My new direction was slowly making itself known to me—by the reading I was choosing and the things I was tearing out and circling in periodicals. I was beginning to keep what amounted to a journal in another form: a record of my reactions to issues.
Every day I take a lot of notes. And the notes go into files in various categories. They can be a sentence, a word, an idea, two things that connect or contrast, an afterthought, a neat phrase. Something I can add to something in a given file; maybe these go together, maybe it could start like this … or something that starts an entirely new file. It’s an incessant process.
What often happens with these notes is that there’s a period of months when they tend in a certain direction or they’re about certain topics. I don’t review them that often but I add to them all the time, so when I finally take time to look them over, I get a kind of objective view of what my mind really wants to produce.
In the mideighties the notes began to be almost exclusively about issues: capital punishment, rich and poor, abortion, government corruption, official euphemisms, the crimes of those business suits I sat next to on planes. The number of notes about department stores or dogs and cats or driving habits or airlines began to diminish. (Those files were fairly fat anyway.) My mind and heart said, “This is what we’re doing now.” And it would be new, a new direction, a new sound.
There was a familiarity to these feelings of anticipation. It was how I’d felt in the formative stages of Class Clown and Occupation: Foole. I knew—just as I had then—that this new material would flow easily and naturally. It had been stored up and was already halfway formed or ready to start forming. It had a life of its own. My process always works like that. I review a file and say, “There’s a lot of good stuff in here, but I don’t feel this bursting out of my chest yet.” I look at another and I get excited: “This shit’s going to be GOOD! Can’t wait till they hear THIS!”
But something else was happening that had never happened before. Previously my notes and ideas came together the way galaxies do: they just naturally clumped. They clumped simply because they were related—an extended family of ideas around a general topic. Now they were parts that fit and functioned together, which I then gradually formed into a whole. My writing was getting more disciplined, more consciously crafting language and structure. I had that constant laboratory of performance to test things, to strip away what wasn’t needed or didn’t work. I was taking the first tentative steps toward comedy as art.
The 1986 HBO show, Playin’ with Your Head, has a piece called “Hello-Goodbye,” which is about the ways we say hello and goodbye to one another. The mature voice hadn’t evolved fully, but it had pace and urgency and verbal fireworks.
The end of it is “Love and Regards,” which in a way is an outgrowth of Stuff, narrowly focusing on one word or phrase—treating the trivial as a matter of great significance. The piece is about the implications of trivial phrases like “Give my love to so-and-so,” all in the form of almost legalistic questions:
Think of the awesome responsibility of carrying one person’s love to another person. If you don’t encounter that person, can you unburden yourself of the love by giving it to someone else? Even to someone who doesn’t know the original person? Does the law allow them to accept it? Does the law allow you to transport the love? Especially across state lines? What form should the actual delivery of the love take, whether or not the person is the intended recipient? Can you tongue-kiss them? What if they’re gay?
It was more an exercise in form than a piece with a particular point, but my mind was beginning to work differently. With my first transformation it was exciting just to speak to my audience one-on-one instead of performing impersonally in front of them—to confide in them who the internal me really was, share insights with them, be their friend.
Now I was driven by a different need: to convey things about the external world—or my version of it. Lead them logically or apparently logically to conclude that my version was correct. Take them step-by-step to the place I wanted them to be.
There was a long piece called “Sports.” Once again it had no social or political aim—that would come—but it had a new tone and approach: definitive, forceful and also reflecting a related theme that was showing up more and more in my notes: violence.
It began with suggestions on how to improve major sports by guaranteeing serious injury: in football, you’d have the entire forty-five-man squad play all the time and leave the injured on the field. In baseball, if the pitcher hit the batter with the ball he’d be out, and the outfield would contain randomly placed landmines. In basketball, there’d be a two-second shot clock and you’d score twenty-five points for any shot that went in the basket off another guy’s head.
I set out to prove that most other sports weren’t sports—another exercise in logically proving the opposite of conventional wisdom.
For instance: Swimming is simply a way to keep from drowning, so it can’t be considered a sport. Having to rent the shoes prevents bowling from being one. As for tennis, what is it really but Ping-Pong played while standing on the table? And then there was golf. Here the point was less that golf wasn’t a sport than how inane it is to hit a ball with a stick, then walk after it, then hit it again. Watching flies fuck is a lot more stimulating.
The noisier the culture becomes, the stronger your voice has to be to be heard above the din. This was a conscious thought—that I’d better raise the level of my voice and therefore the intensity of my metaphors and images and words and topics to get and keep people’s attention.
There was another reason to turn up the volume. There was a comedy boom in full swing during the eighties. I was always being told about the hot new guy or the hot new woman. I’d sometimes tense up internally, because you never know. It’s like gunfighting, the Old West. New guy in town. Might be faster than you. I’m the big guy on the block, or at least one of them. So they’re coming after me. I’ve always been very competitive about that. But they also come and go. So I was always slow to rush out and catch them; I didn’t obsess about the competition as some guys do. But when a stand-up starts breaking from the pack, you have to check them out.
Then one of three things happens. Either: NO THREAT! NO FUCKING THREAT AT ALL! Or: this guy is really good. But he’s not on my block. So NO THREAT either.
Or: WHOOOA!
Sam Kinison was a Whoooa!
When he started catching fire in the second half of the eighties I remember saying to myself: I’m going to have to raise my voice. This motherfucker’s GOOD! He’s got ideas. He’s loud. And he’s on my block. Definitely on my block.
I loved Sam’s mind and the way he went after people and ideas: his piece about world hunger and the Ethiopians—“GO LIVE WHERE THE FOOD IS!”—that was something I’d like to have written. Without wanting to wipe him out, I had to raise my level to where I wasn’t lost in his dust.
Be smarter. Be louder. Be on my fucking toes. And though the general proliferation of comedians presented no threat either, the sheer numbers that were happening, the sheer fact that there was a comedy boom, was a spur. You have to run a little faster, show ’em why you’re out in front. It’s not the accumulated credits, George, not the years you’ve put in. It’s what did you do last week.
My overall reaction to the Reagan years was one of storing up ammunition. Arming myself and storing the armaments away for use later on. I knew this was happening, because I could see the files taking shape, acquiring real structure, meaning and weight. And they were getting fatter and fatter. Before long I was going to be able to back up the things I really wanted to say, the positions I wanted to take. I knew now what I was for and against and I knew why.
The 1988 HBO show, What Am I Doing in New Jersey?, was the first use of the stored armaments, the first time that this newfound attention to structure met up with a heightened political sense:
I haven’t seen this many people gathered in one place since they took the group photo of al
l the criminals and lawbreakers in the Reagan administration. 225 of them so far. 225 different people in Ronald Reagan’s administration have either been fired, arrested, indicted or convicted … of either breaking the law or violating the ethics code. Edwin Meese alone has been investigated by three separate special prosecutors and there’s a fourth one waiting for him in Washington right now. Three separate special prosecutors have had to look into the activities of the attorney general! And the attorney general is the nation’s leading LAW-ENFORCEMENT OFFICER! This is what you gotta remember. This is the Ronald Reagan administration—these are the LAW AND ORDER people. These are the people who are against street crime. They want to put street criminals in jail to make life safer for business criminals. They’re against street crime so long as it isn’t WALL Street.
The Supreme Court decided about a year ago that it’s okay to put people in jail if we just THINK they’re going to commit a crime. It’s called preventive detention. All you gotta do is just THINK they’re gonna commit a crime. Well, if we’d known this seven or eight years ago we coulda put a bunch of these Republican motherfuckers directly into PRISON! Put ’em in the joint where they belong and we could’ve saved the cost of putting these country-club, pinheaded assholes ON TRIAL! Another thing you gotta remember is these were the people who were elected with the help of the Moral Majority. And the Teamsters Union. That’s a good combination: organized religion and organized crime working together to build a better America!
… I’m the first to say it’s a great country, but it’s a STRANGE CULTURE. This has got to be the only country in the world that could come up with a disease like BULIMIA. Where some people have no food at all and some people eat a nourishing meal and then PUKE IT UP INTENTIONALLY! Where tobacco kills 400,000 people a year but they ban artificial sweeteners! BECAUSE A RAT DIED! And now they’re thinking of banning toy guns—but they’re KEEPING THE FUCKING REAL ONES!
It’s the old American double standard. And of course we’re founded on the double standard. That’s our history. This country was founded by slave owners WHO WANTED TO BE FREE! So they killed a lot of English white people in order to continue owning their black African people so they could kill the red Indian people and move west to steal the rest of the land from the brown Mexican people, giving them a place for their planes to take off and drop nuclear weapons on the yellow Japanese people. You know what the motto of this country oughtta be? You give us a color—WE’LL WIPE IT OUT!
You’ve got to be evenhanded though. Nothing like road rage for injecting a little populist class warfare:
… And then of course, the three most puke-inducing words that man has yet come up with: BABY ON BOARD! I don’t know what yuppie cocksucker thought of that! BABY ON BOARD—who gives A FUCK? I certainly don’t! You know what these morons are actually saying to you, don’t you? We know you’re a shitty driver, but our baby is nearby and we expect you to straighten up for a little while! You know what I do? I run ’em into a goddam utility pole! Run ’em into a fucking tree! Bounce that kid around a little bit!! Let him grow up with a sense of reality, for Chrissakes!
I’m supposed to alter my driving habits because some woman forgot to put her diaphragm in? Isn’t that nice? Baby on Board! Child in Car! Don’t tell me your troubles, lady! Why don’t you put up an honest sign: ASSHOLE AT THE WHEEL! They don’t sell many of those, do they? Nah—they give them away free with VOLVOS and AUDIS! And SAAAAABS! Some of these morons have SAAAAAAABS! “We bought a SAAAAAAAAAB!” Well, what did you buy a Swedish piece of shit like that for? “It’s a safe car.” Some of these people think that by buying a safe car it excuses them from the responsibility of actually having to learn to DRIVE THE FUCKING THING! First you learn to DRIVE! THEN you buy your safe car!
WELL, I GET PISSED, GOD-DAM-IT!!!!
16
WORKING RAGEAHOLIC
Brenda, Britt Allcroft and George on the set of Shining Time Station
(Copyright 1992 Shonna Valeska. Courtesy of Britt Allcroft.)
The reason I prefer the sledgehammer to the rapier and the reason I believe in blunt, violent, confrontational forms for the presentation of my ideas is because I see that what’s happening to the lives of people is not rapierlike, it is not gentle, it is not subtle. It is direct, hard and violent. The slow violence of poverty, the slow violence of untreated disease. Of unemployment, hunger, discrimination. This isn’t the violence of some guy opening fire with an Uzi in a McDonald’s and forty people are dead. The real violence that goes on every day, unheard, unreported, over and over, multiplied a millionfold.
And it is not sufficient to have a “clever riposte”! A witty song by the Capitol Steps, “Fa la la, oh dear, the killing, hey dilly dilly dilly!” doesn’t do it for me.
“FUCK YOU, COCKSUCKERS!” is my approach. To the world, to the leadership. When are we going to start assassinating the right people in this country? (Why is it, by the way, that the right-wing guys assassins have tried to shoot survived? Like Wallace and Reagan? Don’t we have any marksmen on our side?)
The 1990 and 1992 HBO shows were when things really gelled. 1990 was the first time that the improvement in my new strengths in writing met up solidly with my heightened political sense. It wasn’t a Jammin’ in New York, but it was a good step beyond what happened in ’88, as ’88 had been beyond ’86.
One reason may have been—don’t laugh—that 1990 and ’88 were both shot in New Jersey. Yeah, kiss-her-where-it-smells New Jersey. We’d finally discovered not to do HBO shows on the West Coast. Californian audiences just sit there trying to decide whether they’re going to go to the beach tomorrow or Magic Mountain. Not a lot of concentrated energy in a Los Angeles audience.
What Am I Doing in New Jersey? in ’88 was taped in the Park Theater in Union City, Doin’ It Again in ’90 in the State Theatre in New Brunswick. The difference in response over the West Coast was explosive. Plus, ’90 solidified the new voice with strong, disturbing pieces. One of them was “Rape Can Be Funny,” which was less about rape than about being told what you could and couldn’t say. The early nineties were the heyday of identity politics, and—especially on campus—language codes were cropping up everywhere, trying to define and prohibit offensive speech. I opened the show by saying I wasn’t sure what I could say anymore. Comedians especially were always being told there were off-limit subjects. Subjects that weren’t funny. I disagreed.
Take rape. Is rape funny? Yes. Consider Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd. And Porky’s raping Elmer because Elmer had been coming on to him. He was asking for it.
Core point: Men justify rape by claiming that if a woman’s provocatively dressed, she’s asking for it.
Example: Those news stories where a burglar robs a house, then rapes an eighty-one-year-old granny! Why? Her bathrobe was too tight. She was asking for it!
Keeping the focus on what pricks men are proved my point: that you can joke about anything—even rape. And let me tie the piece up neatly:
Now I’ve got the feminists pissed off at me, because I’m joking about rape. Feminists wanna control your language. And they’re not alone. They got a lotta company in this country. I’m not picking on the feminists. In fact I got nothing against the feminists.
I happen to agree with most of the feminist philosophy I have read. I agree for instance that for the most part men are vain, ignorant, greedy, brutal assholes who’ve just about ruined this planet. I agree with the abstract that men have pushed the technology that just about has this planet in a stranglehold.
Mother Earth—RAPED AGAIN! Guess who?
“ ’EY, SHE WAS ASKING FOR IT!”
1990 was a sign, looking back from the perspective of years, that Jammin’ was on its way. And when it came—on April 25, 1992, in what used to be called the Felt Forum at Madison Square Garden, in front of 6,500 people—it leaped past all the others. The train had arrived.
Jammin’ in New York has always been my favorite HBO show, but it was more than just a favorite. It lifted me up t
o a new plateau, a good plateau. It became my personal best, the one I had to beat, the template for future HBOs in terms of craft, artistry and risk taking.
We dedicated it to Sam Kinison, who’d been killed by a drunk driver just two weeks earlier.
April 1992 was just over a year after the end of the Gulf War and patriotism was still riding high. A lot of people had seen it and still did as a good war, even though the Pentagon lies in the run-up to it were beginning to come out. Supposed Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait City fabricated by some woman from the Kuwaiti royal family. DOD satellite photos of Iraqi troops “massing at the Saudi border,” which actually showed empty desert. There was some risk in doing “Rockets and Penises in the Persian Gulf” on national television, but it was calculated.
I went right into it—at the height of their commitment to me—and it had such pace, such fire, that they couldn’t ignore the ideas in it. There was less an unpatriotic ring to it than a loud dissenting one.
America loved war, I said. In our history we’ve had a major war every ten years. We suck at everything else but we could bomb the shit out of any country full of brown people. Only brown people. The last white people we bombed were the Germans. Because they were trying to dominate the world, and that’s our job!
I shifted to my theory that war is just men waving their pricks at one another. We bomb anyone we think has a bigger dick than us. That’s why rockets, planes, shells and bullets are all shaped like dicks. America has an overpowering need to thrust the national dick deep into other nations …
The ideas came from all directions, piling on joke after joke and idea after idea, the next idea validating the previous one. There was always more shit coming. Including the familiar point that our language always betrays us.
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