JOHN FUGELSANG
Fugelsang been featured on MSNBC, CNN, FOX News, Dennis Miller, Air America, NPR, CNBC, and CurrentTV. He’s been a regular on MSNBC’s The Ed Schultz Show and UP with Chris Hayes; CNN’s Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien, HLN’s The Joy Behar Show; FOX News’ Fox & Friends and Red Eye, and Progressive Talk’s The Stephanie Miller Show. He’s a regular guest host for Stephanie Miller and has co-hosted the conservative Jay Severin Show, and been published on The Huffington Post and Daily Kos. He’s guest hosted Viewpoint with Eliot Spitzer, The War Room with Jennifer Granholm, and Talking Liberally with Stephanie Miller for Current TV. He also once co-hosted Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.
He’s appeared at Montreal’s Just for Laughs Festival, HBO’s U.S Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Michael Moore’s Traverse City Comedy Arts Festival, The Las Vegas Comedy Festival, and the South Beach Comedy Festival in Miami. He was named ‘Outstanding NY Monologist’ at Lincoln Center by the M.A.C. He also runs stand-up/spoken word shows in NYC and LA that combine comedians, spoken-word artists, hip-hop poets, celebrity storytellers and monologists.
He currently hosts the show Tell Me Everything on SiriusXM Insight.
Before we get to the Sexy Liberal Comedy Tour I’ve got to ask you about your recent Phil Collins experience. How’d that go?
I was really interesting. The show I do over at SiriusXM, we try to make it formatless. It’s 1/3 political talk, 1/3 NPR style interview with authors, historians, rock stars, and 1/3 early Howard Stern with comedians just being deeply inappropriate with each other. And over the shows existence we’ve had a lot of great rock stars including Noel Gallagher, Brian Wilson, and Willie Nelson, and now Phil Collins. It was really nice to get him. I didn’t want to ask him the obvious questions, I just wanted to find a place where he could be real. We talked a lot about insecurity, being a successful artist, and still not believing in yourself. He really opened up and gave me a whole new perspective on him. He’s a guy I grew up with and think should still keep going on making music.
There has always been a deep tie between music and politics. The same goes for comedians and politics. With that said, musicians have both music and lyric to get their message out there where comedians just have the spoken word. How hard is it to break through the clutter with comedy to get your message across?
I agree with you that it’s a lot easier for a good song to get a message across because a good song can be abstract, the chords can touch you in ways that words can’t. I do political stand-up because when I was younger I saw George Carlin he made me feel less alone. And my dad was a history teacher. So talking about politics, history, and religion was always a way I could bond with him because I sucked at sports. It’s been a fun journey. I’ve been able to do stand-up for the troops overseas. I caused an etch-a-sketch kerfuffle for Mitt Romney on CNN during the last election. I’ve had a whole bunch of weird little adventuress along the way.
For me it’s like when Billy Wilder said, “If you are going to tell the truth, make it funny or they’ll kill you.” That’s always been a guiding principal for me. And that’s one of the reasons why doing the Sexy Liberal Tour with Stephanie Miller has been so much fun because I get to go on the road and play to gorgeous large theaters to incredibly smart informed lovely people the kind of material that gets you banned from the type of clubs that pay. It’s not easy to do political stuff in a mixed room.
You’re going to be back in theaters with your stand-up with this one-night only event. That’s got to feel good. It’s cool the tour has been captured forever and people will get to check it out.
It’s great to do all of this material and have it captured on film in the hopes that most of it will be completely irrelevant in two weeks. The tricky thing about doing political stand-up is that you spend all of this time writing material that ends up being dated in three weeks. So there are a lot of perks trying to do this. I did another film a few years back called the Coexist Comedy Tour that was about a Christian comic, a Muslim comic, a Jewish-Hindu Atheist comic, and a Buddhist comic all doing sets. The Christian comic ended up dropping out and the concert film becomes a documentary about trying to find a new Christian comic. Then they meet me in New York and I said, “I would never call myself a Christian comic but I do a lot of material about Christianity.” My Father was a Franciscan Brother and my Mother was a Nun. So Catholicism was my whole asexual orientation. Michael Moore ended up showing the film at his festival and we were all really proud of it.
Now with this new film, the Sexy Liberal Comedy Tour, it’s going to be a really fun “get out to vote” show. I was in the Bernie camp supporting someone now that swore I would never support. But I’m at peace with it. I’m on the side of not letting Mike Pence choose the next three Supreme Court Judges. So for me, it’s been fun not doing just material making fun of Donald Trump’s hair, spray tan, or racism, but actually go a little deeper. It’s a real nice balance of smart and silly.
I love that racism came third in that list. It’s unfortunate that things like hair and spray tans grab the headlines as opposed the important matters. Where does one go to find out what to do, think, or say anymore at this point?
It’s really tricky. For one thing, you can’t get your news all from one place. If all you consume is “nitch news”, and we’re in the golden age of news telling you already what you want to hear, you’ll be part of the problem. That goes for liberals as well as conservatives. Generally, what I like about the liberal point of view is that it’s about questioning authority and it’s about questioning your own beliefs. And I think that’s very healthy. But you are right. We’ve had these four debates and there were no questions about climate change at all. And that’s arguably the most important issue facing us as not only Americans but humans on this earth. And it didn’t get picked up. The candidates barely talked about it. It ain’t sexy. We live in a society where people actually believe that climate science is fake but pro wrestling is real. So at this point, sometimes it feels like we’re voting for a tourniquet or an open hemorrhage? It’s hard to be inspired by how the campaigns are run and how the media covers them.
Do you feel it’s become comedy’s responsibility to be the gateway to discuss certain topics, including politics, that are too hard to discuss other places? Is it comedy’s responsibility to handle politics?
No, I don’t. I don’t think artist have a responsibility to do anything other than what they are called to do as artists. For me it’s something I felt called to do. But I would never say other comedians have the responsibility to talk about anything. I don’t believe in dictating content. But we’re in this age where comedians are fighting for social justice and Presidential candidates are telling penis jokes. That’s just the awkward reality of 2016. And I think there’s a reason why people, especially young people, trust comedians more than they trust journalists, or the media, or politicians. If a joke isn’t funny you don’t laugh right? But I joke has to have an element of truth in it for you to laugh. Even if it’s a rude joke based on a stereotype. There has to be something in there that’s real that makes you laugh. So if a comedian can make you laugh that’s because they are conveying something true. And I think that’s why, on an innate level, you’ll trust a person who uses common sense to make you laugh more than someone who uses their double talking jive is to make you vote against your own self interests.
Well, there was no one better than George Carlin at this. What was your first Carlin experience like?
The first time I saw George Carlin was during the first Gulf War, Desert Storm. We sent troops to restore the dictator of Kuwait while protecting the dictator of Saudi Arabia. I had a lot of problems with that war. It was a feel good PR war. Half of our casualties were from friendly fire. They had a big ticker-tape parade in New York for the heroes. There were some clergy that were praying on the side of the parade and the crowd began chanting obscenities at the clergy. Whitney Houston lip-synced The National Anthem in a stadium and it went to #1. It was an insane time. President Bush actually said that, “We exercised the ghosts of Vietnam.” What does that mean? I was so angry. 93% of Americans supported this war. I was just a kid. I felt so disjointed. Everyone around me thought I was crazy, cynical, and not enjoying this.
I went to go see George Carlin in Westbury out on Long Island with my friends. This was the Jammin’ in New York Tour, and he opened with his routine about the Persian Gulf War. And he talked about how George Bush had to prove his manhood by sending someone else’s kids to die. And how all the bombs are shaped like penises. If you listen to the Jammin’ in New York album, which he said at the time was his best album ever, he said that’s where he stopped being a comic and became an essayist. He really began making points and used jokes to move the points along. Sitting there in the audience hearing him do this and hearing a crowd of people, who probably supported that war but couldn’t help but laugh because he was spitting so much truth, he did the greatest thing an artist can do in my opinion. He made me feel less alone. And that was when I knew I really wanted to try and do that. And that is why this Sexy Liberal Comedy Tour is such an honor. I owe a lot to George Carlin. I don’t agree with him on everything and I think his cynicism was a bit of an act. I don’t think you can have that much compassion in your stand-up act unless you really care about the human race. But he’s my guiding light. He’s one of the holy trinity of comedy for me. I will always be grateful that I had the chance to see him live.
Well, now people are going to be able to see you live, in a theater, and you are going to be three stories tall. Pretty cool.
Hahaha, thanks! I’m really looking forward to it.
You can see John Fugelsang as part of the Sexy Liberal Comedy Tour in theaters tonight thanks to Fathom Events. Grab tickets right here.
