Great American Independents (Part Two): Andrew Heaton on Liberty, Justice, & Satire for All
July 19, 2022 | Can indie-minded political humor break through without alienating polarized audiences?
Listen to Part One with Amy Chua here.
On this second episode featuring great American independents, The Purple Principle sits down with Andrew Heaton, political satirist, author, stand up comedian, podcast host, and let’s not forget small “l” libertarian with a fondness for the free market economist, Milton Friedman.
“I’m a temperamental moderate who wants to help people,“ Heaton tells us, “but thinks government is not very effective at it.”
Pushing back on that position, guest co-host Barbara Bogaev (of KCRW’s “To the Point” and “Press Play”) asks whether the COVID pandemic challenges Heaton’s libertarian, minimal government leanings.
“I am a little bit challenged by it,” Heaton responds. “But it's really more a question of balancing efficacy versus individual rights. If my pathogens are going to kill other people, then it's no longer purely an individual situation. And that there is a reason for the government to intervene.”
Heaton also describes the origins of his dual career track, working as a Capitol Hill Staffer but writing and performing comedy at the same time. In Heaton’s own words, he was “necktie man” by day and “degenerate pseudo-drunk telling jokes to other drunks and neckties” by night.
But Andrew Heaton has a seriously less degenerate side as well. Although surprised by the degree of bipartisanship observed during his own time on Capitol Hill (think “Cap & Trade” and “Obamacare”) he’s learned from those who stayed in DC that polarization has increased considerably over the past decade.
“We've moved on from thinking people are in error to thinking they're in sin,” bemoans Heaton, author of Laughter is Better than Communism and Inappropriately Human, among other satirical books. “And so if you're a Congressman, you're a Senator, and you're hanging out with these sinners, that's different than hanging out with people that are wrong. And that is just lamentable for everyone involved in that process from the politicians all the way down to us and the constituency.”
Tune in for a welcome dose of edifying, possibly even unifying entertainment from Andrew Heaton, born and raised “ethnic Republican” in Oklahoma and speaking in the “country club cowboy hat” dialect. Now based in Austin, Texas, Heaton is a refreshingly independent voice at a time when so much zero sum us vs them rhetoric pervades these not so United States.
The Purple Principle is Fluent Knowledge production.
Original music by Ryan Adair Rooney
SHOW NOTES
Our Guest
Andrew Heaton: Political Satirist, host of The Political Orphanage podcast, and author of Los Angeles is Hideous: Poems About An Ugly City, Inappropriately Human: 21 Short Stories, and Laughter is Better Than Communism. Check out his website and follow him on Twitter @MightyHeaton.
Additional Resources:
About Andrew Heaton
Andrew Heaton’s Touring Schedule
For more on our guest from our upcoming rerelease episode, Geoff Kabaservice, check out his bio from the Niskanen Center and follow him on Twitter @RuleandRuin
Additional Podcasts by Andrew Heaton:
Additional books by Andrew Heaton:
Frank Got Abducted (2014)
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Transcript
Andrew Heaton
I'm from Oklahoma, which means that I'm ethnically Republican. I speak country club cowboy hat as my default language.
Robert Pease (Co-Host)
That’s Andrew Heaton. Indie-minded political satirist for this second of our two American independence-themed episodes on The Purple Principle. I’m Robert Pease.
Barbara Bogaev (Co-Host)
And I’m Barbara Bogaev, co-host today for our conversation with Andrew, even though he did write a takedown of my adopted city of L.A..
Robert Pease (Co-Host)
Ok Barbara, we won’t ask you to utter the book title, which is Los Angeles is Hideous: Poems About An Ugly City. Andrew’s the author of a few other humor books, including Inappropriately Human and Laughter is Better than Communism. He also hosts an indie-themed podcast called Political Orphanage.
Andrew Heaton
I'd say I am a temperamental moderate who wants to help people, but thinks the government's not very effective at it.
Robert Pease (Co-Host)
But Andrew doesn’t just make jokes about politics. He’s a former Congressional staffer who worked for years in D.C. as policy wonk by day and open mic comedian by night.
[Actuality - Andrew Heaton’s Stand-Up Comedy]
Barbara Bogaev (Co-Host)
In a bit, we’ll talk with Andrew about some of the challenges performing stand up in a polarized age. But, let’s kick things off with a more philosophical question – I asked Andrew whether the COVID epidemic, the greatest public health crisis in a century, challenges his libertarian, minimal government inclinations.
[Enter Interview]
Andrew Heaton
I think libertarians tend to come in two flavors. Flavor A is “Government tends to not work very well. Freedom works pretty well. So, let's be careful when employing government.” That's the group A. Group B is “All government is evil and publicly funded stop signs are a form of slavery. And anarchism.” And I've never been a part of that wing. So from my perspective, I would say my default, and I'll own this as the little L libertarian guy, if you wanna take people's money or make 'em do things using force of law. I think the onus is on you to explain that there is an overwhelming public necessity for a problem to be solved by the government and to explain why your solution is going to achieve that end. And if you can meet those two criteria, I will support you on that.
So, when it comes to COVID, I am a little bit challenged by it, but for me, it's really more a question of balancing efficacy versus individual rights. The sort of basic premise of, can you infringe on individual rights for the greater good? Yes, you can. Like if my pathogens are going to kill other people, then it's no longer purely an individual situation and there is a reason for the government to intervene. So for me, it's more just efficacy. What's gonna work? What's gonna be kind of governmental virtue signaling versus actual science backed solutions to problems?
Barbara Bogaev (Co-Host)
Um, it's clear that politics came first for you and then comedy, but what was the tipping point for you from your Capitol Hill days and your politics days to full time standup?
Andrew Heaton
Yeah. Well, they actually kind of started around the same time. When I was in college, I was doing a bunch of political things. I was in a mock government group and paged at the state legislature when I was in high school. But I was also writing funny columns for the newspaper very much in the vein of Dave Barry, who's a personal hero of mine. And that kind of continued, but the difference was between these two was one of the members of my family has worked in politics. So, I grew up going to the state legislature. That seemed like a career option, which made sense to me, because I'd seen people do it. Whereas I had never met a comedian. When I was in college, I did briefly run into Zach Galifianakis my freshman year. He bought me a beer underage. Thank you, Zack.
[laughter]
But other than that, I hadn't met any comedians, right? I graduated from a state where there are more cows than passports. So that was not something that seemed like a possible life outcome. When I moved to DC and was working on the hill, I started doing stand up at night. I was doing open mics and bar shows and things like that, doing them two, three times a week, which you need to do if you're beginning standup comedy, because you really need to get up on stage a lot and was, was day job, neck tie man, nighttime, degenerate, pseudo drunk, telling jokes to other drunks and neckties.
And then I left the hill. I should say, voluntarily without scandal, because I had a scholarship to go to the University of Edinburgh to get a master's degree in international politics. I was the resident comedian at a thing called Edinburg SaturnAlia cabaret. I went up and told jokes after a girl took her clothes off, but before a dude ate light bulbs, which I think was probably the apotheosis of my comedy.
Barbara Bogaev (Co-Host)
I know that guy who eats light bulbs, I've seen him at the Philadelphia fringe festival. He's amazing. So you were well placed.
Andrew Heaton
Yes. I know. It was incredibly fun.
Barbara Bogaev (Co-Host)
How do you follow that act?
Andrew Heaton
<laugh> Yeah. It fit really well. So I was doing that. And then I went back to DC as per the plan and I was not able to go right back into a suit and tie job. I actually found it rather difficult. I wound up working as a segway tour guide, giving historical tours. And I did that for a few months and I went, “Wait a minute. If I'm just gonna be doing odd job survival jobs, anyway, there's no reason for me to be in DC. I'm only in DC because this seems like the logical professional thing for me to do. If that's not happening, why am I here?” So I moved to New York. I got snapped up in television with surprising speed. That happened because there was a show called The Independents that was starting out. And somebody had told them, “Hey, we know this guy that thinks he's funny, but he likes Milton Friedman.” Which there's not a lot of us. There's only not three people in the country that like Milton Friedman that are funny. I'm one of 'em. And so they hired me.
But I basically realized, oh, I can make money at this. I can be funny. And eventually the two sort of joined up together and I went, oh, what if I told jokes about politics? What if I just fused these things together? And that's what I've been doing the last five years.
Barbara Bogaev (Co-Host)
So that is really organic path. But it leaves me with this question about your comedy, what the motivation is? I mean, are you trying to unite people? You're an independent, you’ve flirted with libertarianism or, do you think in terms of changing minds or what?
Andrew Heaton
Wonderful question. So, when I do standup, I'm typically just lobbing jokes in an audience, and it's just whatever mechanism any comedian wants laughter for is why I'm doing that human connection or applause or whatever. But when it comes to political comedy specifically you are right. I do have an agenda. I have a goal. My personal mantra that I have when I'm working on my own stuff is make people laugh, make people think, I do not think that it is my job to be a gladiator on behalf of a team or ideas. I have my opinions and I try to be upfront with them. I don't claim to be objective, but I do claim to be even handed. And I feel like humor's a really good way to get people to suspend whatever their innate defenses are temporarily.
I find that if I'm making an argument to somebody that we're all gonna get our hackles up real quick. But if I'm making jokes, people will generally stick around for the 20 seconds to get to the punchline. And so, the comedy I wanna bring joy and I also just wanna make people think about stuff.
I'd say the, the broader mission that I've been engaging in the last three or four years, hosting my podcast, which is now my day job. I host a show called The Political Orphanage for similarly independent people. With that show, it is more temperamental. I think that most Americans and most people are decent folks and the arguments that we're having for most people are more to do with how do we achieve a positive end that we all want, and we're fighting about the methodology to get there.
And I think we've lost sight of that. I think the way we should look at politics is we shouldn't look at legislation based on the intent. We should look at legislation based on the outcome. But with people we should invert that. I shouldn't judge Barbara or Robert based on the outcome of your policy. I should judge you as a person based on the intent. And I think we've lost that. And the reason I say that is, uh, I think immigration's great. I would triple the amount of immigrants coming into the country every year. I know people that are old labor Democrats and also Republicans that think if you bring in a lot of immigrants, it's gonna lower the wage floor and that's gonna hurt American workers. I disagree with them on that, but I don't think they're coming from a bad place.
And I've been wrong about all sorts of things in my life. So I need other people that I disagree with to point out my own epistemological failings to me and keep me honest and keep me smart. And they need me for the exact same reason. And so I'm trying to kind of bridge that and make a space on The Political Orphanage where people can come in, be exposed to contrary ideas, be exposed to other viewpoints and recognize that you're allowed to be friends with this person, even if you disagree with them. And that it would do well for all of us to have a dollop of intellectual humility.
[Exit Interview]
(ad break)
Robert Pease (Co-Host)
That was a bit more than a dollop of Andrew Heaton there, author, satirist, podcaster and Milton Friedman apostle, of sorts.
Barbara Bogaev (Co-Host)
Rob, I appreciate his point that we should judge legislation based on outcome, not intent. Since so much legislation does have unintended consequences.
Robert Pease (Co-Host)
Like inflation, for example. We’re seeing some of that consequence right now. But Andrew also says we should judge people by their intent, especially their good intentions. It’s a message we’ve heard often on this show. So before hearing more from Andrew let’s hear just a clip, even less than a dollop, from our previous guest Monica Guzman, now of Braver Angels. Back in 2017 she led a group of blue Seattle liberals to talk politics with rural red conservatives in Sherman County Oregon.
[Archival Audio / Monica Guzman / Braver Angels]
Monica Guzman
So, the thing that that trip really did for everyone who was part of it, including the folks from Sherman County, was get curious about other people, with other people. It's something that's getting harder and harder to do in these United States, as the blue zip codes get bluer and the red zip codes get redder and people dis-invite each other from Thanksgiving, you know, all these opportunities that we had to hold that glue between differences, we are eliminating. And that's tragic.
[End Archival]
Barbara Bogaev (Co-Host)
And not an easy thing to do. But Andrew Heaton’s gig as a stand-up has him doing just that, … he’s traveled all over the country on his comedy tours. And he’s lived in some very politically diverse places… Oklahoma, Washington, New York, LA and now Austin, Texas.
Robert Pease (Co-Host)
So we wondered what Andrew’s learned crossing county and party lines about what makes Americans tick and what makes them laugh or grimace or heckle.
[Actuality - Andrew Heaton’s Stand-Up Comedy]
[Enter Interview Part 2]
Andrew Heaton
Uh, for me, I think this is part of the reason that I do what I do is having lived in Oklahoma and loving a lot of people there actively that I'm related to, but having also lived in California and New York and Austin and loving a lot of people from there, I am capable of going, “oh, people I disagree with are still decent human beings”. And I think we're increasingly getting to a point where you don't have to meet anybody you disagree with on a regular basis. And then they just become these kind of evil cartoon characters to you.
Barbara Bogaev (Co-Host)
I'm really glad you brought up siloing, because I wanted to ask you about how you think about that and your comedy, because you've said that you don't do political standup on stage with normies, meaning non-political type audiences.
Andrew Heaton
Yeah. Yeah.
Barbara Bogaev (Co-Host)
And, and here you are, you know, talking about something very real to our show and everyone, concerned with partisanship, which is keeping the conversation going, and trying to undo the silos. So why not talk funny politics to normies?
Andrew Heaton
Great question. It's basically because I don't wanna lose them. So, I do two different sets. I've got a political set that I do, which I do pretty regularly, and I'm paid for it to do for think tanks and advocacy groups. So somebody will call me up and they'll go, you that funny guy that likes Milton Friedman, and I'll go, yeah. And they'll go, do you wanna, we'll give you a thousand dollars. There's
Barbara Bogaev (Co-Host)
Only one <laugh>.
Andrew Heaton
Yeah. There's not many of us. They're like, well, we'll give you a thousand dollars. If you wanna come tell jokes to the Chamber of Commerce for, you know, 30 minutes and I'll go, that sounds great. And so I'll go do it. Right. So in, in that instance, then I like, and I have like really granular, like I have jokes about occupational licensing, which I have to say is pretty funny, by the way, can I tell you this one?
Barbara Bogaev (Co-Host)
Go for it.
Andrew Heaton
Okay. I'm not gonna go into full standup mode, but you have to be licensed to be a mortician, right? If you screw up the worst case scenario is you bring the body back to life. Like you can't hurt the corpse. So, and anyway, I've got a bunch of jokes like that, which by the way, kills for people that hate occupational licensing.
Barbara Bogaev (Co-host)
Kills? It slays.
Andrew Heaton
I've got lots of jokes like that. It's not that I don't mind doing those jokes for an audience, but what I've found through trial and error over the course of my career is audiences are on the defensive when it comes to politics.
Barbara Bogaev (Co-host)
So they get uncomfortable,
Andrew Heaton
They get uncomfortable. They're afraid that I'm gonna point to them and go, who'd you vote for? Why did you vote for 'em? And then I'm gonna ar- like, which I, that doesn't sound super funny to me, but they're afraid of that. And then the other thing that I've found…
Barbara Bogaev (Co-Host)
Well, wait, wait, wait, before you move on. Why not people uncomfortable? I mean, isn't that what comedians do you know? Lenny Bruce? George Carlin?
Andrew Heaton
Primary job of a comedian is to make them laugh. I think a lot of the time that humor is released by tackling things that have psychic tension in releasing that tension.
Barbara Bogaev (Co-host)
Okay. Then that's my question actually. Is it harder to do this kind of comedy that George Carlin and Lenny Bruce did? And for sure, Lenny Bruce got in a lot of trouble for his, but both of them did. But is it harder to do that kind of political comedy because we're in such a polarized era?
Andrew Heaton
Yes. yes, it is. What I tried to do for a while that struck me is fairly equitable. Being an independent, I would make fun of Republicans for a minute. Then I'd make fun of Democrats for a minute. Then I'd make fun of libertarians for a minute. And in my mind the audience would go, well, this guy's a straight shooter. He's taking shots at all sides, right?
Barbara Bogaev (Co-host)
Yeah. That's just fair, fair use there.
Andrew Heaton
Yep.
And, and that would work if I were maybe writing a book or something, but audiences don't actually think that way. What they do is you just turn off a third of the audience and they just shut down. And, and then they start coming back when you make fun of other people, but those people shut down. And so you're in this process of having to reboot the audience every few minutes. And so just on a structural level, it doesn't work very well.
Barbara Bogaev (Co-host)
I do wonder how wokeness has affected your work and whether you fight a voice in the back of your head, you know, voice saying something like, whoa, oh no, can I really say this? Because I would think that would be the death of comedy. And in some ways that's the death of a lot of conversations that we could be having together.
Andrew Heaton
Yes. And yes. Great question, Barbara. I'll add to this, the thing that surprised me culturally in California, that I had not anticipated during the brief amount of time I was, there was, I would have a conversation with someone who was an overt Democrat, who probably voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary and voted for hill Hillary Clinton back in the day,
And multiple times I would have somebody look past me as if they were about to say something racist, like looking to see if there were black people afoot and then would go, I think the wokeness has gone a little too far. And it felt from my perspective, I'm like, we're in your Vatican.
Like, like we're in, we're in Los Angeles. Like, this is we're in your capital. You should very comfortable. Yeah. That surprised me cuz you don't see that in Austin. Like people don't like, I think, uh, you know, actually we should wear masks. Like people are just a little more full-throated about whatever their opinions are. I think that your question is salient to both points Barbara, when it comes to comedy. I think comedy is ideally performed and is optimal and most productive when you're loose and you're happy, at least for me, I know that there are traumatized comedians that do well with darkness. I don't I'm…
Barbara Bogaev (Co-host)
But do you have a, a specific example of that voice cutting in on you?
Andrew Heaton
What I see happening right now with wokeness and comedy is, one, I think that people are really misinterpreting the fault lines between woke and whatever non woke is. I think that this is frequently laziness on the part of partisans that want to make it a red team versus blue team thing, because that's the easiest dichotomy to interpret the world through. But oftentimes the world we live in is nuanced and has different fault lines than that. I think that that's an example of that. I think when it comes to wokeness and the culture war, the battle is not between conservatives and liberals. It never really has been it's between pluralists and authoritarians.
If we go back to the nineties, when I was a kid, when I'm getting my comedic bearings, by watching the Simpsons, the pearl clutching people that were really worried about word choice were the conservatives back then. The Simpsons were getting in trouble because they'd say, butt, or they'd say shut up or something. Or Murphy Brown is a single mom. And the vice president of the United States is talking about how this is leading to the demoralization of the American people. And at that time Democrats were the ones that would go, guys, it's a sitcom, it's a cartoon show. This is not an exegesis. This is just a big hole we shovel jokes into try to have fun, calm down. And the, the conservatives were kind of the church lady, folks that were getting worked up. And that is now switched around to where the, the pearl clutching people getting really worked up are the woke people who tend to be the left.
I think that the kind of spectrum there that's actually operating is, are you okay with people being in error or do we all have to be on board for the thing? And, it's not fun doing comedy for the people that all wanna be on board for the thing. It does make you a little concerned to go be funny at 'em., I'll say, standup comedy clubs tend to not be those people. It is self-selecting on both ends. The comedians tend to be hetero-dox by nature and sort of anti-authoritarian and not prone to sticking to the script .And the crowd tends to be drunks that are out late, who don't care.
Robert Pease (Co-host)
Well, Andrew I’m going to follow up with kind of a two part question. It seems that comedy's been sort of sucked out of Washington too. If you go back 30 or 40 years ago, I remember anecdotes about Ted Kennedy and John McCain, you know, joking about how I'm really gonna beat you up on the Sunday morning shows, or that was a good one as they passed each other in the halls. It's hard to imagine that now. These people have lost their sense of humor at the same time, they're always performing for their base and they're never really themselves.
Andrew Heaton
Great question. So a lot of the people that I knew that were on Capitol hill are no longer there. I'll say when I was on Capitol hill and, I came in just before the Tea Party. So, think Cap and Trade and Obamacare, that era pre-tea party. At that time I will say I was very pleasantly surprised to discover how bipartisan Washington DC was. And that kind of happened across the board. Now, on the politician side, it was a little unctuous in that the politicians would put on a show, but it was a spectacle that they would do intentionally for sound bites to go back to their constituency.
So for example, an episode relayed to me, I did not witness this, but I trusted my colleague that was on the hill at the time said that he'd watched one of these congressional hearings where the Congressman just lit into this person and was just, you know, raking 'em through the coals. And then afterwards came up and went, Hey, I'm really sorry. I know I came hard on you, but I've been kind of low in the polls and I really needed to show my constituency that I'm tough on this issue, you know, enjoy your time in Washington. I think that happens. And you'd see like at the time I was there. I guess Barbara Boxer retired, right? She's no longer the Senator?
Robert Pease (Co-host)
Correct.
Yeah. So at the time I was there, Barbara Boxer and Jim Inhofe would fight like cats and dogs, then they'd go get dinner. They were, and are, friends. Jim Inhofe being an extremely conservative Republican from Oklahoma. And I'd say in DC in general, then and now, if you can't be friends with people you disagree with, it is a professional hindrance to you unless you are a super activist working for a super activist organization.
Now that said, I am told by my democratic colleagues that that began dampening with the tea party coming in and that the tea party viewed itself as a combative and insurgent force fighting the entrenched bad guys. And that old polity did not exist with the new people. And the other thing I'd add to that is, you all have probably covered this before we began the program but, the current process we have right now of first pass the polls and open primaries means that if you were a politician, you were generally not worried about losing to someone from the other party.
You are far more worried about getting primaried. And that is the concern for you is that somebody is going to say that you are a traitor or a cuck or you're friendly with the enemy or you're a limp-wristed centrist or something like that. So you gotta go hard to the edges, right? Well, part and parcel to that is you can't be seen in public being friendly with anybody because we've got to a point now where we don't view the other party as the opposition, we view them as enemies. And that is a qualitatively different state to be in. And we've moved on from thinking people are in error to thinking they're in sin. And so if you're a Congressman, you're a Senator and you're hanging out with these sinners, that's different than hanging out with people that are wrong. And that's, again, just lamentable for everyone involved in that process from the politicians all the way down to us and the constituency.
[Exit Interview]
Barbara Bogaev (Co-host)
Andrew Heaton. Indie-minded political satirist, stand-up comedian and podcaster, and the final guest in our American independence themed episode this month.
Robert Pease (Co-host)
And I do think that compassionate piece says so much about Andrew. There is so much hard edged and mean spirited humor out there, on and off line. While Andrew’s humor has much better intentions.
Barbara Bogaev (Co-host)
It does. and if you all out there appreciated it, and you’d like to check out more of his comedy, and his podcasts, books, and live appearances you can find it at mightyheaton.com. That’s mighty-h-e-a-t-o-n.com.
Robert Pease (Co-host)
Thanks to the mighty Andrew Heaton for joining us today. And to Barbara for co-hosting through our recent California series and onto this special indy-day month episode with Andrew Heaton. Barbara, a pleasure throughout. You handled Andrew’s skewering of LA over two episodes so gracefully.
Barbara Bogaev (Co-host)
Well, thank you, Rob I didn’t want to get into a whole wrestling match with Andrew over LA, but I will say it is a city that transcends all the cliches about it including how ugly it is… But I did enjoy talking with him and really enjoyed doing it with you.
Robert Pease (Co-host)
Great, maybe you can hop back on some future episodes! Upcoming guests on The Purple Principle include Maria Hinojosa & Former Governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick. Specials thanks again to Andrew Heaton and Barbara Bogaev as well as to all our listeners from The whole Purple Principle team.