Satiristas

  That kind of political correctness to me is decent. It’s about caring about other people’s feelings, about respect for other human beings.

  The use of the word “nigger” is just disgraceful. I was of college age seeing Martin Luther King march in ’sixty-three and everyone getting hosed and beaten. After those horrible struggles guys now make millions saying “nigger”?

  And “bitch”? After all women have gone through, we get this slut fest?

  We’re finding out now that people are born with different sexual orientations, finally throwing out that “It’s your choice to be gay” garbage and it hurts people’s feelings now more than ever to be called “faggot,” but I hear it all the time.

  I don’t see political correctness as a problem. To say “chairperson” because we live in a society where women still have to fight for equality is not a problem.

  Believe me, I’m not looking for everything to be tepid. I like stuff with real bite in it. I’ve always been self-righteously indignant about things in my life, in my work—in fact, it was something that held me back. I look at myself on old tapes…A lot of scowling. I was having such fun, but I seem to usually have had a kind of scowl on my face.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Was your style perceived as aggressive?

  ROBERT KLEIN: A little aggressive, that’s true. Intelligent, but aggressively so.

  I suffered from “too smart for the room” at first. When I started doing TV, Rodney Dangerfield told me, “None of the intellectual stuff, okay? You’re not playing Greenwich Village. This is all of America.”

  But I was determined to push that envelope. For some people, I was a little too pushy when I was young. I was a cocky, arrogant kid.

  TERRY JONES

  TERRY JONES CEMENTED his place in the comedy firmament as one-sixth of Britain’s legendary Monty Python troupe, writing some of its most memorable sketches and playing some of its most outrageous characters. When Python made the jump to film, he stepped behind the camera to codirect Monty Python and the Holy Grail with Terry Gilliam and then went on to solo-direct the group’s other iconic films, Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life. With an eclectic, post-Python career writing and directing movies, television documentaries, and children’s stories, Jones most recently turned his satiric eye on the Iraq War, penning a series of lacerating editorials for London newspapers and later collecting them in a volume titled Terry Jones’s War on the War on Terror.

  TERRY JONES: We had an arrogance. I thought John Cleese and Graham Chapman were writing the funniest stuff on television at the time, and I guess they thought the same about me and Mike Palin, and we all had the arrogance that we’d just do what made us laugh.

  We didn’t want to do satire at all. That’s what The Frost Report and That Was the Week That Was had done, and we came at the end of that satire boom, really. Lampooning and specific satire about politics didn’t interest me particularly.

  PAUL PROVENZA: The way the shows were structured and directed, shot on locations, Terry Gilliam’s animation…were all innovative and, ultimately, groundbreaking. Did you consciously set out to reinvent the TV sketch-comedy form?

  TERRY JONES: I was very concerned about the shape of the show. The others weren’t much interested, they were just concerned with doing funny sketches, but I thought the show should have some kind of distinct format.

  We’d all been writing sketches of three minutes to four minutes with beginnings, middles, and ends, and then a thirty-second “quickie.” But I saw the first episode of Spike Milligan’s Q5 and realized he’d just torn up the rule book. He’d start a sketch, then suddenly a marching band would come on and you’d just go off into something else. He just kind of…wandered around!

  Now Terry Gilliam had done this animation for a kids’ show that Michael and Eric and I did, and was a bit worried about it, because it was kind of stream of consciousness; it went from one thing to another, ending up back at the beginning. After seeing the Milligan thing, it suddenly clicked. I thought you could do the whole Python show as stream of consciousness, and Terry’s odd little animations could link it all and get you from one thing to another, and you wouldn’t even need to finish sketches—which was just great!

  PAUL PROVENZA: That surreality was subversive in itself, but then all your figures of authority—MPs, policemen, archbishops, headmasters, newsreaders—devolve into total silliness every time. Did that mindset seem to have any impact at the time?

  TERRY JONES: A teacher at a very tough school in the inner city said she’d noticed a real change in a lot of the teenage boys. There had been quite a lot of bullying going on at the school, but since Python had come on telly, the boys had started doing really silly things—I suppose to get attention through laughs rather than through bullying. I thought, “Well…That’s quite something.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: Even though you say you intended to be not at all political, didn’t Python films end up being banned in some places? Did you expect controversy?

  TERRY JONES: The bans were religious rather than political, but then again, the more I look at history, the more I realize that religion is politics, basically. Ireland banned Life of Brian, Meaning of Life, and another film I had made, about a prostitute, called Personal Services. They had only ever banned four films in Ireland—and I’d made three of them. I was rather proud of that. I thought, “Well…You can’t do much better than that.”

  Certainly when we made Life of Brian, it was with a definite intent to be controversial. That came about when I was editing something else and the others were off doing a publicity jaunt for Holy Grail. They were discussing doing another movie, and Eric said, “Why don’t we do something about Jesus Christ?” Someone came up with the title, Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory. And we all said, “Ooh, that’s very naughty!”

  We thought we were going to do just a funny version of the life of Christ, but then we all read the Gospels again, which we hadn’t done, I suppose, since we were tiny, and we all realized that what Christ says in the Gospels were actually great things. The humor wasn’t there; it wasn’t in any of that. The humor is more in how people interpret it: Christ talks about peace and love, and two thousand years later people torture and kill each other because they can’t quite agree on how he said it—what hats you should wear, how you should dress, or what services you should have in church.

  Reading about medieval history and history of the Church, I realize that religion is power. Religion gives people power. All the quarrels in the Church were all about political power; the squabbles over the Eucharist were purely about who was going to run what bit of the Church.

  A king in Romania worked very closely with a prophet called Zalmoxis, and a Greek historian records that when the king used Zalmoxis’s name in pronouncements, people obeyed more. That was around 500 BC, and people used religion to gain control even then!

  PAUL PROVENZA: For what it’s worth, I’d like to take the opportunity to say that Life of Brian is, to me, one of the three greatest film satires of all time—along with South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut and Dr. Strangelove.

  TERRY JONES: Actually, I haven’t seen Dr. Strangelove, but South Park, absolutely, I agree. Fantastic.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Ten years later, it still seems completely current, as does Life of Brian. It’s a timeless piece of satire, and will be for as long as religion is abused and used to control people. I’m particularly interested in that film because so much of current life in America is pervaded by religion. I know the U.K. is essentially a secular country—

  TERRY JONES: Well, America is meant to be a secular country. It was set up as a secular country. By your Founding Fathers!

  PAUL PROVENZA: Then you know how infuriating it is that people argue it was established as a Christian nation, and that religion’s become such a political force. As such, Life of Brian is a more meaningful statement now by far than when it was released. Religion was a well you drew from again and again. Was an atheist statement your intent?

  TERRY JONES:
I don’t think any of us were particularly interested in making an atheist statement or saying, “This is all nonsense.” It’s like exposing the nonsense in any sort of authority.

  At the time we made it in 1978, religion was on its uppers in England anyway; nobody was going to church. I actually thought it was a bit unfair on religion. It felt unfair to kick it when it was down. It was really about abuse of power more than about people’s believing nonsense.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Speaking of abuse of power, your more recent writings during the Bush/Blair era for the Guardian were tremendously biting, viciously smart, funny critiques of the abuses of power and lies and came at a time when few mainstream journalists here were speaking out. Why the more satirical approach then, after consciously avoiding it earlier?

  TERRY JONES: I was simply so outraged, I couldn’t not do it anymore. It was one of the few times in my life that I’ve been motivated by anger, but I just had to do it; I was just so angry. I was so angry about the supine Tony Blair following the Bush/Cheney agenda.

  That agenda was all right there, laid out in 1997, before Bush got in, by the Project for the New American Century, this sort of Right-wing think tank. In it, they say we must invade Iraq; Saddam Hussein gives us a good excuse for that, but he’s not the real reason we’re going to invade Iraq, we’re just lucky that he’s a nasty character. And they also said, it’d be hard to persuade the American public to buy this, because what we’d need, really, is a catastrophic event, “like a new Pearl Harbor.” And they got it on 9/11. Fantastic! It’s all right there, signed by Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle…

  PAUL PROVENZA: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush, Scooter Libby…were all founding members of the PNAC.

  TERRY JONES: When you’re dealing with an agenda like that, actually I find it quite hard to be funny. I didn’t write more of those columns because I got bored with my voice, really, since it was always the same sort of character writing.

  I went through school being nonpolitical, or with a “plague on both your houses” attitude, and it was actually doing history research on Chaucer and the Middle Ages that made me realize how you could see the same people seeking power then, using the same methods to gain power and the same methods to keep power, as now. That opened my eyes more to what was going on nowadays.

  I don’t really think we change as animals, as human beings. If you read what Aristotle wrote in 600 B.C., he talks about the same things we talk about now, identifying the same problems.

  PAUL PROVENZA: The Native American Hopis had their heyoka, or “sacred clowns,” whose function was to mock tribal elders and discords in ritualized ceremonies and were regarded as powerful spiritual entities because of the effect their mockery had on the dynamics of the tribe and what they revealed of human nature. In ancient Greece, the Group of Sixty met in the Temple of Heracles for the express purpose of satirizing politicians and influential citizens. I think we need some official government agency like that now with the sole responsibility of making fun of everybody running the show. That could be a much funnier and probably more effective way to check and balance things, don’t you think?

  TERRY JONES: Yes! “The Department of Mockery.” I like that idea.

  PAUL PROVENZA: It already sounds like a Python sketch. Is Cleese available?

  For people of my generation drawn to comedy, Monty Python is like the comedy soundtrack of our youth. Did you have any idea it would sustain as it has?

  TERRY JONES: Python looks dated now, but it seems to still work for people. It is surprising. While we were doing it for the BBC, I was thinking, “It’s a pity we’re not doing something that’s going to last.”

  TOM LEHRER

  WHEN HENRY KISSINGER was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, Tom Lehrer declared that it had rendered political satire obsolete. But Lehrer himself had already quit performing by that point after producing several albums’ worth of bitingly funny satirical songs that influenced a great deal of sixties liberal protesters and many comic minds that followed him. In a rare interview as concise and succinct as his career, Lehrer explains why comedy can only do so much, and why he left it behind so many years ago.

  PAUL PROVENZA: You performed for a few short years and then just stopped completely. Did you have any idea that you would have such a big impact on so many people so long after such a self-imposed short career?

  TOM LEHRER: Didn’t hurt anybody, anyway…as far as I know. That’s the important thing.

  Actually, it never dawned on me that, forty or fifty years later, people would still be listening to my songs. Most of them were written for their time. The fact that they’re still around is an unexpected bonus, and I’m quite surprised. I think many more people alive today have listened to and enjoyed my song about Werner von Braun than have probably even heard of Werner von Braun, outside of the song.

  So I’m really amazed that those records are still selling after all these years. As I’ve said, though, it has spread not like Ebola but like herpes. So slowly.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you think that the musical aspect of your satire makes it easier for people to hear the ideas and the content of it in some way?

  TOM LEHRER: I think that’s one of the reasons that my records have lasted, if I may pat myself on the back. One of the reasons that songs last is because they’re songs. I can think of hardly anybody at the moment that does that kind of stuff in songs. There are plenty of comedians and plenty of satirists and stand-up comedians, but there are very few who do satirical songs. Of course, I love Randy Newman, although now he’s mostly writing songs for cartoons, which he can do with one hand. He’s writing real songs with his other hand, I hope. He’s terrific. Stephen Lynch, he has a few. Mostly he’s about sex, I think, but still he’s pretty funny.

  PAUL PROVENZA: You’ve been known to decry a lack of civility in satire these days, and by extension, culture in general. To what do you attribute that?

  TOM LEHRER: The dumbing down of the American populace, I suppose. I always prided myself on at least trying to be literate and use the right words, and if the audience didn’t get it then they could go home and look it up. But now I don’t think that’s true anymore. That is, judging by the little comedy I’ve seen on television, lately. Irreverence has been subsumed by mere grossness. What we have now, to quote myself at my most pretentious, is “a nimiety of scurrility with a concomitant exiguity of taste.” For example, the freedom to say almost anything you want on television about society’s problems has been co-opted by the freedom to talk instead about flatulence, orgasms, genitalia, masturbation, et cetera, et cetera, and to replace real comment with pop-culture references and so-called “adult” language. Irreverence is easy. What’s hard is wit.

  A lot of comedians seem to think that if you say the word “fuck” in a sentence, then that’s what makes it funnier. I mean, it’s one thing to be able to say that, to be free to say that, but that doesn’t mean you ought to.

  I’ve no objection to the word itself. It’s just the fact that I see these Comedy Central things, and even Jon Stewart—whenever they say a naughty word on that show, the audience laughs harder. I tried not to do that. I think I say “hell” twice on my records.

  And it’s not just the words, but the topics. I mean, genitalia and flatulence and just all those things that will automatically get a laugh. It’s just too easy.

  PAUL PROVENZA: When you were writing and performing, there was a very different politics, a very different populace, and a very different government relationship to it, don’t you think?

  TOM LEHRER: There was, as I call it, a “liberal consensus” back then among everybody I knew and everybody in my audience. On the Left, there was a general agreement about what was good and what was bad. Adlai Stevenson would make a better president than Eisenhower; most everyone agreed on that. One got the impression, as I certainly did, that anybody who would come to my performances would already be on my side.

  But then it began to split up. If you make a joke about Israel a
nd Palestine now, you will alienate half of the audience. The same with feminism and all these other complicated things. The liberal consensus is now split. I’ve felt it where I’ve been living, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Santa Cruz, California. They are two hotbeds of, well, you’re not even supposed to say “liberal” anymore, you’re supposed to say “progressive.” I live in two of the most liberal/progressive hotbeds in the country, and they are also two of the most intolerant communities in the United States. I’m sure you’re familiar with that phenomenon of, “Oh, he said that? Oh, he’s a sexist, forget about him. She said that? Oh, she’s a racist, forget about her.”

  And I’m also amused at these politically correct people who will tell a racist joke, but preface it by saying, “Here’s a terrible, awful, racist joke…” and then they’ll say it with great glee, and everybody will laugh, but with the protection that it’s not really racism because they’ve acknowledged it as racist; it’s just a good joke.

  PAUL PROVENZA: If you were performing and writing now, what are the kinds of things you would tackle?

  TOM LEHRER: I don’t answer subjunctive questions. If we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs if we had some eggs.

  There’s plenty of material to make fun of in the papers, the poor things. There are plenty of things that are good for one-liners, as Jay Leno and David Letterman and all those other people do, but to come up with a whole song, that’s a little more difficult. How would you write a song about the Middle East? How would you write a song about Pakistan? I don’t know. I wouldn’t know how to do it. It’s too serious. The issues are really serious. And I’m a little more angry than I used to be. I’m more angry, I would say, than amused. I don’t even know where I stand, sometimes. I’m against everybody. Like Groucho Marx’s song: “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It.” So that’s always a problem. Write a bitter song? Angry songs, as Phil Ochs used to do? It roused the rabble, and that was fine, but I couldn’t do that.