Into the bowels
of comedy

>> Paul Provenza takes audiences behind the scenes to get down and dirty in The Green Room

by JOHN CUSTODIO

It takes a certain passion, not to say monomania, to trace the history of one joke and its different permutations, but that’s exactly what Paul Provenza did when he made The Aristocrats. That same obsession led him to create The Green Room for this year’s Just for Laughs. Each night, Provenza will enlist comedians participating in the festival to tell their stories and discuss the humour process.

Why The Green Room?

“Green rooms are the bowels of show biz, but they’re also where performers are at their most relaxed. The idea behind the show is to give people a behind-the-scenes look at the comedy world. The comedians I know are really fascinating people. There’s a lot more to their work than just being funny. People should see what they’re like when they’re not in front of audiences, when they don’t have to care about their ‘image’.”

“We did a similar show at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It was like lightning in a bottle, man. When you can make comedians feel as free as if they were in a room with just other comedians, what you get is an anything-can-happen vibe. One of the things I’d do is get performers talking about their most difficult material, ’cause that’s what happens in green rooms. ‘I was doing this bit, and this guy was totally heckling me’—that kind of thing. Imagine getting an audience involved in that, particularly when you’re dealing with material that supposedly crosses lines.

“In Edinburgh, I got to talk to Matt Stone and Trey Parker about the censorship battles they’ve fought making South Park, about Tom Cruise going ballistic over their Scientology episode, about all the legal wrangling with Paramount and Comedy Central that resulted in Isaac Hayes leaving the show because they wouldn’t back down. They pretty much told him, ‘We’ve gone after every other religion, why’s yours any better?’”

Retard Porn

“A Canadian comic, whose work I really admire, Glenn Wool, does this one bit I think is brilliant, but audiences find it so challenging, he’s never able to get through it all. It’s about retard porn. The concept alone is challenging, right? People assume it’s purely provocative, done for shock value. But it’s not. Well, I brought him out on stage to perform it and not only did he get through it, we spent the rest of the show taking the bit apart and analyzing it. By the end, Glenn had forced the audience to re-examine their assumptions about mental retardation and sexuality. It was a blast!”

Rape jokes

“On another night, the topic was rape jokes. Can you never joke about rape? Everyone knows rape is bad, right? Shouldn’t that make what a comedian says about it necessarily ironic? Can anyone really believe a comedian would actually be pro rape? So there’s Demetri Martin, who’s so family friendly, talking about rape jokes he’d written but could never perform because they’re too offensive, and there’s this audience telling him, no, no, do it, it’s a great joke! That’s the idea behind The Green Room: encouraging creative freedom. And the audience is down with it, man! This one woman got up and announced that she’d been raped between the ages of 11 and 15, and someone yelled out, ‘That’s hot!’ She was taken aback at first, but believe it or not, she laughed. The crowd, of course, went nuts.”

Elevating the art

“The truth is, there’s a huge audience out there that’s tired of anodyne, sanitized, mainstream comedy. They want to hear challenging stuff. Comedy is a genuine art form. Why impose limitations on it? Other art forms touch on the full range of human emotions; why not comedy? I like what Michael O’Donahue once said: ‘Laughter is a response to comedy. It is not the only response.’ Like all art, comedy can disturb, perplex, offend, or even anger you; it can also make you happy or give you insight. It can do anything any other art form can do.

“It’s a dream of mine to elevate the art of comedy and people’s understanding of it, because right now it’s too limited, too definitive, like if it doesn’t make you laugh, it’s not comedy. You may or may not like country music or hip hop, but you don’t say it’s not music. You accept that it is what it is.”

The Green Room at Theatre
Ste-Catherine, July 18–20,
11:59 p.m., $18.50