Wednesday, Mar 11, 2015 10:30 PM UTC
Salon’s Patton Oswalt peace summit
Salon sits down with our fierce critic to debate comedy, politics and political correctness. Is the hatchet buried?
Topics: Patton Oswalt, Salon, Patton Oswalt Salon, Editor's Picks, bill cosby, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Comedy, Tea Party, John Oliver, #cancelcolbert, Louis CK, Charlie Hebdo, Bill Maher, rape jokes, hannibal buress, Entertainment News, Politics News
I took my seat at Carnegie Hall thinking about Phil Collins.
There’s an old myth that Collins wrote “In the Air Tonight” about watching a man do nothing to save his drowning friend. Then Collins gave him a front-row seat for a concert, set the spotlight upon him and played the song.
On this January evening, we’re comedian Patton Oswalt’s guests for his Carnegie Hall debut. The seats are five rows from the stage. Middle of the row. There won’t be any easy escape. That cascading Phil Collins drum solo echoes in my mind.
Patton Oswalt and Salon have had a caustic history, both in print and on social media. We’ve argued about comedy and political correctness, about jokes that we’ve thought have gone too far or hit the wrong targets. He’s made the case that we’ve become the shrill, scolding left, and have trained our outrage on the wrong subjects. Comedy and laughter, he contends — not outrage — are the best weapons against intolerance.
Oswalt is a thoughtful, well-read and passionate progressive, and despite the long-standing feud, it always seemed like we might agree on more than we disagreed. So the day after his triumphant and very funny Carnegie Hall performance — no spotlight or drum solo, whew — we met for lunch in New York’s Union Square.
We started by debating some of the areas and specific articles where we have disagreed. Then after more than an hour, we both perhaps dropped our wariness and found some room for agreement in our frustration with today’s Democratic Party.
We ended up talking something close to three hours, and I think we came away appreciating the other’s perspective — even where we agreed to disagree. It was a long conversation, so this transcript has been edited and condensed. The conversation also took place in January, prior, for example, to Jon Stewart’s stepping down from “The Daily Show.”
It’s nice to meet. Maybe we’ll even have a friendly lunch.
We’ll see how friendly it lasts.
Friendly but interesting. We have probably always had more in common than not in common.
Yeah.
And perhaps both of us have caricatured the other in some unfair ways.
It feels a little frustrating that a site like Salon that I used to always go to for great news, great commentary, did turn into a caricature of what a lot of really dumb conservatives used to say it was. That’s really disturbing to me because I don’t want it to be. And I’ve been saying this over and over again.
It gets pointed out to me, yes. But I’d disagree with that completely. I know the kind of stories that bother you, and I’m happy to talk about them. I’d argue that so much of what gets dismissed as “political correctness” or shrill culture policing is actually not that at all — that it’s criticized by people who don’t like the way the Internet has broadened the debate and empowered people who perhaps didn’t have a voice before. There are people on both the left and the right who aren’t always happy with that. I think it does a lot of good to listen to people who are responding to the culture – that’s how we make progress and gain empathy and understanding.
I hate to talk in terms of our side, this side, that side. But our side, the liberal progressives, the open-minded people — I don’t want us to be the scolds and the shushers. That was always the role of neoconservatives and the religious fundamentalists, to restrict and remove words. I don’t want our side to be the one that’s parsing language.
It just really, really bothers me, if the liberal progressives have now become the scolds. We were the Grouchos! We’re not the Margaret Dumonts — and we’re turning into the Margaret Dumonts on a lot of levels. That lets the misogynists and homophobes and racists seem like the rebels: “Well, we’re saying what people can’t say anymore.” We should be having way more fun with language and jokes and going too far. If our side starts doing that, then I think we’re fucked in terms of moving forward as a society.
I don’t think that Salon is the joke police or Margaret Dumont. But yes, we are willing — and I think it’s important — to take jokes or other pieces of pop culture and ask whether it’s fair or funny, to try to understand what it’s saying. Does the joke blame the victim, or kick down at a target in a way that demeans a group of people? We believe in the rebel and the outsider and the free thinker. We publish as many of those free thinkers as anyone. But just as the comedian has the right to make a joke, any of us have the right to speak up about it. And I believe in empowering voices that aren’t 40-something white guys like the two of us to say, “Wait a second, maybe there’s something being said here that we should all talk about, or another way of thinking about this.”
Right, but opening the site to transgendered voices and Native American voices, fluidly sexual voices – this is what I think is so frustrating. They are given platforms to speak, but then they’re dismissed, or treated like “Then that nut’s done.” It’s one thing to have your voice silenced, because you have something to fight against. It’s worse when you’re saying something crucial and everyone’s just going, “That’s adorable.”
Comedians have always been the best conduit to the forgotten, to the outsiders, to the inarticulate. We speak for the underdogs, for the most part. That’s what most comedians do. If Salon is doing articles about, “Did the Onion go too far?” or “Why does ‘Last Week Tonight with John Oliver’ have to be hosted by another straight, white male?” then you are now just picking, out of context, these buzzwords. You’re asking questions that don’t need to be asked. The content of what John Oliver does is so revolutionary and so amazing that if you’re going to just pick it apart, you’re making progressives look like people that can count beans but can’t make soup.
You might remember this more clearly than me, but I don’t recall us arguing that someone other than a white male should host John Oliver’s show. We have made the point many times that there must be someone other than a white guy who is qualified to host a late-night show, and have pointed out dozens of amazing possibilities.
It was done in the spirit of “Just asking a question.” It was a glowing review of the show, but it still had that, “Mmm, but it’s gotta be a white guy…” Are you fucking kidding me, people?
Well, let’s talk about all of this: “Did the Onion go too far?” I don’t remember if that was even the headline, but we’re talking about the tweet after the Academy Awards about Quvenzhané Wallis, the preteen actress from “Beast of the Southern Wilds.” They called her a cunt.
They were making fun of click-bait journalism!
By calling a 9-year-old a cunt? On the best night of her life? Make fun of click-bait journalism with some other target!
I do think that you’re right when you say that comedians play a really important role in opening up and furthering the kind of conversation that we absolutely have to have: Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Chris Rock. You can go back to George Carlin, to Lenny Bruce, as far back as you want to go. There are really important conversations that can be started off of comedy. Yes, if somebody does a quick shrill piece that only says, “This is a racist joke,” that’s sometimes stoking outrage and not helpful to the bigger conversation. Maybe that’s Internet journalism’s equivalent of the comic’s easy dick joke.
I’d defend every story we did about the Onion’s tweet — they were stories about the history of that word and how it works, about the power it has and who gets to use it, about who the target of that joke was, and how it was received.
But how do you know how other people are receiving it?
Because you can see how it’s being tweeted or retweeted, you can see how the culture is talking about it. And to wonder whether it’s an appropriate joke to make about a preteen on that night, to me, that’s fair. I’m not sure that asking any of those questions chills the dialogue or makes comedians feel like they can’t make a joke.
Let me just make one more point. John Oliver doesn’t have many bigger champions in the media than us. We have a been a big fan and celebrator of the important work he did on “The Daily Show,” the job he did filling in for Stewart, and then his own show. But it’s valid to look at the big-picture of late-night TV — Fallon, Kimmel, Letterman, Conan, Meyers, Stewart, Ferguson, Colbert — and to say it’s exclusively white. Exclusively white, straight and male. I don’t think it takes anything away from the brilliance of John Oliver to point that out.
It qualifies his triumph in what he does and it makes some people stop looking at the content of what is coming out of the face. All they’re saying is, “another white male,” and they take it down a couple notches.
But if all the faces are white males, shouldn’t people say that? Are we really suggesting that in every case, these are the most talented people?
But in John Oliver’s specific case, what did he have to do with that? If anything, all he’s done is champion the transgendered, champion women that are fighting against oppression and misogyny and stuff like that. So it’s an irrelevant point at that point. Again, it goes back to, you’re just looking at beans. You’re just counting. If you want to do a bigger article about that subject, that’s fine, but to slip it into an article just about John Oliver and his show, what does that have to do with anything?
If people like Louis C.K. and Bill Burr are the two most brilliant comedians working right now, I can’t imagine them going, despite the fact that they’re white and redheaded, “There’s just two white, redheaded guys.” It has nothing to do with anything. You’re now getting back to some bigot in the ’50s, you’re doing the same thing of the guy who says about his doctor, “He’s a black guy, but he does have some good points.” What the fuck does that have to do with anything?
If the score is eight, nine or 10 white guys and zero for everybody else, giving that score seems relevant.
Not in an article about one of the individual white guys, though.
That one sentence, you think, takes away from the individual?
It totally does. You’re focusing on something that has nothing to do with the actual content of what he’s doing.
That’s the big-picture context in which every show exists.
Then do that in an article about the bigger picture.
We have. But why can’t all these things fit together in a big conversation?
Because it feels like you’re throwing red meat out to a certain segment of your readers to go, “OK. Good, they pointed that out because that concerns me.” I just don’t know what that has to do with comedy and content and being ballsy. It’s like when guys go, “Well, women aren’t funny.” It’s like, well, you’re saying it based on nothing. You don’t watch a lot of female comedy.
(laughs) Maybe that’s because none of them are on in late night.
Yeah, none of them are hosting. But any host knows that the funniest people on Twitter are all women. All the funniest people on Twitter are women, and I can name 50 hilarious female comedians and they’re all doing their own thing.
So the fact that none of them get that opportunity to do a show at 11 o’clock or after …
Yeah, they don’t get to do some boring-ass, 11:30, standard-format talk show, but they get to do “Inside Amy Schumer” and “Broad City” and “Girls.” They get to do stuff that actually has, I think, way more effect on society. Maybe a lot of them don’t want to be restricted by that format. It’s not the most free format.
My guess is some of these people might not mind having the opportunity to work four nights a week for a lot of money in a high-profile, important TV job. And to have the chance, like Stewart and Colbert and Oliver, to remake the format.
Fine, do a big article about that, but it does not belong in an individual article about a John Oliver or a Conan who could not be bigger allies towards people of color, towards women, towards transgender people. It is an unnecessary, little jab.
Those guys try to put women on their staff, they try to have women on their show as much as they can. They’re fighting the same fight. I’m just telling you, the way that someone like me reads it, and I’m the kind of reader that I think you guys want to have, it just makes me roll my eyes and go, “Jesus Christ, that is not what this article should be about.” That should not be in this article. It just shouldn’t. Yes, the bigger picture, that’s a huge question to ask. There’s plenty of women I know that could easily host one of those shows, but we’re talking about these very old, dying out, network dinosaurs. It’ll be another generation before they open up to shit like that.
There’s been a lot of turnover in the last year on these shows. The generational turnover just happened. And it looks as white and male as it did before!
I know! Look, I’m just as frustrated. At least they’ve been giving it to funny white males; at least we have John Oliver and Conan and Seth Meyers. So they’re giving it to very open-minded progressives. They’re not giving it to Larry the Cable Guy.
We can be thankful for that, certainly. But you also just gave these shows a lot of credit for diverse writers’ rooms, and I’m not sure what the writers’ rooms look like at all of those shows.
I don’t either.
In Colbert’s case, it was very white as I recall.
But still, who gives a shit? They’re still out there fighting the good fight for progressives. They’re part of the fight to get more people of color, more women, they’re trying to open up that dialogue.
When are they going to do that, though? If the writers’ rooms are white, and if the hosts are white, when do we start to see that change that should come from having these allies that you say are in these places.
That I can’t say. I don’t know. But it doesn’t help to make them seem like not an ally for being white males hosting these shows. That does not fucking help our side, to start picking apart people that are already on our fucking side. It must have been so frustrating for someone like Joan Rivers at the end of her life, who kicked open all these doors for women and gay people and transgendered people and people of color. Early on she was promoting Richard Pryor, she was trying to get the word out. And at the end of her life, suddenly she started having her stuff picked apart by the people that benefited directly from the risks she took and the work she did. To have them start going, “Well, that word’s not right. What is that word?” And she’s like, “Are you fucking kidding me? I opened up the doors for women to get onstage and do whatever the fuck they want. Just like the guys were doing. And now the people that benefited from that are now picking me apart.” That must have been so fucking frustrating.
Oh hey, putting my picture next to “rape joke” was hilarious. What a wonderful joke that was. By the way, don’t think I don’t know how powerful and crucial words are. I understand that. But that’s why I always give it a second and look at it again. I remember when the whole Daniel Tosh thing went down, and I’ve said this a million times. When he told that girl, “Wouldn’t it be funny if you were raped?” Awful. That was awful. That part was awful. Everything leading up to that, I will defend to the ends of the earth. I will defend any comedian being allowed to go onstage and try to make a run at making any subject funny.
But if it doesn’t work, or if people think it doesn’t work, or even if people get it and think it’s not funny, don’t they then have the right to say, “You’re kind of being an asshole”?
Well, don’t laugh. Or talk to them after the show. But the thing was, in that case, she interrupted him before he could get to the punch line. Maybe there wasn’t even a punch line there, I don’t know.
Again, his answer to the heckler was awful. Look, if you’re sitting there watching Lenny Bruce and he goes, “How many n**gers here–” and you’re like, “You fucking racist!” At that point, you’re totally justified screaming racist at him, but you don’t understand how come because he’s doing it to startle you and then bring it to a point about, “Here’s why I hate racism, but I have to do it this way.” So for all we know, Tosh was getting to a point about how rape is awful. Also, it’s an open mic. At an open mic you’re allowed to go onstage and fuck up and just make horrible mistakes. You can’t judge people on that.
Leave the room or don’t laugh. But you can’t interrupt the guy. Just walk up after the show and go, “Hey, I had a problem.” OK, I’ll talk to you. Fine. Anyway, I heard about it and said, look, trying to find a way to make a joke about rape, you’re allowed to try. You’re allowed. You don’t get to yell at someone if they don’t like the joke.
A guy wrote to me and was like, “I didn’t know that you’re so pro-rape and I will never watch anything you’ll do again. Violence against women is really serious.” I’m like, oh, well, does that mean you’ll never watch anything with Sean Connery? I named a bunch of other actors that have hit and beaten women and are on record as hitting women, and wrote back, “At least they’re not making jokes about it, yeah, they’re actually doing it.” But in his mind what I was doing was actually worse. I’ve never made a joke about rape, but I’m not going to tell anyone else that these are the things I talk about and you have to work within that box. Other male and female comedians have made brilliant jokes about rape, brilliant points about it through jokes. Through jokes.
I’m not going to defend shrillness or scoldinesss. Sometimes Internet outrage culture is too shrill; sometimes we’re too shrill. All I’m arguing about jokes is that it’s important to sort of keep in mind the context and the target.
Yeah, that’s why we do open mics and try to work out the joke we’re making perfect. So if you’re at a free open mic where someone’s working it out, you can’t yell at them in the process.
You know who really hated jokes about racism back in the ’50s and ’60s? Fucking racists. They wanted that shit to be serious. But once you start making jokes about it, you can then start pulling it apart and pulling it down. You saw with those Charlie Hebdo attacks; they do not like jokes about the prophet because they use that shit to suppress women, to kill gays, to murder other people. If you’re making fun of them, they’re not cool with that. I’ve heard people go, “I bet rapists laugh at rape jokes all the time.” I bet they don’t, because that [violence] is the one pathetic slice of power they feel like they have.
Sounds like Bill Cosby made a rape reference the other night.
Well, you can’t make a rape joke if you’re a fucking rapist. There’s a huge difference. But if you’re someone that is sickened by rape and sickened by how much of it there seems to be in the world, then yeah, one way you deal with it is to make a joke about it.
Does Twitter then decontextualize things sometimes?
Well, that was that whole experiment I did.
Certainly, yes. But when you talk about what kind of a response something gets, I think back to the Asiana Airlines joke — I know you think we didn’t get the joke, and that we thought the joke didn’t work — but scrolling through all the Twitter responses and it was just a sea of obnoxiously nasty Asian name jokes and it’s like, oh man. No matter what you intended — maybe you’re making a completely deft, ironic comment. But if it is in an environment like that in which sometimes the intent can be unclear, and the response can then be that this nastiness…
And in that case, you’re asking anyone doing comedy to constantly think of an out-of-context moment, which we can’t do. What if somebody walks by the room of a comedy club and just hears one line of mine out of context? Am I responsible for that?
You’re talking about my joke? The “We so solly” joke?
Yes.
But the responses were never like, “Haha, dumb Asians.” It was like, “Oh that stupid fucking station.” If you look at all the responses, they weren’t laughing because, “Oh this silly Asian name.” And literally two tweets before, I had said, “Holy shit, these are the dumbest people.” I can’t believe they literally fell for a joke that a morning zoo would immediately go, “Oh, come on, guys.”
Right, somebody actually sat there and typed that onto a slide. Four of them had to read it.
There were 900 opportunities for someone to just go, “Guys, come on!” And they all just went, “Well, all right. Oh, wow.” And at that point because it was such a public joke at that point, on the station, not the Asian names. Here’s the other thing, though, let’s say you were scrolling through and you honestly thought, “Hey, I feel like that’s racist or inappropriate.” But then, it got explained to you. It got explained, not just me, everyone was like, “Are you guys kidding? He’s making fun of–” and then you doubled down and said, “In the wake of the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman verdict…” and I’m like, are you tying this in with the murder of an unarmed black kid and saying that this is part of the atmosphere of evil that’s hanging over us racially right now? I was making fun of how awful our news services are in bringing us information. That was scary to me. That’s scary that people that are responsible for informing the public fall for shit like that and that deserves all the fucking ridicule possible. All the ridicule possible.
It amazes me that a roomful of people could type those lines in and enter them onto a script and nobody reads them out loud and figures it out. But we are in a really polarized climate …
Not just along racial lines, along financial lines, along sexual lines. So that is why more than anything we need humor like that, to illustrate this stuff and make it seem manageable. If you can make fun of it, you can manage it. If you can laugh at it, you can manage it.
But I saw those responses and there were lots of playground Asian name jokes in there. It’s one thing to say we didn’t get the joke …
I’m sorry, you didn’t get the joke. Objectively, you didn’t get the joke and then you doubled down on not getting it once you realized what the joke was instead of going, “Oh, that’s what he was doing, we get it, OK.” No problem, I miss shit all the time and then go, “Oh, I got it, no problem. I was wrong there.”
By the way, not only am I not responsible for the responses, I’m glad that there were shitty responses. Because those shitty responses lead to someone else going, “You know, that’s not the joke.” And I’m sorry, that was a fucking good joke. I was nailing that station, having a ton of fun with it. It got all these likes, all these retweets. And the people that didn’t get it, if you then look at the people responding, they’re like, “Hey idiot, he’s not making fun of Asians, he’s making fun of …” and they’re like, “Oh …” That’s another great benefit of comedy is the people that get it wrong then get that shit pointed out to them by the people that actually got it. They go, “Oh, no, dude, you didn’t get it,” and they go “Oh!” And that creates more growth, more dialogue, more understanding.
Do you see what I’m saying? Just like the one thing that always drives me crazy in Salon articles or Slate articles or anyone that’s arguing against something like this. Social justice warriors. They will go into a comment thread and find the most extreme comments by people that are clearly unhinged. And, again, I am all for social justice warriors just like anyone else, but just like fundamentalist Christians, there are extremes that are hilarious and you make fun of that shit. Why not?
Hey, I have a 1 p.m. checkout. I’m just going to quickly pack my stuff, then come back down, to be continued.
(Resuming) We’re talking just a few days after the horrifying Charlie Hebdo murders, and it’s been a week of very complicated arguments about satire, freedom of expression, sensitivity, political correctness.
Where do you see the complications, though? I’m not trying to judge …
Well, the question of whether editors should republish these cartoons is complicated. On the one hand, you value speech and expression and independence and the guts to stand behind brave people and courageous thinking. No one wants to back down in the face of extremism or terror. But this particular conversation got twisted very fast, as it often does when the topic is Islam: Defending the publication of things you disagree with, that freedom, is absolute.
I read shit I disagree with constantly because I want my arguments and my worldviews to be strong. Stuff you don’t agree with is not radioactive. It goes back to, “Should you let kids read ‘Mein Kampf’’?” I mean, I wish you would, because then kids would recognize when the new Hitlers crop up and go, “Oh, that’s that same asshole.” I don’t know if you’ve ever read “Mein Kampf.” I read it in high school.
There’s my headline! Patton Oswalt: I was a young Nazi.
(laughs) Teen Nazi. I did an interview and I was talking about the whole Bill Cosby situation. The bottom of my list of concerns about that is that it’s ruining my image of Cosby. The top of my list is that women are being fucking drugged and raped. Of course, I don’t want to believe any of this shit. I was like, “No, no, no. I don’t want this to be true.” But when you get to 20 women who all have the same story… I said something like, Hey, if you see one cockroach in your kitchen, that means there’s a thousand of them. Of course, then some story said, “Patton Oswalt Compares Rape Victims to Cockroaches.” If you read the article and see the whole quote, “Oh, no he didn’t.” They did it to get the eyes on it.
Wasn’t us!
No, that wasn’t you guys. OK, and please don’t misquote me here. I have a weird, affectionate part of me for the book “Mein Kampf” because it’s like an Onion article. You read it and you go, “I can’t believe anyone read this without cracking up because it’s just basically a dumb guy who’s angry that the world isn’t as dumb as he is, and his manifesto is, “If we could just get everyone down to my level, we’d be OK,” which to me is fucking hilarious because it is so sad and desperate. It blows me away that anyone read that book and was like, “Yeah! I’ve got to find out more about this guy.” ‘Mein Kampf’ is the biggest Onion article ever written, unwittingly. It’s so fucking hilarious and so sad. You’re like, “This guy is the most damaged motherfucker.” And then he’s about to run a country. It’s amazing.
