Satiristas Page 9

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you think audiences are more or less receptive nowadays to the kinds of things you challenge them with?

  PAUL MOONEY: People are listening now, because they want to hear the truth. Especially the youth. The youth wants to hear the truth; they want to hear it, because they’ve been lied to.

  And timing is everything. You could say something at the wrong time, and it’s nothing. Say it at the right time, it means everything. Let me give you an example: I was in a class in high school, talking about something other than the class, and the teacher said, “This is science class. We don’t discuss that here, so be quiet.”

  And I waited. If I had told him, “Screw you,” or gone after him then, I would’ve been sent down to the office, maybe even gotten expelled. Instead, I waited. I waited three months. Then one day in class, he told me to shut the back door. I told him to shut his own back door. He said, “What did you say to me?”

  I said, “Are you deaf? I said for you to shut your own door.”

  He said, “Why are you talking to me like that?”

  I said, “Because this is a science class, not a domestics class, and you can shut your own door.”

  The kids in the classroom screamed with laughter. But they weren’t laughing at what I said, they were laughing that I waited so long to talk back to him—and that I used the same weapon on him that he had used on me.

  And you know what that teacher said to me? “Touché.”

  Timing is everything. Timing is powerful.

  THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS

  IN THE LATE 1960s, the Smothers Brothers turned what should have been a conventional, bland variety show into an outspoken vehicle of protest against the Vietnam War and the Johnson administration. Outwardly squeaky-clean, nonthreatening, and perfect for a prime-time Sunday night show on middle-of-the-road, conservative CBS, their image proved a Trojan horse from which burst forth a torrent of anti-authoritarian, countercultural comedy that shocked their gatekeepers and polarized America. Successful in spite of their own network’s wishes, the Smothers Brothers wielded their popularity uncompromisingly and with great comic inventiveness, and gave a platform to countless others of their subversive ilk. They became the frequent subject of personal calls from a nervous President Johnson to the president of CBS, imploring they be reigned in as a threat to America’s security. Censored repeatedly and ulitimately canceled under false pretenses, the silencing of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour stands as a chilling reminder of the dangers of speaking truth to power, and of the power of comedy to rile even the most daunting of powers that be. Tommy and Dickie reflect on the spirit of protest of the sixties, and where it’s gone today—for themselves as well as others.

  TOMMY SMOTHERS: This friend of mine is a mechanic, he fixes some things for me now and then, and I saw this little magnet on the refrigerator in his garage, and it says:

  “When your timing is off, nothing else matters.”

  —TOMMY SMOTHERS

  He’s a mechanic!

  But it not only works with comedy and engines, it works with everything. The decisions you make about your life, everything you do. It’s very obvious with comedy, but I didn’t think about its application to so many other things in life.

  Someone is putting out four of our sixties shows, and so I looked back at them. And I just thought, “Jesus Christ.” So I made Dickie watch them—’cause like most straight men, he’s just going out racing cars, playing golf, having a good time—but I made him watch them, and he comes back and says, “How the hell did we become stars?”

  And part of that was the timing of it. Because of the timeframe, the environment. People watched our show ’cause so much was happening, but nothing was being said on TV in the sixties. But when our show was on, there was always that danger that “They’re gonna say something.” So people watching it would see the dancers, the songs…then all of a sudden…boom! “Jeez, did you hear what he said?!” People would say, “God how did you get away with that? How’d you do that?” There was always that tension that something was gonna be said in the course of that hour.

  But here we are, thirty-five, forty years later, and you take it out of that context and you’re looking back, going, “What the hell was that about? What was the big deal?” I thought, “God, it was filled with observations and political pithy and fuck-you’s, wasn’t it?” And it wasn’t. It just had that brinksmanship. And only a little bit, not as much as I remembered.

  I look at the old Carol Burnett shows, and The Honeymooners, I look at some of the historical shows and, God, they hold up. You’ll see a Flip Wilson show, and Jesus Christ they were funny shows. And I look at ours, and even though ours had a bigger impact politically and artistically and comedically, they weren’t near as good as those other contemporaries. But there was this magical thing of “truth” in there that we had that they didn’t have. But it doesn’t hold up in hindsight or in retrospect. I’m seeing it now and it’s just…

  PAUL PROVENZA: Don’t you think a lot of that has to do with the feat of doing an hour every week? The concepts and ideas in the show are so strong that while perhaps the craftsmanship isn’t as fine as you may like it, if you look at a sketch like God talking to guys in the foxhole and all the other classic moments from it, together those are bigger than any individual moment or scene. That is where craftsmanship also lies; in the show and series and entity as a whole, not just in individual moments.

  DICKIE SMOTHERS: Tommy has this micro-view of everything we do where he gets into the pores and every frigging flaw. It’s like, if Clint Eastwood really looked at his hairline he’d never make another movie, you know? Every single step you could cut it apart and say, “This is flawed, this isn’t as good as it could have been.”

  TOMMY SMOTHERS: Our first albums before we got in television were really pretty creative. I mean, it’s improvisational all the time, eleven albums. And then we got the Comedy Hour show in the late sixties and it was just, “Whaaa…” It was my fault. I was a head; I smoked, I was a weed dude. I’d come on and try to be so cool. And I was so involved in the production.

  We had done a sitcom first and it was just vacuous, silly shit. It went thirty-two shows and won all its time slots and whatever, but it put us off. I said, “Man, if I ever have another show, I’m gonna have creative control. There’s gotta be some substance in just about everything.” So we get the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and I say, “I don’t wanna do it unless I have creative control.”

  “You got it.”

  Little did they know that during the course of the show I would experience an evolution of consciousness as the war ramped up, and people were protesting and everything.

  Just about everybody on the show was under thirty. I said, “I didn’t like that director,” and fired him. Brought in new, young writers.

  “But they’ve never written.”

  “I don’t care,” I said, “who did that bit on that local radio show? Who the fuck was that? It was brilliant.” Bob Einstein. Steve Martin was twenty-one, Rob Reiner was twenty-two.

  Lorenzo Music was a banjo player, and I got him writing on the show. It was great; I loved the power of it.

  I had no vision, I was just doing what I liked. I liked Pat Paulsen, I wanted him on the show. Pretty soon he was in every sketch; if we had a problem, “Put Pat in it.”

  Mason Williams, who was like my moral guide before I got politicized, would read the scripts over and say, “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit,” and I’d go to the meetings and I’d say, “Well that’s bullshit; it’s not written very well.” I was very young too, and I wasn’t very crafted—but I knew what bullshit was.

  But when we were doing it, we were exactly right. I wasn’t trying to save the world, but all of a sudden, when you start saying things, by accident you become like a poster child for the First Amendment and free speech. That comes to you without asking. When you feel passion about something you just always try and put it in your show; it’s always just a personal thing.


  Now I look back and see the old shows and say, “God, the whole show was bullshit,” you know, but that was the fun of it. That was the joy of having a television show.

  But then there was a time, about two years after we were fired from CBS, where I only heard the dark side of everything. I took the serious side.

  DICKIE SMOTHERS: He’s not funny when that happens.

  TOMMY SMOTHERS: I saw Jane Fonda on The Tonight Show around that time, and she was talking about burning babies in Vietnam, and workers’ rights…and all the things I agree with. And I’m going, “What’s wrong with this?” Epiphany: no joy.

  There was no joy, she had no sense of humor! And I realized I’d been doing that for two years at that point. And I just realized: to have a message, you can’t be deadly serious or they’re not gonna hear you; you’re just an advocate of a point of view.

  DICKIE SMOTHERS: You gotta be funny first. The art’s got to be there. If you can’t do that, you’re just doing nothing.

  TOMMY SMOTHERS: And a friend sent me something that Alistair Cook wrote: “Any generation takes the problems of the world so seriously that they forget why they were put on earth in the first place: to enjoy your friends, hug a baby and bounce a ball.” If it’s gonna be done, you have to do your art first, really good.

  So by then we couldn’t get any jobs, and we started from the bottom again opening for everybody else, working discos…Then we did Broadway shows, we did a lot of dinner theater…And after I got my sense of humor back in the theater and stuff, we just worked our way slowly back. A couple of national commercials, a television special…

  And I look at the live work we did in ’eighty-eight, ’eighty-nine, ’ninety…God it was good! Took all the “Tom and Dick” spots from the TV show and put them together—that’s ours, that’s our statement. It wasn’t filled with politics or any of that. Just really good art, good comedy, great timing, eye contact…Just fucking great.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Even with your criticisms of the craft and the flaws you see in your CBS show, that show did have real impact. Yes, it was a particular era and maybe that’s why you stood out so, but you made waves. Prime time on the most conservative network, in the typically sterile variety-show format, and reaching middle America with subversive and controversial views—successfully.

  DICKIE SMOTHERS: Well, satire’s always been a very powerful force. And you don’t go unpunished.

  PAUL PROVENZA: But you had serious impact. Lyndon Johnson himself was asking the network to drop you guys because he believed you were having a major effect on turning the public’s view on the Vietnam War. I don’t see impact like that from anyone anywhere now. Do you think it’s even possible for anyone in comedy now to have the kind of impact that you guys had then?

  TOMMY SMOTHERS: Absolutely, but there’s something else too, you know? Look, Tom Brokaw was doing a “greatest generation” thing, and I flew out to New York to do an interview with Brokaw and Jon Stewart. Jon wasn’t there yet, so Brokaw and I were talking, and I said, “I notice The Daily Show is getting a little bit softer.”

  And Brokaw said, “Yeah, I notice that too. I wonder what that is about.”

  So Jon arrives and the taping starts, and Brokaw says, “You know when the Smothers Brothers were on, they were thrown off the air. They lost their job. It was a lot more oppressive in the sixties than it is now.”

  And Jon Stewart says, “Yeah, we’ve got such freedom now; we’ve got cable, we can do what we want, we have the freedom to say anything…But back then, boy that was tough back then. Jeez.”

  And Brokaw says, “What do you think about Fox News?” and Stewart says, “Well it’s not really news, it’s opinion…There are different sides, liberals and conservatives, those are kinda just labels, there’s room for both…”

  And my head’s spinning! I’m going, “Jesus Christ! We were on for three years before they threw us off. The Dixie Chicks say one line and no one plays their albums on the radio for two years! There’s wiretapping!” I mean you look ten years ahead, and it’s a fascist country.

  It’s already done. The coup took place, and he sees it.

  I said, “Are they holding one of your kids hostage at the White House or something? What the hell happened to you?”

  And he says, “Nothing, there is room for different points of view…I don’t think everyone should be so adamant, God Almighty!”

  In terms of the bigger picture, his work is just softening down. Just like most of the Baby Boomers, going, “Don’t say anything and get fired from your good job by expressing yourself.”

  Where are the fucking Baby Boomers who were out there with signs in the sixties? Fuck, we stopped the war, basically. They’re all in their forties, fifties, early sixties—where are their voices when they see the same things happening again? Well, they’ve now got jobs, they got kids in school or going to college…And the money thing, the greed. You did anything just for money in the sixties you were a piece of shit. What happened to the Baby Boomers?

  DICKIE SMOTHERS: Garrison Keillor said that, at a particular fork in the road of his life, “I thought about telling the truth and being a prophet, but they come to very bad ends. Flayed, hung, beheaded. And people don’t like them very much. Or I could become a liar, and be highly paid and revered, and successful. So I weighed the options and thought I’d become a liar. Because we love liars and they get lots of money.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: Sounds to me like even though you went through a phase of feeling like your politics had gotten in the way of the funny, you’re feeling more fired up politically again.

  TOMMY SMOTHERS: I’ve been feeling it for a long time, but this is so…Orwellian, what’s been going on. It’s so fucking obvious.

  If I had the intellect, the intelligence to write and create a more powerful scream against the darkness, I’d do it, I’d take it as far as I can—without becoming a preacher, ’cause I’ve been there before, and it’s not funny and it’s not rewarding.

  I just think it’s so important that all artists reflect something more than their art. There’s gotta be some substance beyond it.

  I think Bill Maher’s probably the finest political satirist we’ve ever had; Bill Maher doesn’t pull a punch at all. If I could do a Bill Maher I’d be doing that in a minute. If I was smart enough. But I’ve always been slowwitted, kinda inarticulate, and it’s hard to get clever.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Are you both feeling like you might want to be more politicized onstage again now, or is it mostly just you, Tommy?

  TOMMY SMOTHERS: No, my brother is by nature a would-be conservative. I think it’s in the DNA; you run into people who are basically conservative by nature. But he’s always, always appreciated my passion. He’s always allowed me to do it. He just said, “Don’t fuck up the show, though, okay? Don’t get us fired.”

  I said, “Don’t worry.”

  And boom, we’re fired.

  CONAN O’BRIEN

  FROM HIS EARLY days writing Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons through his Late Show years and controversially short reign on the Tonight Show throne, Conan O’Brien found a rabid following for his edgy, inspired lunacy. Abruptly thrust into the center of a highly public exhibition of network television’s cruel, hard vagaries, Conan discovered emotional depth in his relationship with his audience that enabled him to eschew cynicism, and may even have strengthened his commitment to, and love of, pure, childlike silliness. Though his post–Tonight Show future remains unclear (yet undoubtedly assured) at the time of this writing, he was still on air when we discussed not the ugly business of late-night TV, but his particular take on comedy: what fuels it, why a joke can be just a joke and a laugh just a laugh, and how we’ll never really know why one produces the other.

  CONAN O’BRIEN: The censorship The Smothers Brothers were up against in the late sixties is almost inconceivable today. There are, like, 900,000 shows on TV now. The bottom is out of the bathtub; it takes so much content to keep it filled, so there’s less reas
on to be afraid of censorship. If you have a funny and interesting idea, yeah, you may get some letters, but there’s so much to choose from, people will just watch something else.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Except that it’s driven by advertisers who regulate content based on what they think appropriate for shows they advertise on, and they draw the lines in very close. Like what happened with Bill Maher: a small group of people brought just enough pressure to bear on his advertisers.

  CONAN O’BRIEN: Right. And thirty years ago he’d be gone. It would be, “Whatever happened to Bill Maher?” He’d be doing his act somewhere in the Catskills. But in the current climate, he can just slide over to cable, where there are no advertisers.

  PAUL PROVENZA: We have all these new outlets now, but the flip side is that there’s that much less impact one can make, and less attention given any of it.

  CONAN O’BRIEN: That gets trickier and trickier. When Saturday Night Live started in October 1975, it was the only show with a subversive and satirical point of view. Today, when every show is trying to be the bad boy, the show that takes on the system, sometimes you think there’s almost no system for us to work against. At some point, 25 percent of our economy is going to be satirical TV shows making fun of the country. It’s much more difficult now, which might actually be good. It’s probably forcing us to think a little more and try even harder. You’re constantly trying to figure out what’s going to break through the television set and cause a ripple of some kind. It’s not as easy as it used to be, so, like evolution, you have to get better or you’re gonna just go away.

  PAUL PROVENZA: You cut your teeth at the Harvard Lampoon, which has a decidedly satirical bent. Did you want to say something or make any satirical point in those early days?

  CONAN O’BRIEN: I felt very strongly that I didn’t want to make a point. My comedy heroes were people I felt weren’t trying to make a point at all, like the Marx Brothers or W. C. Fields. I have a lot of admiration for talented comedians that have a social cause or try to say something about society, but that’s never how it worked for me. The instincts that I’m working off of in comedy now at the age of forty-six are exactly the same instincts I believe brought us all to comedy when we were seven years old, making people laugh on the playground—just that pure desire to make people laugh.