Just Asking... Lizz Winstead

Not many people know it, but Lizz Winstead discovered Stephen Colbert. “He was just doing these funny little bits on Good Morning America, ” she recalls. As the cocreator of The Daily Show, Winstead also gave us Louis Black and the show’s signature sign-off, Moment of Zen. Winstead served as the show’s head writer back in its pre–Jon Stewart iteration, when it was hosted by fellow Minnesota native Craig Kilborn. After leaving The Daily Show in ’98, she hosted another parody show, O2Be, on the Oxygen network, then she did radio for the politically insurgent Air America network, hosting a morning show with commentator Rachel Maddow and the rapper Chuck D.

Winstead has made her home in San Francisco, LA, and New York City since she dropped out of the University of Minnesota to do standup in the ’80s, but she’s returning to Minnesota in September, just in time for the Republican Super Bowl. She’s bringing her latest comedy project to the Parkway Theater during convention week. It’s a parody of morning news shows like Good Morning America called Wake Up World with Hope and Davis. Right now, Wake Up World is actually an all-volunteer effort, a theater show performed on Monday nights in the Village. Winstead hopes to find a platform for which she and her staff can eventually actually get paid. But the show is going to be on TV in St. Paul—as part of True Blue Minnesota’s “counterprogramming” effort, Winstead says, “Every morning, Wake Up World is going to be broadcast on a huge JumboTron pointed at the convention.”

Are you mad that Jon Stewart ruined your show?
No! You know what, here’s what I’m thrilled about: Jon Stewart took the show and it’s huge. That says a couple of things. It says, satire can be done—it’s a viable commodity and people want it. Which is awesome. And he tells the truth through humor.

How so?
If you fact-check The Daily Show, it’s accurate. Like when people go, “Oh, no! Kids get their news through The Daily Show. ” Like, so? I’m fine with it. But if a big weenie took over The Daily Show and destroyed it and all of a sudden it wasn’t funny anymore . . . .

Like a Scientologist or something?
If they just got Dane Cook because he was popular and then it didn’t work, I would be furious. The fact of the matter is, Jon took the show and made it a little bit of a different show, but also an awesome show.

But I liked what you were doing with Kilborn because you were satirizing other news shows. That’s why I think Colbert is so funny.
Right. Well, I think that transition, from Jon to Stephen . . . I’m glad it went in that direction, because I really like character-driven, no-one-is-commenting-on-it, everybody-stays-in-character-the-whole-time satire. That’s something that I think I’m OK at and is pretty fun. There are different ways to approach satire. One way is you become them and you remain them. So it’s a real taste thing when it comes to how Jon took the show and made it that other thing. I think they’re both completely valid and funny.

Why is a morning show a good target for satire?
There are twenty-three hours of morning shows programming every day. And that includes The View, that type of thing, Regis. Then there’re the weird syndicated ones. And everyone has a local one. And they get money from the news division—a lot of money. It used to be that some of those shows were the biggest funded shows out of the news division, like Today. I don’t know if that’s true anymore. And they’re four hours long. The programming’s so stretched between info, facts, product placement . . . .

What do you call it on your show?
Infonewsment. [These shows] make me feel more numb than electrolysis, because they don’t think I care about anything. So to me, not talking about issues at all is better than saying, “OK, today we have bohemian chic and cancer-sniffing dogs!” With four hours of programming, we just gotta get it done! You wouldn’t think to have any kind of sensitivity to have bohemian chic with “Does This Blazer Make My Butt Look Big?” in a different setting than cancer and the war. But, no. It’s all one big globby thing and the message is “all of this is equally valid.”

I don’t want to blame the victim, but the audience for programming like The Today Show is predominantly women of a certain age.
But it’s also across the board. Let’s remember, it’s on CNN in the morning. It’s Joe Scarborough in that godawful MSNBC morning show—they’re sitting around having coffee. It’s when you wake up in the morning and you have half an hour to get your kids going, get to your job . . . .

How did you get hooked?
That’s how I started. Because I had to get up so early to let the dogs out and I started turning it on and seeing what it was. I always knew it was kind of fluffy. I didn’t think it was as ridiculous as it was. So if you’re turning on the television to get information, bless your heart, [at least] you’re trying to get information.

Really?
They want the weather. They want the talking points of the day. But when the talking points of the day are about global warming in three and a half minutes—everything is three and a half minutes. So it’s like, oh, I don’t know, “This reverend is a big bag of shit.” Reverend Wright. So we’re going to run that clip over and over again? We as journalists are giving you your talking points and your talking point is, “Why did Obama stay in that church?” But if I’m the journalist, I ask myself, “Why did he stay in that church?” I’ll go find out what that church is about and what that neighborhood is about.

Well, to be fair, the morning shows will probably send somebody to the Olympics.
Right. [Laughs.] But these shows get paid money to read me the paper. I’ve read that paper!

OK. So satire expects a familiarity with what you’re satirizing on the part of the audience, right?
Yeah. Because if you have to explain it, it ain’t funny, as a rule. So with The Daily Show or whatever, if your TV’s sound is off, you’ll see it and know it’s a TV news show. It should look like it. The characters have to look like it.

It seems to me that sarcasm and satire would be a hard sell to anybody comfortable with the relentlessly chipper, feminine-to- a-fault morning show.
I don’t know that that’s true.

Wouldn’t the typical Today Show viewer find your show mean-spirited? Do you think they actually want somebody to call “Bullshit!” for them?
Yes, I think they want their version of Colbert. The people who watch Bill O’Reilly don’t love Colbert. I’m not trying to change people’s minds. That’s not my job. My job is to point out hypocrisy in this giant sauna of information that’s on every day. Most folks who get some of their information from that morning blab know what they’re doing. So I’m not trying to say to the women who love it, “You should check out some satire, you’ll think it’s great.” I’m saying to the majority of people out there, “Why can’t Americans see what’s going on? Where do they get this?” I’m just trying to appeal to people who are trying to figure out, like I am, why Americans are into what they’re told in the media? And think of the questions that we’re asking ourselves here. How did that happen? Why did we let that happen? Well, because corporate sponsors are now in the content business. We’re actually giving time to advertisers and letting them come up with ideas to do parts of the show around the products. It’s really happening in a “we’ve announced it, and we’re fine with it” kind of way.

How did you get the idea to do this?
I had been having these Sunday night dinners for years. We would say all this funny crap, and then we would bitch about the media and eat. And it just would never go anywhere. That’s lazy. So why don’t we make it go somewhere? Why don’t I try to format something out and then we can figure out where it stands? We did—with this tiny group of like eight people. And then people started coming to the show, comics, and saying, “Hey, this sounds like a cool project, can I be on it?” Yeah, but nobody gets paid any money, including me. And you have to devote a lot of time to it. So you really gotta like it. You can’t feel like it’s taking away from your life. It’s like yoga.

Was this easier to workshop out for a year rather than selling the show to a corporation with a million conflicts of interest?
Well, that’s why when you work something out, you can ask, “Where could this live on a bigger scale?” A website like The Onion? Awesome. A place that doesn’t have a morning show? Awesome. A bigger theater space? Awesome. To do this live, off Broadway, every night, and to do a new show where people actually make a living and you could write everything new every day? That would be awesome.