America as the brunt of all the jokes.
EDDIE IFFT: Here, everyone makes fun of Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Italians…whatever. In the U.K., it’s the Scots, the Australians, and so on—every country has their favorites to pick on. But no matter who else foreign comedians make fun of, they all make fun of America and Americans. America’s never felt that. There’ve always been American satirists criticizing America, but from within. When you hear it from so many different voices all on the outside, it’s actually shocking. It’s a rude awakening.
And too many Americans believe this country is, or should be, immune from criticism. I always hear people defending America against criticism by listing all the good we do in the world: “We’re the most charitable country in the world!” As if that gives us a pass for all the stuff we’re also responsible for that’s not exactly charitable. That’s like beating your wife then giving her flowers afterward, going, “Come on, it’s okay to beat the shit out of you, because I also buy you roses and take you out for a steak dinner.”
And there’s that whole chip-on-the-shoulder thing they’re pissed off about, too. They think of America as this big, dumb football player. You’re having a high-school party, and you let them in—not because you want them there, you’re just afraid of getting beat up. So you let them in and they start drinking your beer and getting loud and picking fights, going, “I’m the fucking best! Yeah!” and trying to fuck your girlfriend while you’re in the corner, going, “What assholes.”
So of course they’re going to make fun of America. But as an American, even if you agree with them about a lot of what they’re upset about—and a lot of it is justified, in my opinion—it still hurts to hear it, and to hear it so incessantly.
I was getting booed before I’d even said a word overseas. They’d say, “The next comedian is American…”
And right away, “BOOOOO!”
I was, like, “Hold on, hold on! I want to earn my ‘boo.’ I don’t represent a whole country here; I represent a lot of bad jokes. Hold on at least until you hear them, then boo me.” I wanted to be treated just like anyone does, like an individual. The fact that they were stereotyping and generalizing was just racism. So I started going up on stage, like, “Fuck you, you fucking racists! How fucking dare you?! You know, you’re criticizing America for being a racist country when you’re being the same fucking way, so fuck you!”
PAUL PROVENZA: Is it counterproductive to lash out at them? Does it just reinforce their negative image?
EDDIE IFFT: You know, you gotta fight fire with fire. I love America, but I know it’s certainly not immune to criticism—and the greatest part of being American is that you get to criticize it, and I do it all the time, myself. But if you kick a dog long enough, it’s going to bite you, and that’s what happened to me. So I would refer to Britain’s own history, and I’d point out, like, “Your country’s right beside us, you dumb fucks. Your hands are just as bloody as mine are.” I like to turn it all around and play on their own ignorance—’cause they’re really just as ignorant as they believe Americans are about everything that’s going on.
I don’t know who it was—Nietzsche? Whoever the fuck, one of those guys said, “You can’t fight an extreme attitude with a moderate attitude. It’s got to be another extreme.”
When I first started doing comedy, someone said something really interesting to me: “You want to be edgy? Edgy is not being dirty. Edgy is saying things people don’t want to hear.”
Like right now, the edgiest thing you could do is to do a joke about how you don’t support the troops. You can show 2 Girls, 1 Cup over and over onstage and people will be, like, “Oh, I’ve seen girls shit in their own mouths before,” but if you say anything that even suggests you don’t support the troops, you’re saying the most anti-American thing possible—and you’d better be able to prove why you don’t support the troops, and it’d better be real fucking funny. ’Cause if it’s not the funniest thing they’ve ever heard, you’re a dead man.
ROBERT KLEIN
A TRUE STAND-UP icon, Robert Klein emerged in the mid-1970s with a fresh style and intelligent approach that immediately and profoundly influenced the college-educated generation of stand-up that followed in the 1980s comedy boom. From Yale Drama School, Klein went to work with Second City before merging his considerable acting and performance skills with his smart, collegiate sensibility to forge a new kind of stand-up that altered the conventional form from deep within it. Proudly embracing his educated perspective and laced with savvy social and political commentary, Klein’s comedy spoke to a post-sixties generation ready for stand-up with modern values, new observations, and performance flair. Through HBO specials, comedy albums, books, songwriting, and acting roles, he continues “bringing intelligence to bear,” and challenging even himself.
ROBERT KLEIN: People ask, “Is any subject off-limits?”
Well, no…But if you want to joke about nuclear war, cancer, the Nazi Holocaust or anything at that level, you’d better be at least twice as funny as talking about anything else.
There is humor in those kinds of things, for sure—people in concentration camps, America’s slaves…they had their own humor in the midst of all they suffered; the destitute or terminally ill have their own humor—but you’d just better be real good at it.
PAUL PROVENZA: Did you consider yourself subversive when you started out?
ROBERT KLEIN: Some would’ve said I was. I was certainly introducing something kinda new. So much so that on my first Tonight Show, January 19, 1968—I’ll always know the date—they had me sit down and talk with Johnny for two minutes first, before my stand-up. They thought it would help if people got to know me a little first, because what I was going to lay down was so different from what they were used to. It wasn’t so much the material, it was the style. I wanted to be different, and I was.
I wanted to bring intelligence to bear. I loved the Borscht Belt comics I saw as a kid working as a lifeguard in the Catskills, and all the comedians I saw on television were truly great—I just knew I wanted to be smarter. I felt that stand-up in one—one person standing there making people laugh—had so much farther to go than had been explored.
Lenny Bruce was a great inspiration. Jonathan Winters was absolutely brilliant—he made stand-up a theatrical event, not just sitting on a stool talking. He was an improviser of the first order an
d I was a Second City guy, so he meant a lot to me. Some other people were making a mark doing interesting things at the time: Bob Newhart, Bill Cosby were different; they were changing the form. Shelley Berman was doing these long, one-sided telephone conversations—and killed with them on The Ed Sullivan Show, the toughest show in the world, so I just knew stand up could expand beyond “Ladies and gentlemen…”
I still consider stand-up at its best a theatrical experience. Richard Pryor personifies it—he’d do accents, characters, he moved funny…and was incredibly, painfully honest. I’m honest too, but I won’t reveal nearly as much as he did. He’s the best I ever saw in person, no question.
I would say Lenny, Jonathan Winters, and Pryor are the best comedians of all time. Lenny gets extra points for having no champions.
PAUL PROVENZA: And for working at a higher degree of difficulty, given what he did and when.
ROBERT KLEIN: Well put. When I revisit it, some of his stuff isn’t as funny as I first thought, but the stuff that is, is hilarious—and socially important. It’s groundbreaking. His stuff—including his profanity—seems ethereal. And quite harmless by today’s standards.
PAUL PROVENZA: Did you ever run into issues with your material?
ROBERT KLEIN: I had this bit about being a kid and carrying the flag for school assembly. You had to be so careful not to drop it, because letting the flag touch the ground was like one of the worst things anyone could ever do. They made it so frightening; like if it happened, the specter of George Washington would appear like a genie: “You dropped me? After all I suffered at Valley Forge?? You little Jewboy!”
They wouldn’t let me say “Jewboy” on The Tonight Show. They were afraid they’d get letters of complaint. I actually turned that into a joke; I’d mention this incident and say, “They were afraid they’d get angry letters from Alabama saying, ‘Why didn’t he say “Jew Bastard?” ’”
I had a similar problem with a bit about doing Merchant of Venice in college at Alfred University. I’ve pointed to that performance as the confluence of two elements of my career coming together at that point: theater and anti-Semitism. I played Shylock before an entirely anti-Semitic audience.
That experience became a bit where I’d do this elaborate performance of Shylock’s third act speech—the most eloquent dissertation against prejudice of all time, no matter what, if anything, Shakespeare actually knew of Jews.
I’d act Shylock to the hilt in the bit: “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew organs? If you cut us, do we not bleed?”—really doing it up big. Then, “And the audience went, ‘Hell NO!! Jew-boy! Jew-boy!’…” And everyone’s chanting “Jew-boy!” and chasing me with German shepherds.
I wanted to do it when I hosted SNL, and Lorne Michaels was very against it.
PAUL PROVENZA: You were censored for bits decrying anti-Semitism?
ROBERT KLEIN: Absolutely. I persuaded Lorne eventually, but…times were different.
PAUL PROVENZA: I think there’s actually less of a chance to get that on network television today. A while ago, I wanted to do a bit on The Tonight Show about how we’d never take anyone seriously if they said, “Have you heard the word of Thor?” And how everyone agrees that Zeus hurling lightning from mountaintops is laughable but gets upset if you make fun of a god who walks on water and speaks through a burning bush.
They said, “Absolutely no religion material. Period.”
ROBERT KLEIN: Without hearing the whole bit, maybe you pushed it too far?
I remember when Sam Kinison—who was insane, but very funny—did the most brilliant bit about televangelists. I thought I was the only one talking at the time about those crooks I couldn’t stand to see raking in all that money, but Kinison had a great bit that nailed it. I understand he was one of those preachers himself in his youth and really knew what he was talking about.
But at the end of this brilliant piece, he did this bit which wasn’t particularly funny, where he mimes nailing Jesus to the cross. SNL cut that part from the West Coast feed; there was a big controversy over it.
He had just pulled off this brilliant, edgy bit that spoke the truth without being offensive, but then does this harsh, cringe-worthy bit that I imagine is offensive to a lot of people, and screwed the whole thing up.
PAUL PROVENZA: Actually, I think that part made the whole piece. I’m not making a joke now, though it could be one, but—why is Jesus sacrosanct? That’s a real question he addresses.
Those guys get away with taking people’s money claiming to speak for this character in stories they claim are “holy truth.” Kinison’s bit was not just for shock; there’s a serious, subversive—albeit aggressive—purpose in stripping away reverence for this supposed higher authority, trivializing what so many just accept unquestioningly.
It was iconoclasm in the truest sense of the word: reverence for the icon is what enables those greedy posers to get away with it, so…Destroy the swamp, and no one buys swampland.
Why should a religious icon be any different from government, politicians, or anything with power over us? Comedy and satire always take those to task, so why is a religious belief—one with tangible political sway, in this case—off limits? Because it offends someone’s sensibility? A lot of Republicans are offended by jokes about their icon Ronald Reagan, too.
That line we’re not supposed to cross with people’s religious faith is arbitrary. And it’s the refuge for those scoundrels you’re revolted by, so Kinison addresses that in the bit, too.
ROBERT KLEIN: What you say has a lot of truth to it, for sure. When to be subversive, when to be irreverent…It’s a difficult question.
I loved his getting at the hypocrisy of these evangelists, but there are ways of making your point and being hard-hitting, and I recall that part as being superfluous and easily offensive to people who could hate those evangelists, too, but also love Jesus and their faith. So why go that way? It’s not necessary.
PAUL PROVENZA: He asks the question you ask: “How do they get away with it?”
But his answer is, “Because we don’t question the ‘truth’ of what they manipulate us with in the first place.”
Kinison went after the root of that same cancer you recognize, after the “boss” whose orders they say we’re supposed to follow. They tell us they’re authorized as “official” go-betweens. And these flawed, often evil human beings decree that to question what they tell us is to question the boss in whose name they claim to act.
Kinison took down the core premise along with those who use it to their cynical advantage.
ROBERT KLEIN: You’re right on a lot of this. I agree with much of what you say about these ideas, and I’m really arguing just for show, mostly.
But you talked about “subversion” with Kinison’s bit, and I’m talking about “cruelty.” Here’s my point: of course there’s no law against saying something like, “That’s like Christopher Reeve judging a dance contest,” but why is it okay? Isn’t there some better standard of grace or elegance? Isn’t there a more thoughtful way to express things?
Filth or raunch aren’t any real problem to me; the problem is cruelty. Even in some early SNL stuff, there was a lot that was simply gratuitous and unnecessary. Chevy Chase had that hilarious bit making faces behind the news anchor’s back—that funny, juvenile thing we all did in third grade. The news story the guy’s doing isn’t important, it’s just chatter; you’re not listening to it, you’re watching Chevy, right? Well, one week there’d been an earthquake in Sicily, ten thousand people killed, and that was the story Chevy acted like a third-grader behind. Now that may be subtle, but to me that was gratuitous, thoughtless cruelty. A lot of cruelty goes down like that today.
And a lot of the recent backlash against political correctness is troubling to me, too. First of all, “political correctness” is a terrible misnomer; inappropriate at the very least. “Political correctness” makes it sound like North Korean ideology; like the Communists said you’ve thought “incorrectly” your
thoughts must be “corrected.”
PAUL PROVENZA: It sounds Orwellian?
ROBERT KLEIN: Very Orwellian, exactly. Totalitarian-like. It’s a turnoff when you label it “political correctness.” When people make fun of it, they already have a leg up because of that stupid label, but people forget that what it’s really about is just common decency.
PAUL PROVENZA: But regarding art, people all too often use the worthy ideals of it in ways that feel Orwellian; actually feel totalitarian-like.
Doctrinairism keeps people from considering context or irony; it can obfuscate ideas behind words. It’s often debased and bastardized from its extremely worthy intent, used instead to suppress uncomfortable, challenging ideas in art.
ROBERT KLEIN: You know, we’re not really quite all that hip yet in terms of “bigotry control.”
I’m waiting for my luggage at Kennedy Airport, and some guy comes up to me and whispers in my ear, “Didja hear about the Jew who gave to charity?”
Instinctively, I guess, I said, “No.”
He says, “Neither did I,” and walks away.
It really fucking stung me. It was highly offensive to me—especially ’cause it’s some fucking stranger and it’s just some stupid joke, and what am I supposed to do, debate the guy? “The Tisch Pavilion! Jews gave millions! Every lung hospital in America—millions from Jews! You wouldn’t even have lungs if it weren’t for Jews, you stupid fuck!”
I was born in 1942, was brought up on stories of anti-Semitism, then at Alfred University I had all these personal experiences with it…So when I hear shit like that, my hackles come up.
And I’m not completely sure all the time about these lines myself. I know I have to be fair, and I question myself: “What, so no one can make fun of Jews?”
I think about this stuff a lot, but some things, you know…Like Native Americans protesting the name of the Washington Redskins because the pedigree of the term “redskins” is far from pretty? There were bounties on the scalps of Native Americans—that’s what that means and where it came from. Good money was paid for actual scalps—the red skins—of Native American human beings! It’s so shameful that St. John’s University changed the name of their team, the Red Men—which actually referred to the red robes of Catholic clergy or something like that, but most people didn’t know that and assumed it had something to do with Native Americans, so they changed it to the Red Storm so as not to be even mistakenly thought of as participating in that kind of insensitivity.