TV INTERVIEW: PAUL PROVENZA

It's Showtime in the World's Funniest 'Green Room'

By: Team Buzzine

July 11, 2011

The Green Room with Paul Provenza is about to return to our TV screens on Showtime for a second season of intimate chats between comics. After a first season with guests ranging from Eddie Izzard to Robert Klein and Jim Jeffries to Andy Dick, the show returns to The Vanguard in Hollywood accompanied by 26 close friends, including Ray Romano, Kathy Griffin, Lewis Black, Joe Rogan, and Judd Apatow…but namedropping aside, the reason to watch is the insight, candor, and truth broken out in the name of comedy. Oh, and all the drug jokes. Buzzine’s Nicole Rayburn sat down with the show’s ringmaster, Paul Provenza, to talk about green rooms, compadres, and why comedians are like jazz musicians…

Nicole Rayburn: Let’s talk about your show, The Green Room…

Paul Provenza: What, you got a problem with it?

NR: My issues are…it’s just not funny enough. [Laughs]

PP: That’s true. [Laughs] It’s tragic really. It’s tragic that more people don’t live life this insane. 

NR: How do you go about picking your comics to be on your show?

PP: They’re all really busy people, and they’re all very generous, and they all feel sorry for me. So I call and ask a favor, and sometimes they can get away, so they do it… [smiles] But how we put people together is really the fun part. I think of it like putting four jazz musicians together who don’t normally play together: Who’s going to be interesting? Who’s gonna mix? Who’s gonna bump somebody in a way, raise the game in certain ways…and it’s great fun. It’s kind of like rotisserie comedy, like rotisserie baseball. What do they call it now? Do they call it rotisserie?

NR: I can only think of rotisserie chicken when you say that…

PP: That’s also good.

NR: So is there some thought about causing controversy or causing harmony?

PP: No, it’s not toward causing anything; we just spend a lot of time thinking who would really mix well in whatever way they can, but most significantly comedically. Who’s gonna be taking somebody else to a place that maybe they’ve not gone. Who plays well together? What it is is they come to me and go, “My God, this guy is still kickin’ around? He’s still not working? Jesus, let’s throw him a bone.” And they come on, and I use them.

NR: I know that’s not all true… [Laughs] but you do have a history with most of the guests, right?

PP: A lot of them.

NR: Did you get your start in comedy alongside some of them?

PP: I was about 17 when I started out at the New York Improv, and Richard Lewis was one of the people who was there every night, and I was just like, “Oh my God, this guy is amazing.” Some people were compadres; both neophytes at the same time…we’ve spent time on the road… Sometimes you meet other comics because you’re both playing different clubs in the same town and you’re both on the same radio station at the same time, and it’s just a big giant office cooler – the comedy world.

NR: You have this love of comics – a little different than just appreciation for the comics. You love the comedy world…it seems you have a genuine love of them, individual to individual…

PP: It’s an unholy love. It’s a love which cannot be named… It’s getting a little hot in here, isn’t it?

NR: It is steamy… Do you feel like you’ve helped some comics – kind of kick-started new stages in their careers?

PP: No, I wouldn’t say anything of the kind, but what I am very aware of and that I really dig is that I am able to put people together who wouldn’t cross paths for quite some time, and it’s really nice to see somebody like Bo Burnham sitting in a room with Garry Shandling and Judd Apatow and Marc Maron and Ray Romano, and not only hold his own, but earn everybody’s respect and appreciation, and have a real heart-to-heart conversation - a 20-year-old talking with these icons. That’s really cool.

NR: What else do you want your audience to get…

PP: Drugs, money, and whores.

NR: Okay, I can get you two of those. [Laughs]

PP: It’s very rap, kind of hip-hop, kind of gangster – all we really want is drugs, whores, and money.

NR: What do you want people to know about this season of The Green Room?

PP: I want my audience to know that this season of the show is really, really interesting – very odd things happening; it’s really fun. People are really opening up. On the first season, the comics had never seen the show before, so they were discovering it right along, and now a lot of the comics are familiar with what we do, so it’s different in that they’re already in the idea. And a lot of them will start talking very, very intimately in surprising ways, out of nowhere, which is really cool.

NR: It’s been on Showtime now for two seasons, but that’s not where The Green Room started…

PP: Barbara Romen – my partner on the show - and myself started doing it at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival a number of years ago, and then we took it to the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival, and we did it at Sketchfest in San Francisco and a couple of other little festivals, so we also have done this kind of thing with performers from all around the world in really cool environments, and some of them are on the shows now. Some of them are in Australia, some of them are in South Africa… so we were able to get a few of them on here. But other than people like that, most American comics are familiar with it from Showtime.

NR: The show is innovative: It’s awesome; nobody else does it like this…

PP: The production is a big part of it because I’ve always felt that, having done standup on TV and frequently doing it, it’s always bothered me, from the beginning, why the beauty of standup is the spontaneity and the energy and the sense of anything can happen, and the unpredictability of it is what makes it really interesting for me, for the most part. And on television, all of that’s gone, and everything is so formulaic, and it’s a one-shot, a tight-shot, a two-shot, a tight-shot…so the comedy always had to accommodate the process of making a TV show.

So what we did instead was let the comedy be the comedy, and then we figured out how to shoot it without getting in its way, and it’s a very simple transition, but only a comedian would actually know what that feels like, and that’s a big part of why this works. I think people are interested in something that’s different and refreshing, and it will turn some people off, but anything good always have its lovers and detractors.

NR: I like your disclosure at the beginning of each show, that if you’ve ever been offended by anything, don’t come in…

PP: That’s actually a line that was given to me by Penn Jillette, which is what he used to say about The Aristocrats. When we would be doing press for The Aristocrats together, he would always say, “All I can tell the audience is if you’ve ever been offended by anything, don’t come in.” And that’s the thing about Penn – his brutal honesty. It’s just right there: here’s the facts; come in if you like. If you don’t I don’t know what to tell ya. So that’s the philosophy behind this as well. We’re not doing anything because we think an audience will like it; we’re doing it because it’s what we do, and we like it, and we know that there’s an audience out there that does like it, and we hope that they find us.

The second season of ‘The Green Room with Paul Provenza’ premieres new episodes on Showtime every Thursday night at 11:00 p.m. ET/PT beginning July 14, 2011.