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player ready...Jimmy Dore isn’t especially angry. Amused, yes. Bemused. And confused.
But the stand-up comic and social commentator has found a way to cope — charge people to watch TV with him.
“It started with TiVo,” Dore said in a recent telephone interview from Los Angeles. “That’s really what started it — TiVo and watching a lot of late-night talk shows, and I thought, `I can do that better than they do.’ I have TiVo so I could pause things and talk about them.
“It wasn’t really hard: TiVo to Macintosh to stage.”
Dore’s stand-up routine, is not unlike Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” in which a relatively sharp commentator (Stewart, Dore) riffs off the faux pas and flubs of famous folks.
“If I have clips of President Bush or Don Rumsfeld or Sen. Kennedy and respond to them, the great thing is, it’s not me making fun of them. It’s their own words burying them.”
The show is a collection of Dore’s favorite video clips of politicians, journalists, TV personalities and entertainers. “There are some clips that are timeless, but the show is constantly in flux,” he said.
His favorite pieces at the moment involve the president. “Especially the one where George Bush was asked about the Democrats’ agreement not to filibuster except in `extraordinary circumstances.’ And they ask him what that means.” In the clip, President Bush says, “really extraordinary” and then, “I don’t know what that means.”
This allows Dore to riff on other things the president doesn’t know. “Ask him about the economy, and he says, `I’m not an economist.’ Ask him about a legal controversy: `I’m not a lawyer’; about the hurricane: `I’m not a meteorologist’; or stem cells: `I’m not a stem cell.’ He’s the president. He should know some [stuff]!”
Dore said, “It’s excruciating to watch most politicians be funny, but Bush is so natural. All you have to do is pretty much point a camera at him.”
Dore is a Chicago native, one of 12 children in a Catholic family. He was the youngest of seven boys and used comedy to fend off beatings from his brothers. He said he grew up in the ’70s and remembers his blue-collar neighborhood as a place “where people would come home from work, watch `All in the Family’ and laugh for all the wrong reasons.”
Now, he said, “I watch C-SPAN for fun.” And his show “is me making things right in the world.”
Dore has been a stand-up comic for more than 15 years. He started in Chicago in 1989, then moved to Los Angeles in 1995. He has his own Comedy Central special that is “repeated about once a month,” he said, and recently appeared off-Broadway in “The Mari-juana-Logues.” He began incorporating video clips into his act last year.
“I started out small, doing little 10-minute segments,” he said. “It took a while to learn how to do it well. The timing is key. Comedy’s pretty delicate — more delicate than people realize. Even a couple of seconds lag time can kill a joke.”
Dore is the only guy doing this sort of act. “I’m really surprised that nobody else is doing it,” he said, although he admitted it was a risk for a stand-up comic.
“The thing about stand-up is that it’s so easy,” he said. “You just show up and talk. But you can get lazy doing that,” he said.
Comparing “Pop & Politics” to his regular stand-up act — which itself is provocative and irreverent — is (to paraphrase the president) “hard. It’s hard work. It’s easier to present, but the writing is just as intense.”
Dore performed “Pop & Politics” at the San Francisco Punch Line for a week in late May and “it’s gotten me a bigger audience than my regular stand-up.” He has performed it in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, and is scheduled to take it later this year to Chicago; Austin, Texas; and Ann Arbor, Mich. “There’s been a very strong response,” he said.
He said he likes to keep the mix of subject matter “pretty much half and half, pop culture and politics. To me, it’s all about who we are as a culture.”
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