Bashing both Democrats and Republicans – who agree on 90 percent of key US issues – and giving a voice to independent journalists is the success recipe of RT America’s political comedy show Redacted Tonight, creator Lee Camp told Larry King’s Politicking.
The team of the “radicalized satirical comedy show” told King that shooting in Washington, DC is a great advantage for the program, as they not only have direct access to policymakers, but also use the White House as a backdrop.
Watch the full interview with Redacted crew starting 15:51:
Larry King: Joining me now is the cast of
Redacted Tonight, it airs on RT America on
Friday nights at 8 Eastern. They are Lee Camp – stand-up comedian
and activist, who created Redacted Tonight; Abby Feldman, the
actress and comedian and former member of the ‘Upright Citizens
Brigade,’ and John F. O’Donnell – a writer, who has been featured
in The Huffington Post, The New York Times and has also appeared
on Comedy Central’s Fresh Faces of Comedy. How did all this come
together, Lee?
Lee Camp: We have all been doing comedy for a
long time and I have been doing political stand-up comedy for 15
years and talking about issues that I really cared about on stage
– trying to combine it with laughs to make these issues palatable
for your average audience member. And then RT said ‘could you
give us a comedy show,’ so I worked with RT on creating this
show.
King: Did you find Abby and John?
Camp: I found John because he and I knew each
other for about 10 years on the New York City stand-up comedy
circuit and I knew he was amazing, so I brought him in and he was
friends with Abby, so that’s where we found Abby.
King: So you [O'Donnell] brought Abby.
John F. O’Donnell: I was at a comedy club in New
York after the show was just getting started here in DC and we
were there, hanging out, and I was telling her about the show and
she was so excited about it. I showed her some clips and she
loved it so I told her we are looking for another correspondent
for the show and she started submitting stuff, so we knew she was
the perfect fit for the show.
King: So you are a stand-up [O’Donnell] as well
as you [Camp] right? And Abby, have you been a stand-up too?
Abby Feldman: Yes.
King: Or were you drawn to political comedy?
Feldman: In a different way, yeah. I have political kind
of general ideas, but not as specifically activist as these guys,
but I have been learning a lot from them since I joined the team,
but I have general political ideas.
O’Donnell: I would say out of the three of us,
Lee’s stand-up is the most overtly political. He has found a way
to filter out all this important political information through
the medium of stand-up. I have found that I like to do it, but it
is a very difficult thing specifically in stand-up to not come
across as being angry, self-righteous, preaching to the
converted. But there are ways to do it and you just have to be
very creative. And now that I am again so re-immersed in
politics, as I have always cared about it, I am trying to put
more of it into my stand-up and it has been a fun and interesting
experience.
Feldman: I came from more of an improv and
journalism background and wanted to move away from the specifics
and I think I bring more of an absurdist comedic angle to my set,
so it balances out.
King: These kinds of shows like Comedy
Central…are they all tending to be towards the progressive left?
Camp: I would say a lot of the political comedy
that is out there is a little left-wing. I would say we are a
little more left-wing and we try and grab the stories that those
shows aren’t covering, but there is right-wing comedy out there.
You know Dennis Miller, for example. He had a switch after his
HBO show, where he went more right-wing. But the reason there are
less I think is because almost all jokes have a victim or victims
in a way. To have someone in a position of privilege, whether it
is wealth or they are white in America…
READ MORE: ‘Watching the Hawks’: New show for millenials who prefer to ask hard questions
King: So they are easier to attack?
Camp: It's hitting down. It is uncomfortable to
see a comedian hitting down on someone who is lower than him.
King: So give me the format of the show.
O’Donnell: So the show generally opens with
Lee's opening rants, which gets everybody warmed-up. This is
normally the first opening segment and then cut to title
sequence. Then Lee normally has his opening the news segment,
then it cuts to a desk segment, where myself or Abby are
political correspondents on the show. We will do a satirical
piece together. We switch off every week.
King: All of this is written?
O’Donnell: Yeah. What is kind of crazy about our
show is that we write all of our content. There are currently no
additional staff writers.
Camp: There are also two people who are not here
with us, Sam Sacks and Philip Chang, who also do great stuff on
the show.
King: So your piece ends and then what?
O’Donnell: And then we do a lot of parody ads. We have
the ability to attack advertising and big corporations and stuff
like that on this network, so we try to take advantage of it as
much as possible. Abby and I did one where we were parodying
Dunkin Donuts, we did another one about the iPhone. Lee did
another one about Coors Light and we have done one almost every
week.
King: And then does Abby come in after you?
Fledman: Well, it depends on what we are doing.
We alternate. We will do a desk segment, or we will do a field
piece, or we will be doing a man on the street and talking to
people about whatever the topic we are doing and we have a lot of
fun with that.
Camp: Another thing we have over other comedy
shows is we are in [Washington] DC. We can go out in front of the
White House and talk to people right there. John has been in the
halls of Congress talking to people.
O’Donnell: We did a really fun thing. After
Congress recessed, after only coming back for something like
eight days after their summer break and they had just passed
appropriations allowing for some training and bombing in Syria.
So I went into the halls of Congress and into the Senate building
and the Russell building and I was like, ‘let’s ask people what’s
going on.’ This is an important thing – the passing of this bill
to arm the rebels, but there was nobody there, so I kind of just
ran around the halls looking for people and it was kind of a fun
and interesting thing to do and we have that ability because we
are in Washington and we try to take advantage of it. Abby does a
lot of MOS’s in front of the White House and it is pretty
amazing.
Fledman: I do a piece in front of the White House so I
can go around and hug people or offer them renal filtered water.
King: Is it all live?
Camp: The show is live to tape, so we tape it in
front of a live audience, which is small – around 25 people or so
– and then we go from there. So yeah – its live to tape.
King: So this must be a lot of fun to do and you
continue doing stand-up during the week?
Camp: Yeah, I think we all try, but this takes
up a lot of our time and we work really hard on it, but I try and
keep touring. I just got back from Philadelphia and Boston and
the live crowd is part of all of our passions – so we love the
show and we love the live crowd.
O’Donnell: And luckily the scene in DC, the
stand-up scene in DC is really up and coming and its pretty
great. So when we have time, we can bounce around the city and do
spots.
King: Is this an easy city to make fun of? It’s
duck soup right?
Feldman: It is fun and I think people are a
little bit more surprised by what we are doing here as opposed to
if we were doing this in New York. People are used to seeing news
cameras, but whenever I am out on the street doing ‘A Man on the
Street,’ I think people are really surprised to see me sitting on
the ground…
King: Sitting on the ground?
Feldman: Yeah, or whatever it might be. I might
be encouraging people to drink my renal filtrated water, or
encouraging people to become Amish in order to prevent war.
Camp: One thing I will tell you about doing
stand-up in this city is the audiences. Half the time there are
people in the audiences who are congressional interns, so a lot
of the things that John and I say on stage can make those
audiences uncomfortable.
O’Donnell: I would like to tell you one example.
One thing I would do in the Dupont Circle area is say ‘round of
applause if you think Edward Snowden is a hero.’ I would get a
little trickle of applause. Then I would say ‘round of applause
if you think he is a traitor’ – I would get a little trickle of
applause. I would say ‘round of applause if you didn’t applaud
because you are maneuvering for a political position and you
don’t know how you feel about the situation, so you don’t want to
respond.’ Everyone starts clapping and just going to town about
it and I was like – this is very telling about what is going on
in Washington. People don’t really want to define what they are
about, but at Redacted, we can’t help but do so.
King: They don’t use the word ‘change’ anymore –
they say the word ‘evolve.’
King: Is this administration easy to make fun
of?
Fledman: Yeah, I think what comedians do is make
fun of the status quo.
King: Who is the general picking point at the
moment? John Boehner? Barack Obama?
Camp: My position and my feeling is that the two
main parties – the two corporate parties agree on 90 percent of
the biggest structural issues of our time, whether it is the NSA
or our thousands of military bases around the world. So we do go
after these people like Boehner and Obama. But it is more the two
party funded system that gets the center of our ire because until
you get money out of politics, you are going to have a very
middle of the road, very pro-Wall Street, two party system.
King: Do you think there is any difference
between the two parties?
O’Donnell: Yeah, I definitely think there are
differences on domestic social issues and things like that and
these things are important. Often these social issue things are
used as hot buttons to keep people divided from each other rather
than coming together and actually having some evolution in this
country and I think that this is an unfortunate trick that a lot
of politicians do. But as Lee said, ever since this Citizens
United vs the FEC [Federal Election Commission] ruling, it really
is the thing that all these issues are connected to money and
politics. For example our unjust criminal system – this crazy
prison industrial complex – that’s connected to money and
politics. There is lobbying there and there are private prisons
that are publicly traded, and that is a really tragic situation.
NSA surveillance is a thing that most Americans are not for on
both the right and the left. So I think it would be interesting
if people from the right and the left could come together on
single issues to try and enact change.
King: We have always used humor though. America
has always been funny.
Feldman: I think that is the comical relief that
you need. America has always been funny and I think our show
would do well internationally just because people, when there are
hard times and there are wars going on, when there is so much
money in politics, when they are trying to make change but seeing
all these barriers in front of them to try and make change – they
at least want to hear that someone agrees with them and someone
is making fun of it.
King: You are on Fridays. Who sits down and
decides the topics?
Camp: I decide a lot of them, but Abby and John
sit down and pitch ideas about what they would like to cover that
week. They will often come to me with two or three things that
they think are important that week.
King: What happens if you have something break
on a Friday? Like the Hilary Clinton story – when did that break?
Feldman: With Lee’s rants, he can have a little
bit more flexibility and stick something in last minute, but we
try to pick topics that are not evergreen, something that is
going on right now, but something that I film on Tuesday or
Wednesday, I know it will still be relevant on Friday.
Camp: And you know something that I remember breaking on the day we were taping was the Ferguson unrest – the day when it really started to get out of hand.
King: And how did you make fun of that?
Camp: We went after the police response, like
that great video of the police taking down that journalists'
cameras and bashing in the cameras. That sort of thing I think we
should all be against. We can all argue about what happened in
Ferguson, but I think we should be against cops breaking down
journalists' cameras. So we went after that angle a bit.
O’Donnell: I think this is something our show
tries to do, which sets us apart. We give a lot of shout outs to
the activist community and the independent journalists'
community. For example, in Lee’s piece, he got citizen journalist
information that this was happening in Ferguson and because he
brought it up and referenced everybody and leant exposure to that
scene, they were all very excited to get news coverage – albeit
in a radicalized satirical comedy show.
King: Well, you guys were a lot of fun and I
think the shows going to be a guaranteed hit. I want to thank the
show creator Lee Camp, Abby Feldman and John F. O’Donnell – who
does not look like John F. O’Donnell. The show is Redacted
Tonight and it airs Fridays at 8 Eastern on RT America. Thank you
for joining me on this edition of Politicking.