Lee Camp's Reading List

"Paul Provenza has done many things. He was the director of The Aristocrats , the movie, and he was the host of a cable show called Green Room with Paul Provenza and he’s done a million other things – most of them very good projects. I can’t say enough good things about this book. That may sound egotistical because two pages in the book contain an interview with me. But even if you were to take that out, I still think this is one of the best books written on comedy. It’s composed of interviews with comedians. For the most part, Paul is not interjecting his own opinions, he’s mainly trying to draw out the opinions of others. In my view, he talks to some of the best comedians of our time – George Carlin and Patton Oswalt and Janeane Garofalo and Billy Connolly. Legendary comedians like the Smothers Brothers. Brilliant satirists like Stephen Colbert and The Onion writers. It groups all of these amazing comics into this book and elicits their view on comedy. No other book has ever accomplished such a feat so honestly. I wish I had had this book to guide me when I was starting out in stand-up 14 years ago. It’s tough to say. One thing you can gain from reading it is that great comedians often have very different views of the world. Paul shows that comedy can come from all angles and all places. Some comedians are trying to get across a message and some aren’t. But pretty much everyone in the book understands the power of comedy. I started as an observational comedian, a comedian who makes observations about life but doesn’t make a deeper point. I did that for years, and then I made a transition in my personal life and in my comedy to talking not necessarily about politics but mainly about important world issues – issues that are affecting society. I saw that when I talked about deeper issues people left the show with more than just a good mood, they left with a new understanding, or even if they disagreed with the point I was making, they left with new information. That’s what I love about comedy. You can speak to a room full of every different type of opinion and they will not only listen but they’ll enjoy themselves too. People that disagree with me leave saying they enjoyed the show. If I were just up there giving a speech and someone disagreed with it they would walk out but with comedy people will pay attention and learn. It’s very powerful in that way. Like I was saying earlier, comedy is a shortcut into people’s minds. In terms of the first part of the question, his point that advocacy comedy doesn’t work, I disagree. The reason why goes to the second part of your question. If a comedian is focused solely on influencing an audience, they’ll stop listening. I always remain conscious of keeping the whole room laughing during my stand-up act. That’s been really important to me because I feel like my gift, the thing I’ve worked at for so many years and the thing I’ve always wanted to do is to make people laugh. If I lose the laughter I’m just a speaker, and I’m a mediocre speaker. There are a million other people who could stand up on a soapbox. But as a comedian making a point I’m one of a small group. And if I’m doing it well then I’m near the top of that group that change minds while entertaining people. So I wouldn’t agree. You can definitely set out to change minds. Sometimes it’s going to work and sometimes it’s not. The right does understand that there is power in comedy. Fox News attempted a comedy show. It didn’t work out. When the punchline entails foreclosure on the family home, it doesn’t sit right with most people, even Fox watchers. The right wing would like to match the left-wing comedy machine but so far it’s failed. “The right wing would like to match the left-wing comedy machine but so far it’s failed.” Look at what happened to Dennis Miller. I was a huge fan of his stuff in the eighties and nineties. Then he became far right wing and his comedy became angrier and less funny. Now it makes me sad to watch him. Watching someone well-off trash the idea of helping people who are worse off is not funny, to me at least. No organisations as big as the Cato but I work a lot with a group called Laughing Liberally. We do live shows and we’ve occasionally been hired by left-wing organisations like the American Prospect or SEIU [Service Employees International Union] to make videos that have a point but are funny. So we’re sometimes hired by left-wing organisations to get a point out, and if we agree with the point we make the video because we feel like we’re doing something good for the country and at the same time making people laugh. And that’s what we’re good at, so I don’t think I have a problem with that."

"The plot defies summary. It follows Yossarian and his fellow airmen through the war and a series of insane events. It shows the insanity of war – from what the soldiers do day-to-day to the geopolitics. When Joseph Heller wrote Catch-22 he was being satirical, but he knew it wasn’t far off from reality. The plot might seem unbelievable but life has imitated art. The United States now funds both sides of the war in Afghanistan – we pay the Taliban millions so that they will let our trucks through so that we can then fight the Taliban. Catch-22 is incredibly funny but it’s also a prophecy. “When Joseph Heller wrote Catch-22 he was being satirical, but he knew it wasn’t far off from reality.” Normally you read it in high school, but I read it right out of college – it completely changed my view on comedy. It is an intense dark satirical book but at the same time hilarious. It made me think: If I could do something so funny about such dark topics in such a way that it makes people think, that would be a huge accomplishment. It’s probably the book that has had the biggest impact on my comedy. It worked all over the country, naturally! My starting of the movement consisted of announcing it on three videos. I probably personally moved Catch-22 a couple of times. I also moved Dick Cheney’s book to the “true crime” section of a bookstore. It’s a nice legal form of protest."

"He was a brilliant comedian. Although he was only moderately known in the US when he died, he’s become a cult figure and he was always better known in the UK, where they still worship him as one of the best comedians who ever lived. He did a lot of great satire and political comedy – very cutting stuff about war and America and commercialism. Like Catch 22, some of his stuff seems so prophetic. If you watch the clips of the bits he did on the first Iraq war, they apply equally to the second Iraq war . He died before the second Iraq war but he was making jokes about the military or the US saying that we need to attack Saddam because he had weapons of mass destruction. “How do you know?” “Well, we have the receipts.” You feel like if people watched more Bill Hicks maybe it could have kept us out of the second Iraq war. But instead the things he was ranting about in 1990 just got worse. The book is largely his routines written down. It’s great stuff, dark and equally, if not more, applicable today. Yeah, I like those two. I think that’s important. Some might argue you don’t want to disturb the peace just to wreak havoc but when everyone accepts the way things are, when people unquestionably go with the flow, it’s usually not good. I think that being disruptive is useful – it can shock people into seeing the world the way it really is."

"There’s not much of a political agenda in this book, although I guess the writers are largely on the left, but it’s just fall-off-your-chair funny. They go through the entire history of America and satirise accepted mythology in brilliant fashion. It’s made up like a textbook. It’s so funny it’s almost too much for a book. There are 20 good jokes per page and it’s 400 pages long. By the time you make your way through you’ll be in awe of the ability of the writers. I do think it’s an acknowledgement of the power of comedy and an acknowledgement of how many people turn to comedy shows to get educated about current events. Politicians want to be seen by people that are turning to the Comedy Channel for their news so they go on The Daily Show . Jon Stewart sometimes will take on these elected officials harder than you’ll ever see on a regular newscast. That’s another reason people tune in. In satire you have to go after your target full-on. I feel like soft satire falls short of funny. You really gotta cut deep. But I’m not modelling myself after Stewart – I actually think we’re very different. The only thing that’s similar about us is we’re both left-wing comedians. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter My tone and my outlook on the world is different but we live in a world that doesn’t have much satirical political comedy out there. Left-wing political comedians get compared to one another because there aren’t that many of us. But I can’t say I dislike the comparison. I love getting compared to Stewart or Hicks."

"They are a prank group. They prank corporations in such a way that the corporations are forced to address the prank. A good example is a year ago they issued an authentic sounding press release announcing that General Electric would be giving back their billions of dollars in tax refunds to the government because General Electric is hugely profitable so didn’t need this huge tax refund. The media thought it was real – the Associated Press reported, “General Electric to return tax refund,” which forced GE to say, “Hey, that great thing you heard we were going to do, we’re definitely not doing it.” Another good example was the Yes Men announced that Dow Chemical would be paying the victims of the Bhopal chemical spill. Dow then had to come forward and say, “No, we’re not paying the victims who had their lives destroyed.” Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The Yes Men do the best guerrilla satire. Andy [the alter ego of Jacques Servin] pretended he was a Dow Chemical representative. The idea of satire is taking the reverse point of view of what you actually believe. Like when the Republicans vetoed child healthcare, I said: “I agree because children are fucking annoying and we don’t need more of them around.” When Andy addresses the world as a Dow Chemical employee on TV, he’s living out a satirical role – I think it’s brilliant. The book follows some of their pranks – I believe more than just that one. They were invited to speak at the World Trade Organisation so they went and announced they had a new business model for basically enslaving human beings. The businessmen they presented to were not horrified – some of them actually wanted the Yes Men to come and speak at their events. Yes, there are lots of ways to get material out now. That takes away the gatekeepers. I can do my podcast and nobody tells me what to do, what to say, how to say it. If I choose not to have advertisers, I have nobody paying me to have a certain point of view. The gatekeepers are gone. If you want to watch my stuff, you can just come to leecamp . net and see it. There’s no need to kowtow to big corporations and corporate media channels. The unfortunate side is that it’s difficult for most podcasters to make a living. I may never be allowed to do my comedy on one of the late-night television shows, or at least I haven’t so far, because the topics I’m talking about are not safe territory. They want humour that’s easy to digest – they don’t want to offend anyone. If I was living in the seventies or eighties, TV would be my only way to reach people, other than live performance. Nowadays I can do what I do and still reach people around the country and around the world. And I can still make a meagre living. There’s a huge difference between O’Keefe and the Yes Men. O’Keefe took the videos of him going into ACORN [Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now] offices, as an example, and edited them in a misleading way. In one an ACORN employee humoured O’Keefe while he was posing as a pimp, but immediately after called the cops and tried to get him arrested. They have phone records showing he called the cops. O’Keefe leaves out that part of the story. What he does isn’t satire, it’s serial misrepresentation of organisations he disagrees with. That’s a huge difference. The Yes Men use true facts. I frequently get people who say, “You shouldn’t say some of those things because they may upset people” — suggesting that if I really want to be successful I should only talk about things that everybody agrees on. I’d rather say the truth in my opinion and hope to have an effect on the people that are listening than be loved by everyone in the country. Watering down my comedy for mass consumption doesn’t interest me. Moment of Clarity is a compilation of my three-minute video rants. People around the world can view the web series – I get emails from Japan and England and Australia from people who feel the same way about corporate pillaging. Now I’m reaching readers through the book. I started the web videos in February of last year and I talked about a lot of things that Occupy eventually brought to the national spotlight. In June of last year, David Degraw, who helped create Occupy through his writings, asked me to make a video promoting a move-your-money-from-the-big-banks occupation. They tried again in September and that was the beginning of Occupy. I was lucky to be involved in the early stages. When Occupy really started in September I was able to bring my blend of comedy and activism to Wall Street and DC and Chicago and Montreal and all across North America. It’s been really fun. While the crowd might already agree with me, they’re occupying a square so they’re really in need of entertainment. So I got to help keep people jazzed up and ready to fight. That you can be pepper-sprayed for sitting still."