Fade to Black Presents:

Part I of III

How do you feel about the comparison people make between you and Bill Hicks? 

I didn't know that people compared Bill and I but certainly I'm flattered if they do. I knew Bill a bit. We had dinner a couple of times and played guitar together once. I really tried to keep my distance from him professionally. I didn't watch him much and I didn't listen to his albums much because we did talk about some of the same topics and his diction was a bit contagious. We usually had different takes on things and we definitely have different styles and any comparison to Bill I take as a complement. He was a great comic.   

I'll share a great Hicks story with you. Years ago when I was just starting out Bill and I were on the same bill at the Village Gate here in New York. The format of the show was a host, two comics doing fifteen minutes a piece and an improv group at the end. Bill walks in and wants to go on first and I said, "Come on, man. You've got ten Lettermen's under your belt. I'm just starting out here. Let me go first." He said, "I can't. I got to meet someone for a chess game." I said, "Oh, great." The host brings Bill on stage and I walk out to go to the bathroom. I come back like two minutes later and I have no idea what transpired in those two minutes but the audience is paralyzed and Bill is crouched on the lip of the stage screaming at the top of his lungs at a woman in the front row, "Don't you get it? I'm a poet! I'm a fucking poet." There is a hush of silence in the room and the women meekly and sweetly says, "Well, then, tell us a poem." The silence thickens and Bill bounces up on his feet and says, "Aren't you glad you didn't go first, Maron?" I think I was glad.

You have been doing standup for over 15 years and have seen the comedy boom of the eighties and the comedy bust of the early nineties. Where do you think standup comedy is now as an artistic medium and where do you think it is heading? 

By the time I started doing comedy in '86 club owners were already saying the boom was over. It seemed everywhere you went the first thing the guy would  say after the first show was, "I don't get it. Last week was packed." I  believe they were all mentally holding on to a night in 1982.   I think that standup has always been an acquired taste and there was always  only a handful of performers that were really inspired. In the sixties and  seventies you could probably name all the great comics. It was still special.  

The demand for standup in the eighties was created by how easy it was to  exploit 'comedians' and create very cheap television programming. There were dozens of television shows and most stand-ups starting out, myself included, would do ten minutes on any show for cab fare and a meal. That alongside of  the development of the comedy club industry destroyed the uniqueness and  intimacy of the profession but it also created jobs for comics and bred some great performers. America needed comics it didn't really matter if they were original or not. People had money to burn and wanted to laugh. The bottom  fell out because there were to many unoriginal acts that repeated themselves in different performers. The money ran out, people caught onto the hacks and sought more efficient forms of entertainment. There are fewer TV outlets for straight standup, which means fewer amateurs doing it on TV except in  sitcoms. Many of the eighties road acts have moved on to other professions or are working in some capacity in show business.  

As for the craft, it's back to where it was before the boom. It may have lost its special-ness forever and the clubs might not being doing well but I think standup is in the best shape it has been in a long time. Some comics are  doing great stuff. Most of them are unknown to the country at large. They'll  either continue to do great stuff or they'll plateau because of fear,  self-defeat or premature success or they'll be held down because the powers  that be don't 'get it' or they'll be defeated by fate which is a bitch and no medicine can fix it.  

Hopefully standup will become special again.

You have once said in an interview that "Shitty comics ruined comedy". What is the ratio you find now between shitty comics and good comics? 

Comedy is obviously a matter of personal taste and the world always needs a clown and some people have no taste at all and any clown will do. If a comic is doing old jokes or someone else's jokes or someone else's persona or pandering to mediocrity with out an original thought or even a flash of brilliance and just making people 'laugh' without any creative integrity at all I think they're shitty. 

Which comics do you consider to be you influence?

When I was a young kid I loved Don Rickles, Buddy Hackett and Jackie Vernon. My parents actually took me to see Jackie Vernon when I was like ten. When I was a bit older I had all of the George Carlin records, all of the Steve Martin records, all of the Cheech and Chong records and all of the Richard Pryor records. I think seeing Pryor's first movie, Live In Concert, when I was in high school changed my life. Pryor really put the heart in darkness for me. 

I was also a big Woody Allen fan. When I got into college I listened to Lenny Bruce but it's taken me years to put him into context historically and really get what he did.   

When I started doing comedy I saw many  comics that influenced me and some I just loved to watch. Kenny Rogerson, Frank Santorelli, Steve Pearl, Warren Thomas, Warren Hutcherson, Daman Wayans, Dana Gould. I spent a lot of time with Kinison when I was doorman at the Comedy Store and I learned a lot from  his momentum. Some of my favorite comics are my friends. Louis CK, Dave Atell, Todd Barry, Jim Short, Blaine Capatch, Dave Cross, Laura Kightlinger. 

Recently I've grown to love Robert Schimmel's comedy. 

Politically you lean to the left. Why do you think there are so few funny Right Wing comics, and do you think it is easier to be a liberal comic since your targets are almost always in power?  

Right wing comedy. The pep rally of the frightened who can't see any side but their own because if they do their true hearts will be revealed as the  petrified control freaks that they are. Left wing, right wing, I am wingless and tired of trying to fly. Here comes the ground.   

The 'liberal' idea makes room for human fear, for weakness, for the bare  desperation of what it is to be alive in this world, for the underdog and  those who struggle for justice but don't want to live in the fear that breeds hate and blame and the exclusion of everything different. Humility! That's  funny.  

The target is the mighty Oz. An illusion. Lets get the guy at the controls  behind the curtain out here and see what he's made of.    

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