Satiristas

  But really, quite honestly, most of it was just the practical day-to-day life of getting up, wearing a suit, and working hard, and who wants to do that shit?

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  DAMON WAYANS

  MO ROCCA

  JOHN OLIVER

  ANDY DICK

  EDDIE IZZARD

  TENACIOUS D

  PAUL DINELLO, AMY SEDARIS, AND STEPHEN COLBERT

  DAVE CHAPPELLE

  SARAH SILVERMAN

  IAN SHOALES

  JIMMY TINGLE

  MARIA BAMFORD

  PAUL F. TOMPKINS

  ANDY ZALTZMAN

  TIM MINCHIN

  GLENN WOOL

  JIM JEFFERIES

  SHERROD SMALL

  STEVE HUGHES

  WILL DURST AND GREG PROOPS

  GREG PROOPS IS most recognizable as the scene-stealing improv master from Whose Line Is It Anyway? With his retro-hipster look, Proops has cultivated a persona as the sarcastic, nimble-minded know-it-all, dissecting politics and pop culture with uncensored gusto. Will Durst credits Mort Sahl and Will Rogers as inspirations, combining Rogers’s penchant for wry observation with Sahl’s biting political disenchantment. Having started in comedy during Watergate, Durst represents a generation of comics that had no choice but to be politically minded. Here, they compare and contrast what they’ve each learned over their respective multiple decades in comedy.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I don’t think anyone can imagine how much hard work is involved in stand-up. I’m not talking about the business of it and all the challenges that entails, just the basic act of creating, writing, and performing comedy.

  WILL DURST: I do research, I have to construct a script, I have to write everything down, go over it and over it—I’m really a plodder, you know? I work like a craftsman. Proops, here, goes onstage every night with stuff that’s in the paper that day and just waxes on it to get the audience laughing.

  He has the ability to do that—partly because of the character he’s got onstage. His erudite language, the costume he wears…it all adds up. They get him, and just follow him.

  Really, Proops, I don’t even understand why they follow you because some of the words you use are so fucking arcane. I’m going to my Webster’s half the time you’re on. But you get Joe Six Pack to connect with you.

  What’s your favorite word you use in your act that flummoxes them?

  PAUL PROVENZA: “Flummox” would probably flummox a few.

  When I first moved to Los Angeles from New York, like anyone at that early a stage in their comedy development I fell prey to that obvious “L.A. versus NY” thing onstage. But after way too much hard-core L.A. bashing, I’d give a sucker-punch faux apology: “I’m not saying that people in Los Angeles are vapid. I wouldn’t say that…because no one here knows what ‘vapid’ means.”

  GREG PROOPS: I used to talk ironically about Dick Cheney’s personality: “It just lights up the night sky like the aurora borealis.” It got a laugh the first time I did it, and then for the next year in the clubs, nothing. Then suddenly, out of nowhere one night, a huge laugh. And these two guys came up after and said, “That’s the first time we’ve ever heard ‘aurora borealis’ in a joke.”

  But for a year I was just toiling in the vineyards of the Lord throwing it out there night after night, every night, and nothing. I’ve even done it way up North where they have the aurora borealis! They could walk outside after the show and see it right there! But, nope. Maybe there was fog that night.

  I could’ve said “northern lights,” but it’s just not as funny. And I think you have to make the audience work a little. It’s like football: You’re throwing the pass, and you want the audience to run to get it. Of course, if you’re throwing eighty-yard bombs all the time the audience will get tired, so you gotta throw a slant over the middle once in a while, but generally you want the audience to reach a little for the joke.

  A lot of comics we have to follow sometimes, their comedy is just…SMACK! It’s right there, just handed to the audience. Following them, after the audience has not been asked to make any intellectual leap whatsoever in twenty minutes is just…ugh. For me, it’s awful.

  WILL DURST: And you gotta be careful with irony, as anybody who’s worked the Midwest can tell you. Or parts of the South where they like their humor: “Hold the hidden agenda, please.”

  GREG PROOPS: “Smart-ass” is okay, and sarcasm they get, but they’re not as effective in some areas.

  WILL DURST: But I kinda focus on politics of the day. Proops does some of that but he goes more into the social/political stuff. And then he mocks the audience.

  GREG PROOPS: I denigrate them for not appreciating my jokes for the full worth of their brilliance. Someone once said, “You tell one joke, then for the next ten minutes tell the audience how stupid they are for not getting it.”

  When people disagree with me I’ll go, “I’m here to make you laugh. And when you laugh at something you disagree with, that’s called ‘being hip and sophisticated.’ As in, ‘I disagree utterly with your West Coast point of view, but oh how cogent your remark on our vice president’s mendacity was! Ha ha ha…’”

  WILL DURST: “Mendacity!” See?

  GREG PROOPS: But most crowds go with you if you couch it enough and make it funny.

  Opening acts sometimes ask, “Do you want me to stay away from any topics?” I’ll always say, “No,” because someone doing the same topic before you just opens the floor for it; unless they’re doing the exact same joke as something you have, it doesn’t burn the premise to the ground. So I go, “Do anything you want—just don’t do racist stuff.” That’s the hardest thing to follow.

  Material about racism? Right on. But when it’s, “The thing about Asians…” or “I don’t like Arabs…” or whatever, the crowd goes to a weird place. The ability to even go for the joke is so removed then, because “knee-jerk” has come into play. “Knee-jerk” is the worst comedy reaction.

  WILL DURST: Comics who do that identify themselves. That ugly little monster has come out through their mouth, and they can’t pull it back. Then when you go up there and try to come from a place of, “Can’t we all get along?” there’s this real thing of, “No, actually, we can’t,” because that monster’s been unleashed in the room.

  There’s so much we always have to consider and deal with in comedy. But it becomes such a mosaic of craft and technique and skill. We’ve all learned so many tricks over the years. And you do get better because you’ve learned so many tricks. You’ve learned the difference that one syllable can mean in a joke by taking it out or putting it in. You’ve learned how to deal with hecklers—whether to bring them into the act or if you need to ignore them and how to balance it…With enough years, you know so much about yourself and audience dynamics and all that.

  You learn so much that you’re able to put more and more depth and texture and different brushstrokes into the work.

  And for me, after so many years I can now cannibalize my own act from, like, 1985. I can steal from myself, which is endless, because I don’t get pissed off at me for it.

  GREG PROOPS: There’s nothing wrong with doing variations on a theme of your own, working a theme in a different way. I saw Ornette Coleman play recently—and if he’s not allowed to do riffs he came up with forty years ago, then who is? That’s what art is, you know? That’s what craft is.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Monet did over thirty distinct paintings of the Rouen Cathedral, all from the exact same viewpoint.

  GREG PROOPS: Exactly. And Durst’s stuff has so many levels to it anyway at this point. He had this off-the-hook-hilarious bit during the Bush years that was the most baroque, literate, colorful, labyrinthian…What was it, like, two hundred adjectives in a row?

  WILL DURST: That was just a trick, really. It’s that same thing you see some comics do at the end of their set that always makes us go, “Jesus Christ, what a cheap trick that is.” You know, they’ll do a rap or something just calculated t
o get huge applause at the end and we always hate following it. It’s like following a guy on a unicycle juggling kittens on fire—which I actually had to do once.

  The bit he’s talking about is really just that same kind of “drum solo” thing—but it is truly me, though. It starts like an off-hand summation of my feelings about the whole Bush administration: “I hate these lyin’, theivin’, holier-than-thou…” and it goes on for 237 different adjectives like that. It’s really fun to do, and it’s a bit of an acting exercise, too.

  GREG PROOPS: The audience is exhilarated at the end of it.

  WILL DURST: But it’s such a cheap trick. It’s just an audience “Wow!”

  GREG PROOPS: It is not! It’s taking a point to a ridiculous, extreme level. It’s satire!

  WILL DURST: No, it’s not satire. It’s pointillism if it’s anything. Just a big bunch of words that from a distance all add up to one big, obvious thing.

  PAUL PROVENZA: What isn’t?

  GREG PROOPS: He likes to denigrate himself. He thinks it makes him more “populist.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: I’ve seen you do the bit, and executing it is a real feat. And at least you can say, “No kittens were harmed during the making of this joke.”

  WILL DURST: He only juggled phony kittens on fire. But that doesn’t make any difference when you’re following it.

  GREG PROOPS: Interviewers always ask, “Are you nervous before you go on?” I always say, “No, and not because I think I’m so great—which I do—but because if we’re nervous or shaky in any way, that’d be the worst comedy you’d ever see.” The key element for any comedian is absolute confidence on stage. That’s what enables you to handle whatever happens in the room, and the crowd won’t freak out on you.

  PAUL PROVENZA: They freak out when they think the ship has no captain.

  GREG PROOPS: Right. So you can tell a joke that maybe only ten percent of the crowd gets because you’ve got the confidence that you can come right back after that. You know you’ve got a forehand and a strong backhand or whatever it may take.

  WILL DURST: As you get longer into the business you also trust that voice you’ve come up with when writing your material more. I did some political stuff when I started, but it wasn’t the bulk of my act. I had to learn the language of stand-up first and find a voice before I could write political jokes that fit me. Now if I write a joke that doesn’t fit what I believe or isn’t clearly in what I feel is my voice, I can’t get behind it. I have to believe a joke is really me.

  Lately there’s more gray area coming into my act, though. A bit more middle-of-the-road stuff. I don’t know if it’s that I’m getting older, or if it’s having a mortgage or what.

  GREG PROOPS: How do you mean that?

  WILL DURST: Well, part of my one-man show, The All-American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing, was me saying that I’m actually a moderate. I’m in the center—but the center’s been kicked so far to the right that by just staying in the same place I’m suddenly a commie, pinko, yellow, red bastard. How the fuck did that happen? So I’m talking more about how twenty percent of America is far Left, twenty percent’s far Right, and you never hear about the sixty percent of us in the middle.

  It kinda feels more like my real voice now—good timing, right? I keep narrowing it down; becoming more centered.

  Have you watched tapes of yourself from twenty years ago? Christ, what the fuck was I so angry about?

  GREG PROOPS: That was passion! Look at Carlin. He got more and more vicious and morbid and dark…and it was so exciting!

  He didn’t care about the abyss at all anymore. He was just, “I hate God. I hate bullshit. I hate obfuscation…” When I saw him last, he opened with, “Fuck you!” Standing ovation. Then he went, “I just thought I’d make you feel comfortable.”

  I hate seduction onstage. I do it, we all do it—but I loved his brand of non-seduction. Right up front: “Fuck you!”

  I’d watch him on Maher or Colbert and he’d almost become like Pinter or Beckett. He was boiling things down to, like, two sentences. So sharp, so well thought out, so well written. It’s startling how sometimes just a sentence can be so rich.

  But Carlin sat down and wrote and rewrote, and crafted it, then memorized it and reworked it…That’s how Durst works. I never work that way. I write an idea and then bang it around on stage.

  WILL DURST: That’s more exciting, though, because you never know exactly how it’s going to come out. I love the comics who don’t give a shit what the audience thinks.

  GREG PROOPS: Well, you chose to be a political comic.

  WILL DURST: Not a greased chute to the big time, is it?

  GREG PROOPS: It was not a “Hey, everybody! Like me!” choice.

  WILL DURST: Well, I was forged in the crucible of the Vietnam War era. I remember being in school and everything was about the war. Fucking math class would be like, “We’ve got six bombs. If we drop three…” The war was everywhere.

  I started in ’74 when Nixon, Watergate, Vietnam…it was all coming to a head. You couldn’t not be political. And I had all that going into comedy.

  If you think about it, there was almost no political comedy between Kennedy’s assassination pretty much up until ’73, ’74 during Nixon. Look at all the comedy breaking through in that ten-year period: It was people like Cheech and Chong, Steve Martin…No political comedy to speak of, really.

  GREG PROOPS: Political comedy’s included in the discourse much more now. Maher, Stewart, and Colbert have important people on their shows—prime ministers, senators, people active in the system. When you do that, you become part of the discourse as opposed to being on the outside throwing darts at it. When people refuse to go on Colbert’s show, that’s a talking point; people talk about the fact that you won’t go on.

  WILL DURST: And that hasn’t blunted their arrows at all. Mark Russell, on the other hand, is a Washington insider and his barbs always have that little rubber tip on the end.

  GREG PROOPS: It’s a little bit “lunch-y.” He’s too cozy with them: “We had lunch together yesterday, so I’m not really going to go after you.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: I don’t think Mark Russell really does satire or political comedy—it’s more “political cabaret.”

  WILL DURST: As do the Capitol Steps.

  GREG PROOPS: But a satirist’s business, according to Swift or Voltaire or whomever, is not to be a clown for your party, and you’re supposed to take everybody out, right?

  WILL DURST: You’re the leech, bloodletting all the poison out of society.

  GREG PROOPS: But I say if I’m doing too much on one side, tough shit; that’s my point of view. I did a political panel once with Garry Trudeau, and when that came up, he said, “We have no responsibility to show both sides.”

  But I do also go after that whole NPR mind-set of cozy, wine-drinking white people.

  PAUL PROVENZA: “Limousine liberals”?

  GREG PROOPS: I have to take them out just as much—but I don’t think you have any responsibility to show both sides of anything. Others do. Journalism should, sort of.

  WILL DURST: We’re supposed to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted,” right? I actually believe that has to be done—but you can’t change anybody’s mind in a comedy club. The Right-wing, Bush-supporting Ben Stein once even said to me, “Keep making Bush jokes because every time you do, it just humanizes him.”

  Your first responsibility is always to get the laugh—but if you can make a statement with the laugh, then you’re doing something that at least approaches art.

  And what we can do is plant seeds of doubt in the mortar of people’s apathy or inattention to things. Little seeds that may grow and crack that mortar someday.

  That’s really the most we can aspire to.

  ANDY BOROWITZ

  AFTER FACING AN existential crisis in the repetitive, soul-numbing world of television sitcom writing, Andy Borowitz took advantage of that newfangled Internet to launch his own satirical news si
te, The Borowitz Report. He’s since become a regular source of biting Left-wing (mostly) humor and commentary. We discuss satire’s relationship to the truth, how it’s sometimes indistinguishable, and how sometimes it may not be “true” at all.

  ANDY BOROWITZ: The pretentious analogy I use is the solar eclipse: if you look directly into a solar eclipse, it’ll burn your retina or cornea—or some part of your eye I didn’t learn about in science class. But if you look at it through a pinhole, suddenly you can see this amazing phenomenon without getting hurt.

  If you said, “Hey guess what, America? This country that you love tortures people, eavesdrops on you illegally, we’re destroying the environment, our bridges are falling down, our banking system’s collapsing…” you want to put a gun in your mouth after that litany. However, you can watch The Daily Show, or read my site, or The Onion, and you’re really going to hear all those same tough realities, except you’re laughing.

  So you can either burn your eyes out, or you can observe a fantastic phenomenon—in this case, the truth—from a safe perspective. That’s what satire does: it points you toward the truth in an oblique way, rather than making you want to throw yourself out a window.

  PAUL PROVENZA: How’d you go from writing mainstream sitcoms to being a political commentator, quoted on op-ed pages and taken seriously as a pundit?

  ANDY BOROWITZ: I don’t know if I’m being taken seriously; that would probably be a bad thing in this line of work. But I got burned out producing and writing sitcoms for about fifteen years. It was very repetitious—which is the goal of sitcoms, but maybe that’s more fun for the viewer than for the writer. So I moved to New York and didn’t do anything but read and be a bum for a couple years, sort of like what people do in Los Angeles except they say they’re writing a screenplay. I was admitting being a bum.