The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [65]
It’s easy to be socially relevant. I could go in at five tonight and say, “Give me four guests, give me the heads of the prisons of California and give me a politician and give me some psychiatrists and we’ll just discuss what happened in Guyana.” And you can sit there and discuss people in cults and get very heavy, and everybody will say, “Oh, that’s very socially relevant.”
That’s a talk show, but that’s not what I do. I’m an entertainer, and I always look at myself as an entertainer. So it has bothered me for a while when we would get a little flak from the critics saying we’re not doing anything “deep.” That’s not the idea.
Yet, there is a topicality to your show. You’ll come up with witty jokes—not gags—about Watergate, Camp David, drugs, changing sexual mores . . .
I think some of the material we’ve done on political things is some of the best material on the air. And it does get a strong reaction—especially in the political arena. We sense the mood of the country very quickly.
For example, I remember when Agnew was first selected as vice president, it was easy to do jokes about him; nobody knew who he was, and he was good fodder for material. Then, when Agnew became the voice of so-called Middle America, all of a sudden the jokes were not particularly funny. When he fell into disfavor, then again you found out that the people would buy the caustic material. Same thing with Nixon.
Has there ever been a joke you felt uncomfortable doing, either at the time or in retrospect?
NBC used to come to me years ago. They wanted to see the monologue before the show, and I said, “No, I can’t do that.” I can’t have somebody sitting up in an office and making capricious judgments on what he thinks is funny or not funny. I said, “You’re going to have to trust my judgment,” and they have. And nobody sees the monologue outside of the writers and myself; they give me the stuff, and I add to it or edit it, and put it together. Nobody sees it until it’s done. And I don’t think in seventeen years there have been more than one or two instances where something might have been cut.
You’ve always had a kind of iconoclastic flair in your humor, even going back to when you were working on the radio in Omaha. In Kenneth Tynan’s [1978] piece in the ‘New Yorker,’ he wrote about these formatted, prerecorded interviews you would receive at the station and then mischievously distort.
I know what you’re talking about, and I loved that. In the old radio days, the record companies would send out these prepared interviews and they would send you a script so you could interview the recording artist. You’d play the Patti Page tape and say, “Gee, it’s nice to have you here today, Patti,” and she’d say, “Thank you for inviting me tonight; it’s nice to be here.” Then the next question would be, “When did you first start singing?” And the taped reply would be, “Well, I think I was about ten years old, and I was in a church play or something.”
So I just wrote my own questions, and I’d say, “I understand that you hit the juice pretty good and you’ve been known to really get drunk pretty often. When did that start?” Then they’d play the cut, and she’d say, “Well, I think I was about ten years old, and I was in a church play . . .” and it was wonderful. Just these insane, wild, provocative questions, and then the engineer would play this innocent track with the prerecorded reply. They quit sending them to us very soon. I’ve always liked irreverence.
You’ve talked to me in the past about “pure television.” What is pure television?
To me, it’s still the performance on TV that is most important. The personality is more important than all of the dance numbers and the big production things. I always thought those things have been kind of lost on television, because they ignore the automatic focus that TV provides.
But I got the feeling,