Satiristas

  So I wasn’t really a tremendous radical.

  P. J. O’ROURKE

  P. J. O’ROURKE entered the world of satire as a writer, then editor in chief, for National Lampoon, penning such classics as “Foreigners Around the World” and, with the late Doug Kenney, the quintessential “1964 High School Yearbook Parody.” Over the course of the 1980s, this former hard-drinking, hard-drugging hippie Communist transformed into a hard-drinking, hard-drugging Republican-cum-“Libertarian.” As chief of the foreign affairs desk at Rolling Stone for nearly two decades, O’Rourke circled the globe, skewering third-world dictators and self-proclaimed do-gooders alike, publishing countless books along the way. Today, as the H. L. Mencken Fellow at the Cato Institute and with a regular perch at the Atlantic Monthly, O’Rourke continues to stick his poisonous pen in any target he damn well pleases.

  P. J. O’ROURKE: I was a hippie, but I wasn’t a very good hippie. I didn’t have all the earnest peace-love flowers in my hair; they made me sneeze. I just wasn’t getting it, in a way. I was just in it for the girls.

  Nineteen sixty-five, first weekend of my freshman year in college at Miami of Ohio: I’m walking down this alleyway in Oxford, Ohio, and there were two bars: one had all these beautiful girls in it, but all sorority girls with little circle pins on their little nice, tight sweaters. But unlike me, all the guys there were these big jocks and were really well-dressed, so I thought, “Man, those girls are great looking, but it’s probably not happening.”

  In the other bar there were all these chicks smoking Camels and strumming on guitars, wearing leotards and ballet shoes and peasant blouses without brassieres—and they were pretty cute, too. I thought, “I’ll bet they do it.”

  And they did. That was how I wound up in the counterculture. It didn’t have anything to do with anything else, really.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I believe pussy is the reason most men do anything.

  P. J. O’ROURKE: And dope. Don’t forget dope. And there was beer, too. An oft-forgotten part of being a Left-wing lunatic was that there was ample beer and motorcycles—other things I liked.

  I was against the Vietnam War, of course—I mean, they were trying to send me overseas to shoot people I’d never even met, and what’s worse, they were going to shoot back! It wasn’t so much that I was against shooting people;

  I would’ve shot my stepfather, no problem. But nobody was going to draft me to shoot my stepfather.

  But my girlfriend was in college at Kent State, and she was in that crowd where the kids got shot, and I was freaked out and wanted to make sure she was okay so I went out there to see her, and that’s where I saw the first National Lampoon.

  I immediately thought, “Oh, my God! This is perfect! This is wonderful, I love these guys!” And I was just getting out of graduate school, so I thought, “I’d love to work for them. This is really what I want to do with myself.”

  I even wrote them a letter. I don’t think I got any response. But I decided that if I was going to write for a living, I had to go to New York. When I got there, a friend of a friend there knew someone at the Lampoon and we went up and pitched a story, and I wound up working there.

  PAUL PROVENZA: National Lampoon was “it” for subversive, countercultural, iconoclastic humor when I was a kid. Was it those countercultural values that you responded to, despite your less-than-committed hippie experience?

  P. J. O’ROURKE: I don’t think it was because they had countercultural values, really. They actually had a kind of cynicism about that stuff that I responded to.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I can’t believe that you, of all people, in the heyday of the protest movement in the late sixties, weren’t seriously politicized.

  P. J. O’ROURKE: I think I was, but only in an inchoate and an incoherent way. I got all upset about stuff and I used to like to riot—that was fun, you know? Breaking windows and things…And, again, there were girls: “Come on back to the crash pad, Sunshine. Let’s get this tear gas off us. We’d better double up in the shower to save earth’s resources.” But it was more of a lashing out than anything else, and Lampoon was a perfect place to lash out.

  Which relates to the one thing Lampoon did in terms of changing American humor: Until the Lampoon came along, and Saturday Night Live and the various things that Lampoon influenced, humor was urban, kind of Jewish—it was kind of a shield against an outside world gone crazy. So the dominant form of American humor was somewhat defensive. But Lampoon was more WASP and Irish: Doug Kenney, Sean Kelly, Michael O’Donahue, Brian McConaughey…For the Irish, humor is not a defense, it’s a weapon. It’s what you do when you haven’t got fists or a gun; the next best thing is to make fun of people. They say there’s one of two kinds of Irish families: You either get a hitting family or you get a teasing family. If you’re lucky, you get a teasing family. I have a teasing family; they make fun of each other all the time, which is better than hitting each other.

  So in the Lampoon and various things it influenced or that spun off from it, you see a kind of more aggressive humor. Not that that wasn’t there; I mean, Don Rickles is not a basket of warm puppies. Humor always has an aggressive side, but by and large, the Jewish strain of humor was, “Oy, gevalt! What a world.” More “Seinfeld” than “O’Donahue.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: Flash-forward thirty-some-odd years and you’re known as being a Right-wing satirist. What happened?

  P. J. O’ROURKE: That’s fair enough. I’m pretty conservative, but I probably lean more toward the libertarian side of things. My politics started getting more conservative as things got more destructive at the end of the sixties, beginning of the seventies. I wouldn’t want to say it’s something as simple as Altamont or Charlie Manson, but the Weather Underground—that was close to the knuckle. I began looking around then, thinking, “This has got a dark side. This isn’t just sex and dope and rock ’n’ roll.” And going into the early seventies, that dark side began to get pronounced.

  Some kids blew up this town house in Greenwich Village right around the corner from where I used to stay in New York.

  I was editor of this little underground newspaper, this little hippie-dippy thing in Baltimore, and honest to Christ, a bunch of guys who called themselves “the Balto-Cong” invaded our office and said, “We’re liberating your newspaper and taking it over for the people!” We said, “Well, our newspaper consists of this little row house and we’re about six months behind on the rent and we have a couple of junky typewriters and about ten thousand dollars in debt, so…Go crazy, dudes. You are welcome to it.”

  So I began to think this stuff through a little bit more and realized that I wasn’t really a Leftist. I really just wanted to be left alone and I was perfectly willing to leave other people alone. I was much more libertarian than Leftist. And I really thought about that whole “everything you know, you learned in kindergarten” thing: “Mind your own business, and keep your hands to yourself.”

  Regarding free market, libertarians fall to the Right so they generally get lumped in with conservatives, but libertarianism is just the idea that what you want is a form of government that respects the individual, that gives the individual the maximum amount of liberty possible and the maximum amount of personal responsibility. It treats the individual with dignity, so it’s more of a measurement of whether individuals are being treated equally, whether they’re being given the greatest latitude that’s consistent with public order—there’s a lot of debate about that—and are being given the maximum amount of responsibility for themselves, with less involvement from the state and other sources of collective power.

  Libertarianism is very dubious about big corporations, especially when they collaborate with the state. Libertarians are very opposed to corporate wealth; the tendency of business is to create a playing field that tilts in their direction.

  You can be a conservative or progressive and libertarian, too—libertarianism measures a different thing. I’m opposed to abortion on moral grounds—but I don’t think it should be
illegal. I prefer a personally conservative life—monogamous, married with children, go to church, all that shit, but I do not believe these things should be compelled by law.

  Libertarian philosophy becomes more difficult when it comes to one’s duties of compassion and charity. And it comes apart a bit with foreign policy. The Cato Institute, the preeminent libertarian think thank, agree about all sorts of regulatory things—drug legalization, personal choice, personal responsibility…but when it comes to foreign policy, they’re all over the map.

  But I’ve never thought I had any answer. But I think there are certain of our humorous colleagues, and I don’t need to name any names, who sometimes get a little high on their own cooking and start thinking that not only are they good at asking the questions but that they might have the answers, too. I’ve never thought I had any answer.

  That’s the thing I’ve always loved about humor: that there’s a strong element of irresponsibility to it. Our job is to be irresponsible. My job is to turn on the lights in the dirty kitchen and watch the roaches scurry, which is fun. It’s not my job to step on them, it’s not my job to put the Borax in the cupboards. I just turn on the lights and watch them scurry.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I love this quote from you: “Some people are worried about the difference between right and wrong and some people are worried about the difference between wrong and fun.”

  P. J. O’ROURKE: A much more important question! I can tell big wrong from big right. Where I draw the line is in ever declaring that I have any special knowledge about something, that I’m anything more than an ordinary person looking at these things.

  PAUL PROVENZA: When it gets down to the questionable areas, you’re okay just going, “I don’t fucking know.”

  P. J. O’ROURKE: Yeah, “I don’t understand.” Understanding’s not my job. Like, generally speaking I’m against gun control, but when it comes right down to the specifics…Hell, my father-in-law is a career FBI agent. He covered New York City organized crime for twenty-five years in the Bureau; I certainly know the downside of crime. But when it comes to registering guns? In some ways, I don’t like the intrusion of privacy; on the other hand, I don’t mind people knowing I have a gun. So, “I just don’t fucking know.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: So is there any point other than generating some laughs to what we do? Or do we ever have any effect on changing people’s minds or the way they think?

  P. J. O’ROURKE: I think that happens fairly often if we’re good at what we do. If we set out to change people’s minds it probably wouldn’t work, but if we just go with our own thought process and try to be honest about it and funny about it…

  George Carlin changed my attitudes about a bunch of stuff. As did Paul Krassner back in the sixties before he became a complete nut. And think about the great black comedians and the incredible good they did for race relations—those guys made a lot of people really think. And once you start laughing with people, it becomes hard to start regarding them as humanly different from you.

  I’ve been talking more to my side of the aisle lately about why Republicans should just leave the fucking abortion argument alone. I said, “People are conflicted about it. Very few people who are what you’d call ‘in favor of abortion’ will go out and just have them at random. And sit an anti-abortion friend down, get him drunk to the truth-telling point and ask him about his fourteen-year-old daughter. What if it’s rape? Ask them, ‘Do you keep that baby?’ There are people so principled that they would—but I don’t think I’m one of ’em; I might kill that baby. And what are the circumstances if she’s thirteen or fourteen and it ain’t rape? I’d definitely kill the boy.”

  I can get those ideas across with that kind of stuff even to a very Right-wing, evangelical Christian audience and get a laugh. If I were to go in and say, “I think we oughta back off on abortion because I just don’t think it’s tactically good for reclaiming Congress,” I’d be booed out of the room.

  You’re never going to do a show for the Black Panthers that gets them to kiss and make up with the Aryan Brotherhood; we’re just comedians, we’re not miracle workers. But it’s not like we’re completely fucking useless when it comes to decency or making people think about stuff.

  THE KIDS IN THE HALL

  IN THE EARLY 1990s, The Kids in the Hall stormed down from the comedy ghettos of Canada to take America by storm. A cult storm, anyway. As a group, Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, Bruce McCulloch, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson explain the philosophy behind their often dark and twisted humor, and explain why you can make fun of anything, including cancer, homosexuality, and, yes, AIDS. It all depends on whether you’ve got the right point of view—and, if not, how funny the wrong point of view had better be.

  SCOTT THOMPSON: We mock our society and poke fun at the foibles of human behavior, and that would be satire.

  BRUCE McCULLOCH: I think we do a little satire. I think the only piece of really big social satire we did was Brain Candy, which was our cult—or ill-fated; whatever way you wanna say it—film. I think it was actually Lorne Michaels who said, “Americans don’t like satire, they find it cold.”

  But maybe he’s changed his mind.

  DAVE FOLEY: Yeah, ever since that big Oscar Wilde comeback.

  PAUL PROVENZA: When you guys write, do you have a sense of a bigger idea in what you’re writing, other than the comic idea? That it resonates in some way or other than just being funny?

  MARK McKINNEY: Hopefully only after the fact, because if you start with that, you’re an asshole.

  KEVIN McDONALD: It’s usually bad if we think, “Oh, we wanna blow this up.” But if we come up with an idea, and later someone tells us what we were blowing up, then we go, “Oh! I guess that’s what it was!” But the comedy idea comes first.

  SCOTT THOMPSON: Except when we wrote that scene about ripping the lid off the satire industry.

  KEVIN McDONALD: We ripped the lid off that!

  BRUCE McCULLOCH: It’s a pretty small, boutique industry, as you well know.

  DAVE FOLEY: I think that we mostly just follow whatever makes us laugh, but often the stuff that makes us laugh is subversive or horrible. Sometimes, we’ll get in discussions after we write something, “Well, what the hell are we saying with this sketch?” But it’s usually after we’ve already started working on it.

  BRUCE McCULLOCH: There’s also something else about satire, and that is your point of view. People have to understand your slightly odd point of view on what you’re satirizing. We actually were trying to write a piece for a show at the Montreal Comedy Festival. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the festival, and, I don’t know whose idea it was, but it was, “Well, AIDS is also twenty-five this year, so let’s do a Celebration of AIDS!”

  DAVE FOLEY: Happy twenty-fifth anniversary, AIDS!

  BRUCE McCULLOCH: We ended up not doing it, I think, because the point of view was sort of off.

  DAVE FOLEY: It wasn’t that the content was wrong or anything, it was just that we couldn’t make it hold together structurally. It was more we that couldn’t make it hold together.

  SCOTT THOMPSON: We just couldn’t find anything to rhyme with it. That’s the truth.

  MARK McKINNEY: With something like that, you have to load it up with really superb laughs if you wanna get away with it. We found that out the hard way in New York in the eighties.

  DAVE FOLEY: With “The AIDS Bucket.”

  MARK McKINNEY: We had an AIDS bucket with confetti that we flung into the audience.

  KEVIN McDONALD: And I was the AIDS fairy! I spread AIDS dust all over the audience.

  BRUCE McCULLOCH: He was heavier then.

  KEVIN McDONALD: It was funnier when I was heavier.

  MARK McKINNEY: It’s a little out of context, but it’s funny right now.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Did you have a point of view on that then?

  SCOTT THOMPSON: No, just a bucket.

  MARK McKINNEY: It was a dad’s nightmare of what his son is up to. The dad just found
out the son is gay, and the dad imagines him just flinging AIDS dust everywhere.

  SCOTT THOMPSON: What’s amazing is that since that time people have found that AIDS is actually transmitted by confetti in a bucket.

  DAVE FOLEY: And there is an AIDS fairy.

  KEVIN McDONALD: There’s a satire scene that Scott wrote—and it has AIDS again, too.

  DAVE FOLEY: All of our satire’s got AIDS in it.

  KEVIN McDONALD: It was about an actor who was pretending not to be gay. He’s dying of AIDS, but he doesn’t want anyone to know. After he’s dead, there are rumors that it was AIDS, but from inside the coffin you hear him say, “Cancer.”

  DAVE FOLEY: CBS refused to air that, right?

  SCOTT THOMPSON: They did, yes.

  DAVE FOLEY: Yeah. But mostly because our show was sponsored by cancer.

  SCOTT THOMPSON: Right.

  DAVE FOLEY: They didn’t think our cancer sponsors would approve of an AIDS sketch.

  SCOTT THOMPSON: But you know, AIDS itself is a satire of cancer.

  KEVIN McDONALD: I’d say it’s a parody.

  SCOTT THOMPSON: A parody. You’re right, it’s more of a parody.

  KEVIN McDONALD: AIDS is a parody of cancer.

  PAUL PROVENZA: We should call the CDC and tell them to stop all their research; we’ve figured it out. So…Do you guys have any manifesto for what’s right and what’s not right for you?

  KEVIN McDONALD: It’s gut.

  MARK McKINNEY: It’s gut, and argument. And plates of food flying around everywhere.

  DAVE FOLEY: But there are things that we definitely try to steer clear of.

  SCOTT THOMPSON: Parody. No parody.

  DAVE FOLEY: Well, we never did parody, because that was SCTV’s turf.

  BRUCE McCULLOCH: And also because it’s heartbreakingly simple.