By September 2, 2005
DAZE: Deconstruction of comedy, magic … what excites you about deconstructing things? Gillette: I don’t know. I really think that it’s a human being’s job to tell the truth as you see it, and I think that everybody goes through a phase when they’re 16 or 17 where they’re obsessed with the idea of truth, and you’re supposed to grow out of that and I didn’t. This movie started from a conversation between Provenza and me. I met Provenza at the Peppermill, which is a diner in Vegas, four and a half years ago and we started talking. I was obsessed with bebop jazz and I was talking to Provenza about improvisation and what improvisation in real time meant in listening to Coltrane and Miles Davis, Mingus, and Sonny Rollins -that really 50s pure bebop thing, and what that meant. And how that got me thinking about improvisation in comedy. Provenza said, “You know, you always hear musicians improvising over the same song. You never hear comedians tell the same joke.” DAZE: You were saying that Gilbert’s [Godfrey] rendition was the catalyst of the start of the project. Provenza: No, that’s a misconception. We weren’t looking for something to do. Gillette: We had jobs! Provenza: My point is that we didn’t say, “Let’s do something together; what would be a good idea?” This came up and we just said, “You know what? We really have to do this. This feels really cool.” Gillette: And I think what’s so good about this movie is that it can’t be pitched. I think that almost by definition, if you can pitch it in 20 minutes in a room to people in a studio, it’s not a good idea, because you’ve already said it. If you have something that epigrammatical and that kind of perfect and stripped down, why would you do a movie about it? And that’s why we see all this stuff that is derivative. You like War of the Worlds? Let’s do it again! And this time we’ll burlesque 9/11. Won’t that be cool! And because Hollywood is so desperate and studios are dying and they’re clutching, they have this, “Well, we’ve gotta get Tom Cruise in it cause he’s a name that can open a movie.” I mean, what is the idea? Where is the idea? We didn’t have to pitch it. We did it with our own money. George Carlin insisted. George Carlin being the godfather of this, with no wiggle room, he said “You need to make me a promise and a promise that you’ll make to every person in this movie, that you will not take a penny from anyone until the editing is finished and then it will not be changed.” And we made that promise to George Carlin, so when people started hearing that we were doing it, we had some calls from people that said, “Have you got 75 comedians on tape telling a joke and is it really funny? Can we make a deal with you?” We said no because once we make a deal with you, we no longer have any footage. It all goes away. The sound was cleaned up and the video was cleaned up but the edit, the ideas, are what Provenza finished with no change whatsoever from anyone else, including me. DAZE: Any comedians not happy that the joke is getting out there? Provenza: It’s not really a secret handshake. It’s not like there’s some comedy illuminati that’ll hunt us down with rubber chickens or anything. It’s a secret handshake de facto. As people took this joke outside the world of comedy it just became a lot riskier and you were faced with a lot of people who you had to explain yourself to, so it just kind of stayed in that closed circle. But the truth is that I don’t know a comedian worth his salt who wouldn’t be happy to live in a world where everyone got the Aristocrats joke. The reason we’re all so frustrated when we’re in high school or junior high school is because everyone around us doesn’t seem to get it. DAZE: Seeing the movies with audiences, are you surprised by what gets laughter? Provenza: Well, you know what? Once you have a couple hundred people in the theater, that ratio kicks in and there’s always someone laughing at all times, but always at different things which I think is phenomenal. This movie really brings people together-people from all ideologies, backgrounds and ethnicities. They can look at the world totally differently, love and hate different things, and they all walk out agreeing that Bob Saget is a filthy fuck, so in a strange way the movie is bringing people together. Gillette: And the thing is that, you know, everybody was talking up at Sundance, and I hope you remember this, cause it’s quite a prediction, about how people were going to walk out of this movie, it’s going to be controversial. And I kept saying, “No, it’s not. It’s a movie, you know?” When we were in high school I got thrown out of school a dozen times. We would tell jokes in the cafeteria and then someone would rat you out to the principal, like the guy at AMC, would rat you out. Provenza: Someone’s having fun! Gillette: Mr. Jones, come over here! Provenza: You forgot to give us homework over the holiday! Gillette: And we’d get thrown out, we’re still laughing at this, It’s a lot of fun. Our defense now is exactly what our defense was in high school, which is – Provenza: It’s just a joke! More from Penn and Provenza! DAZE: There aren’t a lot of alternative comedians in the movie … is that because they don’t do Friar’s type stuff? Provenza: I don’t know what that means. For us, they’re just funny people and you know, friends of ours. I forget that people categorize. We actually forget about it. Gillette: One of the obsessions that I have is that there’s one show business and people try to break it down and they try to break it down for mercantile reasons really. But there’s one show business and Gilbert Gottfried and Miles Davis and Picasso and the guy at the mall in the Santa suit and Bach all have the exact same job. Every stripper, all pornography and all legitimate stuff is exactly the same. It’s what we do after the chores are done. If you don’t work in the hospital and you’re not making food and you’re not making shelter and you’re not doing anything to keep human beings alive, you’re in show business. DAZE: When you made the list of comics – Gillette: I just told him to stop. I said “That’s it! We’re done.” Provenza: At some point, the voice of reason and Penn’s accountant spoke. I mean, we spent four and a half years shooting footage and at some point we were running into the issues of who’s available, the scheduling. We started running into the same scheduling issues with the same people over and over again and we also had accumulated so much. At that point, it was kind of like chomping at the bit. Like, let’s see what this. We don’t know what this is going to be yet. Gillette: Art thrives on its limitations and we didn’t have limitations. We could do whatever we wanted. We had forty people on the list who said yes who we wanted. Lorne Michaels, Mike Nichols, Conan O’Brien, they were all ready to go and we just couldn’t get in the same city with them when they had an extra hour and it just seemed like “We can’t start editing without Lorne. We gotta have Lorne Michaels! We gotta have Conan O’Brien! We’ve gotta call Albert Brooks again!” And then we just said, “No, no this is what we’ll make it out of.” And I believe from the very beginning that although this is a group of the most funny, talented people in the world, what we really needed was Provenza’s heart and his love for comedians, his love for the world, his love for comedy and his love for the comedy culture. DAZE: To some of the comics, telling this joke seems almost therapeutic or cathartic Provenza: Well, freedom and joy is cathartic and that’s what happens when creative people get together. In this case, they have a task. They were given a challenge or a toy as it were and then what you get is people just being free and being creative and for an artist, that is cathartic. Gillette: I don’t think that the taboo images are particularly cathartic. I think just hanging out with your friends and saying whatever pops into your head is cathartic. It just so happens we’ve filmed it. Provenza: Comedians have to deal with audience perce
By September 2, 2005
Forget the hordes of Uggs, the droves of “Vote for Pedro” t-shirts, and the sudden influx of self-proclaimed poker aficionado’s with their eyes set on the World Series of Poker. The worst trend of the last year is almost as bad as a second coming of Hammerpants. What makes the cancer in question all the more potent, putrid and just downright aggravating is that it, unlike the others, is not just limited to an article of clothing, a movie or just the latest must-have. It’s a plague on all our houses, to paraphrase Mercutio and a little Billy Shakes (now that’s what I call a throwback.) What the hell could possibly be so bad? The sudden onslaught of quotation and its surgically-separated conjoined twin, ’round the clock sarcasm. Yeah, I know, he’s giving himself carpal tunnel over that?! Gimme a break! Well, lemme explain. True, it’s not like people started quoting other sources overnight. I mean, it’s what makes journalism possible in the first place. Usually, not quoting and accrediting something is what’ll get you in serious trouble, but that’s not what has me debating whether or not to jump (up and down that is, not off of anything). I’m talking about chronic quote abuse, not that innocent yet sappy “DMB” song lyric in your AIM profile. We all know someone who suffers from it, and it’s spreading fast. These are the people who go around quoting anything and everything, usually in the hopes that it will somehow make them less unfunny. Excessive quoting used to be the realm of nerds trying to impress each other with their ability to memorize all six Star Wars movies, but it seems to have suddenly become as mainstream a pastime as trying to look like one of the characters of The O.C. It’s not just limited to just marginally funny quotes either. “Plastics” might go around saying “Fetch” after Mean Girls, rap fans “remix” their favorite artists’ “freestyle”, and of course, seemingly everyone has said “Your mom goes to college” at some point in their life. Even the artsy, disaffected kids are in on the act with their dry, nonconformist quotes, including quotes bashing other quotes, like Emerson’s “I hate quotations,” or Lord Peter Wimsey’s “A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought,” – those ladies and gentleman, are examples of irony, unlike most others people give. And while some people think that “quoting in moderation” is an okay thing to do, try telling me that after hearing a suburban white kid tell you he’s “Rick James, bitch”. In fact, quoting in any amount is a warning sign for things far more serious. Like what, you ask? A high school classmate of mine, for example, has got a very debilitating form of this illness. He’ll quote whatever he’s just seen or heard in the last five minutes not once or twice, but three times. Consecutively. Even worse, victims of chronic quote abuse will slip into a state of perpetual sarcasm. Don’t catch my drift? Imagine walking into Springfield’s Kwik-E-Mart and having Apu give you lip with witty retorts to everything you say. Or that girl we all know who says that she’s sarcastic all the time and so she’s misunderstood. Some end up sounding like a horrible stand-up comedian: everything they say comes out sounding like it’s supposed to have a punchline, like “How did you do on the prelim?” It’s usually the result of trying to emulate the style of genuine humor in everyone’s newfound “favorite” show, Family Guy. So please, I’m not trying to make some kind of bullshit plea for people to have a little more creativity when it comes to what they say. This isn’t some kind of “Friends don’t let friends quote” type of public service announcement. Just remember that quoting something for the sake of humor is a lot like surrounding yourself with attractive people in hopes you’ll seem “less ugly” – though it seems like girls do that anyway. Just stop. Or else. Consider this a veiled threat. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”Archived article by aki Rahamad