Episode 417: Charlie Berens, Jackie Kashian, HBO

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• Geez Louise! Charlie Berens tells us how to survive in the Midwest

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  You might remember Charlie Berens as an Emmy-winning journalist, but that was a while ago so we understand if you don’t. Chances are you know him as a comedian and the man behind the comedy series, “The Manitowoc Minute.” His Midwest-centric videos have received millions of views. Well son of a gun, now Berens is a New York Times best-selling author with his first book “The Midwest Survival Guide: How We Talk, Love, Work, Drink and Eat … Everything with Ranch.”

  Cripes thanks to all of yous who bought #TheMidwestSurvivalGuide cause you made it a New York Times Bestseller. Special thanks to my mom who bought half the copies. We were also about to raise over $7,000 for the @Center4Veterans from sales the week of Veterans Day pic.twitter.com/bnG9ZIeYNo

  — Charlie Berens (@CharlieBerens) November 27, 2021

  Oh, Geez Louise! How did he pull that off? And cripes! What the heck is the difference between the “Manitowoc Minute” guy and the real Charlie Berens?

  “The ‘Manitowoc Minute’ version is basically just an exaggerated version of who I am,” Berens told WPR’s “BETA.”

  “It’s based on my time in local news where people would say I did things wrong. I said things wrong. I had an accent. ‘Bubbler’ is not a word you can say in Texas,” he mused. “And so the ‘Manitowoc Minute’ version is a parody of the newsman that I was, where I doubled down on all the things people said I was doing wrong.”

  Berens said he presents more of an authentic version of who he is in “The Midwest Survival Guide.”

  “It’s that same sort of Midwest mentality, that kind of be nice first, ask questions later,” he explained. “I’m more interested in how to make a proper Old Fashioned than I am in talking politics today.”

  Berens can identify the moment he realized that embracing his Midwestern roots could lead to something else. He was doing stand-up at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles. Berens was performing as a character that eventually evolved into the “Manitowoc Minute” guy.

  “I said, ‘Is anybody from the Midwest?’” Berens recalled. “And then you see in this Los Angeles comedy club, a quarter of the room, maybe more, had their hands up. And that bit always did well, no matter how much my other stand-up bombed, that would always help me recover. So I was like, ‘Oh, there’s something here.’ So I made this video the first video,’The Manitowoc Minute.’”

  “So it’s like, ‘OK, now I have enough proof that this is the thing that keeps working,” Berens said. “I’m going to keep doing this. But I never in my wildest dreams would have expected all this to happen, and I just feel very fortunate for it.”

  So why does Berens think that Midwest life resonates so with the rest of the country?

  “I think it’s been largely ignored in pop culture or it’s been viewed as just kind of bland or somewhere in the middle. There are a lot of comedians now exploring the Midwest, so we see these staples of our culture that you don’t often think of,” he said.

  “Once you shine a little flashlight on them, they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s pretty cool.’ And it’s everything from the way we talk to interact. It’s deer camp to fishing for walleyes to just our ability to tailgate,” he added.

  What does Berens think the rest of the world would be like if they borrowed the Midwest attitude?

  “Well, I really think the Midwest nice thing is definitely something that could be borrowed. And, you know, it’s a nice first, ask questions later kind of deal,” Berens said. “What it does is it gives you a pause before you’re immediately going to react with maybe the way you want to react and you decide to be nice anyway. And that at least gives you a moment. And the thing is that Midwest niceness is contagious. And so hopefully that spreads.”

  Of course, no Midwest life would be complete without a Midwest bucket list. So we asked Berens what are the top five things that BETA listeners should include on their Midwest bucket lists?

  “First and foremost, you gotta go ice fishing,” Berens said. “If you’re going to drive your car out on the ice, I legally have to tell you don’t. But if you do, no seatbelts … out on the roads, it’s click it or ticket. On the ice. It’s click it and sink with it.”

  “Also, hey, Lake Michigan’s got a lot of cool, sunken ships, you know? And so you can see that some of the best scuba diving in the world is on Lake Michigan. Same thing. You might not think about it. Sheboygan is the Malibu of the Midwest. Great waves. You can surf the Midwest. You got to have a three-way in Cincinnati. And you know, you might think that sounds a little goofy, but it’s obvious if you’re from Cincinnati, just chilly, not something frisky. Also, you got to play euchre and play some bar dice.”

  Here at BETA, we would recommend upping the ante by playing euchre with Bob Uecker if you can make that happen. And if you can, please let us know. We’d love to join you.

• Keeping up with the Kashian: Jackie Kashian is still hilarious after all these years

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  Comedian Jackie Kashian has been making people laugh for more than 35 years. Her albums have hit No. 1 on Amazon and iTunes and have garnered more than 10 million listens on Spotify and Pandora.

  Kashian’s latest special and companion album, “Stay-Kashian,” has her in fine form, talking about a range of topics including the Rapture, ghosts and her father, Elliot.

  Now a resident of Los Angeles, Kashian was born and raised in South Milwaukee and is the youngest of six kids. So it comes as no surprise that she took her own creative approach when it came time to make her stand-up debut — as a heckler.

  “It’s just an indictment because I went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the early ’80s, and I had never seen stand-up before and clearly had never been out in public before because during the show, I started heckling the comic,” Kashian told WPR’s “BETA.”

  “And there is genuinely nothing worse than a woman heckler, even if you were a woman comic, because for some reason, the audience is always on their side. So everyone was on my side, and I was eventually yelled at by management. And literally the guy said, ‘Open mic is on Sundays. You have to shut up.’ And I came back three weeks later and did open mic,” she said.

  The comedian she was heckling was Sam Kinison, a Grammy-nominated comic who appeared on “Late Night with David Letterman” and “Saturday Night Live.”

  Even though this happened 37 years ago, Kashian still remembers what she heckled Kinison about.

  “It was just as lame as everyone’s heckling,” she recalled. “He had said that he was from Peoria, Illinois, and his timing was slightly off. And I was monumentally inebriated. And during that pause, I yelled, ‘I’m sorry.’ And then that got a pretty big laugh just because my timing was better than his that very evening.”

  “And then he tried to essentially mop up the floor with me, and then it didn’t work because I wouldn’t shut up anyway,” she continued. “And so he just kept yelling at me and I just kept talking back. And so management had to approach me like three times.”

  With experience as a professional heckler, that must give Kashian an advantage when it comes to shutting up hecklers, right?

  “No. No, it sadly does not,” she said. “It gives me no advantage. And I’ve been doing standup since 1984, right? And I’m still slightly self-conscious when there is a heckler where I’m just like, ‘Oh, well, this poor bastard doesn’t know better.’ And much like myself when I was a goofy dumb-dumb and just yell and stuff. So I have too much sympathy for them half of the time and too much rage the other half of the time. So I’m not actually very good with hecklers. I’m OK. But my favorite clubs kick them out for me.”

  Some of the funniest and most intelligent jokes Kashian tells in her special are about her least favorite people — the end times, Rapture people.

  As she says in “Stay-Kashian”:

  “Here’s the thing. They want it to be the end times. There are people who wish it to be the end times right now because they want to get to the Rapture. Here’s the twist. They’ve decided that they’re going to be horrible people to speed up the end times to get to the Rapture. Let’s unpack. First of all: not the end times, just terrible times. Try to help somebody. Second thing: the Rapture, I don’t know if you know anything about the Rapture. They’re not taking horrible people. Third thing you may not know about the Rapture: not real, not real. Literally a parable to get you to not be a horrible person.”

  And while Kashian has been doing stand-up for more than three decades, her comedic voice has stayed relatively the same.

  “It’s weird how much it hasn’t changed,” she said, referring to her style. “There’s always a comfort level that changes; I know that I’m going to do well, right? I know that. Even if I have a bad night, it’s not going to be a terrible night and I’m going to be able to dig myself out of the hole.”

  “So the only thing that’s really changed in my stand-up is my ability to be aware of what I’m trying to do up there,” she added. “It’s just the learned skill of stand-up.”

  “I talk about the same four things every comic talks about, which is sort of sociopolitical things on television, in the news, in interactions with humanity, my family life. … The same four topics are discussed by absolutely every comic that gets on stage, and you have to make sure that you make it your own.”

  Kashian’s style may be the same, but she says the industry itself has changed over the years.

  “When I first started, it was ’84. There was this beginning of this observational kind of standup … sort of a pre-Seinfeld. Leno and Letterman and all those guys with the setup punch,” she said.

  “In the late ’90s, there was this advent of something called alternative comedy, which someone asked me to define at one time in 1999. And I lucked out because my standup has always been an alternative by my definition, because what I think of as alternative comedy is you tell the story of how you came up with the joke and then you tell the punch line” she continued.

  When Kashian isn’t doing stand-up around the country, chances are she’s hosting her two podcasts — “The Dork Forest” and “The Jackie and Laurie Show” which she co-hosts with fellow comedian Laurie Kilmartin — the latter occasionally getting into the culture of harassment and the poor treatment of primarily female comedians.

  “BETA” asked Kashian if she thinks things have improved since the #MeToo movement ramped up in 2006.

  “There have been great strides made, inequality and injustice and all of these things. But because of those strides, the people who don’t want those advances, right? The white supremacists, the misogynists and the people who want to control women and who fear homosexuality or whatever, they have become much more vocal and more in your face,” she said. “There used to be a shame factor if you hated people. And now there’s a lot less people that hate, but the people who do hate are much more vocal.”

  “In the United States, for example, the advantage of being a white person is not as overt as the things that don’t happen to me. It’s not like people are handing me 20s under the table for being a white woman. But I don’t have to deal with a lot of things that Black women have to deal with, or that Black people in general have to deal with. So in the #MeToo situation, I would say that it’s making a lot of more decent people aware of their own advantages, but it’s also making the bad guys go doubling down on it.”

• It's not TV, it's HBO's 50-year history.

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  Long before the familiar “duh-duh” refrain of Netflix launching, TV viewers experienced a similar pavlovian response to another sound. The famous static ascension of the HBO logo that fired up right before their favorite show began.

  Whether it was “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City” or “Game of Thrones,” that video logo was the fanfare of excellence that promised prestige television was on tap.

  Journalist James Andrew Miller — famed for his tell all and provocative oral histories, including the game changing expose on ESPN, “Those Guys Have All the Fun” and the history of “Saturday Night Live” with “Live from New York” — set out to document the premium pay channel’s 50-year history with his comprehensive, “Tinder Box: HBO’s Ruthless Pursuit of New Frontiers.”

  Although, calling this book comprehensive is like calling an ocean vast. At nearly 1,000 pages, this doorstop of a tome leaves no stone, story or show unturned or uncovered. Miller tells WPR’s “BETA” that long before the network launched the concept of prestige television, they were already redefining our relationship to television.

  “We have to transport ourselves back to 1972. The idea that we could sit in our living room and watch a movie without commercials and without network censors blurting out language, nudity and whatever else came along, I think was startling and revolutionary at the time,” he explained.

  What began as an experiment to capitalize on the new frontiers promised by cable television, the early HBO founders led by Chuck Dolan knew they would need to secure must-see programming if they were going to charge a premium each month. As an avid sports fan, Dolan saw the power of being the home for a specific sport. In HBO’s case, this was boxing.

  “They took boxing, which had been somewhat moribund and was relegated to Saturday afternoons on the networks, and brought it to primetime. Just in time for like Mike Tyson and Thomas Hearns and Marvin Hagler and all these unbelievable boxers. And so, I think boxing was that was a big engine for HBO’s growth,” Miller said.

  With an established foundation of uncut films and boxing’s biggest stars, HBO continued to innovate with groundbreaking documentaries that tackled some of the biggest issues of the day like AIDs, Scientology and the popular docu-series, “The Jinx.” Surprisingly, however, Sheila Nevins, who helmed HBO’s documentary team, found transcendent success with some more salacious series.

  “She was responsible for spearheading the late-night very, very sexual in nature documentary series that HBO did, and those things were incredibly popular,” says Miller. “You talk to a lot of people, that’s one of the first things that they remember about HBO was being able to turn on shows like ‘Real Sex‘, ‘Cathouse‘, ‘Taxicab Confessions‘ and see things that they hadn’t seen before.”

  HBO’s censor-less format also became a trailblazing haven to another arena of content: comedy. For years, comedians only had late-night programs to perform a shortened, edited version of their set. Network censors could neuter anything that might upset sponsors. With no sponsors to worry about, HBO created the now commonplace concept of the comedy special.

  “Along comes HBO and HBO says, forget about four and a half minutes. Forget about restrictions, about language. Forget about restrictions, about subjects. We’re going to give you an hour, and we’re going to give you your own comedy special,” Miller said. “HBO wound up being an incredible, important place for these comedians and in turn, something that the audience couldn’t get anywhere else.”

  With several popular (and profitable) content streams in place, HBO began dipping its toe into original programming. They developed an early single-camera sitcom, “Dream On,” with struggling theater writers David Crane and Marta Kauffman. After a contract snafu, Crane and Kauffman would go on to create the comedy sitcom giant, “Friends” for NBC.

  But it was in the late ’90s when HBO hit on a pair of shows that really paved the way for what was to come next.

  “I think ‘The Larry Sanders Show‘ and ‘Oz’ were two big shows in HBO’s early development because both of them registered in meaningful ways and in different ways,” Miller said.

  “Oz” was a particular harbinger of what was to come because it fully utilized HBO’s lack of censorship boundaries to create a dark and realistic look at a prison drama.

  “‘Oz’ was fearless. It was incredibly violent, incredibly vulgar,” Miller said. “How many shows are set in a prison? Well, you don’t really want to do that because it’s such a dark, dangerous world. And HBO was instantly saying, ‘We’re going to go to places that the networks don’t.’”

  What came next altered television history.

  In the early 2000s, HBO — led by head of programming Chris Albrecht and Carolyn Strauss — developed and launched a string of shows including “The Sopranos“, “Six Feet Under“, “The Wire“, “Sex and the City” and “Deadwood” that made HBO a destination on par with networks. Many critics cite this era and these shows as the golden age of television.

  What’s even more remarkable is the list of groundbreaking shows that were created in the mold of HBO’s prestige lineup that the pay channel passed on. HBO had the first crack at AMC pillars “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” as well as Netflix giants and original programming foundations “House of Cards” and “The Crown.”

  It wasn’t so much that passing on those shows led to a hole in programming. HBO still countered a lot of that with mega-hits like “Game of Thrones” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” It was that HBO allowed those shows to jumpstart the competition.

  “In the case of ‘House of Cards,’ HBO was thinking about doing it, wanted to do it, and then all of a sudden, Netflix is there. HBO is going to do a pilot and Netflix gives them two full seasons,” Miller said. “Well, that’s one of those clarifying moments where you realize the business has changed and HBO doesn’t enjoy the advantages that it used to have.”

  Even now as HBO enjoys critical acclaim for comedies and drama like “Succession,” “Hack,” “I May Destroy You” and “White Lotus,” they’re facing an uncertain future in the next frontier of television — streaming.

  With Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Apple TV all following their prestige and censor-free model to create content, HBO will have to continue to innovate moving forward.

  “We’re looking at an industry that is in, I wouldn’t say chaos, but it’s been disrupted so much. And there are so many players trying to adapt and survive and grow that it’s unclear how HBO positions itself,” Miller said. “I think this is probably one of the most uncertain times for HBO, and I’m not sure that the kind of success that they’ve had over the past 49 years is guaranteed to them for the future.”