Satiristas

  PAUL PROVENZA: Which was the whole idea behind the Iran-Contra scandal back in the eighties.

  TOMMY CHONG: Exactly. Did that go away? Uh-uh. Did that all of a sudden stop because people found out about it? Nope.

  CHEECH MARIN: So there you go.

  RANDY CREDICO

  FROM A CROWD-PLEASING Las Vegas impressionist, Randy Credico evolved into a political satirist, and then kept going—all the way to radical activist. Finding Reaganite eighties crowds too far Right, he took an even sharper Left to Nicaragua, where his comedy and activism merged. He’s the subject of the documentary 60 Spins Around the Sun (produced by Jack Black), and is featured with Russell Simmons in Lockdown, USA, a documentary about New York’s Rockefeller drug laws—the harshest in America—against which Randy crusades tirelessly. He is director of the William M. Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, a legal aid service founded by family and friends of the radical lawyer/activist—Randy’s friend and hero. As of this writing, Randy just announced his candidacy in a primary challenge for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Sen. Charles Schumer (D). On Wednesday and Thursday nights, in New York, Randy’s uncompromising political commentary can be appreciated in a perfect triangulation of his natural elements: he hosts The Lenny Bruce Comedy Club, at the Yippie! Museum in Greenwich Village.

  RANDY CREDICO: I had just done an ounce of cocaine the previous week, and was watching something about drug laws on C-SPAN, and I see guys getting twelve to fifteen years in prison for the same thing I’d just done. So I started digging and saw how they’re jailing people left and right for the war on drugs. But I used a lot of cocaine in my life and I didn’t go to jail over it—because I’m a white, middle-class man.

  We have two million people in prison—double what China or Russia has—and most are political prisoners; victims of a political decision to lock up unemployable, uneducated people, almost all of whom are black. It’s a reinvention of the convict leasing of the 1890s.

  Worse than Slavery, by David Oshinsky, about Parchman Farm in Mississippi, details the minor offenses that only applied to blacks then. You could murder someone and do less time than a black man stealing a chicken. Well, you can murder someone now and do five to fifteen, like Robert Chambers, or you can be Rufus Boyd getting twenty-five to life.

  We went from slavery to Reconstruction, for the next sixty years had convict leasing and social control, then a whiff of change in the sixties with the Civil Rights movement, and we’ve now regressed to where we basically have slaves and social control again.

  It’s the biggest crisis in America, and no one gives a fuck. It’s not part of the public debate. Do people care about the Sean Bell shooting or twenty other black kids shot in the back by police across the country? You hear about Virginia Tech, but you can’t even compare it to the number of black people killed all the time in this country. There are absolutely no rights. It drives me crazy.

  I’m working on a case now with a guy who’s done eighteen years for two dime bags. It’s not anecdotal; I’ve got files of cases like that. I know the pain and suffering a child endures when their mother’s in prison. Elaine Bartlett was set up by a drug dealer who could get off if he brought people in, so Elaine, with five children and a mother dying of sickle cell anemia, was sentenced to twenty years. There are so many stories like that.

  Someone once said, “You can judge a society by its prisons.”

  Well, ours suck. You don’t need to go to Abu Ghraib; go to Sing Sing, Attica, Leaven-worth—they’re the same.

  I’m not balanced about this—my father did eight years in prison. He was a model prisoner at Ohio State Penitentiary before I was born, and I was born to a guy who was angry.

  PAUL PROVENZA: It’s so far outside conventional discourse, how do you make it funny if people aren’t even aware of the realities?

  RANDY CREDICO: I don’t know how to! It’s funny, I suppose, comparing Bush’s drug history or Rush Limbaugh’s oxycontin addiction to these guys’, or the time some Wall Streeter gets for stealing millions versus the petty crimes these guys get life for. But it’s been morally and physically debilitating, being involved in this for the last ten years.

  People just don’t give a fuck—it’s poor black people. They’re like Jews in Germany in ’thirty-three. Five hundred thousand black people were stopped and frisked without probable cause in New York City last year—more than were stopped in Berlin in 1933, okay?

  PAUL PROVENZA: The private prison industry adds yet another layer that people don’t really understand.

  RANDY CREDICO: Right! Wackenhut, Correctional Corporation, Pricor, Cornell Companies…New York’s got Corcraft, where prisoners make furniture for the state and eyeglasses for Medicaid/Medicare—which put people in that business out of work.

  If you bring twenty thousand prisoners into your district, you’ve created an entire county big enough to qualify on the census, and you get more federal money. Factories have shut down, so legislators fight to get prisons instead.

  It’s big business for everyone: they get these guys and throw them into, say, 100 Centre Street in Manhattan, where in every courtroom you’ve got a black defendant, a white judge, a white jury, and three white cops just slamming these fuckers through the criminal justice system right into the prison system. There’s five hundred DAs and assistant DAs, plus judges, lawyers, bail bondsmen, clerks, and all their entire staffs. You have buses going to Rikers, the vendors that sell everything to Rikers…it goes on and on.

  Then they’ll go to prison upstate—with staffs, buses, vendors, that whole system there, too. Then families who visit their sons or dads need motel rooms, places to eat…A whole economy’s tied in, so you need defendants—and they’re using young, black eighteen-year-olds to feed this fucking monster.

  And thanks to this drug war, hundreds of thousands of African-Americans are politically disenfranchised. Republicans have banked on that disenfranchisement! And Democrats are unknowing accomplices.

  In Tulia, Texas, forty-six people—13 percent of the black population—were arrested in one fell swoop on trumped-up drug charges. No one knew about it, so I just parked myself down there and spent four years working their cases and doing benefits and stuff.

  Arianna Huffington knew about Tulia; she helped me out there. But Bill O’Reilly really helped—I did his show, can you believe it? He said on air, “Senator Corona, you’ve got to reopen these cases.”

  The very next day they reopened them. Everything else about him sucks, but he did help there. I hate to say it, but Arianna Huffington and Amy Goodman aren’t gonna influence the Texas criminal court of appeals—but a guy like O’Reilly can. He’s got a lot of listeners there.

  PAUL PROVENZA: So which came first for you, the comedy or the real, hands-on activism and involvement in the issues you care about?

  RANDY CREDICO: I’m a product of the sixties. I did a lot of psychedelics, my cousin was a radical SDS speaker, and I got the politics of that era.

  I do political impressions, so David Frye was a big influence, but Mort Sahl—personally—inspired me to do political humor. In ’seventy-five, I was working a lounge in Vegas, and Sahl was playing at the Las Vegas Hilton. I’d watch him every night—very, very smart—and started hanging out with him. One day he said, “If you’re doing impressions, make them political. Start reading the paper.”

  It kinda creeped in, but my act got more and more political—to the dismay of people there, who would plead, “You’re such a gifted impressionist. Do Jimmy Stewart; do Bogart; do Archie Bunker…”

  And I’d do those, but something inside me wanted to do political stuff. I’d do Humphrey Bogart—but I’d do him giving his speech against the death penalty from Knock on Any Door. That got me fired from the Sahara.

  I worked a cruise ship and got kicked off because I just couldn’t keep my mouth shut. They said it was a suicide streak, I’m my own worst enemy…But it was impossible to just do shit that didn’t mean anything. I just couldn’t get inspired t
o get up and do impressions of Redd Foxx talking to Lamont.

  I remember the moment I really made the switch: November 1980, when Reagan won the election. The country was turning to the Right, and I kinda flipped and submerged myself in political humor from that point on.

  But there wasn’t much activism in Vegas. With all these police killings there, judges giving black kids thirty years for burglary…I’d go crazy reading the paper. And I’d be working in revues, doing Jack Nicholson impressions. I’d beg them to let me do the other stuff.

  I was writing really Left-wing humor, and social/political humor had emerged again in New York in the late seventies after Watergate, and I thought that’d be a better place to do it. A lot of comics were just developing on that scene, and most of them weren’t doing that kind of stuff. But I didn’t do it to distinguish myself; I did it because I was an activist inside.

  I wanted to use comedy as the vehicle for my activism. I was a political-activist satirist. There was zero objectivity in what I was saying up there. I definitely had an agenda. A hard-Left agenda.

  PAUL PROVENZA: That was an uphill battle. Did you have anyone championing you, helping you get some breaks?

  RANDY CREDICO: Some people in the business appreciated what I was doing. I got on a few television shows, thanks to yourself, Richard Belzer, the manager/producer David Steinberg, who put me on one of his shows…Jim McCawley, who booked The Tonight Show, appreciated it.

  I did The Tonight Show, but only once, in 1984. I used it as a platform to slam Reagan and his policies in Central America and elsewhere. And I’m the only comic ever to do The Tonight Show whose price went down the next day. I got nothing out of it except a headache from the owner of Dangerfield’s for not mentioning his club on the show.

  At one point, Carson did one of those winces, you know? And up until a point I got a lot of applause—until I basically called then–UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick a Nazi. I said, “If you look at her and analyze what she says, you gotta ask yourself, ‘Did Eva Braun die in that bunker in 1945?’”

  It was very difficult to go after Reagan on TV at the time. Like how in 2002 it was suicidal to do anti-Bush stuff on television. No one was doing it. No one went against the grain. That’s why we ended up in a war.

  Everyone was afraid to challenge the Patriot Act; no one was challenging Ashcroft when some excessive shit started happening. Letterman fell into the fear; he had Ashcroft on his show being all friendly. Jon Stewart fell into the fear; he jumped on the patriotic bandwagon. It took six or seven years before people finally caught on.

  Keith Olbermann was one of the guys who finally opened the door. But he doesn’t have enough black people on his show. No one does. They all use Eugene Robinson from the Washington Post and shove him around from show to show so it looks like they’re pluralistic. They’re not.

  The majority of people doing political comedy on TV are only riding the surf; I don’t think they’re deeply involved. It feels superficial. It’s all just about Democrats or Republicans instead of the whole spectrum being delved into.

  They’re all just “headline-hunting.” That’s what Jay Leno does—but he admits he’s not political. The others won’t admit they’re just headline-hunting. But what can a million people watching all identify with? Some verbal gaffe from the day before, Dick Cheney shooting someone…

  But there’s way more important things they should have gone after Cheney for. Like everybody went after Bush with “He’s so dumb.” Well, his policies weren’t dumb to the people he was working for and with, and they were horrendous. People died, and a lot of people still suffer because of them. You have to go after that real stuff—and early. Way before it’s safe.

  Anyone who’s not blind could see in 2001 what was going on with Bush. They should’ve been attacking him on the Patriot Act eight years ago, on Guantanamo seven years ago, on the Iraq war seven years ago. Mark Twain would have; he went against the Spanish-American War in 1898. Thomas Nast went against conventional wisdom to satirize supporters of slavery in his day.

  But you’re not gonna stay on television five days a week unless you’re acceptable to powers that be. You can maybe tiptoe out there, that’s all.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Well, no one goes quite as far as you do. You weren’t content just to do material about Nicaragua, you had to actually go and live there. How’d that come about?

  RANDY CREDICO: I’d been talking on stage for a few years about Nicaragua and Reagan’s Central America policy. So many people died there and the war was a complete lie—like the Iraq War now.

  My uncle was a CIA operative in the fifties and was banned from Nicaragua. He’d say, “You think it’s so great down there? Go.”

  So I did. And I fell in love with it. It was like being in Mexico or Berlin in the twenties, where all these journalists and writers and cultural figures would hang out. They were all over Nicaragua. All these great writers and journalists…And Julie Christie—weird, right? There were people who’d been friends with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera…That was the kind of environment it was.

  I became well known there. It was a great refuge for a comedian who didn’t have any standing here anymore. It was my crowd down there. I’d do shows in front of the embassy Thursday mornings after drinking this rum they have there until three A.M. and trying to get up at six thirty to do a set when the sun came out.

  I did shows for Manuel Ortega and the minister of interior at a couple of private parties. They loved it.

  I really plunged into it. I started working for the Sandinista government raising money for the election in 1990.

  And I took other comedians down there—Jimmy Tingle, Barry Crimmins—who is the finest political comic around; there’s no one better. “Humorists Against War,” or HAW, I called it. We toured the country; we’d perform for American volunteers picking coffee up in Esteli, Matagalpa…

  It was weird, but those were the greatest moments of my life. Great crowds, great shows, and I was exposed to a real social and political revolution. A possible one, anyway, snuffed out eventually, like the Mexican revolution was. I look back wistfully that that kind of stuff might reappear.

  I went about twenty-five times. I was so involved and obsessed with it. I’d come back and talk about it nonstop onstage and other comics would say, “What the fuck are you doing up there? No one cares about Nicaragua.”

  Now a lot of them wish they’d been talking about it back then, too, because if everyone was maybe things wouldn’t have gotten so bad.

  And I proved to be right about it, you know? Iran-Contra and all that…Between Nicaragua and El Salvador, about 150,000 people died—all to destroy a great experiment.

  But…Whatever you could do, you know? One person can’t change anything, you can just be part of change.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Was Nicaragua about activism, or really more about just finding your audience?

  RANDY CREDICO: Both. And it transformed me as a person to be able to blend political activism and comedy and feel like I was doing something.

  I’d come back here and write about it, and perform at all these political events around the country before the ’eighty-six elections. They were my crowd. I had a nice run in these circles that stemmed from Nicaragua. It opened the door to a lot of performing opportunities I’d never have known. And I’d work comedy clubs a bit…but the Nicaragua experience gave me the sustenance to continue.

  PAUL PROVENZA: You’re so strident about satirists not being committed enough, being too soft, or taking the easy road—how did the hard-core, radical activist in you allow you to just “preach to the choir” like that?

  RANDY CREDICO: A lot of it’s the psychological reasons you get into comedy to begin with. You do it for acceptance, to say something, and because you like that applause—it’s very addictive, that applause. So it’s nice to get the kind of response Richard Jeni would always get in front of any crowd. He’d always kill. It’s just really nice to get that once in a while.

 
Yes, a lot of it was preaching to the choir, but they’d tell others about me and expand my base a little. I’d also bring up stuff with “the choir” that even they might not have been familiar with.

  And there are a lot of people who are not yet in the choir who might join. There are open-minded people out there and you can get to them. People who are aware and ready for something different are out there.

  Yes, you really want to get to other people, and there are ways to do that. But “the choir” also needs to know there’s some art out there, if you want to call it art, that reflects their views. Antiwar activists and liberals and Leftists need comedy, too, you know. Everyone needs something to laugh about and to inspire them. And to help keep them inspired.

  MARGARET CHO

  MARGARET CHO IS unusual, and not just because she’s the first, and perhaps only, Asian-American comedian to find such high-profile success. After an ill-fated sitcom experience that tried to package her as something she wasn’t, Cho tore up the package and set it on fire. In her stage show Margaret Cho: Beautiful, her stand-up framed a loving, inspirational sideshow burlesque of the beauty in all that is “perverted,” wondrous and strange. Here, she explains why comedy means more to her as a celebration of good than as a confrontation against evil, and why it has given so many of her fans cause to rejoice.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Do you care if all that you’re doing is “preaching to the converted”?

  MARGARET CHO: You’re not preaching, you’re celebrating. Celebrating what you feel, and what you think, and what they think. I think that’s the nature of comedy; we laugh because we agree, and that is wonderful.