We showed up at his hotel at 10 A.M. Before we could introduce
ourselves,he told us "When the downfall of the telephone company occurs,
you'll know it started here." Our meal continued from there: tales of
battles with Paramount Pictures, clinical depression, lawyers, and health
insurance. And all this before noon.
PT: In 1969, PSYCHOLOGY TODAY asked you what the state of the union
was. Here we are, twenty-five years later, almost to the day...
AB: Yeah, and nothing's changed. Same union, nothing's changed.
I'll tell you what I think today. The same scoundrels are here in one
form or another--the same law offices, same lobbyists, the same money
problems for the politicians. So nothing's changed.
PT: Do they provide you with better material?
AB: No, I've always been provided with good material. No one
administration is different than another. The executive branch is a bit
more interesting, because of the names. You know who Hillary is, you know
who Bill is, but you don't know who anybody on all those committees
are.
But I'll tell you one thing: I've decided I am going to destroy the
phone company. I haven't figured out how I'm gonna do it yet. But on
planes, everywhere I go, I think of ways of getting them, because they're
driving me absolutely batty.
You know, we're not the ones who make the mistake when we dial.
They make the mistake, and then they pretend that you make the mistake.
And this is really the secret.
PT: What have you got against the phone company?
AB: Well, you and I, we're always dialing a number. They say if you
want Joe Blow, hit 1, if you want Harry Gizmo, hit 2, if you want...
Those folks have screwed up America. You cannot get a human voice
anymore! This computer I bought, if you called them now, you've got a
twenty-five minute wait to get a human voice when you have a problem with
it, and they're playing Valkyrie and they're playing Beethoven, and
you're so sick and tired. And every minute they say, 'We want your
business, we want your call, please don't hang up!' It's horrible!
PT: What are you going to do to them?
AB: I'm going to make them change their ways.
PT: How do you plan on doing that?
AB: There are plenty of ways. For instance, they're going to have
to hire more human beings. I mean, they keep trying to lay off human
beings, and I want to try to make them rehire them. I'm also going to ask
them to publicly apologize to all of us for what they've done.
PT: Okay, tell us--where does your humor come from?
AB: Well, let's just take this thing that we're talking about for a
minute. Here is a subject that the three of us are interested in, that we
can identify with. We all have hostility toward the phone company. The
idea of one guy taking on the phone company is a very funny idea. I mean,
it's so ludicrous, but it's funny. At the same time, the underlying truth
is that humor comes out of the fact that when I say they make the
mistakes, we don't, it makes sense that way. Because we all can't make
that many mistakes when we're phone dialing.
It's the way you look at things. Everything's a little
cockeyed.
PT: You say you decided early on, I think six or seven, that you
wanted to be a humorist.
AB: I was being a little facetious about that, but I meant that I
discovered at an early age, and I can't pinpoint the exact age, that I
could make people laugh. And it was a heady experience for me because
when I made people laugh, I was a star! I became a star overnight in the
classroom. There were forty people around me, and I'm sitting there
whispering stuff, making the kids giggle, and the teacher's getting mad
at me, saying you better shut up or you're going to go to jail.
And so all of a sudden out of this fairly unconventional life I was
leading, I found something that I could do that they couldn't do. And so
my career was really based on my childhood, when nobody paid me to be
funny, but it was the most socially acceptable way to survive.
PT: And the object of your humor has gone from schoolchildren to
presidents of the United States. What does that say?
AB: What it says is that there's a little anger there and a little
resentment of the establishment, which I've always had, whether it was
the principal at school or whether it's the president of the United
States. I also found, and it's commercial, too, that people love to have
their leaders made fun of, or the establishment, or the bureaucracy made
fun of That's how most political satirists survive--by making fun of the
bureaucracy we all hate.
For example, I'm involved in this lawsuit over the Eddie Murphy
movie, Coming to America.* I was awarded $900,000 or a million dollars by
the court. But Paramount won't give up. They're in the court of appeals
now.
So one day I went into the Four Seasons restaurant, and I was at
the hat check area when Marty Davis, the president of Paramount, comes
down. And he says, "Can I have a copy of your new book?" And I said,
"Yeah, for $900,000!"
PT: If you weren't a humorist, what would you be? Would you be a
terrorist?
AB: I would probably be the lowest form of humanity. I would
probably be a public relationist.
PT: What's wrong with PR people?
AB: They're selling something they usually don't believe in.
PT: What makes them any different from lawyers?
AB: I didn't say I liked lawyers, either. And I have a lot of
experience with them.
PT: What do you make of this lawsuit?
Tags:
Art Buchwald,
computer,
depression,
downfall,
executive branch,
gizmo,
hillary,
human voice,
humor,
joe blow,
law offices,
life,
lobbyists,
money problems,
noon pt,
paramount pictures,
planes,
scoundrels,
state of the union,
telephone company,
twenty five years
