In my head while writing this: “Alabama”—Neil Young
CANADIAN THANKSGIVING
CANADIAN THANKSGIVING IS ON A DIFFERENT DAY than Thanksgiving in the United States, so I’ll just write a lot of Canadian jokes in this chapter. It’s okay for me to make fun of Canadians, because my people are from Newfoundland (rhymes with “understand”), and that means if I make jokes about how stupid Newfies are, it’s okay. After she read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, my mom claimed that we had some aboriginal American relatives, and some TV show recently did some genealogy research in our family background and proved she might have been telling the truth. She wasn’t really telling the truth; she was telling a lie that, unbeknownst to her, might be true. So, I can make aboriginal American jokes after the Canadian jokes.
My dad told me that I have at least one African-American ancestor. I’m a pretty direct descendant of Captain Cook, who brought syphilis to Hawaii and gave the English the name “limeys.” Statistically, the long line of sailors must have brought in most other nationalities I can think of and some I can’t. My dad worked at a Jewish school. Ethnic jokes are a wide-open territory for me.
I had a mom, I have a wife and daughter, and those are only some of the women I really care about. I’ve been in many situations in my lifetime, and you wouldn’t have to be Rick Santorum to consider some of them gay and perverted. Gender and sexually leaning jokes are wide open for me. Insult comics will use the defense that he or she is offensive to everyone and therefore not offensive at all. Equal opportunity offensiveness is the old-fashioned spin. Sam Kinison and Howard Stern often explained they were just saying what others were thinking. They were honest, and that excuses all. Lenny Bruce’s genius was carried on by George Carlin, and they both used words considered offensive as just part of their vocabulary. That sure didn’t work for Michael Richards, but Dick Gregory talked about getting over African-American slurs, and then another genius, Richard Pryor, used those slurs when he talked about not using those slurs in a casual, fun way.
Paul Provenza and I did a movie called The Aristocrats that looked into transgressive humor, and let a hundred comics be as funny and shocking as they could, as each of them told the same dirty joke. They all fascinated me, and Provenza’s direction really turned it into a study of what offensive comedy could mean—the craft, joy, and intellectual content of that kind of humor. I learned a lot watching all of those brilliant minds explore what “offensive” is.
I was going to start with Canadians and build on the ethnic humor from there, but I’ve changed my mind. I’m feeling just the opposite. Bob Dylan wrote about a totally different subject (I take Bob out of context the way people take religious writing out of context): “Either I’m too sensitive or else I’m getting soft.” I believe both are true about me. I cry all the time and everything affects me now.
I read Sarah Silverman’s book and was really moved by her discomfort when someone from some eighties band “complimented” her on doing the best race jokes. It’s crystal clear with every breath Sarah takes that she is not a racist. Her offensive material is a comment on racism from inside her character. Her character is a stupid bigot; Sarah isn’t. It’s making fun of racists.
My good friend Emery Emery’s favorite joke is about the fellow with a harelip going into a bar. He orders a drink speaking with his speech impediment and the bartender answers with the same speech impediment. The protagonist gets angry, thinking the bartender is making fun of him. The bartender assures the patron that the bartender himself has a harelip, and they chat a bit, sharing that fact. Another fellow walks into the bar and orders a drink and the bartender answers the new guy without any trace of a speech impediment. The fellow with the harelip is angry and calls the bartender out on his cruel mocking of the harelip. The bartender replies, with the impediment in place, that he was making fun of the other guy. That’s the world Sarah Silverman lives in. She is constantly making fun of people who might not know they themselves are the brunt of her joke.
I have no doubt that Sarah and all the other comics who explore these areas have their hearts in the right place. I watched Bobcat Goldthwait do a wonderful hunk in his live act years ago. He asked people if they had noticed that there were no offensive words or jokes in his act (we’re not talking obscenity here; no one reading this book would consider those words offensive). He explained that he used all those words and made all those jokes with his friends in his private life. With people who knew him, loved him, trusted him and understood him, he would make racial and gender jokes, but he couldn’t risk doing it publicly and being misunderstood. What if some bigots were to not know what side he was on and co-opt his jokes for racist purposes? It was too much of a gamble for the Bobcat to take.
The Penn & Teller show hasn’t as much as one racial or sexual mention anywhere in the full evening. Not even a double entendre. An alien watching our show would not be able to tell there were any religions, races or sexes on planet Earth. Like Bobcat, I am always worried about being misunderstood. The bad guys can misunderstand the joke, or even worse, the party you’re pretending to attack can misunderstand and be really hurt. Those are big dangers.
I remember the rush I used to get when I would joke in a way that could be considered offensive right in the face of the person who might be offended and ultimately got a big laugh. I grew up in Greenfield, Massachusetts, a town where most of us had the same ethnic background. I listened to Lenny Bruce and I read Paul Krassner, Abbie Hoffman and Screw magazine. I wanted so much to be Jewish. I wanted to be an atheist from a Jewish background. I also wanted to be gay. I wanted to be part of the New York City pictured in my mind. Lenny said that all people who lived in the city were Jewish and all those who lived in the country were goys, and I wanted to be Jewish. I wanted to be able to make ethnic jokes. As soon as I got out of Greenfield, all my friends were Jewish, gay or both. That was showbiz to me. I remember the thrill the first time I called a gay man that I loved a “faggot.” I had never used the word as an insult. I had never used that word to hurt, and when I used it sarcastically to make someone I loved laugh—when I played the part of a homophobic asshole, and my dear friend laughed—I loved the feeling of being in the inner circle. I loved that I could use something that was dangerous and painful in a way that would be understood and accepted by an outsider. It was even a bigger deal for me because of how I look. I’m enormous. I have met people who just assume I was a bully and a jock when I was young (gone to seed, you know, maybe I wasn’t always fat). In my school days, I was the one being beat up for being an outsider, but . . . I sure don’t look it. The word “big” goes before “bully” as comfortably as it does before “dumb.” And a big dumb bully is what I’ve always looked like. You should see me without my glasses.
That feeling of using offensive terms with the people those terms were made to hurt and getting away with it was addictive. I never used any of those terms in hate. If you cut me off in traffic, I’m not very likely to notice, but if I do, and I know no one is listening, I’ll say, “Oh fuck,” or if I’m really upset, I’ll say, “Oh, man,” like Swiper on Dora, the Explorer (two words which do not rhyme, you stupid little motherfuckers!). My mom and dad never swore and never used any offensive ethic or sexual putdowns. Not once. Never. The only power those words have to me is a broad cultural power. I’m sure I heard horrible painful words in my hometown, but not often and not in my home either. I learned the slurs against Jews from Lenny Bruce. I learned African-American hate speech from Richard Pryor. All my knowledge of racism was meta. None of those words were part of my formative years. I learned everything about offensive language within the context of the arts. It wasn’t real to me.
There were no anti-gay comments from my family either, but the insults were common in my school, and many of them were used against me. I may look like a ex-jock bully now, but back then this embarrassingly dated haircut, a little eye makeup, and a love of the arts got me beat up quite a bit. Word got out that I wouldn’t fig
ht back because I was a stupid pacifist, and then it’s wicked fun to beat up a big guy. An average guy looks really brave beating up a big guy. I heard those anti-gay slurs, but I never used them outside comedy.
I was raised in a time when feminism was so strong that I still pause before I use the word “girl” referring to my six-year-old daughter. I don’t use the word “lady” ever except as part of a compound word with “bug.” All the “bitch,” “whore,” “slut” stuff is either done jokingly or is used in that postmodern pro-porn feminist way. I’m the exact right age to be very careful about all of that.
When I got out of Greenfield, I loved being around people who looked and sounded like people who were in my books and on my record player. To prove that I was accepted, I would use the hateful words and have my friends look in my eyes. They would know I didn’t really feel that way and laugh. I believed it was taking away the power of the words. It was my “Yankee Doodle” moment. I felt I was helping to redefine those words.
The Penn & Teller organization is just maggoty with people from Jewish backgrounds (atheist now), and we’ve got gays coming out our ass, so to speak. We have people of Irish and Italian descent and, yup, we’ve had a Canadian or two. People tend to work with us for a long time, so there’s not much turnover. Most everyone has worked with us at least ten years, and a bunch have been working with us for over twenty years. We’re a close-knit group that looks a little bit like America, or at least parts of it.
I don’t think there is an obscenity that hasn’t been said by and to every one of our co-workers. We’re all comfortable with each other and we all trust each other. Anything said in anger is said sincerely, honestly and quietly. There’s not a lot of yelling around us unless it’s a joke.
We do joke. And the jokes are sincerely Sarah Silverman. There isn’t one iota of real hate behind any of it—at one point I got sick of it.
Several years ago, I was sitting around with two of my closest friends: rob pike from Google (then at Bell Labs) and Lawrence O’Donnell from MSNBC (then producer and writer on The West Wing). I did a show called Bullshit! so y’all know how much I can swear, but unless you know rob and LOD, you don’t think of them as using a lot of obscenity. But back then when we were talking, it was a rare sentence that lacked a “fuck.” LOD and I were the worst. The two of us were once in a cab together in New York talking about what kind of picture hanger to use on a wall. There was no anger and no tension, but the New York Fucking City cabdriver said he had never heard people swear as much as us.
The three of us decided to stop swearing. But we weren’t going to talk baby talk. We would not turn “shit” into “shoot.” We would never do “freaking” or “frigging.” We would take out all the religious swears. I used to say “goddamn” in our show all the time; I was proud of how many times I said it in our show. I said it for blasphemy. The idea was to show the words meant nothing to me. I felt it proved I was an atheist. I said “Jesus Christ” all the time too. Then I had children. These were children I wanted to bring up without all the god hate and baggage. So, why would they hear me saying a meaningless name all the time? So that came out of our show and out of my daily life. I’d sometimes catch myself saying “Jiminy Cricket,” but I tried not to. “Oh my god” became “my word.” That was a powerful one. It seems that many believe that “my word” is “my lord” with one letter change. Or that it stands for “oh my word of god.” That etymology bothers me, but only a little. I use it as giving my word. Swearing to god means nothing to me, but I want my word to mean something. I don’t know where I come down on “oh my goodness.” It seems to me like that’s a pretty clear euphemism for “OMG,” and it would be better to go with “oh my word,” I suppose, but I like “oh my goodness.” There’s a purity to that. We non-swearing boys found that “ouch” worked pretty well when one dropped a hammer on one’s toe: you didn’t really need “motherfucker” then. As part of our no-baby-talk rule, we still used “fuck” to talk about fucking and “shit” to talk about shit. We were okay with “dick” for our penises, but not for Kreskin. He was an untalented mentalist. Not knowing which word would be worse to call him, we couldn’t talk about him for a while. When you’re not talking about the whole person, “asshole” doesn’t come up that much. Same with “pussy” and the like. It was fine for sex talk, but no more false metonymy on any of that.
The most surprising result was taking out the word “bullshit.” “Bullshit” is good-natured. It’s joking around. It has a colloquial playful feeling. Replace “bullshit” with “that’s not true” and you’ve really said something. There was a power to not swearing, especially in light social situations. “Oh my god, what a load of bullshit” becomes “My word, that’s simply not true.” That sure as fuck means something.
The experiment faded away. I like the way the rhythm of swearing works in sentences and it’s one of my social habits. I say “fuck” and “shit” around my children, but they rarely hear a “goddamn” or “Jesus Christ.” I don’t want them to be confused by any of that from me. The messages from the other children at school get garbled with the home messages, and once when her little brother said, “Oh my god,” Mox responded, “You shouldn’t say that, because there is no god.” Well, she’s right, but I’m not sure that’s why her Christian classmates don’t say it either.
I wanted to take all the power away from the idea of god and Jesus Christ. I wanted to see if I could speak more carefully. I wanted to have the strength to tell people to their faces that I didn’t believe what they were saying was true. I wanted more than just the balls to call bullshit.
I’m thinking maybe I’ll go back to the no-swearing thing. It worked well for my parents, but whether I do that or not, I’m going to try to phase out all the hateful terms and ideas. I’m sick of racial and sexual stereotypes or even making fun of those stereotypes. I believe people are people. Differences between men and women may exist in the aggregate, but they mean nothing at the street view. I know gay men who are a bit prissy, and I know gay men who are slobs. Gilbert Gottfried is the cheapest motherfucker on the planet, but that has nothing to do with Jews, that’s Gilbert.
I’m embarrassed that I wanted to make my African-American, gay, Jewish (background, now atheist) friends (I do have more than one friend who is all of those: African-American, gay and Jewish) prove how much they trusted me every time I felt like making a hack joke.
If I really don’t believe in tribalism and I really want all those stereotypes to go away, it’s much faster to just stop using them than to teach everyone to understand when I’m kidding. I’ve made a mistake or two being overheard or typing in a forum online that I thought was private, when someone didn’t know my relationship with the person I was writing to, and accused me of being a kind of person I’m really not. It really upset me. Isn’t it easier to just not do it than to make it easy for people who are trying to misunderstand?
I appeared on the same episode of Politically Incorrect as Jerry Lewis once. I had just done The Aristocrats and I was on the show selling it. Jerry was saying that he didn’t work blue; that he didn’t swear or make dirty jokes (I believe he meant in public). I decided to turn it on him, for the show, and as Bill Maher took the show out, I was saying things like, “Jerry, I think you’re good enough to make dirty jokes. I really do. You’re good. I bet you could work blue, if you worked on it. You may not be as good as Johnny Carson, Red Foxx, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, or George Carlin, but I bet you could do a pretty good job if you tried. I think you’re good enough to work blue, give it a try.”
I thought it was really funny at the time, but maybe it was true. I’m not as good as that list of people. When I make jokes using those hateful terms, am I adding to our culture like Johnny, Red, Pryor, and Carlin? When Lenny was swearing and doing all that ethnic stuff, it took a lot of bravery, ideas and talent, but times have changed. It’s no longer brave or smart. We’ve gotten to the place where it’s too hard to tell whose side the harelip bartender
is on. Even one person’s misunderstanding may not be worth the next guy’s laugh.
Don’t worry about any of that for the rest of this book. I’ll still use “fuck,” but Canadian Thanksgiving is at a different time than Thanksgiving in the States and that’s okay with me.
Listening to: “Don’t Call me Nigger, Whitey”—Sly and the Family Stone
With Ron Jeremy and Paul Provenza, invoking the punch line from The Aristocrats.
HERE COME OUR “CELEBRITIES” —CUE THE FREEZING RAIN
I DID THE CELEBRITY APPRENTICE 2012 as kind of a work/study thang. TV networks are dying. The death throes of religion give us jihads. The death throes of television give us reality shows. I blame the writers’ strikes. That’s not really fair, but I hate a union that forces me to join it. I’d like to be the anti–Pete Seeger on this and stand up against the unions, but they really have Hollywood writing sewed up. Penn & Teller chose a different battle. We stood up to Equity.
Equity is the only live Broadway theater union. Penn & Teller are not members. The first time we played Broadway, Equity tried to get us to join. They said they could get us a better deal. That seemed impossible, because we were producers on the show. How would they help us negotiate with ourselves? They said we had to join. We found a couple loopholes. Equity guarantees understudies, so we said we would join if they could find five or six guys to audition for my part. They had to be 6'7'' tall and be able to perform the monologues, eat fire, juggle, play bass and do all the magic. Then they’d need to find someone with Teller’s abilities. He’s average height, but aside from that, he can do stuff no one else can do. They failed. Then we claimed we weren’t actors. (And if you saw me deliver the line “Superman, the others!” in Lois & Clark, you saw proof I’m not an actor. We might have been lying about Teller.) Penn & Teller are variety artists, so our Broadway union is the American Guild of Variety Artists. It handles circus performers and Vegas acts. The guild’s president was and is Rod McKuen, so don’t fuck with us. Equity is a union that boasts ninety percent unemployment at any given time. I hope the plate spinners and Risley acts on Broadway follow our lead and hang tough with AGVA.
Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! Page 3
