Robert Smigel: The _Heeb_ Interview

By Pamela Chelin

"The main thing I want people to do when they see the Zohan is to laugh," says Robert Smigel speaking from a Los Angeles hotel room about You Don’t Mess With The Zohan, the comedy he co-wrote with Adam Sandler and Judd Apatow. The screenplay was originally finished in 2001, but was put on hold due to the horrific events of 9-11. "Adam and I did the re-write this year and we put more political humor into it. People have become, sadly, almost desensitized to the violence and the dire situation that’s existed the last number of years, so the movie became subject matter that we could get away with doing now. It almost felt like people are ready to laugh at it to some degree and see the absurd elements that exist in it."

Growing up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to "effervescent Jewish parents who thought I was God", the 48- year old writer was raised with a strong Jewish identity, which included Jewish day school, travel to Israel and summer camp so he was a natural fit to imagine the first Israeli comic lead released to worldwide audiences.

In the film, Zohan (Adam Sandler), an Israeli Mossad agent, becomes a smashing success in New York as hairdresser "Scrappy Coco" whose finishing touches on his infamous haircuts involve sex with the older female clients who, natch, flock to his salon in droves. "That whole part of the movie, the dirty thing with the old women, was something I brought to it." says Smigel. "I’ve developed my own set of perceptions about Israelis. One is that they are sexually aggressive — not a controversial statement to say that, I suppose. It’s the Sabra mentality. It’s confidence. People say that it was almost a conscious thing when the state of Israel was created to be assertive as a reaction to what was perceived as them being victims. They didn’t want to be victims and the funniest manifestation of it was the sexual aggressiveness."

Though a successful satirist and cartoonist known both for his TV Funhouse cartoons on Saturday Night Live and puppet, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, Smigel initially studied and "failed miserably" at dentistry. He remembers wanting to be a comedian as far back as the age of 3 when he was obsessed with Red Skelton and in third grade when he read a story he had written to his classmates–an adventure he wrote involving Cap’n Crunch and Aunt Jemima. "I’m sure there were a lot of gratuitous bad jokes," he recalls. "It was just a writing assignment and we were supposed to read it to the class and I remember reading this childish thing and getting enormous laughs and feeling just incredible that day. That was the first time I remember actually making a whole room laugh really hard."

It wasn’t until he dropped dentistry and won a stand up comedy contest that Smigel really realized that he could make a living doing comedy. "That really turned a switch," he says, "It was like, ‘Fuck this, I’m going to try to figure out how to make a living at this. It changed everything.’"

Saturday Night Live was Smigel’s first comedy job. "I was a big SNL fan growing up," he says, "But it seemed other-worldly to me, like nothing I could ever be a part of in any way." He was hired for his ability to satirize, and thus began a career based upon commenting upon whatever made him uneasy. "Satire probably stems from some essential element of discomfort I feel in my every day life," he says. "It’s cathartic for me to act upon discomfort at things that I find uncomfortable or troubling in some way…. My problem is that I’ll have an idea for something to make fun of and then I have to watch a lot of it to make sure I’m doing it right and I have to suffer. [For example,] I had an idea for a Survivor cartoon and then I had to watch a bunch of Survivor episodes and I didn’t particularly like the show. I have to be aware of pop culture, which I’m not necessarily fond of. When I do the SNL gig, I have to pay attention to American Idol because I know Lorne wants me to write about things that are culturally relevant, so that is my prison at times with that job."

Smigel says that the world at large will never run out of things for him to mock, but he concedes that it is becoming tougher to parody certain topics. "It gets harder to satirize entertainment," he says, "because entertainment has gotten so snarky and self aware. Like, SNL, when the show started, what lasts in the memory are the original cast, but [when] I was there, what everybody talked about when the show started were the commercial parodies and Mr. Bill…. They don’t dare take themselves seriously anymore and so many forms of entertainment are like that now. It’s almost exhausting the layers of irony you’re being subjected to. There are so few people out there willing to be unironic and unguarded these days." He mentions Rosie O’Donnell as an example of someone he respects for her outspoken opinions, though he says he didn’t always agree with what she had to say.

Despite the irony implicit in so much of his humor, Smigel is genuinely earnest when he speaks about the moral code to which he tries to adhere. He abhors humor which derides women’s looks, for instance, and the way celebrities like Amy Winehouse are mocked for their addictions. "There are things that I generally don’t do," he says. "I have broken rules of my own when somebody has an idea that is just too funny, but I don’t like to…. On my cable comedy show, there was a sketch that made me uncomfortable. Someone had an idea where Steadman doesn’t want to have sex with Oprah, so he concocts a whole false persona that he’s a double agent and constantly being called by his boss right when Oprah wants to have sex with him. It was the funniest cartoon that was on my TV Funhouse show and I rejected it for a couple of weeks because I thought it was too mean, but I ended up breaking my rule because I thought it was just way too funny."

It is likely that some Jew or another out there will feel like You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, which pokes fun at both Israelis and Arabs, will be considered too mean, but Smigel emphasizes that it was written with good intentions. "I am proud to get political satire like this into a summer comedy, but I didn’t want to take that extra step and give people the idea that we have the answer to the [Middle East] problem because that would trivialize something very complicated. All we really do in the movie (and hopefully, in a very subtle way) is to create a scenario that brings to light the prejudices that both Arabs and Israelis face in the United States…. I don’t expect to change anything in doing this, but it might be nice if kids who see the movie get a sense that there might be something in looking at the other side as people. I don’t know about the world embracing the film, but if two hundred million dollars worth of the world is ready, I’d be more than happy about that."

In an accent like his character Zohan, he adds, "All I want is just a bissel from the world."

What do you think?