One Hand Jerking (15 page)

In the tradition of Lenny Bruce, Harry plays all the characters in little theatrical productions that serve as a vehicle for his incisive humor. He occasionally presents a phone conversation between George W. Bush and his father, taking the part of both and capturing the nuances of each. On the eve of Bush's trip to England, he confides to the former president:

“You know, this protest stuff is just a lot of hype cooked up by our friends in the liberal media to distract Americans from the good news that I'm having tea with the queen. I mean, I've been thinking about it. One day I'm sucking Jack Daniels off a frozen trailer hitch, ten years later I'm having tea with the frigging Queen of England! You know, that's the same kind of transformation the Iraqis are gonna experience if we play with our cards right. . . .”

On another occasion, in his own voice, referring to Bush's crusade to stamp out global terrorism, Harry observed, “It's like the war on drugs. It's a totally metaphorical war in which some people get killed. I expect the Partnership for a Terrorist Free America to start soon.”

One of the voices he does on
Le Show
is CBS News anchor Dan Rather. When the Museum of Radio and Television honored Rather, he personally invited Harry to attend. Harry wanted to talk about issues, but Rather wanted to discuss
Spinal Tap
, the classic rock'n'roll mockumentary where Harry played Derek Smalls, the bassist in the band.

Ironically, that band, “Spinal Tap,” which was put together and existed only for the sake of the movie, ended up going on tour, just as the three folksinging groups invented for the mockumentary
A Mighty Wind
have similarly been touring. During Spinal Tap's London appearance, Harry entered the brunch place at the hotel
where they were staying—looking like his character, Derek, with fake hair extensions but a real beard—and he was awe-stricken by a gifted vocalist, Judith Owen.

“That's all your music, isn't it?” he asked after her set.

She was thrilled that somebody wasn't coming up and saying, “Do you know anything from
Cats
?” Harry describes her singing style as “equal parts early Elton John, late Joanie Mitchell, a little bit of Stevie Wonder—the first record she ever bought was
Songs in the Key of Life
—and with a tinge of the classicism of Procol Harum.”

Eventally they got married, and now divide their time between Santa Monica and New Orleans. Sometimes when Judith has a gig, Harry accompanies her on the electric bass. And, in keeping with his eclectic taste in music and his keen sense of nepotism, he often plays her albums on
Le Show
.

Harry also does the voice of NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and went through a phase of counting—and recording for a radio montage—the number of times Brokaw said the word “tonight” in his newcasts. The record was 13. However, I started counting the number of times Harry used the expression “Ladies and gentlemen” on
Le Show
, and the record was 15. For example, he recalls asking a waitress, “Excuse me, what flavor ice creams do you have?” Adding, “And her reply, ladies and gentlemen, was ‘Today?'”

Another example: Reading an article in the
Washington Post
about a military intelligence expert: “He defended the administration's pre-war position. ‘The idea that we didn't have specific proof he was planning to give a biological agent to a terrorist group doesn't really lead you to anything, because you wouldn't expect to have that information even if it were true.' Run that around your mind a little bit. ‘You wouldn't expect to have that information even if it were true,' ladies and gentlemen.”

Harry has a few “copyrighted features” on
Le Show
. I won a bet with Nancy that they're not
really
copyrighted, and perhaps as a result of that bet, he recently introduced “Tales of Airport Security,” where he reads listeners' accounts of such misadventures, calling it “a copyrighted feature of this broadcast, and when I say that, of course I am lying. That's full disclosure, ladies and gentlemen.”

Sample tale: “Every time the female security guard swept her wand past my breasts, the wand would buzz. She sort of felt me up a few times, and I told her I was wearing an underwire bra. She took one last probing feel, and then it was determined I was telling the truth. Then came my lower abdomen. She instructed me to open up the top of my zipper. She then put her hand under my
pants. Later, in flight, when I was digging in my purse for some lipstick, what should I find in my purse but somethng I use in my job as a supervisor of a department store restocking team—a box cutter.”

Another “copyrighted feature”—“If it ain't copyrighted,” said Harry, “who knows the difference?”—is “Apologies of the Week,” ranging from the creator of a comic strip,
Get Fuzzy
, apologizing for suggesting that Pittsburgh smells bad, to the president of Serbia apologizing for evil committed during the war in Bosnia. From Brazil's government apologizing to the country's senior citizens for forcing them to show up at Social Security offices to prove they're not dead, to Burger King apologizing to a woman who was ordered by a franchise employee to stop breast-feeding her baby or leave, because it made a customer uncomfortable.

“Yeah,” Harry observed, “it brings you down seeing somebody eating better than you at a Burger King.”

When Rush Limbaugh was outed as an addict to prescription painkillers and went to rehab, Harry did his version of Rush ranting there, which resulted in some hate mail. “Rush is doing a radio show in his head in detox,” he explained to me, “so first Bill Clinton calls him, in this nightmare—one of Rush's trademark lines is, ‘With talent on loan from God'—then John Ashcroft calls him, and the first thing he says is, ‘Rush, this is John Ashcroft, God wants his talent back.' That set them off.”

Limbaugh
seems
like a cartoon character, but Harry also does the voices of several
actual
cartoon characters on
The Simpsons
, though it's possible that more Americans know who Ned Flanders is than John Ashcroft. Since Harry does both Mr. Burns and Smithers, I asked, “When you're taping
The Simpsons
, do you just stand there and talk to yourself?”

“Yes,” he said, “and that happens a lot. When Hank [Azaria] plays Apu and Chief Wiggum, he'll talk to himself, and when Dan [Castellaneta] plays Homer and his dad, he'll talk to himself.”

I sent Harry a report that Fox News had threatened legal action after an episode of
The Simpsons
on Fox Entertainment poked fun at the channel by featuring a “Fox News Crawl” at the bottom of the screen, reading: “Pointless news crawls up 37% . . . Do Democrats cause cancer? Find out at
foxnews.com
. . . Rupert Murdoch: Terrific dancer . . . Dow down 5000 points . . . Study: 92% of Democrats are gay . . . JFK posthumously joins Republican Party . . . Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple . . . Dan Quayle: Awesome . . . Ashcroft Declares breast of chicken sandwich ‘obscene' . . . Hillary Clinton embarrasses
self, nation . . . Bible says Jesus favored capital-gains cut . . . Stay tuned for Hannity and Idiot . . . Only dorks watch CNN . . . Jimmy Carter: Old, wrinkly, useless . . . Brad Pitt + Albert Einstein = Dick Cheney . . . Right wing of chicken . . .”

“Somebody asked me about this story,” Harry told me, “and it sounded like utter hogwash to me—except for the part about misleading people into thinking the crawl was real—[Orson Welles']
War of the Worlds
rule and all. I've advocated that Rupert do many things to himself, but suing wasn't one of them.”

According to
Simpsons
creator Matt Groening, “Fox fought against it and said they would sue the show. We called their bluff because we didn't think Rupert Murdoch would pay for Fox to sue itself. So, we got away with it. But now Fox has a new rule that we can't do those little fake news crawls on the bottom of the screen in a cartoon because it might confuse the viewers into thinking it's real news.”

Fox crawled out of the lawsuit but, Harry asked on the air, “What if there had been a suit?” And he proceeded to present the trial, with Nancy Grace from Court TV as prosecutor, F. Lee Bailey as defense attorney and Lance Ito (from O. J. Simpson's trial) as judge. Rupert Murdoch testified, “The fact that I brought this action against myself is proof enough to the average man that I
do
care about my news network's good name.”

Harry is obviously not afraid to bite the hand that feeds him. Nor is he afraid to poke fun at the power structure that nauseates him.

“I'd always known about the Bohemian Grove, growing up in California and being a political junkie,” he said. “The Grove is a retreat for the richest, most powerful white men in America, who go every summer for a week-long romp where they act like college sophomores on an unlimited budget.
Teddy Bear's Picnic
[the film he wrote and directed] is basically a comedy about grown-ups with too much power and what happens when the secrecy of their yearly romp is threatened.”

Coincidentally, he was invited to be a guest at one of their big shows. I asked how he differentiates between him performing at the Bohemian Grove and Al Franken writing jokes for the Democrats.

“It was just sort of Quixotic orneriness,” he said, referring to the material he chose to do at the Grove. “But I wasn't there being their court jester. I wasn't there to pander to whatever their brand of politics might have been at that particular gathering. Al is, of course,
literally
a Democratic court jester. Basically, the jest is going away. You can call people idiots and morons and fatsos just for a certain period of time before it stops being ironic in any sense.

“The other thing is, nobody at the Grove at that time was a candidate for anything that I was endorsing. Franken clearly wears his endorsements where his wit should be. I'm a satirist. My job is to make fun of
all
of them. People who supposedly practice the art of satire and then retire to the councils of power to write jokes for their leaders—people like Al Franken—really ought to have their satirist cards revoked.”

[
Author's note
: Franken has since stated he was “seriously thinking about” running for senator in Minnesota; I think he'd be a worthy successor to Paul Wellstone.]

Harry's philosophy of comedy is, “Comedy is good, reality is better.” His all-time favorite example:

“Well, I would say my object of idolatry in that regard would be the tape of Richard Nixon just before he makes his resignation speech. You can't beat that. [
In Nixon's voice
] ‘Ollie there, he's always trying to take another picture of me, but he's always trying to get one of me picking my nose. You wouldn't do that, would you, Ollie? That's enough now.' Just the lunacy of him kidding around with this crew that you can actually see on the tape, they don't know what to make of this, and a guy who entered a field where one of the primary qualifications is the ability to make charming small talk, and then at this climactic, penultimate moment in Nixon's fall, what does he choose to do but walk in and make this insane small talk? That to me is one of the great comic choices ever.”

“As a thoroughgoing news junkie,” I asked, “you must know too much. So are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?”

“Whose future?”

“The future of civilization, I suppose.”

“There's that famous quip of Gandhi: ‘When you speak of Western civilization, I think it would be a good idea.' Ultimately, you know, we're gonna be destroyed.”

“You mean as individuals?”

“No, as a race. The planet will get eaten up by some process in the solar system, or in the universe, and the thing regenerates, so in the sense that I think a lot of liberals' pessimism translates as panic, I don't have that. I think I'm intellectually pessimistic and emotionally optimistic. I think the worst is gonna happen, probably, but in terms of my own behavior, in terms of the way I live my life, I don't act that way. A necessary distinction can be mainly to get up in the morning, if you see clearly what's going on. It's also the distinction between the individual and the larger—the two can have difference trajectories.”

“So since we're gonna be totally destroyed anyway,” I asked, “it doesn't make any difference whether you're optimistic or pessimistic?”

“I don't think the universe cares what your attitude is. Most choices you make are based on intellectually what you know and think, and on the other hand—I don't know, I always try to puzzle this out because I know that in terms of my behavior, I've always behaved as if I were optimistic, at least about me and the people around me. For example, I never, ever, as a child of the Cold War, aside from maybe an hour during the Cuban missile crisis, I never believed that we were gonna get blown up, never believed
that
was gonna be nuclear war, I never lived under the ‘shadow of the bomb.'

“Certainly, it's not because I believe in the competence of most people, because I don't, I believe the opposite. That's where comedy comes from, is showing how fucked up people are. But it just didn't seem, on an emotional basis—obviously I knew what the dangers were—and you know, I have taken some joy in reminding people in the recent period when people are walking around as if
this
is the greatest threat that's ever faced the U.S., well, you know, 20 years ago, what, 20,000 missiles were aimed on a 3-minute warning system at the U.S. We got through that. In the forefront of my mind, whatever I'm facing in my time is so much less horrific than what my parents had and their familes faced in their time that it's a joke.”