No Depression No More, Editor Peter Blackstock Talks about the End of an Era

When you see the latest No Depression on the stands, the one with Buddy Miller on the cover, pick it up and pause for a moment to reflect. The issue marks the end of a thirteen-year run of covering some of the best music being made in America (and sometimes beyond). Editors Peter Blackstock and Grant Alden and co-owner/co-publisher Kyla Fairchild decided in February to cease publication of No Depression, much to the dismay of music fans, especially fans of Americana (or alt.country or the new sincerity – they’ve always had a little fun with the breadth of the genre). On a personal note, I lose a consistent source of information on my favorite music, longform journalism about under the radar subjects, and a magazine that gave me some of my first legitimate magazine clips.

Conditions have never been worse for music magazines – shortly after the No Depression announcement, Harp Magazine and Skope Magazine also announced they were shutting down print operations. Declining CD sales have meant fewer music stores, which has meant fewer places to stock the magazine, and fewer advertisers.

The good news is, the Web site will continue, and Blackstock, Alden, and Fairchild will continue putting No Depression in print in a different form, what they call a “bookazine,” which they will release semi-annually with the University of Texas Press starting this fall. And you can still keep in touch with the No Depression mailing list, fitting for a magazine that grew out of a Web discussion group in the first place. No Depression will continue, but there will no longer be the anticipation of that issue hitting the stands ever couple of months, and the satisfaction of bringing it home and tearing into that cover story of your favorite artist no one else is writing about, or finding those new artists in the “Town & Country” section, some of them in your own home town.

I caught up with Peter Blackstock by e-mail recently to talk a bit about No Depression past and present.

What sort of reaction did you get when you announced that No Depression was ending its print run?

There was a pretty strong outpouring of sentiment from our readers. More than two hundred people have left comments on our website about it over the last couple months, and of course there was also a ton of letters, many of which we published in our final issue. A lot of people had some really kind words about how much the magazine had meant to them. Quite understandably a lot of them were rather disappointed we wouldn't be continuing as a bimonthly anymore -- no one was more disappointed than WE were, certainly! -- but I think that folks are only just now beginning to realize how tenuous a position the print journalism industry is in, especially when it comes to niche music magazines.

What was the first indication that you had to seriously consider ceasing publication?

It actually had never even come up for discussion until mid-January, about a month before we made the final decision to do it in mid-February (we sent out the announcement on February 19). Our advertising-base had been shrinking for a couple of years -- whereas we used to routinely publish issues of 144 pages (and occasionally larger), we'd more typically been around 112 for the past year or two. Still, things had more or less balanced out fiscally in 2007. But our first two issues of 2008 were both just 80 pages, which is smaller than we'd been since the very early days of the magazine, about 10 years ago. And the future prospects suggested things probably would only get worse, not better.

We realized that if we tried to continue, we could easily run ourselves into serious debt, and that's never been the way we've done business. We didn't want to be in a position where we could not afford to publish our final issue, as was the case with a couple of other magazines which closed up shop recently. It was important to us that we go out in the style of our finest work, which I think we managed to do with our May-June issue (thanks in no small part to many of our longtime advertisers, and even some new ones, who helped us get to 144 pages for the finale).

It seems like many of the same problems with marketing to a niche demographic have existed since the inception of No Depression, how drastically has the environment changed in the past year or two?

The "niche," musically speaking, is about the same as it ever was, although we obviously broadened it ourselves over the years. Early on we had fairly tight alternative-country boundaries, whereas over the years we expanded to cover a much broader range of Americana/traditional/roots music, as well as some occasional indie things (especially when they related to the roots realm). I honestly don't think our dilemma relates at all to the viability of the music, in large part because it was there long before we started covering it, and thus logically should be there long after as well.

What we managed to catch, when we began in 1995, was a sort of high-point in the visibility cycle for those artists -- part of which we contributed to creating or fostering, certainly, but partly there were just a lot of very good young roots acts who were getting major or semi-major record deals. But all the history still ran underneath everything, and it still does. And the ebb-and-flow of younger bands drawing upon that history continues, as evidenced by the surge in string bands that we recently wrote about in our March-April issue. So ultimately I don't think the "niche" has changed much at all; it's really just the business climate that has changed, in terms of how the internet has greatly affected both the music industry and the print journalism industry.

Was it frustrating to you that this happened at a time when the scene you’re covering is as fertile as ever? I’m in Boston, and just using this scene as an example, you’ve got younger bands like Three Day Threshold and Girls, Guns, and Glory, people who have been around the scene for a while like Mark Erelli and Alastair Moock, the Session Americana folks, along with stalwarts like Bill Morrissey and Dennis Brennan. And I know there are other scenes just as diverse around the country.

The string-band story in our March-April issue is sort of a reflection of that, yeah; we were quite intrigued to suddenly find so many really talented and creative young acts drawing upon old-time traditions seemingly reaching their peak right now, and we'd have been excited about covering them long into the future. (Many of those musicians are based around Boston as well, in fact, most notably Crooked Still, and also a couple members of Uncle Earl.) But I'm not sure there'd ever really be a "good" time to go out, in that it seemed that during our 13 years, there was pretty much constantly a good stream of quality roots-oriented music being made, by artists both younger and older.

Did you have a strategy for the Web and the “bookazine” before you announced the cessation of the print version?

We'd assumed that we'd continue the website in some form or fashion, but the bookazine deal with University of Texas Press came about entirely after we'd made the announcement. We decided to speak with them in part because they'd published our tenth-anniversary anthology in 2005, and in part because there were examples of other roots-related publications that had teamed up with universities (Living Blues at the University of Mississippi, Oxford American at the University of Central Arkansas). They were interested in seeing if we could work something out to at least continue us in print on a limited basis, in a way that did not involve being dependent on advertising. The twice-annual bookazine is what came out of those discussions.

Are there any other publications doing anything similar to that, anywhere you are looking for inspiration?

It's really pretty new territory. Grant (my co-editor) has looked at a few more literary-type things such as McSweeney's to get a vague sense of what form things might take, but to our knowledge nobody's really doing anything like it in terms of music content. Part of our intention here is to create something basically new, something that isn't already out there.

Can you envision a time when you would ever revive No Depression in print?

I think the market circumstances would have to change significantly, in a way that's not very likely to happen. People would have to start gravitating back toward print and away from the internet, and that seems highly doubtful especially as more and more younger music fans who were raised on the internet model keep flowing into the picture. On the other hand, I'm not entirely certain that web advertising will really pan out the way the advertisers are hoping it will; so far it doesn't seem like it has quite worked out to the degree expected. If somehow there becomes a booming demand for print ads again, then maybe. But that's pretty much what it'd take, and we're not exactly holding our breath for that.

Chris Coxen needs votes in a very silly competition...

Those of you who know me know I love only two things in life: comedy, and underwear. So much to my delight, local comedian Chris Coxen has combined the two, and is dancing as Danny Morsel to win cash prizes from the folks over at Jockey. Here is his video appeal for votes:



To vote for him, click on this bit of writing right here.

His opponent apparently has a big e-mail list and the inherent appeal of a concave chest, so every vote helps. You have to register, so make sure to mind all the "opt out" buttons. It's fairly quick and painless, and if Mr. Coxen wins, count on even more elaborate productions like this weekend's show at the Cambridge Family YMCA Theatre.

OC Review: Tim and Eric Awesome Tour, First Night

“Was it what you expected?”

“Yeah. Well, I don’t know what I expected.”

That exchange between two fans walking out of T.T. the Bear’s last night pretty much explains the first show on the first night of Tim and Eric’s Awesome Tour, which is, of course, based on the Adult Swim show Tim and Eric: Awesome Show, Great Job! The TV show is strange enough, an eleven-and-a-half-minute blast of absurdity, flashing lights, disturbing images of hairy babies, and awkward dancing that attacks viewers brains every Sunday night. (You can read more about it in a piece I wrote for the Boston Globe here).

There were a few starts and stops at the beginning. After a quick set from DJ Dougpound, the music came back up for what seemed like a long time. Then the music stopped for what seemed like a ling time, and, being good fans, the crowd remained silent. After all, this was Tim and Eric, and having fans stare at a blank movie screen that barely fit on a stage made for rowdy pub rock may have been part of an opening joke. It wasn’t. But no one seemed to mind. They shouted things like “Brule’s Rules!” referring to John C. Reilly’s recurring character on the show, and “Jeff Goldblum!” who was also on the show. The good thing about presenting a creative, free-thinking show is that you can count on your audience to entertain themselves for a couple of minutes while they wait for you.

When the screen lit up with the image of show regular David Leibe Hart, demanding the crowd pray for Tim and Eric (and, kindly enough, for Robin Williams), everyone recognized him and cheered. Then came a planned false start, with a video of Tim and Eric backstage. They finally made it to the stage for the opening musical dance number about ball swinging, and it was off to the races from there.

The big question for people who hadn’t seen Tim and Eric live would have been, can these guys take material meant for an eleven-and-a-half minute late night sketch show and make a funny, engaging hour-and-a-half live show?

They can, although over that hour and a half, the audience has a bit more time to step back and question what they’re watching. And when your comedy is so particular and strange, not everything is going to hit the audience the same way at the same time. At some point during the show, more individuals probably stopped for a moment to say, what the hell am I watching? But then Tim and Eric would pelt the audience with pizza or hot dogs, or better yet, videos like “Quilting with Will” starring Will Forte and other previews from Season Three, which is still in the middle of production. And they never lost the crowd of clearly devoted fans.

“Casey and his brother” is fascinating live, because the onscreen version uses a lot of awkward close-ups and animation. But Tim’s red-faced, squeaky-voiced, compulsively spitting Casey is just as frightening live, probably because T.T.’s is small enough that most everyone, save those crowding over near the bar, has a clear view of every pained facial expression. Then, of course, there’s Eric playing a toy saxophone or dancing in a hamburger suit. Which is where the comedy nerd in me could reference commedia dell’arte or theatre of the absurd, or I could just admit that seeing a man Eric’s size furiously pumping his knees in time to cheesy music while dressed as ground chuck makes me giggle like a moron.

There was a quick encore, consisting mainly of the “James Quall Dance Contest” and Tim and Eric addressing the crowd as their surprisingly earnest, laid-back selves.

An odd bit of trivia – Tim and Eric were supposed to play Boston last year, but had to cancel the date because of their association with Adult Swim during the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Mooninite bomb scare. Both said they were happy to have finally made it to Boston, apologizing to the crowd for having to have cancelled last year’s show.

After the show, I asked Eric what he thought of the venue and the show. His response?

“Awesome.”

I should have expected that.

OC Interview: The Daily Show's John Oliver

John Oliver rarely gets a break from his job as a correspondent for The Daily Show to do stand-up, but last November, I was lucky enough to catch him at Boston's Comedy Connection. The election cycle was already in full swing then – the field of candidates hadn’t been winnowed down much, and multi-candidate debates seemed to be springing up every week. Oliver studied English at Oxford before striking out to write comedy for the BBC and test his hand at stand-up. But he was always interested in politics and comedy, including American political satire. He admired Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce, but never got to see America firsthand until he was hired by The Daily Show. And it’s all been a strange trip since then.

Oliver’s hour-long stand-up special, Terrifying Times, debuts tonight on Comedy Central, so I thought I would give an almost full transcript of our interview for the Boston Globe (you can see the full article here). Only a few boring bits were left out. Those were mostly my fault. Oliver is an engaging fellow, and based on his show at the Connection, I’m looking forward to a thoughtful and incisive special tonight.

Have you played America much as a stand-up?

Yeah, I guess, that was my job before I came here. And so, when I can, which is maybe not that often. I’ve done college gigs and clubs in and around the east coast.

Had you played America before the Daily Show gig?

I’d never been to America before The Daily Show. I’d never even visited. So it happened pretty fast. It was quite a major life change.

I know when they were auditioning people, they were looking a lot of different places and they didn’t know exactly what direction they were going to go.

To be honest, I’m still not entirely sure what happened. You always have imposter syndrome with stuff like this and I’ve deliberately not asked how it came about out of fear that something went wrong. I don’t want to highlight the mistake and have them go, "Oh, oh yeah, that’s not who we meant at all." So I don’t really know entirely what happened or what they were looking for or why they were looking abroad.

Did you audition or did they know of your work and hire you that way?

They asked me send a tape. I don’t know how they knew who I was. They asked me to send a tape, I think it was maybe through, Ricky Gervais met Jon and said, "you might want to look at this person." But I don’t really know. I sent the tape and then got invited over, and then it all moved very quick. It was a pretty amazing experience.

Did you get any time to adjust before you were thrown on the job?

No. I got in really late Sunday night and thought, I guess they’ll break me into work slowly. I got in Monday morning, having woken up on the sofa, and they said, "All right, you’re on tonight." Bush had said something to Blair. It probably worked out best because I didn’t have time to realize how scared I was. It worked out pretty well. I had absolutely no time to acclimatize to either America or this show. It’s really knee-deep in both.

Have you gotten time to look around and explore at all?

America? No. The only way I’m able to travel is through work, so I guess it’s going to get worse as the year goes on, especially once we get to the twelve-month countdown for the election. The traveling I’ve done has usually been for field pieces. So it’s either been to things like the presidential debates – we’re going down to Baltimore tonight for the Morgan State Republican Black Debates, that only half of them are bothering to turn up to. And then I guess big places in the middle of nowhere where the classic field piece crazies are, the middle of Colorado or Ohio. So yeah, I haven’t gotten to see much.

Do you think you’re getting a strange view of America?

It’s really warped. Also what makes no to me, the first time I flew to the west coast, as a European, it makes no sense to me to fly for five hours and land in the same country. That just makes no sense. You couldn’t even be on the same continent where I’m from. To see the same flags, it’s something like that that really brings home how enormous this country is.

What was your expectation before you got here?

Of what? Of the country?

Of the country or of New York. I realize it may be way too broad of a question, but I wanted to get a sense of what you thought you may be coming to.

I had no idea, really. It all happened fast, and this was my favorite program when I was back home. I kind of knew it pretty well. But that comes with being sort of intimidated as well. I had absolutely no idea what to expect. Obviously the European perspective on American politics is relatively negative. I’ve always been very interested. I’ve always followed American politics, I like politics. So it’s been interesting to delve slightly closer, in more detail.

Have you been surprised about anything you’ve found about American policy?

Not really. We know quite a lot about American policy in Europe because it has significant effect on how we live our lives. So there’s no real way to not, unless you really stick your head in the sand, but American policy is largely our policy as well. Both the European and even more so in the British sense because of our incredibly special relationship, which we’re very grateful for, don’t get us wrong. Don’t listen to what anyone says. We’re very lucky to have you.

I think it goes beyond politics in that way, I think that at a certain point, the populace of England and America sort of realize, or at least I hope they do, that whoever’s in office isn’t necessarily your country.

Yeah. That is the big thing, I think. That is the big problem with the way America is perceived in Europe is that America is presented to us as a united front, you see the news footage is very much people standing behind their country. And I think it’s easy to forget that you’re looking at a president who, at whatever time, who is usually dotting the margins in terms of votes, you know, 51/49. You’ve easily got half the country unhappy with whoever’s there. And that is not presented to us.

It’s probably similar here, in that people probably look to the prime minister and that’s largely what they think of the politics in that country.

I think so. It’s convenient that way. It’s convenient to ignore significant dissent, which people do to other countries and governments do to the people in their own countries, as well.

Do you think that’s changing at all? It seems there’s an acknowledgment of the opposition as something other than that umbrella description of them – prime minister and opposition. Now it seems a little more varied.

Sure. Partisan politics, I don’t think is ever going to be particularly healthy. Although you always want a strong opposition. It doesn’t do anyone any good to have the opposition party in chaos. But the way that America is at the moment, it’s a fascinating time to have no incumbent and some relatively significant choices which the electorate is going to make in terms of where they want their country to go and how America will be perceived worldwide. Because there’s no doubt that either a woman or a black man will have enormous repercussions straight away in terms of how America is perceived abroad, if we go down that road.

Have you gotten to know many of the candidates, not necessarily personally, but –

Not personally, very much not personally. I’m watching closely, but…What’s more odd is them knowing what you’re doing. When we turned up to the first debate in Simi Valley, you just see them out of the corner of their eyes going, ‘Uh-oh.’ How can you know? I’m sure they’ve not watched but they’re clearly briefed, that’s ‘The Daily Show’ over there, they’ll be coming over here and asking ludicrous questions.

Is "The Daily Show" printed on the camera or anything so they sort of know?

Yeah, you have to say at the start. If it’s the spin room you have to say who you are. But it is amazing. It’s I guess the key difference in terms of American and British politics is the role of religion, where it seems impossible for any candidate to campaign with anything other than an overt faith in god. Whereas the opposite is the case, Blair was a devout Catholic and he could never talk about that. He’d never be photographed going to a church because people would be suspicious of that. You should serve the country, not any idea of what is right in a Biblical sense. And that’s taken a lot of getting used to.

That first debate when Huckabee and two others put their hands up for, "Who here doesn’t believe in evolution," I think that’s ludicrous. He cannot surely be a credible candidate now, but his approval ratings are going up. That’s absolutely insane.

I’d imagine that doesn’t speak well for us abroad. I know that in Europe they’re familiar with policy, but do things like this get play on the news, on the BBC.

People are concerned, I think. The worried thing was ’04. You kind of get cut slack electing someone once and then not knowing how they’re going to behave. But to reelect, that was troublesome.


Do you think you have to work harder to get an American audience to except political humor or your critiques of America?

Not really. I don’t know. The places I’ve tended to play at the moment around this east coast area, just for geographical simplicity, are probably areas that are not big fans of this administration anyway. And also of course, the people coming to see me are ‘Daily Show’ fans. So there’s an element of preaching to the choir, as well. But I would certainly want to go and do stand-up elsewhere, a place where people would not be happy to hear you insult the commander-in-chief, let along a Brit, who they successfully kicked out of the country a hundred and fifty years ago.

Yeah, not really, I’ve not had any problems with it. Also, I tend to talk, as well, to balance that out, I tend to talk about how, you have no idea what it’s like to be British. We’ve done terrible things to the world, and you’re not even getting close to our record. You watch the news, there’s trouble in Kashmir and Iraq, that’s essentially our fault. Take it any distance of time back, we did that. We did all that. We’ll be sitting back here, doing absolutely nothing about it now.

Is there any sort of recognition of that do you think in general in England when they look at what America is doing now? Is there resonance?

That depends. If you want to take a black and white lazy view of the world, you get a lot of idiotic British people saying, yeah, well, they’re history tends to start from the second world war onwards because it’s a lot more convenient. But I would hope that people have an awareness of the shame which is flecked across British history. It’s certainly more interesting that way.

You look at the historical view of it, it’s easy to get discouraged, looking at the people in charge now. But then you take a historical view of it, if you read Candide, the world wasn’t much better off then, and you wonder, well, should you just ignore all of this and hope the world is going to be okay just like it was?

That’s the thing, it’s like with the Candide thing, you’ve just got to have some half-hopeful voice saying, let’s hope our gardens grow at the end of the day. That’s pretty much all you can hope for.

I’ve labeled myself an optimistic curmudgeon.

I think that’s the best way to be, though. That’s the only to balance it out. There’s no point in being cynical all the time. But equally, blind optimism just seems willfully inappropriate.

If you can’t let yourself laugh at a fart joke –

That is why I’ve always been, this comedy offering’s always been about more serious issues, I guess. I guess that has always been my coping strategy with the world. If I can’t laugh at something, I don’t really know how to relate to it. That’s kind of got even more entrenched working here. Because now, when you see the news, something terrible, it’s the same awful things. And my instinct is always no, oh, that could be funny. There’s something funny in that. Well, wait a minute, let’s just let the gravity of the reality sink in. Then we can trivialize it.

Were you always a political comic or did that evolve later?

Pretty much. As I got better as a stand-up, I became better, that’s the way it works, I became better at talking about the things I was interested in. As I moved into my twenties I got interested in kind of single-issue protest politics rather than party politics. From then on, I became very interested in it. And it’s what I think is most funny.

Where did you start as a comic?

I left university and worked as a comedy writer, and I started doing stand-up around the same time. And I went to the Edinburgh Festival every year, and that’s really how I learned how to do it and how to get better.

You were a writer for BBC radio shows?

Lots of stuff. I guess I did three series of this show called The Department which was this fictitious government think tank that was solving a different world problem every week. That was a substantial project. That took a long time to write each series.

What made you move on to stand-up from that?

I was always doing stand-up at the same time. I’d get really bored of one, or frustrated at one thing. So I like to do both all the time. I would get bored of stand-up and want to do writing.

You said on your Web site that people might have seen you looking bored on Mock the Week. Do you find that the political shows on the BBC don’t offer you as much as The Daily Show does?

They’re terrible. Absolutely universally appalling. Panel shows are not the way to go about political satire because you have to have a kind of uniform voice to it. That’s where The Daily Show works, it’s all based around Jon Stewart’s voice. So, we’re all pulling in the same direction. But when you have six disparate comedians, it’s just going to become a macho jokefest where usually the quickest and the most lukewarm style of comedy is going win out. That particular show isn’t being particularly political now. It’s just kind of about the news in general, not a political element of the news.

Do you find the American and British traditions of political stand-up comedy terribly different?

Not really, I think they’re pretty similar. Both have their best practitioners, I guess Jon Stewart being one of the best here, and Colbert. The you have Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris back in England. Political people who were just stand-ups but who were extremely good.

I know this is the standard hack question, but who influenced you as a comic?

Oh, a lot. In terms of stand-up in England, Stewart Lee I think was amazing, and Tommy Ginn. And I wrote with a guy named Andy Saltzman. We learned a lot from each other. All of the stuff that Armando Iannucci did on radio and TV was fantastic. And I was also really into American comedy, as well. In terms of stand-up, again, obviously Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce, but also I really loved Dennis Miller. I loved his way with words. I’m a comedy nerd, really. I’ve always loved it.

There ought to be an organization for comedy nerds. I write the comedy column every week for the Globe and my wife gets tired of me dragging her to comedy sometimes.

There is no doubt I have invested throughout my life far more importance than is appropriate. And so, a lot of ex-girlfriends in the past, just the despair that crosses their face when I run into someone who also has an overblown sense of its importance, and has to sit back as two people yabber away about something that is really just supposed to instigate laughter.

I got lucky that my wife is a Monty Python fan.

Oh, wow. Great. You did get lucky.

We went to Spamalot together and she actually enjoyed it more than I did. I was nitpicking.

Wow. That’s fantastic.

Do you do anything similar on The Daily Show that you got to do on the BBC?

No, the BBC shows were more panel shows. So they weren’t a kind of sppof news program like this is where you’re kind of playing a correspondent, or being a correspondent. So no, not really similar to this.

Do you find people back home are watching more now that you’re on the show?

Oh, no. I doubt that. If anything, I would imagine less so. If anything, I’ve damaged the ratings rather than advanced them at home. You’re talking a very small digital channel. So I think it only gets a hundred thousand people watching. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that went down to 90 after my first appearance. The show is ruined now. It’s ruined.

I’ve especially enjoyed the Wilmore/Oliver Investigates clips.

Oh, great. We’re going down to this debate tonight, it’s on tomorrow night. That should be fun.

You guys have a really good chemistry. It seems pretty natural, like you’ve been working together for a while.

It’s pretty weird, obviously we’d never met each other and then with the ‘N’ word piece, we just… All I had was this idea of, every time I needed to say the word I would point at Larry in the interview, and from that point it was very odd. It was like being a married couple. We were able to kind of weave in and out of each other’s sentences. But also, in terms of a technique for an interview, it makes it very hard for the interviewee because we change our points of view all the time. And it’s just completely unfair, you just get blindsided. That’s what we’re planning to do tomorrow.

Is it tough to pull off? It seems to me there’s a dynamic at work where you have to make yourself the butt of the joke and still pull off intelligent satire.

That’s right. It’s a balance. It just takes constant thought, really, so you just think, what is this? Is it clear enough that the joke’s on me?

I read your comment about how you can’t listen to Bush anymore when you see him on TV. There’s a political satirist by the name of Barry Crimmins out of Boston who said that that’s what’s been saving Bush, that no sane person can listen to him for more than fifteen seconds.

When he did that Vietnam comment, we were all in the office walking past TVs, you could hear people say, ‘Did he just really say it was like Vietnam in a good way? Is that my mind rearranging stuff? Oh, he did actually say that and he’s not winking? That’s terrifying.’

Is there any similar sort of dissatisfaction with politicians in England? I mean, I know that there is, but is it the same sort of screaming at the TV frustration?

Absolutely. Blair was loathed. People will never ever forgive him for what he did. It’s very sad. And inexplicable. I will be really interested to know what he thinks he did, whether he regrets it at all.

It seems he had a real chance to bring people together.

Yeah. The biggest democratic mandate we’ve had in years. His first term he played very safe when he really could have been much more bold with the majority that he had. And for a man so obsessed with his legacy, Iraq just makes no sense. I have no idea what he was thinking.

Are you surprised at the amount of handicapping that goes on in political races here, especially on network TV?

Of course.

I saw one local station that put the names of the candidates on horses, and when they answered certain questions, would put them farther ahead on the track.

We’re getting closer to that. Our last election, it was talk of a landslide, so they decided we’re going to have this graphic, they’d be walking along, the candidates, and then land would gradually collapse on top of them. How old are you people? How bored is your graphics department.

Fox is always trying to downplay The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, saying they don’t get many viewers and it’s just a basic cable show. Have you seen that criticism?

They got it right. We are on basic cable, we don’t get many viewers. They may have inadvertently stumbled upon a fact there.

How do you go from [studying] English to political satire?

I wasn’t that interested in the ins and outs of my degree. I did footlights and was writing comedy while I was at University and quickly decided that was what I wanted to do, rather than analyze Chaucer, to the significant distress of my tutors. I don’t really know how. It seemed like a natural progression to me.

Do you expect to do more as a stand-up? I know the election cycle will probably be hellacious for you.

I think I’m going to do an hour special for Comedy Central for Indecision. But otherwise, next year I’ll be doing almost nothing but working on this show. It’ll be great. I’m not saying that in a bad way. But I don’t think I’ll be able to do much stand-up.

Do you think audiences will be surprised at who you are as a stand-up as opposed to who you are on The Daily Show?

I don’t know, really. It’s probably pretty similar. I’m not going to come out with a bag of props like Carrot Top.

Kids in the Hall: Reunion Tour May Lead to More

The new Kids in the Hall reunion tour has been a pleasant surprise for me. I had enjoyed their previous post-television tours in 2000 and 2002, and I didn’t know a new tour had been planned until I saw an ad for their show at the Wang Theatre for April 17. I reviewed that show for the Boston Globe (you can find it in today’s edition here), and spoke with them backstage at the Wang afterwards.

It was a mellow, friendly atmosphere backstage, or, more appropriately, in the mazelike basement-level dressing rooms under the Wang. Mark McKinney, Bruce McCulloch, Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, and Scott Thompson were winding down after a little over an hour and a half of new sketch comedy, with a few old favorite characters like Thompson’s Buddy Cole and McCulloch’s Gavin thrown in. The not-quite-sold-out but sizeable crowd had reacted warmly and enthusiastically to everything, old and new, and there was a palpable sense of gratification amongst the Kids, possibly even a sense of relief that they had been welcomed back so readily.

The Kids had reunited last year for the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal, and had been kicking around the idea of getting together again, but never quite found the time. Earlier this year, they finally found a break. “The writer’s strike did the impossible and freed us all up for a week,” said McKinney.

Rather than just dust off old sketches from the television show or previous tours, the Kids set out to write as much new material as possible. According to Foley, this meant doing a series of surprise club shows in L.A. on short notice. “It was an exercise to see if we could write a 90-miute show in three days,” he said.

Again according to Foley, they were surprised both by how well they wrote together and how much they enjoyed performing together. The new sketches were strong, and there were a couple new short films, most notably an odd, lewd bit about “carfuckers,” that hit the mark (McCulloch, who has been busy directing the sitcom Carpoolers, mentioned he has been working the Russo brothers, of Arrested Development fame, on some film shorts). Everyone seemed to agree that there is some momentum building, which should mean another project of some sort when the tour ends in June, most probably a film.

Right now, somewhere...

It's a strange world out there. And while you sit here reading, right now, somewhere...

* The Pope is looking at his watch and saying, "Sheesh, look at the time."

* One of your relatives is thinking about how much of an asshole you are.

* A fat, naked man is sitting in front of his computer fantasizing about Japanese cartoons.

* Someone is watching a VHS copy of Mariah Carey’s Glitter, and loving it.

* A powerful world leader is tapping his toes to the Toby Keith song playing in his head trying to look like he is paying attention to a meeting of his chief advisors.

* Your parents are listening to Poco and making out on the couch.

* Boston city planners are thinking of what to do when the Big Dig becomes outdated.

* New parents have settled on the name Eugene for their first born, setting forth a chain of events that will either lead to indictment or a career in folk music.

* A Hollywood executive is planning a Saturday morning cartoon based on Brett Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho.” Elsewhere, another executive is making plans to bring “Straw Dogs: The Musical” to Broadway.

* Your doctor is listening to P-Funk, staring at the office aquarium, smoking a big fattie.

* Your cat is humping your favorite bed pillow.

OC-Ed: Late Night Humor vs. Democracy

The topic of Michael Crook’s A Funny Guy blog over at TheLedger.com – “Does Political Comedy Undermine Democracy” – was preposterous to me when it came up on my Google alert. It seemed like one of those inherently flawed questions that people like me in the media often ask to try to get provocative answers and stir up some kind of debate, which is usually about as nuanced and useful as a metal geek slap fight over VH1’s “Top 100 Guitar Solos of the 80s.”

But it turns out, the premise was neither Crook’s not Stevenson Swanson, who wrote the article for the Chicago Tribune that Crook reprinted for his blog. The idea actually belongs to University of Iowa professor Russell Peterson, who has written a book called Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy into a Joke. Peterson, the story notes, tried his hand at stand-up comedy in the early 1990s and has also worked as a political cartoonist. And there are a couple of interesting side notes to his premise.

You can read the piece yourself on the Tribune site here, or, if that link stops functioning, at Crook’s blog here.

To be fair, I haven’t read Peterson’s book, so you’ll have to take any criticism of his premise with a grain of salt. But if his thesis has been presented correctly in the Tribune article, Peterson believes that late night comedians are a threat to the American system of democracy because they promote the belief that it makes no difference who you vote for, that every candidate is equally bad, and there’s no point in engaging in the process.

"I really do think that this sort of belief, that it doesn't matter, is one of the most damaging beliefs that a democracy can harbor,” Peterson is quoted in the Tribune as saying, adding later, "I don't think comedy invented that belief, but it's one of the most important avenues through which it is expressed."

I was about ready to tap out at that point. Certainly the rampant corruption at the presidential level on down for the past twenty-five years and the general disrespect that politicians show for each other and sometimes their own office has to be the more pressing problem here.

Watergate, Iran-Contra, the Lewinski affair, and the current administration’s bumbling of everything from the so-called “War On Terror” to the hiring and firing practices at the Attorney General’s office – the list is long, inglorious, and stretches back to around the time I was actually conceived. I love political comedy, especially the hardest hitting stuff by firebrands like Barry Crimmins and Bill Hicks and the above-the-fray perspective Mort Sahl is still offering, if you can catch him. But as much as I admire someone who can connect with a solid swing of satire, these people are generally only pointing out the damage politicians have done to themselves.

In that respect, if you are going to blame comedians for undermining democracy, you have to put them fairly far down on the list of the indicted, with the politicians themselves first on the list, and anyone who actually tells us what they’re doing second. It’s like arresting a guy for arson when he calls 9-1-1 about a burning building.

But that’s when the story got interesting. Apparently, part of Peterson’s thesis is the idea that late night comedians are helping to create an indifferent attitude toward the system because they are not dealing with substantive issues. In other words, their very inertness makes them dangerous.

Stevenson summarizes the idea thusly: “Political comedy, at least as it's practiced on the Leno, Letterman and O'Brien shows, tends to focus relentlessly on personality flaws, such as Bush's verbal gaffes or former President Bill Clinton's skirt-chasing, instead of on questions of political policy.”

This is the difference between topical comedy and satire, which is not often discussed, since it is admittedly a bit of comedy nerd hair-splitting. But there is a difference. Some comedians have gotten credit as satirists simply because they told a blow job joke about Bill Clinton or dared to call George W. Bush dumb. The jokes might be funny, depending on the skill of the particular comic, but they don’t tend to delve too deep into the details.

According to the story, Peterson finds Leno and Letterman are going for cheap laughs, and gives a bit more credit to Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, and Stephen Colbert for bending more toward the satirical. There’s a decent argument there, especially considering that Leno and Letterman, both on network television, have a much larger audience to please than Stewart, Maher, and Colbert, whose shows air on cable. Leno has professed a sort of fast food philosophy to writing for the Tonight Show (you can find the exact quote if you can find his 2004 appearance on Inside the Actor’s Studio), and when you’re in a ratings war, you’re going to have a hard time doing anything edgy or potentially alienating, a concept to which the Tribune article also alludes.

But even if you accept the premise that the glib nature of Leno and Letterman’s topical humor make for lower standards, it’s a tough leap to say that makes them dangerous. And it’s a bit of a logic puzzle, at least in terms of Peterson’s argument, to think that the more satirical comics are less dangerous than more inert comics because they might actual damage a politician’s reputation in the minds of their audience by dealing with more substantive issues. Start picking at details like that, and suddenly you’re trapped on M.C. Escher’s stairmaster.

Ultimately, it’s a classic straw man argument. If late night television disappeared right now, democracy wouldn’t suddenly regain its buoyancy with a flood of informed participation. I’m fairly sure that’s not Peterson’s argument, but if not, what could possibly be filling all those pages in a book called Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy into a Joke?

I’ll report back if I get my hands on it. If anyone has read it, please comment on this post and let us know what you think.