Jeff Kreisler
written by Ken Carlson
“I tried to keep the satirical edge,” says writer and comedian Jeff Kreisler, “almost as a spoof, to give me cover to say these things about these truths that are almost devastating. I get a lot of questions about how hard it was to research. It was the classic, ‘I had to laugh until I cried.’ Companies like Lehman Brothers...Richard Fuld made around half a billion dollars, but his company helped advance the fall of our whole economy. These companies hire all these people where the CEO walks away with a forty million dollar severance. Some of the feedback I’ve gotten on the book, is that 2/3 thirds through, it gets a little heavy. I’m trying to keep it as light as I can, but it’s a heavy subject.”
A lot of people are outraged by the inherent hypocrisy of our government, its cozy relationship with big business, and how that dalliance brought about the fall of the world economy. If you were an elected official, like Henry Waxman, interested in posturing for the camera, you might address Mr. Fuld in the following way if he came before your committee. “Your company is now bankrupt, our economy is in crisis, but you get to keep $480 million (£276 million). I have a very basic question for you, is this fair? (The Telegraph)” But it you’re a stand-up comic with a background in law and experience as a humorous business columnist, you could put together a book like Get Rich Cheating, The Crooked Path To Easy Street as Jeff Kreisler did, taking the liars and manipulators in politics to task, as well as sports and pop culture figures, and presenting the facts as a satirical guide that’s part infomercial, part indictment. Like his act, it’s as smart and funny as it is independent and direct in its message.
Kreisler started doing stand-up when he was in law school. “There are a lot of lawyers who end up as comedians, like Greg Giraldo or Demetri Martin,” he says. “I quit in the middle, then went back to finish. I imagine a lot of people have the same story. I went to law school because I like the idea of human interaction and how we govern that; constitutionalism, Thurgood Marshall, Thomas Jefferson, justice, and all that. That’s what has formed my views creatively, along with the political stuff. I finished law school, moved to San Francisco. San Francisco has great comedy. It’s not LA or New York so there’s no industry pressure. It’s really creative so you can’t do hack stuff there. The community itself self-polices. I started doing political stuff and got to know Will Durst there. I was a little stubborn in that I chose the root of learning by doing, knowing that I wanted to do political stuff. I didn’t just get funny first.”
The challenges for the political comic are well documented; the short life span of the material, the potential for alienating audience members with opposing views, competition from late night TV hosts. But then there are those who can stand apart just by doing something well. “Politics is harder, so they say, or so I say,” says Kreisler. “I started getting work in San Francisco, then got some road work. I moved back here (New York) in 2003. I started playing the road more and playing colleges. I did a big political tour in 2004. There was an audience out there that wanted to hear what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to just climb up the ranks of comedy clubs. In ‘05 I started writing a humor business column for TheStreet.com. I got approached to do a book by Prentice-Hall and put together a pitch for a Get Rich Cheating book on corporate crime. They loved it. Bought it. Then they backed out after I wrote it because they didn’t know what to do with humor books. It became a blessing in disguise. I got an agent and a new publisher, Harper Collins. They wanted me to expand it. With comedians, artists in general, I follow what Ezra Pound said, ‘Artists are the antennae of the race.’ I think comedians tend to see things ahead of the general population. For what it’s worth, in 2000, before I was elected, I had a joke that said, I didn’t want to hear that Bush was better than we expected, if somehow we lost New York and Washington. I stopped telling that joke in October 2001.”
“In my mind, I started writing the book in 2006,” says Kreisler. “I was reading the papers and business sections every day for the column. I saw it (the economic crisis) coming. Everybody knew it was a house of cards. I wanted the book out a year ago because it was already happening. But with the public consciousness surfacing now, the timing is good.”
While Kreisler’s voice from his stand-up comes through on the written page, and the subject matter overlaps, he admits the process in putting the book differs greatly from his act that has played well here and in Europe. “It’s very different. People have a lot more attention when they’re reading. You can write sentences with ten or twelve words in it. In stand-up, you have a certain amount of time, to keep people focused on what you’re doing. When I started doing stand-up, I went into too many details. They say brevity is the soul of wit. It was helpful, after getting into stand-up, plowing through one nighters and shitty gigs, then coming back to writing. The book actually reads at a relatively quick pace. Now I couldn’t just repeat those words in stand-up, it’s a different pace. I am turning it into a show for the Fringe Festival. But it’s definitely a different thing. There’s no expression or tone of voice. There’s no visual. I tried to use italics now and then, but it’s hard to do. I’ve done stand-up for ten years now, so I’ve learned subtle inflections, things you can do with your hands and body that say so much. You can’t do that on the page. Stand-up’s my first love. I don’t know how many have written a book to get ahead in stand-up. It’s my odd, circuitous route. But, you can do so much more on stage, even when it’s something about politics, and culture. On stage, always err on the side of laughs. It’s my job to tell jokes. I’ve always been in the learning process. If I’m writing a book it’s more about making a point. When Bush was seen as bad, suddenly more and more comics became political, saying how bad he was. But, you still have to do something with it. It has to be funny. There is a danger of preaching too much. I pride myself in trying to talk to people who disagree with me to find out why. People who disagree with me aren’t evil and I want to hear what hey have to say.”
“He’s relentless,” says comedian Sean Crespo. “He commits to his hilarious, stream of consciousness sets with the tenacity of a thousand Bay Area tigers attacking a thousand conservative antelope.”
“He’s unstoppable, a force of nature,” says comedian Will Durst. “The last time I saw him, he made me laugh so hard I actually did a mini spit take back at the bar. He has energy, wit and a social conscience all wrapped up in one peripatetic package.”
The role of the comic as pundit is an ever-growing presence. Should something a comedian says on current events be treated like something stated by a news anchor or acted out like a clown? How seriously should a book be taken by a guy who tells jokes in clubs and describes himself as the love child of George Clooney, John Belushi, and Pete Sampras? As opposed to a news report by networks owned by conglomerates that depend on advertising from the companies they’re covering? What about anything said by politicians that accept donations and serve on boards of the corporations that they pass laws to police?
“How seriously should the Colbert Report be taken?” asks Kreisler. “It’s an easy parallel, but it’s one that can be taken. I think there’s a serious message here. What I stumbled across in working on the book, framing it (greed and corruption) through cheating, is, in a way, not cheating. It’s taking advantage of the system we have. No one out there has a vested interest stopping anybody. Until now, when we’re all losing our homes, we looked the other way. We all think we’re a weekend away from being millionaires ourselves. We all tend to relate to the billionaire like he’s one of us and cheer him on. So we don’t care or think about long term consequences. If there is a serious message, it’s that we should think about our own actions and hold people accountable. In every industry, the police were generally on the take. Comedy has always been about the court jester, the guy who gets truth and power as long as he wears curvy shoes. Satire adds an important voice. To me, satire as the source of information is a little frightening. There are studies that show people get their news from the Daily Show. It’s a little scary. It’s great if they find out that this stuff is happening so they can go out and learn more. Personally, I think the role of satire in the media is to expose the hypocrisy. The great thing about the Daily Show is when they show somebody saying one thing, than they have a clip saying something contradictory. That trains people that if they see something being said, they should question it themselves. I am a bit of an ideal delusionist, the founding fathers and the concepts they were handling then. That ideal is very far from today’s reality. If we can get a population that honestly thinks about these things, whatever conclusion they come to, that’s great. In some way, satire can help people see beyond what they’re told, what it really means in that moment. Jon Stewart and Bill Maher aren’t always going to be there to do that. Satire has a role in the conversation but shouldn’t dominate.”
An important bonus in putting together this book was to create another outlet for this Ivy League graduate and Bill Hicks Spirit Award winner. And while a live crowd may be easy to read, in terms of reaction to what’s being said, a reading audience also finds way to make its opinions known. “I stopped writing the column last year,” says Kreisler. “They chose to go in another direction. My editor had moved on. I had good numbers, about 10,000 readers a week for an investment website. We used to make a big deal saying, ‘This is just satire.’ I would get hate mail after making jokes or puns about somebody’s name. I would get messages from investors in a certain company saying, ‘If I find out your shorting this company I’m going to tear you a new asshole.’ It was always in ALL Caps, poorly spelled.”
“You have these ‘tea parties’ popping up everywhere,” says Kreisler, “because of a difference of opinion on taxes we need to pay for health care or infrastructure, instead of funding Haliburton’s war. Clearly, there are problems on both sides with conflict of interest. Tom Daschle is a great example, being a senator, then a lobbyist. It’s just what people do. The Supreme Court just did something with the Hillary movie case. In anticipation of Hillary being the nominee for president, some right wing group put together, Hillary - the movie. It’s basically just an advertisement against Hillary, an attack ad. Whether you think Michael Moore is politically motivated or not, the Supreme Court just said it’s OK for corporations to do that. Whatever rules that have been set up to get money out of Washington have gotten worse.”
Is there hope that things will get better? Kreisler gave a long pause. “Well, yes, there’s hope,” he says, “If it gets bad enough, people have to assess what’s going on. My fear and disappointment is that we really need an actual Republican party. We can’t have Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin just yelling things. The Democrats can’t fix everything on their own. We need some reasoned heads to say, ‘We’re in the shitter now. Let’s take a step back. Instead of just viciously attacking each other because now it’s just a cartoon. I don’t trust the Democrats either. I lean that way, especially because of the Republicans over the last eight years. Term limits wouldn’t be a bad idea. If you weren’t constantly worrying about re-election, maybe you’d think about what’s really in the best interest of the country. But that presents its own problems, what do you do afterwards? It is a moment, because things are bad so there could be some reexamining, but I just don’t see it. The one hope I have is that Obama has proven to me to have some long term vision. He isn’t instantly swayed by the tides. To whatever extent, he has a plan to change things for the better, great. But, I don’t know if he has that and I don’t know how patient the country will be to let him have that.”
For more on Jeff, visit JeffKreisler.com