“It frustrates me, sometimes, that nobody really wants the truth.
They say they want the truth, but they try to hide from it constantly.
Look at the most popular comedians: they usually aren’t the ones that
are that edgy.”
Eddie Ifft, a comic hailing from Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, late of Los Angeles, California, and frequently calling
various parts of the world ‘home’ for significant periods of the year,
speaks the truth. Ifft is a comedian who doesn’t like to hold back on
stage, and while he doesn’t begrudge any working comic an audience, has
been known to react to some comedians’ material much like that annoying emoticon
on the banner ad that used to grace MySpace pages: “Just say
something!”
Eddie has plenty to say. But it’s not just outrage for
outrage’s sake. The shocking statement will convey a message. More
importantly, it will be a joke: a remark that isn’t necessarily what he
thinks about the subject, but certainly makes you think about it from
somewhere other than the popularly held notion, by making you laugh
either at his position or the truth he’s revealed to you about your
position. But I’m sure this is too high-falutin’ a concept for you to
deal with a mere few paragraphs into an interview, so let me give you
an example: Eddie’s take on Michael Jackson.
I’m so sick of people going, ‘He was the greatest entertainer of
all time’. You’re forgetting about the fact that he was a child
molester. And people always go, ‘He was alleged; he was only alleged,
he was never convicted’.
OJ Simpson was never convicted, either. He was never
convicted of murder. But we’re not gonna be celebrating him at his
funeral.
You like Michael Jackson because you like his music, and he didn’t touch your
kid. He f*cked kids, and the only reason he didn’t get convicted is
because he paid the families 25 million dollars. Twenty-five million,
to each family. And I will tell you this: for 25 million dollars, I
will drive my entire family and let him have sex with them. I would
drive them in a bus, drop them off at Neverland Ranch. I’d be like,
“Granny, get off! I’m going to Cambodia and buying a whole new family!”
(c) Eddie Ifft
“I
like to get the audience
angry, and then turn it around on them and make them laugh and realise
they were being jackasses for their opinion or perception,” Eddie
explains. This Michael Jackson routine is a prime example.
Kiddy-fiddlerage is no laughing matter. Or it shouldn’t be. But if it’s
impossible to discuss anywhere other than in sensationalist media
reports, broaching the topic under the guise of ‘comedy’ enables issues
to be raised and considered – giving the weaker-willed an ‘out’ to
dismiss it (it was ‘only a joke’ or ‘a rude joke, not to be repeated in
mixed company’ or ‘something that oughtn’t even be joked about’), but
those with stronger convictions to acknowledge ‘actually, there’s
something in that…’.
Eddie’s
happy to report that audiences mostly fall into the latter-most category
with this Michael Jackson joke. “People go, ‘You’re right; twenty-five
million dollars is enough money to wipe those sins away’.
Everybody likes to think, ‘No, no, no, I would fight that to the death;
there is not a price you could put on it…’ But then, when a guy has you
outside court and he’s going to give you twenty-five million dollars,
you’re going, ‘Well, you know, we can put the kid in therapy; he
already did f*ck him, so, uh… yeah… let’s take that…’.”
Truth
is, it is the comedian’s job to explore this territory. Sure, there are
audiences who don’t want to forced to think about this stuff; the ‘I
paid to be entertained’ crowd, who are seeking a genuine escape, who
are not paying to be reminded what’s wrong in the world. The truly
talented comedian let’s you do just that: pay for the escape, lull you
into thinking this is the escape, and yet revealing truths about the
world – the way that comic sees the world – to you. And because it’s
done with humour, you are genuinely entertained, discovering the truth
about how the world is. Well, that’s the ideal. It can, and often does,
get watered-down a little along the way. And it sometimes has to be:
the pure, unadulterated message can be a bit hard to handle for
audiences who think comedy is only that funny stuff recorded, edited
and packaged for television. But that stuff is only one part of comedy. There’s
stuff that happens live on stage that is amazing – that you’d never
know about if you never went out to see live comedy. The work of Doug Stanhope, for example, that Eddie finds hilariously inspiring.
“I
watch Doug Stanhope and just go, ‘He’s right…! He’s right…! He’s
right…!’” Eddie says. “You’re laughing because you’re going, ‘How
f*cked up is the world?’ And ‘Why aren’t more people revelling in this?’ I
think what happens is people just shut him off and go,‘I don’t want to
listen to it; I know it’s the truth…’ It’s like someone getting a bill
in the mail and not opening it. ‘I know there’s a bill in there but I
just don’t want to open it.’”
I’ve suggested there’s more ‘comedic truth’ on the live stage than
on the screen, but that isn’t necessarily the case. There are
times when comedy is captured well for movies or television, usually in
a documentary that mixes performance with a look behind the scenes,
like in Paul Provenza’s masterpiece, The Aristocrats. Eddie’s working on a documentary at the moment called America the Punchline,
and he quotes from comedian Lewis Black in it – on striking the
balance between delivering a message and making an audience laugh:
“At the end of the day I’m trying to get the laugh,” Black tells Ifft, “and
the joke might start out preachy but it doesn’t stay in the set unless
it gets a big, big laugh. The important part is, ‘How do I get the
point across initially?’”
Chris Rock, who also appears in America the Punchline, says, “I
write down what I want to talk about, then I make it funny.” Eddie’s
approach is the same:
“I put down all the subjects I want to talk about and then I find
what’s funny in them. I was probably talking about Michael Jackson for
two weeks, saying, ‘Why are we celebrating him?’ And then I finally
found that angle about driving my whole family in the bus to Neverland
Ranch and dropping them off, and getting massive, massive laughs. I’d
found their ‘hot’ button: once you paint the picture in their head of
something so silly, and me being so honest – that I would give up my
entire family for money – by then the whole idea becomes funny.”
It’s the idea that’s funny, not the underlying issue – which is an
important one. Comedy enables the serious topic to be broached in a way
that it can be discussed, and – you’d hope – that leads to reflection and debate. “People go, ‘Oh,
you shouldn’t joke about that stuff’,” Eddie acknowledges. “Yes, you
should. You should joke
about it. You should talk about it. You should make points about what
is right
and what is wrong.”
At the moment, Eddie’s working on a routine about a current trend of incarcerating teenagers for having sex. The
inspiration is the case, outlined in a recent issue of The Economist, of “a 17-year-old girl who gave a 16-year-old boy a blow job, and went to gaol for it”. Meanwhile, argues Eddie, “you’ve got a guy who is eighty-something years
old, who’s got a mansion, and we watch a TV show where he bangs
18-year-olds. That, to me, is a lot creepier than a 17-year-old giving
the 16-year-old a blow job. Where are our moral standards there? It’s
okay for Hugh Hefner and we celebrate him? Why?”
Another one of the inspirational comics Eddie likes is Louis CK, a “phenomenal” comic who “can say anything and it's funny”. According to Eddie, Louis likes to take “the edgiest route you can go”. He had a routine about how most people mistakenly believe molestation to be the worst thing that can happen to
your child. “I have two kids,” Eddie says, paraphrasing Louis, “and
if somebody called me to say my child had been killed, that would be the worst
thing ever. And the child molesters kill them because they don’t want to get
caught. I would much rather get the phone call from the guy going, ‘Hey, ah,
listen – I got your kid, I just molested him. I know he’s got football
practice, so I’ll drop him off there. You can pick him up.’” As Jim Jeffries, a fellow uncompromising comic, has pointed out, “Louis has this way of taking a
subject that if not done correctly, you could walk an entire audience
out of the room on a joke”. As for Eddie, he has his own take on the situation: “When you see someone who is so amazing, you walk
out and go, ‘I'm a fraud’.”
Who’s your Father!Of course, Eddie Ifft is authentic, and always has been. His whole life has been about challenging authority with funny ideas. And although he reckons he turned to a life of comedy because he “couldn’t do anything
else”, I’m not so sure.
“I was a failure at everything, I
really was,” he insists. “I wasn’t good in school; I wasn’t
particularly good in sports at a young age. Those two really are your
only options. To get attention I turned to making the class laugh and
being the class clown.”
Possibly. But there was intent in the
boy’s actions. Raised “your typical, hypocritical Catholic”, Eddie
clearly had ideas about how to make that funny. Because, as an altar
boy, there is a clear path to getting ahead without having to be good
at sport or academia – just toeing the religious line. Not Eddie.
Dressed in those vestments an altar boy wears, he knew, “if I stood
over the fan, my gown would blow up and make everyone laugh in the
church”. Sure, the priest got angry and Mama Ifft got angry, but Eddie
loved making the congregation laugh.
Despite playing his faith
for laughs, Eddie somehow persevered until he was “nearly 30”, going to
church every Sunday. “I was always a typical,
hypocritical Catholic,” he says. “I’d get up and go to church on
Sunday, after
having been on stage to tell a story on
Saturday about having a threesome with two girls in a tent at a
music festival.”
Hmm. A threesome with two girls in a tent at a music
festival isn’t necessarily typical of Catholic hypocrisy; in fact, nor
is telling a story about it. But, taking the point, you can only assume
the priests must have relished their turn hearing Eddie’s confessions,
surely? Not so, according to Eddie, who recalls his last attempt at
confession, as an 8th Grader:
“There were two priests who
would hear confessions: the nice priest and the evil priest. They divided us
up, one group to go to one priest, one group to the other. I was on the
side to go to the evil priest. His name was Monsignor Kraus.
He was a mean f*cker. I was a little bit nervous: ‘Why did I
get this side?’
“I went in and I kneeled down on the kneeler to
start telling him, and the nun came in and pulled me out and walked me over to the other side, knowing
that otherwise, you were never gonna see me again!”
Good
on the nun, who possibly saved two souls with that one action. Still, not a lot has changed since
Eddie Ifft’s days as an altar boy. The authorities, responsible people,
powers that be, might all prefer he didn’t say the stuff he says, to
the people he’s saying it to. But Eddie still makes congregations
laugh. Indeed, there are parallels between the stuff priests do and the
stuff comics do, as Eddie knows. He used to be a volunteer ski
patroller, and one of his fellow volunteers was a Catholic priest who
confessed to watching “a lot of comedy” in order to come up with ideas for his sermons.
I know! Eddie was dumbstruck, too. But the priest had an explanation:
“If you think about it, comedians have their finger on the pulse
of the nation and the pulse of the world. They have to. They have to
know what’s relevant. So for me, watching comedy, I get my idea of what
my sermon should be and how to relate to the people. But I’ve been
watching Def Comedy Jam a lot. Those guys say ‘motherf*cker’ way too
much.”
Stand-up Downunder
Eddie Ifft has been coming to Australia at least
since 2006, and returning frequently – a couple of times a year. “I
love it here,” he says. “I love the people, I love the surfing. I love
everything about it. I’ve got an Australian cattle dog back in LA named
Noosa.” That’s pretty Aussie. But Eddie can go a step further: he’s been coming here for so long, he’s getting aspects of our humour that you virtually have to be Aussie to truly appreciate. At the recent Sydney Doin’ it for Dave show (an all-star fundraiser for Oz comedy stalwart Dave Grant, one of a handful of local comics who understands the art of comedy intimately and loves passing the knowledge on), Eddie finally understood Carl Barron.
“I found myself laughing hysterically at Carl’s stuff,” Eddie says, fittingly describing it as “an acquired taste” not unlike another great cultural icon Australia holds dear. “You know when you’re young and you drink beer, and you almost don’t like it?” Eddie offers. “You drink beer, and you drink beer, and you drink beer, and then, all of a sudden, it clicks and
you’re like, ‘I love this stuff!’ Carl came together for me like that, that night.”
Proof that Eddie is, pretty much, one of us. But that was already obvious: it’s why he keeps coming back. Although people back home don’t quite understand. They reckon he’s “hurting his career in
America” by spending so much time downunder. Eddie’s answer? “What?
The career you want me to have? How do you know this isn’t the career I
want to have?” Eddie likes spending time on
both continents. “The truth is, I’d much
rather be in Sydney in Australia than in Branson, Missouri,” he explains, and although I can only commend Ifft’s decision
from a parochial position – why wouldn’t you prefer Sydney? – he has a far more logical rationale:
“American comics are working hard in all the shit towns
in America so that some day they become really successful and have
enough money to vacation in Australia. I’m sitting here thinking,
‘Chris Rock just got to come to Australia; I’ve been here ten times!’
So I try to make my life the life I want. I surf and I ski a lot, so I
try to get as many gigs as I can in ski resorts and places with good
waves.”
Ah, I’m quick – and foolish – to point out, you can get both of those here…
“Yeah, well…” Eddie begins. “Let's not talk about your skiing…”
Yeah but – isn’t there a snowfield comedy circuit? Jindabyne, Perisher Blue, Thredbo…
“I’ve
done the snow,” Eddie explains. “For an American with the Rocky
Mountains, it’s kind of insulting to call that ‘skiing’, just as I
would call our waves ‘surfing’ compared to the amazing surf you have
here.”
Well, okay – I’ll grant him that. But only because he
added the bit about the surf. Which makes me a bit kinder than Eddie’s
Aussie ‘snowfield’ audiences. When he kept making fun of “the snow –
what they call ‘the mountains’,” the punters were a little proud and
got somewhat restless. “I was like, ‘Aw, c’mon, you call this rock with
a dusting, a sprinkle of snow, ‘skiing’? You’re kidding yourselves.’
And they’d boo me for it.”
Rules (and Laws and Regulations) of Comedy
Despite the typical negative reaction of an ignorant and prejudiced crowd to a comic admitting he’s American with malice aforethought, it’s quite an interesting position to be in: travelling
the world, speaking the truth not just about America but also the
parts of the world you’re visiting. That’s essentially what Eddie does – not
quite ‘innocent’ abroad, more like ‘guilty, as charged’. Fact is, we love it when he speaks the horrible truth about his culture and country, even more than when he speaks of ours (although there are times when the differences between ‘his’ and ‘ours’ are virtually nonexistent). He’s been doing that for a while now –
Eddie’s show for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival a couple
of years ago was called Anti-Septic Tank, playing on our rhyming slang,
‘septic tank’ for ‘yank’, and setting the record straight.
“It was all about the perception of Americans around the world and why
people feel the way they do and what it’s like to be an American and
travelling.” Subsequently, Eddie’s expanded the idea, and has started to turn it into that doco he’s making, America the Punchline (currently in post-production).
Last year’s show was Disorder to Chaos,
in which he was drawing on what it is, the broadest sense, that he
does: whereas laws attempt to bring order to the world and prevent
chaos, Eddie’s job is to question that process. “I go ‘F*ck off! I
don’t have to abide by your rules, all I have to do is live and die and
pretty much make myself happy’. All my jokes involve me questioning
authority and questioning rules and laws and regulations.”
This time round, Eddie’s working up his next festival show to be called either I Shouldn’t Have Said That or Evolution to Revolution.
And, as you’d expect, he’s doing what he does so well: questioning
authority. “Here we are at this point in history and we haven’t evolved
as human beings,” Eddie explains. “We’re still abiding some of the
stupidest religions and the stupidest regulations. We fall into these
dumb, stupid laws and we haven’t evolved. And the only way to evolve is
to revolt. This is the basis of that show that I’m gonna do at the next
Melbourne International Comedy Festival.”
Eddie loves the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and Sydney’s
Cracker Comedy Festival. We’re lucky we are to have such a wealth of
festivals, given also the upcoming World's Funniest Island Comedy Festival
and Adelaide Fringe. There are no equivalents in America.
“We
have the Aspen Comedy
Festival – that’s an elitist thing – and we have the Las Vegas Comedy Festival and that, in a sense, is an elitist thing also because it’s
$150 a ticket to most events and there’s no real variety. If you go to
New York there are a million comedy clubs, but you're gonna see a lot
of the same.” Go to Australia's comedy festivals, though, and what you
see is “a lot of
variety”. Just as you can love different types of music – and Eddie
does – you can also love different kinds of comedy – and Eddie does. “I
can enjoy David O’Doherty and then walk across the
street and enjoy Jim Jeffries and then go enjoy Tim Minchin or go enjoy Arj Barker...”
And of course, you can enjoy Eddie Ifft. Because when he first came to Australia, he pretty much hit the ground running (perhaps ‘landed on his feet’ is a better metaphor for a stand-up comic), doing material about us, to us, that was insightful and hilarious. Although, there are still gags in development and transition. He tells
me about the Crocodile Hunter – how, years ago, Steve Irwin material
was ‘hacky’ in America, no matter how good your impression was, or
astute your observation.
“I always found it funny that, coming
to Australia, people would think everyone in America loves the
Crocodile Hunter. So one time somebody asked me on the radio, ‘Are you
a big fan of the Crocodile Hunter?’ – kind of like taking the piss out
of me. And I said, ‘Oh yeah, I watch the show every day, but for
different reasons. I watch it hoping every day will be that day!’”
That’s
a brilliant take on the Croc Hunter. Or at least, it was, until that
day arrived. “Now, people boo me,” Eddie says. “When I said that
before he died, hilarious! Now when I say it, even though I tell them, ‘I
said this before he died, not knowing he died’, people shut down on me.
To me, it’s a real study of the mentality of people. Even though they
know I was just joking and didn’t mean it, the fact that it just
happened…”
Again, the role of the comic. Risking your life
foolishly and getting away with it makes you a hero, and it’s okay to
make fun of heroes ’cos they’re invincible. But once the foolish hero
risks his life that last time, only someone as foolhardy as a comedian
can take the risk of mocking. Even though the hero’s behaviour didn’t
change, nor that of the comic knocking him, for some reason, once he’s
gone, the hero attains a status some feel should be beyond the probing
light of comedy. It’s true of all the media’s duffers. Remember the
reverence afforded Ronald Reagan? Much greater in death than during life. Eddie’s got a theory about that.
“In
America, it’s all about ‘branding’,” he explains. Regan “branded himself as the guy who ended the Cold War and made peace”. The theory is, America bankrupted Russia “just by building weapons and
building weapons and building weapons – Russia couldn’t keep up and
eventually bankrupted their entire country”. But, Eddie points out, look at the current state of the American economy: “America spends 51 cents of every tax dollar on
defence. We had a trillion-dollar war because we
have to justify all the weapons that we made. Who’s bankrupt now?”
This tendency, to rewrite society’s attitude towards people after they passed away, is what got us to Michael Jackson in the first place, so we’ve essentially come full circle. A good place to end our interview. But just to make sure, I ask that one last ‘housekeeping’ question: is there anything I’ve overlooked, that fans might need to know?
“Um… let’s see… What do fans need to know?” Eddie thinks aloud. “Well, I’m in room four-fifty-… No!”
What fans need to know is that Eddie's at the Comedy Store, Tue September 1st to Saturday September 12th before heading to Adelaide.
