Four decades in, Barry Crimmins is as fiery as ever
Outspoken U.S. comedian coming to Toronto keeps up fight but has shed ‘everybody’s demons’
Barry Crimmins doesn’t know if comedy can save America but it can, at the least, point out the country’s flaws — one of the primary ones being its president’s coiffure.
“I think more people think they’re political comics because they can talk about a guy’s funny hair and, believe me, his hair is a factor. Just him walking out in public like that shows you how many Yes Men he’s surrounded by,” the veteran comedian said on the phone from his home in upstate New York, ahead of a three-day run at Toronto’s Yuk Yuk’s comedy club downtown.
“It’s like the Twilight Zone where that kid could send everybody off to the cornfield.”
Crimmins’ open disdain for the American political scene, among other things, is part of the fiery brand of political satire the 63-year-old is renowned for — a brashness that shows no sign of relenting after more than four decades in the business.
“I feel this election was really a census of how many people despise themselves in the United States — and it’s a lot of people,” he said.
“‘Hate yourself?’ ‘Yes, I do, and so does Donald Trump! Well, it’s about time we had someone who hates me as much as I hate myself!’ ”
“He’s a surly bastard, for sure,” said Canadian comedian Rob Mailloux, who recently toured across the U.S. and Canada with Crimmins and was struck by his ties to respected intellectuals on the left.
“This is a guy who interviews (Noam) Chomsky and knew Howard Zinn . . . When I’m around comics, I feel like one of the smarter guys in the room but with Barry, you’re like, ‘God, I’ve got to be on my toes because this guy has been around some of the greatest thinkers that have ever been on the planet.’ ”
Since getting his start during the standup-comedy explosion of the 1970s (he founded two clubs in Boston that would serve as the launching pad for comics such as Denis Leary, Paula Poundstone and Steven Wright), he carved out a space for himself with a signature aggressive approach. He points out injustices without belittling his audience, an education as much as a routine. (One vintage Crimmins line from the 1980s: “People ask, ‘If you don’t love this country why don’t you get out of it?’ Because I don’t want to be victimized by its foreign policy.”)
“People drop their guard when they’re laughing,” Crimmins said. “All humour isn’t truth — that’s a big lie about comedy — but if you are truthful and you get them to drop their guard, you can get some information into them that might serve them, might make a little more sense of their lives.”
His fight for justice and truth extends beyond the stage: In the 1990s, Crimmins led a valiant crusade against AOL chat rooms where child pornography proliferated. The comedian, himself repeatedly raped as a child, accidentally found them while searching for support groups for abuse survivors. He began collecting evidence, turning it over to the FBI, and went on to testify before a U.S. Senate committee in 1995 about AOL’s apparent unwillingness to act.
Amonth later, as part of a two-yearlong investigation into child-porn rings, the FBI executed more than 100 search warrants and arrested more than a dozen people across the country.
That legacy — both as a comedian and his personal fight against child sexual abuse — became the subject of the 2015 documentary Call Me Lucky, directed by fellow comedian Bobcat Goldthwait. Although the award-winning film brought a new wave of recognition for Crimmins, it also turned him into an even bigger magnet for other abuse survivors.
And 23 years of absorbing other people’s pain — answering emails, phone calls, talking to people after shows — while pushing aside his own pain took a toll.
“The end of last year, I just finally decided I just couldn’t do that anymore because I was just carrying around everybody’s demons,” Crimmins said.
“It was just getting to the point where I was starting to have flashbacks again and I just would like a few years of relative peace . . . And I think that (my) advocacy will become more effective when I’m not just towing around barges of other people’s demons.”
Peace, in this case, is “waking up in the morning and not having to put on a helmet to answer my emails.”
But stepping back hasn’t meant tuning out. Riding the renewed interest in his name that came with Call Me Lucky, Crimmins hit the road again, touring across the U.S. and Canada and also starring in his first live standup special, 2016’s Whatever Threatens You, produced by Louis C.K.
He also tweets at the Pope every day, asking to be excommunicated. The Catholic Church is one of his regular targets. (“Pope Francis says he’s a socialist. If he is, I have an idea where there’s a whole bunch of wealth I could help him redistribute.”)
“He hasn’t responded to me and I’m well into four figures of requests for excommunication. It’s a bit of theatre, but really, what it’s meant to do is to just publicly state on a daily basis, ‘Here’s your ultimate threat and here’s what I say to it.’ ”
Besides his politics, there’s at least one other belief Crimmins has stood behind for most of his career: Always, always open your set by taking charge — with a strong, straightforward joke.
“You get introduced as a comic, you get this fluffy introduction, and then you walk out onstage and (unwisely) ask them a rhetorical question: ‘How you doing?’ There’s 300 people there, they’re doing 300 different ways,” he said.
“If you come out there and you’ve got a line . . . or just a really good, spiffy joke, the tension in an audience is relieved, instantly, and you gain all this capital with them. They think, ‘Oh, thank goodness, this really is a funny person.’ ”
“For whatever reason, I’ve got to wake up every morning for the past 44 years and kind of decide what I needed to do. I’m really lucky.” Barry Crimmins will be playing four shows at Yuk Yuk’s Toronto from March 16 to 18. Tickets are available via Yuk Yuk’s website.