Satiristas

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you consider the points that you make in your writing or performing to be political?

  BOB ODENKIRK: I think that political points are not really all that worthwhile. To say, “Our side is right, their side is wrong” is not really worth much. The real point is to try to get behind the story.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you think anything anyone does in comedy makes any kind of difference?

  BOB ODENKIRK: You know, it’s disappointing for comedians as we go through all of this for our whole lives to accept that we’re just entertainment. That people entertain themselves by going to see George Carlin’s show. They laugh at the cranky hippie, and then they leave and get into their gas-guzzler and go to the country club and tell their friends, “I saw George Carlin. That guy was fuckin’ hilarious,” and it doesn’t affect them at all. It’s a shame to feel like some of us are being very conscious and trying hard to express something and thinking really hard about points we want to make, but that ultimately all it is is just a diversion for most people. And that’s just true.

  PAUL PROVENZA: When you think about comedy as much as you do, do you focus more on the art of it or the craft of it?

  BOB ODENKIRK: First of all, “art” is a very weird word. It’s hard to define “art.” I probably talk about the art of it because the craft isn’t that interesting to me. It’s something to think about, and it’s certainly there, but it’s not really all that mysterious.

  Aaron Freeman, a comedy writer and performer who came out of Second City, was famously proud of having written a computer program that actually wrote jokes. They’re not good, you know, but they are technically jokes. It’s interesting, my son and my daughter both tell jokes, but my son makes more of a conscious effort to be funny. When he was seven or eight, he would do all these things that were like a joke but weren’t really jokes. But he thought they were, because they were constructed like a joke. He would be laughing his ass off, and most of his buddies would be, too. They could feel it. They could sense, “That’s like a joke, what you just did.”

  Of course, I’m sitting there thinking, “Oh my God, he doesn’t actually think that’s funny does he? Is he always gonna think that’s funny? Uh-oh. I’m gonna have to put him into a ‘special’ class.” Now that he’s nine, the jokes are starting to make sense, and I’m really loving him. Wait a minute: I’ve always loved him. I mean, now I’m loving his sense of humor. No, I’ll just say it: I’m loving him now that he’s funny, dammit. Now that he’s authentically funny, I can love him.

  DAVID CROSS

  AUDIENCES GOT TO know David Cross as part of HBO’s subversive sketch comedy series, Mr. Show. In the years following, on top of numerous television and film roles, Cross has staked his claim in stand-up comedy as one of the country’s most outraged, outspoken, and funniest critics. But for someone who’s spent his life speaking his own mind, he’s adamant about how any one person’s opinion is both inconsequential and important.

  DAVID CROSS: People are just not that thoughtful about most things. It’s not like people go, “I refuse to listen to politics or watch the news; I’m only going to watch American Idol.” There’ve always been distractions; there will always be distractions. It’s just now there’s more stimulation, more media, more bombardment of the advertising culture we’re in. I don’t think it’s a calculated, cynical ploy; it’s just capitalism. It’s giving people what they want and finding a way to make money out of it. Long before American Idol there was Zsa Zsa Gabor, or Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra, or Montgomery Clift that everybody was talking about.

  PAUL PROVENZA: It seems that people are checking out more than they ever have in my lifetime. I was a kid in the sixties, a teenager in the seventies, and there just seemed to be a greater political awareness.

  DAVID CROSS: I think that might be a bit of solipsism. I have to check myself when I have those observations. Like, “Okay, this is what I’m observing, but…I do live in New York City.” If I’m not in New York, I’m usually in L.A., and neither of those places represent what’s going on in America. More people voted in the last election than in any other in the last forty-two or whatever years. That was the highest per capita vote we’ve had in a long time, so “checking out” doesn’t really apply.

  There’s a great deal of misinformation and disinformation, and the effect of that is probably more the polarization of people than that they’re checking out. You have a guy on the Left, say Michael Moore, well-meaning as he may be, manipulates his films, in my opinion, but calls them documentaries and presents them as investigative truth. Then there’s the ones on the Right, like Bill O’Reilly—and, honestly, I don’t understand how he is legally able to, but he is consistently spouting blatant, wrong information on a daily basis, never correcting any of it. I don’t understand why there’s no recourse or penalty for that. If I was that wrong that often, I would be fired, and should be.

  But those types all say, “I’m not a journalist. I’m just a guy expressing my opinion.” That’s their out.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Which really is saying, “Hey, it’s just show business.”

  DAVID CROSS: Of course, and I don’t think he’d deny that. He knows. But it doesn’t seem right, really.

  The other thing is, this country has 300 million people in it, and on average about 2.8 million people tune into Bill O’Reilly every night. I’m just pulling these numbers out of my ass, but let’s say they’re accurate. So who actually gives a shit about Bill O’Reilly? He has no influence. Didn’t he try and start like a couple of boycotts against Pepsi and against, like, France, I think? They were a joke. The man is a joke.

  PAUL PROVENZA: If not influenced by that kind of rhetoric, how does half a nation consciously turn its back on war crimes, on violations of international law, on an illegal occupation of another nation? How does that happen?

  DAVID CROSS: Well, you’re presupposing that everyone in America is magnanimous and ethical. I’d be hard pressed to find five people out on the street or that I know in my life that haven’t stolen from the office or haven’t lied when they’ve had something to gain.

  PAUL PROVENZA: There’s a big leap between that and war crimes.

  DAVID CROSS: And that big leap is filled in with all those teeny, tiny leaps.

  And America’s number one in a lot of things in the world, and we’re also number one in propaganda. We have the best, most finely tuned propaganda machine that works without you even realizing it. We honestly believe that we are a blessed country, the best, greatest country in the world, that we’ve done so much good stuff that we aren’t capable of doing any evil, that the rest of the world are all just jealous ’cause we have the highest quality of life on the planet and we live in a true democracy, and that in America if you don’t like something, you can always do something about it. You and I can sit here and know that’s a crock of shit, but there are plenty of people who believe all of it. Whatever they are—Christian, Jew, Muslim, atheist, whatever—they believe it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Because the myth of all that’s been ingrained in us from such a very early age.

  DAVID CROSS: Right. I don’t have that problem, because at a very early age I said, “Well, this doesn’t sound right” a lot. There were always examples. The Vietnam War. Or like when I was a kid, the Union Carbide plant blew up in Bhopal, India, thousands of people were killed and we did everything we could to not compensate the families of the people who died or were mutilated or crippled because of that negligence. I was really young but I remember going, “How could America call itself such a perfect place? This doesn’t seem right.” I didn’t see everything through an American flag draped over my glasses.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you think that comedy can serve to dispel those kinds of myths? I get a sense that it sometimes contributes to creating myths, as it seems as though John Kerry was, to a certain extent, brought down by a lot of jokes on late-night talk shows that reinforced a mythology and narrative that had been created about him. Al Gore was mythologized a
s being this robotic, uncharismatic character, and that, too, was reinforced again and again by a steady stream of jokes.

  DAVID CROSS: I think there’s an element to that. Like I was saying, one Bill O’Reilly doesn’t matter, but two thousand Bill O’Reillys do matter. One joke doesn’t matter, but two thousand late-night Jay Leno jokes? That starts to add to the cultural feeling.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Does it speak to people actually “not checking out” that so many of the top comics in America right now—

  DAVID CROSS:—Larry the Cable Guy, Dane Cook—

  PAUL PROVENZA: Well, I’m not referring to them at the moment—

  DAVID CROSS: Oh, I thought you were talking about the top comics in America right now.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Okay…There will always be monster truck shows, NASCAR, and the ballet and Chekhov, too, which is exactly as it should be. I don’t expect subversive or political comics to reach that kind of level of popularity, for any number of good reasons, but it is notable to me that The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert, Lewis Black, Bill Maher are as huge as they are, and all simultaneously. Historically, that’s a rare occurrence that I think describes some trend or cultural sway.

  DAVID CROSS: But they’re not huge. They’re big, sure, but they’re not huge. And I’m not denigrating him in any way by saying Bill Maher is not “huge” I think he’d be the first person to tell you that. Those people you mentioned are all really successful—in their niche.

  And to knock myself down a peg or two as well, I got a lot of credit for doing what I was doing when it was unpopular right after September 11. It might have been different if I didn’t live in downtown New York and hadn’t watched the towers fall with my own eyes, if I wasn’t here when we had guys with hazmat outfits and those big, crazy-looking Humvee things that the military had down on Houston Street. I talk about what happened two days ago in the shower; I talk about all kinds of shit that occurs to me, whatever it may be. Since I witnessed all that and that’s what was going on, that’s what I talked about. And I think I got more credit than I deserved for being “courageous” for that, because I was doing it all in front of like-minded people. Sure, I am who I am, my act is my act, I would never change my set, I’m not going to alter it for anybody—But I wasn’t out there picking up the mic in front of a bunch of Sean Hannitys, you know?

  There’s nothing wrong with preaching to the choir—we need that—but it’s in my nature to be contrary. I spent years and years where—and I don’t, or barely, do this anymore—if I was having a good set, I would purposely tank it. I would just bury it. I would subvert a good set, ’cause there’s that part of me that tries to push buttons and get a reaction from the audience that’s not necessarily…“adulation,” you know?

  And I think more than any other subject you can mention from now until dawn—more than politics, race, class, culture—religion is the one that makes people sit up and really either voice their displeasure or get behind you. So I’m doing tons of stuff about religion, which is something I find at its best mildly annoying and at worst extremely dangerous.

  I’m an atheist, and atheists are a lot less popular than either liberals or neocons are. An atheist is still looked upon with suspicion by all different kinds of people.

  PAUL PROVENZA: I often get violent responses to my atheist opinions. One night in particular, I was by the door after my show and some guy actually spat on me as he walked out.

  DAVID CROSS: No way.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Spit a big, honking goober on me. On the other hand, I also find that a lot more people in the crowd actually feel the same way I do, but for whatever reason feel like they can’t say it out loud to their families or in their workplaces.

  DAVID CROSS: I don’t understand that. That is a form of self-preservation or cowardice that I cannot comprehend. It just doesn’t compute with me. I mean, not saying you’re gay is one thing, because you might get the shit kicked out of you in some places. But no one is going to beat the shit out of you for being an atheist.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Like a lot of people, I was raised to believe one should never talk about politics or religion, so I guess it’s just not that easy for everyone to go against that particular grain.

  DAVID CROSS: I was raised a lot of ways, and I did stuff anyway. It’s called being an individual. We’re not talking about fucking barnyard animals, by which everybody would understandably be repulsed. It’s about not believing in God. It’s not that big a deal.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Some people live in a world where not believing in God is about the same level of wrong as fucking barnyard animals.

  DAVID CROSS: That’s bullshit. That’s hyperbole. It’s just not true.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Have you ever seen all those YouTube videos of kids coming out as atheists to their parents? The reactions are incredibly emotional. It means way more to some people than you may think it possibly could.

  DAVID CROSS: I’m not talking about a fucking fifteen-year-old living at home with Mom and Dad who feed him. I’m talking the husband, the wife, the brother-in-law, the grandfather…

  PAUL PROVENZA: Did you forget about that finely tuned propaganda machine in this country? Religion and theism have had that on their side for a long time. Why is it so hard to believe that some people genuinely fear being ostracized if they openly declare their atheism?

  DAVID CROSS: That is like the most pussy, cowardly stance. Even if it means you’re unpopular…Just what kind of person are you? It’s borderline shameful that you’d live your life like that. I don’t get it. I just don’t get it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Well, maybe that’s an example of where a comedian’s jokes about something can be empowering. They can sit there, laugh, and know that they’re not alone.

  DAVID CROSS: Go on the fucking Internet! There’s people everywhere! Read a fucking book!

  PAUL PROVENZA: People work long hours, they come home and want to spend time with their families and don’t—

  DAVID CROSS: Blah, blah, blah; bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

  I just cannot comprehend having any belief, any conviction, and just swallowing it. That, to me, is like having one of those Oliver Sacks kind of maladies.

  BILL MAHER

  KICKING OFF HIS career as the emcee at New York’s Catch a Rising Star, Bill Maher hammered out a clear, sharp, committed voice in his stand-up, ultimately forging it into the groundbreaking Politically Incorrect on Comedy Central. The unorthodox roundtable borrowed the format of the journalistic Sunday-morning talk show and mixed it with the wittiest entertainers and pop culture icons of the day. Maher was the bright sun at its center, and quickly gained a reputation as a comedian who would put the lie to any hypocrisy that crossed his path. The show moved to ABC, where Maher ran into presidential-sized controversy when his comments about the 9/11 hijackers were singled out by the White House as going too far. His show canceled in the controversy’s wake, Maher quickly found a home at HBO, where Real Time with Bill Maher raised his own stakes with the most biting, incisive, no-holds-barred political commentary on television today.

  BILL MAHER: I get a little flap going here or there; I had a dust-up with the Vatican when the pope was here. They claimed it was that I referred to him as a Nazi, but I think it was more about child-abuse jokes.

  PAUL PROVENZA: One was quoted in the papers: “President Bush spoke at a Catholic prayer breakfast. It was early in the morning; he said, ‘I’m dying for a little joe,’ and they brought him an altar boy.”

  BILL MAHER: I also called the Catholic Church “the Bear Stearns of organized pedophilia: too big to fail.”

  That could’ve gone a different way if I was on any broadcast network, but there are no sponsors to write to on HBO. Some people say they’ll cancel their subscriptions, but hopefully HBO feels more people will subscribe because I’m on than will leave because I said the pope wears funny hats or whatever nonsense upsets them.

  But there’s this misconception that I was shackled like Hannibal Lecter on ABC and when I went to HBO t
he shackles came off. I was hardly restrained at ABC. I talked about religion all the time there; they didn’t care, as long as there was someone with an opposing viewpoint. I’ve never skirted around it; I always attacked religion as stupid and destructive. ABC was okay with that.

  The one subject that freaked out ABC was marijuana. We wanted to do a “Harry Pothead” sketch, because Harry Potter’s all about stuff you might imagine when high, you know? That was a huge battle royale—which I lost. That gives you an idea of the nineties mind-set: THE verboten topic was drugs.

  It seems odd that I could say anything I wanted to about religion but couldn’t do “Harry Pothead.” It’s a few subway stops more innocuous to me.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Your big controversy was taking issue with calling the 9/11 hijackers “cowards,” saying, “We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from two thousand miles away. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.” Was that innocuous, or did you intend to be provocative a week after 9/11?

  BILL MAHER: No one saw it as provocative at the time. There was no reaction in the studio, none in the green room afterward, none the next day. Nothing happened until somebody made a point of saying everyone should be upset.

  This disc jockey in Houston had been trying to get me off the air for years for saying things about religion and Ronald Reagan; he saw this as his opportunity and fanned the flames. And people are such sheep, all it takes is one person to say, “Aren’t you mad about what he said?”