by CHRIS BARRY

For almost 20 years Robert Smigel has consistently created some of the funniest and most memorable comic bits to ever grace network television. Intelligent, racy and with a keen eye to "pooping" on some of the lamer elements of pop culture, Smigel is the model of integrity, a man who categorically refuses to dumb down his often dumb humour to the lowest common denominator.

Celebrated for his work on Late Night With Conan O'Brien and Saturday Night Live - he's the guy who does all those animated shorts: "X-Presidents," "The Ambiguously Gay Duo" etc. - Smigel also holds the distinction of being the first, and let's all hope only, "puppeteer" to ever be chastised by both Quebec's National Assembly and the House of Commons for a few arguably off-colour jokes his character, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, made about la Belle Province last winter.

Certain to be one of the highlights of this year's Just for Laughs festival, the Mirror spoke with Smigel last week, looking for the lowdown on what it is to be a poor insult dog trying to survive in a man's world.

Mirror: Do most of the celebrities Triumph torments get the joke or do they find it difficult to laugh at themselves?

RS: Most know better than to get indignant with a puppet. It's really only with the live show where I'm forced to go toe to toe with people. But it's not exactly like I'm going up against an Oscar Wilde when I'm having it out with somebody like Vincent Pastori or, better, the Dell Guy. It's always a huge novelty and surprise to me if people get upset.

M: Any especially bad sports come to mind?

RS: Uh… that one guy in Quebec. (laughing) Everyone else in Quebec got along with Triumph. I don't know if it was only politicians and a few people in the media who were so disturbed by it. You tell me what people in Montreal thought.

M: That it was pretty funny, I suppose. Funnier still was Parliament spending the day condemning a dog puppet.

RS: Yeah, I can see how you could step back and find it funny, but I was concerned. I saw polls online showing that 85 per cent of the respondents saw it as much ado about nothing, which reassured me a little, but at the same time, when people are throwing words like "racism" around, you have to be concerned. I felt like I'd better try to understand why people were so offended.

M: They also raked Stern over the coals when he started teasing the French up here, you know?

RS: Yeah. And with Howard Stern the line between whether he means it or not is even more blurry. But Triumph is a puppet, a character and, oddly enough, one of the reasons we did that bit in the first place, what attracted Conan to the idea, was that the joke would be that since Triumph can't speak French, people would have trouble understanding him. Conceptually, it was more of a sketch where the joke was on Triumph. The joke was deliberately crude, but perhaps I just had trouble conveying that.

Ugly American antics

M: Well Robert, come on, anyone with half a brain should recognize that both Triumph and Stern were…

RS: Just baiting people. I know, it's a game. I could be wrong but I think a lot of people were upset by the raucousness of the Toronto crowd upon hearing the word "Quebec." But, I mean, five minutes earlier, they'd booed the guy done up in the Seattle Space Needle costume just as lustily as they booed Quebec, you know. I'm not trying to deny anything but I think, to some extent, these people who were offended might have been unaware of the concept of the show. It's comedy. Triumph is supposed to be an idiot, an ugly American. When we had him saying "You're in North America, learn the language" it was meant as a dumb, ugly American kind of thing to say.

M: Is there a reason why you haven't gone the Hollywood route yet?

RS: It's not like I haven't tried. You wouldn't believe how many scripts I've written while doing all this other [TV] stuff - probably about six or seven scripts. I wrote one with Conan, and another that was a Hans and Franz adapted movie script. It turned out really funny. It was a musical with Arnold Schwarzenegger, a parody of his career at the time.

M: What? Nobody wants to pick them up?

RS: There are a variety of factors. In the Schwarzenegger case he was the one who actually instigated the script but killed it after Last Action Hero came out and bombed. He went (imitating Arnold) "I can never make fun of myself again in a movie, that's the lesson." So that was the end of that. And there've been other problems. Like, when the network sort of turned on Lorne Michaels and didn't want any more movies made adapted from SNL sketch characters. This, of course, just as I'm finishing mine.

M: I'd argue the fewer of those shitty SNL spinoff movies they make, the better.

RS: Oh yeah, I agree, I don't think - with the exception of Wayne's World - that any of them have been successful. Yeah, they've made money, some of them, but I wouldn't make movies just to go, "Hey, I turned a profit. It cost 10-million and we made 14-million."

The errors of comedy

M: So many films reek of that attitude.

RS: Yeah, I know. A lot of the films I write are a reaction to these cynically crafted… (laughs) "successful" movies. In my early scripts, I had a lot of funny villains. It was very important to me that every moment of the movie be funny, that nothing take itself seriously, and studios just hated that. They'd go, "Oh, it's got a lot of funny stuff, it's got some big laughs, um… it's not a movie." And I'd go, "What do you mean it's not a movie, you say it's funny, it's a comedy…" (Imitating a studio exec) "It's not a movie!" And the word "heart" would always creep into the conversation to torment me. "It needs heart."

M: It torments me just hearing about it.

RS: Ah, people get locked in to formulaics. It wasn't until Mike broke through with Austin Powers, he's like a hero to me just for, like, getting a comedy made that didn't take itself seriously. And that only happened because he found one studio exec who trusted him. Actually, the same exec is trying to get me to do a Triumph movie right now.

M: That could be good.

RS: Yeah, but I'm still torn.

M: Why? You don't think there's enough depth to the character?

RS: (laughing) Oh, thanks a lot. No, I worry about hearing the voice for 80 minutes - what that would do to an audience. Like, I know if you buy the DVD you're going to have a good time - for at least an hour. Then you'll probably want to put it away and maybe take it out again later. There's two-and-a-half hours of Triumph material on this DVD [Come Poop With Me] and nobody should have to sit through that in one sitting. That's why it's a DVD. If it were a VHS tape I never would've allowed that much material to be on it. I figured as a DVD people could pick their favourite bits and come and go as they please. Remember Aykroyd's Coneheads movie? There's an example of what scares me about doing a movie with Triumph. They were maybe the funniest characters ever on Saturday Night Live, unbelievably funny. The sketches were great, but the movie, you know, about 20 minutes into it I didn't ever want to hear Dan Aykroyd substitute a fancy adjective for a normal adjective again. Okay, okay, I get it. I can't hear another one. You've gotta be careful when you do this stuff.

Robert Smigel brings Triumph the Insult Comic Dog to Just For Laughs in Make Poop, Not War, Thursday, July 22, 7pm, at the Metropolis, $32.50

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