When asking one of the leaders of “Occupy Judaism” what the value of political comedy was, comedian Nato Green got a pretty interesting response.
“He said, ‘You’re our sacred clowns,'” Green remembered. “‘Just as Abraham smashed the idols from before people could see the one true God, it’s your job as comedians to smash all the idols so people could see truth.'”
As he retold the story, Green chuckled. “It’s like — woah. That’s heavy.”
Heavy-handed comedy is often what Green, along with friends Janine Brito and W. Kamau Bell, deliver to audiences nationwide on the Laughter Against The Machine: Guerrilla Stand-up Comedy tour. The group will be performing at the District of Columbia Arts Center tonight and tomorrow.
The trio, which originated with just Green and Bell, met as like-minded left-leaning comedians in the San Francisco comedy scene, unsatisfied with the status quo of political humor.
“We felt like the liberal comedy show audiences were showing up expecting to be cheerled, expecting to have their opinions validated and mostly expecting to hear stuff about how stupid the other side was. And that has its place,” Green said, but “we all felt confined by that.”
“I wanted to be able to make fun of us — anybody can make fun of the other guy.”
So Green and Bell tried to create and define a new kind of comedy show, starting with a performance on New Year’s Eve 2009.
“We sort of told the audience upfront: ‘You’re gonna hear a lot of opinions, you’re not gonna agree with everything, we’re gonna charge off the deep end,'” Green said. “‘But our pledge is that none of it is gonna be frivolous. That, everything that we talk about, even if it’s provocative or painful or controversial, as well as being funny, it’s also something that we actually care about.'”
After a few performances, Green and Bell found a “kindred spirit” in Brito and looked to start a national tour.
A week after the start of the tour, Occupy Wall Street began. Green said the movement “completely changed the context of our work.”
The trio has played its scheduled shows in every city, but it has also performed for each local “occupation.” They talk with the protesters, gaining both a broader sense of the world and jokes and context for their stand-up sets.
“A lot of times when comics talk about politics, it’s as an observer,” said Green. “They watch television and see something on CNN and they write jokes about it. So their relationship to the subject matter is not any different from their relationship to writing jokes about Desperate Housewives.”
Green feels his perspective is unique.
“For me, as someone who grew up in the activist world on the left, my relation to the subject matter is more like comics who have kids talking about their kids,” he said.
Green, Bell and Brito have taken an interesting route in funding and documenting the tour. They have raised more than $23,000 on the project-funding website Kickstarter and are creating a documentary Green described as less of a concert film and more of a look at the people in the various cities the tour has visited.
It all amounts to a unique tour that’s distinguishing itself at a time when political humor is prominent in mainstream culture thanks to the efforts of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, among others.
“The Onion, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report and Andy Borowitz are all way better than we ever will be at being up-to-the-second on the vicissitudes of the electoral world,” Green said. “But having a tour that’s a Jewish, red-diaper baby, former union organizer and a black guy and a Cuban lesbian — I mean just the fact of that is a political statement in some way.”
Laughter Against The Machine will be at the District of Columbia Arts Center tonight and tomorrow. Both shows start at 7:30 p.m. Tickets cost $10 for students, $20 for the public.
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