Will Franken Interview
October 31st, 2006 | Interviews, San Francisco Comedyby Chad Lehrman
Will Franken has been described in the press as “a one-man sketch comedy troupe,” “a surreal-estate agent,” “the smartest comedy I’ve ever seen,” “way too good for cable TV,” and my personal favorite, “best alternative to psychedelic drugs.” In this wide-ranging interview, Will talks about bringing his act to television, Islamic fundamentalists, and peanut butter topped hamburgers.
How have you been received in the NY and LA comedy scenes?
New York has been very good to me the few times that I’ve been there. When I moved there in 1998, the difficulty was just getting stage time; I was never concerned that the audiences wouldn’t be hip. It was just a question of being able to have the hip audiences see you. It seems like things escalate pretty quickly out there as far as word of mouth goes. The last time around, I did a handful of ten minute showcases and that turned out to be enough of an impetus to sell out the bigger shows at Mo Pitkins and Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre before coming back home. There’s an urgency I feel now with New York in knowing that it’s there that I want to end up living and working and I feel relatively confident that a few more trips like this last one and that could be a possibility.
Los Angeles has always been a lot trickier, though. There’s a definite delay in audience response depending on my choice of material. I use a lot of sex and death in my shows. I’ve noticed that there’s a polarity in Los Angeles–the sex gets the laughs, but there’s a lot of hesitancy in laughing at death. I’ve had some success in Los Angeles, particularly at the UCB Theatre down there, but mostly it’s been a struggle because a lot of the stereotypes about Los Angeles are unfortunately true. It tends to be very hit and miss and I think that’s because Los Angeles is very image-oriented; it’s almost as if audience members have to reach a consensus before approving of something between themselves and their date or their friends. With San Francisco’s penchant for anti-establishmentarianism and New York’s penchant for just being New York, I seem to fare better in those cities.
How would you describe your creative process, especially your editing process?
My creative process is best when I don’t write anything down. Sometimes I get in the habit of sitting down at the computer to write and I end up spending the whole day feeling depressed and worthless. The best stuff comes from walking around the house, talking to myself in some strange voice, running the idea over and over again until it makes me nauseous, and then sitting down to type it out– or not. I have hours of stuff that I’ve never written down– and probably won’t. I very rarely laugh at anything as I write it, so I never know if it’s funny until I do it or I get feedback. The only times I can remember laughing as I wrote something was the drug counselor character from a few years ago. Mostly, it’s a gruelling, mind-numbing experience augmented with lots of black coffee and cigarettes. Since starting the podcasts, I’ve gotten back to my roots. Before performing live, I used to record stuff for myself on a cheap four-track recorder. So my creative process has shifted a little from the live shows. I may have an outline in my head for how I want a podcast episode to go down, but what usually happens is I’ll download a sound effect or song that I need and that’ll inspire me to go in another direction. The voices, premise and outline will come to me instantaneously start to finish–then it’s simply a matter of polishing it. With the podcasts, I tend to spend just as much time making cuts and throwing stuff out as I do recording it.
Your act can sound like an encyclopedia of popular culture- how do you keep up with current events, and how much reading do you do?
I haven’t read fiction in a long time. If I read anything at all besides the internet, it’s usually history or some textbook. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I’ll read a random encyclopedia or almanac or a movie review book. Anything that’s simply facts. Last year, I started reading a lot of news on the internet. I also watch at least one movie a night. I started this project about six months ago where I went through the entire Videohound Movie Review Book
What was your involvement in the film Stanley Cuba?
I haven’t seen any of the footage from Stanley Cuba yet, but the scene that I shot was with Mike Birbiglia (an ex-San Francisco, now New York comic, extremely funny) who plays Stanley Kubrick in the film. The director Per Anderson wanted me to play some crazy guy and deliver a specific line to Mike that he saw in my show. It’s this thirty second litany about the concept of time I wrote for a talk show bit. “…in the future, the idea of having a past, present, and future will just be something out of the past…” I believe it’s supposed to come in some hallucinatory scene where Stanley Kubrick enters a glitch in the time-space continuum. So I’ll be credited with that and additional dialogue. We shot that last year on a really cold morning in Brooklyn.
You’ve been called the “best alternative to psychedelic drugs” by the SF Bay Guardian- what has been your own experience with psychedelic drugs?
Well, I smoked a lot of pot and hash and dropped a moderate amount of blotter acid between the ages of 14 and 21 back in Missouri. I had a few experiences–joyful experiences–with peyote as well. Sad to say I never got around to doing mushrooms. After a long abstinence, a few years ago I started socially smoking pot again, but had to lay off after I started to worry it might affect the creativity. I did have a chance to drop acid again. Friends in Brooklyn gave me a few hits to take back to California with me in 2005. After driving across country with it in my suitcase, it had gone worthless, though. My friend and I dropped it and waited around for hours waving our arms and looking for tracers.
What are some of your favorite things to do in San Francisco?
I don’t really get out in San Francisco as much as I do New York–but then again, when I lived in New York I stopped going out after a few years there as well. I love the Castro Theatre–we saw Crispin Glover there a few nights ago. I also like that Museum Mechanique down near Fisherman’s Wharf with all the old vintage arcade games. San Francisco has a lot of old dive bars that have these machines called “Triple Play”–they’re forerunners of pinball games that you can bet money on. Speaking of pinball, I like Lucky JuJu’s out there in Alameda where you can go on the weekends and play all the vintage pinball you want for five dollars. Ocean Beach is nice. I like to do a lot of middle-America stuff that you actually have to leave the city for– like miniature golf near Fairfield or batting cages in Oakland.
Your most recent podcast [available here] includes some satire of the Islamic world. Why do you think there’s been so little of that in American comedy?
I never paid attention to what was going on in the Islamic world until people started going nuts over the Danish cartoons. What really bothered me was that the West seemed to be in a compromise when it came to the basic freedoms of speech, press, and religion.
As a comedian, I think it’s imperative to point out that any compromise of these tenets is a compromise of satire. Just like all political correctness or multiculturalist attitudes should be regarded as anathema to comedians. South Park was even censored. There was an episode where the image of Muhammed was blocked out with a placard. Yet in the same episode, Jesus and George Bush were seen shitting on an American flag. So in my last Marsh [Theater] show, I devoted the last fifteen minutes to making fun of the Koran and hostage-beheading videos and fundamentalist Islam in general–(I even had a friend do a walk-on as a mujahadeen with a shotgun) and it was definitely a scary experience. It just got eerily quiet. There were some people who appreciated it, but it definitely hammered home the notion to me that criticism of Islam is still taboo.
I try to make fun of all religions and all political parties. The problem is, it seems more and more like radical Islam is the exception to the rule in that it gets sort of a free pass. What we were told from our media during the cartoon fiasco was that our stance on not showing the cartoons was out of respect for all religions. Well, we know that to be a lie because Judaism, Christianity, even Hinduism (Apu from The Simpsons) have all had their heads on the satirical chopping block. And I think this is a good thing because it’s really helped encourage a sort of secular assimilation (It’s made it easier, for example, for me to shoot up a crucifix like a junkie’s needle and get a laugh). But when fundamentalist Islam, which is in desperate need of a sort of reforming ridicule from the West, is immune from criticism, it invariably sets up a situation where a single religion is exempt from our own comedic tradition–and what is that but religious superiority? So I think the lie that we’re told is that we respect all religions, but the actual truth is twofold. On an artistic level, people are afraid of being stigmatized as racist. The epithet ‘racist’ carries such moral weight nowadays that careers can actually be ruined over knee-jerk accusations that have no basis in fact. I read somewhere that UC Berkeley–not known for overt racism–nevertheless hired a “Chancellor of Diversity and Inclusion” at a salary of $200,000 a year. So political correctness has become not only a barometer of moral weight, it’s also a major money-making industry.
On a more corporate and political level, I think people are just afraid that the stereotypes of radical Islamists are actually true and somebody’s going to lose their head or have their building blown up. We live in an age nowadays where the fashionable trend is moral equivocation. For example, if a nun or a priest is killed in Somalia because of something the pope said and Westerners attempt to criticize this, we’re told the obvious that not all Muslims are like this (something which very few artists would argue) and shortly thereafter we’re reminded of some distant historical event like The Spanish Inquisition so that something negative which is happening right now is put on par with something that happened hundreds of years ago and the overall effect is that nothing gets discussed, much less criticized. This is the curse of multiculturalism in that it won’t let us place one culture or way of life over another.
I don’t approve of mistreatment of women, murder of homosexuals, suppression of free speech, hatred of Jews, theocratic governments, and a lack of sense of humor in anybody–which is why I believe that Western society has a great weapon in its satirical tradition to ridicule fundamentalist Islam (as it’s already done with fundamentalist Christianity a la Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Lenny Bruce) into a less volatile secular assimilation. Otherwise, we’re just allowing ourselves to become a cultural prison bitch to opportunistic thugs like the ones in the Goodfellas spoof [from the podcast].
On a lighter note, have you ever tried the “Guberburger?” (The Guberburger is a famous peanut butter topped burger from the Wheel Inn Drive-In, in Will’s hometown of Sedalia, Missouri)
I never tried the Guberburger, I’m sad to say. How’d you find out about the Guberburger? I was in Sedalia this summer and I heard that they were actually going to close down The Wheel Inn, so I think I might have missed my chance. I went in there a couple of times for some coffee and it was atrocious. But I’ve always heard the Guberburgers were great.
You’ve avoided doing television so far- at what point do you think you’ll bring your act to TV?
I don’t know if I’ve avoided going into television. I’ve had pitches before a few networks like HBO and Showtime for show concepts and I’ve met with people from Comedy Central. I’d love to be on TV, but it’d have to be just right.
I think great shows like Strangers With Candy, Mr. Show, Kids In The Hall and Monty Python’s Flying Circus were very fortunate in that they were able to bring a show onto the air where the show’s creators were able to maintain that necessary creative control in order to keep it funny. Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, for example, wrote most of the first season of Mr. Show by themselves I remember reading.
What most of these shows had in common, however, is that the principals already had years of resume experience in television writing for others. I’ve gone the unconventional route in that I’ve spent my time writing mostly for myself, doing solo shows exactly the way I want them and consequently becoming really addicted to the idea of complete creative control before I even got to the point of meeting with television people. I wouldn’t mind writing or acting in something where I didn’t have complete creative control as long as it wasn’t my own show. That way you don’t look like a jackoff if the show falls flat and your name isn’t the big one in lights.
There was a time last year, however, when I was working with these management people who wanted me to write and pitch my own show and they explained that if it did get past the initial stages of acceptance, I would probably be assigned a headwriter and writing team and that scared me. I have to really trust someone and know them pretty well to collaborate with them. It’s obvious that Bob and David from Mr. Show and the five Kids In The Hall had that special relationship you need to produce that rarity of rarities–a great television show.
I’d love to eventually get my own show on HBO because of possible censorship concerns. My ultimate fantasy has always been the BBC, however. Do it just like the British “Office”– two seasons, a Christmas special, tell the story and take a bow. One of my worries when television people see my stuff is that they may enjoy it, the people they’re with may enjoy it, but there’s this consensus that has to be reached and it seems sometimes that despite their laughter, there’s this fear of taking a risk. They might have too much time to think about it afterwards–”I liked it, they liked it, but will the rest of America?” I’m keeping my fingers crossed, though.
For more on Will, visit willfranken.com.
March 31st, 2007 at 9:26 pm
Good stuff! Will’s podcast is the funniest one there is. Period.