The comedy of the last atrocity

The life of a political satirist and comedian is, you would imagine, fairly tough at the best of times. But what if it’s the worst of times? What if you have to go out and perform a set two days after the worst terrorist atrocity the world has ever witnessed? Yet for American satirist Will Durst, the evening of September 13, 2001 had to be business as usual.

“Imagine you’re a political comedian and something like that happens and you don’t talk about it on stage, your audience is going to look at you like there’s a white elephant there,” he explains down a phone line from Boston where he is appearing in their own comedy festival. “It was an incredible, life-changing event, like the death of Kennedy. Everybody watching TV for days and days. That’s one of the reasons why people were so reciprocal, we all had this shared experience and everyone reacted to it differently.”

Was that initial writing period actually productive or simply more a cathartic process?

“I look back at the set that I did those first few weeks afterwards and maybe 10% of that stuff lasted because so much of it was perishable. It had to do with the stuff on TV, just watching it and dealing with those inner feelings.”

After a while, however, Durst was to regain his razor sharp eye for detail and find relevant targets for his humour, perhaps proving the theory that comedy is tragedy plus time.

“Straight away, Vice President Dick Cheney is frog-marched to a secure bunker in the southeast corner of Wyoming,” he recalls. “Meanwhile Bush is giving a speech in front of a window. With traffic behind him. Why don’t they just tie him to a gate as bait? You know during the whole anthrax thing they had Bush opening Cheney’s mail. You know they did.”

Despite the old adage that it is Jewish comedians who tell the best Jewish jokes, Will doesn’t believe that only Americans had the ability or the right to find the humour in the situation.

“Everybody shared the experience, no matter what it was. Even if it was the unrestrained glee of certain Arab communities, or the knowing wink (that meant) ‘welcome to the club’. They were all different reactions but they were all authentic.”

Since the attack, of course, the world has been staggering from dark day to dark day – all of which has provided Durst with new material. The conflict in Iraq was no exception.

“I’m finding that the further away we get from the war, the more people are willing to laugh at it,” he observes. “The red, white and blue ballyhoo, the jingoistic automatic response is a little softened and people are wondering. Part of that comes because we know more. Where are the weapons of mass destruction? He hid them, that’s why we can’t find them. How come he didn’t use them? He hid them so well that he couldn’t find them. You couldn’t do that in the beginning but now it’s easier.”

Is it important that he is seen to target both sides of the political divide to maintain his credibility?

“I don’t know if it’s important, it’s just the way I am. I don’t want to end up preaching to the converted. That just turns people off. I know I’m turned off when I see someone from the right just mouthing the party line. Why don’t you ever fucking surprise me? That’s what really pisses me off. I know what to expect as soon as I see certain figures from the right or left, I know what they’re going to say before they say it. I want to be surprised, I want someone to say I’m a big Bush fan but he’s wrong about this or visa versa but I never see that. I think everybody has been turned off by never being surprised by anyone’s opinion. I try and straddle the line and mock the left as well.”

With the success of his stand-up depending to a large extent on an audience being as knowledgeable as he is (“my comedy is for people who read or know somebody who does”), Durst notes that his not infrequent trips to Europe provide him with particularly receptive and open crowds.

“I find you guys read more because your TV sucks,” he says. “There’s the whole tradition of the many newspapers, everybody has a splinter that you can belong to. You have to remember also that you guys are in the midst of the rest of the world, we’re very isolated. We have Mexico and we have Canada within 1,500 miles of our borders. If you think of where London or Dublin is, there are about thirty countries within that radius so you’re in the thick of it.”

Does he make an effort to mug up on specific issues to the places that he visits?

“I do but I find it presumptuous to come over and immediately start harping about what’s going on in places. I do try and drop a few references in my act that I’m aware of things but I think it’s a bit impertinent of this Yank to cross the pond and start bleating.”