AVC: You were working with live animals as well. That's got to be kind of a crazy variable.
RS: Yes. We had actors crouched under this 3-foot puppet stage intermingling with live animals. The low point was when Dino [Stamatopoulos] was shat in the eye by a duck. We had actors come in, people who weren't working at all, people who desperately needed the work. They'd come and do puppets or do a voice and we'd call them later and be like, "Hey, you did a great job. We're doing another thing next Friday, we got…" "You know what, I don't think so." They couldn't handle being underneath that tiny stage. It was too painful.
AVC: It seemed to entail an enormous amount of work on everybody's part.
RS: Oh boy, it was a hard show to mount. And the ironic thing was we really weren't interested in making the animals do anything difficult. The whole joke was that the animals are not in on the joke. They're just sitting around and disappointing us with their animal behavior. It was about how much we invest in our animals' personalities, and how we portray them like humans. And the gap between that and reality. So, I just wanted the animals to sit around most of the time, and even that ended up being hard to do. Even just sitting, sometimes. It's just not that easy to sit a duck on a chair and have it stay there. Even just for a few seconds, to get it to sit in front of a plate of Peking duck. Or a cow to drink from a milkshake.
AVC: Tell me about the DVD. Are there going to be commentaries?
RS: Yes. Dino and myself and Doug Dale, the host of the show, did commentary on all eight episodes. I brought in Andy Breckman for a couple of episodes. He's a really great comedy writer, the guy who created Monk. He worked on the show just sort of when he could at the time, and he came up with the "Stedman" cartoon, which is probably funnier than any cartoon I came up with on SNL.
AVC: I'm partial to the cartoon about the superhero who's always trying to get his alter ego laid.
RS: Oh, "Wonderman"? That was mine. Thank you. I did the voice of that guy, too. Most people go bananas over the "Stedman" cartoon. I actually rejected it at first, because it was too mean for me. I have no problem making fun of people, but there are certain things that make me uncomfortable. I'm uncomfortable about drug addiction jokes. Addiction humor sometimes makes me uncomfortable, because I feel sorry for the people it targets. It's something that they can't necessarily help. It's a disease. It's a hard thing for me to laugh at. I don't laugh at handicapped jokes very easily. Things where people can't help it, I get into trouble. In this case, the idea that Oprah was unattractive actually made me uncomfortable. The whole idea that Stedman can't stand to have sex with her made me uncomfortable. But I revisited it a week later, and understood it was far too funny to adhere to that rule.
AVC: Funny excuses an awful lot.
RS: Yeah, without question, that's true. That should be called the Michael Richards rule. That was the cardinal crime. He was trying to be ironic and failing in the worst possible way. The rage underneath his attempt at irony was so transparent you really were confused at what he was trying to do.
AVC: You talked a little bit about being uncomfortable with jokes about drug addiction. But there was a fair amount of drug humor on TV Funhouse.
RS: But it wasn't making fun of people who were really suffering from a serious addiction, a problem. I actually did break the rule on TV Funhouse. I broke the rule with another Andy Breckman sketch, which was called "Kidder, Downey, and Heche." It was such a strange idea that I thought it was too funny not to do. I can't even remember the premise now. Because all three of them had wandered aimlessly in a drunken or drug-induced stupor into somebody's house, in the cartoon they tried to use this "talent" as a skill and become private investigators. One time Conan wanted me to do the lips of Nick Nolte's mug shot, and [head writer Mike] Sweeney approached me about this and I was like, "Really? I feel so bad for the guy. He's got a problem he's working through. He was caught in this awful state." And we didn't do it, and literally a month later, Steve Martin in his monologue at the Academy Awards, it was a punch line to one of his monologue jokes, and there on the Kodak Stage or the Shrine Auditorium was a gigantic Nick Nolte shot. The whole world laughed at him. So, I guess I was too squeamish or something. People would probably be surprised that I do try to draw the line at certain points. With the Zohan movie, I drew a lot of the lines. There are going to be people on both sides who disagree and they'll think I'm crazy to say things like that. "What do you mean restraint? Are you kidding me, with the Hezbollah Hotline?" Or something like that. But, I don't know, it's not like we were saying these three guys were terrorists. We were kind of making the point that they weren't.
AVC: Getting back to the "TV Funhouse" SNL special. Could you talk a little bit about putting that together? It's probably one of the best Saturday Night Live episodes of the last 15 years.
RS: Well, I'm glad you think so. It didn't read like it was the funniest episodes in the last 15 years to the folks over at ACNielsen.
AVC: It seems like it's always athletes that get the best…
RS: Best ratings?
AVC: It's got to be a little dispiriting to think, "LeBron James is getting better ratings than my life's work."
RS: It was a little humbling in that sense, to do something in between a rerun and a first run. I always know those cartoons have a very loyal following, but there is a chunk of the audience that are there to watch the performers in the live show and it's probably a bathroom break for some of those people.
AVC: It's generally the funniest part of every episode. That and the Digital Video.
RS: The Digital Video has really found a niche. I still like to do the cartoons, but they're not as vital as they seemed before. They felt really essential to the show when they were the only pre-taped element. But I feel like when we have a good one, it adds a lot to the show. I had a good one, the Dora The Explorer one, which I wish was on the best-of DVD that I did a couple years ago. But the best-of, I had complete control of the whole episode. The cast was very nice. I asked the cast to do interstitial pieces, reacting to [Ambiguously Gay Duo] Ace and Gary. And they basically did it as a favor. I always wanted to a best-of cartoon show, but once I got the opportunity, I got very paranoid. How am I going to entertain these people with cartoons for the whole 90 minutes? So I felt like I had to have live people in there. I probably didn't, but I did it anyway.
AVC: I think having Colbert and Carell as Ace and Gary in the interstitial material would be an attraction as well.
RS: Well, you would think. ACNielsen didn't seem to agree.
AVC: Were the ratings really that bad for it?
RS: No, they were fine, but they weren't up to a first-run show. They were low for a first-run show. It just reinforced that there's definitely a niche audience for it. These things have enjoyed a great deal of positive response in the media, which is great and flattering. But I never thought that everybody who watches Saturday Night Live loves these cartoons. It's a very specific thing, and Saturday Night Live is a live show. It's about live performers and you're watching cartoons for 90 minutes.
AVC: Were you worried about the topicality of the cartoons? You were oftentimes responding to something very immediate in the culture.
RS: Over the years, I started making the cartoons more immediately topical. I've been pushing the animators. Originally the lead time was five to six weeks, and the last two years, it's been more like two weeks. They've been able to pull off stuff that's amazed me over the last two years. The last thing I did this year was a Barack Obama cartoon that I kind of rushed out. I wasn't able to go into production until after the writers' strike ended. But they were able to get it on the second show back. I was incredibly grateful that they could do it, but once they were able to prove to me that they were able to do cartoons in two weeks, they kind of fucked themselves, because they could never pretend that they couldn't after that.
AVC: Watching the best-of, did you ever find yourself thinking, "I have led a silly, silly life?"
RS: [Laughs] A very lucky life. When I got that cartoon I thought I would do it for a couple of years, then I hung onto it, because I never stop being amazed that I'm able to do it. Over the years, I see people trying to do cartoons on the web, short-form stuff, and I'm this one person that is able to do it on this huge forum and waste a lot of NBC money. That'll probably change. You know how that's going. Their primetime television, everybody's getting hit.
AVC: Saturday Night Live had to cut the budget?
RS: They had to chop some cast members last year. There were budget cuts after the writers' strike for sure. A lot of shows were hit with that stuff. But fortunately [veteran staff-writer James] Downey wrote a sketch that Hillary [Clinton] felt the need to comment on in the middle of the debate.
AVC: Do you feel like that revitalized the show?
RS: It certainly did in the media. There's nothing the media loves more than to be the subject of everyone's attention. The premise of Downey's sketch was that the media had made the decision to favor Barack Obama, and so not only was it a funny political sketch that Hillary Clinton actually mentioned in a debate, but the subject of the sketch was a group of people deciding whether to make it a story or not.
AVC: There's an element of navel-gazing to it that's absolutely irresistible to the media.
RS: Tonight's subject: ME!
AVC: As a satirist, which candidate would you—
RS: Hillary. Everybody agrees that Hillary will be the funniest person to be president. Was that was your question?
AVC: That was my question. Why do you think that is?
RS: Baggage. That's the reason that she isn't getting in, pretty much. I have never seen a candidate come into a race with so much baggage and be so prejudged as Hillary Clinton. I've always been amazed at the magnitude of hatred a certain segment of the public has for her. It's a combination of factors: There's the sexist side of it that she's a strong woman that doesn't always convey a big sense of humor. Not that there are a lot of male candidates who are necessarily cut-ups either. There's that, then there's the fact that the Clintons are basically the most successful Democratic politicians of the last 30 years, and thus became lightning rods for the opposition. You put those two things together, sexism and partisanship. You couldn't build a candidate that had more baggage than Hillary. Those two things. It's pretty incredible. No candidate has ever demonstrated in an unwitting way how wrong-headed the way we make decisions about who will run our country really is.
AVC: It seems like Obama would be a difficult subject for satirists.
RS: I think he has a lot of funny moves that people will be able to pick up and imitate. I think Obama and McCain are both funny. They're just no Hillary. There's just too much going on there for either of those guys to possibly compete. For Obama, it could be a John Kennedy situation where everybody is going to invest all this hope and optimism, idealism, but John Kennedy was probably the first president to be subjected to a great deal of satire once he was elected. Maybe it was because he had a funny accent.
AVC: Getting back to Obama, one of the reasons the media seized on the whole Jeremiah Wright thing was because here was an aspect of Obama and his history that was very broad. That was very silly. It was such an incredibly juicy, juicy target for satire that they finally had an in and they definitely seized on that.
RS: I think the reason the media seized on it is because it was all over YouTube and it was an unavoidable subject. They knew that the Republicans were going to seize on it and they knew that the media, everybody believes that the media tries to shape our perceptions. Whether this is true or not, everyone assumes that it is. Here was something that was completely beyond their control. This was a sound bite that everybody could see. Everybody would have access to it on the web. Basically, it had to be addressed. Once they dove in, absolutely it was a juicy story, because Jeremiah Wright was a juicy character. I haven't had a chance to do Obama on Conan yet, but I did do Jeremiah Wright. They were anxious to do a Jeremiah Wright Clutch Cargo.
AVC: I wanted him to linger in the public eye longer so you could do more of those Jeremiah Wright bits.
RS: Sure. Well, I don't know what happened. Obama castigated him then he disappeared.
AVC: It seems like a lot of these stories have a short shelf life.
RS: Let's see what happens in the fall. Let's check in the fall and see if that story has a short shelf life. You know that it's going to be used on some level, but Obama's genius is that he's been the anti-politics candidate. Even before he's been the subject of criticism because of Jeremiah Wright, he's always been able to dismiss it as politics as usual. So every time he gets criticized, and you're placed in a position of judging Obama on this new set of criticisms, he turns the mirror on you in a brilliant way. He makes you ask yourself whether you really want to go there and choose your candidate on something like that. If Hillary Clinton could have come up with this, she might have had more success.
AVC: It seems like with McCain, at this point the only satirical angle for him is old-people jokes.
RS: Oh, I can't stand it!
AVC: It also seems like, a) 72 really isn't all that old these days, and b) old jokes are inherently one-size-fits-all.
RS: But he also doesn't seem like an old fogey. Bob Dole was old and he also came off like a bitter old man. Bob Dole is my favorite comedy bit I've ever done. Doing the lips of Bob Dole on Conan. I enjoyed that even more than Triumph. Because he was really a crotchety old man. He had that persona. He had it back when he was running with Gerald Ford in the '70s. He was this crazy, angry guy, this Republican hatchet man. Then he just became this hilariously tragic, Nixonian figure. He was a crotchety old guy who was never going to get his moment in the sun, and then he finally got it against Clinton. It's a little bit of a parallel to McCain in the sense that everybody thinks McCain's candidacy is going to end up like Dole's, a "so-what?" kind of candidate who doesn't energize the party and gets clobbered. Everybody's perception is that the Democrats can only beat themselves. The only ones who haven't in the last 30 years are the Clintons.
AVC: It would be nice if comic writers could satirize his actual politics and not just indulge in the standard "He's old! His first car was a dinosaur!"
RS: You know, we did that with Dole, because Dole felt like an old man.
AVC: It was the Wilford Brimley thing where he was born an old man.
RS: Thank you, I should be interviewing you. You said it in like five words. Let me tell you one more thing about Zohan. We were talking about the Arabs and Israelis in the movie and we went to all this trouble to hire all these real people. The point of the movie is what they have in common. It was fascinating to see that it came to life on the set. It manifested itself on the set because some of these people really were from Israel and had practically never been here before. And to see them debate and discuss every night with the Arab-American actors was pretty amazing. For both sides, they'd never really interacted. Here in America, I get the sense that there is a sort of acceptance of either side, a "the war's over there" kind of thing. But it's not like Israeli-Americans and Arab-Americans are all buddy-buddy necessarily. But these guys had never had a dialogue with each other. On these long nights on the set, we were stuck doing crowd scenes for eight hours a night. And they'd hang out and talk to each other, hang out and talk about other shit. And there were these people saying, "I'd never trusted an Israeli. I'd been brought up to hate them unilaterally. My perception of them has just been a stern army guy at checkpoint who gives me a hard time for trying to get into Israel." And the reverse is true as well, you know. Israelis have all these perceptions about Arabs. It was amazing to see, and this was completely unexpected, that people would have their perceptions shaken by appearing in this silly summer comedy.
AVC: It sounds like you think that Don't Mess With The Zohan does have the capacity to bring people together.
RS: Well, let me say this: One of the actors invited a bunch of actors to Las Vegas. One of the Israeli guys owns a restaurant and both Israeli and Arab actors went out there. He set them up at parties and everything. I just think that if Israelis and Arabs can share a hookah, then I think that says a lot about their potential to share a tiny sliver of land in the Middle East as well.
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