Will Durst: Political Comedy for People Fed Up with Politics
As America enters its longest presidential campaign season ever, the time is ripe for a political satirist like Will Durst to take aim and fire. The five-time Emmy nominee is bringing his brand of punditry to off-Broadway's New World Stages in The All American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing, a new one-man show that Durst describes as "political comedy for people who are sick of politics as usual." The San Francisco-based comic has honed his humor for more than 30 years in clubs and 400-plus TV appearances, picking up seven consecutive nominations for "Stand-Up of the Year" at the American Comedy Awards. Having earned glowing reviews across America and in London for his act, Durst decided to put together a theatrical version of the show with the help of producer/director Eric Krebs. Here, he explains the influences behind his work.
It's funny: One of the raps I've gotten on the comedy circuit is that my material is too theatrical. That probably has something to do with my spending too many idle days trodding the boards before entering the suspect world of stand-up—high school, community theater, UW-Milwaukee, studying with Paul Sills in Milwaukee and George Coates in San Francisco, all of them trying like heck to pound the basics of stage performance into me.
I've found that the economy of the written word for the theater is more in line with my peculiar brand of mocking and scoffing and taunting, but with taste. It's not that comedy club audiences are dumb. They're smarter and richer with better haircuts than their predecessors, but they're saddled with the attention span of high-speed lint. Theater audiences have a history of patience. The biggest annoyance in putting together a one-person show is not being able to curse the playwright!
When it comes to political humorists, I'm kind of a Pollyanna. I appreciate anybody who believes they possess the hormones required to attempt to make a living by encouraging people to laugh out loud on purpose against their will. Comics have always been the fighter pilots of show business: a man and a microphone, the final frontier. But if forced to come up with a list of heroes and mentors, it would have to start with the traditional immortals: Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Tom Lehrer and Dick Gregory. I also admire current fellow plank-walkers: Lewis Black, Jimmy Tingle, Barry Weintraub, Barry Crimmins, Randy Credico, Jim Morris and a bunch of other guys you probably never heard of, all brave and valiant warriors manning the front lines of the comedy wars even though we are that close to being labeled enemy non-combatants.
As for my own beliefs, no matter the degree of bipartisanship a political comic vows to retain, it's impossible not to get involved with the words coming out of your mouth. You're responsible for and destined to be defined by them, so they better come from some core place you can defend. The biggest kick I personally get is people who leave the show and say, "What I liked most is you hit both sides equally." That's a compliment, sure, but it also makes me wonder if that person was paying attention. I'm fairly transparent up there, but people believe what they want to believe. And of course, over the last six years, the mood of the country has, how do you say, tumbled and rolled like a hefty bag full of Jell-O on a roller coaster with rickety tracks. It is I who have remained constant—and pissed.
The one thing my genius producer/director, Eric Krebs, and I share is a fierce and strident outrage at the current political scene, dominated not by the interests of the citizenry but by increasingly intransigent and calcified dogmas. In other words, people are busy being polarized when what we really need to do is come together. Thank god this is the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, or that would sound incredibly lame. Eric has been a ginormous calming influence while encouraging me to go through with this pretty damn intimidating experience, and I hope this is but the start of a beautiful friendship.