Janeane Garofalo - The Progressive Interview - Interview

Progressive, The, May, 2003 by Elizabeth DiNovella

Janeane Garofalo is first and foremost a comedian. She started her stand-up career while a college student in Rhode Island, going to an open-mic night at a local comedy club in 1985. Since then, she's performed throughout the United States, and she just wrapped up a year-and-a-half-long tour.

Garofalo has hit the talk show circuit over the last several months, speaking out for diplomacy and peace and against the war in Iraq. She's been on Crossfire, Inside Politics, Good Morning America, Fox News Sunday, MSNBC, and CNN. And she voiced one of the anti-war commercials sponsored by Win Without War.

Though she has acted in numerous movies--The Laramie Project, Dogma, Steal This Movie (the Abbie Hoffman story), Wet Hot American Summer, The Truth About Cats and Dogs, Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, Reality Bites, to name a few--Garofalo says she's surprised when people connect her to Hollywood.

"It's strange when people refer to me as a Hollywood activist because I don't live there and I don't participate in it," she says. "Have you ever seen me at the Oscars? Have you ever seen me in a gown? Have you ever seen me in a limo?"

She's been on several television and cable programs, including a brief stint on Saturday Night Live, a regular role on The Larry Sanders Show, for which she received an Emmy nomination in 1997, and various comedy specials. She's also written for comedy shows, and, with co-author Ben Stiller, she published the 1999 self-help parody Feel This Book.

I catch up with Garofalo at her Manhattan apartment just a few days before the war in Iraq begins. Kid and Dewey, her affectionate mutts, greet me at the door. She's wearing green corduroys with frayed ends, black gym shoes with three white racing stripes, and a pink T-shirt with a faded "wild child" logo. With a sweatband on one wrist and a big black watch on the other, Janeane is ready to talk. We sit down on the floor on top of a beautiful Persian rug covered in dog hair. "You're gonna get total dogface now," she says, as Kid comes up to lick me in the middle of the interview.

Three guitars, a piano, a blue iMac, and a few colorful paintings decorate the rust-colored room. Though she has a framed photo of herself and Bill Clinton nearby, Garofalo mentions that she protested Desert Fox, Clinton's 1998 bombing of Iraq. And she's adamant about the Bush Administration. "There's nothing you could point to in the Bush Administration with pride," she says. "Nothing. There is no way any rational, reasonable person can say that the Bush Administration has been good for America."

She offers me a cigarette, and I accept. We talk about 9/11, and she tells me how surreal it was. Like so many New Yorkers, she volunteered to do her part in the relief effort. "Whoever was in charge of the aid wouldn't allow cigarettes and alcohol down there [at Ground Zero], which is what a lot of the relief workers were asking for. So they had to sneak in people that would volunteer to buy cigarettes and alcohol for them. I know that sounds terrible but c'mon, wouldn't you be asking for cigarettes and alcohol if you were down there?"

Q:

* Why are you speaking out against this

* War in Iraq?

Janeane Garofalo: I'm so public about this because I've been asked to do so and because I painfully felt that the anti-war movement was being ignored. So it was a combination of those two things. If I thought the anti-war movement was getting proper coverage in the mainstream media, I would have said no. You don't need actors to make this a mockery.

But as it became abundantly dear that no one was getting on TV talking about this, and when I was specifically approached by the founders of Win Without War and some people at MoveOn.org, I said yes. And I wasn't reluctant about it. I can't stand watching history roll right over us. It's like they're asking you to bend over, put your head in the sand, and put a flag in your ass.

Q: Have you felt a backlash from speaking out?

Garofalo: Ohmigod. It's ridic. I'm not saying that it's just me, it's everybody who's spoken out. The press has wasted America's time, an inordinate amount of time, with celebrity bashing.

First of all, why are you wasting time celebrity bashing? Don't book me. Don't put me on your show. You have a choice. You can book a guest you can respect or you can respect the guest you book.

They love to pretend that if you are in entertainment, that's what defines you and you can't possibly have any knowledge of what's going on in the news. So you have grown adult anchors and media people who are literally acting like twelve year olds, saying, "You shut up. You don't know anything." Literally treating you with the contempt of a schoolyard bully.

Q: You've been on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox speaking out against the war. How has that gone?

Garofalo: On the one hand, it's so bad that it's enjoyable. Some of the anchors or journalists or whatever you want to call them, personalities, have been kind and it's been fine. But for the most part, you just have to defend yourself. You don't get a chance to have a real debate. You don't get a chance to discuss anything. You defend your position, defend your career choice, defend .your patriotism, defend your intelligence level, and then no information has been disseminated to people watching the show.