Satiristas

by Paul Provenza

  First thing we did after the Twin Towers fell was go dark for a week, because we live in New York and were flipping out. Then, when we started talking, we were, like, “I guess we should definitely not do anything about current events.”

  Everyone agreed. So we started to try and brainstorm other stuff, and the more we tried the more we realized, “Well, we’ve got to say something about it, because it’s ridiculous to publish anything that says nothing about it.” So, we thought we’d do one appropriate reference to it and then everything else will be something light and inoffensive. Then we thought, “Well, you can’t put anything else next to that piece,” so just in the process of deciding what to do, we ended up arriving at this decision to do the entire issue about what had happened.

  If you read it, it’s not making light of anything and it’s not even funny ha-ha. There’s humor that comes from rage. There’s humor that comes from sadness, and there’s a lot of cry-cry-type punch lines, as opposed to ha-ha punch lines. It was a rage-based outlet, and a lot of people responded to that.

  I wrote a story on the front page: “Real Life Turns into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Film,” and it was just about the weird sense of un-reality that everyone was feeling at that time, and also the fact that it was a scenario straight out of a really over-the-top action thriller, but there was nothing entertaining about it in real life. The main story I always get comments on wasn’t on the front page, it was in the inside story, but people still talk about it to me. It was “God Angrily Re-clarifies Don’t Kill Rule.” I was feeling maudlin, and I was crying when I wrote it, so it wasn’t, like, “Hey! We’re gonna be wacky about the World Trade Center!”—you know? It was a genuinely heartbroken voice and we had no idea how people would react.

  This was published before almost all the comedy came back. But, when we walked into the office the day it came out, there was a big letter in the fax machine, in really huge font, just saying “NOT FUNNY NOT FUNNY NOT FUNNY” over and over again. But during the course of the day, more and more e-mails piled in. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, and then there were thousands of them, and 90 percent of them were saying things like, “God bless you, thank you.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: Were you unified in your mind-set there, or were there stories submitted where you had to go, “No.”

  TODD HANSON: Tim Harrod, who was a guy who worked here for a long time, had a brilliant joke; it was a great joke, but we didn’t run it because we decided the target was wrong. It was “America Stronger than Ever, Say Quadragon Officials,” and it would have been very irreverent and funny, but we just felt it was the wrong target because the target was the fucking dead people at the Pentagon, and we just didn’t think that was right, so we ran something else.

  Whenever anyone talks to us about The Onion, they always say, “Where do you draw the line?” It’s like a form letter we get every week: “I have enjoyed your publication for many years, but the last thing you did about [insert specific subject] went over the line. My son or my grandmother or my child or my husband had [insert specific subject] and it is not funny.”

  So, we did a joke specifically about that. It was called “That’s Not Funny; My Brother Died That Way.” And there’s this scene in Police Academy where the blustering authority-figure cop is driving a motorcycle and his motorcycle comes to a sudden stop and he flies forward into the back of a police horse and his head goes up the horse’s asshole. So, we picked this incident and then had the author describe it in a totally straight voice about how that happened to his brother, and his brother died from having his head up a horse’s ass and that Police Academy went way over the line and should not have included that scene because it is inappropriate. So, it really just comes down to your subjective experience.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Well, that’s fair. People always talk about “crossing the line,” and I would say it’s not a line. It’s a point. If you get the point, you don’t have to talk about lines.

  TODD HANSON: Is the point you’re making legitimate, or what? If it’s illegitimate, then you have every right to be offended.

  I don’t think there’s any subject that you can’t do, but it just depends on the angle. So, anyway, point being, with 9/11 we were thinking really carefully about what the target was, but the 9/11 issue isn’t really a good example if you want to talk about hard-edged satire, because it was almost very sentimental.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Most of the comedy and satire I really like is unsentimental. To me, it comes down to the Mickey Mouse/Bugs Bunny dichotomy. Bugs Bunny was always funny and completely unsentimental, and whenever it did get sentimental, it was always just the set up for a punch line. Mickey Mouse and Disney were always sentimental.

  TODD HANSON: Why does everyone act like Mickey Mouse is the icon of American humor or something? Mickey Mouse is lame. There’s nothing really cool about Mickey Mouse. The only cool thing I can think about Mickey Mouse is the Mickey Mouse sequence in Fantasia, and the only reason that is awesome is because it is fucking terrifying. But Bugs Bunny, on the other hand, always ruled every time; Bugs Bunny is just the shit, man—he is the coolest.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Mickey Mouse is just bland. You can’t even define his character. Bugs Bunny is anarchy, chaos, and satire. Bugs Bunny is the antihero. He’s the archetype of Arlecchino in Commedia del Arte; Scapin in Molière. He is the wise fool, the person who’s not supposed to be the one who knows everything, but for whom it’s so clear that everything’s absurd, and it’s that awareness that allows him to always succeed. There’s real character there.

  TODD HANSON: It also gives an example of what we were talking about: the target. Because Bugs Bunny is the prey of the hunter, he’s not the guy with the gun—he’s the guy without the gun.

  I don’t know that much about the ancient Greek rules of theater, but I read something recently that really surprised me. It touches on what you said about the sentimental and unsentimental. It said that tragedy was the genre that was associated with emotion and comedy was associated with rationality. I always thought it would be the other way around. You would think having a strictly realistic view of life would be tragic, and having a more emotional, positive way of thinking would involve laughing. But that’s not the way it was. Comedy comes from just looking at things rationally without sentimentality. It was counterintuitive, but then I was, like, “Okay, yeah.” It’s tragedy that’s the emotional drama, making a big grandiose thing about it. And, looking at it that way, tragedy is actually less deep than comedy, and less true.

  BOB ODENKIRK

  BEST KNOWN AS half of HBO’s Mr. Show, Bob Odenkirk is a big thinker when it comes to comedy. After getting his feet wet with improv and sketch comedy in Chicago—where he wrote Chris Farley’s legendary “Motivational Speaker” sketch—Odenkirk went on to become a writer for Saturday Night Live, Late Night, The Ben Stiller Show, and countless other groundbreaking shows, including Mr. Show, the one in which he was taller than his partner, David Cross. Today, Odenkirk is producing and directing a wide range of television series and feature films, and he’s taken time to sit with the author for one of his favorite pastimes: dissecting the minutiae and art and craft of comedy.

  BOB ODENKIRK: I think about comedy all the time, all my life, for years. I watch it and think about it. I think about what’s good and what people are doing and why. I can’t help it; it’s just what we do. I’m not really passionate about too much else.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I think that’s true for a lot of people in comedy—that it feels more like a “calling” than a job or a living. And I am always amazed, and sometimes impressed, by comedians who don’t think about it as much as you and I seem to.

  BOB ODENKIRK: There are some very smart guys in comedy who won’t talk about it. There’s an element of it being almost like a magician thing: “You don’t tell people the trick.” So they don’t break down comedy. And then there’s also an element of maybe thinking it’s pompous and an element of “If you don’t know, it doesn’t matter how much you’re tol
d; you’ll never really get it, so what’s the point of talking about it?”

  Me, I like to talk about comedy. I talk about it too much.

  PAUL PROVENZA: So how did you start?

  BOB ODENKIRK: I started doing sketch comedy because I always loved Monty Python. That’s my biggest influence by far. I wrote sketches in junior high. I even wrote sketches for class. We’d get an assignment to write something about a foreign country or an event in history or something, and instead of a paper, I’d write a sketch about it and perform it in class. So I wrote first, and then I gravitated to doing improv. Obviously, improv is mostly really about sketch comedy. I grew up just outside of Chicago, so Second City was naturally the place I heard about. I went to Second City and was ecstatic about it, so I got into improv through that.

  I think improv is really fun, but it’s really just a bit of a parlor trick. Now, Del Close is a guy who influenced me in a huge way in my life choice to write comedy and to be in entertainment, but I completely disagree with him—respectfully—about improvisation being an art form or being a form of real entertainment. It’s just a parlor trick that you can get really good at if you do it all the time. I’ve seen groups who are fucking unbelievable—who can do a forty-five-minute show, and then another one and another one after that, and they’re great shows and they make sense and tie together, and they live on another plane of consciousness—but those are people who do it all the time. The only way you get that good is by just doing it so much, and they can only do it that much for like a year and a half.

  PAUL PROVENZA: That’s interesting you feel that way. With some groups it sure seems like a lot more than a parlor game; it really feels like pure verbal jazz. Isn’t there something to be said for the tightrope-walking aspect of it?

  BOB ODENKIRK: But the tightrope aspect is not good. It causes a lot of artificial reaction. Most everybody who is getting a laugh through improvisation is getting it because the tightrope is what’s generating it. It’s the fact that we’re all in this room and we know you just got that suggestion and we know it’s hard and we know you don’t know where you’re going and you’re kicking up these little twists and turns and these funny little moments. Ultimately, that’s all it will ever be. It’s fun, but it’s a little artificial in that the funny is bumped way up by that circumstance.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I see where you’re coming from. Most improv groups end up spinning off sketch shows based on things that come out of improv, so really their improv is just kind of writing in public.

  BOB ODENKIRK: That’s exactly what it is. When you sit at a desk and try to write something, you make shit up, come up with a scenario, make some more up, sometimes talk out loud and try out a line—you’re improvising. And then you clear out all the crap, find the point, and go further.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I once heard you define the difference between satire and parody. Can you do that in a nutshell?

  BOB ODENKIRK: Well, look, this is all made up in my own mind. I didn’t go to school for it, and I’m sure there is a clear definition of both satire and parody, but “satire” makes a point. It exaggerates to make a point or to illuminate something. And “parody” merely exaggerates—usually just a form—and it doesn’t really have anything to say about it except to point to the building blocks of whatever form that is.

  Generally, parody is considered kind of lesser, because it’s easier to exaggerate and just leave it at that. Mad magazine exaggerates whatever it’s making fun of that month. It just takes the formal aspects of something and blows it up. It doesn’t have anything to say about it. Parody is easy and satire is hard, that’s the difference.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Which do you consider most of your work?

  BOB ODENKIRK: Satire, for sure. I don’t care about parody. I’ve only participated in parody—I make it sound like an orgy, but I’ve only participated in a few parodies. I usually decline the invitation. I think on The Ben Stiller Show we did a lot of parody. I helped with a few of them that I liked, like the Husbands and Wives parody, which kind of had another level to it.

  But I don’t think much of parody, I really don’t. It’s easy to do. You know, if Mad magazine ever is satirical, it is in a very thin, obvious way: “We talk like this, with these catch phrases and in this tone of voice because you will buy anything if it sounds like it’s coming from a reporter.” That’s your point right there, and it’s being stated right in the parody. It’s not a very nuanced point, and there isn’t anything more to it than that. And I am not putting down Mad magazine here at all, by the way. When I was between the ages of nine to about thirteen or fourteen, I would ride my bike to the store every month and buy it and read it cover to cover.

  PAUL PROVENZA: We all did.

  BOB ODENKIRK: Absolutely. Because it’s at that first level of funny. It’s basic. It’s almost like a how-to manual for comedy. It shows you the directions you can head in to be funny.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I think Mr. Show was predominantly satire rather than parody, but David Cross was hard-pressed to say that wholeheartedly, though, which surprised me. Why do you think somebody in comedy would prefer to champion that their work is not about content or making a meaningful point?

  BOB ODENKIRK: Well, being in comedy is all about poking fun at and letting the air out of pompous people and pretension and all that, so the last thing you want is to appear to be pontificating or self-important. But on Mr. Show, we always had a point to make. We always asked ourselves, “What is the point of this sketch? Who is this going after? What are we saying here?”

  All our stuff came from different places and directions: we made fun of politics, we made fun of standards, we made fun of assumptions people have about entertainment, and things like that. I would always ask myself, “What’s the ‘voice’ of this piece? How does it work on a person?”

  I was thinking about All in the Family recently, because I’m also working on a TV project that I think will be related to it, and I really feel that in All in the Family, every character had dignity, you know what I mean? Archie Bunker was hilarious and reacted in knee-jerk, thoughtless ways to everything, but he loved his family. And because he loved them, he looked at the world in the way he really thought was best for them, and all that gave him more depth than just his surface reactions to things. He was forced to grow a little and forced to find different shades of himself, which gave him dignity. He wasn’t just funny because he had this conservative or bigoted attitude. That was a much more nuanced kind of satire. That was great satire.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I agree. That show was really a bold, thoughtful, and very humanistic look at a type of person that all too often is written off as a cliché. Understanding the depth of people contributes so much to understanding why we look at the world in such awful ways. That show also brings up another thing that I think about a lot, which is that I don’t think in today’s PC climate you could get that show on the air, despite the fact that its values are all about ridiculing the ignorance of small-mindedness and bigotry.

  BOB ODENKIRK: I don’t know about that. I think you could. The fact is, it’s hard to get anything on the air. It’s just hard to get a project to go all the way to TV, and then to be supported enough to grow on TV to where it is all it can be. That’s always been hard, and possibly it is harder now than it ever was. But, given that, if you had a good, satirical show that was very well-written, it would have a pretty good chance, I think.

  PAUL PROVENZA: But the language on All in the Family, which was authentic and character-driven, would have to be watered down today. The ideas could still be expressed, but I think it would have to be done differently and not as viscerally and realistically with such blatant dialogue.

  BOB ODENKIRK: I think network TV is really evolving into something different than what we grew up with; I think those days are long gone. Cable television is the real television now. Networks are kind of a way station for mainstream fare and special events. Network TV is soon gonna be just about event programming, I think: specials,
big sporting events, high-budget mass-appeal events. Anything with a stronger voice, or any remotely pointed voice, is going to be on cable, and it’s all the same to any kid watching TV.

  PAUL PROVENZA: So network TV will be to broadcasting like Walmart is to retailing?

  BOB ODENKIRK: And kind of is already.

  PAUL PROVENZA: What comes to you first, the comic scenario or the idea behind it?

  BOB ODENKIRK: It can come any way, really. A lot of the time, with David Cross, we would sit around and read the paper and go, “Did you read this?”

  That’s what happened with a piece for the live Mr. Show, which came right out of the paper, about this guy on death row who happened to be mentally retarded and there were all these legal issues around executing a mentally retarded guy. So we wrote this sketch where the state spent all this money to educate him so he would be at a level of intelligence where they could legally put him to death. That just came up reading some newspaper article.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Well, that’s a really good piece to deconstruct for a moment here. I get that the absurdity of that reality is just juicy with comic possibilities, but what would you say was the politics of it? What was the point you were trying to make in exaggerating that scenario?

  BOB ODENKIRK: Well, it’s all around the idea that we think it’s more important to put people to death than it is to educate people; we’ll educate people so that we can put them to death, and that’s the best education this guy ever got. It’s such a high priority for us to have a death penalty that we will go to great lengths for it. It’s more important for us to build prisons than to take that money and invest it in helping people before they’re so broken and damaged and committing crimes. Our valuing of punishment and revenge on wrongdoers is so great that we take it to ridiculous extremes.

  And before you think that we’re exaggerating, a few years after we wrote that scene, something almost exactly like it happened with a guy in Texas, who was mentally retarded and they did all kinds of things to help raise his IQ to execute him. Cross called me up, going, “Did you see this? Did you see it? It’s our sketch!” It was our story almost exactly. They gave the guy all this therapy and tested him a number of times as they tried to find a doctor who would sign off on his being out of the range of “retarded” so they could execute him.