Factually! with Adam Conover - Adam Meets Beakman with Paul Zaloom

Episode Date: January 15, 2020

On a very special FACTUALLY! Adam sits down with political satirist, puppeteer, former children's show host and personal hero, Paul Zaloom aka Beakman of Beakman's World. Adam and Paul talk about the inspiration and development behind the show, the Children's Television Act, the environment today for comedic educational programming and much more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know, I got to confess, I have always been a sucker for Japanese treats. I love going down a little Tokyo, heading to a convenience store, and grabbing all those brightly colored, fun-packaged boxes off of the shelf. But you know what? I don't get the chance to go down there as often as I would like to. And that is why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way I don't know what to think I don't know what to say Yeah, but that's alright Yeah, that's okay I don't know anything Hello, welcome to Factually, I'm Adam Conover

and we have a bit of a different episode for you this week. A little bit of a change of pace. But before I explain in what way it's different, I'd like to take you down a little trip down memory lane. See, in the early 90s, I was a huge fan of children's educational television. I know, I know, it's a big surprise coming from the guy who does an educational comedy show wearing brightly colored outfits. But I used to eat up shows like Bill Nye the Science Guy, Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego, and especially Beekman's World. I don't know if you remember Beekman's World. It was a show that combined cutting edge special effects, puppeteering and comedy to illustrate complex scientific concepts for kids. There was even a dude in a rat costume who burped and farted.

I loved this show. It perfectly spoke to my nine-year-old sensibilities. Now, you'd think a show like that would just succeed in the cutthroat marketplace of children's television because of how great it was, right? I mean, kids like to learn and they like farting rats, so it should have been an easy sell. Well, it wasn't until recently that I found out that Beekman's World and many of your favorite kids' educational shows like it that you remember from growing up wouldn't have existed at all if not for a particular law passed by Congress. See, in the late 80s, there was very little educational programming on children's TV. And what programming there was, to put it plainly, sucked ass.

I mean, seriously, go back and watch one of those supposed classics, a G.I. Joe, a Transformers, or a Gummy Bears. You will see shows that are badly animated, designed purely to sell toys with incredibly long commercial breaks because kids would watch anything, right? Including tons of commercials for toys based on the exact show they just watched. Now, if you think that shoving loud, aggressive ads down the eye holes of impressionable children without even giving them a good show in return sounds, uh, exploitative and gross, well, legislators in the late 80s would agree with you.

And that is why Congress passed the Children's Television Act of 1990, which did two things. First, it put strict limits on how many minutes of commercials children's broadcast TV could have. Very good step. And secondly, it required networks to include genuinely educational children's programming on their schedules. So suddenly, we went from a world in which if you tried to pitch a show about science to a broadcast network, they'd probably say, hey, get the fuck out of here. How are we going to sell robot toys with that science crap? To one where suddenly every network was suddenly scrambling to buy educational shows that met the new mandate. And it was shows like Beekman's World, Bill Nye, and others that arose to fill that market. others that arose to fill that market. Now, look, I'm not going to say this was a perfect law. As with most regulations, there were a lot of unintended negative side effects, too. A lot of networks tried to get around the rule by making crappy, quasi-educational shows, like, for instance, a variety show hosted by Brazilian actress, model, recording star, and businesswoman Xuxa. Not a lot

of good material for the growing brain there. But the fact remains that these networks needed a nudge from the federal government to know what was good for them and put on at least some of the educational shows kids turned out to love. I mean, again, these shows turned out to be hits. That law is literally the only reason that Bill Nye and Beekman's World were on the air at all. Today, though, things have changed. See, that law only affected broadcast stations that use the public airwaves. It had no jurisdiction over cable television and definitely none over the internet, which hadn't even really become popular yet. And since those places, cable and the internet, are where the majority of kids watch their content today,

once again, we're in a world where the majority of what kids are watching is crappy content that serves adult pocketbooks far more than it does their growing brains. Except, of course, the new Nickelodeon kids show that I'm hosting, The Crystal Maze, which, just to remind you, premieres January 24th on Nickelodeon. That show is very quality. Please watch it. But, look, that brings me to the topic of today's show. Like I said, it's a little bit different. See, normally on this show, we have scholars, experts, other smart folks on to blow your mind with the revelatory things they know. Today, though, I wanted to bring on one of the artists who inspired and taught me so much and blew my mind so much when I was growing up. An artist that I didn't really realize how much he influenced my own style until I went back and watched his work

and figured out how deeply my work is influenced by his. Look, I'm just going to come out with it. I'm talking about Beekman himself or Paul Zaloom, the actor who played Beekman for so many years. He was gracious enough to join me on the show today. And in this interview, we get into Paul's life, his career, what it was like making a classic in children's educational television. And I try to contain my nervousness and excitement talking to a formal idol of mine in whose footsteps I am following. So like I said, bit of a change of pace,

but fear not, I'm not turning this show into an infotainment version of Marc Maron's podcast. We will be back next week with more fascinating expert interviews. And before we get into it, I'd like to share with you a couple tour dates. On January 18th, I will be at the San Francisco Sketch Fest with Chloe Hilliard opening for me. And on January 30th, I will be performing at the Irvine Improv in lovely Irvine, California. If you want tickets for those shows, go to my website, adamconover.net, and grab them. Without further ado, here's my interview with Paul Zaloon. Thank you so much for sitting here and talking to me. It's actually, strangely, not the first time we've met, because when I was a kid,

my mom ran a small science museum on long island and we were big fans of the show and you came to the museum and you did a demo when i was i don't know i'm 12 years old or something like that as i met you then very i'm sure i was like a shell-shocked little child like hello mr saloom you know uh but it was uh and i think you did a demo with dry ice like that one of those types of things right um but uh it was yeah it's really it's really remarkable uh because yeah we were huge fans of beekman's world in my household and uh and the reason i wanted to talk to you was because you know i created my show adam ruins everything people listening might have seen it before uh that uh you know i created about five years ago um and you know sort

of synthesizing all the tools i had as a comedian stand-up comedy and sketch comedy sort of get across information i had learned etc and then you know i was late at night doing what you do sometimes i was on the internet and i was like just going down memory lane oh let me look up you know oh some clips for old tv shows oh beak mens world i love that show and i went and looked at clips and i realized holy shit so much of what i do on my show was clearly influenced by this without me realizing it um the you know the the synthesis of like educational uh material and comedy but also just like the speed of it the way you're popping around the way you're talking to another person you say today we're going to learn about this and they say really what do you that sounds ridiculous you say oh no it's going to work or whatever uh all of that really was it like seeped into me in a way that I that I didn't realize and

uh I don't know it felt like it would come full circle to talk to you about it right on well I think what what's interesting is that we what we have in common is we take information in our work and we make it entertaining. Yeah. And we use humor and comedy. Yeah. And as I've become introduced to your work, I see there's a great deal of common insanity and interest. How did you end up on children's educational television? Well, I am an old bread and puppet theater guy, and bread and puppet is sort of a

neo-German expressionist anarchist theater company founded like 53 years ago by this guy, Peter Schumann, and his wife, Elke Schumann. And I joined in 71. And then after a bunch of years, I started making my own work. And I did, I've done all different kinds of puppetry. Shadow puppets, rod puppets, found objects was sort of my thing. Like you find something and then you bring it to life. Yeah, junk, debris, appliances, toys, anything. And, you know, that comes from pop art when I was a kid.

I was fascinated by it. I had a found object museum in the garage. And, you know, I thought Annie Warhol was great because it pissed my parents off so bad. And so it was like a natural segue i mean it's all comes from duchamp you know the father of yeah um but uh it just became interesting to me to take objects and animate them as characters right and that's the soul of puppeteering right to take an inanimate object and bring it to life and like give it give it uh a humanity that we empathize with right but then to take a shoe or a sandwich box or you know a schmata or

something and jiggle it around and find out what it can do and how it works and how it expresses itself and what it sounds like and what it makes sense for the character to be you know that was interesting so i started doing the found object work in like 77 and then segued into doing contestoria which is storytelling with pictures that that was part of our practice of bread and puppet and um it's commonly called film before film i mean film is storytelling with pictures but contestoria which is thousands of years old and exists in every culture in the world uh so i i did slideshows and i had a slideshow about food processing where i photographed different um industrial brochures and industrial you know information and packaging and all that and then i was a food technologist i wore a lab coat and a chef's toque and the show was called food p-h-o-o-d and it was

i did that show for years a slideshow and did it around new york and here there and everywhere it was a lot of fun it was great to have to get you know i have the image drop just at the right time in the storytelling technique using pictures and beekman they were looking around in hollywood for somebody to be the guy and they were only able to come up with like sitcom dads is what they told me so they had to start looking beyond the hollywood you know which is amazing when you think of how competitive it is yeah and the director knew me from the old days in new york because we had tried to pitch my found object shows um and uh you know as a as a tv thing or whatever and he they i sent my tape of me doing this food show with the slides and i'm wearing the lab coat and they're like oh

this guy's you know this is the guy and they brought me out to do a screen test and you know I'm lousing it up and things aren't going on they knocked over a thing of water and then I just ad-libbed improvised yeah and even people in the biz are suckers for that shit so you know they were like oh my god that was amazing so I got the job incredible do you think it helped that you wore a lab coat in your show was that like an address for the job. Incredible. Do you think it helped that you wore a lab coat in your show? Was that like a dress for the job you want kind of way? Yeah, I think they were desperate. And I mean,

I mean, they certainly would have set out to hire a avant-garde puppeteer from New York to host a kid show. That wouldn't be their first thought. No, but I think puppeteers were good at handling stuff. And it's not that big a stretch to play a lot of different characters. I mean, you do it with puppets in your hands or you're jiggling around or whatever. And then to just put the crap down and to be the character, to me, is not that big a leap. So I ended up playing, I don't know, 30 or 40 different characters on the show. Like, really? Like, via puppeteering? No, no. big a leap so i ended up playing i don't know 30 or 40 different characters on the show like

really like through the via puppeteering uh no no on the tv show yeah um we had this dead guys in science thing where i would say oh well you're interested in blah blah and then i i would just turn around and introduce you know edison or or Alexander Graham Bell or Narcissus or whoever. And it would be me playing all those parts. And I had done Galileo in the first episode, I think. And the writers came to me and said, can you do other characters? I said, yeah, I could, you know, just throw whatever you got at me and I'll figure it out. Fantastic. I mean, how did you feel about going from, you know, I assume that when you're doing that work in theater in New York, you've got your sort of vision and your goals as an artist,

et cetera. And that, you know, this might've been a little bit tangential to that. You're now a science educator and people know you as, I mean, it's, you know, however many years later and we're talking about it here we're sitting here talking about it um uh how does that you know how did that feel and how does it feel now to to have your impact through that work well i you know my work had always been about disseminating information in a right you know amusing way both very specifically and then just in more general ways with uh political and social issues going on so to take information and make it entertaining

and interesting was not that big a leap for me um you know working for the man was like that was definitely that was definitely i mean on broadcast network tv that is very the man in the early 90s there's no uh you know there's no youtube or any sort of like indiness about it you've got to like sell cereal or you're not going to get on television right yeah and i think that was a little challenging in the beginning uh getting used to that idea i um had wanted to be a writer and help create the show and they said no forget it because i had no juice and you know it was like no we're hiring you as an actor and here's your salary and shut up got it so i said okay well then i'm going to volunteer i'll just um volunteer to help create

the show yeah and so i hung out and was in the creative process and did all that stuff because you know life's too short not to do the fun stuff and i figured the more i plugged into it again sort of arrogantly the better the show would be the more the more i could bring my own nutty sensibility to it um and and you know the show people may think it was influenced by uh mr wizard but it was definitely influenced by Soupy Sales. That was much more in line. And Lord Buckley, Lord Richard Buckley, the great comedian of the 60s, the great master of everything verbal possible. I would have been shocked to find out that you weren't involved in the creative because it feels so much like it all is coming from that

character who you who you must have created i mean the uh the little details of uh you know the way that he moves and like the little quick turns that that you know you were doing as a performer of of uh you know the little hand movements the little twitches and all those sorts of things that must have been things you created and the entire show is coming out of that. Yeah, but I get like all the credit and it's the writers who wrote about the theory of relativity and explained it to six to 10 year olds in six minutes. I didn't do that and I couldn't do that. And the director, Jay Doobin, his brilliant visual sense and the way he shot the show is completely different than any show on television.

So one of the things that I really have an appreciation for when I went back and watched it was the early 90s was such a creative time in television, but specifically children's television. a creative time in television, but specifically children's television. And there's a lot of shows that if I go back and watch them, oh yeah, cartoons were doing really interesting things. There was like an animation renaissance happening. I've gone back and watched literally a commercial for Kraft macaroni and cheese that was like gorgeous. That was, you know, was clay animation and stuff like that. So there was a lot going on, but your show specifically, play animation and stuff like that. So there was a lot going on, but your show specifically,

the visual sense of it, it's so much more beautiful and fast paced and interesting looking. Then you would think it would have to be in order to get on, you know, CBS Saturday morning or whatever it was. Right. Like the, like there's different interesting angles every moment and there's stuff flying in and out.

Like it's the, the, the, the the background is fascinating to look at there's just so much happening compressed into every second yeah again it wouldn't happen if we didn't have people like wayne white uh who worked on peewee's show and was a renowned painter and what did he do on it uh he did the i guess it was the set design yeah but he also did the animations which were on an Omega, which was already like five years out of date when we did the show. But he did these very primitive animations that were really cool.

And then Bob Green, who sort of realized those visuals with all the giant props and stuff in the back and and plus we had this great leadership uh and the executive producer uh mark waxman who sort of put all these elements together uh and then jay's unique look uh which was basically we had two cameras with wide angle lenses very close to each other practically touching each other and he never in all the episodes did a zoom boom any of that crap the cameras were locked off and the performers moved back and forth between the cameras ah yeah i mean there's a boom shot i think in the beginning credits or something and we had a couple of guest directors and they they probably did move the camera but he really just had them locked off and they were so closer they were touching and so that and you know plus the fact that i'm very close to the camera i mean no never

much more than a few feet yeah and often much closer and the the show is very popular today in latin america i've heard about this i wanted to ask you about this that it uh from what i've read you know the show i mean the show was popular in the united states it was rerun for a for a bunch of years i understand now it's kind of hard to find actually because it wasn't on dvd it's on netflix for a while it's sort of bouncing around from rights to rights but in latin america it was like on for a long time and it's far more popular there than it was here and you have toured there now do you not yeah yeah i go down there as as much as i can um i mean i played in september in mexico city to an audience of 10 000 people and there was 1.2 million watching the

live stream are you kidding me i, I'm happily not kidding you. And what I was getting at was, you know, so why, well, there's something about the show that appeals to the Latin sensibility. And I think kids TV down there was maybe not so hot in those days that probably contributed. But also the fact that the guy is looking at the kids like right in the eye and very close to the camera because i'll say to people why do you love being why are people like running after the car i'm in and blocking traffic and pounding on the windows and all this rock star shit like why is this happening and they say well because you explain science so well and it's like no

there's got to be something more visceral than that deep down it's emotional yeah i mean they're they have emotional response i meet people and they weep yeah they weep and and a lot of people want to hug me and they thank me for making their childhood and all this stuff yeah and so that's an emotional thing. And that comes, I think, from being very close to the camera, talking to the kids directly, the direct address thing. And I think the character is probably pretty warm and friendly or something. And you're speaking to them with intelligence and respect for their intelligence that like, oh, I'm going to tell you this. You're smart enough for it. I'm not talking down to you.

Here it is. It's going to be cool. You know, we're doing this together in that way yeah yeah it's interesting i i did sesame street uh i went on sesame street as a puppeteer and to explain to the characters in sesame street what a puppet is what a puppeteer is and you know they're not puppets i don't know what the hell they are but whatever they are they're not puppets because I couldn't say, oh, yeah, I'm a puppeteer, just like the guy that's jiggling you around right now. It's a bath toy. It does seem like explaining to a pig what a pork sandwich is or something like that.

There's something strangely perverse about it. But I'm sorry. Please go on. Well, one of the suits there said, you know, you don't talk to the puppet like it's a kid or an imbecile you talk to him like normally and yeah i was yeah i mean because i i don't know what the hell that thing is but it's not a kid or an imbecile so yeah um it was you don't patronize them yeah i mean i it's it's tricky sometimes i mean when i get kids on stage yeah uh my tone probably softens a little bit um when i do these shows in in mexico these stage shows

a lot of it is improv based because it seems to me that the improv brings the spirit of the show and the sensibility of the show closer to what it was on screen so yeah does it make you optimistic at all that that you know a a science science educating character is like such a huge hit uh that that people are pounding on the i mean i i honestly wish that that was the case in the united states that i mean you know people love uh you know bill knight and you know people i'm uh i you have many fans here as well. But that rock star treatment for a science educator is very nice to hear about. I really hope that it portends well for the future of Latin America,

as getting self-aggrandizing as that sounds. I've had hundreds of people say to me, I'm a scientist today because of you. I'm a doctor. I'm a biologist. I'm a scientist today because of you. I'm a doctor. I'm a biologist. I'm an astrophysicist. I'm a teacher. I'm a professor. I mean, I hear this all the time.

And they say, oh, I know you must be sick of hearing this, but I don't know how you could possibly get sick of hearing that. Yeah. So I think it's had a really positive impact. a really positive impact. And to see a lot of people in Mexico and Brazil really excited about, being really excited about science, technology, that seems very positive and encouraging to me. Yeah. Well, on that note, I have a lot more I want to ask you. Let's take a quick break.

We'll be right back with more Paul Zaloum. I just want to talk a little bit more about what it was like to shoot the show itself. And it's a little bit, it's almost like inside baseball just because I also, you know, make a show like this. But I love the interplay between you and the other performers on the show i know there are a number over the years uh is so tight and wonderful to watch and it it seems like it must have been a huge amount of fun to do it yeah we pretty much laughed all day long and goofed around yeah just had a really nice relaxed atmosphere the set was open people wandering off the lot and just hung out and yeah um you know the prop guy he was a comedian also and and uh ron jankula was the guy's name and he would he would make a suggestion for a gag because he was ray he was

the hand that came in on the side which is very very, very. Yeah. You're running gag of like Ray, hand me that like the off screen producer arm. Yeah. And he would always have his pinky elevated and he'd do everything with a flourish and he would make suggestions. And he told me on the next show he went on to, he made a suggestion and the producers said one more suggested and you're fired. So it was not, you know, we were open to anything it was a lot of fun and then the cast um you know lester the rat was played by a puppeteer like like me he was

not hired as an actor he was hired to jiggle around some puppet and um he was a harvard educated guy who you put him a giant rat suit, he showed up expecting to do this puppet. Yeah. And Jay, in the course of developing the show, he says, what the hell do I want a puppet for? What's a puppet going to do? It's just going to be cut to and he's going to have some joke, some lame joke and then cut back. It's not helpful. And I'm a puppeteer.

I'm dedicated to puppetry, but you only want puppets when you need them. Yeah. And it was a bad idea so he said let's put it let's put him as a guy in a rat suit not a rat but a guy in a rat suit yeah and so he showed up expecting to do a puppet and we said well no actually you're gonna be in this suit and that was quite a shock for him but he really grew into it and he was incredible there's like there's like a subversive quality to the show as well that you know it's not a it's not mr wizard right it's not a squeaky clean uh you know science show it's like there's you know your sidekick is a guy in a rat suit who's

like disgusting there's like all sorts of bodily noises you know kids love that kind of thing i just just watching a clip today where you encourage kids to do a demo at home where they swab sweat from between their toes and put it in a you know sort of medium of like uh of jello to grow a stinky foot smell um and the only you know concession you make is don't open it in your house but because it creates this jar of like a horrible aroma it's just it's a disgusting demo to do but like what a fun thing to tell children to do like kids yeah the guy who created the character jock church he did that experiment because um uh he he got an idea to create a comic that would run in the newspaper right that he created X yeah you can with Beekman and Jack's and it was syndicated in over 300 newspapers and it was the first comic

that was created on a Mac according to him and he did it for many many years and he'd have experiments and uh things you could do at home and uh one of them was this thing with the with the toes and when he opened the jar and took a whiff he instantly threw up it's probably why we said don't do this on television yeah but a lot of that sort of he he was a like a very radical queer um eccentric artist and uh his kind of rejectionist attitude came through in the comic there was a little tinge of sort of anarchy and questioning authority that came across in the comic more so than the tv show well that's so fascinating that such a seminal you know kids program was essentially yeah created by a bunch of avant-garde you know weirdos uh in that way or you know not uh uh you know people who are don't didn't at the time represent

you know the sort of conservative uh mainstream american media approach that was so prevalent on kids tv maybe that's part of the success of this yeah yeah i yeah if you're coming from the weird land then you're gonna end up with some weird shit. I mean, the thing about Mr. Wizard, I was not a fan as a kid. And when he was asked about Nye's show and my show, he says, well, I don't understand why they have to be funny. And, you know, I don't really have a response. I mean, how do you respond to that? Yeah, I watched Mr. Wizard as a kid, but that bums me out that he would. I mean, I guess if you're a real purist you're like the science should be enough but you know everything's better if it's

funny yes agreed that's you know that's our credo i mean gotta have the jokes did you have a favorite uh demo you ever did that to film or oh this is exactly when people ask me what my favorite thing to ruin was so maybe that's a frustrating question uh-huh but what do you what do you think about i'd love going up the nose i mean that was a fun thing you know because we were doing a show on snot in in the early episodes and um and we we had um three women on the show alana yubak and eliza schneider and sent to moses and this is alana's season the first season and uh and she um i'm covered in snot and i'm waving my hands around at some point some snot came off my hand and like went into her eye and she does this whole slow

burn of taking this snot out of her eye that was uh that was pretty classic but and that was an improvised moment because those moments always seem so specific. Yeah. Well, we had a rule that no matter what goes wrong, you have to keep going. Yeah. Because a lot of time, these bloopers and mistakes would end up in the cut.

And plus, it was just more fun to try to dig yourself out of a hole, like we do on stage all the time, and to see where it goes and a real moment is always beats a scripted moment every time so yeah if you roll through it you might have gold there yeah and also i used to whenever i got gunk dunked on me i made sure that when i gestured that my hands would stop very abruptly so the slime would end up on the crew because they would they are all laughing they all think it's hilarious i was like okay man you're gonna get it now and so it would

it would fly all over the place but jay said to me so if you're gonna do a show on snot like how would you do that and i said well we should go up the nose i said you know build a corridor and put cover it in snot i'll be like an astronaut and he got the idea using a sauna tube you know for pouring concrete foundations and we did a whole nasa thing and a hazmat suit then you know the nose hairs were broom bristles and oh man and we had seven dollars worth of industrial um hollywood snot in there and it was all covered with bubble wrap. And I remember the snot like squishing between my toes in the suit. And then they left me in there and they took a five. And I don't know how they forgot about me, but it was actually, I was sort of running

out of air. I couldn't really breathe. And I'm going, guys, could somebody get me out of here? And the executive was just like a half mile away, you know, listening to the feed in his office and he sort of panicked. I loved how much often, how often you, as a kid, I think the ones that stuck with me the most

are the ones where you seemingly put yourself in harm's way, where you would do a demo where there was like a bowling ball hanging from a rope, like on a pendulum and you'd hold it up to your face and let it go and to prove that you know because of whatever the you know the laws of thermodynamics the ball is not going to be able to come back and smack you in the face and the other characters are terrified big man you're going to kill yourself right it's going to break your face open um or uh the one that i just re-watched today where you know you uh you build an arch and demonstrate the keystone and i i today where, you know, you build an arch and demonstrate the keystone.

And I specifically remembered this, you know, I remembered this segment before I went back and looked at it on YouTube. You demonstrate how an arch is built, how the keystone works, and then stand on top of it and like bring spikes below. And like there's a special angle on the spikes. Everyone's like, oh, no, spikes. Like all of that drama makes makes the information stick right yeah i mean for me the scariest thing was when we had a lion on the show and wow the lion was behind me and then there's me and then there's the camera and behind the camera is the trainer and he's got like a porterhouse steak on a stick.

And he's waving it back and forth over the camera. And the lion's head is like bobbing back and forth, looking at the steak. And I'm between the lion and the steak. What were you trying to demonstrate with this? Well, I was talking about lions, I guess. I mean, I don't remember and i i don't care because i was just like and we didn't do i think we did one take of of everything because i was really it was really unnerving do you think uh do you think a show like like yours is something that could or would be produced now because i notice uh you know a dearth of of

you know of that kind of programming on television now why why do you think that is well the show costs between 200 and 225 something like that an episode that's cheap today's standards but that was years ago right but nobody's going to spend that kind of money on a kid's show unless there's heavy merchandising associated with it. Yeah. I mean, maybe I'm wrong. I'm not involved in the TV business, but that's my understanding. Yeah.

They're just not making live action shows and expensive shows, a lot of clip shows and all the rest of it. Yeah. Because the show was mandated by the Children's Television Act in 1991. Right. by the Children's Television Act in 1991 that said that if local television stations wanted to get their licenses renewed, they had to have a certain amount of educational and or informational programming, a certain number of hours,

like two and a half hours or something like that. So, you know, the networks being super creative, they said, well, the Smurfs, you know, or the Flintstones teach kids about the past and the Jetsons teach kids about the future. And, you know, the Smurfs teach kids about being blue. Well, tell me, I know that in addition to Beakman's World, you're also a master puppeteer. Tell me about that work.

I'm so curious. Well, I've been doing this since I was 19, and it allows me to do all the characters in the solo show. So it's perfect for megalomaniacal lunatics and puppeteers. You know, we traditionally write our shows and build them and design them. We do everything. I have an artistic partner, Lynn Jeffries, who helps me with all that. And we collaborate and do these things. But it's great because you can create whole worlds with puppetry.

You can create anything you want and have anything happen. I can go to Mars, you know, for $ dollars or just hot glue a you know a rocket ship to a popsicle stick and have it go through the frame or whatever tell me more about the found objects work because i'm again so you know fascinated by the idea of taking something inanimate and giving it you know a spirit and a voice and that seems like such a you know elemental part of performance generally and as a performer as a comedian i'm really sort of interested in these other performance traditions how does that how does that work tell me more about it well i had worked in bread and puppet where the shows

were the puppets were generally you know beautifully sculpted painted designed by schumann painted design by schumann and i thought well there's not enough jokes and i want it to be more crass and more jokes and and i thought god you know found objects and i i was inspired in part by his using a chair in a show about um jesus of nazareth where jesus is played by a giant puppet and by a woman and at one point it's a chair and he's the chairs being whipped in this scene and I thought oh that's interesting and that just got me into this thing of Oh objects so I collected a bunch of crap and I made a show called the world of plastic and that was in 77 then I went on to make many others about I had one that sort of

had a Three Mile island scene where i used blenders for the cooling towers and i had loads that i put in them with soap so they overflow and they make this big mess and this almost sounds like a beekman-esque like onstage demo except you're doing it about its political commentary on a nuclear disaster yeah i mean there was yeah a lot of crossover with that stuff yeah and the the thing that's interesting about the objects and interesting about puppetry in general is you it's it sounds corny or weird but the puppets really tell you what to do you don't get to tell them what to do really i mean you can build stuff into them that allows them to do

things but once you get going with them and you start juggling them around they are going to tell you what they can and can't do what they want to do you're constrained by the physical nature of the puppet in terms of what it can what what it's capable of yeah they can't do everything they can only do a limited amount of things and there's power in that there's power in the limitation of that because then they specialize in that they do that and you get rid of them yeah and you do the next little bit of shtick and it's very visual it's very visual and gag oriented in my you know i mean doing shakespeare with puppetry that i'm i'm puzzled by that because i want to see them well i mean the fighting scenes are great and the love me you, when they're screwing, that's always hilarious.

But I love it. Yeah, but there's a certain, like, built-in comedy to the form that you want to see expressed. You don't necessarily want to, like, yeah, a puppet doing Romeo, Romeo, wherefore I thought it was a little bit like, no, this is not what it's good at. Yeah, they're really good at banging and killing at the bunch of judy show yeah and and you look at the sicilian marionettes you know

those fight scenes and those things are just phenomenal and just banging around hitting each other and so a lot of that and transformations and trick puppets and all of that stuff is really interesting well i i really appreciate you sitting down to talk with me today. It's been a really, it's been an awesome conversation. It's also a thrill to meet you at all. So yeah, thank you so much. Well, thank you, Adam. It's been a delight for me as well.

Well, thank you once again to Paul Zalum for coming on the show. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. That is it for us this week on Factually. I'd like to thank our engineer, Ryan Conner, our producer, Dana Wickens, our researcher, Sam Roudman, Andrew WK for our theme song. Once again, you can check out my tour dates or sign up for my mailing list at adamconover.net. Follow me wherever you are on social media at Adam Conover. And until next week, see you then.