Satiristas

  KEVIN McDONALD: No political satire.

  SCOTT THOMPSON: And no celebrity impersonation, either.

  DAVE FOLEY: And we made sure all of our sketches had endings, because we didn’t wanna seem like Monty Python. That was one of our rules.

  SCOTT THOMPSON: And we wanted our hair and our wigs to look very good.

  KEVIN McDONALD: That was the big one.

  PAUL PROVENZA: How much stuff that you work on together goes by the wayside? What’s your ratio on that kind of stuff?

  SCOTT THOMPSON: A lot. About a quarter. I’d say there’s about forty bad, dead sketches littering the way to this show we’re doing now.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Will those ever see the light of day again?

  SCOTT THOMPSON: Some, I think so.

  DAVE FOLEY: Because Scott will resubmit them all for the next read-through.

  SCOTT THOMPSON: You bastard. You’ve always been a bastard, Foley. You’ve always been a bastard.

  MARK McKINNEY: You don’t like it? Satirize him.

  SCOTT THOMPSON: He’s lucky I didn’t satirize him, I can tell you.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Not only do you still have your original audience that came up with you guys, but now you’ve also got a whole new generation of fans that is almost more rabid about you than your original audience.

  SCOTT THOMPSON: Well they have more energy, don’t they?

  KEVIN McDONALD: “I grew up on you” is a phrase we’re hearing a lot.

  DAVE FOLEY: A lot.

  SCOTT THOMPSON: Occasionally, “I threw up on you.”

  KEVIN McDONALD: “My mum loved you.”

  DAVE FOLEY: “My mum loved you when she was at college.” We don’t do topical humor; I think that helps us a lot.

  SCOTT THOMPSON: That’s also part of our manifesto, definitely.

  KEVIN McDONALD: That makes you more timeless.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Given that you’d do A Celebration of AIDS if you could only have figured out the structure, what kind of stuff have you come up with that really makes you laugh but that you just can’t quite bring yourselves to do?

  MARK McKINNEY: A lot of dark jokes from the tour bus are in the writing. Some of them are just orphan jokes that you can’t build the sketch around. They’re little orphan laugh bombs that you can’t really find a place for.

  PAUL PROVENZA: What have you decided is too offensive or crosses one too many lines?

  SCOTT THOMPSON: Nothing.

  MARK McKINNEY: Pack it with enough funny, and if there’s a good premise and it doesn’t try to prove a point, then you have to put it out there.

  DAVE FOLEY: But despite what a lot of people think about our stuff, our stuff is never mean. Things can be really dark and they can be brutal, but none of it, I don’t think, is ever mean.

  SCOTT THOMPSON: Even when we are really vicious, there’s still an empathy for how tragic human beings can be.

  DAVE FOLEY: We’re never hateful of the characters we’re playing.

  KEVIN McDONALD: We’re not nihilistic, and some comedy is.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I think that’s one of the reasons your stuff is so interesting. You create these situations where you can’t really tell whom you’re making fun of, but it’s not because you’re making fun of everybody, it’s because you’re actually not making fun of anybody.

  THE KIDS IN THE HALL: Right, uh-huh.

  BRUCE McCULLOCH: Hey, you should do a documentary; you seem to know a little bit about this stuff.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Why do you think each of you guys have spent your lives doing this? There are easier roads than the one you’ve taken. You could go out there and just please the audience without challenging them with such dark ideas.

  DAVE FOLEY: Part of it is we don’t know how to please an audience. I don’t. We kind of just do the comedy we know how to do.

  BRUCE McCULLOCH: And I think we’re obsessed with weird ideas. Some of us more than others. I mean, Scott definitely needs to process his life through his work and by thinking up weird stuff, but I think that’s kind of why we all do it, really.

  JOY BEHAR

  AS A STAND-UP comedian and radio personality, Joy Behar is edgy, outspoken, and, by her own admission, sometimes downright vitriolic. On HLN’s The Joy Behar Show, she heats up watercooler issues in prime-time, but as the Emmy-winning cohost of ABC’s morning coffee klatch, The View, she holds a position in typically anodyne daytime television that demands diplomacy, deference, and tact—qualities lacking in most comedians, let alone those who speak their minds as freely as Joy Behar. She speaks candidly about the advantages and limitations of that position and how she walks the fine line between them, bringing subversive ideas to an audience rarely presented with fearless opinion and blunt honesty.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Were you drawn to stand-up, or did you discover it looking for a way to say the stuff you had to say?

  JOY BEHAR: Interesting question; which came first, the chicken or the egg?

  In the beginning, I talked about my Italian-American background. One early piece of material was about these little WASP girls I was working with behind the scenes at Good Morning America. One said to the other, “Are you going to Southampton for Thanksgiving?”

  “No, Mummy closed up the house.”

  I thought to myself, “The last time ‘Mummy’ closed up the house, they left Italy.”

  It was an early joke of mine that really had a social context; it says a lot of things. I think that that was the beginning for me. I wanted to address social inequities in some way, and did it by telling stories about my background. How my family used to take me to the cemetery for a vacation. About how I never went to camp: “My family didn’t believe in camp. They believed in ‘stoop.’” All of that was to say, “I’m going to tell you the truth.”

  I didn’t come from an abusive background, nobody hit me or verbally abused me, no one told me to shut up; I was a little princess. It took me till I was older to be on the bottom, on the balls of my ass. I lost my job, my marriage, and had a near-death experience, and those three things catapulted me to finally do stand-up, and to be able to endure the abuse of being onstage. I was in my late thirties, had already been married and had a kid, and was practically a grown-up when I started stand-up.

  My goal always was to have a party and have fun while I tell things to people. To have laughs, but also say something. You’ve got the microphone and the position, why not say something? If you bring humor to something, it’s disarming, and you can say things that people would otherwise get into trouble for. If I set out only to make them laugh I might as well put an arrow through my head.

  I come from the sixties and seventies, a generation of people who marched against the war in Vietnam. We hated Nixon, hated Johnson, hated the war, all of that, and we wanted to speak our minds. I lost a teaching job at one high school because I was telling the ninth-graders not to enlist and to make sure they didn’t go to Vietnam. The school didn’t like that, so I was out of there pretty fast. I was more blatant than subversive then.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Are you aware when you’re being confrontational on The View?

  JOY BEHAR: Sure, but sometimes I pretend I’m not. It’s a funny way to go, you know? Like if they react when I say something blue, I innocently go, “What?” My friend Angela said, “You don’t even realize that you’re saying things the average person doesn’t say.”

  I asked my first manager, “Why do you want to manage me?”

  He said, “Because you say ‘fuck you’ to people and they say ‘thank you.’”

  I don’t know if that’s exactly accurate, but I’m edgier than most people. For me, that’s de rigueur; it’s the normal way I talk to people.

  PAUL PROVENZA: In daytime television we generally see mostly bland, vacuous people who play it safe rather than voice real opinions. You’re confrontational, yet somehow you’ve avoided controversy.

  JOY BEHAR: Yeah, thirteen years at The View without any real controversy. I’ve had minor skirmishes with Donald Trump,
but that’s about it. Oh—and some Christians. Somebody asked, “Are you glad your diet’s done?”

  And I said, “Thank you, Jesus.”

  I was bleeped, and ABC were mad at me for saying that. But interestingly, Jerry Falwell himself said on Hannity and Colmes that he was on my side because he thought that I was “testifying.” Now there’s an example of subversive behavior: I was not testifying, but he decided I was.

  I seem to have an instinct about where the line is and I go right up to it without crossing too far over it, I guess. No one says “bitch” on the air more than I do, and they seem to be okay with it. I practically defy them to take that word out.

  But my confrontations are about issues; I don’t get into interpersonal fights. I don’t say “You’re an idiot” to one of my cohosts. If I don’t like what they say, I’ll go after that, not them personally. For example, we have Sherri Shepherd on the show, who is very religious, raised a Jehovah’s Witness. A conversation came up when the governor of Georgia prayed for rain during a drought there, and she wants me to pray. She wants everybody should pray for rain. I took the position that I don’t believe it does any good. Native Americans have been praying for rain for centuries; did it work? I want to see statistics.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Critical thinking. Often a problem on television.

  JOY BEHAR: Yeah. And Sherri’s position, which is very religious and adorable, I thought, was, “Well, it couldn’t hurt, why don’t we all pray anyway?”

  My answer to that is that it distracts you from science, that’s why not. It makes people think maybe it’s a solution, as if somebody’s watching over you going, “Oh, Paul Provenza’s praying for rain! Let’s give him rain.” It’s very self-centered, when you think about it.

  Religion is very narcissistic. How come at any given moment, thousands of people die in hurricanes or earthquakes somewhere? Because those people weren’t praying? I don’t get it. The whole thing is over my head.

  But Sherri Shepherd, who believes all this, is a comic also, just with a whole different view of the world. The next day, very subversively, she brings some information and says on the air, “Look Joy! They got a half-inch of rain in Georgia.”

  I was now in the position of, “How shall I respond?” Instead of getting angry, I said, “You know what? I think I helped because I lit a scented candle last night.”

  I guess people could be mad at me for that, so I don’t know how it works exactly.

  PAUL PROVENZA: From the way I’ve heard network executives talk about mainstream audiences, you don’t exactly fit their profile, do you?

  JOY BEHAR: For a long time, in their eyes, I was in some category of New York/Jewish/ethnic/Italian-Jewish—whatever the hell they call it. I was considered a type the mainstream audience would not relate to. Thanks to Barbara Walters, who doesn’t really buy into that, I got this job and—surprise! I appeal to the mainstream! Even though I come from New York, from a small ethnic group, and I’m a liberal Democrat, they find me “highly relatable.” I think that’s because I’m also a woman who’s been married and divorced, has a child, went to school, and lives in the world. So obviously, network executives are just wrong about who’s relatable and what mainstream America really likes. They’re just wrong.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you find your stand-up audience thinks they’re going to get Joy Behar from The View and then have issues with Joy Behar the comedian?

  JOY BEHAR: I think they do, actually. But in the first five minutes they get that I’m much more raunchy, more raucous, more edgy, and more pointed than on The View—more of everything television’s always pushing away. But when people come to see you in person, they’re paying actual money, so you want to give them something they can talk about, something different than what they get for free on television.

  I don’t think anyone is shocked by my language or anything like that, but sometimes they’re shocked by my disdain for the Right wing. I have nothing but complete disdain and negative things to say about them. In fact, when I had surgery, one of the surgeons told me he had voted for Bush. I was beside myself. As I’m being gurneyed in, I made him swear that he would never, ever vote Republican again. I wanted to stop the operation, but it was too late. I was already anesthetized and starting to go under.

  PAUL PROVENZA: That’s how Republicans operate. Anesthetize people before they can stop them.

  JOY BEHAR: Pretty much! I’ll run across audiences at Caroline’s on Broadway or when I do benefits where they’re not coming specifically to see me and I still tell them what I want to tell them. If they don’t like it, I just have to bring them around. You have to work them a little. That’s what being a pro is all about. Once I’ve got them, then my goal becomes not just for them to laugh with me, but to agree with me. I make them swear to me that they’ll never vote Republican again, too.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you think you have any influence, really, on people’s politics?

  JOY BEHAR: Well, I’ll tell you this: I once met Joe Biden in Florida somewhere—and I like him, too, very much—and he told me that he was more scared to go on Jon Stewart’s show than on Meet the Press. Why? Joe Biden is witty. He’s very witty and could probably play around, but he knows comedians are subversive and could sabotage him in some way, or play a game with him that he’s gonna get caught up in and lose. That’s why he doesn’t want to sit with Jon Stewart. That’s the power of the comedian.

  And there’s a childlike quality to comedians, too, that’s another part of this. You know how kids will just say things like, “You have funny hair,” out of naiveté or innocence?

  PAUL PROVENZA: A friend of my family got a nose job, and he grew a moustache after the surgery, figuring that when people saw him looking so different, they’d think it must be the new moustache. He came over one night and out of nowhere my five-year-old cousin innocently and guilelessly said, “Hey Al, you know what? Your moustache makes your nose look smaller.”

  JOY BEHAR: That’s what I mean. There’s a bit more of an adult filter than your five-year-old cousin, of course, but we’re always in touch with that kid in us, and we could just come out and ask, “Why’d you say that? What were you thinking?”

  It’s ingrained in our brains that we’re still kids just having fun. That scares politicians. Republicans particularly do not want to come on The View. Almost every Democratic primary candidate came on the show, but where was Giuliani? Mitt Romney? Why wouldn’t Mike Huckabee, who doesn’t believe in evolution, sit and talk about that with me? What are they afraid of?

  They’re not afraid of Sherri, she’s much more on their side. I don’t think they’re scared of Barbara Walters, she’s a journalist, more Meet the Press, which they’re used to. Are they scared of me and Whoopi? We’re just comedians, right?

  LEE CAMP

  ASIDE FROM HIS opinionated stand-up, for which he was singled out as one of the best New Faces at the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival, Lee Camp ran for “president” on Comedy Central’s “Fresh Debate ’08,” does frequent comedic commentary on E!, SpikeTV, MTV, and Good Morning America, is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post, contributes headlines to The Onion, has authored two books, and continues creating a prolific and varied body of satirical work on the Internet. Mistakenly invited to do commentary on Fox News, Lee provided catharsis for millions as a Left-wing Trojan horse confronting Fox in its own henhouse.

  LEE CAMP: Fox News invited me on to do a few jokes commenting on the primaries. I don’t even know how they found me, but my first thought was to say no, because I’ve watched this festering pile of propaganda wrapped in the American flag spew its poisonous eggs into the brains of average Americans for twelve years. Watching the flag flapping behind a Fox “news” program—that’s desecration. But my second thought was, “Why not do it once and burn that bridge—just fucking set the thing on fire? That might be fun and interesting.”

  I figured I’ve got one shot, live on their own airwaves, to tell some truth. I didn’t plan it word for word
, but I had some ideas. I’d read an article about how woefully underreported civilian deaths in Iraq are and that it was probably closer to a million than anything they’ve told us, so I kept that in my head to keep my nerve and remind me why I was doing this.

  So, live on air, after some lame jokes about Mike Huckabee, I just suddenly stopped being funny and said, “Excuse me—what is Fox News? It’s just a parade of propaganda, isn’t it? A festival of ignorance. A million people dead in Iraq, and what are you doing here? It’s ridiculous. You people watching, go outside instead. Go hug your children, love your families, do something with your life.” Then they cut to a commercial, I got up, took my microphone off, and walked silently back to the green room, itching to get the fuck out of that sixth circle of hell.

  Back on air, Clayton Morris pretended he’d thrown me out of the building, saying something like, “I had to get rid of that guy!”

  His cohost said, “Well, that proves that we show both sides of the issues here at Fox News.” So, in a three-second span, they stated that they accept all viewpoints and that they physically throw opposing viewpoints out of the building.

  The segment blew up online with about a million and a half hits, and I got interview requests from all these national radio shows. I had no idea people would get so excited about it, but apparently I struck a nerve.

  I’m very happy with my decision. Too many people have died for me to just look the other way and tell asinine jokes on their couch. If there’s anything else that disgusts me as much as Fox News, given the opportunity, I’ll do the same.

  Some people criticized me as being rude or disrespectful or lacking class. But in my view, knowing that nearly a million civilians have died in Iraq and reporting only eighty thousand is “lacking class.” “Rude” is calling peace activists “anti-American.” My view of “vulgar” is knowing that genocide goes on in Darfur but refusing to speak about it on-air because the people funding it are your corporate friends. “Disrespectful” is labeling the first African-American presidential candidate “Muslim,” hoping to inspire enough racism to defeat him at the polls.