Paul Provenza
Paul Provenza
Paul Provenzais a television presenter and actor, actor on stage, radio panelist, stand-up comedian, filmmaker, and skeptic based in Los Angeles. He has appeared on several podcasts and in recent years has interviewed other stand-up comedians. In 2005 he became a director, in 2010 an author and in 2011 he started producing for comedy festivals and television...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActor
Date of Birth31 July 1957
CountryUnited States of America
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As we set about to edit, I watched 150 hours of footage over and over for a period of months. I had to figure out what hanging out with these artists doing this joke meant. In that process some ideas began to emerge: craft and art, freedom and creativity, boundaries and taboos, etc. So we used comics' performances that illustrated those ideas. We wanted to show rather than tell.
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The joke is the comedy equivalent of jazz. It's raunchy, it's free of constraints, yet has a simple 'melody' to hold on to. It's about where you take it, not where it's going. If that is not a workable definition of art, I don't know what is.
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Johnny can't gain his composure, Ed McMahon is doing his characteristic bull moose guffaw, the band -- the instruments are banging into one another -- the audience is in tears, and every time Johnny would try to gain his composure, he would look at Buddy and it would start all over again.
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Gary is awesome, he's amazing, ... The music in the movie alludes to jazz, bebop and pop but has an improvisational feel and he did an amazing job with just a few minutes.
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I don't know if the audience wants to hear it,
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He was a huge champion of the idea and a big cheerleader for the movie, and this is where it gets heartbreaking, ... We were supposed to bring it over to his house and screen it for him right after Sundance, and he died while we were at Sundance.
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If you've ever been offended by any particular word, you'll probably hear it 100 times in this movie.
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Social media allows comics to bypass the gatekeepers and connect directly with people who will want to come see them.
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Comedy is inherently subversive because it turns the normal reality on its head. The art form is all about these questions and contradictions. In comedy, we're dealing with language that we all understand, but words can have a dozen other things around them that alter or affect meaning.
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George Carlin maintained that anything and everything is funny given the right context. This context also includes your own history with a given group. What I can get away with and where I can go is not a problem with my audience because they know me.
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When I was a young comic just starting out, I was very cautious, as I didn't want to alienate people. George Carlin's bravery became a benchmark. I became perfectly fine with alienating some people in the audience. That just comes with the territory.
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We met at the free clinic. She's there three times a week.
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We didn't shoot it like a real movie, ... We never set up lights, we didn't do anything elaborate with sound, we never did makeup or anything like that, because every time something like that happens, it's another layer of artifice.
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We're familiar with the notion of musicians reinterpreting the same song over and over, but we don't ever hear that with comedians,