by Bret Fetzer
"As the political climate became more harrowing, I was having more and more trouble finding things that made me want to laugh," says Marilyn Raichle. This is not merely an existential dilemma for Raichle; she's the executive director of Foolproof Performing Arts, an arts group that presents a wide range of comedy--from Sinbad to David Sedaris--on various Seattle stages. "So this last fall, I thought, 'I'm just going to present the people I want to hear'"--all of whom were politically left-of-center speakers, not comedians, from documentarian Michael Moore to satirist Al Franken.
Foolproof's ticket sales tripled. Its events sold out. The organization received grateful phone calls. The explosive response made it clear that Foolproof had tapped a hungry market. In six weeks, Raichle put together Foolproof's new American Voices series, featuring people not usually associated with standup comedy: Gore Vidal, Spike Lee, Tony Kushner, Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., and former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, whose wife was illegally outed as a CIA agent by an angry White House.
This isn't a radical change of direction for Foolproof--it presented left-wing columnist Molly Ivins in 1999, and Franken previously appeared in 2000--but Raichle cheerfully makes clear her intentions: "This series is designed to motivate people to get involved in the political process. Even after the election, there's so much to grapple with--challenges to Social Security, education, medical care, civil liberties--and there's a sense of desperation, people want to hear things they're just not hearing from the mass media." She's currently working on a series of dialogues between advocates on both sides of the political fence. "Not yellers, not screamers, we're actually talking about civil discourse."
Raichle believes there's no gap between politics and entertainment, that Foolproof can present a "giant tutorial in democracy" without losing its grounding in humor. She quotes Ivins: "Anyone working as a political activist has got to laugh."
