Lee Camp: Pepper Spray The Tears Away
by Nicole Powers for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Unless you’re the kind of rabid right winger who gets up at 7 AM on a Saturday to watch Fox & Friends, which I’m assuming you’re not if you’re reading this, Lee Camp is probably the best comedian you’ve never seen on TV. And there’s a good reason for that. Back in February 2008, when the Faux News Channel made the glorious mistake of interviewing him live on air, he took the opportunity to present a monologue on the nature of the network – calling it a “parade of propaganda” and a "festival of ignorance.” The purported “news” show reacted by cutting away to an anchor in another part of the studio, who was surrounded by four foxy female models dressed in miniaturized Lieutenant Uhura outfits, who previewed an upcoming segment on Captain Kirk’s sex appeal – which underscored Camp’s point rather nicely (no disrespect to William Shatner or his undeniable animal magnetism intended).

In the intervening four years, as the economic climate degenerated Camp’s political awareness increased, and though a few doors closed for him, many tent flaps unexpectedly opened up – thanks to the birth of Occupy Wall Street. Camp’s philosophy was naturally aligned with that of the founders of the movement, and the comedian has supported and promoted it since its inception, through street performances at numerous encampments and via his popular Moment of Clarity videos (which can now be seen on SG). Camp recently published a collection of his finest Moment of Clarity revolutionary rants in book form, and has just released a second riotously funny comedy album on Stand Up Records called Pepper Spray The Tear Away, which is essential listening for anyone who gets nostalgic for the scent of capsicum.

SuicideGirls caught up with Camp in New York City to talk politics, the upcoming presidential election, Occupy, apathy – and how to save the Doritos munching masses from themselves.

Nicole Powers: So this funny business, it’s a bit of a laugh really?

Lee Camp: Bit of a laugh – that’s the goal. That’s the goal, have a bit of a laugh.

NP: When did you start taking this funny business seriously?

LC: That’s a good question.

NP: Was it to stop getting the crap beaten out of you a school?

LC: In terms of just taking it seriously like it’s what I wanted to do, I was about 12. I wanted to be a humor writer, so that’s when I took it seriously that way. If you mean took it seriously as in started talking about serious subjects, that wasn’t until I was 25 or something.

NP: Why did you want to be a comic writer rather than doing stand up?

LC: I think it was kind of a cowardly way of me thinking I could never be on stage. I wasn’t an outgoing showy person, and so the idea of standing on a stage horrified me. I wasn’t an actor, and so it was like, well I can be a comedy writer.

NP: So you thought you would be a writer so that you could be funny but avoid stage fright?

LC: Right. Avoid stage fright, avoid being made fun of, avoid being laughed at, yeah.

NP: Very telling, you’re a comedian but you wanted to avoid being made fun of.

LC: There’s a lot of ironies in being a comedian…A lot of comedians are depressed and a lot of comedians are on a stage because they are trying to avoid getting laughed at, and they’re trying to get laughed with. I never was the class clown, but a lot of class clowns, that’s their way of dealing with [being] judged.

NP: So you’re not dealing with childhood trauma though your humor?

LC: Certainly not trauma, but I think I got into it because I was drawn to make people laugh because I was so shy and horrified of being made fun of and wanted to get attention in positive ways. There’s definitely factors of my childhood that made me go towards comedy.

NP: You say when you started out you weren’t taking your material seriously – so did you start with banana skin humor and progress?

LC: My hero at the time was Seinfeld, his stuff…we call it observational, which is a horrible term, it just means talking about the little mundane nonsense of life and having no deeper meaning. That’s how my comedy started. That’s what I wanted to be. I wanted to do that, and both I progressed and started caring more about this stuff – about what was going on in the world – and I also progressed in what I wanted to do with my comedy. I wanted it to have more of an effect on the audience than just the laughter. That’s not to take anything away from comedians where it is only about the laughter. I love Steven Wright who has no deeper meaning to his jokes at all. They're just really fucking funny. I love that type of comedy. But I wanted my stuff to have a soul to it. So I try to make 90 percent of my stuff have that deeper meaning.

NP: Was there a moment in your life when you had a political awakening? Because I remember being a kid and thinking the news was really boring.

LC: I guess it was in '91 when the Soviet Union fell. I was like 12. I remember my older brother going, “Hey, do you understand what’s going on in the Soviet Union?” And I was like, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” He was like, “Lee, this is huge news and you have no idea what’s going on?” And I was like, “Whatever,” and I ran off and didn’t care. I specifically remember that moment and now I think back on it and I’m like, wow, there was major shit going on and I couldn’t care less.

My awakening, it wasn’t a moment, it was a four-year period – probably Bush’s second four year period mainly. It wasn’t like I was an idiot, I knew the Iraq War was wrong, but I wasn’t marching to stop it or anything…Then I started caring more and more about it. I guess it wasn’t just his last four years, it was a little before that, because I remember thinking if Kerry doesn’t get elected we’re really fucked…But it was a four to five year period that it started dawning on me just how fucked up shit was.

NP: Sometimes I think that’s a double-edged sword. In some ways I’m jealous of the people that are happy in their ignorance.

LC: Oh my god, ignorance is bliss.

NP: I think if Romney gets in I might need a lobotomy. I will need to be one of those people that just lives happily in their ignorance.

LC: What scares me is Romney or Obama, I feel like there’s not a lot of time to turn things around…We’ve got to go even beyond that to really change things. But in terms of taking the bite of the apple, for me it went much deeper than just the larger politics and politicians. Every product I was buying I was now thinking about the toxins or about how horrible it was for the environment. Every piece of clothing, where it was made…And you wonder, if I hadn’t fucking taken – what was it in Matrix? – the red pill. If I hadn’t taken the red pill, this would be so easy. I would walk in and I would be like, “Doritos! Doritos taste delicious!” And that would be it.

NP: How happy would you be if all you thought about when you put a handful of Doritos in your mouth was how delicious they taste?

LC: Yeah, seriously…It’s a nice easy life.

NP: You got involved in the whole Occupy Wall Street movement fairly early on. How did that come about?

LC: It’s tough to really pin it all down. One of the people who was calling for Occupy over a year ago, like a year and half or two year years ago, was David DeGraw who writes at AmpedStatus…He may be the one that coined the “99%” term because he was using it long before Occupy started. He asked me to do video promoting Move Your Money and an occupation of Wall Street on June 14th of last year, so this is months before Occupy.

NP: I love that how early you got into Occupy is a badge of beyond hipster honor amongst occupiers. What was the first day you occupied?

LC: Seriously. People will ask me about whether I’ve been down there, and I’ll be like, “Oh yeah, I was down there on the first night.” And they're like, “ The first night? You were there the first night?!?”

NP: And it really fucks with them if you're talking about June 14th –that’s a total head fuck.

LC: [David DeGraw] asked me to do that, and so we did it, and the occupation didn’t take. I mean probably a hundred people showed up for it or something. There was some Move Your Money stuff that was successful….Then people tried again with support from Adbusters and others. That’s when September 17th happened and it was amazing. I’m lucky…I performed at probably a dozen different occupations. I was also weirdly connected to the beginning of the corresponding occupation in Freedom Plaza in D.C. It was just a coincidence that they started at the same time. Because the one in D.C., they had been planning it for eight months or something before Occupy started.

NP: That was just a parallel universe situation?

LC: Yeah. There was a video that I was in, that Chris Hedges and Cornel West were in, saying, “We’re going to D.C. and we’re going to occupy, and we're not leaving.” That started October 6th, and it gained a lot of energy because Occupy had started. I was down there and lived there for four days. But I got lucky in that I’ve been to probably a dozen different occupations. I was even at OccupyLA just a couple weeks ago, and performed for them. They’re getting shot at with rubber bullets just for drawing in chalk on the sidewalk. Because, you know, if you let chalk drawing go unpunished it can quickly lead to finger paints – so you’ve got to fucking take it down quick. Before you know it, glitter's everywhere, there are people stepping on pipe cleaners – social fabric will break down really.

NP: While you were talking about how many occupations you visited, I was imagining the Twitter Ap where you check in, and, if you check in often enough, you became the Mayor of that Occupy.

LC: Like Four Square Occupy?

NP: We could throw out the whole General Assembly process and let whomever is the Mayor of Occupy at any given time dictate policy….

NP: Were you there for the end of Zuccotti?

LC: I was. I got there late. It started at 1 AM and I got there at 3 AM. By that point they’d blocked off all the [streets].

NP: Oh, no ,so you didn’t get your ass kicked?

LC: I didn’t get my ass kicked

NP: It must have been so disappointing.

LC: Oh, it was. I tried to tickle the cops to see if I could get a pummeling, but it didn’t happen. Yeah, they’d blocked off like four blocks so you couldn’t even get close.

NP: That’s the Occupy Four Square badge you’ll never get; the “I Got Beaten At Zuccotti Park” badge.

LC: Everybody was waiting to see if I would check in.

NP: So September 17, we’re approaching a big anniversary...

LC: Yeah, I think I’m going to miss it because my brother’s wedding is that weekend.

NP: Dude, he needs to fucking change his date.

LC: He probably still doesn’t even know.

NP: We are going to launch an online petition to get Lee Camp’s brother to change his wedding day.

LC: I’m not even going to tell him. He’s just going to stumble upon a website: Lee Camp’s brother must move his wedding date…

NP: Dot com. The petition…

LC: That'd be awesome.

NP: But seriously, dude, brothers are two a penny, there's only one first OWS anniversary.

LC: I agree.

NP: At least throw a sickie on his wedding day, yes. No sibling’s really that important.

LC: That’s true, that's true. What do you think will happen on the anniversary?

NP: That's the question everyone is asking isn’t it?

LC: Because you know the cops are going to be going nuts. I mean they're not going to let people stay there for long.

NP: I don’t think you'll even be able to get within a two-mile radius of Zuccotti Park…

NP: But you’ve already missed one chance to get arrested?

LC: I have missed several chances to get arrested. I was in Chase's headquarters the other day delivering a 30,000-person petition that tells Jaime Dimon [the president, chairman, CEO of JPMorgan Chase] to step down.

NP: I saw that.

LC: And I avoided getting arrested there too.

NP: Have you had any off the cuff conversations with police officers?

LC: Not at Occupy. I have a friend who’s a comedian and his whole family are cops, and I became friendly with his brother when I first moved to New York…But since then, I have become more political on the left and he has become more crazy right wing. He sits in his cop car all day and listens to Rush Limbaugh. So now, even though if you have conversations that aren’t political he seems like the nicest guy in the world, he has semi-automatics that he’s collecting in his basement and he’s ready for the Obama socialist regime that’s going to take all of his guns away. It’s insane. It’s crazy to think that people believe that shit. It's mindboggling.

NP: But it does go back to the Doritos, these are people that put Doritos in their mouth and just think about how delicious they taste.

LC: It’s true. However it’s not an “ignorance is bliss” kind of thing, because he’s very informed with lies. He's taken a lot of time to educate himself incorrectly.

NP: I guess it takes as much brain power to educate yourself with misinformation as it does information. It’s just a hell of a lot easier to come across misinformation.

LC: Oh yeah…The internet has done so much good for getting information to people, but it has done so much good for getting incorrect information to people. That’s part of the problem with getting people to understand climate change, it’s so easy to spread seeds of doubt about anything that happens.

NP: Because if you read it on the internet, it must be true.

LC: I have always felt that way, yeah. I’ve always believed that.

NP: And if Fox News repeats it, it’s doubly true.

LC: No doubt…

NP: One of the things that disturbs me coming into the election cycle is the common view amongst occupiers that we shouldn’t participate in the election process.

LC: Right.

NP: I appreciate the rationale: that the system’s so broken that we shouldn’t support it in any way. But my fear is that if occupiers don’t participate you are going to create a Nader situation – only instead of having a third party, you’re going to have a third non-party – where a huge swathe of natural Democratic voters are going to choose not to vote, which will help Mitt the Twit get in by default.

LC: Right. I have never said, don’t vote. I have always said vote. I have also said that I’m not going to vote for Obama, but I am not in a swing state so it’s a different game for me. If I were in a swing state, I don’t know what I would be saying. I would have to spend a lot more time thinking about it. I definitely think people should vote, whether they vote for a third party or they vote for Obama or whatever they do. I think that sitting it out doesn’t solve anything. A huge number of Americans already sit it out and what has that proved?

NP: Well, as much as we like to blame the 1%, I think our apathy has allowed this economic and political meltdown to happen. It’s not Occupy’s apathy but…

LC: No doubt. Imagine if everyone voted with their wallet. Imagine if everyone took their money out of Chase Bank. Imagine if everyone didn’t buy clothing that was made with child labor...It would be a whole different ballgame if people were willing to really put the effort into it.

NP: So in the lead up to November, what are you going to be doing?

LC: The truth is I am very ambivalent about it…Like you don’t have to tell me that if Romney is in office then if a Supreme Court Justice dies it’ll be a whole game changer…But at the same time l feel we could elect Democrats from now to eternity and things will still get pulled further and further to the right…and I don’t know that we have that much time to fuck around with that….I feel like we need a sudden and dramatic shift.

NP: I understand where you’re coming from, but at the end of the day, the Democrats are not trying to shove a trans-vaginal ultrasound wand up my cooch. And if that happens, I will blame you.

LC: You’re right, but aren’t those the perfect issues to keep electing essentially Republicans who are Democrats on social issues [and by name]. Like that is the perfect excuse, they just find little things like that and gay marriage.

NP: But that is not a little thing. Have you seen the size of them?

LC: That’s not a little thing, it’s a big thing.

NP: I should shove one of those things up your ass and then ask you decide if you are going to be a-political.

LC: So let me ask you this, if you could see into the future and 15 or 20 years from now we’ve decimated the environment even farther than we have today, just beyond belief, and global warming is just running rampant, and there’s endless death and destruction, but we have had Democrats in office and you don’t have your trans-vaginal ultrasound…If you could see that and know that’s coming, what would be your answer today? What would we do today to change it?

NP: Okay, I get it. I don’t trust anyone as far as I can throw them, and it’s a frying pan or fire kind of choice. But, not the best case scenario, but the lesser of two evils is that Obama gets a second term and he has nothing to lose so he can do the right thing because he doesn’t need to get reelected. He has decent a majority in the House and Senate so he can actually get shit done. We occupy the streets and do not give him an inch or a mile, and we force him to do the right thing because he knows we’re teetering on the edge of civil unrest. We get rid of things like Citizens United and Super PACs, we demand the various government agencies work for us, and we have the level of people on the streets that Montreal has to ensure at least some of our demands are met.

LC: Yeah, listen, I want to see him win, believe it or not. But I think that a lot of our fight needs to be outside of him. It needs to be changing the media and changing the way our political system works…I mean how many Democrats are you going to get to vote to get rid of Citizens United? A small percentage?

NP: A small percentage right now because we are not putting the pressure on them. I guess that goes back to apathy.

LC: Yep.

NP: Because, at the end of day, there’s 99 of us for every 1 of them, and if the 99 were all doing something…

LC: I’m so in the middle on this. I talk to someone who is really fighting for Obama and I leave the room going, “Yeah, you know, they’re right. We have to fucking fight for that.” Then I talked to someone who is like, “I can’t support a man who has killed more civilians with drones than Bush did, and who deported more immigrants than Bush did.” I mean, just today they torpedoed the arms treaty that was going to go through the UN. It was this huge thing, so many countries had agreed on it and it was going to happen, and the US at the end of the day fucking destroyed it. Money interests is what it comes down to. They want to keep selling arms. So with those types of things, what are we supporting?

NP: But as a member of the underrepresented 52 percent of the population, I’m just trying to keep a fucking trans-vaginal wand out of my cooch. It makes it a whole lot simpler.

LC: It all comes down to the tool jabbed in the cooch.

NP: We should get wands and shove them up guys' asses before they go into the polling booth.

LC: I think so too, and say how do you like it?

NP: And how are you going to vote?

LC: By the way, that’s my home state, Virginia, the trans-vaginal state.

NP: You must be so proud.

LC: I'm very proud, yeah. You know they’re going to put it on the flag.

NP: Did you get back there much?.

LC: Sometimes, to see the family. My parents are in Richmond. Luckily I don’t have to confront many people while I'm there and talk to them about their views on ultrasounds.

NP: What's your background? Are your parents proud when they see your videos?

LC: My dad is a doctor, a psychiatrist who was in Vietnam. He's interesting because he has voted for both sides. He's voted for Republican presidents, but now in his older age is closer to my view – like definitely an Obama supporter over Romney. He thinks Republicans have gone nuts, and he thinks we've got ten years to do something about climate change that’s even reasonable, and no one's talking about it, and its infuriating him. So he's had a strong switch to closer to my views, and yeah, they're proud.

But at the same time, when I did my thing on Fox News, when I called them a “parade of propaganda” on their network…This is before I knew how big the clip was going to be. I didn’t think many people would see it, and then it went viral or whatever. But when my mom saw it, even though she's a Democrat, she didn’t know that there's a difference between Fox News and regular news or other news channels…She was like, “I think you’re saying the right things, but why did you burn those bridges? You should have made friends with them.” But then it was fine, because she had some co-workers who eventually saw it and were like, “Oh my god! That was great what your son did.” Then all of a sudden she was proud.

NP: That was just such an awesome moment. Was that something that was premeditated? Did you have that speech prepared or was it a random compulsion?

LC: No, I knew I was going to say something. I had no desire to be on their network at as a standard comedian. My thought when they asked me was either I'm going to say no or I'm going to make them regret it. So I knew I was going to say something, and I had thought a little bit about some phrasing, but a lot of it was off the top of my head. “Parade of propaganda” I thought was a good phrase to use…

NP: What was the immediate reaction in the studio after they cut away?

LC: There was this dead silence. The anchor I was sitting with was furious, literally his face turned red, like you saw the veins in his neck. I just got up, walked out of the studio, took my mic off, and went in to the green room area to grab my bag. The co-host, who wasn’t in that segment, this runway model girl, she pretended she'd been watching the segment but she hadn't because she goes, “Great job. You were terrific.” I was like, “Thanks.” Then I just grabbed my bag and walked out. I didn’t find this out until later because I was on the subway, but then they come back from commercial and they pretended that they had physically ejected me from the building. Like one [of the anchors] walks in cleaning off his hands and goes, “Had to get rid of that guy.” None of that happened. He didn’t throw me out. I just walked out.

NP: But the aftermath of that has been a rather interesting…

LC: Yeah. It shut a lot of doors that I didn’t really realize would be shut. Like I used to tour a lot of colleges. I was doing a 100 colleges a year for a little while, when my material was less political, and those are basically all gone because colleges don’t want to book any comedian that's going to be controversial at all. They Google me and the first thing that comes up is that clip. But it opened a lot of other doors that I also hadn’t planned on. I didn’t really think anybody was going to see it other than Fox News viewers at 7 AM on a Saturday. But I got great fans, like Paul Provenza, who does a lot of great comedy stuff. He basically become a fan of mine because of that moment. I don’t know that I would have met a lot of cool people without it.

NP: It is a glorious clip.

LC: It's a catharsis for millions of people. They're like, "If only I had been able to do that."

NP: It's a dose of YouTube crack.

LC: Every time you see something crazy on Fox News you almost need to play that clip – just to wash down the flavor of some Bill O'Reilly rant.



Lee Camp’s Moment of Clarity book and Pepper Spray The Tears Away CD are available now. For more information visit LeeCamp.net and follow @LeeCamp.

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Lee+Camp%3A+Pepper+Spray+The+Tears+Away/