Wednesday, August 3, 2011
I NEVER WANTED TO BE A STAR. IT WAS AN ANOMALY THAT I WAS ON SNL AT ALL: Joe Piscopo sits down with New York magazine for an interview that is wholly unedited and unfiltered. Piscopo's far more revealing than he thinks he is -- I don't believe he's conscious of how name-droppy and self-aggrandizing he is, and the end of the interview is a beaut.
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That last part...wow. That's kind of unreal.
ReplyDeleteHe lost me the first time when he said that it's more important for an impression to be accurate than funny. Because: (a) a funny impression is always funny, but an accurate one is artifice without art; and (b) Joe Piscopo's impressions aren't really much of either.
ReplyDelete"<span>So I'm in this property with all these gay divas walking around upstairs and the circus, it’s perfect for a reality show, but I don’t know if I’ll get back at anybody, get any revenge. It’s like The Simpsons. I don’t let my children watch The Simpsons. You know, I’ll tell you this: For me, that show was the original dumbing-down of America. Oh my God! Are we that stupid? You know what I mean? And I don’t let my children watch it, man."</span>
ReplyDeleteI...what? The Simpsons are part of a dumbing down of America? Not to mention how he got to that from his previous though completely escapes me.
And then there's his trashing of Hartman's superior Sinatra impression, at least partially because Piscopo seems to think Sinatra wasn't a bully. (cough)
Yeah, and also, he didn't do steroids. Rrrrrrright.
ReplyDeleteI'm about halfway through it, and I keep trying to figure out who he sounds like. And then it hit me when he said, <span>“Johnny, you’re a legend, and I love ya, and you’re the Man in Black, but this is Sinatra.”</span>
ReplyDeleteHe talks just like Donald Trump.
(Errant pronoun fixed.)
ReplyDeleteThe "I respect Sinatra too much to make fun of him" is the antithesis of comedy.
This interview helped me understand why I rarely found Piscopo to be funny. He's not funny. He is pretty much admitting it. And the ending . . . yikes. (That said, the character from Johnny Dangerously is memorable.)
ReplyDelete<span>I've been fulfilling a lot of people's prophecies about me; I've become a real scumbag. </span>
ReplyDeleteAnd yet he wasn't nearly as funny as the rest of the movie. "E.S.S."
Except that he did that interview in Sinatra character, especially the last line (Mia Farrow joke). I'm assuming. The alternative is just too sad to contemplate.
ReplyDeleteThe ending . . . so Joe Piscopo is Old Barney Stinson?
ReplyDeleteOk. We have verification that Piscopo isn't too bright. I didn't see that much name-dropping in the interview, though; every name he dropped, he earned, and, except for his unjustified slam at Hartmann, he was more self-effacing than most 60-year-old celebrities with his pedigree. But the last three answers, wow. How self un-aware.
ReplyDeleteRelated: have you been following the Faye Dunaway eviction saga in the Times? I'll stay on the right side of the no-politics line and not mention the rent control issue, but there's something sad that someone so successful apparently managed her money that poorly. You expect Faye Dunaway to be lving happily ever after sunning herself by the pool in a Brentwood mansion, rather than schnorring $12,000 a year from some poor landlord.
I find the whole thing quite sad. In particular, the part where he talks about Eddie Murphy and proclaims over and over that he didn't really want to be a star.
ReplyDeleteReading the SNL stuff does make me want to pull out that Shales oral history book again.