Satiristas Page 8

  RANDY NEWMAN: No. In your life, how many arguments have you won? I can’t think of three.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Well, there’s another one I just lost. So do you think of yourself more as a comedian or as a songwriter?

  RANDY NEWMAN: Songwriter. Comedy’s a really important part of my songwriting. I like to make people laugh, maybe inordinately, which is why I write songs the way I do even though that may not be what people like about them.

  PAUL PROVENZA: With the risks you’ve taken and challenging subjects you’ve tackled, did you expect that “Short People” would be responsible for the only serious flak you’ve ever gotten? That looked to me like a classic example of missing the point. What was your intent and how was it misconstrued?

  RANDY NEWMAN: What I intended was an “up” song for the album. I needed something that moved. I had that rhythm going, and I just thought of this idea about a crazy guy with a psychosis about short people. It wasn’t about prejudice; it wasn’t about anything bigger than just somebody who was loony. As a matter of fact, I think I was a little insensitive to people about their height. I just didn’t think it was a big deal. But it made a lot of people very angry.

  I had to say it was about prejudice and racism, because it reached people that I’ve never reached before or since, but it really wasn’t. There isn’t some cabal against short people—the guy was just crazy!

  PAUL PROVENZA: Have I ascribed aspects of the rest of your work to this particular song and given it more credence than it deserves? A guy who singles out and hates short people wasn’t meant to be an absurd analogy for an irrational hatred toward any group of people?

  RANDY NEWMAN: There wasn’t any hatred to that group of people, and they weren’t meant to represent anything. If I wanted to write a song about prejudice, I did it about seven, eight times about black people, or people that are different. “Davy the Fat Boy” was about that kind of thing.

  It’s often individuals that interest me. It interested me that this guy was so nutty about this one subject, that’s all. It is giving too much credit to that song to extend it to being about prejudice.

  PAUL PROVENZA: You’ve just pulled the rug out from underneath everything I believed from the moment I heard it. But that brings up an interesting point about how what we do simply because it’s funny to us ends up meaning other things as people interpret it.

  RANDY NEWMAN: And sometimes things take you places you didn’t even know you were going. I’ve got a song about America, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” and the last verse is sad. The end of any empire is particularly sad to me, but I didn’t know it would go there until I arranged it and realized, “Hmmm…This is kind of a sad picture here.”

  I do feel somewhat sorry for Americans. We’re brought up to think America’s the best place on earth, but you don’t measure a nation’s greatness by how many guns they have, you measure it with boring things like infant mortality, standard of living, health, and how they care for their poor or aged—of which I am one. I’m sad that people’s idea of this country has been disabused by what’s happened recently.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Since I was so wrong about “Short People,” I’d better ask about “I Love L.A.” Is that ironic, or do I have to rethink that one too?

  RANDY NEWMAN: Ha! Well, it’s true that the weather’s great and it is great to drive in an open car with a redhead listening to the Beach Boys, but it’s also true that there are bums on their knees, and I purposely named streets in it that aren’t exactly the Champs-Elysees.

  It’s not a straight-out “New York Is My Kind of Town” song. And when people chant “We love it!” at Lakers games, they know it’s funny; they know a real “chamber of commerce” song about a big American city shouldn’t mention a bum and all that in it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: That’s such beautiful satire, because of its ambivalence. Two people can hear it, one can take it literally, the other ironically, and both are kinda right. It’s on that razor’s edge of irony/not irony.

  RANDY NEWMAN: You’re right. But whom would you rather have in the audience? I can’t decide which one I’d rather have in the audience myself.

  It’s a “toe-tapper.” That the song is played at Lakers and Dodgers games, that it’s got “the bum on his knees” and the raggedy streets, none of that diminishes its appeal—but it’s got some things in it. If it didn’t have that stuff in there, I wouldn’t have written it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you love L.A.?

  RANDY NEWMAN: I don’t know anymore! I like the weather, but I’ve never been through a real winter, so I don’t know. I don’t know!

  PAUL PROVENZA: Then I’m okay on that one. That’s what makes your work so compelling to me—it’s often in a shade of gray; the ideas, the understanding you give to your characters even when they have really ugly points of view create tough, conflicting emotions. “Sail Away” is a perfect example. While not a laugh riot, it’s funny as well as moving and disturbing.

  RANDY NEWMAN: If I don’t announce that it’s about a recruiter for the slave trade, I’m not sure most people would get it. Since the guy’s trying to recruit people into slavery, he’s making it as attractive as possible, like someone recruiting a high school ball player.

  People don’t expect something like that to come in that kind of a package, in a song. It sounds pretty and you wanna sing along, and then you realize what you’re singing along with, and…It’s an odd song. I’m glad I wrote it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: It feels like there’s a “meta-joke” in the fact that people get lulled into this horrible character’s third-person point of view.

  RANDY NEWMAN: You’re right. It does lull you, and you don’t want people laughing out of the side of their nose, saying, “Oh, we can’t enjoy this music because of what it’s about.” But if you really think about it, it is a jarring contrast.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I wish that all of us in comedy had more license to play with all those other emotions. I feel like comedy’s the only art form where the emotional range is limited by the audience: emotions A through M are acceptable for comedy; emotions N through Z don’t belong in comedy. Like any other art form, comedy should be able to evoke a lot of different emotions along with laughter, as your work does so richly.

  RANDY NEWMAN: It’s hard to do. I have music going for me, so I can get through it. It’d require quite an acting job to bring off something like that. Writers that are good enough—Harry Shearer, Albert Brooks—could bring off something like that. Lenny Bruce did things like that and brought it off. I couldn’t.

  Take the lyric in “Sail Away”: “Won’t have to run through the jungle and scuff up your feet.” If that were prose, you’d have to get a laugh pretty quick just to continue. You’d have to be a great actor to make comedy out of that character, but in a song I can just go on singing.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Which brings us back to “Rednecks.” You use “nigger” in “Rednecks,” said by the character you portray in the song, not by you. Do people get past that explosive word to understand the point and reason you’re using it?

  RANDY NEWMAN: Not everybody, I don’t think. There are places I don’t play it. Sometimes I’ll intro it by telling the story of how I happened to write it. It’s a close call, that word, whether to use it or not. If there’s just been some kind of incident it may be even worse, but the word’s always been ugly.

  It’s always been the worst thing a white person can say—but I didn’t think twice about using it. I always knew the character was going to use that word. I felt he had to; there was no way I could write that song without it.

  Even so, it’s not something I’m completely comfortable with.

  PAUL MOONEY

  IT WOULD BE far too reductive to label Paul Mooney as simply a “black comedian,” as his range and audiences are much broader than the term suggests, though it would be perfectly apt to do so. He has been and remains a leading African-American satirical voice, and his career follows somewhat the evolution of modern black comedy itself. In t
he 1970s he wrote for Richard Pryor, helping to craft some of his best-known and most incendiary material and the use of a certain word that we all know and shouldn’t say. In the wake of Michael Richards’s racially charged, epithet-laden meltdown at L.A.’s Laugh Factory, Mooney’s got a lot more to say on the subject. But even as his language has changed, his antiauthoritarian opinions and his refusal to care what anyone may think of them have not.

  PAUL MOONEY: Michael Richards was a godsend. He was. He put the N-word on the table, that’s what he did. It stopped the world. Everybody wants to say that it’s just one person, it’s just Michael Richards, but it’s not. It’s everyone. America is responsible for him; America has to take the responsibility. Everyone in this room has to take responsibility.

  I took it, and that’s why I stopped saying it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Paul Mooney stopped saying the N-word??

  PAUL MOONEY: Of course I did. Because of that incident.

  PAUL PROVENZA: You’ve used it more than every gangsta rapper combined.

  PAUL MOONEY: Oh, I was an ambassador for that word. I was a lover to that word—and like a lover, I stayed right with it. Richard Pryor and I made a lot of money saying that word. Then Richard went to Africa and came back saying that it wasn’t in any African language, and he wasn’t going to say it. But I couldn’t see the N-word for the trees. Richard Pryor couldn’t stop me from saying it, but Michael Richards did.

  I’ve known Michael for over twenty years, and what’s funny is that everybody came at me saying he’s not funny. Well he started out in stand-up, and he was very funny, but he got caught up in that Hollywood bullshit. He was the “darling of the discotheque.” They sucked out of his ass on that hit show of his, okay? When that show went off the air, he was looking for that same thing he always wanted: that attention. So he came back to this arena, but, like Jesse James, if you hang those guns up you’re gonna get shot in the back.

  He had hung those guns up. And it also wasn’t the same arena, it wasn’t the same audience, and he fell. Comedians, we don’t like to fail up there. If you listen to the tapes of the audience, the Mexican gentlemen and the black gentlemen who were heckling were more vicious to him than he could ever hope to be, saying, “You ain’t funny, you ain’t never been funny.” They talked shit to him, so he reached into hell to pull out all that shit he was talking.

  When it went down, Reverend Jesse Jackson and everybody else called me. They brought me over to the Hilton to a room with Michael. That boy grabbed on to me—I told you how long I’ve known him—he clutched on to me, didn’t know if I was gonna hit him or curse him out or whatever. He just hid. He was scared to death. He told me he didn’t even know he had that in him; that it wasn’t a performance, it was a meltdown.

  He freaked out from what was going on, and he was real sorry. He said white people were calling saying he should be the leader of the Klan, that they agreed with him, all this other bullshit. It fucked with him and scared him, and he was really sorry.

  I couldn’t believe that all the Christians in America didn’t have the forgiveness for him. We’re all human beings; we can all screw up. My kids, everybody, came to me, “How can you go near that asshole?”

  People are vicious, okay? I think everyone saw a lot of themselves in Michael Richards, and that’s why they all freaked. And everybody’s responsible for it and has to take responsibility for it before we can change any of this, so I stopped using that word. I knew I was a part of it.

  We’re all part of it. These fucking pedophiles in America, where are they coming from? Mars? They’re coming from our society. The wife beaters, the assholes that get up on buildings and shoot people—we’re responsible for all of it. It’s us. We’re creating it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: If you feel you have great responsibility for what you say, do you feel that you also have some obligation?

  PAUL MOONEY: Yes, I do. And for us as comedians, as truth-sayers, as satirists—political, social, and otherwise—we have a very hard job with this new environment we’re in now.

  What the whole Bush administration did, it’s very scary. They tried to make America not America, you know? It’s like with that “Are you now or have you ever been a Communist?” crap. Who would think that could happen in this country called America? If you wrote that in a script, people would walk out of the theater and call it unbelievable.

  I got fired from a TV show at The Apollo for talking about Bush. Whoopi Goldberg was hosting the series, and she couldn’t host all of them so they had me host some. I talked about Bush and his girlfriend, Condoleezza. I said the question of the evening was, “Does Bush eat Rice?”

  It brought the house down, brother. But they freaked. You’d have thought that it was 9/11 again. They shut the show down for an hour and a half because Time Warner saw the taping here in Hollywood by satellite, and put a stop to it. The woman producing the show told them she could change it, and they told her, “No, he’s a Bush-basher. We want him out of here.”

  I had two witnesses in my dressing room, thank God. After that I went to the press and got on their case. I told Howard Stern. I brought the witnesses. Time Warner denied it. Said, “That’s ridiculous. We’d never fire him for that.”

  We actually owe President Nixon—remember him?—an apology. Nixon eavesdropped and we crucified him, and Bush did it every five minutes and they loved him for it. It’s disgusting. It really is. We have to stick to our guns, we really do.

  But it’s the Jim Jones syndrome. People drink the Kool-Aid simply because it’s there to drink. There’s no thought process.

  And I resent the idea that we don’t help our own, that we run to help everybody else spread democracy. We want to free people? Our own people aren’t free. I don’t know where Americans get their balls from. Somewhere out of a book? I don’t know where they get their nerve. That’s very nervy to tell somebody, “I don’t like the way you’re living. Live like me, in a democracy.” It’s crap.

  PAUL PROVENZA: You thrive on confrontation with audiences, don’t you? Confrontation is as much a part—or more—of what you do as the laughs are.

  PAUL MOONEY: Well, that’s who I am, I had nothing to do with it; I don’t have any choice.

  When I get onstage, I can only in my heart be earnest about what I feel. I’m as American as apple pie; I didn’t drop here from Mars. This shit was here when I got here; if I drop dead right now it’ll be here when I leave. People need something to blame: “It’s him. He’s the troublemaker,” but I had nothing to do with none of this. I had to learn to survive in this bullshit. Every trick in the book. And I’ve turned a few.

  People say to me they’re shocked by some of the things that come out of my mouth, but I’m shocked by some of the things coming out of me. I don’t know where it comes from. It’s innate; it comes from some sort of process I’m unaware of. Maybe I’m an alien, I don’t know. I’m shocked by things I say, and I’m also amused by them.

  It’s great to shock people. A lot of times people walk out on me, they’ll pick up and leave while I’m performing. Lately that hasn’t been happening, though, and I thought I was losing my touch. I think it’s the best that people get so emotionally involved with me I can make them get up and walk out of a club. It’s the best. What power.

  People have been programmed that if you get out of line, you’re the enemy. See, us comedians, we cross the line, which is good. We open people’s eyes. Also, comedy is a time bomb. We give them time bombs. They might not get it that night; it could hit them six, seven weeks later.

  I love my audience. Without them, I’m nothing. I want them to learn and I try to give them knowledge.

  Black and white, I try to make people feel good about themselves, to feel that one person makes the difference. A majority doesn’t rule; a lynch mob is a majority. Harriet Tubman made a difference, not Harriet Tubman and her little sister, not Harriet Tubman and her next-door neighbor. Harriet Tubman.

  PAUL PROVENZA: So if you’re trying to make the au
dience feel good about themselves, what do you think is really going on with people who are so taken aback by things you say?

  PAUL MOONEY: It’s almost like church. Some people don’t get it, and that’s not my problem; some people do get it, and it’s great and it’s wonderful.

  In America, I can sit here and talk about religion, about sex, and people will sit on their ass here all night. I talk about race, give it fifteen minutes and they’ll run out that fucking door.

  Because they’re caught up in this thing in their heads. They’re brainwashed about it. Certain subtleties are put out there, and they believe it all.

  Women do the same thing. Women are a minority, and like you say “Uncle Tom,” there are “Uncle Women” who go along with it not to have trouble. They burned women; they said they were witches. They fucking burned them, okay? They didn’t burn men for being witches, but burned women for it. It’s like this fucking insanity and hating their mothers and beating women and all this crazy shit that goes on.

  While I’m talking right now, there’s some woman in a river just because she’s a woman. And what we do to our kids, besides the molesting and the brutality? It’s insane. A fucking baboon has more sense.

  They taught a monkey sign language, you know about that? And it gave them the finger! Now they’re trying to figure if it was just imitating us or whether it meant it. That’s the best. There’s nothing funnier.

  PAUL PROVENZA: What’s been your biggest frustration doing what you do?

  PAUL MOONEY: White Hollywood.

  Hollywood’s been like a woman wrestling with me. California? The phoniest state on the planet. Los Angeles has burned three times, and it’s all been racial. It’s a scary place, but they play this wholesome Gidget/Beach Boy attitude. It’s not the City of Angels, don’t let that fool you. It’s the city of demons. This place here bears watching.

  I’m from the South; from Louisiana. When I see Malibu burning down like it does, I just think, “You want some water for that? You don’t have enough water in Malibu? No water out there in the woods? Come to Louisiana. We got plenty of it.”