Satiristas Read online

  I do like that I’ve given people jobs and I generate income for people, and there’s a fellowship in my brother’s name that I’ve been helping generate money for, for the last five years. I can shovel money to them—because the pricks that watch my money aren’t directing it anywhere! They’re just, “We can get you a shelf built out of a giant Courvoisier bottle made in the 1700s” or some stupid shit. Those fucks.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I’m guessing it makes sense to you, but a shelf made out of a giant Courvoisier bottle is just surreal to me.

  LEWIS BLACK: It is. I don’t know what the fuck that was about. That happens sometimes.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Just checking. I’m curious what you make of the Pew Research Center study that says The Daily Show is a primary source of news for so many people.

  LEWIS BLACK: Well, the news—I call it “news” by default—stopped giving us information; they just editorialize. If some ninety-two-year-old dies, it’s “The sad departure of so-and-so…” They’re even editorializing on that level, you know? I’ll decide if it’s a sad departure, you prick.

  Once the New York Times apologized for not giving us information on Iraq—for not doing their job—because of The Daily Show, Colbert, and others, all of a sudden comedy in essence became a place where information actually became disseminated at least as well, if not better. Even Keith Olbermann is pretty satirical sometimes; he says a lot of things in a very funny way.

  PAUL PROVENZA: A lot of comedians appear on Hardball-type shows now and then, but you never do.

  LEWIS BLACK: I don’t want to be a pundit; I don’t want to be in that position. I watched Janeane Garofalo get blindsided; they used her like a punching bag and I thought it was disgusting.

  You can’t put me on with Arianna Huffington and Pat Buchanan and Stinky Valdez and Hoopy Poopa and have me sit there and come out with a few comic lines while everyone just looks at me. Comedy has to be in a context where people know you’re being funny, otherwise they’ll take your jokes at face value. I was on some FOX show, of all things, some money show with Buddy Bing or whoever, and Ben Stein was on via remote. They come around to me with some question about Arnold Schwarzenegger and I said, “This thing about him running for president is insane. And being Jewish, my hair stands on end whenever I hear an Austrian accent.”

  They’re looking at me, like, “What is wrong with you?”

  Then Ben Stein goes, “Excuse me, but Arnold has given millions of dollars to a variety of Jewish organizations.”

  And I go, “Thanks for ruining the joke, Ben. Thank you, you putz.”

  Then the host goes, “We’ll be right back with Lewis Black, who obviously doesn’t like Austrians.”

  It’s just a totally different skill set. It’s like the skill you needed as the wiseass in junior high when you had to learn to pull your punches to work within the context of the classroom and not get your ass kicked by the teacher.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you ever see some amazing piece of work that’s so funny and so rich and think, “I’m a total charlatan. I’m not fearless at all; I’m playing it safe. I’m not doing anything that would make my own head explode.”

  LEWIS BLACK: Yeah, I get that. I watch some of the writing on The Daily Show, and just go, “Wow!” Will Durst does stuff that’s so good, I’m, like, “You gotta be kidding me. How’d he do that?”

  Not long ago Andy Borowitz did this thing about reality shows, and said the one he’d really like to see would be Trading Meds, where someone with ADD trades their Ritalin with the meds of some paranoid schizophrenic, and I just thought, “Goddammit! Fuck me.”

  Stephen Colbert, of course, has done something just astonishing. Truly astonishing. It’s the most major step of comedy of our generation of comics. I watched it evolve on The Daily Show, where he’d do it, then he’d do it some more, and then he just kind of fell into it and became it. I watch him just to go, “What more could he possibly do with this?” It’s that improv skill he’s got, that commitment to character. “Commitment” is really the key word. From the very beginning he made me laugh, but I was always, like, “How long can he keep doing this??” But he just gets stronger and stronger with it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: In your book, you mention reading Paul Krassner’s story “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book” as a kid, and that it inspired you and made you think about comedy in a whole different way. I had a similar reaction when I came across it as a kid, and I’ve since learned it was pretty influential for a lot of people in comedy.

  LEWIS BLACK: I must’ve been fourteen or fifteen when I started getting Krassner’s The Realist, and I was the only one I knew who was getting it. It arrived once a month, and man! He had references to Lenny Bruce, one issue had this poster of a Disney character sex orgy—and up until that point in my life, Disney was an icon, so it was like somebody went, “The emperor has no clothes!”

  It just flipped my world over. When I was growing up in the suburbs, it was all of the good and wonderful, but there was also this sense of, “This is way too idyllic. It’s…weird.” It’s great and safe, but you’re always kinda looking over your shoulder, and the stuff in The Realist suddenly made me feel comfortable. Like, “So this is bullshit. These people are actually nuts.”

  The really big one was the one you’re asking about. It was about The Death of the President book, which is considered the important tome on the Kennedy assassination—about what really happened from the moment he was shot in Dallas right up until his burial—all the details everyone’s still arguing about to this day, fifty years later. The book was a big deal when it came out, and in The Realist, Krassner claimed to have gotten hold of the parts that had been edited out of it. He had written them himself, of course—and each one was more shocking than the last.

  The thing I remember most was when they’re flying the president’s body back from Dallas, and Jacqueline Kennedy goes to the back of Air Force One where Lyndon Johnson is standing over the open coffin. She thought Johnson was performing—I’ll never forget this—some “ancient Indian rite he might have learned in his Texas boyhood,” but she was stunned to find that Johnson was actually fucking the bullet hole in JFK’s neck!

  It was like somebody gave me a drug. My head exploded. The Kennedy assassination had been the single most important event that happened in my life and in the collective life of the country up to that point, and just two or three years after the fact, Krassner had taken it and said, “Fuck you!”—you know? “Enough already! Sixteen thousand other things are happening, and we’ve got to move on.”

  I showed it to my friends and they went nuts over it, too. They started writing these cartoons, kind of in that vein, about some kid in our school who’d committed suicide. The rumor was that he’d done the autoerotic-asphyxiation thing, and that was the first time I’d ever heard of it, so it was pretty bizarre—and pretty fuckin’ funny if you didn’t know the kid, which we didn’t. My friends wrote this cartoon that was just wrong—but it was seriously funny.

  So that Krassner story had a huge impact on all of us. After reading it, I realized I could think things that were shocking, and that other people were thinking things that were shocking, too, and that they could be funny. And that it was okay to be wrong, as long as it was funny.

  PAUL KRASSNER

  PAUL KRASSNER WAS a close friend, colleague, and kindred revolutionary comedic spirit of the legendary Lenny Bruce, and edited the groundbreaking comedian’s autobiography. In the 1960s, Krassner, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin cofounded the antiauthoritarian Youth International Party—the YIPPIES!—engaging in political and cultural agitprop that provoked and energized the entire counterculture of that chaotic, explosive era. He founded and edited the underground magazine The Realist, a cultural landmark that, like the Velvet Underground’s first album, had influence far beyond its modest range and distribution. One of its most notorious satires was an ersatz excerpt from William Manchester’s The Death of a President. In it, Krassner exploded the boundaries of wha
t was possible in satire, influencing and expanding the terrain for countless artists to follow. He recounts the origins of that epochal moment, and how comedy and political activism can become one and the same.

  PAUL KRASSNER: “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book” is my favorite thing I’ve ever written. I was relatively jaded already, so if it blew my mind, I assumed it would blow the readers’ minds. Over forty years later, people still refer to that piece.

  Let me give you context: In 1967, The Death of a President by William Manchester came out. This was the book about the assassination, authorized by the Kennedy family. There were all these news stories that Jacqueline Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy had problems with certain parts of it and the book had been bowdlerized to satisfy them. There was a lot of speculation about what they forced Manchester to delete.

  Through my publishing contacts, I tried to get a copy of the original manuscript before the cuts, but I was not successful, so…I was forced to write them myself, in Manchester’s style, as if he had written them, and I said these were the parts that got cut out.

  I wrote it as a seduction for the reader. I started with true, known facts. One was that during the 1960 presidential primary Lyndon Johnson said publicly that JFK’s father, former U.S. ambassador to England, Joseph P. Kennedy, was a “Nazi sympathizer.” There’d been a story in the New York Times, and it was on the record that indeed, Joseph Kennedy had made such statements—something to the effect of how he had admired Hitler. So I started with those true, credible facts; everything in my story was authentic at that point.

  Then I added some stuff about John F.

  Kennedy’s affair with Marilyn Monroe—also true. Journalists knew it to be true, but it was a taboo then, so no one wrote about it, but it was known to be true.

  There had also been story after story about Jackie being upset about a cover story in Photoplay, a movie celebrity magazine: “Jacqueline Kennedy: Is It Too Soon for Her to Start Dating?” I used that true story about Jackie being upset about that, and had her asking very William Manchester–like things like, “What will they ask next, do I use a diaphragm or take the Pill? Do I keep it in a drawer or in the medicine cabinet?”

  All of it could very well have been in Manchester’s original manuscript, so the piece built up verisimilitude and credibility right up until the climactic scene. It was all true or extensions of what was known to be true, and I kept peeling layers off this onion of truth until I got to the totally fictional core, a scene of—well, “Presidential Neck-rophilia.”

  The climax was Jackie Kennedy accompanying the president’s body from Dallas to the hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. She describes her state of shock when she went into the part of Air Force One where JFK’s body was and saw Lyndon Johnson leaning over the casket, “making strange motions with his body.” She says she thought he might be performing some traditional Indian rite, because Johnson had taught Native American kids in Texas at one point in his life—also true, by the way; he had—so that’s how she first rationalized what she was seeing. Then I had her say, “But no, I realized that he was, and there is no other way to put it, fucking my husband in his throat wound.”

  Then she says, “I just froze.” Now, everyone at the time knew this iconic photo of Jackie on Air Force One “frozen” in a state of shock, Johnson standing nearby. The implication was that this incident was what happened right before that picture was taken, capturing her reaction to it.

  I even included notes and citations in the article, which I attributed to the Warren Commission, referring to a semen analysis and suggestions that Johnson’s fucking the throat wound might have been functional, possibly to make an entry wound coming from the “grassy knoll” look like an exit wound from shots coming from behind, where Oswald was.

  That issue of The Realist had a circulation of 100,000, but an estimated couple million in passed-on readership—if your mind is blown, you want to share it with other people, you know? Ken Kesey told me Neal Cassady did exactly that on the bus; he read it and went, “Kesey! Take a look at this.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: Younger people may not realize how the country was affected by Kennedy’s assassination, but even four years later, publishing that was like doing hard-core 9/11 jokes on 9/15—and really vile, disgusting ones.

  PAUL KRASSNER: The printer who always did The Realist refused to print it! I had to search for one that would; even the printer of the Communist Daily Worker wouldn’t do it. I finally found this small printer in Brooklyn who would.

  Even my radicalized readership had its threshold, and I got so many threats and subscription cancellations. The radical Lefty editors of Ramparts magazine said it was a mistake to publish it and would hurt my credibility for other articles I was doing, particularly this serious piece by a respected investigative journalist about the Malcolm X assassination. So even within the ranks everyone saw it through their own eyes, but almost everyone said, “You’ll get killed; you’ll get sued for libel…”

  I didn’t want to hear that stuff, because you can’t help but absorb other people’s paranoia, and the only other choice was to not do it. That issue was already two months late because of the printer problem, so it made me realize my commitment. I went ahead with it, and I accepted that this was no longer a career; it was now a way of life.

  I felt exhilarated. I went to a store in the Village that carried The Realist, and saw a kid holding a copy looking dazed. We talked a bit and he said, “It doesn’t make any difference if this is true or not. Because it is.”

  That was my first review!

  Someone told me that a young woman recently told him my story as being true. She’d never heard of me or The Realist, and with all the conspiracy theories and Bohemian Grove stories and that kind of stuff we’ve been hearing for decades, it didn’t seem at all far-fetched to her. But English professors have told me students sometimes believe Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” was investigative journalism, actually exposing the truth about England solving Irish overpopulation by eating Irish babies, so…

  It happens. I was performing once during a period when a bunch of new drugs had begun showing up on the streets, and I joked that the latest one was called “FDA,” which I always thought sounded like a drug. It ended up in Time magazine: “A new hallucinogenic on the streets known as ‘FDA’…” How great is that?

  But the Kennedy piece seemed real, because I played on real character. Johnson was crude. He’d talk about Vietnam with cabinet members while sitting on the toilet taking a dump with the door open. On his yacht once, with some reporters, he took out his penis, put it on the railing, and yelled, “Watch it touch bottom, boys!” I just extended his actual, known persona as far as I could, and his real personality suggested maybe he really was a little “off.” Maybe all that odd stuff was his unconscious poking through and he really was a madman.

  That was the challenge: to write something incredible, but nurture it in the credible so people would say, “I believed it—just for a moment.” In that moment, it revealed that they could find it conceivable. And if it was conceivable, the president may actually be insane.

  I also went on all these radio shows and would not cop to a hoax—partly to see the fury of the interviewers, but also with that old idea that if a politician says his opponent’s a pig-fucker, it puts his opponent in the position of having to say, “I’m not a pig-fucker!”

  Well, Albert Merriman Smith of UPI wrote, “Terrible, terrible things written about President Johnson are being scooped up at newsstands across the city, and though I can’t say in a family newspaper what it is, it’s not true; it never happened.”

  Which of course sounded to me like, “Lyndon Johnson is not only not a pig-fucker, he’s not a corpse-fucker!”

  That was success to me. There was no separation between my work and play. It was pure art. Of course, other people said, “This is filth you find on bathroom walls!” so “art” is subjective. As is humor, and as is “obscenity.”

  PAUL PRO
VENZA: National Lampoon did satire and subversive humor, but The Realist was as much about legitimate journalism and commentary along with comic, satirical pieces, and each gave different context to the other.

  PAUL KRASSNER: That was conscious. I launched it in 1958 with entertainment and the First Amendment as two sides of the same coin in mind; it was not either/or. I wanted a by-product of what I published to be examining what mainstream media pass along as news with a bit more healthy skepticism.

  Maybe 50 percent of it was critiquing organized religion and politics, and I wanted to phase some of that out, intending it to be all satire, but stories kept coming to me that weren’t satirical; serious investigative journalism stories that had been rejected by other magazines not because they were undocumented or inaccurate but because they were too controversial or violated taste or made publishers fear lawsuits. I felt privileged to have an outlet for those kinds of stories, so it became a mixture.

  Sometimes a journalistic story seemed so outrageous that people thought it was a satire, and sometimes a satire was so believable people thought it was pure reportage—and I never labeled any of them as one or the other.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Yourself along with Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, the Yippies!, the Diggers—so many of the 1960s protest movement—engaged in genuine protest and community organizing through comic agitprop and humor. It was serious activism for civil rights, to end the war in Vietnam…And many of you were imprisoned or beaten, in some cases killed, and you were all under government surveillance. It was very serious business, but so much of that activism was genuinely funny. Arguments about whether the protests of the 1960s did any good notwithstanding, it had impact. That’s a real inspiration, and a serious indication of what is possible through comedy.