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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Everybody did an amazing job of letting their hair down and being fearless,
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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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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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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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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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Career is a mindset. The wrong mindset. Career is linear. Especially when you are trapped in the TV or film world. The next thing you do has always got to be bigger, or it is perceived as a failure.
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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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I was surprised how deeply that affected us. Every comedian will say Johnny was just the biggest influence on their life.
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There are a lot of movies out there for you, but there is room on the shelf for something that's free and liberating as well, ... If you don't like dirty jokes, if you don't like rough language, I highly recommend the penguin movie because they dress really nicely.
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There are many people who say it was Johnny's favorite ever.
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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,
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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 don't judge anybody if they're offended, we're just having a good time,
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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.