CONFESSIONS OF A LEFTWING COMIC
Tyler, David
CULTURE David Tyler Confessions of a Leftwing Comic Jimmy Tingle is against the death penalty, supports gay rights, backs a higher minimum wage, and believes in gun control. Tingle's not a...
...I said, 'I've got to chill out...
...When I was in New York, my politics were coming from The Nation, The Progressive, what these people were writing about...
...For forty years, we had nu-:lear warheads pointed at Moscow, when ve should have had them pointed at Mon-real, the great white threat to the north...
...I think it has great potential...
...I think the strongest way to combat the Christian right is with Christianity...
...Let's go...
...When I started asking for help and from a power greater than myself, I started to be able to stop drinking...
...One friend was just released after spending eighteen years in jail...
...So when Tingle talks about prison reform, and love in sentencing, he's talking about what happened to friends he grew up with...
...Communist.' "I couldn't believe it...
...When he moved back to Cambridge, Tingle found the political enlightenment he achieved while in New York connecting with the people he knew and grew up with...
...He's bumming money on the street...
...Like many on the left...
...Here's a guy who developed his adult life in jail...
...about spraying racist graffiti on a playground wall: about his fears attending a basketball game in an all-black section of town...
...about his fear of gays...
...In 1988...
...Then I started reading, not because I'm a great intellectual—I couldn't sleep," Tingle says in his show...
...Hell, there's e\en a bit of .1 market for it...
...the cops aren't somebody I'm reading about...
...One communist :ountry left in the world, and apparently t's Canada...
...Which got me thinking," he says in his act...
...Tingle began working more and more social commentary into his humor...
...He's short, with light red hair and a square, reddish face...
...he makes fun of politicians...
...The power of social movements based in theology inspires Tingle: the abolitionist movement, the civil-rights movement, He acknowledges the contradictions within the Catholic Church on many of the issues he believes in, such as gay rights but he underscores the social-justice message of liberation theology...
...He's an a!coholic, and was not treated in prison...
...I'm back where I grew up...
...If Jesus Christ were here, and running for office, would the Christian Coalition vote for him...
...Mr...
...George Bush...
...This is what happened to me...
...When he began as a comedian in 1980, Tingle did not do political humor...
...I was working in Kentucky last summer, and I said, you know...
...I know the cops...
...He asks...
...about taunting war protesters in Harvard Square...
...His father was a cab driver...
...Ross Perot, and corporate ownership of the media...
...punctuating jokes...
...And he is brutally honest about his own social and political awakening...
...Critics perpetually liken his appearance to that of Barney Rubble...
...All of a sudden...
...He grew up in an Italian-American family in a predominantly Catholic, working-class section of Cambridge...
...This is important...
...And when you have a reference point of who you are, it makes your work more real, and more honest...
...I just had to get to a bookstore, I was so stressed out...
...His transformation came when he stopped drinking...
...What does it take to get the United States government involved in true humanitarian missions abroad...
...Tingle paces the stage with manic energy...
...1 see miracles all around me all the time...
...Martin Luther King, and Thomas Jefferson are all welcomed into heaven bv God...
...Tingle sees humor as a powerful, seldom-used political tool...
...and making it easier to buy assault weapons...
...I'm kind of leaning towards the Canadian-style, single-payer health-care system myself...
...I'm sorry, this is heaven, vou're on the wrong floor...
...Uncommon Sense," which ran for most of 1995 in Cambridge...
...People are laughing, people are thinking...
...Let's face it: they were either racist, sexist, homophobic, or making fun of David Tyler i\ me editorial-page editor of the Tab newspapers in Boston...
...One night I almost killed a guy right in the South End [of Boston] over a parking space...
...I went into this store and got this book...
...Rush Limbaugh is powerful and funny...
...Tingle switches into his news-anchor voice, high-pitched and frantic...
...I know the people who went to prison...
...I'm going to have to send you back to earth as a pregnant, teen-aged girl...
...On stage, he talks about the 1994 election, where it seemed every candidate for national office backed the death penalty...
...He's talking about the increasingly harsh sentences that are being meted out to criminals: "How about love in sentencing'1 That's it, love in sentencing, as if it were you or your friends and relatives or me and my friends and relatives in jail...
...Along the way...
...Pick vourself up by your bootstraps, and find a job...
...Massachusetts...
...On stage, he is indignant and incredulous, but there is no bitterness, no sense of despair about the causes he advocates...
...He says prayer—along with detox, rehab, and therapy—put him on the road to recovery...
...Then, lower, the voice of the corporations: "Where is this...
...In the mid-1980s...
...Christ, we in the Coalition would like to know your views on the death penalty...
...Millions of potential customers are being denied access to the cash register...
...Look, I don't know what racism is, but I've been trying to figure it out...
...Health care is one of Tingle's concerns...
...Tingle's style of humor mixes sharp political satire with personal confession...
...Medicaid...
...He's reaching people that George Will doesn't reach...
...Tingle's transformation led him to new material, which he has now refined...
...Tingle stops his pacing, and points at the audience...
...somebody else, usually fat people...
...Tingle's not a politician...
...I think the love and tolerance and acceptance of the message of Christ—I think that would take precedence over the narrowness of the conservative Christian right...
...Before, he drank daily, "just to feel OK...
...And a guy yells out...
...And he believes that the Christian right can be fought with its own professed beliefs...
...As he tells in his show, he began like almost every other white, male comic...
...Tingle conjures up a press conference with Christ...
...Medicare, and fuel assistance for the poor...
...His arms fly out...
...Tingle performs a variation on an old chestnut: Jesus Christ...
...He attributes that to his recoverv from alcoholism...
...The only jokes I heard growing up were pretty rude...
...He's a nationally known comic who has made leftwing political humor the centerpiece of his act for the past ten years—rare in an industry that shuns liberal politics as unmarketable...
...Operation Credit Card, come on...
...Apparently these words mean nothing to these people...
...The stage lights go out, except for one spotlight on Tingle, who puts his arms up, his head down—the image of Christ on the cross...
...he skewers Newt Gingrich...
...For Tingle, the personal is political...
...Tingle believes he's making a difference...
...I think more of the message gets out there...
...We have to start talking in a language they understand: customers...
...There's a connection, there's a human connection that I get by moving back to Cambridge that I never had...
...Perhaps the unique aspect of Tingle's comedv is his optimism...
...Torture, genocide, the senseless killing of innocent people don't seem to motivate American corporations to put pressure on the United States government to intervene and stop the killing...
...he moved to New York City...
...He read Noam Chomsky and Martin Luther King Jr...
...Bosnia...
...increasing the defense budget...
...He subscribed to left-wing journals, like The Nation and The Progressive...
...Tingle, who was raised Catholic, has rediscovered his religion since recovering from alcoholism...
...It seems we'll only help out if our economic interests are threatened, he concludes...
...Newt...
...One of the books that influenced Tingle the most, Martin Luther King's The Strength to Love, was bought in a very Tinglesque manner...
...He tells stories about fights he got in with black kids in rival basketball teamsin Cambridge...
...Ralph Reed, head of the Christian Coalition, steps forward...
...It gives me much more of a sense of who I am...
...Now he's out...
...Tingle talks about his own political and personal transformation from a drunk bigot to a socially conscious political humorist...
...His family was heavily involved in the local political scene: one uncle was a city councilor and a judge, another uncle was the superintendent of schools...
...In his latest show...
...I drank every day for years, and I couldn't stop drinking...
...In 1987 he quit the bottle...
...The average person doesn't know who George Will is...
...It was very medicinal...
...I go to see some of the homeless—I drank with some of the homeless that are now living on the streets...
...I'm just a person who talks about his own prejudices growing up...
...I'm trying to come from a placed honesty and truthfulness about myself first, and the inconsistencies in myself, and then in the rest of society, I suppose...
...Whatever I'm doing, people connect into it...
...Not bad for a leltwing comic...
...I figured, when in doubt, combine them...
...But then Newt Gingrich shows up and lists his accomplishments: cutting welfare, food stamps...
Vol. 60 • February 1996 • No. 2
