Paul Provenza – In The Green Room

An AmericasComedy.Com Interview

Paul Provenza wants to take you behind the scenes where only comedians hang out. He knows that the funniest, most creative material comes after the show: in the parking lot, at Denny’s at 2:00 AM and in the green rooms of comedy clubs across the nation. He’s your ticket to the comics’ world where personalities take precedence over material.

Provenza is a comedian/actor/producer and the director of the critically acclaimed 2005 documentary, “The Aristocrats.” He is currently executive producer and host of Showtime’s hit show, “The Green Room,” and co-author of the bestselling book, “Satiristas: Comedians, Contrarians, Raconteurs and Vulgarians” with internationally noted San Francisco photographer, Dan Dion.

Both of these endeavors showcase the fact that Provenza, by virtue of his stand up, past and present, has the unique ability to bring out real conversations with other comedians. To set a stage where they feel comfortable enough to have an uninhibited conversation that that they share with us.

We caught up with Provenza while he was in Montreal for the “Just for Laughs Festival,” where he was hosting Second City’s 50th Anniversary bash and giving book readings and signings.

Tell us about that eye patch you wore as a youngster.
“Yeah, yeah, I wore an eye patch. I had eye surgery. It was the bane of my entire childhood. I’d been wearing glasses since about the age of three. Back in the 1960s, eyeglasses were not unbreakable and bendable. I always had these big clunky glasses, and because I had amblyopia, which is ‘lazy eye,’ I wore an eye patch.

Because I was really only looking through one eye during most of my childhood, I had terrible depth perception. I was constantly bumping into things, falling over, tripping and spilling and breaking things. Among the things that I would break would be my glasses. My parents were like, ‘You know what, you’re going to have to learn to be more careful.’  They wouldn’t buy me new glasses; they would just put a big hunk of scotch tape on the corner. I was seriously a sad little kid. I was destined for comedy.”

Is a talent for comedy something you’re born having?
“As a matter of fact, my partner on ‘The Green Room,’ Barbara Roman, and I are working on another project with comedy writer Ron Zimmerman which very much addresses how a sense of humor in comedy is something you are born with.

“It’s a gift to be funny . . . .”
“Some people are born funny. If you have a kid who’s born with an amazing musical talent, you celebrate. If you have a kid who’s gifted with a sense of comedy and a sense of humor, they’re maligned and told to shut up and go to the back of the classroom. It’s about equating the ability to be really, really funny with a musical gift, or a gift of dance or drawing, or all that stuff we champion in any kid, except for comedy.

In my case, it was because of the ‘lazy eye’ and the eye patch and bumping into shit and just being a big klutz when I was a kid. How that related for me was that around five years old, I went to see a Jerry Lewis movie with my family. There I am watching Jerry Lewis, who is a goofy star and loved by millions, doing exactly what I happened to be doing.

Very consciously at a very young age, I realized and decided that if I’m going to get laughed at and mocked and get in trouble anyway, I may as well make it look like it was my idea and go for the laugh. You can shut up and pretend like shit didn’t happen, whine about it or feel miserable and psychologically abused for it. I just turned to comedy and that’s how it really started for me.”

Did you ever do dramatic acting or mostly just comedy?
“While I was in college, I decided I wanted to get a theater arts degree and the University of Pennsylvania did not offer one. At the time, they were in the process of building a theater arts program, but I couldn’t wait. I only had a couple of years left, so I went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (R.A.D.A.) in London. I did the first year and a half of their three-year program, returned to the University of Pennsylvania and, basically, filled in all the missing pieces to an actual theater arts degree. The university had to see what I was doing and say, ‘Well, he’s filled in all the gaps we haven’t filled in yet.’ After about a year of cajoling and whining, they issued me their first theater arts degree. But that came from my going to R.A.D.A. to study classical theater.”

“The Green Room” is groundbreaking. Is its style on purpose or by accident?
“It was very calculated. You know we had done the producing part with Barbara Roman. If you notice the way we shot it, the show opens mid-conversation. What we tried to do was not have any conventional trappings of a television show, because television shows are set up with an opening, an agenda, an ending and all this formality that immediately takes it away from any sort of reality or truth. So, we open in mid-conversation because I didn’t want the hey-the-show-is-starting-now vibe. I wanted it’s-already-happening, you get on board with it, right?”

Like shooting news or sports…
“We shot ‘The Green Room’ almost all handheld. We told the camera guys, ‘Listen, this is like shooting news or sports; we don’t know where the ball’s going; we don’t know who’s going to attack whom. Just be ready for anything.’ So all the handheld cameras are part of the vibe, in that they’re going to catch the thing that they’re not ready for.  And so you, as a viewer, you get the sense of movement and spontaneity and unpredictability.”

Doing comedy the other way around
“It was a very conscious manifesto. I’ve always felt like the things that are emotionally involving about comedy fall away when it’s on television because its all so programmed and stale. One shot, two shot, two shot, one shot and it’s all predictable. Why does comedy always have to adapt to media and television? What happens if you do it the other way around?  And so that’s what we set out to do.”

From “The Green Room’s” co-producer, Barbara Roman
“I’ve been producing comedy for a long time, live and television. Paul and I both agree that the funniest stuff we ever heard was after the show, in the green room or at the deli or bar. You know, it’s like, ‘If people could hear this, they would be blown away.’”

Buy tickets to a place you are not allowed to be, “The Green Room.”
“More great comedy has happened in parking lots at three in the morning than has ever happened on stage. My original intent was to sort of just capture it live and give comics a form to be uncensored, so it was a late night thing. The audience was all told, ‘You don’t belong here, but we’re allowing you in. This is the comedian’s space.’ They buy tickets to go to a place they’re not allowed to be.”

A crew chosen for their humanity
“It’s very conscious. There’s no detail that was not filtered through meetings and sensibility. For everything from top to bottom, every aspect of it, we brought people on board to do things like set and sign and lighting and directing. And all the key people we brought on board, we interviewed them and our real motivation in choosing anybody was not based on their resume or anything like that. (In fact, we moved a lot of people up a notch.) But it was based on humanity, like what kind of people are they? Are they going to be good people to work with? Are they going to get what we’re all about?

And then it was a question of having everybody break down all the conventions that they’re forced to work with in television. As a result, they all got wind under their wings. They were like, ‘This is cool. I’m actually getting to do something creative and interesting and unpredictable,’ and they loved it.  So the fact that everybody’s passionate about the project comes through, as well.”

Life-changing

“Comedy changed my life. It saved my life really. If it weren’t for comedy, I’d be on a water tower with a high powered rifle. Seriously, it changed my life.”

Most people are not aware of comedy as a sophisticated art form with real depth with rich humanity involved, and how really, really expressive and honest and truthful it can be. ‘The Green Room’ is a little bit about giving back, which is what ‘Satiristas’ is about, and which was what ‘The Aristocrats’ was about. I want people to have an experience that’s not so much about the comedy, but the experience that I had when I found comedy and all of the sudden I was part of a community and I was amongst other people who were also misunderstood and felt outcast and all of that sort of stuff.”

I realized I wasn’t alone and found a real family that’s been with me my entire life. What I’ve been trying to do is not only create comedy that’s funny, that people are enjoying, but also to give people a bit of an experience of what’s really is going on in comedy. What we tried to do with ‘The Green Room’ was to create an experience where you can walk away feeling the things that I felt when I first became part of the comedy world.”

“It’s more about creating an experience than it is about being funny, . . . . Being funny is the foundation of it all, but we try to create a context where more is going on than meets the eye, where you can feel things about comedy, not just watch comedy.”

Do you and Barbara choose the mix? Are you and Barbara responsible for that?
“Yes, very much. Barbara and I have had some line-ups set when somebody had to drop out and we’d have to cancel the whole show because it’s all about the combinations of people, not necessarily about the individuals. It’s very, very well thought out. Some of our choices are driven by logistical realities, like who’s available when, and things like that.  But, even given those parameters, people are put together for very, very specific reasons, either because of what I know about their work, what I know about them personally, or what I know about the relationships they have with each other.

Sometimes, it’s the really subtle things. For example, I knew that Bob Saget, just loves to joke, loves to whip out one liners. It’s really hard to get Bob to be real. But I also knew that he and Patrice O’Neal go back a long way and I know that Patrice is the kind of guy who will not tolerate you not being real with him, so I thought, ‘Here’s the perfect combo. Put them on the show with Roseanne (and he didn’t know that Roseanne was a huge fan of his) and there was a little intimidation factor being on a panel with Roseanne.’

I knew that Bob would be safe because Roseanne loves him (he didn’t even know that). Then we put Sandra Bernhard on that show because I knew that she and Roseanne had a great relationship. They egg each other on a lot and have known each other for years, so that gave Roseanne a level of comfort.”

I heard “Satiristas” builds. Do you do callbacks throughout the book?
“I don’t even know how to explain it. ‘Satiristas: Comedians, Contrarians, Raconteurs and Vulgarians’ is not journalistic, but comprises slices of conversations between myself and the other artists, as well as remarkable photography by Dan Dion. I took slices of the conversations we had and flowed them together so things sort of bounce off one another, reiterate and conflict. Different ideas merge at different paces and so they resonate in different ways when you read it in sequence.

I tried to approach ‘Satiristas’ in as artful a way as I could that would somehow complement the artfulness of Dan’s photography. So rather than it being either literal or journalistic, it’s more evocative. ‘Satiristas’ is another example of where I tried to do something that would create feelings and emotional responses or intellectual challenges to people as they’re enjoying the comedy, more than focus on the people who do the comedy.”

In your opinion, what’s the difference between a comic and satirist?
“Well, you know, ‘Satiristas’ gets into it a little bit about how ultimately that satire is irrelevant. ‘Satire,’ in its classic definition, is very, very specific; it’s an ancient Greek rule. Satire is embodying the idea that you want to mock to such a degree that it becomes self evident. Stephen Colbert is the best example of that. But, today, satire has become known as basically any comedy that has a point of view that is about political or social issues.

A lot of comedy is just people showing off. We’re focusing more on the people who have a little more substance than that and have gone through their own journeys and have points of view. Another thing I’m proud of in the book is that there is no overriding point of view.  When we first started doing it, we thought that we were going to have to balance a left wing, right wing, and all that sort of stuff. It became very clear, very quickly that these are all independent, critical thinkers. With some notable exceptions, they’re not really party members. They call out bullshit where they see bullshit. That’s one of the things that I love about the book.”

Refusing to STFU, regardless of the price
“There’s something very empowering about the book, too, because it’s all about all these people who have gone through their own personal journey and refuse to shut-the-fuck-up, regardless of the price. We live in a society now where if you’re out with friends and you’re having a conversation and some politics come up and you get animated in this discussion, and you get a little passionate about it, some idiot will always give that hack sitcom, off-the-show, poor excuse for an original idea, ‘Hey tell us what you really think,’  as if there’s something wrong or worthy of scorn in being passionate and concerned and interested. That’s one of the things that everybody in “Satiristas” defies. There’s something empowering in it. And there are life lessons in it, too, for people to be inspired to not think like everybody else and to find some connection with the fact that a lot of people don’t think like everybody else. It’s having an interesting impact on a lot of people.

They don’t take no shit for nobody. They say what’s on their mind and they say it how they say it.
“And they’ve turned what is potentially destructive in their lives into valuable content. So there’s that other sort of empowering self-help aspect that you know these people have taken the worst parts of their lives, the hardest things about being them, and turned it. Instead of shoving it in the closet and hoping it doesn’t become a problem in life, they grab it by the horns and they get on it and ride it into the sunset.”

A lot of comedy is still mediocre . . .
“Yeah, I do wanna point this out. It’s something that I feel often needs to be stated because I know that there are people who have not experienced the level of artistry and comedy that we were talking about here. The truth is, that on any average night, you go to any average comedy venue, and you’ll probably see mediocre comedy. You’ll probably see people trying to sell what they think people are going to buy. Or, you know, people who are doing sexist, racist, homophobic or even worse stuff that’s about the status quo, maligning anyone who’s different or unusual. But we’re not interested in that kind of comedy. What we’re trying to put forth is the alternative to that… that there is real artistry, real heart and soul, real compassion, and real thought and intellect in a lot of people doing comedy. A lot of what I’m doing between ‘The Green Room’ and ‘Satiristas’ is championing the good rather than criticizing the other stuff.”

The real crime
“I’m trying to make people enjoy the process of learning about these things and experience these things if different ways. On a personal level, I feel like the crime is not that there’s crap comedy out there, but that the people who are doing good comedy aren’t celebrated and separated from the pack and given their due. So, rather than deal with the negativity of lambasting everybody who sucks, I would rather focus on the people who are really extraordinary and elevate them in some way, if I can.”

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