Robert Smigel

The new Adam Sandler vehicle You Don't Mess
With The Zohan
marks Robert Smigel's first produced screenplay—he co-wrote it with
Sandler and Judd Apatow—but he's already a famed television comedy
writer. Smigel began writing for Saturday Night Live in the mid-'80s and has
gone on to become one of the venerable comedy institution's most acclaimed and
popular writers, having written or co-written classics like "Action Reagan" and
the sketch where William Shatner admonishes a convention full of traumatized
Trekkies to get a life. But he's best known for his "TV Funhouse" cartoons, an
ongoing series of dark, pop-culture-damaged toons that have consistently ranked
as the show's funniest and most bitingly satirical element.

Smigel served as the first head writer for
friend and frequent collaborator Conan O'Brien's Late Night With Conan
O'Brien
and created some of the show's signature bits, like the use of crude Clutch
Cargo-style
"syncho-vox" animation for satirical fake celebrity interviews and Triumph The
Insult Comic Dog, a ribald, cigar-smoking puppet insult comedian voiced by
Smigel himself. As the executive producer of The Dana Carvey Show, he gave crucial breaks
to a pair of young talents named Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell, who also
provided the voices for the "Ambiguously Gay Duo," a popular recurring feature
of "TV Funhouse." In 2000 he masterminded a short-lived but cultishly popular
Comedy Central TV Funhouse spin-off that will be released on DVD in late
July. The A.V Club
spoke at length with the comedy vet about Adam Sandler's package, the
super-charged libidos of Israeli men, and why You Don't Mess With The Zohan might just bring people
together.

The A.V Club: Can you talk a little about the
writing of Zohan? Did you and Sandler and Apatow go to local Starbucks
with a laptop and spitball ideas?

Robert Smigel: I can't remember it was
so long ago. It feels like 30 years ago. Did you see the preview?

AVC: Yes, I did.

RS: Did you like it?

AVC: I had a smile on my face pretty much the
entire film. It is a very, very silly movie.

RS: You can be honest with me. You can be honest
with me. You can be honest with me. I've been shat on in my career now and
then. So I can handle it if you had problems with it. I like it, because it was
opportunity to do a comedy with Adam that had stuff that you don't normally
see, not just in an Adam Sandler movie, but in a summer comedy as well. I was
excited about the opportunity to tackle this crazy sensitive subject in a
movie. I had done Israeli sketches on Saturday Night Live before. Actually Adam's
first sketch on SNL was something called the "Sabra Shopping Network." It was a
home shopping show. It was at the beginning of the home shopping phenomenon. It
was these Israeli electronic store guys with their own home shopping show and
they would haggle with the callers and shame them into overspending on the
items. And we did "Sabra Price Is Right" with Tom Hanks a few years later. I was
excited to write about Israelis, too. I'd gone to a Jewish summer camp where I
met a lot of Israelis every year. So I had a lot of Israeli humor stored up.

AVC: There's an interesting culture divide
between American Jews and Israeli Jews, and there's a lot of overlapping as
well. It's strange to think of all these very domestic American Jews who, not
too long ago, were wielding an Uzi in the Israeli army.

RS: Just the fact that they all serve in the army
is a hard thing to wrap your head around as a fat, lazy, American Jew.

AVC: There's also this culture of machismo
that doesn't necessarily carry over to American Jews.

RS: Without question it exists. A lot of people wear
it as a badge of honor. The Sabra mentality is being confident and aggressive
and not hesitating and the appearance of strength. It's a reaction to
everything the Jews dealt with that led to the creation of the state of Israel.
Once it was created, it inspired people to behave from a position of strength.

AVC: The movie tweaks that a little bit. On
one hand, Zohan is a very masculine soldier, on the other…

RS: Without question. Well, the movie extrapolates
that into sexuality of course. I noticed a recurring theme of sexually
confident and aggressive Israeli men. I was worried whether we were pushing it
too far, but then we cast some of the actors, and were delighted to see that
they embodied every aspect of that quite quickly. One of the guys that we cast
was Ido Mosseri, who played the little sidekick Oori, who runs the electronics
store. His first day on the set he's going off on Tel Aviv and how cool it is.
Which is funny, because there was this line that we ending up cutting, which
had Nick Swardson's character saying, "I'd love to visit Israel at some point.
I always wanted to see the Wailing Wall." And the guys are all saying, "Wailing
Wall? You're not going to get any pussy at the Wailing Wall! Tel Aviv is where
you go! Fuck the Wailing Wall!" And then I'm talking to Ido about it, and he
goes, "Jerusalem? You don't need to see Jerusalem. You come with me to Tel
Aviv. You won't believe it: the partying, the girls, it's unbelievable!" Then
there's a little bit of silence, and then, "You married?" And I say, "Yeah.
Yeah I am." "Maybe you don't have to come." Not joking, just, "Well, all right.
Then you might as well not come to Israel if you're not there to score." Then
his buddy got another part, a smaller part, and he shows me this text message
he sent him after he got cast—here's a guy that's been working as an
actor in Israel then all of a sudden he gets a part in a summer blockbuster
comedy. The first thing in his text message: "I got cast! Tell the girls in Los
Angeles to wait for me!" It didn't matter if it were Adam Sandler or Gallagher
II in a movie, this guy just wanted to be flown to L.A so he could get laid.

And then they got here and it was funny, and I
think this is reflected in the movie a little bit, they talked about how they
were getting shut out at clubs by the girls. I don't know what clubs they went
to, but they said they weren't having any luck and they said it was because
there was an inherent prejudice against, you know, they came off as foreign
guys. They were frustrated that everybody was mixing up Arabs and Israelis here
anyway, which is also in the movie.

AVC: Did you do a lot of research on the
Mossad before writing the film?

RS: That's where Judd was the responsible one, Judd
mostly worked with us on the first draft. Then he went off to become a superstar. Remember,
the first draft was written in the summer of 2000. I think Judd was ready to do Undeclared
at that time. We were completely happy with it and then 9/11
happened and we didn't even think about doing the movie for a long time after
that. Basically, at some point, we were like, "Oh, the Zohan movie. Forget that.
That's not happening." It wasn't even a blip at the time. It was the last thing
that mattered to us.

AVC: When do you think we, as a culture,
reached the point where people could laugh about terrorism?

RS: We didn't even really talk about the movie for
a couple of years. Even before 9/11 there was some talk about fictionalizing
the countries. Having the dispute stem for orange groves or something like
that. Just heightening the trivialization. Once we got back into the
reality of it, we tried to get away from that. We're just comedy writers, and I
hope it comes off that we are not trying to imply that there's an easy solution
to the disputes over there. The only point we're trying to make in the movie is
that once these guys are placed in another context that they're not necessarily
all that dissimilar from each other.

AVC: If you had gone the fictionalization
route, do you think that would have been a cop out?

RS: Well, people on both sides were saying that
people are going to know either way what you're talking about. Some people
thought that's why you can do it and some people thought, well, you might as
well do the real thing because you're not going to be fooling anyone. Adam and
I always wanted to do the real thing because everybody knows what it is. Why
not hit it head on? In 2004, I tried a version where Adam became a stuntman in
a movie directed by a Scorsese kind of guy. He was hired to be Mariah Carey's
hairdresser and he sees a stuntman doing something really badly and he shows
him how to do the stunt and the guy is amazed by Zohan's ability to get hit by
a car and not be hurt. The whole thing ended up turning this Martin Scorsese
drama into a crazy action movie. The director becomes consumed with Zohan's
ability to absorb pain. I tried that at one point. And then after a few years
it just became apparent that not only are we used to the state of the world as
it is, but there have been so many uprisings in the Middle East since then that
people have become sadly, on some level, desensitized to the violence. On the
other hand, people are ready to laugh at the shitty state of affairs we're in.

AVC: Do you think it can be cathartic in that
respect?

RS: Absolutely.

AVC: The paradox of this story is that it is
an incredibly silly movie with an incredibly serious subject.

RS: Hopefully, whatever points we make are not
trite. Most of the parody in the movie has to do not so much with stereotypes,
although people might disagree; but I don't really see it as a movie so much
about the stereotypes of those two cultures as parodying everything that goes
with war and the passions on both sides. I think one of the bolder things we do
in the movie is parody the glorification of violence. We do it on both sides, I
think, with the guy Adam meets who is an enormous fan of his work. He's
reminding Adam of the time he made a terrorist sit on a grenade. He's like,
"You gotta tell me how you did that, man!" It's sort of a sports metaphor-y type thing. Then
on the other side, it's the same thing. The John Turturro character, after he's
presumably defeated Zohan, he gets blinged out and gets a gold tooth and a
chain of restaurants.

AVC: With his action figure in the happy
meal.

RS: Like a retired superstar. It's dicey because
there will be people that might suggest that we're saying that everybody
glorifies violence.

AVC: Do you think that you could have written
with Sandler and Apatow if you weren't Jewish? Do you think that granted you a
little more leeway?

RS: The only leeway we might have is making fun of
Israelis a little more than non-Jews. As far as creating stereotypes, we've
probably hit on some Israeli ones more than we hit on Arab ones. I went to an
Arab comedy festival. I made a lot of friends with a lot of the actors in the
movie and also used this guy, Dean Obeidallah a comedian, for feedback. He's an Arab comic who read all
the scripts and a lot of the drafts. He was one of the people I depended on to
make sure I wasn't saying anything that was inaccurate or offensive, or that
would be perceived as unfair by the majority of people. But he had an Arab-American
comedy festival that I went to. And there were a lot of funny people there, but
I was amazed by the stereotypes that were in the sketches. A lot of the sketches
were about being an Arab-American, and some stuff was political, but some
sketches were about how Arab women are hairy and have moustaches, stuff I never
even heard of or thought about. It was funny to see how every ethnic group goes
to that well of exploiting their own stereotypes.

[pagebreak]

AVC: There's something preemptive about
making fun of yourself before others can make fun of you.

RS: Oh, yeah. Everybody has the right to make fun
of themselves. Maybe the three of us, we're probably more cautious in that
regard. The characters of [Rob] Schneider and his friends in America and all
the shop owners that were in that neighborhood, we didn't really go for any
stereotypes there. We tried to portray them as regular people, going about
their jobs, unless you want to say the stereotypes were that Schneider was a
cab driver. It's not like Arab-American cab drivers don't exist. We went to a
great deal of trouble to cast Middle Eastern performers. I really didn't want
it to be a minstrel show with everybody doing a fake accent.

AVC: You didn't want to cast Mickey Rooney.

RS: Schneider probably could have played this broader
but he was careful to try to keep it real and still keep some of the energy. But he's
not as broad as some of his, "You can do it!" guys. The Arab-American actors
that were cast, it was hilarious how grateful they were that they weren't
playing terrorists. One of the guys, Sayed [Badreya], he's a main bad guy in Iron
Man,
and he was one of the people who was like, "Thank God! I'm playing a cab driver
this time! I'm so tired of playing a terrorist." (It's like) cab driver! What a step up! I
think being Jewish, I wanted to be very careful about being fair to both sides,
especially in the way people were portrayed in general, so I would consult with
the actors on their wardrobe, on their lines, on the set. I would drive some of
the people on the set crazy by bringing an actor in and saying, "Does this
really look like where an Israeli guy would live in Tel Aviv? Where a
Palestinian would have lived?" We were very careful about that.

AVC: There were times when I thought I was
watching a documentary. I was like: Who's that real Israeli soldier who looks
like Adam Sandler? It was disconcerting.

RS: I suspect that you're probably joking.

AVC: To me, one of the interesting things
about the movie is that it feels like a live-action cartoon.

RS: People probably imagine that all the cartoony
elements were brought to the movie by me, but Adam actually pushed me further
on some things, like when Zohan catches the bullet in his nose. That was Adam's
idea. And I'm like, "Wait, is this guy a superhero? Or is he just incredibly,
just over-the-top skilled?" But when I saw it on film, I just figured people
aren't keeping score. Just let it go.

AVC: It's not like people would leave the
theater thinking, "That Adam Sandler movie was not realistic. He swam like a
dolphin. That could not have happened in real life."

RS: Well, the dolphin thing, you know, that was
fine with me, because that seemed like an exaggeration of what a human can do.
But no human can even deflect a bullet. Much less catch one. I'm pretty sure. I'm
pretty sure. What the hell?

AVC: It seemed like he was a superhero. Like
he possessed superhuman powers.

RS: Besides the bullet, you mean? I thought of him
possessing extra-human powers. Not superhuman.

AVC: Well, there's a scene where his hand
gets chopped off and then he still manages to stab someone with it.

RS: And he used his telekinesis to…

AVC: So there's a logical grounding of that
gag.

RS: I guess you can call that superhero stuff. When
we were writing it just seemed like an over-the-top skill because it involved
telepathy. It just felt like we could get away with it. That was a particularly
goofy joke that Adam also came up with.

AVC: At any point during the writing or
making of this film did anyone go, "No, that's too silly?"

RS: As long as it was funny, no. Sometimes too
silly is not funny. The telepathy thing was on the fence. There were people
who, when I sent them the script, were like, "Oh, that's the best," or "I love
it! It's so ridiculous." We knew that for some people, we would lose them. For
a moment, anyway. It's either, "That's fantastic! It's so ridiculous," or "Oh,
come on, that's ridiculous!"

AVC: I saw it with some of my co-workers, and
one of them said that one of the things he liked about it was that the movie
didn't shoehorn a dramatic aspect into it where Zohan, you know, learns to be a
good dad and then the sensitive piano music plays. Was it a conscious decision
to just go for laughs?

RS: Well, I think it's in there. The movie has a
bit of that element. That is a place where I get involved or try to. Adam's
done it a little more skillfully than others have in some comedies, but there
are a lot of comedies where it's way more contrived. Even great movies like Dumb
And Dumber,
which I thought was unbelievably funny. But it has this one moment where the
music shifts and [Jim] Carrey is explaining his dream. I can't even remember
what the dream was. I don't even remember the scene except that it made me
uncomfortable for that brief moment. That's where the cynicism of comedies
entered into it. It was more about having a light touch. Adam had actually
taken out scenes we had already shot; there was a scene in particular where he
was kissing [love interest] Emmanuelle [Chriqui] at the end of the movie, which
I thought was pretty funny. He expresses how amazed he is at how great kissing
her is. He confesses he never kissed a woman before. Incredible. And then he
lists all the forms of sex he's had with these women, but he's never done this
kissing thing. And then she asks him if he wants to do the other stuff, he
said, "No, let's just do this."

It was such a novelty. It was such a sweet
moment, but Adam felt like he already had enough sweet moments with Emmanuelle.
Adam came up with the great move of Zohan discovering his
love for Emmanuelle via his erection. I don't know if you like dick jokes. You
may like some of the dick jokes more than others. But the moment that Adam
discovers than he is in love with her because he has a boner, that was a very
funny way to convey his growing attraction. I don't know if I should be giving
this away.

AVC: Nobody is going to see the film after
you give this away.

RS: The idea that he realizes how much he feels for
her because he's finally able to get a boner again was a very funny plot move,
and a great kind of novel way to get through that moment in the movie where you
know these guys want to get together. I actually resisted having a romantic
lead in the movie for a long time. I thought the romance in this movie is about
Adam and [John Turturro's] Phantom character realizing that they have the same
dream. There's also a romance between Zohan and America. I just thought there
were other romances in the movie and wouldn't it be cool to not have to do the
girl thing. I was outvoted, but I was very grateful in the end. Judd pushed me
on that, and then Adam came up with that move which really sold that whole act
for me.

AVC: Was the studio pushing for the love
interest? Were they saying, "We can't just have him shtupping old ladies?"

RS: Any studio's going to want to have a love
interest in a movie, because they think that more women are going to be
interested in seeing the movie for that reason. But I don't think it was so
much studio pressure. I think that Adam just knew that it was the right thing
to do, and he figured out the key move that sold it for me. And the girl was
really great in that when she auditioned she was the only one that looked funny
when she was annoyed. They brought in all these model-type girls that were
vaguely foreign-looking. None of them were funny. They just didn't look like
they've ever experienced pain in their lives. Emmanuelle comes off as a real
human being and sort of has a little sister quality to her that makes her feel
very human even though she's va-va-va-voom.

AVC: Getting back to the dick jokes, in Zohan, Adam has the largest
package I've ever seen onscreen.

RS: I'm actually jealous of this movie, because I
wrote an Ambiguously Gay Duo live-action movie with Colbert a couple of years
ago. Every successful character on Saturday Night Live prompts the question, "Is
this a movie?" Ace and Gary were two characters I had no interest in doing a
movie about. When I thought of them doing it live-action though, I thought,
okay, I can make the characters much more dimensional, and, boy, would they
look funny in those costumes with the enormous packages.

AVC: Especially if they were Carell and
Colbert.

RS: Well, at the time, Carell and Colbert were, you
know, it was the year 2000, and they weren't superstars. Nobody had any idea.
They blew us away at The Dana Carvey Show and we thought that they should have
incredible careers, but we were surprised that they weren't famous even then.
We were surprised that Saturday Night Live hadn't hired them back
in 1996. Because they were both like 30 years old already, and they'd been
around Second City. You never know when someone's going to get a break. But
it's refreshing to see talent win out like that.

AVC: You were briefly a consultant on The
Colbert Report.

RS: Yeah, I probably never earned a credit less.
That was nice of Stephen to do. I talked conceptually about the show a few
times with him and I didn't even know he was going to do that until they called
me and asked me where I wanted my check to go. Then later he told me he did it
for his own inspiration, which was sort of sweet and nice of him to say and
nice of him to do.

AVC: What did he mean by that?

RS: Well, I didn't want to get into that. "What do
I mean to you, Stephen?" We're great friends and I hired him at the Carvey show
and I believed in him. I'm so proud to see what he's done. I saw him when I was
still at Saturday Night Live in '92 one summer. We were scouting for people
and I went to Second City. We saw their show and we were told there was an
understudy that night for this guy Steve Carell, who's really great, but, you
know, this was the night that Lorne Michaels could go. But I was just blown
away by the understudy, who of course was Colbert. I became obsessed with
getting Colbert involved with something I was doing. I tried to get him
involved with Conan when we started. It didn't come together then.

AVC: As a writer or a performer?

RS: As either a writer or a performer. But for some
reason it didn't click at the time. So then The Dana Carvey Show happened and he was not
available to audition so he sent in a pathetic videotape where he didn't really
do anything, he just was trying to be funny to the camera. Then he showed us
his newborn child and begged us to hire him. I told Carvey, let's just fly him
in and see what he can do. Then we flew him in and did a genuine audition and
he was hilarious. At that point it became very easy. But anyway, Zohan has a
big dick.

AVC: Can you talk a little about the TV Funhouse special?

RS: Do you mean the SNL thing or the Comedy
Central TV Funhouse? Cause that's coming out on DVD imminently. It's so
imminent. I can't begin to tell you how imminent it is. It's coming out July
22.

AVC: That's got to be exciting. Kind of validating.

RS: Considering what's put out on DVD, I wouldn't
necessarily call it validating.

AVC: Like My Big Fat Greek Life: The
Complete Series
and Mama's Family: Season 7?

RS: The Real Housewives Of New York: Season 2 is already out. My
thing took eight years to get on DVD. I'm not exactly bursting with pride. The
demand was not exactly the same.

AVC: But there's still a bit of a cult
following.

RS: Well, the show was cancelled, as I explained in
the past, because of the budget. Not unlike That's My Bush!, which had the same
problem. They were just expensive shows to mount for Comedy Central. Mine went
way over budget. I mean, [That's My Bush! creators] Trey [Parker] and Matt [Stone]
are superstars there and they had a million dollar budget an episode from day
one. The show needed to be a monster hit to survive.

AVC: It needed South Park ratings.

RS: Exactly. My show was not supposed to be $700,000
per episode, but the studio time was out of control.

[pagebreak]

AVC: You were working with live animals as
well. That's got to be kind of a crazy variable.

RS: Yes. We had actors crouched under this 3-foot puppet stage
intermingling with live animals. The low point was when Dino [Stamatopoulos] was shat in the eye by
a duck. We had actors come in, people who weren't working at all, people who
desperately needed the work. They'd come and do puppets or do a voice and we'd
call them later and be like, "Hey, you did a great job. We're doing another
thing next Friday, we got…" "You know what, I don't think so." They couldn't
handle being underneath that tiny stage. It was too painful.

AVC: It seemed to entail an enormous amount
of work on everybody's part.

RS: Oh boy, it was a hard show to mount. And the
ironic thing was we really weren't interested in making the animals do anything
difficult. The whole joke was that the animals are not in on the joke. They're
just sitting around and disappointing us with their animal behavior. It was
about how much we invest in our animals' personalities, and how we portray them
like humans. And the gap between that and reality. So, I just wanted the
animals to sit around most of the time, and even that ended up being hard to
do. Even just sitting, sometimes. It's just not that easy to sit a duck on a chair
and have it stay there. Even just for a few seconds, to get it to sit in front
of a plate of Peking duck. Or a cow to drink from a milkshake.

AVC: Tell me about the DVD. Are there going
to be commentaries?

RS: Yes. Dino and myself and Doug Dale, the host of
the show, did commentary on all eight episodes. I brought in Andy Breckman for
a couple of episodes. He's a really great comedy writer, the guy who created Monk. He worked on the show
just sort of when he could at the time, and he came up with the "Stedman"
cartoon, which is probably funnier than any cartoon I came up with on SNL.

AVC: I'm partial to the cartoon about the
superhero who's always trying to get his alter ego laid.

RS: Oh, "Wonderman"? That was mine. Thank you. I
did the voice of that guy, too. Most people go bananas over the "Stedman"
cartoon. I actually rejected it at first, because it was too mean for me. I
have no problem making fun of people, but there are certain things that make me
uncomfortable. I'm uncomfortable about drug addiction jokes. Addiction humor
sometimes makes me uncomfortable, because I feel sorry for the people it
targets. It's something that they can't necessarily help. It's a disease. It's
a hard thing for me to laugh at. I don't laugh at handicapped jokes very
easily. Things where people can't help it, I get into trouble. In this case,
the idea that Oprah was unattractive actually made me uncomfortable. The whole
idea that Stedman can't stand to have sex with her made me uncomfortable. But I
revisited it a week later, and understood it was far too funny to adhere to
that rule.

AVC: Funny excuses an awful lot.

RS: Yeah, without question, that's true. That
should be called the Michael Richards rule. That was the cardinal crime. He was
trying to be ironic and failing in the worst possible way. The rage underneath
his attempt at irony was so transparent you really were confused at what he was
trying to do.

AVC: You talked a little bit about being
uncomfortable with jokes about drug addiction. But there was a fair amount of
drug humor on TV Funhouse.

RS: But it wasn't making fun of people who were
really suffering from a serious addiction, a problem. I actually did break the
rule on TV Funhouse. I broke the rule with another Andy Breckman sketch, which
was called "Kidder, Downey, and Heche." It was such a strange idea that I
thought it was too funny not to do. I can't even remember the premise now.
Because all three of them had wandered aimlessly in a drunken or drug-induced
stupor into somebody's house, in the cartoon they tried to use this "talent" as
a skill and become private investigators. One time Conan wanted me to do the
lips of Nick Nolte's mug shot, and [head writer Mike] Sweeney approached me
about this and I was like, "Really? I feel so bad for the guy. He's got a
problem he's working through. He was caught in this awful state." And we didn't
do it, and literally a month later, Steve Martin in his monologue at the
Academy Awards, it was a punch line to one of his monologue jokes, and there on
the Kodak Stage or the Shrine Auditorium was a gigantic Nick Nolte shot. The
whole world laughed at him. So, I guess I was too squeamish or something.
People would probably be surprised that I do try to draw the line at certain
points. With the Zohan movie, I drew a lot of the lines. There are going to be
people on both sides who disagree and they'll think I'm crazy to say things
like that. "What do you mean restraint? Are you kidding me, with the Hezbollah
Hotline?" Or something like that. But, I don't know, it's not like we were
saying these three guys were terrorists. We were kind of making the point that
they weren't.

AVC: Getting back to the "TV Funhouse" SNL special.
Could you talk a little bit about putting that together? It's probably one of
the best Saturday Night Live episodes of the last 15 years.

RS: Well, I'm glad you think so. It didn't read
like it was the funniest episodes in the last 15 years to the folks over at ACNielsen.

AVC: It seems like it's always athletes that
get the best…

RS: Best ratings?

AVC: It's got to be a little dispiriting to
think, "LeBron James is getting better ratings than my life's work."

RS: It was a little humbling in that sense, to do
something in between a rerun and a first run. I always know those cartoons have
a very loyal following, but there is a chunk of the audience that are there to
watch the performers in the live show and it's probably a bathroom break for
some of those people.

AVC: It's generally the funniest part of
every episode. That and the Digital Video.

RS: The Digital Video has really found a niche. I
still like to do the cartoons, but they're not as vital as they seemed before.
They felt really essential to the show when they were the only pre-taped
element. But I feel like when we have a good one, it adds a lot to the show. I
had a good one, the Dora The Explorer one, which I wish was on the best-of DVD
that I did a couple years ago. But the best-of, I had complete control of the
whole episode. The cast was very nice. I asked the cast to do interstitial pieces,
reacting to [Ambiguously Gay Duo] Ace and Gary. And they basically did it as a
favor. I always wanted to a best-of cartoon show, but once I got the opportunity,
I got very paranoid. How am I going to entertain these people with cartoons for
the whole 90 minutes? So I felt like I had to have live people in there. I
probably didn't, but I did it anyway.

AVC: I think having Colbert and Carell as Ace
and Gary in the interstitial material would be an attraction as well.

RS: Well, you would think. ACNielsen didn't seem to
agree.

AVC: Were the ratings really that bad for it?

RS: No, they were fine, but they weren't up to a
first-run show. They were low for a first-run show. It just reinforced that
there's definitely a niche audience for it. These things have enjoyed a great deal
of positive response in the media, which is great and flattering. But I never
thought that everybody who watches Saturday Night Live loves these cartoons.
It's a very specific thing, and Saturday Night Live is a live show. It's
about live performers and you're watching cartoons for 90 minutes.

AVC: Were you worried about the topicality of
the cartoons? You were oftentimes responding to something very immediate in the
culture.

RS: Over the years, I started making the cartoons
more immediately topical. I've been pushing the animators. Originally the lead
time was five to six weeks, and the last two years, it's been more like two
weeks. They've been able to pull off stuff that's amazed me over the last two
years. The last thing I did this year was a Barack Obama cartoon that I kind of
rushed out. I wasn't able to go into production until after the writers' strike
ended. But they were able to get it on the second show back. I was incredibly
grateful that they could do it, but once they were able to prove to me that
they were able to do cartoons in two weeks, they kind of fucked themselves,
because they could never pretend that they couldn't after that.

AVC: Watching the best-of, did you ever find
yourself thinking, "I have led a silly, silly life?"

RS: [Laughs] A very lucky life. When I got that
cartoon I thought I would do it for a couple of years, then I hung onto it,
because I never stop being amazed that I'm able to do it. Over the years, I see
people trying to do cartoons on the web, short-form stuff, and I'm this one
person that is able to do it on this huge forum and waste a lot of NBC money.
That'll probably change. You know how that's going. Their primetime television,
everybody's getting hit.

AVC: Saturday Night Live had to cut the
budget?

RS: They had to chop some cast members last year.
There were budget cuts after the writers' strike for sure. A lot of shows were
hit with that stuff. But fortunately [veteran staff-writer James] Downey wrote
a sketch that Hillary [Clinton] felt the need to comment on in the middle of
the debate.

AVC: Do you feel like that revitalized the
show?

RS: It certainly did in the media. There's nothing
the media loves more than to be the subject of everyone's attention. The
premise of Downey's sketch was that the media had made the decision to favor
Barack Obama, and so not only was it a funny political sketch that Hillary
Clinton actually mentioned in a debate, but the subject of the sketch was a
group of people deciding whether to make it a story or not.

AVC: There's an element of navel-gazing to it
that's absolutely irresistible to the media.

RS: Tonight's subject: ME!

AVC: As a satirist, which candidate would
you—

RS: Hillary. Everybody agrees that Hillary will be
the funniest person to be president. Was that was your question?

AVC: That was my question. Why do you think
that is?

RS: Baggage. That's the reason that she isn't
getting in, pretty much. I have never seen a candidate come into a race with so
much baggage and be so prejudged as Hillary Clinton. I've always been amazed at
the magnitude of hatred a certain segment of the public has for her. It's a
combination of factors: There's the sexist side of it that she's a strong woman
that doesn't always convey a big sense of humor. Not that there are a lot of
male candidates who are necessarily cut-ups either. There's that, then there's
the fact that the Clintons are basically the most successful Democratic
politicians of the last 30 years, and thus became lightning rods for the
opposition. You put those two things together, sexism and partisanship. You
couldn't build a candidate that had more baggage than Hillary. Those two things.
It's pretty incredible. No candidate has ever demonstrated in an unwitting way
how wrong-headed the way we make decisions about who will run our country
really is.

AVC: It seems like Obama would be a difficult
subject for satirists.

RS: I think he has a lot of funny moves that people
will be able to pick up and imitate. I think Obama and McCain are both funny.
They're just no Hillary. There's just too much going on there for either of
those guys to possibly compete. For Obama, it could be a John Kennedy situation
where everybody is going to invest all this hope and optimism, idealism, but
John Kennedy was probably the first president to be subjected to a great deal
of satire once he was elected. Maybe it was because he had a funny accent.

AVC: Getting back to Obama, one of the
reasons the media seized on the whole Jeremiah Wright thing was because here
was an aspect of Obama and his history that was very broad. That was very
silly. It was such an incredibly juicy, juicy target for satire that they finally
had an in and they definitely seized on that.

RS: I think the reason the media seized on it is
because it was all over YouTube and it was an unavoidable subject. They knew
that the Republicans were going to seize on it and they knew that the media, everybody
believes that the media tries to shape our perceptions. Whether this is true or
not, everyone assumes that it is. Here was something that was completely beyond
their control. This was a sound bite that everybody could see. Everybody would
have access to it on the web. Basically, it had to be addressed. Once they dove
in, absolutely it was a juicy story, because Jeremiah Wright was a juicy
character. I haven't had a chance to do Obama on Conan yet, but I did do
Jeremiah Wright. They were anxious to do a Jeremiah Wright Clutch Cargo.

AVC: I wanted him to linger in the public eye
longer so you could do more of those Jeremiah Wright bits.

RS: Sure. Well, I don't know what happened. Obama
castigated him then he disappeared.

AVC: It seems like a lot of these stories
have a short shelf life.

RS: Let's see what happens in the fall. Let's check
in the fall and see if that story has a short shelf life. You know that it's
going to be used on some level, but Obama's genius is that he's been the
anti-politics candidate. Even before he's been the subject of criticism because
of Jeremiah Wright, he's always been able to dismiss it as politics as usual.
So every time he gets criticized, and you're placed in a position of judging
Obama on this new set of criticisms, he turns the mirror on you in a brilliant
way. He makes you ask yourself whether you really want to go there and choose
your candidate on something like that. If Hillary Clinton could have come up
with this, she might have had more success.

AVC: It seems like with McCain, at this point
the only satirical angle for him is old-people jokes.

RS: Oh, I can't stand it!

AVC: It also seems like, a) 72 really isn't
all that old these days, and b) old jokes are inherently one-size-fits-all.

RS: But he also doesn't seem like an old fogey. Bob
Dole was old and he also came off like a bitter old man. Bob Dole is my
favorite comedy bit I've ever done. Doing the lips of Bob Dole on Conan. I enjoyed that even
more than Triumph. Because he was really a crotchety old man. He had that
persona. He had it back when he was running with Gerald Ford in the '70s. He
was this crazy, angry guy, this Republican hatchet man. Then he just became
this hilariously tragic, Nixonian figure. He was a crotchety old guy who was
never going to get his moment in the sun, and then he finally got it against
Clinton. It's a little bit of a parallel to McCain in the sense that everybody
thinks McCain's candidacy is going to end up like Dole's, a "so-what?" kind of
candidate who doesn't energize the party and gets clobbered. Everybody's
perception is that the Democrats can only beat themselves. The only ones who
haven't in the last 30 years are the Clintons.

AVC: It would be nice if comic writers could
satirize his actual politics and not just indulge in the standard "He's old!
His first car was a dinosaur!"

RS: You know, we did that with Dole, because Dole
felt like an old man.

AVC: It was the Wilford Brimley thing where
he was born an old man.

RS: Thank you, I should be interviewing you. You
said it in like five words. Let me tell you one more thing about Zohan. We were talking about
the Arabs and Israelis in the movie and we went to all this trouble to hire all
these real people. The point of the movie is what they have in common. It was
fascinating to see that it came to life on the set. It manifested itself on the
set because some of these people really were from Israel and had practically
never been here before. And to see them debate and discuss every night with the
Arab-American actors was pretty amazing. For both sides, they'd never really
interacted. Here in America, I get the sense that there is a sort of acceptance
of either side, a "the war's over there" kind of thing. But it's not like
Israeli-Americans and Arab-Americans are all buddy-buddy necessarily. But these
guys had never had a dialogue with each other. On these long nights on the set,
we were stuck doing crowd scenes for eight hours a night. And they'd hang out
and talk to each other, hang out and talk about other shit. And there were
these people saying, "I'd never trusted an Israeli. I'd been brought up to hate
them unilaterally. My perception of them has just been a stern army guy at
checkpoint who gives me a hard time for trying to get into Israel." And the
reverse is true as well, you know. Israelis have all these perceptions about
Arabs. It was amazing to see, and this was completely unexpected, that people
would have their perceptions shaken by appearing in this silly summer comedy.

AVC: It sounds like you think that Don't
Mess With The Zohan does have the capacity to bring people together.

RS: Well, let me say this: One of the actors
invited a bunch of actors to Las Vegas. One of the Israeli guys owns a
restaurant and both Israeli and Arab actors went out there. He set them up at
parties and everything. I just think that if Israelis and Arabs can share a
hookah, then I think that says a lot about their potential to share a tiny
sliver of land in the Middle East as well.