The Comedy Couch - Todd Barry Interview

GUY MACPHERSON: How many times have you performed the
Marijuana-logues?
TOMMY CHONG: Two weeks. I did two weeks in New York.
It's up in a little playhouse called The Actor's
Playhouse in SoHo... or, in the Village. I performed
it for two weeks.

GM: And it went over well?
TC: Oh, great, great.

GM: Arj Barker, I know, helped develop it.
TC: I took his place. I don't know what happened to
him. He got some kinda deal down here. Some sitcom or
something. I'm with Tony Caman and Doug Benson.

GM: When you take his place, are you adding anything
of your own or are you reading his lines?
TC: No, I have to. I tried reading but (laughs)... and
it wasn't just his, it was everybody else's. They sort
of tailored... The director, I forget his name, he
came in from Toronto and the tried to tailor the
existing monologue to me, but I had to put my own
stuff in.

GM: So it's easier for you.
TC: Well, easier for me, easier for the audience. I
mean, I've got stuff that's been around longer than
all of those guys.

GM: This play is just perfect for you. Tailor-made,
almost, even though you weren't the original guy.
TC: Yeah, absolutely. And the thing I like about it is
it has insights that I would never think about. A
collegiate look at it, you know. Just different little
interesting looks at it. And it works great because it
gives the audience... There's something for everybody.

GM: You say "something for everybody". Is that
everybody even if they don't smoke marijuana or
particularly care about the drug culture.
TC: You know what I'm saying. The different types of
smokers. The Napolean Dynamite type, you know?

GM: I saw a fairly extended clip of the show on Bill
Maher's show and I was really impressed. It was really
funny. And it seemed to be not just typical stoner
humour.
TC: Yeah, like I was saying, they got away from... In
fact, there isn't any kind of typical stoner stuff in
the monologues. It really is legitimate... like an
intelligent look at it.

GM: Yeah. And funny, too, which is the main thing, I
guess.
TC: Yeah. Funny in an intellectual playwright sort of
way, so that the material rises from, say, the Cheech
& Chong approach.

GM: Cheech & Chong started up in Vancouver, right?
TC: Exactly. In Chinatown. 'Shanghai Junk', corner of
Pender and Main.

GM: How did you get so well known? Was it from
Vancouver or had you moved off?
TC: Oh, no. (laughs) We played two clubs in Vancouver,
two gigs in Vancouver and then boom, down to LA.

GM: After playing two gigs, what made you decide to
say, 'Hey, we can take this to LA'?
TC: Well, I was a musical guy. I was with a group
called Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers. And we were
with MoTown. We got signed with MoTown from Vancouver.
Barry Gordy and the Supremes came to town one time and
saw our act at the Elegant Parlour. The old Parlour.
And from there they signed us and we went to Detroit
and recorded a record. And we took another Vancouver
guy with us, Tom Baird, who unfortunately was killed
in a boating accident in the sixties. Off the coast of
Malibu. But he co-wrote Does Your Mama Know About Me.
Then he went on to produce Rare Earth, you know, the
white group, the MoTown group. But anyway, Bobby
Taylor did a solo career. He discovered the Jackson 5
and then went on sort of a solo career. I ended up
quitting the band, or getting fired. And then I came
back to Vancouver. And he had a couple of strip clubs
in Vancouver. The Shanghai Junk was one of them. Uh,
two clubs, the Parlour and the Junk. And then I put an
improvisational group into the strip club. Instead of
the stripping entertainment, we used the strippers in
the improv group. We had the first and only naked
improv group. And then Cheech joined and the rest is
history.

GM: That's what improv is missing now, I think.
TC: (laughs) Yeah. It always did. It was a nice touch
because it (laughs) really kept your interest. The
strippers got such a wealth of material. My original
partner was a well-known Vancouverite named David
Graham, lives on Denman Island now. David is the Dave
in Dave's Not Here, you know, the first comedy record
we did.

GM: Vancouver was different then, wasn't it?
TC: Vancouver was weird. They had these draconian pot
laws. They had a detective named Stadenko running
around busting people for pot. A good friend of mine
that was living at my father's house got a year in
jail for selling a baggie of pot.

GM: Times have changed.
TC: Yeah (laughs) and now what a change, huh? What a
change.

GM: When Cheech & Chong started, did you start with
stoner material?
TC: No, we had very little stoner material. We got a
lot of jokes out of Playboy magazine. Because none of
us were theatre-trained, thank God. It never held us
back.

GM: So how did you stumble across the stoner stuff?
TC: Well, the stoner material... Actually what we did,
we formed a band and we played at the Gardens --
remember the ice rink at the PNE? Danny Basita
promoted a battle of the bands thing. And I put a band
together with Cheech singing. But Cheech and I just
went out and did our improv material and we never got
around to singing or playing music. And a lot of the
kids were dope smokers then, so we did just a little
bit of pot humour then. When we took it down to the
States, then we started playing different clubs and
the pot humour... Actually, the pot humour came out of
us opening for jazz groups. There were no comedy
clubs. There were just black jazz clubs. And we got
booked to open for, like, Cannonball Adderley and
Carmen McRae and Bill Withers. All these different
jazz singers. And we found that the audience responded
to our stoner bits, so we started putting them in.

GM: Really, your problems in the last year being
arrested and incarcerated, stemmed, as your defence
team said, from your persona, a character.
TC: Yeah.

GM: I mean, there's obviously something in your real
life, too, but it was only because the audience
demanded this type of humour...
TC: Yeah, it was a type of humour that the improv
group The Committee and Second City, they touched on
it. Because that's where we got our start was
watching... Because when I was with the band, instead
of going to blues clubs, I would go to the
improvisation clubs, you know? Second City. I didn't
even know what it was. I thought it was interesting. I
went in there and got blown away by all this good
improv. And so when I started my own improv group, I
just naturally took to bits that I saw from Second
City and The Committee and reworked them into the
topless improv. And then Cheech and I, a couple of the
bits were like our staple. One of them was about a
couple guys smoking a joint, but they turn out to be
cops. But all the stoner material was original stuff,
because that's what we used to do in between shows. We
would smoke up and then come on stage and have a good
time.

GM: Part of it is making fun of the stereotypical
stoner, right?
TC: The guy that my character's based on was a real
guy. He was the light guy in our group. His nickname
was Strawberry. He actually existed. He was a
red-headed kid. I've met him a few times since. He's a
businessman now. He morphed into a real businessman
with a suit and everything. But he was a
living-on-the-streets hippie with beautiful long red
hair and just the best attitude ever. He'd bust us.
We'd come off stage and he'd say, 'Boy, that really
sucked, man. No one laughed. Wo!' (laughs) That whole
attitude just gave us the base for our stoner guy.

GM: Most people, like the prosecutor, just assume this
is who you are.
TC: Well, the American justice system is a very cookie
cutter kind of thing, you know. It goes back to 'If
you're black, you must be a criminal.' It goes back to
that.

GM: But you're not black.
TC: Or 'If you're Chinese, you must be dealing dope.'
It's all stereotypical attitudes that John Ashcroft is
proud to... You know, he admits he's that person. They
tailored laws for my character. Those laws they
brought out that put me in jail were hidden. They were
brought out in the Clinton era and they were tacked on
to other laws that would get passed. Then they tack on
these paraphenalia laws, for instance. And they bring
them out when they need it. It's a political bust.
Purely political. When Clinton was telling everybody
he didn't inhale... stoners know a fellow stoner.

GM: It's interesting to see that you got busted for
selling bongs when I see them at almost every corner
store in Vancouver. But I guess you have them in the
States, too, but you can't take them over the state
line, is that what the problem was?
TC: This is the same law that got Jack Johnson. Going
across the state line you create a federal offence.
Federal laws in the states can be way different than
state laws. There's no state law against what kind of
smoking material is being sold in certain stores. Now,
Pennsylvania is very strict and you won't find a bong
in Pennsylvania. Guys have gone to jail. It's crossing
the state line. A guy did over a year in jail for
cigarette papers. That was before my bust. But he had
a big factory going. He had a thing going. But they
took him down. They bring it out. It's a commerce law,
where you're making money supposedly illegally. Even
though we're paying taxes. My company had a licence
and we paid taxes. It wasn't drug money. But they've
bastardized the laws down here to include anything
that even has the word 'drugs' around it. They can
take your possessions; your house, your cars, your
money, whatever you got, if you've made money
so-called 'illegally'. It's just a typical Weapons of
Mass Destruction mentality they got down here.

GM: How long did you spend in prison?
TC: I did nine months.

GM: When did you get out?
TC: I got out July 6th.

GM: Of last year?
TC: Yeah.

GM: So you're still on probation?
TC: I'm on probation till July.

GM: There are some terms you have to follow, right?
TC: Oh yeah.

GM: I'm surprised you're allowed to be in the
Marijuana-logues.
TC: Well, you know, it's a free speech thing. I was a
little bit hesitant about performing while I'm on
probation, but then I realized it's very unpatriotic
of me to hesitate exercising free speech. You know, I
can see me not selling bongs - which I never really
did; it was my son's company - but being afraid to
talk even though part of the administration would love
to have that effect on me, but that's totally against
what people are dying for in Iraq. You got people
dying for freedom and liberty and here I am huddled in
my house afraid to go on stage and talk? I just said
to myself, 'Come on!' Yeah, they can do anything they
want, but if they do, well then too bad. Because
that's one thing that I have to do to honour people
like the soldiers and that who are dying in Iraq. I
have to do that.

GM: What other kinds of terms do you have on
probation?
TC: Actually none. The only term I have with them is
that I'm not supposed to talk about it. That's the
only term. They told me, you know, 'Don't bring us
into this.'

GM: Obviously you're allowed to leave the country and
come up here.
TC: I was born in Canada, so that's the only reason.
They've got my passport. And because I don't need a
passport to come into Canada, I'm allowed to travel to
Canada.

GM: Are you still a Canadian citizen?
TC: Yup. Oh, I'd never give that up. Thank God. And
I'm a naturalized American. I learned a long time ago
that they can't keep me out of Canada and they can't
keep me out of the States.

GM: You'd think the Canadian government could have
saved you; stepped in and made an international
incident out of it.
TC: Well, unfortunately, had I been Nelson Mandella,
maybe. But even Nelson did twenty years. Arnold
Schwarzennegar, a guy that I smoked a joint with,
wouldn't lift a finger. The thing is, stoners are
political footballs that everybody wants to kick
around but nobody wants to stand up for. Well, look at
Clinton. The law was passed during his administration.

GM: They talk about Schwarzennegar possibly running
for president and there are pictures of him smoking
joints. How does he remain so popular?
TC: It's the same old Republican
say-anything-to-get-in-power. The American public is
so gullible and they're ruled with fear. I'm talking
the red states. It's all fear. Fear and fanaticism,
you know? The Christian fanatics.

GM: It was a little chilling that you were sentenced
on September 11th, wasn't it?
TC: Oh yeah! We tried to get that changed. You know,
when I went back for the arraignment, they kept
telling me, 'Oh, nothing's going to happen to you.
Just plead guilty to one charge. You'll get house
arrest." My lawyers were telling me different, though.
My lawyers said that we really gotta show them that
blah, blah, blah, show them that you're a nice guy,
this is only a movie. But they knew... All the defence
lawyers down here, their hands are tied. Except when
it comes to getting into your pocket. They untie their
hands to get into your money. Just before I went to be
sentenced I asked for a continuance on my sentencing
date to take it off from 9/11. And they said no,
absolutely not. The first time, according to legal
people that I've talked to, the first time they could
remember that a sentence wasn't changed. They change
sentences just because the judge just doesn't feel
like working that day or a defendant has a dentist
appointment. They change for any reason. It's a
sentencing date. But it was a ploy by the ... Well,
you know, it was an event by the government. A media
event. And listen, I'm honoured.

GM: They wanted to make an example of you. You're a
high profile guy and it might scare some others,
right?
TC: That's right.

GM: Do you think it's had an effect?
TC: On the industry?

GM: Yeah, on others going, 'Hey, we better not,
because look what they did to Tommy."
TC: Oh yeah! Oh absolutely! It closed down the bong
industry. I mean, it closed for the government getting
their taxes. I mean, the blowers are still blowing.
The only thing it closed down were the warehouses that
legitimately kept stock. Now it's all underground like
everything else. Or coming in from China. There's
websites in China where you can order your bongs from.
And they come in. They're coming in, sure. Kelly
Gross, on All Things Considered, she interviewed the
prosecutor, Mary Beth Buchanan, and she said, 'Did
this have any effect on the way people smoke pot?
Don't you think there are other ways they can smoke
pot besides a glass bong?' And the prosecutor says,
'Well, regardless, there are millions of bongs that
won't be used by our young people.' Because they
destroyed them.

GM: Hadn't they ever heard of a joint?
TC: (laughs) It was all polit... They keep your mind
off... Distraction. It was all distraction. Just like
Bush now. He's got his budget and he doesn't include
the Iraqi war in the budget. That's a billion dollars
a week going down the drain, and he doesn't include
that in the budget. It's not only crazy, but people
are... It just shows you that people don't read the
fine print. They read headlines.

GM: We're all guilty of that.
TC: Yeah. I force myself now to take time and read. I
mean, because I'm also a comedian and looking for
material. But I just have to force myself. There's
been days when I don't even open the newspaper, like
if I'm on the road and come home and there'll be a
pile of them there... And news of new pot laws or
something, you could miss all that. But that's the
nature of people, you know. And this is what kills me
about Canada: I talk to people up there and they say,
'What do you think of our liberal pot laws?' Well, you
look at your pot laws. They're the same as ours. The
only difference is you won't get popped for having a
little amount. It's still against the law but they
won't arrest you because no judge will be serious
about it. But if you get caught growing or selling,
it's 15 years waiting for you. So it's the same state
that's down here. Except down here, if there's a gun
involved then they'll enhance your sentence. I was in
jail with guys who were finishing up 20- and 30-year
sentences for growing pot. They were on a farm and
they got a .22 rifle leaning against the door, and
because of the gun their sentence doubled. So it went
from like 10 years to 20 years. And that's legitimate
people.

GM: What was your average day like in prison?
TC: Get up early, count, work for a few hours --
actually with me, it was like 20 minutes of work...

GM: Doing what?
TC: Sweeping, picking up cigarette butts. And then I'd
volunteer in the garden, I'd work in the garden. We
had a nice little garden thing going. And then go back
for lunch and count...

GM: What do you mean 'count'?
TC: Where they count you. And then go to school or go
to class. I took a agricultural... I learned how to
grow grass (laughs). I took my GED, I studied for
that. I'd do that for a couple of hours and then come
back and have a nap -- an hour hap or a two-hour nap,
whatever I could squeeze in there -- and then get up
and count again. You know when you count, you have to
stand up in your cubicle until they come by. Then it
was dinnertime. We would cook... I was with a group of
guys that cooked in the microwave. It was much
healthier than the mess hall. We'd eat early: 4:30,
5:00. And then watch a little TV or go for a walk and
watch the sunset, that's what I was doing. Play a
little bocce ball and then be back for another count
at 9 o'clock, and then go to bed.

GM: A nice little retreat.
TC: It was very nice, in that respect. I was down with
some of the most intelligent people on the planet.
Really beautiful and sweet. People that had been in
jail a long time, they really respect a person's
privacy - because you don't have any. It was very,
very cool. There were tensions that come up now and
then between people. And there were dramas. It was the
most exciting time of my life.

GM: Would you do anything different?
TC: Well, I would never have a bong company to begin
with. I knew that things were coming down. When 9/11
hit, everything changed in America.