Satiristas Page 7

  PENN JILLETTE: The fact that Colbert can pass off anything he does as “satire” just seems very, very safe to me. There’s a kind of protection in satire—in that you get to do your emotional acting as someone else, and if you are wrong, it’s very hard to tell exactly how you’re wrong.

  If I say, as myself, “There’s been too much collateral damage in Iraq; too many innocent people have died,” then you can come back and say, “But it’s during a war and we’re trying to protect American soldiers. Can you go into a war and worry about the other side’s collateral damage more than your own soldiers?” And then we’d get a real discussion going about that. But as soon as I go into a character, like…say I’m playing the part of “The Guy Running the Acme Chemical Company, Who Has All the Money in the World And His Hand Up the President’s Ass Because the President Is His Puppet,” okay? If I’m wrong as that guy, well, we can be in an area where I was using hyperbole, or where I was using a certain kind of shading…all kinds of stuff like that. As that Acme presidential puppeteer guy, I can go, “Well, the job is collateral damage! The more women and children we kill the quicker they’ll be broken down,” and you can’t come back and say, “Wait a minute, you can’t make that argument.”

  Intellectually, it’s just all sorts of shading and sloppiness. It all ends up being such broad strokes that the interesting stuff gets lost for me.

  When I’m watching Jon Stewart, there’s a sense that he’s speaking from his heart—that’s not always true, of course, it’s show business—but that’s the sense of it: he’s being him, it’s his point of view; it’s him and his thoughts and feelings. But when you go to Stephen Colbert, that ancient Greek question of “Who am I?” of every poem gets rammed down my throat too much. It seems more of an intellectual puzzle and less of pure balls to me.

  Stephen Colbert is so smart and so talented and so cool, but I was so much more interested in talking to him backstage, out of character, than I ever am in watching his show.

  I think I don’t much like satire. There’s a lack of nakedness in it that I often find much less interesting. It seems like in satire, almost by definition, you have to bump up the character enough to say, “This isn’t me, this isn’t me, this isn’t me.”

  It grabs me when someone is really talking to me; the lack of archness and the lack of artifice just grabs my heart. In Lenny Bruce’s classic bit about “Would you rather fuck a black woman or a white woman? How about if the black woman was Lena Horne and the white woman was Kate Smith?” he talks about who he’d rather fuck. To me that’s so much more profound and there’s so much more to think about because it’s in Lenny’s own voice; it’s Lenny talking personally.

  When he did “How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties,” which is satire, and was a really important bit about civil rights and prejudice and tokenism, if you just read the script, all it says is, “Racism is stupid,” and that liberals avoid it sloppily. But to me, the intense part of that bit was that he had one of the African-American jazz musicians in the band come out and play the part of the black man the character talks to at the white liberal’s cocktail party. To me, that makes the whole tension, and it humanizes it, you know?

  I’m always less interested in anyone who is doing a character. The exceptions to that, and I don’t know why it is, are in music—like when Randy Newman or David Bowie or Lou Reed and even Tom Waits have done whole songs as characters. They really interest me, and I think that’s because of the form itself—when you bring music into it, it’s so much more confessional.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Is it that the music itself evokes feelings and makes a connection?

  PENN JILLETTE: The clearest examples of Randy Newman doing this are songs that I love: “Sail Away” and “God’s Song.” And, as satire, “Sail Away” is the hardest example to make any sense out of for me, because I kinda think the parts of that song that kill me dead are actually the parts that are not satire.

  The slave trader sings, “Don’t have to run through the jungle, scuff up your feet.” That part fries me, because at the time he wrote that song in the early seventies, it probably was better to be an African-American in the U.S. than to be an African in wherever it was they took him from. And Randy Newman is so into the character there that it almost makes it seem like there really is a justification, and he’s actually making it! Those are the parts that are really, really scary.

  When satire crosses over into seeing the point of view of the enemy, it becomes really fascinating. Is it even still satire?

  PAUL PROVENZA: I think that makes it really good satire, and why so much of it is misunderstood and upsets people. Abbie Hoffman comes up for me along those same lines of “Is it even satire?” Even as a kid watching things he was doing on the news at the time, as my very conservative, hawkish dad railed against nutty things Abbie Hoffman was in the middle of—people holding hands surrounding the Pentagon trying to levitate it, throwing dollar bills down onto the floor of the stock exchange and creating havoc—even then I had a sense that this was some kind of comedy going on. But it was on the news! He was very funny on talk shows while he made serious points, but he was arrested, charged with conspiracy to incite riots, was even mentioned by Nixon himself on the infamous White House tapes as someone they needed to go after and get out of the way. What he was doing was not about silliness, but it was clearly very silly. And being silly got him in trouble and made him a real threat.

  PENN JILLETTE: Abbie Hoffman, because of my age, was very important to me. I read Steal This Book… He meant everything to me.

  In the late sixties, when all that stuff was happening, I thought that what I loved about Abbie Hoffman and what he was doing was the politics. I loved that it was real; I loved that he really believed in things. But Abbie was really interested in not getting too close to the other hippies and Yippies! He’d take a cab away from the scenes of the things, throw his hair under a hat, and get out of there, because he wanted to go back to someplace and laugh about it. That was really important to him. So I now realize—and it’s, like, the hardest thing to admit—that Abbie Hoffman probably now comes under my category of artist/comedian, and the political stuff is actually pretty insignificant.

  I remember when I was in high school having a huge screaming argument over an article in National Lampoon, where I believed that all that mattered in it was the political content, and the person arguing against me had the foolish point of view that maybe some of it was in there to be funny. That was the most appalling point of view that I could imagine! And when I saw the movie Lenny, with Dustin Hoffman playing Lenny Bruce, at the end of the movie—I believe the last line of it—they say “He was a very funny guy.” I was appalled by that, too. Lenny Bruce being funny was totally unimportant to me. Abbie Hoffman being funny? Totally unimportant. There was a much higher calling than that.

  But you know, my wife occasionally has to tell people, “I don’t mean this as an insult—it’s one of the reasons I love my husband—but you’ve gotta understand he takes everything seriously.”

  I was complaining that my three-year-old daughter was being thrown into this whole “princess” culture. I watched a little bit of Aladdin with her and there’s all this stuff about being a princess, all her friends have these “princess days,” she has this Disney princess game where she moves these little princess puppets around the board…And I said to her, “You’re not my little princess—you’re Daddy’s little freedom fighter. You’re not Daddy’s royally born, with no egalitarian spirit and able to keep down other people because of your ancestry and birth. You’re an individual, and you will accomplish in life what you want to accomplish. Your friends, they are their daddies’ little princesses—you are Daddy’s little freedom fighter. If you want to dress up, dress up like Betsy Ross! Dress up like Susan B. Anthony!”

  And I was saying things like, “Lady Di was an evil whore! Why did anybody in America like her? She’s a symbol of everything bad! Susan B. Anthony—women’s rights, atheist, abolitio
nist…Everything Susan B. Anthony did was right! Dress up like her! Dress up like Madame Curie! There are female heroes that you can dress up as. Don’t do the princess thing.”

  And my sister-in-law looked at me and said, “You know, Penn, I don’t think it’s meant that seriously. I think it has more to do with playing dress-up and the nice pretty gowns. I don’t think she’s thinking all that much about keeping down the proletariat.”

  But I feel a horrible guilt come over me when she pulls out the princess book for me to read and look at the gowns. I just feel, “This is so wrong.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: If satire or character stuff seems detached or impersonal, has anything that’s clearly satire ever been able to make the leap across that distance to affect you in a visceral, emotional way?

  PENN JILLETTE: Randy Newman’s “Rednecks” is the easiest example of that for me.

  When I heard it, I was living in Massachusetts, and I’d been brought up to believe there were no civil rights problems in New England, and that Northerners understood that blacks were okay, and Southerners were poorly educated, bigoted, bad people, and they had all the problems with race. I was brought up to hate Southerners the way Southerners were brought up to hate blacks. So the song “Rednecks” was a baseball bat to my chest.

  These aren’t the actual lyrics—which are beautifully written—but it starts out with the redneck character singing about how Lester Maddox was on TV “with a smart-ass New York Jew,” and how the Jew and the audience all laughed at Maddox. And he goes into how they all think they’re better than Lester Maddox but, he says, they’re wrong.

  And he proceeded to sing exactly, precisely about my point of view—as a satire of it. He was satirizing the way I saw rednecks!

  It turns at the end—so much so that it was banned from radio play in Massachusetts, because the character says that down South they’re just too ignorant to realize that “niggers” up North have been set free. And basically he says, yeah, sure black people are free up North—free to be put in a cage. He says they’re free to be put in cages in all these black ghettoes he names in all these different cities—including “in Roxbury in Boston.”

  I’d been to Boston only three times, to see concerts—one of them Randy Newman—and I’d never even been to Roxbury, but hearing that…my world collapsed. Randy Newman made a point in “Rednecks” that sticks with me to this very day and informs my very shallow, uninformed thinking about racial relations in America.

  It changed my thinking from “I know everything I need to. I’m from Massachusetts; we didn’t have cotton plantations, we were on the correct side of the Civil War, I’m totally okay on the racism thing all the way back” to “Wow, I really don’t know jack shit about this.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: And, by extension, “I might be part of the problem?”

  PENN JILLETTE: Yeah, exactly. Sure. And what’s interesting is that at first blush you could say it’s an example of satire making a huge political and emotional difference in someone’s life, but if you graph it out, it wasn’t the satire that blew my mind. What blew my mind and made me think differently was the point of view that was being satirized. It was my own!

  RANDY NEWMAN

  RANDY NEWMAN HAS long worn two hats, one as a venerated, Oscar-winning film composer, the other as a sardonic singer/songwriter whose incisive, disturbing lyrics lay bare many of our nation’s assumptions and great hypocrisies. With melodic, seductive tunes like “Sail Away,” “Rednecks,” and “Short People,” Newman affected a generation of future satirists. Sometimes misunderstood, he courted controversy by often assuming the first-person voice of the undesirables he portrays. But in this thoughtful discussion he explains why, like a broken heart, racism is easier to understand if you put it in a song.

  RANDY NEWMAN: The point the guy in “Rednecks” is ultimately making is that he’s offended by the way Dick Cavett and his audience treated Lester Maddox on his show—being morally superior to Maddox and people of the South—because there’s racism everywhere. There is no basis for anyone anywhere in America assuming moral superiority over citizens of Georgia.

  Lester Maddox was awful, no doubt about it. It’s public record; you could hate him, and if they had let him talk he would’ve indicted himself. But they didn’t let him speak—as if they all had black friends at home. Bullshit, y’know? An audience of New Yorkers has no right to scream and not let him speak as if they were on some moral high ground. I set up a character that used that word for black people, and uses it on purpose, but the point he makes? He’s right. That character’s vile, but his point of view is not.

  The only “cheat” in that song is that the guy knows the names of all those ghettoes and he wouldn’t, okay, but he’s an American, and he’s not Lester Maddox, and he’s right that there isn’t any moral high ground in this country where racism’s concerned. It’s been our great sin. And despite all the songs I’ve written about it, it’s not cured.

  PAUL PROVENZA: You have dealt with that issue quite a bit.

  RANDY NEWMAN: I really have. I wonder when I’m gonna stop. Apparently, it bothers me a great deal that this kind of thing exists.

  It’s always bothered me. My father was a rough feller who hated a lot of people and a lot of things, but he didn’t have an ounce of that kind of bigotry in him. A black woman from Texas brought up my brother and me, to a large extent, and my mother was from the South, so as a kid I’d see the COLORED ONLY and WHITE ONLY signs—and I’m not saying I was oh so sensitive and ran home crying and ate a madeleine, but I noticed.

  It’s astonishing, the disparity. You just can’t put it in words. It comes from something so clearly unfair. It’s complicated, but it’s simple in that affirmative action is required. When an African-American is born, he’s born behind, because he’s going to encounter that kind of fear, no matter what. Unless he’s wearing a sign saying I’M A MILLIONAIRE, he goes into a market and women grab on to their purses.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Has hip-hop and rap altered the way the white middle-class relates to the African-American experience in any way?

  RANDY NEWMAN: If it has, it’s just been the kids, but I don’t think so. I think people still get scared when black kids come into their shop; they’re not any more comfortable just because they like Jay-Z.

  But people don’t get along in Switzerland, or in Belgium either, you know?

  PAUL PROVENZA: That’s an important point: in no way have we solved or addressed every aspect of race in America; we certainly have far to go and much injustice that desperately needs correcting, but I’ve traveled the world and worked with comics of every race in many different cultures, and it’s shocking how much deep-seated racism exists in every other country I’ve ever been to. Endemic racism is accepted; even worse, unacknowledged. The tragic truth is that even with how far we have to go, no country on earth has made such strides, such effort, and has such awareness of racial issues as America.

  RANDY NEWMAN: You’re right. When it comes to race, no one can throw stones at us. We agonize about it. And America’s doing absolutely, unequivocally the best when it comes to immigration, too.

  In Europe you don’t even have to be a different color. I don’t think people can get along if people are just different. I don’t know what the hell it is.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you find people who may sing along a little too enthusiastically with something like “Rednecks”?

  RANDY NEWMAN: Yeah, I do, actually, but there’s nothing I can do about that. It comes with the territory; what can you do? There’s something about the beat that makes you sing along. It’s a powerful thing.

  In any number of ways it’s a very strange medium to do what I do—to write first-person songs and comedic songs; songs that aren’t love songs, like, “I fell in love with a woman, but she wasn’t my type”—so if you make someone laugh, you kind of know you’re all right; you don’t have to wait for applause or anything. A laugh is, like, “They like me!”

  But I figure if you’re up there
and you have a lyric, you should say something. Most of the repertory of song-writing is love songs; that’s what people like, they always have and always will, so it’s the wrong medium for what I do.

  And people don’t really listen to music like we used to in the sixties and seventies. It’s now background while doing something else, and my stuff doesn’t work too well if you’re doing something else. If you’re hearing it at a party or while driving at seventy mph, you’re not going to go, “Oh, that guy’s being ironic.” You’re either not following the story or the jokes, and will lose a little bit. So it’s a strange choice I made, and I’m very lucky to have done as well as I have.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you set out to make points that are important to you, or does your sense of humor just seem to take you to those places?

  RANDY NEWMAN: I’m out to make people laugh. I like comedy; it’s my favorite form of entertainment, along with classical music. I’m trying to make people laugh, almost first and foremost. Naturally I want minds to be changed about certain things I write about, but I never believed that music could change the world.

  Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it did help the whole movement to get us out of Vietnam faster; maybe it did do some good things. But it’s had more effect on fashion than anything else.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Can music or comedy or anything artists do change any minds about anything?