When asked about her political beliefs, Babs Johnson, the heroine of John Waters’ 1972 masterpiece Pink Flamingos, exclaims, “Kill everyone now! Condone first-degree murder! Advocate cannibalism! Eat shit! Filth is my politics! Filth is my life!” Then Babs, played by the legendary drag queen Divine, eats dog shit. This is unsimulated: from a canine anus to a human mouth in one take.
Where does a provocateur go from there?
Fifty-four years later, Waters evangelizes to throngs of adoring misfits. He still mocks the mainstream and embraces the margins, mining dominant culture for absurdity. Dominant culture has changed, though, and Waters is no longer anywhere near the margins. RuPaul’s Drag Race is one of the highest rated shows on television. Hairspray, the heartwarming musical based on Waters’ film of the same name, is performed in middle schools across America.
At Waters’ age (80 on April 22!), it is easy for an artist to become an icon, a mascot from another era. But Waters stays current. In his solo show, which he tours nonstop and rewrites from scratch every year, he rails against the humorlessness on all sides of our country’s political divides. Far from whining about “kids these days,” though, Waters’ concern is about strategy. He believes that humor is the most effective way to change minds, and that is what he wants to do. In fact, Waters speaks of younger generations with tremendous affection. He admires them, it seems, as much as they admire him.
I spoke with Waters by phone about his upcoming birthday show, Going to Extremes: A John Waters 80th Birthday Celebration, which will play at New York Society for Ethical Culture on April 19 and Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts on April 22.
What is there to say about John Waters that hasn’t already been said? He is my hero. He is my favorite filmmaker. When I found out I would be interviewing him I was speechless for several minutes, and then I called my mom.
This interview has been edited for both length and clarity.
Annie Rasiel: Happy early birthday!
John Waters: Thank you! I’m over-celebrating my birthday by doing so many shows.
AR: I hope you also have some time for you to celebrate, unless it’s fun for you doing the shows.
JW: Oh no, it’s fun. I have fun meeting audiences all over the world—and I have fun after I get the check, when I’m celebrating at dinner. After the shows, I’m going to Europe for vacation, so, yes, I am going to have some fun on my birthday too.
AR: Good! I’m excited to talk about Going to Extremes. I know that the show is constantly changing, that you’re always adding new material. How do you choose that material? What draws you to a story and what might disqualify a story?
JW: Well, I rewrite my show completely once a year and then it becomes many different versions. This is a birthday version of that show, so there are more jokes about how old I am and birthdays in general. The show is always about politics and art, and there’s the same skeleton to it. But I always come up with a completely new show once a year. Every single thing. That’s why people keep coming every year to my Christmas show, because it’s different every year. What draws me to material is some kind of absurdity or extreme that will make people laugh, that will make people not so serious. There are very serious things going on in the world. But if you want to get someone to change their opinion, you don’t tell them they’re stupid. I always say, “you make them laugh and then you have sex with them.” Especially in Miami!
AR: I would think in Miami it’s legally required!
JW: Exactly.
AR: It’s making your high school bullies laugh. Humor is the best defense.
JW: Exactly. I did that too in high school, that’s why I didn’t get beat up.
AR: It’s the only way through.
JW: Humor is the ultimate protection, the ultimate armor, and the ultimate way to get people on your side. It’s the best way to get people to change their minds.
AR: Do you ever feel like your audience is too on your side? You have such a fervent fan base.
JW: Do you mean preaching to the converted? Yeah. Nobody gets pissed off at my shows. The only time that ever happens is if someone gets there too early and they’re drunk in the front row and laughing too much. Ugh. I say “the” and they start laughing. But they usually pass out after that, so it’s not much of an issue.
My audience is great. They get dressed. They’re smart. They get the obscure jokes, and if they don’t, they look them up. I leave the audience with homework after the show! Nobody gets every joke. Kathleen Turner once said to me afterwards, “Darling, I have no idea what you were talking about the whole time.” That really made me laugh.
AR: What excites or interests you in culture today?
JW: What excites me is any young person that is somehow getting movies made when the movie business I know no longer exists. I’m always impressed that anybody can get their film made and distributed. And I’m always excited about what young people are doing. They should be trying to get on the artistic nerves of the generation that came right before them, whoever was cool before them.
AR: I am a kind-of-young filmmaker trying to get movies made, so that really speaks to me.
JW: Great, good!
AR: God help us!
JW: It’s a lot easier now. You can use your cell phone. I used to carry around those giant sixteen millimeter magstripe cameras they used for the news.
AR: My friends do a lot of buying and returning equipment.
JW: We used to do that with costumes. We would get clothes from department stores, use them in the movie, and then take them back the next week.
AR: Oh yes, I’m familiar with that move. Do audience reactions ever surprise you?
JW: Sometimes they surprise me with really good questions, and I can never remember them when I come off the stage. Good questions give me the opportunity to ad-lib. I love getting to meet the audience and see what they care about. The questions are always smart. I don’t get stupid questions. I get weird questions! One time a girl said, “My dad said he almost went home with you at a bar.” I said, “Well, tell him hi.” I didn’t really know what to say to that.
AR: What are you supposed to say? “Is he still available?”
JW: “Well, why didn’t he?” I’m surprised when people tell me, “My parents took me to see Pink Flamingos.” When I was young, people’s parents called the police if they watched a movie like that! So that has changed—and Pink Flamingos is even worse today because of so-called “political correctness.”
AR: Can you tell me about that? Is it really easier to shock and provoke now than it was in the 70s?
JW: Well, it’s always easy to shock and provoke, but it’s not easy to do it with humor and also get people to laugh and change their opinions. You should never try too hard. Usually when people say a movie reminds them of a John Waters film, I don’t like it, because it’s trying too hard without any wit. I think it’s a thin line that you have to walk and surprise people by just seeing something in a way they’ve never thought of it before. I think that’s what my audience comes to see.
AR: There’s an authenticity in that, and there’s an authenticity in your work. It’s easy to use shock as an affectation.
JW: It’s easy to shock. It’s harder to make people laugh at their ability to be shocked, which today is very important. When I was growing up, there were so many censorship laws. Now you can do whatever you want in a Hollywood movie—except smoke cigarettes. I always tell kids, “try to make an NC-17 movie without any sex or violence and you’ll have a hit.” Something like… smoking cigarettes at a satanic temple. With children.
AR: We need to get more kids smoking.
JW: Can you believe they still have candy cigarettes?
AR: I know! I saw them in a store the other day, and I was shocked. Who’s buying candy cigarettes?
JW: Training wheels for little cancer children, right?
AR: I’m glad people are still buying candy cigarettes. So, you don’t have to worry about your audience taking themselves too seriously?
JW: They have a sense of humor about themselves. My audience is often people who take whatever people used against them in high school and exaggerate it, turn it into their own style—and they win in the end because they’re proud of who they are. I think that’s very important. They don’t have the same goals as the people who hassle them. They want to be something different. I love a really hot, sexy girl that makes herself ugly. It’s so punk. I love anything that reverses the gaze.
AR: Yes!
JW: G-A-Z-E gaze, not G-A-Y-S.
AR: Reversing the G-A-Y-S is what the other side’s trying to do. You have been the patron saint of freaks for nearly sixty years now. How do you keep that position fresh? What keeps you on your toes?
JW: I keep up with what young people are doing. I go to heavy metal clubs and lesbian clubs and places that my generation doesn’t go anymore. And I have youth spies, people who tell me about new stuff. This generation is having just as much fun as I had when I was young. It’s just different. I think the new sexual revolution is more radical than the one I went through.
AR: What is the new sexual revolution?
JW: They’re not even gay or straight anymore! That’s old hat. It’s the non-binary thing, the trans thing. Considering that gay rights took three centuries, it’s amazing how quickly this is all being accepted.
AR: The younger generations are questioning the foundations of gender.
JW: It’s a completely new thing. I was really amazed when I saw Elon Musk’s trans daughter lip-synching as Divine. Have you seen that?
AR: No!
JW: Look it up. His trans daughter. She’s great and looks gorgeous, and she’s doing Divine’s full speech at the end of Pink Flamingos: “Filth is my politics! Filth is my life!” She does it very well. I would have never imagined that. You never know who’s watching. I was at Atomic Books in Baltimore, doing a signing of my new screenplay books, and there was a four-hour line in the rain. When the last person came up, I said, “What’s your name?” to sign the book, and she said, “Lorena Bobbitt.”
AR: Oh my god!!!!!
JW: It was her! And I love her.
AR: And she’s a fan!
JW: Yeah, she lived in Virginia and said she drove up because she’s a fan. I said, “We love a woman with a past in Baltimore”
AR: A woman with a past indeed. Wow, what an exciting character to show up. You have been known to say “resist with a limp wrist fist.”
JW: Yeah, that’s my new slogan.
AR: It’s great. What does it mean to you, and how do you resist with a limp wrist fist in your work?
JW: My show is exactly that. I say, “Yes, we recruit. There’s one! Get them! Suck out their young blood and give it to Iggy Pop if he ever needs life support!”
AR: Please!
JW: It means to resist with humor, to admit to everything that they use against us and do a humorous version of that. Why aren’t drag queens going to the Melania documentary dressed as her and shouting out lines like Rocky Horror. Wouldn’t that be good? To prove that there’s such a thing as female-to-female impersonators and they’re in the Republican Party.
AR: Melania is absolutely in drag.
JW: Exactly.
AR: How do you feel this show has changed throughout the time that you’ve been performing it?
JW: It hasn’t changed much. It’s changed politically because now the left wing doesn’t have a sense of humor either. They used to. So now I say I’m radically in the middle. Otherwise, it hasn’t changed much. It still appeals to people that love causing artistic trouble. It appeals to people that are gay, straight—they get along with each other. I’m not a separatist. I don’t think gays are necessarily better or something, though it’s a good start. But there are horrible gay movies. There’s progress in admitting that there are, you know, bad gay hairdressers out there somewhere. I’ve always been appealing to people that are rebelling with a sense of humor about themselves first.
AR: What does being radically in the middle mean to you?
JW: It means that I reject the humor-impairedness of both the right and the left. Neither side is perfect, but if I had to pick, well at least Antifa dresses well.
AR: All black is always chic.
JW: And the trash can lids with duct tape. It’s great. What I’m really saying with that is that having a sense of humor is so important if you want to change people’s opinions. Preaching and trying to make them look stupid doesn’t help.
AR: There’s a humility in humor too, in making fun of yourself first, rather than the fundamentalism, the puritanism, in so much of politics today.
JW: And the right is woke in reverse! You can’t say diversity, justice, any of those. But it’s way too late. They think they can stop drag, are you kidding? RuPaul made drag famous for the whole world. And everyone knows someone gay now—even Republicans go to gay weddings. And the younger generations are very accepting of trans people, which is so important. It’s all the same. As soon as someone in their family is affected by an issue, people change their minds. People are just scared. And when they’re scared, they become reactionary. They become extremists to protect themselves. We have to try not to provoke that, because reactionary responses work, unfortunately. We lose when people become reactionaries.
AR: When you make someone laugh, you disarm them.
JW: Yes.
AR: Since it’s your birthday show, will you tell me about a noteworthy birthday from your past?
JW: I only celebrate every ten years. My 30th birthday party was in a punk rock club, and Sue Lowe who played Mole in Desperate Living jumped out of a cake as a stripper and broke her leg.
AR: Oh my god. [Ed. note: For my 30th birthday party, which was John Waters themed, I dressed as Mole from Desperate Living, something I was too overwhelmed to tell Mr. Waters.]
JW: For my 40th birthday party, I rented out a retirement home. My 50th birthday was at Pravda in New York, and my 60th was at a fancy club in New York. For my 70th, I took six friends to Paris first class, and for my 80th, I’m going to Europe.
Tickets for John Waters Going to Extremes can be purchased here.
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