Pauly Shore, whose recent projects have included adopting African children and faking his own death, has been busy reinventing himself once again with his new act, Pauly-tics, performing stand-up, conducting interviews with politicians, and exploring his newfound interest in our country’s political process. The program will air later in the month as a special on Showtime. I spoke with Mr. Shore, and asked him about his foray into political humor, as well as his thoughts on being an obstacle to human progress.
GOOD: Hey, Pauly.
PAULY SHORE: What’s up, dude?
GOOD: What brings you to the political sphere?
SHORE: Well, I know people probably wouldn’t associate Pauly Shore with politics. First of all, it’s what entertains me at night. I go home and I kind of channel surf FOX, CNN, MSN. I’m entertained by these politicians because they’re so full of shit.
GOOD: You call your movie roles “exaggerated versions of yourself.” Do you think politicians play exaggerated versions of themselves?
SHORE: You mean they kind of put on an act? I think it’s more like Superman. You know, like how Superman is two different people at once.
GOOD: So, you’re doing the Pauly-tics thing, it’s going to be a Showtime special, you’ve been touring, you got this whole crew of comedians together, tell me about the program.
SHORE: It’s Pauly Shore in Washington. It’s me doing stand-up comedy there, interviewing these politicians and pundits, and kind of not choosing a side. I don’t really go Republican or Democrat—the attitude is: Let’s just stop fighting and dance. It’s kind of like Bill Maher meets Spring Break.
There are girls, I do all these different songs, I do a country song. I do a party song, political party rock. And a lot of straight stand-up all about politics. We’re doing this thing on the website. Have you been to the website? I’m doing a big sweepstakes, where you get to purchase a pre-order for five dollars, and you could possibly win $100,000. Once I get to 100,000 downloads, that’s when I release the $100,000.
GOOD: Very American.
SHORE: Yeah. So far I have three downloads. They’re all people I know.
GOOD: I’ll just download it 85,000 times.
SHORE: Yeah. That’s true, dude. Think about it. You could definitely win if you did that.
GOOD: Yeah, but would it be profitable? How much is the download? Five dollars?
SHORE: Five dollars.
GOOD: I’ll have to think about that … So, at GOOD we take environmentalism very seriously, so as you might imagine, we are all huge fans of Biodome, which maybe was the first cultural moment that framed environmentalism as being cool.
SHORE: Uh huh.
GOOD: The lesson of Biodome, the takeaway from that movie, is that getting into the environment is a path to sex and beautiful women.
SHORE: It’s a scam. Tell a chick you’re into the environment—that’s like saying you rescue dogs, you know?
GOOD: It works, though?
SHORE: Yeah.
GOOD: Are you an environmentalist?
SHORE: What does that mean?
GOOD: What does it mean to you?
SHORE: I’m not a pig.
GOOD: That’s a start.
SHORE: You know, I’m conscious of that stuff. I don’t drive a hummer, I’ve got a really small car. I put my garbage in the right places. I don’t litter. I guess that’s a start. I don’t have a solar panel house, though.
GOOD: I was reading about trying to raise money to restart the Biosphere project. They were saying that it was hard to get taken seriously because of the movie.
SHORE: I think the movie did make a joke out of the Biodome. So if anyone is out there reading this, I apologize. Because I think at the end of the day, I think it would be really cool to live in an environment like that.
